The Kindly Ones

I didn’t have a fracture of the skull, Thomas still had his place. He returned around evening and handed me a signed, stamped piece of paper: “Your leave of absence. You’d better leave Berlin.” My head was hurting; I was sipping Cognac diluted with mineral water. “To go where?”—“I don’t know. What if you went to see your girlfriend, in Baden?”—“The Americans could get there before me.”—“Precisely. Take her to Bavaria, or Austria. Find yourself a little hotel, you can have a nice little romantic vacation. If I were you, I’d take advantage of it. You might not have any more for a while.” He described the results of the raid: the offices of the Staatspolizei

were unusable, the old chancellery was destroyed, the new one, Speer’s, had been severely damaged, even the Führer’s private apartments had burned down. A bomb had struck the People’s Court in midtrial, they were trying Oberleutnant von Schlabrendorff, one of the conspirators from the OKHG Center; after the raid, they had found Judge Freisler stone dead, von Schlabrendorff’s file in his hand, his head crushed, they said, by the bronze bust of the Führer, which sat enthroned behind him during his ranting speeches for the prosecution.

Leaving seemed like a good idea to me, but where? Baden, the romantic vacation: they were out of the question. Thomas wanted to have his parents evacuated from the outskirts of Vienna, and suggested I go in his place to take them to a cousin’s farm. “You have parents?” He looked at me, puzzled: “Of course. Everyone has parents. Why?” But the Viennese option seemed terribly complicated to me for a convalescence, and Thomas readily agreed. “Don’t worry. I’ll make other arrangements, it’s no problem. Go rest somewhere.” I still had no idea where, yet I asked Piontek to come the next morning, with several cans of gasoline. That night I didn’t sleep much; my head and ears hurt, shooting pains woke me up, I vomited twice, but there was something else besides. When Piontek presented himself, I took my letter of leave—essential to get me through the checkpoints—the bottle of Cognac and four packs of cigarettes that Thomas had given me, my bag with a few things and a change of clothes, and without even offering him a coffee, I gave him the order to start off. “Where are we going, Obersturmbannführer?”—“Take the road to Stettin.”