He is telling the Schwarzkommando this now, all this and more. After a week of shouting I know, of crying I’ve seen the Schwarzgerät whenever a black face appears behind the flowing wire fences, at the cinderbanks or the crossings, word has got around. One day they come for him: he is lifted from the straw as black with coal-dust as they—lifted easy as an infant, a roach flicked in kindness off of his face—and transported shivering, gathered moaning south to the Erdschweinhöhle where now they are all sitting around a fire, smoking and munching, eyes riveted on blue Thanatz, who has been gabbing for seven hours nonstop. He is the only one privileged, in a way, to tell this much of the story, he’s the fella who lost out, the loser,

Just a fool-who-never-wins, at love,

Though-he-plays, most-ev’, ry night…

A loser-to-the-Ones, Above,

Who stack-the-cards, of wrong, and right… .

Oh the loser never bets-it-all, and-he never-plays, to win,

He knows if-once, you don’t-succeed, you can al-ways lose-again!

Just a loser at-the-game, of love…

Spending night after night a-lo-o-o-one!

He lost Gottfried, he lost Bianca, and he is only beginning, this late into it, to see that they are the same loss, to the same winner. By now he’s forgotten the sequence in time. Doesn’t know which child he lost first, or even—hornet clouds of memory welling up—even if they aren’t two names, different names, for the same child… but then in the crash of others’ flotsam, sharp edges, and high-spin velocities you understand, he finds he can’t hold on to this thought for long: soon he’s floundering in the open water again. But he’ll remember that he held it for a little, saw its texture and color, felt it against the side of his face as he woke from a space of sleeping near it—that the two children, Gottfried and Bianca, are the same… .

He lost Blicero, but it wasn’t quite as real. After the last firing, the unremembered night-hours to Hamburg, the hop from Hamburg to Bydgoszcz in a purloined P-51 Mustang was so clearly Procalowski-down-out-of-the-sky-in-a-machine, that Thanatz came to imagine he had disposed of Blicero too only in that same very conditional, metallic way. And sure enough, the metal has given way to flesh, and sweat, and long chattering night encounters, Blicero cross-legged stammering down at his crotch I cuh-cuh-cuh-cuh—“Can’t,” Blicero? “Couldn’t”? “Care”? “Cry”? Blicero that night was offering all his weapons, laying down all maps of his revetments and labyrinths.

Thanatz was really asking: when mortal faces go by, sure, self-consistent and never seeing me, are they real? Are they souls, really? or only attractive sculpture, the sunlit faces of clouds?

And: “How can I love them?”

But there’s no answer from Blicero. His eyes go casting runes with the windmill silhouettes. A number of contributed scenes do now flash by for Thanatz. From Ensign Morituri, a banana-leaf floor somewhere near Mabalacat in the Philippines, late ’44, a baby squirms, rolls, kicks in drops of sunlight, raising dust off the drying leaves, and the special-attack units roar away overhead, Zeros bearing comrades away, finally as fallen cherry-blossoms—that favorite Kamikaze image—in the spring… from Greta Erdmann, a world below the surface of Earth or mud—it crawls like mud, but cries like Earth, with layer-pressed generations of gravities and losses thereto—losses, failures, last moments followed by voids stringing back, a series of hermetic caves caught in the suffocated layers, those forever lost… from someone, who’ll ever know who? a flash of Bianca in a thin cotton shift, one arm back, the smooth powdery hollow under the arm and the leaping bow of one small breast, her lowered face, all but forehead and cheekbone in shadow, turning this way, the lashes now whose lifting you pray for… will she see you? a suspension forever at the hinge of doubt, this perpetuate doubting of her love—