Read Sepharad for Free Online

yet ours, arrived at the station and stopped with a slow screech. In the darkness it had the shape of some great mythological beast, and as it approached, the round headlight on the engine reminded me of Captain Nemo’s submarine. A woman was leaning against the railing of the observation platform; I was instantaneously overwhelmed with desire, the innocent, frightened, and fervent desire of a fourteen-year-old boy. I wanted her so badly my legs trembled, and the pressure in my chest made it difficult to breathe. I can still see her, although I don’t know now whether what I remember is in fact a memory: a tall blond foreigner wearing a black skirt and a black blouse unbuttoned low. I looked at her windswept hair and the brightly painted toenails of her bare feet. A deep tan brought out the gleam of her blond hair and light eyes. She moved a knee forward, and thigh showed through the slit in her skirt. The train started off, and as I watched she moved away, still leaning on the rail and watching the disappearing faces observe her from the platform of that remote station. Midnight in a foreign country.
    In shifting tatters of dreams, the woman appeared again as I dozed and my grandfather and the other man kept talking in the darkened coach. Through half-opened eyes I could see the tips of their cigarettes, and when my grandfather or his companion took a drag, their country faces were visible in the reddish glow. Oh, the acrid black tobacco that men smoked then. As I watched those faces and listened, their words dissolved into sleep, and I felt myself on one of the trains they were telling about, past trains of defeated soldiers or deportees who traveled without ever reaching their destination, stopped for whole nights beside darkened platforms. Shortly before he died, Primo Levi said that he was still frightened by the sealed freight cars he occasionally saw on sidetracks. “I served in Russia,” the man said, “in the Blue Division. We got on a train at the North Station, and it took ten days to reach a place called Riga.” And I thought, or half said in my sleep, Riga is the capital of Latvia, because I’d studied it in the atlases I liked so much and because one of Jules Verne’s novels is set in Riga and his books filled my imagination and my life.
    Now I understand that in our dry inland country night trains are the great river that carries us to the world outside and then brings us back, the great waterway slipping through shadows toward the sea or the beautiful cities where a new life awaits us, luminous and true to what we were promised in books. As clearly as I remember that first train trip, I remember the first time I stopped at a border station; in both memories are the brilliant night, anticipation, and fear of the unknown that made my pulse race and my knees buckle. Scowling, rough-mannered policemen examined our passports on the platform at Cerbère Station. Cerbère. Cerberus. Sometimes stations at night do resemble the entrance to Hades, and their names contain curses: Cerbère, where in the winter of 1939 French gendarmes humiliated the soldiers of the Spanish Republic, insulted them, pushed and kicked them; Port Bou, where Walter Benjamin took his life in
1940; Gmünd, the station on the border between Czechoslovakia and Austria where Franz Kafka and Milena Jesenska sometimes met secretly, within the parentheses of train schedules, within the exasperating brevity of time running out the minute they saw each other, the minute they climbed the stairs toward the inhospitable room in the station hotel where the rumble of passing trains rattled the windowpanes.
    What would it be like to arrive at a German or Polish station in a cattle car, to hear orders shouted in German over the loudspeakers and not understand a word, to see the distant lights, wire fences, and tall, tall chimneys expelling black smoke? For five days, in February 1944, Primo Levi traveled in a cattle car