The military doctor, a rather chubby, almost bald Viennese named Hohenegg, turned out to be a very pleasant travel companion. He was a professor, holder of an important chair in Vienna, who had been named as the Sixth Army’s chief pathologist. Even when he was expressing the most serious opinions, his soft, almost oiled voice seemed to betray a trace of irony. Medicine had given him his philosophical views: we discussed them at some length while the train crossed the steppe beyond Zaporozhie, as empty of life as the high seas. “The advantage of forensic pathology,” he explained to me, “is that after you’ve opened up corpses of all ages and sexes, you have the impression that death loses its horror, is reduced to a physical phenomenon as ordinary and banal as the natural functions of the body. I can manage very calmly to imagine myself on a dissection table, under the hands of my successor, who would grimace slightly as he observed the state of my liver.”—“Ah, but that’s because you have the luck to get them when they’re already dead. It’s a very different thing when, as so often happens here, especially when you work in the SD, you’re present at the step beyond itself.”—“And are even contributing to it.”—“Exactly. Whatever his attitude or his ideology, the spectator can never fully grasp the experience of the deceased.” Hohenegg reflected: “I see what you mean. But this gap exists only for the person who watches. For he alone can see both sides. The man dying will only experience something confused, more or less brief, more or less brutal, but something in any case that will always escape his awareness. Do you know Bossuet?”—“In French, even,” I replied, smiling, in that language. “Excellent. I see that your education was a little broader than that of the average lawyer.” He declaimed the sentences in a rather thick, choppy French: “This final instant, which in one single stroke will erase your whole life, will itself be lost, with all the rest, in that great abyss of nothingness. No trace of what we are will remain on earth: the flesh will change its nature; the body will take on another name; even that of corpse will not long remain. ‘It will become,’ said Tertullian, ‘a strange something that no longer has a name in any language.’”—“That,” I said, “is fine for the dead man, I’ve often thought that way. The problem is only one for the living.”—“Until their own death,” he retorted, winking. I laughed gently and he did too; the other passengers in the compartment, who were discussing girls or sausages, looked at us with surprise.
In Simferopol, the terminus, they loaded us into trucks or ambulances for a convoy to Yalta. Hohenegg, who had come to visit the doctors of AOK 11, stayed in Simferopol; I parted from him regretfully. Our convoy took a mountain road, to the east, via Alushta, since Bakhchisaray was still in the zone of operations of the siege of Sebastopol. I was put up in a sanatorium west of Yalta, high over the road to Livadia, its back to the steep snow-covered mountains overlooking the city, a former royal palace converted into a Kurort for Soviet workers; it had been damaged a bit by the fighting but quickly patched up and repainted. I had a nice little bedroom on the third floor, with a bathroom and a small balcony: the furniture left something to be desired, but at my feet, beyond a few cypress trees, stretched the Black Sea, smooth, gray, calm. I couldn’t get enough of looking at it. Though it was still a little cold, the air was much softer than in the Ukraine, and I could go out to smoke on the balcony; otherwise, lying on the sofa facing the French doors, I spent long tranquil hours reading. I didn’t lack reading material: I had my own books, and the sanatorium too had a library, made up mostly of books abandoned by previous patients, very eclectic, even including, next to the unreadable Myth of the Twentieth Century, some German translations of Chekhov that I discovered with great pleasure. I didn’t have any medical obligations. At my arrival a doctor had examined me and had me describe my symptoms. “It’s nothing,” he concluded after reading Dr. Sperath’s note. “Nervous fatigue. Rest, baths, no excitement, as little alcohol as possible, and beware of Ukrainian girls. It will pass on its own. Have a nice stay.”
