‘Where do you live,’ insisted the British lieutenant, with that horrific accent.
‘What did you call me? What did you call me?’
‘Doctor Budden.’
‘But …’
‘You’ve never set foot on the front, Doctor Budden. Much less the Eastern front.’
‘Why do you call me doctor?’
The British officer opened the folder he had on the desk in front of him. The army file. Their fucking obsession with archiving and controlling everything. He was a bit younger, but it was him, with that gaze that didn’t gaze but rather punctured. Herr Doktor Konrad Budden, surgeon of the graduating class of 1938. Oh, and professional level piano studies. Wow, doctor.
‘That is a mistake.’
‘Yes, Doctor. A big mistake.’
It wasn’t until the third of the five years in prison they’d given him — because by some last-minute miracle no one had linked him to Auschwitz-Birkenau — that Doctor Budden started to cry. He was one of the few prisoners that had yet to receive a single visitor, because his parents had died in the bombing of Stuttgart and he hadn’t wanted to let any other relatives know where he was. Particularly not those in Bebenhausen. He didn’t need visitors. He spent the day staring at the wall, especially when he began to suffer several days of insomnia. Like a sip of sour milk, the faces came back to him, the faces of each and every one of the patients who had passed before him when he was under Doctor Voigt’s orders in the medical research office at Birkenau. And he took it upon himself to try to remember as many as possible, the faces, the moans, the tears and the frightened screams, and he spent hours sitting, immobile, in front of the bare table.
‘What’s that?’
‘Your cousin Herta Landau still wants to visit you.’
‘I said I don’t want any visitors.’
‘She’s in front of the prison on hunger strike. Until you agree to see her.’
‘I don’t want to see anyone.’
‘This time you’ll be forced to. We don’t want scandals on the street. And your name has begun to appear in the newspapers.’
‘You can’t force me.’
‘Of course we can. You two, take him by the arms and let’s put an end to this little scene that madwoman has staged, for once and ffucking all.’
They put Doctor Budden in a visiting room. They made him sit in front of three austere Australian soldiers. The doctor had to wait five endless minutes until the door opened and an aged Herta came in, walking slowly towards the table. Budden lowered his gaze. The woman stood before him; they were only separated by a few feet of table. She didn’t sit down. She only said on behalf of Lothar and me. Then Budden looked up and Herta Landau, who had leaned towards him, spat in his face. Without adding anything further, she turned around and left, her motions a bit more animated, as if she had shook off a few years. Doctor Budden didn’t move to wipe his face. He stared into space for a little while until he heard a harsh voice saying take him out of here and he thought he heard take away this carrion. And alone again in his cell, the memory of the patients’ faces came back to him, like a sip of sour milk in his mouth. Each and every one of the patients. From the thirteen that had been the subjects of the sudden decompression experiments, and the many that had received grafts and died of infections, to the group of children chosen to prove the possible beneficial effects of the Bauer salve. The face he saw most often was the little Flemish girl who asked him waarom without understanding why so much pain. Then he got into the habit, as if it were a liturgical act, of sitting at the bare table and unfolding a dirty rag with one poorly cut, fraying side, and on which a blue-and-white chequered pattern could barely be made out; and he would stare at it, without blinking, until he couldn’t stand to any more. And the void he felt inside was so intense that he was still unable to cry.
After a few months of repeating more or less the same gestures each day, morning and afternoon, over the third year of his imprisonment, his conscience became more porous: in addition to the moans, shrieks, sobs and panicked tears, he started to remember the smells of each face. And the time came when he could no longer sleep at night, like the five Latvian subjects whom they were able to keep awake for twenty-two days until they died of exhaustion, with their eyes destroyed by looking at so much light. And one night he began to shed tears. Konrad hadn’t cried since he was sixteen, when he’d asked Sigrid out on a date and she’d responded with a look of total disdain. The tears emerged slowly, as if they were too thick, or perhaps indecisive after remaining hidden for such a long time. And an hour later they were still streaming down slowly. And when, outside of the cell, the rosy fingers of dawn tinted the dark sky, he broke out into an endless sob as his soul said waarom, how can it be, warum, how can it be that I never thought to cry in the presence of those sad, wide eyes, warum, mein Gott.
‘Works of art are of an infinite solitude, said Rilke.’
The thirty-seven students looked at him in silence. Professor Adrià Ardèvol got up, left the dais and began to deliberately ascend a few of the terraced rows of chairs. No comments? he asked.
No: no one had any comments. My students have no comment when I prod them with that bit about works of art being an infinite solitude. And if I tell them that artwork is the enigma that no reasoning can master?
‘Artwork is the enigma that no reasoning can master.’
Now his walking had led him to the middle of the classroom. Some heads turned to look at him. Ten years after Franco’s death, students had lost the impetus that made them participate in everything, chaotically, uselessly but passionately.
‘The hidden reality of things and of life can only be deciphered, approximately, with the help of art, even if it is incomprehensible.’ He looked at them, turning to take them all in with his gaze. ‘In the enigmatic poem echoes the voice of unresolved conflict.’
She raised her hand. The girl with the short hair. She had raised her hand! Perhaps she would ask him if all that about the incomprehensible was going to be on the exam the next day; perhaps she would ask him for permission to use the toilet. Perhaps she would ask him if through art we can grasp all that which man had to renounce in order to build an objective world.
He pointed to the girl with the short hair and said yes, go ahead.
‘Your reprehensible name will always be remembered as one of those that contributed to the horror that vilified humanity.’ He said it in English with a Manchester accent and a formulaic tone, not worrying if he’d been understood. With a dirty finger he pointed to a place on the document. Budden raised his eyebrows.
‘Here must sign you,’ said the sergeant impatiently, in a terrible German he seemed to be making up as he went along. And he tapped several times with his dirty finger to show exactly where.
Budden did so and returned the document.
‘You are free.’
Free. Once he was out of prison, he fled for a second time, again without any clear destination. Yet he stopped in a frozen village on the Baltic coast, in the shelter of a humble Carthusian monastery, and he spent the winter contemplating the fireplace of the silent house where they’d taken him in. He did just enough odd jobs around the house and the town to survive. He spoke little because he didn’t want to be recognised as an educated person and he worked hard to toughen up his pianist and surgeon’s hands. In the house that took him in they didn’t speak much either because the married couple who lived there were grieving over the death of their only son Eugen on the Russian front during damn Hitler’s damn war. The winter was long for Budden, who had been put into the mourned son’s room in exchange for all the work he could do; he stayed there for two long years, during which he spoke to no one, except when strictly necessary, as if he were one of the monks in the neighbouring Carthusian monastery; strolling alone, letting himself be whipped by the cutting wind off the Gulf of Finland, crying when no one could see him, not allowing the images that tormented him to vanish unjustly because in remembrance there is penitence. At the end of that two-year-long winter, he headed to the Carthusian monastery of Usedom and, on his knees, asked the brother doorman for someone to hear his confession. After some hesitation at his unusual request, they assigned him a father confessor, an old man who was accustomed to silence, with a grey gaze and a vaguely Lithuanian accent whenever he strung together more than three words. Beginning when the Terce rang out, Budden didn’t leave out a single detail, with his head bowed and his voice monotonous. He could feel the poor monk’s shocked eyes piercing the back of his neck. The monk only interrupted him once, after the first hour of confession.