by Anna Seghers
“I have no doubt of that. I’ve been working on the preparations for this trip for quite a long time. At some point my documents will all be ready. And then there’ll also be a ship I can take. I’ll find one. Except that suddenly I can’t remember anymore why I was so obsessed with leaving. Was it because I was afraid? But I’m a pretty strong character and in general not afraid of anything. So someone must have hammered this fear into me. But now the contagion has subsided, and the fear is gone. I’m sick and tired of all this nonsense; I was already fed up with it the last time we met. I’ve finally had enough of it.”
“You know as well as I do that they’ll never let you stay here in peace.”
“If I have to leave France, then I want to take a different journey. First thing tomorrow morning I plan to go on a rather modest trip. I’m taking the electric train to Aix. The German Commission has its headquarters there. I’ll register with them, tell them that I’d like to go back to my hometown. I want to go back to the place where I was born.”
“Of your own free will? You know, don’t you, what’s waiting for you there.”
“And here? What can I expect here? You know the fairy tale about the man who died, don’t you? He was waiting in Eternity to find out what the Lord had decided to do with him. He waited and waited, for one year, ten years, a hundred years. He begged and pleaded for a decision. Finally he couldn’t bear the waiting any longer. Then they said to him: ‘What do you think you’re waiting for? You’ve been in Hell for a long time already.’ That’s what it’s been like for me here, a stupid waiting for nothing. What could be more hellish? War? The war’s going to follow us across the ocean too. I’ve had enough of it. All I want is to go home.”
III
I went to the Spanish Consulate. I took my place in the line of transit applicants. It was a long line that stretched for a block along the sidewalk up to the gate. In front of me and behind me they were telling stories about Spanish transit visas which eventually arrived but so close to the date of the ship’s departure from Lisbon that it would have been impossible to get there in time to board the ship. Nevertheless, I waited patiently, the way you wait when you’re waiting for the sake of waiting, and when what you’re waiting for is unimportant. I must have been pretty deep in the Hell that my friend had been describing at the Café St. Ferréol, if it didn’t even seem bad to me anymore compared to all that I’d already experienced and all that still lay ahead of me—it was bearable and cool, with storytellers all around me.
And so, after a couple of hours, I finally reached the outer gate of the Spanish Consulate; behind me the line snaked into the street. In the meantime a cold rain had started to fall on the people in line. After another couple of hours I reached the front hall of the consulate. I don’t know what mysterious order reigned here, but I was brought before a gaunt, thin-lipped official with a long sallow face. He questioned me with grave courtesy as if there were no long line waiting behind me reaching to the next street corner, which he’d probably never seen anyway because he was always inside and the human queue always outside. Holding my documents, he pored through a ledger seemingly searching for the name Weidel. Why should this poor forgotten name that might at most be spoken by his mother, if she’s still alive, appear in that book? But it was listed. A dour smile contorted the official’s thin lips. Politely he told me that it was futile for me to apply for a transit permit; I would never be allowed to travel through Spain. I asked him why. He said that I must know the reason better than anyone else.
I replied, “I have never been in your country.”
He said, “You can hurt a country without ever having stepped on its soil.” He was very serious and proud of being able to refuse me a transit visa. He’d tasted a bit of power with his tongue—which I got to see since he lisped—and had liked the taste of it. But something in my face must have displeased him. Maybe it was my expression of joy that surprised him and spoiled the taste of power. So Weidel isn’t just dust, I thought, not just ashes, not just a faint memory of some intricate story that I’d find hard to retell, like the stories I was told at bedtime as a child just before I fell asleep and was only half awake. Something is left of him that’s alive enough and arouses enough fear for them to close their borders to him, thereby closing off access to other countries as well. The culprits were probably those same articles that the American consul showed me on my first visit to his consulate. I would have loved to read them. Maybe by now they’re already ashes too, but not forgiven in Spain. Yet they’ve given their creator the right to live in another country. I imagined a ghostly march by night through a country that Weidel had never set foot in while he was alive. And wherever he passed, shadows moved in the fields, in the villages, and on the pavement of streets he’d never seen. Corpses stirred a little in their poorly prepared graves as he passed by because he had done at least this much for them: writing only a few lines, but obsessed with the need of doing something, of intervening, much as for me it had been just one punch in the face of some SA boor. So there was some similarity between us, at least in this one respect in our otherwise rather humdrum lives—this stubborn need to take action, to intervene. The Spanish consular official was staring at me with his somewhat protruding eyes. I thanked him cheerfully as if he actually had signed my transit visa.
IV
I sat down in the Mont Vertoux to think things over. I hadn’t eaten anything, nor did I have enough money left to buy a meal. I had a glass of wine instead. So it seemed the route through Spain had been denied us three: the dead man, the doctor, and me. We were destined to take another little boat, probably that decrepit crate the Transports Maritimes dispatched to Martinique every month. The doctor had seen it lying at anchor once through the gates of the pier. What was it he’d told me before that first unsuccessful departure of his? That Marie had now decided to leave. He probably thought he’d won the game now, but hadn’t Marie also decided to leave back then when he raced with her in his car across the Loire over a half-destroyed bridge? He hadn’t taken me into account, he couldn’t have since I didn’t exist back then. Nonetheless, I’d caught up with them, arriving out of nowhere at the right spot.
The Mont Vertoux was beginning to fill up. Flecks of bright sunshine dappled my hands. I began, mentally, to put the earthly legacy of my dead man in order. There was our joint treasure in Portugal. The Corsican had to help us get at it. We needed money for travel, and for the security payment the French demanded to make sure that we didn’t get stuck in—what did they call it?—the Eastern Hemisphere. A bright lofty word that suited the dead man better than it did me with my strong fingers and those broad fingernails that always annoyed me. I called to the waiter and asked him for an atlas. He brought me a greasy, tattered travel guide that contained a world map. I looked for Martinique, which I’d been too lazy to do up to now. And there it was! A little dot between the two hemispheres which weren’t some prefecture’s trick, nor a consular invention, but real, from eternity to eternity.
I felt someone touch my shoulder. By then I’d lost track of how much I’d drunk. I looked up to see my neighbor from the hotel, his chest gleaming with medals. I don’t know why we were always running into each other when I’d had a lot to drink. The short, stocky legionnaire always seemed to appear before me in a fog of glittering medals. He asked if he could sit with me. I said I’d be happy to have his company.
“How’s Nadine?” he asked.
“Nadine?”
“It’s as if she’s bewitched. I go looking for her everywhere. I walk up and down the streets at night, I check out all the cafés.”
“All you have to do is stand at the employee exit of Dames de Paris at six in the evening.”
“Me? Never! I’d never have the nerve to do that. It has to look as if I’m running into her accidentally at some odd moment. But is something wrong? You can tell me. I feel there’s something bothering you.”
I did then what I always do when someone asks me an awkward question. I asked
him one in turn: “You owe me your story,” I said. “How did you get all those things dangling on your chest?”
He said, “By preventing a couple of dozen young fellows who were in circumstances similar to yours from going to the dogs.”
I laughed and asked him whether this was a habit of his and whether that’s what had made him sit down at my table.
“Probably,” he said, quite serious. Then, of his own accord, he started to tell his story, because he needed to. “When the war started I was still living in a village in the Var. The locals were tolerant of outsiders and maybe I could have gone on living there without problems till today. But my father lived in the Garonne Département, and there they were interning all foreigners under sixty. They said they would release my father only if I, his son, joined the army. I thought it over and decided it was my duty to enlist. Back then, like most people, I believed in a real war against Hitler. They gave me a checkup and found that I was in good health. I’d known that all along, but my physical condition was so exceptional that I was one of those “select” men who fulfilled the requirements for the Foreign Legion. So they sent me off to the Foreign Legion training camp. I was surprised, but thought it was all part of the war. And meanwhile they released my father from the internment camp...What’s the matter?”
Marie was just walking past outside. She wore a strange gray coat that I’d never seen on her before. I thought she’d already vanished into the crowd, when she entered the Mont Vertoux. She wasn’t searching as usual, but sat down quietly in a corner of the café, staring straight ahead of her. She’d obviously come in for a quiet moment by herself. I was happy she was there, even if she wasn’t looking for me, glad she was alive, still alive.
“Nothing’s the matter with me—anymore,” I said. “Please go on with your story.”
“They sent us to Marseille. They sent us up there.” He pointed to Fort St. Jean on the other side of the Old Harbor. “It’s cold inside the fort, it stinks, and filthy water drips down the walls which are covered with the slogan ‘March or Die’; that’s the unofficial motto of the legion. Every morning they marched us down to the sea. There’s a small cove behind the fort, and it’s strewn with lots of boulders. We had to roll these boulders up a steep set of stairs that had been carved into the hillside. Once we reached the top, we had to throw the boulders back into the sea. This was our special training. It was supposed to accustom us to obedience. Am I boring you?”
I took hold of his hand to assure him that he was in no way boring me. And as he continued, I watched Marie’s face, so still in the evening light. She could have been sitting by that window for a thousand years already, going back to the days of the Cretans and Phoenicians, a young woman looking in vain for her lover among the masses of people. The thousand years had passed like one day. Now the sun was setting.
“One day we sailed to Africa. They jammed us into the hold of a ship. That ship had been carrying legionnaires to Africa for I don’t know how many decades, how many thousands of years. The accumulated filth of generations of legionnaires, never scrubbed out! We arrived at another training camp. It was even tougher. The harangues of our superior officers were full of mysterious references, of threats implying that the best was still to come. We were sent to Sidi-bel-Abbès. The noncoms were old legionnaires. All of them had run away at some time from their homelands because they’d killed somebody, set a house on fire, or been caught stealing.”
I could sense that it was important for him to tell the whole story from the beginning. Meanwhile I thought about how I could get on the ship on which Marie would soon be sailing. I’d been waiting for the moment when she would stop searching; and now it had arrived. Today, in the seventeenth month after her flight from Paris, the fifteenth month since her arrival in Marseille. I could give the exact figures to the dead man. I could calculate it all. And she’d been searching for me, for me or for both of us. Yet the way she broke off her search was quite different from what I’d expected. It wasn’t precipitous, no wild ‘if you’re going to do it then do it properly.’ It was a calm decision to accept what chance had wrought. But chance itself seemed surprised to find her sitting there with lowered head and downcast eyes, in a state of resignation that chance had never come across before and which was only due to the fact that chance looked a devilish lot like something else.
I heard my companion’s voice, and I wasn’t sure whether he’d been talking all this time or not.
“The officers were French. Many of them had gotten into trouble while serving in Europe. We were the only ones who were there because of the war, because we wanted to defeat Hitler. But nobody believed us. And if they’d believed us, they would have hated us even more. They’d gone through the same stiff training that we were going through, and for that reason they wanted to make sure that this should go on forever into Eternity; they didn’t want it to stop suddenly or get any better.
“Then came the day we marched into the desert. Before we left I got a letter from my father telling me that he was about to sail for Brazil and asking that I follow him there as soon as possible. I cursed my father, something I’ll regret the rest of my life.”
I was careful not to do anything that might interrupt his narrative, listening without moving to reassure him of my interest; yet my eyes never left Marie. I knew that, at this very moment and at this table, my friend was about to bring this past life of his to a close. For what has been told is finished. Only after he’s told someone about his journey, will he have crossed that desert once and for all.
“We arrived at Fort St. Paul. It’s in an oasis with palm trees and wells. There were cool, stone houses. French legionnaires were sitting around in the shade, playing cards and drinking. We were hoping for better days. But these French legionnaires despised us; they’d been told we were a gang of lowlifes who’d accept all sorts of humiliations just to earn a few sous. They led us out of town into the desert. We could see the lights of the town from there. They made us pour gravel into the sand for our camp so that the ground wouldn’t be too soft, so that we wouldn’t get too soft.”
Marie was sitting motionless, silhouetted against the harbor. I felt our cursed belonging together so profoundly that it burned.
My neighbor continued, “They marched us farther out, way out into the desert, toward a small fort not far from the Italian border. Everything was yellow—we, the earth, the sky. The officers rode while we went on foot, the noncoms too. The officers despised us because they were riding and we were walking; the noncoms hated us because they were walking and we were walking. I don’t remember how long we marched through that desert. It seemed like forty years, like in the Bible.
“We were still a week’s march away from our destination. They said we were going there to relieve the garrison. Then the Italian planes came. We were two regiments, alone between heaven and earth. The planes swooped down. They might just as well have been hurtling down on a single ship on the high seas. We dug ourselves into the sand, and every time the firing let up we’d move on. And again and again new swarms of these birds of death would swoop down from the sky. At that point the men despaired. They lay down in the sand, and they just stayed there, waiting for death. Our water was running out. Please forgive me. Perhaps you’ve experienced similar marches? I’m just telling you all this in answer to your question about how I got these things dangling on my chest.
“Up to that point I’d had no chance to prove my courage. Dragging boulders up a hillside, crossing the sea in a ship full of vomit that hadn’t been washed for centuries, sleeping in a porridge of squashed bedbugs, jumping off a four-yard-high wall into a ditch filled with broken glass and rocks when your only alternatives are to die jumping or being stood against the wall for refusing to obey orders—that’s no proof of courage, although it may be proof of endurance. But now, in the desert, I swear I wasn’t even aware that I was being brave. I was just trying to talk my fellow legionnaires into showing a little courage. Especially the younger ones. I co
nvinced them that this had nothing to do with the Foreign Legion, that there was a law that applied to all men, namely, that you had to behave decently until the moment of your death. And this notion or delusion got all mixed up with a promise of water and of our eventual arrival at our destination. And for a few minutes, they believed me. They pulled themselves together, got up out of the sand and trotted on for another hour. I told them I was there with them and had to endure everything along with them, as if it was in any way reassuring for them to know that I was enduring it too.
“Around that time the captain occasionally began to take me aside, to discuss how long it might still take, what one could expect, how the last of the water should be parceled out and when and where. And all the time there were those planes, again and again they would come, at shorter and shorter intervals. Diving down, and firing at us. Several of my boys died in those raids, boys to whom I’d just been swearing by all that was holy that we’d soon be at our destination. Now and then, I’d shoulder a pack for one of them. I swear to you, it never once occurred to me that any of this had anything to do with bravery.
“Much later I found out that we were the only outfit to arrive at its destination in any kind of decent shape. The captain claimed I’d had a lot to do with it. Later, at the fort, I was awarded the Ordre de la Nation. The guards had to stand at attention before me. They pinned the medal on me. The Captain kissed me in front of the company. The strange thing about this whole business is that I enjoyed it. What was even stranger is that everyone suddenly respected me. I swear, I didn’t care that the respect was for me. But suddenly there was respect again. Respect for something. It didn’t matter whether it was for me or what sort of medal I was awarded or which country’s medal it was. The strangest thing about this story is that I began to like them all, and they liked me. I suddenly began to love them, body and soul, all these cruel, horrible, shifty men, all these vile, wicked bastards. With all my heart; I loved them and they loved me. I’ve never found saying good-bye so hard as when I left them.”