Sepharad by Antonio Muñoz Molina Page B

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.
    â€œThat 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