The Kindly Ones

I had said it without thinking, I’m sure of it; but when I had spoken, it seemed obvious to me that it couldn’t have been otherwise. We had to take complicated detours to reach the autobahn; Piontek, who had spent the night in the garage, explained that Moabit and Wedding had been leveled and that hordes of Berliners had come to swell the ranks of refugees from the East. On the autobahn, the line of carts, most of them surmounted by white tents that people had improvised to protect themselves from the snow and the bitter cold, stretched out endlessly, the nose of each horse on the back of the cart in front, kept to the right by Schupos and Feldgendarmen, to let the military convoys going up to the front pass. From time to time, a Russian Sturmovik made its appearance, and then there was panic, people jumped from the carts and fled into the snow-covered fields while the fighter plane went up the column, letting loose bursts of shells that struck down stragglers, blew open the heads and bellies of panicking horses, burned mattresses and carts. During one of these attacks, my car took several hits, its doors were riddled with holes and the rear window broken; the engine, fortunately, was unharmed, and the Cognac too. I handed the bottle to Piontek, then drank a swig myself as we started up again in the midst of the screams of the wounded and the cries of terrified civilians. At Stettin, we passed the Oder, whose early thaw had been accelerated by the Kriegsmarine with dynamite and icebreakers; then, skirting round the ManüSee from the north, we crossed Stargard, occupied by Waffen-SS with black-gold-red badges, Degrelle’s men. We continued on the main road to the East; I guided Piontek with a map, for I had never been in these parts. Alongside the congested roadway stretched undulating fields, covered with clean, soft, crystalline snow, and then dark, lugubrious birch or pine woods. Here and there, one could see an isolated farm, long, squat buildings, nestled under their thatched, snow-covered roofs. The little redbrick villages, with their gray, steep-sloping roofs and austere Lutheran churches, seemed surprisingly calm, the inhabitants going about their business. After Wangerin, the road rose above wide, cold, gray lakes, only the rims of which had frozen. We crossed Dramburg and Falkenburg; in Tempelburg, a little town on the southern bank of the Dratzig-See, I told Piontek to leave the autobahn and head north, by the road to Bad Polzin. After a long, straight line through wide fields stretching between the fir woods that hid the lake, the road ran atop a steep isthmus crowned with trees, which separates the Dratzig-See from the smaller Sareben-See like a knife blade. Below, forming a long curve between the two lakes, a little village was spread out, Alt Draheim, terraced around a block of square, massive stone, the ruins of an old castle. Beyond the village, a pine forest covered the north bank of the Sareben-See. I stopped and asked my way from a farmer, who showed us almost without a gesture: we had to drive two more kilometers, then turn right. “You can’t miss the turn,” he said. “There’s a big lane of birch trees.” But Piontek almost passed it without seeing it. The lane crossed a little wood and then cut straight through lovely open countryside, a long, clear track between two tall curtains of bare, pale birch trees, serene in the midst of the white, virgin expanse. At the far end was the house.

AIR