The Kindly Ones Read online

  That night, in the mess, I realized that Pyatigorsk truly was a place of reunions: sitting at a table with some other officers, I saw Dr. Hohenegg, the good-natured, cynical pathologist I had met in the train between Kharkov and Simferopol. I went up to greet him: “I see, Herr Oberstarzt, that General von Kleist surrounds himself only with the best people.” He got up to shake my hand: “Oh, but I’m not with Generaloberst von Kleist: I’m still attached to the Sixth Army, with General Paulus.”—“What are you doing here, then?”—“The OKH decided to take advantage of the KMV infrastructures to organize an interarmy medical conference. A very useful exchange of information. Everyone competes to describe the most atrocious case.”—“I’m sure that honor will fall to you.”—“Listen, I’m dining with my colleagues; but if you like, come by afterward, have a brandy in my room.” I went to dine with the officers from the Abwehr. They were realistic, sympathetic men, but almost as critical as the officer in Mozdok. Some stated openly that if we didn’t take Stalingrad soon, the war was lost; von Gilsa was drinking French wine and didn’t contradict them. Afterward I went out to walk by myself in Tsvetnik Park, behind the Lermontov gallery, a curious pavilion of pale blue wood, in a medieval style, with pointed turrets and Art Deco windows tinted pink, red, and white: an utterly disparate effect, but wholly in keeping here. I smoked, absent-mindedly contemplating the faded tulips, then climbed back up the hill to the sanatorium and went to knock on Hohenegg’s door. He welcomed me lying on his sofa, his feet bare, his hands crossed on his large round belly. “Excuse me for not getting up.” He made a sign with his head toward an end table. “The brandy is over there. Pour me one too, will you?” I poured two measures into the glasses and held one out to him; then I settled into a chair and crossed my legs. “So what’s the most atrocious thing you’ve seen?” He waved his hand: “Man, of course!”—“I meant medically.”—“Medically, atrocious things don’t interest me in the least. On the other hand one does see extraordinary curiosities, which completely revise our notions of what our poor bodies can endure.”—“What, for example?”—“Well, a man will catch a tiny piece of shrapnel in the calf that will slice through the peroneal artery and he’ll die in two minutes, still standing, his blood emptied into his boot without his noticing. Yet another man might take a bullet through the head, from one temple to the other, and will get up on his own to walk to the first-aid post.”—“What an insignificant thing we are,” I commented.—“Precisely.” I tasted Hohenegg’s brandy: it was Armenian, a little sweet but drinkable. “You’ll excuse my brandy,” he said without turning his head, “but I couldn’t find any Rémy-Martin in this town of barbarians. To go back to what I was saying, almost all of my colleagues have stories like that. And it’s not new: I once read the memoirs of a military doctor in Napoleon’s army, and he talked about the same things. Of course, we’re still losing far too many men. Military medicine has come a long way since 1812, but so have the methods of butchery. We’re still lagging behind. But, little by little, we’re getting better, and it’s true that Gatling has done more for modern surgery than Dupuytren.”—“But still you perform real wonders.” He sighed: “Maybe. The fact is I can no longer bear to see a pregnant woman. It depresses me too much to think about what’s in store for her fetus.”—“Nothing ever dies except what is born,” I recited. “Birth is indebted to death.” He let out a short cry, got up suddenly, and swallowed his brandy in one gulp. “That’s what I like about you, Hauptsturmführer. A member of the Sicherheitsdienst who quotes Tertullian instead of Rosenberg or Hans Frank is always a pleasure. But I could criticize your translation: Mutuum debitum est nativitati cum mortalitate, I’d say rather: ‘Birth has a mutual debt with death,’ or ‘Birth and death are mutually indebted to each other.’”—“You’re probably right. I was always better in Greek. I have a linguist friend here, I’ll ask him.” He held out his glass for me to fill. “Speaking of mortality,” he asked me pleasantly, “are you still murdering poor defenseless people?” I handed him his glass coolly. “Coming from you, Doktor, I won’t take that the wrong way. But in any case, I’m nothing but a liaison officer, which suits me fine. I observe and do nothing, that’s my favorite position.”—“You would have made a very poor physician, then. Observation without practice isn’t worth much.”—“That’s why I’m a jurist.” I got up and went to open the French window. Outside, the air was sweet, but you couldn’t see the stars and I could feel rain coming. A light wind was rustling through the trees. I went back to the sofa where Hohenegg had stretched out again after unfastening his tunic. “What I can tell you,” I said, standing in front of him, “is that some of my dear colleagues here are absolute bastards.”—“I don’t doubt it for an instant. It’s a common defect in people who practice without observing. It even occurs among doctors.” I rolled my glass between my fingers. I suddenly felt hollow, heavy. I finished my glass and asked him: “Are you here for long?”—“There are two sessions: now we’re going over the wounds, then we’ll come back at the end of the month for diseases. One day for venereal diseases, and two whole days devoted to lice and scabies.”—“We’ll see each other again, then. Good night, Doktor.” He held out his hand and I shook it. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t get up,” he said.

  Hohenegg’s brandy turned out to be a poor choice of after-dinner drink: back in my room, I vomited up my dinner. The retchings caught me so quickly I barely had the time to reach the bathtub. Since I had already digested, it was easy to rinse out; but it had a bitter, acidic, revolting taste; I preferred to vomit my meals right away, it came up more painfully and with more difficulty, but at least it didn’t have any taste, or else it tasted like food. I thought about returning to have another drink with Hohenegg, to ask his advice; but finally I just washed out my mouth with water, smoked a cigarette, and went to bed. The next day, I had to go to the Kommando to pay a courtesy visit; they were also expecting Oberführer Bierkamp. I went there around eleven o’clock. From the lower part of town, on the boulevard, you could clearly see, in the distance, the jagged peaks of the Beshtau, rising like a guardian idol; it hadn’t rained, but the air was still fresh. At the Kommando, they told me that Müller was busy with Bierkamp. I waited on the steps of the little courtyard, watching one of the drivers wash the mud off the bumpers and wheels of the Saurer truck. The rear door was open: out of curiosity, I went over to it to look inside, since I hadn’t yet seen what it looked like; I recoiled and immediately began coughing; it was foul, a stinking pool of vomit, excrement, urine. The driver noticed my reaction and said a few words to me in Russian: “Griaznyi, kazhdi raz,” but I didn’t understand the words. An Orpo, probably a Volksdeutscher, came over and translated: “He says that it’s always like that, Hauptsturmführer, very dirty, but they’re going to modify the interior, have the floor slope down, and put a little trapdoor in the middle. That will make it easier to clean out.”—“Is he a Russian?”—“Who, Zaitsev? He’s a Cossack, Hauptsturmführer, we have several of them.” I went back to the steps and lit a cigarette; just at that instant I was summoned, and had to throw it away. Müller received me together with Bierkamp. I saluted him and introduced my mission in Pyatigorsk. “Yes, yes,” Müller said, “the Oberführer explained it to me.” They asked me some questions and I talked about the feeling of pessimism that seemed to be reigning among the army officers. Bierkamp shrugged: “The soldiers have always been pessimists. Already, when it came to the Rhineland and the Sudetenland, they were wailing like sissies. They have never understood the strength of the Führer’s will and of National Socialism.—Tell me something else, have you heard this story about a military government?”—“No, Oberführer. What is it?”—“A rumor is circulating to the effect that the Führer has approved of a military government for the Caucasus, instead of a civilian administration. But we can’t manage to get any official confirmation. At the OKHG they’re very evasive.”—“I’ll try to find out more at the AOK, Oberführer.” We exchanged a few more remarks and I took my leave. In th
e hallway, I met Turek. He gave me a sardonic, angry look and said with incredible rudeness: “Ah, the Papiersoldat. Don’t worry, your turn will come.” Bierkamp must have talked to him. I answered him amiably, with a little smile: “Hauptsturmführer, I’m at your service.” He stared at me for an instant with a furious look, then disappeared into an office. There, I said to myself, you’ve made yourself an enemy; that’s not so hard.

  At the AOK, I requested a meeting with von Gilsa and put Bierkamp’s question to him. “It’s true,” he replied, “they’re talking about it. But the details aren’t clear yet for me.”—“And what will happen to the Reichskommissariat, then?”—“The establishment of the Reichskommissariat will be delayed for a while.”—“And why haven’t the representatives of the SP and the SD been informed?”—“I couldn’t say. I’m still waiting for more information. But you know, this question concerns the OKHG. Oberführer Bierkamp should apply directly to them.” I left von Gilsa’s office with the impression that he knew more than he was saying. I wrote a brief report and addressed it to Leetsch and Bierkamp. In general, that was what my work consisted of now: the Abwehr sent me a copy of the reports they wanted, generally having to do with the evolution of the partisan problem; I threw in some information gleaned here and there, most of the time at meals, and sent the whole thing on to Voroshilovsk; in exchange, I received other reports that I communicated to von Gilsa or one of his colleagues. Thus, the activity reports of Ek 12, whose offices were half a mile away from the AOK, had to be sent first to Voroshilovsk, then, collated with those of Sk 10b (the other Kommandos were operating in the theater of operations or the rear areas of the Seventeenth Army), some of them came down to me, and I passed them on to the Ic; and the whole time, of course, the Einsatzkommando maintained its own direct relations with the AOK. I didn’t have much work to do. I took advantage of this: Pyatigorsk was a pleasant town, there were lots of things to see. Accompanied by Voss, always curious, I went to visit the local museum, located a little below the Hotel Bristol, across from the post office and Tsvetnik Park. There were some fine collections there, accumulated in the course of decades by the Kavkazskoe Gornoe Obshchestvo, an association of amateur but enthusiastic naturalists: they had brought back from their expeditions heaps of stuffed animals, minerals, skulls, plants, dried flowers; old gravestones and pagan idols; moving photographs in black-and-white, representing mostly elegant gentlemen in cravats, celluloid collars, and straw boaters perched on the steep slope of a peak; and (I remembered my father’s office with delight) a whole wall of large cases of butterflies containing hundreds of specimens, each one labeled with the date and place of its capture, the name of the collector, and the sex and scientific name of the butterfly. They came from Kislovodsk, from Adyghea, from Chechnya, as far as Daghestan and Adjaria; the dates were 1923, 1915, 1909. At night, we sometimes went to the Teatr Operetty, another eccentric building, decorated with red ceramic tiles embossed with books, musical instruments, and garlands, and recently reopened by the Wehrmacht; then we would dine at the mess or in a café or at the Kasino, which was none other than the old hotel-restaurant Restoratsiya where Pechorin met Mary and where, as a plaque in Russian that Voss translated for me indicated, Lev Tolstoy celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday. The Soviets had turned it into a Central Government Institute of Balneology; the Wehrmacht had left this impressive title on the pediment, in gold letters above the massive columns, but had returned the building to its original use, and you could drink dry wine from Kakhetia there and eat shashlik and sometimes even venison; there, too, I introduced Voss to Hohenegg and they spent the evening discussing the origins of the names of diseases, in five languages.

  Around the middle of the month, a dispatch from the Group shed some light on the situation. The Führer had in fact approved the setting up, for the Kuban-Caucasus, of a military administration under OKHG A, headed by the General der Kavallerie Ernst Köstring. The Ostministerium was detaching a high functionary to serve with this administration, but the creation of the Reichskommissariat was delayed indefinitely. Even more surprising, the OKH had ordered the OKHG to form autonomous territorial entities for the Cossacks and the different mountain peoples; the kolkhozes would be dissolved and forced labor prohibited: the systematic opposite of our policy in the Ukraine. That seemed to me too intelligent to be true. I had to return urgently to Voroshilovsk to attend a meeting: the HSSPF wanted to discuss the new decrees. All the leaders of the Kommandos were present, with most of their adjuncts. Korsemann seemed worried. “The disturbing thing is that the Führer made this decision at the beginning of August; but I myself was only informed of it yesterday. It’s incomprehensible.”—“The OKH must be worried about SS interference,” Bierkamp said.—“But why?” Korsemann plaintively asked. “Our collaboration is excellent.”—“The SS spent a lot of time cultivating good relations with the Reichskommissar-designate. For the time being, all that work has gone up in smoke.”—“In Maikop,” interrupted Schultz, Braune’s replacement who’d been nicknamed Eisbein-Paule because of his girth, “they say the Wehrmacht will keep control of the oil installations.”—“I will also point out to you, Brigadeführer,” Bierkamp added, addressing Korsemann, “that if these ‘local self-governments’ are established, they will control police functions in their district themselves. From our point of view, that is unacceptable.” The discussion went on in this vein for a while; the consensus seemed to be that the SS had been well and truly taken in. Finally we were dismissed and instructed to gather as much information as possible.

  In Pyatigorsk, I had begun to develop tolerable relations with some officers in the Kommando. Hohenegg had left, and aside from the officers of the Abwehr, I saw almost no one except Voss. At night, I sometimes met SS officers in the Kasino. Turek of course never spoke to me; as for Dr. Müller, ever since I’d heard him publicly explain why he didn’t like the gas truck, but found execution by firing squad much more gemütlich, I had decided that we wouldn’t have much to say to each other. But among the subordinate officers there were some decent men, even if they were often boring. One night, as I was having a brandy with Voss, Obersturmführer Dr. Kern came over and I invited him to join us. I introduced him to Voss: “Oh, so you’re the linguist from the AOK,” said Kern.—“Apparently so,” Voss replied with amusement.—“That’s good,” said Kern, “I wanted to submit a case to you. They tell me you know the peoples of the Caucasus well.”—“A little,” Voss admitted.—“Professor Kern teaches in Munich,” I interrupted. “He is a specialist in Muslim history.”—“That’s an extremely interesting subject,” Voss approved.—“Yes, I spent seven years in Turkey and I know a little about it,” Kern said.—“How did you end up here, then?”—“Like everyone else, I was mobilized. I was already a member of the SS and a correspondent of the SD, and I ended up in the Einsatz.”—“I see. And your case?”—“A young woman they brought me. A redhead, very beautiful, charming. Her neighbors denounced her as Jewish. She showed me an internal Soviet passport, delivered in Derbent, where her nationality is inscribed as Tatka. I checked in our files: according to our experts, the Tats are assimilated with the Bergjuden, the Mountain Jews. But the girl told me I was mistaken and that the Tats were a Turkic people. I had her speak: she has a curious dialect, a little hard to understand, but it was indeed a Turkic language. So I let her go.”—“Do you remember the terms or expressions she used?” An entire conversation in Turkish ensued: “That can’t be it exactly,” Voss said, “are you sure?” and they started up again. Finally Voss declared: “According to what you’re describing, it does in fact more or less resemble the vernacular Turkic spoken in the Caucasus before the Bolsheviks imposed Russian. I read they still used it in Daghestan, especially in Derbent. But all the peoples there speak it. Did you take down her name?” Kern pulled a notebook out of his pocket and leafed through it: “Here it is. Tsokota, Nina Shaulovna.”—“Tsokota?” said Voss, knitting his brows. “That’s strange.”—“It’s her husband’s name,” Kern explained.�
�“Oh, I see. And tell me, if she is Jewish, what will you do with her?” Kern looked surprised: “Well, we…we…” He was visibly hesitating. I came to his aid: “She’ll be transported elsewhere.”—“I see,” said Voss. He thought a moment and then said to Kern: “To my knowledge, the Tats have their own language, which is an Iranian dialect and has nothing to do with Caucasian languages or with Turkish. There are Muslim Tats; in Derbent, I don’t know, but I’ll look into it.”—“Thank you,” said Kern. “You think I should have kept her?”—“Not at all. I’m sure you did the right thing.” Kern looked reassured; he had obviously not grasped the irony in Voss’s last words. We chatted a little longer and he took his leave. Voss watched him leave with a puzzled look. “Your colleagues are a little strange,” he said finally.—“How do you mean?”—“They sometimes ask disconcerting questions.” I shrugged my shoulders: “They’re doing their work.” Voss shook his head: “Your methods seem a little arbitrary to me. But it’s not my business.” He seemed displeased. “When will we go to the Lermontov Museum?” I asked to change the subject.—“Whenever you like. Sunday?”—“If the weather is nice, you can take me to see the place of the duel.”