The following is a short story I wrote while coming out of the worst period of writer's block I've ever suffered. I had forgotten that one crucial thing a writer must continue to do while writing is to read. Fortunately, in the midst of my frustration, I stumbled upon the novel Sepharad by the acclaimed Spanish author Antonio Munoz Molina. And I found a wonder that left me in awe. In this unique piece of work, Molina displayed such a mastery of language and sentence structure that he could make one single sentence flow over two-thirds of a page, and it would make sense! I was so captivated by his style, I had to try it. I had to see if I could come even close to that level of control.

The title word, 'Sepharad', comes from the history of the Sephardic Jews who were exiled from Spain in 1492 by the same King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella who sent Columbus sailing west to find the east. The novel explores the theme of what it means to be a refugee; of just how many different ways there are to be out of place and time, some forced and some chosen; how some paths can lead to destruction while others are the very road to salvation.

So it was that both the amazingly intricate style and the subject matter of Molina's superb novel sparked my imagination to make the leap over whatever the hell was blocking me, and resulted in this short story simply titled...

 

 THE REFUGEE

I am not scheduled to depart until this afternoon, so technically I still occupy the third-floor flat in this old converted hotel. But for a while now, with regard to many of those I believed I’d come to know over the past three years, it has seemed as if I were already gone. It’s not that they ignore me, but rather just the opposite.

“Good morning, Mr. Klemp,” Reginald, the doorman, continues to say with a smile when I exit each day for what would have normally been my commute to work, but I haven’t gone to work for two weeks now, my presence there no longer needed. However, being an old man I keep to the old schedule to the end, which is today. It took nearly half-a-year to earn that smile from the solemn-faced fellow, a fixture at this building for more than three decades.

After months of receiving only the most perfunctory of greetings, I came upon him unnoticed one morning and overheard him muttering under his breath, assaulting the insufferably hot weather with a surly, “If I owned this city and hell, I’d rent this city out and live in hell!” Already sweating like a schwein, I immediately said, “Hell yes!” Once recovered from his surprise, Reginald drew himself up ramrod straight and said, “Good morning, Mr. Klemp,” with a smile.

“Hola, Senor Oskar,” Enrique continues to sing out my name when, as usual, my morning walks take me four blocks to KATYA’S--the coffee shop he owns with his Polish wife of that name--for my first espresso of the day, savored with an authentic mazurka from which I usually drop flaky crumbs and bits of sliced almonds onto my newspaper; all this subsumed beneath the rich, musky aroma of coffee already brewed and steaming in patron’s cups; coffee in the act of being brewed; coffee being ground, the scent given a new sharpness as a result of having just been cleaved by the blades of the grinder; and the soft aroma of coffee beans untouched, asleep in large glass jars and small burlap bags. I am addicted to Enrique’s coffee. He has never made a jest concerning my German accent as others have when they must have assumed I wouldn’t hear. Enrique has an accent of his own.

Everything continues to be familiar, all so common to the days of my common life, but then, that’s the problem. Enrique and Reginald and all the others, who after today in all likelihood I’ll never see again, have known for weeks that this day was coming, and knowing this, they went on with their lives as usual because after I’m gone they will go on as if I had never existed.

I’m still here. By acting toward me as if everything is as it has always been, and will continue to be after my departure, do they deny my place in the world? Do their actions belie that I’ve taken up any of their space and time, made any mark at all in my passing? Am I as insubstantial as a wisp of fog waiting to be blown away on the next breeze? That breeze is scheduled for this afternoon. But for now, I’m still here.

Maybe it’s my fault? Knowing this day was coming, and with no prospect of changing anything that might alter the outcome, have I already left them behind? Have I been playing the role of outsider, a refugee in the land that against all probability has become home, while simultaneously facing my imminent return to the country of my birth in the form of an unknown and unknowing refugee? I can’t be sure.

I do know that I have only a few hours left here. Will I use them to cement in memory the people and places of my present and near past? Or will I offer a quick, poignant goodbye, then turn and walk away? I choose to begin this day as usual, with an espresso at KATYA’S.

This is so predictable. Perhaps it’s the curse of being a German whose life’s work has revolved around the close tolerances of a German robotic machine tool company. Instead of taking jobs away to Germany, my employer opened a factory here, and takes away American jobs by the expedient of employing robots to do their work. I developed and monitored the layout of that factory to make it as efficient as possible.

I was efficient enough to make this posting last the three years necessary to reach the company’s mandatory retirement age of seventy. I needed time away from my country. But that time is up, my work visa has expired, and I laugh, to keep from crying, at the irony of being a man who, having made his living planning ways that things could move with the least resistance, finds himself unwilling to move.
 
This morning, as every previous morning, I do move out the hotel door, but on this occasion I set off knowing I’ll never again see these stately old row houses, or those neighborhood shops, produce stores, and restaurants with their names displayed on rippling canvas awnings, all of them vibrant with the colors and aromas that helped me claim a sense of place in my daily routine. For me, they’re already gone.

Four achingly familiar blocks later I push open the door to KATYA’S, setting off that little brass bell that is such an endearingly comforting cliche, a fanfare announcing yet another refugee from the street.

“Hola, Senor Oskar,” Enrique sings out.

“Hola, Enrique. Un espresso, por favor,” I say, using Spanish to please him, as I’ve done hundreds, maybe thousands of times before. The number doesn’t matter. What’s important is that I play my part in the charade that this is like any other morning, which, come to think of it, is true. This afternoon is when everything will change.

Enrique hands me a small plastic plate with a square of peach mazurka lying on a sheet of waxed paper. I didn’t ask for it, for a change, but I don’t refuse it. It’s weight in my hand is comforting. I’m used to carrying it, having done so nearly every morning for three years. Would I be unbalanced walking to my usual table by the window without it? I don’t want to find out. Being between worlds as I am, I’m unbalanced enough already.

“So, this is your last day with us for a while?” Enrique’s rich Cuban accent flows over me like warm butter. “We will miss you. Katya will have to make fewer mazurkas until you return. She will not be happy about this.”

I blush, momentarily speechless, that he has remembered I’m leaving today. But he did say, ‘for a while,’ and, ‘until you return.’ He has forgotten that it’s not for a while, but probably forever. Or have I avoided telling him? “It has been my pleasure to visit your establishment,” I mumble in the formal English of which I’ve been unable to break myself no matter how I strive, though I’m quite comfortable writing in contractions. They are so efficient. “Please tell your lovely wife goodbye for me.”

“She's in the back. I will tell her you are here. If I let you leave before she has a chance to say farewell, that would mean a rolling pin to my head.” His dark eyes twinkle, his grin spreads into a broad smile. Enrique, a small man, laughs at the absurdity of his tall, large-boned wife even so much as raising her voice to him much less doing real physical damage, which, considering the difference in their sizes, she is well capable of inflicting. “Please,” he adds. “For my sake, wait.”

Touched by his remarks, I hurry from the counter to my table--vacant as usual at this hour, the regular customers being so accustomed to seeing me sitting here. I wonder, who will occupy this space tomorrow?

Awaiting my espresso, I am very near to crying at the idea that the Cuban man and his Polish wife will miss the German who has joined them, for a few moments each morning at least, in America, all of them refugees in one way or another, from one thing or another. For now he must leave them and the place he’s made into a home to return, a different sort of refugee, to the place he once lived, though not the same house, that one having been sold when he left Germany. Too many memories there. Too much of Freya, his… my wife of nearly fifty years. But I will return to the same city, perhaps in time even to the same neighborhood, though not right away. A hotel will do for now.

In a moment, Mira, the girl Enrique hired last year--the one with the dark eyes and hair, olive skin, and the hawk’s nose marking her as a daughter of the Mediterranean--brings my espresso with a flash of white teeth behind full lips, lips so like Freya’s. Mira’s smile is automatic, house issue for the elderly gentleman, nothing personal. Still, I retain the image of that smile, those lips, well after she has returned to her station behind the counter.

Mira was hired as a result of my suggestion for a procedure that would streamline the process between taking a customer’s order and serving them. Adding another employee made no sense to Enrique, but Katya immediately grasped the logic.

After that, she would often sit with me chatting about what she referred to as ‘things’, one of which was how she ‘stole’ her mother’s pastry recipes when she ran away from Poland to avoid a family scandal, or a forced marriage, or maybe it was both, she was never very specific about those things, only saying something about an 'indiscretion'.

Enrique claims that my idea almost single handedly made their shop a success. Or rather, he used to say that to anyone who cared, or didn’t care, to listen, but then he stopped, other concerns having overtaken his and Katya’s united life. Freya and I once shared a life like that.

Savoring the smokey espresso, glancing out the window at the commuters passing by, I can’t help but ponder, How did this foreign land become home?

When did the barren shore of my self-imposed exile transform into this comfortable haven? Since leaving the days of my childhood behind, the word ‘home’, the idea of home, the very essence of home, had only one reality--Freya--and she had already left, taking home with her, before I ever departed Germany.

I didn’t consider bringing mementos of her with me--knickknacks, photos or paintings that she loved, anything she might have merely touched in passing. It was painful enough carrying the memories of her last days, their edges sharp, like having a collection of forgotten scalpels stitched up inside after undergoing surgery. Realizing only after the fact that the most random thing that moved me--an overheard word or barely glimpsed image, especially a familiar scent--could stir one of those memories causing it to pierce my heart, and no one standing by had the least hint that I was dying. It was just taking such an awfully long time.

While waiting to die, I picked up odds and ends that gradually buried the few things I’d brought from Germany. And as time passed, my scalpel-edged memories grew dull, nicking my heart less savagely and less often, until one day I understood that I wasn’t dying at all. It was then I realized that in self defense--perhaps in a desperate bid for a kind of healing--I had consigned my wife to a realm of invisibility like that inhabited by the undocumented who move among us every day. It’s not that we don’t notice them; we refuse to notice. In answer to the pain, I had made my memories of Freya invisible to my heart. How else could I have ever made of this place a home?

From the corner of my eye I see Katya approaching, and hold on to her image seen at this oblique angle for as long as courtesy permits--I must look directly at her eventually--recognizing in her general form and the way she moves, a hint of my Freya when she was young and vital, before the day the recitation of a long list of lab test results ended in a single word that removed her from the world of the living before she’d been allowed the simple grace to die. So she wouldn’t have to walk her new world alone, I tried as best I could to become displaced with her, but I failed. I was healthy. I still belonged.

“Oskar.” Katya rests her hand on my shoulder, her soft voice carrying the barest trace of a slavic accent. “After today, we’ll have to retire this table.”

I want to tilt my head, incline my face against her hand, but of course I don’t. “You are too kind. I will miss you and Enrique … but you the most.”

“We’ll see each other again.” She pats my shoulder. “It’s just a matter of time. Do you have a way to the airport? Enrique could drive you.”

“No, no, all is arranged, thank you,” I tell her, though nothing is arranged except that I am to leave. I’ll get to the airport more surely than I’ll ever experience Katya’s future in which we’ll meet again. The young take so much for granted. “In fact, I should leave as soon as I have finished this mazurka. I am lucky that you brought your mother’s recipes when you left Krakow.”

“I didn’t bring them. I stole them.”

Katya’s smile, demure yet playful, tugs at my heart. Freya was like that; a kokette frau, sweet like the pastries she loved, the treasures we would go together and buy at Jacob’s, a little bakery shop much like this one, in the old Jewish Quarter, only a few blocks from our house.

When did I forget that? Why would I consign that memory to the invisible land of the refugees when it doesn’t hurt like those others? This one does close around my heart, but more like a hug than a clenched fist, and elicits a smile. How many more such memories have I buried? How many smiles? What have I done? At the moment, I cannot bear to contemplate that question.

“I think I’ll save this.” Avoiding her eyes, I wrap the sheet of waxed paper around my pastry. “It will be a good snack on the airplane.” I rise and say, “Goodbye,” but before I can step toward the door, Katya hugs me.

“When Enrique is … more mature, I hope he’s like you,” she says and releases me.

Eyes brimming, I’m out the door so quickly it’s a surprise, and I realize I haven’t said goodbye to Enrique. I could go to the window, the one by my table, and get his attention, knock on the glass if I have to, and wave. But I don’t.

He’s probably busy, and anyway I must return to my building to retrieve the single bag I’m taking on this trip. I shipped a few things on ahead. Everything else has either been sold, consigned, or given away, even the few articles I brought from Germany, artifacts of a vanished life. When a refugee is forced to flee, he takes only what he can carry. It’s all I can do to carry myself into what awaits.

#

It’s far too early to be up and about, but the time difference between America and here, distorted as it is by having traveled against the sun’s path, has thrown off my internal clock. Not yet five in the morning, and I’m wide awake with too much time on my hands and no idea where to direct my steps. I’m not only disoriented in time, but also in space.

I’m in the city where I once lived, ensconced in a hotel in a modest neighborhood near the old town, I know all that, but what has this city become in my absence, to what have I been repatriated, and for that matter, who is this person I’ve returned as? Would Freya recognize me?

When I left three years ago, I tried with all my strength to bury the memories of her last days. Then, just as I’m being forced to return, I begin to reawaken to those other memories, the ones that had stowed away and been hiding in my deepest heart all along, the ones that could make me smile.

During last night’s flight, as I nibbled Katya’s peach mazurka, I peeked at some of those memories, only quick sidelong glances, I didn’t dare look too directly or for too long, but it was enough to whet the appetite and make me crave more. Now I fear for them and for me too. Have I begun to reclaim those memories only to risk losing them again to the painful familiarity of the sights and scents of a life that once was, but was lost? Am I lost? Forever?

Back ho… Back in America--I must remember that this German city is once again where I live--I would be getting ready to walk to KATYA’S for my first espresso of the day. There is no KATYA’S here, but I can still walk. So I’ll explore, and see what of the city has changed and what has remained the same. Maybe in this way, I’ll discover what remains of me.

There is no Reginald to greet me with a, ‘Good morning, Mr. Klemp,’ as I leave this hotel. It’s dark yet, with a mist that arose overnight from the river still hanging in the air, making of each street lamp an amorphous glowing blob. My footsteps echo in the deserted street, my path aimless, or so I think, but how can that be when I suddenly find myself deep in the old town, meandering down Volker Strasse. Then I see it.

There, on the left, two houses from the next corner, the small, faux-half-timber one with the attic window: I lived there … with Freya. The house draws me and repels me at the same time, but it draws me more, and I follow right up to the front gate. There’s a light on inside, in the back, probably the kitchen, the glow diffused into the front room and out the window onto the narrow strip of lawn, right up to my feet. From this perspective everything appears to be as I left it, as if nothing at all has changed in the time that has passed, but I know that's an illusion.

Freya went away, then I left, and now someone else lives there. That’s what has changed. And seeing the glow spilling from the window, imagining a couple in the kitchen having coffee--just like Freya and I used to do--before he, or she, goes off to work, I realize that’s all right, and this knowledge is such a relief, such a weight off my soul, I should be able to soar, but I can’t. I’ve come back, recognized I’m back in a world that has gone on without me, and I’m left feeling like a phantom, displaced from any time and everywhere I’ve ever known. I need a refuge, but who will take me in?

Led by the haloed street lamps--like an elevated trail of glowing breadcrumbs--I walk on through the lingering mist searching for some unrealized haven that lies hidden beyond my ability to discern, but I know it’s out there, it must be. On the side of a building, I spy a street sign marking where Zuhause Gasse veers off to the right to wind its narrow way into the darkness of the old Jewish Quarter. Led by memory and hope, I turn.

Though a window is lit here and there--signs of an awakening world--the tall houses flanking the lane press in so close and brooding it’s hard to breathe. But where I’m going isn’t far, and maybe it’ll be open at this hour. If not, what will I do?

Led by the faint hint of an aroma so deeply rooted in memory it’s virtually a part of me, a torturous few minutes later, over the door of a familiar building, I see the placard that declares ‘JACOBS BACKEREI’. I stand in the dark. The lights inside are on.

The little brass bell rings when I open the door, just like it did all those times so long ago, but not really that long ago, it only seems that way, so much has happened since. After Freya became too ill to walk, I would come to Jacob’s shop alone every morning to claim a bienenstich--she was captivated by the combination of Bavarian cream filling with shaved almonds and honey on top--still warm from the oven, and so soft I had to be careful not to crush it in my big clumsy hands as I carried it home to her like an offering. Jacob once told me how much it meant that she so loved the fruits of his labor.

This day is like those days, now as I open the door and step into the dense aromas of warm pastries and strong coffee. I see Jacob--his girth proclaiming a man who obviously enjoys the fruits of his labors--with both hands propped on the flat top of a glass display case that is crammed with baked goods. He’s leaning over the case reading ‘Der Spiegel'--without looking, I know it’s the editorials--as if frozen in his customary pose, the one I remember from the last time I came here before going to America.

At the sound of the bell he looks up from the newspaper, and stares for a long, curious, bewildered, and then surprised, moment.

“Herr Klemp?” Jacob says with the beginning of a smile. “Is it really you? Are you home at last?”

How shall I answer?