Translation into English of 'Another Russian story' taken from Llamadas telefónicas by Roberto Bolaño

For Anselmo Sanjuan
At some point in time, after discussing with a friend about the wandering identity of art, Amalfitano told a story that he had heard in Barcelona. The story dealt with a soldier of the Spanish Blue Division who fought in the second world war, on the Russian front, more specifically as part of the Army Group North, in a zone near Novgorod.

The Soldier was a a small man from Seville, stick thin with blue eyes that, life as is (he was no Dionisio Ridruejo nor Thomas Salvador and when he had to salute the Roman salute, neither was he a real fascist or falangist), he went to stop Russia. There, without knowing who started, someone told him soldier go over there or soldier do that or the other, and the word soldier was left in his head, but in the dark part of the head, and in this place, large and desolate with the passing of time and with the daily shocks, the word transformed into a precentor. I don't know how this happened, let's suppose that an infantile mechanism activated it, some happy memory that had been waiting for the opportunity to return.

This meant that the Andalusian thought about himself in the terms and duties of a precentor, although he didn't consciously have any real understanding of the significance of this word which is given to the head of the choir in certain cathedrals. But somehow, and this is remarkable, through the power of thinking of himself as precentor, he was converted into a precentor. During the terrible winter of '41, he put himself in charge of a choir that sang carols while the Russians crushed 250 Regiment. In their memory these days were full of sound (dry, constant sounds) and of a subterranean happiness, a little out of focus. They sang, but it was as if their voices arrived afterwards or even before and the lips, the throats, the eyes of the singers slid over a fracture of silence, in a brief journey, equally foreign.

Anyway, the man from Seville behaved courageously, with resignation, even if his mood soured as time passed.

He didn't have to wait to taste his share of blood. One evening, in a lapse of concentration, he was injured and for two weeks he was interned at the Military Hospital at Riga, in the care of robust, smiling nurses of the Reich, skeptical of the colour of his eyes, and of a few ugly Spanish volunteer nurses, probably sisters or sisters in law or distant cousins of Jose Antonio.

When orders arrived, something happened that would not have grave consequences for the man from Seville: instead of receiving a ticket with the correct destination, he was sent one that took him to the quarters of an SS batallion, posted some three hundred kilometres from his own regiment. There, surrounded by Germans, Austrians, Lithuanians, Danes, Norwegians and Swedish, all much taller and stronger than him, he tried to rectify the mistake using rudimentary German, but the SS put him off and while clearing up the matter, gave him a broom to scrub the barracks and a mop and a bucket of water to mop the enormous, oblong wooden building where they held, interrogated and tortured every kind of prisoner.

Without giving up on everything, but still complying with his new task conscientiously, the man from Seville saw time pass from his new barracks, eating better than before and without exposing himself to new dangers, being as the SS batallion was stationed in the rearguard, fighting those termed 'bandits'. Then, in the dark part of his head, the word soldier returned to be readable. I am a soldier, he told himself, a raw recruit, and I must accept my destiny. The word precentor disappeared little by little, although some evenings, under an unending sky that took him back to nostalgic memories of Seville, the word still echoed, lost who knows where. Once he heard some German soldiers singing and was reminded of it, another time he heard a child singing behind some bushes and remembered once again the word, this time more precisely, but when he looked behind the bushes, the child had gone.

One day, what had to happen, happened. The SS barracks were attacked and taken, according to some, by the Russian Cavalry, according to others, a group of partisans. The fight was brief and went against the Germans. After an hour the Russians found the man from Seville hidden in the oblong building, dressed in the uniform of an SS and surrounded by not long since committed disgraces. As they say, caught red handed. He was quickly tied to one of the chairs that the SS had used during interrogations, one of those chairs with belts on the legs and arms, and everything the Russians asked, he answered in Spanish that he didn't understand and that he was only a dogsbody. He also tried to say it in German, but he hardly knew four words in the language and the Russians didn't know any. After a session of slaps and kicks, they went to find one who knew German and got to work interrogating prisoners in another of the cells in the oblong building. Before they returned, the man from Seville heard shots, he knew they were killing some of the SS and lost the hope of walking free that he had still held; however, when the shots stopped he went on clutching onto life with everything he had. The one who knew German asked him what he did there, what was his rank and his role. The man from Seville tried to explain in German, but in vain. The Russians then opened his mouth and with a pair of pliers that the Germans used for other parts of the anatomy, started to pull and squeeze his tongue. The pain that he felt made his eyes water and he said, or  shouted the word 'coño'. With the pliers in his mouth, the Spanish outburst tranformed and came out in a shriek as the word kunst.

The Russian who knew German looked at him quizzically. The man from Seville shouted kunst, kunst, and cried with pain. The word kunst in German means art and the bilingual soldier understood it as such and said that the bastard was an artist or something. Those torturing the man from Seville pulled out the pliers with a little piece of tongue and waited, momentarily hypnotized by the discovery. The word art. It tamed them. And so tamed, the Russians took a breather and waited for some sort of signal while the solder bled from his mouth and swallowed and choked on his blood mixed with large doses of saliva. The word 'coño', metamorphosed into the word art had saved his life. When he left the oblong building the sun was hidden but hurt his eyes as if it was the middle of the day. 


They took him with the other remaining prisoners and a little after another Russian who understood Spanish was able to listen to his story and the man from Seville was stopped up at a prison camp in Siberia while his accidental comrades in wickedness were shot. He remained in Siberia well into the next decade. In 1957 he moved to Barcelona. Sometimes he would open his mouth and happily recount war stories. Other times he would open his mouth and show whoever was willing to see, the piece of tongue that was missing. It was hardly visible. When people said this to him, the man from Seville explained that his tongue, with the years had grown. Amalfitano didn't meet him personally, but when he told the story, the man from Seville still lived in a hostel in Barcelona.