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And then, taking an unexpected
detour, General Entrescu began to talk about Flavius Josephus, that
intelligent, cowardly, cautious man, a flatterer and odds-on gambler, whose
idea of the world was much more complex and subtle than Christ's, if one paid
it careful attention, but much less subtle than that of those who, it's said,
helped to translate his
History
into Greek, in other words the lesser
Greek philosophers, men for hire of the great man for hire, who gave shape to
his shapeless writings, elegance to what was vulgar, who converted Flavius
Josephus's splutterings of panic and death into something distinguished,
gracious, and fine.

And then Entrescu began to
envision those philosophers for hire, he saw them wandering the streets of Rome
and the roads that lead to the sea, he saw them sitting by the side of those
roads, bundled in their cloaks, mentally constructing an idea of the world, he
saw them eating in portside taverns, dark places that smelled of seafood and
spices, wine and fried food, until at last they faded away, just as Dracula
faded away, with his blood-tinted armor and blood-tinted clothing, a stoic
Dracula, a Dracula who read Seneca or took pleasure in hearing the German
minnesingers and whose feats in Eastern Europe found their match only in the
deeds described in the
Chanson de Roland.
Historically, that is, or
politically, sighed Entrescu, as well as symbolically or poetically.

And at this point Entrescu
apologized for letting himself be carried away by enthusiasm and was silent,
and the lull was seized upon by Popescu, who began to talk about a Romanian
mathematician who lived from 1865 to 1936, a man who spent the last twenty
years of his life devoted to the search for some "mysterious numbers"
hidden in a part of the vast landscape visible to man, though the numbers
themselves were invisible and could live between rocks or between one room and
another or even between one number and another, call it a kind of alternative
mathematics camouflaged between seven and eight, just waiting for the man
capable of seeing it and deciphering it. The only problem was that to decipher
it one had to see it and to see it one had to decipher it.

When the mathematician talked
about deciphering, explained Popescu, he really meant understanding, and when
he talked about seeing, explained Popescu, he really meant applying, or so
Popescu believed. Though perhaps not, he said, hesitating. Perhaps his
disciples, among whom I count myself, misinterpreted his words. In any case, as
was inevitable, the mathematician went out of his head one night and had to be
sent to an asylum. Popescu and two other young men from
Bucharest
went to visit him. At first he
didn't recognize them, but as the days went by and he no longer resembled a
raging lunatic but simply a defeated old man, he remembered them or pretended
to remember them and smiled. Nevertheless, at his family's request, he remained
at the asylum. And anyway, because of his regular relapses, his doctors
counseled an indefinite stay. One day Popescu went to see him. The doctors had
given the mathematician a little notebook in which he drew the trees that
surrounded the hospital, portraits of other patients, and architectural
sketches of the houses visible from the grounds. For a long time they were
silent, until Popescu decided to speak frankly. With the typical heedlessness
of youth, he broached the subject of his teacher's madness or presumed madness.
The mathematician laughed. There is no such thing as madness, he said. But you're
here, said Popescu, and this is a madhouse. The mathematician didn't seem to be
listening: the only real madness, if we can call it that, he said, is a
chemical imbalance, which is easily cured by treatment with chemical products.

"But you're here, dear
professor, you're here, you're here," shouted Popescu.

"For my own
protection," said the mathematician.

Popescu didn't understand him.
It occurred to him that he was talking to an utter lunatic, a hopeless lunatic.
He covered his face with his hands and didn't move for some time. For a moment
he thought he would fall asleep. Then he opened his eyes, rubbed them, and saw
the mathematician sitting before him, watching him, his back straight, his legs
crossed. Popescu asked whether something had happened. I saw something I
shouldn't, said the mathematician. Popescu asked him to explain what he meant.
If I explained, answered the mathematician, I would go mad again and possibly
die. But for a man of your genius, said Popescu, being here is like being
buried alive. The mathematician smiled kindly. You're wrong, he said, in fact I
have everything here I need to stave off death: medicine, time, nurses and
doctors, a notebook to draw in, a park.

Shortly afterward, however, the
mathematician died. Popescu attended the burial. When it was over, he and some
other disciples of the dead man went to a restaurant, where they ate and
lingered until dusk. They told stories about the mathematician, they talked
about posterity, someone compared man's fate to the fate of an old whore, and
one boy, scarcely eighteen, who had just returned from a trip to
India
with his
parents, recited a poem.

Two years later, purely by
chance, Popescu was at a party with one of the doctors who had treated the
mathematician during his stay at the asylum. The doctor was a sincere young man
with a Romanian heart, which is to say a heart not deceitful in the slightest.
Also, he was a bit drunk, which made confidences easier.

According to this doctor, the
mathematician, upon being admitted, showed severe symptoms of schizophrenia,
though he made favorable progress after a few days of treatment. One night when
the doctor was on duty he went to the mathematician's room to talk a little,
because, even with sleeping pills, the mathematician hardly slept and the
hospital management allowed him to keep his light on as long as he wanted. The
first surprise came when he opened the door. The mathematician wasn't in bed.
For an instant the doctor thought he might have escaped but then he discovered
him huddled in a dark corner. He crouched down beside him and after verifying
that he was in fine physical shape he asked what was wrong. Then the
mathematician said: nothing, and met his eyes, and in them the doctor saw a
look of absolute fear of a sort he had never seen before, even in his daily
dealings with so many madmen of the most varied types.

"What is a look of
absolute fear?" Popescu asked.

The doctor belched a few times,
shifted in his chair, and answered that it was a kind of look of mercy, but
empty, as if all that were left of mercy, after a mysterious voyage, was the
skin, as if mercy were a skin of water, say, in the hands of a Tatar horseman
who gallops away over the steppe and dwindles until he vanishes, and then the
horseman returns, or the ghost of the horseman returns, or his shadow, or the
idea of him, and he has the skin, empty of water now, because he drank it all
during his trip, or he and his horse drank it, and the skin is empty now, it's
a normal skin, an empty skin, because after all the abnormal thing is a skin
swollen with water, but this skin swollen with water, this hideous skin swollen
with water doesn't arouse fear, doesn't awaken it, much less isolate it, but
the empty skin does, and that was what he saw in the mathematician's face, absolute
fear.

But the most interesting thing,
the doctor said to Popescu, was that after a while the mathematician recovered
and his look of alienation vanished without a trace, and as far as he knew, it
never came back. That was the story Popescu had to tell, and like Entrescu
before him, he expressed regret for going on too long and probably boring them,
which the others hastened to deny, although their voices lacked conviction.
From that moment on, conversation began to flag and soon afterward they all
retired to their rooms.

But there were more surprises
still in store for Reiter. In the early morning hours he felt someone shaking
him. He opened his eyes. It was Kruse. Unable to make out what Kruse was
saying, the words whispered in his ear, he grabbed him by the neck and
squeezed. Another hand dropped on his shoulder. It was their comrade Neitzke.

"Don't hurt him,
idiot," said Neitzke.

Reiter let go of Kruse's neck and listened
to the proposal. Then he dressed quickly and followed them. They left the
cellar that served as sleeping quarters and turned into a long hallway where
Wilke, another comrade, was waiting for them. Wilke was a small man, no more
than five foot two, with a wizened face and intelligent eyes. When they reached
him they shook hands, because Wilke was a formal man and his comrades knew that
with him one had to adhere to protocol. Then they went up a staircase and
opened a door. The room they came to was empty and cold, as if Dracula had just
stepped out. The only thing there was an old mirror that Wilke lifted off the
stone wall, uncovering a secret passageway. Neitzke took out a flashlight and
passed it to Wilke.

They walked for more than ten
minutes, going up and down stone stairs, not knowing whether they were at the
top of the castle or whether they had returned to the cellar by a different
path. The passageway split every ten yards, and Wilke, who was in the lead, got
lost several times. As they walked, Kruse whispered that there was something
strange about the passageways. They asked what was strange and Kruse answered
that there weren't any rats. Good, said Wilke, I hate rats. Reiter and Neitzke
agreed. I don't like rats either, said Kruse, but there are always rats in the
passageways of a castle, especially if it's an old castle, and here we haven't
come across a single one. The others meditated in silence on Kruse's remark and
after a while they admitted there was something shrewd about it. It really was
strange they hadn't seen a single rat. Finally they stopped and shone the
flashlight behind them and ahead of them, over the ceiling of the passageway
and the floor that snaked away like a shadow. Not a single rat. All for the
best. They lit four cigarettes and each man described how he would make love to
the Baroness Von Zumpe. Then they moved on in silence until they began to sweat
and Neitzke said it was hard to breathe.

Then they turned back, with
Kruse leading the way, and they soon reached the mirror room, where Neitzke and
Kruse took their leave. After saying goodbye, Wilke and Reiter returned to the
labyrinth, but this time they didn't talk, so that the sound of their whispers
wouldn't confuse them again. Wilke thought he heard footsteps, footsteps
gliding behind him. Reiter walked for a while with his eyes closed. When they
were just about to despair, they found what they were looking for: a side
passage, very narrow, that ran through the stone walls, walls that looked thick
but were apparently hollow, and in which there were peepholes or tiny slits
that provided a nearly perfect view of the rooms behind.

And so they were able to look
into the room of the SS officer, lit by three candles, and they saw the SS
officer up, wrapped in a robe, writing something at a table near the fireplace.
The expression on his face was forlorn. And although that was all there was to
see, Wilke and Reiter patted each other on the back, because only then were
they sure they were on the right path. They moved on.

By touch they discovered other
peepholes. Rooms lit by the light of the moon or in shadows, where, if they
pressed an ear to the hole bored in the stone, they could hear the snores or
sighs of a sleeper. The next lit room belonged to General Von Berenberg. There
was a single candle, set in a candlestick on the night table, and its flame
wavered as if someone had left the huge window open, making shadows and ghostly
shapes that at first disguised the spot where the general knelt at the foot of
the big canopied bed, praying. Von Berenberg's face was contorted, Reiter
noted, as if he bore a huge weight on his shoulders, not the life of his
soldiers, certainly, or his family, or even his own life, but the weight of his
conscience, which was something that grew clear to Reiter and Wilke before they
moved away from that peephole, struck with astonishment or horror.

Finally, after passing other
watch points plunged in darkness and sleep, they arrived at their true
destination, the room of the Baroness Von Zumpe, a room lit by nine candles and
presided over by the portrait of a soldier or warrior monk with the intent and
tortured air of a hermit, in whose face, which hung three feet from the bed,
one could observe all the bitterness of abstinence and penitence and
self-abnegation.

Beneath a naked man with an
abundance of hair on his upper back and legs, they glimpsed the Baroness Von
Zumpe, her golden curls and part of her lily-white forehead occasionally
emerging from behind the left shoulder of the person thrusting on top of her.
The cries of the baroness alarmed Reiter at first, who was slow to understand that
they were cries of pleasure, not pain. When the coupling ended, General
Entrescu got up from the bed and they watched him walk to a table where a
bottle of vodka stood. His penis, from which hung a not negligible quantity of
seminal fluid, was still erect or half erect and must have measured nearly a
foot long, Wilke reflected afterward, his calculations on the mark.

He looked more like a horse
than a man, Wilke told his comrades. And he had the stamina of a horse too,
because after swallowing some vodka he returned to the bed where the Baroness
Von Zumpe was drowsing and after he had rearranged her he began to fuck her
again, at first scarcely moving, but then with such violence that the baroness,
on her belly, bit the palm of her hand until she drew blood, so as not to
scream. By now Wilke had unbuttoned his fly and was masturbating, leaning
against the wall. Reiter heard him moan beside him. First he thought it was a
rat that just happened to be breathing its last somewhere nearby. A baby rat.
But when he saw Wilke's penis and Wilke's hand moving back and forth, he was
disgusted and elbowed him in the chest. Wilke ignored him and continued to
masturbate. Reiter glanced at his face: Wilke's profile struck him as very odd.
It looked like an engraving of a worker or artisan, an innocent passerby
suddenly blinded by a ray of moonlight. He seemed to be dreaming, or, more
accurately, momentarily breaking through the massive black walls that separate
waking from sleep. So he left him alone and after a while he began to touch
himself too, at first discreetly, through his trousers, and then openly,
pulling out his penis and adjusting to the rhythm of General Entrescu and the
Baroness Von Zumpe, who wasn't biting her hand anymore (a bloodstain had spread
on the sheet next to her sweaty cheeks) but crying and speaking words that
neither the general nor the two soldiers understood, words that went beyond
Romania, beyond even Germany and Europe, beyond a country estate, beyond some
hazy friendships, beyond what they, Wilke and Reiter, though perhaps not
General Entrescu, understood by love, desire, sexuality.