"The Kindly Ones" - читать интересную книгу автора (Littell Jonathan)

AIR

The house was closed up. I had Piontek stop at the entrance to the courtyard and I walked up to it through virgin, compact snow. The weather was strangely gentle. Along the front, all the shutters were drawn. I walked around the house; the back faced a wide terrace with a balustrade and a curved stairway leading to a snow-covered garden, level at first and then sloping away. Beyond rose the forest, slim pines in the midst of which stood out a few beech trees. Here too everything was shuttered down, silent. I went back to Piontek and had him take me to the village, where I was shown the house of a woman named K#228;the, who worked on the estate as a cook and looked after the property when the owners were away. Impressed by my uniform, this K#228;the, a sturdy peasant in her early fifties, still very blond and pale, made no difficulty about giving me the keys; my sister and her husband, she explained, had left before Christmas, and since then hadn’t sent any word. I went back to the house with Piontek. Von #220;xk#252;ll’s home was a fine little eighteenth-century manor, with a fa#231;ade the color of rust and ochre, very bright in the midst of all this snow, in a baroque style that was curiously light, subtly asymmetrical, almost fanciful, unusual in these cold, severe regions. Grotesques, each one different from the other, decorated the front door and the lintels of the windows on the ground floor; from the front, the characters seemed to be smiling with all their teeth, but if you looked at them from the side, you saw that they were pulling their mouths open with both hands. Above the heavy wooden door, a cartouche decorated with flowers, muskets, and musical instruments bore a date: 1713. In Berlin, von #220;xk#252;ll had told me the story of this almost French house, which had belonged to his mother, a von Recknagel. The ancestor who had built it was a Huguenot who had gone to Germany after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He was a rich man and had managed to preserve a good amount of his wealth. In his old age, he married the daughter of a minor Prussian nobleman, an orphan who had inherited this estate. But he didn’t like his wife’s house and had it torn down to build this one. The wife, however, was devout, and thought such luxury scandalous: she had a chapel built, along with an annex behind the house, where she ended her days and which her husband promptly razed after her death. The chapel itself was still there, set a little apart under old oak trees, stiff, austere, with a bare fa#231;ade of red brick and a gray, steeply sloping slate roof. I slowly walked around it, but didn’t try to open it. Piontek was still standing near the car, waiting without saying anything. I went over to him, opened the rear door, took out my bag, and said: “I’ll stay for a few days. Go back to Berlin. I’ll call or send a telegram for you to come get me. Will you be able to find this place again? If anyone asks, say you don’t know where I am.” He maneuvered to make a U-turn and started off again, bumping down the long lane of birch trees. I went to put my bag in front of the door. I contemplated the snow-covered courtyard, Piontek’s car going back down the lane. Besides the tracks the tires had just left, there were no others in the snow, no one came here. I waited till he reached the end of the lane and started off on the road to Tempelburg; then I opened the door.

The iron key that K#228;the had given me was large and heavy, but the lock, well oiled, opened easily. The hinges must also have been well oiled, for the door didn’t creak. I pushed open a few shutters to light the entry hall, then examined the handsome, intricately carved wooden staircase, the long bookcases, the parquet floor polished by time, the little sculptures and moldings where one could still make out traces of chipped gold leaf. I turned the switch: a chandelier in the middle of the room lit up. I turned it off and went upstairs, without bothering to close the door or take off my cap, coat, or gloves. Upstairs, a long hallway lined with windows traversed the house. I opened the windows one by one, threw open the shutters, and closed the windows. Then I opened the doors: next to the stairway there was a storeroom, a maid’s room, another hallway that led to a service staircase; opposite the windows, a bathroom and two cold little bedrooms. At the end of the hallway, a cloth-covered door opened onto a vast master bedroom that took up the entire rear of the floor. I turned on the light. There was a large four-poster bed with twirling posts, but no curtains or canopy, a cracked, polished old leather sofa, a wardrobe and a writing desk, a vanity with a tall mirror, another full-length mirror, facing the bed. Next to the wardrobe another door must have led to the bathroom. It was obviously my sister’s bedroom, cold and odorless. I contemplated it a while and then went out and closed the door, without opening the shutters. Downstairs, the hall led to a vast living room, with a piano and a long dining table made of old wood; then came the pantries and kitchen. There I opened everything, going out for a moment to gaze at the terrace, the woods. It was almost warm out, the sky was gray, the snow was melting, dripping from the roof with a pleasant little sound on the flagstones of the terrace and, farther away, hollowing out little wells in the snowy layer at the foot of the walls. In a few days, I thought, if the weather doesn’t get cold again, there will be mud, that will slow the Russians down. A crow took off heavily from the pines, cawed, then settled a little farther on. I closed the French windows and returned to the entry hall. The front door was still open: I brought in my bag and closed it. Behind the stairway was another double door, of varnished wood with round ornaments. That must have led to von #220;xk#252;ll’s apartments. I hesitated, then went back to the living room, where I looked at the furniture, the rare, carefully chosen bibelots, the large stone fireplace, the grand piano. A full-length portrait hung behind the piano, in a corner: von #220;xk#252;ll, still young, in three-quarter profile, with his gaze turned to the spectator, his head bare, in a uniform from the Great War. I examined it, noting the medals, the signet ring, the suede gloves held negligently in his hand. This portrait frightened me a little, I felt my stomach tighten, but I had to admit that he must have been a handsome man, once. I went over to the grand piano and raised the cover. My gaze went from the painting to the long line of ivory keys, then back to the painting. With a finger that was still gloved, I hit a key. I didn’t even know what the note was, I knew nothing, and in front of von #220;xk#252;ll’s handsome portrait I was again filled with the old regret. I said to myself: I would so have liked to know how to play the piano, I would so like to hear Bach one more time, before I die. But such regrets were pointless, I replaced the cover and left the living room through the terrace. In a storage room by the side of the house I found the wood supply, and in several trips I carried some large logs to the fireplace, along with smaller pieces of wood, already cut, which I piled into a log holder made of thick leather. I also carried some wood upstairs and lit the stove in one of the small spare bedrooms, fuelling the fire with old issues of the VB piled up in the bathroom. In the entry hall, I finally removed my outer clothes, trading my boots for some big slippers I found there; then I went back upstairs with my bag, which I unpacked on the narrow brass bed, putting my clothes away in the closet. The room was simple, with functional furniture, a ewer and a sink, discreet wallpaper. The ceramic stove heated up quickly. I went back downstairs with the bottle of Cognac and began making a fire in the fireplace. It was more trouble than the stove but it finally caught. I poured myself a glass of Cognac, found an ashtray, and settled into a comfortable armchair near the hearth, with my tunic unfastened. The daylight outside was gently waning, and I thought about nothing.

About what happened in that beautiful empty house, I don’t know if I can say much. I have already written an account of these events, and when I wrote it, it seemed true to me, equal to the reality, but apparently it doesn’t actually correspond to the truth. Why is that the case? Hard to say. It’s not that my memories are confused, on the contrary, I have many of them and very precise ones, but many of them overlap and even contradict one another, and their status is uncertain. For a long time I thought that my sister must have been there when I arrived, that she was waiting for me near the entrance to the house in a dark dress, her long, heavy black hair mixing with the mesh of a thick black shawl wrapped round her shoulders. We had spoken, standing in the snow, I wanted her to leave with me, but she didn’t want to, even when I explained to her that the Reds were coming, that it was just a question of weeks, or even of days, she refused, her husband was working, she said, he was writing music, it was the first time in a long time and they couldn’t leave now, so I decided to stay and sent Piontek away. In the afternoon, we had had tea and talked, I had told her about my work and also about Helene; she had asked me if I had slept with her, if I loved her, and I hadn’t known what to say; she had asked me why I didn’t marry her and I still hadn’t known what to say, finally she had asked me: “Is it because of me that you didn’t sleep with her, that you won’t marry her?”; and I, ashamed, had kept my eyes lowered, lost in the geometric patterns in the carpet. That is what I remembered, yet it seems that things didn’t happen that way, and now I have to acknowledge that my sister and her husband were probably not there, and that is why I am starting this story over from the beginning, trying to hold as close as I can to what can be affirmed. K#228;the arrived in the evening with some provisions, in a little cart drawn by a donkey, and prepared a meal for me. As she cooked, I went down to look for wine in the long, vaulted, dusty cellar full of the pleasant smell of damp earth. There were hundreds of bottles there, some of them very old, I had to blow the dust off to read the labels, many of which were completely mildewed. I chose the best bottles without the slightest hesitation, there was no point leaving such treasures to Ivan, anyway he just liked vodka, I found a Ch#226;teau-Margaux 1900 and also took an Ausone from the same year, along with, somewhat at random, a Graves, an Haut-Brion from 1923. Much later, I understood that this was a mistake, 1923 wasn’t really a great year, I should have chosen the 1921, better by far. I opened the Margaux while K#228;the served the meal, and arranged with her, before she left, that she come by every day to make me dinner, but would leave me alone the rest of the time. The dishes were simple and copious: soup, meat, potatoes roasted in fat, all the better to savor the wine. I had sat down at the end of the long table, not in the host’s seat but on the side, with my back to the fireplace, where the fire was crackling, with a tall candelabrum beside me; I had turned off the electric light and ate in the golden light of the candles, methodically devouring the rare meat and the potatoes and drinking the wine in long draughts, and it was as if my sister were sitting opposite me, also eating calmly with her beautiful floating smile, we were sitting opposite each other and her husband was at the head of the table between us, in his wheelchair, and we were chatting amicably, my sister spoke in a gentle, clear voice, von #220;xk#252;ll cordially, with that stiffness and severity that never seemed to leave him, but without ever relinquishing all the thoughtfulness of a born aristocrat, never putting me ill at ease, and in this warm, shifting light I saw and heard our conversation perfectly, it occupied my mind as I ate and finished the bottle of unctuous, opulent, fabulous Bordeaux. I was describing the destruction of Berlin for von #220;xk#252;ll. “It doesn’t seem to shock you,” I finally remarked.—“It’s a catastrophe,” he retorted, “but not a surprise. Our enemies are imitating our methods, what’s more normal than that? Germany will drink her cup of sorrow to the dregs before it’s all over.” From there, the conversation moved to July 20. I knew from Thomas that several friends of von #220;xk#252;ll’s were directly involved. “A large part of the Pomeranian aristocracy has been decimated by your Gestapo since then,” he commented coldly. “I knew von Tresckow’s father very well, a man of great moral rigor, like his son. And of course von Stauffenberg, a family relation.”—“How is that?”—“His mother is a von #220;xk#252;ll-Gyllenband, Karoline, my second cousin.” Una listened in silence. “You seem to approve of their action,” I said. His answer came to my mind on its own: “I have a great deal of personal respect for some of them, but I disapprove of their attempt for two reasons. First of all, it’s much too late. They should have done it in 1938, during the Sudeten crisis. They considered it, and Beck wanted to do it, but when the English and French turned yellow in front of that ridiculous corporal, it took the wind out of their sails. And also Hitler’s successes demoralized them and finally swept them along, even Halder, a very intelligent man, but too cerebral. Beck had the intelligence of honor, he must have understood that now it was too late, but he didn’t back down, to support the others. The real reason, though, is that Germany chose to follow this man. He wants his G#246;tterd#228;mmerung at all costs, and now Germany has to follow him to the end. Killing him now to save what’s left would be cheating, rigging the game. I told you, we have to drink the cup of sorrow to the dregs. That’s the only way for something new to begin.”—“J#252;nger thinks the same thing,” said Una. “He wrote to Berndt.”—“Yes, that’s what he let on between the lines. There’s also an essay of his about this that’s going round.”—“I saw J#252;nger in the Caucasus,” I said, “but I didn’t have an opportunity to talk with him. In any case, wanting to kill the F#252;hrer is an insane crime. There might be no way out, but I think treason is unacceptable, both today and in 1938. It’s the reflex of your class, condemned to disappear. It won’t survive any better under the Bolsheviks.”—“No doubt,” von #220;xk#252;ll calmly said. “I told you: everyone followed Hitler, even the Junkers. Halder thought we could beat the Russians. Ludendorff was the only one who understood, but too late, and he cursed Hindenburg for having brought Hitler to power. I have always detested the man, but I don’t take that as a warrant that exempts me from Germany’s fate.”—“You and your kind, excuse me for saying so, have had your day.”—“And you will soon have had yours. It will have been much shorter.” He contemplated me fixedly, the way one contemplates a cockroach or a spider, not with disgust, but with the cold passion of an entomologist. I could imagine it very clearly. I had finished the Margaux, I was slightly tipsy, I uncorked the Saint-#201;milion, changed our glasses, and had von #220;xk#252;ll taste the wine. He looked at the label. “I remember this bottle. It was a Roman cardinal who sent it to me. We had had a long discussion about the role of the Jews. He maintained the very Catholic proposition that the Jews must be oppressed, but kept as witnesses to the truth of Christ, a position I’ve always found absurd. Actually, I think he defended it more for the pleasure of the argument, he was a Jesuit, after all.” He was smiling and he asked me a question, no doubt to annoy me: “Apparently the Church caused you some problems when you wanted to evacuate the Jews of Rome?”—“Apparently. I wasn’t there.”—“Not just the Church,” said Una. “You remember, your friend Karl-Friedrich told us that the Italians didn’t understand anything about the Jewish question?”—“Yes, that’s true,” von #220;xk#252;ll replied. “He said the Italians weren’t even applying their own racial laws, that they were protecting foreign Jews from Germany.”—“That’s true,” I said, ill at ease. “We had some difficulties with them about it.” And this is what my sister answered: “That’s the proof that they are healthy people. They appreciate life at its full value. I understand them: they have a beautiful country, a lot of sun, they eat well, and their women are beautiful.”—“Not like Germany,” von #220;xk#252;ll said laconically. I finally tasted the wine: it had the fragrance of roasted clove and a little of coffee, I found it broader than the Margaux, sweet and round and exquisite. Von #220;xk#252;ll was looking at me: “Do you know why you’re killing the Jews? Do you know?” Throughout this strange conversation he kept provoking me, I didn’t reply, I savored the wine. “Why have the Germans shown so much determination to kill the Jews?”—“You’re wrong if you think it’s only the Jews,” I said calmly. “The Jews are only one category of enemy. We are destroying all our enemies, whoever and wherever they are.”—“Yes, but admit it, for the Jews you’ve shown a special determination.”—“I don’t think so. The F#252;hrer, in fact, may have personal reasons to hate the Jews. But at the SD, we don’t hate anyone, we objectively pursue our enemies. The choices we make are rational ones.”—“Not as rational as all that. Why did you have to eliminate the mentally ill, the handicapped in hospitals? What danger did they pose, those poor wretches?”—“Useless mouths. Do you know how many millions of reichsmarks we saved that way? Not to speak of the hospital beds freed for the wounded from the front.”—“I know,” said Una, who had been listening to us in silence in this warm golden light, “I know why we killed the Jews.” She spoke in a clear, firm voice, I heard her clearly and listened to her as I drank, having finished my meal. “By killing the Jews,” she said, “we wanted to kill ourselves, kill the Jew within us, kill that which in us resembles the idea we have of the Jew. Kill in us the potbellied bourgeois counting his pennies, hungry for recognition and dreaming of power, but a power he pictures in the form of a Napoleon III or a banker, kill the petty, reassuring morality of the bourgeoisie, kill thriftiness, kill obedience, kill the servitude of the Knecht, kill all those fine German virtues. For we’ve never understood that these qualities that we attribute to the Jews, calling them baseness, spinelessness, avarice, greed, thirst for domination, and facile malice are fundamentally German qualities, and that if the Jews show these qualities, it’s because they’ve dreamed of resembling the Germans, of being Germans, it’s because they imitate us obsequiously like the very image of all that is fine and good in High Bourgeoisie, the Golden Calf of those who flee the harshness of the desert and the Law. Or else maybe they were pretending, maybe they ended up adopting these qualities almost out of courtesy, out of a kind of sympathy, so as not to seem so distant. And we, on the other hand, our German dream, was to be Jews, pure, indestructible, faithful to a Law, different from everyone else and under the hand of God. But actually they’re all mistaken, the Germans as well as the Jews. For if Jew, these days, still means anything, it means Other, an Other and an Otherwise that might be impossible, but that are necessary.” She drained her glass in one long swallow. “Berndt’s friends didn’t understand any of that, either. They said that in the end the massacre of the Jews wasn’t really important, and that by killing Hitler they could lay the crime on him, on Himmler, on the SS, on a few sick assassins, on you. But they’re just as responsible for it as you are, for they too are Germans and they too waged war for the victory of this Germany, and not any other. And the worst thing is that if the Jews pull through, if Germany collapses and the Jews survive, they’ll forget what the name Jew means, they’ll want to be more German than ever before.” I kept drinking as she spoke in her clear, rapid voice, the wine going to my head. And all of a sudden my vision of the Zeughaus came back to me, the F#252;hrer as a Jew with the prayer shawl of the rabbis and the leather ritual objects, in front of a vast audience where no one noticed it, except me, and all of that suddenly disappeared, Una and her husband and our conversation, and I was left alone with the remains of my meal and the extraordinary wines, drunk, full, a little bitter, a guest no one had invited.

That night, I slept poorly in my little bed. I had drunk too much, my head was spinning, I was still suffering from the aftereffects of the shock from the day before. I hadn’t closed the shutters and the moonlight fell softly into the room, I pictured it penetrating the bedroom at the end of the hallway too, sliding over my sister’s sleeping body, naked under the sheet, and I would have liked to be this light, this intangible gentleness, but at the same time my mind was raging, the febrile arguments at dinner echoed in my head like the mad ringing of Orthodox bells at Easter and ruined the calm in which I’d have liked to bathe. Finally I sank into sleep, but the unease continued, stained my dreams in horrible colors. In a dark bedroom, I could see a tall, beautiful woman in a long white dress, maybe a wedding dress, I couldn’t make out her features but it was obviously my sister, she was lying on the ground, on the carpet, prey to uncontrollable convulsions and diarrhea. Black shit oozed through her dress, the inner folds must have been full of it. Von #220;xk#252;ll, having found her this way, went back into the hallway (he was walking) to call in a peremptory tone a bellboy or a floor waiter (thus it must have been a hotel, I imagine it was their wedding night). Returning to the room, von #220;xk#252;ll ordered the attendant to pick her up by her arms as he took her feet to carry her into the bathroom so she could be undressed and washed. He did this coldly, efficiently, he seemed indifferent to the foul smells emanating from her and choking me, I had to force myself to control my disgust, my rising nausea (but where was I, then, in this dream?).

I got up early and crossed the empty, silent house. In the kitchen I found some bread, some butter, honey, and coffee, and I ate. Then I went into the living room and examined the books in the library. There were a lot of volumes in German but also in English, Italian, Russian; I ended up choosing, with a rush of pleasure, L’#201;ducation sentimentale, which I found in French. I sat down near a window and read for a few hours, raising my head from time to time to look at the woods and the gray sky. Around noon, I fixed an omelette with bacon for myself, and ate at the old wooden table that took up the corner of the kitchen, pouring myself some beer, which I drank in long draughts. I made some coffee and smoked a cigarette, then decided to take a walk. I put on my officer’s coat without buttoning it: it was still warm out, the snow wasn’t melting but was hardening and forming a crust. I set out across the garden and entered the forest. The pines were well spaced out, very tall, they rose and at the very top came together like a vast vault set on columns. There were still patches of snow in places, the bare ground was hard, red, carpeted with dry needles that crackled under my steps. I came to a sandy path, a straight line between the pines. Tracks of wagon wheels were imprinted in the ground; by the edge of the path, here and there, logs were carefully piled up. The path led to a gray river, a dozen meters wide; on the far shore rose a plowed field whose black furrows streaked the snow, running up to a beech wood. I turned right and entered the forest, following the course of the gently murmuring river. As I walked, I imagined Una walking with me. She was wearing a wool skirt and boots, a man’s leather jacket, and her large knit shawl. I saw her walking in front of me, with a sure, calm step, I watched her, aware of the play of her muscles and thighs, her buttocks, her proud, straight back. I couldn’t imagine anything nobler or truer or more beautiful. Farther on, oak and beech trees mixed with the pines, the ground became swampy, covered with waterlogged dead leaves through which my feet sank into a mud that was still hard from the cold. But a little farther along, the ground rose slightly and became dry and pleasant underfoot again. Here there were almost nothing but pines, thin and arrow-straight, young stock replanted after clear-cutting. Then finally the forest opened onto a brushy, cold, almost snowless meadow, looking down on the still water of the lake. To the right I saw a few houses, the road, the crest of the isthmus crowned with firs and birches. I knew that the river was called the Drage, and that it went from this lake to the Dratzig-See and then continued on to the Kr#246;ssin-See, where there was an SS school, near Falkenburg. I looked at the gray expanse of the lake: around it lay the same ordered landscape of black earth and woods. I followed its bank to the village. A farmer in his garden hailed me, and I exchanged a few words with him; he was worried, he was afraid of the Russians, I couldn’t give him any definite news but I knew he was right to be afraid. At the road, I headed left and slowly climbed the long hill between the two lakes. The slopes were steep and hid the water from me. At the top of the isthmus, I climbed the hillock and went between the trees, pushing the branches aside, to a place overlooking, from high up, a bay that opened up into wide, irregular planes of water. The immobility of the water, of the black forests on the other bank, gave this landscape a solemn, mysterious look, like a kingdom beyond life, yet still on this side of death, a land between the two. I lit a cigarette and looked at the lake. A childhood conversation came to my mind, my sister, one day, had told me an old Pomeranian myth, the legend of Vineta, a beautiful, arrogant city swallowed up in the Baltic, whose bells fishermen still heard ringing on the water at noon, somewhere near Kolberg, it was said. This rich, great city, she had explained to me with her childlike seriousness, was lost because of the limitless desire of a woman, the king’s daughter. Many sailors and knights came to drink and amuse themselves there, handsome, strong men, full of life. Every night, the king’s daughter went out disguised into the town, she went down to the inns, the most sordid dens, and there she chose a man. She brought him back to her palace and made love to him all night; in the morning, the man was dead of exhaustion. Not one, even the strongest, resisted her insatiable desire. She had their corpses thrown into the sea, into a storm-tossed bay. But being unable to satisfy the immensity of her desire only excited that desire more. She could be seen walking on the beach, singing for the Ocean, to whom she wanted to make love. Only the Ocean, she sang, would be vast enough, powerful enough to fulfill her desire. Finally one night, unable to stand it any longer, she went out of her palace naked, leaving the corpse of her last lover in her bed. There was a storm that night, the Ocean was lashing the sea wall protecting the city. She went out onto the dyke and opened the great bronze door placed there by her father. The Ocean entered the city, took the princess and made her his wife, and kept the drowned city as her dowry. When Una had finished her story, I had pointed out that it was the same as the French legend of the city of Ys. “Indeed,” she had retorted haughtily, “but this one is more beautiful.”—“If I understand it correctly, it explains that the order of the city is incompatible with the insatiable pleasure of women.”—“I would say, rather, the excessive pleasure of women. But what you are proposing is a man’s morality. I believe that all these ideas—moderation, morality—were invented by men to compensate for the limits of their pleasure. For men have known for a long time that their pleasure can never be compared to the pleasure we endure, which is of a different order.”

On the way back, I felt like an empty shell, an automaton. I thought about the terrible dream of the night before, I tried to imagine my sister with her legs covered in liquid, sticky diarrhea, with its abominably sweet smell. The emaciated evacuees of Auschwitz, huddled under their blankets, also had their legs covered in shit, their legs like sticks; the ones who stopped to defecate were executed, they were forced to shit as they walked, like horses. Una covered in shit would have been even more beautiful, solar and pure under the mire that would not have touched her, that would have been incapable of soiling her. Between her stained legs I would have nestled like a newborn starving for milk and love, lost. These thoughts ravaged my head, impossible to chase away, I was having trouble breathing and didn’t understand what was invading me so brutally. Back at the house, I wandered aimlessly through the hallways and rooms, opening and closing doors at random. I wanted to open the ones to von #220;xk#252;ll’s rooms, but stopped at the last instant, my hand on the doorknob, held back by a wordless confusion, like when as a child I entered my father’s office to stroke his books and play with his butterflies. I went upstairs and into Una’s bedroom. I rapidly opened the shutters, throwing them back with a clatter of wood. The windows overlooked the courtyard on one side, and on the other, the terrace, the garden, and the forest, beyond which one could glimpse a tip of the lake. I sat down on the chest at the foot of the bed, opposite the large mirror. I contemplated the man in front of me in the mirror, a slumping, tired, glum man, his face swollen with resentment. I didn’t recognize him, that couldn’t be me, but it was. I straightened up and lifted my head, but that didn’t change much. I imagined Una standing in front of this mirror, naked or wearing a gown, she must have found herself fabulously beautiful, and how fortunate she was to be able to look at herself this way, to be able to gaze at her beautiful body, but maybe not, maybe she didn’t see the beauty, invisible to her own eyes, maybe she didn’t perceive the frightening strangeness, the scandal of those breasts and that sex, that thing between her legs that can’t be seen but that jealously hides all its splendor, maybe she felt only its heaviness and slow aging, with a light sadness or at most a gentle feeling of familiar complicity, never the acridness of panicking desire: Look, there’s nothing to be seen there. Breathing with difficulty, I got up, went over to the window to look out, toward the forest. The warmth I’d worked up from my long walk had dissipated, the room seemed icy to me, I was cold. I turned to the writing desk standing against the wall between the two windows that looked out onto the garden, and tried absentmindedly to open it. It was locked. I went downstairs, found a big knife in the kitchen, piled some kindling into the log holder, took also the bottle of Cognac and a tumbler, and went back upstairs. In the bedroom, I poured myself a measure of alcohol, drank a little, and started making a fire in the heavy stove built into the corner. When it had caught, I straightened up and snapped the lock of the writing desk with the knife. It gave way easily. I sat down, the glass of Cognac next to me, and went through the drawers. There were all sorts of trinkets and papers, jewelry, some exotic shells, fossils, business correspondence, which I skimmed over absentmindedly, letters addressed to Una from Switzerland dealing mostly with questions of psychology mixed with ordinary gossip, other things besides. In one drawer, crammed into a little leather portfolio, I found a sheaf of papers written in her handwriting: drafts of letters addressed to me, which she had never sent. With my heart beating, I cleared the desk, stuffing the rest of the things into the drawers, and fanned the letters out like a deck of playing cards. I let my fingers play over them and chose one, at random I thought, but it was probably not entirely at random, since the letter was dated April 28, 1944, and began: Dear Max, it was a year ago today that Mother died. You never wrote to me, you never told me anything about what happened, you never explained anything to me… The letter broke off there, I quickly skimmed over a few others, but they all looked unfinished. Then I drank a little Cognac and began telling my sister everything, exactly as I’ve written it here, without omitting anything. That took some time; when I finished, the room was growing dark. I took another letter and rose to hold it up near the window. This one talked about our father, and I read it at one go, my mouth dry, tense with anguish. Una wrote that my resentment toward our mother, on our father’s account, had been unfair, that our mother had had a hard life because of him, his coldness, his absences, his final, unexplained departure. She asked me if I even remembered him. In fact I didn’t remember many things, I recalled his smell, his sweat, how we rushed at him to attack him, when he was reading on the sofa, and how he took us then in his arms, roaring with laughter. Once when I was coughing he had me swallow some medicine that I had immediately vomited onto the carpet; I was dying of shame, I was afraid he would get angry, but he had been very kind, he had comforted me and then cleaned the carpet. The letter went on, Una explained to me that her husband had known our father in Courland, that our father, as Judge Baumann had indicated, commanded a Freikorps. Von #220;xk#252;ll commanded another unit, but he knew him well. Berndt says he was a mad animal, she wrote. A man without faith, without limits. He had raped women crucified to trees, he himself threw living children into burning barns, he handed captured enemies over to his men, a pack of insane beasts, and laughed and drank as he watched them tortured. In command, he was stubborn and narrow, he wouldn’t listen to anyone. The entire flank he was supposed to defend at Mitau collapsed because of his arrogance, precipitating the army’s retreat. I know you’re not going to believe me, she added, but that is the truth, you can think what you like about it. Horrified, overcome with rage, I crumpled the letter up, made as if to tear it up, but restrained myself. I threw it on the secretary and walked across the room, I wanted to go out, but came back, hesitated, blocked by a flood of contradictory impulses, finally I drank some Cognac, that calmed me down a little, I took the bottle and went downstairs to drink some more in the living room.

K#228;the had arrived and was preparing dinner, going in and out of the kitchen; I didn’t want to be around her. I went back to the entry hall and opened the door to von #220;xk#252;ll’s apartments. There were two handsome rooms there, a study and a bedroom, tastefully furnished with old pieces in heavy, dark wood, oriental carpets, simple metal objects, a bathroom with special equipment, probably adapted to his paralysis. Looking at all this, I again felt a vivid sense of confusion, but at the same time I didn’t care. I walked around the study: no objects cluttered the massive, chairless desk; on the shelves there were only music scores, by all sorts of composers, arranged by country and period, and, set aside, a small pile of bound scores, his own works. I opened one and contemplated the series of notes, an abstraction for me, I didn’t know how to read music. In Berlin, von #220;xk#252;ll had spoken to me about a work he was planning, a fugue or, as he had said, a suite of serial variations in the form of a fugue. “I don’t know yet if what I envisage is actually possible,” he had said. When I had asked him what the theme would be, he had made a face: “It’s not romantic music. There is no theme. It’s just an #233;tude.”—“Whom are you writing it for?” I had then asked.—“For no one. You know quite well they never play my works in Germany. I’ll probably never hear it played.”—“Why are you writing it, then?” And he had smiled, a big, happy smile: “To have done it before I die.”

Among the scores there were of course some Rameau, some Couperin, Forqueray, Balbastre. I took a few from the shelf and leafed through them, looking at the titles I knew well. There was Rameau’s Gavotte #224; six doubles, and by looking at the page the music immediately unfurled in my head, clear, joyous, crystalline, like the galloping of a purebred horse raced across the Russian steppe in winter, so light that its hooves just brushed the snow, leaving only the slightest of traces. But no matter how much I stared at the page I couldn’t connect those bewitching trills to the signs drawn on it. At the end of the meal in Berlin, von #220;xk#252;ll had mentioned Rameau again. “You’re right to like that music,” he had said. “It’s a lucid, sovereign music. It never foresakes its elegance but remains bristling with surprises and even traps, it is playful, joyful with a gay knowledge that neglects neither mathematics, nor life.” He had also defended Mozart in curious terms: “For a long time I had little regard for him. When I was young, he seemed to me a gifted hedonist, without any depth. But that might have been the judgment of my own Puritanism. As I get older, I’m beginning to think he may have had a sense of life as strong as Nietzsche’s, and that his music seems simple only because life, in fact, is rather simple. But I haven’t entirely decided yet, I have to listen some more.”

K#228;the was leaving and I went to eat, ceremoniously emptying another one of von #220;xk#252;ll’s marvelous bottles. The house was beginning to seem familiar and warm to me, K#228;the had made a fire in the fireplace, the room was pleasantly heated, I felt assuaged, akin to all this, this fire and this good wine and even the portrait of my sister’s husband, hanging over the piano I couldn’t play. But this feeling didn’t last. After the meal, I had cleared the table and poured myself a measure of Cognac, I settled in front of the fireplace and tried to read Flaubert, but couldn’t concentrate. Too many mute things worried me. I had an erection, the idea came to me to strip naked, to go explore this big and dark and cold and silent house naked, a vast, free space that was also private and full of secrets, just like Moreau’s house when we were children. And this thought brought along another one, its obscure twin, that of the controlled, disciplined space of the camps: the overcrowding of the barracks, the swarming in the collective latrines, no place possible to have, alone or with someone else, a human moment. I had talked about this once with H#246;ss, who had told me that despite all the prohibitions and precautions, the inmates continued to have a sexual activity, not just the kapos with their Pipel or the lesbians among themselves, but men and women, the men bribed the guards so they’d bring them their mistresses, or slipped into the Frauenlager with a work Kommando, and risked death for a quick jolt, a rubbing together of two emaciated pelvises, a brief contact of shaved, lice-ridden bodies. I had been strongly impressed by this impossible eroticism, doomed to end crushed beneath the guards’ hobnail boots, the very opposite in its despair of the free, solar, transgressive eroticism of the rich, but maybe also its hidden truth, slyly and obstinately signifying that all real love is inevitably turned toward death and, in its desire, doesn’t take the body’s wretchedness into account. For man has taken the coarse, limited facts given to every sexed creature and has built from them a limitless fantasy, murky and profound, an eroticism that, more than anything, distinguishes him from the animals, and he has done the same thing with the idea of death, but this imagination, curiously, has no name (you could call it thanatism, perhaps): and it is these imaginations, these forever rehearsed obsessions, and not the thing itself, that are the frantic driving forces behind our thirst for life, for knowledge, for the agonizing struggle of self. I was still holding L’#201;ducation sentimentale, set down on my lap almost touching my sex, forgotten, I let these idiot’s thoughts dig into my head, my ears full of the anguished beating of my heart.

In the morning I was calmer. In the living room, I tried to resume reading after having some bread and coffee, and then my thoughts drifted away again, detached from the torments of Fr#233;d#233;ric and Madame Arnoux. I wondered: What did you come here for? What do you want, exactly? To wait till Una returns? To wait till a Russian comes and slits your throat? To commit suicide? I thought about Helene. She and my sister, I said to myself, were the only two women, aside from a few nurses, to have seen my body naked. What had she seen, what had she thought when she saw that? What did she see in me that I didn’t see, and that my sister, for a long time now, didn’t want to see anymore? I thought about Helene’s body, I had often seen her in a bathing suit, her curves were finer and lither than my sister’s, her breasts smaller. Both had the same white skin, but this whiteness stood in stark contrast to the thick black hair of my sister, whereas with Helene, it continued in the soft blondness of her hair. Her sex too must have been blond and soft, but I didn’t want to think about that. I was seized by a sudden disgust. I said to myself: love is dead, the only love is dead. I shouldn’t have come, I should leave, go back to Berlin. But I didn’t want to go back to Berlin, I wanted to stay. A little later I got up and went out. I set off again through the forest, I found an old wooden bridge over the Drage and crossed it. The thickets became increasingly dense, dark, one could only continue on the foresters’ and loggers’ paths, across which branches stretched and scratched my clothes. Farther on stood an isolated hill from which one could probably see the whole region, but I didn’t push on as far as that, I walked aimlessly, in a circle perhaps, finally I found the river again and came back to the house. K#228;the was waiting for me and came out of the kitchen to meet me: “Herr Busse is here, with Herr Gast and some other people. They’re waiting for you in the courtyard. I gave them some schnapps.” Busse was von #220;xk#252;ll’s farmer. “What do they want with me?” I asked.—“They want to talk with you.” I crossed the house and went out into the courtyard. The farmers were sitting on an open wagon drawn by a scrawny draught horse, which was grazing on the tufts of grass emerging from the snow. When they saw me they bared their heads and jumped to the ground. One of them, a red-faced man, his hair gray but his moustache still black, came forward and bowed slightly in front of me. “Good day, Herr Obersturmbannf#252;hrer. K#228;the told us that you are the Baronness’s brother?” His tone was polite, but he was hesitating, searching for his words. “That’s right,” I said.—“Do you know where the Freiherr and the Freifrau are? Do you know what their plans are?”—“No. I thought I’d find them here. I don’t know where they are. In Switzerland, probably.”—“It’s just that we’ll soon have to leave, Herr Obersturmbannf#252;hrer. We shouldn’t wait much longer. The Reds are attacking Stargard, they’ve surrounded Arnswalde. People are worried. The Kreisleiter says they’ll never reach this far, but we don’t believe him.” He was embarrassed, he kept turning his hat around in his hands. “Herr Busse,” I said, “I understand your concern. You have to think of your families. If you feel you should leave, leave. No one’s holding you back.” His face cleared a little. “Thank you, Herr Obersturmbannf#252;hrer. It’s just that we were concerned, seeing as how the house was empty.” He hesitated. “If you like, I can give you a cart and a horse. We’ll help you, if you want to load some furniture. We can take it with us, put it somewhere safe.”—“Thank you, Herr Busse. I’ll think about it. I’ll send K#228;the to get you, if I decide on something.”

The men climbed back up, and the wagon moved slowly away down the birch lane. Busse’s words had no effect on me, I couldn’t manage to think about the Russians’ arrival as a concrete, imminent thing. I stayed there, leaning on the frame of the large door, and smoked a cigarette as I watched the wagon disappear down the end of the lane. Later on in the afternoon, two other men presented themselves. They wore blue jackets made of coarse cloth, big hobnail boots, and held caps in their hands; I understood right away that they were the two Frenchmen from the STO that K#228;the had told me about, who carried out maintenance or farm work for von #220;xk#252;ll. They were the only personnel, along with K#228;the, who still remained: all the men had been drafted, the gardener was with the Volkssturm, the maid had left to join her parents, who had been evacuated to Mecklenburg. I didn’t know where these two men were staying, maybe with Busse. I talked to them directly in French. The older one, Henri, was a stocky, broad-backed farmer in his forties from the Lub#233;ron, he knew Antibes; the other probably came from a provincial city, and seemed still young. They too were worried, they had come to say they wanted to leave, if everyone else was leaving. “You understand, Monsieur l’Officier, we don’t like the Bolsheviks any more than you do. They’re savages, we don’t know what to expect from them.”—“If Herr Busse leaves,” I said, “you can leave with him. I won’t hold you back.” Their relief was palpable. “Thank you, Monsieur l’Officier. Please give our respects to Monsieur le Baron and to Madame, when you see them.”

When I see them? This idea seemed almost comical to me; at the same time, I was entirely incapable of accepting the thought that I might never see my sister again: it was literally unthinkable. That evening, I had dismissed K#228;the early and served myself, I dined for the third time alone in this large candlelit room, solemnly, and as I ate and drank I was overcome with startling fantasies, the demented vision of a perfect coprophagic autarky. I pictured myself confined alone in this manor house with Una, isolated from the world, forever. Every evening, we put on our finest clothing, suit and a silk shirt for me, a beautiful, close-fitting, barebacked evening gown for her, enhanced by heavy, almost barbaric silver jewelry, and we sat down to an elegant dinner, at this table covered with a lace tablecloth and set with crystal tumblers, silverware stamped with our crest, S#232;vres porcelain plates, massive silver candelabra bristling with long white tapers; in the glasses, our own urine, on the plates well-formed pieces of excrement, pale and firm, which we calmly ate with little silver spoons. We wiped our lips with monogrammed cambric napkins, we drank, and when we had finished, we went into the kitchen ourselves to wash the dishes. This way, we were self-sufficient, without loss and without trace, neatly. This aberrant vision filled me for the rest of the meal with a sordid anguish. Afterward I went up to Una’s room to drink Cognac and smoke. The bottle was almost empty. I looked at the secretary, now closed again, my evil feeling wouldn’t let me go, I didn’t know what to do, but above all I didn’t want to open the secretary. I opened the wardrobe and inspected my sister’s dresses, breathing in deeply to immerse myself in the smell they gave off. I chose one, a beautiful evening gown made of delicate material, black and gray with silver threads; standing in front of the tall mirror, I held the dress draped over my body, and with great seriousness made a few feminine gestures. But immediately I was afraid and put the dress away, full of disgust and shame: What was I playing at here? My body wasn’t hers and never would be. At the same time, I couldn’t contain myself, I should have left the house right away, but I couldn’t leave the house. Then I sat down on the sofa and finished the bottle of Cognac, forcing myself to think about the scraps of letters I had read, about these endless, answerless enigmas, my father’s departure, my mother’s death. I got up, went to get the letters, and sat down again to read a few more of them. My sister was trying to ask me questions, she asked me how I could have slept while our mother was being killed, what I had felt when I saw her body, what we had talked about the day before. I could answer almost none of these questions. In one letter, she told me about the visit from Clemens and Weser: intuitively, she had lied to them, she hadn’t said I had seen the bodies, but she wanted to know why I had lied, and what exactly I remembered. What I remembered? I didn’t even know what a memory was anymore. When I was little, one day, I climbed, and even today, as I write, I can see myself very clearly climbing the gray steps of a great mausoleum or a monument lost in a forest. The leaves were red, it must have been the end of autumn, I couldn’t see the sky through the trees. A thick layer of dead leaves, red, orange, brown, gold, covered the steps, I sank into them up to my thighs, and the steps were so high that I was forced to use my hands to hoist myself up to the next one. In my memory, this whole scene is thick with an overwhelming feeling, the burned colors of the leaves weighed on me, and I cleared a path for myself on these steps for giants through this dry, crumbling mass, I was afraid, I thought I would sink into it and disappear. For years, I believed this image was the memory of a dream, an image from a childhood dream that had stayed with me. But one day, in Kiel, when I returned there for university, I chanced upon this ziggurat, a little granite war monument, I walked around it, the steps weren’t higher than other steps, this was the place, this place existed. Of course, I must have been very small when I had gone there, that’s why the steps seemed so tall to me, but that’s not what overwhelmed me, it was seeing, after so many years, something that I had always located in the world of dreams present itself this way as reality, as a concrete, material thing. And the same was true with everything Una had tried to talk to me about in these unfinished letters that she had never sent me. All these endless thoughts were bristling with sharp angles, I gashed myself on them viciously, the hallways of this cold, oppressive house were streaming with the bloody shreds of my feelings; a young, healthy maid should have come and washed everything clean, but there was no more maid. I put the letters away in the secretary and, leaving the empty bottle and glass there, went into the bedroom next to hers to go to bed. But as soon as I lay down, obscene, perverse thoughts began to flood in again. I got up again and in the trembling light of a candle contemplated my naked body in the wardrobe mirror. I touched my flat belly, my stiff penis, my buttocks. With the tip of my fingers I caressed the hairs on the back of my neck. Then I blew the candle out and lay down again. But these thoughts refused to go away, they emerged from the corners of the room like mad dogs and rushed at me to tear into me and inflame my body, Una and I were exchanging our clothes, naked except for stockings, I pulled on her long dress as she buttoned herself up in my uniform and put up her hair and fastened it under my cap, then she sat me down in front of her dressing table and carefully made up my face, combing my hair back, applying lipstick to my mouth, mascara on my eyelashes, powder on my cheeks, she dabbed drops of perfume on my neck and painted my nails, and when it was over we just as brutally exchanged our roles, she equipped herself with a sculpted ebony phallus and took me like a man, in front of her tall mirror that impassively reflected our bodies intertwined like snakes, she had coated the phallus with cold cream, and the acrid smell bit into my nose as she used me as if I were a woman, until all distinctions were erased and I could say to her: “I am your sister and you are my brother,” and she: “You are my sister and I am your brother.”

These appalling images kept gnawing at me for days on end like overexcited puppies. My relation to these thoughts was that of two magnets whose polarities were constantly reversed by a mysterious force: if we attracted each other, they changed so that we repelled each other; but scarcely had this happened than they changed again, we attracted each other again, and all this took place very rapidly, so that we oscillated before each other, these thoughts and I, at an almost constant distance, as incapable of approaching each other as we were of drawing away from each other. Outside the snow was melting, the ground was turning muddy. K#228;the came one day to tell me that she was leaving; officially, it was still forbidden to evacuate, but she had a cousin in Lower Saxony, she was going to live with her. Busse returned also to renew his offer: he had just been recruited into the Volkssturm but wanted to send his family away, before it was too late. He asked me to go over his accounts with him, in von #220;xk#252;ll’s name, but I refused and dismissed him, asking him to take the two Frenchmen along with his family. When I went walking by the road, I didn’t see much traffic; but in Alt Draheim, the prudent ones were discreetly getting ready to leave; they were emptying their stores of supplies and sold me provisions cheaply. The countryside was calm, from time to time you could just make out the sound of an airplane, high in the sky. One day, while I was upstairs, a car came down the lane. Hiding behind a curtain, I watched it from a window; when it had come closer, I recognized a Kripo license plate. I ran to my bedroom, took out my service weapon from the holster in my bag, and, without thinking, ran down the servants’ stairway and through the kitchen door to take refuge in the woods beyond the terrace. Clutching my pistol nervously, I skirted a little around the garden, well back behind the line of trees, then drew closer under cover of a thicket to observe the house. I saw a figure come out through the French windows of the living room and cross the terrace to position himself at the balustrade and observe the garden, hands in his coat pockets. “Aue!” he called twice, “Aue!” It was Weser, I recognized him easily. The tall figure of Clemens stood outlined in the doorway. Weser barked my name out a third time, in a definitive tone, then turned around and went into the house, preceded by Clemens. I waited. After a long while, I saw their shadows busy behind the windows of my sister’s bedroom. A mad rage seized me and brought blood to my face as I cocked the pistol, ready to run into the house and kill these two evil bloodhounds pitilessly. I restrained myself with difficulty and stayed there, my fingers white from clutching the pistol, trembling. Finally I heard the sound of an engine. I waited a little more and then went in, on the lookout in case they had set a trap for me. The car had left, the house was empty. In my bedroom, nothing seemed to have been touched; in Una’s bedroom, the secretary was still closed, but inside, the drafts of her letters had disappeared. Stunned, I sat down on a chair, the pistol on my knee, forgotten. What were they after, these rabid, obstinate animals, deaf to all reason? I tried to think about what the letters contained, but I couldn’t manage to put my thoughts in order. I knew they provided a proof of my presence in Antibes at the time of the murder. But that had no importance anymore. What about the twins? Did these letters talk about the twins? I made an effort to remember, it seemed that no, they said nothing about the twins, whereas obviously that was the only thing that mattered to my sister, much more than our mother’s fate. What were they to her, these two kids? I got up, put the pistol on the end table, and set about searching through the secretary again, slowly and methodically this time, as Clemens and Weser must have done. And then I found, in a little drawer that I hadn’t noticed, a photograph of the two boys, showing them naked and smiling, in front of the sea, probably near Antibes. Yes, I said to myself as I examined this image, in fact it’s possible, they must be hers. But who then was the father? Certainly not von #220;xk#252;ll. I tried to imagine my sister pregnant, holding her swollen belly in her hands, my sister giving birth, torn apart, screaming, it was impossible. No, if that was indeed the case they must have cut her open, taken them out through the belly, it wasn’t possible otherwise. I thought about her fear while faced with this thing swelling inside her. “I’ve always been afraid,” she had said to me one day, a long time ago. Where was that? I don’t know anymore. She had spoken to me about the permanent fear women have, that old friend that lives with them, all the time. Fear when you bleed every month, fear of taking something inside yourself, of being penetrated by the parts of men who are so often selfish and brutal, fear of gravity dragging the flesh, the breasts, downward. It must have been the same for the fear of being pregnant. Something’s growing, something’s growing in your belly, a strange body inside you, which moves and sucks up all your body’s strength, and you know it has to come out, even if it kills you, it has to come out, how horrible. Even with all the men I had known I couldn’t approach that, I could understand nothing of women’s overwhelming fear. And once the children are born, it must be even worse, since then begins the constant fear, the terror that haunts you day and night, and that ends only with you, or with them. I saw the image of those mothers clutching their children as they were shot, I saw those Hungarian Jewesses sitting on their suitcases, pregnant women and girls waiting for the train and the gas at the end of the trip, it must have been that which I had seen in them, that which I had never been able to get rid of and had never been able to express, that fear, not their open and explicit fear of the gendarmes or the Germans, of us, but the mute fear that lived inside them, in the fragility of their bodies and their sexes nestling between their legs, that fragility we were going to destroy without ever seeing it.

It was almost warm out. I had taken a chair out onto the terrace, I stayed there for hours, reading or listening to the snow melting in the sloping garden, watching the topiary reappear, reimposing their presence. I read Flaubert and also, when I tired momentarily of the great moving walkway of his prose, verses translated from Occitan that sometimes made me laugh out loud in surprise: I have a lady, don’t know who she is, / Never saw her, by my faith. I had the joyous feeling of being on a deserted island, cut off from the world; if, as in fairy tales, I could have surrounded the estate with a barrier of invisibility, I would have stayed there forever, waiting for my sister’s return, almost happy, as Bolsheviks and trolls overran the surrounding lands. For like the poet-princes of the Lower Middle Ages, the thought of the love of a woman cloistered in a distant castle (or a Helvetian sanatorium) fully contented me. With a serene gaiety, I pictured her sitting like me on a terrace, facing high mountains instead of a forest, also alone (let her husband deal with his treatment), and reading books like the ones I was reading, taken from her library. The keen mountain air must have bitten at her mouth, perhaps she had wrapped herself in a blanket to read, but beneath it her body remained, with its heaviness and its presence. As children, our spindly bodies rushed at each other, clashed together furiously, but they were like two cages of skin and bone, which prevented our naked feelings from touching each other. We hadn’t yet grasped the extent to which love lives in bodies, nests in their most secret folds, in their wearinesses and their weight too. I imagined with precision Una’s body reading, adjusting itself to the chair, I guessed the curve of her backbone, of the back of her neck, the weight of one leg crossed over the other, the almost inaudible sound of her breathing, and the very idea of her sweat, under her armpits, delighted me, lifted me into a transport that abolished my own flesh and turned me into pure perception, strained to the breaking point. But such moments couldn’t last: water was slowly dripping from the trees and there, in Switzerland, she got up, pushing off her blanket, and went back into the common rooms, leaving me with my chimeras, my dark chimeras that, as I in turn went back into the house, blended into its architecture, spread out according to the layout of the rooms I lived in, avoided, or, like her bedroom, wanted to avoid but couldn’t. I had finally pushed open the door to her bathroom. It was a large woman’s room, with a long porcelain bathtub, a bidet, a toilet in the back. I fingered the perfume flasks, contemplating myself bitterly in the mirror over the sink. As in her bedroom, there was almost no odor in this bathroom; no matter how deeply I breathed in, it was in vain, she had left too long ago, and K#228;the had cleaned well. If I put my nose over the perfumed soaps, or else opened the flasks of eau de toilette, then I smelled magnificent, profoundly feminine scents, but they weren’t hers, even her sheets had no smell, I had gone out of the bathroom and returned to the bed to sniff it in vain, K#228;the had put on clean, white, stiff, cool sheets, even her underwear had no smell, the few black lace panties left in her drawers, carefully washed, and it was only with my head buried in the dresses in the closet that I noticed something, a distant, indefinable odor, which made my temples pulsate and the blood beat dully in my ears. At night, in the light from a candle (the electricity had been cut off for some days), I heated two large buckets of water on the stove and went up to pour them into my sister’s bathtub. The water was boiling, I had to wear gloves to hold the burning handles; I added a few buckets of cold water, dipping my hand in to check the temperature, and added some flakes of scented bubbles. I was now drinking a local plum brandy, a large demijohn of which I had found in the kitchen, and I had also brought up a flask of it, with a glass and an ashtray, which I placed on a little silver tray across the bidet. Before entering the water I lowered my eyes to my body, my pale skin that took on a softly golden tint in the light of the candles stuck in a candelabrum at the foot of the bath. I didn’t like this body very much, and yet, how could I not adore it? I got into the water thinking about the creaminess of my sister’s skin, alone and naked in a tiled bathroom in Switzerland, with the thick blue veins snaking beneath that skin. I hadn’t seen her body naked since we were children; in Zurich, overcome with fear, I had turned off the lights, but I could picture it down to the smallest details, the heavy, ripe, firm breasts, the solid hips, the beautiful round belly that was lost in a dense black triangle of curls, creased possibly now by a thick vertical scar, from the navel to the pubis. I drank a little brandy and relaxed into the embrace of the hot water, my head resting on the shelf near the candlestick, my chin scarcely rising above the thick layer of soap bubbles, as the serene face of my sister must have floated, her long hair put up in a heavy bun stabbed by a silver needle. The thought of that body stretched in the water, its legs slightly apart, reminded me of the conception of Rhesos. His mother, one of the Muses, I forget which, Calliope perhaps, was still a virgin and she was going to a musical contest to answer the challenge of Thamyris; to get there, she had to cross the River Strymon, which slipped its cool ripples into her, between her thighs, and that’s how she conceived. Was that how my sister conceived her twins, I said to myself sourly, in the soapy water of her bath? She must have known men, after me, many men; and since she had betrayed me in this way, I hoped it was with many men, an army, and that she deceived her impotent husband every day with anything that came her way. I imagined her having a man come up to this bathroom, a farm boy, the gardener, a milkman, one of the Frenchmen from the STO. Everyone in the neighborhood must have known, but no one said anything, out of respect for von #220;xk#252;ll. And von #220;xk#252;ll couldn’t care less, he stayed hunched like a spider in his apartments, dreaming about his abstract music, which carried him far from his broken body. And my sister too couldn’t care less about what her neighbors thought or said, as long as they kept coming up. She asked them to carry the water, to help her unfasten her dress; and they were clumsy, they blushed, their stubby fingers, hardened by work, got tangled up, she had to help them. Most of them were already hard when they came in, that was obvious through their pants; they didn’t know what to do, she had to tell them everything. They rubbed her back, her breasts, and afterward, she fucked them in her bedroom. They smelled of earth, of filth, of sweat, of cheap tobacco, she must have liked that, madly. Their cocks, when she pulled back the foreskin to suck them, stank of urine. And when it was over she dismissed them, amicably but without smiling. She didn’t wash, she slept in their smell, like a child. Thus her life, when I wasn’t there, was no better than mine, both of us, without the other, knew only how to wallow in our bodies, their infinite, yet at the same time so limited possibilities. The bath was slowly growing colder, but I didn’t get out, I warmed myself in the evil fire of these thoughts, I found an insane comfort in these daydreams, even the most sordid ones, I sought a refuge in my dreams like a kid under his blanket, for however cruel and corrupt they might have been, it was always better than the unbearable bitterness of the outside. Finally I got out of the bath. Without even drying myself I swallowed a glass of brandy, then rolled myself up in one of the large bath towels hanging there. I lit a cigarette and, without troubling to get dressed, went to smoke at one of the windows looking out onto the courtyard: in the farthest distance, a pale line rimmed the sky, shifting slowly from pink to white to gray then to a dark blue that melted into the nighttime sky. The cigarette finished, I went to drink another glass and then lay down on the large four-poster bed, pulling the starched sheets and heavy blankets over me. I stretched out my limbs, turned onto my stomach, my head buried in the soft pillow, lying as she had lain there, after her bath, for so many years. I saw it clearly, all these agitated and contradictory things were rising up in me like a black water, or like a loud noise that threatened to drown out all other sounds, reason, prudence, even conscious desire. I slipped my hand between my thighs, and said to myself: If I slipped my hand there, on her, she wouldn’t be able to stand it anymore, but at the same time this thought revolted me, I didn’t want her to take me as she would have taken a farm boy, just to satisfy herself, I wanted her to desire me, freely as I desired her, I wanted her to love me as I loved her. Finally I sank into sleep and into ferocious, dislocated dreams, of which only the dark trace of this phrase, uttered by Una’s serene voice, remains in my mind: “You are a very heavy man for women to bear.”

I was gradually reaching the limit of my abilities to contain the disconcerting rushes, the incompatible surges that were sweeping over me. I roamed aimlessly through the house, I spent a whole hour caressing with my fingertips the polished wooden ornaments decorating the doors to von #220;xk#252;ll’s apartments, I went down to the basement with a candle to lie down on the hard dirt floor, damp and cold, I inhaled with delight the dark, stale, archaic smells of this underground chamber, I went to inspect with an almost forensic meticulousness the two ascetic bedrooms of the house servants and their bathrooms, Turkish-style toilets with carefully polished corrugated foot rests, set far apart to leave ample room for the intestinal discharge of these women whom I pictured as strong, white, and well built, like K#228;the. I no longer thought about the past, I was no longer at all tempted to turn back to look at Eurydice, I kept my eyes firmly in front of me on this unacceptable present, which was swelling endlessly, on the innumerable objects cluttering it, and I knew, with an unwavering confidence, that she, she was following me step by step, like my shadow. And when I opened up drawers to go through her lingerie, her hands passed delicately beneath my own, unfolded, caressed these sumptuous underclothes made of very delicate black lace, and I didn’t need to turn around to see her sitting on the sofa unrolling a silk stocking, adorned at midthigh with a wide band of lace, on that smooth and carnal expanse of white skin, slightly hollowed out between the tendons, or else putting her hands behind her back to hook her bra, in which she adjusted her breasts, one by one, with a quick movement. She would have carried out these gestures in front of me, these everyday gestures, shamelessly, without false modesty, without exhibitionism, exactly as she must have carried them out alone, not mechanically but with attention, taking great pleasure in them, and if she wore lace underwear, it wasn’t for her husband, or for her lovers of a night, or for me, but for herself, for her own pleasure, the pleasure of feeling this lace and this silk on her skin, of contemplating her beauty thus adorned in her tall mirror, of looking at herself exactly as I looked at myself or wanted to be able to look at myself: not with a narcissistic gaze, or with a critical gaze that searches for defects, but with a gaze that is desperately trying to grasp the elusive reality of what it sees—a painter’s gaze, if you like, but I am not a painter, any more than I am a musician. And if she had stood thus in front of me in reality, almost naked, I would have looked at her with a similar gaze, whose desire would only have sharpened its lucidity, I would have looked at the texture of her skin, the weft of her pores, the little brown flecks of beauty spots strewn by chance, constellations yet to be named, the thick strokes of veins that surrounded her elbow, climbed her forearm in long branches, then came to swell the back of her wrist and hand before ending up, channeled between the joints, disappearing into her fingers, exactly as in my own man’s arms. Our bodies are identical, I wanted to explain to her: aren’t men the vestiges of woman? For every fetus starts out female before it differentiates itself, and men’s bodies forever keep the trace of this, the useless tips of breasts that never grew, the line that divides the scrotum and climbs the perineum to the anus, tracing the place where the vulva closed to contain ovaries that, having descended, evolved into testicles, as the clitoris grew unrestrainedly. Only one thing was actually lacking to be a woman like her, a real woman, the mute e, in French, of feminine word endings, the extraordinary possibility in that language we shared of saying and writing: “Je suis nue, je suis aim#233;e, je suis d#233;sir#233;e.” It’s this e that makes women so terribly female, and I suffered inordinately from being stripped of it, it was a flat loss for me, even harder to compensate for than the loss of that vagina I had left at the gates of existence.

From time to time, when these inner tempests calmed down a little, I took up my book again, I let myself be carried peacefully away by Flaubert’s pages, facing the forest and the low, gray sky. But, inevitably, I came to forget the book on my lap, as the blood rose to my face. Then to gain time I again took up one of the old French poets, whose condition must not have differed much from my own: I know not when I am asleep / Or when I wake, unless I’m told. My sister had an old edition of Thomas’s Tristan, which I also lazily leafed through until I saw, with a terror almost as keen as that of a nightmare, that she had marked the following lines in pencil:

Quant fait que faire ne desire

Pur sun buen qu’il ne puet aveir

Encontre desir fait voleir.

When he does what he does not desire to do

Because he can’t have what he wants

He turns his will against desire.

And once again it was as if her long ghostlike hand had come and slipped under my arm, all the way from her Helvetian exile or else right behind me, to place a finger gently in front of my eyes under these words, this irrevocable sentence that I couldn’t accept, that I rejected with all the miserable determination I could still muster.

And thus I fell into a long, endless stretto, where every response came before the question was over, but in retrograde, like a cancrizans. Of the last days spent in that house, only scraps of images, disconnected and senseless, remain, confused but animated too by the implacable logic of dream, the very speech or rather the clumsy croaking of desire. I slept every night now in her odorless bed, stretching myself out on my stomach with all my limbs extended, or else curling into a ball on my side, my head empty of all thought. Nothing remained in this bed that recalled her, not even a strand of hair, I had taken off the sheets to examine the mattress, hoping to find at least a bloodstain, but the mattress was as clean as the sheets. So I set about soiling it myself, squatting with my legs wide apart, the ghostly body of my sister open beneath me, her head turned slightly aside and her hair pulled back to reveal her small, delicate, round ear that I loved so, then I collapsed in my slime and abruptly fell asleep, my belly still sticky. I wanted to possess this bed, but it was the bed that possessed me, no longer let me go. All kinds of phantoms came to coil up in my sleep, I tried to chase them away, for I wanted only my sister there, but they were stubborn, they returned by the ways I least expected them, like the shameless little feral girls in Stalingrad, I opened my eyes and one of them had slid right up against me, she was turning her back to me and pushing her buttocks against my belly, my penis entered her from that end and she stayed like that, moving very slowly, and then afterward she kept me in her ass, we fell asleep that way, embedded in each other. And when we woke up she slipped her hand between her thighs and raked my scrotum, almost painfully, and again I became hard inside her, one hand on the bone of her taut hip, and I turned her over onto her stomach and began again, as she clenched her little fists in the sheets and moved without a sound. She never left me free. But then another, unexpected feeling came over me, a gentle and forlorn feeling. Yes, that’s exactly it, it’s coming back to me now, she was blond, gentle and forlorn. I don’t know how far things went between us. The other image, the one of the girl sleeping with her lover’s cock in her ass, doesn’t involve her. It wasn’t Helene, that’s certain, for I have a confused idea that her father was a policeman, a high official who didn’t approve of his daughter’s choice and regarded me with hostility, and then also with Helene my hand had never gone farther than her knee, which here was perhaps not the case. This blond girl too took up room in the big bed, room that wasn’t hers. All this caused me a great deal of concern. But finally I succeeded in driving them all away, by brute force, at least up against the torsaded posts of the canopy, and in leading my sister back by the hand and laying her down in the middle of the bed, I spread out on top of her with all my weight, my belly naked right against the scar slicing across hers, I thrust against her, vainly and with increasing rage, and finally there was a great opening, as if my body in turn were split open by the surgeon’s blade, my bowels poured onto her, the children’s door opened on its own beneath me and everything flowed in that way, I was lying on her as one lies in the snow, but I was still clothed, I took off my skin, abandoned my naked bones to the embrace of this cold white snow that was her body, and it closed in over me.

A gleam of light from the setting sun passed under the clouds and struck the wall of the bedroom, the secretary, the side of the wardrobe, the foot of the bed. I got up and went to piss, then went downstairs to the kitchen. Everything was quiet. I cut some slices of good coarse peasant bread, buttered them, put some thick slices of ham on top. I also found some pickles, a terrine of p#226;t#233;, some hard-boiled eggs, and put it all onto a tray with silverware, two glasses, and a bottle of good Burgundy, a Vosne-Roman#233;e, I think it was. I returned to the bedroom and placed the tray on the bed. I sat down cross-legged and contemplated the empty sheets before me, across the tray. Slowly my sister took shape there, with a surprising solidity. She was sleeping on her side, folded in on herself; gravity drew down her breasts and even, a little, her belly, her skin was stretched over her raised, angular hip. It wasn’t her body that was sleeping but she who, sated, was sleeping nestled inside her body. A little bright red blood was seeping between her legs, without staining the bed, and all this heavy humanity was like a stake driven into my eyes; it didn’t blind me, though, but on the contrary opened up my third eye, the pineal eye grafted into my head by a Russian sniper. I uncorked the bottle, breathed in the heady odor deeply, then poured two glasses. I drank and began to eat. I was immensely hungry, I devoured everything that was there and emptied the bottle of wine. Outside, the day was drawing to a close, the room was growing dark. I cleared the tray, lit some candles, and brought over some cigarettes that I smoked lying on my back, the ashtray on my stomach. Above me, I could hear a frantic buzzing. I looked around, without moving, and saw a fly on the ceiling. A spider was leaving it and slipping into a crack in the molding. The fly was trapped in the spiderweb, struggling with this buzzing to free itself, in vain. At that instant a breath passed over my penis, a phantom finger, the tip of a tongue; immediately it began to swell up, to unfold. I put the ashtray aside and imagined her body slipping over me, rearing up to bury me inside her while her breasts sat heavy in my hands, her thick black hair forming a curtain round my head, framing a face lit up by an immense, radiant smile, which said to me: “You have been placed in this world for one single thing, to fuck me.” The fly kept buzzing, but ever less frequently, it would start suddenly and then stop. I felt the base of her spine beneath my hands, the small of her back, her mouth, above me, murmured: “Oh, God, oh, God.” Afterward, I looked at the fly again. It was silent and still, the poison had finally overcome it. I waited for the spider to reemerge. Then I must have fallen asleep. A furious outbreak of buzzing woke me up, I opened my eyes and watched. The spider was hovering near the struggling fly. The spider hesitated, came forward and withdrew, returned finally to its crack. Again the fly stopped moving. I tried to imagine its silent terror, its fear fractured in its faceted eyes. From time to time the spider reemerged, tested its prey with a leg, added a few spins to the cocoon, returned; and I observed this interminable agony, until the moment the spider, hours later, finally dragged the dead or overcome fly into the molding to consume it in peace.

When day came, still naked, I put on some shoes so as not to get my feet dirty and went to explore this large, cold, dark house. It unfurled around my charged body, my skin white and bristling from the cold, as sensitive over its entire surface as my stiff penis or my tingling anus. It was an invitation to the worst excesses, to the most insane, transgressive games, and since the tender, warm body I desired was denied to me, I used her house as I would have used her, I made love to her house. I went everywhere, lay down in the beds, stretched out on the tables or the carpets, rubbed my backside against the corners of furniture, jerked off in armchairs or closed wardrobes, in the midst of clothes smelling of dust and mothballs. I even thus entered von #220;xk#252;ll’s apartments, with a feeling of childlike triumph at first, then of humiliation. And humiliation in one form or another never let go of me, a sense of the mad vanity of my gestures, but this humiliation and this vanity too placed themselves at my service, and I profited from them with an evil, limitless joy.

These disjointed thoughts, this frantic exhaustion of all possibilities, had replaced my sense of time. Sunrises, sunsets, only marked out the rhythm, like hunger or thirst or natural needs, like sleep that rose up at any time to engulf me, restore my strength, and return me to the wretchedness of my body. Sometimes I put on some clothes and went out walking. It was almost hot out, the abandoned fields beyond the Drage had become heavy, slippery, their crumbling soil stuck to my feet and forced me to walk around them. During these walks I saw no one. In the forest, a breath of wind was enough to drive me into a frenzy, I lowered my pants and pulled up my shirt and lay down on the hard, cold ground covered with pine needles that pricked my rear end. In the dense woods beyond the bridge over the Drage, I stripped completely naked, except for my shoes, which I kept on, and began running, as when I was a kid, through branches that scratched my skin. Finally I stopped against a tree and turned around, both hands behind me clutching the trunk, to rub my anus slowly against the bark. But that didn’t satisfy me. One day I found a tree lying down, overturned by a storm, with a broken branch on the top of the trunk, and with a pocket knife I shortened this branch some more, removed its bark and smoothed the wood, carefully rounding out the tip. Then, soaking it copiously in saliva, I straddled the trunk and, leaning on my hands, slowly buried this branch inside me, all the way. It gave me an immense pleasure, and all this time, my eyes closed, my penis forgotten, I imagined my sister doing the same thing, making love in front of me like a lustful dryad with the trees of her forest, using her vagina as well as her anus to take an infinitely more terrifying pleasure than my own. I came in huge disordered spasms, tearing myself away from the stained branch, falling to the side and backward onto a dead branch that made a deep gash in my back, a raw, adorable pain on which I remained for several minutes leaning with the weight of my almost fainting body. Finally I rolled over onto my side, blood flowing freely from my wound, dead leaves and needles sticking to my fingers; I got up, my legs trembling with pleasure, and began running between the trees. Farther on, the woods grew wet, a fine mud dampened the earth, patches of moss covered the driest places, I slipped in the mud and fell onto my side, panting. The cry of a buzzard echoed through the undergrowth. I got up and went down to the Drage, took off my shoes and dove into icy water that shocked my lungs, to wash off the mud and the still-flowing blood, mixed, when I got out, with the cold water streaming down my back. Once dry, I felt revived, the air on my skin was warm and gentle. I would have liked to cut down some branches, build a hut that I’d have carpeted with moss, and spend the night there, naked; but it was still too cold out, and also there was no Iseult to share it with me, no King Mark either to chase us from the castle. Instead I tried to lose myself in the woods, first with a childlike joy, then almost with despair, for it was impossible, I always stumbled onto a path or else a field, all ways led me to known landmarks, whatever direction I chose.

Of the outside world I no longer had the slightest idea, I didn’t know what was happening in it. There was no radio, no one came. Abstractedly, I understood that to the south, while I was losing myself here in the mad bitterness of my impotence, many human lives were coming to an end, as so many other lives already had, but it all was the same to me. I couldn’t have said if the Russians were twenty kilometers away or a hundred, and I couldn’t have cared less, worse, I didn’t even think about it, for me all that was occuring in a time—not to mention a space—completely different from my own, and if that time came to meet my time, well, then, we’d see which one would give way. But despite my abandon, a naked anguish welled up from my body, trickled out of it, the way droplets of melted snow fall from a branch to strike the branches and needles below it. This anguish was mutely corroding me. Like an animal digging through its fur to find the source of a pain, like a child, obstinate and furious at his fractious toys, I sought to put a name on my sorrow. I drank, I emptied several bottles of wine or else glasses of brandy and then I abandoned my body to the bed, thrown open to the winds. A cold, wet breeze circulated through it. I looked at myself sadly in the mirror, contemplating my red, tired sex hanging in the middle of the pubic hair, I said to myself it had changed quite a bit, and that even if she had been there it would no longer be as it was before. When we were eleven or twelve our sexes were minuscule, it was almost our skeletons that collided with each other in the twilight; now, there was all this thickness of flesh, and also the terrible wounds it had undergone, a slit belly no doubt for her, and for me the long hole through my skull, a scar wrapped around itself, a tunnel of dead flesh. A vagina, a rectum, is also a hole in the body, but inside the flesh is alive, it forms a surface, for it, there is no hole. What is a hole, a void, then? It’s what is inside the head when thought dares to try to flee from itself, to separate itself from the body, to act as if the body didn’t exist, as if you could think without a body, as if the most abstract thought, the thought of the starry sky above and the moral law within, for example, were not wedded to the rhythm of the breath, the pulsing of blood in the veins, the grating of cartilage. And it’s true, when I played with Una when we were children, and later on, when I learned to use for my own purposes the bodies of the boys who desired me, I was young, I hadn’t yet understood the specific weight of bodies, and what the commerce of love involves, destines and condemns us to. Age meant nothing to me, even in Zurich. Now, I had begun the preliminary work, I sensed what living in a body could signify, and even in a woman’s body, with its heavy breasts, a body forced to sit on the toilet or crouch down to urinate, whose belly has to be cut open with a knife to take the children out. I would have loved to set that body down in front of me, on the sofa, its thighs open like the pages of a book, a narrow band of white lace hiding the bulge of the sex, the beginnings of the thick scar above it and, to the sides, the ridges of the tendons, hollows where I longed to set my lips, and to stare at it as two fingers slowly came to push the fabric aside: “Look, look how white it is. Think, think how black it is beneath.” I desired madly to see this sex lying between those two coombs of white flesh, swollen, as if offered on the serving tray of its thighs, and to slip my tongue through the almost dry cleft, from bottom to top, delicately, just once. I also wanted to watch this beautiful body pissing, leaning forward on the toilet seat, elbows resting on the knees, and to hear the urine gushing into the water; and I then wanted her mouth to lean forward as she finished, take my still-limp penis in her lips, I wanted her nose to sniff at my pubic hair, the hollow between my scrotum and my thigh, the line of my hips, to grow intoxicated with my rough, sour smell, that male smell I know so well. I was burning to lay this body down on the bed and spread its legs, to bury my nose in that moist vulva like a sow nuzzling for a nest of black truffles, then to turn the body over on its stomach, spread its buttocks with both hands to contemplate the purplish rosette of the anus blinking gently like an eye, put my nose to it, and breathe in. And I dreamed of pushing my face as I slept into the curly hair of her armpit and of letting her breast weigh on my cheek, my two legs wrapped around one of hers, my hand resting lightly on her shoulder. And when, upon waking, this body beneath me had completely absorbed me, she would have looked at me with a floating smile, would have spread her legs once again and rocked me inside her to the slow, subterranean rhythm of one of Josquin’s old Masses, and we would have slowly moved away from the shore, carried by our bodies as by a warm, becalmed sea rich in salt, and her voice would have come whispering next to my ear, clearly and distinctly: “The gods created me for love.”

It was beginning to grow cold again, it snowed a little, the terrace, the courtyard, the garden were dusted with snow. There wasn’t much left to eat, I had finished the bread, I tried to make some myself with K#228;the’s flour, I didn’t really know how to go about it, but I found a recipe in a cookbook and made several loaves, from which I tore pieces that I swallowed hot as soon as they came out of the oven, crunching at the same time on raw onions that gave me an awful breath. There were no more eggs or ham, but in the basement I found some crates of little green apples from the previous summer, a little mealy but sweet, which I ate throughout the day, drinking sips of brandy. The wine cellar, however, was inexhaustible. There were also some p#226;t#233;s, so I dined on p#226;t#233;, on bacon grilled on the stove with onions, and on the greatest wines of France. At night, it snowed again, in heavy gusts; the wind, coming from the north, struck the house mournfully, banging the poorly fastened shutters as the snow beat against the windows. But there was no lack of wood, the stove in the bedroom roared, it was pleasant in this bedroom, where I stretched out naked in a darkness illumined by snow, as if the storm were whipping my skin. The next day it was still snowing, the wind had fallen and the snow was coming down, thick and heavy, covering the trees and the ground. A shape in the garden made me think of the bodies lying in the snow at Stalingrad, I could see them clearly, their blue lips, their bronze-colored skin pricked with stubble, surprised, stunned, dumbstruck in death but calm, almost peaceful, the very opposite of Moreau’s body bathing in its blood on the carpet, of my mother’s body with its twisted neck, spread out on the bed, atrocious, unbearable images, I couldn’t stay with them despite all my efforts, and to chase them away I climbed in my mind the steps leading to the attic of Moreau’s house, I took refuge there and huddled in a corner, to wait for my sister to come find me and console me, her doleful knight with the broken head.

That night, I took a long, hot bath. I placed one foot and then the other on the ledge and, rinsing the razor in the bathwater, I shaved both my legs, carefully. Then I shaved my armpits. The blade slid over the thick hair, coated with shaving cream, which fell in curly bundles into the soapy bathwater. I got up, changed the blade, placed one foot on the edge of the bathtub and shaved my sex. I proceeded attentively, especially for the hard-to-reach parts between the legs and the buttocks, but I slipped and cut myself just behind the scrotum, where the skin is most sensitive. Three drops of blood fell one after the other into the white foam of the bath. I patted some eau de Cologne on, it burned a little but also soothed my skin. Everywhere hair and shaving cream floated on the water, I took a bucket of cold water to rinse myself off, my skin was bristling, my scrotum shriveled. Leaving the bath, I looked at myself in the mirror, and this frighteningly naked body seemed foreign to me, it looked more like the body of the green Apollo in Paris than my own. I leaned against the mirror with my whole body, I closed my eyes and imagined myself shaving my sister’s sex, slowly, delicately, pulling the folds of flesh between two fingers so as not to wound her, then turning her over and making her lean forward so I could shave the curly hairs around her anus. Afterward, she came to rub her cheek against my skin, naked and withered by the cold, she tickled my little boy’s shrunken testicles and licked the tip of my circumcised penis, with short, exciting tongue strokes: “I almost liked it better when it was as big as that,” she said laughing, holding her thumb and forefinger a few centimeters apart, and I stood her up and looked at her naked sex protruding from her legs, prominent, the long scar I always imagined there not quite reaching it but stretching toward it, it was the sex of my little twin sister and I burst into tears in front of it.

I lay down on the bed, I touched my child’s parts, so strange under my fingers, I turned over onto my stomach, caressed my buttocks, gently touched my anus. I put all my effort into imagining that these buttocks were my sister’s, I kneaded them, slapped them. She laughed. I kept spanking her, with the flat of my hand, the elastic behind rang beneath my palms, and she, her breasts, her face lying like mine on the sheet, was overcome with uncontrollable laughter. When I stopped, the buttocks were red, I don’t know if mine actually were, for in this posture I couldn’t hit hard, but on the sort of invisible stage in my head they were, I could see the shaved vulva overflowing between them, still white and pink, and I turned her body around, buttocks toward the great full-length mirror and I said to her: “Look,” and she, still laughing, turned her head to see, and what she saw cut off her laughter and her breath, just as it cut off my own. Held by my thought, floating in this dark and empty space inhabited only by our bodies, I slowly reached my hand out toward her, with my forefinger out, and I ran my finger in the slit that parted like a poorly healed wound. Then I slipped behind her and, rather than remaining on my knees, I squatted so that I could see between my legs and she could see too. Leaning with one hand on her bared neck—her head was resting on the bed and she was looking between her legs—I took my penis in my other hand and pushed it between the lips of her sex; in the mirror, when I turned my head, I could clearly see my penis enter her childlike vulva, and, beneath, her upended face, flushed with blood and hideous. “Stop, stop,” she moaned, “that’s not how it should be done,” and then I pushed her forward so her body was again flat on the bed, crushed by my own, and I took her that way, both hands on her long neck, she panted as I came, my breath rattling. Then I tore myself from her and rolled on the bed, as she cried like a little girl: “That’s not how it should be done,” then I too began crying and touched her cheek: “How should it be done?” and she slid onto me, kissed my face, my eyes, my hair, “Don’t cry, don’t cry, I’ll show you,” she was calming down, I too was calming down, she was sitting astride me, her belly and smooth vulva rubbing against my stomach, she straightened up, crouched down so as to be sitting on my hips, her knees up and her sex swollen, like a strange, decorative thing attached to her body, placed on my abdomen, she began rubbing it and it opened up, sperm mixed with her own secretions flowed from it which she smeared on my belly, facing me, kissing my belly with her vulva as if it were a mouth, I drew up, took her by the neck and, leaning against her, kissed her in the mouth, her buttocks were pushing now against my hardening penis, she pushed me back down and, one hand leaning on my chest, still crouching, she guided my penis with her other hand and impaled herself on it. “Like that,” she repeated, “like that.” She rocked back and forth, starting and stopping, her eyes closed, and I, I looked at her body, I sought out her little flat body from before beneath the breasts and curves of her hips, dazed, almost stunned. The dry and nervous orgasm, almost spermless, tore me open as a fish knife would, she kept plunging on me, her vulva like an open shell, prolonged by the long straight scar that cut across her belly, and all that now formed one long slit, which my sex opened up to the navel.

It was snowing in the night, but I continued wandering in this limitless space where my thought reigned sovereign, making and unmaking forms with an absolute freedom that nevertheless kept running into the limits of bodies, mine real, material, and hers imagined and thus inexhaustible, in an erratic to-and-fro that left me each time emptier, more febrile, more desperate. Sitting naked on the bed, drained, I drank brandy and smoked and my gaze went from the outside, from my reddened knees, my long veined hands, my sex shriveled up at the bottom of my slightly bulging belly, to the inside, where it traveled over her sleeping body, sprawled out on her stomach, her head turned toward me, her legs stretched out, like a little girl. I gently parted her hair and bared her neck, her beautiful, powerful neck, and then my thoughts returned, as in the afternoon, to the strangled neck of our mother, she who had borne us together in her womb, I caressed my sister’s neck and tried seriously and attentively to imagine myself twisting my mother’s neck, but it was impossible, the image didn’t come, there was no trace of such an image inside me, it stubbornly refused to form in the mirror that I contemplated within myself, this mirror reflected nothing, remained empty, even when I placed both my hands under my sister’s hair and said to myself: Oh my hands on my sister’s nape. Oh my hands on my mother’s neck. No, nothing, there was nothing. Suddenly shivering, I curled up in a fetal ball at the end of the bed. After a long while I opened my eyes. She lay fully stretched out, one hand on her belly, her legs apart. Her vulva was opposite my face. The small lips protruded slightly from the pale, domed flesh. This sex was watching at me, spying on me, like a Gorgon’s head, like a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks. Little by little this silent gaze penetrated me to the marrow. My breath sped up and I stretched out my hand to hide it: I no longer saw it, but it still saw me and stripped me bare (whereas I was already naked). If only I could still get hard, I thought, I could use my prick like a stake hardened in the fire, and blind this Polyphemus who made me Nobody. But my cock remained inert, I seemed turned to stone. I stretched out my arm and buried my middle finger into this boundless eye. The hips moved slightly, but that was all. Far from piercing it, I had on the contrary opened it wide, freeing the gaze of the eye still hiding behind it. Then I had an idea: I took out my finger and, dragging myself forward on my forearms, I pushed my forehead against this vulva, pressing my scar against the hole. Now I was the one looking inside, searching the depths of this body with my radiant third eye, as her own single eye irradiated me and we blinded each other mutually: without moving, I came in an immense splash of white light, as she cried out: “What are you doing, what are you doing?” and I laughed out loud, sperm still gushing in huge spurts from my penis, jubilant, I bit deep into her vulva to swallow it whole, and my eyes finally opened, cleared, and saw everything.

In the morning, a thick fog had come and covered everything: from the bedroom, I couldn’t see the birch lane, or the forest, or even the end of the terrace. I opened the window, again I could hear the drops falling from the roof, the screech of a buzzard far off in the forest. Barefoot, I went downstairs and out onto the terrace. The snow on the flagstones was cold beneath my feet, the cool air made my skin bristle, I went over and leaned against the stone railing. When I turned around, I couldn’t even see the house anymore, the railing disappeared into the mist, I felt as if I were floating, isolated from everything. A shape under the snow in the garden, possibly the one I had glimpsed the day before, attracted my attention. I leaned over to see it better, the fog half veiled it, again it made me think of a body, but this time of the body of the young hanged woman in Kharkov, lying in the snow in the Trade Unions Park, her breast gnawed by dogs. I shivered, my skin tingled, the cold made it extraordinarily sensitive, my naked, shaved sex, the cold air, the fog enveloping me all gave me a wonderful feeling of nudity, an absolute, almost raw nudity. The shape had disappeared now, it must have been a dip in the land, I forgot it and leaned my body against the railing, letting my fingers wander over my skin. When my hand began rubbing my penis I scarcely noticed it, so little did it alter the sensations that were slowly peeling back my flesh, then thinning out my muscles, then removing my very bones, leaving only something nameless that, reflecting itself, gave itself pleasure as if to something identical yet slightly shifted, not opposite to it but merging with it in its oppositions. The orgasm thrust me backward like a discharge and sent me sprawling onto the snow-covered flagstones of the terrace where I remained in a stupor, all my limbs trembling. I thought I could see a shape lurking in the fog near me, a feminine form, I heard cries, they seemed far away but they must have been my own, and at the same time I knew that all this was happening in silence, and that not a sound came from my mouth to trouble this gray morning. The form detached itself from the fog and came to lie down on me. The cold of the snow bit into my bones. “It’s us,” I whispered into the labyrinth of its little round ear. “It’s us.” But the form remained mute and I knew it was still me, only me. I got up and went back into the house, I was trembling, I rolled on the carpets to dry myself out, breathing heavily. Then I went down into the basement. I pulled out bottles at random and blew on them to clear the labels, the clouds of dust made me sneeze. The cold and dank smell of this basement penetrated my nostrils, the soles of my feet enjoyed the cold, damp, almost slippery feeling of the hard earthen floor. I settled on a bottle and opened it with a corkscrew hanging from a string, I drank straight from the bottle, the wine ran from my lips onto my chin and my chest, I was getting hard again, now the shape was standing behind the shelves and swaying gently, I offered it wine but it didn’t move, then I lay down on the hard earth and it came to crouch over me, I kept drinking from the bottle as it used me, I spat some wine at it, but it didn’t take notice, it continued its disjointed movement. Each time, now, my orgasm came harsher, more acrid, even slightly acidic, the tiny stubble that was reappearing irritated my flesh and my penis, and when, immediately afterward, it went limp, the red, crumpled skin showed the thick jutting green veins, the network of purple venules. And yet I couldn’t rest, I ran heavily throughout the big house, into the bedrooms, the bathrooms, arousing myself every possible way but without coming, for I no longer could. I played at hide-and-seek, knowing there was no one to find me, I didn’t really know what I was doing anymore, I followed the impulses of my bewildered body, my mind remained clear and transparent but my body took refuge in its opacity and its weakness, the more I worked it, the less it served me as a passageway and the more it turned into an obstacle, I cursed it and also tried to outsmart this thickness, irritating and exciting it to the point of madness, but a cold excitation, almost sexless. I committed all sorts of infantile obscenities: in a maid’s room, I knelt on the narrow bed and stuck a candle into my anus, I lit it with difficulty and maneuvered it, letting big drops of hot wax fall onto my buttocks and the back of my testicles, I roared, my head crushed against the iron bedstead; afterward, I shat crouching on the Turkish-style toilets in the servants’ dark cubbyhole; I didn’t wipe myself, but jerked off standing in the service staircase, rubbing my shit-stained buttocks against the railing, the smell assaulting my nose and going to my head; and as I came, I almost fell down the stairs, I caught myself just in time, laughing, and looked at the traces of shit on the wood, which I carefully wiped off with a little lace tablecloth taken from the guest room. I grated my teeth, I could hardly bear to touch myself, I laughed like a madman, finally I fell asleep stretched out on the floor in the hallway. When I woke up I was famished, I devoured everything I could find and drank another bottle of wine. Outside, the fog veiled everything, it must still have been daytime, but it was impossible to guess the hour. I opened up the attic: it was dark, dusty, full of a musty odor, my feet left great tracks in the dust. I had taken some leather belts, which I threw over a beam, and I began showing the shape, which had discreetly followed me, how I hanged myself in the forest when I was little. The pressure on my neck made me hard again, it panicked me, to avoid suffocating I had to stand on tiptoe. I jerked off very quickly this way, just rubbing the glans coated with saliva, until the sperm spurted across the attic, a few drops only but projected with incredible force, I yielded to the orgasm with all my weight, if the shape hadn’t supported me I would really have hanged myself. Finally I unfastened myself and collapsed into the dust. The shape, on all fours, sniffed at my limp member like an avid little animal, raised its leg to expose its vulva to me, but avoided my hands when I reached out to it. I didn’t get hard quickly enough for it, and it strangled me with one of the belts; when my penis was finally erect, it freed my neck, tied my feet together, and impaled itself on me. “Your turn,” it said. “Squeeze my neck.” I took its neck in my hands and pressed with both thumbs as it raised its legs and, its feet on the floor, moved back and forth on my aching penis. Its breathing gushed from its lips in a high-pitched whistle, I pressed harder, its face swelled, flushed crimson, horrible to see, its body remained white, but its face was red as raw meat, its tongue stuck out from its teeth, it couldn’t even rattle, and when it came, burying its nails into my wrists, it emptied itself, and I began howling, bellowing and bashing my head against the floor, I was past all restraint, I bashed my head and sobbed, not out of horror, because this female form that would never remain my sister had pissed on me, it wasn’t that, but when I saw it come and piss, strangled, I saw the hanged women in Kharkov who as they suffocated emptied themselves over the passersby, I had seen that girl we had hanged one winter day in the park behind the statue of Shevchenko, a young and healthy girl bursting with life, had she too come when we hanged her and soiled her panties, when she fought and shuddered, strangled, was she coming, had she ever even come before, she was very young, had she experienced that before we hanged her, what right did we have to hang her, how could we hang this girl, and I sobbed endlessly, ravaged by her memory, my very own Our-Lady-of-the-Snows, it wasn’t remorse, I didn’t have remorse, I didn’t feel guilty, I didn’t think things could or should have been otherwise, yet I understood what it meant to hang a girl, we had hanged her the way a butcher slaughters a steer, without passion, because it had to be done, because she had done something stupid and had to pay for it with her life, that was the rule of the game, of our game, but the girl we had hanged wasn’t a pig or a steer that you kill without thinking about it because you want to eat its flesh, she was a young girl who had been a little girl who may have been happy and who was then just entering life, a life full of murderers whom she hadn’t been able to avoid, a girl like my sister in a way, someone’s sister, perhaps, as I too was someone’s brother, and such cruelty had no name, no matter how objectively necessary, it ruined everything, if one could do that, hang a girl like that, then one could do anything, nothing could be assured, my sister could be happily pissing in a toilet one day and the next day be emptying herself as she suffocated on the end of a rope, there was absolutely no sense to it, and that is why I wept, I didn’t understand anything anymore and I wanted to be alone to no longer understand anything.

I woke up in Una’s bed. I was still naked but my body was clean and my legs free. How had I gotten there? I had no memory of it. The stove had gone out and I was cold. I uttered my sister’s name softly, stupidly: “Una, Una.” The silence froze me and made me shiver, but maybe it was the cold. I got up: it was daytime outside, the sky was cloudy but there was a beautiful light, the fog had dissipated and I looked at the forest, the trees with their branches still loaded with snow. A few absurd lines came to mind, an old song of Guillem IX, that slightly crazed duke of Aquitaine:

Farai un vers de dreyt nien:

non er de mi ni d’autra gen,

non er d’amor ni de joven,

ni de ren au.

I’ll make a song about nothing at all:

not about me, or anybody else,

not about love not about youth,

or anything else.

I rose and headed for the corner where some of my clothes were piled up, to pull on a pair of pants, drawing the suspenders over my bare shoulders. Passing in front of the bedroom mirror I looked at myself: a thick red mark cut across my throat. I went downstairs; in the kitchen I bit into an apple, drank a little wine from an open bottle. There was no more bread. I went out onto the terrace: the weather was still cold, I rubbed my arms. My irritated penis hurt, the wool pants made it worse. I looked at my fingers, my forearms, I idly played at emptying the thick blue veins in my wrist with the tip of my fingernail. My nails were dirty, the thumbnail on my left hand was broken. On the other side of the house, in the courtyard, birds were cawing. The air was sharp, biting, the snow on the ground had melted a little then hardened on the surface, the traces left by my footsteps and my body on the terrace were still visible. I went to the railing and leaned over. A woman’s body was lying in the snow of the garden, half naked in her gaping bathrobe, motionless, her head tilted, her eyes open to the sky. The tip of her tongue rested delicately on the corner of her blue lips; between her legs, a shadow of hair was reappearing on her sex, it must still have been continuing to grow, stubbornly. I couldn’t breathe: this body in the snow was the mirror of the girl’s body in Kharkov. And I knew then that the body of that girl, that her twisted neck, her prominent chin, her frozen, gnawed breasts, were the blind reflection not, as I had thought then, of one image but of two, intermingled and separate, one standing on the terrace and the other down below, lying in the snow. You must be thinking: Ah, finally this story is over. But no, it still goes on.