Sepharad (12 page)

 

WHO CAN SLEEP THIS NIGHT,
in which so much is under way, the prelude to a burial overseen by women trained in the rituals of mourning, in dressing the dead woman before she stiffens, in ordering the coffin and the catafalque on which it will rest, and the candles and large crucifix that for a few hours will lend the somber air of a sanctuary to the house, a place where the cult of the past and death is honored. I hear your soft breathing in the darkness and know you're not asleep, even though you haven't spoken for a long time and are lying as still as possible in order not to disturb me. The bed with its cold sheets and the room that smells of mildew and gloom feel strange to me, but must feel stranger to you, who haven't slept here since the end of your teenage years, the first bed and the first room you slept in alone after you outgrew the crib in your parents' bedroom, the room where you knew terror and sleeplessness on stormy nights, when rumbling thunder shook the windowpanes and a lightning flash blinded you with its white blaze, where you were afraid to fall asleep and dream of the horror movie your cousin and you saw at the theater that opened in the summer, the two of you huddled beneath the sheets and talking all night long, trading secrets of shameful intimacies, your first period and first boyfriends, slow dancing at the town fiestas with boys who were also summer residents, or in the sinful reddish darkness of the first discotheques you visited, you always tagging along behind your cousin, who introduced you to the giddiness of beer and cigarettes and didn't seem to recognize any of the limits that held you back—not modesty, not danger. Who could have said then that your destinies would be so different, that she, so like you, born at almost the same time, would slowly disappear into the dark maze of misfortune? She never made her way out, and it would have
been so easy for you to wander into it, not consciously but just drifting, as she did. One year your cousin didn't come back to spend the summer with her parents and the brother who became a doctor, so serious and docile from the time he was a little boy, always the exact opposite of his sister.

Green eyes—her father stares at the photograph in silence, as if asking a question whose answer he must await forever. Curly hair, suntanned skin—hair made blond by the summer sun and swimming pool—the still plump cheeks of a teenager, the smile like a declaration of complacency or defiance, and the chin so like yours. She was very thin the last time I saw her, but still pretty, tall, with curls falling into her face and that gleam in her green eyes and the same crazy laugh I remember from the times we set out on some risky adventure. But by then she'd become so pale, and she spoke with a slur I'd never noticed before, and although she was married and had a child, she kept telling me the same kinds of crazy things she had told me when we started going out with boys in the summer. For instance, that she met a man on a train, and within a few minutes they'd locked themselves in the bathroom for a quick fuck. We were in a cafeteria, and she was smoking too much and glancing around, nervous, making a great effort to contain herself. I could see that she enjoyed being with me, but also that she wanted to leave, to get something she needed, something that made her bite her fingernails and chainsmoke, and we both also saw that despite our mutual affection and memories we weren't alike anymore, we didn't have things to talk about and just sat there sometimes in silence, then she would turn and look outside or put out a just-lit cigarette in the ashtray, crushing it violently. We agreed that the following summer we'd go back home together, but I couldn't because I had too much work, and she didn't go anyway, and I never saw her again. Not until after her parents had lost track of her completely. By the time my doctor cousin learned what hospital she was in, it was
too late. An ambulance had picked her up in the street. He told me she was so wasted he could recognize only her green eyes.

 

YOUR ARMS ARE AROUND ME,
hugging me tight, as you do when you're asleep and have a bad dream, you snuggle your icy feet between mine, shivering from the same cold you felt as a little girl, an ancient cold of long winters and houses without heat, cold retained in the rooms of this house as faithfully as the photos of the dead, as the most vivid memories older than reason but already brushed by melancholy and the inkling of inevitable loss: a child's sudden fear of growing up, the cruel knowledge, which comes from nowhere, that your parents will grow old and die. Also the fear that clutched you in its pincers those nights after your mother's death, when you didn't dare go from your bedroom to the bathroom lest you see her in the shadowy hallway in her nightgown, her hair all wild, the way she looked when you came home and were there only a few days before she had to go back to the hospital. You closed your eyes and feared that when you opened them she would be standing at the foot of your bed, asking you something wordlessly, and if you felt you were falling asleep you feared that she would appear in a dream, and you would jerk awake with anguish, thinking you heard the sound of doors opening, or footsteps, and again you felt the raw pain of her death and of being so alone, and shamefully afraid she would come back as a ghost.

 

FROM BELOW COME THE
sounds of conversations and footsteps, a car starting, a telephone ringing, male voices issuing instructions, large objects being shoved around or set down. They're moving furniture to make room for the coffin. But you don't want to give in to that thought, you resist imagining the face of your dead aunt, ravaged not only by cancer but also by the old age your mother never knew, a delicate woman young forever
because the images you have of the time she was ill are nearly erased and because you happen to have no photographs from her last years. That's how I see her too, assiduous spy that I am, researcher of your memory, which I want to be as much mine as your present life is. I can't imagine the woman your mother would be now had she not died: seventy-some years, heavyset, probably with dyed hair. I see her as you do, as you sometimes dream of her, a young woman who still has the smile of a girl, the shadow of which I sometimes intuit on your lips, just as I can see her gaze in your eyes, and that from her—like a ring spreading on the surface of time—comes your inclination to melancholy, your way of building illusions about anything new, the care with which you arrange the objects around you, your devotion to this house in which you and she both were girls, to this oasis with the desertlike hills in the background, this place where she wanted to rest forever and be with her own, with those who gradually have been joining her in the small cemetery with the earthen walls: first her niece, who died even younger than your mother, forever safe from time in the photograph on the television, and tonight her sister, another name added to the tablet in the family pantheon, which you will see tomorrow morning during the burial, and think—maybe for the first time, and without my knowing, without your wanting to say it to me—“When I die, I want you to bury me with them.”

THEY DISAPPEAR ONE DAY,
they are lost, erased forever, as if they had died, as if they had died so many years ago that they are no longer in anyone's memory and there is no sign they were ever in this world. Someone comes along, suddenly enters your life, is part of it for a few hours, a day, the duration of a journey, becomes a presence so insistent that it's difficult to recall a time he wasn't there. Whatever exists, even for an hour or two, seems permanent. In Tangiers, in the dark office of a cloth merchant, in a Madrid restaurant, in the dining car of a train, one man tells another fragments from the novel of his life, and the hours of the telling and of the conversation seem to contain more time than will fit within ordinary hours: someone speaks, someone listens, and for each the other's voice and face take on the familiarity of a person he has always known. Yet an hour or day later, he isn't there, will never be there, not because he died, although he might have, and his presence for those to whom he was so close dissolves into nothing. For fourteen years, beginning July 30, 1908, Franz Kafka punctually went to his office in the Society for Prevention of Workplace Accidents in Prague, and then one day in
the summer of 1922 he left at the customary hour and never returned, because of illness. His disappearance was as inconspicuous as the way he had sat for so many years at his neat desk, where in one of his locked drawers he kept the letters Milena Jesenska wrote him. For some time afterward an old overcoat that he kept there for rainy days hung in the closet, then it too disappeared, and with it the peculiar odor that had identified his presence in the office for fourteen years.

The most stable things vanish, the worst and the best, the most trivial along with those that were necessary and decisive: the years one spends in a dismal office or endures remorsefully indifferent and distant in a marriage, or the memory of a journey to a city where one had either lived or promised oneself to return to after a unique and memorable visit. Love, suffering, even some of the greatest hells on Earth are erased after one or two generations, and a day comes when there is not one living witness who can remember.

In Tangiers, Señor Salama told of going to Poland to visit the camp where the gas chambers swallowed up his mother and two sisters, and of having found nothing but a large clearing in a forest and a sign bearing the name of an abandoned railway station, and of how the horror of the fact that there were now no visible traces of the camp was somehow contained in that name, in the rusty iron sign swinging above a platform beyond which there was nothing but the sweep of the clearing and gigantic pines against a low gray sky from which a silent rain was falling, rain scarcely visible in the fog but dripping from the roof of a shed at the station. It was a camp so unimportant that almost no one knew its name, said Señor Salama, and he pronounced a difficult word that must have been Polish—but then the name Auschwitz hadn't meant anything to Primo Levi either the first time he saw it written on the sign of a railway station. In a place like that, far
from the principal camps, it was easier for deportees to be lost, for their names to disappear from those detailed records the Germans always kept. With that same fanatic administrative zeal they organized the transporting of hundreds of thousands of captives by rail in the midst of the Allied bombings and military disasters of the last months of the war.

Railroad tracks were just visible in the wet grass, rusted rails and rotted ties, and one of Señor Salama's crutches snagged or got tangled in them, and he nearly fell, fat and clumsy and humiliated, onto the same soil where his mother and two sisters perished, over which they'd walked when they reached the camp and got down from the train that had carried them like animals to the slaughterhouse: three familiar faces and names in an abstract mass of unknown victims. The guide steadied him, the survivor who had driven him here in an old car, and pointed out the now barely visible outlines of walls, the rectangles of cement on which the barracks had stood, a low line of bricks that someone who didn't know the place well wouldn't have noticed, it was all that remained of the courtyard where the crematory ovens had been, because the Germans had blown up the buildings at the last moment, after the sky had been red every night for weeks on the eastern horizon and the earth trembled with reverberations from the ever closer Russian artillery. Tens of thousands of human beings killed there over four or five years, unloaded onto this platform from cattle cars and lined up on the cement platforms, with orders barked in German or Polish and cries of pain and desperation, echoes of screams and commands lost in the enormous thicket of conifers, military marches and waltzes played by a spectral orchestra of prisoners . . . and of all that, nothing was left but a clearing in a forest drenched by a wet mist, and the fog wiping out the view, the places the prisoners would have seen every day through the barbed wire, knowing they would never walk in the
outside world again, excluded from the number of the living as if they were already dead.

That skinny, evasive, servile man who accompanied Señor Salama to the site of the camp, what could he have experienced to make him choose this strange duty of acting as guardian and guide of the hell he had survived yet still did not want to leave? Guardian of a large deserted area in the middle of the woods and of a platform that now had no connection with any railroad; an archaeologist of blackened brick and slowly rusting hinges and oven doors; a seeker of remains, testimonies, relics, the metal bowls and spoons the prisoners used to eat their soup; a guide through traces of ruins increasingly overgrown and erased by the simple passage of time or sometimes enhanced by the white winter snows. When he died or was too old or tired to accompany the rare traveler who came to visit that unimportant camp, when he was no longer there to point out the sooty brick wall or line of cement platforms or peculiar undulation beneath the unbroken snow, no one would notice those minor irregularities in the forest clearing, or realize that the metallic crunch beneath their boots came from a spoon that once was the most valuable treasure in a man's life, and no one would guess the atrocious significance of a few piles of burned brick or, lying in the grass, a post to which a curl of barbed wire was still attached.

 

THEY DISAPPEAR,
left behind by time, and distance falsifies memory as gradually as the rain. The years, abandon, and deteriorating materials all obliterate the ruins of a German death camp lost in the woods on the boundary between Poland and Lithuania, meticulously burned and destroyed by its guards on the eve of the arrival of the Red Army, which found only cinders, debris, and hastily filled-in ditches where countless layers of human bodies were piled, preserved by the cold, clustered and tangled,
naked, skeletal, frozen limb to limb, tens of thousands of nameless bodies among whom were Señor Isaac Salama's four grandparents and most of his aunts and uncles and cousins, along with his mother and two sisters, who weren't saved as he and his father were, because the passports came too late for them in the summer of 1944, issued by the Spanish legation in Hungary, acknowledging the Spanish nationality of the Sephardic families living in Budapest.