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A
month after both were sent, the Cologne publishing house wrote back to say that
despite its undeniable merits, his novel
Lüdicke
regrettably wasn't the
right fit for their list, but he should be sure to send them his next novel. He
chose not to tell Ingeborg what had happened and that same day he went to pick
up the manuscript, which took several hours, since no one at the publishing
house seemed to know where it was and Archimboldi made it plain he wouldn't
leave without it. The next day he took it in person to another Cologne
publishing house, which rejected it in a month and a half, using more or less
the same words as the first publishing house, perhaps with the addition of a
few adjectives, perhaps wishing him better luck the next time around.

Now there was just one publishing house left in Cologne, a house
that from time to time published some novel or volume of poetry or history, but
whose catalog mainly consisted of practical manuals that might just as easily
provide instruction on the proper care of a garden as on the correct
administration of first aid or the reconstruction of the shells of destroyed
houses. The name of the publishing house was the Adviser, and unlike the first
two times, this time the publisher came out in person to receive the manuscript.
And it wasn't for lack of employees, as he pointed out to Archimboldi, since he
had at least five people working for him, but because he liked to see the faces
of the writers who hoped to be published by his company. Their conversation, as
Archimboldi remembered it, was odd. The editor had the face of a gangster. He
was a young man, just a bit older than Archimboldi, dressed in a well-cut suit
that was nevertheless a bit tight on him, as if overnight he had
surreptitiously gained twenty pounds.

During
the war he had served in a paratrooper unit, although he had never, he hastened
to clarify, made a jump, much as he would have liked to. His military record
included participation in various battles in different theaters of operations,
especially in
Italy
and
Normandy
. He said he had
been carpet bombed by American planes. And he claimed to know the secret to
surviving such an attack. Since Archimboldi had spent the whole war in the east
he had no idea what carpet bombing was and he said as much. The editor, whose
name was Michael Bittner but who preferred his friends to call him Mickey, like
the mouse, explained that carpet bombing was when masses of enemy planes,
really huge masses, a vast number, dropped their bombs on a given area, a
previously designated piece of countryside, until not a blade of grass was
left.

"I
don't know whether you get the idea, Benno," he said, fixing his gaze on
Archimboldi.

"I
get the idea perfectly, Mickey," said Archimboldi, thinking all the while
that this man was not only irritating but ridiculous, with the particular
ridiculousness of self-dramatizers and poor fools convinced they've been
present at a decisive moment in history, when it's common knowledge, thought
Archimboldi, that history, which is a simple whore, has no decisive moments but
is a proliferation of instants, brief interludes that vie with one another in
monstrousness.

But
what Mickey Bittner wanted, the poor wretch, stuffed into his well-tailored,
tight-fitting suit, was to explain the effect of carpet bombing on soldiers and
the system he had come up with to combat it. Noise. First of all is noise. The
soldier in his trench or his poorly fortified position suddenly hears noise.
The noise of planes. But not the noise of fighter planes or fighter-bombers,
which is a quick noise, if one can call it that, a low-flying noise. Instead
it's a noise that comes from the highest point in the sky, a harsh, roaring
noise that heralds nothing good, as if a storm were approaching, as if the
clouds were colliding, but the problem is there are no clouds, there is no
storm. Of course, the soldier looks up. At first he sees nothing. The
artilleryman looks up. He sees nothing. The machine gunner, the mortar
operator, the advance scout, look up and see nothing. The driver of an armored
vehicle or tank gun looks up. He sees nothing either. As a precaution, however,
he turns his vehicle off the road. He parks it under a tree or covers it with a
camouflage tarp. Just then the first planes appear.

The
soldiers watch them. There are many planes, but the soldiers think they're on
their way to bomb some city behind the front lines. A city or bridges or rail
lines. There are many, so many they blacken the sky, but their targets are
surely in some industrial region of
Germany
. To general surprise the
planes drop their bombs and the bombs fall within specific bounds. After the
first wave comes a second wave. The noise grows deafening/The bombs fall and
make craters in the earth. The forests are set ablaze. The undergrowth, the
main cover in
Normandy
,
begins to disappear. All the hedges are blown to pieces. The terraces collapse.
Many soldiers are momentarily deafened. A few can't bear it and go running. By
now the third wave of planes is dropping bombs over the chosen swath.
Impossible as it seems, the noise grows louder. Call it noise, why not. One
might call it a din, a roar, a clamor, a hammering, a great shriek, a bellow of
the gods, but
noise
is a simple word that serves just as well to
describe what has no name. The machine gunner dies. Another bomb falls directly
on his dead body. Bones and shreds of flesh are scattered over spots that
thirty seconds later will be pulverized by other bombs. The mortar operator is
vaporized. The driver of the armored vehicle starts his engines and goes in search
of better shelter, but along the way he is struck by a bomb, and then two more
bombs turn the vehicle and the driver into a single formless thing in the
middle of the road amid the wreckage and the lava. Then comes the fourth wave
and the fifth. Everything is burning. It looks more like the moon than
Normandy
. When the
bombers have finished pounding the designated piece of earth, not a single bird
can be heard. In fact, not even in the neighboring areas where no bomb has
fallen, to either side of the devastated divisions, does a single bird cry.

Then
the enemy troops appear. For them, too, there is horror in forging into that
steel-gray territory, smoking and pocked with craters. Every so often there
rises up from the fiercely churned earth a German soldier with the eyes of a
madman. Some surrender, weeping. Others, the paratroopers, the Wehrmacht
veterans, some SS infantry battalions, open fire, try to reestablish lines of
command, hold off the enemy advance. A few of these soldiers, the most indomitable,
have clearly been drinking. Among them is certainly the paratrooper Mickey
Bittner, because his recipe for enduring any kind of bombardment is precisely
this: drink schnapps, drink cognac, drink brandy, drink grappa, drink whiskey,
drink any kind of strong drink, even wine if that's all there is, to escape the
noises, or to confuse the noises with the throbbing and spinning of one's head.

Then
Mickey Bittner wanted to know what Archimboldi's novel was about and whether it
was his first novel or whether he already had a body of work behind him.
Archimboldi told him it was his first novel and described the plot in broad
strokes. Sounds like it has potential, said Bittner. Immediately he added: but
we won't be able to publish it this year. And then he said: of course, there'll
be no talk of an advance. And later he clarified: we'll give you five percent
of the sales price, which is more than fair. And then he confessed: in
Germany
people don't read the way they used to, now there are more practical things to think
about. And then Archimboldi knew for sure that the man was talking for the sake
of talking and that probably all paratrooper bastards, General Student's dogs,
talked for the sake of talking, just to hear their own voices and to reassure
themselves that no one had strung them up yet.

For
a few days Archimboldi thought that what
Germany
really needed was a civil
war.

He had no faith that Bittner, who surely knew nothing about
literature, would publish his novel. He was nervous and lost his appetite. He hardly
read at all and the little he did read disturbed him so much that no sooner did
he begin a book than he had to shut it, because he would start to shake and was
overcome by an irresistible urge to go outside and walk. He did make love,
although sometimes, in the middle of the act, he went off to another planet, a
snowy planet where he memorized Ansky's notebook.

"Where
are you?" Ingeborg asked when this happened.

Even
the voice of the woman he loved reached him as if from a great distance. After
two months of receiving no response, negative or positive, Archimboldi visited
the publishing house and asked to speak to Mickey Bittner. The secretary told
him that Mr. Bittner was now involved in the import and export of essential
goods and was rarely to be found at the publishing house, which was still his,
of course, although he almost never stopped by. Upon insisting, Archimboldi got
the address of Bittner's new office, on the outskirts of
Cologne
. The office was in a neighborhood of
old nineteenth-century factories, above a warehouse stacked with crates, but
Bittner wasn't there either.

In his place were three ex-paratroopers and a secretary with
silver-colored hair. The paratroopers informed him that Mickey Bittner was in
Antwerp
just then closing
a deal on a shipment of bananas. Then they all started to laugh and it took
Archimboldi a moment to understand that they were laughing about the bananas,
not at him. Then the paratroopers began to talk about the movies, since they
were all avid moviegoers, as was the secretary, and they asked Archimboldi what
front he'd been on and in what arm of the service, and Archimboldi said he'd
been in the east, always the east, and in the light infantry, although in the
last years of the war he hadn't seen a single mule or horse. The paratroopers
themselves had always fought in the west, in Italy, France, one of them in Grete,
and they had that cosmopolitan air of veterans of the western front, an air of
roulette players, late-night revelers, sippers of fine wines, men who visited
brothels and greeted the whores by name, an air unlike that of most veterans of
the eastern front, who looked more like the living dead, zombies, cemetery
dwellers, soldiers without eyes or mouths, but with penises, thought
Archimboldi, because the penis, sexual desire, is unfortunately the last thing
man loses, when it should be the first, but no, human beings keep fucking,
fucking or fucking themselves, which amounts to the same thing, until their
last breaths, like the soldier who was trapped under a pile of corpses and
there, beneath the corpses and the snow, he dug a little cave with his
regulation shovel, and to pass the time he jerked off, more boldly each time,
because once the fear and surprise of the first few instants had vanished, all
that was left was the fear of death and boredom, and to stave off boredom he
began to masturbate, first timidly, as if he were seducing a peasant girl or a
little shepherdess, then with increasing determination, until he managed to
bring himself off to his full satisfaction, and he went on like that for
fifteen days, in his little cave of corpses and snow, rationing his food and
indulging his urges, which didn't make him weaker but rather seemed to
retronourish him, as if he had drunk his own semen or as if after going mad he
had found a forgotten way back to a new sanity, until the German troops
counterattacked and discovered him, and here was a curious bit of information,
thought Archimboldi, one of the soldiers who freed him from the pile of reeking
corpses and the heaps of snow said the man smelled strange somehow, in other
words not dirty or like shit or urine, nor like rot or worm meat, in fact, the
survivor smelled
good,
the smell was strong, perhaps, but
good,
like
cheap perfume, Hungarian perfume or Gypsy perfume, maybe with a faint hint of
yogurt, maybe a faint scent of roots, but the predominant smell wasn't of
yogurt or roots but of something else, something that surprised all of those
present, all the men shoveling out the corpses to send them behind the lines or
give them a Christian burial, a smell that
parted the waters,
as Moses
parted the waters of the Red Sea, to let the soldier pass, though he could
scarcely stand, and where was he going? who could say, surely away from the
fighting, surely to a madhouse back home.

The
paratroopers, who weren't bad people, offered Archimboldi the chance to get in
on a job they had to handle that very night. Archimboldi asked what time it
would end, because he didn't want to lose his position at the bar, and the paratroopers
promised that everything would be over by eleven. They agreed to meet at eight
at a bar near the station and when he left the secretary winked at him.

The bar was called the Yellow Nightingale and the first thing that
struck Archimboldi when the paratroopers came in was that they were all wearing
black leather coats very similar to his. The job consisted of unloading part of
a freight car full of
U.S.
army stoves. Near the freight car, on an isolated bit of track, they met an
American who first demanded a certain sum of money, which he counted to the
last bill, and then warned them, like someone repeating a familiar order to
slow-witted children, that they could take boxes only from that particular
freight car, and only the boxes marked PK.