by Anna Seghers
The boy was chewing on his straw when I got back to the café. The glass was empty. I’d been gone for about an hour. I felt guilty and was afraid to look him in the eye. But it wasn’t until we were walking home that he said, “So now you’re clearing out, too.”
“What gave you that idea?”
He replied, “Well, you went to a consulate. You came suddenly and now you’re going away suddenly.”
I held him close, kissed him, and swore that I’d never leave him.
VIII
The doctor was already sitting there when we got to the apartment. He scolded me for making him wait for his patient. He then led the boy over to the bed and listened to his chest. I stood there feeling reprimanded and sad. The boy was all tired out and fell asleep almost immediately.
The doctor and I left together. We really had nothing to talk about but agreed it was bitter cold. I turned in the direction of the Quai des Belges and he followed me, I don’t know why. More to himself than to me he said, “To think I could have left today!”
“You could have left today?” I said. “Why didn’t you?” We were now facing into the icy wind, and he scarcely opened his lips when he replied, “I would have had to leave a woman behind. She doesn’t have her documents yet. We’re hoping to travel together at the first opportunity.”
“And aren’t you afraid of losing your position in the hospital over there if you wait here for this woman?” I asked. “Remember, you’re a doctor, first and foremost.”
For the first time he looked at me. “That precisely is my insoluble problem. I worry about it night and day.”
Making a great effort because the wind was blowing right down my throat, I said, “But actually there’s nothing more to worry about now. After all, you stayed.”
“It’s not that simple,” he replied almost gasping since he had both the Mistral and me to contend with. “There are also some compelling external reasons that have delayed my departure. As always in such cases, one’s inner considerations sometimes coincide with external circumstances. The money for my passage is in Lisbon. I had intended to leave from there. I was still waiting for my Spanish transit visa and then suddenly, from one hour to the next, there was word about a small ship leaving for the island of Martinique, a cargo ship carrying goods to Fort de France, along with a dozen officials, and there’s room on it for thirty passengers. So now I have to raise the money for the passage, get the necessary papers, pay the security deposit, and quickly arrange to be one of the thirty passengers. And at the same time to manage this good-bye.—Do you understand?”
I said, “No.”
We glanced at each other sideways, our necks tensed as if the wind might blow away our looks. I stopped at the corner because I wanted to get rid of him. He certainly wouldn’t want to stand on this icy, windy street corner just to hear my opinion. But the matter must have been extremely important to him since, despite the cold, he asked, “What is it you don’t understand?”
“That a person wouldn’t know what matters most to him. It will come to light anyway.”
“How?”
“My God, man, by his actions, how else? Unless nothing matters to him. Then he’ll be like that piece of white paper over there that looks like a bird.”
He looked with great concentration at the deserted Quai, only sparsely lighted by a darkened streetlamp. It was as if he’d never before seen a scrap of white paper blowing in a gust of wind. I added, “Or like me.”
He turned abruptly to face me, looking at me with the same concentration. Then he said, “No.” His teeth were clattering with cold. “Nonsense. You only assume this pose, this attitude so that nothing and no one will surprise you.”
With that we parted. I had the same feeling I used to have when, as a boy, the top student in our class finally thought I was worthy of taking part in a special, privileged game, which, it soon turned out, was nothing special at all. And now, to top it off, I’d also been infected once more with the dismal transit talk.
IX
By then I was quite numb from the cold and I entered the first café I saw. It was called Café Roma. The warmth made me dizzy. Even as I stood there, unsteady on my feet, looking for a table, I sensed with some unease that someone was watching me. The dizziness left me; I became aware of a group of men at one of the tables. Among them was the little official from the Mexican Consulate. He was watching me with laughing eyes as though amused to see me there. I realized that all the men at the table were from the Mexican Consulate. Even the doorman with the proud dark face was there. I told myself that the little official had a right to drink his coffee wherever he wanted to on this icy evening. Moreover, in his daily routine he must certainly meet as many transit applicants as a pastor meets churchgoers. I didn’t sit down but pretended to continue my search for a table. At that point the Mexicans all got up to leave, and I sat down at the table they had vacated, which was too large for me alone.
As usual, I sat facing the door. A healthy man who’s been hurt doesn’t think night and day about his wound. But the awareness of his injury remains with him, a fine undeniable pain, even while he’s working, talking, or walking. It hadn’t left me for one second, no matter whether I was out for a walk with the boy, drinking, spending time at the consulates, or talking with the doctor. I searched for her wherever I happened to be, everywhere, no matter what else I was doing.
I hadn’t yet touched my glass of wine when the door was pushed open and the young woman walked in. She took a few steps, stopped, and looked around breathlessly as if the bleak Café Roma were a place of execution, as if she’d been sent by a higher authority to stop a sentence from being carried out. But to me her coming, whatever her reason for coming, seemed to be a direct consequence of my waiting. And so because I felt she had come too late and because I didn’t want to be too late, I left my glass on the table and went to stand by the door. After she passed me with her face turned away. I followed her. We crossed the Canebière. It wasn’t as dark outside as it had seemed from inside the café. The wind had stopped. She walked into the Rue des Baigneurs. I was hoping to find out where she lived, where she belonged, under what conditions she survived here. But she just walked back and forth through the many narrow streets between the Cours Belsunce and the Boulevard d’Athènes. Perhaps at first she intended to go home and then suddenly changed her mind.
We crossed the Cours Belsunce and then the Rue de la République. She went into the maze of alleys behind the Old Harbor. We even passed the house where the Binnets lived. Its door with the bronze knocker seemed to me like one of those chunks of reality that enter into one’s dreams. In the Corsican quarter we walked by the fountain in the market square. Perhaps she was searching for a particular street here, a house. I might have offered to help her. But instead I just walked behind her as if I feared that one word from me might be enough to make her disappear forever. One door was draped with silver-edged black sashes, the custom in this country when a dead person is lying in a house. In this way this wretched street became a proud portal for the almighty Visitor. It seemed like a dream in which I myself was the dead man, and at the same time it touched my heart. She walked up the stairs that led to the sea. Suddenly she turned around. Her face was right across from mine. She didn’t recognize me. It was absurd. She walked right past me.
For a moment I looked down at the nighttime sea. It was almost completely blotted out by cranes and bridges. Patches of water were visible between the moles and piers, a bit lighter than the sky. A line ran from the outermost point of the Corniche with its lighthouse, all the way to the left mole of La Joliette. It was the horizon—a thin and unprepossessing line and only recognizable because it was lighter than the water. A line, inviolable and unreachable, but which eluded everything. Suddenly, from one moment to the next, I was overwhelmed by a desire to leave. I could leave if I wanted to. I could do it all. And my departure would also be different in that it would not be driven by fear. It would be an honest, old-fashioned departure
befitting a human being traveling toward that distant, fine line. Suddenly I came to. When I turned to look for the woman, she was gone. The stairs were deserted, too. It was as if she had intentionally lured me up there.
X
I returned to the Rue de la Providence. I wasn’t tired at all. What was I going to do? Read? That’s what I used to do on free evenings like this. Never again! I felt that old boyhood reluctance to reading a book, that reaction against invented stories about a life that wasn’t real. If something had to be invented, if this cobbled-together life we were living was too wretched, then I wanted to be the inventor of another life, but not on paper.
But here I was in this intolerably bare room of mine, and I had to find something to do. Write a letter? There wasn’t anybody left on this earth I could have written to. Maybe my mother—but she might already be long dead. The borders between France and Germany had been closed for a long time. Go out again and sit in some café? Was I already so badly infected by those milling crowds that I had to be one of them?
Finally I did start writing a letter. I wrote to Marcel, Binnet’s cousin. I asked him to talk to his uncle about me, to tell him that I’d come from the Saarland. After all, they should be able to find a spot for me on such a big farm. Even though I was living in Marseille and I had grown to like the city, was even attached to some things here...I stopped because at that moment there was a knock on the door.
It was the short legionnaire, the one who had put me to bed on my second night in Marseille. His chest was covered with medals, but he had taken off his burnoose. I had nothing to offer him besides a torn-open pack of Gaulois Bleu cigarettes. He asked me if he was interrupting me. In answer I tore up my half-written letter. He sat down on my bed. He was definitely a lot smarter than me—as soon as he’d seen the light under my door he’d given up foolishly fighting his loneliness. He confessed something I’d known for a long time: “I thought it would be paradise to have a room all to myself. And now all my buddies are gone; they’ve all left. And I miss them!”
“Where did they go?”
“Shipped back to Germany. I hardly think they’ll be slaughtering a calf to celebrate the return of their prodigal sons. They’ll put them to work in some especially unpleasant factory or assign them to the most dangerous posts at the front.” He sat up very erect on the edge of my bed, a short, sturdy man surrounded by a spiral of smoke. He said, “The Germans came to Sidi-bel-Abbés; they set up commissions there. German style. They issued a proclamation, calling on all legionnaires of German birth to report to them, no matter why they had fled Germany. The Fatherland, et cetera, the magnanimity of the German people, all would be forgiven, and so forth and so on. So the German men in the Foreign Legion came forward, both ordinary soldiers and those in the middle ranks. The German commission, disregarding the promises made in their proclamation, checked them all thoroughly but took only a few. The rest they sent back. But those men had broken their French oath by having gone to the Germans. And now after the Germans rejected them, the French put them on trial. As punishment they were all sent to work in the mines in Africa.”
I didn’t like his story. It troubled me. I asked my guest how he had passed the commission alive.
“With me it’s something else,” he said. “I’m Jewish. For me the magnanimity of the German people was never even a consideration.”
I asked him why he’d joined the Foreign Legion. That question seemed to stir up a whole swarm of unpleasant thoughts for him
He said, “I ended up in the Legion because of the war, and was committed to staying in it for the duration of the war. It’s a long story and I don’t want to bore you with it. I was released finally because of my injury and my medals. I’d rather have you tell me what happened to the beautiful young woman I envied you for, the first week I met you.”
It took me a while to realize he meant Nadine. He said he’d almost gone blind looking for her as soon as he noticed that she was no longer my lover. He spoke of Nadine as I myself might have talked about the other one. His impassioned words hit me like an icy wave of terror. It was as if a gust of wind were blowing into the mists of my own enchantment.
5
I
I DIDN’T run into the young woman again in the next few days. Maybe she’d given up her futile search, or found the person she was looking for. Or perhaps she was already on the high seas, possibly on that boat to Martinique whose departure everyone had been speculating about that week. I had a feeling I’d find her again, somewhere, somehow. But even though I tried to force myself to stop expecting to see her, I always picked a seat facing the door.
The stream of the departure-obsessed swelled steadily hour by hour, day by day. No police raid, no decree by the Prefect of Bouches du Rhône, not even the threat of concentration camps, could keep the number of those hoping to leave from surpassing the number of people living here permanently. I considered all those who had already departed as refugees in transit. The refugees passing through this place had left behind their real lives, their lost countries. They were fleeing the barbed wire of Gurs and Vernet, Spanish battlefields, fascist prisons, and the scorched cities of the North. By now I knew many of their faces. No matter how alive they pretended to be, or how animated their talk about audacious escape plans, colorful outfits, visas for exotic lands, and transit visas, nothing fooled me about their plight. I was only amazed that the prefect and the other authorities and officials of the city continued to act as if the flood of departures could be dammed by mere human means. I was afraid that I might be caught up in the tide—I, who still felt alive, and absolutely determined to stay here. I feared I might be dragged into the stream by temptation or by an act of violence.
I went to the department that dealt with foreigners who were there on a temporary basis. There was a small group of us with all sorts of visa confirmations, safe conducts, and concentration camp release certificates. A fat official looked at us as if we’d come from another planet, not just from another country. He seemed to feel that the privilege of permanent residence here applied only to individuals from his own privileged country. They sent me to another department because a residence permit with so many extensions was either illegal or would have to be changed to a limited-residence permit.
I found myself waiting in line at the Rue Stanislas Lorein. You know the place, Didn’t you stand there yourself in the rain and snow that terrible winter when there was a shortage of bread? Lines of people waiting for food, or actually, for the right to eat it in this city. There were Czech and Polish prestataires waiting there, soldiers who seemingly no longer had any role to play. They weren’t even needed as cannon fodder since an agreement had been reached with the enemy. They were irrelevant here and so had laid down their weapons. Armies of ragged men who, as chance would have it, had barely survived, some just pretending to be alive. But they all had to be registered. Waiting in line, I met my little orchestra conductor again. He was shivering with cold—as if he’d crept out of a grave to be registered again with the living. I found the foreign legionnaire from the room next to mine. I found a gypsy carrying her children in a shawl on her back. And I found myself there, too, waiting with the rest of them.
Of course, you’re also familiar with the cavernous Prefecture and the horde of frizzy-haired bureaucratic goblins that work there, digging out dossiers from the walls of shelves with their little paws and red-lacquered claws. And then, depending on whether you’ve hit a well-disposed goblin or a malicious one, you leave the cave either happy or gnashing your teeth. They gave me a magic paper, a new invitation to appear at a later date. They indicated that a general proof of departure wasn’t enough, and that I would only receive a limited-residence permit if I brought along specific proof that I had booked passage on a ship, the date when my ship would leave, and a transit visa, giving me permission to pass through the United States.
II
I was stunned by all this and decided to go to the Mont Vertoux to catch my breath. The first
thing I saw in the café, once I could see clearly, was the young woman. She was leaning against the wall behind the table where I liked to sit. I quickly pulled myself together and sat down. For minutes her hand rested on the back of my chair. Someone at the adjacent table leaned over to tell me that he’d found a boat that would take him to Oran this week along with a shipment of copper wire. He’d also arranged his route from there to Tangier at the English Consulate. The fellow had developed the technique of an actor’s stage whisper that could be heard around the room. The revolving door turned, disgorging the woman from the hotel room next to mine with her two dogs, which bounded toward me barking joyfully. Tugging at their leashes, she greeted me with a laugh. Two people at the table across from mine started arguing about how Gibraltar seemed to be fogged in as soon as a ship was reported. And all this time the young woman’s hand still lay on the back of my chair. I looked up at her. Her brown hair, cut after a fashion, was casually covered by her hood. Suddenly she made the only gesture possible: She held her hands over her ears. Then she left.
I was already on my way out the door when someone grabbed my sleeve; it was Paul. “Hey there, your Weidel might have thanked me,” he said.
I wanted to shake him off, but he put his foot into the revolving door, and I actually fought that small, effeminate but tough foot in its ugly russet-colored shoe.
“Hey!” said Paul, “I really talked my tongue off for your Weidel. There were some major, even justified impediments. I had to use my influence. I spent a lot of my time, ploughed my way through lots of committees. But evidently even a simple gesture or a word of thanks is too much for Weidel.”
“Forgive me, Paul.” It took great willpower to calm the pounding of my heart. “But it’s all my fault. I should have thanked you on his behalf a long time ago. But going like that to a committee, even making such a gesture—things that are a cinch for us—are impossible for him by his very nature.”