Transit

by Anna Seghers

  I turned around. The young woman was coming over to our table. She didn’t speak, merely nodded slightly to him in an old mutual understanding.

  The doctor said, “This gentleman has been kind enough to give us some good advice.”

  She looked at me briefly. Sometimes it’s easier to recognize a person from a certain distance rather than close up. I made no effort to reveal my identity to her. Meanwhile, the waiter brought over a pizza the size of a small wagon wheel. He cut each of us a triangular slice. The doctor said, “Marie, please eat something, you look so tired.”

  She said, “Again it was all in vain.”

  He took her hand. It’s not that I was jealous. I just had the feeling that I was about to take something away from him that wasn’t really his, something he couldn’t possibly deal with. I grabbed his wrist and turned his hand a little so that the woman withdrew her fingers and I was able to see the face of his watch. Regaining my composure, I said I’d have to leave soon. He was disappointed and said he’d hoped that I had the evening free to have supper with them. Marie wasn’t hungry, and he couldn’t possibly eat the pizza all by himself. He would use his bread ration. But above all, I must tell Marie the whole story before I left. He poured me another glass of rosé. After I had downed this glass, too, I realized that if I got up and left now, the woman would certainly not follow me; she would continue to sit there with the doctor. So I poured myself another glassful and told the entire long, trivial story for the fourth time. The woman listened with complete disinterest as I told it. But the doctor couldn’t get enough of the nonsense. That’s right, I think it’s all a lot of nonsense —exchanging one burning city for another burning city, switching from one lifeboat to another in the middle of the bottomless sea.

  “But you’d have to go by yourself,” I told him. “This sort of journey is nothing for a woman. It would be quite out of the question.”

  She broke in suddenly, “There’s nothing out of the question for me. All I want is to get away from here. I don’t care by what means. I’m not afraid of anything.”

  “It has nothing to do with being afraid. They can hide a man anywhere. They can drop him off in mid-journey. But these people would never risk taking a woman on board their boat.”

  We looked each other in the eye. I think at that moment she recognized me for the first time. I don’t mean that she recognized me as someone she had run into often, but rather as someone who had crossed her path before, for good or for evil.

  The doctor ordered another bottle of rosé to replace the one I had emptied almost single-handedly. And while I was drinking, I weighed her words: I want to get away from here. I don’t care by what means. This confession coming from her lips, though I’d heard the same thing hundreds of times a day, seemed fresh and new in its foolishness and matter-of-factness; as if she was assuring me, here in front of the open fire and the sliced-up pizza, that death would some day destroy her features, too. I even took a moment to think of this most natural sort of destruction, the inevitable end of everything that’s destructible. Her small pale face appeared close to mine, still untouched, in a rosé-tinged, glittering rosé world. The doctor grabbed for her hand once more. By reaching for the bottle, I managed to obstruct him just in time with my elbow.

  The doctor said, “You wouldn’t be able to leave by that date anyway. And when you are ready to leave, you may as well go via Spain.”

  I poured each of us another glass of wine. And even as I was emptying my glass, I realized that I had to push the man away from the table, out of the pizzeria, out of the city, and across the ocean, as quickly and as far as possible.

  VII

  I’ll admit it—I didn’t let the couple out of my sight after that. I’m not at all ashamed of it either. And rather than be annoyed, they truly seemed glad of my presence. I used the passage to Oran as an excuse. I talked things over with the doctor and the little mousy man and even with Bombello, whom I’d met by then. He was a lean, mustachioed, ordinary-looking Corsican; he didn’t have much more than the one passage from Ajaccio to Marseille to his credit. I told the doctor that the cargo they were waiting for might still be stuck for weeks or it might suddenly be released, and if that happened the boat would be leaving from one hour to the next. And I asked him if he was irrevocably committed to the trip. With lowered eyes he said he had finally made up his mind: he was ready. He was counting on meeting Marie in Lisbon.

  I passed most of my time waiting in Binnet’s apartment under Claudine’s suspicious eyes. She was puzzled by these longer visits of mine. The boy also waited in silence for the doctor whose visits became shorter as the boy’s health improved.

  The doctor would drag me along to the pizzeria to wait for Marie. On one occasion, while we waited for her, he told me, to my astonishment, that he had promised to bring me along because the presence of a stranger would remove some of the apprehension and anxiety that would inevitably accompany their good-byes. And, he said, he was glad to do anything that would make Marie a little more cheerful and calm her anxiety. We often had to wait a long time before she arrived. I could always tell when she entered a place from the expression on the doctor’s face—it would suddenly and inexplicably change to an odd one of jealousy and apprehension. But even as the two of us were waiting there, I visualized Marie running through the city, going from one place to another, in this search of hers, which I was no longer a witness to, since I now ended up at the same table with her in the evenings. Once I casually asked the doctor about this, and he said, just as casually, “Oh, good lord, it’s the old visa scourge.” His answer didn’t sound quite sincere, and I was surprised because he was usually needlessly frank and honest in his confessions.

  One ice-cold evening, he and I were waiting as usual. The pier outside the pizzeria had been swept clear by the wind. The few lights in the houses on the other side of the harbor blinked as if from a distant coastline. I wondered whether my companion was really as calm as he pretended to be. If the German commission were to release the cargo tomorrow, thus signaling his departure, he’d no longer be able to keep watch over Marie’s life. Just then I saw from the contraction of his eyebrows, the narrowing of his eyes, that the small shadow in the cape with the pointed hood we had been waiting for had just appeared outside the window, and then the door opened.

  She was breathless, but not just from the wind. Her lips were pale but not only from the cold. She didn’t try to hide her fear, but leaned down to her friend, whispered a few words to him. For the first time since I’d met him, he seemed perplexed, dismayed. He got halfway up out of his chair and looked around. Infected by his dismay, I, too, looked around the place. But the room presented no threat of any kind, only calm. The owner’s family sat at the next table, with the same wine, the same food as ours. The owner, who was also the chief cook, was stroking his favorite daughter’s cheek, and giving orders to the second cook, his son-in-law, who, just as Marie entered, had grabbed the rolling pin to prepare some more dough. There were two other couples in the place holding hands and touching knees; they sat there motionless as if the most fleeting of all encounters had fused them together for all eternity. You could count on your fingers the shadows, not including ours, cast on the wall by the fire. It was burning only moderately as not too many customers were expected due to the weather and the lateness of the hour. The small pizzeria at that moment seemed like the last haven in the old world; offering us shelter and a last period of grace in which to decide what to do: whether to leave or stay. How many men had these walls shielded as they sat in front of the fire, agonizing over whether to leave, thinking about the most important thing that held them here. In here, before the glow of the fire, it was peaceful and quiet, no matter what disastrous tidings the newspaper hawkers would croak at us as soon as we stepped out onto the Canebière. No one would ever dare put out this fire as it warmed all these tormented people who’d managed to come as far as the Old Port. Even those who were pursuing them, no matter how much fear and terror the
y were spreading, were not immune to fear.

  The doctor at last got hold of himself; he shook his head, saying, “See for yourself, Marie, there’s nothing wrong here.” He added, “There was nobody here before either.” Suddenly he pointed to me, “Just him.”

  I felt slightly uneasy because I can’t stand having someone point at me. I said, “I’d better go now.”

  At that Marie grabbed my hand, crying, “No, please stay! It’s good that you’re here.”

  I saw that her fear had grown less by my mere presence and that she thought I would protect her from any real or imagined danger.

  VIII

  I was ready now to fulfill whatever demands the officials and the consulates made; I was ready to provide them with the most ridiculous proofs of my intention to leave just so that they would let me stay.

  Still grimacing from fighting the Mistral, people were crowding into the anteroom of the American Consulate. Here at least it was warm. In the last few days, bitterly cold temperatures had been adding to all the other woes of the departure obsessed. The doorman at the United States Consulate, looking as powerful as a boxer, stood behind a table loaded with files that was blocking the stairway leading to the upper floors. With one small movement of his massive chest he could have pushed the whole dry swarm of visa seekers driven here this morning by the icy wind out onto the Place St. Ferréol. The powder lay on the women’s faces, stiff from the cold, like chalk. They had spruced up not only their children and themselves, but also their men in the hope of finding favor in the doorman’s eyes. From time to time he pushed the file-covered table aside with his brawny hip to free a space like the eye of a needle, through which a privileged transit visa applicant could go upstairs.

  I almost didn’t recognize the orchestra conductor without his sunglasses. The icy Mistral of the last few days had utterly devastated him, insofar as a Mistral can devastate a skeleton. But his hair was neatly combed and parted; he was trembling with joy. “You should have started sooner. I’ll be leaving the consulate today with my transit permit.” He held his elbows close to his body so that his little black tailcoat would not be damaged in the crush.

  Suddenly a wave of anger spread through the waiting crowd. The woman from the hotel room next to mine had come in, wearing a colorful outfit and serenely leading the two Great Danes on tight leashes. The doorkeeper, knowing that she was acceptable to the consul, had immediately cleared the way between the table and the stairs with an impassive respectfulness as if the two Great Danes were visa guarantors bewitched by a spell. I made use of the small breach to follow the dog lady. I threw the doorkeeper my application form, Seidler, aka Weidel. The doorkeeper yelled at me, then he saw the dogs greeting me familiarly, whereupon he allowed me to go upstairs to the consulate secretarial office.

  Here again there were waiting rooms. The dogs scared half a dozen little Jewish children. They squeezed against their parents and their grandmother, a yellowed, stiff-jointed woman, old enough to have been driven out of Vienna not by Hitler but by an edict of the Empress Maria Theresa. A young woman came out through one of the consulate doors to find out what all the commotion was about. She must have been floating on a little cloud as soft and pink as her face all through the war and the wholesale devastation of the world. Smiling and fluttering her wings, she led the entire family, still apprehensive and gloomy, toward the consul’s desk.

  Even caught up as I was in my transit permit mania and immersed in my own visa-obsession fog, I felt a pair of eyes on me. I wondered where I’d seen this man before. He’d already examined everyone else in the room and having nothing better to do for the moment, he was calmly staring at me. He was holding his hat in his hand. Then it came to me—I’d seen him yesterday at the travel bureau, but I couldn’t tell then that he was almost completely bald. We didn’t greet each other, merely smiled scornfully, because we both knew that, for better or for worse, we’d be seeing each other a hundred times more, that our lives were linked as fellow transit applicants, even against our wishes, our wills, even against fate. Then the little conductor appeared. There were red spots on his cheeks. His hands twitched. He was counting photographs, all the time assuring us, “I swear there were twelve of them in the hotel.” The woman from the room next to mine used the time to brush her dogs.

  I’m embarrassed to confess that my heart was pounding; I was scared. For a while I stopped paying any attention to the people entering the upstairs waiting room after me. They came in slowly, one by one, breathing shallowly. It doesn’t matter what the consul looked like, I thought. One thing was certain, he had power over me. Even though this power was restricted to his own country. Still, if he refused to grant me an American transit visa now, I’d be branded as a failed transit applicant, indelibly marked for all the officials of the city, and for all the other consulates. I’d have to flee again, and lose my beloved even before I’d won her.

  I calmed down when they called out the name Weidel. I was no longer afraid of being unmasked or of being rejected. I sensed the immeasurable, the uncrossable divide that separated the man whose name had been called out and the consul who, flesh and blood—lean flesh and thin blood—sat impassively behind his desk. I watched with interest, as if from outside myself, this ghost being conjured up—a ghost summoned to appear who had long ago fled to some shadowy, moldering, swastika-marked necropolis.

  The consul arrogantly looked me up and down, the living man who stood between him and the ghost. He said, “Your name is Seidler? Yet you write your books under the name Weidel. Why?”

  I said, “Writers often do that.”

  “What made you apply for a Mexican visa, Mr. Weidel-Seidler?”

  I answered his stern question frankly, modestly. “I didn’t apply for it, I just accepted the first visa that was offered to me. My situation required it.”

  He said, “How is it, sir, that you, as a writer, never tried to emigrate to the United States, like so many of your colleagues?”

  I answered, “Where could I have applied? To whom? How? I was outside the world. The Germans had invaded! The end of days had come.”

  He tapped his pencil on the desk. “The Consulate of the United States was open for business on the Place de la Concorde.”

  “How could I have known that, sir? I no longer went to the Concorde. People like us didn’t dare show themselves on the streets at that time.”

  He frowned. I realized that behind him the typewriters were clattering, taking down the entire interrogation. Just a bit of additional clatter in the general din, the big fear of silence.

  “Mr. Seidler, how do you explain that you have been issued a Mexican visa?”

  “Favorable circumstances I would assume,” I replied, “and some good friends.”

  “Why do you say ‘some’? You know you had certain friends in the former government of the former Spanish Republic and they are in some way connected with certain circles in the Mexican government today.”

  I thought of the poor dead man so hastily buried, of his pitiful legacy. Aloud I said, “Friends in the government? Absolutely not!”

  He went on, “You performed certain services for the former Republic, worked for its information service.”

  I remembered the little bundle of papers at the bottom of the suitcase, the complicated story that bemused me one sad evening—how long ago had it been? I said, “I never wrote anything of the sort.”

  “Pardon me, but let me help you remember. There is, for example, a description of the shootings at Badajos written by you and translated into many languages.”

  “Of what, sir?”

  “Of the mass shootings of Reds in the Badajos arena.” He gave me a piercing look. Probably he thought my astonishment was due to his display of such complete knowledge. I really was quite astonished. Whatever might have motivated the dead man to write about that incident—someone else may actually have told him about it—he probably lent it some of the magic that now lay in the grave with him. His magic lamp, extinguished
and broken, lay buried beside him now, a lamp that lit up for eternity anything on which he focused its beam, mostly on precarious adventures, but once also on this arena in Badajos. How stupid of the dead man to blow the lamp out himself. After all, as the old tale has it, the genie will obey the one who has the lamp. I would have given a lot to read what he wrote about that event.

  I said, “I’ve never written anything like that either before or after.”

  The consul stood there and looked at me with a look that might have been called penetrating, if only it had been penetrating the right man.

  He asked, “Do you have someone to vouch for you here?”

  Where was I supposed to get someone who would swear to the consul that the dead man had never before or afterward written something like that, someone who would swear that my dead man would never write about any mass execution of Reds in any arena whatsoever?—The typewriters had gone silent along with the interrogation. And when the silence threatened even this room, I thought back to the beginning of this long story; I remembered Paul. I said to the consul, “Of course, my friend Paul Strobel, at the Aid Committee on the Rue Aix.” The name was added to other names, the files to other files, the dossier to other dossiers, and I was given an appointment to appear January eighth.

  After that exhausting interrogation I wanted nothing so much as to flee to the nearest café. I left the chambers of the consulate, walked down the stairs into the large entrance hall where I could barely make my way through the crush of people there. Dismay and shock were on all their faces. An ambulance had stopped outside the gate, and as I stepped outside, they were strapping a man on a stretcher and carrying him off. I recognized the little orchestra conductor. He was dead. People were saying, “He collapsed while he was standing in line. He was supposed to get his visa today. But the consul sent him back because he had one photo less than he was supposed to have. And so his visa date was postponed and his passage became invalid. This upset him terribly. And then when somebody helped him count his photos again, it turned out that he had miscounted because two of the photos were stuck together. So he got in line all over again, and that’s when he collapsed.”