by Bruno Arpaia
‘They sure planned this one well,’ muttered Mariano.
‘Why?’ I asked as they herded us onto trucks.
‘Make us arrive dead tired in the middle of the night. Now they’re going to separate us and we won’t even be able to protest.’
As always he was right. The truck headed up a secondary road and travelled two hours on over the bumps until we arrived at an isolated farm in the middle of a field. There was a barn with a little bit of straw spread on the ground.
‘Get out here,’ they said. ‘This is a war zone. From now on there will be no smoking or building fires.’
Mariano elbowed me awake at dawn. The wind was scratching at the wall like a file. It was a dull relentless sound.
‘Come with me,’ he said.
Under that filthy barely lit sky, I saw an immense courtyard, barbed wire all around it, and a sentinel posted at every twenty metres. Mariano stared at the grim scene, his jaw clenched. He was in a chilly rage.
‘You see?’ he said. ‘We’re prisoners. And there are only a hundred of us here. Now the rebels of Septfonds are scattered all over France.’
I didn’t answer.What was there to say? I looked at the other men who were straggling into the courtyard. They were dressed in dark grey uniforms, disorderly, gesturing and talking loudly. This time I elbowed Mariano.
‘Spaniards,’ I said quickly. ‘These other guys are Spanish, too.’
‘Bullshit,’ he answered.
But it was true. Actually, it seemed . . . I looked and then looked harder. Who did I see, but Alfonso, the Italian. Yes! It was really him. I was so happy I didn’t hear myself.
‘It’s Alfonso,’ I said. Or maybe I yelled.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ Mariano said.
‘Maybe,’ I answered and called over to our friend, waving broadly and shouting. Alfonso finally saw me. He stiffened for a moment and then nodded and casually separated out from the group, walking over to us, one finger planted against his nose. We understood. We should keep it down.
‘I’m known as Andrés now,’ he said in a muffled voice. ‘Andrés Del Campo. Is that clear?’
What an asshole. In the middle of the Babel on the border, he’d passed for a Spaniard so that instead of exile, he’d gone to the camp at Argelès and in May they’d sent him to work in Marne, and now finally to the front.
‘Do you remember Sepúlveda? He’s here too, in another company.’
‘So we’ve got a royal flush,’ I said with a smile.
The truth was that there wasn’t much to smile about. That same morning an official interpreter rounded us all up in the yard and explained where we were – between Sarralbe and Sarreguemines, just a few kilometres south of the Maginot line. We were one of six Spanish companies serving the 125th regiment of sappers.
‘But are we soldiers in the French army or not?’
The voice, the one perforating the cold like a knife, belonged, as always, to Mariano. He was still in his position in the third row, hands in his pockets, his collar up. From there he was challenging the officer, who was standing on a low wall.
‘Yes, of course,’ muttered the lieutenant, tapping his whip on his boot.
‘Then,’ Mariano said calmly, ‘take away this barbed wire immediately. And I mean immediately. Get it?’
Now it’s going to get good, I thought. In fact the little officer turned lilac then blue and his moustache twittered nervously.
‘That’s not up for discussion,’ he said. ‘You’ve been arrested and whoever is not in agreement should step forward.’
It wasn’t a single person who stepped forward, but two, then three, then all of us together.We surrounded that son of a bitch, that cardboard guappo, who was now practically peeing himself. He wilted. In the end they took the barbed wire away, so at least we could move around. But the French made us pay. They put us to work like slaves, building barricades and trenches against tanks in the middle of the desolate plain. They barely fed us. It was so bad we had to go looking for potatoes and carrots in nearby fields, and steal the dry bread they fed the horses. I don’t remember our commander’s name. I just remember the nickname we gave him. We called him The Seal because he was fat and walked with his gut sticking out. He wasn’t just fat, he was mean and he had a beef with us Spaniards, with the Republicans. They must have worked hard to dig this guy up. It would have been difficult to find a bigger son of a bitch. He had us spitting our own teeth. The winter was bitter up there, the temperature often dropped to thirty-five below zero, and there we were digging in dirt that was as hard as ice, living on bird rations. We’d be sent to isolation if we stood up for a minute to rest our kidneys.
The other companies had it bad too.When we saw Sepúlveda he’d been reduced to skin and bones and had no colour at all. It had been months since he’d last been able to pee on any church steps. But this wasn’t what made him mad.
‘The trenches of Aragon were better. It was better on the Ebro,’ he went around muttering. ‘I’m hungry like the ninth circle of Dante’s Inferno, that’s what I am. And I’d kill these French bastards, these good-for-nothing officers, sons of whores.’
One bitterly cold evening around the middle of February, when the few thoughts that we might have had left were frozen solid, we were all talking at the low brick wall between our two companies. Alfonso, Mariano and I were all in agreement, but what could we do? Sepúlveda smiled and lit up like he’d had a vision.
‘I know,’ he said. ‘It’s just that I’m not a good organiser.’
He fell silent and pulled on the last bit of cigarette that had been passed through eight hands.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Let’s strike,’ he said. ‘We’ll hold a hunger strike. Considering how little they give us to eat as it is . . .’
No sooner said than done. The next week we refused our rations and went on like that for almost two days. Finally a colonel came, a state-level big cheese. He arrived like a bull, tough, charging in head first. What were we thinking? Staging a hunger strike in the army? It was crazy stuff. And then we were stealing food from the horses as well. But he was a good man, the old colonel, I have to say. He didn’t know anything about our conditions and when we explained what had been going on he was shocked.
‘I can’t believe it,’ he said falling heavily back in his chair. ‘What you’re telling me is unworthy of France and unworthy of her army. Give me a little time and I’ll see what I can do.’
He was true to his word. An old-fashioned man of honour. Three days later we were served chicken and loads of bread, then they held a soccer match between all of the troops in the sector. It had been years since Mariano and I even touched a ball, but we joined a team. We won, you know. Alfonso played defence, and I was centrefield. Mariano was a forward. Sepúlveda watched and advised our coach, a Basque captain who’d played in the B league when he was younger. That was living. If it hadn’t been for the work on the barricades and the occasional burst of cannon fire from the Krauts, you wouldn’t have said that we were at war. If only Mercedes were with me; that would have been the best. But that peculiar period of revelry didn’t last long. The drôle de guerre was about to end.
Chapter Twenty-five
Benjamin returned to Paris on November 25, 1939. It was a humid day. There was the promise of a storm in the air; black, webby clouds raced across the sky. A wan light hovered over the rain-sprinkled streets. He knocked on his sister’s front door, barely touching the wood with his knuckles. It didn’t occur to him to use the doorbell.
‘Walter!’ Dora exclaimed, putting her hands to her face.
‘What’s wrong? Am I a ghost?’
He was – more or less. He’d lost at least twenty-five pounds, his eyes were deep sockets under his shaggy eyebrows, the skin on his face was loose and his shoulders were drowning in his shirt. As for his state of mind – it was better left unsaid. ‘You can well imagine,’ he wrote to Horkheimer a few days later, ‘what the constant racket and the imposs
ibility of being alone even for an hour must have cost me over time.’ He felt extraordinarily tired, extenuated to the point of having to pause every three or four minutes along the road because he couldn’t walk any more. It was his heart, though he didn’t tell Horkheimer this. The three months of hardship in Nevers had weakened it even more. Old Benjamin was an invalid.
‘Myocarditis,’ declared Doctor Abrami. ‘You must not worry so much. Take advantage of the truce. Stop smoking. Only walk when necessary.’
This was the real killer. He’d made an art of walking, roaming Paris. It was his way of understanding things and now he was reduced to panting after just a few steps, heart pounding through his chest and his vision clouding over. It was a nemesis, a curse. All that aside, even Paris seemed sickly. Benjamin found it greyer, darker; the shutters were drawn and people used flashlights and candles. The sound of sirens ran amuck in the darkness and there were armed sentries on every major intersection.
That was the war for old Benjamin, an undoing that hovered at his back like a shadow, a silent, empty self-annihilation. The thread of his days was as precarious and as sticky as before; he seemed to be waiting every hour for life to take another direction. As soon as he rose in the morning he felt the day slipping away, losing itself in the cold early darkness of winter. The house on rue Dombasle was poorly heated so he stayed in bed most of the time. The first month, he only went out when it was strictly necessary – to thank Adrienne and his other friends, to shop, pay bills, unblock his bank account and apply for a library card. Then, in early January he saw his ex-wife, Dora. She was on her way back to London and she stopped in Paris to see him and ask him again to come away with her.
‘Maybe just for a while, until you regain your health.’
‘It’s better that I don’t. Thank you for the invitation though.’
They walked across the Ile St-Louis arm in arm, fending off the pitch of the howling wind through the winding streets and aiming for the open spaces over the river. Suddenly Benjamin stopped and leaned against the balustrade of Ponte Louis-Philippe. Here it was again. He could barely breathe. He gasped for air, letting the rain drench his face.
‘What’s the matter? Are you sick?’
‘No no, I’m fine,’ he gasped. ‘I’m just a little weak still and I tire quickly. That’s all. Perhaps we can go to that café?’
They sat down; Walter like a broom, stiff and pale, looking out over the Ile de le Cité and Notre-Dame through the rain-stippled windows. Dora rested her face on her hands and looked at him worriedly.
‘See? You should come to London. It would do you good. You could rest, eat properly, visit Stefan, work.’
He inhaled deeply, sucking at the air, then shook his head and brushed back a grey lock of hair.
‘I said no already. It isn’t possible for me. The only place I can work is here in Paris. In just a few days they will issue me a library card and I have to finish my work at all costs.’
‘You wouldn’t even do it for Stefan? He really needs to see you.’
‘Dora, you know I’m a bad father.’
It was dark when they left the café. The rain had stopped and the wind was cleaning the sky. Under the early evening starlight, Paris dripped as though buckets of water had just been emptied on it. The few cars left on the street made fleeting shots of light that lasted a few minutes and hung in the damp air.
‘We’ll see each other soon,’ said Dora.
Walter stood in front of her, his head down, tapping at his feet with the tip of his umbrella.
‘Yes, soon,’ he confirmed.
They looked at each other. A happy silence fell. And then their smiles stretched into the obtuse, scattered expressions of people who don’t know what else to say to each other. Dora gave him a quick kiss, just two lips fleeting on his cheek.
‘You’re a stubborn mule,’ she murmured.
Walter watched her disappear behind the glass door of the hotel, wiggling her fingers at him. He lingered for a few moments on the pavement and then headed off again, leaning on his umbrella. His shoulders sloped and he walked uncertainly as if he weren’t passing through very familiar streets and squares, but rather in a dangerous, strange place. He walked through time, in his own past.
At home he lay down without undressing. He fell into a stony sleep and in the morning he woke in a cold sweat, shaping bitter words without meaning.Was it really his rumpled face reflecting back at him from the mirror? He stared at it, closed his eyes, and stared again. He looked away when he started to fear that there was someone else looking back through the mirror. He shook himself and began to clean up. All those lies, he thought. He’d told them to Dora and then repeated them to himself. It would be, he knew, certain disaster to go to London. But staying in Paris was difficult as well. So he had settled down to study some English with Hannah Arendt. And he had written to Horkheimer a few days earlier asking for advice. Should he stay or go? And would Horkheimer even be willing to prepare the affidavit for him?
The letter had turned out a little whiney, possibly even servile in his clumsy attempt to be proud. ‘It goes without saying,’ he wrote, ‘that your advice will carry the most weight for me in this situation. For I would not like my arrival in America to cause difficulties of a material nature, introducing a discordant element into our friendship. That friendship at the moment constitutes for me not only the sole support of my material existence, but also almost the only moral support I have at my disposal.’ And further, ‘Please be as explicit as possible in informing me of your own opinion, namely whether I should stay in France or join you in America. It is really important to me that you consider this request in detail and that you are aware that it does not constitute an attempt on my part to shun my responsibility to what I must unhappily call “my destiny”. On the contrary, the only purpose of this request is to allow me to come to a decision in full cognisance of the situation.’
Decisions did not come easily to Benjamin. But even if he were to decide he wanted to leave, it wouldn’t necessarily be easy. As a ressortissant, a stateless foreigner, a Jew, it would be problematic to leave Paris without a permit. Getting a visa for the United States would mean going through a network of queues, sponsors, documents – far beyond his capabilities. So all that was left to him was to concentrate on his work. On January 11, his library card was renewed. This was his lot. And as always when circumstances took him by the hand, they also alleviated him of choice, allowing him some peace of mind. He found an icy serenity in the middle of an old world falling to pieces. The armoured divisions meanwhile gunned their motors at his borders.
Chapter Twenty-six
They met on the stairs in the middle of the afternoon. The elevator was broken again and Benjamin was sliding slowly down, leaning on the banister. Koestler passed him at a run and then stopped suddenly. He’d got back from the prison camp two days earlier; he was thin as a rail, and his face still marked with hunger.
‘Walter, is it really you?’ he asked turning.
‘It would seem so,’ said Benjamin with a half-smile. ‘I’m so pleased to see you free. Are you still you?’
‘More or less,’ answered Koestler with a grimace. ‘But I’m well, at least I’m better than I was a few days ago. I’m in a hurry.Will you walk with me to Madame Suchet? We’ll chat as we walk and get some wine and cheese so that tonight we can celebrate.’
‘I really . . .’
‘Come on. It’s not every day that you run into a man who’s just come out of Vernet.’
That name didn’t ring any bells for Benjamin but he realised he couldn’t refuse.
‘Okay,’ he decided, ‘but let’s walk slowly.You see I’m not in the best shape.’
The rain had stopped early that morning after an overcast, damp week. The January sky over rue de Vaugirard hung low, colourless and glowing with light. There were clouds but they were invisible and the sun was filtered through them making a beam of light here and there. They walked from bright spots into shad
ows. Koestler walked ahead, awkward, hands in his pockets, a cigarette stuck between his lips.
‘It was rough, right? Unbelievable. For years France has been denouncing the Nazi camps as blights on European civilisation and then the first thing they think of doing is to imitate them.’
He was indignant, shaking his head and flapping his elbows in order to avoid extracting his hands from his pockets and exposing them to the cold.
‘And it’s not as if they put Fascists in there. No sir,’ he continued after a pause. ‘They put the soldiers of the Spanish Civil War in there alongside German and Italian refugees and those who have nothing to do with anything but are Hungarian, neutral like me. I have nothing more to say about democracy in France.’
Benjamin just nodded.After walking on for a bit, he managed to mention Vernuche. Just a few words because he didn’t like to think about those three months anymore, or of Sahl and all the others left there to rot. But Koestler still needed to vent, to recount the horrors he’d escaped. He walked and talked, smoking one cigarette after the other. He hardly looked at Benjamin, the roads, the passing cars; his head was a tumble of racing images. They’d held him in a stadium too, but he’d been in Roland Garros, the tennis stadium, then they’d transferred him to Le Vernet, near Ariège, about four kilometres from the border of the Pyrenees. It was a punishment camp if you thought about it. He could still see the barbed wire and trenches all around, the rocky soil that turned to mud when it rained and icy clumps when it was cold. The barracks there had been built the year before by Spanish refugees using jerry-rigged wooden planks. There were two hundred men crammed into each barrack, forced to sleep five across on wooden planks two and a half metres wide. In December, the temperature dropped to twenty below zero but there was neither heat nor blankets in the barracks. There was no mess hall for meals, no tables, chairs, spoons or forks. There was no soap to clean with. The work was back-breaking. The food was disgusting. The guards beat and whipped you or put you in the hole, eight days minimum, no food or drink then after a while bread and water.