Going out, I asked Reuter for a Feldgendarm; he sent me to his company chief, who pointed to a Rottwachtmeister: “Hanning! Go with the Hauptsturmführer and do what he says.” Hanning took his helmet and shouldered his rifle; he must have been close on to forty; his large metal half-moon plate bounced on his narrow chest. “We’ll need a shovel, too,” I added. Outside, I turned to the old man: “Which way?” He raised his finger to the Mashuk, whose summit, caught in a cloud bank, looked as if it were spitting out smoke: “That way.” Followed by Hanning, we climbed the streets to the last one, which encircles the mountain; there the old man pointed to the right, toward the Proval. Pine trees lined the road and at one place a little path headed into the trees. “It’s that way,” said the old man.—“Are you sure you’ve never come here before?” I asked him. He shrugged. The path climbed and zigzagged and the slope was steep. The old man walked in front with a nimble, sure step; behind, the shovel on his shoulder, Hanning was panting heavily. When we emerged from the trees, I saw that the wind had chased the clouds away from the summit. A little farther on I turned around. The Caucasus barred the horizon. It had rained during the night, and the rain had finally swept away the ever-present summer haze, revealing the mountains, clear, majestic. “Stop daydreaming,” the old man said to me. I started walking again. We climbed for about half an hour. My heart was pounding wildly, I was out of breath, Hanning too; the old man seemed as fresh as a young tree. Finally we reached a kind of grassy terrace, a scant hundred meters or so from the top. The old man went forward and contemplated the view. This was the first time I really saw the Caucasus. Sovereign, the mountain chain unfurled like an immense sloping wall, to the very edge of the horizon; you felt as though if you squinted you could see the last mountains plunging into the Black Sea far to the right, and to the left into the Caspian. The hills were blue, crowned with pale-yellow, whitish ridges; the white Elbruz, an overturned bowl of milk, sat atop the peaks; a little farther away, the Kazbek loomed over Ossetia. It was as beautiful as a phrase of Bach. I looked and said nothing. The old man stretched out his hand to the east: “There, beyond the Kazbek, that’s Chechnya already, and afterward, that’s Daghestan.”—“And your grave, where is that?” He examined the flat terrace and took a few steps. “Here,” he said finally, stamping the ground with his foot. I looked at the mountains again: “This is a fine place to be buried, don’t you think?” I said. The old man had an immense, delighted smile: “Isn’t it?” I began to wonder if he wasn’t making fun of me. “You really saw it?”—“Of course!” he said indignantly. But I had the impression that he was laughing in his beard. “Then dig,” I said.—“What do you mean, ‘dig’? Aren’t you ashamed, meirakiske? Do you know how old I am? I could be the grandfather of your grandfather! I’d curse you rather than dig.” I shrugged and turned to Hanning, who was still waiting with the shovel. “Hanning. Dig.”—“Dig, Herr Hauptsturmführer? Dig what?”—“A grave, Rottwachtmeister. There.” He gestured with his head: “And the old man there? Can’t he dig?”—“No. Go on, start digging.” Hanning set his rifle and cap down in the grass and headed to the place indicated. He spat onto his hands and began to dig. The old man was looking at the mountains. I listened to the rustling of the wind, the vague rumor of the city at our feet; I could also hear the sound of the shovel hitting earth, the fall of the clumps of earth thrown out, Hanning’s panting. I looked at the old man: he was standing facing the mountains and the sun, and was murmuring something. I looked at the mountains again. The subtle and infinite variations of blue tinting the slopes looked as if they could be read like a long line of music, with the summits marking time. Hanning, who had taken off his neck plate and jacket, was digging methodically and was now at knee level. The old man turned to me with a gay look: “Is it coming along?” Hanning had stopped digging and was blowing, leaning on his shovel. “Isn’t that enough, Herr Hauptsturmführer?” he asked. The hole seemed a good length now but was only a few feet deep. I turned to the old man: “Is that enough for you?”—“You’re joking! You aren’t going to give me a poor man’s grave, me, Nahum ben Ibrahim! Come on, you’re not a nepios.”—“Sorry, Hanning. You have to keep digging.”—“Tell me, Herr Hauptsturmführer,” he asked me before going back to work, “what language are you speaking to him in? It’s not Russian.”—“No, it’s Greek.”—“He’s a Greek?! I thought he was a Jew?”—“Go on, keep digging.” He went back to work with a curse. After about twenty minutes he stopped again, panting hard. “You know, Herr Hauptsturmführer, usually there are two men to do this. I’m no longer young.”—“Pass me the shovel and get out of there.” I took off my cap and jacket and took Hanning’s place in the ditch. Digging wasn’t something I had much experience of. It took me some minutes to find my pace. The old man leaned over me: “You’re doing it very badly. It’s obvious you’ve spent your life in books. Where I come from, even the rabbis know how to build a house. But you’re a good boy. I did well to go to you.” I dug; the earth had to be thrown out quite high up now, a lot of it fell back into the hole. “Now is it all right?” I finally asked. “A little more. I want a grave that’s as comfortable as my mother’s womb.”—“Hanning,” I called, “come spell me.” The pit was now chest level and he had to help me climb out. I put my jacket and cap back on, and smoked while Hanning started digging again. I kept looking at the mountains; I couldn’t get enough of the view. The old man was looking too. “You know, I was disappointed I wasn’t to be buried in my valley, near the Samur,” he said. “But now I understand that the angel is wise. This is a beautiful place.”—“Yes,” I said. I glanced to the side: Hanning’s rifle was lying on the grass next to his cap, as if abandoned. When Hanning’s head had just cleared the ground, the old man declared he was satisfied. I helped Hanning get out. “And now?” I asked.—“Now, you have to put me inside. What? You think God is going to send me a thunderbolt?” I turned to Hanning: “Rottwachtmeister. Put your uniform back on and shoot this man.” Hanning turned red, spat on the ground, and swore. “What’s wrong?”—“With respect, Herr Hauptsturmführer, for special tasks, I have to have an order from my superior.”—“Leutnant Reuter put you at my disposal.” He hesitated: “Well, all right,” he finally said. He put his jacket, his big crescent neck plate, and his cap back on, brushed off his pants, and seized his rifle. The old man had positioned himself at the edge of the grave, facing the mountains, and was still smiling. Hanning shouldered his rifle and aimed it at the old man’s neck. Suddenly I was overcome with anguish. “Wait!” Hanning lowered his rifle and the old man turned his head toward me. “And my grave,” I asked him, “have you seen that too?” He smiled: “Yes.” I sucked in my breath, I must have turned pale, a vain anguish filled me: “Where is it?” He kept smiling: “That, I won’t tell you.”—“Fire!” I shouted to Hanning. Hanning raised his rifle and fired. The old man fell like a marionette whose string has been cut all at once. I went up to the grave and leaned over: he was lying at the bottom like a sack, his head turned aside, still smiling a little into his blood-splattered beard; his open eyes, turned toward the wall of earth, were also laughing. I was trembling. “Close that up,” I curtly ordered Hanning.

At the foot of the Mashuk, I sent Hanning back to the AOK and went by the Academic Gallery to the Pushkin baths, which the Wehrmacht had partially reopened for its convalescents. There I stripped naked and plunged my body into the scalding, brackish, sulfurous water. I stayed in it for a long time and then rinsed myself off in a cold shower. This treatment reinvigorated my body and soul: my skin was mottled red and white, and I felt more awake, almost light. I returned to my quarters and lay down for an hour, my feet crossed on the sofa, facing the open French window. Then I changed and went down to the AOK to find the car I had requested that morning. On the way, I smoked and contemplated the volcanoes and the soft blue mountains of the Caucasus. Night was already setting in; it was fall. Entering Kislovodsk, the road passed the Podkumok; below, peasants’ carts were fording the river; the last one, just a board on wheels, was pulled by a camel with long hair and a thick neck. Hohenegg was waiting for me at the Kasino. “You look fit,” he said when he saw me.—“I’m a new man. But I had a strange day.”—“Tell me all about it.” Two bottles of white wine from the Palatinate were waiting next to the table in ice buckets: “I had those sent to me by my wife.”—“You’re in a class by yourself, Doktor.” He uncorked the first one: the wine was cool and bit the tongue, leaving behind it a fruity caress. “How is your conference going?” I asked him.—“Very well. We’ve gone over cholera, typhus, and dysentery, and now we’re coming to the painful subject of frostbite.”—“It’s not the season for that yet.”—“It will be soon enough. And you?” I told him about the old Bergjude. “A wise man, this Nahum ben Ibrahim,” he commented when I had finished. “We can envy him.”—“You’re probably right.” Our table was placed right against a partition; behind it was a private booth, from which laughter and bursts of indistinct voices were emanating. I drank a little wine. “Still,” I added, “I have to admit that I had trouble understanding him.”—“Not me,” Hohenegg asserted. “You see, in my view there are three possible attitudes faced with this absurd life. First the attitude of the mass, hoi polloi, which simply refuses to see that life is a joke. They don’t laugh at it, but work, accumulate, masticate, defecate, fornicate, reproduce, get old, and die like oxen harnessed to the plow, as idiotic as they lived. That’s the large majority. Then there are those, such as me, who know that life is a joke and who have the courage to laugh at it, like the Taoists or your Jew. Finally there are those, and if my diagnosis is correct you are one of them, who know that life is a joke, but who suffer from it. It’s like your Lermontov, whom I’ve finally read: I zhizn takaya pustaya i glupaya shutka, he writes.” I knew enough Russian now to understand and complete the phrase: “He should have added: i grubaya, ‘an empty, stupid and dirty joke.’”—“He certainly thought of it. But it wouldn’t have scanned right.”—“Those who have that attitude do know, however, that the other laughing one exists,” I said.—“Yes, but they don’t manage to adopt it.” The voices on the other side of the partition had become clearer: a waitress had left the curtain of the booth open as she went out. I recognized the coarse intonations of Turek and his lackey Pfeiffer. “Women like that should be banned from the SS!” Turek was screeching.—“That’s right. He should be in a concentration camp, not a uniform,” Pfeiffer replied.—“Yes,” said another voice, “but you need evidence.”—“We saw them,” said Turek. “The other day, behind the Mashuk. They left the road to go do their things in the woods.”—“Are you sure?”—“I give you my word as an officer.”—“And you recognized him?”—“Aue? He was as close to me as you are now.” The men suddenly fell silent. Turek turned slowly around and saw me standing in the entrance to the booth. His flushed face drained of blood. Pfeiffer, at the head of the table, went yellow. “It is very regrettable that you should use your word as an officer so lightly, Hauptsturmführer,” I said clearly, in a measured, neutral tone. “That devalues it. Yet there is still time to withdraw your despicable words. I warn you: if you don’t, we must fight.” Turek had gotten up, abruptly pushing back his chair. An absurd tic was deforming his lips, giving him an even more spineless and lost look than usual. His eyes sought out Pfeiffer, who encouraged him with a sign of his head. “I have nothing to withdraw,” he squeaked in a monotone. He still hesitated to go all the way. I was filled with a strong exaltation; but my voice remained calm, precise. “Are you quite sure?” I wanted to push him, to inflame him and slam all the doors shut behind him. “I won’t be as easy to kill as an unarmed Jew, you can be sure of that.” These words provoked a commotion. “You’re insulting the SS!” Pfeiffer roared. Turek was pale; he looked at me like a mad bull, without saying anything. “Very well, then,” I said. “I will send someone soon to the Teilkommando offices.” I turned on my heel and left the restaurant. Hohenegg caught up with me on the steps: “That’s not very smart, what you did there. Lermontov has decidedly gone to your head.” I shrugged my shoulders. “Doktor, I believe you are a man of honor. Will you be my second?” Now it was his turn to shrug his shoulders. “If you like. But it’s idiotic.” I patted him amiably on the shoulder. “Don’t worry! Everything will go well. But don’t forget your wine, we’ll need it.” He brought me to his room and we finished the first bottle. I spoke to him a little about my life and my friendship with Voss: “I like him a lot. He’s an astonishing man. But it has nothing to do with what those swine are imagining.” Then I sent him to the Teilkommando offices and began the second bottle as I waited for him, smoking and watching the autumn sun play on the large park and the slopes of the Maloe Sedlo. He returned from his errand after an hour. “I should warn you,” he said point-blank, “they’re plotting something.”—“How’s that?”—“I went into the Kommando and heard them bellowing. I missed the beginning of the conversation, but I heard the fat one say: ‘That way we won’t run any risks. Anyway he doesn’t deserve anything else.’ Then your enemy, the one who looks like a Jew, right? replied: ‘And what about his second?’ The other one shouted: ‘Too bad for him.’ After that I came in and they shut up. In my opinion they’re getting ready to simply massacre us. Talk about the honor of the SS!”—“Don’t worry, Doktor. I’ll take my precautions. Did you settle on the arrangements?”—“Yes. We’ll meet them tomorrow night at six o’clock outside of Zheleznovodsk and we’ll go find an isolated balka. The dead man will be chalked up to the partisans lurking around there.” “Yes, Pustov’s gang. That’s a good idea. Shall we go eat?”