Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  The telephone rings. The receiver clamps itself to a mouth and an ear. (Where did those come from? I thought they were mine.) Another order flies up the black cable, down the elastic coil, and into the ear: Under no circumstances will we agree to artillery preparation, which squanders time and the advantage of surprise.

  The V-phone rings; the S-phone rings. Jackboots ring on Warsaw’s uneven sidewalks. The Tyrvakians have mined their bridges with Turkish dynamite. We believe, on the contrary, that the combination of the internal combustion engine and armor plate enable us to take our fire to the enemy without any artillery preparation . . .

  All across Europe, telephones ring, teleprinters begin to click their hungry teeth, a Signal Corps functionary waves the first planes forward, and velocity infuses steel-plated monsters whose rivets and scales shimmer more blindingly than Akhmatova’s poems. Within each monster, men sit on jumpseats, waiting to kill and die.

  Just in case, shouldn’t we now call up our rectangles of knobbly reptile-flesh, each knob a helmeted Red Army man, the rectangles marching across the snow toward the Kremlin domes while chilly purple sky-stripes rush in the same direction, white cloud-stripes in between? They’re dark icons, almost black. The telephone rings: Commence Operation Little Saturn. Everything becomes a mobile entity comprised of articulated segments. Don’t worry. In the cinema palaces, Lisca Malbran will help us pretend that it isn’t happening.

  Here come the guns like needles on round bases, and the guns which protrude from between two grey shields, and the guns which grow out of steel mushrooms, and the guns as long as houses, anchored by chassis large enough for a crew of twenty, the guns whose barrels are as long as torpedoes and the wheeled guns with fat snouts and long flare suppressors. It’s only a question of time and manpower. And so the mechanized hordes go rushing east and west across Europe.

  5

  Guarding itself against posterity’s blame, the telephone has qualified itself: Provided always that the operation obeys the following conditions: appropriate terrain, surprise and mass commitment. Moreover, it warns, each component must be metallic, replaceable, reliable, rapid and lethal—In spite of mass commitment, there were not enough components. The operation will fail.

  Someday, bereft of propellants, steel must fall to rest and rust. (The telephone pleads: Mechanical reinforcement.) Smiling wearers of the starred helmet will raise high the red banner, as filmed by R. L. Karmen. Hold fast to the last bullet. Then, in the shellshocked silence of Europe, which squanders time and the advantage of surprise, morgues and institutes will blossom through the snow. In one of them, in a windowless, telephoned recess, I sit at a desk, playing with a Geco 7.65 shell.

  6

  What once impelled millions of manned and unmanned bullets into motion? You say Germany. They say Russia. It certainly couldn’t have been Europe herself, much less Europe Central, who’s always such a good docile girl. I repeat: Europe’s a mild heifer, a plump virgin, an R-maiden or P-girl ripe for loving, an angel, a submissive prize. Europe is Lisca Malbran. Europe’s never burned a witch or laid hands on a Jew! How can one catalogue her jewels? In Prague, for instance, one sees dawn sky through the arched windows of bell-towers, and that sky becomes more desirable by being set in that verdigrised frame whose underpinning, the finger of the tower itself, emerges from the city’s flesh, the floral-reliefed, cartouched and lionheaded facades of it whose walled and winding streets have ever so many eyes; Europe’s watchful since she’s already been raped so many times, which may be why some of her eyes still shine with lamplight even now, but what good does it do to see them coming? The first metal lice already scuttle over her skin, which is cobblestoned with dark grey and light grey follicles. Europe feels all, bears all, raising her sky-ringed church-fingers up to heaven so that she can be married.

  What set steel in motion? The late-Obersturmführer Kurt Gerstein has counseled me to seek the answers in Scripture, meaning Europe Central’s old Greek Bibles with their red majiscules and black woodcut engravings of terrifying mummies bursting up from narrow sarcophagi; a few dozen of those volumes survived the war. To Gerstein, elucidation became even more magical a solvent than xylol, into which our forensicists immerse the identity documents dug up from Katyń Forest. (In that bath, inks bleached away by cadaveric fluid come back to life.) Have you ever seen a railroad tank car of fuel shot up by incendiary bullets? Elucidation must be even brighter than that! He asked himself what he dared not ask his strict father: Why, why all the death? His blood-red Bibles told him why.

  The telephone rings. It informs me that Gerstein’s answer has been rejected, that Gerstein has been hanged, obliterated, ruthlessly crushed. It puts the former Field-Marshal Paulus on the line.

  Paulus advises me that the solution to any problem is simply a matter of time and manpower.

  So I apply myself now, on this dark winter night, preparing to invade the meaning of Europe; I can do it; I can almost do it, just as when coming to a gap in the wall of some ruined Romanian fort, one can peer down upon thriving linden treetops; you can see them waving and massing, then far away dropping abruptly down to the fields. ‣

  PINCER MOVEMENTS

  (1914 -1975)

  THE SAVIORS: A KABBALISTIC TALE

  1

  The tale of Fanya Kaplan, that darkhaired, pale-faced, slender idealist, tells itself with grim brevity in keeping with her times. For just as tyrannicides spurn slow justice, so likewise with tyrants. Between exploit and recompense lay only four days, which in most histories would comprise but an ellipsis between words, a quartet of periods, thus: . . . .—but which, if through close reading we magnify them into spheres, prove to contain in each case a huddle of twenty-four grey subterranean hours like orphaned mice; and in the flesh of every hour a swarm of useless moments like ants whose queen has perished; and within each moment an uncountable multitude of instants resembling starpointed syllables shaken out of words—which at the close of this interval, Fanya Kaplan was carried beyond Tau, final letter of the magic alphabet. Her attempt took place on 30 August 1918. It is written that after Lenin fell, the young assassin hysterically fled, but then, remembering that the moral code of the Social Revolutionaries required her to give up her life in exchange for her victim’s, stopped running, turned back, and in trembling silence surrendered to our security forces. On 3 September, Fanya Kaplan, who happened to be noted for her “Jewish features,” was led into a narrow courtyard of the Lubyanka and there shot from behind by the commandant of the Kremlin himself, P. D. Malkov. (That luminary I. M. Sverdlov, who’d already played so indispensable a role in the liquidation of the Romanov family, instructed Malkov: Her remains are to be destroyed without a trace.) Thus the life and works of the blackhaired woman.

  The tale of Lenin’s bride, N. K. Krupskaya, makes for a happier parable. And doesn’t the parable possess greater integrity, greater righteousness we might almost say, than any other literary form? For its many conventions weave a holy covenant between the reader, who gets the mystification he craves in a bonbon-sized dose, and the writer, whose absence renders him divine. Granted, those very stringencies sometimes telescope events into dreamlike absurdity. In Krupskaya’s case, were it not for her nearly accidental marriage she’d surely have remained as hidden to history as the silent letter Aleph. What was she then in her maiden days? We don’t want to call her a cipher; we can’t deny that her parable, like ours, began with birth. But in this genre (as in the lyric poem) there can be no random causes. Every death must occur for good reason. Every word, right down to its gaping letters o and grinning letters e, must offer resonance with sentences before and beyond—not predictability, mind you, for that would be tedious, but after each comma the hindsighted reader needs to be in the position of saying: Why didn’t I see that coming? Fanya Kaplan, for example, was never notified that she’d been condemned to death. And yet when Malkov’s very first bullet exploded between her shoulderblades, she experienced coherence, and screamed not with surprise, but with despe
rate fear and outrage against inevitability.—As for Krupskaya, call her the darling of parable-mongers; introduce her as the perfect personification of convention. (This is why her collected works are so deadly dull.) Trotsky patronized her; Stalin by the end commanded her; Lenin himself merely used her. Historians regard her as a faithful mediocrity. I myself have always read in her a striving toward kindliness, for which I offer praise. Unutterably typical of her epoch—and thus perhaps curiously akin to Fanya Kaplan—she was agitated all her life by fervor. Just as the same letter may appear in two words of contrary meaning, so the lives of those two women write themselves in nearly identical characters. Who am I to find in Krupskaya’s enthusiasms anything alien to Fanya Kaplan’s? One loved the Revolution; the other hated it. What force transformed them into opposites, if they were opposites?

  2

  We read that Krupskaya was first (that is, before her parable is supposed to begin) a pious little girl who prayed to the icon in her bedroom, then a rapturous Tolstoyan. In company with her friends she attacked a wealthy factory owner with snowballs. We find her cutting hay to help hostile and uncomprehending peasants at age fifteen, then teaching night classes in literacy to factory workers at twenty-two. She was one of those souls who long more than anything to be of use in this world. Unknowingly she found herself drawn to the letter Cheth, which resembles the Greek letter pi and which, thus visually representing a gate, refers to ownership. She yearned to give herself, to be possessed, to know where she stood.

  By the time she was twenty-six, she was receiving, materializing and carrying to underground printers the invisible-inked manifestoes which Lenin sent from prison. The legend says that one of her greatest joys was to watch the magic letters appear in the boiling water, as if they comprised a secret message written expressly for her, instead of being merely another metallically impersonal appeal to the workers. (After all, reader, don’t you prefer to believe that this story which you’re taking the trouble to read has something to say to you?) But for just the same reason that she shunned fashionable clothes, chocolates and other frivolous pleasures, Krupskaya strove to persuade herself that in the self-abnegation of transcription lay her destiny.

  When she reached the age of twenty-seven, N. K. Krupskaya was arrested for the first time. After two months in preliminary detention, they released her, thinking her to be a shy nobody who’d gotten mixed up in illegal activity only by mistake, but so brazen and exalted were her actions on behalf of the Kostroma strikers that she was arrested again after only eighteen days.

  Here again I seem to see that pallid, protuberant-featured Social Revolutionary woman who sought to kill Lenin. It’s said that Fanya Kaplan had already become a committed anarcho-terrorist by the time she was sixteen. When the gendarmes burst in, she and her comrades were arrayed around the bed, carefully assembling the components of a bomb, like those Kabbalists who in their circle-beset diagrams arrange into bristling molecules the various emanations and manifestations of God. It’s even said that the police themselves were moved by the perfection of the urchin-spined grey spheres laid out upon the young girl’s white sheets. Fearing for the Tsar’s safety, the court at first condemned her to death, but in view of her youth and sex the sentence was commuted to hard labor for life in Siberia. There she dwelled between the river-ice and the celestial alphabets of constellations until the October Revolution amnestied her. By then Fanya Kaplan was more determined than ever to redeem all Russia from centralist abomination.

  As for Comrade Krupskaya, who proved equally unrepentant, they kept her in the blankness of the cells for five months, until a convict named M. F. Vetrova burned herself to death to protest her own fate. So in garments of flame this woman (otherwise almost unknown) dictated her tale of righteousness. Who says that tales are only words? Embarrassed by Vetrova’s propaganda triumph, the authorities felt compelled to exercise upon their remaining female prisoners the same leniency which they would grant Fanya Kaplan. In March of 1897, not long after her twenty-eighth birthday, they freed Krupskaya on grounds of failing health. (Fanya Kaplan for her part was also twenty-eight when she was freed forever by Malkov’s bullets.)

  A photograph from this period reveals Krupskaya’s pale, stern beauty. Her smooth forehead glows like winter sunshine on a snowy field, her clenched lips cannot entirely deny their own sensuousness, and her eyes gaze with painful sincerity into the ideal—dark eyes these, longing eyes from which a craving for meaning steadfastly bleeds. Her high and proper collar hides her almost to the chin, so she’s but a face, closed but promising something, like a flower-bud. She’s combed her hair severely back, and cropped it short; she’s a recruit, a fighter, a militant.

  3

  Knowing that Lenin needed a copyist in his Siberian exile, and learning that she too would be exiled (the police themselves being not entirely illiterate readers of dangerousness), she accepted her leader’s proposal for a marriage of convenience, replying in those famous words, meant to show her imperviousness to bourgeois institutions: Well, so what. If as a wife, then as a wife.—In fact there is every reason to believe that beneath this bravado lived an idolatrous passion.—Upon her arrival the following year, when Fanya Kaplan was celebrating her tenth birthday, the reunited atheists submitted to a full church wedding in Shushenskoe, which is wistfully called “the Siberian Italy.”

  The law required an exchange of rings; and devotees of that most Kabbalistic genre, the parable-within-a-parable, might well concentrate on this most pathetic episode of the ceremony, unable to resist dissecting the ironic symbolism of those two copper wedding bands lying side by side on the black velvet cushion.2 It’s said that when the eternally virginal Krupskaya first saw them, she blushed. Freshly worked copper has a peculiar brightness, like bloody gold. We need not detain ourselves here with mystic correlations and analogies, God being ineffable anyway; it seems that the raw luminosity of the rings exposed her unacknowledged feelings in their revelatory glare. They’d been fashioned by a Finnish comrade who was still learning the jeweler’s craft—indeed, he was indebted to Krupskaya for his tools, so he’d taken special pains, inscribing them with the names of the bride and groom in characters which in their squat angularity might well have graced some seventeenth-century diagram of astrology’s nested spheres. In their shape the rings are said to have resembled the letter Samekh—a sort of o which tapers as it rejoins its starting point, and which sports a tiny bud on top, imagined by dreamy brides to be a precious stone. Need I add that this character of the mystical alphabet symbolizes both help and sleep? (Recall Marx’s ambiguous proverb: Religion is the opium of the masses.)

  Who knows the fate of those shining circlets? The ring which Krupskaya slipped upon Lenin’s finger was never seen again. As for the one he slid onto hers, she removed it immediately, for the sake of revolutionary convention. Then the ceremony was over, and they walked home by separate ways.

  So she became both drudge and disciple, the good soldier, the bedfellow (or occasional bedfellow as I should say, for in their Kremlin suite each spouse had a private room and a single-width metal-framed bed3), the harmless mediocrity, the liquidator of pessimism, the amateur who transcribed Lenin’s essays and sewed his nightshirts. (That German Communist Clara Zetkin, more glamorous than Krupskaya by far, visited the happy couple before and after the Revolution; her memoirs indulgently commend the wife’s “frankness, simplicity and rather puritanic modesty.”)

  He called her Nadya. She called him Volodya.

  4

  On that August day two decades later, when the darkhaired, pale-faced, slender woman approached Lenin’s Rolls-Royce, then took shaky aim with her little Browning as a line of hysterical determination sank from each corner of her tight-compressed lips, the supreme deity of the Soviet Union ought to have been gathered in, rising to the heart of heaven just as letters of the Hebrew alphabet are said to take wing during the course of certain Kabbalistic raptures. Certainly Fanya Kaplan (alias Dora) was banking on that when she gave herself
up in observance of the covenant a life for a life. But the blackhaired woman, member in good standing of the Social Revolutionary Combat Organization though she was (which is to say, self-spendthrift), lacked competence. One cannot forbear to recall the half-built bomb on her girlhood’s bed. Was the premature ending of that story mere bad luck, or had she and her accomplices forgotten to post sentries? (In this connection we’d do well to invoke the letter Daleth, whose shape—the upper righthand angle of a square—implies both knowledge and unenlightenment, being a door which can open and close. The young anarchists had faith3 that the door would stay closed until they’d completed their preparations to murder the Minister of the Interior. The police forced it open. Either way, the tale would have gone on, and the door remained.) What else should we expect? So many revolutionaries are intellectuals, a class of people whose aspirations tend to run ahead of their capabilities. Just think of that Paris Communard of the previous century who used to sit in cafés, constructing such beautiful little barricades out of breadcrumbs that everyone admired him; come the uprising, he built a perfect barricade out of stones—and the troops marched around it. (Shall we interject here that Krupskaya was perfectly useless with a gun, and that her attempts at cryptography brought smiles to the lips of Tsarist police spies?)