The End and the Beginning - Open Book Publishers

28
The End and the Beginning: On-line Supplement
of the old homeland had fluttered. The Señora tapped the table impatiently
with her needle. She could not wait to hear how many had perished in
the disaster. The captain – good; and the first officer – good; and twenty
sailors – only twenty sailors? And the second officer had been saved along
with the rest of the crew? The Señora wrinkled her brow: “Poor show,” she
muttered to her husband. “What was God thinking of, allowing all of those
to be saved?”
She reached for her netting again and pulled the knots tighter and
tighter, as though she was tying a noose around the neck of one of those
who had been saved and drawing it ever tighter.
“Yes,” Señor Geraldo said to an acquaintance one day. “She has been like
that for five years now. At night she gets up, turns on the light, and re-reads
the old newspapers from the first to the last page. She is afraid that I may
not have reported all the deaths to her. And then she comes back to bed
and whispers the names of the dead to herself. No she doesn’t need sleep.
One or two hours are enough for her. At the crack of dawn, she wakes up
and shakes me to awaken me also. She asks how long it will be before the
newspaper comes. Every day she again believes that the front page will
carry the news of the fall of the regime. And in the meantime, she contents
herself with deaths and catastrophes; she collects them and reads them out
to herself from her diary. As if to pray. Then she knots her netting. I have no
idea how many pieces of netting she has stored in her trunks or how large
they are. Yes, in her trunks. In the five years we have been here she has
never unpacked her trunks. “What for?” she would ask. “Tomorrow or the
day after tomorrow we could be going home. And it would be a shame to
have to waste time packing.”
In a frame of springtime in Switzerland, blossoming fruit-trees, the blue
waters of a lake, and a large, bright hall, I see before me the long forgotten
image of the dark-eyed woman whose fingers work restlessly on her
netting and on whose thin pale lips a smile forms from time to time as she
whispers to herself “Muerto, muerto, muerto!”
“Die Senora,” Die Zeitung (London), 1 April 1941; Zeitspiegel (London), 8
June 1946; Arbeiter-Zeitung (Vienna), 18 February 1949.