Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  And so, when the actress was brought to his office and stood before him as straight as the letter Vau, which resembles a nail, Stalin lit his pipe, looked her over, then said: Well, comrade, do you understand that you’ve been given a gigantic moral responsibility?

  Yes, Comrade Stalin, I—

  I have my doubts that you do. Listen, you. We don’t want the old cunt to put us to this trouble again. Just because she shares the same bathroom with Lenin is no reason why I have to respect her. Hey! Did you hear what I said? You’re not sick, are you?

  No, Comrade Stalin.

  Make her hate you, and don’t let her pin you down on anything. Mystification is in order, get it? Nu, you’re a Yid, so act like a Yid.

  Stalin’s will, if the black-clad woman had correctly deciphered it, was that she punish and terrify Krupskaya. Each syllable departing her mouth must become a ravening animal to attack the grand lady’s soul.

  Unlike most inmates of that epoch, the woman could see the future as brightly as if it were a six-pointed star of violet fire around which whirled all the signs of the heavens. Until she ceased to exist, Lenin and Stalin would worry that the trick might be exposed. And therefore she must take refuge in gnomic utterances.—Her apprehension now ascended higher, until she realized that even so obscure a course, mystification as he’d called it, would profit her nothing. No matter what she said or did, she was doomed.

  And so she felt herself even more pinned to silence, like Fanya Kaplan herself, who’d done nothing, it is said, but stare out the window of her cell, waiting for the bullet in the back. It was all hopeless.

  But as soon as Krupskaya had entered her cell, the woman had pitied her. She would be true to the text whose letters crawled around her so uneasily. The lot is cast into the lap, but the decision is wholly from the Lord.7

  11

  Most literary critics agree that fiction cannot be reduced to mere falsehood. Well-crafted protagonists come to life, pornography causes orgasms, and the pretense that life is what we want it to be may conceivably bring about the desired condition. Hence religious parables, socialist realism, Nazi propaganda. And if this story likewise crawls with reactionary supernaturalism, that might be because its author longs to see letters scuttling across ceilings, cautiously beginning to reify themselves into angels. For if they could only do that, then why not us?

  A kindred longing for autonomy doubtless animated the prisoner when in her low and leaden voice she whispered: Nadezhda Konstantinovna, have you ever read the Kabbalah?

  I haven’t time for that trash. Say what you like . . .

  It’s written that man is the moving hand, and God is the shadow. Only man can save God. And now you and Lenin are the two gods of Russia. Don’t deny it, Nadezhda Konstantinovna! You yourself are God.8 And only I can save you. Only I can repair your glory.

  Krupskaya half rose, staring at her in astonishment.—So that’s the kind you are, she said. You’re not even intelligent.

  Not at all. But at least I am real. I tried to kill Lenin because he wanted to be God, but now that he’s achieved his aim he’s become my shadow, so I must worship him. And you, too, with your tremors, your isolation and your silliness, you’re my shadow, too! If it weren’t for me, you wouldn’t be here . . .

  You should be in an asylum. I’m leaving.

  I seek hidden worlds, the woman said into Krupskaya’s staring, steadfast face. And then, in a very low voice (since Stalin was undoubtedly listening behind the wall), she whispered: Are you true to yourself?

  I beg your pardon! Why should I answer to you, murderess?

  I don’t ask for justifications, Nadezhda Konstantinovna. I ask only for your pity.

  Krupskaya’s heart was pounding. Rubbing her forehead, rapidly gasping, she wondered when a stroke would finish her off.

  Will you pity me? the woman was demanding.

  I—

  Look at me. Look at where I am. Will you pity me?

  Krupskaya wanted to weep, but dared not. Clearing her throat, she haltingly said: I remember when I was in prison and I felt so passionately that armed struggle was necessary. And I—I think that you, too, must feel passionately.

  The woman’s face swelled then with a dull ecstasy, and she knelt before Krupskaya on the flagstones of the cell, flinging back her head, offering her throat, so that in her shape she resembled the letter Beth, which means both wisdom and madness.

  But you’re deranged! You need a doctor. I’ll tell Ilyich . . .

  Don’t trouble yourself, Nadezhda Konstantinovna—

  Then Krupskaya began to tremble, and she said: You’re not Fanya Kaplan, are you?

  If I’m not who I say I am, draw your own conclusions—

  Is she dead?

  Rising, the woman said: In other words, you wish to know whether I am the assassin in herself, or the manifestation of an assassin.

  Who are you?

  I am your revelation.

  Then the woman (who unlike both Krupskaya and Fanya Kaplan sought to delay her own doom) knelt down once more and began to murmur these words: Suryah, Prince of the Presence, I have fasted with my head between my knees; now I adjure You one hundred and twelve times with the Name of God. I adjure You with the name NADEZHDA KONSTANTINOVNA KRUPSKAYA HA-SHEM ELOHEI YISRA’EL.

  Paling more and more in the darkness until her flesh was as a white flame, one hundred and eleven times (each time in a single long breath) she repeated this clandestine Name, nodding her head with each syllable, counting on the fingers of her ecstatically outstretched hands.

  Krupskaya sat paralyzed. Afterward she could scarcely remember her sensations. It was as if she hadn’t been there at all, or been there only in some insubstantial sense, like a wisp of smoke . . . And then, whispering LE’ARSIY IEHOLE MEHS-AN AYAKSPURK ANVONITNATSNOK ADHZEDAN, the woman trembled and fell upon the floor foaming at the mouth, and in her eyes was darkness like the darkness within Krupskaya’s nostrils. At that moment the writhing Hebrew letters upon the wall became as red as fire, and took wing, gathering into a circular swarm about the woman’s face, so that her features were obscured just as Fanya Kaplan’s execution had been veiled in the mysterious roaring of an automobile engine (Malkov had been afraid that bystanders might otherwise hear the screams). Then the letters disappeared into the woman’s mouth. Krupskaya was speechless. The woman began to glow more and more, until the light from her was as white and pure as a page of the Torah.

  She stood and approached Krupskaya, who, overcome by a mysterious impulse, kissed her upon the mouth so that those two drank from each other at last.

  Then, in a voice as soft as the lace in Russian shopwindows before the Revolution stripped them, the woman said: I have beheld you, I have prayed to you, and I have repaired your glory with the power of righteousness. You stand guiltless. But as for me, now that I have beheld you, I shall surely die.

  Who are you? said Krupskaya, squeezing the woman’s hand.

  And if I told you, would you be swept aside by the telling?

  Who are you?

  I am you. I have become you. I have given myself utterly to you. And now what will you do? You are innocent and perfect, so you can do anything.

  Who are you?

  I am unknowable, the woman whispered. I am nothing.

  12

  Brushing past the fixed bayonets of ironically polite Chekists outside the Kremlin wall, she ascended the three long, steep flights of stairs, clenching her trembling hands. Her worshiper had drunk from her the kiss of enlightenment, but who can enlighten God Herself? Krupskaya felt as if she were trapped within a circle of fire.

  Yesterday we talked about legalizing them; today we are arresting them! she heard Volodya say with that cheerful chuckle of his. That’s the way to cut off counterrevolution . . .

  Not long afterward, Comrade Angelica Balabanoff came to visit. When the latter raised the subject of Fanya Kaplan’s execution, Krupskaya is said to have wept many tears.9

  13

  Here,
perhaps, the parable should end, because in her last years Krupskaya shared scant sisterhood with either of the two Fanya Kaplans. She preached, lectured, traveled, set up schools, ever remaining enchanted, though she could not admit it, by the old Narodnik slogan Go to the people.—Well, and so she did still resemble her husband’s assassins! How can we end yet?—She wrote austere essays on pedagogy. (Krupskaya loved children and would have been so happy to bear her own. But Volodya was embalmed now in the Mausoleum she’d opposed.10) In her writings recurred this phrase: The task before us . . . In the years when her Party was murdering Ukrainians by the millions, a certain comrade otherwise unrecorded told her the tale of a poor littleboy who liked to draw pictures of flowers, but had been born paralyzed from the waist down, so he had to remain indoors and scarcely ever saw real plants; as usual, Krupskaya wept; she wanted to do something. And what right have I to belittle weeping? Were not her goodness and her judgment laid up in store against all adversaries?—Kabbalistically she now possessed affinity for the letter Yod, which resembles a deformed bullet dug out of a corpse and which means, above all, praxis. In short, she followed the correct line, remaining worthy of the supreme experience. Convicts told her: I am well treated . . .—Before Volodya’s death she was already transmitting directives requiring libraries to suppress undesirable books, including the harmfully superficial ecstasies of Tolstoyans. Blame Volodya if you want to. It was upon his instructions that she had long ago broken off with the Narodniks whose printers once set in illegal type his invisible-inked prison essays. Had Volodya then been the key to her submission? Or was it simply her lack of intellectual self-confidence, which left her convinced throughout life that she still knew too little to render any unguided sacrifice?

  When the new wave of “repressions” began in 1928, the peasants, who worshiped her, sent her many letters begging her to save their families from dekulakization, exile and imprisonment. It was impossible even to answer them all. She said to herself: My personal reading of these words is irrelevant. The Revolution must be saved.—The rapture was gone. She no longer hoped to write in the Book of Life, or even to be Lenin’s copy-editor; all that remained to her was to read aloud whatever might be set before her. In 1936 we find her writing in support of Stalin’s show trials that many of her own former comrades-in-arms deserved to be shot like mad dogs (a stilted commonplace of the time). By then she’d become a sad, round-faced babushka, a good Kommunistka who stared slowly at the world. Sometimes it was whispered to her that Fanya Kaplan was still alive. She credulously gobbled such rumors, which were presented to her like offerings.

  Superior in her destiny to the murdered murderess, she escaped even the show trials. The rumor that Stalin poisoned her need not be credited. She died of arterial sclerosis in 1939, and this seems to me a strangely appropriate disease for one whose vitality and spontaneity had been gradually clogged. Stalin was prominent among those who carried her funeral urn to its waiting niche in the Kremlin wall. ‣

  MOBILIZATION

  I have often observed in myself that my will has decided even before my thinking is over.

  —Bismarck (ca. 1878)

  1

  In the Kaiser’s time, iron crosses hung from the Brandenburg Gate, and there were processions of white horses and of Prussian officers whose immense brass buttons gleamed fiercely. (The Russians didn’t mind at first; the Tsar and the Kaiser were cousins.) After our spectacular adventures in France, we had begun to overcome the human fearfulness of death, and even (on certain very hot nights) to speak to each other of destiny. A man leaped up in the beerhall and cried out that this would be the year when our century finally began, fourteen years late; never mind those fourteen lost years because we had a thousand more ahead of us! And nobody laughed. Pretty soon we were all in the streets. The July breath of linden trees, the sheen of rivers, the Kaiser’s promises and the perfumed humidity rising up from between women’s breasts now dissolved one another into a supersaturated solution whose molecules swarmed apart, perched in the lindens, opened their wings, then, unable to remain alone beyond the saturation limit, rejoined the Kaiser’s newly crystalline slogans.

  A generation before, the Iron Chancellor had observed: I’ve always found the word Europe on the lips of those statesmen who want something from a foreign power which they would never venture to ask for in their own name. And so the Kaiser, inaugurating a century of perfect honesty, divorced the word Europe. He said Germany. At once, Berlin’s department stores became as airy and multi-windowed as hothouses. The clockfaces which crowned them opened gilded hands to embrace a futurity of undying summer.

  The Kaiser shouted: Germany! On the outer walls of the Zeughaus, stone helmets which had obediently overshadowed stone collars for nearly two centuries came alive. Within each helmet-darkness, drops of excited moisture strove to become eagles.

  2

  The winged figures on the bridges of Berlin are now mostly flown, for certain things went wrong in Europe, which was supposed to become Germany; indeed, the wrongnesses ripened into bombs, so our angels had to flee or go smash. But even now (I’m writing in the year 2002), Berlin remains the city of eagles; and in 1914, when everything began to happen, we were, if I may say so, graced to perfection by those kingly war-birds, who inspired us as much as they guarded us, sometimes disguising themselves as winged deities on columns—I’m thinking of the gilded Victory who still flexes her wings atop the Siegessäule’s triumphal phallus—sometimes protecting our dead, as does, for instance, the black eagle in gold upon the ancient pall of Anna Elisabeth Louise, the Margrave’s daughter.

  In the Hitler years we still believed in books enough to burn them. Imagine, then, how much life our faith could impart to stone effigies of eagles back in the Kaiser’s day, when belief really meant something! The Brandenburg Gate had not yet been time-scorched to the color of earth. None of the people in the old photographs were dead—not one! Berlin’s pale green willow trees bent over the water, craving to marry their own reflections and thereby complete eternity’s circle; several succeeded. On the bridges and columns, eagles shrieked. New atoms of humidity flew up to become eagles.

  3

  Here came our Kaiser, jaunty and true; he was sterner than a Bismarck statue in a crypt; his soul was a sarcophagus of gilded lizard-dragons and gaping faces eternally melded to black bronze. He came in uniform, with his Iron Cross and dark sash, emerging from a crypt-gate between pillars crowned by a pair of eagle-angels. He’d been communing with the white grave-effigy of Kaiser Friedrich III, the gilded bier of Friedrich I. He’d rested his ear against the marble and heard a voice groan: Germany.

  Do you want to know more? Beneath that bier, the marble was cunningly tunneled through. That’s where it got secret; farther down, it got top secret. That was where the stone always sweated and the tunnels stopped forking; there was only one choice. The deep passage ended in a niche into whose wall a medallion had been set forever (which is to say, until 1945). Whose likeness did it carry? Whose could it have been, but his, the one who won the Pope’s kiss of peace even when all Europe stood against us, the one who sent our first iron tentacles into the Slavic East, the one who launched the Third Crusade? Oh, yes, it was Barbarossa’s round, cruelly birdlike face beneath that squat crown; he was bulging-eyed; he clutched floral spearheads; he glared at us all from within his heavy round money-disk. And so the Kaiser came down to him. He knelt and placed his ear against the face of Barbarossa, as we do with telephones. And Barbarossa sighed in a voice neither gravelly nor liquid: Germany.

  The Kaiser rose up. Germany was on his lips now. Germany would come out.

  Awaiting his words, we beerhall men got our hats ready to throw up in the air. We’d brought our martial-looking mothers, wives and children, all of whom were blank-eyed, tranquil and strong, the children protected by their mothers’ hands, the mothers guarded by the gilded profile of Friedrich I, which was in turn upheld by gruesome, menacing eagles.

  Our Kaiser began to speak. Clenc
hing his hand in the white glove, he said that like the bravely honest people that we were, we must honor our promise to the Austrians and punish the Serbs; that this meant war against England and France; that because Russia refused to disinterest herself in the Serbian question, the only correct thing was to declare war on Russia also.

  Then the Kaiser shouted: Germany! and before we could even wave our hats, all the Medusa-faces which had glared somnolently on stone shields since the creation of Berlin, which was the creation of the world, woke up. They wanted war games and adventures. Soon our white-clad girls would be waving goodbye to troop trains.

  On the Schlossbrücke, a winged goddess held a dying naked warrior above an eagle who was about to eat a snake. Their flesh was stone, but now the snake writhed, the warrior groaned, the goddess laughed, and the eagle shrieked! In the Berliner Dom, an immense white eagle, blocky and menacing, with a fan-tail, had masqueraded as an angel for centuries. Now it too began to scream, flapping its wings until all the picture postcards blew out of the little kiosk outside. The church’s stained-glass windows glowed yellow. Then the silver gunbarrels of the organ began to fire; gold and silver music-notes rained up into the air; and right beside me a pale little man, probably a tramp, with disheveled hair and a dark trapezoidal moustache, began to caper, smiling at the world with a sleepwalker’s eyes. He was the one who’d leaped up in the beerhall that time. He gripped my hand and cried: I saw them! I saw them come to life! It happened when the Kaiser said Germany . . .

  He was a ridiculous little man. But he threw back his head to yell: Germany! and his shout drowned out the Kaiser’s; moreover, it grew louder the farther it traveled, and by the time it passed beyond the Egyptian Museum and the Schloss Charlottenburg, it was so loud that our ears burst and we could no longer hear it. And then creepers and vines of fire began rising up to hide Europe, just as they did in Wagner’s Magic Fire music. ‣