The elevator, as could have been predicted with even the faintest idea of the way of things, will not stop at the first floor. It will transpire that the first floor was never in the running as a scene of the action; the elevator descends lower and lower, moving ever more rapidly, till it comes to a stop with a sudden jolt. It is only now that the door will open. It isn’t the only elevator in the large lobby where the narrator has found himself. Steel doors slide open and shut; now here, now there, small red lights flash over them. The tiled floor is strewn with handfuls of loose straw; sheaves of straw lie about, and straw mattresses block hallways that lead in every direction, echoing with moans and permeated with the smell of disinfectant. Let’s say that the exhausted doctor, the only one in the entire field hospital, in civilian life was the youngest assistant of the senior registrar in a university hospital; he had hoped to specialize in, for instance, gynecology. Instead of this he is battling gangrene with the aid of a surgical saw, assisted by a perpetually sleep-deprived orderly whose suspenders dangle beneath an ill-fitting white coat. The orderly is more vigorous all the same; he handles all the paperwork himself. What can they talk about, looking hard at one another through reddened eyes? Between them lies a stack of forms completed in the careful handwriting of a postal clerk only recently forced to give up his first ever appointment. The doctor’s gold-rimmed glasses flash. He is indignant. This patient isn’t dead yet, he remarks, thumbing through the forms; nor this other one, nor that one. Later there’ll be no time for paperwork; in this matter the orderly is undeniably right. With a vulgar curse, the doctor signs death certificates in advance. Formalities are easy. Nothing matters to those lying on the mattresses, gasping for breath; they no longer have any other desires. Their massed breathing is interspersed with whistles and hisses, then turns into groans, the bubbling of loose coughs, sobs, and hoarse rattles, interrupted all of a sudden by snorts that sound like giggles. The less seriously wounded slurp soup from tin bowls. On these lower floors of the hotel the body seizes the moment, greedy and certain of nothing. Personnel and freight elevators go up and down, bringing ever more consignments of wounded. Buckets are filled with bloody dressings fashioned from bed linen, some with shreds of lace still attached to them — improvised bandages that in most cases were of little avail. Over the refuse there is a buzzing — flies have gathered here from all the floors. Those that were looking for an open window and those that kept circling beneath lamps. They are always drawn to places where life is harder. At the end of their journey hangs flypaper. They squirm about on it in vain. They do not realize that the long series of rooms from which there was no good way out ends precisely here.
Stretchers glide by bearing discolored fatigues, school uniforms, pure wool suits riddled with bullet holes, flowery cretonne frocks. With an infallible eye the orderly tells life from death and points the bodies in the appropriate direction. One of the stretcher bearers limps as if he were dancing. He miraculously managed to save his walkman and headphones and he himself also miraculously survived, plucked out of some African backwater from which no one else emerged alive. The other stretcher bearer steps behind the first, seeing nothing, clinging to the stretcher. From the plight he found himself in, probably somewhere in the Caucasus, he saved everything except his sight, and now he raises his feet high, afraid of stumbling. They go back and forth; at a certain moment they will bring in Fojchtmajer’s wife with a round hole in the back of her head, dragged by a military policeman from a cart full of people and shot to death on the spot. The children are riding on among strangers. The narrator will find it hardest to conclude the matter of the children. Since the Fojchtmajers stopped at nothing, accepting every kind of humiliation, willing to bear anything for their sake, the children ought to be spared. But the lowest floors of the hotel know no pity. Here no one has the time or the inclination to worry about individual fates. There is no way of counting how many women have passed through the place, each with a round hole in the back of her head, taken from buses and trains in which their children continued on. In the lobby there is a feverish commotion: The center of the room must be cleared, right away. The walking wounded hurriedly push the last mattresses against the wall, for those lying on them are delirious from fever and cannot help. Gazes stray upward and are lost beneath a ceiling so high it cannot be seen. But they at least latch onto a dark shape gradually descending ever lower. A substantial hull can already be made out. The orderly makes a call, trying to arrange something; he shouts into the receiver, but at the other end of the line it seems he cannot be heard. A German gunboat slowly drops onto the floor, a rusty white waterline on its side; it is full of dead sailors in navy blue uniforms and round caps bearing the inscription Kriegsmarine. The boat settles with a groan and tilts over, creaking at its seams. The captain, immaculately dressed, is still on the bridge; his wide-open eyes no longer see anything through his gold-rimmed glasses.
Here the story branches off in every direction; the hallways leading from the lobby seem to have no end and one can imagine innumerable further branches, just as overcrowded and stinking just the same of disinfectant; they gradually enter the territories occupied by the mortuary and governed by its laws. The transitional zone includes the resting place for instance of unshaven Russian prisoners of war staring with glazed eyes into the void. Accustomed since childhood to sleeping in gray underwear, to wretched canteens, and to rules and regulations that outlaw expressions of freedom, they shouldn’t complain about their captivity, even if they have died from hunger and cold. No more mass parades await them and they lack for nothing. Their rest is shared by German prisoners of war, who were fortunate enough to survive the confusion of battle and then froze in the ice and snow of Kamchatka. They set off for the east when the grass was probably still green. It was only in the newsreels that it turned out to be gray. Clouds swirling like high seas chase across the sky. Somewhere outside the frame is concealed a symphony orchestra; the bombastic rumble of timpani and the crash of cymbals sound the loudest. The stiffened bodies no longer hear anything now. They melt slowly; at times a transparent tear flows from beneath an eyelid and down a cheek. The story has no sharp boundaries. That is why it must include so many dead. Neither the prisoners of war nor the civilians have been granted the reprieve of an easy death. Their spilled blood soaks into the earth, and with it despair. Wounded feelings do not decompose quickly; their traces contaminate the soil for years afterward,like a fatal deposit of lead. Mention should be made of all the stories of walls and ceilings, weighing down like an inconsolable sense of wrong. Of the torment of unutterable boredom from which there is no longer any escape. Chance passers-by, torn by the flashes of explosions from crowds pressing along shopping streets, lie in black plastic bags stacked in layers. The dead, caught in the trap of the same story as always, in the end are left with nothing but their bodies, dispossessed of all rights. All are made of the same clay, with the same parting on the top of their heads and fingers yellowed from smoking. They are distinguished by their memories, but the memories are inaccessible. The body is like a millstone with which dreams are weighed down so they will drown once and for all. Unimaginably lonely narrators would never be permitted to have a say in anything except grammatical forms; it was their lot to bear responsibility without a trace of influence on the course of events, and now they are filling cellars the length and breadth of the world, all the way to the seas: the Blue, the Green, the Yellow, and even the White — all resembling the Dead. The waters do not mix. The bodies rest on the bottom, tangled in seaweed.