The Impostor (MacLehose Press Editions Book 9)

by Javier Cercas

  “They would always win” – is what Bassa says the Nazis were thinking, or what Bassa says that Marco thought the Nazis were thinking during his fictitious stay in Flossenbürg; and he goes on: “Like the day somebody relieved himself outside the barracks and one of the soldiers noticed. The prisoners were told to fall in and asked who had done so. No-one said anything, and as punishment, the prisoners were forced to strip and stand all night on the Appellplatz [the main square in the camp]. In mid-winter. By the following morning, a dozen prisoners had frozen to death. This was how they demonstrated their power. And they could do so whenever they chose. Any moment was a good one to kill these inferior creatures.

  “Suffering and death pervaded every corner of the camp, and gradually consumed the soul of every prisoner. Enric was no exception. He was strong, and he had had solid political education, but in the camp, he was nothing. Torment and fear proved difficult enemies to defeat when they nightly besieged you in a darkness filled with the sobs of prisoners mourning friends and relatives who had died that day. A fear that sometimes made men lose their heads, as on the day the prisoners were led to a disinfection chamber. This is what the SS officers said but, obviously, everyone assumed it was the gas chamber. No-one had ever seen it, but everyone had heard the stories, and some had lost friends to it. Naked, they were locked inside and the steam was turned on. Many prisoners began to scream, to fall on the floor, to beat their heads against the walls. Enric panicked, thinking that the gas was already beginning to kill the weakest. But after a few seconds he realised that they were not dying, fear had triggered panic attacks and even epileptic fits. And the panic was contagious. It began with two prisoners, then three, five, ten . . . Until even the prisoners next to him began to lose their minds. He slapped each of them twice. And at least those closest to him began to calm down. That morning, he got a closer look at death than he had on the day when, with the assembled prisoners in the camp, he watched as twenty-five Czechs who had attempted to escape were hanged. But midday came, and then afternoon, and eventually the night. And with it, dreams, an escape that freed his soul if only for a few short hours.

  “And the nights gave way to days, to weeks, to months and years. Until, on April 22, 1945, the U.S. Third Army arrived at Flossenbürg. Enric, who was hiding in the underground heating ducts, did not come out until he heard the whoops of joy. He had hidden because, knowing [as everyone else knew] that the Allies had crossed into Germany, he was afraid that the SS would execute the prisoners out of anger, or to ensure there would be no witnesses. But the Germans fled like rats before the Allies reached the village of Flossenbürg. On the following day, April 23, chaos reigned in the camp. The infirmary was filled with the dying, the barracks saw scenes of fighting and arguments, some prisoners had managed to get hold of guns . . . There were still German police patrols in the village to ensure the prisoners did not leave the camp. The Allies had liberated them, and then they had left. No-one knew what to do or where to go. And, surprisingly, after a few days new prisoners arrived at the camp. These prisoners had not been sent by the Nazi regime, they were displaced people sent there by Allied Forces who did not know what to do with them. In the confusion of the days that followed, the joy that followed the liberation turned bitter, especially for Enric, who was the only Catalan in the camp, the only stateless person no-one claimed.”

  This, then, is the essence of Bassa’s account, which in turn constitutes the essence of the fiction Marco invented about his internment in Flossenbürg. The rest of Bassa’s tale is a brief epilogue in which Marco returns to mixing lies and truths and in which he recounts his supposed return to Kiel, after his liberation from Flossenbürg, where he went back to working in the dockyards, his supposed return to Barcelona in 1946, his supposed links to underground anti-Franco movements during the dictatorship and his indisputable links, after the fall of the dictatorship, with the C.N.T., FaPaC, and with the Amical de Mauthausen, for which, a gratified Bassa concludes, in 2001, the Catalan government awarded Marco its highest civilian decoration, the Creu de Sant Jordi. Honour to the heroes!

  13

  This is the lie. But what of the truth? What really happened during the period Marco spent in Germany in the early 1940s? Is it possible to reconstruct the most controversial section of his biography? The answer is yes: for the most part.

  Marco set off for his new life as an emigrant on November 27, 1941, from Estación del Norte in Barcelona, with the first convoy of Catalan volunteer workers leaving for Germany. The train was crowded with men, some of them adults, most of them young men, though few as young as Marco, who had barely turned twenty; each had an envelope with his name, his number, his train ticket, his seat reservation and a food coupon, in addition to a hunk of bread, some tinned food and a change of winter clothes; each wore an armband bearing the Spanish flag, and carried his personal passport and a sheet of instructions he was to observe during the journey. It lasted several days. At various stations, the train would stop, here they were given coffee and a roll, and they were allowed to get out and stretch their legs and visit the toilets, but not leave the station, and when they arrived in Metz, in northwest France, they were assigned to different trains headed for different destinations, and the French police who had escorted the convoy since it crossed the Spanish border were replaced by the German police (or this is what Marco remembers). Many years later, shooting a scene for Santi Fillol and Lucas Vermal’s film “Ich bin Enric Marco” at this same station, Marco, would wonder aloud, with the pensive and melodramatic air of someone seeking out his distant past but unable to find it, as though so many years later he could not understand why he had left Spain as a volunteer worker: “I would like to know where I was heading. And what I was hoping to achieve.” In fact, the answers to these two questions are no mystery, and Marco knew them better than anyone: he was heading for Kiel, in northeast Germany, having been hired by a German company as part of a Spanish-German accord enabling Franco to repay his debt to Hitler for aid during the Civil War and to help him win the world war and impose fascism throughout Europe; he was hoping to avoid military service and to earn a much better living than he could have in Spain at the time. It is that simple. It is that easy.

  Marco arrived in Kiel in early December. Like the rest of the Spanish workers, he was not billeted in Kiel itself, but in an encampment of wooden barracks some twenty-five kilometres away in Wattenbek, in the district of Bordesholm. Here he lived for three months, travelling into Kiel every day and returning every night. The city had been one of the principal German naval bases since the mid-nineteenth century, and the Deutsche Werke Werft, the company that employed Marco, had specialised in building merchant ships until the Nazis came to power when they began to specialise in building warships, submarines and various other military vessels. Marco worked on the docks as a mechanic, specifically in a unit dedicated to repairing and servicing the engines of torpedo boats; his job mostly involved checking the engines (dismantling cylinder heads, grinding valves, replacing piston rings), but also in manufacturing precision parts for the propeller shafts of torpedo boats. This was a rather specialised task, and one to which he was assigned because he was a conscientious and diligent worker. Not all of his co-workers were so diligent, in fact most of his co-workers were not, at least according to Marco, who considered himself better than they were, or who considered that, compared to him, they were plebs, a crowd of idle, illiterate, alcoholic morons. Marco prided himself, not only on being better than they, but on working in a section predominantly staffed by free Germans together with a number of French and Belgians, some of whom were prisoners of war. Marco claims that he organised a resistance cell with them, but there is not the slightest evidence that this is true. He also claims that he personally engaged in acts of sabotage, something that, according to him, he could do without running any risks, by failing to clean the rag he used to grind the valve and the valve seat of the three 20-cylinder Mercedes Benz engines that powered each torpedo boat; but ther
e is no proof that this is true either. There is, however, evidence, incontrovertible evidence, that Marco was arrested by the German police, that he spent several months in prison and that he was brought to trial.

  All of these facts are contained in the charges against Marco brought by the Hanseatic High Tribunal in Hamburg. In it, we can read that our man was arrested on March 2, 1942, scarcely three months after arriving in Germany and taken to the Gestapo gaol on Blumenstrasse in Kiel. For Marco himself, however, it all began several days before his arrest, when he was alerted by one of his colleagues. His name was Bruno Shankowitz, a German, and Marco had become friendly with him and his wife, Kathy, who had invited him to spend Christmas with them (Marco, ever the ladies’ man, insinuated that he had, or could have had an affair with Kathy, or that Kathy was infatuated with him; he also claims that he had several other affairs while in Kiel). One morning, while he was working, Bruno asked him whether he was a communist; surprised, Marco said no and inquired why he had asked. Because there is a rumour going around that you are a communist, said Bruno; then he advised him: Be careful what you say and who you say it to. It was sound advice, but Marco barely had time to follow it. Hours or days later he was arrested at his barracks in Wattenbek. According to the judicial record, Marco was held for five days before being remanded in custody; according to Marco, these five days were spent in a crowded cell with many other prisoners like him (among them a Brazilian sailor named Lacerda or Lacerta or Lacerte da Silva), sleeping on straw strewn over hard concrete and being repeatedly interrogated. Marco says (and I think we have to believe him) that this was the most difficult point of his life, that he was panicked, that he was mistreated, that he did not know what would become of him, and that he remembers being permanently sodden: with water, with urine, with vomit; but he also says other things that I do not think we have to believe, or that we do not have to believe wholeheartedly, like the fact that he faced up to his interrogators and that he presented himself to them as a freedom fighter.

  According to the record, Marco was transferred to Kiel gaol on March 11, where he was held pending his trial until October of that year. We know nothing of what happened during those six months other than the account Marco began to give after his imposture was discovered, almost always with the intention of proving that all the lies he had told about his internment in Flossenbürg were a legitimate, educational and well-intentioned displacement, albeit a little embroidered, of the punishments he had suffered in Kiel prison, and not the bastard child of a ménage à trois between his need to be a protagonist, his imagination and his reading. Nevertheless, in a long letter to the editor of the Diari de Sant Cugat in January 2006, in response to a letter from a certain señora Ballester, published in the same newspaper, Marco offered some concrete details about his imprisonment which, though slathered in the usual pottage of heroism, victimhood and self-justification, occasionally have a distinct flavour of truth.

  “Shaved, disinfected, daubed with some caustic, foul-smelling ointment,” Marco writes in a Catalan full of rhetorical flourishes which I have taken the liberty of correcting or tempering in this translation, “I was confined to a cell on the second floor [of Kiel gaol], the last cell on the left, next to the drain where urine and excrement were emptied and where we filled our water jugs. In the cell there was no running water, no toilet and no flush mechanism, only a small stone washbasin against the wall that was barely large enough to fit my cupped hands when I washed my face, and which, on tiptoe, I could just reach to wash my arse. A bucket with no lid in which to shit and piss, and a handful of newspaper clippings to wipe myself, for which I will always be grateful, less for their hygienic purpose than because the pictures kept me connected to the outside world. A bed that was barely fifty centimetres wide, screwed to the wall by two hinges, with two folding legs that could be raised by a chain and stowed against the wall. It was important to save space in order to use the work bench. It was strictly forbidden to keep the bed lowered during the day. A straw mattress scarcely the thickness of two fingers. The remainder of the furnishing consisted of a box containing an aluminium plate and spoon, a comb – I never understood the purpose of this – and a bilingual book of prayers and psalms, in German set in gothic type, and in Latin, which, fortunately, I could understand. A large card bearing my name, misspelled as always – they always assumed Marco was a first name rather than a surname – and significant details: ‘Solitary confinement, indefinite sentence’. [. . .] Days of backbreaking work from morning to night, from Monday to midday on Sunday, with no possibility of being excused or exempted. Every morning, after coffee, the Wachtmeister brought me a box of metal objects from the foundry that I was to smooth using files and other tools given to us with the day’s work. Metres upon metres of thick hemp rope that had to be separated into fibres. The dust from the hemp parched the nose and throat and irritated the eyes, but the most difficult thing was stripping electrical wiring with your bare hands to collect the copper from the cables the Germans ripped from the cities they conquered. Nine months in these conditions, señora Ballester,” Marco concludes, “nine months locked up in that cell.”

  It was not nine months, but seven, but that hardly matters now. Here and there, in this version and various other accounts and statements made after the scandal broke, our man gave many other details, real and fictitious, about his incarceration. Details about the revolting food he was given, about the beatings he received, about his repeated detention in punishment cells, about the despair that often threatened to overwhelm him and the remedies he used to combat it: with his infallible nose for melodrama, Marco told Pons Prades – as I have already recounted – that, listening in his cell to the cries of the gulls and the voices of the warders’ children playing in the courtyard outside, he said to himself: “While there are gulls gliding over the sea and children playing, all is not lost”; on the other hand, there is a story that Marco did not tell Pons Prades, one that surpasses this in its sentimentality; one that, though often repeated and alluded to in Bassa’s biography, I have not yet recounted. According to Marco, while in prison he was allowed to write letters from time to time, letters that he wrote but which never reached their destination because they were kept by the authorities; he was compelled to write letters in German, but his German was so rudimentary and his gaolers gave him so little time to write, that he was forced to devise a system if he was to say everything he had to say: the system involved pricking his finger with a needle, mixing the blood with saliva, and using the resulting mixture as ink and the needle as a pen to write drafts of his letters in the margins of the newspaper articles he used as toilet paper; in this way, when the time came, when he was finally given paper and pen and a few scant minutes in which to write, he had only to make a clean copy of these bloodstained drafts.

  Knowing Marco (and even without knowing him), this harrowing story is difficult to credit; what is true is that, like most of Marco’s lies, it contains a sliver of truth: it is true that our man wrote at least one letter while in prison, and it is true that he wrote it in German, just as it is true that it never reached its destination because Marco’s gaolers never sent it. I know this because the letter was found in the Schleswig-Holstein state archives and I am holding it in my hands. It is addressed to his wife – who had been informed by Spanish authorities that her husband was in prison – and is dated Kiel Prison, September 1, 1942, by which time Marco has already spent six months in custody and knows the serious charges levelled against him; the writer’s German grammar is flawed, and his handwriting often illegible. Below, I have transcribed the letter in its entirety, chiefly because the intended reader is less its notional recipient than the writer’s very real censors and well expresses Marco’s desperate desire to ingratiate himself with them (Marco lies, flatters the Germans and even gives his own name and those of his relatives in German, or in his made-up German), in a display of obsequiousness that may partly explain the outcome of his trial. The translation, by Carlos Pérez Ricar
t, attempts to preserve the limitations of Marco’s pidgin German:

  My darling [name illegible, probably “Anni”, meaning Anita], I send kisses from far away with the hope of my happy return to your side. I know that you do not understand one word of German, I understand little. But, writing in other language is not permitted and, at best, this letter would arrive too late [had he written it in Spanish], next week, Wednesday exactly, my trial begins after seven months of investigation where I defended myself against accusation of communist and other lies said against me. My lawyer told me already I will be found innocent. There is no guilt in me. They think I was a red volunteer, but it is proved this is a lie.

  A man accused me of being communist volunteer and other madness that makes sense. These crazy things have provoked seven months in prison and much silence, because I know not many words of German and people are not kind to me at work hour because they think I am red.

  My imprisonment is a test for the Germans . . . [illegible] But now everything will be resolved because I will leave the gaol, we will get back our money and our little [illegible, a child’s name, probably “Toni”, Anita’s biological, and Marco’s adoptive son] will have his father by his side again. We will have tranquillity. I will demand justice from my enemies and the recovery of salary for the seven months spent in prison.

  I know very well how much you have suffered but all that is almost over and soon we will be together. In all this time not one day has passed when I did not think about you, nor one moment without kissing my wedding ring. It is all I have left; everything else is kept by the prison. But you know how much love I have. I have resisted seven months in prison for you.

  I have been thinking that it would be good for you to come here. [Child’s name, illegible, probably “Toni” again] could come here too and love the German land more than our own country. Perhaps here there is not the blue sky and the dazzling sun of our country, but the men here have these things [the blue sky and the dazzling sun] in their soul. Yes, we could come and live here because we are like the Germans: careful and with open hearts. Here I have learned to love them.