5. THE PART ABOUT ARCHIMBOLDI

His mother was blind in one eye. She had blond hair and was blind in one eye. Her good eye was sky blue and placid, which made her seem slow but sweet natured, truly good. His father was lame. He had lost his leg in the war and spent a month in a military hospital near Düren, thinking he was done for and watching as the patients who could move (he couldn't!) stole cigarettes from the others. When they tried to steal his cigarettes, though, he grabbed the thief by the neck, a freckled boy with broad cheekbones and broad hips, and said: halt! a soldier's tobacco is sacred! Then the freckled boy went away and night fell and he had the sense that someone was watching him.

In the next bed there was a mummy. He had black eyes like two deep wells.

"Do you want a smoke?" the man with one leg asked.

The mummy didn't answer.

"It's good to have a smoke," said the man with one leg, and he lit a cigarette and tried to find the mummy's mouth among the bandages.

The mummy shuddered. Maybe he doesn't smoke, thought the man, and he took the cigarette away. The moon illuminated the end of the cigarette, which was stained with a kind of white mold. Then he put it back between the mummy's lips, saying: smoke, smoke, forget all about it. The mummy's eyes remained fixed on him, maybe, he thought, it's a comrade from the battalion and he's recognized me. But why doesn't he say anything? Maybe he can't talk, he thought. Suddenly, smoke began to filter out between the bandages. He's boiling, he thought, boiling, boiling.

Smoke came out of the mummy's ears, his throat, his forehead, his eyes, which remained fixed on the man with one leg, until the man plucked the cigarette from the mummy's lips and blew, and kept blowing for a while on the mummy's bandaged head until the smoke had disappeared. Then he stubbed the cigarette out on the floor and fell asleep.

When he woke, the mummy was no longer there. Where's the mummy? he asked. He died this morning, said someone from a different bed. Then he lit a cigarette and settled down to wait for breakfast. When he was released he went stumping toward the city of Düren. There he boarded a train that brought him to another city.

In this city he waited twenty-four hours in the station, eating army soup. The man distributing the soup was a one-legged sergeant like himself. They talked for a while, as the sergeant ladled soup into the soldiers' tin plates and he ate, sitting on a nearby wooden bench like a carpenter's. According to the sergeant, everything was about to change. The war was coming to an end and a new era was about to begin. He answered, as he ate, that nothing would ever change. Not even the two of them had changed, and each had lost a leg.

Whenever he spoke, the sergeant laughed. If the sergeant said white, he said black. If the sergeant said day, he said night. And the sergeant laughed at his answers and asked whether the soup needed salt, whether it was very bland. Then the man got tired of waiting for a train that seemed as if it would never come, and he set off again on foot.

He roamed the countryside for three weeks, eating stale bread and stealing fruit and chickens from farmyards. During his wanderings, Germany surrendered. When he was told, he said: good. One afternoon he came to his town and knocked at the door of his house. His mother came to the door and upon seeing him in such a state she didn't recognize him. Then everyone hugged him and fed him. He asked if the girl who was blind in one eye had married. They said no. That night he went to see her, without changing clothes or washing, despite his mother's pleas that he at least shave. When the girl saw him standing at the door to her house, she recognized him instantly. The one-legged man saw her too, looking out the window, and he raised a hand in a formal salute, even a stiff salute, though it could also have been interpreted as a way of saying such is life. From that moment on he told whoever would listen that in his town everyone was blind and the one-eyed girl was a queen.

In 1920 Hans Reiter was born. He seemed less like a child than like a strand of seaweed. Canetti, and Borges, too, I think-two very different men-said that just as the sea was the symbol or mirror of the English, the forest was the metaphor the Germans inhabited. Hans Reiter defied this rule from the moment he was born. He didn't like the earth, much less forests. He didn't like the sea either, or what ordinary mortals call the sea, which is really only the surface of the sea, waves kicked up by the wind that have gradually become the metaphor for defeat and madness. What he liked was the seabed, that other earth, with its plains that weren't plains and valleys that weren't valleys and cliffs that weren't cliffs.

When his one-eyed mother bathed him in a washtub, the child Hans Reiter always slipped from her soapy hands and sank to the bottom, with his eyes open, and if her hands hadn't lifted him back up to the surface he would have stayed there, contemplating the black wood and the black water where little particles of his own filth floated, tiny bits of skin that traveled like submarines toward an inlet the size of an eye, a calm, dark cove, although there was no calm, and all that existed was movement, which is the mask of many things, calm among them.

Once, his one-legged father, who sometimes watched as his one-eyed mother bathed him, told her not to lift him out, to see what he would do. From the bottom of the washtub Hans Reiter's blue eyes gazed up at his mother's blue eye, and then he turned on his side and remained very still, watching the fragments of his body drift away in all directions, like space probes launched at random across the universe. When he ran out of breath he stopped watching the tiny particles as they were lost in the distance and set out after them. He turned red and understood that he was passing through a region very like hell. But he didn't open his mouth or make the slightest attempt to come up, although his head was only four inches below the surface and the seas of oxygen. Finally his mother's arms lifted him out and he began to cry. His father, wrapped in an old military cloak, looked down at the floor and spat into the center of the hearth.

At three Hans Reiter was taller than all the other three-year-olds in his town. He was also taller than any four-year-old, and not all the five-year-olds were taller than he was. At first he was unsteady on his feet and the town doctor said it was because of his height and advised that he be given more milk to strengthen his bones. But the doctor was wrong. Hans Reiter was unsteady on his feet because he moved across the surface of the earth like a novice diver along the seafloor. He actually lived and ate and slept and played at the bottom of the sea. Milk wasn't a problem. His mother kept three cows and hens and the boy was given plenty to eat.

His one-legged father sometimes watched him walking in the fields and wondered whether anyone in his family had ever been so tall. The brother of a great-great-grandfather or great-grandfather, it was said, had served under Frederick the Great in a regiment composed only of men over five foot ten or six feet. This select regiment or battalion had suffered many losses, because the soldiers were such easy targets.

At some point, thought the one-legged man as he watched his son move clumsily along the edges of the neighboring gardens, the Prussian regiment found itself face-to-face with a similar Russian regiment, peasants five foot ten or six feet tall, clad in the green jackets of the Russian Imperial Guard, and they clashed and the carnage was terrible. Even when both armies had retreated, the two regiments of giants remained locked in hand-to-hand combat that ceased only when the top generals sent unconditional orders to retreat to new positions.

Before Hans Reiter's father went off to war, he was five foot five. When he came back, perhaps because he was missing a leg, he was only five foot four. A regiment of giants is madness, he thought. Hans's one-eyed mother was five foot two and she believed that men could never be too tall.

At six Hans Reiter was taller than all the other six-year-olds, taller than all the seven-year-olds, taller than all the eight-year-olds, taller than all the nine-year-olds, and taller than half the ten-year-olds. At age six, too, he stole his first book. The book was called Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. He hid it under his bed although no one at school ever noticed it was missing. Around the same time he began to dive. This was in 1926. He had been swimming since he was four and he would put his head underwater and open his eyes and then his mother scolded him because his eyes were red all day and she was afraid that when people saw him they would think he was always crying. But until he was six, he didn't learn to dive. He would duck underwater, swim down a few feet, and open his eyes and look around. That much he did. But he didn't dive. At six he decided that a few feet wasn't enough and he plunged toward the bottom of the sea.

The book Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region was stamped on his brain, and while he dove he would slowly page through it. This was how he discovered Laminaria digitata, a giant seaweed with a sturdy stem and broad leaves, as the book said, shaped like a fan with numerous sections of strands that really did look like fingers. Laminaria digitata is native to cold waters like the Baltic, the North Sea, and the Atlantic. It's found in large masses, at low tide, and off rocky shores. The tide often uncovers forests of this seaweed. When Hans Reiter saw a seaweed forest for the first time he was so moved that he began to cry underwater. It may be hard to believe that a human being could cry while diving with his eyes open, but let us not forget that Hans was only six at the time and in a sense he was a singular child.

Laminaria digitata is light brown and resembles Laminaria hyperborea, which has a rougher stalk, and Saccorhiza polyschides, which has a stem with bulbous protuberances. The latter two, however, live in deep waters, and although sometimes, on summer afternoons, Hans Reiter would swim far from the beach or the rocks where he had left his clothes and then dive down, he could never spot them, only fantasize that he'd seen them there in the depths, a still and silent forest.

Around this time he began to draw all kinds of seaweed in a notebook. He drew Chorda filum, made up of thin strands that could nevertheless grow to be twenty-five feet long. It had no branches and looked delicate but was really very strong. It grew below the low-tide mark. He also drew Leathesia difformis, rounded bulbs of olive brown that grew on rocks and other seaweed. A strange-looking plant. He never saw it, but he often dreamed about it. He drew Ascophyllum nodosum, a dun-colored, irregularly patterned seaweed with oval blisters along its branches. There were male and female varieties of Ascophyllum nodosum, which produced fruitlike growths akin to raisins. In the male, they were yellow. In the female, they were a greenish color. He drew Laminaria saccharina, a single long frond in the shape of a belt. When it was dry, crystals of a sweet substance called mannitol were visible on its surface. It grew on rocky coasts, clinging to various solid objects, though it was often washed out to sea. He drew Padina pavonia, an uncommon seaweed, small and fan shaped. It was a warm-water species found from the southern coasts of Great Britain to the Mediterranean. There were no related species. He drew Sargassum vulgare, a seaweed that lived on the stony beaches of the Mediterranean and possessed small pedunculated reproductive organs among its fronds. It was found in shallow water as well as in the deepest seas. He drew Porphyra umbilicalis, a particularly lovely seaweed, nearly eight inches long and reddish purple in color. It grew in the Mediterranean, the Atlantic, the English Channel, and the North Sea. There were various species of Porphyra and all of them were edible. The Welsh, in particular, were fond of them.

"The Welsh are swine," said the one-legged man in reply to a question from his son. "Absolute swine. The English are swine, too, but not as bad as the Welsh. Though really they're the same, but they make an effort not to seem it, and since they know how to pretend, they succeed. The Scots are bigger swine than the English and only a little better than the Welsh. The French are as bad as the Scots. The Italians are little swine. Little swine ready and willing to gobble up their own swine mother. The same can be said of the Austrians: swine, swine, swine. Never trust a Hungarian. Never trust a Bohemian. They'll lick your hand while they devour your little finger. Never trust a Jew: he'll eat your thumb and leave your hand covered in slobber. The Bavarians are also swine. When you talk to a Bavarian, son, make sure you keep your belt fastened tight. Better not to talk to Rhinelanders at all: before the cock crows they'll try to saw off your leg. The Poles look like chickens, but pluck four feathers and you'll see they've got the skin of swine. Same with the Russians. They look like starving dogs but they're really starving swine, swine that'll eat anyone, without a second thought, without the slightest remorse. The Serbs are the same as the Russians, but miniature. They're like swine disguised as Chihuahuas. Chihuahuas are tiny dogs, the size of a sparrow, that live in the north of Mexico and are seen in some American movies. Americans are swine, of course. And Canadians are big ruthless swine, although the worst swine from Canada are the French-Canadians, just as the worst swine from America are the Irish-American swine. The Turks are no better. They're sodomite swine, like the Saxons and the Westphalians. All I can say about the Greeks is that they're the same as the Turks: bald, sodomitic swine. The only people who aren't swine are the Prussians. But Prussia no longer exists. Where is Prussia? Do you see it? I don't. Sometimes I imagine that while I was in the hospital, that filthy swine hospital, there was a mass migration of Prussians to some faraway place. Sometimes I go out to the rocks and gaze at the Baltic and try to guess where the Prussian ships sailed. Sweden? Norway? Finland? Not on your life: those are swine lands. Where, then? Iceland, Greenland? I try but I can't make it out. Where are the Prussians, then? I climb up on the rocks and search for them on the gray horizon. A churning gray like pus. And I don't mean once a year. Once a month! Every two weeks! But I never see them, I can never guess what point on the horizon they set sail to. All I see is you, your head in the waves as they wash back and forth, and then I have a seat on a rock and for a long time I don't move, watching you, as if I've become another rock, and even though sometimes I lose sight of you, or your head comes up far away from where you went under, I'm never afraid, because I know you'll come up again, there's no danger in the water for you. Sometimes I actually fall asleep, sitting on a rock, and when I wake up I'm so cold I don't so much as look up to make sure you're still there. What do I do then? Why, I get up and come back to town, teeth chattering. And as I turn down the first streets I start to sing so that the neighbors tell themselves I've been out drinking down at Krebs's."

Young Hans Reiter also liked to walk, like a diver, but he didn't like to sing, for divers never sing. Sometimes he would walk east out of town, along a dirt road through the forest, and he would come to the Village of Red Men, where all they did was sell peat. If he walked farther east, there was the Village of Blue Women, in the middle of a lake that dried up in the summer. Both places looked like ghost towns, inhabited by the dead. Beyond the Village of Blue Women was the Town of the Fat. It smelled bad there, like blood and rotting meat, a dense, heavy smell very different from the smell of his own town, which smelled of dirty clothes, sweat clinging to the skin, pissed-upon earth, which is a thin smell, a smell like Chorda filum.

In the Town of the Fat, as was to be expected, there were many animals and several butcher shops. Sometimes, on his way home, moving like a diver, he watched the Town of the Fat citizens wander the streets of the Village of Blue Women or the Village of Red Men and he thought that maybe the villagers, those who were ghosts now, had died at the hands of the inhabitants of the Town of the Fat, who were surely fearsome and relentless practitioners of the art of killing, no matter that they never bothered him, among other reasons because he was a diver, which is to say he didn't belong to their world, where he came only as an explorer or a visitor.

On other occasions his steps took him west, and he walked down the main street of Egg Village, which each year was farther and farther from the rocks, as if the houses could move on their own and chose to seek a safer place near the dells and forests. It wasn't far from Egg Village to Pig Village, a village he imagined his father never visited, where there were many pigstys and the happiest herds of pigs for miles around, pigs that seemed to greet the passerby regardless of his social standing or age or marital status, with friendly grunts, almost musical, or in fact entirely musical, while the villagers stood frozen with their hats in their hands or covering their faces, whether out of modesty or shame it wasn't clear.

And farther on was the Town of Chattering Girls, girls who went to parties and dances in even bigger towns whose names the young Hans Reiter heard and immediately forgot, girls who smoked in the streets and talked about sailors at a big port who served on this or that ship, the names of which the young Hans Reiter immediately forgot, girls who went to the movies and saw the most thrilling films, with actors who were the handsomest men on the planet and actresses who, if one wanted to be fashionable, one had to imitate, and whose names the young Hans Reiter immediately forgot. When he got home, like a night diver, his mother asked him where he'd spent the day and the young Hans Reiter told her the first thing that came to mind, anything but the truth.

Then his mother stared at him with her blue eye and the boy held her gaze with his two blue eyes, and from the corner near the hearth, the one-legged man watched them both with his two blue eyes and for three or four seconds the island of Prussia seemed to rise from the depths.

At eight Hans Reiter lost interest in school. By then he had twice come close to drowning. The first time was during the summer and he was saved by a young tourist from Berlin who was spending his holidays in the Town of Chattering Girls. The young tourist saw a boy near some rocks, his head bobbing up and down, and after confirming that it was in fact a boy, since the tourist was shortsighted and at first glance thought it was a clump of seaweed, he removed his jacket, in which he was carrying some important papers, climbed down the rocks as far as he could go, and plunged into the water. In four strokes he was beside the boy, and once he'd scanned the shore for the best place to make for land, he began to swim toward a spot some thirty yards from where he'd gone in.

The tourist's name was Vogel and he was a man of incredible optimism. Though perhaps he wasn't optimistic so much as mad, and he was on holiday in the Town of Chattering Girls on the orders of his doctor, who, concerned about his health, endeavored to get him out of Berlin on the slightest pretext. If one was on anything like intimate terms with Vogel, his presence soon became unbearable. He believed in the intrinsic goodness of humankind, he claimed that a person who was pure of heart could walk from Moscow to Madrid without being accosted by anyone, whether beast or police officer, to say nothing of a customs official, because the traveler would take the necessary precautions, among them leaving the road from time to time and striking off across country. He was easily smitten and awkward, with the result that he didn't have a girl. Sometimes he talked, not caring who might be listening, about the healing properties of masturbation (he cited Kant as an example), to be practiced from the earliest years to the most advanced age, which mostly tended to provoke laughter in the girls from the Town of Chattering Girls who happened to hear him, and which exceedingly bored and disgusted his acquaintances in Berlin, who were already overfamiliar with this theory and who thought that Vogel, in explaining it with such stubborn zeal, was really masturbating in front of them or using them as masturbation aids.

But bravery was another thing he held in high esteem, and when he saw that a boy, though at first he mistook him for seaweed, was drowning, he didn't hesitate a second before throwing himself into the sea, which wasn't exactly calm near the rocks just there, to rescue him. One further thing must be noted, which is that Vogel's blunder (mistaking a boy with brown skin and blond hair for a tangle of seaweed) tormented him that night, after it was all over. In bed, in the dark, Vogel relived the day's occurrences just as he always did, that is, with great satisfaction, until suddenly he saw the drowning boy again and himself watching, not sure whether it was a human being or seaweed. Sleep deserted him. How could he have mistaken a boy for seaweed? he asked himself. And then: in what sense can a boy resemble seaweed? And then: can a boy and seaweed have anything in common?

Before he formulated a fourth question, Vogel thought that possibly his doctor in Berlin was right and he was going mad, or perhaps not mad in the usual sense, but he was approaching the path of madness, so to speak, because a boy, he thought, has nothing in common with seaweed, and an observer from the rocks who mistakes a boy for seaweed is a person with a half-loosened screw, not a madman, exactly, with a screw altogether loose, but a man whose screw is loosening, and who, as a result, must tread more carefully in all matters regarding his mental health.

Then, since he knew he wouldn't be able to sleep all night, he began to think about the boy he had saved. He was very thin, he remembered, very tall for his age, and his speech was confoundedly garbled. When Vogel asked what had happened, the boy answered:

"Nut."

"What?" asked Vogel. "What did you say?"

"Nut," repeated the boy. And Vogel understood that nut meant: nothing, nothing happened.

And so it was with the rest of his vocabulary, which struck Vogel as highly picturesque and amusing, so he began to ask all kinds of pointless questions, just for the pleasure of listening to the boy, who answered everything in the most natural manner, for example, what do you call this wood, Vogel asked, and the boy answered Slavs, which meant Gustav's wood, and: what's the name of that wood over there, and the boy answered Retas, which meant Greta's wood, and: what's the name of that dark wood, to the right of Greta's wood, and the boy answered an-naname, which meant the wood that has no name, until they got to the top of the rocks where Vogel had left his jacket with the important papers in the pocket, and at the urging of Vogel, who wouldn't let him get back in the water, the boy retrieved his clothes from a cave a little farther down the shore, a kind of resting place for gulls, and then they said goodbye, not without first introducing themselves:

"My name is Heinz Vogel," Vogel said as if he were addressing an idiot, "what is your name?"

The boy told him it was Hans Reiter, pronouncing the name clearly, and then they shook hands and each went his separate way. All of this Vogel recalled as he tossed and turned in bed, reluctant to turn on the light and unable to sleep. What was it about the boy that made him look like seaweed? he asked himself. Was it his thinness, his sun-bleached hair, his long, placid face? And he wondered: should I return to Berlin, should I take my doctor more seriously, should I embark on a course of self-examination? Finally he grew tired of all the questions and jerked off, and fell asleep.

The second time young Hans Reiter almost drowned was in winter, when he went with some fishermen to cast nets across from the Village of Blue Women. It was getting dark and the fishermen began to talk about the lights that moved at the bottom of the sea. One said it was dead fishermen searching for the way to their villages, their cemeteries on dry land. Another said it was shining lichens, lichens that shone only once a month, as if in a single night they gave off all the light it had taken them thirty days to build up. Another said it was a kind of anemone particular to that coast, and the female anemones lit up to attract the male anemones, although everywhere else in the world anemones were hermaphrodites, neither male nor female, but male and female in a single body, as if the mind lapsed into sleep and when it woke, a part of the anemone had fucked the other part, as if inside each of us there were a woman and a man, or a faggot and a man in the cases where the anemone was sterile. Another said it was electric fish, a very strange kind of fish that required great vigilance, because if they landed in your nets they looked no different from any other kind of fish, but when people ate them they fell ill, with terrible electric shocks in the stomach, which at times could even be deadly.

And as the fishermen talked, young Hans Reiter's irrepressible curiosity, or madness, which at times made him do things he shouldn't, led him to drop off the boat with no warning, and he dove down after the lights or light of those singular fish or that singular fish, and at first the fishermen weren't alarmed, nor did they shout or cry out, because they were all aware of young Reiter's peculiarities, and yet, after a few seconds without a sighting of his head, they grew worried, because even though they were uneducated Prussians they were also men of the sea and they knew that no one can hold his breath for more than two minutes (or thereabouts), certainly not a boy, whose lungs-no matter how tall he is-aren't strong enough to survive the strain.

And finally two of them plunged into that dark sea, a sea like a pack of wolves, and they dove around the boat trying to find young Reiter's body, with no success, until they had to come up for air, and before they dove again, they asked the men on the boat whether the brat had surfaced. And then, under the weight of the negative response, they disappeared once more among the dark waves like forest beasts and one of the men who hadn't been in before joined them, and it was he who some fifteen feet down spotted the body of young Reiter floating like uprooted seaweed, upward, a brilliant white in the underwater space, and it was he who grabbed the boy under the arms and brought him up, and also he who made the young Reiter vomit all the water he had swallowed.

•

When Hans Reiter was ten, his one-eyed mother and one-legged father had their second child. It was a girl and they called her Lotte. She was a beautiful child and she might have been the first person on the surface of the earth who interested (or moved) Hans Reiter. Often his parents left her in his care. In no time at all he learned to change diapers, fix bottles, walk with the baby in his arms until she fell asleep. As far as Hans was concerned, his sister was the best thing that had ever happened to him, and many times he tried to draw her in the same notebook where he'd drawn different kinds of seaweed, but the results were always unsatisfactory: sometimes the baby looked like a bag of rubbish left on a pebbly beach, other times like Petrobius maritimus, a marine insect that lives in crevices and rocks and feeds on scraps, or Lipura maritima, another insect, very small and dark slate or gray, its habitat the puddles among rocks.

In time, by stretching his imagination or his tastes or his own artistic nature, he managed to draw her as a little mermaid, more fish than girl, closer to fat than thin, but always smiling, always with an enviable tendency to smile and see the positive side of things, which was a faithful reflection of his sister's character.

At thirteen Hans Reiter left school. This was 1933, the year Hitler came to power. At twelve Hans had begun to attend a school in the Town of Chattering Girls. But for various reasons, all of them perfectly sensible, he didn't like it there, and he dawdled on his way, finding the path neither flat nor flat with hills nor flat with switchbacks, but vertical, a prolonged fall toward the bottom of the sea where everything, trees, grass, swamps, animals, fences, was transformed into marine insects or crustaceans, into suspended and remote forms of life, into starfish and sea spiders, whose bodies, the young Reiter knew, were so tiny that the animal's stomach didn't fit inside and extended into its legs, which were themselves enormous and mysterious, or in other words contained an enigma (or at least for him they did), because the sea spider has eight legs, four on each side, plus another pair, much smaller, in fact infinitely smaller and useless, at the end nearest its head, and those legs or tiny appendages struck Reiter not as legs but as hands, as if the sea spider, over a long process of evolution, had finally developed two arms and therefore two hands but didn't know yet that it had them. How long would the sea spider be unaware that it had hands?

"Probly," the young Reiter said to himself out loud, "nuffer a thou-sings, nuffer two thousings, nuffer ten thousings year. Nuffer long, long time."

And that was how he walked to school in the Town of Chattering Girls, and of course he was always late, his mind elsewhere, too.

In 1933, the headmaster of the school summoned Hans Reiter's parents. Only Hans's mother came. The headmaster ushered her into his office and explained briefly that the boy wasn't fit for school. Then he spread his arms, as if to take the sting out of what he'd said, and suggested that she apprentice him in a trade.

This was the year Hitler seized power. The same year, before Hitler seized power, a propaganda committee passed through Hans Reiter's town. The committee stopped first in the Town of Chattering Girls, where it held a rally at the movie theater, a success, and the next day it moved on to Pig Village and Egg Village and in the afternoon it reached Hans Reiter's town, where the members of the committee drank beer at the tavern with the local farmers and fishermen, bringing glad tidings and explanations of National Socialism, a movement that would raise Germany up from its ashes and Prussia from its ashes, too, the talk open and friendly, until someone who couldn't keep his mouth shut mentioned Hans Reiter's one-legged father, the only townsman who had returned alive from the front, a hero, a seasoned veteran, every inch a Prussian, although perhaps a bit lazy, a countryman who told war stories that gave you goose bumps, stories he had lived himself, the townspeople put special emphasis on this, he had lived them, they were true, and not only were they true but the storyteller had lived them, and then one member of the committee, a man who put on lordly airs (this must be stressed, because his companions certainly didn't put on lordly airs, they were ordinary men, happy to drink beer and eat fish and sausages and fart and laugh and sing, and they didn't put on airs, which is only fair to say and bears repeating because in fact they were like villagers, salesmen who traveled from village to village and sprang from the common herd and lived as part of the common herd, and who, when they died, would fade from common memory), said that perhaps, just perhaps, it would be interesting to meet this soldier, and then he asked why Reiter wasn't there, at the tavern, conversing with his National Socialist comrades who had only Germany at heart, and one of the townspeople, a man who had a one-eyed horse that he looked after more carefully than Reiter looked after his one-eyed wife, said that the aforementioned wasn't at the tavern because he didn't have the money to buy even a mug of beer, which led the members of the committee to protest that they would buy the soldier a beer, and then the man who put on lordly airs singled out one of the townsmen and ordered him to go to Reiter's house and bring the old soldier to the tavern, and the townsman hurried off, but when he returned, fifteen minutes later, he informed those present that Reiter had refused to come, with the excuse that he wasn't dressed properly to be introduced to the distinguished members of the committee, and also that he was alone with his daughter, because his one-eyed wife was still at work, and naturally his daughter couldn't be left alone, an argument that nearly moved the members of the committee (who were swine) to tears, because in addition to being swine they were sentimentalists, and the fate of this veteran and war cripple touched their hearts, but not so the lordly man, who got up and, after saying, as evidence of his great learning, that if Mohammed couldn't come to the mountain, the mountain would come to Mohammed, motioned for the townsman to lead him to the soldier's house and forbade any of the other members of the committee to accompany them, and so this National Socialist Party member dirtied his boots in the mud of the town streets and followed the townsman nearly to the edge of the forest, where the Reiter family house stood, which the lordly man scanned with a knowing eye for an instant before he went in, as if to weigh the character of the paterfamilias by the harmony or strength of the house's lines, or as if he were tremendously interested in rustic architecture in that part of Prussia, and then they went into the house and there really was a girl of three asleep in a wooden cot and her one-legged father really was dressed in rags, because his military cloak and only pair of decent trousers were in the washtub that day or hanging wet in the yard, which didn't prevent the old soldier from offering his visitor a warm welcome, and surely at first he felt proud, privileged, that a member of the committee had come all the way to his house expressly to meet him, but then things took a wrong turn or seemed to take a wrong turn, because the questions asked by the lordly man began gradually to displease the one-legged man, and the lordly man's remarks, which were more like prophecies, also began to displease him, and then the one-legged man answered each question with a statement, generally outlandish or outrageous, and countered each of the other man's remarks with a question that somehow discredited the remark itself or cast it in doubt or made it seem puerile, completely lacking in common sense, which in turn began to exasperate the lordly man, and in a vain effort to find common ground he told the one-legged man that he had been a pilot during the war and shot down twelve French planes and eight English planes and he knew very well the suffering one experienced at the front, to which the one-legged man replied that his worst suffering hadn't come at the front but at the cursed military hospital near Düren, where his comrades stole not only cigarettes but whatever they could lay their hands on, they even stole men's souls to sell, since there were a disproportionate number of satanists in German military hospitals, which, after all, said the one-legged man, was understandable, because a long stay in a military hospital drove people to become satanists, a claim that exasperated the self-avowed aviator, who had also spent three weeks in a military hospital, in Düren? asked the one-legged man, no, in Belgium, said the lordly man, and the treatment he had received not only met but very often exceeded every expectation of sacrifice but also of kindness and understanding, marvelous and manly doctors, skilled and pretty nurses, an atmosphere of solidarity and endurance and courage, even a group of Belgian nuns had shown the highest sense of duty, in short, everyone had done his or her part to make the patient's stay as pleasant as possible, taking into account the circumstances, of course, because naturally a hospital isn't a cabaret or a brothel, and then they moved on to other topics, like the creation of Greater Germany, the construction of a Hinterland, the cleansing of the state institutions, to be followed by the cleansing of the nation, the creation of new jobs, the struggle for modernization, and as the ex-pilot talked Hans Reiter's father grew more and more nervous, as if he were afraid little Lotte would start to cry at any moment, or as if all at once he had realized that he wasn't a worthy interlocutor for this lordly man, and that perhaps it would be best to throw himself at the feet of this dreamer, this centurion of the skies, and plead what was already obvious, his ignorance and poverty and the courage he had lost, but he did nothing of the sort, instead he shook his head at each word the other uttered, as if he wasn't convinced (in fact he was terrified), as if it were difficult for him to understand the full scope of the other man's dreams (in fact he didn't understand them at all), until suddenly both of them, the former pilot who put on lordly airs and the old soldier, witnessed the arrival of young Hans Reiter, who, without a word, lifted his sister from her cot and carried her into the yard.

"And who is that?" asked the former pilot.

"My son," said the one-legged man.

"He looks like a giraffe fish," said the former pilot, and he laughed.

So in 1933 Hans Reiter left school, charged with apathy and poor attendance, which was strictly true, and his parents and relatives found him a job on a fishing boat, which lasted three months, until the skipper let him go, because young Reiter was more interested in gazing at the bottom of the sea than helping to cast the nets, and then he worked for a little while as a farm laborer, until he was let go for idling, and as a gatherer of peat and an apprentice at a tool shop in the Town of the Fat and as a helper to a farmer who traveled to Stettin to sell his vegetables, until he was once again let go because he was more of a burden than a help, and finally he was put to work at the country house of a Prussian baron, a house in the middle of a forest, near a lake of black waters, where his one-eyed mother also worked, dusting the furniture and paintings and enormous curtains and Gobelins and the different rooms, each with a mysterious name of its own that evoked the rites of a secret sect, where the dust inevitably built up, rooms that had to be aired to be rid of the smell of damp and neglect that crept in every so often, and there was also dusting to be done of the books in the huge library, books the baron hardly ever read, old tomes his father had tended and that had been handed down by the baron's grandfather, seemingly the only member of that vast family who read books and who had inculcated the love of books in his descendants, a love that translated not into reading but into the preservation of the library, which was exactly as the baron's grandfather had left it, no bigger and no smaller.

And Hans Reiter, who had never in his life seen so many books all together, dusted them one by one and handled them with care, but didn't read them either, partly because he was satisfied with his book of marine life and partly because he feared the sudden appearance of the baron, who rarely visited the country house, busy as he was with his affairs in Berlin and Paris, although every so often his nephew came to stay, the son of the baron's younger sister, prematurely deceased, and a painter who had settled in the south of France, despised by the baron. This nephew was a boy of twenty who often spent a week at the country house, entirely alone, never getting in anyone's way, retreating to the library for hours on end to read and drink cognac until he fell asleep in his chair.

Other times the baron's daughter came, but her visits were shorter, no longer than a weekend, although for the servants that weekend was like a month because the baron's daughter never came alone but with a retinue of friends, sometimes more than ten, all gay, all voracious, all untidy, who turned the house into a chaotic and noisy place, with parties every night that lasted until dawn.

Sometimes the daughter's arrival coincided with one of the visits from the baron's nephew, and then the baron's nephew almost always left immediately, despite his cousin's urging, sometimes even without waiting for the cart drawn by a draft horse that in such cases usually conveyed him to the train station in the Town of Chattering Girls.

With the arrival of his cousin, the baron's nephew, already timid, was thrown into a state of such stiffness and awkwardness that the servants, when they discussed the day's events, were unanimous in their verdict: he loved her or desired her or yearned for her or was pining away for her, opinions that the young Hans Reiter listened to, sitting cross-legged and eating bread and butter, without saying a word or adding any commentary of his own, although the truth is he knew the baron's nephew, whose name was Hugo Halder, much better than the other servants, who seemed blind to reality and saw only what they wanted to see, which was a young orphan in love and distress and a young orphan girl (although the baron's daughter had a father and mother, as everyone well knew), headstrong and awaiting a vague, dense redemption.

A redemption that smelled of peat smoke, of cabbage soup, of the wind tangled in the forest undergrowth. A redemption that smelled of mirror, thought young Reiter, nearly choking on his bread.

And why did the boy Reiter know Hugo Halder, a youth of some twenty years, better than the rest of the servants? Well, for one very simple reason. Or two very simple reasons, which, intertwined or combined, supply a fuller and also more complicated portrait of the baron's nephew.

First: he had watched him in the library as he ran his feather duster over the books, he had watched, from the top of the rolling ladder, as the baron's nephew slept, breathing deeply or snoring, talking to himself, though not in whole sentences, like sweet Lotte, but in monosyllables, scraps of words, particles of insults, defensive, as if in his sleep he were about to be killed. He had also seen the titles of the books the baron's nephew read. Most were history books, which meant the baron's nephew loved history or found it interesting, which at first struck the young Reiter as repulsive. Nights spent drinking cognac and smoking and reading history books. Repulsive. Which led him to wonder: all that silence for this? And he'd heard the words uttered by the baron's nephew when he was woken by the least sound, the rustle of a mouse or the soft scrape of a leather-bound book as it was returned to its place between two other books, words of total confusion, as if the world had shifted on its axis, not the words of a man in love but words of total confusion, the words of a sufferer, words issuing from a trap.

The second reason was even more solid. On one of the several occasions when Hugo Halder had decided to make a quick exit from the country house upon the sudden appearance of his cousin, young Hans Reiter had accompanied him, carrying his valise. There were two paths from the country house to the train station in the Town of Chattering Girls. One, the longest, passed Pig Village and Egg Village and occasionally ran along the rocks and the sea. The other, much shorter, cut through a huge forest of oaks and beeches and poplars and emerged on the edge of the Town of Chattering Girls, near an abandoned pickle factory, very near the station.

The scene is the following: Hugo Halder walks ahead of Hans Reiter with his hat in his hand and carefully scans the forest canopy, a dark underbelly alive with the stealthy movement of animals and birds he doesn't recognize. Thirty feet behind walks Hans Reiter with the nephew's valise, which is too heavy and which every so often he shifts from hand to hand. Suddenly both hear the grunt of a wild boar or what they believe is a wild boar. Maybe it's just a dog. Maybe what they've heard is the distant engine of a car about to crash. These two last scenarios are highly improbable but not impossible. In any case, both quicken their step, without a word, and suddenly Hans Reiter trips and falls and the valise falls too and it opens and its contents are scattered over the dark path through the dark forest. And in the tangle of Hugo Halder's clothes, as Hugo Halder keeps walking, not noticing the boy has fallen, the exhausted young Hans Reiter sees silver cutlery, candelabras, little lacquered wooden boxes, medallions forgotten in the many chambers of the country house, which the baron's nephew will surely pawn or sell for a pittance in Berlin.

Of course, Hugo Halder knew Hans Reiter had found him out and the result of this was to bring him closer to the young servant. The first sign came the same afternoon Hans Reiter carried his valise to the train station. When Halder took his leave, he dropped a few coins into Hans's hand (it was the first time he'd given him money and also the first time Hans Reiter had received money over and above his meager wage). On Halder's next visit to the country house he gave Hans a sweater. He said it was his and it didn't fit him anymore because he'd gained a little weight, though it was plain at a glance that this was untrue. In a word, Hans Reiter was no longer invisible and his presence merited some sort of notice.

Sometimes, when Halder was in the library reading or pretending to read his history books, he sent for Reiter, with whom he held longer and longer conversations. At first he asked about the other servants. He wanted to know what they thought of him, whether they were inconvenienced by his presence, whether they minded having him, whether anyone bore him a grudge. Next came the monologues. Halder talked about his life, his dead mother, his uncle the baron, his only cousin (that unattainable and headstrong girl), about the temptations of Berlin, a city he loved but that also caused him untold suffering, at times unbearably fierce, about the state of his nerves, always near the breaking point.

Then, in turn, he wanted the young Hans Reiter to talk about his own life, what did he do? what did he want to do? what were his dreams? what did he think the future held for him?

Regarding the future, naturally, Halder had ideas of his own. He believed that someone would soon invent and sell a kind of artificial stomach. The idea was so outrageous that he was the first to laugh at it (it was the first time Hans Reiter had heard him laugh and he found Halder's laugh deeply disagreeable). About his father, the painter who lived in France, Halder never spoke, but at the same time he liked to hear about other people's parents. He was amused by young Reiter's response to his questions on the subject. Hans said he didn't know anything about his father.

"True," said Halder, "one never knows anything about one's father."

A father, he said, is a passageway immersed in the deepest darkness, where we stumble blindly seeking a way out. Still, he insisted that the boy at least tell him what his father looked like, but the young Hans Reiter replied that he sincerely didn't know. At this point Halder wanted to know whether he lived with his father or not. I've always lived with him, answered Hans Reiter.

"So what does he look like? Can't you describe him?"

"I can't because I don't know," answered Hans Reiter.

For a few seconds both were silent, one examining his nails and the other gazing up at the library's high ceiling. It may have been hard to believe this reply, but Halder did.

Speaking very loosely, one might call Halder Hans Reiter's first friend. Each time Halder came to the country house he spent more time with Hans, whether shut in the library or walking and talking in the parkland that surrounded the estate.

Halder, too, was the first to get Hans to read something other than Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. It wasn't easy. First he asked whether he knew how to read. Hans Reiter said yes. Then he asked whether he'd ever read a good book. He stressed the word good. Hans Reiter said yes. He had a good book, he said. Halder asked what the book was. Hans Reiter told him it was Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region. Halder said that must be a reference book and he meant a good literary book. Hans Reiter said he didn't know the difference between a good refints (reference) book and a good litchy (literary) book. Halder said the difference lay in beauty, in the beauty of the story and the beauty of the language in which the story was told. Immediately he began to cite examples. He talked about Goethe and Schiller, he talked about Holderlin and Kleist, he raved about Novalis. He said he had read all these authors and each time he reread them he wept.

"Wept," he said, "wept, do you understand, Hans?"

To which Hans Reiter replied that the only books he had seen Halder with were history books. Halder's answer took him by surprise. Halder said:

"It's because I don't have a proper grasp of history and I need to brush up."

"What for?" asked Hans Reiter.

"To fill a void."

"Voids can't be filled," said Hans Reiter.

"Yes, they can," said Halder, "with a little effort everything in this world can be filled. When I was your age," said Halder, clearly exaggerating, "I read Goethe until I couldn't read anymore (although Goethe, of course, is infinite), but anyway, I read Goethe, Eichendorff, Hoffman, and I neglected my studies of history, which are also needed in order to hone both edges of the blade, so to speak."

Then, as dusk fell and they listened to the crackling of the fire, they tried to decide which book Hans Reiter should read first and were unable to agree. When night had come, Halder finally told him to take any book he wanted and return it in a week. The young servant agreed that this was the best solution.

Soon afterward there was an increase in small thefts by the barons nephew at the country estate, due, in his words, to gambling debts and inescapable obligations to certain ladies he was duty-bound to assist. Halder's clumsiness in disguising his purloinings was great and the young Hans Reiter decided to help. To keep the pilfered objects from being missed he suggested that Halder order the other servants to shift things around arbitrarily, to empty rooms under the pretext of airing them, to bring up old trunks from the cellars and carry them back down. In a word: to make rearrangements.

He also suggested, and in this he actively participated, that Halder devote his attention to the rare objects, taking only the really old and therefore forgotten antiques, diadems of no apparent value that had belonged to his great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother, silver-handled walking sticks of precious wood, swords that his forebears had used in the Napoleonic wars or against the Danes or the Austrians.

Meanwhile, Halder was always generous. Upon each new visit he gave Hans what he called his share of the booty, which was really no more than a rather large tip, but which for Hans Reiter constituted a fortune. He didn't show his parents this fortune, of course, because they would have been quick to accuse him of stealing. Nor did he buy anything for himself. He found a biscuit tin, into which he put the few bills and many coins, wrote on a paper "this money belongs to Lotte Reiter," and buried it in the forest.

Of course, there were German medieval poets more important than Wolfram von Eschenbach. Like Friedrich von Hausen or Walther von der Vogelweide. But Wolfram's pride (I fled the pursuit of letters, I was untutored in the arts), a pride that stands aloof, a pride that says die, all of you, but I'll live, confers on him a halo of dizzying mystery, of terrible indifference, which attracted the young Hans the way a giant magnet attracts a slender nail.

Wolfram had no lands. Wolfram therefore lived in a state of vassalage. Wolfram had some protectors, counts who allowed their vassals-or at least some of them-to be visible. Wolfram said: my hereditary office is the shield. And as Halder told Hans all these things about Wolfram, as if to place him at the scene of the crime, Hans read Parzival from beginning to end, sometimes aloud, out in the fields or on his way along the path home from work, and not only did he understand it, he liked it. And what he liked most, what made him cry and roll laughing in the grass, was that Parzival sometimes rode (my hereditary office is the shield) wearing his madman's garb under his suit of armor.

Chance or the devil had it that the book Hans Reiter chose to read was Wolfram von Eschenbach's Parzival. When Halder saw him with it he smiled and told him he wouldn't understand it, but he also said he wasn't surprised he had chosen that book and none other, because in fact, he said, though he might never understand it, it was the perfect book for him, just as Wolfram von Eschenbach was the author in whom he would find the clearest resemblance to himself or his inner being or what he aspired to be, and, regrettably, never would become, though he might come this close, said Halder, holding his thumb and index finger a fraction of an inch apart.

Wolfram, Hans discovered, said of himself: I fled the pursuit of letters. Wolfram, Hans discovered, broke with the archetype of the courtly knight and was denied (or denied himself) all training, all clerical schooling. Wolfram, Hans discovered, unlike the troubadours and the minnesingers, declined to serve a lady. Wolfram, Hans discovered, declared that he was untutored in the arts, not to boast of a lack of education, but as a way of saying he was free from the burden of Latin learning and that he was a lay and independent knight. Lay and independent.

The years he spent in Hugo Halder's company were profitable for him. The thefts continued, now at a furious pace, now slowing, in part because there was little left to rob anymore that wouldn't be noticed by Hugo's cousin or the other servants. Only once did the baron make an appearance. He drove up in a black sedan, with the curtains drawn, and stayed one night.

Hans thought he would see him, thought perhaps the baron would speak to him, but nothing happened like that. The baron spent only a single night at the estate, roaming the most neglected wings of the house, in constant motion (and constant silence), making no demands on the servants, as if he were lost in a dream and couldn't communicate verbally with anyone. At night he dined on black bread and cheese and went down to the cellars himself to choose the bottle of wine he opened to accompany his frugal meal. The next morning he was gone by the first light of day.

The baron's daughter, however, he saw many times. Always in the company of her friends. On three occasions during the time Hans worked at the house she came to stay while Halder was visiting, and each time Halder, profoundly ill at ease in his cousin's presence, was quick to pack his bags and leave. The last time, as they were crossing the forest that had in some sense sealed their complicity, Hans asked what made him so nervous. Halder's response was curt and ill-tempered. He said Hans wouldn't understand and strode along under the leafy forest roof.

In 1936 the baron closed the country house and let the servants go, retaining only the groundskeeper. For a while Hans had nothing to do and then he moved on to swell the ranks of the laborers who built the Reich's highways. Each month he sent his family almost his entire salary, because his needs were few, although on his free days he went down with his fellow workers to the taverns in the nearest towns, where they drank themselves insensible with beer. Among the young workers he undoubtedly held his liquor best, and a few times he took part in impromptu contests to see who could drink the most in the shortest time. But he didn't like alcohol, or he didn't like it any more than food, and when his team was stationed near Berlin he gave his notice and headed off.

It didn't take him long to find Halder in the big city, and he turned up at his door in search of assistance. Halder got him a job as a clerk in a stationery shop. Hans lived in a room in a house of workmen, where he was let a bed. He shared the room with a man of about forty who worked as a night watchman at a factory. The man's name was Füchler and he suffered from an affliction, possibly of nervous origin, as he admitted, that some nights manifested itself in the form of rheumatism and other nights as heart trouble or sudden attacks of asthma.

He and Füchler didn't see each other often, because Füchler worked at night and Hans worked during the day, but when they did meet they got along marvelously. As Füchler confessed, long ago he had been married and had a child. When his son was five the boy fell ill, and soon afterward he died. The child's death was more than Füchler could bear, and after three months of mourning in the cellar, he filled a pack and left without a word to anyone. For a time he wandered the roads of Germany, living on charity or whatever chance saw fit to offer him. A number of years later he came to Berlin, where a friend recognized him on the street and offered him a job. This friend, who was dead now, worked as a supervisor at the factory where Füchler was still employed as a watchman. The factory wasn't very big and it used to make shotguns, but lately it had been converted to the production of rifles.

One night, when he got back from work, Hans Reiter found the watchman in bed. The landlady had brought up a plate of soup. The stationer's apprentice knew at once that his roommate was going to die.

Healthy people flee contact with the diseased. This rule applies to almost everyone. Hans Reiter was an exception. He feared neither the healthy nor the diseased. He never got bored. He was always eager to help and he greatly valued the notion-so vague, so malleable, so warped-of friendship. The diseased, anyway, are more interesting than the healthy. The words of the diseased, even those who can manage only a murmur, carry more weight than those of the healthy. Then, too, all healthy people will in the future know disease. That sense of time, ah, the diseased man's sense of time, what treasure hidden in a desert cave. Then, too, the diseased truly bite, whereas the healthy pretend to bite but really only snap at the air. Then, too, then, too, then, too.

Before he died, Füchler told Hans he could have his job if he wanted it. He asked how much he earned at the stationer's. Hans told him. A pittance. Füchler wrote Hans a letter of introduction to the new supervisor, in which he vouched for the young man's conduct, saying he had known Hans since he was born. Hans thought about it all day, as he unloaded boxes of pencils and erasers and notebooks and swept the sidewalk in front of the shop. When he got home he told Füchler he liked the idea, he would change jobs. That same night he showed up at the rifle factory, which was on the edge of the city, and after a brief conversation with the supervisor they agreed on a two-week trial period. Shortly afterward, Füchler died. Since there was no one to give his belongings to, Hans kept them. A coat, two pairs of shoes, a wool scarf, four shirts, various undershirts, seven pairs of socks. Füchler's razor he presented to the landlord. Under the bed, in a cardboard box, he found several cowboy novels. He kept those for himself.

From then on Hans Reiter had much more free time. At night he paced the flagstone factory yard and the cold corridors of long rooms with big glass windows designed to let in as much sunlight as possible, and in the mornings, after breakfasting at some cart in the working-class neighborhood where he lived, he slept between four and six hours and then he had his afternoons free to ride the tram to the center of Berlin, where he would drop in on Hugo Halder, with whom he would go for a walk or to cafes and restaurants where the baron's nephew invariably came upon acquaintances and proposed deals that were never made.

In those days Hugo Halder was living on a backstreet near the Himmelstrasse, in a small flat crammed with old furniture and dusty paintings, and his best friend, besides Hans, was a Japanese who worked as assistant to the charge of agricultural affairs at the Japanese legation. The Japanese man's name was Noburo Nisamata, but Halder, and Hans, too, called him Nisa. He was twenty-eight and good-natured, ready to laugh at the most innocent jokes and willing to listen to the most outrageous ideas. Generally they met at the Stone Virgin Cafe, a few steps from Alexanderplatz, where Halder and Hans usually arrived first and had something to eat, perhaps sausage with a bit of sauerkraut. An hour or two later, the Japanese man would meet them, impeccably dressed, and they would scarcely drink a glass of whiskey neat before leaving in a hurry and losing themselves in the Berlin night.

Then Halder would take charge. They went by taxi to the Eclipse, a cabaret with the worst performers in Berlin, a group of talentless old women who had found success in the unadorned exhibition of failure, and where, despite the laughter and whistles, if one knew a waiter well enough to be given an out-of-the-way table, one could converse without too much difficulty. The Eclipse was cheap, too, although Halder didn't concern himself with money during these nights of Berlin revelry, among other reasons because his Japanese friend always paid. Then, well lubricated, they would go to the Cafe des Artistes, where there were no variety acts but one could catch a glimpse of some of the Reich's painters, and-this was something Nisa greatly enjoyed-share a table with an art world celebrity or two, many of whom Halder had long known and some of whom he even called by their first names.

It was generally three in the morning when they left the Cafe des Artistes for the Danube, a fancy cabaret, where the dancers were very tall and beautiful and where they more than once had trouble convincing the doorman or maitre d' to let Hans in, since he was as poor as a church mouse and his attire didn't conform to the dress code. On weekdays, anyway, Hans left his friends at ten to run to the tram stop and make it just on time to the factory where he worked as night watchman. On these days, if the weather was good, they spent hours sitting on the terrace of some fashionable restaurant, talking about the inventions Halder came up with. Halder swore that someday, when he had time, he would patent them and make his fortune, which provoked strange attacks of hilarity in his Japanese friend. There was something hysterical about Nisa's laughter: he laughed not only with his lips and eyes and throat but also with his hands and neck and feet, stamping delicately on the floor.

Once, after explaining the usefulness of a machine that would make artificial clouds, Halder asked Nisa abruptly whether his mission in Germany was what he claimed it to be or whether he was really a secret agent. The question, so unexpected, took Nisa by surprise, and at first he didn't fully understand it. Then, when Halder seriously explained the mission of a secret agent, Nisa exploded in an attack of laughter like nothing Hans had witnessed in his life, going so far as to fall in a faint onto the table, and Hans and Halder had to carry him off to the washroom, where they splashed water on his face and managed to revive him.

Nisa didn't talk much himself, whether out of discretion or because he didn't want to offend with his heavily accented German. And yet sometimes he said interesting things. He said, for example, that Zen was a mountain that bites its own tail. He said the language he had studied was English and it was just another of the ministry's many mistakes that he was stationed in Berlin. He said that samurais were like fish in a waterfall but the best samurai in history was a woman. He said his father had known a Christian monk who lived for fifteen years without ever leaving the island of Endo, a few miles from Okinawa, an island of volcanic rock with no water.

When he said these things it was often with a smile. Halder, in turn, baited him by announcing that Nisa was a Shintoist, that he liked only German whores, that in addition to German and English he could speak and write Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and Russian. When Halder said these things, Nisa laughed slowly, hee hee hee, and showed Hans his teeth, his eyes shining.

Sometimes, however, as they sat on a cafe terrace or around a dark cabaret table, an obstinate silence descended inexplicably over the trio. They seemed suddenly to freeze, lose all sense of time, and turn completely inward, as if they were bypassing the abyss of daily life, the abyss of people, the abyss of conversation, and had decided to approach a kind of lakeside region, a late-romantic region, where the borders were clocked from dusk to dusk, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, an eternity, like the minutes of those condemned to die, like the minutes of women who've just given birth and are condemned to die, who understand that more time isn't more eternity and nevertheless wish with all their souls for more time, and their wails are birds that come flying every so often across the double lakeside landscape, so calmly, like luxurious excrescences or heartbeats. Then, naturally, the three men would emerge stiff from the silence and go back to talking about inventions, women, Finnish philology, the building of highways across the Reich.

On no few occasions they ended their nights at the flat of Crete von Joachimsthaler, an old friend with whom Halder maintained relations full of subterfuge and misunderstandings.

Musicians often visited Crete, including an orchestra conductor who claimed that music was the fourth dimension and whom Halder respected greatly. The orchestra conductor was thirty-five and was admired (women swooned over him) as if he were twenty-five and venerated as if he were eighty. As a general rule, when he came to conclude an evening at Crete's flat he sat at the piano, though he didn't touch it with even the tip of his little finger, and immediately he was surrounded by a court of spellbound friends and followers, until he decided to get up and go forth like the keeper of a swarm of bees, except that this beekeeper wasn't protected by a mesh suit or a helmet and woe betide the bee that tried to sting him, even if only in thought.

The fourth dimension, he liked to say, encompasses the three dimensions and consequently puts them in their place, that is, it obliterates the dictatorship of the three dimensions and thereby obliterates the three-dimensional world we know and live in. The fourth dimension, he said, is the full richness of the senses and the (capital S) Spirit, it's the (capital E) Eye, in other words the open Eye that obliterates the eyes, which compared to the Eye are just poor orifices of mud, absorbed in contemplation or the equation birth-training-work-death, whereas the Eye sails up the river of philosophy, the river of existence, the (fast-flowing) river of fate.

The fourth dimension, he said, was expressible only through music. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven.

It was hard to get near the conductor. That is, it wasn't hard to get near him physically, but it was hard to get him to see one, blinded as he was by the footlights, separated from others by the pit. One night, however, the picturesque trio composed of Halder, Nisa, and Hans caught his attention and he asked the hostess who they were. She told him that Halder was a friend, the son of a once-promising painter, nephew of Baron Von Zumpe, and that the Japanese gentleman worked at the Japanese embassy and the tall, shabby, poorly dressed young man was doubtless an artist, perhaps a painter, Halder's protege.

The conductor then wanted to meet them, and the hostess, with great delicacy, beckoned to the surprised trio and led them to a quiet corner of the flat. For a while, as might be expected, they didn't know what to say. Again, because it was his favorite subject at the time, the conductor talked about music or the fourth dimension, it wasn't exactly clear where one ended and the other began, though perhaps, to judge by certain mysterious words of the conductor, the point of union was the conductor himself, in whom mysteries and answers spontaneously coincided. Halder and Nisa nodded agreement at everything. Not so Hans. According to the director, life qua life in the fourth dimension was of an unimaginable richness, etc., etc., but the truly important thing was the distance from which one, immersed in this harmony, could contemplate human affairs, with equanimity, in a word, and free of the artificial travails that oppress the spirit devoted to work and creation, to life's only transcendent truth, the truth that creates more and more life, an inexhaustible torrent of life and happiness and brightness.

The conductor talked and talked, about the fourth dimension and some symphonies he had conducted or planned soon to conduct, never once taking his eyes off his listeners. His eyes were like the eyes of a hawk that flies and delights in its flight, but that also maintains a watchful gaze, capable of discerning even the slightest movement down below, on the scrambled pattern of earth.

Perhaps the conductor was slightly drunk. Perhaps the conductor was tired and his thoughts were elsewhere. Perhaps the conductor's words didn't at all express his state of mind, his manner of being, his worshipful regard for the artistic phenomenon.

That night, however, Hans asked or wondered aloud (it was the first time he had spoken) what those who inhabited or visited the fifth dimension must think. At first the conductor didn't quite understand him, although Hans's German had improved considerably since he left home to join the road crews and even more since he came to live in Berlin. Then he got the idea and turned from Halder and Nisa to focus his hawk's or eagle's or carrion bird's gaze on the calm blue eyes of the young Prussian, who was already formulating another question: what would those who had ready access to the sixth dimension think of those who were settled in the fifth or fourth dimension? What would those who lived in the tenth dimension, that is, those who perceived ten dimensions, think of music, for example? What would Beethoven mean to them? What would Mozart mean to them? What would Bach mean to them? Probably, the young Reiter answered himself, music would just be noise, noise like crumpled pages, noise like burned books.

At this point the conductor raised a hand and said or rather whispered confidentially:

"Don't speak of burned books, my dear young man."

To which Hans responded:

"Everything is a burned book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, the fourth dimension, cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned books."

"What are you talking about?" asked the director.

"I was just stating my opinion," said Hans.

"An opinion like any other," said Halder, doing his best to end the conversation on a humorous note, one that would leave them all on good terms, he and the conductor and Hans and the conductor, "a typically adolescent pronouncement."

"No, no, no," said the conductor, "what do you mean by Westerns?"

"Cowboy novels," said Hans.

This declaration seemed to relieve the director, who, after exchanging a few friendly words with them, soon took his leave. Later, he would tell their hostess that Halder and the Japanese man seemed like decent people, but Halder's young friend was a time bomb, no question about it: an untrained, powerful mind, irrational, illogical, capable of exploding at the moment least expected. Which was untrue.

After the musicians had gone home, nights at Crete von Joachims-thaler's flat usually ended in bed or the bathtub, a bathtub like few in Berlin, eight feet long and five feet wide, black enamel with claw feet, where Halder and then Nisa endlessly massaged Crete, from temples to toes, the two of them fully dressed, even sometimes with their coats on (at Crete's express request), while Crete cavorted like a mermaid, sometimes on her back, sometimes on her belly, other times underwater! her nakedness covered only by foam.

During these amorous interludes Hans waited in the kitchen, where he made a snack and poured a beer, and then walked, glass of beer in one hand and snack in the other, along the flat's wide hallways or went to stand by the big windows in the salon from which he watched the sunrise as it washed like a wave over the city, drowning them all.

Sometimes Hans felt feverish and he thought it was desire that made his face burn, but he was wrong. Sometimes Hans left the windows open to clear the smell of smoke from the salon and turned out the lights and sat in an armchair, bundled in his coat. Then he felt the cold and he was tired and closed his eyes. An hour later, when the sun was fully up, he felt Halder and Nisa shaking him, telling him they had to go.

Crete von Joachimsthaler never appeared at that hour. Only Halder and Nisa. And Halder always had a bundle that he tried to hide under his coat. Once out in the street, still half asleep, he saw that his friends' trouser legs were wet and the sleeves of their suits, too, and that the legs and sleeves steamed in the cold, the vapor only a little less dense than the clouds breathed out by Nisa and Halder and Hans himself, and in the early morning his friends spurned taxis to walk to the nearest cafe and eat a big breakfast.

In 1939 Hans Reiter was drafted. After a few months of training he was assigned to the 31 Oth, a light infantry regiment whose base was twenty miles from the Polish border. The 310th, as well as the 311th and 312th, was part of the 79th Light Infantry Division, commanded at the time by General Kruger, which in turn was part of the 10th Infantry Corps, commanded by General Von Bohle, one of the Reich's leading philatelists. The 310th was commanded by Colonel Von Berenberg, and it consisted of three battalions. Hans Reiter belonged to the 3rd Battalion, assigned first to serve as an assistant machine gun operator and then to an assault company.

The captain responsible for this second assignment was Paul Gercke, an aesthete who believed that Reiter's height would do very well to instill respect and even fear during, say, a practice charge or military parade, but who knew that in the case of real as opposed to simulated combat the same height that had got him the post would, in the long run, be his undoing, because in practice the best assault soldier is short and thin as a sprig and darts along like a squirrel. Of course, before becoming an infantryman with the 310th Regiment, 79th Division, Hans Reiter, presented with the dilemma of choosing, tried to get himself selected for service on a submarine. This ambition, encouraged by Halder, who called on or claimed to have called on all of his friends in the military and government, most of whom, Hans suspected, were more imaginary than real, only provoked fits of laughter in the officers in charge of the German navy's priority lists, especially among those familiar with the real dimensions of submarines and the living conditions aboard, where a man who was six foot five would surely become the bane of his comrades.

Whatever the case, despite Halder's connections, real or not, Hans was rejected by the German navy in the most ignominious fashion (it was even recommended to him, in jest, that he join a tank company), and he had to content himself with his original assignment, the light infantry.

A week before he left for basic training, Halder and Nisa took him out for a farewell dinner that ended at a brothel, where they begged him to lose his virginity once and for all, in honor of their friendship. The whore he was assigned (chosen by Halder and probably a friend of Halder's and also probably a disappointed partner in one of Halder's multiple business schemes) was a peasant from Bavaria, very sweet and quiet, although when she talked, which she did infrequently as if to conserve words, she seemed to be a practical woman in every sense, including the sexual, even showing signs of avarice that thoroughly repelled Hans. Of course, he didn't make love that night, although he told his friends he had, but the next day he went back to see the whore, whose name was Anita. On this second visit Hans lost his virginity, and there were two more visits, enough to inspire Anita to expound on her life and her philosophy of life.

When the time came for him to go, he left alone. He noted that it was odd no one saw him off at the train station. He'd said his goodbyes to Anita the night before. Of Halder and Nisa he'd heard nothing since the first visit to the brothel, as if both friends had taken it for granted that he was leaving the next morning, which wasn't the case. For a week now, he thought, Halder has been living in Berlin as if I were already gone. The only person he bade farewell the day he left was his landlady, who told him it was an honor to serve his country. All he carried in his new kit bag were a few items of clothing and the book Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region.

In September the war began. Reiter's division advanced to the border and crossed behind the Panzer divisions and the motorized infantry divisions that cleared the way. By forced marches they made their way into Polish territory, seeing no combat and taking few precautions: the three regiments moved almost as one in a general atmosphere of festivity, as if the men were on a journey of pilgrimage and not a march toward a war in which some would inevitably be killed.

They passed through several towns, without plundering them, in orderly fashion, but not arrogantly at all, smiling at the children and young women, and every so often they crossed paths with soldiers on motorcycles flying along the road, sometimes heading east and sometimes west, carrying orders for the division or the corps general staff. They forged ahead of the artillery. Sometimes, when they reached the top of a hill, they gazed east, toward where they imagined the front to be, and they didn't see anything, just a landscape slumbering in summer's last splendor. Toward the west, however, they could make out the dust cloud of the regimental and divisional artillery as it strove to catch up with them.

On the third day of traveling, Hans's regiment turned onto another dirt road. Just before nightfall they reached a river. Past the river rose a forest of pines and poplars, and past the forest, they were told, was a village where a group of Poles had taken a stand. They assembled the machine guns and mortars and shot up flares, but there was no response. Two assault companies crossed the river after midnight. In the forest Hans and his comrades heard the hoot of an owl. When they came out on the far side, they spied the village, like a black lump set or encrusted in the darkness. The two companies divided into several groups and continued their advance. At fifty yards from the first house the captain gave the order and they all went running toward the village and one or two even seemed surprised when they found it was deserted. The next day the regiment continued eastward, along three different roads, parallel to the main route taken by the larger part of the division.

Reiter's battalion came upon a detachment of Poles occupying a bridge. The Germans demanded the surrender of the Poles. The Poles refused and opened fire. After the battle, which lasted scarcely ten minutes, one of Reiter's comrades returned with a broken nose, which bled copiously. As he told it, after he had crossed the bridge he had walked on with ten soldiers to the edge of the forest. Just at that moment, a Pole dropped from a tree branch and began to beat him with his fists. Naturally, Reiter's comrade didn't know what to do, because in the worst or best of cases, call it the most extreme of cases, he had imagined being attacked with a knife or a bayonet, if not shot, but he had never imagined being punched. When the Pole hit him in the face, he felt anger, of course, but stronger than anger was the surprise, the shock of it, which left him powerless to respond, whether with his fists, like his attacker, or with his gun. He just stood there and took a blow to the stomach, which didn't hurt, and then to the nose, which half stunned him, and then, as he fell, he saw the Pole, the hazy silhouette of the Pole, who instead of taking his gun, as someone more intelligent might have, tried to run back into the forest, and the silhouette of one of his companions shooting at the Pole, and then more shots and the silhouette of the Pole falling riddled with bullets. When Hans and the rest of the battalion crossed the bridge there were no enemy bodies lying by the side of the road and the battalion's only casualties were two lightly wounded soldiers.

It was around this time, as they walked under the sun or the gray clouds, enormous, endless gray clouds that brought tidings of a fall to remember, and his battalion left behind village after village, that Hans imagined that under his Wehrmacht uniform he was wearing the suit or garb of a madman.

One afternoon his battalion encountered a group of general staff officers. Which general staff? He didn't know, but they were general staff officers. As his battalion marched along the road, the officers had gathered on a hill very near the road and were gazing at the sky, across which at that moment a squadron of planes was flying east, maybe Stukas, maybe fighter planes; some of the officers pointed with their index finger or with their whole hand, as if they were giving the planes the Heil Hitler salute, while a few steps away, another officer, seemingly lost in thought, watched as an orderly carefully laid out refreshments on a folding table, refreshments that he unpacked from a large black box, like a special box from some pharmaceutical company, the kind of box that holds dangerous medicines or medicines that haven't been thoroughly tested, or even worse, like a box from some scientific research center where glove-wearing German scientists pack away something with the power to destroy the world and Germany too.

Near the orderly and the officer who watched as the orderly arranged the refreshments on the table was another officer, this one in a Luftwaffe uniform, his back to everyone, bored with watching the planes fly overhead, who held a long cigarette in one hand and a book in the other, a simple operation but one that seemed to demand untold efforts, because the breeze on the hill where everyone stood was constantly fluttering the pages of the book so that the officer was unable to read and had to use the hand that held the long cigarette to keep the pages from fluttering (or ruffling or flipping), which only managed to make the situation worse, because the cigarette or the cigarette's ash unfailingly scorched the pages or the breeze scattered ash across them, which bothered the officer no end, causing him to bend his head and blow, very carefully, because he was facing into the wind and when he blew there was a risk the ashes would fly into his eyes.

Near this Luftwaffe officer, but sitting in two folding chairs, were a couple of old soldiers. One of them looked like a general of the land forces. The other seemed to be dressed as a lancer or hussar. They looked at each other and laughed, first the general and then the lancer, and so on, back and forth, as if they had no idea what was happening or as if they understood something that none of the general staff officers stationed on the hill knew. Three cars were parked at the bottom of the hill. Next to the cars, the drivers stood and smoked, and in one of the cars was a woman, lovely and elegantly dressed, who bore a strong resemblance, or so Reiter thought, to the daughter of the Baron Von Zumpe, Hugo Halder's uncle.

The first real battle in which Reiter took part was on the outskirts of Kutno, where the Poles were few and poorly armed but showed no inclination to surrender. The clash didn't last long, because in the end it turned out that the Poles did want to surrender and the problem was they didn't know how. Reiter's assault group attacked a farm and a forest where the enemy had concentrated the remains of its artillery. As he watched the group leave, Captain Gercke thought that Reiter would probably be killed. For the captain it was like seeing a giraffe go off in a pack of wolves, coyotes, and hyenas. Reiter was so tall that any Polish conscript, even the clumsiest, would surely target him.

Two German soldiers were killed in the attack on the farm and five others were wounded. In the attack on the forest, another German soldier was killed and three more were wounded. Nothing happened to Reiter. That night, the sergeant who commanded the group told the captain that far from serving as an easy target, Reiter had somehow frightened the other side. How? asked the captain, by shouting? by cursing? by his ruthlessness? maybe he had frightened them because in combat he was transformed? transformed into a Teutonic warrior without fear or mercy? or maybe a hunter, the primal hunter inside all of us, wily, fast, always a step ahead of his prey?

To which the sergeant, after thinking a moment, replied no, it wasn't exactly that, Reiter, he said, was different, but actually he was the same person as always, the person everyone knew, what happened was that he had gone into combat as if he wasn't going into combat, as if he wasn't there or the quarrel wasn't with him, which didn't mean he failed to follow orders or disobeyed orders, it wasn't that at all, nor was he in a trance, some soldiers, paralyzed by fear, go into a trance, but it isn't a trance, it's just fear, anyway, he, the sergeant, wasn't sure what it was, but Reiter had something evident even to the enemy, who shot at him several times and never hit him, to their increasing dismay.

The 79th Division kept fighting on the outskirts of Kutno, but Reiter didn't take part in another skirmish. Before the end of September the whole division was transferred, this time by train, to the western border, to join the rest of the 10th Infantry Corps.

From October 1939 to June 1940 they didn't budge. Ahead was the Maginot Line, though they couldn't see it from where they lay hidden in forests and orchards. Life grew calm: the soldiers listened to the radio, ate, drank beer, wrote letters, slept. Some talked about the day they would have to march straight for the concrete fortifications of the French. Those who listened laughed nervously, told jokes, swapped stories about their families.

One night someone told them that Denmark and Norway had surrendered. That night Hans dreamed of his father. He saw the one-legged man, wrapped in his old military cloak, staring out at the Baltic and wondering where the island of Prussia had hidden itself.

Sometimes Captain Gercke came to talk to Hans for a while. The captain asked whether he was afraid of dying. What kind of question is that, Captain? said Reiter, of course I'm afraid. When the captain heard this, he gave him a long stare and then said in a low voice, as if talking to himself:

"You goddamn liar, I don't believe you, you can't fool me. You're not afraid of anything!"

Then the captain would go talk to other soldiers and his mood changed depending on the soldier he was talking to. Around this time his sergeant was awarded the Iron Cross Second Class, for valor in combat in Poland. They celebrated by drinking beer. At night Hans left the makeshift barracks and lay on his back on the cold grass outside to watch the stars. The chill didn't seem to bother him much. He often thought about his family, about little Lotte, who by then would be ten, in school. Sometimes, without bitterness, he regretted having abandoned his studies so early, because he sensed vaguely that he might have had a better life if he had kept at them.

At the same time, he wasn't unhappy as a soldier and he felt no need or perhaps wasn't able to think seriously about the future. Sometimes, alone or with his companions, he pretended he was a diver, strolling along the bottom of the sea again. No one noticed, of course, although if they had watched Reiter's movements more carefully, something might have given him away: a slight difference in the way he walked, the way he breathed, the way he gazed around him. A certain prudence, each step premeditated, his breathing measured, a glassiness of the corneas, as if his eyes were swelling from an insufficient supply of oxygen, or as if, solely at these moments, all his sangfroid deserted him and he found himself suddenly unable to contain his tears, which meanwhile never quite spilled over.

Around this time, as they were waiting, a soldier from Reiter's battalion went mad. He said he could hear radio transmissions from the German side, and also, more curiously, the French. This soldier's name was Gus-tav and he was twenty, the same age as Reiter, and he had never been assigned to the battalion's communications team. The doctor, a tired-looking man from Munich, examined him and said that Gustav had experienced an episode of auditory schizophrenia, which consisted of hearing voices in the head, and prescribed cold baths and tranquilizers. Gustav's case, however, differed in one critical respect from most cases of auditory schizophrenia: usually the voices the patient hears are directed at him, they talk to him or berate him, whereas in Gustav's case the voices simply issued orders, they belonged to soldiers, scouts, lieutenants giving their daily reports, colonels speaking by phone to generals, quartermasters demanding one hundred pounds of flour, pilots delivering the weather report. The first week of treatment Gustav seemed to improve. He went about in a slight stupor and he resisted the cold baths, but he no longer shouted or claimed his soul was being poisoned. The second week he escaped from the field hospital and hanged himself from a tree.

For the 79th Infantry Division there was nothing epic about the war on the western front. In June, after the Somme offensive, they crossed the Maginot Line with few surprises and participated in the siege of a few thousand French soldiers near Nancy. Then the division was quartered in Normandy.

During the train trip Hans heard an odd story about a soldier of the 79th who had gotten lost in the tunnels of the Maginot Line. The section of tunnel he was lost in, as far as the soldier could tell, was called the Charles Sector. The soldier, of course, had nerves of steel, or so it was told, and he kept searching for a way to the surface. After walking some five hundred yards underground he came to the Catherine Sector. The Catherine Sector, it goes without saying, was in no way different from the Charles Sector, except for the signs. After walking half a mile, he got to the Jules Sector. By now the soldier was nervous and his imagination had begun to wander. He imagined himself imprisoned forever in those underground passageways, with no comrade coming to his aid. He wanted to yell, and although at first he restrained himself, for fear of alerting any French soldiers still hiding nearby, at last he gave in to the urge and began to shout at the top of his lungs. But no one answered and he kept walking, in the hope that at some point he'd find the way out. He left behind the Jules Sector and entered the Claudine Sector. Then came the Emile Sector, the Marie Sector, the Jean-Pierre Sector, the Berenice Sector, the Andre Sector, the Sylvie Sector. When he got to the Sylvie Sector, the soldier made a discovery (which anyone else would've made much sooner). He noticed the curious neatness of the nearly immaculate passageways. Then he began to think about the usefulness of the passageways, that is their military usefulness, and he came to the conclusion that they were of absolutely no use and there had probably never been soldiers here.

At this point the soldier thought he'd gone mad or, even worse, that he'd died and this was his private hell. Tired and hopeless, he lay down on the floor and slept. He dreamed of God in human form. The soldier was asleep under an apple tree, in the Alsatian countryside, and a country squire came up to him and woke him with a gentle knock on the legs with his staff. I'm God, he said, and if you sell me your soul, which already belongs to me anyway, I'll get you out of the tunnels. Let me sleep, said the soldier, and he tried to go back to sleep. I said your soul already belongs to me, he heard the voice of God say, so please don't be a fool, and accept my offer.

Then the soldier awoke and looked at God and asked where he had to sign. Here, said God, pulling a paper out of the air. The soldier tried to read the contract, but it was written in some other language, not German or English or French, of that he was certain. What do I sign with? asked the soldier. With your blood, as is only proper, God answered. Immediately the soldier took out a penknife and made a cut in the palm of his left hand, then he dipped the tip of his index finger in the blood and signed.

"All right, now you can go back to sleep," God said.

"I'd like to get out of the tunnels soon," the soldier pleaded.

"All will proceed as ordained," said God, and he turned and started down a little dirt path toward a valley where there was a village of houses painted green and white and light brown.

The soldier thought it might be wise to say a prayer. He joined his hands and raised his eyes to the heavens. Then he saw that all the apples on the tree had dried up. Now they looked like raisins, or prunes. At the same time he heard a noise that sounded vaguely metallic.

"What is this?" he exclaimed.

From the valley rose long plumes of black smoke that hung in the air when they reached a certain height. A hand grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him. It was soldiers from a company that had come down the tunnel into the Berenice Sector. The soldier began to weep with joy, not much, but enough to find relief.

That night, as he ate, he told his best friend about the dream he'd had in the tunnels. His friend told him it was normal to dream nonsense when one found oneself in such situations.

"It wasn't nonsense," the soldier answered, "I saw God in my dreams, I was rescued, I'm back among friends again, but I can't quite be easy."

Then, in a calmer voice, he corrected himself:

"I can't quite feel safe."

To which his friend responded that in war no one could feel entirely safe. The friend went to sleep. Silence fell over the town. The sentinels lit cigarettes. Four days later, the soldier who had sold his soul to God was walking along the street when he was hit by a German car and killed.

During his regiment's stay in Normandy, Reiter often swam, no matter how cold it was, off the rocks of Portbail, near the Ollonde, or off the rocks north of Carteret. His battalion was based in the town of Besneville. In the mornings he went out, with his weapons and a rucksack in which he carried cheese, bread, and half a bottle of wine, and walked to the coast. There he chose a rock well out of sight, and after swimming and diving naked for hours, he would stretch out on his rock and eat and drink and reread his book Animals and Plants of the European Coastal Region.

Sometimes he found starfish, which he stared at for as long as his lungs would hold, until finally he made up his mind to touch them just before he returned to the surface. Once he saw a pair of gobies, Gobius paganellus, lost in a jungle of seaweed, and he followed them for a while (the seaweed jungle was like the locks of a dead giant), until he was seized by a strange, powerful despair and had to come up quickly, because if he had stayed down any longer the despair would have dragged him to the bottom.

Sometimes he felt so good, drowsing on his damp slab of rock, that he might have chosen never to rejoin the battalion. And more than once he gave serious thought to deserting, living like a tramp in Normandy, finding a cave, feeding himself on the charitable offerings of peasants or small thefts that no one would report. I would learn to see in the dark, he thought. In time my clothes would fall to rags and finally I would live naked. I would never return to Germany. One day I would drown, radiant with joy.

Around this time, a medical team came to visit Reiter's company. The doctor who examined him found him as healthy as could be, except for his eyes, which were unnaturally red, for reasons of which Reiter was well aware: the long hours spent diving barefaced in salt water. But he didn't tell the doctor for fear he would be punished or forbidden to return to the sea. In those days, Reiter would have considered it sacrilege to dive with goggles. A helmet yes, goggles categorically no. The doctor prescribed some drops for him and told him to get his superior to issue him an order to be seen by the ophthalmologist. As the doctor left he mused that the lanky boy was probably a drug addict, and he wrote in his diary: how is it that in the ranks of our army we find young men addicted to morphine, heroin, perhaps all sorts of drugs? What do they represent? Are they a symptom or a new social illness? Are they the mirror of our fate or the hammer that will shatter mirror and fate together?

One day, without warning, all leaves were canceled and Reiter's battalion, which was in the town of Besneville, joined two other battalions of the 310th Regiment that were stationed in St-Sauveur-le-Vicomte and Bricquebec and they all got on an eastward-bound military train that linked up in Paris with another train carrying the 311 th Regiment, and although the division was missing its 3rd Regiment, which apparently it would never regain, they set off across Europe from west to east, and thus passed through Germany and Hungary, finally coming to a halt in Romania, the new posting of the 79th Division.

Some troops set up camp near the Soviet frontier, others near the new border with Hungary. Hans's battalion was stationed in the Carpathians. The headquarters of the division, which was no longer part of the 10th Corps, but of a new corps, the 49th, which had just been formed and for the moment consisted of a single division, was located in Bucharest, although every so often General Kruger, the new commander of the corps, accompanied by General Von Berenberg, formerly Colonel Von Berenberg, the new commander of the 79th, visited the troops and took an interest in their state of preparation.

Now Reiter lived far from the sea, in the mountains, and for the moment he gave up any idea of deserting. For the first few weeks of his stay in Romania all he saw were soldiers from his own battalion. Then he saw peasants, who kept in constant motion, as if they had ants in their pants, going back and forth with bundles of their belongings. They spoke only to their children, who followed them like sheep or little goats. The sunsets in the Carpathians were endless, but the sky seemed too low, just a few yards above the soldiers' heads, which produced a sense of smothering or unease. Daily life, despite everything, was once again peaceful, uneventful.

One night some soldiers from Reiter's battalion rose before dawn and left in two trucks for the mountains.

As soon as they had settled themselves on the wooden benches in the back of the truck, the soldiers fell asleep again. Reiter couldn't. Sitting next to the back flap, he pushed aside the canvas that served as roof and watched the scenery. His night-vision eyes, permanently reddened despite the drops he used each morning, glimpsed a series of small, dark valleys between two lines of peaks. Every so often the trucks passed huge stands of pine, which crept threateningly toward the road. In the distance, on a smaller mountain, he made out the silhouette of a castle or fort. When the sun rose he realized it was just a forest. He saw hills or rocky outcroppings that looked like ships about to sink, prows lifted, like enraged horses, nearly vertical. He saw dark mountain paths that led nowhere, but above which, at a great height, soared blackbirds that must be carrion fowl.

At midmorning they came to a castle. The only people there were three Romanians and an SS officer who was acting as butler and who put them right to work, after serving them a breakfast consisting of a glass of cold milk and a scrap of bread, which some soldiers left untouched in disgust. Everyone, except for four soldiers who stood guard, among them Reiter, whom the SS officer judged ill suited for the task of tidying the castle, left their rifles in the kitchen and set to work sweeping, mopping, dusting lamps, putting clean sheets on the beds.

At around three the guests arrived. One was General Von Berenberg, the division commander. With him came Herman Hoensch, a writer of the Reich, and two officers of the 79th's general staff. In the other car came the Romanian general Eugen Entrescu, thirty-five at the time and the rising star of his country's armed forces, accompanied by the young scholar Paul Popescu, twenty-three, and the Baroness Von Zumpe, whom the Romanians had met only the night before at a reception at the German embassy and who by rights should have ridden with General Von Berenberg, but who was finally persuaded by Entrescu's gallant ways and Popescu's amusing and playful manner to give in to their pleas, which were reasonably based on the fact that the baroness would have more room in their car, since they were carrying fewer passengers.

Reiter's surprise when he saw the Baroness Von Zumpe step out of the car couldn't have been greater. But the strangest thing of all was that this time the young baroness stopped in front of him and asked, with real interest, whether he knew her, because his face, she said, looked familiar. Reiter (still standing at attention, staring impassively off at the horizon in martial fashion, or perhaps gazing into nothing) answered that of course he knew her because he had served in the house of her father, the baron, from an early age, as had his mother, Frau Reiter, whom perhaps the baroness might recall.

"That's right," said the baroness, and she began to laugh, "you were the long-legged boy who was always underfoot."

"That was me," said Reiter.

"My cousin's confidant," said the baroness.

"A friend of your cousin," said Reiter, "Mr. Hugo Halder."

"And what are you doing here, at Dracula's castle?" asked the baroness.

"Serving the Reich," said Reiter, and for the first time he looked at her.

He thought she was stunningly beautiful, much more so than when he had known her. A few steps from them, waiting, was General Entrescu, who couldn't stop smiling, and the young scholar Popescu, who more than once exclaimed: wonderful, wonderful, yet again the sword of fate severs the head from the hydra of chance.

The guests had a light meal and then went out to explore the castle grounds. General Von Berenberg, initially a proponent of this expedition, soon felt fatigued and retired, leaving General Entrescu to lead the way, with the baroness on his arm and the young scholar Popescu to his left, who made it his business to reel off and elaborate on a host of mostly contradictory facts. Alongside Popescu was the SS officer, and lagging a bit behind were Hoensch, the Reich writer, and the two general staff officers. Bringing up the rear was Reiter, whom the baroness had insisted on keeping with her, arguing that before he served the Reich he had served her family, a petition Von Berenberg immediately granted.

Soon they came to a crypt dug out of the rock. An iron gate, with a coat of arms eroded by time, barred the entrance. The SS officer, who behaved as if he owned the castle, took a key out of his pocket and let them in. Then he switched on a flashlight and they all ventured into the crypt, except for Reiter, who remained on guard at the door at the signal of one of the officers.

So Reiter stood there, watching the stone stairs that led down into the dark, and the desolate garden through which they had come, and the towers of the castle like two gray candles on a deserted altar. Then he felt for a cigarette in his jacket, lit it, and gazed at the gray sky, the distant valleys, and thought about the Baroness Von Zumpe's face as the cigarette ash dropped to the ground and little by little he fell asleep, leaning on the stone wall. Then he dreamed about the inside of the crypt. The stairs led down to an amphitheater only partially illuminated by the SS officer's flashlight. He dreamed that the visitors were laughing, all except one of the general staff officers, who wept and searched for a place to hide. He dreamed that Hoensch recited a poem by Wolfram von Eschenbach and then spat blood. He dreamed that among them they had agreed to eat the Baroness Von Zumpe.

He woke with a start and almost bolted down the stairs to confirm with his own eyes that nothing he had dreamed was real.

When the visitors returned to the surface, anyone, even the least astute observer, could have seen that they were divided into two groups, those who were pale when they emerged, as if they had glimpsed something momentous down below, and those who appeared with a half smile sketched on their faces, as if they had just been reapprised of the naivete of the human race.

That night, during dinner, they talked about the crypt, but they also talked about other things. They talked about death. Hoensch said that death itself was only an illusion under permanent construction, that in reality it didn't exist. The SS officer said death was a necessity: no one in his right mind, he said, would stand for a world full of turtles or giraffes. Death, he concluded, served a regulatory function. The young scholar Popescu said that death, in the Eastern tradition, was only a passage. What wasn't clear, he said, or at least not to him, was toward what place, what reality, that passage led.

"The question," he said, "is where. The answer," he answered himself, "is wherever my merits take me."

General Entrescu was of the opinion that this hardly mattered, the important thing was to keep moving, the dynamic of motion, which made men and all living beings, including cockroaches, equal to the great stars. Baroness Von Zumpe said, and perhaps she was the only one to speak frankly, that death was a bore. General Von Berenberg declined to offer an opinion, as did the two general staff officers.

Then they talked about murder. The SS officer said that murder was an ambiguous, confusing, imprecise, vague, ill-defined word, easily misused. Hoensch agreed. General Von Berenberg said that he would rather leave the laws to the judges and the criminal courts and if a judge said a certain act was murder, then it was murder, and if the judge and the court ruled it wasn't, then it wasn't, and that was the end of the matter. The two general staff officers agreed.

General Entrescu confessed that his childhood heroes were always murderers and criminals, for whom, he said, he felt a great respect. The young scholar Popescu reminded the guests that murderers and heroes resembled each other in their solitariness, and, at least initially, in the public's lack of understanding of their actions.

Baroness Von Zumpe, meanwhile, said she had never in her life met a murderer, as was only natural, but she had met a criminal, if he could be called that, a despicable being imbued with a mysterious aura that made him attractive to women, in fact, she said, an aunt of hers, her father's only sister, fell in love with him, which almost drove her father mad and led him to challenge the man who had conquered his sisters heart to a duel, and to the surprise of everyone, the challenge was accepted, and the duel took place in the Heart of Autumn forest, outside Potsdam, a place that she, the Baroness Von Zumpe, had visited many years later in order to see with her own eyes the towering gray trees and the clearing, a sloping piece of ground some fifty yards across, where her father had done battle with that unpredictable man, who arrived at seven in the morning with two tramps instead of seconds, two beggars falling down drunk, of course, whereas her father's seconds were the Baron of X and the Count of Y, anyway, such a disgrace that the Baron of X himself, red with fury, was about to raise his own gun and kill the seconds who had come with Conrad Halder, that was the name of my aunt's beloved, as doubtless General Von Berenberg will recall (the general nodded though he had no idea what the Baroness Von Zumpe was talking about), the case was much discussed back then, before I was born, of course, in fact my father, the Baron Von Zumpe, was still a bachelor at the time, anyway, in that little forest with the romantic name the duel was fought, with pistols, of course, and although I don't know what rules were followed I suppose both men aimed and fired at once: my father's bullet passed a fraction of an inch from Halder's left shoulder, and no one heard Halder's shot, though everyone was convinced it hadn't hit its target either, since my father was a much better marksman and if anyone fell it would be Halder, not my father, but then, oh surprise, everyone, including my father, saw that Halder, far from lowering his arm, was still aiming, and then they understood that he hadn't fired yet and the duel, therefore, wasn't over, and then came the most surprising thing of all, especially if we take into account the reputation of the man, the pretender to the hand of my father's sister, who, far from shooting at my father, chose a part of his own anatomy, I think it was his left arm, and shot himself point-blank.

What happened next I don't know. I suppose they took Halder to a doctor. Or perhaps Halder went himself, with his beggar-seconds, to find a doctor to see to the wound, while my father stood motionless in the Heart of Autumn forest, seething with rage or livid at what he had just witnessed, while his seconds gathered around to console him and urge him not to concern himself, one could expect all sorts of buffoonery from these people.

Shortly afterward Halder ran away with my father's sister. For a while they lived in Paris and then in the south of France, where Halder, who was a painter, though I never saw any of his paintings, spent long stretches. Then they got married and settled in Berlin, or so I heard. Life was hard and my father's sister fell gravely ill. The day of her death my father received a telegram and that night he saw Halder for the second time. He found him drunk and half naked, while Halder's son, my cousin, who was three at the time, roamed the house, which was also Halder's studio, completely naked and daubed with paint.

That night they talked for the first time and possibly came to an agreement. My father took charge of his nephew and Conrad Halder left Berlin forever. Occasionally news came of him, always preceded by some small scandal. His Berlin paintings were left in the care of my father, who didn't have the heart to burn them. Once I asked where he kept them. He wouldn't tell me. I asked him what they were like. My father looked at me and said they were just dead women. Portraits of my aunt? No, said my father, other women, all dead.

No one at that dinner, of course, had ever seen a painting by Conrad Halder, except for the SS officer, who said the painter was a degenerate artist, clearly a disgrace to the Von Zumpe family. Then they talked about art, about the heroic in art, about still lifes, superstitions, and symbols.

Hoensch said that culture was a chain of links composed of heroic art and superstitious interpretations. The young scholar Popescu said culture was a symbol in the shape of a life buoy. The Baroness Von Zumpe said culture was essentially pleasure, anything that provided or bestowed pleasure, and the rest was just charlatanry. The SS officer said culture was the call of the blood, a call better heard by night than by day, and also, he said, a decoder of fate. General Von Berenberg said culture was Bach and that was enough for him. One of his general staff officers said culture was Wagner and that was enough for him too. The other general staff officer said culture was Goethe, and as the general had said, that was enough for him, sometimes more than enough. The life of a man is comparable only to the life of another man. The life of a man, he said, is only long enough to fully enjoy the works of another man.

General Entrescu, who was highly amused by the general staff officer's claim, said that for him, on the contrary, culture was life, not the life of a single man or the work of a single man, but life in general, any manifestation of it, even the most vulgar, and then he talked about the backdrops of some Renaissance paintings and he said those landscapes could be seen anywhere in Romania, and he talked about Madonnas and said that at that precise instant he was gazing on the face of a Madonna more beautiful than any Italian Renaissance painter's Madonna (Baroness Von Zumpe flushed), and finally he talked about cubism and modern painting and said that any abandoned wall or bombed-out wall was more interesting than the most famous cubist painting, never mind surrealism, he said, which couldn't hold a candle to the dream of a single illiterate Romanian peasant. After which there was a brief silence, brief but expectant, as if General Entrescu had said a bad word or a rude word or a word in poor taste or had insulted his German guests, since it had been his idea (his and Popescu's) to visit that gloomy castle. A silence that was nevertheless broken by the Baroness Von Zumpe when she asked, her tone ranging from innocent to worldly, what it was that the peasants of Romania dreamed and how he knew what those most peculiar peasants dreamed. To which General Entrescu responded with a frank laugh, an open and crystalline laugh, a laugh that in Bucharest's most fashionable circles was described, not without a hint of ambiguity, as the unmistakable laugh of a superman, and then, looking the Baroness Von Zumpe in the eye, he said that nothing about his men (he meant his soldiers, most of whom were peasants) was foreign to him.

"I steal into their dreams," he said. "I steal into their most shameful thoughts, I'm in every shiver, every spasm of their souls, I steal into their hearts, I scrutinize their most fundamental beliefs, I scan their irrational impulses, their unspeakable emotions, I sleep in their lungs during the summer and their muscles during the winter, and all of this I do without the least effort, without intending to, without asking or seeking it out, without constraints, driven only by love and devotion."

When it came time to go to sleep or move into another room adorned with suits of armor and swords and hunting trophies, where liquors and little cakes and Turkish cigarettes awaited them, General Von Berenberg excused himself and shortly afterward retired to his chambers. One of his officers, the Wagner enthusiast, followed his lead, whereas the other, the Goethe enthusiast, chose to prolong the evening. The Baroness Von Zumpe said she wasn't tired. Hoensch and the SS officer led the march to the next room. General Entrescu sat beside the baroness. The intellectual Popescu remained standing, next to the fireplace, observing the SS officer with curiosity.

Two soldiers, one of them Reiter, served as footmen. The other was a fat man with red hair, his name Kruse, who seemed on the verge of sleep.

First they praised the assortment of little cakes and then, without pause, they began to talk about Count Dracula, as if they had been waiting all night for this moment. It wasn't long before they broke into two factions, those who believed in the count and those who didn't. Among the latter were the general staff officer, General Entrescu, and the Baroness Von Zumpe. Among the former were Popescu, Hoensch, and the SS officer, though Popescu claimed that Dracula, whose real name was Vlad Tepes, aka Vlad the Impaler, was Romanian, and Hoensch and the SS officer claimed that Dracula was a noble Teuton, who had left Germany accused of an imaginary act of treason or disloyalty and had come to live with some of his loyal retainers in Transylvania a long time before Vlad Tepes was born, and while they didn't deny Tepes a real historical or Transylvanian existence, they believed that his methods, as revealed by his alias or nickname, had little or nothing to do with the methods of Dracula, who was more of a strangler than an impaler, and sometimes a throat slitter, and whose life abroad, so to speak, had been a constant dizzying spin, a constant abysmal penitence.

As far as Popescu was concerned, meanwhile, Dracula was simply a Romanian patriot who had resisted the Turks, a deed for which every European nation should to some degree be grateful. History is cruel, said Popescu, cruel and paradoxical: the man who halts the conquering onslaught of the Turks is transformed, thanks to a second-rate English writer, into a monster, a libertine whose sole interest is human blood, when the truth is that the only blood Tepes cared to spill was Turkish.

At this point, Entrescu, who despite the copious quantities of drink he had downed at dinner and continued to down during the postprandial hour, didn't seem drunk-in fact he gave the impression of being the most sober of the group, along with the fastidious SS officer, who scarcely wet his lips with alcohol-said it wasn't strange, if one cast a dispassionate glance over the great deeds of history (even the blank deeds of history, although this, of course, no one understood), that a hero should be transformed into a monster or the worst sort of villain or that he should unintentionally succumb to invisibility, in the same way that a villain or an ordinary person or a good-hearted mediocrity should become, with the passage of the centuries, a beacon of wisdom, a magnetic beacon capable of casting a spell over millions of human beings, without having done anything to justify such adoration, in fact without even having aspired to it or desired it (although all men, including the worst kind of ruffians, at some moment in their lives dream of reigning over man and time). Did Jesus Christ, he asked, suspect that someday his church would spread to the farthest corners of Earth? Did Jesus Christ, he asked, ever have what we, today, call an idea of the world? Did Jesus Christ, who apparently knew everything, know that the world was round and to the east lived the Chinese (this sentence he spat out, as if it cost him great effort to utter it) and to the west the primitive peoples of America? And he answered himself, no, although of course in a way having an idea of the world is easy, everybody has one, generally an idea restricted to one's village, bound to the land, to the tangible and mediocre things before one's eyes, and this idea of the world, petty, limited, crusted with the grime of the familiar, tends to persist and acquire authority and eloquence with the passage of time.

And then, taking an unexpected detour, General Entrescu began to talk about Flavius Josephus, that intelligent, cowardly, cautious man, a flatterer and odds-on gambler, whose idea of the world was much more complex and subtle than Christ's, if one paid it careful attention, but much less subtle than that of those who, it's said, helped to translate his History into Greek, in other words the lesser Greek philosophers, men for hire of the great man for hire, who gave shape to his shapeless writings, elegance to what was vulgar, who converted Flavius Josephus's splutterings of panic and death into something distinguished, gracious, and fine.

And then Entrescu began to envision those philosophers for hire, he saw them wandering the streets of Rome and the roads that lead to the sea, he saw them sitting by the side of those roads, bundled in their cloaks, mentally constructing an idea of the world, he saw them eating in portside taverns, dark places that smelled of seafood and spices, wine and fried food, until at last they faded away, just as Dracula faded away, with his blood-tinted armor and blood-tinted clothing, a stoic Dracula, a Dracula who read Seneca or took pleasure in hearing the German minnesingers and whose feats in Eastern Europe found their match only in the deeds described in the Chanson de Roland. Historically, that is, or politically, sighed Entrescu, as well as symbolically or poetically.

And at this point Entrescu apologized for letting himself be carried away by enthusiasm and was silent, and the lull was seized upon by Popescu, who began to talk about a Romanian mathematician who lived from 1865 to 1936, a man who spent the last twenty years of his life devoted to the search for some "mysterious numbers" hidden in a part of the vast landscape visible to man, though the numbers themselves were invisible and could live between rocks or between one room and another or even between one number and another, call it a kind of alternative mathematics camouflaged between seven and eight, just waiting for the man capable of seeing it and deciphering it. The only problem was that to decipher it one had to see it and to see it one had to decipher it.

When the mathematician talked about deciphering, explained Popescu, he really meant understanding, and when he talked about seeing, explained Popescu, he really meant applying, or so Popescu believed. Though perhaps not, he said, hesitating. Perhaps his disciples, among whom I count myself, misinterpreted his words. In any case, as was inevitable, the mathematician went out of his head one night and had to be sent to an asylum. Popescu and two other young men from Bucharest went to visit him. At first he didn't recognize them, but as the days went by and he no longer resembled a raging lunatic but simply a defeated old man, he remembered them or pretended to remember them and smiled. Nevertheless, at his family's request, he remained at the asylum. And anyway, because of his regular relapses, his doctors counseled an indefinite stay. One day Popescu went to see him. The doctors had given the mathematician a little notebook in which he drew the trees that surrounded the hospital, portraits of other patients, and architectural sketches of the houses visible from the grounds. For a long time they were silent, until Popescu decided to speak frankly. With the typical heedlessness of youth, he broached the subject of his teacher's madness or presumed madness. The mathematician laughed. There is no such thing as madness, he said. But you're here, said Popescu, and this is a madhouse. The mathematician didn't seem to be listening: the only real madness, if we can call it that, he said, is a chemical imbalance, which is easily cured by treatment with chemical products.

"But you're here, dear professor, you're here, you're here," shouted Popescu.

"For my own protection," said the mathematician.

Popescu didn't understand him. It occurred to him that he was talking to an utter lunatic, a hopeless lunatic. He covered his face with his hands and didn't move for some time. For a moment he thought he would fall asleep. Then he opened his eyes, rubbed them, and saw the mathematician sitting before him, watching him, his back straight, his legs crossed. Popescu asked whether something had happened. I saw something I shouldn't, said the mathematician. Popescu asked him to explain what he meant. If I explained, answered the mathematician, I would go mad again and possibly die. But for a man of your genius, said Popescu, being here is like being buried alive. The mathematician smiled kindly. You're wrong, he said, in fact I have everything here I need to stave off death: medicine, time, nurses and doctors, a notebook to draw in, a park.

Shortly afterward, however, the mathematician died. Popescu attended the burial. When it was over, he and some other disciples of the dead man went to a restaurant, where they ate and lingered until dusk. They told stories about the mathematician, they talked about posterity, someone compared man's fate to the fate of an old whore, and one boy, scarcely eighteen, who had just returned from a trip to India with his parents, recited a poem.

Two years later, purely by chance, Popescu was at a party with one of the doctors who had treated the mathematician during his stay at the asylum. The doctor was a sincere young man with a Romanian heart, which is to say a heart not deceitful in the slightest. Also, he was a bit drunk, which made confidences easier.

According to this doctor, the mathematician, upon being admitted, showed severe symptoms of schizophrenia, though he made favorable progress after a few days of treatment. One night when the doctor was on duty he went to the mathematician's room to talk a little, because, even with sleeping pills, the mathematician hardly slept and the hospital management allowed him to keep his light on as long as he wanted. The first surprise came when he opened the door. The mathematician wasn't in bed. For an instant the doctor thought he might have escaped but then he discovered him huddled in a dark corner. He crouched down beside him and after verifying that he was in fine physical shape he asked what was wrong. Then the mathematician said: nothing, and met his eyes, and in them the doctor saw a look of absolute fear of a sort he had never seen before, even in his daily dealings with so many madmen of the most varied types.

"What is a look of absolute fear?" Popescu asked.

The doctor belched a few times, shifted in his chair, and answered that it was a kind of look of mercy, but empty, as if all that were left of mercy, after a mysterious voyage, was the skin, as if mercy were a skin of water, say, in the hands of a Tatar horseman who gallops away over the steppe and dwindles until he vanishes, and then the horseman returns, or the ghost of the horseman returns, or his shadow, or the idea of him, and he has the skin, empty of water now, because he drank it all during his trip, or he and his horse drank it, and the skin is empty now, it's a normal skin, an empty skin, because after all the abnormal thing is a skin swollen with water, but this skin swollen with water, this hideous skin swollen with water doesn't arouse fear, doesn't awaken it, much less isolate it, but the empty skin does, and that was what he saw in the mathematician's face, absolute fear.

But the most interesting thing, the doctor said to Popescu, was that after a while the mathematician recovered and his look of alienation vanished without a trace, and as far as he knew, it never came back. That was the story Popescu had to tell, and like Entrescu before him, he expressed regret for going on too long and probably boring them, which the others hastened to deny, although their voices lacked conviction. From that moment on, conversation began to flag and soon afterward they all retired to their rooms.

But there were more surprises still in store for Reiter. In the early morning hours he felt someone shaking him. He opened his eyes. It was Kruse. Unable to make out what Kruse was saying, the words whispered in his ear, he grabbed him by the neck and squeezed. Another hand dropped on his shoulder. It was their comrade Neitzke.

"Don't hurt him, idiot," said Neitzke.

Reiter let go of Kruse's neck and listened to the proposal. Then he dressed quickly and followed them. They left the cellar that served as sleeping quarters and turned into a long hallway where Wilke, another comrade, was waiting for them. Wilke was a small man, no more than five foot two, with a wizened face and intelligent eyes. When they reached him they shook hands, because Wilke was a formal man and his comrades knew that with him one had to adhere to protocol. Then they went up a staircase and opened a door. The room they came to was empty and cold, as if Dracula had just stepped out. The only thing there was an old mirror that Wilke lifted off the stone wall, uncovering a secret passageway. Neitzke took out a flashlight and passed it to Wilke.

They walked for more than ten minutes, going up and down stone stairs, not knowing whether they were at the top of the castle or whether they had returned to the cellar by a different path. The passageway split every ten yards, and Wilke, who was in the lead, got lost several times. As they walked, Kruse whispered that there was something strange about the passageways. They asked what was strange and Kruse answered that there weren't any rats. Good, said Wilke, I hate rats. Reiter and Neitzke agreed. I don't like rats either, said Kruse, but there are always rats in the passageways of a castle, especially if it's an old castle, and here we haven't come across a single one. The others meditated in silence on Kruse's remark and after a while they admitted there was something shrewd about it. It really was strange they hadn't seen a single rat. Finally they stopped and shone the flashlight behind them and ahead of them, over the ceiling of the passageway and the floor that snaked away like a shadow. Not a single rat. All for the best. They lit four cigarettes and each man described how he would make love to the Baroness Von Zumpe. Then they moved on in silence until they began to sweat and Neitzke said it was hard to breathe.

Then they turned back, with Kruse leading the way, and they soon reached the mirror room, where Neitzke and Kruse took their leave. After saying goodbye, Wilke and Reiter returned to the labyrinth, but this time they didn't talk, so that the sound of their whispers wouldn't confuse them again. Wilke thought he heard footsteps, footsteps gliding behind him. Reiter walked for a while with his eyes closed. When they were just about to despair, they found what they were looking for: a side passage, very narrow, that ran through the stone walls, walls that looked thick but were apparently hollow, and in which there were peepholes or tiny slits that provided a nearly perfect view of the rooms behind.

And so they were able to look into the room of the SS officer, lit by three candles, and they saw the SS officer up, wrapped in a robe, writing something at a table near the fireplace. The expression on his face was forlorn. And although that was all there was to see, Wilke and Reiter patted each other on the back, because only then were they sure they were on the right path. They moved on.

By touch they discovered other peepholes. Rooms lit by the light of the moon or in shadows, where, if they pressed an ear to the hole bored in the stone, they could hear the snores or sighs of a sleeper. The next lit room belonged to General Von Berenberg. There was a single candle, set in a candlestick on the night table, and its flame wavered as if someone had left the huge window open, making shadows and ghostly shapes that at first disguised the spot where the general knelt at the foot of the big canopied bed, praying. Von Berenberg's face was contorted, Reiter noted, as if he bore a huge weight on his shoulders, not the life of his soldiers, certainly, or his family, or even his own life, but the weight of his conscience, which was something that grew clear to Reiter and Wilke before they moved away from that peephole, struck with astonishment or horror.

Finally, after passing other watch points plunged in darkness and sleep, they arrived at their true destination, the room of the Baroness Von Zumpe, a room lit by nine candles and presided over by the portrait of a soldier or warrior monk with the intent and tortured air of a hermit, in whose face, which hung three feet from the bed, one could observe all the bitterness of abstinence and penitence and self-abnegation.

Beneath a naked man with an abundance of hair on his upper back and legs, they glimpsed the Baroness Von Zumpe, her golden curls and part of her lily-white forehead occasionally emerging from behind the left shoulder of the person thrusting on top of her. The cries of the baroness alarmed Reiter at first, who was slow to understand that they were cries of pleasure, not pain. When the coupling ended, General Entrescu got up from the bed and they watched him walk to a table where a bottle of vodka stood. His penis, from which hung a not negligible quantity of seminal fluid, was still erect or half erect and must have measured nearly a foot long, Wilke reflected afterward, his calculations on the mark.

He looked more like a horse than a man, Wilke told his comrades. And he had the stamina of a horse too, because after swallowing some vodka he returned to the bed where the Baroness Von Zumpe was drowsing and after he had rearranged her he began to fuck her again, at first scarcely moving, but then with such violence that the baroness, on her belly, bit the palm of her hand until she drew blood, so as not to scream. By now Wilke had unbuttoned his fly and was masturbating, leaning against the wall. Reiter heard him moan beside him. First he thought it was a rat that just happened to be breathing its last somewhere nearby. A baby rat. But when he saw Wilke's penis and Wilke's hand moving back and forth, he was disgusted and elbowed him in the chest. Wilke ignored him and continued to masturbate. Reiter glanced at his face: Wilke's profile struck him as very odd. It looked like an engraving of a worker or artisan, an innocent passerby suddenly blinded by a ray of moonlight. He seemed to be dreaming, or, more accurately, momentarily breaking through the massive black walls that separate waking from sleep. So he left him alone and after a while he began to touch himself too, at first discreetly, through his trousers, and then openly, pulling out his penis and adjusting to the rhythm of General Entrescu and the Baroness Von Zumpe, who wasn't biting her hand anymore (a bloodstain had spread on the sheet next to her sweaty cheeks) but crying and speaking words that neither the general nor the two soldiers understood, words that went beyond Romania, beyond even Germany and Europe, beyond a country estate, beyond some hazy friendships, beyond what they, Wilke and Reiter, though perhaps not General Entrescu, understood by love, desire, sexuality.

Then Wilke came on the wall and mumbled something too, a soldier's prayer, and soon afterward Reiter came on the wall and bit his lips without saying a word. And then Entrescu got up and they saw, or thought they saw, drops of blood on his penis shiny with semen and vaginal fluid, and then Baroness Von Zumpe asked for a glass of vodka, and then they watched as Entrescu and the baroness stood entwined, each with a glass in hand and an air of distraction, and then Entrescu recited a poem in his tongue, which the baroness didn't understand but whose musicality she lauded, and then Entrescu closed his eyes and cocked his head as if to listen to something, the music of the spheres, and then he opened his eyes and sat at the table and set the baroness on his cock, erect again (the famous foot-long cock, pride of the Romanian army), and the cries and moans and tears resumed, and as the baroness sank down onto Entrescu's cock or Entrescu's cock rose up into the Baroness Von Zumpe, the Romanian general recited a new poem, a poem that he accompanied by waving both arms (the baroness clinging to his neck), a poem that again neither of them understood, except for the word Dracula, which was repeated every four lines, a poem that might have been martial or satirical or metaphysical or marmoreal or even anti-German, but whose rhythm seemed made to order for the occasion, a poem that the young baroness, sitting astride Entrescu's thighs, celebrated by swaying back and forth, like a little shepherdess gone wild in the vastness of Asia, digging her nails into her lover's neck, scrubbing the blood that still flowed from her right hand on her lover's face, smearing the corners of his lips with blood, while Entrescu, undeterred, continued to recite his poem in which the word Dracula sounded every four lines, a poem that was surely satirical, decided Reiter (with infinite joy) as Wilke jerked off again.

When it was all over, though for the unflagging Entrescu and the unflagging baroness it was far from over, they filed silently back down the secret passageways, silently replaced the mirror, crept silently down to the improvised underground barracks, and slipped silently into bed next to their respective guns and kits.

The next morning the detachment left the castle after the departure of the two carloads of guests. Only the SS officer remained behind while they swept, washed, and tidied everything. Then, when the officer was fully satisfied with their efforts, he ordered them off and the detachment climbed into the truck and headed back down to the plain. Only the SS officer's car-with no driver, which was odd-was left at the castle. As they drove away, Reiter saw the officer: he had climbed up to the battlements and was watching the detachment leave, craning his neck, rising up on tiptoe, until the castle, on the one hand, and the truck, on the other, disappeared from view.

While he was posted in Romania, Reiter requested and obtained two leaves that he used to visit his parents. Back in the village, he spent the day lying on the rocky shore watching the sea, but with no urge to swim, much less dive, or he took long walks through the countryside, walks that invariably ended at the ancestral home of the Baron Von Zumpe, empty and diminished, now watched over by the old gamekeeper, with whom he sometimes stopped to talk, although the conversations, if they could be called that, were mostly frustrating. The gamekeeper asked how the war was going and Reiter shrugged. Reiter, in turn, asked about the baroness (actually he asked about the young baroness, which was how the locals referred to her) and the gamekeeper shrugged. The shrugs could mean he didn't know or that reality was increasingly vague, more like a dream, or that everything was going badly and it was best not to ask questions and to gird oneself with patience.

He also spent long periods with his sister, Lotte, who was ten by then and adored her brother. This devotion made Reiter laugh, but it made him sad, too, and he was swamped by grim thoughts in which everything was meaningless, though he was careful not to come to any resolve because he was sure he would end up shot. No one commits suicide in wartime, he thought as he lay in bed listening to his mother and father snore. Why not? Well, for convenience's sake, to postpone the inevitable, because human beings tend to leave their fate in the hands of others. In fact, the suicide rate is highest in wartime, but Reiter was too young then (though he could no longer be called completely untutored) to know that. On both leaves, too, he visited Berlin (on the way to his village) and tried in vain to find Hugo Halder.

He couldn't find him. A family of civil servants with four adolescent daughters lived in Halder's old flat. When he asked whether the previous tenant had left an address where he could be found, the head of the family, a party member, answered curtly that he didn't know, but as Reiter was leaving, one of the daughters, the oldest and prettiest, caught up to him on the stairs and said she knew where Halder was living now. Then she continued down the stairs and Reiter followed her. The girl dragged him to a public park. There, in a corner safe from prying eyes, she turned, as if seeing him for the first time, and hurled herself at him, planting a kiss on his mouth. Reiter pulled away and asked why in heaven she was kissing him. The girl said she was happy to see him. Reiter studied her eyes, a washed-out blue, like the eyes of a blind woman, and realized he was talking to a madwoman.

Even so, he wanted to know what information the girl had about Halder. She said that if he didn't let her kiss him she wouldn't tell him. They kissed again: the girl's tongue was very dry at first and Reiter caressed it with his tongue until it was thoroughly moistened. Where does Hugo Halder live now? he asked. The girl smiled at him as if Reiter were a slow child. Can't you guess? she asked. Reiter shook his head. The girl, who couldn't have been more than sixteen, began to laugh so hard that Reiter was afraid if she didn't stop the police would come, and he could think of no better way of silencing her than kissing her on the mouth again.

"My name is Ingeborg," said the girl when Reiter removed his lips from hers.

"My name is Hans Reiter," he said.

Then she looked at the sandy, pebbly ground and paled visibly, as if she were about to faint.

"My name," she repeated, "is Ingeborg Bauer, I hope you won't forget me."

From this moment on they spoke in fainter and fainter whispers.

"I won't," said Reiter.

"Swear it," said the girl.

"I swear," said Reiter.

"Who do you swear by? Your mother, your father, God?" asked the girl.

"I swear by God," said Reiter.

"I don't believe in God," said the girl.

"Then I swear by my mother and father," said Reiter.

"An oath like that is no good," said the girl, "parents are no good, people are always trying to forget they have parents."

"Not me," said Reiter.

"Yes, you," said the girl, "and me, and everyone."

"Then I swear to you by whatever you want," said Reiter.

"Do you swear by your division?" asked the girl.

"I swear by my division and regiment and battalion," said Reiter, and then he added that he also swore by his corps and his army group.

"Don't tell anyone," said the girl, "but to be honest, I don't believe in the army."

"What do you believe in?" asked Reiter.

"Not much," said the girl after pondering her reply for a second. "Sometimes I even forget what I believe in. There are so few things, and so many things I don't believe in, such a huge number of things, that they hide what I do believe in. Right now, for example, I can't remember anything."

"Do you believe in love?" asked Reiter.

"Frankly, no," said the girl.

"What about honesty?" asked Reiter.

"Ugh, that's worse than love," said the girl.

"Do you believe in sunsets," asked Reiter, "starry nights, bright mornings?"

"No, no, no," said the girl with a gesture of evident distaste, "I don't believe in anything ridiculous."

"You're right," said Reiter. "What about books?"

"Even worse," said the girl, "and anyway in my house there are only Nazi books, Nazi politics, Nazi history, Nazi economics, Nazi mythology, Nazi poetry, Nazi novels, Nazi plays."

"I had no idea the Nazis had written so much," said Reiter.

"As far as I can tell, you don't have much idea about anything, Hans," said the girl, "except kissing me."

"True," said Reiter, who was always ready to admit his ignorance.

By then they were strolling through the park holding hands and every so often Ingeborg would stop and kiss Reiter on the mouth and anyone who saw them might have thought they were just a young soldier and his girl, with no money to go anywhere else, very much in love and with many things to tell each other. And yet if this hypothetical observer had approached the couple and looked them in the eyes he would have seen that the young woman was mad and the young soldier knew it and didn't care. Truthfully, by now Reiter didn't care that the girl was crazy, much less about his friend Hugo Halder's address. All he cared about was learning once and for all the few things Ingeborg felt were worthy of swearing by. So he asked and asked and made tentative suggestions: the girl's sisters and the city of Berlin and world peace and the children of the world and the birds of the world and the opera and the rivers of Europe and the faces, dear God, of men she had loved, and her own life (Ingeborg's), and friendship and humor and everything he could think of, and he received one negative response after another, until at last, after they had explored every corner of the park, the girl remembered two things she thought were valid oaths.

"Do you want to know what they are?"

"Of course I do!" said Reiter.

"I hope you won't laugh when I tell you."

"I won't laugh," said Reiter.

"The first is storms," said the girl.

"Storms?" asked Reiter, greatly surprised.

"Only big storms, when the sky turns black and the air turns gray. Thunder, lightning, and peasants killed when they cross fields," said the girl.

"Now I understand," said Reiter, who didn't love storms. "So what's the second thing?"

"The Aztecs," said the girl.

"The Aztecs?" asked Reiter, more perplexed than by the storms.

"That's right, the Aztecs," said the girl, "the people who lived in Mexico before Cortes came, the ones who built the pyramids."

"Oh, the Aztecs, those Aztecs," said Reiter.

"They're the only Aztecs," said the girl, "the ones who lived in Tenochtitlan and Tlatelolco and performed human sacrifices and inhabited two cities built around lakes."

"Oh, so they lived in two cities built around lakes," said Reiter.

"Yes," said the girl.

For a while they walked in silence. Then the girl said: I imagine those cities to be like Geneva and Montreux. Once I was with my family on holiday in Switzerland. We went by ferry from Geneva to Montreux. Lake Geneva is marvelous in summer, although there are perhaps too many mosquitoes. We spent the night at an inn in Montreux and the next day we returned by ferry again to Geneva. Have you been to Lake Geneva?"

"No," said Reiter.

"It's very beautiful and it isn't just those two cities, there are many towns on the lake, like Lausanne, which is bigger than Montreux, or Vevey, or Evian. In fact there are more than twenty towns, some tiny. Do you see?"

"Vaguely," said Reiter.

"Look, this is the lake"-the girl drew the lake with the tip of her shoe on the ground-"here's Geneva, here, and at the other end, Montreux, and these are the other towns. Do you see now?"

"Yes," said Reiter.

"Well, that's how I imagine the lake of the Aztecs," said the girl as she rubbed out the map with her shoe. "Except much prettier. With no mosquitoes, nice weather all year round, and lots of pyramids, so many and so big it's impossible to count them all, pyramids on top of pyramids, pyramids behind other pyramids, all stained red with the blood of daily sacrifices. And then I imagine the Aztecs, but perhaps that doesn't interest you," said the girl.

"It does," said Reiter, who until then had never given the Aztecs any thought.

"They're very strange people," said the girl. "If you look them closely in the face, after a moment you realize they're mad. But they aren't shut up in a madhouse. Or maybe they are. But they don't seem to be. The Aztecs dress with great elegance, they're very careful when they choose what clothes to wear each day, one might think they spent hours in a dressing room, choosing the proper attire, and then they put on very precious plumed hats, and necklaces and rings, as well as gems on their arms and feet, and both the men and the women paint their faces, and then they go out for a walk along the lakeshore, never speaking to one another, absorbed in contemplation of the passing boats, whose crews, if they aren't Aztec, lower their gaze and keep fishing or hurry away, because some Aztecs are seized by cruel whims, and after strolling like philosophers they go into the pyramids, which are completely hollow and look like cathedrals inside, and are illuminated only by a light from above, light filtered through a great obsidian stone, in other words a dark, sparkling light. By the way, have you ever seen a piece of obsidian?" asked the girl.

"No, never," said Reiter, "or maybe I have and I didn't know it."

"You would have known it instantly," said the girl. "Obsidian is a black or very dark green feldspar, a curious thing in itself because feldspar tends to be white or yellowish. The most important kinds of feldspar, for your information, are orthoclase, albite, and labradorite. But the kind I like best is obsidian. Well, back to the pyramids. At the top is the sacrificial stone. Can you guess what it's made of?"

"Obsidian," said Reiter.

"Precisely," said the girl, "a stone like a surgeon's table, where the Aztec priests or doctors lay their victims before tearing out their hearts. But now comes the part that will really surprise you. This stone bed where the victims were laid was transparent! It was a sacrificial stone chosen and polished in such a way that it was transparent. And the Aztecs inside the pyramid watched the sacrifice as if from within, because as you'll have guessed, the light from above that illuminated the bowels of the pyramids came from an opening just beneath the sacrificial stone, so that at first the light was black or gray, a dim light in which only the inscrutable silhouettes of the Aztecs inside the pyramids could be seen, but then, as the blood of the new victim spread across the skylight of transparent obsidian, the light turned red and black, a very bright red and a very bright black, and then not only were the silhouettes of the Aztecs visible but also their features, features transfigured by the red and black light, as if the light had the power to personalize each man or woman, and that is essentially all, but that can last a long time, that exists outside time, or in some other time, ruled by other laws. When the Aztecs came out of the pyramids, the sunlight didn't hurt them. They behaved as if there were an eclipse of the sun. And they returned to their daily rounds, which basically consisted of strolling and bathing and then strolling again and spending a long time standing still in contemplation of imperceptible things or studying the patterns insects made in the dirt and eating with friends, but always in silence, which is the same as eating alone, and every so often they made war. And above them in the sky there was always an eclipse," said the girl.

"Well, well, well," said Reiter, impressed by his new friend's knowledge.

For a while, without intending to, the pair walked in silence through the park, as if they were Aztecs, until the girl asked what he would swear by, Aztecs or storms.

"I don't know," said Reiter, who had already forgotten what he had to swear to.

"Choose," said the girl, "and think carefully because it's much more important than you understand."

"What's important?" asked Reiter.

"Your oath," said the girl.

"And why is it important?" asked Reiter.

"For you, I don't know," said the girl, "but for me it's important because it will mark my fate."

At that moment Reiter remembered that he had to swear he would never forget her and he felt great sorrow. For a moment he could scarcely breathe and then he felt as if the words were catching in his throat. He decided he would swear by the Aztecs, since he didn't like storms.

"I swear by the Aztecs," he said, "I'll never forget you."

"Thank you," said the girl, and they kept walking.

After a while, although he no longer cared, Reiter asked for Halder's address.

"He lives in Paris," said the girl with a sigh. "I don't have the address."

"Ah," said Reiter.

"It's only natural that he lives in Paris," said the girl.

Reiter thought that maybe she was right and it was the most natural thing in the world that Halder had moved to Paris. When it began to get dark Reiter walked the girl to her front door and then went running to the station.

The attack on the Soviet Union began on June 22, 1941. The 79th Division was attached to the 11 th German Army, and a few days later the division's advance troops crossed the Prut and marched shoulder to shoulder into combat, along with the Romanian army corps, who showed much more spirit than the Germans expected. And yet their advance was not as rapid as that of the units of Army Group South, composed of the 6th Army, the 17th Army, and the 1st Panzer Group, as it was called at the time, although during the course of the war it would come to be known-along with the 2nd Panzer Group, the 3rd Panzer Group, and the 4th Panzer Group-as the more intimidating Panzer Army. The human and material resources of the llth Army were, as might be expected, infinitely smaller, not to mention the matter of the region's terrain and scarcity of roads. Nor could it rely on the surprise factor that had favored Army Groups South, Central, and North. But Reiter's division delivered what its commanders expected of it and they crossed the Prut and fought and then they fought some more on the steppes and hills of Bessarabia and then they crossed the Dniester and came to the outskirts of Odessa and then they advanced, while the Romanians halted, and fought Russian troops in retreat and then they crossed the Bug and kept advancing, leaving a wake of burned Ukrainian villages and granaries and woods that suddenly burst into flames as if by means of a mysterious process of combustion, woods like dark islands in the middle of endless wheat fields.

Who's setting fire to the woods? Reiter asked Wilke sometimes, and Wilke shrugged, and so did Neitzke and Kruse and Sergeant Lemke, exhausted from walking, because the 79th was a light infantry division, in other words a division that moved under its own steam, powered only by mules and soldiers, the function of the mules to pull the heavy equipment and the function of the soldiers to walk and fight, as if lightning warfare hadn't even blinked an eye on the division's organizational charts, like in Napoleonic times, said Wilke, marches and countermarches and forced marches, or rather constant forced marches, said Wilke, and then, without getting up from the ground where he lay like everyone else, he said I don't know who the hell is setting fires, it certainly wasn't us, was it, boys? and Neitzke said no, not us, and Kruse and Barz echoed him and even Sergeant Lemke said no, we burned that village there or we bombed this village to the left or right, but not the woods, and his men nodded and no one said another word, they just watched the blaze, the way the fire turned the dark island into an orangish red island, maybe it was Captain Ladenthin's battalion, someone said, they came this way, they must have encountered resistance in the woods, maybe it was the sapper battalion, said another, but the truth is they hadn't seen anyone in the area, whether German soldiers nearby or Soviet soldiers putting up a fight, only the black woods in the middle of a yellow sea, under a bright blue sky, and suddenly, without warning, as if they were in a great theater of wheat and the wood was the stage and proscenium of that theater in the round, the all-devouring, beautiful fire.

After the Bug, the division crossed the Dnieper and forged into the Crimean peninsula. Reiter fought in Perekop and several villages near Perekop whose names he never learned but along whose dirt streets he walked, clearing away corpses and ordering the elderly, women, and children to go inside and not come out. Sometimes he felt dizzy. Sometimes he noticed that when he stood up suddenly, a black fog rose before his eyes, full of granulated dots like a rain of meteors. But the meteors moved in a very odd way. Or they didn't move. They were motionless meteors. Sometimes, along with his companions, he flung himself into the conquest of an enemy position, taking no precautions at all, which gave him a reputation for daring and bravery, though all he sought was a bullet to bring peace to his heart. One night, he got into an unexpected discussion of suicide with Wilke.

"Good Christians masturbate but we don't commit suicide," Wilke said, and before Reiter went to sleep he pondered Wilke's words, because he suspected there might be a hidden truth behind the joke.

And yet his resolve was unshaken. During the battle for Chornomorske, in which the 310th Regiment and especially Reiter's battalion played an important role, Reiter risked his life at least three times, the first during an attack on a brick fortification on the outskirts of Kirovske, at the junction of Chernishove, Kirovske, and Chornomorske, a fort that wouldn't have withstood a single artillery volley, a fort that touched Reiter deeply from the moment he saw it because of the poverty and innocence it radiated, as if it had been built and were manned by children.

The company had no mortar rounds and decided to take it by storm. Volunteers were requested. Reiter was the first to step forward. He was joined almost immediately by Voss, who was also a brave man or a would-be suicide, and three others. The attack was quick: Reiter and Voss advanced along the left flank of the fort, the other three along the right. When they were twenty yards away, rifle fire came from inside. The three who were moving along the right flank dropped to the ground. Voss hesitated. Reiter kept running. He heard the hum of a bullet as it passed an inch from his head but he didn't get down. On the contrary, his body seemed to stretch up in a vain effort to see the faces of the adolescents who would put an end to his life, but he couldn't see anything. Another bullet brushed his right arm. He felt someone push him from behind and knock him down. It was Voss, who might have been rash but still retained some common sense.

For a while he watched as his comrade, after having pulled him to the ground, crawled toward the fort. He saw stones, weeds, wildflowers, and the nails in the soles of Voss's boots as he was left behind, the tiny cloud of dust Voss raised, tiny to us, he mused, but not to the processions of ants marching from north to south as Voss crawls east to west. Then he got up and began to fire at the fort, over Voss's body, and once again he heard the bullets whistle past his body as he fired and walked, like someone strolling and taking photographs, until the fort exploded, hit by a grenade and then another and another, lobbed by the soldiers on the right flank.

The second time he almost died was during the capture of Chor-nomorske. The two main regiments of the 79th Division led the attack after all the divisional artillery was concentrated near the piers, at the head of the road that linked Chornomorske with Evpatoria, Frunze, Inkerman, and Sevastopol, a road that lacked significant geographic landmarks. The first attack was repulsed. Reiter's battalion, which had been held in reserve, advanced in the second wave. The soldiers rushed over the barbed wire as the artillery adjusted its sights and pulverized the Soviet machine gun nests that had been located. As they ran, Reiter began to sweat, as if suddenly, in a fraction of a second, he had fallen ill. This time, he thought, he would die and the nearness of the sea convinced him even more thoroughly of this idea. First they crossed a field and then they came out into a garden where there was a little house, and from one of the windows, a tiny, asymmetric window, an old man with a white beard watched. It seemed to Reiter that the old man was eating something because his jaws moved.

On the other side of the garden there was a dirt road and a little farther on they saw five Soviet soldiers dragging a field gun behind them. They killed all five and kept running. Some continued along on the road and others turned into a pine grove.

In the grove Reiter spotted a figure in the undergrowth and stopped. It was the statue of a Greek goddess, or so he believed. Her hair was gathered up and she was tall, her expression impassive. Bathed in sweat, Reiter began to shake and stretched out his hand. The marble or stone, he couldn't say which, was cold. There was something absurd about where it stood, because that hidden spot in the trees was hardly the place for a statue. For a brief and painful instant, Reiter thought he should ask it something, but no question occurred to him and his face twisted in a grimace of suffering. Then he ran.

The grove ended at the edge of a ravine from which one could see the sea and the harbor and a kind of seaside drive bordered by trees and benches and white houses and three-story buildings that looked like hotels or spas. The trees were big and dark. In the hills a few houses were in flames and at the harbor a group of miniature people crowded onto a ship. The sky was very blue and the sea looked calm, nearly flat. To the left, along a winding road, the first men of his regiment appeared, as a few Russians fled and others raised their hands over their heads and came out of fish sheds with blackened walls. The men with Reiter went down the hill toward a square on which two new five-story buildings rose, painted white. When they reached the square, they were fired upon from several windows. The soldiers sought cover behind the trees, except for Reiter, who kept walking as if he hadn't heard anything, until he reached the door of one of the buildings. One of the walls was painted with a mural of an old sailor reading a letter. Some of the letters lines were perfectly legible by the viewer, but they were written in Cyrillic and Reiter didn't understand a thing. The tiles on the floor were big and green. There was no elevator so Reiter began to climb the stairs. When he got to the first landing someone shot at him. He saw a shadow pop up and then he felt a sting in his right arm. He kept climbing. He was shot at again. He stood still. The wound was hardly bleeding and the pain was perfectly bearable. Maybe I'm dead already, he thought. Then he thought he wasn't and he shouldn't faint, not until he took a bullet in the head. He turned toward one of the flats and kicked open the door. He saw a table, four chairs, a glass cabinet full of dishes with a few books on top. In the room he found a woman and two little boys. The woman was very young and gazed at him in terror. I won't hurt you, he said, and tried to smile as he retreated. Then he went into another flat and two militiamen with closely cropped hair raised their hands and surrendered. Reiter didn't even glance at them. People came out of the other flats, looking as if they were starving or like pupils at a reform school. In one room, next to an open window, he found two old rifles that he threw down into the street as he signaled to his comrades to stop shooting.

The third time he almost died was weeks later, during the attack on Sevastopol. This time the advance was driven back. Each time the German troops tried to stake out a line of defense, the city's artillery loosed a rain of projectiles on them. In the area outside the city, near the Russian trenches, there were stacks of the mutilated bodies of German and Romanian soldiers. More than once the struggle was hand to hand. The assault troops reached a trench of Russian sailors and fought for five minutes, after which one side retreated. But then more Russian sailors appeared shouting hurrahs and the battle began again. For Reiter, the presence of the sailors in those dusty trenches was charged with terrible and exhilarating portents. One of them, surely, would kill him and then he would sink down again into the depths of the Baltic or the Atlantic or the Black Sea, because all seas were ultimately the same sea, and at the bottom of the sea a forest of seaweed awaited him. Or he would simply disappear, no more.

To Wilke, the whole business was insane, because where had the Russian sailors come from? what were they doing there, miles from their natural element, the sea and ships? It made no sense unless the Stukas had sunk all the ships in the Russian fleet, Wilke speculated, or the Black Sea had dried up, which naturally he didn't believe. But he said this only to Reiter, because the others never questioned anything they saw or that happened to them. In one attack Neitzke and several others from the company were killed. One night, in the trenches, Reiter rose up to his full height and gazed at the stars, but his attention, inevitably, was diverted toward Sevastopol. The city in the distance was a black mass with red mouths that opened and closed. The soldiers called it the bone crusher, but that night it didn't strike Reiter as a machine but as the reincarnation of a mythological being, a living creature struggling to draw breath. Sergeant Lemke ordered him to get down. Reiter eyed him from above, took off his helmet, scratched his head, and before he could put his helmet back on, he was felled by a bullet. As he dropped he felt another bullet penetrate his chest. He gazed dimly at Sergeant Lemke: he thought the sergeant looked like an ant that gradually grew bigger and bigger. Some five hundred yards away, several artillery rounds fell.

Two weeks later Reiter received the Iron Cross. A colonel presented it to him in the field hospital at Novoselivske. The colonel shook Reiter's hand, told him there had been outstanding reports on his actions in Chornomorske and Mykolaivka, and then left. Reiter couldn't talk because a bullet had pierced his throat. The wound in his chest healed well and soon he was transferred from the Crimean peninsula to Krivoy Rog, in Ukraine, where there was a bigger hospital, and his throat was operated on again. After the operation he could eat normally and move his neck as he had before, but he still couldn't talk.

The doctors who treated him didn't know whether to give him leave to return to Germany or send him back to his division, which was still engaged in the siege of Sevastopol and Kerch. The arrival of winter and the Soviet counterattack that overran parts of the German line postponed the decision and finally Reiter was neither sent to Germany nor reinstated in his unit.

But since he couldn't stay at the hospital either, he was sent with three other wounded men from the 79th to the village of Kostekino, on the banks of the Dnieper, which some called Budienny Model Farm and others Sweet Spring, because of a spring, a tributary of the Dnieper, whose waters were of a sweetness and purity unusual in the region. Really, Kostekino was scarcely a village. There were a few houses scattered among the hills, half-collapsed old wooden fences, two rotting granaries, and a dirt road, impassable in winter because of the snow and mud, that connected the village to a town on the rail line. On the outskirts there was an abandoned sovkhoz that five Germans tried to start up again. Most of the houses were abandoned, according to some because the villagers had fled the advance of the German army, according to others because they had been conscripted by the Red Army.

For the first few days Reiter slept in what must have been an agronomy office or possibly the Communist Party headquarters, the only brick and cement building in town, but cohabitation with the few German engineers and convalescents who lived in Kostekino soon grew unbearable. So he decided to take up residence in one of the many empty farmhouses. At first glance, they all looked alike. One night, as he was having coffee at the brick house, Reiter heard a different account of the villagers' disappearance: they had neither been conscripted nor fled. The depopulation was the direct consequence of the passage through Kostekino of a detachment of the Einsatzgruppe C, which proceeded to physically eliminate all the Jews in the village. Since he couldn't speak he didn't ask any questions, but he spent the next day studying the houses more closely.

In none of them did he find any object that might indicate the origin or religion of the former inhabitants. Finally he settled in a house near Sweet Spring. The first night he spent there he was woken several times by nightmares. But he couldn't remember what he had dreamed. The bed he slept in was narrow and very soft, next to the fireplace, on the first floor. The second floor was a kind of attic where there was another bed and a tiny round window, like a porthole. In a big chest he found a number of books, most in Russian, but some, to his surprise, in German. Since he knew that many Eastern European Jews spoke German, he guessed that the house had in fact belonged to a Jew. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, after waking up shouting from a nightmare, he would light the candle he always kept beside the bed and sit still for a long time, with the blankets cast off, contemplating the objects that danced in the candlelight and feeling that there was no hope as he slowly froze in the cold. Sometimes, in the morning, when he awoke, he would lie still again, staring up at the mud and straw ceiling, and it seemed to him there was something indefinably feminine about the house.

Nearby lived some Ukrainians who weren't from Kostekino and had arrived recently to work on the old sovkhoz. When he left the house the Ukrainians lifted their caps and bowed slightly in greeting. The first few days Reiter didn't respond. But then, timidly, he raised his hand and waved as if to say goodbye. Each morning he walked to the stream. With his knife he hacked a hole and then lowered a pot and ladled out some water that he drank where he stood, not minding the cold.

With the arrival of winter all the Germans holed up in the brick building and sometimes they caroused until dawn. Everyone had forgotten them, as if they had disappeared with the collapse of the front. Sometimes they went out in search of women. Other times they made love among themselves and no one said anything. This is a frozen paradise, said one of Reiter's old comrades from the 79th. Reiter stared at him as if he had no idea what he was talking about and the soldier patted him on the back and said poor Reiter, poor Reiter.

At some point, Reiter looked at himself in a mirror he found in a corner of the farmhouse. It had been a long time, and he almost didn't recognize himself. His beard was blond and tangled, his hair long and dirty, his eyes vacant and dry. Shit, he thought. Then he took the bandage off his throat: the wound seemed to have healed without trouble, but the bandage was dirty, and the crusted blood made it stiff, so he decided to throw it in the fire. Then he went looking all over the house for something to use as a bandage and that was how he found the papers of Boris Abramovich Ansky and the hiding place behind the hearth.

The hiding place was extremely simple but extremely clever too. The hearth, which also served as cookstove, was wide enough and the flue deep enough so that a person could crouch inside. If the width was apparent at a glance, it was impossible to tell the depth from outside, because the soot-blackened walls afforded subtle camouflage. The eye couldn't discern the gap at the rear, just a crack, but big enough so that one person, sitting with his knees drawn up, could be safe there in the dark. Although for the hiding place to work perfectly, mused Reiter, alone in the solitude of the farmhouse, there had to be two people: one to hide and one to stay in the room and put a pot of soup on to heat and then light the fire and stoke it again and again.

For many days this problem occupied his thoughts, because he believed that if he solved it he would have a better idea of the life or state of mind or the degree of desperation that had once afflicted Boris Ansky or someone Boris Ansky knew very well. On various occasions he tried to light a fire from inside. He managed it only once. Hanging a pot of water or lighting the samovar turned out to be an impossible task, so in the end he decided that whoever built the hiding place had done it thinking that someone, someday, would hide and another person would help him to hide. The rescued, thought Reiter, and the rescuer. The survivor and the victim. The one who flees when night falls and the one who stays and surrenders. Sometimes, in the afternoons, he got into the hiding place, armed only with Boris Ansky's papers and a candle, and he sat there until well into the night, until his joints were stiff and his limbs frozen, reading, reading.

Boris Abramovich Ansky was born in 1909, in Kostekino, in the same house that Reiter the soldier now occupied. His parents were Jews, like almost all the villagers, and they made a living selling shirts, which his father bought wholesale in Dnepropetrovsk and sometimes in Odessa and then resold in the neighboring villages. His mother raised chickens and sold eggs and they didn't need to buy vegetables because they kept a garden, small but well tended. They had just one son, Boris, when they were already approaching old age, like the biblical Abraham and Sarah, which filled them with happiness.

Sometimes, when Abraham Ansky saw his friends, he would joke about it, saying his son was so spoiled that every so often he thought the boy should have been sacrificed when he was little. The village's Orthodox Jews were scandalized or pretended to be scandalized and the others laughed openly when Abraham Ansky concluded: but instead of sacrificing him I sacrificed a hen! a hen! a hen! not a sheep or my firstborn but a hen! the hen that lays the golden eggs!

At fourteen Boris Ansky enlisted in the Red Army. His goodbyes were heartbreaking. First his father began to weep inconsolably, then his mother, and finally Boris threw himself into their arms and wept too. The trip to Moscow was unforgettable. Along the way he saw incredible faces, heard incredible conversations or speeches, read incredible proclamations on the walls that announced the paradise at hand, and everything he came upon, whether on foot or on the train, affected him deeply because this was the first time he'd left his village, with the exception of two trips he'd taken with his father to sell shirts in the region. In Moscow he visited a recruitment office and when he tried to enlist to fight Wrangel he was told that Wrangel had already been defeated. Then Ansky said he wanted to enlist to fight the Poles and he was told that the Poles had already been defeated. Then Ansky shouted that he wanted to fight Krasnov or Denikin and he was told that Denikin and Krasnov had already been defeated. Then Ansky said all right, he wanted to fight the White Cossacks or the Czechs or Koltchak or Yudenitsch or the Allied troops and he was told that all of them had already been defeated. News comes late to your village, they said. And they also asked: where are you from, boy? And Ansky said Kostekino, near the Dnieper. And then an old soldier who was smoking a pipe asked him his name and whether he was Jewish. And Ansky said yes, he was Jewish, and he looked the old soldier in the face and only then did he notice that he was missing an eye, and also an arm.

"I had a Jewish comrade, in the campaign against the Poles," said the old man, exhaling a puff of smoke.

"What's his name?" asked Ansky. "Maybe I know him." "Do you know all the Jews in the Soviet republic, boy?" the one-eyed, one-armed soldier asked.

"No, of course not," said Ansky, flushing.

"His name was Dmitri Verbitsky," said the one-eyed man from his corner, "and he died fifty miles from Warsaw."

Then the one-eyed man shifted in his chair, pulled a blanket up to his chin, and said: our commander's name was Korolenko and he died the same day. Then, at supersonic speed, Ansky imagined Verbitsky and Korolenko, he saw Korolenko mocking Verbitsky, heard what Korolenko said behind Verbitsky's back, entered into Verbitsky's night thoughts, Korolenko's desires, into each man's vague and shifting dreams, into their convictions and their rides on horseback, the forests they left behind and the flooded lands they crossed, the sounds of night in the open and the unintelligible morning conversations before they mounted again. He saw villages and farmland, he saw churches and hazy clouds of smoke rising on the horizon, until he came to the day when they both died, Verbitsky and Korolenko, a perfectly gray day, utterly gray, as if a thousand-mile-long cloud had passed over the land without stopping, endless.

At that moment, which hardly lasted a second, Ansky decided that he didn't want to be a soldier, but at the very same moment the officer handed him a paper and told him to sign. Now he was a soldier.

•

The next three years he spent traveling. He was in Siberia and at the lead mines of Norilsk and he crossed the Tunguska Basin escorting engineers from Omsk who were looking for coal deposits and he was in Yakutsk and he traveled up the Lena to the Arctic Ocean, beyond the Arctic Circle, and he accompanied another group of engineers and a neurologist to the New Siberian Islands where two of the engineers went mad, one of them peacefully, but the other dangerously, so that they had to liquidate him immediately on the orders of the neurologist, who explained there was no cure for that kind of madness, especially in the middle of such a blindingly white and mentally unsettling landscape, and then he was at the Okhotsk Sea with a supply detail carrying provisions to a detachment of lost explorers, but after a few days the supply detail got lost too and ended up eating all the provisions for the explorers and then he was in a hospital in Vladivostok and then in Amur and then he saw the shores of Lake Baikal, where thousands of birds flocked, and the city of Irkutsk, and finally he chased bandits in Kazakhstan, before returning to Moscow and attending to other affairs.

And those affairs were reading and visiting museums, reading and walks in the park, reading and the almost obsessive attendance at all kinds of concerts, theatrical evenings, literary and political lectures, from which he drew many valuable lessons that he was able to apply to the freight of lived experience he had accumulated. And it was around this time that he met Efraim Ivanov, the science fiction writer, at a literary cafe, the best literary cafe in Moscow, or rather on the terrace of the cafe, where Ivanov drank vodka at a table off to one side, under the branches of a giant oak that stretched up to the third floor of the building, and they became friends, in part because Ivanov was interested in Ansky's outlandish ideas and in part because Ansky displayed, at least at the time, unqualified and unreserved admiration for Ivanov's science writing, as Ivanov liked to call it, rejecting the official and popular label of fantasy writer. In those days Ansky thought it wouldn't be long before the revolution spread all over the world, because only an idiot or a nihilist could fail to see or sense the potential it held for progress and happiness. Ultimately, thought Ansky, the revolution would abolish death.

When Ivanov told him that this was impossible, that death had been with man from time immemorial, Ansky said that was precisely it, the whole point, maybe the only thing that mattered, abolishing death, abolishing it forever, immersing ourselves in the unknown until we found something else. Abolishment, abolishment, abolishment.

Ivanov had been a party member since 1902. Back then he had tried to write stories in the manner of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Gorky, or rather he had tried to plagiarize them without much success, which led him, after long reflection (a whole summer night), to the astute decision that he should write in the manner of Odoevsky and Lazhechnikov. Fifty percent Odoevsky and fifty percent Lazhechnikov. This went over well, in part because readers, their memories mostly faulty, had forgotten poor Odoevsky (1803-1869) and poor Lazhechnikov (1792-1869), who died the same year, and in part because literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticed a thing.

In 1910 Ivanov was what is called a promising writer, of whom great things were expected, but Odoevsky and Lazhechnikov had been exhausted as templates, and Ivanov's artistic production came to a dead halt or, depending on one's perspective, a point of collapse, from which he couldn't extricate himself even with the new blend he tried in desperation: a combination of the Hoffmanian Odoevsky and the Walter Scott disciple Lazhechnikov with the rising star Gorky. His stories, he had to acknowledge, were no longer of interest to anyone, and this took its toll on his finances, and above all his self-regard. Until the October Revolution, Ivanov worked sporadically for scientific journals, for agricultural journals, as a proofreader, as a salesman of electric lightbulbs, as a clerk in a lawyer's office, all without neglecting his work for the party, where he did practically everything that needed to be done, from writing and editing pamphlets to procuring paper and serving as a liaison with like-minded writers and some fellow travelers. And he did it all without complaint and without giving up his long-established habits: his daily visit to the watering holes where Moscow 's bohemia gathered, and his vodka.

The triumph of the revolution didn't improve his literary or work prospects, rather the reverse. His labors doubled and not infrequently tripled and sometimes even quadrupled, but Ivanov did his duty without complaint. One day he was asked for a story about life in Russia in 1940. In three hours Ivanov wrote his first science fiction tale. It was called "The Train Through the Urals" and it was told from the perspective of a boy traveling in a train the average speed of which was one hundred and twenty-five miles an hour. The boy described everything that passed before his eyes: shining factories, well-tilled fields, new model villages comprising two or three buildings of more than ten stories each, visited by cheerful foreign delegations that took careful note of the advances so as to adopt them in their own countries. The traveling boy in "The Train Through the Urals" was on his way to visit his grandfather, a former Red Army soldier who, after having received a university degree at an age when most students had long finished their studies, headed a laboratory devoted to complicated research shrouded in the deepest secrecy. As they left the station holding hands, the boy's grandfather, an energetic sort who didn't look more than forty although of course he was much older, told the boy about some recent discoveries, but his grandson, a boy after all, made him tell stories about the revolution and the war against the Whites and the foreign intervention, something his grandfather, an old man after all, was happy to do. And that was all. The story's reception was overwhelming.

The first to be surprised, it must be said, was the writer himself. The second was the editor, who had read the story pencil in hand and didn't think much of it. Letters arrived at the magazine's offices asking for more contributions from Ivanov, that "unknown," that "promising voice," "a writer who believes in tomorrow," "a writer who inspires faith in the future we're fighting for," and the letters came from Moscow and Petro-grad, but also from combatants and political activists in the farthest corners of the country who identified with the grandfather character, which kept the magazine editor up at night, since he, a dialectical and methodical and materialist and in no way dogmatic Marxist, a Marxist who as a good Marxist hadn't studied only Marx but also Hegel and Feuerbach (and even Kant) and who laughed heartily when he reread Lichtenberg and had read Montaigne and Pascal and was relatively familiar with the writings of Fourier, couldn't believe that of all the good things (or, to be fair, the few good things) the magazine had published, it was this story, cloyingly sentimental and with no scientific basis, that had most moved the citizens of the land of the Soviets.

Something is wrong, he thought. Naturally, the editor's sleepless night was a night of vodka and jubilation for Ivanov, who decided to celebrate his first success in Moscow 's worst dives and then at the Writers House, where he dined with four friends who resembled the four horsemen of the Apocalypse. From then on Ivanov was asked only for science fiction stories, and after carefully scrutinizing his first, which he had more or less tossed off, he repeated the formula with variations, drawing on the riches of Russian literature and various chemistry, biology, medical, and astronomy publications that he accumulated in his room just as a moneylender accumulates unpaid promissory notes, letters of credit, canceled checks. In this fashion his name became known in every corner of the Soviet Union and he was soon established as a professional writer, a man who lived solely on the income of his books and who attended meetings and conferences at universities and factories and whose works were fought over by literary magazines and newspapers.

But everything grows old, and the formula of the bright future plus the hero who helps to bring about that bright future plus the boy (or the girl) who in the future (which in Ivanov's stories was the present) enjoys the fruits of the whole cornucopia of Communist inventiveness also grew old. By the time Ansky met Ivanov, the latter was no longer a sales success and his novels and stories, which many considered precious or insufferable, no longer aroused the enthusiasm they had in earlier days. But Ivanov kept writing and he kept being published and he kept bringing in money each month for his arcadian visions. He was still a party member. He belonged to the Association of Revolutionary Writers. His name figured on the official lists of Soviet creators. On the surface he was a happy man, a bachelor with a big, comfortable room in a house in a nice Moscow neighborhood, a man who slept every so often with prostitutes who were no longer young and with whom he ended up singing and weeping, a man who ate at least four times a week at the writers' and poets' restaurant.

Inside, however, Ivanov felt that something was missing. The decisive step, the bold stroke. The moment at which the larva, with a reckless smile, turns into a butterfly. Then came the young Jew Ansky and his peculiar ideas, his Siberian visions, his forays into cursed lands, the plenitude of wild experience that only a young man of eighteen can possess. But Ivanov had been eighteen once, too, and not by a long shot had he experienced anything like what Ansky described. Perhaps, he thought, it's because he's Jewish and I'm not. He soon rejected that idea. Perhaps it's because of his naivete, he thought. His impulsive character. His scorn for the conventions that govern life, even bourgeois life, he thought. And then he began to think about how repulsive adolescent artists or pseudoartists were when viewed from up close. He thought about Mayakovsky, whom he knew personally, with whom he'd spoken once, perhaps twice, and his enormous vanity, a vanity that likely hid his lack of love for his fellow man, his lack of interest in his fellow man, his outsize craving for fame. And then he thought about Lermontov and Pushkin, as puffed up as movie stars or opera singers. Nijinsky, Gurov. Nadson. Blok (whom he'd met and who was unbearable). Remoras on the flanks of art, he thought. They think they're suns, setting everything ablaze, but they aren't suns, they're just plunging meteors and in the end no one pays them any heed. They spread humiliation, not conflagration. And ultimately it's always they who are humiliated, truly humiliated, bludgeoned and spat upon, execrated and maimed, thoroughly humiliated, taught a lesson, humiliated utterly.

For Ivanov, a real writer, a real artist and creator, was basically a responsible person with a certain level of maturity. A real writer had to know when to listen and when to act. He had to be reasonably enterprising and reasonably learned. Excessive learning aroused jealousy and resentment. Excessive enterprise aroused suspicion. A real writer had to be someone relatively cool-headed, a man with common sense. Someone who didn't talk too loud or start polemics. He had to be reasonably pleasant and he had to know how not to make gratuitous enemies. Above all, he had to keep his voice down, unless everyone else was raising his. A real writer had to be aware that behind him he had the Writers Association, the Artists Syndicate, the Confederation of Literary Workers, Poets House. What's the first thing a man does when he comes into a church? Efraim Ivanov asked himself. He takes off his hat. Maybe he doesn't cross himself. All right, that's allowed. We're modern. But the least he can do is bare his head! Adolescent writers, meanwhile, come into a church and don't take off their hats even when they're beaten with sticks, which is, regrettably, what happens in the end. And not only do they not take off their hats: they laugh, yawn, play the fool, pass gas. Some even applaud.

And yet what Ansky had to offer was too tempting for Ivanov to pass up, despite his reservations. The pact, it seems, was sealed in the science fiction writer's room.

A month later, Ansky joined the party. His sponsors were Ivanov and one of Ivanov's ex-lovers, Margarita Afanasievna, who worked as a biologist at a Moscow institute. In Ansky's papers, the event is likened to a wedding. It was celebrated at the writers' restaurant and then they made the rounds of several Moscow dives, hauling along Afanasievna, who drank like a condemned woman and who very nearly lapsed into an alcoholic coma that night. In one of the dives, as Ivanov and two writers who had joined them sang songs of lost loves, of glances never to be returned again, of silken words never to be heard, Afanasievna awoke and, with her tiny hand, grabbed Ansky's penis and testicles through his trousers.

"Now that you're a Communist," she said, avoiding his eyes, her gaze fixed on an indeterminate spot between his navel and his neck, "you'll need these to be of steel."

"Really?" asked Ansky.

"Don't play the fool," said Afanasievna's hoarse voice. "I understand you. From the start, I've known who you are."

"And who am I?" asked Ansky.

"A Jewish brat who confuses his desires with reality."

"Reality," murmured Ansky, "can be pure desire."

Afanasievna laughed.

"What should I make of that?" she asked.

"Whatever you like, but take care, comrade," said Ansky. "Consider certain kinds of people, for example."

"Who?" asked Afanasievna.

"The ill," said Ansky. "Tuberculosis patients, say. According to their doctors, they're dying, and there's no arguing with that. But for the patients, especially on some nights, some particularly long evenings, desire is reality and vice versa. Or take people suffering from impotence."

"What kind of impotence?" asked Afanasievna without letting go of Ansky's genitals.

"Sexual impotence," said Ansky. "The impotent are more or less like tuberculosis patients, and they feel desire. A desire that in time not only supplants reality but is imposed on it."

"Do you think," asked Afanasievna, "that the dead feel sexual desire?"

"Not the dead," said Ansky, "but the living dead do. When I was in Siberia I met a hunter whose sexual organs had been torn off."

"Sexual organs!" said Afanasievna mockingly.