Thomas was certainly a man of convictions; convictions, obviously, that were entirely compatible with the pursuit of his ambitions and of pleasure. Back at my hotel, I found a note from him inviting me to the ballet. I called him with my excuses; without giving me time to present them, he said abruptly, “So how did it go?,” then began to explain why he wasn’t having any success on his side. I listened patiently and at the first opportunity tried to turn down his invitation. But he would hear nothing of it: “You’re turning into a caveman. It will do you good to get out.” To tell the truth the idea bored me profoundly, but I ended up giving in. All the Russian ballets were of course forbidden; so they put on little pieces by Mozart, ballets from Idomeneo, followed by a Gavotte and his Petits Riens. The orchestra was conducted by von Karajan, then a rising young star whose fame hadn’t yet eclipsed Furtwängler’s. I found Thomas near the artists’ entrance: one of his friends had procured a private box for him. Everything was superbly organized. Bustling usherettes took our coats and caps and led us to a buffet, where we were served drinks in the company of musicians and starlets from Goebbels’s studios, who were immediately charmed by Thomas’s wit and good looks. When they led us to our box, which was right at the edge of the stage, above the orchestra, I whispered: “Aren’t you going to try to invite one of the girls?” Thomas shrugged his shoulders: “You’re joking! To get in behind the good Doktor, you have to be at least a Gruppenführer.” I had teased him mechanically, without conviction; I remained withdrawn into myself, closed, hostile to everything; but as soon as the ballet began I was delighted. The dancers were just a few yards away from me, and as I watched them I felt poor and haggard and miserable, as if I hadn’t yet shaken the cold and fear of the front from my body. The dancers leaped in their brilliant costumes, splendid, as if to mark an insuperable distance, and their shining, sumptuous bodies petrified me and drove me mad with excitement (but it was a vain, aimless, distraught excitement). The gold, the crystal in the chandeliers, the tulle, the silk, the opulent jewelry, the artists’ sparkling teeth, their gleaming muscles, overwhelmed me. During the first intermission, sweating in my uniform, I rushed to the bar and had several drinks, then brought the bottle back with me to the box. Thomas looked at me amusedly and drank too, more slowly. On the other side of the theater, sitting in a raised box, a woman was eying me through some opera glasses. She was too far away, I couldn’t make out her features and I didn’t have any opera glasses, but she was obviously staring at me, and this little game began to annoy me enormously; during the second intermission, I made no attempt to look for her, I took refuge in the private buffet and kept drinking with Thomas; but as soon as the ballet began again, I was like a child. I applauded and even considered sending flowers to one of the dancers, but I didn’t know which one to choose, and also I didn’t know their names, and I didn’t know how to go about it, and I was afraid of making a mistake. The woman kept peering at me, but I couldn’t care less. I drank some more, laughed. “You were right,” I said to Thomas, “this was a good idea.” Everything dazzled me and frightened me. I couldn’t begin to understand the beauty of the dancers’ bodies, an almost abstract, asexual beauty, with no distinction between the men and the women: this beauty almost scandalized me. After the ballet, Thomas took me to a little street in Charlottenburg; when we went in, I realized to my horror that it was a brothel, but it was too late to retreat. I drank some more and ate some sandwiches while Thomas danced with the unclothed girls, who obviously knew him well. There were some other officers there and some civilians. A gramophone played American records, a frenzied, irritating jazz mingled with the brittle, lost laughter of the whores. Most of them wore nothing but colored silk negligees, and their soft, insipid, dormant skin, which Thomas grasped with both hands, filled me with disgust. A girl tried to sit on my lap; I gently pushed her away, my hand on her naked belly, but she insisted, and so I brutally shoved her off and upset her. I was pale, distraught; everything was shiny and jangling and making me ill. Thomas came over to pour me another drink, laughing: “If you don’t like her, you don’t have to make a scene, there are others.” He waved his hand, his face flushed. “Choose, choose, it’s on me.” I had no desire whatsoever, but he insisted; finally, so that he would leave me alone, I seized the bottle I was drinking by the neck and went up with one of the girls, picked out at random. In her room, it was calmer. She helped me take off my tunic; but when she wanted to unbutton my shirt, I stopped her and made her sit down. “What’s your name?” I asked her.—“Émilie,” she answered, using the French form of the name.—“Tell me a story, Émilie.”—“What kind of story, Herr Offizier?”—“Tell me about your childhood.” Her first words froze me: “I had a twin sister. She died when she was ten. We both had the same illness, rheumatic fever, and then she died of uremia, the water kept rising, rising…. She suffocated to death.” She rummaged through a drawer and took out two framed photographs. The first one showed the two twins, side by side, with large eyes and ribbons in their hair, about ten years old; the other, the dead girl in her coffin, surrounded by tulips. “At home, they hung this photo up. From that day on my mother couldn’t bear tulips anymore, the smell of tulips. She said: I have lost the angel and kept the devil. After that, whenever I caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror, I thought I was seeing my dead sister. And if I came running back from school, my mother would get hysterical, she thought she was seeing my sister, so I forced myself always to walk back from school slowly.”—“And how did you end up here?” I asked. But the girl, overcome with fatigue, had fallen asleep on the sofa. I leaned on the table and watched her, sipping my drink from time to time. She woke up: “Oh, I’m sorry, I’ll get undressed right away.” I smiled and replied: “Don’t bother.” I sat down on the sofa, took her head on my lap and stroked her hair. “Go on, sleep a little more.”

Another message was waiting for me at the Hotel Eden: “Frau von Üxküll,” the porter explained. “Here is the number where you can reach her.” I went up to my room and sat down on the sofa without even unbuttoning my tunic, overwhelmed. Why contact me like this, after all these years? Why now? I would have been incapable of saying if I did or didn’t want to see her again; but I knew that if she wanted to, not seeing her again would be as impossible for me as not breathing anymore. That night I didn’t sleep at all, or only a little. The memories came brutally rushing back; unlike the ones that had welled up in great waves in Stalingrad, these were not solar, dazzling memories of the force of happiness, but memories already tinged with the cold light of the full moon, white and bitter. In the springtime, back from our winter sports, we continued our games in the attic, naked, shining in the dust-filled light, among the dolls and piles of trunks and suitcases overloaded with old clothes behind which we nestled together. After the winter, I was pale, and still hairless; as for her, the shadow of a tuft was appearing between her legs, and minuscule breasts were beginning to deform her chest, which I loved so flat and smooth. But there was no way back. It was still cold, our skin was taut and bristling. She climbed on top of me, but already a trickle of blood was running down the inside of her thighs. She cried: “It’s beginning, the end is beginning.” I took her in my thin arms and cried with her. We weren’t yet thirteen. It wasn’t right, I wanted to be like her; why couldn’t I bleed too, share that with her? Why couldn’t we be the same? I didn’t have ejaculations yet, our games continued; but maybe now we were observing each other, we were observing ourselves a little more, and that already introduced a distance, an infinitesimal one still, but one that may have made us push things sometimes. Then came the inevitable: one day, the whitish cream on my hand, my thighs. I told Una and showed her. It fascinated her, but she was afraid, she had learned the mechanics of the thing. And for the first time the attic seemed gloomy to us, dusty, full of spiderwebs. I wanted to kiss her breasts, round now, but that didn’t interest her, and she knelt down, presenting her narrow adolescent buttocks to me. She had brought some cold cream taken from our mother’s bathroom: “Take it,” she said. “There nothing can happen.” More than the sensation, I remember the acrid, heady smell of the cold cream. We were between the Golden Age and the Fall.