The Certainties Read online

  ‘Je comprends,’ I said. ‘I understand.’

  The woman smiled again and placed her hand on her daughter’s head. If there was weariness in the gesture, an awareness of the dangers of associating with a refugee, she did not convey this—did not look down the street to see if she was being observed as the woman at the hotel had done, and as so many others had done in the weeks and months before this moment.

  ‘I’m also a visitor here,’ she said, taking her daughter’s hand and leaning down to admonish the child with a whisper. ‘Pia—’ she began, and this was followed by a reprimand that carried within it the dual tones of chastisement and love. When her short speech was finished the woman reached across the table with her free hand and gripped mine quickly. ‘I wish you luck, sir.’ And then the two of them started down the passeig, the girl turning to wave goodbye.

  I see you! her wave was saying.

  And in my heart I said, I see you back! I see you, I see you, I see you.

  * * *

  I TOOK A DIFFERENT ROUTE to the hotel on my way back from the Paradou. I had been in Portbou less than a day and had otherwise not ventured out of the hotel, so it seemed silly to have a new route, but that was how I thought of it—a wilful detour from the expedient. It was a simple deviation: a left at the main passeig and suddenly I was on a secondary street and then in a square with a few humble shops and a market that consisted of a handful of carts arranged in a line, their sombre purveyors sitting behind on stools or benches—vendors who were far quieter than those I was accustomed to in the arrondissements of Paris or the streets of Berlin.

  The man closest to me was selling olives. He was needle-thin and his legs appeared weak. Unlike the other vendors, who were sitting under their various canopies, he stood uncomfortably—one hand on the stack of crates behind him—as though his priority was to stand tall. Olives are a mark of luxury now. Though the market on Boulevard Raspail—with its baguettes, salamis and cheeses—was part of my everyday life before the war, such delicacies have long been relegated to the quarter of dreams. Even the niçoise I was served at lunch had arrived without its namesake olive, the tuna slopped in a mound over wilting greens, the dressing more oil than mustard, a few anchovies laced across the top where the olive should have been.

  I had, I calculated, thirty pesetas in my possession; the rest of my money was hidden back at the hotel in various currencies, for bribes if necessary, and for the train to Lisbon and then a ship to America. The olives—a selection of six varieties in clay pots—looked bright and well procured though the pots were far too large for the meagre amount of stock. I was still full from lunch but I thought a small handful of something so fresh and vibrant might make Bernard and Suzanne happy.

  In the pot closest to me were the manzanillas I like best: briny, firm, the slightest taste of almond. The vendor followed my gaze and offered me a sample, lifting an olive from the pot with a spoon and extending it toward me. I picked the olive up and smiled at him, revelling in the simplicity of the exchange. The manzanilla’s flavour was delicate and just a little tart. The vendor had stewed it in a mix of lemon and young, grassy olive oil. In the pot to the left, filled with small purple olives, there was a quartered orange and an array of herbs. I hadn’t seen anything like this in France in some time—a reminder that our war wasn’t here, and that while the scars of their war were everywhere, the wave of relief I had felt crossing the border marker at the top of that intolerable mountain was not unfounded.

  ‘Une louche,’ I said, pointing to his ladle in case he didn’t understand French. He nodded and, seeing I had not brought my own container, placed a scoop of strained manzanillas onto some newsprint, shakily weighing them on an antique scale. When he handed the olives over to me he caught my eye and glanced to his left, to the stand beside his—a fruit cart stacked with lemons, limes and oranges with a robust old woman in a grey dress sitting behind it. She was studying me, though when my eyes met hers she turned away.

  I nodded at the olive vendor to indicate that I understood the warning—if that’s indeed what it was—and handed over the amount owing. On impulse, I reached out and offered him a few extra coins; a small token that I hoped would appear to be part of the total. It wasn’t much, but in that instant I could imagine this olive vendor’s family—the shadowy presence of a wife and children—and somehow, in imaging them, in thinking about the war they had just come through, I felt more care for them than for myself. No words passed between us; there was just my hand under the dirty cuff of my shirt dropping a few final coins onto his rough palm. Without any hesitation, however—without looking up or down the street, and without a glance toward the woman I now thought of as an informant—the man stood as tall as he could, took the coins between his finger and thumb and handed them back to me.

  As I turned toward the hotel, I saw a large painting hanging in a window in the corner of the square. I walked toward it. Above an unassuming doorway the words Galeria Navarro were lettered in gold. There was a sign on the door indicating that the gallery was open, a surprise under the circumstances. In France, all the galleries, large and small, were shuttered, and most art of value had been sent into cellars or the holds of ships.

  The painting was of a landscape with a white horse in the middle of it. Not a horse with evidence of muscle and sinew as Géricault or Delacroix would have it, but rather the expression of a white horse: a ghostly figure with her head down to the grass, a grey whorl for an eye, standing against darkly outlined trees and a green register of field; the moon in the upper right-hand corner full and bright. In the bottom corner of the painting the date—1901—was inscribed sternly in red.

  Inside, the gallery consisted of a single room with no furniture and no counters, just four white walls hung with a half-dozen works on either side of a curtained doorway which likely led to a storage area or private quarters. There was a long crack across the room’s ceiling, and this crack, like the bomb blasts and bullet holes in the nearby buildings’ fascia, and the rubble by the station, spoke to the fact that war had come to this place, too, dug its claws in.

  The gallery’s paintings were mostly landscapes, each an expression fattened by colour and line. The work spoke to me of that period of pastoral idealism in Germany at the turn of the century when a number of artists rejected the academy and set up a colony in the woods so that they could be in the world they painted. I stopped before each work, aware that this was a style that would be somewhat safe to display now—given that the men who might walk through the door could be corrupt Spanish officials, or legitimate buyers getting rich off post–civil war corruption, or German intelligence agents. I thought then that I should leave, that I was a trespasser, like someone who enters a bookstore only to discover that the books for sale are in a language the individual no longer speaks. I sensed, too, that my footsteps were giving me away: now I am walking, step, step, now I am stopping. But I was hungry for art, for how it makes me think, for its windows. And so I studied the work: a grey landscape with a marsh canal cutting through it; a stand of birch—and observed myself as if I were being observed, which led me to look toward the archway at the back of the gallery repeatedly until finally a man’s balding head stuck out the slightest bit between two black curtains.

  I nodded to him and moved on to the next work: a painting of a cowshed and of two cows pressing their heads between its bars, the far cow lowing and the near cow staring at the viewer with blind, empty eyes. It was by the same artist whose horse was in the window, the year marked again in red paint in the bottom right-hand corner. It was a work that broke with the pastoral because it referenced the torture to come. I was surprised at what it aroused in me…anger, frustration, a sense of doom. The cow’s blank stare seemed not only a reflection of the ordeals we’d come through these past four months since leaving Paris, but also a study of the trap that is existence itself, the daily choices that all of us make, that are made on our behalf. It was, for me, as if that animal were not blind. It was as if what she, or he, saw was so awful the artist knew they could not render it in the work. A black slot: an animal caught in the prolepsis of the next moment’s horrible dealings.

  When I turned away from the paintings the attendant of the shop emerged fully from the back room. He was a man in a crisp shirt and brown suit wearing wire-rimmed spectacles similar to my own.

  ‘Darf ich Ihnen behilflich sein?’ he asked, bowing but hesitant. This presumption, his use of German, reminded me of my father who used to delight my sister and me with tales of the souks he’d visited during his years of study as an engineer. He said there was a trick, practised in almost every market in the Middle East, where the sellers, seeing a foreigner, would loudly proffer their wares in whatever language they thought matched the foreigner’s appearance. The story of this guessing game entertained Meira and me to no end, and although in truth my father had often been mistaken for French or British before he was finally identified as German, he liked to embellish these stories—pretending the jewellery seller or the tea vendor had worked their way through twenty or more languages before finding one that fit.

  ‘Monsieur?’ the attendant tried to meet my eye. I smiled but said nothing. ‘Oui, celui-ci,’ he continued in French, referring to the painting of the cows and the shed but studying my face to see if I understood what he was saying. His French was halting but good. ‘She is a German artist,’ he said, ‘one of the finest of this mode of expression. She died not long after this work was made.’ He nodded his head again, a form of subservience that had probably served him well during the civil war, and backed away toward the curtain. I could have dissuaded him of any misperceptions then—that I was a customer, that I was a threat—but I was too exhausted. This turned out to be a good, if unintentional, ruse. For what refugee, with any sense, having entered the country illegally, would eat on a patio, enter an art gallery, and walk down the centre of the street in daylight in Portbou?

  * * *

  NOW, FROM THE BALCONY of this hotel, I watch the early morning swimmers. Their ease impresses me: how the woman in the yellow swimsuit and her husband, or lover, swim independently and then come together to talk, sometimes kissing on parting to swim out again, his strokes long and sure, hers of a shorter duration before she stops to wade in place. They watch each other more often than not: checking their relative positions and then making adjustments so they aren’t swimming at too great a distance. The water must be cool now in September, still comfortable, though there would be a need to keep moving.

  I’ve had five lovers. Six, if you count Leonie—though I was young and she was experimenting: teasing out a series of actions and reactions in order to understand her power. I was only twelve to her seventeen when she first kissed me. She was the oldest of my cousins and frequently left in charge of my younger sister and me during the one summer she came to stay with us at our house in the country. Kissing soon turned to other kinds of touching. She made it into a game, an ante of if-this-then-that…but I would have been happy either way: game or no game, overt manipulation or encounters of the more romantic kind. My parents had an excellent library in the country house, and I knew, from novels and clinical texts on anatomy, more than most boys my age. By August we were well on our way to having intercourse—Leonie having in her possession some sort of object that she said would prevent her from becoming pregnant—when my mother caught us with our clothes mussed in the tool shed at the back of the property. ‘I’ve been calling for you everywhere!’ she said, a look of fright on her wide face. And then her expression changed as if to say she knew the difference between child’s play and what had, moments before, been occurring. Soon after, mother sent Leonie back to her parents, and although I felt the loss of her auburn hair and milk-white skin in a confused and sometimes tormented way—a way that I would come to understand involved both longing and shame—my concerns, in her absence, eventually returned to the more obdurate sorts of things I could discover through books.

  That autumn, in what might have been a consolation prize for the loss of my cousin, I was given my uncle’s microscope. My sister, Meira, was busy by then with her sports—with the temperamental horse my parents had bought her and with fencing and shooting and cross-country running. She was so fast at the latter that she’d earned a scholarship. Left to my own devices I immediately set out into the fields, collecting beetles and damselflies in jars, whereupon I would add a wad of wool daubed in ether to kill them. I would then make a grand study of their constituent parts under the microscope, complete with elaborate drawings and mathematical formulas to explain flight dynamics. My father, an engineer, called my hypotheses ‘clever fabrications,’ which he deemed evidence of a literary mind. Because of this slight and other, less overt, discouragements, I turned to the social sciences, though they had no such name then. I decided that I wanted to know how collectives worked and how group selection was made—how the hive of bees in the woods by the stream came to reside there and reside together, how the ewes chose their mates, how the lambs knew their mothers, why our bitch once killed her own pup. This was, perhaps, the greatest year of my childhood: it was a time when civic and national politics were not yet real to me, when the environments in which groups and individuals were raised and habituated abounded outside our estate windows and inside my classroom, and in our house: in the kitchens and servants’ quarter downstairs where I was sent for cake, in the relations between my father and the groundskeeper, and at our own dinner table. This, I think, is when I learned to fall in love so easily—by watching others. Later, I realized this feeling of love, of heightened infatuation, was like my encounters with the work of Rembrandt: that effusive light that is both inside and outside the subject being painted. But back then, at twelve, thirteen, fourteen, it was something else—it was the bees bursting into a black cloud at some unseen signal, it was Meira’s cat suckling her kittens in the barn, it was the power of seeing without being seen…it was as simple as hiding while Gerda stood at the butcher-block table working the dough off her fingers with such concentration, it was as if she were at prayer.

  * * *

  —

  Yesterday when the three of us presented ourselves at the station, we did as Suzanne’s contact had instructed—waiting inside the tunnel until the train from Perpignan arrived and then slipping into the station with the passengers who were disembarking. We acted as if we’d come in with everyone else: three more ragged travellers among a collective of fifty or sixty, lugging the last vestiges of our old lives in beat-up cases across the platform.

  As we moved forward, four Spanish police officers appeared, checking papers and ushering passengers in one of two directions: Spaniards with identity cards were allowed to exit, while the rest of us were steered toward a large set of double doors that had been wedged open and led to a room that appeared to have once been a central waiting room or a customs hall. It had high ceilings, slow-spinning fans, and beige walls strutted with concrete pillars capped with Corinthian designs. There was a row of seats near the door to the platform, but most of the room was empty, save for the long tables where the guards were inspecting suitcases and the counter to their left where a clerk was stationed. Behind her, there was another room, or something approximating a room—an area partitioned by a low wall—in which a half-dozen men sat at desks behind lamps and typewriters and telephones.

  Suzanne waited in line with the other passengers to see the clerk, while Bernard and I stood near the door to the platform. The clerk was a local woman in the drab clothes of a civil servant, her expression stern, her dark hair wound into a tight coil at the nape of her neck. I wanted to sit on one of the wooden chairs lined up by the wall because my legs were still weak from the climb across the col, but the situation seemed to call for standing, so I remained beside Bernard with a French newspaper tucked purposefully under my arm and my battered black briefcase wedged between my feet. The air in the room, just off the platform, was stale with cigarette smoke and the grease of the locomotives. I had to fight to keep from coughing. There were dozens of people in the queue before and behind Suzanne, mostly French it seemed, many likely trying to get to America on their papers, and a few German-looking like me. All of us were adults—as if everyone had sent their children to remote locations for safety months ago, as Suzanne had.

  How many people like me, I wondered—stateless, stripped of their citizenship—had come through here? How many thousands or tens of thousands had stood in this room? I had, in my briefcase, identification papers, the appropriate visas, and six petitions for my care from French citizens of import. I had examples of my academic work and a letter of promise from an American publisher for my new essays on the Metamorphoses. Few others would have so much support. There had been a demand for my extradition in Paris, and the Gestapo had confiscated my apartment and what books and papers I’d left there, but I knew in my blood that the bureaucracy of the war was too great, and my significance too negligible, for any record of these transgressions to appear in an office such as this. Nonetheless, in the reality of the moment—the grey despondency of the people trudging forward, the clerk’s unsympathetic expression as she questioned a woman wearing too light a dress for the changing season—I felt frightened. And standing there, my feet throbbing in my shoes, a procession of human bewilderment shuffling along in front of me, I tried to locate what I was seeing, what vision of the future haunted me. I looked to the woman nearest me—in her floral print dress and cloche hat and smart gloves—and her eyes were full of fear. The man in line behind her—his beard suffering from the lack of a barber—his eyes were also full of fear. I found myself asking of each—what have you done, what might they hold against you? I thought then of that line in Ovid’s poem when Narcissus is at the pool studying his own reflection: ‘He fell in love with an insubstantial hope.’ What was our hope? That the disarray of the war neuter our interrogators? That we had now become as insignificant as we have been made to feel, so that we might slip through the cracks in our nothingness? Standing there in the shared misery of other travellers struggling forward with their papers clenched in their hands, I looked for myself…for some version of me…or for someone’s eyes to meet mine with a look that said we would be all right. I realized what I was doing with a shock: at that moment, even after being on this earth for five decades, to still feel empathy most easily in those cases that reflect my own? This was a failing. Perhaps the greatest failing of all.