It was snowing in the night, but I continued wandering in this limitless space where my thought reigned sovereign, making and unmaking forms with an absolute freedom that nevertheless kept running into the limits of bodies, mine real, material, and hers imagined and thus inexhaustible, in an erratic to-and-fro that left me each time emptier, more febrile, more desperate. Sitting naked on the bed, drained, I drank brandy and smoked and my gaze went from the outside, from my reddened knees, my long veined hands, my sex shriveled up at the bottom of my slightly bulging belly, to the inside, where it traveled over her sleeping body, sprawled out on her stomach, her head turned toward me, her legs stretched out, like a little girl. I gently parted her hair and bared her neck, her beautiful, powerful neck, and then my thoughts returned, as in the afternoon, to the strangled neck of our mother, she who had borne us together in her womb, I caressed my sister’s neck and tried seriously and attentively to imagine myself twisting my mother’s neck, but it was impossible, the image didn’t come, there was no trace of such an image inside me, it stubbornly refused to form in the mirror that I contemplated within myself, this mirror reflected nothing, remained empty, even when I placed both my hands under my sister’s hair and said to myself: Oh my hands on my sister’s nape. Oh my hands on my mother’s neck. No, nothing, there was nothing. Suddenly shivering, I curled up in a fetal ball at the end of the bed. After a long while I opened my eyes. She lay fully stretched out, one hand on her belly, her legs apart. Her vulva was opposite my face. The small lips protruded slightly from the pale, domed flesh. This sex was watching at me, spying on me, like a Gorgon’s head, like a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks. Little by little this silent gaze penetrated me to the marrow. My breath sped up and I stretched out my hand to hide it: I no longer saw it, but it still saw me and stripped me bare (whereas I was already naked). If only I could still get hard, I thought, I could use my prick like a stake hardened in the fire, and blind this Polyphemus who made me Nobody. But my cock remained inert, I seemed turned to stone. I stretched out my arm and buried my middle finger into this boundless eye. The hips moved slightly, but that was all. Far from piercing it, I had on the contrary opened it wide, freeing the gaze of the eye still hiding behind it. Then I had an idea: I took out my finger and, dragging myself forward on my forearms, I pushed my forehead against this vulva, pressing my scar against the hole. Now I was the one looking inside, searching the depths of this body with my radiant third eye, as her own single eye irradiated me and we blinded each other mutually: without moving, I came in an immense splash of white light, as she cried out: “What are you doing, what are you doing?” and I laughed out loud, sperm still gushing in huge spurts from my penis, jubilant, I bit deep into her vulva to swallow it whole, and my eyes finally opened, cleared, and saw everything.
In the morning, a thick fog had come and covered everything: from the bedroom, I couldn’t see the birch lane, or the forest, or even the end of the terrace. I opened the window, again I could hear the drops falling from the roof, the screech of a buzzard far off in the forest. Barefoot, I went downstairs and out onto the terrace. The snow on the flagstones was cold beneath my feet, the cool air made my skin bristle, I went over and leaned against the stone railing. When I turned around, I couldn’t even see the house anymore, the railing disappeared into the mist, I felt as if I were floating, isolated from everything. A shape under the snow in the garden, possibly the one I had glimpsed the day before, attracted my attention. I leaned over to see it better, the fog half veiled it, again it made me think of a body, but this time of the body of the young hanged woman in Kharkov, lying in the snow in the Trade Unions Park, her breast gnawed by dogs. I shivered, my skin tingled, the cold made it extraordinarily sensitive, my naked, shaved sex, the cold air, the fog enveloping me all gave me a wonderful feeling of nudity, an absolute, almost raw nudity. The shape had disappeared now, it must have been a dip in the land, I forgot it and leaned my body against the railing, letting my fingers wander over my skin. When my hand began rubbing my penis I scarcely noticed it, so little did it alter the sensations that were slowly peeling back my flesh, then thinning out my muscles, then removing my very bones, leaving only something nameless that, reflecting itself, gave itself pleasure as if to something identical yet slightly shifted, not opposite to it but merging with it in its oppositions. The orgasm thrust me backward like a discharge and sent me sprawling onto the snow-covered flagstones of the terrace where I remained in a stupor, all my limbs trembling. I thought I could see a shape lurking in the fog near me, a feminine form, I heard cries, they seemed far away but they must have been my own, and at the same time I knew that all this was happening in silence, and that not a sound came from my mouth to trouble this gray morning. The form detached itself from the fog and came to lie down on me. The cold of the snow bit into my bones. “It’s us,” I whispered into the labyrinth of its little round ear. “It’s us.” But the form remained mute and I knew it was still me, only me. I got up and went back into the house, I was trembling, I rolled on the carpets to dry myself out, breathing heavily. Then I went down into the basement. I pulled out bottles at random and blew on them to clear the labels, the clouds of dust made me sneeze. The cold and dank smell of this basement penetrated my nostrils, the soles of my feet enjoyed the cold, damp, almost slippery feeling of the hard earthen floor. I settled on a bottle and opened it with a corkscrew hanging from a string, I drank straight from the bottle, the wine ran from my lips onto my chin and my chest, I was getting hard again, now the shape was standing behind the shelves and swaying gently, I offered it wine but it didn’t move, then I lay down on the hard earth and it came to crouch over me, I kept drinking from the bottle as it used me, I spat some wine at it, but it didn’t take notice, it continued its disjointed movement. Each time, now, my orgasm came harsher, more acrid, even slightly acidic, the tiny stubble that was reappearing irritated my flesh and my penis, and when, immediately afterward, it went limp, the red, crumpled skin showed the thick jutting green veins, the network of purple venules. And yet I couldn’t rest, I ran heavily throughout the big house, into the bedrooms, the bathrooms, arousing myself every possible way but without coming, for I no longer could. I played at hide-and-seek, knowing there was no one to find me, I didn’t really know what I was doing anymore, I followed the impulses of my bewildered body, my mind remained clear and transparent but my body took refuge in its opacity and its weakness, the more I worked it, the less it served me as a passageway and the more it turned into an obstacle, I cursed it and also tried to outsmart this thickness, irritating and exciting it to the point of madness, but a cold excitation, almost sexless. I committed all sorts of infantile obscenities: in a maid’s room, I knelt on the narrow bed and stuck a candle into my anus, I lit it with difficulty and maneuvered it, letting big drops of hot wax fall onto my buttocks and the back of my testicles, I roared, my head crushed against the iron bedstead; afterward, I shat crouching on the Turkish-style toilets in the servants’ dark cubbyhole; I didn’t wipe myself, but jerked off standing in the service staircase, rubbing my shit-stained buttocks against the railing, the smell assaulting my nose and going to my head; and as I came, I almost fell down the stairs, I caught myself just in time, laughing, and looked at the traces of shit on the wood, which I carefully wiped off with a little lace tablecloth taken from the guest room. I grated my teeth, I could hardly bear to touch myself, I laughed like a madman, finally I fell asleep stretched out on the floor in the hallway. When I woke up I was famished, I devoured everything I could find and drank another bottle of wine. Outside, the fog veiled everything, it must still have been daytime, but it was impossible to guess the hour. I opened up the attic: it was dark, dusty, full of a musty odor, my feet left great tracks in the dust. I had taken some leather belts, which I threw over a beam, and I began showing the shape, which had discreetly followed me, how I hanged myself in the forest when I was little. The pressure on my neck made me hard again, it panicked me, to avoid suffocating I ha
d to stand on tiptoe. I jerked off very quickly this way, just rubbing the glans coated with saliva, until the sperm spurted across the attic, a few drops only but projected with incredible force, I yielded to the orgasm with all my weight, if the shape hadn’t supported me I would really have hanged myself. Finally I unfastened myself and collapsed into the dust. The shape, on all fours, sniffed at my limp member like an avid little animal, raised its leg to expose its vulva to me, but avoided my hands when I reached out to it. I didn’t get hard quickly enough for it, and it strangled me with one of the belts; when my penis was finally erect, it freed my neck, tied my feet together, and impaled itself on me. “Your turn,” it said. “Squeeze my neck.” I took its neck in my hands and pressed with both thumbs as it raised its legs and, its feet on the floor, moved back and forth on my aching penis. Its breathing gushed from its lips in a high-pitched whistle, I pressed harder, its face swelled, flushed crimson, horrible to see, its body remained white, but its face was red as raw meat, its tongue stuck out from its teeth, it couldn’t even rattle, and when it came, burying its nails into my wrists, it emptied itself, and I began howling, bellowing and bashing my head against the floor, I was past all restraint, I bashed my head and sobbed, not out of horror, because this female form that would never remain my sister had pissed on me, it wasn’t that, but when I saw it come and piss, strangled, I saw the hanged women in Kharkov who as they suffocated emptied themselves over the passersby, I had seen that girl we had hanged one winter day in the park behind the statue of Shevchenko, a young and healthy girl bursting with life, had she too come when we hanged her and soiled her panties, when she fought and shuddered, strangled, was she coming, had she ever even come before, she was very young, had she experienced that before we hanged her, what right did we have to hang her, how could we hang this girl, and I sobbed endlessly, ravaged by her memory, my very own Our-Lady-of-the-Snows, it wasn’t remorse, I didn’t have remorse, I didn’t feel guilty, I didn’t think things could or should have been otherwise, yet I understood what it meant to hang a girl, we had hanged her the way a butcher slaughters a steer, without passion, because it had to be done, because she had done something stupid and had to pay for it with her life, that was the rule of the game, of our game, but the girl we had hanged wasn’t a pig or a steer that you kill without thinking about it because you want to eat its flesh, she was a young girl who had been a little girl who may have been happy and who was then just entering life, a life full of murderers whom she hadn’t been able to avoid, a girl like my sister in a way, someone’s sister, perhaps, as I too was someone’s brother, and such cruelty had no name, no matter how objectively necessary, it ruined everything, if one could do that, hang a girl like that, then one could do anything, nothing could be assured, my sister could be happily pissing in a toilet one day and the next day be emptying herself as she suffocated on the end of a rope, there was absolutely no sense to it, and that is why I wept, I didn’t understand anything anymore and I wanted to be alone to no longer understand anything.
I woke up in Una’s bed. I was still naked but my body was clean and my legs free. How had I gotten there? I had no memory of it. The stove had gone out and I was cold. I uttered my sister’s name softly, stupidly: “Una, Una.” The silence froze me and made me shiver, but maybe it was the cold. I got up: it was daytime outside, the sky was cloudy but there was a beautiful light, the fog had dissipated and I looked at the forest, the trees with their branches still loaded with snow. A few absurd lines came to mind, an old song of Guillem IX, that slightly crazed duke of Aquitaine:
Farai un vers de dreyt nien:
non er de mi ni d’autra gen,
non er d’amor ni de joven,
ni de ren au.
I’ll make a song about nothing at all:
not about me, or anybody else,
not about love not about youth,
or anything else.
I rose and headed for the corner where some of my clothes were piled up, to pull on a pair of pants, drawing the suspenders over my bare shoulders. Passing in front of the bedroom mirror I looked at myself: a thick red mark cut across my throat. I went downstairs; in the kitchen I bit into an apple, drank a little wine from an open bottle. There was no more bread. I went out onto the terrace: the weather was still cold, I rubbed my arms. My irritated penis hurt, the wool pants made it worse. I looked at my fingers, my forearms, I idly played at emptying the thick blue veins in my wrist with the tip of my fingernail. My nails were dirty, the thumbnail on my left hand was broken. On the other side of the house, in the courtyard, birds were cawing. The air was sharp, biting, the snow on the ground had melted a little then hardened on the surface, the traces left by my footsteps and my body on the terrace were still visible. I went to the railing and leaned over. A woman’s body was lying in the snow of the garden, half naked in her gaping bathrobe, motionless, her head tilted, her eyes open to the sky. The tip of her tongue rested delicately on the corner of her blue lips; between her legs, a shadow of hair was reappearing on her sex, it must still have been continuing to grow, stubbornly. I couldn’t breathe: this body in the snow was the mirror of the girl’s body in Kharkov. And I knew then that the body of that girl, that her twisted neck, her prominent chin, her frozen, gnawed breasts, were the blind reflection not, as I had thought then, of one image but of two, intermingled and separate, one standing on the terrace and the other down below, lying in the snow. You must be thinking: Ah, finally this story is over. But no, it still goes on.
GIGUE
Thomas found me sitting on a chair at the edge of the terrace. I was looking at the woods and the sky and drinking brandy out of the bottle, in little sips. The raised balustrade hid the garden from me, but the thought of what I had seen was softly eating away at my spirit. One or two days must have gone by, don’t ask me how I spent them. Thomas had come walking around the side of the house: I hadn’t heard anything, neither the sound of an engine nor a call. I handed him the bottle: “Hail, comrade! Drink.” I was probably a little drunk. Thomas looked around him, drank a little, but didn’t hand the bottle back. “What the hell are you up to?” he finally asked. I smiled inanely at him. He looked at the house. “You’re alone?”—“I think so, yes.” He walked up to me, looked at me, repeated: “What the hell are you doing? Your leave ended a week ago. Grothmann is furious, he’s talking about court-martialing you for desertion. These days, courts-martial last five minutes.” I shrugged and reached for the bottle, which he was still holding. He moved it away. “And you?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”—“Piontek told me where you were. He brought me. I came to get you.”—“We have to go, then?” I said sadly.—“Yes. Go get dressed.” I got up, went upstairs. In Una’s bedroom, instead of getting dressed, I sat down on her leather sofa and lit a cigarette. I thought about her, with difficulty, strangely empty, hollow thoughts. Thomas’s voice, in the stairway, drew me out of my reverie: “Hurry up! Shit!” I got dressed, pulling on my clothes somewhat at random, but with some good sense, since it was cold out—long underwear, wool socks, a turtleneck sweater under my office uniform. L’Éducation sentimentale was lying on the secretary: I slipped the book into my tunic pocket. Then I began opening the windows to pull the shutters closed. Thomas appeared in the doorway: “What are you doing?”—“Well, I’m closing up. We can’t leave the house wide open.” His bad mood burst out then: “You don’t seem to realize what’s happening. The Russians have been attacking along the whole front for a week. They could be here any minute now.” He took me unceremoniously by the arm: “Come on.” In the entryway, I briskly freed myself from his grip and went to find the big key to the front door. I put on my coat and cap. As we left I carefully locked the door. In the courtyard in front of the house, Piontek was wiping the headlight of an Opel. He straightened to salute me, and we got into the car, Thomas next to Piontek, me in the back. In the long lane, between jolts, Thomas asked Piontek: “Do you think we can pass through Tempelburg again?”—“I don’t know, Standartenf
ührer. It looked calm, we can try.” On the main road Piontek turned left. In Alt Draheim, a few families were still loading some wagons, harnessed to little Pomeranian horses. The car passed around the old fort and began climbing the long slope of the isthmus. A tank appeared on top, low and squat. “Shit!” Thomas exclaimed. “A T-thirty-four!” But Piontek had already slammed on the brakes and started going in reverse. The tank lowered its cannon and fired at us, but it couldn’t traverse low enough and the shell went over us and exploded by the side of the road, at the entrance to the village. The tank advanced in a rattle of treads to fire lower; Piontek quickly backed the car across the road and started off at top speed toward the village; the second shell hit quite close, shattering one of the left side windows, then we were around the fort and hidden from the tank. In the village, people had heard the explosions and were running in all directions. We drove through without stopping and headed north. “They couldn’t have taken Tempelburg!” Thomas was raging. “We went through there two hours ago!”—“Maybe they came round by the fields,” Piontek suggested. Thomas was examining a map: “All right, go to Bad Polzin. We’ll get information there. Even if Stargard has fallen, we can take the Schivelbein-Naugard road and then reach Stettin.” I wasn’t paying much attention to what he said, I was looking at the landscape out of the smashed window, after having cleared away the debris. Tall, widely spaced poplar trees lined the long straight road, and beyond them stretched snowy, silent fields, a gray sky where some birds were flitting, isolated, shuttered, silent farms. In Klaushagen, a neat little village, sad and dignified, a few kilometers farther on, a checkpoint of Volkssturm in civilian clothes with armbands blocked the road, between a little lake and a wood. Anxiously, the farmers asked us for news: Thomas advised them to head with their families toward Polzin, but they hesitated, twisted their moustaches and fiddled with their old rifles and the two Panzerfäuste they had been allocated. Some had pinned their medals from the Great War onto their jackets. The Schupos in bottle-green uniforms sent to supervise them seemed just as uneasy, the men talked with the slow deliberation of a town council meeting, almost solemn with anxiety.
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