I HAVE PUT THE BOOK on the night table and turned off the light, and as I lie here with my eyes open in the darkness, the sleep that only moments before was sweeping over me now evaporates. I’ve missed falling asleep the way you miss a train, by a minute, by seconds, and I know that I will have to wait for it to return and that it may be hours before it comes. The last time Münzenberg was seen alive was at a table in the town café, sitting with two men much younger than he and speaking with them in German. It’s possible that they too were fugitives from the camp, and that one of them killed him; maybe they’d been sent to the camp as prisoners to win the confidence of the man they’d been ordered to shoot.
I lie quietly in the dark, listening to your breathing. Münzenberg flees in advance of the German army, accompanied by two men, and he doesn’t know they are Soviet agents who have been watching him ever since they arrived in the camp as prisoners, with others whose executions have been assigned to them. Or maybe he knows but doesn’t have the strength to escape, to keep pushing on in an exhausting and futile flight, the dragging out of a hunt that has lasted several years. Past the balcony, across the rooftops, I see the great face of the clock in the Telephone Building, which from this distance suggests a Moscow skyscraper, maybe because it isn’t difficult to imagine that the red light at the pinnacle is a huge Communist star. Years ago, before I ever went to New York, I saw in my dreams an enormous building of black brick with a large red star at its pyramid-shaped peak, and someone beside me, someone I couldn’t see, pointed and said, “That’s the Bronx star.”
When I can’t sleep, the ghosts of the dead return, the ghosts of the living as well, people I haven’t seen or thought of in a long time, events, actions, names from earlier lives, laced not with nostalgia, but rather with regret or shame. Fear returns too, a childish fear of the dark, of shadows or shapes that take on the form of an animal or a human presence or of a door about to open. In the winter of 1936, in a hotel room in Moscow, Willi Münzenberg lay awake and perhaps was smoking in the dark as his wife slept by his side, and every time he heard footsteps in the corridor outside their room, he thought with a shudder of clearsighted panic, “They’ve come, they’re here.” Out the window he saw a red star, or a clock with numbers in red, glowing at the pinnacle of a building above the vast darkness of Moscow, above the streets where nothing was moving at that hour but the black vans of the KGB.
My grandmother Leonor — may she rest in peace — whom I can scarcely remember now, told me when I was a boy that her mother appeared to her every night after she died. She didn’t do anything, didn’t say anything, didn’t evoke fear, only melancholy and tenderness and a sense of guilt, although my grandmother never used that word, guilt wasn’t part of her country vocabulary. Her mother would look at her in silence, smile so she wouldn’t be afraid, make a movement of her head as if to point to something, ask for something, and then she disappeared, or my grandmother would fall asleep, and the next night she would wake and see her again, motionless and faithful, at the foot of the bed, which is the same bed you and I are sleeping in now.
“Mama, what do you want? Do you need something?” my grandmother would ask her, as solicitous as when her mother was alive and very ill and would stare at her without speaking, her face pale against the pillow and her eyes following her daughter around the room.
The ghost repeated this nightly gesture, like someone who wants to say something but has lost the use of her voice. One Sunday morning in church, my grandmother realized what it was her mother wanted to say. She was so poor, and had so many children, she hadn’t been able to pay for masses for her mother, and although she wasn’t a dedicated believer her remorse wouldn’t leave her in peace; a mute uneasiness developed that she shared with no one. Without the masses maybe her mother hadn’t been able to get out of purgatory. My grandmother managed to scrape a little money together by borrowing from a sister-in-law, and with the coins and worn five-peseta bills wrapped in a handkerchief she went to the Church of Santa María to schedule the masses. That night, when her mother visited, standing by the bars of the brass footboard, my grandmother told her not to worry, soon she would have what she needed. Her mother never came again, there was never another “visitation,” as my grandmother said in her language from another century. She felt relieved, but also sad, because now she would never see her mother again, not even in dreams.
The bed you and I are sleeping in now is the one my mother was born in. My parents were surprised that we wanted to bring this cumbersome old bed back to Madrid with us after all the years it sat in the attic. It was against those same bars I can see outlined in the dark, now that my eyes have adjusted, that my grandmother’s mother rested her pale hand, my great-grandmother, from whom some part of me comes and whose name I don’t even know, although I must have inherited from her some of my face, or character, or erratic health. How strange to live in places where the dead have lived, to use things that belonged to them, to look in mirrors where their faces were reflected, to look at oneself with eyes that may have the shape or color of theirs. The dead return during the sleepless hours, people I have forgotten and people I never knew, all prodding the memory of one who survived a war sixty years ago, telling him not to forget them, to speak their names aloud and tell how they lived, why they were carried off so early by a death that could have claimed him. Whose place in life have I taken? Whose destiny was canceled so that mine could be fulfilled? Why was I chosen and not another?
During nights when I lay in the darkness, waiting in vain to fall asleep, I have imagined the sleepless hours of Willi Münzenberg, the insomniac who couldn’t sleep when he began to understand that the time of his power and pride had come to an end, and that all he had before him was running without hope of respite or possibility of safe harbor and finally dying like a dog, a hunted and sacrificed animal, just as so many friends of his friends had died, former comrades, Bolshevik heroes transformed overnight into criminals and traitors, into insects that must be crushed, according to the harangues of the drunken and demented prosecutors of the Moscow trials. Executed like a dog, like Zinoviev or Bukharin, like his friend and brother-in-law Heinz Neumann, director of the German Communist Party, who was living as a refugee or trapped in Moscow and who died in 1937, perhaps shot in the head, as unarmed and surprised before his executioners as another accused man, Josef K., whom Franz Kafka invented during the feverish insomnia of tuberculosis, unaware how prophetic he was. But it has never been ascertained exactly how Neumann died, how many weeks or months he was tortured, or where his body was buried.
In the death camp of Ravensbrück, Neumann’s widow listened to stories her friend Milena Jesenska told her about Kafka. During many sleepless nights, Babette Gross lived minute by minute the torture of not knowing whether her husband was dead or in one of Stalin’s prisons or in a German concentration camp. Years later, when she finally was told the truth, she imagined his hanged body in a forest, swinging from a tree branch, swaying back and forth until the branch or the rope broke and his body fell to the ground to rot without anyone’s finding it, and all that long time she couldn’t sleep, wondering whether she should or shouldn’t think of him as a dead man. With autumn, falling leaves began to cover him.
You were sleeping beside me, and I was imagining Willi Münzenberg smoking in the dark as he listened to the quiet breathing of his wife, Babette, a stylish bourgeois blond, daughter of a Prussian beer magnate, an undoubting Communist in the early twenties, who lived much longer — nearly half a century — than he, an ancient woman who on the eve of the fall of the Berlin Wall received an American historian and whispered into a tape recorder stories of a vanished time and world, images of the night the Reichstag burned, of the first parades of the Brownshirts through German cities, and of Moscow in November 1936, when she and her husband waited for days in a hotel room for someone to come for them, waited to be called and given a day and an hour for an appointment with Stalin, a call that never came, until they heard pounding at the door: the men who had come to arrest them.