The Kindly Ones

I had left my windows open and little by little dawn spilled into the apartment. Slowly, the fluctuations of my fever brought me back to an awareness of my body, of the soaking sheets wrapped around it. A violent urge finally finished waking me up. I don’t really know how, but I managed to drag myself to the bathroom and sit on the toilet and empty myself, a long diarrhea that seemed never to end. When it finally stopped I wiped myself as well as I could, took the slightly dirty glass where I kept my toothbrush, and drew some water from the bucket to drink greedily the bad water that seemed to come from the purest spring to me; but pouring the rest of the bucket into the toilet bowl full of waste (the flush had stopped working a long time ago) was beyond me. I went back to roll myself up in the blankets and shivered violently, for a long time, overwhelmed by the effort. Later on I heard someone knocking on the door: it must have been Piontek, whom I usually met in the street, but I didn’t have the strength to get up. The fever came and went, at times dry and almost gentle, at other times a blaze raging through my body. The telephone rang several times, each ring pierced my eardrums like a knife, but I couldn’t do anything, could neither answer it nor disconnect it. The thirst had returned immediately and absorbed most of my attention, which, now almost detached from everything, coldly studied my symptoms, as if from without. I knew that if I didn’t do something, if no one came, I would die here, on this bed, in pools of excrement and urine, for, incapable of getting up, I was soon going to have to go in my bed. But that idea didn’t bother me, didn’t arouse any pity or fear in me, I felt nothing but scorn for what I had become and wished neither that it stop nor that it continue. In the midst of the wanderings of my sick mind, daylight now lit up the apartment, the door opened and Piontek came in. I took him for another hallucination and just smiled foolishly when he spoke to me. He came over to my bed, touched my forehead, distinctly uttered the word “Shit,” and called Frau Zempke, who must have opened the door for him. “Go get something to drink,” he said to her. Then I heard him telephoning. He came back to see me: “Can you hear me, Obersturmbannführer?” I signed yes. “I called the office. A doctor is coming. Unless you’d rather I take you to the hospital?” I signed no. Frau Zempke returned with a jug of water; Piontek poured some into a glass, raised my head, and had me drink a little. Half of the glass spilled onto my chest and the sheets. “More,” I said. Frau Zempke closed the windows. “Leave them open,” I ordered.—“Do you want to eat something?” asked Piontek.—“No,” I replied, and let myself fall back onto my soaking pillow. Piontek opened the wardrobe, took out some clean sheets, and began changing the bed. The dry sheets were cool, but too rough for my skin which had become hypersensitive, I couldn’t find a comfortable position. A little later, an SS doctor arrived, a Hauptsturmführer I didn’t know. He examined me from head to foot, palpated me, listened to my chest—the cold metal of the stethoscope burned my skin—took my temperature, tapped my chest. “You should be in the hospital,” he finally declared.—“I don’t want to,” I said. He made a face: “Do you have someone who can take care of you? I’ll give you a shot, but you will have to take some pills, drink some fruit juice, some broth.” Piontek went to talk with Frau Zempke, who had gone back downstairs, then returned to say she could take care of that. The doctor explained to me what I had but either I didn’t understand any of his words or I forgot them immediately, I retained nothing of his diagnosis. He gave me a shot, abominably painful. “I’ll come back tomorrow,” he said. “If the fever hasn’t gone down, I’ll have you hospitalized.”—“I don’t want to be hospitalized,” I mumbled.—“I assure you it’s all the same to me,” he said sternly. Then he left. Piontek looked upset. “All right, Obersturmbannführer, I’m going to see if I can find some things for Frau Zempke.” I nodded, and he left too. A little later, Frau Zempke appeared with a bowl of broth and forced me to swallow a few spoonfuls. The lukewarm liquid overflowed from my mouth and dribbled onto my chin, which had been invaded by a rough beard; Frau Zempke patiently wiped me and began again. Then she had me drink some water. The doctor had helped me urinate, but my diarrhea was coming back; after my stay in Hohenlychen, I had lost all shyness about this, I asked Frau Zempke to help me, apologizing, and this already elderly woman did it without disgust, as if I were a little child. Finally she left me and I floated on my bed. I felt light now, calm, the shot must have relieved me a little, but I was drained of all energy, conquering the weight of the sheet to raise my arm would have been beyond my strength. It was all the same to me, I let myself go, I calmly sank into my fever and the gentle summer light, the blue sky that filled the frames of the open windows, empty and serene. In thought, I drew around me not just my sheets and my blankets but also the entire apartment, I surrounded my body with it, it was warm and reassuring, like a uterus from which I never wanted to emerge, a dark, silent, elastic paradise, agitated only by the rhythm of my heartbeats and my blood flowing, an immense organic symphony, it wasn’t Frau Zempke I needed, but a placenta, I bathed in my sweat as in amniotic fluid, and I would have liked birth not to exist. The sword of fire that chased me out of this Eden was Thomas’s voice: “Well! You don’t look so great.” He too lifted me up, made me drink a little. “You should be in the hospital,” he said like the others.—“I don’t want to go to the hospital,” I repeated stupidly, obstinately. He looked around, went out onto the balcony, came back. “What’ll you do in case of an alert? You could never go down into the basement.”—“I don’t care.”—“At least come to my place, then. I’m in Wannsee now, you’ll be quiet. My housekeeper will take care of you.”—“No.” He shrugged: “As you like.” I wanted to piss again, I took advantage of his presence to ask him to help. He wanted to talk some more to me, but I didn’t reply. Finally he left. A little later, Frau Zempke returned to fuss around me: I gave in with gloomy indifference. Toward evening, Helene appeared in my room. She was carrying a little suitcase that she put near the door; then, slowly, she took the pin out of her hat and shook her thick, slightly wavy blond hair, without taking her eyes off me. “What the hell are you doing here?” I asked coarsely.—“Thomas told me. I came to take care of you.”—“I don’t want anyone to take care of me,” I said cantankerously. “Frau Zempke is good enough.”—“Frau Zempke has a family and can’t come here all the time. I’m going to stay with you until you’re better.” I stared at her coldly: “Go away!” She came to sit down by the bed and took my hand; I wanted to remove it but didn’t have the strength. “You’re burning up.” She rose, took off her jacket, hung it on the back of a chair, and then went to wet a towel and returned to put it on my forehead. I let her do it in silence. “Anyhow,” she said, “I don’t have much to do at work. I can take the time off. Someone has to stay with you.” I said nothing. Daylight was fading. She had me drink some water, tried to give me a little cold broth, then sat down next to the window and opened a book. The summer sky was turning pale, it was evening. I looked at her: she was like a stranger. Since my departure for Hungary more than three months ago, I hadn’t had any contact with her, hadn’t written her one letter, and it seemed to me I had almost forgotten her. I examined her gentle, serious profile and told myself it was beautiful; but this beauty had neither sense nor usefulness to me. I turned my eyes to the ceiling and let myself go for a while, I was very tired. Finally, an hour later maybe, I said without looking at her: “Go get me Frau Zempke.”—“Why?” she asked, closing her book.—“I need something,” I said.—“What? I’m here to help you.” I looked at her: the calmness of her brown eyes irritated me like an insult. “I need to shit,” I said brutally. But provoking her seemed impossible: “Explain to me what I have to do,” she said calmly. “I’ll help you.” I explained it to her, without coarse words but without euphemisms, and she did what needed to be done. I told myself bitterly that it was the first time she saw me naked, I had no pajamas, and that she must never have imagined she would see me naked in these conditions. I wasn’t ashamed of it, but I was disgusted with myself and this disgust extended to her, to her patience and her gentleness. I wanted to offend her, to masturbate in front of her, ask her for obscene favors, but it was just an idea, I would have been incapable of getting an erection, incapable of making a gesture requiring a little strength. In any case the fever was rising again, I began trembling again, sweating. “You’re cold,” she said when she had finished cleaning me. “Wait.” She left the apartment and returned after a few minutes with a blanket which she spread over me. I was rolled up in a ball, my teeth were chattering, I felt as if my bones were banging against each other like a handful of jacks. Night still didn’t come, the interminable summer day prolonged itself, it threw me into a panic, but at the same time I knew that night would bring no respite, no appeasement. Again, with great gentleness, she forced me to drink. But this gentleness made me mad with rage: What did this girl want with me? What was she thinking about, with her kindness and her goodness? Was she hoping to convince me of something this way? She was treating me as if I were her brother, her lover, or her husband. But she was neither my sister nor my wife. I shivered, waves of fever shook me, and she wiped my forehead. When her hand approached my mouth, I didn’t know if I should bite it or kiss it. Then everything became completely muddled. Images came to me, I couldn’t say if they were dreams or thoughts, they were the same as the ones that had so preoccupied me in the first months of the year, I saw myself living with this woman, settling my life this way, I left the SS and all the horrors that had surrounded me for so many years, my own failings fell away from me like a snakeskin during molt, my obsessions dissolved like a summer cloud, I joined the common stream. But these thoughts, far from pacifying me, revolted me: What! Bleed my dreams dry to bury my penis in her blond vagina, kiss her belly that would swell up, bearing handsome, healthy children? I saw the young pregnant women again, sitting on their suitcases in the mud of Kachau or Munkacs, I thought about their sexes discreetly nestled between their legs, beneath their round bellies, those female sexes and bellies that they would carry to the gas like a badge of honor. It’s always in a woman’s belly that children are made, that’s what’s so terrible. Why this atrocious privilege? Why must relations between men and women always come down, in the end, to impregnation? A semen bag, an incubator, a milk cow, there you have her, woman in the sacrament of marriage. As unattractive as my habits might be, they at least remained pure of such corruption. A paradox maybe, I see now as I write it, but one that at that time, in the vast spirals drawn by my overheated mind, seemed perfectly logical and coherent to me. I wanted to get up, to shake Helene, to explain all that to her, but maybe I also dreamed of that desire, for I would have been quite incapable of making a gesture. With the morning, the fever went down a little. I don’t know where Helene slept, probably on the sofa, but I know she came to see me every hour, to wipe my face and make me drink a little. With the sickness all energy had withdrawn from my body, I lay there, my limbs broken and without strength

, oh what a fine old school memory. My panic-stricken thoughts had finally dissipated, leaving behind them only a profound bitterness, a sharp desire to die quickly, to put an end to it. In the morning, Piontek arrived with a full basket of oranges, an unheard-of treasure in Germany at the time. “Herr Mandelbrod sent them to the office,” he explained. Helene took two and went downstairs to Frau Zempke’s to squeeze them; then, aided by Piontek, she sat me up on some pillows and had me drink the juice in small sips; it left a strange, almost metallic taste in my mouth. Piontek had a brief consultation with her that I couldn’t hear, then he left. Frau Zempke came up; she had washed and dried my sheets from the day before, and she helped Helene change my bed, again soaked with the night’s sweat. “It’s very good you’re sweating,” she said, “that chases the fever away.” It was all the same to me, I just wanted to rest, but I didn’t have a moment of peace, the Hauptsturmführer from the day before returned and examined me glumly: “You still don’t want to go to the hospital?”—“No, no, no.” He went into the living room to talk with Helene, then reappeared: “Your fever has gone down a little,” he said. “I told your friend to take your temperature frequently: if you go back over forty-one degrees, we’ll have to send you to the hospital. Is that understood?” He gave me a shot in the buttocks, as painful as the one the day before. “I’m leaving another one here, your friend will give it to you tonight—that will reduce the fever during the night. Try to eat a little.” After he left, Helene brought me some broth: she took a piece of bread, crumbled it up, soaked it in the liquid, and tried to make me swallow it, but I shook my head, it was impossible. I still managed to drink a little broth. As after the first shot, my head was clearer, but I felt drained, empty. I didn’t even resist when Helene patiently washed my body with a sponge and some warm water, then dressed me in pajamas borrowed from Herr Zempke. It wasn’t until she tucked me in and wanted to sit down to read that I exploded. “Why are you doing all this?” I said meanly. “What do you want from me?” She closed her book and stared at me with her large, calm eyes: “I don’t want anything from you. I just want to help you.”—“Why? What are you hoping for?”—“Nothing whatsoever.” She gave a slight shrug of her shoulders. “I came to help you out of friendship, that’s all.” Her back was to the window, so her face was in the shadow; I examined it greedily, but couldn’t read anything in it. “Out of friendship?” I barked. “What friendship? What do you know about me? We went out together a few times, that’s all, and now you’ve settled here as if you lived here.” She smiled: “Don’t get excited like that. You’re going to tire yourself out.” This smile enraged me: “But what do you know about fatigue? What! What do you know about it?” I had sat up; I fell back, exhausted, my head against the wall. “You have no idea, you don’t know anything about fatigue, you live your nice German girl’s life, with your eyes closed, you don’t see anything, you go to work, you look for a new husband, you don’t see anything that’s happening around you.” Her face remained calm, she didn’t notice the brutality of the

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form I was using, I went on, spluttering through my shouts: “You know nothing about me, nothing about what I do, nothing about my fatigue, for the three years we’ve been killing people, yes, that’s what we do, we kill, we kill the Jews, we kill the Gypsies, the Russians, the Ukrainians, the Poles, the sick, the old, the women, young women like you, the children!” She was clenching her teeth now, and still she didn’t say anything, but I couldn’t stop: “And the people we don’t kill, we send them to work in our factories, like slaves, don’t you see, that’s what an economic question is. Don’t act all innocent! Where do you think your clothes come from? And the flak shells that protect you from enemy planes, where do they come from? The tanks that are holding the Bolsheviks back, in the East? How many slaves died to make them? You’ve never asked yourself that kind of question?” She still wasn’t reacting, and the more she remained calm and silent, the more I got carried away: “Or maybe you didn’t know? Is that it? Like all the other good Germans. No one knows anything, except the ones doing the dirty work. Where did they go, your Jewish neighbors in Moabit? You’ve never asked yourself? To the East? We sent them to work in the East? Where? If there were six or seven million Jews working in the East, we’d have built entire cities! You don’t listen to the BBC? They know! Everyone knows, everyone except the good Germans who don’t want to know anything.” I was raging, I must have been ashen-faced, she seemed to be listening attentively, she didn’t move. “And your husband, in Yugoslavia, what was he doing, in your opinion? In the Waffen-SS? Fighting the partisans? You know what that is, fighting the partisans? We hardly ever see any partisans, so we destroy the environment where they survive. You understand what that means? Can you imagine your Hans killing women, killing their children in front of them, burning their houses with their corpses inside?” For the first time she reacted: “Be quiet! You don’t have the right!”—“And why don’t I have the right?” I jeered. “You think maybe I’m better? You come to take care of me, you think I’m a nice man, with a law degree, a perfect gentleman, a good catch? We’re murdering people, you understand, that’s what we do, all of us, your husband was a murderer, I’m a murderer, and you, you’re a murderer’s accomplice, you wear and you eat the fruit of our labor.” She was livid, but her face showed only infinite sadness: “You are an unhappy man.”—“And why’s that? I like what I am. I’m rising in the ranks. Of course, it won’t last. It’s no use killing everybody, there are too many of them, we’re going to lose the war. Instead of wasting your time playing the nurse and the nice patient, you’d do better to start thinking about getting out of here. And if I were you, I’d head west. The Yankees won’t be so quick to pull out their cocks as the Ivans. At least they’ll wear rubbers: those brave boys are afraid of diseases. Unless you’d prefer a stinking Mongol? Maybe that’s what you dream of at night?” She was still white, but she smiled at these words: “You’re delirious. It’s the fever, you should hear yourself.”—“I hear myself very well.” I was panting, the effort had exhausted me. She went to wet a compress and returned to wipe my forehead. “What if I asked you to strip naked, would you do that? For me? Masturbate in front of me? Suck my cock? Would you do that?”—“Calm down,” she said. “You’re going to make the fever rise.” There was nothing for it, this girl was too stubborn. I closed my eyes and abandoned myself to the sensation of the cold water on my forehead. She readjusted the pillows, pulled up the blanket. My breath came in wheezes, once again I wanted to beat her, to kick her in the belly, for her obscene, her inadmissible kindness.