Sepharad

copenhagen

SOMETIMES IN THE COURSE of a journey you hear and tell stories of other journeys. It seems that with the act of departing the memory of previous travels becomes more vivid, and also that you listen more closely and better appreciate the stories you’re told: a parenthesis of meaningful words within the other, temporal, parenthesis of the journey. Anyone who travels can surround himself with a silence that will be mysterious to strangers observing him, or he can yield, with no fear of the consequences, to the temptation of shading the truth, of gilding an episode of his life as he tells it to someone he will never see again. I don’t believe it’s true what they say, that as you travel you become a different person. What happens is that you grow lighter, you shed your obligations and your past, just as you reduce everything you possess to the few items you need for your luggage. The most burdensome aspect of our identity is based on what others know or think about us. They look at us and we know that they know, and in silence they force us to be what they expect us to be, to act according to certain habits our previous behavior has established, or according to suspicions that we aren’t aware we have awakened. To the person you meet on a train in a foreign country, you are a stranger who exists only in the present. A woman and a man look at each other with a tingle of intrigue and desire as they take seats facing each other: at that moment they are as detached from yesterday and tomorrow and from names as Adam and Eve were when they first looked upon each other in Eden. A thin and serious man with short and very black hair and large dark eyes gets onto the train at the station in Prague and perhaps is trying not to meet the eyes of other passengers coming into the same car, some of whom look him over with suspicion and decide that he must be a Jew. He has long, pale hands and is reading a book or absently staring out the window. From time to time he is shaken by a dry cough and covers his mouth with a white handkerchief he then slips into a pocket, almost furtively. As the train nears the recently invented border between Czechoslovakia and Austria, the man puts away the book and looks for his documents with a certain nervousness. When the train reaches the station of Gmünd, he immediately peers out at the platform, as if expecting to see someone in the solitary darkness of that deep hour of the night.

No one knows who he is. If you travel alone on a train or walk along the street of a city in which no one knows you, you are no one; no one can be sure of your anguish or of the source of your nervousness as you wait in the station café, although they might guess the name of your illness when they observe your pallor and hear the rasping of your bronchial tubes, or when they notice the way you hide the handkerchief you used to cover your mouth. But when I travel I feel as if I were weightless, as if I had become invisible, that I am no one and can be anyone, and this lightness of spirit is evident in the movements of my body; I walk more quickly, with more assurance, free of the burden of my being, my eyes open to the incitement of a city or a landscape, of a language I enjoy understanding and speaking, now more beautiful because it isn’t mine. Montaigne writes of a presumptuous man who returned from a journey without learning anything: How was he going to learn, he asks, if he carried himself with him?

BUT I DON’T HAVE TO GO far in order to undergo this transformation. Sometimes, as soon as I leave the house and turn the first corner or walk down the steps of the metro, I leave my persona behind, and I am dazed and excited by the great blank page my life has become, the space where the sensations, places, people’s faces, the tales I may hear, will be printed with more brilliance and clarity. In literature there are many narratives that pretend to be stories told during a journey, at a chance encounter along the road, around the fireplace of an inn, in the coach of a train. It’s on a train that one man tells another the story Tolstoy recounts in “The Kreutzer Sonata.” In Heart of Darkness, Marlow tells of a journey toward the unexplored territory along the Congo as he is traveling up the Thames on a barge, and when he sees the still-distant glow of the lights of London through the night fog, he recalls the bonfires he saw on the banks of the African river, and he imagines much older bonfires, fires the first Roman sailors would have seen when they sailed into the Thames for the first time more than two thousand years ago. On the train on which he was being deported to Auschwitz, Primo Levi met a woman he had known years before, and he says that during the journey they told each other things that living people do not tell, that only those who are on the other side of death dare say aloud.

In a dining car, traveling from Granada to Madrid, a friend told me of another trip on the same train when he met a woman he was kissing within the hour. It was summertime, in broad daylight, on the Talgo, which leaves every day at three in the afternoon. My friend’s fiancée came to see him off, but shortly thereafter he and the stranger had locked themselves in a rest-room, with a terrifying urgency and joy and desire that neither cramped quarters nor problems keeping balance nor the pounding on the door by impatient travelers could disrupt. They had thought they would say good-bye forever when they reached Madrid. My friend, who was fulfilling his military service, had no profession or income, and she was a married woman with a small child, a little unstable, given to both fits of reckless excitement and black spells of depression. My friend told me that he liked her very much although she frightened him, but also that he had never had such pleasure with any woman. He remembered her with the greatest clarity and gratitude because with the exception of his wife, whom he married soon after returning from the army, she was the only woman he had ever slept with.

They continued seeing each other in secret for several months, repeating the sexual intoxication of their first meeting in boardinghouse rooms, the darkness of movie theaters, several times in her home in the bed she slept in with her husband, watched from the crib by the large, tranquil eyes of the child clinging to the bars to hold himself up. When my friend was discharged they agreed that she would not come to see him off on the midnight express that was to carry him back to Granada. At the last moment the woman appeared. My friend jumped from the train and as he put his arms around her felt such a surge of desire that he didn’t care if he missed the train. But he took it the next day, and they never saw each other again. “It frightens me to think what must have become of her, unstable as she was,” my friend said, his elbows propped on the bar of the Talgo diner, sitting before the coffee he still hadn’t touched and staring through the window at the desert landscape of the northern Granada province, or turning toward the slamming door that led to the other cars, as if with the impossible hope that the woman would appear all these years later. Listening to him, I was envious, and sad too that nothing like that had ever happened to me, that I had no memories of such a woman. She smoked joints, took pills, sniffed coke, he told me, and he was afraid of all those things, but he followed her through all her strange behavior, and the more frightened he was the more he desired her. “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised to learn that she ended up on heroin,” he told me. “Some mornings I wake up remembering that I’ve dreamed of her. I dream that I meet her in Madrid, or that I’m sitting on this same train and see her coming down the corridor. She was very tall, like a model, and she had curly chestnut hair and green eyes.”

TODAY’S TRAINS, whose seats aren’t arranged so we’re forced to sit face to face with strangers, are not conducive to travel stories. Instead, there are silent ghosts with headphones covering their ears, their eyes fixed on a video of an American film. You heard more stories in those old second-class coaches, which had the flavor of a waiting room or a room where poor families eat. During my first trip to Madrid, as I dozed on the hard, blue plastic seat, I listened in the dark to my grandfather Manuel and another passenger tell each other tales of train trips during the winters of the war. “In the battalion of assault troops I served in they marched us all up to a train in this same station and made us get on, and although they didn’t tell us where they were taking us, the rumor spread that our destination was the front along the Ebro River. My legs trembled at the thought all night, there in the dark of the closed coach. In the morning they made us get off and with no word of explanation sent us back to our usual posts. A different battalion had been dispatched in our stead, and of the eight hundred men who went no more than thirty returned. Had that train taken us to the front,” my grandfather said, “I wouldn’t be telling you this story,” and suddenly I thought, half asleep, if that journey along the Ebro hadn’t been canceled, my grandfather probably would have died and I wouldn’t have been born.

Everything was strange that night, that rare and magical night of my first trip; it was as if when I got on the train — or earlier, when I arrived at the station — I had abandoned the everyday and entered a kingdom very much like the world of films or books: the insomniac world of travelers. Almost without leaving my home I had been nourished by stories of travels to far-off places, including the moon, the center of the earth, the bottom of the sea, the islands of the Caribbean and the Pacific, the North Pole, and that enormous Russia that Jules Verne’s reporter named Claudius Bombarnac traveled through.

As I recall, it was a June night. I was sitting on a bench on the train platform between my grandmother and grandfather, and a train, not yet ours, arrived at the station and stopped with a slow screech. In the darkness it had the shape of some great mythological beast, and as it approached, the round headlight on the engine reminded me of Captain Nemo’s submarine. A woman was leaning against the railing of the observation platform; I was instantaneously overwhelmed with desire, the innocent, frightened, and fervent desire of a fourteen-year-old boy. I wanted her so badly my legs trembled, and the pressure in my chest made it difficult to breathe. I can still see her, although I don’t know now whether what I remember is in fact a memory: a tall blond foreigner wearing a black skirt and a black blouse unbuttoned low. I looked at her windswept hair and the brightly painted toenails of her bare feet. A deep tan brought out the gleam of her blond hair and light eyes. She moved a knee forward, and thigh showed through the slit in her skirt. The train started off, and as I watched she moved away, still leaning on the rail and watching the disappearing faces observe her from the platform of that remote station. Midnight in a foreign country.

In shifting tatters of dreams, the woman appeared again as I dozed and my grandfather and the other man kept talking in the darkened coach. Through half-opened eyes I could see the tips of their cigarettes, and when my grandfather or his companion took a drag, their country faces were visible in the reddish glow. Oh, the acrid black tobacco that men smoked then. As I watched those faces and listened, their words dissolved into sleep, and I felt myself on one of the trains they were telling about, past trains of defeated soldiers or deportees who traveled without ever reaching their destination, stopped for whole nights beside darkened platforms. Shortly before he died, Primo Levi said that he was still frightened by the sealed freight cars he occasionally saw on sidetracks. “I served in Russia,” the man said, “in the Blue Division. We got on a train at the North Station, and it took ten days to reach a place called Riga.” And I thought, or half said in my sleep, Riga is the capital of Latvia, because I’d studied it in the atlases I liked so much and because one of Jules Verne’s novels is set in Riga and his books filled my imagination and my life.

Now I understand that in our dry inland country night trains are the great river that carries us to the world outside and then brings us back, the great waterway slipping through shadows toward the sea or the beautiful cities where a new life awaits us, luminous and true to what we were promised in books. As clearly as I remember that first train trip, I remember the first time I stopped at a border station; in both memories are the brilliant night, anticipation, and fear of the unknown that made my pulse race and my knees buckle. Scowling, rough-mannered policemen examined our passports on the platform at Cerbère Station. Cerbère. Cerberus. Sometimes stations at night do resemble the entrance to Hades, and their names contain curses: Cerbère, where in the winter of 1939 French gendarmes humiliated the soldiers of the Spanish Republic, insulted them, pushed and kicked them; Port Bou, where Walter Benjamin took his life in 1940; Gmünd, the station on the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria where Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenska sometimes met secretly, within the parentheses of train schedules, within the exasperating brevity of time running out the minute they saw each other, the minute they climbed the stairs toward the inhospitable room in the station hotel where the rumble of passing trains rattled the windowpanes.

What would it be like to arrive at a German or Polish station in a cattle car, to hear orders shouted in German over the loudspeakers and not understand a word, to see the distant lights, wire fences, and tall, tall chimneys expelling black smoke? For five days, in February 1944, Primo Levi traveled in a cattle car toward Auschwitz. Through cracks in the wood planks where he pressed his lips to breathe he glimpsed the names of the last stations in Italy, and each name was a farewell, a step in the voyage north toward winter cold, toward names of stations in German and then Polish, isolated towns no one had yet heard of: Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz. It took Margarete Buber-Neumann three weeks to travel from Moscow to the Siberian camp where she had been sentenced to serve ten years. When only three had passed, they ordered her onto a train back to Moscow, and she thought she would be set free; the train, however, did not stop in Moscow, it continued west. When finally it stopped at the border station of Brest-Litovsk, the Russian guards told Buber-Neumann to hurry and get her belongings together, because they were in German territory. Between the boards nailed over the window, she saw the black-uniformed SS on the platform and understood with horror and infinite fatigue that because she was German, Stalin’s guard were handing her over to Hitler’s guard, fulfilling an infamous clause in the German-Soviet pact.

The great night of Europe is shot through with long, sinister trains, with convoys of cattle and freight cars with boarded-up windows moving very slowly toward barren, wintry, snow- or mud-covered expanses encircled by barbed wire and guard towers. Arrested in 1937, tortured, subjected to interrogations that lasted four or five days without interruption, days and nights during which she had to remain standing, then locked for two years in solitary confinement, Eugenia Ginzburg, a militant Communist, was sentenced to twenty years of forced labor in camps near the Arctic Circle, and the train that carried her to her imprisonment took an entire month to cover the distance between Moscow and Vladivostok. During the journey, the women prisoners told one another their life stories, and sometimes when the train was stopped at a station, they put their heads out a window or to a breathing place between two boards and shouted their names to anyone passing by, or tossed out a letter or a piece of paper on which they’d scrawled their names, with the hope that the news that they were still alive would eventually reach their families. If one of two survives, if she gets back, before doing anything else she will look for the other’s parents or husband or children and tell them how her friend lived and died, give evidence that through hell and in the farthest reaches her friend never stopped thinking of them. In the Ravensbrück camp, Margarete Buber-Neumann and her soul mate Milena Jesenska made that vow. Milena told Margarete about her love affair with a man dead for twenty years, Franz Kafka, and she also told her the stories he had written, stories Margarete hadn’t read or heard till then and for that reason enjoyed even more, like the age-old stories no one has written down and yet are revived whole and powerful as soon as someone tells them aloud: the story, say, of the surveyor who comes to a village where there’s a castle he is never able to enter, or the one about the man who wakes one morning turned into an insect, or the one where police come to the director of a bank one day and tell him that he is going to be tried, although he never learns what accusation was brought against him.

The love affair between Milena Jesenka and Franz Kafka is crisscrossed with letters and trains, and in it distance and written words count more than real meetings and caresses. In the spring of 1939, a few days before the German army entered Prague, Milena sent to Willy Haas the letters from Kafka that she had kept, the last of them coming to her sixteen years before, in 1923. On the journey toward the death camp, in the dark stations where the train would stop all night, she must have remembered the emotion and the anguish of those secret journeys of other days, when she was married and lived in Vienna and her lover lived in Prague, and they would meet halfway in the border town of Gmünd, or the first time they met, after several months of exchanging letters, at the station in Vienna. Before they started writing, they saw each other only once, in a café, scarcely noticing each other, and now suddenly he wanted to reclaim from the fuzzy fringes of memory the face of this woman. I warn you that I cannot remember your face in detail. I remember only your moving away between the small tables in the café: your figure, your dress… I still see them. He has taken the train in Prague, knowing that at the same time she has taken another in Vienna, and his impatience and desire are no stronger than his fear, because he knows that within a few hours he will hold in his arms a physical woman who is scarcely more than a ghost of his imagination and their letters. Fear is unhappiness, he wrote to her. He fears that the train will arrive and he will find Milena standing there, her light-colored eyes searching for him, and also fears that she had second thoughts at the last moment and stayed in Vienna with her husband, who does not make her happy, who deceives her with other women, but whom she doesn’t want or is unable to leave. He consults his watch, looks at the names of the stations at which the train is stopping, and is tormented by an urgent wish for the hours to race by, to already be there, but also by the fear of arriving and finding himself alone on the platform of the station in Gmünd. And he fears the impetuous physical presence of Milena, who is much younger and healthier than he, more skillful and more daring in sex.

Unconscious memory is the yeast of imagination. I did not know until this very moment, while I was trying to imagine Franz Kafka’s journey on a night express, that I was in fact remembering a journey I myself made when I was twenty-two, one sleepless night on a train to Madrid, on my way to a rendezvous with a woman with light eyes and chestnut hair. I had sent her a telegram minutes before buying my second-class ticket with borrowed money and foolishly leaving everything behind. When I reached the station at dawn, there was no one there to meet me.

What would it be like to approach a border checkpoint and not know if you would be turned back, if the uniformed guards who examined your papers with cruel deliberation, looking up arrogantly to compare the face in the passport photograph with the fear-filled face struggling to seem normal and innocent, would prevent you from crossing to the other side, to the salvation only a few feet away? After meeting Milena for the first time and spending four days with her, Kafka took the express from Vienna to Prague, nervous about getting to his job the next morning, feeling a mixture of happiness and guilt, of sweet intoxication and intolerable amputation, for now he couldn’t bear to be alone and who knows how long it would be before he could meet his lover again? When the train stopped at the station in Gmünd, the border police told him that he could not continue on to Prague; one paper was lacking among his numerous documents, an exit visa that could be issued only in Vienna. On the night of March 15, 1938, when Kafka had been dead for almost fourteen years, safe from all worry and guilt, that same express, which left Vienna for Prague at 11:15, was filled with refugees — Jews and leftists, especially — because Hitler had just entered the city, welcomed by crowds howling like packs of wild beasts, their arms uplifted, shouting his name with the hoarse, collective roar of a raging ocean, yelling Heil to the Führer and to the Reich, clamoring for the annihilation of the Jews. Uniformed Austrian Nazis boarded the Prague express at intermediate stations and looted the baggage of the refugees, whom they beat and subjected to insults and curses. Many passengers had no papers, and at the border station the Czech guards prevented them from continuing. Some leaped from the train and fled across the fields, hoping to cross the border in the shelter of night.

What would it be like to arrive by night at the coast of an unfamiliar country, to jump into the water from a boat in which you have crossed the ocean in darkness, hoping to leave the coast far behind even as your feet are sinking into the sand? A man alone, with no documents, no money, who has come from the horror of illness and slaughter in Africa, from the heart of darkness, who knows no word of the language of the country to which he’s come, who throws himself to the ground and crouches in a ditch when he sees the headlights of a car, maybe the police, coming toward him.

IT SEEMS WE ENJOY reading travel books more when we are traveling. At the beginning of the summer of 1976, after wrapping up my courses, I took a train from Granada and during the trip read Proust’s account of a journey to Vienna in Remembrance of Things Past. Two years later, on a September evening, I went to Venice for the first time, and remembered Proust and his painful propensity for disillusionment as I visited places I had wanted so long to see. Talking with Francisco Ayala about the pleasure of reading Proust, I discovered that he, too, connected it with the simultaneous pleasure of a journey. In nineteen forty-something, when my friend was living in exile in Buenos Aires, he taught at the provincial University of Rosario. He traveled once a week, first by train to Santa Fe, then in a bus that ran along the banks of the Paraná. He always carried a volume of Proust, and it seemed to him that reading Proust now was even more delicious than the first time, because when he looked up, he saw vistas from the other side of the world, was instantly whisked from the streets of Paris in 1900 and from the cloudy beaches of Normandy to the immense uninhabited spaces of South America he was passing through by train and bus. Suddenly the book was his only tie with his previous life, with a Spain lost to him, a Spain he might never return to, and a Europe that still had not emerged from the cataclysm of war. He was reading Proust on a bus traveling along the sealike vastness of the Paraná, and the volume he held in his hands was the same he’d read so often on streetcars in Madrid.

Once, at one of the stops, he looked up and saw a white-haired old man who had just got on, wearing a worn overcoat and carrying an equally worn briefcase. He was struck by his air of melancholy and poverty; the face reflected illness and exhaustion, the face of an old man whom the years had not spared life’s bitterest dregs. In an instant of shock, disbelief, and embarrassed compassion, he recognized in this old man riding a bus in a remote town in Argentina a man who had once been president of the Spanish Republic: Don Niceto Alcalá Zamora. Afraid that Alcalá might recognize him as well, he turned his face toward the window and buried himself in the book. When he looked up again, after the next stop, the man was no longer on the bus.

ON A JOURNEY YOU HEAR a story or by chance find a book that sends out ripples of concentric rings that affect succeeding discoveries. Once on a train to Seville, at a time when I was very much in love with a woman who fled from me when I most desired her and who pursued me when I tried to break away, I was reading The Garden of the Finzi-Continis and bestowed on Giorgio Bassani’s beautiful and ungovernable Jewish heroine, Micol, the features of the woman I loved. The final failure of the novel’s protagonist sadly anticipated mine, which I saw with a clearsightedness I wouldn’t have been capable of on my own.

I remember a cheap, dog-eared copy of Herodotus’s Histories that I found in a street stall in New York, and also Captain John Franklin’s journal of his trek to the North Pole that I had leafed through by chance in a secondhand bookshop and then read ravenously in a London hotel, a narrow, high-ceilinged bedroom of perverse geometry and a dressing room scarcely larger than an armoire but writhing with angles of expressionist decor. In 1989, having arrived in Buenos Aires during the southern hemisphere’s autumn, I spent hours lying on the bed in my room listening to the rain drumming against the windows, the same rain that prevented me from going outside to walk the streets I wanted so badly to explore. For hours, to offset the claustrophobia of my confinement, I read the first book I had discovered by Bruce Chatwin, In Patagonia. Now I know that precisely during the time I was reading Chatwin’s book, the author was dying of an illness whose name he did not want to divulge to anyone. A rare infection contracted in Central Asia through food or an insect bite, his friends said, to conceal his disgrace and avoid speaking the word that was already akin to the sore that centuries ago announced the horror of the plague.

So I read Chatwin in Buenos Aires as he was dying in London. My journey through Argentina was thus part truth and part literature, because as I read I was traveling to the great desolate spaces of the south, though my itinerary had ended in the nation’s capital, in the room of a hotel I seldom left because of the rain. What a rest for the soul, to be far from everything, completely isolated, like a monk in his cell, a cell with every comfort: a firm bed, a telephone within reach, a remote control for the television. The rain absolved me from the exhausting obligation of touring and provided the perfect excuse for spending hours doing nothing, lying or half sitting propped up on two pillows, with a book in my hands that told of a journey to the ends of the earth and in which other, much older journeys were recalled: that of Charles Darwin in the large sailing ship Beagle, that of the Patagonian Indian who traveled with Darwin to England, learned English and English ways, visited Queen Victoria, and after a few years returned to his southern clime and to the primitive life he had left, now forever an alien wherever he lived.

IN COPENHAGEN, a Danish woman of French and Sephardic heritage told me of a journey she had taken as a child with her mother through recently liberated France, toward the end of autumn 1944. I met her at a luncheon in the Writer’s Club, which was a palace with double doors, marble columns, and ceilings with gilded garlands and allegorical paintings. At a window I watched as one of the tall ships passed, looking as if it were gliding down a street: it sailed along one of the canals that lead deep into the city and suddenly give a street corner the surprise perspective of a port.

That was early in September, about eight years ago. I had spent a couple of days wandering the city, and on the third an editor friend invited me to lunch. My memory is filled with cities that have greatly pleased me but that I visited only once. Of Copenhagen I remember especially images from my first walk. I left the hotel and started walking at random, and soon I came upon an oval plaza circled with palaces and columns; in the center was the bronze statue of a horse, the color bronze acquires because of humidity and lichen, a grayish green like the sky or like the marble of the palace I was told was once the Royal Palace.

In all the cold and baroque space of that plaza cut through from time to time by a solitary car (as I heard the sound of the motor, I heard also the whisper of tires on the cobblestones) there was no human presence other than mine and that of a soldier in the red coat and high furry shako of a hussar who was unenthusiastically standing guard with a gun over his shoulder, a gun with a bayonet as anachronistic as his uniform.

Not knowing which way to go, I let the streets lead me, as I let myself be led by a trail in the country. Across from the bronze horseman began a long, straight street that dead-ended at a dome, also verdigris bronze, of a church adorned with golden letters in Latin and a variety of statues of saints, warriors, and individuals dressed in frock coats along the cornices. The church resembled those baroque churches of Rome, one just like another, that give the unpleasant effect of being branch offices of something, maybe the Vatican or the financial offices of God’s grace.

A statue ensconced on that facade undoubtedly represented Søren Kierkegaard. Stooped over, as if watching something below, hands behind his back, he did not have that attitude of elevation or of definitive immobility typical of statues. After death, after a century and a half of official immortality, of rubbing elbows with all those solemn heroes, saints, generals, and tribunes of the historic pantheon of Denmark, Kierkegaard — that is, his statue — still had a transient, temporary, restless demeanor, a look of uneasiness about walking alone through a closed and hostile city, casting sidelong glances at people he scorned and who scorned him still more, not only for his hump and large head but for the incomprehensible extravagance of his writings, his fervent biblical faith. He was as exiled and stateless in his native city as if he had been forced to live on the other side of the world.

I looked for the way back to the hotel. In less than an hour my editor — whom in truth I scarcely knew — would be coming to pick me up. On one long, bourgeois street of clothing and antique shops I saw a tiled roof projecting rather absurdly from a whitewashed or painted wall in which there was a wooden door with metal hinges and doorknocker and a window grill filled with geraniums. I, who on that Saturday afternoon had felt so far from everything on my walk through the empty streets of Copenhagen, had found a Spanish oasis called Pepe’s Bar.

A WOMAN WAS SEATED beside me at a large oval table in the Writer’s Club. As has happened other times, the luncheon was in my honor, but no one was paying much attention to me. Before each of us was a card with a name. The woman’s name was an enigma and a promise: Camille Pedersen-Safra. I can’t resist the attraction of names. She told me she’d been born in France, into a Jewish family of Spanish descent. Pedersen was her married name. While the other guests were laughing and heatedly talking, relieved at not having to make conversation with a stranger they knew nothing about, she told me that she and her mother escaped from France on the eve of the fall of Paris, in the great exodus of June 1940. They had returned to that country only once, in the autumn of 1944, and both realized that after only those few years they no longer belonged to the country of their birth, from which they would have been deported to the death camps had they not escaped in time, and to show their gratitude they had become Danish citizens. Denmark, too, was occupied by the Germans and subjected to the same anti-Jewish laws as those of France, but unlike the French Vichy government the Danish authorities did not collaborate in isolating and deporting Jews, did not even apply the law making them wear a yellow star.

Camille Safra had been six at the time of their flight from France. She remembered her displeasure when her mother shook her awake in the middle of the night, and the strange, warm, and vaguely pleasant sensation of traveling wrapped in blankets in a trailer behind a truck, beneath a canvas being beaten by the rain. She also remembered sleeping in kitchens or entryways of houses that weren’t hers, places where there was a strong odor of apples and hay, and she sometimes had flashes of mysterious routes along moonlit country roads, held in her mother’s arms beneath the shelter of a wet woolen shawl, listening to the creaking of a cart and the slow hoofbeats of a horse. She remembered, or dreamed of, lonely lights on street corners and in barn windows, the red lights of locomotives, and series of lights in the windows of trains she and her mother did not succeed in boarding.

In her memory, the journey into exile had all the sweetness of childhood well-being, the way children settle comfortably into the exceptional and give dimensions to things that adults cannot know and that have nothing to do with what is being experienced. When she left France, Camille was still submerged in that mythology; but by ten or eleven, when she and her mother returned, her adult sense of the real was nearly established. She had precise images now, colored with a sadness that was the reverse of the mysterious dream of the first journey.

She was a redheaded woman, stocky, energetic, careless in her dress, with features more central European than Latin and pronounced by age. I’ve seen Jewish women very much like her in the United States and in Buenos Aires: women of a certain age, fleshy, negligently dressed, lips brightly painted. She smoked a lot, unfiltered cigarettes, and conversed brilliantly, leaping between English and French according to her needs or limitations in expression, and she drank beer with a superb Scandinavian panache. She wrote book reviews for a newspaper and a radio program. The editor who had brought me to the luncheon, and who in the heat of conversation and the beer seemed not to remember I was there, had mentioned her influence when he introduced me, indicating that a favorable review from her was important to a book, especially one written by an unknown foreign author. I had the firm and melancholy conviction that the book, my reason for being in Copenhagen, would not attract Danish readers, so I was feeling remorse in advance for the bad deal the editor was getting from me, and I forgave him and was even grateful that at this luncheon at the Writer’s Club he had abandoned me to my fate. In any case, the event was not that successful; there were unoccupied tables in the large dining room with its mythological paintings. Before serving, the waiters had removed those settings.

I also noted with annoyance as Camille Safra was talking that she hadn’t said a word about the Danish edition of my book. She told me that her mother had died several months ago, in Copenhagen, and that in the last conversation she’d had with her the two of them agreed about details of that journey to France, especially something that had happened one night at a hotel in a small town near Lyon.

They were looking for relatives. Few had survived. Old neighbors and acquaintances looked on them with suspicion, perhaps fearing that they’d come back to make some claim, to accuse them or ask for an accounting. Camille’s mother had taken her to that small town — she didn’t give me the name — because someone had told her mother that one of her sisters took refuge there in early 1943. They found no record of the sister’s having been arrested, though neither was there any information about where she might be — and they never found out. People disappeared in those days, said Camille Safra, trails were lost; her aunt’s name was not on any list of deportees, repatriated, or dead. They came by train very early in the morning and ate a breakfast of cold coffee, black bread, and rancid butter in the station canteen. They asked questions of several unsociable early risers, who looked at them sullenly and refused to give the simplest information for fear of compromising themselves, since at that time collaborators were being flushed out.

Hungry, disoriented, strangers in the country that four years before had been theirs, their feet aching after walking all day, they found themselves, when night overtook them, in an open area near the shelter of a streetcar stop. They couldn’t return to Paris until the following morning. The streetcar had left them at a plaza with closed-up shops and with a monument to the fallen of the First World War; nearby was a street lamp lighting the sign of a hotel that called itself the Commerce.

They rented a room. They went upstairs to go straight to bed because the electricity would be turned off at nine. Sitting on the bed beneath a bulb that faded to pale red then revived to shed an oily yellow light, they shared a package of food they’d been given by the Red Cross. Then, dressed, and with their arms around each other, they lay down, icy feet touching beneath the thin blanket and threadbare bedspread. Her mother, Camille Safra told me, never locked doors; she was terrified of being trapped, of losing the key and not being able to get out. In the shelters, when the air-raid sirens sounded, she had attacks of sweating and panic. If they went to the movies, as soon as the film was over she rushed to the exit, for fear that everyone would leave before her and they would lock the doors, thinking the theater was empty.

Mother and daughter woke at dawn. Through the window, beneath the beating rain, they could see a rustic patio with chicken coops and an area of garden. They took turns washing with the icy cold water in the pitcher beneath the washstand and dressed in the drab, dignified, and inexpensive clothing they always wore, clothes that never kept them warm, just as there was never enough food to satisfy their hunger. When her mother tried to leave the room, the knob wouldn’t turn, the door wouldn’t open.

“I told you last night not to turn the key.”

“But I didn’t, I’m sure.”

The key lay on the dressing table opposite the bed. They inserted it in the lock, turned it this way and that, but nothing happened. The key didn’t click, it seemed not to meet any resistance, merely turned ineffectually in the lock. It wasn’t that it didn’t fit because it was the key to a different room. The mechanism appeared to function, but the door simply didn’t open.

The mother grew nervous. She rattled the doorknob and the key, beat on the lock, bit her lips. She said in a low voice that if they didn’t get out, they would miss the train to Paris and couldn’t go back to Denmark, would have to stay forever in France, where they had no one, where no one had given them so much as a smile of welcome, not even recognition. She took the key from the lock but then couldn’t get it back in, and when she finally did, refusing to let her daughter help her, she turned it so hard that the key broke in half.

“Why don’t we ask for help?” said Camille. “They’d laugh at us, two ridiculous Jews. Who ever would expect to be locked in like this?”

They tried the window: it, too, was impossible to open, although they didn’t see any latch, and of course there was no lock. They had to ask for help. A few minutes later, her mother, now out of control, her jaw hanging loose and her eyes glassy with fear — the fear she’d suffered during the flight that had saved her daughter four years before — beat on the door with desperation, yelling for help.

It was with relief that they heard footsteps on the stairs and along the hallway. The owner of the hotel, with the help of a wire, managed to extract from the lock the half of the key that had broken off, but when he introduced the master key, the door still wouldn’t open. From both sides, the door was pushed, shaken, and pounded, but it remained firmly locked, and the wood was too thick and the hinges too solid for them to batter it down.

Her mother was choking. She had sat down on the bed, in her black traveling clothes — ancient overcoat, small hat, and wide, misshapen shoes — and was breathing open-mouthed, nostrils flaring, wringing her hands or burying her face in them, the way she had when mother and daughter went down into the shelters during the raids at the beginning of the war. We’ll never get out of here, she kept saying, we shouldn’t have come back, this time they won’t let us leave. Camille then made a decision she was still proud of forty years later. She threw the washstand pitcher at the window, and as the glass broke, the cool, damp morning air flowed in. But it was too high for them to jump down to the patio, and the ladder someone went to look for never appeared.

They never did get the door open. An hour later the manager opened a second, sealed door hidden behind an armoire that the two of them struggled to pull away.

Despite all this, they caught a train to Paris that same morning. Her mother led her by the hand, squeezing hard, and told her that they were going back to Denmark and that she would never again set foot in France. In the train compartment, she was as pale, and looked as worn, as if she’d been traveling a long, long time, like many of the refugees and exiles in those times who were seen wandering around stations, waiting days, entire weeks, for trains to arrive that had no schedule or precise destinations, because in many places tracks had been twisted and bridges destroyed by bombings or sabotage. One gentleman with an air of genteel penury very like theirs offered the girl half of the orange he unrolled from a very clean handkerchief and peeled with extreme tidiness while they had tried not to look or notice the tart, tempting aroma that filled the air, erasing the usual odors of sweaty clothes and tobacco smoke. He was the first person to smile at them since they arrived in France. They struck up a conversation, and the mother told him the name of the town and the hotel where they’d spent the night. When he heard it, the man stopped smiling. He was also the only one they’d met who spoke without caution or fear.

“That was a good hotel before the war,” he told them. “But I’ll never go in it again. During the occupation the Germans converted it into a barracks for the Gestapo. Terrible things happened in those rooms. People passing through the town plaza heard screams, though they acted as if nothing were wrong.”

When she stopped talking, Camille Safra shook her head slowly and smiled with her eyes closed. When she opened them, they were moist and shining. Those eyes had been beautiful in her youth, when she traveled with her mother through France on that train and had shyly and enviously looked at the orange the man in her car so carefully peeled on his white handkerchief. She told me that toward the end of her mother’s life, in the hospital room where Camille spent nights beside her bed, her mother waked at times from a nightmare and asked her not to lock the door, breathing through her open mouth, staring at her with eyes wide with fear, fear not only for her approaching death but also, and perhaps worse, for the death she and her daughter had escaped forty-five years before.

At the end of the luncheon at the Writer’s Club, several toasts were made with excessive fervor. I don’t remember whether any was in my honor, but perhaps they were in Danish and I didn’t understand them. The clearest memory I have of that trip to Copenhagen, aside from the misanthropic statue of Kierkegaard and the Andalusian red tiles of Pepe’s Bar, is of the journey the woman named Camille Safra made during the rainy, lugubrious autumn of the war’s end in Europe. While traveling, you hear and tell tales of journeys. “Wherever a man goes, he takes his novel with him,” Galdós writes in Fortunata y Jacinata. But sometimes, looking at travelers who never say a word to anyone but sit silent and impenetrable beside me in their plane seat or who drink their drink in the dining car or stare at the monitor showing a movie, I wonder about the stories they know and aren’t telling, about the novels each carries inside, the journeys lived or heard or imagined that they must be remembering as they travel in silence at my side, shortly before disappearing forever from my sight, their faces forgotten, as mine is to them, like those of Franz Kafka on the Vienna express or Niceto Alcalá Zamora on a bus traveling through the desolate landscape of northern Argentina.