I liked the well-regulated life on this beautiful, bare, cold island, all grays, yellows, and pale blues; there were just enough sharp edges to cling to there, to keep from being carried away by the wind, but not too many, so you didn’t risk getting scraped. Thomas came to see me; he brought me gifts, a bottle of French Cognac and a fine leather-bound edition of Nietzsche; but I wasn’t allowed to drink, and I would have been quite incapable of reading: all meaning fled, and the alphabet mocked me. I thanked him and tucked away his gifts in a chest of drawers. The insignia on the collar of his handsome black uniform now bore, over the four diamonds embroidered in silver thread, two bars, and a chevron adorned the center of his epaulettes: he had been promoted to SS-Obersturmbannführer, and I too, he informed me, had been promoted, the Reichsführer had explained it to me when I received my medal, but I hadn’t remembered this detail. I was now a German hero, the Schwarzes Korps had published an article about me; my decoration, which I had never looked at, was the Iron Cross, first class (at the same time I had also received the second class, retroactively). I had no idea what I could have done to deserve this, but Thomas, happy and voluble, was already bubbling over with information and gossip: Schellenberg had finally taken Jost’s place at the head of Amt VI, Best had gotten himself kicked out of France by the Wehrmacht, but the Führer had appointed him plenipotentiary to Denmark; and the Reichsführer had finally made up his mind to appoint a replacement for Heydrich, Obergruppenführer Kaltenbrunner, the big scarred ogre I had seen standing beside him in my room. The name meant almost nothing to me, I knew he had been HSSPF-Danube and that he was generally thought of as an insignificant man; Thomas seemed delighted with the choice, Kaltenbrunner was almost “a neighbor,” spoke the same dialect as he did, and had already invited him to dinner. Thomas himself had been appointed Deputy Gruppenleiter of IV A, under Panzinger, Müller’s deputy. These details to tell the truth did not arouse much interest in me, but I had learned to be polite, and I congratulated him, since he seemed very pleased, both with his lot and with his person. He humorously told me about the grandiose funeral of the Sixth Army; officially, everyone, from Paulus to the lowest Gefreiter, had
resisted to the death; in fact, only one general, Hartmann, had been killed under fire, and only one (Stempel) had chosen suicide; the twenty-two others, including Paulus, had ended up in Soviet hands. “They’re going to turn them inside out like gloves,” Thomas said lightly. “You’ll see.” For three days, all the radios of the Reich had suspended their broadcasts to play funeral music. “The worst was Bruckner. The Seventh. Nonstop. Impossible to escape it. I thought I’d go mad.” He also told me, but almost in passing, how I had gotten there: I listened to his story attentively, and so I can report it, but even less than the rest, I could connect it with nothing; it remained a story, a truthful one no doubt, but a story all the same, scarcely more than a series of phrases that fit together according to a mysterious and arbitrary order, ruled by a logic that had little to do with the one that allowed me, here and now, to breathe the salty air of the Baltic, to feel the wind on my face when they took me out, to bring spoonfuls of soup from the bowl to my mouth, then to open my anus when the time came to evacuate the waste. According to this story, which I am not altering in any way, I had walked away from Thomas and the others, toward the Russian lines and an exposed zone, without paying the slightest attention to their shouts; before they could catch up to me, there was a gunshot, just one, that had knocked me to the ground. Ivan had courageously broken cover to pull my body to safety, he too had been shot at, but the bullet had gone through his sleeve without touching him. As for me—and here Thomas’s version confirmed the explanations of the doctor in Hohenlychen—the shot had hit me in the head; but, to the surprise of those pressed around me, I was still breathing. They had carried me to a first-aid station; there, the doctor declared he couldn’t do anything, but since I persisted in breathing, he sent me to Gumrak, where they had the best surgical unit in the Kessel. Thomas had requisitioned a vehicle and transported me there himself, then, thinking he had done everything he could, he left me. That same night he had received his departure orders. But the next day, Gumrak, the main runway since the fall of Pitomnik, also had to evacuate in front of the Russian advance. So he went up to Stalingradsky, from which a few planes were still leaving; while he waited, for lack of anything better to do, he visited the field hospital set up in some tents and found me there, unconscious, my head bandaged, but still breathing like a pair of bellows. A nurse, in exchange for a cigarette, told him that they had operated on me in Gumrak, he didn’t know much about it, there had been some kind of altercation, and then a little later the surgeon had been killed by a mortar shell that fell on the unit, but I was still alive, and as an officer, I was entitled to consideration; during the evacuation, they had put me in a vehicle and brought me here. Thomas had wanted to have me put on a plane, but the Feldgendarmen refused, since the red characters of my VERWUNDETE label meant “Untransportable.” “I couldn’t wait, because my plane was leaving. And also the shelling was starting up again. So I found a guy who was really smashed up but who had an ordinary label, and I switched it with yours. He wouldn’t have made it anyway. Then I had you put with the wounded by the runway, and I left. They loaded you onto the next plane, one of the last. You should have seen their faces, in Melitopol, when I arrived. No one wanted to shake my hand, they were too afraid of the lice. Except for Manstein, he shook everyone’s hand. Aside from me there was almost no one except Panzer officers. Not surprising, given that Hube wrote up the lists for Milch. You can’t trust anyone.” I let myself fall back onto the cushions and closed my eyes. “Aside from us, who else got out?”—“Aside from us? Only Weidner, you remember? From the Gestapostelle. Möritz also received orders, but we never found a trace of him. We’re not even sure he was able to leave.”—“And the little guy, there? Your colleague, the one who got hit by shrapnel and was so happy?”—“Vopel? He was evacuated before you were even wounded, but his Heinkel was shot down at takeoff by a Sturmovik.”—“And Ivan?” He produced a silver cigarette holder: “Mind if I smoke? No?—Ivan? Well, he stayed, of course. You don’t really think they’d have given a German’s place to a Ukrainian?”—“I don’t know. He was fighting for us too.” He dragged on his cigarette and said, smiling: “You’re indulging in misplaced idealism. I see that your shot in the head hasn’t set you right. You should be happy to be alive.” Happy to be alive? That seemed as incongruous to me as rejoicing at being born.