by Erich Hackl
Marta no longer has a passport, nor an identity card. She knows she can be abducted again at any time. So a few days later she goes, in disguise, to the Chilean consulate and asks for asylum. Her request is granted. She is not the only one. She spends almost eight weeks with other applicants in the servant’s bedroom of the consulate because the Brazilian government of General Emílio Garrastazu Médici refuses them permission to emigrate to Chile. Then, however, members of the Vanguarda Popular Revolucionária kidnap the Swiss ambassador to Brazil, Giovanni Enrico Bucher. In exchange for him not only seventy political prisoners but also, after pressure from the Chilean government, the six asylum-seekers in the consulate are to be flown out to Santiago. On January 12, 1971, they are taken to Galeão Aiport. Police vehicles with mounted machine guns escort the minibus to the runway.
Victor is released three months later. His sister once visited him in prison. During her visit he learns that, after his name appeared in the papers as a ‘subversive’ who had been arrested, she was dismissed as personal assistant to the head of the Brazilian office of Standard Oil. Later, in his mother’s apartment, they don’t talk about it any more. The fact is, Victor says, that Thea’s career never really got going again. She was quite different from him, consumption oriented, earned good money and spent it like water.
Three months later Victor too sets off for Chile without a valid passport. As a Brazilian you can get as far as Puerto Suárez, the first town after the Bolivian border, with a normal ID card. His intention is to make his way on foot to Santa Cruz, in order to avoid check points, but the sweltering heat forces him to take the risk of traveling by bus and train via Cochabamba to La Paz and then on to the Chilean border, where he applies for political asylum. Once in Chile, in Arica, the carabineros hand him over to the local police, who put him in a cell, threatening to send him back to Brazil. It is only a call from the presidential office in the capital that saves Victor. He is allowed to travel on, to Santiago, where Marta is waiting for him.
In Chile Salvador Allende has been president since 1970. During his time in office his country takes in victims of persecution from all over South America, including three thousand Brazilians. Many have not learnt a trade or profession, or had to break off their training because of the political persecution. They survive on money transferred by their families and have to endure the unfamiliar cold, separation from the place where they belong and the physical and psychological after-effects of torture and defeat.
Marta, too, initially finds it difficult to adapt to the present again. She feels a great emptiness inside, feels alien in her own tormented body, is panic-stricken at the thought of possibly never seeing Brazil again. She often recalls something an attorney once told her: there are people who rise above themselves in prison, become more mature, grow stronger, and others who are destroyed by it. An opinion, or prognosis, that makes her even more disheartened when she feels depressed. She makes an effort to develop her artistic talents, takes courses in photography and film. For their final assessment in the film course the students use a story by the writer Antonio Skármeta, “The Cyclist of San Christobal.” Marta contributes to the script, directs and plays the female lead.
Victor finds employment in the Estación Experimental La Platina, an agricultural experimental station outside Santiago. Unlike most of their fellow Brazilians, who stick together socially, Marta and he seek to make contact with the Chileans. They are amazed at the strength of the workers’ organizations, their class consciousness. Neither, they think, was so well developed in Brazil. However, they also sense how deeply divided the society is, the determination of the opposition to use all means to overthrow the government. The majority of Victor’s colleagues at work, at least the graduates among them, side with the ‘mummies’, as the reactionary alliance of big landowners, industrialists and army officers is called that is putting increasing pressure on the Popular Front government. When, at the end of June 1971, the Second Armored Regiment attempts a putsch, Victor suspects it’s only the prelude to the large-scale attack on the labor movement. To the bloodbath, as everywhere where the right-wing sees its supremacy under threat.
Immediately after Victor’s arrival in Chile he got his mother to send him copies of the family documents and applied to the Austrian Embassy for a passport for himself and Marta. On the basis of the regulations in force at the time they have the right to Austrian citizenship. The officials promise to let him know as soon as the passports can be collected. That doesn’t happen and in the turmoil of events he forgets to go and ask. Marta and he have heard from Rio that they have each been sentenced in their absence to six months in prison for subversive activities. And more news arrives, the most painful of all: that Victor’s mother died on December 25, 1971, at the age of fifty and from a heart attack like his father. And he can’t even fly there to attend her funeral.
Life was hard on her, Victor says, and with time she grew harder and harder. He remembers her impatience because, delicate like his father, as a child he refused to eat, at least when she was there, and her despair later when he neglected his studies more and more to concentrate on the political struggle. He also remembers how she would come home exhausted from her strenuous work doing the rounds of stores and businesses with her cases of samples. And how she visited him in prison as often as she was allowed, and never forgot to bring huge food parcels. What neither he nor his sister can remember: that their mother ever kissed or hugged them. At least there was one final good conversation, on the evening before he fled the country, when he told her he intended to make his way to Chile to join Marta, a decision she accepted without a word.
Then comes the putsch of September 11, 1973. The attack on the presidential palace, the death of Allende, the mass arrests, shootings and curfews. For a whole week no civilian is allowed out in the streets. The state radio broadcasts demands for people to report foreign neighbors to the authorities. Brazilians are easily recognized by their lilting accent anyway. Despite all this, Victor imagines he and Marta are relatively safe. After all they did apply for permanent residence a long time ago. Only when a friend asks him about it does it occur to him that their papers are still with the police department dealing with aliens. Their friend drives them to the Mexican embassy, but as they approach the building they see that it is just being surrounded by military vehicles. They turn off and drive back home. The next day they try the Argentinian embassy. One block before it their friend stops to let them out. In order not to arouse suspicion, they have not brought anything with them from their apartment. No case, no bag, no rucksack. Marta is wearing a headscarf, so that her blond hair won’t give her away as a foreigner. They stroll down the street, holding hands, stop, kiss, take a few more steps. When they’re only a few yards away, they start to run, through the gate and across the forecourt, which seems endless. Then they’re finally at the door, in the embassy.
For the second time, Marta says, we’d lost everything.
21
WHEN THE PUTSCH HAPPENS in Chile, Argentina is ruled by the left-wing Peronist Héctor Cámpora. It is due to him that the embassy takes in unrestricted numbers of Chileans and foreigners who are seeking asylum. Eventually there will be six hundred people crammed together in the grounds and building. The sanitary arrangements cannot cope with the rush, babies, children and pregnant women are in danger of catching diseases. The United Nations’ refugee relief organization sends an official to Santiago, an Austrian who gets his wife to inspect the Argentine embassy. She is horrified by conditions there and promises to see that Marta and Victor receive their passports.
In the middle of October 1973, shortly before or after Juan Domingo Perón’s assumption of power in Argentina, the Chilean military regime allows the refugees in the embassy to leave the country. Victor and Marta are able to leave the country in an Argentine Air Force plane. During the flight the crew—all officers of the Argentine Air Force—talk about it being time to get rid of the subversives. We’re going the open the hatch now
and throw you down… Victor doesn’t take the threat seriously. It will only come back to mind decades later when he reads reports of the Argentine Army’s death flights with prisoners. The plane doesn’t land in Buenos Aires, as they expected, but in Corrientes, in the north of the country. From there the refugees are taken to Posadas, not far from the Brazilian border. A whole night long they are interrogated, not just by the Argentine military but also by specialists of the CIA and people from the Brazilian secret service. For the first time in his life Victor sees a video camera, with which the interrogations are filmed. Then they are separated into groups. Victor and Marta go back to Corrientes where, as Victor puts it, they find their Argentine Schindler. That is, a left-wing Peronist official who, contrary to regulations, issues them papers that allow them to get away, to Buenos Aires.
We didn’t want to go away from South America, Victor says. Our attitude was: here we’re close to Brazil; here we know our way around.
But the government gives them an ultimatum: you have one week to leave the country. To Europe, then, for want of other alternatives, and for preference to a country with a strong left-wing movement. One of their companions, who has also managed to get to the capital, persuades them to go to Italy. He has lived there for several years, he has contacts that might be useful for them. What have they to lose if they change continents for a while? And with Austrian passports no one can stop them.
They manage to survive in Rome for two years in precarious circumstances. Marta as a photographer and trade-fair hostess, Victor as a babysitter. From time to time the Chilean wife of a film director arranges for them to have walk-on parts in slapstick comedies. Then they have a piece of luck and meet the two Brazilian bishops, Hélder Câmara and Aloísio Lorscheider, who are in Europe denouncing the crimes of the military dictatorship. Lorscheider has good connections with the German members of his order, the Franciscans, who obtain a three-month scholarship from the Catholic charitable organization Caritas for Victor. Thus they move to Berlin, where his mother came from. The first obstacle they find themselves faced with—quite unexpectedly for him—is the foreign language.
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VICTOR: At home my mother used to talk to my sister and me in German and we replied in Portuguese. I assumed I had a passive knowledge of the language. What nonsense. When we arrived in Germany I couldn’t even understand the news.
MARTA: I started learning German while we were still in Rome. Then I took another intensive course, lasting three semesters. It provided a good basis but nothing more. There were Brazilians in Berlin who never managed to communicate in German throughout their time there.
VICTOR: What struck us was that language is a class barrier for the Germans as well. Not in Brazil. There everyone can understand everything. But German workers can’t read papers such as the Süddeutsche Zeitung. They’re not written in their language. That’s why ordinary people read the Bild-Zeitung.
MARTA: Only we couldn’t even understand Bild.
VICTOR: And exile has other obstacles. For example I know people who survived torture and went to pieces in exile. It’s not harder for them but longer-lasting. It was easier for me because of the internationalist experience of my mother, who had made the journey in the opposite direction.
MARTA: You lose everything, you have to build everything up from the beginning again. And that while you don’t really want to do it because you intend to go back. I resisted that mental attitude. I told myself I had to be here a bit more, in Germany. I tried to make friends and foster the friendships, which helped to keep my curiosity about the country and its society alive. But at first I wasn’t so clear about that. I saw myself as someone who was far away from her roots, from the life I’d imagined for myself, and I didn’t know where to turn. Ten years of marriage in a condition like that aren’t ten normal years of marriage. Routines haven’t been established. Being in a foreign country keeps couples together. But so many relationships were broken off once the exile was over.
VICTOR: When there are difficulties you don’t separate. I always compare it to a house of cards: you need someone to lean against if you don’t want to collapse.
MARTA: We always set ourselves just short-term goals. We didn’t have much time to assimilate our own experiences. For ages my own self-image was determined by what I’d been through. One thing was clear to us: it was right to have been in the resistance. It was right to fight for more justice, and our love of Brazil, of the people who have shown such courage, has never faded. I think we did everything it was possible to do at the time. That revolutionary movement in Brazil—that really was something. But I have the feeling that those who, unlike us, weren’t involved, refuse to acknowledge its significance. That was my first impression when we went back to Brazil: that they don’t really want us here. We could even sense that attitude among those who had sympathized with us at the time: it had all been for nothing. It had all been futile.
VICTOR: Another reason why it was difficult for us was because we didn’t belong to any group. None of our former friends and companions had studied in Germany.
MARTA: We wanted to go back to Brazil. But we were also afraid of returning. Brazil had changed while we’d been away and we too were not the same anymore. The first five years were very difficult for us.
VICTOR: It was complicated. Some people had returned from exile and wanted to tell the others what to do. That’s not the way we are. And I know myself: I only go along with a movement that I can really identify with. There wasn’t anything like that in the political sphere. As far as employment was concerned, there was. People didn’t always understand that.
MARTA: I calculate that, including the time in prison, I was away from my country for seventeen years. That’s too long. In the first place I couldn’t talk about my life. Nor did I want to. I tried to be authentic. And to come to understand our country again.
VICTOR: Finding your place in a society again is a lengthy process. You have to proceed cautiously. I wasn’t cautious. I was in a hurry. I was forty when I got there. It’s still complicated. You tend to hold your tongue.
MARTA: Living a life that is a permanently provisional arrangement has left its mark on us. We are now at an age when everyone’s well established. But we don’t feel that we are. For our life has been different.
23
IN WEST BERLIN Marta completed her studies with a master’s dissertation on Brazilian telenovelas (soap operas) that was also published. Victor wrote a thesis on the development of agriculture in north-east Brazil after 1950 and then had a fixed-term position as assistant professor in the Institute of Sociology at the Free University. Their daughter Luana was born in 1977. When she was nine Victor and Marta decided to return to Brazil.
It was the right moment and at the same time the last opportunity in political, professional and private respects. After a slow and contradictory process, the military had ceded power to civilian politicians and in May 1985 the Brazilian parliament voted to change the constitution, introducing direct elections for the office of president and posts of governor, granting illiterate people the right to vote and legalizing the Marxist parties that had been forbidden until then. Victor’s contract with the Free University was running out. And Luana was of an age when she was well enough established to remember her German childhood and flexible enough to accept her parents’ home as her own. Despite that, her parents’ greatest concern was whether and how she would cope with the change.
Compared with Rio, or any other Brazilian city, they had found West Berlin an idyllic home. They could let their daughter go to the park or to see a friend by herself without worrying. Now that was out of the question because of the stark social differences, the violence permeating all levels of society and the immensely increased amount of traffic. The distances were greater, the hours of work longer, the salaries lower. It was usual even for the lower middle classes to employ servants at home and the relationship with them was, whether willingly or by force of circumstance, determined by
command and obedience. To have a car of their own, which was more of a nuisance in West Berlin, was essential to take their daughter to school, bring her home, drive her to birthday parties or sporting events, to manage the long distances to and between their places of work. Victor soon made it to assistant then full professor in the Faculty of Economics at the Universidade Federal Fluminense, while Marta struggled along with poorly paid teaching posts at several private universities until ten years ago, when she was appointed to a position at the Academia Brasileira de Letras, the Brazilian Academy of Language and Literature. Unlike Victor she is still working.
One year before they left for Brazil, in February or March 1986, the family went skiing in the South Tyrol. On the return journey they stopped off in Vienna. It was the first time Victor had been to the city. The three of them stayed for a few days in a guest house in the city center and went to the usual tourist attractions: St. Stephen’s Cathedral, the Hofburg, the Opera, Schönbrunn Palace. Victor took the opportunity to have a look round on the other side of the Danube, in Floridsdorf, as well. It was familiar to him because his grandmother had talked more and more often about it the older she got. Floridsdorf. Floridsdorf and the summers on the old arm of the Danube. Floridsdorf and my Leo. Floridsdorf and Mitzi Pfeiffer. But at that time he was still too bound up in the present to look into the history of his forebears. And I didn’t have any idea exactly where they’d lived anyway, Victor says.
The last source for that would have been his Uncle Kurt. But he had completely lost contact with him during the years of oppression and exile. There was no question of his uncle ever having visited him in prison. Once Vera wrote to him that Kurt had turned up unexpectedly to ask what his, Victor’s, address in Berlin was. Another time the telephone rang in their apartment in Berlin, Victor picked up the phone and said his name, at which an oldish woman’s voice asked whether he was related to a certain Kurt Klagsbrunn. She had, the woman explained happened to come across his name in the phone book.