by Jaume Cabré
At home, Sara looked at him strangely, as if the argument and the unpleasantness had got stuck to his face or his clothes, but you didn’t say anything; I am sure you understood everything, but you had the sense not to put it on the table and when you said I have to tell you something, Adrià already saw a new storm brewing; but instead of making it clear that you knew everything, you said I think we should switch bakeries: this bread is like chewing gum. What do you think?
Until one day Sara got a call and was speaking softly into the dining room telephone and when I poked my head in I saw that she was silently crying, her hand still on the receiver after hanging up.
‘What’s going on?’ No reply. ‘Sara?’
She looked at him, absent. She took her hand off of the telephone, as if it were burning hot.
‘Mama is dead.’
My God. I don’t know how it happened, but I remembered the day that Father had said we are starting to have too many treasures in this house and I had understood that we were starting to have too many skeletons in this house. Now I was an adult, but I still had trouble accepting that life was made up of one death after another.
‘I didn’t know that …’
She looked at me through her tears.
‘She wasn’t sick: it was sudden. Ma pauvre maman …’
It made me furious. I don’t know how to say it, Sara, but it made me furious that people died around me. It made me furious even though, with the passing of time, things hadn’t improved much. Surely I can’t accept life. That’s why I rebelled uselessly and dangerously and was unfaithful to you. Like a thief, like the Lord, I entered the temple. I sat on a discreet bench at the back of the synagogue. And I saw your father again, who I hadn’t seen since the day of that awful conversation, when you had disappeared without a trace and I could only cling to desperation. Adrià was also able to enjoy watching the back of Max’s neck; he was a head taller than his sister, more or less Bernat’s height. And Sara, squeezed between the two men and other family members that I won’t ever meet because you don’t want me to, because I am my father’s son and the blood of his sins will flow through his children and his children’s children for seven generations. I would like to have a child with you, Sara, I thought. With no conditions, I thought. But I still didn’t dare to tell you that. When you told me it’s best if you don’t come to the funeral, then Adrià grasped the magnitude of the aversion the Epsteins had to the memory of Mr Fèlix Ardèvol.
Meanwhile, the distance with Laura grew even though I always thought poor Laura, it was all my fault. And I was relieved when, in the middle of the cloister, she told me I am going to Uppsala to finish my thesis. And maybe I’ll stay there forever.
Boom. Her blue gaze on mine like an accusation.
‘I wish you the best of luck; you deserve it.’
‘Bastard.’
‘Good luck, really, Laura.’
And I didn’t see her for at least a year or even think about her, because Mrs Voltes-Epstein’s death slipped in. You don’t know how it pains me to have to call your mother Mrs Voltes-Epstein. And one day, a few months after the funeral, I made a date with Mr Voltes in a café near the university. It’s something I’ve never told you, my dear. I didn’t dare. Why did I do it? Because I am not my father. Because I am guilty of many things. But, even though sometimes it seems that I am, I am in no way guilty of being my father’s son.
They didn’t shake hands. They both sort of nodded in greeting. They both sat in silence. They both struggled not to look each other in the eye.
‘I’m very sorry about your wife’s death.’
Mr Voltes thanked him for his comment with a nod of approval. They ordered two teas and waited for the waitress to walk away so they could continue in silence.
‘What do you want?’ asked Mr Voltes after a long while.
‘I guess to be accepted. I would like to come to the commemoration for Uncle Haïm.’
Mr Voltes glanced at him in surprise. Adrià couldn’t get the day she had said I’m going to Cadaqués out of his head.
‘I’ll go with you.’
‘Impossible.’
Disappointment; again, she put up a wall.
‘But tomorrow isn’t Yom Kippur, it’s not Hanukkah, it’s no one’s bar mitzvah.’
‘It’s the anniversary of Uncle Haïm’s death.’
‘Ah.’
The Voltes-Epsteins squeaked by with their fulfilment of the Sabbath precepts in the synagogue on Avenir Street, but they weren’t religious. And when they celebrated Rosh Hashanah and Sukkot it was to say we are Jews in a land of goyim. And we always will be. But not out of … My father isn’t Jewish, Sara told me one day. But it’s as if he were: he went into exile in ’39. And he doesn’t believe in anything; he always says that he just tries not to do harm.
Now Mr Voltes was sitting before Adrià, stirring in sugar with a little spoon. He looked Adrià in the eye and Adrià felt he should react and he said Mr Voltes, I really love your daughter. And he stopped stirring the sugar and he put the little spoon down silently on the saucer.
‘Didn’t Sara ever tell you about him?’
‘About Uncle Haïm?’
‘Yes.’
‘A little bit.’
‘Which little bit?’
‘No, that … That a Nazi pulled him out of the gas chamber so he could give him a check-up.’
‘Uncle Haïm committed suicide in nineteen fifty-three and we always wondered why, when he had survived everything, why, when he was saved and back with his family … with what was left of his family … and to commemorate that why, we want to be alone.’ And Adrià, with the arrogance that comes with being told an unexpected confidence, replied that perhaps Uncle Haïm had committed suicide because he couldn’t bear having survived; because he felt guilty about not having died.
‘Look at you, you know everything, eh? Is that what he told you? Did you ever meet him?’
Why don’t I know how to keep my mouth shut, bloody hell.
‘Forgive me. I didn’t mean to offend you.’
Mr Voltes picked up the little spoon and stirred his tea some more, surely to help him think. When Adrià thought that the meeting was over, Mr Voltes continued, in a monotonous tone, as if reciting a prayer, as if what he said was part of the commemorative ceremony for Haïm’s death:
‘Uncle Haïm was a cultured man, a well-known doctor who, when he came back from Auschwitz after the war, couldn’t look us in the eye. And he came to our home, because we were his only family. He was a bachelor. His brother, Sara’s grandfather, had died in a goods train in nineteen forty-three. A train that Vichy France had organised to help with the world’s ethnic cleansing. His brother. And his sister-in-law couldn’t bear the shame and died in the Drancy detention camp before starting the voyage. And he, much later, returned to Paris, to the only family he had left, which was his niece. He never wanted to practise medicine again. And when we married, we forced him to come and live with us. When Sara was three years old, Uncle Haïm said to Rachel that he was going down to drink a pastis at the Auberge, he lifted Sara in his arms, kissed her, kissed Max, who was just arriving from nursery school, pulled his hat down and left the house whistling the andante of Beethoven’s seventh. Half an hour later we found out that he jumped into the Seine from the Pont-Neuf.’
‘I’m so sorry, Mr Voltes.’
‘And we commemorate it. We commemorate all of our family members who died in the Shoah. And we do it on that day because it is the only date of death that we have out of the fourteen close relatives we know were eliminated without even a shred of compassion in the name of a new world.’
Mr Voltes drank a sip of tea and stared straight ahead, looking towards Adrià but not seeing him, perhaps only seeing the memory of Uncle Haïm.
They were silent for a long time and Mr Voltes got up.
‘I have to go.’
‘As you wish. Thank you for seeing me.’
He had parked right in front of the caf�
�. He opened the door to his car, hesitated for a few seconds and then offered, ‘I can drop you off somewhere.’
‘No, I …’
‘Get on in.’
It was an order. He got on in. They circled around aimlessly, through the thick traffic of the Eixample. He pressed a button and a violin and piano sonata by Enescu began to play softly. I don’t know if it was the second or the third. And suddenly, stopped at a red light, he continued with the story that must have been continuing inside his head:
‘After being saved from the showers because he was a doctor, he spent two days in barracks twenty-six, where sixty silent, skinny people with lost gazes slept, and when they went out to work, they left him alone with a Romanian kapo who looked at him suspiciously from a distance, as if wondering what to do with that newcomer who still looked healthy. On the third day, a Hauptsturmbannführer who was clearly drunk solved that by peeking into the empty barracks and seeing Doctor Epstein sitting on his bunk trying to become invisible.
‘What’s he doing here?’
‘Orders of Strumbannführer Barber.’
‘You!’
You was him. He turned slowly and looked the officer in the eye.
‘Stand up when I speak to you!’
You stood up because a Hauptsturmbannführer was speaking.
‘All right. I’ll take him.’
‘But, sir,’ said the kapo, red as a beet. ‘Strumbannführer Barber …’
‘Tell Strumbannführer Barber that I’ve taken him.’
‘But, sir! …’
‘Screw Strumbannführer Barber. You understand me now?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Come on, You, come, we’re going to have some fun.’
The fun was very good, incredibly good. Very intense. He found out that it was Sunday when the officer told him that he had some friends over and he brought him to the officers’ houses and then he stuck him in some sort of cellar where there were eight or ten pairs of eyes that looked at him in fear and he asked what the hell is going on?, and they didn’t understand him, because they were Hungarian women and he only knew how to say köszönöm and no one even smiled. And then they suddenly opened the door to the basement, which it turns out wasn’t a basement because it was at the level of a long, narrow courtyard, and an Unterscharführer with a red nose bellowed a few inches from You’s ear and said when I say go, start running to the far wall. Last one there is a poof! Go!
The eight or ten women and You began to run, like gladiators in the circus. Behind them they heard the laughter of excited people. The women and You reached the far wall. There was just one elderly woman who had only made it halfway. Then some sort of trumpet sounded and shots were heard. The elderly Hungarian woman fell to the floor, drilled through by half a dozen bullets, punished for having been in last place, poor anyóka, poor öreganyó; for not having reached the finish line, that’ll teach the lousy hag. You turned in horror. From a raised gallery, three officers loaded their rifles and a fourth, also armed, was waiting for a clearly drunk woman to light his cigar. The men fervently argued and one of them brusquely ordered the red-nosed subordinate, who in turn shouted it at them, saying that now what they had to do was return to the shelter, slowly, that their job wasn’t over, and the nine Hungarian women and You turned, weepy, trying not to step on the old woman’s corpse, and they watched in horror as an officer aimed at them as they approached the basement and they waited for the shot and another officer realised the intentions of the one who was aiming and slapped his hand just as he was shooting at a very thin girl, and the shot diverted to a few inches from You’s head.
‘And now run to the wall again.’ To Haïm, pushing him: ‘You stand here, damn it!’
He looked at his team of hares with some sort of solidarity and pride and shouted: ‘The bastard who doesn’t run in zig-zags, won’t make it. Go!’
They were so drunk that they could only kill three women. You reached the other side, alive, and guilty of not having acted as a shield for any of the three women who lay on the ground. One of them was badly hurt, and Doctor You saw right away that the entry hole in her neck had cut her jugular; as if wanting to prove him right, the woman remained immobile as the puddle of blood that was her bed widened. Mea culpa.
And more things that he only told me and I wasn’t brave enough to tell Rachel and the children. That he couldn’t take it any more and he shouted at the Nazis that they were miserable wretches, and the least drunk among them started laughing and aimed at the youngest of the surviving women and said ffucking shut your trap or I’ll start picking them off one by one. You shut up. And when they went back to the basement, one of the hunters started to vomit and another told him you see?, you see?, that’s what you get for mixing so many sweet liquors, blockhead. And it seemed they had to stop their fun and games and the basement was left in the dark, and only the moans of horror kept them company. And outside, an exchange of cross shouts and vexed orders that You couldn’t understand. And it turns out that the next day the camp’s evacuation began because the Russians were approaching faster than they had foreseen and, in the confusion, no one remembered the six or seven hares in basement. Long live the Red Army, said You in Russian, when he realised the situation; and one of the women understood him and explained it to the other hares. And the moans stopped to give way to hope. And so, You’s life was saved. But I often think that surviving was a worse punishment than death. Do you understand me, Ardèvol? That is why I am a Jew, not by birth, as far as I know, but by choice, as are many Catalans who feel we are slaves in our land and we have tasted the diaspora just for being Catalan. And from that day on I knew that I am also a Jew, Sara. Jewish not by blood, but by intellect, by people, by history. A Jew without God and trying not to do harm, like Mr Voltes, because trying to do good is, I think, too pretentious. I didn’t pull it off either.
‘It would be better if you didn’t tell my daughter about this conversation,’ were the last words Mr Voltes said to me as I got out of the car. And that is why I never told you anything about it, until writing it today, Sara. I was unfaithful to you with that secret as well. But I am very sorry that I never saw Mr Voltes alive again.
If I’m not mistaken, that was about the time that you bought the wine pitcher with the long spout.
And when we had only been living together for a couple of months Morral called me and said I have the original of El coronel no tiene quien le escriba.
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘Guaranteed?’
‘Mr Ardèvol, don’t insult me.’
And I said, putting on a normal voice with no hint of emotion in it, I’m going out for a minute, Sara. And from the depths of her studio Sara’s voice emerged from the tale of the laughing frog and said where are you going?
‘To the Athenaeum’ (I swear it just came out).
‘Ah’ (what did she know, poveretta).
‘Yes, I’ll be back shortly’ (maestro dell’inganno).
‘It’s your night to cook’ (innocente e angelica).
‘Yes, yes, don’t worry. I’ll be back soon’ (traditore).
‘Is something wrong?’ (compassionevole).
‘No, what could be wrong’ (bugiardo, menzognero, impostore).
Adrià ran away and didn’t realise that, when he closed the door, he had slammed it, like his father had many years earlier, when he went to meet his death.
In the little flat where Morral carried out his transactions I was able to examine the splendid, extraordinary manuscript. The final part was typed, but Morral assured me that that was often the case with García Márquez manuscripts. What a delicacy.
‘How much?’
‘That much.’
‘Come on!’
‘As you wish.’
‘This much.’
‘Don’t make me laugh. And I have to be frank with you, Doctor Ardèvol. I acquired it at, let’s just say, a certain risk, and risk is costly.’
‘You mean it’s stol
en?’
‘Such words … I can assure you that these papers haven’t left any trail.’
‘Then this much.’
‘No: that much.’
‘Deal.’
These transactions were never paid by cheque. I had to wait, impatient, until the next day; and that night I dreamt that García Márquez himself came to my house to reproach me for the theft and I pretended not to know what he was talking about and he chased me around the flat with a huge knife and I …
‘What’s wrong with you?’ asked Sara, turning on the light.
It was past four in the morning and Adrià had sat up in his parents’ bed, which was now ours. He was panting as if he’d just run a race.
‘Nothing, nothing … Just a dream.’
‘Tell me about it.’
‘I can’t remember.’
I lay back down. I waited for her to turn off the light and I said García Márquez was chasing me around the house and wanted to kill me with a knife this big.
Silence. No: a slight tremble in the bed. Until Sara exploded with laughter. Then I felt her hand running lovingly over my bald head the way my mother’s never had. And I felt dirty and a sinner because I was lying to her.
The next day, we were quiet at breakfast, still waking up. Until Sara burst into explosive laughter again.
‘And now what’s wrong with you?’
‘Even your ogres are intellectuals.’
‘Well, I was really scared. Oh, today I have to go to the university’ (impostore).
‘But it’s Tuesday’ (angelica).
‘I know, yeah … But Parera wants something and asked me to … pff …’ (spregevole).
‘Well, have patience’ (innocente).
One lie after another, and I was headed to La Caixa bank, I withdrew that much and went to Can Morral, with the anguished premonition that the flat had caught fire that night, or he’d changed his mind, or he’d found a more generous bidder … or he’d been arrested.
No. The colonel was still waiting patiently for me. I picked him up tenderly. Now it was mine and I didn’t have to suffer any more. Mine.