“This lot's finished now,” a soldier said, pointing. “Now it's off to the ovens—they've cleaned up a bit over there. Had some German prisoners in a couple of weeks ago. Before that, there were bits of skeletons lying around, the pieces that hadn't got burned all the way.”
“One of them looked like the top half of a little girl.”
“You don't know it was a girl. Could've been a boy.”
“It looked like a girl to me.”
“Hurry now,” a man told Butler, “before the next lot comes in, you can get a tour all by yourself.”
He took a few steps forward. He stared up the camp road, past the Bad & Disinfektion building with its twin rows of skylights. The company of fresh conscripts marched away from him, toward a half-ruined structure that seemed to have collapsed around its single red smokestack. He recognized the place from Simonov's vivid description in Pravda. As with the camp as a whole, it looked much less horrible than he'd imagined.
Once again he tried to make himself feel something. He wanted to empathize properly with the countless human beings whose earthly existence had ended a few steps up the road there. Most of them had been Jews from a place called “Lublinland,” a make-believe province that existed only on the wall-charts at the SS Race and Settlement Office. Into this arbitrary corner of the Generalgouvernement, the Nazis had herded racial undesirables from the newly acquired territories of the Reich during those early, dizzying months after the fall of Poland. The plan had been to hand their homes and farms and businesses over to Volksdeutsch settlers, who were themselves being coerced into “coming home” from all the old German enclaves of Eastern Europe—all part of a grand scheme to redraw the ethnic isobars of the continent. Butler wondered how things had turned out at the other end, the places from which the Lublinlanders had been “evacuated.” Had they become model German hamlets, as envisioned by the planners at the Siedlungsamt? Or just burned-out, depopulated zones like so much of the Nazi empire?
A wave of revulsion swept over him. He had wanted to feel something and now he did, though it was more nausea than compassion. Turning away from the crematorium, he began walking in the opposite direction, aimless, passing one block of identical buildings after another. Prisoners' barracks, he supposed, but they might have been warehouses, horse stalls, repair sheds. Beyond them, he came to a fence that divided the camp into unequal sections, its gateway open and unguarded. On the other side, the buildings were sturdier, more permanent-looking. Perhaps this had been the administrative area: offices where records were kept, a dining hall where SS men shared wholesome meals, a recreation hall to pass one's off-duty hours. Butler moved from one to another, imagining the function of each, composing little mental narratives. Over there is the sauna, and here is where we watch the latest films from Ufa. And along here—watch your step!— Hauptmann Schuler likes to walk his Doberman bitch, he calls her Freya, isn't that the goddess who likes to fuck? He came to a little building with a high-pitched roof that in any other place might have been taken for a chapel. But there were no chapels for Himmler's SS. Curious, he tried the door. It yielded easily, the heavy, cross-braced wood swinging back on well-oiled hinges.
“You're a bit early,” said Puak.
The little man sat on a large, wide bed that occupied a place of honor against the far wall, draped on either side with opulent folds of crimson velvet.
Butler was too startled to reply. His mind crackled with a static of detail: stag's antlers mounted over the bed, Puak's gray silk jacket smartly adorned with a white carnation, a log fire blazing in the wide stone hearth.
“I thought you might want to inspect the facilities.” Puak spoke in his perfect, slightly effeminate English, his tone neutral and his smile, as usual, open to interpretation.
“No thanks.”
“No? Then I suppose it is down to business.”
“What the hell is this place?” Butler was past the surprise now and on to the customary struggle of composing himself in the presence of the Spider, whose gleaming black eyes seemed capable of melting things down to their essence.
“Precisely what it appears to be”— switching now to collegial Russian. “Here, sit down, see how that chair feels, I believe it is bison's leather.”
Butler stepped closer to the outlandish chunk of wood whose upholstery sat like an expensive saddle on a torture device.
“This is a shrine,” Puak continued, now in Hochdeutsch, “to the heroic act of procreation. You stand in a sanctum for the breeding of German heroes!” Then English again: “From what the villagers tell us, the SS officers were always on the lookout among the political prisoners—that is to say, the non-Jews—for females of the ideal Nordic type. Blond, long legs, good breasts, proper small noses. When they found one, they would bring her back here and a few of the lads would have a go at her. They fed the girls well and kept them around for a few weeks. At the end, they offered the girls a deal: their freedom, in exchange for their promise that should a child result, it would be given over to the SS Lebensborn—a sort of baby-farming operation.”
“What happened? Did both sides keep their end of the bargain?”
Puak's smile did not change. “The prisoners were released, but their fate beyond that point is hard to determine. To the best of our knowledge, few progeny of these matings survived to full term. The Poles did not fancy a new breed of monsters being spawned among them. They killed many of the girls as a precautionary measure. It is a case of denying the enemy much needed resources—the resource in this case being a fresh supply of wombs.”
“War is biology by other means,” Butler said; cleverly, he thought.
Puak pursed his lips. “Clausewitz has nothing to say about this. We are not fighting here a Clausewitzian war. We are back in the days of Nevsky, the peasantry rising up to repel the Teutonic Knights by any means necessary. And remember, it was not we, nor was it the Poles, who chose to fight such a war. The Germans have allowed themselves to become drunk on their own mythology—which would not be so bad if they stayed home and listened to Wagner and stabbed each other in the back, like Siegfried and Hagen. But no. They must impose this irrational construct upon the rest of the world, and that cannot be permitted. History itself will not allow it.”
“You speak of History as though it were…an angry pagan god. Isn't that a kind of mythologizing?”
Puak shot him an annoyed glare, which Butler took to mean he had scored a point. “I shouldn't be so smug. You Americans also tend to mistake your own myths for objective truth. Look at your national archetype, the Lone Gunslinger—a strong and independent man, unconcerned with culture or manners, set on doing what he pleases, irrespective of the consequences. Especially if the consequences affect only such lesser breeds as Indians. That sort of legend makes for a good Saturday matinee but hardly a sound foreign policy. Then there is your homegrown version of Christianity, which is every bit as crude and apocalyptic as the Germans' Götterdämmerung, with the disadvantage of being also self-righteous. We had a taste of that in your recent Prohibition. One suspects things will only get worse as your society spins further into decline. Someday, my friend, these strands are going to intertwine, and your great nation will become as daemonically possessed by this mythic, Bible-toting cowboy as the Germans by their white knight singing the Nibelungenlied.”
Butler was surprised to find that he resented this; it had been many years since he'd thought of himself as American. A Yank, yes, as long as the word was preceded by “expatriate,” which spared him from lugging all that heritage around. “I suppose you Russkis are above all that,” he said, trying not to sound too flippant. “No myths of any kind. No ghosts. No tendency toward hysteria. Bulgakov got the whole thing wrong.”
“The triumph of the Soviet Union,” said Puak, speaking primly as a schoolmaster, with pauses to facilitate the taking of notes, “is to have transcended national consciousness—to have dissolved the artificial boundaries between Russian and Georgian and Azerbaijani—and to have ope
ned, to people everywhere, the greater wisdom that resides in the collective consciousness of the proletariat. The clear Communist mind is not haunted by archetypal daemons, nor ruled by outmoded conceptions of manhood and vengeance and honor. It shines forth with the light of science and understanding. And it offers this same understanding, this liberation from mythic bondage, to all humankind.” He smiled benevolently, a Marxist boddhisatva.
Butler slid tentatively back into the bison-leather upholstery. The chair was built for the Teutonically postured, hence a bad fit for the average Western spine, which yearned to slouch. “All right, what's this about?” he said. If he were to be regarded as a damn American, he might as well behave like one. “Why this little tête-à -tête in a death camp?”
“Because it is not the only such place.” Puak leaned forward from his perch on the bed. “Nor the largest. Nor the most horrific. I wanted you to see it by way of preparation.”
“Preparation. For what?”
“For your assignment. The difficult business ahead.”
“I thought my assignment was to grab a piece of paper.”
“Just so. But not an ordinary sort of paper—no, this is rather like the parchment on which Tacitus scrawled his Germania. A seed, you might say, from which a new and dangerous mythology could emerge.”
Butler stared at him. You did grow tired, at times, of the little man's parables. “I thought we were getting down to business.”
Puak gave a gentle laugh. “And so we are. You are a man who likes stories, Comrade Sammy, isn't that so? You like to hear them, but especially you like to tell them. Let us think then for a moment how you would tell the story of what happened here at Majdanek. You would make it out to be a tragedy, I expect. Not in Aristotle's meaning of the term, but in the commonplace sense: a stage strewn with corpses. There is even a deus ex machina—the T-34 crashing with Olympian power through the gate, its hatch popping open to reveal a strange being with almond eyes.”
Butler only shrugged. “Okay, a tragedy. Maybe. Why not? Love the almond eyes, that's a nice touch.”
“Very well. Now, at the center of this story there is a man, the prime mover of events, by whose command such places as Majdanek came into being. This man might be thought of as the villain, but the role does not fit him. For one thing, he never appears onstage. For another, he is no mere foil for the protagonist—and who is that, by the way? No, this man is more than a villain. He has assumed the godly prerogative of life and death; he has dared to reshape the world to his own design. He is guilty, that is to say, of the classic sin of hubris, which we know to be the downfall of tragic heroes. He must be the hero, then—the dark and terrible protagonist of the story that will be told of this place, and of the war at large.”
Butler did not need to give this a lot of thought. “That's ridiculous. Pure sophistry. Hitler's no hero. You said yourself, this isn't a tragedy as the Greeks understood it. It's something unique to the twentieth century. Call it an epic horror picture. Hitler's the producer, the DeMille. Which is why you never see him on-screen.”
Puak knitted his fingers. “Perhaps that is saying much the same thing. In any case, it shares the same problem. Everything revolves around a single man. The masses who fought and died are relegated to the chorus. Moreover, in this version, the story has no historic meaning. It becomes merely a case study in exceptionalism, like one of your Horatio Alger fables: a man can accomplish anything if he sets his mind to it. But is this the kind of story good Communists want to tell their grandchildren?”
“Tell me a different one.”
Puak rose from the bed. He stood near the hearth, making a strange figure there: the little Slav in his silk jacket, dwarfed by massive German stonework. “Of course, I lack your narrative gift. Yet it occurs to me, this tale might be spun as a piece of popular history, an exciting yet very distant-seeming object lesson that shows, among other things, how far we have come as a people, how much different and better is the world we live in today. Consider the story of the Crusades, a fantastic account of knights in shining armor marching off to glory—or to death, if that be their fate—under the banner of Christianity. Better perhaps, think of the Black Plague, a horror raging unchecked across the land, its symptoms hideous, its causes unknown—it was commonly felt to be a sign of God's displeasure—wiping out families, entire villages, erasing centuries of progress. Such stories fire the imagination. And in the hands of a politically astute narrator, they also have practical uses. They impart useful lessons about the folly of religion, the life-saving power of science.”
“The Nazis liked the one about the Crusades, too,” Butler said. “But they read something different into it.”
Puak rounded on him. “The point is that in such tales, the motive power is no longer an individual man. It is a broader thing, a widely distributed force—the people as a whole, an entire epoch. Surely our present story, of death camps and Blitzkriegs and deportations, the whole Nazi saga, can be better understood in such a telling. Not as tragedy, with a single protagonist, but as a horrifying, yet safely distant, saga from an age long past. Because then, you see, it will have a lesson to impart.”
“That the noble Soviet peasant always triumphs over Fascist Crusaders?”
Puak gave Butler an indulgent smile. “I would put it differently. Capitalism, with its stratified society and its Darwinian ethic of competition, must always lead to conflict. And the victims of that conflict must always be those most distant from the rulers, in terms of race or class or geography. Whatever its cultural achievements, and its pretense of morality, Capitalist society is at its core barbaric. Strip away its pleasant material trappings, as was done to Germany after the last war, and the inner beast emerges. No institution in Western society has the power to tame it, indeed none finds it advantageous to do so. They all, as you say, are in on the deal.”
“Maybe so. But it's academic, isn't it? You can't dictate how people who aren't even born yet are going to think.”
“No? Perhaps not. But I believe we may exert some influence, at least.
We may, for a start, manage to dethrone the tragic hero. We cannot write him out of the story, any more than you can rid the Crusades of Richard Lion-Heart. But we can deny him the leading role.”
“And how, dare I ask, are we going to do that?”
Puak turned from the fire, casting his expression into shadow. “If indeed there exists a document proving that all this”— flicking a hand toward the death camp outside the walls—” is the responsibility of one man, a single deranged mind whose force of will once held an entire continent in thrall …” He looked at Butler, his dark eyes glinting in the orange firelight, his lips forming a spider's smile. “If such proof exists, then your task is to find it and destroy it. A tale so great and terrible must have only one meaning.
“The correct one.”
WEREWOLF COUNTRY
NOVEMBER 1944
Dolina Zimnej Wody—Cold Water Valley—possessed a naked beauty Ingo found unnerving. Every feature was exaggerated. The riverbeds were gouged from sheer rock like battle scars. The water coursing through them ran so icy and blue you feared to drink it, lest the chill go right to your bones. On all sides the Tatry Mountains climbed at a pitch that seemed geologically implausible, shooting upward to peaks that might have been honed by a storm-god's ax. Life clung precariously to the land here: sand-colored wisps where grasses had waved in summer; dark holds of spruce whose ragged tips imitated the mountaintops; more rarely, stripped-down blackened stalks of some native flower jutting from gaps between pale gray rocks, their pods rattling faintly with the tiny seeds inside.
This land was shaped with no regard for soft-skinned creatures. And so history had flowed around it, crossing and recrossing the Polish plain to the north, creeping east onto the Ukrainian steppe, welling like a tide from the old imperial cities in the south. The war, too, had mostly bypassed the Tatrys, as it had the rest of Carpathia. But now the Reich was collapsing like an empty bag and
the bloodied remnants of the Wehrmacht were retreating, mostly on foot, into territory they had skirted in the heady days of the Blitzkrieg. It was partisan-held territory, according to one school of thought. According to another—the thinking to which Ingo's guides subscribed—it was held by no one and never had been. Inherently, and like no other place in Europe, on account of its roughness and isolation, the land belonged only to itself.
Ingo had set out two days ago with the partisan Shuvek and the yellow-haired man who spoke like a Sudeten German and whom Ingo believed to be the chief of the guerrilla encampment. He was called Uli—short for Ulrich?— but of course his given name could be anything. No one talked much, which was a relief; Ingo needed every ounce of energy for coping with the journey. And he wanted his thoughts to himself.
What these thoughts were was not easy to say. To an extent that surprised him, his mind was simply open, like a window, admitting views. These shifted from time to time, but certain things came around repeatedly, shifting Leitmotive that included another journey he had taken a long time ago. Journey made too much of it; all it had been was a drive into the country. Ingo was about to turn twelve. It was his first Boy Scout camping trip. He was frantic with anxiety; he had never spent a night away from home or needed to relieve himself in a place without indoor conveniences. He sat tensely in the backseat of somebody's rattling Ford with his friend Timmy Nye. Timmy was slender and confident, someone to whom the business of boyhood came naturally. As such he was of great interest to Ingo, who made a continuing study of his characteristics: how he wore his clothes, how he walked, how he behaved toward other boys. Riding in an automobile was itself an unusual experience—Ingo felt slightly carsick— and riding in an automobile to a place in the woods near Olney, Maryland, where he must survive without home or family for an entire weekend was without precedent.
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