We went back down to the town by the Verkhnyi rynok, where the peasants were finishing packing up their unsold chickens, fruits, and vegetables onto carts or mules. Around them the crowd of sunflower seed sellers and boot polishers was dispersing; boys sitting on little wagons improvised from boards and baby carriage wheels were still waiting for a lingering soldier to ask them to cart his packages. At the foot of the hill, on Kirov Boulevard, rows of fresh crosses were lined up on a small knoll surrounded by a low wall: the pretty little park, with its monument to Lermontov, had been transformed into a cemetery for German soldiers. The boulevard heading toward Tsvetnik Park passed in front of the ruins of what had been the Orthodox cathedral, dynamited in 1936 by the NKVD. “Have you noticed,” Voss remarked as he pointed to the collapsed stones, “they didn’t touch the German church. Our men still go there to pray.”—“Yes, but they emptied the three surrounding villages of Volksdeutschen. The czar had invited them to settle here in 1830. They were all sent to Siberia last year.” But Voss was still thinking about his Lutheran church. “Did you know that it was built by a soldier? A man named Kempfer, who fought against the Cherkess under Yevdokimov, and settled here.” In the park, just after the entrance gate, stood a two-level wooden gallery, sporting turrets with futuristic cupolas and a loggia that wrapped around the upper level. There were some tables there where they served, to those who could pay, Turkish coffee and sweets. Voss chose a place on the side of the park’s main path, above the groups of grizzled, cantankerous, grouchy old men, who came in the evening to sit on the benches and play chess. I ordered coffee and brandy; they also brought us some little lemon cakes; the brandy came from Daghestan and seemed even sweeter than the Armenian, but it went well with the cakes and my good mood. “How are your studies going?” I asked Voss. He laughed: “I still haven’t found an Ubykh speaker; but I’m making considerable progress in Kabard. What I’m really waiting for is for us to take Ordzhonikidze.”—“Why is that?”—“Well, I’ve already told you that Caucasian languages are only my subspecialty. What really interests me are the so-called Indo-Germanic languages, especially the languages of Iranian origin. And Ossetic is a particularly fascinating Iranian language.”—“How so?”—“You can see the geographic situation of Ossetia: whereas all the other non-Caucasian speakers live on the rim or in the foothills of the Caucasus, they straddle the massif, just at the level of the most accessible pass, the Darial where the Russians built their Voyennaya doroga from Tiflis to Ordzhonikidze, the old Vladikavkaz. Although these people adopted the clothing and customs of their mountain neighbors, it’s obviously a late invasion. It is believed that these Ossetes or Osses are descended from the Alans and hence the Scythians; if that is correct, their language would constitute a living archeological remnant of the Scythian language. And there’s something else: in 1930 Dumézil published a collection of Ossetian legends having to do with a fabulous people, half-divine, whom they call the Narts. Now Dumézil also postulates a connection between these legends and the ancient Scythian religion as it is reported by Herodotus. Russian researchers have been working on this subject since the end of the last century; the library and institutes in Ordzhonikidze must be overflowing with extraordinary materials, inaccessible in Europe. I just hope we don’t burn everything down during the attack.”—“In short, if I’ve understood you correctly, these Ossetes are an Urvolk, one of the original Aryan peoples.”—“Original is a word that is much used and misused. Let’s say that their language has some very interesting archaic characteristics from a scientific standpoint.”—“What do you mean about the notion of ‘original’?” He shrugged his shoulders: “Original is more a fantasy, a psychological or political pretense, than a scientific concept. Take German, for instance: for centuries, even before Martin Luther, people claimed it was an original language under the pretext that it had no recourse to roots of foreign origin, unlike the Romance languages, to which it was compared. Some theologians, in their delirium, even went so far as to claim that German was the language of Adam and Eve, and that Hebrew later derived from it. But that’s a completely illusory claim, since even if the roots are ‘native’—actually, all derived directly from the languages of Indo-European nomads—our grammar is entirely structured by Latin. Our cultural imagination, however, was very strongly marked by these ideas, and by this peculiarity German has in contrast to other European languages: the way it can sort of self-generate its vocabulary. It’s a fact that any eight-year-old German child knows all the roots of our language and can take apart and understand any word, even the most abstruse compound, which is not the case for a French child, for instance, who will take a very long time to learn the ‘difficult’ words derived from Greek or Latin. That, moreover, has a lot to do with the idea we have of ourselves: Deutschland is the only country in Europe that doesn’t have a geographic designation, that doesn’t bear the name of a place or a people like the Angles or the Franks, it’s the country of the ‘people’ per se; deutsch being an adjectival form of the old German Tuits, ‘people.’ That’s why none of our neighbors call us by the same name: Allemands, Germans, Duits, Tedeschi in Italian which also stems from Tuits, or Nyemtsi here in Russia, which means ‘the Mutes,’ those who don’t know how to speak, like Barbaros in Greek. And our whole present-day racial and völkisch ideology, in a certain way, is built on these very ancient German pretensions. Which, I will add, are not unique to us: Goropius Becanus, a Flemish author, made the same argument in 1569 about Dutch, which he compared to what he called the original languages of the Caucasus, vagina of peoples.” He laughed gaily. I would have liked to continue the conversation, especially about racial theories, but he was already standing up: “I have to go. Would you like to have dinner with Oberländer, if he’s free?”—“Of course.”—“Shall we meet at the Kasino? Around eight o’clock.” He ran down the steps. I sat back down and contemplated the old men playing chess. Fall was advancing: already the sun was passing behind the Mashuk, tinting the crest with pink and, farther down on the boulevard, casting orange-colored reflections through the trees, up to the windows and the gray roughcast of the façades.

Around seven thirty I went down to the Kasino. Voss hadn’t yet arrived and I ordered a brandy, which I carried into an alcove set a little back. A few minutes later Kern came in, examined the room, and headed toward me. “Herr Hauptsturmführer! I was looking for you.” He took off his cap and sat down, casting glances around him: he looked embarrassed, nervous. “Hauptsturmführer. I wanted to let you know about something that concerns you, I think.”—“Yes?” He hesitated: “They…You are often in the company of that Leutnant from the Wehrmacht. That…how should I say it? That’s giving rise to some rumors.”—“What sort of rumors?”—“Rumors…let’s say dangerous rumors. The kind of rumors that lead straight to the concentration camp.”—“I see.” I remained impassive. “And might this kind of rumor by chance be spread by a certain kind of person?” He turned pale: “I don’t want to say anything else about it. I think it’s low, shameful. I just wanted to warn you so that you could…could act in a way that would prevent it from going any further.” I got up and held out my hand: “Thank you for this information, Obersturmführer. But I have nothing but contempt for those who spread sordid rumors in a cowardly way instead of confronting someone face-to-face, and I ignore them.” He shook my hand: “I completely understand your reaction. But take care all the same.” I sat back down, overcome with rage: so that’s the game they wanted to play! What’s more, they were completely mistaken. I’ve said it already: I never form bonds with my lovers; friendship is something else entirely. I loved a single person in this world, and even if I never saw her, that was enough for me. But narrow-minded scum like Turek and his friends could never understand that. I resolved to get my revenge; I didn’t know how yet, but the opportunity would present itself. Kern was an honest man, he had done well to warn me: that would give me time to think.