of the lean-to, and the next morning he is found strangled with a wire and hanged from a telegraph post near the hut. The mother and child are barricaded in the hut and itâs set afire, and when everything has burned to the ground they flatten the area with a tractor and stick a sign in German and Russian in the mud reiterating the punishment reserved for those who collaborate with guerrillas.
Wait a minute.
He shudders as a chill runs down his spine; he is huddled in the darkness, feeling the sheets, a pillow he should find a pistol beneath.
These things havenât happened yet. I canât be remembering something that hasnât happened. In April or May of 1936, my literature professor couldnât know that at the end of that summer he would be shot and thrown into a ditch.
Confused again, he is on the verge of waking and doesnât know where he is or who he is. Where am I if not in a Russian hut near the Leningrad front in the autumn of 1942? Iâm wearing not a German winter uniform but lightweight pajamas, there is no rough cloth of a military blanket, no stink of manure or the rotted straw of the mattress I dropped onto a few hours ago, dead with fatigue, not roused from sleep by the stealthy sounds of guerrillas who came to kill me.
Now, yes now he feels panic, lost somewhere in the tangle of unreliable memories and the chaos of time, and vertigo, because in a single instant his mind has leaped more than half a century and an entire continent. He is tempted to reach over to the night table and turn on the lamp, but he chooses to lie quietly, curled up as he did that night fifty-seven years before, a whole lifetime in one lightning flash, in that instant when youâre dozing but jerk awake as your head drops. He listens attentively to the quiet whir of the alarm clock, the distant hum of the refrigerator, the muted night traffic of Madrid. He looks at who he was as if watching a stranger, seeing himself from the outside, feeling curiosity and a
certain tenderness, as well as the satisfaction of learning that he wasnât a coward, and the surprise of having survived where so many perished. He knows that his lack of fear, like his lack of envy, is not something to be proud of but simply a part of his character. He sees the youth who was so passionate about philosophy and literature and the German language in a public institute in Madrid, the young man who wasnât born in time to fight in the Spanish Civil War but enlisted in a fit of reckless, toxic romanticism to go to Russia. He sees himself leaping over a trench, at the head of a squad, shooting a pistol and shouting orders, all the while feeling invulnerable. He sees coming toward him, emerging from a mist, a platoon of Russians with upraised swords.
But of all his successive identities the strangest, the most unreal, is the one he has experienced now, tonight, just awakened from a memory as vivid as a dream. Who is this eighty-year-old man turning clumsily in the bed, who knows he will lie awake until dawn, seeing the faces of dead men and places that donât exist, the Russian woman and the benumbed child hiding in the folds of her ragged skirt, the flames of the fire glowing on the leveled plain of mud, the face of the executed professor without his eyeglasses? He wishes he could fall asleep and for a few minutes or seconds have
now
again become
then.
valdemún
COMING OUT OF THE last curve of the highway, you will suddenly see all the things she never saw again, the last things, perhaps, she remembered and felt a surge of nostalgia for as she lay dying in her hospital bed, caged among machines and tubes in a room where the air was burning with July heat, the thin cloth of her sick-room gown clinging to her sweaty back. She was always thirsty, and she mumbled words, working parched lips that you moistened with a wet cloth, and she imagined or dreamed she was sitting on the bank of a river in the shade of large trees swaying in
Wait a minute.
He shudders as a chill runs down his spine; he is huddled in the darkness, feeling the sheets, a pillow he should find a pistol beneath.
These things havenât happened yet. I canât be remembering something that hasnât happened. In April or May of 1936, my literature professor couldnât know that at the end of that summer he would be shot and thrown into a ditch.
Confused again, he is on the verge of waking and doesnât know where he is or who he is. Where am I if not in a Russian hut near the Leningrad front in the autumn of 1942? Iâm wearing not a German winter uniform but lightweight pajamas, there is no rough cloth of a military blanket, no stink of manure or the rotted straw of the mattress I dropped onto a few hours ago, dead with fatigue, not roused from sleep by the stealthy sounds of guerrillas who came to kill me.
Now, yes now he feels panic, lost somewhere in the tangle of unreliable memories and the chaos of time, and vertigo, because in a single instant his mind has leaped more than half a century and an entire continent. He is tempted to reach over to the night table and turn on the lamp, but he chooses to lie quietly, curled up as he did that night fifty-seven years before, a whole lifetime in one lightning flash, in that instant when youâre dozing but jerk awake as your head drops. He listens attentively to the quiet whir of the alarm clock, the distant hum of the refrigerator, the muted night traffic of Madrid. He looks at who he was as if watching a stranger, seeing himself from the outside, feeling curiosity and a
certain tenderness, as well as the satisfaction of learning that he wasnât a coward, and the surprise of having survived where so many perished. He knows that his lack of fear, like his lack of envy, is not something to be proud of but simply a part of his character. He sees the youth who was so passionate about philosophy and literature and the German language in a public institute in Madrid, the young man who wasnât born in time to fight in the Spanish Civil War but enlisted in a fit of reckless, toxic romanticism to go to Russia. He sees himself leaping over a trench, at the head of a squad, shooting a pistol and shouting orders, all the while feeling invulnerable. He sees coming toward him, emerging from a mist, a platoon of Russians with upraised swords.
But of all his successive identities the strangest, the most unreal, is the one he has experienced now, tonight, just awakened from a memory as vivid as a dream. Who is this eighty-year-old man turning clumsily in the bed, who knows he will lie awake until dawn, seeing the faces of dead men and places that donât exist, the Russian woman and the benumbed child hiding in the folds of her ragged skirt, the flames of the fire glowing on the leveled plain of mud, the face of the executed professor without his eyeglasses? He wishes he could fall asleep and for a few minutes or seconds have
now
again become
then.
valdemún
COMING OUT OF THE last curve of the highway, you will suddenly see all the things she never saw again, the last things, perhaps, she remembered and felt a surge of nostalgia for as she lay dying in her hospital bed, caged among machines and tubes in a room where the air was burning with July heat, the thin cloth of her sick-room gown clinging to her sweaty back. She was always thirsty, and she mumbled words, working parched lips that you moistened with a wet cloth, and she imagined or dreamed she was sitting on the bank of a river in the shade of large trees swaying in
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