The Kindly Ones

GIGUE

Thomas found me sitting on a chair at the edge of the terrace. I was looking at the woods and the sky and drinking brandy out of the bottle, in little sips. The raised balustrade hid the garden from me, but the thought of what I had seen was softly eating away at my spirit. One or two days must have gone by, don’t ask me how I spent them. Thomas had come walking around the side of the house: I hadn’t heard anything, neither the sound of an engine nor a call. I handed him the bottle: “Hail, comrade! Drink.” I was probably a little drunk. Thomas looked around him, drank a little, but didn’t hand the bottle back. “What the hell are you up to?” he finally asked. I smiled inanely at him. He looked at the house. “You’re alone?”—“I think so, yes.” He walked up to me, looked at me, repeated: “What the hell are you doing? Your leave ended a week ago. Grothmann is furious, he’s talking about court-martialing you for desertion. These days, courts-martial last five minutes.” I shrugged and reached for the bottle, which he was still holding. He moved it away. “And you?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”—“Piontek told me where you were. He brought me. I came to get you.”—“We have to go, then?” I said sadly.—“Yes. Go get dressed.” I got up, went upstairs. In Una’s bedroom, instead of getting dressed, I sat down on her leather sofa and lit a cigarette. I thought about her, with difficulty, strangely empty, hollow thoughts. Thomas’s voice, in the stairway, drew me out of my reverie: “Hurry up! Shit!” I got dressed, pulling on my clothes somewhat at random, but with some good sense, since it was cold out—long underwear, wool socks, a turtleneck sweater under my office uniform. L’Éducation sentimentale was lying on the secretary: I slipped the book into my tunic pocket. Then I began opening the windows to pull the shutters closed. Thomas appeared in the doorway: “What are you doing?”—“Well, I’m closing up. We can’t leave the house wide open.” His bad mood burst out then: “You don’t seem to realize what’s happening. The Russians have been attacking along the whole front for a week. They could be here any minute now.” He took me unceremoniously by the arm: “Come on.” In the entryway, I briskly freed myself from his grip and went to find the big key to the front door. I put on my coat and cap. As we left I carefully locked the door. In the courtyard in front of the house, Piontek was wiping the headlight of an Opel. He straightened to salute me, and we got into the car, Thomas next to Piontek, me in the back. In the long lane, between jolts, Thomas asked Piontek: “Do you think we can pass through Tempelburg again?”—“I don’t know, Standartenführer. It looked calm, we can try.” On the main road Piontek turned left. In Alt Draheim, a few families were still loading some wagons, harnessed to little Pomeranian horses. The car passed around the old fort and began climbing the long slope of the isthmus. A tank appeared on top, low and squat. “Shit!” Thomas exclaimed. “A T-thirty-four!” But Piontek had already slammed on the brakes and started going in reverse. The tank lowered its cannon and fired at us, but it couldn’t traverse low enough and the shell went over us and exploded by the side of the road, at the entrance to the village. The tank advanced in a rattle of treads to fire lower; Piontek quickly backed the car across the road and started off at top speed toward the village; the second shell hit quite close, shattering one of the left side windows, then we were around the fort and hidden from the tank. In the village, people had heard the explosions and were running in all directions. We drove through without stopping and headed north. “They couldn’t have taken Tempelburg!” Thomas was raging. “We went through there two hours ago!”—“Maybe they came round by the fields,” Piontek suggested. Thomas was examining a map: “All right, go to Bad Polzin. We’ll get information there. Even if Stargard has fallen, we can take the Schivelbein-Naugard road and then reach Stettin.” I wasn’t paying much attention to what he said, I was looking at the landscape out of the smashed window, after having cleared away the debris. Tall, widely spaced poplar trees lined the long straight road, and beyond them stretched snowy, silent fields, a gray sky where some birds were flitting, isolated, shuttered, silent farms. In Klaushagen, a neat little village, sad and dignified, a few kilometers farther on, a checkpoint of Volkssturm in civilian clothes with armbands blocked the road, between a little lake and a wood. Anxiously, the farmers asked us for news: Thomas advised them to head with their families toward Polzin, but they hesitated, twisted their moustaches and fiddled with their old rifles and the two Panzerfäuste they had been allocated. Some had pinned their medals from the Great War onto their jackets. The Schupos in bottle-green uniforms sent to supervise them seemed just as uneasy, the men talked with the slow deliberation of a town council meeting, almost solemn with anxiety.

At the entrance to Bad Polzin, the defenses seemed more solidly organized. Waffen-SS were guarding the road, and a PAK gun, positioned on a hill, covered the approach. Thomas got out of the car to confer with the Untersturmführer commanding the platoon, but he didn’t know anything and referred us to his superior in town, at the command post set up in the old castle. Vehicles and wagons were clogging the streets, the atmosphere was tense, mothers shouted after their children, men brutally pulled the reins of their horses, scolded the French farm workers who were loading the mattresses and the bags of provisions. I followed Thomas into the command post and stayed behind him, listening. The Obersturmführer didn’t know much, either; his unit was attached to the SS Tenth Corps, they had sent him here at the head of a company to hold the main roads; and he thought the Russians would come from the south or from the east—the Second Army, around Danzig and Gotenhafen, was already cut off from the Reich, the Russians had broken through to the Baltic along the Neustettin-Köslin axis, he was almost sure of it—but he guessed the ways leading west were still free. We took the road to Schivelbein. It was a paved highway, long wagons of refugees occupied one full lane, a continuous flow, the same sad spectacle as a month before on the autobahn from Stettin to Berlin. Slowly, at a horse’s pace, the German East was emptying out. There wasn’t much military traffic, but many soldiers, armed or not, walked alone among the civilians, Rückkämpfer who were trying to rejoin their units or find another one. It was cold out, a fierce wind blew through the car’s broken window, bringing wet snow with it. Piontek honked as he passed the wagons; men on foot, horses, livestock congested the road, giving way slowly. We drove alongside fields, then again the road passed through a fir forest. In front of us, wagons were stopping, there was commotion, I heard an enormous, incomprehensible noise, people were yelling and running toward the forest. “The Russians!” Piontek roared.—“Get out, get out!” Thomas ordered. I got out on the left with Piontek: two hundred meters in front of us, a tank was moving swiftly toward us, crushing wagons, horses, straggling fugitives. Terrified, I ran as fast as I could with Piontek and some civilians to hide in the forest; Thomas had crossed through the column to the other side. Beneath the treads of the tank, the carts shattered like matches; the horses died with horrible neighing, cut short by the metallic grinding. Our car was caught from the front, driven back, swept aside, and, in a great racket of crushed sheet metal, thrown into the ditch, on its side. I could make out the soldier perched on the tank, just in front of me, an Asiatic with a pug-nosed face black with engine oil; under his leather tanker’s helmet, he wore little women’s sunglasses, hexagonal with pink rims, and he held in one hand a big machine gun with a round magazine, in the other, perched on his shoulder, a summer parasol, trimmed with lace; his legs apart, leaning against the turret, he straddled the cannon like a horse, absorbing the impacts of the tank with the ease of a Scythian rider guiding a nervy little horse with his heels. Two other tanks with mattresses or mesh springs attached to their sides followed the first one, finishing off under their treads the crippled screaming and wriggling among the debris. The whole passage took a dozen seconds at most; they continued on toward Bad Polzin, leaving in their wake a wide band of wood shards mixed with blood and crushed flesh in pools of horse intestines. Long trails left by the wounded who had tried to crawl to shelter reddened the snow on both sides of the road; here and there, a man writhed, without any legs, howling; on the road there were headless torsos, arms emerging from a red, vile pulp. I was trembling uncontrollably, Piontek had to help me get back to the road. Around me people were screeching, gesticulating, others stayed motionless and in a state of shock, the children let out endless, piercing cries. Thomas quickly rejoined me and searched through the wreckage of the car to retrieve the map and a little bag. “We’ll have to continue on foot,” he said. I made a dazed gesture: “And the people…?”—“They’ll have to manage,” he cut in. “We can’t do anything. Come on.” He made me cross the road again, Piontek following. I was careful not to step on human remains, but it was impossible to avoid the blood, my boots left big red tracks in the snow. Beneath the trees, Thomas unfolded the map. “Piontek,” he ordered, “go search through those carts, find us something to eat.” Then he studied the map. When Piontek returned with some provisions tied up in a pillowcase, Thomas showed the map to us. It was a large-scale map of Pomerania, it indicated the main roads and the villages, but not much more. “If the Russians came from there, then they’ve taken Schivelbein. They must also be heading up toward Kolberg. We’ll go north, try to reach Belgarde. If our people are still there, fine; if not we’ll see. By avoiding the roads we should be all right: if they’re moving so fast, it means their infantry is still far behind.” He pointed to a village on the map, Gross Rambin: “The railroad passes here. If the Russians haven’t reached it yet, we might find something.”

We quickly crossed the forest and took to the fields. The snow was melting on the plowed earth, we sank into it up to our calves; between each plot of land ran rivulets full of water bordered with barbed-wire fences, not tall but hard to pass. Then we traveled on little dirt paths, also muddy, but easier, which we had to leave whenever we approached villages. It was tiring, but the air was brisk and the countryside deserted and quiet; on the roads, we walked at a good pace, Thomas and I a little ridiculous in our dress uniforms with our legs all smeared with mud. Piontek carried the supplies; our only weapons were our two service pistols, Lüger automatics. Near the end of the afternoon, we reached Rambin and paused in a small grove of beech and ash trees. It was snowing again, a wet, sticky snow that the wind blew into our faces. A little river flowed on our right; to our left, a little farther on, we could make out the railroad and the first houses. “We’ll wait for nightfall,” Thomas said. I leaned back against a tree, pulling the folds of my coat under me, and Piontek handed us hard-boiled eggs and sausages. “I couldn’t find any bread,” he said sadly. Thomas pulled out of his bag the little bottle of brandy he had taken from me and offered us each a swig. The sky was darkening, the snow flurries were beginning again. I was tired and fell asleep against the tree. When Thomas woke me my coat was dusted with snow and I was stiff from the cold. There was no moon, no light came from the village. We followed the edge of the wood up to the railroad, then walked in the dark in single file along the embankment. Thomas had taken out his pistol and I imitated him, without really knowing what I’d do with it if we were surprised. Our footsteps crunched on the snowy gravel between the tracks. The first houses, dark and silent, appeared to the right of the rails, near a large pond; the little train station at the entrance to the village was locked; we stayed on the tracks to pass through the hamlet. Finally we could put our pistols away and walk more easily. The track bed was slippery and crumbled beneath our feet, and the spacing of the ties kept us from walking at a normal pace along the tracks; at last, one by one, we left the embankment and walked alongside it in the virgin snow. A little farther on, the tracks once again went through a large pine forest. I felt tired, we’d been walking for hours, I wasn’t thinking about anything, my head remained void of any idea or any image, all my effort went into my footsteps. I was breathing heavily, and along with the crunching of our boots on the wet snow it was one of the only sounds I heard, a haunting sound. A few hours later, the moon rose behind the pines, not quite full; it cast patches of white light on the snow through the trees. Later still, we reached the edge of the forest. Beyond a large plain, a few kilometers in front of us, a yellow light danced in the sky and we could make out the crackle of guns, hollow, muffled explosions. The moon illuminated the snow on the plain and I could make out the black line of the railroad, the bushes, the little scattered woods. “They must be fighting around Belgarde,” Thomas said. “Let’s sleep a little. If we approach now, we’ll get shot by our own men.” Sleeping in the snow wasn’t very appealing to me; with Piontek, I gathered some dead branches together to form a nest, rolled myself up in a ball, and fell asleep.

A rude blow on my boot woke me up. It was still dark. Several forms were standing around us, I could see the steel of machine guns glinting. A voice whispered abruptly: “Deutsche? Deutsche?” I sat up and the shape moved back: “Excuse me, Herr Offizier,” a voice said in a strong accent. I stood up; Thomas was already standing. “You are German soldiers?” he asked then, also in a low voice. “Jawohl, Herr Offizier.” My eyes were growing used to the darkness: I could make out SS insignia and blue-white-red badges on the men’s coats. “I’m an SS-Obersturmbannführer,” I said in French. A voice exclaimed: “You see that, Roger, he speaks French!” The first soldier replied: “Our apologies, Obersturmbannführer. We couldn’t see you well in the dark. We thought you were deserters.”—“We’re from the SD,” Thomas said, also in French, with his Austrian accent. “We were cut off by the Russians and we’re trying to rejoin our lines. And you?”—“Oberschütze Lanquenoy, Third Company, First Platoon, zu Befehl, Standartenführer. We’re with the Charlemagne Division. We were separated from our regiment.” There were a dozen of them. Lanquenoy, who seemed to be leading them, explained the situation in a few words: they had been given the order to leave their position several hours ago and to retreat to the south. Most of the regiment, which they were trying to rejoin, must have been a little farther to the east, near the Persante River. “Oberführer Puaud is in charge. There are still some guys from the Wehrmacht in Belgarde, but it’s bloody hot over there.”—“Why aren’t you heading north?” Thomas asked curtly. “Toward Kolberg?”—“We don’t know, Standartenführer,” Lanquenoy said. “We don’t know anything. There are Russkoffs everywhere.”—“The road must be cut off,” another voice said.—“Are our troops still holding Körlin?” Thomas asked.—“We don’t know,” Lanquenoy said.—“Do we still hold Kolberg?”—“We don’t know, Standartenführer. We don’t know anything.” Thomas asked for a flashlight and had Lanquenoy and another soldier show us the terrain on the map. “We’re going to try to head north and reach Körlin or, if not that, Kolberg,” Thomas said finally. “Do you want to come with us? In a little group, we could pass the Russian lines, if we have to. They must just be holding the roads, maybe a few villages.”—“It’s not that we don’t want to, Standartenführer. We’d like to, I think. But we have to rejoin our buddies.”—“As you like.” Thomas had them give him a weapon and some ammunition, which he handed to Piontek. The sky was growing gradually paler, a thick layer of fog filled the hollows of the plain near the river. The French soldiers saluted us and moved off into the forest. Thomas said to me: “We’ll take advantage of the fog to get round Belgarde, fast. On the other side of the Persante, between the bend in the river and the road, there’s a forest. We’ll go that way up to Körlin. Afterward, we’ll see.” I didn’t say anything, I felt as if I had no will of my own. We went back along the railroad. The explosions, in front of us and on our right, resounded in the fog, keeping pace with our advance. When the tracks crossed a road, we lurked, waited a few minutes, then crossed it running. Sometimes too we heard the clanking of gear, boxes, canteens: armed men were passing us in the fog; and we stayed down, on the lookout, waiting for them to move away, without ever knowing if they were our own men or not. To the south, behind us, heavy gunfire was starting up; in front of us, the noises were getting more distinct, but they were isolated gunshots and volleys, just a few explosions, the fighting must have been winding down. In the time it took us to reach the Persante, a wind rose up and began to scatter the fog. We moved away from the railroad and hid in the reeds to observe. The metal railroad bridge had been dynamited and lay, twisted, in the gray, turbid water of the river. We waited for about fifteen minutes observing it; the fog had almost lifted now, a cold sun glowed in the gray sky. Behind us, to the right, Belgarde was burning. The ruined bridge didn’t seem to be guarded. “If we’re careful, we could cross on the beams,” Thomas murmured. He stood up, and Piontek followed him, the Frenchmen’s submachine gun raised. From the shore, the crossing looked easy, but once we were on the bridge, the girders turned out to be treacherous, wet and slippery. We had to hang on the outside of the deck, just above the water. Thomas and Piontek crossed safely. A few meters from the shore, my reflection drew my gaze; it was blurred, deformed by the movements of the surface; I leaned over to see it more clearly, my foot slipped and I fell to meet it. Tangled in my heavy coat, I sank for a second into the cold water. My hand found a metal bar, I caught hold, hoisted myself back to the surface; Piontek, who had turned back, pulled me out onto the bank, and I lay there, dripping, coughing, furious. Thomas was laughing and his laughter added to my anger. My cap, which I had slipped into my belt before crossing, was safe; I had to take off my boots to empty the water, and Piontek helped me wring out my coat as best we could. “Hurry up,” Thomas whispered, still laughing. “We can’t stay here.” I felt my pockets, my hand encountered the book I had brought and then forgotten. The sight of the soaking, curling pages made my stomach turn. But there was nothing for it, Thomas was hurrying me, I put it back in my pocket, slung my wet coat over my shoulders and started off again.

The cold cut through my drenched clothes and I shivered, but we walked fast and that warmed me a little. Behind us, the fires in the city were crackling, thick smoke blackened the gray sky and veiled the sun. For a while, a dozen starving, panic-stricken dogs harassed us, rushing at our heels and barking furiously; Piontek had to cut a stick and lay into them to make them go away. Near the river, the ground was swampy; the snow had already melted, a few isolated patches showed the dry places. Our boots sank in up to our ankles. A long grassy dyke dusted with snow took shape, running alongside the Persante; to our right, at the foot of the embankment, the marsh thickened, then the woods began, also swampy; and soon we were stuck on this dyke, but couldn’t see anyone, neither Germans nor Russians. Others had come this way before us, though: here and there, slumped in the wood, with a foot or an arm caught in the branches, or else lying head-down on the side of the dyke, we saw a corpse, a soldier or civilian who had dragged himself there to die. The sky was clearing, the pale late-winter sun gradually scattered the grayness. Walking on the dyke was easy, we moved quickly, Belgarde had already disappeared. On the brown water of the Persante, ducks were floating, some with green heads, others black-and-white; they took off suddenly when we approached, quacking plaintively, then settling a little farther off. Across, beyond the river, stretched a large forest of tall, dark pines trees; to our right, after the little stream that separated the dyke from land, we saw mostly birch trees, with some oaks. I heard a distant buzzing: above us, very high in the light-green sky, a solitary plane was circling. The sight of this aircraft worried Thomas and he pulled us over to the little canal; we crossed it on a fallen trunk to reach the trees; but there, firm ground disappeared under water. We made our way through a little meadow covered with tall, thick grass, sodden and bent; beyond stretched out more sheets of water; there was a little padlocked hunter’s cabin, also standing in water. The snow had completely disappeared. There was no use sticking to the trees, our boots sank into the water and the mud, the wet ground was covered with rotten leaves that hid quagmires. Here and there a little island of firm land gave us courage. But farther on it became completely impossible again; the trees grew on isolated clumps or in the water itself, the strips of earth between the puddles were also flooded, wading was difficult, we had to give up and go back to the dyke. Finally it opened up onto fields, wet and covered with damp snow, but at least we could walk on them. Then we entered a woodlot of pine trees ready for cutting, thin, straight and tall with ruddy trunks. The sun filtered through the trees, scattering spots of light on the black, almost bare ground dotted with patches of snow or cold green moss. Trunks, abandoned where they fell, and broken branches blocked the way between the trees; but it was even harder to walk in the black mud, churned up by wagon wheels, on the logger’s paths that snaked through the pine grove. I was out of breath, hungry too, Thomas finally agreed to pause. Thanks to the heat given off from walking, my underwear was almost dry; I took off my tunic, boots, and pants, and stretched them out with my coat in the sun, on a cord of pine logs, carefully piled up in a square by the side of the road. I also put the Flaubert there, open, to dry out the curled paper. Then I perched on a neighboring cord, ridiculous in my long underwear; after a few minutes I was cold again, and Thomas passed me his coat, laughing. Piontek handed out some food and I ate. I was exhausted, I wanted to lie down on my coat in the weak sunlight and fall asleep. But Thomas was adamant that we reach Körlin, he still hoped to get to Kolberg the same day. I put my wet clothes back on, pocketed the Flaubert, and followed him. Soon after the wood a little hamlet appeared, nestled in the bend of the river. We watched it for a while—we’d have to make a long detour if we had to go around it; I could hear dogs barking, horses neighing, cows mooing, with that long painful sound they have when they’re not milked and their udders are swelling. But that was all. Thomas decided to move forward. There were large old farm buildings made of brick, crumbling, the broad roofs covering generous haylofts; the doors were smashed, the path strewn with overturned carts, broken furniture, torn sheets; here and there, we stepped over the corpse of a farmer or an old woman, shot point-blank; a strange little snowstorm blew through the little streets, flurries of down raised from ripped-open quilts and mattresses and carried by the wind. Thomas sent Piontek to look for food in the houses and, as we waited, translated a sign hastily painted in Russian, placed around the neck of a farmer tied high up on an oak tree, his intestines dripping from his split stomach, half torn out by dogs: YOU HAD A HOUSE, COWS, TINNED FOOD. WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU WANT WITH US, PRIDUROK? The smell of the intestines made me nauseous, I was thirsty and I drank from the pump of a well that still worked. Piontek joined us: he had found bacon, onions, apples, some preserves, which we shared between us and put in our pockets; but he was pale and his jaw was trembling, he didn’t want to tell us what he’d seen in the house, and his anguished gaze shifted from the disemboweled man to the growling dogs that were drawing close through the whirlwinds of down. We left this hamlet as fast as we could. Beyond stretched large undulating fields, pale yellow and beige under the still-dry snow. The path skirted round a little stream, climbed a hill, went past a deserted prosperous farm adjacent to a wood. Then it led down to the Persante. We followed the bank, which was high above the river; on the other side of the water there were more woods. Another tributary barred our way, we had to take off our boots and socks and ford it, the water was freezing, I drank some and sprinkled my neck with it before continuing. Then more snow-covered fields and, far off on a hill to the right, the edge of a forest; right in the middle, empty, stood a gray wooden tower, for duck-hunting or maybe to shoot at crows during harvest time. Thomas wanted to cut through the fields, in front of us the forest descended to join the river, but leaving the paths wasn’t easy, the ground got treacherous, we had to pass over barbed-wire fences, so we went back to following the river when we found it again a little farther on. Two swans were drifting on the water, not at all alarmed by our presence; they paused near a little island, raised and stretched their huge necks in one long gesture, then started preening themselves. Farther, the woods began again. Here the trees were mostly pine, young ones, a forest carefully managed for cutting, open and airy. The paths made walking easier. Twice, the noise of our footsteps caused small deer to run from us, we could see them leaping through the trees. Thomas led us along various paths under the calm high vault of branches and regularly found the Persante again, our Ariadne’s thread. A path cut through a little grove of oak trees, not very tall, a dense, gray tracery of shoots and bare branches. The ground under the snow was carpeted with dead leaves, dry and brown. When I was thirsty, I went down to the Persante, but often, at the shore, the water was stagnant. We were getting close to Körlin; my legs were heavy, my back ached, but here now the paths were easy.

In Körlin, battle was raging. Crouching by the edge of the wood, we watched the Russian tanks scattered along a slightly raised road relentlessly shelling the German positions. Infantrymen were running around the tanks, lying in trenches. There were lots of dead bodies, brown spots dotting the snow or the blackish ground. We cautiously retreated into the forest. A little farther back we had spotted a little stone bridge over the Persante, intact; we returned to it and crossed it, then, hiding in a beech grove, we slipped toward the main road to Plathe. In these woods too there were bodies everywhere, Russians and Germans both, they must have fought furiously; most of the German soldiers were wearing the French badge; now, though, everything was quiet. Searching through their pockets we found a few useful things, pocketknives, a compass, some dried fish in a Russian’s haversack. On the road, above us, Soviet tanks were headed at top speed toward Körlin. Thomas had decided that we would wait for night, then try to cross to see farther ahead who held the roadway to Kolberg, the Russians or our own men. I sat down behind a bush, with my back to the road, and ate an onion, which I washed down with some brandy, then I pulled L’Éducation sentimentale out of my pocket, its leather binding swollen and deformed, delicately unstuck a few pages, and began to read. The long, steady flow of the prose soon carried me away, I didn’t hear the rattle of treads or the rumble of engines, the absurd shouts in Russian, “Davaï! Davaï!” or the explosions, a little farther away; only the curling, sticking pages got in the way of my reading. The fading light forced me to close the book and put it away. I slept a little. Piontek was sleeping too; Thomas remained seated, watching the woods. When I woke up, I was covered in a thick, powdery snow; it was falling heavily, in big flakes that whirled between the trees before settling. On the road a tank passed by from time to time, its headlights on, the light piercing whirlwinds of snow; everything else was silent. We went close to the road and waited. Over toward Körlin, they were still shooting. Two tanks came along, followed by a truck, a Studebaker painted with the red star: as soon as they had passed, we crossed the road at a run to bolt into a wood on the other side. A few kilometers farther on, we had to repeat the process to cross the little road leading to Gross-Jestin, a neighboring village; there too tanks and vehicles clogged the road. The thick snow hid us as we crossed the fields, there was no wind and the snow fell vertically, muting sounds, explosions, motors, shouts. From time to time, we heard metallic clicking or bursts of Russian voices; we quickly hid, flat on our stomachs in a ditch or behind a bush; once, a patrol passed right by without noticing us. Again the Persante barred our way. The road to Kolberg was on the other side; we followed the bank northward and Thomas finally unearthed a boat hidden in the reeds. There were no oars, so Piontek cut some long branches to maneuver it, and the crossing was easy enough. On the road there was heavy traffic in both directions: Russian tanks and trucks were driving with all lights on, as if on an autobahn. A long column of tanks flowed toward Kolberg, a fairytale spectacle, each vehicle draped with lace, large white lengths attached to the cannons and to the gun turrets and dancing on the sides, and in the whirlwinds of snow illumined by their headlights, these dark and thundering machines took on a light, almost airy quality; they seemed to float over the road, through the snow that blended with their delicate sails. We slowly retreated to hide in the woods. “We’ll cross the Persante again,” Thomas’s tense voice whispered, disembodied in the dark and the snow. “We can forget about Kolberg. We’ll have to go all the way to the Oder, probably.” But the boat had disappeared, and we had to walk for a while before we could find a fordable stretch, indicated by posts and a kind of footbridge stretched beneath the water, to which the corpse of a French Waffen-SS was caught by the foot, floating on its stomach. The cold water rose up to our thighs, I held my book in my hand to spare it another dip; thick snowflakes were falling onto the water and disappeared instantly. We had taken off our boots but our pants stayed wet and cold all night and into the morning, when we fell asleep, all three of us, without posting a guard, in a little forester’s cabin deep in the woods. We had been walking for almost thirty-six hours, we were worn out; now we had to walk some more.

We advanced at night; during the day, we hid in the woods; then I slept or read Flaubert, I didn’t talk much with my companions. An impotent rage was welling up in me, I didn’t understand why I had left the house near Alt Draheim, I was furious at myself for letting myself be led along to wander like a savage in the woods, instead of staying there quietly alone. Beards covered our faces, dried mud stiffened our uniforms, and under the rough cloth, cramps racked our legs. We ate poorly, there was only what we could find in abandoned farms or the debris of refugees’ convoys; I didn’t complain, but I found the raw bacon vile, the fat stayed stuck inside your mouth for a long time, there was no bread to help it down. We were always cold and couldn’t make a fire. Still, I liked this grave, quiet countryside, the serene, airy quiet of the birch woods or pine groves, the gray sky scarcely agitated by wind, the hushed rustle of the last snowfalls of the year. But it was a dead, deserted countryside: empty fields, empty farms. Everywhere the disasters of war had left their traces. Every sizeable hamlet, which we skirted around from afar, at night, was occupied by Russians; from the outskirts, in the dark, we could hear drunken soldiers singing and firing off volleys in the air. There were still some Germans, though, in these villages, we could make out their frightened but patient voices between the Russian exclamations and curses; screams were common too, especially women’s screams. But that was still better than the burned villages to which hunger drove us: dead livestock made the streets stink; the houses gave off a stench of carrion, mixed with the smell of cold ashes, and since we had to go inside to find food, we couldn’t avoid seeing the twisted corpses of women, often stripped naked, even old women or ten-year-old girls, with blood between their legs. But staying in the woods didn’t mean we could escape the dead: at crossroads, immense, ancient oak branches bore clusters of hanged men, usually Volkssturm, dismal bundles, victims of zealous Feldgendarmen; bodies dotted the clearings, like that of a naked young man, lying in the snow with one leg folded, as serene as the hanged man on the Twelfth Tarot Trump, frightening in his strangeness; and further on, in the forests, cadavers polluted the pale ponds we walked alongside, fighting our thirst. In these woods and forests, we also found living people, terrorized civilians, incapable of giving us the slightest bit of information, isolated soldiers or little groups who were trying like us to thread their way through the Russian lines. Waffen-SS or Wehrmacht, they never wanted to stay with us; they must have been afraid, if we were captured, of being found with high-ranking SS officers. That made Thomas think, and he had me destroy my pay book and my papers and tear off my insignia, as he did, in case we fell into Russian hands; but out of fear of the Feldgendarmen, he decided, somewhat irrationally, that we should keep our handsome black uniforms, a little incongruous for this walk in the countryside. All these decisions were made by him; I agreed without thinking and followed, closed to everything except to what fell under my eyes, in the slow unfurling of the march.

When something did arouse a reaction in me, it was even worse. The second night after Körlin, around dawn, we entered a hamlet, a few farms surrounding a manor house. A little to the side stood a brick church, set against a pointed bell tower and topped with a gray slate roof; the door was open, and organ music was coming out; Piontek had already left to search the kitchens; followed by Thomas, I went into the church. An old man, near the altar, was playing Bach’s Art of the Fugue, the third contrapunctus, I think, with that beautiful rolling of the bass that on an organ is played with the pedals. I approached, sat down on a pew, and listened. The old man finished the piece and turned to me: he wore a monocle and a neatly trimmed little white moustache, and an Oberstleutnant’s uniform from the other war, with a cross at his neck. “They can destroy everything,” he said to me calmly, “but not this. It is impossible, this will remain forever: it will go on even when I stop playing.” I didn’t say anything and he attacked the next contrapunctus. Thomas was still standing. I got up too. I listened. The music was magnificent, the organ wasn’t very powerful but it echoed in this little family church, the lines of counterpoint met each other, played, danced with each other. But instead of pacifying me, this music only fueled my anger, I found it unbearable. I wasn’t thinking about anything, my head was empty of everything except this music and the black pressure of my rage. I wanted to shout at him to stop, but I let the end of the piece go by, and the old man immediately started the next one, the fifth. His long aristocratic fingers fluttered over the keys, pulled or pushed the stops. When he slapped them shut at the end of the fugue, I took out my pistol and shot him in the head. He collapsed forward onto the keys, opening half the pipes in a desolate, discordant bleat. I put my pistol away, went over, and pulled him back by the collar; the sound stopped, leaving only the sound of blood dripping from his head onto the flagstones. “You’ve gone completely mad!” Thomas snarled. “What’s the matter with you?!” I looked at him coldly, I was livid but my cracked voice didn’t tremble: “It’s because of these corrupt Junkers that Germany is losing the war. National Socialism is collapsing and they’re playing Bach. It should be forbidden.” Thomas stared at me, he didn’t know what to say. Then he shrugged: “You know, you might be right. But don’t do that again. Let’s go.” Piontek, in the main courtyard, had taken fright at the shot and was brandishing his submachine gun. I suggested we sleep in the manor house, in a real bed, with sheets; but Thomas, I think, was furious at me, he decided we’d sleep in the woods again, to annoy me, probably. But I didn’t want to get angry again, and also, he was my friend; I obeyed, I followed him without protesting.

The weather was fickle, it suddenly got warmer; as soon as the cold disappeared, it got hot, and I sweated copiously in my coat, the slippery earth of the fields stuck to my feet. We remained north of the road to Plathe; imperceptibly, to avoid spaces that were too open, and to stay close to the forests, we were drifting even farther north. Whereas we thought we would cross the Rega around Greifenberg, we reached it near Treptow, less than ten kilometers from the sea. Between Treptow and the river’s mouth, according to Thomas’s map, the entire left bank was swampy; but at the sea’s edge lay a large forest, where we could walk safely to Horst or Rewahl; if these seaside resorts were still in German hands, we could pass through the lines; if not, we would head back inland. That night, we crossed the railroad that links Treptow to Kolberg, then the road to Deep, waiting for an hour for a Soviet column to pass by. After the road, we were almost out in the open, but there were no villages there; we followed little isolated paths in the bend of the Rega, approaching the river. The forest, opposite, was growing visible in the darkness, a large black wall in front of the clear wall of the night. We could already smell the sea. But we couldn’t see any way of crossing the river, which kept getting wider as it neared its mouth. Instead of turning back, we continued on toward Deep. Skirting around the town where the Russians were sleeping, drinking, and singing, we went down to the beach and the bathhouses. A Soviet guard was sleeping on a chaise longue, and Thomas bashed his head in with the metal shaft of a beach umbrella; the noise of the waves drowned out all sounds. Piontek broke the chain fastening the pedal-boats. An icy wind was blowing over the Baltic, from west to east; along the coast, the black water was rough; we dragged the pedal-boat onto the sand to the mouth of the river; there it was calmer, and I launched onto the waves with a swell of joy; as I pedaled, I remembered the summers on the beaches in Antibes or Juan-les-Pins, where my sister and I begged Moreau to rent us a pedal-boat and then set off on our own on the sea, as far as our little legs could push us, before drifting happily in the sun. We crossed quickly, Thomas and I pedaling with all our strength, Piontek, lying between us with his gun, watching the shore; on the far bank, I abandoned our craft almost with regret. The forest began immediately, stocky low trees of all kinds bent by the wind that swept this long, gloomy coast unceasingly. Walking in these woods is not easy: there are few paths, and young saplings, birch trees especially, invade the ground between the trees, you have to clear a path for yourself among them. The forest came up to the sand on the beach and overlooked the sea, right up against the large dunes that, shifting under the wind, poured their sand between the trees and buried them up to midtrunk. Behind this barrier the backwash of the invisible sea thundered endlessly. We walked until dawn; farther on, it was mostly pine trees; we made better time. When the sky cleared, Thomas climbed a dune to look at the beach. I followed him. An uninterrupted line of debris and corpses cluttered the cold, pale sand, wrecks of vehicles, abandoned artillery guns, overturned, shattered carts. Bodies lay where they had fallen, on the sand or with their heads in the water, half covered by white foam, others floated farther away, tossed by the waves. The seawater looked heavy, almost dirty on this beige, pale beach, the gray-green of lead, hard and sad. Fat seagulls flew level with the sand or soared above the rumbling swell, facing the wind, as if suspended, before heading off away with a precise movement of wing. We ran down the dune to rapidly search some corpses for provisions. There were all kinds of people among the dead, soldiers, women, little children. But we didn’t find much to eat and soon hurried back to the forest. As soon as I moved away from the beach, the calm of the woods enveloped me, letting the roar of the surf and the wind resound in my head. I wanted to sleep on the flank of the dune, the cold, hard sand drew me, but Thomas was afraid of patrols, and led me farther into the forest. I slept a few hours on pine needles and then read my misshapen book until nightfall, forgetting my hunger in the sumptuous descriptions of the banquets of the bourgeois monarchy. Then Thomas gave the signal for departure. After two hours of walking, we reached the end of the forest, a curve overlooking a little lake separated from the Baltic by a dyke of gray sand, surmounted by a line of pretty beach cottages, abandoned, built down to the sea on a long, gentle strand scattered with debris. We threaded our way from house to house, keeping an eye out on the paths and the beach. Horst was a little farther on: a former seaside resort, popular in its day, but for some years past given over to invalids and the convalescent. On the beach, the jumble of wrecks and bodies grew thicker, a big battle had taken place here. Farther on, we could see lights and hear engine noises, it must have been the Russians. We had already passed the little lake; according to the map, we were no more than twenty or twenty-two kilometers from the island of Wollin. In one of the houses we found a wounded man, a German soldier hit in the stomach by a piece of shrapnel. He was crouching under a stairway but called to us when he heard us whispering. Thomas and Piontek carried him onto a gutted sofa, holding his mouth so he wouldn’t cry out; he wanted something to drink, Thomas wet a cloth and wiped his lips with it several times. He had been lying there for days, and his words, between the panting, were scarcely audible. The remains of several divisions, herding tens of thousands of civilians, had formed a pocket in Horst, Rewahl, Hoff; he had arrived there with what was left of his regiment, from Dramburg. Then they had tried to break through to Wollin. The Russians held the cliffs above the beach and fired methodically at the desperate mass that passed beneath them. “It was like a pigeon shoot.” He had been wounded almost immediately, and his comrades had abandoned him. During the day, the beach was swarming with Russians, who came to strip the dead. He knew they had taken Kammin and probably controlled the whole shore of the Haff. “The region must be swarming with patrols,” Thomas commented. “The Reds are going to look for survivors of the breakthrough.” The man kept muttering and moaning, he was sweating; he asked for water, but we didn’t give him any, it would have made him shout; and we didn’t have any cigarettes to offer him, either. Before letting us go, he asked us for a pistol; I gave him mine, with the rest of the bottle of brandy. He promised to wait till we had gotten far away to shoot. Then we started off south again: after Gross Justin and Zitzmar there were woods. On the roads the traffic was incessant, American Jeeps or Studebakers with the red star, motorcycles, more tanks; on the paths there were now foot patrols of five or six men, and it took all our alertness to avoid them. Ten kilometers from the coast, we found snow again in the fields and woods. We headed toward Gülzow, west of Greifenberg; then, Thomas explained, we could continue on and try to cross the Oder near Gollnow. Before dawn we found a forest and a hut, but there were traces of footsteps and we left the path to sleep farther off, in the pine trees near a clearing, rolled up in our coats on the snow.

I awoke surrounded by children. They formed a wide circle around us, dozens of them, looking at us in silence. They were in rags, dirty, their hair disheveled; many of them wore scraps of German uniforms, a jacket, a helmet, a coarsely cut coat; some were clutching farm tools, hoes, rakes, shovels; others, rifles and submachine guns made of wire or cut from wood or cardboard. Their gazes were sullen and threatening. Most of them looked between ten and thirteen years old; some of them weren’t yet six; and behind them stood a few girls. We rose, and Thomas greeted them politely. The tallest of them, a blond, lanky boy wearing a staff officer’s coat with red velvet lapels over a tank-driver’s black jacket, stepped forward and barked: “Who are you?” He spoke German with a thick Volksdeutscher accent, from Ruthenia or maybe even the Banat. “We are German officers,” Thomas calmly replied. “And you?”—“Kampfgruppe Adam. I’m Adam, Generalmajor Adam, and this is my command.” Piontek burst out laughing. “We are from the SS,” Thomas said.—“Where are your insignia?” the boy spat out. “You’re deserters!” Piontek stopped laughing. Thomas didn’t lose his calm, he kept his hands behind his back and said: “We are not deserters. We were forced to remove our insignia for fear of falling into Bolshevik hands.”—“Standartenführer!” Piontek shouted, “why are you talking to these brats? Can’t you see they’re nuts? We should give them a thrashing!”—“Shut up, Piontek,” Thomas said. I didn’t say anything, I was beginning to be horrified at the fixed, insane gaze of these children. “Well, I’ll show them, I will!” Piontek bellowed, reaching for the submachine gun on his back. The boy in an officer’s coat made a sign and a half-dozen children rushed Piontek, hitting him with their tools and dragging him to the ground. A boy lifted a hoe and split his face open, crushing his teeth and flinging an eye out of its socket. Piontek was still screaming; a blow from a metal pipe caved in his forehead, and he fell silent. The children kept hitting until his head was nothing but red pulp in the snow. I was petrified, seized with uncontrollable terror. Thomas wasn’t moving a muscle, either. When the children abandoned the corpse, the tallest one shouted again: “You are deserters and we are going to hang you like traitors!”—“We are not deserters,” Thomas coldly repeated. “We are on a special mission for the Führer behind Russian lines, and you have just killed our driver.”—“Where are your papers to prove it?” the boy insisted.—“We destroyed them. If the Reds captured us, if they guessed who we were, they would torture us and make us speak.”—“Prove it!”—“Escort us to the German lines and you’ll see.”—“We have other things to do besides escorting deserters,” the child hissed. “I’m going to call my superiors.”—“As you like,” Thomas said calmly. A little boy about eight years old came through the group, a box on his shoulder. It was a wooden ammunition crate with Russian markings, on the bottom of which were fixed a number of screws and nailed several colored cardboard circles. A tin can, tied to the crate by a wire, hung from the side; clamps held a long metal rod in the air; around his neck, the boy wore real operator’s earphones. He adjusted them on his ears, put the crate on his lap, turned the cardboard circles, played with the screws, brought the tin can to his mouth and called: “Kampfgruppe Adam to HQ! Kampfgruppe Adam to HQ! Answer!” He repeated this several times and then freed one ear from the earpieces, much too big for him. “I have them on line, Herr Generalmajor,” he said to the tall blond boy. “What should I say?” The blond boy turned to Thomas: “Your name and rank!”—“SS-Standartenführer Hauser, attached to the Sicherheitspolizei.” The boy turned back to the little boy with the radio: “Ask them if they confirm the mission of Standartenführer Hauser of the Sipo.” The little boy repeated the message into his tin can and waited. Then he declared: “They don’t know anything, Herr Generalmajor.”—“That’s not surprising,” Thomas said with his incredible calm. “We report directly to the Führer. Let me call Berlin and he’ll confirm it to you in person.”—“In person?” the boy in charge asked, a strange glint in his eyes.—“In person,” repeated Thomas. I was still petrified; Thomas’s boldness froze me. The blond youth made a sign and the little boy took off the helmet and passed it with the tin can to Thomas. “Speak. Say ‘Over’ at the end of each sentence.” Thomas brought the earpieces to one ear and took the can. Then he called into the can: “Berlin, Berlin. Hauser to Berlin, answer.” He repeated this several times, then said: “Standartenführer Hauser, on special assignment, reporting. I have to talk to the Führer. Over…Yes, I’ll wait. Over.” The children surrounding us kept their eyes riveted on him; the jaw of the boy who went by the name of Adam was quivering slightly. Then Thomas stiffened, clicked his heels, and shouted into the can; “Heil Hitler! Standartenführer Hauser from the Geheime Staatspolizei, reporting, mein Führer! We have met Kampfgruppe Adam and request confirmation of our mission and our identity. Over.” He paused again and then said: “Jawohl, mein Führer. Sieg Heil!” He handed the earpieces and the can to the boy in the officer’s coat. “He wants to speak to you, Herr Generalmajor.”—“It’s the Führer?” the boy said in a muted voice.—“Yes. Don’t be afraid. He’s a kind man.” The boy slowly took the earpieces, put them to his ears, stiffened, threw an arm into the air, and shouted into the can: “Heil Hitler! Generalmajor Adam, zu Befehl, mein Führer! Over!” Then: “Jawohl, mein Führer! Jawohl! Jawohl! Sieg Heil!” When he took off the earpieces to return them to the little boy, his eyes were moist. “That was the Führer,” he said solemnly. “He confirms your identity and your mission. I’m sorry for your driver, but he had an unfortunate reaction and we couldn’t know. My Kampfgruppe is at your disposal. What do you need?”—“We need to rejoin our lines safe and sound to transmit secret information of vital importance for the Reich. Can you help us?” The boy withdrew with some others and conferred with them. Then he returned: “We came here to destroy a concentration of Bolshevik forces. But we can accompany you as far as the Oder. To the south there’s a forest, we’ll pass under the nose of those brutes. We’ll help you.”

So we started off with this horde of children in rags, leaving poor Piontek’s body lying there. Thomas took his submachine gun, and I picked up the bag of provisions. The group included almost seventy kids in all, including a dozen girls. Most of them, as we gradually learned, were orphan Volksdeutschen; some came from the region of Zamosc and even from Galicia and as far as Odessa. They had been roaming like this for months behind Russians lines, living on what they could find, picking up other children, pitilessly killing Russians and isolated Germans, whom they regarded as deserters. Like us, they marched at night and rested during the day, hidden in the forests. On the march they advanced in military order, with scouts out front, then the rest of the troupe, girls in the middle. Twice, we saw them massacre little groups of sleeping Russians: the first time it was easy, the soldiers, drunk, were sleeping off their vodka on a farm and had their throats cut or were hacked to pieces in their sleep; the second time, a kid shattered a guard’s skull with a rock, then the others rushed the ones snoring around a fire, near their broken-down truck. Curiously, they never took their weapons: “Our own Germans weapons are better,” the boy who commanded them and who claimed his name was Adam explained. We also saw them attack a patrol with amazing guile and savagery. The little unit had been spotted by the scouts; most of the group withdrew into the woods, and twenty or so boys advanced onto the path toward the Russians, shouting, “Russki! Davaï! Khleb, khleb!” The Russians weren’t suspicious and let them approach, some even laughed and took some bread out of their bags. When the children had surrounded them, they attacked them with their tools and their knives, it was an insane butchery, I saw a little seven-year-old boy jump onto a soldier’s back and plant a big nail in his eye. Two of the soldiers still managed to fire off a few volleys before they collapsed: three children were killed on the spot and five were wounded. After the fight, the survivors, covered in blood, brought back the wounded, who were crying and howling in pain. Adam saluted them and himself finished off, with his knife, the ones who were hit in the legs or stomach; the two others were handed over to the girls, and Thomas and I tried as well as we could to clean their wounds and bandage them with rags from shirts. Among themselves they behaved almost as brutally as with the adults. During the breaks, we had time to observe them: Adam had himself waited on by one of the older girls, then led her off into the woods; the others fought for pieces of bread or sausage, the smallest had to run to pilfer from the bags while the big ones clouted them or even hit them with shovels; then two or three boys would grab a girl by the hair, throw her on the ground, and rape her in front of the others, biting her neck like cats; some boys openly jerked off as they watched; others would hit the one on top of the little girl and shove him aside to take his place; when the girl tried to run away, they caught her and knocked her down with a kick in the stomach, all this in a racket of shouts and piercing screams; several of these barely pubescent girls looked pregnant. These scenes shattered my nerves profoundly; I found it very hard to bear this demented company. Some of the children, especially the older ones, scarcely spoke German; whereas, at least until the previous year, they all must have gone to school, no trace of their education seemed to remain, aside from the unshakeable conviction that they belonged to a superior race. They lived like a primitive tribe or a pack, cleverly cooperating to kill or find food, then viciously fighting over the booty. The authority of Adam, who was physically the tallest, seemed uncontested; I saw him strike against a tree, till it bled, the head of a boy who had been slow to obey him. Maybe, I said to myself, he has all the adults he meets killed so he can remain the oldest.

This march with the children lasted for several nights. I felt as if I were gradually losing control of myself, I had to make an immense effort not to hit them in turn. Thomas still kept his Olympian calm; he followed our progression on the map and with a compass, conferring with Adam about what direction to take. Before Gollnow, we had to cross the Kammin railroad, then, in several compact groups, the road. Beyond was nothing but an immense, dense forest, deserted but dangerous because of the patrols, which, fortunately, kept to the paths. We also began again meeting, alone or in groups, German soldiers, who like us were headed toward the Oder. Thomas stopped Adam from killing the isolated ones; two of them joined us, including a Belgian SS man, the others went their own way, preferring to try their luck alone. After another road, the forest became a marsh, we weren’t far from the Oder; to the south, according to the map, these swamps led to a tributary, the Ihna. Moving became difficult, we sank up to our knees, sometimes our waists, the children almost drowned in the bogs. It was very warm now, even in the forest the snow had disappeared; I finally got rid of my coat, still wet and heavy. Adam decided to escort us to the Oder with a smaller troupe and left part of his group, the girls and the smallest ones, under the guard of the two wounded children, on a strip of dry land. Crossing these desolate marshes took most of the night; sometimes we had to make considerable detours, but Thomas’s compass helped guide us. Finally we reached the Oder, black and gleaming beneath the moon. A line of long islands seemed to stretch between us and the German shore. We couldn’t find a boat. “No matter,” Thomas said, “we’ll swim across.”—“I don’t know how to swim,” the Belgian said. He was a Walloon, he had known Lippert well in the Caucasus and had told me about his death in Novo Buda. “I’ll help you,” I said. Thomas turned to Adam: “You don’t want to cross with us? Go back to Germany?”—“No,” the boy said. “We have our own mission.” We took off our boots to tuck them into our belts and I shoved my cap inside my tunic; Thomas and the German soldier, whose name was Fritz, kept their submachine guns in case the island wasn’t deserted. At this spot the river must normally have been about three hundred meters wide, but with the thaw, it had risen and the current was strong; the Belgian, whom I held under the chin as I swam on my back, slowed me down, I was soon carried away and almost missed the island; as soon as I managed to get my footing, I let the soldier go and pulled him by the collar, until he could walk on his own in the water. On the bank, I was overcome with fatigue and had to sit down for a while. Opposite, the marshes barely rustled, the children had already disappeared; the island on which we found ourselves was wooded, and I didn’t hear anything here, either, except the murmuring of the water. The Belgian went to find Thomas and the German soldier, who had landed farther up, then came back to tell me that the island seemed deserted. When I could get up I went through the wood with him. On the other side, the shore was also silent and dark. But on the beach, a pole painted red and white indicated the location of a field telephone, protected beneath a tarp, whose wire vanished into the water. Thomas took the receiver and made the call. “Hello,” he said. “Yes, we’re German soldiers.” He gave our names and ranks. Then: “Good.” He hung up, straightened, looked at me with a big smile. “They say we should stand in a row with our arms out.” We scarcely had time to get in place: a powerful spotlight on the German shore came on and aimed at us. We stayed that way for several minutes. “Good idea, their system,” Thomas commented. An engine noise started up in the night. A rubber dinghy approached and landed near us; three soldiers examined us in silence, holding their weapons until they were sure we were indeed German; still without a word, they herded us into the boat and the dinghy set off, bouncing through the black water.

On the bank, in the darkness, Feldgendarmen were waiting. Their big curved neck plates shone in the moonlight. They led us into a bunker to face a police Hauptmann, who asked for our papers; none of us had any. “In that case,” the officer said, “I have to send you under escort to Stettin. I’m sorry, but all kinds of people are trying to infiltrate.” As we waited, they handed out cigarettes and Thomas talked amiably with him: “You have a lot of crossings?”—“Ten or fifteen a night. In our entire sector, dozens. The other day, more than two hundred men arrived all at once, still armed. Most of them end up here because of the swamps, where the Russians don’t patrol much, as you saw.”—“The idea of the telephone is ingenious.”—“Thank you. The water has risen, and a lot of men drowned when they tried to swim across. The telephone spares us bad surprises…at least, so we hope,” he added, smiling. “It seems the Russians have traitors with them.” Around dawn, they had us get into a truck with three other Rückkämpfer and an armed escort of Feldgendarmen. We had crossed the river just above Pölitz; but the city was under Russian artillery fire and our truck made a long detour before we reached Stettin. There too shells were falling, buildings were cheerfully burning; in the streets, from the truck sides, I saw almost no one but soldiers. They took us to a Wehrmacht HQ, where we were immediately separated from the soldiers, then a severe Major interrogated us, soon joined by a representative of the Gestapo in civilian clothes. I let Thomas talk, he told our story in detail; I spoke only when questioned directly. On Thomas’s suggestion, the man from the Gestapo finally agreed to call Berlin. Huppenkothen, Thomas’s superior, wasn’t there, but we were able to reach one of his deputies, who immediately identified us. Right away the attitude of the Major and the Gestapo man changed; they began calling us by our rank and offering us schnapps. The Gestapo functionary left, promising to find us transportation to Berlin; in the meantime, the Major gave us some cigarettes and had us sit on a bench in the hallway. We smoked without talking: since the beginning of the march, we’d hardly smoked at all, and it was intoxicating. A calendar on the Major’s desk bore the date March 21, our adventure had lasted for seventeen days, and it must have been obvious from our appearance: we stank, our faces were bearded, our torn uniforms were coated in mud. But we weren’t the first to arrive in this state, and it didn’t seem to shock anyone. Thomas sat upright, one leg crossed over the other, he seemed very happy with our escapade; I was slumped, my legs spread straight in front of me in a rather unmilitary fashion; a bustling Oberst, passing by with a briefcase under his arm, threw me a look of disdain. I recognized him immediately, leapt up, and greeted him warmly: it was Osnabrugge, the demolisher of bridges. He took a few moments to recognize me, then his eyes opened wide: “Obersturmbannführer! What a state you’re in.” I briefly decribed our adventure to him. “And you? Are you dynamiting German bridges now?” His face fell: “Yes, unfortunately. I blew up the Stettin bridge two days ago, when we evacuated Altdamm and Finkenwalde. It was horrible, the bridge was covered with hanged men, runaways caught by the Feldgendarmen. Three of them were still hanging after the explosion, right at the entrance to the bridge, all green. But,” he went on, pulling himself together, “we didn’t destroy everything. The Oder in front of Stettin has five branches, and we decided to demolish only the last bridge. That leaves some chance for rebuilding.”—“That’s good,” I remarked, “you’re thinking about the future, you’re keeping up your morale.” We separated at these words: a few bridgeheads, farther south, hadn’t yet fallen back, Osnabrugge had to go inspect the preparations for demolitions. Soon afterward, the man from the local Gestapo returned and had us get into a car with an SS officer who also had to go to Berlin and didn’t seem the least bit bothered by our smell. On the autobahn, the spectacle was even more horrible than in February: a continuous flow of haggard refugees and exhausted, ragged soldiers, trucks loaded with wounded, the debris of the debacle. I fell asleep almost immediately, they had to wake me up during a Sturmovik attack; as soon as I could get back in the car I fell asleep again.

In Berlin, we had some trouble justifying ourselves, but less than I expected; not like ordinary soldiers, who were unceremoniously hanged or shot on suspicion alone. Even before shaving or washing, Thomas went to present himself to Kaltenbrunner, whose headquarters were now in the Kurfürstenstrasse, in Eichmann’s old premises, one of the last RSHA buildings still pretty much standing. Since I didn’t know where to report to—even Grothmann had left Berlin—I accompanied him. We had agreed on a story that was for the most part plausible: I was taking advantage of my leave to try to evacuate my sister and her husband, and the Russian offensive had caught me short with Thomas, who had come to help me; Thomas had had the foresight to provide himself with a mission order from Huppenkothen before leaving. Kaltenbrunner listened to us in silence and then dismissed us without any comment, informing me that the Reichsführer, who had resigned the day before from his command of Army Group Vistula, was in Hohenlychen. The report on Piontek’s death took me no time at all, but I had to fill out a number of forms to justify the loss of the vehicle. In the evening, we went to Thomas’s place, in Wannsee: the house was intact, but there was neither electricity nor running water, and we could only have a quick wash with cold water, and shave with difficulty before going to bed. The next morning, wearing a clean uniform, I went to Hohenlychen to present myself to Brandt. As soon as he saw me, he ordered me to shower, have my hair cut, and come back when I looked presentable. The hospital had hot showers, I spent almost an hour under the stream of water, voluptuously; then I went to the barber and, while I was at it, had myself shaved with hot water and sprinkled with eau de Cologne. Almost cheerful, I went back to see Brandt. He listened to my story severely, berated me curtly for having cost the Reich, through my imprudence, several weeks of my work, then informed me that in the meantime I had been reported missing; my office was dissolved, my colleagues reassigned, and my files archived. For now, the Reichsführer had no more need of my services; and Brandt ordered me to return to Berlin to put myself at Kaltenbrunner’s disposal. After the interview, his secretary led me into his office and handed me my personal mail, transmitted by Asbach when the Oranienburg office was closed: mostly bills, a note from Ohlendorf about my wound in February, and a letter from Helene, which I pocketed without opening. Then I went back to Berlin. A chaotic atmosphere reigned at the Kurfürstenstrasse: the building now housed the headquarters of the RSHA and of the Staatspolizei, as well as numerous representatives of the SD; everyone needed more room, hardly anyone knew what he was supposed to be doing, all wandered aimlessly through the hallways, trying to look busy. Since Kaltenbrunner couldn’t receive me before nightfall, I settled into a chair in a corner and resumed my reading of L’Éducation sentimentale, which had suffered again from the crossing of the Oder, but which I was determined to finish. Kaltenbrunner had me summoned just as Frédéric meets Madame Arnoux for the last time; it was frustrating. He could have waited a little, especially since he had no idea what to do with me. He ended up, almost at random, appointing me liaison officer with the OKW. My work consisted of this: three times a day, I had to go to the Bendlerstrasse and bring back dispatches about the situation on the front; the rest of the time, I could calmly daydream. The Flaubert was soon finished, but I found other books. I could also have gone out walking, but that wasn’t recommended. The city was in a bad state. Everywhere, windows were gaping; one regularly heard part of some building collapse with a huge roar. In the streets, teams of people tirelessly cleared away the rubble and piled it up in neatly spaced heaps so that the rare cars could pass, slaloming their way through, but often these piles too toppled over, and they had to start again. The spring air was acrid, full of black smoke and brick dust gritty in the teeth. The last major raid had occurred three days before our return: on that occasion, the Luftwaffe had introduced its new weapon, surprisingly rapid jet aircraft, which had inflicted some losses on the enemy; since then, there had been only harassing Mosquito raids. The Sunday after our arrival was the first fine spring day of 1945: in the Tiergarten, the trees were budding, grass was appearing on the heaps of debris and turning the gardens green. But we had few occasions to take advantage of the nice weather. Food rations, ever since the loss of the eastern territories, were reduced to a strict minimum; even the best restaurants didn’t have much. The ministries were being emptied of their personnel to fill out the Wehrmacht, but with the destruction of most of the index files and the general disorganization, most of the men thus freed waited for weeks to be called up. At the Kurfürstenstrasse, they had set up an office that delivered false papers from the Wehrmacht or from other organizations to senior RSHA officials who were regarded as compromised. Thomas had several cards made up for himself, all different, and showed them to me, laughing: engineer at Krupp’s, Hauptmann of the Wehrmacht, civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture. He wanted me to do the same, but I kept putting it off; instead I had another pay book and SD card made up, to replace the ones I had destroyed in Pomerania. From time to time, I saw Eichmann, who was still hanging around there, completely dejected. He was very nervous, he knew that if our enemies got their hands on him, he was finished, he wondered what was going to happen to him. He had sent his family away and wanted to join them; I saw him one day in a hallway arguing bitterly, probably about this, with Blobel, who was also wandering about without knowing what to do, almost constantly drunk, hateful, enraged. A few days before, Eichmann had met the Reichsführer in Hohenlychen, and had returned from this interview extremely depressed; he invited me to his office to drink some schnapps and to listen to him talk, he seemed to have a certain regard for me and treated me almost as his confidant, though I had no idea why. I drank in silence and let him vent. “I don’t understand,” he said plaintively, pushing his glasses back up on his nose. “The Reichsführer said to me: ‘Eichmann, if I had to start over again, I’d organize the concentration camps as the British do.’ That’s what he said to me. He added: ‘I made a mistake there.’ What could he have meant? I don’t understand. Do you understand? Maybe he meant the camps should have been, I don’t know, more elegant, more artful, more polite.” I didn’t understand what the Reichsführer had meant, either, but it was all the same to me, really. I knew from Thomas, who had immediately plunged back into his intrigues, that Himmler, prompted by his Finnish masseur, Kersten, and by Schellenberg, kept making gestures—mostly incoherent ones, to tell the truth—toward the Anglo-Americans: “Schellenberg managed to get him to say: ‘I protect the throne. That doesn’t necessarily mean the one who is sitting on it.’ That’s real progress,” Thomas explained to me.—“Truly. Tell me, Thomas, why are you still in Berlin?” The Russians had stopped on the Oder, but everyone knew it was just a question of time. Thomas smiled: “Schellenberg asked me to stay. To keep an eye on Kaltenbrunner and especially Müller. They’re running a bit wild.” Everyone, in fact, was running a bit wild, Himmler first and foremost, Schellenberg, Kammler who now had his own direct access to the Führer and no longer listened to the Reichsführer; Speer, it was said, was racing around the Ruhr trying, in the face of the American advance, to countermand the Führer’s destruction orders. The population was losing all hope, and Goebbels’s propaganda wasn’t helping things: by way of consolation, he promised that in case of defeat the Führer, in his great wisdom, was preparing an easy death, by gas, for the German people. That was very encouraging and it led the malicious to suggest: “What is a coward? It’s a guy who’s in Berlin and who signs up for the front.” The second week of April, the Philharmonic gave a final concert. The program, execrable, was entirely in the taste of that period—Brünnhilde’s last aria, the Götterdämmerung of course, and to end it all Bruckner’s Romantic Symphony—but I went all the same. The icy auditorium was intact, the chandeliers shone with all their lights; I could see Speer, from a distance, with Admiral Dönitz in the box of honor; at the exit, uniformed Hitlerjugend holding baskets offered members of the audience cyanide capsules: I was almost tempted to swallow one on the spot, in a fit of pique. Flaubert, I was sure, would have had a fit in front of such a display of inanity. These ostentatious demonstrations of pessimism alternated with ecstatic effusions of optimistic joy: the same day as this famous concert, Roosevelt died, and Goebbels, confusing Truman with Peter III, immediately launched a new slogan, “The Czarina is dead.” Soldiers claimed they had seen the face of “Uncle Fritz” in the clouds, and were promised a decisive counteroffensive and victory for the Führer’s birthday, on April 20. Thomas, at least, even though he didn’t give up his maneuvering, still kept his wits about him; he had managed to send his parents through to the Tyrol, near Innsbruck, to a zone that would certainly be occupied by the Americans: “Kaltenbrunner took care of it. Through the Gestapo in Vienna.” And when I showed a little surprise: “He’s an understanding man, is Kaltenbrunner. He has a family too, he knows what it means.” Thomas had immediately resumed his frantic social life and took me from party to party, where I drank myself into a stupor as he exaggeratedly narrated our Pomeranian wanderings to titillated ladies. There were parties every night, pretty much everywhere, people no longer paid any attention to the Mosquito raids or to the propaganda orders. Beneath the Wilhelmplatz, a bunker had been transformed into a nightclub, very cheerful, where they served wine, hard liquor, brand-name cigars, fancy hors d’oeuvres; the place was frequented by high-ranking officers from the OKW, the SS, and the RSHA, wealthy civilians and aristocrats, as well as actresses and flirtatious young ladies, superbly decked out. We dined almost every evening at the Adlon, where the maître d’hôtel, solemn and impassive, welcomed us in a tailcoat, led us into the well-lit restaurant, and had us served, by waiters wearing tails, purple slices of cabbage in silver dishes. The basement bar was always crowded, packed with the last diplomats, Italian, Japanese, Hungarian, or French. I met Mihaï there one night, dressed in white, with a canary yellow silk shirt. “Still in Berlin?” he asked me with a smile. “It’s been a long time since I saw you last.” He began openly flirting with me, in front of several people. I took him by the arm and, squeezing him tightly, drew him aside: “Stop,” I ordered.—“Stop what?” he said, smiling. This smug, calculating smile drove me out of my mind. “Come on,” I said, and pushed him discreetly into the bathroom. It was a large white tiled room, with massive sinks and urinals, brightly lit. I checked the stalls: they were empty. Then I shot the bolt on the door. Mihaï was looking at me, smiling, one hand in the pocket of his white jacket, next to the sinks with their big brass faucets. He came toward me, still with his eager smile; when he raised his head to kiss me, I took off my cap and hit him hard in the face with my forehead. His nose, under the violence of the blow, burst, blood gushed out, he screamed and fell to the ground. I stepped over him, still holding my cap, and went to look at myself in the mirror: I had blood on my forehead, but my collar and uniform weren’t stained. I carefully washed my face and put my cap back on. On the ground, Mihaï was writhing in pain and holding his nose, groaning pitifully: “Why’d you do that?” His hand found the hem of my pants; I removed my foot and looked around the room. A mop was leaning in a corner, in a galvanized metal bucket. I took this mop, placed the handle across Mihaï’s neck, and stood on it; with one foot to each side of his neck, I rocked slowly on the handle. Mihaï’s face beneath me became red, scarlet, then purplish-blue; his jaw quivered convulsively, his bulging eyes stared at me with terror, his nails scratched my boots; behind me, his feet beat the tiled floor. He wanted to speak, but no sound came out of his mouth from which a swollen, obscene tongue stuck out. He emptied himself with a soft noise and the stench of shit filled the room; his legs struck the ground one last time, then fell limp. I got down off the mop, set it aside, tapped Mihaï’s cheek with the tip of my boot. His inert head rolled a bit, then slowly came back. I took him by the armpits, dragged him into one of the stalls, and sat him down on the toilet, making sure the feet were straight. These stalls had latches that pivoted on a screw: by holding the raised latch with the tip of my pocketknife, I could shut the door and make it fall so as to lock the stall from inside. A little blood had run on the tiled floor; I used the mop to clean it, then rinsed it off, wiped the handle with my handkerchief, and put it back in the bucket where I had found it. Finally I went out. I went to the bar to get a drink; people were going in and out of the bathroom, no one seemed to notice anything. An acquaintance came over to ask me: “Have you seen Mihaï?” I looked around: “No, he must be somewhere around.” I finished my drink and went to chat with Thomas. Around one in the morning, there was a disturbance: someone had found the body. Diplomats uttered horrified exclamations, the police came, they questioned us, like everyone else I said I hadn’t seen a thing. I never heard anything more about this business. The Russian offensive was finally under way: on April 16, at night, they attacked the Seelow Heights, our last defensive position before the city. The sky was overcast, it was drizzling; I spent the day and then part of the night carrying dispatches from the Bendlerstrasse to the Kurfürstenstrasse, a short trip complicated by the incessant Sturmovik raids. Around midnight, I ran into Osnabrugge at the Bendlerstrasse: he looked lost, exhausted. “They want to blow up all the bridges in the city.” He was almost weeping. “Well,” I said, “if the enemy’s advancing, that’s normal, isn’t it?”—“You don’t realize what that means! There are nine hundred and fifty bridges in Berlin. If we blow them up, the city dies! Forever. No more food supplies, no more industry. Even worse, all the electric cables, all the water pipes pass through these bridges. Can you picture it? The epidemics, the people dying of hunger in the ruins?” I shrugged: “We can’t just hand the city over to the Russians.”—“But that’s no reason to demolish everything! We can choose, we can just destroy the bridges on the main routes.” He was wiping his forehead. “In any case, I’ll say this to you, have me shot if you want, but for me it’s the last time. When this madness is over, I don’t care who I have to work for, I’m going to build. They’ll have to rebuild, won’t they?”—“No doubt. Would you still know how to build a bridge?”—“Probably, probably,” he said as he moved off, nodding gently. Later on, that same night, I found Thomas in the Wannsee house. He wasn’t sleeping, he was sitting alone in the living room, in shirtsleeves, drinking. “So?” he asked me.—“We still hold the Seelow redoubt. But farther south, their tanks are crossing the Neisse.” He made a grimace: “Yes. Well. In any case it’s kaput.” I took off my wet cap and coat and poured myself a drink. “It’s really over, then?”—“It’s over,” Thomas confirmed.—“Defeat, again?”—“Yes, once again, defeat.”—“And afterward?”—“Afterward? We’ll see. Germany won’t be wiped off the map, whatever Herr Morgenthau may say. The unnatural alliance of our enemies will hold up until their victory, but not much longer. The Western powers will need a bastion against Bolshevism. I give them three years, at most.” I drank and listened. “I wasn’t talking about that,” I said finally.—“Ah. Us, you mean?”—“Yes, us. Accounts will have to be settled.”—“Why didn’t you have some ID papers made up?”—“I don’t know. I don’t really believe in them. What will we do, with these papers? Sooner or later, they’ll find us. Then it’ll be the rope or Siberia.” Thomas swirled the liquid around in his glass: “It’s obvious that we’ll have to leave for a while. Lie low a bit, long enough for people to calm down. Then we can come back. The new Germany, whatever it might be, will need brains.”—“Go? Where? And how?” He looked at me, smiling: “You think we haven’t thought of that? There are networks, in Holland, in Switzerland, people ready to help us, out of conviction or self-interest. The best networks are in Italy. In Rome. The Church will not let down its flock in its time of distress.” He raised his glass as if for a toast, and drank. “Schellenberg, Wolfie too, have received good guarantees. Of course, it won’t be easy. Endgames are always delicate.”—“And afterward?”—“We’ll see. South America, the sun, the pampas, the horses, doesn’t that tempt you? Or, if you like, the pyramids. The British are going to pull out, they’ll need good specialists, over there.” I poured myself some more and drank: “What if Berlin is surrounded? How do you plan on getting out? Are you staying?”—“Yes, I’m staying. Kaltenbrunner and Müller are still giving us a hard time. They’re really not reasonable. But I’ve thought it over. Come and see.” He led me into his bedroom, opened his wardrobe, took out some clothes, which he spread out on the bed: “Look.” They were coarse work clothes made of blue canvas, stained with oil and grease. “Look at the labels.” I looked: they were French clothes. “I also have shoes, the beret, the armband, everything. And the papers. Here.” He showed me the papers: they were those of a French worker from the STO. “Of course, in France, I’ll have trouble passing, but it will be enough for the Russians. Even if I come across an officer who speaks French, it’s not very likely he’ll balk at my accent. I can always tell him I’m Alsatian.”—“That’s not a bad idea,” I said. “Where did you find all that?” He tapped the rim of his glass and smiled: “You think they count foreign workers these days, in Berlin? One more, one less…” He drank. “You should think about it. With your French, you could get as far as Paris.” We went back downstairs to the living room. He poured me another glass and clinked glasses with me. “It won’t be without risks,” he said laughing. “But what is? We got out of Stalingrad. You have to be clever, that’s all. You know that there are guys in the Gestapo who are trying to get themselves stars and Jewish papers?” He laughed again. “They’re having a hard time of it. There aren’t a lot left on the market.”

I slept little and returned early to the Bendlerstrasse. The sky had cleared and there were Sturmoviks everywhere. The next day it was even nicer out, the gardens, in the ruins, were flowering. I didn’t see Thomas, he had gotten caught up in some business between Wolff and Kaltenbrunner, I don’t know too much about it, Wolff had come up from Italy to discuss the possibility of a surrender, Kaltenbrunner had gotten angry and wanted to arrest him or have him hanged, as usual it ended up in front of the Führer, who let Wolff go. When I finally saw Thomas again, the day the Seelow Heights fell, he was furious, raging against Kaltenbrunner, his stupidity, his narrow-mindedness. I myself didn’t understand at all what Kaltenbrunner was playing at, what use it could be to him to turn against the Reichsführer, to intrigue with Bormann, to maneuver to become the Führer’s new favorite. Kaltenbrunner wasn’t an idiot, he must have known, better than anyone, that the game was coming to an end; but instead of positioning himself for what would come after, he was wasting his energy in pointless, futile quarrels, affecting a hard-line attitude that he would never, as was obvious to anyone who knew him, have the courage to bring to its logical conclusion. Yet Kaltenbrunner was far from being the only one to lose all sense of moderation. Everywhere, in Berlin, Sperrkommandos were appearing, blocking units made up of men from the SD, the police, various Party organizations, Feldgendarmen, who administered an extremely summary justice to those who, more reasonable than they, just wanted to live, and sometimes even to some who had nothing to do with anything, but who just had the misfortune to be there. The little fanatics of the Leibstandarte hauled wounded soldiers out of basements to execute them. Everywhere, exhausted veterans from the Wehrmacht, recently called-up civilians, sixteen-year-old kids, their faces purplish-blue, decorated lampposts, trees, bridges, S-Bahn elevated tracks, anyplace from which a man can be hanged, and always with the invariable sign around their necks: I AM HERE BECAUSE I ABANDONED MY POST WITHOUT ORDERS. Berliners had a resigned attitude: “Instead of getting hanged, I’d rather believe in victory.” I myself had problems with these maniacs; since I moved around a lot, they were constantly checking my papers, I thought of asking for an armed escort to defend myself. At the same time, I almost pitied these men, drunk with fury and bitterness, devoured by an impotent hatred that, as it could no longer be directed at the enemy, they turned against their own, like rabid wolves devouring one another. At the Kurfürstenstrasse, a young Obersturmführer from the Staatspolizei, Gersbach, hadn’t shown up one morning; he didn’t have any work to do, true, but it had been noticed; some policemen finally found him at his home, dead drunk; Müller waited for him to sober up, then had him shot with a bullet in the neck in front of the officers gathered in the building’s courtyard. Afterward, his corpse was thrown out onto the asphalt, while a young SS recruit, almost hysterical, emptied the magazine of his submachine gun into the poor man’s body.

The news I was bearing several times a day was rarely good. Day after day, the Soviets were advancing, entering Lichtenberg and Pankow, taking Weissensee. Refugees crossed the city in large columns, many of them were hanged, at random, as deserters. The Russian artillery bombardments caused more victims: on the Führer’s birthday, they had arrived within cannon’s range of the city. It had been a beautiful day, a warm, sunny Friday, the smell of lilacs filled the air of the abandoned gardens with their fragrance. Here and there flags with swastikas had been hung on the ruins, as well as large signs whose irony I hoped was unconscious, like the one that dominated the rubble on the Lützowplatz: WE THANK OUR FüHRER FOR EVERYTHING. But people’s hearts weren’t really in it. In midmorning, the Anglo-Americans had launched one of their massive raids, more than a thousand aircraft in two hours, followed by Mosquitos; after they left, the Russian artillery had taken over. It was certainly a beautiful fireworks display, but few appreciated it, on our side at least. Goebbels did try to have extra rations distributed in the Führer’s honor, but even that turned sour: the artillery caused many victims among the civilians standing in line; the next day, in spite of the heavy rain, it was even worse, a shell struck a line of people waiting in front of the Karstadt department store, the Hermannplatz was full of bloody corpses, scattered pieces of limbs, children screaming and shaking the inert bodies of their mothers, I saw it myself. On Sunday there was a brilliant spring sun, then showers, then sun again that shone on the rubble and the soaking ruins. Birds sang; everywhere tulips and lilacs were blooming, apple trees, plum and cherry trees, and in the Tiergarten, rhododendrons. But these gorgeous flower aromas couldn’t mask the stench of rotting and burned brick floating over the streets. A heavy, stagnant smoke veiled the sky; when it rained, this smoke grew even thicker, filling people’s throats. The streets, despite the artillery strikes, were full of life: at the antitank barricades, children with paper helmets, perched on top of the obstacles, were waving wooden swords; I passed old women pushing strollers full of bricks, and even, crossing the Tiergarten toward the zoo bunker, soldiers chasing a herd of mooing cows before them. At night it rained again; and the Reds, in turn, celebrated Lenin’s birthday with a brutal riot of artillery.

The public services were shutting down one by one, their personnel evacuating. A day before being dismissed, General Reynmann, the city Kommandant, had distributed to NSDAP officials two thousand passes to leave Berlin. Whoever hadn’t been lucky enough to get one could still buy his way out: at the Kurfürstenstrasse, a Gestapo officer explained to me that a complete set of valid papers fetched around eighty thousand reichsmarks. The U-Bahn ran until April 23, the S-Bahn until the twenty-fifth, the interurban telephone worked until the twenty-sixth (they say a Russian managed to reach Goebbels at his office, from Siemensstadt). Kaltenbrunner had left for Austria immediately after the Führer’s birthday, but Müller stayed on, and I continued my liaisons for him. I usually went by the Tiergarten, because the streets south of the Bendlerstrasse, by the Landwehrkanal, were blocked; in the Neue Siegesallee, repeated explosions had smashed the statues of the sovereigns of Prussia and Brandenburg, the street was strewn with Hohenzollern heads and limbs; at night, the fragments of white marble gleamed in the moonlight. At the OKW, where the city Kommandant now had his HQ (someone named Käther had replaced Reynmann, then two days later, Käther had in turn been dismissed to make way for Weidling), they often made me wait for hours before finally granting me a few useless fragments of information. To avoid being too much in the way, I waited with my driver in my car, beneath a cement roof in the courtyard, I watched, as they scurried about, overexcited, haggard officers, exhausted soldiers dawdling so as not to go back under fire too quickly, Hitlerjugend greedy for glory come to beg for a few Panzerfäuste, lost Volkssturm waiting for orders. One night, I was searching through my pockets for a cigarette when I came across Helene’s letter, pocketed at Hohenlychen and forgotten since then. I tore open the envelope and read the letter as I smoked. It was a brief, direct declaration: she didn’t understand my attitude, she wrote, she didn’t want to understand it, she wanted to know if I wished to join her, she asked if I was planning on marrying her. The honesty and frankness of this letter overwhelmed me; but it was much too late, and I threw the crumpled paper out of the lowered car window into a puddle.

The noose was tightening. The Adlon had closed its doors; my only diversion was drinking schnapps at the Kurfürstenstrasse, or at Wannsee with Thomas, who, laughing, filled me in on the most recent events. Müller now was looking for a mole: an enemy agent, apparently in the entourage of a high-ranking SS official. Schellenberg saw in this a conspiracy to destabilize Himmler, and so Thomas had to follow the developments of the affair. The situation was degenerating into vaudeville: Speer, who had lost the Führer’s confidence, had returned, dodging Sturmoviks to land his crate on the Ost-West-Achse, to beg for his grace; Göring had been stripped of all his offices and placed under arrest in Bavaria, for having somewhat hastily anticipated the death of his lord and master; the more sober people, von Ribbentrop and the military, were laying low or evacuating toward the Americans; the countless candidates for suicide were putting the finishing touches on their final scene. Our soldiers kept conscientiously getting themselves killed, a French battalion from the Charlemagne Division somehow found a way to enter Berlin on the twenty-fourth to reinforce the Nordland Division, and the administrative center of the Reich was now defended only by Finns, Estonians, Dutchmen, and young Parisian toughs. Elsewhere, people were keeping a cool head: a powerful army, it was said, was on the way to save Berlin and cast the Russians beyond the Oder, but at the Bendlerstrasse my interlocutors remained perfectly vague about the position and progression of the divisions, and the promised Wenck offensive was taking just as long to materialize as the one by Steiner’s Waffen-SS, a few days earlier. As for me, to tell the truth, I wasn’t much tempted by Götterdämmerung, and I would have prefered to be somewhere else, to reflect calmly on my situation. It wasn’t so much that I was afraid of dying, believe me, I had few reasons to keep on living, after all, but the idea of being killed in this way, somewhat at the mercy of events, by a shell or a stray bullet, displeased me exceedingly, I would have liked to sit down and contemplate things rather than let myself be carried away by this black current. But such a choice was not offered me, I had to serve, like everyone else, and since it was necessary, I did it loyally, I collected and transmitted this useless information that seemed to serve only one purpose, to keep me in Berlin. As for our enemies, they remained supremely indifferent to all this commotion and kept advancing.

Soon the Kurfürstenstrasse too had to be evacuated. The remaining officers were dispersed; Müller withdrew to his emergency HQ, in the crypt of the Dreifaltigkeitskirche on Mauerstrasse. The Bendlerstrasse was practically on the front line, the liaisons had become very complicated: to reach the building, I had to thread my way through the rubble to the edge of the Tiergarten, then continue on foot, guided through basements and ruins by Kellerkinder, filthy little orphans who knew every nook and crany. The thunder of the bombardments was like a living thing, a multifaceted and tireless assault on hearing; but when the immense silence of the pauses descended, it was worse. Entire sections of the city were burning, giant phosphorous fires that sucked in the air and provoked violent storms that fed the flames even more. Heavy, violent, brief rains sometimes extinguished a few fires, but mostly intensified the smell of burning. A few planes were still trying to land on the Ost-West-Achse; twelve Ju-52s transporting SS cadets were shot down on approach, one after the other. Wenck’s army, according to the information they deigned to pass on to me, seemed to have vanished into the woodworks somewhere to the south of Potsdam. On April 27, it was very cold out, and after a violent Soviet assault on the Potsdamer Platz, driven back by the Leibstandarte AH, there were several hours of quiet. When I returned to the church on Mauerstrasse to report to Müller, I was told he was in one of the annexes of the Ministry of the Interior, and that I should join him there. I found him in a large, almost bare room with water-stained walls, in the company of Thomas and thirty or so officers from the SD and the Staatspolizei. Müller had us wait for half an hour, but only five more men arrived (he had summoned fifty in all). Then we all lined up, at ease, for a brief speech: the day before, after a telephone discussion with Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner, the Führer had decided to honor the RSHA for its services and its staunch loyalty. He had asked that the German Cross in Gold be bestowed on ten officers remaining in Berlin who had particularly distinguished themselves during the war. The list had been drawn up by Kaltenbrunner; the ones who didn’t hear their names called should not be disappointed, since the honor fell upon them too. Then Müller read the list, at the head of which he himself figured; I wasn’t surprised to hear Thomas’s name; but to my astonishment, Müller named me too, second to last. What could I have done to be distinguished in this way? I wasn’t in Kaltenbrunner’s good books, far from it. Thomas, across the room, gave me a quick wink; already we were regrouping to go to the chancellery. In the car, Thomas explained the business to me: among the people they had still been able to find in Berlin, I was one of the few, along with him, who had served at the front, and that’s what had counted. The trip to the chancellery along the Wilhelmstrasse had gotten difficult, the water mains had burst, the street was flooded, corpses were floating in the water and swayed gently as our cars went by; we had to finish our trip on foot, soaking wet up to our knees. Müller led us into the ruins of the Auswärtiges Amt: from there, an underground tunnel led to the Führer’s bunker. In this tunnel too water was flowing, up to our ankles. Some Waffen-SS from the Leibstandarte were guarding the entrance to the bunker: they let us pass, but took our service pistols. We were led through a first bunker and then, via a spiral staircase streaming with water, to a second one, even lower down. We waded through the stream from the AA, at the bottom of the steps it soaked the red carpets of a wide hallway, where they had us sit down along a wall, on wooden school chairs. In front of us, a general from the Wehrmacht was shouting to another, who wore a Generaloberst’s epaulettes: “We’re all going to drown down here!” The Generaloberst was trying to calm him down and assured him a pump was on the way. An abominable stench of urine filled the bunker, mixed with the musty effluvia of mildew, sweat, and wet wool, which they had tried in vain to mask with disinfectant. We were kept waiting for a while; officers came and went, crossing the waterlogged carpets with loud thwacks before disappearing into another room in the back, or climbing the spiral staircase; the room resounded with the continuous throbbing of a diesel generator. Two elegant young officers walked by, talking animatedly; behind them emerged my old friend Dr. Hohenegg. I leaped up and seized his arm, overjoyed at seeing him there. He took me by the hand and led me into a room where several Waffen-SS were playing cards or sleeping on bunk beds. “I was sent here as a backup doctor for the Führer,” he explained gloomily. His bald, sweating head gleamed beneath the yellowish lightbulb.—“And how is he doing?”—“Oh, not very well. But I’m not looking after him, they’ve entrusted me with the children of our dear Propaganda Minister. They’re in the first bunker,” he added, pointing to the ceiling. He looked around and went on in a low voice: “It’s something of a waste of time: as soon as I find their mother alone, she swears to God that she’s going to poison them all and then commit suicide herself. The poor kids don’t suspect a thing, they’re charming, it breaks my heart, let me tell you. But our limping Mephistopheles has his mind firmly made up to form an honor guard to accompany his master to Hell. All the better for him.”—“So that’s where we’re at, then?”—“Certainly. That fat Bormann, who doesn’t much like the idea, has tried to get him to leave, but he refused. In my humble opinion, there’s not much time left.”—“And you, my dear Doktor?” I asked, smiling. I really was happy to see him again. “Me? Carpe diem, as the British public school boys say. We’re having a party tonight. Upstairs, in the chancellery, so as not to disturb him. Come if you can. It’ll be full of lusty young virgins who would rather offer their maidenhood to a German, whatever his appearance, than to a hairy, stinking Kalmyk.” He patted his paunch: “At my age, you don’t turn down offers like that. Afterward,” his eyebrows went up comically on his egg-shaped skull—“afterward we’ll see.”—“Doktor,” I said solemnly, “you are wiser than I am.”—“I never doubted it for an instant, Obersturmbannführer. But I don’t have your mad luck.”—“In any case, believe me, I’m delighted to see you again.”—“Me too, me too!” We were back in the hallway already. “Come if you can!” he said before scurrying away on his squat legs.

Soon afterward, they had us go into the back room. We pushed back the map-covered tables ourselves and lined up against the wall, our feet in the wet carpet. The two generals who had just been shouting about the water went and stood at attention in front of a door opposite us; on one of the tables, an adjutant was preparing the boxes with the medals. Then the door opened and the Führer appeared. All of us stiffened simultaneously, launched our arms into the air, and bellowed our salute. The two generals were also saluting. The Führer tried to raise his arm in response but it was shaking too much. Then he came forward with a hesitant, jerky, unstable step. Bormann, buttoned up tight in his brown uniform, emerged from the room behind him. I had never seen the Führer so close up. He wore a simple gray uniform and cap; his face looked yellow, haggard, puffy, his eyes remained fixed on one spot, inert, then began blinking violently; a drop of spittle stood out at the corner of his mouth. When he tottered, Bormann held out his hairy paw and supported him by the elbow. He leaned on the corner of a table and gave a brief, somewhat disjointed speech that included Frederick the Great, eternal glory, and the Jews. Then he went over to Müller. Bormann followed him like a shadow; the adjutant was holding open a box with a medal. The Führer took it slowly between his fingers, placed it without pinning it on Müller’s right pocket, shook his hand, calling him “My good Müller, my faithful Müller,” and patted his arm. I kept my head straight but watched from the corner of my eye. The ceremony was repeated for the next man: Müller barked out his name, rank, and service, then the Führer decorated him. Thomas was decorated next. As the Führer approached me—I was almost at the end of the line—my attention was caught by his nose. I had never noticed how broad and ill-proportioned this nose was. In profile, the little moustache was less distracting and the nose could be seen more clearly: it had a wide base and flat bridges, a little break in the bridge emphasized the tip; it was clearly a Slavonic or Bohemian nose, nearly Mongolo-Ostic. I don’t know why this detail fascinated me, but I found it almost scandalous. The Führer approached and I kept observing him. Then he was in front of me. I saw with surprise that his cap scarcely reached my eyes; and yet I am not tall. He muttered his compliment and groped for the medal. His foul, fetid breath overwhelmed me: it was too much to take. So I leaned forward and bit into his bulbous nose, drawing blood. Even today I would be unable to tell you why I did this: I just couldn’t restrain myself. The Führer let out a shrill cry and leaped back into Bormann’s arms. There was an instant when no one moved. Then several men lay into me. I was struck and thrown to the ground; rolled into a ball on the wet carpet, I tried to protect myself from the kicks as well as I could. Everyone was shouting, the Führer was bellowing. Finally they pulled me back to my feet. My cap had fallen; I at least wanted to adjust my tie, but they held my arms firmly. Bormann was pushing the Führer toward his room and shouting: “Shoot him!” Thomas, behind the crowd, was observing me in silence, looking both disappointed and mocking. They dragged me toward a door at the back of the room. Then Müller interrupted in his loud, harsh voice: “Wait! I want to question him first. Take him to the crypt.”

Trevor-Roper, I know, never breathed a word about this episode, nor has Bullock, nor any of the historians who have studied the Führer’s last days. Yet it did take place, I assure you. This silence of the chroniclers is understandable: Müller disappeared, killed or gone over to the Russians a few days later; Bormann certainly died trying to flee Berlin; the two generals must have been Krebs and Burgdorf, who committed suicide; the adjutant must be dead too. As for the RSHA officers who witnessed the incident, I don’t know what became of them, but one can easily imagine, given their service record, that the ones who survived the war must not have bragged about being decorated by the Führer in person three days before his death. So it’s entirely possible that this minor incident indeed escaped the attention of researchers (but perhaps some trace of it remains in the Soviet archives?). I was dragged to the surface up a long stairway that opened onto the chancellery gardens. The magnificent building lay in ruins, gutted by bombs and shells, but a fragrant smell of jasmine and hyacinth filled the cool air. I was brutally pushed into a car and driven to the nearby church; there, they led me down into the bunker and threw me unceremoniously into a concrete room, bare and wet. Puddles dotted the ground; the walls were sweating; and the lock on the heavy metal door plunged me into absolute, uterine darkness: even with my eyes open wide, not the slightest ray of light filtered through. I remained like this for several hours, wet and cold. Then they came to get me. They tied me to a chair, I blinked, the light hurt me; Müller in person interrogated me; they beat me with truncheons, on my ribs, shoulders, and arms, Müller too came over and boxed me with his big peasant’s fists. I tried to explain that my thoughtless gesture meant nothing, that I hadn’t premeditated it, that I had just gone blank, but Müller wouldn’t believe me, he saw a carefully prepared conspiracy, he wanted me to name my accomplices. No matter how much I protested, he wouldn’t give up: when Müller set his mind on something, he knew how to stick to it. Finally they threw me back into my cell, where I remained lying in the puddles, waiting for the pain to subside. I must have fallen asleep like this, my head half in the water. I woke up chilled to the bone and twisted with cramps; the door was opening, another man was being shoved in. I just had time to glimpse an SS officer’s uniform, without medals or insignia. In the darkness, I heard him swearing in a Bavarian dialect: “Isn’t there a dry place in here?”—“Try near the walls,” I murmured politely.—“Who’re you?” His voice barked vulgarly, though in a cultivated tone. “Me? I’m Obersturmbannführer Dr. Aue, from the SD. And you?” His voice became calmer: “My apologies, Obersturmbannführer. I’m Gruppenführer Fegelein. Ex-Gruppenführer Fegelein,” he added with a rather pointed irony. I knew him by name: he had replaced Wolff as the Reichsführer’s liaison officer to the Führer; before, he had commanded an SS cavalry division in Russia, chasing partisans and Jews in the Pripet marshes. At the Reichsführung, he was said to be ambitious, a gambler, a good-looking braggart. I leaned up on my elbows: “And what brings you here, ex-Gruppenführer?”—“Oh, it’s a misunderstanding. I’d had a little to drink and I was at home, with a girl; those lunatics in the bunker thought I wanted to desert. Another one of Bormann’s tricks, I’ll bet. They’ve all gone mad over there; their Walhalla business is not for me, thanks. But it should get sorted out, my sister-in-law will take care of it.” I didn’t know who he was talking about, but I didn’t say anything. It was only when I read Trevor-Roper, years later, that I understood: Fegelein had married the sister of Eva Braun, whose existence I was unaware of at the time, like pretty much everyone else. This highly diplomatic marriage, unfortunately, proved of little help to him: despite his connections, his charm, and his easy tongue, Fegelein was shot the following night in the chancellery gardens (this too, I only learned much later). “And you, Obersturmbannführer?” Fegelein asked. Then I told him my misadventure. “Ah!” he exclaimed. “That was smart. So that’s why they’re all in such a bad mood. I thought that Müller was going to tear my head off, the brute.”—“Oh, he hit you too?”—“Yes. He got it into his head that the girl I was with is a British spy. I don’t know what’s gotten into him all of a sudden.”—“It’s true,” I said, remembering Thomas’s words: “Gruppenführer Müller is looking for a spy, a mole.”—“That’s possible,” he muttered. “But it has nothing to do with me.”—“Excuse me,” I interrupted, “do you know what time it is?”—“Not exactly. It must be around midnight, one o’clock?”—“Then we should get some sleep,” I suggested pleasantly.—“I’d have preferred my bed,” Fegelein grumbled.—“I can only agree.” I dragged myself on the ground against the wall and dozed off; my hips were still in the water, but it was better than my head. I slept well and had pleasant dreams; I emerged from them regretfully, but I was being kicked in the ribs. “Get up!” a voice shouted. I stood up with difficulty. Fegelein was sitting by the door, his arms around his knees; when I went out, he smiled at me timidly and made a little sign with his hand. They took me up to the church: two men in civilian clothes were waiting, policemen, one of them with a revolver in his hand; there were also SS men in uniform with them. The policeman with the revolver took me by the arm, pulled me into the street, and shoved me into an Opel; the others got in too. “Where are we going?” I asked the policeman who was driving the barrel of the revolver into my ribs. “Shut your face!” he barked. The car started off, turned onto Mauerstrasse, went about a hundred meters; I heard a high-pitched whistle; an enormous explosion lifted the car and threw it onto its side. The policeman, beneath me, pulled the trigger, I think: I remember having the impression that his shot killed one of the men in front. The other policeman, covered in blood, had fallen inert on top of me. I kicked and elbowed my way out of the overturned car through the rear window, cutting myself a little on the way. Other shells were falling nearby, projecting huge showers of bricks and earth. I was deafened, my ears were ringing. I collapsed onto the sidewalk and lay there for a minute, stunned. The policeman tumbled out behind me and rolled heavily onto my legs. With one hand I found a brick and struck his head with it. We rolled together in the rubble, coated with red brick dust and mud; I hit him with all my strength, but it’s not easy to knock out a man with a brick, especially if this brick has already burned. At the third or fourth blow, it crumbled in my hand. I cast around for another one, or for a stone, but the man knocked me over and began strangling me. The blood running down his face traced furrows in the red dust covering it, his eyes were mad, rolling wildly. My hand finally found a cobblestone and I slammed it up and sideways into him. He collapsed on top of me. I freed myself and pounded at his head till his skull burst, leaking brains mixed with dust and hair. Then I stood up, still deafened. I looked for his revolver, but he must have left it in the car, one wheel of which was still spinning in the air. The three other men inside looked dead. For now the shells had stopped falling. I began to run limping down Mauerstrasse.

I had to find somewhere to hide. Around me there were only ministries or government buildings, almost all of them in ruins. I turned down Leipzigstrasse and went into the lobby of an apartment house. Bare or stockinged feet floated in front of me, turning slowly. I raised my head: several people, including children and women, were hanging from the stairway railing, their arms dangling. I found the entrance to the basement and opened it: a gust of putre-faction, shit, and vomit assailed me, the basement was full of water and swollen corpses. I closed the door and tried to go upstairs: after the first landing, the staircase opened onto the void. I headed back down, around the hanged people, and went out. It had begun to rain lightly, I heard explosions everywhere around me. In front of me was the entrance to a U-Bahn station, Stadtmitte on the C line. I ran down the steps, went through the gates, and kept going down into the darkness, guiding myself with one hand on the wall. The tiles were wet, water was welling out of the ceiling and streaming down the vault. Sounds of muffled voices rose from the platform. It was littered with bodies, I couldn’t see if they were dead, sleeping or just lying there, I stumbled over them, people were shouting, children crying or moaning. A train with broken windows, lit by wavering candles, was standing at the platform: inside, some Waffen-SS with French insignia were standing at attention, and a tall Brigadeführer in a black leather coat, with his back turned to me, was solemnly handing out decorations to them. I didn’t want to disturb them, I went quietly by and jumped down onto the tracks, landing in cold water that came up to my calves. I wanted to head north, but I was disoriented; I tried to remember the direction of the trains when I used to take this line, but I didn’t even know what platform I had stumbled upon, everything was confused. To one side, in the tunnel, there was a little light: I went that way, wading in the water that hid the tracks, stumbling over invisible obstacles. At the end of the platform several trains were lined up, also lit by candlelight, a makeshift hospital, crowded with wounded, shouting, swearing, groaning. I walked alongside these cars without anyone noticing me, and groped my way forward, using the wall to guide me. The water rose, reached midcalf. I stopped and plunged my hand into it: it seemed to be flowing slowly toward me. I continued. A floating body bumped against my legs. I could scarcely feel my feet, numb from the cold. In front, I thought I saw a gleam of light, and I seemed to hear other noises besides the lapping of the water. Finally I reached a station lit by a single candle. The water came up to my knees now. Here too there were a lot of people. I called out: “Please, what station is this?”—“Kochstrasse,” someone replied amiably. I had gone in the wrong direction, I was heading toward the Russian lines. I turned around and headed back down the tunnel toward Stadtmitte. In front of me I could make out the lights of the U-Bahn hospital. On the tracks, next to the last car, stood two human figures, one quite tall, the other shorter. A flashlight switched on and blinded me; as I was hiding my eyes, a familiar voice grunted: “Hello, Aue. How’s it going?”—“You’ve come at the right time,” a second, reedier voice said. “We were just looking for you.” It was Clemens and Weser. Another flashlight turned on and they came toward me; I waded backward. “We wanted to talk with you,” said Clemens. “About your mother.”—“Ah, meine Herren!” I exclaimed. “Do you really think now is a good time?”—“It’s always a good time to talk about important things,” said the slightly rougher, higher-pitched voice of Weser. I retreated some more but found myself backed against the wall; cold water seeped through the cement and froze my shoulders. “What else do you want with me?” I squealed. “My case has been closed for a long time now!”—“By corrupt, dishonest judges,” Clemens said.—“You wriggled your way out with your intrigues,” said Weser. “Now all that’s over.”—“Don’t you think it’s up to the Reichsführer or to Obergruppenführer Breithaupt to decide that?” The latter was the head of the SS-Gericht.—“Breithaupt was killed a few days ago in a car accident,” Clemens said phlegmatically. “As for the Reichsführer, he’s far away.”—“No,” Weser added, “now, it’s really just you and us.”—“But what do you want?”—“We want justice,” Clemens said coldly. They had walked up to me and were surrounding me, aiming their flashlights at my face; I had already noticed that they were holding automatics.

“Listen,” I stammered, “all this is a huge misunderstanding. I am innocent.”—“Innocent?” Weser curtly interrupted. “We’ll see about that.”—“We’re going to tell you how it happened,” Clemens began. The powerful light from the flashlights dazed me, his big voice seemed to emanate from this harsh light. “You took the night train from Paris to Marseille. In Marseille, on April twenty-sixth, you had someone issue you a pass for the Italian zone. The next day, you went to Antibes. There, you presented yourself at the house and they welcomed you as a son, as the genuine son that you are. That night, you dined with the family and afterward you slept in one of the upstairs bedrooms, next to the twins’ room, opposite the bedroom of your mother and Herr Moreau. Then it was the twenty-eighth.”—“Hey,” Weser interrupted. “It’s the twenty-eighth of April, today. What a coincidence.”—“Meine Herren,” I said, trying to sound confident, “you’re raving.”—“Shut your face,” Clemens roared. “I’ll go on. During the day, we don’t really know what you did. We know you cut some wood, and that you left the axe in the kitchen instead of putting it back in the storeroom. Then you walked into town and bought your return ticket. You were wearing civilian clothes, no one noticed you. Then you came back.” Weser went on: “Afterward, there are some things we’re not sure about. Maybe you talked with Herr Moreau, with your mother. Maybe you had words. We’re not sure. We’re not sure about the time, either. But we do know that you found yourself alone with Herr Moreau. Then you took the axe in the kitchen, where you’d left it, you returned to the living room, and you killed him.”—“We’re even willing to believe that you weren’t thinking of it when you left the axe,” Clemens went on, “that you left the axe there by chance, that you didn’t premeditate anything, that it just happened like that. But once you began, you certainly went all the way.” Weser continued: “That’s for sure. He must have been quite surprised when you laid into his chest with the axe. It went in with the sound of crushed wood and he fell gurgling, his mouth full of blood, taking the axe down with him. You put your foot on his shoulder for leverage and you pulled out the axe and swung again, but you got the angle wrong and the axe bounced back, just breaking a few ribs. Then you stepped back, aimed more carefully, and brought the axe down on his throat. It went through the Adam’s apple and you clearly heard the cracking when it crushed his spinal column. He vomited dark flows of blood in one last great heave all over you, it was gushing from his neck too and you were covered with it, and then in front of you his eyes went dull and his blood emptied out through his half-severed neck, you watched his eyes go out like those of a sheep whose throat’s just been cut on the grass.”—“Meine Herren,” I said forcefully, “you are completely insane.” Clemens took up: “We don’t know if the twins saw that. In any case, they saw you go upstairs. You left the body and the axe there and you went upstairs, covered in blood.”—“We don’t know why you didn’t kill them,” said Weser. “You could have, easily. But you didn’t. Maybe you didn’t want to, maybe you wanted to, but too late, and they’d run away. Maybe you wanted to and then changed your mind. Maybe you already knew they were your sister’s children.”—“We went by her place, in Pomerania,” Clemens grunted. “We found some letters, some documents. There were some very interesting things, among others the children’s documents. But we already knew who they were.” I let out a hysterical little laugh: “I was there, you know. I was in the woods, I saw you.”—“Actually,” Weser went on imperturbably, “we thought so. But we didn’t want to insist. We said to ourselves that we’d find you sooner or later. And you see, we did find you, in fact.”—“Let’s go on with our story,” said Clemens. “You went upstairs, covered in blood. Your mother was standing there waiting for you, either at the top of the staircase, or in front of the door to her room. She was wearing a nightgown, your old mother. She spoke to you, looking into your eyes. What she said, we don’t know. The twins listened to everything, but they didn’t tell anyone. She must have reminded you how she had carried you in her womb, then fed you at her breast, how she had wiped your ass and washed you while your father was chasing whores God knows where. Maybe she showed you her breast.”—“Not very likely,” I spat out with a bitter laugh. “I was allergic to her milk, I never breastfed.”—“Too bad for you,” Clemens continued without batting an eye. “Maybe then she stroked your chin, your cheek, she called you her child. But you weren’t moved: you owed her your love, but you thought only about your hatred. You closed your eyes so you’d stop seeing hers and you took her neck in your hands and you squeezed.”—“You’re mad!” I shouted. “You’re making all this up!”—“Not at all,” Weser said sardonically. “Of course, it’s a reconstruction. But it agrees with the facts.”—“Afterward,” Clemens continued in his calm bass voice, “you went into the bathroom and got undressed. You threw your clothes into the bathtub, washed yourself, cleaned off all the blood, and returned to your bedroom, naked.”—“There, we can’t say,” Weser commented. “Maybe you engaged in perverted acts, maybe you just slept. At dawn, you got up, put on your uniform, and left. You took the bus, then the train, you returned to Paris and then to Berlin. On April thirtieth, you sent a telegram to your sister. She went to Antibes, buried your mother and her husband, then she left again as soon as possible, with the boys. Maybe she had already guessed.”—“Listen,” I babbled, “you’ve lost your minds. The judges said you had no evidence. Why would I have done that? What would be the motive? You always have to have a motive.”—“We don’t know,” Weser said calmly. “But actually it’s all the same to us. Maybe you wanted Moreau’s money. Maybe you’re a sex fiend. Maybe your wound messed up your head. Maybe it was just an old family hatred, that’s pretty common, and you wanted to take advantage of the war to settle your accounts on the sly, thinking it would hardly be noticed among so many other deaths. Maybe you simply went mad.”—“But what are you after, damn it!” I shouted again.—“We told you,” Clemens murmured: “we want justice.”—“The city is burning!” I shouted. “There aren’t any more courthouses! All the judges are dead or gone. How do you plan on judging me?”—“We’ve already judged you,” Weser said in a voice that was so quiet that I could hear the water streaming by. “We found you guilty.”—“You?” I sniggered. “You’re cops. You don’t have the right to judge.”—“Given the circumstances,” Clemens’s big voice rumbled, “we’ll take that right.”—“Then,” I said sadly, “even if you are right, you’re no better than I.”

At that moment, I heard a great din coming from Kochstrasse. People were shouting, running, splashing frantically. A man passed by crying, “The Russians! The Russians are in the tunnel!”—“Shit,” Clemens belched. He and Weser aimed their flashlights toward the station; German soldiers were surging back, firing randomly; I could see the muzzle flashes of machine guns, bullets whistled by, cracked against the walls or hit the water with soft little thwacks. Men were yelling, falling into the water. Clemens and Weser, lit by their flashlights, calmly raised their pistols and began firing round after round at the enemy. The whole tunnel echoed with cries, gunshots, the sounds of water. From the other side, machine-gun fire volleyed back. Clemens and Weser made to switch off their flashlights; just then, in a fleeting burst of light, I saw Weser catch a bullet under the chin, rise as if lifted up, and then fall straight backward in a huge splash. Clemens bellowed, “Weser! Shit!” But his light had gone out and, holding my breath, I dove underwater. Guiding myself by holding onto the tracks rather than swimming, I headed toward the cars of the makeshift hospital. When my head emerged from the water, bullets were whistling around me, patients screamed in panic, I heard French voices, curt orders. “Don’t shoot, guys!” I shouted in French. A hand seized my collar, dragged me, dripping, toward the platform. “You’re one of ours?” went a cocky voice. I was breathing hard and coughing, I had swallowed water. “No, no, German,” I said. The man let off a volley of rounds next to my head, deafening me just as Clemens’s voice resounded: “Aue! You son of a bitch! I’ll get you!” I hoisted myself onto the platform and, striking out with hands and elbows at the panicking refugees to clear a path for myself, found the stairs, which I fled up four at a time.

The street was deserted, except for three foreign Waffen-SS men charging toward Zimmerstrasse with a heavy machine gun and some Panzerfäuste, paying no attention to me or to the other civilians escaping from the U-Bahn entrance. I started in the opposite direction, running north up Friedrichstrasse, between burning buildings, corpses, burned-out cars. I reached Unter den Linden. A large fountain of water was gushing from a blown water main, spraying the bodies and the rubble. At the corner two grizzled old men were walking along, they seemed not to be paying any attention to the racket of the artillery and the heavy mortar shells. One of them wore the armband of the blind; the other was guiding him. “Where are you going?” I asked, panting.—“We don’t know,” the blind man replied.—“Where are you coming from?” I asked again.—“We don’t know that, either.” They sat down on a crate among the ruins and piles of rubble. The blind man leaned on his cane. The other stared about him with wild eyes, plucking at his friend’s sleeve. I turned my back to them and went on. The avenue, for as far as I could see, seemed completely deserted. Opposite stood the building that housed the offices of Dr. Mandelbrod and Herr Leland. It had been hit a few times but didn’t look ruined. One of the main doors was hanging from a hinge, I pushed it open with my shoulder and entered the lobby, full of marble slabs and moldings fallen from the walls. Soldiers must have camped here: I noticed traces of a campfire, empty cans, nearly dry excrement. But the lobby was deserted. I pushed open the emergency stairway and ran up. At the top floor, the stairs opened onto a hallway that led to the beautiful reception room before Mandelbrod’s office. Two of the amazons were sitting there, one on the sofa, the other in an armchair, their heads leaning to the side or backward, their eyes wide open, a thin stream of blood running from their temples and the corners of their lips; each one held a small automatic pistol with a mother-of-pearl handle in her hand. A third girl was lying in front of the double padded doors. Cold with horror, I went over to look at them close up, I brought my face to theirs, without touching them. They were perfectly turned out, their hair pulled back, clear gloss made their full lips shine, mascara still outlined a crown of long black eyelashes around their empty eyes; their nails, on the pistol butts, were carefully manicured and painted. No breath raised their chests under the ironed suits. No matter how much I scrutinized their pretty faces, I was incapable of distinguishing one from the other, of recognizing Hilde from Helga or Hedwig; yet they weren’t triplets. I stepped over the one who was lying across the doorway and entered the office. Three other girls were lying dead on the sofa and the carpet; Mandelbrod and Leland were at the back of the room, in front of the large shattered bay window, near a mountain of leather suitcases and trunks. Outside, behind them, a fire was roaring, they were paying no attention to the spirals of smoke invading the room. I went up to them, looked at the bags, and asked: “You’re planning on going on a trip?” Mandelbrod, who was holding a cat on his lap and stroking it, smiled slightly in the ripples of fat that drowned his features. “Exactly,” he said in his beautiful voice. “Would you like to come with us?” I counted the trunks and suitcases out loud: “Nineteen,” I said, “not bad. You’re going far?”—“To begin with, Moscow,” said Mandelbrod. “Afterward, we’ll see.” Leland, wearing a long navy blue trenchcoat, was sitting on a little chair next to Mandelbrod; he was smoking a cigarette, with a glass ashtray on his knees, and he looked at me without saying anything. “I see,” I said. “And you really think you can take all that?”—“Oh, of course,” Mandelbrod smiled. “It’s already arranged. We’re just waiting for them to come get us.”—“The Russians? Our men are still holding the area, I should warn you.”—“We know that,” Leland said, blowing out a long puff of smoke. “The Soviets told us they’d be here tomorrow, without fail.”—“A very cultivated colonel,” Mandelbrod added. “He told us not to worry, he’d personally take care of us. The fact is, you see, we still have a lot of work to do.”—“And the girls?” I asked, waving my hand toward the bodies.—“Ah, the poor little things didn’t want to come with us. Their attachment to the fatherland was too strong. They didn’t want to understand that some values are even more important.”—“The Führer has failed,” Leland said coldly. “But the ontological war that he began isn’t over. Who else besides Stalin can finish the job?”—“When we offered them our services,” Mandelbrod whispered as he stroked his cat, “they were immediately very interested. They know that they’ll need men like us, after this war, that they can’t allow the Western powers to walk off with the cream of the crop. If you come with us, I can guarantee you a good position, with all the advantages.”—“You can keep doing what you do so well,” said Leland.—“You’re crazy!” I exclaimed. “You’re all crazy! Everyone’s gone mad in this city.” Already I was backing to the door, past the gracefully slumped bodies of the girls. “Except for me!” I shouted before escaping. Leland’s last words reached me at the door: “If you change your mind, come back to see us!”

Unter den Linden was still empty; here and there, a shell struck a façade or a pile of rubble. My ears were still ringing from the Frenchman’s machine-gun volley. I began running toward the Brandenburg Gate. I had to get out of the city at all costs, it had become a monstrous trap. My information was already a day old, but I knew that the only way out was to go through the Tiergarten and then by the Ost-West-Achse down to the Adolf-Hitler-Platz; then I’d see. The day before, that side of the city still wasn’t sealed off, some Hitlerjugend still held the bridge over the Havel, Wannsee was in our hands. If I can reach Thomas’s place, I said to myself, I’m saved. The Pariser Platz, in front of the still relatively intact Gate, was strewn with overturned, wrecked, burned-out vehicles; in the ambulances, charred corpses still wore on their extremities white casts made of plaster of Paris, which doesn’t burn. I heard a powerful rumbling noise: a Russian tank passed behind me, sweeping wrecked cars in front of it; several Waffen-SS were perched on top, they must have captured it. It stopped right next to me, fired, then started off in a clatter of treads; one of the Waffen-SS observed me indifferently. The tank turned right into the Wilhelmstrasse and disappeared. A little farther on, down Unter den Linden, between the lampposts and the rows of shredded trees, I glimpsed a human shape through the smoke, a man in civilian clothes with a hat. I began running again and, threading between the obstacles, went through the Gate, black with smoke, riddled with bullets and shrapnel.

Beyond lay the Tiergarten. I left the road and dove into the trees. Aside from the whirring of flying mortar shells and distant explosions, the park was strangely silent. The Nebelkrähe, those hooded crows whose hoarse cries always resound through the Tiergarten, had all left, fleeing the constant shelling for a safer place: no Sperrkommando in the sky, no flying court-martial for birds. How lucky they are, and they don’t even know it. Corpses sprawled among the trees; and all along the pathways, sinister, swayed the hanged. It began to rain again, a light rain through which the sun still shone. The bushes in the flowerbeds had blossomed, the smell of rose bushes mingled with that of corpses. From time to time I turned around: between the trees, I seemed to glimpse the silhouette following me. A dead soldier was still holding his Schmeisser; I grabbed it, aimed it at the silhouette, pulled the trigger; but the weapon was jammed and I threw it furiously into a bush. I had hoped not to stray too far from the main road, but on that side I saw movement, vehicles, and I moved deeper into the park. To my right, the Victory Column rose above the trees, hidden by its protective coverings and still obstinately standing. In front of me several pools of water blocked the path: instead of heading back toward the road, I decided to skirt round them toward the canal, where I used to go, a very long time ago, prowling the night in search of pleasure. From there, I said to myself, I’ll cut through the zoo and go lose myself in Charlottenburg. I crossed the canal over the bridge where I had had that curious altercation with Hans P., one night. Beyond, the wall of the zoo had collapsed in several places, and I climbed up over the rubble. Sustained fire came from the large bunker, light cannon shots and machine-gun volleys.

This part of the zoo was completely flooded: the bombardments had ripped open the Aquarium and the fish tanks had burst, pouring out tons of water, strewing the lanes with dead fish, crayfish, crocodiles, jellyfish, a panting dolphin that, lying on its side, contemplated me with a worried eye. I waded forward, around the baboon island where babies clutched with minuscule hands the stomachs of their panicking mothers, I wove between parrots, dead monkeys, a giraffe whose long neck hung over a railing, bleeding bears. I entered a half-destroyed building: in a large cage, an immense black gorilla was sitting, dead, a bayonet stuck in its chest. A river of black blood flowed between the bars and mingled with the pools of water. This gorilla looked surprised, astonished; its wrinkled face, its open eyes, its enormous hands, seemed frighteningly human to me, as if it were on the point of talking to me. Beyond this building stretched a long enclosed pond: a hippopotamus was floating in the water, dead, the fin of a mortar shell stuck in its back; another one was lying on a platform, riddled with shrapnel, dying in long, heavy gasps. The water overflowing from the pool was soaking the clothes of two Waffen-SS lying there; a third one rested, leaning against a cage, his eyes blank, his machine gun across his legs. I wanted to go on but I heard bursts of Russian voices, mixed with the trumpeting of a panic-stricken elephant. I hid behind a bush and then turned back to go around the cages across a kind of little bridge. Clemens barred my path, his feet in a puddle at the end of the footbridge, his wet hat still dripping with rainwater, his automatic in his hand. I raised my hands, as in the movies. “You made me run,” Clemens panted. “Weser is dead. But I got you.”—“Kriminalkommissar Clemens,” I hissed, out of breath from running, “don’t be ridiculous. The Russians are a hundred meters away. They’ll hear your gunshot.”—“I should drown you in a pool, you piece of shit,” he belched, “sew you up in a bag and drown you. But I don’t have time.”—“You haven’t even shaved, Kriminalkommissar Clemens,” I bellowed, “and you want to pass judgment on me!” He gave an abrupt laugh. A gunshot rang out, his hat came down over his face, and he fell like a block across the bridge, his head in a puddle of water. Thomas stepped out from behind a cage, a carbine in his hands, a large, delighted smile on his lips. “As usual, I arrive just in time,” he said happily. He glanced at Clemens’s massive body. “What did he want with you?”—“He was one of those two cops. He wanted to kill me.”—“Stubborn guy. Still for the same business?”—“Yes. I don’t know, they’ve gone mad.”—“You haven’t been very smart, either,” he said to me severely. “They’re looking for you everywhere. Müller is furious.” I shrugged and looked around. It had stopped raining, the sun shone through the clouds and made the wet leaves on the trees and the patches of water in the lanes glisten. I could still make out a few scraps of Russian voices: they must have moved a little farther off, behind the monkey enclosure. The elephant trumpeted again. Thomas, his carbine leaning on the railing of the little bridge, had crouched down next to Clemens’s body; he had pocketed the policeman’s automatic and was rummaging through his clothes. I passed behind him and looked to that side, but there was no one. Thomas had turned toward me and was waving a thick wad of reichsmarks: “Look at that,” he said, laughing. “A gold mine, your cop.” He put the bills in his pocket and kept searching. Next to him, I saw a thick iron bar, torn from a nearby cage by an explosion. I picked it up, weighed it, then brought it down with all my strength on the nape of Thomas’s neck. I heard his vertebrae crack and he toppled over like a log, across Clemens’s body. I dropped the bar and contemplated the bodies. Then I turned Thomas over, his eyes were still open, and unbuttoned his tunic. I undid my own and quickly switched jackets with him before turning him onto his stomach again. I inspected the pockets: along with the automatic and Clemens’s banknotes were Thomas’s papers, those of the Frenchman from the STO, and some cigarettes. I found the keys to his house in his pants pocket; my own papers had stayed in my jacket.

The Russians had moved farther on. In the lane a little elephant came trotting toward me, followed by three chimpanzees and an ocelot. They went around the bodies and over the bridge without slowing down, leaving me alone. I was feverish, my mind was coming apart. But I still remember perfectly the two bodies lying on top of each other in the puddles, on the footbridge, and the animals moving off. I was sad but didn’t really know why. I felt all at once the entire weight of the past, of the pain of life and of inalterable memory, I remained alone with the dying hippopotamus, a few ostriches, and the corpses, alone with time and grief and the sorrow of remembering, the cruelty of my existence and of my death still to come. The Kindly Ones were on to me.