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Yet to be explained
was the hiding place for a single person at the back of the fireplace. Who
built it? Who hid there?

After
much thought, Reiter decided the builder must have been Ansky's father.
Probably the hiding place was finished before Ansky returned to the village.
The possibility also existed that Ansky's father had built it after his son's
return, which was in fact more logical, since only then did his parents learn
that Ansky was an enemy of the state. But Reiter sensed that the hiding place,
whose creation he imagined to be slow, craftsmanlike, unhurried, had been
conceived long before Ansky returned, which gave his father the aura of a seer
or a madman. He also came to the conclusion that no one had used the hiding
place.

He
didn't rule out, of course, the inevitable visit of the party officials, who
would've poked around the farmhouse seeking some trace of Ansky. That Ansky
would've hidden in the fireplace during these visits was likely, almost
certain. But at the crucial moment, when the detachment of the Einsatzgruppe C
arrived, no one had hidden there, not even Ansky's mother. He imagined her
finding a safe place for her son's notebook and then, in his dreams, he watched
her go off with the other Jews of Kostekino toward the waiting German
punishment, toward us, toward death.

He
saw Ansky in his dreams too. He saw him walking across country, by night, a
nameless person heading westward, and he saw him felled in a hail of gunfire.

For several days Reiter thought
that he had been the one who shot Ansky. At night he had horrible nightmares
that woke him up and made him weep. Sometimes he lay still, curled up in bed,
listening to the snow fall on the village. He no longer thought about suicide,
because he believed he was dead. In the mornings the first thing he did was
read Ansky's notebook, opening it at random. At other times during the day he took
long walks in the snowy forest, until he reached the old sovkhoz where the
Ukrainians worked under the orders of two listless Germans. When he stopped by
the main building in the village to get his food he felt as if he were on
another planet. There the fire was always lit and steam from two huge pots of
soup filled the ground floor. It smelled of cabbage and tobacco, and his
comrades were in shirtsleeves or shirtless. He far preferred the forest, where
he sat in the snow until his backside
froze. He preferred the farmhouse, where he
lit a fire and sat down by the hearth to reread Ansky's notebook. Every so
often he lifted his gaze and stared into the fireplace, as if a shadowy figure
radiating timidity and goodwill were looking out at him. A shiver of pleasure
ran through him then. Sometimes he imagined he lived with the Ansky family. He
saw young Ansky and his mother and father traveling the roads of
Siberia
and he ended up covering his eyes. When the fire
in the hearth had burned down to tiny bright embers in the darkness, he climbed
carefully into the hiding place, which was warm, and he stayed there a long
time, until the morning chill woke him.

One night he dreamed he was back in
Crimea
.
He wasn't sure what part, but it was
Crimea
.
He shot his gun amid the clouds of smoke that erupted here and there like
geysers. Then he set off walking and came upon a dead Red Army soldier,
facedown, with a rifle still in his hand. When he bent to turn him over and see
his face, he feared, as he had so often feared, that the corpse would have
Ansky's face. As he grasped the dead soldier by the jacket, he thought: I don't
want to bear this weight, I don't, I don't, I want Ansky to live, I don't want
him to die, I don't want to be the one who killed him, even unintentionally,
accidentally, unawares. Then, with more relief than surprise, he discovered
that the corpse had his own face, Reiter's face. When he woke from the dream
that morning, his voice had returned. The first thing he said was:

"Thank God, it
wasn't me."

At the start of the
summer of 1942 someone remembered the soldiers in Kostekino and Reiter was
returned to his division. He was in
Crimea
. He
was in
Kerch
.
He was on the banks of the Kuban and in the streets of
Krasnodar
. He traveled through the
Caucasus
to Budennovsk and he crossed the Kalmuk Steppe
with his battalion, always carrying Ansky's notebook under his jacket, between
his madman's garb and his soldier's uniform. He swallowed dust and saw no enemy
troops, but he saw Wilke and Kruse and Sergeant Lemke, although they were hard
to recognize because they had changed, not just their looks but their voices.
Now Wilke, for example, spoke only in dialect and almost no one except Reiter
understood him, and Kruse's voice had changed, he talked as if his testicles
had long since been removed, and Sergeant Lemke no longer shouted, except on
rare occasions. Most of the time he addressed his men in a kind of murmur, as
if he were tired or he'd been lulled to sleep by the long distances they'd
traveled. In any case, Sergeant Lemke was gravely wounded as they tried vainly
to fight their way through to Tuapse and he was replaced by Sergeant Bublitz.
Then came fall, the mud, the wind, and at the end of the fall the Russians
counterattacked.

Reiter's
division, which was part of the 17th Army now, not the 11th, retreated from
Elista to Proletarskaya and then followed the
Manych
River
up to
Rostov
. And then it kept retreating west, to
the
Mius
River
, where a new front line was
established. Summer 1943 came and the Russians attacked again and Reiter's
division retreated again. Each time it retreated there were fewer men. Kruse
was killed. Sergeant Bublitz was killed. Voss, who was brave, was promoted
first to sergeant and then lieutenant, and under Voss the number of casualties
doubled in less than a week.

Reiter
acquired the habit of inspecting the dead like someone who inspects a lot for
sale or a farm or a country house, and then going through the dead man's
pockets in case there was any food to be found. Wilke did the same, but rather
than doing it in silence he sang to himself: Prussian soldiers may masturbate,
but they don't commit suicide. Some of their battalion comrades dubbed them the
vampires. Reiter didn't care. In his free time he took a piece of bread and
Ansky's notebook from his jacket and began to read. Sometimes Wilke sat down
next to him and fell asleep. Once he asked Reiter whether he had written what
was in the notebook. Reiter looked at him as if the question was too stupid to
merit a reply. Wilke asked again whether he had written it. Reiter thought
Wilke must be talking in his sleep. His eyes were half shut and he was unshaven
and his cheekbones and jaw seemed to leap from his face.

"A friend
wrote it," he said.

"A dead
friend," said Wilke's voice in his sleep.

"More or
less," said Reiter, and he kept reading.

Reiter liked to fall asleep
listening to artillery fire. Wilke couldn't stand a long silence either, and
before he closed his eyes he sang to himself. But Lieutenant Voss plugged his
ears when he slept and only with difficulty did he awake and readjust to
wakefulness and the war. Sometimes he had to be shaken and then he demanded to
know what the fuck was going on and struck out in the dark. But he won medals
and once Reiter and Wilke accompanied him to division headquarters where
General Von
Berenberg in person pinned on his chest the highest honor a soldier of the
Wehrmacht could receive. This was a happy day for Voss but not for the 79th
Division, which by then had fewer troops than a regiment, since that afternoon,
as Reiter and Wilke ate sausages beside a truck, the Russians attacked their
position, which meant that Voss and his two companions had to return
immediately to the front line. The resistance was brief and they retreated
again. In the course of the retreat the division was reduced to the size of a
battalion and many of the soldiers looked like madmen escaped from an asylum.

For several days they marched west as best they could, keeping in
their companies or in groups that formed and split up at random.

Reiter went off alone. Sometimes he saw squadrons of Soviet planes
pass overhead, and sometimes the sky, a blinding blue the minute before, grew
overcast and a storm that lasted hours was suddenly unleashed. From a hill he
saw a column of German tanks moving east. They looked like the coffins of an
extraterrestrial civilization.

He walked at night. During the day he found shelter as best he
could and passed the time reading Ansky's notebook and sleeping and watching
things grow or burn around him. Sometimes he remembered the seaweed forests of
the Baltic and smiled. Sometimes he thought about his little sister and that
made him smile too. It had been a long time since he had news of his family. He
had never gotten a letter from his father and Reiter suspected it was because
his father didn't know how to write very well. His mother had written. What did
she say in her letters? Reiter couldn't remember, they weren't very long, but
he couldn't remember anything she said, all he remembered was her handwriting,
shaky and sprawling, her grammar mistakes, her nakedness. Mothers should never
write letters, he thought. His sister's letters, however, he remembered
perfectly, and that made him smile, flat on his stomach, hidden in the grass,
as sleep overtook him. They were letters in which she talked about the things
that had happened to her, about the village, school, the dresses she wore, him.

You're a giant,
said little Lotte. At first Reiter was disconcerted by this. But then he
thought that for a child, and a child as sweet and impressionable as Lotte,
someone of his height was the closest thing to a giant she had ever seen. Your
steps echo in the forest, said Lotte in her letters. The birds of the forest
hear the sound of your footsteps and stop singing. The workers in the fields
hear you. The people hidden in dark rooms hear you. The Hitler Youth hear you
and come out to wait for you on the road into town. Everything is happiness.
You're alive.
Germany
is alive. Et cetera.

One
  
day,
  
without
 
knowing
 
how,
  
Reiter
 
found
 
himself back
 
in Kostekino. There were no Germans left in the village. The sovkhoz was
deserted and only the heads of a few undernourished and trembling old people
looked out of farmhouses to inform him, by signs, that the Germans had evacuated
the engineers and all the young Ukrainians who had been working in the village.
That day Reiter slept at Ansky's farmhouse and he felt more comfortable than he
would have felt at home. He lit a fire in the hearth and lay clothed on the
bed. But he couldn't fall asleep right away. He began to think about semblance,
as Ansky had discussed it in his notebook, and he began to think about himself.
He felt free, as he never had in his life, and although malnourished and weak,
he also felt the strength to prolong as far as possible this impulse toward
freedom, toward sovereignty. And yet the possibility that it was all nothing
but semblance troubled him. Semblance was an occupying force of reality, he
said to himself, even the most extreme, borderline reality. It lived in
people's souls and their actions, in willpower and in pain, in the way memories
and priorities were ordered. Semblance proliferated in the salons of the
industrialists and in the underworld. It set the rules, it rebelled against its
own rules (in uprisings that could be bloody, but didn't therefore cease to be
semblance), it set new rules.

National Socialism
was the ultimate realm of semblance. As a general rule, he reflected, love was
also semblance. My love for Lotte isn't semblance. Lotte is my sister and she's
little and she thinks I'm
a
giant. But love, ordinary love, the love of
a man and a woman, with breakfasts and dinners, with jealousy and money and
sadness, is playacting, or semblance. Youth is the semblance of strength, love
is the semblance of peace. Neither youth nor strength nor love nor peace can be
granted to me, he said to himself with a sigh, nor can I accept such a gift.
Only Ansky's wandering isn't semblance, he thought, only Ansky at fourteen
isn't semblance. Ansky lived his whole life in rabid immaturity because the
revolution, the one true revolution, is also immature. Then he fell asleep and
didn't dream and the next day he went into the forest in search of firewood and
when he returned to the village, out of curiosity, he went into the building
where the Germans had lived during the winter of '42 and found it abandoned and
in a shambles, no cooking pots or sacks of rice, no blankets or fires in the
grates, the windowpanes broken and the shutters hanging loose, the floor dirty
and covered in slicks of mud or shit that clung to the soles of one's boots if
one made the mistake of stepping in them. On one wall a soldier had written
Heil
Hitler
in charcoal. On another there was a kind of love letter. On the
walls—and on the ceiling!—of the floor above someone had amused himself by
drawing scenes from the daily life of the Germans who had lived in Kostekino.
Thus, in a corner was a sketch of the forest and five Germans, recognizable by
their caps, gathering wood or hunting birds. In another corner two Germans made
love while a third, with both arms bandaged, watched from behind a tree. In
another, four Germans lay asleep after dinner and next to them one could make
out the bones of a dog. In the last corner was Reiter himself, with a long
blond beard, peering out the window of the Anskys' farmhouse at the passing
parade of an elephant, a giraffe, a rhinoceros, and a duck. In the middle of
the fresco, if it could be called that, was a paved square, an imaginary square
that had never existed in Kostekino, crowded with women or the ghosts of women,
their hair standing on end, who ran back and forth wailing as two German
soldiers oversaw the work of a squad of young Ukrainians raising a stone statue
whose shape couldn't yet be made out.