He left, suggesting we meet up that evening with Cousteau, near Pigalle. As I headed out, I went over to greet Brasillach, who was sitting with a woman I didn’t know; he acted as if he hadn’t recognized me and welcomed me with a smile, but did not introduce me to his companion. I asked him for news of his sister and his brother-in-law; he politely enquired about the conditions of life in Germany; we vaguely agreed to see each other again, without fixing a date. I went back to my hotel room, changed into my uniform, wrote a note to Knochen, and left to drop it off at Avenue Foch. Then I returned to put my civilian clothes back on and went out walking until the time we’d agreed on. I found Rebatet and Cousteau at the Liberty, a drag bar at the Place Blanche. Cousteau, not that he was into that sort of thing, knew the owner, Tonton, and obviously at least half the queens, whom he called by their first names; several of them, proud and absurd with their wigs, makeup, and glass jewelry, exchanged taunts with him and Rebatet while we drank martinis. “That one, you see,” Cousteau pointed, “I nicknamed her ‘Pompe-Funèbre.’ Because she sucks you to death.”—“You stole that from Maxime Du Camp, you creep,” Rebatet retorted with a face, before diving into his vast literary knowledge to try to surpass him. “And you, darling, what do you do?” one of the queens asked me, pointing an impressively long cigarette holder at me. “He’s with the Gestapo,” Cousteau said ironically. The fairy placed her lace-gloved fingers on her lips and let out a long “Ooooh.” But Cousteau had already launched into a long anecdote about Doriot’s boys giving blow jobs to German soldiers in the Palais Royal urinals; the Parisian cops who regularly raided them or those toward the bottom of the Champs-Élysées sometimes ran into bad surprises; but while the Préfecture bitched, the Majestic seemed not to care. These ambiguous stories put me ill at ease: What were they playing at, these two? Other comrades, I knew, showed off less and practiced more. But neither of them had the slightest scruple about publishing anonymous denunciations in the columns of Je Suis Partout; and if someone didn’t have the misfortune of being a Jew, he could just as easily be made into a homosexual; more than one career, or even life, had been ruined that way. Cousteau and Rebatet, I thought, were trying to show that their revolutionary radicalism surmounted all prejudices (except those that were scientific and racialist, as French thinking had to be); basically, they too were just trying to shock the bourgeois, like the surrealists and André Gide, whom they so execrated. “Did you know, Max,” Rebatet asked me, “that the sacred phallus the Romans paraded during the Liberalia, in the spring and at harvest time, was called a fascinus? Mussolini may have remembered that.” I shrugged my shoulders: all this seemed false to me, bad theater, a stage production, while everywhere people were dying for real. I, for one, really did want a boy—not just for show, but for the warmth of his skin, the sharpness of his sweat, the sweetness of his sex nestled between his legs like a little animal. As for Rebatet, he was afraid of his shadow, of men and of women, of the presence of his own flesh, of everything except abstract ideas that could offer him no resistance. More than ever I wanted to be left alone, but it seemed this was impossible: I was scraping my skin on the world as on broken glass; I kept deliberately swallowing fishhooks, then being surprised when I tore my guts out of my mouth.

My interview with Helmut Knochen, the next day, only reinforced this feeling. He received me with a curious mixture of ostentatious camaraderie and condescending haughtiness. When he was working at the SD, I never saw him outside the office; of course, he must have known that I spent a lot of time with Best then (but maybe now that was no longer a recommendation). Whatever the case, I told him that I had seen Best in Berlin and he asked me how he was doing. I also mentioned that I had served under the command of Dr. Thomas, as he had; he then asked me about my experiences in Russia, while still making me subtly feel the distance between us: he, the Standartenführer in charge of an entire country; I, a convalescent with an uncertain future. He had received me in his office, around a low table decorated with a vase of dried flowers; he had settled into the sofa, crossing his long legs sheathed in riding breeches, leaving me to cram into the depths of a small and too low armchair: from where I sat, his knee almost hid his face and the vagueness of his eyes. I didn’t know how to broach the subject that concerned me. Finally, I told him somewhat at random that I was preparing a book about the future of Germany’s international relations, embroidering on the ideas I had picked up from Best’s Festgabe (and as I spoke, I picked up steam and began convincing myself that I really did intend to write such a book, which would make an impression and ensure my future). Knochen listened politely, nodding his head. Finally I slipped in that I was thinking of taking up a position in France to gather concrete experiences there, which would complete those of Russia. “Have you been offered something?” he asked with a gleam of curiosity. “I hadn’t heard.”—“Not yet, Standartenführer, it’s under discussion. It doesn’t pose any problems in principle, but the appropriate position would have to open up or be created.”—“With me, you know, there’s nothing for now. It’s a pity, the position of Specialist for Jewish Affairs was vacant in December, but it has already been filled.” I forced myself to smile: “That’s not what I’m looking for.”—“But you’ve acquired some good experience in that field, it seems to me. And the Jewish question, in France, touches very closely on our diplomatic relations with Vichy. But in any case your rank is too high: it’s at most a position for a Hauptsturmführer. What about with Abetz? Have you been to see him? If I remember correctly, you had personal contacts with the Parisian protofascists. That should interest the ambassador.”

I found myself on the wide, almost deserted sidewalk of Avenue Foch in a state of profound discouragement: I felt as if I were confronted with a wall—a soft, elusive, blurry one, but still just as insurmountable as a high stone wall. At the top of the avenue, the Arc de Triomphe still hid the morning sun and cast long shadows on the pavement. Go to Abetz? True, I could probably mention our brief meeting in 1933 as a reference, or have myself introduced by someone from Je Suis Partout. But I didn’t feel up to it. I thought of my sister, in Switzerland: perhaps a posting in Switzerland would suit me? I could see her from time to time, when she accompanied her husband to the sanatorium. But there were almost no SD positions in Switzerland, and everyone fought for them. Dr. Mandelbrod could probably have swept aside all obstacles, for France as well as for Switzerland; but Dr. Mandelbrod, I knew, had his own ideas in mind for me.

I went back to change into civilian clothes and then went to the Louvre: there, at least, surrounded by these immobile, serene figures, I felt calmer. I sat for a long time in front of Philippe de Champaigne’s dead Christ; but it was especially a little painting by Watteau that held my attention, L’indifférent: a character dressed for a party stepping forward in a dance, almost with an entrechat, his arms poised as if waiting for the first note of an overture, feminine, but with an obvious erection under his pistachio-green silk breeches, and with an indefinably sad, almost lost face, having already forgotten everything and perhaps not even trying to remember why or for whom he was posing this way. It struck me as a rather pertinent commentary on my situation, and even the title brought its counterpoint: indifferent? no, I wasn’t indifferent, I had only to pass in front of a painting of a woman with heavy black hair to feel an axe blow of the imagination; and even when the faces didn’t look at all like hers, under the rich Renaissance or Regency trappings, under those dazzling fabrics, loaded with colors and gemstones, as thick as the dripping oil of the painters, it was her body I could make out, her breasts, her belly, her hips, pure, flowing smoothly over the bones or slightly curved, enclosing the only source of life I knew where to find. Angry, I left the museum, but that wasn’t enough, for every woman I met or saw laughing behind a window had the same effect on me. I downed drink after drink whenever I passed a café, but the more I drank, the more lucid I seemed to become, my eyes opened and the world rushed into them, roaring, bleeding, voracious, spattering the inside of my head with fluids and excrement. My pineal eye, gaping vagina in the middle of my forehead, projected a crude, gloomy, implacable light on this world, and allowed me to read each drop of sweat, each pimple, each poorly shaven hair on the garish faces that assailed me as an emotion, the infinite cry of anguish of the child forever prisoner in the atrocious body of a clumsy adult incapable, even by killing, of avenging himself for the fact of living. Finally, it was already late in the night, a boy accosted me in a bistro to ask me for a cigarette: there, maybe, I could drown myself for a few instants. He agreed to come up to my room. Another one, I said to myself as I climbed the stairs, another one, but it will never be enough. We each got undressed on opposite sides of the bed; ridiculously, he kept on his shoes and watch. I asked him to have me standing up, leaning on the chest of drawers, facing the narrow mirror that dominated the room. When the pleasure seized me, I kept my eyes open, I scrutinized my crimson, hideously swollen face, trying to see in it, my true face filling my features from behind, the features of my sister’s face. But then this surprising thing happened: between these two faces and their perfect fusion there slid, smooth, transparent as a glass leaf, another face, the bitter, placid face of our mother, infinitely fine but more opaque, denser than the thickest of walls. Seized with an enormous rage, I roared and smashed the mirror with my fist; the boy, frightened, jumped and fell back onto the bed as he came in long spurts. I came too, but reflexively, without feeling it, already going limp. Blood dripped from my fingers onto the floor. I went into the bathroom, washed my hand, pulled a piece of glass out of it, wrapped it in a towel. When I came out, the boy was getting dressed, obviously worried. I searched through my pants pocket and threw a few bills on the bed: “Get out.” He seized the money and fled without a word. I wanted to go to bed but first I carefully collected the pieces of broken glass, throwing them into the waste-paper basket and examining the floor to be sure I hadn’t overlooked any, then I wiped up the drops of blood and went to wash. Finally I could lie down; but the bed was a crucifix to me, a torture rack. What was she doing here, the odious bitch? Hadn’t I suffered enough because of her? Did she have to persecute me again this way? I sat cross-legged on the sheets and smoked cigarette after cigarette as I thought. The wan gleam of a streetlight filtered through the closed shutters. My thinking—carried away, panic-stricken—had turned into a sly old assassin; a new Macbeth, it murdered my sleep. I kept feeling as if I were on the point of understanding something, but this comprehension remained at the tip of my lacerated fingers, mocking me, imperceptibly withdrawing as I approached it. Finally a thought allowed itself to be grasped: I contemplated it with disgust, but since none other wanted to come take its place, I had to grant it its due. I placed it on the night table like a heavy old coin: if I tapped it with my fingernail, it sounded true, no matter how often I flipped it, it always presented me with the same impassive face.