The Kindly Ones

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.