The Time of the Uprooted Read Online Free PDF Page A

forget, and yet know that you will never know.”
    HE THOUGHT OF CALLING DIEGO. HE STILL HAD time before his appointment at the hospital.
    Diego, with his jutting chin and black forelock over eyes that opened wide, as if he were forever hearing an unexpected sound. There was an air of challenge about the short, stocky Jew from Lithuania who claimed he was Spanish. Right now, he was probably guzzling his lemonade the way he did his wine ration under the African sun, while recalling his adventures in the Foreign Legion in Morocco and the Djebel of Algeria, or the time he spent locked up in Franco’s prisons and France’s internment camps. At times, he would pretend to be drunk and shout, “I am a free man!” And then, as if sobered by his own frenzy, he would add, “I’ll lay down my life but never my freedom.” He loved to tell about his skirmishes with French bureaucracy. One such tale, punctuated as always with laughter:
    Paris, 1958. On a lovely, tranquil day, Diego went to the Bureau of Missing Persons at police headquarters. One place he didn’t have to wait in line. “Yes?” the clerk said irritably, without looking up, while putting aside his pen and inkwell. Diego waited for the clerk to look up. He wanted to see the man’s eyes. He hated to talk to someone who would not meet his eyes, who would conceal his expression. “So?” the clerk asked. “You want something?”
    “Yes,” said Diego.
    “Go ahead. I’m listening,” said the clerk, still looking down at his record books. “Who’s missing?”
    “I am,” said Diego.
    At that, the clerk finally lifted his head. His eyes lit up, but for only a moment. “The insane asylum is around the corner,” he said, and he pointed to the exit.
    “Fine,” said Diego with a shrug. “I’ll see you there.”
    At that, the clerk jumped to his feet and grabbed his visitor by the collar.“Keep that up and I’ll have you thrown in jail!”
    Once outside, Diego scolded himself: How could you, knowing what it is to be stateless, risk your freedom just for the fun of taunting the bureaucracy? A man without a country is someone to be despised. Don’t you realize that? People throw you exiles away like old clothes, turn aside as if you smell bad. . . . Only barely do they grant you the right to talk to the birds, to the trees, to the wind, to the rocks . . . no, not the rocks. I hate rocks. So cold, indifferent, mute, they make me feel inferior: They’ll still be around when I’m gone . . . and they’re not afraid of that clerk in Missing Persons. Suppose the clerk had asked you for your papers, those documents you left at home? All the police in every country on earth demand your papers, in the same hostile manner, as if that were the only thing in life that interested them . . . your papers, your papers! What a world this is, Diego reflected. . . . To take a human being with all his triumphs and failures, his memories of love and war, and reduce him to a grimy piece of paper—well, only a cop or a bank clerk thinks like that. And then he remembered he had even come across a border guard who, studying his travel permit, read as if in surprise: “ ‘Diego Bergelson . . . stateless.’ . . . That’s a funny name.” And Diego replied, deadpan, “Do you like it? I’ll sell it to you.”
    When he was out on the street, Diego burst out laughing. He was laughing mostly at himself: Why hadn’t he asked for French nationality when he was being discharged from the Legion? It would have been his with a stroke of a pen. Was it from a feeling of solidarity with his Spanish comrades who were still stateless? A youth in a silver-lined black leather jacket accosted him: “Hey, you, why are you laughing?”
    “Because it’s funny.”
    “Who are you talking to?”
    “To my comrades who disappeared in the desert. They’re the only ones I talk to. Only they know how to listen.”
    “Is that why you’re talking to yourself?” the young man said snidely.
    Diego