László's Suicide at the Berlin Position

László’s suicide at the Berlin position turns the retreat’s accumulated violence into a private, irreversible loss. Adrián Gallardo and Jan Schmitt bring Agneta Müller back to their post as she sings herself hoarse; there, Alfonso Navarro tells them that László has shot himself. The body they find, and the makeshift covering they give it, leave Adrián confronting both the debt he owes a comrade and how little he knew of the man who saved his life.

The return to the position

Near the Brandenburg Gate, Agneta collapses on a stone, covers her face, and weeps. She cries that the Horst-Wessel-Lied will never be sung again and says that she would rather die than live in such a world. As Gallardo and Schmitt carry her toward their position, she continues singing the Nazi Party anthem. Her voice grows rough and desperate, nearly losing the shape of words, even as she insists that the streets must open for the storm-trooper battalions.

The scene brings a political collapse into the body. Agneta’s singing is no longer a confident public performance: it becomes a hoarse cry sustained amid exhaustion and grief. Gallardo and Schmitt support her almost in their arms, while the song’s demand for marching troops persists even as its singer can barely articulate it. The anthem’s surviving words and the ruined voice carrying them pull in opposite directions, making the return to the post feel less like a resumption of order than a passage into its wreckage.

The news and the body

At the position, only Alfonso Navarro appears. Gallardo pauses to help Agneta recover and make herself presentable: he fastens the buttons of her jacket, tucks her blouse into her skirt, and uses Schmitt’s black silk scarf to wipe dust from her face and neck. Schmitt does not intervene, but offers the scarf. Their small, careful gestures are interrupted by Navarro’s announcement that László has just blown his brains out.

The physical description confirms the bluntness of the news. László’s skull is gone, and blood and tissue have spread across the wall of the dugout, contrasting with the rest of his body: his legs are extended, his arms lie at his sides, and his rifle still rests on his chest with its barrel pointing upward. Navarro explains that László had been standing in the same place, then sat down, took the rifle, placed its barrel beneath his chin, and fired. There was no farewell. The others had been waiting to bury him, but night was approaching, so Navarro proposes leaving that task until morning.

A comrade without a surname

As Gallardo carries László’s body out of the dugout, he realizes that he never learned László’s surname. They had met in Narva, served in the same platoon at Klooga, and walked together from the Baltic to central Europe. László had once saved Gallardo’s life, yet Gallardo cannot even name him fully as he carries him away. The relationship is made up of shared danger and a life-debt, but the circumstances of war have left almost no ordinary knowledge by which to remember the man.

The burial is correspondingly incomplete. Gallardo cannot give László a proper grave; he can only cover the body with stones, pieces of mortar and brick, and blocks of concrete. He hopes the enemy will find it too late for the dead man’s remains to be registered before they are thrown into a mass grave. The covering is both a practical concealment and a final, inadequate act of care: it protects the body from immediate discovery while making clear how little control the survivors have over what happens to it.

Aftermath and narrative significance

The death leaves Gallardo in a sadness so deep that anger, fury, and the desire for revenge no longer fit within it. Yet even that grief cannot displace his love. The narrative places this private attachment beside the ruined body and the unfinished burial, without treating love as an escape from violence or as a remedy for loss. Gallardo’s sorrow is instead shown to coexist with the continuing emotional bonds that the retreat has failed to erase.

Afterward, nobody speaks while the survivors finish what remains of their meal. They draw lots for guard duty, and Gallardo takes the first watch while the others sleep. Schmitt lies on his side beside Agneta and draws close under the pretext of covering her with his blanket; they whisper together for more than an hour. Gallardo remains the sentry, beneath a blanket that came from László and is soaked with blood and flecked with fragments of his body. The quiet meal, the allotted watch, and the whispered conversation continue around the suicide, but the stained blanket carries the dead comrade into the survivors’ night.