Once I had eaten, I felt better. While I was swallowing a kind of broth in which vague scraps of meat were floating, Thomas had explained the gist of my duties: collecting gossip, rumors, and Latrinenparolen and reporting on the soldiers’ morale; fighting Russian defeatist propaganda; and maintaining a few informers, civilians, often children, who slipped from one line to the other. “It’s something of a double-edged sword,” he said, “because they give the Russians as much information as they report to us. And also they often lie. But sometimes they’re useful.” In our quarters, a narrow room furnished with a metal bunk bed and an empty ammunition crate with an enamel basin and a cracked mirror to shave with, he had brought me a reversible winter uniform, a typical product of German ingenuity, white on one side, feldgrau on the other. “Take that for your sorties,” he said. “Your coat is fine for the steppe; in town it’s much too heavy.”—“Can we go out?”—“You’ll have to. But I’ll give you a guide.” He led me to a guard room where some Ukrainian auxiliaries were playing cards and drinking tea. “Ivan Vassilievitch!” Three men raised their heads; Thomas pointed to one, who came out and joined us in the hallway. “This is Ivan. He’s one of my best. He’ll take care of you.” He turned to him and explained something to him in Russian. Ivan, a young, blond, rather slim youth with prominent cheekbones, listened to him attentively. Thomas turned back to me: “Ivan isn’t an ace at discipline, but he knows every nook and cranny of this city and he’s very trustworthy. Never go out without him, and outside, do anything he tells you, even if you don’t see why. He speaks a little German, you’ll be able to understand each other. Capisce? I told him that he was now your personal bodyguard and that he would have to answer for your life.” Ivan saluted me and went back into the room. I felt exhausted. “Go on, go to sleep,” Thomas said. “Tomorrow night, we’re celebrating Christmas.”

My first night in Stalingrad, I still remember, I had another metro dream. It was a station with many levels, but they communicated with each other, a huge labyrinth of steel beams, footbridges, steep metal ladders, spiral staircases. The trains arrived at the platforms and left them in a deafening racket. I didn’t have a ticket and I was terrified of being checked by the station police. I went down a few levels and slipped into a train that was leaving the station and then dive-bombed almost vertically on its tracks; below, it slowed down, reversed its direction and, passing by the platform again without stopping, plunged in the other direction, into a vast abyss of light and harsh noise. When I awoke, I felt drained; I had to make an immense effort to wash my face and shave. My skin itched; I hoped I wasn’t catching lice. I spent a few hours studying a map of the city and some files; Thomas helped me orient myself: “The Russians are still holding a thin strip along the river. They were surrounded, especially when the river was carrying ice floes and wasn’t completely frozen; now it doesn’t matter if they have their backs to the river; they’re the ones surrounding us. Here, above, is Red Square; last month, we finally managed, a little farther down, there, to cut their front in half, and so we have a foot on the Volga, here at the level of their old landing area. If we had ammunition we could almost prevent them from getting supplies, but we can really only shoot in case of attack, and they come and go as they please, even in daytime, on ice roads. All their logistics, their hospitals, their artillery, is on the other bank. From time to time we send them a few Stukas, but that’s just to tease them. Near here, they’ve hung on to a few blocks along the river, then they hold the whole big refinery, up to the foot of Hill 102, which is an old Tatar kurgan we’ve taken and lost dozens of times. The One Hundredth Jägerdivision holds this sector—Austrians, with a Croat regiment. Behind the refinery, there are some cliffs that lead to the river, and the Russians have a whole underground network inside them, untouchable since our shells pass right over them. We tried to liquidate it by blowing up the oil tanks, but they rebuilt everything as soon as the fires went out. Farther on, they also hold a large section of the Lazur chemical factory, with the whole zone we call the “Tennis Racket,” because of the shape of the tracks. Farther north, most of the factories are ours, except a sector of the Red October foundry. From there on we’re on the river, up to Spartakovka, the northern limit of the Kessel. The city itself is held by General Seydlitz’s LIST Corps; but the factories sector belongs to the Eleventh Corps. To the south, it’s the same thing: the Reds hold just a strip, about a hundred meters wide. It’s those hundred meters we never managed to reduce. The city is more or less cut in half by the Tsaritsa ravine; we’ve inherited a fine underground complex dug into the cliffs, and that has become our main hospital. Behind the train station, there’s a Stalag, administered by the Wehrmacht; we have a little KL in the Vertyashyi kolkhoz, for the civilians we arrest and don’t execute right away. What else? There are brothels in the basements, but you’ll find those on your own, if you’re interested. Ivan knows them well. That said, the girls are mostly covered in lice.”—“Speaking of lice…”—“Oh, you’ll have to get used to them. Look.” He unfastened his tunic, slipped his hand inside, searched, and pulled it out: it was full of little gray creatures, which he threw on the stove where they began to crackle. Thomas continued calmly: “We have huge fuel problems. Schmidt, the Chief of Staff—the one who replaced Heim, you remember?—Schmidt controls all the reserves, even our own, and he dispenses it in dribs and drabs. Anyway, you’ll see: Schmidt controls everything here. Paulus is just a marionette. The result is that moving around by car is forbidden. Between Hill 102 and the south station, we do everything on foot; to go farther, you have to hitch a ride with the Wehrmacht. They have pretty regular liaisons between the sectors.” There was still a lot to absorb, but Thomas was patient. Midmorning, we learned that Tatsinskaya had fallen at dawn; the Luftwaffe had waited till the Russian tanks were at the edge of the runway to evacuate, and had lost 72 aircraft, almost 10 percent of their transport fleet. Thomas had shown me the supply figures: they were catastrophic. The previous Saturday, December 19, 154 planes had been able to land with 289 tons; but there were also days with only 15 or 20 tons; AOK 6, at the beginning, had demanded 700 tons per day, at a minimum, and Göring had promised 500. “As for that one,” Möritz commented dryly during the meeting when he announced to his officers the news of the loss of Tatsinskaya, “a few weeks’ diet in the Kessel would do him good.” The Luftwaffe planned to move to Salsk, 300 kilometers away from the Kessel, the maximum range of the Ju-52s. That promised a merry Christmas.

Near the end of the morning, after a soup and some dry biscuits, I said to myself, All right, time to start work. But where to start? With troop morale? Why not then, troop morale. I could well guess it wasn’t going to be good, but it was my duty to verify my opinions. Studying the morale of the Wehrmacht soldiers meant going out; I didn’t think Möritz wanted a report on the morale of our Ukrainian Askaris, the only soldiers I had within reach. The idea of leaving the entirely relative security of the bunker worried me, but I had to do it. And also, I did have to see this city. Maybe I would get used to it and things would go better. As I was putting on my new outfit, I hesitated; I decided on the gray side, but saw from Ivan’s face that I had made a mistake. “It’s snowing today. Wear the white side out.” I ignored the inappropriate informality of the du form of address and went back to change. I also took a helmet; Thomas had insisted on it: “You’ll see, it’s very useful.” Ivan handed me a submachine gun; I dubiously contemplated the mechanism, unsure if I knew how to use it, but slung it over my shoulder nonetheless. Outside, a violent wind was still blowing, carrying with it large swirls of snowflakes: from the entrance of the Univermag, you couldn’t even see the fountain with the children. After the stifling dampness of the bunker, the cold, sharp air invigorated me. “Kuda?” Ivan asked. I had no idea. “To the Croats,” I said at random; Thomas, that morning, had mentioned some Croats. “Is it far?” Ivan grunted and turned right, down a long street that seemed to head toward the train station. The city seemed relatively calm; from time to time, a muffled explosion resounded through the snow, and even that made me nervous; I unhesitatingly copied Ivan, who walked right next to the buildings, I clung to the walls. I felt terrifyingly naked, vulnerable, like a crab that’s left its shell; I realized keenly that for all the eighteen months I had been in Russia, this was the first time I was actually under fire; and an unpleasant sense of dread made my limbs heavy and numbed my thoughts. I have spoken before about fear: what I felt then I won’t call fear, or else not an honest, conscious fear, but rather an almost physical discomfort, like an itch that you can’t scratch, concentrated on the blind parts of the body—the nape of the neck, the back, the buttocks. To try to distract myself, I looked at the buildings on the other side of the street. Many façades had collapsed, revealing the interior of the apartments, a series of dioramas of everyday life, powdered with snow and sometimes odd: on the third floor, a bicycle hanging on the wall; on the fourth, flowered wallpaper, an intact mirror, and a framed reproduction of Kramskoy’s haughty Unknown Woman; on the fifth, a green sofa with a corpse lying on it, its feminine hand dangling in the void. A shell, hitting the roof of a building, broke this illusion of peacefulness: I hunched over and understood why Thomas had insisted on the helmet: I was hit by a rain of debris, fragments of roof tiles and bricks. When I raised my head I saw that Ivan hadn’t even leaned over, he had just covered his eyes with his hand. “Come on,” he said, “it’s nothing.” I calculated the direction of the river and of the front and understood that the buildings we were walking alongside were partly protecting us: for the shells to fall in this street, they had to pass over the roofs; it wasn’t very likely they’d burst on the ground. But this thought didn’t do much to reassure me. The street led to some ruined outbuildings and railway warehouses; Ivan, in front of me, crossed the long square at a trot, and slipped into one of the warehouses through a metal door rolled up on itself like the lid of a sardine can. I hesitated, then followed him. Inside, I threaded my way through mountains of crates long ago plundered, skirted round a section of collapsed roof, and emerged into the open through a hole in a brick wall, where there were many traces of footprints in the snow. The path ran alongside the walls of the warehouses; on the slope overhanging the path stretched the freight train cars that I had seen the day before from the bridge, their sides riddled with bullet holes and shrapnel strikes and covered with Russian and German graffiti, ranging from the comic to the obscene. An excellent color caricature showed Stalin and Hitler fornicating while Roosevelt and Churchill jacked off around them: but I couldn’t decide who had painted it, one of ours or one of theirs, and so it was not very useful for my report. A little farther on, a patrol coming from the opposite direction passed us without a word, without a salute. The men’s faces were haggard, sallow, scraggly with beards; they kept their fists shoved into their pockets, and dragged along in boots wrapped with rags or enveloped in enormous cumbersome galoshes made of braided straw. They disappeared behind us into the snow. Here and there, in a train car or on the rails, appeared a frozen corpse, its uniform an indistinguishable color. We heard no more explosions and everything seemed calm. Then in front of us it started up again: detonations, gunshots, or machine-gun volleys. We had passed the last warehouses and crossed another residential zone: the landscape opened up onto a snowy terrain dominated, on the left, by an enormous round hillock like a little volcano, its summit periodically spitting out black smoke from explosions. “Mamaev Kurgan,” Ivan pointed, before turning left and entering a building.