‘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 didn’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.