The Kindly Ones

SARABANDE

Why was everything so white? The steppe hadn’t been so white. I was lying in an expanse of white. Maybe it had snowed, maybe I was resting there like a fallen soldier, a battle flag lying in the snow. But I wasn’t cold. Actually, it was hard to say, I felt completely detached from my body. From far away, I tried to identify a concrete sensation: in my mouth, a taste of mud. But that mouth was floating, without even a jaw to support it. And my chest, it seemed crushed beneath tons of stone; I looked for them, but perceiving them proved impossible. Well, I said to myself, here I am really scattered. Oh my poor body. I wanted to huddle over it, the way you huddle over a beloved child, at night, in the cold.

In these endless white landscapes, a ball of fire was spinning, stabbing my gaze. But strangely its flames gave no heat to the whiteness. Impossible to stare at it, impossible to turn away from it too, it followed me with its displeasing presence. Panic overwhelmed me; and if I never found my feet again, how would I master it? Oh, this was all so difficult. How much time did I spend like this? I couldn’t say, a fetal lifetime at least. It gave me time to observe things, and that’s how I slowly became aware that all this white wasn’t uniform; there were gradations—none of them could have been labeled even pale gray, really, yet there were variations all the same; to describe them, one would need a new vocabulary, as subtle and precise as that of the Inuit to describe different kinds of ice. There must also have been a question of texture; but my sight seemed as unresponsive, on this point, as my inert fingers. Distant rumblings reached me. I resolved to cling to detail, a discontinuity of the white, until it revealed itself to me. I devoted at least another century or two to this immense effort, but finally I understood what it was all about: it was a right angle. Come, another effort. By extending this angle, I ended up discovering another one, then yet another one; so, eureka, it was a frame, now it went faster, I discovered other frames, but all these frames were white, and outside of the frames everything was white, and inside the frames too: faint hope, I despaired, of getting to the bottom of this anytime soon. Perhaps I should proceed by hypotheses? Might it be modern art? But these regular frames were sometimes confused with other forms, also white but fluid, soft. Lord, what a labor of interpretation, what endless work. But my obstinacy kept giving me new results: the white surface that extended to the distance was in fact streaked, undulating, the steppe perhaps seen from a plane (but not from a dirigible; that didn’t have the same appearance). What a success! I was more than a little proud of myself. Another final effort, it seemed to me, and I’d come to the end of these mysteries. But an unforeseen catastrophe abruptly put an end to my research: the ball of fire died, and I was plunged into darkness, a thick, asphyxiating blackness. Fighting was pointless; I shouted, but no sound came out of my crushed lungs. I knew I wasn’t dead, since death itself couldn’t be so black; it was much worse than death, a cesspit, a turgid bog; and eternity seemed only an instant compared to the time I spent there.

Finally, my sentence was repealed: slowly, the endless blackness of the world lifted. And with the magical return of the light, I saw things more clearly; then, as to a new Adam, the ability to name things was given back to me (or maybe just given): the wall, the window, the milky sky behind the glass. I contemplated this extraordinary spectacle with wonder; then I itemized everything my gaze could find: the door, the doorknob, the weak lightbulb under its shade, the foot of the bed, the sheet, veined hands, mine no doubt. The door opened and a woman appeared, dressed in white; but with her a color burst into this world, a red shape, bright as blood on snow, and it distressed me beyond all proportion, and I burst into tears. “Why are you crying?” she said in a melodious voice, and her pale, cool fingers caressed my cheek. Little by little I grew calm. She said something else, which I didn’t make out; I felt her handling my body; terrified, I closed my eyes, and that finally gave me some kind of power over this blinding white. Later on, an older man came in, with white hair: “Ah, so you’ve woken up!” he exclaimed cheerfully. Why was he saying that? I had lain awake for an eternity, I had forgotten the very name of sleep. But maybe we weren’t thinking of the same thing. He sat down next to me, pulled up my eyelid without ceremony, stuck a light in my eye: “Very good, very good,” he repeated, satisfied with his cruel trick. Finally he too left.

It took a little more time for me to connect these fragmentary impressions and to understand that I had fallen into the hands of representatives of the medical profession. I had to be patient and learn to let myself be manhandled: not only did women, the nurses, take unheard-of liberties with my body, but doctors, solemn, serious men with paternal voices, entered at any moment, surrounded by a horde of young people, all wearing lab coats; lifting me up shamelessly, they moved my head and discoursed about my case, as if I were a mannequin. I found it all extremely disagreeable, but I couldn’t protest: the articulation of sounds, like my other faculties, still failed me. But the day when I was finally able distinctly to call one of these gentlemen a swine, he didn’t get angry; on the contrary, he smiled and applauded: “Bravo, bravo.” Encouraged, I grew bolder and went on during their next visits: “Piece of filth, bastard, stinker, Jew, asshole.” The doctors gravely shook their heads, the young people took notes on clipboards; finally, a nurse scolded me: “You could be a little more polite, really.”—“Yes, that’s true, you’re right. Should I call you meine Dame?” She waved a pretty ringless hand in front of my eyes: “Mein Fräulein,” she replied lightly, and slipped away. For a young woman, this nurse had a firm, skillful grip: when I had to relieve myself, she turned me over, helped me, then wiped me clean with a thoughtful efficiency, her gestures sure and pleasant, free of all disgust, like those of a mother cleaning her child; as if she, still a virgin perhaps, had done this all her life. I probably took pleasure in it, and delighted in asking her for this service. She or others also fed me, slipping spoonfuls of broth into my lips; I would have preferred a rare steak, but didn’t dare ask, it wasn’t a hotel, after all, but, I had finally understood, a hospital: and to be a patient means precisely what it says.

Thus, clearly, I had had some sort of health problem, in circumstances that still escaped me; and judging from the freshness of the sheets and the calm and cleanliness of the premises, I must no longer be in Stalingrad; or else things had changed quite a bit. And indeed, I no longer was in Stalingrad but, as I finally learned, in Hohenlychen, north of Berlin, at the German Red Cross hospital. How I had gotten there, no one could tell me; I had been delivered in a van, they had been told to look after me, they didn’t ask any questions, they looked after me, and as for me, I didn’t have to ask any questions, either: I had to get back on my feet again.

One day, there was a commotion: the door opened, my little room filled with people, most of them, this time, not in white but in black. I recognized the shortest of them after some effort, my memory was slowly coming back to me: he was the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler. He was surrounded by other SS officers; next to him stood a giant whom I didn’t know, with a rough-hewn, horselike face slashed with scars. Himmler planted himself next to me and gave a brief speech with his nasal, professorial voice; on the other side of the bed, men were photographing and filming the scene. I didn’t understand much of what the Reichsführer said: isolated phrases bubbled to the surface of his words, heroic officer, honor of the SS, lucid reports, courageous, but they certainly didn’t form a narration in which I could recognize myself, I had trouble applying these words to myself; and yet the meaning of the scene was clear, I was indeed the person being discussed, it was because of me that all these officers and these gleaming dignitaries were gathered in this tiny room. In the crowd, in back, I recognized Thomas; he made a friendly gesture toward me, but alas I couldn’t speak to him. His speech over, the Reichsführer turned to an officer in round, thick glasses with black rims, who eagerly handed him something; then he leaned toward me, and with an increasing panic I saw his pincenez, his grotesque moustache, his fat, short, dirty-nailed fingers approach; he wanted to put something on my chest, I saw a pin, I was terrified at the thought of it pricking me; then his face descended even lower, he was paying no attention whatsoever to my anguish, his verbena-smelling breath was stifling me, and he deposited a wet kiss on my face. He straightened himself and launched his arm into the air, bellowing; the entire audience imitated him, and my bed was surrounded with a forest of raised arms, black, white, brown; timidly, so as not to be singled out, I too raised my arm; that had its effect, since everyone turned around and hurried to the door; the crowd quickly flowed out, and I was left alone, exhausted, incapable of removing this curious cold thing that was weighing on my chest.

I could now take a few steps, if someone supported me; this was useful, since it allowed me to go to the bathroom. My body, if I concentrated, began again to obey my orders, fractious at first, then with more docility; only my left hand continued to hold itself apart from the general entente; I could move the fingers, but they would under no conditions agree to close, to form a fist. In a mirror, I looked for the first time at my face: to tell the truth, I didn’t recognize anything in it, I didn’t see how this mosaic of such diverse features held together, and the more I considered them, the more foreign they became. The white bands wrapped around my skull at least prevented it from bursting open, that was already something and even a considerable something, but it didn’t help my speculations make any progress; this face looked like a collection of pieces that fit together well enough but came from different puzzles. Finally, a doctor came to tell me that I was going to leave: I was healed, he explained, they couldn’t do anything more for me, I was going to be sent elsewhere to regain my strength. Healed! What a surprising word, I didn’t even know I had been hurt. In fact, a bullet had gone through my head. By a chance less rare than people think, they patiently explained to me, I not only had survived, but I wouldn’t suffer any after-effects; the stiffness of my left hand, a slight neurological difficulty, would persist a little while longer, but that too would go away. This precise scientific information filled me with astonishment: so, these unusual and mysterious sensations had a cause, an explainable and rational one; but even with an effort, I couldn’t manage to connect the sensations to this explanation, it seemed hollow to me, contrived; if this was really Reason, then I too, like Luther, would have called it Hure, a whore; and in fact, obeying the calm, patient orders of the doctors, Reason raised its skirt for me, revealing that there was nothing beneath. I could have said the same thing about it as about my poor head: a hole is a hole is a hole. The idea that a hole could also be a whole would never have occurred to me. Once the bandages were removed, I could see for myself that there was almost nothing there: on my forehead, a tiny round scar, just above my right eye; in back of the skull, scarcely visible, they assured me, a swelling; between the two, my reemerging hair was already hiding the traces of the operation I had undergone. But if these doctors so sure of their science were to be believed, a hole went right through my head, a narrow circular corridor, a fabulous, closed shaft, inaccessible to thought, and if that were true, then nothing was the same again, how could it have been? My thinking about the world now had to reorganize itself around this hole. But the only concrete thing I could say was: I have awakened, and nothing will ever be the same again. As I was thinking about this impressive question, they came to fetch me and put me on a stretcher in a hospital vehicle; one of the nurses had kindly slipped into my pocket the case with my medal, the one the Reichsführer had given me. They took me to Pomerania, on the island of Usedom near Swinemünde; there, by the sea, was a rest home belonging to the SS, a beautiful, spacious house; my room, full of light, looked out onto the sea, and during the day, pushed in a wheelchair by a nurse, I could place myself in front of a large bay window and contemplate the heavy, gray waters of the Baltic, the shrill play of the seagulls, the cold, wet sand of the pebble-strewn beach. The hallways and common rooms were regularly cleaned with carbolic acid; I liked this bitter, ambiguous smell, which reminded me harshly of the demeaning joys of my adolescence; the long hands, so translucent they were nearly blue, of the nurses, blond, delicate Frisian girls, also smelled of carbolic acid, and the convalescents, among themselves, called them the Carbolic Babes. These smells and strong sensations gave me erections, astonishingly detached from myself; the nurse who washed me smiled at them and sponged them with the same indifference as the rest of my body; sometimes they lasted, with a resigned patience; I would have been quite incapable of relieving myself. The very fact of day had become a mad, unexpected, undecipherable thing to me; a body that was still far too complex for me, I had to take things little by little.

I liked the well-regulated life on this beautiful, bare, cold island, all grays, yellows, and pale blues; there were just enough sharp edges to cling to there, to keep from being carried away by the wind, but not too many, so you didn’t risk getting scraped. Thomas came to see me; he brought me gifts, a bottle of French Cognac and a fine leather-bound edition of Nietzsche; but I wasn’t allowed to drink, and I would have been quite incapable of reading: all meaning fled, and the alphabet mocked me. I thanked him and tucked away his gifts in a chest of drawers. The insignia on the collar of his handsome black uniform now bore, over the four diamonds embroidered in silver thread, two bars, and a chevron adorned the center of his epaulettes: he had been promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer, and I too, he informed me, had been promoted, the Reichsführer had explained it to me when I received my medal, but I hadn’t remembered this detail. I was now a German hero, the Schwarzes Korps had published an article about me; my decoration, which I had never looked at, was the Iron Cross, first class (at the same time I had also received the second class, retroactively). I had no idea what I could have done to deserve this, but Thomas, happy and voluble, was already bubbling over with information and gossip: Schellenberg had finally taken Jost’s place at the head of Amt VI, Best had gotten himself kicked out of France by the Wehrmacht, but the Führer had appointed him plenipotentiary to Denmark; and the Reichsführer had finally made up his mind to appoint a replacement for Heydrich, Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner, the big scarred ogre I had seen standing beside him in my room. The name meant almost nothing to me, I knew he had been HSSPF-Danube and that he was generally thought of as an insignificant man; Thomas seemed delighted with the choice, Kaltenbrunner was almost “a neighbor,” spoke the same dialect as he did, and had already invited him to dinner. Thomas himself had been appointed Deputy Gruppenleiter of IV A, under Panzinger, Müller’s deputy. These details to tell the truth did not arouse much interest in me, but I had learned to be polite, and I congratulated him, since he seemed very pleased, both with his lot and with his person. He humorously told me about the grandiose funeral of the Sixth Army; officially, everyone, from Paulus to the lowest Gefreiter, had resisted to the death; in fact, only one general, Hartmann, had been killed under fire, and only one (Stempel) had chosen suicide; the twenty-two others, including Paulus, had ended up in Soviet hands. “They’re going to turn them inside out like gloves,” Thomas said lightly. “You’ll see.” For three days, all the radios of the Reich had suspended their broadcasts to play funeral music. “The worst was Bruckner. The Seventh. Nonstop. Impossible to escape it. I thought I’d go mad.” He also told me, but almost in passing, how I had gotten there: I listened to his story attentively, and so I can report it, but even less than the rest, I could connect it with nothing; it remained a story, a truthful one no doubt, but a story all the same, scarcely more than a series of phrases that fit together according to a mysterious and arbitrary order, ruled by a logic that had little to do with the one that allowed me, here and now, to breathe the salty air of the Baltic, to feel the wind on my face when they took me out, to bring spoonfuls of soup from the bowl to my mouth, then to open my anus when the time came to evacuate the waste. According to this story, which I am not altering in any way, I had walked away from Thomas and the others, toward the Russian lines and an exposed zone, without paying the slightest attention to their shouts; before they could catch up to me, there was a gunshot, just one, that had knocked me to the ground. Ivan had courageously broken cover to pull my body to safety, he too had been shot at, but the bullet had gone through his sleeve without touching him. As for me—and here Thomas’s version confirmed the explanations of the doctor in Hohenlychen—the shot had hit me in the head; but, to the surprise of those pressed around me, I was still breathing. They had carried me to a first-aid station; there, the doctor declared he couldn’t do anything, but since I persisted in breathing, he sent me to Gumrak, where they had the best surgical unit in the Kessel. Thomas had requisitioned a vehicle and transported me there himself, then, thinking he had done everything he could, he left me. That same night he had received his departure orders. But the next day, Gumrak, the main runway since the fall of Pitomnik, also had to evacuate in front of the Russian advance. So he went up to Stalingradsky, from which a few planes were still leaving; while he waited, for lack of anything better to do, he visited the field hospital set up in some tents and found me there, unconscious, my head bandaged, but still breathing like a pair of bellows. A nurse, in exchange for a cigarette, told him that they had operated on me in Gumrak, he didn’t know much about it, there had been some kind of altercation, and then a little later the surgeon had been killed by a mortar shell that fell on the unit, but I was still alive, and as an officer, I was entitled to consideration; during the evacuation, they had put me in a vehicle and brought me here. Thomas had wanted to have me put on a plane, but the Feldgendarmen refused, since the red characters of my VERWUNDETE label meant “Untransportable.” “I couldn’t wait, because my plane was leaving. And also the shelling was starting up again. So I found a guy who was really smashed up but who had an ordinary label, and I switched it with yours. He wouldn’t have made it anyway. Then I had you put with the wounded by the runway, and I left. They loaded you onto the next plane, one of the last. You should have seen their faces, in Melitopol, when I arrived. No one wanted to shake my hand, they were too afraid of the lice. Except for Manstein, he shook everyone’s hand. Aside from me there was almost no one except Panzer officers. Not surprising, given that Hube wrote up the lists for Milch. You can’t trust anyone.” I let myself fall back onto the cushions and closed my eyes. “Aside from us, who else got out?”—“Aside from us? Only Weidner, you remember? From the Gestapostelle. Möritz also received orders, but we never found a trace of him. We’re not even sure he was able to leave.”—“And the little guy, there? Your colleague, the one who got hit by shrapnel and was so happy?”—“Vopel? He was evacuated before you were even wounded, but his Heinkel was shot down at takeoff by a Sturmovik.”—“And Ivan?” He produced a silver cigarette holder: “Mind if I smoke? No?—Ivan? Well, he stayed, of course. You don’t really think they’d have given a German’s place to a Ukrainian?”—“I don’t know. He was fighting for us too.” He dragged on his cigarette and said, smiling: “You’re indulging in misplaced idealism. I see that your shot in the head hasn’t set you right. You should be happy to be alive.” Happy to be alive? That seemed as incongruous to me as rejoicing at being born.

Every day, more wounded arrived: they came from Kursk, from Rostov, from Kharkov, recaptured one after the other by the Soviets, from Kasserine too; and a few words with the newcomers said much more about the current situation than the military communiqués. These communiqués, which were delivered to us in the common rooms over little loudspeakers, were introduced by the overture to Bach’s cantata Ein Feste Burg ist unser Gott; but the Wehrmacht used the arrangement by Wilhelm Friedmann Bach, Johann Sebastian’s dissolute son, who had added three trumpets and a kettledrum to his father’s austere orchestration, an ample enough pretext, by my lights, to flee the room each time, thus avoiding being drugged by the flood of lulling euphemisms, which sometimes lasted a good twenty minutes. I wasn’t the only one to show a certain aversion to these communiqués; a nurse whom I often found at those times ostensibly busy out on a terrace explained to me one day that most Germans had first heard of the encirclement of the Sixth Army at the same time as its destruction, and that this had done little to temper the shock on morale. It had had an effect on the life of the Volksgemeinschaft; people were openly talking and criticizing; a semblance of a student rebellion had even broken out in Munich. That, of course, I had not learned from the radio or from the nurses or from the patients, but from Thomas, who was now well placed to be informed about this sort of event. Subversive pamphlets had been distributed, defeatist slogans painted on the walls; the Gestapo had to intervene vigorously, and they had already condemned and executed the ringleaders, most of them idealistic youth gone astray. Among the minor consequences of this catastrophe would have to be counted, alas, the sensational return to the forefront of the political scene of Dr. Goebbels: his renewed declaration of total war, in the Sportpalast, had been broadcast to us on the radio, no possibility of escaping it; in a rest house belonging to the SS, they unfortunately took this sort of thing very seriously.

The handsome Waffen-SS who filled the rooms were for the most part in a piteous state: often they were missing pieces of arms or legs, or even a jaw; the atmosphere wasn’t always very cheerful. But I noticed with interest that despite what the most casual reflection on the facts or the studying of a map could suggest, their faith in the Endsieg and their veneration of the Führer remained for the most part intact. This wasn’t the case for everyone; some people, in Germany, were clearly beginning to draw objective conclusions from the facts and from the maps; I had discussed this with Thomas, and he had even led me to understand that there were some, like Schellenberg, who thought through the logical consequences of their conclusions, and who were considering acting on that basis. I didn’t discuss any of this, of course, with my comrades in misfortune: to demoralize them even more, thoughtlessly to take away from them the foundation of their wounded lives, would have made no sense to me. I was regaining my strength: I could now get dressed by myself, walk on the beach on my own, in the wind under the harsh calls of the seagulls; my left hand was finally beginning to obey me. Around the end of the month (all this happened in February 1943), the chief doctor of the establishment, after examining me, asked me if I felt able to leave: with everything that was happening, they were short on space, and I could just as easily finish my convalescence with my family. I amiably explained to him that returning to my family wasn’t an option, but that if he liked, I would leave; I’d go to the city, to a hotel. The papers he handed me gave me three months’ leave. So I took the train and went to Berlin. There I rented a room in a good hotel, the Eden, on the Budapesterstrasse: a spacious suite with a sitting room, a bedroom, and a beautiful tiled bathroom; hot water, here, wasn’t rationed, and every day I slipped into the bathtub and emerged an hour later with my skin bright red, and collapsed naked onto my bed, my heart pounding wildly. There were also French windows and a narrow balcony looking out onto the zoo: in the morning, as I got up and drank my tea, I would watch the keepers make their rounds and feed the animals; I took great pleasure in this. Of course, all this was on the expensive side; but I had received all at once my back wages accumulated over twenty-one months; with the bonuses, that made a tidy little sum, I could easily indulge myself and spend a little. I ordered a magnificent black uniform from Thomas’s tailor, onto which I had my new Sturmbannführer stripes sewn and to which I pinned my medals (along with the Iron Cross and my War Service Cross, I had received some minor medals: for my wound, for the ’41–’42 winter campaign, a little late, and a medal from the NSDAP, which they gave out to pretty much anyone); although I don’t like uniforms much, I had to admit that I cut a dashing figure, and it was a joy to stroll about town like this, my cap a little askew, my gloves held negligently in my hand; seeing me, who would have thought that I was actually nothing but a bureaucrat? The city, since I had left, had changed its appearance quite a bit. Everywhere the measures taken against the English air raids had disfigured it: a huge oversize circus tent, made of netting camouflaged with strips of cloth and fir tree tops, covered the Ost-West-Achse from the Brandenburg Gate to the end of the Tiergarten, darkening the avenue even in the middle of the day; the Victory Column, draped in netting, had had its gold leaf replaced by an awful brown paint; on Adolf-Hitler-Platz and elsewhere, they had set up dummy buildings, vast theater sets beneath which the cars and trams circulated; and a fantastic construction overlooked the zoo near my hotel, as if risen out of a nightmare—an immense medieval fort made of concrete, bristling with cannons that were supposed to protect humans and animals from the British Luftmörder; I was curious to see this monstrosity at work. But it should be said that the attacks, which already at that time were terrifying the population, were still nothing compared with what would come later on. Almost all the good restaurants had been closed in the name of total mobilization; Göring had tried his best to protect Horcher, his favorite place, and had posted a guard in front of it, but Goebbels, acting in his capacity as Gauleiter of Berlin, had organized a spontaneous demonstration of the anger of the people, during which they had broken all its windows; and Göring had had to cave in. Thomas and I weren’t the only ones to laugh at this incident: failing a real “Stalingrad” diet, a little abstinence wouldn’t harm the Reichsmarschall. Thomas, fortunately, knew several private clubs, exempt from the new regulations: there you could stuff yourself on lobster or oysters, which were expensive but not rationed, and drink Champagne, which was strictly limited in France itself but not in Germany; fish, alas, was still nowhere to be found, as well as beer. These places sometimes displayed a curious spirit, given the general mood: at the Golden Horseshoe they had a black hostess, and the female customers could ride horseback on a little circus ring, to show off their legs; at the Jockey Club the orchestra played American music; you couldn’t dance, but the bar was decorated with photographs of Hollywood stars, and even of Leslie Howard.

I soon realized that the gaiety that had taken hold of me when I arrived in Berlin was but a thin veneer; beneath it, everything was terribly fragile, I felt made of a sandy substance that could break up at the slightest gust. Wherever I looked, the sight of ordinary life, the crowd in the trolleys or the S-Bahn, the laughter of an elegant woman, the satisfied creasing of a newspaper, struck me like contact with a sharp sliver of glass. I had the feeling that the hole in my forehead had opened up a third eye, a pineal eye, one not turned to the sun, not capable of contemplating the blinding light of the sun, but directed at the darkness, gifted with the power of looking at the bare face of death, and of grasping this face behind each face of flesh and blood, beneath the smiles, through the palest, healthiest skin, the most laughing eyes. The disaster was already there and they didn’t realize it, since the disaster is the very idea of the disaster to come, which ruins everything long before term. At bottom, I repeated to myself with a hollow bitterness, it’s only the first nine months that you’re peaceful, and after that the archangel with the flaming sword chases you forever out through the door marked Lasciate ogni speranza, and you want only one single thing, to go back, then time keeps pushing you pitilessly forward, and in the end there is nothing, nothing at all. There was nothing original about these thoughts, they could have come to the lowliest soldier lost in the frozen waters of the East, who knows, when he listens to the silence, that death is near, and who perceives the infinite value of each intake of breath, of each heartbeat, of the cold, brittle sensation of the air, of the miracle of daylight. But the distance from the front is like a thick layer of moral fat, and looking at these satisfied people, I sometimes felt short of breath, I wanted to cry out. I went to the barber: there, suddenly, in front of the mirror, incongruous, fear. It was a white, clean, sterile, modern room, a discreetly expensive salon; one or two clients were occupying the other chairs. The barber had put a long black smock on me, and beneath this garment my heart was pounding, my intestines sank into a wet cold, panic drowned my whole body, the tips of my fingers prickled. I looked at my face: it was calm, but behind this calm, fear had erased everything. I closed my eyes: snip, snip, went the barber’s patient little scissors in my ear. On my way home, I had this thought: Yes, go on repeating to yourself that everything will be fine, you never know, you might end up convincing yourself. But I did not manage to convince myself, I was vacillating. I had no physical symptoms such as those I had experienced in the Ukraine or in Stalingrad: I wasn’t overcome with nausea, I didn’t vomit, my digestion was perfectly normal. Only, in the street, I felt as if I were walking on glass that was ready at any instant to shatter beneath my feet. Living required a sustained attention to things, which exhausted me. In the calm little streets near the Landwehrkanal, I found, on a windowsill on the ground floor, a long woman’s glove in blue satin. Without thinking, I took it and went on walking. I wanted to try it on; of course it was too small, but the texture of the satin excited me. I imagined the hand that must have worn this glove: this thought disturbed me. I wasn’t going to keep it; but to get rid of it I needed another window, with a little wrought-iron railing around the sill, preferably in an old building; yet in this street there were only shops, with silent, closed store-fronts. Finally, just before my hotel, I found the right window. The shutters were closed; I gently deposited the glove in the middle of the ledge, like an offering. Two days later the shutters were still closed, and the glove was still there, an opaque, discreet sign, which was certainly trying to tell me something, but what?

Thomas must have begun to guess my state of mind, since after the first few days, I stopped calling him and going out to dinner with him; to tell the truth, I preferred to wander around the city, or contemplate the lions, giraffes, and elephants in the zoo from my balcony, or else float in my luxurious bathtub, wasting hot water without the slightest shame. In his commendable anxiety to entertain me, Thomas asked me to go out with a young woman, a secretary of the Führer’s who was spending her leave in Berlin and didn’t know many people there; out of politeness, I didn’t want to refuse. I took her to dinner at the Hotel Kempinsky: even though the dishes had been given idiotic patriotic names, the cuisine was still excellent, and at the sight of my medals, they didn’t bother me much with rationing issues. The young woman, whose name was Grete V., greedily fell upon the oysters, sliding them one after the other between her rows of teeth: in Rastenburg, apparently, they didn’t eat very well. “And it could be worse!” she exclaimed. “At least we don’t have to eat the same thing as the Führer.” While I poured her more wine, she told me that Zeitzler, the new Chief of Staff of the OKH, scandalized by Göring’s brazen lies about the Kessel airlift, had openly started in December to have himself served the same ration, in the Kasino, as the soldiers of the Sixth Army. He had quickly lost weight, and the Führer had had to force him to stop these unhealthy demonstrations; on the other hand, Champagne and Cognac had been banned. As she spoke, I observed her: her appearance was far from ordinary. She had a strong, very wide jaw; her face tried to look normal but seemed to mask a heavy, secret desire, which welled up through the bloody stroke of her lipstick. Her hands were very animated, her fingers reddened from bad circulation; she had fine, birdlike joints, bony, sharp; and peculiar marks on her left wrist, like the traces of a bracelet or cord. I found her elegant and animated, but veiled by a faint insincerity. Since wine made her voluble, I had her talk about the Führer’s private life, which she described with a surprising lack of restraint: every night, he discoursed for hours, and his monologues were so repetitive, so boring, so sterile, that the secretaries, assistants, and adjutants had set up a system of rotation to listen to him; the ones whose turn it was didn’t go to bed till dawn. “Of course,” she added, “he is a genius, the savior of Germany. But this war is exhausting him.” In the evening, around five o’clock, after the meetings but before the dinner, the movies, and the nighttime tea, he held a coffee break with the secretaries; there, surrounded solely by women, he was much more cordial—before Stalingrad at least; he joked, teased the girls, and almost never discussed politics. “Does he flirt with you?” I asked with amusement. She looked serious: “Oh no, never!” She asked me about Stalingrad; I gave her a fierce, sardonic description, which at first made her laugh till tears came, but then made her so uneasy that she cut me off. I accompanied her back to her hotel, near the Anhalter Bahnhof; she invited me to come up for a drink, but I politely refused; my courtesy had its limits. As soon as I left her, I was filled with a feverish, uneasy feeling: What use was it to me to waste my time this way? What good were gossip and office rumors about our Führer to me? What interest did I have in strutting about this way in front of some paintedup doll who expected only one thing from me? It was better to be quiet. But even in my hotel, first-class though it was, quiet eluded me: the floor beneath mine was having a noisy party, and the music, shouts, and laughter rose up through the floorboards and seized me by the throat. Lying on my bed in the darkness, I thought about the men of the Sixth Army: the evening took place at the beginning of March, the last units had surrendered more than a month before; the survivors, rotting with vermin and fever, must have been on the way to Siberia or Kazakhstan, at the very same moment that I was so laboriously breathing the night air in Berlin, and for them, no music, no laughter—shouts of an entirely different kind. And it wasn’t just them, it was everywhere, the whole world was twisted in pain, and people should not be having fun, not right away in any case, they should wait a little while, a decent amount of time should go by. A mean, fetid anguish rose and suffocated me. I got up, searched through my desk drawer, took out my service pistol, checked it was loaded, put it back. I looked at my watch: 2:00 a.m. I put on my uniform jacket (I hadn’t undressed) and went down without buttoning it. At reception, I asked for the telephone and called Thomas at the apartment he was renting: “Sorry to bother you so late.”—“No, it’s fine. What’s up?” I explained my homicidal urges to him. To my surprise, he didn’t react ironically, but said very seriously: “That’s normal. These people are bastards, profiteers. But if you shoot some of them, you’ll still have problems.”—“What do you suggest, then?”—“Go talk to them. If they don’t calm down, we’ll see. I’ll call some friends.”—“All right, I’ll go.” I hung up and went up to the floor below mine; I easily found the right door and knocked. A tall, beautiful woman in somewhat casual evening dress opened the door, her eyes shining. “Yes?” Behind her, the music roared, I could hear glasses clinking, mad laughter. “Is this your room?” I asked, my heart beating. “No. Wait.” She turned around: “Dicky! Dicky! An officer is asking for you.” A man in a vest, slightly drunk, came to the door; the woman watched us without hiding her curiosity. “Yes, Herr Sturmbannführer?” he asked. “What can I do for you?” His affected, cordial, almost slurred voice conveyed an aristocrat of old stock. I bowed slightly and said in the most neutral tone possible: “I live in the room over yours. I’ve just come back from Stalingrad, where I was seriously wounded and where almost all my comrades died. Your festivities are disturbing me. I wanted to come down and kill you, but I called a friend, who advised me to come talk with you first. So I’ve come to talk with you. It would be better for us all if I don’t have to come down again.” The man had turned pale: “No, no…” He turned around: “Gofi! Stop the music! Stop!” He looked at me: “Excuse us. We’ll stop right away.”—“Thank you.” As I was climbing back up, vaguely satisfied, I heard him shout: “Everyone out! It’s over. Out!” I had touched a nerve, and it wasn’t a question of fear: he too, suddenly, had understood, and he was ashamed. In my room, everything was quiet now; the only noises were from the occasional passing of a car, the trumpeting of an insomniac elephant. But I didn’t calm down: my action appeared to me like play-acting, prompted by a genuine, obscure feeling, but then distorted, diverted into an outward show of rage, conventional. But that was precisely where my problem lay: seeing myself this way, constantly, with this external gaze, this critical camera, how could I utter the slightest authentic word, make the slightest authentic gesture? Everything I did became a spectacle for myself; my thinking itself was just a reflection, and I a poor Narcissus showing off for himself, but who wasn’t fooled by it. This was the dead-end I had run into since the close of my childhood: only Una, before, could pull me out of myself, make me forget myself a little, and after I lost her, I kept looking at myself with a gaze that was confused with hers in thought but that remained, without any way out, my own. Without you, I am not me: and that was pure, deadly terror, unrelated to the delicious terrors of childhood, a sentence with no hope of appeal, with no judgment, either.

It was also during those first days of March 1943 that Dr. Mandelbrod invited me over for tea.

I had known Mandelbrod and his partner, Herr Leland, for some time. Many years before, after the Great War—and maybe even before it, but I have no way of checking—my father had worked for them (apparently my uncle had also served as an agent for them on occasion). Their relations, from what I had gleaned little by little, went beyond a simple employer-employee relationship: after my father’s disappearance, Dr. Mandelbrod and Herr Leland had helped my mother in her searches, and may also have supported her financially, but that’s not so certain. And they had continued to play a role in my life; in 1934, when I was preparing to break with my mother, to come to Germany, I got in touch with Mandelbrod, who had long been a respected figure within the Movement; he supported me and offered me his help; it was he too who encouraged me to pursue my studies—for the sake of Germany now, though, and not for France—and who organized my enrollment in Kiel as well as my enlisting in the SS. Despite his Jewish-sounding name, he was, like Minister Rosenberg, a pure German of old Prussian stock, with perhaps a drop of Slavic blood; as for Herr Leland, he was of British origin, but his Germanophile convictions had impelled him to turn his back on his native country long before my birth. They were industrialists, but their exact position would be hard to define. They sat on numerous boards, especially that of IG Farben, and held shares in other companies, without their names being linked to any one in particular; they were said to be very influential in the chemical sector (they were both members of the Reichsgruppe for the chemical industry) and also in the metals sector. Moreover, they had been close to the Party ever since the Kampfzeit, and had contributed to financing it when it was starting up; according to Thomas, with whom I had discussed them once before the war, they held positions in the Führer’s chancellery, but were not entirely subordinate to Philipp Bouhler; and they had access to the highest spheres of the Party chancellery. Finally, the Reichsführer-SS had made them honorary SS-Gruppenführers, and members of the Freundeskreis Himmler; but Thomas, mysteriously, stated that this gave the SS no influence over them, and that any influence there might be worked the other way. He had been very impressed when I told him about my relationship with them, and obviously even envied me a little for having such protectors. Their interest in my career, however, had varied over time: when I had been in effect sidelined, after my 1939 report, I had tried to see them; but that was a busy period, it had taken me several months to get a reply, and it wasn’t until the invasion of France that they invited me to dinner: Herr Leland, as was his custom, remained for the most part taciturn, and Dr. Mandelbrod was mainly concerned with the political situation; my work hadn’t been mentioned, and I hadn’t dared broach the subject myself. I hadn’t seen them again since then. So Mandelbrod’s invitation caught me off guard: What could he want from me? For the occasion, I put on my new uniform and all my decorations. Their private offices occupied the top two floors of a handsome building on Unter den Linden, next to the Academy of Sciences and the headquarters of the Reichsvereinigung Kohle, the Coal Board, where they also played a role. There was no plaque on the entrance. In the lobby, my papers were checked by a young woman with long light brown hair pulled back, who wore charcoal-gray clothes without any insignia, but cut like a uniform, with men’s pants and boots instead of a skirt. Satisfied, she escorted me to a private elevator, which she started up with a key hanging around her neck on a long chain, and accompanied me to the top floor, without a word. I had never come here: in the 1930s, they had another address, and in any case I usually met them in a restaurant or in one of the big hotels. The elevator opened onto a wide reception room furnished in wood and dark leather inset with polished brass and frosted glass decorative elements, elegant and discreet. The woman who escorted me left me there; another woman, in identical costume, took my coat and hung it in a wardrobe. Then she asked me to hand her my service revolver, and holding it with a surprising naturalness in her beautiful carefully manicured fingers, she put it away in a drawer, which she locked shut. I wasn’t made to wait any longer; she led me in through a padded double door. Dr. Mandelbrod was waiting for me at the rear of an immense room, behind a large reddish mahogany desk, his back to a long bay window, also of frosted glass, that let a pale, milky light filter through. He looked even fatter than at our last meeting. Several cats were strolling about the carpets or sleeping on the leather furniture and on his desk. He pointed with his pudgy fingers to a sofa on the left, in front of a low table: “Hello, hello. Have a seat, I’ll be right there.” I had never been able to understand how such a beautiful and melodious voice could emanate from so many layers of fat; it still surprised me. With my cap under my arm, I crossed the room and took a seat, displacing a sleek tabby cat with white paws, who didn’t seem to hold it against me, but gently slipped under the table to settle down elsewhere. I examined the room: all the walls were padded with leather, and aside from the stylish ornaments such as those in the antechamber, there were no decorations, no paintings or photographs, not even a portrait of the Führer. The surface of the low table, on the other hand, was made of superb marquetry, a complex labyrinth in precious wood, protected by a thick glass plate. Only the cat hair clinging to furniture and rugs disfigured this discreet, hushed décor. A vaguely unpleasant smell pervaded the room. One of the cats rubbed against my boots, purring, its tail up; I tried to get rid of it with the tip of my foot, but it didn’t pay any attention. Mandelbrod, in the meantime, must have pressed a hidden button: an almost invisible door opened in the wall to the right of his desk and another woman came in, dressed like the first two, but with completely blond hair. She walked behind Mandelbrod, pulled him back, swiveled him around, and pushed him alongside his desk toward me. I got up. Mandelbrod had in fact gotten fatter; whereas before he got around in an ordinary wheelchair, he was now settled in a vast round armchair mounted on a little platform, like an enormous Oriental idol, placid, bovine, colossal. The woman pushed this massive apparatus without any visible effort, probably by starting up and controlling an electrical system. She set him in front of the low table; I walked round to shake his hand and he scarcely brushed me with the tips of his fingers while the woman left through the door by which she had come in. “Please, do sit down,” he murmured in his beautiful voice. He was dressed in a thick brown wool suit; his tie disappeared beneath a breastplate of flesh hanging from his neck. A rude noise came from beneath him and a horrible smell reached me; I made an effort to remain impassive. At the same time a cat jumped onto his knees and he sneezed, then began caressing it, then sneezed again: each sneeze came like a little explosion that made the cat jump. “I am allergic to these poor creatures,” he sniffled, “but I love them too much.” The woman reappeared with a tray: she came up to us with a measured, assured step, placed a tea service on the low table, attached a tray to Mandelbrod’s armrest, poured us two cups, and again disappeared—all as discreetly and silently as the cats. “There’s milk and sugar,” said Mandelbrod. “Help yourself. I don’t take any.” He examined me for a few minutes: an impish gleam glinted in his little eyes almost drowned beneath folds of fat. “You have changed,” he declared. “The East did you good. You have matured. Your father would have been proud.” These words touched me to the quick: “You think?”—“Certainly. You’ve done some remarkable work: the Reichsführer himself took note of your reports. He showed us the album you prepared in Kiev: your chief wanted to take all the credit for himself, but we knew the idea came from you. In any case that was a trifle. But the reports you wrote, especially these past few months, were excellent. In my opinion, you have a brilliant future before you.” He fell silent and contemplated me: “How is your wound?” he asked finally.—“Fine, Herr Doktor. It’s healed, I just have to rest a little more.”—“And then?”—“I’ll resume my service, of course.”—“And what do you plan on doing?”—“I’m not sure, actually. It will depend on what they offer me.”—“It’s really up to you to receive the offer you like. If you choose wisely, doors will open, I assure you.”—“What are you thinking of, Herr Doktor?” Slowly, he raised his teacup, blew on it, and drank noisily. I also drank a little. “In Russia, I believe you concerned yourself mostly with the Jewish question, isn’t that right?”—“Yes, Herr Doktor,” I said, slightly annoyed. “But not just that.” Mandelbrod was already going on in his measured, melodious voice: “From the position you were in, you no doubt could not appreciate the full extent either of the problem or of the solution being applied to it. You have probably heard rumors: they are true. Since the end of 1941, this solution has been extended to all the countries in Europe, insofar as possible. The program has been operational since the spring of last year. We have already recorded considerable successes, but it is far from over. There is room there for energetic, devoted men like you.” I felt myself blush: “Thank you for your trust, Herr Doktor. But I should tell you: I found that aspect of my work extremely difficult, beyond my strength. I’d rather concentrate now on something that corresponds better to my talents and knowledge, like constitutional law or even legal relations with the other European countries. The construction of the new Europe is a field that attracts me very much.” During my little speech, Mandelbrod had finished his tea; the blond Amazon had reappeared and crossed the room, poured him another cup, and left again. Mandelbrod drank some more. “I understand your hesitations,” he said finally. “Why take on difficult tasks if there are others to do them? That’s the spirit of the time. During the other war, it was different. The more difficult or dangerous a task was, the more men strove to carry it out. Your father, for example, thought that difficulty in itself was reason enough to do a thing, and to do it to perfection. Your grandfather was a man of the same mold. These days, despite all the Führer’s efforts, the Germans are sinking into laziness, indecision, compromise.” I felt the indirect insult like a slap; but something else in what he had said was more important to me: “Excuse me, Herr Doktor. I thought I understood you to say that you knew my grandfather?” Mandelbrod put down his cup: “Of course. He too worked with us, in our early years. An amazing man.” He stretched his swollen hand out to the desk. “Go look, there.” I obeyed. “You see that morocco portfolio? Bring it to me.” I went over and handed it to him. He put it on his knees, opened it, and took out a photograph, which he held out to me. “Look.” It was an old sepia photo, slightly yellowed: three figures side by side, in front of a background of tropical trees. The woman, in the middle, had a chubby little face, still marked by the plumpness of adolescence; the two men wore light summer suits: the one on the left, with narrow somewhat fluid features and a forehead streaked with a lock of hair, also wore a tie; the shirt of the man on the right was open, beneath an angular face, as if engraved in precious stone; even a pair of tinted glasses didn’t manage to hide the joyful, cruel intensity of his eyes. “Which one is my grandfather?” I asked, fascinated, full of anxiety too. Mandelbrod pointed to the man in the tie. I examined him again: unlike the other man, he had secretive, almost transparent eyes. “And the woman?” I asked again, guessing already.—“Your grandmother. Her name was Eva. A superb, magnificent woman.” I actually hadn’t really known either one: my grandmother had died long before my birth, and the rare visits of my grandfather, when I was very little, hadn’t left me any memories. He had died not long after my father’s disappearance. “And who is the other man?” Mandelbrod looked at me with a seraphic smile. “You can’t guess?” I looked at him: “It’s not possible!” I exclaimed. He didn’t stop smiling: “Why? You don’t think I’ve always looked like this, do you?” Confused, I stammered: “No, no, that’s not what I meant, Herr Doktor! But your age…In the photo, you look the same age as my grandfather.” Another cat, who was walking on the carpet, leaped nimbly onto the back of the armchair and climbed onto his shoulder, rubbing against his enormous head. Mandelbrod sneezed again. “In fact,” he said between two sneezes, “I was older than he. But I’ve aged well.” I was still greedily scrutinizing the photo: how many things it could teach me! Timidly, I asked: “Can I keep it, Herr Doktor?”—“No.” Disappointed, I gave it back; he put it away in the portfolio and sent me to replace it on his desk. I came back and sat down. “Your father was an authentic National Socialist,” Mandelbrod declared, “even before the Party existed. People then were living under the sway of wrong ideas: for them, nationalism meant a blind, narrow-minded patriotism, a parochial patriotism, coupled with an immense domestic injustice; socialism, for their adversaries, signified a false international equality of the classes, and a class struggle within each nation. In Germany, your father was among the first to understand that there had to be an equal role, with mutual respect, for all members of the nation, but only within the nation. In their own way, all great societies in history have been national and socialist. Look at Temujin, the excluded one: it was only when he could impose this idea, and unify the tribes on that basis, that the Mongols were able to conquer the world, in the name of this man from nowhere who became the Oceanic Emperor, Genghis Khan. I had the Reichsführer read a book about him, he was very impressed. With immense, fierce wisdom, the Mongols razed everything in their path, to rebuild it all afterward on healthy foundations. The entire infrastructure of the Russian Empire, all the foundations on which the Germans later built, under czars who were in fact also German—it was the Mongols who brought them: the roads, the money, the postal system, customs, the administration. It was only when the Mongols compromised their purity, by taking foreign women generation after generation, and often from among the Nestorians—the most Jewish of Christians—that their empire broke apart and collapsed. The Chinese present an opposite but equally instructive example: they never leave their Middle Kingdom, but absorb and irremediably sinicize any population that enters it, however powerful it may be; they drown the invader in a limitless ocean of Chinese blood. They are very strong. And we shouldn’t forget that when we’ve finished with the Russians, we’ll still have the Chinese to contend with. The Japanese will never resist them, even if they look as if they’re on top today. If not right away, we’ll have to confront them someday in any case, in a hundred, two hundred years. So we might as well keep them weak, prevent them if possible from understanding National Socialism and applying it to their own situation. Do you know, by the way, that the very term National Socialism was coined by a Jew, a precursor of Zionism, Moses Hess? Read his book someday, Rome and Jerusalem, you’ll see. It’s very instructive. And that’s not by chance: what’s more völkisch than Zionism? Like us, they realized that there can be no Volk or Blut without Boden, without land, and so the Jews must be brought back to the land, Eretz Israël, purified of any other race. Of course, those are ancient Jewish ideas. The Jews were the first genuine National Socialists, for almost three thousand five hundred years they’ve been so, ever since Moses gave them a Law to separate them forever from the other peoples. All our great ideas come from the Jews, and we must have the lucidity to recognize it: the Land as promise and as accomplishment, the notion of the Chosen People, the concept of the purity of blood. That’s why the Greeks, degenerate, democrats, travelers, cosmopolitans, hated them so much, and that’s why they tried first to destroy them, then, through Paul, to corrupt their religion from within, by detaching it from the soil and from the blood, by making it catholic, that is, universal, by suppressing all the laws that served as a barrier to maintaining the purity of Jewish blood: food prohibitions, circumcision. And that’s also why the Jews, of all our enemies, are the worst, the most dangerous; the only ones who truly deserve being hated. They are our only real competitors, in fact. Our only serious rivals. The Russians are weak, a horde deprived of a center despite the attempts of that arrogant Georgian to impose a ‘National Communism’ on them. And the islanders, British or American, are rotten, corrupt, polluted. But the Jews! Who was it who, in the scientific era, discovered the truth of race by drawing on the age-old intuition of his people, humiliated but unconquered? Disraeli, a Jew. Gobineau learned everything from him. You don’t believe me? Go look.” He pointed to the shelves next to his desk: “There, go look.” I got up again and went over to the shelves: several books by Disraeli stood next to books by Gobineau, Vacher de Lapouge, Drumont, Chamberlain, Herzl, and others. “Which one, Herr Doktor? There are many.”—“It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter. They all say the same thing. Take Coningsby. You read English, don’t you? Page two hundred and three. Begin with But Sidonia and his brethren…Read it out loud.” I found the passage and read: “But Sidonia and his brethren could claim a distinction which the Saxon and the Greek, and the rest of the Caucasian nations, have forfeited. The Hebrew is an unmixed race…. An unmixed race of a first-rate organisation are the aristocracy of Nature.”—“Very good! Page two-thirty-one, now. The fact is, you cannot destroy… He’s talking about the Jews, of course.”—“Yes. The fact is, you cannot destroy a pure race of the Caucasian organisation. It is a physiological fact; a simple law of nature, which has baffled Egyptian and Assyrian Kings, Roman Emperors, and Christian Inquisitors. No penal laws, no physical tortures, can effect that a superior race should be absorbed in an inferior, or be destroyed by it. The mixed persecuting races disappear; the pure persecuted race remains.”—“There you have it! Just think that this man, this Jew, was Queen Victoria’s Prime Minister! That he founded the British Empire! A man who, when still unknown, advanced such arguments in front of a Christian Parliament! Come back here. Serve me some more tea, please.” I went back to him and poured him another cup. “Out of love and respect for your father, Max, I have helped you, I have followed your career, I’ve supported you when I could. You owe it to yourself to make him proud, both for his race and for your own. There’s room on this earth for only one chosen people, called on to dominate the others: either it will be them, as the Jew Disraeli and the Jew Herzl wanted, or it will be us. And so we must kill them down to the last one, extirpate their stock. Because even if only ten remain, an intact quorum, or if only two remain, a man and a woman, in a hundred years we’ll have the same problem, and we’ll have to do everything over again.”—“May I ask you a question, Herr Doktor?”—“Ask away, my boy.”—“What is your role in all this, precisely?”—“Leland’s and mine, you mean? It’s a little hard to explain. We don’t have a bureaucratic position. We…we stand by the Führer’s side. You see, the Führer had the courage and the lucidity to make this historic, fatal decision; but, of course, the practical side of things doesn’t concern him. Between that decision and its realization, which has been entrusted to the Reichsführer-SS, there is, however, an immense space. Our task consists of reducing this space. In this sense, we don’t even answer to the Führer, but rather to that space.”—“I’m not sure I entirely understand. But what do you expect from me?”—“Nothing, except that you follow the path that you yourself have traced, to the end.”—“I’m not really sure what my path is, Herr Doktor. I have to think about it.”—“Oh, think! Think. And then call me. We’ll discuss it again.” Another cat was trying to climb up onto my lap, leaving white hairs on the black fabric before I could chase it away. Mandelbrod, without even batting an eyelid, still just as impassive, almost sleeping, emitted another huge fart. The odor made my throat seize up and I breathed in tiny breaths through my mouth. The main door opened and the young woman who manned the reception desk came in, seemingly oblivious to the smell. I got up: “Thank you, Herr Doktor. Please pass on my respects to Herr Leland. Soon, then.” But Mandelbrod seemed already almost asleep; only one of his enormous hands, which was slowly caressing a cat, showed the contrary. I waited for an instant, but he didn’t seem to want to say anything else, so I went out, followed by the girl, who closed the doors without a sound.

When I had spoken with Dr. Mandelbrod about my interest in issues of European relations, I wasn’t lying, but I hadn’t said everything, either: in fact, I had an idea in mind, a precise idea of what I wanted. I don’t really know how it came to me: during a night of semi-insomnia at the Eden Hotel, probably. It was time, I thought, for me to do something for myself, to think of myself. And what Mandelbrod was suggesting didn’t correspond to the idea that had come to me. But I wasn’t sure I knew how to go about putting it in play. Two or three days after my interview in the offices on Unter den Linden, I called Thomas, who invited me to come see him. Instead of meeting me at his office, on Prinz-Albrechtstrasse, he gave me an appointment at the headquarters of the SP and the SD, on the neighboring Wilhelmstrasse. Situated a block down from Göring’s Ministry of Aviation—an immense angular cement structure, in a sterile and pompous neoclassical style—the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais was quite the opposite: an elegant little eighteenth-century classical palazzo, renovated in the nineteenth by Schinkel, but with taste and delicacy, and rented to the SS by the government since 1934. I knew it well; before I left for Russia, my department was housed there, and I had spent many hours strolling through the gardens, a little masterpiece of asymmetry and calm variety designed by Lenné. From the street, a large colonnade and some trees hid the façade; guards, in their red-and-white kiosks, saluted me as I went by, but another, more discreet team checked my papers in a little office next to the driveway, then escorted me to reception. Thomas was waiting for me: “Shall we go to the park? It’s nice out.” The garden, which one reached by a few steps lined with stoneware flowerpots, stretched from the palace to the Europahaus, a plump modernist cube set down on the Askanischer Platz and contrasting oddly with the calm, sinuous volutes of the lanes laid out between the mulched flowerbeds, the little round fountains, and the still-bare trees on which the first buds were forming. No one was there. “Kaltenbrunner never comes here,” Thomas remarked, “so it’s quiet.” Heydrich liked to walk there; but then no one else could have access to it, except the people he invited. We strolled through the trees and I told Thomas the gist of my conversation with Mandelbrod. “He exaggerates,” he said when I had finished. “The Jews are indeed a problem and we have to take care of them, but that’s not an end in itself. The objective isn’t to kill people, it’s to manage a population; physical elimination is part of the management tools. We can’t make it into an obsession, there are other problems that are just as serious. You really think he believes everything he told you?”—“That’s the impression I got. Why?” Thomas thought for a minute; the gravel crunched under our boots. “Look,” he finally went on, “for a lot of people, anti-Semitism is an instrument. Since it’s a subject that means a lot to the Führer, it has become one of the best ways to get close to him: if you manage to play a role in the solution to the Jewish question, your career will advance much more quickly than if you concern yourself, say, with Jehovah’s Witnesses or homosexuals. In that sense, you can say that anti-Semitism has become the currency of power of the National Socialist State. You remember what I said to you in November ’thirty-eight, after the Reichskristallnacht?” Yes, I remembered. I had found Thomas the day after the SA’s rampage, seized by a cold rage. “The morons!” he had barked as he slipped into the booth in the bar where I was waiting for him. “The bloody fools.”—“Who, the SA?”—“Don’t be an idiot. The SA didn’t do that all on their own.”—“Who gave the orders, then?”—“Goebbels, that horrid little cripple. He’s been frantic for years to get his grubby hands on the Jewish question. But he’s screwed it up good now.”—“But don’t you think it was time to do something concrete? After all…” He had given a brief, bitter laugh: “Of course we have to do something. The Jews will drink their cup, to the dregs. But not like that. That’s just idiotic. Do you have the slightest idea what it’s going to cost us?” My empty look must have encouraged him, since he went on almost without a pause. “In your opinion, all those broken windows belong to whom? To the Jews? The Jews rent their shops. And it’s always the owner who’s responsible in case of damage. And also there are the insurance companies. German companies, who will have to reimburse the owners of German buildings, and even Jewish owners. Otherwise, it’s the end of the German insurance business. And then there’s the glass. Plate glass like that, you know, isn’t manufactured in Germany. It all comes from Belgium. We’re still estimating the damage, but it’s already more than half of their total annual production. And it will have to be paid for in hard currency. Just when the nation was directing all its energy at autarky and rearmament. Oh yes, there are truly complete idiots in this country.” His eyes glittered while he spat the words out: “But let me tell you something. All that is finished now. The Führer has just officially entrusted the question to the Reichsmarschall. But actually the fat man will delegate everything to us, to Heydrich and us. And none of those Party cretins will be allowed to get involved again, ever. From now on, things will be done correctly. We’ve been pushing for a global solution for years. Now we can put it to work. Properly, efficiently. Rationally. Finally we’ll be able to do things as they should be done.”

Thomas had sat down on a bench and, with his legs crossed, held out his silver case to offer me a luxury cigarette, with a gold tip. I took one and lit his too, but remained standing. “The global solution you were talking about, then, was emigration. Things have changed quite a bit since then.” Thomas let out a long puff of smoke before replying: “That’s true. And it’s also true that we have to change with the times. That doesn’t mean we have to become stupid. The rhetoric is mostly for those playing second, even third, fiddle.”—“That’s not what I’m talking about. What I mean is that we’re not necessarily forced to get mixed up in it.”—“You’d rather do something else?”—“Yes. I’m tired of it.” It was my turn to take a long pull on my cigarette. It was delicious, a rich, fine tobacco. “I’ve always been impressed by your formidable lack of ambition,” Thomas finally said. “I know ten men who’d kill their father and mother to get a private interview with a man like Mandelbrod. Just think that he lunches with the Führer! And you play hard-to-get. Do you know what you want, at least?”—“Yes. I’d like to go back to France.”—“To France!” He thought. “It’s true, with your contacts, your knowledge of the language, that’s not so dumb. But it won’t be easy. Knochen is BdS now, I know him well, but he doesn’t have a lot of openings, and a lot of people are after them.”—“I know Knochen too. But I don’t want to be with the BdS. I want a job where I can get involved in political relations.”—“That means a job at the embassy or with the Militärbefehlshaber. But I heard that since Best left, the Wehrmacht there doesn’t think much of the SS—and same goes for Abetz. We might be able to find something that would suit you with Oberg, the HSSPF. But for that, the Amt I can’t do much: you have to go directly through the SS-Personal Hauptamt, and I don’t know anyone there.”—“If a suggestion came from the Amt I, would that work?”—“Possibly.” He drew a last puff and negligently threw the butt into the flowerbed. “If it had still been Streckenbach, no problem. But he’s like you, he thinks too much and he got sick of it all.”—“Where is he now?”—“At the Waffen-SS. He’s commanding a Lithuanian division at the front, the Fifteenth.”—“And who replaced him? I haven’t even asked.”—“Schulz.”—“Schulz? Which one?”—“Don’t you remember? The Schulz who headed a Kommando, in Group C, and who asked to leave, way back in the beginning. The weasel, with that ridiculous little moustache.”—“Oh, him! But I never met him. I’ve heard he’s a decent sort.”—“No doubt, but I don’t know him personally, and things didn’t go well between the Gruppenstab and him. He was a banker before, you know the type. Whereas I served with Streckenbach, in Poland. And also Schulz has just been appointed, so he’ll overdo things. Especially since he has a lot to make up for. Conclusion: if you make an official request, they’ll send you anywhere but France.”—“What would you suggest, then?” Thomas had gotten up and we had resumed our walk. “Listen, I’ll see. But it’s not going to be simple. On your side, can’t you try too? You used to know Best well: he comes to Berlin often, go ask him his opinion. You can easily contact him through the Auswärtiges Amt. But if I were you, I’d try to think of other options. And it’s wartime. You don’t always have a choice.”

Before leaving me, Thomas had asked me for a favor: “I’d like you to see someone. A statistician.”—“From the SS?”—“Officially, he’s the statistics inspector for the Reichsführer-SS. But he’s a civil servant, he’s not even a member of the Allgemeine-SS.”—“That’s odd, isn’t it?”—“Not really. The Reichsführer clearly wanted someone from outside.”—“And what would you like me to tell your statistician?”—“He’s in the process of preparing a new report for the Reichsführer. An overview of the diminution of the Jewish population. But he’s questioning the numbers in the reports from the Einsatzgruppen. I’ve already seen him, but it would be good for you to talk with him. You were closer to the field than I was.” He scribbled an address and phone number in a notebook and tore the page out: “His office is right near here, at the SS-Haus, but he’s always closeted at the IV B 4, with Eichmann, you know who that is? That’s where they archive everything on this question. They have an entire building, now.” I looked at the address; it was on the Kurfürstenstrasse: “Oh, that’s near my hotel. Fine.” The conversation with Thomas had depressed me, I felt as if I were sinking into a marsh. But I didn’t want to let myself go, I had to take myself in hand. I made the effort to call this statistician, Dr. Korherr. His assistant set up an appointment. The headquarters of IV B 4 were housed in a handsome building made of stone with four floors, from the end of the last century: no other section of the Staatspolizei, to my knowledge, had such offices; their activities must have been colossal. A large marble staircase led up to the main lobby, a cavernous, dimly lit space; Hofmann, the assistant, was waiting for me to lead me to Korherr. “This is huge here,” I remarked as I climbed another staircase with him.—“Yes. It’s a former Judeo-Masonic lodge, confiscated of course.” He led me into Korherr’s office, a tiny room cluttered with boxes and files: “Excuse the disorder, Sturmbannführer. It’s a temporary office.” Dr. Korherr, a glum little man, was wearing civilian clothes and shook my hand instead of saluting. “Please, have a seat,” he said as Hofmann withdrew. He tried to clear some papers from a desk, then gave up and left things as they were. “The Obersturmbannführer has been very generous with his documentation,” he murmured, “but there’s really no order.” He stopped rummaging, took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “Is Obersturmbannführer Eichmann here?” I asked.—“No, he’s on assignment. He’ll be back in a few days. Did Obersturmbannführer Hauser explain to you what I do?”—“In general terms.”—“In any case, you’ve come a little late. I’ve almost finished my report, which I have to hand in in a few days.”—“What can I do for you, then?” I retorted with a touch of annoyance.—“You were in the Einsatz, weren’t you?”—“Yes. In a Kommando first…”—“Which one?” he interrupted.—“Four-A.”—“Ah yes. Blobel. Good show.” I couldn’t tell if he meant that seriously or ironically. “Then, I served in the Gruppenstab D, in the Caucasus.” He made a face: “Yes, I’m not so interested in that one. The numbers are negligible. Tell me about Four-A.”—“What do you want to know?” He bent down behind his desk and came back up with a cardboard box, which he put in front of me. “These are the reports from Group C. I went through them in minute detail, with my deputy, Dr. Plate. And we noticed some curious things: sometimes, there are extremely precise numbers—two hundred eighty-one, one thousand four hundred seventy-two, or thirty-three thousand seven hundred seventy-one, as in Kiev; other times, they’re round numbers. Including for a single Kommando. We also found contradictory numbers. For example, a city where twelve hundred Jews were supposed to live, but where the reports mentioned two thousand people convoyed to the special measures. And so on. What interests me, then, are the counting methods. I mean the practical methods, on-site.”—“You should have talked directly to Standartenführer Blobel. I think he’d have been better able to inform you than me.”—“Unfortunately Standartenführer Blobel is in the East again and can’t be reached. But, you know, I have my own idea anyway. Your testimony will only confirm it, I think. Tell me about Kiev, for instance. Such an enormous but precise number is curious.”—“Not at all. On the contrary, the bigger the Aktion, the more means we had, the easier it was to get a precise calculation. In Kiev, there were very tight cordons. Just before the operation site, the…the patients, or rather the condemned, were divided into equal groups, always a round number, twenty or thirty, I don’t remember. A noncom counted the number of groups that passed by his table and noted it down. The first day, they stopped at twenty thousand exactly.”—“And everyone who walked by the table was submitted to the special treatment?”—“In principle, yes. Of course, a few could, let’s say, pretend, then run away under cover of night. But that would be at most a handful of individuals.”—“And the smaller actions?”—“They were under the responsibility of a Teilkommandoführer who was in charge of counting and passing on the numbers to the Kommandostab. Standartenführer Blobel always insisted on exact counts. For the case you mentioned, I mean the one where they took away more Jews than there were in the beginning, I think I can give you an explanation: when we arrived, a lot of Jews fled into the woods or the steppe. The Teilkommando treated those who were found on-site in an appropriate manner, then left. But the Jews couldn’t remain hidden: the Ukrainians chased them out of the villages, sometimes the partisans killed them. So little by little, impelled by hunger, they returned to their towns or villages, often with other refugees. When we found out, we conducted a second operation that liquidated a certain number again. But again others returned. Some villages were declared judenfrei three, four, five times, but each time, more appeared.”—“I see. That’s an interesting explanation.”—“If I understand correctly,” I said, a little annoyed, “you think the Groups inflated the figures?”—“To be frank with you, yes. For several reasons, no doubt, advancement being only one. There are also bureaucratic habits. In statistics, we’re used to seeing agencies get fixated on some number, no one really knows how, and then this number is taken up and repeated as fact, without any criticism or modification in time. We call that a house number. But it also differs from Group to Group and from Kommando to Kommando. The worst case is clearly that of Einsatzgruppe B. There are also gross irregularities among certain Kommandos in Group D.”—“In ’forty-one or ’forty-two?”—“In 1941 especially. At the beginning, then in the Crimea too.”—“I was in the Crimea briefly, but I didn’t have anything to do with the actions then.”—“And in your experience of Four-A?” I thought for a minute before replying: “I think the officers were honest. But in the beginning, things were badly organized, and some figures might be a little arbitrary.”—“In any case it’s not very serious,” Korherr said sententiously. “The Einsatzgruppen represent only a fraction of the overall numbers. Even a deviation of ten percent would scarcely affect the overall results.” I felt something tighten around my diaphragm. “Do you have the figures for all of Europe, Herr Doktor?”—“Yes, of course. Up to December thirty-first, 1942.”—“Can you tell me what they add up to?” He looked at me through his little glasses: “Of course not. That’s a secret, Herr Sturmbannführer.” We talked some more about the work of the Kommando; Korherr asked precise, meticulous questions. In the end, he thanked me. “My report will go directly to the Reichsführer,” he explained. “If your responsibilities require it, you’ll have access to it then.” He accompanied me back to the main entrance. “Good luck! And Heil Hitler.”

Why had I asked him that idiotic, useless question? How did that concern me? It had been nothing but morbid curiosity, and I regretted it. I wanted to take an interest in nothing but positive things now: National Socialism still had a lot to build; that’s where I wanted to direct my energies. But the Jews, unser Unglück, kept pursuing me like a bad dream in early morning, stuck in the back of my head. In Berlin, though, not many were left: all the so-called protected Jewish workers in the arms factories had just been rounded up. Yet fate decreed that I would meet up with them in the most incongruous places.

On March 21, Heroes’ Memorial Day, the Führer gave a speech. It was his first public appearance since the defeat at Stalingrad, and like everyone else, I awaited his words with impatience and anxiety: What was he going to say, how would he seem? The wave of shock from the catastrophe was still vividly felt; the most varied rumors were running rampant. I wanted to be present at this speech. I had seen the Führer in person only once, a dozen years before (I had since then heard him often on the radio and seen him in newsreels); that had been during my first trip back to Germany, in the summer of 1930, before the Seizure of Power. I had extorted that trip from my mother and Moreau, in exchange for my consent to continue the course of study they demanded. Once I had passed my baccalauréat (without honors, which meant I had to take a preparatory class to pass the ELSP entrance exam), they let me go. It was a wonderful trip, from which I came back dazzled, bewitched. I had gone accompanied by two high-school friends, Pierre and Fabrice; and we, who didn’t even know what the Wandervögel were, followed their traces as if instinctively, heading for the forests, walking during the day, talking at night around little campfires, sleeping on hard earth and pine needles. Then we went south to visit the cities of the Rhine and ended up in Munich, where I spent many hours in the Pinakotek or wandering through the streets. Germany, that summer, was growing turbulent again: the aftereffect of the previous year’s American stock market crash was making itself harshly felt; elections in the Reichstag, planned for September, would decide the future of the nation. All the political parties were agitating, using speeches, parades, sometimes violence and brawls. In Munich, one party clearly set itself apart from the others: the NSDAP, which I heard about then for the first time. I had already seen Italian Fascists on the news, and these National Socialists seemed to draw inspiration from their style; but their message was specifically German, and their leader, a frontline soldier who was a veteran of the Great War, spoke of a German renewal, of German glory, of a rich, vibrant German future. This, I said to myself as I watched them march by, was what my father had fought for during four long years, until he was finally betrayed, he and all his comrades, and lost his land, his house, our house. This was also everything that Moreau, that good French patriot and radical, who drank to the health of Clemenceau, Foch, and Pétain every year on their birthdays, detested. The leader of the NSDAP was going to give a speech in a Braukeller: I left my French friends in our little hotel. I found myself at the back, behind the crowd, and could scarcely hear the speakers; as for the Führer, I just remember his gestures, made frenetic by emotion, and the way his hair kept falling over his forehead. But he was saying, as I knew with absolute certainty, the things that my father would have said, if he had been present; if he had still been there, he would certainly have been on the platform, one of the men close to that man, one of his foremost companions; he might even, if such had been his fate, who knows, have been there in his place. What’s more, the Führer looked like him, when he stood still. I returned from that trip now for the first time with the idea that something was possible besides the narrow and stifling path outlined for me by my mother and her husband, and that my future was there, with this unfortunate people, my father’s people, my people too.

Since then, many things had changed. The Führer still had all the confidence of the Volk, but the certainty of final victory was beginning to ebb away among the masses. The people blamed the High Command, the Prussian aristocrats, Göring and his Luftwaffe; but I knew too that within the Wehrmacht some were blaming the interference of the Führer. Within the SS, it was being whispered that he had had a nervous breakdown after Stalingrad, that he wasn’t talking to anyone anymore; that at the beginning of the month, when Rommel had tried to convince him to evacuate North Africa, he had listened to him without comprehension. As for the public rumors, in the trains, the tramways, the lines, they were becoming downright ludicrous: according to the SD reports that Thomas received, people were saying that the Wehrmacht had put the Führer under house arrest in Berchtesgaden, that he had lost his reason and was kept under guard, drugged, in an SS hospital, that the Führer we saw was just a double. The speech was going to be given in the Zeughaus, the former arsenal at the end of Unter den Linden, right next to the Spree Canal. As a Stalingrad veteran, wounded and decorated, I didn’t have any trouble getting an invitation; I suggested to Thomas that he come with me, but he replied, laughing: “I’m not on leave, I have work to do.” So I went alone. They had taken considerable security precautions; the invitation said that service weapons would be forbidden. The possibility of a British raid frightened some: in January, the English had reveled at launching a Mosquito attack on the anniversary of the Seizure of Power, producing many victims; yet now the chairs had been set up in the Zeughaus courtyard, under the large glass cupola. I found myself seated in the center, between an Oberstleutnant covered with decorations and a civilian wearing the Gold Badge of the Party on his lapel. After the introductory speeches, the Führer made his appearance. I opened my eyes wide: on his head and shoulders, over his simple feldgrau uniform, I seemed to see a large blue-and-white striped rabbi’s shawl. The Führer had started speaking right away in his rapid, monotone voice. I examined the glass roof: Could it be a play of the light? I could clearly see his cap; but underneath it, I thought I made out long side curls, unrolling along his temples down over his lapel, and on his forehead, the tefillin, the little leather box containing verses of the Torah. When he raised his arm, I thought I could make out other leather straps bound around his wrist; and under his jacket, weren’t those the white fringes of what the Jews call the little tallith showing through? I didn’t know what to think. I scrutinized my neighbors: they were listening to the speech with solemn attention, the civil servant was studiously nodding his head. Didn’t they notice anything? Was I the only one to see this unprecedented spectacle? I looked at the dignitaries’ stand: behind the Führer, I recognized Göring, Goebbels, Ley, the Reichsführer, Kaltenbrunner, other well-known leaders, high-ranking Wehrmacht officers; they were all contemplating the Führer’s back or the audience, impassive. Maybe, I said to myself, panic-stricken, it’s the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes: everyone sees how it really is, but hides it, counting on his neighbor to do the same. No, I reasoned, I must be hallucinating, with a wound like mine, that’s entirely possible. Yet I felt perfectly sound of mind. I was far from the platform, though, and the Führer was lit from the side; maybe it was simply an optical illusion? But I still saw it. Maybe my “pineal eye” was playing a trick on me? But there was nothing dreamlike about it. It was also possible that I had gone mad. The speech was short, and I found myself standing in the midst of the crowd trying to head for the exit, unable to make any headway in my thoughts. The Führer would now go to the galleries in the Zeughaus to visit an exhibition of war trophies captured from the Bolsheviks, before going on to inspect an honor guard, and place a wreath at the Neue Wache; I could have followed him, since this was included in my invitation, but I was too rattled and disoriented; I extricated myself from the crowd as quickly as possible and headed back up the avenue toward the S-Bahn station. I crossed the avenue and went to sit in a café, under the arcades of the Kaiser Gallerie, where I ordered a schnapps, drained it in one swallow, then ordered another. I had to think, but the meaning of my thinking escaped me, I was having trouble breathing, I undid my collar and drank some more. There was one way to discover the truth of the matter: in the evening, at the movies, the newsreels would show excerpts from his speech; that would set me straight. I ordered a paper with a list of showings: at seven o’clock, not far away, they were showing Uncle Krüger. I ordered a sandwich and then went for a walk in the Tiergarten. It was still cold, and not many people were strolling under the bare trees. Different interpretations were whirling around in my head, I was impatient for the film to start, even if the prospect of seeing nothing there wasn’t any more reassuring than the opposite. At six o’clock, I headed for the movie theater and took my place in the line to buy my ticket. In front of me, a group of people were discussing the speech, which they must have heard on the radio; I listened to them eagerly. “He blamed the Jews for everything again,” said a skinny man wearing a hat. “What I don’t understand is that there aren’t any more Jews in Germany, so how can it be their fault?”—“But no, Dummkopf,” replied a rather vulgar woman with bleached hair stacked in an elaborate permanent, “it’s the international Jews.”—“Yes,” the man retorted, “but if these international Jews are so powerful, why couldn’t they save their Jewish brothers here?”—“They’re punishing us by bombing us,” another grayish, stringy woman said. “Did you see what they did in Münster, the other day? It’s just to make us suffer. As if we weren’t suffering enough already with all our men at the front.”—“What I found scandalous,” said a ruddy, paunchy man dressed in a gray pinstripe suit, “is that he didn’t even mention Stalingrad. It’s shameful.”—“Oh, don’t talk to me about Stalingrad,” said the fake blonde. “My poor sister had her son Hans over there, in the Seventy-sixth Division. She’s almost mad with grief, she doesn’t even know if he’s alive or dead.”—“On the radio,” said the grayish woman, “they said they were all dead. They fought to the last bullet, they said.”—“And you believe everything they say on the radio, you poor thing?” the man with the hat said. “My cousin, who is an Oberst, says there were a lot of prisoners. Thousands. Maybe even a hundred thousand.”—“So Hansi might be a prisoner?” asked the blonde.—“It’s possible.”—“Why don’t they write, then?” asked the fat bourgeois. “Our prisoners in England or America write; it even comes through the Red Cross.”—“That’s true,” said the mouse-faced woman.—“And how could they write when they’re all officially dead? They write, but our people don’t pass on the letters.”—“Excuse me,” another person interrupted, “but that is true. My sister-in-law, my wife’s sister, she got a letter from the front, it was just signed: A German patriot, which said that her husband, who is a Leutnant in the Panzers, is still alive. The Russians dropped leaflets on our lines, near Smolensk, with lists of names and addresses, printed in tiny letters, and messages to the families. Soldiers collect them and they write anonymous letters, or send the leaflet as is.” A man with a military haircut joined the conversation: “Anyway, even if there are prisoners, they won’t survive for long. The Bolsheviks will send them to Siberia and make them dig canals until they die. Not one of them will come back. And after what we did to them, that will be only fair.”—“What do you mean, after what we did to them?” the fat man asked sharply. The fake blonde had noticed me and was staring at my uniform. The man with the hat spoke before the soldier did: “The Führer said we have lost five hundred and forty-two thousand men since the beginning of the war. Do you believe that? I think he’s just lying.” The blonde elbowed him and glanced in my direction. The man followed her gaze, reddened and stammered: “Or, well, maybe they don’t give him all the figures…” The others were also looking at me and fell silent. I tried to look neutral and absent. Then the fat man tried to restart the conversation on another subject, but the line had begun to move toward the ticket counter. I bought a ticket and found my seat. Soon the lights went out and they played the news, which opened with the Führer’s speech. The film was grainy, it jumped and went blurry at times, they must have rushed to develop it and print the copies. I still seemed to see the large striped shawl over the Führer’s head and shoulders; I couldn’t make out anything else, aside from his moustache; impossible to be sure of anything. My thoughts fled in all directions, like a school of fish in front of a diver; I scarcely noticed the main film, a flimsy Anglophobic thing, I was still thinking about what I had seen, it didn’t make any sense. That it was real seemed impossible to me, but I couldn’t believe that I was hallucinating. What had that bullet done to my head? Had it irremediably blurred the world for me, or had it truly opened a third eye, the one that sees through the opacity of things? Outside, when I exited, it was night, time for dinner, but I didn’t want to eat. I went back to my hotel and locked myself up in my room. For three days I didn’t go out again.

Someone knocked and I opened the door: a bellboy was there to tell me that Obersturmbannführer Hauser had left a message. I had him cart away the leftovers of the meal I had had sent up the day before, and took the time to shower and comb my hair before going down to reception to call Thomas. Werner Best was in Berlin, he told me; he was willing to see me, that very evening, in the bar at the Hotel Adlon. “You’ll be there?” I went back up to run a bath, as hot as possible, and plunged into it until my lungs felt as if they would crush. Then I sent for a barber to come shave me. At the appointed time I was at the Adlon, toying nervously with the stem of a martini glass, gazing at the Gauleiters, diplomats, high-ranking SS officers, wealthy aristocrats who stayed there while they were passing through Berlin, or were just dining there. I thought about Werner Best. How would a man like Best react if I told him I thought I’d seen the Führer draped in a rabbi’s shawl? No doubt he’d give me the address of a good doctor. But maybe he’d also coldly explain to me why it had to be that way. An odd man. I had met him in the summer of 1937, after he had helped me, through Thomas, during my arrest in the Tiergarten; he had never again alluded to it. After my recruitment, although I was at least ten years younger than he, he seemed to take an interest in me and invited me several times to dinner, usually along with Thomas and one or two other officials from the SD, once with Ohlendorf, who drank a lot of coffee and spoke little, and sometimes also one-on-one. He was an extraordinarily precise, cold, and objective man, and at the same time passionately devoted to his ideals. When I still barely knew him, it seemed obvious to me that Thomas Hauser imitated his style, and I saw later on that this was the case for most of the young SD officers, who definitely admired him more than they did Heydrich. Best, at that time, still liked to preach what he called heroic realism: “What counts,” he asserted, quoting Jünger, whom he read avidly, “is not what you fight for, but how you fight for it.” For this man, National Socialism was not a political opinion, but rather a way of life, a hard, radical one that blended a capacity for objective analysis with the ability to act. The highest morality, he explained to us, consists in surmounting traditional inhibitions in the search for the good of the Volk. In that, the Kriegsjugendgeneration, the “war youth generation,” to which he belonged along with Ohlendorf, Six, Knochen, and also Heydrich, was clearly distinct from the previous generation, the junge Frontgeneration, the “youth of the front,” who had been in the war. Most of the Gauleiters and Party leaders, like Himmler and Hans Frank and also Goebbels and Darré, belonged to that generation, but Best thought them too idealistic, too sentimental, naïve, and unrealistic. The Kriegsjungen, too young to have been in the war or even fought with the Freikorps, had grown up during the troubled Weimar years, and against this chaos they had forged a völkisch, radical approach to the problems of the nation. They had joined the NSDAP not because its ideology was different from that of the other völkisch parties of the 1920s, but because instead of getting bogged down in ideas, in leaders’ quarrels, in endless, unproductive debates, it had concentrated on organization, mass propaganda, and activism, and had thus naturally emerged in a guiding position. The SD embodied this hard, objective, realistic approach. As for our generation—by that, Best, in these discussions, meant the generation of Thomas and me—it hadn’t yet fully defined itself: it had reached adulthood under National Socialism, but hadn’t yet been confronted with its real challenges. That was why we had to prepare ourselves, cultivate a severe discipline, learn to fight for our Volk and if necessary destroy our enemies, without hatred and without animosity, not like those Teutonic big shots who behaved as if they were still wearing animal pelts, but in a systematic, efficient, carefully thought-out way. That was the mood of the SD then—and, for example, of Professor Dr. Alfred Six, my first department head, who was also at the same time the head of the foreign economics faculty at the university: a bitter, somewhat disagreeable man who spoke more often of bioracial politics than of economics; but he advocated the same methods that Best did, and the same held true for all the young men recruited through the years by Höhn, the young wolves of the SD, Schellenberg, Knochen, Behrends, d’Alquen, Ohlendorf of course, but also less well known men now, such as Melhorn, Gürke who was killed in combat in 1943, Lemmel, Taubert. It was a race apart, not much appreciated within the Party, but lucid, active, disciplined, and after I entered the SD, I had aspired only to become one of them. Now I wasn’t so sure. I had the impression, after my experiences in the East, that the idealists in the SD had been overwhelmed by the policemen, the bureaucrats of violence. I wondered what Best thought of the Endlösung. But I had no intention of asking him, or even of broaching the subject, not to mention that of my strange vision.

Best arrived half an hour late, wearing an extraordinary black uniform with two rows of gold buttons and immense lapels lined in white velvet. After a formal exchange of salutes, he vigorously shook my hand, apologizing for his lateness: “I was with the Führer. I didn’t even have time to change.” While we congratulated each other on our respective promotions, a maître d’hôtel appeared, greeted Best, and led us to a reserved booth. I ordered another martini and Best a glass of red wine. Then he questioned me about my career in Russia: I replied without going into details; in any case, Best knew better than anyone what an Einsatzgruppe was. “And now?” So I explained my idea to him. He listened to me patiently, nodding his head; his high-domed forehead, gleaming beneath the chandeliers, still bore the red mark of his cap, which he had placed on the banquette. “Yes, I remember,” he said finally. “You were beginning to be interested in international law. Why haven’t you published anything?”—“I’ve never really had a chance. At the RSHA, after you left, they entrusted me only with questions of constitutional and penal law, and afterward, in the field, it was impossible. I have acquired a solid practical experience of our methods of occupation, though.”—“I’m not sure that the Ukraine is the best example.”—“Of course not,” I said. “No one in the RSHA can understand how we let Koch go on like that. It’s a catastrophe.”—“That’s one of the dysfunctions of National Socialism. On this point, Stalin is much more rigorous than we are. But men like Koch, I hope, have no future. You read the Festgabe that we arranged to have published for the Reichsführer’s fortieth birthday?” I shook my head: “Unfortunately not.”—“I’ll have a copy sent to you. My contribution to it developed a theory of the Grossraum founded on a völkisch basis; your old professor Höhn wrote an article on the same subject, as did Stuckart, from the Ministry of the Interior. Lemmel, you remember him, has also published work on these concepts, but elsewhere. It was a question both of completing our critical reading of Carl Schmitt and at the same time of putting forward the SS as the driving force behind the construction of the New European Order. The Reichsführer, surrounded by men like us, could have been its main architect. But he let the chance slip by.”—“What happened, then?”—“It’s hard to say. I don’t know if the Reichsführer was obsessed by his plans for the reconstruction of the German East, or if he was overwhelmed with too many tasks. Certainly the involvement of the SS in the processes of demographic planning in the East played a role. That’s part of the reason I decided to quit the RSHA.” This last assertion, I knew, lacked sincerity. Around the time I was finishing my thesis (it had to do with the reconciliation of positive State law with the notion of Volksgemeinschaft) and was entering the SD full-time, to help write legal opinions, Best was already beginning to have problems, especially with Schellenberg. Schellenberg, in private but also in writing, accused Best of being too bureaucratic, too narrow-minded, an academic lawyer, a hair-splitter. That, according to rumor, was also Heydrich’s opinion; at least Heydrich had given Schellenberg free rein. Best, for his part, criticized the “de-officialization” of the police: concretely, he argued that all employees of the SD assigned to the SP, like Thomas and me, had to be subject to the ordinary rules and procedures of the State administration; department heads should all have legal training. But Heydrich made fun of this kindergarten for ticket punchers, and Schellenberg launched attack after attack. Best, on this subject, had made a striking remark to me one day: “You know, despite all my hatred for 1793, I sometimes feel close to Saint-Just, who said: I fear less the austerity or the delirium of some than the flexibility of others.” All that occurred during the last spring before the war; I have already spoken about what ensued in the fall, Best’s departure, my own troubles; but I understood why Best preferred to see the positive side of these developments. “In France and now in Denmark,” he said, “I tried working on the practical aspects of these theories.”—“And how is that going?”—“In France, the idea of a supervised administration was good. But there was too much interference from the Wehrmacht, which continued its own policy, and from Berlin, which spoiled things a little with that business of hostages. And also, of course, the Eleventh of November put an end to all that. In my opinion it was a gross mistake. But well! I have every hope, on the other hand, of turning Denmark into a model Protektorat.”—“People have only good things to say about your work.”—“Oh, I have my critics too! And also, you know, I’ve only just begun. But beyond these precise issues, what counts is to get down to developing a global postwar vision. For now, all our measures are ad hoc and incoherent. And the Führer is giving contradictory signals about his intentions. So it’s very hard to make concrete promises.”—“I see perfectly what you mean.” I spoke to him briefly about Lippert, about the hopes he had raised during our conversation in Maikop. “Yes, that’s a good example,” said Best. “But you see, other people are promising the same things to the Flemish. And also now the Reichsführer, encouraged by Obergruppenführer Berger, is launching his own policy, with the creation of foreign legions of the Waffen-SS, and this is incompatible with, or in any case not coordinated with, the policies of the Auswärtiges Amt. That’s the whole problem: so long as the Führer doesn’t intervene in person, everyone pursues his own personal policies. There’s no overall vision, and so no truly völkisch policies. The real National Socialists are incapable of doing their work, which is to direct and guide the Volk; instead, it’s the Parteigenossen, the Party men, who carve out fiefs for themselves and then govern them as they please.”—“You don’t think the members of the Party are authentic National Socialists?” Best raised a finger: “Watch out. Don’t confuse a member of the Party with a man of the Party. All members of the Party, like you and me, are not necessarily ‘PGs.’ A National Socialist must believe in his vision. And necessarily, since the vision is unique, all real National Socialists can work only in a single direction, which is that of the Volk. But do you think that all these people”—he made a wide gesture encompassing the room—“are authentic National Socialists? A Party man is someone who owes his career to the Party, who has a position to defend within the Party, and who thus defends the interests of the Party in controversies with other hierarchies, whatever the real interests of the Volk may be. The Party, in the beginning, was conceived as a movement, an agent of mobilization for the Volk; now it has become a bureaucracy like all the others. For a long time, some of us hoped the SS could take up that role. And it’s not too late yet. But the SS is also succumbing to dangerous temptations.” We drank a little; I wanted to return to the subject that concerned me. “What do you think of my idea?” I finally asked. “It seems to me that with my past, my knowledge of the country and of the various trends in French thinking, it’s in France that I could be most useful.”—“You might be right. The problem, as you know, is that aside from strictly police functions, the SS is a little out of the picture in France. And I don’t think my name would be very useful to you with the Militärbefehlshaber. With Abetz I can’t do anything either, he’s very jealous of his shop. But if you’re really interested, contact Knochen. He should remember you.”—“Yes, that’s an idea,” I said halfheartedly. That wasn’t what I wanted. Best went on: “You could tell him that I recommended you. What about Denmark? Wouldn’t that interest you? I could probably find a good job for you there.” I tried not to show my increasing embarrassment too much: “Thank you very much for the suggestion. But I have very concrete ideas about France, and I’d like to follow them up if that’s possible.”—“I understand. But if you change your mind, contact me.”—“Of course.” He looked at his watch. “I’m dining with my minister and I really have to change. If I think of something else, for France, or if I hear of an interesting position opening up, I’ll let you know.”—“I would be very grateful to you. Thank you again for taking the time to see me.” He finished his glass and replied: “It was a pleasure. That’s what I miss the most, since I left the RSHA: the possibility of openly discussing ideas with men of convictions. In Denmark, I have to be on my guard all the time. Good night, then!” I walked him out and left him in the street, in front of the former British embassy. I watched his car head off down Wilhelmstrasse and then I made for the Brandenburg Gate and the Tiergarten, troubled by his last words. A man of convictions? Before, probably, I had been one, but now, where was the clarity of my convictions hidden away? I could glimpse these convictions, they were dancing gently around me: but if I tried to grasp one, it slipped between my fingers, like a nervous, powerful eel.

Thomas was certainly a man of convictions; convictions, obviously, that were entirely compatible with the pursuit of his ambitions and of pleasure. Back at my hotel, I found a note from him inviting me to the ballet. I called him with my excuses; without giving me time to present them, he said abruptly, “So how did it go?,” then began to explain why he wasn’t having any success on his side. I listened patiently and at the first opportunity tried to turn down his invitation. But he would hear nothing of it: “You’re turning into a caveman. It will do you good to get out.” To tell the truth the idea bored me profoundly, but I ended up giving in. All the Russian ballets were of course forbidden; so they put on little pieces by Mozart, ballets from Idomeneo, followed by a Gavotte and his Petits Riens. The orchestra was conducted by von Karajan, then a rising young star whose fame hadn’t yet eclipsed Furtwängler’s. I found Thomas near the artists’ entrance: one of his friends had procured a private box for him. Everything was superbly organized. Bustling usherettes took our coats and caps and led us to a buffet, where we were served drinks in the company of musicians and starlets from Goebbels’s studios, who were immediately charmed by Thomas’s wit and good looks. When they led us to our box, which was right at the edge of the stage, above the orchestra, I whispered: “Aren’t you going to try to invite one of the girls?” Thomas shrugged his shoulders: “You’re joking! To get in behind the good Doktor, you have to be at least a Gruppenführer.” I had teased him mechanically, without conviction; I remained withdrawn into myself, closed, hostile to everything; but as soon as the ballet began I was delighted. The dancers were just a few yards away from me, and as I watched them I felt poor and haggard and miserable, as if I hadn’t yet shaken the cold and fear of the front from my body. The dancers leaped in their brilliant costumes, splendid, as if to mark an insuperable distance, and their shining, sumptuous bodies petrified me and drove me mad with excitement (but it was a vain, aimless, distraught excitement). The gold, the crystal in the chandeliers, the tulle, the silk, the opulent jewelry, the artists’ sparkling teeth, their gleaming muscles, overwhelmed me. During the first intermission, sweating in my uniform, I rushed to the bar and had several drinks, then brought the bottle back with me to the box. Thomas looked at me amusedly and drank too, more slowly. On the other side of the theater, sitting in a raised box, a woman was eying me through some opera glasses. She was too far away, I couldn’t make out her features and I didn’t have any opera glasses, but she was obviously staring at me, and this little game began to annoy me enormously; during the second intermission, I made no attempt to look for her, I took refuge in the private buffet and kept drinking with Thomas; but as soon as the ballet began again, I was like a child. I applauded and even considered sending flowers to one of the dancers, but I didn’t know which one to choose, and also I didn’t know their names, and I didn’t know how to go about it, and I was afraid of making a mistake. The woman kept peering at me, but I couldn’t care less. I drank some more, laughed. “You were right,” I said to Thomas, “this was a good idea.” Everything dazzled me and frightened me. I couldn’t begin to understand the beauty of the dancers’ bodies, an almost abstract, asexual beauty, with no distinction between the men and the women: this beauty almost scandalized me. After the ballet, Thomas took me to a little street in Charlottenburg; when we went in, I realized to my horror that it was a brothel, but it was too late to retreat. I drank some more and ate some sandwiches while Thomas danced with the unclothed girls, who obviously knew him well. There were some other officers there and some civilians. A gramophone played American records, a frenzied, irritating jazz mingled with the brittle, lost laughter of the whores. Most of them wore nothing but colored silk negligees, and their soft, insipid, dormant skin, which Thomas grasped with both hands, filled me with disgust. A girl tried to sit on my lap; I gently pushed her away, my hand on her naked belly, but she insisted, and so I brutally shoved her off and upset her. I was pale, distraught; everything was shiny and jangling and making me ill. Thomas came over to pour me another drink, laughing: “If you don’t like her, you don’t have to make a scene, there are others.” He waved his hand, his face flushed. “Choose, choose, it’s on me.” I had no desire whatsoever, but he insisted; finally, so that he would leave me alone, I seized the bottle I was drinking by the neck and went up with one of the girls, picked out at random. In her room, it was calmer. She helped me take off my tunic; but when she wanted to unbutton my shirt, I stopped her and made her sit down. “What’s your name?” I asked her.—“Émilie,” she answered, using the French form of the name.—“Tell me a story, Émilie.”—“What kind of story, Herr Offizier?”—“Tell me about your childhood.” Her first words froze me: “I had a twin sister. She died when she was ten. We both had the same illness, rheumatic fever, and then she died of uremia, the water kept rising, rising…. She suffocated to death.” She rummaged through a drawer and took out two framed photographs. The first one showed the two twins, side by side, with large eyes and ribbons in their hair, about ten years old; the other, the dead girl in her coffin, surrounded by tulips. “At home, they hung this photo up. From that day on my mother couldn’t bear tulips anymore, the smell of tulips. She said: I have lost the angel and kept the devil. After that, whenever I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror, I thought I was seeing my dead sister. And if I came running back from school, my mother would get hysterical, she thought she was seeing my sister, so I forced myself always to walk back from school slowly.”—“And how did you end up here?” I asked. But the girl, overcome with fatigue, had fallen asleep on the sofa. I leaned on the table and watched her, sipping my drink from time to time. She woke up: “Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll get undressed right away.” I smiled and replied: “Don’t bother.” I sat down on the sofa, took her head on my lap and stroked her hair. “Go on, sleep a little more.”

Another message was waiting for me at the Hotel Eden: “Frau von Üxküll,” the porter explained. “Here is the number where you can reach her.” I went up to my room and sat down on the sofa without even unbuttoning my tunic, overwhelmed. Why contact me like this, after all these years? Why now? I would have been incapable of saying if I did or didn’t want to see her again; but I knew that if she wanted to, not seeing her again would be as impossible for me as not breathing anymore. That night I didn’t sleep at all, or only a little. The memories came brutally rushing back; unlike the ones that had welled up in great waves in Stalingrad, these were not solar, dazzling memories of the force of happiness, but memories already tinged with the cold light of the full moon, white and bitter. In the springtime, back from our winter sports, we continued our games in the attic, naked, shining in the dust-filled light, among the dolls and piles of trunks and suitcases overloaded with old clothes behind which we nestled together. After the winter, I was pale, and still hairless; as for her, the shadow of a tuft was appearing between her legs, and minuscule breasts were beginning to deform her chest, which I loved so flat and smooth. But there was no way back. It was still cold, our skin was taut and bristling. She climbed on top of me, but already a trickle of blood was running down the inside of her thighs. She cried: “It’s beginning, the end is beginning.” I took her in my thin arms and cried with her. We weren’t yet thirteen. It wasn’t right, I wanted to be like her; why couldn’t I bleed too, share that with her? Why couldn’t we be the same? I didn’t have ejaculations yet, our games continued; but maybe now we were observing each other, we were observing ourselves a little more, and that already introduced a distance, an infinitesimal one still, but one that may have made us push things sometimes. Then came the inevitable: one day, the whitish cream on my hand, my thighs. I told Una and showed her. It fascinated her, but she was afraid, she had learned the mechanics of the thing. And for the first time the attic seemed gloomy to us, dusty, full of spiderwebs. I wanted to kiss her breasts, round now, but that didn’t interest her, and she knelt down, presenting her narrow adolescent buttocks to me. She had brought some cold cream taken from our mother’s bathroom: “Take it,” she said. “There nothing can happen.” More than the sensation, I remember the acrid, heady smell of the cold cream. We were between the Golden Age and the Fall.

When I called her, in the late morning, her voice was perfectly calm. “We’re at the Kaiserhof.”—“Are you free?”—“Yes. Can we see each other?”—“I’ll come by and pick you up.” She was waiting for me in the lobby and got up when she saw me. I took off my cap and she kissed me delicately on the cheek. Then she stepped back and contemplated me. She held out a finger and tapped one of the silver buttons on my tunic with the tip of her fingernail: “It suits you nicely, this uniform.” I looked at her without saying anything: she hadn’t changed, a little older of course, but she was still just as beautiful. “What are you doing here?” I asked.—“Berndt had some business with his lawyer. I thought you might be in Berlin, and I wanted to see you.”—“How did you find me?”—“A friend of Berndt’s at the OKW called the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse and they told him where you were staying. What would you like to do?”—“You have some time?”—“The whole day.”—“Let’s go to Potsdam, then. We can eat and walk in the park.”

It was one of the very first fine days of the year. The air was getting warmer, the trees were budding beneath a pale sun. In the train we didn’t say much; she seemed distant, and to tell the truth, I was terrified. Her face turned to the window, she watched the still-bare trees of the Grunewald go by; and I watched that face. Beneath her heavy, jet black hair, it looked almost translucent; the long blue veins were clearly outlined beneath her milk white skin. One of them started at the temple, touched the corner of her eye, then, in a long curve, crossed her cheek like a scar. I imagined the blood pulsing slowly beneath this surface as thick and deep as the opalescent oils of a Flemish master. At the base of her neck, another network of veins began, unfurled over the delicate clavicle, and passed beneath her sweater, I knew, like two large open hands to irrigate her breasts. As for her eyes, I could see them reflected in the window, on the dense brown background of the trees, colorless, distant, absent. In Potsdam I knew a little restaurant near the Garnisonskirche. The pealing bells were ringing out their little melancholic tune, to a melody by Mozart. The restaurant was open: “Goebbels’s obsessions don’t hold sway in Potsdam,” I commented; but even in Berlin most of the restaurants were already reopening. I ordered some wine and asked my sister about her husband’s health. “He’s fine,” she replied laconically. They were just in Berlin for a few days; after that, they would go to a sanatorium in Switzerland, where von Üxküll would get his treatment. Hesitant, I wanted her to talk about her life in Pomerania. “I have nothing to complain about,” she said, looking at me with her large clear eyes. “Berndt’s farmers bring us food to eat, we have everything we need. Sometimes we even have fish. I read a lot, take walks. The war seems very far away.”—“It’s getting closer,” I said harshly.—“You don’t think they’ll get as far as Germany?” I shrugged my shoulders: “Anything is possible.” Our words remained cold, awkward, I could see, but I didn’t know how to break this coldness to which she seemed indifferent. We drank and ate a little. Finally, more gently, she ventured: “I heard you were wounded. From some of Berndt’s army friends. We live a somewhat retired life, but he keeps his contacts. I didn’t get any details and I was worried. But seeing you, it must not have been very serious.” So, calmly, I told her what had happened and showed her the hole. She put down her silverware and turned pale; she raised her hand, then put it down. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.” I held out my fingers and touched the back of her hand; she slowly withdrew it. I didn’t say anything. In any case I didn’t know what to say: everything I wanted to say, everything I should have said, I couldn’t say. There was no coffee; we finished our meal and I paid. The streets of Potsdam were quiet: some soldiers, some women with strollers, not many vehicles. We headed for the park, without speaking. The Marlygarten, where you enter, prolonged the calm of the streets and deepened it; from time to time we saw a couple, or some convalescent soldiers, on crutches or in wheelchairs. “It’s terrible,” murmured Una. “What a waste.”—“It’s necessary,” I said. She didn’t reply: we were still talking past each other. Some tame squirrels were scampering in the grass; to our right, one of them ran up to snatch some pieces of bread from a little girl’s hand, withdrew, returned to nibble, and the girl broke out in peals of laughter. On the ornamental ponds, some mallards and other ducks were swimming or had just landed: just before impact, they quickly beat their wings, leaning backward to slow down, and pointing their webbed feet at the water; as soon as they touched the surface, they folded back their feet and ended up skidding on their rounded bellies, in a little spray of water. The sun was shining through the pines and bare oak branches; where the paths joined, little cherubs or nymphs stood on gray stone pedestals, superfluous and laughable. At the Mohrenrondell, a circle of busts set in topiary hedges, beneath terraced vines and greenhouse plants, Una gathered her skirt around her and sat down on a bench, casually, like a teenager. I lit a cigarette; she borrowed it from me and took a few drags before giving it back. “Tell me about Russia.” I explained to her, in short, dry sentences, what security work in the rear areas consisted of. She listened without saying anything. In the end she asked: “And you, did you kill people?”—“Once, I had to give the coups de grâce. Most of the time I gathered information, wrote reports.”—“And when you shot at people, what did you feel?” I answered without hesitating: “The same thing as when I watched other people shoot. As long as it has to be done, it doesn’t matter who does it. And also, I consider that watching involves my responsibility as much as doing.”—“But do you have to do it?”—“If we want to win this war, yes, certainly.” She thought about this and then said: “I’m happy I’m not a man.”—“And I’ve often wished I had your luck.” She held out her arm and brushed her hand over my cheek, pensive: I thought happiness would suffocate me, that I would huddle in her arms, like a child. But she stood up and I followed her. She calmly climbed the terraces toward the little yellow palace. “Have you heard from Mother?” she asked over her shoulder.—“No. We stopped writing years ago. What’s happened with her?”—“She’s still in Antibes, with Moreau. He was doing business with the German army. Now they’re under Italian control: apparently they’re very well behaved, but Moreau is furious because he’s convinced Mussolini wants to annex the Côte d’Azur.” We had reached the last terrace, an expanse of gravel reaching to the façade of the palace. From there, we looked out over the park; the roofs and steeples of Potsdam were silhouetted behind the trees. “Papa liked this place very much,” Una said calmly. The blood rose to my face and I grasped her arm: “How do you know that?” She shrugged her shoulders: “I know it, that’s all.”—“You never…” She looked at me sadly: “Max, he’s dead. You should get that into your head.”—“You too, even you say that,” I spat out angrily. But she remained calm: “Yes, I too say that.” And she recited these lines in English:

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes;

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange.

Disgusted, I turned and walked away. She caught up with me and took my arm. “Come. Let’s visit the palace.” The gravel crunching under our steps, we went round the building and under the rotunda. Inside, I looked vaguely at the gilt finish, the small, precious furniture, the voluptuous eighteenth-century paintings; I was moved only in the music room, when I saw the fortepiano and wondered if it was the same one on which old Bach had improvised for the king what would become the Musical Offering, the day he had come there: if it weren’t for the guard, I would have stretched out my hand and struck the keys that might have felt Bach’s fingers. The famous painting by von Menzel that shows Frederick II, illumined by cathedrals of candles, playing his flute just as on the day he received Bach, had been taken down, likely from fear of bombs. A little farther on, the tour went through the guest room known as Voltaire’s Room, with a tiny bed where the great man supposedly had slept during the years he taught Frederick the Enlightenment and hatred of the Jews; actually he stayed at the Potsdam town castle. Una studied the frivolous decorations with amusement: “For a king who couldn’t even take off his own boots, let alone his pants, he certainly appreciated naked women. The whole palace seems eroticized.”—“That’s to remind himself of what he had forgotten.” At the exit, she pointed to the hill where some artificial ruins stood out, products of this rather capricious prince’s whim: “Would you like to climb up there?”—“No. Let’s go toward the orangery.” We strolled lazily along, without looking much at the things around us. We sat down for a bit on the terrace of the orangery, then went down the steps framing the large ponds and flowerbeds in a regular, classical, perfectly symmetrical order. Afterward the park began again and we walked on at random, down one of the long footpaths. “Are you happy?” she asked me.—“Happy? Me? No. But I’ve known happiness. Now I’m content with what there is, I can’t complain. Why do you ask me that?”—“Just like that. No reason.” A little farther, she went on: “Can you tell me why we haven’t spoken in more than eight years?”—“You got married,” I answered, holding back a burst of rage.—“Yes, but that was later. And also, that’s not a reason.”—“For me it is. Why did you get married?” She stopped and looked at me closely: “I don’t owe you any explanations. But if you want to know, I love him.” I looked at her now: “You have changed.”—“Everyone changes. You’ve changed too.” We continued walking. “And you, you’ve never loved anyone?” she asked.—“No. I keep my promises.”—“I never made you any.”—“That’s true,” I acknowledged.—“Anyway,” she went on, “obstinate attachment to old promises is no virtue. The world changes, you have to be able to change with it. You’re still a prisoner of the past.”—“I’d rather call it loyalty, fidelity.”—“The past is over, Max.”—“The past is never over.”

We had reached the Chinese pavilion. A mandarin under his parasol sat enthroned at the top of the cupola, which was trimmed with a blue-and-gold canopy supported by gilt columns in the shape of palm trees. I glanced inside: a round room, Oriental paintings. Outside, at the foot of each palm tree, sat exotic figures, also gilded. “A real folie,” I commented. “That’s what the great used to dream of. It’s a little ridiculous.”—“No more than the mad fantasies of the powerful today,” she replied calmly. “I like this century a lot. It’s the only one of which you can at least say it wasn’t a century of faith.”—“From Watteau to Robespierre,” I retorted ironically. She made a face: “Robespierre is already the nineteenth. He’s almost a German romantic. Do you still like that French music as much as you used to—Rameau, Forqueray, Couperin?” I felt my face darken: her question had suddenly reminded me of Yakov, the little Jewish pianist from Zhitomir. “Yes,” I answered finally. “But I haven’t had a chance to listen to them for a long time now.”—“Berndt plays them now and then. Especially Rameau. He says it’s not bad, that there are some things that are almost as good as Bach, for the keyboard.”—“That’s what I think too.” I had had almost the same conversation with Yakov. I didn’t say anything more. We had come to the edge of the park; we turned around and then, by common consent, headed off toward the Friedenskirche and the exit. “And you?” I asked. “Are you happy, in your Pomeranian hideout?”—“Yes. I’m happy.”—“You don’t get bored? You must feel a little lonely sometimes.” She looked at me again, for a long time, before replying: “I don’t need anything.” This statement chilled me. We took a bus to the train station. Waiting for the train, I went and bought the Völkische Beobachter; Una laughed when she saw me come back with it. “Why are you laughing?”—“I was thinking about one of Berndt’s jokes. He calls the VB the Verblödungsblatt, the Mindless Rag.” I scowled: “He should be careful about what he says.”—“Don’t worry. He’s not an idiot, and his friends are intelligent men.”—“I wasn’t worried. I was warning you, that’s all.” I looked at the front page: the English had bombed Cologne again, causing many civilian deaths. I showed her the article: “Those Luftmörder really have no shame,” I said. “They say they’re defending freedom and they kill women and children.”—“We’re killing women and children too,” she replied gently. Her words made me ashamed, but immediately my shame turned into anger: “We’re killing our enemies, to defend our country.”—“They’re defending their country too.”—“They’re killing innocent civilians!” I was turning red, but she remained calm. “The people you were executing—you didn’t catch them all with weapons in their hands. You too have killed children.” Rage was suffocating me, I didn’t know how to explain to her; the difference seemed obvious to me, but she was acting stubborn and pretending not to see it. “You’re calling me a murderer!” I shouted. She took my hand: “No, I’m not. Calm down.” I calmed down and went out to smoke; then we got on the train. As on the way down, she watched the Grunewald go by, and as I watched her I shifted, slowly at first, then vertiginously, into the memory of our last meeting. It was in 1934, just after our twenty-first birthday. I had finally won my freedom, I had announced to my mother that I was leaving France; on my way back to Germany, I made a detour through Zurich; I rented a room in a little hotel and went to find Una, who was studying there. She seemed surprised to see me: but she already knew about the scene in Paris, with Moreau and our mother, and about my decision. I took her out to dinner at a modest, quiet restaurant. She was happy in Zurich, she told me, she had friends, Jung was a magnificent man. These last words made my hackles rise, it must have been something in her tone, but I didn’t say anything. “And you?” she asked me. I revealed my hopes to her then, my enrollment in Kiel, my joining the NSDAP too (I had done so during my second trip to Germany, in 1932). She listened to me as she drank her wine; I drank too, but more slowly. “I’m not sure I share your enthusiasm for this Hitler,” she commented. “He seems a neurotic to me, full of unresolved complexes, frustrations, and dangerous resentments.”—“How can you say that!” I launched into a long tirade. But she frowned, withdrew into herself. I stopped as she poured herself another glass, and I took her hand on the checkered tablecloth. “Una. It’s what I want to do, it’s what I have to do. Our father was German. My future is in Germany, not with the corrupt bourgeoisie of France.”—“You may be right. But I’m afraid you’ll lose your soul with those men.” I flushed with anger and struck the table. “Una!” It was the first time I had raised my voice with her. Her glass tipped over from the blow, rolled, and smashed at her feet, bursting into a puddle of red wine. A waiter hurried over with a broom and Una, who until then had kept her eyes lowered, raised them to me. Her gaze was clear, almost transparent. “You know,” I said, “I’ve finally read Proust. You remember this passage?” I recited, my throat tight: “This glass will be, as in the Temple, the symbol of our indestructible union.” She waved her hand. “No, no. Max, you don’t understand anything, you’ve never understood anything.” She was red, she must have drunk a lot. “You’ve always taken things too seriously. They were games, children’s games. We were children.” My eyes, my throat swelled up. I made an effort to control my voice. “You’re wrong, Una. You’re the one who never understood anything.” She drank some more. “You have to grow up, Max.” It had been seven years then since we were apart. “Never,” I said, “never.” And I kept that promise, even if she never thanked me for it.

In the train from Potsdam, I watched her, dominated by a feeling of loss, as if I had sunk and had never come back to the surface. And what was she thinking about? Her face hadn’t changed since that night in Zurich, it had simply filled out a little; but it remained closed to me, inaccessible; behind it, there was another life. We passed between the elegant residences in Charlottenburg; then came the zoo and the Tiergarten. “You know,” I said, “since I got to Berlin I haven’t even been to the zoo yet.”—“But you used to like zoos.”—“Yes. I should go for a walk there.” We got out at the Lehrter Hauptbahnhof and I took a taxi to accompany her to the Wilhelmplatz. “Do you want to have dinner with me?” I asked her in front of the entrance to the Kaiserhof. “Yes,” she replied, “but now I have to go see Berndt.” We agreed to meet in two hours, and I went back to my hotel to bathe and change. I felt exhausted. Her words were confused with my memories, my memories with my dreams, and my dreams with my most insane thoughts. I remembered her cruel Shakespeare quotation: so had she too joined our mother’s camp? It was undoubtedly the influence of her husband, the Baltic baron. I said to myself with rage: She should have remained a virgin, like me. The incoherence of this thought made me burst out laughing, a long crazy laughter; at the same time I wanted to cry. At the appointed time, I was at the Kaiserhof. Una joined me in the lobby, among the comfortable square armchairs and little potted palm trees; she wore the same clothes as in the afternoon. “Berndt is resting,” she said. She too felt tired and we decided to stay and eat at the hotel. Ever since the restaurants had reopened, a new directive from Goebbels enjoined them to offer customers Feldküchengerichte, field rations, in solidarity with the troops at the front; the maître d’hôtel’s gaze, while he explained that to us, remained fixed on my medals, and my expression made him stutter; Una’s cheerful laughter cut his embarrassment short: “I think my brother has already eaten enough of that.”—“Yes, of course,” he hastened to say. “We also have some venison from the Black Forest. With a prune sauce. It’s excellent.”—“Fine,” I said. “And some French wine.”—“Burgundy, with the venison?” During the meal we chatted about this and that, skirting around what concerned us most. I talked to her again about Russia, not the horrors, but my more human experiences: Hanika’s death, and especially about Voss: “You liked him a lot.”—“Yes. He was a decent fellow.” She spoke to me about the matrons who had been pestering her since she arrived in Berlin. With her husband, she had gone to parties and society dinners, where wives of high-ranking Party dignitaries decried deserters from the reproduction front, the childless women guilty of treason against nature for their childbearing strike. She laughed: “Of course, no one had the gall to attack me directly, everyone can see the state Berndt is in. Luckily, because otherwise I would have slapped them. But they were dying of curiosity, they came prowling around me without daring to ask me right out if he can function.” She laughed again and drank a little wine. I kept quiet; I too had asked myself the same question. “There’s even one, just picture this, a fat Gauleiter’s wife dripping with diamonds, with a bluish permanent, who had the nerve to suggest, if someday it should become necessary, that I go find a handsome SS man to impregnate me. How did she phrase it? A decent, dolichocephalic, völkisch will-bearing, physically and psychically healthy man. She explained to me that there was an SS office that was in charge of eugenic assistance and that I could apply to it for help. Is that true?”—“So they say. It’s a project of the Reichsführer’s called Lebensborn. But I don’t know how it works.”—“They’ve really gone mad. Are you sure it’s not just a brothel for SS officers and socialites?”—“No, no, it’s something else.” She shook her head. “Anyway, you’ll love the punchline: You won’t receive your child from the Holy Ghost, she said to me. I had to keep myself from replying that in any case I didn’t know any SS officer patriotic enough to impregnate her.” She laughed again and kept drinking. She had scarcely touched her food but had already drunk almost an entire bottle of wine on her own; still, her gaze remained clear, she wasn’t drunk. For dessert, the maître d’hôtel suggested grapefruit: I hadn’t tasted any since the beginning of the war. “They come from Spain,” he said. Una didn’t want any; she watched me prepare mine and eat it; I gave her a few pieces to try, lightly sprinkled with sugar. Then I accompanied her back to the lobby. I looked at her, with the taste of sweet grapefruit still in my mouth: “Do you share his bedroom?”—“No,” she replied, “that would be too complicated.” She hesitated, then touched the back of my hand with her oval nails: “If you like, come up and have a drink. But behave. Afterward, you have to leave.” In the bedroom, I put my cap on a table and sat down in an armchair. Una took her shoes off and, crossing the carpet in silk stockings, poured me some Cognac; then she sat on the bed with her feet crossed and lit a cigarette. “I didn’t know you smoked.”—“From time to time,” she replied. “When I drink.” I thought she was more beautiful than anything in the world. I talked to her about my plans for a position in France, and the difficulties I was encountering. “You should ask Berndt,” she said. “He has a lot of friends in high places in the Wehrmacht, comrades from the other war. Maybe he could do something for you.” These words unleashed my suppressed anger: “Berndt! He’s all you talk about.”—“Calm down, Max. He’s my husband.” I got up and began pacing up and down the room. “I don’t give a damn! He’s an intruder, he has no business getting between us.”—“Max.” She was still talking softly; her eyes remained serene. “He is not between us. The us you’re talking about does not exist, it no longer exists, it’s come undone. Berndt is my everyday life, you have to understand that.” My rage was so mixed with my desire that I no longer knew where one began and the other ended. I went up to her and took both her arms: “Kiss me.” She shook her head; for the first time, I saw a harsh look in her eyes. “You’re not going to start that again.” I felt sick, I was suffocating; overcome, I fell down next to the bed, my head against her knees as on a chopping block. “In Zurich, you kissed me,” I sobbed.—“In Zurich I was drunk.” She moved over and put her hand on the bedspread. “Come here. Lie down next to me.” Still with my boots on, I climbed onto the bed and lay curled up against her legs. I thought I could smell her odor through the stockings. She caressed my hair. “My poor little brother,” she murmured. Laughing through my tears, I managed to say: “You call me that because you were born fifteen minutes before me, because it was your wrist they tied the red thread to.”—“Yes, but there’s another difference: now I’m a woman, and you’re still a little boy.” In Zurich, things had gone differently. She had drunk a lot, as had I. After the meal we had gone out. Outside, it was cold and she shivered; she was staggering a little, so I put my arm around her and she clung to me. “Come with me,” I had said. “To my hotel.” She protested in a thickish voice: “Don’t be stupid, Max. We’re not children anymore.”—“Come,” I insisted. “To talk a little.” But we were in Switzerland and even in that kind of hotel the concierges made difficulties: “I’m sorry, mein Herr. Only guests of the establishment are allowed into the rooms. You can go to the bar, if you like.” Una turned toward it, but I held her back. “No. I don’t want to see people. Let’s go to your place.” She didn’t resist and brought me back to her little student’s room, cluttered with books, freezing. “Why don’t you heat it more?” I asked, clearing away the inside of the stove to prepare a fire. She shrugged her shoulders and showed me a bottle of white wine from the Valais. “That’s all I have. Is it all right with you?”—“Anything is all right with me.” I opened the bottle and filled to the brim two glasses she held out, laughing. She drank, then sat down on the bed. I felt tense, strained; I went to the table and examined the spines of the piled-up books. Most of the names were unknown to me. I took one at random. Una saw it and laughed again, a sharp laughter that set my nerves on edge. “Oh, Rank! Rank is good.”—“Who is he?”—“A former disciple of Freud, a friend of Ferenczi. He wrote a fine book on incest.” I turned toward her and stared at her. She stopped laughing. “Why do you say that word?” I said finally. She shrugged her shoulders and held out her glass. “Stop with your nonsense,” she said. “Pour me some more wine instead.” I put the book down and took the bottle: “It’s not nonsense.” She shrugged her shoulders again. I poured wine into her glass and she drank. I went up to her, my hand outstretched to touch her hair, her beautiful thick black hair. “Una…” She brushed my hand away. “Stop, Max.” She was swaying slightly and I put my hand under her hair, stroked her cheek, her neck. She stiffened but didn’t push my hand away; she drank some more. “What do you want, Max?”—“I want everything to be like before,” I said gently, my heart pounding.—“That’s impossible.” She clicked her teeth a little and drank again. “Even before wasn’t like before. Before never existed.” She was rambling, her eyes were closed. “Pour me some more wine.”—“No.” I took her glass and leaned over to kiss her lips. She pushed me harshly away, but the gesture made her lose her balance and she fell back onto the bed. I put her glass down and lay down next to her. She had stopped moving, her stockinged legs hung off the bed, her skirt had risen up over her knees. The blood was beating in my temples, I was overwhelmed, at that moment I loved her more than ever, more even than I had loved her in our mother’s womb, and she had to love me too, now and forevermore. I leaned over her, and she didn’t resist.

I must have fallen asleep; when I woke up, the room was dark. I didn’t know where I was anymore, Zurich or Berlin. No light filtered through the blackout curtains. I could vaguely make out a shape next to me: Una had slipped under the sheets and was sleeping. I spent a long while listening to her gentle, even breathing. Then, with infinite slowness, I brushed back a lock of hair from her ear and leaned over her face. I stayed there without touching her, breathing in her skin and her breath still tinged with the smell of cigarette. Finally I got up and, tiptoeing on the rug, went out. In the street I realized I had forgotten my cap, but I didn’t go back up; I asked the porter to call a taxi for me. In my room at the hotel, the memories kept flowing in, feeding my insomnia, but now they were brutal, confused, hideous memories. As adults, we visited a kind of Torture Museum; there were all kinds of whips there, tongs, an “iron maiden of Nuremberg,” and a guillotine in the back room. At the sight of that instrument my sister flushed bright crimson: “I want to lie down on it.” The room was empty; I went to see the guard and slipped him a bill: “That’s to leave us alone for twenty minutes.”—“Fine,” he agreed with a slight smile. I closed the door and heard him turn the key. Una had stretched out on the bed of the guillotine; I lifted the lunette, made her put her head through it, and closed it on her long neck, after carefully lifting her heavy hair. She was panting. I tied her hands behind her back with my belt, then raised her skirt. I didn’t even bother to lower her panties, just pushed the lace to one side and spread her buttocks with both hands: in the slit, nestling in hair, her anus gently contracted. I spit on it. “No,” she protested. I took out my penis, lay on top of her, and thrust it in. She gave a long stifled cry. I was crushing her with all my weight; because of the awkward position—my pants were hindering my legs—I could only move in little jerks. Leaning over the lunette, my own neck beneath the blade, I whispered to her: “I’m going to pull the lever, I’m going to let the blade drop.” She begged me: “Please, fuck my pussy.”—“No.” I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg. But this memory is dubious, after our childhood we had seen each other only once, that time in Zurich, and in Zurich there was no guillotine, I don’t know, it was probably a dream, an old dream perhaps that, in my confusion, alone in my dark room at the Eden Hotel, I had remembered, or even a dream dreamt that night, during a brief moment of sleep, almost unnoticed. I was angry, for the day, despite all my distress, had remained shot through with purity for me, and now these foul images were coming and soiling it. It repelled me but at the same time troubled me, since I knew that, memory or image or fantasy or dream, this also lived inside me, and that my love must have been made of this too.

In the morning, around ten o’clock, a bellboy knocked on my door: “Herr Sturmbannführer, a phone call for you.” I went down to reception and took the receiver; Una’s joyful voice resounded at the other end: “Max! Can you come have lunch with us? Say yes. Berndt wants to meet you.”—“All right. Where?”—“At Borchardt’s. You know it? On Französischestrasse. At one o’clock. If you get there before us, give our name, I’ve reserved a table.” I went back up to shave and shower. Since I didn’t have my cap anymore I dressed in civilian clothes, with my Iron Cross on my jacket pocket. I arrived early and asked for Freiherr von Üxküll: they led me to a table set a little back and I ordered a glass of wine. Pensive, still saddened by the images from the night before, I thought about my sister’s strange marriage, her strange husband. It had taken place in 1938, when I was finishing my studies. After the night in Zurich, my sister wrote to me only rarely; that year, in the spring, I had received a long letter from her. She told me that in the fall of 1935, she had become very ill. She had gone into analysis, but her depression had only gotten worse, and they had sent her to a sanatorium near Davos to rest and regain her strength. She had stayed there for several months and, in the beginning of 1936, had met a man there, a composer. They had seen each other regularly since then and were going to get married. I hope you will be happy for me, she wrote.

This letter had left me prostrate for many days. I stopped going to the university and didn’t leave my room anymore; I stayed on the bed, facing the wall. So, I said to myself, that’s what it all comes to. They talk to you about love, but at the first opportunity, at the prospect of a nice happy bourgeois marriage, upsy-daisy, they roll onto their backs and spread their legs. Oh, my bitterness was immense. It seemed to me the inevitable end of an old story that pursued me relentlessly: the story of my family, which had almost always persisted in destroying any trace of love in my life. I had never felt so alone. When I recovered a little, I wrote her a stiff, conventional letter, congratulating her and wishing her all happiness.

At that time, I was beginning to form a friendship with Thomas, we were already calling each other by the familiar du, and I asked him to find out about the fiancé, Karl Berndt Egon Wilhelm, Freiherr von Üxküll. He was much older than she; and this aristocrat, a German Balt, was a paralytic. I didn’t understand. Thomas gave me some details: he had distinguished himself during the Great War, which he had finished as an Oberst with the Pour le Mérite; then he had led a Landeswehr regiment into Courland against the Red Latvians. There, on his own property, he had been hit with a bullet in the spinal column, and from his stretcher, before being forced to retreat, he had set fire to his ancestral home, so the Bolsheviks wouldn’t soil it with their debauchery and their shit. His SD file was quite thick: without being regarded exactly as an opponent, he was seen in an unfavorable light, apparently, by certain authorities. During the Weimar years, he had acquired European renown as a composer of modern music; he was known to be a friend and supporter of Schönberg, and he had corresponded with musicians and writers in the Soviet Union. After the Seizure of Power, moreover, he had rejected Strauss’s invitation to enroll in the Reichsmusikkammer, which had in fact put an end to his public career, and he had also refused to become a member of the Party. He lived in seclusion on the estate of his mother’s family, a manor house in Pomerania where he had moved after the defeat of Bermondt’s army and the evacuation from Courland. He left it only for treatment in Switzerland; the Party and local SD reports said that he received few guests and went out even less, avoiding mingling with the society of the Kreis. “An odd sort,” Thomas summed up. “A bitter, uptight aristo, a dinosaur. And why is your sister marrying a cripple? Does she have a nursing complex?” Why, indeed? When I received an invitation for the wedding, which was going to be held in Pomerania, I replied that my studies prevented me from coming. We were twenty-five then, and it seemed to me that everything that had been truly ours was dying.

The restaurant was filling up: a waiter pushed von Üxküll’s wheelchair, and Una was holding my cap under her arm. “Here!” she said cheerfully as she kissed me on the cheek. “You forgot this.”—“Yes, thanks,” I said, blushing. I shook von Üxküll’s hand while the waiter removed a chair, and I declared somewhat solemnly: “Freiherr, delighted to meet you.”—“Likewise, Sturmbannführer. Likewise.” Una pushed him into place and I sat down opposite him; Una came and sat down between us. Von Üxküll had a severe face, very thin lips, gray hair in a crew cut: but his brown eyes seemed sometimes curiously laughing, with crow’s feet. He was simply dressed, in a gray woollen suit with a knit tie, no medals, and his only piece of jewelry was a gold signet ring, which I noticed when he placed his hand on Una’s: “What will you have to drink, darling?”—“Some wine.” Una seemed very cheerful, happy; I wondered if she was forcing it. Von Üxküll’s stiffness was obviously entirely natural. They brought the wine, and von Üxküll asked me some questions about my wound and my convalescence. He drank as he listened to my answer, but very slowly, in little sips. Then, since I didn’t really know what to say, I asked him if he had been to a concert since he arrived in Berlin. “There’s nothing that interests me,” he answered. “I don’t like that young Karajan much. He’s much too full of himself, too arrogant.”—“So you prefer Furtwängler, then?”—“There are rarely any surprises with Furtwängler. But he is very solid. Unfortunately, they don’t let him conduct Mozart’s operas anymore, and that’s what he does best. Apparently Lorenzo da Ponte was half Jewish, and The Magic Flute is a Masonic opera.”—“You don’t think it is?”—“It may be, but I challenge you to show me a German spectator who would realize it on his own. My wife told me you like old French music?”—“Yes, especially the instrumental works.”—“You have good taste. Rameau and the great Couperin are still far too neglected. There is also a whole treasure trove of music for viola da gamba from the seventeenth century, still unexplored—but I’ve been able to consult some manuscripts. It’s superb. But the early French eighteenth century is truly a high point. No one can write like that anymore. The Romantics spoiled everything, we’re still struggling to emerge from it.”—“You know that Furtwängler did conduct, this week,” Una interrupted. “At the Admiralpalast. That Tiana Lemnitz sang there, she isn’t half bad. But we didn’t go. It was Wagner, and Berndt doesn’t like Wagner.”—“That’s an understatement,” he went on. “I detest him. Technically, there are some extraordinary discoveries, some truly new, objective things, but that’s all lost in bombast, gigantism, and also the coarse manipulation of emotions, like the vast majority of German music since 1815. It’s written for people whose main musical reference is still basically the military fanfare. Reading Wagner’s scores fascinates me, but I could never listen to them.”—“Is there any German composer who finds favor with you?”—“After Mozart and Beethoven? A few pieces by Schubert, some passages from Mahler. And even there, I’m being indulgent. At bottom, there’s almost no one but Bach…and now, of course, Schönberg.”—“Excuse me, Freiherr, but it would seem to me that it would be difficult to describe Schönberg’s music as German music.”—“Young man,” von Üxküll retorted dryly, “don’t you try to give me lessons in anti-Semitism. I was an anti-Semite before you were born, even if I remain old-school enough to believe that the sacrament of baptism is powerful enough to wash away the strain of Judaism. Schönberg is a genius, the greatest since Bach. If the Germans don’t want him, that’s their problem.” Una let out a ringing burst of laughter: “Even the VB still talks about Berndt as one of the great representatives of German culture. But if he were a writer, he would be either in the United States with Schönberg and the Manns, or in Sachsenhausen.”—“Is that why you haven’t produced anything in ten years?” I asked. Von Üxküll shook his fork as he answered: “First of all, since I’m not a member of the Musikkammer, I can’t. And I refuse to have my music played abroad if I can’t present it in my own country.”—“So why don’t you enroll, then?”—“Out of principle. Because of Schönberg. When they threw him out of the Academy and he had to leave Germany, they offered me his place: I told them to go screw themselves. Strauss came to see me in person. He had just taken the place of Bruno Walter, a great conductor. I told him he should be ashamed, that it was a government of gangsters and bitter proletarians and that it wouldn’t last. Anyway, they kicked Strauss out two years later, because of his Jewish daughter-in-law.” I forced myself to smile: “I’m not going to get into a political discussion. But it’s hard for me, listening to your opinions, to understand how you can think of yourself as an anti-Semite.”—“But it’s simple,” replied von Üxküll haughtily. “I fought against the Jews and the Reds in Courland and in Memel. I advocated the exclusion of the Jews from German universities, from German political and economic life. I drank to the health of the men who killed Rathenau. But music is different. You just have to close your eyes and listen to know right away if it’s good or not. It has nothing to do with blood, and all great music is equal, whether it’s German, French, English, Italian, Russian, or Jewish. Meyerbeer isn’t worth anything, not because he was Jewish, but because he’s not worth anything. And Wagner, who hated Meyerbeer because he was Jewish and because he had helped him, is scarcely any better, in my opinion.”—“If Max repeats what you’re saying to his colleagues,” Una said, laughing, “you’re going to have problems.”—“You told me he was an intelligent man,” he replied, looking at her. “I’m doing you the honor of taking you at your word.”—“I’m not a musician,” I said, “so it’s hard for me to answer you. What I’ve heard of Schönberg I’ve found inaudible. But one thing is certain: you are definitely not in tune with the mood of your country.”—“Young man,” he retorted, shaking his head, “I’m not trying to be. I stopped meddling in politics a long time ago, and I’m counting on politics not to meddle with me.” We don’t always have a choice, I wanted to reply; but I held my tongue.

At the end of the meal, urged by Una, I had spoken with von Üxküll about my wish to land a position in France. Una had added: “Can’t you help him?” Von Üxküll reflected: “I’ll see. But my friends in the Wehrmacht don’t hold the SS close to their hearts.” That I was beginning to understand; and sometimes I told myself that at bottom it was Blobel, losing his mind in Kharkov, who had been right. All my paths seemed to be leading to dead ends: Best had sent me his Festgabe, but without mentioning France; Thomas was trying to be reassuring, but couldn’t seem to do anything for me. And I, completely absorbed by the presence and thought of my sister, I wasn’t attempting anything anymore, I was sinking into my despondency, stiff, petrified, a sad salt statue on the shores of the Dead Sea. That night, my sister and her husband were invited to a reception, and Una suggested I come with them; I refused: I didn’t want to see her like that, in the midst of thoughtless, arrogant, drunk aristocrats drinking Champagne and joking about everything I held sacred. In the midst of those people, it was certain, I would feel powerless, ashamed, an idiotic kid; their sarcasm would wound me, and my anguish would prevent me from responding; their world remained closed to people like me, and they knew just how to get that across. I shut myself up in my room; I tried to leaf through the Festgabe, but the words made no sense to me. So I abandoned myself to the gentle sway of mad fantasies: Una, overcome with remorse, left her party, came to my hotel, the door opened, she smiled at me, and the entire past, at that instant, was redeemed. All that was perfectly idiotic, and I knew it, but the more time passed, the more I managed to convince myself it would happen, here, now. I remained in the dark, sitting on the sofa, my heart leaping at every noise in the hallway, every clank of the elevator, waiting. But it was always another door that opened and closed, and the despair rose like black water, like that cold, pitiless water that engulfs the drowned and steals their breath away, the precious air of life. The next day, Una and von Üxküll were leaving for Switzerland.

She called me in the morning, just before taking the train. Her voice was soft, tender, warm. The conversation was short, I wasn’t really paying attention to what she was saying, I was listening to that voice, clinging to the receiver, lost in my distress. “We can see each other again,” she said. “You can come visit us.”—“We’ll see,” replied the other person who was speaking through my mouth. I was overcome with nausea again, I thought I would throw up, I convulsively swallowed my saliva by breathing through my nose and managed to control myself. Then she hung up and I was alone again.

Thomas, in the end, had managed to arrange an interview for me with Schulz. “Since things aren’t really getting anywhere, I think it’s worth the trouble. Try to handle him tactfully.” I didn’t have to make much of an effort: Schulz, a scrawny little man who mumbled into his moustache, his mouth streaked with a bad dueling scar, spoke in long circumlocutions that were sometimes hard to follow and, while he stubbornly leafed through my file, didn’t leave me many openings to speak. I managed to get two words in about my interest in the Reich’s foreign policy, but he seemed not to notice. The upshot of this interview was that people were taking an interest in me in high places and that we’d see at the end of my convalescence. It wasn’t very encouraging, and Thomas confirmed my interpretation: “They have to ask for you over there, for a specific job. Otherwise, if they send you anywhere, it will be Bulgaria. True, it’s quiet there, but the wine isn’t so great.” Best had suggested I contact Knochen, but Thomas’s words gave me a better idea: after all, I was on leave, nothing was forcing me to stay in Berlin.

I took the night express and arrived in Paris a little after dawn. The controls didn’t pose any problems. In front of the station I happily contemplated the pale gray stone of the buildings, the bustle in the streets; because of the restrictions, there weren’t many vehicles, but the streets were congested with bicycles and carts, through which the German cars made their way with difficulty. Suddenly joyous, I went into the first café and drank a Cognac, standing at the bar. I was in civilian clothes, and no one had any reason to take me for anything but a Frenchman; I found a curious pleasure in this. I walked calmly up to Montmartre and checked into a discreet little hotel, on the side of the hill, above Pigalle; I knew this place: the rooms were simple and clean, and the owner devoid of curiosity, which suited me. For this first day, I didn’t want to see anyone. I went out for a walk. It was April, spring was starting to show through everywhere, in the pale blue of the sky, the buds and flowers coming out on the branches, a certain liveliness or at least a lightness in people’s steps. Life, I knew, was hard here, the sallow tint of many faces betrayed the difficulties of finding food. But nothing seemed to have changed since my last visit, aside from the traffic and the graffiti: on the walls now you could see STALINGRAD or “1918,” usually erased and sometimes replaced by “1763,” no doubt a brilliant initiative of our services. I headed downhill toward the Seine, then went slowly rummaging through the booksellers along the quays: to my surprise, next to Céline, Drieu, Mauriac, Bernanos and Montherlant, they were openly selling Kafka, Proust, and even Thomas Mann; permissiveness seemed to be the rule. Almost all the sellers had a copy of Rebatet’s book, Les Décombres, which had been published the previous year: I leafed through it with curiosity, but put off buying it till later. I finally decided on a collection of essays by Maurice Blanchot, a critic from the Journal des débats, some of whose articles I had read with interest before the war; it was an advance copy, probably resold by a reviewer, bearing the title Faux Pas; the bookseller explained to me that the publication of the book had been delayed because of the paper shortage, while assuring me that it was still the best thing written recently, unless I liked Sartre, but he didn’t like Sartre (I hadn’t even heard of Sartre then). At the Place Saint-Michel, near the fountain, I sat down at a table on a terrace and ordered a sandwich and a glass of wine. The previous owner of the book had cut open only the first pages; I asked for a knife and, while I waited for the sandwich, cut the remaining pages, a slow, placid ritual that I always savored. The paper was of very poor quality; I had to be careful not to tear the pages by going too fast. After eating, I walked up to the Luxembourg. I had always loved this cold, geometric, luminous park, traversed with a calm agitation. Around the great circle of the central fountain, along the lanes curving out among trees and flowerbeds still bare, people walked, hummed, conversed, read, or, their eyes closed, sunbathed in the pale sun, a long and peaceful murmuring. I sat down on a metal chair with chipped green paint and read a few essays at random, the one on Orestes first, which actually had more to do with Sartre; this latter had apparently written a play where he used the figure of the unfortunate matricide to develop his ideas on man’s freedom in crime; Blanchot judged it harshly, and I could only approve. But I was especially charmed by an article on Melville’s Moby-Dick, where Blanchot speaks of this impossible book, which had marked a moment of my own youth, of this written equivalent of the universe, mysteriously, as a work that presents the ironic quality of an enigma and reveals itself only by the questions it raises. To tell the truth, I didn’t understand much of what he was writing there. But it awoke in me a nostalgia for a life that I could have had: the pleasure of the free play of thought and language, rather than the ponderous rigor of the Law; I let myself be carried along happily by the meanderings of this heavy, patient thinking, which dug a way for itself through ideas the way an underground river slowly carves itself a path through the rock. Finally I closed the book and continued my walk, first toward the Odéon, where more writing covered the walls, then up the Boulevard Saint-Germain, almost empty, toward the Assemblée Nationale. Every place awoke precise memories in me, of my preparatory years and afterward, when I had entered the ELSP; I must have been rather tormented in those days, and I remembered the quick surge of my hatred for France, but these memories, given the distance, reached me as if appeased, almost happy, wreathed in a serene, probably distorted light. I continued toward the Invalides esplanade, where passersby were congregating to watch some workers who, with draught horses, were plowing up the lawns so as to plant vegetables; farther on, near a light tank of Czech manufacture stamped with the swastika, indifferent children were playing with a ball. Then I crossed the Alexandre III Bridge. At the Grand Palais, the posters announced two exhibitions: one entitled Why Did the Jew Want War?, the other a collection of Greek and Roman art. I felt no need to broaden my anti-Semitic education, but antiquity attracted me; I paid for my ticket and went in. There were some superb pieces there, most of them probably borrowed from the Louvre. For a long time I admired the cold, calm, inhuman beauty of a large Apollo with Cithara from Pompeii, a life-size bronze now turned greenish. He had a slender, not entirely formed body, with a child’s sex and narrow, well-rounded buttocks. I walked from one end of the exhibition to the other, but I kept coming back to him: his beauty fascinated me. He might have been nothing but an exquisite, ordinary adolescent, but the verdigris that was eating away at his skin in large patches conferred a stupefying profundity upon him. One detail struck me: regardless of the angle from which I looked at his eyes, painted realistically directly on the bronze, he never looked me in the eye; it was impossible to capture his gaze, drowned, lost in the void of his eternity. The metallic leprosy was blistering his face, his chest, his buttocks, almost devouring his left hand, which must have held the vanished cithara. His face seemed vain, almost smug. Looking at him, I felt overcome with desire, with a wish to lick him; and he was decomposing in front of me with a calm, infinite slowness. After that, avoiding the Champs-Élysées, I walked through the silent little streets of the eighth arrondissement, then slowly climbed back up to Montmartre. Night was falling, the air smelled good. At the hotel, the owner showed me a little black-market restaurant where I could eat without ration cards: “It’s full of lowlife, but the food is good.” The clientele in fact seemed made up of collaborators and black-market dealers; I was served a top cut of sirloin with shallots and green beans, and some decent Bordeaux in a carafe; for dessert, a tarte Tatin with crème fraîche, and, supreme luxury, real coffee. But the Apollo from the Grand Palais had awakened other desires. I went down to Pigalle and found a little bar that I knew well: sitting at the counter, I ordered a Cognac and waited. It didn’t take long, and I brought the boy back to my hotel. Under his cap, he had curly, unruly hair; a light down covered his stomach and darkened in curls on his chest; his olive skin awoke in me a furious desire of mouth and of ass. He was as I liked them, taciturn and available. For him, my ass opened like a flower, and when he finally slipped it in, a ball of white light began to grow at the base of my spine, slowly rose up my back, and annihilated my head. And that night, more than ever, it seemed to me that in this way I was responding directly to my sister, incorporating her into me, whether she accepted it or not. What happened in my body, under the hands and sex of this unknown boy, overwhelmed me. When it was over, I sent him away but didn’t fall asleep; I lay there on the creased sheets, naked and spread out like a child crushed with happiness.

The next day, I went to the editorial office of Je Suis Partout. Almost all my Parisian friends worked there or gravitated around it. This went back quite a long way. When I had gone to Paris to take my preparatory classes, at seventeen, I didn’t know anyone. I was attending Janson-de-Sailly as a boarder; Moreau had allocated a small monthly allowance for me, as long as I got good grades, and I was relatively free; after the carceral nightmare of the three preceding years, it would have taken a lot less to turn my head. But I behaved, I didn’t do anything stupid. After classes, I would dash over to the Seine to hunt through the booksellers’ stalls, or else join my friends in a little bar in the Latin Quarter, to drink cheap red wine and set the world to rights. But I found my classmates a little dull. Almost all of them were from the upper middle class and were getting ready to follow blindly in their fathers’ footsteps. They had money, and they had been taught very early on how the world was made and what their place in it would be: the dominant one. Toward workers, they felt only scorn, or fear; the ideas that I had brought back from my first trip to Germany—that workers were just as much a part of the nation as the middle class, that the social order had to be arranged organically for the advantage of all, not just a few of the well-off, that workers should not be oppressed but rather offered a life of dignity and a place in this order so as to counter the seductions of Bolshevism—all that was foreign to them. Their political opinions were as narrow as their feeling of bourgeois propriety, and it seemed to me even more pointless to try to discuss with them fascism or German National Socialism (which had just, in September of that year, won a crushing electoral victory, thus becoming the second largest party in the country and sending shockwaves across the victors’ Europe) than to talk about the youth movement ideals preached by Hans Blüher. Freud, for them (if they had even heard of him), was a sexual maniac, Spengler a mad, monomaniacal Prussian, Jünger a warmonger flirting dangerously with Bolshevism; even Péguy they found suspect. Only a few students on scholarship from the provinces seemed a little different, and it was mostly toward them that I gravitated. One of these boys, Antoine F., had an older brother at the École normale supérieure, which I had dreamed of attending, and it was he who took me there for the first time, to drink rum toddies with his brother and his dorm mates and discuss Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, whom I was just discovering. This Bertrand F. was a carré, or “squared”—a second-year student; the best study rooms, with sofas, engravings on the walls, and stoves, were mostly occupied by cubes, or the “cubed,” third-year students. One day, passing by one of these rooms, I noticed a Greek inscription painted on the lintel: IN THIS CARREL WORK SIX FINE AND GOOD MEN (hex kaloi kagathoi)—AND A CERTAIN OTHER ONE (kai tis allos). The door was open, so I pushed it and asked in Greek: “So who is this other one?” A young man with a round face raised his thick glasses from his book and answered in the same language: “A Hebrew, who doesn’t know Greek. And you, who are you?”—“Another too, but made of finer stuff than your Hebrew: a German.”—“A German who knows Greek?”—“What better language to speak with a Frenchman?” He burst out laughing and introduced himself: he was Robert Brasillach. I explained to him that I was in fact half French, and had lived in France since 1924; he asked me if I had gone back to Germany since, and I told him about my summer trip; soon we were chatting about National Socialism. He listened attentively to my descriptions and explanations. “Come back whenever you like,” he said at the end. “I have some friends who will be happy to meet you.” Through him, I discovered another world, which had nothing to do with that of the civil servants in training. These young people cultivated visions of the future of their country and of Europe that they argued about bitterly, while also drawing on a rich study of the past. Their ideas and interests burst out in all directions. Brasillach, together with his future brother-in-law Maurice Bardèche, was a passionate student of the cinema and had me discover not only Chaplin and René Clair but also Eisenstein, Lang, Pabst, Dreyer. He brought me to the offices of L’Action française, in their printing house on the Rue Montmartre, a fine narrow building with a Renaissance staircase, full of the din of the rotary presses. I saw Maurras a few times; he would arrive late, around eleven at night, half deaf, bitter, but always ready to open his heart and vent his spleen against the Marxists, the bourgeois, the republicans, the Jews. Brasillach, at that time, was still completely under his spell, but Maurras’s stubborn hatred for Germany formed an obstacle that I couldn’t overlook, and Robert and I often quarreled about it. If Hitler reached power, I asserted, and united the German worker with the middle class, once and for all countering the Red Peril, and if France did the same, and if the two together managed to eliminate the pernicious influence of the Jews, then the heart of Europe, both nationalist and socialist, would form, along with Italy, an invincible bloc of common interests. But the French were still bogged down, floundering in their petty shopkeepers’ interests and their backward-looking spirit of revenge. Of course, Hitler would sweep aside the unjust Versailles clauses, that was a pure historical necessity; but if the healthy forces of France could on their side liquidate the corrupt republic and its Jewish puppets, then a Franco-German alliance would not only be a possibility, but would become an inevitable reality, a new European entente that would clip the wings of the British plutocrats and imperialists, and would soon be ready to confront the Bolsheviks and bring Russia back into the bosom of civilized nations. (As you can see, my German trip had served my intellectual education well; Moreau would have been horrified if he had known the use I put his money to.) Brasillach, in general, agreed with me: “Yes,” he said, “the postwar is already over. We have to act quickly if we want to avoid another war. That would be a disaster, the end of European civilization, the triumph of the barbarians.” Most of Maurras’s young disciples thought likewise. One of the most brilliant and caustic of them was Lucien Rebatet, who wrote the literary and film criticism in L’Action française under the name of François Vinneuil. He was ten years older than I, but we quickly formed a friendship, drawn to each other by his attraction to Germany. There were also Maxence, Blond, Jacques Talagrand who became Thierry Maulnier, Jules Supervielle, and many others. We met at the Brasserie Lipp, when someone had money in his pocket, or else at a restaurant for students in the Latin Quarter. We feverishly discussed literature and tried to define a “fascist” literature: Rebatet put forward the names of Plutarch, Corneille, Stendhal. “Fascism,” Brasillach said one day, “is the very poetry of the twentieth century,” and we could only agree with him: fascist, fascio, fascination (but later on, having become wiser or more prudent, he would confer the same title on communism).

In the spring of 1932, when I passed my entrance exam, most of my friends from the ENS were finishing their studies; when the summer was over, they scattered throughout France, either to do their military service or to take up the teaching positions offered them. I once again spent my vacation in Germany, which was then in the midst of upheaval: German production had fallen to half the level of 1929, and Brüning, with Hindenburg’s support, was governing by means of emergency decrees. Such a situation couldn’t last. Elsewhere, too, the established order was faltering. In Spain, the monarchy had been overturned by a cabal of Freemasons, revolutionaries, and priests. America was almost on its knees. In France, the direct effects of the crisis were less felt, but the situation wasn’t rosy, and the Communists were quietly and methodically undermining things. Without telling anyone, I sent in my application for the NSDAP, Ausland section (for Reichsdeutschen living abroad), and was quickly accepted. When I entered the ELSP, in the fall, I continued to see my friends from the École normale and from L’Action française, who came up regularly to spend weekends in Paris. My classmates remained pretty much the same as at Janson, but to my surprise I found the classes interesting. It was also around this period, probably under the influence of Rebatet and his new friend Louis Destouches, who hadn’t yet become famous (his Journey to the End of the Night had just come out, but enthusiasm hadn’t yet spread beyond the circle of initiates, and Céline still liked to spend time with young people), that I formed a passion for French keyboard music, which was just being rediscovered and played; with Céline, I went to hear Marcelle Meyer; and more bitterly than ever I regretted my laziness and casualness that had made me abandon the piano so quickly. After the New Year, President Hindenburg invited Hitler to form a government. My classmates trembled, my friends waited with bated breath, I exulted. But while the Party was crushing the Reds, sweeping aside the garbage of plutodemocracy, and dissolving the bourgeois parties, I remained stuck in France. A real national revolution was taking place in front of our eyes and in our own time, and I could only follow it from afar, in the newspapers and the newsreels in the movie theaters. France too was seething. Many people went to Germany to see things firsthand; everyone wrote about and dreamed of a similar recovery for their country. People made contact with the Germans, official Germans now, who called for a Franco-German rapprochement; Brasillach introduced me to Otto Abetz, von Ribbentrop’s man (at that time still the Foreign Affairs Advisor of the Party): his ideas were no different from the ones I had aired since my first trip to Germany. But for many, Maurras remained an obstacle; only the best acknowledged that it was time to move on beyond his hypochondriac vaticinations, but even they hesitated, his charisma and the fascination he exercised held them under his sway. At the same time the Stavisky affair exposed the police connections of corruption in government and gave Action Française a moral authority it hadn’t known since 1918. All that came to an end on February 6, 1934. Actually it was a confused business: I too was in the streets, along with Antoine F. (who had entered the ELSP at the same time as I), Blond, Brasillach, a few others. From the Champs-Élysées, we vaguely heard some gunshots; farther down, near the Place de la Concorde, people were running. We spent the rest of the night walking through the streets, chanting slogans when we met other young people. We didn’t learn till the next day that there had been several deaths. Maurras, to whom everyone had instinctively turned, had stood down. The whole affair had just been a damp squib. “French inaction!” foamed Rebatet, who never forgave Maurras. It was all the same to me: my decision was taking shape, and I no longer saw a future for me in France.

It was actually Rebatet I ran into at Je Suis Partout. “Will you look at that! A revenant.”—“As you see,” I retorted. “Apparently you’re famous, now.” He spread his arms and made a face: “I don’t understand it at all. I even racked my brains to be sure I wasn’t forgetting anyone in my invectives. And in the beginning it worked: Grasset rejected my book because I insulted too many friends of the house, as they said, and Gallimard wanted to make some major cuts. Finally it was that Belgian who took me on, you remember him, the one who printed Céline? Result: he’s raking it in and I am too. At the Rive Gauche,’ when I went there to sign books, you’d have thought I was a movie star. In fact, the only ones who didn’t like it were the Germans.” He looked at me suspiciously: “Have you read it?”—“Not yet, I’m waiting for you to give me a copy. Why? Do you insult me too?” He laughed: “Not as much as you deserve, you filthy Kraut. Anyway, everyone thought you had died on the field of honor. Shall we go out for a drink?” Rebatet had an appointment a little later on, near Saint-Germain, and he took me to the Café Flore. “I always like to go stare at the dirty mugs of our official antifascists, especially the faces they make when they see me.” When he went in, in fact, people shot him black looks; but several persons also got up to greet him. Lucien, obviously, was enjoying his success. He wore a pale, well-cut suit and a slightly skewed polka-dot bow tie; a crest of disheveled hair crowned his narrow, mobile face. He chose a table to the right, under the windows, a little apart, and I ordered some white wine. When he began to roll a cigarette, I offered him a Dutch one, which he gladly accepted. But even when he smiled, his eyes remained worried. “So, tell me everything,” he said. We hadn’t seen each other since 1939, he just knew I was in the SS: I told him rapidly about the Russian campaign, without going into details. He opened his eyes wide: “You were in Stalingrad, then? Well, damn.” He had a strange look, a mixture of fear and desire perhaps. “You were wounded? Show me.” I showed him the hole, and he let out a long whistle: “You’ve got some luck, don’t you.” I didn’t say anything. “Robert’s going to Russia soon,” he went on. “With Jeantet. But it’s not the same thing.”—“What are they going to do there?”—“It’s an official trip. They’re accompanying Doriot and Brinon, they’re going to inspect the Legion of French Volunteers, near Smolensk I think.”—“And how is Robert doing?”—“Actually, we’ve sort of fallen out, these days. He’s become an out-and-out Pétainist. If he goes on like that, we’ll kick him out of JSP.”—“Has it come to that?” He ordered two more drinks; I gave him another cigarette. “Listen,” he spat out aggressively, “it’s been a while since you were in France: believe me, things have changed. They’re all like starving dogs, fighting over the scraps of the corpse of the republic. Pétain is senile, Laval is behaving worse than a Jew, Déat wants Social Fascism, Doriot National Bolshevism. A bitch wouldn’t be able to find her pups among them all. What we’ve lacked is a Hitler. That’s the tragedy.”—“And Maurras?” Rebatet made a disgusted face: “Maurras? Action marrane, they should call it. I gave him a rough time, in my book; apparently he was livid. And I’ll tell you something else: ever since Stalingrad, everyone’s bolting. The rats are jumping ship. You’ve seen the graffiti? Not one Vichyist who doesn’t keep a Resistant or a Jew in his house, as life insurance.”—“It’s not over yet, though.”—“Oh, I know. But what do you expect? It’s a world of cowards. I made my choice, and I won’t go back on it. If the boat sinks, I’ll sink with it.”—“In Stalingrad, I interrogated a Commissar who quoted Mathilde de la Mole, you remember, in The Red and the Black, near the end?” I repeated the sentence to him and he let out a guffaw: “Oh, that’s unbelievable. He got that out in French?”—“No, German. He was an old Bolshevik, a militant, a real tough guy. You’d have liked him.”—“What did you do with him?” I shrugged my shoulders. “Sorry,” he said. “Stupid question. But he was right. I admire the Bolsheviks, you know. None of this trained cockroach show with them. It’s a system of order. You submit or you croak. Stalin is an extraordinary man. If there were no Hitler, I might have been a Communist, who knows?” We drank a little and I watched the people coming and going. At a table near the back of the room some people were staring at Rebatet and whispering, but I didn’t recognize them. “Are you still into cinema?” I asked him.—“Not anymore, no. I’m interested in music, now.”—“Really? You know Berndt von Üxküll?”—“Of course. Why?”—“He’s my brother-in-law. I met him the other day, for the first time.”—“No kidding! You have some relatives! What’s become of him?”—“Not much, from what I could make out. He’s sulking at home, in Pomerania.”—“Too bad. He did some good stuff.”—“I don’t know his music. We had a long discussion about Schönberg, whom he defends.”—“That doesn’t surprise me. No serious composer could think otherwise.”—“Oh, you’re on his side too?” He shrugged his shoulders: “Schönberg never got involved in politics. And also his greatest disciples, like Webern or Üxküll, are real Aryans, aren’t they? What Schönberg discovered, serial composition, is a sonic potentiality that was always there, a rigor that was so to speak hidden by the deliberate vagueness of the tempered scales, and after him, anyone can use it to do what he wants with it. It’s the first genuine advance in music since Wagner.”—“Actually, von Üxküll hates Wagner.”—“That’s impossible!” he cried in a horrified tone. “Impossible!”—“But it’s true.” And I quoted von Üxküll’s statements to him. “That’s absurd,” Rebatet retorted. “Bach, of course…nothing comes close to Bach. He is untouchable, immense. What he achieved is the definitive synthesis of the horizontal and the vertical, harmonic architecture with melodic thrust. With that, he put an end to everything that came before him, and created a framework from which everyone who followed him tried in one way or another to escape, until finally Wagner blew it apart. How can a German, a German composer, not be on his knees before Wagner?”—“What about French music?” He made a face: “Your Rameau? He’s amusing.”—“You didn’t always say that.”—“One grows up, doesn’t one?” He finished his drink, pensive. I considered for an instant telling him about Yakov, then decided against it. “And in modern music, aside from Schönberg, what do you like?” I asked.—“A lot of things. For thirty years now, music has been waking up, it’s becoming really interesting. Stravinsky, Debussy, it’s great.”—“And Milhaud, Satie?”—“Don’t be an idiot.” At that moment, Brasillach came in. Rebatet called out to him: “Hey, Robert! Look who’s here!” Brasillach examined us through his thick round glasses, made a little sign to us with his hand, and went to another table to sit down. “He’s really becoming unbearable,” Rebatet muttered. “He doesn’t even want to be seen with a Kraut anymore. You’re not even in uniform, so far as I can tell.” But that wasn’t quite the reason, and I knew it. “We got into an argument, the last time I was in Paris,” I said to placate Rebatet. One night, after a small party where he had drunk a little more than usual, Brasillach had found the courage to invite me back to his place, and I had followed him. But he was the kind of shameful invert who doesn’t like anything so much as jacking off listlessly while languorously gazing at his eromenos; I found that boring and even slightly repugnant, and had curtly cut his excitement short. That said, I thought we had remained friends. Probably I had wounded him without realizing it, and in one of his most vulnerable spots: Robert had never been able to face the sordid, bitter reality of desire; and he had remained, in his way, the great boy scout of fascism. Poor Brasillach! So casually and summarily shot, once it was all over, just so that so many good folk, their conscience at peace, could return to the fold. I have often wondered, too, if his leanings had worked against him: collaboration, after all, remained within the family, whereas pederasty was something else entirely, for De Gaulle as well as for the good workers on the jury. Whatever the case, Brasillach would certainly rather have died for his ideas than for his tastes. But wasn’t he the one who described collaboration with this memorable phrase We have slept with Germany, and the memory will remain sweet to us? Rebatet, on the other hand, despite his admiration for Julien Sorel, was cleverer: he got his death sentence, and his pardon with it; he did not become a Communist; and he found time after all that to write a fine History of Music, and to let himself be forgotten.

He left, suggesting we meet up that evening with Cousteau, near Pigalle. As I headed out, I went over to greet Brasillach, who was sitting with a woman I didn’t know; he acted as if he hadn’t recognized me and welcomed me with a smile, but did not introduce me to his companion. I asked him for news of his sister and his brother-in-law; he politely enquired about the conditions of life in Germany; we vaguely agreed to see each other again, without fixing a date. I went back to my hotel room, changed into my uniform, wrote a note to Knochen, and left to drop it off at Avenue Foch. Then I returned to put my civilian clothes back on and went out walking until the time we’d agreed on. I found Rebatet and Cousteau at the Liberty, a drag bar at the Place Blanche. Cousteau, not that he was into that sort of thing, knew the owner, Tonton, and obviously at least half the queens, whom he called by their first names; several of them, proud and absurd with their wigs, makeup, and glass jewelry, exchanged taunts with him and Rebatet while we drank martinis. “That one, you see,” Cousteau pointed, “I nicknamed her ‘Pompe-Funèbre.’ Because she sucks you to death.”—“You stole that from Maxime Du Camp, you creep,” Rebatet retorted with a face, before diving into his vast literary knowledge to try to surpass him. “And you, darling, what do you do?” one of the queens asked me, pointing an impressively long cigarette holder at me. “He’s with the Gestapo,” Cousteau said ironically. The fairy placed her lace-gloved fingers on her lips and let out a long “Ooooh.” But Cousteau had already launched into a long anecdote about Doriot’s boys giving blow jobs to German soldiers in the Palais Royal urinals; the Parisian cops who regularly raided them or those toward the bottom of the Champs-Élysées sometimes ran into bad surprises; but while the Préfecture bitched, the Majestic seemed not to care. These ambiguous stories put me ill at ease: What were they playing at, these two? Other comrades, I knew, showed off less and practiced more. But neither of them had the slightest scruple about publishing anonymous denunciations in the columns of Je Suis Partout; and if someone didn’t have the misfortune of being a Jew, he could just as easily be made into a homosexual; more than one career, or even life, had been ruined that way. Cousteau and Rebatet, I thought, were trying to show that their revolutionary radicalism surmounted all prejudices (except those that were scientific and racialist, as French thinking had to be); basically, they too were just trying to shock the bourgeois, like the surrealists and André Gide, whom they so execrated. “Did you know, Max,” Rebatet asked me, “that the sacred phallus the Romans paraded during the Liberalia, in the spring and at harvest time, was called a fascinus? Mussolini may have remembered that.” I shrugged my shoulders: all this seemed false to me, bad theater, a stage production, while everywhere people were dying for real. I, for one, really did want a boy—not just for show, but for the warmth of his skin, the sharpness of his sweat, the sweetness of his sex nestled between his legs like a little animal. As for Rebatet, he was afraid of his shadow, of men and of women, of the presence of his own flesh, of everything except abstract ideas that could offer him no resistance. More than ever I wanted to be left alone, but it seemed this was impossible: I was scraping my skin on the world as on broken glass; I kept deliberately swallowing fishhooks, then being surprised when I tore my guts out of my mouth.

My interview with Helmut Knochen, the next day, only reinforced this feeling. He received me with a curious mixture of ostentatious camaraderie and condescending haughtiness. When he was working at the SD, I never saw him outside the office; of course, he must have known that I spent a lot of time with Best then (but maybe now that was no longer a recommendation). Whatever the case, I told him that I had seen Best in Berlin and he asked me how he was doing. I also mentioned that I had served under the command of Dr. Thomas, as he had; he then asked me about my experiences in Russia, while still making me subtly feel the distance between us: he, the Standartenführer in charge of an entire country; I, a convalescent with an uncertain future. He had received me in his office, around a low table decorated with a vase of dried flowers; he had settled into the sofa, crossing his long legs sheathed in riding breeches, leaving me to cram into the depths of a small and too low armchair: from where I sat, his knee almost hid his face and the vagueness of his eyes. I didn’t know how to broach the subject that concerned me. Finally, I told him somewhat at random that I was preparing a book about the future of Germany’s international relations, embroidering on the ideas I had picked up from Best’s Festgabe (and as I spoke, I picked up steam and began convincing myself that I really did intend to write such a book, which would make an impression and ensure my future). Knochen listened politely, nodding his head. Finally I slipped in that I was thinking of taking up a position in France to gather concrete experiences there, which would complete those of Russia. “Have you been offered something?” he asked with a gleam of curiosity. “I hadn’t heard.”—“Not yet, Standartenführer, it’s under discussion. It doesn’t pose any problems in principle, but the appropriate position would have to open up or be created.”—“With me, you know, there’s nothing for now. It’s a pity, the position of Specialist for Jewish Affairs was vacant in December, but it has already been filled.” I forced myself to smile: “That’s not what I’m looking for.”—“But you’ve acquired some good experience in that field, it seems to me. And the Jewish question, in France, touches very closely on our diplomatic relations with Vichy. But in any case your rank is too high: it’s at most a position for a Hauptsturmführer. What about with Abetz? Have you been to see him? If I remember correctly, you had personal contacts with the Parisian protofascists. That should interest the ambassador.”

I found myself on the wide, almost deserted sidewalk of Avenue Foch in a state of profound discouragement: I felt as if I were confronted with a wall—a soft, elusive, blurry one, but still just as insurmountable as a high stone wall. At the top of the avenue, the Arc de Triomphe still hid the morning sun and cast long shadows on the pavement. Go to Abetz? True, I could probably mention our brief meeting in 1933 as a reference, or have myself introduced by someone from Je Suis Partout. But I didn’t feel up to it. I thought of my sister, in Switzerland: perhaps a posting in Switzerland would suit me? I could see her from time to time, when she accompanied her husband to the sanatorium. But there were almost no SD positions in Switzerland, and everyone fought for them. Dr. Mandelbrod could probably have swept aside all obstacles, for France as well as for Switzerland; but Dr. Mandelbrod, I knew, had his own ideas in mind for me.

I went back to change into civilian clothes and then went to the Louvre: there, at least, surrounded by these immobile, serene figures, I felt calmer. I sat for a long time in front of Philippe de Champaigne’s dead Christ; but it was especially a little painting by Watteau that held my attention, L’indifférent: a character dressed for a party stepping forward in a dance, almost with an entrechat, his arms poised as if waiting for the first note of an overture, feminine, but with an obvious erection under his pistachio-green silk breeches, and with an indefinably sad, almost lost face, having already forgotten everything and perhaps not even trying to remember why or for whom he was posing this way. It struck me as a rather pertinent commentary on my situation, and even the title brought its counterpoint: indifferent? no, I wasn’t indifferent, I had only to pass in front of a painting of a woman with heavy black hair to feel an axe blow of the imagination; and even when the faces didn’t look at all like hers, under the rich Renaissance or Regency trappings, under those dazzling fabrics, loaded with colors and gemstones, as thick as the dripping oil of the painters, it was her body I could make out, her breasts, her belly, her hips, pure, flowing smoothly over the bones or slightly curved, enclosing the only source of life I knew where to find. Angry, I left the museum, but that wasn’t enough, for every woman I met or saw laughing behind a window had the same effect on me. I downed drink after drink whenever I passed a café, but the more I drank, the more lucid I seemed to become, my eyes opened and the world rushed into them, roaring, bleeding, voracious, spattering the inside of my head with fluids and excrement. My pineal eye, gaping vagina in the middle of my forehead, projected a crude, gloomy, implacable light on this world, and allowed me to read each drop of sweat, each pimple, each poorly shaven hair on the garish faces that assailed me as an emotion, the infinite cry of anguish of the child forever prisoner in the atrocious body of a clumsy adult incapable, even by killing, of avenging himself for the fact of living. Finally, it was already late in the night, a boy accosted me in a bistro to ask me for a cigarette: there, maybe, I could drown myself for a few instants. He agreed to come up to my room. Another one, I said to myself as I climbed the stairs, another one, but it will never be enough. We each got undressed on opposite sides of the bed; ridiculously, he kept on his shoes and watch. I asked him to have me standing up, leaning on the chest of drawers, facing the narrow mirror that dominated the room. When the pleasure seized me, I kept my eyes open, I scrutinized my crimson, hideously swollen face, trying to see in it, my true face filling my features from behind, the features of my sister’s face. But then this surprising thing happened: between these two faces and their perfect fusion there slid, smooth, transparent as a glass leaf, another face, the bitter, placid face of our mother, infinitely fine but more opaque, denser than the thickest of walls. Seized with an enormous rage, I roared and smashed the mirror with my fist; the boy, frightened, jumped and fell back onto the bed as he came in long spurts. I came too, but reflexively, without feeling it, already going limp. Blood dripped from my fingers onto the floor. I went into the bathroom, washed my hand, pulled a piece of glass out of it, wrapped it in a towel. When I came out, the boy was getting dressed, obviously worried. I searched through my pants pocket and threw a few bills on the bed: “Get out.” He seized the money and fled without a word. I wanted to go to bed but first I carefully collected the pieces of broken glass, throwing them into the waste-paper basket and examining the floor to be sure I hadn’t overlooked any, then I wiped up the drops of blood and went to wash. Finally I could lie down; but the bed was a crucifix to me, a torture rack. What was she doing here, the odious bitch? Hadn’t I suffered enough because of her? Did she have to persecute me again this way? I sat cross-legged on the sheets and smoked cigarette after cigarette as I thought. The wan gleam of a streetlight filtered through the closed shutters. My thinking—carried away, panic-stricken—had turned into a sly old assassin; a new Macbeth, it murdered my sleep. I kept feeling as if I were on the point of understanding something, but this comprehension remained at the tip of my lacerated fingers, mocking me, imperceptibly withdrawing as I approached it. Finally a thought allowed itself to be grasped: I contemplated it with disgust, but since none other wanted to come take its place, I had to grant it its due. I placed it on the night table like a heavy old coin: if I tapped it with my fingernail, it sounded true, no matter how often I flipped it, it always presented me with the same impassive face.

In the morning, very early, I paid my bill and took the first train south. The French had to reserve their seats days or even weeks in advance, but the compartments for Germans were always half empty. I went down to Marseille, at the limit of the German zone. The train made frequent stops; in the stations, just as in Russia, farmers crowded round to sell the passengers food—hard-boiled eggs, chicken drumsticks, salted boiled potatoes—and when I was hungry, I took something at random, through the window. I didn’t read, I just idly watched the landscape flow by and toyed with my torn fingers; my thoughts wandered, detached from both the past and the present. In Marseille, I went to the Gestapostelle to inquire about access to the Italian zone. A young Obersturmführer received me: “Relations are a little delicate, right now. The Italians show no understanding for our efforts to resolve the Jewish question. Their zone has become a veritable paradise for Jews. When we asked them at least to intern them, they put them up in the best ski resorts in the Alps.” But I didn’t care about this Obersturmführer’s problems. I explained what I wanted: he looked worried, but I assured him that I relieved him of all responsibility. Finally he agreed to write a letter for me asking the Italian authorities to facilitate my movements for personal reasons. It was getting late and I took a room for the night, on the Vieux Port. The next morning, I got on a bus headed for Toulon; at the boundary line, the bersaglieri, with their ridiculous feathered hats, let us pass without any inspections. In Toulon, I changed buses, then again in Cannes; finally in the afternoon I reached Antibes. The bus dropped me off at the main square; my bag on my shoulder, I walked round the Port Vauban, passed the squat mass of the Fort Carré, and began to follow the road by the sea. A light, salty breeze was coming in from the bay; little waves licked the strip of sand, the cry of the seagulls resounded over the surf and the sounds of the occasional vehicle; aside from a few Italian soldiers, the beach was deserted. With my civilian clothes, no one paid any attention to me: an Italian policeman hailed me, but only to ask me for a light. The house was a few kilometers away from the center of town. I walked calmly, I didn’t feel in a hurry; the sight and smell of the Mediterranean left me indifferent, but I no longer felt any anguish, I remained calm. Finally I reached the dirt path that led to the property. A faint breeze rustled the branches of the umbrella pines along the path, and their fragrance mixed with that of the sea. The gate, its paint chipped, stood half open. A long lane cut across a handsome park planted with black pines; I didn’t follow it, but glided along the inside of the wall to the end of the park; there I got undressed and put on my uniform. It was a little wrinkled from having been folded in my traveling bag; I smoothed it out with my hand, it would do. The sandy ground, between the spaced-out trees, was covered with pine needles; beyond the long, slender trunks, you could see the ochre wall of the house, with its terrace; the sun, behind the wall surrounding the property, shone through the undulating tops of the trees, confusingly. I went back to the gate and up the path; at the front door, I rang the bell. I heard something like a stifled laugh on my right, among the trees: I looked, but didn’t see anything. Then a man’s voice called out from the other side of the house: “Hello! Over here.” Right away I recognized Moreau’s voice. He was waiting in front of the entrance to the living room, below the terrace, an extinguished pipe in his hand; he wore an old knitted sweater and a bow tie, and looked to me lamentably old. He frowned when he saw my uniform: “What do you want? Who are you looking for?” I came forward and took off my cap: “You don’t recognize me?” He stared, and his mouth opened; then he took a step forward and shook my hand vigorously, patting me on the shoulder. “Of course, of course!” He stepped back and contemplated me, embarrassed: “But what’s this uniform?”—“The one I serve under.” He turned around and called into the house: “Héloïse! Come see who’s here!” The living room was deep in shadow; I saw a form move forward, slim, gray; then an old woman appeared behind Moreau and contemplated me in silence. So this was my mother? “Your sister wrote us that you had been wounded,” she said finally. “You could have written to us too. You could at least have told us you were coming.” Her voice, compared to her yellowed face and her gray hair pulled back in a severe bun, seemed still young; but for me, it was as if the most ancient times were speaking, in an immense voice that made me shrink, reduced me almost to nothing, despite the protection of my uniform, laughable talisman that it was. Moreau must have seen my confusion: “Of course,” he said quickly, “we’re happy to see you. You’re always at home, here.” My mother was still staring at me enigmatically. “Well, come in,” she said finally. “Come kiss your mother.” I put down my bag, went up to her, and, leaning over, kissed her on the cheek. Then I took her in my arms and hugged her to me. I felt her stiffen; she was like a branch in my arms, a bird I could easily have suffocated. Her hands came up and rested on my back. “You must be tired. Come, we’ll settle you in.” I let her go and straightened up. Again, behind me, I heard soft laughter. I turned around and saw two little identical twins, dressed in matching shorts and jackets, who, standing next to each other, were staring at me with big, curious, amused eyes. They must have been seven or eight. “Who are you?” I asked them.—“The children of a friend,” my mother replied. “We’re keeping them for now.” One of them raised his hand and pointed at me: “And him, who is he?”—“He’s a German,” said the other one. “Can’t you see?”—“He’s my son,” my mother declared. “His name is Max. Come say hello.”—“Your son is a German soldier, Aunt?” the first one asked.—“Yes. Shake his hand.” They hesitated, then came forward together and held out their little hands to me. “What are your names?” I asked. They didn’t answer. “These are Tristan and Orlando,” my mother said. “But I always mix them up. They love passing for each other. You’re never really sure.”—“That’s because there is no difference between us, Aunt,” said one of the little ones. “One name would be enough for both of us.”—“I warn you,” I said, “I’m a policeman. For us, identities are very important.” Their eyes widened: “Oh, super,” said one.—“Have you come to arrest someone?” asked the other.—“Maybe,” I said.—“Stop being silly,” said my mother.

She put me in my old room: but there was nothing there that could help me recognize it as mine. My posters, the few things I’d left there, had all disappeared; they had changed the bed, the chest of drawers, the wallpaper. “Where are my things?” I asked.—“In the attic,” she replied. “I kept everything. You can go see later.” She looked at me, both hands in front of her on her dress. “And Una’s room?” I continued.—“For now, we’ve put the twins there.” She left and I went into the main bathroom to wash my face and neck. Then I went back into the room and changed again, putting my uniform away in the closet. As I came out, I hesitated for an instant in front of Una’s door, then kept going. I went out onto the terrace. The sun was shining behind the tall pines, projecting long shadows through the park, pouring a beautiful, rich saffron color on the stone walls of the house. I saw the twins go by: they ran onto the lawn, then disappeared into the trees. Once, from this terrace, angry over a trifle, I had shot an arrow (a blunt-tipped one, though) at my sister, aiming for her face; it had struck right above her eye, and just missed blinding her. Thinking about it, it seemed to me that I had then been severely punished by my father: if he was still there, the incident must have taken place in Kiel, and not here. But in Kiel there was no terrace at our house, and I thought I clearly remembered, in connection with this gesture, the large clay flowerpots scattered around the graveled area where Moreau and my mother had just welcomed me. I couldn’t make any sense of it and, frustrated by this uncertainty, I turned around and reentered the house. I walked through the hallways, breathing in the smell of furniture polish, opening doors at random. Few things, aside from my room, seemed to have changed. I reached the foot of the stairs that led to the attic; there too, I hesitated, then turned back. I went down the main entryway staircase and out through the front door. Leaving the lane swiftly, I walked again under the trees, brushing past their gray, rough trunks, the streaks of sap hardened but still thick and sticky, kicking at pinecones fallen to the ground. The sharp, heady smell of pine filled the air; I wanted to smoke but didn’t, so I could go on smelling it. There the ground was bare, without any grass, without bushes, without ferns: but it brought powerfully back to memory the forest near Kiel where I played my curious child’s games. I tried leaning against a tree, but the trunk was sticky, so I stayed standing there, my arms dangling, spinning crazily around in my thoughts.

Dinner passed in brief, constrained phrases, almost lost in the clicking of silverware and plates. Moreau complained about his business and about the Italians, and insisted pathetically on his good relations with the German economic administration in Paris. He tried to make conversation and I, on my side, politely, baited him with little aggressive jabs. “What is your rank there, on your uniform?” he asked me.—“SS-Sturmbannführer. It’s the same as a major, in your army.”—“Oh, a major, you’ve been promoted, that’s great—congratulations.” In return, I asked him where he had served, before June ’40; blind to the ridicule, he threw his arms up: “Oh, my boy! I would have liked to serve. But they didn’t take me, they said I was too old. Of course,” he hurried to add, “the Germans beat us fairly. And I completely approve of the Maréchal’s policy of collaboration.” My mother didn’t say anything; she followed this little game with alert eyes. The twins ate cheerfully; but from time to time their expression changed completely, as if a veil of gravity descended on them. “What about your Jewish friends? What’s their name? The Benahums, I think. What happened to them?” Moreau reddened. “They went away,” my mother replied curtly. “To Switzerland.”—“That must have been hard for your business,” I went on to Moreau. “You were partners, weren’t you?”—“I bought him out,” Moreau said.—“Oh, very good. At a Jewish price, or an Aryan price? I hope you didn’t let yourself be cheated.”—“That’s enough,” my mother said. “Aristide’s business has nothing to do with you. Tell us about your experiences. You were in Russia, weren’t you?”—“Yes,” I said, suddenly humiliated. “I went to fight Bolshevism.”—“Ah! Now that is praiseworthy,” Moreau remarked sententiously.—“Yes, but the Reds are advancing now,” my mother said.—“Oh, don’t worry!” Moreau exclaimed. “They won’t reach here.”—“We’ve had some setbacks,” I said. “But that’s temporary. We’re preparing new weapons. And we’ll crush them.”—“Excellent, excellent,” Moreau breathed, nodding his head. “I hope you’ll take care of the Italians, afterward.”—“The Italians have been our brothers in arms from the beginning,” I retorted. “When the new Europe is formed, they will be the first to have their share.” Moreau took this very seriously and got angry: “They’re cowards! They declared war on us when we were already beaten, so they could plunder us. But I’m sure Hitler will respect France’s integrity. They say he admires the Maréchal.” I shrugged my shoulders: “The Führer will treat France as it deserves.” Moreau grew red. “Max, that’s enough,” my mother said again. “Have some dessert.”

After dinner, my mother had me go up to her dressing room. It was a room that adjoined her bedroom, which she had decorated tastefully; no one entered it without her authorization. She didn’t beat around the bush. “What did you come here for? I warn you, if it’s just to annoy us, you shouldn’t have bothered.” Once again, I felt as if I were shrinking; before this imperious voice, these cold eyes, I was going to pieces, I was becoming a fearful child, smaller than the twins. I tried to get control of myself, but it was a lost cause. “No,” I managed to articulate, “I wanted to see you, that’s all. I was in France for my work, and I thought of you. And also, I was almost killed, you know, Mother. I might not survive this war. And we have so many things to make up.” She softened a little and touched the back of my hand, with the same gesture as my sister: gently, I removed my hand, but she didn’t seem to notice. “You’re right,” she said. “You could have written, you know; that wouldn’t have cost you anything. I know you disapprove of the choices I’ve made. But for you to disappear like that, when you’re someone’s child, that’s just not right. It’s as if you were dead. Can’t you understand that?” She thought, then went on, speaking quickly, as if she would run out of time. “I know you’re angry at me because of your father’s disappearance. But it’s him you should be angry with, not me. He abandoned me with you, he left me alone; for more than a year I didn’t sleep, your sister woke me up every night, she was crying in her nightmares. You never cried, but it was almost worse. I had to take care of you both alone, feed you, dress you, educate you. You can’t imagine how hard that was. Then, when I met Aristide, why should I have said no? He’s a good man, he helped me. What should I have done, according to you? Where was your father? Even when he was still there he was never there. I was the one who had to do everything, change your diapers, wash you, feed you. Your father came to see you fifteen minutes a day, he played with you a little, then he went back to his books or his work. But it’s me you hate.” Emotion knotted my throat: “No, Mother. I don’t hate you.”—“Yes, you hate me, I know it, I can see it. You came in that uniform to tell me how much you hate me.”—“Why did my father leave?” She took a long breath: “No one knows that except him. Maybe just out of boredom.”—“I don’t believe it! What did you do to him?”—“I didn’t do anything to him, Max. I didn’t chase him away. He left, that’s all. Maybe he was tired of me. Maybe he was tired of you.” Anguish swelled my face: “No! That’s impossible. He loved us!”—“I don’t know if he ever knew what loving means,” she replied very gently. “If he loved us, if he loved you, he would at least have written. If only to say he wouldn’t be coming back. He wouldn’t have left us in doubt, in anguish.”—“You had him declared dead.”—“I did that mostly for you both. To protect your interests. He never gave a sign of life, he never touched his bank account, he left all his affairs in the lurch, I had to settle everything, the accounts were blocked, I had a lot of problems. And I didn’t want you to be dependent on Aristide. The money you left for Germany with, where do you think that came from? It was his money, you know that very well, and you took it and used it. He probably really is dead, somewhere.”—“It’s as if you killed him.” My words were making her suffer, I could see it, but she remained calm. “He killed himself, Max. It was his choice. You have to understand that.”

But I didn’t want to understand it. That night, I fell into sleep as into dark, thick, agitated waters, but dreamless. The twins’ laughter, rising up from the park, woke me. It was day, the sun was shining through the slits in the shutters. As I washed and got dressed, I thought about my mother’s words. One of them had struck me painfully: my departure from France, my break with my mother, all that had in fact been made possible by the inheritance from my father, the meager capital that Una and I had to share when we came of age. But I had never, at that time, made the link between my mother’s odious actions and this money that had allowed me to free myself of her. I had prepared that departure for a long time. In the months following the February 1934 riot, I had contacted Dr. Mandelbrod to ask him for help and support; and as I said earlier, he had provided them generously; by my birthday, everything was organized. My mother and Moreau came up to Paris for the formalities concerning my inheritance: at dinner, the notary’s papers in my pocket, I announced to them my decision to leave the ELSP for Germany. Moreau had swallowed his anger and remained silent while my mother tried to reason with me. In the street, Moreau had turned to my mother: “Don’t you see that your son has become a little Fascist? Let him go goosestep with them, if he wants to.” I was too happy to get angry, and I left them on the Boulevard Montparnasse. Nine years and a war had to pass before I saw them again.

Downstairs, I found Moreau sitting in a garden chair in a square of sunlight, in front of the French windows to the living room. It was rather cool out. “Hello,” he said in his sly way. “Sleep well?”—“Yes, thanks. Has my mother gotten up?”—“She’s awake, but she’s still resting. There’s some coffee and toast on the table.”—“Thanks.” I went to serve myself and then came back to him, cup of coffee in hand. I looked at the grounds. I didn’t hear the twins anymore. “Where are boys?” I asked Moreau.—“At school. They come back in the afternoon.” I drank a little coffee. “You know,” he continued, “your mother is happy you’ve come.”—“Yes, that’s possible,” I said. But he placidly went on with his thought: “You should write more often. Times are going to be hard. Everyone is going to need their family. Family is the only thing you can count on.” I didn’t say anything, just watched him absently; he was contemplating the garden. “Listen, Mother’s Day is next month. You could send her your best wishes.”—“What is this holiday?” He looked surprised: “The Maréchal instituted it, two years ago. To honor maternity. It’s in May, this year it falls on the thirtieth.” He was still looking at me: “You could send a card.”—“Yes, I’ll try.” He fell silent and turned back to the garden. “If you have time,” he said after a while, “could you go cut some wood in the shed, for the stove? I’m getting old.” I looked at him again, huddled in his chair: in fact, he had aged. “If you like,” I replied. I went back into the house, put the empty cup on the table, nibbled on a cracker, and went upstairs; this time I went straight to the attic. I closed the trapdoor behind me and walked carefully between the furniture and boxes, making the floorboards creak under my feet. My memories rose around me, tactile now with the air, the smell, the light, the dust: and I dove into these sensations as I had plunged into the Volga, with complete abandon. It seemed to me I could see the shadow of our bodies in the recesses, the brightness of our white skins. Then I shook myself and found the boxes containing my things. I dragged them into a large empty space near a pillar, crouched down, and began sorting through them. There were tin cars, report cards, and school notebooks, youth novels, photographs in thick envelopes, more envelopes, sealed, containing letters from my sister—a whole past, strange and sudden. I didn’t dare look at the photos or open the envelopes; I felt an animal terror growing in me; even the most commonplace, innocent details bore the imprint of the past, of that past, and the very fact of this past chilled me to the bone; each new but so familiar object inspired in me a mixture of repulsion and fascination, as if I were holding a live bomb in my hands. To calm down, I examined the books: it was the collection of any adolescent of my generation—Jules Verne, Paul de Kock, Victor Hugo, Eugène Sue, the Americans E. R. Burroughs and Mark Twain, the adventures of Fantômas and Rouletabille, travel books, some biographies of famous men. I was seized with the desire to reread some of them and, after reflection, I put aside the first three volumes of Burroughs’s Martian series, the ones that had so excited my fantasies in the upstairs bathroom, curious to see if they would still correspond to the intensity of my memories. Then I returned to the sealed envelopes. I weighed them in my hands, turned them over between my fingers. In the beginning, after the scandal, when we were sent to boarding school, my sister and I were still allowed to write to each other; when I received one of her letters, I had to open it in front of a priest and give it to him to read before I could myself; and she, on her side, probably had to do the same thing. Her letters, curiously written on a typewriter, were long, edifying, and solemn: My dear brother: Everything is fine here, they’re treating me nicely. I am awakening to a renewed sense of spirituality, etc. But at night, I locked myself up in the bathroom with a candle stub, trembling with anxiety and excitement, and held the letter over the flame until a second message appeared, scribbled between the lines with milk: HELP! GET ME OUT OF HERE! I BEG YOU! We had gotten that idea by reading, secretly of course, a life of Lenin, found at a bookseller’s near the mairie. These desperate messages threw me into panic, and I decided to run away and save her. But my attempt was poorly prepared, and I was soon caught. They punished me severely, I was given the cane and a week of stale bread, and the abuse of the older boys only got worse, but it was all the same to me; only, they had forbidden me from receiving any letters, and that plunged me into rage and despair. I didn’t even know if I had saved those last letters, if they too were in these envelopes; and I didn’t want to open them to check. I put everything away in the boxes, took the three books, and went back downstairs.

Compelled by a silent force, I went into Una’s old room. There was now a double bed there, a wooden one painted red and blue, and toys carefully lined up, among which I angrily recognized some of my own. All the clothes were folded and put away in drawers and in the wardrobe. I quickly searched through the room looking for clues, letters, but found nothing. The family name written on the report cards was unknown to me, and seemed Aryan. These report cards went back a few years: so they had been living here for quite some time. I heard my mother behind me: “What are you doing?”—“I’m looking,” I said without turning round.—“You’d do better to go downstairs and cut wood as Aristide asked you. I’m going to get lunch ready.” I turned around: she was standing in the doorway, severe, impassive. “Who are these children?”—“I told you: the children of a close friend. We took them in when she couldn’t look after them anymore. They didn’t have a father.”—“How long have they been here?”—“A while. You left a long time ago too, my boy.” I looked around me, then stared at her again: “They’re little Jews, aren’t they? Admit it. They’re Jews, right?” She didn’t let herself be intimidated: “Stop talking nonsense. They’re not Jews. If you don’t believe me, just look at them when they’re taking their bath. That’s how you do it, isn’t it?”—“Yes. Sometimes that’s how we do it.”—“Anyway, even if they were Jews, what difference would that make? What would you to do them?”—“I wouldn’t do anything to them.”—“What do you do, with the Jews?” she went on. “We hear all kinds of horrors. Even the Italians say it’s not acceptable, what you’re doing.” I felt suddenly old, tired: “We send them to work, in the East. They build roads, houses, they work in factories.” She stuck to her guns: “And the children? You send them away to build roads? You take the children too, don’t you?”—“The children go to special camps. They stay with the mothers who can’t work.”—“Why do you do that?” I shrugged: “Someone had to do it. The Jews are parasites, exploiters: now they’re serving the people they used to exploit. And I should point out that the French help us a lot: in France, it’s the French police who arrest them and hand them over to us. It’s French law that decides. Someday, history will judge that we were right.”—“You are completely mad. Go cut the wood.” She turned around and headed to the side stairs. I went to put the three Burroughs books in my bag, then went out to the shed. I took off my jacket, picked up the axe, put a log on the block, and split it. It was difficult, I wasn’t used to this kind of work; I had to start over several times. As I raised the axe, I thought about my mother’s words; it wasn’t her lack of political comprehension that bothered me, it was the way she looked at me: What did she see, when she looked at me? I could feel the extent to which I labored under the weight of the past, of wounds received or imagined, of irreparable mistakes, of the unredeemability of time. Struggling against it did no good. When I got some logs finished, I loaded them up in my arms and carried them to the kitchen. My mother was peeling potatoes. I put the wood on the woodpile near the stove and went out again without a word, to split some more. I made several trips this way. As I worked, I thought: in the end, the collective problem of the Germans was the same as my own; they too were struggling to extract themselves from a painful past, to wipe the slate clean so they’d be able to begin new things. That was how they arrived at the most radical solution of them all: murder, the painful horror of murder. But was murder a solution? I thought of the many conversations I had had about this: in Germany, I wasn’t the only one to have my doubts. What if murder weren’t a definitive solution, what if on the contrary this new fact, even less reparable than the ones before it, opened in turn onto new abysses? Then, what way out was left? In the kitchen, I noticed I still had the axe with me. The room was empty: my mother must have been in the living room. I looked at the pile of wood; there seemed to be enough there. I was dripping with sweat; I put the axe in the corner next to the wood and went up to wash and change my shirt.

The meal passed in a dull silence. The twins were having lunch at school, there were just the three of us. Moreau tried to comment on the latest news—the Anglo-Americans were rapidly advancing toward Tunis; in Warsaw, some disturbances had broken out—but I obstinately kept silent. Looking at him, I said to myself: He’s a clever man, he must also keep in contact with the terrorists, and help them a little; if things get worse, he’ll say he was always on their side, that he worked with the Germans only as a cover. Whatever happens, he’ll be able to make his nest, that cowardly, toothless old lion. Even if the twins weren’t Jewish, I was sure he had hidden Jews: too good an opportunity, at so little cost (with the Italians, he wasn’t risking anything), to give himself an alibi for whatever comes later. But then a raging thought occurred to me: we’ll show him, him and everyone like him, what Germany is made of; we’re not finished yet. My mother too was silent. After the meal I told them I was going out for a walk. I crossed the grounds, passed the still-half-open gate and went down to the beach. On the path the salt smell of the sea blended strongly with that of the pines, and once again the past rose up in me, the happy past that had bathed in these fragrances, the unhappy past too. At the beach, I turned right, toward the harbor and the town. At the base of Fort Carré, on a strip of earth overlooking the sea and surrounded by stone pines, stretched a playground where some children were playing with a ball. When I was little I was a puny child, I didn’t like sports, I preferred reading; but Moreau, who thought I was sickly, had advised my mother to sign me up for a soccer club; so I too had played on this field. It wasn’t much of a success. Since I didn’t like to run, they made me the goalkeeper; one day, another child kicked the ball so hard into my chest that I was hurled to the back of the cage. I remember lying there on the ground, looking through the net at the tops of the pine trees waving in the breeze, until the coach finally came over to see if I had passed out. A little later we played our first game against another club. The team captain didn’t want me to play; finally, at the second halftime, he let me go out onto the field. I found myself, I’m not sure how, with the ball at my feet and began running toward the goal. In front of me, the empty field opened wide, the spectators were shouting, whistling, I didn’t see anything except this goal, the powerless goalkeeper trying to stop me and waving his arms, I was triumphing over everything and I scored, but it was an “own goal,” my own team’s goal. In the locker room, I was beaten by the other boys, and I gave up soccer. Beyond the fort, Port Vauban curves inward, a large natural cirque converted to a harbor, where fishing craft and patrol boats from the Italian navy were rocking. I sat down on a bench and lit a cigarette, watching the seagulls wheel around the fishing boats. Here, too, I had often come. There had been one walk in 1930, just before my baccalauréat, during Easter vacation. I had been avoiding Antibes for almost a year, since my mother’s marriage to Moreau, but for this vacation, she used a clever trick: she wrote to me, without any allusion to what had happened or to my letter full of insults, to tell me that Una was coming back for the vacation and would be delighted to see me. They had kept us apart for three years by then: those bastards, I said to myself, but I couldn’t refuse, and they knew it. Our reunion was awkward, we didn’t say much; of course my mother and Moreau practically never left us alone. When I arrived, Moreau had taken me by the arm: “No dirty business, okay? I’m keeping my eye on you.” To him, dense bourgeois that he was, it was obvious that I had seduced her. I didn’t say anything, but when she finally was there, I knew that I loved her more than ever. When, in the middle of the living room, she brushed me as she went by, the back of her hand touching mine for a fraction of a second, it was as if an electric shock riveted me to the floor; I had to bite my lip so as not to cry out. And then we went for a stroll around the harbor. Our mother and Moreau were walking in front of us, there, a few steps away from where I was sitting and remembering that moment; I spoke to my sister about my school, the priests, the corruption and the depraved habits of my classmates. I also told her I had been with boys. She smiled gently and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. Her own experiences hadn’t been much different, although the violence was more moral than physical. The nuns, she told me, were all neurotic, inhibited and frigid. I laughed and asked where she had learned these words; boarding school girls, she replied with a light, joyful laugh, now bribed the concierges so they would secretly smuggle them books not by Voltaire or Rousseau, but by Freud, Spengler, and Proust, and if I hadn’t read them yet, it was high time I started. Moreau stopped to buy us some ice-cream cones. But when he had rejoined our mother, we continued the conversation: this time, I talked about our father. “He’s not dead,” I whispered passionately.—“I know,” she said. “And even if he is, it’s not up to them to bury him.”—“It’s not a question of burial. It’s as if they had murdered him. Murdered him with paper. What a disgrace! For their shameful desires.”—“You know,” she said then, “I think she loves him.”—“I don’t give a damn!” I whispered. “She married our father and she’s his wife. That’s the truth. A judge can’t change any of that.” She stopped and looked at me: “You’re probably right.” But already our mother was calling us, and we walked toward her, licking our vanilla ice-cream cones.

In town, I had a glass of white wine at a counter, still thinking back on those things, and told myself that I had seen what I had come to see, even if I still didn’t know what that was; already I was thinking about leaving. I went to the ticket office near the bus station and bought a ticket for the next day, for Marseille; at the train station next door, they sold me a ticket for Paris; the transfer was short, I’d be there by nightfall. Then I returned to my mother’s house. The grounds around the house stretched out calm and still, permeated by the gentle murmuring of pine needles caressed by the sea breeze. The French door to the living room was still open: I approached and called out, but no one answered. Maybe they’re taking a nap, I said to myself. I too felt tired, it was probably the wine and the sun; I walked around the house and climbed the main staircase, without meeting anyone. My room was dark, cool. I lay down and fell asleep. When I woke up the light had changed, it was quite dark: on my doorstep, I saw the two twins, standing side by side, looking at me fixedly with their large round eyes. “What do you want?” I asked. At these words, they stepped back together, and fled. I could hear their little footsteps echoing on the floorboards and then rushing down the main staircase. The front door slammed and it was silent again. I sat up on the edge of the bed and realized I was naked; but I had no memory of getting undressed. My injured fingers hurt and I sucked them distractedly. Then I turned on the lamp switch and, blinking, looked for the time: my watch, on the night table, had stopped. I looked around me but didn’t see my clothes. Where could they have gone? I took some fresh underwear out of my bag and got my uniform out of the closet. My beard rasped a little, but I decided to shave later on, and got dressed. I went down the side stairs. The kitchen was empty, the stove cold. I went out the service entrance: outside, on the sea side, dawn was breaking and was just starting to turn the bottom of the sky pink. Strange that the twins have gotten up so early, I said to myself. Had I slept through dinner, then? I must have been more tired than I thought. My bus left early, I had to get ready. I turned back and closed the door, went up the three steps that led to the living room and came in, groping my way to the French door. In the half-light I stumbled against something soft lying on the rug. This contact froze me. I stepped back to the light switch, put my hand behind me without looking, and turned it on. The light sprang from several lamps, bright, harsh, almost bleak. I looked at the shape I had bumped into: it was a body, as I had instinctively felt, and now I saw that the rug was soaked with blood, that I was walking in a pool of blood that overflowed the rug and spread out on the stone tiles, under the table, up to the French door. Horror and terror threw me into a panicked urge to flee, to hide in some dark place; I made an effort to control myself and drew my sidearm from my holster. I felt around with my finger to unfasten the safety catch. Then I approached the body. I wanted to avoid walking in the blood, but it was impossible. When I was closer I saw—but I knew it already—that it was Moreau, his chest smashed in, his neck nearly cut through, his eyes still open. The axe that I had left in the kitchen was lying in the blood next to the body; this almost black blood soaked his clothes, splattered his slightly tilted face, his graying moustache. I looked around but didn’t see anything. The French door seemed closed. I returned to the kitchen and opened the storage room, but there was no one there. My boots left long trails of blood on the tiled floor: I opened the service door, went out, and wiped them on the grass, while still scrutinizing the back of the park, on the lookout. But there was nothing there. The sky was growing paler, the stars were beginning to disappear. I walked around the house, opened the main door, and went upstairs. My room was empty; the twins’ room also. Still gripping my pistol, I found myself in front of the door to my mother’s room. I stretched my left hand out to the doorknob: my fingers were trembling. I seized it and opened the door. The shutters were closed, it was dark; on the bed I could make out a gray shape. “Mother?” I murmured. Groping my way, aiming my gun, I found the light switch and turned it on. My mother, in a nightgown with a lace collar, was lying across the bed; her feet hung a little off it, one of them still wearing a pink slipper, the other, dangling, was bare. Petrified with horror, I didn’t forget to look behind the door and quickly bend down to check under the bed: aside from the fallen slipper, there was nothing there. Trembling, I went up to her. Her arms were resting on the bedspread, her nightgown, properly pulled down to her feet, wasn’t wrinkled, she didn’t seem to have defended herself. I leaned over and put my ear close to her open mouth: there was no breath. I didn’t dare touch her. Her eyes were bulging and there were red marks on her bare throat. Oh my God, I said to myself, she’s been strangled, someone has strangled my mother. I examined the room. Nothing was overturned, the dresser drawers were all closed, the closets too. I went into the dressing room, it was empty, everything seemed in place; I returned to the bedroom. On the bedspread, on the rug, on her nightgown, I saw then, there were bloodstains: the murderer must first have killed Moreau, then come upstairs. Anguish was suffocating me, I didn’t know what to do. Search the house? Find the twins and interrogate them? Call the police? I didn’t have time, I had to catch my bus. Gently, very gently, I took the foot that was dangling and replaced it on the bed. I should have put the fallen slipper back on, but I didn’t have the courage to touch my mother again. I went out of the room, almost backing out. In my room, I shoved my few things into my bag and left the house, closing the front door. My boots still bore traces of blood, I rinsed them off with a little rainwater in an abandoned basin. I didn’t see any sign of the twins: they must have run away. Anyhow those children were no concern of mine.

The trip unfurled like a film, I didn’t think; the methods of transportation followed one another, I held out my tickets when I was asked, the authorities didn’t make any problems for me. When I left the house, on the path to town, the sun now fully risen over the gently booming sea, I met an Italian patrol that glanced curiously at my uniform, but didn’t say anything; just before getting into the bus, a French policeman accompanied by two bersaglieri accosted me to ask for my papers: when I showed him the letter from the Einsatzkommando in Marseille and translated it for him, he saluted and let me go. It was better that way, I would have been incapable of talking, I was petrified with anguish, my thoughts were frozen in place. In the bus, I realized I had forgotten my suit and all my clothes from the day before. At the train station in Marseille I had to wait for an hour, so I ordered a coffee and drank it at the bar, in the hubbub of the main concourse. I had to try to reason things out a little. There must have been cries, noise; how could I not have been awakened? I had only drunk a glass of wine. And also the man hadn’t killed the twins, they must have yelled. Why hadn’t they come looking for me? What were they doing there, silent, when I had woken up? The murderer must not have searched the house, in any case he hadn’t come into my room. And who was he? A bandit, a thief? But nothing seemed to have been touched, moved, overturned. Maybe the twins had surprised him and he had run away. But that didn’t make any sense, they hadn’t cried out, they hadn’t come looking for me. Was the killer alone? My train was leaving, I got in and sat down, still reasoning. If he wasn’t a thief, or thieves, then what? A settling of accounts? One of Moreau’s business deals gone sour? Terrorists from the Maquis, come to set an example? But the terrorists didn’t massacre people with axes like savages, they took them into a forest for a show trial, then shot them. And, again, I hadn’t woken up, I who sleep so lightly, I didn’t understand, anguish was racking my body, I sucked my half-healed fingers, my thoughts flew round and round, set off on insane tangents, caught in the jerking rhythm of the train, I wasn’t sure of anything, nothing made sense. In Paris, I easily caught the midnight express to Berlin; when I arrived, I took a room in the same hotel. Everything was calm, silent, a few cars went by; the elephants, which I still hadn’t gone to see, were trumpeting in the early morning light. I had slept a few hours in the train, a black, dreamless sleep; I was still exhausted, but it was impossible to go back to sleep. My sister, I said to myself finally, I have to let Una know. I went to the Kaiserhof: Had Freiherr von Üxküll left an address? “We cannot give out the addresses of our clients, Herr Sturmbannführer” was the reply. But could they at least send a telegram? It was a family emergency. Yes, that was possible. I asked for a form and wrote it on the reception counter: MOTHER DEAD MURDERED STOP MOREAU TOO STOP AM IN BERLIN CALL ME STOP, followed by the number of the Eden Hotel. I handed it to the receptionist with a tenreichsmark bill; he read it gravely and said, bowing his head slightly: “My condolences, Herr Sturmbannführer.”—“You’ll send it right away?”—“I’m calling the post office this instant, Herr Sturmbannführer.” He gave me the change and I went back to the Eden, leaving instructions for someone to come get me immediately in case of a phone call, whatever the time. I had to wait till nightfall. I took the call in a booth next to the reception, fortunately isolated. Una’s voice was panicked: “What happened?” I could hear that she had been crying. I began as calmly as possible: “I was in Antibes, I went to visit them. Yesterday morning…” My voice faltered. I cleared my throat and went on: “Yesterday morning I woke up…” My voice broke and I couldn’t go on. I heard my sister calling: “What is it? What happened?”—“Wait,” I said harshly and lowered the receiver to my thigh while I tried to get control of myself. This had never happened to me, losing control of my voice like this; even at the worst moments, I had always been able to explain things in an orderly, precise way. I coughed, coughed again, then brought the receiver back to face level and explained to her in a few words what had happened. She had only one question, frantic, panic-stricken: “And the twins? Where are the twins?” And then I went mad, started thrashing about in the phonebooth, hitting the walls with my back, my fist, my foot, shouting into the receiver: “Who are those twins?! Those fucking brats, whose are they?” A bellboy, alerted by the racket, had stopped in front of the booth and was looking at me through the glass. I calmed down with an effort. My sister, at the other end, remained silent. I took a breath and said into the receiver: “They’re alive. I don’t know where they went.” She didn’t say anything, I thought I could hear her breathing through the crackle of the international line. “Are you there?” No answer. “Whose are they?” I asked again, gently. She still didn’t speak. “Fuck!” I shouted, and hung up abruptly. I burst out of the booth and stood in front of the reception desk. I took out my address book, found a number, scribbled it on a piece of paper and handed it to the concierge. After a few minutes the telephone rang in the booth. I picked up the receiver and heard a woman’s voice. “Good evening,” I said. “I would like to speak with Dr. Mandelbrod. It’s Sturmbannführer Aue.”—“I’m sorry, Herr Sturmbannführer. Dr. Mandelbrod is not available. Can I take a message?”—“I would like to see him.” I left the hotel’s number and went back up to my room. An hour later a bellboy came with a note for me: Dr. Mandelbrod would receive me the next day, at 10:00 a.m. The same women, or ones who looked just like them, led me in. In the large light-filled office, with cats everywhere, Mandelbrod was waiting in front of the low table; Herr Leland, upright and thin in a pinstriped suit, was sitting next to him. I shook their hands and sat down. This time they didn’t serve me tea. Mandelbrod spoke first: “I’m delighted to see you. Have you had a good leave?” He seemed to be smiling into his folds of fat. “Have you had time to think about my proposal?”—“Yes, Herr Doktor. But I would like something else. I would like to be transferred to the Waffen-SS to go to the front.” Mandelbrod made a slight movement, as if he were shrugging his shoulders. Leland was staring at me with a harsh, cold, lucid gaze. I knew he had a glass eye, but could never tell which. It was he who answered, in a gravelly voice with a minute trace of an accent: “That is impossible. We have seen your medical file: your wound is regarded as a serious disability, and you have been classified for office work.” I looked at him and stammered: “But they need men. They’re recruiting everywhere.”—“Yes,” Mandelbrod said, “but they’re not taking just anyone. Rules are rules.”—“They’ll never take you back for active service,” Leland hammered out.—“Yes,” Mandelbrod went on, “and for France there’s not much hope, either. No, you should put your trust in us.” I got up: “Meine Herren, thank you for having me. I’m sorry I disturbed you.”—“But there’s no problem, my boy,” Mandelbrod whispered. “Take your time, think some more.”—“But remember,” Leland added severely: “a soldier at the front cannot choose his place. He must do his duty, whatever his post.”

From the hotel, I sent a telegram to Werner Best in Denmark, telling him I was ready to accept a position in his administration. Then I waited. My sister didn’t call back, and I didn’t try to contact her, either. Three days later they brought me a letter from the Auswärtiges Amt; it was Best’s reply: the situation in Denmark had changed, and he had nothing to offer me for the moment. I crumpled the letter up and threw it out. Bitterness and fear were welling up; I had to do something to avoid collapsing. I called back Mandelbrod’s office and left a message.