The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume 2 Page 7

  The melodrama of the violent crimes that were playing out before us today would have found a form a hundred years ago in the works of Sue, which mirrored contemporary events through their serial structure, their shady, questionable characters, their details painted in often lurid colors. Now and then I would pick up one of his novels, which formed part of the inventory of Aschberg’s library; reading them provoked contradictory reactions: the style of the revelations from a world of taverns and hideouts, of ballrooms and bordellos, of card sharps and secret agents, of thieves and stockjobbers originally turned me off somewhat, until in the accumulation of the loucheness, eccentricity, and vulgarity I recognized the means for representing a particular social situation. Marx and Engels had handed down a one-sided judgment on the author of the Mystères de Paris, the Fleur de Marie, and the Juif errant, charging him with a tendency toward mysteriousness, to cruelty, to a belief in miracles, redemption, and grace, which he expressed in his characters. For them, Sue was a blinded, an isolated figure, for whom the city, filled with life, became a mere idea; one who reduced everything that revealed itself to him to his own hallucinations. Though they were willing to see a critical approach in his depictions of a civilization gone feral, of lawlessness and inequality in the state, they still maintained that, in the countless scenes full of fury and the thirst for revenge, he was only satiating his hunger for the self-abasement of humanity, that he used the contrition and penance that followed deeds of extreme brutality only in order to transform reality into smoke and mirrors. For all their appreciation of the political implications that Sue, influenced by the theories of Fourier and Proudhon, drew from his knowledge of economic misery, for them he remained a confused, sentimental petit bourgeois who, having failed in his personal life, found success and a comfortable livelihood in depicting moral degradation. His work, however, as dubious and speculative as it might have often appeared, could only be understood if it was related to Sade and Bretonne; then, in the depiction of modes of torture and oppression, the humanistic and moral intentions emerged, the mystifications were nothing but the rug the rulers pulled over their scheming; the accentuation of the brutal punishments, of iniquity, served to denounce an entire system. Moreover, the fantastical encounters with pimps and prostitutes, with butlers, porters, and poor man’s lawyers, the surprising glimpses into hidden doorways and spaces; the bridges, colonnades, and embankments appearing in half-light, the descriptions of cryptic figures floating by, all reflected an outlook that was emerging in the first half of the nineteenth century, not just in a number of literary works but also in the visual arts, above all in the graphic arts, and which reached their high point in the etchings of Meryon, which I discovered in the Bibliothèque Nationale, and in Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal. My study of Géricault and of that forgotten illustrator and printmaker who perished in poverty and mental derangement had taught me something about life in this city, something that expressed less the susceptibility to morbidity and decadence that had repulsed Marx and Engels than a deepening of the real, in which precisely and objectively reproduced details were assigned the character of dream. Such an extremely personal vision, without which the art of Lautréamont and Rimbaud would not have been possible, formed part of this city, it could only, as Münzenberg said in his considerations on the cultural revolution, come from Paris. His conception of the interrelation of the social and political with the poetic, the visionary, pointed toward the intellectual world of those who refused to accept the existing paradigms and rules, who were able to make the imposing buildings transparent and to recognize the events within them, who could make a fleetingly glanced face into a reflection of the doom, the calamity of an era. Münzenberg had referred to an artistic way of life that encompassed everything that we understood under openness, unreservedness, the will for renewal; for him, the visual revolution meant a path to more richly composed concepts that corresponded more closely to reality. In their aversion toward Sue and the admiration that they showed toward Balzac, Marx and Engels joined in on the mockery which the great historian of La Comédie humaine showered on the literarily inferior depicter of morals. Sue, the son of an anatomist who had provided Géricault with corpses to use as models while he was creating his preparatory studies for The Raft of the Medusa, had originally been a ship’s doctor, and only came to writing after long voyages on the seas. In the eyes of Balzac, and of the two masters of social analysis, he would always remain a dilettante, completely unable to detach impressions from emotion, which is why he wrote such turgid tales. Balzac’s condemnation of Sue was not related solely to the fact that Sue strayed into hunting grounds that Balzac claimed for himself alone but also to the fact that Sue, as a representative of the left, was an advocate of a socialist revolution. Balzac, with his affinity for the nobility, was a reactionary, and yet he was viewed as progressive by Marx and Engels because he was able to depict the class to which he himself belonged with all of its contradictions and symptoms of decay. For Marx and Engels, Balzac’s artistic superiority was obvious; they had no feeling for the criteria of gaucheness, of ambiguity, which comprised Sue’s originality. In the figure of the prostitute Marie, he conveyed his attitude toward the terror of the bourgeoisie most clearly; she retained her dignity in her downfall, she put up a fight, until she was made to disavow and destroy herself by society’s most underhanded instrument of oppression, the church. Setting out from a sympathy with her fate, he forged on into regions for which there were still no benchmarks of investigation; here too he followed in the footsteps of Restif de la Bretonne, who, while addressing the bizarre and the obscene, sought to lay the foundations for a new, materialist outlook, anticipating communist doctrine in the middle of the eighteenth century. Like Bretonne, Sue stood on the side of the poorest, despised art that allowed itself to be exploited by the ruling classes, and believed that poems ought to be scratched into walls and bridge vaults, able to be read by vagabonds, surrendered to the elements. During my time in Paris, the mere mention of a name, the broaching of a topic, would cause disparate connections to resonate; all the motifs of my being were present, like an organ register that would someday come to resound fully. Which is why I also accepted the encounters in their haphazardness, their brevity, the conversations in their abruptness. What remained fragmentary in one articulation would find its continuation in another encounter. I moved through this time as if by circular paths which screwed deeper and deeper, unnoticeably, turning my stay in Paris into a saison en enfer; there was a reason why Münzenberg had said to me, read Rimbaud, there you have everything that makes poetry complex, as well as everything that brings about its demise. With its riotous attitude, its provocation of heated contradictions, he said, this art form was also associated with a form of society, and yet it gives the impression that it was hurrying ahead of its time, that it was conceived from a future position. There, as in Hölderlin as well, a consciousness extended far beyond its own contemporary moment; this phenomenon, he said, endows us with a particularly keen sense of hearing, enables us to assess our personal project with more focused attention. Much of what I experienced in Paris was more of a guessing, I lacked the prior knowledge required to understand most of the things that confronted me, and the strain of arriving at some kind of understanding would often leave me confused. From our fleeting encounters I wasn’t able to interpret Münzenberg’s essential nature. In the way he would digress or break off as soon as he got close to important material, it seemed to me as if he were himself marked by the strife that was afflicting the Party. He liked to point out that he was free, that nothing could get to him; but it was inevitable that the things that were savaging the Party he had helped to build would also eat away at him, it would have been unimaginable for somebody who had intervened so deeply in all the entanglements and flash points not to have been seized by the political phantasms of his time. I took in what he and Katz described from their opposing standpoints; the flitting from one topic to another produced a polarization, a principle that also sh
aped the appearance of the Party. We sensed the burden under which the Party labored, it often brought us to the brink of despair, yet there was no alternative; that which was infected would fall off; people, many of the best, perhaps, would go down in the process, it was shameful that such sacrifices were being demanded, we jolted up from our sleep in terror, wandered restlessly to and fro, had no solution, but stopping was unthinkable, as long as there was life, there could be no standstill. We cursed ourselves for being so helpless, for being unable to bring a stop to the distortions, we beat our brows on the walls in rage that our knowledge was so limited, that we weren’t able to explain, in a manner enlightening for everybody, what was going on and what had to be done; we sensed our blindness, we threw ourselves on the floor when it was no longer possible to stand upright in the midst of the onslaught of slander; over and over we were forced to crawl like this, this terrible dragging ourselves about as if stricken by a plague, and everything happened in this city, in which, alongside the paralyzing internal conflicts in the Party and the bourgeois intrigues, suddenly, one of the slain pulled himself up and began to dance. It was at Carré de l’Odéon, at the spot where, before the old quarter was torn down and opened up by Boulevard Saint-Germain, Rue de l’École de Médicine had intersected Rue Carret on its way toward Rue de l’Ancienne-Comédie. There might have also been roasted chestnuts being sold from carts back then, like they were today beside the steps of the metro; the pungent aroma, the yell of the vendor unchanged. In his rambles through the alleyways, Sue had also seen the ragged figure, initially crouching vacantly on the edge of the street, who jumped up suddenly as if he’d been wound up, and he would have surely, like Meryon after him, spent plenty of time observing the house with the corner tower beginning on the first floor, for Marat had lived overlooking the inner courtyard and met his demise there. Meryon had depicted a peculiar throng around the house. Like now, the people were hurrying across the square, or lingering in pairs and small groups, a conspiratorial air colored their demeanor, a tall covered wagon drove toward us from the side street, the two women sitting up front, one of them holding the reins, seemed not to notice the horse shying, they were turned toward each other, deep in conversation, as if in a basket of calm in the middle of the hustle and bustle. The artist had adorned the stone under the ledge of the tower with the initial of his own and Marat’s name, above the street sign another name was visible that was still obscure to me, Cabat. The shop window on the left was filled with spices, in front of the bakery, on the opposite side of the road, a few people bore tall, formless bundles on their backs, and high above, on a rooftop pedestal, two naked figures could be glimpsed, in combat, the one forced onto his knees, the other raising his hand to deliver the mortal blow. Every groove, every patch of plaster that had fallen off, every store sign on the walls of the buildings had been depicted with precision, but from the heavens, goddesses flew down, a Fury, her grimace surrounded by billowing waves of hair and veils, a sword tethered to a scale pan, hurtling into the tower building, and a Grace, an Aurora, holding an open book with the inscription Fiat Lux, while a small genius, losing his wings, throws himself into the air. In eighteen seventy-one, when Sue died in exile, banished from France following Louis Napoleon’s coup d’état, at the time of the military dictatorship and the colonial wars of conquest in Indochina, Meryon, fearing his own persecution, had shrouded the house of the friend of the people and revolutionary with deeply cryptic symbols. The cryptogram bore the traces of his anxiety: the lurking and creeping, the waiting for plots could be felt all around the buildings. Now it was where the length of the building of the medical faculty ran. At the grandfather clock, the prearranged meeting point, a man and a woman embraced, the clochard danced, swaying and singing, hinted with contemplative gestures that he wasn’t bothered in the slightest by the lack of success of his begging, and as a group up ahead at the steps leading down to the metro went to part ways, he jumped toward them, shoved his hand between their leave-taking hands, shook them, bowed chivalrously, and his participation in the parting was remunerated with laughter. It wasn’t just the sudden proximity of people that touched us; buildings also took on life. The sight of them was like the manifestation of a painting, a statue, only the buildings were more alive, resembled organisms. Through the eyes that had observed them for centuries, the hands that had touched them, their exteriors had become sensitive like a skin, and their interiors swelled with the breath of generations. For this reason, often when I was confronted by such an entity, one that had been erected by human hands, I would find myself caught in a dialogue. At that time, Meryon was still able to walk from the intersection into the narrow courtyard, fenced off on the sides by tall firewalls, and look up to the windows behind which Marat had lived. I only found photographs, in the Musée Carnavalet, that showed the corner building, in a state of demolition, in eighteen sixty-four. A staircase with the wall torn away, a richly ornamented balustrade on the curvature of the steps, a living room above, floral wallpaper, an open fireplace, then a sketch, a floor plan of the apartment, an indication of Corday’s path through the building to the little room in the corner, an A designating Marat’s bathtub, a B the location of the murderess, everything rendered in fine, shaky watercolors, faded memory on crinkled paper. And the imaginary encounters were always entwined with what was occurring in that moment, they were flushed with reality, the historical relationships were absorbed alongside the measures and assessments arising from the political situation, from our work assignments. On the twenty-third of October, the day before his departure, Hodann collapsed. The overpowering mental pressure had triggered an asthma attack. Branting and Münzenberg were present; I had come from the Spanish Aid office, had registered the newly arrived children, whom I was to send in the next convoy to Compiègne, to the home La Brévière; I rushed from the rooms in the wings of the building where the medical staff were now housed, across the courtyard, past the Roman fountain, up into the conference room in which, illuminated by the chandeliers that were duplicated in the mirrors on the walls, Hodann lay on his side on the sofa, his knees pulled up toward his torso. His friends were tending to him, but he was already in the process of overcoming the attack; his face waxen, wet with sweat, he pronounced his own diagnosis: obstruction of expectoration through bronchitic symptoms resulting from emphysemic mutations to the inferior lobe, had me inject him with a codeine solution, demanded that we pay no attention to his ailment, sat upright and continued the conversation without interruption. The topic had been dogmatism, which the French Party was intensifying in an attempt to combat its disintegration, and a number of Hodann’s remarks led me to suspect that he had moved closer to Münzenberg’s position. At a time when they ought to be pursuing an independent, broad, democratic politics, one tailored to their own country, their adherence to the directives coming from the Comintern could only have disastrous effects. The German Communists as well, he said, were now using the Committee for the Foundation of a Popular Front for the exclusive interests of their own party. It was less his statements than the tone in which they were delivered that left me unsettled; Hodann’s intolerance in the face of errors that had been committed, of poor decisions, was all too familiar to me for me to be able to view it as an ideological deviation, but it now seemed to me that he was no longer willing to defend the Party as he had been earlier, despite all the difficulties that had arisen. His critique was characterized by a sense of disappointment and demoralization, betraying an anxious, conflictual relationship. The discussion subjected me once again to the conflict of double loyalty, yet on that evening I ascribed his agitation primarily to nerves in anticipation of his departure for Norway. I refrained from referring to the opinions that he had once divulged to me on the trip between Albacete and Denia, according to which every hint of a feeling of dislocation robbed us of some of our strength to act. In switching countries, he had said, we must always preserve the continuity of our political stance. It wasn’t until a few days later, in the Château de La
Brévière, on the edge of a medieval village in the forest of Compiègne, in the attic, upon whose ceiling a lantern was casting shadows of bare branches, that this moment returned to me once more, as a penitence, in which I had to tussle with my mistrust. My silence could be traced back to his impending departure, to my long-standing affection and deference toward him, but also to feelings of hurt and, as I now recognized, of fear and cowardice, for Branting had guaranteed my entry into Sweden. Together with a financial guarantee from the banker Aschberg, Branting, the Social Democrat lawyer and politician, chair of the Swedish Committee on Spain and supporter of the antifascist Popular Front, provided me with my only chance of getting anywhere. Katz had repeatedly urged me to accept the offer, but also to be careful, the German Communist Party was planning on relocating a base to Sweden, Mewis had been tasked with directing the section, it would be possible to put me in touch with him. The combination of the necessity of cooperating with radical Social Democrats—which I had always considered a prerequisite to maintaining a socialist front—with the admonition to maintain a distinction between the parties left me uncertain; despite his sympathies for the Soviet Union, I didn’t know how far Branting could be trusted; and Aschberg too, a backer of the Soviet state since the October Revolution, always presenting himself as a humanist and a democrat, had something unsettling about him, with the thought of his princely estates and finances, which were indeed partially used for the benefit of the persecuted, but in disproportionately larger amounts were invested in banks and industries. Acknowledging my half-heartedness, my tactical reticence, I had to make my peace with dissimulations and secret paths. During the night in La Brévière, that castle with its sixty rooms, erected in the pompous style of Napoleon III, once a hunting lodge with a stud, now a place where children stayed, their wailing and periodic yelps ringing through the halls, I was overcome by fever. I had not been ill a single time in Spain; now, far away from battle, my blood was racing and sizzling, my throat and lungs on fire. The shadows of the branches seesawed up and down to the noise of the rain, a child seemed to be whimpering right beside my bed, the castle was a showcase, a menagerie, where the Spanish orphans were placed on display for the arriving delegations, where the headmistress ran a strict, unjust regime, where, upon a suggestion for the improvement of some arrangements, I had been told that I, as a refugee, had no right to say anything. I jumped up, looked down through the window at a deer standing on a hill, motionless, glistening, haloed by the spray of the rain. On the twenty-fourth of October, Hodann had flown out from Le Bourget in the evening; after seeing Bremen and Hamburg as glimmering mounds in the twilight, he landed in Kastrup and continued on to Oslo the following morning. He hadn’t concealed his fear on the way to the airport, and I could still feel his hand shaking in mine; now, at least for the time being, he was safe. I thought back on the conversation upstairs in the hall of the Cercle des Nations; the deer stared up at me, the leaves swirling through the park behind it. Some of Münzenberg’s statements must have referred to things that had been mentioned earlier; I thought I could trace them back to his decision to announce his split with the Party, in order to preempt his excommunication by the Central Committee. Hodann’s answer hinted that the Party had not yet made a decision; it was still of the opinion that all points of contention had to be discussed and reconciled. Neither you nor the Party, he said to Münzenberg, can afford for you to leave. In the eyes of the Party, countered Münzenberg, I have long been leading a pleasant life in the bourgeois camp. Branting attempted to appease him. Now, with the most extreme concentration of energy being required, he said, all personal disagreements had to recede. Shivering, I crawled into bed, but saw the opulent stucco work above me which filled the ceiling of the hall in Rue Casimir-Périer, the putti on their pedestals, the bacchanalian, allegorical figures of the ceiling painting, time and again, something painted or sculpted by another hand interfered with the monumental image that Münzenberg sketched out for us, pacing silently to and fro on the thick rugs, and which he wrapped around the hostile forces he had fought against his entire life. He went back to what he might have been talking about before I arrived. France would not fight against fascism, he said; the haute bourgeoisie would even form alliances with the fascists if it meant preventing a reemergence of the workers’ front. The strike movement and the mass actions that were emerging would be smashed with the most brutal means, ushering in a mood of passivity. The mechanism depicted by Münzenberg, which allowed the ruling classes to reconsolidate their position after every crisis, took on the proportions of a nightmare. One of the difficulties of following the vision was that his words became increasingly interrupted by the stammering which lay beneath all of his efforts at expression. And so at times while he was holding forth I would see him among the highwaymen in the seedy drinking dens of the Thuringian Forest, the heads of roe bucks and wild boars appeared behind him, his face illuminated by the flickering of the rocking kerosene lamp. The will to liberation was buried under mountains of money, the voice of revolt made mute by the droning of the rotary presses, the walls of living bodies that raised themselves up out of the depths were nothing against the flurry of bullets that instantly ploughed through them. Their riches enabled the despots to keep henchmen everywhere, but how could these hordes, these armies, who themselves came from poverty, be willing to offer themselves up to the powerful: why did they not turn their weapons against them instead of against those who were as lowly as they were. Because money numbed them, because the lies engendered by money left their brains matted, because the pay, their tiny portion of the enormous profit, gave them a sense of supremacy, made them adventurous, fed a greed to reap profit in them. They were unable to see past their own hand, raised, ready to strike, they were steered from control panels high above them, at the press of a button, through the resonance of a membrane. The most terrifying aspect of Münzenberg’s hallucination was the unshakeable, sovereign reign of the owners. They claimed as their own everything that we too were striving for—perspective, the ability to organize, consistency—and while our armies allowed themselves to be fractured, their shock troops were everywhere diligently at work. We had to hide ourselves away, we burrowed below the ground, they ruled the states, we had to arduously recruit allies, they drew on hoarded reserves, we printed flyers in secret, distributed them at the factory gates, ready to flee, calling for global solidarity, they speculated brazenly, openly, internationally, sucked the continents dry. He brushed away the fact that people were fighting in Spain, in China, in Indochina, that in France too, the workers hoped to win back their strength. I no longer knew, that night in La Brévière, what was fact and what imagination, a cancerous sore was spreading in every living thing, consciousness was devouring itself, everything orderly became contagion, the earthly mêleé served to elicit nothing but agony, we chose our own floggers, our torturers, it was we who provoked the insane actions, we who enforced the madness; I cried that it wasn’t so, that it couldn’t be so, that we possessed reason. Reason would prevail, I heard myself say, to Münzenberg’s laughter, and, but you were in Lenin’s room, I said to him, and soothed myself with this thought, you have seen him with your own eyes, but he just shrugged his shoulders, asked what has that got to do with anything. I saw the brownish-yellow map of Belarus that he had described in Lenin’s office in the Kremlin, and it was already being permeated by a lighter gray, I was confusing it with the map in another interior, it hung wide, crumbling, unfurled on the wall behind the easel, next to the model with the wreath of leaves, it echoed in the studio of the painter Vermeer, clad in black, there, with cogs and rows of islands, the North Sea coast stretched out, De Noord See it read, clearly legible, Hodann had flown toward the North Sea, he had seen the sudden glitter of the course of the Weser, he was overcome by the fear that the engine would suddenly give out, that the propellers would stand still, that the craft would descend for an emergency landing, into the arms of the hangmen. Then I was no longer sure whose journey this was, mine, Hoda
nn’s, or Münzenberg’s. Münzenberg had gotten to talking about his visit to Stockholm, in May of nineteen seventeen, as a delegate of the Young Communist International. On the way from Zurich, and again on the return leg, he had traveled through Germany, constantly expecting to be arrested on the train, his vision of this monstrous Germania fused with Hodann’s panic about the Reich, which was making its preparations for war, and with my own image of the country in which I had grown up and which I had abandoned. Far away from this dangerous world was Sweden, with the provincial feel of its capital; Münzenberg had recalled that the congress participants had been welcomed at the train station by a wind orchestra, with each appearance on the podium being accompanied by fanfare. Stockholm, in the lead-up to the summer of seventeen, after Lenin’s April Theses but half a year before October, was still the ideal home of capitalism. In their arrogance, the rulers didn’t pay much mind to who all these new arrivals were, Balabanoff, Lunacharsky, Chicherin, Manuilsky, Sokolnikov, Shlyapnikov; Lenin had also stepped out of the train station here a month earlier, unrecognized, on his way to Petrograd, together with Zinoviev, Krupskaya, Armand, Radek. And yet, said Münzenberg, in that idyllic city, perched on bodies of water and surrounded by forests, in those days, there were work stoppages, mass demonstrations, hunger marches, and a new party, the Social Democratic Left Party, had just been founded. But it was just that in this city, said Münzenberg, the people who hit the streets were beaten up as quick as a flash by the mounted police, the military, and driven out; in next to no time, the blood stains were washed from the cobblestones, and even the revisionists held their positions as if the radicals had never existed. And today, the country could still be held up as an example of the gentle progress of reforms, of the harmony between the buyers and sellers of labor power. There was one more thing I wanted to ask Münzenberg about, whether he had met my father back then, when he passed through Bremen, but he had become just as hazy as Hodann, and the cities began to melt into one another as well; I asked myself what I had to do with Bremen, with Hamburg, with Stockholm. The only thing I was certain of was that I was lying in a bed. Stretched out on a bed I lay and knew that I was in a hotel room. A clunky, angular protrusion ran from the floor up to the ceiling, the wallpaper was of a shabby, greenish gray, the lace curtains in the window were drawn open, bunched together by thick cords, outside there was a muted, misty light, and beside me, on her side, her face resting on her hand, lay my mother, looking at me. Now it occurred to me that we had set off from Bremen, on the trip to Berlin we had stopped off in Hamburg for a day, my father had traveled ahead in order to rent an apartment, in a moment, we would walk down to the harbor and through the Elbe Tunnel, I had desperately wanted to set foot inside this tunnel, deep beneath the masses of water, the large ships. Soon enough we were walking through the hall with the glass cupola, we walked down the spiral staircase and along the narrow footpath, on the road automobiles and carriages rattled, horses’ hooves stomped. I drew a longitudinal section of the tunnel in the hotel room, or later on the train, with my pencil I drew the steps, the elevator, which hung from enormous cogs, drew the cars inside it, the coach with its driver, the little men walking back and forth in the tube, the frigates and ocean liners above and, like a fata morgana, the silhouette of the shoreline with towers and warehouse gables. I was absorbed in the act of drawing, attempting to solve a technical miracle, but something wasn’t right, I didn’t know where my mother was, just a moment ago, she had been holding my hand, below, in the dead-straight passage, a terrible uncertainty emerged as to where I could have lost her, perhaps she had been kidnapped, I heard only a screaming and moaning, people hurried past, there was a crashing sound, as if panes of glass had been shattered, the crowd was pushing a woman ahead of them, a sign hung around her neck with the inscription Jidd, in Jewish lettering, perhaps it was my mother, I made my way through the throng, but the woman was no longer to be seen; what was now being asked of me outstripped my reserves, something that lay beyond my grasp was supposed to be molded into a concept, are you still clinging to the conviction that nothing is inexplicable, asked Münzenberg, do you consider all puzzles solvable, yes, I wanted to cry, but I didn’t produce a sound, all searching would be in vain, but still I walked as if I could see tracks, clues in front of me, even if it was too late, all was lost, I would continue walking, to the train station, from platform to platform, chase after a train, pull myself up on the railing, jump back down, until I found a carriage with a sign announcing my destination, there had to be some meaning, an objective, I had to fight off fatigue, not slacken in my endeavor, my destination had already been decided, it was just that I had forgotten the name of the city, hands pointed in the direction I had to pursue, something was called out to me through the smoke of the locomotive, but shrill voices drowned out the cries, children’s voices, they were crying for help, in Basque, I hurried out into the adjoining room, the dormitory, where children, shivering, drenched in sweat, threw themselves at me.