Back in Stalingrad, I used the figures Hohenegg had provided me to draft a report that, according to Thomas, stunned Möritz: he had read it at one go, he told me, then returned it without any comments. Thomas wanted to forward it directly to Berlin. “You can do that without Möritz’s authorization?” I asked him, surprised. Thomas shrugged his shoulders: “I’m an officer of the Staatspolizei, not of the Geheime Feldpolizei. I can do what I like.” In fact, I realized, we were all more or less autonomous. Möritz only rarely gave me precise instructions, and in general I was left to myself. I wondered why he had had me come. Thomas kept direct contacts with Berlin, I didn’t really know through what channels, and he seemed always sure of the next step. In the first months of the occupation of the city, the SP, along with the Feldgendarmerie, had liquidated the Jews and the Communists; then they had evacuated most of the civilians and sent the ones of working age to Germany, almost sixty-five thousand in all, for the Aktion Sauckel. But they too found little to do now. Thomas, though, seemed busy; day after day, he cultivated his intelligence officers with cigarettes and canned preserves. I decided, for lack of anything better to do, to reorganize the network of civilian informers that I had inherited. I summarily cut off supplies to the ones who seemed useless, and told the others I expected more of them. On a suggestion from Ivan, I went with a Dolmetscher to visit the basements of the destroyed buildings in the center of town: there were old women there who knew a lot but never went out. Most of them hated us, and were waiting impatiently for the return of nashi, “our own”; but a few potatoes, and especially the pleasure of having someone to talk to, loosened their tongues. From the military standpoint they didn’t contribute anything; but they had lived for months just behind the Soviet lines, and spoke eloquently about the morale of the soldiers, their courage, their faith in Russia, and also about the immense hopes that the war had given rise to among the people, which the men discussed openly, even with their officers: liberalization of the regime, abolition of the sovkhozes and kolkhozes, elimination of the work booklet that prevented free movement. One of these old women, Masha, animatedly described to me their General Shuikov, whom she already called “the hero of Stalingrad”: he hadn’t left the right bank since the fighting began; the day we burned the oil tanks, he had just barely managed to find refuge on a rocky out-crop, and had spent the night between the rivers of fire, without batting an eyelid; the men now swore only by him; as for me, it was the first time I had heard this name. With these women, I also learned a lot about our own Landsers: many of them came to shelter for a few hours with them, to eat a little, talk, sleep. This zone on the front was a senseless chaos of collapsed buildings, constantly under the fire of Russian artillery, whose outgoing booms could sometimes be heard from the other bank of the Volga; guided by Ivan, who seemed to know the tiniest nooks and crannies of the city, I moved almost exclusively underground, from one basement to the other, sometimes even traveling through sewer pipes. Elsewhere, however, we went through upstairs floors, for mysterious reasons Ivan thought it was safer; we passed through apartments with the tatters of burned curtains, their ceilings caved in and blackened, the bare brick visible behind torn wallpaper and plaster, still cluttered with nickel-plated bed frames, gutted sofas, sideboards, and children’s toys; then came beams placed over gaping holes, exposed hallways you had to crawl through, and everywhere brick riddled like lace. Ivan seemed indifferent to the artillery but had a superstitious fear of snipers; with me it was the opposite: explosions terrified me, I always had to make an effort not to hunch over; as for the snipers, I didn’t pay any attention to them. This was out of ignorance, and Ivan often had to jerk me away from a place that must have been more exposed but that, to me, looked like any other place. He too claimed that most of these snipers were women, and that he had with his own eyes seen the corpse of the most famous of them, a champion of the 1936 Pan-Soviet Games; yet he had never heard of the Sarmatians of the Lower Volga, descended, according to Herodotus, from intermarriages between Scythians and Amazons, who sent their wives to fight alongside the men, and built immense kurgans like those of the Mamai. In these devastated, desolate landscapes, I also met soldiers; some spoke to me with hostility, others amiably, yet others with indifference. They told of the Rattenkrieg, the “rat war” for these ruins, where a hallway, a ceiling, a wall, served as a front line, where they bombarded each other blindly with grenades in the dust and smoke, where the living suffocated in the heat of the fires, where the dead cluttered the stairways, the landings, the doorways to apartments, where you lost any notion of time and space, and where the war almost became an abstract, three-dimensional chess game. This was how our forces had come sometimes to within three, two streets of the Volga, and no farther. Now it was the Russians’ turn: every day, usually at dawn and at nightfall, they launched fierce assaults on our positions, especially in the sector of the factories, but also in the center of town; the companies’ ammunition, strictly rationed, was giving out, and after each attack the survivors would collapse, overcome; during the day, the Russians walked around out in the open, knowing our men weren’t allowed to shoot. In the basements, packed together, they lived under carpets of rats that, having lost all fear, ran over the living as well as the dead and, at night, came and nibbled at the ears, noses, or toes of the exhausted sleepers. One day I was on the second floor of a building when a small mortar shell exploded in the street; a few instants later, I heard a wild burst of uncontrollable laughter. I looked out the window and saw what looked like a human torso in the midst of the rubble: a German soldier, both his legs torn off by the explosion, was laughing madly. I watched, and he didn’t stop laughing, in the midst of a pool of blood that kept growing larger among the debris. This spectacle chilled me to the bone and knotted my gut; I sent Ivan out and dropped my pants in the middle of the living room. Out on expedition, when I was seized with diarrhea, I shat anywhere, in hallways, in kitchens, in bedrooms, even, at times, sitting on a genuine toilet, not always connected to a pipe, however. These vast destroyed buildings where, the summer before, thousands of families were living the ordinary, everyday life of all families, never suspecting that soon men would be sleeping six together in their conjugal bed, would be wiping their asses with their curtains and sheets, would be massacring each other with shovels in their kitchens, and laying the corpses of slaughtered men in their bathtubs—these buildings filled me with a pointless, bitter despair; and through this despair images from my past rose like drowned men after a shipwreck, one by one, more and more frequently. Often they were pathetic memories. Thus, two months after we arrived at Moreau’s house, a little before I turned eleven, my mother had placed me, when school began, in a boarding school in Nice, on the pretext that there was no good school in Antibes. It wasn’t a horrible establishment; the teachers were ordinary people. (Later, among the priests, how I would miss that place!) I could come home every Thursday afternoon and on weekends; still, I hated it. I was determined not to become once again the favorite target of the envy and spite of the other children, as in Kiel; the fact that in the beginning I still had a slight German accent made me even more nervous; our mother had always spoken to us in French at home, but before we arrived in Antibes, we hadn’t had much practice. What’s more, I was frail and small for my age. To compensate, I cultivated without really realizing it a vicious and sarcastic attitude, certainly an artificial one, which I directed at my teachers. I became the class clown; I interrupted the lessons with deadpan comments or questions that made my comrades shout with evil joy; I orchestrated carefully planned and sometimes cruel farces. One teacher in particular became my victim: a nice, slightly effeminate man who taught English, wore a bow tie, and who was rumored to engage in practices that, like everyone else, I regarded then as vile, without, however, having the slightest idea of what they were. For these reasons, and because he was weak by nature, I made him my scapegoat, and humiliated him regularly in front of the class, until one day, overcome with a mad, impotent rage, he slapped me. Many years later this memory still shames me, and I have long understood that I had treated this poor man the way the bullies treated me, shamelessly, for the odious pleasure of demonstrating an illusory superiority. That is surely the immense advantage over the weak that those called strong possess: both are consumed with anxiety, fear, and doubt, but the weak know it and suffer because of it, while the strong do not perceive it and, to shore up the wall that protects them from the bottomless void, turn against the weak, whose all-too-visible fragility threatens their own fragile confidence. Thus the weak are a threat to the strong, and invite the violence and murder that pitilessly strike them down. And it’s only when blind and irresistible violence strikes the strongest in turn that the wall of their certainty cracks: only then do they glimpse what awaits them, and see that they are finished. This was what was happening to the men of the Sixth Army, so proud, so arrogant when they were crushing Russian divisions, stripping civilians of their rights, eliminating suspects as one crushes flies: now, just as much as the Soviet artillery and snipers, as the cold, disease, and hunger, it was the slow rising of the internal flood that was killing them. In me too it was rising, acrid and stinking like the sweet-smelling shit that streamed from my bowels. A curious interview Thomas arranged for me demonstrated this in a blatant way. “I’d like you to talk with someone,” he said to me, sticking his head into the tiny cubbyhole that served as my office. This happened, I’m sure of it, on the last day of the year 1942. “Who?”—“A politruk we caught yesterday near the factories. We’ve already squeezed everything we could out of him, the Abwehr too, but I thought it would be interesting for you to talk with him, to discuss ideology, see a little of what’s going on in their heads, these days, on the other side. You have a subtle mind, you’ll do it better than me. He speaks good German.”—“If you think it might be useful.”—“Don’t waste any time with military questions: we’ve already taken care of that.”—“He talked?” Thomas shrugged his shoulders, smiling slightly: “Not really. He’s past his prime, but he’s tough. We’ll continue afterward maybe.”—“Ah, I understand: you want me to soften him up.”—“Precisely. Lecture him, talk to him about his children’s future.”