I secured a travel permit to Perpignan. At the appointed hour, Fritz, who was still hoping to make it out on a boat, came to see me off on the overnight train from the Gare Saint-Charles. We climbed the hundred and four steps of the grand stairway that lead to the station. I was, as usual, carrying my black suitcase, which contained this manuscript. We farewelled each other, hugged, wished each other luck, made vague plans for a reunion in some indeterminate place at some indeterminate time. Then he turned around and walked the steps back down the hill, disappearing into the crowd. Another friend, another farewell. I wasn’t sure how many more I could take.

I traveled to Perpignan with the photographer Henny Gurland and her son Joseph. From there, we traveled on a local train to Port-Vendres and met up with a fresh-faced young German woman called Lisa Fittko, who had taken it upon herself to guide people across the border. She said she would take us over the mountains to Spain on a track dubbed the Lister route, after a Republican officer who, with his men, had made his own escape, in the opposite direction, only a few years earlier. The two of us would do a trial run, she said, as she had yet to traverse the track herself. Together, we went to speak with the local mayor, who was sympathetic. He told us where to go and advised us to leave at dawn with the grape pickers. I knew I would be spending the night up there in the mountains.

It was still dark when Lisa knocked at my hotel room door, but I was waiting for her, fully dressed and ready to go. We joined the throng of grape harvesters climbing the trail leading up to the vines in the foothills behind the village. They gave us bread, cheese, and watered wine for breakfast. Soon enough, the track steepened in the dawn light and, as the sun finally appeared, we left the pickers to their harvest and kept climbing. As feared, my heart was barely up to the task of hauling a suitcase across a mountain. It was beating fast and each contraction was a spasm of pain. For every ten minutes of walking, I had to rest a minute. Lisa was most patient. Our slow progress afforded us the luxury of admiring the views. The world was bathed in a warm, golden glow. A steep bank of late summer clouds was gathering in the south. Behind us, France stretched out in splendor, and the white-fringed shore of the Golfe de Lion curved away to the northeast.