I had not always liked boys, though. When I was young, still a child, as I had told Thomas, I had loved a girl. But I hadn’t told Thomas everything. Like Tristan and Isolde, it had begun on a boat. A few months before, in Kiel, my mother had met a Frenchman named Moreau. My father must have been gone for three years, I think. This Moreau owned a small company in the South of France and was traveling in Germany on business. I don’t know what went on between them, but some time afterward he returned and asked my mother to come live with him. She consented. When she spoke to us about it, she presented the thing to us skillfully, praising the fine weather, the sea, the plentiful food. This latter point was particularly attractive: Germany was just emerging from the great inflation, and even if we were too small to have understood much about it, we had suffered from it. So my sister and I replied: Fine, but what will we do when Papa comes back? “Well, he’ll write to us and we’ll return.”—“Promise?”—“I promise.”

Moreau lived in a large family house, a little old-fashioned and full of hiding places, in Antibes, near the sea. The rich food was soaked in olive oil, and the bright warm April sun, which in Kiel we saw only in July, delighted us right away. Moreau, who, despite his coarseness, was far from being a stupid man, made special efforts to win if not our affection then at least our acceptance. That same summer he rented a large sailboat from an acquaintance and took us on a cruise to the Îles des Lérins and even farther, up to Fréjus. At first I got seasick, but that passed quickly; she—the one I’m talking about—she didn’t get seasick. We settled down together, in the bow of the boat, and we looked at the waves breaking into whitecaps, and then we looked at each other, and through this look, fired by the bitterness of our childhood and the all-consuming roar of the sea, something happened, something irremediable: love, bittersweet, until death. But at the time it was still just a look.

It didn’t stay that way for long. It wasn’t right away but maybe a year later that we discovered those things; then a boundless pleasure filled our childhood. And then one day, as I said, we were caught. There were endless scenes, my mother called me a pig and a degenerate, Moreau cried, and it was the end of all that is beautiful. A few weeks later, when school began, they sent us to Catholic boarding schools, hundreds of kilometers away from each other, and so, vom Himmel durch die Welt zur Hölle, began a nightmare that lasted many years and that, in a way, still continues. Frustrated, bitter priests, informed of my sins, forced me to spend hours on my knees on the ice-cold flagstones of the chapel, and let me take nothing but cold showers. Poor Partenau! I too have known the Church, and worse still. Yet my father was a Protestant, and I already despised the Catholics; under this treatment, the few remnants of my naïve child’s faith disintegrated, and rather than repentance, I learned hatred.

Everything in that school was deformed and perverted. At night, the older boys came and sat down on the edge of my bed and put their hands between my legs until I slapped them; then they laughed, calmly got up, and left; but in the showers, after gym, they slipped up against me and quickly rubbed their things on my rear end. The priests also sometimes invited boys into their offices to hear their confessions, then, with promises of gifts or through intimidation, forced them to commit criminal acts. It was hardly surprising that the unhappy Pierre R. tried to kill himself. I was disgusted, I felt as if I were covered in mud. I didn’t have anyone to appeal to: my father would never have allowed such things, but I had no idea where my father was.

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.