Another message was waiting for me at the Hotel Eden: “Frau von Üxküll,” the porter explained. “Here is the number where you can reach her.” I went up to my room and sat down on the sofa without even unbuttoning my tunic, overwhelmed. Why contact me like this, after all these years? Why now? I would have been incapable of saying if I did or didn’t want to see her again; but I knew that if she wanted to, not seeing her again would be as impossible for me as not breathing anymore. That night I didn’t sleep at all, or only a little. The memories came brutally rushing back; unlike the ones that had welled up in great waves in Stalingrad, these were not solar, dazzling memories of the force of happiness, but memories already tinged with the cold light of the full moon, white and bitter. In the springtime, back from our winter sports, we continued our games in the attic, naked, shining in the dust-filled light, among the dolls and piles of trunks and suitcases overloaded with old clothes behind which we nestled together. After the winter, I was pale, and still hairless; as for her, the shadow of a tuft was appearing between her legs, and minuscule breasts were beginning to deform her chest, which I loved so flat and smooth. But there was no way back. It was still cold, our skin was taut and bristling. She climbed on top of me, but already a trickle of blood was running down the inside of her thighs. She cried: “It’s beginning, the end is beginning.” I took her in my thin arms and cried with her. We weren’t yet thirteen. It wasn’t right, I wanted to be like her; why couldn’t I bleed too, share that with her? Why couldn’t we be the same? I didn’t have ejaculations yet, our games continued; but maybe now we were observing each other, we were observing ourselves a little more, and that already introduced a distance, an infinitesimal one still, but one that may have made us push things sometimes. Then came the inevitable: one day, the whitish cream on my hand, my thighs. I told Una and showed her. It fascinated her, but she was afraid, she had learned the mechanics of the thing. And for the first time the attic seemed gloomy to us, dusty, full of spiderwebs. I wanted to kiss her breasts, round now, but that didn’t interest her, and she knelt down, presenting her narrow adolescent buttocks to me. She had brought some cold cream taken from our mother’s bathroom: “Take it,” she said. “There nothing can happen.” More than the sensation, I remember the acrid, heady smell of the cold cream. We were between the Golden Age and the Fall.
When I called her, in the late morning, her voice was perfectly calm. “We’re at the Kaiserhof.”—“Are you free?”—“Yes. Can we see each other?”—“I’ll come by and pick you up.” She was waiting for me in the lobby and got up when she saw me. I took off my cap and she kissed me delicately on the cheek. Then she stepped back and contemplated me. She held out a finger and tapped one of the silver buttons on my tunic with the tip of her fingernaiclass="underline" “It suits you nicely, this uniform.” I looked at her without saying anything: she hadn’t changed, a little older of course, but she was still just as beautiful. “What are you doing here?” I asked.—“Berndt had some business with his lawyer. I thought you might be in Berlin, and I wanted to see you.”—“How did you find me?”—“A friend of Berndt’s at the OKW called the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse and they told him where you were staying. What would you like to do?”—“You have some time?”—“The whole day.”—“Let’s go to Potsdam, then. We can eat and walk in the park.”