by Anna Seghers
I was astounded by this explicit demonstration of her good luck. I said, “Don’t scare the man off! I’m sure he’s waiting for you now.”
She didn’t think making him wait for her would do any harm, but finally I managed to get her to leave by making a date to meet eight days from then. I could just as well have arranged the appointment for eight years later.
I saw Nadine walk past the window as she went up the Canebière. Shortly after that they lowered the shutters. Blackout rules. For me it was oppressive not to be able to look out, to see the water and the shadows in the street. I felt trapped, locked in with all the demons populating the Mont Vertoux that evening. One clear thought flashed through my mind so worn out from waiting: If a squadron of planes were to bombard the city, I didn’t want to die in this place with them. But in the end, that didn’t matter either. How was I any different from them? Just because I didn’t want to leave? Even that was only half true.
Suddenly my heart began to pound. Even before my eyes caught sight of her, it knew who had just entered. She was in a hurry, just as she had been the day before, as if fleeing from or searching for something. Her young face was so tense that it hurt me to look at it. I thought, as if she were my daughter: It’s not good for her to be here, not in this place, not at this hour.
She searched through the entire café, going from table to table. She came back to my section, pale with despair. But then she immediately began the search all over again. She was alone and helpless in this herd of escaped demons. She came close to my table. Her gaze now rested on me. I thought: She’s looking for me, who else? But already her eyes had moved elsewhere. She made her way out.
V
I returned to the Rue de la Providence. My room seemed bare and empty, as if I’d been burglarized while I was gone. My head was empty, too. I didn’t even have a clear picture of her in my mind. Even that vestige was gone.
I was sitting at my bare table when there was a knock on the door. A stranger came in, a short man, wearing glasses. He asked whether I knew by any chance where his wife had disappeared to; he had found their room unexpectedly empty. From his questions I gathered that he was the man I’d seen from my hiding place on the roof, being led off in handcuffs. Slowly I began to explain that his wife, unfortunately, had been arrested.
He became furious. I was really afraid that, given his stout neck, he might choke. He told me they had taken him in chains back to his original département, but the official there had been in a good mood and had told the guards to let him go. He said he was still hoping to make the ship in time, but now that they’d dragged his wife off to Camp Bompard, he’d have to pay her bail, or, to call it what it really was, her ransom. He immediately disappeared into the city to find some friends to help him. How I envied him! The plump little woman belonged to him. She couldn’t get away from him, although it was too bad that she was stuck in a camp. But she couldn’t vanish from his life. He’d walk his legs off, do whatever he could to get her back.
As for me, I had nothing, no one I could hold on to. I went to bed because I was cold. I tried to visualize the young woman’s face, her figure. I sought to find an image of her in the thin, bitter cigarette smoke that gradually filled the room. The hotel was deserted. The legionnaires had left in search of entertainment. It was one of those evenings when everything and everyone has withdrawn from you as if by some conspiracy.
VI
I was awakened by yowling dogs. When I banged on the wall, it got even worse. I jumped up and went to see if I could get them to stop their racket. I found the adjacent room occupied by two powerful Great Danes and a woman with insolent eyes and crooked shoulders. She was wearing an ugly, garish dress. I assumed she had something to do with one of the small, seedy theaters in the alleys down by the harbor that presented all sorts of trash. I explained to her in French that her animals were disturbing me. She answered me flippantly in German that it was too bad but I had to get used to it because the animals were her traveling companions. All she wanted was to go to Lisbon once she’d received her transit visa. I asked her if her attachment to the two mutts was really so strong that she’d drag them along all over the world.
She laughed and began to tell me her story. “I could slaughter them here and now. But I’m shackled to them because of a series of remarkable coincidences. I already had a ticket to sail on a ship of the Export Line. My American visa was approved. But when I went to the consulate to ask for an extension, they said that I needed a new, incontestable affidavit, a sponsor, and statements by two American citizens saying I was completely spotless morally. Where was I, a woman who’d always lived alone, going to find two American citizens who would put their hands in the fire for me, vouching that I’d never embezzled money, that I denounced the pact with Russia and didn’t support the Communists, and never was and never would be one, that I would receive no strange men in my room, that I was leading, had led, and would lead a respectable life? I was pretty desperate. Then I happened to run into a couple from Boston, whom I had met one summer when we were staying at a place at the seashore. The husband had a position with Electromotor; that was something the consul respected. They didn’t like it at all here in France and wanted to leave immediately on the Clipper, except that they loved their two dogs and dogs weren’t allowed on the Clipper. We were despondent and complaining to each other about our respective dilemmas when we realized there was a way we could help each other. I promised the two Americans that I would take the dogs safely across the ocean on an ordinary ship, and, in return, they gave me an affidavit. Now you see why I wash, brush, and care for these two dogs. They’re my guarantors—I’d drag them across the ocean with me even if they were lions.”
Somewhat cheered by her tale, I went out into the cold morning. I chose a shabby little café because it was cheap and it was on the Canebière across from the Mont Vertoux. I stared out at the busy street. One minute the Mistral was driving the rain into the throngs of people, the next minute the sky suddenly turned light. The windows of the café rattled. I was thinking about the Office for Aliens; I was planning to try my luck there the following morning, perhaps show them the camp release certificate Heinz had given me.
Suddenly the young woman—for once I wasn’t even thinking of her—appeared in the doorway of the café. With one look she took in the entire shabby little place. Besides me, there were only three construction workers who had come in to get out of the rain, and so she didn’t even come inside. Under her hood her face seemed even smaller and paler than before.
I hurried out into the street. The young woman had already disappeared into the crowd. I walked up and down the Canebière, bumping into people, disrupting their departure gossip, their march to the consulates. Far away, at the end of the Canebière, I caught sight of the pointed hood. I ran after her but she disappeared on the Quai des Belges. I followed her onto the Quai, up the stairs, through the bare, endless streets to St. Victor’s Church. There she stopped in the entrance of the church, near the candle sellers. Only then did I realize that this wasn’t the woman I was looking for, but another woman, a woman I didn’t know with ugly, mean, shriveled features. She was haggling over the price of the candles to be lit for the good of her soul.
There was another sudden rainsquall, and so I slipped into the nearest pew. I don’t know how long I sat there, head in my hands. I’d come again to the brink, to the edge of it all. In spite of that I kept on with the old game, even at the edge. Also, I remembered that this was the morning I was supposed to have met Heinz. But the time of our appointment was long past and with it, so it seemed, the best of what lay in store for me. How cold it was in the church! A damp gloom reigned not only inside St. Victor’s but also near the half-open door. The Mistral even blew in, causing the little altar candles to flicker. How empty the mighty nave, and yet new people were constantly coming in from outside; where did they disappear to? I heard faint singing, but couldn’t tell where it was coming from, for the church remained empty. The c
hurchgoers were all disappearing on the other side of a wall. I followed them down a stairway that was dug into the bedrock. The farther down we went the clearer the singing. Soon a flickering light from the crypt fell on the stairs. By now we must have been deep under the city, indeed, it seemed to me, under the sea.
It was here that they were performing the Mass. In the thin smoke wafting up, the timeworn capitals of the antique pillars were transformed into the grimaces of sacred animals. The ancient priest had a white beard and wore a sumptuously embroidered white stole. He was like one of those priests from long ago who are stricken when their unholy, sinful city is condemned to sink to the bottom of the sea because it scorned the warnings of Him who created this rock. The pale choirboys, eternally youthful, were singing as they carried their candles in procession about the pillars. Light from the flames danced on their faces. A soft drizzling sound turned into the shaky breaking of waves. It was the sea roaring above us. The singing ended abruptly. The priest, in a voice both weak and hard, typical of old men, began to reproach us for our cowardice and our hypocrisy and our fear of death.
“Today, too, we came here only because this place seemed safe to us. But why is this place safe? Why has it survived the ages, withstood the military campaigns of two thousand years? Because He who carved His house into the many rocks around the Mediterranean Sea did not know fear.
“‘Three times I was beaten with rods; once I was stoned; three times I was shipwrecked; a night and a day I have been in the deep; in journeys often, in perils of waters, in perils of robbers, in perils of my own countrymen, in perils of the Gentiles, in perils of the city, in perils in the wilderness, in perils in the sea, in perils among false brethren.’”
The veins stood out on the old man’s forehead, his voice died away. The church seemed to be sinking down deeper and deeper, and the people listened, trembling both with shame and fear, to the old man’s bitter silence. Then the choirboys’ singing began again in its unbearable angelic purity, raising futile hopes in us as long as the melody floated in the air. It was answered by a dreadful sound issuing from the old man’s deep chest that evoked gloom and remorse.
I was struggling to breathe. I didn’t want to get stuck at the bottom of the sea; I wanted to die up above, together with others like me. I rushed back up the stairs. The air was cold and clear. The deluge had stopped; the Mistral had blown itself out. Stars were already glittering in the battlements of Fort St. Nicolas across from St. Victor’s Church.
VII
The Binnet boy was allowed to leave the house for the first time the following day. Claudine asked me to take him out into the sun. I liked my assignment. We walked slowly up the Canebière on the sunny side of the street. The peaceful closeness between us was there again, almost effortless. I wished the Canebière would stretch on forever, that the afternoon sun might stand still, and the boy would always lean his head against my arm as he was doing then. He was dragging his feet a little lazily and spoke only when I asked him a question. He said he wanted to be a doctor one day. Despite the fact that I had his full trust and the peaceful gaze of his eyes on me, I immediately felt a pang of envy. By then he was so tired that I was almost pulling him along. I suggested we go to a café on the Cours d’Assas. Unfortunately they had no cocoa or fruit juice, only some watery greenish stuff. Yet there was a glint of happiness in his face, such as usually comes in response to the more precious things so rare in life. I loved him very much. I looked over his head and out through the window at the still-sunny square with its contorted trees. There was a crowd in front of one of the large houses. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“Over there? Oh, nothing,” the waiter said. “Those are just Spaniards. They’re lined up outside the Mexican Consulate.”
I left the boy with his greenish juice and crossed the square. I looked up at the tall doorway, at the coat of arms. It gleamed brightly; the layer of dust had been removed. I was amazed. Now I could even see the snake in the eagle’s beak. The Spaniards looked at me, smiling. Only one said in annoyance, “Get in line, sir!”
So I got in line. Ahead of me and behind, I heard them saying the same words and phrases I’d heard months before outside the Mexican Consulate in Paris. Now they were repeating with even greater certainty that ships were going to sail from Marseille for Mexico. Again they repeated the ships’ names: Republica. Esperanza. Passionaria. They were sure the ships would be leaving since they even specifically mentioned the names; they wouldn’t be wiped off the shipping companies’ blackboards. Moreover, the ports they were sailing to would never go up in flames. There were no impassable straits on their routes. I wanted to sail on one of these ships with such fellow passengers.
And lo and behold, I reached the gate. The doorman sprang toward me as though he’d been expecting me. I almost didn’t recognize the lean, leathery man from the Boulevard de la Madeleine. He held himself proudly and was well dressed, which just reinforced our hopes for a departure. They ushered me into the office. It was no longer a simple room, but an awe-inspiring space with counters and a railing. And behind the railing, at a massive table, sat my little official with the most sparkling and alert eyes in the world. I wanted to turn on my heels and leave. But he jumped up and called to me, “There you are finally! We’ve had them search everywhere for you. You didn’t enter your address properly. My government’s confirmation has arrived.”
I stood there transfixed, thinking, So Paul really did have some influence. He really does have a certain amount of power on this earth. Dumbfounded, I did the silliest thing, I made a slight bow.
The official gazed at me in amusement. I could read in his sardonic look just what he was thinking—You can be sure I didn’t lift a finger in your affair. Other powers were involved. But we’ll see who has the last laugh. He had me step behind the railing, and while I was waiting there, some ten or twenty departure-crazed people walked past. I also saw the white-haired Spaniard again, the one who had asked my advice about whether it would be worthwhile coming here again. And here he was. He had come, in spite of my advice and his own bitterness. Maybe he hoped that once on the other side of the ocean, he would regain his youth or find a sort of eternal life that would give him back his sons.
They brought out my dossier, leafed through it, rustling the papers. Suddenly the little official turned to me, his eyes flashed, I had the impression that up to then he had only wanted to lull me. “What kind of documents do you have, Mr. Seidler?” He was looking at me quite joyfully, almost laughing. “There are several compatriots of yours here who have had their visas for two months already but are still waiting for confirmation from the German authorities that they are no longer considered German citizens. Only then will the Prefecture issue them an exit visa, permitting them to leave the country.”
We looked at each other. We could sense an adversarial relationship, but we both derived pleasure from this evenly matched duel. I replied, “Please don’t worry. I have a refugee certificate from the Saarland, as well as from Alsace.”
“But weren’t you born in Silesia, Mr. Seidler?”
We looked each other in the eye, amused. I said, “In Europe very few people have the citizenship of the country they were born in. I happened to be in the Saarland at the time of the referendum.”
“Permit me, but I continue to be seriously concerned about you. In view of all this, you’re almost French, and you’ll have considerable difficulties getting an exit visa.”
I said, “I’m sure that, with your help, I can manage it. What do you suggest I do?”
He looked at me, smiling, as if I’d just asked him something funny. “First you should go with my government’s confirmation of your visa to the American travel bureau. There you should ask for a receipt showing that your ship’s passage has been paid.”
“Paid?”
“Certainly, Mr. Seidler, paid. The same friends who were worried about your life and who pushed through my government’s visa for you have paid in full for your ticket
at the Export Line in Lisbon. Here in your dossier is proof of payment. Does that surprise you?”
I certainly was surprised. So all Weidel had to do was die, and, voilà, his voyage across the ocean was paid for, and his dossier filled with the best of documents that would prove more and more useful the longer his corpse moldered in the ground. It seemed as if dying was all it took for his friends to remember him and smooth his way down to the last detail.
“Then you must immediately go to the American Consulate with this proof of payment and the confirmation of your visa and apply for a transit visa.”
“From the American Consulate?”
He looked at me sharply, “No matter what other talents you may have, I’m sure you can’t walk on water. There’s no ship that goes direct to Mexico. So you’ll need a transit visa.”
“But they keep talking about a direct ship to Mexico.”
“Of course, they talk. But these are just phantom ships they’re talking about. The Export Line is a safer bet. In any case, see if they’ll give you a transit visa. Besides, you look a bit worldlier than other writers I’ve come across. Not that I’m belittling your abilities as a writer! Anyway, try your luck at the American Consulate. And then ask for a transit visa for Spain and Portugal.” He had said the last merely incidentally, as if referring to a situation he was convinced would never come to pass, and that expending too much effort on it was futile.
I went back across the square that was by now cold and quiet. With my splendid new visa confirmation, they’ll certainly give me another extension of my residence permit at the Prefecture. After all, I’ve got to make the various preparations now for my departure—getting transit visas, etc. will take weeks. Now they’ll believe me when I tell them that I’m serious about leaving and so they’ll let me stay.