El Quemado and I eat sitting on the bed, staring at the wall where I’ve pinned up the photocopies. Without needing to put it into words, he understands the degree of defiance in me. The degree of acceptance. Regardless, we eat wrapped in a silence interrupted only by banal observations that are really silences, added by us to the great silence that for something like an hour has fallen over the hotel and the town.
Finally we wash our hands so that we don’t stain the tokens with oil, and we start to play.
Later I’ll take London and lose it immediately. I’ll counterattack in the East and be forced to retreat.
ANZIO. FORTRESS EUROPA. OMAHA BEACHHEAD. SUMMER 1942
I walked the beach when all was Dark, reciting the names of the forgotten, names languishing on dusty shelves, until the sun came out again. But are they forgotten names or only names in waiting? I remembered the player as viewed by Someone from above, just the head, the shoulders, and the backs of the hands, and the board game and counters like a stage set where thousands of beginnings and endings eternally unfold, a kaleidoscopic theater, the only bridge between the player and his memory, a memory that is desire and gaze. How many infantry divisions was it—depleted, untrained— that held the Western front? Which ones halted the advance in Italy, despite treachery? Which armored divisions pierced the French defenses in ’40 and the Russian defenses in ’41 and ’42? And with what key division did Marshal Manstein retake Kharkov and exorcise the disaster? What infantry divisions fought to clear the way for tanks in ’44, in the Ardennes? And how many countless combat groups sacrificed themselves to stall the enemy on all fronts? No one can agree. Only the player’s memory knows. Roaming the beach or curled up in my room, I invoke the names and they come in soothing waves. My favorite counters: the First Parachute in Anzio, the Lehr Panzer and the First SS LAH in Fortress Europa, the eleven counters of the Third Parachute in Omaha Beachhead, the Seventh Armored Division in France ’40, the Third Armored Division in Panzerkrieg, the First SS Armored Corps in Russian Cam-paign, the Fortieth Armored Corps in Russian Front, the First SS LAH in Cobra, the Grossdeutschland Armored Corps in Third Reich, the Twenty-first Armored Division in The Longest Day, the 104th Infantry Regiment in Panzer Armee Afrika… Not even reading Sven Hassel aloud at the top of my lungs could be more invigorating… (Oh, who was it who read nothing but Sven Hassel? Everyone will say it was M.M.—it sounds like him, it suits him— but it was someone else, someone who resembled his own shadow, someone Conrad and I liked to mock. This kid organized a Role-Playing Festival in Stuttgart in ’85. With the whole city as stage he set up a macrogame about the last days of Berlin, using the reworked rules of Judge Dredd. Describing it now, I can see the interest it sparks in El Quemado, interest that could well be faked to distract me from the match, a legitimate but vain strategy, since I can move my corps with my eyes closed. What the game—dubbed Berlin Bunker—was about, what its objectives were, how victory was achieved, and who achieved it was never quite clear. Twelve people played the ring of soldiers defending Berlin. Six people played the Nation and the Party, and could move only inside the ring. Three people played the Leadership, and their task was to manage the other eighteen so that they weren’t left outside the perimeter when it shrank, as it generally did, and especially to prevent the perimeter from being breached, which was inevitable. There was a final player whose role was murky and secret; he could (and should) move all over the besieged city, but he was the only one who never knew the coordinates of the defensive ring; he could (and did) move all over the city but he was the only one who didn’t know any of the other players; he had the capacity to unseat a member of the Leadership and replace him with a member of the Nation, for example, but he did this blindly, leaving written orders and receiving reports in an agreed-upon spot. His power was as great as his blindness—his innocence, according to Sven Hassel— and his freedom was as great as his constant exposure to danger. He was watched over by a kind of invisible and careful guardian, because his fate determined the ultimate destiny of all. The game, as might have been predicted, ended disastrously, with players lost in the suburbs, cheating, plotting, protesting, sectors of the ring abandoned at nightfall, players who throughout the entire match saw only the referee, etc. Naturally neither Conrad nor I took part, though Conrad went to the trouble of following events from the gymnasium of the School of Industrial Arts where the festival was held and was later able to explain to me the initial dismay and then the moral collapse of Sven Hassel when faced with the evidence of his failure. A few months later Hassel left Stuttgart, and now, according to Conrad, who knows everything, he lives in Paris and has taken up painting. I wouldn’t be surprised to run into him at the convention… )
After midnight, the photocopies tacked to the wall take on a funereal air, little doors to the void.
“It’s starting to get chilly,” I say.
El Quemado is wearing a leather jacket, too small, doubtless the gift of some charitable soul. The jacket is old but well made. When he comes over to the game board after eating, he takes it off and sets it on the bed, folding it carefully. His abstracted courtesy is touching. He has a notebook (or maybe a diary, like mine?) in which he jots down the strategic or economic shifts in his alliance, a notebook that he never lets out of his sight… It’s as if he’s found, in Third Reich, a satisfactory mode of communication. Here, alongside the map and the Force Pool, he isn’t a monster but rather a thinking being who expresses himself through hundreds of counters… He’s a dictator and a creator… And he’s having fun… If it weren’t for the photocopies, I’d say that I’ve done him a favor. But these are like a clear warning, the first signal that I should watch my step.