Confessions (49 page)

‘No, leave her be!’ said an older woman with a package in her arms, a violin case of some sort, as if it were an infant.

Doctor Budden washed his hands of the argument. As he headed off, he saw Doctor Voigt emerge from the officer’s canteen and head over to the scuffle. Konrad Budden didn’t
even bother to conceal his disdainful look towards his superior officer, who was always attracted to conflict. He went into his office, still calm. He had time to hear the crack of a Luger firing.

‘W
here are you from?’ he said in a harsh voice without looking up from the papers. Finally he had to lift his eyes because the mute little girl just stared at him in confusion. She was wringing a dirty napkin in her hands and Doctor Budden was starting to get nervous. He raised his voice, ‘Would you mind keeping still?’

The girl stopped, but her perplexed expression remained. The doctor sighed, took in a breath and gathered his patience. Just then the telephone on his desk rang.

‘Yes? / Yes, Heil Hitler. / Who?’ Confused. / ‘Put her on. (…)’ ‘Heil Hitler. Hallo.’ Impatient. ‘Ja, bitte? / What’s going on?’ Annoyed. / ‘Who is this Lothar?’ Peeved. / ‘Ah!’ Scandalised. ‘Abject Franz’s father? / And what do you want? / Who arrested him? / But why? / Girl … Here I really … / I’m very busy right now. You want to expose us all? / He must have done something. / Look, Herta: someone’s got to pay the piper.’

And he looked the girl with the dirty napkin up and down:

‘Holländisch?’ he asked her. And into the telephone: ‘I don’t know about you, but I’m working. I have too much work to waste time on such nonsense. Heil Hitler!’

And he hung up. He stared at the girl, waiting for a reply.

The girl nodded. As if holländisch was the first word she had understood. Doctor Budden, in a softer voice, so no one would see that he wasn’t using German, asked her in his cousins’ Dutch what town she was from and she answered Antwerp. She wanted to say that she was Flemish, that she lived on Arenberg Street, and where was her father, that he’d been taken away. But she stood there with her mouth hanging open, observing that man who was now smiling at her.

‘You just have to do what I tell you to.’

‘It hurts me here.’ And she pointed to the back of her neck.

‘That’s nothing. Now, listen to me.’

She looked at him, curious. The doctor insisted, ‘You have to do what I say. You understand?’

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.

B
oth 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.

‘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.’

I
t 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.