Homework answers / question archive / ANNA SEGHERS (née Netty Reiling; 1900–1983) was born in Mainz, Germany, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family

ANNA SEGHERS (née Netty Reiling; 1900–1983) was born in Mainz, Germany, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family

Writing

Share With

ANNA SEGHERS (née Netty Reiling; 1900–1983) was born in Mainz, Germany, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family. She was a sickly and introverted child by her own account, but became an intellectually curious student, eventually earning a doctorate in art history at the University of Heidelberg in 1924; her first story, written under the name Antje Seghers, was published in the same year. In 1925 she married a Hungarian immigrant economist and began her writing career in earnest. By 1929 Seghers had joined the Communist Party, given birth to her first child, and received the Kleist Prize for her first novel, The Revolt of the Fishermen. Having settled in France in 1933, Seghers was forced to flee again after the 1940 Nazi invasion. With the aid of Varian Fry, Seghers, her husband, and two children sailed from Marseille to Mexico on a ship that included among its passengers Victor Serge, André Breton, and Claude Lévi-Strauss. After the war she moved to East Berlin, where she became an emblematic figure of East German letters, actively championing the work of younger writers from her position as president of the Writers Union and publishing at a steady pace. Among Seghers’s internationally regarded works are The Seventh Cross (1939; adapted for film in 1944 by MGM), one of the only World War II–era depictions of Nazi concentration camps; the novella Excursion of the Dead Girls (1945); The Dead Stay Young (1949); and the story collection Benito’s Blue (1973). MARGOT BETTAUER DEMBO has translated works by Judith Hermann, Robert Gernhardt, Joachim Fest, Ödön von Horváth, Feridun Zaimoglu, and Hermann Kant, among others. She was awarded the Goethe-Institut/Berlin Translator’s Prize in 1994 and the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize in 2003. Dembo also worked as a translator for two feature documentary films, The Restless Conscience, which was nominated for an Academy Award, and The Burning Wall. PETER CONRAD was born in Australia, and since 1973 has taught English literature at Christ Church, Oxford. He has published nineteen books on a variety of subjects; among the best known are Modern Times, Modern Places; A Song of Love and Death; The Everyman History of English Literature; and studies of Alfred Hitchcock and Orson Welles. His most recent book is Creation: Artists, Gods and Origins. He has contributed features and reviews to many magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Observer, the New Statesman, The Guardian, and The Monthly. HEINRICH BÖLL (1917–1985) was one of Germany’s foremost post– World War II writers. He wrote short stories, essays, plays, and novels, the most famous of which are Billiards at Half-Past Nine, The Clown, Group Portrait with Lady, and The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum. Böll was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1967 and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1972. TRANSIT ANNA SEGHERS Translated from the German by MARGOT BETTAUER DEMBO Introduction by PETER CONRAD Afterword by HEINRICH BÖLL NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS New York This is a New York Review Book Published by The New York Review of Books 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 www.nyrb.com Copyright © 1951 by Aufbau-Verlag GmbH, Berlin Translation copyright © 2013 by Margot Bettauer Dembo Introduction copyright © 2013 by Peter Conrad Afterword by Heinrich Böll © Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG, Cologne/Germany; courtesy René Böll All rights reserved. The translation of this work was supported by a grant from the GoetheInstitut, which is funded by the German Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Cover image: Francis Picabia, Olga, 1930; © 2012 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY/ADAGP, Paris; photograph by Philippe Migeat; Paris CNAC/MNAM/RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY Cover design: Katy Homans Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Seghers, Anna, 1900–1983. [Transit. English] Transit / by Anna Seghers ; introduction by Peter Conrad ; translated by Margot Bettauer Dembo ; afterword by Heinrich Böll. pages cm. — (New York Review Books Classics) ISBN 978-1-59017-625-2 (alk. paper) 1. World War, 1939–1945—Refugees—Fiction. 2. Marseille (France)— Fiction. I. Dembo, Margot Bettauer, translator. II. Title. PT2635.A27T713 2013 833'.912—dc23 2012044953 eISBN 978-1-59017-640-5 v1.0 For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014 CONTENTS Biographical Notes Title page Copyright and More Information Introduction TRANSIT 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 Afterword INTRODUCTION told by Transit—about refugees attempting to escape from Europe as Hitler’s armies advanced—is one that Anna Seghers had lived. As a Communist, she had been arrested by the Gestapo when Hitler seized power in 1933. After her release, she migrated to Paris, and after the Germans invaded northern France she fled to Marseille—the city “where Europe ends” as the narrator of Transit dolefully notes. Along with Lisbon in neutral Portugal, Marseille was one of the few ports that offered an exit from a continent that was closing down. Here Seghers joined the crowd of harried strays she describes in her novel, scuttling from one consulate to the next in an attempt to assemble the visas and permits required for their onward journey. Not for the last time, modern life had turned into the enactment of a Kafka novel: Seghers and countless others were like Kafka’s Joseph K trying to get his credentials as a land surveyor recognized by the officials in the impenetrable castle. While Seghers fretted in one or another of those Marseille waiting rooms, her friend Walter Benjamin, who also abandoned Paris when the Nazis marched in, killed himself in a town on the border between France and Spain. Benjamin was hoping for a visa that would allow him to cross the Pyrenees and travel on to Lisbon, from where he hoped to sail to the United States. Threatened with deportation to France, he took morphine pills. Seghers was luckier. In March 1941 she managed to obtain the necessary permits, and secured passage on a ship bound for what was still, for terrorized Europeans, the New World. She began to write Transit soon after her arrival in Mexico, where she settled. It was first published in English and Spanish translations in 1944; it did not appear in German until 1948, three years after Seghers returned to her native land. True to the left-wing faith of her youth, she lived in East Berlin until her death in 1983. Sailing to Mexico, Seghers told friends that she felt “as though I had been dead for a year.” This was not quite the same as asserting that she now felt alive: she placed herself in the transitional state of Marie, the heroine of her novel, who may or may not have died when a ship like the one on which Seghers was traveling hits a mine and who is now, thanks to the narrator’s wishful imagination, “ripped from the Underworld by sacrifices and fervent prayers.” Although Seghers adopted the persona of a narrator who plots unscrupulously to get onto one of those ships, Transit takes a sadder, longer view of her own THE STORY experience. It observes events from what might be the vantage point of the gods, looking down—or in Seghers’s case looking back since, when she wrote it, she was already “over there,” enjoying the resurrection her characters dream of—on the spectacle of human folly, the delusion of human hope, and the alternation of anxiety and ennui that consumes our days. The perspective places individual fates at a distance. The characters who crowd the Marseille waterfront gaze out toward a vanishing point on the horizon that is obscured by mist; Seghers seems to be quizzically peering in the opposite direction, across the ocean that divides the continent she identified with renewal from the old one which was in terminal decline. The chronology to which the story refers is not that of the newspapers: it deals in epochs, where disasters cyclically recur and nothing new ever happens. Biblical catastrophes are the stuff of daily life, and the last days always seem to be arriving. The concentration camp inmates resolve to break free “before the Last Judgment”; in Marseille a travel bureau looks like “the administrative offices for the Last Judgment.” A ship leaving for Brazil reminds the narrator of Noah’s Ark—an inevitable analogy, further elaborated in Erich Maria Remarque’s very similar novel The Night in Lisbon, where the refugees clustered on the quays in the Portuguese capital see every boat as an ark, with America as the Ararat where it will, with luck, come to rest. Completing the allegory, Remarque fills in details of the Old Testament deluge, sent to exterminate errant mankind: it was happening again on dry land as Hitler’s armies trampled Europe. The myth, as Seghers retells it in Transit, omits the olive branch: the characters spend much of the novel scrambling to qualify for berths on a ship that we already know, if we remember the opening sentence of the book, will sink. Seghers captures the atmosphere of Marseille with gritty exactitude: the cheerless winter sun, the trees rigid with cold, the hydrants opened in the morning to clean the streets that merely sluice dirt downhill. But her contemporary snapshots record only the surface. This city is a time tunnel, through which the wind has always been blowing, with clouds of dust and crowds of people swirling before it. The same gossip has been exchanged around the harbor—which opens onto a sea that was once considered to be the uterine center of the earth—since the time of the Romans, Greeks, or Phoenicians, while the same food has been consumed for all those centuries. Who’d have thought that pizza, a local speciality, was so antique, so venerable, not after all the invention of Dr. Oetker or Papa John? The narrator loves the cave-like pizzerias of Marseille, where the wet dough has been flattened with a bent wrist since time immemorial. (He also makes this overfamiliar dish look new, thanks to a fillip of metaphorical magic: he reminds us of the surprise we all experience when eating it for the first time. How come something that looks like “an open-face fruit pie” tastes so peppery? Shouldn’t the olives that stud it be cherries and raisins?) Transit frequently removes us from the present in this way and lets us drop, as if through a hole in the floor, into a remote past. An American consul, an agent of what would soon become a new global empire, slips back through a couple of millennia and suddenly resembles “a Roman official . . . listening to the emissaries of foreign tribes with their dark and to him ridiculous demands from gods unknown to him.” Such temporal recessions induce an abysmal dizziness. Europe simply has too much history: individuals inherit ancestral problems, which have always been and will remain insoluble. On his way south through France, the narrator jokingly calls the bureaucrats who stamp passports “dogcatchers,” and wonders why they bother, since this human flood is just the latest case of a churning of runaway multitudes that has been going on forever: “It was like trying to register every Vandal, Goth, Hun, and Langobard during the ‘Barbarian Invasion.’” And if the uniformed men who stamp the papers are dogcatchers, then the narrator and his kind are just dogs—ownerless strays and mongrels, a “wretched refuse” that will never be embraced by the welcoming Statue of Liberty in another harbor across the ocean. Jean Cocteau, on a brief visit to New York in 1949, sat up all night on the plane composing a sermon addressed to the liberators and (he hoped) saviors of self-destructive Europe. “Americans,” he said, “the dignity of humanity is at stake.” So it is in Transit, except that the dignity of our species may already have been forfeited—brutishly denied by the Nazis, sabotaged as well by the treachery and selfishness that are rife among the refugees. The novel’s blunt but richly allusive title suggests that these are people in transition, and not only between countries: they commute up and down on what theologians once saw as the great chain of being, some aspiring to the status of spirits, others behaving and even coming to look like beasts. Binnet’s mistress has “the head of a wild, black bird,” while another woman who has been compulsively crying is left with the puffy red face of a goblin. A suspicious landlady, perhaps “working in disguise for some secret authority as an exorcist,” has teeth that grow longer overnight, an inflatable bosom, and a body that probably ends in a fishtail. We are in the realm of Greek myth, liable to encounter ogres or deities. The gatekeeper at the Mexican consulate in Paris is a glowering Cyclops with one empty eye socket, and in Marseille the narrator finds that the hotel room next to his is occupied by Diana, the goddess of the hunt, who is accompanied by two howling Great Danes. Or rather—as the myth is turned upside down, with human and animal changing places—she accompanies the dogs, since their exit from France has already been arranged by their American owners, and the woman, whose crooked shoulders and garish dress hardly suit the chaste deity, is only guaranteed passage out because she is their guardian. The narrator’s French girlfriend Nadine comments at one point, “You foreigners are all so strange.” She means that they are aliens, not members of a common human family—existentially different like the étranger in the novel of that title by Albert Camus, which was published in 1942. For good or ill, the metaphors in Transit alienate or estrange us from the people to whom they’re attached. Does this make the fishy landlady or the weepy goblin dangerous, inimical, subhuman, like the ethnic groups the Nazis wished to exterminate, or are our own definitions at fault? Might we be in the presence of the divine, not the demonic? As H.G. Wells suggests in his descriptions of Martians in The War of the Worlds, it’s merely our anthropomorphic conceit that makes us think that creatures who don’t look like us must be monsters; Picasso’s portraits also treat the human face as something provisional, able to be rearranged at will. There’s a creepy moment in Transit when the narrator stumbles upon a party of drunken Foreign Legionnaires in “outlandish Arabic headgear.” One of them is a dwarf, and another—who doesn’t think Hitler is such a bad fellow—is so disfigured that he looks “as if neither his mouth nor his nose were in the right place, as if they were flattened over his face.” The dead writer Weidel—whose identity the narrator adopts—leaves behind him a manuscript that is, like Transit, a modern fairy tale, set in “a forest for adults.” Boys turn into bears, girls into lilies; the transformations are uncanny, but Weidel’s fictional magic works like a spell, a talisman. These, the narrator feels, are “stories that would have protected me from evil.” In fact they teach him how to practice a kind of evil, a sinister enchantment that puts a physiological curse on other people. Marseille is supposed to be the point of departure for heaven, that fanciful next world “over there,” the place where the old Spanish man believes he will “regain his youth or find a sort of eternal life.” In fact, the people in the crowd jostling outside one of the consulates are scrambling to board “the last ferry across the Dark River Styx.” They are debarred because they are still vestigially alive and haven’t yet suffered enough; the fate worse than death is to be sent back to that bleakly sunlit reality above ground. Everything and everyone in Transit is transitory. The narrator begins by shrugging that all acquaintances are “fleeting,” like people accidentally met on trains and in waiting rooms, and he adds that mental impressions also go “right through you, quickly, fleetingly.” Even thoughts are fugitives—and from whom or what are they, like those who think them, fleeing? From death, which is moving ever closer with its swastika banner (or with the skull emblems that were the insignia of the SS). The narrator fancies that “Death was also fleeing” and can only wonder “who was at his heels?” In this perpetually moribund Europe, always dying and always being reborn to sicken and die all over again, no finality—not even that supplied by an unhappy ending—can be hoped for. Hence the narrator’s grim admiration for two beggars he sees sleeping at a construction site: they may be the wisest characters in this populous book, because they are so inertly resigned. The tramps in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot —written in 1948–49, not long after the publication of Transit—share the vexatious vital itch of Seghers’s refugees. Stalled and impotent, they still feel compelled to pass the time with their games and whimsies. The tramps in Transit are beyond that, unconcerned about the passage of time and indifferent to history, and they are therefore at peace. Louse-ridden, scurfy-skinned, they are “unaffected by what was happening in their country—feeling as little shame as trees do, molding and decaying. . . .They had as little thought of leaving their homeland as trees might.” These homeless men are rooted; they are fixtures, while everyone else is passing through, wind-blown. Transit is about society and politics, but it is also, more intriguingly, about literature, its deceptions and its bad faith. Can it, in circumstances like those Seghers describes, save lives? And if not, what good is it? The narrator is an inadvertent writer, or perhaps—because he plagiarizes an entire life—a fraudulent one. He does have a knack for it: even before he becomes a posthumous continuation of Weidel, he admits that “I’d always enjoyed unraveling tangled yarn, just as I had always enjoyed messing up neat skeins of yarn.” He is describing the process of weaving and interweaving that produces textiles as well as literary texts; writers, who are both orderly and anarchic, create messes for characters and readers in order to have the pleasure of disentangling them. The narrator’s imposture is his apprenticeship as a novelist. To create a character is to inhabit the identity of someone other than oneself; the man in Transit—unencumbered by a name of his own—enjoys a double or even treble existence, passing himself off with forged documents as a refugee called Seidler, although the authorities take him to be Weidel. But he has a sense of morality that many writers lack, and knows that what he’s doing is an ethical crime. To make matters worse, the book Seghers has him write, the one that we are reading, belongs to a genre he dislikes, for his own world-weary reasons: it’s a thriller, and as he says at the start, immediately after his digression on pizza, he is sick and tired of “suspenseful tales about people surviving mortal danger.” The mere business of writing reminds him of the meaningless “paper jungle” in which he is trapped—a thicket of documents, none of them worth the paper they are written on, despite the officious stamps and letterheads. He even has an aversion to reading, especially novels, which are “invented stories about a life that wasn’t real”; he wants another life for himself, “but not on paper.” He despises the pompous Strobel, who thinks he deserves an American visa because he has written “countless articles against Hitler.” Does Strobel really fancy that there’s some moral equivalency between his rhetorical posturing and the courage of the narrator’s one-legged friend Heinz, “beaten half to death by the Nazis in 1935” and then sent to a concentration camp? This uneasy literary conscience prompts the confession the narrator makes near the end, when he tells an American official, in a spasm of self-contempt, “the full truth.” Is life and its agony merely the raw material for art? “It seems to me,” he says, remembering his time in captivity with other writers, “that we lived through these most terrible stretches in our lives just so we could write about them: the camps, the war, escape, and flight.” It might be Seghers’s reproach to herself. Perhaps she felt guilty about her survival, or was unable to forgive herself for having chosen art not action. This could be why her narrator, previously so sly and cynical, undergoes a last-minute conversion and opts for political engagement. To me, it’s not entirely convincing. Explaining himself, the narrator seems to be making a prepared speech, rather than allowing us to be privy to his thoughts. When he describes his sudden determination to resist the Nazis and says that “Even if they were to shoot me, they’d never be able to eradicate me,” he sounds oddly like Humphrey Bogart’s Rick, who in 1942 in Casablanca makes the same uncharacteristically noble choice by giving up his place on the plane to Lisbon. Hollywood certainly took an interest in Seghers: her second novel, The Seventh Cross, about a manhunt for seven prisoners who escape from a concentration camp, was filmed in 1944, with Spencer Tracy in the leading role. (The adaptation of course overlooked the fact that in the book Tracy’s character was a doctrinaire Communist.) It’s revealing that in Transit Seghers tries literally to ground the decision of her narrator by giving him his own version of the Nazi cult of blood and soil. What he vows to defend is the hills and mountains of Provence and he emphasizes above all the crops that grow from that earth, “its peaches and its grapes.” Napoleon said that an army fights on its stomach. Was Seghers implying that only the thought of food and wine could persuade a Frenchman to take up arms? The narrator’s sentimentalized change of heart is forgivable enough: Seghers needed to go on hoping, and could hardly risk damaging the morale of those who were standing up to Hitler. The end of the war, however, did not do away with the misery of displacement and deracination. Today, the characters Seghers describes are everywhere. People-smugglers cram them into airless trucks and drive them between continents. They wade across the Rio Grande, or crowd into leaky boats to travel from Cuba to Florida or from Indonesia to Australia or from North Africa to Italy. For a while they slipped out of a camp for asylum-seekers near Calais and made nightly treks on foot through the Channel Tunnel to reach England. They even sometimes stow away in the undercarriages of jets flying from Pakistan to Europe: recently one of them, ejected when the incoming plane lowered its landing gear, plummeted out of the sky onto a suburban street in London. Those of us who travel for pleasure, rather than to save our lives, have our own reasons for sympathizing with Transit. We live in a world where people are in constant circulation, where borders have supposedly become porous and distances are abbreviated by jet engines and by electronic communications—yet never has travel been more like travail, bedeviled by bureaucratic obstacles and by the apparatus of security and surveillance that subjects our every movement to scrutiny. In 1969 Brigid Brophy published a fantastical novel called In Transit, an unwitting comic sequel to Seghers’s book. The protagonist is a transsexual who is in transit at the airport in Dublin, which he or she calls “a free-range womb” where “you too can be duty free.” In the heady spirit of the 1960s, Brophy sings the praises of mobility and elasticity, predicting that in the future it will be as easy to flip genders as to flit between countries. It is her novel, not Seghers’s much older one, that now seems wistfully out-of-date. The narrator of Transit refers to an earth that has become “uncomfortable,” and later notices the instability of “this trembling earth.” Our discomfort is now more intense, as we begin to sense that the earth is not merely tremulous but convulsed, furiously protesting against our depredations. The human race now plays the role of Hitler’s army, overrunning and ravaging an entire planet, not just a single continent. And where else can we hope to go? There are no safe havens left, no “fabled cities of other continents” where we can start life all over again or rescind the iniquities of history. It is sobering and alarming to rediscover this book: what Seghers saw as an emergency has now become what we call normality. —PETER CONRAD TRANSIT 1 I saying that the Montreal went down between Dakar and Martinique. That she ran into a mine. The shipping company isn’t releasing any information. It may just be a rumor. But when you compare it to the fate of other ships and their cargoes of refugees which were hounded over all the oceans and never allowed to dock, which were left to burn on the high seas rather than being permitted to drop anchor merely because their passengers’ documents had expired a couple of days before, then what happened to the Montreal seems like a natural death for a ship in wartime. That is, if it isn’t all just a rumor. And provided the ship, in the meantime, hasn’t been captured or ordered back to Dakar. In that case the passengers would now be sweltering in a camp at the edge of the Sahara. Or maybe they’re already happily on the other side of the ocean. Probably you find all of this pretty unimportant? You’re bored?—I am too. May I invite you to join me at my table? Unfortunately I don’t have enough money for a regular supper. But how about a glass of rosé and a slice of pizza? Come, sit with me. Would you like to watch them bake the pizza on the open fire? Then sit next to me. Or would you prefer the view of the Old Harbor? Then you’d better sit across from me. You can see the sun go down behind Fort St. Nicolas. That certainly won’t be boring. Pizza is really a remarkable baked item. It’s round and colorful like an openface fruit pie. But bite into it and you get a mouthful of pepper. Looking at the thing more closely, you realize that those aren’t cherries and raisins on top, but peppers and olives. You get used to it. But unfortunately they now require bread coupons for pizza, too. I’d really like to know whether the Montreal went down or not. What will all those people do over there, if they’ve made it? Start a new life? Take up new professions? Pester committees? Clear the forest primeval? If, that is, there really is a genuine wilderness over there, a wilderness that can rejuvenate everyone and everything. If so, I might almost regret not having gone along.— Because, you know, I actually had the opportunity to go. I had a paid-for ticket, I had a visa, I had a transit permit. But then at the last moment I decided to stay. There was a couple on the Montreal I knew casually. You know yourself what these fleeting acquaintances you make in train stations, consulate waiting THEY’RE rooms, or the visa department of the prefecture are like. The superficial rustle of a few words, like paper money hastily exchanged. Except that sometimes you’re struck by a single exclamation, a word, who knows, a face. It goes right through you, quickly, fleetingly. You look up, you listen, and already you’re involved in something. I’d like to tell someone the whole story from beginning to end. If only I weren’t afraid it was boring. Aren’t you thoroughly fed up with such thrilling stories? Aren’t you sick of all these suspenseful tales about people surviving mortal danger by a hair, about breathtaking escapes? Me, I’m sick and tired of them. If something still thrills me today, then maybe it’s an old worker’s yarn about how many feet of wire he’s drawn in the course of his long life and what tools he used, or the glow of the lamplight by which a few children are doing their homework. Be careful with that rosé! It tastes just the way it looks, like raspberry syrup, but can make you incredibly tipsy. It’s easier then to put up with everything. Easier to talk. But when the time comes to get up, your knees will be wobbly. And depression, a perpetual state of depression will take hold of you—till the next glass of rosé. All you’ll want is to be allowed to just sit there, never again to get involved in anything. In the past I often got embroiled in things I’m ashamed of today. Just a little ashamed—after all, they’re over and done with. On the other hand, I’d be dreadfully ashamed if I were boring someone. Still, I’d like to tell the whole story, just for once, from the beginning. II Toward the end of that winter I was put into a French work camp near Rouen. The uniform I had to wear was the ugliest of any worn by World War armies—a French prestataire’s uniform. At night, because we were foreigners— half prisoners, half soldiers—we slept behind barbed wire; during the day we performed “labor service,” unloading British munitions ships. We were subjected to horrible air raids. The German planes flew so low, their shadows touched us. Back then I understood what was meant by the phrase, “In the shadow of death.” Once I was unloading a ship, working alongside a young guy they called Little Franz. His face was as close to mine as yours is now. It was a sunny day. We heard a hiss in the air. Franz looked up. And then it came plunging down. Its shadow turned his face black. Whoosh, it crashed down next to us. But then, you probably know as much about these things as I do. Eventually this came to an end too. The Germans were approaching. What had we endured all the horrors and suffering for? The end of the world was at hand—tomorrow, tonight, any moment. Because that’s what we all thought the arrival of the Germans would mean. Bedlam broke out in our camp. Some of the men wept, others prayed, several tried to commit suicide, some succeeded. A few of us resolved to clear out before the Last Judgment. But the commandant had set up machine guns in front of the camp gate. In vain, we explained to him that if we stayed, the Germans would shoot all of us—their own countrymen who’d escaped from Germany. But he could only follow the orders he’d been given, and was awaiting further orders instructing him what to do with the camp itself. His superior had long since left; our little town had been evacuated; the farmers from the neighboring villages had all fled. Were the Germans still two days away, or a mere two hours? And yet our commandant wasn’t the worst guy on Earth, you had to give him his due. This wasn’t a real war for him, not so far; he didn’t understand the extent of the evil, the magnitude of the betrayal. We finally came to a kind of unspoken agreement with the man. One machine gun would remain at the gate, because no countermanding order had arrived. But presumably if we climbed over the wall, he wouldn’t aim at us too deliberately. So we climbed the wall, a few dozen of us, in the darkness of night. One of our group, Heinz, had lost his right leg in Spain. After the Civil War was over he sat around in southern prison camps for a long time. The devil only knows how and through what bureaucratic mistake a guy like him, who really was useless for a labor camp, should have been transported north to our camp. And so Heinz had to be lifted over the wall. After that we took turns carrying him as we ran like crazy through the night to stay ahead of the Germans. Each of us had his own particularly persuasive reason for not falling into German hands. I, for one, had escaped from a German concentration camp in 1937 and had swum across the Rhine at night. For half a year afterward I’d been pretty proud of myself. Then other things happened to the world and to me. On my second escape, this time from the French camp, I remembered that first escape from the German camp. Little Franz and I were jogging along together. Like most people in those days we had the simplistic goal of getting across the Loire. We avoided the main road, walking instead across the fields. Passing through deserted villages where the unmilked cows were bellowing, we would search for something to sink our teeth into, but everything had been consumed, from the berries on the gooseberry bushes to the grain in the barns. We wanted something to drink, but the water lines had been cut. We no longer heard any shooting. The village idiot, the only one who’d stayed behind, couldn’t give us any information. That’s when we started feeling uneasy. The lack of human life was more oppressive than the bombing on the docks had been. Finally we came to the road leading to Paris. We certainly weren’t the last to reach it. A silent stream of refugees was still pouring south from the northern villages. Hay wagons, piled high as farmhouses with furniture and poultry cages, with children and ancient grandparents, goats and calves. Trucks carrying a convent of nuns, a little girl pulling her mother in a cart, cars with pretty women wearing the furs they had salvaged, the cars pulled by cows because there were no gas stations anymore; and women carrying their dying children, even dead ones. It was then that I wondered for the first time what these people were fleeing from. Was it from the Germans? That seemed pretty futile since the German troops were after all motorized. Was it from death? That would doubtless catch up with them along the way. But such thoughts came to me only then at that moment, when I saw these most wretched and pitiable refugees. Franz jumped onto one vehicle, and I found a spot on a different truck. On the outskirts of a village, my truck was hit by another truck, and I had to continue on foot from there. I never saw Franz again. Once more I struck out across the fields. I came to a large, out-of-the-way farmhouse that was still occupied. I asked for food and drink and to my great surprise the farmer’s wife set out a plate of soup, wine, and bread for me on a garden table. She told me that after a long family argument, they had just decided to leave. Everything was already packed; they had only to load their truck. While I ate and drank, planes were buzzing by pretty low. But I was too tired to look up from my plate. I also heard some brief bursts of machine-gun fire quite nearby. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from and was too exhausted to think much about it. I just kept thinking that I’d be able to hop onto their truck when the time came. They started the engine. The woman was running nervously back and forth between the truck and the house. You could see how sorry she was to leave her beautiful home. Like others in such circumstances, she was hurriedly gathering up all sorts of useless stuff. Then she rushed over to my table, took away my plate and said, “Fini!” Suddenly I realized she was staring, her mouth wide open, at something on the other side of the garden fence; I turned around and saw, no I heard—actually I don’t know whether I saw or heard them first or both at the same time— motorcyclists. The sound of the truck engine must have drowned out the noise of their motorcycles approaching on the road. Two of them stopped on the other side of the fence; each had two people in the sidecar, and they were wearing gray-green uniforms. One said in German, so loud that I could hear it: “Goddam it, now the new drive belt is torn too!” The Germans were here already! They’d caught up with me. I don’t know how I had imagined the arrival of the Germans: With thunder and earthquakes? But at first nothing at all happened besides two more motorcycles pulling up on the other side of the garden fence. Still, the effect was just as powerful, maybe even more so. I sat there paralyzed, my shirt instantly soaking wet. Now I felt what I hadn’t felt during my escape from the first camp, not even while I was unloading the ships under the low-flying planes. For the first time in my life I was scared to death. Please be patient with me. I’ll get to the point soon. You understand, don’t you? There comes a time when you have to tell someone the whole story, everything, just the way it happened. Today I can’t figure out how I could have been so afraid, and of what. Afraid of being discovered? Of being stood up against a wall and shot? On the docks I could have disappeared just as easily. Of being sent back to Germany? Of being slowly tortured to death? It could have happened to me while I was swimming across the Rhine. What’s more I’d always liked living on the edge, always felt at home with the smell of danger. As soon as I started thinking about what it was that I was so incredibly frightened of, I became less afraid. I did what was both the most sensible and the most foolish thing I could do: I remained sitting there. I had intended to drill two holes into my belt, and that’s what I now did. The farmer came into the garden with a blank look on his face and said to his wife: “Now we might as well stay.” “Of course,” his wife said with relief, “but you’d better go to the barn. I’ll deal with them; they won’t eat me.” “Me neither,” her husband said. “I’m not a soldier; I’ll show them my club foot.” In the meantime an entire convoy of motorcycles had driven up on the grassy plot on the other side of the fence. They didn’t even enter the garden. After three minutes they drove on. For the first time in four years I had heard German commands again. Oh, how they grated! It wouldn’t have taken much more for me to jump up and stand at attention. Later I heard that this very same motorcycle column had cut off the refugee escape route along which I had come. And that all this discipline, all these commands, all these orders had produced the most terrible disorder—bloodshed, mothers screaming, the dissolution of our world order. And yet thrumming like an undertone in these commands was something terribly obvious, insidiously honest: Don’t complain that your world is about to perish. You haven’t defended it, and you’ve allowed it to be destroyed! So don’t give us any crap now! Just make it quick; let us take charge! Suddenly I felt quite calm. I thought, I’m sitting here, and the Germans are moving past me and occupying France. But France has often been occupied— and the occupiers all had to withdraw again. France has often been sold down the river, and you, too, my gray-green fellows, have often been sold down the river. My fear vanished completely; the whole dreadful swastika episode was a nightmare haunting me; I saw the mightiest armies of the world marching up to the other side of my garden fence and withdraw; I saw the cockiest of empires collapse and the young and the bold take heart; I saw the masters of the world rise up and come crashing down. I alone had immeasurably long to live. In any event, my dream of getting across the Loire was now at an end. I decided to go to Paris. I knew a couple of decent people there, that is, provided they were still decent. III I walked to Paris; it took me five days. German motorized columns drove along beside me. The rubber of their tires was superb; the young soldiers were the elite—strong and handsome; they had occupied a country without a fight; they were cheerful. Some farmers were already working the fields on the side of the road—they had sown their crops on free land. In one village bells were ringing for a dead child who had bled to death on the road. A farm wagon had broken down at one of the crossroads. Perhaps it belonged to the dead child’s family. German soldiers ran over to the wagon and fixed the wheels; the farmers thanked them for their kindness. A young fellow my age was sitting on a rock; he was wearing a coat over the remnants of a uniform. He was crying. As I walked by I patted him on the back, saying, “It will all pass.” He said, “We would have held the place, but those pigs gave us only enough bullets to last an hour. We were betrayed.” “We haven’t heard the last of this,” I told him. I kept walking. Early one Sunday morning I walked into Paris. A swastika flag was actually flying before the Hotel de Ville. And they were actually playing the Hohenfriedberg March in front of Notre Dame. I couldn’t believe it. I walked diagonally across Paris. And everywhere there were fleets of German cars and swastikas. I felt quite hollow, as if emptied of all emotion. All this trouble, all this misfortune that had befallen another people had been caused by my people. For it was obvious that they talked like me and whistled the same tunes. As I was walking to Clichy where my old friends the Binnets lived, I wondered whether the Binnets would be sensible enough to understand that, even though I was one of these people, I was still myself. I wondered whether they would take me in without identity papers. They did, and they were sensible. In the past this sensibleness of theirs even used to bother me! Before the war, for six months, I’d been Yvonne Binnet’s boyfriend. She was only seventeen. And I, fool that I was, had fled from my homeland to escape the mess, the evil fog of dense emotions. I was secretly annoyed at the Binnet family’s clear-headed common sense. I thought all the family members were just too reasonable in their view of life. For instance, from their sensible point of view, people went on strike so that next week they could buy a better cut of meat. The Binnets even thought that if you earned three more francs a day, then your family would not only feel less hungry but also stronger and happier. And Yvonne’s good sense made her believe that love existed for our pleasure, hers and mine. But I knew deep down in my bones—of course I didn’t tell her this—that love sometimes goes along with suffering, that there’s also death, separation, and hardship, and that happiness can overtake you for no reason at all, as can the sadness into which it often imperceptibly turns. But now the Binnet family’s clearheaded common sense proved to be a blessing. They were glad to see me and took me in. They didn’t think I was a Nazi just because I was a German. The old Binnets were at home, as well as the youngest son who wasn’t yet in the army and the second son who had shed his uniform in the nick of time when he saw how things stood. But their daughter Annette’s husband was a prisoner of the Germans. She now lived at her parents’ house with her child. My Yvonne, they told me with embarrassment, had been evacuated to the South, where she had married her cousin a week ago. That didn’t bother me at all. At that moment I wasn’t the least bit in the mood for love. Since their factory was shut down, the Binnet men stayed at home. As for me, all I had was time. So we had nothing better to do from morning till night than talk about what was going on. We all agreed on how much the invasion of Germany suited the rulers here. The elder Binnet seemed to understand quite a few things as well or better than any Sorbonne professor. The only thing we disagreed on was Russia. Half of the Binnets claimed that Russia was thinking only of itself and had left us in the lurch. The other half claimed that the French and German rulers had agreed that their armies should be launched at the Russians first instead being used in the West, and it was this that had thwarted Russia. Trying to make peace among us, old man Binnet said that the truth would come to light, that one day the files would all be opened, by which time he’d be long dead. Please forgive this digression. We’re getting close to the main point. Annette, the Binnets’ older daughter, had been assigned some work at home. I had nothing better to do, so I helped her pick up and deliver her laundry bundles. We took the Métro to the Latin Quarter. Got off at the Odéon stop. While Annette went to her shop on Boulevard Saint Germain, I waited on a bench near the Odéon station exit. Once Annette took a long time. But what did it matter to me? The sun was shining down on my bench; I watched the people going up and down the Métro stairs; two women were hawking Paris Soir, shouting in an ancient mutual hatred for each other that increased whenever one of them took in two sous more than the other. For to be honest, although the two women stood next to each other, only the one was making any sales, while the other’s pile never got any lighter. The bad saleswoman suddenly turned to the lucky one and cursed her wildly. In a flash she flung her entire rotten life at the head of the other woman, interrupting herself only to cry out, Paris Soir! Two German soldiers came over and laughed. That really annoyed me, as much as it would have if the drunken newspaper seller were my French foster mother. Some women porters sitting next to me were talking about a young woman who had cried all night after being detained by the police because she was walking with a German soldier while her own husband was a prisoner of war. The trucks of refugees kept rolling down the Boulevard Saint Germain without interruption. Between them darted the small swastika-emblazoned cars of German officers. Some of the plane tree leaves were already falling on us, for that year everything was drying up early. But I kept thinking about how heavily time weighed on me because I had so much of it. It really is hard to experience war as a stranger among a strange people. Just then, Paul came walking along the avenue. Paul Strobel had been in the camp with me. Once while we were unloading a ship, someone had stepped on his hand. For three days they thought his hand was done for. He had cried back then. Actually I could understand that. He prayed when we heard the Germans were already surrounding the camp. Believe me, I could understand that too. Now he was far removed from such situations. He was coming from the direction of the Rue de l’Ancienne Comédie. An old buddy from the camp! And in the middle of Swastika-Paris! I called to him, “Paul!” He was startled, but then he recognized me. He looked amazingly cheerful and was well dressed. We sat down in front of a little café on the Carrefour de l’Odéon. I was glad to see him again. But he seemed pretty distracted. Up to that point, I had never had anything to do with writers. My parents saw to it that I was trained as a mechanic. In the camp everyone knew Paul Strobel was a writer. We were assigned to unload on the same dock. The German planes were heading straight for us. While I was at that camp, Paul was a sort of buddy of mine, a somewhat funny, slightly crazy camp pal, but always a pal. Since our escape I hadn’t experienced anything new, and for me the old stuff hadn’t yet blown over. I was still half in escape mode, half in hiding. But I could tell he had finished with that chapter of his life; something new seemed to have happened to him that gave him strength. All the things I was still deeply caught up in were just a memory for him. He said, “Next week I’m going to the unoccupied zone. My family lives in Cassis near Marseille. I have a danger visa for the United States.” I asked him what that was. “A special emergency visa for especially endangered people,” he said. “Are you in special danger?” I just meant to ask whether he was perhaps endangered in a more unusual way than the rest of us in this now dangerous part of the world. He looked at me in surprise, a little annoyed. Then he said in a whisper, “I wrote a book and countless articles against Hitler. If they find me here—Why are you smiling?” I wasn’t smiling at all, I was in no mood to smile; I thought of Heinz who had been beaten half to death by the Nazis in 1935, who was then put in a German concentration camp, escaping to Paris, only to end up in Spain with the International Brigade where he then lost a leg, and who, one-legged, was then dragged through all of France’s concentration camps, ending up in ours. Where was he now? I also thought of flocks of birds being able to fly away. The whole earth was uncomfortable, and still I quite liked this kind of life; I didn’t envy Paul for that thing he had—what was it called? “My danger visa’s been confirmed by the American Consulate at the Place de la Concorde. My sister’s best friend is engaged to a silk merchant from Lyon. He brought me my mail. He’s driving back there in his car and will take me with him. He just needs to get a general permit saying how many people he’s taking. That way I can circumvent the German safe conduct.” I looked at his right hand, the one that had been stepped on back then. The thumb was a little shriveled. Paul hid his thumb. “How did you get to Paris?” I asked. “By a miracle,” he said. “Three of us escaped together, Hermann Achselroth, Ernst Sperber, and I. You know Achselroth, don’t you? His plays?” I didn’t know any of his plays, but I did remember Achselroth. An exceptionally good-looking fellow, who would have looked better in an officer’s uniform than the dirty prestataire rags he wore like a Landsknecht. He was famous, Paul assured me. The three of them had gotten as far as L. and were pretty much exhausted. Then they came to a crossroads, a real parting of the ways, Paul said, smiling—I liked him very much then, and I was glad to be sitting there with him, both of us still alive. Anyway, he said, it was a real crossroads, with a deserted inn. They’d been sitting on the steps of the inn when a French military car drove up, stuffed with military supplies. The three of them watched as the driver began dumping everything out. Suddenly Achselroth went over to the fellow and exchanged a few words with him. The rest of us weren’t paying much attention. Then Achselroth climbed into the driver’s seat of the car and roared off, without even waving good-bye. The French driver took the other branch of the crossroad and started walking toward the nearest village. “How much do you think he gave him?” I asked. “Five thousand? Six?” “You’re crazy! Six thousand! For a car! And an army car at that! And don’t forget, the driver’s honor had to be paid for, too! On top of the price of the car. Desertion while on duty, that’s treason! He must have paid the man at least sixteen thousand! We, of course, had no idea that Achselroth had that much money in his pockets. I tell you, he didn’t even turn once to look at us. How awful it all was. What a mean, rotten thing to do!” “But it wasn’t all mean. Not all of it was awful. Do you still remember Heinz, the one-legged guy? They helped him get over the wall back then. And they didn’t leave him behind, I’m sure they had to carry him. Anyway, they schlepped him all the way into the unoccupied territory.” “Did they get away?” “I don’t know.” “But that guy Achselroth, he made it. He’s already on some ship, on his way to Cuba!” “To Cuba? Achselroth? Why?” “How can you still ask why? He just took the first visa and the first ship he could.” “If he had split his money with you two, Paul, then he couldn’t have bought himself a car.” The story as a whole amused me because of its utter consistency. “What are your plans?” Paul asked. “What are you going to do now?” I had to admit that I hadn’t made any plans; that the future was hazy for me. He asked whether I belonged to any party. I said no. Back then, I told him, I’d ended up in a German concentration camp without belonging to any party, because even without belonging to a party I wouldn’t put up with some of their dirty tricks. I escaped from that first concentration camp, the German one, because if I was going to kick the bucket I didn’t want to do it behind barbed wire. I was also going to tell Paul how I’d swum across the Rhine, at night in the fog; but it occurred to me that by now there’d been lots of people who’d swum across lots of rivers. And so I didn’t tell him my story so as not to bore him. Annette must have given up on me and gone back home by herself long ago. I had thought Paul wanted to spend the evening with me. He was silent now, looking at me in a way that puzzled me. Finally, in a changed tone of voice, he said, “Listen, you could do me a huge favor. Would you?” I wondered what he wanted me to do. Of course I was willing. “In the letter my sister’s friend sent me—she’s the friend I mentioned before, the one who’s engaged to the silk merchant who wants to take me along in his car—in that letter she enclosed a second letter addressed to a man I know well. The man’s wife had asked her, as a favor, to see that the letter was delivered to him in Paris. Actually, in her letter she said that the man’s wife had been desperate, had pleaded with her. “The husband had stayed in Paris; he couldn’t get out in time; he’s still here. You’ve surely heard of the writer Weidel, haven’t you?”—I’d never heard of him. Paul quickly assured me that this wouldn’t affect the favor he was asking of me. He suddenly seemed uneasy. Maybe he’d been uneasy the whole time and I just hadn’t noticed. I was curious to find out what all this was leading up to. Mr. Weidel, he continued, lived quite nearby, on the Rue de Vaugirard. In a small hotel between the Rue de Rennes and Boulevard Raspail. Paul himself had already gone there earlier today. But when he asked whether Mr. Weidel was in, they gave him a strange look. The woman who owned the hotel had refused to take the letter. Yet, she had given only an evasive answer when he asked whether the gentleman had moved elsewhere. Would I be willing to go to the hotel again with the letter and ask for the man’s address so that the letter could be delivered to him? Would I be willing to do that? I had to laugh and said, “Of course, if that’s all there is to it!” “Maybe he’s been picked up by the Gestapo?” “I’ll find out,” I said. Paul amused me. On the dock, while we were unloading the ships, I hadn’t noticed if he was any more afraid than the rest of us. We were all afraid, and he was too. In our shared fear he hadn’t said anything more stupid than the rest of us. Like the rest of us he had slaved away, because when you’re afraid it’s better to be doing something, and better yet to be doing a lot, than to wait for death, shivering and trembling like baby chicks waiting for a hawk to swoop down on them. And this keeping busy in the face of death has nothing to do with bravery. Don’t you agree? Even though it’s sometimes mistaken for bravery and rewarded as such. But at that moment Paul was certainly more afraid than I was. He didn’t like this Paris, three quarters of it deserted; he hated the swastika flag, and saw a spy in every man who followed him. At one time Paul probably did have some success as a writer; he had wanted to be incredibly successful and he couldn’t bear to think that he was now just a poor devil like me. So in his mind he twisted it around, feeling terribly persecuted. He firmly believed that the Gestapo had nothing better to do than to wait for him in front of Weidel’s hotel. So I took the letter. Paul again assured me that Weidel had really been a great writer. It was his way of making my errand less unpleasant, which was unnecessary in my case. Weidel could have been a tie salesman, for all I cared. I’d always enjoyed unraveling tangled yarn, just as I had always enjoyed messing up neat skeins of yarn. Paul asked me to meet him the next day at the Café Capoulade. The hotel on Rue de Vaugirard was a tall, narrow building, an average Paris hotel. The owner was quite pretty. She had a fresh, soft face and pitch-black hair. She was wearing a white silk blouse. I asked without thinking whether she had a room available. She smiled even as her eyes looked me coldly up and down. “As many as you want.” “But first, there’s something else,” I said. “You have a guest here, Mr. Weidel, is he in by chance?” Her face, her attitude, changed in a way you only see among the French. The most courteous composure can suddenly turn to furious anger when they lose control. She said, quite hoarse with fury, “For the second time today someone’s asked me about this person. The gentleman has moved, how often do I have to explain that?” I said, “You’re explaining it to me for the first time. Would you be so kind as to tell me where the gentlemen is staying now.” “How should I know?” the woman said. It began to dawn on me that she was afraid, but why? “I don’t know where he’s staying now. I really can’t tell you anything else.” So the Gestapo’s picked him up after all, I thought. I put my hand on the woman’s arm. She didn’t pull it away, but looked at me with a mixture of scorn and unease. “I don’t know this man at all,” I assured her. “Someone asked me to give him a message. That’s all. Something that’s important to him. I wouldn’t want to keep even a stranger waiting.” She looked at me carefully. Then she led me into a small room next to the hotel lobby. Finally she came out with it. “You can’t imagine what a lot of trouble this person has caused me! He came on the 15th towards evening; by that time the Germans were already marching in. I chose to stay; I didn’t close my hotel. You don’t leave during a war, my father used to say. If you do, they’ll mess everything up and steal everything. And why should I be afraid of the Germans? I prefer them to the Reds. They won’t lay a hand on my bank account. Anyway, Mr. Weidel arrives and he’s trembling. I find it odd that somebody should be trembling with fear of his own countrymen. But I was glad to have a paying guest. I was the only hotel open in the entire quarter. When I gave him the registration forms to fill out, he asked me not to register him with the police. As you must know, Monsieur Langeron, the chief of police, emphatically insists that all foreigners be registered. We have to maintain order, right?” “I’m not so sure,” I replied. “The Nazi soldiers are all foreigners too, unregistered ones.” “Well this Mr. Weidel, in any case, made a fuss about his registration. He hadn’t given up his room in Auteuil, he said, and he was still registered there. I didn’t like it one bit. Mr. Weidel had stayed at my hotel once before with his wife. A beautiful woman, only she didn’t take care of herself and cried often. I assure you, the man made trouble everywhere. All right, so I left him unregistered. Only for that one night, though, I told him. He paid in advance. The following morning the man doesn’t come down. In short, I go up and open the door with my master key. I push back the bolt with this contraption I had made. She opened a drawer and showed me the device, a cleverly designed hook. “The man was lying on his bed, still fully dressed, a little glass bottle empty on the night table. If that little bottle was full originally, then he had enough pills in his stomach to kill all the cats in our quarter. “Luckily I have a good friend at the Saint Sulpice police station. He was able to straighten it out for me. First we registered him for the day before he died. Then we arranged his burial. That man really caused me more trouble than the German invasion.” “In any case, he’s dead,” I said and got up to leave. The story bored me. I had witnessed too many messy deaths. Then the woman said, “Don’t think that my problems are over. This man has actually managed to create trouble for me from beyond the grave.” I sat down again. “He left a suitcase. What am I supposed to do with it? It was sitting here in my office when the thing happened. I’d forgotten about it. I don’t want to stir things up again at the police station.” “Well, throw it in the Seine,” I said, “or burn it in your furnace.” “That’s impossible,” the woman said, “I can’t take the chance.” “Well, after all, if you were able to get rid of the body, I’m sure you can deal with the suitcase.” “That’s something quite different. The man is dead now. It’s in the official records. But the suitcase is a forensic object, it’s tangible property, it can be inherited; claimants might turn up.” I was already sick of the whole affair. I said, “I’ll be happy to take the suitcase, I don’t mind. I know someone who was a friend of the dead man; he can take it to the widow.” The hotel owner was quite relieved. But she did ask me to fill out a receipt for her. I wrote a false name on a piece of paper that she dated and receipted. She shook my hand warmly, then I left quickly. I had completely lost the favorable impression I had formed of her earlier. No matter how pretty she had seemed to me initially. I suddenly saw in her long, cunning head only a skull to which little black curls had been attached. IV The following morning I went to the Capoulade with the suitcase. I waited in vain for Paul. Had he left in a hurry with the silk merchant? Was it because of the sign on the café door, “No Jews allowed,” that he didn’t come? But then it occurred to me that he had recited the Paternoster when the Germans arrived. Besides, the sign had already disappeared by the time I left the Capoulade. Maybe one of the customers or the proprietor himself had thought the sign too ridiculous; maybe it had been flimsily tacked up, fallen off, and not been important enough to anyone to be nailed up again. It was a beautiful day, the little suitcase wasn’t heavy. I walked to the Concorde. But even though the sun shone brightly that morning I was overcome by the kind of misery that the French call a “cafard.” The French lived so well in their beautiful country; everything went so smoothly for them—all the joys of existence—but sometimes even they lose their joy in life and then there is nothing but boredom, a Godless emptiness: a cafard. Why should I be spared? My cafard had already set in the day before when I no longer thought the hotel owner pretty. Now the cafard swallowed me up, body and soul. Sometimes there’s a gurgling in a large puddle because inside there’s another hole, an even deeper puddle. That’s how the cafard was gurgling in me. And when I saw the huge swastika flag on the Place de la Concorde, I crept down into the darkness of the Métro. A cafard had also taken hold of the Binnet family. Annette was furious with me because I hadn’t waited for her the previous day. Her mother thought it was time that I got some sort of identification papers, and the newspapers were saying there would soon be ration cards for bread. I didn’t eat with the family that day because my feelings were hurt. I crawled into the hole under the roof that was my room. I could have brought a girl up with me, but I didn’t feel in the mood for that either. They talk about fatal wounds and fatal illnesses; they also speak of fatal boredom. I assure you, my boredom was deadly. That evening, out of sheer boredom, I broke open the lock on the suitcase. It contained little more than paper. And out of sheer boredom I began to read. I read on and on. I was spellbound, maybe because I’d never before read a book to the end. But no, that couldn’t be the reason. Paul was right. I didn’t know anything about writing. It wasn’t my world. Yet I think the man who’d written this was an expert in his art. I forgot my cafard. I forgot my deadly boredom. And if I’d had fatal wounds I would have forgotten them too while I was absorbed in reading. And as I read line after line, I also felt that this was my own language, my mother tongue, and it flowed into me like milk into a baby. It didn’t rasp and grate like the language that came from the throats of the Nazis, their murderous commands and objectionable insistence on obedience, their disgusting boasts.—This was serious, calm, and still. I felt as if I were alone again with my own family. I came across words my mother had used to soothe me when I was angry and horrible words she had used to admonish me when I had lied or been in a fight. I also stumbled on words I had used myself back then, but had forgotten because I never again felt the emotion I needed to express them. There were new words, too, that I sometimes use now. The whole thing was a fairly complicated story with some complicated characters. One of whom, I thought, resembled me. The story deals with . . . oh no, I’d better not bore you with that. You’ve read enough stories in your life. For me, you might say, it was the first. I’d had more than enough experiences, but I’d never read anything! This was something new for me. And how avidly I read it! In the story, as I said, there were a lot of crazy characters, really mixed-up people; almost all of them got involved in bad, devious things, even those who tried to resist. I had read entranced like this, no listened, only as a child. I felt the same joy, the same dread. The forest was just as impenetrable. But this was a forest for adults. The wolf was just as bad, but it was a wolf who bewitched grown-up children. And the old fairy-tale magic that turned boys into bears and girls into lilies took hold of me anew in this story, threatening again with grim transformations. But the people in this story didn’t annoy me with their infuriating behavior, as they would have done in real life, stupidly allowing themselves to be taken in, heading toward disastrous fates. I was able to understand their actions because I was at last able to follow them from the very beginning to the point where it all came together as it had to. Already they seemed to me less evil—even the man who resembled me like a pea in a pod—only because the writer had described them. They all became clear and pure, as if they had done their penance, as if they had already passed through a little purgatory, the small fire that was the dead man’s brain. And then suddenly, after some three hundred pages, everything stopped. I never found out how it ended. The Germans had entered Paris. The man had packed up everything, his few belongings, his writing paper, and left me alone looking at the last, almost empty page. Again I was overwhelmed by an immense sadness, by deadly boredom. Why did he commit suicide? He shouldn’t have left me alone. He should have finished writing his story. I could have kept reading till dawn. He should have gone on writing, gone on writing innumerable stories that would have protected me from evil. If he could only have met me in time! Instead of that fool Paul who got me into this mess. I would have pleaded with him to go on living. I would have found him a hiding place. I would have brought him food and drink. But now he was dead. Two typewritten lines on the last page. And I was left all alone! As miserable as before! I frittered away the next day looking for Paul. He had disappeared. I suppose because he was afraid. And yet the dead man had been his copain, his buddy, his pal. I thought of the story he had told me about the man who bought the car at the crossroads. Oh well, Paul himself was a pretty good one for leaving you in the lurch! In the evening I crept up to my hole very early so I could return to my story. But I was disappointed this time. I wanted to read it all again. But unfortunately it resisted me. On my first reading I had greedily absorbed everything. Now I had as little desire to read the story again as I would to live through the same adventure twice, the same series of dangers. So I had nothing more to read; the man wasn’t going to rise from the dead for my sake; his story was unfinished, and I was alone and demoralized up in my hole with his suitcase. I rummaged around in it, finding a pair of new silk socks, a couple of handkerchiefs, an envelope with foreign stamps. Apparently the dead man had collected stamps as a hobby. Well, so what. I also found a small elegant case containing nail files, a Spanish language textbook, an empty little perfume bottle; I unscrewed it and sniffed—nothing. The dead man was probably a squirrel, now he was done squirreling. There were also two more letters. I read them carefully, though not just out of idle curiosity. Please, you must believe me. In the first letter someone informed him that his story promised to be quite good and worthy of standing alongside all the other stories he had written so far in his life. But unfortunately because of the war no one was publishing such stories now. In the second letter a woman, probably his wife, wrote that he should not expect her ever to come back to him; their life together was over. I put the letters back. As I saw it: Nobody wanted his stories anymore. His wife had run away. He was alone. The whole world was collapsing, and then the Germans came to Paris. That was too much for him. So he put an end to it. I started fiddling with the broken locks trying to fix them so that I could lock the suitcase again. What was I supposed to do with it? A story only three-fourths completed . . . Take it to the Pont de l’Alma and throw it in the Seine? I would as soon have drowned a child! Suddenly I remembered the letter Paul had given me —and let me tell you right now, it led to my undoing. Oddly enough, up to that point I had completely forgotten the letter, as if Providence had sent me the suitcase out of the blue. Perhaps if I read the letter, I thought, it might give me some clue as to what to do with the things. It contained two enclosures. One was a letter from the Mexican Consulate in Marseille saying that a visa and travel funds were waiting for him there. This was followed by all sorts of additional details—names, numbers, committees— which I skimmed over. The other was a letter from the woman who had left him, written in the same handwriting. Only now, as I was comparing the two, I took note of the handwriting—tight and neat, like a child’s; what I really mean is clean, not neat. She urged her husband to come to Marseille. She had to see him, to see him right away. He must not delay a second; he was to join her immediately on receiving this letter, no matter what! It would probably take them a long time to get out of this cursed country. And the visa might expire. Even though the visa had been obtained, and the trip paid for. But there was no ship that would take them straight to their destination. They had to cross other countries to get there. And those countries demanded transit visas, which took a long time and were hard to get. So everything could fall apart if they didn’t get together at once! Only the visa was assured. And even that would be valid only for a certain period of time. Everything now depended on the transit visa. The letter seemed a bit confused to me. What did she suddenly want from this man whom she had left for good? To leave the country with him, even though she hadn’t wanted to stay with him at any price? It occurred to me that the dead man by dying had escaped new anguish and fresh complications. And after I reread the letter and the entire mishmash of wanting to see him again, of transit visas, consulates, and transit dates, it seemed to me that his present resting place was a safe and reliable one and would provide him with perfect rest. In any case, I knew now what to do with the suitcase. I would take it to the Mexican Consulate here in Paris. The consul would send all the documents to his counterpart in Marseille. Because that’s where the wife would be inquiring for news. Or at least this is how I imagined it would work. So, the following day I asked a police officer where to find the Mexican Consulate. At my question, the officer looked at me briefly. This was probably the first time he, a Parisian traffic policeman at the Place de Clichy, had ever been asked for the address of the Mexican Consulate. He searched in a little red book for the address. Then he looked at me again as if to decipher how I was connected with Mexico. I was amused by my own question. There are countries you’re familiar with from boyhood on without ever having laid eyes on them. They’re exciting countries, God knows why. A picture, a small snaking section of a river in an atlas, the mere sound of the name, a postage stamp. Nothing interested me about Mexico. I didn’t know anything about the country and had never read anything about it, probably because even as a boy I didn’t liked to read. I’d never heard anything about the country that had stuck in my mind. I knew that it had oil, cacti, and huge straw hats. And whatever else it may have had, interested me as little as it did the dead man. I dragged the little suitcase from the Place de l’Alma Métro station to the Rue Longuin. It was a pretty neighborhood. Most of the houses were closed down. The quarter was nearly deserted. The rich had all gone south. They had left in time, before getting a whiff of the war now scorching their country. How gentle the hills of Meudon on the other side of the Seine! How blue the air! German trucks were rolling continuously along the riverbank. For the first time since I’d come to Paris I wondered what it was I was actually waiting for here. Lots of dry leaves lay on Avenue Wilson; summer was already over. Yet it was barely August. I had been cheated of summer. The Mexican Consulate turned out to be a small house, painted a light yellow; it stood at an odd angle in one corner of a beautifully paved courtyard full of plants. There were probably courtyards just like this in Mexico. I rang the bell at the gate. The single high window was closed. A shield with a coat of arms hung above the inner door. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it even though it was shiny and new. I did make out an eagle perched on a thicket of cacti. At first I thought this house was also uninhabited. But when I dutifully rang again, a heavyset man appeared on the stairs on the other side of the inner door. He looked me up and down with his single eye—the other eye socket was empty. My first Mexican. I looked at him curiously. He just shrugged in answer to my question. He was only the caretaker, he said; the legation was in Vichy; the consul had not returned; the telegraph was down. Then he withdrew. I imagined all Mexicans were like him, broad, silent, one-eyed—a nation of Cyclopses! One should get to know all the peoples of the world, I thought. Suddenly I felt sorry for the dead man whom I had envied up to then. In the following week I went to the Mexican Consulate almost every day. The one-eyed man always waved me off from the upstairs window. I probably looked like a crazy man with my little suitcase. Why was I so persistent? Conscientiousness? Boredom? Because the house attracted me? One morning there was a car parked outside the fence. Maybe the consul had arrived? I rang the bell like crazy. My Cyclops appeared on the stairs, but this time he angrily shouted at me to beat it, the bell wasn’t there for me to ring. I walked irresolutely to the next street corner. When I turned around again, I was amazed. The car was still parked outside the consulate, but now the place was teeming with people. And this crowd had appeared behind my back within a few minutes. I don’t know what sort of magnetic force had drawn them there, what mysterious, psychic communication. They couldn’t possibly all be from the neighborhood. But how had they gotten there? Spaniards of all kinds were probably hidden away in the nooks and crannies of the city, like me in mine, having escaped much the same way I had. But now the swastika had followed them here, too. I asked a few questions and discovered why they were gathering here. There was a rumor, a hope that this faraway nation would take in all Republican Spaniards. There were also ships ready to sail in the harbors of Bordeaux, and they now felt they were all under such powerful protection that not even the Germans could interfere with their departure. An old, emaciated, yellow-skinned Spaniard said bitterly that it was all nonsense. Although there might be visas available because Mexico now had a popular government, unfortunately you couldn’t receive a safe conduct from the Germans. In fact, quite the contrary had happened. The Germans were capturing Spaniards here and in Brussels and handing them over to Franco. Then another man, a young one with round black eyes, called out that the ships were not in Bordeaux, but in Marseille. And they were ready to sail. He even knew their names: Republica, Esperanza, and Passionaria. Just then my Cyclops came down the stairs. I was dumbstruck. He was smiling. It was only with me that he was grouchy as if I were an imposter. He handed each of us a piece of paper while patiently explaining in a soft voice that we must write down our names so that the consul could see us, one at a time. He gave me one of the forms too, but silently and with a warning look. If only I had allowed myself to be intimidated! On my piece of paper I found the time at which I was to appear. On a whim I wrote down the name I had given the dead man’s landlady. My own name never entered the picture. I was given an appointment for the following Monday, but several things happened in Paris that weekend which proved to be significant for me, too. As elsewhere, the Germans had put up posters in Clichy that depicted a German soldier helping French women and looking after children. In Clichy all these posters were torn to shreds overnight. There were a couple of arrests, and after that masses of leaflets against the Nazis started circulating for the first time. Here they call these little leaflets papillons, butterflies. The best friend of the Binnet’s youngest son had gotten mixed up in this, and the Binnets feared for the safety of their sons. Their cousin Marcel suggested the boys disappear for a while into the unoccupied zone. So Marcel, the Binnets’ two sons, and the friend met up to make plans. I was infected by their travel preparations. Suddenly I didn’t have the least desire to hide away in Paris anymore. I imagined the unoccupied territory as an overgrown, wild country, a confused jumble in which a person like me could get lost if he chose to. And if, for a while, my life was going to consist of being chased from one place to another, then I wanted at least to be chased to beautiful cities and strange unknown places. They were glad to have me join them. The morning before our departure I once more carried the little suitcase to the Mexican Consulate. This time, with the piece of paper I’d been given, I was allowed to enter. I found myself in a cool, circular room that matched the strange exterior of the house. They called out the name I had given, repeating it three times before I remembered that it was mine. My Cyclops escorted me only reluctantly and, I felt, mistrustfully. I didn’t know who the rotund man was who received me. Was he the consul himself, the deputy consul, the deputy consul’s secretary, or a temporary secretary? I set the suitcase down under the man’s nose, while explaining truthfully that it belonged to someone who had committed suicide but who had a Mexican visa and that the contents of the suitcase should be delivered to his wife. I never had the chance to mention the dead man’s name. The rotund man interrupted my account, which apparently displeased him. He said, “Excuse me, sir. But I couldn’t help you even in normal times. Much less now that the postal service has been interrupted. You cannot ask us to put the property left by this person into our courier bag, just because my government once provided him with a visa while he was alive. It’s out of the question. Please forgive me. But you must agree. I am the Mexican vice consul, I am not a notary public. While he was alive this man may also have received other visas, Uruguayan, Chilean, what do I know. You could, by the same token, turn to my colleagues at these consulates. But you’d get the same answer. Surely you can understand our position.” I had to admit that the vice consul was right. I felt embarrassed. I left. The crowd outside the fence had grown. Countless shining eyes turned toward the gate. For these men and women the consulate wasn’t merely a government agency, a visa wasn’t just government office trash. In their desolation, which was exceeded only by their faith, they saw this house as the country and the country as this house. An infinitely large house in which lived a welcoming nation. Here set into the yellow wall was the door to the house. And once across the threshold, you were already a guest. Walking through this crowd for the last time, everything in me that could hope and suffer with other people was awakened, and the part of me that drew a sort of bold pleasure from my own and other people’s desolation, and saw suffering as an adventure, dwindled away. After that I decided to use the suitcase myself since my backpack was torn. I stuffed my few belongings on top of the dead man’s papers. Perhaps I would actually get to Marseille one day. We needed German permission to get across the demarcation line. And so we spent a couple of days, still undecided, in the rural towns near the border. They were teeming with German soldiers. Finally at an inn we found a farmer who owned some land on the other side of the border. At dusk he led us across through a tobacco field. We embraced him and rewarded him with gifts. We kissed the first French border guard we met. We were deeply moved and felt liberated. I needn’t tell you that it proved to be a delusion. 2 I of course what unoccupied France was like in the fall of 1940. The cities’ train stations, their shelters, and even the public squares and churches were full of refugees. They came from the north, the occupied territory and the “forbidden zone,” from the Départements of Alsace, Lorraine, and the Moselle. And even as I was fleeing to Paris I realized these were merely the remnants of those wretched human masses as so many had died on the road or on the trains. But I hadn’t counted on the fact that many would also be born on the way. While I was searching for a place to sleep in the Toulouse train station, I had to climb over a woman lying among suitcases, bundles, and piles of guns, nursing a baby. How the world has aged in this single year! The infant looked old and wrinkled, the nursing mother’s hair was gray, and the faces of the baby’s two little brothers watching over her shoulder seemed shameless, old, and sad. Old also were the eyes of these two boys from whom nothing had been concealed, neither the mystery of death nor the mystery of birth. The trains were still packed with soldiers in ragged uniforms openly reviling their superiors, cursing their marching orders, yet following them nevertheless, the devil only knew where to, in order to stand guard in some leftover part of their country, at a concentration camp or a border crossing that would surely have been moved by the next day. Or they might even be loaded onto ships headed for Africa because a commander in some small cove had decided to defy the Germans, but would probably have already been relieved of his command long before these soldiers could get there. For the time being they marched on. Maybe because the senseless marching order was at least something to hold on to, a substitute for some command from on high, a great rallying cry, or for the lost Marseillaise. At one point in the journey they handed us the remnants of a man—a head and a torso; instead of arms and legs, empty uniform parts dangling down. We squeezed him in between us and stuck a cigarette between his lips since he had no hands; it burned his lips, he growled and suddenly started crying, “If only I knew what it was all for.” We felt like crying, too. We were scrambling around in a big senseless arc, sometimes spending nights in shelters, then in the open fields, now jumping up on a truck, then on a freight car, unable to find a place to stay anywhere—to say YOU KNOW nothing about getting an offer of work—in a large arc always reaching farther south, across the Loire, over the Garonne River to the Rhône. All those old beautiful cities teeming with wild, disheveled people. But the wildness was different from what I had dreamed of. A local rule prevailed in these cities, a sort of medieval municipal code of law. And each city had its own code. A tireless pack of officials was on the move night and day, like dogcatchers, intent on fishing suspicious people out the crowds as they passed through, so as to put them into city jails from which they’d be dragged off to a concentration camp if they didn’t have the money to pay the ransom or to hire a crafty lawyer who would later split the outsize reward for freeing the prisoner with the dogcatcher himself. As a result, everyone, especially the foreigners, guarded their passports and identification papers as if they were their very salvation. I was amazed to see the authorities, in the midst of this chaos, inventing ever more intricate drawn-out procedures for sorting, classifying, registering, and stamping these people over whose emotions they had lost all power. It was like trying to register every Vandal, Goth, Hun, and Langobard during the “Barbarian Invasion.” I evaded the clutches of the dogcatchers quite a few times with help from my clever buddies, for I had no papers, no documents at all. When I escaped from the camp, I’d left all my papers behind in the camp, in the commandant’s barracks. I would have assumed that they were burned by now, if experience hadn’t taught me that it’s much harder to burn paper than metal or stone. Once, sitting at a table in an inn, we were asked for our papers. My four friends had pretty solid French documents—although the older Binnet had not been legally demobilized. This dogcatcher, though, was pretty drunk, and didn’t notice Marcel slipping me his papers under the table after they’d already been inspected. Right after that, in the very same room, the same official led off a beautiful girl while her aunts and uncles, Jews who had fled from Belgium, cursed and lamented the fate of this girl they’d taken along in place of their own child. They had great faith but insufficient identification papers. Now she’d probably be hauled off to a women’s detention camp in some corner of the Pyrenees. I’ve never been able to forget her because she was so beautiful and because of the anguished expression on her face as she was being separated from her people. I asked my friends what would happen if one of them were to declare himself ready to marry the girl on the spot, right then and there. They were all minors, yet they immediately began to argue heatedly over who would get the girl. They almost came to blows but were too exhausted to fight. My friends were ashamed for their country. When you’re young and healthy you can recover quickly from a defeat. But betrayal is different—it paralyzes you. The next night we admitted to each other that we were homesick for Paris. We had faced a terrible, cruel enemy there, almost more than one could endure, at least that’s what we thought at the time. But there the enemy was visible. Looking back, it almost seemed better than the invisible, almost mysterious evil of the rumors, bribery, and lies we now faced. Everyone was fleeing and everything was temporary. We had no idea whether this situation would last till tomorrow, another couple of weeks, years, or our entire lives. We made what we thought was a very sensible decision. We checked a map to see just where we were. It turned out we weren’t far from the village where Yvonne, my former girlfriend, the one who had married her cousin, lived. So we set out in that direction and arrived there a week later. II Many refugees had already sought shelter in Yvonne’s village, quite a few of whom had been sent to help out on her husband’s farm. Still, everyday farm life didn’t seem to have changed much. Yvonne was pregnant and she was proud of her new house and farm. She seemed a little embarrassed as she introduced me to her husband. When she found out I had no papers, she sent her husband that very night into the village where he also happened to be the acting mayor. She suggested he have a drink at the Grappe d’Or with his friends and the chairman of the United Refugees from the Aigne sur Ange. He came home at midnight with a little piece of yellow paper. It was a refugee certificate that a man had probably given back when he got a different, better set of documents. Seidler was the name of the man whose second-best certificate ended up being a better one for me. He had emigrated from the Saar to Alsace at the time of the Referendum. Yvonne’s husband stamped it again. We looked up Seidler’s village in a school atlas, and concluded from its location that, fortunately for me, the village along with the registry of its inhabitants had probably been burned to the ground. Yvonne’s husband was even able to get me some money. Since now, with my new papers, I was quite the proper refugee, he had the provincial capital of the département dole out some refugee money that I was supposedly entitled to. I realized that Yvonne had pushed all this through in order to get rid of me as quickly as possible. In the meantime, my traveling companions had written to their scattered families. Marcel tracked down his great-uncle who had a peach farm near the sea. The younger Binnet and his friend planned to stay with his sister. As Yvonne’s former sweetheart, I was a somewhat unsuitable guest here and completely superfluous. Yvonne gave some more thought to my situation, and this time came up with a cousin named George, George Binnet. He had been employed at a factory in Nevers before being evacuated along with everyone else in the factory, nobody really knew why, and was now stuck in Marseille. He had written that he was doing quite well there living with a woman from Madagascar who was also working. Marcel figured that once he was at the peach farm, he could arrange for me to follow him there, and until then I could stay in Marseille. Anyway, the Binnet cousin would be a help to me. By now I felt attached to the Binnet family much like a child who has lost his own mother and hangs on to the skirts of another woman who, although she can never be his mother, still shows him some affection and kindness. I had always wanted to see Marseille, and besides, I felt like going to a big city. As for the rest, it was all the same to me. We said good-bye. Marcel and I traveled part of the way together. I found myself searching among the throngs of soldiers, refugees, and demobilized troops who filled the trains and the roads for a familiar face, some person whom I had known in my old life. How happy I would have been if Franz, with whom I’d escaped from the camp, had turned up. Or even Heinz. Whenever I saw a man on crutches I hoped I’d see his face with the crooked mouth and the light-colored eyes mocking his own fragility. I had lost something, lost it so completely that I didn’t quite know what it was, I’d lost it so utterly in all that confusion that gradually I didn’t even miss it very much anymore. But one of those faces from the past, I was certain, would at least remind me of what it was. Marcel left me, and I went on to Marseille by myself. I was and remained alone. III On the train they were saying that the crafty guards at the Marseille station had set up checkpoints and wouldn’t let any foreigner through. I had only limited faith in Yvonne’s refugee certificate, and so I left the train two hours before it was to reach Marseille and boarded a bus. I got off in a village in the hills. Walking down from the hills, I came to the outer precincts of Marseille. At a bend in the road I saw the sea far below me. A bit later I saw the city itself spread out against the water. It seemed as bare and white as an African city. At last I felt calm. It was the same calm that I experience whenever I like something very much. I almost believed I had reached my goal. In this city, I thought, I could find everything I’d been looking for, that I’d always been looking for. I wonder how many more times this feeling will deceive me on entering a strange city! I boarded a streetcar and arrived without being challenged. Twenty minutes later I was strolling with my suitcase down the Canebière. Most of the time you’re disappointed when you finally see streets you’ve heard a lot about. But I wasn’t disappointed. I walked with the crowds, buffeted by a wind that blew first sunshine, then showers over us in rapid succession. And the lightness brought on by hunger and exhaustion turned into an exalted, grand buoyancy that enabled the wind to blow me faster and faster down the street. When I realized that the blue gleam at the end of the Canebière was the Old Harbor and the Mediterranean, I felt at last, after so much absurdity, madness and misery, the one genuine happiness that is available to everyone at any time: the joy of being alive. The last few months I’d been wondering where all this was going to end up —the trickles, the streams of people from the camps, the dispersed soldiers, the army mercenaries, the defilers of all races, the deserters from all nations. This, then, was where the detritus was flowing, along this channel, this gutter, the Canebière, and via this gutter into the sea, where there would at last be room for all, and peace. I had a coffee standing up with the suitcase clamped between my legs. All around me I heard people talking. It was as if the counter where I was drinking stood between two pillars of the Tower of Babel. Nevertheless, there were occasional words I could understand, and they kept hitting my ears in a certain rhythm as if to impress themselves on my memory: Cuba visa and Martinique, Oran and Portugal, Siam and Casablanca, transit visa and three-mile zone. At last I reached the Old Port. It was at about the same time as I arrived here today. It was almost deserted because of the war—just as it is today. And like today the ferry was slowly gliding along under the railroad bridge. Today, though, it seems as if I’m seeing it all for the first time. When I arrived that evening the fishing boat masts crisscrossed the large bare walls of the ancient houses—just as they do now. As the sun set that day behind Fort St. Nicolas, I thought, as very young people do, that all the things that had happened to me so far had led me here and that this was a good thing. I asked for directions to the Rue du Chevalier Roux, which is where George Binnet, Yvonne’s cousin, lived. The bazaars and the street markets were teeming with people. It was already getting dark in the warren-like streets, and the red and gold colors of the fruit displayed in the market stalls glowed in strong contrast. I detected an aroma I had never smelled before, but I couldn’t find the fruit it emanated from. I sat down to rest a while on the edge of a fountain in the Corsican Quarter, the suitcase on my knees. Then I climbed up a stone stairway without having any idea where it would lead me. Below me lay the sea. The beacon lights along the Corniche and on the islands were still faint in the twilight. How I used to hate the sea when I was working on the docks! It had seemed merciless to me in its inapproachable, inhuman monotony. But now, having come here after such a long and difficult journey across a ruined and defiled land, I couldn’t have found greater consolation anywhere than this inhuman emptiness and solitude, trackless and unspoiled. I went back down to the Corsican Quarter. It had become quieter in the meantime. The market stalls had been cleared away. I found the house on the Rue du Chevalier Roux. I let the bronze, hand-shaped knocker fall on the great, carved door. A black man asked me what I wanted. I told him I was looking for the Binnets. From the knobs on the banister, the remnants of colored tiles, and the worn stone crests, you could tell that this house had once belonged to a man of means —a merchant, or a sea captain. Now immigrants from Madagascar, a few Corsicans, and the Binnets were living here. Binnet’s mistress opened the apartment door, and I stared at her. She was extraordinarily beautiful, if somewhat strange in appearance. She had the head of a wild, black bird, a sharp nose, glittering eyes, and a delicate neck. Her long hips, long-fingered, loose-jointed hands, even her toes in her espadrilles— everything about her seemed slightly in motion, the way peoples’ faces usually are—as if anger, joy, and sadness were like the wind. In answer to my question she said curtly that George was on night duty at the mill and she herself had just come home from the sugar factory. She turned away from me and yawned. It brought me back down to earth. On the stairs, as I was leaving, I bumped into a slender, dark boy who was coming up two steps at a time. He turned around, just as I turned to look at him. I wanted to see whether my arrival fever had also invested the boy with some magic, but he just wanted to see if I was a stranger, a surprise intruder. Right after that I heard Binnet’s girlfriend, still standing in the open doorway— undecided, as she later confessed to me, about whether she should call me back and ask me to wait—scolding her son for coming home so late. You’ll understand later why I’m telling you all this in such detail. Back then I thought my visit had been a mistake, and that the rest of the evening lay empty ahead of me. I had deluded myself into thinking that the city had opened its heart to me, just as I had opened mine to it, that Marseille would take me in on my first night and its people would shelter me. In contrast to my joy on arrival, I now felt a severe disillusionment. I figured that Yvonne probably hadn’t written to her cousin about me, that she’d only wanted to get rid of me. I was also mortified to learn that George was working the night shift. It meant that there were still people who were leading normal lives. IV IV I had to find another place to stay the night. The first dozen hotels I tried were full. By now I was exhausted. I sat down at the first table I found in front of a seedy café in a small, quiet square. The city was dark because of the fear of air raids; yet there were feeble lights in many windows. I thought about the many thousands of people who called this city their own and quietly lived their lives as I had once done in mine. I gazed up at the stars and felt, I don’t know why, some consolation at the thought that these stars were probably there more for me and people like me than for those who could switch on their own lights. I ordered a beer. I would have preferred just to sit there by myself. But a little old man sat down at my table. He was wearing a jacket that, on anyone else, would have been in tatters long ago, but which had found an owner who with dignity and care would not let it go to ruin. And the man was much like his jacket. He might long ago have been lying in his grave, but his face was firm and serious. What remained of his hair was neatly parted; his nails were carefully trimmed. With a glance at my little suitcase, he immediately asked me what country I had a visa for. I told him I had no visa and didn’t intend to get one; I wanted to stay here. He cried out, “You can’t stay here without ...