Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  The Red Guillotine gazed back into his defiant face and experienced a hideous sense of familiarity. It had never been her habit to indulge the so-called “feelings,” so the sensations of sorrow and repugnance which now assaulted her were overwhelmingingly inexplicable. This Hagen had been, said the indictment, a guard at KZ-Mauthausen. Although Georg’s death had been officially judged a suicide, we all know how those people do things. It was possible that Hagen had witnessed or even precipitated her husband’s death. All the same, a true Communist remains unaffected by such things.

  Defendant Hagen, you committed crimes against the people, did you not?

  That I did.

  Then why did you say to the arresting officers that you had done nothing out of the ordinary, when you knew perfectly well that such was not the case?

  The accused began to answer: I can’t say it any more exactly than this—

  In fact, you can say it extremely exactly! laughed the Red Guillotine, and the courtroom laughed with her. But you want to make fools of us.

  No, I don’t want to . . . he whispered. At least, that is what the others had always whispered. But Hagen didn’t whisper at all. In fact, he chuckled: You’re not simply a Jew by marriage, now, are you, Frau Benjamin? You’re a blood-Jew. Do you know what Germans think about blood-Jews?

  She went greyish-white.

  Of course she condemned him to death—one more example of the impartiality of justice in our German Democratic Republic. To us onlookers she explained: This sentence is a warning for all who waver in the defense of our state, for all who fail to press forward for the victory of world peace.

  But her round pale face writhed and trembled restlessly.

  25

  After that she seemed to age ever more swiftly, and the set of her mouth expressed weariness and disgust. Neither torchlight processions in our traditional German manner nor trainloads of glistening coal gladdened her. The smoke of the past hung so gloomily over everything! And that dream she had, the one of the tarnished silver box whose lock she could not master, she could never understand why it caused her such anxiety.

  She came into the Stasi office and Comrade Mielke was all smiles; but she wondered whether an instant before her arrival he’d been making anti-Semitic innuendos against her.

  In 1956, when we created our National People’s Army to counter the increasing threat from the West, the second Five-Year Plan was approved, and Roman Karmen made the film “India’s Dawn.” Meanwhile, de-Stalinization began. This put the Red Guillotine in almost as awkward a position as Comrade Ulbricht. In any event, it was already being said of her that her energies had slackened. What she used to demand of those within her power was confession. After Hagen, what she longed for more than anything was silence before the quick conviction. Her courtrooms were no longer quite so full of sadistically expectant onlookers. And now, without regard to the very serious internal and external situation we faced in those days, Neues Deutschland, following Comrade Khruschev’s line, dared to attack her for being schematic and unbending.

  We retreated; we amnestied twenty-one thousand criminals. Fortunately, the so-called “Hungarian uprising” gave us the excuse we needed to reestablish our standards. On 17.10.56, the Red Guillotine announced: We cannot permit ourselves to dispense with the death penalty. There have been no unjust sentences in our German Democratic Republic.

  All the same, in 1957 we agreed to punish murder with twenty-five years’ imprisonment, not death. I saw her sitting beside the Hungarian Minister of Justice, Ferenc Nezval, each of them isolated, and later that same day she signed this dreadful piece of legislation in a bizarre ceremony of abstruse plainness, while dark-suited figures stood behind them in a line, and behind them hung a huge portrait of a man with white hair: Comrade Ulbricht. Fortunately, treason, espionage and kindred crimes could still be penalized as they deserved.

  I’m told that she attended the funeral of the former Field-Marshal Paulus, which for political reasons was a restrained affair. Afterward she sat at the writing-desk of her hotel room, opened her briefcase, removed the Stasi folder, withdrew the second photograph, which showed Paulus in a waist-deep trench at Stalingrad, clasping his wrist and seeming to push away at the enemy as the men in uniform who surround him gaze obediently on; laughing, she tore this photograph to pieces.

  She signed another death sentence, and then I saw her speaking earnestly with Erich Mückenberger, her missing and crooked teeth giving her a cheaply monstrous expression; the sentence was not carried out. Meanwhile her Stasi file began to contain complaints of her overbearing, imperious, “uncolleaguish” lapses of temper. It was around this time that we reinvestigated her past record and discovered that the years 1937-39, which her autobiographical statement claimed she’d spent as a retail employee, were in fact passed in a Jewish-owned pastry shop. It’s not that we have anything against Jews in our Germany. (I won’t speak for the West.) All the same, one can’t be too careful, given the adventurism of the Zionists nowadays. It’s possible that a report was made to Comrade Mielke. On the other hand, I can’t believe that anything came of it. The memorial tribute she wrote to Georg Benjamin a few years later was published to careful acclaim.

  On 5 December, when we’d passed around cigarettes and schnapps to celebrate Soviet Constitution Day, she tried to ingratiate herself with Comrade Honecker, who was obviously going to be Number One sooner or later, but he snubbed her.

  I’ve seen her in her fur coat, standing next to SED- Zentralkomitee Secretary Grüneberg in 1958, by which time we had completely liquidated unemployment. That was when peace-loving peoples of the Soviet Union demanded that the Anglo-American imperialists demilitarize Berlin. Needless to say, the imperialists rejected this just demand. No matter. When the time is ripe we will open their eyes.

  At another ceremony with Soviet soldiers she was smiling, looking sweet, with her grey hair braided in coils upon the top of her head; and her striped scarf appeared quite stylish within the fur coat. Particularly as she aged, she came to have a strangely sweet meditative face, round and soft as she sat at a white-clothed table with a line of other dignitaries; she could be a Jewish refugee, which by marriage she was, or a Spanish gypsy woman or even Käthe Kollwitz herself with that heavy round face; oh, how odd that she could be Käthe Kollwitz! As the Programmatic Declaration of the State Council so perfectly put it in 1960: Our laws are the realization of human freedom.

  That same year, when the Stasi expanded its powers and membership in order to better spy on hostile-negatives; when we executed the traitor Manfred Smolka; when Roman Karmen directed “Our Friend Indonesia” and Shostakovich composed Opus 110, we resumed our drive for forced collectivization—a task which the drought of 1959 had made doubly urgent. Who was willing to undertake the prosecutions for failure to deliver harvest quotas? Why, our dear Red Guillotine! (Comrade Bley: Based on the teachings of Lenin, she envisioned a necessary direction for the workers’ and farmers’ movement in socialist legislation.) Meanwhile, the Red Guillotine sat frail and uncomfortable in the front row of a gathering, her hand gripping the armrest, her white legs crossed for the hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Humboldt University.

  Naturally, our increased efforts to socialize agriculture caused more parasites to flee the nation—two thousand of them a day!—The Red Guillotine sent the ones we caught to prison, crying to the courtroom: To get a free education and then run away, is that decent? All the same, more and more of them got away. So Comrade Ulbricht was forced to build the Wall—or, as it’s more properly termed, the anti-Fascist protective barrier. That worked perfectly. It made manifest to the world the utter divide between our new Germany and what has been aptly called nazideutscher Faschismus. The telephone screamed for joy. Only a shambles was left of Adenauer’s “policy of strength,” Comrade Honecker gloated.

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  She drafted our Family Law of 1966, which protects the property of wives after marriage and requires parents to educate their children with a social
ist outlook. How many other countries can boast such progressive legislation? Her head was tilted, showing the part in her hair as she signed; a man from the Zentralkomitee bent over her, while at her right another man was bending over Comrade Ulbricht. They gave her the Service Medal of the National People’s Army in gold. But her ideals were already being lost.

  Regarding the Volkskammer elections of 1967, it had been arranged immediately before her one-week trip to Bulgaria that she would be put up for candidature as usual; but three days after her return, on 30.5.67, she called her chauffeur and had herself driven to Potsdam in that tiny-windowed limousine so that she could take care of the formalities, only to discover that she wasn’t going to be nominated after all; and, in fact, that her term as Minister of Justice was over. A report by Richter Hauptmann of the Stasi describes her as between astonished and angry. Her round grey head sank deep between her dark-suited shoulders. And so she found herself obliged to step aside for Dr. Kurt Wünsche. After all, she was now sixty-five.

  She took a few mementoes with her, including a folder whose only exhibit now was a grainy photograph of Paulus from the side as he enters his captivity, head up. Now she entered hers, in her two-storey house in the new concrete-walled restricted area between Basdorf and Wandlitz, with its tennis court and shooting range; according to Comrade Ulbricht, the food was far better than it had been at the “reserved” restaurant in Moscow’s Hotel Lux. She could walk over to Justice Minister Matern’s house whenever she pleased, or even to Comrade Ulbricht’s, which boasted Chinese silk hangings. But she didn’t like either of them. Sometimes when she went to get a massage she met Comrade Ulbricht doing calisthenics, and she did her best to be polite, but how could she forget that he had not prevented her removal?

  In ’68, we firmly supported the Soviet Union against the Czech provocateurs. Listening to her radio at home, the Red Guillotine screamed: Death, death! The year after that, the Soviet Union sold us out and normalized relations with West Germany! (Look! There’s Roman Karmen, smiling amiably at little crewcut children as he films “Comrade Berlin.” He’ll come back again soon for a retrospective in celebration of his sixty-fifth birthday. But none of this makes the Red Guillotine feel any better.)

  That September she attended an international legal conference at Walter Ulbricht German Academy of State and Law, but she was only a lecturer in the history of law; she was no longer allowed to do what she’d been put on earth to do. The lessons of the Hagen case were forgotten. And everything got worse and worse in our ever more advanced socialist society right up until 1989, the last year of her old age, by which time her dark eyes kept looking away from everything, while her drawn mouth showed teeth. A few months after she closed her eyes forever, so did East Germany.

  Well, what had she accomplished? By 1967, seventy-five percent of our judges in the regional and district courts derived from the working class. To be remembered here is her impartiality, as well as her distinct contributions to refining the family law system and conducting cases consistent with the culture of socialist jurisdiction. Her praises stretch as long as the lines at the Intertank gas station. By the time she retired, ninety-three hundred industrial enterprises had been demonopolized and transferred to the ownership of the people; thirteen thousand seven hundred farms had been confiscated by local agencies of self-government! Much of this vital work was accomplished in the courtroom, for which we must thank our Red Guillotine. The sly cones of the SM-70 automatic shooting devices on the Wall were not in place until the seventies; we can’t give her credit for instituting those; but she could be proud of having presided over our new Criminal Code of 1968, which respects Soviet justice even more, and replaces beheading by (I quote the regulations) an unexpected shot at close quarters in the back of the head. As Comrade Mielke always used to say: Short schrift to all of them! Because I’m a humanitarian.

  27

  In the first week of August 1971, Comrade Mielke himself picked up the telephone. The call originated on Majakowskiweg 18/20. The ancient female voice on the line was so hysterical that for a long time he could hardly understand what it was saying.

  She had in any case been sleeping very poorly that summer on account of a recurring dream, that dream of the black iron box which none could open; and then the first anonymous telephone call came, very early at morning: Your coffin is ready, Comrade Benjamin.

  Shuddering, she disconnected the line with a clang almost as loud as the sleepwalker’s; and then she sat on the sofa, trembling.

  The telephone rang again. Comrade Benjamin, your coffin is right outside.

  And again, and again! Each time her coffin was coming closer. Finally she called the special number at the Stasi. That was when Comrade Mielke decided to handle this business personally.

  Our People’s Police have always honorably fulfilled their duty against German Fascists; moreover, she was one of us, so they arrested somebody just to satisfy her, but then the telephone rang again. The undertaker was calling for Comrade Benjamin.

  It’s because I’m a Jew, isn’t it? she whispered to Comrade Mielke. Tell me frankly, just because I married a Jew do you consider me a Jew? ‣

  WE’LL NEVER MENTION IT AGAIN

  Everywhere that Torah is studied at night one thread-thin ray appears from that hidden light and flows down upon those absorbed in her.

  —Kabbalah (13th century)

  1

  Every time she said no to him, that no was as perfect as her cheekbones.

  There was about her something comfortably immovable, reassuringly merciless—still, silent, slender and incorruptible, hence ultimately fragile; since she was too good to bend, she would have had to shatter if she’d ever said yes; which was why to the very end he remained able to be proud of himself for accepting her refusals with his best if fallible grace, loving and respecting her all the more for not giving him all of herself. He cherished her, so he must cherish the coherence which she’d created with the other man and which his touch would accordingly have broken. He loved her; he would not damage her.

  He asked her for her photograph at least and she gazed at him across the table, then said so quietly: No.

  Not long after that, his First Cello Concerto in E-flat Major premiered, so there were any number of women, not that at his age he could always, you know, and so, forty minutes after the embarrassing recording session with Rostropovich, there was a woman who pretty soon was kissing him and kissing him, lying on top of him on the big hotel bed, holding him tight so that some of the loneliness oozed away, leaving him sufficiently clearheaded to win some chance of not committing errors if he only considered rapidly and logically what on earth he wanted, this woman, this kind woman who liked him and who had already told him that after the merest four hours of his company, for three hours of which she had seen him only across a loudly crowded room which shone with liquor-glasses (my dear lady, thank you for your, your, you know, but I, I, well, I simply took a simple little theme and I did my simple, simple best to develop it!), she now felt jealous of all the other women who might be in his life (he never told her about the one with the dark, dark hair), this woman who was lying on top of him might help him; because what he needed was something sexual so that he could relieve a portion of his desire for the woman with the dark hair and thereby alleviate the nuisance which his passion inflicted upon her, although I don’t quite mean nuisance, I mean anguish, misery, outright harm, because she cared for him; and since he himself had, so to speak, reciprocal feelings, the something sexual which he now sought from the woman on top of him must not be too sexual, for he would not betray, lapse in fidelity to, the woman with the dark, dark hair, whose unmade double bed (at that time she’d still been married to R. L. Karmen) he’d once seen with an agony (not of jealousy, only of a sensation we can’t call loss, since he no longer possessed any fragment of her to lose) which for an instant he mistakenly supposed that he couldn’t bear. That was before Nina died. And now the darkhaired woman was married to Professor Vigods
ky. He bore it; he composed a string quartet. Later he would telephone the darkhaired woman—oh, how much he loved telephones! Then he married Margarita, who did her narrow best to fill Nina’s place; she wasn’t very, well, you understand what I mean. So he asked the woman on top of him whether she would kindly do him the favor of laying her gentle fingers on his throat, then strangling him just a little and a little more, which between smiles, whispers and long kisses she affectionately did, assuring him that she didn’t mind one way or the other if it was what he needed, and because she hadn’t been told how dangerous it was, she went farther than Galina Ustvolskaya ever had, farther than his first love Tatyana Glivenko, farther even than the other one, his darkhaired one who’d left him forever and from whose memory a continuing and even now not entirely unrequited love had saved him with shocking power. So the woman on top of him, kissing his mouth again and again, dreamily reached for his throat whenever she felt like it, smiling at his smile of grateful anticipatory happiness; then she laid down her soft hands just below his chin and began to squeeze, legato, dolce, her eyes so intent on his eyes as her fingers began to dig into him and take hold of his wildly worthless life which he yearned to lay down at the feet of the darkhaired woman for her to keep or break as she chose, the keeping or breaking equally conformable to his thrilling acceptance because he was hers and if she destroyed him, he would remain hers completely whereas if instead she raised him up to her starshine face for awhile, then he could knowingly be with her that much longer. Elena, you’re so lucky you didn’t marry me. A red spot was spinning. By now somebody unfamiliar to him was uttering involuntary noises from a throat, deeper than the noises which he himself made in orgasm, yet broken like a scattering of cylindrical beads which had once made up a necklace; these staccato, somewhat unpleasant, not really liquid sounds, neither coughs nor gurgles nor metronome-clicks which he would represent musically in the third movement of Opus 110, seemed to substitute quite well for the breathing which he no longer could or desired to accomplish; he sank into a delightful swoony feeling which should have never ended but always did, at which point his heart broke because he found himself alone, meaning without the darkhaired woman.