In the Night of Time (16 page)

 

I catalogue Ignacio Abel's pockets—everything a man carries, what he hasn't thrown out, what he cares about, and what for no reason stays there, making his pockets bulge, creating excess weight that begins to loosen a few threads, and once loose the slackening can turn into a tear, what would help him establish his identity and reconstruct his steps and is as ephemeral as any piece of paper the October wind blows down the street, like the contents of the wastebasket the cleaning women in the New Yorker Hotel empty into a trash can. Suppose you died and only those things spoke of you. But in Madrid the suicides on the Viaducto tended to empty their pockets and leave their documents and valuable personal possessions in good order before jumping into the void. Some took off their shoes, but not their socks, and left them lined up together, as if at the foot of a bed. (Adela didn't take hers off; she jumped into the water, or rather took a step and let herself fall, wearing her high-heeled shoes, her handbag clutched between her hands in light summer gloves, the small hat that would remain floating and from a distance look like a paper boat.) He recalls Adela's letter, which he should have torn to pieces but still carries in his pocket with the tenacity of memory or remorse.
Why should I hide the fact that I'm no better than you, what frightens and angers me the most is not the thought that those savages you believed to be your people have killed you and that your children will grow up without a father but that right now you're alive and happy in the arms of that woman.
He remembers Judith's letters, stupidly kept in his study, in a drawer locked with a small key that at some point he would forget and leave in the lock.
I knew very well I couldn't give you many things you desired, but then neither will any other woman because what you want doesn't exist and you don't know how to want what's closest to you.

 

Archeology of the passenger on a train that left Pennsylvania Station at four o'clock on a specific day in October 1936, not what's in his suitcase but the contents of his pockets: the train ticket; a card with emergency instructions in the event of shipwreck, distributed to each passenger on the SS
Manhattan
upon embarkation; a stamped postcard he's promised himself to mail as soon as he reaches his destination, guilty for not having written to his children in so long, though he doesn't know whether any of the postcards he's been sending since the morning after his departure from Madrid have reached them; a few French centimes; a small copper penny hidden in the hindmost gap, where the hardest crumbs of bread lodge, in an opening where one's nails cannot reach; a postage stamp; a fountain pen Adela gave him for his last birthday, a gift suggested—and sold, with a small commission—by Professor Karl Ludwig Rossman, taking advantage of one of the occasions when he went to Ignacio Abel's house to pick up his daughter after the German lesson she gave the children; a token for the elevated train; two letters from two women, as different from each other as their handwriting (both announce the end of something on each of the two sides of his life, which for a time he thought would never collide or meet, contiguous rooms in the same hotel with a soundproof wall between parallel worlds). Photos in his wallet, worn and stuffed with useless documents and credentials: identity card; membership cards in the UGT, the Socialist Party, and the Association of Architects; a safe-conduct pass, dated September 4, 1936, to travel to Illescas, province of Toledo,
for the purpose of saving valuable works of art belonging to the national patrimony and threatened by the brutal Fascist aggression.
The safe-conduct mentions aggression, not advance. Words were modified in the hope that the facts words can no longer recount would cease to exist. That the enemy came and there was no effective force to stop them, or at least hamper their advance, except for unruly groups of militiamen who passed from boasting to panic to scattering after the first shots; who died with a generous, useless heroism, not knowing where the enemy was or even that the confusion suddenly surrounding them was a battle; who fell backward when their rifles recoiled against their shoulders or had rifles with no bullets or only wooden rifles or enormous pistols stolen in the looting of the Montana Barracks, foolishly aimed at an airplane flying low over the straight highway and firing shrapnel, or at some poplars shaken by the wind that appeared to be teeming with the enemy.
The squares the rebels consider decisive bulwarks of their position look more and more desperate each day. If they have not yet surrendered, it is simply because our victorious forces do not wish to destroy those cities but conquer them for Civilization and the Republic.
Perhaps they've already reached Madrid and this is the first night of the occupation, the night six hours later will fill the silent streets with the darkness of an inkpot or a well. Perhaps when the train reaches the Burton College station the newsstand will display headlines in fresh ink announcing the fall of Madrid.

 

Judith Biely is a photo in his wallet, taken in Paris when the possibility of their meeting didn't exist, days or weeks before she received the unexpected invitation to travel to Madrid, overnight, when she imagined she would spend the autumn in Italy, writing articles for an American magazine that would pay her very little but offered at least the double recompense of not spending the money she had left and seeing something she'd written in print; she'd see it and so would her mother, who kept in an album the photographs and letters Judith had been sending her for the past two years and the few published articles with her byline—compensation, at the moment so doubtful, for the sacrifice she had made so that her daughter could travel and give herself the education in the world she deserved and needed. The most fragile things have an extraordinary capacity to endure, at least by comparison to the people who use and make them. In some New York archive no one visits, clerks are probably binding the small radical magazines that between 1934 and 1936 published accounts of journeys or brief descriptions of European cities written by Judith Biely, never overtly political though endowed with sharp observations of life in a witty, breathless style, typed on a portable, the Smith-Corona that had also been a gift from her mother, as was the entire trip and the impulse to undertake it. She gave her daughter the typewriter when they were on the pier waiting for the gangplank to open, when the huge siren had sounded and a great column of smoke rose from one of the ship's funnels. She imposed no conditions and demanded no results; she simply offered her this gift with an unrestrained devotion similar to what she felt twenty-nine years earlier when she had given her life. Judith turned twenty-nine in the middle of the ocean, enclosed in her cabin before the typewriter in which she'd placed a sheet of paper and then written nothing, dizzy with the movement and heat of the ship, overwhelmed by the magnitude of the gift and the responsibility of deserving it. Leaning his elbows on a railing on the first-class deck, Philip Van Doren had been observing her during the voyage. It was Judith's life that would acquire a decisive form as a consequence of the gift, but it was also, by proxy, the life her mother hadn't been able to have; crossing to a Europe where she'd never been was the return journey her mother wouldn't make now. Judith, the youngest, unexpected daughter who had come when she was in her thirties, would now fulfill the expectations and possibilities she'd renounced under the weight of rearing her children, caring for the house, and feeling pressure from a husband who couldn't explain to himself why other, more recent arrivals triumphed in America and he didn't, or not on the scale he would have wished; who in Russia had been a shrewd and respected merchant, capable of closing critical deals as easily in French and German as in Polish or Yiddish, but who in the new country found himself to be as dimwitted in doing business as he was in handling the English language. The bitterness of a proud man enveloped his presence, filled his house like a suffocating shadow. Being a girl and the last born, Judith was safe from the violent pressure her father put on his sons: he demanded they be what he hadn't been and at the same time was very sensitive to the humiliation they inflicted on him by soon going beyond his discredited teaching; speaking English with no accent, becoming ashamed of him, moving ahead with an inexhaustible capacity for giving themselves over to work, for trading in goods that in Russia he would have scorned—scrap, old clothes, building materials, any merchandise that could be easily bought and sold in large quantities. At the family table he spoke loudly and listened to no one, indoctrinating his sons with useless advice that always began and ended on the same note, the relationships he'd known how to cultivate throughout Europe, conducting his own correspondence in French and German; he told them how to write their letters, as if unaware he was in Brooklyn and not St. Petersburg, as he still called his native city. The farther outside the world he found himself, the more aggressive he became; the more terror he felt at venturing into a city that would never be his, the more defiantly he refused to follow his sons' instructions in the limited tasks they gave him. His egomania swelled with the constantly repeated and increasingly exaggerated recollections in which he was always the center. His sons exchanged glances or simply looked away, became distracted playing with crumbs of bread or smoking cigarettes; they left quickly, they always had things to do, and got up so early in the morning they were snoring into their plates as soon as supper was over. The mother remained at the table, nodding, not daring to leave him without an audience for his ravings; sometimes she became absorbed in playing piano scales on the oilcloth. In time little Judith was the only one who listened to him, unable to escape the eyes that had wandered from one face to another searching for an attentive gaze where he could anchor his monologue. She understood him only in part, because he spoke fast in Russian, or rambled in French or German to demonstrate his command of those two languages which for him represented civilization, or to cite the praise for him in letters sent from business associates in Paris or Berlin many years earlier. Being a girl and having come last gave her a somewhat feline freedom denied to the others, from which she observed them all, absolved of the brutal obligations to which her brothers and father devoted themselves—the early risings, the trips to junkyards and dumping grounds, the fury of male celebrations, always harsh and threatening, the vodka, beer, tobacco, the athletic competitions. But she was also saved for the most part from the work of her mother, who lived in silence as her husband lived in words, but in ever greater isolation, which Judith began to understand when she grew older and could explain to herself what she had only sensed as currents of sadness when she was a little girl, sensitive to them but unaware of their origin. After spending the whole day working in the house, when the others were asleep her mother would remain in the spotless kitchen, and her face would change once she put on her eyeglasses and sat up straight to read a book in Russian, usually some thick tome with black covers, like a Bible. What she felt toward her husband was not fear of his unfocused and violent energy but a profound contempt that made her boredom more tolerable, allowing her to confirm that his command of languages was not as good as he asserted, his boasting nothing more than secret, pathetic fear. She took her revenge by seeing him as ridiculous, noting each indication of his vulgarity, predicting in advance and word for word the lies he would tell night after night. She would look at him and make a face, and knew her children had seen it and taken it as a signal to share with her the discredit of their father, against whom she held grudges immune to the passage of time and dating to long before he'd forced her to leave her beloved native city. It was he who had foolishly insisted on taking her to America. It was his fault she stopped being a lady with a love of music and literature, and with domestic servants who efficiently and silently attended to household tasks, to become little more than a scrubwoman. From occupying the main floor of a building in St. Petersburg she had come to live in a foul-smelling, noisy tenement of immigrants, in an apartment with low ceilings and walls like cardboard where almost all the windows faced an interior courtyard that was a black hole of garbage and screams. She who had been a lady had to fight not to lose her turn at the washbasin or the toilet with unkempt, loud women who despised her because they sensed her superiority and reserve, because they saw her returning from the public library carrying books under her arm, because she occasionally received in the mail a Russian magazine or a sales catalogue from a piano company. She spent years saving, penny by penny, to buy the piano. She'd brought musical scores from Russia, and some nights, instead of reading, she opened one on the kitchen table, leaning it vertically against a jar or box of biscuits and rapidly moving her fingers over a nonexistent keyboard, murmuring the music in a voice so low Judith barely heard it. When she was little she was hypnotized by the invisible piano that disappeared as if by magic but remained present in the strange markings on the score and in the delicacy with which her mother's hands moved over the cheap oilcloth or scoured wood. Sometimes her mother did piecework in a sweatshop where the sewing machines never stopped, night or day. It was important not to injure her fingers, not to let them become dull and slow, and to keep the music in her head, though no instrument would make it sound. Judith watched her reading or playing the nonexistent piano and understood that her mother, though so concerned about her—she wasn't to miss school or leave the house without completing her homework, she was to be neatly combed and clean and dressed like a young lady—in reality lived in another world from which she, her daughter, just like her husband and the boys, was excluded, a bubble of silence inside which floated the Russian novels she read in a low voice, the notes on the piano that perhaps no longer sounded in her head as clearly as she might have wished. Long after the Petersburg of her youth had become Petrograd and then—barbarously, in her opinion, a profanation she took as a personal insult—the Leningrad of the Soviets; when letters from relatives and friends stopped arriving and she learned in retrospect the fate of many of them—deported, imprisoned, dead of cold and hunger in the streets, disappeared—even then she continued to nourish the same circular denunciations of her husband for having uprooted her from her city and her life: a city that no longer existed, a life that eventually would have been much worse than the one she had in America. Her husband boasted at the table of having foreseen what was happening twenty years before the fact. It seemed incomprehensible to him that the czar hadn't asked for his advice, that Kerensky in 1917 had allowed himself to be guided by an ingenuousness with such disastrous consequences when he might have heeded Biely's warnings, though he'd been out of the country for many years, because he had knowledge of the world and an eye for business, an ability to penetrate the most secret intentions of men and read between the lines of the newspaper reports. When Fanny Kaplan attempted to kill Lenin in 1918, he maintained that in reality she'd assassinated him and the Soviets, masters of propaganda, gained time by deceiving the entire world except him. When it was learned several years later that Lenin had died, he predicted the immediate collapse of a system of Asiatic tyranny dependent on just one man: this was how the empire of Genghis Khan fell apart after his death, and this was how Attila's hordes dissolved into nothingness. Unlike others, he didn't base his opinions on the banalities published in the papers; one needed to have a broad perspective, to read history books in several languages. By this time Judith was already a brilliant student at City College, not because her mother's insistence that she have an education would have prevailed over her father and brothers, but because none of them paid much attention to her when she was growing up, quiet and reserved, subdued and pliant; she was the only one of them born in America. They accepted as part of her singularity that she won all the prizes in high school and with no difficulty would excel on the entrance examination for City College. In fact, they thought it a minor achievement, a thing for girls or unmanly men. At first her father bragged about her, much more than her mother did. He explained that his daughter's achievements in one way or another were due to him, and he altered his memories to fit the new version of events; in front of her, her mother, and her brothers, he recounted what everyone knew wasn't true, and the more he sensed their disbelief, the more he adorned and exaggerated his account, as if defying them to contradict him, to not agree to remember as well—she, Judith, above all—what never happened: how her father had walked her to school every winter morning when she was little, how he'd helped her with her homework, how he'd actually been more responsible for her excellent grades than she was. As his daughter progressed toward her degree, he began to display an offended mistrust that manifested itself in disdain for what he called “book knowledge,” the lack of true education in professors who in many cases achieved their positions thanks not to personal merit but to family connections or the corrupting influence of money. Had he needed to go to the university to direct an expanding business in St. Petersburg with branches in the great cities of Europe and the capitals of the Levant from which he imported, at an excellent profit, olive oil, almonds, olives, and oranges? What degree had he needed to make his way in America, having foreseen before anyone, and contrary to the opinions of pompous university professors, that the days of czarism were numbered and that when the monarchy fell it would be replaced not by a European-style parliamentary system, as so many deluded men with doctorates had maintained, but by Asiatic despotism. At the family table, beneath the circle of light from the lamp, one of the brothers, exhausted by fourteen hours of work without respite, snored with his chin resting on his chest. The other smoked a cigarette, paying close attention to the ash. The mother looked sideways and practiced fingering exercises with her right hand on the edge of the table. Only she, Judith, held her father's gaze, acted as an audience, nodded without much effort at his questions that always implied the answer. But she felt no real rancor toward him and didn't lose her patience, and this tolerance of hers hurt her mother, who would have wanted her to be more indignant with him, more wounded by his miserliness, his vanity, his indifference toward everything that was not himself. She, who had actually done so much for her daughter, wasn't she entitled to have Judith place herself openly on her side, become her accomplice in resentment and in the care of the archive of all the affronts catalogued since a few years before the end of the previous
century, in a world of corsets and horse-drawn carriages and byzantine solemnities in honor of the czar? But if she spoke against her father, Judith didn't second her, and if she enumerated his displays of vulgarity, Judith agreed and then smiled, making a comment that in some way exculpated him, presented him as picturesque or eccentric rather than arbitrary and cruel. He'd never given her a cent to buy a notebook, a pencil, a book. And still she wasn't resentful, and if despite everything she felt a private impulse to complain, she smothered it in remorse. The day before Judith left for Europe, he caressed her hair in his usual awkward way and said in Russian, “My girl,” before turning away to hide the wet gleam in his eyes.