Jaume Cabré - Confessions

It had never been so hard for him to finalise an experiment before. After months of seeing moaning little guinea pigs — like the boy with that dark skin, or the albino who said Tėve, Tėve, Tėve, cornered in his bed, refusing to get out of it until they finally had to finish him off right there, or that bloody girl with the dirty rag that was unable to stand up without crutches and, when they didn’t sedate her, bellowed with pain to fuck with all the staff as if they didn’t have enough with the responsibility of some of the experiments and brutal pressure of their blockhead superior, who it seems had friends in high places because not even Höss himself was able to get him sent off to some front so he would stop being such a nuisance — had to accept that it was useless to expect a more positive response on the cartilage treated with the Bauer salve. Twenty-six guinea pigs, boys and girls, and no restored tissue, revealed the conclusions he very reluctantly gave Professor Bauer. And one fine day Doctor Voigt left on a postal plane, without saying a word. That was very strange, because he hadn’t left any instructions for how to continue the experiments. Doctor Budden understood it later on that day, when he began to receive word of the alarming advance of the Red Army and the inefficiency of the German lines of defence. And as the primary medical authority in the camp, he decided that it was time to mop up everything with bleach. First, with the help of Barabbas, he spent five straight hours burning papers and photographs, destroying any documentary evidence that could lead to the suspicion that anyone at Birkenau had experimented on little girls who clung desperately to dirty rags. Not a trace of the pain inflicted because it was too impossible to be believed. All burned, Barabbas, and the simpleton still kept saying what a shame, so many hours and so much work going up in smoke. And neither of them thought of all the people who had also gone up in smoke, right there, two hundred metres from the laboratory. And the copies sent by the research department must be in some part of the Health Ministry, but who would go looking for them when the only important thing then was saving their hides.

Under the cover of night, his hands still blackened by smoke, he went into the guinea pigs’ bedroom with loyal Barabbas. Each child was in his or her bunk. He administered the injection into each of their hearts without any explanation. Except for that one boy who asked what the injection was, and he told him it was to calm the pain in his knees. The others probably died knowing they were finally dying. The girl with the dark, dirty rag was the only one who received him wide awake, with those accusatory eyes. She also asked why. But she asked in a different way. She asked why and she looked him straight in the eye. Weeks of pain had stripped her of her fear and, sitting up in her bunk, she opened her shirt so Barabbas could find the perfect spot to inject her. But she stared at Doctor Budden and asked him why. This time it was he who, unwillingly, had to look away. Why. Waarom. She said it until her lips darkened, tinted by death. A seven-year-old girl who doesn’t despair in the face of death is a very desperate, very devastated girl. There is no other way to explain such composure. Waarom.

After leaving everything prepared to flee the Lager in the morning with several unassigned officers, for the first time in many months, Doctor Budden didn’t sleep well. It was the fault of the waarom. And those thin, darkening lips. And Oberscharführer Barabbas smiling and giving him an injection, without taking off his uniform, and smiling with his lips blackened by a death that never quite came because the dream continued.

In the morning, without making much noise and before Oberlagerführer Rudolf Höss realised, some twenty officers and subordinates, among them Budden and Barabbas, took off, headed anywhere that was far from Birkenau.

Both Barabbas and Doctor Budden were lucky because, taking advantage of the confusion, they were able to get far enough away from their work and the Red Army that they were able to pass themselves off to the British as soldiers coming from the Ukrainian front, anxious to see the war end so they could finally get home to their wives and children, if they were still alive. Doctor Budden had transformed into Tilbert Haensch, yes, from Stuttgart, Captain, and he had no documents to prove it because with the surrender, you know. I want to go back home, Captain.

‘Where do you live, Doctor Konrad Budden?’ asked the officer in charge of the interrogations, as soon as the other man had abandoned his claim.

Doctor Budden looked at him, mouth agape. All he could think of to say was what? with a very shocked expression.

‘Where do you live,’ insisted the British lieutenant, with that horrific accent.

‘What did you call me? What did you call me?’

‘Doctor Budden.’

‘But …’

‘You’ve never set foot on the front, Doctor Budden. Much less the Eastern front.’

‘Why do you call me doctor?’

The British officer opened the folder he had on the desk in front of him. The army file. Their fucking obsession with archiving and controlling everything. He was a bit younger, but it was him, with that gaze that didn’t gaze but rather punctured. Herr Doktor Konrad Budden, surgeon of the graduating class of 1938. Oh, and professional level piano studies. Wow, doctor.

‘That is a mistake.’

‘Yes, Doctor. A big mistake.’

It wasn’t until the third of the five years in prison they’d given him — because by some last-minute miracle no one had linked him to Auschwitz-Birkenau — that Doctor Budden started to cry. He was one of the few prisoners that had yet to receive a single visitor, because his parents had died in the bombing of Stuttgart and he hadn’t wanted to let any other relatives know where he was. Particularly not those in Bebenhausen. He didn’t need visitors. He spent the day staring at the wall, especially when he began to suffer several days of insomnia. Like a sip of sour milk, the faces came back to him, the faces of each and every one of the patients who had passed before him when he was under Doctor Voigt’s orders in the medical research office at Birkenau. And he took it upon himself to try to remember as many as possible, the faces, the moans, the tears and the frightened screams, and he spent hours sitting, immobile, in front of the bare table.

‘What’s that?’

‘Your cousin Herta Landau still wants to visit you.’

‘I said I don’t want any visitors.’

‘She’s in front of the prison on hunger strike. Until you agree to see her.’

‘I don’t want to see anyone.’

‘This time you’ll be forced to. We don’t want scandals on the street. And your name has begun to appear in the newspapers.’

‘You can’t force me.’

‘Of course we can. You two, take him by the arms and let’s put an end to this little scene that madwoman has staged, for once and ffucking all.’

They put Doctor Budden in a visiting room. They made him sit in front of three austere Australian soldiers. The doctor had to wait five endless minutes until the door opened and an aged Herta came in, walking slowly towards the table. Budden lowered his gaze. The woman stood before him; they were only separated by a few feet of table. She didn’t sit down. She only said on behalf of Lothar and me. Then Budden looked up and Herta Landau, who had leaned towards him, spat in his face. Without adding anything further, she turned around and left, her motions a bit more animated, as if she had shook off a few years. Doctor Budden didn’t move to wipe his face. He stared into space for a little while until he heard a harsh voice saying take him out of here and he thought he heard take away this carrion. And alone again in his cell, the memory of the patients’ faces came back to him, like a sip of sour milk in his mouth. Each and every one of the patients. From the thirteen that had been the subjects of the sudden decompression experiments, and the many that had received grafts and died of infections, to the group of children chosen to prove the possible beneficial effects of the Bauer salve. The face he saw most often was the little Flemish girl who asked him waarom without understanding why so much pain. Then he got into the habit, as if it were a liturgical act, of sitting at the bare table and unfolding a dirty rag with one poorly cut, fraying side, and on which a blue-and-white chequered pattern could barely be made out; and he would stare at it, without blinking, until he couldn’t stand to any more. And the void he felt inside was so intense that he was still unable to cry.