The Informers Read Online Free PDF

cunning."
And that's how it went: the owner demanded the house back; he alleged a fictitious buyer and barely even apologized for the inconvenience. The Guterman family, who hadn't been in Colombia for six months yet, had to move again already. But then came the first stroke of luck. In those days something was going on in Tunja. The city was full of important people. A Swiss businessman from Berne, who was negotiating setting up pharmaceutical laboratories in Colombia, had become a friend of the family. One day, at around ten in the morning, he arrived at the house unexpectedly.
"I need an interpreter," he said to Peter Guterman. "It's more than an important negotiation. It's a matter of life or death."
Peter Guterman could think of no better solution than to offer his daughter, the only one in the family who could speak Spanish as well as understand it. Sara had to obey the Swiss man. She knew perfectly well that the will of an adult, and an adult who was a friend of her father's, was law to an adolescent like herself. On the other hand, she always felt insecure in that sort of situation: she had never managed to feel at ease with the unspoken rules of the host society. This man was European, like her. How had crossing the Atlantic changed his ways? Should she greet him as she would have greeted him in Emmerich? But this man, in Emmerich, would not have looked her in the face. Sara had not forgotten the occasional snubs she'd received over the last few years, or what happened to Gentiles' faces when they spoke of her father.
She went to the lunch, and it turned out that the man for whom she was to convert the Swiss man's words into Spanish was President Eduardo Santos, recognized friend of the German colony; and there was Santos, who had so much respect for Sara's father, squeezing the hand of the adolescent interpreter, asking her how she was, congratulating her on the quality of her Spanish. "From that moment I felt committed to the Liberal Party forever," Sara would say many years later, with a sharply ironic tone. "I've always been like that. Three set phrases and I'm overcome." She interpreted during a two-hour lunch (and in another two she'd completely forgotten the content of the words she'd interpreted), and afterward she mentioned the move to Santos.
"We're getting tired of moving from one house to another," she said. "It's like living in shifts."
"Well, set up a hotel," said Santos. "Then you can be the ones to evict people."
But the matter couldn't be so simple. At that time foreigners were not allowed to practice, without previous authorization, occupations other than those they'd declared upon entering the country. Sara pointed this out to the president.
"Oh, don't worry about that," was the answer. "I'll take care of the permission."
And a year later, the cheese factory sold at a generous profit, they opened the Hotel Pension Nueva Europa in Duitama. When the president of the republic attended the opening of a hotel (everyone thought), that hotel was destined to be successful.
Sara's father had intended to baptize the hotel with his name, Hotel Pension Guterman, but his associates let him know that a surname like his at a time like that was the worst start you could give to a business. Just a few months earlier, a Bogota taxi company had contracted seven Jewish refugees as drivers; the taxi drivers of Bogota organized an elaborate campaign against them, and all over the place, in the shop windows downtown, in the windows of cabs and even some trams, could be seen posters with the slogan: We support the taxi drivers in their campaign against the Poles . That was the first sign that the new life wasn't going to be much easier than the old. When the Gutermans heard about the taxi drivers, Sara's father's despair was so intense that the family reached the point of fearing something serious. (After all, one of his friends had already hanged himself in his house in Bonn, shortly after the pogrom of 1938.) Peter