The Kindly Ones

COURANTE

And so I took a train in Minvody and slowly made my way up north. The traffic was constantly disrupted; I had to change convoys several times. In filthy waiting rooms, hundreds of soldiers milled around, standing up or sprawling on their kits, waiting to be served soup or a little ersatz coffee before heading off into the unknown. Someone would give up a space on a bench for me and I would remain there, motionless, until an exhausted stationmaster came and shook me. In Salsk, finally, they put me on a train coming up from Rostov with men and materiel for Hoth’s army. These makeshift units had been hastily and haphazardly formed: men on leave intercepted on the way home, as far as Lublin and even Posen, and sent back to Russia, underage conscripts whose training had been sped up and then curtailed, convalescents swept out of the lazarettos, individual soldiers from the Sixth Army found wandering outside of the Kessel, after the catastrophe. Hardly any of them seemed to have any idea of the gravity of the situation; and that wasn’t surprising, the military communiqués remained obstinately silent on the subject, at most mentioning activity in the Stalingrad sector. I didn’t speak with these men; I stowed my kit and wedged myself into the corner of a compartment, withdrawn into myself, absently studying the large vegetal shapes, branching out, intricate, deposited on the window by the frost. I didn’t want to think, but thoughts flooded in, bitter, full of self-pity. Bierkamp, a little inner voice raged inside me, would have done better to put me directly in front of a firing squad, that would have been more human, rather than making hypocritical speeches about the educational value of a siege in the middle of a Russian winter. Thank God, another voice groaned, at least I have my shuba and my boots. It was frankly a little difficult for me to conceive of the educational value of pieces of burning metal tearing through my flesh. When you shot a Jew or a Bolshevik, it had no educational value, it killed them, that’s all, even though we had a lot of nice euphemisms for that too. When the Soviets wanted to punish someone, they sent them to a shtrafbat, where the life expectancy was a few weeks at most: a brutal method, but an honest one, just like everything they did, in general. One of their great advantages over us (aside from their seemingly countless divisions and tanks): at least with them you knew where you stood.

The tracks were congested; we spent hours waiting on sidings, following unfathomable rules of priority set by mysterious, distant authorities. Sometimes I forced myself to go out and breathe in the biting air and stretch my legs: beyond the train there was nothing, a vast white expanse, empty, swept by the wind, cleansed of all life. Under my feet, the snow, hard and dry, cracked like a crust; the wind, when I faced it, chapped my cheeks; so I turned my back to it and looked at the steppe, the train with its windows white with frost, the rare other men propelled outside like me by their boredom or their diarrhea. Insane desires seized hold of me: to lie down on the snow, rolled in a ball in my coat, and to stay there when the train left, hidden already under a fine white layer, a cocoon that I imagined as soft, warm, tender as the womb from which I had one day been so cruelly expelled. These surges of melancholia frightened me; when I managed to regain control of myself, I wondered where this could be coming from. It wasn’t a habit of mine. Fear, maybe, I finally said to myself. Fine, fear, but fear of what, then? Death was something I thought I had tamed within me, and not just since the massacres of the Ukraine, but for a long time already. Yet perhaps that was just an illusion, a curtain drawn by my mind over the low animal instinct that was still there, lurking? That was possible, of course. But maybe it was also the idea of being surrounded: of heading alive into this vast open-air prison, as into an exile with no return. I had wanted to serve, I had carried out, for my nation and my people and in the name of this service, difficult and terrible things that went against my grain; and now I was to be exiled from myself and from the common life, sent to join those already dead, the abandoned ones. Hoth’s offensive? Stalingrad wasn’t Demyansk, and even before November 19 we were already at the end of our tether, out of breath and out of strength, we had reached the farthest limits; we, who had been so powerful, who thought we were just getting started. Stalin, that cunning Ossete, had used the tactics of his Scythian ancestors on us: the endless retreat, always farther into the interior, the little game, as Herodotus called it, the infernal pursuit; playing, using the emptiness. When the Persians gave the first signs of exhaustion and dejection, the Scythians imagined a way to give them some more courage and thus to make them drink their cup of sorrow to the dregs. They willingly sacrificed some herds that they let wander about in full visibility and that the Persians eagerly fell upon. Thus they regained a little optimism. Darius fell several times into this trap, but finally found himself driven to famine. It was then (writes Herodotus) that the Scythians sent Darius their mysterious message in the form of an offering: a bird, a rat, a frog, and five arrows. But, for us, no offering, no message: death, destruction, and the end of hope. Is it possible that I thought about all this at the time? Didn’t such ideas come to me later on, when the end was approaching, or even later, when it was already all over? Possible, but it is also possible that I already was thinking like that between Salsk and Kotelnikovo, for the proofs were there, you just had to open your eyes to see them, and my sadness had perhaps already begun to open my eyes. It’s hard to say, like a dream that leaves only vague, sour traces in the morning, like the cryptic drawings that, in the manner of a child, I traced with my fingernail in the frost on the train’s windows.

In Kotelnikovo, the staging area for Hoth’s offensive, they were unloading another train before ours, so we had to wait a long time to disembark. It was a little country station made of worn brick, with a few platforms of bad cement laid between the tracks; on either side, the cars, stamped with the German emblem, bore Czech, French, Belgian, Danish, Norwegian markings: to gather materiel as well as men, they were scouring the farthest reaches of Europe now. I stood leaning on the open door of my car, smoking and watching the confused commotion of the station. There were German soldiers of all kinds there, Russian Polizei or Ukrainians wearing armbands with swastikas and carrying old rifles, Hiwis with hollow features, peasants red with cold come to sell or exchange a few meager marinated vegetables or a scrawny chicken. The Germans wore coats or furs; the Russians, padded jackets, most of them in rags, from which tufts of straw or pieces of newspaper escaped; and this motley crowd was talking, heckling, jostling each other at the level of my boots, in huge jerky waves. Just beneath me, two big, sad soldiers were holding each other by the arm; a little farther down, a haggard, dirty Russian, trembling and wearing only a thin cloth jacket, was stumbling along the platform with an accordion in his hands: he approached some groups of soldiers or Polizei, who sent him away with a rough word or a shove, or at best turned their backs to him. When he came up to me I took a small bill out of my pocket and held it out to him. I thought he would go on his way, but he stayed there and asked me, in a mixture of Russian and bad German: “What would you like? Popular, traditional, or Cossack?” I didn’t understand what he was talking about and shrugged my shoulders: “It’s up to you.” He looked at me for an instant and struck up a Cossack song that I knew from having heard it often in the Ukraine, the one whose refrain goes so gaily Oy ty Galia, Galia molodaya… and which relates the atrocious story of a girl carried off by the Cossacks, tied by her long blond tresses to a pine tree, and burned alive. And it was magnificent. The man sang, his face raised up to me: his eyes, a faded blue, shone gently through the alcohol and the filth; his cheeks, beneath a scruffy reddish beard, quivered; and his bass voice, hoarse from coarse tobacco and drink, rose clear and pure and firm and he sang verse after verse, as if he would never stop. Beneath his fingers the keys of his accordion clicked. On the platform, the agitation had stopped, the people were watching and listening, a little surprised, even the ones who a few minutes before had treated him harshly, overcome by the simple and incongruous beauty of the song. From the other side, three fat peasant women were coming in single file, like three plump geese on a village path, with a large white triangle raised in front of their faces, a knitted wool shawl. The accordionist was blocking their path and they flowed around him the way a sea eddy skirts round a rock, while he pivoted slightly in the other direction without interrupting his song, then they continued along the train and the crowd shuffled and listened to the musician; behind me, in the corridor, some soldiers had come out of their compartments to listen to him. It seemed never to end, after each verse he attacked another one, and no one wanted it to end. Finally it did end, and without even waiting to be offered more money he continued on his way to the next car, and below my boots the people dispersed or resumed their activities or their waiting.

Finally our turn came to get out. On the platform, Feldgendarmen were examining documents and steering the men to various assembly points. They sent me to an office in the station where an exhausted clerk looked at me vacantly: “Stalingrad? I have no idea. Here is for the Hoth army.”—“They told me to come here and that I’d be transferred to one of the aerodromes.”—“The aerodromes are on the other side of the Don. Go see at HQ.” Another Feldgendarm got me into a truck headed for the AOK. There, I finally found a somewhat better informed operations officer: “Flights for Stalingrad leave from Tatsinskaya. But usually the officers who have to join the Sixth Army go there from Novocherkassk, where the HQ of Army Group Don is located. We have a liaison with Tatsinskaya every three days, maybe. I don’t understand why they sent you here. But we’ll try to find you something.” He set me up in a barrack room with a number of double beds. He reappeared a few hours later. “It’s all set. Tatsinskaya is sending you a Storch. Come along.” A driver ferried me outside the village to a makeshift runway in the snow. I waited some more in a hut heated by a stove, drinking ersatz coffee with a few noncoms from the Luftwaffe. The idea of an airlift to Stalingrad depressed them profoundly: “We’re losing five to ten planes a day, and in Stalingrad, apparently, they’re dying of hunger. If General Hoth doesn’t manage to break through, they’re fucked.”—“If I were you,” another one genially added, “I wouldn’t be in such a hurry to join them.”—“Couldn’t you get a little lost?” the first one joked. Then the little Fieseler Storch landed, skidding. The pilot didn’t even bother to cut the engine; he did a U-turn at the end of the runway and got into position for departure. One of the men from the Luftwaffe helped me carry my kit. “At least you’ll be dressed warmly,” he shouted out over the throb of the propeller. I hoisted myself up and settled in behind the pilot. “Thank you for coming!” I shouted to him.—“It’s nothing,” he answered, shouting to be heard. “We’re used to being taxi drivers.” He took off before I had even managed to buckle myself in, and veered off to the north. Night was falling but the sky was clear and for the first time I saw the earth from the skies. A flat, white, uniform surface extended to the horizon; here and there a track pathetically cut across the expanse, perfectly straight. The balki looked like long grooves of shadow nestled beneath the dying light that skimmed across the steppe. Where the tracks joined, remains of villages appeared, already half swallowed up, the roofless houses full of snow. Then came the Don, an enormous white snake curved in the whiteness of the steppe, made visible by its blue-tinted shores and the shadow of the hills overlooking the right bank. The sun, in the distance, was setting on the horizon like a swollen red ball, but the red gave no color to anything; the snow remained white and blue. After taking off, the Storch flew straight ahead, quite low, calmly, like a peaceable bumblebee; suddenly it veered left and went into a dive and beneath me there were rows of big transport planes on all sides, then already the wheels were touching down and the Storch was bouncing over the hard snow and taxiing over to pull up at the rear of the aerodrome. The pilot cut the engine and showed me a long, low building: “It’s over there. They’re waiting for you.” I thanked him and walked quickly with my kit to a door lit by a hanging lightbulb. On the runway, a Junker was coming in for a heavy landing. With nightfall the temperature was falling fast; the cold struck me in the face like a slap and burned my lungs. Inside, a noncom invited me to put down my kit; he led me to an operations room buzzing like a hive. An Oberleutnant from the Luftwaffe greeted me and checked my papers. “Unfortunately,” he said finally, “the flights for tonight are already full. I can put you on a morning flight. There’s another passenger waiting too.”—“You fly at night?” He looked surprised: “Of course. Why not?” I shook my head. He led me with my things to a dormitory set up in another building: “Try to sleep,” he said as he left. The dormitory was empty, but another kit lay on a bed. “That’s the officer who’s flying with you,” the Spiess who was accompanying me said. “He must be at the mess. Would you care to have something to eat, Herr Hauptsturmführer?” I followed him to another room, with some tables and benches lit by a yellowish lightbulb, where some pilots and ground personnel were eating and talking in low voices. Hohenegg was sitting alone at the end of a table; he let out a guffaw when he saw me: “My dear Hauptsturmführer! What kind of foolishness has brought you here?” I blushed with happiness, and went to get a dish of thick pea soup, some bread, and a cup of ersatz before sitting down opposite him. “It’s not your failed duel to which I owe the pleasure of your company, is it?” he asked again with his cheerful, pleasant voice, “I wouldn’t forgive myself.”—“Why do you say that?” He looked at once embarrassed and amused: “I have to confess that I was the one who denounced your plan.”—“You!” I didn’t know if I should burst out in a fit of rage or laughter. Hohenegg looked like a kid caught in the act. “Yes. First of all, let me tell you that it really was an idiotic idea, misplaced German romanticism. And also, remember, they wanted to ambush us. I had no intention of going and getting myself massacred with you.”—“Doctor, you are a man of little faith. Together, we could have foiled their stratagem.” I briefly explained my problems with Bierkamp, Prill, and Turek. “You shouldn’t complain,” he concluded. “I’m sure it will be a very interesting experience.”—“That’s what my Oberführer pointed out to me. But I’m not convinced.”—“That’s because you still lack philosophy. I thought you were made of sterner stuff.”—“Maybe I’ve changed. And you, Doctor? What brought you here?”—“A medical bureaucrat in Germany decided we should take advantage of the occasion to study the effects of malnutrition on our soldiers. AOK 6 thought it wasn’t necessary, but the OKH insisted. So they asked me to conduct this fascinating study. I confess that despite the circumstances it does excite my curiosity.” I pointed my spoon at his round belly: “Let’s hope you won’t become a subject of study yourself.”—“Hauptsturmführer, you are becoming rude. Wait till you’re my age to laugh. And how is our young linguist friend?” I looked at him calmly: “He is dead.” His face darkened: “Ah. I’m very sorry.”—“So am I.” I finished my soup and drank the tea. It was vile and bitter, but it quenched one’s thirst. I lit a cigarette. “I miss your Riesling, Doctor,” I said, smiling.—“I still have a bottle of Cognac,” he replied. “But let’s keep it. We’ll drink it together in the Kessel.”—“Doctor, never say: Tomorrow I shall do this or that, without adding: God willing.” He shook his head: “You missed your calling, Hauptsturmführer. Let’s go to bed.”

A noncom woke me from my bad sleep at around six o’clock. The mess was cold and almost empty; I didn’t taste the bitterness of the tea, but concentrated on its warmth, with both my hands around the tin cup. Then they led us with our kit to a freezing hangar where they made us wait for a long time, stamping our feet in the midst of oily machinery and crates of spare parts. My breath formed heavy condensation in front of my face, suspended in the moist air. Finally the pilot came and introduced himself: “We’ll fill up and get going,” he said. “Unfortunately, I don’t have any parachutes for you.”—“Are they of any use?” I asked. He laughed: “Theoretically, if we get shot down by a Soviet fighter plane, we might have time to jump. In practice, you can forget it.” He led us to a little truck that took us to a Junker-52 parked at the end of the runway. During the night the sky had become overcast; to the east, the cottony mass was clearing up. Some men were finishing loading small crates into the aircraft; the pilot had us climb in and showed us how to buckle down on a narrow seat. A thickset mechanic came and sat down opposite us; he flashed us a sardonic smile, then ignored us. Bursts of static and chatter came from the radio. The pilot slipped back out of the cockpit to check something in the rear, climbing over the pile of crates and bags tied down with cable mesh. “It is a good thing you’re leaving today,” he said as he returned. “The Reds are almost in Skassirskaya, just to the north. Soon we’ll close up shop here.”—“Are you going to evacuate the aerodrome?” I asked. He made a face and returned to his post. “You know our traditions, Hauptsturmführer,” Hohenegg commented. “We’ll only evacuate when everyone’s gotten killed.” One by one, the engines coughed and started up. A high throbbing sound filled the cabin; everything vibrated, the seat beneath me, the metal wall to my back; a monkey wrench left on the floor trembled. Slowly, the plane began to taxi to the runway, U-turned, picked up speed; the tail lifted; then the whole mass tore itself off the ground. Our bags, which hadn’t been tied down, slipped to the back; Hohenegg fell against me. I looked out the window: we were lost in the fog and the clouds; I could barely see the engine. The vibrations penetrated my body in an unpleasant way. Then the plane climbed beyond the cloud cover and the sky was a metallic blue; the dawning sun stretched its cold light over the immense landscape of clouds, undulating with balki like the steppe. The air was biting, the cabin wall icy; I wrapped myself in my coat and huddled down. Hohenegg seemed to be sleeping, his hands in his pockets, his head leaning forward; the plane’s vibrations and jolts disturbed me, I couldn’t do the same. Finally the plane began its descent; skimming over the summit of clouds, it dove, and once again everything was gray and dark. Through the monotonous buzzing of the propellers I thought I heard a muffled explosion, but I couldn’t be sure. A few minutes later, the pilot shouted into the cabin: “Pitomnik!” I shook Hohenegg, who woke up without any surprise, and wiped the condensation off the window. We had just passed beneath the clouds and the white steppe, almost shapeless, stretched beneath the wing. In front, everything was drastically changed: brown craters spattered the snow in large dirty spots; heaps of scrapped metal lay in tangles, powdered with white. The plane was coming down quickly, but I still couldn’t see the runway. Then it suddenly touched the ground, bounced, landed. The mechanic was already unbuckling his strap: “Quick, quick!” he shouted. I heard an explosion and a spray of snow struck the window and the wall of the cabin. I unbuckled frantically. The plane had slewed a little sideways and the mechanic opened the door and threw down the ladder. The pilot hadn’t cut the engines. The mechanic took our bags, tossed them unceremoniously out the opening, then motioned to us energetically to get out. A howling wind, loaded with fine, hard snow, struck me in the face. Some bundled-up men were busy around the plane, setting blocks in place, opening the hold. I slid down the ladder and gathered up my kit. A Feldgendarm armed with a submachine gun saluted me and gestured for me to follow him; I shouted out, “Wait, wait!” Hohenegg was getting out. A shell burst in the snow a few dozen meters away, but no one seemed to pay any attention to it. At the end of the runway rose a mound of swept snow; a group of men was waiting there, guarded by several armed Feldgendarmen, their sinister metal plates hanging over the coats. Hohenegg and I, behind our escort, approached them; closer up, I saw that most of these men were bandaged or holding makeshift crutches; two of them were lying on stretchers; all of them had the tag of the wounded pinned visibly on their greatcoats. At a signal, they rushed toward the plane. Behind them was a melee: Feldgendarmen were blocking an opening in the barbed wire, beyond which a mass of haggard men were pushing each other; they were shouting, begging, waving bandaged limbs, pressing against the Feldgendarmen who were also shouting and brandishing their submachine guns. Another detonation, closer this time, made some snow rain down; several of the wounded had thrown themselves to the ground, but the Feldgendarmen remained unruffled; behind us there was shouting; some of the men who were unloading the plane seemed to have been hit, they lay on the ground and others were pulling them aside, the wounded who were being allowed to board were shoving each other to climb up the ladder, still other men were finishing unloading the plane and tossing bags and crates to the ground. The Feldgendarm accompanying us fired a brief volley into the air and then dove forward into the hysterical, imploring crowd, hitting out with his elbows; I followed him as well as I could, dragging Hohenegg behind me. Beyond were rows of tents covered with frost, the brown openings of bunkers; farther on, radio trucks were parked in a tight group, in the midst of a forest of poles, antennas, wires; at the end of the runway began a vast dumping ground of metal wrecks, planes that had been blown up or split in half, burned trucks, tanks, smashed vehicles piled on top of each other, half hidden beneath the snow. Some officers were coming toward us; we exchanged salutes. Two military doctors welcomed Hohenegg; my interlocutor was a young Leutnant from the Abwehr, who introduced himself and bade me welcome: “I have to look after you and find you a vehicle to take you into the city.” Hohenegg was walking away: “Doktor!” I shook his hand. “We’ll surely see each other again,” he said kindly. “The Kessel isn’t so big. When you’re feeling sad, come find me and we’ll drink my Cognac.” I made a wide gesture with my hand: “In my opinion, Doktor, your Cognac won’t last long.” I followed the Leutnant. Near the tents I noticed a series of large heaps powdered with snow. From time to time, a muffled explosion would resound all through the aerodrome. Already the Junker that had brought us was slowly taxiing toward the end of the runway. I paused to watch it take off and the Leutnant watched with me. The wind was blowing quite hard, you had to blink your eyes so as not to be blinded by the fine snow raised from the surface of the ground. Having reached the far point, the plane swung round and, without pausing the slightest bit, accelerated. It swerved once, then again, dangerously close to the snowy embankment; then the wheels left the ground and it rose up groaning, swaying, with great juddering, before vanishing into the opaque cloud bank. I looked again at the snowy pile beside me and saw that it was made up of corpses, piled like logs to form long cords, their frozen faces the color of bronze gone slightly green, studded with dense beards, and with ice crystals at the corners of their mouths, in their nostrils, their eye sockets. There must have been hundreds of them. I asked the Leutnant: “You don’t bury them?” He stamped his foot: “How are we supposed to bury them? The ground is hard as iron. We don’t have any explosives to waste. We can’t even dig trenches.” We walked on; where traffic had made paths, the ground was slick, slippery; you had to walk to the side, through the snowdrifts. The Leutnant led me to a long low line covered with snow. I thought they were bunkers, but when I approached I saw that they were in fact half-buried train cars, their walls and roofs covered with sandbags, with steps dug into the ground leading to the doors. The Leutnant brought me in; inside, some officers were bustling about in the hallway; the train compartments had been transformed into offices; a few weak lightbulbs spread a dirty, yellowish light, and they must have had a stove going somewhere, it wasn’t all that cold. The Leutnant invited me to sit down in a compartment, after clearing the seat of the papers piled on it. I noticed some Christmas decorations, coarsely cut out of colored paper, hanging in the window, behind which were piled up the earth and snow and the frozen sandbags. “Would you like some tea?” the Leutnant asked. “I can’t offer you anything else.” I accepted, and he went out. I took off my shapka and unfastened my coat, then collapsed into the seat. The Leutnant returned with two cups of ersatz and held one out to me; he drank his own standing in the entrance to the compartment. “Hard luck for you,” he said timidly, “being sent here like this just before Christmas.” I shrugged my shoulders and blew on my scalding tea: “Christmas doesn’t mean that much to me, really.”—“For us, here, it’s very important.” He gestured at the decorations. “The men are very attached to it. I hope the Reds will leave us in peace. But you can’t count on it.” I found this strange: Hoth, in principle, was advancing to make his junction; it seemed to me that the officers should have been in the process of preparing their retreat rather than getting ready for Christmas. The Leutnant looked at his watch: “Movements are strictly limited and we can’t take you into the city right away. There will be a liaison this afternoon.”—“Fine. Do you know where I have to go?” He looked surprised: “To the city Kommandantur, I guess. All the SP officers are there.”—“I have to present myself to Feldpolizeikommissar Möritz.”—“Yes, that’s right.” He hesitated: “Have some rest. I’ll come and get you.” He left. A little later, another officer came in, greeted me absently, and began vigorously working at a typewriter. I went into the hallway, but it was too crowded. I began to feel hungry; they hadn’t offered me anything, and I didn’t want to ask. I went to smoke a cigarette outside, you could hear the droning of the planes, some explosions from time to time, then I went back in to wait, in the monotonous clacking of the typewriter.

The Leutnant reappeared in midafternoon. I was famished. He pointed to my kit and said, “The liaison is about to leave.” I followed him to an Opel equipped with chains and driven, strangely, by an officer. “Good luck,” the Leutnant said, saluting me.—“Happy Christmas,” I replied. Five of us had to pile into the car; with our coats, there was hardly any room and I felt as if I were suffocating. I leaned my head against the cold window and breathed onto it to defrost it. The car started up and left, jolting. The road, marked out by tactical signs nailed to posts, boards, and even to frozen horse legs, planted in the snow hoof-up, was slippery, and despite its chains, the Opel often skidded sideways; most of the time, the officer righted it adroitly, but sometimes it got buried in the snowdrifts and then we had to get out and push to free it. Pitomnik, I knew, was near the center of the Kessel, but the liaison wasn’t going directly to Stalingrad; it followed a capricious route, stopping off at various command posts; each time, officers got out of the car and others took their places; the wind had risen and it was becoming a snowstorm: we advanced slowly, as if we were feeling our way along. Finally the first ruins appeared, some brick chimneys, stumps of walls standing along the road. Between two blasts of wind I glimpsed a sign: ENTER STALINGRAD AT THE RISK OF DEATH. I turned to my neighbor: “Is that a joke?” He looked at me dully: “No. Why?” The road was descending a kind of cliff, snaking back and forth; at the bottom, the ruins of the city began: huge shattered buildings, burned, with gaping, blind windows. The roadway was strewn with debris, sometimes hastily cleared away so vehicles could thread their way through. The bomb craters hidden by the snow inflicted brutal jolts on the shock absorbers. On all sides flowed a chaos of wrecked cars, trucks, tanks, German and Russian intermingled, sometimes even embedded in each other. Here and there we passed a patrol or, to my surprise, civilians in rags, women especially, carrying buckets or bags. With a clanking of chains, the Opel crossed a long bridge repaired with prefabricated sections, over a railroad: below, hundreds of motionless train cars stretched out, covered with snow, intact or mangled by explosions. After the silence of the steppe, pierced only by the noise of the engine, the chains, and the wind, a constant racket reigned here, detonations more or less muffled, the abrupt barking of the PAKs, the crackle of machine guns. After the bridge, the car turned left, following the railroad and the abandoned freight trains. To our right a long bare park, completely treeless, emerged; beyond, more ruined buildings, dark, silent, their façades collapsed into the street, or else raised up against the sky like a stage set. The road skirted round the train station, a large building from the czarist era, once probably yellow and white; on the square, in front, a confusion of burned vehicles, torn to pieces by direct impacts, lay piled up, their twisted forms scarcely softened by the snow. The car set out on a long diagonal avenue: the noise of the gunfire intensified; in front, I could see puffs of black smoke but didn’t have the slightest idea where the front line could be. The avenue emerged onto an immense empty square, full of debris, surrounding a kind of park marked out by streetlights. The officer parked the car in front of a large building: at its corner, a peristyle in a half-circle with its columns riddled by gunfire, surmounted by large bay windows, empty and black; at the top, a flag with a swastika hung limply on a pole. “You’re here,” he said to me, lighting a cigarette. I extracted myself from the car, opened the trunk, and got out my kit. Some soldiers armed with submachine guns were standing under the peristyle but didn’t come forward. As soon as I closed the trunk, the Opel started up again, executed a rapid U-turn, and headed back up the avenue toward the train station, in a noisy clang of chains. I looked at the desolate square: in the center, a circle of children made of stone or plaster, probably the remnants of a fountain, seemed to be mocking the ruins all around. When I went toward the peristyle, the soldiers saluted me but barred my way; I saw with surprise that they were all wearing the white armband of the Hiwis. One of them asked me in bad German for my papers, and I held out my paybook. He examined it, returned it to me with a salute, and gave a brief order, in Ukrainian, to one of his comrades. He signed for me to follow. I climbed the steps between the columns, broken glass and stucco crackling beneath my boots, and entered the dark building through a wide opening without any doors. Just beyond stood a row of pink plastic mannequins dressed in varied attire: women’s dresses, blue work clothes, twill suits; the figures, some of their skulls smashed by bullets, were still smiling inanely, their hands raised or pointing in childish, unformed gestures. Behind them, in the darkness, stood shelves still full of household objects, shattered or overturned glass cases, counters covered with plaster and debris, display shelves of polka-dot dresses or bras. I followed the young Ukrainian through the aisles of this phantom store to a stairway guarded by two other Hiwis; on an order from my escort, they stood aside to let me pass. He led me down to a basement lit by the yellow, diffuse light of weak bulbs: hallways, rooms swarming with Wehrmacht officers and soldiers dressed in the most disparate uniforms, regulation coats, padded gray jackets, Russian greatcoats with German insignias. The farther in we went, the hotter, damper, heavier the air became; I was sweating profusely under my coat. We went down even more stairs, then crossed a large, high-ceilinged operations room lit by a chandelier overloaded with glass, with Louis XVI furniture and crystal glasses scattered among the maps and files; a crackling Mozart aria was emanating from a portable gramophone set on top of two crates of French wine. The officers were working in slippers, wearing casual slacks and even shorts; no one paid any attention to me. Beyond the room was another hallway, and I finally saw someone in an SS uniform: the Ukrainian left me there and the Untersturmführer led me to Möritz.

The Feldpolizeikommissar, a stocky bulldog with wire-rimmed glasses, wearing nothing more than a pair of pants with suspenders and a stained undershirt, welcomed me rather dryly: “It’s about time. I’ve been requesting someone for three weeks now. Ah well, Heil Hitler.” A heavy silver ring gleamed on his hand stretched almost to the level of the lightbulb hanging over his massive head. I recognized him vaguely: in Kiev, the Kommando worked closely with the Secret Feldpolizei; I must have crossed him in a hallway. “I received the assignment order just four days ago, Herr Kommissar. I couldn’t come any faster.”—“I’m not blaming you. It’s those damn bureaucrats. Have a seat.” I took off my shuba and my shapka, put them on my kit, and looked for a seat in the cluttered office. “As you know, I’m not an SS officer, and my group of the Geheime Feldpolizei is under the control of the AOK. But as a Kriminalrat of the Kripo, all branches of the police in the Kessel are under my command. It’s a rather delicate arrangement, but we understand each other. The Feldgendarmen take care of the executive tasks, or else my Ukrainians do it. I used to have eight hundred in all, but there’ve been some losses. They’re divided up between the two Kommandanturen, this one and another one south of the Tsaritsa. You are the only SD officer in the Kessel, so your jobs will be pretty varied. My Leiter IV will explain it all to you in detail. He’ll also take care of your logistics problems. He’s an SS-Sturmbannführer, so unless there’s an emergency, you’ll report to him and he’ll summarize it for me. Good luck.”

Coat and kit under my arm, I went back out into the hallway and found the Untersturmführer: “The Leiter IV, please?”—“This way.” I followed him to a little room cluttered with desks, papers, crates, files, with candles stuck on every available surface. An officer raised his head: it was Thomas. “Well,” he said happily, “it’s about time.” He got up, skirted round the table, and warmly shook my hand. I looked at him, speechless at first. Then I said: “But what are you doing here?” He spread his arms; as was his habit, he was impeccably turned out, freshly shaved, his hair combed with brilliantine, his tunic buttoned up to the neck, with all his decorations. “I volunteered, Max. What have you brought us to eat?” I opened my eyes wide: “To eat? Nothing, why?” His face took on a horrified expression: “You’ve just come from outside of Stalingrad and you haven’t brought anything to eat? You should be ashamed. Didn’t anyone explain to you the situation, here?” I bit my lip, I couldn’t tell if he was joking: “Actually, it didn’t occur to me. I told myself that the SS would have whatever they needed.” He briskly sat back down and his voice took on a mocking tone: “Find yourself a free crate. You should know that the SS controls neither the planes nor what they bring. We receive everything from the AOK, and they distribute our rations to us at the standard rate, which is, right now”—he searched his desk and pulled out a piece of paper—“two hundred grams of meat, usually horse, per man per day, two hundred grams of bread, and twenty grams of margarine or fat. Needless to say,” he went on as he put the paper down, “one could do with more.”—“You don’t look too badly off,” I remarked. “Yes, well, fortunately, some people are more provident than you. And also our Ukrainian boys are pretty resourceful, especially if you don’t ask them too many questions.” I pulled some cigarettes out of my jacket pocket and lit one. “At least,” I said, “I brought some smokes.”—“Ah! You see, you’re not such a simpleton. So, apparently you ran into some trouble with Bierkamp?”—“In a way, yes. A misunderstanding.” Thomas leaned forward a little and shook a finger: “Max, I’ve been telling you for years now to tend to your relations. One day it’ll end badly.” I made a vague gesture toward the door: “You could say it’s already ended badly. And also I should point out that you’re here too.”—“Here? It’s fine here, aside from the grub. Afterward, there will be promotions, decorations, e tutti quanti. We’ll be real heroes and we can parade our medals at the finest soirées. They’ll even forget your little troubles.”—“You seem to be omitting one detail: between you and your soirées, there are a few Soviet armies. Der Manstein kommt, but he hasn’t arrived yet.” Thomas made a scornful face: “You’re a defeatist, as always. What’s more, you’re not well informed: der Manstein isn’t coming anymore; he gave Hoth the order to retreat several hours ago. With the Italian front collapsing, they need him elsewhere. Otherwise we’ll lose Rostov. In any case, even if he had reached us, there wouldn’t have been an order to evacuate. And without orders, Paulus would never have budged. This whole business with Hoth, if you want my opinion, was just for show. So that Manstein could have a good conscience. And the Führer too, for that matter. All that’s to say that I never counted on Hoth. Give me a cigarette.” I handed him one and lit it for him. He exhaled for a long time and threw himself back on his chair: “The indispensable men, the specialists, will be evacuated just before the end. Möritz is on the list—me too, of course. Obviously, some will have to stay to the end to hold down the shop. That’s called being out of luck. The same goes for our Ukrainians: they’re screwed and they know it. It makes them mean, and they take their revenge in advance.”—“You could get yourself killed first. Or even when you leave: I saw that quite a few planes weren’t making it.” He smiled widely: “That, my friend, is an occupational hazard. You can also get yourself run over by a car when you’re crossing Prinz-Albrechtstrasse.”—“I’m happy to see you’ve lost none of your cynicism.”—“My dear Max, I’ve explained to you a hundred times that National Socialism is a jungle that functions according to strictly Darwinian principles. It’s the survival of the fittest or the cleverest. But you never want to recognize that.”—“Let’s just say that I have a different vision of things.”—“Yes, and look at the result: you’re in Stalingrad.”—“And you really asked to come here?”—“Before the encirclement, of course. Things didn’t seem to be going so badly in the beginning. And at the Group, it was getting rather dull. I had no desire to wake up as a KdS in some godforsaken hole in the Ukraine. Stalingrad offered interesting possibilities. And if I get out, it will have been worth it. Otherwise…” he laughed out loud. “C’est la vie.”—“Your optimism is admirable. And what about my own prospects?”—“You? That might be a little more complicated. If they sent you here, it’s because they don’t think you’re indispensable: you’ll agree with me on that. So for a place on the evacuation lists, I’ll see what I can do, but I can’t guarantee anything. Otherwise, you can always get yourself a Heimatschuss. Then we could manage to ship you out on priority. But be careful! Don’t get wounded too seriously; they only repatriate the ones who can be patched up to serve again. Speaking of which, we’re beginning to have quite a lot of experience with self-inflicted wounds. You should see what the guys invent, sometimes they’re very ingenious. Since the end of November, we’ve been shooting more of our own men than Russians. To encourage the others, as Voltaire once said about Admiral Byng.”—“But you’re not suggesting…” Thomas waved his hands: “No, no! Don’t be so gullible. I was just saying that because we were on the subject. Have you eaten?” I hadn’t thought about it since I had arrived in the city; my stomach grumbled. Thomas laughed. “Actually, not since this morning. In Pitomnik, they didn’t offer me anything.”—“People are losing all sense of hospitality. Come, let’s go put your things away. I had you bunk in my room, so I can keep an eye on you.”

Once I had eaten, I felt better. While I was swallowing a kind of broth in which vague scraps of meat were floating, Thomas had explained the gist of my duties: collecting gossip, rumors, and Latrinenparolen and reporting on the soldiers’ morale; fighting Russian defeatist propaganda; and maintaining a few informers, civilians, often children, who slipped from one line to the other. “It’s something of a double-edged sword,” he said, “because they give the Russians as much information as they report to us. And also they often lie. But sometimes they’re useful.” In our quarters, a narrow room furnished with a metal bunk bed and an empty ammunition crate with an enamel basin and a cracked mirror to shave with, he had brought me a reversible winter uniform, a typical product of German ingenuity, white on one side, feldgrau on the other. “Take that for your sorties,” he said. “Your coat is fine for the steppe; in town it’s much too heavy.”—“Can we go out?”—“You’ll have to. But I’ll give you a guide.” He led me to a guard room where some Ukrainian auxiliaries were playing cards and drinking tea. “Ivan Vassilievitch!” Three men raised their heads; Thomas pointed to one, who came out and joined us in the hallway. “This is Ivan. He’s one of my best. He’ll take care of you.” He turned to him and explained something to him in Russian. Ivan, a young, blond, rather slim youth with prominent cheekbones, listened to him attentively. Thomas turned back to me: “Ivan isn’t an ace at discipline, but he knows every nook and cranny of this city and he’s very trustworthy. Never go out without him, and outside, do anything he tells you, even if you don’t see why. He speaks a little German, you’ll be able to understand each other. Capisce? I told him that he was now your personal bodyguard and that he would have to answer for your life.” Ivan saluted me and went back into the room. I felt exhausted. “Go on, go to sleep,” Thomas said. “Tomorrow night, we’re celebrating Christmas.”

My first night in Stalingrad, I still remember, I had another metro dream. It was a station with many levels, but they communicated with each other, a huge labyrinth of steel beams, footbridges, steep metal ladders, spiral staircases. The trains arrived at the platforms and left them in a deafening racket. I didn’t have a ticket and I was terrified of being checked by the station police. I went down a few levels and slipped into a train that was leaving the station and then dive-bombed almost vertically on its tracks; below, it slowed down, reversed its direction and, passing by the platform again without stopping, plunged in the other direction, into a vast abyss of light and harsh noise. When I awoke, I felt drained; I had to make an immense effort to wash my face and shave. My skin itched; I hoped I wasn’t catching lice. I spent a few hours studying a map of the city and some files; Thomas helped me orient myself: “The Russians are still holding a thin strip along the river. They were surrounded, especially when the river was carrying ice floes and wasn’t completely frozen; now it doesn’t matter if they have their backs to the river; they’re the ones surrounding us. Here, above, is Red Square; last month, we finally managed, a little farther down, there, to cut their front in half, and so we have a foot on the Volga, here at the level of their old landing area. If we had ammunition we could almost prevent them from getting supplies, but we can really only shoot in case of attack, and they come and go as they please, even in daytime, on ice roads. All their logistics, their hospitals, their artillery, is on the other bank. From time to time we send them a few Stukas, but that’s just to tease them. Near here, they’ve hung on to a few blocks along the river, then they hold the whole big refinery, up to the foot of Hill 102, which is an old Tatar kurgan we’ve taken and lost dozens of times. The One Hundredth Jägerdivision holds this sector—Austrians, with a Croat regiment. Behind the refinery, there are some cliffs that lead to the river, and the Russians have a whole underground network inside them, untouchable since our shells pass right over them. We tried to liquidate it by blowing up the oil tanks, but they rebuilt everything as soon as the fires went out. Farther on, they also hold a large section of the Lazur chemical factory, with the whole zone we call the “Tennis Racket,” because of the shape of the tracks. Farther north, most of the factories are ours, except a sector of the Red October foundry. From there on we’re on the river, up to Spartakovka, the northern limit of the Kessel. The city itself is held by General Seydlitz’s LIST Corps; but the factories sector belongs to the Eleventh Corps. To the south, it’s the same thing: the Reds hold just a strip, about a hundred meters wide. It’s those hundred meters we never managed to reduce. The city is more or less cut in half by the Tsaritsa ravine; we’ve inherited a fine underground complex dug into the cliffs, and that has become our main hospital. Behind the train station, there’s a Stalag, administered by the Wehrmacht; we have a little KL in the Vertyashyi kolkhoz, for the civilians we arrest and don’t execute right away. What else? There are brothels in the basements, but you’ll find those on your own, if you’re interested. Ivan knows them well. That said, the girls are mostly covered in lice.”—“Speaking of lice…”—“Oh, you’ll have to get used to them. Look.” He unfastened his tunic, slipped his hand inside, searched, and pulled it out: it was full of little gray creatures, which he threw on the stove where they began to crackle. Thomas continued calmly: “We have huge fuel problems. Schmidt, the Chief of Staff—the one who replaced Heim, you remember?—Schmidt controls all the reserves, even our own, and he dispenses it in dribs and drabs. Anyway, you’ll see: Schmidt controls everything here. Paulus is just a marionette. The result is that moving around by car is forbidden. Between Hill 102 and the south station, we do everything on foot; to go farther, you have to hitch a ride with the Wehrmacht. They have pretty regular liaisons between the sectors.” There was still a lot to absorb, but Thomas was patient. Midmorning, we learned that Tatsinskaya had fallen at dawn; the Luftwaffe had waited till the Russian tanks were at the edge of the runway to evacuate, and had lost 72 aircraft, almost 10 percent of their transport fleet. Thomas had shown me the supply figures: they were catastrophic. The previous Saturday, December 19, 154 planes had been able to land with 289 tons; but there were also days with only 15 or 20 tons; AOK 6, at the beginning, had demanded 700 tons per day, at a minimum, and Göring had promised 500. “As for that one,” Möritz commented dryly during the meeting when he announced to his officers the news of the loss of Tatsinskaya, “a few weeks’ diet in the Kessel would do him good.” The Luftwaffe planned to move to Salsk, 300 kilometers away from the Kessel, the maximum range of the Ju-52s. That promised a merry Christmas.

Near the end of the morning, after a soup and some dry biscuits, I said to myself, All right, time to start work. But where to start? With troop morale? Why not then, troop morale. I could well guess it wasn’t going to be good, but it was my duty to verify my opinions. Studying the morale of the Wehrmacht soldiers meant going out; I didn’t think Möritz wanted a report on the morale of our Ukrainian Askaris, the only soldiers I had within reach. The idea of leaving the entirely relative security of the bunker worried me, but I had to do it. And also, I did have to see this city. Maybe I would get used to it and things would go better. As I was putting on my new outfit, I hesitated; I decided on the gray side, but saw from Ivan’s face that I had made a mistake. “It’s snowing today. Wear the white side out.” I ignored the inappropriate informality of the du form of address and went back to change. I also took a helmet; Thomas had insisted on it: “You’ll see, it’s very useful.” Ivan handed me a submachine gun; I dubiously contemplated the mechanism, unsure if I knew how to use it, but slung it over my shoulder nonetheless. Outside, a violent wind was still blowing, carrying with it large swirls of snowflakes: from the entrance of the Univermag, you couldn’t even see the fountain with the children. After the stifling dampness of the bunker, the cold, sharp air invigorated me. “Kuda?” Ivan asked. I had no idea. “To the Croats,” I said at random; Thomas, that morning, had mentioned some Croats. “Is it far?” Ivan grunted and turned right, down a long street that seemed to head toward the train station. The city seemed relatively calm; from time to time, a muffled explosion resounded through the snow, and even that made me nervous; I unhesitatingly copied Ivan, who walked right next to the buildings, I clung to the walls. I felt terrifyingly naked, vulnerable, like a crab that’s left its shell; I realized keenly that for all the eighteen months I had been in Russia, this was the first time I was actually under fire; and an unpleasant sense of dread made my limbs heavy and numbed my thoughts. I have spoken before about fear: what I felt then I won’t call fear, or else not an honest, conscious fear, but rather an almost physical discomfort, like an itch that you can’t scratch, concentrated on the blind parts of the body—the nape of the neck, the back, the buttocks. To try to distract myself, I looked at the buildings on the other side of the street. Many façades had collapsed, revealing the interior of the apartments, a series of dioramas of everyday life, powdered with snow and sometimes odd: on the third floor, a bicycle hanging on the wall; on the fourth, flowered wallpaper, an intact mirror, and a framed reproduction of Kramskoy’s haughty Unknown Woman; on the fifth, a green sofa with a corpse lying on it, its feminine hand dangling in the void. A shell, hitting the roof of a building, broke this illusion of peacefulness: I hunched over and understood why Thomas had insisted on the helmet: I was hit by a rain of debris, fragments of roof tiles and bricks. When I raised my head I saw that Ivan hadn’t even leaned over, he had just covered his eyes with his hand. “Come on,” he said, “it’s nothing.” I calculated the direction of the river and of the front and understood that the buildings we were walking alongside were partly protecting us: for the shells to fall in this street, they had to pass over the roofs; it wasn’t very likely they’d burst on the ground. But this thought didn’t do much to reassure me. The street led to some ruined outbuildings and railway warehouses; Ivan, in front of me, crossed the long square at a trot, and slipped into one of the warehouses through a metal door rolled up on itself like the lid of a sardine can. I hesitated, then followed him. Inside, I threaded my way through mountains of crates long ago plundered, skirted round a section of collapsed roof, and emerged into the open through a hole in a brick wall, where there were many traces of footprints in the snow. The path ran alongside the walls of the warehouses; on the slope overhanging the path stretched the freight train cars that I had seen the day before from the bridge, their sides riddled with bullet holes and shrapnel strikes and covered with Russian and German graffiti, ranging from the comic to the obscene. An excellent color caricature showed Stalin and Hitler fornicating while Roosevelt and Churchill jacked off around them: but I couldn’t decide who had painted it, one of ours or one of theirs, and so it was not very useful for my report. A little farther on, a patrol coming from the opposite direction passed us without a word, without a salute. The men’s faces were haggard, sallow, scraggly with beards; they kept their fists shoved into their pockets, and dragged along in boots wrapped with rags or enveloped in enormous cumbersome galoshes made of braided straw. They disappeared behind us into the snow. Here and there, in a train car or on the rails, appeared a frozen corpse, its uniform an indistinguishable color. We heard no more explosions and everything seemed calm. Then in front of us it started up again: detonations, gunshots, or machine-gun volleys. We had passed the last warehouses and crossed another residential zone: the landscape opened up onto a snowy terrain dominated, on the left, by an enormous round hillock like a little volcano, its summit periodically spitting out black smoke from explosions. “Mamaev Kurgan,” Ivan pointed, before turning left and entering a building.

A few soldiers were sitting in empty rooms, leaning against the wall, their knees pulled up to their chests. They looked at us with empty eyes. Ivan led me through several buildings, passing through inner courtyards or alleyways; then, since we were probably by now far enough from the lines, he continued down a street. The buildings here were low, two stories at most, perhaps workers’ dormitories; then came smashed houses, collapsed, ruined, but still more recognizable than the ones I had seen entering the city. Occasionally a movement or a sound indicated that some of these ruins were still inhabited. The wind continued blowing; now I could hear the roar of detonations on the kurgan, which was outlined on our right, behind the houses. Ivan led me through some small gardens, recognizable beneath the snow from the debris of fences or railings. The place looked deserted, but the path we were following was well used, footsteps had cleared away the snow. Then he dove into a balka, sliding down the slope. The kurgan disappeared from sight; at the far end, the wind blew less strongly, the snow fell gently, and suddenly things became animated; two Feldgendarmen barred our way; behind them soldiers were coming and going. I presented my papers to the Feldgendarmen, who saluted me and stepped aside to let us pass; and then I saw that the eastern side of the balka, its back to the kurgan and the front, was riddled with bunkers, dark tunnels propped up by beams or boards from which emerged little smoking chimneys made of tin cans stuck to each other. The men entered and left this troglodyte city on their knees, often backward. At the end of the ravine, on a wooden block, two soldiers were cutting up a frozen horse with an axe; the pieces, chopped at random, were thrown into a pot where some water was heating. After about twenty minutes the path joined up with another balka that housed similar bunkers; in places rudimentary trenches rose toward the kurgan we were skirting; here and there, a tank buried up to its turret served as a fixed artillery piece. Russian shells occasionally fell around these ravines, sending up immense sprays of snow; I could hear them whistling, a piercing, nerve-shattering, gut-wrenching sound; each time I had to resist the impulse to throw myself to the ground, and forced myself to follow the example of Ivan, who haughtily ignored them. After a while I managed to regain confidence: I let myself be invaded by the feeling that everything here was a vast children’s game, a huge adventure playground of the sort you dream about when you’re eight or nine, with sound effects, special effects, secret passages, and I was almost laughing with pleasure, caught up as I was in this idea that brought me back to my earliest games, when Ivan dove onto me without warning and pinned me to the ground. A deafening explosion tore the world apart, it was so close that I could feel the air slamming onto my eardrums, and a rain of mixed snow and earth fell onto us. I tried to curl up, but already Ivan was pulling me by the shoulder and lifting me up: thirty meters away, black smoke was lazily rising from the ground of the balka, the raised dust slowly settled onto the snow, an acrid smell of cordite filled the air. My heart was pounding wildly, I felt such an intense heaviness in my thighs that it was painful, I wanted to sit back down, like a mass. But Ivan didn’t seem to be taking it seriously; he was carefully brushing off his uniform. Then he had me turn my back to him and he vigorously brushed it while I shook off my sleeves. We continued on our way. I began to find this episode idiotic: What was I doing there, after all? I seemed to have trouble grasping the fact that I was no longer in Pyatigorsk. Our road emerged from the balki: then a long empty unkempt plateau began, dominated by the rear side the kurgan. The frequency of the detonations at the summit, which I knew to be occupied by our troops, fascinated me: How was it possible for men to stay there, to undergo that rain of fire and metal? I was a kilometer or two away from it, yet it scared me. Our path snaked between mounds of snow that the wind, here and there, had eroded to reveal a cannon pointing to the sky, the twisted door of a truck, the wheels of an overturned car. In front of us we joined up again with the railroad tracks, empty this time, disappearing in the distance into the steppe. They led out from behind the kurgan, and I was seized by the irrational terror of seeing a column of T-34s suddenly appear along the tracks. Then another ravine cut through the plateau and I hurtled down its side following Ivan, as if I were diving into the warm security of a childhood house. Here too were bunkers, petrified and scared soldiers. I could have stopped anywhere, talked to the men and then gone back, but I docilely followed Ivan, as if he knew what I had to do. Finally we emerged from this long balka: once again a residential zone stretched out; but the houses were razed, burned to the ground, even the chimneys had collapsed. Ruined military gear cluttered up the narrow streets, tanks, assault vehicles, Soviet artillery, German too. Carcasses of horses lay in absurd positions, sometimes tangled in the harnesses of carts volatilized like straw; under the snow, you could still make out corpses, also often surprised in curious contortions, fixed in place by the cold until the next thaw. From time to time a patrol passed us; there were also checkpoints, where Feldgendarmen a little better off than the soldiers went through our papers before letting us pass into the next sector. Ivan started up a wider street; a woman came toward us, hunched into two coats and a scarf, a small nearly empty bag on her shoulder. I looked at her face: impossible to say if she was twenty or fifty. Farther on, a fallen bridge lay collapsed on the bed of a deep ravine; to the east, near the river, another bridge, very high up, surprisingly intact, spanned the mouth of this same ravine. We had to descend here by clinging to debris and then, skirting round or scaling the pieces of smashed concrete, climb back up the other side. A Feldgendarm post stood in a shelter formed by a piece of broken roadway. “Khorvati?” Ivan asked them. “The Croats?” The Feldgendarm directed us; it wasn’t much farther away. We entered another residential neighborhood: everywhere, you could see former gun emplacements with red signs, ACHTUNG! MINEN, the remnants of barbed wire, trenches half filled with snow between buildings; this had once been a frontline sector. Ivan led me through a series of alleyways, sticking to the walls again; at a corner, he motioned with his hand: “Who do you want to see?” It was hard for me to get used to his use of the familiar du. “I don’t know. An officer.”—“Wait.” He entered a building, a little farther on, from which he emerged with a soldier who pointed out to him something in the street. He gestured to me and I joined him. Ivan raised his arm toward the river, from which the punctual noise of mortars and machine guns came: “There, Krasnyi Oktyabr. Russki.” We had come a long way: now we were near one of the last factories held in part by the Soviets, beyond the kurgan and the “Tennis Racket.” The buildings must have been collective workers’ lodgings. Having reached one of these barracks, Ivan went up the three front steps and exchanged a few words with a soldier on guard. The soldier saluted me, and I went into the hallway. All the rooms were dark, their windows roughly blocked with boards, piled-up bricks, and blankets; each room sheltered a group of soldiers. Most of them were sleeping, close to each other, sometimes with several under one blanket. Their breaths formed little clouds of condensation. A horrible odor filled the place, a stench made of all the secretions of the human body, with urine and the sweetish smell of diarrhea dominating. In one long room, probably the former canteen, many men were crammed around a stove. Ivan pointed out an officer sitting on a little bench; like the others, he had the red-and-white checkerboard pattern on the arm of his German feldgrau. Several of these men knew Ivan: they conversed in a kind of lingua franca made up of Ukrainian and Croat, peppered with the crudest words (pitchka, pizda, pizdets, these are common to all Slavic languages, and one learns them very quickly). I headed toward the officer, who got up to salute me. “Do you speak German?” I asked him after clicking my heels and raising my arm.—“Yes, yes.” He looked at me with curiosity; my new uniform didn’t have any distinctive markings on it. I introduced myself. Behind him, on the wall, they had stuck some meager Christmas decorations: garlands made from newspaper around a tree sketched in coal on the wall, stars cut out of tin, and other products of the soldiers’ ingenuity. There was also a large, handsome drawing of the Bethlehem crèche: but instead of a manger, the scene was represented in a destroyed house, in the midst of burned ruins. I sat down with the officer. He was a young Oberleutnant; he commanded one of the companies of this Croatian unit, the 369th Infantry Regiment: some of his men were standing guard at a sector on the front, before the Red October factory; others were resting here. The Russians had remained relatively calm for the past few days; from time to time they lobbed a few rounds of mortar fire, but the Croats thought it was mainly to annoy them. They had also set up loudspeakers opposite the trenches and played sad, or happy, music throughout the day, interrupted with propaganda encouraging the soldiers to desert or surrender. “The men don’t pay too much attention to the propaganda, because they used a Serb to record it; but the music really depresses them.” I asked him about attempts at desertion. He replied rather vaguely: “It happens…but we do everything to prevent them.” He was much more talkative about the Christmas celebration they were preparing; the commander of the division, an Austrian, had promised them extra rations; he himself had managed to save a bottle of lozavitsa, distilled by his father, which he planned on sharing with his men. But more than anything he wanted news of von Manstein. “He’s coming, then?” The failure of Hoth’s offensive had of course not been announced to the troops, and it was my turn to be vague: “Be ready,” I answered lamely. This young officer must once have been an elegant, agreeable man; now he seemed as pathetic as a beaten dog. He spoke slowly and chose his words carefully, as if he were thinking in slow motion. We discussed the food supply problems a little more, then I got up to leave. Once again, I wondered what I was doing there: What could this officer, cut off from everything, teach me that I hadn’t already read in some report? True, I could see for myself the miserable condition of the men, their fatigue, their distress, but that, too, I already knew. I had vaguely thought, on my way there, about a discussion on the political involvement of the Croat soldiers with Germany, on Ustashi ideology: now I understood there was no sense in that; it was worse than futile, and this Oberleutnant would probably not have known how to respond; in his head there was room only for food, his home, his family, captivity, or his imminent death. All of a sudden I was tired and disgusted, I felt hypocritical, idiotic. “Merry Christmas,” the officer said to me as he shook my hand, smiling. A few of his men looked at me, without the slightest glint of curiosity. “Merry Christmas to you too,” I forced myself to reply. I collected Ivan and went out, greedily breathing in the cold air. “And now?” Ivan asked. I thought: if I had come as far as this, I said to myself, I should at least go see one of the outposts. “Can we go up to the front?” Ivan shrugged his shoulders: “If you want to, boss. But we have to ask the officer.” I went back into the large room: the officer hadn’t moved; he was still absently staring at the stove. “Oberleutnant? Could I inspect one of your advanced positions?”—“If you like.” He called one of his men and gave him an order in Croatian. Then he said to me: “This is Oberfeldwebel Nišíc. He’ll be your guide.” Suddenly it occurred to me to offer him a cigarette: his face lit up and he slowly stretched out his hand to take one. I shook the packet: “Take more.”—“Thank you, thank you. Merry Christmas again.” I also offered one to the Oberfeldwebel, who said, “Hvala,” and carefully stowed it away in a case. I looked once more at the young officer: he was still holding his three cigarettes, his face radiant as a child’s. How long, I wondered, before I was like him? The thought made me want to cry. I went back out with the Oberfeldwebel, who led us first down the street, then through some courtyards and inside a warehouse. We must have been on the grounds of the factory; I hadn’t seen a wall, but everything was in such a shambles you often couldn’t recognize anything. The warehouse floor was furrowed by a trench into which the Oberfeldwebel made us climb. The wall, opposite, was pock-marked with holes; light and snow poured with murky brightness into this large empty space; smaller trenches branched off the central trench toward the corners of the warehouse; they weren’t straight, and I couldn’t see anyone there. We passed in single file under the warehouse wall: the trench crossed a courtyard and disappeared into the ruins of a red brick administrative building. Nišíc and Ivan walked bent over, their backs beneath the rim of the trench, and I carefully copied them. In front of us, everything was strangely silent; farther on, to our right, we heard brief volleys, gunshots. Inside the administrative building it was dark, and it stank even more than the house where the soldiers were sleeping. “We’re here,” Nišíc said calmly. We were in a basement, the only light coming from little slits or holes in the brick. A man appeared out of the darkness and spoke to Nišíc in Croatian. “They had a skirmish. A few Russians tried to infiltrate. They killed some of them,” Nišíc translated into rough German. He coolly explained their setup: where the mortar was, where the MG was, where the little machine guns were, what range of fire was covered, where the blind spots were. I wasn’t interested in any of that, but I let him talk; in any case I didn’t really know what I was interested in. “What about their propaganda?” I asked. Nišíc spoke to the soldier: “After the fight they stopped.” We were silent for a bit. “Can I see their lines?” I finally asked, probably to give the impression I had come for something. “Follow me.” I crossed the basement and climbed a staircase littered with plaster and brick fragments. Ivan, submachine gun under his arm, brought up the rear. On the landing, a corridor led us to a room, in the back. All the windows were blocked by bricks and boards, but the light filtered through thousands of holes. In the last room, two soldiers were leaning against the wall with an MG. Nišíc pointed out a hole surrounded by sandbags held up by boards. “You can look from there. But not for too long. Their snipers are very good. They’re women, apparently.” I knelt near the hole and then slowly stretched up my head; the slit was narrow, I could just see a landscape of shapeless, almost abstract ruins. Then I heard the scream, on the left: a long hoarse cry, suddenly interrupted. Then the scream began again. There was no other noise and I heard it very clearly. It came from a young man, and they were long piercing cries, terrifyingly hollow; he must have been shot in the belly. I leaned forward and looked sideways: I could see his head and part of his torso. He screamed until he was breathless, stopped to breathe in, then began again. Without knowing Russian, I understood what he was shouting: “Mama! Mama!” I couldn’t stand it. “What is it?” I stupidly asked Nišíc.—“He’s one of the guys from before.”—“Couldn’t you finish him off?” Nišíc stared at me with a hard look, full of contempt: “We don’t have ammunition to waste,” he spat. I sat against the wall, like the soldiers. Ivan was leaning on the doorjamb. No one spoke. Out there, the boy was still screaming: “Mama! Ya ne khachu! Ya ne khachu! Mama! Ya khachu domoi!” and other words that I couldn’t make out. I squatted down and wrapped my arms around my knees. Nišíc, squatting, kept looking straight at me. I wanted to block my ears, but his leaden stare petrified me. The kid’s shouts were boring into my brain, a trowel burrowing in thick, sticky mud, full of worms and messy life. I wondered, would I too beg for my mother, when the time came? The idea of that woman filled me with hatred and disgust. It had been years since I last saw her, and I didn’t want to see her; the idea of invoking her name, her help, seemed inconceivable to me. Still, somehow I wondered if behind that mother there was not another one, the mother of the child I had been before something was irremediably broken. I too would probably writhe and cry out for that mother. And if not for her, it would be for her womb, the one from before the light, the diseased, sordid, sick light of day. “You shouldn’t have come here,” Nišíc suddenly said. “There’s no point. And it’s dangerous. There are often accidents.” He stared at me with an openly angry look. He was holding his submachine gun by the grip, finger on the trigger. I looked at Ivan: he was holding his weapon in the same way, pointed toward Nišíc and the two soldiers. Nišíc followed my gaze, examined Ivan’s weapon, his face, and spat on the ground: “You’d better head back.” An abrupt detonation made me jump, a little explosion, probably a grenade. The screams stopped for a bit, then began again, monotonous, nerve-shattering. I got up: “Yes. Anyway I have to go back to the center. It’s getting late.” Ivan stepped aside to let us pass and followed close behind, keeping an eye on the two soldiers until he was in the corridor. We left by the same trench, without a word; at the house where his company was staying, Nišíc left me without saluting me. It had stopped snowing and the sky was clearing up, I could see the moon, white and swollen in the sky, which was quickly darkening. “Can we go back by night?” I asked Ivan. “Yes. It’s actually faster. An hour and a half.” We probably could take some shortcuts. I felt drained, old, out of place. The Oberfeldwebel had been right, in fact.

As we walked, the thought of my mother returned to me violently, rushing, barging about my head like a drunken woman. For a long time, I had not had such thoughts. When I spoke about it to Partenau, in the Crimea, I had stuck to the facts, the ones that counted least. Here it was another order of thoughts, bitter, full of hate, tinged with shame. When had that begun? When I was born? Was it possible that I had never forgiven her for the fact of my birth, that insanely arrogant right she had granted herself to bring me into the world? One strange fact: I had turned out to be acutely allergic to her breast milk; as she herself had told me much later on, offhandedly, I was allowed only baby bottles, and I watched my twin sister breastfeed with a look full of bitterness. But in my early childhood I must have loved her, as all children love their mothers. I still remember the tender, female odor of her bathroom, which plunged me into numb delight, like a return to the lost womb: it must have been, if I thought about it, a mixture of the humid vapor of the bath, of perfumes, soaps, maybe too the smell of her sex and maybe too that of her shit; even when she didn’t let me get into the bath with her, I never got enough of sitting on the edge of the tub, near her, blissfully. Then everything had changed. But when, exactly, and why? I hadn’t blamed it right away on the disappearance of my father: that idea didn’t come till later on, when she prostituted herself to that Moreau. But even before meeting him, she had begun to behave in ways that sent me into a wild rage. Was it my father’s departure? It’s hard to say, but the pain seemed sometimes to drive her mad. One night, in Kiel, she had gone all alone into a worker’s café, near the docks, and had gotten drunk, surrounded by foreigners, dock workers, sailors. It’s even possible that she sat down on a table and lifted her skirt, exposing her sex. Whatever the case, things got scandalously out of hand, till the lady got thrown out into the street, where she fell into a puddle. A policeman brought her home, soaking, disheveled, her dress filthy; I thought I would die of shame. Little as I was—I must have been about ten—I wanted to beat her, and she wouldn’t even have been able to defend herself, but my sister intervened: “Have pity on her. She’s sad. She doesn’t deserve your anger.” I took a long time to calm down. But even then I must not have hated her, not yet; I was just humiliated. The hatred must have come later, when she forgot her husband and sacrificed her children to give herself to a stranger. Of course that didn’t happen in one day, there were several stages on the way. Moreau, as I’ve said, was not a bad man, and in the beginning he made great efforts to be accepted by us; but he was a narrow-minded fellow, a prisoner of his coarse bourgeois, capitalist concepts, slave to his desire for my mother, who soon turned out to be more masculine than he; thus, he willingly became an accomplice to her erring ways. Then there was that great catastrophe, after which I was sent away to boarding school; there were also more traditional conflicts, like the one that broke out when I was finishing high school. I was about to pass my baccalauréat, I had to make a decision about what to do afterward; I wanted to study philosophy and literature, but my mother firmly refused: “You have to have a profession. Do you think we’ll always live on the kindness of others? Afterward, you can do what you like.” And Moreau said mockingly: “What? Teacher in some godforsaken village for ten years? A two-cent, half-starved hack? You’re no Rousseau, my boy, come back to earth.” God how I hated them. “You have to have a career,” Moreau said. “Afterward, if you want to write poems in your spare time, that’s your business. But at least you’ll earn enough to feed your family.” That lasted for more than a week; running away wouldn’t have done any good, I would have been caught, as when I had tried to run away before. I had to give in. Both of them decided on enrolling me in the École libre des sciences politiques, from which I could have entered one of the major government branches: Conseil d’État, the accounts court, the Inspection générale des finances. I would be a civil servant, a mandarin: a member, they hoped, of the elite. “It will not be easy,” Moreau explained to me, “you’ll have to work hard”; but he had connections in Paris, he would help me. Ah, things didn’t happen as they wished and hoped: the mandarins of France now were serving my country; and I had ended up here, in the frozen ruins of Stalingrad, and probably for good. My sister had more luck: she was a girl, and what she wished didn’t count as much; just finishing touches, to appeal to her future husband. They allowed her to go freely to Zurich to study psychology with a certain Dr. Carl Jung, who has become quite well-known since then.

The worst had already happened. Around the spring of 1929, I was still in boarding school when I received a letter from my mother. She announced that since there had never been any news from him, and since her repeated inquiries at various German consulates had yielded nothing, she had filed a request for my father to be declared legally dead. Seven years had gone by since his disappearance, and the court had issued the decision she had hoped for; now she was going to marry Moreau, a good, generous man who was like a father to us. This odious letter threw me into a paroxysm of rage. I sent her a letter full of violent insults: My father, I wrote, was not dead, and the profound desire they both had of it would not be enough to kill him. If she wanted to sell herself to a despicable little French shopkeeper, that was entirely up to her; as for me, I would regard their marriage as illegitimate and bigamous. I hoped at least that they wouldn’t try to inflict on me a bastard whom I could only detest. My mother, wisely, did not answer this philippic. That summer, I arranged to have myself invited by the parents of a rich friend, and so didn’t set foot in Antibes. They got married in August; I tore up the invitation and flushed it down the toilet; the following school vacation, I still persisted in not going back; finally they managed to get me to return, but that’s another story. In the meantime, my hatred was there, intact, full-fledged, something whole and almost succulent inside me, a pyre waiting for a match. But to avenge myself I only knew low, shameful means: I had kept a photo of my mother; I jacked off or sucked my lovers in front of it and made them ejaculate onto it. I did worse than that. In Moreau’s large house, I gave myself over to baroque, fantastically elaborate erotic games. Inspired by the Martian novels of E. R. Burroughs (the author of the Tarzan of my childhood), which I devoured with the same passion as the Greek classics, I locked myself up in the large upstairs bathroom, running the water so as not to attract attention, and created extravagant scenes from my imaginary world. Captured by an army of four-armed green men from Barsoom, I was stripped naked, bound, and led before a superb copper-skinned Martian princess, haughty and impassive on her throne. There, using a belt for the leather bonds and with a broom or a bottle stuck in my anus, I writhed on the cold tiles while half a dozen of her massive, mute bodyguards took turns raping me in front of her. But brooms or bottles could hurt: I looked for something more suitable. Moreau loved thick German sausages; at night, I took one from the fridge, rolled it between my hands to warm it up, lubricated it with olive oil; afterward, I washed it carefully, dried it, and put it back where I had found it. The next day I watched Moreau and my mother slicing it up and eating it with great pleasure, and I refused my portion with a smile, offering a lack of appetite as my excuse, delighted at going hungry so I could watch them eat. It’s true that this happened before their wedding, when I still regularly visited their house. So it wasn’t their marriage in itself that bothered me. But these were just the miserable, pitiful acts of revenge of a powerless child. Later on, after I came of age, I turned away from them, left for Germany, and stopped answering my mother’s letters. But the story went on, secretly, and it just needed a trifle, the cries of a dying man, for everything to come back all at once, since it had always existed, it came from elsewhere, from a world that was not the world of men and of everyday work, a world that was usually sealed but whose doors the war could suddenly throw open, freeing in a hoarse, inarticulate, brutal shout its gaping darkness, a pestilential swamp, overturning the established order of things, customs and laws, forcing men to kill each other, putting them back under the yoke from which they had with so much difficulty liberated themselves, the weight of all that came before. We were once again following the tracks along the abandoned train cars: lost in my thoughts, I had scarcely noticed the long walk around the kurgan. The hard snow, which crackled beneath my boots, was taking on bluish tints beneath the pallid moon that lit up our path. Another fifteen minutes and we were back at the Univermag; I felt quite fresh, reinvigorated by the walk. Ivan saluted me casually and left to join his compatriots, taking my submachine gun with him. In the large operations room, beneath the enormous chandelier salvaged from a theater, the officers of the Stadtkommandantur were drinking and singing in chorus “O Du fröhliche” and “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht.” One of them handed me a glass of red wine; I drained it in one swallow, even though it was good French wine. In the hallway, I passed Möritz, who looked at me, stunned: “You went out?”—“Yes, Herr Kommissar. I went to reconnoiter some of our positions, to get an idea of the city.” His face darkened: “Don’t go risking yourself uselessly. I had a hard job getting you; if you get yourself killed right away, I’ll never be able to replace you.”—“Zu Befehl, Herr Kommissar.” I saluted him and went to change. A little later, Möritz offered his officers a drink, from two bottles of Cognac carefully held in reserve; he introduced me to my new colleagues, Leibbrandt, Dreyer, Vopel, the intelligence officer, Hauptsturmführer von Ahlfen, Herzog, Zumpe. Zumpe and Vopel, the Untersturmführer I had met the day before, worked with Thomas. There was also Weidner, the Gestapoleiter for the city (Thomas was Leiter IV for the whole Kessel, and thus Weidner’s superior). We drank to the Führer and to the Endsieg and wished each other a merry Christmas; it all remained sober and cordial—I vastly preferred it to the sentimental or religious effusions of the soldiers. Thomas and I, out of curiosity, went to the midnight Mass that was celebrated in the main hall. The Catholic priest and Lutheran pastor of one of the divisions took turns officiating, in a perfect ecumenical spirit, and the faithful of both confessions prayed together. General von Seydlitz-Kurbach, who commanded the LIST Corps, was there with several division commanders and their chiefs of staff; Thomas pointed out Sanne, who commanded the One Hundredth Jägerdivision, Korfes, von Hartmann. Some of our Ukrainians were also praying: they were, Thomas explained, Uniates from Galicia, who celebrate Christmas at the same time as we do, unlike their Orthodox cousins. I examined them, but didn’t see Ivan among them. After the Mass, we went back to drink Cognac; then, suddenly exhausted, I went to bed. I dreamed of metros again: this time, two parallel tracks ran side by side between brilliantly lit platforms, then joined each other farther on down the tunnel, after a separation marked by large round cement pylons; but this switch didn’t work and a team of women in orange uniforms, including a black woman, were working feverishly to repair it while the train, crowded with passengers, was already leaving the station.

I finally set myself to my task in a more structured and rigorous way. On Christmas morning, a violent blizzard put an end to hopes of a special supply delivery; at the same time, the Russians launched an attack on the northeast sector and also on the factories, taking a few kilometers of territory back from us and killing more than twelve hundred of our men. The Croats, I saw from a report, had been violently hit, and Oberfeldwebel Nišíc was on the list of the killed. Carpe diem! I hoped he at least had had time to smoke his cigarette. I digested reports and wrote other ones. Christmas didn’t seem to affect the men’s morale too much: most of them, according to the reports or letters opened by the censors, had kept intact their faith in the Führer and in victory; nevertheless, every day we were executing deserters or men guilty of self-mutilation. Some of the divisions shot their condemned men themselves; others handed them over to us; the executions took place in a courtyard behind the Gestapostelle. They also handed over to us civilians caught looting by the Feldgendarmen, or suspected of passing messages to the Russians. A few days after Christmas, I passed two dirty, snot-nosed kids in a hallway; the Ukrainians were taking them away to shoot them after an interrogation: the kids had polished the boots of our officers at various HQ and mentally took down details; at night, they slipped through a sewer to go inform the Soviets. On one of them, they had found a Russian medal hidden: he claimed he had been decorated, but it may simply have been stolen or taken from a dead man. They must have been about twelve or thirteen, but they looked under ten, and while Zumpe, who was going to command the firing squad, was explaining the matter to me, they both stared at me with large eyes, as if I were going to save them. That made me enraged: What do you want from me? I wanted to shout at them. You’re going to die, so what? I too am probably going to die here, everyone here is going to die. That’s the deal. I took a few minutes to calm down; later on, Zumpe told me that they had wept but had also cried out: “Long live Stalin!” and “Urra pobieda!” before they were shot. “Is that supposed to be an edifying story?” I rapped out at him; he left a little crestfallen.

I began to meet some of my own so-called informers, who were brought to me by Ivan or another Ukrainian, or who came on their own. These women and men were in a lamentable state, foul-smelling, covered with filth and lice; lice I had already, but the smell of these people made me nauseated. They seemed to me more like beggars than agents: the information they gave me was invariably useless or unverifiable; in exchange, I had to give them an onion or a frozen potato, which I kept for this purpose in a safe, a veritable slush fund in local currency. I had no idea how to treat the contradictory rumors they reported to me; if I had transmitted them to the Abwehr, they would have laughed at us; I ended up creating a file entitled Miscellaneous information, unconfirmed, which I passed on every other day to Möritz.

Information about the supply problems, which affected morale, particularly interested me. Everyone knew, without speaking about it, that the Soviet prisoners in our Stalag, whom we had virtually stopped feeding for some time, had sunk into cannibalism. “It’s their true nature that’s being revealed,” Thomas had snapped at me when I tried to discuss it with him. It was understood, though, that the German Landser, when in distress, would keep his dignity. So the shock caused by a report on a case of cannibalism in a German company posted at the western edge of the Kessel was all the keener in high places. The circumstances made the affair particularly atrocious. When famine made them resolve on this course, the soldiers in the company, still concerned with the Weltanschauung, had debated the following point: Should they eat a Russian or a German? The ideological problem posed was about the legitimacy of eating a Slav, a Bolshevik Untermensch. Couldn’t that sort of meat corrupt their German stomachs? But eating a dead comrade would be dishonorable; even if they couldn’t bury them anymore, they still had respect for those who had fallen for the Vaterland. Finally they agreed to eat one of their Hiwis, an entirely reasonable compromise, given the terms of the debate. They killed him and an Obergefreiter, a former butcher from Mannheim, proceeded to dismember him. The surviving Hiwis panicked: three of them were killed trying to desert, but another managed to reach the regiment’s HQ, where he had told the story to an officer. No one had believed him; after an investigation, they had been forced to face the facts, since the company hadn’t been able to dispose of the victim’s remains, and they had found his entire rib cage and some of the bits deemed unsuitable for consumption. The soldiers, when they were arrested, had confessed everything; the meat, according to them, tasted like pork, and was every bit as good as horse. They had discreetly shot the butcher and four ringleaders, then hushed up the affair, but it had created a stir in the various headquarters. Möritz asked me to write a general report on the nutritional situation of the troops since the Kessel had been sealed off; he had the numbers from the AOK 6, but suspected them of being mostly theoretical. I thought of going to see Hohenegg.

This time, I prepared my expedition a little better. I had already gone out with Thomas, to visit some division Ic/AOs; after my Croatian escapade, Möritz had ordered me, if I wanted to go out alone, to fill out an itinerary first. I made a phone call to Pitomnik, to the office of Generalstabsarzt Dr. Renoldi, the chief medical officer of AOK 6, where I was told that Hohenegg was based in the main campaign hospital in Gumrak; there I was told that he was traveling around within the Kessel, to make observations; I finally located him in Rakotino, a stanitsa in the southern part of the pocket, in the sector of the 376th Division. I then had to call the different HQs to organize liaisons. The trip would take half a day, and I would definitely have to spend the night either in Rakotino itself, or in Gumrak; but Möritz agreed to the expedition. There were still a few days left before the New Year; it had been twenty-five below zero since Christmas, and I decided to get out my shuba, despite the risk that lice would nest in it. I was already covered with them in any case—my vigilant hunt through the seams every night didn’t do any good: my belly, my armpits, the inside of my legs were red with bites, and I couldn’t stop myself from scratching till I drew blood. I was also suffering from diarrhea, probably because of the bad water and irregular food, a mixture, depending on the day, of tinned ham or French pâté and Wassersuppe with horse. At HQ it was all right, the officers’ latrines were revolting but at least accessible, but on the move it could soon become problematic.

I went without Ivan: I didn’t need him in the Kessel; anyway, seats in the liaison vehicles were strictly limited. The first car brought me to Gumrak, another to Pitomnik; there I had to wait several hours for a liaison to Rakotino. It wasn’t snowing, but the sky remained a milky, somber gray, and the planes, which were now taking off from Salsk, arrived irregularly. On the runway an even more horrible chaos reigned than the week before; there was a stampede for each plane, wounded men fell and were crushed by the others, the Feldgendarmen had to fire volleys in the air to force the horde of desperate men to fall back. I exchanged a few words with a Heinkel 111 pilot who had gotten out of his plane to smoke; he was livid, and watched the scene with a bewildered look, murmuring: “It’s not possible, it’s not possible…. You know,” he finally said to me before he walked off, “every night, when I get back to Salsk alive, I cry like a child.” This simple sentence made my head swim; turning my back on the pilot and the desperate mob, I started sobbing: the tears froze on my face, I wept for my childhood, for a time when snow was a pleasure that knew no end, when a city was a wonderful space to live in, and when a forest was not yet a convenient place to kill people. Behind me, the wounded howled like men possessed, mad dogs, almost drowning out the throb of the engines with their cries. At least this Heinkel took off smoothly; that wasn’t the case for the next Junker. Some shells were beginning to fall again, they must have botched the refueling, or maybe one of the engines was defective, because of the cold: a few seconds after the wheels had left the ground, the left engine stalled; the aircraft, which hadn’t worked up enough speed yet, lurched to the side; the pilot tried to straighten it, but the plane was already too unbalanced and suddenly it toppled onto one wing and crashed a few hundred meters beyond the runway, in a giant ball of fire that lit up the steppe for an instant. I had taken refuge in a bunker because of the shelling but still saw everything, again my eyes filled with tears, but I managed to control myself. Finally they came to get me for the liaison, but not before an artillery shell had fallen on one of the tents of wounded near the runway, sending limbs and scraps of flesh flying over the whole unloading area. Since I was nearby, I had to help clear away the bloody debris, to look for survivors; as I caught myself studying the entrails spilled out of the belly of a young soldier on the reddened snow, to find traces of my past or signs of my future in them, I told myself that everything here was indeed taking on the look of an agonizing farce. I remained shaken, I smoked cigarette after cigarette, despite my limited supply, and every fifteen minutes had to run to the latrines to let out a thin stream of liquid shit; ten minutes after the car started, I had to make it stop to rush behind a snowdrift; my coat got in my way and I soiled it. I tried to clean it with some snow, but managed only to freeze my fingers; back in the car, I huddled against the door and closed my eyes to try to forget it all. I shuffled through the images of my past as through a worn pack of cards, trying to find one that could come to life before me for a few minutes: but they fled, dissolved, or remained dead. Even the image of my sister, my last recourse, seemed like a wooden figure. Only the presence of the other officers kept me from weeping again.

By the time we got to our destination, the snow had started up again, and snowflakes danced in the gray air, joyful and light; and for a brief moment one might have thought that the immense, empty, white steppe actually was a country of crystalline fairies, joyful and light like the snowflakes, whose laughter burst gently in the murmuring wind; but the knowledge that it was polluted by men and their unhappiness and sordid fear ruined the illusion. In Rakotino, I finally found Hohenegg in a wretched little isba half buried beneath the snow, banging away on a portable typewriter in the light of a candle stuck into a PAK cartridge casing. He raised his head but showed no surprise: “Look at that. The Hauptsturmführer. What good wind brings you here?”—“You.” He passed his hand over his bald skull: “I didn’t know I was so desirable. But I warn you: if you’re sick, you’ve come in vain. I only deal in those for whom it’s too late.” I made an effort to get a grip on myself to come up with a repartee: “Doctor, I suffer from only one disease, sexually transmissible and irremediably fatal: life.” He made a face: “Not only do I find you a little pale, but you’re sinking into clichés. I’ve known you in better form. The state of siege doesn’t agree with you.” I took off my shuba, hung it on a nail, and then, without being invited, sat down on a coarsely carved bench, my back to the wall. The room was barely heated, just enough to cut the cold a little; Hohenegg’s fingers looked blue. “How is your work going, Doktor?” He shrugged his shoulders: “All right. General Renoldi didn’t welcome me very politely; apparently he thought this whole mission was useless. I didn’t take offense, but I would have preferred it if he had expressed his opinion when I was still in Novocherkassk. That said, he’s wrong: I’m not done yet, but my preliminary results are already extraordinary.”—“That’s just what I came to discuss with you.”—“The SD is interested in nutrition, now?”—“The SD is interested in everything, Doktor.”—“So let me finish my report. Then I’ll go look for some so-called soup in the so-called mess, and we can talk while we pretend to eat.” He patted his round belly: “For now, it’s a health cure for me. But it better not last.”—“You have some reserves, at least.”—“That doesn’t mean anything. Nervous thin men like you seem to last much longer than the fat and the strong. Let me work. You’re not in too much of a hurry?” I raised my hands: “You know, Doktor, given the critical importance of what I’m doing for the future of Germany and of the Sixth Army…”—“That’s just what I was thinking. In that case, you’ll spend the night here and we’ll go back together to Gumrak tomorrow morning.”

The village of Rakotino remained strangely silent. We were less than a kilometer from the front, but since I arrived I had heard just a few gunshots. The clacking of the typewriter resounded in this silence and made it even more nerve-wracking. At least my runs had calmed down. Finally, Hohenegg stowed his papers into a briefcase, got up, and stuck a scruffy shapka onto his round skull. “Give me your paybook,” he said, “I’m going to look for some soup. You’ll find a little wood next to the stove: start it up again, but use as little as possible. We have to keep till tomorrow with that.” He went out; I busied myself next to the stove. The wood supply was indeed meager: a few wet fence pickets, with bits of barbed wire attached. I finally managed to light a piece after cutting it up. Hohenegg returned with a mess tin of soup and a thick slice of Kommissbrot. “I’m sorry,” he said, “but they refuse to give you a ration without a written order from the HQ of the Panzer Corps. We’ll share.”—“Don’t worry,” I replied, “I anticipated that.” I went over to my coat and took from the pockets a piece of bread, some dry biscuits, and some tinned meat. “Magnificent!” he exclaimed. “Keep the tin for tonight, I have an onion: it’ll be a feast. For lunch, I have this.” He took a piece of bacon wrapped in a Soviet newspaper out of his bag. With a pocket knife, he cut the bread into slices and also cut two thick slices of bacon; he placed all of it directly on the stove, with the mess tin of soup. “Sorry, but I don’t have a saucepan.” While the bacon sizzled, he stored his typewriter away and spread the newspaper out on the table. We ate the bacon on the warmed slices of black bread: the slightly melted fat seeped into the thick bread, and it was delicious. Hohenegg offered me his soup; I refused, pointing to my stomach. He raised his eyebrows: “The Flux?” I nodded. “Be careful with that. Normally one gets over it, but here, it can carry men away in a few days. They become dehydrated and die.” He explained the hygienic procedures I should follow. “That can be a little complicated here,” I pointed out.—“Yes, that’s true,” he acknowledged sadly. While we were finishing our bacon toast, he talked to me about lice and typhus. “We already have a few cases, which we isolate as well as we can,” he explained. “But inevitably, an epidemic will break out. And then it will be catastrophic. The men will fall like flies.”—“In my opinion, they’re dying fast enough as is.”—“Do you know what our tovarishchi are doing now on the front of the division? They’re playing a recording with a clock going tick, tock, tick, tock, very loud, then a sepulchral voice announcing in German: ‘Every seven seconds, a German dies in Russia!’ Then the tick, tock again. They put that on for hours. It’s quite striking.” For men devoured by cold and hunger, gnawed by vermin, crouching at the bottom of their bunkers of snow and frozen earth, I could see how it must have been terrifying, even if the calculation (as we have seen at the beginning of this memoir) was a little excessive. I responded by telling Hohenegg the story of the Solomonic cannibals. His only commentary was: “Judging from the Hiwis I’ve examined, they must not have had a very satisfying feast.” That brought us to the object of my mission. “I haven’t finished the tour of all the divisions,” he explained, “and there are differences for which I haven’t yet found any explanation. But I’ve already conducted about thirty autopsies and the results are irrefutable: more than half present symptoms of acute malnutrition. To put it simply, almost no adipose tissue left under the skin or surrounding the internal organs; gelatinous fluid in the mesentery; congested liver; pale, anemic organs; red and yellow marrow replaced by a vitreous substance; cardiac muscle atrophied, but with an enlargement of the right ventricle and the right auricle. In ordinary language, their body, lacking anything to sustain its vital functions, devours itself to find the necessary calories; when there’s nothing left, everything stops, like a car that’s run out of gas. It’s a well-known phenomenon: but the curious thing here is that despite the dramatic reduction in rations, it’s still much too soon to have so many cases. All the officers assure me that the food supplies are centralized by the AOK and that the soldiers are indeed receiving the official ration. Which, for now, is just under a thousand calories per day. That’s far too little, but it’s still something; the men should be weak, more vulnerable to diseases and opportunistic infections, but they shouldn’t be dying of hunger yet. That’s why my colleagues are looking for another explanation: they talk of exhaustion, stress, physical shock. But that’s all vague and not very convincing. My autopsies don’t lie.”—“What do you think, then?”—“I don’t know. There must be a number of reasons, hard to separate in these conditions. I suspect that the capacity of certain organisms to break down food properly, to digest it, is altered by other factors such as tension or lack of sleep. There are of course quite obvious cases: men with diarrhea that’s so severe that the little they absorb doesn’t stay in their stomach long enough and comes out almost as is; that’s especially the case for the ones eating almost exclusively this Wassersuppe. Some of the food they distribute to the troops is even harmful; for example, canned meat like yours, very rich, sometimes kills men who haven’t eaten anything except bread and soup for weeks; their organism can’t bear the shock, the heart pumps too quickly and suddenly gives out. There’s also the butter, which keeps arriving: it’s delivered in frozen blocks, and out in the steppe, the Landsers don’t have anything to make fires with, so they break it up with an axe and suck on the pieces. That provokes horrible diarrhea that soon finishes them off. If you want to know the truth, many of the bodies I receive have their pants still full of shit, frozen fortunately: in the end, they’re too weak to drop their pants. And note that these are bodies picked up at the front lines, not in the hospitals. In short, to return to my theory, it will be hard to demonstrate, but it seems plausible to me. The metabolism itself is affected by the cold and fatigue, and can no longer function properly.”—“And fear?”—“Fear too, of course. We saw it during the Great War: under some particularly intense bombardments, the heart fails; we find young, healthy, well-fed men dead without the slightest wound. But here I’d say rather that it’s an aggravating factor, not a primary cause. Once again, I have to continue my investigations. It won’t be much use for the Sixth Army, I’m sure, but I flatter myself that it will serve science, and that’s what helps me get up in the morning; that, and the inevitable salyut of our friends across the lines. This Kessel, in fact, is a giant laboratory. A genuine researcher’s paradise. I have as many bodies at my disposal as I could wish for, perfectly preserved, even if it’s sometimes a little hard to defrost them. I have to force my poor assistants to spend the night with them near the stove, turning them over regularly. The other day, in Baburkin, one of them fell asleep; the next morning, I found my subject frozen on one side and roasted on the other. Come along now, it’ll soon be time.”—“Time? Time for what?”—“You’ll see.” Hohenegg gathered up his briefcase and his typewriter and put on his coat; before going out, he snuffed the candle. Outside, it was dark. I followed him to a balka behind the village, where he slithered, feet first, into a bunker that was almost invisible beneath the snow. Three officers were sitting on little stools around a candle. “Good evening, meine Herren,” Hohenegg said. “Let me introduce Hauptsturmführer Dr. Aue, who has very kindly come to visit us.” I shook hands with the officers and, since there was no other stool, sat down on the frozen ground, pulling my coattails under me. Despite the fleece lining, I felt the cold. “The Soviet commander opposite us is a man of remarkable punctuality,” Hohenegg explained to me. “Every day, since the middle of the month, he has sprayed this sector three times a day, at 05:30, 11:00, and 16:00 sharp. In the meantime, nothing, aside from a few mortar shells. It’s very practical for my work.” Indeed, three minutes later, I heard the piercing screech, followed by a close series of enormous explosions, of a volley of “Stalin organs.” The whole bunker shook, snow came down and half filled the entryway, clumps of earth rained from the ceiling. The frail light of the candle flickered, projecting monstrous shadows on the exhausted, badly shaved faces of the officers. Other volleys followed, punctuated by the staccato detonations of tank or artillery shells. The noise had become a mad, insane thing, living its own life, occupying the air and pressing against the partly obstructed entrance of the bunker. I was seized with terror at the idea of being buried alive; I would almost have fled, but I got control of myself. After ten minutes the pounding abruptly stopped. But the noise, its presence and pressure, took longer to withdraw and dissipate. The acrid smell of cordite stung the nose and eyes. One of the officers cleared away the bunker’s entrance by hand. We went crawling out. Above the balka, the village looked crushed, swept as if by a storm; isbas were burning, but I soon saw that only a few houses had been struck: the bulk of the shells must have been aimed at the trenches. “The only problem,” Hohenegg commented as he brushed earth and snow off his cloak, “is that they never aim at quite the same spot. That would be much more practical. Let’s go see if our humble refuge has survived.” The hut was still standing; the stove was even giving off a little warmth. “Would you like to come over for some tea?” offered one of the officers who had accompanied us. We followed him to another isba, divided in half by a partition; the first room, where the two others already sat, was also equipped with a stove. “Here, in the village, it’s all right,” the officer said. “We find some wood after each bombardment. But the men on the line don’t have anything. At the slightest little wound, they die of shock and frostbite caused by the loss of blood. We rarely have time to evacuate them to a hospital.” Another officer was preparing the “tea,” some Schlüter ersatz. All three of them were Leutnants or Oberleutnants, very young; they moved and spoke slowly, almost apathetically. The one who was making the tea was wearing the Iron Cross. I offered them some cigarettes: this produced the same effect on them as it had with the Croatian officer. One of them took out a greasy pack of cards: “Do you play?” I made a sign that I didn’t, but Hohenegg agreed, and he dealt the cards for a game of skat. “Cards, cigarettes, tea…” joked the third one, who hadn’t said anything yet. “Just like home…”—“Before,” the first one explained to me, “we played chess. But we don’t have the strength for that anymore.” The officer with the Iron Cross served the tea in dented cups. “I’m sorry, there’s no milk. No sugar, either.” We drank, and they started playing. A noncom came in and began talking in a low voice with the officer with the Iron Cross. “In the village,” he announced angrily, “four dead, thirteen wounded. The Second and Third companies were hit too.” He turned to me with a look that was both enraged and helpless: “You’re in charge of intelligence, Herr Hauptsturmführer, can you explain something to me? Where do they get all these weapons, cannons, and shells from? We’ve been chasing and pursuing them for a year and a half now. We’ve hunted them from the Bug to the Volga, we’ve destroyed their cities, wrecked their factories…. So where are they getting all these fucking tanks and cannons from?” He was almost on the verge of tears. “I’m not in charge of that kind of intelligence,” I explained calmly. “Enemy military potential is the business of the Abwehr and the Fremde Heere Ost. In my opinion, it was underestimated from the start. And also, they managed to evacuate a lot of factories. Their production capacity in the Urals seems considerable.” The officer appeared to want to continue the conversation, but was obviously too tired. He went back to playing cards in silence. A little later, I asked them about the Russian defeatist propaganda. The one who had invited us got up, passed behind the partition, and returned with some pieces of paper. “They send us this.” One of them was a simple poem written in German, entitled “Think About Your Child!” and signed by a certain Erich Weinert; the other ended with a quotation: If German soldiers or officers surrender, the Red Army must take them prisoner and spare their lives (Order No. 55 of the People’s Commissar for Defense J. Stalin). The work was quite sophisticated; the language and typography were excellent. “And is it working?” I asked. The officers looked at each other. “Unfortunately, yes,” the third finally said.—“Impossible to prevent the men from reading them,” the one with the Iron Cross said.—“Recently,” the third one went on, “during an attack, an entire platoon surrendered without firing a shot. Fortunately, another platoon was able to intervene and block the attack. Finally we pushed the Reds back, and they didn’t take their prisoners with them. A lot of them had been killed during the fighting; we shot the others.” The Leutnant with the Iron Cross gave him a black look and he fell silent. “Can I keep this?” I asked, pointing to the papers. “If you like. We keep them for another purpose.” I folded them and put them away in my jacket pocket. Hohenegg was finishing the game and got up: “Shall we go?” We thanked the three officers and returned to Hohenegg’s isba, where I prepared a small meal with my tinned meat and some slices of grilled onion. “I’m sorry, Hauptsturmführer, but I left my Cognac in Gumrak.”—“Oh, that can be for another time.” We talked about the officers; Hohenegg told me about the strange obsessions that seized some of them, like the Oberstleutnant from the Forty-fourth Division who had demolished an entire isba where a dozen of his men were sheltering, to heat water for a bath, and then who, after soaking for a long time and shaving himself, had put his uniform back on and shot himself in the mouth. “But Doktor,” I pointed out, “you must know that in Latin ‘to besiege’ is obsidere. Stalingrad is an obsessed city.”—“Yes. Let’s go to bed. The morning wake-up is a little brutal.” Hohenegg had a mattress and a sleeping bag; he found two blankets for me and I rolled up in my fleece-lined coat. “You should see my quarters in Gumrak,” he said as he lay down. “I have a bunker with wooden walls, heated, and clean sheets. Luxury.” Clean sheets: that, I said to myself, was something to dream about. A hot bath and clean sheets. Was it possible that I would die without ever taking another bath? Yes, it was possible, and seen from Hohenegg’s isba, it seemed even probable. Once again, an immense desire to weep overwhelmed me. That seized me often nowadays.

Back in Stalingrad, I used the figures Hohenegg had provided me to draft a report that, according to Thomas, stunned Möritz: he had read it at one go, he told me, then returned it without any comments. Thomas wanted to forward it directly to Berlin. “You can do that without Möritz’s authorization?” I asked him, surprised. Thomas shrugged his shoulders: “I’m an officer of the Staatspolizei, not of the Geheime Feldpolizei. I can do what I like.” In fact, I realized, we were all more or less autonomous. Möritz only rarely gave me precise instructions, and in general I was left to myself. I wondered why he had had me come. Thomas kept direct contacts with Berlin, I didn’t really know through what channels, and he seemed always sure of the next step. In the first months of the occupation of the city, the SP, along with the Feldgendarmerie, had liquidated the Jews and the Communists; then they had evacuated most of the civilians and sent the ones of working age to Germany, almost sixty-five thousand in all, for the Aktion Sauckel. But they too found little to do now. Thomas, though, seemed busy; day after day, he cultivated his intelligence officers with cigarettes and canned preserves. I decided, for lack of anything better to do, to reorganize the network of civilian informers that I had inherited. I summarily cut off supplies to the ones who seemed useless, and told the others I expected more of them. On a suggestion from Ivan, I went with a Dolmetscher to visit the basements of the destroyed buildings in the center of town: there were old women there who knew a lot but never went out. Most of them hated us, and were waiting impatiently for the return of nashi, “our own”; but a few potatoes, and especially the pleasure of having someone to talk to, loosened their tongues. From the military standpoint they didn’t contribute anything; but they had lived for months just behind the Soviet lines, and spoke eloquently about the morale of the soldiers, their courage, their faith in Russia, and also about the immense hopes that the war had given rise to among the people, which the men discussed openly, even with their officers: liberalization of the regime, abolition of the sovkhozes and kolkhozes, elimination of the work booklet that prevented free movement. One of these old women, Masha, animatedly described to me their General Shuikov, whom she already called “the hero of Stalingrad”: he hadn’t left the right bank since the fighting began; the day we burned the oil tanks, he had just barely managed to find refuge on a rocky out-crop, and had spent the night between the rivers of fire, without batting an eyelid; the men now swore only by him; as for me, it was the first time I had heard this name. With these women, I also learned a lot about our own Landsers: many of them came to shelter for a few hours with them, to eat a little, talk, sleep. This zone on the front was a senseless chaos of collapsed buildings, constantly under the fire of Russian artillery, whose outgoing booms could sometimes be heard from the other bank of the Volga; guided by Ivan, who seemed to know the tiniest nooks and crannies of the city, I moved almost exclusively underground, from one basement to the other, sometimes even traveling through sewer pipes. Elsewhere, however, we went through upstairs floors, for mysterious reasons Ivan thought it was safer; we passed through apartments with the tatters of burned curtains, their ceilings caved in and blackened, the bare brick visible behind torn wallpaper and plaster, still cluttered with nickel-plated bed frames, gutted sofas, sideboards, and children’s toys; then came beams placed over gaping holes, exposed hallways you had to crawl through, and everywhere brick riddled like lace. Ivan seemed indifferent to the artillery but had a superstitious fear of snipers; with me it was the opposite: explosions terrified me, I always had to make an effort not to hunch over; as for the snipers, I didn’t pay any attention to them. This was out of ignorance, and Ivan often had to jerk me away from a place that must have been more exposed but that, to me, looked like any other place. He too claimed that most of these snipers were women, and that he had with his own eyes seen the corpse of the most famous of them, a champion of the 1936 Pan-Soviet Games; yet he had never heard of the Sarmatians of the Lower Volga, descended, according to Herodotus, from intermarriages between Scythians and Amazons, who sent their wives to fight alongside the men, and built immense kurgans like those of the Mamai. In these devastated, desolate landscapes, I also met soldiers; some spoke to me with hostility, others amiably, yet others with indifference. They told of the Rattenkrieg, the “rat war” for these ruins, where a hallway, a ceiling, a wall, served as a front line, where they bombarded each other blindly with grenades in the dust and smoke, where the living suffocated in the heat of the fires, where the dead cluttered the stairways, the landings, the doorways to apartments, where you lost any notion of time and space, and where the war almost became an abstract, three-dimensional chess game. This was how our forces had come sometimes to within three, two streets of the Volga, and no farther. Now it was the Russians’ turn: every day, usually at dawn and at nightfall, they launched fierce assaults on our positions, especially in the sector of the factories, but also in the center of town; the companies’ ammunition, strictly rationed, was giving out, and after each attack the survivors would collapse, overcome; during the day, the Russians walked around out in the open, knowing our men weren’t allowed to shoot. In the basements, packed together, they lived under carpets of rats that, having lost all fear, ran over the living as well as the dead and, at night, came and nibbled at the ears, noses, or toes of the exhausted sleepers. One day I was on the second floor of a building when a small mortar shell exploded in the street; a few instants later, I heard a wild burst of uncontrollable laughter. I looked out the window and saw what looked like a human torso in the midst of the rubble: a German soldier, both his legs torn off by the explosion, was laughing madly. I watched, and he didn’t stop laughing, in the midst of a pool of blood that kept growing larger among the debris. This spectacle chilled me to the bone and knotted my gut; I sent Ivan out and dropped my pants in the middle of the living room. Out on expedition, when I was seized with diarrhea, I shat anywhere, in hallways, in kitchens, in bedrooms, even, at times, sitting on a genuine toilet, not always connected to a pipe, however. These vast destroyed buildings where, the summer before, thousands of families were living the ordinary, everyday life of all families, never suspecting that soon men would be sleeping six together in their conjugal bed, would be wiping their asses with their curtains and sheets, would be massacring each other with shovels in their kitchens, and laying the corpses of slaughtered men in their bathtubs—these buildings filled me with a pointless, bitter despair; and through this despair images from my past rose like drowned men after a shipwreck, one by one, more and more frequently. Often they were pathetic memories. Thus, two months after we arrived at Moreau’s house, a little before I turned eleven, my mother had placed me, when school began, in a boarding school in Nice, on the pretext that there was no good school in Antibes. It wasn’t a horrible establishment; the teachers were ordinary people. (Later, among the priests, how I would miss that place!) I could come home every Thursday afternoon and on weekends; still, I hated it. I was determined not to become once again the favorite target of the envy and spite of the other children, as in Kiel; the fact that in the beginning I still had a slight German accent made me even more nervous; our mother had always spoken to us in French at home, but before we arrived in Antibes, we hadn’t had much practice. What’s more, I was frail and small for my age. To compensate, I cultivated without really realizing it a vicious and sarcastic attitude, certainly an artificial one, which I directed at my teachers. I became the class clown; I interrupted the lessons with deadpan comments or questions that made my comrades shout with evil joy; I orchestrated carefully planned and sometimes cruel farces. One teacher in particular became my victim: a nice, slightly effeminate man who taught English, wore a bow tie, and who was rumored to engage in practices that, like everyone else, I regarded then as vile, without, however, having the slightest idea of what they were. For these reasons, and because he was weak by nature, I made him my scapegoat, and humiliated him regularly in front of the class, until one day, overcome with a mad, impotent rage, he slapped me. Many years later this memory still shames me, and I have long understood that I had treated this poor man the way the bullies treated me, shamelessly, for the odious pleasure of demonstrating an illusory superiority. That is surely the immense advantage over the weak that those called strong possess: both are consumed with anxiety, fear, and doubt, but the weak know it and suffer because of it, while the strong do not perceive it and, to shore up the wall that protects them from the bottomless void, turn against the weak, whose all-too-visible fragility threatens their own fragile confidence. Thus the weak are a threat to the strong, and invite the violence and murder that pitilessly strike them down. And it’s only when blind and irresistible violence strikes the strongest in turn that the wall of their certainty cracks: only then do they glimpse what awaits them, and see that they are finished. This was what was happening to the men of the Sixth Army, so proud, so arrogant when they were crushing Russian divisions, stripping civilians of their rights, eliminating suspects as one crushes flies: now, just as much as the Soviet artillery and snipers, as the cold, disease, and hunger, it was the slow rising of the internal flood that was killing them. In me too it was rising, acrid and stinking like the sweet-smelling shit that streamed from my bowels. A curious interview Thomas arranged for me demonstrated this in a blatant way. “I’d like you to talk with someone,” he said to me, sticking his head into the tiny cubbyhole that served as my office. This happened, I’m sure of it, on the last day of the year 1942. “Who?”—“A politruk we caught yesterday near the factories. We’ve already squeezed everything we could out of him, the Abwehr too, but I thought it would be interesting for you to talk with him, to discuss ideology, see a little of what’s going on in their heads, these days, on the other side. You have a subtle mind, you’ll do it better than me. He speaks good German.”—“If you think it might be useful.”—“Don’t waste any time with military questions: we’ve already taken care of that.”—“He talked?” Thomas shrugged his shoulders, smiling slightly: “Not really. He’s past his prime, but he’s tough. We’ll continue afterward maybe.”—“Ah, I understand: you want me to soften him up.”—“Precisely. Lecture him, talk to him about his children’s future.”

One of the Ukrainians led in the handcuffed man. He wore a tank crewman’s short yellow jacket, oily, its right sleeve torn at the seam; his face was completely flayed on one side, as if peeled open; on the other, a bluish bruise almost closed his eye; but he must have shaved right before he was captured. The Ukrainian brutally sent him flying into a little classroom chair in front of my desk. “Take off his handcuffs,” I ordered. “And go wait in the hallway.” The Ukrainian shrugged his shoulders, undid the handcuffs, and went out. The Commissar massaged his wrists. “Nice guys, our national traitors, aren’t they?” he said pleasantly. Despite his accent, his German was clear. “You can keep them when you leave.”—“We’re not going to leave,” I replied curtly.—“Ah, all the better. That will save us the task of running after them to shoot them.”—“I am Hauptsturmführer Dr. Aue,” I said. And you?” He made a slight bow on his chair: “Pravdin, Ilya Semionovich, at your service.” I took out one of my last packs of cigarettes: “Do you smoke?” He smiled, revealing two missing teeth: “Why do cops always offer cigarettes? Every time I’ve been arrested, they’ve offered me cigarettes. This being said, I won’t refuse.” I handed him one, and he leaned over so I could light it. “And your rank?” I asked. He exhaled a long puff of smoke with a sigh of contentment: “Your soldiers are dying of hunger, but I see that the officers still have good cigarettes. I’m a Regimental Commissar. But recently they gave us military ranks and I was made a Lieutenant-Colonel.”—“But you’re a member of the Party, not an officer in the Red Army.”—“That is correct. And you? You’re also from the Gestapo?”—“From the SD. It’s not quite the same thing.”—“I know the difference. I’ve already interrogated enough of your own.”—“And how could a Communist like you let himself be captured?” His face darkened: “During an assault, a shell exploded next to me and I was hit in the head by some rubble.” He pointed to the scorched part of his face. “I was knocked out. I suppose my comrades left me for dead. When I regained consciousness, I was in the hands of your people. There was nothing I could do,” he concluded sadly.—“A high-ranking politruk who goes up to the front line, that’s pretty rare, isn’t it?”—“The commanding officer had been killed and I had to rally the men. But in general, I agree with you: the men don’t see enough Party leaders under fire. Some abuse their privileges. But these abuses will be corrected.” With his fingertips, he delicately felt the purplish, wounded skin around his swollen eye. “Is that from the explosion too?” I asked. He gave a gap-toothed smile: “No, that’s from your colleagues. You must be quite familiar with that sort of method.”—“Your NKVD uses the same.”—“Absolutely. I’m not complaining.” I paused: “How old are you, if I may?” I finally asked. “Forty-two. I was born with the century, like your Himmler.”—“So you witnessed the Revolution?” He laughed: “Of course! I was a Bolshevik activist when I was fifteen. I was a member of a workers’ soviet in Petrograd. You can’t imagine what a time that was! A great wind of freedom.”—“It’s changed a lot, then.” He became pensive: “Yes. That’s true. Probably the Russian people weren’t ready for such an immense, immediate freedom. But that will come, little by little. They must be educated first.”—“And your German, where did you learn that?” He smiled again: “On my own, when I was sixteen, with some prisoners of war. Afterward, Lenin himself sent me to the German Communists. Can you believe that I knew Liebknecht, Luxemburg! Extraordinary people. And after the civil war, I returned to Germany many times, secretly, to keep up contacts with Thälmann and others. You don’t know what my life has been like. In 1929, I acted as an interpreter for your officers who came to train in Soviet Russia, to test your new weapons and your new tactics. We learned a lot with you.”—“Yes, but it didn’t do you any good. Stalin liquidated all the officers who had adopted our concepts, beginning with Tukhachevsky.”—“I miss Tukhachevsky. Personally, I mean. Politically, I can’t judge Stalin. Maybe it was a mistake. The Bolsheviks make mistakes too. But the important thing is that we have the strength to purge our own ranks regularly, to eliminate those who deviate, who let themselves be corrupted. It’s a strength that you lack: your Party is rotting from within.”—“With us, too, there are problems. In the SD, we know it better than anyone, and we’re working to make the Party and the Volk better.” He smiled softly: “In the end, our two systems aren’t so different. In principle at least.”—“That’s an odd statement, for a Communist.”—“Not really, if you think about it. What difference, at bottom, is there between National Socialism and socialism in a single country?”—“In that case, why are we locked together in such a death struggle?”—“You’re the ones who wanted it, not us. We were ready to make compromises. But it’s as once before, with the Christians and the Jews: instead of joining forces with the People of God with whom they had everything in common, to form a united front against the pagans, the Christians preferred, no doubt out of jealousy, to let themselves be paganized and to turn against the witnesses of truth, to their own misfortune. That was a huge waste.”—“I’m guessing that in your comparison, the Jews are you?”—“Of course. After all, you took everything from us, even if only to caricature it. And I’m not talking about symbols, like the red flag and the First of May. I’m talking about the concepts that are dearest to your Weltanschauung.”—“In what sense?” He began to count on his fingers, in the Russian way, folding them down one by one, starting with the little finger: “Where communism aims for a classless society, you preach the Volksgemeinschaft, which is basically strictly the same thing, reduced to your borders. Where Marx saw the proletariat as the bearer of truth, you decided that the so-called German race is a proletarian race, incarnation of Good and morality; consequently, for class struggle, you substituted the German proletarian war against capitalist governments. In economy too your ideas are just deformations of our values. I know your political economy well, since before the war I translated articles from your specialized newspapers for the Party. Where Marx posited a theory of value based on labor, your Hitler declares: Our German mark, which is not backed by gold, is worth more than gold. This rather obscure phrase was glossed by Goebbels’s right-hand man, Dietrich, who explained that National Socialism had understood that the best foundation for a currency is confidence in the productive forces of the nation and in the leadership of the State. The result is that for you, money becomes a fetish that represents the productive power of your country, hence a total aberration. Your relations with your great capitalists are grossly hypocritical, especially since your minister Speer’s reforms: your leaders continue to advocate free enterprise, but your industries are all subject to a plan and their profits are limited to six percent, with the State appropriating the rest in addition to the production.” He fell silent. “National Socialism also has its deviations,” I finally replied. I briefly explained Ohlendorf’s theses to him. “Yes,” he said, “I know his articles. But he too is mistaken. Because you didn’t imitate Marxism; you perverted it. The substitution of race for class, which leads to your proletarian racism, is absurd.”—“No more than your notion of the continual war of classes. Classes are a historical given; they appeared at a certain moment and will likewise disappear, harmoniously dissolving into the Volksgemeinschaft, instead of tearing each other to pieces. Whereas race is a biological given, natural, and thus undeniable.” He raised his hand: “Listen, I won’t argue with you, since it’s a question of faith, and so logical demonstrations, reasoning, won’t serve any purpose. But you can at least agree with me on one point: even if the analysis of the categories at stake is different, our ideologies have this basic thing in common, which is that they are both essentially deterministic; racial determinism for you, economic determinism for us, but determinism all the same. We both believe that man doesn’t freely choose his fate, but that it is imposed on him by nature or history. And we both draw the conclusion that objective enemies exist, that certain categories of human beings can and must legitimately be eliminated not for what they’ve done or even thought, but for what they are. In that, we differ only in the definition of the categories: for you, the Jews, Gypsies, the Poles, and, even I believe, the mentally ill; for us, the Kulaks, the bourgeois, the Party deviationists. At bottom, it’s the same thing; we both reject the homo economicus of the capitalists, the egotistical, individualistic man trapped in his illusion of freedom, in favor of a homo faber: Not a self-made man but a made man, you might say in English, or a man yet to be made, since communist man must still be constructed, educated, just like your perfect National Socialist. And this man-to-be-made justifies the pitiless liquidation of everything that is uneducable, and thus justifies the NKVD and the Gestapo, gardeners of the social body, who tear out the weeds and force the good plants to follow their stakes.” I handed him another cigarette and lit one for myself: “You have broad ideas, for a Bolshevist politruk.” He laughed, a little bitterly: “That’s because my old relations, German and otherwise, fell into disfavor. When you are sidelined, it gives you time, and especially a perspective, to reflect.”—“Is that what explains why a man with your past holds such a modest position?”—“No doubt. At one time, you know, I was close to Radek—but never to Trotsky, which is why I’m still here. But my lack of advancement doesn’t bother me, you know. I have no personal ambition. I serve my Party and my country, and I’m happy to die for them. But that doesn’t keep one from thinking.”—“But if you believe our two systems are identical, why are you fighting against us?”—“I never said they were identical! And you’re much too intelligent to think so. I tried to show you that the ways our ideologies function are similar. The contents, of course, differ: class and race. For me, your National Socialism is a heresy of Marxism.”—“How, in your opinion, is Bolshevik ideology superior to National Socialism?”—“In that it wants the good of all humanity, whereas yours is selfish, it just wants the good of the Germans. Not being German, it’s impossible for me to adhere to it, even if I wanted to.”—“Yes, but if you were born a bourgeois, like me, it would be impossible to become a Bolshevik: you would remain, whatever your innermost convictions, an objective enemy.”—“That’s true, but that’s because of education. A child of bourgeois parents, a grandchild of bourgeois parents, educated from birth in a socialist country, will be a good, a true Communist, above suspicion. When classless society becomes a reality, all classes will be dissolved within communism. In theory, this can be extended to the whole world, which isn’t the case of National Socialism.”—“In theory, maybe. But you can’t prove it, and in reality you commit atrocious crimes in the name of this utopia.”—“I won’t answer that your crimes are worse. I’ll simply tell you that if we can’t prove the validity of our hopes to someone who refuses to believe in the truth of Marxism, we can and we will concretely prove to you the inanity of your own. Your biological racism postulates that the races are unequal among themselves, that some are stronger and more valid than others, and that the strongest and the most valid of all is the German race. But when Berlin looks like this city”—he pointed his finger at the ceiling—“and when our brave soldiers are camping on your Unter den Linden, you’ll at least be forced, if you want to save your racist faith, to acknowledge that the Slavic race is stronger than the German race.” I didn’t let myself be intimidated: “You sincerely believe, when you’ve just barely held Stalingrad, that you’re going to take Berlin? You’re joking.”—“I don’t believe it, I know it. You just have to look at the respective military potentials. Without counting the second front that our allies are going to open in Europe soon. You’re finished.”—“We’ll fight to the last man.”—“No doubt, but you’ll perish all the same. And Stalingrad will remain as the symbol of your defeat. Wrongly, too. In my opinion, you already lost the war last year, when we stopped you in front of Moscow. We lost land, cities, men; all that can be replaced. But the Party didn’t collapse, and that was your only hope. Without that, you could even have taken Stalingrad, it wouldn’t have changed anything. And you could have taken Stalingrad, too, if you hadn’t made so many mistakes, if you hadn’t underestimated us so much. It wasn’t inevitable that you’d lose here, that your Sixth Army would be completely destroyed. But if you had taken Stalingrad, then what? We would still have been in Ulianovsk, in Kuibyshev, in Moscow, in Sverdlovsk. And we would have ended up doing the same thing to you a little farther along. Of course, the symbolism wouldn’t have been the same, it wouldn’t have been Stalin’s city. But who is Stalin, really? And what does his hubris and his glory mean to us Bolsheviks? We, here, who are dying every day, what do his daily telephone calls to Zhukov mean to us? It’s not Stalin who gives the men the courage to rush in front of your machine guns. Of course, you need a leader, you need someone to coordinate everything, but that could have been any other man of ability. Stalin is no more irreplaceable than Lenin, or me. Our strategy here has been a strategy of common sense. And our soldiers, our Bolsheviks, would have shown as much courage in Kuibyshev. Despite all our military defeats, our Party and our people have remained unvanquished. Now things are going to go the other way. Your troops are already beginning to evacuate the Caucasus. There’s no doubt whatsoever about our final victory.”—“Maybe,” I retorted. “But at what price for your communism? Ever since the beginning of the war, Stalin has appealed to national values, the only things that truly inspire men, not to communist values. He reintroduced the czarist orders of Suvorov and Kutuzov, as well as golden epaulettes for the officers, which your comrades in Petrogad used to nail to their shoulders in ’seventeen. In the pockets of your dead soldiers, and even of superior officers, we find hidden icons. Better yet, we know from our interrogations that racial values are appearing in broad daylight in the highest spheres of the Party and the Red Army, a Great Russian, anti-Semitic spirit that Stalin and the Party leaders cultivate. You too are beginning to mistrust your Jews; but they’re not a class.”—“What you say is certainly true,” he acknowledged sadly. “Under the pressure of the war, atavisms are resurfacing. But you can’t forget what the Russian people were before 1917, their state of ignorance, of backwardness. We haven’t even had twenty years to educate and correct them; that’s not very long. After the war we’ll resume that task, and little by little all those mistakes will be corrected.”—“I think you’re wrong. The problem isn’t the people: it’s your leaders. Communism is a mask stuck onto the unchanged face of Russia. Your Stalin is a czar, your Politburo are boyars, or greedy and egotistical aristocrats, your Party cadres, the same chinovniki as the ones under Peter or Nicholas. It’s the same Russian autocracy, the same permanent insecurity, the same paranoia of the foreign, the same fundamental inability to govern correctly, the same substitution of terror for the common consensus, and thus for real power, the same unbridled corruption, in other forms, the same incompetence, the same drunkenness. Read the correspondence between Kurbsky and Ivan, read Karamzin, read Custine. The crucial given of your history has never been changed: humiliation, from father to son. Ever since the beginning, but especially since the Mongols, everything humiliates you, and all the politics of your ruling class consists not of correcting this humiliation and its causes, but of hiding it from the rest of the world. Peter’s city is nothing but another Potemkin village: it’s not a window opening onto Europe, but a theater set put up to mask from the West all the poverty and endless filth stretching out behind it. But one can humiliate only those who can be humiliated; and in turn, only the humiliated humiliate. The humiliated of 1917, from Stalin down to the muzhik, have done nothing since then but inflict their fear and their humiliation on others. For in this country of the humiliated, the czar, whatever his strength may be, is powerless, his will is lost in the muddy swamp of his administration, and he is soon reduced, like Peter, to ordering his minions to obey his orders; in front of him people bow, but behind his back, they steal from him or conspire against him; everyone flatters his superiors and oppresses his subordinates, everyone has a slave mentality, raby as you say, and this slave spirit rises to the top; and the greatest slave of all is the czar, who can do nothing against the cowardliness and humiliation of his people of slaves, and who thus, in his powerlessness, kills them, terrorizes them, and humiliates them even more. And every time there’s a real rupture in your history, a real chance to get out of this infernal cycle to begin a new history, you blow it: faced with freedom, the freedom of 1917 you were talking about, everyone, people and leaders alike, recoils and goes to the old tried-and-true methods. The end of the NEP, the declaration of socialism in a single country, is nothing but that. And since hope wasn’t completely extinguished, there had to be purges. The present Great Russianism is only the logical outcome of this process. The Russian, the eternally humiliated man, can never escape from this humiliation except by identifying himself with the abstract glory of Russia. He may work fifteen hours a day in a freezing factory, eat nothing his entire life but black bread and cabbage, and serve a fat boss who calls himself a Marxist-Leninist but who rides around in a limousine with his high-class hookers and his French Champagne—none of that matters to him, so long as the Third Rome is at hand. And this Third Rome can call itself Christian or communist, it’s not important. As for the factory boss, he will constantly tremble for his position, he will flatter his superior and offer him sumptuous gifts and, if he’s demoted, another one identical to him will be appointed in his place, just as greedy, ignorant, and humiliated, and full of scorn for his workers, because after all he serves a proletarian State. One day, no doubt, the communist façade will disappear, with or without violence. Then we’ll discover that same Russia, intact. If you ever do win this war, you’ll emerge from it more National Socialist and more imperialistic than us, but your socialism, unlike ours, will be nothing but an empty name, and you’ll have nothing but nationalism left to cling to. In Germany, and in the capitalist countries, everyone says communism ruined Russia; but I believe it’s the opposite: it’s Russia that ruined communism. It could have been a fine idea, and who can say what would have happened if the Revolution had taken place in Germany rather than Russia? If it had been led by self-assured Germans, like your friends Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht? For my part, I think it would have been a disaster, since it would have exacerbated our specific conflicts, which National Socialism is trying to resolve. But who knows? What is certain is that having been attempted here, the communist experiment could be nothing but a failure. It’s like a medical experiment conducted in a contaminated environment: the results can go straight in the trash.”—“You are an excellent dialectician, and I congratulate you; you sound like a trained Communist. But I am tired and I am not going to argue with you. In any case, all this is nothing but words. Neither you nor I will see the future you describe.”—“Who knows? You’re a high-ranking Commissar. Maybe we’ll send you to a camp to interrogate you.”—“Don’t play with me,” he replied harshly. “Seats in your planes are much too limited for you to evacuate small fry. I know perfectly well I’ll be shot, in a short while or tomorrow. It doesn’t bother me.” He went on in a cheerful voice: “Do you know the French writer Stendhal? Then you’ll certainly have read this phrase Only a death sentence truly distinguishes a man. It’s the only thing that cannot be bought.” I couldn’t help laughing; he too laughed, but more quietly. “But where did you dig that up?” I finally got out. He shrugged his shoulders: “Oh. I’ve read more than just Marx, you know.”—“It’s too bad I have nothing to drink,” I said. “I’d have gladly offered you a glass.” I became serious again: “It’s also too bad we’re enemies. In other circumstances, we could have gotten along.”—“Maybe,” he said pensively, “but also maybe not.” I got up, went to the door, and called the Ukrainian. Then I went back behind my desk. The Commissar had gotten up and was trying to straighten his torn sleeve. Still standing, I offered him the rest of my pack of cigarettes. “Oh, thanks,” he said. “Do you have any matches?” I gave him the box of matches too. The Ukrainian was waiting in the doorway. “Allow me not to shake your hand,” the Commissar said with a little ironic smile.—“Of course,” I replied. The Ukrainian took him by the arm and he went out, putting the pack of cigarettes and the box of matches into his jacket pocket. I shouldn’t have given him the whole pack, I said to myself; he won’t have time to finish it, and the Ukrainians will smoke the rest.

I didn’t file a report on this conversation; what would there have been to report? That night, the officers got together to wish each other a happy New Year and finish the last bottles that some of us still had. But the celebration was glum: after the usual toasts, my colleagues spoke little, each one standing apart, drinking and thinking; the gathering soon broke up. I had tried to describe to Thomas my discussion with Pravdin, but he cut me off: “I know all that interests you; but theoretical rantings aren’t my main concern.” Out of a curious sense of propriety I didn’t ask him what had happened to the Commissar. The next morning I woke up, long before a dawn that was invisible here underground, racked with shudders of fever. As I shaved, I attentively examined my eyes, but didn’t see any traces of pink; at the mess, I had to force myself to swallow my soup and tea; I couldn’t touch my bread. Sitting, reading, writing reports soon became unbearable; I felt as if I were suffocating; I decided, without Möritz’s authorization, to go out and get some air: Vopel, Thomas’s deputy, had just been wounded, and I’d go visit him. Ivan, as usual, shouldered his weapon without a word. Outside, it was unusually warm and humid; the snow on the ground was turning to mud, and a thick layer of clouds hid the sun. Vopel must have been at the hospital set up in the municipal theater a little farther down. Shells had smashed the main steps and blown out the heavy wooden doors; inside the main foyer, among the fragments of marble and shattered pillars, lay dozens of corpses; some nurse’s aides were carrying them up from the basements and stacking them until they could be burned. A horrible stench rose from the underground entrances, filling the lobby. “I’ll wait here,” Ivan declared, taking up position next to the main doors to roll a cigarette. I looked at him, and my surprise at his composure turned into a sudden, keen sadness: though I, in fact, had every chance of remaining here, he had none to get out. He was calmly smoking, indifferent. I headed for the basements. “Don’t get too close to the bodies,” a nurse said next to me. He pointed and I looked: a dark, indistinct swarming was streaming over the piled-up corpses, detaching from them, moving among the rubble. I looked closer and my stomach turned over: the lice were leaving the cold bodies, en masse, in search of new hosts. I carefully walked round them and went down; behind me, the nurse was sniggering. In the crypt, the smell enveloped me like a wet sheet, a living, polymorphous thing that curled up into your nostrils and throat, comprised of blood, gangrene, rotting wounds, the smoke from damp wood, wet or urine-soaked wool, almost cloying diarrhea, vomit. I breathed, hissing through my teeth, forcing myself to hold in my retching. The wounded and sick had been lined up, on blankets or sometimes right on the ground, throughout the vast, cold cement basements of the theater; moans and shouts resounded from the vaulted ceiling; a thick layer of mud covered the floor. Some doctors or nurses in dirty smocks were slowly moving between the rows of the dying, carefully looking before setting their feet down to avoid crushing a limb. I had no idea how to find Vopel in this chaos. Finally I located what seemed to be an operating room and went in without knocking. The tiled floor was splattered with mud and blood; on my left, a man with one arm was sitting on a bench, his eyes open and empty. On the table lay a blond woman—probably a civilian, since they had already evacuated all our female nurses—naked, with horrible burns on her stomach and the underside of her breasts, and both her legs cut off above the knees. This spectacle stunned me; I had to force myself to turn my eyes away, not to stare at her swollen sex exposed between the stumps. A doctor came in and I asked him to show me the wounded SS man. He made a sign for me to follow him and led me to a little room where Vopel, half dressed, was sitting on a folding cot. Some shrapnel had hit his arm; he seemed very happy, he knew that now he could leave. Pale, envious, I looked at his bandaged shoulder the way I must have looked at my sister suckling our mother’s breast. Vopel smoked and chatted, he had his Heimatschuss and his luck made him euphoric as a child, he had trouble hiding it, it was unbearable. He kept fiddling with the VERWUNDETE tag attached to the lapel of the jacket thrown over his shoulders, as if it were a fetish. I left him, promising to discuss his evacuation with Thomas. He had incredible luck: given his rank, he had no hope of being on the evacuation lists of indispensable specialists; and we all knew that for us SS, there wouldn’t even be a prisoner’s camp, the Russians would treat the SS the way we treated Commissars and the men from the NKVD. As I left, I thought again about Pravdin and wondered if I would have as much composure as he did; suicide still seemed preferable to me to what awaited me with the Bolsheviks. But I didn’t know if I’d have the courage. More than ever I felt cornered like a rat; and I couldn’t accept the fact that it would end like this, in this filth and misery. The shivers of fever seized me again, I thought with horror that it wouldn’t take much for me to be stretched out in that stinking basement, caught in the trap of my own body until I too in turn was carried to the entryway, finally rid of my lice. Having reached the lobby, I didn’t go out to join Ivan but climbed the main staircase to the auditorium of the theater. It must have been a beautiful hall, with balconies and velvet seats; now the ceiling, torn open by shelling, had almost completely collapsed, the chandelier had crashed into the seats, a thick layer of rubble and snow covered everything. In the grip of curiosity, but also maybe out of a sudden fear of going out again, I went to explore the upper floors. Here, too, there had been fighting: the walls had been drilled through to set up gun emplacements, and the hallway was strewn with empty cartridge cases and ammunition boxes; on a balcony, two Russian corpses, whom no one had gone to the trouble of taking downstairs, lay sprawled in their seats, as if they were waiting for the beginning of an endlessly postponed play. Through a broken-down door at the end of a hallway, I reached a catwalk over the stage: most of the lights and set machinery had fallen, but some were still in place. I reached the attic: where the hall opened up down below there was just a gaping hole, but over the stage the floorboards were still intact, and the roof, pierced through all over, still rested on its tangled mass of beams. I risked a peek through one of the holes: I saw blackened ruins, smoke rising up in several places; a little to the north, a violent attack was under way, and behind, I could hear the characteristic wailing of invisible Sturmoviks. I looked for the Volga, which I’d have liked to see at least once, but it remained hidden behind the ruins; this theater wasn’t tall enough. I turned back and contemplated the desolate attic: it reminded me of the one in Moreau’s big house, in Antibes. Whenever I came back from the boarding school in Nice, my sister and I could never be separated, and together we would explore the farthest recesses of his ramshackle house, invariably ending up in the attic. There we would set up a hand-cranked gramophone taken from the living room, and unpack some marionettes belonging to my sister, representing different animals, a cat, a frog, a hedgehog; pinning up a sheet between two beams, we would stage, just for ourselves, plays and operas. Our favorite was Mozart’s Magic Flute: the frog represented Papageno, the hedgehog Tamino, the cat Pamina, and a human-shaped doll, the Queen of the Night. Standing in this rubble, my eyes open wide, I thought I could hear the music, glimpse the enchanting play of the marionettes. A heavy cramp seized my stomach and I lowered my pants and crouched down, and already as the shit flowed, liquid, I was far away, thinking of the waves, the sea under the boat’s keel, two children sitting in the bow facing that sea, myself and my twin sister, Una, our gaze locked and our hands touching without anyone noticing, and our love even vaster and more endless than that blue sea or the bitterness and pain of the wounded years, a solar splendor, a voluntary abyss. My cramps, my diarrhea, my surges of white-hot fever, my fear too, all that was erased, dissolved in this unhoped-for return. Without even bothering to pull my pants back up I lay down in the dust and rubble and the past unfolded like a flower in the springtime. What we loved, in the attic, was that unlike in basements, there was always light. Even when the roof isn’t riddled with shrapnel, either the daylight filters through little windows or through cracks between the tiles, or it rises up through the trapdoor leading to the house, it’s never entirely dark. And it was in that diffuse, uncertain, fragmented light that we played and learned the things we had to learn. Who knows how it happens? Maybe we found, hidden behind other books in Moreau’s library, certain forbidden books, maybe it happened naturally, proceeding along with our games and our discoveries. That summer, we remained in Antibes, but on Saturdays and Sundays we would go to a house rented by Moreau, near Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, by the sea. There our games spilled into the fields, the pine woods, and the nearby maquis, vibrating with the chirping of the crickets and the buzzing of the bees in the lavender, whose odor overlapped the scents of rosemary, thyme, and resin, mixed too, near the end of the summer, with that of the figs we would devour to the point of nausea, and then, farther away, the sea and the chaotic rocks that formed this jagged coast, up to a little sloping island that we reached by swimming or by rowboat. There, naked as savages, we would dive with an iron spoon to detach the fat black sea urchins clinging to the rocks underwater; when we had gathered a pile of them, we would open them with a pocketknife and swallow the bright orange mass of little eggs gathered within the shell, then throw the scraps into the sea and patiently extract the broken spines from our fingers, opening the skin up with the tip of the penknife and urinating into the cut. Sometimes, especially when the mistral was blowing, the waves grew, crashing against the rocks; reaching the shore became a perilous game, all childlike skill and ardor: once, while I was hoisting myself out of the water, having waited for an ebb to get hold of the rock, an unexpected wave swept me onto the stone, my skin was scraped on the rough edges, the blood flowed in multiple little trickles, diluted by seawater; my sister rushed onto me and lay me down in the grass, to kiss the scratches one by one, lapping up the blood and salt like a greedy little cat. In our sovereign delirium, we had invented a code that allowed us, in front of our mother and Moreau, openly to suggest precise gestures and actions. It was the age of pure innocence, superb, magnificent. Freedom possessed our narrow little bodies, thin and tanned; we swam like seals, dashed through the woods like foxes, rolled, twisted together in the dust, our naked bodies indissociable, neither one nor the other specifically girl or boy, but a couple of snakes intertwined.

At night, the fever rose; I shivered on my bed above Thomas’s, hunched under the blankets, devoured by lice, dominated by these distant images. When school began again, after the summer, almost nothing changed. Separated, we dreamed of each other, waiting for the moment we’d be together again. We had our public lives, lived openly like those of all children, and our private lives, which belonged to us alone, a space vaster than the world, limited only by the possibilities of our united minds. As time went by, the settings changed, but the pavane of our love continued to mark its own rhythm, elegant or furious. For the winter vacation, Moreau took us to the mountains; at the time, that was much rarer than it is now. He rented a chalet that had belonged to a Russian nobleman: this Muscovite had transformed an annex into a sauna, something none of us had ever seen; but the owner showed us how to work it, and Moreau, especially, developed a passion for this invention. At the end of the afternoon, after we had returned from skiing or sledding or hiking, he spent a good hour there sweating; he didn’t have the courage to go out and roll in the snow, though, as we did, clothed, alas, in swimming trunks, which our mother forced us to wear. She, for her part, did not like this sauna and avoided it. But when we were alone in the house, either during the day, when they went out for a walk in the town, or at night, when they were sleeping, we reoccupied the room after it had grown cold and finally shed our clothes, and our little bodies became a mirror for each other. We also nestled in the long empty closets built beneath the large sloping roof of the chalet, tall enough to stand up in, but where we stayed sitting or lying down, slithering, snuggled against each other, skin against skin, slaves of each other and masters of everything.

During the day, I tried to find my fragile bearings in that devastated city; but the fever and diarrhea wore me down, separating me from the nonetheless heavy and grief-filled reality surrounding me. My left ear also hurt, a numb, insistent pain, just beneath the skin inside the canal. I tried soothing it by rubbing the spot with my little finger, to no avail. Distracted, I spent many long, gray hours in my office wrapped in my soiled fleece-lined coat, humming a little mechanical, toneless tune, trying to find my way back to the lost paths of old. The angel opened my office door and came in, bearing the hot coal that burns away all sins; but instead of touching my lips with it, he buried it whole in my mouth; and if then I went out into the street, at the touch of the fresh air, I burned alive. I stayed standing, I didn’t smile, but my gaze, I knew, remained calm, yes, even as the flames were eating into my eyelids, hollowing out my nostrils, filling my jaw and veiling my eyes. Once these conflagrations were extinguished, I saw astonishing, extraordinary things. In a slightly sloping street, lined with destroyed cars and trucks, I noticed a man on the sidewalk leaning with one hand on a streetlight. He was a soldier, dirty, ill-shaven, dressed in rags held together by strings and pins, his right leg cut off under the knee, a fresh, open wound from which blood was gushing in streams; the man was holding a can or a tin cup under the stump and trying to gather this blood and drink it quickly, so as not to lose too much of it. He carried out these gestures methodically, with precision, and my throat tightened with horror. I’m not a doctor, I said to myself, I cannot intervene. Fortunately we were near the theater, and I rushed through the long, dark, cluttered basements, scattering the rats running over the wounded: “A doctor! I need a doctor!” I shouted; the nurses looked at me dully, without interest, no one answered. Finally I found a doctor sitting on a stool near a stove, slowly drinking tea. He took some time to respond to my agitation; he seemed tired, slightly annoyed by my insistence; but he ended up following me. In the street, the man with his leg cut off had fallen down. He was still calm and impassive, but he was obviously weakening. The stump was now foaming with a whitish substance that mixed with the blood, maybe it was pus; the other leg was also bleeding and looked as if it were about to fall away. The doctor knelt down next to him and began to look after his atrocious wounds with cold, professional gestures; his composure amazed me, not just his ability to touch these sources of horror but to work on them without emotion or revulsion; as for me, it was making me sick. While he was working, the doctor looked at me and I understood his gaze: the man wasn’t going to last long, there was nothing to do but seem to be helping him to make his anguish and the last moments of his fleeting life a little easier to bear. All this is real, believe me. Elsewhere, Ivan had taken me to a large building, not very far from the front, on the Prospekt Respublikanskyi, where a Russian deserter was supposed to be hidden. I didn’t find him; I was going through some rooms, wishing I hadn’t come, when a child’s high-pitched laughter burst out down the hallway. I went out of the apartment and didn’t see anything, but a few instants later the stairway was invaded by a horde of feral, shameless little girls, who brushed past me and dashed between my legs before lifting their skirts to show me their dirty behinds and bounding upstairs; then they all came tumbling back down, giggling wildly. They looked like frantic little rats in the throes of a sexual frenzy: one of them sat down on a step at the level of my head and spread her legs, exhibiting her bare, smooth vulva; another bit my fingers; I grasped her by the hair and pulled her toward me to slap her, but a third girl slipped her hand between my legs from behind while the one I was holding twisted around, tore herself away, and disappeared into a hallway. I ran after her but the hallway was already empty. I looked for an instant at the closed doors of the apartments, leaped, opened one: I had to throw myself backward so as not to fall into the void, since there was nothing behind the door, and I slammed it shut, just before a Russian machine-gun volley riddled it with holes. I threw myself down to the ground: an antitank shell exploded against the wall, deafening me and showering me with plaster and fragments of wood and old newspapers. I crawled furiously and rolled into an apartment on the other side of the hallway, which had lost its door. In the living room, gasping to get my breath back, I distinctly heard a piano; submachine gun in hand, I opened the door to the bedroom: inside, a Soviet corpse was lying on the unmade bed, and a Hauptmann in a shapka, sitting with his legs crossed on a stool, was listening to a record on a gramophone placed on the floor. I didn’t recognize the tune and asked him what it was. He waited for the end of the piece, a light tune with an obsessive little ritornello, and picked up the record to look at the label: “Daquin. The Cuckoo.” He wound the gramophone up, got out another disk from an orange sleeve, and set the needle down. “You’ll recognize this one.” In fact, it was Mozart’s Turkish Rondo, in an interpretation that was at once fast and cheerful but also imbued with romantic gravity; a Slav pianist, certainly. “Who’s playing?” I asked.—“Rachmaninov, the composer. You know him?”—“A little. I didn’t know he played too.” He handed me a pile of records. “He must have been some music lover, our friend,” he said, pointing to the bed. “And he must have had good contacts in the Party, given the source of the records.” I examined the labels: they were printed in English—these records came from the United States; Rachmaninov played Gluck, Scarlatti, Bach, Chopin, as well as one of his own pieces; the recordings dated back to the early 1920s, but seemed to have been recently issued. There were also some Russian records. Mozart’s piece came to an end, and the officer put on the Gluck, a transcription of a melody from his Orfeo ed Euridice, delicate, haunting, terribly sad. I motioned with my chin toward the bed: “Why don’t you get rid of him?”—“Why should I? He’s fine where he is.” I waited for the end of the piece to ask him: “Listen, you haven’t seen a little girl around, have you?”—“No, why, do you need one? Music is better.” I turned my back on him and went out of the apartment. I opened the next door: the little girl who had bitten me was peeing, squatting over a rug. When she saw me she looked at me with shining eyes, rubbed her crotch, and dove between my legs before I could react, running into the stairwell again, laughing. I went to sit down on the sofa and looked at the wet spot on the flowered carpet; I was still reeling from the bomb explosion, and the piano music was ringing in my infected ear, which throbbed with pain. I touched it delicately with my finger and brought it back covered with yellowish pus, which I wiped distractedly on the cloth of the sofa. Then I blew my nose in the curtains and went out; so much for the little girl, someone else would have to administer the punishment she deserved. In the basement of the Univermag, I went to consult a doctor: he confirmed the infection, cleaned it as well as he could, and put a bandage over my ear, but couldn’t give me anything else, as he had nothing left to give. I couldn’t say what day it was, I couldn’t even say whether the great Russian offensive west of the Kessel had begun; I had lost all notion of time and of the technical details of our collective agony. When people spoke to me, the words reached me as if from far away, a voice underwater, and I understood nothing of what they were trying to tell me. Thomas must have noticed that I was rapidly losing my footing and he made efforts to guide me, to bring me back to less obviously rambling paths. But he too was having trouble maintaining a sense of the continuity and importance of things. To keep me busy, he took me out: some of the Ics he frequented still had a bottle of Armenian brandy or schnapps, and while he talked with them I would sip a glass and bury myself in the buzzing inside me. Coming back from such an expedition, I saw a metro entrance at a street corner: I didn’t know that Stalingrad had a metro. Why hadn’t they ever shown me a map of it? I took Thomas by the sleeve, pointing to the steps disappearing into the darkness, and said: “Come on, Thomas, let’s go see this metro up closer.” He answered very kindly but firmly: “No, Max, not now. Come along.” I insisted: “Please. I want to see it.” My voice took on a plaintive tone, I was filled with a mute anguish, this entrance drew me irresistibly, but Thomas still refused. I was about to begin sobbing like a child who’s been denied a toy. At that moment an artillery shell exploded near us and the blast knocked me over. When the smoke cleared, I sat up and shook my head; Thomas, I saw, was still lying in the snow, his greatcoat splattered with blood mixed with pieces of earth; his intestines spilled out of his stomach in long, sticky, slippery, smoking coils. As I watched him, stupefied, he sat up with jerky, uncoordinated movements, like a baby who’s just learned to walk, and buried his gloved hand in his stomach to draw out jagged pieces of shrapnel, which he tossed into the snow. These shards were still almost red-hot and, despite the glove, they burned his fingers, which he sucked sadly after each piece; when they touched the snow, they disappeared into it sizzling, letting off a little cloud of steam. The last few pieces must have been deeply lodged, since Thomas had to stick his whole fist in to pry them out. While he began to gather his intestines together, pulling them gently toward him and looping them around one hand, he gave me a lopsided smile: “There are still a few bits left, I think. But they’re too small.” He pushed the coils of intestines in and smoothed the fold of skin of his stomach back over them. “Could I borrow your scarf?” he asked me; always the dandy, he wore only a turtleneck sweater. Feeling faint, I handed him my scarf without a word. Passing it under the shreds of his uniform, he carefully wrapped it around his belly and made a tight knot in front. Then, firmly holding his work with one hand, he hoisted himself up, staggering, leaning on my shoulder. “Shit,” he mumbled, swaying, “that hurts.” He stood on tiptoe and bounced several times, then risked a hop. “Well, it looks like it’ll hold.” With all the dignity he could muster, he gathered the remnants of his uniform around him and drew them over his stomach. The sticky blood held them more or less in place. “That’s the last thing I needed. And of course, you might as well forget about finding a needle and thread, in this place.” His little rasping laugh turned into a grimace of pain. “What a mess,” he sighed. “Lord,” he added as he glimpsed my face, “you do look a little green.”

I didn’t insist on taking the metro anymore, but accompanied Thomas to the Univermag, to wait for the end. The Russian offensive, west of the Kessel, had completely smashed through our lines. A few days later, Pitomnik was evacuated in an indescribable chaos that left thousands of wounded scattered throughout the frozen steppe; troops and HQ flowed toward the city; even the AOK, in Gumrak, was preparing its retreat, and the Wehrmacht expelled us from the bunker of the Univermag, to rehouse us temporarily in the former premises of the NKVD, which had once been a handsome building, with a large glass cupola now shattered and a polished granite floor, but whose basements were already occupied by a medical unit, which left us only the demolished offices on the first floor, over which we still had to fight with Seydlitz’s staff (as in a hotel with a sea view, everyone wanted to be on one side, not the other). But all these frenetic events left me indifferent, I barely noted the latest changes, since I had made a wonderful discovery, an edition of Sophocles. The book was torn in half, someone must have wanted to share it, and it was alas only in translation, but Electra was still there, my favorite. Forgetting the shivers of fever that shook my body, the pus that was oozing from my bandage, I lost myself blissfully in the verses. At the boarding school where my mother had had me locked up, to flee the surrounding brutality, I had taken refuge in my studies, and I especially liked Greek, thanks to our professor, the young priest I’ve already mentioned. I wasn’t yet fifteen but I spent all my free time at the library, deciphering the Iliad line by line, with passion and limitless patience. At the end of the school year, our class organized a performance of a tragedy, Electra, in fact, in the school gym, rigged out for the occasion; and I was chosen for the title role. I wore a long white dress, sandals, and a wig whose black curls danced on my shoulders: when I looked at myself in the mirror, I thought I saw Una, and I almost fainted. We had been separated from each other for almost a year. When I walked onto the stage I was so possessed by hatred and love and the sensation of my young virgin’s body that I saw nothing, heard nothing; and when I moaned Oh my Orestes, your death is killing me, tears streamed from my eyes. When Orestes reappeared, I screeched, possessed by the Erinyes, vociferated my injunctions in that beautiful, sovereign language, Go on, then, one more blow, if you still feel the strength, I cried, encouraging him, urging him to murder, Kill him quickly, then expose his body: let his gravediggers be whatever creatures find him. And when it was over, I didn’t hear the applause, didn’t hear the words of Father Labourie who was congratulating me, I was sobbing, and the butchery in the House of Atreus was the blood in my own house.

Thomas, who seemed to have completely recovered from his accident, scolded me amicably, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. To tease him, when I emerged from my Sophocles, I quoted Joseph de Maistre at him: What is a lost battle? It’s a battle you think you have lost. Thomas, delighted, had a sign painted with these words, which was posted in our hallway: this, apparently, earned him Möritz’s congratulations, and the new slogan got as far as General Schmidt, who wanted to adopt it as the motto for the army; but Paulus, it was said, opposed it. Neither Thomas nor I, by mutual agreement, spoke any longer of evacuation; but everyone knew that it was only a question of days, and the fortunate chosen ones of the Wehrmacht were already leaving. I sank into a sordid indifference; only the obsessive fear of typhus shook me now and then, and not content with scrutinizing my eyes and lips, I undressed to look for black spots on my torso. I didn’t even think about the diarrhea anymore; on the contrary, squatting in the stinking latrines, I found a certain tranquility, and would have liked, as when I was a child, to lock myself up in them for hours reading, but there was no light, and no door, either, so I had to make do with a cigarette, one of my last. My fever, almost permanent now, had become a warm cocoon in which I could curl up, and I took an insane enjoyment in my filth, my sweat, my dehydrated skin, my stinging eyes. I hadn’t shaved for days and a fine reddish beard contributed to my voluptuous feeling of dirtiness and neglect. My sick ear was suppurating, resounding by turns like a bell or a muffled siren; sometimes I couldn’t hear anything at all. The fall of Pitomnik had been followed by a few days’ lull; then, around January 20, the methodical annihilation of the Kessel resumed (for these dates, I’m citing books, not my memory, since the calendar had become an abstract notion for me, a fleeting memory of a bygone world). The temperature, after the brief thaw at the beginning of the year, had plummeted catastrophically—it must have been twenty-five or thirty below. The meager fires lit in empty oil drums weren’t enough to warm the wounded; even in town, the soldiers had to wrap their penises in cloth to piss, a stinking rag, preciously guarded in one’s pocket; and others took advantage of these occasions to hold out their hands, swollen with frostbite, beneath the warm stream. All these details were reported to me by the somnambulistic mechanisms of the army; just as somnambulistically, I read and classified these reports, after having issued them a file number; but it had been some time already since I stopped writing reports myself. When Möritz wanted information, I grabbed some reports from the Abwehr at random and brought them to him; maybe Thomas had explained to him that I was sick, he looked at me strangely but didn’t say anything. As for Thomas, he had never returned my scarf, and when I went out to take the air, my neck was cold: but I still went out, the dense stench of the buildings was becoming unbearable. Thomas’s rapid recovery intrigued me: he seemed entirely well, and when I asked him, raising my eyebrows significantly and looking at his abdomen: “So, are you all right?” he looked surprised and answered: “Yes, I’m fine, why shouldn’t I be?” As for me, however, my sores and my fevers weren’t getting any better; I would have liked to know his secret. One of those days, probably around the twentieth or the twenty-first, I went out to smoke in the street, and soon after, Thomas joined me. The sky was clear, cloudless, the cold biting, the sun, streaming everywhere through the gaping openings of the façades, was reflected on the dry snow, brilliant, dazzling, and where it couldn’t reach it projected steel shadows. “Do you hear?” Thomas asked, but my mad ear was ringing, I couldn’t hear anything. “Come.” He pulled me by the sleeve. We skirted round the building and discovered a strange sight: two or three Landsers, wrapped in greatcoats or blankets, were standing near an upright piano in the middle of the little street. A soldier, perched on a little chair, was playing, and the others seemed to be listening to him attentively, but I couldn’t hear anything—it was curious, and it saddened me: I too would have liked to listen to this music, I thought I had as much a right to it as anyone. A few Ukrainians were heading toward us; I recognized Ivan, who made a little sign to me with his hand. My ear was itching terribly, and I couldn’t hear anything anymore: even the words of Thomas, right next to me, reached me now only as an indistinct rumbling. I had the horrible and terrifying impression of living a silent film. Exasperated, I tore off my bandage and buried my pinky into the ear canal; something gave way, a flow of pus gushed out onto my hand and ran onto the neck of my coat. That soothed me a little, but I still could hear almost nothing; the piano, if I turned my ear toward it, seemed to be emitting a watery gurgle; the other ear wasn’t functioning any better; disappointed, I turned aside and slowly walked away. The sunlight was truly splendid, it chiseled each detail of the jagged façades. Behind me, I thought I could make out some agitation: I turned around, Thomas and Ivan were gesturing toward me, the others were looking at me. I didn’t know what they wanted, but I was embarrassed at being such an object of attention; I made a friendly little sign to them and went on walking. I glanced at them again: Ivan was running toward me, but I was distracted by a slight tap on my forehead: a piece of gravel, perhaps, or an insect, since when I felt it, a little drop of blood beaded on my finger. I wiped it off and continued on toward the Volga, which I knew lay somewhere that way. This was a sector where our forces held the riverbank; and I still hadn’t seen it, this famous Volga, and I resolutely headed in that direction, to contemplate it at least once before leaving this city. The streets wound between a shambles of quiet, deserted ruins lit by the cold January sun; it was very calm and I found it extraordinarily pleasant; if there were gunshots, I didn’t hear them. The icy air invigorated me. The pus had stopped flowing from my ear, which let me hope that the source of infection was pierced once and for all; I felt in good form and full of strength. After the last buildings, running along cliffs that loomed over the great river, there was an abandoned railway, the tracks already eaten by rust. Beyond stretched the white surface of the river caught in the ice, and then beyond that the other bank, the one we had never reached, completely flat and also white and as if emptied of all life. Around me, there was no one, I didn’t see any trenches or positions, the lines must have been farther up. Emboldened, I climbed down the steep sandy bank and found myself at the river’s edge. First hesitatingly, then with more confidence, I set one foot on the snow-dusted ice, then another: I was walking on the Volga, and it made me as happy as a child. The snowflakes lifted from the ice by the light wind danced in the sun, a little will-o’-the-wisp around my feet. In front of me, a dark hole opened up in the ice, quite wide, probably pierced by a high-caliber shell that had fallen short; deep inside the hole, water was flowing quickly, almost green in the sun, fresh, alluring; I leaned over and dunked my hand in it—it didn’t seem cold: gathering it in both hands, I rinsed my face, my ear, the back of my neck, then drank several mouthfuls. I took off my shuba, folded it carefully, put it together with my cap on the ice, then, breathing in deeply, I dove in. The water was clear and welcoming, a maternal kind of warmth. The swift current created whirlpools that soon carried me away under the ice. All kinds of things were passing by me, which I could clearly make out in this green water: horses whose feet the current was moving as if they were galloping, fat and almost flat fish, bottom-feeders, Russian corpses with swollen faces, entwined in their curious brown capes, pieces of clothing and uniforms, tattered flags floating on their poles, a wagon wheel that, probably soaked in oil, was still burning as it swirled beneath the water. A body bumped into me, then went on its way; this one was wearing a German uniform; as it drifted farther away I saw its face and its dancing blond curls, it was Voss, smiling. I tried to catch up with him but an eddy separated us, and by the time I reestablished my position, he had disappeared. Above me, the ice formed an opaque screen, but the air lasted in my lungs, I wasn’t worried and kept swimming, passing sunken barges full of handsome young men sitting in rows, their weapons still in their hands, little fish threading through their hair agitated by the current. Then slowly in front of me the water grew lighter, columns of green light plunged down from holes in the ice, became a forest, then melded into each other as the blocks of ice drifted farther apart. I finally rose back to the surface to regain my breath. A little iceberg bumped into me, I dove back down, straightened out, rose up again. Here, the river carried almost no more blocks of ice. Upriver, to my left, a Russian ship was drifting in the current, lying on its side, gently burning. Despite the sun, a few large flakes of luminous snow were falling, which lay hidden as soon as they touched the water. Paddling with my hands, I turned around: the city, stretched all along the shore, lay hidden behind a thick curtain of black smoke. Above my head, seagulls were reeling and shrieking, looking at me curiously, or possibly calculatingly, then flying off to perch on a block of ice; the sea was still far away, though; had they come all the way up from Astrakhan? Swallows too were whirling around and skimming the water’s surface. I began swimming calmly toward the left bank. Finally I touched bottom and emerged from the water. The shore, on this bank, was made of a fine sand that rose gently up, forming little dunes; beyond, everything was flat. Logically I should have found myself at the level of the Krasnaya Sloboda, but I didn’t see anything: no artillery pieces neatly lined up, no trenches, no village, no soldiers, no one. A few scraggly trees adorned the top of the dunes or leaned toward the Volga, which was flowing swiftly behind me; somewhere, a linnet was calling; a grass snake threaded between my feet and disappeared into the sand. I climbed the dunes and looked around: in front of me stretched an almost bare steppe, a land the color of ash lightly powdered with snow, with here and there a brown, short, dense, grass, and a few tufts of sagebrush; to the south, a line of poplars barred the horizon, probably bordering an irrigation canal; there was nothing else to be seen. I searched through my jacket pocket and fished out my pack of cigarettes, but they were soaking wet. My wet clothes clung to my skin, but I wasn’t cold; the air was gentle and mild. Then I felt a wave of fatigue, probably the effects of swimming: I fell to my knees and dug my fingers into the dry ground, still frozen by winter. I finally managed to pull up some clumps of earth, which I greedily stuffed into my mouth. They had a somewhat bitter, mineral taste, but when mixed with my saliva this earth gave off almost vegetable sensations, a fibrous life, which was still disappointing; I would have liked it to be soft, warm, and oily, for it to melt in my mouth, and for me to be able to bury my whole body in it, slip into it as into a grave. In the Caucasus, the mountain people have a curious way of digging graves: first they cut a trench two meters deep; then, at the bottom, on one side they dig out a niche with a slanting roof. The dead man, without a coffin, wrapped in a white shroud, is placed on his side in this recess, his face turned toward Mecca; then the alcove is walled in with bricks, or wood if the family is poor; only then is the ditch filled in, the excess earth forming an oblong hillock; yet the dead man doesn’t lie beneath this hillock, but right next to it. That, I said to myself when this custom was described to me, is a grave that would suit me, at least the cold horror of the thing is clear, and also it must be more comfortable, more intimate perhaps. But here there was no one to help me dig, and I didn’t have a tool, not even a knife: so I began walking, more or less in an easterly direction. It was a vast plain with no one on it, neither living on the earth nor dead beneath it; and I walked a long time beneath a colorless sky, which didn’t let me judge the time (my watch, set like all military watches to Berlin time, hadn’t stood up to the swim and showed an eternal thirteen minutes to noon). Here and there a bright red poppy grew, the only patches of color in this gloomy landscape; but when I tried to pick one, it turned gray and crumbled in a light puff of ash. Finally, in the distance, I made out some shapes. As I approached, I saw that it was a long white dirigible, floating over a large kurgan. Several figures were walking on the sides of the tumulus: three of them detached from the group and came toward me. When they were close enough, I could see that they were wearing white lab coats over suits, with high, slightly old-fashioned detachable collars and black ties; one of them also wore a bowler hat. “Guten Tag, meine Herren,” I said politely when they were standing in front of me. “Bonjour, monsieur,” said the one wearing a hat. He asked me in French what I was doing there and, answering in the same language, I explained to him as best I could. The two others nodded as they listened. When I had finished my narrative, the man with the hat said: “In that case, you’ll have to come with us; the doctor will want to talk with you.”—“If you like. Who is this doctor?”—“Dr. Sardine, the head of our expedition.” They brought me to the foot of the kurgan; three thick cables were anchoring the dirigible, a zeppelin that swayed slowly in the breeze more than fifty meters above our heads, its long oval mass carrying a two-story metal gondola. Another, thinner cable seemed to provide a telephone connection: one of the men spoke briefly into a receiver set up on a folding table. On the kurgan, the other gentlemen were digging, probing, measuring. I raised my head again: a kind of basket was slowly descending from the gondola, swaying back and forth in the wind. When it got close to the ground two men grasped it and guided it. This large basket was made of saplings and woven wicker; the man with the bowler hat opened a door and motioned me to get into it; then he joined me and closed it. The cable began to rise and with a heavy leap the basket tore itself from the ground; with our bodies as ballast, it reeled less, but it still made for a sort of seasick effect, and I gripped the edge; my chaperone held onto his hat. I looked at the steppe: as far as I could see, not one tree, not one house, just, at the horizon, a kind of hump, probably another kurgan.

The basket entered through a trapdoor into a room in the gondola; from there, my guide had me climb a spiral staircase, then go down a long hallway. Everything here was aluminum, brass, well-polished hardwood: a beautiful machine, truly. Having reached a padded door, the man rang a little doorbell. The door opened, he gestured for me to go in, and didn’t follow.

It was a large room lined with a banquette and a long bay window and furnished with shelves, with a long table in the center covered with an unlikely assortment of bric-a-brac: books, maps, globes, stuffed animals, models of fantastic vehicles, astronomical, optical, navigational instruments. A white cat with different-colored eyes was silently threading its way between these objects. A little man, also in a white lab coat, was hunched over on a chair at the end of the table; when I came in, he turned around, swiveling in his seat. His hair, streaked with gray and combed back, looked dirty and stringy; a pair of thick-rimmed glasses, set on top of his forehead, held it back. His slightly sunken face was badly shaved and wore a quarrelsome, disagreeable expression. “Come in! Come in,” he squealed in a hoarse voice. He pointed to the long banquette: “Have a seat.” I skirted round the table and sat down, crossing my legs. He spluttered as he spoke; the remnants of a meal stained his lab coat. “You are very young!” he exclaimed. I turned my head slightly and contemplated the bare steppe from the bay window, then looked at the man again. “I am Hauptsturmführer Dr. Maximilien Aue, at your service,” I said finally, bowing my head.—“Ah!” he croaked, “a doctor! A doctor! A doctor of what?”—“Of law, Monsieur.”—“A lawyer!” he leaped out of his chair. “A lawyer! Hideous…wretched scum! You’re worse than Jews! Worse than banksters! Worse than royalists!…”—“I am not a lawyer, Monsieur. I am a jurist, expert in constitutional law, and an officer of the Schutzstaffel.” He suddenly calmed down and sat down again in one bound: his legs, too short for his chair, reached only a few centimeters above the ground. “That’s hardly any better…” He pondered. “I too am a doctor. But…of useful things. Sardine, I’m Sardine, Dr. Sardine.”—“Pleased to meet you, Doktor.”—“I can’t say the same yet. What are you doing here?”—“In your airship? Your colleagues invited me to come up.”—“Invited…invited…a big word. I mean here, in this region.”—“Well, I was walking.”—“You were walking…fine! But why?”—“I was walking at random. To tell you the truth I got a little lost.” He leaned forward with a mistrustful look, gripping the armrests of his chair with both hands: “Are you quite sure of that?…Didn’t you have a specific purpose?!”—“I must confess I did not.” But he was still muttering: “Confess, confess…aren’t you looking for something…aren’t you actually…on my trail! Sent by my jealous competitors!…” He was getting worked up on his own. “Then how did you find us?”—“Your aircraft can be seen quite far away, in this plain.” But he stuck to his guns: “Aren’t you an accomplice of Finkelstein!…Of Krasschild! Those envious Yids…swollen up with their own importance…Squids! Dwarves! Boot-polishers! Falsifiers of diplomas and of results…”—“Allow me to point out to you, Doctor, that you must not read the papers much. Otherwise you would know that a German, especially an SS officer, rarely places himself at the service of Jews. I do not know the gentlemen you speak of, but if I met them, it would be my duty to arrest them.”—“Yes…yes…” he said, rubbing his lower lip, “that’s possible, in fact…” He searched through the pocket of his lab coat and took out a little leather purse; with fingers yellowed by nicotine, he fished out a pinch of tobacco and began rolling a cigarette. Since he didn’t seem inclined to offer me one, I took out my own pack: it had dried out, and by rolling and tamping one of my cigarettes a little, I could make something suitable out of it. My matches, however, were useless; I looked at the table, but didn’t see any others in the midst of the mess. “Do you have a light, Doktor?” I asked.—“One instant, young man, one instant…” He finished rolling his cigarette, took a rather large pewter cube from the table, put his cigarette into a hole, and pressed a little button. Then he waited. After a few minutes that I found rather long, a little ping could be heard; he drew out the cigarette, whose end glowed red, and breathed in little puffs: “Ingenious, no?”—“Very. But a little slow, perhaps.”—“It’s the element that takes time to warm up. Give me your cigarette.” I held it out to him and he repeated the operation while spitting smoke out in little puffs; this time, the ping sounded a little more quickly. “It’s my only vice…” he murmured, “the only one! All the rest…finished! Alcohol…a poison…As for fornication…All those greedy females! Plastered with paint! Syphilitic! Ready to suck the genius out of a man…to circumcise his soul!…Not to speak of the danger of procreation…omnipresent…Whatever you do, you can’t escape it, they always find a way…an abomination! Hideous big-titted monsters writhing! Seductive Jewesses, waiting to strike the death blow! Always in heat! The smells! All year long! A man of science must know how to turn his back on all that. Build himself a shell of indifference…of will…Noli me tangere.” As he smoked, he let his ashes fall on the floor; since I couldn’t see an ashtray, I did the same. The white cat was rubbing its neck against a sextant. Suddenly, Sardine put his glasses on his eyes and leaned forward to examine me: “And are you looking for the end of the world too?”—“Sorry?”—“The end of the world! The end of the world! Don’t act innocent. What else could have brought you out here?”—“I don’t know what you’re talking about, Doktor.” He grimaced, bounded out of his chair, ran around the table, seized an object, and hurled it at my head. I caught it in the nick of time. It was a cone mounted on a base, painted like a globe with the continents spread out around it; the flat base was gray and bore the caption TERRA INCOGNITA. “Don’t tell me you’ve never seen that?” Sardine had gone back to his seat and was rolling another cigarette. “Never, Doktor,” I replied.—“What is it?”—“It’s the Earth! Idiot! Hypocrite! Two-faced bastard!”—“I’m very sorry, Doktor. At school, we were taught that the Earth was round.” He let out a fierce growl: “Balderdash! Nonsense!…Medieval theories…hackneyed…Superstition! There!” he shouted, pointing with his cigarette at the cone I was still holding, “There! That’s the truth. And I’m going to prove it! At this instant, we’re headed for the Edge.” In fact, I noticed that the cabin was gently vibrating. I looked out the bay window: the dirigible had raised anchor and was slowly gaining altitude. “And when we arrive,” I asked carefully, “will your aircraft pass over it?”—“Don’t be an imbecile! What an ignoramus. You are an educated man, you say…Think! It goes without saying that beyond the Edge, there is no gravitational field. Otherwise, the evidence would have been proven a long time ago!”—“But then how do you count on…”—“That’s my whole genius,” he replied maliciously. “This aircraft is hiding another one.” He got up and came over to sit next to me. “I’ll tell you. In any case, you’re going to stay with us. You, the Incredulous, will be the Witness. At the Edge of the world, we will land, deflate the balloon, there, above us, which will be folded and put away in a compartment designed for this purpose. Below, there are legs that can be unfolded, and that are articulated, eight in all, ending in strong pincers.” As he spoke, he mimed pincers with his fingers. “These pincers can grip any soil whatsoever. Thus, we will pass over the Great Edge like an insect, a spider. But we will pass over it! I’m rather proud of myself…Can you believe it?! The difficulties…in wartime…to construct such a machine?…The negotiations with the occupying power? With those morons in Vichy, drunk on mineral water? With the factions…That whole alphabet soup, crawling with retards, microcephalics, careerists? And with Jews! Yes, Mr. German Officer, Jews too! A man of science cannot have scruples…He must be ready to strike a deal with the devil if necessary.” A siren sounded somewhere inside the vessel, interrupting him. He stood up: “I have to go. Wait for me here.” At the door, he turned around: “Don’t touch anything!” Alone, I got up too and took a few steps. I held out my fingers to pet the cat with the different-colored eyes, but it bristled and hissed, baring its teeth. I looked again at the objects piled up on the long table, fiddled with one or two, leafed through a book, then went to kneel down on the banquette and look at the steppe. A river crossed it, snaking gently, shimmering in the sun. I thought I could make out an object on the water. At the end of the room, a telescope mounted on a tripod stood in front of the bay window. I set my eye to it, turned the knob to focus, and looked for the river; when I had located it, I followed its course to find the object. It was a small boat with figures in it. I adjusted the focus. A naked young woman was sitting in the center of the boat, flowers in her hair; in front and behind her, two awful creatures, in human form and also naked, were paddling. The woman had long black hair. My heart suddenly beating hard, I tried to make out her face, but it was difficult to distinguish her features. Little by little, this certainty dawned in me: it was Una, my sister. Where was she going? Other boats were following hers, heaped with flowers, it looked like a marriage procession. I had to join her. But how? I rushed out of the cabin, down the spiral staircase: in the room with the basket, there was a man. “The doctor?” I panted. “Where is he? I must see him.” He signaled me to follow him and led me to the bow of the vessel, into the control cabin where, in front of a vast circular bay window, men in white lab coats were busy. Sardine sat enthroned on a raised armchair in front of a command panel. “What do you want?” he asked abruptly when he saw me.—“Doktor…I have to go down. It’s a question of life or death.”—“Impossible!” he shouted in a shrill voice. “Impossible! I understand everything. You are a spy! An accomplice!” He turned to the man who had brought me there. “Arrest him! Clap him in irons!” The man put his hand on my arm; without thinking, I landed an uppercut on his chin and bounded to the door. Several men rushed at me, but the door was too narrow for them all to pass through, and it delayed them. I ran back up the spiral staircase, taking the steps three at a time, and positioned myself at the top: when the first head appeared beneath me, crowned with a bowler hat, I delivered a kick that propelled him backward; he tumbled down the steps, dragging his colleagues down with a huge racket. I could hear Sardine howling. I opened doors at random: cabins, a map room, a canteen. At the end of the hallway I came across a storage room with a ladder going up; the trapdoor at the top must have opened onto the inside of the hull, for repairs; there were metal lockers there, which I opened; they contained parachutes. My pursuers were approaching; I slipped a parachute on and began to climb. The trapdoor opened easily: above, an immense cylindrical cage of waxed canvas stretched over metal circlets rose through the body of the dirigible. A diffuse light passed through the cloth, there were also lightbulbs set at intervals; through portholes made of transparent rubber, one could make out the soft outlines of the hydrogen gasbags. I began the ascent. The shaft, held in place by a solid framework, was a few dozen meters tall, and I soon ran out of breath. I risked a glance beneath me: the first bowler hat was appearing through the trapdoor, followed by the man’s body. I saw that he was brandishing a pistol and I resumed my climb. He didn’t shoot; no doubt he was afraid of puncturing the gasbags. Other men followed him; they were climbing as slowly as I was. Every four meters an open landing interrupted the shaft, to allow one to rest, but I couldn’t stop, I kept climbing, rung after rung, panting. I didn’t look up and it seemed to me that this interminable ladder would never end. Finally my head bumped against the trapdoor at the top. Beneath me resounded the metallic noises of the men climbing. I turned the handle of the hatchway, pushed it, and stuck my head outside: a cold wind hit me in the face. I was at the top of the dirigible’s hull, a large curved surface, quite rigid, seemingly. I hoisted myself outside and stood up; alas, no way to close the trapdoor from without. What with the wind and the vibrations of the airship, my balance was unsteady. I headed, staggering, toward the tail, checking the parachute’s fastenings. A head appeared at the trapdoor and I began to run; the surface of the cover was slightly elastic and bounced under my feet; a gunshot rang out and a bullet whistled past my ear; I stumbled, rolled over, but instead of trying to catch hold of something I let myself go. I heard another gunshot. The slope grew increasingly steep, I slid quickly, trying to twist my feet forward, then it became almost vertical and I fell into the void like a puppet with its strings cut, waving my arms and legs in the wind. The brown-and-gray steppe rose toward me like a wall. I had never jumped in a parachute before but I knew you had to pull on a cord; with an effort, I brought my arms back close to my body, found the handle, and pulled; the shock was so abrupt that I hurt my neck. I was now descending much more slowly, feet first; I caught hold of the risers and raised my head; the white corolla of the parachute filled the sky, hiding the dirigible from view. I looked for the river: it seemed to be a few kilometers away. The procession of boats was gleaming in the sun and I mentally calculated the path to take to reach it. The ground approached and I held out my legs together, a little worried. Then I felt a violent shock that went through my whole body, tumbled over, let myself be dragged by the parachute as it was carried off by the wind; finally I managed to find my footing and get up. I undid the harness and left the parachute there, blown by the wind and rolling about on the dirt. I looked at the sky: the dirigible was impassively drifting away. I got my bearings and began trotting toward the river.

The dirigible disappeared. The steppe seemed to be rising imperceptibly: I began to tire, but forced myself to go on. My feet stumbled on clumps of dry grass. Panting, I reached the river; but I found myself, as I saw only then, at the top of a high steep cliff that overlooked it from about twenty meters up; down below, the water was flowing with a swift current; impossible to jump, impossible too to climb down this cliff. I should have landed on the other shore: there, the almost flat bank gently descended to the water. To my left, upriver, I saw the procession of boats arriving. Musicians wearing garlands, who were following the carved gondola carrying my sister, were playing shrill, solemn music on flutes, string instruments, and drums. I could clearly see my sister, haughty between the two creatures who were rowing; she sat cross-legged and her long black hair fell over her breasts. I cupped my hands over my mouth and shouted her name, many times. She raised her head and looked at me, but without changing her expression or saying anything; her gaze was riveted on mine while the boat passed slowly by; I shouted her name like a madman, but she didn’t react; finally she turned away. The procession slowly drew away downstream, while I remained there, stunned. Then I tried to begin pursuing her; but at that moment violent stomach cramps seized me; feverishly, I undid my pants and squatted down; but instead of shit, living bees, spiders, and scorpions gushed out of my anus. It burned horribly, but they had to be evacuated; I strained, the spiders and scorpions scattered, running, the bees flew away, I had to clench my jaw not to shout with pain. I heard something and turned my head: two boys, identical twins, were looking at me in silence. Where in God’s name had they come from? I stood and pulled up my pants; but already they had done an about-face and were going away. I dashed after them, calling out to them. But I couldn’t catch up to them. I followed them for a long time.

In the steppe, there was another kurgan. The two boys climbed it and then went down its other side. I ran around it, but they had disappeared. “Where are you, boys?” I shouted. I realized that even from the top of the kurgan, I had lost sight of the river; the dull gray of the sky hid the sun, I didn’t know how to get my bearings; I had let myself get distracted, like an idiot! I had to find those boys again. I went around the kurgan again and discovered a depression: I felt around and a door appeared. I knocked, it opened and I went in; a long hallway stretched in front of me, with, at the end, another door. I knocked again and it opened too. There was a vast, high-ceilinged room, lit by oil lamps: from outside, though, the kurgan hadn’t seemed so large. In the back of the room stood a dais covered with rugs and cushions, with a potbellied dwarf playing a game; standing next to him was a tall, thin man with a black triangle over one eye; a wizened old woman in a scarf was stirring an immense ornamented cauldron hanging from the ceiling in a corner. Of the two children there wasn’t a trace. “Hello,” I said politely. “You haven’t seen two boys by any chance, have you? Twins,” I specified.—“Ah!” the dwarf shouted, “a visitor! Do you know how to play nardi?” I went up to the dais and saw that he was playing a game of backgammon, making his right hand play against his left hand: each took turns rolling the dice and then moved the pieces, red or white. “Actually,” I said, “I’m looking for my sister. A very beautiful young woman with black hair. They’re taking her away in a boat.” The dwarf, without stopping his game, looked at the one-eyed man, then turned back to me: “They’re bringing that girl here. We are going to marry her, my brother and I. I hope she is as beautiful as they say.” He leered lecherously and nimbly buried one hand in his pants. “If you are her brother, then we’ll be in-laws. Have a seat and drink some tea.” I sat down on a cushion, legs crossed, facing the game; the old woman brought me a bowl of good hot tea, real tea and not ersatz, which I drank with pleasure. “I would rather you didn’t marry her,” I said finally. The dwarf kept on playing one hand against the other. “If you don’t want us to marry her, play with me. No one wants to play with me.”—“Why not?”—“Because of my conditions.”—“And what are your conditions?” I asked amiably. “Tell me, I don’t know them.”—“If I win, I kill you, if I lose, I kill you.”—“Fine, that’s no problem, let’s play.” I watched how he was playing: it didn’t resemble any game of backgammon that I knew. In the beginning of the game, the pieces, instead of being arranged in columns of two, three, and five, were all placed at the ends of the board; and during the game, they couldn’t be removed, but blocked the place they occupied. “Those aren’t the rules for backgammon,” I pointed out.—“Listen, boy, you’re no longer in Munich, here.”—“I’m not from Munich.”—“Berlin, then. We’re playing nardi.” I looked again: the principle didn’t seem hard to grasp, but there must have been subtleties. “All right, let’s play, then.” In fact, it was more complicated than it seemed, but I learned quickly and won the game. The dwarf got up, took out a long knife and said: “All right, I’m going to kill you.”—“Calm down. If I had lost, you could have killed me, but I’ve won, so why should you kill me?” He thought a bit and sat back down: “You’re right. Let’s play again.” This time, it was the dwarf who won. “What do you say now? I’m going to kill you.”—“All right, I won’t say anything else, I lost, kill me. But don’t you think we should play a third game first to settle it?”—“You’re right.” We played one more time and I won. “Now,” I said, “you have to give me back my sister.” The dwarf got up in one bound, turned his back to me, leaned over, and let loose an enormous fart in my face. “But that’s disgusting!” I exclaimed. The dwarf was bounding up and down and letting off a fart at each leap, chanting: “I am a God, I do what I like, I am a God, I do what I like. Now,” he added interrupting himself, “I’m going to kill you.”—“Honestly, you’re incorrigible, you’re just too rude.” I got up, made an about-face, and went out. In the distance, I saw a large cloud of dust appearing. I climbed up onto the kurgan to see better: they were horsemen. They approached, divided themselves into two rows, and lined up, face-to-face, on either side of the kurgan to form a long walkway. I could see the closest ones clearly; the horses looked as if they were mounted on wheels. Looking more closely, I saw that they were impaled front to back on fat beams that rested on a wheeled platform; their feet dangled freely; and the horsemen too were impaled, I saw the points of the stakes coming out of their heads or mouths: a rather sloppy job, to tell the truth. Each chariot or framework was pushed by a few naked slaves who, when they had placed them in position, went to sit down in a group a little farther off. I stared at the horsemen and thought I recognized Möritz’s Ukrainians. Had they too gotten all the way here, and undergone the fate that was awaiting them? But maybe it was a wrong impression. The tall, thin one-eyed man had joined me. “It’s not proper,” I scolded him, “to say that whether you win or lose, you’ll kill everyone who plays with you.”—“You are right. The fact is that we don’t have many guests. But I’ll have my brother cease this practice.” A light wind had risen again and swept the dust raised by the chariots. “What are they?” I asked, pointing to them.—“That’s the honor guard. For our wedding.”—“Yes, but I won two games out of three. So you are going to give me my sister back.” The man stared at me sadly with his single eye: “You can never get your sister back.” An uneasy dread rose in my throat. “Why?” I cried out.—“It’s not proper,” he replied. In the distance, I saw some figures approaching on foot, raising a lot of dust, which was soon carried off by the wind. My sister was walking in the middle, still naked, escorted by the two awful creatures and the musicians. “Is it proper for her to walk like that, naked, in front of everyone?” I asked, enraged. His single eye never left me: “Why not? She’s no longer a virgin, after all. But we’ll take her all the same.” I wanted to run down the kurgan to join her but the two twins, who had reappeared, barred my path. I tried to go around them but they moved to prevent me. Overcome with anger, I raised my hand at them. “Don’t hit them!” the one-eyed man barked. I turned toward him, beside myself: “What are they to me, then?” I shouted furiously. He said nothing. At the end of the walkway, between the rows of horsemen impaled on their mounts, my sister was moving forward with an even tread.