Last Times, page 32
Madame Concepcion’s house was lower than the others and painted pink. Her triangular courtyard was full of potted plants, so that in his room, which gave onto the courtyard, Silber could imagine living in the middle of an inanimate brushwood. Madame Concepcion, formerly a “Midwife, First Class,” had stopped practicing after the serious trouble she had got into—on account of her kind heart—terminating in a two-year visit to her native Alicante. “Ah, what a beautiful country, if you only knew!” Returning from this fairy tale with a serial number on her laundry, Mme Concepcion continued, out of sheer kindness, to render services to pious-looking ladies, to prostitutes, to worried ingenues and cynical matrons . . . Spanish, French by marriage, a widow, she was a person of good sense, rather obese, with a massive head poised over white chins like a thick, white collar of flesh. Over an imposing mass of hair, she tied flowered kerchiefs in the Spanish peasant style. A delicate, charming profile was lost in her broad flabby face. She quickly guessed that this refugee, M. Silber, had been in prison—in Poland—and was afraid of going to prison again. She spoke to him like a mother: “I know what it’s like. My late husband did two years at Montpellier for smuggling—as if everybody, beginning with the customs officers, didn’t smuggle. But it’s the little fish that suffer for the big ones, eh? In my house you’ll sleep in peace. The cops don’t pester me. You couldn’t count all the little favors I’ve done for their wives. I only hope you don’t get picked up in the street, young man.”
The pomegranate-colored living room was decorated with stuffed lizards, photographs, a pair of painted terra-cottas representing a snake charmer and a Kabyle shepherd, an enclosed case of medical books, and some rancid artificial orange blossoms under a glass dome. “That’s for effect, young man. The looser a woman is, the more she likes to see orange blossoms under glass, like soft cheese.”
Sometimes, when Moritz retired early, Mme Concepcion brought him a glass of mulled wine in bed. “I can’t tell you,” she said, “how sorry I feel for the young people nowadays. How many fine young people have been killed in my country, and what for? I’m convinced of one thing: it’s better not to be born. If all women knew it as I do, there’d be an end of suffering in this world, Dios mio!” Between the violet-tinted tips of her plump fingers she held a cigar from which the smoke rose straight up. She had the smile of one of Goya’s old women. The skinny young man lying between the sheets inspired a kind of tenderness in her.
“Go to America, Monsieur Silber, and get rich—walk all over them, wring their necks—there’s nothing but money that counts—and the meaner you are the more you take in. Ah yes! You think I’m talking nonsense? That’s the gospel truth: either you’ve got to be a crook or you might as well never be born . . .” Squat, flabby, powerful, she filled the tiny, flower-papered room with fleshy opacity. As she was leaving, she turned abruptly. “Women aren’t worth much, and don’t forget it: victims, whores, lechers, liars, and crybabies . . . But men! They’re really disgusting. I’d roast them all from first to last over a slow fire. I wish there was such a thing as hell!”
“There is a hell,” Silber replied, mentally.
The door closed. The spiced wine made for sound sleeping. Savoring his beatitude, Silber unfolded his identity certificate: SILVER, MAURICE, Lithuanian, born in Kaunas, religion Catholic, valid until— His feet did a dance beneath the sheets.
Usually he avoided the main thoroughfares; the poor streets enjoyed a tolerance based on meager profits, mutual aid, and adroit knife-play in the dark hours. Police buses parked near the squares, which, in spite of history on the march, remained centers of gaiety, and the raiding parties spread their dragnets on the open spaces, the sidewalks, the cafés. The police buses filled up with a human jumble. Two plainclothesmen who looked like pimps sat in the rear, discussing the war in Africa, one betting on the Italians, the other on the English. The ocean-blue streets fled by, the prisoners looked around at each other like cautious drowned men. They said nothing. The (Jewish) director of an art theatre in Berlin; the (Jewish) correspondent of Amsterdam’s (defunct) leading daily; the noncom in the Polish Army who had escaped from a concentration camp; the pretty little Catalan girl, who had also escaped—but for love; the aging, crotchety German intellectual woman with an expired residence permit; the Tunisian with no papers at all, who laughed maliciously in the knowledge that he would be beaten; the Viennese (Jewish) psychologist whom this absurd arrest might kill, because his papers would never be in order, because his American visa would expire in a week; the lame, painted widow of a an old-time German playwright, looking like a figure in a danse macabre; the Italian Freemason who had come to Marseille without a safe-conduct and was wanted by the Armistice Commission; the gigolo in silk shirt and rings who claimed to be a Spaniard, a supporter of Franco, “under the protection of my consulate,” but was most likely Romanian, or Syrian, or Turkish, or Egyptian, or Maltese, or Smyrniot. These people and a throng of others—the persecuted, ruined elite of many countries, the scum of the ports, of the gin mills, the brothels, the spies’ nests, and the universal dislocation—were corralled in the dusty halls of the Évêché. Their faces revealed every nuance of mute panic, despair, polite fury, outraged pride. Inspectors moved through this human flock like sheepdogs. Other inspectors, more important, sat arrogant and sweating at little desks under glaring lamps, examining papers and settling cases with the insouciance of a Chinese headsman.
“This international rabble, this nest of Jews, if I was running things, Monsieur, I’ll tell you what I’d do, I’d put the lot of them on board some leaky old tub. Why yes, ladies and gentlemen, you’re going to England, take my compliments to de Gaulle. And one fine moonlight night I’d sink the lot of them in the middle of the ocean, like plague-ridden rats, yes, friend, like rats!”
“Come on, you. You’re a Belgian? Suspended sentence of deportation? You will report to the préfecture tomorrow”—this meant the internment bureau—“that’s all, get going. —Next! Russian? What kind of Russian? Nansen passports aren’t valid anymore, Madame, to hell with Abbé Siccard, he can come and see you in the cooler if he has time, ah, and if you think you can make scenes here, you’ve got another think coming. You can bawl all you like in the cooler, you should have got your papers in order, take her away. —Next! What? What’s that you say? Born in Danzig, volunteer in the French Army, wounded on the Somme? Service record doesn’t count here, what counts is the stamp of the Service of Foreigners. Jew of course?”
The man, leaning on a long crutch, acquiesced politely.
“Good. You will tell your story at the Screening Depot.”
A Negro in a pink shirt and threadbare jacket lamented hypocritically, “But it’s impossible leave France—no boats run—me from Protectorate, French protection.”
“Shut your trap, you, Jaspar—say, where is he? Jaspar, give this fellow a good black eye, I don’t want to see him again. Get going, Ben Alouf. —Next!”
A frail little old man, pale and breathless, former head cardiologist in a Viennese hospital. He was unable to speak French and held out some pink papers and several letters of recommendation in longhand, addressed to a former minister now under house arrest. “Fervent Catholic, illustrious scholar, president of the congress of . . . friend of France . . .” Monseigneur Illegible had written.
“All that’s very fine, Monsieur, but your status isn’t regular. Translate that to him, you. He’ll have a chance to explain at the Screening Depot, let him sit down in the Assistant Chief’s Office. —Next!”
A lady had fainted, they were sponging her face with a handkerchief soaked in spirits of ammonia. A well-dressed Dutchwoman, arrested with her whole family, was demanding sandwiches for the children. A bearded young American, born in Hungary, kept stamping frantically and shouting in cadence, “Kon-sul amé-ri-cain! Kon-sul amé-ri-cain!” No way to shut him up, you couldn’t hit an American, in the end they dragged him off somewhere. Some went out to the toilet and hurriedly tore certain pages out of their address books. Others made little balls of paper and chewed them thoroughly before spitting them out.
When Moritz Silber passed through this Gehenna he had the good luck to reach the examiner’s desk with his dubious papers and forged safe-conduct just as the sanguinary inspector had finished his shift. He was succeeded by a mournful, tubercular soul of about fifty, nearsighted and discreetly indulgent, who discharged his duties as quickly as possible in order to improve the air supply, and regretted the peaceful days before police had come to be synonymous with persecution. He held only the most impossible cases, and then reluctantly—such as the well-dressed feebleminded gentleman who presented two different identities at the same time; or the aged Serbian lady who had come to Marseille in 1892 with a diplomatic passport and had never heard of the Registration of Foreigners— The mournful, tubercular inspector wrote out a blue slip for Silber and sent him to the correct bureau.
Silber had spent seven hours breathing the foul air and speculating on the possibilities: prosecution for forgery, and for the use of forged papers and for infraction of the law relating to foreigners; two years in prison—a beating, of course, internment at Gurs, if he weren’t dead and buried by that time, if he weren’t handed over to the Nazis, if . . . He left the Évêché at dawn, giddy with good luck, with hunger, thirst, and a depressing joy. The naked square was as white as a transparent winding sheet. On the pink wall of the church, twenty feet up, a trail of brown blood could be seen, left by an unknown body hurled against the stones. The iron benches were still twisted every which way from a fantastic explosion. The streets slept. Two bicycle policemen rode up and stopped him.
“Your papers . . .”
“I’ve just come from the Évêché, I’ve just been checked.” Fear sullied him to the marrow.
“You were in a spot,” said one of the cyclists amiably. “Better not be out so early in the morning.”
Now he was a Lithuanian, equipped with an authentic identity certificate. He idled on the Cannebière and the Quai des Belges, almost seeking encounters with the plainclothes men, like the primitive warrior made invulnerable by magic who wants the test of bullets for the pleasure of scoffing at them. The police at this tranquil afternoon hour were enjoying siestas at home or playing cards in the bars, often side by side with refugees whom they observed half-professionally, though asking no questions—for enough is enough, there are hours on duty and hours when duty is forgotten—we’re not watchdogs after all! On the half-deserted quay, outside a shop displaying fresh sea urchins of a brown undersea color, Silber met Dr. Ardatov and Tullio Gaétani.
“Maurice,” said Gaétani, “you’re in luck, I can see it by your eyes. But you ought to put on a clean shirt when you go to meet your unknown charmer. Tell me her name.”
Silber’s joy burst forth, lending beauty to his humiliated features.
“Her name is Préfectance! I’m all kitted out.”
At once he realized his lack of tact.
“What about you?”
“More or less.”
Gaétani made a floating gesture.
“We keep afloat. Now all you need is thirty-six visas and a seat on the Clipper.”
The word visa could make asthmatics breathe again, relieve sufferers from heart trouble, cure neuroses, dispel the temptation of suicide; it reigned over condemned horizons as a mirage reigns over a desert strewn with bones—but this word also wrought devastation, giving rise to diseases of the personality hitherto unknown to psychiatry. After the thirtieth day spent waiting in the antechamber of a consulate, a white-haired woman clutches her handbag and dashes across the Place Saint-Ferréol like a lunatic in a catatonic state, preserving just enough of her wits to ask for a dose of veronal sufficient to assure sleep without waking. The only difficulty is that you don’t know the dose and the doctors often succeed in reviving you, and everything begins again, but with weakened kidneys. She meets someone, she speaks out of habit, smiling even, though rather hysterically, she is advised to try Paraguay, you cable New York, I’ll give you the address, you undertake to devote yourself to agriculture and invest some capital. Hope unreasonably returns, just as an exhausted heart begins to beat again after certain injections. Somebody knows the price of various dubious visas, somebody has precious bits of information about aid committees, the Quakers, the Unitarians, the American Aid, the Joint Distribution Committee, the special channels of the Communists, the influence of the White Russians, the religious orders, various moribund political parties or the League of Nations, the possibilities of relatives lost sight of eighteen years past but now become rich, naturalized, and established in Brooklyn, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, Shanghai.
“I haven’t much faith in that American visa of yours,” said Tullio Gaétani to Moritz Silber. “You haven’t an uncle with a business in Chicago, you’re not a famous pianist or a well-known journalist, or a ladies’ hairdresser, no party will claim you, you are nothing but a buck private of the extreme left, all very compromising. Now your Ecuadorian visa has more serious possibilities. Do you know where the Republic of Ecuador is?”
“Out in the sun, latitude zero.”
“I’ve been there. Spectral mountains under an incandescent sky. The Indios move about at an altitude of eight thousand feet, taking little short steps. They are stoop-shouldered and covered with red and brown blankets and big hats. Their donkeys are the most patient and most desolate in the world. Men and beasts out of prehistory. They believe in the gods of the Incas, in the copper-colored Virgin, in Christ the King, in the Serpent Creator, in the Omnipotence of the Colonel. The earth burns, the heavens are aflame, and man can scarcely breathe. The wild plants have thorns like long steel needles. You move in the crushing silence of the celestial fire or of enormous icy stars that seem close enough to touch. I see you there, Maurice, with your box of glove samples, meditating as you look down into the crater of a volcano extinct for six thousand years. I can also see the thin red snake likewise meditating as it watches you from under the burning stones. It is called the coralito and its bite is often fatal; but it has never been known to bite a Jew in distress. It is free, you are free. You’ll discover that no one needs any gloves.”
“And I’ll find a gold nugget!”
“Better not. The snake will tell the colonel, and the colonel will have you hung by the ankles under big leafless trees covered with purple flowers.”
“I’ll risk it.”
Silber outlined the steps to be taken. As a rule Ecuador did not accept applications for immigration visas, but some providential connections were at work and the visa might arrive in about a month, cable expenses paid. On what passport should he take it? The préfecture might grant a stateless travel paper, the American Aid Committee would support the application, which would have to be filed at the same time as the application for an exit visa, with a certificate of unfitness for military service (cost, three hundred francs), a certificate of residence, a letter (promised) from Abbé N. Would the Spanish transit visa be granted to a Lithuanian? Spain theoretically recognized the existence of an independent Lithuania that no longer existed. The Portuguese visa was contingent upon the Spanish visa and on a certificate from a steamship agency in Lisbon attesting that the price of a tourist-class passage from Lisbon to New York or Havana had been paid. The United States would probably not grant a transit visa. Cuba would demand a deposit of $500, this would be reimbursed on his departure from Cuba—but meanwhile where was he to get money? “The Jewish HICEM would consent to pay for one-third of the passage, I know Dr. S., Little R., and Miss B.; Mayer will bond me for another third, the Americans will pay a third if you put in a word for me, Gaétani. The danger is that in view of three thousand seven hundred applications, the Ecuadorian visa might expire while I’m waiting for a place on the boat. Or if it doesn’t, one of the transit visas might expire; or the Spanish border might be temporarily closed on account of rumors of invasions; or Vichy might decide to suspend all exit visas; meanwhile my residence permit is sure to expire, the newspapers will carry another announcement that foreigners whose labor is not indispensable to the nation will be interned. And another thing: one of these days the panzer divisions may head for the Mediterranean, followed by special detachments of the Gestapo. In any case, I’m going to take out Siamese and Chinese visas, you can get them without the slightest difficulty for a few dollars; and I’m going to apply for a visa for San Salvador; and Mexico. Some Spanish friends will recommend me. If the Halcyon returns to port, if the Halcyon leaves again for Dakar and Brazil, I’ll try to get Brazilian and Uruguayan transit visas, it’s not entirely impossible—”
Gaétani said, “I remember the days when we carried a map of the Métro around with us. Today it’s the planisphere. Our vision is broadening.”
“There are enchanted isles again,” said Ardatov. “A Dutchman proposes to get me a visa for Curaçao and the Windward Islands.”
These safety planks across the abysses of perdition seemed perpetually on the point of breaking but you had had the time—about ten seconds—in which to jump to the next plank. At the very moment of despair a letter arrived bearing stamps from the other world; someone brought up the possibility of reaching Africa in the hold of a freighter; it seemed the HICEM was going to charter a steamer, a Mexican ship was expected, the American Red Cross was taking some steps. The Swiss newspapers ran the story of some Bohemian Jews embarked on a ship sailing down the Danube, rejected by Hungary, rejected by Romania, rejected by Bulgaria, dying of hunger on the gentle blue waters, landing secretly in a forest, tracked by the police. A ship overcrowded with refugees was wandering through the Black Sea, the Golden Horn, the Aegean, the Mediterranean. It had been turned back at the ports of Greece and Turkey—because the visas, granted in principle, had not been granted formally—because there was disease on board, because health officers raised questions of quarantine—because international law had not foreseen the condemnation of a whole people—because the chancelleries, very busy with more important matters, acted slowly—because the governments were discussing the problem of stateless persons, the question of the Jewish National Home, the Balfour Declaration of 1917, the Arab question, the nationalist terrorism of two peoples. (No one knows what became of the human cargo of this phantom ship. It is even possible that they were saved. Later, another steamer, the Struma, put out from Romania and after having been turned away from Istanbul and Palestine, sank somewhere at sea, blown up by desperadoes. The number, perhaps exact, of the refugees without refuge who sank with it is known: 769.)
