Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  2

  Unconsciousness can never examine consciousness; but the reverse is possible, for consciousness is reliable, like a Ju-52 transport plane. On a sunset as purple as the identity card of an NKVD agent, I passed behind the Iron Curtain once more, and this time I meant to maintain a death-grip upon my impressions. Oh, the mysterious East! I was there for a good long while, I couldn’t tell you how long exactly, but I do remember snow and darkness; I think I experienced a symphony which stunned and chained me with chords of steel, although it’s possible that I heard not the orchestral elaboration but the core of it, in which case it would have been performed by a bespectacled genius who played by memory for me on a grand piano which was for sale, payment to be made in bread; I remember kissing somebody named Elena, but I’m not certain anymore whether she was named Elena Konstantinovskaya, Elena Kruglikova, or possibly Elena Rosetti-Solescu, with whom I seem to associate the nickname Coca. I’m fairly sure that the pavements were shimmering and shining with ice; I believe that I might have seen children peeping at me from within their fur-ruffed hoods; but I have a West German friend (codenamed HIRSCH) who subscribes to National Geographic, and he once showed me a pictorial about Canada, where there are people called Eskimos, in whose existence I disbelieve because they live in conditions which the phenomenon of our Iron Curtain can’t explicate: daylight for six months, darkness otherwise; but should there in fact be Eskimos, then the fur-hooded children in HIRSCH’s article may be germane; although it’s equally plausible that the children I met were Kazakhs; I could have easily gone that far east; I was in a land as deep and broad as the devil’s antitank trench; I heard the ticking of a metronome.

  Well, was she Elena Konstantinovskaya or Elena Kruglikova? And what was she to me? I’ve retained an ice-clear memory of the tight black fur caps which seem to match Kazakh women’s hair, so I must have been in Kazakhstan. I can also recollect blonde Russian girls whose blonde fur shoulders—yes, they must have been wearing fox or maybe white sable, so was I at the opera?—resembled sunlight on the snow. But the rest was dark; that I’d swear to.—What category of darkness, did you ask? Dirt-black like a soldier’s hands, iron-black like the Curtain itself—with a taste of blue and grey, as is customary in metals.

  That’s the sum of all intelligence I managed to gather, which really wasn’t bad for a first trip. So I decided to cross back into West Berlin. I yearned to see how successfully I prevent these recollections from effervescing away; and I might have had any number of additional objectives, too, but I can’t remember them. When I got up to the Iron Curtain itself, where darkness is particularly dark, the border guard kept his light upon me for a such a long time that I began to wonder whether he had always done this; and then he said: Why are your eyes so shifty today?

  Shocked and frightened, trying to formulate an answer, I fidgeted, and then I could actually see him lean forward behind the dark glass, much as if I were looking into the dark water of the Kryukov Canal and then glimpsed the darker darkness of some fish or monster swimming up toward me; yes, he leaned forward and he crooned: What are you, actually?

  3

  I feared that official; so next time I determined to dig my illegal way; in this rubbled earth we all dig like gravediggers, mindful that some fleeing-man might have stopped here to bury a golden coronation sword, or maybe even a suitcase filled with gold and silver spoons from a castle in Krakow; we all hide things when we see death coming, and it may well be that by thus interring our treasures, we prepare our minds for our own entombment. Pharaoh must have been comforted to know that his scepter and his women would sleep forever with him. All the while, to be sure, one longs to believe that it’s possible to awake from that sleep, crawl back under the Curtain and reclaim one’s property, which remains (another hope!) safely cached away from the expropriations of Commissar Death—aren’t human beings absurd?

  Lifting up a corner of the Iron Curtain in the vicinity of what would soon be called Checkpoint Charlie, I discovered darkness within, but I was prepared; I had with me the latest “Eagle” electric torch! Now I could see domes, bells, eagles and round windows. My eyes were already getting heavy, but I was ready for that, too; I started pinching myself. This must be Yugoslavia. The edifices of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, shellholed although they might be, spread themselves out before me like the pages of a book, with windows in place of words. What should I have read there? This place (so I’ve been told—by Yugoslavs, coincidentally) is the soul of Europe, or at least the Slavic soul. But why accept a map drawn by others? As lightly as a soap bubble I sleepwalked farther east. What did I see? Better yet, what didn’t I see? My tale is cluttered with visual bric-a-brac, none of which matters; it’s all rubble, so to speak; and if I lead you down an alley where red stars and red spiders dance on strings, that’s mere reality, which, being itself instead of ourselves, remains inherently alien, like the pretty flames which ought to be ornaments but betray the child by burning its hand. Actually, nothing’s nearly as real as a certain old West Berliner lady in black who gazes lovingly at me from deep-set eyes, crouching beside her empty basket; nowadays I see her every morning just before I slip beneath the Wall. She’s an operative of the Gehlen Organization, and she’s codenamed NEY. She neither alters nor sleeps. And now here I was in Byelorussia; well, well. That must have been why I started to dream of something pale—snow, maybe; well, whatever it was, it was almost as white as the service colors of the Organization Todt Frontline Command . . . so I pinched myself again. And now my flashlight beam picked out a Slavic hero on a rearing charger; the pediment was bas-reliefed with other Slavs; then came the war wreaths, graves and fires, nationalism being kept decently within Communist bounds. I admit that I was definitely getting sleepy by then. The faces of the inhabitants seemed to drift about me like seaweed. I had somehow entered a crowd of them: Slavs or dream-figures; their bony white faces, made terrifying by black mouths and broken black eye-sockets, kept gazing out at me from long black cloaks and dresses which were interrupted only by the white triangles of wrists emerging from dark sleeves and entering black pockets. I thought I heard the name Elena Kruglikova; perhaps it was Konstantinovskaya. Pinching myself as hard as I could, I discovered that a beautiful woman was kissing me. Probably I was on the Tverskaia then, in one of those icy doorways where they sell wooden toys.

  4

  Everything which has existed will always exist. This is the chief consolation, however spurious, of both religion and mathematics. Somewhere farther back in Russia, Nicholas II’s salon de réception survived with its gilt-edged screens and chairs, a carpet of dizzying ornamentality, mainly white, like a jigsaw puzzle of ice-floes; and on the wall, a depiction of an immense military column—are they on horseback?—this room’s so dim! . . . Someone is saluting; it seems to be sunset—probably this now obsolete receiving area had been transferred, as would have been an entirely correct decision, to an iceberg. And this woman kissing me, whoever she was, I had to believe that even if I lost her she would always be with me. But that won’t be true of Shostakovich, because, you know . . . Elena was kissing me, kissing me! Now where had she gone? My flashlight battery was dead; I started digging blindly westward. The war between Germany and Russia had been a conflict between lava and ice; ice had won, but everything that the ice had chilled to death, and everything that the lava had seared away, were safe somewhere, meaning Russia, since Adenauer has proved that Russia is the collective unconscious. According to the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, volume fifteen, love for an idea, which is to say for the no longer consciously “existent,” can take the form of an intellectual ecstasy that may be possible only at certain cultural levels, each of which must be guarded and demarcated, first by the People’s Police, then by the Soviet Military Authority, then finally by home units of the Red Army. This is why the Iron Curtain was in everybody’s interest.

  But even then, when we couldn’t possibly know that it would someday get pulled down and interred in a lead mine in Ekaterinberg, tha
t Europe Central’s Bolshevized courtyards of rubble, skulls and boarded-up palaces would either be taken over by crypto-Fascist separatists (among whom I regretfully include the West German NIKA, who compromised Trotskyite organizations from 1951 until he was neutralized in 1974), or else fall into the clutches of the Hotel Astoria, where happy American tourists carried lacework, wooden dolls, absinthe and prewar folios up to their rooms, I could sense that the Iron Curtain would not be eternal. And I freely admit that this saddened me. A pyramid of flame (to pick a familiar wartime example) possesses a specific shape at any given instant, and a general shape over time; we call it a pyramid only for convenience; it’s writhing upward, getting nowhere in particular, doomed to subsidence. But an Iron Curtain, if it only lasted, would give us something to navigate us from good to evil and back again, even if we disagreed as to which was which! Well, it’s vanished now, it really has, like the prewar icon shops of Saint Petersburg, and I’m now going to tell you exactly how it happened.

  5

  But first it’s necessary to mention that when I came tunneling back into my own zone, yawning and rubbing my eyes, it was blinding daylight, and so they saw me and the sirens went off.

  They took me by taxi, not by Green Minna, thank God, to the Gehlen Organization to be interrogated; and in a room without windows, a pale, pale man who wore dark glasses said to me: You’ve absorbed the Russian mentality.

  How can you tell?

  There’s something of the Russian soul in you, that emotional, sentimental, immeasurable something . . .

  He opened a black folder which bore the red-and-white label, and he showed me that my name had been deleted from the list of persons to be trusted. I need not claim that he terrified me even ten percent as much as the the East German border official had done; all the same, whenever authority’s representatives define my soul, I can’t help but wonder if that clicking sound I hear in the basement is the firing squad cocking triggers; so I asked him, wanting to gain as much information as possible: What do I need to do to be trusted again?

  Kill someone.

  And then?

  We’ll forget that you concerned us. We might even pay you.

  The desk drawer sprang open, and shoving aside two long heavy pistols and a pair of spurs like silver sun-wheels (they must have belonged to the prewar Polish cavalry), he fished out a brand-new Walther and a box of ammunition: Geco, 7.65 millimeter.

  They’re special, he said with a strangely shy smile, and I knew then that he had cast the bullets himself. (Those sunken eyes in that pale, puffy face, that even voice; whom did he remind me of?)

  I opened the box. The casings were brass, but each projectile was solid silver.

  You see, he explained, they’re vampires over there. You can only kill a Slav with one of these.

  Knowing now that I would betray him for the sake of the beautiful woman who’d kissed me, I said: That’s all very well, but how can I stay awake?

  Do you swear to uphold the “watertight bulkhead” system of the Gehlen Organization?

  Naturally. I mean, I . . .

  Yes or no?

  I do.

  Swallow this pill. You’ll never sleep again.

  You mean I won’t be able to dream?

  Dreams are for cowards. Swallow it, and be quick about it, or else I’ll have to press this button.

  Do you have any liquid to wash it down with?

  Liquid’s for cowards.

  I see, I said, pretending to swallow the capsule. Actually it lay beneath my tongue. Now I really needed to get out of there, because it was starting to dissolve. With every moment, I would sleep a little worse.

  Excuse me, I said, but now I need to piss.

  Take this pill. You’ll never—

  But I sometimes enjoy pissing—

  You do? I’ll note that in your file. All right. Go down the hall, but don’t forget that we’re watching you. Can you guess what I miss most?

  No, I said, fidgeting urgently.

  The beech forests of Lower Saxony. They’re locked away in Dreamland now. Did you by any chance see them?

  No.

  Answer just for me. This isn’t official at all. You know, there’s a certain long line of trees beneath long lines of mist, with the sky between them cut off, strangled you might say, and my father’s house stands straight ahead; it has an exceptionally steep roof and it’s made of stone. Have you been there?

  I go farther east.

  Farther east! You really are a natural! he said proudly. You’ve been codenamed HINDEMITH. Don’t worry. We’re going to make a man out of you.

  Rushing out of his office, I found the lavatory, bolted myself inside a stall, removed the pill, wrapped it up in toilet paper and hid it inside the porcelain tank. Fortunately, it floated. I was already feeling more wide awake than I’d been in years.

  Good, he said when I’d returned. This is the one you’re going to kill.

  He showed me a photograph of a pallid, balding man with thick glasses: the Soviet composer Shostakovich.

  He said to me: He’s the one behind all this.

  Then he said: The birds in the Tiergarten, the green summer light in the Tiergarten, we’re going to get all that back.

  6

  Why yes, said Shostakovich with an inconstant attempt at a witty smile, even in Leningrad, even this far, so to speak, north, we did hear something about a, an interruption I guess one ought to call it; I don’t know for certain whether it was a war exactly . . .

  Of course, I said.

  They made my little Galisha play the Butterfly Game at school, and that Sunday there was supposed to be a Dynamos match when . . . You think I eat moon mushrooms for breakfast, no?

  I unbuckled my Walther and fired a silver bullet into his face. Screeching, he shriveled into a pile of charred music-paper. Then I woke up. I was still in West Germany, with two hours left before they inserted me into my mission zone.

  It was a hot afternoon of stinking ruins. Three boys were taking turns swinging from the barrel of a broken antiaircraft gun. The Iron Curtain sullied the horizon with its leaden fog. I walked slowly through the flatness of bomber-cleared lots, wondering what on earth I really ought to be or do.

  When you separate from a woman, what you have to do is kill your love for her; you have to blockade it and starve it to death, just as the sleepwalker set out to do in Leningrad; that’s the only way. To separate Shostakovich from this world, one must be similarly energetic. Basically, it’s a question of time and manpower.

  The Gehlen Organization had just finished laying a secret telephone cable in one of the canals which separated East from West Berlin. Fishing the receiver from the water at 2315 hours, I spoke the code word and received the go-ahead. (There was also something about proceeding from Anhalter Bahnhof to Hahenklee, but I’ve woken up since then; I don’t remember that part. I think it happened earlier.) Remembering how it had been once upon a time, when the enemy crept out from between Russian trees to murder us, I felt exactly the way I used to: depressed, yet resolute. So I crossed their canal hand over hand, the cable thrilling me with faint electrical tingles all the way. On the far side, they’d dug in a pole to prop up one pleat in the Iron Curtain for me, to the tune of maybe thirty centimeters. I wriggled under that leaden darkness, kicked down the pole behind me, and was back in Dreamland.

  Fleets of narrow windows, perfectly stationed upon each wall’s stony sea, deployed their shallow balconies all around the world like guns. Evidently I had breached the Curtain in Prague. A little operative came up to me and made conversation, whispering: You and I both work in the East, so we know what’s what. . . .—I nodded, meanwhile shaking the last drops of canal water out of the barrel of my Walther.

  The command post is in that cellar, said the little operative, who was codenamed GREINER. Unfortunately, there’s nobody left. The Red Guillotine got them all last night . . .

  Don’t worry, I said, wanting to console him. Everything’s just a dream anyhow. Even if
the Red Guillotine catches you, you’ll wake up before you die. You can’t die in a dream.

  Unless you really die, he whispered bitterly.

  Well, that’s just a contingency, I said. I was already getting sleepy, but only slightly—exactly enough to numb that scared feeling. As we humans say, this can’t really be happening! Self-deception is a pessimistic definition of optimism. I was confident that tonight I could do the job and get stricken from the list of persons who “concerned” the Gehlen Organization. That was my new goal in life. So I shook GREINER’s tiny hand and wished him a long-lasting camouflage. He yawned and crawled into the cellar to sleep, which appeared incautious to me, but in my organization we refrain from advising each other how to live.

  My target shouldn’t be difficult to locate, they’d told me, because he quote lives in a fairytale ballet without human context end quote, so I floated in the direction which seemed most inhuman, proceeding rapidly eastward beneath what a nineteeth-century traveler has described as a pearl-grey, faintly blue sky which lent a luminous quality to everything except the pale green roofs, yes, I knew that, everything transparently grey, with lime trees painted on the stage backdrop.

  Shostakovich was eating dinner with a younger woman, a certain Galina Ustvolskaya, about whom I’d been given no information; they appeared to be consuming some sort of fat blind white cave-fish which resembled turbot. He looked unhealthy, and she seemed angry about something. Frankly, I didn’t like her. Groaning, my host locked the door behind me and hobbled back to the table. When I asked him how he was, he smilingly quoted the poetess Akhmatova: Call this working! This is the life! To overhear some music, and pretend that it’s my own . . .

  Ustvolskaya began screaming when I drew my gun. I shot him in the head five times, after which he said to me: There’s a musical term—it’s, it’s, well, it’s Italian actually, which you might not . . . ma non tanto, which I think means but not so much.