The Scent of Lemon Leaves Read online

  When I came out of the kitchen he wasn’t there any more. He’d left with Martín.

  They wouldn’t let me go back home. Someone was waiting for me maybe? We played cards till late and it didn’t stop raining, so Fred would have to take me to the motorbike in the car and then I’d have to go down through all those horrible curves in the middle of the downpour. Well, what for? To sleep in my own bed?

  “We’ve got spare rooms,” Karin said.

  Fred said nothing, which made me hesitate, until Karin nudged him.

  “Say something,” she urged. “Stop acting like a nincompoop.”

  “If you spend the night here, we can go to the beach together tomorrow, or maybe you’d rather swim in the pool,” he added.

  I let myself be persuaded for a few minutes and I stayed. We spun out the evening a little longer until they led me to a very nice room, with blue-flowered wallpaper and a set of white shelves.

  “Fred made them.” Karin pointed at the shelves.

  I thought that my parents might be happier if my mother admired my father like Karin admired her husband. But it must be something genetic, because I hadn’t managed to admire Santi like this either. Karin lent me an off-white satin nightdress with a fabulous cut. It must have been from the days when she would have been tall and slim and they made fabrics to last your whole lifetime. It looked great on me and I felt bad about wearing it in bed and getting it crumpled. I normally slept in a comfortable old T-shirt and knickers. I didn’t need anything more. It didn’t make sense to get between the sheets as if I was at a high-class party… well, until now, when the silk or satin was swirling round my thighs and clinging to my princess-like breasts. It could even be that if my baby was going to be born with good self-esteem and able to move confidently through a future life, he or she would need a mother who slept in vampire nightdresses.

  Although I was missing some of my sister’s back-dated magazines and wanting to know what had become of Princess Ira von Fürstenberg, I started nodding off at once because it was impossible to resist that bed, although I did take the time to ask myself what I was doing in this room, in this bed, among these little blue flowers and wearing this nightdress.

  Like every other night for the past couple of months, I had to get up to pee at least once or twice. I woke up slightly disoriented, vaguely remembering that there was a bathroom in the passage. As I was looking for it, I kept hearing that noise that beds make when… together with the odd moan. Would these two old people be… Could they really be making love? I had no idea of the time and when I got back into bed I could still hear a distant murmuring, words here and there as if they were discussing how it had gone, so I covered my head with the pillow, almost embarrassed about having listened to them without wanting to. Hence, I wasn’t surprised to find it was striking ten when I awoke next morning. When I first got up, I thought I was the lazy one because I couldn’t hear a thing, but when I saw that the front door was bolted I deduced that they must be still sleeping. I drew back the curtains in the living room and opened the doors. It was a marvellous day. The sun was making the wet leaves shine and the birds were singing their lungs out. I made myself a milk coffee, which I was drinking on the porch when they appeared, yawning, Karin in her nightdress and Fred in shorts with an enormous polo shirt with elbow-length sleeves. They were happy. They asked if I’d slept well and Karin seemed more agile than she’d been the previous day.

  “I’m going to get breakfast,” Fred said.

  He didn’t give me time to announce that it was quite late and I was leaving. Karin was one jump ahead of me, setting out the dainty embroidered serviettes on the porch table. While she was getting dressed, Fred made orange juice and the customary tea. OK, I said to myself, as soon as we finish I’ll be off so I can keep reading the life of Ira in instalments. It’s not that I had great things to do, but here I had the impression of neglecting them, the impression that everything I wasn’t doing was very important.

  Fred and Karin were very vivacious, chatting about the television series they watched, recounting whole episodes for me. I joined in with anything that came into my head but, all of a sudden, as I was talking, I caught them looking at me, terribly serious, as if they were going to leap on me and devour me. Was it because of something stupid I’d said without realizing? It lasted half a second. Then they looked at one another in the way they usually did and, a second later, everything was back to normal. Their faces changed back to being very agreeable. It had been one of those mirages you hardly notice. When we left the table, Karin suggested that we could lie in the hammocks in the sun. I thought, oh well, in for a penny, in for a pound and, after all, it didn’t really matter if I stayed a while longer and if I had another rest before getting on the motorbike.

  Karin and I lay there, our faces turned towards the sun, eyes closed. I had no intention of going back to sleep but was simply thinking how comfortable the hammocks were and that my sister would do well to buy some like this and throw away the ones she had. Half an hour in them was about as much as you could stand.

  For such an old man, Fred didn’t get tired. He cleared the table, washed the dishes and then locked himself away somewhere to work and, at about four, after serving us tea and biscuits, which only I ate, set off to the shopping centre since it seemed that we’d eaten up everything they had in the fridge. I thought I could get a lift back to the motorbike, but by the time I managed to react he was already out of the garage. We went back to the hammocks. Karin’s arthritis was better now. Even her fingers were straighter and she was quite sprightly getting out of the hammock, as I could see just then. She came back with the skein of wool, her knitting needles plus another skein and needles for me.

  “You can have a swim if you like,” she offered, “and it doesn’t matter if you haven’t got your bikini. No one’s going to see you here.”

  The water was cold. However sunny it was, it wasn’t swimming-pool weather, but it felt good. It cleared my head and I could sunbathe practically naked, making the most of Fred’s not being around, because I wanted to respect his age and customs, although after what I’d heard in the night I felt kind of embarrassed to think about his customs. When I calculated that he might be about to arrive, I got dressed and picked up the knitting needles. Karin showed me how to cast on. It was pleasing to keep advancing, making the band grow on what was going to be a little lemon pullover, even if my stitches weren’t all that regular. I thought I could keep rotating magazine, pullover, strolls, meals, and my life would be full.

  Julián

  I was trailing Fredrik for several days and keeping watch on his house. Almost every morning he and Karin went to the beach or to buy things at the zone’s biggest shopping centre. I think she was doing some kind of rehabilitation therapy, because some afternoons they went to a gymnasium where she spent an hour before coming out, during which time he went off to fill up the car and get it washed, or headed for the Nordic Club. You might say they led a normal, discreet existence.

  He’d got into the habit (with so many years ahead of him) of pushing the shopping trolley and reading the labels of products, no doubt making sure they didn’t contain sugar or fats. He was polite to people and seemed unperturbed by the hotchpotch of races swarming around him, the inferior beings that were going to survive him and take over the planet. How they must have turned his stomach! This was an aversion that he bore deep inside. His success in life was inseparable from the fact that he was revolted by part of humanity and, besides Karin, he must have needed other beings of his kind with whom to share his sentiments. Were there others of their ilk here, or were they alone?

  It was as if I had eyes that were different from those of other people, because, where they only saw an old couple, I saw the young Nurse Karin.

  She was four years younger than Fredrik and had suited him beautifully, though now they were on the scrap heap. With her pretty face, pretty body, wavy blonde hair and her being sufficiently tall so as not to look like a dwarf at his s
ide, she was the typical Nordic woman, although not a stunning beauty. They met as students and it seems she was the one that pushed him to join the Nazi party and to prosper in it. The information I had at my disposal suggested that Karin was the brains of the two, the one who did the manipulating, the one who’d made the most of her husband’s limited, rigid ideas to get him – and, by the by, herself – to the top. A mediocre tale, except for the massacred lives it entailed. Fredrik had been a good sportsman. He’d played ice hockey, like his friend Aribert Heim. In addition, he was a horseman, skier, mountaineer, a fit man. In any case, they weren’t people to whom I would have devoted a lot of time, but just enough to know who they were, probably because I’d spent the best years of my life running around after the Butcher of Mauthausen, after Martin Bormann, after Léon Degrelle, after Adolf Eichmann and others of that breed. Sometimes, as they say, you can’t see the wood for the trees, and I hadn’t given Fredrik the attention he warranted, had considered him a second-ranking Nazi until now, when I’d gone back to extract from my files information as old, dry and wrinkly as he was, and as I was too. Then I realized that everything I’d been doing up to that point had led me to this place and to him.

  I couldn’t keep still that afternoon. Sometimes we old people get very fidgety. It’s as if fatigue affects our bodies but not our brains. My brain had a lot of work to do and these flaccid, debilitated muscles of mine were in revolt and, lying there, I tried to sink into the bed as much as I could, so that the mattress would do its restorative work. Thus with an hour’s rest, during which I’d drowsed off for fifteen minutes, I was in good enough shape to go up to the little square in El Tosalet and keep watch on Villa Sol. Sooner or later they’d be having visitors and, with a bit of luck, they’d be visitors like themselves, their comrades from hell who’d been drawn together in the mutual attraction of wanting to feel more secure. I was dying to find out more.

  I took the binoculars I’d brought with me from Buenos Aires which, according to my daughter, were going to add considerably to the weight of my bag, but they were old-style Canon binoculars of a kind they don’t make any more. I’d been using them for so long that they adjusted to my eyes almost by themselves and there was no way I was going to fork out money unnecessarily to buy new ones here. They were a pro’s binoculars, made for observing important life-and-death matters. I’d never use them to sneak into other people’s lives, to see something it was no business of mine to be looking at. I’d already had too much intimacy in the camp. In our hut we slept piled up in three-tier bunks and I had to squeeze my eyes shut in order not to see what was not for me to see. Ever since then, I’ve never been able to witness intimate scenes, not even in a film. This was different. My binoculars were strictly focused on the enemy. My binoculars had always been at war. I also had a tiny camera that made no noise, a gift from my daughter who, even while she was trying to make me forget, also understood that there were some things that had come to be part of me. Otherwise, my way of working was very homespun. I had neither time nor inclination to get up to date.

  In the car I also had several bottles of water, of a litre and a half each, two notebooks, a couple of biros and the apples I kept taking from the hotel buffet in case I got bored and started feeling hungry. I put the mini-camera in my pocket. All my jackets ended up out of shape, almost invariably with a rip in the lining of the right-hand pocket and the two front corners pulled out of alignment. Thus equipped, I went to take up my position in the small square in El Tosalet from where I planned to monitor Villa Sol. However, it wasn’t necessary for me to go all the way since, before starting the upward climb through the bends, I crossed with Fredrik’s olive-green four-by-four. He was coming down slowly, hogging the whole road. These people were also voracious in monopolizing centimetres.

  This sudden change of circumstances made my heart rate shoot up. I urgently needed to do a U-turn and follow Fredrik. Damn road. I had to risk my life as soon as I saw the chance and the space to bring off the abrupt U-turn. From the great beyond Raquel told me I was crazy, that I was also endangering the life of another person who might have crashed into me. Raquel said that nobody should keep paying because of Christensen or anybody else. On this point, Raquel and I had never agreed. She told me to stop worrying about it, not to waste any more time because these bastards would end up dying like everyone else and there was no way they were going to escape from that. They’d end up as skeletons or ashes, would die, would expire, would disappear. When I used to tell her that I wanted them to suffer in this life, that what I didn’t want was precisely that they should go off to the next world having escaped from me and my hatred when I couldn’t escape from them, from them who’d had no reason to hate me, then Raquel would say that I was giving too much of myself, that it was as if I’d never really succeeded in getting out of the camp, and that they were even sucking up my hatred. I missed Raquel so much.

  I drove recklessly so as not to lose him and, in effect, when I reached the bottom and got onto the straight part of the road I could make him out in the distance. I overtook as much as I could until I was a couple of cars behind him. The good thing about the four-by-four was that it was very easy to spot. When I realized he was heading for the shopping centre, I relaxed. My heart rate suddenly slowed down so fast that I almost got dizzy.

  In the shopping centre I had him by the balls because, while it covered a very large area and had many sections, Fredrik’s head would always be sticking up somewhere. Yet, at first glance, the four-by-four wasn’t visible in the car park. It didn’t matter as I only had to think about what I’d have to buy for myself to know what he and Karin would be needing. Bottled water, calcium-enriched yogurt, fruit and fish. Anything else was bad for them. I might also find him at the shelves with herbal teas, or in the bathroom section buying shower gel, disposable razors and toilet paper. I covered the route at a good pace until I spotted him in the central zone chatting with another man of similar age who was wearing a fisherman’s cap.

  They were both wearing shorts, Fredrik showing long skinny legs ending in a bulky pair of Nikes, and the other man shorter, stronger legs, or legs that must have been strong in other times but that were fat now. Fredrik was so neat and tidy that the other man looked coarse and sloppy beside him. Both of them were leaning on the handlebars of their shopping carts. The solid fellow, whose face I couldn’t make out very well because of the cap he was wearing and my contact lenses, which played up in enclosed spaces, was pointing somewhere off to the right and they set off in that direction. I could have taken a photo of them with my mini-camera but, though it appeared that nobody was paying any attention to me, it wasn’t a good idea to do it in an enclosed precinct like this where security cameras would necessarily be installed, so I pushed my cart in that direction. Unlike these individuals, I didn’t have to buy anything as I was living in a hotel, because I was alone, and because I had more important matters to deal with: them. From the time I retired to the present, alone and in Raquel’s company, I’d frequented places like this, where once again I had the feeling of not being like other people, although pretending to be like other people was very agreeable, and such moments had perhaps been the only happy ones of my life. There are people who’ve suffered much more than us, Raquel used to say, and everyone suffers in his or her way. At bottom, it made me feel bad that Raquel should have made such an effort to turn me into somebody it was impossible for me to be. She did it out of love and that’s the only reason why I tried hard to pretend that I’d forgotten.

  Fredrik and the other man were looking at some shirts on special offer. Three denim shirts for the price of two. It turned my stomach to think they should be there chatting about shirts, that they should be there checking the sizes, and I was indignant that they should be happier than me, and that Fredrik, after everything he had done, should still have Karin. They were at large among their victims, crossing paths with people they would have been only too happy to gas.

  Fredrik remarked in German t
hat he wanted to buy a sea bass because they had a dinner guest, so they said their goodbyes. It’s curious that I used to eat much more before going into the camp than I did after I came out. I never went back to eating a lot. It was as if my respect for a simple bit of meat and a few carrots was enough to satisfy me. People will do anything for food: steal, whore or kill. Raquel was only just spared from being sent into the camp brothel along with the Polish women, although a lot of officers and Kapos preferred boys, especially Russian boys. What would have become of those children? There was one Kapo in the camp who sometimes went into the hut with ten at a time and nobody could do anything to stop him.

  Fredrik went to the fish stall, but there were a lot of people milling around there, so he took a number. I calculated he wouldn’t be served for at least half an hour. He must have had the same thought, because he got a bit of paper out of his pocket, a shopping list no doubt, read it and went off to the cooking-oil section, where he took two bottles, after which he took the shirts out, stood there staring at them as if he wanted to hypnotize them and then resolutely turned his trolley around to retrace his steps. I could have sworn that he was going to change them or dump them, because suddenly he didn’t want to be wearing the same shirts as the other fellow. He must have been too carried away by a sense of brotherliness, or he’d picked them up to get rid of his pal as soon as he could.

  I got there before he did and positioned myself behind some beach towels hung out full length so people could see their designs. The shirts were the pièce de résistance of the offers and they were jumbled up together on the display table. Fredrik took those he had in his cart, put them back where he’d found them and stood there gazing at the ones he’d passed over the first time. Then I had the urge to say from behind the towels, “I know who you are. You’re Fredrik Christensen and I’m going to get you, but first I’m going to get Nurse Karin.”