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"Do
I keep digging?" asked Barz.

"Don't
be stupid," I answered, "cover it up again, leave it as it was."

Each
time someone found something I repeated the same thing. Leave it alone. Cover
it up. Go dig somewhere else. Remember the idea isn't to find things, it's to
not
find them. But all my men, one after the other, kept finding something and
in fact, as my secretary had said, it seemed there was no room left at the
bottom of the hollow.

And
yet in the end my tenacity won out. We found an empty space and I put all my
men to work there. I told them to dig deep, always down, farther down, as if we
were trying to dig all the way to hell, and I also made sure the pit was as
wide as a swimming pool. That night, working by flashlight, we managed to
finish the job and then we left. The next day the weather was so bad we were
able to bring only twenty Jews to the hollow. The boys got drunker than ever.
Some couldn't stand up, others vomited on the way back. The truck left them in
the main square, not far from my offices, and many stayed there, under the
eaves of the gazebo, huddled together as the snow kept falling and they dreamed
about liquor-fueled soccer matches.

The next morning
five of the boys had come down with pneumonia and the rest, to a greater or
lesser degree, were in a pitiable state, unable to work. When I ordered the
police chief to replace the boys with our men, at first he was reluctant, but
in the end he gave in. That afternoon he disposed of eight Jews. It struck me
as a paltry number, and I said as much. There were eight of them, the police
chief answered, but it was as if there were eight hundred. I gazed at him in
the eyes and understood.

I
told him we would wait until the Polish boys recovered. The ill luck that
dogged us, however, seemed determined to persist, no matter what we did. Two
Polish boys died of pneumonia, in the throes of a fever, with visions of soccer
matches in the snow and white holes into which balls and players disappeared,
as the town doctor explained. As a token of condolence I sent their mothers a
bit of smoked bacon and baskets of potatoes and carrots. Then I waited. I let
the snow fall. I let myself freeze. One morning I went to the hollow. The snow
there was soft, even excessively soft. For a few seconds I felt as if I were
walking across a big dish of cream. When I got to the edge and looked down, I
saw that nature had done its work. Magnificent. There was no sign of anything,
only snow. Then, when the weather improved, the brigade of drunk boys went back
to work.

I
gave them a rousing speech. I told them they were doing a good job and now
their families had more food, more opportunities. They stared at me and didn't
say anything. Still, their indifference and lack of enthusiasm for the task at
hand was evident in their bearing. I knew very well they would rather have been
in the street drinking and playing soccer. Meanwhile, at the station bar all
anyone talked about was how close the Russians were. Some said
Warsaw
would fall at any
moment. They whispered it. But I heard the whispers, and I whispered, too.
Ill
omens.

One
afternoon they told me the boys had drunk so much they had fallen down one
after the other in the snow. I scolded them. They didn't seem to understand
what I was saying. It didn't matter. One day I asked how many Greek Jews we had
left. After half an hour one of my secretaries handed me a detailed account of
everything, the five hundred Jews who had arrived by train from the south,
those who had died on the trip, those who had died during their stay at the old
tannery, those we had dispatched ourselves, those the drunken boys had
dispatched, et cetera. I still had more than one hundred Jews and everyone was
exhausted, my policemen, my volunteers, and the Polish boys.

What to do? The work was too
much for us. Man wasn't made to
bear some tasks for very long, I said to myself as I
contemplated the horizon from my office window, striped in pink and a cloacal
murk. It was too much for me, anyway. I was doing my best, but I couldn't stand
it. Nor could my policemen. Fifteen, all right. Thirty, fine. But when one
reaches fifty the stomach turns and the head spins and the restless nights and
nightmares begin.

I
put a halt to the work. The boys went back to playing soccer in the street. The
policemen returned to their duties. The peasants returned to their farms. No
one from the outside showed any interest in the Jews, so I started up the
sweeping brigades again and let some, no more than twenty, do farmwork, making
the farmers responsible for their safety.

One
night I was gotten out of bed and told I had an urgent call. It was an official
from
Upper Galicia
with whom I had never
spoken before. He told me to prepare for the evacuation of Germans from my
region.

"There
are no trains," I said, "how can I evacuate them all?"

"That's your
problem," said the official.

Before
he hung up I said I had a group of Jews in my power, what to do with them? He
didn't answer. The line had gone dead or he had other people like me to call or
the Jews were of no interest to him. It was four in the morning. I couldn't go
back to bed. I told my wife we were leaving and then I sent for the mayor and
the police chief. When I got to my office they were there, looking as if they
had slept little and poorly. They were both afraid.

I
reassured them, I told them that if we acted fast no one would be in danger. We
put our people to work. Before dawn the first evacuees were already on their
way west. I stayed until the end. I spent another day and night in the village.
In the distance the sound of artillery could be heard. I went to see the Jews,
the police chief is my witness, and I told them to leave. Then I collected the
two policemen who were on guard and abandoned the Jews to their fate in the old
tannery. That's freedom, I suppose.

My
driver told me he had seen some Wehrmacht soldiers passing through without
stopping. I went up to my office without knowing very well what I was looking
for. The night before I had slept on the sofa for a few hours and I had already
burned everything that needed to be burned. The town streets were empty,
although women's heads could be glimpsed at some windows. Then I went down the
stairs, got in my car, and left, said Sammer to Reiter.

I
was a fair administrator. I did good things, guided by my instincts, and bad
things, driven by the vicissitudes of war. But now the drunken Polish boys will
open their mouths and say I ruined their childhoods, said Sammer to Reiter. Me?
I ruined their childhoods? Liquor ruined their childhoods! Soccer ruined their
childhoods! Those lazy, shiftless mothers ruined their childhoods! Not me.

"Anyone
else in my place," said Sammer to Reiter, "would have killed all
those Jews with his own hands. I didn't. It isn't in my nature."

One
of the men with whom Sammer took long walks around the camp was the police
chief. The other was the fire chief. The mayor, Sammer said one night, had died
of pneumonia after the war ended. The driver had disappeared at a crossroads,
when the car stopped running for good.

Sometimes,
in the afternoons, Reiter watched Sammer from the distance and he could see
that Sammer, in turn, was watching him out of the corner of his eye, his gaze
betraying desperation, unease, and also fear and mistrust.

"We
do things, say things, that later we regret with all our souls," Sammer
said to him one day, as they were waiting in line for breakfast.

And another day he
said:

"When
the American police come back and interrogate me, I know they'll arrest me and
I'll be subjected to public disgrace."

When
Sammer talked to Reiter, the police chief and the fire chief stood to one side,
several feet from them, as if they didn't want to meddle in their former boss's
affairs. One morning Sammer's body was found halfway between the tent and the
latrines. Someone had strangled him. The Americans interrogated perhaps ten
prisoners, among them Reiter, who said he hadn't heard anything unusual that
night, and then they took away the body and buried it in the common grave of
the Ansbach cemetery.

When Reiter was allowed to
leave the camp, he went to
Cologne
.
There he lived in some barracks near the station and then in a cellar shared
with a veteran of one of the armored divisions, a silent man with a burn down one
side of his face who could go for whole days without eating, and another man
who said he had worked for a newspaper and who, unlike his companion, was
friendly and talkative.

The tank veteran must have been about thirty or thirty-five and
the former reporter about sixty, though both seemed like children at times.
During the war the reporter had written a series of articles in which he
described the heroic life in a few Panzer divisions, east and west. He still
had the clippings, which the taciturn tank veteran had chance to read with
approval. Sometimes he would open his mouth and say:

"Otto, you've
captured the essence of the tank man's life."

With a modest
shrug, the reporter answered:

"Gustav, my greatest reward is that it should be precisely
you, a tank veteran, who assures me I didn't get it all wrong."

"You
didn't get anything wrong, Otto," answered the tank man.

"I thank you
for your kind words, Gustav," said the reporter.

The
two worked occasionally clearing debris for the city or selling the things they
found under the rubble. When the weather was nice they went off to the
countryside and Reiter had the basement to himself for a week or two. He spent
his first few days in
Cologne
trying to get a train ticket to return to his village. Then he found work as a
doorman at a bar that catered to a clientele of American and English soldiers
who tipped well and for whom he sometimes did little extra jobs, like finding
them flats in certain neighborhoods or introducing them to girls or putting
them in contact with black marketeers. So he stayed in
Cologne
.

During the day he wrote and read. Writing was easy, because all he
needed was a notebook and a pencil.
Reading
was a little harder, because the public libraries were still closed and at the
few bookshops one could find (most of them mobile) the prices were exorbitant.
Even so, Reiter read and he wasn't the only one: sometimes he looked up from
his book and everyone around him was reading too. As if all the Germans cared
about was reading and food, which wasn't true but sometimes seemed to be,
especially in
Cologne
.

Meanwhile,
Reiter noted, interest in sex had waned considerably, as if the war had used up
men's reserves of testosterone, pheromones, desire, and no one wanted to make
love anymore. They only fucked whores, as far as Reiter could tell from what he
saw on the job. There were some women who dated the occupying forces, but even
for them desire was really the mask of something else: a theater of innocence,
a frozen slaughterhouse, a lonely street, a movie theater. The women he saw
were like girls who've just woken from a terrible nightmare.

One
night as he stood guard at the door to the bar on the Spengler-strasse, a
female voice spoke his name out of the darkness. Reiter looked around and when
he didn't see anyone he thought it must be one of the whores, with their
strange, sometimes incomprehensible sense of humor. But when his name was
called again, he knew the voice didn't belong to any of the women who
frequented the bar and he asked what it wanted.

"I just wanted
to say hello," said the voice.

Then
he saw a nicker of movement and in two strides he was across the street and had
grabbed the owner of the voice by the arm and dragged her into the light. The
girl who had called him by name was very young. When he asked what she wanted
from him, she answered that she was his girlfriend. Frankly, she said, it was
sad he didn't recognize her.

"I
must look very ugly," she said, "but if you were still a German
soldier, you would try to pretend I wasn't."

Reiter
examined her carefully but no matter how he tried he couldn't remember who she
was.

"War is often
linked to amnesia," said the girl. Then she said:

"Amnesia is
when you lose your memory and you don't remember anything, even your name or
your girlfriend's name." And she added:

"There's
also such a thing as selective amnesia, which is when you remember everything
or think you remember everything and forget only a single thing, the one
important thing in your life."

I know this girl,
thought Reiter as he listened to her talk, but he couldn't say where or under
what circumstances he'd met her. So he decided to proceed calmly and asked if
she'd like a drink. The girl glanced at the door of the bar and after
considering for a moment, she accepted. They had tea sitting at a table near
the entrance. The woman who waited on them asked Reiter who this hatchling was.
"My girlfriend," said Reiter. The girl smiled at the woman and
nodded. "She's very nice," said the woman.

"And
hardworking, too," said the girl.