A few soldiers were sitting in empty rooms, leaning against the wall, their knees pulled up to their chests. They looked at us with empty eyes. Ivan led me through several buildings, passing through inner courtyards or alleyways; then, since we were probably by now far enough from the lines, he continued down a street. The buildings here were low, two stories at most, perhaps workers’ dormitories; then came smashed houses, collapsed, ruined, but still more recognizable than the ones I had seen entering the city. Occasionally a movement or a sound indicated that some of these ruins were still inhabited. The wind continued blowing; now I could hear the roar of detonations on the kurgan, which was outlined on our right, behind the houses. Ivan led me through some small gardens, recognizable beneath the snow from the debris of fences or railings. The place looked deserted, but the path we were following was well used, footsteps had cleared away the snow. Then he dove into a balka, sliding down the slope. The kurgan disappeared from sight; at the far end, the wind blew less strongly, the snow fell gently, and suddenly things became animated; two Feldgendarmen barred our way; behind them soldiers were coming and going. I presented my papers to the Feldgendarmen, who saluted me and stepped aside to let us pass; and then I saw that the eastern side of the
balka, its back to the kurgan and the front, was riddled with bunkers, dark tunnels propped up by beams or boards from which emerged little smoking chimneys made of tin cans stuck to each other. The men entered and left this troglodyte city on their knees, often backward. At the end of the ravine, on a wooden block, two soldiers were cutting up a frozen horse with an axe; the pieces, chopped at random, were thrown into a pot where some water was heating. After about twenty minutes the path joined up with another balka that housed similar bunkers; in places rudimentary trenches rose toward the kurgan we were skirting; here and there, a tank buried up to its turret served as a fixed artillery piece. Russian shells occasionally fell around these ravines, sending up immense sprays of snow; I could hear them whistling, a piercing, nerve-shattering, gut-wrenching sound; each time I had to resist the impulse to throw myself to the ground, and forced myself to follow the example of Ivan, who haughtily ignored them. After a while I managed to regain confidence: I let myself be invaded by the feeling that everything here was a vast children’s game, a huge adventure playground of the sort you dream about when you’re eight or nine, with sound effects, special effects, secret passages, and I was almost laughing with pleasure, caught up as I was in this idea that brought me back to my earliest games, when Ivan dove onto me without warning and pinned me to the ground. A deafening explosion tore the world apart, it was so close that I could feel the air slamming onto my eardrums, and a rain of mixed snow and earth fell onto us. I tried to curl up, but already Ivan was pulling me by the shoulder and lifting me up: thirty meters away, black smoke was lazily rising from the ground of the