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"No, never," said
Reiter, "or maybe I have and I didn't know it."

"You would have known it
instantly," said the girl. "Obsidian is a black or very dark green
feldspar, a curious thing in itself because feldspar tends to be white or
yellowish. The most important kinds of feldspar, for your information, are
orthoclase, albite, and labradorite. But the kind I like best is obsidian.
Well, back to the pyramids. At the top is the sacrificial stone. Can you guess
what it's made of?"

"Obsidian," said
Reiter.

"Precisely," said the
girl, "a stone like a surgeon's table, where the Aztec priests or doctors
lay their victims before tearing out their hearts. But now comes the part that
will really surprise you. This stone bed where the victims were laid was
transparent! It was a sacrificial stone chosen and polished in such a way that
it was transparent. And the Aztecs inside the pyramid watched the sacrifice as
if from within, because as you'll have guessed, the light from above that
illuminated the bowels of the pyramids came from an opening just beneath the
sacrificial stone, so that at first the light was black or gray, a dim light in
which only the inscrutable silhouettes of the Aztecs inside the pyramids could
be seen, but then, as the blood of the new victim spread across the skylight of
transparent obsidian, the light turned red and black, a very bright red and a
very bright black, and then not only were the silhouettes of the Aztecs visible
but also their features, features transfigured by the red and black light, as
if the light had the power to personalize each man or woman, and that is
essentially all, but
that
can last a long time,
that
exists
outside time, or in some other time, ruled by other laws. When the Aztecs came
out of the pyramids, the sunlight didn't hurt them. They behaved as if there
were an eclipse of the sun. And they returned to their daily rounds, which
basically consisted of strolling and bathing and then strolling again and
spending a long time standing still in contemplation of imperceptible things or
studying the patterns insects made in the dirt and eating with friends, but
always in silence, which is the same as eating alone, and every so often they
made war. And above them in the sky there was always an eclipse," said the
girl.

"Well, well, well,"
said Reiter, impressed by his new friend's knowledge.

For a while, without intending
to, the pair walked in silence through the park, as if they were Aztecs, until
the girl asked what he would swear by, Aztecs or storms.

"I don't know," said
Reiter, who had already forgotten what he had to swear to.

"Choose," said the
girl, "and think carefully because it's much more important than you
understand."

"What's important?"
asked Reiter.

"Your oath," said the
girl.

"And why is it
important?" asked Reiter.

"For you, I don't
know," said the girl, "but for me it's important because it will mark
my fate."

At that moment Reiter
remembered that he had to swear he would never forget her and he felt great
sorrow. For a moment he could scarcely breathe and then he felt as if the words
were catching in his throat. He decided he would swear by the Aztecs, since he
didn't like storms.

"I swear by the
Aztecs," he said, "I'll never forget you."

"Thank you," said the
girl, and they kept walking.

After a while, although he no
longer cared, Reiter asked for Halder's address.

"He lives in
Paris
," said the
girl with a sigh. "I don't have the address."

"Ah," said Reiter.

"It's only natural that he
lives in
Paris
,"
said the girl.

Reiter thought that maybe she
was right and it was the most natural thing in the world that Halder had moved
to
Paris
. When
it began to get dark Reiter walked the girl to her front door and then went
running to the station.

The attack on the
Soviet Union
began on June 22, 1941. The 79th Division
was attached to the 11 th German Army, and a few days later the division's
advance troops crossed the
Prut
and marched
shoulder to shoulder into combat, along with the Romanian army corps, who
showed much more spirit than the Germans expected. And yet their advance was
not as rapid as that of the units of Army Group South, composed of the 6th
Army, the 17th Army, and the 1st Panzer Group, as it was called at the time,
although during the course of the war it would come to be known—along with the
2nd Panzer Group, the 3rd Panzer Group, and the 4th Panzer Group—as the more
intimidating Panzer Army. The human and material resources of the llth Army
were, as might be expected, infinitely smaller, not to mention the matter of
the region's terrain and scarcity of roads. Nor could it rely on the surprise
factor that had favored Army Groups South, Central, and North. But Reiter's
division delivered what its commanders expected of it and they crossed the Prut
and fought and then they fought some more on the steppes and hills of
Bessarabia and then they crossed the Dniester and came to the outskirts of
Odessa and then they advanced, while the Romanians halted, and fought Russian
troops in retreat and then they crossed the Bug and kept advancing, leaving a
wake of burned Ukrainian villages and granaries and woods that suddenly burst
into flames as if by means of a mysterious process of combustion, woods like
dark islands in the middle of endless wheat fields.

Who's setting fire to the
woods? Reiter asked Wilke sometimes, and Wilke shrugged, and so did Neitzke and
Kruse and Sergeant Lemke, exhausted from walking, because the 79th was a light
infantry division, in other words a division that moved under its own steam,
powered only by mules and soldiers, the function of the mules to pull the heavy
equipment and the function of the soldiers to walk and fight, as if lightning
warfare hadn't even blinked an eye on the division's organizational charts,
like in Napoleonic times, said Wilke, marches and countermarches and forced
marches, or rather constant forced marches, said Wilke, and then, without
getting up from the ground where he lay like everyone else, he said I don't
know who the hell is setting fires, it certainly wasn't us, was it, boys? and
Neitzke said no, not us, and Kruse and Barz echoed him and even Sergeant Lemke
said no, we burned that village there or we bombed this village to the left or
right, but not the woods, and his men nodded and no one said another word, they
just watched the blaze, the way the fire turned the dark island into an
orangish red island, maybe it was Captain Ladenthin's battalion, someone said,
they came this way, they must have encountered resistance in the woods, maybe
it was the sapper battalion, said another, but the truth is they hadn't seen
anyone in the area, whether German soldiers nearby or Soviet soldiers putting
up a fight, only the black woods in the middle of a yellow sea, under a bright
blue sky, and suddenly, without warning, as if they were in a great theater of
wheat and the wood was the stage and proscenium of that theater in the round,
the all-devouring, beautiful fire.

After the Bug, the division
crossed the
Dnieper
and forged into the
Crimean peninsula. Reiter fought in Perekop and several villages near Perekop
whose names he never learned but along whose dirt streets he walked, clearing
away corpses and ordering the elderly, women, and children to go inside and not
come out. Sometimes he felt dizzy. Sometimes he noticed that when he stood up
suddenly, a black fog rose before his eyes, full of granulated dots like a rain
of meteors. But the meteors moved in a very odd way. Or they didn't move. They
were motionless meteors. Sometimes, along with his companions, he flung himself
into the conquest of an enemy position, taking no precautions at all, which
gave him a reputation for daring and bravery, though all he sought was a bullet
to bring peace to his heart. One night, he got into an unexpected discussion of
suicide with Wilke.

"Good Christians
masturbate but we don't commit suicide," Wilke said, and before Reiter
went to sleep he pondered Wilke's words, because he suspected there might be a
hidden truth behind the joke.

And yet his resolve was
unshaken. During the battle for Chornomorske, in which the 310th Regiment and
especially Reiter's battalion played an important role, Reiter risked his life
at least three times, the first during an attack on a brick fortification on
the outskirts of Kirovske, at the junction of Chernishove, Kirovske, and
Chornomorske, a fort that wouldn't have withstood a single artillery volley, a
fort that touched Reiter deeply from the moment he saw it because of the
poverty and innocence it radiated, as if it had been built and were manned by
children.

The company had no mortar
rounds and decided to take it by storm. Volunteers were requested. Reiter was
the first to step forward. He was joined almost immediately by Voss, who was
also a brave man or a would-be suicide, and three others. The attack was quick:
Reiter and Voss advanced along the left flank of the fort, the other three
along the right. When they were twenty yards away, rifle fire came from inside.
The three who were moving along the right flank dropped to the ground. Voss hesitated.
Reiter kept running. He heard the hum of a bullet as it passed an inch from his
head but he didn't get down. On the contrary, his body seemed to stretch up in
a vain effort to see the faces of the adolescents who would put an end to his
life, but he couldn't see anything. Another bullet brushed his right arm. He
felt someone push him from behind and knock him down. It was Voss, who might
have been rash but still retained some common sense.

For a while he watched as his
comrade, after having pulled him to the ground, crawled toward the fort. He saw
stones, weeds, wildflowers, and the nails in the soles of Voss's boots as he
was left behind, the tiny cloud of dust Voss raised, tiny to us, he mused, but
not to the processions of ants marching from north to south as Voss crawls east
to west. Then he got up and began to fire at the fort, over Voss's body, and
once again he heard the bullets whistle past his body as he fired and walked,
like someone strolling and taking photographs, until the fort exploded, hit by
a grenade and then another and another, lobbed by the soldiers on the right
flank.

The second time he almost died
was during the capture of Chor-nomorske. The two main regiments of the 79th
Division led the attack after all the divisional artillery was concentrated
near the piers, at the head of the road that linked Chornomorske with
Evpatoria, Frunze, Inkerman, and Sevastopol, a road that lacked significant
geographic landmarks. The first attack was repulsed. Reiter's battalion, which
had been held in reserve, advanced in the second wave. The soldiers rushed over
the barbed wire as the artillery adjusted its sights and pulverized the Soviet
machine gun nests that had been located. As they ran, Reiter began to sweat, as
if suddenly, in a fraction of a second, he had fallen ill. This time, he
thought, he would die and the nearness of the sea convinced him even more
thoroughly of this idea. First they crossed a field and then they came out into
a garden where there was a little house, and from one of the windows, a tiny,
asymmetric window, an old man with a white beard watched. It seemed to Reiter
that the old man was eating something because his jaws moved.

On the other side of the garden
there was a dirt road and a little farther on they saw five Soviet soldiers
dragging a field gun behind them. They killed all five and kept running. Some
continued along on the road and others turned into a pine grove.

In the grove Reiter spotted a
figure in the undergrowth and stopped. It was the statue of a Greek goddess, or
so he believed. Her hair was gathered up and she was tall, her expression
impassive. Bathed in sweat, Reiter began to shake and stretched out his hand.
The marble or stone, he couldn't say which, was cold. There was something
absurd about where it stood, because that hidden spot in the trees was hardly
the place for a statue. For a brief and painful instant, Reiter thought he
should ask it something, but no question occurred to him and his face twisted
in a grimace of suffering. Then he ran.

The grove ended at the edge of
a ravine from which one could see the sea and the harbor and a kind of seaside
drive bordered by trees and benches and white houses and three-story buildings
that looked like hotels or spas. The trees were big and dark. In the hills a
few houses were in flames and at the harbor a group of miniature people crowded
onto a ship. The sky was very blue and the sea looked calm, nearly flat. To the
left, along a winding road, the first men of his regiment appeared, as a few
Russians fled and others raised their hands over their heads and came out of
fish sheds with blackened walls. The men with Reiter went down the hill toward
a square on which two new five-story buildings rose, painted white. When they
reached the square, they were fired upon from several windows. The soldiers
sought cover behind the trees, except for Reiter, who kept walking as if he
hadn't heard anything, until he reached the door of one of the buildings. One
of the walls was painted with a mural of an old sailor reading a letter. Some
of the letters lines were perfectly legible by the viewer, but they were
written in Cyrillic and Reiter didn't understand a thing. The tiles on the
floor were big and green. There was no elevator so Reiter began to climb the
stairs. When he got to the first landing someone shot at him. He saw a shadow
pop up and then he felt a sting in his right arm. He kept climbing. He was shot
at again. He stood still. The wound was hardly bleeding and the pain was
perfectly bearable. Maybe I'm dead already, he thought. Then he thought he
wasn't and he shouldn't faint, not until he took a bullet in the head. He
turned toward one of the flats and kicked open the door. He saw a table, four
chairs, a glass cabinet full of dishes with a few books on top. In the room he
found a woman and two little boys. The woman was very young and gazed at him in
terror. I won't hurt you, he said, and tried to smile as he retreated. Then he
went into another flat and two militiamen with closely cropped hair raised
their hands and surrendered. Reiter didn't even glance at them. People came out
of the other flats, looking as if they were starving or like pupils at a reform
school. In one room, next to an open window, he found two old rifles that he
threw down into the street as he signaled to his comrades to stop shooting.