I didn’t insist on taking the metro anymore, but accompanied Thomas to the Univermag, to wait for the end. The Russian offensive, west of the Kessel, had completely smashed through our lines. A few days later, Pitomnik was evacuated in an indescribable chaos that left thousands of wounded scattered throughout the frozen steppe; troops and HQ flowed toward the city; even the AOK, in Gumrak, was preparing its retreat, and the Wehrmacht expelled us from the bunker of the Univermag, to rehouse us temporarily in the former premises of the NKVD, which had once been a handsome building, with a large glass cupola now shattered and a polished granite floor, but whose basements were already occupied by a medical unit, which left us only the demolished offices on the first floor, over which we still had to fight with Seydlitz’s staff (as in a hotel with a sea view, everyone wanted to be on one side, not the other). But all these frenetic events left me indifferent, I barely noted the latest changes, since I had made a wonderful discovery, an edition of Sophocles. The book was torn in half, someone must have wanted to share it, and it was alas only in translation, but Electra was still there, my favorite. Forgetting the shivers of fever that shook my body, the pus that was oozing from my bandage, I lost myself blissfully in the verses. At the boarding school where my mother had had me locked up, to flee the surrounding brutality, I had taken refuge in my studies, and I especially liked Greek, thanks to our professor, the young priest I’ve already mentioned. I wasn’t yet fifteen but I spent all my free time at the library, deciphering the Iliad line by line, with passion and limitless patience. At the end of the school year, our class organized a performance of a tragedy, Electra, in fact, in the school gym, rigged out for the occasion; and I was chosen for the title role. I wore a long white dress, sandals, and a wig whose black curls danced on my shoulders: when I looked at myself in the mirror, I thought I saw Una, and I almost fainted. We had been separated from each other for almost a year. When I walked onto the stage I was so possessed by hatred and love and the sensation of my young virgin’s body that I saw nothing, heard nothing; and when I moaned Oh my Orestes, your death is killing me, tears streamed from my eyes. When Orestes reappeared, I screeched, possessed by the Erinyes, vociferated my injunctions in that beautiful, sovereign language, Go on, then, one more blow, if you still feel the strength, I cried, encouraging him, urging him to murder, Kill him quickly, then expose his body: let his gravediggers be whatever creatures find him. And when it was over, I didn’t hear the applause, didn’t hear the words of Father Labourie who was congratulating me, I was sobbing, and the butchery in the House of Atreus was the blood in my own house.

Thomas, who seemed to have completely recovered from his accident, scolded me amicably, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. To tease him, when I emerged from my Sophocles, I quoted Joseph de Maistre at him: What is a lost battle? It’s a battle you think you have lost. Thomas, delighted, had a sign painted with these words, which was posted in our hallway: this, apparently, earned him Möritz’s congratulations, and the new slogan got as far as General Schmidt, who wanted to adopt it as the motto for the army; but Paulus, it was said, opposed it. Neither Thomas nor I, by mutual agreement, spoke any longer of evacuation; but everyone knew that it was only a question of days, and the fortunate chosen ones of the Wehrmacht were already leaving. I sank into a sordid indifference; only the obsessive fear of typhus shook me now and then, and not content with scrutinizing my eyes and lips, I undressed to look for black spots on my torso. I didn’t even think about the diarrhea anymore; on the contrary, squatting in the stinking latrines, I found a certain tranquility, and would have liked, as when I was a child, to lock myself up in them for hours reading, but there was no light, and no door, either, so I had to make do with a cigarette, one of my last. My fever, almost permanent now, had become a warm cocoon in which I could curl up, and I took an insane enjoyment in my filth, my sweat, my dehydrated skin, my stinging eyes. I hadn’t shaved for days and a fine reddish beard contributed to my voluptuous feeling of dirtiness and neglect. My sick ear was suppurating, resounding by turns like a bell or a muffled siren; sometimes I couldn’t hear anything at all. The fall of Pitomnik had been followed by a few days’ lull; then, around January 20, the methodical annihilation of the Kessel resumed (for these dates, I’m citing books, not my memory, since the calendar had become an abstract notion for me, a fleeting memory of a bygone world). The temperature, after the brief thaw at the beginning of the year, had plummeted catastrophically—it must have been twenty-five or thirty below. The meager fires lit in empty oil drums weren’t enough to warm the wounded; even in town, the soldiers had to wrap their penises in cloth to piss, a stinking rag, preciously guarded in one’s pocket; and others took advantage of these occasions to hold out their hands, swollen with frostbite, beneath the warm stream. All these details were reported to me by the somnambulistic mechanisms of the army; just as somnambulistically, I read and classified these reports, after having issued them a file number; but it had been some time already since I stopped writing reports myself. When Möritz wanted information, I grabbed some reports from the Abwehr at random and brought them to him; maybe Thomas had explained to him that I was sick, he looked at me strangely but didn’t say anything. As for Thomas, he had never returned my scarf, and when I went out to take the air, my neck was cold: but I still went out, the dense stench of the buildings was becoming unbearable. Thomas’s rapid recovery intrigued me: he seemed entirely well, and when I asked him, raising my eyebrows significantly and looking at his abdomen: “So, are you all right?” he looked surprised and answered: “Yes, I’m fine, why shouldn’t I be?” As for me, however, my sores and my fevers weren’t getting any better; I would have liked to know his secret. One of those days, probably around the twentieth or the twenty-first, I went out to smoke in the street, and soon after, Thomas joined me. The sky was clear, cloudless, the cold biting, the sun, streaming everywhere through the gaping openings of the façades, was reflected on the dry snow, brilliant, dazzling, and where it couldn’t reach it projected steel shadows. “Do you hear?” Thomas asked, but my mad ear was ringing, I couldn’t hear anything. “Come.” He pulled me by the sleeve. We skirted round the building and discovered a strange sight: two or three Landsers, wrapped in greatcoats or blankets, were standing near an upright piano in the middle of the little street. A soldier, perched on a little chair, was playing, and the others seemed to be listening to him attentively, but I couldn’t hear anything—it was curious, and it saddened me: I too would have liked to listen to this music, I thought I had as much a right to it as anyone. A few Ukrainians were heading toward us; I recognized Ivan, who made a little sign to me with his hand. My ear was itching terribly, and I couldn’t hear anything anymore: even the words of Thomas, right next to me, reached me now only as an indistinct rumbling. I had the horrible and terrifying impression of living a silent film. Exasperated, I tore off my bandage and buried my pinky into the ear canal; something gave way, a flow of pus gushed out onto my hand and ran onto the neck of my coat. That soothed me a little, but I still could hear almost nothing; the piano, if I turned my ear toward it, seemed to be emitting a watery gurgle; the other ear wasn’t functioning any better; disappointed, I turned aside and slowly walked away. The sunlight was truly splendid, it chiseled each detail of the jagged façades. Behind me, I thought I could make out some agitation: I turned around, Thomas and Ivan were gesturing toward me, the others were looking at me. I didn’t know what they wanted, but I was embarrassed at being such an object of attention; I made a friendly little sign to them and went on walking. I glanced at them again: Ivan was running toward me, but I was distracted by a slight tap on my forehead: a piece of gravel, perhaps, or an insect, since when I felt it, a little drop of blood beaded on my finger. I wiped it off and continued on toward the Volga, which I knew lay somewhere that way. This was a sector where our forces held the riverbank; and I still hadn’t seen it, this famous Volga, and I resolutely headed in that direction, to contemplate it at least once before leaving this city. The streets wound between a shambles of quiet, deserted ruins lit by the cold January sun; it was very calm and I found it extraordinarily pleasant; if there were gunshots, I didn’t hear them. The icy air invigorated me. The pus had stopped flowing from my ear, which let me hope that the source of infection was pierced once and for all; I felt in good form and full of strength. After the last buildings, running along cliffs that loomed over the great river, there was an abandoned railway, the tracks already eaten by rust. Beyond stretched the white surface of the river caught in the ice, and then beyond that the other bank, the one we had never reached, completely flat and also white and as if emptied of all life. Around me, there was no one, I didn’t see any trenches or positions, the lines must have been farther up. Emboldened, I climbed down the steep sandy bank and found myself at the river’s edge. First hesitatingly, then with more confidence, I set one foot on the snow-dusted ice, then another: I was walking on the Volga, and it made me as happy as a child. The snowflakes lifted from the ice by the light wind danced in the sun, a little will-o’-the-wisp around my feet. In front of me, a dark hole opened up in the ice, quite wide, probably pierced by a high-caliber shell that had fallen short; deep inside the hole, water was flowing quickly, almost green in the sun, fresh, alluring; I leaned over and dunked my hand in it—it didn’t seem cold: gathering it in both hands, I rinsed my face, my ear, the back of my neck, then drank several mouthfuls. I took off my shuba, folded it carefully, put it together with my cap on the ice, then, breathing in deeply, I dove in. The water was clear and welcoming, a maternal kind of warmth. The swift current created whirlpools that soon carried me away under the ice. All kinds of things were passing by me, which I could clearly make out in this green water: horses whose feet the current was moving as if they were galloping, fat and almost flat fish, bottom-feeders, Russian corpses with swollen faces, entwined in their curious brown capes, pieces of clothing and uniforms, tattered flags floating on their poles, a wagon wheel that, probably soaked in oil, was still burning as it swirled beneath the water. A body bumped into me, then went on its way; this one was wearing a German uniform; as it drifted farther away I saw its face and its dancing blond curls, it was Voss, smiling. I tried to catch up with him but an eddy separated us, and by the time I reestablished my position, he had disappeared. Above me, the ice formed an opaque screen, but the air lasted in my lungs, I wasn’t worried and kept swimming, passing sunken barges full of handsome young men sitting in rows, their weapons still in their hands, little fish threading through their hair agitated by the current. Then slowly in front of me the water grew lighter, columns of green light plunged down from holes in the ice, became a forest, then melded into each other as the blocks of ice drifted farther apart. I finally rose back to the surface to regain my breath. A little iceberg bumped into me, I dove back down, straightened out, rose up again. Here, the river carried almost no more blocks of ice. Upriver, to my left, a Russian ship was drifting in the current, lying on its side, gently burning. Despite the sun, a few large flakes of luminous snow were falling, which lay hidden as soon as they touched the water. Paddling with my hands, I turned around: the city, stretched all along the shore, lay hidden behind a thick curtain of black smoke. Above my head, seagulls were reeling and shrieking, looking at me curiously, or possibly calculatingly, then flying off to perch on a block of ice; the sea was still far away, though; had they come all the way up from Astrakhan? Swallows too were whirling around and skimming the water’s surface. I began swimming calmly toward the left bank. Finally I touched bottom and emerged from the water. The shore, on this bank, was made of a fine sand that rose gently up, forming little dunes; beyond, everything was flat. Logically I should have found myself at the level of the Krasnaya Sloboda, but I didn’t see anything: no artillery pieces neatly lined up, no trenches, no village, no soldiers, no one. A few scraggly trees adorned the top of the dunes or leaned toward the Volga, which was flowing swiftly behind me; somewhere, a linnet was calling; a grass snake threaded between my feet and disappeared into the sand. I climbed the dunes and looked around: in front of me stretched an almost bare steppe, a land the color of ash lightly powdered with snow, with here and there a brown, short, dense, grass, and a few tufts of sagebrush; to the south, a line of poplars barred the horizon, probably bordering an irrigation canal; there was nothing else to be seen. I searched through my jacket pocket and fished out my pack of cigarettes, but they were soaking wet. My wet clothes clung to my skin, but I wasn’t cold; the air was gentle and mild. Then I felt a wave of fatigue, probably the effects of swimming: I fell to my knees and dug my fingers into the dry ground, still frozen by winter. I finally managed to pull up some clumps of earth, which I greedily stuffed into my mouth. They had a somewhat bitter, mineral taste, but when mixed with my saliva this earth gave off almost vegetable sensations, a fibrous life, which was still disappointing; I would have liked it to be soft, warm, and oily, for it to melt in my mouth, and for me to be able to bury my whole body in it, slip into it as into a grave. In the Caucasus, the mountain people have a curious way of digging graves: first they cut a trench two meters deep; then, at the bottom, on one side they dig out a niche with a slanting roof. The dead man, without a coffin, wrapped in a white shroud, is placed on his side in this recess, his face turned toward Mecca; then the alcove is walled in with bricks, or wood if the family is poor; only then is the ditch filled in, the excess earth forming an oblong hillock; yet the dead man doesn’t lie beneath this hillock, but right next to it. That, I said to myself when this custom was described to me, is a grave that would suit me, at least the cold horror of the thing is clear, and also it must be more comfortable, more intimate perhaps. But here there was no one to help me dig, and I didn’t have a tool, not even a knife: so I began walking, more or less in an easterly direction. It was a vast plain with no one on it, neither living on the earth nor dead beneath it; and I walked a long time beneath a colorless sky, which didn’t let me judge the time (my watch, set like all military watches to Berlin time, hadn’t stood up to the swim and showed an eternal thirteen minutes to noon). Here and there a bright red poppy grew, the only patches of color in this gloomy landscape; but when I tried to pick one, it turned gray and crumbled in a light puff of ash. Finally, in the distance, I made out some shapes. As I approached, I saw that it was a long white dirigible, floating over a large kurgan. Several figures were walking on the sides of the tumulus: three of them detached from the group and came toward me. When they were close enough, I could see that they were wearing white lab coats over suits, with high, slightly old-fashioned detachable collars and black ties; one of them also wore a bowler hat. “Guten Tag, meine Herren,” I said politely when they were standing in front of me. “Bonjour, monsieur,” said the one wearing a hat. He asked me in French what I was doing there and, answering in the same language, I explained to him as best I could. The two others nodded as they listened. When I had finished my narrative, the man with the hat said: “In that case, you’ll have to come with us; the doctor will want to talk with you.”—“If you like. Who is this doctor?”—“Dr. Sardine, the head of our expedition.” They brought me to the foot of the kurgan; three thick cables were anchoring the dirigible, a zeppelin that swayed slowly in the breeze more than fifty meters above our heads, its long oval mass carrying a two-story metal gondola. Another, thinner cable seemed to provide a telephone connection: one of the men spoke briefly into a receiver set up on a folding table. On the kurgan, the other gentlemen were digging, probing, measuring. I raised my head again: a kind of basket was slowly descending from the gondola, swaying back and forth in the wind. When it got close to the ground two men grasped it and guided it. This large basket was made of saplings and woven wicker; the man with the bowler hat opened a door and motioned me to get into it; then he joined me and closed it. The cable began to rise and with a heavy leap the basket tore itself from the ground; with our bodies as ballast, it reeled less, but it still made for a sort of seasick effect, and I gripped the edge; my chaperone held onto his hat. I looked at the steppe: as far as I could see, not one tree, not one house, just, at the horizon, a kind of hump, probably another kurgan.