Roberto Bolaño - The Third Reich

“Call me. Remember that Conrad is your best friend.”

“I know. Conrad is my best friend. Good-bye…”

Summer 1942. El Quemado shows up at eleven. I hear his shouts as I’m lying in bed reading the Florian Linden novel. Udo, Udo Berger, his voice echoes on the empty Paseo Marítimo. My first impulse is to lie still and wait. El Quemado’s call is hoarse and raw as if fire had also scorched his throat. When I open the balcony doors I see him on the sidewalk across the street, sitting on the seawall of the Paseo, waiting for me as if he has all the time in the world, with a big plastic bag at his feet. There’s a familiar air of terror to our greeting, to the way we acknowledge each other, essentially encapsulated in the abruptly silent and absolute manner in which we raise our arms. Between the two of us a stern and mute awareness is established, to galvanizing effect. But this state is brief and lasts only until El Quemado, in the room now, opens the bag to reveal an abundance of beers and sandwiches. Pathetic but sincere cornucopia! (Earlier, when I passed the reception desk, I asked for Frau Else again. She isn’t back yet, said the watchman, avoiding my gaze. Next to him, sitting in a huge white armchair, an old man with a German paper on his knees watches me with a scarcely concealed smile on his fleshless lips. Judging by his appearance one would say he has no more than a year left to live. And yet from beneath that extreme thinness, the cheekbones and temples especially prominent, the old man stares at me with a strange intensity, as if he knows me. How goes the war? asks the watchman, and then the old man’s smile grows more marked. If only I could stretch over the counter and grab the watchman by the shirt and shake him, but the watchman senses something and backs a little farther away. I’m an admirer of Rommel, he explains. The old man nods in agreement. No, you’re a miserable loser, I shoot back. The old man forms a tiny o with his lips and nods again. Maybe, says the watchman. The looks of hatred that we shoot each other are naked and full of real aggression. And you’re scum, I add, wanting to put him over the edge or at least get him to come a few inches closer to the counter. Well, that’s that, then, murmurs the old man in German, and he gets up. He’s very tall, and his arms, like a caveman’s, dangle down almost to his knees. Actually, that’s a false impression, caused by the old man’s stoop. Still, his height is notable: standing upright he must be (or must once have been) well over six feet tall. But it’s in his voice, the voice of a stubborn dying man, that his authority lies. Almost immediately, as if all he’d intended was for me to see him in his full grandeur, he drops back into the armchair and asks: Any further difficulties? No, of course not, the watchman hastens to say. No, none, I say. Perfect, says the old man, infusing the word with malice and virulence— per-fect —and he closes his eyes.

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.

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… )