Sepharad by Antonio Muñoz Molina Read Free Book Online Page B

also verdigris bronze, of a church adorned with golden letters in Latin and a variety of statues of saints, warriors, and individuals dressed in frock coats along the cornices. The church resembled those baroque churches of Rome, one just like another, that give the unpleasant effect of being branch offices of something, maybe the Vatican or the financial offices of God’s grace.
    A statue ensconced on that facade undoubtedly represented Søren Kierkegaard. Stooped over, as if watching something below, hands behind his back, he did not have that attitude of elevation or of definitive immobility typical of statues. After death, after a century and a half of official immortality, of rubbing elbows with all those solemn heroes, saints, generals, and tribunes of the historic pantheon of Denmark, Kierkegaard—that is, his statue—still had a transient, temporary, restless demeanor, a look of uneasiness about walking alone through a closed and hostile city, casting sidelong glances at people he scorned and who scorned him still more, not only for his hump and large head but for the incomprehensible extravagance of his writings, his fervent biblical faith. He was as exiled and stateless in his native city as if he had been forced to live on the other side of the world.
    I looked for the way back to the hotel. In less than an hour my editor—whom in truth I scarcely knew—would be coming to pick me up. On one long, bourgeois street of clothing and antique shops I saw a tiled roof projecting rather absurdly from a whitewashed or painted wall in which there was a wooden door with metal hinges and doorknocker and a window grill filled with
geraniums. I, who on that Saturday afternoon had felt so far from everything on my walk through the empty streets of Copenhagen, had found a Spanish oasis called Pepe’s Bar.
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    A WOMAN WAS SEATED beside me at a large oval table in the Writer’s Club. As has happened other times, the luncheon was in my honor, but no one was paying much attention to me. Before each of us was a card with a name. The woman’s name was an enigma and a promise: Camille Pedersen-Safra. I can’t resist the attraction of names. She told me she’d been born in France, into a Jewish family of Spanish descent. Pedersen was her married name. While the other guests were laughing and heatedly talking, relieved at not having to make conversation with a stranger they knew nothing about, she told me that she and her mother escaped from France on the eve of the fall of Paris, in the great exodus of June 1940. They had returned to that country only once, in the autumn of 1944, and both realized that after only those few years they no longer belonged to the country of their birth, from which they would have been deported to the death camps had they not escaped in time, and to show their gratitude they had become Danish citizens. Denmark, too, was occupied by the Germans and subjected to the same anti-Jewish laws as those of France, but unlike the French Vichy government the Danish authorities did not collaborate in isolating and deporting Jews, did not even apply the law making them wear a yellow star.
    Camille Safra had been six at the time of their flight from France. She remembered her displeasure when her mother shook her awake in the middle of the night, and the strange, warm, and vaguely pleasant sensation of traveling wrapped in blankets in a trailer behind a truck, beneath a canvas being beaten by the rain. She also remembered sleeping in kitchens or entryways of houses that weren’t hers, places where there was a strong odor of apples and hay, and she sometimes had flashes of mysterious routes
along moonlit country roads, held in her mother’s arms beneath the shelter of a wet woolen shawl, listening to the creaking of a cart and the slow hoofbeats of a horse. She remembered, or dreamed of, lonely lights on street corners and in barn windows, the red lights of locomotives,