I didn’t have a fracture of the skull, Thomas still had his place. He returned around evening and handed me a signed, stamped piece of paper: “Your leave of absence. You’d better leave Berlin.” My head was hurting; I was sipping Cognac diluted with mineral water. “To go where?”—“I don’t know. What if you went to see your girlfriend, in Baden?”—“The Americans could get there before me.”—“Precisely. Take her to Bavaria, or Austria. Find yourself a little hotel, you can have a nice little romantic vacation. If I were you, I’d take advantage of it. You might not have any more for a while.” He described the results of the raid: the offices of the Staatspolizei were unusable, the old chancellery was destroyed, the new one, Speer’s, had been severely damaged, even the Führer’s private apartments had burned down. A bomb had struck the People’s Court in midtrial, they were trying Oberleutnant von Schlabrendorff, one of the conspirators from the OKHG Center; after the raid, they had found Judge Freisler stone dead, von Schlabrendorff’s file in his hand, his head crushed, they said, by the bronze bust of the Führer, which sat enthroned behind him during his ranting speeches for the prosecution.

Leaving seemed like a good idea to me, but where? Baden, the romantic vacation: they were out of the question. Thomas wanted to have his parents evacuated from the outskirts of Vienna, and suggested I go in his place to take them to a cousin’s farm. “You have parents?” He looked at me, puzzled: “Of course. Everyone has parents. Why?” But the Viennese option seemed terribly complicated to me for a convalescence, and Thomas readily agreed. “Don’t worry. I’ll make other arrangements, it’s no problem. Go rest somewhere.” I still had no idea where, yet I asked Piontek to come the next morning, with several cans of gasoline. That night I didn’t sleep much; my head and ears hurt, shooting pains woke me up, I vomited twice, but there was something else besides. When Piontek presented himself, I took my letter of leave—essential to get me through the checkpoints—the bottle of Cognac and four packs of cigarettes that Thomas had given me, my bag with a few things and a change of clothes, and without even offering him a coffee, I gave him the order to start off. “Where are we going, Obersturmbannführer?”—“Take the road to Stettin.”

I had said it without thinking, I’m sure of it; but when I had spoken, it seemed obvious to me that it couldn’t have been otherwise. We had to take complicated detours to reach the autobahn; Piontek, who had spent the night in the garage, explained that Moabit and Wedding had been leveled and that hordes of Berliners had come to swell the ranks of refugees from the East. On the autobahn, the line of carts, most of them surmounted by white tents that people had improvised to protect themselves from the snow and the bitter cold, stretched out endlessly, the nose of each horse on the back of the cart in front, kept to the right by Schupos and Feldgendarmen, to let the military convoys going up to the front pass. From time to time, a Russian Sturmovik made its appearance, and then there was panic, people jumped from the carts and fled into the snow-covered fields while the fighter plane went up the column, letting loose bursts of shells that struck down stragglers, blew open the heads and bellies of panicking horses, burned mattresses and carts. During one of these attacks, my car took several hits, its doors were riddled with holes and the rear window broken; the engine, fortunately, was unharmed, and the Cognac too. I handed the bottle to Piontek, then drank a swig myself as we started up again in the midst of the screams of the wounded and the cries of terrified civilians. At Stettin, we passed the Oder, whose early thaw had been accelerated by the Kriegsmarine with dynamite and icebreakers; then, skirting round the ManüSee from the north, we crossed Stargard, occupied by Waffen-SS with black-gold-red badges, Degrelle’s men. We continued on the main road to the East; I guided Piontek with a map, for I had never been in these parts. Alongside the congested roadway stretched undulating fields, covered with clean, soft, crystalline snow, and then dark, lugubrious birch or pine woods. Here and there, one could see an isolated farm, long, squat buildings, nestled under their thatched, snow-covered roofs. The little redbrick villages, with their gray, steep-sloping roofs and austere Lutheran churches, seemed surprisingly calm, the inhabitants going about their business. After Wangerin, the road rose above wide, cold, gray lakes, only the rims of which had frozen. We crossed Dramburg and Falkenburg; in Tempelburg, a little town on the southern bank of the Dratzig-See, I told Piontek to leave the autobahn and head north, by the road to Bad Polzin. After a long, straight line through wide fields stretching between the fir woods that hid the lake, the road ran atop a steep isthmus crowned with trees, which separates the Dratzig-See from the smaller Sareben-See like a knife blade. Below, forming a long curve between the two lakes, a little village was spread out, Alt Draheim, terraced around a block of square, massive stone, the ruins of an old castle. Beyond the village, a pine forest covered the north bank of the Sareben-See. I stopped and asked my way from a farmer, who showed us almost without a gesture: we had to drive two more kilometers, then turn right. “You can’t miss the turn,” he said. “There’s a big lane of birch trees.” But Piontek almost passed it without seeing it. The lane crossed a little wood and then cut straight through lovely open countryside, a long, clear track between two tall curtains of bare, pale birch trees, serene in the midst of the white, virgin expanse. At the far end was the house.

AIR

The house was closed up. I had Piontek stop at the entrance to the courtyard and I walked up to it through virgin, compact snow. The weather was strangely gentle. Along the front, all the shutters were drawn. I walked around the house; the back faced a wide terrace with a balustrade and a curved stairway leading to a snow-covered garden, level at first and then sloping away. Beyond rose the forest, slim pines in the midst of which stood out a few beech trees. Here too everything was shuttered down, silent. I went back to Piontek and had him take me to the village, where I was shown the house of a woman named Käthe, who worked on the estate as a cook and looked after the property when the owners were away. Impressed by my uniform, this Käthe, a sturdy peasant in her early fifties, still very blond and pale, made no difficulty about giving me the keys; my sister and her husband, she explained, had left before Christmas, and since then hadn’t sent any word. I went back to the house with Piontek. Von Üxküll’s home was a fine little eighteenth-century manor, with a façade the color of rust and ochre, very bright in the midst of all this snow, in a baroque style that was curiously light, subtly asymmetrical, almost fanciful, unusual in these cold, severe regions. Grotesques, each one different from the other, decorated the front door and the lintels of the windows on the ground floor; from the front, the characters seemed to be smiling with all their teeth, but if you looked at them from the side, you saw that they were pulling their mouths open with both hands. Above the heavy wooden door, a cartouche decorated with flowers, muskets, and musical instruments bore a date: 1713. In Berlin, von Üxküll had told me the story of this almost French house, which had belonged to his mother, a von Recknagel. The ancestor who had built it was a Huguenot who had gone to Germany after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. He was a rich man and had managed to preserve a good amount of his wealth. In his old age, he married the daughter of a minor Prussian nobleman, an orphan who had inherited this estate. But he didn’t like his wife’s house and had it torn down to build this one. The wife, however, was devout, and thought such luxury scandalous: she had a chapel built, along with an annex behind the house, where she ended her days and which her husband promptly razed after her death. The chapel itself was still there, set a little apart under old oak trees, stiff, austere, with a bare façade of red brick and a gray, steeply sloping slate roof. I slowly walked around it, but didn’t try to open it. Piontek was still standing near the car, waiting without saying anything. I went over to him, opened the rear door, took out my bag, and said: “I’ll stay for a few days. Go back to Berlin. I’ll call or send a telegram for you to come get me. Will you be able to find this place again? If anyone asks, say you don’t know where I am.” He maneuvered to make a U-turn and started off again, bumping down the long lane of birch trees. I went to put my bag in front of the door. I contemplated the snow-covered courtyard, Piontek’s car going back down the lane. Besides the tracks the tires had just left, there were no others in the snow, no one came here. I waited till he reached the end of the lane and started off on the road to Tempelburg; then I opened the door.