Egger stayed where he was for a moment, thinking. He realized that he had been standing face to face with his mortal enemy, yet now that the soldier had disappeared he felt his loneliness more profoundly than ever before.
At first his two comrades came every few days, as agreed, to stock up his food supplies and, when necessary, to bring a pair of woollen socks or a new rock drill, as well as news from the front (things were seesawing back and forth, there had been losses but also some gains, all in all no one really knew what was going on). But after a few weeks the visits stopped, and towards the end of December — Egger was scoring the days onto a sheet of ice with the drill, and by his count it must have been the day after Christmas — he started to suspect that they wouldn’t be coming again. On the first of January 1943, after another week had gone by and still no one had turned up, he set off in thick, driving snow to walk back down to the camp. He followed the path they had come up almost two months earlier and was relieved when he soon saw the familiar red of the swastikas glimmering towards him. Within seconds, though, it abruptly dawned on him that the flags driven into the ground ahead to mark the camp perimeter were not swastikas at all, but the banners of the Russian Soviet Socialist Republic. In that moment Egger owed his life entirely to the presence of mind with which he immediately tore his rifle off his back and flung it as far away from him as he could. He saw the gun disappear into the snow with a muffled thud, and a split second later he heard the shouts of the guards running towards him. He raised his hands, fell to his knees and bowed his head. He felt a blow to the back of his neck, toppled forwards, and heard deep Russian voices speaking over him like incomprehensible sounds from another world.
For two days Egger crouched alongside two other prisoners in a wooden crate carelessly nailed together and sealed with felt. It had a length and breadth of about one and a half metres and was less than a metre high. He spent most of the time peering out through a slit, trying to glean from the movements around them some hint as to the Russians’ plans, and his own future. When at last, on the third day, the nails were ripped from the wood with a screech and one of the slatted walls fell outwards, the winter light pierced his eyes so brightly that he feared he would never be able to open them again. He could, after a while; but this sensation of piercing brightness, which seemed to fill even his nights with blinding light, stayed with him until long after the end of his wartime captivity, and only disappeared for good many years after his return home.
The transfer to a camp near Voroshilovgrad took six days, which Egger spent in the midst of a group of prisoners herded together onto the back of an open truck. It was a terrible journey. They travelled through cold days and icy nights, beneath a dark sky shredded with shell-fire and across white, open snowfields where the stiff, frozen limbs of people and horses jutted from the furrows. Egger sat on the back of the truck and saw innumerable wooden crosses lining the road. He thought of the magazine Marie had read aloud to him so often, and of how little the winter landscape it depicted resembled this ice-bound, wounded world.
One of the prisoners, a small, stocky man trying to shield his head from the cold with the tattered shreds of a horse blanket, said the crosses were really not as sad as they appeared; they were just signposts indicating the direct route to Heaven. The man’s name was Helmut Moidaschl and he laughed easily. He laughed about the snow that lashed their faces, and he laughed about the bricklike crusts of bread that were dumped out of a sack onto the back of the truck for them to eat. You’d be better off using that bread to build good, solid houses, he said, and laughed so loudly that their two Russian guards laughed with him. Sometimes he would wave to the old women examining the snow-covered corpses for useful items of clothing or food. If you’re on the way to Hell, he’d say, you have to laugh with the devils: it costs nothing, and makes the whole thing more bearable.
Helmut Moidaschl was the first in a long line of people Egger saw die in Voroshilovgrad. The very night they arrived he was seized with a heavy fever, and his screams, stifled by the shreds of his blanket, filled the barracks for hours. The next morning they found him lying dead in a corner, half-naked, doubled over, both fists pressed against his temples.
After a few weeks Egger stopped counting the dead. They were buried in a little birch wood behind the camp. Death belonged to life like mould to bread. Death was a fever. It was hunger. It was a crack in the wall of the barracks and the winter wind whistling through.
Egger was assigned to a team of about a hundred workers. They worked in the forest or on the steppe, cut wood, built low walls with stones from the fields, helped out with the potato harvest or buried the previous night’s dead. In winter he slept in the barracks with about two hundred other men. As soon as temperatures permitted he bedded down outdoors on a pile of straw. Ever since the warm night when someone had turned on the electric light by mistake and thousands of bugs had responded by trickling down from the ceiling, he preferred to sleep in the open air.