Sepharad (9 page)

He thinks coolly, trying to make the numb fingers of his right hand respond and find the pistol; they're carrying rifles, but they're not going to shoot me, they won't want to waste a bullet or have shots heard so near our guard posts. How strange to remember Jorge Manrique at this moment:
How death comes, silencing everything.
They will push open the plank door, and one of them will shine the flashlight on me and point a pistol at me, and maybe before I can get up another will bend over me and slit my throat, expertly stepping to one side to avoid the spurt of blood. The
blood will steam in this cold. Everything soaked, heavy with blood: blankets, greatcoat, rotted straw mattress, and me dead . . . no, not me, someone else, because the dead lose all trace of identity. I will be dead without having touched my pistol, paralyzed by the cold that stiffens my hands, my entire body, as if I were wrapped in a premature shroud that prevents me from moving, as when you are sleeping and your muscles don't respond to your will, and you wake up with one arm so numb that you have to move it with the other arm as if it were made of wood.

What terrifies me is not dying but being mutilated. At the moment I'm safe from that. I won't be blown up by a howitzer or have my legs ground into the mud under the tread of an armored car. Someone, at any moment now, will push open that old plank door and cut my neck with a Russian Army machete, or with a nicked kitchen knife, or a rusty old sickle, and I won't move or do anything to prevent it. I'm lying here in the dark, staring at the streaks of light still in my eyes even though the flashlight was turned off, and I'm waiting like a steer to be slaughtered by some Russian guerrilla who's never seen my face, who will forget it as soon as he's cut my throat, because no one can remember a dead man's face, it becomes anonymous as soon as the life has left it, and that's why we have so little sense of the death all around us, rotting in the barbed wire, bloating in the mud, the piles of dead that we sometimes sit on to rest as we eat our rations.

Now he understands why he can't find the pistol. The woman took it while he was asleep; she must have slipped her hand beneath the doubled-up greatcoat he uses as a pillow and then crept away on her large bare feet, broad like her face and hips, in which there is a kind of stubborn, mulish strength despite the hunger and misfortune of the war that has upended the only world she knew and taken her husband. Shot by the Germans, she explained sketchily with gestures and mimicked sounds, as the child clung to her like a limpet, clutching her skirt with tiny, filthy hands so
thin they were delicate, his frightened eyes fixed on the uniformed stranger, eyes huge in the starved face, as was his broad forehead, his entire head, compared to the scrawny torso and the skinny legs and arms as fragile as the limbs of some amphibian creature.

I offered them food, both mother and child, one of my rations or a tin of conserves, and they looked at my extended hand as warily as beaten dogs. The woman pushed the little boy, said something in a low voice, but he didn't budge, didn't take what I was offering but merely clung more desperately to his mother's skirts, never taking his eyes from the slice of bread or packet of crackers I'd brought. I could see the thread of saliva running down his scrawny neck, which didn't seem capable of supporting the weight of that enormous head. I put my offering on the table and went into the lean-to to rest, or I walked away a bit from the hut—
izba
is the Russian word. When I returned, the food was no longer on the table, but neither the mother nor child was chewing, they'd eaten it all, gulping it down with the choking haste of hunger, or else they'd hidden some in their clothing or beneath the bed, and they looked at me as if they feared that I wanted something from them, that I would demand they give back what no longer existed: two pairs of blue eyes bored into mine, staring at me with the knowledge that I could kill them without thinking twice.

Until this evening, I'd never seen them eat. I'd been out several days with guards and patrols on the front line; there'd been rumors of a Russian attack, and I hadn't been able to go back to the
izba
to sleep. I'd barely slept at all in the last three or four nights. Worse than the hunger and cold in war is the lack of sleep. When I went past the battalion command post to start my watch, I was handed a package of food my family sent from Spain. I reached the
izba
dead with hunger and weariness and found with relief that neither woman nor child was there, though I couldn't imagine where they might have gone. They must have been scrabbling through the mud somewhere, looking for food like stray dogs around some of our camps. But the fire was going, so I opened my package, which was filled with delicious sausages—almost impossible to believe they'd traveled untouched across the whole of Europe and half of Russia to reach me—and began roasting a few. What incredible delight in the midst of such misery, the sputter of the red grease bursting the casing, the smell of the seasoned, roasting meat. Then I became aware that the woman and her child were standing in the doorway, looking at me, looking at the sausages I was roasting over the fire. Maybe all they'd had to eat on the days I didn't bring anything was potato peels. I set the package on the table and motioned for them to come in. This time when the woman pushed, the boy didn't resist. With both hands he picked up a sausage I'd put on a plate and gobbled it down without lifting his head, grunting like an animal.

The woman watched but didn't come closer. I let her see I was leaving. I came in here and closed the door, I wrapped myself up in my blankets and folded the greatcoat to use as a pillow. I'd barely closed my eyes when I was swept away by the sleep I'd missed for so many days. Then the woman knocked very softly at the door. I could see her large body through the openings in the planks. I told her to come in and got to my feet. She came in, words tumbling out in Russian and making strange gestures as if crossing herself. She had red grease all around her mouth. Before I could say anything, she was kneeling before me and covering my hands with kisses, with tears and saliva and sausage drippings.

Now I hear her voice again, and although she's speaking so low that the only thing I can distinguish is sound, her voice has the same monotonous tone of supplication I heard this afternoon.
Niet,
she's saying,
niet.
The flashlight flicks on, goes out, and it's the woman's large body that has blocked the light. If I can work the stiffness out of my fingers and pick up the pistol and cock it
before the men come to kill me, I might get at least one or two of them. When they shine the light in my face, I'll raise my hand and shoot, and in the confusion maybe I can save myself. But that simple act is as impossible as if I were planning it in a dream. I do nothing, I lie rigid on the floor, half propped up against the wall, listening to those murmuring voices, counting the seconds I have left before I die in these desolate northern reaches of the world, less than one kilometer from Leningrad, the city we were always on the verge of conquering but never reached, the city I'll never reach now, even though on clear days we see its golden cupolas gleaming in the distance, on the edge of the plain.

But there is no fear in me, not even now. I hope they come soon and that the pain doesn't last too long. The flashlight goes out, is turned on again, and my heart lurches, thinking that
now
they will push open the door.
Niet,
the woman says, and after the muted sound of a male voice I hear a cry from the boy that sounds something like the mewing of a cat.

No more voices. They'll come in, and I can't move this hand to pick up my pistol. A door opens, but it isn't the door in front of me, it's the other one, of stouter wood, the door of the
izba,
and as it opens a blast of wind touches me. I feel the vibration of boots on the ground. I hear that slight noise of a rifle, the sling ring clicking against the butt. Now the door has closed, and everything is darkness and silence once more.

With faint gratitude, but also with the indifference that has been growing in him as the war proceeds, he understands that the woman has saved his life. She has convinced the guerrillas not to kill him, telling them that he isn't a German and doesn't act like them despite the uniform with the lieutenant's insignia. Maybe she showed them the package of food, or what was left of it, maybe she gave them something to ease their hunger.

A German lieutenant takes his place in the hut a few days later, when he goes to serve in the front line. The first night, the
German claims the iron bed, while the mother and child sleep on the floor of the lean-to, and the next morning he is found strangled with a wire and hanged from a telegraph post near the hut. The mother and child are barricaded in the hut and it's set afire, and when everything has burned to the ground they flatten the area with a tractor and stick a sign in German and Russian in the mud reiterating the punishment reserved for those who collaborate with guerrillas.

Wait a minute.
He shudders as a chill runs down his spine; he is huddled in the darkness, feeling the sheets, a pillow he should find a pistol beneath.
These things haven't happened yet. I can't be remembering something that hasn't happened. In April or May of 1936, my literature professor couldn't know that at the end of that summer he would be shot and thrown into a ditch.

Confused again, he is on the verge of waking and doesn't know where he is or who he is. Where am I if not in a Russian hut near the Leningrad front in the autumn of 1942? I'm wearing not a German winter uniform but lightweight pajamas, there is no rough cloth of a military blanket, no stink of manure or the rotted straw of the mattress I dropped onto a few hours ago, dead with fatigue, not roused from sleep by the stealthy sounds of guerrillas who came to kill me.

Now, yes now he feels panic, lost somewhere in the tangle of unreliable memories and the chaos of time, and vertigo, because in a single instant his mind has leaped more than half a century and an entire continent. He is tempted to reach over to the night table and turn on the lamp, but he chooses to lie quietly, curled up as he did that night fifty-seven years before, a whole lifetime in one lightning flash, in that instant when you're dozing but jerk awake as your head drops. He listens attentively to the quiet whir of the alarm clock, the distant hum of the refrigerator, the muted night traffic of Madrid. He looks at who he was as if watching a stranger, seeing himself from the outside, feeling curiosity and a
certain tenderness, as well as the satisfaction of learning that he wasn't a coward, and the surprise of having survived where so many perished. He knows that his lack of fear, like his lack of envy, is not something to be proud of but simply a part of his character. He sees the youth who was so passionate about philosophy and literature and the German language in a public institute in Madrid, the young man who wasn't born in time to fight in the Spanish Civil War but enlisted in a fit of reckless, toxic romanticism to go to Russia. He sees himself leaping over a trench, at the head of a squad, shooting a pistol and shouting orders, all the while feeling invulnerable. He sees coming toward him, emerging from a mist, a platoon of Russians with upraised swords.

But of all his successive identities the strangest, the most unreal, is the one he has experienced now, tonight, just awakened from a memory as vivid as a dream. Who is this eighty-year-old man turning clumsily in the bed, who knows he will lie awake until dawn, seeing the faces of dead men and places that don't exist, the Russian woman and the benumbed child hiding in the folds of her ragged skirt, the flames of the fire glowing on the leveled plain of mud, the face of the executed professor without his eyeglasses? He wishes he could fall asleep and for a few minutes or seconds have
now
again become
then.

COMING OUT OF THE
last curve of the highway, you will suddenly see all the things she never saw again, the last things, perhaps, she remembered and felt a surge of nostalgia for as she lay dying in her hospital bed, caged among machines and tubes in a room where the air was burning with July heat, the thin cloth of her sick-room gown clinging to her sweaty back. She was always thirsty, and she mumbled words, working parched lips that you moistened with a wet cloth, and she imagined or dreamed she was sitting on the bank of a river in the shade of large trees swaying in a breeze as cool as the current, the clean, swift water where she dabbled her bare feet one summer morning in her early youth. Irrigation ditches snaking through heavy shade, gurgling water hidden beneath thickets of blackberries and willows, scales of gold glittering in the sun, clean pebbles on the bottom shining like precious stones, and in the eddies, spongy masses of eggs brushed the feet with the same delicate feel as water or mud, and bubblelike protuberances, imperceptible to the untrained eye, betray the presence of half-submerged frogs. She swallowed saliva and her throat burned, and once again her mouth was dry, her rough tongue licking lips that you didn't moisten because you fell asleep,
overcome by the exhaustion of so many sleepless nights, now in the hospital and earlier at home, when they released her after her first stay and it seemed she would recover, would regain her health even though she was fragile and frightened. But once she was back home, it was obvious that she belonged in the hospital, for in those few days she had become a stranger to the place and things that once had formed the framework of her life. She would walk with a strange air through the kitchen or the living room in her bathrobe, as if she couldn't find her way, get lost in a corridor or stand before an open closet, looking for something she didn't know how to find, trying unsuccessfully to resume the domestic patterns of the time when she was well, the simplest tasks: preparing a snack in midafternoon, changing sheets.

Then she was back in the hospital and growing worse, her heart weaker than ever, but her face, colorless against the sanitary white of the pillows, took on an expression of serenity and surrender, and she stopped asking when she could go home. At night she was delirious with thirst or fever, or from the tranquilizers and injections they gave her to calm her unruly heart, and she imagined or dreamed that she was looking down on the swift, transparent river, dipping her cupped hands into the water and lifting it streaming and sparkling in the rays that slipped through the trees. But just as her lips touched the water, it escaped through her fingers, and she was still dying of thirst, and some part of her that remained lucid accepted that she would never again see the stair-stepped houses on the hillside or the valley of orchards with the ever-present sound of water in the irrigation ditches and the breeze in the treetops and waving willows. She twisted and turned in the bed, in the tangle of tubes and straps, moaned, half sleeping, half awake, and then you sat up with a start in your synthetic-leather armchair, with a rush of anguish and remorse for having dozed off when she might need something, might ask and
you wouldn't hear, might die there beside you, gone forever without your knowing.