In the steppe, there was another kurgan. The two boys climbed it and then went down its other side. I ran around it, but they had disappeared. “Where are you, boys?” I shouted. I realized that even from the top of the kurgan, I had lost sight of the river; the dull gray of the sky hid the sun, I didn’t know how to get my bearings; I had let myself get distracted, like an idiot! I had to find those boys again. I went around the kurgan again and discovered a depression: I felt around and a door appeared. I knocked, it opened and I went in; a long hallway stretched in front of me, with, at the end, another door. I knocked again and it opened too. There was a vast, high-ceilinged room, lit by oil lamps: from outside, though, the kurgan hadn’t seemed so large. In the back of the room stood a dais covered with rugs and cushions, with a potbellied dwarf playing a game; standing next to him was a tall, thin man with a black triangle over one eye; a wizened old woman in a scarf was stirring an immense ornamented cauldron hanging from the ceiling in a corner. Of the two children there wasn’t a trace. “Hello,” I said politely. “You haven’t seen two boys by any chance, have you? Twins,” I specified.—“Ah!” the dwarf shouted, “a visitor! Do you know how to play nardi?” I went up to the dais and saw that he was playing a game of backgammon, making his right hand play against his left hand: each took turns rolling the dice and then moved the pieces, red or white. “Actually,” I said, “I’m looking for my sister. A very beautiful young woman with black hair. They’re taking her away in a boat.” The dwarf, without stopping his game, looked at the one-eyed man, then turned back to me: “They’re bringing that girl here. We are going to marry her, my brother and I. I hope she is as beautiful as they say.” He leered lecherously and nimbly buried one hand in his pants. “If you are her brother, then we’ll be in-laws. Have a seat and drink some tea.” I sat down on a cushion, legs crossed, facing the game; the old woman brought me a bowl of good hot tea, real tea and not ersatz, which I drank with pleasure. “I would rather you didn’t marry her,” I said finally. The dwarf kept on playing one hand against the other. “If you don’t want us to marry her, play with me. No one wants to play with me.”—“Why not?”—“Because of my conditions.”—“And what are your conditions?” I asked amiably. “Tell me, I don’t know them.”—“If I win, I kill you, if I lose, I kill you.”—“Fine, that’s no problem, let’s play.” I watched how he was playing: it didn’t resemble any game of backgammon that I knew. In the beginning of the game, the pieces, instead of being arranged in columns of two, three, and five, were all placed at the ends of the board; and during the game, they couldn’t be removed, but blocked the place they occupied. “Those aren’t the rules for backgammon,” I pointed out.—“Listen, boy, you’re no longer in Munich, here.”—“I’m not from Munich.”—“Berlin, then. We’re playing nardi.” I looked again: the principle didn’t seem hard to grasp, but there must have been subtleties. “All right, let’s play, then.” In fact, it was more complicated than it seemed, but I learned quickly and won the game. The dwarf got up, took out a long knife and said: “All right, I’m going to kill you.”—“Calm down. If I had lost, you could have killed me, but I’ve won, so why should you kill me?” He thought a bit and sat back down: “You’re right. Let’s play again.” This time, it was the dwarf who won. “What do you say now? I’m going to kill you.”—“All right, I won’t say anything else, I lost, kill me. But don’t you think we should play a third game first to settle it?”—“You’re right.” We played one more time and I won. “Now,” I said, “you have to give me back my sister.” The dwarf got up in one bound, turned his back to me, leaned over, and let loose an enormous fart in my face. “But that’s disgusting!” I exclaimed. The dwarf was bounding up and down and letting off a fart at each leap, chanting: “I am a God, I do what I like, I am a God, I do what I like. Now,” he added interrupting himself, “I’m going to kill you.”—“Honestly, you’re incorrigible, you’re just too rude.” I got up, made an about-face, and went out. In the distance, I saw a large cloud of dust appearing. I climbed up onto the kurgan to see better: they were horsemen. They approached, divided themselves into two rows, and lined up, face-to-face, on either side of the kurgan to form a long walkway. I could see the closest ones clearly; the horses looked as if they were mounted on wheels. Looking more closely, I saw that they were impaled front to back on fat beams that rested on a wheeled platform; their feet dangled freely; and the horsemen too were impaled, I saw the points of the stakes coming out of their heads or mouths: a rather sloppy job, to tell the truth. Each chariot or framework was pushed by a few naked slaves who, when they had placed them in position, went to sit down in a group a little farther off. I stared at the horsemen and thought I recognized Möritz’s Ukrainians. Had they too gotten all the way here, and undergone the fate that was awaiting them? But maybe it was a wrong impression. The tall, thin one-eyed man had joined me. “It’s not proper,” I scolded him, “to say that whether you win or lose, you’ll kill everyone who plays with you.”—“You are right. The fact is that we don’t have many guests. But I’ll have my brother cease this practice.” A light wind had risen again and swept the dust raised by the chariots. “What are they?” I asked, pointing to them.—“That’s the honor guard. For our wedding.”—“Yes, but I won two games out of three. So you are going to give me my sister back.” The man stared at me sadly with his single eye: “You can never get your sister back.” An uneasy dread rose in my throat. “Why?” I cried out.—“It’s not proper,” he replied. In the distance, I saw some figures approaching on foot, raising a lot of dust, which was soon carried off by the wind. My sister was walking in the middle, still naked, escorted by the two awful creatures and the musicians. “Is it proper for her to walk like that, naked, in front of everyone?” I asked, enraged. His single eye never left me: “Why not? She’s no longer a virgin, after all. But we’ll take her all the same.” I wanted to run down the kurgan to join her but the two twins, who had reappeared, barred my path. I tried to go around them but they moved to prevent me. Overcome with anger, I raised my hand at them. “Don’t hit them!” the one-eyed man barked. I turned toward him, beside myself: “What are they to me, then?” I shouted furiously. He said nothing. At the end of the walkway, between the rows of horsemen impaled on their mounts, my sister was moving forward with an even tread.
SARABANDE
Why was everything so white? The steppe hadn’t been so white. I was lying in an expanse of white. Maybe it had snowed, maybe I was resting there like a fallen soldier, a battle flag lying in the snow. But I wasn’t cold. Actually, it was hard to say, I felt completely detached from my body. From far away, I tried to identify a concrete sensation: in my mouth, a taste of mud. But that mouth was floating, without even a jaw to support it. And my chest, it seemed crushed beneath tons of stone; I looked for them, but perceiving them proved impossible. Well, I said to myself, here I am really scattered. Oh my poor body. I wanted to huddle over it, the way you huddle over a beloved child, at night, in the cold.
In these endless white landscapes, a ball of fire was spinning, stabbing my gaze. But strangely its flames gave no heat to the whiteness. Impossible to stare at it, impossible to turn away from it too, it followed me with its displeasing presence. Panic overwhelmed me; and if I never found my feet again, how would I master it? Oh, this was all so difficult. How much time did I spend like this? I couldn’t say, a fetal lifetime at least. It gave me time to observe things, and that’s how I slowly became aware that all this white wasn’t uniform; there were gradations—none of them could have been labeled even pale gray, really, yet there were variations all the same; to describe them, one would need a new vocabulary, as subtle and precise as that of the Inuit to describe different kinds of ice. There must also have been a question of texture; but my sight seemed as unresponsive, on this point, as my inert fingers. Distant rumblings reached me. I resolved to cling to detail, a discontinuity of the white, until it revealed itself to me. I devoted at least another century or two to this immense e
ffort, but finally I understood what it was all about: it was a right angle. Come, another effort. By extending this angle, I ended up discovering another one, then yet another one; so, eureka, it was a frame, now it went faster, I discovered other frames, but all these frames were white, and outside of the frames everything was white, and inside the frames too: faint hope, I despaired, of getting to the bottom of this anytime soon. Perhaps I should proceed by hypotheses? Might it be modern art? But these regular frames were sometimes confused with other forms, also white but fluid, soft. Lord, what a labor of interpretation, what endless work. But my obstinacy kept giving me new results: the white surface that extended to the distance was in fact streaked, undulating, the steppe perhaps seen from a plane (but not from a dirigible; that didn’t have the same appearance). What a success! I was more than a little proud of myself. Another final effort, it seemed to me, and I’d come to the end of these mysteries. But an unforeseen catastrophe abruptly put an end to my research: the ball of fire died, and I was plunged into darkness, a thick, asphyxiating blackness. Fighting was pointless; I shouted, but no sound came out of my crushed lungs. I knew I wasn’t dead, since death itself couldn’t be so black; it was much worse than death, a cesspit, a turgid bog; and eternity seemed only an instant compared to the time I spent there.
Finally, my sentence was repealed: slowly, the endless blackness of the world lifted. And with the magical return of the light, I saw things more clearly; then, as to a new Adam, the ability to name things was given back to me (or maybe just given): the wall, the window, the milky sky behind the glass. I contemplated this extraordinary spectacle with wonder; then I itemized everything my gaze could find: the door, the doorknob, the weak lightbulb under its shade, the foot of the bed, the sheet, veined hands, mine no doubt. The door opened and a woman appeared, dressed in white; but with her a color burst into this world, a red shape, bright as blood on snow, and it distressed me beyond all proportion, and I burst into tears. “Why are you crying?” she said in a melodious voice, and her pale, cool fingers caressed my cheek. Little by little I grew calm. She said something else, which I didn’t make out; I felt her handling my body; terrified, I closed my eyes, and that finally gave me some kind of power over this blinding white. Later on, an older man came in, with white hair: “Ah, so you’ve woken up!” he exclaimed cheerfully. Why was he saying that? I had lain awake for an eternity, I had forgotten the very name of sleep. But maybe we weren’t thinking of the same thing. He sat down next to me, pulled up my eyelid without ceremony, stuck a light in my eye: “Very good, very good,” he repeated, satisfied with his cruel trick. Finally he too left.
It took a little more time for me to connect these fragmentary impressions and to understand that I had fallen into the hands of representatives of the medical profession. I had to be patient and learn to let myself be manhandled: not only did women, the nurses, take unheard-of liberties with my body, but doctors, solemn, serious men with paternal voices, entered at any moment, surrounded by a horde of young people, all wearing lab coats; lifting me up shamelessly, they moved my head and discoursed about my case, as if I were a mannequin. I found it all extremely disagreeable, but I couldn’t protest: the articulation of sounds, like my other faculties, still failed me. But the day when I was finally able distinctly to call one of these gentlemen a swine, he didn’t get angry; on the contrary, he smiled and applauded: “Bravo, bravo.” Encouraged, I grew bolder and went on during their next visits: “Piece of filth, bastard, stinker, Jew, asshole.” The doctors gravely shook their heads, the young people took notes on clipboards; finally, a nurse scolded me: “You could be a little more polite, really.”—“Yes, that’s true, you’re right. Should I call you meine Dame?” She waved a pretty ringless hand in front of my eyes: “Mein Fräulein,” she replied lightly, and slipped away. For a young woman, this nurse had a firm, skillful grip: when I had to relieve myself, she turned me over, helped me, then wiped me clean with a thoughtful efficiency, her gestures sure and pleasant, free of all disgust, like those of a mother cleaning her child; as if she, still a virgin perhaps, had done this all her life. I probably took pleasure in it, and delighted in asking her for this service. She or others also fed me, slipping spoonfuls of broth into my lips; I would have preferred a rare steak, but didn’t dare ask, it wasn’t a hotel, after all, but, I had finally understood, a hospital: and to be a patient means precisely what it says.
Thus, clearly, I had had some sort of health problem, in circumstances that still escaped me; and judging from the freshness of the sheets and the calm and cleanliness of the premises, I must no longer be in Stalingrad; or else things had changed quite a bit. And indeed, I no longer was in Stalingrad but, as I finally learned, in Hohenlychen, north of Berlin, at the German Red Cross hospital. How I had gotten there, no one could tell me; I had been delivered in a van, they had been told to look after me, they didn’t ask any questions, they looked after me, and as for me, I didn’t have to ask any questions, either: I had to get back on my feet again.
One day, there was a commotion: the door opened, my little room filled with people, most of them, this time, not in white but in black. I recognized the shortest of them after some effort, my memory was slowly coming back to me: he was the Reichsführer-SS, Heinrich Himmler. He was surrounded by other SS officers; next to him stood a giant whom I didn’t know, with a rough-hewn, horselike face slashed with scars. Himmler planted himself next to me and gave a brief speech with his nasal, professorial voice; on the other side of the bed, men were photographing and filming the scene. I didn’t understand much of what the Reichsführer said: isolated phrases bubbled to the surface of his words, heroic officer, honor of the SS, lucid reports, courageous, but they certainly didn’t form a narration in which I could recognize myself, I had trouble applying these words to myself; and yet the meaning of the scene was clear, I was indeed the person being discussed, it was because of me that all these officers and these gleaming dignitaries were gathered in this tiny room. In the crowd, in back, I recognized Thomas; he made a friendly gesture toward me, but alas I couldn’t speak to him. His speech over, the Reichsführer turned to an officer in round, thick glasses with black rims, who eagerly handed him something; then he leaned toward me, and with an increasing panic I saw his pincenez, his grotesque moustache, his fat, short, dirty-nailed fingers approach; he wanted to put something on my chest, I saw a pin, I was terrified at the thought of it pricking me; then his face descended even lower, he was paying no attention whatsoever to my anguish, his verbena-smelling breath was stifling me, and he deposited a wet kiss on my face. He straightened himself and launched his arm into the air, bellowing; the entire audience imitated him, and my bed was surrounded with a forest of raised arms, black, white, brown; timidly, so as not to be singled out, I too raised my arm; that had its effect, since everyone turned around and hurried to the door; the crowd quickly flowed out, and I was left alone, exhausted, incapable of removing this curious cold thing that was weighing on my chest.
I could now take a few steps, if someone supported me; this was useful, since it allowed me to go to the bathroom. My body, if I concentrated, began again to obey my orders, fractious at first, then with more docility; only my left hand continued to hold itself apart from the general entente; I could move the fingers, but they would under no conditions agree to close, to form a fist. In a mirror, I looked for the first time at my face: to tell the truth, I didn’t recognize anything in it, I didn’t see how this mosaic of such diverse features held together, and the more I considered them, the more foreign they became. The white bands wrapped around my skull at least prevented it from bursting open, that was already something and even a considerable something, but it didn’t help my speculations make any progress; this face looked like a collection of pieces that fit together well enough but came from different puzzles. Finally, a doctor came to tell me that I was going to leave: I was healed, he explained, they couldn’t do anything more for me, I was going to be sent elsewhere to regain my str
ength. Healed! What a surprising word, I didn’t even know I had been hurt. In fact, a bullet had gone through my head. By a chance less rare than people think, they patiently explained to me, I not only had survived, but I wouldn’t suffer any after-effects; the stiffness of my left hand, a slight neurological difficulty, would persist a little while longer, but that too would go away. This precise scientific information filled me with astonishment: so, these unusual and mysterious sensations had a cause, an explainable and rational one; but even with an effort, I couldn’t manage to connect the sensations to this explanation, it seemed hollow to me, contrived; if this was really Reason, then I too, like Luther, would have called it Hure, a whore; and in fact, obeying the calm, patient orders of the doctors, Reason raised its skirt for me, revealing that there was nothing beneath. I could have said the same thing about it as about my poor head: a hole is a hole is a hole. The idea that a hole could also be a whole would never have occurred to me. Once the bandages were removed, I could see for myself that there was almost nothing there: on my forehead, a tiny round scar, just above my right eye; in back of the skull, scarcely visible, they assured me, a swelling; between the two, my reemerging hair was already hiding the traces of the operation I had undergone. But if these doctors so sure of their science were to be believed, a hole went right through my head, a narrow circular corridor, a fabulous, closed shaft, inaccessible to thought, and if that were true, then nothing was the same again, how could it have been? My thinking about the world now had to reorganize itself around this hole. But the only concrete thing I could say was: I have awakened, and nothing will ever be the same again. As I was thinking about this impressive question, they came to fetch me and put me on a stretcher in a hospital vehicle; one of the nurses had kindly slipped into my pocket the case with my medal, the one the Reichsführer had given me. They took me to Pomerania, on the island of Usedom near Swinemünde; there, by the sea, was a rest home belonging to the SS, a beautiful, spacious house; my room, full of light, looked out onto the sea, and during the day, pushed in a wheelchair by a nurse, I could place myself in front of a large bay window and contemplate the heavy, gray waters of the Baltic, the shrill play of the seagulls, the cold, wet sand of the pebble-strewn beach. The hallways and common rooms were regularly cleaned with carbolic acid; I liked this bitter, ambiguous smell, which reminded me harshly of the demeaning joys of my adolescence; the long hands, so translucent they were nearly blue, of the nurses, blond, delicate Frisian girls, also smelled of carbolic acid, and the convalescents, among themselves, called them the Carbolic Babes. These smells and strong sensations gave me erections, astonishingly detached from myself; the nurse who washed me smiled at them and sponged them with the same indifference as the rest of my body; sometimes they lasted, with a resigned patience; I would have been quite incapable of relieving myself. The very fact of day had become a mad, unexpected, undecipherable thing to me; a body that was still far too complex for me, I had to take things little by little.
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