We had reached the Chinese pavilion. A mandarin under his parasol sat enthroned at the top of the cupola, which was trimmed with a blue-and-gold canopy supported by gilt columns in the shape of palm trees. I glanced inside: a round room, Oriental paintings. Outside, at the foot of each palm tree, sat exotic figures, also gilded. “A real folie,” I commented. “That’s what the great used to dream of. It’s a little ridiculous.”—“No more than the mad fantasies of the powerful today,” she replied calmly. “I like this century a lot. It’s the only one of which you can at least say it wasn’t a century of faith.”—“From Watteau to Robespierre,” I retorted ironically. She made a face: “Robespierre is already the nineteenth. He’s almost a German romantic. Do you still like that French music as much as you used to—Rameau, Forqueray, Couperin?” I felt my face darken: her question had suddenly reminded me of Yakov, the little Jewish pianist from Zhitomir. “Yes,” I answered finally. “But I haven’t had a chance to listen to them for a long time now.”—“Berndt plays them now and then. Especially Rameau. He says it’s not bad, that there are some things that are almost as good as Bach, for the keyboard.”—“That’s what I think too.” I had had almost the same conversation with Yakov. I didn’t say anything more. We had come to the edge of the park; we turned around and then, by common consent, headed off toward the Friedenskirche and the exit. “And you?” I asked. “Are you happy, in your Pomeranian hideout?”—“Yes. I’m happy.”—“You don’t get bored? You must feel a little lonely sometimes.” She looked at me again, for a long time, before replying: “I don’t need anything.” This statement chilled me. We took a bus to the train station. Waiting for the train, I went and bought the Völkische Beobachter; Una laughed when she saw me come back with it. “Why are you laughing?”—“I was thinking about one of Berndt’s jokes. He calls the VB the Verblödungsblatt, the Mindless Rag.” I scowled: “He should be careful about what he says.”—“Don’t worry. He’s not an idiot, and his friends are intelligent men.”—“I wasn’t worried. I was warning you, that’s all.” I looked at the front page: the English had bombed Cologne again, causing many civilian deaths. I showed her the article: “Those Luftmörder really have no shame,” I said. “They say they’re defending freedom and they kill women and children.”—“We’re killing women and children too,” she replied gently. Her words made me ashamed, but immediately my shame turned into anger: “We’re killing our enemies, to defend our country.”—“They’re defending their country too.”—“They’re killing innocent civilians!” I was turning red, but she remained calm. “The people you were executing—you didn’t catch them all with weapons in their hands. You too have killed children.” Rage was suffocating me, I didn’t know how to explain to her; the difference seemed obvious to me, but she was acting stubborn and pretending not to see it. “You’re calling me a murderer!” I shouted. She took my hand: “No, I’m not. Calm down.” I calmed down and went out to smoke; then we got on the train. As on the way down, she watched the Grunewald go by, and as I watched her I shifted, slowly at first, then vertiginously, into the memory of our last meeting. It was in 1934, just after our twenty-first birthday. I had finally won my freedom, I had announced to my mother that I was leaving France; on my way back to Germany, I made a detour through Zurich; I rented a room in a little hotel and went to find Una, who was studying there. She seemed surprised to see me: but she already knew about the scene in Paris, with Moreau and our mother, and about my decision. I took her out to dinner at a modest, quiet restaurant. She was happy in Zurich, she told me, she had friends, Jung was a magnificent man. These last words made my hackles rise, it must have been something in her tone, but I didn’t say anything. “And you?” she asked me. I revealed my hopes to her then, my enrollment in Kiel, my joining the NSDAP too (I had done so during my second trip to Germany, in 1932). She listened to me as she drank her wine; I drank too, but more slowly. “I’m not sure I share your enthusiasm for this Hitler,” she commented. “He seems a neurotic to me, full of unresolved complexes, frustrations, and dangerous resentments.”—“How can you say that!” I launched into a long tirade. But she frowned, withdrew into herself. I stopped as she poured herself another glass, and I took her hand on the checkered tablecloth. “Una. It’s what I want to do, it’s what I have to do. Our father was German. My future is in Germany, not with the corrupt bourgeoisie of France.”—“You may be right. But I’m afraid you’ll lose your soul with those men.” I flushed with anger and struck the table. “Una!” It was the first time I had raised my voice with her. Her glass tipped over from the blow, rolled, and smashed at her feet, bursting into a puddle of red wine. A waiter hurried over with a broom and Una, who until then had kept her eyes lowered, raised them to me. Her gaze was clear, almost transparent. “You know,” I said, “I’ve finally read Proust. You remember this passage?” I recited, my throat tight: “This glass will be, as in the Temple, the symbol of our indestructible union.” She waved her hand. “No, no. Max, you don’t understand anything, you’ve never understood anything.” She was red, she must have drunk a lot. “You’ve always taken things too seriously. They were games, children’s games. We were children.” My eyes, my throat swelled up. I made an effort to control my voice. “You’re wrong, Una. You’re the one who never understood anything.” She drank some more. “You have to grow up, Max.” It had been seven years then since we were apart. “Never,” I said, “never.” And I kept that promise, even if she never thanked me for it.

In the train from Potsdam, I watched her, dominated by a feeling of loss, as if I had sunk and had never come back to the surface. And what was she thinking about? Her face hadn’t changed since that night in Zurich, it had simply filled out a little; but it remained closed to me, inaccessible; behind it, there was another life. We passed between the elegant residences in Charlottenburg; then came the zoo and the Tiergarten. “You know,” I said, “since I got to Berlin I haven’t even been to the zoo yet.”—“But you used to like zoos.”—“Yes. I should go for a walk there.” We got out at the Lehrter Hauptbahnhof and I took a taxi to accompany her to the Wilhelmplatz. “Do you want to have dinner with me?” I asked her in front of the entrance to the Kaiserhof. “Yes,” she replied, “but now I have to go see Berndt.” We agreed to meet in two hours, and I went back to my hotel to bathe and change. I felt exhausted. Her words were confused with my memories, my memories with my dreams, and my dreams with my most insane thoughts. I remembered her cruel Shakespeare quotation: so had she too joined our mother’s camp? It was undoubtedly the influence of her husband, the Baltic baron. I said to myself with rage: She should have remained a virgin, like me. The incoherence of this thought made me burst out laughing, a long crazy laughter; at the same time I wanted to cry. At the appointed time, I was at the Kaiserhof. Una joined me in the lobby, among the comfortable square armchairs and little potted palm trees; she wore the same clothes as in the afternoon. “Berndt is resting,” she said. She too felt tired and we decided to stay and eat at the hotel. Ever since the restaurants had reopened, a new directive from Goebbels enjoined them to offer customers Feldküchengerichte, field rations, in solidarity with the troops at the front; the maître d’hôtel’s gaze, while he explained that to us, remained fixed on my medals, and my expression made him stutter; Una’s cheerful laughter cut his embarrassment short: “I think my brother has already eaten enough of that.”—“Yes, of course,” he hastened to say. “We also have some venison from the Black Forest. With a prune sauce. It’s excellent.”—“Fine,” I said. “And some French wine.”—“Burgundy, with the venison?” During the meal we chatted about this and that, skirting around what concerned us most. I talked to her again about Russia, not the horrors, but my more human experiences: Hanika’s death, and especially about Voss: “You liked him a lot.”—“Yes. He was a decent fellow.” She spoke to me about the matrons who had been pestering her since she arrived in Berlin. With her husband, she had gone to parties and society dinners, where wives of high-ranking Party dignitaries decried deserters from the reproduction front, the childless women guilty of treason against nature for their childbearing strike. She laughed: “Of course, no one had the gall to attack me directly, everyone can see the state Berndt is in. Luckily, because otherwise I would have slapped them. But they were dying of curiosity, they came prowling around me without daring to ask me right out if he can function.” She laughed again and drank a little wine. I kept quiet; I too had asked myself the same question. “There’s even one, just picture this, a fat Gauleiter’s wife dripping with diamonds, with a bluish permanent, who had the nerve to suggest, if someday it should become necessary, that I go find a handsome SS man to impregnate me. How did she phrase it? A decent, dolichocephalic, völkisch will-bearing, physically and psychically healthy man. She explained to me that there was an SS office that was in charge of eugenic assistance and that I could apply to it for help. Is that true?”—“So they say. It’s a project of the Reichsführer’s called Lebensborn. But I don’t know how it works.”—“They’ve really gone mad. Are you sure it’s not just a brothel for SS officers and socialites?”—“No, no, it’s something else.” She shook her head. “Anyway, you’ll love the punchline: You won’t receive your child from the Holy Ghost, she said to me. I had to keep myself from replying that in any case I didn’t know any SS officer patriotic enough to impregnate her.” She laughed again and kept drinking. She had scarcely touched her food but had already drunk almost an entire bottle of wine on her own; still, her gaze remained clear, she wasn’t drunk. For dessert, the maître d’hôtel suggested grapefruit: I hadn’t tasted any since the beginning of the war. “They come from Spain,” he said. Una didn’t want any; she watched me prepare mine and eat it; I gave her a few pieces to try, lightly sprinkled with sugar. Then I accompanied her back to the lobby. I looked at her, with the taste of sweet grapefruit still in my mouth: “Do you share his bedroom?”—“No,” she replied, “that would be too complicated.” She hesitated, then touched the back of my hand with her oval nails: “If you like, come up and have a drink. But behave. Afterward, you have to leave.” In the bedroom, I put my cap on a table and sat down in an armchair. Una took her shoes off and, crossing the carpet in silk stockings, poured me some Cognac; then she sat on the bed with her feet crossed and lit a cigarette. “I didn’t know you smoked.”—“From time to time,” she replied. “When I drink.” I thought she was more beautiful than anything in the world. I talked to her about my plans for a position in France, and the difficulties I was encountering. “You should ask Berndt,” she said. “He has a lot of friends in high places in the Wehrmacht, comrades from the other war. Maybe he could do something for you.” These words unleashed my suppressed anger: “Berndt! He’s all you talk about.”—“Calm down, Max. He’s my husband.” I got up and began pacing up and down the room. “I don’t give a damn! He’s an intruder, he has no business getting between us.”—“Max.” She was still talking softly; her eyes remained serene. “He is not between us. The us you’re talking about does not exist, it no longer exists, it’s come undone. Berndt is my everyday life, you have to understand that.” My rage was so mixed with my desire that I no longer knew where one began and the other ended. I went up to her and took both her arms: “Kiss me.” She shook her head; for the first time, I saw a harsh look in her eyes. “You’re not going to start that again.” I felt sick, I was suffocating; overcome, I fell down next to the bed, my head against her knees as on a chopping block. “In Zurich, you kissed me,” I sobbed.—“In Zurich I was drunk.” She moved over and put her hand on the bedspread. “Come here. Lie down next to me.” Still with my boots on, I climbed onto the bed and lay curled up against her legs. I thought I could smell her odor through the stockings. She caressed my hair. “My poor little brother,” she murmured. Laughing through my tears, I managed to say: “You call me that because you were born fifteen minutes before me, because it was your wrist they tied the red thread to.”—“Yes, but there’s another difference: now I’m a woman, and you’re still a little boy.” In Zurich, things had gone differently. She had drunk a lot, as had I. After the meal we had gone out. Outside, it was cold and she shivered; she was staggering a little, so I put my arm around her and she clung to me. “Come with me,” I had said. “To my hotel.” She protested in a thickish voice: “Don’t be stupid, Max. We’re not children anymore.”—“Come,” I insisted. “To talk a little.” But we were in Switzerland and even in that kind of hotel the concierges made difficulties: “I’m sorry, mein Herr. Only guests of the establishment are allowed into the rooms. You can go to the bar, if you like.” Una turned toward it, but I held her back. “No. I don’t want to see people. Let’s go to your place.” She didn’t resist and brought me back to her little student’s room, cluttered with books, freezing. “Why don’t you heat it more?” I asked, clearing away the inside of the stove to prepare a fire. She shrugged her shoulders and showed me a bottle of white wine from the Valais. “That’s all I have. Is it all right with you?”—“Anything is all right with me.” I opened the bottle and filled to the brim two glasses she held out, laughing. She drank, then sat down on the bed. I felt tense, strained; I went to the table and examined the spines of the piled-up books. Most of the names were unknown to me. I took one at random. Una saw it and laughed again, a sharp laughter that set my nerves on edge. “Oh, Rank! Rank is good.”—“Who is he?”—“A former disciple of Freud, a friend of Ferenczi. He wrote a fine book on incest.” I turned toward her and stared at her. She stopped laughing. “Why do you say that word?” I said finally. She shrugged her shoulders and held out her glass. “Stop with your nonsense,” she said. “Pour me some more wine instead.” I put the book down and took the bottle: “It’s not nonsense.” She shrugged her shoulders again. I poured wine into her glass and she drank. I went up to her, my hand outstretched to touch her hair, her beautiful thick black hair. “Una…” She brushed my hand away. “Stop, Max.” She was swaying slightly and I put my hand under her hair, stroked her cheek, her neck. She stiffened but didn’t push my hand away; she drank some more. “What do you want, Max?”—“I want everything to be like before,” I said gently, my heart pounding.—“That’s impossible.” She clicked her teeth a little and drank again. “Even before wasn’t like before. Before never existed.” She was rambling, her eyes were closed. “Pour me some more wine.”—“No.” I took her glass and leaned over to kiss her lips. She pushed me harshly away, but the gesture made her lose her balance and she fell back onto the bed. I put her glass down and lay down next to her. She had stopped moving, her stockinged legs hung off the bed, her skirt had risen up over her knees. The blood was beating in my temples, I was overwhelmed, at that moment I loved her more than ever, more even than I had loved her in our mother’s womb, and she had to love me too, now and forevermore. I leaned over her, and she didn’t resist.