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When he said these things it
was often with a smile. Halder, in turn, baited him by announcing that Nisa was
a Shintoist, that he liked only German whores, that in addition to German and
English he could speak and write Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch,
and Russian. When Halder said these things, Nisa laughed slowly, hee hee hee,
and showed Hans his teeth, his eyes shining.

Sometimes, however, as they sat
on a cafe terrace or around a dark cabaret table, an obstinate silence
descended inexplicably over the trio. They seemed suddenly to freeze, lose all
sense of time, and turn completely inward, as if they were bypassing the abyss
of daily life, the abyss of people, the abyss of conversation, and had decided
to approach a kind of lakeside region, a late-romantic region, where the
borders were clocked from dusk to dusk, ten, fifteen, twenty minutes, an
eternity, like the minutes of those condemned to die, like the minutes of women
who've just given birth and are condemned to die, who understand that more time
isn't more eternity and nevertheless wish with all their souls for more time,
and their wails are birds that come flying every so often across the double
lakeside landscape, so calmly, like luxurious excrescences or heartbeats. Then,
naturally, the three men would emerge stiff from the silence and go back to
talking about inventions, women, Finnish philology, the building of highways
across the Reich.

On no few occasions they ended
their nights at the flat of Crete von Joachimsthaler, an old friend with whom
Halder maintained relations full of subterfuge and misunderstandings.

Musicians often visited
Crete
, including an orchestra conductor who claimed that
music was the fourth dimension and whom Halder respected greatly. The orchestra
conductor was thirty-five and was admired (women swooned over him) as if he
were twenty-five and venerated as if he were eighty. As a general rule, when he
came to conclude an evening at Crete's flat he sat at the piano, though he
didn't touch it with even the tip of his little finger, and immediately he was
surrounded by a court of spellbound friends and followers, until he decided to
get up and go forth like the keeper of a swarm of bees, except that this
beekeeper wasn't protected by a mesh suit or a helmet and woe betide the bee
that tried to sting him, even if only in thought.

The fourth dimension, he liked
to say, encompasses the three dimensions and consequently puts them in their
place, that is, it obliterates the dictatorship of the three dimensions and
thereby obliterates the three-dimensional world we know and live in. The fourth
dimension, he said, is the full richness of the senses and the (capital S)
Spirit, it's the (capital E) Eye, in other words the open Eye that obliterates
the eyes, which compared to the Eye are just poor orifices of mud, absorbed in
contemplation or the equation birth-training-work-death, whereas the Eye sails
up the river of philosophy, the river of existence, the (fast-flowing) river of
fate.

The fourth dimension, he said,
was expressible only through music. Bach, Mozart, Beethoven.

It was hard to get near the
conductor. That is, it wasn't hard to get near him physically, but it was hard
to get him to see one, blinded as he was by the footlights, separated from
others by the pit. One night, however, the picturesque trio composed of Halder,
Nisa, and Hans caught his attention and he asked the hostess who they were. She
told him that Halder was a friend, the son of a once-promising painter, nephew
of Baron Von Zumpe, and that the Japanese gentleman worked at the Japanese
embassy and the tall, shabby, poorly dressed young man was doubtless an artist,
perhaps a painter, Halder's protege.

The conductor then wanted to
meet them, and the hostess, with great delicacy, beckoned to the surprised trio
and led them to a quiet corner of the flat. For a while, as might be expected,
they didn't know what to say. Again, because it was his favorite subject at the
time, the conductor talked about music or the fourth dimension, it wasn't
exactly clear where one ended and the other began, though perhaps, to judge by
certain mysterious words of the conductor, the point of union was the conductor
himself, in whom mysteries and answers spontaneously coincided. Halder and Nisa
nodded agreement at everything. Not so Hans. According to the director, life
qua life in the fourth dimension was of an unimaginable richness, etc., etc.,
but the truly important thing was the distance from which one, immersed in this
harmony, could contemplate human affairs, with equanimity, in a word, and free
of the artificial travails that oppress the spirit devoted to work and
creation, to life's only transcendent truth, the truth that creates more and
more life, an inexhaustible torrent of life and happiness and brightness.

The conductor talked and
talked, about the fourth dimension and some symphonies he had conducted or
planned soon to conduct, never once taking his eyes off his listeners. His eyes
were like the eyes of a hawk that flies and delights in its flight, but that
also maintains a watchful gaze, capable of discerning even the slightest
movement down below, on the scrambled pattern of earth.

Perhaps the conductor was
slightly drunk. Perhaps the conductor was tired and his thoughts were
elsewhere. Perhaps the conductor's words didn't at all express his state of
mind, his manner of being, his worshipful regard for the artistic phenomenon.

That night, however, Hans asked
or wondered aloud (it was the first time he had spoken) what those who
inhabited or visited the fifth dimension must think. At first the conductor
didn't quite understand him, although Hans's German had improved considerably
since he left home to join the road crews and even more since he came to live
in
Berlin
.
Then he got the idea and turned from Halder and Nisa to focus his hawk's or
eagle's or carrion bird's gaze on the calm blue eyes of the young Prussian, who
was already formulating another question: what would those who had ready access
to the sixth dimension think of those who were settled in the fifth or fourth
dimension? What would those who lived in the tenth dimension, that is, those
who perceived ten dimensions, think of music, for example? What would Beethoven
mean to them? What would Mozart mean to them? What would Bach mean to them?
Probably, the young Reiter answered himself, music would just be noise, noise
like crumpled pages, noise like burned books.

At this point the conductor
raised a hand and said or rather whispered confidentially:

"Don't speak of burned
books, my dear young man."

To which Hans responded:

"Everything is a burned
book, my dear maestro. Music, the tenth dimension, the fourth dimension,
cradles, the production of bullets and rifles, Westerns: all burned
books."

"What are you talking
about?" asked the director.

"I was just stating my
opinion," said Hans.

"An opinion like any
other," said Halder, doing his best to end the conversation on a humorous
note, one that would leave them all on good terms, he and the conductor and
Hans and the conductor, "a typically adolescent pronouncement."

"No, no, no," said
the conductor, "what do you mean by Westerns?"

"Cowboy novels," said
Hans.

This declaration seemed to
relieve the director, who, after exchanging a few friendly words with them,
soon took his leave. Later, he would tell their hostess that Halder and the
Japanese man seemed like decent people, but Halder's young friend was a time
bomb, no question about it: an untrained, powerful mind, irrational, illogical,
capable of exploding at the moment least expected. Which was untrue.

After the musicians had gone
home, nights at Crete von Joachims-thaler's flat usually ended in bed or the
bathtub, a bathtub like few in Berlin, eight feet long and five feet wide,
black enamel with claw feet, where Halder and then Nisa endlessly massaged
Crete, from temples to toes, the two of them fully dressed, even sometimes with
their coats on (at Crete's express request), while Crete cavorted like a
mermaid, sometimes on her back, sometimes on her belly, other times underwater!
her nakedness covered only by foam.

During these amorous interludes
Hans waited in the kitchen, where he made a snack and poured a beer, and then
walked, glass of beer in one hand and snack in the other, along the flat's wide
hallways or went to stand by the big windows in the salon from which he watched
the sunrise as it washed like a wave over the city, drowning them all.

Sometimes Hans felt feverish
and he thought it was desire that made his face burn, but he was wrong.
Sometimes Hans left the windows open to clear the smell of smoke from the salon
and turned out the lights and sat in an armchair, bundled in his coat. Then he
felt the cold and he was tired and closed his eyes. An hour later, when the sun
was fully up, he felt Halder and Nisa shaking him, telling him they had to go.

Crete von Joachimsthaler never
appeared at that hour. Only Halder and Nisa. And Halder always had a bundle
that he tried to hide under his coat. Once out in the street, still half
asleep, he saw that his friends' trouser legs were wet and the sleeves of their
suits, too, and that the legs and sleeves steamed in the cold, the vapor only a
little less dense than the clouds breathed out by Nisa and Halder and Hans
himself, and in the early morning his friends spurned taxis to walk to the
nearest cafe and eat a big breakfast.

In 1939 Hans
Reiter was drafted.
After
a few months of training he was assigned to the 31 Oth, a light infantry
regiment whose base was twenty miles from the Polish border. The 310th, as well
as the 311th and 312th, was part of the 79th Light Infantry Division, commanded
at the time by General Kruger, which in turn was part of the 10th Infantry
Corps, commanded by General Von Bohle, one of the Reich's leading philatelists.
The 310th was commanded by Colonel Von Berenberg, and it consisted of three
battalions. Hans Reiter belonged to the 3rd Battalion, assigned first to serve
as an assistant machine gun operator and then to an assault company.

The captain responsible for this second
assignment was Paul Gercke, an aesthete who believed that Reiter's height would
do very well to instill respect and even fear during, say, a practice charge or
military parade, but who knew that in the case of real as opposed to simulated
combat the same height that had got him the post would, in the long run, be his
undoing, because in practice the best assault soldier is short and thin as a
sprig and darts along like a squirrel. Of course, before becoming an
infantryman with the 310th Regiment, 79th Division, Hans Reiter, presented with
the dilemma of choosing, tried to get himself selected for service on a
submarine. This ambition, encouraged by Halder, who called on or claimed to
have called on all of his friends in the military and government, most of whom,
Hans suspected, were more imaginary than real, only provoked fits of laughter
in the officers in charge of the German navy's priority lists, especially among
those familiar with the real dimensions of submarines and the living conditions
aboard, where a man who was six foot five would surely become the bane of his
comrades.

Whatever the case, despite
Halder's connections, real or not, Hans was rejected by the German navy in the
most ignominious fashion (it was even recommended to him, in jest, that he join
a tank company), and he had to content himself with his original assignment,
the light infantry.

A week before he left for basic
training, Halder and Nisa took him out for a farewell dinner that ended at a
brothel, where they begged him to lose his virginity once and for all, in honor
of their friendship. The whore he was assigned (chosen by Halder and probably a
friend of Halder's and also probably a disappointed partner in one of Halder's
multiple business schemes) was a peasant from Bavaria, very sweet and quiet,
although when she talked, which she did infrequently as if to conserve words,
she seemed to be a practical woman in every sense, including the sexual, even
showing signs of avarice that thoroughly repelled Hans. Of course, he didn't
make love that night, although he told his friends he had, but the next day he
went back to see the whore, whose name was Anita. On this second visit Hans
lost his virginity, and there were two more visits, enough to inspire Anita to
expound on her life and her philosophy of life.

When the time came for him to
go, he left alone. He noted that it was odd no one saw him off at the train
station. He'd said his goodbyes to Anita the night before. Of Halder and Nisa
he'd heard nothing since the first visit to the brothel, as if both friends had
taken it for granted that he was leaving the next morning, which wasn't the
case. For a week now, he thought, Halder has been living in
Berlin
as if I were already gone. The only
person he bade farewell the day he left was his landlady, who told him it was
an honor to serve his country. All he carried in his new kit bag were a few
items of clothing and the book
Animals and Plants of the European Coastal
Region.

In September the war began.
Reiter's division advanced to the border and crossed behind the Panzer
divisions and the motorized infantry divisions that cleared the way. By forced
marches they made their way into Polish territory, seeing no combat and taking
few precautions: the three regiments moved almost as one in a general
atmosphere of festivity, as if the men were on a journey of pilgrimage and not
a march toward a war in which some would inevitably be killed.