The girl shook her head.
‘Then I’ll have to rip off your nose. Did you understand me now?’
And he looked patiently at the horrified girl, who frantically nodded her head.
‘How old are you?’
‘Seven and a half,’ she replied, exaggerating to make herself seem older.
‘Name?’
‘Amelia Alpaerts. Twenty-two Arenberg Street, third apartment.’
‘Fine, fine.’
‘Antwerp.’
‘I said that’s fine!’ Irritated. ‘And stop messing with that damned handkerchief if you don’t want me to take it away from you.’
The girl lowered her gaze and instinctively put her hands behind her back, hiding the blue-and-white chequered napkin, perhaps to protect it. She couldn’t hold back a tear.
‘Mama,’ she implored, also in a soft voice.
Doctor Budden snapped his fingers and one of the twins who were holding up the back wall came forward and grabbed the girl brusquely.
‘Get her prepped,’ said the doctor.
‘Mama!’ shouted the girl.
‘Next!’ answered the doctor without looking up from the file he had on the desk.
‘Holländisch?’ heard the girl with the blue-and-white chequered napkin as they made her enter a room that smelled very strongly of medicine and I didn’t know what to do: I didn’t give any justification or explanation, because Laura didn’t demand one of me. She could have calmly said you are a fucking liar because you told me that there was no other woman; she could have said why didn’t you just tell me; she could have said you’re a coward; she could have said you never stopped using me; she could have said many things. But no: life went on like always in the office. For a few months I barely went in there. A couple of times we passed each other in the cloister or we saw each other in the bar. I had become a transparent person. It was hard to get used to. And forgive me, Sara, for not having told you any of this before.
Doctor Konrad Budden, after a very intense month, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. He was exhausted. When he heard a heel stomp in front of his desk he lifted his head. Oberscharführer Barabbas stood firm, rigid, always ready, awaiting orders. With a weary gesture, the doctor pointed to the stuffed file with the name of Doctor Aribert Voigt clearly visible, and the other man picked it up. When the subordinate stamped his heels hard, the doctor shook, as if he had stomped on his head. Barabbas left the office with the detailed report explaining that, unfortunately, the patellar tendon regeneration experiment, which consisted in exposing the tendon, slicing it, applying Doctor Bauer’s salve and observing whether it would regenerate without the aid of any suture, hadn’t succeeded as they had foreseen, neither in adults nor in children. They had expected it wouldn’t be effective on the elderly, but they’d hoped that in the case of growing organisms the regeneration following the application of the Bauer salve could be spectacular. That failure put an end to the possibility of triumphantly offering this miraculous medication to humanity. What a shame, because if it had worked, the benefits for Bauer, Voigt and him would have been, not only triumphant, but unimaginable.
It had never been so hard for him to finalise an experiment before. After months of seeing moaning little guinea pigs — like the boy with that dark skin, or the albino who said Tėve, Tėve, Tėve, cornered in his bed, refusing to get out of it until they finally had to finish him off right there, or that bloody girl with the dirty rag that was unable to stand up without crutches and, when they didn’t sedate her, bellowed with pain to fuck with all the staff as if they didn’t have enough with the responsibility of some of the experiments and brutal pressure of their blockhead superior, who it seems had friends in high places because not even Höss himself was able to get him sent off to some front so he would stop being such a nuisance — had to accept that it was useless to expect a more positive response on the cartilage treated with the Bauer salve. Twenty-six guinea pigs, boys and girls, and no restored tissue, revealed the conclusions he very reluctantly gave Professor Bauer. And one fine day Doctor Voigt left on a postal plane, without saying a word. That was very strange, because he hadn’t left any instructions for how to continue the experiments. Doctor Budden understood it later on that day, when he began to receive word of the alarming advance of the Red Army and the inefficiency of the German lines of defence. And as the primary medical authority in the camp, he decided that it was time to mop up everything with bleach. First, with the help of Barabbas, he spent five straight hours burning papers and photographs, destroying any documentary evidence that could lead to the suspicion that anyone at Birkenau had experimented on little girls who clung desperately to dirty rags. Not a trace of the pain inflicted because it was too impossible to be believed. All burned, Barabbas, and the simpleton still kept saying what a shame, so many hours and so much work going up in smoke. And neither of them thought of all the people who had also gone up in smoke, right there, two hundred metres from the laboratory. And the copies sent by the research department must be in some part of the Health Ministry, but who would go looking for them when the only important thing then was saving their hides.
Under the cover of night, his hands still blackened by smoke, he went into the guinea pigs’ bedroom with loyal Barabbas. Each child was in his or her bunk. He administered the injection into each of their hearts without any explanation. Except for that one boy who asked what the injection was, and he told him it was to calm the pain in his knees. The others probably died knowing they were finally dying. The girl with the dark, dirty rag was the only one who received him wide awake, with those accusatory eyes. She also asked why. But she asked in a different way. She asked why and she looked him straight in the eye. Weeks of pain had stripped her of her fear and, sitting up in her bunk, she opened her shirt so Barabbas could find the perfect spot to inject her. But she stared at Doctor Budden and asked him why. This time it was he who, unwillingly, had to look away. Why. Waarom. She said it until her lips darkened, tinted by death. A seven-year-old girl who doesn’t despair in the face of death is a very desperate, very devastated girl. There is no other way to explain such composure. Waarom.
After leaving everything prepared to flee the Lager in the morning with several unassigned officers, for the first time in many months, Doctor Budden didn’t sleep well. It was the fault of the waarom. And those thin, darkening lips. And Oberscharführer Barabbas smiling and giving him an injection, without taking off his uniform, and smiling with his lips blackened by a death that never quite came because the dream continued.
In the morning, without making much noise and before Oberlagerführer Rudolf Höss realised, some twenty officers and subordinates, among them Budden and Barabbas, took off, headed anywhere that was far from Birkenau.
Both Barabbas and Doctor Budden were lucky because, taking advantage of the confusion, they were able to get far enough away from their work and the Red Army that they were able to pass themselves off to the British as soldiers coming from the Ukrainian front, anxious to see the war end so they could finally get home to their wives and children, if they were still alive. Doctor Budden had transformed into Tilbert Haensch, yes, from Stuttgart, Captain, and he had no documents to prove it because with the surrender, you know. I want to go back home, Captain.
‘Where do you live, Doctor Konrad Budden?’ asked the officer in charge of the interrogations, as soon as the other man had abandoned his claim.
Doctor Budden looked at him, mouth agape. All he could think of to say was what? with a very shocked expression.