The soldiers walked back and forth across the camp, like runners after a race, strolling about to let the fever of the effort die down. They checked all the huts, they freed the bound prisoners (most of whom collapsed beside their stakes). The commanding officer counted. About forty of the wraiths clad in striped garments showed signs of life, some of them by opening their eyes, some by attempting to get up. Out of the six hundred members of the three penal companies twenty-seven soldiers remained.
Pavel found it difficult to disengage Marelst's body. He had to lift the other bodies, draw out the barbed wire. Most notably, the soldier's fingers seemed to be clinging to the earth. In his comrade's knapsack Pavel found two letters sent from Leningrad before the siege. He kept them.
Despite the fighting that started again the next day and the infinite diversity of the mutilated bodies, he could not forget Marelst's gesture: the hand that had found the time to feel for the lower part of his face, ripped away by shrapnel. He had often thought about his own death, about the last second before dying, about the possibility or impossibility of knowing how to die. This gesture became an answer.
The assault on the camp earned the survivors an amnesty and posting to ordinary units. They heard the news without showing any joy, as if this change did not concern them.
The war had grown younger. Pavel noticed this as he observed the latest conscripts, their indifference to being killed or their fear of dying, their awkwardness in suffering, their youthful receptiveness to all that war offered. He had forgotten how he, too, in the old days, would address amateurish prayers to death, polish his medals, dream of returning home, wait for letters.
On the opposing side this youthfulness was also visible. In the German ranks the bullets easily eroded the soft stratum of very young men, adolescents recruited from the Hitlerjugend. Once this layer was torn away, the core seemed almost mineral in its toughness: soldiers who had survived Stalingrad, Kursk, Konigsberg. Soldiers who knew that their native cities, or the cities from which they received their letters, had been transformed into charred ruins by aerial bombardment. For a long time the war had become their only country. And the soldier who knows that no one anywhere awaits his return is much to be feared.
Pavel encountered just such a soldier late in the day in the suburbs of Berlin, where their company was floundering about among little pockets of resistance. The red flag was already flying over the Reichstag, the victory had been announced, but there, behind a church with a dome shattered by shelling, there were still several concealed snipers who refused to give themselves up. There was one in particular, his face blackened by smoke, who was riddling the street from a hiding place behind a pillar eroded by bullets. He seemed invulnerable. After each burst of gunfire, as the dust cleared, you could see his stiff profile visible behind the column and the shooting started again. The young soldiers, perplexed, shrugged their shoulders, took careful aim, or, on the contrary, began spraying the whole façade, their faces contorted with rage. They finally took him out with a grenade launcher. Drawing closer, Pavel grasped their mistake at the same time as the others did, and whistled in astonishment. In a niche between two pillars stood a bronze statue crammed with their bullets. The German's hiding place had been close by, lower down. He lay there, dead, his face turned toward them. His left hand, covered in blood, was made fast to the butt of the machine gun by a length of wire. This had taken the place of smashed ligaments, so that he could continue firing. Browned with the soot of fires and the dust, his face closely resembled the metal of the statue. His features were expressionless.
This shooting had taken place while around the Reichstag victory was being celebrated. They arrived too late and Pavel did not even have time to write his name on the mutilated walls. The order to board the trucks had already been given and he had failed to find a piece of plaster on the ground strewn with cartridges and shrapnel. His greatest regret was not having written Marelst's name there, as he had for so long promised himself he would.
He felt there was something incomplete about those days of victory. The inscription not written… No, much more than that. The war was over, he thought, and the very idea seemed strange. From one day to the next all that tide of faces, dead or alive, of bodies unscathed or massacred, of cries, of tears, of dying breaths, all that was located in the past now, relegated to the past by the joy of the May sunshine in Berlin. Without being able to say as much, Pavel was waiting for a sign, a change in the color of the sky, in the smell of the air. But the weeks flowed by, confident of their newly established routine rhythm. The trucks arrived at the station. The trains filled with soldiers and traveled slowly back toward the east.