I didn’t file a report on this conversation; what would there have been to report? That night, the officers got together to wish each other a happy New Year and finish the last bottles that some of us still had. But the celebration was glum: after the usual toasts, my colleagues spoke little, each one standing apart, drinking and thinking; the gathering soon broke up. I had tried to describe to Thomas my discussion with Pravdin, but he cut me off: “I know all that interests you; but theoretical rantings aren’t my main concern.” Out of a curious sense of propriety I didn’t ask him what had happened to the Commissar. The next morning I woke up, long before a dawn that was invisible here underground, racked with shudders of fever. As I shaved, I attentively examined my eyes, but didn’t see any traces of pink; at the mess, I had to force myself to swallow my soup and tea; I couldn’t touch my bread. Sitting, reading, writing reports soon became unbearable; I felt as if I were suffocating; I decided, without Möritz’s authorization, to go out and get some air: Vopel, Thomas’s deputy, had just been wounded, and I’d go visit him. Ivan, as usual, shouldered his weapon without a word. Outside, it was unusually warm and humid; the snow on the ground was turning to mud, and a thick layer of clouds hid the sun. Vopel must have been at the hospital set up in the municipal theater a little farther down. Shells had smashed the main steps and blown out the heavy wooden doors; inside the main foyer, among the fragments of marble and shattered pillars, lay dozens of corpses; some nurse’s aides were carrying them up from the basements and stacking them until they could be burned. A horrible stench rose from the underground entrances, filling the lobby. “I’ll wait here,” Ivan declared, taking up position next to the main doors to roll a cigarette. I looked at him, and my surprise at his composure turned into a sudden, keen sadness: though I, in fact, had every chance of remaining here, he had none to get out. He was calmly smoking, indifferent. I headed for the basements. “Don’t get too close to the bodies,” a nurse said next to me. He pointed and I looked: a dark, indistinct swarming was streaming over the piled-up corpses, detaching from them, moving among the rubble. I looked closer and my stomach turned over: the lice were leaving the cold bodies, en masse, in search of new hosts. I carefully walked round them and went down; behind me, the nurse was sniggering. In the crypt, the smell enveloped me like a wet sheet, a living, polymorphous thing that curled up into your nostrils and throat, comprised of blood, gangrene, rotting wounds, the smoke from damp wood, wet or urine-soaked wool, almost cloying diarrhea, vomit. I breathed, hissing through my teeth, forcing myself to hold in my retching. The wounded and sick had been lined up, on blankets or sometimes right on the ground, throughout the vast, cold cement basements of the theater; moans and shouts resounded from the vaulted ceiling; a thick layer of mud covered the floor. Some doctors or nurses in dirty smocks were slowly moving between the rows of the dying, carefully looking before setting their feet down to avoid crushing a limb. I had no idea how to find Vopel in this chaos. Finally I located what seemed to be an operating room and went in without knocking. The tiled floor was splattered with mud and blood; on my left, a man with one arm was sitting on a bench, his eyes open and empty. On the table lay a blond woman—probably a civilian, since they had already evacuated all our female nurses—naked, with horrible burns on her stomach and the underside of her breasts, and both her legs cut off above the knees. This spectacle stunned me; I had to force myself to turn my eyes away, not to stare at her swollen sex exposed between the stumps. A doctor came in and I asked him to show me the wounded SS man. He made a sign for me to follow him and led me to a little room where Vopel, half dressed, was sitting on a folding cot. Some shrapnel had hit his arm; he seemed very happy, he knew that now he could leave. Pale, envious, I looked at his bandaged shoulder the way I must have looked at my sister suckling our mother’s breast. Vopel smoked and chatted, he had his Heimatschuss and his luck made him euphoric as a child, he had trouble hiding it, it was unbearable. He kept fiddling with the VERWUNDETE tag attached to the lapel of the jacket thrown over his shoulders, as if it were a fetish. I left him, promising to discuss his evacuation with Thomas. He had incredible luck: given his rank, he had no hope of being on the evacuation lists of indispensable specialists; and we all knew that for us SS, there wouldn’t even be a prisoner’s camp, the Russians would treat the SS the way we treated Commissars and the men from the NKVD. As I left, I thought again about Pravdin and wondered if I would have as much composure as he did; suicide still seemed preferable to me to what awaited me with the Bolsheviks. But I didn’t know if I’d have the courage. More than ever I felt cornered like a rat; and I couldn’t accept the fact that it would end like this, in this filth and misery. The shivers of fever seized me again, I thought with horror that it wouldn’t take much for me to be stretched out in that stinking basement, caught in the trap of my own body until I too in turn was carried to the entryway, finally rid of my lice. Having reached the lobby, I didn’t go out to join Ivan but climbed the main staircase to the auditorium of the theater. It must have been a beautiful hall, with balconies and velvet seats; now the ceiling, torn open by shelling, had almost completely collapsed, the chandelier had crashed into the seats, a thick layer of rubble and snow covered everything. In the grip of curiosity, but also maybe out of a sudden fear of going out again, I went to explore the upper floors. Here, too, there had been fighting: the walls had been drilled through to set up gun emplacements, and the hallway was strewn with empty cartridge cases and ammunition boxes; on a balcony, two Russian corpses, whom no one had gone to the trouble of taking downstairs, lay sprawled in their seats, as if they were waiting for the beginning of an endlessly postponed play. Through a broken-down door at the end of a hallway, I reached a catwalk over the stage: most of the lights and set machinery had fallen, but some were still in place. I reached the attic: where the hall opened up down below there was just a gaping hole, but over the stage the floorboards were still intact, and the roof, pierced through all over, still rested on its tangled mass of beams. I risked a peek through one of the holes: I saw blackened ruins, smoke rising up in several places; a little to the north, a violent attack was under way, and behind, I could hear the characteristic wailing of invisible Sturmoviks. I looked for the Volga, which I’d have liked to see at least once, but it remained hidden behind the ruins; this theater wasn’t tall enough. I turned back and contemplated the desolate attic: it reminded me of the one in Moreau’s big house, in Antibes. Whenever I came back from the boarding school in Nice, my sister and I could never be separated, and together we would explore the farthest recesses of his ramshackle house, invariably ending up in the attic. There we would set up a hand-cranked gramophone taken from the living room, and unpack some marionettes belonging to my sister, representing different animals, a cat, a frog, a hedgehog; pinning up a sheet between two beams, we would stage, just for ourselves, plays and operas. Our favorite was Mozart’s Magic Flute: the frog represented Papageno, the hedgehog Tamino, the cat Pamina, and a human-shaped doll, the Queen of the Night. Standing in this rubble, my eyes open wide, I thought I could hear the music, glimpse the enchanting play of the marionettes. A heavy cramp seized my stomach and I lowered my pants and crouched down, and already as the shit flowed, liquid, I was far away, thinking of the waves, the sea under the boat’s keel, two children sitting in the bow facing that sea, myself and my twin sister, Una, our gaze locked and our hands touching without anyone noticing, and our love even vaster and more endless than that blue sea or the bitterness and pain of the wounded years, a solar splendor, a voluntary abyss. My cramps, my diarrhea, my surges of white-hot fever, my fear too, all that was erased, dissolved in this unhoped-for return. Without even bothering to pull my pants back up I lay down in the dust and rubble and the past unfolded like a flower in the springtime. What we loved, in the attic, was that unlike in basements, there was always light. Even when the roof isn’t riddled with shrapnel, either the daylight filters through little windows or through cracks between the tiles, or it rises up through the trapdoor leading to the house, it’s never entirely dark. And it was in that diffuse, uncertain, fragmented light that we played and learned the things we had to learn. Who knows how it happens? Maybe we found, hidden behind other books in Moreau’s library, certain forbidden books, maybe it happened naturally, proceeding along with our games and our discoveries. That summer, we remained in Antibes, but on Saturdays and Sundays we would go to a house rented by Moreau, near Saint-Jean-Cap-Ferrat, by the sea. There our games spilled into the fields, the pine woods, and the nearby maquis, vibrating with the chirping of the crickets and the buzzing of the bees in the lavender, whose odor overlapped the scents of rosemary, thyme, and resin, mixed too, near the end of the summer, with that of the figs we would devour to the point of nausea, and then, farther away, the sea and the chaotic rocks that formed this jagged coast, up to a little sloping island that we reached by swimming or by rowboat. There, naked as savages, we would dive with an iron spoon to detach the fat black sea urchins clinging to the rocks underwater; when we had gathered a pile of them, we would open them with a pocketknife and swallow the bright orange mass of little eggs gathered within the shell, then throw the scraps into the sea and patiently extract the broken spines from our fingers, opening the skin up with the tip of the penknife and urinating into the cut. Sometimes, especially when the mistral was blowing, the waves grew, crashing against the rocks; reaching the shore became a perilous game, all childlike skill and ardor: once, while I was hoisting myself out of the water, having waited for an ebb to get hold of the rock, an unexpected wave swept me onto the stone, my skin was scraped on the rough edges, the blood flowed in multiple little trickles, diluted by seawater; my sister rushed onto me and lay me down in the grass, to kiss the scratches one by one, lapping up the blood and salt like a greedy little cat. In our sovereign delirium, we had invented a code that allowed us, in front of our mother and Moreau, openly to suggest precise gestures and actions. It was the age of pure innocence, superb, magnificent. Freedom possessed our narrow little bodies, thin and tanned; we swam like seals, dashed through the woods like foxes, rolled, twisted together in the dust, our naked bodies indissociable, neither one nor the other specifically girl or boy, but a couple of snakes intertwined.