In the bedroom, Hanika had managed to plug the windows with some cardboard and canvas tarps, and he had found a few candles for light; but the rooms were still freezing. For a long while, sitting on the sofa while he made some tea, I let a pleasant fantasy come over me: I invited him to sleep with me, for mutual warmth, then slowly, during the night, I passed my hand under his tunic, kissed his young lips, and searched through his pants to take out his stiff penis. Seducing a subordinate, even a consenting one, was out of the question; but it had been a long time since I had even thought of such things, and I didn’t try to resist the sweetness of these images. I looked at the nape of his neck and wondered if he had ever been with a girl. He was really very young, but even before his age, in the boarding school, we were already doing everything you can do among boys, and the older boys, who must then have been the age Hanika was now, knew how to find girls in the next village who were more than happy to go for a roll in the hay. Now my thoughts shifted: in place of his frail neck other powerful necks appeared, of men I had been with or even just looked at, and I considered these necks with a woman’s eyes, suddenly understanding with a terrifying clarity that men control nothing, dominate nothing, that they are just children and even toys, put there for the pleasure of women, an insatiable pleasure all the more sovereign that the men think they are in charge, think they dominate women, whereas in reality women absorb them, wreck their dominion and dissolve their control, to take far more from them than they give. Men believe in all honesty that women are vulnerable, and that they must either take advantage of this vulnerability or protect it, whereas women laugh, with tolerance and love or else with scorn, at the childish, infinite vulnerability of men, at their fragility, this brittleness so close to a permanent loss of control, this perpetually threatening collapse, this vacuity embodied in such strong flesh. That is why, without a doubt, women so rarely kill. They suffer much more, but they will always have the last word. I drank my tea. Hanika had made my bed with all the blankets he could find; I took two of them and left them for him on the sofa in the first room, where he would sleep. I closed the door and rapidly masturbated, then fell asleep immediately, my hands and stomach still damp with sperm.
For one reason or another, maybe to stay close to von Reichenau, who had his HQ there, Blobel chose to remain in Poltava, and we waited for the Kommandostab for more than a month. The Vorkommando didn’t remain inactive. As in Kiev, I set up networks of informers; it was all the more necessary given the motley population, full of immigrants from all over the USSR, among whom certainly lurked a number of spies and saboteurs; furthermore, we hadn’t found a single NKVD list or file: before retreating, they had methodically cleaned out their archives, so there was nothing left for us that might make our job easier. Working in the hotel was becoming rather difficult: while I tried to type a report or talk with a local collaborator, the screams of some man being interrogated would ring out next door, overwhelming me. One night they served us red wine at dinner: my meal was scarcely over when everything started coming back up. This had never happened to me before with such violence, and I was beginning to worry: before the war, I never vomited, when I was little I had almost never thrown up, and I wondered what the reason for it could be. Hanika, who had heard my retching through the bathroom door, suggested maybe the food was bad, or else I was suffering from an intestinal flu: I shook my head, that wasn’t it, I was sure of it, since it had started exactly like the retchings, with a cough and a feeling of heaviness or else of something blocked, except this had gone further and everything had come up all of a sudden, the scarcely digested food mixed with the wine, a frightening red mixture.
