The Informers (36 page)

The following are the letters I transcribed:

Fusa, August 6, 1944

Son,

Today the ones who are being deported have left the hotel. Heinrich Stock, Heider and Max Focke. Stock was a propagandist, one of the hard-liners, that is what everyone said.

Last Sunday their families came as usual and everything was just like always, and on Tuesday the order arrived and today they took them. They are going to travel to Buenaventura and from there board a ship to the USA. They say that from the USA some are going to Germany and some will stay in other camps.

The only thing I do not want is to return to Germany. The war is already lost.

Senores censors, this is not a code.

It seems they are going to bring skittles. But every day we hear something different.

They said they were going to give us more than four beers a day.

Here the people have a reason to get out. What am I going to get out for?

Papa

Fusagasuga, June 25, 1944

My dear son,

Now it is five o'clock and we're all in the dining room writing our letters. Sundays are the most terrible days for me. The mass does not help me at all, just the opposite, making me think how far away God is from me. I feel confused. Which is my religion and which is my country? These are the two things a person can ask for and I do not know who I can ask for anything.

This is what is called total ABANDONMENT.

All day I speak in my language with people from my land but we are in another land. Forgive me if this seems silly to you. On Sundays I generally write silliness. On weekdays we are in the coffee plantations and we tend the gardens but on Sundays we do not. The agricultural work distracts us but on Sundays there is too much free time. Today I sat out on the terrace and watched the cars arriving from Bogota with families. Everyone sat by the pool with their families. Has ours failed forever? I don't even want to think that. Who am I without you two? Nobody. To keep myself entertained, I started thinking about how many of those people I had sold windows to. Twenty-three. Kraus still owes me, incredible. I have lost the ability to sleep. I don't want to complain too much but that's how it is. Tomorrow the bell will ring at six and I know now that I will have been awake for two hours by then. I sleep for four hours at best. From nine-thirty we cannot make noise and those hours of silence and darkness are the worst. Tell me how things are at home. Tell me if you have had news of your mother and do not lie to me about this. Please, do not abandon me as well.

Your papa,

Konrad

Fusagasuga, May 26, 1944

Dear son,

Your mama will come back sooner or later. I have taken a little while to write to you because I did not want to tell you lies. One is too optimistic in moments of emotion and your letter left me floored, I will not deny it. I could be destroyed but I am not. Do you know why? Because later when I calmed down I was thinking what was in truth most probable and I arrived at this conclusion. Your mama is going to come back because we are a family. I do not have the slightest doubt and I do not make mistakes when it comes to judging someone. Have patience that everything will come in due time with God's help.

You tell me that she went through terrible days. I have also had some terrible days because it is not easy to be separated. Of course what she did is an act of egotism and that is rare in her, always such a generous person. That is why I am sure that she will reconsider. There is nothing that time cannot fix and one day we will be together again, all three of us. I give you my word.

Your papa who loves you,

Konrad

Hotel Sabaneta, April 21, 1944

My dear and adored Marguerite,

I would like you to come and live in Fusa. Here in the hotel there are people who have their families in Fusa and they can go and see them every day and even stay and sleep with them. When they go they are escorted by a policeman and also when they come back. But they sleep with their wives and can see their children. The houses in Fusa are very expensive because now everyone wants a house in Fusa and there are people here with lots of money. But if we make an effort we can find a cheap little place for you to live. Enrique can stay in Bogota. How good it would be to sleep next to you again. I know we do not have money but something could be done, as they say hope is the last thing to die.

Here one lives without serious problems so do not worry about me. There is not much to do because it is forbidden to have a radio. They do not even let us listen to music and for me listening to music would help a little because I could be distracted. One of the employees in the hotel likes me and he is the one who helps me to write my letters. Let us see if I can ask him for a radio or if he will let me go in his room to listen to music for a while.

I love you always.

Yours,

Konrad

Hotel Sabaneta, Fusagasuga, April 9, 1944

My adored Marguerite,

You never like me to write to you in German and now you are in luck because in this place German is forbidden for correspondence. All letters must be in Spanish and have to pass through a horrible censorship. We submit them open and a person in charge reads them and asks for explanations. They will be looking for spies. But of course here we are all spies, simply for having surnames that they cannot pronounce. They gave us medical examinations as if we had contagious diseases. Being German is a contagious disease. We can still speak it. At least that is not forbidden.

There was a Catholic mass last week but I only found out today. It was Father Baumann. If they say masses here maybe it will not all be so bad, and anyway there is only one God. Father Baumann reminded me very much of Gabriel. I told Gabriel that if he wanted he could come and practice here instead of going always to the Gutermans. It would break the tedium for me. And he could hear Father Baumann because Gabriel is Catholic. Remind him, please. But do not insist if he does not want to.

Well, I hope you have not stopped looking for help. Someone has to understand that all this is a mistake and that I have done nothing wrong. This is how this country pays me back for loving it as I have loved it. Colombia is the most ungrateful country that God has placed on the face of the earth. And I am not the only one to say so. At meals this is the topic of conversation. What happens is that here there are wolves in sheep's clothing and that is the problem for those of us who have ended up here. That the others know I am not like them. My love, the important thing is that you believe me. The rest does not matter. What Enrique thinks matters very little if you believe me.

I will write to you as much as they allow here and hope I do not bore you.

Yours,

Konrad

When the last letter in the archive, the first that Konrad Deresser wrote from the Hotel Sabaneta, was transcribed into my notebook, I took a couple of minutes to recover from the blow of everydayness: the letters had been the best testimony of those ordinary days, unbearably ordinary, that in an ordinary city had been spent in an extraordinary time and place; the letters had been, for that very reason, the best testimony of the error committed by my father. This alone had forced me to steal them; as if that weren't enough, there was also this paragraph in the middle, dropped in there, between two pathetic appeals destined for a Margarita who perhaps already, at that moment, had ceased to be with her husband, that neutral paragraph like the net on a tennis court, that mentioned my father's name (which was enough to make it unique and valuable) and to me seemed to contain impossible images.
Practice
in that paragraph was a long and malleable verb, and a word made of burned rubber. I spent a while thinking about
The Mastersingers of Nuremberg
, and I put the anecdote of the radio station together with the lost cover I'd found at my father's apartment. Suddenly my father had a violin pressed against his neck, and he was practicing; or rather, he received singing lessons from old Konrad or learned vocal tricks to control his diaphragm better, because old Konrad knew about things like that. I imagined my father getting on buses or into other people's cars with his violin case hanging from his shoulder, and I tried to speculate about the moment he decided to give the instrument up. I managed to think all those things before I sensed that the paragraph did not refer to the learning of instruments or breath control but of the German language.

Was that possible? My father learning German from such a young age? My head began to look for signs in the life of the Gabriel Santoro I had known, but it was late, and investigative work in the mental archives is exhausting and not always reliable. It would be better to turn to my current informer, Enrique Deresser, although that would have to wait till the next day.

I put my notebook back in the glove compartment. Before getting out of the car, I looked at all the corners of the street, making sure Sergio was nowhere to be seen. I walked back to the building as if someone were following me, and toward five, still dressed, I managed to get to sleep for a couple of hours without remembering what I'd dreamed. But maybe I dreamed of my father speaking German.

I woke up to the gurgling of a coffeemaker. I mustn't have opened my eyes straightaway, because later, when I finally managed it, Enrique Deresser was standing in front of me, asking to be taken out for a walk like a dog with a leash in its mouth; he didn't have a leash in his mouth, but a cup of coffee in his hand, and he didn't want to go for a walk, but to the place where, according to the Highways Authority reports, a friend from his youth had died in an accident. His collection of letters was no longer beside the sofa, where I had left it the night before. It was already put away, it was in a safe place now, it had been put out of reach of thieves. Enrique handed me the hot cup.

"OK, I'll wait for you downstairs," he said. "I'm going to get some
bunuelos
. If you want I'll get you some, too."

"Bunuelos?"

"To eat on the way. So we don't waste time having breakfast."

And that's how it went, of course: Enrique wasn't prepared to put the business off a second longer than necessary. With the steering wheel in my left hand and holding a ball of hot dough between the fingers of my right, I followed his directions and found myself, after going up some steep, urban, unevenly paved streets (concrete squares bordered with lines of tar), leaving the city and going up into the mountains. My passenger's knees banged against the glove compartment: I hadn't realized Enrique was so tall, or his legs so long, until that moment, but didn't say anything for fear of provoking a conversation that might somehow lead him to open the glove compartment and find my notebook and leaf through it out of curiosity and come across the words I'd stolen from him and his family. But that didn't seem probable: Enrique was concentrating on other things, his gaze fixed on the trucks we passed and on the curves of the road, that ribbon of dark, sinuous cement that became unpredictable a few meters in front of the car and disappeared from sight in the rearview mirror. At one point, Enrique raised his index finger and tapped the windshield.