During the day, I felt fresh, alert; at the Haus, I ate well, and in the evenings I thought with pleasure about my bed, with its clean sheets; but at night, ever since I had arrived, the dreams came in vast gusts, sometimes short and abrupt and soon forgotten, other times like a long worm uncoiling inside my head. One sequence in particular repeated itself and expanded nightly, an obscure, difficult-to-describe dream, without any narrative meaning, but that unfurled according to a spatial logic. In this dream I was traveling, at different altitudes, but always as if in the air, I was more like a pure gaze or even a camera than a living being, traveling through an immense city, without any visible end, its topography monotonous and repetitive, divided into geometric sectors, its way animated with an incessant flow. Thousands of beings came and went, entered and exited identical buildings, walked along long, straight avenues, plunged underground through subway entrances to emerge at some other place, constantly and without any apparent aim. If I, or rather the gaze I had become, went down toward these avenues to examine them close up, I noticed that these men and women weren’t distinguished from one another by any special characteristic; they all had white skin, light-colored hair, blue, pale, lost eyes, Höss’s eyes, the eyes of my old orderly Hanika, too, when he died in Kharkov, eyes the color of the sky. Railroad tracks crisscrossed the city, little trains came forward and made regular stops to spew out an instantly replaced wave of passengers, as far as the eye could see. During subsequent nights, I entered some of the buildings: lines of people moved between long communal tables and latrines, eating and defecating in a row; on bunk beds, others were fornicating, then children were born, played between the bedsteads, and, when they had grown big enough, went out to take their place in the human waves of this city of perfect happiness. Little by little, by dint of looking from different points of view, a tendency became apparent in the seemingly arbitrary swarm: imperceptibly, a certain number of people always ended up on the same side, and finally went into windowless buildings, where they lay down to die without a word. Specialists came and collected from them whatever could still contribute to the city’s economy; then their bodies were burned in ovens that served simultaneously to warm the water distributed by pipes throughout the sectors; the bones were ground up; the smoke, coming from the chimneys, rejoined, like tributaries, the smoke of neighboring chimneys to form one long, calm, solemn river. And when the dream’s point of view took on altitude again, I could make out an equilibrium in all this: the quantity of births, in the dormitories, equaled the number of deaths, and the society self-reproduced in perfect equilibrium, always in movement, producing no excess and suffering no diminution. When I woke up, it seemed obvious to me that these serene dreams, void of all anguish, represented the camp, but a perfect camp, having reached an impossible point of stasis, without violence, self-regulated, functioning perfectly and also perfectly useless since, despite all this movement, it produced nothing. But upon thinking more about it, as I tried to do while drinking my ersatz in the dining room of the Haus der Waffen-SS, wasn’t it a representation of social life as a whole? Stripped of its tawdry rags and its pointless agitation, human life was reduced to scarcely more than that; once one had reproduced, one had fulfilled the purpose of mankind; and as for one’s own purpose, that was just an illusion, a stimulus to encourage oneself to get up in the morning; but if you examined the thing objectively, as I thought I could do, the uselessness of all these efforts was obvious, as was the uselessness of reproduction itself, since it served only to produce more uselessness. So I came to think: Wasn’t the camp itself, with all the rigidity of its organization, its absurd violence, its meticulous hierarchy, just a metaphor, a
