I could now take a few steps, if someone supported me; this was useful, since it allowed me to go to the bathroom. My body, if I concentrated, began again to obey my orders, fractious at first, then with more docility; only my left hand continued to hold itself apart from the general entente; I could move the fingers, but they would under no conditions agree to close, to form a fist. In a mirror, I looked for the first time at my face: to tell the truth, I didn’t recognize anything in it, I didn’t see how this mosaic of such diverse features held together, and the more I considered them, the more foreign they became. The white bands wrapped around my skull at least prevented it from bursting open, that was already something and even a considerable something, but it didn’t help my speculations make any progress; this face looked like a collection of pieces that fit together well enough but came from different puzzles. Finally, a doctor came to tell me that I was going to leave: I was healed, he explained, they couldn’t do anything more for me, I was going to be sent elsewhere to regain my strength. Healed! What a surprising word, I didn’t even know I had been hurt. In fact, a bullet had gone through my head. By a chance less rare than people think, they patiently explained to me, I not only had survived, but I wouldn’t suffer any after-effects; the stiffness of my left hand, a slight neurological difficulty, would persist a little while longer, but that too would go away. This precise scientific information filled me with astonishment: so, these unusual and mysterious sensations had a cause, an explainable and rational one; but even with an effort, I couldn’t manage to connect the sensations to this explanation, it seemed hollow to me, contrived; if this was really Reason, then I too, like Luther, would have called it Hure, a whore; and in fact, obeying the calm, patient orders of the doctors, Reason raised its skirt for me, revealing that there was nothing beneath. I could have said the same thing about it as about my poor head: a hole is a hole is a hole. The idea that a hole could also be a whole would never have occurred to me. Once the bandages were removed, I could see for myself that there was almost nothing there: on my forehead, a tiny round scar, just above my right eye; in back of the skull, scarcely visible, they assured me, a swelling; between the two, my reemerging hair was already hiding the traces of the operation I had undergone. But if these doctors so sure of their science were to be believed, a hole went right through my head, a narrow circular corridor, a fabulous, closed shaft, inaccessible to thought, and if that were true, then nothing was the same again, how could it have been? My thinking about the world now had to reorganize itself around this hole. But the only concrete thing I could say was: I have awakened, and nothing will ever be the same again. As I was thinking about this impressive question, they came to fetch me and put me on a stretcher in a hospital vehicle; one of the nurses had kindly slipped into my pocket the case with my medal, the one the Reichsführer had given me. They took me to Pomerania, on the island of Usedom near Swinemünde; there, by the sea, was a rest home belonging to the SS, a beautiful, spacious house; my room, full of light, looked out onto the sea, and during the day, pushed in a wheelchair by a nurse, I could place myself in front of a large bay window and contemplate the heavy, gray waters of the Baltic, the shrill play of the seagulls, the cold, wet sand of the pebble-strewn beach. The hallways and common rooms were regularly cleaned with carbolic acid; I liked this bitter, ambiguous smell, which reminded me harshly of the demeaning joys of my adolescence; the long hands, so translucent they were nearly blue, of the nurses, blond, delicate Frisian girls, also smelled of carbolic acid, and the convalescents, among themselves, called them the Carbolic Babes. These smells and strong sensations gave me erections, astonishingly detached from myself; the nurse who washed me smiled at them and sponged them with the same indifference as the rest of my body; sometimes they lasted, with a resigned patience; I would have been quite incapable of relieving myself. The very fact of day had become a mad, unexpected, undecipherable thing to me; a body that was still far too complex for me, I had to take things little by little.
