I didn’t file a report on this conversation; what would there have been to report? That night, the officers got together to wish each other a happy New Year and finish the last bottles that some of us still had. But the celebration was glum: after the usual toasts, my colleagues spoke little, each one standing apart, drinking and thinking; the gathering soon broke up. I had tried to describe to Thomas my discussion with Pravdin, but he cut me off: “I know all that interests you; but theoretical rantings aren’t my main concern.” Out of a curious sense of propriety I didn’t ask him what had happened to the Commissar. The next morning I woke up, long before a dawn that was invisible here underground, racked with shudders of fever. As I shaved, I attentively examined my eyes, but didn’t see any traces of pink; at the mess, I had to force myself to swallow my soup and tea; I couldn’t touch my bread. Sitting, reading, writing reports soon became unbearable; I felt as if I were suffocating; I decided, without Möritz’s authorization, to go out and get some air: Vopel, Thomas’s deputy, had just been wounded, and I’d go visit him. Ivan, as usual, shouldered his weapon without a word. Outside, it was unusually warm and humid; the snow on the ground was turning to mud, and a thick layer of clouds hid the sun. Vopel must have been at the hospital set up in the municipal theater a little farther down. Shells had smashed the main steps and blown out the heavy wooden doors; inside the main foyer, among the fragments of marble and shattered pillars, lay dozens of corpses; some nurse’s aides were carrying them up from the basements and stacking them until they could be burned. A horrible stench rose from the underground entrances, filling the lobby. “I’ll wait here,” Ivan declared, taking up position next to the main doors to roll a cigarette. I looked at him, and my surprise at his composure turned into a sudden, keen sadness: though I, in fact, had every chance of remaining here, he had none to get out. He was calmly smoking, indifferent. I headed for the basements. “Don’t get too close to the bodies,” a nurse said next to me. He pointed and I looked: a dark, indistinct swarming was streaming over the piled-up corpses, detaching from them, moving among the rubble. I looked closer and my stomach turned over: the lice were leaving the cold bodies, en masse, in search of new hosts. I carefully walked round them and went down; behind me, the nurse was sniggering. In the crypt, the smell enveloped me like a wet sheet, a living, polymorphous thing that curled up into your nostrils and throat, comprised of blood, gangrene, rotting wounds, the smoke from damp wood, wet or urine-soaked wool, almost cloying diarrhea, vomit. I breathed, hissing through my teeth, forcing myself to hold in my retching. The wounded and sick had been lined up, on blankets or sometimes right on the ground, throughout the vast, cold cement basements of the theater; moans and shouts resounded from the vaulted ceiling; a thick layer of mud covered the floor. Some doctors or nurses in dirty smocks were slowly moving between the rows of the dying, carefully looking before setting their feet down to avoid crushing a limb. I had no idea how to find Vopel in this chaos. Finally I located what seemed to be an operating room and went in without knocking. The tiled floor was splattered with mud and blood; on my left, a man with one arm was sitting on a bench, his eyes open and empty. On the table lay a blond woman—probably a civilian, since they had already evacuated all our female nurses—naked, with horrible burns on her stomach and the underside of her breasts, and both her legs cut off above the knees. This spectacle stunned me; I had to force myself to turn my eyes away, not to stare at her swollen sex exposed between the stumps. A doctor came in and I asked him to show me the wounded SS man. He made a sign for me to follow him and led me to a little room where Vopel, half dressed, was sitting on a folding cot. Some shrapnel had hit his arm; he seemed very happy, he knew that now he could leave. Pale, envious, I looked at his bandaged shoulder the way I must have looked at my sister suckling our mother’s breast. Vopel smoked and chatted, he had his