The most divergent information, and sometimes the most contradictory, flowed in concerning the new military administration. General Köstring was setting up his offices in Voroshilovsk. He was an already elderly officer, called back from retirement, but my informants at the Abwehr claimed that he was still vigorous, and called him the Wise Marabu. He had been born in Moscow, had led the German military mission to Hetman Skoropadsky in Kiev in 1918, and had served twice as military attaché to our embassy in Moscow: he was seen as one of the best German experts on Russia. Oberst von Gilsa arranged an interview for me with the new representative of the Ostministerium to Köstring’s office, a former consul in Tiflis, Dr. Otto Bräutigam. With his round wire-rimmed glasses, his starched collar, and his light brown uniform displaying the Party’s Gold Badge, I found him a bit stiff; he remained distant, almost cold, but gave me a better impression than most of the Goldfasanen. Gilsa had explained to me that he had an important position at the political department in the ministry. “I’m pleased to meet you,” I said to him as I shook his hand. “Perhaps you can finally bring us some clarifications.”—“I met Brigadeführer Korsemann in Voroshilovsk and I had a long conversation with him. Was the Einsatzgruppe not informed?”—“Oh, of course! But if you have a few minutes, I’d be delighted to speak with you, since these questions interest me greatly.” I led Bräutigam to my office and offered him a drink; he politely refused. “The Ostministerium must have been disappointed by the Führer’s decision to suspend the establishment of the Reichskommissariat, I imagine?” I began.—“Not at all. On the contrary, we think the Führer’s decision is a unique opportunity to correct the disastrous policies we are carrying out in this country.”—“How do you mean?”—“You must realize that the two Reichskommissars now in place were appointed without Minister Rosenberg’s being consulted, and that the Ostministerium exercises almost no control over them. So it’s not our fault if Gauleiters Koch and Lohse do exactly as they please; responsibility falls on those who support them. It’s their thoughtless and aberrant policies that have earned the ministry its reputation as the Chaostministerium.” I smiled; but he remained serious.—“In fact,” I said, “I spent a year in the Ukraine, and Reichskommissar Koch’s policies caused quite a few problems for us. You could say that he was a very good recruiter for the partisans.”—“Just like Gauleiter Sauckel and his slave-hunters. That’s what we want to avoid here. Don’t you see, if we treat the Caucasian tribes as we treated the Ukrainians, they’ll rise and take to the mountains. Then we’ll never be finished with them. Last century, the Russians spent thirty years trying to make the imam Shamil submit. There were only a few thousand rebels; to crush them, the Russians had to deploy up to three hundred and fifty thousand soldiers!” He paused and went on: “Minister Rosenberg, along with the political department of the ministry, has since the beginning of the campaign argued in favor of a clear political stance: only an alliance with the peoples of the East oppressed by the Bolsheviks will allow Germany to crush the Stalin system once and for all. Until now, this strategy, this Ostpolitik if you like, hasn’t been accepted; the Führer has always supported the people who think Germany can carry out this task all by itself, repressing the peoples it should be liberating. The Reichskommissar-designate Schickendanz, despite his old friendship with the minister, also seems to be going along with this. But there are cool heads in the Wehrmacht, especially Generalquartiermeister Wagner, who wanted to avoid a repetition in the Caucasus of the Ukrainian disaster. Their solution, to keep the region under military control, seems good to us, all the more so since General Wagner expressly insisted on involving the most clearsighted elements of the ministry, as my presence here proves. For us as for the Wehrmacht, it’s a unique opportunity to demonstrate that the Ostpolitik is the only valid one; if we succeed here, we might have the possibility of repairing the harm done in the Ukraine and in Ostland.”—“So the stakes are considerable,” I noted.—“Yes.”—“And hasn’t the Reichskommissar-designate Schickedanz been upset at finding himself sidelined in this way? He too has some support.” Bräutigam made a scornful gesture with his hand; his eyes were gleaming behind his glasses: “No one asked his opinion. In any case, the Reichskommissar-designate Schickedanz is much too busy studying the sketches of his future palace in Tiflis, and discussing the number of gates with his deputies, to worry about practical matters in the way we must.”—“I see.” I thought for an instant: “One more question. How do you see the role of the SS and the SP in this arrangement?”—“The Sicherheitspolizei of course has important tasks to carry out. But they should be coordinated with the Army Group and the military administration in order not to interfere with the positive initiatives. In plain language, as I suggested to Brigadeführer Korsemann, we’ll have to show a certain delicacy in our relations with the mountain and Cossack minorities. There are elements among them, in fact, who collaborated with the Communists, but out of nationalism rather than out of Bolshevist conviction, to defend the interests of their people. It’s not a question of automatically treating them like Commissars or Stalinist functionaries.”—“And what do you think of the Jewish problem?” He raised his hand: “That’s another thing entirely. It’s clear that the Jewish population remains one of the main supports of the Bolshevist system.” He got up to take his leave. “Thank you for taking the time to speak with me,” I said as I shook his hand on the steps.—“Not at all. I think it’s very important that we keep up good relations with the SS as well as with the Wehrmacht. The better you understand what we want to do here, the better things will go.”—“You can be sure that I’ll make that clear in my report to my superiors.”—“Very good! Here’s my card. Heil Hitler!”

Voss deemed this conversation quite comical when I reported it to him. “It was about time! Nothing like failure to sharpen the wits.” We had met as agreed, on Sunday, toward noon, in front of the Feldkommandantur. A troop of kids was clustered around the barricades, fascinated by the motorcycles and an amphibious Schwimmwagen parked there. “Partisans!” bellowed a territorial who was vainly trying to scatter them with a stick; no sooner were they chased away from one side than they streamed in on the other, and the reservist was already out of breath. We climbed the steep slope of Karl Marx Street, toward the museum, and I finished summing up Bräutigam’s remarks. “Better late than never,” Voss commented, “but in my opinion it won’t work. We’ve developed too many bad habits. This business with the military administration is just a grace period. In six or ten months they’ll have to hand over the reins, and then all the jackals being kept on the leash will pour in, the Schickedanzes, the Körners, the Sauckel-Einsatzes, and all hell will break loose again. You see, the problem is that we don’t have a colonial tradition. Even before the Great War, we were managing our African possessions very badly. And then afterward, we didn’t have any more possessions at all, and the little bit of experience we had accumulated in colonial administration was lost. Just compare us to the English: look at the delicacy, the tact with which they govern and exploit their empire. They know very well how to wield the stick when they have to, but they always offer the carrot first, and go back to the carrot right after they hit with the stick. Even the Soviets, at bottom, have done better than us: despite their brutality, they were able to create a feeling of a shared identity, and their empire is holding. The troops that kept us in check on the Terek were made up mostly of Georgians and Armenians. I’ve spoken with some Armenian prisoners: they think of themselves as Soviet, and fight for the USSR without hesitation. We haven’t been able to offer them anything better.” We had arrived at the green door of the museum and I knocked. After a few minutes the vehicle gate, a little higher up, opened a little, giving us a glimpse of an old wrinkled peasant wearing a cap, his beard and callous fingers yellowed by makhorka. He exchanged a few words with Voss, then pulled the gate open a little more. “He says the museum is closed, but if we like, we can come in and look. Some German officers live here, in the library.” The gate opened onto a little paved courtyard, surrounded by charming little whitewashed buildings; on the right, a second floor had been built over a shed, with a staircase outside; the library was there. In the background rose the Mashuk, omnipresent, massive, tatters of clouds clinging to its eastern slope. To the left, lower down, you could see a little garden, with vines on a trellis, then some other buildings, their roofs covered with thatch. Voss climbed the steps to the library. Inside, the varnished wooden shelves took up so much space that you could barely slip past them. The old man had followed us; I handed him three cigarettes; his face lit up, but he remained near the door, watching us. Voss examined the books through the glass but didn’t touch anything. My gaze came to rest on a little oil portrait of Lermontov, rather nicely done: he was represented in a red dolman decked with epaulettes and gilt braid, his lips moist, his eyes surprisingly anxious, wavering between rage, fear, and unbridled mockery. In another corner hung an engraved portrait, under which I could just make out an inscription in Cyrillic: this was Martynov, Lermontov’s killer. Voss was trying to open one of the cases, but it was locked. The old man said something and they conversed a little. “The curator has run away,” Voss translated for me. “One of the employees has the keys, but she isn’t in today. Too bad, they have some nice things.”—“You’ll be back.”—“Certainly. Come, he’s going to open Lermontov’s house for us.” We crossed the courtyard and the little garden to reach one of the low houses. The old man pushed open the door; inside, it was dark, but the light let in by the opening was enough to see by. The walls had been whitewashed, and the furniture was simple; there were some beautiful oriental carpets and Caucasian sabers hanging from nails. A narrow sofa looked very uncomfortable. Voss had paused in front of a desk and was stroking it with his fingers. The old man explained something to him. “He wrote A Hero of Our Time at this table,” Voss translated pensively.—“Right here?”—“No, in St. Petersburg. When the museum was created, the government had the table sent here.” There was nothing else to see. Outside, clouds were veiling the sun. Voss thanked the old man, and I gave him a few more cigarettes. “We’ll have to come back when there’s someone who can explain everything,” said Voss. “By the way,” he added at the gate, “I forgot to tell you: Professor Oberländer is here.”—“Oberländer? But I know him. I met him in Lemberg, at the beginning of the campaign.”—“All the better. I was going to suggest we have dinner with him.” In the street, Voss turned left, toward the wide flagstone-paved lane that started at Lenin’s statue. The path kept rising; I was short of breath already. Instead of leaving the lane to head for the Aeolian Harp and the Academic Gallery, Voss kept going straight ahead, along the Mashuk, on a paved road that I hadn’t yet taken. The sky was darkening rapidly and I was afraid it would rain. We passed a few sanatoriums, then the pavement ended and we continued on a wide dirt path. This place was not much traveled: a peasant sitting on a wagon passed us, the jingling of the harnesses mingled with the lowing of the ox and the grating squeal of ill-sprung wheels; after that, the road was deserted. A little farther on, to the left, a brick archway opened into the mountainside. We went up to it and squinted to see into the darkness; an iron gate, padlocked, barred access to the tunnel. “That’s the Proval,” Voss said. “At the end, there’s an open-air grotto, with a sulfur spring.”—“Isn’t this where Pechorin meets Vera?”—“I’m not sure. Isn’t that in the grotto beneath the Aeolian Harp?”—“We’ll have to check.” The clouds were passing just over our heads: I felt that if I lifted my arm I could stroke the swirls of vapor. We couldn’t see the sky at all and the atmosphere had become muffled, silent. Our footsteps crunched on the sandy earth; the path rose gently; and soon the clouds surrounded us. We could barely make out the tall trees lining the path; the air seemed heavy; the world had disappeared. In the distance, a cuckoo’s call echoed in the woods, an anxious, sorrowful cry. We walked in silence. This lasted a long time. Here and there, I caught a fleeting glimpse of large, dark, indistinct masses, buildings probably; then forest again. The clouds were dissipating, the gray shone with a confused gleam and all of a sudden they unraveled and scattered and we found ourselves in the sunlight. It hadn’t rained. To our right, beyond the trees, the jagged shapes of the Beshtau stood out; another twenty minutes’ walk brought us to the monument. “We’ve taken the long way round,” said Voss. “From the other side it’s faster.”—“Yes, but it was worth it.” The monument, a white obelisk erected in the middle of a poorly maintained lawn, offered little of interest: faced with this setting, carefully landscaped by bourgeois piety, it was hard to imagine the gunshots, the blood, the hoarse cries, the rage of the murdered poet. A few German vehicles were lined up in the parking area; below, in front of the forest, there were tables and benches where some soldiers were eating. For the sake of thoroughness I went over to examine the bronze medallion and the inscription on the monument. “I saw the photo of a temporary monument that they built in 1901,” Voss told me. “A kind of fanciful half-rotunda made of wood and plaster, with a bust perched high up top. It was much funnier.”—“They must have had trouble funding it. Should we go eat?”—“Yes, they make good shashlik here.” We crossed the parking area and went down to the tables. Two vehicles bore the tactical marks of the Einsatzkommando; I recognized several officers at one of the tables. Kern waved at us and I waved back, but I didn’t go over to say hello. There were also Turek, Bolte, Pfeiffer. I chose a table that was set somewhat back, near the woods, with coarse stools. A local mountain man in a skullcap, his cheeks badly shaved around his thick moustache, approached: “No pork,” Voss translated. “Just mutton. But there’s vodka and kompot.”—“That’s fine.” Bursts of conversation reached us from the other tables. There were also some junior officers from the Wehrmacht and a few civilians. Turek was watching us, then I saw him talking animatedly with Pfeiffer. Some Gypsy children were running between the tables. One of them came up to us: “Khleb, khleb,” he chanted, holding out a hand black with filth. The mountain man had brought us some slices of bread and I held one out to the boy, which he immediately crammed into his mouth. Then he pointed to the forest: “Sestra, sestra, dyev. Krasivaya.” He made an obscene gesture. Voss exploded in laughter and flung some words at him that made him run away. He headed toward the SS officers and repeated his gestures. “You think they’ll follow him?” Voss asked.—“Not in front of everyone,” I said. Turek in fact gave the boy a clout that sent him rolling onto the grass. I saw him make as if to take out his gun; the kid bolted into the trees. The native, who was officiating behind a long metal box on legs, came back to us with two skewers that he laid on top of the bread; then he brought us the drinks and glasses. The vodka went wonderfully well with the meat dripping with juice, and we each drank several measures, washing it all down with kompot, a juice of marinated berries. The sun was shining on the grass, the slender pines, the monument, with the slope of the Mashuk behind it all; the clouds had completely disappeared on the other side of the mountain. I thought again about Lermontov dying on the grass a few steps away, his chest shattered, for an empty remark about Martynov’s clothes. Unlike his hero Pechorin, Lermontov had fired into the air; his adversary, not. What could Martynov have been thinking as he looked at his enemy’s corpse? He himself had wanted to be a poet, and he had certainly read A Hero of Our Time; so he could savor the bitter echoes and slow ripples of the growing legend, he knew too that his name would remain only as that of Lermontov’s murderer, another d’Anthès encumbering Russian letters. But he must have had other ambitions when he started out in life; he too must have wanted to create, and create good things. Perhaps he was simply jealous of Lermontov’s talent? Or perhaps he chose to be remembered for the harm he had done, rather than not at all? I tried to remember his portrait but already couldn’t manage to. And Lermontov? His last thought, when he had emptied his pistol into the air and saw that Martynov was aiming at him, had it been bitter, desperate, furious, ironic? Or had he simply shrugged his shoulders and looked at the sunlight on the pine trees? As with Pushkin, they said that his death had been a setup, a contrived assassination; if that was the case, he had gone to it with his eyes wide open, obligingly, demonstrating his dissimilarity from Pechorin. What Blok wrote about Pushkin was no doubt even truer for him: It wasn’t Dantes’s bullet that killed him, it was the lack of air. I too lacked air, but the sun and the shashliks, and Voss’s joyous kindness, helped me breathe for an instant. We settled our bill with the native using occupation carbovanets and started again toward the Mashuk. “I suggest we go to the old cemetery,” Voss said. “There’s a stele there where Lermontov was buried.” After the duel, his friends had laid the poet to rest here; one year later, a hundred years before our arrival in Pyatigorsk, his maternal grandmother had come for his remains and had brought them home with her, to bury them next to his mother, near Penza. I readily agreed to this suggestion of Voss’s. Two cars passed us in a whirl of dust: the officers of the Kommando returning. Turek was driving the first vehicle himself; his hateful look, which I glimpsed through the window, made him look truly Jewish. The little convoy continued straight on but we went to the left, following a long zigzagging path that climbed up the side of the Mashuk. With the meal, the vodka, and the sun, I felt heavy; then the hiccups started and I left the path for the woods. “Are you all right?” Voss asked when I returned. I made a vague gesture and lit a cigarette. “It’s nothing. The tail end of something I caught in the Ukraine. It comes back from time to time.”—“You should see a doctor.”—“Maybe. Dr. Hohenegg must be coming back soon, I’ll see.” Voss waited for me to finish my cigarette, then followed close behind me. I was warm and I took off my cap and jacket. At the top of the knoll, the path formed a wide loop from which there was a fine view over the city and the plain beyond. “If you continue straight on, you return to the sanatoriums,” Voss said. “For the cemetery, we can go by these orchards.” The steep slope, with its faded grass, was planted with fruit trees; a tethered mule was nuzzling the ground in search of fallen apples. We descended the hill, sliding a little, then cut through a wood that was dense enough for us soon to lose the path. I put my jacket back on as the branches and brambles were scratching my arms. Finally, following Voss, I emerged onto a little muddy hollow that ran alongside a cemented stone wall. “This must be it,” said Voss. “We’ll go around.” Since the cars had passed us we hadn’t seen anyone, and I felt as if I were walking in the open countryside; but a few steps farther on a young boy, his feet bare, leading a donkey, passed us without a word. Following the wall, we finally arrived at a little square, in front of an Orthodox church. An old woman dressed in black, sitting on a crate, was selling some flowers; others were coming out of the church. Beyond the gate, the graves lay scattered under tall trees that plunged the sloping cemetery into shadow. We followed a rising path paved with coarse stones buried in the ground, between old graves lost in dry grass, ferns, and thorn bushes. Patches of light fell in places between the trees and in these islands of sun, little black-and-white butterflies were dancing around faded flowers. Then the path curved and the trees opened out a little to reveal the plain to the southwest. In an enclosure, two little trees had been planted to give shade to the stele that marks the place of Lermontov’s first grave. The only sounds were the chirping of crickets and the breeze rustling the leaves. Near the stele were the graves of Lermontov’s relations, the Shan-Gireis. I turned around: in the distance, the long green balki furrowed the plain to the first rocky foothills. The mounds of the volcanoes looked like clumps of earth fallen from the sky; in the distance, I could make out the snowy peaks of the Elbruz. I sat down on the steps leading to the stele, while Voss went to nose about a little farther on, thinking again about Lermontov: like all poets, first they kill him, then they venerate him.