In Berlin, we had some trouble justifying ourselves, but less than I expected; not like ordinary soldiers, who were unceremoniously hanged or shot on suspicion alone. Even before shaving or washing, Thomas went to present himself to Kaltenbrunner, whose headquarters were now in the Kurfürstenstrasse, in Eichmann’s old premises, one of the last RSHA buildings still pretty much standing. Since I didn’t know where to report to—even Grothmann had left Berlin—I accompanied him. We had agreed on a story that was for the most part plausible: I was taking advantage of my leave to try to evacuate my sister and her husband, and the Russian offensive had caught me short with Thomas, who had come to help me; Thomas had had the foresight to provide himself with a mission order from Huppenkothen before leaving. Kaltenbrunner listened to us in silence and then dismissed us without any comment, informing me that the Reichsführer, who had resigned the day before from his command of Army Group Vistula, was in Hohenlychen. The report on Piontek’s death took me no time at all, but I had to fill out a number of forms to justify the loss of the vehicle. In the evening, we went to Thomas’s place, in Wannsee: the house was intact, but there was neither electricity nor running water, and we could only have a quick wash with cold water, and shave with difficulty before going to bed. The next morning, wearing a clean uniform, I went to Hohenlychen to present myself to Brandt. As soon as he saw me, he ordered me to shower, have my hair cut, and come back when I looked presentable. The hospital had hot showers, I spent almost an hour under the stream of water, voluptuously; then I went to the barber and, while I was at it, had myself shaved with hot water and sprinkled with eau de Cologne. Almost cheerful, I went back to see Brandt. He listened to my story severely, berated me curtly for having cost the Reich, through my imprudence, several weeks of my work, then informed me that in the meantime I had been reported missing; my office was dissolved, my colleagues reassigned, and my files archived. For now, the Reichsführer had no more need of my services; and Brandt ordered me to return to Berlin to put myself at Kaltenbrunner’s disposal. After the interview, his secretary led me into his office and handed me my personal mail, transmitted by Asbach when the Oranienburg office was closed: mostly bills, a note from Ohlendorf about my wound in February, and a letter from Helene, which I pocketed without opening. Then I went back to Berlin. A chaotic atmosphere reigned at the Kurfürstenstrasse: the building now housed the headquarters of the RSHA and of the Staatspolizei, as well as numerous representatives of the SD; everyone needed more room, hardly anyone knew what he was supposed to be doing, all wandered aimlessly through the hallways, trying to look busy. Since Kaltenbrunner couldn’t receive me before nightfall, I settled into a chair in a corner and resumed my reading of L’Éducation sentimentale, which had suffered again from the crossing of the Oder, but which I was determined to finish. Kaltenbrunner had me summoned just as Frédéric meets Madame Arnoux for the last time; it was frustrating. He could have waited a little, especially since he had no idea what to do with me. He ended up, almost at random, appointing me liaison officer with the OKW. My work consisted of this: three times a day, I had to go to the Bendlerstrasse and bring back dispatches about the situation on the front; the rest of the time, I could calmly daydream. The Flaubert was soon finished, but I found other books. I could also have gone out walking, but that wasn’t recommended. The city was in a bad state. Everywhere, windows were gaping; one regularly heard part of some building collapse with a huge roar. In the streets, teams of people tirelessly cleared away the rubble and piled it up in neatly spaced heaps so that the rare cars could pass, slaloming their way through, but often these piles too toppled over, and they had to start again. The spring air was acrid, full of black smoke and brick dust gritty in the teeth. The last major raid had occurred three days before our return: on that occasion, the Luftwaffe had introduced its new weapon, surprisingly rapid jet aircraft, which had inflicted some losses on the enemy; since then, there had been only harassing Mosquito raids. The Sunday after our arrival was the first fine spring day of 1945: in the Tiergarten, the trees were budding, grass was appearing on the heaps of debris and turning the gardens green. But we had few occasions to take advantage of the nice weather. Food rations, ever since the loss of the eastern territories, were reduced to a strict minimum; even the best restaurants didn’t have much. The ministries were being emptied of their personnel to fill out the Wehrmacht, but with the destruction of most of the index files and the general disorganization, most of the men thus freed waited for weeks to be called up. At the Kurfürstenstrasse, they had set up an office that delivered false papers from the Wehrmacht or from other organizations to senior RSHA officials who were regarded as compromised. Thomas had several cards made up for himself, all different, and showed them to me, laughing: engineer at Krupp’s, Hauptmann of the Wehrmacht, civil servant in the Ministry of Agriculture. He wanted me to do the same, but I kept putting it off; instead I had another pay book and SD card made up, to replace the ones I had destroyed in Pomerania. From time to time, I saw Eichmann, who was still hanging around there, completely dejected. He was very nervous, he knew that if our enemies got their hands on him, he was finished, he wondered what was going to happen to him. He had sent his family away and wanted to join them; I saw him one day in a hallway arguing bitterly, probably about this, with Blobel, who was also wandering about without knowing what to do, almost constantly drunk, hateful, enraged. A few days before, Eichmann had met the Reichsführer in Hohenlychen, and had returned from this interview extremely depressed; he invited me to his office to drink some schnapps and to listen to him talk, he seemed to have a certain regard for me and treated me almost as his confidant, though I had no idea why. I drank in silence and let him vent. “I don’t understand,” he said plaintively, pushing his glasses back up on his nose. “The Reichsführer said to me: ‘Eichmann, if I had to start over again, I’d organize the concentration camps as the British do.’ That’s what he said to me. He added: ‘I made a mistake there.’ What could he have meant? I don’t understand. Do you understand? Maybe he meant the camps should have been, I don’t know, more elegant, more artful, more polite.” I didn’t understand what the Reichsführer had meant, either, but it was all the same to me, really. I knew from Thomas, who had immediately plunged back into his intrigues, that Himmler, prompted by his Finnish masseur, Kersten, and by Schellenberg, kept making gestures—mostly incoherent ones, to tell the truth—toward the Anglo-Americans: “Schellenberg managed to get him to say: ‘I protect the throne. That doesn’t necessarily mean the one who is sitting on it.’ That’s real progress,” Thomas explained to me.—“Truly. Tell me, Thomas, why are you still in Berlin?” The Russians had stopped on the Oder, but everyone knew it was just a question of time. Thomas smiled: “Schellenberg asked me to stay. To keep an eye on Kaltenbrunner and especially Müller. They’re running a bit wild.” Everyone, in fact, was running a bit wild, Himmler first and foremost, Schellenberg, Kammler who now had his own direct access to the Führer and no longer listened to the Reichsführer; Speer, it was said, was racing around the Ruhr trying, in the face of the American advance, to countermand the Führer’s destruction orders. The population was losing all hope, and Goebbels’s propaganda wasn’t helping things: by way of consolation, he promised that in case of defeat the Führer, in his great wisdom, was preparing an easy death, by gas, for the German people. That was very encouraging and it led the malicious to suggest: “What is a coward? It’s a guy who’s in Berlin and who signs up for the front.” The second week of April, the Philharmonic gave a final concert. The program, execrable, was entirely in the taste of that period—Brünnhilde’s last aria, the Götterdämmerung of course, and to end it all Bruckner’s Romantic Symphony—but I went all the same. The icy auditorium was intact, the chandeliers shone with all their lights; I could see Speer, from a distance, with Admiral Dönitz in the box of honor; at the exit, uniformed Hitlerjugend holding baskets offered members of the audience cyanide capsules: I was almost tempted to swallow one on the spot, in a fit of pique. Flaubert, I was sure, would have had a fit in front of such a display of inanity. These ostentatious demonstrations of pessimism alternated with ecstatic effusions of optimistic joy: the same day as this famous concert, Roosevelt died, and Goebbels, confusing Truman with Peter III, immediately launched a new slogan, “The Czarina is dead.” Soldiers claimed they had seen the face of “Uncle Fritz” in the clouds, and were promised a decisive counteroffensive and victory for the Führer’s birthday, on April 20. Thomas, at least, even though he didn’t give up his maneuvering, still kept his wits about him; he had managed to send his parents through to the Tyrol, near Innsbruck, to a zone that would certainly be occupied by the Americans: “Kaltenbrunner took care of it. Through the Gestapo in Vienna.” And when I showed a little surprise: “He’s an understanding man, is Kaltenbrunner. He has a family too, he knows what it means.” Thomas had immediately resumed his frantic social life and took me from party to party, where I drank myself into a stupor as he exaggeratedly narrated our Pomeranian wanderings to titillated ladies. There were parties every night, pretty much everywhere, people no longer paid any attention to the Mosquito raids or to the propaganda orders. Beneath the Wilhelmplatz, a bunker had been transformed into a nightclub, very cheerful, where they served wine, hard liquor, brand-name cigars, fancy hors d’oeuvres; the place was frequented by high-ranking officers from the OKW, the SS, and the RSHA, wealthy civilians and aristocrats, as well as actresses and flirtatious young ladies, superbly decked out. We dined almost every evening at the Adlon, where the maître d’hôtel, solemn and impassive, welcomed us in a tailcoat, led us into the well-lit restaurant, and had us served, by waiters wearing tails, purple slices of cabbage in silver dishes. The basement bar was always crowded, packed with the last diplomats, Italian, Japanese, Hungarian, or French. I met Mihaï there one night, dressed in white, with a canary yellow silk shirt. “Still in Berlin?” he asked me with a smile. “It’s been a long time since I saw you last.” He began openly flirting with me, in front of several people. I took him by the arm and, squeezing him tightly, drew him aside: “Stop,” I ordered.—“Stop what?” he said, smiling. This smug, calculating smile drove me out of my mind. “Come on,” I said, and pushed him discreetly into the bathroom. It was a large white tiled room, with massive sinks and urinals, brightly lit. I checked the stalls: they were empty. Then I shot the bolt on the door. Mihaï was looking at me, smiling, one hand in the pocket of his white jacket, next to the sinks with their big brass faucets. He came toward me, still with his eager smile; when he raised his head to kiss me, I took off my cap and hit him hard in the face with my forehead. His nose, under the violence of the blow, burst, blood gushed out, he screamed and fell to the ground. I stepped over him, still holding my cap, and went to look at myself in the mirror: I had blood on my forehead, but my collar and uniform weren’t stained. I carefully washed my face and put my cap back on. On the ground, Mihaï was writhing in pain and holding his nose, groaning pitifully: “Why’d you do that?” His hand found the hem of my pants; I removed my foot and looked around the room. A mop was leaning in a corner, in a galvanized metal bucket. I took this mop, placed the handle across Mihaï’s neck, and stood on it; with one foot to each side of his neck, I rocked slowly on the handle. Mihaï’s face beneath me became red, scarlet, then purplish-blue; his jaw quivered convulsively, his bulging eyes stared at me with terror, his nails scratched my boots; behind me, his feet beat the tiled floor. He wanted to speak, but no sound came out of his mouth from which a swollen, obscene tongue stuck out. He emptied himself with a soft noise and the stench of shit filled the room; his legs struck the ground one last time, then fell limp. I got down off the mop, set it aside, tapped Mihaï’s cheek with the tip of my boot. His inert head rolled a bit, then slowly came back. I took him by the armpits, dragged him into one of the stalls, and sat him down on the toilet, making sure the feet were straight. These stalls had latches that pivoted on a screw: by holding the raised latch with the tip of my pocketknife, I could shut the door and make it fall so as to lock the stall from inside. A little blood had run on the tiled floor; I used the mop to clean it, then rinsed it off, wiped the handle with my handkerchief, and put it back in the bucket where I had found it. Finally I went out. I went to the bar to get a drink; people were going in and out of the bathroom, no one seemed to notice anything. An acquaintance came over to ask me: “Have you seen Mihaï?” I looked around: “No, he must be somewhere around.” I finished my drink and went to chat with Thomas. Around one in the morning, there was a disturbance: someone had found the body. Diplomats uttered horrified exclamations, the police came, they questioned us, like everyone else I said I hadn’t seen a thing. I never heard anything more about this business. The Russian offensive was finally under way: on April 16, at night, they attacked the Seelow Heights, our last defensive position before the city. The sky was overcast, it was drizzling; I spent the day and then part of the night carrying dispatches from the Bendlerstrasse to the Kurfürstenstrasse, a short trip complicated by the incessant Sturmovik raids. Around midnight, I ran into Osnabrugge at the Bendlerstrasse: he looked lost, exhausted. “They want to blow up all the bridges in the city.” He was almost weeping. “Well,” I said, “if the enemy’s advancing, that’s normal, isn’t it?”—“You don’t realize what that means! There are nine hundred and fifty bridges in Berlin. If we blow them up, the city dies! Forever. No more food supplies, no more industry. Even worse, all the electric cables, all the water pipes pass through these bridges. Can you picture it? The epidemics, the people dying of hunger in the ruins?” I shrugged: “We can’t just hand the city over to the Russians.”—“But that’s no reason to demolish everything! We can choose, we can just destroy the bridges on the main routes.” He was wiping his forehead. “In any case, I’ll say this to you, have me shot if you want, but for me it’s the last time. When this madness is over, I don’t care who I have to work for, I’m going to build. They’ll have to rebuild, won’t they?”—“No doubt. Would you still know how to build a bridge?”—“Probably, probably,” he said as he moved off, nodding gently. Later on, that same night, I found Thomas in the Wannsee house. He wasn’t sleeping, he was sitting alone in the living room, in shirtsleeves, drinking. “So?” he asked me.—“We still hold the Seelow redoubt. But farther south, their tanks are crossing the Neisse.” He made a grimace: “Yes. Well. In any case it’s kaput.” I took off my wet cap and coat and poured myself a drink. “It’s really over, then?”—“It’s over,” Thomas confirmed.—“Defeat, again?”—“Yes, once again, defeat.”—“And afterward?”—“Afterward? We’ll see. Germany won’t be wiped off the map, whatever Herr Morgenthau may say. The unnatural alliance of our enemies will hold up until their victory, but not much longer. The Western powers will need a bastion against Bolshevism. I give them three years, at most.” I drank and listened. “I wasn’t talking about that,” I said finally.—“Ah. Us, you mean?”—“Yes, us. Accounts will have to be settled.”—“Why didn’t you have some ID papers made up?”—“I don’t know. I don’t really believe in them. What will we do, with these papers? Sooner or later, they’ll find us. Then it’ll be the rope or Siberia.” Thomas swirled the liquid around in his glass: “It’s obvious that we’ll have to leave for a while. Lie low a bit, long enough for people to calm down. Then we can come back. The new Germany, whatever it might be, will need brains.”—“Go? Where? And how?” He looked at me, smiling: “You think we haven’t thought of that? There are networks, in Holland, in Switzerland, people ready to help us, out of conviction or self-interest. The best networks are in Italy. In Rome. The Church will not let down its flock in its time of distress.” He raised his glass as if for a toast, and drank. “Schellenberg, Wolfie too, have received good guarantees. Of course, it won’t be easy. Endgames are always delicate.”—“And afterward?”—“We’ll see. South America, the sun, the pampas, the horses, doesn’t that tempt you? Or, if you like, the pyramids. The British are going to pull out, they’ll need good specialists, over there.” I poured myself some more and drank: “What if Berlin is surrounded? How do you plan on getting out? Are you staying?”—“Yes, I’m staying. Kaltenbrunner and Müller are still giving us a hard time. They’re really not reasonable. But I’ve thought it over. Come and see.” He led me into his bedroom, opened his wardrobe, took out some clothes, which he spread out on the bed: “Look.” They were coarse work clothes made of blue canvas, stained with oil and grease. “Look at the labels.” I looked: they were French clothes. “I also have shoes, the beret, the armband, everything. And the papers. Here.” He showed me the papers: they were those of a French worker from the STO. “Of course, in France, I’ll have trouble passing, but it will be enough for the Russians. Even if I come across an officer who speaks French, it’s not very likely he’ll balk at my accent. I can always tell him I’m Alsatian.”—“That’s not a bad idea,” I said. “Where did you find all that?” He tapped the rim of his glass and smiled: “You think they count foreign workers these days, in Berlin? One more, one less…” He drank. “You should think about it. With your French, you could get as far as Paris.” We went back downstairs to the living room. He poured me another glass and clinked glasses with me. “It won’t be without risks,” he said laughing. “But what is? We got out of Stalingrad. You have to be clever, that’s all. You know that there are guys in the Gestapo who are trying to get themselves stars and Jewish papers?” He laughed again. “They’re having a hard time of it. There aren’t a lot left on the market.”