by Jaume Cabré
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.
He stopped his account of the facts, but he kept his gaze fixed forward, looking nowhere because such pain could not be expressed while looking into anyone’s eyes. He swallowed hard, but I, tied to my chair, didn’t even think that the stranger, with all his talking, might need a glass of water. As if he didn’t, he continued his tale, saying and so I went through life with my head bowed, crying over my cowardice and looking for some way to make amends for my evilness until I thought of hiding myself there where the memory could never reach me. I sought out a refuge: I probably made a mistake, but I needed shelter and I tried to get closer to the God I distrusted because he hadn’t moved a muscle to save innocents. I don’t know if you can understand it, but absolute desperation makes you do strange things: I decided to enter a Carthusian monastery, where they counselled me that what I was doing wasn’t a good idea. I have never been religious; I was baptised as a Christian although religion in my house was never more than a social custom and my parents passed down their disinterest in religion to me. I married my beloved Berta, my brave wife who was Jewish but not from a religious family, and who didn’t hesitate to marry a goy for love. She made me Jewish in my heart. After the Carthusians refused me I lied and at the next two places I tried I didn’t mention the reasons for my grief; I didn’t even show it. In one place and the other I learned what I had to say and what I had to keep quiet, so that when I knocked on the door of Saint Benedict’s Abbey in Achel I already knew that no one would put up obstacles to my belated vocation and I begged, if obedience d
idn’t demand otherwise, that they let me live there and fulfil the humblest tasks in the monastery. That was when I began speaking again, a bit, with God and I learned to get the cows to listen to me. And then I realised that the telephone had been ringing for some time, but I didn’t have the heart to answer it. At least that was the first time in two years that it had rung without giving me a start. The stranger named Matthias, who was no longer such a stranger, and who had been called Brother Robert, looked at the telephone and at Adrià, waiting for some reaction. Since his host showed no interest in answering it, he continued speaking.
‘And that’s it,’ he said, to help himself get started again. But maybe he had already said everything, because he started to fold up the dirty cloth, as if gathering up his stand after a very hard day at the street market. He did it carefully, using all five of his senses. He left the folded cloth in front of him. He repeated en dat is alles, as if no further explanations were necessary. Then Adrià broke his long silence and asked why have you come to explain this to me. And then he added, what does this have to do with me?
Neither of the two men realised that the telephone, at some point, had got fed up with ringing in vain. Now the only noise that reached them was the very muffled sounds of the traffic on València Street. They were both silent, as if exceedingly interested in the traffic noise of Barcelona’s Eixample district. Until I looked the old man in the eye, and he, without returning my gaze, said and with all that, I confess that I don’t know where God is.
‘Well, I …’
‘For many years, in the monastery, he was part of my life.’
‘Was that experience useful to you?’
‘I don’t believe so. But they wanted to show me that pain is not the work of God, but a consequence of human freedom.’
Now he did look at me and continued, raising his voice slightly, as if it were a mass meeting, and he said what about earthquakes? And floods? And why doesn’t God doesn’t stop people from committing evil? Huh?
He put his palms on the folded cloth: ‘I talked a lot with cows, when I was a peasant monk. I always came to the maddening conclusion that God is guilty. Because it can’t be that evil only resides in the desire for evil. That’s too easy. He even gives us permission to kill the evil: dead dogs don’t bite, says God. And it’s not true. Without the dog, the bite continues to gnaw on us from inside, forever and ever.’
He looked from side to side without focusing on the books that had amazed him when he’d first entered the study. He picked up the thread: ‘I came to the conclusion that if all-powerful God allows evil, God is an invention in poor taste. And I broke inside.’
‘I understand. I don’t believe in God either. The guilty always have a first and last name. They are named Franco, Hitler, Torquemada, Amalric, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Adrià Ardèvol or whatever. But they have first and last names.’
‘Not always. The tool of evil has a first and last name, but evil, the essence of evil … I still haven’t resolved that.’
‘Don’t tell me that you believe in the devil.’
He looked at me in silence for a few seconds, as if weighing my words, which made me feel proud. But no: his head was somewhere else. He obviously didn’t want to philosophise: ‘Truu, the brunette, Amelia, the one with jet-black hair, Juliet, the littlest, blonde as the sun. And my coughing mother-in-law. And my strength, my wife, who was named Berta and who I have to believe has been dead for the last fifty-four years and ten months. I can’t stop feeling guilty about still being alive. Every day I wake up thinking that I am failing them, day in, day out … and now I’m eighty-five and I still haven’t known how to die, I keep living the same pain with the same intensity of the first day. Which is why – since despite everything I have never believed in forgiveness – I tried to get vengeance …’
‘Excuse me?’
‘… and I discovered that vengeance can never be complete. You can only take it out on the idiot who let himself get caught. You are always left with the disappointment of those who got away with it.’
‘I understand.’
‘You don’t understand,’ he interrupted, abruptly. ‘Because vengeance causes even more pain and brings no satisfaction. And I wonder: if I can’t forgive, why doesn’t vengeance make me happy? Huh?’
He grew quiet and I respected his silence. Had I ever taken vengeance on anyone? Surely I had, in the thousand evil things of daily life surely I had. I looked into his eyes and I insisted, ‘Where do I show up in this story?’
I said it with some confusion, I don’t know if I was expecting to have some sort of starring role in that life of pain or if I wanted to get to the part I was already fearing.
‘You are entering the stage right now,’ he responded, half hiding a smile.
‘What do you want?’
‘I came to get back Berta’s violin.’
The telephone started to ring, as if it were feverishly applauding the interpreters of a memorable recital.
Bernat plugged in the computer and turned it on. As he waited for the screen to come to life, I explained what had happened the day before. As he listened, his jaw dropped in amazement.
‘What?’ he said, absolutely beside himself.
‘You heard me right,’ I replied.
‘You’re … you’re … you’re crazy, man!’
He connected the mouse and the keyboard. He banged angrily on the table and started to walk around the room. He went over to the instrument cabinet and opened it with a bit too much force, as if he wanted to check what I’d just told him. He slammed it shut.
‘Careful you don’t break the glass,’ I warned him.
‘Fuck the glass. Fuck you, bloody hell, why didn’t you tell me?’
‘Because you would have talked me out of it.’
‘Obviously! But how could you …’
‘It was as simple as the man standing up, going over to the cabinet, opening it and pulling out the Storioni.’ He stroked it and Adrià watched him with curiosity and a bit of suspicion. The man burst into tears, hugging the violin; Adrià let him do it. The man pulled a bow from the cabinet, tightened it, looked at me to ask for my permission and began to play. ‘It didn’t sound very good. Actually, it sounded awful.’
‘I’m not a violinist. She was. I was only a hobbyist.’
‘And Berta?’
‘She was a great woman.’
‘Yes, but …’
‘She was first violinist of the Antwerp Philharmonic.’
He began playing a Jewish melody that I had heard once but couldn’t place where. But since he played so terribly, he ended up singing it. I got goose bumps.
‘And now I’ve got fucking goose bumps, because you gave away that violin, for fuck’s sake!’
‘Justice was done.’
‘He was an imposter, you blockhead! Can’t you see? Bloody hell, my God. Our Vial is gone forever. After so many years of … What would your father say? Huh?’
‘Don’t be ridiculous. You’ve never wanted to use it.’
‘But I was dying to, for fuck’s sake! Don’t you know how to interpret a no?’ Don’t you know that when you told me use it, take it on tour, Bernat smiled timidly and left the instrument in the cabinet as he shook his head and said I can’t, I can’t, it’s too big a responsibility? Huh?
‘That means no.’
‘It doesn’t mean no, bloody hell. It means I’m dying to!’ Bernat, with his eyes wanting to pounce on me: ‘Is that so hard to understand?’
Adrià was silent for a few moments, as if he was having trouble digesting so much life philosophy.
‘Look, laddie: you’re a bastard,’ continued Bernat. ‘And you let yourself be swindled by some bloke who came to you with a sob story.’
He pointed to the computer: ‘And I came here to help you.’
‘Maybe we should do it some other day. Today we’re … a little …’
‘Fuck, you’re an idiot, giving the violin to the first cry-baby who knocks on your door! I c
an’t fucking believe it.’
When he had finished singing the melody, the old man put the violin and bow into the cabinet and sat back down as he timidly said at my age you can only play the violin for yourself. Nothing works any more, your fingers fail you, and your arm isn’t strong enough to hold up the instrument correctly.
‘I understand.’
‘Being old is obscene. Ageing is obscene.’
‘I understand.’
‘You don’t understand. I would have liked to die before my wife and daughters and yet I’m becoming a decrepit old man, as if I had the slightest interest in clinging to life.’
‘You’re in good shape.’
‘Poppycock. My body is falling apart. And I should have died more than fifty years ago.’
‘So what the fuck did that stupid old man want with a violin if what he wanted was to die? Can’t you see that it’s contradictory?’
‘It was my decision, Bernat. And it’s done.’
‘Bastard. Tell me where that hapless cretin is and I’ll convince him that …’
