Transit Page 2
To make matters worse, the book Seghers has him write, the one that we are reading, belongs to a genre he dislikes, for his own world-weary reasons: it’s a thriller, and as he says at the start, immediately after his digression on pizza, he is sick and tired of “suspenseful tales about people surviving mortal danger.” The mere business of writing reminds him of the meaningless “paper jungle” in which he is trapped—a thicket of documents, none of them worth the paper they are written on, despite the officious stamps and letterheads. He even has an aversion to reading, especially novels, which are “invented stories about a life that wasn’t real”; he wants another life for himself, “but not on paper.” He despises the pompous Strobel, who thinks he deserves an American visa because he has written “countless articles against Hitler.” Does Strobel really fancy that there’s some moral equivalency between his rhetorical posturing and the courage of the narrator’s one-legged friend Heinz, “beaten half to death by the Nazis in 1935” and then sent to a concentration camp?
This uneasy literary conscience prompts the confession the narrator makes near the end, when he tells an American official, in a spasm of self-contempt, “the full truth.” Is life and its agony merely the raw material for art? “It seems to me,” he says, remembering his time in captivity with other writers, “that we lived through these most terrible stretches in our lives just so we could write about them: the camps, the war, escape, and flight.” It might be Seghers’s reproach to herself. Perhaps she felt guilty about her survival, or was unable to forgive herself for having chosen art not action.
This could be why her narrator, previously so sly and cynical, undergoes a last-minute conversion and opts for political engagement. To me, it’s not entirely convincing. Explaining himself, the narrator seems to be making a prepared speech, rather than allowing us to be privy to his thoughts. When he describes his sudden determination to resist the Nazis and says that “Even if they were to shoot me, they’d never be able to eradicate me,” he sounds oddly like Humphrey Bogart’s Rick, who in 1942 in Casablanca makes the same uncharacteristically noble choice by giving up his place on the plane to Lisbon. Hollywood certainly took an interest in Seghers: her second novel, The Seventh Cross, about a manhunt for seven prisoners who escape from a concentration camp, was filmed in 1944, with Spencer Tracy in the leading role. (The adaptation of course overlooked the fact that in the book Tracy’s character was a doctrinaire Communist.) It’s revealing that in Transit Seghers tries literally to ground the decision of her narrator by giving him his own version of the Nazi cult of blood and soil. What he vows to defend is the hills and mountains of Provence and he emphasizes above all the crops that grow from that earth, “its peaches and its grapes.” Napoleon said that an army fights on its stomach. Was Seghers implying that only the thought of food and wine could persuade a Frenchman to take up arms?
The narrator’s sentimentalized change of heart is forgivable enough: Seghers needed to go on hoping, and could hardly risk damaging the morale of those who were standing up to Hitler. The end of the war, however, did not do away with the misery of displacement and deracination. Today, the characters Seghers describes are everywhere. People-smugglers cram them into airless trucks and drive them between continents. They wade across the Rio Grande, or crowd into leaky boats to travel from Cuba to Florida or from Indonesia to Australia or from North Africa to Italy. For a while they slipped out of a camp for asylum-seekers near Calais and made nightly treks on foot through the Channel Tunnel to reach England. They even sometimes stow away in the undercarriages of jets flying from Pakistan to Europe: recently one of them, ejected when the incoming plane lowered its landing gear, plummeted out of the sky onto a suburban street in London.
Those of us who travel for pleasure, rather than to save our lives, have our own reasons for sympathizing with Transit. We live in a world where people are in constant circulation, where borders have supposedly become porous and distances are abbreviated by jet engines and by electronic communications—yet never has travel been more like travail, bedeviled by bureaucratic obstacles and by the apparatus of security and surveillance that subjects our every movement to scrutiny. In 1969 Brigid Brophy published a fantastical novel called In Transit, an unwitting comic sequel to Seghers’s book. The protagonist is a transsexual who is in transit at the airport in Dublin, which he or she calls “a free-range womb” where “you too can be duty free.” In the heady spirit of the 1960s, Brophy sings the praises of mobility and elasticity, predicting that in the future it will be as easy to flip genders as to flit between countries. It is her novel, not Seghers’s much older one, that now seems wistfully out-of-date.
The narrator of Transit refers to an earth that has become “uncomfortable,” and later notices the instability of “this trembling earth.” Our discomfort is now more intense, as we begin to sense that the earth is not merely tremulous but convulsed, furiously protesting against our depredations. The human race now plays the role of Hitler’s army, overrunning and ravaging an entire planet, not just a single continent. And where else can we hope to go? There are no safe havens left, no “fabled cities of other continents” where we can start life all over again or rescind the iniquities of history. It is sobering and alarming to rediscover this book: what Seghers saw as an emergency has now become what we call normality.
—PETER CONRAD
TRANSIT
1
I
THEY’RE saying that the Montreal went down between Dakar and Martinique. That she ran into a mine. The shipping company isn’t releasing any information. It may just be a rumor. But when you compare it to the fate of other ships and their cargoes of refugees which were hounded over all the oceans and never allowed to dock, which were left to burn on the high seas rather than being permitted to drop anchor merely because their passengers’ documents had expired a couple of days before, then what happened to the Montreal seems like a natural death for a ship in wartime. That is, if it isn’t all just a rumor. And provided the ship, in the meantime, hasn’t been captured or ordered back to Dakar. In that case the passengers would now be sweltering in a camp at the edge of the Sahara. Or maybe they’re already happily on the other side of the ocean. Probably you find all of this pretty unimportant? You’re bored?—I am too. May I invite you to join me at my table? Unfortunately I don’t have enough money for a regular supper. But how about a glass of rosé and a slice of pizza? Come, sit with me. Would you like to watch them bake the pizza on the open fire? Then sit next to me. Or would you prefer the view of the Old Harbor? Then you’d better sit across from me. You can see the sun go down behind Fort St. Nicolas. That certainly won’t be boring.
Pizza is really a remarkable baked item. It’s round and colorful like an open-face fruit pie. But bite into it and you get a mouthful of pepper. Looking at the thing more closely, you realize that those aren’t cherries and raisins on top, but peppers and olives. You get used to it. But unfortunately they now require bread coupons for pizza, too.
I’d really like to know whether the Montreal went down or not. What will all those people do over there, if they’ve made it? Start a new life? Take up new professions? Pester committees? Clear the forest primeval? If, that is, there really is a genuine wilderness over there, a wilderness that can rejuvenate everyone and everything. If so, I might almost regret not having gone along.—Because, you know, I actually had the opportunity to go. I had a paid-for ticket, I had a visa, I had a transit permit. But then at the last moment I decided to stay.
There was a couple on the Montreal I knew casually. You know yourself what these fleeting acquaintances you make in train stations, consulate waiting rooms, or the visa department of the prefecture are like. The superficial rustle of a few words, like paper money hastily exchanged. Except that sometimes you’re struck by a single exclamation, a word, who knows, a face. It goes right through you, quickly, fleetingly. You look up, you listen, and already you’re involved in something. I’d like to tell someone the whole story from beg
inning to end. If only I weren’t afraid it was boring. Aren’t you thoroughly fed up with such thrilling stories? Aren’t you sick of all these suspenseful tales about people surviving mortal danger by a hair, about breathtaking escapes? Me, I’m sick and tired of them. If something still thrills me today, then maybe it’s an old worker’s yarn about how many feet of wire he’s drawn in the course of his long life and what tools he used, or the glow of the lamplight by which a few children are doing their homework.
Be careful with that rosé! It tastes just the way it looks, like raspberry syrup, but can make you incredibly tipsy. It’s easier then to put up with everything. Easier to talk. But when the time comes to get up, your knees will be wobbly. And depression, a perpetual state of depression will take hold of you—till the next glass of rosé. All you’ll want is to be allowed to just sit there, never again to get involved in anything.
In the past I often got embroiled in things I’m ashamed of today. Just a little ashamed—after all, they’re over and done with. On the other hand, I’d be dreadfully ashamed if I were boring someone. Still, I’d like to tell the whole story, just for once, from the beginning.
II
Toward the end of that winter I was put into a French work camp near Rouen. The uniform I had to wear was the ugliest of any worn by World War armies—a French prestataire’s uniform. At night, because we were foreigners—half prisoners, half soldiers—we slept behind barbed wire; during the day we performed “labor service,” unloading British munitions ships. We were subjected to horrible air raids. The German planes flew so low, their shadows touched us. Back then I understood what was meant by the phrase, “In the shadow of death.” Once I was unloading a ship, working alongside a young guy they called Little Franz. His face was as close to mine as yours is now. It was a sunny day. We heard a hiss in the air. Franz looked up. And then it came plunging down. Its shadow turned his face black. Whoosh, it crashed down next to us. But then, you probably know as much about these things as I do.
Eventually this came to an end too. The Germans were approaching. What had we endured all the horrors and suffering for? The end of the world was at hand—tomorrow, tonight, any moment. Because that’s what we all thought the arrival of the Germans would mean. Bedlam broke out in our camp. Some of the men wept, others prayed, several tried to commit suicide, some succeeded. A few of us resolved to clear out before the Last Judgment. But the commandant had set up machine guns in front of the camp gate. In vain, we explained to him that if we stayed, the Germans would shoot all of us—their own countrymen who’d escaped from Germany. But he could only follow the orders he’d been given, and was awaiting further orders instructing him what to do with the camp itself. His superior had long since left; our little town had been evacuated; the farmers from the neighboring villages had all fled. Were the Germans still two days away, or a mere two hours? And yet our commandant wasn’t the worst guy on Earth, you had to give him his due. This wasn’t a real war for him, not so far; he didn’t understand the extent of the evil, the magnitude of the betrayal. We finally came to a kind of unspoken agreement with the man. One machine gun would remain at the gate, because no countermanding order had arrived. But presumably if we climbed over the wall, he wouldn’t aim at us too deliberately.
So we climbed the wall, a few dozen of us, in the darkness of night. One of our group, Heinz, had lost his right leg in Spain. After the Civil War was over he sat around in southern prison camps for a long time. The devil only knows how and through what bureaucratic mistake a guy like him, who really was useless for a labor camp, should have been transported north to our camp. And so Heinz had to be lifted over the wall. After that we took turns carrying him as we ran like crazy through the night to stay ahead of the Germans.
Each of us had his own particularly persuasive reason for not falling into German hands. I, for one, had escaped from a German concentration camp in 1937 and had swum across the Rhine at night. For half a year afterward I’d been pretty proud of myself. Then other things happened to the world and to me. On my second escape, this time from the French camp, I remembered that first escape from the German camp. Little Franz and I were jogging along together. Like most people in those days we had the simplistic goal of getting across the Loire. We avoided the main road, walking instead across the fields. Passing through deserted villages where the unmilked cows were bellowing, we would search for something to sink our teeth into, but everything had been consumed, from the berries on the gooseberry bushes to the grain in the barns. We wanted something to drink, but the water lines had been cut. We no longer heard any shooting. The village idiot, the only one who’d stayed behind, couldn’t give us any information. That’s when we started feeling uneasy. The lack of human life was more oppressive than the bombing on the docks had been. Finally we came to the road leading to Paris. We certainly weren’t the last to reach it. A silent stream of refugees was still pouring south from the northern villages. Hay wagons, piled high as farmhouses with furniture and poultry cages, with children and ancient grandparents, goats and calves. Trucks carrying a convent of nuns, a little girl pulling her mother in a cart, cars with pretty women wearing the furs they had salvaged, the cars pulled by cows because there were no gas stations anymore; and women carrying their dying children, even dead ones.
It was then that I wondered for the first time what these people were fleeing from. Was it from the Germans? That seemed pretty futile since the German troops were after all motorized. Was it from death? That would doubtless catch up with them along the way. But such thoughts came to me only then at that moment, when I saw these most wretched and pitiable refugees.
Franz jumped onto one vehicle, and I found a spot on a different truck. On the outskirts of a village, my truck was hit by another truck, and I had to continue on foot from there. I never saw Franz again.
Once more I struck out across the fields. I came to a large, out-of-the-way farmhouse that was still occupied. I asked for food and drink and to my great surprise the farmer’s wife set out a plate of soup, wine, and bread for me on a garden table. She told me that after a long family argument, they had just decided to leave. Everything was already packed; they had only to load their truck.
While I ate and drank, planes were buzzing by pretty low. But I was too tired to look up from my plate. I also heard some brief bursts of machine-gun fire quite nearby. I couldn’t figure out where it was coming from and was too exhausted to think much about it. I just kept thinking that I’d be able to hop onto their truck when the time came. They started the engine. The woman was running nervously back and forth between the truck and the house. You could see how sorry she was to leave her beautiful home. Like others in such circumstances, she was hurriedly gathering up all sorts of useless stuff. Then she rushed over to my table, took away my plate and said, “Fini!”
Suddenly I realized she was staring, her mouth wide open, at something on the other side of the garden fence; I turned around and saw, no I heard—actually I don’t know whether I saw or heard them first or both at the same time—motorcyclists. The sound of the truck engine must have drowned out the noise of their motorcycles approaching on the road. Two of them stopped on the other side of the fence; each had two people in the sidecar, and they were wearing gray-green uniforms. One said in German, so loud that I could hear it: “Goddam it, now the new drive belt is torn too!”
The Germans were here already! They’d caught up with me. I don’t know how I had imagined the arrival of the Germans: With thunder and earthquakes? But at first nothing at all happened besides two more motorcycles pulling up on the other side of the garden fence. Still, the effect was just as powerful, maybe even more so. I sat there paralyzed, my shirt instantly soaking wet. Now I felt what I hadn’t felt during my escape from the first camp, not even while I was unloading the ships under the low-flying planes. For the first time in my life I was scared to death.
Please be patient with me. I’ll get to the point soon. You understand, don’t you? There co
mes a time when you have to tell someone the whole story, everything, just the way it happened. Today I can’t figure out how I could have been so afraid, and of what. Afraid of being discovered? Of being stood up against a wall and shot? On the docks I could have disappeared just as easily. Of being sent back to Germany? Of being slowly tortured to death? It could have happened to me while I was swimming across the Rhine. What’s more I’d always liked living on the edge, always felt at home with the smell of danger. As soon as I started thinking about what it was that I was so incredibly frightened of, I became less afraid.
I did what was both the most sensible and the most foolish thing I could do: I remained sitting there. I had intended to drill two holes into my belt, and that’s what I now did. The farmer came into the garden with a blank look on his face and said to his wife: “Now we might as well stay.”
“Of course,” his wife said with relief, “but you’d better go to the barn. I’ll deal with them; they won’t eat me.”
“Me neither,” her husband said. “I’m not a soldier; I’ll show them my club foot.”
In the meantime an entire convoy of motorcycles had driven up on the grassy plot on the other side of the fence. They didn’t even enter the garden. After three minutes they drove on. For the first time in four years I had heard German commands again. Oh, how they grated! It wouldn’t have taken much more for me to jump up and stand at attention. Later I heard that this very same motorcycle column had cut off the refugee escape route along which I had come. And that all this discipline, all these commands, all these orders had produced the most terrible disorder—bloodshed, mothers screaming, the dissolution of our world order. And yet thrumming like an undertone in these commands was something terribly obvious, insidiously honest: Don’t complain that your world is about to perish. You haven’t defended it, and you’ve allowed it to be destroyed! So don’t give us any crap now! Just make it quick; let us take charge!