Wakolda E-Book

Lucia Puenzo

• Herausgeber: Hesperus Press Ltd.
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 284

Beschreibung

Now a major motion picture The German Doctor is a story of obsession, loyalty and control as one man with dark intentions charms his way into the lives of an innocent, unsuspecting family. Patagonia, 1960. José is on the run. Having fled from him homeland Germany, he has come to South America to continue his work - José is a doctor, who is seeking to manipulate genes to create the 'perfect' human race'. In the small village of Chacharramendi he first meets Lilith, a child he notices from the balcony of his motel and is instantly fascinated yet repulsed by. For Lilith has a growth defect, and the disproportionate size of her features represent all he is trying to exterminate from humankind. Yet, even more fascinating is the fact that her siblings are perfect examples of the Aryan race; tall, strongly built and fair. The anomaly of Lilith's existence fascinates him, and when he discovers Lilith's mother is pregnant, if he is not mistaken with twins, the temptation to involve himself in their lives and even interfere with the pregnancy is too much for him to pass up on. A cold, calculating but eerily charming man, José befriends Lilith and manipulates his way into the family. And so begins a dark relationship between the doctor and little girl, a kind of love that cannot end well. For José is actually Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, infamous for performing human experiments at Auschwitz and sooner or later his past is going to catch up with him.

Leseprobe

WAKOLDA

LUCÍA PUENZO

TRANSLATED BY DAVID WILLIAM FOSTER

Contents

Title PagePART ONEHERLITZKA 1234567PART TWOWAKOLDA891011121314Biographical NoteCopyright

PART ONE

HERLITZKA

1

That day, a mixture of sodium chloride and magnesium nitrate, injected with infinite patience into each eyeball, would change forever the course of science. The mass sterilisations, the vivisections, the frustrated attempts to change skin and hair colour using subcutaneous injections and even the night on which he thought he had finally succeeded in joining together the veins of two twins to create Siamese twins, only to find them a few hours later gasping like fish out of water – all his failures would be forgotten if he could manage to change the colour of the eyes of this child. He had imagined at least a thousand times holding the only surviving Romanian twin whose left iris had been coloured by the dye (albeit after an overdose had burned his right one), standing on the stage of every medical Racial Hygiene congress in which he had participated during the last decade. The boy’s optical nerves paralysed by an excess of chemicals and his pupils dilated with terror, in the arms of the person who had jabbed him something like a thousand times until he had finally freed him from mediocrity. He had dreamed of him with his head shaved to allow the black fuzz of his origins to be eclipsed by a future Aryan. Although he understood it was only a dream, the images of that first life in which everything was possible were obliterated by the certainty that his victory was only the harbinger of all the transformations that were to come (including moulding genetically the citizens of an entire nation), even if up until then had only been lacerated skin, gangrene and amputations. Their investment of millions of Deutschmarks had not been in vain. All in the name of the purity of blood and genes. That was the real war: purity vs contamination.

He sat down on the bed with the excitement of a child preparing for a day at the amusement park. Only then did the surroundings of his rented room with its sparse decor return him to the shaky present. It was all a mirage. Every day his skin hung looser and his ruined muscle tone was that of an old man. His entire existence had turned grey, days and nights of identical routine repeated ad nauseam, in the secret hope something would happen. Someone was going to inform him they had finally stopped searching for him, or they had arranged the journey across the border to his next stop. He had devoted his life to freeing the world of rats and now, on the run and a coward, banished to the shadows and the fringes of the world, he had turned into a fleeing rat himself.

Life cannot reduce itself to just this, he thought.

When he received the warning that they were on his trail, he didn’t doubt it was true for a moment: he froze the samples of bacteriology in terminal specimens he had been working on in recent months, walked out of his laboratory, stopped at the bank to empty his account, and drove until he left the city behind. He was never going to lack money: his bottomless family fortune had been supplemented by the contributions of his mentor, Professor von Verschuer, who worked at the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut in Dahlem and who had always taken it upon himself to obtain the necessary underwriting for his work in exchange for being the first to receive the results of his experiments. Even in Mengele’s exile, von Verschuer was one of the many who continued to contribute anonymously to this well-being, convinced that it was only a matter of time before he could resume his studies. There were many who continued to believe in him, supporting him from a distance, from the shadows, and writing him long letters in which they treated him like a mentor. An illustrious man. Theirs were not excessive words of praise, but the acknowledgement that gave him the strength to go on.

He bought supplies at a petrol station and a map of Argentina before calling his wife. He didn’t tell her where he was headed. He told her he would be gone for a time and asked her to stay for a few weeks with a couple of friends, hanging up before she could protest. He drove for ten hours before stopping at a roadside motel on the outskirts of Chacharramendi. In reality the town didn’t really have a downtown or outskirts, since it ended in the same block where it began. He stayed in the room until it grew dark. Although his Spanish was fluent, he took out his dictionary and the notebook in which he wrote out his daily correspondence class. Like all survivors, he knew he had to erase some tracks as soon as possible. His mind was more a soldier’s than a scientist’s, and his first training had been the moulding that comes from the blows of military discipline received in the ranks. He never let a day go by without doing his written and oral exercises.

‘I’m a pharmacist,’ he repeated three times, making an effort to improve his pronunciation. ‘My favourite activity is lis… tening to opera with my son.’

He lied, used to protecting himself even when he was alone. He couldn’t even remember his first-born’s features. In the only photograph he’d kept, his son was babbling his first words, mindless to the butchery to which his father had dedicated his existence.

A little girl’s cry startled him as he was about to answer the next question out loud. He pulled a yellowing curtain aside and saw a group of little girls playing in the car park. Two of them were turning a skipping rope in circles, faster and faster, while singing as fast as they could something that sounded like a mantra, given the hypnotic devotion with which they repeated a monotonous verse. They were dark-skinned, children of a mixed race, except for one… She would have made a perfect specimen (blonde, fair-skinned, with clear eyes) if it hadn’t been for her height. Visibly small for her age, although with arms and legs normal enough, the child who jumped faster and faster before his eyes could be an example that defined one of his favourite fields of study: dwarfism, taken to be the exemplary category of the abnormal. She had managed to absorb some Aryan genes, but not enough to lose her animal features. These were the lab rats that most fascinated him: perfect except for one intolerable defect.

When her challenger gave up, she cried out for more. To his surprise, her voice did not match her deformity. It was an octave lower than what he would have expected. She didn’t seem afraid of the rope hitting her on her head or heels.

She didn’t seem afraid of anything.

That evening he saw her sitting on the pavement with three of the dark-skinned girls, playing jacks. She was the one to toss in the air the tiny sacks of rice grains, trapping them with the same hand that held one more jack. He was whistling Tosca’s final aria, Addio alla vita, when he stopped to observe her. Her motor skills and her reflexes were excellent, above average. Each one of her movements was an apex of vitality. It was obvious. The dark-skinned girls were locals and the blonde wasn’t from around there, a circus professional who had them captivated by some unknown game.

‘Time for dinner, Lilith!’

‘I’m not hungry!’

‘I didn’t ask you if you were hungry! I told you to come and have your dinner!’

The boy who was shouting was standing in the doorway of the motel, an adolescent about sixteen years old, as blonde and fit as she was and delightfully arrogant. There was no doubting they were brother and sister, although the measurements of the small South American Adonis were perfect. He would have given anything at that moment to know their parents and grandparents so he could delve into the family tree to understand at what fork in the road the one guilty of degrading the race was to be found.

‘Is everything all right, sir?’

He turned and saw the motel owner watching him as he smoked a cigar on the veranda. Except for the blonde children, the rest of the town seemed to move in slow motion, rendered lethargic by the flatness of the desert. That afternoon he’d counted on the fingers of one hand the inhabitants who had dragged their chairs out to the pavement to drink a couple of matés before the darkness forced them to take refuge in their caves.

‘There’s an inn nearby if you’d like something to eat.’

‘Where?’

‘Two blocks straight ahead… You can’t miss it.’

‘Is it likely to be open?’

‘It always is.’

Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the little girl was walking toward the boy, swaying her hips as she tossed in the air one of the little sacks of rice and caught it with her hand. She moved with the grace of a ballerina, unaware of her limitations. There was something enchanting about her boldness. An imperfect body had never seemed so irresistible to him. She walked past less than three feet from him without stopping. But when she was close to him, she suddenly turned her head, looked him in the eye and stuck out her tongue.

That mouth, he thought.

It was the most disproportionate thing about her. She had the lips of someone twice her size, buck teeth, everything moist and warm. It was the first time in years that something so far removed from asceticism had excited him. The flight of one of the jacks bisected their line of sight, separating them. He was about to walk on when a new question made him stop.

‘Will you be leaving tomorrow?’

He nodded, not taking his eyes off the two fair-skinned bodies that had already turned the corner at the end of a poorly lit block, like grotesque mirrors of the possible results of the same womb.

‘Wait another day. Mark my words, the rains are coming.’

‘Rain, here?’

‘Ask people in town if you don’t believe me.’

He didn’t do it. He spoke to no one that evening.

Fifteen minutes later, at a corner table in the general store, he was eating without taking his eyes off the plate of bland lentils. To his disappointment, the blondes were nowhere to be seen. The specimens squawking around him were as far removed from his race as he’d seen in months, and that despite the fact that the mixing of races in Buenos Aires was beginning to reach a level of no return. There was no end of genetic cleansing they could do. He’d said that to the General at one of the many parties to which he had been invited.

‘If you want to do something for your country, ban the mixing of races.’

Everybody laughed, taking his proposals as a joke. But nothing daunted him and there were few who had the necessary courage to ban the mixing of races. Blessed be the faith of thosewho dare to reform the face of the world in pursuit of their own ideal, he thought, but he didn’t dare cite La Rochelle in the presence of the General, who was already raising his glass to welcome the newcomers, instead he murmured, his teeth drowned in champagne: With the pride of the mature races, our powerful obedience accepted the pain of bearing in our blood this invasion of the greatness of the world.

He had for years scribbled his favourite quotations in the margin of his notebooks. That night the faces around him confirmed to him that there were many regions of the world in which they were losing the battle. They did not see the damage that mixing the races was doing to their continent. Sometimes it’s too late to avoid the damage done to heritage, genes, genealogy. They talk about class in schools, never about race… two separate things.

He was in bed before eight o’clock.

The possibility of not seeing the blondes again kept him awake until he reached for one of his notebooks to draw the measurements of their bodies. He recalled them from memory, without a shred of doubt. He could imagine their bone structures, the volume of their organs, their jawbones and the composition of their blood flow. But he would never be able to lay the two out on metal trays to compare them. For a man used to getting what he wanted, the possibility of not seeing them again was intolerable. He had lived in this far corner of the world for almost a decade and he even caught himself thinking in Spanish. He had arrived from Geneva with the clothes on his back and a small bag containing his greatest treasures: three notebooks filled with writing about the last years of study on human experiments and a few blood samples in glass containers. A customs official had asked him what they were.

‘Biological annotations,’ he had answered in German.

‘What kind?’

‘Animal experiments.’

They detained him while they awaited the arrival of the port’s veterinary doctor, to whom he described in great detail his experiments with cows that allowed him, on demand, to produce twin calves. He omitted that in the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut they wanted to produce the systematic birth of twins in women to increase twofold the growth of the race. Nor that in a moment of optimism he had sworn that pregnancy would be reduced to 135 days. His insistence convinced the veterinarian as to the advantages afforded by two identical animals as a privileged field of research which allowed for the reproduction of specific qualities or bodily defects. After years of comparing twin calves, using one of them as a control, he had discovered which attributes and weaknesses they inherited genetically and which ones came from their environment. Argentina was the ideal country to pursue his study, and perhaps he would come to discover the key to multiple births and thus accelerate the proliferation of the bovine race. Taken aback by the superabundance of information, the official, who barely spoke German, allowed him in without even confiscating his samples. The chaos at the port was too large to start worrying about a doctor entering the country with a Red Cross passport.

‘Well, you’ll have fun here,’ an official who came from a German family and who had heard everything said, before stamping the document. ‘I mean, in terms of cows.’

‘Are there a lot?’

‘Millions.’

‘That many?’

‘Can you really make them give birth two at a time?’

‘Everything is possible.’

‘Then we could feed the entire world.’

He smiled and made his way through the throng of recent arrivals. Once he was installed in a hotel room in Palermo, he ceased to talk about his life with the same discreet elegance used by so many of his colleagues who forgot to mention him during the trials… Why bother to mention him, after all, if they thought he was dead? He had undertaken to vanish into thin air without a trace, never giving in to the temptation to lower his guard, to the point of forfeiting for over a decade any contact with his son. The only time he saw him before going into exile on the other side of the ocean, he ordered the intimate circle organising the visit to tell the child it was his Uncle Fritz and not his father who was going to walk home from school with him. Once in Argentina, he never once wrote him or sent a telegram. He knew his survival depended on discipline. After a few months he was lodged in a rented room in a house in Olivos, divorced from any correspondence with the mother of his son, who had refused to leave with him. She was one of the many people in his intimate circle who, upon learning of his successes, called them atrocities.

Free of excess baggage, there was no reason to return.

He was not going to find any other country that would welcome a man like him with more open arms. Within two years he had found employment with a pharmaceutical company, bought a two-storey house in Vicente López, married his brother’s widow, thus duplicating with this union a million-dollar inheritance. He had even gone so far as to list himself in the telephone book under his real name. He had no need to go under a surgeon’s knife or change his name as so many others had.

But the illusion of a new life didn’t last long. At every get-together he was reminded that the bloodhounds were getting closer and closer. He had asked himself hundreds of times how to go on after the defeat. The survivors were hiding out in every corner of the earth, pursued like criminals. He could feel around his neck the noose they had used to hang so many others, hunted down like wild animals, huddling together in the middle of the night, judged and condemned from across the ocean before being massacred. And the worst part was that no one raised a voice to defend them. They were alone.

He swore he was not going to end up like that.

2

The next morning, having flexed his arms 200 times to eliminate the last chemical fibres of the tranquilizer he had taken, he was filling his car at a petrol station a few yards from the desert motorway when he saw the girl from the day before get out of a Citroën filled with suitcases, unaware that her favourite doll (the realistic replica of a six-month-old baby) fell on its head on the pavement as she ran toward the small market. He drew close enough to cover the perfect body of the doll with his shadow. Its mouth was half-open and behind some lips, painted by the sure hand of an artisan, he could see a small red tongue. He bent down to pick it up. He put one hand behind the neck of the doll and the other on its left heel, as he had done with so many others that were breathing. He studied it front and back. It was a baby made of porcelain, with skin that had been polished to give it the softness of a newborn. His clinical eye could discern some imperfections, tiny traces that indicated it had been made by an artisan, although undoubtedly he had used an imported doll as a mould, one similar to the ones he’d seen in the arms of high-born little German girls. An almost imperceptible tick-tock caused him to raise the doll to his left ear… Was it a watch? It took him only a moment to confirm that, yes, it was. It beat inside the porcelain doll, attached to the inside of the chest. The effect was unsettling. The doll had a mechanical heart. He had never before studied one so closely. It was a work of art that was too close to real life.

‘It’s mine.’

He smiled before raising his head. The authority of the voice of children, for someone who knew how to listen, was always mixed with strands of horror. Moreover, this one had tiny traces of the deformed body to which it belonged. Even though it was deeper that he would have expected, it was too nasal, too sharp, too uneven. Standing in front of him with her arms akimbo, Lilith confronted him with all four feet of her height. He was still down on his heels, but he was kind enough to bend his back a few inches so he wouldn’t be towering over her. He was used to weighing and measuring a body just by looking at it. She was probably eight years old, weighed sixty-five pounds, was well fed and had perfect teeth. Her clothes were old but clean and her skin, fingernails and hair showed no vitamin deficiencies.

‘Where’s she from?’

‘My baby?’

‘Where did you buy her?’

‘We didn’t buy her. My father made it.’

‘Your father makes dolls?

‘Sometimes.’

‘What’s her name?’

The stranger immediately made Lilith feel like she trusted him. She was not the first to be enchanted by his voice. She smiled at the way he looked fascinated at her doll.

‘Herlitzka.’

‘Her…?’

‘…litzka.’

‘Is it Russian?’

‘She’s female.’

‘I mean the name.’

‘No, she’s Argentine. Just like me.’

‘Aha,’ he said with a German accent.

‘Can I have her back?’

‘Of course. She’s yours.’

With considerable delicacy, as though handling a newborn, the German set the doll in the girl’s arms.

‘There’s a clock inside her.’

‘A heart.’

‘When does it stop beating?’

‘Not for a while.’

José nodded, keeping in check his desire to pursue the issue.

‘Is she your daughter?’

Lilith hesitated a moment before nodding yes, as if deciding it then and there.

‘Do you have any…?’

‘Children?’

‘Isn’t that what we’re talking about?’

She began to treat him like an idiot, even though she was delighted to explain her life to him. She had forgotten her mother’s order not to separate from her brother.

‘I shouldn’t be talking to you.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m not supposed to talk to strangers,’ she said and smiled with the pearly sweetness of a nymph.

‘Then we should say goodbye.’

The child nodded in agreement but didn’t budge an inch. On the contrary, she slowly studied him, smiling like an accomplice.

‘Momma says that it’s enough for her to tell me not to do something for me to do it.’

‘Is she right?’

‘Mostly.’

‘What part isn’t true?’

‘There’re things I’d do anyway, even if I wasn’t supposed to.’

‘Would you be talking to me even if you weren’t supposed to?’

‘I think so.’

‘But you’re not sure…’

‘Yes. I’m sure.’

She showed no fear of pauses and silences. She didn’t even look away when the stranger smiled at her, looking her up and down. As if origins contained the key to everything, he repeated:

‘How did you come up with that name?’

‘It was my grandmother’s favourite name. They wanted to call me Herlitzka, but my father said no.’

‘And so they called you Lilly…’

‘It’s Lilith, with a th,’ the small child said, delighted to contradict him. ‘It means night monster.’

It means a lot more than that, the German thought.

God of darkness, libidinous goddess possessed by melancholy, transgression and desire… But there was no time to explain to her the power of her name. Their encounter could be interrupted at any moment and the fact that it was so ephemeral is what made it all the more enchanting. It had just struck him why her deformity was so upsetting: it was almost imperceptible, but marked her body inescapably. Her arms and legs were barely a few inches longer than normal. Her head was about an inch too big in circumference. Her eyes, mouth and ears suffered from the same delightful phenomenon, a mixture of nymph and goblin. The German held back the impulse to reach out and feel the shape of her head.

‘Anyway, I’m too old to play with dolls.’

‘Too old?’

‘How old do you think I am?’

‘Nine,’ he lied, tacking an extra year on.

‘I’m twelve.’

‘Sorry about that.’

‘That’s OK. I’m used to it.’

‘To what?’

‘Being a lot older than people think.’

Holding his gaze, Lilith stretched her hand out toward his teeth, as if wanting to touch them. With a gesture of immodest indecency she crossed the threshold of his lips and rested the tip of her index finger on the tiny gap he had between his two front teeth.

‘You have a gap between your teeth.’

‘I know.’

‘See? You’re not perfect either.’

Many people said that obvious space between his top front teeth was the only imperfection he tolerated, his personal trademark. But no one had ever dared to mention it, much less to touch it. None of the women who had come close to his mouth had, either out of their own will or because they had been forced to, touched that gap with their tongues. Lilith smiled with a demented shine in her eyes (even the colour of her iris was unique, a mixture of grey and yellow) and he suddenly saw in them something old. It made him think she was more than twelve years old. She seemed aware of sticking her finger in the wolf’s mouth. She rubbed the wet tip of her index finger against her thumb, covering it with the saliva of the stranger. Her act, far from annoying him, excited him in an unexpected way, with more intensity than the last sexual encounters he’d had, with a couple of employees at the pharmaceutical plant where he worked.

‘Can you whistle through your teeth?’

‘Whistle?’

He liked the sound of the word, but he didn’t understand its meaning until Lilith puckered her lips and whistled. Despite the number of years he’d spent in Argentina, his vocabulary was still small and he had unexpected gaps. Like this one, one of his favourite hobbies, whistling, whose Spanish translation he had not yet learned.

‘Ah… pfeifen,’ he said and then whistled.

Obeying the call, a humid wind suddenly enveloped them, fluttering the skirt of Lilith’s flowery dress with the first deformed notes. The man, by contrast, had nothing that could be moved by the wind. Everything about him was stuck to his body, slicked back and neat. Or that’s what he thought, until he saw the directness with which Lilith rested a hand on her legs to keep the dress from dancing about and with the other brushed back a lock of hair that covered her eye, while she whistled through a narrow hole between two baby teeth. It wasn’t the first time that a monstrous specimen had excited him in this way. Without thinking he responded to her whistling with a second melody that interwove with Lilith’s, at first softly and then stronger and stronger and it drowned hers out.

There’s music to be found even in the most unexpected places, he thought.

(And even his cynicism was by now a stammer.)

‘Let’s go, Lilith!’

Her brother’s shout interrupted everything, past, present and future. José would have shot him on the spot if he’d had a gun.

‘Lilith!’

He continued to whistle until the boy swooped down on his sister to grab her by the arm. But he had his hands full of shopping bags and no arms to force his orders. Totally captivated by him, Lilith joined in the last flourish of his tune, which ended on a sustained note. She bowed to him, resting the tip of her left foot on the tarmac, behind the right one, and at the same time she bowed her head and the doll’s in his direction.

‘Are you deaf or something?’ her brother shook her. ‘Get going.’

Deaf, no, he thought, but she has no ears for you.

As though she could hear the stranger who had hypnotized her, Lilith giggled in a way that sealed their complicity.

‘That’s Tomás, my prison guard,’ she said pointing to her brother.

‘Get going.’

‘It was a pleasure to meet you Lili. My name’s José.’

Only then did he stand up, but not without first stopping at the level of her left ear.

‘And I can whistle a lot better than that,’ he whispered. ‘Some day I’ll show you.’

Lilith hugged Herlitzka to her chest and shrugged her shoulders, biting her lip to keep from smiling. The tickle of the stranger’s words caressed her ear and made its way in, descending through her throat down to between her legs. Her brother gave her a shove in the direction of the car.

‘March.’

‘Are you heading south?’ he asked, in no hurry for them to leave.

‘As far as Bariloche.’

‘Could we go in convoy? They tell me the route through the desert is…’

‘The route of death,’ the boy interrupted him, smiling, as if it were a question of adventure and not a danger. ‘Some 200 miles of nothing. Ask my father.’

He deposited a couple of bags in his sister’s arms and pulled her by the hand toward the car. Only then did the German spot their father, whom he had taken for a petrol station employee. He was a homo syriacus with a round head, brachycephalic with a Jewish nose, a short body and stocky. He was a bit overweight, normal stature, with a bald spot in the middle of his head. Sweat made his shirt stick to his body. The mother waited in the passenger seat, fanning herself. She was four months pregnant. She was as common as her husband, but she was clearly a homo arabicus, dolichocephalic, with a longish head. José’s surprise came to a head when he discovered a young male about five years old as perfect as his older brother, playing with an English mastiff in the back seat. The two seemed to have eluded genealogical mandates: they were homo europeans, tall and thin, with whiter skin and clearer eyes than their parents. It wasn’t the first time he had observed the same phenomenon: the genetics of two mediocre individuals could combine to bring perfect specimens into the world. The combination irritated him because it defied his theories of cleansing. For more than a decade, in each one of the 3,000 twins who passed through his hands, he had attempted to demonstrate the complete and reliable classification of human genetics, along with the dimension of the damage wrought by unfavourable genetics.

‘Dad, the gentleman wants to travel with us.’

‘In my own car,’ José hastened to add, pointing to a Chevrolet parked a few feet away. ‘Following you, if it’s no bother…’

The father took note of the neat appearance of the stranger and wiped the palm of his hands on his trousers. He’d been travelling this route for years and he’d never seen so much elegance in the middle of so much dust. He’d met foreigners, of course, poor guys intent on hiding their poverty and rich ones who pretended to be nobodies. They rarely travelled alone.

‘Foreigners are always afraid of the route. But people still stop. If they see a car pulled over, they’ll stop. Don’t worry. And now that they’re paving it, it will be better yet. You’ll see the difference with the stretch that’s still dirt.’

‘Is there a lot that’s still unpaved?’

‘More than half.’

‘That much?’

‘Well, progress comes… but it comes slow. The important thing is not to be on it at night. If we leave now we’ll arrive at dusk. Do you prefer to go in front or behind?’

‘Behind, please.’

‘Taking up the rear,’ the fat man said, a model of friendliness.

José didn’t drop his smile during the entire exchange. He feigned calm, but he would have begged if he’d had to. He could hardly recognise himself, because he hadn’t discovered what a coward he was until after he stopped giving orders. They shook hands, each holding the other’s gaze, without realising that it was all written there in the flesh that covered their bones: the scavenger-like firmness of a man on the run and the squishy confidence of a family man incapable even of killing the cockroaches that he often discovered in the corners of his house.

‘We’d better get going.’

Eva’s voice sounded strong and clear from inside the car. José leaned over a few inches to offer her his hand. That’s when he saw the determination in the eyes of the woman, who was still quite young.

‘My pleasure… Your children are beautiful.’

Eva smiled back wordlessly, as though she had no time for such pleasantries. She looked toward the sky, which was quickly clouding over.

‘We’d better get going… Did you buy supplies?’

José looked at her startled. Eva had said the last sentence in perfect German, with no trace of a foreign accent. He thought for a moment he’d imagined it.

‘I had breakfast an hour ago,’ he said.

‘Nevertheless, my advice is that you do.’

But it was true: they were speaking the same language. Eva’s nervousness was not for the climate, but for the turns of destiny that had in an instant transported her back to her childhood home.

‘How is it that you speak –’

‘I went to a German school,’ she cut him off.

‘In Buenos Aires?’

‘Bariloche.’

Like a bad joke, the harsh realities of life intruded on the memories of her childhood, because Primo Capraro had been much more than a school.

3

When he was advised to leave Buenos Aires immediately, they had promised him at the same time that the south of Argentina was as close as he could get to German Switzerland. They spoke to him of trees, lakes and snow-covered mountains. You people were not the only ones who did a good job of cleansing