He took me into another room. — This young boy lived three days, he said. See how his stomach is open? They say he screamed day and night. But I think he's an exception. My brother was wounded last month by a grenade. I asked him what he felt. He told me that he felt nothing. He was injured very seriously in his arm. He said it was not until later that the pain started. So I believe that most of these people felt nothing.
His words comforted me. When I left the morgue, returning to the not-yet-dead outside the hospital's dusty window-shards like gray scraps of cloth where a man sat flirting with the nurses, his hand-bandage sporting a blaze of autumn, and a smiling girl took the sun with her friends, offering to God her deep scars just under knee and eye; I got back into the car (the militiaman had refused to go in with me because last time when the pathologist raised the sheet on an unidentified body it turned out to be his friend's), I found that the tenderness at the back of my head had gone away. I wasn't afraid of being shot there anymore. I feared only getting my stomach blown open. In general, of course, I remained just as afraid. A week later, when I was standing outside one of the apartment buildings near the front, waiting for my friend Sami to buy vodka, I felt a sharp impact on the crown of my head. Reaching up to explore the wound, I felt wetness. I took a deep breath. I brought my hand down in front of my eyes, preparing myself to see blood. But the liquid was transparent. Eventually I realized that the projectile was merely a peach pit dropped from a fifteenth-floor window.
She sat next to me at the table, utterly trapped in silence while the laughs burst around her like shells. Finally I asked her why she was so unhappy.
It's too difficult to explain, she said.
Try.
You have only a few words. I have only a few words.
So it's not the war, then, I said. I think you were always unhappy.
She leaned toward me. — Yes, she said.
Me too, I said.
She smiled. She laid her pale hand down on my hand. I felt a violent tenderness for her.
Come, she said. I must cook for these people. You can be with me.
As we went out together, the others all shouted with glee at the conquest they were sure I had made. The host, wounded twice since he'd volunteered a month before, was very drunk. His was one of those apartments still intact (or perhaps refurbished by means of that special liquidity which property acquires in wartime), with carpets, glass cabinets and windows (astounding to see them unbroken), fur rugs, and all the Ballantines and vodka you could drink. He had pulled out his pistol in the middle of the party and announced that he would test my bulletproof vest, which I was wearing. His eyes gleamed with desperate laughter and the barrel wavered. — May I finish my drink first? I asked. — I
Outside the candle-lit apartment it was night-dark, of course. We felt our way down the two flights of stairs to the landing where the stove was, and she bent over it. — No good, she said. She put my hand on it, and I found that it was cold. Nothing would be cooked today.
So we came back to the party, and the others stared at us. They thought that we must have quarrelled.
She said to me: What I don't understand is why we have to live. Life is nothing but sadness.
But you said you liked music. Don't you have moments of happiness?
Happiness? Oh, yes, in brief flashes. And sadness for yean and years.
What would make you happy?
Not to work. To live entirely alone. But I cannot, because I have no money. And I don't understand why there must be money to live.
How much money would you need to be happy?
I don't know. It's impossible anyway.
A hundred thousand deutsche marks a month?
No, no, that's too much.
How much?
Maybe two hundred.*
A month?
Yes.
So if I gave you two hundred deutsche marks you could be happy for one month?
She smiled for the second time. She thought I was joking, but she liked the joke. — Yes. You are a good man. .
