The Kindly Ones Page 20

  When we reached Yagotin, I was so coated in mud that the noncom in charge of the station didn’t recognize my rank and greeted me with a torrent of abuse because I was tracking mud into his waiting room. I put my kit down on a bench and retorted harshly: “I am an officer and you are not to speak to me like that.” I went back out to join Hanika, who helped me wash up a little at a hand pump. The noncom apologized profusely when he saw my insignia, which were still those of an Obersturmführer; he invited me to take a bath and have dinner. I gave him the letter for Thomas, which would leave with the mail. He put me up in a small room for officers; Hanika slept on a bench in the waiting room, with some men on leave waiting for the train to Kiev. The station chief woke me up in the middle of the night: “There’s a train in twenty minutes. Come.” I quickly got dressed and went out. The rain had stopped but everything was still dripping, the tracks were gleaming under the bleak station lights. Hanika had joined me with our kit. Then the train arrived, its brakes squealing for a long time, in spurts, before it stopped. Like all the trains nearing the front, it was half empty; we had our choice of compartments. I lay down and fell asleep. If Hanika ground his teeth, I didn’t hear him.

  When I woke up we hadn’t even passed Lubny. The train stopped often, because of alerts or to let priority convoys pass. Near the toilets, I met a Major from the Luftwaffe who was returning from leave to join his squadron in Poltava. It had been five days since he left Germany. He talked to me about the morale of the civilians of the Reich, who remained confident even though victory was slow in coming; very amiably he offered us a little bread and sausage. At the station stops too we sometimes found something to snack on. The train kept its own time, I didn’t feel hurried. At the stops I lazily contemplated the sadness of the Russian stations. The facilities, barely built, already took on a dilapidated look; brambles and weeds invaded the railways; here and there, even in this season, one could see the burst of color of a stubborn flower, lost among gravel soaked with black oil. The cows that placidly wandered onto the tracks seemed surprised each time the roaring whistle of a train came to disturb their meditation. The dull gray of mud and dust covered everything. On the paths alongside the tracks, a filthy kid pushed a ramshackle bicycle, or else an old peasant hobbled along to the station to try to sell us some of her moldy vegetables. Slowly I let this endless ramification grow in me, this vast system of tracks, of switches controlled by idiotic, alcoholic laborers. At the marshalling yards, I watched interminable lines of dirty, oily, muddy freight cars waiting, full of wheat, coal, iron, gasoline, livestock, all the wealth of occupied Ukraine seized to be sent to Germany, all the things men need, moved from one place to another according to a grandiose, mysterious plan of circulation. Was that the reason why we were waging war, why men were dying? But even in everyday life that’s the way it is. Somewhere a man wastes away his life, covered with coal dust, in the stifling depths of a mine; elsewhere, another man rests warmly, clothed in alpaca, buried in a good book in an armchair, without ever thinking whence or how this armchair, this book, this alpaca, this warmth reach him. National Socialism wanted every German, in the future, to be able to have his modest share of the good things of life; but within the limitations of the Reich, that had turned out to be impossible; so now we were taking these things from others. Was that fair? So long as we had the strength and the power, yes, since as far as justice is concerned, there is no absolute authority, and each people defines its own truth and justice. But if ever our strength weakened, if our power gave out, then we would have to endure the justice of others, terrible as it might be. And that too would be fair.

  In Poltava, Blobel sent me to the delousing station as soon as he set eyes on me. Then he filled me in on the situation. “The Vorkommando finally entered Kharkov on the twenty-fourth, with the Fifty-fifth Army Corps. They’ve set up offices already.” But Callsen was sorely lacking in men and urgently asking for reinforcements. For now, though, the roads were blocked by the rains and the mud. The train didn’t run any farther, since the tracks had to be restored and widened, and that too could be done only when travel became possible again. “As soon as it freezes you’ll go to Kharkov with some other officers and troops; the Kommandostab will join you a little later on. The entire Kommando will take its winter quarters in Kharkov.”

  Hanika soon turned out to be a much better orderly than Popp. Every morning, I found my boots polished and my uniform cleaned, dried, and ironed; at breakfast, he often produced something to improve the ordinary fare. He was very young; he had been drafted directly from the Hitlerjugend to the Waffen-SS, and from there had been posted to the Sonderkommando; but he wasn’t lacking in qualities. I taught him our file classification system, so he could sort or find documents for me. Ries had overlooked a pearl: the boy was friendly and obliging; you just had to know how to take him. At night, for a little, he would have slept across my doorway, like a dog or a servant in a Russian novel. Better nourished, and well rested, with his face rounded out, he was in fact a handsome boy despite his teenage acne.

  As for Blobel, he was growing more and more moody; he drank and flew into hysterical rages, on the slightest pretext. He would pick out a scapegoat from among the officers and pursue him for days on end, without respite, harassing him on every aspect of his work. At the same time he was a good organizer, he had a well-developed sense of priorities and practical constraints. Fortunately, he hadn’t yet had an occasion to test his new Saurer; the truck had stayed stuck in Kiev, and he was impatiently waiting for it to be delivered. The very idea of the thing made my blood run cold, and I hoped to be long gone by the time he received it. I continued to suffer from sudden retchings, accompanied sometimes by painful and exhausting up-wellings of gas; but I kept that to myself. Nor did I speak about my dreams to anyone. Almost every night now, I rode in a metro, each time different but always skewed, strange, unpredictable, haunting me with an endless circulation of trains coming and going, escalators or elevators rising and falling from one level to another, doors opening and closing at the wrong moment, signals changing from green to red without the trains stopping, lines crossing without any shunting, and terminus stops where the passengers waited in vain, a broken-down, noisy, immense, interminable network traveled by incessant and insane traffic. When I was young I loved the Metro; I had discovered it when I was seventeen and went up to Paris, and at the slightest occasion I took it simply for the pleasure of movement, of looking at people, at the stations going by. The CMP, the previous year, had taken over the north-south line, and for the price of a single ticket I could cross the city from one end to the other. Soon I got to know the underground geography of Paris better than its surface. With other boarding students from my prépa, I slipped out at night, thanks to a copy of a key the students passed on from one generation to the next, and, armed with little flashlights, we waited on a platform for the last train so we could then climb into the tunnels and walk on the tracks from station to station. We had quickly discovered numerous tunnels and shafts closed to the public, which came in handy when railroad men, disturbed in their nighttime work, tried to chase us. This underground activity still leaves a trace of strong emotion in my memory, a friendly feeling of security and warmth, with probably a distant erotic overtone too. Back then, metros already filled my dreams, but now they bore with them a translucent, nearly acid anguish; I could never arrive where I had to be, I missed my connections, the doors to the cars slammed in my face, I traveled without a ticket, in horror of the inspectors, and I often awoke filled with a cold, abrupt panic, that left me feeling utterly lost.

  Finally the first frosts seized the roads, and I could leave. The cold had settled in suddenly, overnight; in the morning, the vapor of our breath, the windows white with frost, were a joyous sight. Before leaving, I put on all my sweaters; Hanika had managed to find an otterskin shapka for me for a few reichsmarks; in Kharkov, we would quickly have to find some warm clothes. On the road, the sky was pure and blue; clouds of sparrows whirled befor
e the woods; near the villages, peasants were reaping frozen pond rushes to cover their isbas. The road itself was treacherous: the frost, in places, had seized the chaotic ridges of the mud, raised by the passage of tanks and trucks, and these hardened crests made the vehicles skid, tore the tires, sometimes even caused cars to flip over when a driver took a curve badly and lost control of his vehicle. Elsewhere, beneath a fine crust that crumbled under the wheels, the mud remained viscous, insidious. All around stretched the empty steppe, the harvested fields, some forests. It’s about 120 kilometers from Poltava to Kharkov: the trip took a full day. We entered the city through devastated suburbs with charred, ruined, overturned walls, among which, hastily cleared away, lay piled in little stacks the twisted and burned wrecks of the fighting equipment wasted on the futile defense of the city. The Vorkommando had set itself up in the Hotel International, which sat at the side of an immense central square dominated, at the rear, by the constructivist pile of the Dom Gosprom, cubical buildings, arranged in a semicircle, with two tall square arches and a pair of skyscrapers—a surprising construction for this large lazy city with its wooden houses and old czarist churches. The House of the Plan, burned during the battles, raised its massive façades and columns of gutted windows nearby, over to the left; in the center of the square, an imposing bronze Lenin turned his back to the two blocks and, indifferent to the cars and German tanks lined up at his feet, welcomed the passersby with a large gesture. In the hotel, confusion reigned; most of the rooms had broken windows, and bitter cold swept in. I requisitioned a small suite that was more or less inhabitable, left Hanika to see to the windows and the heating, and went back down to find Callsen. “The battles for the city were very violent,” he summarized for me, “there was a lot of destruction, as you saw; it will be hard to find quarters for the whole Sonderkommando.” The Vorkommando had nonetheless started its SP work and was interrogating suspects; in addition, at the Sixth Army’s request, they had taken a number of hostages to discourage sabotage, as in Kiev. Callsen had already formed his political analysis: “The population of the city is mostly Russian, so the delicate problems stemming from our relations with the Ukrainians will be less acute here. There’s also a large Jewish population, although a lot of them fled with the Bolsheviks.” Blobel had given him the order to summon the Jewish leaders and shoot them: “For the others, we’ll see later on.”

  In the bedroom, Hanika had managed to plug the windows with some cardboard and canvas tarps, and he had found a few candles for light; but the rooms were still freezing. For a long while, sitting on the sofa while he made some tea, I let a pleasant fantasy come over me: I invited him to sleep with me, for mutual warmth, then slowly, during the night, I passed my hand under his tunic, kissed his young lips, and searched through his pants to take out his stiff penis. Seducing a subordinate, even a consenting one, was out of the question; but it had been a long time since I had even thought of such things, and I didn’t try to resist the sweetness of these images. I looked at the nape of his neck and wondered if he had ever been with a girl. He was really very young, but even before his age, in the boarding school, we were already doing everything you can do among boys, and the older boys, who must then have been the age Hanika was now, knew how to find girls in the next village who were more than happy to go for a roll in the hay. Now my thoughts shifted: in place of his frail neck other powerful necks appeared, of men I had been with or even just looked at, and I considered these necks with a woman’s eyes, suddenly understanding with a terrifying clarity that men control nothing, dominate nothing, that they are just children and even toys, put there for the pleasure of women, an insatiable pleasure all the more sovereign that the men think they are in charge, think they dominate women, whereas in reality women absorb them, wreck their dominion and dissolve their control, to take far more from them than they give. Men believe in all honesty that women are vulnerable, and that they must either take advantage of this vulnerability or protect it, whereas women laugh, with tolerance and love or else with scorn, at the childish, infinite vulnerability of men, at their fragility, this brittleness so close to a permanent loss of control, this perpetually threatening collapse, this vacuity embodied in such strong flesh. That is why, without a doubt, women so rarely kill. They suffer much more, but they will always have the last word. I drank my tea. Hanika had made my bed with all the blankets he could find; I took two of them and left them for him on the sofa in the first room, where he would sleep. I closed the door and rapidly masturbated, then fell asleep immediately, my hands and stomach still damp with sperm.

  For one reason or another, maybe to stay close to von Reichenau, who had his HQ there, Blobel chose to remain in Poltava, and we waited for the Kommandostab for more than a month. The Vorkommando didn’t remain inactive. As in Kiev, I set up networks of informers; it was all the more necessary given the motley population, full of immigrants from all over the USSR, among whom certainly lurked a number of spies and saboteurs; furthermore, we hadn’t found a single NKVD list or file: before retreating, they had methodically cleaned out their archives, so there was nothing left for us that might make our job easier. Working in the hotel was becoming rather difficult: while I tried to type a report or talk with a local collaborator, the screams of some man being interrogated would ring out next door, overwhelming me. One night they served us red wine at dinner: my meal was scarcely over when everything started coming back up. This had never happened to me before with such violence, and I was beginning to worry: before the war, I never vomited, when I was little I had almost never thrown up, and I wondered what the reason for it could be. Hanika, who had heard my retching through the bathroom door, suggested maybe the food was bad, or else I was suffering from an intestinal flu: I shook my head, that wasn’t it, I was sure of it, since it had started exactly like the retchings, with a cough and a feeling of heaviness or else of something blocked, except this had gone further and everything had come up all of a sudden, the scarcely digested food mixed with the wine, a frightening red mixture.

  Finally Kuno Callsen obtained permission from the Ortskommandantur to set up the Sonderkommando in the premises of the NKVD, on Sovnarkomovskaya Street, the street of the Soviet People’s Commissariats. This large L-shaped building dates from the beginning of the century, and the main entrance is off a little side street, lined with trees stripped bare by winter; a plaque in Russian at the corner states that during the civil war, in May and June 1920, the famous Dzerzhinsky had his headquarters here. The officers kept living at the hotel; Hanika had found a stove for us; unfortunately, he had installed it in the little living room where he slept, and if I left the door open, his atrocious teeth-grinding ruined my sleep. I asked him to warm the two rooms well during the day, so that I could close the door when I went to sleep; but at dawn the cold would wake me, and I ended up sleeping with my clothes on, with a wool cap, until Hanika found me some duvets that I piled up so I could sleep naked, as I was used to. I continued vomiting almost every night or at least every other night, right away at the end of meals, once even before finishing—I had just drunk a cold beer with my pork chop and it came back up so quickly that the liquid was still cool, a hideous sensation. I always managed to vomit neatly, in a bathroom or a washbasin, without drawing too much attention, but it was exhausting: the huge retchings that preceded the upwelling of the food left me emptied, drained of all energy for a long time. At least the food returned so quickly that it wasn’t yet acid, digestion had scarcely begun, and it didn’t have any taste; I just had to rinse my mouth out to feel better.

  The specialists from the Wehrmacht had meticulously searched all the public buildings for explosives and mines, and had defused some bombs; despite that, a few days after the first snowfall, the House of the Red Army exploded, killing the commander of the Sixtieth Division, its Chief of Staff, its Ia, and three clerks, who were found horribly mutilated. The same day there were four other explosions; the military was furious. The chief engineer of the Sixth Army, Oberst Se
lle, gave the order to place Jews in all the large buildings to discourage new bombings. As for von Reichenau, he wanted reprisals. The Vorkommando was not involved in this: the Wehrmacht took care of it. The Ortskommandant had prisoners hanged from all the balconies in the city. Behind our offices, two streets, Chernychevsky and Girchman, combined to form an irregular expanse, like a vague square between small buildings scattered about without any plan. Several of these buildings, from different periods and in different colors, opened onto the street at an abrupt angle, their elegant doorways topped by small balconies; soon, at each railing, one or several men were hanging like sacks. On a townhouse built before the last war, pale green with three floors, two muscular Atlases, flanking the door, supported the balcony with their white arms, bent back behind their heads: when I went by, a body was still twitching between these impassive caryatids. Each hanged man had a sign around his neck in Russian. To go to the office, I liked to walk, either under the bare linden and poplar trees of the long Karl-Liebknecht Street, or cutting across the vast Trade Unions Park with its monument to Shevchenko; it was just a few hundred meters, and during the day the streets were safe. On Liebknecht Street they were also hanging people. Under a balcony, a crowd had gathered. Several Feldgendarmen had come out the French door and were solidly attaching six ropes with slipknots. Then they went back into the dark room. After a while they reappeared, carrying a man with his arms and legs tied, his head covered with a hood. A Feldgendarm passed a slipknot around his neck, then the sign, then pulled off his hood. For an instant, I saw the man’s bulging eyes, the eyes of a bolting horse; then, as if overcome with fatigue, he closed them. Two of the Feldgendarmen lifted him and slowly let him slide from the balcony. His bound muscles convulsed with great shudders, then calmed down; he swung quietly, his neck broken cleanly, while the Feldgendarmen hanged the next one. The people watched till the end; I watched too, full of an evil fascination. I eagerly examined the faces of the hanged men, of the condemned men before they were passed over the railing: these faces, these terrified or terrifyingly resigned eyes told me nothing. Several of the dead men had their tongues sticking out, grotesque; streams of saliva ran from their mouths to the sidewalk, some of the spectators laughed. Anguish filled me like a vast tide, the noise of the drops of saliva horrified me. When I was still young, I had seen someone hanged. It had taken place in the frightful boarding school where I had been locked up; I suffered there, but I wasn’t the only one. One night, after dinner, there was a special prayer, I forget what for, and I had myself excused, because of my Lutheran origins (it was a Catholic school); that way I could return to my room. Each dormitory was organized by class and had about fifteen bunk beds. As I went up, I passed by the next room, where the premières slept (I was in seconde, I must have been fifteen); there were two boys there who had also been let off Mass: Albert, with whom I was more or less friendly, and Pierre R., a strange boy, not very well liked, who frightened the other students with his violent, frantic rages. I chatted with them for a few minutes before I went back to my room, where I lay down to read, a novel by E. R. Burroughs—such books of course were banned, like everything else in that prison. I was finishing another chapter when suddenly I heard Albert’s voice, a wild scream: “Help! Help! Come help!” I leaped out of bed, my heart beating, then a thought held me back: What if Pierre R. were killing Albert? Albert was still yelling. So I forced myself to go see; terrified, ready to flee, I went toward the door and pushed it open. Pierre R. was hanging from a beam, a red ribbon around his neck, his face already blue; Albert, screaming, was holding him by his legs and trying to lift him up. I ran out of the room and down the stairs, yelling in turn, through the yard to the chapel. Some teachers came out, hesitated, then started running toward me, followed by a crowd of students. I led them to the room, everyone tried to go in; as soon as they grasped what was happening, two teachers blocked the doorway, forcing the students back into the hallway. But I had already entered, I saw everything. Two or three teachers supported Pierre R. while another furiously struggled to cut the big ribbon with a penknife or a key. Finally Pierre R. came crashing down like a felled tree, dragging the teachers to the ground with him. Albert, huddled in a corner, was sobbing, his hands clenched in front of his face. Father Labourie, my Greek teacher, was trying to pry open Pierre R.’s jaw; he was using both hands to force apart the teeth, with all his strength, but to no avail. I distinctly remember the deep, gleaming blue of Pierre R.’s face, and his purple lips, flecked with white foam. Then they made me go out. That night I spent in the infirmary; they wanted to isolate me from the other boys, I suppose; I don’t know where they put Albert. A little later on, they sent Father Labourie to me, a gentle, patient man, rare qualities in that establishment. He wasn’t like the other priests, and I enjoyed talking with him. The next morning, all the students were gathered together in the chapel for a long sermon on the abomination of suicide. Pierre R., we were told, had survived; and we had to pray for the salvation of his sinner’s soul. We never saw him again. Since the students were quite shaken up, the good fathers decided to organize a long walk in the woods. “How stupid,” I said to Albert when I met him in the courtyard. He seemed withdrawn, tense. Father Labourie came up to me and said gently, “Come, come with us. Even if it doesn’t make a difference to you, it will do the others good.” I shrugged and joined the group. They made us walk for several hours; and it’s true, that night, everyone was calm. They let me return to my dormitory, where I was assailed by the other boys. During the walk, Albert had told me that Pierre R. had climbed onto his bed, and, after placing the slipknot around his neck, had called out, “Hey, Albert, look,” then had jumped. Over the sidewalk in Kharkov, the hanged men swung slowly. There were, I knew, Jews, Russians, Gypsies there. All these dismal, bound men hanging made me think of sleeping chrysalises patiently waiting for metamorphosis. But there still was something I couldn’t grasp. I was finally beginning to perceive that no matter how many dead people I might see, or people at the instant of their death, I would never manage to grasp death, that very moment, precisely in itself. It was one thing or the other: either you are dead, and then in any case there’s nothing else to understand, or else you are not yet dead, and in that case, even with the rifle at the back of your head or the rope around your neck, death remains incomprehensible, a pure abstraction, this absurd idea that I, the only living person in the world, could disappear. Dying, we may already be dead, but we never die, that moment never comes, or rather it never stops coming, there it is, it’s coming, and then it’s still coming, and then it’s already over, without ever having come. That’s how I was reasoning in Kharkov, very poorly no doubt, but I wasn’t doing very well.