The night in Lisbon

by Erich Maria Remarque

  I began to eat again. There's something good about unpleasant memories: they make you think you're happy when a moment before you were convinced of the contrary. Happiness is a question of degree. When you know that, you're seldom completely unhappy. I had been happy in Swiss prisons because they were not German prisons. But here in front of me sat a man who spoke as if he had a lease on happiness although somewhere in Lisbon a wooden coffin was standing in an airless room.

  "The last time they released me they said they'd have to send me back to Germany if they caught me again without papers," said Schwarz. "It was only a threat, but it scared me. I began to wonder what I'd do if it really happened. I began to dream at night that I was in Germany with the SS on my tracks. I had that dream so often that I began to be afraid of falling asleep. Has that ever happened to you?"

  "I could write a thesis about it," I replied.

  "One night I dreamed I was in Osnabrück, the city where I had lived and where my wife was still living. I stood in her room and saw that she was sick. She was thin as a reed. And she was in tears. I woke up in a cold sweat. I hadn't seen her or heard from her in five years. I hadn't written either, because I didn't know whether her mail was being opened. Before I left, she had promised to get a divorce. I thought that would make it easier for her. And for a few years I thought she had done so."

  Schwarz was silent for a time. I didn't ask him why he had left Germany. There were plenty of reasons, none of them interesting, because all were unjust. It's not interesting to be a victim. Either he was a Jew, or he had belonged to a political party hostile to the regime, or he had enemies who had risen to positions of influence—in Germany there were dozens of reasons for being thrown into a concentration camp or executed.

  "I managed to get back to Paris," said Schwarz. "But that dream left me no peace. It kept coming back. At the same time the illusion of the Munich Pact was shattered. By spring everyone knew there was going to be war. You could smell it, as you smell a fire long before you see it. Only the diplomats shut their eyes and dreamed wishful dreams—of a second or third Munich, or anything but war. Never have so many people believed in miracles as in our times, when there aren't any."

  "Oh yes there are," I said, "or we wouldn't any of us be alive today."

  Schwarz nodded. "That's true. Private miracles. I had one myself. It began in Paris. I suddenly inherited a valid passport. That's the one in the name of Schwarz. It belonged to an Austrian I had met at the Café de la Rose. He died, leaving me his passport and his money. He had arrived only three months before. I had met him in the Louvre—looking at the Impressionists. I often went there in the afternoon to quiet my nerves. When you looked at those peaceful, sundrenched landscapes, you just couldn't believe that a species capable of creating such paintings was going to unleash a murderous war—a soothing illusion that sent your blood pressure down for an hour or two.

  "The man with the passport in the name of Schwarz often stood looking at Monet's nenuphars and cathedrals. We started to talk and he told me that after the Anschluss he had managed to get out of Austria by giving up his fortune, consisting of a collection of Impressionists. It had been seized by the state. He had no regrets. As long as paintings were shown in museums, he could regard them as his own, without having to worry about fire and theft. Besides, there were better pictures in the French museums than he had ever owned. Instead of being wedded to his own mediocre collection as a father is wedded to his family, under obligation to prefer his own, he now possessed all the pictures in the public museums without effort or responsibility. He was a strange man, quiet, gentle, and cheerful in spite of all he had been through. He had been able to take very little money with him; but he had saved a number of old stamps. Stamps are the smallest things to hide, easier than diamonds. It's hard to walk on diamonds if you've hidden them in your shoes and you are called out of the train for questioning. You can't sell them except at a great loss, and a good many questions are always asked. Stamps are for collectors. Collectors aren't so curious."

  "How did he get them out?" I asked, with the professional interest common to all refugees.

  "He took some old, harmless-looking letters with him and hid the stamps under the lining of the envelopes. The customs officers checked the letters but not the envelopes."

  "Not bad," I said.

  "He also took two little Ingres portraits. Pencil drawings. He put them in hideous gilt frames and said they were portraits of his parents. He slipped two Degas drawings in between the portraits and the backing."

  "Not bad," I said again.

  "In April he had a heart attack. He gave me his passport, what stamps he had left, and the drawings. He also gave me the addresses of some people who would buy the stamps. When I dropped in to see him next morning, he lay dead in his bed, so changed by the silence that I could hardly recognize him. I took what money he had left and a suit and some underwear. He had told me to do so the day before; he preferred leaving his belongings to a companion in fate than to the landlord."

  "Did you alter the passport?" I asked.

  "Only the photo and the year of birth. Schwarz was twenty years older than I. Our first names were the same."

  "Whodidit? Brünner?"

  "Somebody from Munich."

  "That was Brünner, the passport doctor. He is an artist."

  Brünner was well known for his skillful doctoring of identification papers. He had helped no end of people, but he himself had no papers when he was arrested. He was superstitious. He believed himself to be an honorable man and a public benefactor, and was convinced that nothing would happen to him as long as he did not practice his art for his own benefit. He had been the owner of a small print shop in Munich.

  "Where is he now?" I asked.

  "Isn't he in Lisbon?"

  I didn't know, but it was possible, if he was still alive.

  "Funny thing," said Schwarz II. "When I had the passport, I didn't dare to use it. Besides, it took me a few days to get used to my new name. I kept repeating it to myself. Crossing the Champs-Elysées, I mumbled my name and my new place and date of birth. I sat in the museum gazing at the Renoirs, and if I was alone, I'd rehearse an imaginary dialogue. Stern voice: 'Schwarz!' And I'd jump to my feet and answer: 'Here!' Or I'd snarl: 'Name!' and reply automatically: 'Josef Schwarz, born in Wiener Neustadt on June 22, 1898.' I'd even practice before I went to sleep. I didn't want to be awakened by a policeman and say the wrong name before I'd collected my wits. I had to forget my old name completely. There is a difference between having no passport and having a false one. The false one is more dangerous.

  "I sold the two Ingres drawings. I received less for them than I had expected, but now I had money, more money than I had seen in a long time.

  "Then one night I had an idea that stayed with me from then on. Wouldn't it be possible for me to go to Germany with this passport? It was almost genuine, and why should anyone get suspicious at the border? I could see my wife again. I could appease my fears about her. I could . . ."

  Schwarz looked at me. "You must know that feeling. Refugee jitters in their purest form. That tightening in the stomach, in the throat, and in the back of the eyes. Everything you've been trying to bury for years, all the things you've done your best to forget, that you've avoided like the plague, come to life again. Memory is a deadly disease for a refugee; it's his cancer of the soul.

  "I tried to down it. I kept going to see those paintings of peace and quietness, the Sisleys and Pissarros and Renoirs; I spent hours in the museum—but now it had the opposite effect on me. The pictures no longer pacified me—they began to cry out, to challenge, to remind me ... of a country that hadn't yet been ravaged by the brown leprosy, of evenings in streets bordered by walls overgrown with lilac, of the golden sunsets in the old city, of green belfries with swallows flying round them—and of my wife.

  "I'm a plain man without any special qualities. For four years I had lived with my wife as most men do: peacefully, pleasantly, but without
great passion. After the first few months our relationship had become what is called a happy marriage—a relationship between two considerate people who don't expect too much. Our dreams belonged to the past, but we didn't miss them. We were reasonable people. And we were very fond of each other.

  "Now I saw everything in a new light. I began to reproach myself; it was my fault that our marriage had been so commonplace. I had bungled everything. What had I lived for? What was I doing now? I had crawled into a hole, I was vegetating. How long would it go on? And how would it end? The war would come, and Germany was bound to win; no other country was fully prepared. And then what? Where could I crawl to, even assuming that I still had the time and strength? What camp would I starve in? Against what wall would I be shot—if I were lucky?

  "The passport that should have given me peace drove me to despair. I wandered through the streets until I was dead tired. But I couldn't sleep, and when I did drop off, my dreams woke me up. I saw my wife in the cellars of the Gestapo; I heard her calling for help in the courtyard of my hotel; and one day, as I entered the Café de la Rose, I thought I saw her face in the mirror across from the door. For a moment she turned toward me—she was pale, her eyes were desolate—then she slipped away. I had seen her so clearly I was sure she was really there. I ran into the back room. As usual, it was full of people, but she was not among them.

  "For a few days I was obsessed with the thought that she had come to Paris and was looking for me. Dozens of times I saw her turn the corner; I saw her sitting on a bench in the Luxembourg Gardens, and when I reached the spot, a strange face looked up at me in surprise; she crossed the Place de la Concorde just as the stream of traffic was about to start up again, and this time it was really she—her gait, the way she squared her shoulders; I even seemed to recognize her dress, but when the traffic policeman finally stopped the stream of cars and I was able to run after her, she had vanished, swallowed up by the black maw of the Métro. I raced down the stairs and was just in time to see the mocking taillights of the train receding in the darkness.

  "I confided in a friend. His name was Löser; he sold stockings and had formerly been a doctor in Breslau. He advised me not to spend so much of my time alone. 'Find yourself a woman,' he said.

  "It didn't help. You know these affairs born of misery, loneliness, fear. You hanker after human warmth, a voice, a body—and you wake up in a strange, awful room, feeling as though you'd fallen off the earth. In your desolation you're grateful for the sound of breathing beside you—but then your imagination starts working again, and after a while nothing is left but an ugly feeling of having abused yourself.

  "When I talk about it now, it all sounds absurd and contradictory. It was different then. All my struggles added up to one thing: I had to go back. I had to see my wife again.

  Possibly she had been living with someone else for heaven knew how long. That didn't matter. I had to see her. To me that seemed perfectly logical.

  "Every day it became clearer that war was inevitable. Hitler had lost no time in breaking his promise to content himself with the Sudetenland and to spare the rest of Czechoslovakia. Obviously he was going to do the same with Poland. That meant war, because France and England both had alliances with Poland. And it was no longer a question of months, but of weeks or even days. For me, too. I'd have to decide quickly; my whole life depended on it. And I did decide. I decided to go back. What would happen afterward I didn't know. And I didn't care. If war came, I was lost in any case. I might as well do this insane thing.

  "A strange peace came over me in the last few days. It was May, and the flower beds in the Rond-Point were bright with tulips. The evenings were bathed in the silvery light and blue shadows of the Impressionists. Behind the cold glare of the first street lamps rose the high, pale-green sky, and across the roofs of the newspaper buildings ran restless red ribbons of luminous writing, spelling out war for all who could read.

  "First I went to Switzerland. I had to try out my passport in a safe place before I could really trust it. The French border guard handed it back to me with indifference; that I had expected. Only countries under dictatorship are hard to get out of. But when the Swiss guard came in, I felt something shrinking inside me. I sat there as nonchalantly as I could, but at the edges of my lungs I felt a fluttering, as of a leaf that begins to go wild on a windless day.

  "The guard looked at my passport. He was a powerful, broad-shouldered man, who smelled of pipe smoke. As he stood in the doorway of the compartment, he blocked off the light, and for a moment I had the feeling that it was my freedom he was shutting out—that the compartment had become a prison cell. Then he handed me back the passport.

  " 'You've forgotten to stamp it,' I said, so eased with relief that the words poured out much faster than I intended.

  "The guard smiled. 'Don't worry. I'll stamp it. Does it make so much difference?'

  " 'No. But to me it's a kind of souvenir.'

  "The man stamped the passport and left. I bit my lips. How nervous I had become! Then it occurred to me that the passport looked a little more authentic with the stamp.

  "In Switzerland I spent a day wondering whether I should take the train into Germany. In the end I was afraid to. I didn't know whether the passports of Germans, or even of former Austrians, returning home might not be examined with special care. Probably not; but still it seemed advisable to cross the border unofficially.

  "In Zurich I went to the main post office, as I had on my first arrival years before. At the General Delivery window you were almost sure to meet acquaintances—homeless souls without residence permits, who could give you information. From there I went to the Café Greif—the Swiss version of the Café de la Rose. I met a number of people who had sneaked across the border, but no one who really knew how to cross safely back into Germany. That was understandable. Except for me, who would want to go to Germany? I noticed the way they looked at me. Then when they saw I was serious, they shrank away from me. Anyone who was planning to return must be a traitor; for who would go back unless he accepted the regime? And if a man could do that, what might he do next? Whom or what would he betray?

  "I was alone. They avoided me as if I'd been a murderer. And I couldn't explain; when I thought about what I was going to do, I was so panic-stricken that I broke into a sweat; how could I possibly explain it to anyone else?

  "At six o'clock the third morning the police came and pulled me out of bed. It was clear to me that one of my acquaintances had reported me. They looked at my passport suspiciously and took me along for questioning. It was lucky now that the passport had been stamped, because I was able to prove that I had entered the country legally and had only been there for three days. I shall never forget that early morning as I passed through the streets under guard. It was a clear day, and the towers and roofs of the city stood out sharply against the sky, as though cut out of metal. From a bakery came the smell of warm bread, and all the consolation in the world seemed to be in that smell. Do you know what I mean?"

  I nodded. "The world never looks more beautiful than when you're being locked up. When you're about to leave it. If only we could always keep this feeling."

  "I had that feeling."

  "Were you able to hold it?" I asked.

  "I don't know," Schwarz answered slowly. "That's what I want to find out. It slipped through my fingers—but even when I held it, did I have it completely? Can't I possibly win it back again, stronger than before, and hold on to it forever? Now that it can't change any more? Don't we always lose what we think we have hold of? Do we lose it because it moves? And does it stand still only when it's gone and can no longer change? Is it only then that it really belongs to us?"

  His eyes were fixed on me in a rigid stare. It was the first time he had looked me full in the face. His pupils were dilated. A fanatic or a madman, I thought.

  The woman in the evening dress at the next table stood up. She looked across the veranda down at the city and the harbor. "Darling, why do we h
ave to go back?" she said to the man in the white dinner jacket. "If we could only stay here! I don't feel a bit like going back to America."

  CHAPTER 2

  "The police in Zurich," Schwarz went on, "held me for only one day. But it was a hard day for me. I was afraid they would check my passport. A phone call to Vienna would be enough. Or if they called in a specialist, he would discover the alterations.

  "In the afternoon I calmed down. Whatever happened, it seemed to me, would be a kind of divine judgment. The decision was out of my hands. If they put me in prison, I'd have to abandon my idea of going to Germany. But late that afternoon they let me out, giving me to understand that I should leave Switzerland as quickly as possible.

  "I decided to go by way of Austria. I had some familiarity with the Austrian border, and felt sure it would not be as closely guarded as that of Germany proper. Actually, why should either border be closely guarded? Who wanted to get in? But on the other hand, there were probably a good many wanting to get out.

  "I took the train to Oberriet, planning to attempt the crossing somewhere in the vicinity. I'd have liked best to wait for a rainy day, but for two days the sky was clear. I left the third night, for fear that too long a stay would attract attention.