Transit by Anna Seghers

Author:Anna Seghers [Seghers, Anna]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Historical
ISBN: 9781590176252
Publisher: NYRB Classics
Published: 1944-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

6

I

BACK THEN they were all consumed by one wish: to leave. And they were all afraid of one thing: being left behind.

They wanted to get away, to get away from this broken-down country, away from this continent! They were consumed by waiting. And to make the time fly, they resorted to gossip. As long as you were talking about departures, people would listen eagerly. They loved to talk about visas bought and sold or letters of transit and new transit countries. But more than anything else they liked to hear about ships that were seized or never reached their destinations, especially when they were ships that, for whatever reason, had left without them.

I was afraid of running into someone at the Mexican Consulate who might know me. But my heart jumped with joy when I saw Heinz among the people waiting there. I even forgot my guilty conscience. I embraced him the way Spaniards embrace each other, pressing all his shot-up, brittle bones close to me. The Spaniards waiting there gathered around us, watching our reunion and smiling with the indomitable hearts of passionate people not yet hardened by war, detention camps, or the horror of thousands of deaths.

“Oh, Heinz, I was afraid you’d gone and left me forever. I’m sorry I couldn’t keep our appointment back then. Something came up, something that happens just once in a lifetime. I wouldn’t have stood you up for anything less.”

He looked at me as he used to do in the camp when I tried to get his attention by doing something silly. Rather coldly, he asked, “What in the world are you doing here?”

“I’m on an errand for someone. I’ve been looking everywhere for you the last few days—or has it been weeks. I was afraid you’d already left.”

His face had grown even smaller since our first reunion. The thinner and more emaciated he got physically, the stronger and firmer his gaze, as is so often the case with people who are ill and deathly tired. Since my childhood, no one had ever looked at me so attentively. Then it occurred to me that he looked at everything and everyone with the same attentiveness, whether it was the leathery-skinned consulate doorman or the old Spaniard who had decided to get a visa even though his entire family had been killed, as if he thought of that faraway country as a realm of the blessed where one could find one’s family again. Heinz gave the same attention to them as he did the round-eyed child whose father, as long as I’ve been here, has been incarcerated after he had already seen his ship through the pier gate, or to the prestataire whose beard was even longer now giving him an owlish appearance.

“You’ve got to leave this country, Heinz, before the trap snaps shut. Or in the end you’ll be swallowed up by the Germans. Do you have a transit permit?”

“They got me a Portuguese transit. From there I go on—via Cuba.”

“But how are you going to get to Portugal? You can’t go through Spain!”

“I don’t know yet,” he said.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.