/ "Promised Land"

"Promised Land" (German: Das gelobte Land)

Writing history

Erich Maria Remarque left his homeland in the early 30s. For a long time he lived in Switzerland and America. Having emigrated from Nazi Germany, the writer knew from his own experience about all the "delights" of illegal life. Deprived of his homeland by the German authorities, wandering across countries and continents, in 1939 he moved to New World... Remarque received American citizenship only in August 1947.

Having started working on the plot back in 1950, the author did not have time to put an end to it. Of the three surviving manuscripts, two have been published. In 1971, Remarque's widow was closely involved in his legacy - the novel "Shadows in Paradise" was published. One of the versions of the Promised Land was shortened and revised by the editors. Much later, in 1998, readers were able to see the latest version of the manuscript. The novel was published under the title of the author. In Russian, some publications are published under the title "The Promised Land".

Plot

The main character is Ludwig Sommer. The young art critic is just an amateur posing as a professional. His name is someone else's and his passport is fake. All the real remains in Nazi Germany from where he fled to save his life. Helped Sommer, a German by nationality, his friend - a Jew from France, Robert Hirsch. It is not known how, having obtained a diplomatic passport, he saved people from death in the occupied territory.

Gloomy shadows wandering in a foreign country among strangers and incomprehensible people. They are so different and with such similar destinies... A hysterical fashion model, a member of the resistance, a wealthy banker. What can they have in common? Only a ghostly hope of returning home. Cherishes such a dream and the main character... But he not only wants to return to his homeland, he needs to avenge his father's death.

Reviews

The author of the novel does not describe hostilities. But the plot is closely related to the war. Its heroes are emigrants who fled to America from the horrors of concentration camps and prisons. People who have managed to avoid death lose the meaning of life, plunging into the quagmire of bourgeois life. Heroes live, think, hope, fall in love and die. For some of them, America has become their second home. And someone could not find themselves in a foreign country.

The analogy between the novels "Shadows in Paradise" and "Promised Land" is very clear. The names of the heroes have been changed, but the characters and fates are still the same. The main character in "Promised Land" is a novice amateur art critic Ludwig Sommer, in "Shadows" - journalist Robert Ross. Sommer's closest friend is a member of the French Resistance Robert Hirsch. Ross's friend, Kahn, also saved lives with forged documents and was also an active member of the Resistance. The novel "Shadows in Paradise" has been finalized and has a built storyline... In the "Promised Land", the understatement and incompleteness are clearly felt. But the novel did not become worse because of this. Rather, on the contrary, some gaps in the plot make it possible to more fully feel the depth of the images prescribed by Remarque.

Quotes

"Loneliness is a very proud and extremely harmful disease."

"Poor is the one who no longer wants anything."

“To live without roots, you need to have a strong heart. Memory is the best forger in the world; everything that a person happened to go through, she easily turns into exciting adventures; otherwise, more and more wars would not have begun. "

"Help only comes when you don't need it."

“All brilliant ideas are simple. That is why they are so hard and given. "

"Be afraid of your own fantasy: it exaggerates, underestimates and distorts."

“Only the fallen have the right to talk about the war - they went through it to the end. But they were just made to be silent forever. "

“How far are the days when the military in ancient China were considered the lowest caste, even lower than the executioners, because they only kill criminals, and the generals - innocent people. Today we have them in great honor, and what more people they sent to the next world, the greater their glory. "

Plot

The novel "Shadows in Paradise" is written on behalf of the main character, who is a journalist by profession, who tells the story of his arrival in New York (USA) at the end of World War II. The novel describes archetypal collective images refugees from all over Europe to flee the war. Absolutely different people binds one common feature- hope to return home someday. This work by Remarque describes how people, exhausted by years of war, flight and prisons, entered a paradise called the United States. Hence such an accurate comparison in the title of the novel - "Shadows in Paradise". In fact, the entire novel is permeated with descriptions of tragedies in the lives of immigrants, and each of them deals with the psychological and physical trauma caused by the war in its own way. Someone starts drinking heavily, someone goes to work, someone becomes suicidal. The cynicism of people who were taught to be rude and lack of sentimentality by the war borders on the story of sincere love and true friendship.

Facts

• In 1944, the main character worked for some time in Hollywood as a consultant on the filming of a film about Nazi Germany. Contrary to his recommendations, the film comes out with a "cowboy touch" that is very far from reality:

Some of the scenes were concocted according to the vulgar templates of popular cowboy films about the Wild West. The same gangster morality, the same banal situations when opponents simultaneously draw out their pistols and everyone tries to shoot first. All this, in comparison with what was happening in Germany with its bureaucratic murders, with the howling of bombs and the roar of guns, gave the impression of harmless fireworks. I realized that even the authors who got their hands on horror films did not have enough imagination to imagine everything that happened in the Third Reich. ( Chapter XXVI)

Erich Maria Remarque

Promised land

Erich Maria Remarque DAS GELOBTE LAND

First published in the German language

Reprinted with permission from the publisher

Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG.

For the third week I looked at this city: it lay in front of me at a glance - and as if on another planet. Only a few kilometers away from me, separated by a narrow arm of the sea bay, which I, perhaps, could have crossed - and yet inaccessible and inaccessible, as if surrounded by an armada of tanks. It was defended by the most secure bastions the twentieth century had invented — walls of paperwork, passport regulations, and inhuman laws of an impenetrable bureaucracy. I was on Ellis Island in the summer of 1944 and the city of New York lay before me.

Ellis Island was the most humane of all internment camps I had ever seen. No one was beaten, tortured, tortured to death with backbreaking work, and nobody was poisoned in the gas chambers. The inhabitants here were even provided good food, and free, and beds in which it was allowed to sleep. There were sentries everywhere, it is true, but they were almost kind. Ellis Island held foreigners who arrived in America, whose papers either inspired suspicion or were simply not in order. The fact is that only one entry visa issued by the American consulate in European country, for America it was not enough - upon entering the country, it was necessary to pass the check of the New York Immigration Bureau again and obtain permission. Only then were you allowed in - or, on the contrary, declared an undesirable person and sent back with the very first ship. However, with sending back, everything has long been not at all as simple as before. There was a war in Europe, America was also bogged down in this war head over heels, German submarines scoured the entire Atlantic, so that passenger ships to European ports of destination were extremely rare. For some poor fellows who were denied entry, this meant, albeit tiny, but happiness: they, who had long been accustomed to counting their lives only for days and weeks, gained hope for at least some time to stay on Ellis Island. However, there were too many other rumors around to indulge in such hope - rumors about ghost ships chock-full of Jews, which plow the ocean for months and which, wherever they sailed, were not allowed to dock anywhere. Some of the emigrants claimed that they saw with their own eyes - who is on the way to Cuba, who is near the ports South America- these crowds of desperate, praying for salvation, crowding to the handrails of people on abandoned ships in front of the entrance to the harbors closed to them, - these woeful "flying Dutchmen" of our days, tired of running away from enemy submarines and human cruelty, carriers of the living dead and damned souls, whose only fault was that they were human and hungry for life.

Of course, not without nervous breakdowns. In a strange way, here on Ellis Island, they happened even more often than in the French camps, when german troops and the Gestapo were very close, a few kilometers away. Probably, in France, this resistance to one's own nerves was somehow connected with a person's ability to adapt to mortal danger. There the breath of death was felt so clearly that it must have forced the person to control himself, but here people, who had just relaxed at the sight of such a close salvation, later a short time when salvation suddenly began to elude them again, they completely lost their composure. However, unlike France, there were no suicides on Ellis Island - probably, the hope was still too strong in people, albeit permeated with despair. But the very first innocent interrogation from the most innocuous inspector could lead to hysteria: the mistrust and vigilance accumulated over the years of exile for a moment cracked, and after that, an outbreak of new mistrust, the thought that you had made an irreparable mistake, plunged the person into panic. Typically, men had more nervous breakdowns than women.

The city, which lay so close and at the same time so inaccessible, became something like a hassle - it tormented, beckoned, mocked, promising everything and doing nothing. Now, surrounded by flocks of clumpy clouds and hoarse, like the roar of steel ichthyosaurs, the horns of ships, he appeared to be a huge vague monster, then, deep at night, bristling with hundreds of towers of silent and ghostly Babylon, turned into a white and inaccessible lunar landscape, and then, late in the evening, drowning in a storm of artificial lights, it became a sparkling carpet, stretched from horizon to horizon, alien and stunning after impenetrable military nights of Europe - about At this time, many refugees in the sleeping room got up, awakened by the sobs and screams, groans and wheezing of their restless neighbors, those who were still pursued in their sleep by the Gestapo, gendarmes and SS thugs, and, huddling in dark handfuls of people, talking quietly or in silence, staring their burning gaze into the unsteady haze on the other side, into the dazzling light panorama of the promised land - America, they froze near the windows, united by the mute brotherhood of feelings, into which only grief brings people, happiness never.

I had a German passport, good for another four months. This almost authentic document was issued in the name of Ludwig Sommer. I inherited it from a friend who died two years ago in Bordeaux; since the external signs indicated in the passport - height, hair and eye color - coincided, a certain Bauer, the best specialist in forging documents in Marseille, and a former professor of mathematics, advised me not to change my surname and name in my passport; and although there were several excellent lithographers among the emigrants there who had already managed to straighten out quite tolerable papers for more than one passportless refugee, I nevertheless preferred to follow Bauer's advice and refuse own name, especially since there was almost no use from him anyway. On the contrary, this name was on the lists of the Gestapo, so it was high time for him to evaporate. So I had an almost genuine passport, but the photo and I myself were a little fake. The craftsman Bauer explained to me the benefits of my position: a badly forged passport, no matter how wonderfully worked it out, is suitable only in case of a cursory and careless check - he cannot resist any efficient forensic examination and will inevitably give away all his secrets; prison, deportation, if not something worse, in this case I am guaranteed. But checking a genuine passport with a fake owner is a much longer and more troublesome story: in theory, a request should be sent to the place of issue, but now, when there is a war, this is out of the question. There are no ties with Germany. All experts strongly advise to change not passports, but personality; the authenticity of stamps has become easier to verify than the authenticity of names. The only thing that didn't fit in my passport was my religion. For Sommer it was Jewish, for me it was not. But Bauer considered this to be irrelevant.

“If the Germans grab you, you just throw away your passport,” he taught me. - Since you are not circumcised, then, you look, you somehow wriggle out and not immediately end up in the gas chamber. But while you are running away from the Germans, the fact that you are a Jew even benefits you. And explain ignorance in terms of customs by the fact that your father himself was a free-thinker, and he raised you that way.

Bauer was captured three months later. Robert Hirsch, armed with the Spanish consul's papers, tried to get him out of prison, but was late. The night before, Bauer was sent with a train to Germany.

On Ellis Island I met two immigrants whom I had known only briefly before. It happened to us several times to see each other on the "passionate path." This was the name of one of the stages of the route along which refugees fled from the Nazi regime. Through Holland, Belgium and Northern France, the route led to Paris and was divided there. From Paris, one line led through Lyon to the coast Mediterranean Sea; the second, having slipped through Bordeaux, Marseille and crossed the Pyrenees, fled to Spain, Portugal and stuck to the port of Lisbon. It was this route that was dubbed the "Passionate Path". Those who followed them had to escape not only from the Gestapo - they still had to not fall into the clutches of the local gendarmes. The majority did not have passports, let alone visas. If the gendarmes came across such, they were arrested, sentenced to imprisonment and expelled from the country. However, in many countries, the authorities had enough humanity to deliver them, at least not to the German border, otherwise they would have inevitably died in concentration camps. Since very few of the refugees had the opportunity to take a suitable passport with them on the road, almost all of them were doomed to almost ceaselessly wander and hide from the authorities. After all, without documents, they could not get any legal work. The majority suffered from hunger, poverty and loneliness, so they called the path of their wanderings "the passionate path." Their stops along the way were the main post offices in the cities and the walls along the roads. At the main post offices, they hoped to receive correspondence from relatives and friends; the walls of houses and fences along the highway served them as newspapers. Chalk and coal imprinted on them the names of those who had lost and were looking for each other, warnings, instructions, screams into emptiness - all these bitter signs of an era of human indifference, which was soon followed by an era of inhumanity, that is, the war, when on both sides of the front the Gestapo and gendarmes often did one thing in common.

Erich Maria Remarque

Promised land

For the third week I looked at this city: it lay in front of me at a glance - and as if on another planet. Only a few kilometers away from me, separated by a narrow arm of the sea bay, which I, perhaps, could have crossed - and yet inaccessible and inaccessible, as if surrounded by an armada of tanks. It was defended by the most secure bastions the twentieth century had invented — walls of paperwork, passport regulations, and inhuman laws of an impenetrable bureaucracy. I was on Ellis Note 1, it was the summer of 1944, and the city of New York lay in front of me.

Ellis Island was the most humane of all internment camps I had ever seen. No one was beaten, tortured, tortured to death with backbreaking work, and nobody was poisoned in the gas chambers. The inhabitants were even provided with good food, free of charge, and beds in which they were allowed to sleep. There were sentries everywhere, it is true, but they were almost kind. Ellis Island held foreigners who arrived in America, whose papers either inspired suspicion or were simply not in order. The fact is that an entry visa issued by an American consulate in a European country alone was not enough for America - when entering the country, it was necessary to pass the check of the New York Immigration Bureau again and obtain permission. Only then were you allowed in - or, on the contrary, declared an undesirable person and sent back with the very first ship. However, with sending back everything was not at all as simple as before. There was a war in Europe, America was also bogged down in this war head over heels, German submarines scoured the entire Atlantic, so that passenger ships to European ports of destination were extremely rare. For some poor fellows who were denied entry, this meant, albeit tiny, but happiness: they, who had long been accustomed to counting their lives only for days and weeks, gained hope for at least some time to stay on Ellis Island. However, there were too many other rumors circulating around to indulge oneself with such hope - rumors about ghost ships chock-full of Jews, which plow the ocean for months and which, wherever they sailed, were not allowed to dock anywhere. Some of the emigrants claimed that they had seen with their own eyes - some on the approach to Cuba, some near the ports of South America - these crowds of desperate people, begging for salvation, crowding to the railings of people on abandoned ships in front of the entrance to the harbors closed to them - these woe Dutch ”of our days, tired of fleeing from enemy submarines and human cruelty, carriers of the living dead and damned souls, whose only fault was that they were people and thirst for life.

Of course, not without nervous breakdowns. In a strange way, here, on Ellis Island, they happened even more often than in the French camps, when the German troops and the Gestapo were very close, a few kilometers away. Probably, in France, this resistance to one's own nerves was somehow connected with a person's ability to adapt to mortal danger. There the breath of death was felt so clearly that it must have forced a person to control himself, but here people who had just relaxed at the sight of such a close salvation, after a short time, when salvation suddenly began to elude them again, they completely lost their composure. However, unlike France, there were no suicides on Ellis Island - probably, the hope was still too strong in people, albeit permeated with despair. But the very first innocent interrogation by the most innocuous inspector could lead to hysteria: the mistrust and vigilance accumulated over the years of exile for a moment cracked, and after that the outbreak of new mistrust, the thought that you had made an irreparable mistake, plunged the person into panic. Typically, men had more nervous breakdowns than women.

The city, which lay so close and at the same time so inaccessible, became something like a hassle - it tormented, beckoned, mocked, promising everything and doing nothing. Now, surrounded by flocks of patchy clouds and hoarse, as if the roar of steel ichthyosaurs, the whistle of ships, he appeared to be a huge blurry monster, then, in the middle of the night, bristling with hundreds of towers of silent and ghostly Babylon, turned into a white and inaccessible lunar landscape, and then, late in the night, drowning in a storm of artificial lights, it became a sparkling carpet, stretched from horizon to horizon, alien and stunning after the impenetrable military nights of Europe - at this time, many refugees in the sleeping room got up, awakened by sobs and screams, groans and wheezing of their restless neighbors, those who were still pursued in a dream by the Gestapo, gendarmes and SS thugs, and, huddling in dark human handfuls, talking quietly or silently, fixing their burning eyes into the unsteady haze on the other side, into the dazzling light panorama of the Promised Land - America, froze near the windows, united by a mute brotherhood of feelings, into which only grief brings people, happiness never.

I had a German passport, good for another four months. This almost authentic document was issued in the name of Ludwig Sommer. I inherited it from a friend who died two years ago in Bordeaux; since the external signs indicated in the passport - height, hair and eye color - coincided, a certain Bauer, the best specialist in forging documents in Marseille, and a former professor of mathematics, advised me not to change my surname and name in my passport; and although among the emigrants there were several excellent lithographers who had already managed to straighten out quite passable papers for more than one passportless refugee, I nevertheless preferred to follow Bauer's advice and abandon my own name, all the more since there was almost no use in it anyway. On the contrary, this name was on the lists of the Gestapo, so it was high time for him to evaporate. So I had an almost genuine passport, but the photo and I myself were a little fake. The craftsman Bauer explained to me the benefits of my position: a badly forged passport, no matter how wonderfully worked it out, is suitable only in case of a cursory and careless check - he cannot resist any efficient forensic examination and will inevitably give away all his secrets; prison, deportation, if not something worse, in this case, I am guaranteed. But checking a genuine passport with a fake owner is a much longer and more troublesome story: in theory, a request should be sent to the place of issue, but now, when there is a war, this is out of the question. There are no ties with Germany. All experts strongly advise to change not passports, but personality; the authenticity of stamps has become easier to verify than the authenticity of names. The only thing that didn't fit in my passport was my religion. For Sommer it was Jewish, for me it was not. But Bauer considered this to be irrelevant.

If the Germans grab you, you just throw away your passport, - he taught me. - Since you are not circumcised, then, you look, you somehow wriggle out and not immediately end up in the gas chamber. But while you are running away from the Germans, the fact that you are a Jew even benefits you. And explain ignorance in terms of customs by the fact that your father himself was a free-thinker, and he raised you that way.

Bauer was captured three months later. Robert Hirsch, armed with the Spanish consul's papers, tried to get him out of prison, but was late. The night before, Bauer was sent with a train to Germany.

On Ellis Island I met two immigrants whom I had known only briefly before. It happened to us several times to see each other on the "passionate path." This was the name of one of the stages of the route along which refugees fled from the Nazi regime. Through Holland, Belgium and Northern France, the route led to Paris and was divided there. From Paris one line ran through Lyon to the Mediterranean coast; the second, having slipped through Bordeaux, Marseille and crossed the Pyrenees, fled to Spain, Portugal and stuck to the port of Lisbon. It was this route that was dubbed the "Passionate Path". Those who followed them had to escape not only from the Gestapo - they still had to not fall into the clutches of the local gendarmes. The majority did not have passports, let alone visas. If the gendarmes came across such, they were arrested, sentenced to imprisonment and expelled from the country. However, in many countries, the authorities had enough humanity to deliver them, at least not to the German border - otherwise they would have inevitably died in concentration camps. Since very few of the refugees had the opportunity to take a suitable passport with them on the road, almost all of them were doomed to almost ceaselessly wander and hide from the authorities. After all, without documents, they could not get any legal work. The majority suffered from hunger, poverty and loneliness, so they called the path of their wanderings "the passionate path." Their stops along the way were the main post offices in the cities and the walls along the roads. At the main post offices, they hoped to receive correspondence from relatives and friends; the walls of houses and fences along the highway served them as newspapers. Chalk and coal imprinted on them the names of those who had lost and were looking for each other, warnings, instructions, screams into emptiness - all these bitter signs of an era of human indifference, which was soon followed by an era of inhumanity, that is, the war, when on both sides of the front the Gestapo and gendarmes often did one thing in common.

I remember that I met one of these emigrants on Ellis Island at the Swiss border, when customs officers sent us to France four times in the course of one night. And there the French border guards caught us and drove us back. The cold was terrible, and in the end Rabinovich and I somehow persuaded the Swiss to put us in jail. They drowned in Swiss prisons, for refugees it was just paradise, we would have been very happy to spend the whole winter there, but the Swiss, unfortunately, are very practical. They quickly drove us off via Tessinnote 2 to Italy, where we parted. Both of these emigrants had relatives in America who gave them financial guarantees. Therefore, after a few days they were released from Ellis Island. At parting, Rabinovich promised me to look for mutual acquaintances in New York, comrades in the emigre misfortune. I did not attach any importance to his words. An ordinary promise that you forget about at the very first steps in freedom.

However, I did not feel unhappy here. A few years earlier, in a Brussels museum, I had learned to sit still for hours, maintaining a stony equanimity. I plunged into a completely thoughtless state, bordering on complete detachment. Looking at myself as if from the outside, I fell into a quiet trance, which softened the unrelenting convulsion of a long wait: in this strange schizophrenic illusion, at the end I even began to think that it was not me at all, but someone else who was waiting. And then the loneliness and crampedness of the tiny closet without light no longer seemed intolerable. The director of the museum hid me in this closet when the Gestapo, in the course of another roundup of emigrants, combed the whole of Brussels quarter after quarter. The director and I saw each other for a few seconds, only in the morning and in the evening: in the morning he brought me something to eat, and in the evening, when the museum was closed, he let me out. The pantry was locked during the day; only the director had the key. Of course, when someone walked along the corridor, I was not allowed to cough, sneeze and move loudly. It was not difficult, but the tickle of fear that haunted me at first could easily turn into panic when a really serious danger is approaching. That is why, at first, in the matter of accumulating mental stability, I went, perhaps, even further than necessary, strictly forbidding myself to look at the clock, so that sometimes, especially on Sundays, when the director did not come to me, I did not know at all. day now or night - fortunately, I was smart enough to give up this idea in time. Otherwise, I would inevitably lose the last remnants peace of mind and would come very close to the quagmire behind which the complete loss of his own personality begins. And I never really moved away from her anyway. And it was not faith in life that held me back; the hope of vengeance was what saved me.

A week later, I was suddenly spoken to by a skinny, dead-looking gentleman who looked like one of those lawyers who were circling in flocks of insatiable crows in our spacious day room. He carried a flat briefcase in green crocodile skin.

Are you, by any chance, Ludwig Sommer?

I looked at the stranger incredulously. He spoke German.

What is it to you?

Do you know if you are Ludwig Sommer or someone else? he asked, and chuckled with his short croaking laugh. Strikingly white, large teeth did not fit well with his gray, rumpled face.

In the meantime, I managed to figure out that special reasons I don't seem to have to hide my name.

I know that, ”I said. - But why do you need to know?

The stranger blinked several times like an owl.

I'm on behalf of Robert Hirsch, ”he announced at last.

I looked up in amazement.

From Hirsch? Robert Hirsch? The stranger nodded.

From whom else?

Robert Hirsch is dead, ”I said.

Now the stranger gave me a puzzled look.

Robert Hirsch in New York, he said. - Not later than two hours ago, I talked to him.

I shook my head.

Excluded. There’s some mistake. Robert Hirsch was shot in Marseilles.

Nonsense. It was Hirsch who sent me here to help you get off the island.

I didn't believe him. I sensed that there was some kind of trap set up by the inspectors.

How would he know I'm even here? I asked.

The man who introduced himself as Rabinovich called him and said that you were here. - The stranger took it out of his pocket business card... “I'm Levin from Levin and Watson. Law office. We are both lawyers. I hope this is enough for you? You are so damn incredulous. Why would it suddenly? Are you really hiding so much?

I took a deep breath. Now I believed him.

All Marcel knew that Robert Hirsch had been shot by the Gestapo, I repeated.

Just think, Marcel! Levin chuckled contemptuously. - We're here in America!

Indeed? - I expressively looked around our huge day room with its bars on the windows and emigrants along the walls.

Levin gave his croaking laugh again.

Well, not quite yet. As I see, you have not lost your sense of humor yet. Mr. Hirsch managed to tell you something about you. You were with him in an internment camp in France. This is true?

I nodded. I still could not really come to my senses. “Robert Hirsch is alive! - spun in my head. "And he's in New York!"

So? Levin asked impatiently.

I nodded again. Actually, it was only half so: Hirsch stayed in that camp for no more than an hour. He arrived there, disguised as an SS officer, to demand from the French commandant to hand over to him two German political emigrants who were sought by the Gestapo. And suddenly he saw me - he did not know that I was in the camp. Without batting an eye, Hirsch immediately demanded my extradition. The commandant, a fearful reservist major, had long been fed up with everything, did not argue, but insisted that he be left with an official transfer certificate. Hirsch gave him such an act - he always had with him a lot of various forms, genuine and false. Then he saluted Hitler's "Heil!", Pushed us into the car and was like that. A year later, both politicians were recaptured: in Bordeaux they fell into a Gestapo trap.

Erich Maria Remarque DAS GELOBTE LAND

First published in the German language

Reprinted with permission from the publisher

Verlag Kiepenheuer & Witsch GmbH & Co. KG.

I

For the third week I looked at this city: it lay in front of me at a glance - and as if on another planet. Only a few kilometers away from me, separated by a narrow arm of the sea bay, which I, perhaps, could have crossed - and yet inaccessible and inaccessible, as if surrounded by an armada of tanks. It was defended by the most secure bastions the twentieth century had invented — walls of paperwork, passport regulations, and inhuman laws of an impenetrable bureaucracy. I was on Ellis Island 1
A small island in Upper Bay near New York, south of the southern tip of Manhattan; in 1892-1943 - the main center for the reception of immigrants in the United States, until 1954 - a quarantine camp. - Hereinafter, note. ed.

It was the summer of 1944, and the city of New York lay before me.

Ellis Island was the most humane of all internment camps I had ever seen. No one was beaten, tortured, tortured to death with backbreaking work, and nobody was poisoned in the gas chambers. The inhabitants were even provided with good food, free of charge, and beds in which they were allowed to sleep. There were sentries everywhere, it is true, but they were almost kind. Ellis Island held foreigners who arrived in America, whose papers either inspired suspicion or were simply not in order. The fact is that an entry visa issued by an American consulate in a European country was not enough for America - when entering the country, it was necessary to pass the check of the New York Immigration Bureau again and obtain permission. Only then were you allowed in - or, on the contrary, declared an undesirable person and sent back with the very first ship. However, with sending back, everything has long been not at all as simple as before. There was a war in Europe, America was also bogged down in this war head over heels, German submarines scoured the entire Atlantic, so that passenger ships to European ports of destination were extremely rare. For some poor fellows who were denied entry, this meant, albeit tiny, but happiness: they, who had long been accustomed to counting their lives only for days and weeks, gained hope for at least some time to stay on Ellis Island. However, there were too many other rumors around to indulge in such hope - rumors about ghost ships chock-full of Jews, which plow the ocean for months and which, wherever they sailed, were not allowed to dock anywhere.

Some of the emigrants claimed that they had seen with their own eyes - some on the approach to Cuba, some near the ports of South America - these crowds of desperate people, begging for salvation, crowding to the railings of people on abandoned ships in front of the entrance to the harbors closed to them - these woe Dutch ”of our days, tired of fleeing from enemy submarines and human cruelty, carriers of the living dead and damned souls, whose only fault was that they were people and thirst for life.

Of course, not without nervous breakdowns. In a strange way, here, on Ellis Island, they happened even more often than in the French camps, when the German troops and the Gestapo were very close, a few kilometers away. Probably, in France, this resistance to one's own nerves was somehow connected with a person's ability to adapt to mortal danger. There the breath of death was felt so clearly that it must have forced a person to control himself, but here people who had just relaxed at the sight of such a close salvation, after a short time, when salvation suddenly began to elude them again, they completely lost their composure. However, unlike France, there were no suicides on Ellis Island - probably, the hope was still too strong in people, albeit permeated with despair. But the very first innocent interrogation from the most innocuous inspector could lead to hysteria: the mistrust and vigilance accumulated over the years of exile for a moment cracked, and after that, an outbreak of new mistrust, the thought that you had made an irreparable mistake, plunged the person into panic. Typically, men had more nervous breakdowns than women.

The city, which lay so close and at the same time so inaccessible, became something like a hassle - it tormented, beckoned, mocked, promising everything and doing nothing. Now, surrounded by flocks of patchy clouds and hoarse, as if the roar of steel ichthyosaurs, the horns of ships, he appeared as a huge vague monster, then, in the middle of the night, bristling with hundreds of towers of silent and ghostly Babylon, turned into a white and inaccessible lunar landscape, or, late in the night, drowning in a storm of artificial lights, it became a sparkling carpet, stretched from horizon to horizon, alien and stunning after the impenetrable military nights of Europe - about this time, many refugees in the sleeping room got up, awakened by sobs and screams, groans and wheezing of their restless neighbors, those who were still pursued in a dream by the Gestapo, gendarmes and SS thugs, and, huddling in the dark handfuls of people, talking quietly or silently, fixing their burning eyes into the unsteady haze on the other side, into the dazzling light panorama of the promised land - America, froze near the windows, united by a mute brotherhood of feelings, into which only grief brings people, happiness never.

I had a German passport, good for another four months. This almost authentic document was issued in the name of Ludwig Sommer. I inherited it from a friend who died two years ago in Bordeaux; since the external signs indicated in the passport - height, hair and eye color - coincided, a certain Bauer, the best specialist in forging documents in Marseille, and a former professor of mathematics, advised me not to change my surname and name in my passport; and although among the emigrants there were several excellent lithographers who had already managed to straighten out quite passable papers for more than one passportless refugee, I nevertheless preferred to follow Bauer's advice and abandon my own name, all the more since there was almost no use in it anyway. On the contrary, this name was on the lists of the Gestapo, so it was high time for him to evaporate. So I had an almost genuine passport, but the photo and I myself were a little fake. The craftsman Bauer explained to me the benefits of my position: a badly forged passport, no matter how wonderfully worked it out, is suitable only in case of a cursory and careless check - he cannot resist any efficient forensic examination and will inevitably give away all his secrets; prison, deportation, if not something worse, in this case, I am guaranteed. But checking a genuine passport with a fake owner is a much longer and more troublesome story: in theory, a request should be sent to the place of issue, but now, when there is a war, this is out of the question. There are no ties with Germany. All experts strongly advise to change not passports, but personality; the authenticity of stamps has become easier to verify than the authenticity of names. The only thing that didn't fit in my passport was my religion. For Sommer it was Jewish, for me it was not. But Bauer considered this to be irrelevant.

“If the Germans grab you, you just throw away your passport,” he taught me. - Since you are not circumcised, then, you look, you somehow wriggle out and not immediately end up in the gas chamber. But while you are running away from the Germans, the fact that you are a Jew even benefits you. And explain ignorance in terms of customs by the fact that your father himself was a free-thinker, and he raised you that way.

Bauer was captured three months later. Robert Hirsch, armed with the Spanish consul's papers, tried to get him out of prison, but was late. The night before, Bauer was sent with a train to Germany.

On Ellis Island I met two immigrants whom I had known only briefly before. It happened to us several times to see each other on the "passionate path." This was the name of one of the stages of the route along which refugees fled from the Nazi regime. Through Holland, Belgium and Northern France, the route led to Paris and was divided there. From Paris one line ran through Lyon to the Mediterranean coast; the second, having slipped through Bordeaux, Marseille and crossed the Pyrenees, fled to Spain, Portugal and stuck to the port of Lisbon. It was this route that was dubbed the "Passionate Path". Those who followed them had to escape not only from the Gestapo - they still had to not fall into the clutches of the local gendarmes. The majority did not have passports, let alone visas. If the gendarmes came across such, they were arrested, sentenced to imprisonment and expelled from the country. However, in many countries, the authorities had enough humanity to deliver them, at least not to the German border, otherwise they would have inevitably died in concentration camps. Since very few of the refugees had the opportunity to take a suitable passport with them on the road, almost all of them were doomed to almost ceaselessly wander and hide from the authorities. After all, without documents, they could not get any legal work. The majority suffered from hunger, poverty and loneliness, so they called the path of their wanderings "the passionate path." Their stops along the way were the main post offices in the cities and the walls along the roads. At the main post offices, they hoped to receive correspondence from relatives and friends; the walls of houses and fences along the highway served them as newspapers. Chalk and coal imprinted on them the names of those who had lost and were looking for each other, warnings, instructions, screams into emptiness - all these bitter signs of an era of human indifference, which was soon followed by an era of inhumanity, that is, the war, when on both sides of the front the Gestapo and gendarmes often did one thing in common.

I remember that I met one of these emigrants on Ellis Island at the Swiss border, when customs officers sent us to France four times in one night. And there the French border guards caught us and drove us back. The cold was terrible, and in the end Rabinovich and I somehow persuaded the Swiss to put us in jail. They drowned in Swiss prisons, for refugees it was just paradise, we would have been very happy to spend the whole winter there, but the Swiss, unfortunately, are very practical. They quickly shaved us off through Tessin 2
Canton in Switzerland bordering Italy.

To Italy, where we parted. Both of these emigrants had relatives in America who gave them financial guarantees. Therefore, after a few days they were released from Ellis Island. At parting, Rabinovich promised me to look for mutual acquaintances in New York, comrades in the emigre misfortune. I did not attach any importance to his words. An ordinary promise that you forget about at the very first steps in freedom.

However, I did not feel unhappy here. A few years earlier, in a Brussels museum, I had learned to sit still for hours, maintaining a stony equanimity. I plunged into a completely thoughtless state, bordering on complete detachment. Looking at myself as if from the outside, I fell into a quiet trance, which softened the unrelenting convulsion of a long wait: in this strange schizophrenic illusion, at the end I even began to think that it was not me at all, but someone else who was waiting. And then the loneliness and crampedness of the tiny closet without light no longer seemed intolerable. The director of the museum hid me in this closet when the Gestapo, in the course of another roundup of emigrants, combed the whole of Brussels quarter after quarter. The director and I saw each other for a few seconds, only in the morning and in the evening: in the morning he brought me something to eat, and in the evening, when the museum was closed, he let me out. The pantry was locked during the day; only the director had the key. Of course, when someone walked along the corridor, I was not allowed to cough, sneeze and move loudly. It was not difficult, but the tickle of fear that bothered me at first could easily turn into panic horror when a really serious danger approached. That is why, at first, in the matter of accumulating mental stability, I went, perhaps, even further than necessary, strictly forbidding myself to look at the clock, so that sometimes, especially on Sundays, when the director did not come to me, I did not know at all. day now or night - fortunately, I was smart enough to give up this idea in time. Otherwise, I would inevitably lose the last remnants of mental equilibrium and come close to the quagmire behind which the complete loss of my own personality begins. And I never really moved away from her anyway. And it was not faith in life that held me back; the hope of vengeance was what saved me.

A week later, I was suddenly spoken to by a skinny, dead-looking gentleman who looked like one of those lawyers who were circling in flocks of insatiable crows in our spacious day room. He carried a flat briefcase in green crocodile skin.

- Are you, by any chance, Ludwig Sommer?

I looked at the stranger incredulously. He spoke German.

- And what do you want?

- Do you know if you are Ludwig Sommer or someone else? He asked, and chuckled with his short croaking laugh. Strikingly white, large teeth did not fit well with his gray, rumpled face.

In the meantime, I managed to figure out that I didn't seem to have any special reason to hide my name.

“I know that,” I said. - But why do you need to know?

The stranger blinked several times like an owl.

“I'm on behalf of Robert Hirsch,” he announced at last.

I looked up in amazement.

- From Hirsch? Robert Hirsch?

The stranger nodded.

- From whom else?

“Robert Hirsch is dead,” I said.

Now the stranger gave me a puzzled look.

“Robert Hirsch is in New York,” he said. - Not later than two hours ago, I talked to him.

I shook my head.

- Excluded. There is some mistake here. Robert Hirsch was shot in Marseilles.

- Nonsense. It was Hirsch who sent me here to help you get off the island.

I didn't believe him. I sensed that there was some kind of trap set up by the inspectors.

- How would he know that I'm even here? I asked.

- The man who introduced himself as Rabinovich called him and said that you were here. The stranger took a business card out of his pocket. “I'm Levin from Levin and Watson. Law office. We are both lawyers. I hope this is enough for you? You are so damn incredulous. Why would it suddenly? Are you really hiding so much?

I took a deep breath. Now I believed him.

“All Marcel knew that Robert Hirsch had been shot by the Gestapo,” I repeated.

- Just think, Marcel! Levin chuckled contemptuously. - We're here in America!

- Indeed? - I expressively looked around our huge day room with its bars on the windows and emigrants along the walls.

Levin gave his croaking laugh again.

- Well, not quite yet. As I see, you have not lost your sense of humor yet. Mr. Hirsch managed to tell you something about you. You were with him in an internment camp in France. This is true?

I nodded. I still could not really come to my senses. “Robert Hirsch is alive! - spun in my head. "And he's in New York!"

- So? Levin asked impatiently.

I nodded again. Actually, it was only half so: Hirsch stayed in that camp for no more than an hour. He arrived there, disguised as an SS officer, to demand from the French commandant to hand over to him two German political emigrants who were sought by the Gestapo. And suddenly he saw me - he did not know that I was in the camp. Without batting an eye, Hirsch immediately demanded my extradition. The commandant, a fearful reservist major, had long been fed up with everyone, did not argue, but insisted that he be left with an official transfer certificate. Hirsch gave him such an act - he always had with him a lot of various forms, genuine and false. Then he saluted Hitler's "Heil!", Pushed us into the car and was like that. A year later, both politicians were recruited: in Bordeaux they fell into a Gestapo trap.

“Yes, it’s so,” I said. - May I have a look at the papers that Hirsch gave you?

Levin hesitated for a second.

- Oh sure. But why do you need it?

I didn't answer. I wanted to make sure that what Robert wrote about me coincided with what I had told the inspectors about myself. I carefully read the sheet and returned it to Levin.

- It's like that? He asked again.

- So, - I answered and looked around. How instantly everything around has changed! I'm not alone anymore. Robert Hirsch is alive. A voice suddenly reached me, which I thought had been silenced forever. It's different now. And nothing is lost yet.

- How much money do you have? - asked the lawyer.

“One hundred and fifty dollars,” I replied cautiously.

Levin shook his bald head.

- It is not enough even for the shortest-term transit-visitor visa to travel to Mexico or Canada. But nothing, it can still be settled. Is there something you don't understand?

- I do not understand. Why should I go to Canada or Mexico?

Levin grinned his horse teeth again.

- Absolutely no need, Herr Sommer. The main point is to get you to New York. A short-term transit visa is the easiest to apply for. And once you are in the country, you can get sick. So much so that you will not be able to continue the journey. And you will have to apply for a visa extension, and then another. The situation could change. Sticking your foot in the door - that's what is most important for now! Do you understand now?

A woman passed us with a loud cry. Levin took a pair of horn-rimmed glasses from his pocket and looked after her.

“It's not fun to hang around here, is it?

I shrugged.

- It could be worse.

- Worse? How is it?

“Much worse,” I explained. - You can, living here, die of stomach cancer. Or, for example, Ellis Island could be in Germany, and then your father would be nailed to the floor in front of your eyes to force you to confess.

Levin looked at me point-blank.

“You have a devilishly peculiar fantasy.

I shook my head, then I said:

- No, just a damn peculiar experience.

The lawyer took out a huge motley handkerchief and blew his nose deafeningly. Then he folded the handkerchief neatly and put it back in his pocket.

- How old are you?

- Thirty two.

- And how many of them are you already on the run?

- Five years soon.

This was not the case. I wandered much longer, but Ludwig Sommer, according to whose passport I lived, was only in 1939.

I nodded.

"And the appearance is not to say especially Jewish," remarked Levin.

- Perhaps. But don't you think that Hitler, Goebbels, Himmler and Hess also do not have a particularly Aryan appearance?

Levin gave his short croaking laugh again.

- What is not, that is not! Yes, and I do not care. Besides, why on earth would a person pretend to be a Jew, since he is not a Jew? Especially nowadays? Right?

- May be.

- Were you in a German concentration camp?

“Yes,” I recalled reluctantly. - Four months.

- Do you have any documents from there? Levin asked, and I heard something like greed in his voice.

- There were no documents. I was just released, and then I ran away.

- It's a pity. Now they would be very useful to us.

I glanced at Levin. I understood him, and yet something in me opposed the smoothness with which he translated all this into business. It was too disgusting and creepy. So terrible and disgusting that I myself, with great difficulty, managed to cope with it. Not to forget, no, but precisely to master, melt and immerse in oneself, as long as it is unnecessary. Not needed here on Ellis Island - but not in Germany.

Levin opened his briefcase and took out several sheets of paper.

- Here I have some more papers: Mr. Hirsch gave me testimony and statements from people who know you. Everything is already notarized. By my partner Watson, for convenience's sake. Maybe you want to look at them too?

I shook my head. I knew these testimonies from Paris. Robert Hirsch was a good judge of such matters. I didn't want to look at them now. In a strange way, for some reason it seemed to me that with all the luck today I must leave something to fate itself. Any emigrant would immediately understand me. Anyone who is always forced to bet on one chance out of a hundred, for this very reason, will never block the path of ordinary luck. It hardly made sense to try to explain all this to Levin.

The lawyer began to tuck the papers back in satisfaction.

- Now we need to find someone who is ready to guarantee that during your stay in America you will not burden the state treasury. Do you have any acquaintances here?

- Then maybe Robert Hirsch knows someone?

- I have no idea.

"There must be someone," said Levin with strange certainty. - Robert is very reliable in these matters. Where are you going to live in New York? Mr. Hirsch offers you the Mirage Hotel. He himself had lived there before.

I was silent for a few seconds, and then I said:

- Mr. Levin, don't you mean to say that I will really get out of here?

- Why not? Why else am I here?

"Do you really believe that?"

- Of course. You are not?

I closed my eyes for a moment.

“I believe,” I said. - I believe too.

- Very well! The main thing is not to lose hope! Or do expats think differently?

I shook my head.

- You see. Not giving up hope is an old, tried and tested American principle! Do you understand me?

I nodded. I did not have the slightest desire to explain to this innocent child of legitimate right how destructive hope is sometimes. It consumes all the resources of a weakened heart, its ability to resist, like inaccurate punches of a boxer who is hopelessly losing. In my memory, disappointed hopes have ruined many more people than human obedience to fate, when a coiled hedgehog soul concentrates all its strength on surviving, and there is simply no room for anything else in it.