The Kindly Ones

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 Üxküll’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 Üxküll 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.