Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Do you think there’s any hope at all? he asked.

  I can’t honestly say that I do feel any hope, she said gently.

  But still they stayed together.

  And now the war had come, and whenever he got to see her, which was far more often than most husbands got to see their wives, he felt claustrophobic; he couldn’t forget how she had called him creepy for wanting to be all alone with her in isolated places.

  I’ve already told you how during the Nazi-Soviet idyll he’d gone in the ice-breaker Josef Stalin to film the rescue of the Sedov with her crew of thirteen. This vessel had been icebound for eight hundred and twelve days. Karmen would never forget the magnetic storms, the cold, the silence. And yet none of it had depressed him; he was an adventurer; he truly loved the experience! (Shostakovich would have killed himself.) Of course, what’s worst about being icebound is the solitude, but a gregarious man is armored against that. Roman Karmen never ran out of jokes. He’d bunked with his cameraman V. Shtatland and his sound engineer Ruvim Khalulashkov; if either man turned morose, Roman Karmen knew how to make him laugh.26 Defeatism is a crime. They recorded the repair and reassembly of the Sedov’s engine. The engine started; the Sedov was saved; one more Roman Karmen film ended happily! But now when he was with Elena he was back in the cold; they sat miserably together in the captain’s icy cabin.

  21

  He asked her whether she was sure that the problem was him, not her, and she said that she was sure.

  Was it like this with Shostakovich?

  Never.

  22

  They invited him to film the premiere of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, but he didn’t want to see Shostakovich; even though Arnshtam scolded him, he said he didn’t have time. Instead, he requested a transfer out of the Central Frontline Kinogroup and filmed “Leningrad Strikes Back!” (A titanic poster of D. D. Shostakovich in a fire-helmet gazed shyly down on him.) He crawled with his camera over the ice of Lake Ladoga to film the agony and encourage the defenders, almost getting killed four times.

  Two lost soldiers, with frost on their machine-pistols, huddle over their truck’s frozen engine as they try to read a map. Ruins stretch behind them and before them. Perhaps they’ll die today, but Roman Karmen has photographed them; he wants them to live forever. We see them for a single long instant in his newsreel, and we feel for them; we want them to get safely to Leningrad. Roman Karmen is a man who cares! He stands in the same fur-lined greatcoat in which he filmed “The Sedov Men,” knee deep in Leningrad snow, with the skeleton of a wrecked bus very black behind him. Throwing back his head and shoulders, yet continuing to gaze levelly ahead, he braces the cine-camera against his heart.

  The half-blacked-out eyes of supply trucks creep darkly through the white fog and ice of Lake Ladoga. He leaps to one side, films it, gets back in another truck which turns out to be filled with sullen soldiers he’s never met; in thirty seconds he gets them grinning at his imitation of the laughing man in “Volga-Volga.”

  He came home and she was sitting by the gramophone, listening to Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata in D Minor (which is Opus 40, I believe). He sat down beside her and she gazed at him in annoyance.

  23

  He had just found that his application to speak at the Conference on American and British Cinema had been accepted. Everyone would be there, even Eisenstein, since his name was familiar to the Americans; he was supposed to read a paper on feature films. It meant good cheer and good food, neither of which was in great supply in those war years, and he had thought that Elena would be coming with him; actually he had applied for her sake. But now they had what’s called a little talk, which is to say a talk in which she gradually, carefully expressed more and more how hopeless she felt, all the time watching him to make sure that no one dose was lethal. It was like the time that a nurse he cared for had been killed by a Fascist barrage, and they sat him down and said first: Roman Lazarevich, we have some very bad news, and then: We’re very sorry, but something has happened, and so on and so on, und so weiter as the German Fascists would say. In this spirit, Elena asked him what he thought about their life together, what he thought, what he thought, always what he thought! Eventually, he comprehended: She wants me to do the dirty work!

  This isn’t fair! he cried weakly.

  I understand, said Elena, evidently willing to be infinitely agreeable as long as her object could be obtained. Usually she got angry the instant he accused her of being unfair.

  Do you ever think about it? she kept asking him.

  After awhile he felt like a character in a silent film—a half-silent film, I should say, for he could still hear and remember her words, but everything he said might as well have been silent.

  I tried to let you see that it was all right for you to be happy, she was saying. You deserve someone better than I am.

  You’ve been a pillar of strength to me, she said. I don’t know what I’ll do without you.

  I know I’m letting you down, sobbed Elena. I’m really, really sorry. I hate to lose you.

  That’s all right, said Karmen wearily.

  He threw on his oilskin jacket and went out. She had asked him to telephone her so she wouldn’t worry about him, but he didn’t. She knew where he would be staying: at the studio, naturally. Two days later she rang him up, and he burst out crying. Elena had that effect on people.

  He sobbed: When it happened, I was sure it was a mutual thing, but today it isn’t. Every time the phone rings I hope that it’s you, and now that it’s you I’m hoping that you’ll say, please take me back. You’re the one for me.

  There’s a large part of me that hates to lose you, Elena said consolingly.

  24

  That would not happen until the summer of 1943, shortly before Operation Citadel. In 1942 he collaborated on “Defeat of the German Armies near Moscow,” and directed “Leningrad in Combat.” I’ve told you how I saw him at Stalingrad, eagerly photographing the captured German Fascist Field-Marshal, a certain F. Paulus, who, like a recently dead person, hadn’t entirely shed his former grandeur; in another week he’d be a convict, a nothing, but for now he still remembered how to sit up straight and proud in his uniform. All the same, he stared so woodenly into space! He reminded Karmen of someone, but he didn’t know whom. Unfortunately, the light wasn’t good enough for cinematic work. I’ve seen footage of him at Vyazma, standing between his fellow camera-soldiers K. M. Simonov and B. Tseitlin. In his bulky coat and fur cap he looks strangely gamin-like, smiling a slightly buck-toothed smile; yes, he resembles a lost French child. Simonov, who puffs at his pipe, seems the most genuine of the three. Tseitlin’s pale grin is tense beneath the cap, and Karmen’s smile is cautious. Behind them are ruins and dirty snow.

  25

  He performed all the trickiest camerawork for L. Arnshtam’s 1944 film “Zoya,” with a musical score by Shostakovich: Zoom in on the Nazi officer gazing into the slender lamp, losing the battle with himself; now pan to Zoya herself, beautiful, bruised and angry, standing upright before him in her quilted jacket; she’s ready to take her medicine, resolute to die without mercy for herself. Cut to closeup of her bloody lips saying: You can’t hang all hundred and ninety million of us.

  Shostakovich had a question about whether the pacing of a certain long shot on the gallows was to be altered, because it would affect the tempo of the, you know. No one else happened to be in the studio. Arnshtam had rushed off to the Ministry for another argument. Zoya had just wiped the makeup off her lips and stood behind the half-opened lavatory door, flirting with the Nazi officer. 27 The technician had gone into the darkroom to drink vodka.

  Karmen laid his hand on Shostakovich’s shoulder and said: I hope it doesn’t make you sad to work with me, given the circumstances.

  That’s not the point, Roman Lazarevich, oh, no, not at all! You know, you were born the same year I was, almost the same day! Three weeks apart—what a narrow frontline trench! That makes us, so to speak, contemporaries. Evidently
she likes older men. Because we, I, you know. Well, that’s another matter. The point is, the point is that here, you see, in our Soviet homeland, for us . . .—and here Shostakovich’s lips fleered out and flittered into a spitefully sarcastic smile—film is the most important art form, not music.

  My dear Dmitri Dmitriyevich!

  No, nein, nyet, noch nie! That bastard Dmitri Dmitriyevich is not my concern at the moment. Film is the most . . . As you know, Lenin himself said so. Who can argue with Vladimir Ilyich? She wouldn’t, because she’s been, you know. The results are known—

  The results of arguing?

  Are you, how should I put it, crazy? screamed Shostakovich in terror. Of course I didn’t mean it like that! When she was, no, no! She never even . . . The results of, of, I’m implying of Soviet film in our Soviet homeland today! And Comrade Stalin confirmed Lenin’s profound and just thought and put it into, so to speak, execution.

  What Karmen did next exemplified why we like him. (He found himself thinking, as he so often did: One of this person’s mannerisms is actually mine, but I don’t know what it is.) Squatting down in front of Shostakovich, rocking on his wiry little knees, he said: There’s no need for hard feelings on that score, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, absolutely none. I think you know why.

  Shostakovich was silent; Shostakovich looked away. And this infuriated Karmen inexpressibly. He did not smile much nowadays. A year later, with a white bandage dividing his head into three zones, the boyish look would be entirely gone as he filmed the ruins of Berlin steadily and without pity. He was with the Second Guards Tank Regiment by then. Toward Shostakovich his anger was no less than toward the enemy. All the same, something inclined him to be gentle. Oh, the gentleness of her that was somehow sweet like milk!

  He rose, smiled and said: Do you remember what they said to Robespierre at the end? I’m sure you do.

  You mean when they wrenched the, the, his bandage off? And he—

  Your education was better than mine. I’m just a gutter-rat from Odessa. Before his arrest, he was calling them all kinds of names, and they said, why should the people’s business be thrown out of joint for the sake of one man’s wounded self-esteem? You and I should both try to be more optimistic, Dmitri Dmitriyevich.

  Shostakovich stared at him. He gaped his mouth as if to scream.

  26

  In 1945 he directed “Berlin.” (Balding and bulky, jovial in his big suitcoat; he took home a bulletholed Unter den Linden sign for a souvenir.) Somehow, he simultaneously found time to collaborate with Troyanovsky on the production of “Albania.” The next year he directed the Soviet documentary about the Nuremberg Trials.28

  Whitehaired, he filmed Ho Chi Minh in 1954, leaning alertly on his elbow as the Vietnamese leader raised an arm in salute. (That was the year that the formalist Dziga Vertov, long excluded from our national life, died from cancer.) In 1955 his “Vietnam” was released to considerable official acclaim. Even the American monopoly-propagandist Burt Lancaster was forced to recognize (although perhaps not in the context of this anti-American film) his passionate love for life and people, but also an irreconcilable hatred for war, violence and fascism. Karmen’s working conditions in North Vietnam had been perilous, but at the reception after the premiere he scooped caviar on a biscuit and said: My father died at forty-four, thanks to the White Guards. I turned forty-four in 1950. So whatever happens, I’m ahead!—Then he threw back his head and laughed, just like our favorite actor in “Volga-Volga.”

  An essay I found in the library basement cites his “Far and Wide My Country Stretches” (1958) as being the first film to use the Kinopanorama system of the wide curved screen, complete with nine tracks of stereophonic sound (and we’re glancingly informed that the countervailing American system used only seven). Unfortunately, the difficulty in getting the three projectors to overlap precisely proved to be most annoying, and so, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia informs us, Kinopanorama came to be used increasingly less frequently after 1963.

  He was a delegate of the Twenty-fifth Party Congress in Moscow. I’ve seen him smile resolutely at the East German leader, Honecker, whose returning smile seems more strained, more like Hilde Benjamin’s; Karmen for his part remained natural all his life. That is why we all liked him: Dolores Ibarruri, head of the Spanish Communist Party, praised him and smiled eternally; Castro said of him: In the name of our people we thank you for your free and deep friendship for us; Salvador Allende mentioned my friend Roman Karmen. For the same reason, at the Moscow Academy of Film he was renowned for his easy closeness with the younger students, men and women both. But these details shunt his story away from its true end.

  In 1965 “The Great Patriotic War” appeared under his name. Two famous shots: A haunted old man clutches his hat to his chest; a calm old soldier salutes.

  In 1966, shortly before returning to Spain as a tourist, he was named a People’s Artist of the Soviet Union. (I remember how he used to be dark and skinny like a French gamin as he stood at the panning lever of his cinematic camera in 1933, shooting “Moscow-Kara-Kum-Moscow.”) That year’s edition of the Moscow Kinoslovar describes the character of his films as strikingly emotive, but the feelings are faithfully bright, which is to say remarkably dramatic, but always in a public-spirited context. Drobaschenko names him in the same breath as the great Dziga Vertov.

  In 1968 he co-directed “Granada, Granada, My Granada”29 with K. M. Simonov, with whom he’d always got on well. One shrouded female figure halfway through the first reel, some of whose archival footage dates from 1936, is rumored to be Elena Konstantinovskaya. ‣

  BREAKOUT

  With few, but courageous allies . . . we must take upon ourselves the defense of a continent which largely does not deserve it.

  —Joseph Goebbels (1944)

  1

  Until July 1942, Lieutenant-General A. A. Vlasov, Commander of the Second Shock Army of the Volkhov Front, remained one of those heroically immaculate men of Soviet marble, each of whom bears a glittering star centered in his forehead like an Indian woman’s caste mark (why didn’t German snipers shoot at it?), each holding his gleaming black gun in white hands, aiming with confidence. So the old photographs portray them, all highlights bleached into blank purity. Vlasov cannot be descried among them now. Nor has he been found deserving of a citation in the Great Soviet Encyclopedia. There is, indeed, an angry entry about “Vlasov Men.” That befits, for the crime which Vlasov committed was of a collective nature: He organized an army of traitors to fight against their own motherland.

  He is said to have been both brave and coolheaded in the foredoomed defense of Lvov. In a series of energetic attacks, he led a breakout right through the German pincers, saving his troops for future fighting. Repeating this dangerous and thankless accomplishment when the enemy took Kiev, he preserved the remnants of Thirty-seventh Army. (No doubt he was aided both times by the rumors, each day less deniable, that the Fascists were machine-gunning prisoners by the thousands.) He reached Moscow shortly before that city came under siege. The people around him were as faint and intermittent as his reflection in the broken, blacked out windows. Most of them had never even thrown a hand grenade. Vlasov visited his wife and tried to prepare her for the worst. On 10 November 1941, he was summoned beneath the five-pointed Kremlin stars of ruby glass (each of which weighed one ton, and each of which was illuminated from within by incandescent lamps), and so he came into the presence of Comrade Stalin himself. It was literally the stroke of midnight. Rigidly polite, he awaited honor or death.

  Stalin demanded his opinions on the protection of Moscow. Vlasov gave them without mitigation but without defeatism, either, recommending a deeply echeloned defense to delay the Fascist Army Group Center until winter. In particular, the Mozhaisk defensive line should be strengthened. Ground might be given, in Kalinin for instance, but it must be contested. Meanwhile, it was essential that we use the time purchased with the lives of a few more hundred thousand peasant boys to form up the Siberian reserves.
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  Stalin raised his haggard head. He asked: Where will the enemy break through?

  Vlasov rose, approached the situation map, and said: I’ve already mentioned Mozhaisk. Generally speaking, the Iartsevo axis will soon be endangered.

  Speak the truth, like a Communist. Will we lose Moscow?

  I think not. By the end of this month they’ll start freezing to death, and then we can counterattack . . .

  With what?

  Well, Comrade Stalin, as I said, with the Siberian reserves.

  Anybody can defend Moscow with reserves.

  Vlasov nodded obediently.

  Nevertheless, your analysis is correct, Comrade Vlasov. I’m going to give you fifteen tanks. As for this echeloned defense, you’ll present your diagrams to Comrade Zhukov in one hour’s time . . .

  And that very day, the four hundred and fifty thousand shivering, famished Muscovites who’d been mobilized (three-quarters of them women, for all conditionally fit men had been sent to the front long ago) began reifying the Mozhaisk defensive line with their shovels. Mozhaisk fell. The survivors regrouped to dig more trenches according to Vlasov’s specifications: deep and narrow, like the corridors of the Lubyanka. Within hours there were blanket-wrapped corpses in one ditch—magnified representations of the worms which would eat them come summer. Firepoints of concrete blocks sank down into place like tombstones. As for the still-immaculate man, he went to take command of Twentieth Army with his fifteen shopworn tanks. The night sky was already turning pink under Fascist artillery fire. This time he had no chance to say farewell to his wife, who, white-faced in her dark winter coat and shawl, too sick to dig trenches, sat against her cold samovar, hugging herself for warmth with her hands inside her coat-sleeves, the apartment lightless but for a candle. Soon she’d be sleeping underground with the others, beneath the arched roofs of the Metro station. Somebody in raspberry-colored boots was asking a railroad man which train for Kuibyshev would be the last. As for Vlasov, he expected to be dead within a week at most.