The Kindly Ones

During dinner, Thomas had once again reproached me for my unsociability and impossible hours: “I know everyone has to give his utmost, but you’re going to ruin your health if you go on like that. And I shouldn’t have to tell you that Germany isn’t going to lose the war if you take your evenings and Sundays off. This is going to last a while, you should pace yourself, otherwise you’ll collapse. And look, you’re even getting a belly.” It was true: I wasn’t getting fat, but my abdominal muscles were sagging. “At least come and get some exercise,” Thomas insisted. “Twice a week I fence, and on Sunday I go to the pool. You’ll see, it will do you good.” As always, he was right. I soon regained my taste for fencing, which I had practiced a little at university; I took up the saber, I liked the keen, nervous aspect of this weapon. What I liked in this sport was that, despite its aggressiveness, it’s not a brute’s sport: as much as the good reflexes and agility required to handle the weapon, it’s the mental work before the pass that counts, the intuitive anticipation of the other’s movements, the swift calculation of possible responses, a physical chess game where you have to foresee several moves, for once a decision has been made, there’s no more time to think, and one can often say that the pass is won or lost even before it began, according to whether one saw rightly or not, the thrusts themselves only confirming or refuting the calculation. We practiced in the arms room of the RSHA, at the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais; but for swimming we went to a public pool in Kreuzberg, instead of the Gestapo’s: first of all, an essential point for Thomas, there were women there (and not just the unavoidable secretaries); it was bigger too, so that after swimming one could go in a bathrobe and sit down at wooden tables, on a wide balcony upstairs, to drink cold beer while watching the swimmers, whose happy shouts and splashes resounded throughout the vast dome. The first time I went there, I had a violent shock that left me for the rest of the day with a distressing anguish. We were getting undressed in the changing room: I looked at Thomas and saw that a wide forked scar ran across his belly. “Where did you get that?” I exclaimed. Thomas looked at me, surprised: “In Stalingrad of course. Don’t you remember? You were there.” A memory, yes, I had one, and I wrote it down with the others, but I had filed it away in the back of my head, in the attic of hallucinations and dreams; now this scar came to turn everything upside down, I suddenly felt as if I couldn’t be sure of anything anymore. I kept staring at Thomas’s belly; he slapped his abdominal muscles with the flat of his hand, smiling widely: “It’s all right, don’t get upset, it’s all better. And also it drives the girls wild, it must excite them.” He closed one eye and pointed at my head, his thumb up, like a child playing cowboy: “Pow!” I almost felt the shot in my forehead, my anguish grew like a gray, flaccid, endless thing, a monstrous body that occupied the limited space of the changing room and prevented me from moving, a terrified Gulliver stuck in a Lilliputian house. “Don’t look like that,” Thomas shouted cheerfully, “come swim!” The water, heated but still a little cool, did me good; tired after just a few laps—I had definitely let myself get out of shape—I stretched out on a deck chair while Thomas frolicked, bellowing and letting his head be dunked underwater by spirited young women. I watched these people letting off steam, having fun, taking pleasure in their own strength; I felt far away. Bodies, even the handsomest ones, no longer threw me into a panic, as the ballet dancers’ had a few months before; they left me indifferent, boys’ as well as girls’. I could admire with detachment the play of muscles under the white skin, the curve of a hip, water streaming down a neck: the crumbling bronze Apollo in Paris had excited me much more than all this insolent young musculature, which was deployed casually, as if jeering at the flabby, yellowing flesh of the few old people who came there. My attention was drawn to a young woman who stood out from the others by her serenity; as her girlfriends ran or splashed around Thomas, she remained motionless, her arms folded on the edge of the pool, her body floating in the water, and her head, oval beneath an elegant black rubber cap, resting on her forearms, her large somber eyes calmly directed at me. I couldn’t tell if she was really looking at me; without moving, she seemed to be contemplating with pleasure everything that was in her field of vision; after a long while, she raised her arms and let herself slowly sink down. I waited for her to come back to the surface, but the seconds passed; finally she reappeared at the other end of the pool, which she had crossed underwater, as calmly as I had once crossed the Volga. I leaned back on my chaise and closed my eyes, concentrating on the sensation of the chlorinated water slowly evaporating on my skin. My anguish, that day, was slow to relax its asphyxiating embrace. The next Sunday, though, I went back to the pool with Thomas.