The Kindly Ones

T

he 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 Käthe, who worked on the estate as a cook and looked after the property when the owners were away. Impressed by my uniform, this Käthe, 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 Üxküll’s home was a fine little eighteenth-century manor, with a façade 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 Üxküll 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 façade 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.