2666 (115 page)

The third time he almost died
was weeks later, during the attack on
Sevastopol
.
This time the advance was driven back. Each time the German troops tried to
stake out a line of defense, the city's artillery loosed a rain of projectiles
on them. In the area outside the city, near the Russian trenches, there were
stacks of the mutilated bodies of German and Romanian soldiers. More than once
the struggle was hand to hand. The assault troops reached a trench of Russian sailors
and fought for five minutes, after which one side retreated. But then more
Russian sailors appeared shouting hurrahs and the battle began again. For
Reiter, the presence of the sailors in those dusty trenches was charged with
terrible and exhilarating portents. One of them, surely, would kill him and
then he would sink down again into the depths of the Baltic or the Atlantic or
the
Black Sea
, because all seas were
ultimately the same sea, and at the bottom of the sea a forest of seaweed
awaited him. Or he would simply disappear, no more.

To Wilke, the whole business
was insane, because where had the Russian sailors come from? what were they
doing there, miles from their natural element, the sea and ships? It made no
sense unless the Stukas had sunk all the ships in the Russian fleet, Wilke
speculated, or the
Black Sea
had dried up,
which naturally he didn't believe. But he said this only to Reiter, because the
others never questioned anything they saw or that happened to them. In one
attack Neitzke and several others from the company were killed. One night, in
the trenches, Reiter rose up to his full height and gazed at the stars, but his
attention, inevitably, was diverted toward
Sevastopol
. The city in the distance was a
black mass with red mouths that opened and closed. The soldiers called it the
bone crusher, but that night it didn't strike Reiter as a machine but as the
reincarnation of a mythological being, a living creature struggling to draw
breath. Sergeant Lemke ordered him to get down. Reiter eyed him from above,
took off his helmet, scratched his head, and before he could put his helmet
back on, he was felled by a bullet. As he dropped he felt another bullet
penetrate his chest. He gazed dimly at Sergeant Lemke: he thought the sergeant
looked like an ant that gradually grew bigger and bigger. Some five hundred
yards away, several artillery rounds fell.

Two weeks later Reiter received
the Iron Cross. A colonel presented it to him in the field hospital at
Novoselivske. The colonel shook Reiter's hand, told him there had been
outstanding reports on his actions in Chornomorske and Mykolaivka, and then
left. Reiter couldn't talk because a bullet had pierced his throat. The wound
in his chest healed well and soon he was transferred from the Crimean peninsula
to Krivoy Rog, in
Ukraine
,
where there was a bigger hospital, and his throat was operated on again. After
the operation he could eat normally and move his neck as he had before, but he
still couldn't talk.

The doctors who treated him
didn't know whether to give him leave to return to
Germany
or send him back to his division, which was still engaged in the siege of
Sevastopol
and
Kerch
.
The arrival of winter and the Soviet counterattack that overran parts of the
German line postponed the decision and finally Reiter was neither sent to
Germany
nor
reinstated in his unit.

But since he couldn't stay at
the hospital either, he was sent with three other wounded men from the 79th to
the village of Kostekino, on the banks of the Dnieper, which some called Budienny
Model Farm and others Sweet Spring, because of a spring, a tributary of the
Dnieper, whose waters were of a sweetness and purity unusual in the region.
Really, Kostekino was scarcely a village. There were a few houses scattered
among the hills, half-collapsed old wooden fences, two rotting granaries, and a
dirt road, impassable in winter because of the snow and mud, that connected the
village to a town on the rail line. On the outskirts there was an abandoned
sovkhoz that five Germans tried to start up again. Most of the houses were
abandoned, according to some because the villagers had fled the advance of the
German army, according to others because they had been conscripted by the Red
Army.

For the first few days Reiter
slept in what must have been an agronomy office or possibly the Communist Party
headquarters, the only brick and cement building in town, but cohabitation with
the few German engineers and convalescents who lived in Kostekino soon grew
unbearable. So he decided to take up residence in one of the many empty
farmhouses. At first glance, they all looked alike. One night, as he was having
coffee at the brick house, Reiter heard a different account of the villagers'
disappearance: they had neither been conscripted nor fled. The depopulation was
the direct consequence of the passage through Kostekino of a detachment of the
Einsatzgruppe C, which proceeded to physically eliminate all the Jews in the
village. Since he couldn't speak he didn't ask any questions, but he spent the
next day studying the houses more closely.

In none of them did he find any
object that might indicate the origin or religion of the former inhabitants.
Finally he settled in a house near Sweet Spring. The first night he spent there
he was woken several times by nightmares. But he couldn't remember what he had
dreamed. The bed he slept in was narrow and very soft, next to the fireplace,
on the first floor. The second floor was a kind of attic where there was
another bed and a tiny round window, like a porthole. In a big chest he found a
number of books, most in Russian, but some, to his surprise, in German. Since
he knew that many Eastern European Jews spoke German, he guessed that the house
had in fact belonged to a Jew. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, after
waking up shouting from a nightmare, he would light the candle he always kept
beside the bed and sit still for a long time, with the blankets cast off,
contemplating the objects that danced in the candlelight and feeling that there
was no hope as he slowly froze in the cold. Sometimes, in the morning, when he
awoke, he would lie still again, staring up at the mud and straw ceiling, and
it seemed to him there was something indefinably feminine about the house.

Nearby lived some Ukrainians
who weren't from Kostekino and had arrived recently to work on the old sovkhoz.
When he left the house the Ukrainians lifted their caps and bowed slightly in
greeting. The first few days Reiter didn't respond. But then, timidly, he
raised his hand and waved as if to say goodbye. Each morning he walked to the
stream. With his knife he hacked a hole and then lowered a pot and ladled out
some water that he drank where he stood, not minding the cold.

With the arrival of winter all
the Germans holed up in the brick building and sometimes they caroused until
dawn. Everyone had forgotten them, as if they had disappeared with the collapse
of the front. Sometimes they went out in search of women. Other times they made
love among themselves and no one said anything. This is a frozen paradise, said
one of Reiter's old comrades from the 79th. Reiter stared at him as if he had
no idea what he was talking about and the soldier patted him on the back and
said poor Reiter, poor Reiter.

At some point, Reiter looked at
himself in a mirror he found in a corner of the farmhouse. It had been a long
time, and he almost didn't recognize himself. His beard was blond and tangled,
his hair long and dirty, his eyes vacant and dry. Shit, he thought. Then he
took the bandage off his throat: the wound seemed to have healed without
trouble, but the bandage was dirty, and the crusted blood made it stiff, so he
decided to throw it in the fire. Then he went looking all over the house for
something to use as a bandage and that was how he found the papers of Boris
Abramovich Ansky and the hiding place behind the hearth.

The hiding place was extremely
simple but extremely clever too. The hearth, which also served as cookstove,
was wide enough and the flue deep enough so that a person could crouch inside.
If the width was apparent at a glance, it was impossible to tell the depth from
outside, because the soot-blackened walls afforded subtle camouflage. The eye
couldn't discern the gap at the rear, just a crack, but big enough so that one
person, sitting with his knees drawn up, could be safe there in the dark.
Although for the hiding place to work perfectly, mused Reiter, alone in the
solitude of the farmhouse, there had to be two people: one to hide and one to
stay in the room and put a pot of soup on to heat and then light the fire and
stoke it again and again.

For many days this problem
occupied his thoughts, because he believed that if he solved it he would have a
better idea of the life or state of mind or the degree of desperation that had
once afflicted Boris Ansky or someone Boris Ansky knew very well. On various
occasions he tried to light a fire from inside. He managed it only once.
Hanging a pot of water or lighting the samovar turned out to be an impossible
task, so in the end he decided that whoever built the hiding place had done it
thinking that someone, someday, would hide and another person would help him to
hide. The rescued, thought Reiter, and the rescuer. The survivor and the victim.
The one who flees when night falls and the one who stays and surrenders. Sometimes,
in the afternoons, he got into the hiding place, armed only with Boris Ansky's
papers and a candle, and he sat there until well into the night, until his
joints were stiff and his limbs frozen, reading, reading.

Boris Abramovich Ansky was born
in 1909, in Kostekino, in the same house that Reiter the soldier now occupied.
His parents were Jews, like almost all the villagers, and they made a living
selling shirts, which his father bought wholesale in
Dnepropetrovsk
and sometimes in
Odessa
and then resold in the neighboring villages. His mother raised chickens and
sold eggs and they didn't need to buy vegetables because they kept a garden,
small but well tended. They had just one son, Boris, when they were already
approaching old age, like the biblical Abraham and Sarah, which filled them
with happiness.

Sometimes, when Abraham Ansky
saw his friends, he would joke about it, saying his son was so spoiled that
every so often he thought the boy should have been sacrificed when he was
little. The village's Orthodox Jews were scandalized or pretended to be
scandalized and the others laughed openly when Abraham Ansky concluded: but
instead of sacrificing him I sacrificed a hen! a hen! a hen! not a sheep or my
firstborn but a hen! the hen that lays the golden eggs!

At fourteen Boris Ansky
enlisted in the Red Army. His goodbyes were heartbreaking. First his father
began to weep inconsolably, then his mother, and finally Boris threw himself
into their arms and wept too. The trip to
Moscow
was unforgettable. Along the way he saw incredible faces, heard incredible
conversations or speeches, read incredible proclamations on the walls that
announced the paradise at hand, and everything he came upon, whether on foot or
on the train, affected him deeply because this was the first time he'd left his
village, with the exception of two trips he'd taken with his father to sell
shirts in the region. In
Moscow
he visited a recruitment office and when he tried to enlist to fight Wrangel he
was told that Wrangel had already been defeated. Then Ansky said he wanted to
enlist to fight the Poles and he was told that the Poles had already been
defeated. Then Ansky shouted that he wanted to fight Krasnov or Denikin and he
was told that Denikin and Krasnov had already been defeated. Then Ansky said
all right, he wanted to fight the White Cossacks or the Czechs or Koltchak or
Yudenitsch or the Allied troops and he was told that all of them had already
been defeated. News comes late to your village, they said. And they also asked:
where are you from, boy? And Ansky said Kostekino, near the
Dnieper
.
And then an old soldier who was smoking a pipe asked him his name and whether
he was Jewish. And Ansky said yes, he was Jewish, and he looked the old soldier
in the face and only then did he notice that he was missing an eye, and also an
arm.

"I had a Jewish comrade,
in the campaign against the Poles," said the old man, exhaling a puff of
smoke.

"What's his name?"
asked Ansky. "Maybe I know him." "Do you know all the Jews in
the Soviet republic, boy?" the one-eyed, one-armed soldier asked.

"No, of course not,"
said Ansky, flushing.

"His name was Dmitri
Verbitsky," said the one-eyed man from his corner, "and he died fifty
miles from
Warsaw
."

Then the one-eyed man shifted
in his chair, pulled a blanket up to his chin, and said: our commander's name
was Korolenko and he died the same day. Then, at supersonic speed, Ansky
imagined Verbitsky and Korolenko, he saw Korolenko mocking Verbitsky, heard
what Korolenko said behind Verbitsky's back, entered into Verbitsky's night
thoughts, Korolenko's desires, into each man's vague and shifting dreams, into
their convictions and their rides on horseback, the forests they left behind
and the flooded lands they crossed, the sounds of night in the open and the
unintelligible morning conversations before they mounted again. He saw villages
and farmland, he saw churches and hazy clouds of smoke rising on the horizon,
until he came to the day when they both died, Verbitsky and Korolenko, a
perfectly gray day, utterly gray, as if a thousand-mile-long cloud had passed
over the land without stopping, endless.