They keep talking, but now there are occasional periods of silence and both realize it, and although she tries hard to fill them there is already a pool of shadow, of curiosity or suspicion, behind her words. Maybe she thinks she’s done something wrong, said something she shouldn’t have. In the meantime Señor Salama looks out the window every time the train comes to a station and calculates how many stops are left before Casablanca, before the inevitable farewell. He berates himself with secret rage, sets himself periods of time in which to express his feelings, postpones them, and all the while she is talking and smiling, her eloquent hands brushing his, her knees so close that they bump his when the train brakes, and then he surreptitiously adjusts the raincoat over his thighs so it won’t slip to the floor. He will tell her that he too is going to Casablanca, he will pull himself up in the seat as soon as the train has stopped and take down his crutches, he won’t let her try to help carry his luggage, because after so many years he’s acquired an agility and strength in his arms and torso that he never imagined having, and when he doesn’t have enough hands, he holds something with his teeth, or catches his balance by leaning against a wall.
But deep down he knows and has never doubted for an instant that he won’t do that. As the train gets closer to Casablanca, the woman writes her address and telephone number for him and asks for his, which Señor Salama scrawls illegibly on a scrap of paper. The train has stopped, and the woman, standing before him, pauses for a minute, confused, surprised that he doesn’t get to his feet to say good-bye, that he doesn’t help her get down her suitcase. She probably hasn’t seen the crutches hidden behind his bag, although it is also tempting to imagine that she did see them, with a woman’s keen perceptiveness, and also noticed something strange about the legs placed so close together and covered by the raincoat. She decides not to bend down and kiss Señor Salama goodbye, instead she holds out her hand and smiles, and the shrug of her shoulders expresses fatalism, or capitulation, and she asks him to call her if he decides to stop in Casablanca on the return trip, and says that she will call him the next time she goes to Tangiers. At the last instant, he is tempted to stand up, or not to release her hand but allow her to help him up with her strong grip. The impulse is so strong that it almost seems he has enough strength in his legs to stand up without help from anyone. But he sits quietly, and, after a moment’s hesitation, the woman releases his hand, picks up her suitcase, turns toward him for the last time, and goes out into the corridor. Once she’s on the platform, he can’t see her anymore. He leans back in the seat when the train starts off toward a city where he has nothing to do, where he will have to look for a hotel to spend the night, a hotel near the station because he will have to take the first train back to Casablanca. Oh you, whom I would have loved, he recited that evening in his office in the Ateneo Español, moved as deeply as if he were chanting the Kaddish in his father’s memory, the sound of a ship’s horn and the music of a muezzin’s call came through the open window. Oh you, who knew so well.
münzenberg
I SIT UP UNTIL VERY LATE, fighting back sleep in order to read a little more, to learn more about the life of this man I had never heard of before yesterday, Willi Münzenberg, who at the beginning of the summer of 1940 is fleeing west along the roads of France in the great flood of people occasioned by the advance of German armored cars. Now that he is seeing things quietly and with clarity for the first time in the fifty years of his life, and has acquired enough experience and courage to do openly the things he should, nothing matters and there isn’t enough time. This isn’t the first time he’s fled, but it is the first time he’s fled on foot, with no resources and without a place to go, knowing that on whichever side of the front lines he tries to find refuge there will be people ready to betray him and turn him in, if he isn’t machine-gunned — unknown and unidentified — among a line of hostages chosen at random, or blown up by a bomb or mine. He will be executed if the Germans capture him, but he will also die if his former comrades and Communist subordinates come across his trail. If he tries to reach England, a nearly impossible proposition, he knows that there too he will be arrested as a spy, and that surely the English will use him as a pawn in an exchange with the Soviets or the Germans. He had everything, and now he has and is nothing, although someone says, no, he had two thousand francs in his pocket, which he planned to use to buy a car and escape to Switzerland.
He knows that even the little that’s left of him, this fleeting shadow on the roads of France, is unacceptable to many, an irrelevant or harmful witness whom it would be very good to eliminate. What he thought to be his strength, his life insurance, is actually the reason for his sentence. He knows something more: in the English secret services there are Soviet moles who will send news of his presence in England to Moscow, so that he won’t be safe there even if the British government offers him asylum.
MY EYES CLOSE, the book nearly slips from my hands, as Münzenberg walks on among the throngs that flood the highways and scatter into nearby fields like a swarm of insects every time the low-flying German fighter planes swoop down over them. First comes the sound of engines in the distance, then the metallic silhouettes glinting in the June sunlight, and finally their shadows, huge raptors with fixed, widespread wings, machine-gunning a convoy of retreating military vehicles, dropping bombs on a bridge where escaping soldiers are clustered around a broken-down truck. Scurrying insects are what the pilots see from the air: tiny figures, oblique black scrawls. But each of those little creatures is a human being, having a name, a life, a face unlike that of any other person. Münzenberg is trying to blend in, to be a nobody and escape the claws and gullet of the cyclops. But the eye of the cyclops he knows best and fears most, Joseph Stalin, sees everything, scrutinizes everything, will not allow anyone to save himself. Not even by shrinking to the size of the most insignificant insect can a marked man escape his hunters, not even in a fortress in Mexico protected by high walls, barbed wire, armed guards, lookout towers, and iron gates, could Trotsky escape a pursuit that lasted more than ten years and encompassed the entire world.
Who among the masses fleeing around him could imagine Willi Münzenberg’s story? A corpulent foreigner, badly dressed and unshaven, who has spent the last few months in a concentration camp, one of those camps in which the French government is incarcerating the refugees and stateless persons who according to the criminal logic of the times have most to fear from the Nazis: if war breaks out against Germany, the German refugees living in France become the enemy, so they must be locked up even though it is the Nazi regime they want to escape. Once imprisoned, they are perfect prey for the German army and the Gestapo they believed they eluded when they fled to France. In 1933 this man, Willi Münzenberg, came to Paris with the first wave of fugitives from Nazi persecution after the fire in the Reichstag, where he had held a seat as a Communist deputy. That time he escaped in a large black Lincoln Continental driven by his chauffeur, not on foot, like now, when he has nothing and is nobody, when he doesn’t know where his wife is or if she’s alive or if he will see her again. Both of them are caught in the chaos of the war, she too a tiny figure among the fleeing multitudes, in the uncountable census of the displaced and deported, the millions of people forced onto the highways of a Europe suddenly thrown back into barbarity. Crowds wait on train platforms, on the docks of seaside cities, line up on sidewalks outside the closed doors of foreign legations to get the passports, papers, visas, and administrative seals that can stamp on their destinies the difference between life and death.