Professor Rossman must have seen it all happening again, this time with the certainty that there was no way out: the footsteps on the stairs, the pounding on the door, his daughter shaking, the same suitcase that had been packed in Moscow ready under the bed. But it wasn’t his daughter who’d been chosen by misfortune, as he’d always feared. It was him. Sitting in a rocking chair in the heat of an August afternoon, Professor Rossman slowly realized that these methodical men who didn’t raise their voices and weren’t wearing the coveralls of militiamen or carrying rifles were probably going to kill him.
“Of course you did everything you could to save him,” said Van Doren. “Perhaps you even put your own life in danger.”
“Is Rossman dead?” Stevens looked at them in the rearview mirror, not quite following the conversation in Spanish. “In Madrid? I didn’t see anything in the paper.”
“I didn’t have to risk anything. He was dead and I kept looking for him.”
29
HE WAS DEAD, and for several days early in September Ignacio Abel searched for him in vain, wandering from one end of Madrid to the other, looking suspicious in his light suit and tie and neatly folded handkerchief in the breast pocket of his jacket among the men with unshaven faces in unbuttoned shirts and blue coveralls who filled the streets and café terraces, the young men who carried rifles over their shoulders and wore pistols and cartridge belts around their waists, demanding papers or ordering passersby to put up their hands. That morning he told Señorita Rossman to wait until he returned, and if he learned anything he’d telephone her; he showed her where the kitchen was in case she wanted something to eat, though there was little food left in the cupboard or refrigerator. Throughout the day he thought of her, imagining her in the same position in which he’d left her, sitting at the dining room table in front of the glass of water, waiting for his return or a telephone call, crushed by a grief that when transmitted to him changed into guilt, a bottomless remorse for not having helped her and Professor Rossman as much as he should have, helped them with true conviction and not out of pity, perhaps turning in a timely way to influential friends. Señorita Rossman’s desperate overconfidence in coming to him for help led him to an unrealistic sense of resolve. He leafed through his pocket diary for names, addresses, and telephone numbers; with her present he made calls that weren’t answered (the telephone lines weren’t working or phones rang in empty houses or abandoned offices). With a decisive air he put on his jacket and tie and placed his wallet and keys in his pocket but didn’t know where to go, whom to ask for help. Since the hot July night when he’d looked for Judith Biely in a Madrid that had become alien to him, he’d lived in a state of lethargy, a sort of convalescence, in the empty apartment, going every day to his office in University City, now deserted except for patrols of militiamen, or people who stole building materials, or groups, almost always women, who walked the empty lots at first light to search among the previous night’s dead. Toward the middle of August, large families who’d fled to Madrid before the advancing enemy army camped in some of the unfinished buildings: waves of refugees with wooden-wheeled carts and donkeys and mules, bent under the weight of possessions they’d attempted to save: mattresses, furniture, metal bed frames, cages of chickens. They lit their fires and cooked their pots of food in the half-completed lobbies, just as they did in public gardens in the heart of Madrid or under the arches of metro stations. Their goats and sheep grazed on the weeds of future sports fields where corpses would randomly appear, hands tied behind their backs. Packs of boys with shaved heads chased one another up and down the staircases and abandoned scaffolding until they bumped into a corpse, the boldest boys daring to go through the pockets or remove an article of clothing in good condition. As on so many mornings when he left for his office, with purposeless obstinacy that at least allowed him the deception of a certain degree of normality, Ignacio Abel told Señorita Rossman not to worry. The porter, now in a proletarian coverall and beret, greeted him as unctuously as when he wore blue livery and a visored cap. “Still no news about the señora and your children, Don Ignacio? I wouldn’t worry. As I say, things are calmer in the Sierra, even if they’re on the other side, and it’s healthier for the children. And a summer away from Madrid is sure to do the señora good.” The porter said this knowingly: he’d learned the reason Adela spent the last two weeks of June in a sanatorium — she didn’t have weak lungs. He smiled, leaning forward and perhaps calculating the possibility of denouncing him now, since he knew that Ignacio Abel, though he’d saved himself once, wasn’t invulnerable. “I see the señor has had a visitor,” said the porter. “The foreign señorita asked for you and I let her up because I remembered seeing her when she came to give your children lessons. The truth is she looked like someone who’s had some sorrow, but these days who doesn’t have troubles?” He proffered the insinuation along with a cautious hand: he’d close his hand around the offered coin just as he’d clutch at a confidence that might be of benefit to him and perhaps harmful to the one who’d formulated it, his old status as gossip elevated in the new era to that of expert informer.