Near the end of the morning, after a soup and some dry biscuits, I said to myself, All right, time to start work. But where to start? With troop morale? Why not then, troop morale. I could well guess it wasn’t going to be good, but it was my duty to verify my opinions. Studying the morale of the Wehrmacht soldiers meant going out; I didn’t think Möritz wanted a report on the morale of our Ukrainian Askaris, the only soldiers I had within reach. The idea of leaving the entirely relative security of the bunker worried me, but I had to do it. And also, I did have to see this city. Maybe I would get used to it and things would go better. As I was putting on my new outfit, I hesitated; I decided on the gray side, but saw from Ivan’s face that I had made a mistake. “It’s snowing today. Wear the white side out.” I ignored the inappropriate informality of the du form of address and went back to change. I also took a helmet; Thomas had insisted on it: “You’ll see, it’s very useful.” Ivan handed me a submachine gun; I dubiously contemplated the mechanism, unsure if I knew how to use it, but slung it over my shoulder nonetheless. Outside, a violent wind was still blowing, carrying with it large swirls of snowflakes: from the entrance of the Univermag, you couldn’t even see the fountain with the children. After the stifling dampness of the bunker, the cold, sharp air invigorated me. “Kuda?” Ivan asked. I had no idea. “To the Croats,” I said at random; Thomas, that morning, had mentioned some Croats. “Is it far?” Ivan grunted and turned right, down a long street that seemed to head toward the train station. The city seemed relatively calm; from time to time, a muffled explosion resounded through the snow, and even that made me nervous; I unhesitatingly copied Ivan, who walked right next to the buildings, I clung to the walls. I felt terrifyingly naked, vulnerable, like a crab that’s left its shell; I realized keenly that for all the eighteen months I had been in Russia, this was the first time I was actually under fire; and an unpleasant sense of dread made my limbs heavy and numbed my thoughts. I have spoken before about fear: what I felt then I won’t call fear, or else not an honest, conscious fear, but rather an almost physical discomfort, like an itch that you can’t scratch, concentrated on the blind parts of the body—the nape of the neck, the back, the buttocks. To try to distract myself, I looked at the buildings on the other side of the street. Many façades had collapsed, revealing the interior of the apartments, a series of dioramas of everyday life, powdered with snow and sometimes odd: on the third floor, a bicycle hanging on the wall; on the fourth, flowered wallpaper, an intact mirror, and a framed reproduction of Kramskoy’s haughty Unknown Woman; on the fifth, a green sofa with a corpse lying on it, its feminine hand dangling in the void. A shell, hitting the roof of a building, broke this illusion of peacefulness: I hunched over and understood why Thomas had insisted on the helmet: I was hit by a rain of debris, fragments of roof tiles and bricks. When I raised my head I saw that Ivan hadn’t even leaned over, he had just covered his eyes with his hand. “Come on,” he said, “it’s nothing.” I calculated the direction of the river and of the front and understood that the buildings we were walking alongside were partly protecting us: for the shells to fall in this street, they had to pass over the roofs; it wasn’t very likely they’d burst on the ground. But this thought didn’t do much to reassure me. The street led to some ruined outbuildings and railway warehouses; Ivan, in front of me, crossed the long square at a trot, and slipped into one of the warehouses through a metal door rolled up on itself like the lid of a sardine can. I hesitated, then followed him. Inside, I threaded my way through mountains of crates long ago plundered, skirted round a section of collapsed roof, and emerged into the open through a hole in a brick wall, where there were many traces of footprints in the snow. The path ran alongside the walls of the warehouses; on the slope overhanging the path stretched the freight train cars that I had seen the day before from the bridge, their sides riddled with bullet holes and shrapnel strikes and covered with Russian and German graffiti, ranging from the comic to the obscene. An excellent color caricature showed Stalin and Hitler fornicating while Roosevelt and Churchill jacked off around them: but I couldn’t decide who had painted it, one of ours or one of theirs, and so it was not very useful for my report. A little farther on, a patrol coming from the opposite direction passed us without a word, without a salute. The men’s faces were haggard, sallow, scraggly with beards; they kept their fists shoved into their pockets, and dragged along in boots wrapped with rags or enveloped in enormous cumbersome galoshes made of braided straw. They disappeared behind us into the snow. Here and there, in a train car or on the rails, appeared a frozen corpse, its uniform an indistinguishable color. We heard no more explosions and everything seemed calm. Then in front of us it started up again: detonations, gunshots, or machine-gun volleys. We had passed the last warehouses and crossed another residential zone: the landscape opened up onto a snowy terrain dominated, on the left, by an enormous round hillock like a little volcano, its summit periodically spitting out black smoke from explosions. “Mamaev Kurgan,” Ivan pointed, before turning left and entering a building.
