The Kindly Ones

I resented Brandt’s attitude, it was completely unjustified, in my opinion: he had no business getting involved in my private life that way. My private life, actually, was taking a pleasant turn; and it had been a long time since I had enjoyed myself so much. On Sundays I went to the pool with Helene, sometimes also with Thomas and one of his girlfriends; we’d go out for tea or hot chocolate, then I’d take Helene to the movies, if there was something worth seeing, or else to the concert to hear Karajan or Furtwängler; and we’d have dinner before I took her home. I also saw her from time to time during the week: a few days after my visit to Mittelbau, I had invited her to our fencing hall, at the Prinz-Albrecht-Palais, where she watched us fence and applauded the thrusts, then, in the company of Thomas, who flirted outrageously with her friend Liselotte, to an Italian restaurant. On December 19, we were together during the great English attack; in the public shelter where we had taken refuge, she sat next to me without saying anything, her shoulder against mine, flinching slightly at the closest explosions. After the raid, I took her to the Esplanade, the only restaurant I found open: sitting opposite me, her long white hands resting on the table, she stared at me silently with her beautiful, deep, dark eyes, a searching, curious, serene gaze. In such moments, I said to myself that if things had been different, I could have married this woman, I could have had children with her as I did much later with another woman who wasn’t her equal. It would certainly not have been done to please Brandt or the Reichsführer, to fulfill a duty or satisfy conventions: it would have been a part of everyday, ordinary life, simple and natural. But my life had taken another path, and it was too late. She too, when she looked at me, must have had similar thoughts, or rather women’s thoughts, different from men’s, in their tonality and color probably more than in their content, difficult to imagine for a man, even me. I pictured them this way: Is it possible I will enter this man’s bed someday, give myself to him? To give oneself

, a strange phrase in our language; but the man who doesn’t grasp its full extent should try in turn to let himself be penetrated, it will open his eyes. These thoughts, in general, didn’t cause me any regrets, but rather a bitter feeling that was almost sweet. But sometimes, in the street, without thinking, with a natural gesture, she took my arm, and then, yes, I surprised myself by missing that other life that could have been, if something hadn’t been broken so early. It wasn’t just the question of my sister; it was vaster than that, it was the entire course of events, the wretchedness of the body and of desire, the decisions you make and on which you can’t go back, the very meaning you choose to give this thing that’s called, perhaps wrongly, your life.