2666

by Roberto Bolaño

as the baroness sank down onto Entrescu’s cock or Entrescu’s cock rose up into the Baroness Von Zumpe, the Romanian general recited a new poem, a poem that he accompanied by waving both arms (the baroness clinging to his neck), a poem that again neither of them understood, except for the word Dracula, which was repeated every four lines, a poem that might have been martial or satirical or metaphysical or marmoreal or even anti-German, but whose rhythm seemed made to order for the occasion, a poem that the young baroness, sitting astride Entrescu’s thighs, celebrated by swaying back and forth, like a little shepherdess gone wild in the vastness of Asia, digging her nails into her lover’s neck, scrubbing the blood that still flowed from her right hand on her lover’s face, smearing the corners of his lips with blood, while Entrescu, undeterred, continued to recite his poem in which the word Dracula sounded every four lines, a poem that was surely satirical, decided Reiter (with infinite joy) as Wilke jerked off again.

“My name,” she repeated, “is Ingeborg Bauer, I hope you won’t forget me.” From this moment on they spoke in fainter and fainter whispers. “I won’t,” said Reiter. “Swear it,” said the girl. “I swear,” said Reiter. “Who do you swear by? Your mother, your father, God?” asked the girl. “I swear by God,” said Reiter. “I don’t believe in God,” said the girl. “Then I swear by my mother and father,” said Reiter.

By then they were strolling through the park holding hands and every so often Ingeborg would stop and kiss Reiter on the mouth and anyone who saw them might have thought they were just a young soldier and his girl, with no money to go anywhere else, very much in love and with many things to tell each other. And yet if this hypothetical observer had approached the couple and looked them in the eyes he would have seen that the young woman was mad and the young soldier knew it and didn’t care. Truthfully, by now Reiter didn’t care that the girl was crazy, much less about his friend Hugo Halder’s address. All he cared about was learning once and for all the few things Ingeborg felt were worthy of swearing by.

the truth is they hadn’t seen anyone in the area, whether German soldiers nearby or Soviet soldiers putting up a fight, only the black woods in the middle of a yellow sea, under a bright blue sky, and suddenly, without warning, as if they were in a great theater of wheat and the wood was the stage and proscenium of that theater in the round, the all-devouring, beautiful fire.

One night, he got into an unexpected discussion of suicide with Wilke. “Good Christians masturbate but we don’t commit suicide,” Wilke said, and before Reiter went to sleep he pondered Wilke’s words, because he suspected there might be a hidden truth behind the joke.

For Reiter, the presence of the sailors in those dusty trenches was charged with terrible and exhilarating portents. One of them, surely, would kill him and then he would sink down again into the depths of the Baltic or the Atlantic or the Black Sea, because all seas were ultimately the same sea, and at the bottom of the sea a forest of seaweed awaited him. Or he would simply disappear, no more.

Sometimes, in the morning, when he awoke, he would lie still again, staring up at the mud and straw ceiling, and it seemed to him there was something indefinably feminine about the house.

Then he went looking all over the house for something to use as a bandage and that was how he found the papers of Boris Abramovich Ansky and the hiding place behind the hearth.

The hiding place was extremely simple but extremely clever too. The hearth, which also served as cookstove, was wide enough and the flue deep enough so that a person could crouch inside. If the width was apparent at a glance, it was impossible to tell the depth from outside, because the soot-blackened walls afforded subtle camouflage. The eye couldn’t discern the gap at the rear, just a crack, but big enough so that one person, sitting with his knees drawn up, could be safe there in the dark. Although for the hiding place to work perfectly, mused Reiter, alone in the solitude of the farmhouse, there had to be two people: one to hide and one to stay in the room and put a pot of soup on to heat and then light the fire and stoke it again and again.

News comes late to your village, they said. And they also asked: where are you from, boy? And Ansky said Kostekino, near the Dnieper. And then an old soldier who was smoking a pipe asked him his name and whether he was Jewish. And Ansky said yes, he was Jewish, and he looked the old soldier in the face and only then did he notice that he was missing an eye, and also an arm.

Then the one-eyed man shifted in his chair, pulled a blanket up to his chin, and said: our commander’s name was Korolenko and he died the same day. Then, at supersonic speed, Ansky imagined Verbitsky and Korolenko, he saw Korolenko mocking Verbitsky, heard what Korolenko said behind Verbitsky’s back, entered into Verbitsky’s night thoughts, Korolenko’s desires, into each man’s vague and shifting dreams, into their convictions and their rides on horseback, the forests they left behind and the flooded lands they crossed, the sounds of night in the open and the unintelligible morning conversations before they mounted again. He saw villages and farmland, he saw churches and hazy clouds of smoke rising on the horizon, until he came to the day when they both died, Verbitsky and Korolenko, a perfectly gray day, utterly gray, as if a thousand-mile-long cloud had passed over the land without stopping, endless. At that moment, which hardly lasted a second, Ansky decided that he didn’t want to be a soldier, but at the very same moment the officer handed him a paper and told him to sign. Now he was a soldier.

Ultimately, thought Ansky, the revolution would abolish death. When Ivanov told him that this was impossible, that death had been with man from time immemorial, Ansky said that was precisely it, the whole point, maybe the only thing that mattered, abolishing death, abolishing it forever, immersing ourselves in the unknown until we found something else. Abolishment, abolishment, abolishment.

he had tried to plagiarize them without much success, which led him, after long reflection (a whole summer night), to the astute decision that he should write in the manner of Odoevsky and Lazhechnikov. Fifty percent Odoevsky and fifty percent Lazhechnikov. This went over well, in part because readers, their memories mostly faulty, had forgotten poor Odoevsky (1803–1869) and poor Lazhechnikov (1792–1869), who died the same year, and in part because literary criticism, as keen as ever, neither extrapolated nor made the connection nor noticed a thing.

Something is wrong, he thought. Naturally, the editor’s sleepless night was a night of vodka and jubilation for Ivanov, who decided to celebrate his first success in Moscow’s worst dives and then at the Writers House, where he dined with four friends who resembled the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.

Ivanov kept writing and he kept being published and he kept bringing in money each month for his arcadian visions. He was still a party member. He belonged to the Association of Revolutionary Writers. His name figured on the official lists of Soviet creators. On the surface he was a happy man, a bachelor with a big, comfortable room in a house in a nice Moscow neighborhood, a man who slept every so often with prostitutes who were no longer young and with whom he ended up singing and weeping, a man who ate at least four times a week at the writers’ and poets’ restaurant.

then he thought about Lermontov and Pushkin, as puffed up as movie stars or opera singers. Nijinsky, Gurov. Nadson. Blok (whom he’d met and who was unbearable). Remoras on the flanks of art, he thought. They think they’re suns, setting everything ablaze, but they aren’t suns, they’re just plunging meteors and in the end no one pays them any heed. They spread humiliation, not conflagration. And ultimately it’s always they who are humiliated, truly humiliated, bludgeoned and spat upon, execrated and maimed, thoroughly humiliated, taught a lesson, humiliated utterly.

For Ivanov, a real writer, a real artist and creator, was basically a responsible person with a certain level of maturity. A real writer had to know when to listen and when to act. He had to be reasonably enterprising and reasonably learned. Excessive learning aroused jealousy and resentment. Excessive enterprise aroused suspicion. A real writer had to be someone relatively cool-headed, a man with common sense. Someone who didn’t talk too loud or start polemics. He had to be reasonably pleasant and he had to know how not to make gratuitous enemies. Above all, he had to keep his voice down, unless everyone else was raising his. A real writer had to be aware that behind him he had the Writers Association, the Artists Syndicate, the Confederation of Literary Workers, Poets House.

What’s the first thing a man does when he comes into a church? Efraim Ivanov asked himself. He takes off his hat. Maybe he doesn’t cross himself. All right, that’s allowed. We’re modern. But the least he can do is bare his head! Adolescent writers, meanwhile, come into a church and don’t take off their hats even when they’re beaten with sticks, which is, regrettably, what happens in the end. And not only do they not take off their hats: they laugh, yawn, play the fool, pass gas. Some even applaud.

“I understand you. From the start, I’ve known who you are.” “And who am I?” asked Ansky. “A Jewish brat who confuses his desires with reality.” “Reality,” murmured Ansky, “can be pure desire.”

I believed the hunter had managed to impose his desires on reality, which, in their fashion, had transformed his surroundings, the village, the villagers, the forest, the snow, his lost penis and testicles. I imagined him on his knees, pissing, his legs well apart, in the middle of the frozen steppe, northward bound, striding toward the white deserts and blizzards with his knapsack full of traps, utterly oblivious of what we call fate.”

“That’s a pretty story,” said Afanasievna as she let go of Ansky’s genitals. “A pity I’m too old and have seen too much to believe it.” “It has nothing to do with belief,” said Ansky, “it has to do with understanding, and then changing.”

Ivanov’s fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also fear of being overlooked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one’s efforts and striving will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers.

Irrational fears, thought Ansky, especially when the fearful soothed their fears with semblances. As if the paradise of good writers, according to bad writers, were inhabited by semblances. As if the worth (or excellence) of a work were based on semblances. Semblances that varied, of course, from one era and country to another, but that always remained just that, semblances, things that only seem and never are, things all surface and no depth, pure gesture, and even the gesture muddled by an effort of will, the hair and eyes and lips of Tolstoy and the versts traveled on horseback by Tolstoy and the women deflowered by Tolstoy in a tapestry burned by the fire of seeming.

The shout had a rending violence, like a claw, but not a claw that did any damage to Ansky’s or Ivanov’s real adversaries. Instead it was like a claw that pounces and floats in the middle of the room, like a helium balloon, a self-conscious claw, a claw-beast that wonders what in God’s name it’s doing in this rather untidy room, who that old man is sitting at the table, who that young man is standing with tousled hair, then falls to the floor, deflated, returned once more to nothing.

On the subject of art, a politician with power is like a colossal pheasant, able to crush mountains with little hops, whereas a politician without power is only like a village priest, an ordinary-sized pheasant.

The Milanese painter’s technique struck him as happiness personified. The end of semblance. Arcadia before the coming of man. Not all of the paintings, of course, because The Roast, for example, was like a horror painting, a reversible canvas that, hung one way, looked like a big metal platter of roast meats, including a suckling pig and a rabbit, with a pair of hands, probably a woman’s or an adolescent’s, trying to cover the meat so it won’t get cold, and, hung the other way, showed the bust of a soldier, in helmet and armor, with a bold, satisfied smile missing some teeth, the terrible smile of an old mercenary who looks at you, writes Ansky, and his gaze is even more terrible than his smile, as if he knew things about you that you never even suspected.

In one of his last notes he mentions the chaos of the universe and says that only in chaos are we conceivable.

Sometimes he saw squadrons of Soviet planes pass overhead, and sometimes the sky, a blinding blue the minute before, grew overcast and a storm that lasted hours was suddenly unleashed. From a hill he saw a column of German tanks moving east. They looked like the coffins of an extraterrestrial civilization.

Semblance was an occupying force of reality, he said to himself, even the most extreme, borderline reality. It lived in people’s souls and their actions, in willpower and in pain, in the way memories and priorities were ordered. Semblance proliferated in the salons of the industrialists and in the underworld. It set the rules, it rebelled against its own rules (in uprisings that could be bloody, but didn’t therefore cease to be semblance), it set new rules.

He said his wife had died when the Russians took Küstrin, where they were from, but he didn’t bear anyone a grudge, war was war, he said, and when the war ended it was best for each side to forgive the other and start anew. Start how? Reiter wanted to know. From zero, and with joy and imagination, whispered the other man in his deliberate German.

When the visitors returned a week later they moved on to the letters T, U, and V and this time Zeller really got nervous. His voice was as gentle as ever, but his talk and manner of speech changed: words came tumbling from his lips and at night he couldn’t stop whispering. He spoke quickly, as if compelled by reasons beyond his control, reasons he scarcely understood. He craned his neck toward Reiter and leaned on one elbow and began to whisper and moan and imagine scenes of splendor that together formed a chaotic assemblage of dark cubes stacked one on top of the other.

Zeller’s countenance betrayed a progressive deterioration, as if inside of him a merciless struggle were being waged between diametrically opposed forces. What forces were these? Reiter didn’t know, but he sensed that both sprang from a single source, which was madness. One night Zeller said his name wasn’t Zeller, it was Sammer, and it therefore stood to reason that he need not appear before the alphabetic interrogators on their next visit.

That night Reiter wasn’t tired and the full moon filtered through the fabric of the tent like boiling coffee through a sock.

“Of course, I was never in the Volkssturm. I fought, never let it be said I didn’t fight, I did fight, like any wellborn German, but I served in other theaters, not on the military battlefield but on the economic and political battlefield.

My son had died. My daughter lived in Munich, happily married and far removed from my troubles. Work piled up and my fellow workers were losing heart. The war wasn’t going well and anyway it no longer interested me. How can someone who’s lost a son care about the war? My life, in short, unfolded under permanent black clouds.

His three sons were at the front and each time he won he said something that struck me as very strange, even mysterious. Luck and death go hand in hand, he said.

“If they have any fellow feeling, each Jew will share his blanket with another, and if not, that’s their business, I’ve done all I can,” I said. On my way back to my office I noticed that the streets were cleaner than they’d ever been.

“It seems there’s been a mistake,” said the voice. “So it seems,” I said, and I was silent. The silence lasted for quite a while. “That train should have unloaded in Auschwitz,” said the adolescent’s voice, “or at least I think so, I’m not quite sure. Hold, please.”

“Look, with the situation as it is we have no transportation available to collect the Jews. Administratively they belong to Upper Silesia. I’ve talked to my superiors and we’re in agreement that the easiest and best thing would be for you to dispose of them.” I didn’t answer. “Do you understand?” asked the voice from Warsaw. “Yes, I understand,” I said. “Then we have a solution, don’t we?” “That’s right,” I said. “But I’d like to receive the order in writing,” I added. I heard a pealing laugh at the other end of the line. It could be my son’s laugh, I thought, a laugh that conjured up country afternoons, blue rivers full of trout, and the scent of fistfuls of flowers and grasses. “Don’t be naïve,” said the voice without a hint of arrogance, “these orders are never issued in writing.”

When we arrived I took a flashlight and made my way along a ghostly path. The animals seemed to have suddenly retreated from the area around the hollow. From now on, I thought, this is the realm of insects. My driver followed me a little reluctantly. I heard him whistle and I asked him to stop. At a glance the hollow looked just as it had the first time I saw it.

The taxing work had begun to take its toll on the men. The volunteers from the farms, of whom there had been as many as six at a certain point, were reduced to one. The town police complained that their nerves were frayed and when I tried to urge them on I could see they really were at the breaking point. My office staff were either unwilling to continue to take an active part in the operations or they suddenly fell ill. My own health, I discovered one morning as I was shaving, hung by a thread.

We began to dig. After a little while, I heard an old farmer called Barz shout that there was something there. I went to look. Yes, there was something. “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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

“I did,” said Ingeborg. “So long as the men looked healthy, so long as they didn’t seem to be rotting away from cancer or syphilis,” said Ingeborg. “The peasant women who roamed the station, the factory workers, the madwomen who were lost or had fled their homes, we all believed that semen was a precious nutrient, an extract of all kinds of vitamins, the best remedy for a cold,”