Free Sepharad by Antonio Muñoz Molina Page A

slightest uncertainty or weakness in her blind revolutionary faith. You believe you know who you are, but suddenly you’ve become something others want to see in you, then you’ve
become a stranger to yourself, and your own shadow is the spy following your footsteps, and in your eyes you see the look of your accusers, those who cross the street to avoid saying hello or lower their head when they pass. But life is slow to change, and at first a person refuses to notice the alarm signals, to question the order and solidity of the world that has begun to break apart, the everyday reality in which large holes, pits of darkness even at midday, begin to open, where at any moment you may hear loud pounding at the door of the dining room where your children have lunch or do their homework, and the ring of the telephone cuts the air like an icy steel blade, like a fatal shot.
    Eugenia Ginzburg is summoned at odd hours to meetings that turn out to be interrogations; it is suggested to her that she will be punished, because at one time she was connected with the university, or worked in the Party with someone who was a traitor, or didn’t denounce someone with the proper revolutionary zeal. But the meeting, the interrogation, ends, and she is allowed to go home, and if there are people who have begun to pretend they don’t see her or change course if she is walking toward them, others tell her to be calm, give her advice, say that nothing will happen, she’ll see, everything will work out in the end. Only one woman warns her of the danger: her husband’s mother, who is an old and maybe illiterate woman from a small village, shakes her head with resignation and remembers that all this happened before, in the times of the czars.
Eugenia, they’re setting a trap for you, and you must run away while you can, before they have your head.
But why would I, a Communist, hide from my Party? I must show the Party that I’m innocent. They speak in low voices, trying not to let the children hear, afraid that the telephone, even though the receiver’s down, will allow someone to listen. On February 7, Eugenia Ginzburg is called to yet another meeting, which is less disagreeable, and at the end of it the comrade who has been interrogating her gets to his feet with a smile; she thinks he will
shake her hand, maybe tell her that the misunderstandings and suspicions are clearing up, but the man asks her rather casually, as if remembering a minor bureaucratic detail he’d almost overlooked, to leave her Party card with him. At first she doesn’t understand, or can’t believe what she’s heard: she looks at this comrade and the smile disappears from his serene face, then she opens her handbag and looks for the card she always carries with her, and when she hands it to him, he takes it without a glance toward her and puts it in one of his desk drawers.
    For eight days she waits. She stays home, in her room, not answering the telephone, barely noticing what is going on around her, the presence of her children, who move quietly, as if in a house where someone is ill, the company of her husband, who comes and goes like a shadow and raps quietly at the door and says in a low voice, “Open up, it’s me.” Now they begin to doubt whether innocence is enough to save her, they burn papers and books, old letters, any manuscript or printed page that might draw attention during a search. At night they lie awake, silent and rigid in the darkness, and shiver every time they hear a car coming down the silent street or see headlights through the window, flashing diagonally across the walls of the room. Their fear lasts from the moment they hear the car in the distance until it fades and is lost at the end of the street. In Kazan, as in Moscow, the only cars moving about at such hours are the black vans of the KGB.
Russia is very large, Eugenia, take a train and go hide in our village. Our little summer house