In the evening, she came to give me a shot. I turned over onto my stomach with difficulty; when I pushed down my pants, the memory of certain vigorous adolescents shot briefly through my head, then crumpled, I was too tired. She hesitated, she had never given a shot before, but when she stuck the needle in, it was with a firm, sure hand. She had a little cotton soaked in alcohol and she wiped my buttocks after the injection, I found that touching, she must have remembered nurses doing that. Lying on my side, I planted the thermometer into my rectum myself to take my temperature, without paying attention to her but without trying especially to provoke her either. I must have had a little over forty degrees. Then the night began again, the third of that stone eternity, I wandered again through the underbrush and the collapsed cliffs of my thoughts. In the middle of the night, I began sweating profusely, the soaking pajamas stuck to my skin, I was barely conscious, I remember Helene’s hand on my forehead and cheek, pushing back my soaking hair, brushing against my beard, she told me later that I had begun talking out loud, it drew her out of her sleep and brought her to my side, scraps of phrases, mostly incoherent, she said, but she never wanted to tell me what she had understood. I didn’t insist, I felt it was better that way. The next morning, the fever had fallen below thirty-nine. When Piontek came to ask about me, I sent him to the office to get some real coffee, which I kept in reserve, for Helene. The doctor, when he came to examine me, congratulated me: “You’ve come through the worst, I think. But it’s not over yet and you should regain your strength.” I felt like the victim of a shipwreck who, after a fierce, exhausting battle with the sea, finally lets himself roll onto the sand of a beach: maybe I wasn’t going to die after all. But that’s a bad comparison, for a shipwrecked person swims, fights to survive, and I hadn’t done anything, I had let myself be carried along and it was only death that hadn’t wanted me. I greedily drank the orange juice Helene brought me. Around noon, I sat up a little: Helene was standing in the open doorway between my bedroom and the living room, leaning on the doorframe, a summer pullover on her shoulders; she was looking at me absentmindedly, a steaming cup of coffee in her hand. “I envy you, being able to drink coffee,” I said.—“Oh! Wait, I’ll help you.”—“That’s all right.” I was more or less sitting up, I had managed to pull a pillow behind my back. “Please forgive me for what I said yesterday. I was despicable.” She made a little sign with her head, drank some coffee, and turned her face aside, toward the French window to the balcony. After a little while, she looked at me again: “What you said…about the dead. Was that true?”—“You really want to know?”—“Yes.” Her beautiful eyes were examining me, I seemed to glimpse a worried glint in them, but she remained calm, in control of herself. “Everything I said is true.”—“The women, the children too?”—“Yes.” She turned her head away, bit her upper lip; when she looked at me again, her eyes were full of tears: “It’s sad,” she said.—“Yes. It’s horribly sad.” She thought before she spoke again: “You know we are going to pay for that.”—“Yes. If we lose the war, our enemies’ revenge will be pitiless.”—“I wasn’t talking about that. Even if we don’t lose the war, we are going to pay. We will have to pay.” She hesitated again. “I pity you,” she concluded. She didn’t speak of it again, she continued her ministrations, even the most humiliating ones. But her gestures seemed to have another quality—colder, more functional. As soon as I could walk, I asked her to go home. She protested a little, but I insisted: “You must be exhausted. Go get some rest. Frau Zempke can take care of what I need.” Finally she agreed and put her things into her little suitcase. I called Piontek to take her home. “I’ll phone you,” I said to her. When Piontek arrived, I accompanied her to the apartment door. “Thank you for taking care of me,” I said, shaking her hand. She nodded but didn’t say anything. “See you later,” I added coldly.

I spent the following days sleeping. I still had a fever, around thirty-eight, sometimes thirty-nine; but I drank orange juice and meat broth, I ate bread, a little chicken. At night, there were frequent alerts and I ignored them (there may have been alerts during my three nights of delirium, but I don’t know). These were little raids, a handful of Mosquitos that dropped a few bombs haphazardly, mostly on the administrative center. But one night Frau Zempke and her husband forced me to go down to the basement, after putting me into my bathrobe; the effort exhausted me so much that I had to be carried back up. A few days after Helene’s departure, Frau Zempke burst in in the early evening, red, in curlers and a dressing gown: “Herr Obersturmbannführer! Herr Obersturmbannführer!” She had woken me up and I was annoyed: “What is it, Frau Zempke?”—“They tried to kill the Führer!” She clumsily explained to me what she had heard on the radio: there had been an assassination attempt, at the Führer’s HQ, in eastern Prussia, he was unhurt, had received Mussolini in the afternoon and had already returned to work. “And so?” I asked.—“Well, it’s horrible!”—“Indeed,” I retorted dryly. “But the Führer is alive, you say, that’s the main thing. Thank you.” I went back to bed; she waited a bit, a little at a loss, then beat a retreat. I must confess that I didn’t even think about this piece of news: I no longer thought about anything. A few days later, Thomas came to see me. “You look like you’re getting better.”—“A little,” I replied. I had finally shaved, I must have vaguely resumed a human appearance; but I had trouble formulating coherent thoughts, they broke up with the effort, only scraps remained, without any link between them, Helene, the Führer, my work, Mandelbrod, Clemens and Weser, an inextricable jumble. “You heard the news,” said Thomas, who had sat down by the window and was smoking. “Yes. How is the Führer doing?”—“The Führer is doing fine. But it was more than a failed assassination. The Wehrmacht, or at least part of it, wanted to pull a coup d’état.” I grunted in surprise, and Thomas gave me the details of the affair. “In the beginning we thought it was limited to an officers’ plot. Actually it branched out in every direction: there were cliques in the Abwehr, at the Auswärtiges Amt, among the old aristocrats. Even Nebe, apparently, was in on it. He disappeared yesterday after trying to cover himself by arresting some conspirators. Like Fromm. In short, it’s a bloody mess. The Reichsführer was appointed head of the Ersatzheer, in place of Fromm. It’s clear that now the SS is going to have a crucial role to play.” His voice was tense, but sure and determined. “What happened at the Auswärtiges Amt?” I asked.—“You’re thinking of your girlfriend? We’ve already arrested quite a few people, including some of her superiors; we should be arresting von Trott zu Solz any day now. But I don’t think you have to worry about her.”—“I wasn’t worrying. I was asking, that’s all. Are you looking into all that?” Thomas nodded yes. “Kaltenbrunner has created a special commission to investigate the ramifications of the affair. Huppenkothen is in charge, I’ll be his deputy. Panzinger is probably going to replace Nebe at the Kripo. We’d already begun reorganizing everything at the Staatspolizei anyway; this will just speed things up.”—“And what were your conspirators aiming for?”—“They’re not my conspirators,” he hissed. “And it varies. Most of them apparently thought that without the Führer and the Reichsführer, the West would accept a separate peace. They wanted to dismantle the SS. They didn’t seem to realize that it was just another Dolchstoss, a stab in the back like in ’eighteen. As if Germany would have followed them, the traitors. I have the impression that a lot of them were a little in the clouds: some of them even thought they’d be allowed to keep Alsace and Lorraine, once they’d dropped their pants. And the Incorporated Territories, of course. You know, dreamers. But we’ll see all that—they were so stupid, the civilians especially, that they put almost everything down in writing. We found masses of projects, lists of ministers for their new government. They had even put your friend Speer on one of the lists: I can tell you he’s feeling the heat a little right now.”—“And who was supposed to take the lead?”—“Beck. But he’s dead. He killed himself. Fromm also had quite a few guys shot right away, to try to cover himself.” He explained the details of the attempt and the failed putsch to me. “It could have gone either way. We’ve never had such a close shave before. You have to get better: there’s going to be work to do.”