The Kindly Ones

In the evening, she came to give me a shot. I turned over onto my stomach with difficulty; when I pushed down my pants, the memory of certain vigorous adolescents shot briefly through my head, then crumpled, I was too tired. She hesitated, she had never given a shot before, but when she stuck the needle in, it was with a firm, sure hand. She had a little cotton soaked in alcohol and she wiped my buttocks after the injection, I found that touching, she must have remembered nurses doing that. Lying on my side, I planted the thermometer into my rectum myself to take my temperature, without paying attention to her but without trying especially to provoke her either. I must have had a little over forty degrees. Then the night began again, the third of that stone eternity, I wandered again through the underbrush and the collapsed cliffs of my thoughts. In the middle of the night, I began sweating profusely, the soaking pajamas stuck to my skin, I was barely conscious, I remember Helene’s hand on my forehead and cheek, pushing back my soaking hair, brushing against my beard, she told me later that I had begun talking out loud, it drew her out of her sleep and brought her to my side, scraps of phrases, mostly incoherent, she said, but she never wanted to tell me what she had understood. I didn’t insist, I felt it was better that way. The next morning, the fever had fallen below thirty-nine. When Piontek came to ask about me, I sent him to the office to get some real coffee, which I kept in reserve, for Helene. The doctor, when he came to examine me, congratulated me: “You’ve come through the worst, I think. But it’s not over yet and you should regain your strength.” I felt like the victim of a shipwreck who, after a fierce, exhausting battle with the sea, finally lets himself roll onto the sand of a beach: maybe I wasn’t going to die after all. But that’s a bad comparison, for a shipwrecked person swims, fights to survive, and I hadn’t done anything, I had let myself be carried along and it was only death that hadn’t wanted me. I greedily drank the orange juice Helene brought me. Around noon, I sat up a little: Helene was standing in the open doorway between my bedroom and the living room, leaning on the doorframe, a summer pullover on her shoulders; she was looking at me absentmindedly, a steaming cup of coffee in her hand. “I envy you, being able to drink coffee,” I said.—“Oh! Wait, I’ll help you.”—“That’s all right.” I was more or less sitting up, I had managed to pull a pillow behind my back. “Please forgive me for what I said yesterday. I was despicable.” She made a little sign with her head, drank some coffee, and turned her face aside, toward the French window to the balcony. After a little while, she looked at me again: “What you said…about the dead. Was that true?”—“You really want to know?”—“Yes.” Her beautiful eyes were examining me, I seemed to glimpse a worried glint in them, but she remained calm, in control of herself. “Everything I said is true.”—“The women, the children too?”—“Yes.” She turned her head away, bit her upper lip; when she looked at me again, her eyes were full of tears: “It’s sad,” she said.—“Yes. It’s horribly sad.” She thought before she spoke again: “You know we are going to pay for that.”—“Yes. If we lose the war, our enemies’ revenge will be pitiless.”—“I wasn’t talking about that. Even if we don’t lose the war, we are going to pay. We will have to pay.” She hesitated again. “I pity you,” she concluded. She didn’t speak of it again, she continued her ministrations, even the most humiliating ones. But her gestures seemed to have another quality—colder, more functional. As soon as I could walk, I asked her to go home. She protested a little, but I insisted: “You must be exhausted. Go get some rest. Frau Zempke can take care of what I need.” Finally she agreed and put her things into her little suitcase. I called Piontek to take her home. “I’ll phone you,” I said to her. When Piontek arrived, I accompanied her to the apartment door. “Thank you for taking care of me,” I said, shaking her hand. She nodded but didn’t say anything. “See you later,” I added coldly.