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.
Käthe had arrived and was preparing dinner, going in and out of the kitchen; I didn’t want to be around her. I went back to the entry hall and opened the door to von Üxküll’s apartments. There were two handsome rooms there, a study and a bedroom, tastefully furnished with old pieces in heavy, dark wood, oriental carpets, simple metal objects, a bathroom with special equipment, probably adapted to his paralysis. Looking at all this, I again felt a vivid sense of confusion, but at the same time I didn’t care. I walked around the study: no objects cluttered the massive, chairless desk; on the shelves there were only music scores, by all sorts of composers, arranged by country and period, and, set aside, a small pile of bound scores, his own works. I opened one and contemplated the series of notes, an abstraction for me, I didn’t know how to read music. In Berlin, von Üxküll had spoken to me about a work he was planning, a fugue or, as he had said, a suite of serial variations in the form of a fugue. “I don’t know yet if what I envisage is actually possible,” he had said. When I had asked him what the theme would be, he had made a face: “It’s not romantic music. There is no theme. It’s just an étude.”—“Whom are you writing it for?” I had then asked.—“For no one. You know quite well they never play my works in Germany. I’ll probably never hear it played.”—“Why are you writing it, then?” And he had smiled, a big, happy smile: “To have done it before I die.”
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.