Sepharad

narva

BACK HOME, I LOOKED in the encyclopedia for that name I’d never heard but kept repeating to myself during the taxi ride, a name I didn’t catch at first because my friend doesn’t speak very loud and it was noisy in the restaurant where we had lunch. It’s November, the evenings are much shorter now, and the winter dusk is still unexpected in the narrowest, darkest streets. We said good-bye at the door of the building he lives in, a block of modern apartments that don’t seem to fit his character or age or the life he’s led. Who could guess the life of this man, seeing him as he crosses the street or stands in the entryway of that anonymous building? A vigorous old man with a sparkle in his small eyes, a little bent, and with very fine white hair, like Spencer Tracy toward the end, or like my paternal grandfather, who was also in a war, but not one he marched off to voluntarily, and it may be that my grandfather never completely understood why they took him or realized the magnitude of the cataclysm his life had been dragged into, a life of which mine, if I stop to think about it, is in part a distant echo.

My friend is eighty, almost the age of my grandfather when he died, but he doesn’t think about death, he tells me, just as he didn’t think about it when he found himself on the Russian front in the winter of 1943, a very young second lieutenant soon to be promoted to lieutenant because of valor and having been awarded an Iron Cross. You don’t think about death when you’re twenty and in peril every minute, when with pistol in hand you advance across a no-man’s-land and suddenly your face and uniform are sprayed with the blood of the man beside you, who in one burst of machine-gun fire becomes a mound of entrails sprawled in the mud. You think only about how cold it is, or about the rations that never showed up, or about sleep, because the worst things in war are the cold and lack of sleep, my friend says, taking a brief, reflective sip of wine. He is seated directly across from me, older than any of the diners in the restaurant, all men, all the same age and wearing midlevel-executive suits, some speaking in an elementary but fluent English in that overly loud tone you tend to use when you’re on a cell phone in a public place. Their conversations mix with ours, the bleeps and music of their phones, the clinking of dishes and glassware, so I have to strain to hear what my friend is saying. I lean toward him across the table, especially when there’s a foreign name, of some German general or Russian sector or city I never knew existed, one of so many cities of the world that you will never hear of, just as millions of people don’t know the name of the small town where I was born, though it’s completely real to me, clear in every detail, in its census of living and dead, the living whom I hardly ever see now and the dead who are fainter in memory with each passing day, although sometimes they reappear suddenly, like my paternal grandfather who died fourteen years ago.

I remember Pascal’s maxim: Entire worlds know nothing of us. Nevertheless, that foreign city is taking on a presence in my mind, which my friend established when he spoke its name in a restaurant in Madrid. The first time he said it, I paid no attention, because the story he was telling was more important to me, then he said it again but I didn’t catch it, with the noise. I interrupted him to ask the name of this city in Estonia. But who can imagine what Estonia is like, what lies behind that name, inside that name? It’s like trying to put yourself inside those small glass globes with snowy scenes that people used to have in their homes and you shook to make the snow swirl. Snow also falls in winter in Estonia, in that small city in the provinces, beside a river with the same name, Narva — the Narva River carries huge masses of ice in the winter, my friend tells me, remembering, and that recalled detail means it was early winter when he reached the city.

Afterward, I came home in a taxi, from the sunny autumnal openness of the west part of Madrid to the somber streets of the center, where night is closer, night and the damp cold of winter twilights: mist and the woodsy smell of the road that runs beside a river that is beginning to freeze over and that empties into the Baltic thirteen kilometers beyond the city that bears its name. I was in a taxi in Madrid but also traveling through the places my friend had told me about, and a lifetime of vanished years were squeezed together in the ten or fifteen minutes of my ride, just as the Madrid I barely glanced at out the window was also the dark ruined capital to which my friend returned after his adventures in the European war, less innocent but not completely disillusioned, guarding with modest pride the Iron Cross he still keeps as a talisman.

As I listened, abstracted, to the voices on the taxi radio and the driver’s diatribe against the government or the traffic, I thought of that name, mouthed it, decided to look it up in the Britannica as soon as I got home: Narva, where my friend was in 1943 and where he returned thirty years later with the nearly impossible task of finding a woman he had seen only once, one night at a dance for German officers he’d been invited to because he was one of the few Spaniards in the Blue Division who spoke German, and also because he liked Brahms and at a certain moment had hummed a melodic passage of the Third Symphony. The war was filled with coincidences like that, with chains of random events that dragged you away or saved you; your life could depend not on your heroism or caution or cleverness but on whether you bent down to tighten a boot one second before a bullet or shard of shrapnel passed through the place where your head would have been, or whether a comrade took your turn in a scouting patrol from which no one came back. My friend was saved that way many times, on the edge of disasters that claimed others, by a coincidence, a fraction of a second. By going to that city in Estonia on a two-day leave he may have avoided certain death. The Brahms melody he loved, Brahms being one of the names on which his worship of Germany was based, changed the course of his life, opening his eyes to a horror for which nothing had prepared him, a horror that marked him for more than the unthinking vertigo of courage and danger.

“There was an inspection of our sector, and the commander of my battalion asked me to act as guide for the German officers. I was with them for several days, and although the Germans didn’t have much confidence in us, one of them, a captain almost as young as I was, took a liking to me, because of Brahms. We were standing around, not talking, the three German officers and I, beside a parapet between two machine-gun nests, on one of those calm days when it seemed that nothing would happen at the front, and without thinking I hummed a few bars of a melody. The captain began humming the same thing, but with all the notes, and more slowly, the better to enjoy the memory of the music.” My friend hums too, right there in the restaurant, lips closed, eyes shut, and I hear the music more easily than his words, despite the voices, silverware, and cell phones. I recognize it immediately, because it’s a favorite of mine, a powerful and sentimental melody a little like a film score: the third movement of Brahms’s Third Symphony. “The other two officers had dropped behind, pointing out to each other disapprovingly some defect in our Spanish defenses, but the captain at my side closed his eyes and bobbed his head, and with his right hand he seemed to be drawing the music in the air, his black-gloved index finger a baton directing the sad, undulating theme that combined both great pain and great consolation. He told me that in civilian life he was a professor of philosophy in a gymnasium, and that he played the clarinet in his city orchestra and in a chamber group. That prompted me to mention the Brahms quintet for clarinet, and the German was moved to an almost embarrassing display of affectation,” though those aren’t exactly the words my friend used. “I noticed then,” he says, “that he was a bit limp in the wrist, as they say nowadays, in spite of the uniform and how tall and strong he was. He told me that when he played that piece, there were parts where he had to struggle to hold back the tears. It was always as if he were playing that music for the first time, and each time it was more profound, more moving, containing all the grief of Brahms’s life. There was only one other quintet for clarinet that he liked as much as the Brahms: I guessed immediately and said, Mozart’s, and in the emotion of remembering the music and because of the empathy between us, he told me, lowering his voice, that he also liked Benny Goodman, although in Germany it was impossible to find his records. By then the other officers joined us, and the captain’s demeanor changed, he became as rigid as he was at first, as military as they, and didn’t say another word about music, barely speaking to me until we said good-bye. Those Germans were very strange,” my friend tells me. “You never knew what was going through their head when they looked at you with those light-colored eyes. Some weeks later, the commander of my battalion called me to say that I had been given a few days’ leave because the German officers I accompanied as guide and interpreter were pleased with me and asked that I be allowed to attend a dance in that city behind the lines: Narva. The captain who was a fan of Brahms and Benny Goodman picked me up at the station. I remember that we drove into the city along a road near a river and bordering a forest, and that though there was still a little sun, it was already starting to get very cold.

The person who hasn’t lived the experience demands details that mean nothing to the true narrator: my friend speaks of the cold and of the blocks of ice floating down the river, but my imagination adds the hour and the evening light, which is the same as the light in the street as we left the restaurant, and I also added the German officers’ heavy gray overcoats with the broad lapels, as well as the dissimilar build of the two men — the Spaniard a little emaciated, at least in comparison with the captain who loved the clarinet, but both alike in the black gloves, black-visored caps, and collars turned up against the cold, talking about music, remembering sad passages from Brahms and Mozart and snappy George Gershwin tunes played by Benny Goodman’s orchestra, which had not been heard for years on German radio.

“THEN I SAW SOMETHING I’ve never forgotten.” My friend puts down his knife and fork, takes a sip of wine with a lively and slightly furtive gesture, so rare in a man of eighty, that suggests many tasks ahead in life, things to learn, books to review for the specialized journals of his profession, in which he is internationally eminent, appointments, travels abroad. As he speaks now, his small eyes peer at me behind heavy white eyebrows and wrinkled eyelids, but he doesn’t seem to see me, he’s not in the same place and time that I am, a restaurant in Madrid loud with voices and telephones. “I saw a large group of people that spanned the road from side to side coming toward us, men only, some almost children and others so old they stumbled as they walked and leaned on one another. They came in rows, close together, in formation, none speaking, heads bowed, as we used to see in the funerals that wound through the narrow streets of our villages, and the men in the lead held in front of them a horizontal pole like the barrier at a border post, with a tangle of barbed wire hanging from it that must have ripped their legs as they walked. You could hear their footsteps, the wire dragging the ground, and the swish of the guards’ rifles brushing against their uniforms. The German and I pulled to one side of the road, where we watched. There were hundreds of men, guarded by a few SS soldiers, and in every fifth or sixth row was another bar with barbed wire, perhaps to entangle anyone who broke formation and tried to escape. I had never seen such thin, pale faces, not even on Russian prisoners, or the way those men had of walking, keeping time but dragging their feet, shoulders hunched, staring at the ground. I remember one old man with a long white beard, but I especially remember a young man in the front row, at the center, very tall, with sallow skin and a dead face, he wore an ankle-length overcoat, the kind in style then, and a navy-blue cap. I can see him as clearly as I’m seeing you now, his pince-nez glasses and his face with its dark beard, not because it was several days since he shaved but because the beard was thick and made even darker by his pallor. He was the only one to lift his head a little, though not much, and he stared at me as he passed, turning his long neck with its prominent Adam’s apple, just at me, not the German. He turned and kept looking between the bowed heads of the other men, as if trying to say something with his eyes, which seemed abnormally large in such a thin face.”

The sound of marching feet blended into the sound of the river as the column of prisoners moved on. The two men stood in silence, the German captain and the Spaniard recently promoted to lieutenant, both large in their gray overcoats and like brothers in their silver caps with the black visors. The light of the sun had disappeared, and the cold was damper and more intense. Deep in the woods, beyond the road, night would be advancing, as it did in some of the narrow streets in the center of Madrid, where the sun still shone on the windows of the tallest buildings in the pure icy blue of November.

My friend asked the German who those men were. The German was both surprised and amused at the innocence of the young officer so new to the war, the unpolished Spaniard still not entirely worthy of being admitted into their superior German brotherhood despite the purity of his accent, his bravery at the front, and his devotion to Brahms. Juden! the German said, and his face took on a strange expression, as if he were sharing a lewd secret or piece of barracks humor. My friend imitates the tone and the look of sarcasm and scorn on the face of the German, who winked and nudged him with his elbow.

“I didn’t know anything then, but worst of all was my refusal to know, to see what was before my eyes. I had enlisted in the Blue Division because I believed everything they told us, I don’t want to hide anything or try to excuse myself, I thought that Germany was civilization and Russia barbarism, the steppes of Asia from which all the invading hordes of Europe had come for centuries. Ortega said Germany was the West, and we believed him. Germany was the music that touched me so deeply, the tongue of poetry and philosophy, law and science. You can’t know the passion with which I had studied German in Madrid, before our war, how vain I was when the Germans I interpreted for in Russia praised my accent. But that German word, Juden, was jarring, a discordant warning of something I had not heard until then, although surely I had heard it many times, I will not say what many said later: that they didn’t know, that they never saw or heard anything. We didn’t know because we weren’t of a mind to know. You can make an effort not to know, close your eyes and not want to open them, but once they’re open, what the eyes have seen cannot be erased.”

FIRST WAS THAT WORD, Juden. Then, maybe two hours later, he met a woman at the dance, a beautiful redhead with green eyes. He walked into a room filled with people, noise, and music and immediately picked her out, as if no one else were there, and in the first look they exchanged he knew she wasn’t German in the same way she knew that despite his uniform he was not like the other military men there. The city would have been dark, with no lights except at the street corners, a Baltic city in the winter of the war, occupied by the German army, under curfew, split by a river that would soon freeze and from which a fog rose that wets the paving stones and the streetcar tracks and seemed denser in the headlights of the military trucks.

My friend doesn’t describe the place where the dance was held, but I imagine it as I listen to him talk: one of those official buildings I’ve seen in Nordic countries, white columns and pale-yellow stucco, a cobbled square, its stones shining in the night damp, crisscrossed by streetcar tracks and cables, and at the rear a requisitioned mansion that is the only place where the windows are lit and from which music spills out to the square with the unexpected brilliance of ballroom chandeliers. Sudden light in a dark city, music in the terrified silence of the streets.

After the front, that place must have had the unreal splendor of a cinematographic mirage. But my friend goes on, ignoring that kind of detail as he ignores the bellow of laughter from the banking executives who are honoring someone at a nearby table, toasting in Spanish and English the success of some financial venture. He erases it all, the ballroom in 1943 and the restaurant of today, the sound of the orchestra and the sound of the cell phones, the gleam of leather on the German uniforms, the crunch of black boots on the gleaming parquet floor, the heel clicks of salutes. How intimidated he must have felt among so many strangers, nearly all of them of higher rank. The only thing that stands out in his story is the figure of the woman he was dancing with and whose name he can’t remember, unless he said it and I didn’t hear, and now I am tempted to invent a name: Gerda or Grete or Anicka: Anicka was the friend of Milena Jesenska in the death camp.

“I NOTICED HER THE MINUTE I walked into the room. There were officers from the army and the SS, and the blue uniforms of the Luftwaffe. Among all those military men I was the only one not German. Maybe that was why the woman stood looking at me when I walked by her, because she wasn’t German either. A tall redhead wearing silk stockings and a low-cut gown of some flimsy fabric, she wore a perfume I would like to smell once more before I die. You are still young, so you don’t know that some things are not erased by time. So much has happened since then,” my friend calculates mentally, with a smile trapped in a memory whose sweetness can’t be conveyed: fifty-six years ago, and it was November, as now, and he still holds intact the sensation of putting his arm around her waist, noting beneath the cloth the smoothness of a body made even more desirable by his being so long without a woman.

She was standing, very serious, beside a heavy man in civilian clothes — an ostentatious pinstripe suit — and there was a weary, conjugal air in the way they spoke without looking at each other. My friend doesn’t explain whether it was difficult to overcome his shyness, whether he danced with other women before approaching her, and since he isn’t writing a novel he doesn’t need intermediate episodes, doesn’t need to tell me what happened to the captain he came with. Right now, in his memory, he is alone with the redhead, as if silhouetted against a black background, and the woman doesn’t have a name, either because my friend has forgotten it or because I didn’t hear it and don’t want to give her one.

They danced and she murmured into his ear, leaning a little toward him but at the same time looking in a different direction, with a distracted, formal air, as if they were in one of those dance halls of the time where men paid to dance with women for the two or three minutes of one song. He had come a long way to meet this woman, had traveled across Europe and through the devastation and mud of Russia and fought at Leningrad, all to hold her in his arms and gradually press her to his waist as he breathed the scent of her hair and skin and listened to her voice, the two of them, arms around each other, alone among all the people crowding the dance floor, scarcely moving to the music. He would look for her when a piece was finished during which he had felt obliged to dance with a different partner. But for her, this woman in the full splendor of her thirty-some years, it wasn’t just interest or desire, there was also a desperation that he had never seen, just as he had never had his arm around a body like hers, it was in her eyes and voice, and also in the way she gripped his hand as she glided lightly across the dance floor, squeezing his fingers as if she wanted to convey an urgency that he first thought was sexual and perhaps was in part. She kept speaking into his ear, at the same time keeping an eye on the couples near them, and never losing sight of the dark-clad man who hadn’t moved from the far end of the room all evening. She smiled at her dancing partner, half closing her eyes as if carried away by the delicious and sensual dizziness of the music, but her words had no relation to the calm and somewhat fatigued expression on her face, only with something at the back of her green eyes, with the way her fingernails dug into the back of his hand.

“You aren’t like them, even though you wear the uniform. You must leave here and tell what they’re doing to us. They are killing us all, one by one. When they came to Narva there were ten thousand of us Jews, and now there are fewer than two thousand, and the way they’re going, we won’t last through the winter. No one is spared, not the children, not the old, not the newborn. They take them away in trains, and no one ever comes back.”

“But you’re alive and well, and they invite you to their dances.”

“Because I go to bed with that pig who was with me when you came in. But as soon as he tires of me or thinks it’s dangerous to have a Jewish mistress, I’ll end up like the others.”

“Then get out.”

“And go where? All of Europe is theirs.”

“Why was he invited, if he isn’t military?”

“He supplies clothing and food for the army. He buys up the Jews’ properties for nothing.”

“Must you sleep with him tonight?”

“Not tonight. His wife is waiting for him. They’re giving a dinner for some generals.”

“I’ll take you home.”

“You’re reckless.”

“Tomorrow afternoon I go back to the front.”

He wanted to keep holding her and listening to her, he couldn’t bear to have her leave without him at the end of the dance, but when the piece they were dancing ended and a German officer moved him aside politely but firmly to dance the next dance with her, he couldn’t refuse, because the man in the pinstripe suit was watching her from a distance and maybe had already observed with displeasure that it was a long time since she changed partners, maybe had even guessed what she was saying to the young lieutenant who looked so little like a German despite the uniform. Strong as his desire was, he wanted to protect her and needed to know more, and he began to fear the looming darkness he had ignored until then, the dreadful suspicion of what was unimaginable yet couldn’t be denied. He looked around at the red German faces, the elegance of the uniforms identical to his, which had given him such a thrill the first time he put it on, and felt an instinctive revulsion, though the monstrous thing was invisible, like the desperation of the woman dancing with him, moving her head to the rhythm of the music and smiling, closing her eyes and digging her fingernails into the back of his hand, repeating in a low voice the words that my friend kept hearing long afterward and that still return to him on sleepless nights when the darkness is peopled with the voices and faces of the dead. But the two faces he remembers most clearly are that of the young man in the pince-nez who turned toward him on the road as if wanting to tell him something, and that of the woman he danced with over and over, he doesn’t know how many times, falling in love with her and being infected by her fear, her clear vision, her fatalism. What would her voice sound like now? With what accent would she speak German? Now, as I write, reliving what my friend told me, I would invent her, say that she was Sephardic by birth and spoke a few words to him in Ladino, establishing with him, in that remote city in Estonia and in the midst of all those German officers, the melancholy complicity of a secretly shared fatherland.

But it isn’t necessary to invent or add a thing for that woman to materialize, to appear to me in the restaurant where my friend and I were talking amid all the noise and people, in the mix of conversations, steam from hot dishes, cigarettes, cell phones. He who has not been able to forget her for more than half a century has bequeathed her to me now, transferring the memory of her to my imagination, but I won’t give her an origin or a name, I haven’t the authority, she isn’t a ghost or fictional character but someone who was as real as I am, who had a destiny as unique as mine although far more cruel, a biography that can neither be supplanted by the beautiful lie of literature nor reduced to arithmetical data, another cipher among the immense number of the dead. “Fifty-six years I’ve been remembering her, and I always wonder whether she survived or died in one of those camps that we knew nothing about then, not because they were run in absolute secrecy, since that is impossible, it would have been like keeping the operations of the railway system of an entire nation secret, but because we didn’t want to believe the unbelievable. I went back to Narva thirty years later, when I traveled for the first time to Leningrad, to a psychology conference organized by UNESCO. It wasn’t easy to do, but I obtained permission to visit the city, although they assigned me a Soviet guide who didn’t leave me alone for a minute. Now the name was written on the station platform in Cyrillic characters, and the road along the river was gone, and in its place was an entire neighborhood of those horrid cement-colored buildings. It must seem absurd to you, and it was so then to me, but the minute I arrived in Narva I started looking at every woman, with my heart in my mouth, as if I might run into her and recognize her after thirty years. Looking not for a woman a little older than I was, which would have made her over sixty, but the same young redhead I danced with that night, falling more in love with her by the minute, weak with desire, so excited that I was dizzy, and afraid she could see, or someone else could, despite the heavy cloth of my trousers, how aroused I was.

The Soviet guide or watchdog made a show of glancing at his watch and gave my friend a disgusted look, and reminded him that they would have to go back to the station soon, they couldn’t miss the return train to Leningrad, but my friend kept walking, ignoring his guide and leaving him a few paces behind, slightly bent over and moving quickly, as he did when we left the restaurant, his wise little eyes darting everywhere. Turning a corner, he recognized the cobbled square and the mansion where the dance had been held and the streetcar tracks, which had the same film of dirt and neglect as the facade of the mansion, which now, according to the guide, was the headquarters of Estonia’s unions. He didn’t recall all the cables strung from one side of the square to the other, and of course the gigantic statue of Lenin in the center, circled by streetcars clanging and jerking along, came afterward. But he perceived the same icy damp edge to the air and the smell of the river that couldn’t be far away, now mixed with the general odor of boiled cabbage and bad gasoline that seemed to be the indelible essence of the Soviet Union. Time did not exist; he heard the footsteps of hundreds of men on the hard-packed dirt of a road and the wire barbs scraping the ground, and saw a thin, pale face turned toward him, eyes again appealing to him through pince-nez glasses, then slowly disappearing down the road and the years to fade into the unbridgeable gulf between those who died and those who were saved, those who were now in the ground and those who walked across it with the lightheartedness of people who don’t realize that wherever they step, they are stepping on graves.

“HOW STRANGE TO BE standing at a streetcar stop across from the mansion and see yourself as you were thirty years before, because it isn’t that I was remembering,” my friend says. “I was literally seeing myself, the way you might see someone in the street and have trouble recognizing him because it’s been so long since the last time. I was so young, so different, a twenty-three-year-old lieutenant in a German uniform.” I could feel what he was feeling at that moment, the excitement and suspense of the waiting, the fear that his friend the captain might appear and suspect something or simply tell him he had to go back to headquarters. Because before leaving him to dance with a commander of the SS, the redheaded woman had told him to let a half hour go by and then meet her on the other side of the square beneath the shelter for the streetcar stop. He watched her move away through the dancing couples, now in the arms of the man in the black uniform, who was a little taller than she, casually turning to look for him while talking to her partner. He had to give her time to make small talk with some friends of her lover, who had never taken his eyes off her and who now and then sent short, precise signals to her, time to say good-bye. He didn’t need to have someone take her home since she lived only two stops away on the streetcar. “I won’t leave you alone for a moment,” my friend told her, not being foolhardy but with the same assurance and absence of fear he felt sometimes as he leaped over a trench, immune to bullets, exalted and agile, pistol in hand, hoarse from shouting orders to the soldiers advancing behind him, fighting through the clay and tangles of wire and cadavers strewn across the no-man’s-land. “I won’t leave you by yourself,” he told her again, when their dance ended and she tried to step away from him because the SS commander was waiting his turn. “If you want to help me, do as I told you,” she pleaded, with an urgency that widened her eyes, and immediately smiled at the German officer who took her in his arms with a polite nod to my friend.

Thirty years later he saw himself from the other side of the square, a solitary figure standing at the streetcar stop in a cone of light, the cobbles wet from the fog. He looked at the windows of the mansion where the dancing was still in full swing, and heard very faintly the music of the orchestra and the sound his feet made as he stamped them to keep warm, the echoes that spread across the wide, open space. He was at the same time the young lieutenant who counted the minutes, jumping out of his skin with hope and disappointment every time the door of the mansion opened. He felt both the wrenching impatience of someone who doesn’t know what the next minute will bring and the melancholy compassion of knowing what it brought: the young man waited for more than an hour, more desolate by the minute, and then went back to the ballroom to look for the redheaded woman, but did not find her, neither her nor her protector in the garish pinstripe suit, nor the SS commander who had bowed so ceremoniously when he claimed her. The lieutenant looked for her on the dance floor, then in the large room where drinks and canapés were being served, and walked through corridors where there was no one at all and through salons and libraries lit by large crystal chandeliers.

“And I never saw her again,” he says, making a gesture with two upraised hands, as if to indicate a thing that vanishes into thin air. It occurred to him that maybe she had left without his seeing her and was waiting for him at the streetcar stop, and if he didn’t hurry she would tire of waiting and leave, and then it would be too late to get her address, but in the vestibule he ran into the captain he’d come with and who had been looking for him. The captain said it was late and they had to get back to the barracks.

THERE IS NO NOISE NOW in the restaurant. Without realizing it, we have lingered until we are the only ones left. A waiter helps my friend into his navy-blue jacket, which accentuates the stoop of his shoulders. Watching him walk ahead of me toward the exit, I remember that he is a man of eighty. Outside we are surprised to find the pale light of early dusk, and the air is damp. My friend offers to take me home in his car.

“I still like to drive, although now and then I get into trouble when people see how old I am. One jerk yelled at me the other day at a traffic light, said it was time for me to pick out my coffin. I asked him, ‘You want to bury me alive?’ He scowled, rolled up his window, and shot off ahead of me. Generalizations are harmful, I should know, but the real problem is our species. We’re aggressive primates, much more dangerous than gorillas or chimpanzees; we carry cruelty and the will to dominate in our brains, and we get the oldest part of the brain from our reptile ancestors. It’s all in Darwin, to our misfortune. I know the theory that’s going around, that in the evolution of the species the instinct for cooperation has served us better than the law of the survival of the fittest. Except that some primates cooperate to wipe others out. Look how well the Nazis and Communists cooperated, how many millions of dead they left behind. But it’s not just them, think of Bosnia, or Rwanda just a while back, only yesterday, a million people murdered in a few months’ time, and with machetes and clubs, not the technology the Germans had. Who knows what evil is being perpetrated this very moment while you and I are talking? I don’t sleep much anymore, I lie in the darkness waiting for the dawn and remember all the dead I’ve seen rotting between our lines and the Russian positions, the bodies lying in ditches along the highways as we approached the front, or piled into trucks, stiff from the cold. I could easily have been one of them. And I see them all, one after another, and they look at me like that Jew in the pince-nez, and tell me that because I’m alive I have the obligation to speak for them, say what was done, so that the little that remains of them in people’s memories will not be lost for all time.”

We passed the park where the Egyptian temple of Debod is now, and I remember that the La Montana barracks stood in that very place. Here too we walk over tombs without names, over common graves. I remember black-and-white photographs and films of the first days of the Civil War, when my friend was a boy of sixteen studying Greek and Latin and German in the Institute and staying up late at night reading Nietzsche, Rilke, Juan Ramón Jiménez, and Ortega, when there was no way he could have known that in a few years he would be a decorated war hero. Not far from where we are now, in those gardens where the ruins of an Egyptian temple are enshrined and mothers walk their children and retirees take the afternoon sun, there was an esplanade filled with dead more than sixty years ago. On the same sidewalk where my friend and I are walking bombs fell during Franco’s siege of Madrid.

But I don’t say anything, I just listen while he talks about how the legs get weak after a certain age and how names become hard to recollect because of the deterioration of the neurotransmitters. When we say good-bye at the door of the modern building where he lives (maybe the one before it was destroyed in the bombardments), I see him from behind as he walks through the entry hall toward the elevator, bent and diligent, with only a hint of hesitation in his movements. If she were alive, if she is alive, the woman my friend met and lost in the city called Narva, she would be ninety. And if she was saved and is still alive somewhere, I wonder if she remembers, now, tonight, as I write these words, the young lieutenant she danced with one January night in 1943.