t sight of the horrified gaze of a soldier, a boy, lying there next to him, his mouth opening. The commander grabbed the grenade and heaved it as far away as he could into bushes, a thicket, by the path leading to the forest. A little farther off were heard shrieks and cries, and soon a group of soldiers ran out from the thicket, hands held high. The shooting, which had begun abruptly, ended abruptly, and the soldiers trotted slowly up to the checkpoint barrier, which, throughout the melee, was unscathed. The commander rose and went to the barrier. He knew he was standing completely exposed to enemy snipers, he even felt a little itch in the places they were aiming at, his forehead and chest, but as a true soldier, and he felt he was one, he had only one thing in mind: completing the task he’d undertaken and never, remember this, he said to the kids standing by the checkpoint, never show fear. “I am not afraid of death,” said the young soldier, “but I am afraid of a gradual, inching death.” “And boring,” shouted another, “there’s nothing so awful as a boring death.” The commander felt something tugging at his pant leg and saw that the young soldier had crawled over to him. “I can’t get up,” whispered the soldier, “because I think I soiled my pants. If I’m wounded and am suffering would you put me out of my misery?” “Stop talking nonsense,” said the commander, he crouched and slipped his hand under the soldier’s belt, then turned him over on his side and moved his hand to the man’s scrotum. When he withdrew it, his hand was covered in blood and excrement. With the same hand he greeted the soldiers who, a few seconds later, hands still high in the air, trotted up to the barrier. He went over to one of them who wore symbols on his sleeve and, waving his bloody, putrid hand in front of the man’s nose, asked, “Where from?” “Where from?” repeated the soldier, and shrugged, plugging his nose and breathing through his mouth. “Not ours,” said the commander, “that much is clear.” “Not ours,” echoed the soldier, “that much is clear.” The commander turned to his soldiers and asked them what they thought, were these clowns messing with him and what should he do. He received so many suggestions that he could have spent the rest of the day weighing which was best. The soldiers, meanwhile, had chosen a suggestion that someone, sniggering, shouted out: “What about: kill the lot!” and immediately most of the others began a chant, softly at first, of “Kill! Kill!” The commander only then wiped his hand off on the grass and someone’s shirt hanging from the barrier post, and then he asked the foreign soldiers whether they had passports. They shrugged and the commander flew into a rage. He turned them, one by one, to face the enemy positions, repeating: “Go there, you’ll be better off there.” He gestured for them to keep their hands up and gently nudged the soldier who wore the insignia of rank on his sleeve. In the hush that followed, all that could be heard were their agitated voices, and soon, not even those. Whoever was hiding in the bushes on the opposite side let the group approach until they were about sixty feet away, and then a blaze of gunfire erupted as if an entire armored unit were on its way. The commander peered out just when the soldier wearing the insignia was blown toward the checkpoint, probably swept by the force of a strike, and in one endlessly brief moment his gaze found the commander’s eyes just long enough for all his bitterness and pain to spill over and for them to communicate the commander’s betrayal. “How could I have betrayed you,” said the commander aloud, “when you aren’t even my soldier?” He shivered because he knew better. Somebody surrenders to you in a plea for clemency, and you, without so much as a twinge, send them to their death. That sentence doesn’t read well, thought the commander, no matter which end you read it from. In fact, he thought something different: chaos now reigned and there’d be no turning back. A war is a game in which there are rules to be respected, and as soon as these rules are skipped, the war is no longer a game in which the foes are bent on outwitting one another. Until the First World War, thought the commander, wars were a lot like chess, even the rulers and generals saw them that way. They perched here and there on the surrounding hills and watched how their armies advanced or retreated. Until then a ritual, a theater of manners, a well-rehearsed ballet or operetta, war was now verging on chaos, arbitrary unpredictability, slaughter for slaughter’s sake. The commander knew that none of this justified him in the eyes of the soldier, in that immeasurable moment when their gazes locked. But that doesn’t mean, thought the commander, that he was flailing or had lost his will. Not at all, indeed he suddenly came alive, rushed from man to man, spurred them with encouragement, offered to be a father or mother to them, and then went over to the young soldier and told him to change his clothes before he stank up the place. Somebody might accuse us of jeopardizing the environment on top of everything else, that we’re destabilizing the ecology. He went looking for the radio and telegraph operator but, instead, came across the cook. Everything’s all set, said the cook, his stove was working, he had enough fuel, and was about to start flipping pancakes. The commander asked that two with jam be saved for him, and then he spotted the operator. There the man sat on an empty barrel, smoking. “So, do you want to go home,” asked the commander, “like those men over there?” The operator looked at him with clouded eyes, and said, “My father died.” The commander felt his shoulders and back heave under the weight of his own stupidity and shame. He wanted to say something more to the operator, maybe to himself as well, but all that came to mind was a sentence he’d read somewhere that all words were pointless in such situations, because no matter what a person said, the dead were still dead. A person should not, however, be left without hope, one should continue using one’s words. The commander whispered a curse and then asked the radio and telegraph operator how he’d heard of his father’s death. “My brother let me know,” said the operator. “Your brother?” repeated the commander. “Yes,” said the operator, “my brother.” “I didn’t know you had a brother,” said the commander, his voice shaking. “A cousin, actually, my aunt’s boy,” answered the operator. The junior officer, standing not far from them, said that when a family member dies, a soldier is permitted a four-to-seven-day furlough for the funeral. The operator said he’d go only if he were allowed to travel in his civilian clothes, because in his uniform he was a sitting duck. The commander took a deep breath and asked who would replace him as radio and telegraph operator, and the junior officer said he was prepared to take over the man’s duties. His expression was so doleful as he said this that the commander thought the junior officer was about to ask that the father’s death be ascribed to him as well. “There is no such thing as double dying,” said the commander firmly and sent off the radio operator to change his clothes. He gazed up at the sky: it was crystal clear, endlessly blue, and only here or there was it shrouded in a pale mist. The blue was somewhat paler there, but no less beautiful. What is wrong with me? thought the commander, somebody might think I’m in love. He really was the kind of person who was always falling in love, and this wasn’t just from time to time, but regularly, the way a passionate reader devours novels. His civilian librarian was glad for this and told him the poetry collections shelved in the library were surviving thanks entirely to the commander. “No one,” said the librarian, “no one reads poetry anymore!” Someone then piped up to ask whether any new poetry is being written. The librarian was about to respond and provide figures from an article written for the recent annual conference of the Librarians’ Association, but he was interrupted by an impatient reader who wanted to hear how many readers were borrowing books of poetry. “Well, the commander and… and…” stuttered the librarian, “and there was a girl who once borrowed Lorca’s poems, but she hasn’t yet returned them.” The commander cautioned them to retreat to their shelters because at any moment the afternoon session of gunfire would begin. The enemy stopped its shooting at around 11:00 in the morning and this tacit cease-fire would last until 4:30 in the afternoon. Why sweat out there in the heat of the day? asked the enemy commander once when they’d spoken to each other over the radio, we have plenty of time for fighting when the sun isn’t beating down quite so fiercely. “A genteel man if I may say so,” said the commander to the radio and telegraph operator and that prompted him to wonder where the operator was now that he’d sent him to change his clothes. He should be leaving now, thought the commander, because at least one of the enemies won’t be trying to kill him. As for the other—or others, who knows how many were out there—he couldn’t say. If the united Europe had broken asunder, and if clashes had begun in a number of the countries with pro-European against anti-European forces, it would be realistic to imagine that there might be dozens of potential and/or genuine adversaries. It wasn’t clear to him how the radio and telegraph operator planned to get home, but he understood this feeling of misery, self-pity, and self-accusation, because he, too, had been away from home when his father died and until recently he’d been blaming himself for that. As if his father would have survived had he been by his side, thought the commander. He came across the radio and telegraph operator who, dressed in his civvies, was kneeling by his belongings. The commander thought the man might be praying, but it turned out he was actually asleep. The commander touched his shoulder and, bringing his lips to the man’s ears, he said: “It’s time!” The operator started, rammed the back of his head into the commander’s mouth and both of them swore. “Scram,” said the commander, “they’re about to start.” The radio and telegraph operator scampered off down the hill. He stopped for a moment before turning into the forest, straightened, thrust out his chest, and flew into the woods. A little later three shots rang out and though the chances were fifty-fifty, the commander was almost certain the radio operator was still running. You could see right away, thought the commander, that he was one of those people bullets didn’t want to hit. There aren’t many folks who enjoy that kind of luck, though they’ll pay for it elsewhere, as things tend to go with good and bad luck. Life is impartial, it plays no favorites. If a person is offered something that is not equally accessible to all in equal measure, they’ll also be given something bad, meaning they’ll be greater losers in other realms. So the radio and telegraph operator, say, was spared the bullets, but he often tripped and fell, and it may have been a fall that additionally shielded him from bullets. The radio and telegraph operator may have stumbled exactly when the fingers of three snipers were on their triggers, and his tumble removed him from the enemies’ field of vision. But why shoot at him when he was merely passing through, peaceably, in civilian dress? That is what the commander wanted to know, and he’d have given anything to find out who was hiding in the forests around the checkpoint. At the moment when the shells began to fly, a thought popped into his mind that would come back to haunt him many times during yet another sleepless night. And what, said the thought, what if there never was a war to begin with, if all this was just somebody’s huge experiment, an attempt to test the mettle of various categories of soldier in an atypical situation? Perhaps the victims had already been marked in some way in advance and they didn’t protest being chosen to leave the scene of life so early. The commander curled up in an even tighter ball in his hole, listening to the malevolent whistle of shells. One exploded not far from him and covered him in a mound of dirt. Then silence, and the sound of someone crying. The person wept and shouted a few times: “Mama, oh, Mama!” After a while the weeping changed to whimpering that sounded as if it would never stop. The commander tried blocking his ears, but the whimpering was merciless and nothing could stop it. A little later the enemy’s weapons thundered again, and then, when they subsided, there was no more whimpering. It had been a direct hit, the commander later ascertained, but though a complete identification of the remains was not possible just then, he was certain this was the young soldier who not long before, on this very spot, had been sobbing in shame for having soiled himself out of fear. So it is, thought the commander, that nature makes its selection, leaving the toughest and most tenacious, and then his gaze shifted from soldier to soldier, and he had to admit that the demands of natural selection were truly bizarre. He’d expected to see a dozen of the most vigorous soldiers, the healthiest, most robust, most determined, but instead he saw a motley group with the tall and short, fat and skinny, sour and bright-eyed. “How many of us are left?” he asked the junior officer who checked his pad. “All together,” he said, finally, “nineteen.” “Maybe we should split into two groups,” said the commander, “and steal away from here by night somehow.” “But,” said the junior officer, “which route do we take? There are enemy forces all around us. If we go to the right, downhill, we’ll run into the ones who shot at the radio operator: on the left are the ones who attacked us from the forest and did so treacherously, from behind, while facing us are the first enemy units who mowed down that group of unarmed soldiers in cold blood while hitting us so savagely with all their different weapons. If they’d had an atomic bomb they’d have dropped it on us, they wouldn’t have even waited to check which direction the wind was blowing, or where it would blow the radioactive dust.” “How about over there,” said the commander, and pointed to the most distant part of the forest, and a wide meadow near it. “Ah, yes,” said the junior officer, “what’s there?” “Nothing and nobody,” said the commander, “just what we need.” “But how do we go from here to there?” asked the junior officer. “Isn’t that area perfect for hunting rabbits?” The commander scratched his sweaty head. “If that’s so,” he said, “we’ll have to think of ourselves as rabbits; it’s our only way of getting out.” “But what about our dead?” Asked a soldier when the commander and junior officer told them of the still half-baked plan. “We can’t leave them to the enemy!” “For God’s sake,” said the commander, “they’re dead, and we aren’t about to disinter them.” “Oh yes we are,” shouted the soldier, raising his spade high in the air and calling out, “Who is for taking them with us?” Most of the little spades waved high above their heads. “But if they see what we’re up to,” the commander played his last card, “they’ll know we’re preparing to leave.” “No, they won’t,” barked the necrophiliac soldier, “because we’ll pretend we’re just tidying up the graveyard, and we’ll pretend that they are up at the top of the hill and the graveyard is right at the bottom, and they won’t have a clue what we’re doing.” The commander threw up his arms in a gesture of surrender and sat down on the nearest chair. He could do nothing more than look on while the “deadly rebels” marched down to the graveyard. He was suddenly left alone, which had always suited him, but he’d found this easy to forget these last few weeks. Everything is so easily forgotten during wartime, even that commanding officers were ordered to assign duties to their soldiers, preferably in teams, if only a team of two. What matters, as stated the order that was circulated to all the officers who were kept in combat readiness, is that no one be allowed to distance themselves and as soon as someone is noticed growing distant, they should be steered, at all costs, in the proper direction. At what cost? All costs. Yes, sir! At ease! The commander thought he h