“With what money?” she asked, because that was what she always said when she started to like an idea.
I’d probably been too self-centred with Raquel and, sad to say, was continuing to be so with our daughter. I didn’t give her breathing space. I never let her forget about evil. I constantly reminded her of it as I pursued my demons. She always told me she didn’t have time to put the world to rights. She just wanted to be a normal person, despite all the things her family had gone through. At least she had a right to that. Didn’t she?
And I was asking myself whether it was right that Karin and Fredrik should be living surrounded by flowers and innocence.
When I got to my hotel room, I lay on the bed still dressed, half-covering myself with the bedspread, and turned on the television. I didn’t want to go to sleep, but dozed off anyway and, when I opened my eyes, it was getting dark and I could feel the remote control tingling in my hand. I was rested, but also feeling groggy, and went staggering off to the bathroom as if drunk. I hadn’t taken out my contact lenses, and my eyes were stinging. I decided to go out for a stroll, down to the port, to breathe in some fresh air from the sea.
The road to El Tosalet was full of curves, so I didn’t fancy going out in the car at night. I’d wait till the next day, although with a great sense of having wasted time. I wasn’t here on holidays. I didn’t have time for holidays. Holidays were for the young, for people with a whole life ahead of them, while for me the long slumber was waiting just round the corner.
The beautiful lights of the port were nothing to me in comparison with the lights that might be coming on now in the Christensens’ garden. Those lights made sense. They were signs that fitted into my world, guiding me to a lost inferno.
I walked up and down the Paseo Marítimo, noting that the stall where I’d bought my hat was still open and working out a plan of action. I’d have an early breakfast in the morning and then go up to El Tosalet. I’d wait for Fredrik to come out and then tail him. I’d take note of what he was doing. In two or three days I’d have an idea of his routines. He might have been a highly decorated Nazi officer, an escape artist moving from country to country, changing houses and cities, but he wasn’t going to escape the clutches of old age. And old age is built on routine – that’s what keeps it going.
I still wasn’t sure how I was going to use the information I would gather, but I knew I’d end up using it somehow. Knowing someone’s habits and the people around them is like knowing the doors and windows of a house. You finally see a way in.
So let’s see: what was I going to do once I verified Fredrik’s identity? Capture him and bring him before a court, accusing him of crimes so monstrous as to be unthinkable in a human being? That time was past. Old Nazis weren’t being brought to trial any more. At most, it was hoped they’d die off and with them would die the problem of having to extradite them, try them, imprison them and stir up all that murky, stinking shit once again. And I thought, as I contemplated the stars, that, though old and on our last legs, Fredrik and I were still here, and we could still raise our eyes to admire their beautiful light. And I thought I could still manage to make that swine tremble, that I could die with the clear conscience of having done my duty. I know Raquel would ask me who I thought I was fooling, would say I was doing it purely for my own satisfaction and pleasure – and she might be right – but, whatever name you might care to give to what I was feeling, that was not what really mattered.
2
The Red-Haired Girl
Sandra
The beach was very comfortable like this. Fredrik sometimes brought us an ice cream or cool drink, the shadow of his wide bony shoulders falling across us. Karin liked waffling on about Norway and about their beautiful home, an old farmhouse by a fjord. They’d stopped going there because of the climate, the damp that got into their bones. But she missed the snow, the pure air of the bluish snow. Karin wasn’t all skin and bone like her husband. She must have been slim in her youth, fat in her mature years and now she was a combination of both, a deformed mixture. She looked at you with this difficult expression, somewhere between friendly and suspicious, and you never knew what she was really thinking. Better put, what she actually said must have been a thousandth part of what was on her mind, like all old people who’ve lived a lot only to end up enjoying small things. It wasn’t unusual for Karin to bring along, in her straw basket, one of those novels with a man and woman kissing on the cover. She loved romantic stories and sometimes regaled me with some tale of what was going on between the boss and the secretary, or between the teacher and the student, or between the doctor and the nurse, or between two people who’d met in a bar. None of them was anything like my story with Santi.
It was very pleasant letting myself go with the flow. I walked along the water’s edge, from the Norwegians’ beach umbrella to the rocky promontory, and from the rocky promontory back to the umbrella. I didn’t throw up again and we had all the cold water we wanted in the portable fridge, which was a very good one, of a kind that didn’t exist on the Spanish market. Hardly any of the things they used were from here, except for her sarongs, which she bought at the beachside stalls.
Above all, they were placid. They moved slowly, didn’t speak loudly, rarely argued and, at most, they’d change their mind about something. They were completely different from my parents, who always made a mountain out of a molehill, however slight the setback. I hadn’t even told my parents I was pregnant, because I didn’t feel up to dealing with one of their dramas. They made the most of any opportunity to throw a wobbly, to go berserk. Maybe that’s why I got involved with Santi, simply because he has a good character and is patient and well balanced. Yet, as you see, it didn’t work. After half an hour in Santi’s company I’d be swamped by an intolerable sense of wasting my time, and this was the main reason why I couldn’t imagine myself with him after one or two years.
The Norwegians and I went to the beach only a few times, so I wasn’t getting too fed up with them. When they dropped me off, they sometimes didn’t even get out of the car. They said goodbye through the car windows and left me to it.
Julián
I wanted a bite to eat before going back to the hotel, as I’ve always believed that eating in hotels is more expensive than outside. I steered away from restaurants because I didn’t care to spend two hours over a dinner I didn’t really want, so I went into a bar and asked for a serving of Russian salad and a yogurt, plus a large bottle of water to take back to the hotel. My daughter had made such a fuss telling me I mustn’t drink tap water that drinking bottled water was something like an act of loyalty to her.
The hotel receptionist was the same one I’d seen when I arrived. He had a large freckle on the right cheek, which gave him quite a raffish look and ensured I wouldn’t forget him. I’d immediately registered it in my mind, which is what I used to do when I was young, when I automatically filed away faces without any chance of confusion among them. As he handed me the key to my room I asked him if his shift hadn’t finished yet. He seemed surprised that I should be concerned about him.
“Within the hour,” he said.
He must’ve been about thirty-five. He glanced at the bottle.
“If you need anything, the cafeteria’s open till twelve, and sometimes even later.”
I turned, looking around for it.
“There, at the end,” he said.
It would be the place where I’d had the glass of milk. I don’t know what could have prompted me to tell him not to succumb to any temptation of getting the freckle removed, because this mark could help him to be a cut above the rest. This got me thinking about the V-shaped scar at the right-hand corner of Aribert Heim’s mouth, which, with age, must have been camouflaged by wrinkles. For years I’d been so obsessed by it that every time I saw an old man of eighty or ninety with something near the mouth that looked like a scar I was hot on his heels. Even with his eye-catching stature and this mark he’d managed to slip out of sight, over and over
and over again. He’d blended in with the other members of his species and sometimes he’d been confused with other Nazis as giant-sized and long-lived as Fredrik Christensen, who looked very much like him. During the five weeks I was in Mauthausen between October and November 1941, Heim had been busy performing needless amputations without anaesthesia, just to see how much pain a human being could endure. His experiments also included injecting poison into the heart and observing the results, which he meticulously wrote down in black-covered notebooks. He did all this without ever dispensing with politeness or his smile. Fortunately, neither Salva nor I coincided with him in the camp. Others of our countrymen couldn’t say the same. Without any exaggeration, they called him the Butcher and, in all likelihood, the Butcher was sunbathing and swimming in some place like this. He and the others would be enjoying things that didn’t remotely resemble them, things that weren’t made in their own image. Salva had had the courage of not wanting to forget anything.
“What a day! I’m quite tired,” I said, taking my hat off and casting off, too, the image of two Jews sewn together back to back, howling with pain and begging to be finished off for once and for all. Who could have done such a thing? Someone who was affected by those cries of pain in the way the rest of us might be affected by the squealing of a pig being slaughtered or of a rat caught in a trap. It was impossible to go back to the point when you’d never seen such a thing. You could pretend to be like other people, but what you’ve seen remains with you. This old spectre in my head must have suddenly aged me because the receptionist said, looking quite serious, “As I say, if you need anything, don’t hesitate to call me.”
I waved my thanks with the somewhat crumpled hat in my hand.
Truth to say, I wasn’t tired but I was so used to being tired and to saying I was tired that I said it. Being tired fitted so much better with my profile than not being tired.
After the customary ritual that took me three quarters of an hour, I got into bed. I watched television for a while, then turned off the light and started mentally visualizing Fredrik’s house and street, the newspaper photo and what I knew about him. The photos of him as a young man, of which I only had two in my office files and a few more in my mental archive, were a sufficient reminder of what he was really like, a monster who, like Aribert Heim, believed he had power over life and death. Also like Heim, he was one metre ninety, with an angular face and pale eyes. Arrogance is more visible in a young man. It’s in the body, in the way of walking, in the longer neck and the consequently higher head, and the firmer gaze. In old age, decrepit bodies disguise evil as goodness, and people tend to see the elderly as harmless, but I was old too and the old man Fredrik Christensen couldn’t pull any wool over my eyes. I’d reserve what strength that remained to me for the aged Fredrik, and the rest of the world would have to manage without me, I told myself, wondering what Raquel would have thought of all this, although I imagined she’d tell me I was about to throw away the little bit of life that remained to me.
I woke up at six the next morning. I didn’t feel bad, as I’d slept through the night. I had a shower, took my time getting dressed, listening to the news on the radio alarm with its big red numbers next to the telephone. This got me up to date with local politics and the efforts of local ecologists to stop further construction along the seafront.
I was one of the first into the dining room and had a good breakfast, a lot of fruit especially, practically as much as I’d need to get me through the day, and I also took away an apple in my jacket pocket. I went out and walked to the car, noting the fresh morning air, which was quite cool at this late stage of September.
I went up to El Tosalet, crossing with cars going faster than me, probably on their way to work. In some sense I was going to work too, although I wasn’t getting paid for it. Anything that entails an obligation imposed by oneself or by others could be called work, and my work was waiting for me in a small square with several streets running off it, one of which was Fredrik’s. I took up my position in such a way that, from a distance, I could keep an eye on the thick ivy of the house, which almost covered over its name, Villa Sol. Since Christensen had never seen me in his life, I didn’t have to conceal myself too much. I only had to act naturally if our paths crossed.
And our paths were going to cross, because I hadn’t been waiting an hour when an olive-green four-by-four nosed its way out of the Villa Sol fortress. My heart missed a beat, that missed beat my daughter feared so much, and I barely had time to get into the position to follow it. I was just finishing the manoeuvre when the tank-like vehicle driven by Fredrik Christensen cruised slowly by like a vision. Sitting next to him was a woman who had to be Karin. I moved onto the main road behind them. After about five kilometres we turned right. I didn’t have to worry about them seeing me. For them I was just a neighbour taking the same route and this gave me a certain degree of freedom because I wasn’t at risk of losing them.
Some kilometres farther on, a young woman came out of a small holiday house and got into the car with them. They continued on their way to the beach with me behind them. Sometimes I let another car come in between us so they wouldn’t notice me, but I didn’t want to take any chance on losing them either, or to have to resort to any kind of urgent or strange manoeuvre. Not that he’d be up to too many flourishes either.
We drove along parallel to the beach for about ten kilometres until he turned right and parked in a street at the end of which you could see a snippet of sea, a dazzling blue slice. How could hell and paradise be so close? The waves, if you paid proper attention to them, were the work of a prodigious imagination.
They got out of the car and, fearing I was getting too worked up, I breathed in so deeply that I started coughing. It was him, still very tall with long arms and legs, broad-shouldered but skinny. He opened the boot and took out a beach umbrella, a portable fridge and two deckchairs. I wouldn’t have recognized his wife, however. She was walking unsteadily and her body seemed quite out of kilter. She’d put on weight and looked deformed. A plastic bag hung from her shoulder. She was wearing a shapeless pink beach shift with slits up the sides, while he was in shorts, a loose-fitting shirt and sandals. The girl was wearing a T-shirt over her swimsuit and a peaked cap. A towel was slung over her shoulder and hanging from her hand was an attractive plastic bag, not the supermarket type. Once they’d put up the beach umbrella, they were all mine to monitor, so to speak, so I occupied myself looking around for somewhere to relieve my bladder and have a coffee. It wasn’t easy but, in the end, I even obtained two bottles of water, which I left in the car. My daughter would never forgive me if I died of dehydration.
I took off my shoes and socks so I could walk on the sand, which was very agreeable. As soon as I found time I’d have a swim. The Mediterranean conjured up images of youth, love, beautiful women and carefree times. I spotted Fredrik and Karin under the beach umbrella. He was looking at the sea, she was reading and they occasionally exchanged the odd remark. Their heads were in the shade and bodies out in the sun. There weren’t many people in the water, typical holiday stragglers and foreigners without a care in the world, like these two. The girl had gone down to the water’s edge. I was concentrating so hard on the two Norwegians that I didn’t realize that something had happened until Fredrik went over to her. It seemed that a wave had carried away the magazine she was reading and he’d jumped up to grab it. I took off my sunglasses to see better but the light struck my eyes so intensely that I had to close them. When I opened them again, Fredrik was striding back with the magazine in his hand. He very carefully opened it and spread it out in the sun on top of the umbrella, after which he got an ice cream out of the icebox and took it over to the girl. Full of curiosity and somewhat drowsy, I sat down by the wall separating the sand from the thistles, rushes and bushes that spread out behind me.
They seemed to be very considerate and kind with this girl who wasn’t of their Aryan race. It was terrifying to see them being nice. They were acting as i
f they’d never come to be truly aware of the evil they’d done. Generally, in normal life, good and evil are quite mixed up together, but, in Mauthausen, evil was evil. Never in all my life have I come across pure goodness, but I’ve certainly been in the midst of Evil with a capital E, caught up in its devastating power, and there’s nothing good at all there. Seeing Fredrik right now, you’d imagine that this man was once young, had struggled through life, worked and then retired to take things easy. And there was no way you’d discover you were wrong and that you’d go on being wrong every time your path crossed with that of a heartless man.
We were there for a couple of hours. When I saw that they were starting to put down the umbrella and the girl was shaking out her towel, I went to the car and waited. The three of them soon appeared. They got into the four-by-four. The two Norwegians sat in front and the girl in the back seat. They headed off inland where the houses had a more rural, more authentic look about them, and there were vegetable gardens and a lot of orange groves. Then they turned off onto the narrow track where they’d picked up the girl earlier in the morning, but it seemed too risky to follow them, so I went on ahead and waited on a patch of ground by the roadside until the large square snout of Fredrik’s car made its appearance and I saw it driving off. They’d certainly be going back to El Tosalet, where I could head later. Now I’d have a closer look at the girl on the beach because I wanted to know what it was about her that interested the happy couple. Hence I parked the car slightly more conveniently and got out.
The Scent of Lemon Leaves Page 3