Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  12

  I went on deeper and deeper into my own loneliness. (As I’d learned from my total education, the object must be fanatically pursued.) Soldiers and machine-guns lurking in the corn, soldiers hiding in river-grass as they awaited their turn to wade across the water in single file, they were all behind me now; it was rare that I came across the ruins of tanks canted in the mud; once I bypassed a gun which was camouflaged with wavering black stripes, almost like the facade of a Swiss cuckoo-clock house; this was an anomaly; I’d crept beyond almost everything. In other words, I was deep in the unconscious now, and thereby increasingly vulnerable to armored attacks on my lengthening flank.

  So I took up the black mouthpiece, sucker of wounds, and dialed Allfather in Berlin! I wanted to tell him that there was an enemy awaiting outside, a giant in a helmet; his mouth was as vast as the gunbarrel of an SU-152; above all, I wanted to confess that the unconscious was too much for me, but I didn’t dare, so when the sleepwalker came on the line I merely asked him whether I should move forward in support of our left flank or attack out of my position. This was the sort of question that Allfather liked. (It wasn’t true that he only had one eye. Like me, he refused all knowledge which might infect him with death.)

  You want me to concern myself with this very particular question? he shouted. When the Jewish wirepullers have already wormed their cables into my telephone? You scoundrel!

  Yes, my Führer!

  Give me your commanding officer at once. I’m going to order you to be shot!

  Yes, my Führer. He’s dead, my Führer.

  So you’re the only one?

  Yes, my Führer.

  And you stand prepared to carry on the reconquest of these lost territories?

  Yes, my Führer!

  He lowered his voice and whispered: You’ll need to be very careful. There are Jews all around you. And the farther east you go, the closer you’ll get to those yellow Asiatics. Stalin’s one of those. Spare no one, do you hear me? Be fair, but ruthless!

  Yes, my Führer! But I have no more bullets!

  He might have slammed down his black telephone, but I’ll never believe it. Allfather was my loving Uncle Wolf ! In any event, once again the line had gone dead.

  What to do but soldier on? All I could do was my best. At any moment now, I said to myself, I’d see more giants and dragons, not to mention a castle with a red flag where an ogre would be raping Aryan girls. And then what? A magic weapon of some kind, or . . .

  13

  Now I was coming into autumn. In September those gracefully bullet-shaped acorns in the Tiergarten, shiny as fingernails, begin to fall to the ground and decay inside, so that when Lina and I break them open they seem to be filled with rich black gunpowder. That’s autumn for me. When the leaves turn yellow and spin down into the Landwehrkanal, they’re more vividly golden than ever before, since not only can we see through them as if they were lantern slides—after all, they’ve hung between us and the sun—but they’re now also in irrevocable motion; they shift, showing us the sun on one edge or the other, then fall full on like paratroopers, and it’s all so fast; they speed downward, meteors, liquid globs of gold; but once in that water, which is green-brown in the light, green-blue in the shade, they’re nothing but debris; they’re dirt. That’s how autumn is, that sad golden instant. Autumn is No Man’s Land.

  Nourishing myself on ammunition from dead men, I passed tank-herds rolling evenly across the meadow toward the forest of smoke-plumes on the horizon, but they had nothing to do with me. They got devoured by hungry clouds which resembled the semicircular connectors between notes in a Shostakovich score. I can’t say I hadn’t expected that, because by now the weather was getting very gloomy. Meanwhile a flock of Shturmoviks, staggered line abreast, came croaking through the sky; with the red stars on their sides, they resembled September’s maple leaves caught in a gust. Oh, but what if they saw me? I hid in one of the many white-rimmed craters left by their bombs and kept steadily on; my psychotherapist, not to mention Sergeant Gunther, would have been proud. After that, a talking skull in a bunker wanted to tell me something or give me something, but, frankly, I didn’t care to be enlightened. A raven croaked at me: Bring the shadow back to the Germans! I shot at it and missed.

  An enemy armed car! That was serious. But I dodged it; I also escaped the witches in the sunflower fields. Bursting through a ruined palisade, with my gun high in the air, and running across a burning field whose crops were dead tanks, toward a destination utterly obscured by smoke, I felt so frightened that I wasn’t even scared.

  14

  After a long time I saw light on the horizon, a hellishly familiar light, but it wasn’t from tracers or explosions; when I got closer I saw that it was metal; to be exact, it was a wall of metal plates—hatchcovers, shields or battleship decking. And this wall was polished so that it shone like fire.

  Well, I was a telephonist; nobody could fool me; I knew about this sort of signal. Even if I hadn’t seen it, I’d read about it. There’d be a sleeping Valkyrie on the other side. All I had to was unhelm her and . . . But what did I care? Every Valkyrie flies away someday, even if she’s been a loving wife for seven years. She craves war. Even if I knew how to make jewels for her, she’d leave me. They always leave me, because I’m nothing but a telephonist.

  Straining to encode myself into something, I became prescient. I could almost feel the fingers of their reconnaissance goblins on the back of my neck. Now I could receive the signals of a nearby cave of monsters! Here came the first of them, a T-34 with its round twin hatch-covers open to vertical like astonished crab-eyes. And I knew that it was expected of me at Europe Central that I brave these T-34s in order to win the Golden Princess, and I even had some notion of how to go about it (first, get the command tank, the one with the radio transmitter; the other tanks can only receive), but hadn’t I already done enough? So I ran forward toward the wall, which shone ever more brightly, like a mountain of snow. Really I was running away from the T-34s, but when you flee one menace for another, the world will call you brave.

  Oh, it was getting icy all around me! That armored car was chasing me again, but it skidded on the ice and overturned; the last I saw of it, it was spinning round and round on its back, until a great steel eagle with Klieg lights for eyes came speeding down and carried it off. Now what about those T-34s? Better not to look!

  I see you shining, my beloved, chaotic, all-knowing, heartless Russia. Stalin’s daughter Svetlana wrote that. She was referring to this wall.

  Cubes of concrete half-sunk into prisoner-dug hills of ice gave me magic lurking-places as I made my serpentine way forward; I didn’t want to be the enemy in the open, the one which Comrade Bukharin unmasked. Meanwhile, the wall had grown so bright that I no longer needed to open my eyes to see. At last I understood what it must be like to be a sleepwalker.

  The wall was guarded by a man made of steel; he was as stern as Colonel-General Hoth, whom I’d once seen, maybe in Front, maybe in Signal; as I recall, he was peering through a twin-necked rangefinder at the Slavs although there were probably no Slavs in sight; I experienced the pleasure of watching Rüdiger shake his head over that color picture of Colonel-General Hoth, whom we never met. As for this other man of steel, he resembled a Teutonic knight and was sitting with his metal hands between his knees; the ankles of his steel boots were glitteringly articulated like a nickel-alloy shower hose; our time gave birth to men like that; in future decades I was going to keep seeing more and more of them. I don’t mind confessing that he was too fearsome for me!

  He saw me. He came striding forward. If I’d had a grenade I would have thrown it at him.

  Fortunately, there happened to be a mucky bloody hole under the wall—perfect for a wretch of a telephonist!

  So I wormed myself under and now I stood in front of the castle, which rose as infinitely high as the black smoke which boils up through the hatch of a dying T-34.

  I should have asked someone what to do next.
But whom? Not that old cripple who knew everything and kept insinuating that I just had to trust him; not the old witch or the talking skull. I’d tried to ask Allfather, but you know how that turned out. LINA might have known. Once she even took a trip to the East; she’d been studying linguistics. But LINA and FREYA were both out of commission now. In short, I had nothing; I was nothing.

  All the same, my Golden Princess was waiting for me in the doorway, alone.

  Why? Why does a woman ever do anything for a man who’s not a hero? Because she was sorry for me.

  15

  When one gazes up at the victory goddess atop the Siegessäule one perceives her graceful femininity; the way she outstretches the golden garland is simultaneously tender and regal, but what’s the expression on her golden face? She’s too high, too far away. That’s how I’ve felt about each woman in my life. For their part, women have tried to understand me, but what is there to understand? I am nothing more than I am. When on a windless Sunday in the Tiergarten sunlight moves like flames through the leaves of a seemingly motionless oak, there’s no explanation. Why can’t I feel the wind? Why can’t I see the leaves twitching? With women and me it’s exactly the same. Rüdiger, my double, never knew women, either. That’s why femaleness summed itself up for him in the semi-masklike face of Lisca Malbran. Lisca Malbran in “Young Heart,” smiling directly at me, with white, white speckles of glare on her glossy grey lips, wasn’t she the Golden Princesss? Lisca Malbran’s soft and naked shoulders, Lisca Malbran leaning demurely forward, gazing at the cinema hero with her chastely alert eyes; Lisca Malbran in yet another calm, half-smiling, semi-formal embrace with Harald Holberg in “Between Two Fires” (Rüdiger used to say that he hated Harald Holberg more than the Slavs, because it wasn’t right that any man should touch her); Lisca Malbran in Signal magazine, wearing a pretty white sailor miniskirt which I myself for all my lack of masculinity longed to rip off of her—she held a coil of rope in her right hand while nipping at her lower lip with a smile of sweet determination—seventeen-year-old Lisca Malbran was certainly a victory goddess, a Goldelse, I should say, for that is the nickname of the golden figure on our Siegessäule. Lisca Malbran used to get mentioned almost every hour, back when Rüdiger and Volker and I were standing in the road in our shiny boots, smoking real tobacco or singing songs as we watched another village burn.

  16

  Well? said the Golden Princess, with her hands on her hips.

  No doubt I should have asked her to give us a V-weapon so that we could end the war on our terms, preserving all victories and triumphs. At the very least I should have saved Berlin. (But what is Berlin supposed to be, but cobwebs and chestnuts?) Any decent German would have wanted that. But I wasn’t decent. I don’t believe that Rüdiger would have wished for a V-weapon, either; his heart’s desire would have been some kind of carnal knowledge. (Her hair was as dark as the Vltava River on a cloudy spring day.) But I wasn’t even man enough for that; I was only a telephonist!

  How could I bring her back to the Reich? What would FREYA and LINA say, not to mention my father? Wouldn’t ordinary life disappoint her? No, let me say it straight: Wouldn’t I have disappointed her? I was so accustomed by then to receiving and transmitting the messages of others that when I dreamed erotic dreams about anybody, even LINA, I found myself watching private film of her when she was young, I mean really young like Lisca Malbran, and she was sitting pale, soft and perfect with her thighs spread and her eyes closed and her neck-tendons straining but her lips almost parted as her thumb pressed down on the base of her belly and her other fingers worked frantically to bear her to orgasm. Where was I while she was doing that? Plugged into a telephone bank! Perhaps she might have saved me with her love, but that was crazy, too, because if she made too much of me, I’d fail to live up to her; how could I be a Golden Prince? I wasn’t better or worse than everyone else, and everyone else was getting slaughtered, so how could I possibly be saved? In short, what would I do if she placed me, or I placed myself, in a position of trying to be supernaturally noble? I’d only kill myself.

  So I wished my own wish, the coward’s wish, which was to be every morning sitting in a Biergarten under the trees with the old widows who didn’t have to worry because they’d already lost so much; they touched their cups of ersatz coffee or gripped their glasses of wartime Rheinwine; they whispered in each other’s ears about whose grandsons had fallen on the Ostfront, which Jews had been taken away; even if their houses got bombed away they were still the lucky ones. That was the life I wanted. I wasn’t pushy; I didn’t even request creamcakes. Aching bones and loneliness, dead friends, the Golden Princess didn’t have to change any of that. She didn’t even have to pour coffee into my cup. Oh, I was an easy man; I was wishing for trifles! And if I couldn’t have those, I’d settle for lurking once more with Rüdiger in my zigzag trench, with a Tiger tank guarding me on the horizon.

  17

  I made my wish. I knelt down at the knees of my darling Golden Princess. When she forbore from slaying me, I dared to rise. I took a deep breath. Happily ever after? I prayed.

  When I kissed her it suddenly came true that none of this had ever been real, and that what I’d taken for enemy tank-herds was but a grand formation of leaves scuttering all together across the sidewalks by the Siegessäule.

  18

  On 9.7.43, when theDeath’s Head Division seized Red October Village, which lay on the innermost defensive line before Kursk itself, goal of Operation Citadel, our sleepwalker must have thought that the Golden Princess couldn’t get away from him now; but on 17.7.43 he had to cancel Citadel, in order to solve the new Anglo-American threat in Italy. Field-Marshal von Manstein served him with a writ of I-told-you-so. In the spring of 1944, the sleepwalker relieved him of his command, which, considering how the war turned out, was just as well for that gentleman. Good Prussian that he was, he bore his retirement and subsequent prison sentence with proud restraint. In Lost Victories he writes about Citadel: And so the final German offensive in the East ended in fiasco, no matter that the enemy opposite the two attacking formations of Army Group South suffered four times their losses in prisoners, dead and wounded.

  I was never in Army Group South, of course. That must be why the achievement which consoled von Manstein leaves me cold. I was with Dancwart, whom I often saw clothed in Russian blood; Volker, who always insisted on taking his turn in the most dangerous spot; Gernot, who always enjoyed fighting in the open; Rüdiger, who was generous even to enemies. We were all excellent Panzer grenadiers with straps around our helmets. Well, after all, what’s the difference?

  The engagement at Prokhorovka (12.7.43) is usually considered the precise locus of our defeat in the Kursk Salient. I’m told that this was the greatest tank battle in history, but I can’t confirm it; I was sitting on a park bench at that time, kissing Lisca Malbran on the mouth. Somewhere north of Bjelgorod, in a place where the fields had been deeply cut by our dark tank-tracks whose shadows were darker than blood, our Tiger tanks crushed the grass and wheat, the black crosses on them as dark as their ruts in that glaring summer light. But T-34s sucked the life out of them. Stalin gloated: If the Battle of Stalingrad signalled the twilight of the German-Fascist Army, then the Battle of Kursk confronted it with catastrophe.—In short, he agreed with von Manstein. Well, who says that Citadel wasn’t worthwhile? Our withdrawal enabled those Slavs to execute many of our collaborators.

  After Operation Citadel came Operations Kutuzov and Rumiantsev, each of which ended badly for us. It was all as rapid as the westward recession of summer greenness; winter was coming from the east again, but in the west the moist emerald fields still insisted that it was July; the green shadows of the oaks and lindens were as warmly humid as the sweat from my Golden Princess’s armpits. We’d already withdrawn to the Hagen Line. I think I must have been there; I almost remember screaming: Run for your life! It’s T-34s!

  They took Orel away from us, but not before we’d blown it up and killed more Slavs
. There they discovered the mass graves and began making propaganda against us. By the end of August, Kharkov was lost. Then they launched Operation Suvorov . . .

  So we retreated, laying down land mines like metal suitcases, and next to me a shellshocked colonel with sunken eyes kept saying over and over again: My name is Hagen. My job is to take the blame. ‣

  THE TELEPHONE RINGS

  As a general rule, writing for two voices is only successful . . . when discords are prepared by a common note.

  —Rimsky-Korsakoff, Principles of Orchestration (draft, 1891)

  1

  He dreamed that the big black telephone rang and the voice in his ear was hers; that was when he thought that he was going to incur a heart attack. She wanted him to visit her, but he didn’t think he could bear it. In that agonizingly beautiful voice of hers, she said that she needed him to come. So he went to her, at which point she said that what she actually needed was for them to be friends. That, he answered, he definitely couldn’t bear; so long as he didn’t see her, ever, then what they had been to each other could stay frozen just the way it was, but as soon as they began to be “friends,” the thing he refused to let go of would really be over, over. He was weeping when he stood up to leave her and she, refraining of course from approaching him, was gazing at him with implacable gentleness. So he faced away from her and began to go out; he did in fact go out of his dream, awaking with tears on his cheeks and the old longing poisoning him to the very bones; it was all he could do not to go to her right then, or at least telephone her; but, after all, everyone should do his own work all the way to the end. All the while, the familiarity of his anguish was such a comfortable old trick; it did, so to speak, comfort him in a way. The reformed addict who feels the craving almost believes in it, then merely smiles; that was the sort of fellow he was now; he’d never get rid of it now, but after all it was better than the other feeling, the fear which also lived in his bones, year by year eating away his skeleton from the inside out. As for Elena Konstantinovskaya, he remembered for a fact how jealous she had been—why, she’d never trusted him even with his male colleagues, Glikman especially. What was it about that man? Their friendship wasn’t as close as Glikman thought; for that matter, anyone who presumed on a, a, well, an intimacy, let’s say, with Dmitri Dmitriyevich Shostakovich was welcome to dream whatever liked; he himself didn’t mind armoring himself in irony if that would, well, the point is that every instant he’d spent away from Elena embittered her to a more fantastic degree; because the way she quite reasonably looked at it, he was still living with Nina, wasn’t he? And he was never going to leave Nina, never. Therefore, he had no right to further subdivide his heart even for innocuous friendships, did he? Did he? He’d been so often afraid of Elena! Oh, the times when she threw a plate against the wall simply because Sollertinsky had telephoned, or snatched up one of his scores, threatening to tear it up for absolutely no reason that he’d ever comprehended—how he’d hated her, really! Or at least, how he’d feared her . . . ! Why then had she so deeply wounded him by walking out? Well, it had certainly been a shock. He needed to analyze this shock without delay.