In a distant park, one you reach after a long ride in a streetcar, almost on the outskirts of Moscow, Greta Buber-Neumann makes a date to meet an old friend, someone as frightened as she, but nonetheless loyal. You are that woman who jumps from a moving streetcar and turns to see if anyone is following, then takes another streetcar, and when she gets off, following a circuitous route, arrives at a suburban park bathed in the afternoon light. There will be people around, old men with canes and overcoats and leather caps, mothers holding the hands of children swathed in mufflers and heavy coats. Greta and her friend see one another from a distance but do not approach one another until they are sure no one is following. “Can’t we get away somehow?” he asks. “Do we have to have our throats cut like rabbits? How have we been able to accept all this for years without questioning it, without opening our eyes? Now we have to pay for our blind faith.”
The next time, the man doesn’t come. Greta waits until nightfall, then goes back to her room without bothering to check whether she’s being followed. She imagines, with sadness, almost with sweetness, that her friend has managed to escape.
One night in January 1938, the knock at the door finally comes. They haven’t come to take her away, however, only to confiscate the last belongings of the renegade Heinz Neumann. Uniformed police collect the few books Greta hasn’t sold for a pittance in order to buy food, and some of her husband’s old shoes, and as they leave they hand her a receipt. Someone tells her that the friend she used to meet in the park was arrested as he tried to board a train for the Crimea.
They came one morning very early, on July 19, and when she realized that they had finally come for her, she felt only a kind of relief. They drove her to Lubyanka Prison in the backseat of a small black van, sitting between two men in sky-blue uniforms who didn’t look at her or speak a word. This time her knees didn’t tremble, and at her feet was the suitcase she’d kept packed for so long. She remembered the last thing she saw in a Moscow street before the van drove through the prison gates: a luminous clock glowing red in the early dawn.
On July 12, Professor Klemperer refers in his diary to some friends who left Germany and found work in the United States or England. But how do you leave when you don’t have anything? He, an old man with a sick wife, with no knowledge of any foreign language, with no practical skill, how do you leave the house you’ve finally managed to build, the land Eva has almost made into a garden? We have stayed here, in shame and penury, as if buried alive, buried up to our necks, waiting day after day for the last spadefuls of dirt.
silencing everything
STARTLED AWAKE, I am stiff with cold, and I don’t know where I am, even who I am. For a few seconds, I have been a blaze of pure consciousness, without identity, without place, without time, only the waking and the sensation of cold, the darkness in which I’m lying curled up, wrapped in the sheltering warmth of my own body, on my side, hands between my legs and knees up against my chest, my feet icy despite the boots and wool socks, my fingertips numb, my joints so stiff that if I try to move, I may not be able.
There’s something more than the cold and the darkness like the bottom of a well, like a breath of moist stone and frozen, plowed earth. The smell of manure too, manure mixed with mud, an ocean of mud and manure that swallows up military boots, horses’ hooves, the wheels and tracks of war machines. What has woken me is a sense of danger, a reflection of alarm so powerful that in one second it dissipated all the weight of sleep. Quicker than my still groggy consciousness, my right hand feels beneath the blankets in search of the gun. The Spanish wool gloves, the harsh sleeve of the gray military tunic stained with dry mud, the feel of the greatcoat I’m using as a pillow and of the mattress of damp straw on which I was sleeping: each is a feature added to my identity, to this persona that nevertheless observes from without, someone groping among rough fabrics for the cold metal of a Luger. But my whole arm feels heavy as lead, still paralyzed by sleep and cold, and an automatic instinct of caution warns me that I mustn’t make a sound. I hold my breath, hoping to hear something, a whisper that barely scratches the silence. I want to evaporate in the darkness, to lie as motionless as those insects whose defense mechanism is to be mistaken for a blade of grass or a dry leaf.
It’s the danger that has reminded him of who and where he is. Danger, not fear. He never feels fear, just as he cannot remember ever having felt envy. He feels the cold, the hunger, the exhaustion of brutal marches, the desperation of always sinking in endless mud — from the beginning of autumn, when the rains came — in a sea of mire and manure that swamps everything: men, animals, machines, dead and living.
A second ago it was barely a spark of alarm in the void of darkness, as anonymous as the tip of a cigarette glowing for an instant beyond the mud and the no-man’s-land — in the vast nothingness of the plain obliterated by mud, which in a few weeks will become a desert field of snow. Now he knows, remembers. In old Spanish to remember means to wake up. The professor of literature is lecturing, walking from one side to the other on a dais dusty with chalk and echoing hollowly beneath his feet. He wears round eyeglasses, a rumpled suit, and draws from a dangling cigarette as he speaks passionately of Jorge Manrique and recites long sections of his poetry. He doesn’t know that within a few months he will be shot, his nearsighted eyes squinting in the headlights of a truck. He remembers “the sleeping soul” and thinks of his favorite student in the Instituto Cardenal Cisneros in Madrid. His mind brightens, and he wakes completely. Memory explodes in him as if he had walked into a dark room where objects begin to take shape, the outlines of furniture and windows. His animal instinct for danger makes him listen again for the sound that woke him. A staccato, metallic sound, insignificant to anyone who doesn’t know it, but unmistakable: the whisper of a gun lightly brushing against something, a rifle against the clothing on a shoulder. He raises his head a little and sees a ray of light beneath the door, between the chinks of the badly joined boards that separate the lean-to where he’s sleeping from the main room of the hut. He could have chosen to sleep there, the German officer in charge of billeting told him, he’d be near the fire and wouldn’t have to endure the stench of the manure. When he arrived the first night, the Russian woman and her child had already retired to the lean-to, or, more accurately, had hidden in it, leaving the only bed for him. Arms about each other, mother and child become a single mound of rags, two pairs of eyes frightened and shining in the light of the flashlight. He told them in German to come out, that they didn’t have anything to fear, he told them using signs that he didn’t want the bed, that they should take it. The woman shook her head, murmured in Russian, cuddled her child, the two of them rocking back and forth. The child had thin blond hair and sunken cheeks, and large blue circles smudged the transparent skin beneath his eyes.