The Kindly Ones

The street was deserted, except for three foreign Waffen-SS men charging toward Zimmerstrasse with a heavy machine gun and some Panzerfäuste, paying no attention to me or to the other civilians escaping from the U-Bahn entrance. I started in the opposite direction, running north up Friedrichstrasse, between burning buildings, corpses, burned-out cars. I reached Unter den Linden. A large fountain of water was gushing from a blown water main, spraying the bodies and the rubble. At the corner two grizzled old men were walking along, they seemed not to be paying any attention to the racket of the artillery and the heavy mortar shells. One of them wore the armband of the blind; the other was guiding him. “Where are you going?” I asked, panting.—“We don’t know,” the blind man replied.—“Where are you coming from?” I asked again.—“We don’t know that, either.” They sat down on a crate among the ruins and piles of rubble. The blind man leaned on his cane. The other stared about him with wild eyes, plucking at his friend’s sleeve. I turned my back to them and went on. The avenue, for as far as I could see, seemed completely deserted. Opposite stood the building that housed the offices of Dr. Mandelbrod and Herr Leland. It had been hit a few times but didn’t look ruined. One of the main doors was hanging from a hinge, I pushed it open with my shoulder and entered the lobby, full of marble slabs and moldings fallen from the walls. Soldiers must have camped here: I noticed traces of a campfire, empty cans, nearly dry excrement. But the lobby was deserted. I pushed open the emergency stairway and ran up. At the top floor, the stairs opened onto a hallway that led to the beautiful reception room before Mandelbrod’s office. Two of the amazons were sitting there, one on the sofa, the other in an armchair, their heads leaning to the side or backward, their eyes wide open, a thin stream of blood running from their temples and the corners of their lips; each one held a small automatic pistol with a mother-of-pearl handle in her hand. A third girl was lying in front of the double padded doors. Cold with horror, I went over to look at them close up, I brought my face to theirs, without touching them. They were perfectly turned out, their hair pulled back, clear gloss made their full lips shine, mascara still outlined a crown of long black eyelashes around their empty eyes; their nails, on the pistol butts, were carefully manicured and painted. No breath raised their chests under the ironed suits. No matter how much I scrutinized their pretty faces, I was incapable of distinguishing one from the other, of recognizing Hilde from Helga or Hedwig; yet they weren’t triplets. I stepped over the one who was lying across the doorway and entered the office. Three other girls were lying dead on the sofa and the carpet; Mandelbrod and Leland were at the back of the room, in front of the large shattered bay window, near a mountain of leather suitcases and trunks. Outside, behind them, a fire was roaring, they were paying no attention to the spirals of smoke invading the room. I went up to them, looked at the bags, and asked: “You’re planning on going on a trip?” Mandelbrod, who was holding a cat on his lap and stroking it, smiled slightly in the ripples of fat that drowned his features. “Exactly,” he said in his beautiful voice. “Would you like to come with us?” I counted the trunks and suitcases out loud: “Nineteen,” I said, “not bad. You’re going far?”—“To begin with, Moscow,” said Mandelbrod. “Afterward, we’ll see.” Leland, wearing a long navy blue trenchcoat, was sitting on a little chair next to Mandelbrod; he was smoking a cigarette, with a glass ashtray on his knees, and he looked at me without saying anything. “I see,” I said. “And you really think you can take all that?”—“Oh, of course,” Mandelbrod smiled. “It’s already arranged. We’re just waiting for them to come get us.”—“The Russians? Our men are still holding the area, I should warn you.”—“We know that,” Leland said, blowing out a long puff of smoke. “The Soviets told us they’d be here tomorrow, without fail.”—“A very cultivated colonel,” Mandelbrod added. “He told us not to worry, he’d personally take care of us. The fact is, you see, we still have a lot of work to do.”—“And the girls?” I asked, waving my hand toward the bodies.—“Ah, the poor little things didn’t want to come with us. Their attachment to the fatherland was too strong. They didn’t want to understand that some values are even more important.”—“The Führer has failed,” Leland said coldly. “But the ontological war that he began isn’t over. Who else besides Stalin can finish the job?”—“When we offered them our services,” Mandelbrod whispered as he stroked his cat, “they were immediately very interested. They know that they’ll need men like us, after this war, that they can’t allow the Western powers to walk off with the cream of the crop. If you come with us, I can guarantee you a good position, with all the advantages.”—“You can keep doing what you do so well,” said Leland.—“You’re crazy!” I exclaimed. “You’re all crazy! Everyone’s gone mad in this city.” Already I was backing to the door, past the gracefully slumped bodies of the girls. “Except for me!” I shouted before escaping. Leland’s last words reached me at the door: “If you change your mind, come back to see us!”