Seine

The Seine is named as the place where Paul Popescu orders two Hungarian soldiers to throw a sleeping captain, adding a moment of threatened disposal and interruption to the wartime narrative. In this episode, the river is not described as a landscape but invoked as the endpoint of an order to make a man disappear.

The order and its setting

After listening to Bach, Popescu approaches the sleeping captain while the Hungarians wait for his signal. The men lift the captain and drag him toward the door. His prosthetic leg comes off and falls onto the rug; after the soldiers fail to reattach it, Popescu does so himself and checks the prosthetic arm as well. He then tells them to throw the captain into the Seine and make sure he stays there.

Intended disposal and interruption

The exchange presents the river as the destination for a body that the men intend to dispose of. The captain is not yet dead: he has been asleep, snoring, and opens his right eye just after Popescu gives the order. The scene thus closes on an interruption rather than a confirmed outcome; the cited passage does not establish whether the captain is ultimately taken to the river.

Narrative significance

The Seine’s brief appearance belongs to a wartime episode in which an apparently routine command carries the threat of disappearance. The captain’s prostheses make the act of moving him materially difficult, and their removal briefly interrupts the men’s work before Popescu restores them. The river’s role remains sharply bounded: it is named as the intended place of disposal, not as a setting the narration goes on to describe.