At that moment, I heard a great din coming from Kochstrasse. People were shouting, running, splashing frantically. A man passed by crying, “The Russians! The Russians are in the tunnel!”—“Shit,” Clemens belched. He and Weser aimed their flashlights toward the station; German soldiers were surging back, firing randomly; I could see the muzzle flashes of machine guns, bullets whistled by, cracked against the walls or hit the water with soft little thwacks. Men were yelling, falling into the water. Clemens and Weser, lit by their flashlights, calmly raised their pistols and began firing round after round at the enemy. The whole tunnel echoed with cries, gunshots, the sounds of water. From the other side, machine-gun fire volleyed back. Clemens and Weser made to switch off their flashlights; just then, in a fleeting burst of light, I saw Weser catch a bullet under the chin, rise as if lifted up, and then fall straight backward in a huge splash. Clemens bellowed, “Weser! Shit!” But his light had gone out and, holding my breath, I dove underwater. Guiding myself by holding onto the tracks rather than swimming, I headed toward the cars of the makeshift hospital. When my head emerged from the water, bullets were whistling around me, patients screamed in panic, I heard French voices, curt orders. “Don’t shoot, guys!” I shouted in French. A hand seized my collar, dragged me, dripping, toward the platform. “You’re one of ours?” went a cocky voice. I was breathing hard and coughing, I had swallowed water. “No, no, German,” I said. The man let off a volley of rounds next to my head, deafening me just as Clemens’s voice resounded: “Aue! You son of a bitch! I’ll get you!” I hoisted myself onto the platform and, striking out with hands and elbows at the panicking refugees to clear a path for myself, found the stairs, which I fled up four at a time.

The street was deserted, except for three foreign Waffen-SS men charging toward Zimmerstrasse with a heavy machine gun and some Panzerfäuste, paying no attention to me or to the other civilians escaping from the U-Bahn entrance. I started in the opposite direction, running north up Friedrichstrasse, between burning buildings, corpses, burned-out cars. I reached Unter den Linden. A large fountain of water was gushing from a blown water main, spraying the bodies and the rubble. At the corner two grizzled old men were walking along, they seemed not to be paying any attention to the racket of the artillery and the heavy mortar shells. One of them wore the armband of the blind; the other was guiding him. “Where are you going?” I asked, panting.—“We don’t know,” the blind man replied.—“Where are you coming from?” I asked again.—“We don’t know that, either.” They sat down on a crate among the ruins and piles of rubble. The blind man leaned on his cane. The other stared about him with wild eyes, plucking at his friend’s sleeve. I turned my back to them and went on. The avenue, for as far as I could see, seemed completely deserted. Opposite stood the building that housed the offices of Dr. Mandelbrod and Herr Leland. It had been hit a few times but didn’t look ruined. One of the main doors was hanging from a hinge, I pushed it open with my shoulder and entered the lobby, full of marble slabs and moldings fallen from the walls. Soldiers must have camped here: I noticed traces of a campfire, empty cans, nearly dry excrement. But the lobby was deserted. I pushed open the emergency stairway and ran up. At the top floor, the stairs opened onto a hallway that led to the beautiful reception room before Mandelbrod’s office. Two of the amazons were sitting there, one on the sofa, the other in an armchair, their heads leaning to the side or backward, their eyes wide open, a thin stream of blood running from their temples and the corners of their lips; each one held a small automatic pistol with a mother-of-pearl handle in her hand. A third girl was lying in front of the double padded doors. Cold with horror, I went over to look at them close up, I brought my face to theirs, without touching them. They were perfectly turned out, their hair pulled back, clear gloss made their full lips shine, mascara still outlined a crown of long black eyelashes around their empty eyes; their nails, on the pistol butts, were carefully manicured and painted. No breath raised their chests under the ironed suits. No matter how much I scrutinized their pretty faces, I was incapable of distinguishing one from the other, of recognizing Hilde from Helga or Hedwig; yet they weren’t triplets. I stepped over the one who was lying across the doorway and entered the office. Three other girls were lying dead on the sofa and the carpet; Mandelbrod and Leland were at the back of the room, in front of the large shattered bay window, near a mountain of leather suitcases and trunks. Outside, behind them, a fire was roaring, they were paying no attention to the spirals of smoke invading the room. I went up to them, looked at the bags, and asked: “You’re planning on going on a trip?” Mandelbrod, who was holding a cat on his lap and stroking it, smiled slightly in the ripples of fat that drowned his features. “Exactly,” he said in his beautiful voice. “Would you like to come with us?” I counted the trunks and suitcases out loud: “Nineteen,” I said, “not bad. You’re going far?”—“To begin with, Moscow,” said Mandelbrod. “Afterward, we’ll see.” Leland, wearing a long navy blue trenchcoat, was sitting on a little chair next to Mandelbrod; he was smoking a cigarette, with a glass ashtray on his knees, and he looked at me without saying anything. “I see,” I said. “And you really think you can take all that?”—“Oh, of course,” Mandelbrod smiled. “It’s already arranged. We’re just waiting for them to come get us.”—“The Russians? Our men are still holding the area, I should warn you.”—“We know that,” Leland said, blowing out a long puff of smoke. “The Soviets told us they’d be here tomorrow, without fail.”—“A very cultivated colonel,” Mandelbrod added. “He told us not to worry, he’d personally take care of us. The fact is, you see, we still have a lot of work to do.”—“And the girls?” I asked, waving my hand toward the bodies.—“Ah, the poor little things didn’t want to come with us. Their attachment to the fatherland was too strong. They didn’t want to understand that some values are even more important.”—“The Führer has failed,” Leland said coldly. “But the ontological war that he began isn’t over. Who else besides Stalin can finish the job?”—“When we offered them our services,” Mandelbrod whispered as he stroked his cat, “they were immediately very interested. They know that they’ll need men like us, after this war, that they can’t allow the Western powers to walk off with the cream of the crop. If you come with us, I can guarantee you a good position, with all the advantages.”—“You can keep doing what you do so well,” said Leland.—“You’re crazy!” I exclaimed. “You’re all crazy! Everyone’s gone mad in this city.” Already I was backing to the door, past the gracefully slumped bodies of the girls. “Except for me!” I shouted before escaping. Leland’s last words reached me at the door: “If you change your mind, come back to see us!”

Unter den Linden was still empty; here and there, a shell struck a façade or a pile of rubble. My ears were still ringing from the Frenchman’s machine-gun volley. I began running toward the Brandenburg Gate. I had to get out of the city at all costs, it had become a monstrous trap. My information was already a day old, but I knew that the only way out was to go through the Tiergarten and then by the Ost-West-Achse down to the Adolf-Hitler-Platz; then I’d see. The day before, that side of the city still wasn’t sealed off, some Hitlerjugend still held the bridge over the Havel, Wannsee was in our hands. If I can reach Thomas’s place, I said to myself, I’m saved. The Pariser Platz, in front of the still relatively intact Gate, was strewn with overturned, wrecked, burned-out vehicles; in the ambulances, charred corpses still wore on their extremities white casts made of plaster of Paris, which doesn’t burn. I heard a powerful rumbling noise: a Russian tank passed behind me, sweeping wrecked cars in front of it; several Waffen-SS were perched on top, they must have captured it. It stopped right next to me, fired, then started off in a clatter of treads; one of the Waffen-SS observed me indifferently. The tank turned right into the Wilhelmstrasse and disappeared. A little farther on, down Unter den Linden, between the lampposts and the rows of shredded trees, I glimpsed a human shape through the smoke, a man in civilian clothes with a hat. I began running again and, threading between the obstacles, went through the Gate, black with smoke, riddled with bullets and shrapnel.