In his diary, there are three pages about his suicide. To Rachel, it wasn’t suicide. He never uses the word. He talks about retribution, about justice. He calls it an act of love for Papa and for his victims. I don’t know if it’s just to try to link two things that can’t be linked, to make a single gesture for both victims and executioner. I don’t think I’ll ever really understand what was going on in his head. It’s probably the same with anyone who commits suicide. Faced with their lifeless bodies, we’re dumbstruck, asking questions to which there are no answers. Now I’ve read and reread his diary, I can understand the mental process that led him to kill himself, but the act itself is beyond all understanding. I can understand thinking about committing suicide, everyone does it, on the estate it’s like an epidemic. I can even accept that there might come a time when you do something, when you plan, when you decide how to do it, when you run through it in your head, when you play at being a desperate man putting a bullet through his brain, falling back, holding your breath to see what it feels like but it’s a long way from there to actually going through with it. That moment is beyond imagining. Even the person committing suicide can’t imagine it, at some point there’s a click and it’s all over. Rachel didn’t choose the easy option, didn’t put a bullet in his brain, swallow poison, jump off a bridge, throw himself under a train, he killed himself slowly. It was nothing to do with suicide, he wanted to atone, he wanted to be gassed to death like Papa’s victims, like it was Papa who was gassing him. He watched himself die and I think he probably tried to stay conscious right up to that last second. This was the price he wanted to pay in Papa’s place for the victims of the camps and probably for me, to relieve me of the burden of our debt. Yeah. Suicide is not the word.