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.
