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adhesive film. On the back he had written:“Munich, June 6, 1945.” It was of a man of indeterminate age, wearing rags, his face appallingly thin, his eyes so sunken they could almost have been plucked out. He had no laces left in his shoes and he sat slumped amid the ruins. Before him, the dull gleam of a tiny piece of metal.
    Perhaps he was a Jew who had survived one of the Polish death camps that the Soviets had liberated in January. Oświęcim. Later people said Auschwitz. Although Harry had not actually seen a single camp. Or only glimpses from a few photos published here and there in the papers, starting in April 1945 when the British entered Bergen-Belsen. The images were unbearable and yet Bergen-Belsen wasn’t actually an extermination camp, hardly even one for the sick. Harry had cut them out, those photos, and—to keep his loathing for the Germans alive—he sometimes looked at the faces of those dazed, emaciated, spent clowns in their striped suits. That day in Munich was the first time he saw a deportee close up.
    The man had mimed bringing food up to his twisted mouth, and had reached his hand out toward Harry. Then, when Harry didn’t move, he clutched hold of him with his feeble skeletal fingers. He was filthy, covered in fleas and ringworm marks, stinking of putrefaction and piss. Harry looked away and pushed him off. To get rid of him, he rummaged through his pockets and threw him a dime. At the time, that wasn’t too bad. The man reached clumsily for the coin but didn’t manage to catch it. It rolled overthe rubble. He ran to pick it up, but as he bent over he collapsed like an empty sack. Exhausted by the effort, he stayed there, gasping among the ruins. The coin gleamed a few centimeters from his hand, but he didn’t have the strength left.
    Harry had shuddered. It was not yet shame, just disgust. With himself, with the war, with that eye-popping stare fixed on the brass coin. Harry discovered he was capable of barbarity. He had crossed the invisible boundary that separates indifference from cruelty. A monster within him woke and proved stronger than the human being. It was getting dark. Harry walked away, not daring to look at the man who was still on the ground.
    And yet, although he couldn’t have said why, at the last minute he took the photo. The man, the coin, the ruins. The empty eyes.
    An hour later, in the kitchen of a house requisitioned by his regiment, one of the few houses still standing in Munich, he developed the film and immediately made a set of prints. The picture came out in crisp focus, the framing was impeccable, it was the best of the roll. It was taken from just above the man, making him look truly alone, for all eternity, destitute. Only his hands were slightly out of focus, but that was probably because they had been shaking.
    Harry put the picture down. He crouched on the ground and started shivering, and then whimpered likea wounded dog. Then he started punching the tiled floor, until blood oozed from his fingers.
    Harry spent that night scouring the city, not really sure what he would do if he managed to find the man. By dawn he had interviewed dozens of people, old women, children, but in a bomb-ravaged Munich no one paid much attention to anyone else anymore. He sometimes said it was for the best, that his shame was now the truest part of him, that it had changed him permanently for the better.
    Perhaps he was lying. Perhaps he was no better than before.
    I put the newspaper down and turned out the light. I too had been a war correspondent for a while. The draw of the big wide world, the myth surrounding journalists, those words by the poet Supervielle about a pineapple-scented sadness worth more than a happiness that had never known travel. I too wanted to see the sun from another angle. One evening in 1981 when I was on the Mosquito Coast in the Sandinistas’ Nicaragua, a .22 caliber bullet fired from a contra’s M16 embedded itself in a beam less than two feet