Unhinge the Universe

by Aleksandr Voinov

He swallowed the flavorless coffee in three gulps, then shoved the plate and cup away. The soldier chained him, this time in the front, collected plate and mug and left him alone with his thoughts. At least he wasn’t bound to the chair.

  The interrogator had very clearly signaled he wasn’t afraid of Hagen. In fact, it seemed he believed himself well capable of controlling him with nothing more than threats.

  Hagen stared at the floor, seeking out even the tiniest of blood splatters, but it was impossible to tell. He needed to see his brother’s body so he could believe he was dead. What to tell their mother? And Gudrun? She’d take it worse, much worse. She’d adored Siegfried and his tall tales that couldn’t possibly be true because his brother never spoke about what he did. Of course not. So he made it all up.

  Had made it all up.

  Chains rattled as he wiped his eyes again. He’d never get used to the thought. And despite everything—

  “And I don’t think you’re as ready to die as you say you are.”

  —if he could have swapped places with his brother, he would’ve. In the blink of an eye. He’d expected it. He’d been trained and prepared for it. But not Siegfried. He should be alive; he was the smarter of them. The favored son, too. Hell, the heir, the one who’d have continued the family line. Hagen shied away from that thought.

  The door opened just as his heart plunged into that particular miserable place. Hagen pulled himself together and stared evenly at the interrogator. He’d give him nothing. Not a word. Not a scrap of information. No leverage whatsoever.

  The interrogator eyed him for a moment, then eased himself into his usual chair, never once taking his eyes off Hagen. Something equally hot and cold lurked in his gaze this time, like the carefully controlled exterior from yesterday was just that: an exterior.

  Slowly, he withdrew the antler-handled razor from his pocket, and Hagen watched the closed weapon as the American cradled it between his hands. The interrogator caressed its edge, following the contour of the dormant blade’s spine. Anger simmered beneath Hagen’s ribs. He hated this man touching that razor as much as he hated—right?—the man touching him.

  Abruptly, the American closed both hands around the weapon, hiding it from Hagen’s view and making him jump, like he’d sliced away one of the last fraying ties Hagen had to Sieg’s earthly existence.

  “I want to propose a compromise.”

  The words took a moment to sink in. Hagen raised his gaze from the hands holding the weapon to the American’s eyes. “What compromise?”

  “In exchange for one piece of information”—he lifted a finger, revealing the faintest peek of off-white antler—“I’ll let you speak to the priest. About your brother.”

  Oh the bastard. He’d just used the one thing he had.

  And you gave it to him, Hagen.

  “Yes.”

  What the hell.

  He clenched his hands into fists. “Let me see the body and I’ll give you two.”

  Damn. He swallowed against the sudden dread in his chest. He should be fighting, shouldn’t be showing his weakness. But somebody had to know. If he ever made it home, it was his duty to tell the others.

  “Not for my sake,” he muttered. “For the others.”

  Making excuses in front of the enemy.

  The American again obscured the antler with his fingers, all the while watching Hagen as if he knew exactly what that did to him. Like he had a finger on Hagen’s airway and delighted in applying and removing pressure just to watch him squirm whenever his breath was cut off. Damned pig.

  “So if I bring you to the priest,” the man said, speaking slowly as if he was choosing every syllable carefully, “and he shows you the body or tells you what became of it”—Hagen’s gut flipped at images of wild dogs and half-assed pyres—“you’ll answer two questions.”

  Hagen shifted in his chair, cursing the rattling chains that announced even his subtlest movement. “Ja.” He only hoped that the man would ask stupid questions. “Ja, das werde ich.” Somehow, it seemed more honest—more permanent—in German. Yes, I will.

  The interrogator nodded. “Get up.”

  Hagen obeyed and was surprised when the man opened the door. “Tell the priest I’m bringing the prisoner to him,” the interrogator ordered one of the guards, and the man hurried off.

  As if he had all the time in the world, the interrogator led Hagen by the arm out of the musty cellar and into the ruined sanctuary. Soldiers lounged on broken pews, talking and smoking cigarettes, and they stopped whatever they were doing to stare at him. One or two spat. Hagen forced himself to breathe and not think that he was just allowing this, just following alongside this bastard like a tamed lion.

  In the church’s vestibule, his captor knocked on a wooden door. It opened, and the priest on the other side narrowed his eyes at Hagen.

  “Thank you for seeing us, Father,” the interrogator said. “Hagen here has some questions about what happened to the other soldier. His brother.”

  The priest stiffened, and there was venom in his eyes as he said in his native tongue, “He’s a Nazi.”

  “And he is a prisoner, Father,” the American said in the same language. “It is his request, and I need it fulfilled so I can get what I’ve requested.”

  “How do you know he isn’t lying?” the priest spat.

  “So what if I am?” Hagen said in French. “It costs you no advantage to tell me of my brother’s fate.”

  The priest swallowed. He picked up a worn Bible from a table and nodded to the American. “Very well.”

  Both of them exchanged glances that Hagen wasn’t too sure he could decipher—he had no idea what they’d lived through, the history of all this—but it all paled against the thought that this man had indeed been with his brother when he’d died.

  “I’d . . . I need to know what happened.” Hagen nearly choked on the words. Maybe he shouldn’t. Why was it so much harder now? He’d asked an enemy. He could ask a priest.

  The priest’s chin lowered in a slow, subtle nod. “Very well, we—” He paused, eyes flicking toward the interrogator. “I think it would be best if I speak to the man alone, don’t you?”

  The American tensed. “He’s a prisoner, Father. With all due respect, I—”

  “I can protect myself.” The priest pulled back his jacket, revealing the pistol on his hip. Whether it was to remind the interrogator or inform Hagen was impossible to tell, but it had both effects.

  Still, the American didn’t leave. “I shouldn’t—”

  “John.” The priest’s voice hardened. “Your interrogations are not my jurisdiction, and my ministering is not yours.” He pointed at the door.

  The American—John, apparently—opened his mouth to speak, but then snapped it shut. He glanced at Hagen. To the priest, he said, “Make it quick.”

  And with that, he was gone. The tension eased within the dim, almost comfortably warm room.

  The priest let his jacket fall over the gun, then folded his hands in front of him. “Your brother.”

  The two words jolted Hagen from the inside out. “Yes. Was he . . . was he given his last rites?”

  The priest nodded. “He was. I gave them myself.”

  “Good. Good. Thank you.” Hagen could think of few things that would have been more important to Sieg. He wasn’t a zealot, but he’d always claimed that his faith allowed him to see things from “the perspective of eternity”—whatever that meant. He’d been adamant that the moral compass of Catholicism and his honor as an officer of the German army were the two things that guided his actions. Plenty of good they’d done him, in enemy hands. “And he died. How? Where? I mean—” Hagen squeezed his eyes shut and shook his head. “What was his death . . . like?”

  The man didn’t answer for a long moment. His eyes—he had kind eyes when he wasn’t glaring at Hagen—lost focus, and his brow furrowed. Then, in a gentle, sincere tone, he said, “Peaceful. He passed very peacefully.”

  Hagen closed his eyes a
gain, releasing a long breath. Some tightness in his shoulders eased, and his gut unwound. Sieg’s death had hardly been pleasant, he was sure, especially not in an enemy’s interrogation room while he bled beneath his skin, but the end was . . . peaceful. Hagen could live with that.

  “And his body?” he whispered without opening his eyes.

  Again, the answer was not immediate. Hagen looked at the priest, and the thoughtfulness in his expression tangled with something almost apologetic.

  “Tell me,” Hagen said. Even softer now, he added, “Please.”

  The priest swallowed. “The ground is frozen. Burials are . . .” He cringed. “Not practical. He was burned.”

  Hagen breathed deeply. He’d cried plenty, and now he was just numb. He’d have to remember his brother’s face. Laughing. Or beaming down at Gudrun, that smile that was the same whether she brought him a dead butterfly or just hugged his legs with all the passion of a seven-year-old. It seemed like that had been forever ago. And despite everything, Siegfried had never stopped believing and attending church. Even dying in one, which was somehow fitting, even if he’d died a beaten prisoner. Hagen wished he’d had an ounce of his brother’s faith, though it was certainly not encouraged in the SS. But the pagan rites they did encourage—and celebrated—had struck him as theatrical and empty. Nothing to actually believe.

  “Did he say anything? I don’t know. Anything?”

  The priest shook his head. “He asked for last rites. He was too weak for confession, fading in and out, so I believe he heard. But above all, he made his peace.”

  Unlike any of the armies in and around Europe. In all this, one man had made his peace and stolen away.

  Hagen wiped at his eyes.

  A hand pressed down on his shoulder. “I wish I could give you more, my son.” Such strange words to hear from an enemy. And the gentleness. Even if he was a priest, he was still . . . he shouldn’t . . .

  Hagen shook his head and straightened up, looking the priest in the eyes. In French, he said, “Thank you, Father.”

  The corners of the priest’s eyes crinkled as he smiled.

  The priest gave him a brief blessing and even allowed him communion; though he’d lapsed himself, it reminded him of his childhood and Sieg, and that in itself was strangely comforting. More than once, Hagen expected him to offer the last rites; they both knew he wouldn’t live long in this place, even if he was relatively intact at the moment. But today, it was only a blessing and communion, and then the priest showed him out to the vestibule where the American—where John—waited for him.

  John put a hand around Hagen’s arm. Not roughly, but firmly. You’re not getting away, so don’t try. Hagen didn’t have anything left anyway. Even if he’d had a clear shot at the snowy tree line if he could just get outside, his legs wouldn’t have carried him that far. As it was, he barely kept up with John’s brisk walk across the broken floor.

  “You’re satisfied with the priest’s answers.” It wasn’t a question.

  Hagen stared at his feet, trying not to look at the cuffs around his wrists. The American had kept his word and held up his end of the bargain. Now it was Hagen’s turn. “Satisfaction is a strange word,” he muttered, but it didn’t rouse him from the stupor he felt himself sinking into. It was like his body had been holding out, straining to stay standing until that one question was answered. And with that answer, the body let go.

  He didn’t care. Short of another dose of the Pervitin, he was crashing fast, and he welcomed it. Like all the other times. He knew the dreams, the craving, the feeling that he weighed a hundred tons and couldn’t possibly move, or, conversely, that aimless agitation that sometimes could be soothed with running, or fighting and drinking. This was a different crash. Like the life was bleeding out of him. Like he had no other reason to exist. Maybe he’d given up a little. Who cared? Who was left to care?

  John took him back to the interrogation room. Hagen dropped into the chair—that chair—and prayed for the same fate that had found Sieg here.

  Chair legs scraped on the floor, and Hagen was once again face-to-face with John. No table, only the handcuffs and the back of John’s chair separating them.

  “We had a deal.”

  Hagen nodded, but kept his eyes down.

  John drummed his fingers on the back of the chair. Probably sizing him up, eyeing him like a predator trying to decide where to take that first bite of its doomed prey.

  Go for the throat, American. Make it count.

  There was no clock in the room, but Hagen’s lucidity was slipping, and he was aware of every second scratching by as it would have on a bedside clock. Or the grandfather clock against Mother and Father’s living room wall. Tick. Tick. Tick. The last moments of his life, perhaps.

  “Your brother was captured in a village not far from here.” John’s voice was hundreds of kilometers away. “Escorted by a unit of SS paratroopers, we assumed. Were you a part of that mission?”

  Tick. Tick. Tick.

  Dropping out of the sky. The cold, cold winter sky. The forest, the mill, the bodies, the room. And they were dead, and Sieg was dead, and he was dead, so what did it matter anymore?

  “Hagen. Look at me.”

  His head had dropped forward at some point. Eyes had slid closed. Somehow, he made himself raise his head and force his eyelids open, and he was staring into the eyes of the enemy, the interrogator, the man who’d made him hard with a knife—Sieg’s razor—and taken him to the priest.

  “Were you a part of that mission, Hagen?”

  Hagen released his breath.

  And with that breath, a single word: “Yes.”

  He shouldn’t have admitted it, but somehow, it was all too far away. He half jolted, tried to focus, but all he could feel was the cold. The frost. Like death. Being alone. Also like death. Like everything around him had died. One endless winter with no spring. Brambles reached for him, holding him in place while, somewhere beyond his reach, somewhere beyond his sight, his brother was bleeding to death. His consciousness shifted, he became his brother, feeling blood run out of him, and then, like a terrible flood, break out of every orifice, until all he could taste was blood, that metallic heat choking him, and then, like a burst dam, when his mouth and eyes and ears were too small to allow all the blood out, it burst through his pores.

  “Jesus Christ.”

  Something hit him in the face, and he lost his balance and fell off the chair, toppling it on top of him.

  “Hagen? What’s wrong? Talk to me!”

  Hagen forced his eyes open, surprised that the American couldn’t see all the blood, then felt warm, firm fingers on his throat. He shook his head when the man opened his jacket, thought for a hot-cold moment that he shouldn’t be touching him, and yet that it felt good.

  “Medic! Get me the fucking medic!”

  There was motion. Footsteps? Voices? Hagen couldn’t tell them apart anymore. Air moved. Like wind had blown or a door had opened. Cold air. Across his skin. Should have been colder. All the blood, the wet skin, the wet clothing.

  But he didn’t feel that cold dampness anymore. His senses homed in on a single warm focal point. A hand on the side of his face. His mind swam in and out of darkness, but that one point of soft warmth didn’t move. Didn’t fade. It was just there. Holding him here.

  More movement. More hands on him, and the one on his face had gone. He searched for it, panicking as the blackness sucked him deeper, and finally it was there again. On his forehead this time. No, no, it wasn’t right. A touch, yes, but wrong. Different. Gentler.

  “He’s just blacked out,” an unfamiliar voice came from somewhere far away. “Put him on his back. Feet up on the chair.”

  The world shifted and, a moment later, pressed against his back. Cold, hard, and gritty through his jacket. Slowly, everything came into focus. Where he was. Who he was.

  The fact that he was still in chains and surrounded by damned Americans.

  But John was still there. And for some re
ason, that comforted him.

  “I’m fine,” Hagen slurred. “Just need rest.”

  You can rest when you’re dead, he almost heard echoing off the hillsides during those forced marches long ago. Those forced marches through the bitter cold until half the unit collapsed. High-altitude training in the Alps. Why had he put himself through all that? “It’s . . . pills . . . I just need rest.”

  “Jesus Christ,” John snarled. “We’re not done here.”

  The other voice again. Laughing this time, but it was snide and ugly. “Oh, you’re done here. There’s no way this man is in any condition to even sit up on his own.”

  “Fine. He can talk lying down.”

  The other man didn’t laugh that time. Hagen almost did, but he didn’t have enough breath.

  “He’s going back to his cell.” The tone reminded Hagen of their father scolding them as children. “He’ll be useless to you until he’s had a chance to recover.”

  Someone huffed indignantly. “All right. All right. Fine.” John’s voice. “Get him back to his cell.” Movement; clothes rustling, he thought. When John spoke again, he was farther away. Higher than Hagen. “I want a sentry posted in his cell until he comes out of this. The minute he’s lucid, shove some food down his throat and come get me. I don’t care what time of night it is.”

  Footsteps again, and a door slammed.

  “You heard the man,” someone said. “Get him back to his cell.”

  Whether he was carried or dragged or simply reappeared in his cell as if by divine will didn’t make one bit of difference. The only difference was that there was somebody else in the room. Hagen heard him clear his throat every now and then, or shuffle, but that was all he could make out. He lay on the hard cot, mind unfocused, unable to hold a thought. Like a light beam turned into a faint glow by fog or mist. Nothing was sharp enough to even cast a shadow.

  Once—at least he thought it was once—he thought Sieg was in the room, beaten to a pulp, but not bleeding, not dying, not burned to lumpy ash and the uneven remains of a pelvic bone, and he crawled toward him, but even after it felt as if he’d crawled for hundreds of meters, he couldn’t reach him, not nearly.