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 throug
h 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.
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 crawle
d 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.”
The Kindly Ones Page 47
