The Kindly Ones

That night, I slept poorly in my little bed. I had drunk too much, my head was spi

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, ru

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 fa