The Kindly Ones

I didn’t understand what I was seeking with this young woman; but I didn’t try to understand it. What I liked about her was her gentleness, a gentleness I thought existed only in the paintings of Vermeer of Delft, through which could clearly be felt the supple force of a steel blade. I had enjoyed that afternoon very much, and for now I didn’t look any further, I didn’t want to think. I felt that thinking would immediately have led to painful questions and demands: for once, I didn’t feel the need, I was happy to let myself be carried by the course of events, as I was by Monteverdi’s music, at once utterly lucid and emotional, and then we’d see. During the week that followed, in the slack moments during work, or at night, at home, the thought of her grave face or of the calmness of her smile came back to me, almost warm, a friendly, affectionate thought, which didn’t alarm me.

But the past is a thing that, once it has sunk its teeth into your flesh, doesn’t let go. Around the middle of the week after the air raids, Fräulein Praxa knocked on my office door. “Obersturmbannführer? There are two gentlemen from the Kripo who would like to see you.” I was immersed in a particularly complex report; annoyed, I replied, “Well, let them do what everyone else does: make an appointment.”—“Very well, Obersturmbannführer.” She closed the door. A minute later she knocked again: “Excuse me, Obersturmbannführer. They insist. They said to tell you that it’s about a personal matter. They say it concerns your mother.” I breathed in deeply and closed my file: “Show them in, then.”