In a flash Goldie found herself again in her apartment in Buenos Aires that night when all had been lost.
“¡Abra la puerta! ¡Abra la puerta!”
A cluster of fists hammered at the door of her apartment. The voices in her nightmare cried, “¡Abra la puerta! ¡Abra la puerta!,” and she had woken up from the dream that had once been her life. As soon as she unlocked the door, four men in plain clothes jumped inside with guns and handcuffed her from behind. They twisted her arms with such careless venom that she blinked in bewildered pain. They ran through the apartment searching for others and for this, at least, she felt relief.
“Where is he?” one of them asked her, the others milling about.
“Who?” she said.
The man threw a blanket over her head then pushed her out the door in her pyjamas. They will get you to talk, Jewish whore.
A gun barrel was pushed into her side as they rode down the elevator. The blanket still over her head, they threw her down onto the floor of a car. Their feet perched on her body, the gun barrel stuck in her back as they drove away.
Finally they arrived in the basement of some official building. First she was blindfolded, then, without any preamble, she was put on the machine. She didn’t know it was the machine then; she merely knew her fate was catching up with her. Someone placed her on a cot, attached what she later realized were electrodes to her mouth, and pushed a button. A fire, a howling, started in her mouth. She fell into the noise headlong, forgetting her name, forgetting her face. The plague had carried off her family in Europe thirty years before; it finally remembered to come back for her. She was being punished for surviving.
Later on she found out that all the prisoners were given the machine on their arrival to rattle them into submission. Routine. Then to business. At the beginning the conversations went like this:
“Where is your son?”
“I don’t know.”
A sharp slap across the face.
“How can I help you if you don’t cooperate? We don’t want to hurt him. We just want to speak to him about his subversive activities.”
“He has no subversive activities. He’s a musician. He writes songs.”
“Songs? Propaganda that describes us as animals. Lies that give comfort to the enemy.”
“Students are your enemies?”
“Your son is young. Maybe he fell in with a bad crowd. We understand all that. We don’t want to hurt him. Where is he?”
“Out of your reach, Mr. Interrogator. Nowhere you can find him.”
The fist smashed her mouth. That stubborn mouth. Her interrogator, once interested in her son’s whereabouts, now enjoyed torturing her for her own shortcomings: her uncowed demeanor, her Jewishness, her stubborn mouth that refused obedience. An uncontrollable mouth. Not that she didn’t want to control it, only it was directly attached to her brain and her brain she couldn’t control. With the result that her tongue, no matter how she manoeuvred it, succeeded in inflaming her interrogator to heights of sadistic rage. What was worse for an old woman — sitting in pyjamas on the wet floor of a cell, praying the scorpions wouldn’t find her, or sitting in the interrogator’s chair, her only human contact slamming his fist into the side of her ribs, searching for something she could not give him: herself?
After some weeks, when Goldie lay filthy on the stone floor, her pyjamas soiled from the remnants of bodily functions, her interrogator grew bolder. When fetching her from her cell, he neglected to blindfold her. She now saw he was fat, with short greasy hair. He was ageless, sexless, she would not recognize him on the street. She allowed herself a fleeting moment of hope before coming to a halt in the room. Seeing it for the first time, she was perversely satisfied with its shabbiness — it could have been a converted kitchen. She smiled to herself, surprised that she was able. She was being fried in an old kitchen. The smell was damp, musty, like long ago fried fish.
“This amuses you?”
Goldie startled at this German-accented Spanish. She twisted her head toward the source but found the figure in shadow.
“Jorge, the old whore finds her situation amusing. We must show her the seriousness of her position.”
The faceless voice was German; she would hear it in her dreams long after the danger was over. Her mother, her father, her brothers, aunts, cousins, grandparents had all marched into the maw of history because of a German voice. The guttural rasps in the throat still had the power to terrorize her, the deceptively rounded vowels that could pierce a heart.
They placed her on a cot. The fat interrogator attached electrodes to her mouth with clumsy fingers. The anxiety was not on her account, she realized, but resided in the shadows with the faceless German who had, no doubt, given instructions.
The arrogant voice begins:
“Jewish cow, is it not true that you and your son are part of a Jewish conspiracy to take over Patagonia?”
Even his Spanish sounds German.
“We know everything, whore. We even know the name chosen for the new homeland: the Republic of Andinia. Does that surprise you? What is your son’s role in the conspiracy?”
She hesitates.
Then someone pushes a button somewhere and the fire starts in her mouth. She no longer knows who she is, she no longer cares. She can’t stop shaking, even when they tire of this recreation. Goldie never knows whose finger actually pushes the button, but she’s convinced it’s the German whose voice fills her dreams.
“Excuse me, lady.”
The memory of pain, the need to escape from it, brought Goldie back to the Bathurst Street bus, still on her way to the doctor’s.
“Excuse me, lady.”
More students had boarded, a thicket of bodies manoeuvring around her. A dark, heavy man with angry eyes was heading toward her and she knew they’d found her. He was a tall man for whom she, all five-foot-one of her, would be candy. The words in her head conquered time and space to land in his mouth. We will get you to talk, Jewish whore.
In a second, Goldie pushed her way roughly through some students.
“Well pardon us, lady.”
Standing on the step, feeling the kidnapper’s breath on the back of her neck, she pulled the cord continuously. It chimed every few seconds.
“Okay, lady, we get the message,” one kid said. “Maybe she has to go to the bathroom.”
When the bus finally came to a stop a block above College Street, Goldie hurled herself out the door and began to run. If only she hadn’t worn these heels. She dashed across College Street. She’d run like this in her nightmares, aching from fear, past eyes and eyes and more eyes, in shoes that wouldn’t stay on. She could hardly breathe now after two blocks. Blisters had formed on the heels of both feet. Danger lurked behind lampposts, window blinds, in the most quiescent of eyes. She would never be safe. She stumbled once, twice, finally through the blur of her exhaustion she turned to search for her pursuer. No one.
She stopped. The overcast sky hung low over rooftops, cast shadows on the street. Like a loosenecked owl, she scanned in all directions at once to check for danger. The old houses whispered their secrets, their paint in shreds, their rails studded with rust. I will follow you till you drop. I will get you one day. I am always there.
So she was spared another day. She had surprised him and escaped. At least she had reached College Street. Goldie limped up to the cement island to wait for the streetcar. If she hadn’t been so absorbed with the streetcar approaching in the murky distance, Goldie would, no doubt, have noticed the swarthy little man step up beside her on the island.