A new thought, though, came more and more often to occupy my mind. The Sunday after the air raids, around noon, I had taken the car from the garage and had gone to visit Helene Anders. The day was cold and wet, the sky overcast, but it wasn’t raining. On the way, I had managed to find a bouquet of flowers, sold in the street by an old woman near an S-Bahn station. Having reached Helene’s building, I realized I didn’t know what apartment she lived in. Her name wasn’t on the letter boxes. A rather hefty woman who was leaving at that moment stopped and eyed me from head to foot before barking at me, in strong Berlin slang: “Who are you looking for?”—“Fräulein Anders.”—“Anders? There’s no Anders here.” I described her. “You mean the Winnefeld daughter. But she’s not a Fräulein.” She directed me to the apartment and I went up to ring. A lady with white hair opened the door and frowned. “Frau Winnefeld?”—“Yes.” I clicked my heels and bowed my head. “My respects, meine Dame. I came to see your daughter.” I held out the flowers and introduced myself. Helene appeared in the hallway, a sweater over her shoulders, and her face colored slightly: “Oh!” she smiled. “It’s you.”—“I came to ask you if you were planning to swim today.”—“Is the pool still working?” she said.—“Unfortunately not.” I had passed it on my way: a firebomb had gone through the dome, and the concierge who was watching over the ruins had assured me that, given the priorities, it certainly wouldn’t reopen before the end of the war. “But I know of another one.”—“Then I’d be happy to. I’ll go get my things.” Downstairs, I helped her into the car and set off. “I didn’t know you were a Frau,” I said after a few minutes. She looked at me pensively: “I’m a widow. My husband was killed in Yugoslavia last year, by the partisans. We’d been married for less than a year.”—“I’m sorry.” She looked out the window. “Me too,” she said. She turned to me: “But life goes on, doesn’t it?” I didn’t say anything. “Hans, my husband,” she went on, “liked the Dalmatian coast a lot. In his letters, he talked about settling there after the war. Do you know Dalmatia?”—“No. I served in the Ukraine and in Russia. But I wouldn’t want to settle there.”—“Where would you like to live?”—“I don’t know, actually. Not Berlin, I think. I don’t know.” I told her briefly about my childhood in France. She herself was of old Berlin stock: already her grandparents lived in Moabit. We arrived at the Prinz-Albrechtstrasse and I parked in front of number eight. “But that’s the Gestapo!” she cried out, terrified. I laughed: “That’s right. They have a small heated pool in the basement.” She stared at me: “Are you a policeman?”—“Not at all.” Through the window, I pointed to the former Prinz-Albrecht Hotel next door: “I work there, in the Reichsführer’s offices. I’m a legal advisor, I’m in charge of economic questions.” That seemed to reassure her. “Don’t worry. The pool is used more by typists and secretaries than by policemen, who have other things to do.” In fact, the pool was so small you had to sign up in advance. We found Thomas there, already in a bathing suit. “Oh, I know you!” he exclaimed, gallantly kissing Helene’s white hand. “You’re the friend of Liselotte and Mina Wehde.” I showed her where the women’s changing rooms were and went to change also, while Thomas smiled at me mockingly. When I emerged, Thomas, in the water, was talking with a girl, but Helene hadn’t reappeared yet. I dove in and did a few laps. Helene came out of the changing room. Her fashionable swimsuit molded to her contours, rounded but slim; beneath the curves the muscles were clearly apparent. Her face, whose beauty wasn’t altered by the swimming cap, was joyful: “Hot showers! What luxury!” She dove in, crossed half the pool underwater, and began doing laps. I was already tired; I got out, put on a bathrobe, and sat down on one of the chairs placed around the pool, to smoke and watch her swim. Thomas, dripping, came to sit next to me: “It was high time you pulled yourself together.”—“Do you like her?” The lapping of the water resounded on the room’s vaulted ceiling. Helene did forty laps without stopping, a thousand meters. Then she came over to lean on the edge, like the first time I’d seen her, and smiled at me: “You don’t swim much.”—“It’s the cigarettes. I get out of breath.”—“That’s too bad.” Again, she raised her arms and let herself sink down; but this time she came back up in the same place and hoisted herself out of the pool in one supple movement. She took a towel, dried her face and came to sit down next to us, taking off her cap and shaking her damp hair. “And you,” she said to Thomas, “do you also deal with economic questions?”—“No,” he replied. “I leave that to Max. He’s much more intelligent than me.”—“He’s a policeman,” I added. Thomas made a face: “Let’s say I’m in security.”—“Brrr…” Helene said. “That must be sinister.”—“Oh, not really.” I finished my cigarette and went back in to swim a little. Helene did twenty more laps; Thomas was flirting with one of the typists. Afterward, I washed under the shower and changed; leaving Thomas there, I suggested to Helene that we go out for some tea. “Where?”—“Good question. On Unter den Linden there’s nothing left. But we’ll find something.” Finally I took her to the Esplanade Hotel, on Bellevuestrasse: it was a little damaged, but had survived the worst; inside the tea room, aside from the boards on the windows, masked by brocade curtains, you might have thought it was before the war. “What a beautiful place,” Helene murmured. “I’ve never been here.”—“The cakes are excellent, I hear. And they don’t serve ersatz.” I ordered a coffee for me and a tea for her; we also ordered a little assortment of cakes. They were in fact delicious. When I lit a cigarette, she asked for one. “You smoke?”—“Sometimes.” Later on, she said pensively: “It’s too bad there’s this war. Things could have been so nice.”—“Maybe. I have to admit I don’t think about it.” She looked at me: “Tell me frankly: we’re going to lose, aren’t we?”—“No!” I said, shocked. “Of course not.” Again, she looked into emptiness and drew a last puff from her cigarette. “We’re going to lose,” she said. I took her home. In front of the entrance, she shook my hand, looking serious. “Thank you,” she said. “I enjoyed that very much.”—“I hope it won’t be the last time.”—“Me too. See you soon.” I watched her cross the sidewalk and disappear into the building. Then I went back to my place to listen to Monteverdi.

I didn’t understand what I was seeking with this young woman; but I didn’t try to understand it. What I liked about her was her gentleness, a gentleness I thought existed only in the paintings of Vermeer of Delft, through which could clearly be felt the supple force of a steel blade. I had enjoyed that afternoon very much, and for now I didn’t look any further, I didn’t want to think. I felt that thinking would immediately have led to painful questions and demands: for once, I didn’t feel the need, I was happy to let myself be carried by the course of events, as I was by Monteverdi’s music, at once utterly lucid and emotional, and then we’d see. During the week that followed, in the slack moments during work, or at night, at home, the thought of her grave face or of the calmness of her smile came back to me, almost warm, a friendly, affectionate thought, which didn’t alarm me.

But the past is a thing that, once it has sunk its teeth into your flesh, doesn’t let go. Around the middle of the week after the air raids, Fräulein Praxa knocked on my office door. “Obersturmbannführer? There are two gentlemen from the Kripo who would like to see you.” I was immersed in a particularly complex report; annoyed, I replied, “Well, let them do what everyone else does: make an appointment.”—“Very well, Obersturmbannführer.” She closed the door. A minute later she knocked again: “Excuse me, Obersturmbannführer. They insist. They said to tell you that it’s about a personal matter. They say it concerns your mother.” I breathed in deeply and closed my file: “Show them in, then.”