The nighttime zigzags of our back streets seemed strangely animated. Excited people were bunched on street corners all talking at once. Over and again I heard the word “war.”

Glinting fitfully from the walls of buildings I saw paper squares. Only yesterday afternoon they weren’t there.

I walked up to one. The shadow from a cornice had cut off the top lines. I began reading from somewhere in the middle:

. . .are being bought up by the commissariat: foot wrappings—7 kop.; undershirt—26 kop.; pair of boots (mil. type)—6 rub.; also . . .

Only by holding a lighted match up to the paper square’s top lines did I learn that it was collecting not only boots and undershirts but bodies with what was in them: life. About the price of this last item, it said nothing.

By morning many-hued military flags were hanging over building entrances and gateways. Men with newspapers held up to their eyes were walking down the sidewalks; men with rifles on their shoulders were walking down the roadways. Thus from the very first day newspapers and rifles divided us all into those who would die and those for whom they would die.

At first, of course, there was great confusion and chaos. People would crowd round some gawky new recruit in his long earth-colored greatcoat in glad agitation.

“You for us?”

“We’re for you.”

But later the blurry line dividing “those who” from “those for whom” became clearer, and along that line there ran a crack; the crack opened and began to widen.

I don’t know what it was, but the early days of the war slightly excited even me. I had worked too much and too often with the “death” symbol, had included that biological minus in my formulas too systematically, not to be affected by all that was going on around me. Death—a dissociation that I imagined within the bounds of my “I” and only my “I” (beyond was of almost no concern to me)—was now forcing me to think in broader and more generalized terms. All the printer’s ink was now going to death’s accounts; death was turning into a programmatic, government-recommended idea. Officially regulated, death began putting out its own periodical, which, like any well-organized publishing concern, kept to a schedule. It was the most laconic, businesslike, and absorbing publication I had ever read: I refer to those white booklets that provided a “complete list of the dead, wounded, and missing in action.” At first glance, a journal of death might seem dull: number—name—number—another name. But given a certain imagination, the dry, lapidary style of those booklets only intensified a sense of the fantastic. They pushed one to the most surprising conclusions: Having made a purely statistical inspection of the March and April issues for 1915, I, for instance, knew that among the dead there were 35 percent more Sidorovs than Petrovs. Then again, Petrovs went missing more often. Sidorovs were evidently unlucky. Or perhaps Petrovs were cowards, or else found places at the rear. I don’t know. I only know that the distant, battle-scorched fields and crater-pocked earth were exerting a stronger and stronger pull on my imagination. I was here, one of those and among those for whom men were dying. They were dying far away, hundreds of miles away, so as not to alarm us. And their corpses, if they returned at all from there to here, returned in secret, at night, so as not to disturb us, the ones for whom they must die.

I remember I even gave up on my “Axiomatism Crisis.” Work on it had not been going well. Some nights I would quietly dress and slip out into the benighted streets. I knew the exact hours when the ambulance trams fetched up at the infirmaries with fresh batches—just arrived from that mysterious “there”—of hashed human flesh.

As a rule, I didn’t have to wait long. From around a bend in the street, steel grinding softly against steel, unlighted black cars would come trundling out. They would stop at the entrance.