Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  VIEW FROM A RUINED ROMANIAN FORT

  STEEL IN MOTION

  PINCER MOVEMENTS

  THE SAVIORS: A KABBALISTIC TALE

  MOBILIZATION

  WOMAN WITH DEAD CHILD

  YOU HAVE SHUT THE DANUBE’S GATES

  ELENA’S ROCKETS

  MAIDEN VOYAGE

  WHEN PARZIVAL KILLED THE RED KNIGHT

  OPUS 40

  OPERATION MAGIC FIRE

  AND I’D DRY MY SALTY HAIR

  CASE WHITE

  OPERATION BARBAROSSA

  THE SLEEPWALKER

  THE PALM TREE OF DEBORAH

  UNTOUCHED

  FAR AND WIDE MY COUNTRY STRETCHES

  BREAKOUT

  THE LAST FIELD-MARSHAL

  ZOYA

  CLEAN HANDS

  THE SECOND FRONT

  OPERATION CITADEL

  THE TELEPHONE RINGS

  ECSTASY

  OPERATION HAGEN

  INTO THE MOUNTAIN

  DENAZIFICATION

  AIRLIFT IDYLLS

  THE RED GUILLOTINE

  WE’LL NEVER MENTION IT AGAIN

  WHY WE DON’T TALK ABOUT FREYA ANYMORE

  OPERATION WOLUND

  OPUS 110

  A PIANIST FROM KILGORE

  LOST VICTORIES

  THE WHITE NIGHTS OF LENINGRAD

  SOURCES

  AN IMAGINARY LOVE TRIANGLE: SHOSTAKOVICH, KARMEN, KONSTANTINOVSKAYA

  Acknowledgements

  ALSO BY WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

  You Bright and Risen Angels

  The Rainbow Stories

  The Ice-Shirt

  Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs

  Whores for Gloria

  Fathers and Crows

  Butterfly Stories

  The Rifles

  An Afghanistan Picture Show

  The Atlas

  The Royal Family

  Argall

  Rising Up and Rising Down

  VIKING

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. ■ Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) ■ Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England ■ Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) ■ Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) ■ Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India ■ Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) ■ Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published in 2005 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  Copyright © William T. Vollmann, 2005

  All rights reserved

  Portions of this work first appeared in Conjunctions, Grand Street, Film Comment, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader, edited by William T. Vollmann, Larry McCaffery, and Michael Hemmingson (Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2005).

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Vollmann, William T.

  Europe central / by William T. Vollmann. p. cm.

  eISBN : 978-1-101-11819-1

  1. Germany—Social life and customs—Fiction. 2. Soviet Union—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3572.O395E97 2005

  813’.54—dc22 2004061170

  This book is printed on acid-free paper.

  Map by the author

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  This book is dedicated to the memory of Danilo Kis, whose masterpiece

  A Tomb for Boris Davidovich kept me company for many years

  while I was preparing to write this book.

  The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.

  —D. D. Shostakovich

  PATRONYMICS

  For the convenience of my countrymen who lose their way in Russian novels.

  Akhmatova [Gorenko], Anna Andreyevna

  Arnshtam, Leo Oskarovich

  Danchenko, Natalya Kovalova

  Denisov, Edison Vasiliyevich. Nickname: Edik.

  Glikman, Isaak Davidovich

  Glivenko, Tatyana Ivanovna

  Kainova, Margarita Andreyevna

  Karmen, Roman Lazarevich

  Konstantinovskaya, Elena [Yelena] Evseyevna. Nicknames: Elenka, Elenochka, Lyalya, Lyalka, Lyalotchka.

  Krupskaya, Nadezhda Konstantinovna

  Lebedinsky, Lev Nikolayevich

  Lenin [Ulyanov], Vladimir Ilyich. Often called Ilyich.

  Litvinova, Flora Pavlovna

  Nikolayevna, Tatyana Petrovna

  Rostropovich, Mstislav Leopoldovich

  Shebalina, Alisa Maximova

  Shostakovich, Dimitri Dimitriyevich. Nicknames: Mitya, Mitenka, etc.

  Shostakovich, Galina Dimitriyevich. Nicknames: Galya, Galisha, Galotchka.

  Shostakovich, Mariya Dimitriyevna. Nickname: Mariyusha.

  Shostakovich, Zoya Dimitriyevna

  Supinskaya [later Shostakovich], Irina Antonova. Nicknames: Irinotchka, Irinka.

  Ustvolskaya, Galina Ivanovna

  Varzar [later Shostakovich], Nina Vasilyevna. Nicknames: Ninotchka, Ninusha, Ninka, Nita.

  Vlasov, Andrei Andreyevich

  Operation Barbossa

  VIEW FROM A RUINED ROMANIAN FORT

  (1945)

  STEEL IN MOTION

  As often as not, the things that attract us to another person are quite trivial, and what always delighted me about Blumentritt was his fanatical attachment to the telephone.

  —Field-Marshal Erich von Manstein (1958)

  1

  A squat black telephone, I mean an octopus, the god of our Signal Corps, owns a recess in Berlin (more probably Moscow, which one German general has named the core of the enemy’s whole being). Somewhere between steel reefs, a wire wrapped in gutta-percha vibrates: I hereby . . . zzzzzzz . . . the critical situation . . . a crushing blow. But because these phrases remain unauthenticated (and because the penalty for eavesdropping is death), it’s not recommended to press one’s ear to the wire, which bristles anyhow with electrified barbs; better to sit obedient, for the wait can’t be long; negotiations have failed. Away flees Chamberlain, crying: Peace in our time. France obligingly disinterests herself in the Prague government. Motorized columns roll into snowy Pilsen and keep rolli
ng. Italy foresees adventurism’s reward, from which she would rather save herself, but, enthralled by the telephone, she somnambulates straight to the balcony to declare: We cannot change our policy now. We are not prostitutes. The ever-wakeful sleepwalker in Berlin and the soon-to-be-duped realist in the Kremlin get married. This will strike like a bomb! laughs the sleepwalker. All over Europe, telephones begin to ring.

  In the round room with the fan-shaped skylight, with Greek gods ranked behind the dais, the Austrian deputies sit woodenly at their wooden desks, whose black rectangular inlays enhance the elegance; they were the first to accept our future; their telephone rang back in ’38. Bulgaria, denied the British credits which wouldn’t have preserved her anyway, receives the sleepwalker’s forty-five million Reichsmarks. The realist offers credits to no one but the sleepwalker. Shuffling icons like playing cards, Romania reiterates her neutrality in hopes of being overlooked. Yugoslavia wheedles airplanes from Germany and money from France. Warsaw’s humid shade is already scented with panic-gasps. The wire vibrates: Fanatical determination . . . ready for anything.

  According to the telephone (for perhaps I did listen in once, treasonously), Europe Central’s not a nest of countries at all, but a blank zone of black icons and gold-rimmed clocks whose accidental, endlessly contested territorial divisions (essentially old walls from Roman times) can be overwritten as we like, Gauleiters and commissars blanching them down to grey dotted lines of permeability convenient to police troops. Now’s the time to gaze across all those red-grooved roof-waves oceaning around, all the green-tarnished tower-islands rising above white facades which grin with windows and sink below us into not yet completely telephone-wired reefs; now’s the time to enjoy Europe Central’s café umbrellas like anemones, her old grime-darkened roofs like kelp, her hoofbeats clattering up and bellnotes rising, her shadows of people so far below in the narrow streets. Now’s the time, because tomorrow everything will have to be, as the telephone announces, obliterated without warning, destroyed, razed, Germanified, Sovietized, utterly smashed. It’s an order. It’s a necessity. We won’t fight like those soft cowards who get held back by their consciences; we’ll liquidate Europe Central! But it’s still not too late for negotiation. If you give us everything we want within twenty-four hours, we’ll compensate you with land in the infinite East.

  In Mecklenburg, we’ve prepared a demonstration of the world’s first rocket-powered plane. Serving the sleepwalker’s rapture, Göring promises that five hundred more rocket-powered planes will be ready within a lightning-flash. Then he runs out for a tryst with the film star Lida Baarova. In Moscow, Marshal Tukhachevsky announces that operations in a future war will unfold as broad maneuver undertakings on a massive scale. He’ll be shot right away. And Europe Central’s ministers, who will also be shot, appear on balconies supported by nude marble girls, where they utter dreamy speeches, all the while listening for the ring of the telephone. Europe Central will resist, they say, at least until the commencement of Case White. Every man will be issued a sweaty black machine-carbine, probably hand-forged, along with ten round lead bullets, three black pineapple grenades each not much larger than a pistol grip, and a forked powder horn of yellowed ivory adorned with circle-inscribed stars . . .

  The telephone gloats: Liberating advance . . . shock armies . . . ratio of mechanized forces.

  Across the next frontier, where each line of fenceposts leans away from the other, our shared victim’s proud military poets dull all apprehensions by equating Warsaw 1939 with Smolensk 1634. While they dispose their hopeless echelons, we draw the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line, on which we stamp, which means secret. And why stop there? The sleepwalker gets Lithuania, the realist Finland. Our creed’s a lamp whose calibrated radiance bows down into its zone. It was and is Jews who bring the Negroes into the Rhineland. That is precisely why the Party affirms that Trotskyism is a Social-Democratic deviation in our Party. The telephone rings; General Guderian receives his instructions to activate Case Yellow. We’ll whirl away Europe Central’s wine-tinted maple leaves and pale hexagonal church towers.

  2

  You won’t get to watch it happen; they don’t allow windows in this office, so you may feel a trifle dull at times, but at least you’ll never be alone, since on the steel desk, deep within arm’s length, hunches that octopus whose ten round eyes, each inscribed with a number, glare through you at the world. The Pact of Steel . . . a correct decision . . . my unalterable will . . . rally round the

  Party of Lenin and Stalin. In the bottom righthand drawer’s a codebook whose invocations control the speeds and payloads of steel, but the octopus seems to be watching. Take the gamble if you dare; how well can those ten eyes see? The sleepwalker in the Reich Chancellery could tell you (not that he would): they’re his eyes, lidless, oval, which imparts to them a monotonously idiotic or hysterical appearance; in the ditch outside, a hundred other open-eyed heads revert to clay, not that they have anything in common with the octopus, whose glare remains eternally sentient.

  What about the mouthpiece? Is it true that it can hear your every breath through its black holes? In his underground headquarters with its many guards, the realist sits tired behind a large desk, awaiting the telephone’s demands. Although he’s good at hanging up on people with as much force as the soldier who slams another shell into our antitank gun, he’s hanging up on them, not on the telephone itself, which he can’t live without. He subsumes himself in it, all-hearing; he knows when Shostakovich takes his name in vain. At the first ring he’ll summon his generals to attend him at that conference table with its green cloth.

  The sleepwalker’s all eyes; the realist is all ears; their mating forms the telephone.

  3

  This consciousness may indeed derive, as the American victors will assert, from entirely mechanical factors: Within the bakelite1 skull of the entity hangs, either nestled or strangled in a latticework of scarlet-colored wires, a malignantly complex brain not much larger than a walnut. Its cortex consists of two brown-and-yellow lobes filamented with fine copper wire. It owns ideas as neatly, numerously arrayed as Poland’s faded yellow eagle standards: The camp of counterrevolution . . . German straightforwardness . . . the slanders of the opposition . . . the soundness of the Volkish theory. It knows how to get everyone, from Akhmatova (who, visionary that she is, mistakes it for a heart of rose coral), to Zhykov (who fools himself that it can be played with), from Gerstein to Guderian, those twin freethinkers who dance alone within their soaring bullet-prisons in obedience to the telephone-brain’s involution at the center of the shell.

  Don’t trust any technicians who assure you that this brain is “neutral”—soon you’ll hear how angrily the receiver jitters in its cradle. Kollwitz, Krupskaya and the rest—it will dispose of them all, magically. It’s got their number. (As the sleepwalker admonishes Colonel-General Paulus: One has to be on the watch, like a spider in its web . . . ) In short, it will enforce the principle of unified command.

  It makes the connection. It rings.

  From the receiver, now clattering like a dispatch rider’s motorcycle across the cobblestones of Prague, to the black cold body, runs a coil whose elasticity draws out the process of strangulation. (Thanks to this telephone, General Vlasov will perish in a noose of piano wire.) From the anus-mouth behind the dial extrudes another strand of black gut thinner and less elastic than the receiver’scoil, and this pulses all the way to the wall socket. Since this morning our troops have been . . . Some frowning little Romanian blonde’s in the way; we’ve got to shoot her. Now into the deep green forests of Europe Central! The relationship of forces in the Stalingrad sector . . . ferro-concrete defense installations. Can rubberoid sinews feel? How do I make them bleed? Ruthless fanaticism . . . we’ll find a way to deal with him. They undulate now, as the telephone rings.

  The telephone rings. It squats like an idol. How could I have mistaken it for an octopus?

  Behind the wall, rubberized black tentacles spread across Europe. Mil
itary maps depict them as fronts, trenches, salients and pincer movements. Politicians encode them as borders (destroyed, razed, utterly smashed). Administrators imagine that they’re roads and rivers. Public health officials see them as the black trickles of people dwindling day by day on Leningrad’s frozen streets. Poets know them as the veins of Partisan Zoya’s martyred body. They’re anything. They can do anything.

  4

  In a moment steel will begin to move, slowly at first, like troop trains pulling out of their stations, then more quickly and ubiquitously, the square crowds of steel-helmed men moving forward, flanked by rows of shiny planes; then tanks, planes and other projectiles will accelerate beyond recall. Polish soldiers feebly camouflage their helmets with netting. Germans go to the cinema to fall in love with film stars; when Operation Citadel fails, they’ll be swooning over Lisca Malbran. Russian cavalry charge into action against German tanks; German schoolgirls try to neutralize Russian tanks by pouring boiling water down the turrets. Barrage balloons swim in the air, finned and fat like children’s renderings of fish. Don’t worry; Europe Central’s troops will stand fast, at least until Operation Barbarossa! (Their strategic dispositions are foxed and grimed like a centuries-old Bible.) Steel finds them all.

  Steel, imbued with the sleepwalker’s magic sight, illuminates itself as it comes murdering. (Amidst the cemetery snowdrifts of Leningrad lie the coffined and the coffinless. Steel did this.) The broad rays of light as a Nebelwerfer gets launched from its half track, those inform steel’s gaze, mark steel’s reach.

  From the heavy, pleated metal of a DShK machine-gunsight, a soldier’s gaze travels so that his bullet may speed true. Steel needs him to launch it on its way, but don’t the gods always need their worshipers? From the telephone’s brain, thoughts shoot down insulated copper conductors. It’s time to commence Operation Blau. The Signal Corps prepares to receive and retransmit the dispatch: Defend the achievements of Soviet power . . . a severe but just punishment . . . And already the telephone is ringing again! Who will answer? Maybe no one except the Signal Corps, whose flags, attached to arms evolved from human, can transform any command into a series of articulated colors. The telephone rings!