The Kindly Ones

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’Éducation 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 Krössin-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.”