tefillin, the little leather box containing verses of the Torah. When he raised his arm, I thought I could make out other leather straps bound around his wrist; and under his jacket, weren’t those the white fringes of what the Jews call the little tallith showing through? I didn’t know what to think. I scrutinized my neighbors: they were listening to the speech with solemn attention, the civil servant was studiously nodding his head. Didn’t they notice anything? Was I the only one to see this unprecedented spectacle? I looked at the dignitaries’ stand: behind the Führer, I recognized Göring, Goebbels, Ley, the Reichsführer, Kaltenbrunner, other well-known leaders, high-ranking Wehrmacht officers; they were all contemplating the Führer’s back or the audience, impassive. Maybe, I said to myself, panic-stricken, it’s the story of the Emperor’s New Clothes: everyone sees how it really is, but hides it, counting on his neighbor to do the same. No, I reasoned, I must be hallucinating, with a wound like mine, that’s entirely possible. Yet I felt perfectly sound of mind. I was far from the platform, though, and the Führer was lit from the side; maybe it was simply an optical illusion? But I still saw it. Maybe my “pineal eye” was playing a trick on me? But there was nothing dreamlike about it. It was also possible that I had gone mad. The speech was short, and I found myself standing in the midst of the crowd trying to head for the exit, unable to make any headway in my thoughts. The Führer would now go to the galleries in the Zeughaus to visit an exhibition of war trophies captured from the Bolsheviks, before going on to inspect an honor guard, and place a wreath at the Neue Wache; I could have followed him, since this was included in my invitation, but I was too rattled and disoriented; I extricated myself from the crowd as quickly as possible and headed back up the avenue toward the S-Bahn station. I crossed the avenue and went to sit in a café, under the arcades of the Kaiser Gallerie, where I ordered a schnapps, drained it in one swallow, then ordered another. I had to think, but the meaning of my thinking escaped me, I was having trouble breathing, I undid my collar and drank some more. There was one way to discover the truth of the matter: in the evening, at the movies, the newsreels would show excerpts from his speech; that would set me straight. I ordered a paper with a list of showings: at seven o’clock, not far away, they were showing Uncle Krüger. I ordered a sandwich and then went for a walk in the Tiergarten. It was still cold, and not many people were strolling under the bare trees. Different interpretations were whirling around in my head, I was impatient for the film to start, even if the prospect of seeing nothing there wasn’t any more reassuring than the opposite. At six o’clock, I headed for the movie theater and took my place in the line to buy my ticket. In front of me, a group of people were discussing the speech, which they must have heard on the radio; I listened to them eagerly. “He blamed the Jews for everything again,” said a skinny man wearing a hat. “What I don’t understand is that there aren’t any more Jews in Germany, so how can it be their fault?”—“But no, Dummkopf,” replied a rather vulgar woman with bleached hair stacked in an elaborate permanent, “it’s the international Jews.”—“Yes,” the man retorted, “but if these international Jews are so powerful, why couldn’t they save their Jewish brothers here?”—“They’re punishing us by bombing us,” another grayish, stringy woman said. “Did you see what they did in Münster, the other day? It’s just to make us suffer. As if we weren’t suffering enough already with all our men at the front.”—“What I found scandalous,” said a ruddy, paunchy man dressed in a gray pinstripe suit, “is that he didn’t even mention Stalingrad. It’s shameful.”—“Oh, don’t talk to me about Stalingrad,” said the fake blonde. “My poor sister had her son Hans over there, in the Seventy-sixth Division. She’s almost mad with grief, she doesn’t even know if he’s alive or dead.”—“On the radio,” said the grayish woman, “they said they were all dead. They fought to the last bullet, they said.”—“And you believe everything they say on the radio, you poor thing?” the man with the hat said. “My cousin, who is an Oberst, says there were a lot of prisoners. Thousands. Maybe even a hundred thousand.”—“So Hansi might be a prisoner?” asked the blonde.—“It’s possible.”—“Why don’t they write, then?” asked the fat bourgeois. “Our prisoners in England or America write; it even comes through the Red Cross.”—“That’s true,” said the mouse-faced woman.—“And how could they write when they’re all officially dead? They write, but our people don’t pass on the letters.”—“Excuse me,” another person interrupted, “but that is true. My sister-in-law, my wife’s sister, she got a letter from the front, it was just signed: A German patriot, which said that her husband, who is a Leutnant in the Panzers, is still alive. The Russians dropped leaflets on our lines, near Smolensk, with lists of names and addresses, printed in tiny letters, and messages to the families. Soldiers collect them and they write anonymous letters, or send the leaflet as is.” A man with a military haircut joined the conversation: “Anyway, even if there are prisoners, they won’t survive for long. The Bolsheviks will send them to Siberia and make them dig canals until they die. Not one of them will come back. And after what we did to them, that will be only fair.”—“What do you mean, after what we did to them?” the fat man asked sharply. The fake blonde had noticed me and was staring at my uniform. The man with the hat spoke before the soldier did: “The Führer said we have lost five hundred and forty-two thousand men since the beginning of the war. Do you believe that? I think he’s just lying.” The blonde elbowed him and glanced in my direction. The man followed her gaze, reddened and stammered: “Or, well, maybe they don’t give him all the figures…” The others were also looking at me and fell silent. I tried to look neutral and absent. Then the fat man tried to restart the conversation on another subject, but the line had begun to move toward the ticket counter. I bought a ticket and found my seat. Soon the lights went out and they played the news, which opened with the Führer’s speech. The film was grainy, it jumped and went blurry at times, they must have rushed to develop it and print the copies. I still seemed to see the large striped shawl over the Führer’s head and shoulders; I couldn’t make out anything else, aside from his moustache; impossible to be sure of anything. My thoughts fled in all directions, like a school of fish in front of a diver; I scarcely noticed the main film, a flimsy Anglophobic thing, I was still thinking about what I had seen, it didn’t make any sense. That it was real seemed impossible to me, but I couldn’t believe that I was hallucinating. What had that bullet done to my head? Had it irremediably blurred the world for me, or had it truly opened a third eye, the one that sees through the opacity of things? Outside, when I exited, it was night, time for dinner, but I didn’t want to eat. I went back to my hotel and locked myself up in my room. For three days I didn’t go out again.