At the end of the meal, urged by Una, I had spoken with von Üxküll about my wish to land a position in France. Una had added: “Can’t you help him?” Von Üxküll reflected: “I’ll see. But my friends in the Wehrmacht don’t hold the SS close to their hearts.” That I was beginning to understand; and sometimes I told myself that at bottom it was Blobel, losing his mind in Kharkov, who had been right. All my paths seemed to be leading to dead ends: Best had sent me his Festgabe, but without mentioning France; Thomas was trying to be reassuring, but couldn’t seem to do anything for me. And I, completely absorbed by the presence and thought of my sister, I wasn’t attempting anything anymore, I was sinking into my despondency, stiff, petrified, a sad salt statue on the shores of the Dead Sea. That night, my sister and her husband were invited to a reception, and Una suggested I come with them; I refused: I didn’t want to see her like that, in the midst of thoughtless, arrogant, drunk aristocrats drinking Champagne and joking about everything I held sacred. In the midst of those people, it was certain, I would feel powerless, ashamed, an idiotic kid; their sarcasm would wound me, and my anguish would prevent me from responding; their world remained closed to people like me, and they knew just how to get that across. I shut myself up in my room; I tried to leaf through the Festgabe, but the words made no sense to me. So I abandoned myself to the gentle sway of mad fantasies: Una, overcome with remorse, left her party, came to my hotel, the door opened, she smiled at me, and the entire past, at that instant, was redeemed. All that was perfectly idiotic, and I knew it, but the more time passed, the more I managed to convince myself it would happen, here, now. I remained in the dark, sitting on the sofa, my heart leaping at every noise in the hallway, every clank of the elevator, waiting. But it was always another door that opened and closed, and the despair rose like black water, like that cold, pitiless water that engulfs the drowned and steals their breath away, the precious air of life. The next day, Una and von Üxküll were leaving for Switzerland.

She called me in the morning, just before taking the train. Her voice was soft, tender, warm. The conversation was short, I wasn’t really paying attention to what she was saying, I was listening to that voice, clinging to the receiver, lost in my distress. “We can see each other again,” she said. “You can come visit us.”—“We’ll see,” replied the other person who was speaking through my mouth. I was overcome with nausea again, I thought I would throw up, I convulsively swallowed my saliva by breathing through my nose and managed to control myself. Then she hung up and I was alone again.

Thomas, in the end, had managed to arrange an interview for me with Schulz. “Since things aren’t really getting anywhere, I think it’s worth the trouble. Try to handle him tactfully.” I didn’t have to make much of an effort: Schulz, a scrawny little man who mumbled into his moustache, his mouth streaked with a bad dueling scar, spoke in long circumlocutions that were sometimes hard to follow and, while he stubbornly leafed through my file, didn’t leave me many openings to speak. I managed to get two words in about my interest in the Reich’s foreign policy, but he seemed not to notice. The upshot of this interview was that people were taking an interest in me in high places and that we’d see at the end of my convalescence. It wasn’t very encouraging, and Thomas confirmed my interpretation: “They have to ask for you over there, for a specific job. Otherwise, if they send you anywhere, it will be Bulgaria. True, it’s quiet there, but the wine isn’t so great.” Best had suggested I contact Knochen, but Thomas’s words gave me a better idea: after all, I was on leave, nothing was forcing me to stay in Berlin.

I took the night express and arrived in Paris a little after dawn. The controls didn’t pose any problems. In front of the station I happily contemplated the pale gray stone of the buildings, the bustle in the streets; because of the restrictions, there weren’t many vehicles, but the streets were congested with bicycles and carts, through which the German cars made their way with difficulty. Suddenly joyous, I went into the first café and drank a Cognac, standing at the bar. I was in civilian clothes, and no one had any reason to take me for anything but a Frenchman; I found a curious pleasure in this. I walked calmly up to Montmartre and checked into a discreet little hotel, on the side of the hill, above Pigalle; I knew this place: the rooms were simple and clean, and the owner devoid of curiosity, which suited me. For this first day, I didn’t want to see anyone. I went out for a walk. It was April, spring was starting to show through everywhere, in the pale blue of the sky, the buds and flowers coming out on the branches, a certain liveliness or at least a lightness in people’s steps. Life, I knew, was hard here, the sallow tint of many faces betrayed the difficulties of finding food. But nothing seemed to have changed since my last visit, aside from the traffic and the graffiti: on the walls now you could see STALINGRAD or “1918,” usually erased and sometimes replaced by “1763,” no doubt a brilliant initiative of our services. I headed downhill toward the Seine, then went slowly rummaging through the booksellers along the quays: to my surprise, next to Céline, Drieu, Mauriac, Bernanos and Montherlant, they were openly selling Kafka, Proust, and even Thomas Mann; permissiveness seemed to be the rule. Almost all the sellers had a copy of Rebatet’s book, Les Décombres, which had been published the previous year: I leafed through it with curiosity, but put off buying it till later. I finally decided on a collection of essays by Maurice Blanchot, a critic from the Journal des débats, some of whose articles I had read with interest before the war; it was an advance copy, probably resold by a reviewer, bearing the title Faux Pas; the bookseller explained to me that the publication of the book had been delayed because of the paper shortage, while assuring me that it was still the best thing written recently, unless I liked Sartre, but he didn’t like Sartre (I hadn’t even heard of Sartre then). At the Place Saint-Michel, near the fountain, I sat down at a table on a terrace and ordered a sandwich and a glass of wine. The previous owner of the book had cut open only the first pages; I asked for a knife and, while I waited for the sandwich, cut the remaining pages, a slow, placid ritual that I always savored. The paper was of very poor quality; I had to be careful not to tear the pages by going too fast. After eating, I walked up to the Luxembourg. I had always loved this cold, geometric, luminous park, traversed with a calm agitation. Around the great circle of the central fountain, along the lanes curving out among trees and flowerbeds still bare, people walked, hummed, conversed, read, or, their eyes closed, sunbathed in the pale sun, a long and peaceful murmuring. I sat down on a metal chair with chipped green paint and read a few essays at random, the one on Orestes first, which actually had more to do with Sartre; this latter had apparently written a play where he used the figure of the unfortunate matricide to develop his ideas on man’s freedom in crime; Blanchot judged it harshly, and I could only approve. But I was especially charmed by an article on Melville’s Moby-Dick, where Blanchot speaks of this impossible book, which had marked a moment of my own youth, of this written equivalent of the universe, mysteriously, as a work that presents the ironic quality of an enigma and reveals itself only by the questions it raises. To tell the truth, I didn’t understand much of what he was writing there. But it awoke in me a nostalgia for a life that I could have had: the pleasure of the free play of thought and language, rather than the ponderous rigor of the Law; I let myself be carried along happily by the meanderings of this heavy, patient thinking, which dug a way for itself through ideas the way an underground river slowly carves itself a path through the rock. Finally I closed the book and continued my walk, first toward the Odéon, where more writing covered the walls, then up the Boulevard Saint-Germain, almost empty, toward the Assemblée Nationale. Every place awoke precise memories in me, of my preparatory years and afterward, when I had entered the ELSP; I must have been rather tormented in those days, and I remembered the quick surge of my hatred for France, but these memories, given the distance, reached me as if appeased, almost happy, wreathed in a serene, probably distorted light. I continued toward the Invalides esplanade, where passersby were congregating to watch some workers who, with draught horses, were plowing up the lawns so as to plant vegetables; farther on, near a light tank of Czech manufacture stamped with the swastika, indifferent children were playing with a ball. Then I crossed the Alexandre III Bridge. At the Grand Palais, the posters announced two exhibitions: one entitled Why Did the Jew Want War?, the other a collection of Greek and Roman art. I felt no need to broaden my anti-Semitic education, but antiquity attracted me; I paid for my ticket and went in. There were some superb pieces there, most of them probably borrowed from the Louvre. For a long time I admired the cold, calm, inhuman beauty of a large Apollo with Cithara from Pompeii, a life-size bronze now turned greenish. He had a slender, not entirely formed body, with a child’s sex and narrow, well-rounded buttocks. I walked from one end of the exhibition to the other, but I kept coming back to him: his beauty fascinated me. He might have been nothing but an exquisite, ordinary adolescent, but the verdigris that was eating away at his skin in large patches conferred a stupefying profundity upon him. One detail struck me: regardless of the angle from which I looked at his eyes, painted realistically directly on the bronze, he never looked me in the eye; it was impossible to capture his gaze, drowned, lost in the void of his eternity. The metallic leprosy was blistering his face, his chest, his buttocks, almost devouring his left hand, which must have held the vanished cithara. His face seemed vain, almost smug. Looking at him, I felt overcome with desire, with a wish to lick him; and he was decomposing in front of me with a calm, infinite slowness. After that, avoiding the Champs-Élysées, I walked through the silent little streets of the eighth arrondissement, then slowly climbed back up to Montmartre. Night was falling, the air smelled good. At the hotel, the owner showed me a little black-market restaurant where I could eat without ration cards: “It’s full of lowlife, but the food is good.” The clientele in fact seemed made up of collaborators and black-market dealers; I was served a top cut of sirloin with shallots and green beans, and some decent Bordeaux in a carafe; for dessert, a tarte Tatin with crème fraîche, and, supreme luxury, real coffee. But the Apollo from the Grand Palais had awakened other desires. I went down to Pigalle and found a little bar that I knew well: sitting at the counter, I ordered a Cognac and waited. It didn’t take long, and I brought the boy back to my hotel. Under his cap, he had curly, unruly hair; a light down covered his stomach and darkened in curls on his chest; his olive skin awoke in me a furious desire of mouth and of ass. He was as I liked them, taciturn and available. For him, my ass opened like a flower, and when he finally slipped it in, a ball of white light began to grow at the base of my spine, slowly rose up my back, and annihilated my head. And that night, more than ever, it seemed to me that in this way I was responding directly to my sister, incorporating her into me, whether she accepted it or not. What happened in my body, under the hands and sex of this unknown boy, overwhelmed me. When it was over, I sent him away but didn’t fall asleep; I lay there on the creased sheets, naked and spread out like a child crushed with happiness.