The Kindly Ones

As we walked, the thought of my mother returned to me violently, rushing, barging about my head like a drunken woman. For a long time, I had not had such thoughts. When I spoke about it to Partenau, in the Crimea, I had stuck to the facts, the ones that counted least. Here it was another order of thoughts, bitter, full of hate, tinged with shame. When had that begun? When I was born? Was it possible that I had never forgiven her for the fact of my birth, that insanely arrogant right she had granted herself to bring me into the world? One strange fact: I had turned out to be acutely allergic to her breast milk; as she herself had told me much later on, offhandedly, I was allowed only baby bottles, and I watched my twin sister breastfeed with a look full of bitterness. But in my early childhood I must have loved her, as all children love their mothers. I still remember the tender, female odor of her bathroom, which plunged me into numb delight, like a return to the lost womb: it must have been, if I thought about it, a mixture of the humid vapor of the bath, of perfumes, soaps, maybe too the smell of her sex and maybe too that of her shit; even when she didn’t let me get into the bath with her, I never got enough of sitting on the edge of the tub, near her, blissfully. Then everything had changed. But when, exactly, and why? I hadn’t blamed it right away on the disappearance of my father: that idea didn’t come till later on, when she prostituted herself to that Moreau. But even before meeting him, she had begun to behave in ways that sent me into a wild rage. Was it my father’s departure? It’s hard to say, but the pain seemed sometimes to drive her mad. One night, in Kiel, she had gone all alone into a worker’s café, near the docks, and had gotten drunk, surrounded by foreigners, dock workers, sailors. It’s even possible that she sat down on a table and lifted her skirt, exposing her sex. Whatever the case, things got scandalously out of hand, till the lady got thrown out into the street, where she fell into a puddle. A policeman brought her home, soaking, disheveled, her dress filthy; I thought I would die of shame. Little as I was—I must have been about ten—I wanted to beat her, and she wouldn’t even have been able to defend herself, but my sister intervened: “Have pity on her. She’s sad. She doesn’t deserve your anger.” I took a long time to calm down. But even then I must not have hated her, not yet; I was just humiliated. The hatred must have come later, when she forgot her husband and sacrificed her children to give herself to a stranger. Of course that didn’t happen in one day, there were several stages on the way. Moreau, as I’ve said, was not a bad man, and in the begi

The worst had already happened. Around the spring of 1929, I was still in boarding school when I received a letter from my mother. She a