The Kindly Ones

It was beginning to grow cold again, it snowed a little, the terrace, the courtyard, the garden were dusted with snow. There wasn’t much left to eat, I had finished the bread, I tried to make some myself with Käthe’s flour, I didn’t really know how to go about it, but I found a recipe in a cookbook and made several loaves, from which I tore pieces that I swallowed hot as soon as they came out of the oven, crunching at the same time on raw onions that gave me an awful breath. There were no more eggs or ham, but in the basement I found some crates of little green apples from the previous summer, a little mealy but sweet, which I ate throughout the day, drinking sips of brandy. The wine cellar, however, was inexhaustible. There were also some pâtés, so I dined on pâté, on bacon grilled on the stove with onions, and on the greatest wines of France. At night, it snowed again, in heavy gusts; the wind, coming from the north, struck the house mournfully, banging the poorly fastened shutters as the snow beat against the windows. But there was no lack of wood, the stove in the bedroom roared, it was pleasant in this bedroom, where I stretched out naked in a darkness illumined by snow, as if the storm were whipping my skin. The next day it was still snowing, the wind had fallen and the snow was coming down, thick and heavy, covering the trees and the ground. A shape in the garden made me think of the bodies lying in the snow at Stalingrad, I could see them clearly, their blue lips, their bronze-colored skin pricked with stubble, surprised, stunned, dumbstruck in death but calm, almost peaceful, the very opposite of Moreau’s body bathing in its blood on the carpet, of my mother’s body with its twisted neck, spread out on the bed, atrocious, unbearable images, I couldn’t stay with them despite all my efforts, and to chase them away I climbed in my mind the steps leading to the attic of Moreau’s house, I took refuge there and huddled in a corner, to wait for my sister to come find me and console me, her doleful knight with the broken head.

That night, I took a long, hot bath. I placed one foot and then the other on the ledge and, rinsing the razor in the bathwater, I shaved both my legs, carefully. Then I shaved my armpits. The blade slid over the thick hair, coated with shaving cream, which fell in curly bundles into the soapy bathwater. I got up, changed the blade, placed one foot on the edge of the bathtub and shaved my sex. I proceeded attentively, especially for the hard-to-reach parts between the legs and the buttocks, but I slipped and cut myself just behind the scrotum, where the skin is most sensitive. Three drops of blood fell one after the other into the white foam of the bath. I patted some eau de Cologne on, it burned a little but also soothed my skin. Everywhere hair and shaving cream floated on the water, I took a bucket of cold water to rinse myself off, my skin was bristling, my scrotum shriveled. Leaving the bath, I looked at myself in the mirror, and this frighteningly naked body seemed foreign to me, it looked more like the body of the green Apollo in Paris than my own. I leaned against the mirror with my whole body, I closed my eyes and imagined myself shaving my sister’s sex, slowly, delicately, pulling the folds of flesh between two fingers so as not to wound her, then turning her over and making her lean forward so I could shave the curly hairs around her anus. Afterward, she came to rub her cheek against my skin, naked and withered by the cold, she tickled my little boy’s shrunken testicles and licked the tip of my circumcised penis, with short, exciting tongue strokes: “I almost liked it better when it was as big as that,” she said laughing, holding her thumb and forefinger a few centimeters apart, and I stood her up and looked at her naked sex protruding from her legs, prominent, the long scar I always imagined there not quite reaching it but stretching toward it, it was the sex of my little twin sister and I burst into tears in front of it.