Sepharad (13 page)

“Our neighbors, my friends from school, my father's colleagues—they took all of them,” said Señor Salama. “We wouldn't go out of the house for fear they would pick us up in the street before the papers the Spanish diplomat had promised us arrived. We heard on the radio that the Allies had taken Paris and that to the east the Russians had crossed the border with Hungary, but it seemed as if the only thing that mattered to the Germans was exterminating all of us. Imagine the enterprise required to transport all those people by train across half of Europe in the middle of a war they were about to lose. They chose to use the trains to send us to the camps over sending their troops to the front. They went into Hungary in March—March 14, I will never forget, although for many years I didn't remember that date, I didn't remember anything. They came in March and had deported half a million people by summer, but since they were afraid that the Russians would come too soon and not leave enough time for them to send all the Hungarian Jews to Auschwitz in an orderly fashion, they shot many of them in the head right in the street and threw their bodies into the Danube, the work of the Germans and their Hungarian friends. The men of the Cross Arrow, they were called; they wore black uniforms that copied the SS and were even more bloody than the Germans, if much less systematic.”

You live all the days of your life in the house you were born in, a haven where you always had the warm protection of your parents and your two older sisters, and you expect to have that
forever,
just as you expect to have the photographs and paintings on the walls, and the toys and books in your bedroom. Then one day, in a few hours' time, all that disappears forever, without a trace, because you went out to do one of your usual chores, and when you came back, you were prevented from going in by an uncrossable chasm of time. “My father and I had gone to look for something to eat,” said Señor Salama. “And when we returned, the concierge's husband, who had a good heart, came out and warned us to go away because the soldiers who had taken our family might come back. My father had a package in his hand, maybe one of those little packets of candy he brought home every Sunday, and it fell to the ground at his feet. That I remember. I picked up the package and took my father's hand, which was ice cold. ‘Go away, far away,' the concierge's husband told us, and quickly walked off, looking from side to side, fearing that someone might have seen him talking to two Jews as if he were their friend. We walked for a long time without exchanging a word, I clinging to my father's hand, which no longer warmed mine or had the strength to lead me. I led him, keeping an eye out for patrols of Germans or Hungarian Nazis. We went into a café near the Spanish legation, and my father made a telephone call. He fumbled through his pockets for a coin, but he kept getting tangled up in his handkerchief and his billfold and his pocket watch. I remember that too. I had to give him the coin to buy the token. The man came whom my father had visited before, and he told my father that everything was arranged, but my father didn't say anything, didn't answer, it was as if he didn't hear, and the man asked him if he was ill. My father's chin had sunk to his chest, and his eyes were empty, the expression he would wear till he died. I told the man that they had taken our whole family, I wanted to cry but the tears didn't come, and a suffocating heaviness gripped my chest. Finally the tears burst out, and I think that the people at the nearby tables stared at me, but I didn't care; I threw myself at
the
man, clutching the lapels of his overcoat and begging him to help my family, but maybe he didn't understand because I spoke in Hungarian and with my father he'd been speaking French. We were driven in a large black car bearing the flag of the diplomatic legation to a house where there were a lot of other people. I remember small rooms and suitcases, men wearing overcoats and hats, women in kerchiefs, people speaking in low voices and sleeping in the corridors, on the floor, using bundles of clothing as pillows. My father was always wide-awake, smoking, trying to make a telephone call, from time to time badgering the employees of the Spanish legation to bring us something to eat. We searched for the names of my mother and sisters on the list of deportees, but they didn't appear. Later we learned—that is, my father learned years later—that they hadn't been taken to the same camps nearly everyone else was sent to, to Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen. The Spanish diplomat who saved the lives of so many of us was able to rescue some Jews even from those camps, endangering his own life, acting behind the backs of his superiors in the ministry, driving from one end of Budapest to the other at all hours of the day or night in the same black embassy car he'd taken us in, picking up people in hiding or those who'd just been arrested. If they didn't have authentic Sephardic blood, he invented identities and papers for them, even relatives and businesses in Spain. Sanz-Briz, his name was. He located many people and managed to have some sent back from the camps, he snatched them from hell, but of my mother and sisters there was no trace, because they'd been taken to that camp no one had ever heard of, and of which nothing remains except the roof and the sign I saw five years ago. I would never have chosen to go. I can't bear to set foot in that part of Europe, I can't bear the idea of standing and looking at a person of a certain age in a café or on a street in Germany or Poland or Hungary; I wonder what they were doing during those years, what they saw, whom they'd sided
with. But shortly before my father died he asked me to visit the camp, and I promised I would. And do you know what's there? Nothing. A clearing in a forest. The roof of a railway station and a rusted sign.”

I wonder what happened to Señor Salama, who in the middle 1980s was the director of the Ateneo Español, the Spanish cultural center in Tangiers, working in a small office decorated with once brightly colored tourist posters now crumpled and faded by time and with old furniture in fake Spanish style; he also managed, grudgingly, the Galerías Duna on Louis Pasteur Boulevard, a fabric shop established by his father that took its name from a river in that other country that they, unlike most he knew, had managed to escape from, unlike the sisters and mother they didn't even have a photograph of, nothing to use as a crutch for memory, as material proof that would have helped against the erosion of memory.

Duna is the Hungarian name for the Danube River. Señor Salama, with his rich vocabulary and strange accent punctuated with dim tonalities, musical embers of the Jewish Spanish he'd heard spoken in his childhood and the few lullabies he still remembered, with his laborious way of pulling himself along on two crutches and with his eyes that watered so easily, his sparse gray hair, his forehead always gleaming with sweat he constantly dabbed at with a white handkerchief embroidered with his initials, with his breath ragged from the effort of moving a large clumsy body whose legs no longer served it, bone-thin legs beneath the cloth of his trousers, two appendages swinging beneath the weight of a large belly and thick torso. But he insisted on doing everything for himself, without help from anyone; lurching skillfully along, breathing rapidly, he would open doors and turn on lights and explain the small treasures and souvenirs of the Ateneo Español, framed photographs of a famous visitor many years ago, or of performances of plays by Benavente and Casona,
even Lorca, a diploma issued by the Ministry of Information and Tourism, a book dedicated to the center's library by a writer whose fame had been fading with the years, until even his name was no longer familiar—though you had to hide that from Señor Salama, you had to tell him that you'd read the book and that his inscribed first edition must be very valuable by now. Awkward, expert, chaotic, tireless despite his difficulty breathing and his crutches, he would point out old posters announcing conferences and plays in the Ateneo's small theater, and even in the large Teatro Cervantes, which now, he says, is a shameful ruin infested with rats, invaded by delinquents, a jewel of Spanish architecture the government pays no attention to at all. They don't want to know anything of what little is left of Spain in Tangiers, they don't answer the letters that Señor Salama writes to the ministries of Culture and Education and External Affairs. He sets the posters to one side, looks through the papers on his desk, and pulls out a folder stuffed with carbon copies bearing the stamp of the main post office, clear proof that they've been sent, though never answered. He points out dates, quickly thumbs through papers—from a petition to a document dated several years before—all written on a typewriter, in the old-fashioned way before the age of word processors and photocopiers, always with several carbon copies. The stage of the Ateneo Español was the setting for the first theater company of Tangiers, although, he explains, “it is composed of amateurs who don't get a peseta for it, including me—who can't act, as you may imagine, but I often direct.” Along the walls of a corridor, he points out poorly framed black-and-white photographs in which the actors hold exaggerated, theatrical poses, enthusiastic amateurs declaiming in front of modest sets of the inn in
Don Juan Tenorio,
the stairway of a tenement in Madrid, the walls of an Andalusian village. “We've done Benavente and Casona, and every year on the first of November we perform the Don Juan play, but don't judge us too
quickly, because we also presented
The House of Bernarda Alba
long before it made its debut in Spain, when the only person to have performed it was Margarita Xirgu in Montevideo.”

 

THE MELANCHOLY AND PENURY
of Spanish colonies far from Spain. Fake-tile roofs, mock-whitewashed walls, imitations of Andalusian railings, regional bullfight posters, Valencian and Asturian schlock, greasy paellas and large Mexican sombreros, grimy decor inspired by the romantic prints and films of Andalusia that played in Berlin during the Spanish Civil War. The red tiles, the wrought-iron light fixtures, and fancy iron railings of that place in Copenhagen called Pepe's Bar, the imitation caves of Sacromonte at a crossroad near Frankfurt, where they served sangria in December and hung copper sauté pans and Cordovan and Mexican sombreros on the walls. The red tiles and inevitable white stucco wall in the Casa de España in New York in the early nineties; the Café Madrid, which appeared unexpectedly on a neighborhood corner in the Adams Morgan district of Washington, DC, amid Salvadoran restaurants and shops selling cheap clothing and suitcases and bellowing merengue music in places that were emerging from absolute desolation overnight, ruined neighborhoods with whole rows of burned or razed houses and parking lots encircled with barbed wire. Beside the empty lot of a burned house would be a shop for Ethiopian brides, and beyond that a Catholic funeral parlor. Suddenly you would see an eye-catching sign: Café Madrid, right next to a Santo Domingo Bakery and a little Cuban restaurant called La Chinita Linda. It was an icy morning in Washington, and the winter sunlight shimmered on the marble of the monuments and public buildings. You would go up a narrow stairway and on the second floor come to the swinging door of Café Madrid and breathe in warm air carrying odors that were familiar but as rarely experienced as the hiss of the sizzling oil used to deep-fry the white dough of the
churros,
or as the sight of the round, oily face of the woman waiting on tables, who had the brassy air of a churro seller in a working-class neighborhood in Madrid but who by now spoke very little Spanish, because, she said, in an accent flavored with the cadences of Mexico, her parents had brought her to America when she was a kid. Old bullfight posters on the walls, a montera, a toreador's hat, on two crossed banderillas in an arrangement that suggested a display of military trophies, the paper of the banderillas stained an ocher color that could pass for blood and the montera covered with dust, as if coated with years of heavy smoke from boiling oil. Color posters of Spanish landscapes, ads from Iberia Airlines or the old Ministry of Information and Tourism. In his office, Señor Salama had a poster of La Mancha, an arid hill crowned with windmills, all with the flat, overlit tones of color photographs and films of the sixties. There was a poster of the Del Tránsito Synagogue in Toledo, and beside that, equal in the favor and almost the devotion, of Señor Salama, another picturing the monument to Cervantes in Madrid's Plaza de España: it had that same clean winter light of a cold, sunny morning, and Señor Salama remembered childhood walks through that plaza he was so fond of, although it seemed strange now, almost impossible, to believe that he had been a slim young man who didn't need crutches but walked on two efficient and agile legs without a thought for the miracle of their ability to sustain him and take him from place to place as if his body were weightless, believing that everything he had and enjoyed would last forever: agility, health, being twenty, the happiness of living in Madrid with no ties to anyone, being nothing more or less than himself, as free from the force of the gravity of the past as from the earth's, free, temporarily, from his former life and maybe from the future life others had planned for him, free from his father, his melancholy, his cloth business, his loyalty to the dead, to those who couldn't be saved, those whose places they, father and
son, had occupied or usurped, merely by chance not ending up in that obscure camp where so many of their family, their city, and their lineage had perished without a trace. Franz Kafka's three sisters disappeared in the death camps. In Madrid, in the mid-1950s, Señor Salama took courses in economics and law and planned not to return to Tangiers when the period of freedom granted him came to an end, and for the first time in his life he was completely alone and felt that his identity began and ended in him, free now of shadows and heritage, free of the presence and obsessive enshrining of the dead. It wasn't his fault he had survived, nor should he have to be in mourning any longer, mourning not just for his mother and sisters but for all his relatives, for his neighbors and his father's colleagues and the children he'd played with in the public parks of Budapest—for all the Jews annihilated by Hitler. If you looked around, in a tavern in Madrid, in a classroom at the university, if you walked along the Gran Vía and went into a movie theater on a Sunday afternoon, you wouldn't find a hint that any of it had happened, you could let yourself be borne off to a life more or less like that other people lived, his compatriots, classmates, and the friends who never asked about his past, who knew scarcely anything about the European war or the German camps.