The Dead Girls' Class Trip by Anna Seghers

Author:Anna Seghers [Seghers, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2021-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

*Death to the Jews.

THE DEAD GIRLS’ CLASS TRIP

“No, from much farther away. From Europe.”

The man looked at me, smiling, as if I’d said, “From the moon.” He was the proprietor of the pulqueria at the edge of the village. He stepped back from the table and, leaning motionless against the house, looked at me as if he were searching for some trace of my weird origin.

It suddenly seemed just as weird to me as it did to him that I should come from Europe and end up here in Mexico. The village was surrounded like a fortress by a palisade of organ-pipe cactus. Through a gap, I was able to look out at the steep, grayish-brown hills, the sight of which—as barren and wild as a lunar mountain range—dispelled any suspicion that they had ever supported any life. Two pepper trees glowed at the edge of a bleak gorge. The trees seemed to be aflame rather than blooming. The proprietor was now squatting on the ground in the shadow cast by his large hat. He had stopped watching me; neither the village nor the mountains attracted his interest; he was staring, motionless, at the only thing that still presented him with enormous, insoluble riddles: absolute nothingness.

I leaned against the wall in the narrow strip of shade. The refuge afforded by this country was too uncertain, too questionable to be called salvation or sanctuary. I had just gotten over a months-long bout of illness that had laid me low here, even though the manifold dangers of the war hadn’t harmed me. As sometimes happens, the rescue efforts of friends had protected me from obvious calamities and saved me from hidden misfortunes.

Even though my eyes burned in the heat with weariness, I was able to make out the section of the path that led from the village into the desert wilderness. The path was so white that it seemed to be etched on the insides of my eyelids as soon as I closed my eyes. I could also make out, at the edge of the gorge, the white wall I had seen from the roof of my lodgings in the village higher up on the mountain, from which I had walked down to this place. On my arrival up there, I had immediately asked about the wall and the rancho, or whatever it was, with its single light that seemed to have fallen from the night sky, but no one was able to give me any information.

So I had started walking. I had to find out for myself the significance of this house in spite of the weakness and weariness that had forced me to rest here. This idle curiosity was all that remained of my old wanderlust, an offshoot of a habitual compulsion. As soon as it was satisfied, I would climb back up to my lodgings. The bench on which I was resting was until now the farthest I had gone in my travels, in fact the farthest west I had ever been on this earth.

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