by Anna Seghers
“I don’t know this man at all,” I assured her. “Someone asked me to give him a message. That’s all. Something that’s important to him. I wouldn’t want to keep even a stranger waiting.” She looked at me carefully. Then she led me into a small room next to the hotel lobby. Finally she came out with it.
“You can’t imagine what a lot of trouble this person has caused me! He came on the 15th towards evening; by that time the Germans were already marching in. I chose to stay; I didn’t close my hotel. You don’t leave during a war, my father used to say. If you do, they’ll mess everything up and steal everything. And why should I be afraid of the Germans? I prefer them to the Reds. They won’t lay a hand on my bank account. Anyway, Mr. Weidel arrives and he’s trembling. I find it odd that somebody should be trembling with fear of his own countrymen. But I was glad to have a paying guest. I was the only hotel open in the entire quarter. When I gave him the registration forms to fill out, he asked me not to register him with the police. As you must know, Monsieur Langeron, the chief of police, emphatically insists that all foreigners be registered. We have to maintain order, right?”
“I’m not so sure,” I replied. “The Nazi soldiers are all foreigners too, unregistered ones.”
“Well this Mr. Weidel, in any case, made a fuss about his registration. He hadn’t given up his room in Auteuil, he said, and he was still registered there. I didn’t like it one bit. Mr. Weidel had stayed at my hotel once before with his wife. A beautiful woman, only she didn’t take care of herself and cried often. I assure you, the man made trouble everywhere. All right, so I left him unregistered. Only for that one night, though, I told him. He paid in advance. The following morning the man doesn’t come down. In short, I go up and open the door with my master key. I push back the bolt with this contraption I had made. She opened a drawer and showed me the device, a cleverly designed hook. “The man was lying on his bed, still fully dressed, a little glass bottle empty on the night table. If that little bottle was full originally, then he had enough pills in his stomach to kill all the cats in our quarter.
“Luckily I have a good friend at the Saint Sulpice police station. He was able to straighten it out for me. First we registered him for the day before he died. Then we arranged his burial. That man really caused me more trouble than the German invasion.”
“In any case, he’s dead,” I said and got up to leave. The story bored me. I had witnessed too many messy deaths. Then the woman said, “Don’t think that my problems are over. This man has actually managed to create trouble for me from beyond the grave.”
I sat down again.
“He left a suitcase. What am I supposed to do with it? It was sitting here in my office when the thing happened. I’d forgotten about it. I don’t want to stir things up again at the police station.”
“Well, throw it in the Seine,” I said, “or burn it in your furnace.”
“That’s impossible,” the woman said, “I can’t take the chance.”
“Well, after all, if you were able to get rid of the body, I’m sure you can deal with the suitcase.”
“That’s something quite different. The man is dead now. It’s in the official records. But the suitcase is a forensic object, it’s tangible property, it can be inherited; claimants might turn up.”
I was already sick of the whole affair. I said, “I’ll be happy to take the suitcase, I don’t mind. I know someone who was a friend of the dead man; he can take it to the widow.” The hotel owner was quite relieved. But she did ask me to fill out a receipt for her. I wrote a false name on a piece of paper that she dated and receipted. She shook my hand warmly, then I left quickly. I had completely lost the favorable impression I had formed of her earlier. No matter how pretty she had seemed to me initially. I suddenly saw in her long, cunning head only a skull to which little black curls had been attached.
IV
The following morning I went to the Capoulade with the suitcase. I waited in vain for Paul. Had he left in a hurry with the silk merchant? Was it because of the sign on the café door, “No Jews allowed,” that he didn’t come? But then it occurred to me that he had recited the Paternoster when the Germans arrived. Besides, the sign had already disappeared by the time I left the Capoulade. Maybe one of the customers or the proprietor himself had thought the sign too ridiculous; maybe it had been flimsily tacked up, fallen off, and not been important enough to anyone to be nailed up again.
It was a beautiful day, the little suitcase wasn’t heavy. I walked to the Concorde. But even though the sun shone brightly that morning I was overcome by the kind of misery that the French call a “cafard.” The French lived so well in their beautiful country; everything went so smoothly for them—all the joys of existence—but sometimes even they lose their joy in life and then there is nothing but boredom, a Godless emptiness: a cafard. Why should I be spared? My cafard had already set in the day before when I no longer thought the hotel owner pretty. Now the cafard swallowed me up, body and soul. Sometimes there’s a gurgling in a large puddle because inside there’s another hole, an even deeper puddle. That’s how the cafard was gurgling in me. And when I saw the huge swastika flag on the Place de la Concorde, I crept down into the darkness of the Métro.
A cafard had also taken hold of the Binnet family. Annette was furious with me because I hadn’t waited for her the previous day. Her mother thought it was time that I got some sort of identification papers, and the newspapers were saying there would soon be ration cards for bread. I didn’t eat with the family that day because my feelings were hurt. I crawled into the hole under the roof that was my room. I could have brought a girl up with me, but I didn’t feel in the mood for that either. They talk about fatal wounds and fatal illnesses; they also speak of fatal boredom. I assure you, my boredom was deadly. That evening, out of sheer boredom, I broke open the lock on the suitcase. It contained little more than paper.
And out of sheer boredom I began to read. I read on and on. I was spellbound, maybe because I’d never before read a book to the end. But no, that couldn’t be the reason. Paul was right. I didn’t know anything about writing. It wasn’t my world. Yet I think the man who’d written this was an expert in his art. I forgot my cafard. I forgot my deadly boredom. And if I’d had fatal wounds I would have forgotten them too while I was absorbed in reading. And as I read line after line, I also felt that this was my own language, my mother tongue, and it flowed into me like milk into a baby. It didn’t rasp and grate like the language that came from the throats of the Nazis, their murderous commands and objectionable insistence on obedience, their disgusting boasts.—This was serious, calm, and still.
I felt as if I were alone again with my own family. I came across words my mother had used to soothe me when I was angry and horrible words she had used to admonish me when I had lied or been in a fight. I also stumbled on words I had used myself back then, but had forgotten because I never again felt the emotion I needed to express them. There were new words, too, that I sometimes use now.
The whole thing was a fairly complicated story with some complicated characters. One of whom, I thought, resembled me. The story deals with...oh no, I’d better not bore you with that. You’ve read enough stories in your life. For me, you might say, it was the first. I’d had more than enough experiences, but I’d never read anything! This was something new for me. And how avidly I read it! In the story, as I said, there were a lot of crazy characters, really mixed-up people; almost all of them got involved in bad, devious things, even those who tried to resist. I had read entranced like this, no listened, only as a child. I felt the same joy, the same dread. The forest was just as impenetrable. But this was a forest for adults. The wolf was just as bad, but it was a wolf who bewitched grown-up children. And the old fairy-tale magic that turned boys into bears and girls into lilies took hold of me anew in this story, threatening again with grim transformations.
But the people in this story didn’t annoy me with their infuriating behavior, as they would have done
in real life, stupidly allowing themselves to be taken in, heading toward disastrous fates. I was able to understand their actions because I was at last able to follow them from the very beginning to the point where it all came together as it had to. Already they seemed to me less evil—even the man who resembled me like a pea in a pod—only because the writer had described them. They all became clear and pure, as if they had done their penance, as if they had already passed through a little purgatory, the small fire that was the dead man’s brain.
And then suddenly, after some three hundred pages, everything stopped. I never found out how it ended. The Germans had entered Paris. The man had packed up everything, his few belongings, his writing paper, and left me alone looking at the last, almost empty page. Again I was overwhelmed by an immense sadness, by deadly boredom. Why did he commit suicide? He shouldn’t have left me alone. He should have finished writing his story. I could have kept reading till dawn. He should have gone on writing, gone on writing innumerable stories that would have protected me from evil. If he could only have met me in time! Instead of that fool Paul who got me into this mess. I would have pleaded with him to go on living. I would have found him a hiding place. I would have brought him food and drink. But now he was dead. Two typewritten lines on the last page. And I was left all alone! As miserable as before!
I frittered away the next day looking for Paul. He had disappeared. I suppose because he was afraid. And yet the dead man had been his copain, his buddy, his pal. I thought of the story he had told me about the man who bought the car at the crossroads. Oh well, Paul himself was a pretty good one for leaving you in the lurch! In the evening I crept up to my hole very early so I could return to my story. But I was disappointed this time. I wanted to read it all again. But unfortunately it resisted me. On my first reading I had greedily absorbed everything. Now I had as little desire to read the story again as I would to live through the same adventure twice, the same series of dangers.
So I had nothing more to read; the man wasn’t going to rise from the dead for my sake; his story was unfinished, and I was alone and demoralized up in my hole with his suitcase. I rummaged around in it, finding a pair of new silk socks, a couple of handkerchiefs, an envelope with foreign stamps. Apparently the dead man had collected stamps as a hobby. Well, so what. I also found a small elegant case containing nail files, a Spanish language textbook, an empty little perfume bottle; I unscrewed it and sniffed—nothing. The dead man was probably a squirrel, now he was done squirreling. There were also two more letters.
I read them carefully, though not just out of idle curiosity. Please, you must believe me. In the first letter someone informed him that his story promised to be quite good and worthy of standing alongside all the other stories he had written so far in his life. But unfortunately because of the war no one was publishing such stories now. In the second letter a woman, probably his wife, wrote that he should not expect her ever to come back to him; their life together was over.
I put the letters back. As I saw it: Nobody wanted his stories anymore. His wife had run away. He was alone. The whole world was collapsing, and then the Germans came to Paris. That was too much for him. So he put an end to it. I started fiddling with the broken locks trying to fix them so that I could lock the suitcase again. What was I supposed to do with it? A story only three-fourths completed...Take it to the Pont de l’Alma and throw it in the Seine? I would as soon have drowned a child! Suddenly I remembered the letter Paul had given me—and let me tell you right now, it led to my undoing. Oddly enough, up to that point I had completely forgotten the letter, as if Providence had sent me the suitcase out of the blue. Perhaps if I read the letter, I thought, it might give me some clue as to what to do with the things.
It contained two enclosures. One was a letter from the Mexican Consulate in Marseille saying that a visa and travel funds were waiting for him there. This was followed by all sorts of additional details—names, numbers, committees—which I skimmed over. The other was a letter from the woman who had left him, written in the same handwriting. Only now, as I was comparing the two, I took note of the handwriting—tight and neat, like a child’s; what I really mean is clean, not neat. She urged her husband to come to Marseille. She had to see him, to see him right away. He must not delay a second; he was to join her immediately on receiving this letter, no matter what! It would probably take them a long time to get out of this cursed country. And the visa might expire. Even though the visa had been obtained, and the trip paid for. But there was no ship that would take them straight to their destination. They had to cross other countries to get there. And those countries demanded transit visas, which took a long time and were hard to get. So everything could fall apart if they didn’t get together at once! Only the visa was assured. And even that would be valid only for a certain period of time. Everything now depended on the transit visa.
The letter seemed a bit confused to me. What did she suddenly want from this man whom she had left for good? To leave the country with him, even though she hadn’t wanted to stay with him at any price? It occurred to me that the dead man by dying had escaped new anguish and fresh complications. And after I reread the letter and the entire mishmash of wanting to see him again, of transit visas, consulates, and transit dates, it seemed to me that his present resting place was a safe and reliable one and would provide him with perfect rest.
In any case, I knew now what to do with the suitcase. I would take it to the Mexican Consulate here in Paris. The consul would send all the documents to his counterpart in Marseille. Because that’s where the wife would be inquiring for news. Or at least this is how I imagined it would work.
So, the following day I asked a police officer where to find the Mexican Consulate. At my question, the officer looked at me briefly. This was probably the first time he, a Parisian traffic policeman at the Place de Clichy, had ever been asked for the address of the Mexican Consulate. He searched in a little red book for the address. Then he looked at me again as if to decipher how I was connected with Mexico. I was amused by my own question. There are countries you’re familiar with from boyhood on without ever having laid eyes on them. They’re exciting countries, God knows why. A picture, a small snaking section of a river in an atlas, the mere sound of the name, a postage stamp. Nothing interested me about Mexico. I didn’t know anything about the country and had never read anything about it, probably because even as a boy I didn’t liked to read. I’d never heard anything about the country that had stuck in my mind. I knew that it had oil, cacti, and huge straw hats. And whatever else it may have had, interested me as little as it did the dead man.
I dragged the little suitcase from the Place de l’Alma Métro station to the Rue Longuin. It was a pretty neighborhood. Most of the houses were closed down. The quarter was nearly deserted. The rich had all gone south. They had left in time, before getting a whiff of the war now scorching their country. How gentle the hills of Meudon on the other side of the Seine! How blue the air! German trucks were rolling continuously along the riverbank. For the first time since I’d come to Paris I wondered what it was I was actually waiting for here. Lots of dry leaves lay on Avenue Wilson; summer was already over. Yet it was barely August. I had been cheated of summer.
The Mexican Consulate turned out to be a small house, painted a light yellow; it stood at an odd angle in one corner of a beautifully paved courtyard full of plants. There were probably courtyards just like this in Mexico. I rang the bell at the gate. The single high window was closed. A shield with a coat of arms hung above the inner door. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it even though it was shiny and new. I did make out an eagle perched on a thicket of cacti. At first I thought this house was also uninhabited. But when I dutifully rang again, a heavyset man appeared on the stairs on the other side of the inner door. He looked me up and down with his single eye—the other eye socket was empty. My first Mexican. I looked at him curiously. He just shrugged in answer to my question. He was only the caretaker, he said; the
legation was in Vichy; the consul had not returned; the telegraph was down. Then he withdrew. I imagined all Mexicans were like him, broad, silent, one-eyed—a nation of Cyclopses! One should get to know all the peoples of the world, I thought. Suddenly I felt sorry for the dead man whom I had envied up to then.
In the following week I went to the Mexican Consulate almost every day. The one-eyed man always waved me off from the upstairs window. I probably looked like a crazy man with my little suitcase. Why was I so persistent? Conscientiousness? Boredom? Because the house attracted me? One morning there was a car parked outside the fence. Maybe the consul had arrived? I rang the bell like crazy. My Cyclops appeared on the stairs, but this time he angrily shouted at me to beat it, the bell wasn’t there for me to ring. I walked irresolutely to the next street corner.
When I turned around again, I was amazed. The car was still parked outside the consulate, but now the place was teeming with people. And this crowd had appeared behind my back within a few minutes. I don’t know what sort of magnetic force had drawn them there, what mysterious, psychic communication. They couldn’t possibly all be from the neighborhood. But how had they gotten there? Spaniards of all kinds were probably hidden away in the nooks and crannies of the city, like me in mine, having escaped much the same way I had. But now the swastika had followed them here, too. I asked a few questions and discovered why they were gathering here. There was a rumor, a hope that this faraway nation would take in all Republican Spaniards. There were also ships ready to sail in the harbors of Bordeaux, and they now felt they were all under such powerful protection that not even the Germans could interfere with their departure. An old, emaciated, yellow-skinned Spaniard said bitterly that it was all nonsense. Although there might be visas available because Mexico now had a popular government, unfortunately you couldn’t receive a safe conduct from the Germans. In fact, quite the contrary had happened. The Germans were capturing Spaniards here and in Brussels and handing them over to Franco. Then another man, a young one with round black eyes, called out that the ships were not in Bordeaux, but in Marseille. And they were ready to sail. He even knew their names: Republica, Esperanza, and Passionaria.