“Is there something to eat?” José wondered.
“I’ll get something when we stop. Can you wait?”
José nodded, determined to behave as well as possible. It was not his mother’s fault that they were here, in flight, hungry. His head throbbed as the sun beat in hard, searing through the smudged window of the railway car. Outside, the sky had that scraped look that comes after a serious storm: blue beyond blue, and not a cloud anywhere in sight. A perfect morning.
But it had been a hideous night: the lashing rain, thunder across the bay, and then, as if God had suddenly peeled back the lid, this sun too bright to imagine. It sprayed its light everywhere and seemed to blaze from no specific center.
The railway tracks followed the coast, and the sea was gold-flecked, expansive on the left side of the car; on the right were stubble-fields of autumn, haystacks like sentries. Windmills appeared now and then, and cattle in disorganized clusters. Peasant villages scuttled by, nameless, the stone houses huddled together, the orange tiles of their roofs shimmering as the daytime moon kept stubbornly abreast of the window. Signs of life were minimal: a woman lugging water from a well, a boy herding goats up a small hillock, an old man sitting by a tree, smoking.
Henny Gurland and her son had the compartment to themselves, but they said little to each other. The events of the past day and night were beyond articulation. Indeed, they would hardly mention their crossing over the Pyrenees or the events that occurred in Port-Bou for several weeks, and then (in later years) would almost never refer to them again. It was better to leave such things untouched by speech. Language only warps the shapes and forms of attention, reduces them to a caricature. A story is always a lie, since so much is left out.
In the rush to leave the Fonda Franca before the guard woke, José had not had time to wash or brush his teeth. He had simply jumped into the same clothes he had worn the day before, however filthy. His shirt had deep stains around the armpits, and the stench was intolerable, even to him.
He yawned repeatedly, leaning on Benjamin’s briefcase, which he kept beside him on the seat, under his arm. He was tempted to open it, to examine the manuscript inside, but he didn’t dare. It was too much like prying into a casket.
The village of Girona appeared in the middle distance, and the train began to slow.
“If anyone questions us, remember to say nothing,” Frau Gurland warned as the brakes squealed. “We are going to Salamanca, to meet your father. That is all you know. Do you understand?”
“I do.”
“Good. The less said the better. That is always the best way.” She added: “You needn’t worry, darling. I will do the talking.”
José was glad to let her speak for him. The strut of independence exercised in the climb over the Pyrenees had worn him out, and he wanted to relapse, to let her take care of him. He understood now that his mother was doing her best in the circumstances and that he must offer sympathy, must try to help in whatever ways he could to see that they did, indeed, make it safely to Portugal.
He put his hand on Benjamin’s rough leather briefcase. It was miraculous that the responsibility for getting this manuscript to New York should be his and his mother’s. Setting out from the Fonda Franca, he had begged his mother to let him carry it. It was heavy, of course, and she seemed slightly to resent it. “We can’t let anything slow us down,” she said, staring at the briefcase. José tightened his grip on the handle, steeled himself to protect this piece of Walter Benjamin still in their possession. He could almost hear the dear man’s voice: “There is so much of me in the book, José. Everything of me is somewhere in its pages.”
The train stuttered to a halt in the tiny station, which consisted of a single platform and a small, painted shed. After picking up two or three passengers, the train pulled away jerkily, gassing and wheezing. Soon they were rolling smoothly, and José leaned his head against his mother’s shoulder.
Frau Gurland found herself tearing up. José had been so difficult on the trek. He had tried to swallow his childhood and become, in one day, an adult, and this meant rejecting her. Now, of course, he needed her again. The soft head against her shoulder confirmed it. Soon he slumped into her lap, and she cradled him like a tiny boy whom she was determined to protect somehow. Arkady had said to her, just before they took him away, “Take care of him, Henny.” I will, she said now. I will take care of him.
The train sped south along the coast toward Barcelona, the sun pooling in José’s face while he slept. He didn’t wake until moments before their arrival in Barcelona.
“We must change trains,” his mother whispered in his ear.
“We’re here?”
“Yes, in Barcelona.”
José reached for the briefcase while his mother lifted their rucksacks from the overhead rack.
It was a big, vaulting station, with well-dressed businessmen standing in groups of three or four and talking loudly. Frau Gurland stopped at a kiosk to buy a loaf of bread and some soft cheese, but there was no time to eat it. The express for Madrid was leaving in ten minutes, and they boarded the train with only seconds to spare, finding a seat beside a portly gentleman in a chalk-striped suit.
It was an impressive train, with blue upholstery and embossed leather lining along the walls of each compartment. Tulip-shaped reading lamps were unlit over the head of each passenger. A collapsible table was still pushed up against the wall below the broad, clean window.
The portly gentleman glanced toward Frau Gurland as if to acknowledge her presence. His copious flesh was like swaddling, puffy and white, and his big knuckles seemed to be closing in the skin like dents in dough. His steam-pressed suit and brightly polished shoes, even the flowery smell of cologne, were signs of affluence if not gentility. Henny Gurland guessed that he was a lawyer or businessman of some kind, perhaps a politician.
He puffed a thick, reddish cigar while reading a newspaper intently, sometimes grimacing. The news seemed to upset him visibly. Once, however, he erupted into sharp laughter, spooking José, who looked to his mother for reassurance. Smoke hung above the Spaniard’s slick bald head, and soon the air in the compartment became unbreathable. Frau Gurland began to cough, but she did not complain; that would be foolish in these circumstances.
At one point, the man turned to José with a curious look and seemed about to ask a question, but he didn’t. Henny Gurland consciously avoided the man’s eyes, since that might arouse his interest. Above all, she did not want to enter into a conversation. That could be dangerous. What, for example, if he were a police supervisor or government official?
The train pulled slowly out of the station, skirting the city, which Frau Gurland remembered well from the Civil War: its broad avenues, the rows of linden trees, the toylike trolleys, the bakeries and bars. These images flickered in the big window of the compartment, more like memories than real pictures. It was with some relief that she saw the city give way to dense woodland, to closely cropped villages, or meadows opening fanwise in the window.
An hour or so after the train left the station, the conductor arrived to punch their tickets. A short fellow with a well-trimmed beard, he observed the Gurlands without expression, asking to see their tickets in such guttural Spanish that Frau Gurland became confused.
“You are Spanish?” he wondered.
She merely nodded, holding up two tickets.
The conductor did not bother to examine the tickets closely. Nor did he press for conversation, much to her relief. Her Spanish was moderately good (she had, after all, spent several years in Barcelona with her husband), but her accent and fragile grammar would have given her away.
“Thank you, señora,” the conductor said, handing her both tickets.
Frau Gurland offered a slight smile, then turned her head to look out the window.
The gentleman beside her dropped his newspaper when the conductor was gone. “Did you say you were Spanish?” he asked. He smiled, and his teeth appeared, as if marionettes onstage, ready for a small, impromptu performance. They were fiercely white but uneven.
Frau Gurland hesitated, then said, “My husband is Spanish.”
“Ah, you are Colombian, perhaps?”
“No, I’m not.”
“Your accent…it reminded me of a Colombian woman I once knew.”
José sat up, anxious, wondering why this man was questioning his mother. His own Spanish was too weak to follow the conversation, but it reassured him that his mother seemed unperturbed.
“Do you like Spain, then?” the man continued.
Frau Gurland shifted in her seat.
“You must not be afraid of me,” he said. “I’m sorry if my questions are unwelcome. I mean no harm.”
Though she could not guess at his motives, Henny Gurland took him at his word. There was a welcome kindliness in his expression, and she found his voice reassuring. That he meant no harm seemed plausible.
She apologized for her reticence. “We are both very tired, my son and I. We’ve been traveling for several days.”
“Of course,” he said, turning his gaze to the newspaper.
José relaxed now, pressing Benjamin’s briefcase between his ankles, thinking about an unlikely fellow who had befriended them in Marseilles. He had offered them a meal, even though he apparently had little money to spare. That same night he offered to accompany them to the Spanish border, and to introduce them to Lisa Fittko. Without him (and her), they would almost certainly still be in France, probably in Nazi hands.
Benjamin’s deep learning had impressed José; he seemed to know even more than the boy’s father. José wondered if he himself could ever know as much. He had not read many books in their entirety. Novels, in particular, remained a puzzle; it simply made no sense to read a book that declared itself untrue from the outset. Why make up stories when the world supplied each day more spectacular ones than anyone could hope to invent? Surely Adolf Hitler was beyond the power of anyone’s invention? (He could see Hitler’s face staring from the back of the Spanish gentleman’s paper, his eyes like holes cut into the page.)
What José preferred to books were bridges and dikes, electrical systems, and complex machinery. He planned to study engineering one day, and to learn how the various parts of the world connected and how energy was transferred. Matter was, to him, the greatest mystery of all. Although everything was chemistry, the complexity of the material world was unfathomable; if only one little atom in his body shifted, he would not be himself, José Gurland. He would be another person—perhaps trapped in the same circumstances, but a different person nonetheless, and therefore able to respond in significantly different ways to these circumstances.
The train rounded a curve, and José was jolted from his daydreaming. “Could I have a little of that bread, Mother?” he asked.
It frightened his mother that he spoke in French, but the gentleman continued to read his newspaper and puff his cigar, grunting approval or scoffing with raised eyebrows as he turned the pages. She broke off a piece of bread from the small loaf and cut a strip of the yellow, waxy cheese. “Here,” she said, “but this will have to do.”
The portly man peered over his newspaper as José ate, barely suppressing a smile.
Late in the afternoon, the train pulled into Torrabla, some distance north of Madrid. As they approached the station, Henny Gurland noticed a cluster of drab military vehicles beside the tracks, and her scalp prickled with fear. The Spanish army always terrified her. A dozen or more soldiers in black berets had grouped together on the platform, some of them brandishing rifles; an officer barked instructions, though she couldn’t hear his voice. He was pointing ominously to their train.
José, who was busily pressing the cheese into his bread, had not seen the soldiers. Like a child, he was humming a tune to himself, more loudly than he realized.
The gentleman in the chalk stripes set aside his newspaper and rose, pulling down the window to peer outside. When he saw the soldiers boarding the train at the front, he turned to Frau Gurland. “Quickly, madame. You must get off the train.”
Henny Gurland felt her eyebrows lifting.
“Your papers, I assume they are questionable?” he asked.
She stared at him, giving nothing away. Her stomach was clenched, and she wanted only to be far away from this horrible place, the war, this danger, with José safe and happy.
“I will tell them I was alone in this compartment,” the gentleman said. “I’ve been traveling by myself since Barcelona. Do you understand?”
Frau Gurland’s head spun now. Could she trust this man? Could he possibly be saying this to frighten her? To get her into deeper trouble?
“You must do as I say,” he said, urgently.
She saw in his eyes what could only be genuine concern. “I’m very grateful to you, sir.”
They heard shouts in the next car, and the slamming of doors.
“Please,” he said, “don’t thank me. Go!”
She and José stepped into the aisle, which was still clear. They heard voices rising loudly in the next car as they leapt from the train and lost themselves in a crowd of onlookers.
José clung to his mother’s hand. “What’s going on?” he asked. “Were those Nazis?”
“I don’t think so,” she said. “Franco’s troops. But one can’t take a chance. The Gestapo is everywhere. We’ve been lucky so far.”
“Who was that man, the one on the train?”
“I don’t know.”
They stood at the back of the crowd and watched as the whistle blew, leaving a ghost in air, and the wheels engaged. A breath of ashes lingered on the platform as it disappeared slowly around the bend.
“The soldiers stayed on the train,” said José. “They were looking for someone.”
His mother agreed. “It was an express, too. It wasn’t scheduled to stop here.”
“We’ll be stuck here, won’t we?”
Frau Gurland shook her head. “There are plenty of trains, I’m sure. All roads lead to Madrid.” She suggested that they find a café, and they settled in the railway bar, in a corner of a room filled with blue cigarette smoke and loud Spanish voices.
“Would you like another piece of cheese?” Frau Gurland asked.
José reached for the offering, sure that no amount of food would cure the ache in his stomach, this emptiness he had been carrying for months now.
“Eat slowly,” his mother said. “It will help.”
Suddenly a small fire seemed to light in the back of his eyes, and his lips came apart. He began to rub his hands as if he were cold.
“What is it, darling? Is something wrong?”
José could not find words, though his lips moved slightly.
His mother stood now, hovering. “Are you all right, José?”
“The briefcase!” he said, in a whisper.
Henny Gurland felt her hands turning to ice.
“We’ve got to get it!” José said, loudly, standing.
“Please, sit down,” his mother said, noticing that faces had turned in their direction. This was not a moment in their flight to call attention to themselves.
José saw her panic and sat down. He dug one fist into an open palm, grinding it, wincing. He wanted to pound the table, to shout, to throw a jar of salt across the room.
“It’s okay,” his mother said.
“It’s not,” he said. “How can you say that?”
“There was nothing you could do.”
“I left the goddamned briefcase on the train!”
“It was an accident,” she said. “We were in a hurry. The soldiers were coming.”
“I don’t care,” he said.
“Please, darling, don’t—”
“We’ve got to find it,” he broke in. The hot tears of self-directed rage filled his eyes.
“Of course we do,” she said, locating a soothing note. “We’ll check with the porters in Madrid. That nice gentleman will know what to do.”
“How do you know?”
“I don’t,” she said. “But in any case, there was an address inside. He will send it along to the man in New York if we don’t find it. I feel sure of that.” She surprised herself with her confident tone, but even as she spoke she knew better. They would be lucky enough as it was to get to Fuentes de Onoro, in Portugal, by nightfall.
José looked at his mother angrily, hurt. Her assurance meant nothing to him. He put his big hands on the marble tabletop, studying the long fingers and dirty nails, the fine web of blue veins beneath the skin. The hands seemed detached from him, from José Gurland; they had a life of their own, and he felt he could not control them.
Frau Gurland reached over the table to touch those hands. “Dr. Benjamin wanted us to get to Portugal.”
José shook his head, letting the tears fall unabashedly now. It didn’t matter what his mother said or what anyone thought. That manuscript had meant so much to him; indeed, it probably contained everything he had ever thought about, the ultimate formation of his experience as a man. He remembered that Benjamin had asked Frau Fittko to take the manuscript and leave him there, dangling on the precipice, in the Pyrenees. And he was not joking. “It is more important than I am,” he had said. More important than life.
And he had lost it.
“Don’t blame yourself, José,” Henny Gurland said. “You know he would understand.”
José looked up, recalling how Benjamin had reached for him suddenly, awkwardly, and had pulled him close. It seemed that José could actually smell his presence now, feel the coarse wool of his jacket against his cheek, and the stubby fingers kneading his neck. He could hear that low voice, guttural, keyed and pitched like no other. “The world is a dark place,” he was saying. “It is always in disrepair. But we—you and I, José—we have a little chance, an opportunity. If we try very, very hard, we can imagine goodness. We can think of ways to repair the damage, piece by piece.”