The Kindly Ones

Like most people, I never asked to become a murderer. If I could have, as I’ve already said, I would have gone into literature. Written, if I’d had the talent, or else perhaps taught, at least lived in the midst of beautiful, calm things, the noblest creations of the human spirit. Who, of his own free will, aside from a madman, would choose murder? And also I would have liked to play the piano. Once at a concert an elderly lady leaned toward me: “You are a pianist, aren’t you?”—“Unfortunately not, madam,” I had to answer with regret. Even today, the thought that I don’t play the piano and never will play it suffocates me, sometimes even more than the horrors, the dark river of my past carrying me through the years. I literally can’t get over it. When I was a boy, my mother bought me a piano. It was for my ninth birthday, I think. Or my eighth. In any case before we left to live in France with that Moreau man. I had been begging her for months and months. I dreamed of being a pianist, a great concert pianist: cathedrals at my fingertips, airy as foam. But we had no money. My father had been gone for some time, his bank accounts (as I learned much later) were frozen, my mother had to fend for herself. But somehow she found the money, I don’t know how, she must have saved up, or borrowed; maybe she even whored a bit, I don’t know, it doesn’t matter. She probably had ambitions for me and wanted to cultivate my talent. So on my birthday the piano was delivered, a fine upright. Even secondhand, it must have been expensive. At first I was dazzled. I took lessons; but my lack of progress quickly bored me, and I soon dropped them. Practicing scales was not what I had in mind, I was like all children. My mother never dared reproach me for my irresponsibility or my laziness; but I can see that the idea of all that wasted money must have gnawed at her. The piano stayed there, gathering dust; my sister was no more interested in it than I was; I no longer thought about it, and barely noticed when my mother finally resold it, most likely at a loss. I have never really liked my mother, I have even hated her, but this incident makes me sad for her. It’s also somewhat her own fault. If she had insisted, if she had known how to be stern when she had to be, I might have learned to play the piano, and that would have been a great joy to me, a safe haven. To play just for myself, at home, that would have been a delight. Of course, I often listen to music, and I take a keen pleasure in it, but it’s not the same thing, it’s a substitute. Just like my male lovers: the fact of the matter, I’m not ashamed to say, is that I probably would rather have been a woman. Not necessarily a woman living and functioning in this world as a wife or a mother; no, a woman naked, on her back, her legs spread wide open, crushed beneath the weight of a man, clinging to him and pierced by him, drowning in him as she becomes the limitless sea in which he himself is drowned, pleasure that’s endless, and beginningless too. But things did not turn out that way. Instead I ended up a jurist, a State security official, an SS officer, and then a director of a lace factory. It’s sad, but that’s how it is.