The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

  I liked the well-regulated life on this beautiful, bare, cold island, all grays, yellows, and pale blues; there were just enough sharp edges to cling to there, to keep from being carried away by the wind, but not too many, so you didn’t risk getting scraped. Thomas came to see me; he brought me gifts, a bottle of French Cognac and a fine leather-bound edition of Nietzsche; but I wasn’t allowed to drink, and I would have been quite incapable of reading: all meaning fled, and the alphabet mocked me. I thanked him and tucked away his gifts in a chest of drawers. The insignia on the collar of his handsome black uniform now bore, over the four diamonds embroidered in silver thread, two bars, and a chevron adorned the center of his epaulettes: he had been promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer, and I too, he informed me, had been promoted, the Reichsführer had explained it to me when I received my medal, but I hadn’t remembered this detail. I was now a German hero, the Schwarzes Korps had published an article about me; my decoration, which I had never looked at, was the Iron Cross, first class (at the same time I had also received the second class, retroactively). I had no idea what I could have done to deserve this, but Thomas, happy and voluble, was already bubbling over with information and gossip: Schellenberg had finally taken Jost’s place at the head of Amt VI, Best had gotten himself kicked out of France by the Wehrmacht, but the Führer had appointed him plenipotentiary to Denmark; and the Reichsführer had finally made up his mind to appoint a replacement for Heydrich, Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner, the big scarred ogre I had seen standing beside him in my room. The name meant almost nothing to me, I knew he had been HSSPF-Danube and that he was generally thought of as an insignificant man; Thomas seemed delighted with the choice, Kaltenbrunner was almost “a neighbor,” spoke the same dialect as he did, and had already invited him to dinner. Thomas himself had been appointed Deputy Gruppenleiter of IV A, under Panzinger, Müller’s deputy. These details to tell the truth did not arouse much interest in me, but I had learned to be polite, and I congratulated him, since he seemed very pleased, both with his lot and with his person. He humorously told me about the grandiose funeral of the Sixth Army; officially, everyone, from Paulus to the lowest Gefreiter, had resisted to the death; in fact, only one general, Hartmann, had been killed under fire, and only one (Stempel) had chosen suicide; the twenty-two others, including Paulus, had ended up in Soviet hands. “They’re going to turn them inside out like gloves,” Thomas said lightly. “You’ll see.” For three days, all the radios of the Reich had suspended their broadcasts to play funeral music. “The worst was Bruckner. The Seventh. Nonstop. Impossible to escape it. I thought I’d go mad.” He also told me, but almost in passing, how I had gotten there: I listened to his story attentively, and so I can report it, but even less than the rest, I could connect it with nothing; it remained a story, a truthful one no doubt, but a story all the same, scarcely more than a series of phrases that fit together according to a mysterious and arbitrary order, ruled by a logic that had little to do with the one that allowed me, here and now, to breathe the salty air of the Baltic, to feel the wind on my face when they took me out, to bring spoonfuls of soup from the bowl to my mouth, then to open my anus when the time came to evacuate the waste. According to this story, which I am not altering in any way, I had walked away from Thomas and the others, toward the Russian lines and an exposed zone, without paying the slightest attention to their shouts; before they could catch up to me, there was a gunshot, just one, that had knocked me to the ground. Ivan had courageously broken cover to pull my body to safety, he too had been shot at, but the bullet had gone through his sleeve without touching him. As for me—and here Thomas’s version confirmed the explanations of the doctor in Hohenlychen—the shot had hit me in the head; but, to the surprise of those pressed around me, I was still breathing. They had carried me to a first-aid station; there, the doctor declared he couldn’t do anything, but since I persisted in breathing, he sent me to Gumrak, where they had the best surgical unit in the Kessel. Thomas had requisitioned a vehicle and transported me there himself, then, thinking he had done everything he could, he left me. That same night he had received his departure orders. But the next day, Gumrak, the main runway since the fall of Pitomnik, also had to evacuate in front of the Russian advance. So he went up to Stalingradsky, from which a few planes were still leaving; while he waited, for lack of anything better to do, he visited the field hospital set up in some tents and found me there, unconscious, my head bandaged, but still breathing like a pair of bellows. A nurse, in exchange for a cigarette, told him that they had operated on me in Gumrak, he didn’t know much about it, there had been some kind of altercation, and then a little later the surgeon had been killed by a mortar shell that fell on the unit, but I was still alive, and as an officer, I was entitled to consideration; during the evacuation, they had put me in a vehicle and brought me here. Thomas had wanted to have me put on a plane, but the Feldgendarmen refused, since the red characters of my VERWUNDETE label meant “Untransportable.” “I couldn’t wait, because my plane was leaving. And also the shelling was starting up again. So I found a guy who was really smashed up but who had an ordinary label, and I switched it with yours. He wouldn’t have made it anyway. Then I had you put with the wounded by the runway, and I left. They loaded you onto the next plane, one of the last. You should have seen their faces, in Melitopol, when I arrived. No one wanted to shake my hand, they were too afraid of the lice. Except for Manstein, he shook everyone’s hand. Aside from me there was almost no one except Panzer officers. Not surprising, given that Hube wrote up the lists for Milch. You can’t trust anyone.” I let myself fall back onto the cushions and closed my eyes. “Aside from us, who else got out?”—“Aside from us? Only Weidner, you remember? From the Gestapostelle. Möritz also received orders, but we never found a trace of him. We’re not even sure he was able to leave.”—“And the little guy, there? Your colleague, the one who got hit by shrapnel and was so happy?”—“Vopel? He was evacuated before you were even wounded, but his Heinkel was shot down at takeoff by a Sturmovik.”—“And Ivan?” He produced a silver cigarette holder: “Mind if I smoke? No?—Ivan? Well, he stayed, of course. You don’t really think they’d have given a German’s place to a Ukrainian?”—“I don’t know. He was fighting for us too.” He dragged on his cigarette and said, smiling: “You’re indulging in misplaced idealism. I see that your shot in the head hasn’t set you right. You should be happy to be alive.” Happy to be alive? That seemed as incongruous to me as rejoicing at being born.

  Every day, more wounded arrived: they came from Kursk, from Rostov, from Kharkov, recaptured one after the other by the Soviets, from Kasserine too; and a few words with the newcomers said much more about the current situation than the military communiqués. These communiqués, which were delivered to us in the common rooms over little loudspeakers, were introduced by the overture to Bach’s cantata Ein Feste Burg ist unser Gott; but the Wehrmacht used the arrangement by Wilhelm Friedmann Bach, Johann Sebastian’s dissolute son, who had added three trumpets and a kettledrum to his father’s austere orchestration, an ample enough pretext, by my lights, to flee the room each time, thus avoiding being drugged by the flood of lulling euphemisms, which sometimes lasted a good twenty minutes. I wasn’t the only one to show a certain aversion to these communiqués; a nurse whom I often found at those times ostensibly busy out on a terrace explained to me one day that most Germans had first heard of the encirclement of the Sixth Army at the same time as its destruction, and that this had done little to temper the shock on morale. It had had an effect on the life of the Volksgemeinschaft; people were openly talking and criticizing; a semblance of a student rebellion had even broken out in Munich. That, of course, I had not learned from the radio or from the nurses or from the patients, but from Thomas, who was now well placed to be informed about this sort of event. Subversive pamphlets had been distributed, defeatist slogans painted on the walls; the Gestapo had to intervene vigorously, and they had already condemned and executed the ringleaders, mos
t of them idealistic youth gone astray. Among the minor consequences of this catastrophe would have to be counted, alas, the sensational return to the forefront of the political scene of Dr. Goebbels: his renewed declaration of total war, in the Sportpalast, had been broadcast to us on the radio, no possibility of escaping it; in a rest house belonging to the SS, they unfortunately took this sort of thing very seriously.

  The handsome Waffen-SS who filled the rooms were for the most part in a piteous state: often they were missing pieces of arms or legs, or even a jaw; the atmosphere wasn’t always very cheerful. But I noticed with interest that despite what the most casual reflection on the facts or the studying of a map could suggest, their faith in the Endsieg and their veneration of the Führer remained for the most part intact. This wasn’t the case for everyone; some people, in Germany, were clearly beginning to draw objective conclusions from the facts and from the maps; I had discussed this with Thomas, and he had even led me to understand that there were some, like Schellenberg, who thought through the logical consequences of their conclusions, and who were considering acting on that basis. I didn’t discuss any of this, of course, with my comrades in misfortune: to demoralize them even more, thoughtlessly to take away from them the foundation of their wounded lives, would have made no sense to me. I was regaining my strength: I could now get dressed by myself, walk on the beach on my own, in the wind under the harsh calls of the seagulls; my left hand was finally beginning to obey me. Around the end of the month (all this happened in February 1943), the chief doctor of the establishment, after examining me, asked me if I felt able to leave: with everything that was happening, they were short on space, and I could just as easily finish my convalescence with my family. I amiably explained to him that returning to my family wasn’t an option, but that if he liked, I would leave; I’d go to the city, to a hotel. The papers he handed me gave me three months’ leave. So I took the train and went to Berlin. There I rented a room in a good hotel, the Eden, on the Budapesterstrasse: a spacious suite with a sitting room, a bedroom, and a beautiful tiled bathroom; hot water, here, wasn’t rationed, and every day I slipped into the bathtub and emerged an hour later with my skin bright red, and collapsed naked onto my bed, my heart pounding wildly. There were also French windows and a narrow balcony looking out onto the zoo: in the morning, as I got up and drank my tea, I would watch the keepers make their rounds and feed the animals; I took great pleasure in this. Of course, all this was on the expensive side; but I had received all at once my back wages accumulated over twenty-one months; with the bonuses, that made a tidy little sum, I could easily indulge myself and spend a little. I ordered a magnificent black uniform from Thomas’s tailor, onto which I had my new Sturmbannführer stripes sewn and to which I pinned my medals (along with the Iron Cross and my War Service Cross, I had received some minor medals: for my wound, for the ’41–’42 winter campaign, a little late, and a medal from the NSDAP, which they gave out to pretty much anyone); although I don’t like uniforms much, I had to admit that I cut a dashing figure, and it was a joy to stroll about town like this, my cap a little askew, my gloves held negligently in my hand; seeing me, who would have thought that I was actually nothing but a bureaucrat? The city, since I had left, had changed its appearance quite a bit. Everywhere the measures taken against the English air raids had disfigured it: a huge oversize circus tent, made of netting camouflaged with strips of cloth and fir tree tops, covered the Ost-West-Achse from the Brandenburg Gate to the end of the Tiergarten, darkening the avenue even in the middle of the day; the Victory Column, draped in netting, had had its gold leaf replaced by an awful brown paint; on Adolf-Hitler-Platz and elsewhere, they had set up dummy buildings, vast theater sets beneath which the cars and trams circulated; and a fantastic construction overlooked the zoo near my hotel, as if risen out of a nightmare—an immense medieval fort made of concrete, bristling with cannons that were supposed to protect humans and animals from the British Luftmörder; I was curious to see this monstrosity at work. But it should be said that the attacks, which already at that time were terrifying the population, were still nothing compared with what would come later on. Almost all the good restaurants had been closed in the name of total mobilization; Göring had tried his best to protect Horcher, his favorite place, and had posted a guard in front of it, but Goebbels, acting in his capacity as Gauleiter of Berlin, had organized a spontaneous demonstration of the anger of the people, during which they had broken all its windows; and Göring had had to cave in. Thomas and I weren’t the only ones to laugh at this incident: failing a real “Stalingrad” diet, a little abstinence wouldn’t harm the Reichsmarschall. Thomas, fortunately, knew several private clubs, exempt from the new regulations: there you could stuff yourself on lobster or oysters, which were expensive but not rationed, and drink Champagne, which was strictly limited in France itself but not in Germany; fish, alas, was still nowhere to be found, as well as beer. These places sometimes displayed a curious spirit, given the general mood: at the Golden Horseshoe they had a black hostess, and the female customers could ride horseback on a little circus ring, to show off their legs; at the Jockey Club the orchestra played American music; you couldn’t dance, but the bar was decorated with photographs of Hollywood stars, and even of Leslie Howard.

  I soon realized that the gaiety that had taken hold of me when I arrived in Berlin was but a thin veneer; beneath it, everything was terribly fragile, I felt made of a sandy substance that could break up at the slightest gust. Wherever I looked, the sight of ordinary life, the crowd in the trolleys or the S-Bahn, the laughter of an elegant woman, the satisfied creasing of a newspaper, struck me like contact with a sharp sliver of glass. I had the feeling that the hole in my forehead had opened up a third eye, a pineal eye, one not turned to the sun, not capable of contemplating the blinding light of the sun, but directed at the darkness, gifted with the power of looking at the bare face of death, and of grasping this face behind each face of flesh and blood, beneath the smiles, through the palest, healthiest skin, the most laughing eyes. The disaster was already there and they didn’t realize it, since the disaster is the very idea of the disaster to come, which ruins everything long before term. At bottom, I repeated to myself with a hollow bitterness, it’s only the first nine months that you’re peaceful, and after that the archangel with the flaming sword chases you forever out through the door marked Lasciate ogni speranza, and you want only one single thing, to go back, then time keeps pushing you pitilessly forward, and in the end there is nothing, nothing at all. There was nothing original about these thoughts, they could have come to the lowliest soldier lost in the frozen waters of the East, who knows, when he listens to the silence, that death is near, and who perceives the infinite value of each intake of breath, of each heartbeat, of the cold, brittle sensation of the air, of the miracle of daylight. But the distance from the front is like a thick layer of moral fat, and looking at these satisfied people, I sometimes felt short of breath, I wanted to cry out. I went to the barber: there, suddenly, in front of the mirror, incongruous, fear. It was a white, clean, sterile, modern room, a discreetly expensive salon; one or two clients were occupying the other chairs. The barber had put a long black smock on me, and beneath this garment my heart was pounding, my intestines sank into a wet cold, panic drowned my whole body, the tips of my fingers prickled. I looked at my face: it was calm, but behind this calm, fear had erased everything. I closed my eyes: snip, snip, went the barber’s patient little scissors in my ear. On my way home, I had this thought: Yes, go on repeating to yourself that everything will be fine, you never know, you might end up convincing yourself. But I did not manage to convince myself, I was vacillating. I had no physical symptoms such as those I had experienced in the Ukraine or in Stalingrad: I wasn’t overcome with nausea, I didn’t vomit, my digestion was perfectly normal. Only, in the street, I felt as if I were walking on glass that was ready at any instant to shatter beneath my feet. Living required a sustained attention to things, which exhausted me.
In the calm little streets near the Landwehrkanal, I found, on a windowsill on the ground floor, a long woman’s glove in blue satin. Without thinking, I took it and went on walking. I wanted to try it on; of course it was too small, but the texture of the satin excited me. I imagined the hand that must have worn this glove: this thought disturbed me. I wasn’t going to keep it; but to get rid of it I needed another window, with a little wrought-iron railing around the sill, preferably in an old building; yet in this street there were only shops, with silent, closed store-fronts. Finally, just before my hotel, I found the right window. The shutters were closed; I gently deposited the glove in the middle of the ledge, like an offering. Two days later the shutters were still closed, and the glove was still there, an opaque, discreet sign, which was certainly trying to tell me something, but what?