Unforgiving Years

III. Brigitte, Lightning, Lilacs

IF THERE ever had been, if there ever were, somewhere in the world, another reality, it now remained in human memory as no more than a recollection, tinged more by doubt and sadness than by nostalgia. The past marked the older people most deeply, and some of them needed no prompting to talk about it, harping ad nauseam on the good old days. It was understandable that they could not avoid being intoxicated by the past, and that it pained them even more than it pained the people who wished they would shut up. In their chatter, periods and wars got mixed up: Let’s see, was that before the first war or the second? Was that under the Kaiser, the Revolution, Weimar, Versailles, under Brüning or the Führer? Explain yourself! How many wars have there been, sir? The revolution was also a war, you must realize that! The clearest answers — coming from people who seemed to have lived through so many events in the half century that they were probably exaggerating — remained obscure; and the price of a good dinner or the comfort of a railway journey came to sound like preposterous yarns or, more exactly, the gibberish of half-wits. So when Frau Krammerz, down in the bomb shelter below Kellerman’s Rathskeller under vaults glistening with saltpeter, took to reminiscing about how life used to be — the Sundays in the country, the exquisite pastries one could order from the cake shop, the party for Gertrude’s first communion — some of the adults looked at her with hatred; and they were delighted when a little girl took her grubby fingers out of her mouth to declare, with withering finality: “S’not true.” “Quiet, you snot-nose little guttersnipe…” The child went on with her irresistible “s’not true.” Nobody got up to give her a smack, in part because the ground was shaking (bombs were raining down on the other side of the canal, there being nothing left to flatten on this side, the connoisseurs explained, so it would be murderous bad luck if…), but mostly because she was, quite obviously, right. Frau Krammerz suddenly realized it herself. Her face, more wrinkled than an empty bottle, skin crudely decorated by primitives, crumpled as she brushed away her tears and admitted, with a pitiable attempt at a laugh, “No, it’s not true, mein Gott!”

Thunderclaps sent huge waves through the earth; crackling outbursts transmuted into great surges of heat, as though invisible ripples of fire were pulsing outward from a fiery oven, somewhere nearby, to one side, deep underground. “We’re going to be baked like potatoes in ashes,” an old man calmly remarked. Fits of helpless whimpering started up in the children’s corner. “Can’t the little snots get used to it? Pipe down, it’s over, stop bawling and wipe your noses!” Brigitte made her way across the cellar toward the children, holding a cloth-wrapped object. It was her find of the morning, the reward of hours spent picking through the fresh rubble, and aroused much excitement among the small-fry. There was barely any light to see by, as the electric bulbs had just died and the shelter had fallen back on candles, but their eyes, accustomed to the dark, discerned everything in rich detail. Brigitte unrolled a doll wearing an old-fashioned military outfit, with a tall bearskin calpac, a green tunic, a white plastron and buckled gaiters, a soldier of Frederick the Great’s at Rossbach — that’s a glorious piece of History, the Seven Years’ War! Whereas these days, it feels more like the Thirty Years’ War… “For me, for me! Here, Brigitte!” chorused high voices which a string of massive but distant impacts could not drown out. (“You see, they’re going away now… all gone… finished…”) “Not for you and not for you either,” said the young woman. “We’ll hold a draw.”

“S’not real.”

“Not real, what do you mean, you silly minx?”

“Yes it is real, look, I’m playing with it…”

“Listen all to the song of glory!” proclaimed the amiable, if strident, voice of the disabled veteran, for the sirens were sounding the all clear. That sardonic voice always brought peculiar results: now one of the lightbulbs went back on, spreading sepulchral cheer. The invalid was crutching his way over to the stairway, humming to himself. “I’m off for a breath of air…” he called. “Excellent for the health. A poetic night, my friends. I’ll try to bring back some water for the sick…” The water can jangled against the complicated prostheses whose manufacturer, according to him, deserved to be summarily hanged. He had lost his left foot and right arm in some insignificant battle on the eastern front, but he managed nimbly enough on one foot, two contraptions, and a stick salvaged from the rubble that did excellent duty as a crutch, just the right length and burned to a convenient lightness. He even attended sessions at the Vocational Rehabilitation Center, charming but compulsory charades… The sick no longer left the basement shelter. They groaned for a moment, then fell quiet. During the bombing they remained silent, except for chattering teeth; the minute it was over they fell to tossing, spitting, coughing, pissing, and wanting a modicum of attention — but not for long. The disciplined character of the average man who knows there’s nothing to be done about it soon reasserted itself. Besides, this beer cellar made an agreeable shelter with its tapestried walls and elegant furniture, and there were sheets on the mattresses.

Franz, the disabled vet known as “Minus-Two,” hauled himself up the stairs, limped along a narrow corridor, skirted a bulwark of sandbags, struck the high notes of a piano keyboard with his prosthesis as he went by, making it blurt out a cracked lament, listened to this fragment of lied fade away, and continued on, with a little apprehension now because there was always a risk that the entrance to the underground system might be blocked by fresh debris. It wasn’t: silvery clouds opened against a dusting of stars. Minus-Two whistled between his teeth the triumphal march of King Frederick’s fifes. A steel-sharp sickle of moon illuminated the becalmed street, that is to say the line of building façades behind whose gaping windows lay a deepening void, some mounds of collapsed masonry like fossilized monsters, and the dark black outline of a tall, thin slice of building still standing around the axis of its chimney. The four jag-toothed floors of this tilted saw leaned fifteen or twenty degrees south by southwest; if they ever collapsed, they would fall on the uninhabitable rubble of the White Hunter Inn. If the collapse were gentle enough, someone might be able to grab that fine gold-knobbed metal bedstead clinging to the parquet of the fourth floor; as for the oval mirror framed with brass bows on which rays of sunlight sometimes played, there’d be nothing left of it but the frame, and in a sorry state at that. Broken mirror, bad omen! We can expect yet another bad omen… For now, the mirror up there was merely the augury of a bad omen. Minus-Two pondered how nothing changed: order.

Out of idle curiosity he cocked an ear to the noises of the city. A few searchlights were still crisscrossing the sky. Keep searching, keep searching, my friends, for something that leaves no trace, according to Solomon’s proverb: a fish in the sea, a man in a woman, a plane in the sky. They’re far away now. From somewhere a final, bad-tempered burst of antiaircraft fire spat out it’s flak flak flak drak drak drak. “Stupid idiots!” muttered the crippled vet. He heard ambulance sirens and motorcycle engines yapping brokenly, way over in the new part of town, where the no-go underground factories and the model workers’ housing and the railway junctions were; there can’t be much left of all that, at least not above ground; below, they can still hold out. Under the ground or otherwise, the Third Reich will hold out to the end of the millennium, that’s certain.

Minus-Two halted before a stretch of wall that had been cleanly sheared off as though there had never been anything above it; new grass was sprouting on top of the neatly raked rubble of Billingen’s Pharmacy! He practiced writing with his left hand in the moonlight, tracing each word in block letters with a piece of chalk: “One Führer, One Volk, One Tomb! Heil Death!” (This to enrage Herr Blasch.) He judged his calligraphy to be improving; faster too, I’m making progress… If only I had a cigarette butt left! Whose head would I most gladly give for a butt? There was no shortage of choices. In his book, the number-one hateful head still belonged to a tank captain he’d run into around Poznan, a rattlesnake head — monocled, helmeted, shaved, and powdered with gray, rapping out completely unfulfillable orders like: “Take out that machine-gun nest with silver tweezers for me, no getting your fingers dirty, then goose-step across that river for me, keeping dry on the tiptoes of your boots; the valiant soldier scorns all obstacles or I’ll have him court-martialed!” The Russians must have already ground that head into head cheese for the worms long ago… It’s sweet to amuse oneself with private jokes, isn’t it, Captain? Me Minus-Two, you Zero-Minus-a-Thousand, honorable Captain-Baron-Minus-Head, Minus-Balls, Minus-Joke, Minus-Everything! But if I ever learned that you didn’t get blown away by a 177 shell up your ass, I’d have to conclude that not even the shadow of one-eyed justice remains here below…

“But that’s impossible!” cried Minus-Two into the soft transparent night.

So whose head could he offer up to the Great God of Universal War so as to ensure finding tomorrow a juicy stub of genuine tobacco, the kind your Party higher-ups sometimes throw away? Crescent moon, inspire me! The head of Herr Blasch, sergeant of the elite corps’ home guard, in charge of security of recovered dwellings, Führer of the neighborhood lout patrol… Tac-tac-trac-tac, the music of machine-gun fire rang out in the distance among the fresh or refreshed ruins. Herr Blasch and his henchmen — on orders from above — were busy liquidating the seriously wounded, or looters caught red-handed, or some crazed old granny who started mouthing off… I’m a lucky bugger to have only two limbs left, thought Minus-Two.

And for a little shot of schnapps, what would you give for that, Franz? For a cheery draught of Pomeranian brandy? Your Iron Cross? Oh la la! I’ll throw in the colossal Stone Cross they’ll be raising over the tomb of the German people, and the columns of the imperial chancellery for good measure…

“What’s impossible?” From behind came a voice as bubbly as a lovely brook running through green grass — if there still were such things as brooks, grass, cows, pearly green horizons.

“Princess!” Minus-Two exclaimed as he swung around. “You’re incredible.”

“It’s true,” said Brigitte.

She came closer, belted into her white coat, her curls blond in daylight, now the shade of metallic ash, her neck slender, her gaze unfocused. She was always looking elsewhere or beyond, so that Minus-Two had come to conceive of her eyes on the model of classical statuary. He leaned conveniently against a tidy stack of bricks made by the Schools Reconstruction Organization (thanks to Strength through Joy, of course).

“Come here, closer, white fairy.” Brigitte came. With his living arm he pulled her toward him, heatedly. “When this war is over, Brigitte, I’m going to marry a rich woman, a very rich woman. We won’t have kids. Because of the next war, d’you see. My wife will look like you.”

“I am rich,” Brigitte said gently, “but I won’t get married.”

The crippled vet’s horsey head, with its hairy nostrils and soft angry mouth, was calling. They kissed, mouth to mouth until they ran out of breath, their breath returning as one single breath.

“Why won’t you get married, Brigitte?”

“Because of love. It would be too hard to explain. I don’t really understand it myself. I’m going home. Good night, Franz.”

“I’ll go get some water for the sick, see you later,” the man said, or didn’t say, perhaps only thinking the words, suddenly knocked down by exhaustion, like a human animal concussed in the vicinity of an exploding mine. It erases you in an instant and you come to dazed, drained, unable to grasp that life is continuing, or yours is at least, with a frenzied carillon of blood booming in your temples, your rib cage, your limbs, your skull scoured by a wind of fire… With the metal pincer of his right hand, he held the can under the spigot while pumping energetically with his left, it worked, hallelujah! Good old pump, it was holding up better under the circumstances than the western front, the eastern front, the Italian, the oceanic, and the home fronts! The water of this well seemed to have remained pure, even though twenty feet away the sewers were vomiting up stinking slime through a large crack in the asphalt. Some rats scurried up and began lapping at the puddles around the pump; they grew strangely thirsty after each bombardment. Drink your fill, nasty animals, brother rats, you are like us, we are like you.

If there had ever existed, if there still were, some other place, another reality, the children had no way of knowing it. They grew, they played, they died (in large numbers, with even larger numbers surviving, the scientists couldn’t understand it) in a ghostly city bristling with the skeletons of churches lashed by sky, wind, rain, and fire. Oases of habitation robbed the destruction of a few torn, eerie patches of domesticity… Wherever life could take hold, whether in basements or in bedrooms carefully refurbished in the very heart of chaos, some on higher floors propped up by what looked like concrete stilts, households restored a sense of intimacy: pictures and portraits on the wall, doilies on broken-legged furniture, makeshift brick ovens standing on the buckling parquet, access ladders with rope handholds, trunks and bed linen, maxims embroidered by an aged aunt, since evacuated: “Do Good and Thy Soul Shall Leap for Joy.”

The earth shuddered, smoke crept across it, people dwelt in a volcanic realm of sudden explosions, smoldering dormant fires, smoky eddies of soot, dust clouds, the stench of reeking corpses, charred and splintered trees that persisted in budding and even put out, here and there, tender pale-green leaves as though nothing were amiss. Squads of women or schoolboys cleared the ghostly path of streets where no street remained, restoring empty grids like the layout of an archaeological excavation, shoveling human debris from under a mangle of timbers to be borne away on dirty stretchers toward tumbrels disinfected by men in face masks… The children could not have dreamed that another urban landscape was possible, and they found this one simple: terrifying by night, terrifying by day when the routine horrors occurred, pleasant and packed with surprises at other times… On sunny mornings the children emerged in their clean clothes like baby scorpions scuttling out from under a stone to bask in the heat; out came the children to roll marbles, throw balls, skip rope, and play war. They played at escaped prisoners, who were chased, caught, and solemnly shot, yet despite the inevitability of this outcome they all wanted to be the prisoner… Their playground encompassed the deep rubbly crater that yawned behind the little olive-and-yellow house, almost intact, that belonged to the post office subdirector, and a mountainous redoubt they called the Sierra, a mysteriously vast domain where apartment blocks owned by the Patria Life Insurance Company used to stand. The treasure hunters struck out into the Sierra, careless of the official ban, to climb the Himalayas and Chimborazos of destruction; they posted a lookout in the Mount Rose hidey-hole to watch out for the little policemen in the green uniform or the more formidable guard with the white armband; a discreet birdcall was enough to make the energetic heads of girls and boys duck down behind the spurs of Kazbek or Popocatepetl… Because Professor Schiff, skipping the chapters on cosmology and basic physical geography, lectured his pupils passionately on the geological cataclysms that gave birth to mountain chains, on subterranean fire, on earthquakes, on the submersion of entire continents beneath the seas: for example Atlantis, mentioned by the divine Plato, northern Laurentia, Gondwanaland to the southeast… The earth was replete with lost continents.

Schiff was a very old man. He wore a frock coat singed rusty from the time his house caught fire; the atlases he brought to class were singed around the edges like old books from a corsair’s booty; during breaks darkened by rain (or when he felt like it), Herr Schiff told stories about the end of the world, the Flood and Noah’s ark, the San Francisco earthquake, the annihilation of Saint-Pierre de la Martinique under sulfurous clouds that melted the very bronze of the church bells, so imagine what it did to soft human flesh, meine liebe Kinder, my dear children! They were beautiful tales and easy to understand. “Remember when the dike broke, sir, it was like Atlantis in the shelters around there, wasn’t it? Like a flood! And three families got away in an ark, sir, people saw them!” The teacher suspected that the boy who had spoken with such aptness was a Jew hidden by a Catholic family, and felt a combination of pitiful sympathy and insurmountable repugnance toward him but reacted benevolently in appreciation of the boy’s correct understanding. “You have a point,” he said, inclining his head to rest it against his open palm, “but of course the end of Atlantis was the end of an entire world. All the towns, all the fields, even the high mountains, and all the people of twenty tribes… It’s rather hard to imagine.” He was a splendid teacher of drawing, writing, and discipline, who greeted his classes of ten- to fourteen-year-olds with martially outstretched arm and a resounding Heil Hitler! that could compete with the great rallies in Nuremberg. As a result his classes performed the smartest, proudest salute of any school in town. It was common knowledge that his two sons had died like heroes, one in the Libyan desert, the other in the forests of Courland, and hence every pupil was familiar with the location of these important countries, justly conquered… Schiff interrupted the writing lesson to demand in stentorian tones: “Hans Büttel! What is the one and only immortal power?” Hans stood up obediently to recite a formula no one quite understood, inspiring hilarious parodies by wise guys, but which brought a look of peace onto the master’s fraught countenance. “Sir, each of us is merely mortal, but the Aryan Race, is im-mor-tal!” Instructed by his mother, wan little Claudius plunked himself in front of Professor Schiff’s desk, between the color poster of cereals and the portrait of the Leader-of-the-Party-and-the-People-who-is-guiding-us-to-Victory, and asked, “My mother wanted to know, sir, is victory near?” “My dear boy, fetch your pencil and write.” Professor Schiff dictated: “Our victory does not reside in earthly space or time, but in the deathless principle of the Race.” Frau Sonnecker framed these lines in gold paper and hung them above her son’s bed… It was a pleasant schoolroom, lacking only one corner of the roof; the hole had been patched with corrugated iron. Six gilt chairs from the confectioner’s shop added a touch of glamour, but they were not to be sat on, the school will return them to Frau Deinecke when that lady comes back, after the war.

The master turned a blind eye to his pupils’ expeditions, and, when they brought him books, gravely acknowledged the gift. The warrior-explorers, Argonauts, Conquistadors, Knights of the Round Table, or Teutonic heroes, as the fancy took them, unearthed all sorts of trophies in the volcano zone… The great trick was to detect a cave, unblock the entrance, and worm your way inside… And if, at the edge of the dark emptiness, you suddenly spied a convulsed hand or some grayish hair clinging to a bleached skull, you closed the lair and continued your explorations. Bad luck! Sometimes you penetrated into a kitchen or a bathroom, or the corner of a bedroom where the most extraordinary objects preserved a virginity appropriate to treasure troves. There might be a bag of potatoes, an umbrella, some books, a photograph album, a pretty fan decorated in faded watercolors (Charlotte and Werther…), a slightly crushed camera, repairable and salable, clothing holed by bits of metal but still usable… Needless to say you had to watch out for the owners, real or pretend, the latter being the more vindictive; they materialized without warning, able to spot “their stuff” at twenty yards, they snatched the treasure, boxed your ears, and stormed off to complain to the parents or Herr Schiff! They were nicknamed the Winged Vampires. Fortunately, three-quarters of the Winged Vampires had disappeared. On the flank of Chimborazo a precisely printed sign proclaimed LOOTING IS PUNISHABLE BY DEATH, Todestrafe, but that applied chiefly to inferior races, the escaped Poles, Russians, and Serbs who were rumored to be living deep underground, well below the level of cellars and shelters, creeping forth at night under cover of the bombs to attack the SS and people in uniform and to steal marmalade. The twelve-year-old explorer felt rather proud to be braving the Todestrafe, DEATH PENALTY.

If in truth a different world had ever existed, Brigitte would have retained a more convincing memory of it. Nonetheless, she did not doubt that the city had once been completely different, disoriented though she was by the changes being wrought by wave upon wave of destruction. Last week, the flat half-moon edifice of the chamber of commerce was still in its place, at the bottom of Grand Elector Plaza. The carcass of a bus sat rusting next to the kiosk that provided sweets, cigarettes, newspapers, and a wash-room. The bronze Grand Elector lay on his back on the lawn, his comical paunch swelling upward; the female figure from the pedestal had also fallen over and was sleeping on her side with her eyes open; she was holding a laurel branch and the Grand Elector, a book; they lay back to back is if they were quarreling. The main shopping artery still paraded its wounded façades and signboards over its vanished businesses. After last night’s hurricane, the artery was buried under a desert of scorched, blackened rubble, dusted with a powder as fine and light as mineral dew. The recumbent statues, the shell of the bus, the friendly news-and-chocolates building, the chamber of commerce itself were nowhere to be found: the whole square had slid sideways before being erased. Brigitte found herself wandering through an unfamiliar neighborhood where the downstairs of redbrick houses were still inhabited and some men in uniform were assembled in a conclave outside the door of a tavern, Bierstube. Someone shouted, “Hurry up there, Fraülein, the cleanup squad…” She nodded, yes, yes, and walked on. Soon she came to a mobile kitchen handing out soup to about a hundred people, several of whom were elegantly dressed. Humiliated at losing her way, Brigitte asked for directions. “Go right as far as Westphalia, then third left, that’s Marie-Louise Strasse.” But there was no left or right, no way of identifying Westphalia Strasse; Volkssturm roadblocks were inexplicably set up across steep dunes of rubble. A haze of gray smoke rose toward the noonday sun. Instinct led Brigitte back to her familiar territory.

So inexorably did the present annul the past, so simply, so mercilessly did this present perpetuate itself, that no room was left for the anticipation of any other future. The linear direction of time was scrambled, the calendar lost its meaning, the everyday milestones of existence were gradually effaced. Of the past Brigitte retained nothing but a handful of images, devoid of substance, as implausible and yet tenacious as those of recurring dreams. Reality commenced this side of a frontier defined by glowing summer evenings which weren’t prewar, but already wartime, since He was dead. The sirens started howling after midnight… Brigitte got up without any fear. What was there to be afraid of, now that He had ceased to exist, He who may never have existed but in His letters and the wonderful slumber that came before reality? A spreading sound of hurried steps told of the tenants making for the shelters. “Order, order… !” The sirens stopped and an absolute hush fell, like the cradling of the world. Brigitte took the little suitcase containing His letters, underwear, and money, but instead of going downstairs she went up… Ascend, she thought; that’s what you should do, poor souls, ascend toward the stars, (ascend toward Him); the neighbors she tried to tell this to pushed roughly past her muttering Was? Was? What? What? She climbed the ladder to the roof and went to lean her back against a chimney. All the constellations were glittering at once, even the faint Northern Crown was clearly visible, and surrounding them, beyond them, the deep pure blue of celestial space, grander still for containing secret constellations that could be discerned only by the most powerful telescopes… And the dark earth, blossoming all of a sudden into an immense flashing star emitting rays, spears, scimitars, and fans of light. The whiteness wove a tissue of radiance around the city, around the entire planet: the planet in her wedding dress. A bright cupola rose above Brigitte’s rapt, thrown-back head. She wished for cricket song: the crickets sang. Trac-tac-tac, tractac-tac-tac, trrraac, their song grew louder, the crickets all died in a millionth of a second and a deafening buzz of elytrons blew the shredded sails of great maddened ships in every direction of the compass as they plied the rocking firmament. “Good God, great God, Lord God!” stammered Brigitte, alone at the apex of a city turned into a dark, petrified gulf (daughter of a social-democrat academic, she was not a believer, but since His death she thought she half believed, not in the words of the faith but in the inexpressible intuition the words tried vainly to express…). A white-hot symphony of steel struck up. A thousand motors droned in the cold incandescent furnace of the sky. Brigitte glimpsed dull fragments and even a metal fuselage briefly captured in the searchlights: the fragments and fuselage got away… No light, however murderous, is a prison! At the foot of the electric beams garishly colored firebirds soared and fell in triangles of night… The thunders crashed. Was there a beginning? Did they all crash together? Was it a single bouquet of lightning bolts multiplying through space? The black prostrate city did not cry out, despite the continuous shaking of the ground and the unendurable flashing of yellow-and-gold bursts over by the freight yards. The cathedral spire glittered darkly like a piercing scream. Geysers of green water spurted from the disemboweled river, Brigitte could see them clearly. “My God, if only the bridge… Oh, surely there is no more bridge, no quays, no river… All the water sprites have faded into radiant death… Why weren’t you one of them, Brigitte!” Now black waves arose. The lightning struck closer, but strangely in the opposite direction, with long, crackling reverberations, but nothing was visible, over there lay White Queen Park, populated by bronze antelopes and musicians’ busts… From there, oppressive clouds of black yet sulfurous smoke twisted into the air, spreading as they rose. Brigitte breathed in warm air full of nauseous odors… The bouquets of this demented dawn broke apart, some falling to earth, crashing in dark fields. Holes appeared in the sky where the calm sand grains of constellations were insanely still. The Northern Crown was shining again. “Lord God, hear me! Let us all die, all of us, down to the last innocent babe in its loving mother’s arms!” So Brigitte prayed, rigid yet calm, her eyes still dazzled by the inhuman revelry of glimmers and flashes, now convulsing spasmodically, now abating, on the verge of expiring, and bursting back to life like a firebox short of fuel… The thundering symphony stopped all at once. Stray searchlights swiped the air with wounded wings and flickered out. The darkness spread in stony waves over the gulf of the city, but clouds were crawling like wild beasts over the rail yards and the industrial district emitting dull roars and nauseating smells… Sirens proclaimed the all clear…

As Brigitte returned downstairs, she met Frau Hoffberger coming up — a courageous woman, widowed during the first war, who liked to talk. “So where on earth were you, Brigitte? I was horribly worried about you. But it wasn’t too bad, was it? Did you hear our artillery! Herr Flatt, who was in the other war with my late husband, says we were attacked by a hundred planes, and they were all shot down or chased away, it’s a marvelous victory and our city can be proud, Brigitte, what a headache I have, and Frau Sachs, she fainted away as soon as our big guns opened up! And she’d brought her poodle down with her, I do think pets should be absolutely forbidden in shelters, I mean, I know animals are also at risk and they’re family for some people, but there’s hygiene and morale to be considered… Oh well, it’s all blown over, I don’t mind telling you I’m relieved, they won’t be back in a hurry after the hiding we gave them. You’ll see tomorrow, I’m sure those fire-crackers of theirs did far more harm than noise” (Frau Hoffberger meant this the other way around), “Herr Flatt says the Americans are the most incompetent flyers, they get a search beam in their eyes and down they go… Herr Jochsl didn’t agree, he was so jumpy I had to tug him by the sleeve and tell him, discreetly, don’t go on like that, Herr Jochsl, someone might turn you in, of course I know what a patriot you are, but… He was teary eyed as a girl, and a veteran too! They say he’s a Social Democrat! The electricity’s out, by the way, but it’s sure to be fixed tomorrow. Oh dear, how am I going to get through my day tomorrow, I’ve lost at least two hours’ sleep…”

“Good night, Frau Hoffberger,” said Brigitte. “Go right to bed.” In her own room, Brigitte ran her hands over her face several times, as though to remove an invisible veil and firm up her shaky features… The candle burned in the middle of its porcelain flower. How many flowers would be needed for this night’s graves, how many flowers? One enormous flower of light and fire, and of calm, for the city, for us all, Lord! For the world! She opened the old iron-filigreed casket containing His letters, in chronological order and tied with a ribbon. Some of these missives, delivered by the military postal service, contained only expressions of love, but there were others — so overwhelming and she could hardly read them — which had arrived after the notice of His Death on the Field of Honor for Folk and Fatherland: there were also photostats of the official report and the divisional order of His citation, and a photo of His Iron Cross, all forwarded to the fiancée by the fiancé’s parents.

Moments overlap, time is no longer continuous, but it was sometime later — which is to say, after the death notice but before the first heavy bombardment — that an olive-green private on furlough turned up, a shy, grim-looking young man who would only identify himself as Günther. He placed a parcel on the table and said, “Here are His letters. I have read them, at His request. The whole of Germany should read them. Good day, Fraülein.” “But you can’t just leave!” cried Brigitte despairingly. The crumpled forage cap came off again.

He had a receding hairline, pale sparse eyebrows, the face of a young athlete recovering from an illness. Overcoming his embarrassment he began, “Pardon me, Fraülein, I only…”

“You were his friend?”

“Yes.”

“You know how it happened?”

“Yes.”

“I want to know everything. I have the right to know everything.”

Maybe he was measuring her strength, and the anxiety at the bottom of the little strength he saw. Frauenkind, a child-woman; there are also Männerkinder, child-men, you see them on the firing line, despite their fear, because combat and unknown horrors frighten them less than the idea of letting their weakness show; they make good soldiers and excellent corpses (but not very good wounded: they tend to weep and moan and their misery aggravates their pain…). Brigitte understood that he was going to hurt her, badly, unsparingly, out of a kind of pitiless kindness. She begged him: “Go on, tell me, I’m not afraid of anything…”

“He didn’t suffer… He died at once. A dozen bullets, chest, belly… They were experienced marksmen, shooting at almost point-blank range…”

Chest, belly — carnal words, they lacked for Brigitte their full human density. “I’m glad,” she said, “that his face was spared…” And she saw he was going to hurt her again, but what more could there be?

“On his face there was nothing but great astonishment.”

Brigitte smiled, as though half released. The astonishment of ceasing to be, mystery and mystery’s end, she too wanted that. Unintelligible words broke in on her. “What? What did you say? I didn’t quite…”

“I said he was killed by our own men, he and the rest of his tank crew.”

“Our own men? What men?”

“The others!” the soldier said with hatred. “The killers. Oh yes. They exist. Maybe they have to… That tank crew was noted for its bad attitude, do you understand? Well, I didn’t understand, but I did afterward. They’d been sacrificed; they weren’t supposed to come back. But they did come back, that sometimes happens. So an elite squad shot them down between the lines…”

These words burned slowly and unforgettably into Brigitte’s mind. There was no astonishment.

“Fraülein, it’s even happened to generals…” “Yes, yes, I understand, and I am very grateful you told me the truth… The truth…” Our own men, the others, the killers…

Time is in shreds and the soldier’s letters were in shreds. Brigitte could reread only some torn fragments.

“…We were working back through villages burned out during the retreat. As though the land had been killed off. A few people were still living in cellars, they were afraid of us and kept their raped women hidden, but sometimes they’d come out and scrounge for food; and creatures who once were women were still offering themselves. S said we ought to put them out of their misery, but he threw them some bread… The bread fell into the mud, where they scrabbled for it. A desert is what we have made — that may not be the truth, but that’s what I saw. M explained the strategy behind the retreat. He’s the only one who thinks and speaks; he tells us that next we’re going to beat America, now that the Führer’s goals have been met in Russia… And how are we going to beat America, I ask? He’s counting on secret weapons, scientific warfare. He talks about the stratosphere without knowing what it is — as though it were some sort of magical immensity set aside for the most devastating weapons. He’s obstinate and brave, with an unformed intelligence inside a rather noble skull. No experience upsets him. The Führer knows what he’s doing, and thus our defeats become transmuted into brilliant feints. M is aware of my ‘doubts’ and said to me: I hope you will be killed for the Fatherland because I respect you.

“…Once my tank ran over some living men. They were hiding under the snow, lying in wait for us perhaps, the machine swerved as it accelerated and they screamed like mice being crushed. Our treads were clogged with bleeding flesh and we left a red trail on the snow. I had to see it all, since I’m the observer. I’ve seen them finish off wounded men — our men — for lack of stretchers to take them away. The important thing was that they shouldn’t be able to disclose anything about our units’ movements. In any case, that’s how M explained it, approving orders he deems harsh but wise. ‘War,’ he said, ‘lifts man above himself.’ ‘Would you like such an end for yourself?’ I asked. ‘And why not,’ he replied, ‘better than falling into the hands of Jews and Jew lovers…’ He means it too. I respect him; I think I hate him. I’ve seen prisoners lined up to be shot one by one by a Feldwebel because they wouldn’t tell what they could not know about enemy plans. Some of them got down on their knees and talked, making things up. M said laughing: ‘We’ll liquidate these liars a little later…’ He loves to remind us that the Russians never signed the Geneva convention regarding POWs, too bad for them. Then what about our prisoners? M has an answer for that too: I’ve no pity to waste on cowards, I have pity only for the unlucky ones, but they must face up to the law of nature: Vae victis! The powerful races will only triumph by accomplishing nature’s law. His logic is seamless, like a paranoiac’s.

“…We directed a concentrated barrage on a small infantry tank whose motor had conked out forty yards away. It was a pitiful box of cardboard and steel with three men inside, one of them waving a dirty white rag. The sublieutenant was beside himself because we’d had a terrible attack of jitters as we were pulling back, one of those uncontrollable panics that comes over even the best soldiers now and then, like an electric shock to the nerves. G was yelling, ‘Ha, so they surrender do they, the dirty dogs, the cowardly curs!’ He wouldn’t listen to me, he looked completely out of his mind; normally, he’s a decent fellow, a flower gardener by trade. He ordered us to fire and we watched the tin can burn, the magazine blow up, I watched a blond twenty-year-old burning, half out of the turret. I told myself: Look at what you’re doing, you must look without blinking, you’re not allowed to close your eyes. I watched the flames leap to his blond hair, I watched his face twist like a paper mask tossed onto a bonfire. And I said to myself, When I’ve been killed, I want my pure Brigitte to meet this youth — because he will live again — and to love him for love of me…

“…I was thinking that there’s no natural law for mankind, whose natural law is human law. The tiger and the termite obey their natures; we must be true to ours, which is divine, that is to say a thinking, merciful nature…

“…The bodies of hanged men were dangling from telegraph poles, there were more swinging from the porch of the church. There were too many, they no longer frightened anyone. Fear results from a surprise inflicted on the imagination. Once the surprise has worn off, a hanged man seems perfectly simple, getting hanged becomes quite natural, you realize it’s only a few painful moments and that there are worse ways to die. We were talking about a rabbi. ‘He was lucky to swing so soon,’ says M, who is not personally cruel but accepts that others should be, so as to surmount their instinctive cowardice and face up to responsibility. The average man, in his view, has gone soft, domesticated by an ailing civilization, and will benefit from being trained to cruelty. (M does not consider himself an average man; he regards himself, so he told me, as a normal Aryan.) I questioned this, playfully, just to rile him a little — evoking the Aryans of India, who profess detachment from material things and nonviolence even toward animals. M broke out laughing: ‘If that’s what they teach you at the university, then the universities are overdue for disinfection, and the professors of Aryanism belong in Buchenwald, cleaning the latrines.’ That was mostly to annoy me back, I think, for then he was patient, explaining how the decadence of the Aryan races, weakened by Semitic infiltration, was the root cause of all historical calamities. The Aryan renaissance began with the Party. The more I talk with him, the more I have the impression of a dialogue with a systematic psychopath, and yet I have a humiliating compulsion to converse with him. Of the dozen men who constitute my circle of hell, he’s the only one who talks; I don’t know whether he thinks or merely repeats a series of memorized formulas. I am obsessed by the awful possibility of our souls being imprinted with a whole system of notions designed to prevent us from becoming conscious, smothering thought beneath ersatz thought.

“…There were more children than adults, probably as a result of earlier waves of deportation. The little girls were carrying their dolls, pitiful dolls. In the pathos of their silence and the pathos of their wailing lamentation these Jews exhibited two contradictory characteristics. I remained very calm, I wanted only to understand the victims. To understand means to identify. To understand rather than surrender to suffering, which amounts to no more than a carnal, emotional communion. I sought a communion of the spirit. At first, the silence seemed to me to be nobler than the wailing. Women tearing at their hair, old men chanting their prayers and pulling their white beards… I observed that the blows of rifle butts did not interrupt the rhythm of their lamentation. I understood that this was the rhythm of a lamentation echoing down through the centuries; that it is a community’s song of consent. I saw myself: a calm, rigid onlooker, like a disciplined lunatic. They were being herded into the boxcars. M assures me they will be destroyed in the most painless way possible, with cyanide gas, and recalls the Gospel’s injunction to separate the wheat from the chaff. Then he moves on to eugenics and human selection, look how stunted, sniveling, anemic, and infirm they are, how weepy the old men, how ugly the women! At this point F and W broke in, talking about the beautiful girls in Serbia and Holland… I’ll never forget the asphyxiated howls that came from inside the boxcars… The troops were in a good mood because a ration of brandy had been distributed. Many men felt that it was necessary to evacuate the populations of these little towns to make room for the folks from our bombed-out cities.

“…Brigitte, I only have tonight to write you the truth of my soul. I know I am hurting you, but I have no one else in the world with whom to share the bitterness of a cup I must drink to the dregs. And since you are my wife in spirit, you must find the courage to drink this cup with me, even if your reason is shaken, as mine often is. The single absolute duty of those alive today is to drain the bitter cup to the last drop, overcoming our shaking limbs and minds, perhaps in order to be able to say afterward: Everything is accomplished. Here I am.

“…I can’t tell you all of it, it’s impossible to tell it all, even more to see it all and to understand it all. We are moving through the banality of chaos and I can only recall minor, episodic things, poor simple things that sometimes enlighten me. I am a man without grandeur, a humble man unable to take in big events… But don’t doubt me, Brigitte, I am a very good soldier who fulfills his duty at every moment, conscientiously, as if I had no conscience. They’re going to put me up for another decoration, which would mean a few days’ special leave to see you, and then they’ll make me a noncommissioned officer. I’m not especially eager, having no wish for personal responsibility, but do I have the right to abandon it to others? If I’m chosen, I will obey. My body and my will obey, my spirit remains free and refuses. What more can I do? If it weren’t for you, I would consent to be shot. Through you, I perceive a living world for whose sake the survivors must live. They alone will know, will reflect unceasingly upon what must never happen again, upon that which must be excised from mankind. I live in remorse and apprehension because I dread betraying our people’s cause in my thoughts, but I also fear to betray the universal principle of which our people is just one moment, one face. Maybe that’s the truly unpardonable war: between a people and its universal homeland…

“…Was it necessary to unleash hell on earth, did we have to do what we are doing? I have no right to stand apart from anyone, not from the Jews and not from M, who desires the death of the Jews; I’ve no right to consider myself superior to anyone. The only thing I’m certain of is that this crime is the crime of all men. We were the victims of tremendous historical injustices, but every country can say the same, and we’ve inflicted injustices on others — it goes around and around. Were we really so stifled by the Treaty of Versailles? I don’t know anymore. I do know that the world is far more stifled today, and we’re the ones who beckoned to the avalanches and told them: Fall! If the unparalleled energy we devoted in central Europe to a reenactment of the conquests of Sargon and Ramses had been used to build a new, just, dignified nation at the service of the Universal, what an ideal victory we should have won! All the wrongs would be put to rights on a higher plane than that of borders, and what border would not dissolve before the mere presence of a superior humanity?

“…Now the whole world is against us and we are alone. I wonder whether the Seer, in whom so many of the disheartened believed so as to escape from their small despairs, may not be mad. However many gallons of blood we shed, our own or that of others — for human blood is a single substance — we’ll never reach New York, or Tobolsk, or San Francisco, or Baghdad, and that being so we will never gain victory, or peace, or pride (for those who feel compensated by pride), or forgiveness. Our pitiable armies are on the run, our pitiable dead remain as sole occupiers of the conquered lands, sole fraternizers with the dead of other peoples. The Seer should have foreseen it, the Seer was blind! The murder and destruction we have dealt out are turning around to devour us. We should never have followed the Seer! We should have kept our reason, but had we any other choice? I could have let myself be sent to Dachau — I thought about it. Can I be more useful there? I asked myself. Now I see that I might have been more upright, more faithful there. But how could I have known then what I know now? There are plenty of sleepwalkers in our ranks, but almost all of them are beginning to feel, deep down in their hearts, however confusedly, something of what I write here. We are prisoners, all of us. We condemn ourselves…

“…The death of another man is my own death. A man who kills may not know it, but in reality he is killing himself. The frenzy of certain warriors — even more that of the exterminators, whose baseness places them a thousand million leagues below the warriors — is a suicidal frenzy…

“…But is it still permissible to believe in mankind? If our side alone were to blame, it would fill me with relief, it would help me to regain my trust. But I’ve seen too much to believe that… Is it all the fault of the system? Systems are such heavy chains that they exonerate the infinitesimal individual, the thinking reed, the trampled reed. What would Pascal or Spinoza have done in Dachau? Or at the front, under a helmet? The reed stops thinking, becomes malleable matter, identifies with its chains. The system is the work of men, after all, men who are made by it as much as they were makers of it. And not all of them are deranged, clearly; most aspire simply to live off it in peace, killing with the calculated, businesslike temperance of their mentors. I am wrestling with these problems, but, I am and I do not consent! Since I said these salutary words to myself, weak as I am, groping in darkness, I felt I was at the dawn of deliverance. And you’ll know that if I fall, the end will have been the lighter for it. Proof exists that a man need not necessarily consent to what he does. Obey and disobey. Submit to earthly solidarity — or to the crushing weight of the chain — while salvaging something more essential. If I woke up the men who are lying asleep around me in this derelict schoolroom and asked each one (even the incredibly brutal elite soldiers, prey to regressive neuroses): What do you wish for the most? they would all answer: The end! Some would unconsciously be including their own end in that of the nightmare. Of course, one out of three would turn me in, and I’d be shot before the day was out. A curse on the blind Seer, a curse on ourselves!

“…We have been defeated. Even the fanatics can’t help but see it. Someone was saying that we should hold up to the whole world our refusal to capitulate by committing mass suicide. I managed not to ask the question that was on the tip of my tongue: Have the whole people commit suicide? The Race? (For that matter, didn’t we begin the suicide? Not only ours, but Europe’s?) A single word can become deadly dangerous. I’ve learned of a secret order for the immediate execution of suspects. Too little, too late, according to M. He feels that the elimination of two million Germans during the early days of the regime would have made the regime more exemplary, more homogeneous, and might even have avoided a war by scaring the daylights out of international Jewry… I pointed out that a lot more than two million Germans have died as it is. He was so caught up by his reasoning that he stared at me pensively through those stony blue eyes without losing his temper. He then produced a theory — I believe that disaster stimulates his brain. The trick, he said, would be to select death itself, a selection that would be the apotheosis of eugenics…

“…Brigitte, my pure Brigitte, you must prepare your heart for a new love, since life must be continued and it seems that I, like so many others, am destined to fail in that duty. See how guilty we are, how we have failed to honor a supreme commandment, a rule so exalted that it defies formulation. My premonition is that I shall not return. I read the truth of my fate a long time ago, as one reads an equation, advancing toward the Russian flamethrowers through a wood full of frantic animals. All of us in the condemned armies are men who will never recover anything, never resume what was once dear to us. Prepare yourself, I am ready. Be calm, be strong, and forgive me. By forgiving me, you will be forgiving millions of others… Our people will survive like a desperately wounded man, maimed in his very soul; but we will not find forgiveness, since we have lost and history forgives only the strong. We, the dead and the survivors, will be the unforgiven people, we who revealed in their blackest depths the frailty and blindness of human energy. I envision this future without bitterness, because only then, having touched the bottom of the abyss, shall we be able to rise again toward an integral consciousness, in a century… And if that day should ever come to pass, blessed be defeat!”

The handwriting was regular, rank upon rank of firm, slanting downstrokes. Brigitte knew that to understand, she had to penetrate beyond the words. This time, with the light of the great white fires in the sky still glowing inside her, she thought, dry-eyed, that she had truly understood. She decided to forget His name. “The soul of the millions was in him and he was nothing but that soul. All the names are his, and almost all the faces…” She burned his photographs. She wept at burning them, repeating his name all the while. Abruptly her eyes dried and her wish was granted: she no longer knew the name.

“Brigitte, are you crying?” inquired Frau Hoffberger through the door.

Brigitte opened the door, laughing and disheveled.

“Not at all, just look at me!”

“Here’s some herb tea, my girl, it’ll do you good.”

Brigitte accepted the tepid infusion, yellow as urine, maybe poisoned, who could tell? Frau Hoffberger is a kind soul, but does she know her own poisons? The hands of kindness are steeped in poison. She opened the window and flung the tisane into the poisonous smoke of the night. Then she returned the cup to her neighbor: “Thank you so much, you are kind… Have you had some yourself?” “Yes, I drink one every night before bed…” Brigitte’s pupils dilated with a strange suspicion. “Is there something wrong, my dear?” “No, nothing, sleep well…”

Arms folded behind her head, Brigitte lay peacefully waiting for the sun to come up, though now and then a tremor went through her body and she let it, for it was the trembling of the universe.

Next morning, the street looked the same as always. This encouraged a feeling of immutable normality, despite the rumors. People said that fifteen thousand had perished in the industrial suburbs, which were now cordoned off by the police. So much heat had swept the city in wave upon wave that the air remained acrid. Under the low clouds fires were struggling upward, spawning clouds of their own from rising black columns… The bishop toured the periphery of destruction, places that had emerged relatively unscathed but where many people had gone insane. Herr Blasch, the Party’s right-hand man, performed a solemn walkabout through the streets under his control (nothing had happened there). He was wearing a combat uniform, an Iron Cross, several other important insignia, a silver swastika, a thick brown leather belt, a peaked cap as tall as a general’s, and a skull badge… Stiff necked, all black and silver, vigilant yet benevolent, conversing with women, inquiring after the children’s health as he walked by, finding plausible explanations for everything. The underground factories, he could report, had escaped destruction thanks to the foresight of our strategic engineers… Other damage was more apparent than real, forty killer bombers had been shot down, the enemy airmen would be court-martialed — but the verdict was in no doubt — for having violated every law of warfare… Herr Blasch added that this was nothing — less than nothing I assure you — compared to the punishment London had been taking for weeks, London where our automatic rockets, our Secret Weapon of Vengeance Number One, were razing entire neighborhoods so thoroughly that any rescue or clearance efforts were a waste of time… Oh yes, it was raining over London all right, raining meteors night and day, and volcanoes were spouting, eruption upon eruption! And this was only a modest beginning: the second and third Secret Weapons were lined up ready to obliterate whole chunks of England, the soil would be laid waste for years, not a blade of grass would grow back. “Then they will surrender. The Führer knows what he’s doing. They played right into his hands when he let them disembark in France, you wait and see. Let cowards and cretins doubt him, they’ll pay the price!” Herr Blasch’s jet-and-silver uniform was cut from the cloth of confidence itself. The population received an extra ration of foodstuffs that made an excellent impression in the districts which had been spared.

That night, that morning of the time of origins, marked for Brigitte the border between reality and a peaceful, now unimaginable world, which may never have been real at all.

There were daylight raids, nighttime raids, twilight raids, dawn raids, and errors in the warning system, which announced a bombing raid when it had already begun and sounded the all clear as it was starting over again… The city was simultaneously subsisting and disappearing, yet its new, protean physiognomy imposed itself so perfectly that the old was obliterated forever: the cruel curves of twisted rafters appeared more natural than a stupefying, pristine mailbox that had been left untouched by the arcane physics of two deflagrations canceling each other out over precisely that spot. Had the city’s inhabitants possessed the leisure or the inclination to found a philosophy, it would have been a philosophy of the End of the World and personal survival (albeit painful and provisional) — survival barely explicable without evoking the activity of completely irrational good genies or the instinct of self-preservation combined with luck, as well as black markets, esoteric frauds, providential larcenies, influential patrons, the connivance of all and sundry, and a handful of good-luck charms. Each explosion was like a throw of the dice, and people grew accustomed to winning, since the losers never got a chance to voice their disappointment. Everybody clung to their precious little suitcase containing their last riches and dressed as smartly as possible, as though every day were Sunday, to avoid — by having their prettiest dress or best topcoat on them all the time — being robbed during a panic; as a result, there was a certain air of elegance and good taste on the breadline and some of the men even still looked dapper. Everyone had survived several times over by now, and they were all beginning to believe (or ended up believing) in their lucky star, though this did not cure them of worrying. Two voices dueled deep inside, one said: You will die without knowing how, killed like all the rest who hoped against hope as you are doing; the other: You will live, since you are yourself, the living person par excellence — if not, why are you still here, condemned to life? Such people exist, after all, men, women, and children condemned to life, before whom the speeding bullet fractionally alters course, and the pestilent miasmas of stricken cities recede…

Professor Schiff was developing a theory around this topic, based on the great fourteenth-century epidemics of the Black Death, during a period when neither hygiene nor antiseptics existed. The plague came to Altstadt and carried off two-thirds of the population; modern knowledge would lead us to expect all of the population to have succumbed, for the known natural causes are all working in that direction with the inflexibility of a celestial clockworks. But Bishop Othon had known better, as it turned out: the scourge was turned away by prayers and penance, and the final third of the population was saved. This carpet bombing, however meticulously planned by the most expert — to do them justice — high commands, could scarcely be more effective than a medieval plague! Here the good professor’s interlocutor demurred, in view of the mathematical perfection of modern inventions… We’ll soon see! Some attacks were rather entertaining, like the plucky little airplane that would zoom in one morning, drop a few bombs, incendiaries it was thought, and hightail it away with a distant mosquito whine… Pierced by sky and breeze, the wonderfully tenacious spire of the cathedral ascended into the blue, much more sharply visible than it was a moment ago, for the last of the historic old quarter had just crumbled around its feet, raising billows of dust that had quickly blown away. If one ventured closer, pink tongues of flame could be seen to palpitate under a low, stagnant lid of grayish smoke. Nothing else had changed.

Brigitte’s roost defied every calamity. Now that the hurricanes of war had blurred the calendar, jammed the sclerotic clockworks of the administration, and filled the world with horribly banal horrors, Frau Hoffberger had left. All that remained of the building where that lady had occupied a third-floor apartment overlooking the street was a rack of window frames standing about fifteen yards high at the corner, between two eerily empty spaces, one of which contained an unexploded bomb. ACHTUNG! CAUTION! Curious passersby, sidling up gingerly to inspect the tip of a green fin, took this opportunity to launch into a rant against the Security Service — too busy with its special rations of Spam to bother about a bomb stuck between the school and the single local water pump, and in the middle of a hundred middle-class dwellings! Brigitte was living in a nearby building, which, though badly damaged, was listed as forty-seven percent habitable. Why not forty-six or forty-eight percent? — No one would ever know. The upper stories swayed gently at the slightest impact to the ground, whether at night from a convoy rumbling past or by day from a collapsing wall (walls, peculiarly enough, only fell during the day, usually under the caress of the sun’s warmth). The way to Brigitte’s second-story room was via a ladder, for the stairwell had been gutted by fire and any remaining planks had gone to feed the neighbors’ hearths. “The enchanted roost of the fairy,” as Franz Minus-Two referred to it with a snicker. “Why are you making fun of me?” asked Brigitte, startled. “But I swear to God, you are a fairy, Fraülein, and your roost is enchanted or it would have vanished long ago, and you with it… But maybe fairies are immortal?” This was his way of joking by acting the delicate suitor. Brigitte’s face fell. Immortal? Me? What a frightful curse! Mortal, mortal, I’ll prove it. Die? She was as scared of immortality as she was of death, except that her fear of death was nothing but a small fear of the flesh mingled with a great longing, whereas the other fear was becoming a vague, insurmountable dread. “Why must you always say such mean things to me, Franz?” He was genuinely stung.

“Mean things? Me?”

“Oh, you don’t understand. Such a lovely morning, and you’ve spoiled it for me. I’m going out, I have to get my food card stamped.”

A bony young girl strode up to them. Braids coiled over ears, short rubber boots, satchel on hip, armband — she must have been fifteen or sixteen, and she surveyed Minus-Two with equal measures of respect and pitying condescension. A hero; a sad reject of a man whom no one could love, unable to fertilize a woman for the virile perpetuation of the Race. On second thought… The tall young girl’s pale, sharp face grew pink. She said, “Heil Hitler! Civil Defense Evacuation and Reinscription Control and Verification Service for the…” (et cetera).

Minus-Two answered jovially, “Heil Heil! Bugles and kettle-drums! Glory!”

“Checking the papers of all non-evacuees by reason of special dispensation or overriding circumstances to be specified…”

Her pencil between her teeth, she consulted a typed list of names. To Brigitte, “Your name, Comrade of the People?”

“Brigitte.”

That was the only name Brigitte could remember, unique, inseparable from herself, like a tiny blue candle burning in the depths of a vast darkness. Franz filled in discreetly. “Very well,” said the girl. “Fraülein, you missed the third evacuation column, illness or reason unknown. You’ve failed to report to the Recovered Auxiliaries Workshop… You’re not in order.”

Minus-Two rounded on her. “What! Young Comrade of the People! I think I know rather better than you do who’s in order and who isn’t around here. Talking about the third evacuation column, what about Counterorder Number Two Amended? As for your precious workshop for the ugly, the maimed, the skewed, and the screwed, that went up in smoke, like the boxes of matches we so lack these days. And the directress took off, or didn’t you know? Brush up on the facts before throwing your rules and regulations around… Mistress Fairy here is a registered C-category exemption on grounds of nervous illness, curable, with care and respect. Brigitte, show her your papers. And you, adorable zealot, make a note of it. There’s no mistake. D’you realize who’s talking to you? Iron Cross, three citations, seriously wounded, that’s who. I’ll answer for everything.”

To himself, he added, gaily, “Because I don’t answer for anything, you skinny little goose on stilts! I’d like to know who does answer for something anymore! One less limb and I’d have been given a merciful injection and right now I’d be rotting underground, or a pinch of ashes in a one-mark urn, and even then those goddamn idiots would put the wrong name on the urn, and I wouldn’t be able to give a damn…”

“Very well,” said the teenager, somewhat worried to see that the hero displayed no Party insignia, “I have confidence in you. Your papers, Herr Noncommissioned Officer?”

And splendid papers they were too, covered with emblems, seals, stamps, and signatures… Up to date. Civil Defense Volunteer, specially enrolled by virtue of paragraph G of ordinance number… “Not that one,” said Minus-Two carelessly. “Secret.”

The girl shifted into conspiratorial mode. Her eyes, amusingly blue, seemed to glow red. Franz felt like asking her whether she still liked to play with dolls, or if she already knew how to make love. With a jerk of the chin she indicated a building some distance away, hollowed out but with one gable still standing. “It seems there’s a nest of dangerous elements in there, enemies of the people perhaps. Have you noticed anything, Herr Noncommissioned Officer?” “Dangerous as a litter of white rabbits. I know this neighborhood.” In the most depopulated section, to the west, gangs of outlaws crept out after dark from beneath the earth and its tombs… The quieter stretches of every night were interrupted by bursts of gunfire and brief, inconsequential explosions. The special security forces combed through the ruins neighborhood by neighborhood, shooting Russian, Polish, Mongolian, or Yugoslav refugees on the spot, along with army deserters and unidentified strangers who might be enemy parachutists… Other fugitives, not so easily disposed of — Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Czechs — were marched away under heavy escort, probably to be shot the next day. Minus-Two reflected on this. “All the same, don’t go there, Comrade of the People. Or I’d better go with you.”

“Oh, I’ve no intention. The Special Troops had planned to raid it tonight, but they won’t get to it till tomorrow, there’s so much to be done around the cathedral!”

“I can imagine,” said Minus-Two, and he contemplated the low cloud, darker now, that crawled under the flayed spire.

There was lots of horizon. The city was full of horizons.

Brigitte stood engrossed in the play of light and shade. The city was dappled with it, as though covered by a fantastic lacy veil. Sunbeams shining through rows of high windows projected a brilliant checkerboard on the white dust of streets and cleared rubble. The shredded, gaping masonry threw down the queerest shadows whose contours spoke of mythic monsters, Eastern temples, works of art no artist could ever imagine, born of the amorous fray between a tangle of bared rafters and the sun. Schoolboys and People’s Defense teams were working to reinstall the telephone lines and other cables lying on the ground, sometimes marked with warnings: ACHTUNG! HAZARD. LETHAL DANGER. They’ve got to be kidding, just another little lethal danger! Day after day these diligent spiders rewove the torn web, and now they were mounting a loudspeaker against what was left of the beer hall… Soon the news will be broadcast, sibylline communiqués on lost battles in the east, the west, the south, and every other point of the compass, reports on the destruction of London which weren’t of much comfort (and “How are we going to pay for that?”), along with marches and fanfares (apparently good for morale) and occasional snippets of grand opera: The Twilight of the Gods…

Brigitte climbed the ladder to her roost and spread out some gritty bread, a sausage, a dollop of sweet fruit paste, and some wrinkled prunes on the white tabletop. A childish order reigned over this room, hanging over several voids: she was fond of it. The fancy stores downstairs had been burned out; then the side walls, brought slithering down by furious thunderbolts, had blocked up the shop spaces, warping the parquet here above and spearing it through the middle with the end of a beam. There were corpses in the last stages of decomposition in the cellars giving off, through the cracks in the floor, sudden whiffs of sickly, fetid odor, more marshy than human, but corpses are everywhere, and there’s so little difference between them and us! They don’t bother anybody anymore, no longer provoke embarrassing pity, they are there, we are here, we’re all together, the least we can do is try to feel homey at home, or no more uncomfortable than we have to be. The stench didn’t linger in Brigitte’s room because the cracks in the walls allowed for good ventilation and insured a permanent connection with the great outdoors, the rain, the wind, as if under a golden tent in the middle of a verdant meadow. The daffodil-yellow muslin curtains at the window framed a picturesque field of rubble in shades of rose, white, and black. The next-door house, painted pink, had crumbled into the little garden, the flames had smudged the broken walls with charcoal and half consumed a young oak tree, whose other half was turning green; a square of wallpaper still cheered the eye, turquoise sprigged with gladioli. “My garden the air,” thought Brigitte… Her possessions included a sturdy virginal bedstead, a round iron table scavenged from the garden, and a little rusty mirror, strangely cracked in a way that unsettled her. In it she looked quite unlike herself. Can this be me, this girl with a livid, greenish complexion, lips swollen with dark blood, cavernous cheeks, bulging eyes too deeply ensconced in their dark-shadowed sockets, dilated pupils half open onto the night within? The planes of this face had slipped out of line, the smile itself was crooked, the left side remaining stern as the right softened. Only the hair, in tight tresses rolled into a low bun on the nape, seemed not to have changed or been betrayed… “Lying mirror, shame on you!” It had been a present, hadn’t it, but from whom? Given when? Brigitte’s forehead crinkled in a helpless effort to remember. She saw herself fleeing through a tempest of ashes with the mirror under her arm, afraid of tripping, it would break if she fell. There was only one thought in her head: save it. Now what should she do with it, break it? You don’t break a mirror. There were women in the market square who’d gladly pay for it. It was worth, said Franz, “at least four slices of pressed horse, dog, rat, or other novelty meats…” Should she perhaps give the lying thing away? That would be wrong. “Some night I’ll have to bury it,” she decided, “deep enough so that neither the children nor the cleanup squad can uncover it.” Suddenly the mirror brightened, Brigitte recognized herself and pealed with laughter, unreasonable joy bubbling from her heart into her throat, what in heaven’s name came over me? Laughing to herself, she searched through the drawer for her embroidered blouse, hummed a tune as she made herself up with lipstick and powder; some artistes put golden glitter on their eyelids, now that would look lovely on you, Brigitte… She ate quickly, holding an intimate, sparkling conversation with herself throughout the meal. Then she sat straight-backed upon the bed, her face upturned, her eyes half shut, picturing the notes of a score, while her lively hands played a keyboard of air and the charm of a Mozart concerto vibrated softly through her, bathed in silence; the strains of music drowning the thunders reverberating throughout the world. Brigitte’s eyes opened again, her hands sank to rest on her knees, her shoulders drooped forward as though with lassitude. A stealthy tremor was starting up at the base of her being, like the buzzing of malevolent insects in the gloom, like the approach of a solitary bomber in the sky. It was only the approach of the nameless terror, senseless, bottomless, lightless, lifeless and deathless, unspeakable, unendurable, ungraspable, imponderable; a wave rising from the very depths of darkness… Brigitte was tearing something to pieces, trying to rip the smallest shreds between sore fingers until her nails were tearing at one another. What more to destroy, how to sleep, where to disappear? She began reeling about the narrow room in short, crazed lunges.

Night fell. There was a tap at the door.

“Who is it?”

The terror was ebbing away. A man’s voice said, “It’s me… Günther.”

Brigitte opened the door. The penumbras of inside and out coalesced over a helmeted figure erect on the ladder, tall and braced, yet seeming to sway.

“Oh, so it’s you,” she said without surprise. “At last.”

A flurry of gunshots rang out and died into the unknown. A screech, nipped off like that of a slaughtered animal, fell into the emptiness.

“Who are you? What do you want?” she said in a sharp voice.

Was he real, did he have eyes under that helmet? With a careful forefinger, she touched his chest. She thought she discerned a reflection in the shape of a skull.

“Ah, it is you…” she said dreamily. “I’ve been waiting so long. Come in.”

He stepped up and over, lifted by the emptiness beyond; lithe, solid, remote.

“Is there no light in here, Fraülein?”

“Light? You know very well there’s no more light. No sun, no electricity.” (She giggled.) “You mean the candle?”

And by the light of the candle, she recognized him: a tank corpsman, sunburned, with a scar across his jaw and unruly, fireflecked hair. He was holding his helmet between large coppery hands.

“I’m the one who brought you the letters from…”

“What letters? There’s no one to write to me anymore.”

He repeated uneasily, “Well, I… it was me.”

“Of course it was. I was waiting for you. Sit down.”

The only place to sit was this schoolgirl bed. He hesitated.

“You are Fraülein Brigitte W —?”

“Leave me alone. I don’t know. I’m Brigitte.”

He nodded slowly. Strident whistles slashed the darkness around them.

“I was his friend,” he said in a muffled voice. “He was my only friend.”

“Who was?”

He showed a flash of strong teeth. His breath felt good.

“I beg your pardon. I’ll go. Please excuse me for…”

“Don’t be silly,” said Brigitte, and gripped his arm. “Stay. I was waiting. I haven’t changed. I’ve been so frightened, if only you knew… Sit down, I say. Are you hungry?”

Bed and floor sagged under the visitor’s weight. Brigitte, thin, her blouse splashed with embroidered flowers like flowers of blood, smiled at him serenely. “Listen to me, Fraülein. I was his friend. I came back to this city, from the eastern front to the western front… if fronts still exist… I looked for you. The house has gone, but they directed me here…”

“It’s all gone,” Brigitte said. “And no wonder. Do I exist? Do you?”

He hung his head.

“I didn’t know where to go… Our company disbanded. The barracks burned down. Did you know they’re fighting very close to here? The city’s about to fall…”

“Fall where?”

Those peculiar queries — “Do I exist? Do you?” — had broken slowly through the man’s fatigue and he registered them. He peered around the room in desperation. There was no safety in here. Outside were the patrols, bent on making examples of all and sundry. What good are examples? It’s total madness. They’re all stark staring mad at the rear. I must get out. Spend the night in a hole somewhere. Tomorrow will be worse than yesterday. The death throes. All our tanks wiped out. “Please try to understand, Brigitte. I have to leave. Goodbye.”

His hand was on the doorknob when a small noise grated the silence. The sound a famished rat would make, gnawing rabidly on a bone. He turned. Brigitte’s teeth were chattering. She was shaking from head to foot. “Don’t leave me again, I’ve waited so long. I always knew that you existed. I know your letters by heart. I’m scared.” He pulled her toward him. A heavy arm cradled Brigitte’s shoulders, warm breath enfolded her. “Shush, it’s all right. Nothing to be afraid of… We’ve no more to fear.” Ecstatically she repeated, “No more to fear…” The noise of a rat in a tomb stopped. “You’re warming me,” Brigitte murmured, “down to my soul. It’s my soul that was shivering…” She quieted, with both hands laid against the man’s chest and her cheek pressed against her hands. Like a fluid, fear seeped from her into him. Günther gazed without blinking at the tremulous flame of the candle. Such a tiny fire! Was it really fire at all? Real fire is what erupts from the ravaged earth in black, blinding spouts. It vaporizes the men, the trees, it reduces the machine to a mass of twisted metal…

(It happened like this: the torpedo made a noise like a hurricane — earsplitting — the men threw themselves flat on the ground; a fat beetle was zigzagging down the road, its back striped green and gray… The torpedo must have blown up within a few yards of the car; by the time the men ran through a hot, buffeting wind-storm, puffs of steam were gathering above the chassis of the overturned machine… Not a trace left of windows or tires or the three officers they had just encountered. It was such a puzzle that a squad was detailed to sift through the ground, pounded into chalky dust… Death disappeared: no more danse macabre! The crater was a great oval wound gouged into the field, and no living thing subsisted in this earth cleansed by fire; not a worm, not a root, not a blade of grass… Günther tried to remember the general’s face: a tight-ass engineer in a high collar, insignia, splendid kepi… The troops feared him, for he was a stickler in hopeless situations. His gloveless hand was like a hook: the inexorable claw of a ghoul dragging whole regiments to counterattack in retreat, and on down to the underworld of butchered armies and peoples… The general’s remains would be sorely missed by the disciplined multitudes in limbo… Günther did not think all of this, but he relived it in the stillness of the moment. “There are no warriors anymore: only poor bastards facing exploding volcanoes. The cosmos has gone berserk… THIS CAN NEVER STOP…”)

Strange to have a silent young woman against one’s chest as if asleep. And this carcass of a city, barer even than Warsaw, laid out dead in the first warmth of spring! He, Günther, was alive, living under the cold light of a huge, dark, sulfurous star: the sun of destruction.

“Talk to me,” whispered Brigitte cajolingly. “You’re alive.”

“Apparently,” he snickered to himself. Wasn’t the calm night going to explode? If it didn’t explode, it wouldn’t make sense.

“You’re real. You’re not a hallucination, are you? Sometimes I thought I was going mad.”

He answered, lying eagerly, “No, I’m not a hallucination,” because not one of those seconds was really real to him. What double of himself was speaking?

“Brigitte. I feel great tenderness for you.”

“I know. Tell me again.”

He could not say the words again. He could not make a move or the spell would be broken. Indestructible, this immobility, more joyful perhaps than fearful. But NOTHING IS INDESTRUCTIBLE, EVERYTHING WILL BE DESTROYED. Günther asked, “Do you feel better now?”

“I feel fine.”

He was thinking: I’m nearly as disoriented as this young woman, me, the strong, rational one. Strong, what a laughable idea. You wish you were made of bronze, cast by Krupp! You end up foolishly believing that you are, in spite of your melting innards and your foggy brain…

“Brigitte, you ought to rest.”

“I’m yours, don’t you see, why do you talk to me like a stranger?”

The young woman’s fragility eventually communicated to him an animal thirst with which he was all too familiar. All soldiers know it. Slacking off or overworked, their sole virtues are those of beasts. Where was it? A shapely pair of female legs, frozen in an upside-down dance step, tipped with high-heeled patent pumps, poking out from beneath a fall of rocks; they were only just beginning to turn blue. The gang made dirty jokes. It occurred to me that this would make a good photograph to hang beside the one of the carbonized head, still imperiously erect, that I saw on a burned-out turret. The diptych could be called A Match Made in Heaven. He felt hot, thirsty, he wanted the woman, he wanted sleep more than anything. I really should kill you, out of kindness. The only forgivable murder, and the hardest to commit. Brigitte, do you know that the odious time of rape has arrived? All rutting armies fall upon all women cornered in vacated cities, roofless barns, woods sheared by fire. The peasant women of Poland, Russia, or Serbia know it, they run from the armed man, but only a little way; then they stop, turned in on themselves, with watchful, frightened eyes, and quickly lift the skirts under which they keep only their bodies; they glance about for the couch of dead leaves, grass, straw, stones, any good place to get it over with quickly, to pay for their lives. They know all about the blood-thirsty brutes who strangle or eviscerate you afterward — the young women talk about it when they sit up late, after reading love letters from the front to each other; they also know that the stranglers and slashers are a minority, whereas plenty of soldiers reward you with a cigarette, a piece of chocolate, a tin of Spam, a few small coins, a stolen trinket if you’re lucky. Most don’t give a woman anything, but sneer contemptuously when they’re through, or cringe in sudden, stupid shame. And it may be that some of those who kill do it to kill the shame. Do you suppose, poor mad Brigitte, that I’m any different from the others? Elementarily, we’re all the same. And you’re like every other female caught up in the banality of destruction. And the victors who will be storming in next week, if not before, they’re the same. They will shove your legs open and fall roughly on top of you. A resurgence of our primate ancestors. Wouldn’t I truly be doing better if I put my hands around your neck and squeezed a little, a little harder, like this? Next I could kill myself, and you would have delivered me… Not that way, the world will deal with me, I want to see it through, the strong one. Usually, you don’t see anything or know anything or feel anything… Enough.

Brigitte said, “It feels so good, your hands on my throat… Hold tighter.”

The man’s grip slackened. The only thing in the world I care for now is sleep, a deep sleep in warm grass under a white apple tree. Postcard poetry. What am I doing? What if she’s sick, as if it mattered? She’s insane. Shock, schizophrenia? Whole continents have gone insane, civilization is a form of schizophrenia. The sky will blow up and there’ll be nothing left of us, or of this absurd room at the top of a ladder surrounded by the corpses of houses, or of this candle watching over our corpses. The female saints were like you, Brigitte, and they martyred those saints, such was the imperial law of the times. Latin civilization. Cicero. I’ve got to make my brain shut up. We’ll be happy like animals in a hole, ten minutes before they’re smoked out or crushed to death… War is an incredible carnage of innocent creatures… Blessed are the simple-minded, for they shall inherit the kingdom of heaven… Goddammit! How to make my brain shut up? We are still alive, tomorrow it’ll all be over. Nothing will be over…

“I’m thirsty, Brigitte.”

“There’s some disinfected water.”

She poured cloudy liquid into a monogrammed glass. “Are those your initials?” “Yes,” she said, though they were N’s intertwined below a crown… From force of habit, he placed his loaded pistol and his dagger within instant, instinctive reach of his hand, and adjusted the elastic bandage around the scar on his left calf. His underwear was dirty and he removed it all, happy to go naked to bed, something he had not done for weeks. A man is freer in the nude, he enjoys the relief of disarming himself. To take off a filthy uniform is to strip oneself of power and obedience, to cease being a dangerous quasi-robot harassed by fears and cunning, the petty fear of hassles and the overwhelming fear of… Distractedly, he watched Brigitte put on a silky white nightgown. The cool touch of the silk exhilarated him more than that of the long, feeble body, fevered and yet cold, that sought refuge against his. The flesh was pitiful, the silk, luxurious. Rats began or resumed their noisy business beneath the floorboards. Millions of rats proliferate among these ruins. Their kind will outlive ours. Günther, on his back, let Brigitte snuggle up with her head on his shoulder. She had put on perfume… The silk, the skin, the verbena tea, the rats, the pungency of the snuffed candle, the glint of night through the crack in the wall that ran up to a triangular hole beneath the ceiling… He wanted to desire this woman but he felt leaden, paralyzed by the weight of a hopeless inertia. In the present world, the only natural coupling is a rape in the barn of some smoldering farm. That skinny black-haired Slovene, the way she’d hidden under a pile of old sacks, what a childish ploy! She opened her mouth to scream, but didn’t because others were already screaming below us… But I hardly looked like a murderer, I was afraid of myself, I only wanted to feel myself alive, quench my thirst, and escape the inner presence of death, I was afraid of hurting the lass… He brushed Brigitte’s nipples with his fingers. Her breasts were wrinkled and baggy, like the Slovene’s, like the teats of wandering bitches… Packs of stray dogs run wild through the wrecks of cities, and idiots in armbands are sent out to shoot them… The bitches are quick to recognize the armbands, and bolt at full speed, like the children of the Jews, whenever they see one… The idiots in armbands also shoot the children of the Jews…

A crackling volley of small-arms fire dwindled into the distance. The night patrols were shooting down men-dogs-bitches-rats.

And Günther completely remembered the Brigitte to whom he had brought the letters, in a prosperous town: the drive lined with chestnut trees, the lawn before the house, the mullioned casements fringed with creeper, the piano, the young woman with the tentative smile, her lightness among things, the Brigitte whom he had recognized, whom he already knew from his friend’s confidences. “I’m here for one who is no longer anywhere, Brigitte…” And so he was restored to innocence, virility, and the desire for a tender grind.

Light stole into the room. He was dressed by the time Brigitte opened her eyes, shivering.

“I was cold suddenly… You’re leaving already?”

Furtively, he touched her forehead with his lips.

“I’ll be back. Go back to sleep.”

“Oh yes, I’ll go back to sleep. Make sure the door’s closed. Come back.”

Hours later, Brigitte no longer knew whether she’d lived or dreamed that night. Still she thought, “Maybe I’m going to have his child…”

Franz Minus-Two had a ground-floor room which had acquired a marked resemblance to the corner of a stable. It was handy, though, for reaching the air-raid cellar in under a minute. To get in and out he had to negotiate the Schulzes’ pigsty, the whole family snoring in a heap. He roughly prodded his “Baltic mare,” Ilse by name. “Help me change my clothes, precious…” They weren’t hampered by the dark, you get used to it, like moles… He put on an overcoat and a workingman’s cloth cap, picked up the flashlight he used stintingly (no more spare batteries), but left the pistol: you could have your throat cut for one of those… “I’m off for a healthy breath of air, all right, sausage?” “Yes, Franz, and don’t forget your scarf…” Her solicitude pleased him; he rummaged his good hand through Ilse’s short, untidy hair by way of a caress: good-quality horsehair, that. He levered himself ponderously over the windowsill. No need to keep the Schulzes informed of his lunar wanderings. The “Baltic mare” slumped back into sleep.

“We’ve both been lucky,” Franz thought to himself. “Me for picking her up, she for being on my way.” Had it not been for him, Ilse would now be on the roads of Mecklenburg or someplace among the scum of the drifting crowds, little more than a straw mattress open to panicked soldiers caught between disorderly retreat and desertion, emaciated foreign workers, disreputable marauders; or perhaps the SS, rating her on sight as “clap-ridden and incurably demoralized,” would have put her out of her misery for good, so as to improve by a millionth the chances of the Race, already shelled to smithereens! That’s how they are, the guys in the last Special Security squads with their sharp uniforms, spit and polish as if the days of parades were not over, equipped with orders, motorbikes, revolvers, syringes, ideology, and inflexibility, in short admirable men! (Some of the more far-sighted ones sneaked into civvies, had themselves listed as casualties of the previous night’s skirmish, and resurfaced miles away, bearing the papers of an ordinary citizen; the perfectionists among them could even produce from their right pocket a release form stamped Teufelbronn Work and Protection Camp…) Ilse’s story was enough to break your heart, at a time, that is, when hearts were a run-of-the-mill, breakable commodity — not made of stone blocks designed to withstand missiles and high temperatures. 1. A husband gloriously buried at Mozdok, below the Caucasian peaks. 2. An ungrateful lover, a French prisoner who ran away — after all they did to keep him fed! 3. The parents, the last horse, and the two toddlers lost between the Oder and the Elbe, behind Russian lines. 4. The experience of serving in an auxiliary service not recognized in infantry regulations… All the tears in her body having dried up long ago by the fireless bivouacs of a motorized company without motors, Ilse maintained the sturdy taciturnity of a mare, the hygiene of a peasant woman inured to the icy waters of the SpirdingSee, the silence taught by the pine forests, and the fatalism dinned into Mazurian serfs by the thirteenth-century sword-bearers — a submission to destiny wisely maintained, nearer our times, on the baron’s potato acres. A good girl, was she more stupid than stolid, or more stolid than stupid? “Blockhead, Jenny-ass!” jeered Franz when she was clumsy in helping him to dress. An expression of sly, or perhaps merely fearful, subservience would come over Ilse’s round, ruddy face but she never felt offended, perhaps finding in the man’s gruff ways some confirmation of her right as a woman. This had initially been a problem for Minus-Two: How can I ever mount a female with these stumps and prostheses? And which of them’d want me, apart from a few specialized old nags? Ilse, submitting, was all motherly tenderness and he even suspected the woman’s eyes were moist. “Cut it out!” he spat. “Don’t you get mawkish with me, or you’ll be feeling the back of my hand like you won’t forget in a hurry!” She, who spoke so rarely, answered, “Oh no, no pity for you!” (She’d used the word pity… “If not, why not?” wondered the cripple, exasperated.)

Franz set off down Foundling Strasse, that is, down a track tamped into the rough brick dust. There was no moon, and the stars were overrun by clouds which moved forward like invaders across a map. The earth has a phosphorescence all its own. The crutch, the cane, and the iron tip of the prosthesis added nothing to the scattered sounds of solitude. Stones fell of their own accord. The nocturnal rustlings of the city were like those of a forest: they filled the silence with a minute tremor that was the very substance of silence. The vibration of a spring night in the Black Forest orchestrates the beating of wings, the cries of animals seeking one another out or simply expressing their joy to be alive, the pricking of deer hooves along paths known only to them, the fall of dead branches, the hum of the wind… And there can be no doubt that the respiration of leaves, the radiance of the stars, the thrust of roots through the soil, the rising saps must chime in with subtle, essential descants on this enchanted frequency. What’s got into you, Minus-Two, dreaming of the Black Forest as you haul yourself, gasping, over the rubble? Fairly stinks around here, sure enough there’s a family of refugees asleep in that cavity underneath, if you can call it sleeping, rotting’s more like it… An arresting clash of odors made him stop and sniff the air. He was in a bulldozed clearing where the Fraüleins Hahn-Simmelholz had once presided over their drugstore, the Scented Herb. One of these ladies might still be alive, if she could live without her sister, her Siamese cats, her potted plants, her window display; the other was last seen as a pool of guts caramelized by acids, essences, medicinal potions, and Lord knows what else. All of the esoteric liquids stored in the basement had run or burned or melted, hissing and fizzing through everything in their path, including Fraülein Mitzi’s plump chaste tummy. Around the tidied rubble (for it had happened in the far-off days when there were still enough sweepers to meet the demand, who were even paid a meager wage) blew cloying, faintly heady fumes. The old biddies had kept quite a respectable stock hidden under their hats, “to save for a rainy day, hooray” tootled Franz cruelly, and he gave a laugh, balanced on a chaotic tumulus that rose seven feet above this extravagant landscape. He laughed because he was remembering a lecture on the redistribution of stocks in wartime, which he’d heard at his advanced course in Work Reinsertion Training for the Maimed in Action. This was a compulsory sprint through economic geopolitics or geopolitical economics, otherwise known as the art of selling a moon of green cheese by promising world domination to a bunch of cripples at the very moment when our invincible army, instead of taking Suez, was taking it on the chin at El Alamein… Behold the theory:

Grandparents save. Parents save. “In saving lies the strength of nations,” says the Great Economist. The Fraüleins Hahn-Simmelholz save. An elite division is goose-stepping by; the Fraüleins Hahn-Simmelholz, throwing thrift to the winds for the sake of patriotism, ply the boys of the division with sandwiches and pretty gifts; the next day, there are a few pfennigs added to the price of the perfumes the factory girls buy before going to bed with their boyfriends, home on convalescent leave… This young soldier was in fact decorated for destroying a boutique identical to the one run by the Misses Hahnkowski-Simmelkowski — in Warsaw. And down comes a bomblet straight from the United States: adieu savings, thrifty sisters, declared inventory, hidden inventory! From out of his tall silk hat, the professorial magician pulls a hilarious monster with a death’s-head and seven flaccid limbs and introduces him to the audience: Herr Geopolitik! Wild clapping from the audience, which continues to save…

Franz, still chuckling to himself, started to applaud, but you need two hands for that. He smote his cane against the ground with contained fury. Men are insane, Franz! Their destructiveness will not be sated while anything exists, since the magician-professor is probably still teaching his course, people are still alive in the cellars, I am still here to watch the show. The horizon was quieter now, the fighting had moved elsewhere. Not yet the end, goddammit!

He clearly saw a big human bat drop silently between two walls, as though fallen from the stars. A quadruped that was part bear, part pig, part jackal, and part outlaw slunk close to the ground, paused to test the air with its snout, wiggled its rump grotesquely, and disappeared… “Ha ha! Geopolitik, my friend, geopolitics! I know where you’re headed: toward a bullet in the ass. I’d give something to know where you crawled out of: Bosnia, the Volga, Normandy, Zeeland, or Neukölln, like me? Fugitive, looter, deserter, parachutist, Black Front, dead white all over, d-d-death penalty, my good friend. Same goes for me if I don’t report you. If I do report you, your pals will take care of me instead. If we happen to bump into each other ten minutes from now, it could go either way…” Franz did not quite know what he was doing. But then what’s the use of knowing that?

Before following the animal shadow, he let himself be distracted listening again to Altstadt breathe. Pieces of cornice broke off and skittered down with a noise like tiny landslides. A door was banging emptily. A tinkle of shattered glass, a cock crowed. Somewhere a tank column was rumbling along on metal treads. Two muffled whistle blasts chased each other from one constellation to another and were gobbled up by a fat fish of cloud. A child started crying, where? Franz pressed his eye to a crack in a wall and saw a white-haired woman stretched out, reading a book bound in black, the New Testament presumably. What light was she using to read by, the witch? He put his lips against the slit in the brickwork and lowed, spectrally: “The good Lord protect us!” He looked again. The old lady was beaming and nodding, their eyes met but she could not have seen him, she must have thought the voice had been sent from heaven above, the end was nigh! Franz considered following up with a ripe rosary of imprecations, before deciding it was too much trouble.

The manhole through which his four-legged quarry had just vanished made him hesitate. The ladder was twisted, and he would never be able to crutch his way down without being heard. But the warren below probably connected with the old brasserie cellars; some, considered inaccessible, were probably inhabited. Franz found the way in. He moved along as nimbly as a spider. He dragged himself over the sharp stones of a tunnel, making only surreptitious use of his torch. The tongue of light licked at a seething of white maggots in a viscous, purplish slick. He was glad not to have stuck his hand in it, even with his canvas glove on. Just what you’d see if your personal idea of fun was crawling beneath a graveyard. As he was about to turn back, thinking he was lost, the murmuring of voices reached him. He had only to raise his head in order to see. The cellar was open to the sky: a jagged hole in the vault let in the unreal glow of the cloudy heavens. There were human shapes down there, talking low, each in turn, holding council; a poised female voice said something in a language he couldn’t identify — Czech, Russian, Serbian, Polish? He was watching from above, through an oblong hole the size of his hand. If he’d had his revolver on him, it would have been easy to knock down those four opaque forms and collect the four rewards, not to mention a Civil Defense Merit Badge, yes sir. He trained two fingers on the sitting, thinking ducks, one by one, click-clack, your worries would be over my dears. The game amused him. And it was a good job he’d left that gun behind, because the temptation would have been strong: the ingrained habit of killing, the urge to do the right thing, the spirit of fraternity! The incentive of the reward: human motivation is nothing if not complex. Down below, the woman struck a match over a sheet of paper. Franz had a glimpse of slender fingers, an oval face, chestnut-ash hair above the brow. The match went out, but the vision of that stern countenance, youthful yet aging, had imprinted itself so well upon the cripple’s retina that he seemed still to see it in the darkness. Gleefully he prepared his throat for his spectral voice, waited for a silence, and pronounced: “Lady, gentlemen…”

The four shapes scattered into the blackest depths of the vaults. Franz could feel them below him, tense, crouched, unsheathing knives, intently scanning the recesses of the walls, the hole to the sky… Not a flicker of movement. He paced his phrasing, to bring out the humor.

“Honorable fodder for the gallows and the stake! An unknown well-wisher, who doesn’t actually give a fart about anything, advises you to decamp without delay… The neighborhood is getting dangerous.”

Feeling better now, graveyard rats? Franz believed he was feeling in his own breast the beating of four terrified hearts calmed by the balm of such an improbable reprieve. Taking a deep breath, he concluded: “Reasons of State. Good night.”

A man’s deep voice rose from the cavern and said, in good German, “Thank you. Good night. Beat it.”

A pause ensued, like a rising tide of silence slowly sealing off the underground world. And the woman’s voice added, from farther away, “Brotherhood.”

Franz lost his temper. In the light of day, this woman would be repelled by him, his crutch, his stick, his rubberized extension, the hook in place of a hand, the sourness etched into his zero-hero kisser. “Which one’s the glass eye?” she’d wonder, and, “Tell me, are your balls synthetic too?” He loathed her. There’s precious little brotherhood to spare for the armless and the legless, except in official speeches… He answered violently, “And a bucket of flaming shit to you too!”

Laughter melted his anger.

You see, there’s only one brotherhood these days, and that’s in the pit, the common pit, where the same fraternal lime is shoveled over Slavs and Aryans, Negroes and Jews! They’re all the same when they’ve twitched and defecated their last, all equally stinking, putrid, impotent, pacified, delivered… All the drowned look alike, salt water or fresh, and corpses are the truest brothers, the only ones you can trust: they neither murder nor betray… Just as the devastated cities are sisters, Stalingrad, Warsaw, Coventry, London, Lübeck, and this city too: they could all be mistaken for one another in a photograph. Brotherhood.

He was still feeling jubilant, carried away by his speeches to himself, when a security patrol hailed him at the corner of an erstwhile street. It was nearly sunrise. The corporal recognized him.

“Out prowling, Franz?”

The cripple produced an engraved silver goblet he had just found, undamaged, in a thicket of scrap iron.

“It was shining like a cat’s eye!”

“Anything suspicious back there?” “Everything, you name it. A ballet of ghosts. What’s the news?” The corporal edged a step away from his men, mobilized civilians who looked like the defeated insurgents they could never be. “It seems the elite division was crushed to a pulp this morning… The general’s killed himself…” “White of him,” murmured Franz hypocritically. “Does that mean the city is surrounded?” “Only halfway,” said the corporal, a perfect vessel in which official lies were preserved forever fresh. “An army of shock troops is poised to break through their exposed flank, but not for a few days…” “Only a few days?” marveled Minus-Two, reaching for a smirk of gratification, and rounding it off with a wink. His amputated hand was beginning to throb, it must be the damp. He raised his other hand in a parade-ground salute: “Sieg Heil!”

Back at home he removed his clothes by himself, in an agony of pain. His amputated limbs felt as though they were bleeding, severed raw, gnawed by the icy cold. “Warm me, Ilse.” At such times the Pomeranian woman would stretch out on top of him so as to clasp both of his stumps, and the prostheses would cut into her; but a saving warmth crept from her body into his. He began to doze off to the vision of a flaring match which threw light onto a hand and thence onto a face strangely framed by rays intermingled with ash-brown locks. Three human shapes, molded in opacity, were worshipping or menacing that hand, that brow… So he made haste, pointing his machine gun at the hand, the brow, the three crouching forms: fire, fire, fire! I killed all. Duty. Franz let out a groan, his head struck the partition, flakes of plaster rained down on his face. Ilse still sprawled hotly on top of him, suffocating him. “Ha, strangle me would you, vermin!” He shook her off in one convulsive jerk. Ilse knew these nightmares, when he joined battle with things unseen and often hit or abused her, without waking. She made herself passive, as if she didn’t exist, and waited for the storm of the blood to spend itself through his clenched body.

“What is it? An alert?” he asked in a childish voice.

A submachine gun, great strangling pincers, white maggots in the gruesome sludge, tetanus, a vault punctured by the sky; and the sound of the Schulzes snoring in the next room, like in a stable. “Ilse,” he said plaintively…

“Try to sleep, my man,” she answered roughly. “It’ll be light soon.”

Nurse Erna Laub’s dossier had of course been “carefully reviewed” by the appropriate offices… Her father was an agronomical engineer, Oscar-Julius Laub, a card-carrying National Socialist and vice president of a national association abroad, entrusted with the most delicate assignments, awarded top marks, last heard of in 1941 at a civilian prisoners’ camp in the north Obi, Eastern Siberia (there was no more on Oscar-Julius). Erna was his only child, unmarried, a nurse with a Red Cross diploma from Riga; fluent Russian from infancy, smattering of Spanish for having accompanied her father on a six-month journey to Peru, competent French after several visits to Paris; slight Slavonic accent in German. The data regarding her character could be summarized as follows: highly patriotic, member of the National Women’s Association, diligent, conscientious, of below-average intelligence (underlined). Doesn’t speak up at meetings, but ardent in her applause. Generous with donations. Not especially gregarious, strict morals, no offspring (underlined, a black mark). War record: crossed Lithuanian lines with a group of escapees from Russian prisons, which made a twenty-four-hour stand against the Sokolin gang. Slightly wounded in the shoulder, excellent morale, exerted a positive influence upon companions. Personal acquaintance of Standartenführer F. M. B., former Communist, sterling Party member, killed at… and of Lieutenant Colonel H. W. W., a boyhood friend of her father’s. Political acumen: nil. Physical appearance: forty years of age, appears younger, medium height, well built, sober of dress, extremely proper in demeanor. Chestnut hair, pulled back from the forehead and gathered into a low bun, sprinkled with gray strands; blue-gray eyes, and a set to the lips expressing severity.

Discreetly accompanied by the confidential papers that drew this rather accurate portrait of her, Nurse (First Class) Erna Laub, usually well provided with money, looked for jobs just behind the front lines — the sort of posting her colleagues did their best to evade with the help of their connections (in violation of a draconian rule) and even of their amorous liaisons. Laub’s only known liaison occurred in Breslau, with a twenty-six-year-old flying ace who was distinguishing himself on the eastern front. After his sorties over the Red Army munitions depots, this handsome Siegfried, an occasional drug-taker, easily obtained a twenty-four-hour leave from his chiefs in order to attend a concert with Erna and end the night in the arms of this yielding statue. He only tore himself away, still ravished by that embrace, to meet a somewhat unaccountable bullet during a nighttime rumpus in the city itself. Suspicion fell on some Polish workers, who were executed without fuss. A few days later, the deceased’s elite squadron was destroyed in its magnificently camouflaged and isolated hangars by Russian bombs of breathtaking precision. Placing fatherland above friendship, Nurse Erna Laub wrote to denounce the careless talk of a certain officer who drank too much, slept with the first women who came along, and talked about his exploits to all and sundry, neglecting, in short, the most elementary precautions. In view of his service record, the culprit was merely demoted and transferred from the air force to a disciplinary infantry unit, where the soldiers lasted an average of forty-five days. Such a courageous show of patriotism on the part of Erna Laub further bolstered the trust in which she was held, and soon after she was appointed head nurse to Army General von G, recovering from a serious fracture to the skull. This task she fulfilled with “matchless devotion,” though the patient died from rampant septicemia four days after beginning his convalescence… It happened at the spa town of Bad Schanden, in Erzgebirge. The view of lofty ranges and white mists framed by the window was so restful, so invigorating, that General von G felt he was coming back to life. The nurses offered him the first cup of some hot, delicious coffee — a gift from the field marshal — while he talked to them innocently about his mountain-climbing youth, his explorations in Anatolia, his fallen sons, and the execution of a pack of Jews at Tarnopol, carried out by those nasty little bandits of the Reprisals Brigade, the worst soldiers in the world! He explained that the Slavs’ very name had derived in ancient times from the Latin slavus, slave — proof of the immemorially servile nature of these tribes from the Asian steppes. Leavening erudition with wit, the general went on to discuss the alternative etymologies peddled by philosophers with more imagination than sense. These would have “Slav” derive from slovo, the Slavonic for verb; or slava, glory, also in Slavonic — for to cap it all, the slaves aspire to the word, they lay claim to glory! Erna Laub implored him several times not to overtax himself by talking; as dusk fell, she injected him with a sedative. “He is saved,” she repeated, “this great man of war! And such a dazzling conversation-alist!” The fever attacked the next morning. The head nurse offered herself for a transfusion, but she was not of the same blood group… The bereaved family sent a miserly one hundred marks to the nursing staff.

Two American parachutists isolated at the top of the Fourth Field Hospital developed a hatred of Erna Laub, marching in and out of their garret several times a day. Privately they called her Old Lace, after the play Arsenic and Old Lace. Torn between hope and fear, they listened to the throb of battle beyond the horizon. The abrupt silence of the guns plunged them into such despondency that Old Lace, noting the rise in their temperatures, fixed them with a gimlet eye straight out of the Last Judgment. She was standing by the door, thin in starchy white, and to them she looked like a Prussian death’s-head. The latch clicked into place behind her. “Our number is up,” said the young man from Arkansas to the young man from Illinois, without specifying whether he meant them personally, the nearby fighting, or global war. “See that poison look on her face?” Old Lace returned to administer some tablets. Bending toward the ear of the young man from Arkansas, she asked, in English, “Speak French?” The parachutist bit back an expletive, and said, “I understand a bit, un peu.” Old Poison Lace was whispering, unbelievably, “Courage, you have won, gagné la bataille. Elite division kaput, comprenez?” “Ja,” stammered the prisoner, he thought he was dreaming, and gaped admiringly at the austere visage that now looked nothing like a death’s-head. The nurse put a finger to her lips.

“Not possible,” protested the young man from Illinois, “you must be nuts…” But he’d seen the finger on the lips. “She’s great, amazing, what a woman! What chumps we’ve been!” Their temperatures returned to normal. Meanwhile, in the mess, Captain Gerhard Koppel and Heiderman the medical officer were debating the prisoners’ fate with Erna Laub. “I vote we get rid of them quietly,” said Dr. Heiderman. “There’s a circular that gives us the right… You know that if Altstadt falls, there’s not enough transport for all of our wounded…” Captain Koppel objected that the circular had been overruled by a subsequent order from the divisional chief, in the interests of intelligence. Erna Laub proved to have some political acumen after all: “Besides, precisely if the town falls, such captives will indirectly serve to protect the population…” She backed this up, tactfully, with: “Anyway, you can always decide at the last moment. It’ll only take two minutes.” If there is a last moment, even lasting two minutes, and anyone around to decide anything at all…

The thought of the last moment passed through their three minds, stirring up unconfessable anxieties and expectations. Koppel admitted that the local situation was getting worse, but that the general situation would improve, despite appearances. You never knew with this model officer whether he believed what he was saying or if he said what must be believed. “Berlin stands fast, and the enemy’s plans will be foiled in time; the outlying bits of territory we are losing are as insignificant as the bomb damage, which is really a golden opportunity to rebuild… Between ourselves, let’s face it, many of our venerable old piles were crying out to be demolished long ago. The justifiable respect in which they were held were a brake on modern urban development… And what we shall erect in their place will be equally historic…” He gave the final tug to his glove with a little laugh. Straight and supple, agreeably blond, he might have been a life-sized cutout, soul included, from a military fashion magazine. Was he as genuinely steeped in high official stupidity as he appeared? Or did he put on his stupidity in the morning after his cold shower, along with his uniform, well brushed by an orderly? Was it part and parcel of his contempt for others, did it afford him a secret pleasure in deriding the cowardly? Koppel continued: “We only need a few weeks more to perfect a new technology of warfare… England will be destroyed when she least expects it. In future the real war will be a war of scientific inventions…”

The nervous, anemic Dr. Heiderman nodded eagerly in approval, having no other course. But he was sick with foreboding, and it showed; Koppel’s gaze slid over him with polite disdain. “Erna will address herself to me concerning the two parachutists as soon as the evacuation order has been given.” “And if you should be absent, Captain?” The nurse put just enough stress on the word absent to imbue it with the notion of death. A good officer never knows when he may be putting on his gloves for the last time. If you happen to be killed tonight, Captain? Koppel deemed it a reasonable, if distasteful, query; he affected to ignore the doctor. “In that case you yourself will be the judge, Erna, do whatever you think best.” Dr. Heiderman’s trim mustache quivered pitifully, and Koppel saw chaos begin. What connection is there between the muffled buzz of a bell, a cravenly quivering upper lip, and the immense disorder closing over one’s head? The futility of it all was blinding, especially the futility of refusing to look things squarely in the face. Koppel, old chap, you’ll be killed one of these evenings, sooner rather than later, and it’ll be for nothing. Your resolve not to be taken alive serves no purpose whatsoever. The scientific inventions will come afterward, if at all; too late for you, too late for everything. As he was leaving, Koppel turned once, intending to say, “Execute the prisoners!” — and let a few more of those who will kill me meet their end before I do! But the disorder was already taking effect. Koppel shrank from letting a woman perceive the clouding he felt at the back of his own eyes. He did not say the words he wanted to say. Dr. Heiderman let out a sigh. “Asthmatic, are we?” the captain said insultingly, with the unspoken thought: “You’ll be killed too, you repulsive coward!” That’s defeat all over: you feel it as the tooth feels the cavity, it poisons your very breath. The monstrous disorder was rising, drowning out the sounds of water faucets, bells, motors in the courtyard, injured men groaning, and ideas as sonorous as the smash of a boxer’s fist. Koppel pulled off his gloves, just for the sake of pulling off his gloves, made the nurse and the doctor sit down again, and listened to himself speak.

“I’m waiting on the miracle of our technical genius. We may shortly be in a position to blow up half the planet. From what I hear, the tests are proceeding with considerable success…”

A door banged, a furious voice shouted, “Erna! For God’s sake get over here, are you deaf? You too, Doctor, on the double.” The bell was still vibrating. When all is lost, a mindless bell will keep on ringing through whitewashed basements, and glasses will stand empty on tables long after our mouths have rotted… Quick march! Tonight Koppel was expected to lead a special unit, reduced to a third of its strength, into the breach opened by the sacrifice of the elite division. Away he strode like a energetic sleepwalker. Under the arch at the entrance of the former tourist hotel, he saluted the last batch of mangled bodies from the division. Blood-soaked men were stretched out against the embankment of the road as if it were a litter. Repulsive stretchers moved hurriedly back and forth carried by medics with dark rings under their eyes. The workers of the last day! In the center of the courtyard, like a hatless white-maned puppet stuffed with the sawdust of dignity, the chief medical officer was directing the traffic in person. “Immediate surgery, I’ll be there in five minutes, this one to the barn, nothing doing, this one simple: amputation — don’t give me a hard time; this one’s a problem, check him later, get a move on Loschek, no not him, the other one! You there, phone the auxiliary hospital and say I refuse — I refuse — to take the sixty they want to send! No! What are you saying? Idiot! To the cemetery, that’s right. Short of bandages, are you? Anesthetics? I don’t give a… Tell Herr Brückmeister from me, if he hasn’t supplied them by six o’clock, I’ll have him court-martialed… Watch out, gently. Immediate double amputation, Yes, Doctor… Blithering idiots! Can’t you see he’s dead! Not my line of business!” With sarcasm: “Forgotten the difference between fainting and death, have you, young man? What do you mean, no Herr Brückmeister? He’s deserted? The dog, the stinking dog!”

This was neither the place nor the job for a chief medical officer, and he was courting reproof from his superiors. To the colonel approaching through the crush of stretchers and bearers, he addressed a lugubrious salute and looked away. The colonel’s crimson head, squat on his shoulders, suggested the onset of apoplexy. If you want to establish order here, honorable Colonel, try not to burst like a skin full of beer and shit. As for your reproofs, your dressing-downs, your orders, I wipe my a… with them. The colonel was speaking to him confidentially; the doctor caught sight of a gaping, mud-smeared thigh, a pearly gleam of femur deep inside… “No. I’m the boss here. A written order, in writing please! Bring on the badly wounded ones, over there! Idiots! Wake up, man, keep ’em moving… I’ll see you in the operating room…” The red-faced colonel was gazing glassily at another, green-faced colonel being stretchered past. “What’s wrong with him?” “The colonel has been eviscerated, Colonel…” “Quite so, quite so. Keep up the good work.” Above the milling of vertical and horizontal bodies stood huge white clouds. The chief medic ran to the courtyard entrance and with one glance took in the clouds, the banks of the road lined with pale beeches, and the multitude of the wounded emitting what sounded like a harmonious chorus of pain. The white coat and white mane were seen to charge, flailing, at a truck: “Go to blazes! You can’t unload them here! No more! Full up!” A hum was floating on the air: Planes, planes! Hurry up!

Nurse Erna contemplated the chaos from an upstairs window in the officers’ wing. There was Koppel disappearing around the corner with small reluctant steps, on the way to his destruction, no doubt about it! The red-faced colonel was climbing back into his tiny green car, with a boa constrictor painted in yellowish gray on it; swallowed by a boa. A truck blocked his path, the colonel emerged from the boa’s stomach waving a stubby arm: no one saw or heard him. The muffled noise of the alert continued to crackle obstinately through the halls because a plane suddenly appeared, skimming the treetops. Erna picked up the internal telephone: “Turn off that stupid racket, you morons! It’s useless.” She recognized the enemy insignia on the monster’s underwing. It ground sinisterly over their heads, ignoring the Fourth Hospital, but seconds later a slow explosion made the remaining windowpanes vibrate loudly (the less glass there is, the more noise it makes). The heavenly thunderbolt had scored a bull’s-eye on the motor fleet reserved for their evacuation. She looked at her watch. It was time for the kid’s dressing.

The blinded boy endured his darkness fairly well, but he still had a suppurating wound in the groin, threaded with catheters which were torture to replace. “Is that you, Erna?” he asked in an imposingly quiet voice. “It’s not just for show out there, right? Talk to me. I can hear all the sounds. I feel so much better, you know. I was thinking about you. What’s going on?” “Nothing new, Tony… Here, drink this.” The scarred and voided sockets no longer tortured him. Without the bandage, his head was hideously alluring: thick chestnut locks swept the domed forehead, the nose was straight, the mouth full and serious, but the outsize hollows of the eyes, pale as gold in places, devastated a face condemned to the night. “If only I could believe in God!” she thought. She would give the blind boy a final, pacifying injection, as soon as she could arrange it. “Let Tony sleep, let him sleep for good.” If she still loved anyone in this world it was him, this big kid lost in the dark between nothingness and the bitter drink of life to come… His file, penned by someone with a twisted sense of humor, read: “twenty-two years old… draftsman… outstanding performance in the field.”

Once they had conversed as follows: “Do you trust me, Tony?” “Yes.” “How do you imagine me?” (Erna avoided any references to sight.) He reflected for a moment, his features bizarrely illuminated by a smile in which the eyes played no part. “Young, very young…” (Erna felt herself aging; thank you, blind man!) “And tall and slim… with long soft tresses, all gathered up. Loyal and understanding. Straightforward.” (Erna’s frizzy hair was turning gray. Loyal, that was true, mortally so, and yet the word was like a slap. Understanding, indeed, knowing that the deepest grief is to understand. Straightforward, yes, as a string of infernal knots…) “You’re a little off the mark, Tony. No tresses, not soft hair…” But let him think that I’m young! “May I touch you?” he said, moving a translucent hand toward her. She clasped it between her own. “And I’m tough.” “One’s got to be,” the invalid said, with conviction. “So be tough, Tony, and answer me, your friend. Do you want to live — or — ” (warming these words with her voice) “would you prefer not to?” She saw the almost imperceptible tightening of his nostrils, his lips, the premature lines around his mouth. “But do you think I can live, Erna?” (No reprieve from lies and treachery!) “Yes, I do.” “Then I want to live.” And pity, which is the last form of love, must also be betrayed. The nurse knew she was lying again. “And so you will, I know you will.” She forced a tinkling laugh (the sound of laughter a lie) and added, “I’ve never been wrong before…” The ward doctor was taking a twenty-four-hour leave, she could do it then. She was sorry she’d put it off.

Tony ground his teeth while she removed the antiseptic dressings and replaced the catheters. A testicle was turning blue beneath the shrunken member. “I hope I didn’t hurt you too much, Tony?” He smiled, beads of sweat under his nostrils. “Not too much. Just a little… You’re so good! I get the feeling you’re pleased, too. Are you?”

If only he didn’t ask why!

“I am, it’s true. Rest now. I’ll drop in later.”

Footsteps were running up the stairs. Someone was whimpering wretchedly. “Erna, come quickly to the operating room…” Pleased by the breakdown, the demise of an entire world, pleased! You should never say the word “good” again, Tony, it’s a meaningless word, a blind word… The old rafters of the operating room were black. White-shrouded forms were stooping and shifting around prostrate forms. The lamps created a mist of asphyxiating brightness surrounded by visceral penumbras. Scissors could be heard snipping through cloth and leather to expose wounds. Three surgeons, their faces partly masked, stoked with Benzedrine to keep them awake, worked amid raw flesh, pus, gangrene, dying flesh, hallucination. Their shining steel instruments, wondrously pure and cruel, preserved an impenetrable yet intelligent disorder from one torture to the next. Basins filled up with reddened cotton swabs mixed with scraps of flesh. In the bucket by the door, a pink, bristly male ear was resting on dark and light tufts of hair, beside some severed fingers. Rubber tubes and electric cables curved gracefully through the foggy glare… Erna, at a sign, clamped a man’s head between both hands. His throat was an open wound, and she immediately felt the death tremors through her palms. Dr. Felix put down the scalpel, gazed hypnotically into the gray face, and clicked his tongue: “Done for. Take him away…” And he turned aside wearily. On the neighboring table a colossus with an uncovered belly, starred with wounds, had fallen into an incoherently euphoric delirium: “Ha ha, ha ha, La Chênaie… four thousand… three thousand six hundred marks… Snapdragons! Mama…” A long bout of groaning, then he launched into a verse from the Ninth Symphony: “We enter, drunk with joy, Thy bright sanctuary… Drunk with joy.” Gently Erna fitted the anesthetic mask onto a feverish head like a ball of roots pulled out of the soil.

The day staff usually partied through the night, for life is short, death easy (in a certain sense), and joy fleeting, so

The demolished city was preparing for sleep. Patrols were following perilous itineraries which intersected with those of lucky pass holders who were out looking for a good time. Muted singing could be heard deep in the charred ruins, in alcoves like the dens of shipwreckers, around daintily embroidered tablecloths, with plentiful quaffing of that delectable scotch someone swiped after an American retreat, or the last of the champagne from the plunder of France, or the sweet Rhineland wine they call liebsfraumilch, Milk of the Beloved Woman, or the chiefs’ coffee filched from the storeroom; and every bottle, if its story could be known, would relate a gory melodrama full of episodes of the last days of a civilization. “The trophies most prized by victorious armies,” Conrad once remarked, “are the ones they treasure up to the very last minute of their own defeats, are the bottles…” The heroic survivors of slaughtered units organized group-sex parties, for lack of privacy and anyway the proud but not-too-proud depravity of warriors is more fun. Couples entwined wherever they could, mingling lips, breasts, hips, and groins, bursts of laughter and tears, rage and joy. All together now, softly, allegretto:

Or suddenly switching to a mode of lyrical lamentation so touching that the eyes of the Adelinas became moist and it took five men to prevent a pilot from emptying his revolver on everyone:

“I find myself wondering,” confessed a grenadier of the Battalion of Death, “whether I shall ever again be able to sleep with a woman in private and without beating her; I actually tried it the other day, with a classy, good-looking one — between clean sheets if you can imagine that — and I couldn’t get it up! Me!” Someone shot back gaily, “You won’t have that problem much longer!” Indeed (in aparte):

Sung to the tune of a lively march, the words were Conrad’s, disseminated thanks to the Secret Service, which was hell-bent on arresting the author. Under cover of such fraternal orgies of boozing and brawling (after which the corpse, thrown into the street, would be attributed to Polish outlaws), Erna met with Conrad, a volunteer on the night security shift with perforated lungs; skinny, properly helmeted and shined, the young man looked shy — and resolute. People imagined that they enjoyed having their pleasure in the open air, pressed up against derelict walls like homeless animals, and this was the subject of a good deal of joking speculation.

“Well?” Erna questioned anxiously, when Conrad had come for her and they were standing outside under the portico of a bank that still lorded over the surrounding devastation.

“The committee has found a new meeting place,” he said.

“And the voice, do we know who?”

“No, but I suspect an amputee who ran into Corporal Boehm’s patrol about twenty minutes later. I’ll find out. Come along. Careful. There are six steps down, then a gap to hop over, it’s got water in it. Hold on to my arm, we can’t use the light.”

Conrad did not switch on his flashlight until they were crawling over a rubble of cement dust and burned paper. The candlelit vault was genuinely pleasant and clean, though chill as the grave. Erna shook hands with Bartek the Polish delegate, Alain from France, and the Spaniard Ignacio before glancing around her. There were separate piles of weapons, canned food, and clothes. More surprising was the presence of a pair of massive strongboxes, tilted toward each other, intact.

“How about it, we’ve infiltrated the very foundations of capitalism,” said Conrad, the German delegate. “Now for the super-structure!”

He went straight on to the technical specifications.

“The volume of air and the seriously inadequate ventilation limit us to a maximum of ten people staying here. There’s a risk of flooding if bombed. Extremely unlikely to be detected, though, save through our own carelessness. The two schoolboys who found it have been evacuated to Thuringia. They used it for hiding potatoes…”

Bartek the shoemaker, based on his experience as a staff officer, predicted that the Americans would capture the city within the week; much given to making solemn prognostications, his rate of accuracy was as high as fifty percent, if he said so himself — a not dishonorable record for a tactician trained by ignoramuses who understood nothing of warfare… Apart from two groups of armaments workers, his Polish contingent was proving hard to discipline. They got into fights every night: yesterday, seven were shot! Alain reported the formation of a tolerable resistance committee within the most privileged — that is, the most corrupt — French commando. Alain was afraid of gangsters, informers, anti-Semitism, the radio, dirty deals. He asked for two guys with guts, dressed as petty bourgeois, to carry out a delicate assignment. “Got them for you,” Ignacio said. “Myself and a Trotskyite from Madrid I know…” Erna shot him an arch look. “You heard right, dear lady,” Ignacio said teasingly. “Right,” said Alain.

Conrad briefed them on the latest developments. The elite division — it was discussed all over the town — had melted away under a storm of sulfurous bombs and the like, ground into pulp by the Shermans, the last survivors machine-gunned from the air by well-targeted fire, for lack of air cover. Formed of veterans and recently drafted young replacements, half fanatics and the other half chickenshits, marching toward the firing line like condemned men to the scaffold, encouraged by summary executions. The division was not at its full complement, either. “So which half were chicken?” Bartek wanted to know, moved by a professional interest in the behavior of fighters under pressure. “Both,” smiled Conrad. As for the population, it was on its knees. “The petty bourgeois is skidding on the vomit of its own abjectness…” “Ugh!” Ignacio winced. “Nobly put!” “Factual. They’ve always been that way.” The Volkssturm was thoroughly demoralized, save for one ravening company of Young Wolves packed with the teenage scions of Nazi families. “So anyone who hasn’t deserted already will be chopped into little pieces, which is fine by me. Good riddance. Seventeen-year-old brain matter is so damn malleable, it’s enough to put one off youth forever…” A surprisingly healthy black market, Gott sei Dank!, kept supplied by the quartermaster general. Prices for civilian clothing rising, identity papers, ration cards, and certificates declining: the colossal demand stimulated wholesale production, and the supply of forgeries nearly outstripped the demand. The Party was on its last legs. The hard-line faction was contemplating suicide or possible resistance from mountain redoubts (“That’s a laugh!” said Bartek). There was some acknowledgment of ideological and political blunders; the military caste ought to have been purged long ago. The hard-liners, though numerically insignificant, might still pull off some desperate coup. The bulk of the Party, stupefied and discouraged; but there’s no shortage of smart thinkers discreetly getting rid of their Führer portraits, calf-bound Mein Kampfs, uniforms, and armbands, which means we can get hold of some. Those rats think only about leaving the ship, the trouble is they have a deadly fear of salt water! As for the old working class, all but a handful of true stalwarts have become disoriented by the bitterness they feel. “You can see their point. Two wars, a revolution, waves of inflation, crises, persecutions, unemployment, demagogy, anti-Bolshevism, pact with Bolshevism, war on Bolshevism, a whirlwind of traumatic events, all in one generation! The worst of it is, these used to be men with sound heads on their shoulders…” “Come to the point,” said Alain. “Right. The Communists are more active than the Social Democrats, the Social Democrats more reliable…”

Erna cut in, her voice level: “In the interests of unity, best to abstain from political psychologizing. Broadly, what do people think?”

“They think they’re in hell, that tomorrow will be worse than today, that there’s nothing left to believe in or to hope for, but still, they’d rather not all be wiped out just yet…”

Ignacio remarked fliply, “They do display a healthy philosophy of nature. Lacking a political psychology they have a zoological mentality… And I couldn’t agree with you more, Erna, providing we could forget an awful lot of things… I’m all for unity, no one keener, but I won’t hide from you that if I were in the east and the CP took over, I would adopt a few personal precautions pronto: Underground zwei, number two!”

Bartek concurred, with a pained grimace. Alain shrugged grumpily. The Pole distracted the committee by tiptoeing up to one of the safes and gluing his ear to the side. “Something is up,” he said. “I have had eighteen long hours to study the hard heart of these financial idols, and I’ve found it reacts to the great emotions of the earth. My reading is, major artillery offensive west by northwest…”

Conrad led Erna out by the other exit: a good meeting place must have two exits. The pair of them emerged on what used to be a commercial thoroughfare, strangely well preserved and animated. Large clumps of splintered buildings remained upright around their blacked-out display windows and vacant interiors; this architecture was vaguely reminiscent of the badlands of Colorado or Afghanistan as seen in geography books: vertical mountains chiseled into castles… A procession of trucks straggled down the cleared roadway like a giant snake of black vehicles, hissing and growling, guided onward by obscure glimmers of light. A youth tightly belted into leathers checked Erna’s pass and Conrad’s registration card, zealous enough to play his flashlight over their faces. “Where have you come from?”

“Bed,” answered Erna, smiling. “Does that tempt you?”

“No thanks, Fraülein, move along. No loitering in this zone.”

The last motorized infantry were crammed into the squat personnel carriers — a conglomeration of heads massed together with slim barrels. All of a sudden, one hundred yards ahead, a white star was born in the inky sky releasing an unbearable brilliance floating to the ground among the convulsed buildings, highlighting the marquee of a cinema… The fez, thick mustache, and smoke rings of Khedive cigarettes loomed over the startled convoy from the center of this inhuman glare.

“Precise targeting,” muttered Conrad. “Let’s hurry.”

The star faded, having broken the silence of the sky where now a hum of engines could be heard far above. The star flared once more in the form of a scream, a sudden demented howl that rippled heavily over the convoy, echoing through a thousand thunderstruck spines. The human mass smothered the cry beneath its weight as one smothers remorse, as one would want to smother fear…

Conrad slipped his arm around Erna’s waist for appearances, for invisible eyes were watching.

“Sometimes I feel I could let rip like that madman… That madman who had already been killed, I think. I’m disciplined enough to stop myself, but which is the crazier, I wonder, to be disciplined or to scream? You, Erna, you put up a great show of being the woman with nerves of steel, but you’re as bad as I am. And all those poor bastards riding off to the slaughterhouse without a peep, how they’d love to howl their guts out. It would be an overwhelming relief, the convoy would stop, the Special Troops would go wild, then join in three minutes late: AAAAGGHH! The battle would be over before it began. The victors would quake to enter such a madhouse. It could mean the return of sanity…”

“Shut up,” Erna said stiffly. “Shut up or I’ll scream.”

The first deep thumps of an artillery barrage resounded somewhere. The ruins shook. Immense veils were ripped asunder in the night. There was silence among men.

The importance that explosives have acquired in people’s lives is equal only to that of papers. With barely a glance at the man, the robot on guard before some trapdoor peruses “your papers,” die Dokumenten; his decision is the result of a series of dates, rubber stamps, and itemized rules interlocking like cogwheels in his head at roughly an inch below the helmet. The robot pronounces: “Not in order, come this way.” This may be the beginning of the end of one’s own small but cherished world, within the larger end of the world… Alain naturally attempted to argue with the robot; he very nearly groveled. “Mein Kamerad, sehen Sie doch! Just look!” I’m almost in order, surely, hardly out at all, look, lovely blue card, pink card, travel permit (expired), crucial other paper here… ! The man-robot of the final hour, pumped up with a zeal that would make as much difference as the flight of a gnat in a cordite explosion, was impervious to argument. He had the build for the job — a big brute with watery eyes. The well-worn record spun in his larynx to produce the stock response under every clime, still changeless amid pan-destruction: “Tell it to the sergeant.” But where was the robot sergeant? A hundred marks might have nuanced his sense of responsibility, oiled the rusty wheels of his mental clockwork — after all, banknotes are also made of paper, that’s why the magic sometimes works… Alain started playing his own record, stuck on a single word: “Shit shit shit shit shit!” What could be more infuriating than to be shot by mistake or misplaced zeal on the eve of deliverance, to be the last casualty of a lost war, minutes before the cease-fire? But until this happens there’s always the luck factor, you never know. If you made a list of the ways luck has shepherded you — defenseless, trembling, and alive — through a global massacre, there’d be no choice but to accept the complete randomness of the universe, its sovereign absurdity, the existence of an unimaginably insane God.

Alain continued his meditation in a prison that looked like nothing known, while being essentially the same as every other prison. Comforting sunshine, pouring like warm water over his dirty, aching body, warmed the rear playground of this shattered school, whose ground floor and basement had been converted into a holding pen for prisoners. Rumor had it that Altstadt’s jail, symbolically spared by the fires of heaven and earth, was full to bursting with enemies of the people, traitors, suspects, and foreigners; one privileged wing — with rations of meat and dried fruits — was reserved for unworthy Party members, or perhaps not so unworthy, who could say? They may have sold army tires and provisions, changed their names, burned their uniforms, denied the Race and the Führer, yet no sooner did they feel the robot’s iron grip on their scruffs than repentance gushed touchingly forth, the faith returned, the selfless service of the past was brought to bear so earnestly that it was hard to know what to do with them, despite the implacable orders from above… Especially as the judges themselves… Here, barbed wire enclosed a makeshift jail as provisional as life itself; from a catwalk of rickety planks, with a sentry box on top, the guard could see down into the yards, the doorways, the windows, and the latrines dug here and there behind broken-down walls.

Alain lay on his belly under the sun, watching the man with the submachine gun trudge back and forth on his aerial gangway; from behind he looked massive in his forest-green cloak, but on turning he showed the fretful face of a convalescent. The Italian was stretched out opposite the Frenchman. The Croat, lounging against the wall of the pisshouse, had stuck his legs out wide apart, trousers rolled above the knee to expose his shins and naked feet to the sunshine. His feet were mottled, swollen, blackened lumps that seemed to be going rotten beneath the skin. The Croat: a hirsute giant built for strength, now sucked dry, sunk in a permanent stupor. The Italian — short, with bright eyes and hands that seemed agile even at rest — said, “Only four soldiers, and at least seventy of us.”

The Frenchman looked skeptical.

“The wire is pretty well laid out. If they rained a few more bombs over this corpse of a town, I might have an idea.”

“Can’t count on that,” the Italian said glumly. He winked in the direction of the bushy-haired Croat. “A goner, that one. Don’t worry, he only understands his own lingo and a few words of Hun, especially Schwein! Did you see the soles of his feet, the veins on his calves? He took a beating last night, he was hollering like ten stuck pigs. It was in the store cupboard to the right, with the iron-trellis window. They’ll bump him off tonight or tomorrow when they have the time or the inclination, you know how they are. There’s no gallows so they can’t hang him. There’s no ammo, no firing squad, they’ll just dish him a bullet or two in the gut so he can watch himself die… The executioner is Henschel, the fat one who looks like Göring with fangs. Eunuch voice, eyes drowned in blubber, chestful of decorations he must have stolen… He’s off duty this morning.”

“And you?” asked Alain without curiosity.

“Might be down for the same treatment. I was caught crossing over the lines, my job was pouring concrete for the artillery. I might just have a chance.”

“Fascio?”

“Barely. My ass was in it, but I kept my head cool.”

The sickly guard’s gaze wandered reproachfully in their direction. Grinning, the Frenchman raised his hand in a cordial wave, laughing Heil! The man with the submachine gun jumped, thrust the weapon aggressively forward, answered Schweigen! Silence! like an automaton, and resumed his pacing. The prisoners had a clear view of his pinched face — a child sapped by a tapeworm.

“Don’t know what he’s been marinating in,” Alain said, “but if it wasn’t his superiors’ latrine, then it must have been in a pusfilled hospital.”

The Italian sniggered, showing a mouthful of broken teeth.

“I reckon we’re in T section: condemned to death, probably. Henschel came around and gave me a funny look from over the wall. I’d never forgive myself for getting knocked off during the last three days of the Great Reich.”

“Me neither.”

The guard was walking over again, without looking at them, head down. The Frenchman uttered softly: “Blut und Tod! ” The guard stopped short and they heard him cock his weapon. “Don’t move!” whispered the Frenchman to the Italian. The Croat flexed his feet in the sun. Suddenly, piteously, he bellowed over and over: “Nein! Nein! Nein! ” Above them the guard was shaking in a fury, or a nervous fit. Nothing happened. The Croat relapsed into lethargy. Then a small man in a big peaked cap appeared in a gap in the wall and stood staring. He looked like a sun-dazzled owl. The guard trudged along the gangway. The Owl vanished, then reappeared through the pale wooden door of the yard. He hopped toward the Croat and looked him over impassively. A short length of something hard bounced repeatedly off the prisoner’s bushy head, making a thick, deadened sound. The prisoner turned on his side with a groan and lay doubled up in an odd position. Black rivulets of blood trickled down his forehead. The man in the high kepi decorated by a silver eagle turned toward the other two in the yard. His boots creaked, he was trim and elegant, cinched by a black leather belt. Slope-shouldered. The Italian turned the other way and played dead. The Frenchman, without rising, executed a crisp military salute. The Owl was swinging a piece of iron pipe at the end of his fist. The moment darkened. The Owl turned on his heel. They heard him lock the door.

“Phew!” said Alain.

The Italian opened his tunic a fraction to reveal the handle of a tool.

“I had this, but we were fucked. Now shut up. There’s nothing to do but stick it to them between the shoulder blades from behind, round midnight. Only snag is, we’d need to be outside.”

The sun shone mildly. Now every time the guard passed by them, he slowed down. He seemed hypnotized by the expanding puddle of the Croat’s blood. Alain was biting his lips. He began speaking under his breath, as if to himself, offering the back of his head to the submachine gun: “Blut, Blut, Blut, Tod, Tod, und Tod! Blood, blood, blood, death, death, and death!”

“Shut the fuck up, you’ll get us killed!” the Italian hissed.

“Possibly,” said Alain.

The obsessive litany ticked on: Blood, blood, blood, and death, death, blood and death, blood…

The forest-green cape halted above them, dark against an azure sky in the full glare of noon. In a low, personal voice, imitating the Frenchman’s, he ordered: “Schweigen! Silence!”

The Frenchman merely lowered his own voice further, and it was still audible, an obedient muttering: “Blood, blood, blood, death, death, and death, blood, blood, blood…”

It went on for seconds or minutes, in a sluggish interval that clotted like blood. The blackish puddle spread outward. The guard walked jerkily on, boards squeaking under his weight. The incantation continued. The squeaking stopped. There was an abrupt thump, followed by a sun-drowned stillness. The guard had collapsed at the foot of the sentry box; his helmet had come off, and the childish head with its shaven skull was lolling against the boards.

“Got him,” breathed Alain, his forehead dripping. “I knew it.”

A whistle blew in another sentry post, rapid footsteps thudded along the boards. Some figures bustled around the fallen guard before bumping him down the ladder like a sack of potatoes. A beardless youth in a policeman’s cap, with bunches of grenades attached to his belt, paced the catwalk nervously.

“Now we’re fucked,” the Italian said.

“Yes,” said Alain.

The chain of events progressed in broad daylight as though in a madman’s nightmare. The new guard looked at the coagulating pool under the Croat’s thatch of hair. Alain struck up his muted litany once more: Blood, blood, blood, death. The boy in the policeman’s cap burst out laughing. His laughter was answered from the remote horizon by great rumbling, like air coming out of a tire, deepening into a hurricane roar, the distant sabbath of the big guns. The laughter of the grenade-belted boy broke off in a kind of hiccup. Two important commanders were coming into the main yard; Alain could see them through the gap in the wall. The Italian rolled over onto his back, arms flung out, laughing with all of his broken teeth, all of his arched spine, his eyelids fluttering against the sun. His head lay close to the black puddle, so that in laughing he, too, seemed to bleed. The litany of blood continued, the distant booming of the sabbath continued, the placid sunshine continued, guttural commands raked the air.

The Italian and the Frenchman appeared together before the two commanders, in a spotless office with potted geraniums flowering on the windowsills. They performed the ritual salute in style. The chief of the subdivision for guest workers attached to the Extraordinary Security Service of the (et cetera), Fauckel by name, questioned the Frenchman at the same time as Gutapfel, the joint subdirector of Civil Defense under the Department for Emergency Mobilization of the Counterespionage Corps of the State Secret Police (or whatever it was) questioned the Italian — thus expediting the proceedings. Fauckel had stiff, brush-cut hair and appeared to be chewing gum, but it was only a facial tic. Gutapfel had slicked-down hair, a starched collar, a bulging tunic, and a blunt nose, like a pig’s snout. The eyes of the first were tiny, creased, and watery, the eyes of the second bulged dully. Neither trusted the other. “Listen to that,” said Fauckel into Gutapfel’s ear, “they’re going at it hammer and tongs to the north.” “The north, you think so?” In the direction of our one single decent supply or evacuation route? Are we to being sacrificed like lambs, or will the evacuation orders come through in time? It’s all very well to hold out and die standing fast, but who will save the nation then? We are the flower of the nation, after all. The gauleiter’s last remarks were inspired by the field marshal’s “Order of the Day” — as if this were a time for epic literature!

The red-eyed Owl thrust his kepi — peaked like the crest of a silver cock — between their heads; as he whispered, the two commanders stared at the two prisoners. “Very good,” Gutapfel said to the Owl, “I approve!” From the next room came the exhausted sobs of a woman punctuated by cries of “I won’t! I won’t!” A male voice rapped “Silence, whores!” just as the artillery salvos appeared to be moving closer. “Those are our big guns,” Fauckel hoped, sweaty browed. After reaming out his nostrils with a pudgy finger, Gutapfel assumed the impassivity of a younger Hindenburg. Next door the weeping ceased for a moment, then broke out afresh. “I’m the wife of an unimpeachable Party member! You have no right!” The callow and pomaded Hindenburg turned into a bulldog about to bite. “Silence those hysterical females! Not another sound!” “Straightaway, Commander.” Clicked heels and ramrod shoulders, even if they were only the Owl’s, provided a heartening reminder of the existence of discipline. The cannon to the north emitted a prolonged hoo-hoo-hoo that was crushed flat by a baoom-rrh at the very instant at which the wailing — next door — was cut off. “Explain yourself!” Fauckel demanded of the Frenchman. “Pitelli, deserted to the enemy,” Gutapfel read out in quiet voice. “Do you admit the charges?” The accusation — death penalty — had become so commonplace that it impressed him no more than the theft of a can of beans, red-handed pillaging, unpatriotic talk, or the fornication of a refugee’s daughter with some Polish worker; if the laws were actually to be enforced in our demolished cities it would require execution squads working around the clock (when the manpower is badly needed elsewhere) and a limitless concentration camp. Fauckel listened as Alain, standing at attention, recited a string of explanations that formed an irrefutable argument like a madman’s closed system. Fauckel studied this dirty, determined, reasonable young man with grudging interest, for the French were beginning to regain, in his esteem, something of the prestige of the victors of 1918. He well remembered the occupation of the Rhineland, and de Gaulle was undeniably a character to be reckoned with. Alain was breezing through a faultless enumeration of the blown-up bridges, obstructed railway lines, barred roads, and broken-down trains, the orders from one checkpoint and counterorders from the next that all together had combined to make his progress so tortuous; he did not omit to relate what he had seen at the third checkpoint — sergeants hacked to pieces in a tiny guardroom drenched from ceiling to floor in blood. Blut, Blut, Blut everywhere, it was terrifying, and the corpses were minus their heads! “That’s quite enough,” Fauckel interrupted. Due to these contretemps, the honest truth was that while Altstadt was not perhaps on the prescribed route for this prisoner-of-war-cum-voluntary-worker-on-sick-leave, he simply could not have gone anywhere else, given his firm and loyal undertaking never to infringe regulations. For some time now, Fauckel had been unable to tolerate the sight, the very idea, of blood, “our blood.” He returned the Frenchman’s papers, supplemented with a new violet card on which he stamped his stamp. “You will report to Workforce Center at headquarters…” Alain’s heart leaped. Was there still a Workforce Center at headquarters? You’ve got a bad case of the runs, Commandant.

A smartly dressed housewife had already pushed past him to the desk, invoking the authority of some Oberleutnant and waving a paper that was not in her name but in that of a dead woman. Distracted by the pounding cannon fire, Fauckel struggled to grasp that she had been signing in the deceased’s name in order to obtain her rations. “It was my sister-in-law, I’ve taken in her daughter, Grete, her husband’s disappeared and the Oberleutnant assured me that…”

“Of what did he assure you, the Oberleutnant? That I can resurrect a sister-in-law?” He continued: “And that a forgery is not a forgery?”

His fit of bluster subsided into throat-clearing, because the paper he was reading had caught his attention.

“So your husband is in the Party, an army chauffeur?”

He most certainly is, and very well regarded, ask anyone in the twelfth sector… When evacuation orders are imminently expected, it’s sound policy to do favors for the drivers, especially those of the twelfth sector. “Very good, you’re free to go while inquiries proceed. Send your husband to see me…”

The Italian, Giacomo Pitelli, was explaining to Commander Gutapfel that he’d momentarily lost his head under the bombardment; his chiefs and supervisors had vanished, and there was only one way to get out, in the direction of the enemy as it happens, but he didn’t realize, he thought he was catching up with what was left of the company. “Couldn’t you see where the firing was issuing from?” “Apparently from the sky, sir, I swear, all hell was crashing down on top of us…” “That’s enough,” said Gutapfel, energetically scratching his thigh. “Court-martial, transfer him…” The Owl did not dare to mention that there was nowhere to transfer him to, and that the courts-martial were no longer functioning… After eighty minutes of business the commanders called it a day. Standing by their motorcycles, they conferred, stiff with mutual mistrust. “Not very promising,” Fauckel said. “Should I evacuate the archives on my own initiative?” “Your archives are your responsibility… I’m against evacuation.” Gutapfel shrugged a padded shoulder. “I’m staying, unless ordered personally.” The small vial of poison, hanging from a cord against the fleece of his chest, steeled him while burning a hole in his heart. (He was counting on receiving that personal order…) What titans were about to fall! Germany would never recover. But having served in an extermination camp for Jewish vermin in Poland, he did not greatly rate his chances of “crossing over” in the event of a capitulation. This abject colleague was the last person he could tell of his decision not to be hanged by a cabal of New York Jews, now that everything was hopeless. “What about you people?” he inquired unpleasantly. “The pullback of our offices has been postponed for the moment, in view of the imminent counteroffensive, I understand.” “Oh?” Fauckel had evoked this counteroffensive merely to infuriate the fanatical dullard before him, the kind of maniac who would like nothing better than to drag a whole people to suicide. “But your department is hardly essential to the front line!” Gutapfel objected, in a derogatory tone which Fauckel chose to overlook, edging closer to speak privately — for there were other motorcyclists nearby, who might have read derision or defeatism into a perfectly reasonable remark: “Whatever may lie in store, I have faith in the genius of the Führer.” (If that’s of any consolation to you, my friend!) “Don’t we all!” cried Gutapfel angrily. You fraud, he thought, if you haven’t already wangled yourself an Alsatian passport, I’ve lost my nose for cowards and quitters. They parted with a exchange of rigid salutes.

The Frenchman was wandering through the ruins. He would go up to policemen, waving his violet card and asking for the new address of the Workforce Center for Foreign Defense Workers, apparently no longer at the address marked. They answered him politely, with dazed incomprehension. Panic was rising. He drank a cup of potato-flour broth. He was hungry. His fountain pen and half of his cash had been retained by the Owl, that was inevitable. To unstitch his jacket collar and remove a banknote, he would need some privacy. Breaking in somewhere and stealing things he could sell on the black market seemed simpler and, above all, more attractive. On pain of death, of course, but then the Todestrafe stared you in the face every hundred yards in the form of laughable notices, treacherous holes in the road, collapsing walls, dangling power lines, uniforms of every stripe, informers without uniforms, marauders on the prowl — and it could also drop on you by the purest of chance, like a meteor. Best to not be entirely innocent, you’ll feel less of a fool when you get caught.

Toward the end of the afternoon Alain’s attention was caught by the shuttered prow of a house in a badly damaged neighborhood; the tradesmen’s entrance was masked by a pair of tall thin walls, leaning toward each other like parodies of the Tower of Pisa, the sparse bricks sagging until the tops nearly touched, a truly comic sight… No imagination, however wild or drunk, could ever conceive the wealth of fantastical architectural effects to be found in bombed-out cities. Kids growing up in them may someday, as these visions mature within them, create a new art that will be neither realistic nor surrealistic, for destruction nurtures a special reality basically close to the unreal. The bogus reality of civilization reverted back to first principles, violent death, the dissolution of beings and works, the anxious persistence of a life force free of justification… Paintings of individual psychological terrors would seem ridiculous here. Start expressing the Great Authentic Terror, or buzz off… You’re still busy thinking, my boy, as though it were of any use, as though there were avant-guard journals to…

Anyway, let’s go inside! Alain tapped with sly insistence at a the obviously locked door. What if someone were taking a nap inside? I’d say, “Please excuse me, madame, sir, or would you rather I crushed your larynx and jugular with these fingers here?” Silence. The kitchen shutter was easily prized off. Alain stepped over sacks, mattresses, and broken glass to reach a small room furnished in light-colored wood, presumably occupied, for it was as cluttered with odds and ends as a fairground cart. Shiny tins ranged on a shelf contained some sourdough and bitter herbal tea. “How little it takes to reawaken my good intentions! If my unknown host turns up, I’ll be all apologies. I was terribly hungry, madame or sir, and it’s time you knew you’ve lost the war… Whereas I am winning it, so, though I may not look much like a conqueror, allow me to offer my protection…” All the same he picked up the meat cleaver, an excellent means of persuasion. If they come back in a group of two or three, I’m done for. Death is the penalty, my friend. A coin tossed in the air for the hundred-thousandth time. You can’t win every time, but maybe the hundred-thousand-andfirst time. Let’s win!

He was winning! Bottles, poorly hidden under the couch behind books and boxes, their sealed necks protruding. Wonderful, stupendous, incredible! To be shot after getting wasted, at least that would be a worthy end. Alain popped a cork (with one blow of the cleaver) and greedily drank the Moselle, a pert little vintage ripened beneath the tender rays of peacetime which brightened your mind, revived your optimism, and reburnished the shine of your lucky star… He must have drunk too much, for fatigue began to sway in him, leaden and yet weightless. It would be risky to sleep here. The alarm clock marked five, and night would be a long time coming. The clock ticked away like all the timepieces in the world, indifferent to the colicky burpings of the cannon. They don’t bother me either, my plucky little robot, so tell me, what do you have to say about the flow of time? Imbecile, you count the minutes without knowing what they are, the miser counts his pennies, the general counts his bombs, the refugee counts his fleas, the executioner counts his victims, no one knows what it is…

Good song, that! Alain smashed the neck of another bottle and drank.

Off the mark, Baudelaire! Better not to remember. Esto memor, pain of death. I’m good, that is to say drunk, wine is good. The Solitary’s Wine, The Murderer’s Wine. We’re all solitaries and murderers, old boy. I’m as drunk as a drunken mule. I’ll piss on the carpet, can’t expect me to go hunting for a nonexistent toilet. Carpets, lieber Herr, gnädige Frau, are made to be pissed on the day of victory and if today isn’t the day of victory, I’ll piss as though it were the day of victory. And if you don’t like it, landlord, I’ll smash your face in, drink more of your wine, and piss again if I please.

The cleaver gleamed, last weapon of the last fighter of the last hour of the last battle of the last city… And the drunken man’s eyes widened, the scenery changed. Life is continuity, death is rupture, and between the two lies w-w-war — the whoosh of shells, the towers of mounting smoke, the mushrooms of clouds, the stupefaction of finding myself intact, in one piece, little me, in my own home on the rue de Fleurus. The proof? All I need is to put out my hand — really must wash my hands, so tired, I have the hands of a road worker! — and reach over to the bookshelf, like so, and pull out my Botticelli, here it is, and open it…

Good Lord, or is it Lucifer, I no longer believed it possible. Mathilde will have a fit when she sees me here. “Get those muddy shoes off the sofa!” she’ll scold. “You’re priceless, Tilde…” He opened a large, coffered book. Botticellian figures of long-necked women with candid eyes, wreathed in leaves and flowers, were coming toward him. Look, Tilde! What a draftsman… that loving vigor in every stroke, that clear-eyed vision elevated to the highest degree of purity. Real vision, ideally superior to reality, just as the essential and the eternal are superior to contingency. Is it Lionello Venturi’s book, or Jacques Mesnil’s? Both those writers understood him. It would have taken your sad-day pencil, Botticelli, to do the portrait of a Jacques Mensil… Mesnil is dead, Sandro. Alessandro di Mariano Filipepi, Botticelli, a name like a beautiful line of poetry. His power was not to express dreams but to achieve the synthesis of a golden-age dream and a purified reality: thus he encountered the marvel of truth. Faces tend to fulfill an archetype bequeathed by the millennia which themselves refined our human features. Material faces, asserting themselves in space, pick up all the bruises, deformations, blemishes, and blurrings that our flesh of clay is prone to, and every expression of misery adheres to them. They are more carnal, more social, than truthful. Sandro restores them to an eternally adolescent oval, youth knowing neither regret nor repression, with eyes slightly enlarged for the right visual effect, because Sandro is aware of the infirmity of our eyes which he heals. Learn to see in this way, love the healer of our eyes! The eyes of Botticelli’s figures bring peace — like the charm of flowers. His slim women remind us of tall young trees, pushing upward under the caress of sun and wind. No trickery here: Sandro draws his eyes by the rules, much more accurate than sight; he withdraws it from the flesh and from the abstract, this geometric magician! He puts true freshness into them, but rinsed off; he washes out your eyes from inside. Their expression is limpid, direct, they have the courage to live, they have the firmness of crystal and also a crystalline anxiety, for they have seen the mists of falsehood dispersed. They smile gravely, with darkness hidden beneath their clarity; they can look upon the tragic without blinking because spring lives inside them, their eyes untroubled by the tragedy they reflect. The fear that has been overcome but still lingers at the back of their pupils comes from knowledge and secrecy mastered by innocence.

Where’s my Etruscan Art? In God’s name what have they done with my Etruscan Art? I forbade these books to be lent, because who’d be fool enough to return them! He foraged among the spines, irritated, with stumbling fingers. Here was Kandinsky’s book, Abstract Art. Kandinsky begins by lifting from reality its colors, lights, and volumes, its essential substance, and that is doubtless a process of abstraction — but it’s even more a process of reduction to a concrete, rather than abstract, symbol, resulting in a densely simplified landscape. Pushing this procedure to the limit, Kandinsky arrives at a purely mental sign, as conventional as the algebraic X, which might with no loss of meaning be replaced by a triangle, an asterisk, or a dot, yes, a dot, the perfect unknown reduced to a minimum of visible existence. Abstraction, destruction. Straining to see beyond the visible, the artist is left with nothing at his disposal but a set of signs, no longer images or symbols, on their way to becoming number; hold it there, friend, you’re turning away from the earth, the lovely, living earth, you’re squandering the gifts of form, you’re betraying the real, you’re losing the eyes which Sandro had healed… Abstraction culminates in the black-on-white grids of Mondrian: straight lines, right angles, ingenious variations on the prison-bar theme. Then poor old Mondrian remembers about color, and fills in a corner of his jail with a minute square of wash, better than nothing, to be sure; but after that, how gorgeous, how unforgettable a red blouse looks or a richly patterned scarf! All that remains of art is an imprisoned whiteness. You’ll say it’s powerful, and I won’t deny it. Very powerful and very dead.

Prison for prison, allow me to prefer that painting by Raphael, the martyrdom of… who was it now? Here we go, this good wine is mixing up my martyrdoms and my deliverances, much the same thing as it may be, doesn’t martyrdom begin again after deliverance? That’s it, The Deliverance of Saint Peter, in the Vatican apartments — if the Vatican has not been bombed to smithereens in a hail of deliverance… In the foreground, the bars, the only part Mondrian would have thought worth keeping! Behind the bars, the group of warriors, jailers, and the angel, the source of celestial radiance, and old man Peter in chains, drooping, not understanding that deliverance is at hand; or understanding that it is darker than martyrdom in prison…

Where’s that bottle? There were still a few dregs from the source in it. I drink to the source, to the archangel, to the breeze beating the bushes, and no more bars, oops someone’s coming. A woman, Mathilde, not Mathilde, it can’t be, I hear her stepping down from a leafy grove by Botticelli…

He shouted, “Who’s there?”

He grabbed the meat cleaver. The kitchen door was opening… “It’s me, Brigitte… Is Gertrude out? Who are you?” Alain put down the bottle, empty, saw the art books lying open, the matt blade in his hand. Waves pulsed through his head. “What? Who? Let’s see, Alain. I saw you at my show, at Fortuné’s, right?”

The intruder, in narrow jacket and white beret, slender-necked, was in truth Botticellian — but that poor lopsided face, those enormous twelve-year-old’s eyes seared by the fires of hell, you’re ill, tell me. You look crazy, that’s natural, it will happen or it won’t happen, keep drinking, there’s more left. Alain smashed the neck of another bottle and held it out to Brigitte, golden bubbles splashing onto the books and foaming all over his hand, my hands are incredibly filthy, I’m going to disgust you, Mademoiselle. Don’t drink it all, I’m thirsty too. The intruder asked, “Did Gertrude go out?”

“Out with her lover, by Jove!… Have a seat, you’re charming. Not feeling so well? Make yourself comfy and tell me all about it. You can trust me, you know. My head hurts, but that’s what a fine wine will do…”

“Who are you?” the intruder repeated in so penetrating a tone that she found her answer. “You’re French, aren’t you? An artist? But what is that for?” She was pointing at the meat cleaver. He cried out in a low voice, “Touch that and I’ll…” It almost sobered him. Damn the whole pack of you, don’t think I won’t put up a fight! Brigitte said, “You’re drunk. You can’t stay here. Come to my house, where you can sleep. Come on, get up.”

He smiled, beatifically compliant. Young, clear-featured, staggering with tiredness. “Your word is my command, Empress. You’re superb. Have another swig to please me, and I’ll finish the bottle…” Brigitte took a few swallows of the cheerful wine.

“Give me your arm. No one will ask any questions. Minus-Two knows me.”

“Minus what?”

(The algebraic X, the dot, the reduction to the abstract, to nonexistence. Minus times minus equals plus…)

“Franz. He lost a leg and an arm, so we call him Minus-Two. He’s a very good man.”

“What if I finished him off? Then he’d be minus everything. Zero. The ideal point.”

Alain spun the cleaver into the air and caught it like a juggler, nearly falling over in his exuberance.

“But there’s no ideal point,” she said mournfully, “and nothing is ever finished.”

He stuffed the cleaver into his clothing and took the Botticelli book under his arm. Under the arch of a bridge, blown there by the wind perhaps, he searched for a glimpse of water. There was none. Brigitte helped him up a ladder. “Lie down. Go to sleep.” Alain dropped onto the bed, opened the art book. The book fell from his hands. How good it is to fall asleep at last, how…

Every morning Herr Schiff the schoolmaster paid a visit to his lilac bushes. Neither the heat of the fires nor the cement dust in the air had deterred them from flowering. The force of simple vegetal vitality. His shrubs enjoyed more space and light, now that there were no houses around. Schiff pruned a few deviant spears, for the plant will be hardier if it concentrates its sap in a few well-proportioned branches. Then he noticed the silence. A blissful silence. Suspiciously so. What did it mean? The gravel crunched under the uneven step of Franz the cripple.

“Good day, Herr Professor. How are your lilacs doing? You’re a happy man, Herr Professor, to have such splendid blooms… Donnerwetter! Always so pleasant in your domain.”

The little garden measured less than eight yards square. Its wrought-iron railings, uprooted in some places, ballooned like a metallic sail in others. The neatly raked walk was the more enticing for the fact that it led nowhere: intimacy without issue. The diabolical stone lacework all around was kept at bay by this smooth path with its reminder that humble toil, order, and perseverance existed, and might still (albeit exceptionally) claim their reward from the very jaws of pan-destruction. To build and rebuild without tiring, without end, was that not man’s mission? Or not so much his mission as his chore. How many times was Rome rebuilt? Some nod of providential approval, Herr Schiff was sure of it, had spared this tiny corner of the world for the benefit of three lilac bushes, one of them stunted… A bomb could so easily have fallen here; flames had licked at the bushes, the smoke could have suffocated them, but Schiff, his gravel, his flowers, and his gardening shears had pulled off a gentle and astounding victory.

“My congratulations, Herr Professor,” said Franz.

The amputee was looking white and chapped, as though his skin were encrusted with lime scale. His voice sarcastic, slightly breathless. The hook where his hand used to be gleamed like the part of some bizarre machine. Herr Schiff felt vaguely uneasy.

“To what do I owe this compliment, Herr Noncommissioned Officer?”

“To your lilacs. Are there still any birds about, Herr Professor?”

“Yes. Look up there, a new swallows’ nest, up in the corner of the third window of Herr Kettelgruber’s apartment.”

Of course, neither Herr Kettelgruber nor his apartment existed, but the nest was there among the ruddy stones. With swallows dashing in and out, veering through the wide bays filled with sky.

“Marvelous,” said Franz.

“Indeed it is! Divine nature! What is new, Herr Noncommissioned Officer? Those swallows have returned from Egypt.”

“A lot of our boys won’t be returning from Egypt.”

Old Herr Schiff’s head wobbled erratically, as if about to lose its balance and fall off a neck which had been sliced through long ago.

“It’s the end, Herr Professor, and the beginning, for as I’ve heard you say, an end is always a beginning… Only one never knows if the new beginning won’t be worse than the end… The Americans, the British, the New Zealanders, the Kaffirs, and the Patagonians are in the city. Another hour or so and you’ll be able to show them your lilacs, assuming they are fond of flowers.”

“What? What? Ah yes, I understand.”

But Schiff did not understand. He groped for his stick with a doddering hand. Unable to find it, he leaned against the contorted fence.

“It was only to be expected,” he said after a few seconds. “Germany is finished for the next fifty years… Fifty years, I tell you, Herr Noncommissioned Officer!”

“As little as that? And when the fifty years are up, our grandchildren will pick up the noble dance right where we left off, I suppose!”

Seeing the papery old face turn haggard with bewilderment and dismay, Franz toned down his teasing.

“You are a peaceful citizen, Herr Professor. I suggest that you hang a white rag out the window. Then call your pupils together. Keep them from hanging about anywhere near the tanks. Very inconsiderate, tanks, they crush things and spit bullets just like that, for the hell of it.”

“You’re right, Herr Franz. I am a peaceful citizen, I have been so all my life. The true human ideal is one of orderly concord… No, I swear that Germany will never initiate another war, never… There will be no revenge, there will never be a just revenge… I say to you: Enough!”

He was rambling. He was thinking. An old schoolteacher who couldn’t prevent himself from rambling when he thought he was thinking.

“How about a sprig of lilac,” Franz said, “for my buttonhole?”

Lilac does not suit a buttonhole, but the unfortunate cripple is a bit touched in the head, it’s common knowledge. The teacher selected a good thick spray. “Here you are, my friend. A dreadful day lies ahead…”

“Thank you. And no, not half as bad a day as some others… Good day, Professor. Lots to attend to. I fancy killing someone to round off my war… Can’t decide who.”

“Oh, Herr Franz, don’t whatever you do shoot at the Americans! Innocent hostages would pay the price… I beg you!”

As he hobbled away, the cripple with the flowered breast threw back: “First: those innocents of yours might be the worst kind of culprits. Second: I don’t mean the Americans, I mean the intolerable scum…”

“Ah yes,” babbled Schiff, “I understand” — for he less and less understood.

Schiff went back into the house, took from the linen cupboard a worn-out pillowcase, tied it to a school ruler, and went outside to hang the white flag above his door. Already white rags were flocking across the ruins, some floating with the gay flutter of doves. As far as the eye could see, the whole city was covering itself with white birds, captives who would never take wing. The dead birds were born out of a humming silence, in whose depths you could make out the breathing of death throes. The teacher cupped a hand to his ear and listened: convoys on the march, here and there loud cries diminished by distance to the point of insignificance, sounds of weeping, of singing, of sharp gunshots like pinholes in space… This neighborhood seemed completely quiet. The cripple’s wife, Ilse, came along with her bucket, heading for the pump. Schiff whistled like a blackbird. Ilse put down the bucket and tramped over to the window, rested her forearms on the sill in front of the professor.

“Are you not frightened, Ilse?”

“No, Herr Schiff. What should I be afraid of?”

“Are you upset?”

“No, Herr Schiff. Why be upset?”

Schiff recognized the same dusty film over the young woman’s homely face and ugly yellow hair tied with a blue ribbon — a think layer of limestone dust that was probably coating every face at present, even the faces of portraits in their frames. Ilse’s meaty, thick-veined fists. Her discolored nails, cut too short, exposing the animal pads of her fingertips.

“You know the city has fallen, Ilse?”

“Yes, Herr Schiff. So the war’s over for us. And not a day too soon, Herr Schiff.”

“Aren’t you sorry at all, then, that the war has been lost?”

“Everything has been lost for ages, Herr Schiff.”

So many white doves in the broken window frames of the city… Ilse could see the lilacs beyond the professor’s old white petit-point waistcoat; she spoke to them rather than to him.

“The SS are still holding out in the underground factories… They raped the female workers last night, since today they’d be dead or prisoners, they were saying… Lennchen was roughed up. Those poor men… The Poles killed several officers… Frau Hinck says they’re committing suicide, lots of suicides everywhere, the Party leaders are all killing themselves… Frau Hinck says it’s very grand of them, but I’m not sure. Why kill yourself? If someone else kills you, that’s their business, but you yourself?… And Brigitte is dead. She spent the night before with a French prisoner… Then this soldier came last night and strangled her. She can’t hardly have suffered, such a thin little neck she had… So she’s at peace now, Herr Schiff.”

Schiff started. “What’s that you say? Strangled?” The white stitches of his waistcoat formed diamonds, the lilacs shimmered and Ilse smiled stupidly at them. The sun enveloped her shoulders in warmth.

“She’s like a happy little girl on her cot. Give me some lilacs for her, Herr Schiff, lots of lilacs. It’s for Brigitte.”

Schiff had lost his fear of war, doubtless a great crime; but a crime in a neighboring house made him shudder. And no more policemen!

“You are out of your mind, Ilse, you don’t know what you’re saying!”

Ilse ignored the rebuke, she looked away, and insisted without raising her voice — her thick fingers were unpleasant to look at, as if they had the power in them to strangle.

“Give me the lilacs, Herr Schiff, or I’ll have to help myself: quick, so I can fetch my water and take the lilacs to Brigitte’s bedside. I’m glad for her. I really must get on now, Herr Schiff, there’s the soup to cook, seeing as there’s no food distribution today because of the Americans.” (All at once, in the middle of her chatter, an inflexible note.) “The flowers, Herr Schiff, they’re for Brigitte, and you don’t need them anymore!”

“In truth, I don’t,” thought the schoolmaster, enlightened by an unaccustomed lucidity. “I don’t need them anymore. Do I need anything, anymore?” “Right away, Ilse.” He drew his reading glasses from their case and with great slashes of scissors cut a sumptuous armful of blossoms. Ilse went off, vanishing like a heavy apparition carrying off the last flowers on earth. If anything can still stir up some pride in an ossified old brain stuffed with cliché and vaporized by the heat of events, it’s rhetoric. Schiff looked at his devastated bushes and told himself that he had offered up their flowers for the ravaged Fatherland. “But how did that female know I no longer needed them, when I didn’t know it myself?” So many suicides, so many deaths, as simple as that! Frau Hinck is right about the greatness of the vanquished. What is greatness? Tonight, yes, tonight… Finish the day. Which of the Stoics said, “The sage finishes his day without complaining about the gods”? “Each seed falls at its appointed time,” that was Marcus Aurelius. With a serene heart like Marcus Aurelius, Schiff sat in his study before a volume of The History of War, by the great German scholar Hans Delbrück. Lately, it was true, the sense of most of what he read escaped him; but being incapable of inattention, the mechanical act of reading acted upon him like a sedative. His cheek cupped in his hand, he reread the works he admired out of duty. Out of duty he slept, or tried to sleep, or thought he was asleep. Was he falling short of his duty at this time? He would not call the schoolchildren together. Goodbye, children. The murky swirling of the end of a world perceived through the end of a life filled him with dismal reveries on which he brooded in a state of bearable affliction, even contentment. Tonight, thirty barbiturate pills…

A tank moved rapidly over the paths of solitude. Hidden eyes were watching. The enemy. White signals fluttered to meet it, lifted on the breeze. The tank detoured around the fallen granite blocks of the bank, and plunged out of sight into a colossal brush pile of steel girders. The emptiness in its wake merely condensed an unknown expectancy. Then a jeep approached, moving slowly. You could see it coming from afar, then it vanished behind some stumps of dead houses, reappeared in the vicinity of Schiff’s lilac bushes, and advanced toward the pump. Suddenly there were children running to meet it, waving white flags… They were overcome with curiosity, avid anticipation of violence and handouts. The enemy was not scary close up. The enemy was distinguishable only by small differences in the color of his equipment and the shape of his helmet; under a coating of chalky dust, such differences were less noticeable. The jeep driver’s ugly face looked comical and fierce, but he was laughing. The jeep pulled up by the pump. A fat man got out and splashed water on his hands and face. Another fat man, platinum-blond hair surmounted by an undersize overseas cap, stood squarely, legs spread, hands on hips, surveying his surroundings. His was wearing beautiful boots and green sunglasses. No one had ever seen a big bushy mustache like the one he sported. Probably some big shot. The driver was busy with his motor.

Ilse came out of her room, lugging her pail again. At the sight of the newcomers she caught her breath, hesitated for a quarter of a second, and walked up to the pump. “Guten Morgen,” she said, fixing the enemy with a long frosty stare. The driver rolled his shoulders. “Guten Tag,” he replied caustically from beneath his helmet. He was holding a shiny metal wrench in his fist. Ilse wondered whether he might not crack her on the back of head with it as she bent over the tap. She reckoned it wouldn’t be enough to kill her, but then there was the cooking and the housework… The sound of Franz’s crutch making pebbles fly was audible close by as he labored up a low rampart of rubble. He surged into view in front of a bearded officer, who lowered his revolver when he saw him. “Okay!”[29] greeted Franz cordially. “Hello!” said the bearded officer, sounding perplexed. Instead of looking at the conquerors, Franz turned his attention to their machine, making small clucks of appreciation through pursed lips. “Well, well,” he coughed, in a bid to get maximum mileage from his ten words of English. With his good hand, he took the liberty of prodding one of the tires. Superb piece of manufacturing! Synthetic? The guy with the beard offered him a cigarette. “Thank you.” “Speak English?” “No.” The crippled vet’s face split into an friendly grin. Herr Schiff was approaching with measured step, leaning on the antler handle of his cane. The Schulzes all emerged from their lair together, the wife, the children, the man in his cap and sweater. Other people were appearing across the ruins like larvae emerging from the soil — and they were indistinguishable, on the whole, from the inhabitants of Chicago’s slums or any other poverty-stricken corner of the world. A rather elegant woman, wearing a Red Cross armband on her jacket sleeve, climbed down from a sort of chicken coop stuck to the side of a blasted building. A thin, hairy young man, lost in an outsize tramp’s overcoat on which he had pinned a red, white, and blue ribbon, jumped off the ladder and loped unsteadily toward the jeep. His wild eyes and big, gesticulating hands would have made him quite frightening, had this been the time for fear. Everyone stared at him. On his way, he knocked over a little Schulze, pushed Ilse aside, blurted “French war prisoner!”[30] in a voice from the other side of the grave, and opened his arms wide… One of the Americans punched him lightly in the ribs, made him stagger, caught him in a bear hug, and the two men clung to each other as though wrestling, about to collapse in a heap. “Christ almighty!” gasped Alain. “I don’t believe it!” Someone was slapping him on the back hard enough to dislodge his lungs. Someone else stuck a cigarette between his chattering teeth. There were friendly faces in broad daylight, USA insignia, a genuine jeep, white rags snapping in the sunshine as far as you could see, an emaciated Brigitte smiling for eternity on her schoolgirl bed, with something of Botticelli about the hardened oval of her chin; there was a hail of luminous stones falling overhead, each stone an idea, an unbreakable reality, an incredible certainty, a grenade of rapture which could never explode… We’re alive, rescued, delivered, how hollow the words sounded! Victorious, does that make me a victor? Shivering, gripped by a burning chill, Alain chewed on his cigarette. “Speak French,[31] anybody? Quick! Schnell, schnell!” The fat important one with the green sunglasses said, “Je parle fran-çais… Journalist. Paris.” Alain drew himself up before him like a marionette, like remorse itself, crying in a low voice, “The hell with Paris! The guys in jail… Did you think about the jail?” “It’s bound to be occupied by now,” said the journalist, who had no idea. Alain’s vehemence was spent. The nurse took his arm. “We thought of that too,” she said gently. “Oh, you did…” Alain tensed again. We the impotent, we the moles under the ground, we the less than nothings! “You’re special, Erna,” he said, spitting shreds of tobacco. The green sunglasses turned to Erna Laub with amusement. Heavily powdered, her lips rouged, the nurse looked almost insolent, as if wearing a Prussian mask. Make mental note of this vignette. “Health service, Fraülein?” “Underground,” the woman replied. “What?” “You understood me perfectly, I hope.”

There was a growing circle of people around the jeep. Here, as elsewhere, the vanquished were behaving with curious familiarity. The kids, fairly well dressed, however did they manage? The women, worn to a shadow… The journalist chose Herr Schiff, an average elderly German, former officer and civil servant by the looks of him; he beckoned him to come over. Schiff, fulminating against the universe, didn’t budge. The journalist moved toward him. The children, interested, stepped out of the way. The journalist introduced himself in passable German. He mentioned his press agency, whose name meant less to Herr Schiff than the canals on Mars. The old man introduced himself in turn: “Professor Herman-Helmut Schiff.” “If you’ll allow me,” the reporter said, scrawling a few shorthand signs into his notebook.

“Now then, what do you think about the Americans?”

A didactic question could never catch the professor off guard, for he was constantly putting them to himself, and supplying interminable answers in the form of monologues upon eugenics, the world conceived as a representation, the genius of race, or the political errors of Julius Caesar and Wilhelm II.

“A very great people, the Americans… The United States is presently the foremost industrial power in the world, and superior at waging war… On the other hand, there is a certain lack of social cohesion and spiritual tradition…”

“You think so?”

“Beyond a doubt,” Schiff declaimed, getting into his lecturer’s stride. “You will realize that in fifty years.”

“Phew, we got time to turn around then.”

A swift pencil and shorthand pad recorded the schoolmaster’s extravagant ramblings for the benefit of countless newspaper readers.

“Do you people feel guilty?”

If there was one emotion which had never been experienced by Herr Schiff (at least not since his adolescent religious crises) in his half century of diligent service, that emotion was guilt. It is healthy to live one’s life in the meticulous fulfillment of duty. The school-teacher cocked his head obligingly. “Pardon me. I didn’t quite catch…?”

“Guilty for the war?”

Schiff’s gaze swept the horizon of the broken city, strewn with the dead doves of humiliation. The grander generalizations existed for him on a different plane from everyday reality. The Second World War was already down as a great historical tragedy — a quasi-mythological one — which neither Mommsen, Hans Delbrück, Gobineau, Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Oswald Spengler, or Mein Kampf could elucidate entirely… The sons immolated themselves upon the altar of blind gods. A new, unholy war, unworthy of human nobility, had begun with the destruction of Altstadt; and this war alone existed in reality.

“Guilty?” Herr Schiff said in flinty tones, with the air of a livid turkey-cock. “Guilty of that?” (And he bobbed his head at the surrounding devastation.)

“No,” the reporter said patiently, not quite grasping the response, “guilty for the war.”

“And you,” Herr Schiff retorted, “do you feel guilty for this?”

Franz could not contain his delight. He slapped his thigh uproariously. “Wunderbar! Wonderful old idiot!” Alain’s hairy face expressed furious disgust.

“My dear Professor,” the journalist began, striving for an offensive politeness, “you started this war… You bombed Coventry.”

“I?” said Schiff, in frank astonishment. “I?”

Several women were following the exchange from the sidelines, noting the green glasses and heavy mustache of the American and Herr Schiff’s upstanding attitude. They were too discreet to come close enough to hear properly, but it seemed certain that important matters for the neighborhood were being discussed. Franz butted in unceremoniously: “Well, I fought in the war, as perhaps you can tell by looking at me. I give you my faithful, one hundred percent amputee’s word of honor that I didn’t start it.”

“Herr Professor,” whispered a daring old lady in a black lace cap, “do ask them whether the soup kitchens will be allowed to continue? Or do the American gentlemen intend to feed the city?” She spoke the last three words more loudly, to make sure that the authority would hear them. The reporter’s eyes popped with outrage behind his shades. No shame, no guilt, not a shred! These folks seem to think we come over, leaving a hundred thousand of our boys underground along the way, just to sort out their next meal! He turned on the old lady.

“Madam, have you ever heard of a place called Dachau?”

Intimidated by his tone, but happy to help out, she quavered enthusiastically: “Oh yes, it’s a pretty little town in Bavaria, where they held interesting popular festivals in the old days…”

“That’s all?”

“Yes, sir…” (The old lady blanched at the covert fury of the question.)

“What about the concentration camp?”

“Ooh, that may be, I can’t tell you about that, I’m afraid… I so seldom read the newspapers.”

Franz was grinning maniacally. Alain’s face too was that of a madman, a dangerous one. The old lady felt inexplicable tears wetting the corners of her eyes. She murmured, very humbly, “I beg the gentleman to excuse me if I offended him,” for these were clearly military persons of influence. Schiff was aware that his height, his age, and tonight’s thirty barbiturate pills gave him the edge over the other man, whose exasperation was patent. “I bid you good day, mister journalist!” he stated with pointed courtesy, and turned his back.

“They don’t look like bad men,” a woman was saying. Schiff paused, looking sternly down his nose at this housewife. “The Americans are not bad men,” he informed her sententiously. “No more than are the Chinese, dear Madame. But we have been defeated, Madame, and you must never forget it.” “Certainly not, Herr Professor.”

The burly officer with the round beard, like a sailor in an old-fashioned illustration, hailed the reporter. “We’re leaving, old man! Happy with your little interview?” “They are staggeringly unconscious of everything,” the journalist said, climbing back into the jeep. “Well, if you’re looking for consciousness from bombed-out towns…”

Ilse carried her full bucket inside. Franz inhaled the fragrance of a cigarette from across the seas, incontestably superior to the Party cadres’ special-issue reserve rolled with the last of the Bulgarian tobacco. “They take good care of themselves, these victors. Victors always do,” he said to himself, feeling queerly elated and at the same time inert. An exquisite satisfaction weighted his whole body down with languor, as though he had just made love well, his arms and legs intact, with a vigorous, clean-smelling woman. It was only an hour ago that Herr Blasch, vicious dog of the Special Surveillance Unit, was getting ready to mount his bicycle, knapsack on back, swaddled in musette bags, pockets bursting with banknotes and forged documents, when suddenly he saw the barrel of a revolver appear between his eyes at the same time as he heard the cripple say, “Have a nice trip, Herr Blasch!” amplified by the trumpet blast of the Last Judgment… The ants were presently taking care of this turd of officialdom. “I sure fixed him!” thought Franz sarcastically. “My war’s over. The sun’s out.”

Stupendous lawn! The thick grass was pampered as men nowhere are! Mowed to the perfect length, watered every day, and doubtless nourished with vitamin-rich chemical fertilizers… The lawn sloped down to the river, on the far side of which more gardens rose toward their villas. I’ll be damned! Some people were living the good life right up until yesterday. People for whom “the Great Reich in danger” was more than a hollow phrase!

In every war there is a rear that holds better than the front, a rear fat with noble sentiments, creature comforts, and lucrative deals; this rear, which balances the front, makes the insanity total… The beaches of California still exhibit, in season, a full complement of pretty women with smiling thighs: such is the natural order of things. After all, there’s philosophical solace to be found in the fact that some still live while others die, an obvious improvement on everyone dying… But it is no longer possible to embark upon a coherent line of reasoning without falling into absurdity. Thinking this way, Alain felt indulgence, tinged with temptation, toward those pretty Californians. What had they to do with these people, this upper crust of profiteering slavers? He floundered in contradictions. The villa next door belonged to a Standartenführer (to be killed, no discussion!) whose two daughters were said to be charming… Innocent, you think? Innocent? He dimly hoped they would fall into the hands of the most brutal convicts… Have I become a brute myself?

Alain, after waking between fresh sheets, had just shaved. He was “swimming” inside his new clothes, but the fabric was luxurious and the trouser pleats ironed… This manicured landscape, twenty miles outside the corpselike city, carpets over the parquet flooring, all the faultless appointments of a civilized gentleman’s home… A bastard, in any case, the civilized gentleman: the worthy pastor, a Lutheran and a Nazi for good measure, a fat Christian, blesser of executioners, is probably trudging along the highways of defeat right now, among the uniforms at last marked out for a just destruction… Alain stood before a crucifix, his face blurred by sadness. “He made a proper fool out of you, Nazarene, didn’t he, this pastor of your flock of bastards?”

The night before, Alain and his companions, having entered the picture-perfect little town like a gang of scary tramps, were shocked at the sight of prosperous homes with well-tended parterres of flowers and windows nestling in ivy. It was such a strange spectacle that they had to force themselves to enter a garden and knock on a door. As soon as their fists touched this door, they wanted to smash it in. A white-haired woman opened it. “Was wünschen Sie, meine Herren? What do the gentlemen wish? The reverend is out…” Now they were “gentlemen,” now they could have “wishes”! The old housekeeper recognized a Dutch laborer among the group, who began shouting hysterically at her: “Out, you bet he’s out, and he won’t be coming back neither, the old swine!” A torrent of abuse followed. Fortunately, having heard nothing but seemly language during her forty years in service, Frau Hermenegilda failed to comprehend the epithets directed at her. She was deafened by bursts of shrill, stallion laughter. Hairy paws were almost on her, like in one of those horror films. Images of rape and murder flashed through her crafty child’s brain. Must push the door, slam it shut! Mein Gott! Several beggars shoved past her. The Frenchman said in a voice you didn’t argue with: “Get out, Madame. Take your clothes, your guts, and go. I give you ten minutes to vanish, you old tittle-tattle. This house is requisitioned, understand?” Requisitioned is a word everyone understands immediately, and here the hairy young man’s rough German was as plain as day. But “old tittle-tattle”? What did that mean? Was it very rude? Frau Hermenegilda, backed against the wall, clutching the silver crucifix on her bosom, drew courage from the fact that requisitions are legal procedures — the reverend himself drove a requisitioned automobile… “Might I see a warrant, sir?” This reasonable query opened the floodgates. A gorilla in rags lurched into the drawing room and, grabbing a valuable bronze, hurled it against the family portrait. The noise of splintering glass was followed by that of imprecations and a scuffle, as the others fought to overpower the vandal. A demonic mouth was snarling into the old retainer’s ear, “Raus! Get out! Clear off, you sawdust fart, you old boiled tarantula! If you weren’t so puckered up I’d… Beat it or I’ll kick your ass inside out! Raus!” What godless bandits were these? Frau Hermenegilda shrieked for help, but she lost her voice and all that came out was a plaintive meow. A flat blow, as one beats a carpet, silenced her; when she came to her senses her cheek was swelling, the doors of neighboring villas were being kicked in and the Frenchman was leading her to the kitchen, saying, “Put a wet towel on your face, there’s nothing to fear, Madame, just get your things and scram, that’s all we ask.” He cuffed the Dutchman in passing. “Leave the prune alone, Petersen, we’re not that desperate…”

Frau Hermenegilda showed proof of character. “So the war is over. And not an American policemen in sight! My God!” She donned her mistress’s best remaining coat and took nothing with her except a jewelry box overlooked by the reverend, and him such a careful man as a rule. He won’t see his baubles again, thought Frau Hermenegilda severely, serve him right for leaving me in the lurch. She ran away across the lawn, a little black crocheted hat squashed over her white hair. When she reached the hedge along the river, she spotted, through the branches, a switch of ginger hair that could only belong to Paulina, Doctor-at-Law Freidrich Ochsen’s junior housemaid. “Paulina!” Frau Hermenegilda cried. “Come here quick, girl, the most disgraceful things are going on!” Where had the little redhead got to? The old servant was sure they’d be safer, the two of them, hidden under the hedge. And then, suddenly, for an unforgettable instant, all she could see was the open mouth and staring eyes of Paulina, her hair spread out on the grass. A man was arched over her, Paulina was gasping. Frau Hermenegilda ran away down the river path. “Jesus and Mary, Jesus and Mary!”

Unimaginable house! The victorious prisoners saw themselves in a picture-book setting — ready to burn the fucking thing down! The semicircular drawing room, the organ, the framed photographs, the books in their glass cases, the pure-white kitchen that made one want to spit all over it, the bedrooms… Petersen crawled into the marital bed, boots and all, chortling with satisfaction. But when he spied a photo of the newlyweds on the wall — the handsome officer, the bride in white — he jumped out of bed for the pleasure of grinding it under both heels.

Alain chose for himself a girl’s bedroom on the second floor, whence an unexpected view of the wide green lawn brought him down to earth like a billy club to the kidneys. A short redhead, her fists screwed into her eyes, burst from the bushes and began stumbling across the grass. A black figure came after her, joined her, pulled her back toward the hedge. The little redhead didn’t struggle… “Fine time for a marital squabble!” thought Alain. Then, as he understood, he shrugged his shoulders. He sat down on the bed, elbows on knees, head in hands, concentrating on the blue cornflowers of the pitcher on the washstand. Drunken giants’ footfalls reverberated on the stairs. A door was broken down in the attic. His buddies made as if to enter more than once, but each time Alain turned toward the door, looking like a crazed invalid, and in a mechanical voice said, “Leave me alone, huh!” He only knew one thing, something he could not articulate even to himself. It’s all over. Finished. What is finished? Dry-eyed, he wept. He wept in spasms, his whole body trembling.

That was yesterday. Today he was washed clean, replete with half a chicken brought in by scavengers, and draped in an excellent suit that was baggy at the armholes but too short in the sleeve and leg (the pastor must have been slightly obese): Alain was becoming himself again, like the others. The atmosphere of this wealthy suburb spared by the bombers gave him a bitter feeling of well-being. The Croat’s blood spread into a puddle on the cement. Brigitte’s throat bore the shadow of petals pressed there by a strangler’s fingers. The ruins stank, the ruins snickered. And all the time this lawn was basking, gilding itself in the sun, and the reverend and his missus were being served lunch in the dining room. A little worried to be sure, but not for reasons of remorse… The world was in its death throes, we were dying like flies, these people were dining in their customary way, official, overweight, at ease, accomplices in everything… No one will ever understand it!

Alain was beginning to own things again: the Botticelli book lay open among the covers of his bed. Would you understand it, pure eyes, unveiled by Sandro? The very silence of those eyes seemed to say: Peace, be at rest, we see the other side of the world, think about what we see! And little by little, silence actually overcame the tumult. Alain roamed from room to room. He let his fingers idle over the organ keys, releasing an invisible treasure of colors and tears. Church music, the tango, Rachmaninoff, Debussy, they still exist somewhere! The idea was oddly funny and painful enough to make your head spin. Alain contemplated the flowers, he stopped to admire those of the carpet, he bent to touch them. He took men’s shirts with starched fronts out of the drawers, he felt like slashing them, but they would find buyers on the black market, got to be practical. Someone had already made off with the silver from the sideboard, but the glassware remained, useless transparence, limpid transparence; when Alain raised them carefully to the light, tiny leaves etched into the crystal sprang alive with rainbows… There were Bibles, theological tracts, books of canon law — canon law, tell me if that isn’t splendid! Burn them, burn the lot! But he couldn’t summon the energy to do it.

In the study he took the pastor’s chair, tinkered with a pencil, opened a leather folder and found blank sheets of headed consistory paper. His hand, unprompted, began to draw. The elongated body of a woman, hanging, with a thick rope around her neck and a smile of ecstasy upon her face. A rough-hatched sketch of the Arc de Triomphe at the top of the Champs-Élysées. Ruins and helmets. A skull, frontal view, superimposed. In one of the sockets a clear pale eye, a Botticelli eye, a gaze of sad innocence, a gaze of forgiveness…

He stood up, eyes moist, teeth chattering, shouting, “There is no forgiveness! There will never be forgiveness! Not for them, not for us, not for anyone!”

Alain tore the sketch into tiny pieces, flung the pencil out of the window, and ran to put his head under the faucet.

It was on the path along the river’s edge, reminiscent of a path along the banks of the Seine, that he recovered his peace of mind. An extraordinary woman was strolling toward him under the yews and willows. She arrived on an old-fashioned tram. Erna, not pretty, better than pretty. “I was looking for you. How are you feeling, Alain?”

“Magnificent. How about you?” He kissed her. “You know, I’ve just made my first drawing. It’s years since I held a pencil. A madman’s drawing, naturally… I was shouting with fury over it. But it wasn’t bad…” He was exultant. “How lovely it is around here… The war’s over.”

“Nearly,” Erna said. “And the consequences are about to begin.”

“What consequences? What do you mean?”

Thus began a long, digressive exchange between them which resembled the sparring of masked antagonists who were deeply fond, deeply mistrustful of each other and delighted by every sudden chance to face each other, for a moment, with their guard down. “Erna, you’re worth several men,” said Alain. “I see through you, more than you think. You are strong and full of faith.” (“Less than you imagine,” thought Erna.)

Alain, lying against a tree stump, looked up to where she sat, sharp-kneed, too preoccupied to reassure him.

“Don’t think too much, Erna, it drives you off the track. It becomes unlivable. The good thing about war is that it leaves no time for thinking. All you care about is not getting killed, finding something to eat, killing someone else, destroying something, and holding out another day. It puts your consciousness at ease, by suppressing it. The misfortune of prisoners is that they have time… I’ve just spent two extraordinary days, Erna, windows flying open inside my skull, my skull was like the ruins, with empty casements gaping on all sides, the sky pouring in, and the winds, the memories, the future, all this in the form of ideas without form. I couldn’t sleep, nor could I make any order out of the mess in my mind. I let it go, I thought: Either I hang myself tomorrow, singing ‘Why do you tarry under the moon, Marlene, Marlene?’ or else the mess will settle, I’ll see things more clearly, decisions will have been made… It’s now been proved, Erna; I’m not destined to hang myself. I’ve decided.”

The nurse found him childish.

“And what have you decided?”

“I’m changing my life, changing my soul. I’ve realized that everything in this world is geared to destroying mankind, to destroying me, among others. Everything: even the faith I once had. The Party, the triumphant revolution, I used to believe in all that. Deep down I still believe in it, but only as one believes in a dream after waking… I am on my own. I have the right to want to live, even through the decline of Europe. The right to defend myself and to run away. From now on I only want to serve life — my own to start with, the only one I’ve got.”

“But your life will no longer be of any use,” Erna objected.

“Say rather that it will no longer be of any use even to me? That I won’t be able to forget and that I’ll be a mere ectoplasm in the ruins or join the rodent band of schemers and survivors? I was afraid of that. But no. I am alive. I am the proof that some such remain! I take things in my hands and I work and I make something exist that didn’t before. I’m nothing, you might say? I take destruction, suicide, folly, grief, and joy and I create something new and meaningful out of them, I restore meaning to the corpses of men, cities, and ideas, to the thistles growing over them, to the stars that rise in the sky despite everything, to the lovers who walk over the earth or lie decomposing beneath it… From all this I knead an unknown substance which is my gift to all eyes, or to some eyes…”

“Art?”

“Yes, art, though I think I despise that word. I know too much about its impotence. I’ve witnessed the exhibitionism of those greater or lesser swindlers who are more con than artist, I know all about the scams of dealers and merchants, the publicity circus and the snobs in New York or elsewhere who gush — whether it’s a piece of shit, a bloody marvel, or a dark conundrum — ‘Too too fantastic, darling!’ Art be damned, if that’s all it is! But who is to bring the first hint of order to chaos, of light to the caverns, of hope to the graveyards, of balm to the wounds, who is to place a love incarnate among broken beings, an irrefutable reason beneath the cataracts of absurdity? Who else but the artist? Tell me who!”

Erna answered feebly: “The revolutionary.”

“Oh, really? Show me one, give me one name — a living one, mind you, because we could make up a dazzling catalogue of dead ones. I’ve been through the east, between escapes and arrests, I went over the lines with some German refugees. I was robbed, beaten up, and what have you by the comrades, I don’t hold that against them. I know what they’ve suffered and are still suffering, and I know what man is now. I sought among them men of faith, men of ideas, men of justice. At first my fresh illusions were protected by an elephant’s skin of ideology. Then I found the men I was looking for. They were all convicts. Every machine rolled over them. Little lieutenants who were big brutes would blow their brains out as an example, to scare the rest. I remember one of these killers shouting: ‘I need to speed up the pace here, work faster!’ I watched the road crews hacking away, nothing but women, children, old men, and I don’t know what else, not to speak of enemy prisoners. I saw them bogged down, squelching half starved through the Lithuanian mud, first-class mud it was too. It was easy for them to escape by burrowing into the mud, at the risk of getting buried and of getting your companions shot for it… I was working there too. One day on a slippery, disintegrating embankment I met an ex-sailor who spoke French, knew Marseille, who had just returned from the penal colony at Kamchatka and was nostalgic for the fisheries there. ‘So how many of you are behind the great Fatherland’s barbed-wire fences?’ I asked him. ‘Millions,’ he answered, without appearing to say anything sensational. This made me furious. ‘You’re lying! Someone should have perforated your counter-revolutionary brain long ago!’ ‘You have a point there,’ he said seriously. ‘I don’t know why I’m still trying to hang on… They promise us pardons and bonuses… But listen to me, brother, before you condemn me out of ignorance.’ We spent an hour together in the rain working out the rough statistics, by social class and by region across Eurasia… He’d been expelled from the Party, a militant from 1920 who had heard Lenin speak in the factories… A patriot and a socialist in spite of it all! Tell me it isn’t true!”

“It’s true,” said Erna. “I know it better than you.”

Alain seemed sadly satisfied.

“Once I knew a man who was authentic. A man who served. Who probably carried out his fair share of dirty work as well. A man of knowledge and will. He was strong. I believed in him. And I believed he betrayed us. I would happily have killed him. Now I understand. The traitor was myself, who understood nothing. There’s a truth about man and a truth for man, don’t you see?”

“Quite so,” said Erna dryly. “Who was he?”

He told the story as though he were sketching successive images on a pad. Erna saw a familiar face come together in the silky river dappled with leaf fronds and patches of sky. It was exactly the feeling she had experienced, in another universe, when writing the rigorous, nebulous text of a private diary whose every line was surrounded with blank spaces, silences, shadows, secret lights. She tasted sand on her lips. There is no escape from oneself or from numbers. Numbers are what give rise to chance, and this can be a prodigiously significant flash of light: the thing that counts.

By breaking the rule of secrecy, Erna unconsciously made a decision without which she could never have pronounced the syllable formed by a single initial.

“D,” she said. “I knew him too.”

Alain felt no surprise. The nature of his astonishments had changed. An exploding bomb would have startled him, but only out of instinct… But that there should be virginal grass, a simple possible future, this troubled and confused him.

“Well,” he said simply, “then you know what kind of man he was.

“Peace must be declared to the world, and at long last all the victims must be told that it’s over, over for good. That we will reconstruct with justice, after a ruthless cleansing, without forgetting that it’s the most wretched who have the greatest need of justice… Proclaim freedom, even in the midst of abysmal poverty. They hardly go together, true freedom and miserable poverty amid the rubble and tombstones; you don’t need much Marxism to see that. But the match is necessary if moral poverty is not to be added to the other kind. How can the survivor be consoled, how can he regain hope and courage if he’s not allowed to have his say — and if he stammers, that’s his right! — and to shoot his mouth off if he feels the urge? It’s a relief to mouth off when you’re backed into a corner. How can we reconstruct without first constructing a new chaos, but a chaos this time of ideas, utopias, vengeance, and generosity, an unheard-of freedom — which would be quite simple in reality?”

“Yes, but how?” wondered Erna.

Alain continued slowly, as though groping for something in the dark.

“But where are the men? Where are the grand ideas? Perhaps ideas are nothing but ephemeral stars. They point the way while they last, and then they go out, and other stars should flare up… But they haven’t yet. And everything has been done to stamp out the light of minds. The old revolution is dead, I say. We need another, completely different revolution, and I don’t see it anywhere. Are you angry with me?”

Erna felt more nauseous than she ever had in the field hospital’s operating room.

“No,” she said, “go on.”

It was a superhuman effort not to implore him to stop. “You must hear this voice, Erna. You must.

“It’s a great thing to have won, but victory is hollow if it isn’t the beginning of something else… Wild beasts have always known how to vanquish. What will victory bring us? A tiny drop of equity, a tiny extra drop of humanity in an ocean clogged with dead bodies? Or the most highly mechanized secret and visible police forces?

“What about you, Erna, what will you do?” Erna was taking stock of her problem. Return to the great land of mute suffering? Already, while writing her latest report, she had felt uncertain about what political orientation to adapt to. Once the official line was established, this ignorance might become suspect in itself. She wished she could say, “Just let me go back to Ak-Aul, let me be a desert recluse again, writing my notebooks and burning them afterward.” Unthinkable words. Her one glimmer of a chance lay in feigning mindless zeal. Get an interview with the chief of the service, seduce him not so much by her devotion as by her willingness, quickly accept an assignment in Paris, Rome, or Trieste and resume her clandestine activities. During wartime, it was facts about the enemy that were wanted, the stark truth about resources, risks, losses, hopes. And there was no ambiguity as to the enemy’s identity or the necessity of destroying him, no doubt about the action to be undertaken which — transcending crime — became the saving exploit. Now, already, the smokescreens of doubt and deceit were spreading irresistibly. H, the liaison officer, had told her: “Your memorandum must stress what people think about us: the populations, the women, the Jews, the Americans, the prisoners, don’t leave anyone out… That’s essential…” Essential, ha! But how to say it? How to report the rumors of terror seeping from the liberated countries, the comments upon the rumors, the despair of so many comrades? It would be criminal not to record the truth. To record it would be worse… H also said, “For us, esteemed Comrade, the war continues… Indeed who knows if… Can two such different worlds coexist? We are the stronger by virtue of planning, realism, and discipline, and we have hidden allies all over the world… Our opponents enjoy technological superiority, for the time being, and wealth. But technology can be learned and wealth can be conquered. There are no clear boundaries between war and peace nowadays… Wars may be waged almost invisibly. Be very careful.” Wisely feigning to agree, Erna had stocked up on dollars and was close to obtaining an excellent passport… Years passed, wars passed, crushing millions of innocents, cities crumbled, a civilization was dying, and the same problems were rearing their heads… The river shimmered.

“It’s four o’clock,” said Erna. “I must be off. Will you go back to Paris?”

“Straight through the Porte de Bagnolet, the fastest way… But you, come on, you’re not going to remain in these graveyards, are you? Save yourself. We’ve every right to put life first, when what reigns is death.”

These words revolted her. (We have no life beyond working for a great common destiny. And what work is that, Alain might retort — is it humane and decent, is it liberating? By saving ourselves, we attempt to save what little we can save…)

“So this is where we’ve come to,” she said.

“Where? You look like you’re talking to yourself. Your face is all twisted. What’s the matter?”

“Nothing in particular. Goodbye.”

She thought: Farewell.