You kept waiting for something from morning to evening, and nothing happened. You waited again, and yet again. Nothing happened. You waited, waited, waited, you thought, you thought, you thought until your head was aching. Nothing happened. You were left alone. Alone. Alone.

‘I lived like this for two weeks, outside time, outside the world. If a war had broken out during that time I wouldn’t have heard about it, for my world consisted only of table, door, bed, washbasin, chair, window and wall, and I kept staring at the same wallpaper on the same wall; I stared at it so often that every line of its zigzag pattern has etched itself on the innermost folds of my brain as if with an engraver’s burin. Then, at last, the interrogations began. You were suddenly summoned, without really knowing whether it was day or night. You were fetched and led along a few corridors to you didn’t know where; then you waited somewhere, again you didn’t know where, and suddenly you were standing in front of a table with a few men in uniform sitting round it. A pile of papers lay on the table: files, containing you didn’t know what, and then the questions began, real and false, obvious and deceptive, cover-up questions and trick questions, and while you replied strange, malicious fingers leafed through the papers containing you didn’t know what, and strange, malicious fingers wrote something in the record of the interrogation, and you didn’t know what they were writing. But the most terrible part of these interrogations, for me, was that I could never guess or work out how much the Gestapo really knew about what went on in my legal office, and what they wanted to worm out of me. As I’ve told you, I had sent the really incriminating papers to my uncle at the last minute by way of my housekeeper. But had he received them? Had he failed to receive them? And how much had that clerk given away? How many letters had been intercepted, how many might they have extracted by now from some naive cleric in the German monasteries that we represented? And they asked questions and yet more questions. What securities had I bought for such-and-such a monastery, which banks did I correspond with, did I or did I not know a Herr So-and-so, had I received letters from Switzerland and Steenookerzeel? And as I could never guess how much they had found out already, every answer became the heaviest of responsibilities. If I let slip something they hadn’t known, I might be unnecessarily delivering someone up to the knife. If I denied too much, I was doing myself no good.

‘But the interrogation wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was coming back to my void after the questioning, back to the same room with the same table, the same bed, the same washbasin, the same wallpaper. For as soon as I was alone with myself I tried reconstructing what I ought to have said in reply, and what I must say next time to divert any suspicion that some unconsidered remark of mine might have aroused. I thought it all over, I went back over everything, examined my own statements, checked every word of what I had said to the chief interrogator, I recapitulated every question they had asked, every answer I had given, I tried to think what they might have put down in the written record, but I realized I could never work it out, I would never know. However, once these thoughts had started up in the vacuum they wouldn’t stop going round and round in my head, again and again, in ever-changing combinations, and they went on until I fell asleep. After every interrogation by the Gestapo my own thoughts took over the torment of questioning, probing and torturing me just as mercilessly, perhaps even more cruelly, for every interrogation ended after an hour, and thanks to the insidious torture of solitary confinement those thoughts never stopped. And around me, always, I had only the table, the cupboard, the bed, the wallpaper, the window, no means of diversion, no book, no newspaper, no new face, no pencil for making notes, no match to play with, nothing, nothing, nothing. Only now did I realize how diabolically ingenious the hotel-room method was, how fiendishly well devised in psychological terms. In a concentration camp you might have had to cart stones until your hands bled and your frostbitten feet fell off in your shoes, you would have slept packed together with two dozen other people in the stench and the cold. But you would have seen faces, you could have stared at a field, a cart, a tree, a star, something, anything, while here you were always surrounded by the same things, always the same, always the terrible same. There was nothing here to distract me from my thoughts, my delusions, my morbid recapitulations. And that was exactly what they intended – I was to retch and retch on my own thoughts until they choked me, and in the end I had no choice but to spew them out, no choice but to tell them everything, all they were after, handing over the information and the human beings they wanted at last.