In the train from Potsdam, I watched her, dominated by a feeling of loss, as if I had sunk and had never come back to the surface. And what was she thinking about? Her face hadn’t changed since that night in Zurich, it had simply filled out a little; but it remained closed to me, inaccessible; behind it, there was another life. We passed between the elegant residences in Charlottenburg; then came the zoo and the Tiergarten. “You know,” I said, “since I got to Berlin I haven’t even been to the zoo yet.”—“But you used to like zoos.”—“Yes. I should go for a walk there.” We got out at the Lehrter Hauptbahnhof and I took a taxi to accompany her to the Wilhelmplatz. “Do you want to have dinner with me?” I asked her in front of the entrance to the Kaiserhof. “Yes,” she replied, “but now I have to go see Berndt.” We agreed to meet in two hours, and I went back to my hotel to bathe and change. I felt exhausted. Her words were confused with my memories, my memories with my dreams, and my dreams with my most insane thoughts. I remembered her cruel Shakespeare quotation: so had she too joined our mother’s camp? It was undoubtedly the influence of her husband, the Baltic baron. I said to myself with rage: She should have remained a virgin, like me. The incoherence of this thought made me burst out laughing, a long crazy laughter; at the same time I wanted to cry. At the appointed time, I was at the Kaiserhof. Una joined me in the lobby, among the comfortable square armchairs and little potted palm trees; she wore the same clothes as in the afternoon. “Berndt is resting,” she said. She too felt tired and we decided to stay and eat at the hotel. Ever since the restaurants had reopened, a new directive from Goebbels enjoined them to offer customers Feldküchengerichte, field rations, in solidarity with the troops at the front; the maître d’hôtel’s gaze, while he explained that to us, remained fixed on my medals, and my expression made him stutter; Una’s cheerful laughter cut his embarrassment short: “I think my brother has already eaten enough of that.”—“Yes, of course,” he hastened to say. “We also have some venison from the Black Forest. With a prune sauce. It’s excellent.”—“Fine,” I said. “And some French wine.”—“Burgundy, with the venison?” During the meal we chatted about this and that, skirting around what concerned us most. I talked to her again about Russia, not the horrors, but my more human experiences: Hanika’s death, and especially about Voss: “You liked him a lot.”—“Yes. He was a decent fellow.” She spoke to me about the matrons who had been pestering her since she arrived in Berlin. With her husband, she had gone to parties and society dinners, where wives of high-ranking Party dignitaries decried deserters from the reproduction front, the childless women guilty of treason against nature for their childbearing strike. She laughed: “Of course, no one had the gall to attack me directly, everyone can see the state Berndt is in. Luckily, because otherwise I would have slapped them. But they were dying of curiosity, they came prowling around me without daring to ask me right out if he can function.” She laughed again and drank a little wine. I kept quiet; I too had asked myself the same question. “There’s even one, just picture this, a fat Gauleiter’s wife dripping with diamonds, with a bluish permanent, who had the nerve to suggest, if someday it should become necessary, that I go find a handsome SS man to impregnate me. How did she phrase it? A decent, dolichocephalic, völkisch will-bearing, physically and psychically healthy man. She explained to me that there was an SS office that was in charge of eugenic assistance and that I could apply to it for help. Is that true?”—“So they say. It’s a project of the Reichsführer’s called Lebensborn. But I don’t know how it works.”—“They’ve really gone mad. Are you sure it’s not just a brothel for SS officers and socialites?”—“No, no, it’s something else.” She shook her head. “Anyway, you’ll love the punchline: You won’t receive your child from the Holy Ghost, she said to me. I had to keep myself from replying that in any case I didn’t know any SS officer patriotic enough to impregnate her.” She laughed again and kept drinking. She had scarcely touched her food but had already drunk almost an entire bottle of wine on her own; still, her gaze remained clear, she wasn’t drunk. For dessert, the maître d’hôtel suggested grapefruit: I hadn’t tasted any since the beginning of the war. “They come from Spain,” he said. Una didn’t want any; she watched me prepare mine and eat it; I gave her a few pieces to try, lightly sprinkled with sugar. Then I accompanied her back to the lobby. I looked at her, with the taste of sweet grapefruit still in my mouth: “Do you share his bedroom?”—“No,” she replied, “that would be too complicated.” She hesitated, then touched the back of my hand with her oval nails: “If you like, come up and have a drink. But behave. Afterward, you have to leave.” In the bedroom, I put my cap on a table and sat down in an armchair. Una took her shoes off and, crossing the carpet in silk stockings, poured me some Cognac; then she sat on the bed with her feet crossed and lit a cigarette. “I didn’t know you smoked.”—“From time to time,” she replied. “When I drink.” I thought she was more beautiful than anything in the world. I talked to her about my plans for a position in France, and the difficulties I was encountering. “You should ask Berndt,” she said. “He has a lot of friends in high places in the Wehrmacht, comrades from the other war. Maybe he could do something for you.” These words unleashed my suppressed anger: “Berndt! He’s all you talk about.”—“Calm down, Max. He’s my husband.” I got up and began pacing up and down the room. “I don’t give a damn! He’s an intruder, he has no business getting between us.”—“Max.” She was still talking softly; her eyes remained serene. “He is not between us. The us you’re talking about does not exist, it no longer exists, it’s come undone. Berndt is my everyday life, you have to understand that.” My rage was so mixed with my desire that I no longer knew where one began and the other ended. I went up to her and took both her arms: “Kiss me.” She shook her head; for the first time, I saw a harsh look in her eyes. “You’re not going to start that again.” I felt sick, I was suffocating; overcome, I fell down next to the bed, my head against her knees as on a chopping block. “In Zurich, you kissed me,” I sobbed.—“In Zurich I was drunk.” She moved over and put her hand on the bedspread. “Come here. Lie down next to me.” Still with my boots on, I climbed onto the bed and lay curled up against her legs. I thought I could smell her odor through the stockings. She caressed my hair. “My poor little brother,” she murmured. Laughing through my tears, I managed to say: “You call me that because you were born fifteen minutes before me, because it was your wrist they tied the red thread to.”—“Yes, but there’s another difference: now I’m a woman, and you’re still a little boy.” In Zurich, things had gone differently. She had drunk a lot, as had I. After the meal we had gone out. Outside, it was cold and she shivered; she was staggering a little, so I put my arm around her and she clung to me. “Come with me,” I had said. “To my hotel.” She protested in a thickish voice: “Don’t be stupid, Max. We’re not children anymore.”—“Come,” I insisted. “To talk a little.” But we were in Switzerland and even in that kind of hotel the concierges made difficulties: “I’m sorry, mein Herr. Only guests of the establishment are allowed into the rooms. You can go to the bar, if you like.” Una turned toward it, but I held her back. “No. I don’t want to see people. Let’s go to your place.” She didn’t resist and brought me back to her little student’s room, cluttered with books, freezing. “Why don’t you heat it more?” I asked, clearing away the inside of the stove to prepare a fire. She shrugged her shoulders and showed me a bottle of white wine from the Valais. “That’s all I have. Is it all right with you?”—“Anything is all right with me.” I opened the bottle and filled to the brim two glasses she held out, laughing. She drank, then sat down on the bed. I felt tense, strained; I went to the table and examined the spines of the piled-up books. Most of the names were unknown to me. I took one at random. Una saw it and laughed again, a sharp laughter that set my nerves on edge. “Oh, Rank! Rank is good.”—“Who is he?”—“A former disciple of Freud, a friend of Ferenczi. He wrote a fine book on incest.” I turned toward her a
nd stared at her. She stopped laughing. “Why do you say that word?” I said finally. She shrugged her shoulders and held out her glass. “Stop with your nonsense,” she said. “Pour me some more wine instead.” I put the book down and took the bottle: “It’s not nonsense.” She shrugged her shoulders again. I poured wine into her glass and she drank. I went up to her, my hand outstretched to touch her hair, her beautiful thick black hair. “Una…” She brushed my hand away. “Stop, Max.” She was swaying slightly and I put my hand under her hair, stroked her cheek, her neck. She stiffened but didn’t push my hand away; she drank some more. “What do you want, Max?”—“I want everything to be like before,” I said gently, my heart pounding.—“That’s impossible.” She clicked her teeth a little and drank again. “Even before wasn’t like before. Before never existed.” She was rambling, her eyes were closed. “Pour me some more wine.”—“No.” I took her glass and leaned over to kiss her lips. She pushed me harshly away, but the gesture made her lose her balance and she fell back onto the bed. I put her glass down and lay down next to her. She had stopped moving, her stockinged legs hung off the bed, her skirt had risen up over her knees. The blood was beating in my temples, I was overwhelmed, at that moment I loved her more than ever, more even than I had loved her in our mother’s womb, and she had to love me too, now and forevermore. I leaned over her, and she didn’t resist.
I must have fallen asleep; when I woke up, the room was dark. I didn’t know where I was anymore, Zurich or Berlin. No light filtered through the blackout curtains. I could vaguely make out a shape next to me: Una had slipped under the sheets and was sleeping. I spent a long while listening to her gentle, even breathing. Then, with infinite slowness, I brushed back a lock of hair from her ear and leaned over her face. I stayed there without touching her, breathing in her skin and her breath still tinged with the smell of cigarette. Finally I got up and, tiptoeing on the rug, went out. In the street I realized I had forgotten my cap, but I didn’t go back up; I asked the porter to call a taxi for me. In my room at the hotel, the memories kept flowing in, feeding my insomnia, but now they were brutal, confused, hideous memories. As adults, we visited a kind of Torture Museum; there were all kinds of whips there, tongs, an “iron maiden of Nuremberg,” and a guillotine in the back room. At the sight of that instrument my sister flushed bright crimson: “I want to lie down on it.” The room was empty; I went to see the guard and slipped him a bill: “That’s to leave us alone for twenty minutes.”—“Fine,” he agreed with a slight smile. I closed the door and heard him turn the key. Una had stretched out on the bed of the guillotine; I lifted the lunette, made her put her head through it, and closed it on her long neck, after carefully lifting her heavy hair. She was panting. I tied her hands behind her back with my belt, then raised her skirt. I didn’t even bother to lower her panties, just pushed the lace to one side and spread her buttocks with both hands: in the slit, nestling in hair, her anus gently contracted. I spit on it. “No,” she protested. I took out my penis, lay on top of her, and thrust it in. She gave a long stifled cry. I was crushing her with all my weight; because of the awkward position—my pants were hindering my legs—I could only move in little jerks. Leaning over the lunette, my own neck beneath the blade, I whispered to her: “I’m going to pull the lever, I’m going to let the blade drop.” She begged me: “Please, fuck my pussy.”—“No.” I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg. But this memory is dubious, after our childhood we had seen each other only once, that time in Zurich, and in Zurich there was no guillotine, I don’t know, it was probably a dream, an old dream perhaps that, in my confusion, alone in my dark room at the Eden Hotel, I had remembered, or even a dream dreamt that night, during a brief moment of sleep, almost unnoticed. I was angry, for the day, despite all my distress, had remained shot through with purity for me, and now these foul images were coming and soiling it. It repelled me but at the same time troubled me, since I knew that, memory or image or fantasy or dream, this also lived inside me, and that my love must have been made of this too.
In the morning, around ten o’clock, a bellboy knocked on my door: “Herr Sturmbannführer, a phone call for you.” I went down to reception and took the receiver; Una’s joyful voice resounded at the other end: “Max! Can you come have lunch with us? Say yes. Berndt wants to meet you.”—“All right. Where?”—“At Borchardt’s. You know it? On Französischestrasse. At one o’clock. If you get there before us, give our name, I’ve reserved a table.” I went back up to shave and shower. Since I didn’t have my cap anymore I dressed in civilian clothes, with my Iron Cross on my jacket pocket. I arrived early and asked for Freiherr von Üxküll: they led me to a table set a little back and I ordered a glass of wine. Pensive, still saddened by the images from the night before, I thought about my sister’s strange marriage, her strange husband. It had taken place in 1938, when I was finishing my studies. After the night in Zurich, my sister wrote to me only rarely; that year, in the spring, I had received a long letter from her. She told me that in the fall of 1935, she had become very ill. She had gone into analysis, but her depression had only gotten worse, and they had sent her to a sanatorium near Davos to rest and regain her strength. She had stayed there for several months and, in the beginning of 1936, had met a man there, a composer. They had seen each other regularly since then and were going to get married. I hope you will be happy for me, she wrote.
This letter had left me prostrate for many days. I stopped going to the university and didn’t leave my room anymore; I stayed on the bed, facing the wall. So, I said to myself, that’s what it all comes to. They talk to you about love, but at the first opportunity, at the prospect of a nice happy bourgeois marriage, upsy-daisy, they roll onto their backs and spread their legs. Oh, my bitterness was immense. It seemed to me the inevitable end of an old story that pursued me relentlessly: the story of my family, which had almost always persisted in destroying any trace of love in my life. I had never felt so alone. When I recovered a little, I wrote her a stiff, conventional letter, congratulating her and wishing her all happiness.
The Kindly Ones Page 57
