The Words of an Unknown Woman

This new interpretation of life, one that is both tragic and radiant, is still somewhat unintelligible to him. It reveals itself one April evening on the streets of Baden-Baden.

The battles to take the city had been bloody, and now as he parks his tanks for a few hours of rest, he thinks about the theater of shadows in which humans stage their lives. This place of therapeutic cures and games has been transformed into a battlefield. The streets where not long ago a rich and idle crowd would walk now resound beneath the heavy steps of troops. In the halls where the roulette wheel used to turn, the windows are full of machine guns that have just furiously spat their final blasts. This change in décor has been paid for with thousands of dead men, wounded men, burned men; paid for by the death of that foot soldier the lieutenant saw fall down earlier, his face striking the muddy ground.

Behind these unsteady realities he feels the presence of another reality entirely, a life that would make this atrocious merry-go-round of history unnecessary.

He crosses a plaza, stops, raises his head. On the second floor of a building he catches someone’s quick smile—a young woman who, after all the shooting, is happy to be able to open her window and breathe the air that, through the exhaust of tanks and trucks, smells powerfully of spring. The lieutenant, like all of his comrades, is walking down the street looking for a place to stay the night. He knocks on the door to the house, the young woman opens it, and he introduces himself, explaining in German his situation as a “homeless” officer. She invites him to come in, pointing out that “unfortunately, my apartment is very small, just a dining room and a bedroom …”

“Don’t worry,” the lieutenant reassures her, “I’ll be very happy to sleep in the dining room.”

They start to move a mattress that can barely fit through the narrow hallway. Under his breath the lieutenant inquires, “Glauben Sie wirklich, das es sich lohnt?” (Do you really think this is worth the trouble?) And he receives, in response, a wry smile.

He has not come close to a woman since his escape to Spain.

That night he wakes with a start, panting. A dream that often comes back to him: a field covered in snow, tall sprays of dirt projected by explosions. He is in the turret of his tank and there—already so close, and so far!—are his two wounded comrades, crawling toward him, marking the snow with a long trail of blood. Another sixty feet and they’ll be safe. Bullets and shrapnel ricochet off the plating, the lieutenant shouts over the din of the battle, “Leper! Catherineau! Hold on!” He gets down, grabs the first one, and clutches the second, who is bruised and covered in blood … and then time jams to a stop, the way it does in nightmares, where one’s movements become stuck in the impossibility of continuing forward, the paralyzing fear at the sight of enemy tanks coming closer, encircling them, preparing to fire …

He cries out, and his cry wakes him up; he is breathing as if he has just finished an exhausting race through the snow. The darkness, the rapid scanning of a spotlight, the sound of a truck moving farther down the street. A feminine hand places itself on his shoulder. Comforting words in German. “The language of the enemy,” he tells himself, and he thinks once more about the absurdity of these human inventions: allies, enemies, wars, conquests … labels made for killing, hating, dominating, being killed. The woman’s body pulls him away from this world into a time that no longer slides into the airlessness of nightmares, into a moment where he is accepted as he is, and where he is the essence of himself.

The lieutenant knows that tomorrow, from the moment the day begins, he may no longer exist; the probability is high and the means of destruction are overabundant. A shot from an anti-tank cannon, a shell from a Tiger, a bomb dropped by a plane (the Germans are now equipped with Messerschmitt jets), or a terrible Panzerfaust, the grenade launcher that any teenager in the Hitler Youth could operate. Or even, very simply, a stray bullet. Strangely, he is not gripped by any anxiety at this thought, as if the moment he is living right now already belongs to an existence in which all of those young murderers can no longer reach him. He remembers that he has experienced a similar feeling before. One morning in a hotel near a train station, in the arms of Sabine … just as it is now, his survival then was suspended over a multitude of dangers that followed each of his steps. And yet there is the same serenity, the same confidence, something far beyond the singular pleasure of finding himself with a woman.

Lieutenant Schreiber’s third campaign ended in the Bavarian Alps at the beginning of May 1945: the last shells were fired on an SS detachment that kept fighting in spite of the imminent surrender. Enemy soldiers were running away, staggering amid the trees, and the lieutenant gives his tanks the order: “Stop! We stop now!” The enemies turn back into men on the run, and the positioning of the tanks—the gray slope of a hill and their warlike anger—becomes an immense fatigue that tumbles down upon the young tank drivers. They leave their armored tanks and deeply breathe the mountain air—so intoxicating after the poisonous exhaust of their cannons—look at the sky, listen to the silence, and no longer have the strength to express their joy.

A few days later, the lieutenant is informed that the man in charge of the French section of Berlin, General Dubois de Beauchesne, had appointed him as his aide-de-camp. Yes, the same general who, in June 1940, had written on the flyleaf in the Journal of Marches: “With fond memories of my brave little liaison officer …”

The colonel who gives him the news adds, as if it were nothing, “It’s been more than three months since I received that transfer order. But, knowing you like I do, I was sure that you’d prefer to fight until the victory.” The lieutenant has no choice but to agree: “You’re right, Colonel. Except that, during those three months, I could have gotten killed more than once.”

While on his way to Paris to finalize the formalities of his new appointment, he will think again about the extreme stupidity of human games: a sheet of paper with his transfer order written on it had been lying in a folder, turning each day into a Russian roulette where the life and death of Lieutenant Schreiber were at stake.