The Kindly Ones

by Jonathan Littell

Night was falling. A thick frost covered everything: the twisted branches of the trees, the wires and poles of the fences, the dense grass, the earth in the almost bare fields. It was like a world of horrible white shapes, harrowing, ghostlike, a crystalline universe from which life seemed banished. I looked at the mountains: the vast blue wall barred the horizon, guardian of another world, a hidden one. The sun, over toward Abkhazia probably, was setting behind the ridges, but its light still touched the summits, casting on the snow sumptuous and soft pink, yellow, orange, fuchsia glints, which ran delicately from one peak to the other. It was a cruel beauty, enough to take your breath away, almost human but at the same time very remote from any human concerns. Little by little, behind, the sea was swallowing up the sun, and the colors were extinguished one by one, leaving the snow blue, then a gray-white that gleamed calmly in the night. The frost-encrusted trees appeared in the beams of our headlights like creatures in full movement. It was almost as if I had gone over to the other side, to that country that children know well, from which no one returns.