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Kempf’s Poltava HQ to get official support for the organization of his unit. “But then,” his colleague told him over a mug of beer, “it could be worse. We’ve got folks here who are superstitious about walking on the shady side of the street, or leaving their quarters with the left foot. Did I tell you about the captain at Zaporozhye who collects live flies in a glass jar, just to see them cannibalize one another and eventually die? That’s sick, isn’t it?”
    However von Salomon took Bora’s discreet silence about health matters, he seemed anxious to change the subject. “How’s the update coming along?” he asked.
    He meant the painstaking work of gathering details about Soviet guerrilla methods in handbook form: the distilled essence of interrogation, wire-tapping of all kinds and on-sight observation, Bora and his colleagues’ ongoing project ever since 1941.
    “Satisfactorily so far, Herr Oberstleutnant. It’ll soon be ready for use as a third edition of the Partisan Warfare Handbook , or as an addendum to what we have already. It’s a stand-alone text. Naturally, we’re adding items every week.” Bora said it to convince himself, trying not to think of the difficulties he was encountering as an interrogator.
    “Good, good.” Von Salomon stood to place the typewritten sheets about the cavalry unit – meant for Generalleutnant von Groddeck – inside an already overstuffed briefcase. The meeting might have ended here, except he’d apparently heard about the deaths at Krasny Yar, and was “rather intrigued”.
    “Are you familiar with the place, Major?”
    Krasny Yar, again. Bora said he wasn’t, not really. “I only went there for the first time yesterday, Herr Oberstleutnant.”
    “Will you tell me about it?”
    Bora bit his tongue. Those Krasny Yar corpses kept coming up, adding trouble to trouble, surfacing in conversation in the same way they surfaced in the woods. Managing the unexpected is always difficult, even in peacetime; when abnormality reigns, the unexpected is intolerable, mostly because you don’t recognize it at first. You simply stagger when yet another weight is added. Lucidity, on the other hand, was something he took pride in. What else was there, when one had gone beyond courage and beyond fear? Both words were meaningless now, as if his mind (or soul) had developed calluses and no blow would register upon it until it bled.
    He told the colonel what he knew, sketchily because he had errands to run and wanted to make it to the district commissioner’s office before a queue grew in front of his office. “None of the victims died from gunfire, so possibly the killer doesn’t want to be heard, or perhaps he has no firearms. Thedead were mostly women or the elderly, which might make one suspect the attacker may not be in his physical prime; but then, as I understand, mostly women and older people went into the Yar. Our soldiers in the area were never harassed: for the reasons above, or because the killer feared we would then mount a full-scale operation. That’s all the solid data, Herr Oberstleutnant. The rest is peasant gabble.”
    Thankfully, von Salomon had lost interest midway through the exposition. When they parted ways in downtown Merefa, each bound to his next task, the colonel insisted on seeing Bora to his vehicle. Walking between two buildings, he pushed his younger colleague aside with a sudden, barely controlled shove, so that Bora would be the one to step into the shade. It could have been a coincidence, and Bora was careful not to show he’d noticed. As he started the engine, however, he saw the colonel in the rear-view mirror still rigidly keeping to the sunlit centre of the lane, forcing a courier’s motorcycle to swerve around him and skirt the wall.
    Only three kilometres lay between what Bora called his Merefa outpost (the small schoolhouse on the road to Alexandrovka, with a sombre row of graves outside its courtyard) and the office of