by Anna Seghers
“Are you also planning to cross the ocean, Doctor?”
“I have to.”
“Why do you have to?”
“Because I want to heal sick people. I’m being assigned a unit in a hospital in Oaxaca. If the hospital were located on the Cours Belsunce I wouldn’t have to cross the ocean.”
“Where is Oaxaca?”
“In Mexico,” he said, surprised at my ignorance.
And I said, even more surprised, “You want to go to Mexico, too?”
“I once cured the son of a high-ranking Mexican official in the old days.”
“Is it hard to get there?”
“Fiendishly hard. There are no ships that go there directly. And getting a transit visa is very difficult. The best way to go is to take an American ship from Lisbon. But to get to Portugal you have to go through Spain first. Now they’re saying that there might be another way to get there, that is, taking a French ship to Martinique, and from there boarding a ship to Cuba.”
I thought, Here’s a doctor with a heart and soul. He could help people. His reason for leaving was quite different from the one my death’s-head friend from Prague had. He just wanted to wave his baton again.
The two tramps who were always hanging out at the construction site between the Maternity Clinic and the Arab café were lying there now. Their arms, which in the daytime stretched out to beg, were now folded under their heads. They were sleeping, unaffected by what was happening in their country—feeling as little shame as trees do, molding and decaying. Their beards were lousy, their skin was scurfy. They had as little thought of leaving their homeland as trees might.
We crossed Rue de la République; it was totally deserted. The doctor looked around carefully in the maze of dark streets of the Old Port so that he’d be able to find his way back without me. The night was cold and still.
I raised the doorknocker at the apartment on the Rue du Chevalier. When Claudine opened the door, the doctor looked closely at her, the woman whose child he was to treat. Then he walked quickly through the tiny kitchen to the boy’s bed. He indicated to us that we should leave him alone with the boy. George had already left for the mill. Claudine laid her head on the kitchen table. A narrow strip of the softest pink, the palm of her hand, was visible along her chin. To me she’d always seemed like a flower or a seashell. But now, because of our shared concern, she had changed into an ordinary woman who went to her job during the day, and took care of her husband and child, working very hard. For George she had no magical significance. For him she was much less but also much more.
She asked me what I knew about the doctor, and out of jealousy, I exaggerated my praise. Just then he came into the kitchen. In candid French he reassured Claudine that the boy’s illness was less serious than it looked. It was important not to upset the child in any way. This last remark seemed aimed at me, although he wasn’t looking at me and certainly couldn’t blame me for anything. He scribbled a prescription. Then, in spite of his objections, I accompanied him to the Rue de la République. He wasn’t paying any attention to me, nor did he ask any questions about the Binnet family. It was as if he didn’t think such questions worthwhile, preferring to learn from his own observations. I felt like a schoolboy who can’t help liking the new boy even though annoyed because the new boy is ignoring him. I bought the prescribed medicine that same night with the money the Committee had given me for my departure preparations.
By the time I came back up to the Binnets the boy was calm and sleepy. The doctor had promised to bring him a figure of a human body that could be taken apart on his next visit. Even as he was falling asleep he kept talking about the doctor.
That man was here only ten minutes, I thought, and already he’s opened a new world of promises and dreams for the boy.
II
I’m getting to the most important part now. I remember the date. It was November 28th. My second residence permit was about to expire. I brooded about what to do. Should I go back, this time with the camp release certificate Heinz had given me? Or go up to see the Mexicans? I went instead to the Mont Vertoux. Back then I went there four or five times a week.
I’d just been at the Binnets’ place. The child was almost well again. We had become well acquainted with the doctor—I won’t say formed a friendship as he wasn’t the right person for that. We enjoyed being with him; he was different from us. The first thing he always told us was how his departure plans were going, and all the new things that kept happening to him. He told us that in his mind he could see the white walls of the new hospital day and night, and all the sick patients without a doctor. I liked his obsessiveness. I was amused by his inflated self-esteem. By now the doctor was so familiar with the place where he’d be working that he assumed we must be, too. He already had the visa stamp in his passport. The boy turned his face to the wall whenever the visa discussions began. At that time I was foolish enough to assume it was because he was bored.
As soon as he put his ear down to listen to the child’s chest, the doctor became calm, forgetting his visas. His face, the tense face of a harried man possessed by some delusion, took on an expression of wisdom and goodness, as if his existence was now governed by something quite different from the instructions of consuls and officials.
Sitting there at the café, I was thinking about the circumstances of his departure and about my own stay here. The Mont Vertoux is at the corner of the Quai des Belges and the Canebière. The light that day was bright and clear and it lightened my mood and everything else that afternoon, even the most useless and unimportant detail of my unimportant and useless existence. Nothing foreshadowed what was to come.
There were two tables between me and the counter. At one of them sat a small woman with straggly hair; she was usually there this time of day, always setting her chair at an angle to the table and always telling everyone the same story, yet the shock in her eyes each time she told it was fresh and new. The story was about how she had lost her child during the evacuation of Paris. He had gotten tired of walking, and so she lifted the boy up into a truck full of soldiers. Then the German planes came and bombarded the road. So much dust! So much crying and screaming! And her child was gone. It wasn’t until weeks later that they found the child at a farm; he would never be like other children. There was a tall, gangly Czech sitting at her table who told everyone that he wanted to go to Portugal. And then he’d add in a whisper, that it was only so that he could go from there to England to join in the fighting.
I listened for a while, immobilized by boredom. At the other table sat a group of locals. Although not originally from Marseille, they had settled here and were managing to make quite a good living off the fear and the mad longing for departure of the new arrivals. They laughed as they told the story of two young couples who had rented a boat for a great deal of money—the men had escaped together from a camp. But the sellers had cheated the young people; the little boat had a leak. They got as far as the Spanish coast. There they were sent back. They tried sailing up the mouth of the Rhône and were shot at by the coast guard and arrested when they landed. I’d heard this story a hundred times before. It was only the ending that was new to me. Just yesterday the men had been sentenced to two years in prison.
The section of the Mont Vertoux we were sitting in was right on the Canebière. And from where I sat I had a view of the Old Harbor. A small gunboat was anchored by the Quai des Belges across the street. Over the heads of the people filling the café with their smoke and chatter I could see its gray smokestacks among the slender masts of the fishing boats. The afternoon sun hung in the sky above the Fort. I wondered if the Mistral had started blowing again, for the women passing by on the street had pulled up their hoods, and the faces of the people coming through the revolving door were tense from the wind as well as their worries. No one paid any attention to the sun above the sea, the crenellations of St. Victor’s church, or the nets spread out to dry along the whole length of the pier. They talked without pause about their tr
ansit visas, their expired passports, the three-mile zone, and the dollar exchange rate, about exit visas, and again and again about transit visas. I was disgusted. I felt like getting up and leaving.
Then my mood changed. Why? Who knows what causes these mood changes. Suddenly I no longer thought all the chitchat was disgusting; it seemed fascinating now. It was the age-old harbor gossip, as ancient as the Old Port itself and even older. Wonderful, ancient harbor twaddle that’s existed as long as there’s been a Mediterranean Sea, Phoenician chit-chat, Cretan and Greek gossip, and that of the Romans. There was never a shortage of gossips who were anxious about their berths aboard a ship and about their money, or who were fleeing from all the real and imagined horrors of the world. Mothers who had lost their children, children who had lost their mothers. The remnants of crushed armies, escaped slaves, human hordes who had been chased from all the countries of the earth, and having at last reached the sea, boarded ships in order to discover new lands from which they would again be driven; forever running from one death toward another.
Ships must always have been anchored here, at this very place, because this is where Europe ends and the sea begins. There’s always been an inn at this spot because it was on the road that led to the juncture of land and sea. I felt ancient, thousands of years old. I had experienced all this before. But I also felt very young, and eager for all that was yet to come; I felt immortal. Yet this feeling soon faded. It was too strong a feeling for one so weak. I was overcome by despair, despair and homesickness. I mourned my twenty-seven wasted years that had vanished in foreign lands.
Someone at the next table was telling about a ship, the Alesia, headed for Brazil, which had been stopped by the British in Dakar. Since there were French officers on board, all the passengers ended up in an African detention camp. How cheerful the teller of this tale sounded! Probably because, just like him, these people couldn’t get where they were going either. I’d heard this story countless times. Oh, deadly dull gossip! I longed for a simple song, for birds, for flowers; I longed for my mother’s voice, the voice that had scolded me when I was a boy.
The sun disappeared behind Fort St. Nicolas. It was six o’clock. Casually I looked over the heads of the people toward the revolving door. It was turning again. A young woman entered. What should I tell you about her? I can only say, she entered. The man who committed suicide on the Rue de Vaugirard would have expressed it differently. Don’t expect me to describe her. I can only say she entered. That afternoon I couldn’t have told you whether she was blonde or brunette, a woman or a girl. She entered. She stopped and looked around. There was an expression on her face of tense expectancy, almost of fear. As if she hoped—and yet was afraid—to find someone here. Whatever she was thinking, it had nothing to do with visas. At first she went diagonally across the part of the room I could see, the part next to the Quai des Belges. I could still see the pointed top of her hood against the large, by now gray, window. I was afraid that she might not come back, that there was a door in that part of the room leading outside, and that she might simply walk through it. But she returned almost at once. The look of hope, of expectation on the young face had already turned to one of disappointment.
Up to now, if a woman I might have liked walked into a place but didn’t come near me, I never would have begrudged the other man her attentions; I never felt I was losing something irreplaceable. But not this time. The woman walking by me at that moment was different. She had come into the café, but not to find me. And that made me feel awful. Only one thing could have been worse—if she hadn’t come in at all. Again, she looked carefully around the section of the room where I was sitting. She scanned all the faces, all the tables, the way children search, both thoroughly and awkwardly. Whom was she so desperately seeking? Who could cause so much anxious expectation, such bitter disappointment? I would have liked to beat up this man who wasn’t there.
Finally she discovered our three somewhat out-of-the way tables. Carefully she looked at the people sitting at the three tables. Foolish though it might have been, for a moment I had the feeling that I was the one she was searching for. She looked at me, too, but the look was blank. I was the last one she looked at. After that she left. I saw her pointed hood once more outside the window.
III
I went up to the Binnets. The doctor was sitting on the boy’s bed. He had already given the inevitable daily report on how things stood with his transit visa. He had put his gray, close-cropped head on the bare, dark body of the boy, and as he listened, his face, distorted by his transit worries, changed. The expression of haste and fear of coming too late and being left behind changed over into one of infinite patience. His desire to leave Marseille as quickly as possible no matter what, no matter who’d have to stay behind, was transformed into kindness. It seemed as if he had nothing else to do, and didn’t want to do anything else but to listen to the sounds that told him how his patient might be cured. The boy, too, had calmed down, for the soothing effect he’d had on the doctor now came back to him. At last the doctor raised his head, gave the child a gentle pat and pulled down his shirt; then he turned to the family. He treated George Binnet, since he happened to be the only one there, as the child’s father. It even seemed to me that the doctor had changed not only George’s relationship to the child but also to his beloved Claudine by considering them both as the parents. Because a sick child needs parents. He had imperceptibly changed all the relationships in the room in order to facilitate the child’s healing. But once the illness no longer held sway, he wouldn’t care about any of them.
He was just explaining to the parents what foods to give the boy. I was sitting on Claudine’s coal box, listening, watching. Then all at once I became alert and pricked up my ears. What I’d just experienced was so fleeting that nothing of it lingered behind except a delicate, burning sensation, and a feeling of thirst as though I’d abruptly dried up. I was suddenly madly envious of the doctor. He had cured this boy who, once he was well, would presumably be of no further concern to him. And he had a certain power over people, not because of any tricks or cunning but because of his knowledge and patience. I was jealous of his knowledge and of his voice. He was different from me. He wasn’t suffering. His mouth wasn’t dry. I was jealous because there was some quality in the man that I myself would never possess, just as he himself could never, by himself, obtain the proper visas, letters of transit, or residence permits.
I interrupted him gruffly. I said that medicine didn’t work. That, in fact, it didn’t really exist. That no person had ever actually been cured by a physician, that people got well as a result of some coincidence or other. He gave me a penetrating look, as if he wanted to diagnose my fervor on this particular point. Then calmly he said that I was right. On his own, he could do nothing except to avoid doing anything that might interfere with the patient getting better. At most and with the utmost care, he might supply what the patient needed physically or spiritually. But even if all this worked, there was still something else, and maybe it was the most important thing. And he couldn’t really explain what it was. It was something that depended neither on the sick person nor on the doctor himself. Rather it came from the ever-present fullness of all treasured life. We listened, fascinated—then the doctor suddenly looked at the clock, jumped up, and left, calling out to us that he had an appointment with the Siamese consul’s secretary, and that the Siamese consul was a friend of the head of a forwarding agency that gave out visas for Portugal without American transit visas. George laughed; the boy turned his face to the wall.
IV
The next day was windless and overcast. The air felt as gray as the gunboat still lying at anchor in the Old Harbor. People never tired of staring at it as if it could tell them what Admiral Darlan was planning to do with it. The British were approaching the Tripoli border. Would the French voluntarily surrender the harbor at Bizerte, or would they refuse? Would the Germans then occupy the south of France too?—These were the questions of the day. I
f the latter were to happen, the British might bomb Marseille to smithereens. That, for the time being, would solve all transit visa worries. I went to the Café Mont Vertoux. The table where I’d sat the day before was free. I sat down, lit a cigarette, and waited. Waiting at the same place made no sense. But where else should I have waited?
The hour at which the young woman had come there yesterday was already long past. Yet I found it impossible to get up. Maybe I continued to sit there only because I was dead tired. My limbs felt leaden, paralyzed by the stupid waiting. The café was crowded. It was a Thursday, a day when alcohol was served. I’d drunk quite a lot.
Just then Nadine came to my table, dear old Nadine. Would you like me to describe Nadine? I can picture her standing before me at will. I didn’t care about her then or now. She asked me what I’d been doing all this time.
“Been going to the consulates.”
“You? Since when did you want to leave?”
“What else am I supposed to do, Nadine? Everyone is leaving. Am I supposed to kick the bucket in one of your filthy detention camps?”
“My brothers are in camps too,” Nadine tried to reassure me. “One is in the occupied part; the other one is in Germany. Every family has a couple of their men behind barbed wire. You foreigners are all so strange. I never wait for things to just happen.” She lightly stroked my hair.
I didn’t know how to send her away without hurting her feelings. I said, “You’re so beautiful, Nadine, I’m sure things have been going well for you in the meantime.”
She answered me with a sly smile, “I was lucky.” Then she bent down so that our faces touched. “He’s in the navy. His wife is a lot older than he is. Besides that, she’s stuck in Marrakech. He’s goodlooking. It’s just too bad that he’s a lot shorter than me.” She performed a move she’d learned at the Dames de Paris, flinging her coat back a bit so that one could see the light-colored silk lining and her beige dress.