Transit

by Anna Seghers

  VI

  I went to the Rue de la République. Transports Maritimes was already open. I stepped up to the counter and asked whether there was still time for me to return my ticket. The clerk gaped at me open-mouthed. Even though I’d whispered my question, and even before he’d fully comprehended what I was saying, the rumor spread among the people waiting in the room that a ticket had been returned. In fact, the rumor must have spread lightning fast, even into the city. For suddenly they were storming the doors, my ribs were almost crushed against the edge of the counter. The weakest, frailest people turned wild and belligerent in a last, insane hope of getting this returned ticket for themselves. But the clerk just raised his hands, cursing, and the rumor died down; the crowd shrank back, and he hid my ticket in a small side drawer behind the counter. I realized that it was intended for someone who’d asked to be put down for the first available ticket, someone who had already paid for this reservation, someone who had paid the kind of money these people could never pay. This was a person who’d never stand in line for a ticket, but who would just place a hold on it, a person who had power. The official frowned as he locked the little drawer. He compressed his lips in a slight smile like a man who wasn’t losing anything in this little deal.

  VII

  I couldn’t sleep at all that night. On the other side of the wall I could hear the young husband’s last affectionate words to the beloved wife he was leaving behind with a child he might never see. He was sailing the next day.

  It was still dark when I heard on the stairs the excited voices of the old couple who were going to Colombia to join their long-lost son. I got dressed and went downstairs. The Source was just opening, and I was their first customer. I swallowed a cup of bitter coffee. Then I walked down the Cours Belsunce. The nets were stretched out to dry. A couple of women mending them looked quite lost in the huge square. I had never seen them doing this before. I’m sure that I haven’t seen most of the really important things that happen in this city. To see the things that matter, you have to feel that you want to stay. Cities shroud themselves from those who’re just passing through. I picked my way carefully among the nets. The first stores were just opening, and the first newspaper boys were yelling the headlines.

  The newspaper boys, the fishermen’s wives on the Belsunce, the shopkeepers opening their stores, the workers going to work the early shift—they were all part of the masses who would never leave no matter what happened. The thought of leaving this place was as unlikely to occur to them as to a tree or a clump of grass. And if the thought ever did occur to them, there’d be no tickets available for them. Wars, conflagrations, and the fury of the powerful had passed over them. No matter how enormous the throngs of refugees the armies drove before them, their numbers were negligible compared to the masses who stayed behind despite everything. And what would have happened to me in all the cities I passed through as I was fleeing if these people hadn’t remained behind? They were father and mother to me, the orphan. They were brothers and sisters to me who had no brothers or sisters.

  A young fellow was helping his girlfriend fasten back a heavy door. Then, with incredible quickness and efficiency, he helped her set up a little cast-iron stove on which she baked pizzas. And already people were lining up to buy her pizza. Three exhausted streetwalkers came out of the house next door where the red light was still on. They were followed by a bus driver and a couple of businessmen. Even though she wasn’t pretty, I thought the pizza maker was one of the most beautiful of women. She was like the women in those old fairy tales who remain forever young. She had always baked her pizza on that ancient little stove on this hill by the sea, in days when other peoples now long forgotten came by here, and she’ll go on baking pizza for others yet to come.

  My desire to see Marie just once more was stronger than my willpower. I went to the Mont Vertoux to say good-bye. Marie was sitting at the same table where she’d sat when she came there the first time. She looked so happy that I had to smile. Someone watching us might have thought the white paper she was waving around had something to do with our future together. But actually it was her travel permit stamped with all the stamps required for her departure.

  “I’m sailing in two hours,” she said. A rush of joy swept through her hair and lifted her chest and her face. “Unfortunately you’re not allowed to see me off from the pier, but we can say good-bye right here and now.”

  I hadn’t sat down yet, and she now got up and put her hands on my shoulders. I felt nothing but a presentiment of the pain that would surely hit me shortly, maybe even fatally.

  She said, “You’ve been so kind to me!” She kissed me quickly on both cheeks, as they do in this country. I took her head in my hands and kissed her.

  Just then the doctor arrived at our table. He said, “Ah, you must be saying your good-byes?”

  “Yes,” Marie said. “We wanted to have a last drink together.”

  He said, “Too bad, but there’s no time left for that. You have to go to the Transports Maritimes immediately. You have to sign the baggage insurance papers. Unless you’d prefer to stay here... “

  He seemed to be quite sure of everything now. Too much so, it seemed to me. We both looked at Marie. She was no longer beaming. She said, and there was a slight, almost imperceptible tone of mockery in her voice, “I’ve already promised once before to follow you to the ends of the earth.”

  “Then hurry over to the Transports Maritimes and sign the papers!”

  She shook my hand and left, finally, forever. I thought what you think when you’ve been shot or struck, that at any moment I’d be feeling an unbearable pain. But there was no pain at all. I kept hearing the sound of her last words, “...to the ends of the earth.”—I shut my eyes. I saw a green fence with slender, wilted vines. I couldn’t look over the fence; I could only see, between the fence slats, autumn clouds scudding across the sky; I must have been quite small still and thinking then that this must be the end of the earth.

  The doctor said, “I should thank you for everything—you helped us.”

  I said, “It was probably just a coincidence.”

  He didn’t turn away immediately. He gave me a sharp look, seemed to be waiting, maybe he had seen something in my expression to make him think I would say more. But I said nothing, so that in the end he just bowed briefly and walked away.

  At last I sat down all by myself at the table. I was amused by that polite, brief, formal bow of his that put such a sudden end to everything. It was a sad kind of amusement, for suddenly, I don’t know why just at that point, I was hit by grief for Weidel, for the dead man I’d never known while he was alive. We were left behind, he and I. And there was no one here to mourn him in this country shaken by war and betrayal, no one to render him at least some of what we call the last rites, to honor him. No one except me, who had fought over the dead man’s wife with the other man in the hotel in the Old Port.

  The Mont Vertoux was crowded. I overheard conversations in many languages about ships that would never leave, ships that had arrived at their destinations, and others that had run aground, been sunk or seized. Stories of people who wanted to serve with the English or join up with de Gaulle, of those who were forced back into camps, maybe for many years of imprisonment, of mothers who had lost children in the war, of men who had driven off leaving their wives behind. The ancient, yet ever new harbor gossip—Phoenician and Greek, Cretan and Jewish, Etruscan and Roman.

  For the first time back then, I thought about everything seriously. The past and the future, both equally unknowable, and also this ongoing situation that the consulates call “transitory” but that we know in everyday language as “the present.” And the conclusion I came to—it was only a hunch at that point, if a hunch deserves being called a conclusion—was of my own inviolability.

  VIII

  I got up from my table. I was tired, and my knees felt like lead as I walked back to the Rue de La Providence. I stretched out on my bed and lit a cigarette. Then I
started feeling restless and went back into town. People around me were talking incessantly about the Montreal, which was sailing today, probably the last ship to leave. But in the early afternoon, all the talk suddenly stopped. The Montreal had probably put out to sea. Now all the talk was about the next ship that in turn would be the last to leave.

  I went back to the Mont Vertoux and, from force of habit, sat down facing the door. My heart continued to wait, as if it had not yet grasped the emptiness that lay ahead from now on. It was still waiting—Marie might come back. Not the one I had known at the end who was tied to a dead man and only to him, but the Marie I had met that first time when the Mistral blew her to me threatening my young life with a sudden, incomprehensible joy.

  Someone touched my shoulder; it was Achselroth’s friend, the fat musician, with whom he had once gotten as far as Cuba. He said, “He’s deserted me too now.”

  “Who?”

  “Achselroth! I was stupid enough to complete the score for his play. Now he doesn’t need me anymore. But I’d never have dreamed that he’d do the same thing to me, just slip away. I was very close to him, you know. Even when we were children, there was something about him, I don’t know, he had some kind of power over me.” He sat down, put his head in his hands, brooding. He came to himself only when the waiter placed the drink he’d ordered at his elbow.

  “You ask how it happened? He probably has a lot of money. He probably spread it around at all the shipping companies in Marseille; he bribed a whole lot of officials and office staff; he collected a complete series of visas and letters of transit. That’s what you call foresight. And he gave me his firm promise to take me along! But now that I think of it, he also once said that one ought to be careful about traveling with the same companion on two trips, especially if a previous trip went as badly as ours had. Someone probably returned a ticket at the Martinique Line, and he got it. He’s sailing on the Montreal.”

  I couldn’t manage to act as surprised as I had every right to be. I just said the first thing that came to mind, “Why despair over it? You’re rid of him. You said yourself that he had some power over you even as a child. Now you’re rid of all that.”

  “But what’s going to become of me now? The Germans might occupy the Rhône Estuary tomorrow. And I won’t be able to leave till three months from now at the earliest. I might be dead by then, deported, taken to a concentration camp, a little pile of ashes in a bombed-out city.”

  I tried to console him. “That could happen to any one of us. You’re not alone.” Simple-minded though these reassurances were, he perked up, looked around the room.

  I think that was the first time he really looked at the things around him back then. For the first time he realized that we weren’t the only ones involved in this; for the first time he heard the ancient chorus of voices giving advice, filling our ears with gossip, scolding and cursing us, making fun of us, teaching us, and consoling us all the way to our graves. But mostly they were consoling and reassuring us. For the first time, too, he saw the water and the lights on the docks, which were weaker just then than the setting sun reflected in the windows. He saw for the first time all these things that would never desert him, never let him down. He took a deep breath, heaved a sigh of relief.

  “Achselroth may have been in a special hurry because he found out that the young woman he’d recently seen and taken a liking to from afar, would be on board the Montreal. She’s Weidel’s wife. Weidel, you know, isn’t sailing with her.”

  I composed myself before answering. “Another one who’s not sailing! But how do you know all this?”

  “People know,” he said casually. “Even though he has a visa, he’s not leaving. There’s something special about a man like that, don’t you think? To have a visa and not use it to get away. But you’re not like him. Weidel always did unexpected things. Maybe he’s not leaving because his wife deserted him. She was seen with another man recently. So he’s not leaving because everyone let him down, his friends, his wife, time itself. Because you know he’s not the sort of man who’ll fight things like that. He doesn’t think it’s worth it. He fought for better causes.”

  I suppressed a smile. “What was it he fought for?”

  “For every sentence, every word of his mother tongue, so that his short, sometimes slightly crazy stories would be so clear and elegant that everyone would enjoy them—child or adult. Can you imagine doing something like that for your people and your country? Even if he was at times separated from his people, defeated by this war, that’s not his fault. He withdraws with his stories, which can wait like him, ten years, a hundred years—By the way, I saw him just now.”

  “Where?”

  “He was sitting back there by the window that looks out on the Quai des Belges. I’m exaggerating of course when I say I saw him. I saw the newspaper behind which he was hiding.” At one point he stood up halfway, leaning to one side. “He’s not here anymore. Maybe now that his wife’s gone, he’ll come out into the open and allow people to see him.”

  To hide my uneasiness, I asked the first question that came to mind. “Has Paul left already? He must be a pretty resourceful fellow with influence in the right places.”

  He laughed. “Evidently he doesn’t have enough influence to get his own file in order. He has the visas and transits; they probably issued them on the basis of his “Enforced Stay in Marseille” certificate. But unfortunately they won’t give him the harbor office stamp because they don’t give that to anyone who’s ever been expelled from Marseille. And it’s precisely that little piece of paper on which the expulsion order is printed that gets stamped by the Harbor Commission. Paul will never be able to leave legally—and yet he can’t stay legally either.”

  IX

  The following morning I went up to the Binnets. I hadn’t been there for some time. In my confused state of mind I hadn’t felt like visiting them. The boy sat facing the window, doing homework. When he heard my voice he turned around and stared at me wide-eyed. Suddenly he came over and threw himself on me. He was crying, unable to stop. I stroked his head. I was touched, didn’t know what to make of his tears.

  Claudine said, “He thought you’d left.”

  The boy finally freed himself and said a little sheepishly but smiling, “I thought you were all leaving.”

  “How can you think such a thing? Didn’t I promise you I’d stay?” To reassure him I asked if he’d like to go for a walk with me. In a unique peacefulness, we walked along on the sunny side of the Canebière, finally reaching the Triads. From our table there I could look out and see the gate of the Mexican Consulate. As usual crowds of Spanish men and women were waiting under the watchful eyes of some police officers. I asked for pen and ink and wrote, “Mr. Weidel has asked me to return his visa, his letter of transit, his exit visa, and the money he borrowed for the trip. I am also enclosing his manuscript, with the request that you pass it along to his friends who, I’m sure, will take care of it. It isn’t finished for the same reason that Mr. Weidel is not able to leave.”

  I packed all the documents together and asked the Binnet boy to go across the street and give everything to the consular official in person. He was to say that a man he didn’t know had asked him to deliver it. I watched him as he walked across the square and got in line with the Spaniards. He came out of the building again about half an hour later. I was glad to see him walking back between the trees. Eagerly I called out to him, “What did he say?”

  “First he laughed. Then he said, ‘It was to be expected.’”

  I felt slightly uneasy hearing him say this. It seemed as if the little official with the alert eyes had read my entire story in this book of life as soon as he looked at my file on my first visit to the consulate.

  George Binnet came to the door when I brought his son back, saying, “I’m supposed to give you a message from my friend François.”

  I said, “I don’t know any François.”

  “Of course you know him. He said you once ca
me to his seamen’s association with a short Portuguese man. He helped a German friend of yours, a one-legged man. He sends you regards and wants you to know that the man arrived safely. And that the man thanks you, and he says that he is very happy to be over there now. He says the people over there are people from other countries, new faces, young faces. He’s glad for the chance to see it all. He says for you to wait for him here.”

  George stirred his shaving soap until it was foamy and went on, “It’s right that you should stay. What would you do over there? You belong here with us. What happens to us, will happen to you.”

  I said, “He wanted me to know all that?”

  “Oh no. This is what I’m telling you. We know you. We would all tell you the same thing: All of us feel that way.”

  X

  Barely a day had passed since the ship had sailed, when I got a letter from Marcel saying that I could come to the farm now. They were actually looking forward to seeing me there, because the spring farm work had begun. I reassured the boy by telling him that my going to work there didn’t mean we’d be separated; that I was close enough to Marseille so that he could easily come to visit me anytime.

  I’m not crazy for farm work; I’m a born and bred city boy. But Marcel’s relatives are as honest as their relatives in Paris. The work isn’t bad. The village is on a spur of a range of hills, not far from the sea. I’ve been there now for a couple of weeks. But the silence weighs so heavily on me that it seems like years. I wrote a letter to Yvonne in which I asked her again for a safe conduct, because the law still requires you to get permission to change your place of residence.

  I went to the mayor of the village with all my impeccable new documents. I told him I had fled from the Saar, had spent the winter in another département, and had now come to work at a farm near the sea. From what I told him, he assumed I was a distant relative of the Binnets. And so, for the time being, this family and this country are sheltering me. I help them with sowing and removing caterpillars. If the Nazis overrun this part of France too, then maybe they’ll let me do forced labor together with the sons of the family, or deport us somewhere. Whatever happens to them will happen to me as well. In any case, there’s no way the Nazis would ever recognize me as a countryman of theirs. I intend to share the good and the bad with my new friends here, be it sanctuary or persecution. As soon as there’s a resistance movement Marcel and I intend to take up arms. Even if they were to shoot me, they’d never be able to eradicate me. I feel I know this country, its work, its people, its hills and mountains, its peaches and its grapes too well. If you bleed to death on familiar soil, something of you will continue to grow like the sprouts that come up after bushes and trees have been cut down.