Exactly as if they were dragging forth a captured animal, two Germans dragged out another of the fighters on a makeshift stretcher and set him down at the feet of the rest. His face touching the stone, he looked as if he were listening to a distant noise. A fragment of bone, very white amid the dirty fabric of his tunic, poked out from his shoulder. He remained motionless, lying between the Germans and the row of prisoners. One of the officers rapped out a brief command. A soldier ran off, came back with a bucket of water, and emptied it over the recumbent man. The latter turned his head. It could be seen that half his face was charred-the same black surface as the walls and the bricks vitrified by the flamethrowers. Painfully, he raised himself onto one elbow. In this face made up of burned skin and mud an eye glittered, conscious and still full of the darkness of the underground chambers.

The officer leaned forward to meet this one-eyed gaze. In the scorched face the lips moved. In place of spittle, a clot of brown blood hurtled from this mouth and flattened itself against the officer's boots.

" 'Now we've had it,' we said to ourselves," Zurin related. " 'The Kraut will finish him off with a pistol. Then they'll give all of us hell just to pay for that gob of spit.' "

The officer stood up and a fresh command snapped out. The line of soldiers quivered and with a fierce clicking of heels came rigidly to attention, their eyes fixed on the officer. He stared hard at them and barked out several words that rang across the square. Zurin understood German, the enemy's language they had learned at school, reading Heine. "This is a true soldier," said the officer. "You should fight like him!"

For a long moment the square remained silent. A line of German soldiers at attention and this man dying, stretched out on the pavement, his brow against the stone.

In the new company, made up of the remnants of the previous ones, Pavel spoke to nobody. He had already grown accustomed to the futility of forming a tie with anyone, knowing the most you might be left with from such a friendship, formed on the brink of death, was either a knife with the handle notched for days of survival or an unfinished story. And if he now embarked on a conversation one night it was because the offense attributed to this new recruit seemed too improbable. They said that on attacks this man had refused to shout Stalin's name.

The two were on guard duty and spoke in whispers, unable to see one another in the darkness. The German positions were very close, you could not even light a cigarette. The soldier's responses left Pavel perplexed. "He's pulling my leg, this guy," he said to himself from time to time, and in the gray light of the June night he tried to make out the features of his strange interlocutor. But the reflected moonlight showed only quick flashes from his spectacles and the pale patch of his forehead.

"Is it true you swap your vodka for bread?" asked Pavel, seeing this refusal to drink the statutory hundred grams before an attack as a bizarre piece of bravado: those few burning mouthfuls gave you the courage to tear yourself up from the earth when the bullets and shrapnel came whistling past. "Don't you like drinking or what?"

"I do, but I'm always hungry. You see, I was a rich kid. My parents force-fed me like a turkey when I was little."

Such honesty was disconcerting. Pavel told himself that, questioned in that way, he would have invented a rather more heroic reason for his refusal. He would have said he did not drink because he 'was afraid of nothing. He would certainly never have admitted to a past as a spoiled child.

"And is it true they put you in a penal company because of Stalin? You really refused to shout?"

"Look, there was a political commissar who hated my guts. There was nothing I could do about it. He never left me alone. One day he got me out in front of the troop and ordered me to shout: 'For our country! For Stalin!' I refused. I said we weren't attacking."

"But on an attack you shouted?"

"Sure, like everyone else. When you shout you don't feel so scared. You know that yourself."

That night Pavel learned that the soldier had gone as a volunteer to the front at the age of seventeen, lying about his age like so many others. He came from Leningrad and had not received a single letter since the start of the siege, even after the blockade was lifted. When their guard duty was relieved the soldier remained stock still for a moment, with the dazed irresolution of someone who is suddenly overtaken by a wave of sleep, until then held at bay. As Pavel was moving away, he turned back and saw him thus: a figure all alone, in the expanse of the fields at night, beneath a sky already filling with the first light.

He caught up with him again next day during a halt. Now that the company had been slimmed down to half its size by an unsuccessful attack it was easier to locate faces. The soldier greeted him, held out his hand. "He's Jewish," thought Pavel and experienced a mixture of disappointment and distrust, derived from a source he himself was unaware of. He often heard it said at the front that all the Jews stayed behind the lines or were in cushy jobs in supply. Yet they had all of them come across many Jews in the front line or severely wounded in the hospital, as well as in the rushed interludes that came between the trivial actions before a battle (a tongue wetting a cigarette paper, a joke, a hand brushing aside a bee) and the first steps taken afterward, on a strip of earth covered with silent or howling bodies. And yet he continued to hear that refrain about cushy jobs and crafty little bastards in supply. Now he realized that among the men of the penal companies these remarks were no longer heard. The extreme proximity of death swept away the tawdry trappings of names and origins.

"I'm called Marelst. That's my first name."

Pavel stared at him and could not suppress a smile: he was tall, very thin, with the narrow, bony shoulders of an adolescent and glasses that had a diagonal crack across one of the lenses. His physique corresponded very little to the forename derived from the contraction of Marx-Engels-Lenin-Stalin. One of those revolutionary relics from the twenties. On his tunic, above his heart, you could still see the tear marks left by his confiscated medals.

"Did you have a Red Star?" asked Pavel, noticing an angular patch, darker than the rest, on the fabric bleached by the sun.

"Yes, and a 'For Gallantry,'" replied Marelst, and corrected himself at once, so as to eradicate the note of juvenile pride that had crept into his voice. "Yes, I had them. But, when it comes down to it, I tell myself there's no way I'd have got anything else, short of capturing Hitler in person."

As they marched in a column that extended along a road over the plain, he noticed Marelst three files away from him carrying the steel base for the mortar, the most cumbersome burden, for one never knew how to balance it on one's back. Pavel eyed the slightly bent back, the swerves in Marelst's step necessitated by the rocking of the base. A back like any other, Pavel thought, distractedly, a soldier dragging his weary feet in the dust of a road in wartime. He recalled his distrust and vexation on learning that this man was a Jew. Unwillingly he noted that this vexation seemed to him inexplicably justified by, and even inseparable from, the fact of being Russian. He would have liked to find the reason for it. But from his childhood days the possibility of being a Jew had remained purely theoretical, for no one had ever seen one in Dolshanka, where even the people from the other end of the village were regarded as foreigners. Later, away at school, there were a few old sayings of folk wisdom about Jews "raking in the money with both hands." This wise saw was curiously contradicted by their history teacher, a veteran soldier and a Jew who had lost one arm, and whom it was difficult to picture as a raker-in of money.