Since I refused to submit to their hateful desires, the older boys treated me as viciously as the reverend fathers. They beat me up at the slightest pretext, forced me to serve them, to shine their shoes, to brush their suits. One night I opened my eyes: three of them were standing next to my bed, rubbing themselves over my face; before I could react, their horrible stuff blinded me. There was only one way to escape this kind of situation, the classic way—to choose a protector. For that the school had developed a precise ritual. The younger boy was called the shot; the older boy was supposed to make advances, which could be rejected right away; otherwise, he had the right to make his case. But I wasn’t ready yet: I preferred to suffer, and dream of my lost love. Then an odd incident made me change my mind. The boy in the bunk next to mine, Pierre S., was my age. One night his voice woke me up. He wasn’t moaning: on the contrary, he was speaking loudly and clearly, but to all appearances he was asleep. I myself was only half awake, but though I don’t remember his words exactly, the horror they filled me with is still keen. It was something like: “No, no more, that’s enough,” or else: “Please, that’s too far, just half.” Thinking about it, the meaning of these words is ambiguous; but in the middle of the night my interpretation didn’t seem doubtful at all. And I was frozen, overcome by this great fear; I curled up in the middle of my bed, trying not to hear. Even then, the violence of my terror, the quickness with which it had filled me, surprised me. These words, as I came to understand in the next few days, which said openly things that were hidden and unnamable, must have found their hidden counterparts deep down within me, and these, once awakened, raised their sinister heads and opened their shining eyes. Little by little, I came to tell myself this: If I can’t have her, then what possible difference can any of this make? One day a boy confronted me on the staircase: “I saw you during gym,” he said, “I was underneath you, on the hurdle, your shorts were wide open.” He was an athletic boy about seventeen years old with disheveled hair, strong enough to intimidate the others. “All right,” I replied, before running down the steps. After that I didn’t have any more problems. This boy, whose name was André N., gave me little gifts and from time to time took me into the bathroom stalls. A poignant smell of fresh skin and sweat emanated from his body, sometimes mingled with slight hints of shit, as if he hadn’t wiped himself properly. The stalls stank of urine and disinfectant, they were always dirty, and even today the smell of men and sperm reminds me of the odor of carbolic acid and urine, along with dirty porcelain, flaking paint, rust, and broken locks. In the beginning, he didn’t do anything except touch me, or else I took him in my mouth. Then he wanted more. I was familiar with that already, I had already done it with her, after her periods had started; and it had given her pleasure, why couldn’t it give me pleasure too? And also, I reasoned, it brought me even closer to her; in that way, I would feel almost everything she felt, when she touched me, kissed me, licked me, then offered me her thin, narrow buttocks. It hurt me, it must have hurt her too, and then I waited, and when I came, I imagined that it was she who was coming, a blinding, heartrending orgasm, I almost managed to forget how my coming was a poor, limited thing next to hers, her oceanic pleasure of a woman already.
Afterward it became a habit. When I looked at girls, trying to imagine myself taking their milk-white breasts in my mouth and then rubbing my penis in their mucous membrane, I said to myself: What’s the point? It’s not her and it never will be her. Better then for me to be her and all the others, me. I didn’t love those others, I already explained that to you at the outset. My mouth, my hands, my penis, my ass desired them, intensely sometimes, breathlessly, but from them I only wanted their hands, their penises, and their mouths. That doesn’t mean I didn’t feel anything. When I contemplated Partenau’s beautiful naked body, already so cruelly wounded, a secret anguish filled me. When I ran my fingers over his breast, grazing the nipple and then his scar, I imagined this breast once again crushed under metal; when I kissed his lips, I saw his jaw torn off by burning jagged shrapnel; and when I went down between his legs, plunging into the luxuriant forest of his genitals, I knew that somewhere a landmine was lurking, waiting to tear them to shreds. His powerful arms, his lean thighs were just as vulnerable, no part of his beloved body was safe from harm. Next month, in a week, tomorrow, an hour from now, all this beautiful, soft flesh could in an instant be transformed into pulp, into a bloody, charred mass of meat, and his green eyes be extinguished forever. Sometimes I almost cried thinking about it. But when he was healed, and had finally left, I didn’t feel any sadness. He was killed in the end, the following year, at Kursk.
Alone, I read, took walks. In the sanatorium garden, the apple trees were in flower, the bougainvilleas, wisteria, lilacs, laburnum, were all in bloom and assailed the air with a riot of violent, heavy, contrasting odors. I also went every day to stroll about in the botanical gardens, east of Yalta. The different sections rose in tiers above the sea, with grand views over the blue and then the gray of the horizon, and always to the back the omnipresent snow-covered range of the Yaila Mountains. In the arboretum, signs guided the visitor to a pistachio tree over a thousand years old and a yew tree that might have been five hundred; higher up, in the Verkhniy Park, the rose garden displayed two thousand species that were just opening up but were already humming with bees, like the lavender of my childhood; in Primorsky Park there were subtropical plants in glass houses, hardly damaged at all, and I would sit facing the sea to read, at rest. One day, returning through town, I visited Chekhov’s house, a comfortable little white dacha turned into a museum by the Soviets; the staff, judging from the signs on the walls, seemed especially proud of the living room piano, on which Rachmaninoff and Chaliapin had played; but for my part, I was stunned by the caretaker of the place, Masha, the actual sister, now an octogenarian, of Chekhov, who stayed seated on a simple wooden chair in the entryway, motionless, silent, her hands flat on her thighs. Her life, I knew, had been broken by the impossible, just like mine. Was she still dreaming, there in front of me, of the one who should have been standing at her side, Pharaoh, her dead brother and husband?
One evening near the end of my leave, I went to the Kasino in Yalta, set up in a sort of slightly outmoded, rather pleasant rococo palace. In the large stairway leading to the main hall, I ran into an SS-Oberführer whom I knew well. I stepped aside and stood at attention to salute him, and he returned my salute absentmindedly; but two steps farther down he stopped, turned around suddenly, and his face lit up: “Dr. Aue! I didn’t recognize you.” It was Otto Ohlendorf, my Amtschef in Berlin, who now commanded Einsatzgruppe D. He nimbly climbed back up the steps and shook my hand, congratulating me on my promotion. “What a surprise! What are you doing here?” I briefly explained my story. “Oh, you were with Blobel! I pity you. I don’t understand how they can keep mentally ill men like that in the SS, even less entrust them with a command.”—“Whatever the case,” I replied, “Standartenführer Weinmann seemed like a serious man.”—“I don’t know him much. He’s an employee of the Staatspolizei, isn’t he?” He contemplated me for an instant and then abruptly suggested: “Why don’t you stay with me? I need an adjunct for my Leiter III, in the Gruppenstab. My old one got typhus and was sent home. I know Dr. Thomas well, he won’t refuse your transfer.” The offer caught me by surprise: “Do I have to give you an answer right away?”—“No. Actually, yes!”—“All right, then, if Brigadeführer Thomas gives his consent, I accept.” He smiled and shook my hand again. “Excellent, excellent. Now I have to run. Come see me tomorrow in Simferopol, we’ll arrange everything and I’ll explain the details to you. You won’t have any trouble finding us, we’re next to the AOK, just ask. Good night!” He ran down the steps, waving, and disappeared. I headed for the bar and ordered a Cognac. I liked Ohlendorf enormously, and always took keen pleasure in our conversations; a chance to work with him again was more than I could have hoped for. He was a remarkably intelligent, penetrating man, definitely one of the best minds of National Socialism, and one of the most uncompromising; his attitude made him a lot of enemies, but for me he was an inspiration. The lecture he had given in Kiel, the first time I met him, had dazzled me. Speaking eloquently from a few scattered notes, in a clear, well-modulated voice, which marked each point forcefully and precisely, he had begun with a vigorous criticism of Italian fascism, which, according to him, was guilty of deifying the State without recognizing human communities, whereas National Socialism was based on community, the Volksgemeinschaft. Worse, Mussolini had systematically suppressed all institutional constraints on the men in power. That led directly to a totalitarian version of State control, where neither power nor its abuses knew the slightest limit. In principle, National Socialism was based on the reality of the value of the life of the human individual and of the Volk as a whole; thus, the State was subordinate to the requirements of the Volk. Under fascism, people had no value in themselves, they were objects of the State, and the only dominant reality was the State itself. Nevertheless, certain elements within the Party wanted to introduce fascism into National Socialism. Since the Seizure of Power, National Socialism, in certain sectors, had deviated, and was falling back on old methods to overcome temporary problems. These foreign tendencies were especially strong in the agricultural economy, and also in heavy industry, which was National Socialist in name only and which was profiting from the uncontrolled overspending of the State to expand beyond all measure. The arrogance and megalomania that reigned in certain sectors of the Party only aggravated the situation. The other mortal danger for National Socialism was what Ohlendorf called its Bolshevist deviation, mainly the collectivist tendencies of the DAF, the Labor Front. Ley was constantly denigrating the middle classes; he wanted to destroy small-and medium-size businesses, which formed the real social basis of the German economy. The fundamental and decisive measure of political economy should be Man; economics—and in this, one could follow Marx’s analyses completely—was the most important factor in the fate of mankind. It was true that a National Socialist economic order did not yet exist. But National Socialist policies in all sectors—economic, social, or constitutional—should always keep in mind that their object was man and the Volk. The collectivist tendencies in economic and social policies, like the absolutist tendencies in constitutional policies, deviated from this line. As the wellspring of National Socialism, we students, the future elite of the Party, should always remain faithful to its essential spirit, and let this spirit guide each of our actions and decisions.