The Kindly Ones

In my relations, as I may have said, I always took care to avoid intellectuals or men of my social class: they always wanted to talk, and had an annoying tendency to fall in love. With Mihaï, I made an exception, but there weren’t too many risks; he was a cynic, frivolous and amoral. He had a little house west of Charlottenburg; I let him invite me over there the first night, after dinner, under the pretext of having a last drink, and I spent the night there. Beneath his eccentric mannerisms, he had the hard, taut body of an athlete, no doubt inherited from his peasant origins, brown, curly, luxuriant body hair, a rough, male odor. It greatly amused him to have seduced an SS officer: “The Wehrmacht or the Auswärtiges Amt

, they’re too easy.” I saw him again from time to time. Sometimes I went to see him after dining with Helene; I used him brutally, as if to wash her silent desires out of my head, or my own ambiguity.