The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  With a rustle of the spruce needles the wolf dematerialized.

  He coasted into Poland following highways along the Oder. He pedaled fast amid marshes studded everywhere with windmills and finally into the Polish city of Wrocław, once the German city of Breslau.

  He uploaded to the new bike’s navigator an applet that superimposed the map of Breslau 1942, intercoded with the parish registries of that time, onto the Wrocław of the present, where the German citizenry had long since been expelled and the streets and place names Polonized. The neighborhood in which the navigator placed the home of the family Wurs had not been renamed but obliterated. He tapped on the trapezoid designating the lot of the Wurs home, sent the directions to the processor, and supplied its locomotive energy while the navigator guided him to lean into one or another turn. Shortly he arrived outside the cold storage facility of a Syrian grocery store. He froze the sprockets of the bike and went around front and inside. He asked the boy cashier if he could see the manager. She emerged, an old woman frowning. He asked in German, then in French, if there remained nearby any token, a blackened cellar wall or fragment of brick from the homes on this location before the Soviet siege of 1945. The manager asked if he was an inspector from the Department of Foreigners. He said no, he was a scientist of the atmosphere. She asked if he was from the state Geodesy Department or the Agricultural Market Agency. He said, if he were an employee of the Polish state, would he not have addressed her in Polish? She said, “We came here in 2016. The only pictures or records I have of this place are those of my family living in the apartment in the basement and working up here in the store.” She offered him a Mylar bag of dried apricots. He chewed them, standing, reeking of the road. She asked if he was German. He said he was. She asked if it was his own family he was looking for, and he hesitated for half a breath and said yes. She asked if he had a girlfriend or boyfriend. He said no, and she asked why not?, a strong young fellow like him. He said perhaps he would hope for such things after he had a fixed home. She said, “I came here with my mother, my sister, my husband, my son, several toothbrushes, and a roll of toilet paper.” “Yes?” he said. She said, “Other people are your home.”

  He unlocked his bike outside and continued northeast along the Baltic coast through what had been the independent states of Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia before the late conclusion of the Wars of Slavic Reunification and were now mostly Russian republics, with rump coastal areas of ethnic Baltic concentration under a UN mandate. He crossed the whole of Latvia in two days of pedaling that took him four hundred fifty kilometers along the Gulf of Riga while his legs shook and stomach growled and hair dripped with sweat on the road. He did not sleep until the next day when he made it to Tallinn in Estonia, where he boarded the ferry to Helsinki. He rode up the Finnish side of the Gulf of Bothnia and down the Swedish side on paved roads like channels carved through forests of pine trees and birch gone yellow in the shortening days. At Malmö he merged onto the elevated cycleway above the Øresund Bridge, sleek at night as the tongue of a dragon with the lights atop its towers like flaring eyes, and down into a throatlike tunnel in an artificial island. After four more kilometers underground, the road expelled him into the Danish night with the lights of Copenhagen coloring the clumped undersides of altocumulus perlucidus clouds. He rode through Denmark, taking two more ferries. He rode back into Germany near Flensburg, onward through Schleswig, Hamburg, Uelzen, Flechtingen, amid the aluminum and concrete of familiar towns and cities. Magdeburg, Gommern, Zerbst. When he crossed the Elbe, the road went due south toward Saxony and finally into Leipzig again, where with the last of his savings he bought two three-egg omelets adorned with no sauce, no spices, cheese on the side. He rode to the university from which he had departed three months before and left the bike in the rack outside and climbed through the marble lobby, under the glass-paneled roof of the inner courtyard, up the steps not worn but cleanly edged from their renovations. Sunbeams warmed shafts of the white interior, the long marble tunnels segmented with arches on which rosettes were carved amid statues of fawns and dancing girls in frocks. He turned into an alcove that housed the two elevators where along the wall someone had left, on the steel cabinet that housed a fire extinguisher, an empty paper espresso cup, its lip chewed all around by an absent stranger’s teeth.

  He was looking into the stone corner. Behind him some people milled, inquiring of each other as to the library’s closing hour. He waited while the elevator made its ding, and the doors slid open on their tracks, and the people got on, and the elevator swallowed them, and the alcove went silent; before he put his nose into the corner of the cold marble, hiding his face, and cried: the priest was dead, and he was alone.

  * * *

  • • •

  “I HAD A SMALL WHEELBARROW, practically a toy, and a Wehrmacht folding shovel,” the priest told him once. “And I went outside to build the Fatherland.”

  Day and night the boy Werner had loaded the wheelbarrow with rubble from houses the army had demolished. He shuttled the rubble where the Volkssturm engineers directed. They were building an airstrip through the center of the city. Soviet fighter-bombers strafed the streets. Flying low and firing and pulling up. One made a tweedle like a sewing machine. He saw the face of a boy in the cockpit firing. They wrapped the dead in bedsheets. They buried them in mass graves. “Chin up, chin up,” his mother said, “even when things are bad.” He had not seen his younger siblings, away in the country with an aunt, in more than a year. Few had the privilege of sleeping at home. Earlier in the winter his friends had left on foot with their mothers. Westward through the snow by night and thousands died. His mother worked as a doctor’s assistant assigned to stay for the siege. The city was closed now, a fortress.

  He drove the wheelbarrow home, weaving around mounds of snow-sheeted shrapnel that might puncture the tire. He cleaned the wheelbarrow with a hand broom. He propped it against the tidy house in the ruined street. “Leave your shovel outside, please,” his mother said. “It’s dirty.” Mother and son ate by a carbide lamp. They washed and dried the china. They went below to sleep.

  In the night, he lay in the fruit cellar having a dream. He awoke in midair. The ceiling above him exploded. His body was thrown against a wall. He lost consciousness as the house collapsed on him. He awoke again amid choking fumes. Half his face was buried in ash and rubble. The eye, the nose, all but a corner of the mouth. Obscure forces cramped his head, preventing him from moving it. A clamminess clung to the bottom of his foot. He pressed his toes against it. It gave slightly, cold and wet.

  It was his mother’s flesh trapped against the bottom of his foot. His mother had been crushed and was dead. Under the fallen concrete, the pressure of the hot bricks on his chest and limbs, he could neither fully breathe nor remove his foot from where it touched her.

  Absolute dark.

  He was only a location of breath, time, and pain. He was not the vessel of these things. He was the phenomenon of their coinciding, a wave on a black sea.

  He told Willy all this when the boy was fourteen. He withheld nothing. The dirt he had swallowed. The smell of the excrement in his mother’s clothes. Everywhere infinite black. The prayer that he would be permitted to die—

  And then, some days later, amid the black, the shade that appeared. It quivered and dimmed. It grew sharper. It had a vivid edge: a light that defined it.

  Light. Dust in the light. And human voices.

  The excruciating pain of hope being driven like a nail back into his small body right through the socket of his eye.

  The priest served the boy a roasted pork knuckle, fried potatoes, radish salad he had made in the rectory kitchen in Bremen. Willy moved the food around on his plate. They each drank a small beer. The priest did not wear his collar but a blue necktie under a wool sweater. It was the first night of true autumn. Willy had worn no jacket, and afterward, outside, the cold went through him. The priest drove him to the c
urb of his boarding school. Finally, the priest said, “I’m finished deflecting Mrs. Tilly’s correspondence for you. If you don’t want her flying in for your confirmation you’re going to have to tell her yourself. Your indifference to her is a childish mistake. I won’t be an accessory to it anymore.”

  “All right.”

  “You think everything has to be paid for. Even if it’s the innocent who are made to pay. Some things come to us for free.”

  “All right. I’ll text her myself and tell her I don’t want her to come.”

  “For goodness’ sake find some other way to say it if you must. Have you no mercy at all?”

  But he did not yet know what mercy was.

  * * *

  • • •

  HIS NAME WAS WILHELM KÖHLER. They had had to call him something. He liked the name. It came from nothing and pointed nowhere and left him free.

  But he also owned another name. He told no one. It had no legal force. He never wrote it down. The priest had known it, but the priest had died. It was his true name, and he doubted he would ever confess it, because if the person to whom he could tell it existed at all, she existed beyond the boundary that separated him from everyone. The impassable verge. And yet he suspected we all believe we live outside the verge, while in each other’s eyes we appear to be one of the rest living together on the inside. Whoever she was, her face, her voice, certainly her name—all were hidden. All awaited. He had not confessed the name to Doreen in gymnasium, or to Verena during university. It wouldn’t come out. Or he had not yet become the person who would confess the name. Even as a teenager he had known how naive it was to believe a unique other person awaited. But knowing the belief was naive did not disprove it. It meant in fact she must be seen, identified, the name confessed, before he gave way to the truth that no such communion with another person was possible. A drawbridge existed over an abyss, leading us, if we crossed it in time, to the bright world that was not there, sun-drenched and crowded.

  As he aged, the bridge drew up inexorably before him. He coarsened and knew better. He felt perhaps her—but was disillusioned. He accused her, or else her—recognizing as he did so his own complicity, his skepticism and deathward-pointing mind. Hoarding his name as if it really had the power he had ascribed to it in his childhood, by not revealing it, to cloak him in invisibility. To become a part of the earth, of the water soaking it, of the ants in the courtyard, the shining bits of quartz in the gravel of the track bed behind the kinderheim. The name was a foreign object snagged in his lungs.

  In the summer of his thirty-ninth year, he would board a thermospheric jet and land in Windhoek, Namibia, for the biennial conference of the International Global Atmospheric Chemistry Project. He would take a seat in a stifling sixth-floor auditorium drinking a marula-fruit soda and listen to a discussion of heterogenous aerosol nucleation. Midway through the lecture, the power would fail. After a few seconds of comprehensive dark, the individual mobiles of two hundred sweating scientists would start lighting up, the interfaces in myriad languages telling the news; the correspondence; the flight updates; the cricket scores; the fluctuations in the sovereign bond yields of proprietary city-states inside gaming metaverses where populations of virtual citizens lived and died without ever knowing who owned them or that they were owned, or why their owner took such interest in them, why he played this game, whom he was playing against, what constituted winning.

  He would step into the labyrinthine halls and grope along the concrete surfaces for a way onto the balcony. He would find a cargo hatch emblazoned with a warning sign illegible in the dark and fitted with a malfunctioning access control device that had defaulted in the power outage to its fail-safe rather than fail-secure setting: a way that should have been locked was not locked. He would push open the door and step into a moonless night on an unlit landing way, less than three meters deep, for light unmanned airborne deliveries to the sixth floor, an unfenced cargo slip above the street. Starlight would describe the distant ridge of the mountains behind the powerless city. Behind him, the door would open.

  A figure would rush out, mobile in hand, ears holding back the long hair from a face absorbed in blue light, a mole in the declivity below the mouth. She would stride unknowing toward the edge of the dock, the abyss. His arm would shoot before him. He would reach for the back of the collar of the shirt of a woman he didn’t know. His fingers, luck-bitten and undeserving, would grip the collar fast. With all his force he would lift her back from the dark below, into which she had already begun to stumble, and pull her into their common afterlife.

  Acknowledgments

  The author wishes to thank the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library; the Civitella Ranieri Foundation; the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation; the Jentel Artist Residency; Aleksis Karlsons and the Baltic Writing Residency; Ellen Levine and the New York Community Trust; the Dora Maar House; the MacDowell Colony; Maddalena Fossombroni, Pietro Torrigiani Malaspina, and the Castello di Fosdinovo; the Whiting Foundation; and the Corporation of Yaddo for generous support during the writing of this book—as well as Elisabeth Calamari, Bill Clegg, Nicola DeRobertis-Theye, Marion Duvert, Will Heyward, Sophie McManus, and Justin Tussing for their wise counsel.

  About the Author

  Salvatore Scibona's first novel, The End, was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the Young Lions Fiction Award. His work has won a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Pushcart Prize, an O. Henry Award, and a Whiting Award; and the New Yorker named him one of its "20 Under 40" fiction writers to watch. He directs the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library.

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