Shadow Without a Name : A Novel

Excerpt from Shadow Without a Name by Ignacio Padilla. Copyright © 2003 by Ignacio Padilla. To be published in April, 2003 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved.


Franz T. Kretzschmar

Buenos Aires, 1957

My father used to say his name was Viktor Kretzschmar. He was a pointsman on the Munich-Salzburg line and not the type to decide, on the spur of the moment, to commit a crime. His apparent rashness in adversity concealed an extremely calculating mind, an ability to wait years for the right circumstances to hit a long-cherished target. So, while apparently taciturn, he was privately given to unforeseeable outbursts of rage, which made him a time bomb on a short fuse. These were not spontaneous impulses, but the product of that endless soliloquy he pursued with his defeated self, as one who, I'm sure, could have drilled a tunnel through basalt rock driven by the hope of one day recovering the light which was snatched from him in his youth. I once saw him hide for more than ten hours awaiting the reappearance of a famished hare which had dodged his first shots of the day. It was night-time before the animal finally surrendered to its executioner, finished off with a flurry of kicks which soon reduced it to an inedible lump of blood and snow.

Years later, while my father half-heartedly denied the railway tribunal's accusations, I asked my mother if she remembered that story of the hare, but she could not or would not answer me. Since the accident she'd locked herself into an impenetrable silence in solidarity, I thought at first, with the family's disgrace. Later, however, when she heard the judge's verdict, my mother sighed deeply, dropped her head and let out a wail of relief, freed at last of a burden that had poisoned every second of her existence. My words of consolation, offered from the depth of my own confusion, barely calmed her. Then, as if making an indirect reply to my question about the hare, she pointed at my father and muttered, 'That man, my son, is called Thadeus Dreyer, and he despises trains from the bottom of his heart.'

At first I thought my mother was delirious, referring to someone else - as if a perverse shadow had suddenly appeared behind Viktor Kretzschmar, the cause of all his misfortunes, and especially of the disaster that was likely to keep him in prison for the rest of his days. But my mother's gaze was unequivocally fixed on her husband's anxious face. She had decided to reveal to me the true nature of the actions and torments of pointsman Viktor Kretzschmar.

I'd known since I was a child that my father's real name wasn't Viktor Kretzschmar and it hadn't in the least sullied my blind admiration for him. For me, it had always been a closely guarded family secret, permeating my existence and giving rise to a boyish conspiratorial pride. On the other hand, this unexpected declaration of his hatred for trains had the frisson of a revelation which cut the cord between childhood and maturity. As far back as I could remember, I'd always thought my father had adored trains, ever since the day when, on board one, he'd staked his destiny on a game of chess and won. That someone could doubt the importance of a pointsman or the grandeur of those imposing metal beasts plunged him into endless depression. His eternal devotion to everything to do with railways had taken up his entire life; now I think his existence was, in some way, dedicated to demonstrating that his peculiar way of procuring the pointsman's job was more than an anecdotal whim of fate. He'd believed the game of chess on board a train heading for the eastern front in the war of 1914 was the culmination of a plan hatched by a compassionate demiurge, sparing him from certain death.

For a long time I'd imagined that historic game played in a sumptuous smokers' compartment packed with officers and high-society ladies. The gloved hands, swaying crests, ivory pieces and aromatic pipe-smoke flooded my childish fancies for years, and my parents never bothered to disabuse me. After the accident, however, I heard from my mother that things had happened quite differently.

My father must have been younger than I thought, though not young enough to avoid the 1916 levy that shook the outer rims of an Austro-Hungarian Empire intent on reinforcing its eastern front. Somewhere I still have a photo of my grandfather--a peasant from Vorarlberg about whom I know next to nothing--in the village station bidding farewell to the last of his uniformed offspring. The old man is wearing a satisfied smile, inconceivable in someone surrendering his son to a war which would soon be a lost cause. The young recruit doesn't seem to share his father's enthusiasm; he's looking the other way, his smile forced, wanly embracing my grandfather as if about to faint in the middle of the station. It's almost as if he's waiting for a chance to run out of the photograph and vanish into the mountains, where the whistle blast from the train about to carry him before the cannon of the Entente won't reach him. I reckon he's barely twenty, no more, and his face betrays the fear of a young man discovering, perhaps too late, the value of his short life which was suddenly under threat. I imagine my grandfather had to order him to smile for the camera and perhaps felt it necessary to push him towards the train with the unrelenting energy of an old peasant whose greatest satisfaction in life, according to my mother, had been to sacrifice his two eldest sons to the fatherland. Whatever the truth of that, the fact is my father didn't find the nerve to head for the mountains, and was left cowering in an old, dilapidated compartment, completely unlike the carriage of my fantasies. There he must have sunk into a moribund lethargy, his cadaverous hand waving goodbye to his family through the broken window which brought in an ominous gust of wind and the locomotive's infernal smoke. My young father must have sat there some four hours before his opponent, the real Viktor Kretzschmar, entered the coach.

I find it difficult to understand why I always imagined Kretzschmar to be an impeccable Victorian gentleman, maybe a retired officer whose mere presence would have instilled in the recruit a mixture of panic and respect. Perhaps my father once described him like that in his desire to hide the pathetic reality of the scene and its tragic consequences. Or perhaps it was simply the unruly engine of my imagination. Years later my mother cut that image down to size. The man on the train, she confessed, sobbing, as we left the courtroom, was just one more young man from the provinces who had contrived to use a distant uncle's influence to avoid conscription and get a job as a pointsman in the Salzburg district. Weaving her own fictions as a woman wounded by her husband's disgrace, my mother described this mysterious gambler as an alcoholic, a rabid opportunist who took a sick pleasure in snaring idle travellers and adolescents resigned enough to the disasters of war to gamble away their few possessions to a stranger. Of course, I don't know how far my mother's version had been skewed by my father's admissions during more than fifteen years of chequered matrimonial bliss. All in all, and I'm not sure why, when the accident happened and the judges suggested pointsman Kretzschmar's carelessness could well have been premeditated, my mother's description turned the Victorian gentleman into a terrifying spectre: suddenly, my glorious image of the real Viktor Kretzschmar was replaced by the striking vision of my youthful father shaking with fear, rushing to wrest from a drunken Mephistopheles the coins he hoped would cheer his last days in Belgrade.

My father, I must insist, was never the model of moderation. That night, to begin with, he was robbed of all he had in a couple of minutes. Unlike my mother, I don't think this happened in a game of chess; it seems more likely to have been a banal hand of poker played with marked cards or sleight of hand picked up in some low dive. Equally, I doubt my father was unduly worried by losing money he would have frittered away on Turkish cigarettes or Hungarian prostitutes. What must have driven him to see that contest through and transfer it to the 0chessboard, where he operated more skilfully, was some compelling need for at least one triumph before enemy artillery ended his journey in defeat. His rival must have spotted this desire for victory in the conscript's eyes. He perhaps also felt the moment had come to stake everything, not on a chance hand of cards, but on a game at which he was also expert, one much more worthy of the fearsome wager both travellers were about to place on the small table in that dingy compartment.

An adept chess player, my father used to say whenever he explained a masterly move to me, recognizes immediately, even in the strangest of circumstances, those who are his peers. However, he embarks on a game only when he is sure he has measured his opponent's strengths, and never--absolutely never--will he wager on the outcome anything less than his own life. I don't know which of the two made the initial proposal, or at what ill-starred moment the board eventually made an appearance. I do know the game's parameters were soon starkly defined, through the haze which clouds the rest of the story. If my father won, the other man would take his place on the eastern front and hand over his job as pointsman in hut nine on the Munich-Salzburg line. If, on the other hand, my father lost, he would shoot himself before the train reached its destination.

It may seem ridiculous, but that kind of suicidal wager was common currency in this time of tribulation when lives, minds and fates were particularly fragile, and the identity of a pointsman or recruit mattered little to the imperial authorities, provided the empty slot were filled. In a war which seemed infinitely protracted, sooner or later all men would bleed to death in the same trench. Their names, like their lives, would be levelled to an echoing anonymity. In my opinion, the wager never included (as my mother suggested in her eagerness to hide young Kretzschmar's sinfully suicidal impulses) a chimerical piggy-bank packed with gold coins which my grandmother was supposed to have given the last of her sons as a farewell present. I think it more likely that the money, if it ever existed, was lost in previous games. The idea that the man on the train was ready to gamble his life against his opponent's death is more in keeping with the almost sacred importance my father bestowed on chess and with the mental state he had been reduced to by a diabolical traveller intent on securing pacts in which the gambler faced certain defeat, when even a win would only prolong an evidently barren existence.

Unfortunately, my father didn't read it like that on the night. He preferred to use all his wiles to serve the reckless greed of one who for the first time has undreamed of treasure within his grasp. Time, I know, showed him the futility of his victory, but at that moment he must have felt his wager with the pointsman was a promise of immortality, rather than the first hint of the painfully slow death awaiting him in hut nine on the Munich-Salzburg line.

The game can't have lasted long, for my father exchanged identity documents with his opponent as the train approached Vienna. As a reward for his chess-playing prowess, he also received the real Viktor Kretzschmar's railway uniform and the small chessboard on which he'd staked his life and which afterwards he kept hidden in a chest till the day he was sentenced. Now everything was his, along with the life he had exchanged that night for certain death under enemy fire--a death which, for his own sake, he preferred to regard as utterly unavoidable until a few days before the disaster.

My father faithfully carried out his duties as a pointsman for over fifteen years. At first, no one noticed the least anxiety or slightest show of remorse which might have betrayed his imposture and the relentless way someone else's life was poisoning him body and soul, turning him into a shadow. His unbounded enthusiasm for railways was the mask he used to deceive almost everyone, except my mother, a woman endowed with an uncommon and painful intuition for less evident truths.

From the first day my father took great care to assume his new identity fully. Hut nine was situated on the western edge of the Salzburg region, an extremely busy crossing even in wartime. Given its importance, the post included a wooden cabin, vast in the eyes of someone like him who'd grown up in the proverbial penury of Vorarlberg. That cabin immediately became the home of the new Viktor Kretzschmar, native of Galicia, exempted from military service by a respiratory affliction which initially he tried to affect but which ended up conspicuous for its absence. Soon the inhabitants of the region got used to his presence and began calling him Viktor Kretzschmar, until finally even he was convinced the name was really his. His job only required absolute punctuality in the changing of points and the occasional dispatch to his superiors of reports which varied little in their detail. Having established a life of torpid routine, he was soon off to the villages near hut nine, searching for a wife to help him populate his cabin with what he hoped would be numerous offspring.

I don't think my grandparents ever completely understood that their son, who for them was still called Thadeus Dreyer, had traded his destiny so unexpectedly. Nevertheless, I'm sure that the old peasant in the photo, who'd surrendered him to the war, anticipating a third commemorative medal in return, never forgave him for renouncing self-sacrifice on the altars of the fatherland. My grandmother, for her part, wrote him a dozen or so letters in which, despite her absent son's insistence, she continued to call him Thadeus. Eventually, my father broke off the correspondence, completely consumed by his identity as pointsman Viktor Kretzschmar. He may have feared his mother's letters would expose him as a deserter, or perhaps he was worried that they would keep reminding him he was an impostor. And so he killed off the son the elderly couple insisted on reviving. They were unaware that, at the time, the man who answered to the name Thadeus Dreyer was almost certainly being killed on the eastern front, from where the news was more and more dispiriting.

But my father's total rejection of that name and past and his initial contentment weren't enough to prevent him becoming obsessed by this idea, which he must at first have considered trivial but which later took pride of place among his nightmares. While the war lasted, not a single day passed without the pointsman's going down to the city in search of confirmation of his own death. Surrounded in the early morning by potential widows and the grief-stricken elderly, he waited for the post office to publish its list of those fallen at the front.