4 ideas
In May 1945 François Mitterrand found Robert Antelme among the typhus-ridden dying at liberated Dachau. Doctors warned that eating normally would kill him, so for weeks he was refed a few spoonfuls of gruel at a time while Duras watched his fever, ravenous hunger and grotesque excretions decide whether he would live.
When someone is missing and nothing can be known, the waiting person does not stay neutral. The mind fills the empty space with detailed, repeated scenes of the loved one's death, such as a body face-down in a ditch. Daily life shrinks to watching phones, doors and lists of returnees, so the waiting becomes its own ordeal, separate from whatever the absent person is going through.
During the Occupation, Duras kept up a months-long, flirtatious association with Rabier, a Gestapo agent who had arrested her husband. She used him to get news of Antelme and to watch him for the Resistance. After the Liberation she helped bring about his arrest and testified at his trial, which led to his execution. In doing so she had to face that the man had also been, to her, weak, vain and humanly specific.
In the 'Albert of the Capitals' piece, a Resistance woman, Thérèse, directs the beating of a suspected informer in the days after the Liberation. Duras writes 'Thérèse is me' and holds herself accountable for the scene. She shows that the moral line between the side that suffered cruelty and the side that commits it can collapse the moment power changes hands. Her point is that reprisal violence draws on the same appetite for domination it claims to punish.