This time, I prepared my expedition a little better. I had already gone out with Thomas, to visit some division Ic/AOs; after my Croatian escapade, Möritz had ordered me, if I wanted to go out alone, to fill out an itinerary first. I made a phone call to Pitomnik, to the office of Generalstabsarzt Dr. Renoldi, the chief medical officer of AOK 6, where I was told that Hohenegg was based in the main campaign hospital in Gumrak; there I was told that he was traveling around within the Kessel, to make observations; I finally located him in Rakotino, a stanitsa in the southern part of the pocket, in the sector of the 376th Division. I then had to call the different HQs to organize liaisons. The trip would take half a day, and I would definitely have to spend the night either in Rakotino itself, or in Gumrak; but Möritz agreed to the expedition. There were still a few days left before the New Year; it had been twenty-five below zero since Christmas, and I decided to get out my shuba, despite the risk that lice would nest in it. I was already covered with them in any case—my vigilant hunt through the seams every night didn’t do any good: my belly, my armpits, the inside of my legs were red with bites, and I couldn’t stop myself from scratching till I drew blood. I was also suffering from diarrhea, probably because of the bad water and irregular food, a mixture, depending on the day, of tinned ham or French pâté and Wassersuppe with horse. At HQ it was all right, the officers’ latrines were revolting but at least accessible, but on the move it could soon become problematic.
I went without Ivan: I didn’t need him in the Kessel; anyway, seats in the liaison vehicles were strictly limited. The first car brought me to Gumrak, another to Pitomnik; there I had to wait several hours for a liaison to Rakotino. It wasn’t snowing, but the sky remained a milky, somber gray, and the planes, which were now taking off from Salsk, arrived irregularly. On the runway an even more horrible chaos reigned than the week before; there was a stampede for each plane, wounded men fell and were crushed by the others, the Feldgendarmen had to fire volleys in the air to force the horde of desperate men to fall back. I exchanged a few words with a Heinkel 111 pilot who had gotten out of his plane to smoke; he was livid, and watched the scene with a bewildered look, murmuring: “It’s not possible, it’s not possible…. You know,” he finally said to me before he walked off, “every night, when I get back to Salsk alive, I cry like a child.” This simple sentence made my head swim; turning my back on the pilot and the desperate mob, I started sobbing: the tears froze on my face, I wept for my childhood, for a time when snow was a pleasure that knew no end, when a city was a wonderful space to live in, and when a forest was not yet a convenient place to kill people. Behind me, the wounded howled like men possessed, mad dogs, almost drowning out the throb of the engines with their cries. At least this Heinkel took off smoothly; that wasn’t the case for the next Junker. Some shells were beginning to fall again, they must have botched the refueling, or maybe one of the engines was defective, because of the cold: a few seconds after the wheels had left the ground, the left engine stalled; the aircraft, which hadn’t worked up enough speed yet, lurched to the side; the pilot tried to straighten it, but the plane was already too unbalanced and suddenly it toppled onto one wing and crashed a few hundred meters beyond the runway, in a giant ball of fire that lit up the steppe for an instant. I had taken refuge in a bunker because of the shelling but still saw everything, again my eyes filled with tears, but I managed to control myself. Finally they came to get me for the liaison, but not before an artillery shell had fallen on one of the tents of wounded near the runway, sending limbs and scraps of flesh flying over the whole unloading area. Since I was nearby, I had to help clear away the bloody debris, to look for survivors; as I caught myself studying the entrails spilled out of the belly of a young soldier on the reddened snow, to find traces of my past or signs of my future in them, I told myself that everything here was indeed taking on the look of an agonizing farce. I remained shaken, I smoked cigarette after cigarette, despite my limited supply, and every fifteen minutes had to run to the latrines to let out a thin stream of liquid shit; ten minutes after the car started, I had to make it stop to rush behind a snowdrift; my coat got in my way and I soiled it. I tried to clean it with some snow, but managed only to freeze my fingers; back in the car, I huddled against the door and closed my eyes to try to forget it all. I shuffled through the images of my past as through a worn pack of cards, trying to find one that could come to life before me for a few minutes: but they fled, dissolved, or remained dead. Even the image of my sister, my last recourse, seemed like a wooden figure. Only the presence of the other officers kept me from weeping again.
By the time we got to our destination, the snow had started up again, and snowflakes danced in the gray air, joyful and light; and for a brief moment one might have thought that the immense, empty, white steppe actually was a country of crystalline fairies, joyful and light like the snowflakes, whose laughter burst gently in the murmuring wind; but the knowledge that it was polluted by men and their unhappiness and sordid fear ruined the illusion. In Rakotino, I finally found Hohenegg in a wretched little isba half buried beneath the snow, banging away on a portable typewriter in the light of a candle stuck into a PAK cartridge casing. He raised his head but showed no surprise: “Look at that. The Hauptsturmführer. What good wind brings you here?”—“You.” He passed his hand over his bald skulclass="underline" “I didn’t know I was so desirable. But I warn you: if you’re sick, you’ve come in vain. I only deal in those for whom it’s too late.” I made an effort to get a grip on myself to come up with a repartee: “Doctor, I suffer from only one disease, sexually transmissible and irremediably fataclass="underline" life.” He made a face: “Not only do I find you a little pale, but you’re sinking into clichés. I’ve known you in better form. The state of siege doesn’t agree with you.” I took off my shuba, hung it on a nail, and then, without being invited, sat down on a coarsely carved bench, my back to the wall. The room was barely heated, just enough to cut the cold a little; Hohenegg’s fingers looked blue. “How is your work going, Doktor?” He shrugged his shoulders: “All right. General Renoldi didn’t welcome me very politely; apparently he thought this whole mission was useless. I didn’t take offense, but I would have preferred it if he had expressed his opinion when I was still in Novocherkassk. That said, he’s wrong: I’m not done yet, but my preliminary results are already extraordinary.”—“That’s just what I came to discuss with you.”—“The SD is interested in nutrition, now?”—“The SD is interested in everything, Doktor.”—“So let me finish my report. Then I’ll go look for some so-called soup in the so-called mess, and we can talk while we pretend to eat.” He patted his round belly: “For now, it’s a health cure for me. But it better not last.”—“You have some reserves, at least.”—“That doesn’t mean anything. Nervous thin men like you seem to last much longer than the fat and the strong. Let me work. You’re not in too much of a hurry?” I raised my hands: “You know, Doktor, given the critical importance of what I’m doing for the future of Germany and of the Sixth Army…”—“That’s just what I was thinking. In that case, you’ll spend the night here and we’ll go back together to Gumrak tomorrow morning.”
The village of Rakotino remained strangely silent. We were less than a kilometer from the front, but since I arrived I had heard just a few gunshots. The clacking of the typewriter resounded in this silence and made it even more nerve-wracking. At least my runs had calmed down. Finally, Hohenegg stowed his papers into a briefcase, got up, and stuck a scruffy shapka onto his round skull. “Give me your paybook,” he said, “I’m going to look for some soup. You’ll find a little wood next to the stove: start it up again, but use as little as possible. We have to keep till tomorrow with that.” He went out; I busied myself next to the stove. The wood supply was indeed meager: a few wet fence pickets, with bits of barbed wire attached. I finally managed to light a piece after cutting it up. Hohenegg returned with a mess tin of soup and a thick slice of