6
The worst thing I have ever seen was not the annihilation of men I lived and fought with; after all, they comprised an insignificant part of Ninth Panzer Division, which was but one of many units of Ninth German Army, which continued to advance upon Olkovatka after Rüdiger and the rest of us disappeared, and, moreover, could in turn have been extinguished, just as Sixth Army had been at Stalingrad, without negating the existence of its Army Group. For that matter, had Army Group Center vanished, the military forces of our Reich would have continued to function to the end! Rüdiger, to be sure; I missed Rüdiger; but precisely because I identified with him so perfectly, his death was no more tragic than mine would have been. What actually crushed me was when a fifty-seven-millimeter Russian gun opened up on one of our Tigers and punched right through it. That time I did hear the crew screaming. And it burned, calmly and spectacularly, from the inside out. Until then I had truly believed that Tigers were safe.
The cripple croaked in my ear: Tungsten-cored ammunition. That’s their secret. Don’t worry. We’ll take vengeance on those Slavs.
Have you ever seen an injured bird at the seashore? Here come crabs from nowhere—they wait under the sand—and ring it round, cautiously at first; before you know it, the first crab has leapt onto the broken wing and pinched off a morsel. The bird struggles, but here come other crabs in a rush. That’s how it is when T-34s surround a Tiger or a Ferdinand, probing with their seventy-sixes until a close-range shot gets through; if that doesn’t work, the Russian infantrymen, who ride on the backs of those tanks like eggs glued down to a mother beetle’s shell, board us and shoot into every ventilation slit, or pour in gasoline and light it—oh, there’s nothing those Slavs won’t do! Then what? From a hole in a Panzer a hand dangles, half connected to a black puzzle of bones.38
7
My existence had become as heavy as a Stalinets S-60 tractor. What could I do but drag it forward? A line of Russians stretched behind me now; I didn’t dare raise my head to look at them, but they were laughing. Forward toward the final victory; that remained my direction and theirs.
The sun winked at me from the moles on an SU-152’s face. I ducked down, crawled through the sunflower stems beneath the great proboscis, avoided the blind square face of that evil thing which killed our Tigers. It didn’t see me.
The old man was right behind, dragging his crutch. Then he was beside me. Then he was ahead of me. We crawled and crawled. He never got tired.
At 2200 hours, with the night sky spider-legged by artillery fire, we stopped. Where we were remains disputable—between the second and third of the enemy’s defensive lines would be my guess. I longed to telephone Headquarters and give them our position report; they might even have had some use for that information. Whenever I got isolated on the Ostfront, which happened more often than you might imagine, I used to calm myself by visualizing myself amidst the switchboard operators all in a row; they sat facing the wall so that all any third party could have seen of them was their uniformed backs and cropped heads, a black phone dug in against each left ear, a bank of narrow metal shelves sprouting cables and wires like ivy; to me they represented consciousness itself; each one of them was a thought wired into other thoughts; together they comprised a brain, safely hidden under the earth, blind to the enemy outside: nothing could frighten them. Like any child, I used to will away monsters under the bed by shutting my eyes. This might not have been rational, but it was better than smoking cigarettes with Rüdiger, sitting in the dirt.
The old man said in my ear: Do you want me to show you how you can live?
I didn’t like him anymore. I would have preferred Volker, who was always loyal and volunteered for the night watch. He’d passed his life sitting on the grassy lip of a trench-womb, writing letters home which would never get there. That species of futility I respected.
Disdaining to answer, I started to crawl again, gripping my helmet-strap in my teeth, and I kept on until I found shelter behind the hulk of a burned Tiger tank, whose gun-turret went twice as high as I could stand. Now they were shooting at us with their antitank rifles, but blindly. If Dancwart were here, he would have opened up with his eighty-eight! The old man stayed right behind me. We hid there together, observing the hopeless seeking of our long white rays of antiaircraft light in the enemy darkness. When they stopped shooting, we kept hiding, because as Sergeant Gunther used to brilliantly remark, you never know.
Dawn came at 0300 hours. The old man repeated: Shall I show you how you can live?
I wouldn’t answer. Off to the north, I could see half a dozen Tigers locked in position against a pack of T-34s. All at once the sun glinted on their gunbarrels, and our Tigers began to fire. They killed every T-34, whose shots in turn bounced off the Tigers. I wanted to cheer, but didn’t dare. What if the Russians heard?
I’ll have to hang you for awhile, the cripple said.
Now I know who you are, I told him. You’re Wotan. Well, I don’t want your knowledge. Don’t you remember how Siegfried shoves Wotan out of the way? I’m Siegfried.
That’s only in Wagner, he said wearily. That’s incorrect.
We started to crawl eastward. I couldn’t shake him, which was in character for me; never would I have any chance of being Siegfried! “Between Two Fires,” that was I. What a perfect E-film! Lisca Malbran would have had more hope of representing German manhood than Siegfried the telephonist—how Rüdiger would have shaken his head at me!
After half an hour we rested in a Russian spider-hole, the dead Russian still in it below the waist, the rest of him sprawled out on the trampled wheat; he hardly stank yet, and his forage cap was pulled down over his eyes, so we didn’t need to enter into any relationship with him.
Doom never dies, said the old man.
I wouldn’t answer. We sucked in our cheeks beneath our helmets and off we went.
In the next trench lay one of our own dead, and beside him, a communications outfit! Longing to escape my hopelessness, I found myself trying to speak to FREYA on the muddy telephone; needless to say, the enemy had snipped the wire.
I understood all too well what the cripple expected of me. He wanted to place me in anguish, suspended between the zones until I could grow. But I was determined not to change in any way; that would have been disloyal to my own sufferings.
8
Let me expand on this point: Perseverance is eternally correct, even when it inflames the other side. I remember from the fairytales that Grandmother Elsa used to tell me that it’s necessary to follow without the slightest deviation the advice of the fox, fish, sleepwalker, raven, telephone, ragged dwarf; moreover, this advice grows all the more valid as it disguises itself as nonsense: When stealing the golden horse, saddle him up in the worn tackle, not the jeweled harness which hangs on the other peg. When stealing the Golden Princess, who offers to come with you willingly on condition that you permit her to say goodbye to her parents, you must forbid her precisely this. Be firm; let her weep! In other words, the reward will fall only to him who obeys blindly and faithfully.
Now, I have always been willing to submit myself, particularly to women. Nonetheless, in my weaker moments, further weakened by the treasonous insinuations of Rüdiger, it had begun to seem to me that unthinking obedience, “cadaver obedience” we called it, had lost us Moscow and Stalingrad; it hadn’t yet won us Leningrad; nor could Operation Citadel be said to be progressing happily. In short, my belief in the sleepwalker had died. But he believed! He held Europe Central together in his sleep! FREYA would have short-circuited herself without him. My field telephone buzzed out code-clicks of another impending victory: He’d force the enemy to fall back . . .
Once upon a time, when Fremde Heere Ost cautioned him that the Russians were deploying seven hundred new tanks against us every month, the sleepwalker replied: The Russians are dead!
What if saying so could make it so? What if throwing away Sixth Army at Stalingrad corresponded to saddling the golden horse in ragged leather? What
if Operation Citadel would win us the Golden Princess if and only if we threw ourselves away?
When the four dozen ebony men in chains appear, you must not reply when they ask who you are. You must allow them first to beat you, then to cut off your head. When T-34s converge on you, you must gaze steadily up their snouts. Don’t yield a single square centimeter to them! If you follow these orders faithfully, then the talking serpent will change back into a princess for you to marry, and you’ll become King of the Golden Castle.
I wish I could marry the Golden Princess, I thought, and it turned out that I’d thought aloud.
The old man replied: Those are the first sensible words you’ve spoken.
Unfortunately, there’s no Golden Princess.
In fact there is.
Perhaps on top of the Siegessäule in Berlin . . .
No, she’s straight ahead, just past the Thirty-eighth Defensive Construction Directorate! However, the Russians aren’t going to make it easy. They don’t like you.
Well, to be sure, they have good reason for that, I said. But they were doomed to lose their lands. It’s the will of history. They ought to love us now, for what they had will never come back.
Then show them the will of history! Or are you afraid of a few Slavs?
What could I reply? As I keep saying, I’m only a telephonist. I don’t mind admitting to being a timid sort. Back before my Lina left me, or I her (I forget which came first), we used to sit on a bench overlooking the Landwehrkanal, and in September the acorns struck the ground like gunshots; sometimes they rang off the backs of neighboring benches; I freely confess that I felt anxious; one reason that she left me was because she wanted a hero when I reminded her of a Jew.
So what did I reply?—I’ll keep on! I shouted.
A headless Russian, dripping with worms, burst out of his grave and advanced toward me, clawing at the air as he came. I blew him up with a hand grenade.
9
When I refused his help for the third time, the old man vanished. He went up in smoke; he was gone, just like Rüdiger, Dancwart, Gernot and Volker. I was glad; I didn’t want to be in his fairytale. Somewhere there had to be a garden of golden pears where I could waylay the Golden Princess or at least steal the golden horse and ride away to Baden-Baden. That was the fairytale I preferred to be in, the one which ended with my delicious Führer-parcel. As it was, I couldn’t get out of this fairytale spoken by Russians, whose mouths were Degatyarev DP machine guns, which we called record players because of their disk-like magazines. FREYA tried to whisper-click secrets to me on the field telephone, but the Russians shouted her down. Oh, this was becoming a nasty story; how I longed to fall back into Europe Central! But first I was going to have to overcome homogeneous forces in concentration, echeloned defenses in depth, hermeneutically endless layers of tank traps, ditches, spider holes. And those T-34s, my God! Sergeant Gunther used to make us aim for the reserve fuel tanks which sat squarishly behind the hulls, but you know what happened to Sergeant Gunther.
I’ll fight to the last man! I cried, at which ten dead Russians exploded out of the ground and began marching toward me, grinding worms between their teeth. Even the sleepwalker would have screamed. I dodged around them. They kept trudging blindly on toward our lines; the worms had eaten their eyes.
If only we’d had more Tigers! Granted, they weren’t invulnerable, but when they traveled in packs, the T-34s didn’t dare fire at them; then the T-34s dug in and hid like me.
Ammunition, like all life-force, is heavy; a man can carry only so much of it. I didn’t dare to count my rounds. This I did know: The weaker I got, the stronger they got. Here came more Russians! I sent them to their second death or got away from them; then their brothers sprouted up, new shoots from moldering onions. I still had my cartridge belt, with a few cartridges ready.
Here came a Slav as evil-looking as Rasputin, with stars on his shoulder-tabs, and I was all alone! He saw me; he stretched out his arms to me. And this Russian tried to kiss me on the mouth, which I knew would have been my death, so I blew him up with my last grenade, but here came more Russians. As the sleepwalker had insisted, the Russians are dead!
Once upon a time I’d been an invulnerable constituent of our herds of armored personnel carriers gouging their way across the wheat fields of the Kursk salient. The Germans are dead! If I’d only had something or someone to sell to the devil, you can be sure that I would have done it, for I was in difficulties!
10
The next thing that happened was that, miraculously overcoming the incessant pressure of the unconscious, I penetrated one more enemy line. Well, so what? A stereoscopic rangefinder was gazing at me like the uplifted heads of two cobras, and then I saw a Russian hiding in the sunflowers; I shot him with my very last bullet! This act freed the way for me to encounter an old lady in a hut on chicken legs; she was weaving something out of worms. Was that supposed to scare me?
I know how my psychotherapist would have categorized her: an angry feminine principle, which is to say (just in case I’d missed the point) an angry woman, a furious woman. But I myself happen to believe that she was simply an old lady in a hut on chicken legs. There’s no such thing as magic, Tiger tanks excepted.
Have a bowl of soup, she said, but I refused. Never eat anything in the other world! Persephone nibbles six pomegranate seeds and finds herself compelled to live in Hades for half the year. That was why for security reasons the Führer caused to be destroyed all the candy and caviar which Marshal Antonescu sent him.
What is it that you want? she demanded. She kept nodding and nodding.
Nothing, really, I replied. I’m only a telephonist.
Well, you must be here for something.
That’s precisely what I used to say to Rüdiger.
I made soup out of his eyes. And now you’re here.
I quoted her something I’d heard somewhere: To be a German means to do a thing for its own sake.
She stood up from her loom, waddled over to the hearth and stirred her blackly bubbling broth with a ladle made out of an airman’s goggles. Oh, how Rüdiger would have shaken his head! As for me, I couldn’t help but feel anxious. Was that news?
All this time you’ve been hunting for the secret of life, said the witch. Well, you won’t find that here. But I have something more important—the secret of death.
I confess that her offer tempted me for an instant. People will tell you that the darkness needs to be faced; that’s why we had to attack in the East to begin with! And if I only possessed the secret of death, I could have fulfilled Operation Citadel all by myself, applying what von Manstein calls a clear focal point of effort at the decisive spot. Then FREYA would love me. But what if knowing that secret changed me? I was determined not to change. To get right down to it, I wasn’t here by choice; I was only a telephonist.
Forgive me, I told her, but I’m afraid of death. For that matter, I wouldn’t even have accepted the secret of life from you. How can knowledge be anything but death?
You’re going to be sorry! she replied. I think she felt rejected.
Rejected content will come out somewhere else. That’s what my psychotherapist kept saying. I know, I know. And I was out of bullets.
11
So I’d rejected knowledge. Forward to the final victory!
What I longed for was to get back in touch with the big black telephone at Europe Central, where true knowledge lived, the kind which was both lifeless and deathless. I’d been trained to will myself inside the telephone, and gaze up at the underside of the black bakelite pan at the constellations of signals and connections as bright as the sparks on Valkyries’ spearpoints. Then I could guide myself; then I’d know where to go, what to do.
Oh, I was so lonely, so lonely! Just as a burning tank roars blindly about until it blunders onto a land mine and perishes, so I was; I tried to regroup and reinforce, but hopelessly. And the sky was always dark. Around me, T-34s kept pouring endlessly toward every operational objective
. And FREYA had left me! FREYA was Lina, whom from now on I would think of as LINA. To speak more correctly, FREYA and LINA were sisters. I should have understood that before. Some things we’re blind to until it’s already too late. For instance, the Reds’ thrust against Twenty-third Panzer Corps prevented Division Grossdeutschland from participating in the drive on Kursk. Who knows? If Grossdeutschland had been there, Citadel might have succeeded. If LINA had loved me, what might my possibilities have been?—FREYA and LINA were both as pretty as the globs of molten metal which sometimes spew from a burning plane.
In a sunflower field, a cloud of fire idled like a swarm of flies over a dead Tiger. Then came broken carapaces crazy in the mud, doughnut-shaped trenches in the scorched sand, twin wires twitching in a skull, an induction coil spiraling infinitely in someone’s eye-socket: sufficient for me to finally raise FREYA!
I gave the password; that was why she let me touch her. Then I signaled: What must I guard against?
Sixteenth Russian Air Army . . . said FREYA. Her voice was warm and cold at the same time in that spectacular metallic fashion of gold.
Pillboxes and mortar positions . . . added LINA. I’d loved her the best. But it was now my duty to win the Golden Princess.
And then I lost them both; I’d been cheated out of that endless moment, sentimentalized by the etchings of Käthe Kollwitz, when a woman bids her soldier-boy goodbye.
Europe Central Page 63