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elder by several years, but we got along like two old comrades. If he had the time, he liked to accompany me while I went around collecting information for my reports, and it was a pleasure to chat with him. He was an uncommon man, who often—not always, but often—showed good sense, who knew many things, doubtless many more than he admitted to knowing, and who had perfect command of reading, writing, and arithmetic. This last quality, in fact, was the reason why the previous mayor appointed him as the teacher, even though Diodemus wasn’t from the village and came from another village to the south of ours, about a four-day hike away.
    It’s been three weeks since Diodemus died, in circumstances so strange and so poorly defined that his death made me even more alert to all the little signs I was noticing around me. Fear began to brew gently in my brain. The day after he died, I started writing this account alongside the Report the others had already assigned me to do. I’m writing the two of them at the same time.
    Diodemus spent most of his free hours in the village archives. Sometimes I saw a light in his window very late at night. He lived alone, above the school, in a tiny, uncomfortable, dusty apartment. Books, documents, and the records of olden times were his only furniture. “What I’d like to do is to understand,” he confided to me one day. “We never understand anything, or if we do, not much. Men live, in a way, as the blind do, and generally, that’s enough for them. I’d go so far as to say that it’s what they’re looking for: to avoid headaches and dizzy spells, to fill their stomachs, to sleep, to lie between their wives’ thighs when their blood runs too hot, to make war because they’re told to do so, and then to die without knowing what awaits them afterward, but hoping that something’s awaiting them, all the same. Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved questions, and I’ve loved the paths you must follow to find the answers. Sometimes, of course, I end up knowing nothing but the path itself, but that’s not so bad; at least I’ve made some progress.”
    Maybe that was the cause of his death: Diodemus wanted to understand everything, and he tried to give words and explanations to what is inexplicable and should always remain unexplored. On the day I’m referring to, I couldn’t think of anything to say to him; I think I smiled. Smiling costs nothing.
    But there was another time, on a spring afternoon, when we talked about Orschwir, about his postern and the phrase carved on it. This was before the war. Poupchette was not yet born. Diodemus and I had been sitting on the short grass in one of Bourenkopf’s stubble fields, which lie on the way to the valley of the Doura and, beyond it, to the border. Before going back down to the village, we rested for a while near a wayside cross that represented Jesus with an unusual face, the face of a Negro or a Mughal. It was the end of the day. From where we sat, we could see the whole village and cup it in one hand. Its houses looked like the little houses in children’s toys. A fine sunset was gilding the roofs, which were already glistening from the recent rain. Plumes of smoke rose from every dwelling, and in the distance, the slow, sluggish smoke clouds mingled with the shimmering air, blurring the horizon and making it appear almost alive.
    Diodemus took some pieces of paper out of his pocket and read me the last pages of the novel he was writing. Novels were his obsession; he wrote at least one a year, on whatever crumpled writing material came to hand, including strips of wrapping paper and the backs of labels. He kept his manuscripts to himself and never showed them to anybody. I was the only one to whom he occasionally read passages from his work. He read them to me, but he expected nothing in return. He never asked my opinion about the passages he read or the subjects they treated. So much the better, because I wouldn’t have been able