Читаем The Kindly Ones полностью

At the KMV, Dr. Müller was launching his action and Prill asked me to go inspect it. I began to find this curious: I didn’t have anything against inspections, but Prill seemed to be doing everything to keep me away from Voroshilovsk. We were expecting the imminent arrival of Seibert’s replacement, Dr. Leetsch; perhaps Prill, whose rank was the same as mine, was worried that, playing on my relations with Ohlendorf, I could scheme with Leetsch to be named adjunct instead of him. If that was the case, it was idiotic: I had no ambition in that regard, and Prill had nothing to fear from me. But maybe I was imagining things for no reason? It was hard to say. I had never mastered the baroque rituals of precedence in the SS, and it was easy to err in either direction; instinct and Thomas’s advice here would have been precious to me. But Thomas was far away, and I didn’t have any close friend in the Group. To tell the truth, they weren’t the kind of people with whom I could easily strike up a bond. They had been picked out of the most obscure offices of the RSHA, and most of them were very ambitious and saw the work of the Einsatzgruppe only as a springboard; almost all of them, as soon as they arrived, seemed to regard the work of extermination as self-evident, and they didn’t even ask themselves the questions that had so worried the men in the first year. In the midst of these men, I was seen as a somewhat complicated intellectual, and I remained isolated. That didn’t bother me: I have always been able to do without the friendship of coarse loudmouths. But I had to stay on my guard.