Jaume Cabré - Confessions

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 café. 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.