The Kindly Ones

Käthe was leaving and I went to eat, ceremoniously emptying another one of von Üxküll’s marvelous bottles. The house was beginning to seem familiar and warm to me, Käthe 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 Höss, 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’Éducation 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.