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At this point the soldier
thought he'd gone mad or, even worse, that he'd died and this was his private
hell. Tired and hopeless, he lay down on the floor and slept. He dreamed of God
in human form. The soldier was asleep under an apple tree, in the Alsatian
countryside, and a country squire came up to him and woke him with a gentle
knock on the legs with his staff. I'm God, he said, and if you sell me your
soul, which already belongs to me anyway, I'll get you out of the tunnels. Let
me sleep, said the soldier, and he tried to go back to sleep. I said your soul
already belongs to me, he heard the voice of God say, so please don't be a
fool, and accept my offer.

Then the soldier awoke and
looked at God and asked where he had to sign. Here, said God, pulling a paper
out of the air. The soldier tried to read the contract, but it was written in
some other language, not German or English or French, of that he was certain.
What do I sign with? asked the soldier. With your blood, as is only proper, God
answered. Immediately the soldier took out a penknife and made a cut in the
palm of his left hand, then he dipped the tip of his index finger in the blood
and signed.

"All right, now you can go
back to sleep," God said.

"I'd like to get out of
the tunnels soon," the soldier pleaded.

"All will proceed as
ordained," said God, and he turned and started down a little dirt path
toward a valley where there was a village of houses painted green and white and
light brown.

The soldier thought it might be
wise to say a prayer. He joined his hands and raised his eyes to the heavens.
Then he saw that all the apples on the tree had dried up. Now they looked like
raisins, or prunes. At the same time he heard a noise that sounded vaguely
metallic.

"What is this?" he
exclaimed.

From the valley rose long
plumes of black smoke that hung in the air when they reached a certain height.
A hand grabbed him by the shoulder and shook him. It was soldiers from a
company that had come down the tunnel into the Berenice Sector. The soldier
began to weep with joy, not much, but enough to find relief.

That night, as he ate, he told
his best friend about the dream he'd had in the tunnels. His friend told him it
was normal to dream nonsense when one found oneself in such situations.

"It wasn't nonsense,"
the soldier answered, "I saw God in my dreams, I was rescued, I'm back
among friends again, but I can't quite be easy."

Then, in a calmer voice, he
corrected himself:

"I can't quite feel
safe."

To which his friend responded
that in war no one could feel entirely safe. The friend went to sleep. Silence
fell over the town. The sentinels lit cigarettes. Four days later, the soldier
who had sold his soul to God was walking along the street when he was hit by a
German car and killed.

During his regiment's stay in
Normandy
, Reiter often swam, no matter how cold it was,
off the rocks of Portbail, near the Ollonde, or off the rocks north of
Carteret
. His battalion was based in the town of
Besneville
. In the
mornings he went out, with his weapons and a rucksack in which he carried
cheese, bread, and half a bottle of wine, and walked to the coast. There he
chose a rock well out of sight, and after swimming and diving naked for hours,
he would stretch out on his rock and eat and drink and reread his book
Animals
and Plants of the European Coastal Region.

Sometimes he found starfish,
which he stared at for as long as his lungs would hold, until finally he made
up his mind to touch them just before he returned to the surface. Once he saw a
pair of gobies,
Gobius paganellus,
lost in a jungle of seaweed, and he
followed them for a while (the seaweed jungle was like the locks of a dead
giant), until he was seized by a strange, powerful despair and had to come up
quickly, because if he had stayed down any longer the despair would have dragged
him to the bottom.

Sometimes he felt so good,
drowsing on his damp slab of rock, that he might have chosen never to rejoin
the battalion. And more than once he gave serious thought to deserting, living
like a tramp in
Normandy
,
finding a cave, feeding himself on the charitable offerings of peasants or
small thefts that no one would report. I would learn to see in the dark, he
thought. In time my clothes would fall to rags and finally I would live naked.
I would never return to
Germany
.
One day I would drown, radiant with joy.

Around this time, a medical
team came to visit Reiter's company. The doctor who examined him found him as
healthy as could be, except for his eyes, which were unnaturally red, for
reasons of which Reiter was well aware: the long hours spent diving barefaced
in salt water. But he didn't tell the doctor for fear he would be punished or
forbidden to return to the sea. In those days, Reiter would have considered it
sacrilege to dive with goggles. A helmet yes, goggles categorically no. The
doctor prescribed some drops for him and told him to get his superior to issue
him an order to be seen by the ophthalmologist. As the doctor left he mused
that the lanky boy was probably a drug addict, and he wrote in his diary: how
is it that in the ranks of our army we find young men addicted to morphine,
heroin, perhaps all sorts of drugs? What do they represent? Are they a symptom
or a new social illness? Are they the mirror of our fate or the hammer that
will shatter mirror and fate together?

One day, without warning, all
leaves were canceled and Reiter's battalion, which was in the town of
Besneville, joined two other battalions of the 310th Regiment that were
stationed in St-Sauveur-le-Vicomte and Bricquebec and they all got on an
eastward-bound military train that linked up in Paris with another train
carrying the 311 th Regiment, and although the division was missing its 3rd
Regiment, which apparently it would never regain, they set off across Europe
from west to east, and thus passed through Germany and Hungary, finally coming
to a halt in Romania, the new posting of the 79th Division.

Some troops set up camp near
the Soviet frontier, others near the new border with
Hungary
. Hans's battalion was
stationed in the Carpathians. The headquarters of the division, which was no
longer part of the 10th Corps, but of a new corps, the 49th, which had just
been formed and for the moment consisted of a single division, was located in
Bucharest, although every so often General Kruger, the new commander of the corps,
accompanied by General Von Berenberg, formerly Colonel Von Berenberg, the new
commander of the 79th, visited the troops and took an interest in their state
of preparation.

Now Reiter lived far from the
sea, in the mountains, and for the moment he gave up any idea of deserting. For
the first few weeks of his stay in
Romania
all he saw were soldiers
from his own battalion. Then he saw peasants, who kept in constant motion, as
if they had ants in their pants, going back and forth with bundles of their belongings.
They spoke only to their children, who followed them like sheep or little
goats. The sunsets in the Carpathians were endless, but the sky seemed too low,
just a few yards above the soldiers' heads, which produced a sense of
smothering or unease. Daily life, despite everything, was once again peaceful,
uneventful.

One night some soldiers from
Reiter's battalion rose before dawn and left in two trucks for the mountains.

As soon as they had settled
themselves on the wooden benches in the back of the truck, the soldiers fell
asleep again. Reiter couldn't. Sitting next to the back flap, he pushed aside
the canvas that served as roof and watched the scenery. His night-vision eyes,
permanently reddened despite the drops he used each morning, glimpsed a series
of small, dark valleys between two lines of peaks. Every so often the trucks
passed huge stands of pine, which crept threateningly toward the road. In the
distance, on a smaller mountain, he made out the silhouette of a castle or
fort. When the sun rose he realized it was just a forest. He saw hills or rocky
outcroppings that looked like ships about to sink, prows lifted, like enraged
horses, nearly vertical. He saw dark mountain paths that led nowhere, but above
which, at a great height, soared blackbirds that must be carrion fowl.

At midmorning they came to a
castle. The only people there were three Romanians and an SS officer who was
acting as butler and who put them right to work, after serving them a breakfast
consisting of a glass of cold milk and a scrap of bread, which some soldiers
left untouched in disgust. Everyone, except for four soldiers who stood guard,
among them Reiter, whom the SS officer judged ill suited for the task of
tidying the castle, left their rifles in the kitchen and set to work sweeping,
mopping, dusting lamps, putting clean sheets on the beds.

At around three the guests
arrived. One was General Von Berenberg, the division commander. With him came
Herman Hoensch, a writer of the Reich, and two officers of the 79th's general staff.
In the other car came the Romanian general Eugen Entrescu, thirty-five at the
time and the rising star of his country's armed forces, accompanied by the
young scholar Paul Popescu, twenty-three, and the Baroness Von Zumpe, whom the
Romanians had met only the night before at a reception at the German embassy
and who by rights should have ridden with General Von Berenberg, but who was
finally persuaded by Entrescu's gallant ways and Popescu's amusing and playful
manner to give in to their pleas, which were reasonably based on the fact that
the baroness would have more room in their car, since they were carrying fewer
passengers.

Reiter's surprise when he saw
the Baroness Von Zumpe step out of the car couldn't have been greater. But the
strangest thing of all was that this time the young baroness stopped in front
of him and asked, with real interest, whether he knew her, because his face,
she said, looked familiar. Reiter (still standing at attention, staring
impassively off at the horizon in martial fashion, or perhaps gazing into
nothing) answered that of course he knew her because he had served in the house
of her father, the baron, from an early age, as had his mother, Frau Reiter,
whom perhaps the baroness might recall.

"That's right," said
the baroness, and she began to laugh, "you were the long-legged boy who
was always underfoot."

"That was me," said
Reiter.

"My cousin's
confidant," said the baroness.

"A friend of your
cousin," said Reiter, "Mr. Hugo Halder."

"And what are you doing
here, at Dracula's castle?" asked the baroness.

"Serving the Reich,"
said Reiter, and for the first time he looked at her.

He thought she was stunningly
beautiful, much more so than when he had known her. A few steps from them,
waiting, was General Entrescu, who couldn't stop smiling, and the young scholar
Popescu, who more than once exclaimed: wonderful, wonderful, yet again the
sword of fate severs the head from the hydra of chance.

The guests had a light meal and
then went out to explore the castle grounds. General Von Berenberg, initially a
proponent of this expedition, soon felt fatigued and retired, leaving General
Entrescu to lead the way, with the baroness on his arm and the young scholar
Popescu to his left, who made it his business to reel off and elaborate on a host
of mostly contradictory facts. Alongside Popescu was the SS officer, and
lagging a bit behind were Hoensch, the Reich writer, and the two general staff
officers. Bringing up the rear was Reiter, whom the baroness had insisted on
keeping with her, arguing that before he served the Reich he had served her
family, a petition Von Berenberg immediately granted.

Soon they came to a crypt dug
out of the rock. An iron gate, with a coat of arms eroded by time, barred the
entrance. The SS officer, who behaved as if he owned the castle, took a key out
of his pocket and let them in. Then he switched on a flashlight and they all
ventured into the crypt, except for Reiter, who remained on guard at the door
at the signal of one of the officers.

So Reiter stood there, watching
the stone stairs that led down into the dark, and the desolate garden through
which they had come, and the towers of the castle like two gray candles on a
deserted altar. Then he felt for a cigarette in his jacket, lit it, and gazed
at the gray sky, the distant valleys, and thought about the Baroness Von
Zumpe's face as the cigarette ash dropped to the ground and little by little he
fell asleep, leaning on the stone wall. Then he dreamed about the inside of the
crypt. The stairs led down to an amphitheater only partially illuminated by the
SS officer's flashlight. He dreamed that the visitors were laughing, all except
one of the general staff officers, who wept and searched for a place to hide.
He dreamed that Hoensch recited a poem by Wolfram von Eschenbach and then spat
blood. He dreamed that among them they had agreed to eat the Baroness Von
Zumpe.

He woke with a start and almost
bolted down the stairs to confirm with his own eyes that nothing he had dreamed
was real.

When the visitors returned to the
surface, anyone, even the least astute observer, could have seen that they were
divided into two groups, those who were pale when they emerged, as if they had
glimpsed something momentous down below, and those who appeared with a half
smile sketched on their faces, as if they had just been reapprised of the
naivete of the human race.