It was likely that, right now, there before me, in jeans, a cagoule and a battered sailor’s cap, doggedly walking as if trying to anchor himself to life as much as he could, was the Butcher of Mauthausen. In that place that stank of burning flesh and where beings like Heim were the lords of life and death, I’d stopped believing in God, or had stopped liking God. If the God of green fields, of rivers like the Danube, of stars and of people who fill you with happiness was also the God of Heim, of gas chambers, of those who got pleasure out of making others suffer, this God didn’t interest me, whatever name he was given in the thousands of religions of the world. I couldn’t trust in a God from whose energy good and evil came out at the same time, and had therefore begun to do without him in living out the life I hadn’t even asked for.
He was walking so fast it looked as if he was going to fall flat on his face. He was heading for the port, but I needed to have that face just a few centimetres away from my own, to see him front on and to be able to examine him for a few moments without drawing attention to myself and without raising his suspicions. I couldn’t let him get away without confirming that it was him. So, with some difficulty, I sat down on the ground and shouted.
“Please, can you help me?”
Heim turned around, hesitated for a moment and finally came and held out his hand. That this torturer and killer should be holding out his hand to help me stand up was incredible. He didn’t do it because he wanted to, but because it was what was expected of him in the milieu in which he now lived, just as in that other milieu he was amputating the prisoners’ arms and legs without any need, without anaesthesia, and carrying out all kinds of macabre experiments. He was helping me to stand up, me a resident of that lovely holiday home called Mauthausen. It was difficult for me to get on my feet and I wasn’t pretending, so he had to lean over a little more, and I saw it. I saw it clearly, the scar at the corner of his mouth, the light eyes and the inward-looking gaze, directed at a world made in his image and likeness.
I thanked him and he didn’t reply but went on his way. A wind was getting up. The sea started to roar. He clamped his cap to his head with one hand, and then put up the hood of his cagoule. I could follow him without a care in the world because, unless he turned round completely, he wouldn’t be able to see me. He went on board a very beautiful wooden boat with the name Estrella painted in large green letters. It must have been the name it had when he bought it and he hadn’t scrapped it in order to give it a new name. New lives, new names, new habits, but the same soul. Heim, you’ll never change, I told him in my head.
What a discovery. I thought I should perhaps phone one of our old friends from Memory and Action and tell them the whole story, but I feared that by the time they reacted it would be too late and, more than anything else, they’d bungle it for the simple reason that you can’t brief somebody in a moment, relaying the endless string of small details that had to be borne in mind if one is to be on the same wavelength as this group. Because this was an organized group.
Neither did I know whether I should mention this to Sandra. Sooner or later, she’d end up seeing this inoffensive old man at some or other of the group’s gatherings and it wouldn’t be in her best interests if he could read in her eyes that she’d recognized him. For her own safety, it would be better to keep her in the dark.
Sandra
Fred and Karin took it for granted that any native was born knowing how to make paella. I had to beg them not to oblige me to cook, because I didn’t have a clue, had to tell them that I preferred Norwegian cooking to Spanish, and that I’d eat anything they cooked, so that, without actually intending to do so, I liberated myself from this task and the most I did was stack the plates in the dishwasher while Karin stretched out on the sofa to watch some soap or other on TV until she dropped off to sleep and Fred shut himself away in the library-den. I took advantage of this time for my meetings with Julián.
I got to the lighthouse at five to four, and went to the place we’d decided would be our meeting spot. We would sit on the same bench, surrounded by rocks, stones and the wild pygmy date palms that grew all over the place. Pulling them up was prohibited. The sea in front of us allowed us to sit there in silence.
Julián was already there. He always wore the same light-blue jacket, no doubt because when he decided to come here he didn’t imagine he’d be staying so long. He’d added a cravat to the outfit, which, along with the Panama hat, gave him the dapper air of someone out of an Italian film, but it wouldn’t be long before he’d have to buy himself something warmer. He asked me how I was. Then I couldn’t hold it back any more. I told him about the night I’d seen Fred dressed in a Nazi uniform and that I’d been looking for it in the wardrobes at the house but hadn’t found it, so was wondering if it might have been fancy dress.
“I can assure you it wasn’t. If they could, they’d wear it all the time. And, if they could, they’d fence off a bit of land, the stoniest, driest land they could find, stick us all in there and kill us to use our bones, teeth, skins and hair, and to force themselves on us as superior beings.”
And who was Julián? Would that be his real name? Why should I trust him more than Karin and Fred? What if he was a bit mad? Yet it was also true that I hadn’t mentioned anything about the Nazi uniform to either of those two. I didn’t have any proof that it was the real thing and, even so, I’d avoided mentioning it. Instinct had told me that I mustn’t make them feel uncomfortable or oblige them to give me any explanation.
“They don’t feel guilty,” Julián went on. “I’ve never known a single one of them that’s shown the slightest sign of remorse. They think they’re victims of a world that’s changed and that doesn’t understand them. In some way,” he added dejectedly, “this absence of any feeling of guilt has saved a lot of them, including Fredrik and Karin. They’ve escaped and have managed to survive very well. You can be sure that in their intimate life they keep nourishing their fantasies of superiority.”
He gazed at me, testing my reaction, but I didn’t have any, because I hadn’t seen any real sign in them that they saw themselves as Nazis. I just had suspicions.
“And if you’re right, what am I supposed to do? I’ve already told you the little I know.”
“Nothing, I don’t want you to do anything. I want to warn you so you can get away in time. If you get any more involved with them you won’t come out of it well. They always win… until now. I’m going to have no compassion.”
He wasn’t going to have any compassion? But what did he think he was doing, this scrawny old guy dressed up as an Italian? What was I doing listening to him? How can you find out if somebody’s got senile dementia?
“And if I got it into my head to do something, what would I have to do?”
He sat there staring at the sea down below us, pressing dark blue against the horizon.
“The Gold Cross. If you find the Gold Cross, it will clear up any doubts we might have. Or rather doubts you might have, because when I came here I already knew who he was.”
“I need to think about it,” I said.
I didn’t want to believe that Fred and Karin were Nazis. Nazis were incomprehensible beings. The last thing that would have crossed my mind in this life was that I’d ever meet one. I’d seen them in films and documentaries and they’d always seemed unreal. The uniforms, the boots, the banners, crowds of people with their arms raised, the Aryan race, the swastika, and so much and such twisted evilness. It was amazing that people, I mean people with a brain, should have taken them seriously and should have let them do all the things they did.
“I’m repeating it once more. You mustn’t do it. You mustn’t let yourself be intimidated by them and you mustn’t let yourself be exploited by me. You shouldn’t be in this story. You should be with a boy who loves you, with someone who makes you happy. Don’t fritter your life away.”
“I don’t know how not to fritter life away.”
“Being happy, being content, enjoying life. Fall in l
ove.”
“I’d really like to, but it’s not that easy.”
“What about the father of your baby?”
“Santi? Sometimes I miss him, but not like I’d miss him if I was in love.”
“Do you know what? Falling in love happens.”
The rest of the time we were talking about my feelings. You could see he’d loved his Raquel very much, so she must have really existed. Then I asked him how he knew he loved her, what he’d felt to know it. The question took him by surprise and he was lost in thought for a moment.
“Because sometimes she made me walk on air,” he answered.
He told me that he’d come to this same place at four in the afternoon in two days’ time in case I needed to talk with him.
Julián
So Otto lived at number 50 with a woman called Alice who was the very image, from head to foot, of a camp guard. I knew that icy look, so like that of Ilse Koch, who was notorious among all of us because of her collections of tattooed human skin. Alice revolted me almost more than Otto, but no more than Fredrik and Karin. The one who got the repugnance prize was Heim, the man with the most putrid brain ever to have walked this earth, the man who was now taking up fifty per cent of my attention. I filled the two notebooks I’d brought from Buenos Aires with my jottings and had to go to a stationery shop to buy another two. If anything happened to me, or if I wasn’t able to nab them one way or another, I wanted to leave a record of these days, of poor Salva’s sleepless nights, of my own, and Sandra’s as well. Sandra deserved to have somebody who could tell her child what kind of mother he or she had. When I mentioned Sandra, I wrote “she” in case my notebooks fell into other hands, and I had to think hard about who they should be sent to if things went wrong, because I didn’t want this whole investigation to vanish into thin air as Salva’s had. The problem of being old is that nobody takes you seriously. People think we’re anchored in the past, unable to understand the present, and that’s certainly why they would have thrown out Salva’s papers. I was also making a note of what I was spending. I wanted my daughter to understand that I hadn’t spent the money on mere whims but on petrol, car hire, paying for a suite at the price of a modest room, warm clothes, notebooks, contact-lens solution, the lunchtime set menu at the bar and a few coins for the launderette so I wouldn’t have to pay the hotel washing and ironing rates. I’d brought enough supplies of my medication with me, but if I ran out I’d have to go to the hospital and explain my situation, because the pills were too expensive.
The launderette was two streets from the hotel and I used the time waiting there to write my reports. I went when I didn’t have a single pair of socks or underpants left. I sometimes washed the shirts myself, using the little bottles of gel in the bathroom and hanging them from the bathroom rail nicely pulled straight on a coat hanger so they wouldn’t need ironing. I sometimes sat on the terrace for a while to write, wrapping myself in a blanket, so that I could breathe fresh air and not feel cold. I’d got so used to this room, this terrace, getting into the car to go and watch decrepit Nazis, that it didn’t occur to me that I could be doing anything different. It felt as if the whole thing had been planned down to the last millimetre by Salva and Raquel from some out-of-the-way corner of my mind so I’d be able to find some sense in what life was left to me.
Now I’d added to my previous itinerary the house of the deceased Anton Wolf. It was tucked away off the road leading inland, where small farms with market gardens had been renovated and modernized while still conserving a rustic air. I only had to go to the land registry to find out the address. The place was in Elfe’s name.
It wasn’t easy to get there. You had to go down a dirt track, which I did perfectly brazenly as if I’d got lost. Before I entered the property a dog was already barking. At the front door of the house, which was surrounded by a garden so wild that it looked more like the countryside, I started turning around to leave with the front of the car pointing at the way out. I did this slowly, giving Elfe time to appear. There were two cars under a carport, one brand new and the other old.
The woman was on her last legs. Her eyes had got smaller from crying and her hair was dirty and unkempt. At another point in the history of humanity I would have felt sorry for her. Her grief aroused my curiosity, but it might have been the pain of a woman who’d once had everything and now she didn’t. She took some water to the dog and then came over to me.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I think I’ve made a mistake. I’m looking for…”
“Frida’s house is a little farther on, the third bend to the right, with a black letterbox on the track.”
It was evident that whoever came to this lonesome place was looking for Frida, never for Elfe, and Elfe was resigned to it. I thanked her, convinced that Elfe wasn’t going to last long. She’d lowered her guard, talked too much. They couldn’t take the risk of her blabbing what she knew. And, lo and behold, without even trying, I’d located the house of this Frida. One more to keep tabs on.
From the track you could see several cars but not much of the house. It was quite isolated and, from my vantage point, I was exposed and risked being seen, so I didn’t dare to get out my binoculars and follow this one up. I’d instead go and check out Heim and take a photo of his boat with my mini-camera.
Sandra
I never paid attention to what Frida, the helper they called their maid, was doing. She came in three hours a day and, while she was sorting out the house, we used the time for errands or to spend some time in the garden, especially when she was cleaning on the lower floor. However, if we did stay inside she was as silent as a ghost and all you could hear were the sounds made by a few pieces of furniture that seemed to be moving under their own steam or by windows that opened all by themselves, and it also seemed that the floor was in charge of shining itself. On one of the days when Karin was in such good form that she decided to go and play golf with Fred and Otto, I saw the helper opening up the library-den to clean it, no doubt thinking about the party Karin was planning to throw, then closing it again when she was inside, which surprised me because Karin had told me that nobody went in there.
As cheeky as you like, I opened the door and went in. She was standing on the library stepladder dusting some books that didn’t look at all like Karin’s love stories. The atmosphere was cosy. There were leather armchairs in which the visitors must have comfortably lolled as they waited. The helper turned round and asked me in a German accent if I was looking for something, and it was then that I understood that, if Julián’s suspicions were well-founded, she had to be one of them, so I didn’t take any chances. I said that I was thinking about going out shortly and asked her to leave the house properly locked.
I didn’t go out. I made a noise with the motorbike and stayed. I watched from the garden how she was shaking out things from the window of the library-den and how she hung a large Persian rug that she’d just vacuumed over the window sill. I could easily see how she opened up a very beautiful cupboard, in apple green with an antique finish, which contrasted with the seriousness of the bookshelves, and which my sister would have loved. I nearly let out a scream when she took out the Nazi uniform and methodically brushed it down, after which she got a cloth and polished some black boots almost as tall as I am. I’d just discovered something important, another sign to support Julián’s theories, and nobody in this house must realize what I’d found out, so I went into the garage and took the seat off my motorbike ready to pretend that I was fixing some problem in case Frida stuck her nose in there, which fortunately didn’t happen. She didn’t even come into the garage. When her time was up, she locked the house, got on her bicycle and rode off without a second glance.
The Christensens hadn’t come back and this was an ideal chance to go poking about in the basement and the bedrooms once more. I put the motorbike seat back in place, got my keyring out of my trouser pocket and opened the front door. There was a very pleasant smell, as if Frida had been scattering lavender all o
ver the place. What was this lavender? I don’t know, but Frida had a very healthy-looking face, gave the impression that she carried lavender around in her pockets, and she had extremely chunky calf muscles after all the pedalling she did on her bike.
I’d never thought about Frida. I’d seen her arriving and sometimes leaving, but nothing in between, and yet she’d registered in my mind. She was blonde, about forty years old, though her rosy cheeks were like a fifteen-year-old’s. As she zipped around so fast on her bicycle, the fresh air stuck to her skin and clothes and had turned into her personal smell.
There wasn’t much in the basement, or I wasn’t able to see it. After the uniform, I guessed there had to be more bits and pieces stowed away here and there. The only thing that caught my attention was a sun with its rays etched into the floor and painted black.
Julián
The Scent of Lemon Leaves Page 11