The Kindly Ones полностью

It is never good to have such thoughts, I know that. That night my recurrent dream had a final intensification. I was approaching that immense city by way of a derelict railroad track; in the distance, the line of chimneys was peacefully smoking; and I felt lost, isolated, an abandoned whelp, and the need for men’s companionship tormented me. I mixed with the crowd and wandered for a long time, irresistibly drawn by the crematoriums vomiting spirals of smoke and clouds of sparks into the sky, like a dog, both attracted and repell’d / By the stench of his own kind / Burning. But I couldn’t reach it, and entered instead one of the vast building-barracks, where I occupied a bunk, shoving away an unknown woman who wanted to join me. I fell asleep promptly. When I woke up, I noticed a little blood on my pillow. I looked closer and saw there was also some on the sheets. I removed them; beneath, they were soaking in blood mixed with sperm, big gobs of sperm too thick to seep through the cloth. I was sleeping in a room in Höss’s house, upstairs, next to the children’s room; and I had no idea how I could bring these soiled sheets to the bathroom, to wash them, without Höss noticing. This problem was causing me a horrible, agonizing discomfort. Then Höss came into my room with another officer. They took off their underpants, sat down cross-legged next to my bed, and began to masturbate vigorously, each crimson glans disappearing and reappearing from the foreskin, until they had sent huge jets of sperm onto my bed and onto the rug. They wanted me to imitate them, but I refused; the ceremony apparently had a precise significance, but I didn’t know what it was.

This brutal, obscene dream marked the end of my first stay in the KL Auschwitz: I had finished my work. I returned to Berlin and from there went to visit some camps in the Altreich, the KLs Sachsenhausen, Buchenwald, and Neuengamme, as well as many of their satellite camps. I won’t expand any further on these visits: all these camps have been amply described in the historical literature, better than I could do; and it’s also quite true that when you’ve seen one camp, you’ve seen them all: all camps look alike, it’s a well-known fact. Nothing of what I saw, despite local variations, perceptibly changed my opinion or my conclusions. I returned to Berlin for good around mid-August, in the period between the recapture of Orel by the Soviets and the final conquest of Sicily by the Anglo-Americans. I wrote my report quickly; I had already gathered my notes together along the way, I just needed to organize the sections and type it all out, a matter of a few days. I was careful with both my prose and the logic of my argumentation: the report was addressed to the Reichsführer, and Brandt had warned me that I would probably have to give a verbal report. When the final version was corrected and typed up, I sent it off and waited.

I had gone back, without much pleasure I have to confess, to my landlady Frau Gutknecht. She went into raptures, and was determined to make me tea; but she didn’t understand how, since I was coming home from the East, where one can find everything to eat, I hadn’t thought to bring back a pair of geese, for the household of course. (Actually, she wasn’t the only one with this in mind: Piontek had returned from his stay in Tarnowitz with a trunkful of food, and had offered to sell me some without coupons.) What’s more, I got the impression that she had taken advantage of my absence to search through my belongings. My indifference to her whining and her childish behavior was beginning, unfortunately, to wear thin. As for Fräulein Praxa, she had changed her hairdo, but not the color of her nails. Thomas was happy to see me again: great changes were under way, he affirmed, it was good I was in Berlin, I had to be prepared.