So I wished my own wish, the coward’s wish, which was to be every morning sitting in a Biergarten under the trees with the old widows who didn’t have to worry because they’d already lost so much; they touched their cups of ersatz coffee or gripped their glasses of wartime Rheinwine; they whispered in each other’s ears about whose grandsons had fallen on the Ostfront, which Jews had been taken away; even if their houses got bombed away they were still the lucky ones. That was the life I wanted. I wasn’t pushy; I didn’t even request creamcakes. Aching bones and loneliness, dead friends, the Golden Princess didn’t have to change any of that. She didn’t even have to pour coffee into my cup. Oh, I was an easy man; I was wishing for trifles! And if I couldn’t have those, I’d settle for lurking once more with Rüdiger in my zigzag trench, with a Tiger tank guarding me on the horizon.
I made my wish. I knelt down at the knees of my darling Golden Princess. When she forbore from slaying me, I dared to rise. I took a deep breath. Happily ever after? I prayed.
When I kissed her it suddenly came true that none of this had ever been real, and that what I’d taken for enemy tank-herds was but a grand formation of leaves scuttering all together across the sidewalks by the Siegessäule.
On 9.7.43, when the 
Death’s Head Division seized Red October Village, which lay on the innermost defensive line before Kursk itself, goal of Operation Citadel, our sleepwalker must have thought that the Golden Princess couldn’t get away from him now; but on 17.7.43 he had to cancel Citadel, in order to solve the new Anglo-American threat in Italy. Field-Marshal von Manstein served him with a writ of I-told-you-so. In the spring of 1944, the sleepwalker relieved him of his command, which, considering how the war turned out, was just as well for that gentleman. Good Prussian that he was, he bore his retirement and subsequent prison sentence with proud restraint. In Lost Victories he writes about Citadeclass="underline" And so the final German offensive in the East ended in fiasco, no matter that the enemy opposite the two attacking formations of Army Group South suffered four times their losses in prisoners, dead and wounded.
I was never in Army Group South, of course. That must be why the achievement which consoled von Manstein leaves me cold. I was with Dancwart, whom I often saw clothed in Russian blood; Volker, who always insisted on taking his turn in the most dangerous spot; Gernot, who always enjoyed fighting in the open; Rüdiger, who was generous even to enemies. We were all excellent Panzer grenadiers with straps around our helmets. Well, after all, what’s the difference?
The engagement at Prokhorovka (12.7.43) is usually considered the precise locus of our defeat in the Kursk Salient. I’m told that this was the greatest tank battle in history, but I can’t confirm it; I was sitting on a park bench at that time, kissing Lisca Malbran on the mouth. Somewhere north of Bjelgorod, in a place where the fields had been deeply cut by our dark tank-tracks whose shadows were darker than blood, our Tiger tanks crushed the grass and wheat, the black crosses on them as dark as their ruts in that glaring summer light. But T-34s sucked the life out of them. Stalin gloated: If the Battle of Stalingrad signalled the twilight of the German-Fascist Army, then the Battle of Kursk confronted it with catastrophe.—In short, he agreed with von Manstein. Well, who says that Citadel wasn’t worthwhile? Our withdrawal enabled those Slavs to execute many of our collaborators.
After Operation Citadel came Operations Kutuzov and Rumiantsev, each of which ended badly for us. It was all as rapid as the westward recession of summer greenness; winter was coming from the east again, but in the west the moist emerald fields still insisted that it was July; the green shadows of the oaks and lindens were as warmly humid as the sweat from my Golden Princess’s armpits. We’d already withdrawn to the Hagen Line. I think I must have been there; I almost remember screaming: Run for your life! It’s T-34s!
They took Orel away from us, but not before we’d blown it up and killed more Slavs. There they discovered the mass graves and began making propaganda against us. By the end of August, Kharkov was lost. Then they launched Operation Suvorov…
So we retreated, laying down land mines like metal suitcases, and next to me a shellshocked colonel with sunken eyes kept saying over and over again: My name is Hagen. My job is to take the blame. ‣
THE TELEPHONE RINGS
As a general rule, writing for two voices is only successful… when discords are prepared by a common note.
He dreamed that the big black telephone rang and the voice in his ear was hers; that was when he thought that he was going to incur a heart attack. She wanted him to visit her, but he didn’t think he could bear it. In that agonizingly beautiful voice of hers, she said that she needed him to come. So he went to her, at which point she said that what she actually needed was for them to be friends. That, he answered, he definitely couldn’t bear; so long as he didn’t see her, ever, then what they had been to each other could stay frozen just the way it was, but as soon as they began to be “friends,” the thing he refused to let go of would really be over, over. He was weeping when he stood up to leave her and she, refraining of course from approaching him, was gazing at him with implacable gentleness. So he faced away from her and began to go out; he did in fact go out of his dream, awaking with tears on his cheeks and the old longing poisoning him to the very bones; it was all he could do not to go to her right then, or at least telephone her; but, after all, everyone should do his own work all the way to the end. All the while, the familiarity of his anguish was such a comfortable old trick; it did, so to speak, comfort him in a way. The reformed addict who feels the craving almost believes in it, then merely smiles; that was the sort of fellow he was now; he’d never get rid of it now, but after all it was better than the other feeling, the fear which also lived in his bones, year by year eating away his skeleton from the inside out. As for Elena Konstantinovskaya, he remembered for a fact how jealous she had been—why, she’d never trusted him even with his male colleagues, Glikman especially. What was it about that man? Their friendship wasn’t as close as Glikman thought; for that matter, anyone who presumed on a, a, well, an intimacy, let’s say, with Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was welcome to dream whatever liked; he himself didn’t mind armoring himself in irony if that would, well, the point is that every instant he’d spent away from Elena embittered her to a more fantastic degree; because the way she quite reasonably looked at it, he was still living with Nina, wasn’t he? And he was never going to leave Nina, never. Therefore, he had no right to further subdivide his heart even for innocuous friendships, did he? Did he? He’d been so often afraid of Elena! Oh, the times when she threw a plate against the wall simply because Sollertinsky had telephoned, or snatched up one of his scores, threatening to tear it up for absolutely no reason that he’d ever comprehended—how he’d hated her, really! Or at least, how he’d feared her…! Why then had she so deeply wounded him by walking out? Well, it had certainly been a shock. He needed to analyze this shock without delay.