A few soldiers were sitting in empty rooms, leaning against the wall, their knees pulled up to their chests. They looked at us with empty eyes. Ivan led me through several buildings, passing through inner courtyards or alleyways; then, since we were probably by now far enough from the lines, he continued down a street. The buildings here were low, two stories at most, perhaps workers’ dormitories; then came smashed houses, collapsed, ruined, but still more recognizable than the ones I had seen entering the city. Occasionally a movement or a sound indicated that some of these ruins were still inhabited. The wind continued blowing; now I could hear the roar of detonations on the kurgan, which was outlined on our right, behind the houses. Ivan led me through some small gardens, recognizable beneath the snow from the debris of fences or railings. The place looked deserted, but the path we were following was well used, footsteps had cleared away the snow. Then he dove into a balka, sliding down the slope. The kurgan disappeared from sight; at the far end, the wind blew less strongly, the snow fell gently, and suddenly things became animated; two Feldgendarmen barred our way; behind them soldiers were coming and going. I presented my papers to the Feldgendarmen, who saluted me and stepped aside to let us pass; and then I saw that the eastern side of the balka, its back to the kurgan and the front, was riddled with bunkers, dark tunnels propped up by beams or boards from which emerged little smoking chimneys made of tin cans stuck to each other. The men entered and left this troglodyte city on their knees, often backward. At the end of the ravine, on a wooden block, two soldiers were cutting up a frozen horse with an axe; the pieces, chopped at random, were thrown into a pot where some water was heating. After about twenty minutes the path joined up with another balka that housed similar bunkers; in places rudimentary trenches rose toward the kurgan we were skirting; here and there, a tank buried up to its turret served as a fixed artillery piece. Russian shells occasionally fell around these ravines, sending up immense sprays of snow; I could hear them whistling, a piercing, nerve-shattering, gut-wrenching sound; each time I had to resist the impulse to throw myself to the ground, and forced myself to follow the example of Ivan, who haughtily ignored them. After a while I managed to regain confidence: I let myself be invaded by the feeling that everything here was a vast children’s game, a huge adventure playground of the sort you dream about when you’re eight or nine, with sound effects, special effects, secret passages, and I was almost laughing with pleasure, caught up as I was in this idea that brought me back to my earliest games, when Ivan dove onto me without warning and pinned me to the ground. A deafening explosion tore the world apart, it was so close that I could feel the air slamming onto my eardrums, and a rain of mixed snow and earth fell onto us. I tried to curl up, but already Ivan was pulling me by the shoulder and lifting me up: thirty meters away, black smoke was lazily rising from the ground of the balka, the raised dust slowly settled onto the snow, an acrid smell of cordite filled the air. My heart was pounding wildly, I felt such an intense heaviness in my thighs that it was painful, I wanted to sit back down, like a mass. But Ivan didn’t seem to be taking it seriously; he was carefully brushing off his uniform. Then he had me turn my back to him and he vigorously brushed it while I shook off my sleeves. We continued on our way. I began to find this episode idiotic: What was I doing there, after all? I seemed to have trouble grasping the fact that I was no longer in Pyatigorsk. Our road emerged from the balki: then a long empty unkempt plateau began, dominated by the rear side the kurgan. The frequency of the detonations at the summit, which I knew to be occupied by our troops, fascinated me: How was it possible for men to stay there, to undergo that rain of fire and metal? I was a kilometer or two away from it, yet it scared me. Our path snaked between mounds of snow that the wind, here and there, had eroded to reveal a cannon pointing to the sky, the twisted door of a truck, the wheels of an overturned car. In front of us we joined up again with the railroad tracks, empty this time, disappearing in the distance into the steppe. They led out from behind the kurgan, and I was seized by the irrational terror of seeing a column of T-34s suddenly appear along the tracks. Then another ravine cut through the plateau and I hurtled down its side following Ivan, as if I were diving into the warm security of a childhood house. Here too were bunkers, petrified and scared soldiers. I could have stopped anywhere, talked to the men and then gone back, but I docilely followed Ivan, as if he knew what I had to do. Finally we emerged from this long balka: once again a residential zone stretched out; but the houses were razed, burned to the ground, even the chimneys had collapsed. Ruined military gear cluttered up the narrow streets, tanks, assault vehicles, Soviet artillery, German too. Carcasses of horses lay in absurd positions, sometimes tangled in the harnesses of carts volatilized like straw; under the snow, you could still make out corpses, also often surprised in curious contortions, fixed in place by the cold until the next thaw. From time to time a patrol passed us; there were also checkpoints, where Feldgendarmen a little better off than the soldiers went through our papers before letting us pass into the next sector. Ivan started up a wider street; a woman came toward us, hunched into two coats and a scarf, a small nearly empty bag on her shoulder. I looked at her face: impossible to say if she was twenty or fifty. Farther on, a fallen bridge lay collapsed on the bed of a deep ravine; to the east, near the river, another bridge, very high up, surprisingly intact, spanned the mouth of this same ravine. We had to descend here by clinging to debris and then, skirting round or scaling the pieces of smashed concrete, climb back up the other side. A Feldgendarm post stood in a shelter formed by a piece of broken roadway. “Khorvati?” Ivan asked them. “The Croats?” The Feldgendarm directed us; it wasn’t much farther away. We entered another residential neighborhood: everywhere, you could see former gun emplacements with red signs, ACHTUNG! MINEN, the remnants of barbed wire, trenches half filled with snow between buildings; this had once been a frontline sector. Ivan led me through a series of alleyways, sticking to the walls again; at a corner, he motioned with his hand: “Who do you want to see?” It was hard for me to get used to his use of the familiar du. “I don’t know. An officer.”—“Wait.” He entered a building, a little farther on, from which he emerged with a soldier who pointed out to him something in the street. He gestured to me and I joined him. Ivan raised his arm toward the river, from which the punctual noise of mortars and machine guns came: “There, Krasnyi Oktyabr. Russki.” We had come a long way: now we were near one of the last factories held in part by the Soviets, beyond the kurgan and the “Tennis Racket.” The buildings must have been collective workers’ lodgings. Having reached one of these barracks, Ivan went up the three front steps and exchanged a few words with a soldier on guard. The soldier saluted me, and I went into the hallway. All the rooms were dark, their windows roughly blocked with boards, piled-up bricks, and blankets; each room sheltered a group of soldiers. Most of them were sleeping, close to each other, sometimes with several under one blanket. Their breaths formed little clouds of condensation. A horrible odor filled the place, a stench made of all the secretions of the human body, with urine and the sweetish smell of diarrhea dominating. In one long room, probably the former canteen, many men were crammed around a stove. Ivan pointed out an officer sitting on a little bench; like the others, he had the red-and-white checkerboard pattern on the arm of his German feldgrau. Several of these men knew Ivan: they conversed in a kind of lingua franca made up of Ukrainian and Croat, peppered with the crudest words (pitchka, pizda, pizdets, these are common to all Slavic languages, and one learns them very quickly). I headed toward the officer, who got up to salute me. “Do you speak German?” I asked him after clicking my heels and raising my arm.—“Yes, yes.” He looked at me with curiosity; my new uniform didn’t have any distinctive markings on it. I introduced myself. Behind him, on the wall, they had stuck some meager Christmas decorations: garlands made from newspaper around a tree sketched in coal on the wall, stars cut out of tin, and other products of the soldiers’ ingenuity. There was also a large, handsome drawing of the Bethlehem crèche: but instead of a manger, the scene was represented in a destroyed house, in the midst of burned ruins. I sat down with the officer. He was a young Oberleutnant; he commanded one of the companies of this Croatian unit, the 369th Infantry Regiment: some of his men were standing guard at a sector on the front, before the Red October factory; others were resting here. The Russians had remained relatively calm for the past few days; from time to time they lobbed a few rounds of mortar fire, but the Croats thought it was mainly to annoy them. They had also set up loudspeakers opposite the trenches and played sad, or happy, music throughout the day, interrupted with propaganda encouraging the soldiers to desert or surrender. “The men don’t pay too much attention to the propaganda, because they used a Serb to record it; but the music really depresses them.” I asked him about attempts at desertion. He replied rather vaguely: “It happens…but we do everything to prevent them.” He was much more talkative about the Christmas celebration they were preparing; the commander of the division, an Austrian, had promised them extra rations; he himself had managed to save a bottle of lozavitsa, distilled by his father, which he planned on sharing with his men. But more than anything he wanted news of von Manstein. “He’s coming, then?” The failure of Hoth’s offensive had of course not been announced to the troops, and it was my turn to be vague: “Be ready,” I answered lamely. This young officer must once have been an elegant, agreeable man; now he seemed as pathetic as a beaten dog. He spoke slowly and chose his words carefully, as if he were thinking in slow motion. We discussed the food supply problems a little more, then I got up to leave. Once again, I wondered what I was doing there: What could this officer, cut off from everything, teach me that I hadn’t already read in some report? True, I could see for myself the miserable condition of the men, their fatigue, their distress, but that, too, I already knew. I had vaguely thought, on my way there, about a discussion on the political involvement of the Croat soldiers with Germany, on Ustashi ideology: now I understood there was no sense in that; it was worse than futile, and this Oberleutnant would probably not have known how to respond; in his head there was room only for food, his home, his family, captivity, or his imminent death. All of a sudden I was tired and disgusted, I felt hypocritical, idiotic. “Merry Christmas,” the officer said to me as he shook my hand, smiling. A few of his men looked at me, without the slightest glint of curiosity. “Merry Christmas to you too,” I forced myself to reply. I collected Ivan and went out, greedily breathing in the cold air. “And now?” Ivan asked. I thought: if I had come as far as this, I said to myself, I should at least go see one of the outposts. “Can we go up to the front?” Ivan shrugged his shoulders: “If you want to, boss. But we have to ask the officer.” I went back into the large room: the officer hadn’t moved; he was still absently staring at the stove. “Oberleutnant? Could I inspect one of your advanced positions?”—“If you like.” He called one of his men and gave him an order in Croatian. Then he said to me: “This is Oberfeldwebel Nišíc. He’ll be your guide.” Suddenly it occurred to me to offer him a cigarette: his face lit up and he slowly stretched out his hand to take one. I shook the packet: “Take more.”—“Thank you, thank you. Merry Christmas again.” I also offered one to the Oberfeldwebel, who said, “Hvala,” and carefully stowed it away in a case. I looked once more at the young officer: he was still holding his three cigarettes, his face radiant as a child’s. How long, I wondered, before I was like him? The thought made me want to cry. I went back out with the Oberfeldwebel, who led us first down the street, then through some courtyards and inside a warehouse. We must have been on the grounds of the factory; I hadn’t seen a wall, but everything was in such a shambles you often couldn’t recognize anything. The warehouse floor was furrowed by a trench into which the Oberfeldwebel made us climb. The wall, opposite, was pock-marked with holes; light and snow poured with murky brightness into this large empty space; smaller trenches branched off the central trench toward the corners of the warehouse; they weren’t straight, and I couldn’t see anyone there. We passed in single file under the warehouse wall: the trench crossed a courtyard and disappeared into the ruins of a red brick administrative building. Nišíc and Ivan walked bent over, their backs beneath the rim of the trench, and I carefully copied them. In front of us, everything was strangely silent; farther on, to our right, we heard brief volleys, gunshots. Inside the administrative building it was dark, and it stank even more than the house where the soldiers were sleeping. “We’re here,” Nišíc said calmly. We were in a basement, the only light coming from little slits or holes in the brick. A man appeared out of the darkness and spoke to Nišíc in Croatian. “They had a skirmish. A few Russians tried to infiltrate. They killed some of them,” Nišíc translated into rough German. He coolly explained their setup: where the mortar was, where the MG was, where the little machine guns were, what range of fire was covered, where the blind spots were. I wasn’t interested in any of that, but I let him talk; in any case I didn’t really know what I was interested in. “What about their propaganda?” I asked. Nišíc spoke to the soldier: “After the fight they stopped.” We were silent for a bit. “Can I see their lines?” I finally asked, probably to give the impression I had come for something. “Follow me.” I crossed the basement and climbed a staircase littered with plaster and brick fragments. Ivan, submachine gun under his arm, brought up the rear. On the landing, a corridor led us to a room, in the back. All the windows were blocked by bricks and boards, but the light filtered through thousands of holes. In the last room, two soldiers were leaning against the wall with an MG. Nišíc pointed out a hole surrounded by sandbags held up by boards. “You can look from there. But not for too long. Their snipers are very good. They’re women, apparently.” I knelt near the hole and then slowly stretched up my head; the slit was narrow, I could just see a landscape of shapeless, almost abstract ruins. Then I heard the scream, on the left: a long hoarse cry, suddenly interrupted. Then the scream began again. There was no other noise and I heard it very clearly. It came from a young man, and they were long piercing cries, terrifyingly hollow; he must have been shot in the belly. I leaned forward and looked sideways: I could see his head and part of his torso. He screamed until he was breathless, stopped to breathe in, then began again. Without knowing Russian, I understood what he was shouting: “Mama! Mama!” I couldn’t stand it. “What is it?” I stupidly asked Nišíc.—“He’s one of the guys from before.”—“Couldn’t you finish him off?” Nišíc stared at me with a hard look, full of contempt: “We don’t have ammunition to waste,” he spat. I sat against the wall, like the soldiers. Ivan was leaning on the doorjamb. No one spoke. Out there, the boy was still screaming: “Mama! Ya ne khachu! Ya ne khachu! Mama! Ya khachu domoi!” and other words that I couldn’t make out. I squatted down and wrapped my arms around my knees. Nišíc, squatting, kept looking straight at me. I wanted to block my ears, but his leaden stare petrified me. The kid’s shouts were boring into my brain, a trowel burrowing in thick, sticky mud, full of worms and messy life. I wondered, would I too beg for my mother, when the time came? The idea of that woman filled me with hatred and disgust. It had been years since I last saw her, and I didn’t want to see her; the idea of invoking her name, her help, seemed inconceivable to me. Still, somehow I wondered if behind that mother there was not another one, the mother of the child I had been before something was irremediably broken. I too would probably writhe and cry out for that mother. And if not for her, it would be for her womb, the one from before the light, the diseased, sordid, sick light of day. “You shouldn’t have come here,” Nišíc suddenly said. “There’s no point. And it’s dangerous. There are often accidents.” He stared at me with an openly angry look. He was holding his submachine gun by the grip, finger on the trigger. I looked at Ivan: he was holding his weapon in the same way, pointed toward Nišíc and the two soldiers. Nišíc followed my gaze, examined Ivan’s weapon, his face, and spat on the ground: “You’d better head back.” An abrupt detonation made me jump, a little explosion, probably a grenade. The screams stopped for a bit, then began again, monotonous, nerve-shattering. I got up: “Yes. Anyway I have to go back to the center. It’s getting late.” Ivan stepped aside to let us pass and followed close behind, keeping an eye on the two soldiers until he was in the corridor. We left by the same trench, without a word; at the house where his company was staying, Nišíc left me without saluting me. It had stopped snowing and the sky was clearing up, I could see the moon, white and swollen in the sky, which was quickly darkening. “Can we go back by night?” I asked Ivan. “Yes. It’s actually faster. An hour and a half.” We probably could take some shortcuts. I felt drained, old, out of place. The Oberfeldwebel had been right, in fact.