In a distant park, one you reach after a long ride in a streetcar, almost on the outskirts of Moscow, Greta Buber-Neumann makes a date to meet an old friend, someone as frightened as she, but nonetheless loyal. You are that woman who jumps from a moving streetcar and turns to see if anyone is following, then takes another streetcar, and when she gets off, following a circuitous route, arrives at a suburban park bathed in the afternoon light. There will be people around, old men with canes and overcoats and leather caps, mothers holding the hands of children swathed in mufflers and heavy coats. Greta and her friend see one another from a distance but do not approach one another until they are sure no one is following. “Can’t we get away somehow?” he asks. “Do we have to have our throats cut like rabbits? How have we been able to accept all this for years without questioning it, without opening our eyes? Now we have to pay for our blind faith.”
The next time, the man doesn’t come. Greta waits until nightfall, then goes back to her room without bothering to check whether she’s being followed. She imagines, with sadness, almost with sweetness, that her friend has managed to escape.
One night in January 1938, the knock at the door finally comes. They haven’t come to take her away, however, only to confiscate the last belongings of the renegade Heinz Neumann. Uniformed police collect the few books Greta hasn’t sold for a pittance in order to buy food, and some of her husband’s old shoes, and as they leave they hand her a receipt. Someone tells her that the friend she used to meet in the park was arrested as he tried to board a train for the Crimea.
They came one morning very early, on July 19, and when she realized that they had finally come for her, she felt only a kind of relief. They drove her to Lubyanka Prison in the backseat of a small black van, sitting between two men in sky-blue uniforms who didn’t look at her or speak a word. This time her knees didn’t tremble, and at her feet was the suitcase she’d kept packed for so long. She remembered the last thing she saw in a Moscow street before the van drove through the prison gates: a luminous clock glowing red in the early dawn.
On July 12, Professor Klemperer refers in his diary to some friends who left Germany and found work in the United States or England. But how do you leave when you don’t have anything? He, an old man with a sick wife, with no knowledge of any foreign language, with no practical skill, how do you leave the house you’ve finally managed to build, the land Eva has almost made into a garden? We have stayed here, in shame and penury, as if buried alive, buried up to our necks, waiting day after day for the last spadefuls of dirt.
silencing everything
STARTLED AWAKE, I am stiff with cold, and I don’t know where I am, even who I am. For a few seconds, I have been a blaze of pure consciousness, without identity, without place, without time, only the waking and the sensation of cold, the darkness in which I’m lying curled up, wrapped in the sheltering warmth of my own body, on my side, hands between my legs and knees up against my chest, my feet icy despite the boots and wool socks, my fingertips numb, my joints so stiff that if I try to move, I may not be able.
There’s something more than the cold and the darkness like the bottom of a well, like a breath of moist stone and frozen, plowed earth. The smell of manure too, manure mixed with mud, an ocean of mud and manure that swallows up military boots, horses’ hooves, the wheels and tracks of war machines. What has woken me is a sense of danger, a reflection of alarm so powerful that in one second it dissipated all the weight of sleep. Quicker than my still groggy consciousness, my right hand feels beneath the blankets in search of the gun. The Spanish wool gloves, the harsh sleeve of the gray military tunic stained with dry mud, the feel of the greatcoat I’m using as a pillow and of the mattress of damp straw on which I was sleeping: each is a feature added to my identity, to this persona that nevertheless observes from without, someone groping among rough fabrics for the cold metal of a Luger. But my whole arm feels heavy as lead, still paralyzed by sleep and cold, and an automatic instinct of caution warns me that I mustn’t make a sound. I hold my breath, hoping to hear something, a whisper that barely scratches the silence. I want to evaporate in the darkness, to lie as motionless as those insects whose defense mechanism is to be mistaken for a blade of grass or a dry leaf.
It’s the danger that has reminded him of who and where he is. Danger, not fear. He never feels fear, just as he cannot remember ever having felt envy. He feels the cold, the hunger, the exhaustion of brutal marches, the desperation of always sinking in endless mud—from the beginning of autumn, when the rains came—in a sea of mire and manure that swamps everything: men, animals, machines, dead and living.
A second ago it was barely a spark of alarm in the void of darkness, as anonymous as the tip of a cigarette glowing for an instant beyond the mud and the no-man’s-land—in the vast nothingness of the plain obliterated by mud, which in a few weeks will become a desert field of snow. Now he knows, remembers. In old Spanish to remember means to wake up. The professor of literature is lecturing, walking from one side to the other on a dais dusty with chalk and echoing hollowly beneath his feet. He wears round eyeglasses, a rumpled suit, and draws from a dangling cigarette as he speaks passionately of Jorge Manrique and recites long sections of his poetry. He doesn’t know that within a few months he will be shot, his nearsighted eyes squinting in the headlights of a truck. He remembers “the sleeping soul” and thinks of his favorite student in the Instituto Cardenal Cisneros in Madrid. His mind brightens, and he wakes completely. Memory explodes in him as if he had walked into a dark room where objects begin to take shape, the outlines of furniture and windows. His animal instinct for danger makes him listen again for the sound that woke him. A staccato, metallic sound, insignificant to anyone who doesn’t know it, but unmistakable: the whisper of a gun lightly brushing against something, a rifle against the clothing on a shoulder. He raises his head a little and sees a ray of light beneath the door, between the chinks of the badly joined boards that separate the lean-to where he’s sleeping from the main room of the hut. He could have chosen to sleep there, the German officer in charge of billeting told him, he’d be near the fire and wouldn’t have to endure the stench of the manure. When he arrived the first night, the Russian woman and her child had already retired to the lean-to, or, more accurately, had hidden in it, leaving the only bed for him. Arms about each other, mother and child become a single mound of rags, two pairs of eyes frightened and shining in the light of the flashlight. He told them in German to come out, that they didn’t have anything to fear, he told them using signs that he didn’t want the bed, that they should take it. The woman shook her head, murmured in Russian, cuddled her child, the two of them rocking back and forth. The child had thin blond hair and sunken cheeks, and large blue circles smudged the transparent skin beneath his eyes.
But the light filtering from beyond the door doesn’t come from a fire or candle. It’s a flashlight being turned on and off; he can hear the click of the switch, which someone is sliding very quietly: not the woman, because he is sure she doesn’t have a flashlight, she didn’t even have candles until he brought her a handful from the commissary, or matches to light the fire. There was nothing at all in the straw-thatched log hut stranded in the midst of the mud and the chaos of the roads to the front, untouched by the disaster, nothing but the large iron bed that ended up there through God only knows what whim of fate, the bed that he’d refused to sleep in, despite instructions from the officer in charge of billeting.
He hears voices in the hut, barely whispers, but men’s voices, not the woman’s or the child’s. Footsteps too, boots, which he doesn’t exactly hear but rather feels as vibration on the ground where he’s lying. The flashlight is turned on again, and again he hears the sound of a rifle against cloth or a leather belt—specifically, the sound of the ring that fastens the sling to the rifle butt. Now the beam is turned in his direction, and the straw and the nest of blankets and greatcoat in which he’s lying are striped by threads of light coming through the cracks. Som
ething blocks the light, a body brushing against the planks of the door. It’s the woman, he’s sure; he recognizes her voice, even though she is speaking very quietly, repeating one of the few words of Russian he’s learned. Niet.
Now he guesses, understands, but still isn’t afraid. Russian guerrillas. They operate behind our lines, sabotage installations, execute and hang from telegraph poles known collaborators with the Germans. They make raids at night, and at dawn there is no trace of them except for the corpse of someone they’ve hanged or strangled in silence. They don’t run, they vanish in the darkness, in the limitless expanse of plain and woods, a space that no army can encompass or conquer.
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.
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