Voss went on; I took notes as fast as I could. But what charmed me the most, more than the details, was his relation to his knowledge. The intellectuals I had known, like Ohlendorf or Höhn, were continually developing their knowledge and their theories; when they spoke, it was either to present their ideas or to drive them forward. Voss’s knowledge, on the other hand, seemed to live inside him almost like an organism, and Voss enjoyed this knowledge as he would a mistress, sensually; he bathed in it, constantly discovered new aspects of it, already present in him but of which he had not yet been aware, and from it he took the pure pleasure of a child who has learned how to open and close a door or fill a pail with sand and empty it; and whoever listened to him shared this pleasure, since his talk was made up of capricious meanderings and perpetual surprises; you could laugh at it, but only with the laughter of pleasure of the father who watches his child open and close a door ten times in succession while laughing. I went back to see Voss many times, and each time he welcomed me with the same relaxed courtesy and the same enthusiasm. We soon struck up that frank, rapid friendship that war and exceptional situations favor. We would stroll through the noisy streets of Simferopol, enjoying the sun, in the midst of a motley crowd of German, Romanian, and Hungarian soldiers, of exhausted Hiwis, of tanned and turbaned Tatars, and of Ukrainian peasant women with rosy cheeks. Voss knew all the chaikhonas in the city and conversed familiarly, in various dialects, with the obsequious or jolly natives who served us, apologizing for the bad green tea. He took me one day to Bakhchisaray to visit the superb little palace of the Khans of Crimea, built in the sixteenth century by Italian, Persian, and Ottoman architects and by Russian and Ukrainian slaves; and the Chufut-Kale, the Fort of the Jews, a city of caves first dug into the chalk cliffs in the sixth century and occupied by various peoples, the last of whom, who had given the place its Persian name, were in fact Karaïtes, a dissident Jewish sect that, as I explained to Voss, had been exempted in 1937, based on a decision from the Ministry of the Interior, from the German racial laws, and had consequently, here in Crimea, also been spared by the special measures of the SP. “Apparently, the Karaïtes of Germany presented some czarist documents, including a ukase signed by Catherine the Great, that affirmed that they were not of Jewish origin but had converted to Judaism at a later period. The specialists in the ministry accepted the authenticity of these documents.”—“Yes, I heard talk of that,” Voss said with a little smile. “They were clever.” I would have liked to ask him what he meant by that, but he had already changed the subject. The day was radiant. It wasn’t too hot yet, and the sky was pale and clear; in the distance, from the top of the cliffs, you could see the sea, a somewhat grayer expanse beneath the sky. From the southwest vaguely reached us the monotonous rumble of the artillery pounding Sebastopol, resounding gently along the mountains. Filthy little Tatars in rags were playing among the ruins or guarding their goats; many of them observed us curiously, but bolted when Voss hailed them in their language.
On Sundays, when I didn’t have too much work, I’d take an Opel and we’d go to the beach, to Eupatoria. Often I’d drive myself. The heat was increasing by the day, we were in the heart of springtime, and I had to watch out for the clusters of naked boys who, lying on their stomachs on the burning asphalt of the road, scattered like sparrows before each vehicle, in a lively jumble of thin little tanned bodies. Eupatoria had a fine mosque, the largest one in the Crimea, designed in the sixteenth century by the famous Ottoman architect Sinan, and some curious ruins; but we couldn’t find any Portwein there, or even really any tea; and the lake water was stagnant and muddy. So we would leave the city for the beaches, where we sometimes met groups of soldiers coming up from Sebastopol to rest from the fighting. Most of the time naked, almost always completely white, apart from their faces, necks, and forearms, they played around like children, rushing into the water, then sprawling on the sand still wet, breathing in its warmth like a prayer, to chase away the winter cold. Often the beaches were empty. I liked the old-fashioned look of these Soviet beaches: brightly colored parasols missing their canvas, benches stained with bird droppings, changing booths made of rusty metal with their paint flaking off, revealing your feet and head to the kids lazing by the fences. We had our favorite place, a beach south of the city. The day we discovered it, half a dozen cows, scattered around a brightly colored trawler lying on the sand, were grazing on the new grass of the steppe invading the dunes, indifferent to the blond child on a rickety bicycle weaving between them. Across the narrow bay, a sad little Russian tune drifted from a blue shack perched on a shaky dock, in front of which rocked, tied up with old ropes, three poor fishing boats. The place was bathed in calm forsakenness. We had brought some fresh bread and some red apples from the previous year that we snacked on while we drank some vodka; the water was cold, invigorating. To our right stood two old ramshackle refreshment stalls, padlocked, and a lifeguard’s tower on the verge of collapse. The hours passed without our saying much. Voss read; I slowly finished the vodka and plunged back into the water; one of the cows, for no reason, galloped off down the beach. When we left, passing by a little fishing village to get our car, which was parked farther up, I saw a flock of geese slipping one after another beneath a wooden gate; the last one, with a little green apple wedged in her beak, was running to catch up with her sisters.