2666 (122 page)

The drawings were crude and childish and the perspective was
pre-Renaissance, but the composition revealed glimpses of irony and thus of a
secret mastery much greater than was at first apparent to the eye. As he
returned to the farmhouse, Reiter reflected that the painter had talent, but
that he had gone mad like the rest of the Germans who spent the winter of '42
in Kostekino. He also pondered his own surprise appearance in the mural. The
painter clearly believed that it was he who had gone mad, he concluded. The
figure of the duck, bringing up the rear of the procession headed by the
elephant, suggested as much. He remembered that in those days he hadn't yet
recovered his voice. He also remembered that in those days he had ceaselessly
read and reread Ansky's notebook, memorizing each word, and feeling something
very strange that sometimes seemed like happiness and other times like a guilt
as vast as the sky. And he accepted the guilt and happiness and some nights he
even weighed them against each other and the net result of his unorthodox
reckoning was happiness, but a different kind of happiness, a heartrending
happiness that for Reiter wasn't happiness but simply Reiter.

One night, three days after he
had come to Kostekino, he dreamed that the Russians had taken the village and
to escape them he had plunged into the stream, Sweet Spring, and swum until he
came to the Dnieper, and the Dnieper, the banks of the Dnieper, were swarming
with Russians, to the left as well as the right, and they all laughed to see
him appear in the middle of the river and fired at him, and he dreamed that to
escape the bullets he ducked underwater and let himself be carried along by the
current, coming up only to breathe and going under again, and in this way he
traveled miles and miles of river, sometimes holding his breath for three
minutes or four or five, the world record, until the current had carried him
away from the Russians, but even then Reiter kept going under, coming up,
taking a breath, and going under again, and the bottom of the river was like a
gravel road, every so often he saw schools of little white fish and every so
often he bumped into a corpse already picked clean, just the bare bones, and
these skeletons that dotted the river could be German or Soviet, it was
impossible to say, because their clothes had rotted and the current had swept
them downriver, and in Reiter's dream the current swept him downriver, too, and
sometimes, especially at night, he came up to the surface and did the dead
man's float, to rest or perhaps to sleep for five minutes as the river carried
him incessantly southward in its embrace, and when the sun came up Reiter went
under again and dove down, returned to the gelatinous bottom of the Dnieper,
and so the days went by, sometimes he passed a city and saw its lights, or if
there were no lights he heard a vague noise, like the clatter of furniture, as
if sick people were moving furniture around, and sometimes he passed under
military pontoons and he saw the frozen shadows of the soldiers in the night,
shadows cast on the choppy surface of the water, and one morning, at last, the
Dnieper flowed into the Black Sea, where it ceased to exist or was transformed,
and Reiter approached the shore of the river or the sea with shaky steps, as if
he were a student, the student he had never been, who flops down on the sand
after swimming to the point of exhaustion, dazed, at the zenith of the
holidays, only to discover with horror, as he sat on the beach contemplating
the immensity of the Black Sea, that Ansky's notebook, which he was carrying
under his jacket, had been reduced to a kind of pulp, the ink blurred forever,
half of the notebook stuck to his clothes or his skin and the other half
reduced to particles washed away by the gentle waves.
Then Reiter woke and
decided he should leave Kostekino as quickly as possible. He dressed in silence
and gathered his few belongings. He didn't light a lamp or stir the fire. He
thought about how far he would have to walk that day. Before he left the
farmhouse he returned Ansky's notebook carefully to the chimney hiding place.
Let someone else find it now, he thought. Then he opened the door, closed it
with care, and left the village with great strides.

Several
days later he found a column from his division and returned to the monotony of
holding a bit of ground and retreating, until they were destroyed by the
Soviets at the Bug, west of Pervomaysk, and the remnants of the 79th were
incorporated into the 303rd Division. In 1944, as they headed to Jassy with a
Russian motorized brigade on their heels, Reiter and the other soldiers in his
battalion saw a blue dust cloud rising toward the midday sky. Then they heard
shouts and very faint singing, and shortly afterward, through his binoculars,
Reiter saw a group of Romanian soldiers hurtle across a field, as if they were
possessed or terrified, and turn onto a dirt track that ran parallel to the
road along which his division was retreating.

They didn't have much time, because the Russians would be there
from one moment to the next, and yet Reiter and some of his comrades decided to
go and see what was happening. They left the hill they were using as a lookout
post and crossed the scrubland that separated the two roads, riding in an
armored vehicle mounted with a machine gun. They saw a kind of Romanian castle,
deserted, the windows closed, with a paved courtyard that stretched to the
stables. Then they came out into an open space where there were still some
Romanian soldiers, stragglers playing dice or loading paintings and furniture
from the castle onto carts they would later pull themselves. At the far end of
the space, driven into the yellow earth, there was a great cross built of big
pieces of wood varnished in dark shades, probably ripped from the great hall of
the estate. On the cross was a naked man. The Romanians who spoke some German
asked what they were doing there. The Germans answered that they were fleeing
the Russians. They'll be here soon, said the Romanians.

"So what's that?" asked a German, motioning toward the
crucified man.

"The general of our corps," said the Romanians as they
hurried to pack their plunder onto the carts.

"Are you
deserting?" asked one of the Germans.

"That's
right," answered a Romanian, "last night the Third Army Corps decided
to desert."

The
Germans exchanged glances, as if they weren't sure whether to shoot at the
Romanians or desert with them.

"Where are you
going now?" they asked.

"West, back
home," said some of the Romanians.

"Are you sure
you're doing the right thing?"

"We'll kill anyone
who gets in our way," said the Romanians.

As
if to confirm this, most picked up their rifles and there were even a few who
took aim openly at the Germans. For an instant it seemed as if the two groups
were about to exchange fire. Just at that moment Reiter got out of the vehicle,
and paying no heed to the standoff between the Romanians and the Germans, he
set out toward the cross and the crucified man. The man had dried blood on his
face, as if his nose had been broken with the butt of a rifle the night before,
and he had two black eyes and his lips were swollen, but even so Reiter
recognized him immediately. It was General Entrescu, the man who had slept with
the Baroness Von Zumpe in the castle in the Carpathians and whom he and Wilke
had spied on from the secret passageway. His clothes had been torn off,
probably while he was still alive, leaving him naked except for his riding
boots. Entrescu's penis, a proud cock that measured a foot when erect,
according to his and Wilke's reckoning in earlier days, swayed wearily in the
evening breeze. At the foot of the cross there was a box of the fireworks with
which General Entrescu entertained his guests. The powder must have been wet or
the fireworks were old because when they went off all they did was make a
little puff of blue smoke that soon rose up to the sky and disappeared. One of
the Germans, behind Reiter, made a remark about General Entrescu's member. A
few Romanians laughed and all of them, some more quickly than others,
approached the cross as if it had suddenly regained its magnetic force.

The rifles were no longer
pointed at anyone. The soldiers held them like field tools, as if they were
tired peasants marching along the edge of the abyss. They knew the Russians
weren't far off and they feared them, but none could resist a last visit to
General Entrescu's cross.
 

"What kind of man was he?" asked a German, knowing it
didn't matter.

"He
wasn't a bad sort," said a Romanian.

Then they all stood lost in thought, some with their heads bowed
and others staring at the general with dazzled eyes. No one thought to ask how
they had killed him. Probably they'd beaten him, then knocked him down and kept
hitting him. The cross was dark with blood and the stain reached, dark as a
spider, to the yellow earth. It didn't occur to anyone to bring him down.

"It'll be a while before you come across another specimen
like this," said a German.

The Romanians didn't understand him. Reiter inspected Entrescu's
face: his eyes were closed but they might have been wide open. His hands were
fixed to the wood with big silver nails. Three to a hand. Heavy blacksmith's
nails were driven through his feet. To Reiter's left, a young Romanian, no more
than fifteen, his uniform too big on him, prayed. Reiter asked whether there
was anyone else left on the estate. They answered that they were the only ones,
the 3rd Corps or what was left of the 3rd Corps had arrived at the Litacz
station three days ago and the general, instead of seeking a safer place to the
west, had decided to pay a visit to his castle, which they found deserted.
There were no servants or any animals to be killed and eaten. For two days the
general shut himself in his room and wouldn't come out. The soldiers roamed the
house until they found the cellar and broke down the door. Despite the qualms
of some of the officers, they started to drink. That night half of the 3rd
Corps deserted. Those who stayed did so of their own free will, not coerced by
anyone. They stayed because they loved General Entrescu. Or something like that.
Some went out to loot the neighboring villages and didn't come back. Others
shouted up at the general from the courtyard to resume command and decide what
to do. But the general remained locked in his room and wouldn't let anyone in.
One drunken night the soldiers broke down the door. General Entrescu was
sitting in an armchair, surrounded by candelabras and tapers, looking through a
photo album. Then what happened, happened. At first Entrescu defended himself,
lashing out with his riding crop. But the soldiers were crazed with hunger and
fear and they killed him and nailed him to the cross.

"It
must have been hard to make such a big cross," said Reiter.

"We
made it before we killed the general," said a Romanian. "I don't know
why we made it, but we made it even before we got drunk."

Then
the Romanians went back to loading their spoils and some Germans helped and
others decided to take a look around the house, to see whether there was any
liquor remaining in the cellars, and the figure on the cross was left alone
again. Before he left, Reiter asked whether they knew a man by the name of
Popescu, who was always with the general and was probably employed as his
secretary.

"Ah,
Captain Popescu," said a Romanian, nodding, in the same tone of voice he
might have used to say Captain Duck-Billed Platypus. "He must be in
Bucharest
by now."

As
they headed off toward the scrubland, raising a cloud of dust along the road,
Reiter thought he saw some blackbirds flying over the piece of flat ground from
where General Entrescu watched the course of the war. One of the Germans riding
next to the machine gun wondered, laughing, what the Russians would think when
they saw the man on the cross. No one answered.

Moving
from defeat to defeat, Reiter finally returned to
Germany
. In May 1945, at the age of
twenty-five, after spending two months hidden in a forest, he surrendered to
some American soldiers and was interned in a prisoner-of-war camp outside of
Ansbach. There he showered for the first time in many days and the food was
good.

Half of the prisoners of war
slept in barracks that had been built by black American soldiers and the other
half slept in big tents. Every other day visitors came to the camp and checked
the prisoners' papers, in strict alphabetical order. At first they set up a
table outside and the prisoners filed past one by one and answered their
questions. Then the black soldiers, with the help of a few Germans, set up a
special barracks with three rooms, and the lines now formed in front of this
barracks. Reiter didn't know anyone in the camp. His comrades from the 79th and
then the 303rd had been killed or taken prisoner by the Russians or had
deserted, as he had. What was left of the division had been on its way to
Pilsen, in the Protectorate, when Reiter struck off on his own in the midst of
the confusion. In the Ansbach camp he tried not to associate with anyone. Some
of the German soldiers sang in the afternoons. From their watch posts the black
soldiers stared and laughed, but since none
of them seemed to understand
the words of the songs, they let them sing until lights-out. Others would
stroll from one end of the camp to the other, arm in arm, discussing the most
peculiar subjects. It was said that hostilities would soon start up between the
Soviets and the Allies. There was speculation about the circumstances of
Hitler's death. There was talk about hunger and how the potato harvest would
once again save
Germany
from disaster.