Copyright © 1983 by Ariel Dorfman
First published in the United States of America by Pantheon Books, a division of Random House, Inc., 1983
First Seven Stories Press Edition June 2002
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electric, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
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v3.1
by way of dedication
I was going to publish this novel under another name.
If I sought to hide its true father, it was not because I was ashamed of the son, but because books with my name on them could not—and many still cannot—circulate freely in Chile and the other countries of the southern cone of Latin America. But there was another reason as well: The novel I was planning dealt with the disappearance of thousands of men, and some women, into the hands of the secret police of those dictatorships. Taken from their homes in the dead of night or abducted in open daylight on the streets, these people are never seen again. Their relatives are left not just without their loved ones, but without any certainty about whether they are alive or dead. The “missing” are deprived of more than their homes, their livelihoods, their children. They are also deprived of their graves. It’s as if they had never existed. A novel about this sort of situation was not the kind that would endear a publisher to the authorities, the very authorities who had the power to make him too disappear.
My body had already been banned from those countries. I didn’t want my new book to be banned as well, so I decided to write a story that apparently took place in Greece, at a somewhat undefined period of the twentieth century, and publish it under a name I had invented, Eric Lohmann. I hoped readers would be persuaded that it had indeed been penned forty years ago in Denmark, just before the author himself was taken off into the “nacht and nebel.”
My plan was that we would first bring the book out in Danish or German or French, and then have it “translated” into Spanish. Several prominent writer friends were ready to offer support by writing introductions or lending their names as “translators,” so that my child might grow up where it belonged, in its true land, among its own. The scheme was not as farfetched as it may sound. The inmates of the Chilean concentration camps had managed to exhibit plays which they had written themselves, by the simple method of attributing them to nonexistent, foreign authors. If they could do that from behind barbed wire, why couldn’t I do something similar from my own position of relative freedom.
Before beginning, however, I contacted a publishing house of some importance that had no problem putting out books in those countries. The editor-in-chief took an enthusiastic interest in the project, but wouldn’t commit himself until he could read the manuscript. His only suggestion was that maybe I should “go easy” on the military characters. Maybe it was because I didn’t listen to him, maybe it was for other reasons, but when I finally delivered the completed version, the company chose not to risk printing the book; and if they didn’t dare, I knew no one else would even look at it.
I hadn’t expected that decision, and it left me in a rather curious situation. It made no sense to publish the novel under its pseudonym, since access to the readers I wanted to reach was blocked anyway. But it didn’t seem right either to redo the narrative, giving it a contemporary, more realistic Latin American framework and atmosphere. I liked the novel as it was. By forcing myself to choose my words with caution, by forcing myself to witness such a traumatic and immediate experience from a distance, by forcing myself to explore a language which could not be traced to the style that Latin American readers and critics might have recognized as my own, it seemed to me I had managed to make the plight of the missing people into something more universal, which could happen anywhere, at any time, to anyone. It is our misfortune that it is happening today in my own Chile, in El Salvador, in South Africa, in the Philippines. It happened in Denmark yesterday, and who knows where it will happen tomorrow. Just a little imagination is needed to shift the characters and change the landscape.
But there was another reason why I did not want to modify that manuscript. As I watched the words spill out, I came to identify more and more with its dead European author, listening to his tenderness, possessed by his rage to endure. In the end all that was left for me to do was to give over to the reader, who someday soon may also be of that southern cone, this novel for which I take responsibility.
This way, whoever reads the book can judge whether it also could have been written—and it was, nobody has to certify it so—by that Danish resistance fighter, that brother forty years my senior, that father who never got to meet his son, to whose memory I dedicate these pages he managed to finish a few days before his death, before they came to get him, the same men who years later, on another continent, keep coming and coming to take men and women away from their families.
ARIEL DORFMAN
Washington, D.C.
September 1982
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Foreword by the Author’s Son
The Family
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
foreword by the author’s son
I never met my father. Men from the Gestapo came for him in April 1942, one month before my birth. Perhaps my mother’s advanced condition had something to do with their not taking her away too. “It’s a routine interrogation,” they told her, but she knew that wasn’t so, that she’d never see Father again. After the war, over a period of months, my mother questioned former inmates of the concentration camps where Danes were habitually sent, but no one had even seen him.
Only years later, when I began asking my mother more specific questions about the man whose picture I had always had beside my bed, did I find out about the novel. In the months preceding his arrest and disappearance, really from the moment he knew for certain that someone like me was on the way, my father set out in his spare time to write a work of fiction. I’m told he joked about it, saying he’d already planted so many trees, and now that a child was about to bless our turbulent world the only thing lacking was to write a book, and in times like these it had to be done fast, because one never knew how much time was left. It appears that he managed to finish the first draft a few weeks before the Gestapo squadron came to get him, but my mother never read it and didn’t even know where the manuscript had gone. She assumed, naturally enough, that it had been lost or had ended up in the possession of some obscure colonel of the secret police.
Recently, however, we recovered the novel, after its being missing for some thirty-odd years. A cousin of mine found it in the bottom of a trunk full of old papers and periodicals, as she was preparing to move from the huge country house that was now too big for her family now that her children had married. We figured that my father had delivered the manuscript to his sister, my aunt Gertrudis, whose judgment (they were twins) he deemed faultless. We know that she became gravely ill a few weeks later, almost exactly at the moment of my father’s arrest, and no dou
bt had neither the time nor the energy to inform my mother or anyone else about the novel. When my aunt died soon thereafter, no one again disturbed those papers in all those years.
The novel came preceded by a brief letter addressed to my mother and to the son or daughter about to be born, asking them, in case anything happened, to see to its publication, as it was, but under a pseudonym. He thought, of course, that it would have to be circulated illegally. His insistence on the use of a false name arose, I’m sure, from the belief that the Nazi occupation would continue for a prolonged period. Or maybe it simply had to do with an excessive modesty or shyness, character traits which his friends have mentioned to me. Be that as it may, we’ve decided to carry out his wishes and publish the novel, under a pseudonym, despite its fragmentary character. (We don’t even know if it’s missing some parts, as seems to be the case with section ten.) We feel this is an act of respect for his memory.
The publishers desired, nevertheless, that the author’s son should clarify the circumstances of the novel’s origins, which explain some peculiarities that might not otherwise be comprehensible.
As the reader will see, the action occurs in a country that resembles Greece, although it is never named as such. But the historical situation described here has nothing to do with what was happening in Greece at that time. The Greek Quisling government did not maintain its own army, as did Denmark, although its police force and a few groups of shock troops did help with the mop-up work during the German occupation. My father’s novel seems, if anything, more like an unusual mixture of two previous epochs in Greek twentieth-century history—the Metaxas dictatorship and the foreign invasion that followed. Clearly, though, what my father did was to transport to a country like Greece a story that could just as well have happened in Denmark, had our country had mountains and a Balkan guerrilla tradition.
According to my mother, my father never visited Greece or any other Mediterranean country. He set his novel in that distant realm, which suffered a similar tragedy, the better to comment on what was occurring around him. The Norwegian and Danish events that he knew so well were perhaps too close to home to contain his visions.
It may be that this distancing explains one of the greatest merits, in my judgment, of his work. The country he created is not Greece but an imaginary place equivalent to all Europe of that epoch. Written between 1941 and 1942, the novel presages what was to occur in his own country, in Holland, in France, in Italy, in Poland, in the years to come. But more than that, it announces what was to happen in Greece itself after the Second World War, during the civil war. Beyond that, it prefigures what is still happening now, decades later, in so many areas of the Third World.
I hope, as does my mother, that the publication of this book may contribute, even in the smallest way, toward the prevention of what is told here ever happening again.
My father had the capacity to understand, absorb, and express the grief of his widow and of the son who never knew him. It is worthwhile asking today what the talent and tenderness of my father might have produced had he not disappeared into the hands of the men who came that night to take him away.
SIRGUD LOHMANN
the family
Sofia Angelos
Karoulos Mylonas, her father
Michael Angelos, her husband
Dimitriou Angelos, her elder son
Serguei, her younger son
Hilda, her sister
Cristina, Rosa, Maria, her unmarried daughters
Alexandra, Dimitriou’s wife
Fidelia and Alexis, twins, the daughter and son of Dimitriou and Alexandra
Yanina, Serguei’s wife
Little Serguei, the son of Serguei and Yanina
chapter one
i
“That old bitch again?” said the captain. “Again?”
“Yes, sir. The same one.”
“The same one. That’s what I was afraid of. Tell her I’m not in.”
“I already told her that, sir. I told her you weren’t in.”
“Well?”
“With your permission, Captain, she says she’ll wait until you come out.”
“But didn’t you tell her I wasn’t in? Isn’t that what you said?”
“She says she’ll wait, that there’s only one door and that you’ll have to come out where you went in. That’s what she said, Captain.”
“And the body? It’s about the body, right?”
“It’s still there, Captain.”
“And the women?”
“The same, Captain. They’re still there, next to the river.”
“It must be about the body, the son of a bitch. Another body. It must be about that, don’t you think?”
“If you say so, Captain.”
“ ‘If you say so, if you say so.’ Don’t you have any opinions of your own? Can’t you speak and think for yourself? If you say so, if I say so. I’m asking you what you think.”
“Yes, sir, it must be about the body. The lady claims it’s Michael Angelos. That she’s the wife.”
Before responding, the captain took out a cigarette and lit it.
“Wife? She’s this one’s wife?”
“That’s what she claims, Captain.”
“How can she know she’s the wife if she hasn’t even seen it?”
“I don’t know, sir. Ask her, if you want to.”
“She hasn’t even been to the river, right?”
“No, she hasn’t, Captain. As soon as she found out about the body, she came straight here. Just like the other time.”
The captain got up and walked to the window. The spotless window was the only clean thing for miles. Outside, even at this early hour, the heat was drying, twisting, tightening the air. A little girl passed with a donkey. The two went by slowly and disappeared. The dust they’d raised came down, taking its time, swirling to the ground. It was as if no one had ever walked down the street.
“Stink hole.” The captain bit off the words under his breath. “I have to be posted to this fucking stink hole. You’re from around here, aren’t you?” He already knew the answer. Captain Gheorghakis had given him the details before leaving him in charge of the unit. And Philip Kastoria, the owner of almost all this land, who lived on the far side of the mountains, had also recommended the orderly with special enthusiasm. But during the last two weeks he hadn’t wanted to formulate this question, hadn’t wanted to admit any disorientation in this inhospitable, unknown spot. Now it came out naturally.
“From the area, Captain. I was born about forty miles from here, on the other side of the hill. I was employed by Mr. Kastoria. Perhaps they told you.”
The captain waited for him to continue, but the orderly offered no more particulars. “Forty miles,” the captain repeated, swallowing the heat and the violent light coming through the window, those blind white walls under the sun, the rickety cypresses covered with a fine white dust awaiting the slightest blessing of a breeze, even the shadows chalky. “So you understand them, you understand these people—or don’t you?”
“Sort of, Captain.”
“Sort of?”
“I’m different from them, Captain. With your permission, Captain, but I don’t think I’ll stay here my whole life.”
The captain didn’t turn around.
“So this is a fucking stink hole for you too?”
“I wouldn’t live here my whole life, sir, if that’s what you mean.”
“Okay, for now, you’re going to do two things. First you’re going to turn on the fan. That’s the first thing you’ll do. And second you’re going to go out and advise that old bitch that I’m not going to see her because I don’t have time, that I’m busy today and tomorrow too. And you’re going to convince her that it would be nice if she went home and tended her sheep or whatever, because that way I won’t have to dirty my boots. Understood?”
“Yes, sir.”
The orderly went to the desk and put on the fan. The captain heard the hum of the motor and a
few seconds later felt the fleeting satisfaction of a little gust of warm air hitting his sweaty shoulders. He turned decisively, his hands behind his back, and walked over to the desk.
Just then the orderly opened the door. For an instant the captain caught a glimpse of the figure in black sunk in a corner of the improvised anteroom, and remembered that look with which she’d observed him throughout their first and only interview, just the day after he’d arrived to take charge of the regiment. It seemed unreal, the two weeks since then, two weeks in this rotting, forgotten town. He was going to have to take a day off to visit the Kastorias and enjoy a little taste of civilization. He couldn’t live like this.
The door closed.
He conjured up an image of the stubborn old woman. She’d probably leave the building and install herself a few steps away, wait there all morning, all afternoon, all night, like the other time, without moving an inch, still as a statue, a piece of rubbish scarcely stirring. That old woman and all the old women like her ought to be dead, ought to be stacked like stones in the cemetery.
“And that old woman?” the captain had asked, two weeks ago, when he’d passed her on the way in, then on the way out, then on the way in again.
“She’s been here two days, Captain. Says she wants to see you.” She hadn’t acknowledged the reference. She was simply there, facing the door of the headquarters, vigilant, her mouth pressed tight, entirely submerged in her black dress, as if she hadn’t slept all night.
“We’ll clear this up in a hurry.” The captain said it loudly, so all his subordinates could hear. “What do you want?” he’d demanded, brutal, to the point, ready to set things straight at a single stroke.
“I want to bury my father. My father, Karoulos Mylonas.”
“Then bury him. What have I got to do with it?”
“The soldiers already did,” she said in a monotone, without raising her eyes, as if the captain wasn’t going to believe her anyway.
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