If a war had broken out then, I wouldn’t have known it; my world was nothing more than desk, door, bed, washbasin, chair, window, and wall, I stared always at the same wallpaper on the same wall; every line of its jagged pattern became etched as though by a burin into the innermost recesses of my brain, that’s how much I stared at it. Then finally the interrogations began. You were suddenly sent for, not knowing if it was day or night. They summoned you and led you, not knowing where you were going, down a few passageways; then you waited somewhere, not knowing where, and suddenly you were standing in front of a table, around which sat several uniformed men. On the table was a stack of paper, the files whose contents were unknowable, and then the questions started—the real ones and the fake ones, the straightforward ones and the malicious ones, sham questions, trick questions—and while you answered, a stranger’s cruel fingers were shuffling through papers whose contents were unknowable and a stranger’s cruel fingers were writing something unknowable in a report. But for me the most terrible thing about these interrogations was that I could never divine or figure out what the Gestapo actually knew about what went on in my office and what they were just trying to get out of me now. As I mentioned before, at the eleventh hour I had sent the really incriminating papers to my uncle in the care of the housekeeper. But had he received them? Or had he not? And how much had that clerk given away? How many letters had they intercepted, how much had they learned by now in the German monasteries which we represented, perhaps squeezed out of some unfortunate churchman? And the questions kept coming. What securities had I bought for a certain monastery, what banks did I correspond with, did I know a Mr. So-and-So, had I received letters from Switzerland or East Nowhere. And since I could never tell how much they had already ferreted out, every statement became the most terrible responsibility. If I gave away something they didn’t know, I might be delivering someone to the knife unnecessarily. If I denied too much, I was hurting myself.

“But the interrogation wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was coming back after the interrogation to my nothingness, the same room with the same table, the same bed, the same washbasin, the same wallpaper. For as soon as I was by myself I tried to formulate what I should have said if I had been smarter and what I should say next time to allay any suspicion I might have aroused by a thoughtless remark. I mulled over, pondered, examined, scrutinized every word I had said to the interrogator, I recapitulated every question they asked, every answer I gave, I tried to decide what they might have chosen to write down, though I knew I could never reach a conclusion and could never find out. But these thoughts, once set in motion in the empty room, did not stop revolving in my head, always fresh, in ever new permutations—they even invaded my sleep; after every interrogation by the Gestapo my own thoughts relentlessly continued the torment of questioning and examining and harassing—even more cruelly, perhaps, for the former came to an end after an hour but the latter never did, thanks to the insidious torture of this solitude. And all the time nothing around me but the table, the bureau, the bed, the wallpaper, the window, no distraction, no book, no newspaper, no new face, no pencil to write anything down with, no matches to play with, nothing, nothing, nothing. Now I saw how diabolically practical, how psychologically deadly in its conception this hotel room system was. In a concentration camp you might have had to cart stones around until your hands bled and your feet froze in your shoes, you would have been jammed together with two dozen other men in the cold and stench. But you would have seen faces, you would have been able to look at a field, a cart, a tree, a star, something, anything, whereas here it was always the same thing around you, always the same thing, the terrible sameness. Here there was nothing to distract me from my thoughts, from my delusions, from my morbid rehearsals of past events. And that was exactly what they wanted—that I should go on gagging on my thoughts until I choked on them and had no choice but to spit them out, to inform, to tell everything, to finally hand over the evidence and the people they wanted. Little by little I sensed how my nerves were beginning to give under the dreadful pressure of nothingness, and, aware of the danger, I strained myself to the breaking point to find or invent some diversion. To occupy my mind I tried to reconstruct and recite everything I had ever learned by heart, the anthems and nursery rhymes of childhood, the Homer I’d learned in grade school, the sections of the Civil Code. Then I tried arithmetic—adding and dividing random figures—but nothing stuck in my mind in that emptiness. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. The same flickering thought always broke in: What do they know? What did I say yesterday, what must I say next time?

“This truly indescribable state of affairs continued for four months. Now four months is easy to write: so many letters, no more, no less! It’s easy to say: four months—two syllables. It takes no time at all to form the words: four months! But there’s no way to describe, to gauge, to delineate, not for someone else, not for yourself, how long time lasts in dimensionlessness, in timelessness, and you can’t explain to anyone how it eats at you and destroys you, this nothing and nothing and nothing around you, always this table and bed and washbasin and wallpaper, and always the silence, always the same guard pushing food in without looking at you, always the same thoughts in that nothingness revolving around a single thought, until you go mad.