by Anna Seghers
I said, “And they’re still there.”
“And there was meadow cress growing by the brook...”
“Wouldn’t you like to go back?”
“Go back? No one’s ever suggested that to me. And it’s not really bad advice...but...”
“Yes, but...” I repeated Claudine’s words, “a leaf in the wind would have an easier time finding its old twig again.”
She said almost to herself, “A person isn’t a leaf. A person can go wherever she wants to. And she can also go back where she came from.”
Her answer moved me. It was as if a child had given a wise reply to a stupid suggestion. “How did you meet Weidel anyway?”
Her face darkened. I regretted having asked her.
Then, smiling faintly, she said, “I was visiting relatives in Cologne. One day I was sitting on a bench on the Hansa Ring. And Weidel came along and sat down next to me, in the sun. We started to talk. No one had ever spoken to me the way he did. People like that never came to see us. I forgot all about his grumpy face. I ignored his being so short. I think I surprised him, too. He had always lived by himself. After that we met often. I was proud to be with a man like him, so intelligent, so mature. One day he told me that he had to leave. He couldn’t stand Germany any more. This was in the early Hitler years. My father didn’t like Hitler either, but still he wasn’t ready to leave his homeland because of him. I asked Weidel where he was going. He said, ‘Far away and for a long time.’ I said, ‘I’d like to see foreign lands too sometime.’ He asked me whether I’d like to go with him, the way you ask a child, just for fun. I said, ‘Yes.’ Again, just for fun. He said, ‘Good. We’ll leave this evening.’
“That evening I was standing at the train station. I was so scared when I saw his face that I started to tremble. He stared at me and I stared back. You have to understand, he had almost always been alone. And he wasn’t particularly good-looking either. He was almost ugly, unattractive. And I was so very young. You see, he probably wasn’t the sort of man who’s easy to love, who’s used to having someone love him. But he stood there and thought about it a moment, and then he said, ‘All right. You can come along.’
“How simply it all started. For me it was the easiest thing in the world. But how complicated it all got, how mixed up. Who knows why or how. We went south. We stopped at Lake Constance. He showed me everything. Taught me things. And then at last, one day I was tired of learning things. And he was used to being by himself. We moved around to all sorts of cities. We arrived in Paris. He often asked me to leave the apartment. We were poor. We had just one single room. And so I walked through the city, up one street and down another, just so that he could be alone.”
Her expression changed abruptly. She turned pale. She was staring at the idle, aimless stream of people on the other side of the window. She cried, “There he is!” I grabbed her shoulder. With a wild tug she freed herself. I saw now whom she had seen: a short, gray, rather fat man with a sullen face who was just then entering the Mont Vertoux. He looked angrily at Marie. He gave me a churlish look, too. I grabbed Marie, more firmly this time and shook her, forcing her back on her chair.
“Stop this nonsense!” I said. “That man is a Frenchman. Just take a closer look! He’s wearing the ribbon of the Legion of Honor.”
The man stood still, and his expression suddenly changed. He smiled.
His smile told Marie more than the little red ribbon. She said, “Let’s get away from here.”
We left and walked through a maze of streets down to the Old Port. But this time we were together, the two of us, my arm around her shoulders. I asked, “Did that man really look like your husband?”
“A little—at first.”
We kept walking as if we were under a curse that wouldn’t let us rest. Marie was the one who’d been cursed, but I didn’t leave her alone. We passed a house in a narrow alley lined by tall buildings. The door of the house was draped with black and silvery-bronze fabric because death had entered there that day. Now, at night, it looked like the portal of a dark, gloomy palace. We walked to the end of the alley; it led to the stairway that went up to the sea. We climbed the stairs; I never let go of Marie’s hand. We could see the moon and stars in the sky. Her eyes were full of light. She looked out at the sea. Her face reflected a thought she would never reveal to me, maybe she had never expressed it at all. And for me there was a hateful correlation at that moment between that inaccessible thought and the equally hated and inaccessible sea.
She turned away. We went back down the steps in silence. After walking around some more, we finally landed at the pizzeria. How relieved I was to see the open fire! How it put the color back into her face!
IX
We’d already had quite a bit of rosé by the time the doctor came in. Marie hadn’t told me that she’d made an appointment to meet him at the pizzeria. I wanted to leave, but they both asked me to stay with such urgency that I felt they were glad not to be alone together. The doctor asked me as he always did, “How are things going with Marie’s visa? Do you think it will work out?”
As every other time, I said, “It will work out,” adding, “if you’ll only let me take care of it. Any meddling can ruin the soup.”
“The Paul Lemerle is probably going to sail this month. I’ve just been at the Transports Maritimes,” the doctor said.
“Listen, love,” Marie suddenly said in a light-hearted, clear voice—(she’d probably had three glasses of rosé by then) “if you knew for sure that I would never get a visa, would you leave on the Paul Lemerle?”
“Yes, my dear,” he said. He hadn’t yet touched his first glass of wine. “This time if I knew that, I would leave.”
“And leave me alone here?”
“Yes, Marie.”
“Even though you said that I’m your happiness, your great love?” Marie sounded a bit insistent now but quite cheerful.
“I always told you that there’s something more important for me than my happiness, than my great love.”
I was angry now. I said, “Please drink your wine. Have a few drinks to catch up with us so that you can talk sense!”
“No, on the contrary!” Marie said, still in the same cheerful, stubbornly insistent voice. “Don’t drink anything yet. First tell me exactly how many ships you’d allow to sail without you for my sake.”
“At most the Paul Lemerle. But don’t depend on that either. I’ll be thinking it over very carefully.”
Marie turned to me, “Did you hear that? If you really want to help me, you have to do it quickly.”
“You see?” said the doctor. “Marie has decided to leave now; it’s definite. Please help us, my friend. The Germans might occupy the Rhône estuary any day, and then the trap would snap shut.”
“That’s all nonsense,” I said. “That has nothing to do with your departure. What matters is what you think is the decisive factor for your departure. We’ll know after you’ve left what the real deciding factor was—whether it was fear, love, or loyalty to your profession. It will all be revealed in the decision you make. How else, after all? At least we’re still alive and ready to leave, not just ghosts flitting about.”
The doctor finally drank his glass of wine. Then as if Marie weren’t even there, he said, “You probably think that love between a man and woman is very important, don’t you?”
“Me? Not at all! I value less glittering, less glorious passions more highly. But unfortunately there’s something deadly serious mixed in with this fleeting thing called love. And it’s been bothering me for a long time that this most serious important thing in the world is so intertwined with something so ephemeral and trivial. What I mean is, an obligation not to abandon or betray each other. This is an integral part of that questionable, ephemeral, transitory affair. But it is not questionable or trivial, or transitory.”
Suddenly we both turned to look at Marie. She was listening with bated breath. Her eyes were wide. Her face was red from the open fire. I grabbed her a
rm.
“As you learned in your first year at school,” I said, “in your first Bible study class: The body does not last long; it passes away, but before it does it can be scorched. If the Nazi trap closes, if the city is bombed, then it can be mangled or torn to pieces, it can be burned—how do you doctors describe it? First-, second-, or third-degree burns.”
At that moment the big pizza the doctor had ordered arrived with more rosé. We drank it quickly. The doctor said, “In certain French circles they’re already expecting Gaullist uprisings this spring.”
I said, “I don’t understand any of that. I just think people who’ve experienced so much betrayal, who’ve been abandoned so often and spilled so much blood would have to recover first.”
“I don’t think that the young cook over there kneading the dough has any desire to die this spring.”
I said, “You don’t understand what I’m trying to say—that isn’t what I meant at all. Why must you insult the cook, you of all people. You do nothing night and day except worry about the best way to get out of here. His chance hasn’t come yet; his hour hasn’t struck yet.”
“Now that you’ve concluded your argument, you can let go of Marie’s arm,” the doctor said.
We finished drinking our wine. Marie said, “I have no bread coupons left for a second pizza.” So we got up. It was only after we stepped out of the firelight that I noticed how pale she was.
X
I met Marie in a small café on Place Jean Jaurès. We avoided meeting in the large cafés on the Canebière. She sat down silently facing me. For a long time we said nothing. Finally she said, “I was at the Mexican Consulate.”
I was shocked. “Why? Without asking me! Didn’t I tell you not to try anything on your own?”
She looked at me in surprise. Then she said softly, “My visa hasn’t arrived yet. The little official assured me it was just a matter of days, but the departure of the Paul Lemerle is also a matter of days. They’re now saying at the Martinique Line that the ship will be leaving sooner than scheduled because of a special government order. The little Mexican official was very polite, actually he was more than just polite. You probably know him too since you go there so often. He’s a strange little devil. At every other consulate they make you feel as if you’re nothing, a nobody. The consuls all talk as if they were talking to a nobody with a phantom dossier. At the Mexican Consulate it’s different. Have you noticed his eyes? You get the feeling that he knows everything in your file, the real truth. He looked at me and said he was sorry, very politely but with such impolite alert eyes. He said he was sorry that my husband hadn’t immediately applied for a visa for me under his name when he applied for his.”
I concealed my fear. I asked, “What did you say?”
“I told him that I wasn’t here yet at the time. Then he said, still courteous and always with the same look as if he was amused by my stupid lies, that I was probably mistaken since I was already here when his correct name was entered. He said there were of course all sorts of mix-ups in the dossier, all sorts of name changes, but he was used to those tricks. He laughed, not just with his eyes—he laughed out loud, baring his teeth. I didn’t say anything. I don’t know what papers my husband presented there. I shouldn’t screw up his stuff. The official turned serious then and said that it wasn’t his business after all, but he regretted the delay. He had always thought it his duty to minimize people’s unhappiness by any official measures at his disposal.—But never mind the official. In the end I don’t care what he thinks, even if he’s right. My husband didn’t apply for a visa for me because they told him that I was going to leave with another man. You understand?”
“But you will get your visa. I promise you.”
She didn’t say anything. She looked out at the rain. Suddenly I felt that I had to tell her everything, the whole truth, no matter what the outcome, for her or for me. There was a terrible silence of many seconds during which I tried to find the right words to begin, tried so hard that beads of sweat formed on my forehead.
She smiled slightly and moved close to me, put her hand into mine, and leaned her head against my shoulder. I stopped hunting for the right words with which to tell her the truth. I began to think that it would be much better to win her over to my side, body and soul, before she heard the truth. I said, “Look at that woman sitting over there with the pile of oyster shells. I run into her almost every day. She was refused a visa. Now she’s eating up all her travel funds.”
We laughed and watched her. I knew many of the people passing by outside in the rain or coming into our little café, wet and cold, looking for a place to sit down. I told Marie their stories and realized she enjoyed listening. I went on telling her stories so that the smile wouldn’t vanish from her face and to keep the dark expression of sadness from coming back. That’s what I feared most.
During the week that followed the doctor often asked me whether her visa had arrived as the Transports Maritimes had finally set a definite departure date. But I didn’t go back to the Mexican Consulate. For the second time I had decided to let him leave without Marie.
7
I
I SAW THE doctor again at the Binnet apartment on January 2nd. He hadn’t come to examine the boy, who for the time being was well and already back at school. He’d come to bring him a present. The boy didn’t unwrap it. He just stood there, leaning against the wall, eyes downcast, teeth clenched. The doctor tried to stroke the boy’s head, but he pulled away, and shook the doctor’s hand only reluctantly.
As he was leaving, the doctor invited me to meet him at the pizzeria the following evening to celebrate his departure. I realized then that he really was leaving; that I would be left alone with Marie. I felt anxious, the way you do when a dream seems too real and at the same time something intangible, imperceptible, tells you that whatever makes you feel happy or sad can never be reality.
In that calm voice, habitually hushed for the sickroom, and with a serenely sober look he said, “Please, I beg you, do everything you can and as soon as possible so that Marie can leave, perhaps via Lisbon.”
I was utterly dismayed.
“Help her get a transit visa, the way you helped her get the other visas. And above all, put an end to her indecision.” On the threshold he turned and said casually over his shoulder, “In the end, Marie will never make a definite decision to stay. She thinks that her husband has already left and is in the New World by now.”
For a while I stood there in Claudine’s kitchen, stunned. Then suddenly I felt unreasonably jealous of the doctor, even more so than the day I first brought him to the Binnets’ apartment. It was stupid of me. What was it I envied him for? He was leaving after all. Was it his strength? His essential character? I even thought for a moment that he knew more than he was telling me or maybe he was just better at keeping things to himself. In my confusion, my foolishness, I even felt there was a secret understanding between him and the dead man, and that both were silently laughing at me. I was roused from these ridiculous thoughts by a slight noise coming from the bedroom. The boy had thrown himself on the bed and was crying, his body racked with sobs. When I bent down, he kicked at me. I tried to console him, but he shouted, “You can all go to hell!”
I stood there, helpless, watching him cry; I’d never before seen anyone weep like that. The boy felt betrayed and deserted. His grief was real. I picked up the present and unwrapped it. It was a book and I held it out to him. He jumped up, took the book from me, threw it on the floor, and stomped on it. I didn’t know how to comfort him. George Binnet came into the room just then. He picked up the book, and sat down. He began to leaf through the book as if he were more interested in it than in the boy. The boy got up and stood behind George, staring at the book; his face was swollen from crying. Suddenly he tore it out of George’s hands and threw himself together with the book onto the bed. Holding it pressed to his chest he quickly fell asleep.
“What happened?” George asked.
&nbs
p; “The doctor was here; it was his last visit. He’s leaving shortly.”
George said nothing. He lit a cigarette. I envied him, too, for being so uninvolved, for being at home.
II
I was the first to get to the pizzeria and had already drunk half a bottle of rosé by the time the others arrived. Initially the good-bye went better than I expected. All three of us were probably a little apprehensive. Presumably this was the last time I’d be able to spend some quiet hours with the two of them. And, of course, I thought it was their last evening together. I saw things clearly now, as if the impending good-bye had opened my eyes. I even understood now why Marie had followed the doctor this far; how he had always remained constant, steadfast and calm, even as he drove his shabby little car across the country, just ahead of the Germans. I couldn’t help but wonder why Marie had not yielded to his calm after so much moving about, so much turmoil. That evening I also realized to what extent he had seen to every aspect of his departure—he had obtained his visa and the necessary transit visas, and he had already steeled himself against any emotions that might in any way interfere with his departure. I looked at him now with increased respect. Yes, he was ready and able to leave.
Marie was carrying it off well too. She took a bite of pizza and drank a little wine. She didn’t betray any emotion. I couldn’t tell whether she was sorry he was leaving or if it was a relief. The doctor again urged me to work on Marie’s departure and help her in any way possible. He seemed confident of being reunited with her. Apparently he considered my feelings about all this irrelevant.
We left early and crossed the Cours Belsunce. A fair had been set up, but dusk was late and the many colored lanterns weren’t showing to best effect. The doctor asked me to come up to his room to help close an overstuffed suitcase. I hadn’t been back to the Hotel Aumage since the Binnets sent me to find a doctor for the boy. At that time I’d paid hardly any attention to the building on the Rue du Relais. While its façade was narrow and dirty, the hotel itself was surprisingly large with an enormous number of rooms, all opening off narrow corridors that led to a steep staircase. On the ground floor to one side stood a small stove, its stovepipe winding up to the third floor. It gave off a bit of heat. There was a large basin of water on top of the stove and some smaller vessels in the twists of the stovepipe. Several of the hotel guests were sitting around the stove using it to dry their laundry. They looked up curiously when we came in—all of them transients, for who would choose a place like this to stay permanently? It was the sort of place you could put up with only if you knew you’d be leaving soon. It occurred to me that it wasn’t a bad place for the doctor to have hidden Marie. The Rue du Relais was a short ugly street, the only one behind the Cours Belsunce that didn’t cross through to the Boulevard d’Athènes, but ended at the next cross street.