‘Shall we pray first?’ he asks jokingly. ‘Who will lead us?’

  Señor Noguerra and Señor Porras exchange glances. Both claim to be officers of the Guardia Civil but only Porras is in the grey-green uniform of the security forces, its silver monogram pinned to his collar. Still, the two men seem well acquainted with each other, and share the local accent, whereas Commissioner Estévez’s Spanish and his bearing belong to someone who comes from a different part of the country—perhaps a large city, I think, judging by his impatience.

  ‘You must be wondering about our host,’ Porras says evenly, as if he too is suddenly tired of the charade. ‘Commissioner Estévez is the Commissioner of Information. He’s on a tour of the border areas.’

  ‘Beautiful country—’ the commissioner interjects, raising a pronged piece of meat to his mouth.

  ‘He’s responsible,’ Porras continues, ‘for international crimes and for identity documents.’ Porras reaches into the pocket of his uniform and drops fourteen documents on the table between his knife and fork. Suzanne’s light blue identity card from Paris is on top and the yellow folded bits of paper that are our Spanish transit visas are underneath. My passport, which gives me Austrian citizenship, is on the bottom.

  We say nothing, and in that silence Porras pulls a cigarette from his silver case and a lighter. He flicks the lighter into flame. He could burn those papers now, and we three could stand up shouting, and no one would do a thing. The waiter returns with another bottle of wine. He shows the commissioner the label, then takes the capsule off with the blade of a knife. I watch the peel of metal fall to the table. Suzanne stares down at her untouched beef.

  ‘Why is everyone suddenly so serious?’ the commissioner asks. ‘Eat! Eat!’

  * * *

  —

  On my parents’ property in the country there were a number of woodsheds out in the forest amongst the trees. My father, and his father before him, were responsible for them. When I was seven or eight I would sometimes visit one. It had a door, which was never locked, and a small window covered by a flap of burlap. Inside there was a pyramid of logs and some basic tools and woodcutting implements. And of course, years later, my cousin Leonie and I would be in there too, and my mother with her startled face, white as the moon above us. This was a place where I sometimes stored scavenged items: a blue-uniformed toy soldier I’d stolen from my brother, who had an excess of toys but who favoured that one above all others; a red ribbon my mother wore in her hair and which tickled me one night when she came back from dinner and bent over my bed to kiss me; a bird skull from my father’s cabinet—a falcon perhaps, though I was never able to ask because I’d stolen it. I kept this odd assortment of treasures wrapped in a cloth behind the links of logs stacked against the wall. One day, reaching for my parcel, my hand glanced something soft and warm. I lit a match and peered around the back of the pile. There was a rather large mouse, brown and still, bleeding on its back where one of the cats might have got it. In the quick fuse of my match’s light I saw his whiskers twitch. Don’t touch, I thought. This was one of the cardinal rules of my childhood—a rule my mother liked to recite in kitchens and shops, on walks through town or in the elegant homes of our relations. Look was the other imperative—usually from my father—his finger creating a sightline meant to better me through exposure to animals, ships, modes of industry, work he thought bore some stamp of innovation. I dropped my hand back again behind the woodpile, the rough cut of the logs against my cheek, the smell sweet. I felt for the mouse. He did not skitter when I grabbed him and remained limp in my hand as I pulled him out from behind the wood and onto the dirt floor in front of me. His breath, the rise and fall of his damp brown flank, was slow. I nudged him sideways and placed one finger on the place where I imagined his heart would be. I felt nothing. I thought of Martin then, of his dullness and jaundiced eyes, and wished, stupidly, he could be there with me. ‘Maus,’ I said, trying to call some aspect of him toward me. ‘Maus!’ Nothing. The blood beside the claw mark was drying. His back appeared broken. I touched his forehead with one finger and his nose twitched up. Such small teeth, and yet people are so afraid of you, I thought. I stroked his face for ten or so minutes, and then I bashed his head in with a log. This made a mess, and I cried because I didn’t want to do it—but I didn’t know what else to do. I buried him in a shallow hole outside the shed and went in for dinner. I don’t know why I’m thinking about that mouse now.

  * * *

  SHORTLY AFTER MY ARRIVAL on the island I had the good fortune to make the acquaintance of a local businessman. He was a quick man in his thirties who dealt in furniture and who frequented the hotel’s public house in the evening. His business involved the production of basic and affordable furniture—chairs, tables, sideboards and the like—designed with the local pines in mind and suitable for the island’s farming and fishing families, alongside more elaborate pieces, replicas of designs popular on the continent. These latter pieces were made by commission—usually with imported mahogany—in a local workshop where he employed two excellent carpenters. I met this man on the sea road on a gusty day shortly after my arrival. As the gentleman’s English was excellent and mine rapidly improving from my practice with the staff at the hotel, we fell to talking. He offered to drive me around the island and over to his business, which he was due to visit that afternoon. I have forgotten his name but can remember his ruddy face, his wide nose, how he laughed with his entire body.

  The drive was magnificent. His was one of seven cars on the whole of the island, and save for three riders on horses and a young boy driving a pony cart, we did not pass other human beings. First he took me north, where we trekked into a field that held two very old standing stones; then we drove even farther north to a loch renowned for fishing and the cultivation of oysters. After this we went north again, past low mountains and up to the top of the island where a white towered lighthouse stood in the distance on a rocky promontory. There, he wanted to show me a particularly good view so we started out on a grassy track, first passing a group of wild goats who were nibbling at the knots of seaweed, then setting a host of gulls aloft as we rounded the bend toward the wide expanse of the sea.

  By three in the afternoon we were driving south again toward my companion’s workshop, the narrow road taking us past a series of white buildings with peaked roofs and smokestacks, which he said housed a local distillery, and then past a charming fishing village where the weekly market was held.

  The man’s workshop was behind the island’s great house, in a series of buildings that also contained a smithy and a tack shop and a new automotive garage. The estate house itself was shuttered, as the owner was frequently on the mainland, though his dogs were wandering about—a pack of four setters minded by one of the senior stable hands. The furniture shop was long and narrow, laid out to ensure ease in production—from the intake of the lumber to the cutting and sizing of the wood, to the woodworking and joinery. Despite having sat on some very fine pieces of furniture in the local hotel, I had not expected to find such master craftwork out here on the edge of the continent. The two carpenters in the shop appeared to be in their early thirties, near to my own age at the time, but their work and the ease with which they undertook it spoke to more years of experience than they could have had. The taller of the two had scarred hands and an almost impenetrable accent. He was working on the dowels of a beautiful Queen Anne style chair, the back panel of which was inset with a graceful design of grapevines and leaves—a design popular in Florence that year and which these carpenters were replicating based solely on drawings they had received.

  I had numerous questions for the carpenters and my host amiably ‘translated’ their answers. ‘How,’ I asked, ‘does one map a proper design from an illustration?’ ‘Do you prefer to innovate or stay true to the model and form requested?’ ‘Is each model intended to be an exact replica—down to the curl of the grape leaf’—this, I had observed, the younger of the carpenters was entrusted with—‘or is it preferable to have each chair retain some unique marker that might set it apart?’ The carpenters were amused by my questions. They informed me that the chairs they were working on were intended to be indistinguishable from those upon which the drawings were based, the etchings were to be identical; one should not be able to distinguish, if they did their work well, one chair from another. The idea that they would put a motif of their own design, some symbolic signature, into the work amused them; it was an extension of themselves they were disinclined to gift to other people’s property. They took a certain amount of pride, I realized, in the completion of a work that would bear no trace of them.

  At five, when the sky was getting dark, the younger man’s wife brought the men mugs of tea and a thick loaf of bread and a round of soft cheese made from sheep’s milk. I was offered some bread and cheese and sat amongst the wood curls and sawdust on a long bench the men had made, observed attentively by one of the laird’s large-muzzled bitches who’d wandered in to lie down by the open doorway. This idea of replication was not, I knew, the thing my adviser had told me to look for, not the idea to add to my plodding thoughts on bridges and forms. But the hours I spent in the company of these men conjured in me something of equal value…the gift of observing a group of people who seemed to feel at home in their world.

  * * *

  —

  I am not at home in the world now. Even the wine the waiter pours into my glass fails to comfort me. Commissioner Estévez had ordered Spanish wine and its earthiness, its green-stem-like quality reminds me with every sip that I am not in a place I know.

  The waiter at the Dorada is one of the few old men I’ve noticed since we arrived in the village. He’s in his late sixties, maybe early seventies, although I am aware that war stresses people in different ways. I think from his deference he is an able survivor: I watch how he moves knives and forks crosswise over the empty plates and lifts the offending platters up and away from our faces with minimal interference, as if he could stand beside you for the duration of a crisis and remain unnoticed.

  Gone, amongst the citizens of Portbou, are overt signs of affiliation. It’s difficult to tell which side of the civil war people stood on or how they might have survived it. The Republicans—if there are any true Republicans left—have grown quiet. Even back in Marseilles, a city overrun with émigrés and refugees—some of them Spanish—and French soldiers in plain clothes, we could usually surmise who was who. This is the survivor’s game: knowing who might give you bread and who might shoot you the second your back is turned. This waiter, with his pressed black jacket, white shirt and polished shoes must have been one of those who sided with the fascists, or who stayed neutral enough that he might as well have sided with them—otherwise, he would not still be here in this restaurant serving these corrupt men; he would not, given his age, be here among the living on this earth.

  The plates are cleared and a round of coffee is ordered. Suzanne excuses herself to the lavatory. Señor Porras raises a hand and Alejandro, who has kept one eye on the table for the last hour, is suddenly off his seat at the bar, drifting behind Suzanne and taking up station outside the ladies’ restroom. Porras and Noguerra have drunk too much, which tells me that the local Guardia Civil don’t have access to black market luxuries to the extent that Estévez does. Estévez, for all of his girth, barely ate anything. The meal was all show: waving and finger-snapping and joking, assessing us and trying to get us drunk.

  ‘So, you must wonder why you’re here,’ Estévez says, looking Bernard in the eye. He wipes his mouth with a linen napkin and then tosses it toward the centre of the table. ‘It’s not that your papers are in question, they’re very good,’ he says. ‘It’s rather the issue of a new decree from General Franco and a request from our friends to the north that all transit visas from Marseilles be cancelled. Which makes these’—and here he waves his hand over our stack of documents—‘useless.’ He pauses to smile like a poor salesman. ‘Now, of course, Herr Gabler might be helpful here, perhaps securing an exemption from his friends in Berlin, though he is a busy man and such a favour might raise questions. Unless, of course, you can also be of assistance to him.’

  I look at Bernard. Why tell us this now, when Suzanne is away from the table? And why address this blackmail to Bernard, with only a few quick cursory glances at me?

  ‘Of course, as teachers, academics, simple artisans—you wouldn’t be able to help us much. But as men of intellect, who worked in the great city of Paris, perhaps you can.’ He extends his hand toward Herr Gabler, who clicks open a briefcase and lifts out a sheet of paper on which two columns of names are written in black ink. ‘The list isn’t too long,’ Estévez says, ‘it won’t take you but five minutes. Again, I can make no promises, but perhaps Herr Gabler can—if, of course, you can help us locate some of these individuals?’

  I glance down at the paper and when I look up from the scrawled names, Suzanne is back at the table. She is taking everything in—the list of names, my hands on it—as if in her absence some form of agreement has been made. I see now Estévez’s thinking—his attempt, at every moment, to divide us, to create the illusion that some sort of collusion might be taking place.

  ‘The border is closed,’ I tell Suzanne in French. ‘We are now required to have different exit visas from France. This is a list Herr Gabler would like us to look at.’

  Suzanne takes her seat slowly.

  I push the list back to Gabler. ‘I don’t know any of these names.’

  ‘But you have not really read the list, professor,’ Gabler says.

  I force a laugh. ‘I’m not a professor, Herr Gabler, though you flatter me with the designation.’ But I know it is this word, ‘professor,’ that seals my fate.

  When Gabler calls me professor, it becomes clear to me that our charade is falling apart. This assignation had been omitted on my passport and on all my documents. For Herr Gabler to know I had spent five years teaching, first in Bremen and then in Berlin, meant access to my biography, meant—unless these men were baiting me—that he knew where I was from, what faith I’d been born into, and where my sympathies lay. Throughout dinner, our hosts intimated that they suspected some of our documents were embellished, but it is only when Gabler calls me professor that I understand they know precisely who we are. And I understand that the offer to inform could mean more than safe passage. If we gave them information about some of the names on the list, among them Olivier’s—the forger of one of the very documents that sit on the table in front of us—it might mean our lives.

  Herr Gabler’s eyes meet mine. I gaze at his long, narrow face, the grey wells of his eyes, and I wonder what principles he lives by. I think of the word for criminal in the language that Gabler and I both spoke as children. I despise him and I fight to keep that expression to myself. And so, with great effort, I turn my attention to the table now emptied of everything but coffee cups and silver spoons, and I feel, in that moment, incredibly tired.

  ‘I would like to smoke,’ I say. Using the table for support, I stand up. When it becomes clear that I have no cigarettes of my own, Señor Porras pulls one from his silver case. I accept his cigarette and Noguerra, beside me, lights it. ‘If you please,’ I say, and I walk toward the door and into the darkening night, Alejandro falling into place behind me.

  Outside, under the snake of La Dorada’s bougainvillea, I inhale and let the cigarette’s smoke curl around my mouth, savouring this old habit. Turning toward the planted palms so that those inside the restaurant can’t see me speaking, I ask Alejandro, ‘Is this typical? Do they always bring émigrés here and show them lists and ask them questions?’

  The guard says nothing. I glance over at him to be sure he’s heard me. Then I shake my head in disdain and exhale another cloud of smoke. I still have the taste of wine in my mouth, the taste of these very hills above me—the wine served at dinner was a local variety, Grenache perhaps, which the pickers we walked in with might have plucked from these very terraces. When, I wondered, was the last time Alejandro drank wine? I offer him my cigarette but he refuses it.

  From where we stand on the carpet of the El Dorado walkway I can see the front of the Paradou patio down the street, the empty table where I sat yesterday, and beyond that the gate that leads to your mother and father’s house, Pia, and the square of golden light emanating from the window that looks out over your yard.

  ‘Who lives there?’ I ask.

  Alejandro follows my gaze to your house on the hillside. ‘A businessman. He owns a number of mines in South America.’ Alejandro turns toward the bay and in the moonlight I study his strong features, the divot of a scar on his forehead. ‘It’s not his house,’ he says after a minute. ‘It belonged to the mayor. He and his family are just staying there.’

  And so I picture the man who is your father sitting at the table where the mayor once sat, where I imagine you are sitting now: his clean-shaven face, his combed hair, the cufflinks and polished shoes. I picture him making excuses for who he is dealing with and for the questions he already knows the answers to, but would never ask. I picture him as he was yesterday when he passed by the Paradou: such cleanliness, such precision—and I recall with difficulty the daily vanity with which I must once have attended to my own appearance in a vanished world…the hair comb, the razor, the boar bristle brush I used on the shoulders of my good suit.

  There was one name on Herr Gabler’s list that I recognized immediately: Gaston. Gaston, who would be guilty of what? He is a pacifist, a socialist, a philosopher. He has written anti-fascist articles for French magazines and journals but he is mostly a man who keeps his head in books. The last time I saw him he was trying to help two of our mutual Jewish friends secure safe-conduct passes so that they could leave France. That his name is on the list, that he’s not been struck off, as a handful of names were, gives me hope, even if the hope is for him and the work he is doing and not for me.