It's in Ansky's notebook, long before he sees a painting by the man, that Reiter first reads about the Italian painter Arcimboldo, Giuseppe or Joseph or Josepho or Josephus Arcimboldo or Arcimboldi or Arcimboldus (1527-1593). When I'm sad or bored, writes Ansky, although it's hard to imagine Ansky bored, busy fleeing twenty-four hours a day, I think about Giuseppe Arcimboldo and the sadness and tedium vanish as if on a spring morning, by a swamp, morning's imperceptible advance clearing away the mists that rise from the shores, the reed beds. There are also notes on Courbet, whom Ansky considers the paradigm of the revolutionary artist. He mocks, for example, the Manichaean conception that some Soviet painters have of Courbet. He tries to imagine the Courbet painting The Return from the Conference, which depicts a gathering of drunken priests and ecclesiastical dignitaries and was rejected by the official Salon and the Salon des Refuses, which in Ansky's judgment casts the reject-rejectors into ignominy. The fate of The Return from the Conference strikes him as not only inevitable and poetic but also telling: a rich Catholic buys the painting and no sooner does he get home than he proceeds to burn it.

The drawings were crude and childish and the perspective was pre-Renaissance, but the composition revealed glimpses of irony and thus of a secret mastery much greater than was at first apparent to the eye. As he returned to the farmhouse, Reiter reflected that the painter had talent, but that he had gone mad like the rest of the Germans who spent the winter of '42 in Kostekino. He also pondered his own surprise appearance in the mural. The painter clearly believed that it was he who had gone mad, he concluded. The figure of the duck, bringing up the rear of the procession headed by the elephant, suggested as much. He remembered that in those days he hadn't yet recovered his voice. He also remembered that in those days he had ceaselessly read and reread Ansky's notebook, memorizing each word, and feeling something very strange that sometimes seemed like happiness and other times like a guilt as vast as the sky. And he accepted the guilt and happiness and some nights he even weighed them against each other and the net result of his unorthodox reckoning was happiness, but a different kind of happiness, a heartrending happiness that for Reiter wasn't happiness but simply Reiter.

"Look, with the situation as it is we have no transportation available to collect the Jews. Administratively they belong to Upper Silesia. I've talked to my superiors and we're in agreement that the easiest and best thing would be for you to dispose of them."

I didn't answer.

"Do you understand?" asked the voice from Warsaw.

"Yes, I understand," I said.

"Then we have a solution, don't we?"

"That's right," I said. "But I'd like to receive the order in writing," I added. I heard a pealing laugh at the other end of the line. It could be my son's laugh, I thought, a laugh that conjured up country afternoons, blue rivers full of trout, and the scent of fistfuls of flowers and grasses.

"Don't be naive," said the voice without a hint of arrogance, "these orders are never issued in writing."

Meanwhile, Reiter noted, interest in sex had waned considerably, as if the war had used up men's reserves of testosterone, pheromones, desire, and no one wanted to make love anymore. They only fucked whores, as far as Reiter could tell from what he saw on the job. There were some women who dated the occupying forces, but even for them desire was really the mask of something else: a theater of innocence, a frozen slaughterhouse, a lonely street, a movie theater. The women he saw were like girls who've just woken from a terrible nightmare.

At night, before he went to work, Reiter checked to make sure Ingeborg had everything she needed so she wouldn't have to go down the stairs to the street with just a candle to light her way, although in his heart he knew that Ingeborg (and he too) lacked so many things that his precautions were pointless from the outset. At first their relations excluded sex. Ingeborg was very weak and all she wanted to do was talk, or read, when she was alone and there were enough candles. Reiter sometimes fucked the girls who worked at the bar. These were hardly very passionate encounters. On the contrary. They made love as if they were talking soccer, sometimes even with a cigarette still in their mouths or chewing American gum, which had begun to be fashionable, and it was good for the nerves, chewing gum and fucking this way impersonally, although the act was far from impersonal but rather objective, as if once the nakedness of the slaughterhouse had been achieved everything else was unacceptable theatricality.

One morning Reiter and Ingeborg made love. The girl was feverish and her legs, under her nightdress, seemed to Reiter the most beautiful legs he had seen in his life. Ingeborg had just turned twenty and Reiter was twenty-six. From then on they began to fuck every day. Reiter liked to do it sitting by the window with Ingeborg straddling him, making love as they looked into each other's eyes or out at the ruins of Cologne. Ingeborg liked to do it in bed, where she cried and writhed and came six or seven times, with her legs on Reiter's bony shoulders, calling him my darling, my love, my prince, my sweetheart, words that embarrassed Reiter, because he found them precious and in those days he had declared war on preciousness and sentimentality and softness and anything overembellished or contrived or saccharine, but he didn't object, since the despair he glimpsed in Ingeborg's eyes, never entirely dispelled even by pleasure, paralyzed him as if he, Reiter, were a mouse caught in a trap.

He had no faith that Bittner, who surely knew nothing about literature, would publish his novel. He was nervous and lost his appetite. He hardly read at all and the little he did read disturbed him so much that no sooner did he begin a book than he had to shut it, because he would start to shake and was overcome by an irresistible urge to go outside and walk. He did make love, although sometimes, in the middle of the act, he went off to another planet, a snowy planet where he memorized Ansky's notebook.

"Where are you?" Ingeborg asked when this happened.

The baroness, meanwhile, as if to counterbalance Archimboldi's forced travels, told him about her own journeys, all planned and desired and therefore happy, exotic trips to Bulgaria and Turkey and Montenegro and receptions at the German embassies of Italy, Spain, and Portugal, and she confessed that sometimes she tried to repent of the good times she'd had, but no matter how strongly she rejected her hedonistic behavior on an intellectual or perhaps more accurately a moral level, the truth was that when she thought back on those days she still felt a shiver of pleasure.

"Do you understand? Can you understand me?" she asked as they had cappuccino and cakes at a coffee shop like something out of a fairy tale, next to a big window with views of the river and rolling green hills. [...]

It wasn't long before Archimboldi's fourth book arrived at the publishing house. It was called Rivers of Europe, although it was really about only one river, the Dnieper. One might say the Dnieper was the protagonist and the other rivers were the chorus. Mr. Bubis read the book in one sitting, in his office, and his laughter as he read it could be heard all over the house. This time the advance he sent Archimboldi was bigger than any previous advance, in fact so large that Martha, the secretary, before mailing the check to Cologne, brought it into Mr. Bubis's office and asked (not once but twice) whether the sum was correct, to which Mr. Bubis answered yes, it was, or it wasn't, what did it matter, a sum, he thought when he was alone again, is always approximate, there is no such thing as a correct sum, only the Nazis and teachers of elementary mathematics believed in correct sums, only sectarians, madmen, tax collectors (God rot them), numerologists who read one's fortune for next to nothing believed in correct sums. Scientists, meanwhile, knew that all numbers were only approximate. Great physicists, great mathematicians, great chemists, and publishers knew that one was always feeling one's way in the dark.

That evening, before they left the village, the baroness insisted on driving up a mountain from which there was a view of the whole area. She saw winding paths in shades of yellow that vanished in the middle of little leaden-colored clusters of trees, the clusters like spheres swollen with rain, she saw hills covered in olive trees and specks that moved with a slowness and bewilderment that seemed of this world and yet intolerable.