The young Red Army officer has kept his distance from many things the older soldiers have gotten into, but this does not include battle. This is why he is already a major although his skin still displays the downy radiance of a child. He enlisted voluntarily at the age of fifteen after his mother, father and sisters had all been killed by the Germans. The first one he’d found was his little sister, just four years old, when he returned from the paddock to the family’s home. She was floating in the well, face-up. The night before she’d still been lying beside him in the bed they shared, breathing. From then on he had always been right on the front line, and at some point the driving-out had given way to a taking-in, and the defense of his homeland became a ravaging of foreign lands that he would otherwise surely never in his life have set foot in. Like a weed that is ripped from the earth and then thrown through the air in a high arc, he was being carried on by a force that lay outside himself, outside his still youthful body, a force that caused him to march and fight and seize in order to push the Germans further and further across the map, pushing them beyond the borders of their own country, all the way through Switzerland or France or Austria and Italy, further and further until they were shoved into the Mediterranean or the Atlantic, and plunging after them into the depths, sinking further and further to a place where both their movements and his own would be drowned in the same silence. His little sister had probably run out of the house and been caught there by the Germans. His father, his mother and his older sister had burned together with their house. The hands, breasts and eyes of his mother had burned inside the house.
All around the bed in which he now sleeps, the wall is covered to half its height with pink silk. This silk conceals large wooden flaps that are set into the wall and can be opened with a four-sided key, and behind the flaps was the bedding he’s been sleeping in for several days now. The bedding smells of peppermint and camphor, as does the cream-colored morning coat he found hanging inside a shallow closet across from the bed. This shallow closet, flanked to the right and left by wooden columns, is set into the wall like a door and opens with a brass knob. On the inside of the door of this closet a full-length mirror is mounted. When he moved into the room, the young Red Army officer had opened the door to see what was behind it, he’d seen the morning coat hanging there and, without knowing why, he’d taken the cloth in his hands and inhaled its fragrance, peppermint and camphor, and meanwhile the mirror had mutely reflected his image from his short Russian hair to the now very thin soles of his boots in which he had marched all the way from his homeland to here, all this reflected in the German mirror, and then the youth had closed the door again. Sometimes when he is alone in the room in the evening he goes over to the shallow closet, opens it without knowing why, buries his face for a little while in the cream-colored fabric, ignoring his mirror image, then at some point closes the door again and goes to bed. Tonight, too, he puts his hands into the smooth, lustrous cloth, pulls it to his face, rubs it between his fingers, rubs the fabric’s rough inner surface against its rough inner surface, fills his lungs with the scent of peppermint and camphor before he closes the door and lies down on the bed, all around him the walls covered in pink silk; the balcony door is open to the darkness, and down in the garden the horses are softly neighing and pawing the earth and snorting in the huge muffled stall that extends all the way to the stars.
And then there is one additional sound this night, a rustling sound like the sound of the martens that make their nests in the attic, he’d caught one of them yesterday, and the creature’s fur is now hanging over the railing of the little balcony, once more a rustling comes from behind the wall in which the shallow closet is set. The young Red Army officer gets up quickly, before there’s even time for him to think that if things are as they should be, there’s no room for a marten inside a wall. He opens the door, and at once everything falls silent behind the wall on which the morning coat is hanging. Only now does he step back and examine the shallow closet from top to bottom, he examines the wooden columns that flank it, and only now does he see that they don’t quite reach all the way to the floor, in the few millimeters left between the columns and the floor, he sees, kneeling down on the floor now, the outermost curve of tiny wheels almost entirely concealed in the interior of the columns. Only now does he see that the soft cork floor directly in front of the shallow closet has been polished in a half-circle, even though the door with the mirror on it always opened easily. In the remaining fractions of a second in which he thinks and grasps all these things, he also thinks and grasps that on the other side of the shallow cupboard someone is breathing who already knows all his thoughts and is now awaiting the end of this very, very long second.
He reaches for his revolver, quietly closes the mirrored door, and then gives a strong quick tug on the metal knob without turning it first. As expected, one of the wooden columns now emerges from the paneling of the wall, and with a faint squeaking sound the shallow closet follows his energetic tug as if the youth had just opened the thick page of a wooden book. He peers into a deep closet that had previously been hidden, he sees jackets, dresses, coats, shirts and blouses hanging close together one beside the other, and in a compartment above them sweaters, scarves and hats. The closet’s rod and shelf extend off into the darkness to the right of the door. And there something is rustling, but the young Red Army officer cannot see. A vibrant odor — urine and feces — engulfs him, and beneath the hanging clothes he sees a pot filled to the brim with filth. Some defecate out of fear, others because they cannot come out of their hiding places, and still others out of anger, he thinks, and all of this together is called war. Maybe the Germans used to hide too much, it occurs to him, now that he has happened upon this secret closet, they even hid the bedclothes in the wall and put up wooden gratings to hide the radiators. And they weren’t even taking into account that the war might come washing back over them, they concealed all these things from their own eyes alone. Now finally everything is being dragged back out again: clothes, jewelry, bicycles, livestock, horses and women. Now everyone else sees it, and they themselves are being forced to see it as well. Everything is being dragged out into the light and put to use, anyone still alive stops washing himself, and anyone buried beneath the rubble rots and thus also begins to stink.
The Red Army officer forces his way between the clothes, his revolver pointed into darkness, to the back of the closet where he encounters a body that mutely begins to put up resistance when he reaches for it. Before the war, the Red Army officer was still a child, and making use of women had never interested him during the war, but here, as he puts his revolver away so as to be able to use both hands to hold fast what is struggling here in his grasp, he is so occupied with seizing and grasping and forced by this seizing and grasping into such close proximity that before he can even consider what he is doing, he touches the warm breasts of a woman in the dark, a woman who is continuing to struggle and in this struggle forcing him to ever greater proximity, then he feels her hair on his face and finally, when he has forced her into the farthest corner and she bites his arm and he twists both her arms behind her back, he catches a whiff of camphor and peppermint, this smell of illnesses one waits out lying in bed, this smell of maturity and peacetime.