Jaume Cabré - Confessions

Bernat, panting, got into the train car. After almost a minute I saw that he was still standing, talking to someone, gesturing, adjusting his rucksack and showing his ticket. Now I don’t know if I should get on and help him or let him figure it out for himself so he doesn’t get cross with me. Bernat leaned over to look through the window and I flashed him a smile. He sat with a weary gesture and looked at him again. When you say goodbye to a dear friend at the station, you have to leave when he’s got into the train carriage. But Adrià was lingering. He smiled back at him. They had to look away. They both looked at their watches at the same time. Three minutes. I screwed up my courage and waved goodbye; he barely shifted in his seat, and I left without looking back. Right there in the station I bought the Frankfurter Allgemeine and, as I waited for the bus to take me back, I paged through it, wanting to focus on something that wasn’t Bernat’s bittersweet lightning-fast visit to Tübingen. On page 12, a headline on a single column of a brief article. ‘Psychiatrist murdered in Bamberg.’ Bamberg? Baviara. My God, why would anyone want to kill a psychiatrist?

‘Herr Aribert Voigt?’

‘Yes, that’s me.’

‘I don’t have an appointment. I’m very sorry.’

‘That’s fine, come in.’

Doctor Voigt politely let death in. The newcomer sat in the sober chair in the waiting room and the doctor went into his examining room saying I will see you shortly. From the waiting room the rustle of papers and file cabinets being opened and closed could be heard. Finally, the doctor poked his head out into the waiting room and asked death to come in. The newcomer sat where the doctor had indicated, while Voigt sat in his own chair.

‘How can I help you?’

‘I’ve come to kill you.’

Before Doctor Voigt had time to do anything, the newcomer had stood up and was pointing a Star at his temple. The doctor lowered his head with the pressure of the pistol’s barrel.

‘There’s nothing you can do, Doctor. You know death comes when it comes. Without an appointment.’

‘What are you, a poet?’ without moving his head that was inches away from the desk, starting to sweat.

‘Signor Falegnami, Herr Zimmermann, Doctor Voigt … I am killing you in the name of the victims of your inhuman experiments at Auschwitz.’

‘And what if I tell you that you’ve got the wrong person?’

‘I’d laugh my head off. Better not to try it.’

‘I’ll pay you double.’

‘I’m not killing you for money.’

Silence, the doctor’s sweat is already dripping off the tip of his nose, as if he were in the sauna with Brigitte. Death felt he had to clarify: ‘I kill for money. But not you. Voigt, Budden and Höss. We were too late for Höss. Your own victims are killing you and Budden.’

‘Forgive me.’

‘Now that’s hilarious.’

‘I can give you information on Budden.’

‘Oh, we’ve got a traitor. Give it to me.’

‘In exchange for my life.’

‘In exchange for nothing.’

Doctor Voigt stifled a sob. He struggled to pull himself together but was unable. He closed his eyes and began to cry with rage against his will.

‘Come on! Do it already!’ he shouted.

‘Are you in a hurry? Because I’m not.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Let’s do an experiment. Like one of the ones you did on your mice. Or your children.’

‘No.’

‘Yes.’

‘Who’s there?’ he wanted to lift his head, but the pistol didn’t allow him to.

‘Friends, don’t worry.’ Clicking his tongue impatiently, ‘Come on, let’s have that information on Budden.’

‘I don’t have any.’

‘Oy! You want to save him?’

‘I don’t give a shit about Budden. I regret what I’ve done.’

‘Lift your head,’ said death, grabbing his chin and roughly forcing his head up. ‘What do you remember?’

Before him, dark, silent shadows, like in an exhibit in a parish centre, held up a panel with photos: men with their eyes destroyed, a weepy boy with his knees opened like pomegranates, a woman they performed a caesarean section on without anaesthesia. And a couple more he didn’t recognise.

Doctor Voigt started crying again and shouting help and save me. He didn’t stop until the shot sounded out.

‘Psychiatrist murdered in Bamberg’. ‘Doctor Aribert Voigt was killed with a shot to the head in his office in the Bavarian city of Bamberg’. I had been in Tübingen for a couple of years. Nineteen seventy-two or seventy-three, I’m not sure. What I do know is that during those long frozen months I suffered over Kornelia. I couldn’t have known anything about Voigt yet because I hadn’t read the letter in Aramaic and I didn’t know as many things as I know now, nor did I want to write you any letters. I had exams in a couple of weeks. And every day I met another of Kornelia’s secrets. Perhaps I didn’t read that, Sara. But it was in that period when someone killed a psychiatrist in Bamberg and I was unable to imagine that he was more closely linked to my life than Kornelia and her secrets were. Life is so strange, Sara.

I accuse myself of not having shed enough tears when my mother died. I was focused on the run-in I’d had with Coșeriu, my idol, who took down Chomsky, my idol, curiously without quoting Bloomfield. I already knew that he was doing it to provoke us, but on the day he mocked Language and Mind Adrià Ardèvol, who was a bit fed up with life and things like that, and was starting to have little patience, said — in a low voice and in Catalan — that’s quite enough, Herr Professor, that’s quite enough, there’s no need to repeat it. And then Coșeriu looked at me across the desk with the most terrifying gaze in his repertoire and the other eleven students were silent.

‘What’s quite enough?’ he challenged me, in German.

I, cowardly, remained quiet. I was petrified by his gaze and the possibility that he would tear me apart in front of that group. And he had one day congratulated me because he’d caught me reading Mitul reintegrării and he’d said that Eliade is a good thinker; you do well to read him.

‘Come to see me in my office after class,’ he told me quietly in Romanian. And he continued the lesson as if nothing had happened.

Curiously, when he went into Coșeriu’s office, Adrià Ardèvol’s legs weren’t trembling. It had been exactly one week since he’d broken up with Augusta, who had succeeded Kornelia, who hadn’t given him a chance to break up with her because, without giving any explanation, she had gone off with an experience almost seven feet tall, a basketball player who had just been signed by an important club in Stuttgart. His relationship with Augusta had been more measured and calm, but Adrià decided to distance himself after a couple of fights over stupid things. Stupiditates. And now he was in a bad mood and so humiliated by his fear of Coșeriu’s gaze, and that was enough to keep my legs from trembling.

‘Sit down.’

It was funny because Coșeriu spoke in Romanian and Ardèvol answered in Catalan, following the line of mutual provocation that had started on the third day of class when Coșeriu said what’s going on here, why doesn’t anyone ask any questions, and Ardèvol, who had one on the tip of his tongue, asked his first question about linguistic immanence and the rest of the class was the response to Ardèvol’s question multiplied by ten and which I hold on to like a treasure, because it was a generous gift from a genius but thorny professor.

It was funny because they, each in their own language, understood each other perfectly. It was funny because they knew that they both thought of the professor’s course as a version of the Last Supper at Santa Maria delle Grazie, Jesus and the twelve apostles, all hanging on the teacher’s words and slightest gesture, except for Judas, who was doing his own thing.