I woke up in Una’s bed. I was still naked but my body was clean and my legs free. How had I gotten there? I had no memory of it. The stove had gone out and I was cold. I uttered my sister’s name softly, stupidly: “Una, Una.” The silence froze me and made me shiver, but maybe it was the cold. I got up: it was daytime outside, the sky was cloudy but there was a beautiful light, the fog had dissipated and I looked at the forest, the trees with their branches still loaded with snow. A few absurd lines came to mind, an old song of Guillem IX, that slightly crazed duke of Aquitaine:

Farai un vers de dreyt nien:

non er de mi ni d’autra gen,

non er d’amor ni de joven,

ni de ren au.

I’ll make a song about nothing at all:

not about me, or anybody else,

not about love not about youth,

or anything else.

I rose and headed for the corner where some of my clothes were piled up, to pull on a pair of pants, drawing the suspenders over my bare shoulders. Passing in front of the bedroom mirror I looked at myself: a thick red mark cut across my throat. I went downstairs; in the kitchen I bit into an apple, drank a little wine from an open bottle. There was no more bread. I went out onto the terrace: the weather was still cold, I rubbed my arms. My irritated penis hurt, the wool pants made it worse. I looked at my fingers, my forearms, I idly played at emptying the thick blue veins in my wrist with the tip of my fingernail. My nails were dirty, the thumbnail on my left hand was broken. On the other side of the house, in the courtyard, birds were cawing. The air was sharp, biting, the snow on the ground had melted a little then hardened on the surface, the traces left by my footsteps and my body on the terrace were still visible. I went to the railing and leaned over. A woman’s body was lying in the snow of the garden, half naked in her gaping bathrobe, motionless, her head tilted, her eyes open to the sky. The tip of her tongue rested delicately on the corner of her blue lips; between her legs, a shadow of hair was reappearing on her sex, it must still have been continuing to grow, stubbornly. I couldn’t breathe: this body in the snow was the mirror of the girl’s body in Kharkov. And I knew then that the body of that girl, that her twisted neck, her prominent chin, her frozen, gnawed breasts, were the blind reflection not, as I had thought then, of one image but of two, intermingled and separate, one standing on the terrace and the other down below, lying in the snow. You must be thinking: Ah, finally this story is over. But no, it still goes on.

GIGUE

Thomas found me sitting on a chair at the edge of the terrace. I was looking at the woods and the sky and drinking brandy out of the bottle, in little sips. The raised balustrade hid the garden from me, but the thought of what I had seen was softly eating away at my spirit. One or two days must have gone by, don’t ask me how I spent them. Thomas had come walking around the side of the house: I hadn’t heard anything, neither the sound of an engine nor a call. I handed him the bottle: “Hail, comrade! Drink.” I was probably a little drunk. Thomas looked around him, drank a little, but didn’t hand the bottle back. “What the hell are you up to?” he finally asked. I smiled inanely at him. He looked at the house. “You’re alone?”—“I think so, yes.” He walked up to me, looked at me, repeated: “What the hell are you doing? Your leave ended a week ago. Grothmann is furious, he’s talking about court-martialing you for desertion. These days, courts-martial last five minutes.” I shrugged and reached for the bottle, which he was still holding. He moved it away. “And you?” I asked. “What are you doing here?”—“Piontek told me where you were. He brought me. I came to get you.”—“We have to go, then?” I said sadly.—“Yes. Go get dressed.” I got up, went upstairs. In Una’s bedroom, instead of getting dressed, I sat down on her leather sofa and lit a cigarette. I thought about her, with difficulty, strangely empty, hollow thoughts. Thomas’s voice, in the stairway, drew me out of my reverie: “Hurry up! Shit!” I got dressed, pulling on my clothes somewhat at random, but with some good sense, since it was cold out—long underwear, wool socks, a turtleneck sweater under my office uniform. L’Éducation sentimentale was lying on the secretary: I slipped the book into my tunic pocket. Then I began opening the windows to pull the shutters closed. Thomas appeared in the doorway: “What are you doing?”—“Well, I’m closing up. We can’t leave the house wide open.” His bad mood burst out then: “You don’t seem to realize what’s happening. The Russians have been attacking along the whole front for a week. They could be here any minute now.” He took me unceremoniously by the arm: “Come on.” In the entryway, I briskly freed myself from his grip and went to find the big key to the front door. I put on my coat and cap. As we left I carefully locked the door. In the courtyard in front of the house, Piontek was wiping the headlight of an Opel. He straightened to salute me, and we got into the car, Thomas next to Piontek, me in the back. In the long lane, between jolts, Thomas asked Piontek: “Do you think we can pass through Tempelburg again?”—“I don’t know, Standartenführer. It looked calm, we can try.” On the main road Piontek turned left. In Alt Draheim, a few families were still loading some wagons, harnessed to little Pomeranian horses. The car passed around the old fort and began climbing the long slope of the isthmus. A tank appeared on top, low and squat. “Shit!” Thomas exclaimed. “A T-thirty-four!” But Piontek had already slammed on the brakes and started going in reverse. The tank lowered its cannon and fired at us, but it couldn’t traverse low enough and the shell went over us and exploded by the side of the road, at the entrance to the village. The tank advanced in a rattle of treads to fire lower; Piontek quickly backed the car across the road and started off at top speed toward the village; the second shell hit quite close, shattering one of the left side windows, then we were around the fort and hidden from the tank. In the village, people had heard the explosions and were running in all directions. We drove through without stopping and headed north. “They couldn’t have taken Tempelburg!” Thomas was raging. “We went through there two hours ago!”—“Maybe they came round by the fields,” Piontek suggested. Thomas was examining a map: “All right, go to Bad Polzin. We’ll get information there. Even if Stargard has fallen, we can take the Schivelbein-Naugard road and then reach Stettin.” I wasn’t paying much attention to what he said, I was looking at the landscape out of the smashed window, after having cleared away the debris. Tall, widely spaced poplar trees lined the long straight road, and beyond them stretched snowy, silent fields, a gray sky where some birds were flitting, isolated, shuttered, silent farms. In Klaushagen, a neat little village, sad and dignified, a few kilometers farther on, a checkpoint of Volkssturm in civilian clothes with armbands blocked the road, between a little lake and a wood. Anxiously, the farmers asked us for news: Thomas advised them to head with their families toward Polzin, but they hesitated, twisted their moustaches and fiddled with their old rifles and the two Panzerfäuste they had been allocated. Some had pinned their medals from the Great War onto their jackets. The Schupos in bottle-green uniforms sent to supervise them seemed just as uneasy, the men talked with the slow deliberation of a town council meeting, almost solemn with anxiety.

At the entrance to Bad Polzin, the defenses seemed more solidly organized. Waffen-SS were guarding the road, and a PAK gun, positioned on a hill, covered the approach. Thomas got out of the car to confer with the Untersturmführer commanding the platoon, but he didn’t know anything and referred us to his superior in town, at the command post set up in the old castle. Vehicles and wagons were clogging the streets, the atmosphere was tense, mothers shouted after their children, men brutally pulled the reins of their horses, scolded the French farm workers who were loading the mattresses and the bags of provisions. I followed Thomas into the command post and stayed behind him, listening. The Obersturmführer didn’t know much, either; his unit was attached to the SS Tenth Corps, they had sent him here at the head of a company to hold the main roads; and he thought the Russians would come from the south or from the east—the Second Army, around Danzig and Gotenhafen, was already cut off from the Reich, the Russians had broken through to the Baltic along the Neustettin-Köslin axis, he was almost sure of it—but he guessed the ways leading west were still free. We took the road to Schivelbein. It was a paved highway, long wagons of refugees occupied one full lane, a continuous flow, the same sad spectacle as a month before on the autobahn from Stettin to Berlin. Slowly, at a horse’s pace, the German East was emptying out. There wasn’t much military traffic, but many soldiers, armed or not, walked alone among the civilians, Rückkämpfer who were trying to rejoin their units or find another one. It was cold out, a fierce wind blew through the car’s broken window, bringing wet snow with it. Piontek honked as he passed the wagons; men on foot, horses, livestock congested the road, giving way slowly. We drove alongside fields, then again the road passed through a fir forest. In front of us, wagons were stopping, there was commotion, I heard an enormous, incomprehensible noise, people were yelling and running toward the forest. “The Russians!” Piontek roared.—“Get out, get out!” Thomas ordered. I got out on the left with Piontek: two hundred meters in front of us, a tank was moving swiftly toward us, crushing wagons, horses, straggling fugitives. Terrified, I ran as fast as I could with Piontek and some civilians to hide in the forest; Thomas had crossed through the column to the other side. Beneath the treads of the tank, the carts shattered like matches; the horses died with horrible neighing, cut short by the metallic grinding. Our car was caught from the front, driven back, swept aside, and, in a great racket of crushed sheet metal, thrown into the ditch, on its side. I could make out the soldier perched on the tank, just in front of me, an Asiatic with a pug-nosed face black with engine oil; under his leather tanker’s helmet, he wore little women’s sunglasses, hexagonal with pink rims, and he held in one hand a big machine gun with a round magazine, in the other, perched on his shoulder, a summer parasol, trimmed with lace; his legs apart, leaning against the turret, he straddled the cannon like a horse, absorbing the impacts of the tank with the ease of a Scythian rider guiding a nervy little horse with his heels. Two other tanks with mattresses or mesh springs attached to their sides followed the first one, finishing off under their treads the crippled screaming and wriggling among the debris. The whole passage took a dozen seconds at most; they continued on toward Bad Polzin, leaving in their wake a wide band of wood shards mixed with blood and crushed flesh in pools of horse intestines. Long trails left by the wounded who had tried to crawl to shelter reddened the snow on both sides of the road; here and there, a man writhed, without any legs, howling; on the road there were headless torsos, arms emerging from a red, vile pulp. I was trembling uncontrollably, Piontek had to help me get back to the road. Around me people were screeching, gesticulating, others stayed motionless and in a state of shock, the children let out endless, piercing cries. Thomas quickly rejoined me and searched through the wreckage of the car to retrieve the map and a little bag. “We’ll have to continue on foot,” he said. I made a dazed gesture: “And the people…?”—“They’ll have to manage,” he cut in. “We can’t do anything. Come on.” He made me cross the road again, Piontek following. I was careful not to step on human remains, but it was impossible to avoid the blood, my boots left big red tracks in the snow. Beneath the trees, Thomas unfolded the map. “Piontek,” he ordered, “go search through those carts, find us something to eat.” Then he studied the map. When Piontek returned with some provisions tied up in a pillowcase, Thomas showed the map to us. It was a large-scale map of Pomerania, it indicated the main roads and the villages, but not much more. “If the Russians came from there, then they’ve taken Schivelbein. They must also be heading up toward Kolberg. We’ll go north, try to reach Belgarde. If our people are still there, fine; if not we’ll see. By avoiding the roads we should be all right: if they’re moving so fast, it means their infantry is still far behind.” He pointed to a village on the map, Gross Rambin: “The railroad passes here. If the Russians haven’t reached it yet, we might find something.”