name. We favored Eva or Dieter at first; but now we seem to have settled on Birgitta or Eduard. Sensibly, if laboriously, Herta is dismantling the baby’s clothes. I myself spend an hour or two a day in the garden hut with my father-in-law, dismantling the baby’s cot and high chair. Our room, Herta’s room, seems to be analogously prepared for her own eventual childhood. The fairies of the wallpaper smile down on the conjugal bed, which is a single, as slim as a bunk. Its dairy aroma encloses Herta, her shocking new breasts, her ovoid belly. The baby comes between us. It’s more comfortable if Herta lies on her side and I take up position behind her. Annoyingly, however, I am still impotent. Nervous exhaustion, no doubt; perhaps, too, a guilty reminder (in the way our bodies are juxtaposed) of the gratitude I sampled in the camp. Though Herta has hair: lots of hair. Anyway, she talked to her doctor about it, unbearably, and he says that this is quite a common male reaction to pregnancy. Yes, either that, or it’s the work I’ve been doing. And continued to do. Oh, you know how it is. You say: Enough with these busy bodies and goody two-shoes! And then you’re out there again, doing what you can. After my fortnight’s leave I completed a five-month tour of duty in the East with a Waff en SS unit, operating downwind, as it were, of the military withdrawal from the Soviet Union. I like to think we achieved a good deal, though it was humble stuff compared to the Kat-Zet. And crude stuff. And aesthetically catastrophic stuff too, of course. Emotion flits around me now. The world continues to make sense, but emotion isn’t so interested in sense, and wonders how things feel. . . . My face, during this time, can best be imagined as a study in strain. Rather as it looked when I lay there in the dark, wedged between the changed Herta and the cold wall, in full confidence of erotic failure. Then it hap ens—
it doesn’t happen—and you switch on the light and get dressed sadly. The sadness is your very own; it entirely fits you. And Herta’s glance sometimes, and her mother’s glance, and even her father’s glance, which is hard and countervailing, which is on my side (but I don’t want it): these glances say that in my hands there rests a mortal and miserable power. I am omnipotent. Also impotent. I am powerful and powerless.
It was a summer of thunder and sunshine and double rainbows. These were epiphanies. I finally encountered the bomb baby, thus fulfilling the ironic prophecy of my dreams. And with my own eyes I saw the stalled clock at Treblinka. . . .
What the unit was doing could, I suppose, be seen as a natural continuation of my work in the Lager. We were on the interface of bureaucracy and public relations. At this point the Jews were being deconcentrated, were being channeled back into society, and it fell to us to help dismantle and disperse the ghettos, where the light was always failing and where the children all looked so old and full of knowledge, and everybody moved much too slowly or much too fast. Even as an interim measure, the ghettos, one felt, were a failure, and made one suspect, briefly yet sickeningly, that the whole enterprise, the whole dream, had been fatally grandiose: too many, too many. How one longed to uproot those walls. . . . One ghetto, that of Litzmannstadt, had a “king”: Chaim Rumkowski. I myself saw him parading through the stunned streets, with courtiers, in his carriage, pushed by a white horse like a paper bag full of water and bones. Rumkowski was a lord. But a lord of what?
Well, we pitched in, ferrying the people back to their villages and so on. Logistics. But the work also had its creative dimension. We used vans, vans marked with th Red
Cross; and machine guns; and dynamite. I turned out to have a modest talent for neuropsychiatry. The men to whom I gave counseling (and prescribed sedatives) would, for a while, complain of nightmares, anxiety, and dyspepsia—but they all recovered by the end of the tour. The measures to which we were sometimes reduced were distressingly inelegant, and, in those cases where dynamite was used, required hours of backbreaking preparation. But this was our mission, after all: to make Germany whole. To heal her wounds and make her whole.