As we walked, the thought of my mother returned to me violently, rushing, barging about my head like a drunken woman. For a long time, I had not had such thoughts. When I spoke about it to Partenau, in the Crimea, I had stuck to the facts, the ones that counted least. Here it was another order of thoughts, bitter, full of hate, tinged with shame. When had that begun? When I was born? Was it possible that I had never forgiven her for the fact of my birth, that insanely arrogant right she had granted herself to bring me into the world? One strange fact: I had turned out to be acutely allergic to her breast milk; as she herself had told me much later on, offhandedly, I was allowed only baby bottles, and I watched my twin sister breastfeed with a look full of bitterness. But in my early childhood I must have loved her, as all children love their mothers. I still remember the tender, female odor of her bathroom, which plunged me into numb delight, like a return to the lost womb: it must have been, if I thought about it, a mixture of the humid vapor of the bath, of perfumes, soaps, maybe too the smell of her sex and maybe too that of her shit; even when she didn’t let me get into the bath with her, I never got enough of sitting on the edge of the tub, near her, blissfully. Then everything had changed. But when, exactly, and why? I hadn’t blamed it right away on the disappearance of my father: that idea didn’t come till later on, when she prostituted herself to that Moreau. But even before meeting him, she had begun to behave in ways that sent me into a wild rage. Was it my father’s departure? It’s hard to say, but the pain seemed sometimes to drive her mad. One night, in Kiel, she had gone all alone into a worker’s café, near the docks, and had gotten drunk, surrounded by foreigners, dock workers, sailors. It’s even possible that she sat down on a table and lifted her skirt, exposing her sex. Whatever the case, things got scandalously out of hand, till the
lady got thrown out into the street, where she fell into a puddle. A policeman brought her home, soaking, disheveled, her dress filthy; I thought I would die of shame. Little as I was—I must have been about ten—I wanted to beat her, and she wouldn’t even have been able to defend herself, but my sister intervened: “Have pity on her. She’s sad. She doesn’t deserve your anger.” I took a long time to calm down. But even then I must not have hated her, not yet; I was just humiliated. The hatred must have come later, when she forgot her husband and sacrificed her children to give herself to a stranger. Of course that didn’t happen in one day, there were several stages on the way. Moreau, as I’ve said, was not a bad man, and in the beginning he made great efforts to be accepted by us; but he was a narrow-minded fellow, a prisoner of his coarse bourgeois, capitalist concepts, slave to his desire for my mother, who soon turned out to be more masculine than he; thus, he willingly became an accomplice to her erring ways. Then there was that great catastrophe, after which I was sent away to boarding school; there were also more traditional conflicts, like the one that broke out when I was finishing high school. I was about to pass my baccalauréat, I had to make a decision about what to do afterward; I wanted to study philosophy and literature, but my mother firmly refused: “You have to have a profession. Do you think we’ll always live on the kindness of others? Afterward, you can do what you like.” And Moreau said mockingly: “What? Teacher in some godforsaken village for ten years? A two-cent, half-starved hack? You’re no Rousseau, my boy, come back to earth.” God how I hated them. “You have to have a career,” Moreau said. “Afterward, if you want to write poems in your spare time, that’s your business. But at least you’ll earn enough to feed your family.” That lasted for more than a week; running away wouldn’t have done any good, I would have been caught, as when I had tried to run away before. I had to give in. Both of them decided on enrolling me in the École libre des sciences politiques, from which I could have entered one of the major government branches: Conseil d’État, the accounts court, the Inspection générale des finances. I would be a civil servant, a mandarin: a member, they hoped, of the elite. “It will not be easy,” Moreau explained to me, “you’ll have to work hard”; but he had connections in Paris, he would help me. Ah, things didn’t happen as they wished and hoped: the mandarins of France now were serving my country; and I had ended up here, in the frozen ruins of Stalingrad, and probably for good. My sister had more luck: she was a girl, and what she wished didn’t count as much; just finishing touches, to appeal to her future husband. They allowed her to go freely to Zurich to study psychology with a certain Dr. Carl Jung, who has become quite well-known since then.