Jaume Cabré - Confessions

It was the world premiere of the suit jacket that she had made him buy as a condition of her accompanying him to Tübingen for the presentation of his Història del pensament europeu. And Adrià, seated at the table beside those illustrious presenters, looked towards her and I said to myself Sara, you are my life and this is a dream. Not the profound, scrupulous and sensitive presentation by Kamenek, with slight, discreet concessions to a more personal and subjective tone; not the enthusiastic speech by Professor Schott, who insisted that Die Geschichte des europäischen Denkens is a major reflection that must be disseminated to every European university and I beg you all to read promptly. I beg you? I order you all to read it! Professor Kamenek didn’t refer to Isaiah Berlin and his Personal Impressions (vid. supra) in vain. I would have to add, if you’ll allow me, Professor Kamenek, the explicit references that Berlin makes to Ardèvol both in conversation with Jahanbegloo and in Ignatieff’s canonical biography. No, none of this is the miracle, Sara. Nor the Lesung that will surely last a good long hour. That’s not it, Sara. It’s seeing you here, in the chair where I sat so many times, with your dark ponytail spilling down your back and you looking at me, holding back a smile and thinking I’m handsome in my new suit jacket, isn’t that so, Professor Ardèvol?

‘Excuse me, Professor Schott?’

‘What do you think?’

What do I think. My God.

‘Love, that moves the sun and the other stars.’

‘What?’ Puzzled, the professor looked at the audience and turned his confused gaze on Adrià.

‘I’m in love and I often lose the thread of things. Can you repeat the question?’

The hundred or so members of the audience didn’t know whether to laugh or not. Nervous glances, the half-frozen smiles of deer in the headlights; until Sara broke out in a generous laugh and they were able to follow suit.

Professor Schott repeated the question. Professor Ardèvol answered it with precision, many people’s eyes gleamed with interest, and life is wonderful, I was thinking. And then I read the third chapter, the most subjective, which I had devoted to my discovery of the historical nature of knowledge before reading a single line of Vico. And the shock I felt when I discovered his work on the suggestion of Professor Roth, who unfortunately is no longer among us. And as I read I couldn’t help thinking that many years back Adrià had fled to Tübingen to lick his wounds over his sudden, inexplicable desertion by Sara, who now was laughing with satisfaction before him; that twenty years earlier he went through Tübingen sleeping with everyone he could, as had been pointed out in the presentation, and wandered through the classrooms searching every girl for some feature that reminded him of Sara. And now, in Room 037, he had her before him, more mature, looking at him with an ironic smirk as he closed the book and said a book like this requires many years of work and I hope I don’t feel inspired to write another for many, many, many years, amen. And the audience rapped their knuckles on the table with polite enthusiasm. And afterwards, dinner with Professor Schott, Dean Vartten, a thrilled Kamenek, and two female professors who were fairly mute and timid. One of them, perhaps the shorter one, said in a wisp of a voice that she had been moved by the human portrait that Kamenek had given of Doctor Ardèvol, and Adrià celebrated Professor Kamenek’s sensitivity while Kamenek lowered his eyes, a bit confused by the unexpected praise. After dinner, Adrià took Sara for a stroll through the park, which in the last light of day gave off a scent of cold spring bursting forth, and she kept saying this is all so lovely. Even though it’s cold.

‘They say it’s going to snow tonight.’

‘It’s still lovely.’

‘Whenever I was sad and thinking of you I would come walking here. And I would jump over the cemetery fence.’

‘You can do that?’

‘See? I just did.’

She didn’t think twice and leapt over the fence as well. After walking some thirty metres they found the entrance gate, which was open, and Sara struggled to hold back a nervous laugh, as if she didn’t want to laugh in the house of the dead. They reached the grave at the back and Sara read the name on it, curious.

‘Who are they?’ asked the commander with no stars.

‘Germans from the resistance.’

The commander went over to get a better look at them. The man was middle-aged, and looked more like an office worker than a guerrilla fighter; and she looked like a peaceful housewife.

‘How did you get here?’

‘It’s a long story. We want explosives.’

‘Where the hell did you come from and who the hell do you think you are?’

‘Himmler has to visit Ferlach.’

‘Where is that?’

‘In Klagenfurt. Here, on the other side of the border. We know the territory.’

‘And?’

‘We want to offer him a warm reception.’

‘How?’

‘By blowing him up.’

‘You won’t be able to get close enough.’

‘We know how to do it.’

‘You don’t know how to do it.’

‘Yes. Because we are willing to die to kill him.’

‘Who did you say you were?’

‘We didn’t say. The Nazis dismantled our resistance group. They executed thirty of our comrades. And our leader committed suicide in prison. Those of us who are left want to give meaning to the death of so many heroes.’

‘Who was your leader?’

‘Herbert Baum.’

‘You are the group that …’

‘Yes.’

Nervous glances from the commander with no stars at his assistant with the blond moustache.

‘When did you say Himmler was visiting?’

They studied the suicide plan in depth; yes, it was possible, quite possible. Therefore, they assigned them a generous ration of dynamite and the supervision of Danilo Janicek. Since they were very short of resources, they decided that after five days Janicek would rejoin the partisan group, whether or not the operation had been carried out. And Janicek was not to commit suicide along with them, under any circumstances.

‘It’s dangerous,’ protested Danilo Janicek, who wasn’t the least bit thrilled with the idea when they explained it to him.

‘Yes. But if it comes off …’

‘I’m not sure about this.’

‘It’s an order, Janicek. Take someone with you to cover your back.’

‘The priest. I need strong shoulders and good marksmanship.’

And that was how Drago Gradnik ended up on the paths of Jelendol, emulating a krošnjar, loaded down with explosives and just as happy as if he were transporting spoons and wooden plates. The explosives reached their destination safely. A rail-thin man received them in a dark garage on Waidischerstrasse and assured them that Himmler’s visit to Ferlach was confirmed for two days later.

No one was able to explain how the tragedy happened. Not even the activists in Herbert Baum’s group can understand it still. But the day before their planned assassination, Danilo and the priest were preparing the explosives.

‘It must have been unstable material.’

‘No. It was used for military operations: it wasn’t unstable.’

‘I’m sure it must have been sweating. I don’t know if you know but when dynamite sweats …’

‘I know: but the material was fine.’

‘Well, then they bungled it.’

‘It’s hard to believe. But there’s no other explanation.’

The fact is that at three in the morning, when they had already packed the charges into the rucksacks that the two members of the suicide commando planned to use to blow themselves up, with Himmler as their dance partner, Danilo, tired, anxious, said don’t touch that, damn it, and the priest, weary and annoyed by the other man’s tone, put down the rucksack they’d just loaded up, too hard. There was light and noise and the dark garage lit up for a fraction of a second before blowing up with the glass, bricks from the partition wall and bits of Danilo and Father Gradnik mixed into the rubble.