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.

In the morning I was calmer. In the living room, I tried to resume reading after having some bread and coffee, and then my thoughts drifted away again, detached from the torments of Frédéric and Madame Arnoux. I wondered: What did you come here for? What do you want, exactly? To wait till Una returns? To wait till a Russian comes and slits your throat? To commit suicide? I thought about Helene. She and my sister, I said to myself, were the only two women, aside from a few nurses, to have seen my body naked. What had she seen, what had she thought when she saw that? What did she see in me that I didn’t see, and that my sister, for a long time now, didn’t want to see anymore? I thought about Helene’s body, I had often seen her in a bathing suit, her curves were finer and lither than my sister’s, her breasts smaller. Both had the same white skin, but this whiteness stood in stark contrast to the thick black hair of my sister, whereas with Helene, it continued in the soft blondness of her hair. Her sex too must have been blond and soft, but I didn’t want to think about that. I was seized by a sudden disgust. I said to myself: love is dead, the only love is dead. I shouldn’t have come, I should leave, go back to Berlin. But I didn’t want to go back to Berlin, I wanted to stay. A little later I got up and went out. I set off again through the forest, I found an old wooden bridge over the Drage and crossed it. The thickets became increasingly dense, dark, one could only continue on the foresters’ and loggers’ paths, across which branches stretched and scratched my clothes. Farther on stood an isolated hill from which one could probably see the whole region, but I didn’t push on as far as that, I walked aimlessly, in a circle perhaps, finally I found the river again and came back to the house. Käthe was waiting for me and came out of the kitchen to meet me: “Herr Busse is here, with Herr Gast and some other people. They’re waiting for you in the courtyard. I gave them some schnapps.” Busse was von Üxküll’s farmer. “What do they want with me?” I asked.—“They want to talk with you.” I crossed the house and went out into the courtyard. The farmers were sitting on an open wagon drawn by a scrawny draught horse, which was grazing on the tufts of grass emerging from the snow. When they saw me they bared their heads and jumped to the ground. One of them, a red-faced man, his hair gray but his moustache still black, came forward and bowed slightly in front of me. “Good day, Herr Obersturmbannführer. Käthe told us that you are the Baronness’s brother?” His tone was polite, but he was hesitating, searching for his words. “That’s right,” I said.—“Do you know where the Freiherr and the Freifrau are? Do you know what their plans are?”—“No. I thought I’d find them here. I don’t know where they are. In Switzerland, probably.”—“It’s just that we’ll soon have to leave, Herr Obersturmbannführer. We shouldn’t wait much longer. The Reds are attacking Stargard, they’ve surrounded Arnswalde. People are worried. The Kreisleiter says they’ll never reach this far, but we don’t believe him.” He was embarrassed, he kept turning his hat around in his hands. “Herr Busse,” I said, “I understand your concern. You have to think of your families. If you feel you should leave, leave. No one’s holding you back.” His face cleared a little. “Thank you, Herr Obersturmbannführer. It’s just that we were concerned, seeing as how the house was empty.” He hesitated. “If you like, I can give you a cart and a horse. We’ll help you, if you want to load some furniture. We can take it with us, put it somewhere safe.”—“Thank you, Herr Busse. I’ll think about it. I’ll send Käthe to get you, if I decide on something.”