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 and 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.