I remember Pascal’s maxim: Entire worlds know nothing of us. Nevertheless, that foreign city is taking on a presence in my mind, which my friend established when he spoke its name in a restaurant in Madrid. The first time he said it, I paid no attention, because the story he was telling was more important to me, then he said it again but I didn’t catch it, with the noise. I interrupted him to ask the name of this city in Estonia. But who can imagine what Estonia is like, what lies behind that name, inside that name? It’s like trying to put yourself inside those small glass globes with snowy scenes that people used to have in their homes and you shook to make the snow swirl. Snow also falls in winter in Estonia, in that small city in the provinces, beside a river with the same name, Narva — the Narva River carries huge masses of ice in the winter, my friend tells me, remembering, and that recalled detail means it was early winter when he reached the city.
Afterward, I came home in a taxi, from the sunny autumnal openness of the west part of Madrid to the somber streets of the center, where night is closer, night and the damp cold of winter twilights: mist and the woodsy smell of the road that runs beside a river that is beginning to freeze over and that empties into the Baltic thirteen kilometers beyond the city that bears its name. I was in a taxi in Madrid but also traveling through the places my friend had told me about, and a lifetime of vanished years were squeezed together in the ten or fifteen minutes of my ride, just as the Madrid I barely glanced at out the window was also the dark ruined capital to which my friend returned after his adventures in the European war, less innocent but not completely disillusioned, guarding with modest pride the Iron Cross he still keeps as a talisman.
As I listened, abstracted, to the voices on the taxi radio and the driver’s diatribe against the government or the traffic, I thought of that name, mouthed it, decided to look it up in the Britannica as soon as I got home: Narva, where my friend was in 1943 and where he returned thirty years later with the nearly impossible task of finding a woman he had seen only once, one night at a dance for German officers he’d been invited to because he was one of the few Spaniards in the Blue Division who spoke German, and also because he liked Brahms and at a certain moment had hummed a melodic passage of the Third Symphony. The war was filled with coincidences like that, with chains of random events that dragged you away or saved you; your life could depend not on your heroism or caution or cleverness but on whether you bent down to tighten a boot one second before a bullet or shard of shrapnel passed through the place where your head would have been, or whether a comrade took your turn in a scouting patrol from which no one came back. My friend was saved that way many times, on the edge of disasters that claimed others, by a coincidence, a fraction of a second. By going to that city in Estonia on a two-day leave he may have avoided certain death. The Brahms melody he loved, Brahms being one of the names on which his worship of Germany was based, changed the course of his life, opening his eyes to a horror for which nothing had prepared him, a horror that marked him for more than the unthinking vertigo of courage and danger.
“There was an inspection of our sector, and the commander of my battalion asked me to act as guide for the German officers. I was with them for several days, and although the Germans didn’t have much confidence in us, one of them, a captain almost as young as I was, took a liking to me, because of Brahms. We were standing around, not talking, the three German officers and I, beside a parapet between two machine-gun nests, on one of those calm days when it seemed that nothing would happen at the front, and without thinking I hummed a few bars of a melody. The captain began humming the same thing, but with all the notes, and more slowly, the better to enjoy the memory of the music.” My friend hums too, right there in the restaurant, lips closed, eyes shut, and I hear the music more easily than his words, despite the voices, silverware, and cell phones. I recognize it immediately, because it’s a favorite of mine, a powerful and sentimental melody a little like a film score: the third movement of Brahms’s Third Symphony. “The other two officers had dropped behind, pointing out to each other disapprovingly some defect in our Spanish defenses, but the captain at my side closed his eyes and bobbed his head, and with his right hand he seemed to be drawing the music in the air, his black-gloved index finger a baton directing the sad, undulating theme that combined both great pain and great consolation. He told me that in civilian life he was a professor of philosophy in a gymnasium, and that he played the clarinet in his city orchestra and in a chamber group. That prompted me to mention the Brahms quintet for clarinet, and the German was moved to an almost embarrassing display of affectation,” though those aren’t exactly the words my friend used. “I noticed then,” he says, “that he was a bit limp in the wrist, as they say nowadays, in spite of the uniform and how tall and strong he was. He told me that when he played that piece, there were parts where he had to struggle to hold back the tears. It was always as if he were playing that music for the first time, and each time it was more profound, more moving, containing all the grief of Brahms’s life. There was only one other quintet for clarinet that he liked as much as the Brahms: I guessed immediately and said, Mozart’s, and in the emotion of remembering the music and because of the empathy between us, he told me, lowering his voice, that he also liked Benny Goodman, although in Germany it was impossible to find his records. By then the other officers joined us, and the captain’s demeanor changed, he became as rigid as he was at first, as military as they, and didn’t say another word about music, barely speaking to me until we said good-bye. Those Germans were very strange,” my friend tells me. “You never knew what was going through their head when they looked at you with those light-colored eyes. Some weeks later, the commander of my battalion called me to say that I had been given a few days’ leave because the German officers I accompanied as guide and interpreter were pleased with me and asked that I be allowed to attend a dance in that city behind the lines: Narva. The captain who was a fan of Brahms and Benny Goodman picked me up at the station. I remember that we drove into the city along a road near a river and bordering a forest, and that though there was still a little sun, it was already starting to get very cold.
The person who hasn’t lived the experience demands details that mean nothing to the true narrator: my friend speaks of the cold and of the blocks of ice floating down the river, but my imagination adds the hour and the evening light, which is the same as the light in the street as we left the restaurant, and I also added the German officers’ heavy gray overcoats with the broad lapels, as well as the dissimilar build of the two men — the Spaniard a little emaciated, at least in comparison with the captain who loved the clarinet, but both alike in the black gloves, black-visored caps, and collars turned up against the cold, talking about music, remembering sad passages from Brahms and Mozart and snappy George Gershwin tunes played by Benny Goodman’s orchestra, which had not been heard for years on German radio.
“THEN I SAW SOMETHING I’ve never forgotten.” My friend puts down his knife and fork, takes a sip of wine with a lively and slightly furtive gesture, so rare in a man of eighty, that suggests many tasks ahead in life, things to learn, books to review for the specialized journals of his profession, in which he is internationally eminent, appointments, travels abroad. As he speaks now, his small eyes peer at me behind heavy white eyebrows and wrinkled eyelids, but he doesn’t seem to see me, he’s not in the same place and time that I am, a restaurant in Madrid loud with voices and telephones. “I saw a large group of people that spanned the road from side to side coming toward us, men only, some almost children and others so old they stumbled as they walked and leaned on one another. They came in rows, close together, in formation, none speaking, heads bowed, as we used to see in the funerals that wound through the narrow streets of our villages, and the men in the lead held in front of them a horizontal pole like the barrier at a border post, with a tangle of barbed wire hanging from it that must have ripped their legs as they walked. You could hear their footsteps, the wire dragging the ground, and the swish of the guards’ rifles brushing against their uniforms. The German and I pulled to one side of the road, where we watched. There were hundreds of men, guarded by a few SS soldiers, and in every fifth or sixth row was another bar with barbed wire, perhaps to entangle anyone who broke formation and tried to escape. I had never seen such thin, pale faces, not even on Russian prisoners, or the way those men had of walking, keeping time but dragging their feet, shoulders hunched, staring at the ground. I remember one old man with a long white beard, but I especially remember a young man in the front row, at the center, very tall, with sallow skin and a dead face, he wore an ankle-length overcoat, the kind in style then, and a navy-blue cap. I can see him as clearly as I’m seeing you now, his pince-nez glasses and his face with its dark beard, not because it was several days since he shaved but because the beard was thick and made even darker by his pallor. He was the only one to lift his head a little, though not much, and he stared at me as he passed, turning his long neck with its prominent Adam’s apple, just at me, not the German. He turned and kept looking between the bowed heads of the other men, as if trying to say something with his eyes, which seemed abnormally large in such a thin face.”