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freezing to death drunk in snowdrifts. The electric streetcar, brought in by rail on an open platform car, was war booty and still bore the traces of Russian inscriptions. It was kept in motion by a steam turbine taken from Neumann’s factory – electric current flowed through cables that hung above the streets. In compliance with an ordinance from the German
authorities, day and night municipal workers cleared snow from the tracks so the streetcar could run.
    Those same authorities sent a platoon of fifteen men to remove Colonel Ahlberg’s cannon, the one that had shot down the airplane. But the cannon had gotten stuck on the town hall tower, wedged in in such a way that a wall would probably have had to be taken apart to shift it. Or it could be cut up with metal saws, wheels and barrel separately, declared some artillery officer. Instead of the cannon, they brought down from the tower the bronze bell, its tongue carefully wrapped in rags, and transported it out of town on the same railroad platform. That imperfect ordinance, with a mouth too wide and a barrel in which the shell thrashed about on a tether, needed to be melted down in an ironworks and turned into a suitable instrument, one capable of performing con brio , as the hundred and first field gun of its caliber, its assigned part in the dazzling score of the war.
    Left prey to foreign forces, Stitchings filled with stories that previously no one had ever heard or wanted to hear. In the house of pleasure, in the downstairs parlor, at night officers in jackets unbuttoned in contravention of the regulations fell madly in love, sang, and laughed; during the day the other ranks were let in through a side door and took the creaking stairs to the second floor. They thronged the poorly lit corridor, wreathed in cigarette smoke, grasping metal tokens in their sweaty palms. Madame complained about them in French and wrung her
hands, because they were never willing to turn in their knives at the door, and bloody scuffles were forever breaking out on the staircase. After living through the stormwinds of artillery fire, they had grown wild and impudent from the closeness of death.
    One of them in a fit of rage burst into the empty officers’ parlor with a looted pistol that no one had seen fit to confiscate. He shot up the frosting-pink walls and put bullet holes in the portrait of Kaiser Wilhelm. His alarmed comrades came running at the sound of gunfire; they tried to calm him down and reason with him, but the wretched fellow heard nothing till he fell on the rug, stabbed with a knife, a metal token clenched between his teeth.
    â€œAwful,” shuddered Madame the very next day, reaching for the cup of coffee on a tray brought to her in bed around noon. She called back the maid as she was on her way out and had her pour a glass of cognac, a bottle of which, given to her by some major, she kept in her bedside table for emergencies. The soldiers who had happened to take part in the subduing of the madman were by now already on the Russian front; the following day they became tangled in barbed wire out in no-man’s-land, where they remained, covered in snow.
    In place of the fallen, others came, still alive, and one after another they tossed their sweaty tokens into the bowl with a clatter. One of them sobbed, suddenly made sentimental by the touch of a woman’s hand; another remembered homemade
preserves. In the meantime the tokens grew cold and with every moment lost their power; one soldier, urged to hurry, fell silent in mid-sentence and walked out into the dim corridor, shirt in hand. Some of them, troubled by a premonition of sudden death, right from the door fished out crumpled banknotes and gave them to the girls.
    â€œGet yourself something to remember me by,” they would say, but the girls wouldn’t understand a word. They would simply embrace them, the way they had done with the grenadiers whose bones were by now in the ground. Since