Jaume Cabré - Confessions

‘And how can he prove that?’

Mr Berenguer smiled and said nothing.

‘You must be getting a good commission.’

Mr Berenguer ran his handkerchief over his forehead, still smiling and saying nothing.

‘My father acquired it legally.’

‘Your father stole it in exchange for a fistful of dollars.’

‘And how do you know that?’

‘Because I was there. Your father was a bandit who took advantage of whomever he could: first the Jews fleeing any which way they could and then the Nazis, fleeing in an orderly, organised fashion. And always, anyone who was skint and needed money desperately.’

‘That surely is part of the business. And surely you took part in it.’

‘Your father was a man without scruples. He made an ownership title that was inside the violin disappear.’

‘You know what? I don’t believe you and I don’t trust you. I know what you are capable of. I would like to know where you got that Torrijos and the Pedrell in the entryway.’

‘Everything is in order, don’t worry. I have the ownership papers for each and every one of my things. I’m not a blabbermouth like your father. In the end he chose the end he met with.’

‘What?’ Silence. Mr Berenguer looked at me with a poorly concealed cunning smile. Surely to gain a bit of time to think, Carson had me say did I understand you correctly, Mr Berenguer?

Signor Falegnami had pulled out a feminine little parlour gun and aimed it at him nervously. Fèlix Ardèvol didn’t even flinch. He pretending to be stifling a smile and shook his head as if he were very displeased, ‘You are alone. How will you get rid of my corpse?’

‘It will be a pleasure to face that challenge.’

‘You’ll still be left with an even bigger one: if I don’t walk out of here on my own two feet, the people waiting for me on the street already have their instructions.’ He pointed to the gun, sternly. ‘And now I’ll take it for two thousand. Don’t you know that you are one of the Allies’ ten most wanted?’ He improvised that part in the tone of someone scolding an unruly child.

Doctor Voigt watched as Ardèvol pulled out a wad of notes and put them on the table. He lowered the gun, with his eyes wide, incredulous: ‘That’s not even fifteen hundred!’

‘Don’t make me lose my patience, Sturmbannführer Voigt.’

That was Fèlix Ardèvol’s doctorate in buying and selling. A half an hour later he was out on the street with the violin, striding quickly with his heart beating fast and the satisfaction of a job well done. No one was waiting for him downstairs to do what they had to do if he didn’t emerge, and he was proud of his shrewdness. But he had underestimated Falegnami’s little notebook. And he hadn’t even noticed his hate-filled gaze. And that afternoon, without telling anyone, without entrusting himself to God, or the devil, or Mr Berenguer, or Father Morlin, Fèlix Ardèvol turned in that Doctor Aribert Voigt, officer of the Waffen-SS, who was hiding at the Ufficio della Giustizia e della Pace disguised as a harmless, fat, bald consierge with a lost stare and a puffy nose. Fèlix was unaware of his medical activities. Just as there had been no way to tie Doctor Budden to Auschwitz-Birkenau, there was no way to tie Doctor Voigt to the camp either. Someone must have burned the specific papers and all the inquisitorial gazes were focused on the vanished Doctor Mengele and those around him while the enterprising investigators assigned to other Lager had time to destroy compromising evidence. And if we add to that the general confusion, the numerous lists of the accused, the incompetence of Sergeant-Major O’Rourke, who opened the file and who, it must be said, was overwhelmed by the task, all of it colluded to obscure the true personality and activities of Doctor Voigt, who was sentenced to five years of prison as an officer of the Waffen-SS, and about whom there was no record of participation in any act of war or annihilation in the cruel style of most of the SS units.

A few years later, on the street of the Sun, which was filled with people wearing jellabah coming out of the majestic Umayyad Mosque and commenting on some of the reflections of that Friday’s sura, or perhaps only mentioning, shocked, the rise in the prices of shoes, tea or vegetables. But there were also many people who didn’t look as if they’d ever set foot in a mosque and were smoking their hookahs on the narrow rows of outdoor tables at the Concord Café or the Café of the Scissors, trying not to think about whether there would be another coup d’état that year.

Two minutes from there, lost in the labyrinth of backstreets, sitting on a rock of the Deer Fountain, two silent men looked at the ground, lost in thought, as if they were keeping an eye on the sun as it headed west, along Bab al-Jabiyah, towards the Mediterranean. More than one distracted observer must have thought that those individuals were fervent men waiting for the sun to set and the shadows to begin their reign, for the magical moment when it was impossible to distinguish a white thread from a black thread and Mawlid began and the name of the Prophet was forever remembered and venerated. And the moment came when the human eye couldn’t distinguish a white thread from a black thread and, despite the soldiers paying little attention, the entire city of Damascus entered into Mawlid. The two men didn’t move from the rock until they heard some rather hesitant footsteps. A Western person, from the gait, the excessive noise, the panting. They looked at each other in silence and stood up. From the corner of the street of the mosques came a fat man, with a big nose, who was wiping his brow with a handkerchief, as if that Mawlid was a hot night. He went straight over to the two men.

‘I am Doctor Zimmermann,’ said the Western man.

The two men, without saying a word, began to walk swiftly through the backstreets around the bazaar and the fat man had quite a time keeping them in his sight around each corner or when they mingled among the increasingly fewer people circulating on those backstreets. Until they went through a half-open door to a shop stuffed with copper utensils, and he went in after them. They went along the only aisle left by the piles of utensils, a narrow path that led to the back of the shop, where there was a curtain that opened onto a courtyard lit by a dozen candles where a short bald man in a jellabah was pacing, visibly impatient. When they arrived, he extended his hand to the Westerner, ignoring the two guides, and said I was worried. The two guides disappeared as silently as they had come.

‘I had problems at the customs control in the airport.’

‘Everything taken care of?’

The man removed his hat, as if he wanted to show off his baldness, and he used it to fan himself. He made a gesture that said, yes, everything taken care of.

‘Father Morlin,’ he said.

‘Here I am always David Duhamel. Always.’

‘Monsieur Duhamel. What were you able to find out?’

‘Many things. But I want to dot the i’s.’

Father Félix Morlin, standing, dotted the i’s in the light of the twelve candles, and spoke in a murmur that the other man listened to attentively, as if it were a confession without a confessional. He told him that Fèlix Ardèvol had betrayed his confidence by taking advantage of Mr Zimmermann’s situation, robbing him, practically, of that valuable violin. And violating the sacred rule of hospitality, he had also turned Mr Zimmermann in, revealing his hidey hole to the Allies.

‘Because of his unjust actions, I have enjoyed five years of forced labour for having served my country in times of war.’

‘A war against the expansion of communism.’

‘Against the expansion of communism, yes.’

‘And now what do you want to do?’