The Kindly Ones

I began to regain a taste for life outside work: whether this was thanks to the beneficial effects of exercise or to something else, I don’t know. One day I realized that I hadn’t been able to bear Frau Gutknecht for a long time now; the next day, I set to work looking for another apartment. This was a little complicated, but finally Thomas helped me find something: a small furnished bachelor apartment on the top floor of a fairly new building. It belonged to a Hauptsturmführer who had just gotten married and was leaving for a post in Norway. I quickly settled with him on a reasonable rent, and in one afternoon, with Piontek’s help, and under salvos of Frau Gutknecht’s squeals and entreaties, I transferred my few belongings. My new apartment wasn’t very big: two square rooms separated by a double door, a little kitchen, and a bathroom; but it had a balcony, and since the living room was at the corner of the building, the windows opened onto two sides; the balcony looked out over a little park, where I could watch children playing. It was quiet too, and I wasn’t disturbed by car noises; from my windows, I had a fine view over a landscape of roofs, a comforting tangle of shapes, constantly changing with the weather and the light. On days when it was nice out, the apartment was bright from morning to night: on Sunday, I could watch the sun rise from my bedroom and set from the living room. To make it even brighter, I had the faded old wallpaper stripped, with the owner’s permission, and the walls painted white; in Berlin, this wasn’t very common, but I had known apartments like that in Paris, and I liked it, with the wooden floor it was almost ascetic, it corresponded to my state of mind: quietly smoking on my sofa, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of moving sooner. In the morning, I got up early, before sunrise, in that season, ate a few pieces of toast and drank some genuine black coffee; Thomas had it sent to him from Holland by an acquaintance, and he sold me some of it. To get to work I took the trolley. I liked watching the streets go by, contemplating the faces of my neighbors in the light of day, sad, closed, indifferent, tired, but also sometimes surprisingly happy, and if you pay attention to such things, you know that it’s rare to see a happy face in the street or on the trolley, but when it happened, I was happy too, I felt I was rejoining the community of men, these people for whom I was working but from whom I had been living so far apart. For several days in a row, on the trolley, I noticed a beautiful blond woman who took the same line that I did. She had a quiet and grave face; I noticed her mouth first, especially her upper lip, two muscular, aggressive wings. Sensing my gaze, she had looked at me: under high-arched, thin eyebrows, she had dark, almost black eyes, asymmetrical and Assyrian (but perhaps this last likeness only came to my mind through assonance). Standing, she held on to a strap and stared at me with a calm, serious look. I had the impression that I had already seen her somewhere, at least her gaze, but I couldn’t remember where. The next day she spoke to me: “Hello. You don’t remember me,” she added, “but we’ve already seen each other. At the swimming pool.” She was the young woman leaning on the edge of the pool. I didn’t see her every day; when I saw her, I greeted her amiably, and she smiled, gently. At night, I went out more often: I went to dinner with Hohenegg, whom I introduced to Thomas, I saw old university friends again, I let myself be invited out to suppers and little parties where I drank and chatted happily, without horror, without anguish. This was normal life, everyday life, after all, this too was worth living.