Dr. Weseloh wasn’t wearing a wedding ring, but didn’t seem to pay any attention to the handsome soldiers around her. Yet despite her unprepossessing physique and her sweeping, clumsy gestures, in the next few days I received many more visits than usual: officers not only from the Abwehr but even from Operations, who usually disdained speaking with me, suddenly found urgent reasons to come see me. Not one failed to salute our specialist, who had set herself up in an office and remained plunged in her papers, scarcely greeting them, with a distracted word or a sign of her head, unless it was a superior officer whom she had to salute. She only really reacted once, when the young Leutnant von Open came and clicked his heels in front of her table and spoke a few words to her: “Allow me, Fräulein Weseloh, to bid you welcome to our Caucasus…” She raised her head and interrupted: “Fräulein Doktor Weseloh, if you please.” The Leutnant, disconcerted, blushed and mumbled his apologies; but the Fräulein Doktor had returned to her reading. I had trouble holding back my laughter before this stiff, puritanical old maid; but she wasn’t unintelligent and had her human side. I in turn had an occasion to experience her sharpness when I wanted to discuss with her the result of her reading. “I don’t see why they had me come here,” she sniffed haughtily. “The question seems clear to me.” I encouraged her to go on. “The question of language has no importance. The question of customs is a little more important, but not much. If they are Jewish, they’ll have remained so despite all their attempts at assimilation, just like the Jews in Germany who spoke German and dressed like Western bourgeoisie, but remained Jews under their starched shirtfronts and didn’t fool anyone. Open the pinstripe pants of a Jewish industrialist,” she went on crudely, “and you’ll find a circumcised penis. Here, it will be the same thing. I don’t see why they’re racking their brains about it.” I ignored her coarse language, which gave me reason to suspect, in this seemingly icy doctor, the troubled and agitated eddies of murky waters, but I did allow myself to point out to her that given Muslim practices, that particular sign, at least, would lead to little here. She regarded me with even more scorn: “I was speaking metaphorically, Hauptsturmführer. What do you take me for? What I mean is that
