Jaume Cabré - Confessions

Two minutes later they were going down the street, my mother-in-law coughing, with a violin case in her arms because her daughter had left it in the hall after returning home from rehearsal; the girls with their eyes wide, my Berta, pale, squeezing little Juliet in her arms. Down the street, almost running because it seemed the soldiers were in a big hurry, and the mute gazes of the neighbours from the windows, and I grabbed the little hand of Amelia, who turned seven today and was crying because the blow to her neck hurt and because the German soldiers were scary, and poor Trude, just five years old, begged me to pick her up and I put her on my shoulders, and Amelia had to run to keep up with us and until we reached Glass Square, where the lorry was, I didn’t realise that I was still gripping a blue-and-white chequered napkin.

There were more humane ones, they told me later. The ones who said you can take twenty-five kilos of luggage and you have half an hour to gather it, schnell, eh? And then you think about everything there is in a house. What would you grab, to take with you? To take where? A chair? A book? The shoebox with family photos? China? Light bulbs? The mattress? Mama, what does schnell mean. And how much are twenty-five kilos? You end up grabbing that useless key ring that hangs forgotten in the hall and that, if you survive and don’t have to trade it for a crumb of mouldy bread, will become the sacred symbol of that normal, happy life you had before the disaster. Mama, why did you bring that? Shut up, my mother-in-law responded.

Leaving the house forever, accompanied by the rhythm of the soldiers’ boots, leaving that life with my wife pale with panic, the girls terrified, my mother-in-law about to faint and I unable to do anything about it. Who turned us in? We live in a Christian neighbourhood. Why? How did they know? How did they sniff out the Jews? On the lorry, to keep from seeing the girls’ desperation, I thought who, how and why. When they made us get into the lorry, which was filled with frightened people, Berta the Brave with the little one and I with Trude stayed to one side. My mother-in-law and her cough, a bit further down, and Berta started to shout where is Amelia, Amelietje, my daughter, where are you, stay close to us, Amelia, and a little hand made its way over and grabbed my trouser leg and then poor Amelietje, scared, even more scared after finding herself alone for a few moments, looked up at me, asking for help, she too wanted to climb into my arms, but she didn’t ask because Truu was littler and that gaze that I’ve never been able to forget for the rest of my life, never, the help that your daughter begs you for and you don’t know how to give, and you will go to hell for not having helped your little daughter in her moment of need. All you can think to do is give her the blue-and-white chequered napkin and she clung to it with both hands and looked at me gratefully, as if I’d given her a precious treasure, the talisman that would keep her from getting lost wherever she went.

The talisman didn’t work because after that rough journey in a lorry and two, three or four days in a smelly, stifling sealed goods train, they snatched Truu out of my hands despite my desperation, and when they slammed my head so hard I was left stunned, little Amelia had disappeared from my side, I think pursued by dogs that wouldn’t stop barking. Little Juliet in Berta’s arms, I don’t know where they were, because we hadn’t even been able to exchange a last glance, Berta and I, not even to communicate the mute desperation our hardearned happiness had become. And Berta’s mother, still coughing, clinging to the violin, and Trude, where is Truu, I’ve let them take her from my hands. I never saw them again. They had made us get out of the train only a few moments before and I had lost my women forever. Rsrsrsrsrsrsrsrs. And even though they pushed me and shrieked orders in my ear as I twisted my neck, desperate, towards where they might be, I had time to see two soldiers, with cigarettes in their mouths, grabbing suckling babes like my Juliet from the arms of their mothers and smashing them against the wood of the train carriage to make the women obey for once and ffucking all. That was when I decided to stop speaking to the God of Abraham and the God of Jesus.

‘Rsrsrsrsrsrs. Rsrsrsrsrsrsrsrs.’

‘Excuse me …’ Adrià had to say.

The man looked at me, confused, absent. Perhaps he wasn’t even conscious of being with me, as if he’d repeated that story thousands of times in attempts to mitigate his pain.

‘Someone’s at the door …’ said Adrià, looking at his watch as he stood up. ‘It’s a friend who …’

And he left the study before the other man could react.

‘Come on, come on, come on, this is heavy …’ said Bernat, entering the flat and breaking the atmosphere, with a bulky package in his arms. ‘Where should I put it?’

He was already in the study and surprised to see a stranger there.

‘Oh, pardon me.’

‘On the table,’ said Adrià, coming in behind him.

Bernat rested the package on the table and smiled timidly at the stranger.

‘Hello,’ he said to him.

The old man tilted his head in greeting, but said nothing.

‘Let’s see if you can help me,’ said Bernat as he tried to extract the computer from the box. Adrià pulled down on the box and the contraption emerged, in Bernat’s hands.

‘Right now I’m …’

‘I can see that. Should I come back later?’

Since we were speaking in Catalan, I could be more explicit and I told him that it was an unexpected visit and I had the feeling it would be a while. Let’s get together tomorrow, if that works for you.

‘Sure, no problem.’ Referring discreetly to the strange visitor. ‘Is there any problem?’

‘No, no.’

‘Very well then. See you tomorrow.’ About the computer: ‘And until then, don’t mess with it.’

‘I wouldn’t dream of it.’

‘Here’s the keyboard and the mouse. I’ll take the big box. And tomorrow I’ll bring you the printer.’

‘Thanks, eh.’

‘Thank Llorenç: I’m only the intermediary.’

He looked at the stranger and said farewell. The other man tilted his head again. Bernat left saying you don’t need to walk me to the door, go ahead, go ahead.

He left the study and they heard the door to the hall slam shut. I sat down again beside my guest. I made a gesture to excuse the brief interruption and said sorry. I indicated with my hand for him to continue, as if Bernat hadn’t come in and brought me Llorenç’s old computer, to see if I’d finally give up my unhealthy habit of writing with a fountain pen. The donation included a commitment of a short speed course of x sessions, in which the value of x depended on the patience of both the student and the teacher. But it was true that I had finally agreed to find out for myself what was the big deal about computers, which everyone found so wonderful and I had no need for.

Seeing my signal, the little old man continued, apparently not very affected by the interruption, as if he knew the text by heart, and said for many years I asked myself the question, the questions, which are many and muddle together into one. Why did I survive? Why, when I was a useless man who allowed, without putting up any resistance, the soldiers to take my three daughters, my wife and my mother-in-law with a chest cold. Not even a sign of resistance. Why did I have to survive; why, if my life up until then had been absolutely useless, doing the accounting for Hauser en Broers, living a boring life, and the only worthwhile thing I’d done was conceive three daughters, one with jet-black hair, the other a brunette like the finest woods of the forest and the little one honey blonde. Why? Why, and with the added anguish of not being sure, because I never saw them dead, not knowing for sure if they really are all dead, my three little girls and my wife and my coughing mother-in-law. Two years of searching when the war ended led me to accept the words of a judge who determined that, based on the indications and signs — he called them evidence — I could be sure they were all dead, most likely they had all been killed the very day they arrived in Auschwitz-Birkenau, because in those months, according to the confiscated Lager documents, all the women, children and old people were taken to the gas chambers and only the men who could work were saved. Why did I survive? When they took me away from my girls and Berta, I thought I was the one being taken to die because, in my innocence, I thought I was the danger to them and not the women. Yet, for them, it was the women and children that were dangerous, especially the girls, because it was through them that the accursed Jewish race could spread and through them that, in the future, the great revenge could come. They were coherent with that thought and that is why I am still alive, ridiculously alive now that Auschwitz has become a museum where only I sense the stench of death. Perhaps I survived until today and am able to tell you all this because I was a coward on Amelietje’s birthday. Or because that rainy Saturday, in the barracks, I stole a crumb of clearly mouldy bread from old Moshes who came from Vilnius. Or because I crept away when the Blockführer decided to teach us a lesson and let loose with the butt of his rifle, and the blow that was meant to wound me killed a little boy whose name I’ll never know but who was from a Ukrainian village near Upper Hungary and who had hair black as coal, blacker than my Amelia’s, poor little thing. Or perhaps it was because … What do I know? … Forgive me, brothers, forgive me, my daughters, Juliet, Truu and Amelia, and you, Berta, and you, Mama, forgive me for having survived.