The Kindly Ones полностью

At the AOK, I requested a meeting with von Gilsa and put Bierkamp’s question to him. “It’s true,” he replied, “they’re talking about it. But the details aren’t clear yet for me.”—“And what will happen to the Reichskommissariat, then?”—“The establishment of the Reichskommissariat will be delayed for a while.”—“And why haven’t the representatives of the SP and the SD been informed?”—“I couldn’t say. I’m still waiting for more information. But you know, this question concerns the OKHG. Oberführer Bierkamp should apply directly to them.” I left von Gilsa’s office with the impression that he knew more than he was saying. I wrote a brief report and addressed it to Leetsch and Bierkamp. In general, that was what my work consisted of now: the Abwehr sent me a copy of the reports they wanted, generally having to do with the evolution of the partisan problem; I threw in some information gleaned here and there, most of the time at meals, and sent the whole thing on to Voroshilovsk; in exchange, I received other reports that I communicated to von Gilsa or one of his colleagues. Thus, the activity reports of Ek 12, whose offices were half a mile away from the AOK, had to be sent first to Voroshilovsk, then, collated with those of Sk 10b (the other Kommandos were operating in the theater of operations or the rear areas of the Seventeenth Army), some of them came down to me, and I passed them on to the Ic; and the whole time, of course, the Einsatzkommando maintained its own direct relations with the AOK. I didn’t have much work to do. I took advantage of this: Pyatigorsk was a pleasant town, there were lots of things to see. Accompanied by Voss, always curious, I went to visit the local museum, located a little below the Hotel Bristol, across from the post office and Tsvetnik Park. There were some fine collections there, accumulated in the course of decades by the Kavkazskoe Gornoe Obshchestvo, an association of amateur but enthusiastic naturalists: they had brought back from their expeditions heaps of stuffed animals, minerals, skulls, plants, dried flowers; old gravestones and pagan idols; moving photographs in black-and-white, representing mostly elegant gentlemen in cravats, celluloid collars, and straw boaters perched on the steep slope of a peak; and (I remembered my father’s office with delight) a whole wall of large cases of butterflies containing hundreds of specimens, each one labeled with the date and place of its capture, the name of the collector, and the sex and scientific name of the butterfly. They came from Kislovodsk, from Adyghea, from Chechnya, as far as Daghestan and Adjaria; the dates were 1923, 1915, 1909. At night, we sometimes went to the Teatr Operetty, another eccentric building, decorated with red ceramic tiles embossed with books, musical instruments, and garlands, and recently reopened by the Wehrmacht; then we would dine at the mess or in a café or at the Kasino, which was none other than the old hotel-restaurant Restoratsiya where Pechorin met Mary and where, as a plaque in Russian that Voss translated for me indicated, Lev Tolstoy celebrated his twenty-fifth birthday. The Soviets had turned it into a Central Government Institute of Balneology; the Wehrmacht had left this impressive title on the pediment, in gold letters above the massive columns, but had returned the building to its original use, and you could drink dry wine from Kakhetia there and eat shashlik and sometimes even venison; there, too, I introduced Voss to Hohenegg and they spent the evening discussing the origins of the names of diseases, in five languages.