In the Night of Time

28

BEFORE THE TRAIN emerges from a meander in the river, the signal is heard, solemn as a ship’s foghorn, and the electric cables and iron columns of the elevated platform vibrate. The nervous traveler will see the station in the distance like an Alpine castle crowning a wall of bare rock. Rhineberg: someone must have thought of the wooded cliffs above the Rhine when the name was chosen, and the nostalgia endured in the peaked towers of the station. A long metal staircase and the elevated passage that crosses the tracks like a covered bridge join the main building and the platforms. A man looks at his watch when he hears the train approaching and raises his eyes to a glass door. In the setting sun, the yellows and reds of the trees radiate embers of light; a wind from the river brings a wintry cold to an afternoon that had been mild, and moves waves of dry leaves across the platforms and tracks. The ground trembles beneath his feet when the train appears, its headlight shining, and stops with a screech of brakes. For a few long seconds it is quiet, hermetic, filling the entire platform with a suggestion of suspended energy. The only passenger to get off wears a raincoat of European cut and carries a suitcase too small for someone who’s come a long way. He stands in some bewilderment as the train begins to move, his suitcase in one hand, his hat in the other, disconcerted at not seeing anyone, afraid he got off at the wrong station, enveloped by the solitude of the riverbank, the silence of the woods. At his back he hears a voice saying his name and is afraid he’s imagining it. Behind the glass of the elevated passage, Philip Van Doren smiles when he recognizes him, watches him turn to the other man, Professor Stevens, chair of the Department of Architecture and Fine Arts (they met briefly in Madrid the previous year), and welcomes him, shaking his hand vigorously, the first person with whom he’s spoken in many days, the first time anyone’s welcomed him, granting him full existence, in any of the places he’s passed through in recent weeks. Two figures seen from a distance, from above, in a secondary station on the bank of the Hudson River, one October afternoon seventy-three years ago.

He gets ready as soon as the train leaves the previous station. One by one he goes through all his pockets, neurotically checking their contents, his passport and wallet with documents and photographs, Judith Biely’s last letter, Adela’s letter, I don’t know where you are or what you’re doing right now though I can imagine. Just know that if you want to come back to me and your children when this is all over, because someday it will be, the door is open. He went to the toilet and managed to wash his face, comb his hair, straighten his tie, brush fallen hairs and dandruff flakes from his lapels, rinse his mouth for fear that whoever came to meet him might smell his breath, and examine his nails, which should have been trimmed. He’s seen the bags under his eyes, the loose flesh under his chin and jaw. He remembered shaving in front of a mirror and seeing beside his reflection Judith’s much younger face, her hair brushing his cheeks while her naked body pressed delicately against his back. They were in the house facing the sea, the house where they woke up next to each other for the first time, the smell of the Atlantic coming in the window. A flash of memory so fleeting it’s extinguished without bitterness, without wakening a real connection between past and present. The conductor has passed, calling out the name of the station and gesturing to confirm that this time he does have to get off. Through the window, as the train begins to lose speed, Ignacio Abel sees the name in large black letters: RHINEBERG.

He doesn’t see anyone at first. He gets off and finds himself at the end of a long platform facing the great river, a row of tall iron columns and arches supporting what seems to be a covered passage where someone’s looking down and perhaps signaling to him. The smells of the river and the leaves and damp earth from the woods fill his lungs as he feels a silence descend in which the distant clatter of the train and the echo of the locomotive’s whistle fade away. Then someone says his name but he almost doesn’t acknowledge it, almost fears a trick of the imagination, his first and last name pronounced with improbable fluency and a certain reverence. Professor Ignacio Abel, it’s great to have you here with us at long last. He nods awkwardly, instinctively reticent, adapting himself with difficulty to being near another human and trying to catch words in English that are spoken too fast, his hand caught in the warm handshake of Professor Stevens, who, with the same determination, has taken hold of his suitcase: tall, a bit awkward, his arms and legs long, a lock of hair over his forehead, his face no longer young, his skin, a reddish brick color, covered with fine wrinkles, his eyes light blue behind his glasses. Stevens confuses him with his excessive energy, the speed of his praise, his questions, his request to be forgiven for delays and misunderstandings whose explanations Ignacio Abel can’t understand (secretaries, offices, telegrams, inexcusable slip-ups); what an incredible honor finally to have you with us after so many difficulties, how was the train trip, you must be very tired after crossing from Europe. He can’t see in himself the person to whom Stevens’s signs of esteem and excuses are directed, as if they had mistaken him for someone else, and he lacked the necessary command of the language to correct the mistake or the strength to rise above the display of fresh enthusiasm by the head of the department, with his checkered sweater under his jacket and his green polka-dot bow tie, his long-fingered hand that refuses to return the suitcase, don’t mention it, pulling at it vigorously as he leads the way to the elevated passage, the iron steps vibrating under the tread of his large shoes. Following him up the stairs, facing the broad Hudson stained with reddish glints of the setting sun, Ignacio Abel feels a weariness he doesn’t remember having experienced before, all the more evident in the presence of someone younger (but he didn’t feel the age difference when he was with Judith; how strange to have lived so long in a state of total unawareness, to have thought himself immune to the years, to weakness, to death). Leaning against the glass door that leads to the tracks, his arms crossed, the same expression on his face as on the night three months earlier when he stood by the window on a top floor in Madrid, Philip Van Doren looks him up and down with a serene smile before approaching him, as if observing signs of the accelerated passage of time, the result of an experiment. But then he changes in an instant, moves away from the glass door, and for an uncomfortable moment Ignacio Abel thinks Van Doren will embrace him, but he is observing everything, perhaps controlling his surprise, not wanting to reveal that he’s noticed the state of Ignacio Abel’s shoes or shirt or tie, the difference between the face he sees now and the face of the man he met in Madrid a little more than a year ago, the man he saw walk away along the Gran Vía one midnight three months ago. He doesn’t embrace Ignacio Abel but extends his hands, clasps both of his, he, too, subtly changed in this place where he’s not a foreigner, where his figure doesn’t stand out against an alien background, perhaps stockier, fleshier, the same gleam on his shaved head and his chin lifted above a high collar. “Dear Ignacio, what a pleasure to see you,” he says in Spanish, stressing with a smile the complete correctness of the expression dichosos los ojos, his vanity at knowing how to use it, he who was always asking for Judith’s help in finding equivalents of English phrases. “You have so much to tell me. I telegraphed the embassy in Madrid every day. I called. I tried to call your apartment, but it was impossible to get through. Dear Ignacio. Dear Professor. Welcome, at last. Stevens will take care of everything. He’s impressed at having you here. He can’t believe it. He knows your work, your writings. He was the first person who talked to me about you.” He gives orders, just as he did in Madrid. Brief signs, glances. Stevens walks ahead carrying Ignacio Abel’s suitcase, opening doors for them, standing to one side, remaining behind, obedient, conscious of his position. Van Doren gives him instructions, and Stevens listens and nods, taking care of everything. The back seat is spacious and has a subtle smell of leather. Abel sits uncomfortably, rigidly, not leaning back, his knees together, hat in his lap. He has lost the habit of comfort as well as the habit of flattery. Van Doren takes out a cigarette, and Stevens, who’d started the engine, turns it off to look for a lighter and give him a light. Van Doren leans back, barely moving his right hand to wave away the smoke or to indicate to Stevens with some impatience that he should get started at long last. “You’ll spend the first few days in the university guesthouse, if you don’t mind. In a week at most you’ll have your own place, in a convenient location near campus and the library site. Within walking distance. How do you say that in Spanish? Wait, don’t tell me. A stone’s throw? Our dear Judith wouldn’t have hesitated for a second. Though perhaps sitio isn’t the correct translation for site…” How little time it took him to say her name, invoke her presence; observing Ignacio Abel’s face, looking for signs of surprise, the name spoken aloud to him for the first time in so long. He must be waiting for Abel to summon the courage to ask whether he knows anything of her, as he did that night in Madrid at the window where the light of the fires was reflected; planning his little experiment, saying a name as if pouring a drop of some substance into a beaker. But now he looks out the car window, leaning back in the leather seat. He takes a breath, perhaps he’s going to say something, that he knows where Judith is. “I imagine you haven’t had time to hear the latest news from Spain. Their army took Navalcarnero yesterday. I don’t think it’ll be in tomorrow’s papers. How beautiful the names of Spanish towns are, and how difficult to pronounce. I look at the map and read them aloud. The most difficult thing is knowing where the accent goes in such long words. I see the names and miss the car trips along those highways. They took Illescas only three days ago. How far is Navalcarnero from Madrid? Fifteen miles, twenty? How long do you think it’ll take them to reach Madrid?”

The car advances along a narrow road flanked by enormous trees, and beyond them he watches autumnal woods glide past, meadows where horses graze, isolated farms, fences painted white that gleam in the declining afternoon light. On the rolling fields the oblique light reveals a faint mist rising from soil dampened and enriched by the rain and covered by the mantle of autumn leaves that will slowly rot until they turn into fertilizer. He recalls his first trips through the fertile, rain-soaked plains of Europe, misty dawns beyond a train window, daylight revealing straight lines of trees along sumptuous riverbanks, cultivated fields. What an injustice to come from the Spanish barrens, the bone-dry plains and mountains of bare rock inhabited by goats and human beings who lived in caves, who had, men and women both, skin as dark and harsh as the landscape where they barely survived by scratching at the earth, their faces deformed by goiters, injustice bending them like a curse without remedy. “No reason to despair, Abel my friend, like those ashen gentlemen of the Generation of ’98—Unamuno, Baroja, all the rest,” Negrín would say, laughing. “Two generations will be enough to improve the race without eugenics or five-year plans. Agrarian reform and healthy food. Fresh milk, white bread, oranges, running water, clean underwear. If they only give us the time, the other side and our own people…”

But they didn’t. Perhaps there never was any time to give, the real possibility of avoiding disaster never existed, and the future that the year 1931 seemed to open before us was a fantasy as foolish as our illusion of rationality. In the ditches along the recently paved avenues of University City, there are now piles of corpses; in the classrooms we hurried to have ready for the beginning of the school year, no one’s come to study; everything prepared, new benches and blackboards, echoing corridors where some of the windows have probably shattered, where cannon fire will roar very soon, and as happens now, between midnight and dawn, rifles firing at bodies against the walls. Tomorrow, within a few hours, as soon as it dawns over the plain, they’ll continue to approach, heading for Madrid as they have throughout the summer, coming up from the south along desolate straight highways like a pernicious epidemic against which there’s no antidote, no possible resistance, only immolation or flight, bewildered, poorly armed militiamen throwing themselves unprotected against canister shot or fleeing cross-country and tossing aside their rifles to run faster without even seeing the enemy, terrified by the shadows of riders on horseback or by the shouts of others as lost as they. With the pink manicured nail of an index finger — the finger that now distractedly taps the cigarette to shake off the ash while through the car window a landscape of meadows, white houses and fences, red, ocher, and yellow splashes of woods that follow one another in orderly succession — Philip Van Doren has followed on a map the line drawn by the names he read in the papers, or in who knows what reports, which reach him even before they’re published: sonorous, abstract names, Badajoz, Talavera de la Reina, Torrijos, Illescas, as conspicuous with their hard consonants and bright vowels in the music of the English language as their exotic spellings in news columns and headlines. But what does Van Doren know of what lies behind those names? And what can Professor Stevens imagine when he reads the paper or listens to the radio while he eats breakfast next to one of those large windows without shutters or curtains, before these landscapes free of sharp edges, the signs of poverty, drought, or scars of dry streams, bathed in a soft light that seems to touch things ever so delicately while the afternoon fades slowly, enduring in the clear blue of the sky and distant mountains, the dusty gold of hills covered with maples and oaks, the west sides of houses painted white? Names he remembers, places he passed on a trip, villages where he stopped to study a church tower or take photographs of a mill, a washing site, a structure devoted to labor — not even that, a stone wall crowned with tiles, the arch of a bridge over a stream. Day after day, beginning at dawn, in the terrible heat of summer afternoons, in the more temperate twilights, the armed invaders have continued to advance through those landscapes stripped of trees where no one can hide, attacking villages, each a name quickly eliminated from maps, leaving behind a harvest of corpses, a horizon of burned houses along the white strip of highway, the lines of telegraph poles and wires. They advance in military trucks, in requisitioned cars, in cavalry squads that terrorize unarmed fugitives with raised swords and shouts of primitive fury. Turbans and scimitars mixed with machine guns; trophies of cut-off hands and ears, and range finders for the artillery that demolishes with cannon fire a church tower where peasants armed with old shotguns have taken refuge, resolved to die; barbaric acts executed with the kind of precision all of you wanted to realize in the University City project, says Philip Van Doren, uncertain about the verb he’s used — it’s either too inaccurate or too vague. “How do you say to carry out in Spanish?” he asks, not looking at Ignacio Abel, or looking at him obliquely to let him know that the person who could give him the answer is not there. Both of them are thinking about her. “Llevar a cabo,” he says, satisfied now, relieved, Judith’s shadow invoked between them, as present as the war that’s invoked in the names of the towns the enemy continues to take, the ones that will fall tomorrow, within a few hours, when it’s still dark here but dawn in Spain: motors starting up; horses neighing; the deafening noise of weapons, of military boots on gravel (but they don’t wear boots either, or only the officers do; they wear espadrilles, just like our men, united in penury, in their destiny as cannon fodder); slaughter as an exhausting but intoxicating task, like a human hunt where without effort the astonishing number of retrieved prey multiplies, all uniform in the terror of their flight and their helplessness. The beautiful names on maps now designate cemeteries. The other country, occupied now and an enemy, spreads like a stain as the troops advance, reinforced by a retinue of blue-shirted butchers who go through villages with typed lists of those condemned, leaving behind a trail of corpses. While he waited and did nothing in Madrid, they continued to approach, while he traveled by train to Paris, dissembling in his flight, and boarded the ship and was hypnotized looking at the ocean as gray as a steel plate, writing postcards that wouldn’t reach their destinations, imagining letters he’d never write. From Navalcarnero the highway runs almost in a straight line to the outskirts of Madrid. Long before they arrive, the invaders will see in the distance the white patch of the National Palace on the cliffs of the Manzanares; they’ll see the red outline of its roofs, interrupted by the Telephone Company tower beneath the immense sky of Castilla.

“The president of the Republic has left Madrid, as you probably know,” says Van Doren, observing Ignacio Abel to be certain of what he suspects, that Abel didn’t know.

“Probably the government will leave too, if it hasn’t already done so, in secret. Your family is safe, far from Madrid? I seem to remember that the last time we saw each other you said you’d left them in the Sierra. If you’d like, perhaps we can arrange for them to join you here after a time. Other professors we’ve brought over from Europe, from Germany especially, are in a similar situation. And of course, what happened to your friend Professor Rossman?”

When he hears the name, Stevens turns his head toward them for a moment, his face red.

“Professor Karl Ludwig Rossman? He’s a friend of yours, Professor Abel?”

“He was,” he says, in a voice so low Stevens doesn’t hear him over the noise of the engine, but Van Doren does and immediately is on the scent, excited by the possibility of finding out, uncovering something.

“Did he die? Recently? I didn’t know he was ill.”

“Here we admire him as much as Breuer or Mies van der Rohe.” Stevens nervously takes his eyes off the road, turning his head toward Ignacio Abel with a bird’s rapid twist. “Did you really work with him? How exciting. In Weimar, in Dessau? His writings from that time are incomparable. His analyses of objects, his drawings. Come to think of it, Professor Abel, with all due respect, in some of your projects one can see Rossman’s influence.”

Van Doren pays no attention to Stevens; he looks at Ignacio Abel, his head slightly bent, raising a match, the cigarette between straight fingers.

“He was killed? In Madrid?”

Reluctantly Ignacio Abel understands that it would be useless to tell what happened; recently arrived at his destination, not settled yet in the provisional refuge where he’ll spend at least a few months, the precarious portion of the future covered by his visa, he feels the futility of trying to explain what he’s seen, what his awkward English vocabulary won’t convey, much less the articles published in newspapers, the photographs in which almost everything is remote and abstract. What can Stevens understand, with his young heart, quick to admire? How to explain to him or Van Doren the fear of dying that makes you wet your trousers or the nausea of seeing for the first time a corpse with bulging eyes and a swollen black tongue jutting out between its teeth? Having seen or not having seen is the difference: to leave and go on seeing; to squeeze your eyes shut and not have it matter; to go on seeing with closed eyes the face of a dead stranger that gradually is transformed into the face of Professor Rossman, so that it’s easier to identify him by the collar partially detached from his shirt or the insignia of his cavalry regiment in his lapel than by the blurred features, disfigured and subject to fantastic distortions. “It was probably a mistake,” he says. “They must have confused him with someone else.” Professor Rossman was in the morgue, reeking of formaldehyde and decomposing in the heat of early September, a piece of cardboard with a number hanging around his neck like a crude scapular; not on one of the marble tables overflowing with bodies, rigid arms and legs projecting like bare branches, but on the floor, in a back room where flies buzzed and ants swarmed. He sees him now, and the stench invoked by memory is more intense than the smell of autumnal soil and fallen leaves that comes in the window and combines with the sweetish smoke from Van Doren’s cigarette. What he sees with half-closed eyes is more real than this moment, this car trip through fields and woods; so close to Professor Stevens and Philip Van Doren in the confined space of the car, a frontier separates him from them, an invisible trench that words can’t remedy. Suddenly he feels he’s lived in unreality since the night he left Madrid. The world the others inhabit is for him an illusion; what he still sees, though he’s left, is what turns him into a foreigner — not the data printed in a passport issued by a republic that from one day to the next may cease to exist, not the photograph taken several months earlier of the man he no longer is. He sees what they’ll never be able to imagine: the gray faces of the dead in the empty lots and cleared sites of University City, beside the adobe walls of the Museum of Natural Sciences, on the sidewalk of Calle Príncipe de Vergara, next to the entrance to his apartment house, beneath the same grove of trees in the Botanical Garden where not long ago he’d met Judith Biely, in any ditch on the outskirts of Madrid; the dead as diverse and singular as the living, frozen in a final gesture like the one caught by the flash of a photograph and yet gradually stripped of their individuality, preserving only their generic condition, old or young, men or women, adults or children, fat or thin, office workers or bourgeois or simple unfortunates, wearing shoes or espadrilles, with the gaps of lost teeth or gold teeth pulled by the thieves who come out early to plunder the bodies, some of the dead still wearing their eyeglasses, their hands tied or their hands and arms open and dislocated like those of a doll, with a cigarette in the corner of their mouth, with a churro that some wit had put between their teeth, hair standing straight up or disheveled as if just out of bed or flattened with brilliantine; dead bodies in pajamas, dead bodies in undershirts, dead bodies in ties and hard collars, dead bodies with eyelids squeezed tight or eyes wide open, some with jaws distended as if laughing out loud, others with a kind of somnambulistic smile, dead bodies on their backs or with their faces pushed into the ground or leaning to one side with their legs bent, a single hole in the back of the neck or a thorax ripped open by bullets, dead bodies in a puddle of blood or felled neatly as if a bolt of lightning or a heart attack had killed them, dead bodies with their bellies as swollen as the cadavers of donkeys or mules, dead bodies alone or piled on top of one another, dead bodies irreproachably clean or with their trousers stained by piss or shit, vomit on their shirts, all alike in the opaque grayness of their skin; unknown dead bodies, photographed from the front and side, classified in the records of the Ministry of National Security, where a photographer and his assistant came every afternoon to attach to large sheets of smooth cardboard the recently developed photographs they’d been taking since dawn in the empty lots of Madrid. With scissors and a pot of glue the assistant cut out the photographs and attached them to the cardboard pages of albums, above a panel that had at the bottom blank spaces indicated by dotted lines that were never filled in: name, address, cause of death. Fearful people huddled over the albums, looking at photographs, turning pages, elbowing their way into a room that was too small and badly ventilated, filled with smoke, the floor littered with cigarette butts. After a while their eyes grew weary and the faces in the photographs began to look identical, such generic black-and-white portraits that it was difficult to identify anyone. There was whispering, the sound of footsteps, from time to time a scream.

He was out the entire day and at ten that night still hadn’t learned anything regarding Professor Rossman’s whereabouts. Since his car had been confiscated and streetcars ran erratically, he walked all over Madrid under the summer sun or rode in the suffocating metro, looking for him. Señorita Rossman was waiting in front of his building, she’d appeared early, before eight o’clock. “You have to help me, Professor Abel. Some men took my father away yesterday afternoon, told me he’d return as soon as he answered some questions, but wouldn’t tell me where they were taking him. You know so many people in Madrid, surely you can find out what happened to my father. You know how he is — he says whatever’s on his mind. He’d go down to that café next to the pensión, tell everybody that war isn’t a fiesta and unless there’s more discipline and fewer speeches and parades the Fascists would take Madrid before the summer was over. You know him, heard him say the same things a thousand times. Those people had no idea what he was saying, all that talk about Marcus Aurelius and the barbarians, the foreign barbarians and the domestic barbarians. He argued with the landlady at the pensión, whose son is an Anarchist. Perhaps because of his accent someone decided he was a spy.” But she was afraid for herself too, afraid the men who’d come for her father would come back to take her away. She’d spent a sleepless night. It was hot, her father had unbuttoned his hard shirt collar and was dozing in a rocking chair by the balcony that faced Calle de la Luna, where there was a militia barracks or an Anarchist headquarters. They came for him, and the only thing he asked them was to let him button his collar and put on his jacket and tie, take off his slippers, put on high shoes. But they took him away with his shirt open and no jacket, in his old cloth slippers. He did have time to put on the glasses he’d placed on a small table beside the rocking chair before he fell asleep. They were three well-mannered men armed with pistols, behaving with the neutrality of the police. Nothing had alerted her or her father to the danger because they hadn’t heard the usual heavy steps on the staircase or violent pounding on the pensión door while ringing the bell. At first she didn’t understand what was happening. She remembered that her father had sat motionless in the rocking chair, blinking because of the light that flooded the room when one of the men opened the curtains to begin the search. The three men filled the reduced space where Señorita Rossman and her father had moved cautiously to take advantage of every inch: the two identical beds with iron frames, the sink with its oval mirror, the wardrobe, the small bookcase with the few volumes they’d been able to save after years of travel, the mantel where they took turns writing letters and filling out forms, and where Señorita Rossman prepared her German lessons. Within minutes the beds were unmade, the mattresses overturned, the books strewn across the floor, along with valuable documents, forms, Professor Rossman’s diplomas, the contents of his bottomless briefcase, the clothing they kept in the wardrobe. Señorita Rossman sat in a chair, her bony knees and large feet close together, her elbows on her thighs, her skinny face resting on both hands, shaking just as she had a few times in her room in the Hotel Lux in Moscow, when no one would visit her and her father and they didn’t know whether they’d be allowed to leave the USSR. When they took him away, he said something to her in German, and one of them put a pistol to his side. “Be careful about passing messages we can’t understand.”

“He told me to come and see you, that you’d help us, just as you’ve always helped us. I don’t know anyone else.” Señorita Rossman fixed her colorless eyes on Ignacio Abel from behind her glasses, which she wiped with a handkerchief that she returned each time to her sleeve with a kind of obstinate, automatic correctness. There was in her something resistant to attractiveness, a kind of helplessness doomed to awaken discomfort, not sympathy. He asked her to come in. She sat on one of the chairs, covered for the summer, in the dining room he rarely entered and where the disorder wasn’t so apparent. She had to catch her breath after having climbed five flights of stairs. Ignacio Abel brought her a glass of water, and she placed it carefully on the edge of the table, avoiding his inquisitive glance when their eyes met. Overwhelmed not only by her father’s arrest but by remorse at having dragged him to the Soviet Union when they had to leave Germany, she was ultimately responsible for Professor Rossman’s being denied what he most desired, a visa for the United States, where he might have continued his career like so many other colleagues from the Bauhaus, expatriates like him who were welcomed into universities and architects’ studios while he wandered Madrid, where his reputation was nonexistent and his credentials were worth nothing, selling fountain pens on commission in cafés, sitting in the waiting rooms of offices that never opened for him, devising new plans that would lead nowhere: a trip to Lisbon, where he’d been told that visas for America were less difficult to obtain, or where he and his daughter could board a ship that would carry them to an intermediate South American port, to Rio de Janeiro, Santo Domingo, or Havana, where someone would be careless or corrupt enough not to see the stamps with the hammer and sickle in his stateless person’s passport, almost as useless as the expired German passport that had red letters across the page with the photograph: Juden — Juif.

He’d seen Professor Rossman from a distance on Calle Bravo Murillo, and as on many other occasions he’d been tempted to cross to the other side of the street or pass by without attracting his attention. Professor Rossman probably wouldn’t see him anyway, so myopic, so distracted in the crowd on the sidewalk in front of the Cine Europa, beneath large red-and-black flags and posters with bright colors and enormous figures in heroic poses, though they no longer displayed only advertisements for films but also battalions of muscular militiamen, workers carrying hammers and rifles, peasants shaking sickles against a red sky where squadrons of airplanes were flying. THE LIBERTARIAN REVOLUTION WILL CRUSH THE HYDRA OF FASCISM! AIR-COOLED, HIT PREMIERES. VISIT OUR SELECT REFRESHMENT COUNTER. Militiamen with rifles on their shoulders, tanned by the Sierra sun, drank steins of beer in the shade of a café’s striped awning. They talked in noisy groups, some in blue coveralls open to the waist, in odd tunics and trousers of uniforms, in military caps pushed to the back of their heads, almost all of them young, dark-skinned, with long sideburns and kerchiefs around their necks, emboldened when a girl passed near them, intoxicated by the feeling of omnipotence granted them by the collapse of the old order, their possession of weapons, the war, carnival and slaughterhouse all in one. For more than four hours the Popular Front Youth marched through Madrid in an impressive demonstration, cheered enthusiastically by an immense crowd. The war seemed to be simply this rough, nervous joviality, the general untidiness and indolent air of people on a hot August morning, the epic character of those gigantic figures outlined on placards covering the theater’s façade, which no one seemed to notice. On the sharp peaks of the Sierra de Córdoba our troops are preparing their assault on the City of the Mosque, waiting impatiently for the order to advance. The war was triumphalist lying newspaper headlines, funerals with fists in the air, somber marches in which death was always something abstract and glorious, parades with large banners and no one keeping time, preceded, as in the now abolished religious processions, by costumed crowds of children marching with wooden shotguns. The unstoppable advance of our troops continues over the rugged terrain of the Sierra de Guadarrama, where day after day enemy forces are being pushed from their positions.

“My friend, my dear Professor Abel, how happy I am to see you.” Professor Rossman, his black briefcase pressed to his chest, wiped his hand on the skirt of his jacket before shaking Abel’s; he seemed to be in a great hurry and at the same time not to know where he was going, jumping from one topic to another. “Have you read today’s papers? The enemy is retreating on all fronts, but the lines defended by our glorious militias are closer and closer to Madrid. Believe me, I know, I spent four years studying maps of positions on the western front. Have you noticed that the reports deal not with what’s already happened but what’s about to happen? Granada on the point of surrendering to loyal troops, the fall of the Alcázar de Toledo is expected at any moment, the imminent capture of Oviedo or Córdoba is announced. And what about Zaragoza? How many weeks is it that troops have been advancing and putting the enemy to flight or meeting no resistance, and yet they never reach the city? I spend the day looking at the map and the Spanish-German dictionary. I have to look up Spanish words I thought I already knew. Are you well, still working? Your wife and children? You’re not accustomed to living alone, you look thinner. Would you like a drink, a stein of beer? The revolution is now a reality, yet the cafés are still open. It was the same in Berlin when the war was over. This time it’s on me. We have to celebrate my daughter’s excellent new job…”

They looked for a table inside a café. As he sat down, Professor Rossman opened his briefcase and began to take out sections of newspapers and clippings, maps of the kind published every day, with modifications in rebel-occupied territory that according to all the reports kept shrinking, though some rebel positions were close to Madrid. The overwhelming advance of Republican troops along the Aragón front is seen as an imminent threat to the rebels of Zaragoza. Loyal forces are six kilometers from Teruel and continue to hold advantageous positions. Regiments under the command of the heroic Captain Bayo continue their advance toward the reconquest of Mallorca. The rebels of Huesca are in a desperate situation.

Ignacio Abel looked around uncomfortably, afraid someone would overhear what Professor Rossman was saying, be suspicious of his foreign air and war maps.

“Be more careful, Professor,” he said in a quiet voice. “People are denounced on the slightest suspicion.”

“And you ought to take better care of yourself, my dear friend. You don’t look well, if you don’t mind my saying so. Do you have something to occupy your time? Is it true construction at University City is temporarily suspended? I hear the insurgents plan to attack Madrid on that flank, which makes sense, militarily speaking. Don’t look at me that way, don’t be afraid. Personally I’m not afraid. I’m an old man and a refugee from Hitler’s Germany. Those who expelled me from my country are the ones helping the rebels with armaments and airplanes. What interest can I have in being on their side? Where can I go if they enter Madrid? But as I was saying, there’s good news for us, for my daughter above all, excellent news.”

“Did they finally give you visas for America?”

“Who can think now about visas? We’ll have to wait for all this to be over in Spain. Not before the end of the summer, if you’ll permit my pessimism, no matter what the newspapers say. Will the British and French pressure Hitler and Mussolini not to aid Franco? I don’t think so. Your government wants to tell the world it’s facing a barbarian invasion on its own, but newspapers throughout Europe are filled with photographs of burned churches and murdered priests and monks. You say the other barbarians kill more? Probably, but that’s not held against them by Mussolini or Hitler. And how are you going to explain yourselves if no one in the government speaks foreign languages? I’m not complaining — thanks to that, my daughter’s finally found an excellent job now that the children to whom she gave German lessons are all away for the summer. And better paid. She’s been hired as a translator in the censorship service for foreign correspondents. She speaks English and Russian almost as well as German, as you know, and her Spanish is excellent, much better than mine will ever be. She works near the pensión, in an office in the Telephone Building, and has a safe-conduct and food coupons. I help her in whatever way I can, as you see. I look for newspaper articles for her, take her to the Telephone Building and pick her up. My poor child’s never known how to look after herself, not even when she became a fanatical Communist. She’d go to endless meetings, and her mother would fall asleep — she was already ill at the time and taking strong pain medicines — but I’d stay awake until she returned. My poor child, in love with Lenin and Stalin, just as she’d once been in love with Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino. Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go home to review today’s press with her before she goes to the office. My daughter thinks she’s a Communist, but basically she’s a romantic señorita from my grandparents’ generation. Instead of reading Heine, she took to reading Karl Marx. Do you know what I’m afraid of? That she’ll fall in love with one of those American correspondents who arrive each day in Madrid to see the war at first hand. My daughter’s destiny is to suffer for love. For love of a man who ignores her or uses her and deceives her with another woman, or for love of a cause that promises her a total explanation of the world and heaven on earth. The worst has been when the two loves were combined. Do you know why she wanted to go to Russia when we could no longer live in Germany? I followed her, alarmed at her living alone in that frightening country. She wanted to go to Russia to see for herself the homeland of the proletariat and to follow like a dog the leader of the German Communist Party, with whom she fell in love and who took her to bed on a whim even though he was married and had children. Revolutionary morality. They gave my daughter a job as a typist in an office of the Comintern, and from time to time the heroic comrade visited our room in the Hotel Lux and I had to go out for several hours. There are no cafés like this one in Moscow, my friend, no waiters in short white jackets who go on serving you as they did before the revolution. Suddenly the comrade stopped coming, and my daughter spent her nights crying. The new Soviet woman weeping like a señorita of the last century because her beloved no longer visits her as he once did. But the hero also stopped going to the office, where my daughter helped him body and soul in the propaganda struggle that would soon overthrow Hitler, casting an international spotlight on his crimes. He hadn’t gone off with another typist or secretary. He hadn’t gone back to his wife, about whom nothing was known. One day we learned he’d been arrested. They accused him of complicity with the assassins of Kirov in Leningrad. But he’d never gone to Leningrad and wasn’t even in the USSR when Kirov was killed! The other girls in the office stopped speaking to her, and after a few weeks they didn’t even look at her. Not at her and not at me. We were like two phantoms in the halls of the Hotel Lux. But we didn’t talk to each other when we were alone in our room either. She didn’t tell me, but I knew what she was thinking as she sat by the telephone. Her lover had done something worse than betray her — he’d betrayed the revolution or the party or the proletariat. Why would they accuse him if he wasn’t guilty? And what if he’d been arrested because of her, because of some indiscretion she’d committed without realizing it? My daughter always burdens herself with the guilt of the world. She still hopes he’ll appear, the misunderstanding will vanish, and his good name will be rehabilitated. Day after day no one spoke to us, but she wasn’t fired, and we weren’t thrown out of the hotel or arrested. But like most people in our situation, we kept a packed suitcase under the bed in the event the police came to take us in the middle of the night. Then one day they came for us. Not in the middle of the night but at eight o’clock in the evening, a short time after my daughter had come home from the office. We heard their footsteps on the stairs, then in the corridor, they knocked on the door, my daughter remained seated, trembling. I felt a certain relief, to tell you the truth. If it was going to happen, better for it to happen sooner rather than later. Young men, polite, in clean uniforms and shining boots, told us to accompany them, and as we walked along the hall I thought, how strange that they’ve come so early, that they are taking us through the hotel in sight of everyone, not after midnight. They had us climb into a black van — clearly we weren’t going to Lubyanka Prison, which wasn’t far from the hotel. The van stopped at the railroad station. They almost dragged us along the platform, pushed us into a car, and handed us an envelope with our passports. They could’ve killed us or sent us to Siberia, but they expelled us, I still don’t understand why, why they let us live…”

Professor Rossman must have seen it all happening again, this time with the certainty that there was no way out: the footsteps on the stairs, the pounding on the door, his daughter shaking, the same suitcase that had been packed in Moscow ready under the bed. But it wasn’t his daughter who’d been chosen by misfortune, as he’d always feared. It was him. Sitting in a rocking chair in the heat of an August afternoon, Professor Rossman slowly realized that these methodical men who didn’t raise their voices and weren’t wearing the coveralls of militiamen or carrying rifles were probably going to kill him.

“Of course you did everything you could to save him,” said Van Doren. “Perhaps you even put your own life in danger.”

“Is Rossman dead?” Stevens looked at them in the rearview mirror, not quite following the conversation in Spanish. “In Madrid? I didn’t see anything in the paper.”

“I didn’t have to risk anything. He was dead and I kept looking for him.”