Among the scores there were of course some Rameau, some Couperin, Forqueray, Balbastre. I took a few from the shelf and leafed through them, looking at the titles I knew well. There was Rameau’s Gavotte à six doubles, and by looking at the page the music immediately unfurled in my head, clear, joyous, crystalline, like the galloping of a purebred horse raced across the Russian steppe in winter, so light that its hooves just brushed the snow, leaving only the slightest of traces. But no matter how much I stared at the page I couldn’t connect those bewitching trills to the signs drawn on it. At the end of the meal in Berlin, von Üxküll had mentioned Rameau again. “You’re right to like that music,” he had said. “It’s a lucid, sovereign music. It never foresakes its elegance but remains bristling with surprises and even traps, it is playful, joyful with a gay knowledge that neglects neither mathematics, nor life.” He had also defended Mozart in curious terms: “For a long time I had little regard for him. When I was young, he seemed to me a gifted hedonist, without any depth. But that might have been the judgment of my own Puritanism. As I get older, I’m beginning to think he may have had a sense of life as strong as Nietzsche’s, and that his music seems simple only because life, in fact, is rather simple. But I haven’t entirely decided yet, I have to listen some more.”
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.
In the morning I was calmer. In the living room, I tried to resume reading after having some bread and coffee, and then my thoughts drifted away again, detached from the torments of Frédéric and Madame Arnoux. I wondered: What did you come here for? What do you want, exactly? To wait till Una returns? To wait till a Russian comes and slits your throat? To commit suicide? I thought about Helene. She and my sister, I said to myself, were the only two women, aside from a few nurses, to have seen my body naked. What had she seen, what had she thought when she saw that? What did she see in me that I didn’t see, and that my sister, for a long time now, didn’t want to see anymore? I thought about Helene’s body, I had often seen her in a bathing suit, her curves were finer and lither than my sister’s, her breasts smaller. Both had the same white skin, but this whiteness stood in stark contrast to the thick black hair of my sister, whereas with Helene, it continued in the soft blondness of her hair. Her sex too must have been blond and soft, but I didn’t want to think about that. I was seized by a sudden disgust. I said to myself: love is dead, the only love is dead. I shouldn’t have come, I should leave, go back to Berlin. But I didn’t want to go back to Berlin, I wanted to stay. A little later I got up and went out. I set off again through the forest, I found an old wooden bridge over the Drage and crossed it. The thickets became increasingly dense, dark, one could only continue on the foresters’ and loggers’ paths, across which branches stretched and scratched my clothes. Farther on stood an isolated hill from which one could probably see the whole region, but I didn’t push on as far as that, I walked aimlessly, in a circle perhaps, finally I found the river again and came back to the house. Käthe was waiting for me and came out of the kitchen to meet me: “Herr Busse is here, with Herr Gast and some other people. They’re waiting for you in the courtyard. I gave them some schnapps.” Busse was von Üxküll’s farmer. “What do they want with me?” I asked.—“They want to talk with you.” I crossed the house and went out into the courtyard. The farmers were sitting on an open wagon drawn by a scrawny draught horse, which was grazing on the tufts of grass emerging from the snow. When they saw me they bared their heads and jumped to the ground. One of them, a red-faced man, his hair gray but his moustache still black, came forward and bowed slightly in front of me. “Good day, Herr Obersturmbannführer. Käthe told us that you are the Baronness’s brother?” His tone was polite, but he was hesitating, searching for his words. “That’s right,” I said.—“Do you know where the Freiherr and the Freifrau are? Do you know what their plans are?”—“No. I thought I’d find them here. I don’t know where they are. In Switzerland, probably.”—“It’s just that we’ll soon have to leave, Herr Obersturmbannführer. We shouldn’t wait much longer. The Reds are attacking Stargard, they’ve surrounded Arnswalde. People are worried. The Kreisleiter says they’ll never reach this far, but we don’t believe him.” He was embarrassed, he kept turning his hat around in his hands. “Herr Busse,” I said, “I understand your concern. You have to think of your families. If you feel you should leave, leave. No one’s holding you back.” His face cleared a little. “Thank you, Herr Obersturmbannführer. It’s just that we were concerned, seeing as how the house was empty.” He hesitated. “If you like, I can give you a cart and a horse. We’ll help you, if you want to load some furniture. We can take it with us, put it somewhere safe.”—“Thank you, Herr Busse. I’ll think about it. I’ll send Käthe to get you, if I decide on something.”
The men climbed back up, and the wagon moved slowly away down the birch lane. Busse’s words had no effect on me, I couldn’t manage to think about the Russians’ arrival as a concrete, imminent thing. I stayed there, leaning on the frame of the large door, and smoked a cigarette as I watched the wagon disappear down the end of the lane. Later on in the afternoon, two other men presented themselves. They wore blue jackets made of coarse cloth, big hobnail boots, and held caps in their hands; I understood right away that they were the two Frenchmen from the STO that Käthe had told me about, who carried out maintenance or farm work for von Üxküll. They were the only personnel, along with Käthe, who still remained: all the men had been drafted, the gardener was with the Volkssturm, the maid had left to join her parents, who had been evacuated to
Mecklenburg. I didn’t know where these two men were staying, maybe with Busse. I talked to them directly in French. The older one, Henri, was a stocky, broad-backed farmer in his forties from the Lubéron, he knew Antibes; the other probably came from a provincial city, and seemed still young. They too were worried, they had come to say they wanted to leave, if everyone else was leaving. “You understand, Monsieur l’Officier, we don’t like the Bolsheviks any more than you do. They’re savages, we don’t know what to expect from them.”—“If Herr Busse leaves,” I said, “you can leave with him. I won’t hold you back.” Their relief was palpable. “Thank you, Monsieur l’Officier. Please give our respects to Monsieur le Baron and to Madame, when you see them.”
When I see them? This idea seemed almost comical to me; at the same time, I was entirely incapable of accepting the thought that I might never see my sister again: it was literally unthinkable. That evening, I had dismissed Käthe early and served myself, I dined for the third time alone in this large candlelit room, solemnly, and as I ate and drank I was overcome with startling fantasies, the demented vision of a perfect coprophagic autarky. I pictured myself confined alone in this manor house with Una, isolated from the world, forever. Every evening, we put on our finest clothing, suit and a silk shirt for me, a beautiful, close-fitting, barebacked evening gown for her, enhanced by heavy, almost barbaric silver jewelry, and we sat down to an elegant dinner, at this table covered with a lace tablecloth and set with crystal tumblers, silverware stamped with our crest, Sèvres porcelain plates, massive silver candelabra bristling with long white tapers; in the glasses, our own urine, on the plates well-formed pieces of excrement, pale and firm, which we calmly ate with little silver spoons. We wiped our lips with monogrammed cambric napkins, we drank, and when we had finished, we went into the kitchen ourselves to wash the dishes. This way, we were self-sufficient, without loss and without trace, neatly. This aberrant vision filled me for the rest of the meal with a sordid anguish. Afterward I went up to Una’s room to drink Cognac and smoke. The bottle was almost empty. I looked at the secretary, now closed again, my evil feeling wouldn’t let me go, I didn’t know what to do, but above all I didn’t want to open the secretary. I opened the wardrobe and inspected my sister’s dresses, breathing in deeply to immerse myself in the smell they gave off. I chose one, a beautiful evening gown made of delicate material, black and gray with silver threads; standing in front of the tall mirror, I held the dress draped over my body, and with great seriousness made a few feminine gestures. But immediately I was afraid and put the dress away, full of disgust and shame: What was I playing at here? My body wasn’t hers and never would be. At the same time, I couldn’t contain myself, I should have left the house right away, but I couldn’t leave the house. Then I sat down on the sofa and finished the bottle of Cognac, forcing myself to think about the scraps of letters I had read, about these endless, answerless enigmas, my father’s departure, my mother’s death. I got up, went to get the letters, and sat down again to read a few more of them. My sister was trying to ask me questions, she asked me how I could have slept while our mother was being killed, what I had felt when I saw her body, what we had talked about the day before. I could answer almost none of these questions. In one letter, she told me about the visit from Clemens and Weser: intuitively, she had lied to them, she hadn’t said I had seen the bodies, but she wanted to know why I had lied, and what exactly I remembered. What I remembered? I didn’t even know what a memory was anymore. When I was little, one day, I climbed, and even today, as I write, I can see myself very clearly climbing the gray steps of a great mausoleum or a monument lost in a forest. The leaves were red, it must have been the end of autumn, I couldn’t see the sky through the trees. A thick layer of dead leaves, red, orange, brown, gold, covered the steps, I sank into them up to my thighs, and the steps were so high that I was forced to use my hands to hoist myself up to the next one. In my memory, this whole scene is thick with an overwhelming feeling, the burned colors of the leaves weighed on me, and I cleared a path for myself on these steps for giants through this dry, crumbling mass, I was afraid, I thought I would sink into it and disappear. For years, I believed this image was the memory of a dream, an image from a childhood dream that had stayed with me. But one day, in Kiel, when I returned there for university, I chanced upon this ziggurat, a little granite war monument, I walked around it, the steps weren’t higher than other steps, this was the place, this place existed. Of course, I must have been very small when I had gone there, that’s why the steps seemed so tall to me, but that’s not what overwhelmed me, it was seeing, after so many years, something that I had always located in the world of dreams present itself this way as reality, as a concrete, material thing. And the same was true with everything Una had tried to talk to me about in these unfinished letters that she had never sent me. All these endless thoughts were bristling with sharp angles, I gashed myself on them viciously, the hallways of this cold, oppressive house were streaming with the bloody shreds of my feelings; a young, healthy maid should have come and washed everything clean, but there was no more maid. I put the letters away in the secretary and, leaving the empty bottle and glass there, went into the bedroom next to hers to go to bed. But as soon as I lay down, obscene, perverse thoughts began to flood in again. I got up again and in the trembling light of a candle contemplated my naked body in the wardrobe mirror. I touched my flat belly, my stiff penis, my buttocks. With the tip of my fingers I caressed the hairs on the back of my neck. Then I blew the candle out and lay down again. But these thoughts refused to go away, they emerged from the corners of the room like mad dogs and rushed at me to tear into me and inflame my body, Una and I were exchanging our clothes, naked except for stockings, I pulled on her long dress as she buttoned herself up in my uniform and put up her hair and fastened it under my cap, then she sat me down in front of her dressing table and carefully made up my face, combing my hair back, applying lipstick to my mouth, mascara on my eyelashes, powder on my cheeks, she dabbed drops of perfume on my neck and painted my nails, and when it was over we just as brutally exchanged our roles, she equipped herself with a sculpted ebony phallus and took me like a man, in front of her tall mirror that impassively reflected our bodies intertwined like snakes, she had coated the phallus with cold cream, and the acrid smell bit into my nose as she used me as if I were a woman, until all distinctions were erased and I could say to her: “I am your sister and you are my brother,” and she: “You are my sister and I am your brother.”
These appalling images kept gnawing at me for days on end like overexcited puppies. My relation to these thoughts was that of two magnets whose polarities were constantly reversed by a mysterious force: if we attracted each other, they changed so that we repelled each other; but scarcely had this happened than they changed again, we attracted each other again, and all this took place very rapidly, so that we oscillated before each other, these thoughts and I, at an almost constant distance, as incapable of approaching each other as we were of drawing away from each other. Outside the snow was melting, the ground was turning muddy. Käthe came one day to tell me that she was leaving; officially, it was still forbidden to evacuate, but she had a cousin in Lower Saxony, she was going to live with her. Busse returned also to renew his offer: he had just been recruited into the Volkssturm but wanted to send his family away, before it was too late. He asked me to go over his accounts with him, in von Üxküll’s name, but I refused and dismissed him, asking him to take the two Frenchmen along with his family. When I went walking by the road, I didn’t see much traffic; but in Alt Draheim, the prudent ones were discreetly getting ready to leave; they were emptying their stores of supplies and sold me provisions cheaply. The countryside was calm, from time to time you could just make out the sound of an airplane, high in the sky. One day, while I was upstairs, a car came down the lane. Hiding behind a curtain, I watched it from a window; when it had come closer, I recognized a Kripo license plate. I ran to my bedroom, took out my service weapon
from the holster in my bag, and, without thinking, ran down the servants’ stairway and through the kitchen door to take refuge in the woods beyond the terrace. Clutching my pistol nervously, I skirted a little around the garden, well back behind the line of trees, then drew closer under cover of a thicket to observe the house. I saw a figure come out through the French windows of the living room and cross the terrace to position himself at the balustrade and observe the garden, hands in his coat pockets. “Aue!” he called twice, “Aue!” It was Weser, I recognized him easily. The tall figure of Clemens stood outlined in the doorway. Weser barked my name out a third time, in a definitive tone, then turned around and went into the house, preceded by Clemens. I waited. After a long while, I saw their shadows busy behind the windows of my sister’s bedroom. A mad rage seized me and brought blood to my face as I cocked the pistol, ready to run into the house and kill these two evil bloodhounds pitilessly. I restrained myself with difficulty and stayed there, my fingers white from clutching the pistol, trembling. Finally I heard the sound of an engine. I waited a little more and then went in, on the lookout in case they had set a trap for me. The car had left, the house was empty. In my bedroom, nothing seemed to have been touched; in Una’s bedroom, the secretary was still closed, but inside, the drafts of her letters had disappeared. Stunned, I sat down on a chair, the pistol on my knee, forgotten. What were they after, these rabid, obstinate animals, deaf to all reason? I tried to think about what the letters contained, but I couldn’t manage to put my thoughts in order. I knew they provided a proof of my presence in Antibes at the time of the murder. But that had no importance anymore. What about the twins? Did these letters talk about the twins? I made an effort to remember, it seemed that no, they said nothing about the twins, whereas obviously that was the only thing that mattered to my sister, much more than our mother’s fate. What were they to her, these two kids? I got up, put the pistol on the end table, and set about searching through the secretary again, slowly and methodically this time, as Clemens and Weser must have done. And then I found, in a little drawer that I hadn’t noticed, a photograph of the two boys, showing them naked and smiling, in front of the sea, probably near Antibes. Yes, I said to myself as I examined this image, in fact it’s possible, they must be hers. But who then was the father? Certainly not von Üxküll. I tried to imagine my sister pregnant, holding her swollen belly in her hands, my sister giving birth, torn apart, screaming, it was impossible. No, if that was indeed the case they must have cut her open, taken them out through the belly, it wasn’t possible otherwise. I thought about her fear while faced with this thing swelling inside her. “I’ve always been afraid,” she had said to me one day, a long time ago. Where was that? I don’t know anymore. She had spoken to me about the permanent fear women have, that old friend that lives with them, all the time. Fear when you bleed every month, fear of taking something inside yourself, of being penetrated by the parts of men who are so often selfish and brutal, fear of gravity dragging the flesh, the breasts, downward. It must have been the same for the fear of being pregnant. Something’s growing, something’s growing in your belly, a strange body inside you, which moves and sucks up all your body’s strength, and you know it has to come out, even if it kills you, it has to come out, how horrible. Even with all the men I had known I couldn’t approach that, I could understand nothing of women’s overwhelming fear. And once the children are born, it must be even worse, since then begins the constant fear, the terror that haunts you day and night, and that ends only with you, or with them. I saw the image of those mothers clutching their children as they were shot, I saw those Hungarian Jewesses sitting on their suitcases, pregnant women and girls waiting for the train and the gas at the end of the trip, it must have been that which I had seen in them, that which I had never been able to get rid of and had never been able to express, that fear, not their open and explicit fear of the gendarmes or the Germans, of us, but the mute fear that lived inside them, in the fragility of their bodies and their sexes nestling between their legs, that fragility we were going to destroy without ever seeing it.
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