by Anna Seghers
Just then my Cyclops came down the stairs. I was dumbstruck. He was smiling. It was only with me that he was grouchy as if I were an imposter. He handed each of us a piece of paper while patiently explaining in a soft voice that we must write down our names so that the consul could see us, one at a time. He gave me one of the forms too, but silently and with a warning look. If only I had allowed myself to be intimidated! On my piece of paper I found the time at which I was to appear. On a whim I wrote down the name I had given the dead man’s landlady. My own name never entered the picture.
I was given an appointment for the following Monday, but several things happened in Paris that weekend which proved to be significant for me, too. As elsewhere, the Germans had put up posters in Clichy that depicted a German soldier helping French women and looking after children. In Clichy all these posters were torn to shreds overnight. There were a couple of arrests, and after that masses of leaflets against the Nazis started circulating for the first time. Here they call these little leaflets papillons, butterflies. The best friend of the Binnet’s youngest son had gotten mixed up in this, and the Binnets feared for the safety of their sons. Their cousin Marcel suggested the boys disappear for a while into the unoccupied zone. So Marcel, the Binnets’ two sons, and the friend met up to make plans. I was infected by their travel preparations. Suddenly I didn’t have the least desire to hide away in Paris anymore. I imagined the unoccupied territory as an overgrown, wild country, a confused jumble in which a person like me could get lost if he chose to. And if, for a while, my life was going to consist of being chased from one place to another, then I wanted at least to be chased to beautiful cities and strange unknown places. They were glad to have me join them.
The morning before our departure I once more carried the little suitcase to the Mexican Consulate. This time, with the piece of paper I’d been given, I was allowed to enter. I found myself in a cool, circular room that matched the strange exterior of the house. They called out the name I had given, repeating it three times before I remembered that it was mine. My Cyclops escorted me only reluctantly and, I felt, mistrustfully.
I didn’t know who the rotund man was who received me. Was he the consul himself, the deputy consul, the deputy consul’s secretary, or a temporary secretary? I set the suitcase down under the man’s nose, while explaining truthfully that it belonged to someone who had committed suicide but who had a Mexican visa and that the contents of the suitcase should be delivered to his wife. I never had the chance to mention the dead man’s name. The rotund man interrupted my account, which apparently displeased him.
He said, “Excuse me, sir. But I couldn’t help you even in normal times. Much less now that the postal service has been interrupted. You cannot ask us to put the property left by this person into our courier bag, just because my government once provided him with a visa while he was alive. It’s out of the question. Please forgive me. But you must agree. I am the Mexican vice consul, I am not a notary public. While he was alive this man may also have received other visas, Uruguayan, Chilean, what do I know. You could, by the same token, turn to my colleagues at these consulates. But you’d get the same answer. Surely you can understand our position.”
I had to admit that the vice consul was right. I felt embarrassed. I left. The crowd outside the fence had grown. Countless shining eyes turned toward the gate. For these men and women the consulate wasn’t merely a government agency, a visa wasn’t just government office trash. In their desolation, which was exceeded only by their faith, they saw this house as the country and the country as this house. An infinitely large house in which lived a welcoming nation. Here set into the yellow wall was the door to the house. And once across the threshold, you were already a guest.
Walking through this crowd for the last time, everything in me that could hope and suffer with other people was awakened, and the part of me that drew a sort of bold pleasure from my own and other people’s desolation, and saw suffering as an adventure, dwindled away.
After that I decided to use the suitcase myself since my backpack was torn. I stuffed my few belongings on top of the dead man’s papers. Perhaps I would actually get to Marseille one day. We needed German permission to get across the demarcation line. And so we spent a couple of days, still undecided, in the rural towns near the border. They were teeming with German soldiers. Finally at an inn we found a farmer who owned some land on the other side of the border. At dusk he led us across through a tobacco field. We embraced him and rewarded him with gifts. We kissed the first French border guard we met. We were deeply moved and felt liberated. I needn’t tell you that it proved to be a delusion.
2
I
YOU KNOW of course what unoccupied France was like in the fall of 1940. The cities’ train stations, their shelters, and even the public squares and churches were full of refugees. They came from the north, the occupied territory and the “forbidden zone,” from the Départements of Alsace, Lorraine, and the Moselle. And even as I was fleeing to Paris I realized these were merely the remnants of those wretched human masses as so many had died on the road or on the trains. But I hadn’t counted on the fact that many would also be born on the way. While I was searching for a place to sleep in the Toulouse train station, I had to climb over a woman lying among suitcases, bundles, and piles of guns, nursing a baby. How the world has aged in this single year! The infant looked old and wrinkled, the nursing mother’s hair was gray, and the faces of the baby’s two little brothers watching over her shoulder seemed shameless, old, and sad. Old also were the eyes of these two boys from whom nothing had been concealed, neither the mystery of death nor the mystery of birth.
The trains were still packed with soldiers in ragged uniforms openly reviling their superiors, cursing their marching orders, yet following them nevertheless, the devil only knew where to, in order to stand guard in some leftover part of their country, at a concentration camp or a border crossing that would surely have been moved by the next day. Or they might even be loaded onto ships headed for Africa because a commander in some small cove had decided to defy the Germans, but would probably have already been relieved of his command long before these soldiers could get there. For the time being they marched on. Maybe because the senseless marching order was at least something to hold on to, a substitute for some command from on high, a great rallying cry, or for the lost Marseillaise. At one point in the journey they handed us the remnants of a man—a head and a torso; instead of arms and legs, empty uniform parts dangling down. We squeezed him in between us and stuck a cigarette between his lips since he had no hands; it burned his lips, he growled and suddenly started crying, “If only I knew what it was all for.”
We felt like crying, too. We were scrambling around in a big senseless arc, sometimes spending nights in shelters, then in the open fields, now jumping up on a truck, then on a freight car, unable to find a place to stay anywhere—to say nothing about getting an offer of work—in a large arc always reaching farther south, across the Loire, over the Garonne River to the Rhône. All those old beautiful cities teeming with wild, disheveled people. But the wildness was different from what I had dreamed of. A local rule prevailed in these cities, a sort of medieval municipal code of law. And each city had its own code.
A tireless pack of officials was on the move night and day, like dogcatchers, intent on fishing suspicious people out the crowds as they passed through, so as to put them into city jails from which they’d be dragged off to a concentration camp if they didn’t have the money to pay the ransom or to hire a crafty lawyer who would later split the outsize reward for freeing the prisoner with the dogcatcher himself. As a result, everyone, especially the foreigners, guarded their passports and identification papers as if they were their very salvation. I was amazed to see the authorities, in the midst of this chaos, inventing ever more intricate drawn-out procedures for sorting, classifying, registering, and stamping these people over whose emotions they had lost all power. It was like trying to register e
very Vandal, Goth, Hun, and Langobard during the “Barbarian Invasion.”
I evaded the clutches of the dogcatchers quite a few times with help from my clever buddies, for I had no papers, no documents at all. When I escaped from the camp, I’d left all my papers behind in the camp, in the commandant’s barracks. I would have assumed that they were burned by now, if experience hadn’t taught me that it’s much harder to burn paper than metal or stone. Once, sitting at a table in an inn, we were asked for our papers. My four friends had pretty solid French documents—although the older Binnet had not been legally demobilized. This dogcatcher, though, was pretty drunk, and didn’t notice Marcel slipping me his papers under the table after they’d already been inspected. Right after that, in the very same room, the same official led off a beautiful girl while her aunts and uncles, Jews who had fled from Belgium, cursed and lamented the fate of this girl they’d taken along in place of their own child. They had great faith but insufficient identification papers. Now she’d probably be hauled off to a women’s detention camp in some corner of the Pyrenees. I’ve never been able to forget her because she was so beautiful and because of the anguished expression on her face as she was being separated from her people.
I asked my friends what would happen if one of them were to declare himself ready to marry the girl on the spot, right then and there. They were all minors, yet they immediately began to argue heatedly over who would get the girl. They almost came to blows but were too exhausted to fight. My friends were ashamed for their country. When you’re young and healthy you can recover quickly from a defeat. But betrayal is different—it paralyzes you. The next night we admitted to each other that we were homesick for Paris. We had faced a terrible, cruel enemy there, almost more than one could endure, at least that’s what we thought at the time. But there the enemy was visible. Looking back, it almost seemed better than the invisible, almost mysterious evil of the rumors, bribery, and lies we now faced.
Everyone was fleeing and everything was temporary. We had no idea whether this situation would last till tomorrow, another couple of weeks, years, or our entire lives.
We made what we thought was a very sensible decision. We checked a map to see just where we were. It turned out we weren’t far from the village where Yvonne, my former girlfriend, the one who had married her cousin, lived. So we set out in that direction and arrived there a week later.
II
Many refugees had already sought shelter in Yvonne’s village, quite a few of whom had been sent to help out on her husband’s farm. Still, everyday farm life didn’t seem to have changed much. Yvonne was pregnant and she was proud of her new house and farm. She seemed a little embarrassed as she introduced me to her husband. When she found out I had no papers, she sent her husband that very night into the village where he also happened to be the acting mayor. She suggested he have a drink at the Grappe d’Or with his friends and the chairman of the United Refugees from the Aigne sur Ange. He came home at midnight with a little piece of yellow paper. It was a refugee certificate that a man had probably given back when he got a different, better set of documents. Seidler was the name of the man whose second-best certificate ended up being a better one for me. He had emigrated from the Saar to Alsace at the time of the Referendum. Yvonne’s husband stamped it again. We looked up Seidler’s village in a school atlas, and concluded from its location that, fortunately for me, the village along with the registry of its inhabitants had probably been burned to the ground. Yvonne’s husband was even able to get me some money. Since now, with my new papers, I was quite the proper refugee, he had the provincial capital of the département dole out some refugee money that I was supposedly entitled to.
I realized that Yvonne had pushed all this through in order to get rid of me as quickly as possible. In the meantime, my traveling companions had written to their scattered families. Marcel tracked down his great-uncle who had a peach farm near the sea. The younger Binnet and his friend planned to stay with his sister. As Yvonne’s former sweetheart, I was a somewhat unsuitable guest here and completely superfluous. Yvonne gave some more thought to my situation, and this time came up with a cousin named George, George Binnet. He had been employed at a factory in Nevers before being evacuated along with everyone else in the factory, nobody really knew why, and was now stuck in Marseille. He had written that he was doing quite well there living with a woman from Madagascar who was also working. Marcel figured that once he was at the peach farm, he could arrange for me to follow him there, and until then I could stay in Marseille. Anyway, the Binnet cousin would be a help to me. By now I felt attached to the Binnet family much like a child who has lost his own mother and hangs on to the skirts of another woman who, although she can never be his mother, still shows him some affection and kindness.
I had always wanted to see Marseille, and besides, I felt like going to a big city. As for the rest, it was all the same to me. We said good-bye. Marcel and I traveled part of the way together. I found myself searching among the throngs of soldiers, refugees, and demobilized troops who filled the trains and the roads for a familiar face, some person whom I had known in my old life. How happy I would have been if Franz, with whom I’d escaped from the camp, had turned up. Or even Heinz. Whenever I saw a man on crutches I hoped I’d see his face with the crooked mouth and the light-colored eyes mocking his own fragility. I had lost something, lost it so completely that I didn’t quite know what it was, I’d lost it so utterly in all that confusion that gradually I didn’t even miss it very much anymore. But one of those faces from the past, I was certain, would at least remind me of what it was.
Marcel left me, and I went on to Marseille by myself. I was and remained alone.
III
On the train they were saying that the crafty guards at the Marseille station had set up checkpoints and wouldn’t let any foreigner through. I had only limited faith in Yvonne’s refugee certificate, and so I left the train two hours before it was to reach Marseille and boarded a bus. I got off in a village in the hills.
Walking down from the hills, I came to the outer precincts of Marseille. At a bend in the road I saw the sea far below me. A bit later I saw the city itself spread out against the water. It seemed as bare and white as an African city. At last I felt calm. It was the same calm that I experience whenever I like something very much. I almost believed I had reached my goal. In this city, I thought, I could find everything I’d been looking for, that I’d always been looking for. I wonder how many more times this feeling will deceive me on entering a strange city!
I boarded a streetcar and arrived without being challenged. Twenty minutes later I was strolling with my suitcase down the Canebière. Most of the time you’re disappointed when you finally see streets you’ve heard a lot about. But I wasn’t disappointed. I walked with the crowds, buffeted by a wind that blew first sunshine, then showers over us in rapid succession. And the lightness brought on by hunger and exhaustion turned into an exalted, grand buoyancy that enabled the wind to blow me faster and faster down the street. When I realized that the blue gleam at the end of the Canebière was the Old Harbor and the Mediterranean, I felt at last, after so much absurdity, madness and misery, the one genuine happiness that is available to everyone at any time: the joy of being alive.
The last few months I’d been wondering where all this was going to end up—the trickles, the streams of people from the camps, the dispersed soldiers, the army mercenaries, the defilers of all races, the deserters from all nations. This, then, was where the detritus was flowing, along this channel, this gutter, the Canebière, and via this gutter into the sea, where there would at last be room for all, and peace.
I had a coffee standing up with the suitcase clamped between my legs. All around me I heard people talking. It was as if the counter where I was drinking stood between two pillars of the Tower of Babel. Nevertheless, there were occasional words I could understand, and they kept hitting my ears in a certain rhythm as if to impress themselves on my memory: Cuba v
isa and Martinique, Oran and Portugal, Siam and Casablanca, transit visa and three-mile zone.
At last I reached the Old Port. It was at about the same time as I arrived here today. It was almost deserted because of the war—just as it is today. And like today the ferry was slowly gliding along under the railroad bridge. Today, though, it seems as if I’m seeing it all for the first time. When I arrived that evening the fishing boat masts crisscrossed the large bare walls of the ancient houses—just as they do now. As the sun set that day behind Fort St. Nicolas, I thought, as very young people do, that all the things that had happened to me so far had led me here and that this was a good thing. I asked for directions to the Rue du Chevalier Roux, which is where George Binnet, Yvonne’s cousin, lived. The bazaars and the street markets were teeming with people. It was already getting dark in the warren-like streets, and the red and gold colors of the fruit displayed in the market stalls glowed in strong contrast. I detected an aroma I had never smelled before, but I couldn’t find the fruit it emanated from. I sat down to rest a while on the edge of a fountain in the Corsican Quarter, the suitcase on my knees. Then I climbed up a stone stairway without having any idea where it would lead me.
Below me lay the sea. The beacon lights along the Corniche and on the islands were still faint in the twilight. How I used to hate the sea when I was working on the docks! It had seemed merciless to me in its inapproachable, inhuman monotony. But now, having come here after such a long and difficult journey across a ruined and defiled land, I couldn’t have found greater consolation anywhere than this inhuman emptiness and solitude, trackless and unspoiled.