That night, slumped down in a fir copse among some survivors from his company, he lay in wait for the return of those seconds spent under the tank. He fell asleep but the dream went off on a tangent, pushed open a secret door, translated everything into its own language, at the same time precise and oblique. Instead of tanks, a gigantic brand new machine tool with nickel-plated screws and levers covered in oil and grease. Its bowels vibrate with a rhythmic sound and disgorge punched disks at regular intervals. You have to slip your hand very nimbly into the coming and going of the mechanism and insert the steel plate into the press underneath the punch. And each time his hand goes in a little bit further, his body stretches up a little bit higher inside the machine, trying to avoid the rotation of the great cogwheels, the driving belts. Moreover the timing of the huge machine is not very well regulated. It is as if it senses the reaching out of the hand, the contortions of the body within its bowels. The fingers grasp a square of metal, the hand goes forward, the shoulder penetrates into the machine, the body worms its way in, edging between dozens of gears, crankshafts, cylinders. He manages to put the metal in place, withdraws his hand just before the punch comes down, and seeks to extricate himself. But all around him the machine is shuddering, without wasting a second, without the smallest opening via which he might reemerge. And through its noisy workings, he recognizes a room, light, and objects that come from his childhood.
The dream did not return on the nights that followed, for there were no nights. Always a flight toward the east, then an abandoned village that, during the brief hours of darkness, they attempted to transform into an entrenched camp. And in the morning, after disorderly resistance, a fresh retreat before the steady advance of the tanks and the German soldiers who smiled as they fired. The grinning of these men as they killed made a deeper impression on him than the tanks.
During those first weeks of the war he had to forget all he had learned during his military service. He still recalled the sergeant wetting his forefinger with saliva, raising it in the air to check the direction of the wind and explaining to them how much they needed to aim off. If anybody had spat on his finger to test the direction of the wind during these painful rearguard actions he would have been taken for a madman. The Germans fired their submachine guns and smiled. They responded with jerky small-arms fire from bolt-action rifles, often their only weapon at the start of the war. And they retreated, without being able to retrieve their wounded, without remembering the names of the villages surrendered. It seemed to him that he and his comrades in arms were fighting in a battle from one of his father's stories; their old-fashioned rifles, their troops of cavalry. On the opposing side quite a different war was being waged-a rapid sweep of armored vehicles across land turned upside down by aerial bombardment. Perhaps the Germans smiled when they saw the sabers flashing above the horses, as one smiles at the passing of an automobile several decades old, one that quaintly recalls a bygone age.
During these murderous days of the collapse there were, too, irrelevant little vignettes that sometimes made it hard to concentrate, to think only of the gray-green figure in one's sights. A dog, wounded by shrapnel, groaning and writhing on the spot, which looked their way with tears in its eyes. They had abandoned several comrades in fleeing from that burned-out hamlet, but it was the sight of the dog, that rust-colored ball with its broken back, that kept coming to mind. And in another place there was a sweet tangle of plants filled with the lazy buzzing of insects, the vegetation of a glorious summer that continued as if nothing were happening, just next door to izbas in flames, where people trapped inside were screaming. The soldiers of his detachment were hiding in a ravine, their rifles thrown to the ground, not a cartridge between them. The warm air, heady with the scent of flowers, was already growing heavy with the acrid emanations coming from the village. Later, a child's face glimpsed in a packed railroad car. Eyes that happily still understood nothing, that reflected a world from which death was still absent. The train set off. Together with other soldiers Pavel was in position around the station, hoping to keep the Germans at bay for the time it took the train to leave the town.
On his way out of a ruined village at the start of the autumn he picked up a page from a torn newspaper, an issue from the previous week. Reading it, you might have believed the enemy had only just crossed the frontier and was about to be driven back any day now. That night there was fighting some sixty miles from Moscow.
He had known for some time now why the Germans smiled when they fired. It was a grin that had nothing to do with joy, but was the unconscious grimace of a man whose hands are absorbing the recoil from a long burst of fire. Like most of his comrades in arms, Pavel was currently equipped with a German submachine gun, recovered in battle. And now they smiled like the Germans. And they no longer ran away in front of tanks, but dove into a trench, pretended to be dead, then got up and threw hand grenades. On awakening they would pry the panels of their greatcoats up from the frozen earth and turn their faces toward the birth of the light, hoping for sunshine. Moscow, which grew ever closer, lay somewhere within this chill vapor, they sensed it, like the swelling of bare veins, throbbing beneath the wind on that icy plain.
He found himself saying that he had seen all that could be seen of death, that no massacred, broken, dismembered body could any longer surprise him with the capriciousness of its mutilations. And yet death remained astonishing. As on that morning by the bright light of the sun, which rose in the direction of Moscow. A soldier whose eyes had been burned in an explosion ran toward the tanks, blind, guided by the sound of the engines and his own agony, and rolled under the tracks, setting off a grenade. Or yet again that young German without a helmet, half lying beside an overturned field gun, his bloody hands pressed against his shattered sides, crying out in the whimpering voice of a child, weeping in a language that, until then, Pavel had only heard barked out and had believed to be made only for barking.
And then, for an infinite second, there was the vision of his own body, lying there, inert among the snow-covered ruts. The explosion of a shell blotted out all sounds and it was in this silence of a vanished world that he saw himself as if from outside and very far away ("as if from the sky," he would later reflect): the body of a soldier in his mud-spattered greatcoat, his arms outstretched, his face flung back, looking up toward a glorious winter sun that would have shone with the same splendid indifference if no one had been left alive on this December morning. He was certain he had lived through those few moments of detached and painless contemplation, certain of having observed the fragile lacework of hoarfrost that surrounded the head of that unmoving soldier. His own head. When he regained consciousness at the hospital and could hear once more, he learned that they had almost abandoned him for dead on that field where there was no one else alive. Mainly to satisfy her conscience, a nurse had approached this corpse with its head trapped in a frozen puddle, had crouched down and held a little mirror to the soldier's lips. The glass had misted over slightly.