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inside, you who were always so gentle, only I know how gentle you really are, and how tender and loving you can be, and she began to cry, and tears flowed over her cheeks. A man like you, she said to him, who entered HELL [q.v.] and emerged victorious, and she didn’t wipe her eyes but gazed at him through the tears, and he felt she was baptizing him a second time. Neigel: “The truth is that not everything she said was true, because in fact she knows nothing about me, about what happened during the first war, and later in the movement, and here, too, yes, because I didn’t really come out of hell, no, I’m still in it pretty deep, with the stench of smoke and gas and with Staukeh after my butt for a long time now, and those idiot Ukrainians, and the trains coming and going all the time, at night, too, and you can’t shut your eyes with all the noise here, and I can’t tell anymore whether I’m running this camp or whether I’m a prisoner here, but when she talked to me through her tears, I forgot everything, I forgot the work and the Reich, and I was calm and quiet inside, and I wanted to believe that I had finished my war and that it was possible to erase everything and start things afresh—” Wasserman: “And while she spoke, Neigel forgot his hunger for her and embraced her mercifully like a tender chick, oy, how she clung to him, how calm her graceless face, when he began to answer her, to answer the only way he knew, with the only story he could tell her, about himself he could not say a word without feeling like a liar, he could not utter a single ‘I’ without protesting inside, and therefore he told her about Otto and his blue eyes and salt tears, and how some people came to look into his eyes and taste his tears, and he told her about Dr. Fried and his peculiar floralrash, and about poor Ilya Ginzburg, who wanted the truth … and he narrated my story in a quiet, simple voice, thoroughly civilian, and his Tina listened, her eyes misty, with the well-known look of a woman who is ready.” Neigel: “And then I wanted her so badly I couldn’t control myself anymore, but she put her hand in mine and said, A minute more, please. Let me look at you and remember you like this, yes. This is how you used to be. I think you’ve come back, Kurt. Welcome home. And suddenly she started to smile, and bent down to me, and I smelled her, and almost screamed, and she put her mouth to my ear and started to sing slowly, in a whisper, with a kind of smile, ‘If we knew / What Adolf would do / When he ruled at the Brandenburg Gate,’ and it only took me a second to understand that this wasn’t a love song at all, that she was singing me a provocative-imperialist-Bolshevik-Communist-Jewish song from the early years, before they realized how much power he had, and my wife was singing this to me in bed! In my ear! I froze. I couldn’t move. And she sensed it. She could always sense things. She stopped singing and froze alongside me. Her face was in my neck, and she didn’t move. And for a moment we didn’t dare breathe, because we knew what would happen when we moved. And we clung to the moment, and then she sat up and saw my face and was alarmed, and put her hand over her mouth, and in a weak voice, like a little girl’s, she asked, ‘You really do intend to stop it, Kurt, don’t you? That’s all over with for both of us, isn’t it? You’ve come back, Kurt, haven’t you come back?’ And I felt it suddenly exploding inside me, everything, the war and my work, and all the confusion I’ve been feeling lately, and mostly—the fear, yes, the fear of what Tina wants from me, of what she dared to ask, what does she think, what does she understand anyway, what do I have besides my work and the movement, and what am I worth today without my job here … it would be the death sentence, sabotaging the war effort! It would be simple desertion and treachery, and this is what she was asking of me! And Tina understood what was going through my mind, and she stood up, and her face was full of fear, ach, Wasserman, her face showed the kind of fear I see around me all day here, that frightened dreck Jude expression which makes me want to vomit, the same expression you came in with the first time, and my own wife does this to me! And I don’t know what happened, I went berserk, the fear in her face seemed like a provocation to me, like a curse, and her disappointment in meand the scorn I began to notice in her eyes, and you have to remember how hungry I was for a woman, and then I saw the blood in my eyes, everything turned red, I was suddenly on top of her, and I tore her robe off and, listen—I never felt such passion and hatred for a woman in my life, I was merciless, what a catastrophe, I went up and down on her like a hammer, and I screamed, I screamed in her ear the whole time, Spy! I screamed, Judas Iscariot! Bolshevik! Knife in the back of the Reich! I don’t know why those words came out of my mouth all of a sudden, there was blood in my mouth, blood from her mouth, and her frozen face was under me, she didn’t try to struggle, she just lay there like a little girl, with open eyes, looking at me blankly, and then I finished and got