Confessions (63 page)

T
wo years later, the telephone rang suddenly and gave Adrià a start, just like every time he heard it. He stared at the device for a long time. The house was dark except for the reading light on in his study. The house was silent, the house without you, except for the insistent ringing of the telephone. He put a bookmark in Carr, closed it and stared at the shrieking telephone for a few more minutes, as if that solved everything. He let it ring for a good long while and finally, when whoever was calling had already made their stubborness clear, Adrià Ardèvol rubbed his face with his palms, picked up and said hello.

H
is gaze was sad and damp. He was nearing eighty and gave off a worn, infinitely beaten air. He stood on the landing of the staircase breathing anxiously, gripping a small travel bag as if his contact with it was what was keeping him alive. When he heard Adrià walking up the stairs slowly, he turned. For a few seconds, they both stared at each other.

‘Mijnheer Adrian Ardefol?’

Adrià opened the door to his home and invited him in while the man, in something approximating English, confirmed that he was the one who’d called that morning. I was convinced that a sad story was entering my house together with the stranger, but I no longer had any choice. I closed the door to keep the secrets from scampering out onto the landing and into the stairwell; standing, I offered to speak in Dutch and then I saw that the stranger’s damp eyes brightened a tad as he made an appreciative gesture to Adrià, who had to brush up on his rusty Dutch straightaway to ask the stranger what he wanted.

‘It’s a long story. That’s why I asked if you had some time.’

He led him into the study. He noticed that the man hadn’t tried to hide his admiration, which was like someone who suddenly happens upon an unexpected room filled with surprises when visiting the Louvre. Right in the middle of the study, the newcomer spun around timidly, taking in the shelves filled with books, the paintings, the incunabula, the instrument cabinet, the two desks, your self-portrait, the Carr on top of the table, which I still hadn’t been able to finish, and the manuscript beneath the loupe, my latest acquisition: sixty-three handwritten pages of
The Dead
with curious comments in the margin that were probably by Joyce himself. Once he had seen it all, he looked at Adrià in silence.

Adrià had him sit on the other side of the desk, one in front of the other, and for a few seconds I wondered what specific grief could have produced the rictus of pain that had dried onto the stranger’s face. He unzipped his bag with some difficulty and pulled out something covered carefully in paper. He unwrapped it meticulously and Adrià saw a dirty piece of cloth, dark with filth, on which a few dark and light checks could still be made out. The stranger moved aside the paper and placed the rag on the desk and, with gestures that seemed liturgical, he unfolded it carefully, as if it contained a valuable treasure. He seemed like a priest laying out an altar cloth. Once he had spread it out, I was somewhat disappointed to see that there was nothing inside. A stitched line separated it into two equal parts, like a border. I couldn’t perceive the memories. Then the stranger took off his glasses and wiped his right eye with a tissue. Noting Adrià’s respectful silence and without looking him in the eye, he said that he wasn’t crying, that for the last few months he’d been suffering a very uncomfortable allergy that caused etcetera, etcetera, and he smiled as if in apology. He looked around him and tossed the tissue into the bin. Then, with a vaguely liturgical gesture, he pointed to the filthy old rag with both hands extended in front of him. As if it were an invitation to the question.

‘What is that?’ he asked.

The stranger put both palms onto the cloth for a few seconds, as if he were mentally reciting a deep prayer, and
he said, in a transformed voice, now imagine you are having lunch at home, with your wife, your mother-in-law and your three little daughters; your mother-in-law has a bit of a chest cold, and suddenly …

The stranger lifted his head and now his eyes were definitely filled with tears, not allergies and etceteras. But he didn’t make any motion to wipe away the tears of pain, he looked intently straight ahead, and he repeated imagine you are having lunch at home, with your wife, your sick mother-in-law and your three little daughters, with the new tablecloth set out, the blue-and-white chequered one, because today is the eldest girl’s birthday – little Amelietje – and suddenly someone breaks down the door without even knocking first and comes in armed to the teeth, followed by five more soldiers, storming in, and they all keep shouting schnell, schnell and raus, raus, and they take you out of your house forever in the middle of lunch, for the rest of your life, with no chance of looking back, the party tablecloth, the new one, the one my Berta had bought two years earlier, without the chance to grab anything, with just the clothes on your back. What does raus mean, Daddy, says Amelietje, and I couldn’t keep her from getting smacked on the nape of her neck by an impatient rifle who insisted raus, raus because everyone can understand German because it is the language and whoever says they don’t understand it is lying and will get what’s coming to them. Raus!

Two minutes later they were going down the street, my mother-in-law coughing, with a violin case in her arms because her daughter had left it in the hall after returning home from rehearsal; the girls with their eyes wide, my Berta, pale, squeezing little Juliet in her arms. Down the street, almost running because it seemed the soldiers were in a big hurry, and the mute gazes of the neighbours from the windows, and I grabbed the little hand of Amelia, who turned seven today and was crying because the blow to her neck hurt and because the German soldiers were scary, and poor Trude, just five years old, begged me to pick her up and I put her on my shoulders, and Amelia had to run to keep up with us and
until we reached Glass Square, where the lorry was, I didn’t realise that I was still gripping a blue-and-white chequered napkin.

There were more humane ones, they told me later. The ones who said you can take twenty-five kilos of luggage and you have half an hour to gather it, schnell, eh? And then you think about everything there is in a house. What would you grab, to take with you? To take where? A chair? A book? The shoebox with family photos? China? Light bulbs? The mattress? Mama, what does schnell mean. And how much are twenty-five kilos? You end up grabbing that useless key ring that hangs forgotten in the hall and that, if you survive and don’t have to trade it for a crumb of mouldy bread, will become the sacred symbol of that normal, happy life you had before the disaster. Mama, why did you bring that? Shut up, my mother-in-law responded.

Leaving the house forever, accompanied by the rhythm of the soldiers’ boots, leaving that life with my wife pale with panic, the girls terrified, my mother-in-law about to faint and I unable to do anything about it. Who turned us in? We live in a Christian neighbourhood. Why? How did they know? How did they sniff out the Jews? On the lorry, to keep from seeing the girls’ desperation, I thought who, how and why. When they made us get into the lorry, which was filled with frightened people, Berta the Brave with the little one and I with Trude stayed to one side. My mother-in-law and her cough, a bit further down, and Berta started to shout where is Amelia, Amelietje, my daughter, where are you, stay close to us, Amelia, and a little hand made its way over and grabbed my trouser leg and then poor Amelietje, scared, even more scared after finding herself alone for a few moments, looked up at me, asking for help, she too wanted to climb into my arms, but she didn’t ask because Truu was littler and that gaze that I’ve never been able to forget for the rest of my life, never, the help that your daughter begs you for and you don’t know how to give, and you will go to hell for not having helped your little daughter in her moment of need. All you can think to do is give her the blue-and-white chequered napkin and she
clung to it with both hands and looked at me gratefully, as if I’d given her a precious treasure, the talisman that would keep her from getting lost wherever she went.

The talisman didn’t work because after that rough journey in a lorry and two, three or four days in a smelly, stifling sealed goods train, they snatched Truu out of my hands despite my desperation, and when they slammed my head so hard I was left stunned, little Amelia had disappeared from my side, I think pursued by dogs that wouldn’t stop barking. Little Juliet in Berta’s arms, I don’t know where they were, because we hadn’t even been able to exchange a last glance, Berta and I, not even to communicate the mute desperation our hardearned happiness had become. And Berta’s mother, still coughing, clinging to the violin, and Trude, where is Truu, I’ve let them take her from my hands. I never saw them again. They had made us get out of the train only a few moments before and I had lost my women forever. Rsrsrsrsrsrsrsrs. And even though they pushed me and shrieked orders in my ear as I twisted my neck, desperate, towards where they might be, I had time to see two soldiers, with cigarettes in their mouths, grabbing suckling babes like my Juliet from the arms of their mothers and smashing them against the wood of the train carriage to make the women obey for once and ffucking all. That was when I decided to stop speaking to the God of Abraham and the God of Jesus.

‘Rsrsrsrsrsrs. Rsrsrsrsrsrsrsrs.’

‘Excuse me …’ Adrià had to say.

The man looked at me, confused, absent. Perhaps he wasn’t even conscious of being with me, as if he’d repeated that story thousands of times in attempts to mitigate his pain.

‘Someone’s at the door …’ said Adrià, looking at his watch as he stood up. ‘It’s a friend who …’

And he left the study before the other man could react.

‘Come on, come on, come on, this is heavy …’ said Bernat, entering the flat and breaking the atmosphere, with a bulky package in his arms. ‘Where should I put it?’

He was already in the study and surprised to see a stranger there.

‘Oh, pardon me.’

‘On the table,’ said Adrià, coming in behind him.

Bernat rested the package on the table and smiled timidly at the stranger.

‘Hello,’ he said to him.

The old man tilted his head in greeting, but said nothing.

‘Let’s see if you can help me,’ said Bernat as he tried to extract the computer from the box. Adrià pulled down on the box and the contraption emerged, in Bernat’s hands.

‘Right now I’m …’

‘I can see that. Should I come back later?’

Since we were speaking in Catalan, I could be more explicit and I told him that it was an unexpected visit and I had the feeling it would be a while. Let’s get together tomorrow, if that works for you.

‘Sure, no problem.’ Referring discreetly to the strange visitor. ‘Is there any problem?’

‘No, no.’

‘Very well then. See you tomorrow.’ About the computer: ‘And until then, don’t mess with it.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

‘Here’s the keyboard and the mouse. I’ll take the big box. And tomorrow I’ll bring you the printer.’

‘Thanks, eh.’

‘Thank Llorenç: I’m only the intermediary.’

He looked at the stranger and said farewell. The other man tilted his head again. Bernat left saying you don’t need to walk me to the door, go ahead, go ahead.

He left the study and they heard the door to the hall slam shut. I sat down again beside my guest. I made a gesture to excuse the brief interruption and said sorry. I indicated with my hand for him to continue, as if Bernat hadn’t come in and brought me Llorenç’s old computer, to see if I’d finally give up my unhealthy habit of writing with a fountain pen. The donation included a commitment of a short speed course of x sessions, in which the value of x depended on the patience of both the student and the teacher. But it was true that I had finally agreed to find out for myself what was the big deal
about computers, which everyone found so wonderful and I had no need for.

Seeing my signal, the little old man continued, apparently not very affected by the interruption, as if he knew the text by heart, and said for many years I asked myself the question, the questions, which are many and muddle together into one. Why did I survive? Why, when I was a useless man who allowed, without putting up any resistance, the soldiers to take my three daughters, my wife and my mother-in-law with a chest cold. Not even a sign of resistance. Why did I have to survive; why, if my life up until then had been absolutely useless, doing the accounting for Hauser en Broers, living a boring life, and the only worthwhile thing I’d done was conceive three daughters, one with jet-black hair, the other a brunette like the finest woods of the forest and the little one honey blonde. Why? Why, and with the added anguish of not being sure, because I never saw them dead, not knowing for sure if they really are all dead, my three little girls and my wife and my coughing mother-in-law. Two years of searching when the war ended led me to accept the words of a judge who determined that, based on the indications and signs – he called them evidence – I could be sure they were all dead, most likely they had all been killed the very day they arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau, because in those months, according to the confiscated Lager documents, all the women, children and old people were taken to the gas chambers and only the men who could work were saved. Why did I survive? When they took me away from my girls and Berta, I thought I was the one being taken to die because, in my innocence, I thought I was the danger to them and not the women. Yet, for them, it was the women and children that were dangerous, especially the girls, because it was through them that the accursed Jewish race could spread and through them that, in the future, the great revenge could come. They were coherent with that thought and that is why I am still alive, ridiculously alive now that Auschwitz has become a museum where only I sense the stench of death. Perhaps I survived until today and am able to tell you all this because I was a coward on Amelietje’s birthday. Or because
that rainy Saturday, in the barracks, I stole a crumb of clearly mouldy bread from old Moshes who came from Vilnius. Or because I crept away when the Blockführer decided to teach us a lesson and let loose with the butt of his rifle, and the blow that was meant to wound me killed a little boy whose name I’ll never know but who was from a Ukrainian village near Upper Hungary and who had hair black as coal, blacker than my Amelia’s, poor little thing. Or perhaps it was because … What do I know? … Forgive me, brothers, forgive me, my daughters, Juliet, Truu and Amelia, and you, Berta, and you, Mama, forgive me for having survived.