Near the end of the morning, after a soup and some dry biscuits, I said to myself, All right, time to start work. But where to start? With troop morale? Why not then, troop morale. I could well guess it wasn’t going to be good, but it was my duty to verify my opinions. Studying the morale of the Wehrmacht soldiers meant going out; I didn’t think Möritz wanted a report on the morale of our Ukrainian Askaris, the only soldiers I had within reach. The idea of leaving the entirely relative security of the bunker worried me, but I had to do it. And also, I did have to see this city. Maybe I would get used to it and things would go better. As I was putting on my new outfit, I hesitated; I decided on the gray side, but saw from Ivan’s face that I had made a mistake. “It’s snowing today. Wear the white side out.” I ignored the inappropriate informality of the du form of address and went back to change. I also took a helmet; Thomas had insisted on it: “You’ll see, it’s very useful.” Ivan handed me a submachine gun; I dubiously contemplated the mechanism, unsure if I knew how to use it, but slung it over my shoulder nonetheless. Outside, a violent wind was still blowing, carrying with it large swirls of snowflakes: from the entrance of the Univermag, you couldn’t even see the fountain with the children. After the stifling dampness of the bunker, the cold, sharp air invigorated me. “Kuda?” Ivan asked. I had no idea. “To the Croats,” I said at random; Thomas, that morning, had mentioned some Croats. “Is it far?” Ivan grunted and turned right, down a long street that seemed to head toward the train station. The city seemed relatively calm; from time to time, a muffled explosion resounded through the snow, and even that made me nervous; I unhesitatingly copied Ivan, who walked right next to the buildings, I clung to the walls. I felt terrifyingly naked, vulnerable, like a crab that’s left its shell; I realized keenly that for all the eighteen months I had been in Russia, this was the first time I was actually under fire; and an unpleasant sense of dread made my limbs heavy and numbed my thoughts. I have spoken before about fear: what I felt then I won’t call fear, or else not an honest, conscious fear, but rather an almost physical discomfort, like an itch that you can’t scratch, concentrated on the blind parts of the body—the nape of the neck, the back, the buttocks. To try to distract myself, I looked at the buildings on the other side of the street. Many façades had collapsed, revealing the interior of the apartments, a series of dioramas of everyday life, powdered with snow and sometimes odd: on the third floor, a bicycle hanging on the wall; on the fourth, flowered wallpaper, an intact mirror, and a framed reproduction of Kramskoy’s haughty Unknown Woman; on the fifth, a green sofa with a corpse lying on it, its feminine hand dangling in the void. A shell, hitting the roof of a building, broke this illusion of peacefulness: I hunched over and understood why Thomas had insisted on the helmet: I was hit by a rain of debris, fragments of roof tiles and bricks. When I raised my head I saw that Ivan hadn’t even leaned over, he had just covered his eyes with his hand. “Come on,” he said, “it’s nothing.” I calculated the direction of the river and of the front and understood that the buildings we were walking alongside were partly protecting us: for the shells to fall in this street, they had to pass over the roofs; it wasn’t very likely they’d burst on the ground. But this thought didn’t do much to reassure me. The street led to some ruined outbuildings and railway warehouses; Ivan, in front of me, crossed the long square at a trot, and slipped into one of the warehouses through a metal door rolled up on itself like the lid of a sardine can. I hesitated, then followed him. Inside, I threaded my way through mountains of crates long ago plundered, skirted round a section of collapsed roof, and emerged into the open through a hole in a brick wall, where there were many traces of footprints in the snow. The path ran alongside the walls of the warehouses; on the slope overhanging the path stretched the freight train cars that I had seen the day before from the bridge, their sides riddled with bullet holes and shrapnel strikes and covered with Russian and German graffiti, ranging from the comic to the obscene. An excellent color caricature showed Stalin and Hitler fornicating while Roosevelt and Churchill jacked off around them: but I couldn’t decide who had painted it, one of ours or one of theirs, and so it was not very useful for my report. A little farther on, a patrol coming from the opposite direction passed us without a word, without a salute. The men’s faces were haggard, sallow, scraggly with beards; they kept their fists shoved into their pockets, and dragged along in boots wrapped with rags or enveloped in enormous cumbersome galoshes made of braided straw. They disappeared behind us into the snow. Here and there, in a train car or on the rails, appeared a frozen corpse, its uniform an indistinguishable color. We heard no more explosions and everything seemed calm. Then in front of us it started up again: detonations, gunshots, or machine-gun volleys. We had passed the last warehouses and crossed another residential zone: the landscape opened up onto a snowy terrain dominated, on the left, by an enormous round hillock like a little volcano, its summit periodically spitting out black smoke from explosions. “Mamaev Kurgan,” Ivan pointed, before turning left and entering a building.
A few soldiers were sitting in empty rooms, leaning against the wall, their knees pulled up to their chests. They looked at us with empty eyes. Ivan led me through several buildings, passing through inner courtyards or alleyways; then, since we were probably by now far enough from the lines, he continued down a street. The buildings here were low, two stories at most, perhaps workers’ dormitories; then came smashed houses, collapsed, ruined, but still more recognizable than the ones I had seen entering the city. Occasionally a movement or a sound indicated that some of these ruins were still inhabited. The wind continued blowing; now I could hear the roar of detonations on the kurgan, which was outlined on our right, behind the houses. Ivan led me through some small gardens, recognizable beneath the snow from the debris of fences or railings. The place looked deserted, but the path we were following was well used, footsteps had cleared away the snow. Then he dove into a balka, sliding down the slope. The kurgan disappeared from sight; at the far end, the wind blew less strongly, the snow fell gently, and suddenly things became animated; two Feldgendarmen barred our way; behind them soldiers were coming and going. I presented my papers to the Feldgendarmen, who saluted me and stepped aside to let us pass; and then I saw that the eastern side of the balka, its back to the kurgan and the front, was riddled with bunkers, dark tunnels propped up by beams or boards from which emerged little smoking chimneys made of tin cans stuck to each other. The men entered and left this troglodyte city on their knees, often backward. At the end of the ravine, on a wooden block, two soldiers were cutting up a frozen horse with an axe; the pieces, chopped at random, were thrown into a pot where some water was heating. After about twenty minutes the path joined up with another balka that housed similar bunkers; in places rudimentary trenches rose toward the kurgan we were skirting; here and there, a tank buried up to its turret served as a fixed artillery piece. Russian shells occasionally fell around these ravines, sending up immense sprays of snow; I could hear them whistling, a piercing, nerve-shattering, gut-wrenching sound; each time I had to resist the impulse to throw myself to the ground, and forced myself to follow the example of Ivan, who haughtily ignored them. After a while I managed to regain confidence: I let myself be invaded by the feeling that everything here was a vast children’s game, a huge adventure playground of the sort you dream about when you’re eight or nine, with sound effects, special effects, secret passages, and I was almost laughing with pleasure, caught up as I was in this idea that brought me back to my earliest games, when Ivan dove onto me without warning and pinned me to the ground. A deafening explosion tore the world apart, it was so close that I could feel the air slamming onto my eardrums, and a rain of mixed snow and earth fell onto us. I tried to curl up, but already Ivan was pulling me by the shoulder and lifting me up: thirty meters away, black smoke was lazily rising from the ground of the balka, the raised dust slowly settled onto the snow, an acrid smell of cordite filled the air. My heart was pounding wildly, I felt such an intense heaviness in my thighs that it was painful, I wanted to sit back down, like a mass. But Ivan didn’t seem to be taking it seriously; he was carefully brushing off his uniform. Then he had me turn my back to him and he vigorously brushed it while I shook off my sleeves. We continued on our way. I began to find this episode idiotic: What was I doing there, after all? I seemed to have trouble grasping the fact that I was no longer in Pyatigorsk. Our road emerged from the balki: then a long empty unkempt plateau began, dominated by the rear side the kurgan. The frequency of the detonations at the summit, which I knew to be occupied by our troops, fascinated me: How was it possible for men to stay there, to undergo that rain of fire and metal? I was a kilometer or two away from it, yet it scared me. Our path snaked between mounds of snow that the wind, here and there, had eroded to reveal a cannon pointing to the sky, the twisted door of a truck, the wheels of an overturned car. In front of us we joined up again with the railroad tracks, empty this time, disappearing in the distance into the steppe. They led out from behind the kurgan, and I was seized by the irrational terror of seeing a column of T-34s suddenly appear along the tracks. Then another ravine cut through the plateau and I hurtled down its side following Ivan, as if I were diving into the warm security of a childhood house. Here too were bunkers, petrified and scared soldiers. I could have stopped anywhere, talked to the men and then gone back, but I docilely followed Ivan, as if he knew what I had to do. Finally we emerged from this long