That night, I slept poorly in my little bed. I had drunk too much, my head was spinning, I was still suffering from the aftereffects of the shock from the day before. I hadn’t closed the shutters and the moonlight fell softly into the room, I pictured it penetrating the bedroom at the end of the hallway too, sliding over my sister’s sleeping body, naked under the sheet, and I would have liked to be this light, this intangible gentleness, but at the same time my mind was raging, the febrile arguments at dinner echoed in my head like the mad ringing of Orthodox bells at Easter and ruined the calm in which I’d have liked to bathe. Finally I sank into sleep, but the unease continued, stained my dreams in horrible colors. In a dark bedroom, I could see a tall, beautiful woman in a long white dress, maybe a wedding dress, I couldn’t make out her features but it was obviously my sister, she was lying on the ground, on the carpet, prey to uncontrollable convulsions and diarrhea. Black shit oozed through her dress, the inner folds must have been full of it. Von Üxküll, having found her this way, went back into the hallway (he was walking) to call in a peremptory tone a bellboy or a floor waiter (thus it must have been a hotel, I imagine it was their wedding night). Returning to the room, von Üxküll ordered the attendant to pick her up by her arms as he took her feet to carry her into the bathroom so she could be undressed and washed. He did this coldly, efficiently, he seemed indifferent to the foul smells emanating from her and choking me, I had to force myself to control my disgust, my rising nausea (but where was I, then, in this dream?).

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, running up to a beech wood. I turned right and entered the forest, following the course of the gently murmuring river. As I walked, I imagined Una walking with me. She was wearing a wool skirt and boots, a man’s leather jacket, and her large knit shawl. I saw her walking in front of me, with a sure, calm step, I watched her, aware of the play of her muscles and thighs, her buttocks, her proud, straight back. I couldn’t imagine anything nobler or truer or more beautiful. Farther on, oak and beech trees mixed with the pines, the ground became swampy, covered with waterlogged dead leaves through which my feet sank into a mud that was still hard from the cold. But a little farther along, the ground rose slightly and became dry and pleasant underfoot again. Here there were almost nothing but pines, thin and arrow-straight, young stock replanted after clear-cutting. Then finally the forest opened onto a brushy, cold, almost snowless meadow, looking down on the still water of the lake. To the right I saw a few houses, the road, the crest of the isthmus crowned with firs and birches. I knew that the river was called the Drage, and that it went from this lake to the Dratzig-See and then continued on to the Krössin-See, where there was an SS school, near Falkenburg. I looked at the gray expanse of the lake: around it lay the same ordered landscape of black earth and woods. I followed its bank to the village. A farmer in his garden hailed me, and I exchanged a few words with him; he was worried, he was afraid of the Russians, I couldn’t give him any definite news but I knew he was right to be afraid. At the road, I headed left and slowly climbed the long hill between the two lakes. The slopes were steep and hid the water from me. At the top of the isthmus, I climbed the hillock and went between the trees, pushing the branches aside, to a place overlooking, from high up, a bay that opened up into wide, irregular planes of water. The immobility of the water, of the black forests on the other bank, gave this landscape a solemn, mysterious look, like a kingdom beyond life, yet still on this side of death, a land between the two. I lit a cigarette and looked at the lake. A childhood conversation came to my mind, my sister, one day, had told me an old Pomeranian myth, the legend of Vineta, a beautiful, arrogant city swallowed up in the Baltic, whose bells fishermen still heard ringing on the water at noon, somewhere near Kolberg, it was said. This rich, great city, she had explained to me with her childlike seriousness, was lost because of the limitless desire of a woman, the king’s daughter. Many sailors and knights came to drink and amuse themselves there, handsome, strong men, full of life. Every night, the king’s daughter went out disguised into the town, she went down to the inns, the most sordid dens, and there she chose a man. She brought him back to her palace and made love to him all night; in the morning, the man was dead of exhaustion. Not one, even the strongest, resisted her insatiable desire. She had their corpses thrown into the sea, into a storm-tossed bay. But being unable to satisfy the immensity of her desire only excited that desire more. She could be seen walking on the beach, singing for the Ocean, to whom she wanted to make love. Only the Ocean, she sang, would be vast enough, powerful enough to fulfill her desire. Finally one night, unable to stand it any longer, she went out of her palace naked, leaving the corpse of her last lover in her bed. There was a storm that night, the Ocean was lashing the sea wall protecting the city. She went out onto the dyke and opened the great bronze door placed there by her father. The Ocean entered the city, took the princess and made her his wife, and kept the drowned city as her dowry. When Una had finished her story, I had pointed out that it was the same as the French legend of the city of Ys. “Indeed,” she had retorted haughtily, “but this one is more beautiful.”—“If I understand it correctly, it explains that the order of the city is incompatible with the insatiable pleasure of women.”—“I would say, rather, the excessive pleasure of women. But what you are proposing is a man’s morality. I believe that all these ideas—moderation, morality—were invented by men to compensate for the limits of their pleasure. For men have known for a long time that their pleasure can never be compared to the pleasure we endure, which is of a different order.”

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.