At night, the fever rose; I shivered on my bed above Thomas’s, hunched under the blankets, devoured by lice, dominated by these distant images. When school began again, after the summer, almost nothing changed. Separated, we dreamed of each other, waiting for the moment we’d be together again. We had our public lives, lived openly like those of all children, and our private lives, which belonged to us alone, a space vaster than the world, limited only by the possibilities of our united minds. As time went by, the settings changed, but the pavane of our love continued to mark its own rhythm, elegant or furious. For the winter vacation, Moreau took us to the mountains; at the time, that was much rarer than it is now. He rented a chalet that had belonged to a Russian nobleman: this Muscovite had transformed an annex into a sauna, something none of us had ever seen; but the owner showed us how to work it, and Moreau, especially, developed a passion for this invention. At the end of the afternoon, after we had returned from skiing or sledding or hiking, he spent a good hour there sweating; he didn’t have the courage to go out and roll in the snow, though, as we did, clothed, alas, in swimming trunks, which our mother forced us to wear. She, for her part, did not like this sauna and avoided it. But when we were alone in the house, either during the day, when they went out for a walk in the town, or at night, when they were sleeping, we reoccupied the room after it had grown cold and finally shed our clothes, and our little bodies became a mirror for each other. We also nestled in the long empty closets built beneath the large sloping roof of the chalet, tall enough to stand up in, but where we stayed sitting or lying down, slithering, snuggled against each other, skin against skin, slaves of each other and masters of everything.

During the day, I tried to find my fragile bearings in that devastated city; but the fever and diarrhea wore me down, separating me from the nonetheless heavy and grief-filled reality surrounding me. My left ear also hurt, a numb, insistent pain, just beneath the skin inside the canal. I tried soothing it by rubbing the spot with my little finger, to no avail. Distracted, I spent many long, gray hours in my office wrapped in my soiled fleece-lined coat, humming a little mechanical, toneless tune, trying to find my way back to the lost paths of old. The angel opened my office door and came in, bearing the hot coal that burns away all sins; but instead of touching my lips with it, he buried it whole in my mouth; and if then I went out into the street, at the touch of the fresh air, I burned alive. I stayed standing, I didn’t smile, but my gaze, I knew, remained calm, yes, even as the flames were eating into my eyelids, hollowing out my nostrils, filling my jaw and veiling my eyes. Once these conflagrations were extinguished, I saw astonishing, extraordinary things. In a slightly sloping street, lined with destroyed cars and trucks, I noticed a man on the sidewalk leaning with one hand on a streetlight. He was a soldier, dirty, ill-shaven, dressed in rags held together by strings and pins, his right leg cut off under the knee, a fresh, open wound from which blood was gushing in streams; the man was holding a can or a tin cup under the stump and trying to gather this blood and drink it quickly, so as not to lose too much of it. He carried out these gestures methodically, with precision, and my throat tightened with horror. I’m not a doctor, I said to myself, I cannot intervene. Fortunately we were near the theater, and I rushed through the long, dark, cluttered basements, scattering the rats running over the wounded: “A doctor! I need a doctor!” I shouted; the nurses looked at me dully, without interest, no one answered. Finally I found a doctor sitting on a stool near a stove, slowly drinking tea. He took some time to respond to my agitation; he seemed tired, slightly annoyed by my insistence; but he ended up following me. In the street, the man with his leg cut off had fallen down. He was still calm and impassive, but he was obviously weakening. The stump was now foaming with a whitish substance that mixed with the blood, maybe it was pus; the other leg was also bleeding and looked as if it were about to fall away. The doctor knelt down next to him and began to look after his atrocious wounds with cold, professional gestures; his composure amazed me, not just his ability to touch these sources of horror but to work on them without emotion or revulsion; as for me, it was making me sick. While he was working, the doctor looked at me and I understood his gaze: the man wasn’t going to last long, there was nothing to do but seem to be helping him to make his anguish and the last moments of his fleeting life a little easier to bear. All this is real, believe me. Elsewhere, Ivan had taken me to a large building, not very far from the front, on the Prospekt Respublikanskyi, where a Russian deserter was supposed to be hidden. I didn’t find him; I was going through some rooms, wishing I hadn’t come, when a child’s high-pitched laughter burst out down the hallway. I went out of the apartment and didn’t see anything, but a few instants later the stairway was invaded by a horde of feral, shameless little girls, who brushed past me and dashed between my legs before lifting their skirts to show me their dirty behinds and bounding upstairs; then they all came tumbling back down, giggling wildly. They looked like frantic little rats in the throes of a sexual frenzy: one of them sat down on a step at the level of my head and spread her legs, exhibiting her bare, smooth vulva; another bit my fingers; I grasped her by the hair and pulled her toward me to slap her, but a third girl slipped her hand between my legs from behind while the one I was holding twisted around, tore herself away, and disappeared into a hallway. I ran after her but the hallway was already empty. I looked for an instant at the closed doors of the apartments, leaped, opened one: I had to throw myself backward so as not to fall into the void, since there was nothing behind the door, and I slammed it shut, just before a Russian machine-gun volley riddled it with holes. I threw myself down to the ground: an antitank shell exploded against the wall, deafening me and showering me with plaster and fragments of wood and old newspapers. I crawled furiously and rolled into an apartment on the other side of the hallway, which had lost its door. In the living room, gasping to get my breath back, I distinctly heard a piano; submachine gun in hand, I opened the door to the bedroom: inside, a Soviet corpse was lying on the unmade bed, and a Hauptmann in a shapka, sitting with his legs crossed on a stool, was listening to a record on a gramophone placed on the floor. I didn’t recognize the tune and asked him what it was. He waited for the end of the piece, a light tune with an obsessive little ritornello, and picked up the record to look at the label: “Daquin. The Cuckoo.” He wound the gramophone up, got out another disk from an orange sleeve, and set the needle down. “You’ll recognize this one.” In fact, it was Mozart’s Turkish Rondo, in an interpretation that was at once fast and cheerful but also imbued with romantic gravity; a Slav pianist, certainly. “Who’s playing?” I asked.—“Rachmaninov, the composer. You know him?”—“A little. I didn’t know he played too.” He handed me a pile of records. “He must have been some music lover, our friend,” he said, pointing to the bed. “And he must have had good contacts in the Party, given the source of the records.” I examined the labels: they were printed in English—these records came from the United States; Rachmaninov played Gluck, Scarlatti, Bach, Chopin, as well as one of his own pieces; the recordings dated back to the early 1920s, but seemed to have been recently issued. There were also some Russian records. Mozart’s piece came to an end, and the officer put on the Gluck, a transcription of a melody from his Orfeo ed Euridice, delicate, haunting, terribly sad. I motioned with my chin toward the bed: “Why don’t you get rid of him?”—“Why should I? He’s fine where he is.” I waited for the end of the piece to ask him: “Listen, you haven’t seen a little girl around, have you?”—“No, why, do you need one? Music is better.” I turned my back on him and went out of the apartment. I opened the next door: the little girl who had bitten me was peeing, squatting over a rug. When she saw me she looked at me with shining eyes, rubbed her crotch, and dove between my legs before I could react, running into the stairwell again, laughing. I went to sit down on the sofa and looked at the wet spot on the flowered carpet; I was still reeling from the bomb explosion, and the piano music was ringing in my infected ear, which throbbed with pain. I touched it delicately with my finger and brought it back covered with yellowish pus, which I wiped distractedly on the cloth of the sofa. Then I blew my nose in the curtains and went out; so much for the little girl, someone else would have to administer the punishment she deserved. In the basement of the Univermag, I went to consult a doctor: he confirmed the infection, cleaned it as well as he could, and put a bandage over my ear, but couldn’t give me anything else, as he had nothing left to give. I couldn’t say what day it was, I couldn’t even say whether the great Russian offensive west of the Kessel had begun; I had lost all notion of time and of the technical details of our collective agony. When people spoke to me, the words reached me as if from far away, a voice underwater, and I understood nothing of what they were trying to tell me. Thomas must have noticed that I was rapidly losing my footing and he made efforts to guide me, to bring me back to less obviously rambling paths. But he too was having trouble maintaining a sense of the continuity and importance of things. To keep me busy, he took me out: some of the Ics he frequented still had a bottle of Armenian brandy or schnapps, and while he talked with them I would sip a glass and bury myself in the buzzing inside me. Coming back from such an expedition, I saw a metro entrance at a street corner: I didn’t know that Stalingrad had a metro. Why hadn’t they ever shown me a map of it? I took Thomas by the sleeve, pointing to the steps disappearing into the darkness, and said: “Come on, Thomas, let’s go see this metro up closer.” He answered very kindly but firmly: “No, Max, not now. Come along.” I insisted: “Please. I want to see it.” My voice took on a plaintive tone, I was filled with a mute anguish, this entrance drew me irresistibly, but Thomas still refused. I was about to begin sobbing like a child who’s been denied a toy. At that moment an artillery shell exploded near us and the blast knocked me over. When the smoke cleared, I sat up and shook my head; Thomas, I saw, was still lying in the snow, his greatcoat splattered with blood mixed with pieces of earth; his intestines spilled out of his stomach in long, sticky, slippery, smoking coils. As I watched him, stupefied, he sat up with jerky, uncoordinated movements, like a baby who’s just learned to walk, and buried his gloved hand in his stomach to draw out jagged pieces of shrapnel, which he tossed into the snow. These shards were still almost red-hot and, despite the glove, they burned his fingers, which he sucked sadly after each piece; when they touched the snow, they disappeared into it sizzling, letting off a little cloud of steam. The last few pieces must have been deeply lodged, since Thomas had to stick his whole fist in to pry them out. While he began to gather his intestines together, pulling them gently toward him and looping them around one hand, he gave me a lopsided smile: “There are still a few bits left, I think. But they’re too small.” He pushed the coils of intestines in and smoothed the fold of skin of his stomach back over them. “Could I borrow your scarf?” he asked me; always the dandy, he wore only a turtleneck sweater. Feeling faint, I handed him my scarf without a word. Passing it under the shreds of his uniform, he carefully wrapped it around his belly and made a tight knot in front. Then, firmly holding his work with one hand, he hoisted himself up, staggering, leaning on my shoulder. “Shit,” he mumbled, swaying, “that hurts.” He stood on tiptoe and bounced several times, then risked a hop. “Well, it looks like it’ll hold.” With all the dignity he could muster, he gathered the remnants of his uniform around him and drew them over his stomach. The sticky blood held them more or less in place. “That’s the last thing I needed. And of course, you might as well forget about finding a needle and thread, in this place.” His little rasping laugh turned into a grimace of pain. “What a mess,” he sighed. “Lord,” he added as he glimpsed my face, “you do look a little green.”