Chapter One
I STARED AT THE SHIP. Glaringly lighted, it lay at anchor in the Tagus. Though I had been in Lisbon for a week, I hadn’t yet got used to its carefree illumination. In the countries I had come from, the cities at night were black as coal mines, and a lantern in the darkness was more to be feared than the plague in the Middle Ages. I had come from twentieth-century Europe.
The ship was a passenger vessel; it was being loaded. I knew it was going to sail the next afternoon. In the harsh glow of the naked light bulbs, crates of meat, fish,canned goods, bread, and vegetables were being lowered into the hold; stevedores were carrying baggage on board, lifting up crates and bales as silently as if they had been weightless. The ship was being made ready for a voyage—like the ark in the days of the flood. It was an ark. Every ship that left Europe in those months of the year 1942 was an ark. Mount Ararat was America, and the flood waters were rising higher by the day. Long ago they had engulfed Germany and Austria, now they stood deep in Poland and Prague; Amsterdam, Brussels, Copenhagen, Oslo, and Paris had gone under, the cities of Italy stank of seepage, and Spain, too, was no longer safe. The coast of Portugal had become the last hope of the fugitives to whom justice, freedom, and tolerance meant more than home and livelihood. This was the gate to America. If you couldn’t reach it, you were lost, condemned to bleed away in a jungle of consulates, police stations, and government offices, where visas were refused and work and residence permits unobtainable, a jungle of internment camps, bureaucratic red tape, loneliness, homesickness, and withering universal indifference. As usual in times of war, fear, and affliction, the individual human being had ceased to exist; only one thing counted: a valid passport.
That afternoon I had gone to the Casino Estoril to gamble. I still owned a good suit, and they had let me in. It was a last, desperate effort to blackmail fate. Our Portuguese residence permit would expire in a few days, and Ruth and I had no other visas. We had made our plans in France and drawn up a list of possible sailings for New York. This ship anchored in the Tagus had been the last on our list. But it was sold out for months; we had no American visas, and we were more than three hundred dollars short of the fare. I had tried to raise the money at least, in the only way still possible for a foreigner in Lisbon—by gambling. An absurd idea, for even if I had won, it would have taken a miracle to get us aboard. But in danger and despair you acquire a faith in miracles; without it you would go under.
I had lost fifty-six of the sixty-two dollars we still had left.
It was late at night and the quayside was almost deserted. But after a while, I became aware of a man not far off. First he paced aimlessly about, then he stopped and he, too, began to stare at the ship. Another stranded refugee, I thought, and took no further notice of him, until I felt that he was watching me. A refugee never loses his fear of the police, not even when he is asleep or when there is nothing to be afraid of—so I turned away with an affectation of bored indifference and started to leave the pier, slowly, like a man who has no ground for fear.
A moment later I heard steps behind me. I kept on walking but without hastening my step, wondering how I could let Ruth know if I were arrested. The pastel-tinted houses at the end of the pier, asleep like butterflies in the night, were still too far away to make a run for it and disappear in the tangle of narrow streets.
Now the man was beside me. He was a little shorter than I. “Are you a German?” he asked in German.
I shook my head and kept on walking.
“Austrian?”
I did not answer. I looked at the pastel-tinted houses, which were approaching much too slowly. I knew there were Portuguese policemen who spoke German very well.
“I’m not a policeman,” the man said.
I didn’t believe him. He was wearing civilian clothes, but plain-clothes men had arrested me half a dozen times in Europe. I had papers, not a bad job, done in Paris by a mathematics teacher from Prague, but they wouldn’t have stood close scrutiny.
“I saw you looking at the ship,” the man said. “That made me wonder …”
I mustered him with indifference. He didn’t really look like a policeman, but the last plain-clothes man, who had nabbed me in Bordeaux, had looked as pathetic as Lazarus after three days in his grave, and he had been the most heartless of the lot. He had pulled me in even though he knew the Germans would be in Bordeaux next day, and it would have been all up with me if a kindly warden hadn’t let me out a few hours later.
“Do you want to go to New York?” the man asked.
I did not reply. Twenty yards more would do it; then, if necessary, I could knock him down and run for it.
“Here,” said the man, reaching into his pocket, “are two tickets for that boat.”
I saw the tickets. I couldn’t read the writing in the feeble light. But we had covered enough ground. It was safe to stop now.
“What is all this?” I asked him in Portuguese. I had learned a few words of the language.
“You can have them,” said the man. “I don’t need them.”
“You don’t need them? What do you mean?”
“I don’t need them any more.”
I stared at the man. I couldn’t understand. He really didn’t seem to be a policeman. If he had wanted to arrest me, he could have done so without these fancy tricks. But if the tickets were good, why couldn’t he use them? And why did he offer them to me? Something began to tremble inside me.
“I can’t buy them,” I said finally in German. “They’re worth a fortune. There are wealthy refugees in Lisbon; they’ll pay anything you ask. You’ve come to the wrong man. I haven’t any money.”
“I don’t want to sell them,” said the man.
I looked back at the tickets. “Are they real?”
He handed them to me without a word. They crackled between my fingers. They were genuine. Possession of them was the difference between ruin and salvation. Even if I couldn’t use them without American visas, I could still try next morning to get visas on the strength of them—or at least I could sell them. That would mean six months’ more survival.
“I don’t understand,” I said.
“You can have them,” he replied. “For nothing. I’m leaving Lisbon tomorrow morning. There’s only one condition.”
My arms sagged. I knew it was too good to be true. “What is it?” I asked.
“I don’t want to be alone tonight.”
“You want me to stay with you?”
“Yes. Until morning.”
“That’s all?”
“That’s all.”
“Nothing else?”
“Nothing else.”
I looked at him incredulously. I knew, of course, that people in our situation could go to pieces; that solitude was sometimes unbearable. I knew this dread of the void that attacks people whose world has become a void, and I knew that the company even of a total stranger could save a man from suicide. But in such cases people helped each other as a matter of course; there was no need to offer a reward. And not such a reward! “Where do you live?” I asked.
He made a negative gesture. “I don’t want to go there. Isn’t there a bar that’s still open?”
“There must be.”
“Isn’t there a place that caters to refugees? Like the Café de la Rose in Paris?”
I knew the Café de la Rose. Ruth and I had slept there for two weeks. The patron would let you stay as long as you pleased for the price of a cup of coffee. You spread out some newspapers and lay down on the floor. I had never slept on tables; you can’t fall off the floor.
“I don’t know of any,” I replied. This was not true, but you don’t take a man with two boat tickets to give away to a place frequented by people who would have sold their souls to get hold of them.
“I only know one place,” said the man. “We can try it. Maybe it’s still open.”
He motioned to a solitary cab and looked at me.
“All right,” I said.
We got in, and he gave the driver an address. I’d have liked to let Ruth know that I wouldn’t be home that night; but as I entered the dark, foul-smelling cab I was assailed by so furious, so terrible a hope that my head almost reeled. Maybe all this was really true; maybe our lives were not at an end and the impossible was happening; maybe we were going to be saved. Once this thought had entered my head, I was afraid to leave this stranger out of sight for so much as a second.
Copyright © 2014 by Erich Maria Remarque. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
