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?
Thomas must have begun to guess my state of mind, since after the first few days, I stopped calling him and going out to dinner with him; to tell the truth, I preferred to wander around the city, or contemplate the lions, giraffes, and elephants in the zoo from my balcony, or else float in my luxurious bathtub, wasting hot water without the slightest shame. In his commendable anxiety to entertain me, Thomas asked me to go out with a young woman, a secretary of the Führer’s who was spending her leave in Berlin and didn’t know many people there; out of politeness, I didn’t want to refuse. I took her to dinner at the Hotel Kempinsky: even though the dishes had been given idiotic patriotic names, the cuisine was still excellent, and at the sight of my medals, they didn’t bother me much with rationing issues. The young woman, whose name was Grete V., greedily fell upon the oysters, sliding them one after the other between her rows of teeth: in Rastenburg, apparently, they didn’t eat very well. “And it could be worse!” she exclaimed. “At least we don’t have to eat the same thing as the Führer.” While I poured her more wine, she told me that Zeitzler, the new Chief of Staff of the OKH, scandalized by Göring’s brazen lies about the Kessel airlift, had openly started in December to have himself served the same ration, in the Kasino, as the soldiers of the Sixth Army. He had quickly lost weight, and the Führer had had to force him to stop these unhealthy demonstrations; on the other hand, Champagne and Cognac had been banned. As she spoke, I observed her: her appearance was far from ordinary. She had a strong, very wide jaw; her face tried to look normal but seemed to mask a heavy, secret desire, which welled up through the bloody stroke of her lipstick. Her hands were very animated, her fingers reddened from bad circulation; she had fine, birdlike joints, bony, sharp; and peculiar marks on her left wrist, like the traces of a bracelet or cord. I found her elegant and animated, but veiled by a faint insincerity. Since wine made her voluble, I had her talk about the Führer’s private life, which she described with a surprising lack of restraint: every night, he discoursed for hours, and his monologues were so repetitive, so boring, so sterile, that the secretaries, assistants, and adjutants had set up a system of rotation to listen to him; the ones whose turn it was didn’t go to bed till dawn. “Of course,” she added, “he is a genius, the savior of Germany. But this war is exhausting him.” In the evening, around five o’clock, after the meetings but before the dinner, the movies, and the nighttime tea, he held a coffee break with the secretaries; there, surrounded solely by women, he was much more cordial—before Stalingrad at least; he joked, teased the girls, and almost never discussed politics. “Does he flirt with you?” I asked with amusement. She looked serious: “Oh no, never!” She asked me about Stalingrad; I gave her a fierce, sardonic description, which at first made her laugh till tears came, but then made her so uneasy that she cut me off. I accompanied her back to her hotel, near the Anhalter Bahnhof; she invited me to come up for a drink, but I politely refused; my courtesy had its limits. As soon as I left her, I was filled with a feverish, uneasy feeling: What use was it to me to waste my time this way? What good were gossip and office rumors about our Führer to me? What interest did I have in strutting about this way in front of some paintedup doll who expected only one thing from me? It was better to be quiet. But even in my hotel, first-class though it was, quiet eluded me: the floor beneath mine was having a noisy party, and the music, shouts, and laughter rose up through the floorboards and seized me by the throat. Lying on my bed in the darkness, I thought about the men of the Sixth Army: the evening took place at the beginning of March, the last units had surrendered more than a month before; the survivors, rotting with vermin and fever, must have been on the way to Siberia or Kazakhstan, at the very same moment that I was so laboriously breathing the night air in Berlin, and for them, no music, no laughter—shouts of an entirely different kind. And it wasn’t just them, it was everywhere, the whole world was twisted in pain, and people should not be having fun, not right away in any case, they should wait a little while, a decent amount of time should go by. A mean, fetid anguish rose and suffocated me. I got up, searched through my desk drawer, took out my service pistol, checked it was loaded, put it back. I looked at my watch: 2:00 a.m. I put on my uniform jacket (I hadn’t undressed) and went down without buttoning it. At reception, I asked for the telephone and called Thomas at the apartment he was renting: “Sorry to bother you so late.”—“No, it’s fine. What’s up?” I explained my homicidal urges to him. To my surprise, he didn’t react ironically, but said very seriously: “That’s normal. These people are bastards, profiteers. But if you shoot some of them, you’ll still have problems.”—“What do you suggest, then?”—“Go talk to them. If they don’t calm down, we’ll see. I’ll call some friends.”—“All right, I’ll go.” I hung up and went up to the floor below mine; I easily found the right door and knocked. A tall, beautiful woman in somewhat casual evening dress opened the door, her eyes shining. “Yes?” Behind her, the music roared, I could hear glasses clinking, mad laughter. “Is this your room?” I asked, my heart beating. “No. Wait.” She turned around: “Dicky! Dicky! An officer is asking for you.” A man in a vest, slightly drunk, came to the door; the woman watched us without hiding her curiosity. “Yes, Herr Sturmbannführer?” he asked. “What can I do for you?” His affected, cordial, almost slurred voice conveyed an aristocrat of old stock. I bowed slightly and said in the most neutral tone possible: “I live in the room over yours. I’ve just come back from Stalingrad, where I was seriously wounded and where almost all my comrades died. Your festivities are disturbing me. I wanted to come down and kill you, but I called a friend, who advised me to come talk with you first. So I’ve come to talk with you. It would be better for us all if I don’t have to come down again.” The man had turned pale: “No, no…” He turned around: “Gofi! Stop the music! Stop!” He looked at me: “Excuse us. We’ll stop right away.”—“Thank you.” As I was climbing back up, vaguely satisfied, I heard him shout: “Everyone out! It’s over. Out!” I had touched a nerve, and it wasn’t a question of fear: he too, suddenly, had understood, and he was ashamed. In my room, everything was quiet now; the only noises were from the occasional passing of a car, the trumpeting of an insomniac elephant. But I didn’t calm down: my action appeared to me like play-acting, prompted by a genuine, obscure feeling, but then distorted, diverted into an outward show of rage, conventional. But that was precisely where my problem lay: seeing myself this way, constantly, with this external gaze, this critical camera, how could I utter the slightest authentic word, make the slightest authentic gesture? Everything I did became a spectacle for myself; my thinking itself was just a reflection, and I a poor Narcissus showing off for himself, but who wasn’t fooled by it. This was the dead-end I had run into since the close of my childhood: only Una, before, could pull me out of myself, make me forget myself a little, and after I lost her, I kept looking at myself with a gaze that was confused with hers in thought but that remained, without any way out, my own. Without you, I am not me: and that was pure, deadly terror, unrelated to the delicious terrors of childhood, a sentence with no hope of appeal, with no judgment, either.