My father died reminding me of my mother’s last wish. He had repeated it to me many, many times, but hearing it then, with his death rattle filling the increasingly longer silences that he made between words, brought tears to my eyes. “Don’t forget to be happy.”
I would have liked to say goodbye to Alma in a different way. Not on the station platform talking about the plants in the garden and Rufus’s hairs. But that is another of the disadvantages of living subject to fate. I left Erika without saying a word. I suppose words were no longer necessary. After so many fights, the last straw — to say it without all the resentment I feel when I recall it — was the exhibition of degenerate art in Munich, which Erika had to write an article about for one of the propaganda magazines she was a contributor to. It would have been more prudent not to go with her, but my desire to lay eyes on — perhaps for the last time — so many works that had been removed from the museums was stronger than my good sense. During the visit through the small, poorly-lit halls of the Archeological Institute, with the paintings crowded together on top of a sackcloth backdrop, Erika kept making insulting comments about what she was seeing. The colors, the figures, the perspective, the motifs. . Nothing escaped her scorn. When, tired of listening to her, I told her that maybe she was taking it too far, all she said was “If they don’t know how to paint, to hell with them.” Perhaps because, deep down, I had trusted that someday she would eventually understand that the ideas she was defending were a dead-end street, I was more disappointed than ever that she could be present at the start of a tabula rasa like that one without flinching. I only noticed a flash of confusion when, in one of the rooms, beneath an inscription that read “Nature seen by sick minds,” she found one of my paintings surrounded by landscapes by Kirchner, Schmidt-Rottluff, and Nagel. Town by the River was the title. Erika looked at me and, without saying a word, continued walking. I didn’t follow her. I had had enough. I turned around and walked back towards the street with my heart in my throat. I waited for her at the Hofgarten for more than an hour. There are few times in my life when I’ve felt so alone. Sitting on a bench in the square, my only company the crows watching me from the branches of the lindens, I realized, as Alma did some years later, that I only had one way out.
That same day, I went back to Berlin to say goodbye to Konrad, gather up the few things I could fit into my car, and leave Germany. That was no longer my home. And I’ve never seen Erika or Konrad again. I don’t know what would have happened if they hadn’t died in the 1945 bombings. Perhaps, without the atmosphere of fanaticism that ended up pushing us apart, we could have started over. I don’t know. What I still haven’t processed is not taking Konrad with me. I suppose that Erika, with her contacts, wouldn’t have let me get very far. Nevertheless, I should have made the attempt.
But that’s the problem with decisions. It’s difficult to go over them and not have any regrets. Of all my decisions, at least those that’ve had some lasting effect, the only one I have no qualms about is not giving in to Hofer’s extortion. That morning, once the last watercolor was dry, I took down the Cranach and filled the wall with the sixty-eight paintings on the list. There were three rows of them. I don’t know if that moment is more potent than the rest, but reliving it helps me to calm the guilt I feel over everything I could have done, all the wrong turns, all the unsaid words.
When I think back on it, I’m still surprised that, after everything that happened, what best represents the moment that gives meaning to my life, the center where all the lines of the star’s vertices come together, is a sound. Not a color, not a word, not a person. A sound. That of the studio door closing behind me, with the Cranach, wrapped in newspaper, under my arm. Yes, in the end, that’s the answer.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to all the people who, in one way or another, made this book possible:
Quim Armengol, Silvia Bastos, Maru Boquet, Eugènia Broggi, Lula Bullich,Àngel Burgas, Pau Centellas, Javier Cisneros, Xavier Cortés, José Antonio de Juan, Eduard Márquez, Jordi Márquez, Ramón Minguillón, Bernat Puigtobella, Mercè Pujadas, Andreu Rossinyol and Ramon Solsona, for their comments and suggestions.
Silvia Schmid, for answering so many questions.
Ángel Seral, for Brandes’ artistic trajectory.
Isabel Balaguer, for an afternoon of watercolors.
Gabriele Saure, for the trees in the Hofgarten.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eduard Márquezlives in Barcelona. He published two books of poetry in Spanish before writingZugzwang, his first work in Catalan. He has continued writing in Catalan, publishing another collection of short fiction, fifteen children’s books, and four novels. His work has been translated into German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Turkish.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
Mara Faye Lethem is a writer and literary translator from the Catalan and the Spanish.Authors she has translated include Jaume Cabré, David Trueba,Albert Sánchez Piñol, Javier Calvo,Toni Sala, Patricio Pron, Juan Marsé, Rodrigo Fresán and Pola Oloixarac. Her translations have appeared in publications such as Granta, The Paris Review and McSweeney’s.