by Anna Seghers
Suddenly I felt quite calm. I thought, I’m sitting here, and the Germans are moving past me and occupying France. But France has often been occupied—and the occupiers all had to withdraw again. France has often been sold down the river, and you, too, my gray-green fellows, have often been sold down the river. My fear vanished completely; the whole dreadful swastika episode was a nightmare haunting me; I saw the mightiest armies of the world marching up to the other side of my garden fence and withdraw; I saw the cockiest of empires collapse and the young and the bold take heart; I saw the masters of the world rise up and come crashing down. I alone had immeasurably long to live.
In any event, my dream of getting across the Loire was now at an end. I decided to go to Paris. I knew a couple of decent people there, that is, provided they were still decent.
III
I walked to Paris; it took me five days. German motorized columns drove along beside me. The rubber of their tires was superb; the young soldiers were the elite—strong and handsome; they had occupied a country without a fight; they were cheerful. Some farmers were already working the fields on the side of the road—they had sown their crops on free land. In one village bells were ringing for a dead child who had bled to death on the road. A farm wagon had broken down at one of the crossroads. Perhaps it belonged to the dead child’s family. German soldiers ran over to the wagon and fixed the wheels; the farmers thanked them for their kindness. A young fellow my age was sitting on a rock; he was wearing a coat over the remnants of a uniform. He was crying. As I walked by I patted him on the back, saying, “It will all pass.”
He said, “We would have held the place, but those pigs gave us only enough bullets to last an hour. We were betrayed.”
“We haven’t heard the last of this,” I told him.
I kept walking. Early one Sunday morning I walked into Paris. A swastika flag was actually flying before the Hotel de Ville. And they were actually playing the Hohenfriedberg March in front of Notre Dame. I couldn’t believe it. I walked diagonally across Paris. And everywhere there were fleets of German cars and swastikas. I felt quite hollow, as if emptied of all emotion.
All this trouble, all this misfortune that had befallen another people had been caused by my people. For it was obvious that they talked like me and whistled the same tunes. As I was walking to Clichy where my old friends the Binnets lived, I wondered whether the Binnets would be sensible enough to understand that, even though I was one of these people, I was still myself. I wondered whether they would take me in without identity papers.
They did, and they were sensible. In the past this sensibleness of theirs even used to bother me! Before the war, for six months, I’d been Yvonne Binnet’s boyfriend. She was only seventeen. And I, fool that I was, had fled from my homeland to escape the mess, the evil fog of dense emotions. I was secretly annoyed at the Binnet family’s clear-headed common sense. I thought all the family members were just too reasonable in their view of life. For instance, from their sensible point of view, people went on strike so that next week they could buy a better cut of meat. The Binnets even thought that if you earned three more francs a day, then your family would not only feel less hungry but also stronger and happier. And Yvonne’s good sense made her believe that love existed for our pleasure, hers and mine. But I knew deep down in my bones—of course I didn’t tell her this—that love sometimes goes along with suffering, that there’s also death, separation, and hardship, and that happiness can overtake you for no reason at all, as can the sadness into which it often imperceptibly turns.
But now the Binnet family’s clearheaded common sense proved to be a blessing. They were glad to see me and took me in. They didn’t think I was a Nazi just because I was a German. The old Binnets were at home, as well as the youngest son who wasn’t yet in the army and the second son who had shed his uniform in the nick of time when he saw how things stood. But their daughter Annette’s husband was a prisoner of the Germans. She now lived at her parents’ house with her child. My Yvonne, they told me with embarrassment, had been evacuated to the South, where she had married her cousin a week ago. That didn’t bother me at all. At that moment I wasn’t the least bit in the mood for love.
Since their factory was shut down, the Binnet men stayed at home. As for me, all I had was time. So we had nothing better to do from morning till night than talk about what was going on. We all agreed on how much the invasion of Germany suited the rulers here. The elder Binnet seemed to understand quite a few things as well or better than any Sorbonne professor. The only thing we disagreed on was Russia. Half of the Binnets claimed that Russia was thinking only of itself and had left us in the lurch. The other half claimed that the French and German rulers had agreed that their armies should be launched at the Russians first instead being used in the West, and it was this that had thwarted Russia. Trying to make peace among us, old man Binnet said that the truth would come to light, that one day the files would all be opened, by which time he’d be long dead.
Please forgive this digression. We’re getting close to the main point. Annette, the Binnets’ older daughter, had been assigned some work at home. I had nothing better to do, so I helped her pick up and deliver her laundry bundles. We took the Métro to the Latin Quarter. Got off at the Odéon stop. While Annette went to her shop on Boulevard Saint Germain, I waited on a bench near the Odéon station exit.
Once Annette took a long time. But what did it matter to me? The sun was shining down on my bench; I watched the people going up and down the Métro stairs; two women were hawking Paris Soir, shouting in an ancient mutual hatred for each other that increased whenever one of them took in two sous more than the other. For to be honest, although the two women stood next to each other, only the one was making any sales, while the other’s pile never got any lighter. The bad saleswoman suddenly turned to the lucky one and cursed her wildly. In a flash she flung her entire rotten life at the head of the other woman, interrupting herself only to cry out, Paris Soir!
Two German soldiers came over and laughed. That really annoyed me, as much as it would have if the drunken newspaper seller were my French foster mother. Some women porters sitting next to me were talking about a young woman who had cried all night after being detained by the police because she was walking with a German soldier while her own husband was a prisoner of war. The trucks of refugees kept rolling down the Boulevard Saint Germain without interruption. Between them darted the small swastika-emblazoned cars of German officers. Some of the plane tree leaves were already falling on us, for that year everything was drying up early. But I kept thinking about how heavily time weighed on me because I had so much of it. It really is hard to experience war as a stranger among a strange people. Just then, Paul came walking along the avenue.
Paul Strobel had been in the camp with me. Once while we were unloading a ship, someone had stepped on his hand. For three days they thought his hand was done for. He had cried back then. Actually I could understand that. He prayed when we heard the Germans were already surrounding the camp. Believe me, I could understand that too. Now he was far removed from such situations. He was coming from the direction of the Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. An old buddy from the camp! And in the middle of Swastika-Paris! I called to him, “Paul!”
He was startled, but then he recognized me. He looked amazingly cheerful and was well dressed. We sat down in front of a little café on the Carrefour de l’Odéon. I was glad to see him again. But he seemed pretty distracted. Up to that point, I had never had anything to do with writers. My parents saw to it that I was trained as a mechanic. In the camp everyone knew Paul Strobel was a writer. We were assigned to unload on the same dock. The German planes were heading straight for us. While I was at that camp, Paul was a sort of buddy of mine, a somewhat funny, slightly crazy camp pal, but always a pal. Since our escape I hadn’t experienced anything new, and for me the old stuff hadn’t yet blown over. I was still half in escape mode, half in hiding. But I could tell he had finished with that chapte
r of his life; something new seemed to have happened to him that gave him strength. All the things I was still deeply caught up in were just a memory for him.
He said, “Next week I’m going to the unoccupied zone. My family lives in Cassis near Marseille. I have a danger visa for the United States.”
I asked him what that was.
“A special emergency visa for especially endangered people,” he said.
“Are you in special danger?” I just meant to ask whether he was perhaps endangered in a more unusual way than the rest of us in this now dangerous part of the world.
He looked at me in surprise, a little annoyed. Then he said in a whisper, “I wrote a book and countless articles against Hitler. If they find me here—Why are you smiling?”
I wasn’t smiling at all, I was in no mood to smile; I thought of Heinz who had been beaten half to death by the Nazis in 1935, who was then put in a German concentration camp, escaping to Paris, only to end up in Spain with the International Brigade where he then lost a leg, and who, one-legged, was then dragged through all of France’s concentration camps, ending up in ours. Where was he now? I also thought of flocks of birds being able to fly away. The whole earth was uncomfortable, and still I quite liked this kind of life; I didn’t envy Paul for that thing he had—what was it called?
“My danger visa’s been confirmed by the American Consulate at the Place de la Concorde. My sister’s best friend is engaged to a silk merchant from Lyon. He brought me my mail. He’s driving back there in his car and will take me with him. He just needs to get a general permit saying how many people he’s taking. That way I can circumvent the German safe conduct.”
I looked at his right hand, the one that had been stepped on back then. The thumb was a little shriveled. Paul hid his thumb. “How did you get to Paris?” I asked.
“By a miracle,” he said. “Three of us escaped together, Hermann Achselroth, Ernst Sperber, and I. You know Achselroth, don’t you? His plays?”
I didn’t know any of his plays, but I did remember Achselroth. An exceptionally good-looking fellow, who would have looked better in an officer’s uniform than the dirty prestataire rags he wore like a Landsknecht.
He was famous, Paul assured me. The three of them had gotten as far as L. and were pretty much exhausted. Then they came to a crossroads, a real parting of the ways, Paul said, smiling—I liked him very much then, and I was glad to be sitting there with him, both of us still alive. Anyway, he said, it was a real crossroads, with a deserted inn. They’d been sitting on the steps of the inn when a French military car drove up, stuffed with military supplies. The three of them watched as the driver began dumping everything out. Suddenly Achselroth went over to the fellow and exchanged a few words with him. The rest of us weren’t paying much attention. Then Achselroth climbed into the driver’s seat of the car and roared off, without even waving good-bye. The French driver took the other branch of the crossroad and started walking toward the nearest village.
“How much do you think he gave him?” I asked. “Five thousand? Six?”
“You’re crazy! Six thousand! For a car! And an army car at that! And don’t forget, the driver’s honor had to be paid for, too! On top of the price of the car. Desertion while on duty, that’s treason! He must have paid the man at least sixteen thousand! We, of course, had no idea that Achselroth had that much money in his pockets. I tell you, he didn’t even turn once to look at us. How awful it all was. What a mean, rotten thing to do!”
“But it wasn’t all mean. Not all of it was awful. Do you still remember Heinz, the one-legged guy? They helped him get over the wall back then. And they didn’t leave him behind, I’m sure they had to carry him. Anyway, they schlepped him all the way into the unoccupied territory.”
“Did they get away?”
“I don’t know.”
“But that guy Achselroth, he made it. He’s already on some ship, on his way to Cuba!”
“To Cuba? Achselroth? Why?”
“How can you still ask why? He just took the first visa and the first ship he could.”
“If he had split his money with you two, Paul, then he couldn’t have bought himself a car.” The story as a whole amused me because of its utter consistency.
“What are your plans?” Paul asked. “What are you going to do now?”
I had to admit that I hadn’t made any plans; that the future was hazy for me. He asked whether I belonged to any party. I said no. Back then, I told him, I’d ended up in a German concentration camp without belonging to any party, because even without belonging to a party I wouldn’t put up with some of their dirty tricks. I escaped from that first concentration camp, the German one, because if I was going to kick the bucket I didn’t want to do it behind barbed wire. I was also going to tell Paul how I’d swum across the Rhine, at night in the fog; but it occurred to me that by now there’d been lots of people who’d swum across lots of rivers. And so I didn’t tell him my story so as not to bore him.
Annette must have given up on me and gone back home by herself long ago. I had thought Paul wanted to spend the evening with me. He was silent now, looking at me in a way that puzzled me. Finally, in a changed tone of voice, he said, “Listen, you could do me a huge favor. Would you?”
I wondered what he wanted me to do. Of course I was willing.
“In the letter my sister’s friend sent me—she’s the friend I mentioned before, the one who’s engaged to the silk merchant who wants to take me along in his car—in that letter she enclosed a second letter addressed to a man I know well. The man’s wife had asked her, as a favor, to see that the letter was delivered to him in Paris. Actually, in her letter she said that the man’s wife had been desperate, had pleaded with her.
“The husband had stayed in Paris; he couldn’t get out in time; he’s still here. You’ve surely heard of the writer Weidel, haven’t you?”—I’d never heard of him. Paul quickly assured me that this wouldn’t affect the favor he was asking of me.
He suddenly seemed uneasy. Maybe he’d been uneasy the whole time and I just hadn’t noticed. I was curious to find out what all this was leading up to. Mr. Weidel, he continued, lived quite nearby, on the Rue de Vaugirard. In a small hotel between the Rue de Rennes and Boulevard Raspail. Paul himself had already gone there earlier today. But when he asked whether Mr. Weidel was in, they gave him a strange look. The woman who owned the hotel had refused to take the letter. Yet, she had given only an evasive answer when he asked whether the gentleman had moved elsewhere. Would I be willing to go to the hotel again with the letter and ask for the man’s address so that the letter could be delivered to him? Would I be willing to do that?
I had to laugh and said, “Of course, if that’s all there is to it!”
“Maybe he’s been picked up by the Gestapo?”
“I’ll find out,” I said.
Paul amused me. On the dock, while we were unloading the ships, I hadn’t noticed if he was any more afraid than the rest of us. We were all afraid, and he was too. In our shared fear he hadn’t said anything more stupid than the rest of us. Like the rest of us he had slaved away, because when you’re afraid it’s better to be doing something, and better yet to be doing a lot, than to wait for death, shivering and trembling like baby chicks waiting for a hawk to swoop down on them. And this keeping busy in the face of death has nothing to do with bravery. Don’t you agree? Even though it’s sometimes mistaken for bravery and rewarded as such. But at that moment Paul was certainly more afraid than I was. He didn’t like this Paris, three quarters of it deserted; he hated the swastika flag, and saw a spy in every man who followed him. At one time Paul probably did have some success as a writer; he had wanted to be incredibly successful and he couldn’t bear to think that he was now just a poor devil like me. So in his mind he twisted it around, feeling terribly persecuted. He firmly believed that the Gestapo had nothing better to do than to wait for him in front of Weidel’s hotel.
So I took the letter. Paul again assured me tha
t Weidel had really been a great writer. It was his way of making my errand less unpleasant, which was unnecessary in my case. Weidel could have been a tie salesman, for all I cared. I’d always enjoyed unraveling tangled yarn, just as I had always enjoyed messing up neat skeins of yarn. Paul asked me to meet him the next day at the Café Capoulade.
The hotel on Rue de Vaugirard was a tall, narrow building, an average Paris hotel. The owner was quite pretty. She had a fresh, soft face and pitch-black hair. She was wearing a white silk blouse. I asked without thinking whether she had a room available. She smiled even as her eyes looked me coldly up and down. “As many as you want.”
“But first, there’s something else,” I said. “You have a guest here, Mr. Weidel, is he in by chance?”
Her face, her attitude, changed in a way you only see among the French. The most courteous composure can suddenly turn to furious anger when they lose control. She said, quite hoarse with fury, “For the second time today someone’s asked me about this person. The gentleman has moved, how often do I have to explain that?”
I said, “You’re explaining it to me for the first time. Would you be so kind as to tell me where the gentlemen is staying now.”
“How should I know?” the woman said. It began to dawn on me that she was afraid, but why? “I don’t know where he’s staying now. I really can’t tell you anything else.”
So the Gestapo’s picked him up after all, I thought. I put my hand on the woman’s arm. She didn’t pull it away, but looked at me with a mixture of scorn and unease.