Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  They introduced her to the Soviet people, explaining: Her family was involved in the workers’ movement. So densely was the hall ornamented with her life’s work, and in such a loving fashion did all these Russians regard her, that she hardly knew who she was. They photographed her seated in the center of a gathering of our Soviet artists, her ancient eyelids drooping, young women leaning lovingly against her, light shining on the spectacles of painters, photographers and actors, a fellow from Meyerhold’s theater standing stiffly or ironically to one side, as if he knew that he wouldn’t be aboveground much longer. Karl stood self-deprecatingly out of the picture except when they called him. About him his poor patients remembered: The doctor came immediately, and his invoice never.

  Another man in raspberry-colored boots who said he was an art critic pointed to one of her etchings and brusquely demanded that she explain it.

  Well, Käthe said, that’s the typical misfortune of a worker’s family: A man drinks or gets sick, then he becomes a parasite or goes crazy, or kills himself. And then, you know, the woman’s misery is always the same.

  But here that doesn’t happen anymore, because we’re all part of the collective.

  I’m so glad, she said. It’s very, very good to be in a place where there’s actually hope!

  The man nodded unsmiling and wrote something in a notebook.

  They’d devoted an entire room to her Weavers’ Series, whose every wrinkle was dark, the ground made of fine lines, everything marching or progressing or fissuring: outstretched hands, bent bodies, fists grasping stones, dark houses with corpses on the floor, crazed widows reaching at nothing. This was the work whose gold medal had been vetoed by the Kaiser himself.

  A proletarian woman cried out, very vigorously, but through the darkhaired interpreter, that since Frau Kollwitz had lost her son in the last war, she doubtless was at one with us in our unflinching class hatred.

  I have experienced those feelings, yes.

  It’s really true about your child? inquired the intrepreter. Frau Kollwitz, I am so very very sorry! And also in my family . . .

  And the curator fluttered excitedly about, exclaiming over everything.

  Käthe knew that these new friends of hers, with their soulful Slavic natures, saw at least as deeply into her work as her compatriots, and indeed, their comments, particularly regarding the Weavers’ Series, lacked for neither passion nor intellect. All the same, the interpreter, who’d known nothing of the most important event in her life, not to mention the poor curator, who like many of her peers throughout this world found herself so burdened by the necessity that this event be successful that she had no time to communicate with the creator of the work; the woman who thought to substitute hatred for sorrow; these people began to infect her with disappointment, which she battled as desperately as any Old Fighter ever fought an enemy.

  Frau Kollwitz, is it true that the rightists call you an enemy of the nation?

  Karl laughed proudly, and with a half-smile she agreed that it was.

  Several of her new colleagues—such clever, frail young theoreticians! it goes without saying that all but one of them were doomed—opined that since revolution was a dynamic and ultimately all-embracing process, art ought to be dynamic, too; they pointed out to her that paintings and etchings could depict only moments, whereas a film could actually unscroll time when the projectionist plucked it out of its jar. Furthermore, so one young man insisted in excellent German (he wore small oval spectacles as Hans had done when he was a student), the temporal sequence of a movement could be more effectively conveyed through acoustical than through optical articulation.

  That’s all beyond me, she replied calmly. She was hardly listening to him. There was a woman she’d seen in the street that morning, an old woman who obviously knew nothing but hard work; she could have been one of her husband’s patients. She kept wishing she’d embraced that woman.

  Your “Woman with Dead Child” is superb propaganda, the young man was saying. With great effectiveness it mobilizes us against the bloodbaths and massacres which will remain inevitable as long as capital dominates the world.

  Thank you, she said.

  You think I have no compassion. I can see that now. To you I’m just a fool in love with an idea.

  It’s a beautiful idea, she said, as politely as she could. (How tired she was!)

  That seemed to encourage him. Coming a little closer, he confessed: I used to believe that if I lived out my life without making anybody feel compassion for me, I would have done well. And I loved the masses because they didn’t excite my compassion, even when they perished.—I see your disappointment and disapproval (or is that compassion in your eyes?) Maybe I can’t explain it. At that time I’d simply made up my mind: To hell with personal feelings! I wanted to live only as part of a collective.

  She had to laugh a little. She liked him now.

  And is that still what you want?

  Of course.

  The young man, whose name was Comrade Alexandrov, offered to escort her and her husband to a Shostakovich concert. This Shostakovich was apparently the darling of the Soviet Union just then. His Second Symphony would soon premiere in Leningrad, the young man said. Karl was happy because now he’d finally get his promenade. He’d lived with her for all these years, and the Weavers’ Series was not exactly novel to him. In point of fact, she herself had lived with it for so many years that it was almost dead to her; when she’d seen it again tonight, all she could think of was that there were a few details which should have been done differently; for the rest, it was what it was. As for the promenade, Käthe would rather have gone home.—I think the concert would be wonderful, she said, stroking her husband’s grey hair.

  Look, Käthe! he cried out in astonishment. That store sells nothing but butter! And everyone’s queuing up for it!

  Correct, said the young man, shooting him a long look. The Romanovs left our country in a shambles.

  Karl grew silent. As for Käthe, she hadn’t even seen the store he was talking about. The sidewalk was so icy and the night so dark that all she could do was watch her footing. Actually, there was quite a bit to see. The Museum of Atheism was open. The tapering metal lacework of the Shukhov Radio Tower wasn’t quite finished; the windowed bays of Zholtovsky’s electric power station wouldn’t glow for two years yet; but no one could deny that we were ahead of Berlin. (Red Kiel, Red Leipzig, Red Munich, Red Frankfurt, Red Stuttgart, all fallen like Alexander II’s statue!) A shivering old lady stood in a doorway, trying to sell dough-and-sugar figurines. Käthe would have bought one, simply for pity, but Comrade Alexandrov, who reminded her more and more of her son Hans, said they hadn’t time. She didn’t look at Karl’s face.

  The composition which they attended, the Scherzo in E-flat Major, had the flavor of something modern, but not quite new. Her husband, as she could see quite well from the vagueness of his smile, did not like it at all. How much he had to endure for her! She for her part preferred Schnabel, whose music she called clear-consoling-good. Whenever she listened to Beethoven on the gramophone, the heavens opened. This scherzo was like a peek into hell. The stench of grief rose up from its grey and lifeless earth. As Shostakovich’s notes wailed out, the great hall seemed to get so cold that she wouldn’t have been surprised to see icicles on the ceiling. All the same, there was something about the music which haunted her, not simply its acoustic color, which beneath the greyness resembled a gruesome aurora borealis, but a desperate encoded message which baffled her. She said as much to Comrade Alexandrov, who suavely replied: Why then, if he’s incomprehensible then he’s failed.—She thought that rather harsh. At the end she saw this Shostakovich, for they called him onstage to take his bow. She thought him a nice-looking boy, somewhat nervously high-spirited. Everything in Russia was so strange . . .

  You look tired, Frau Kollwitz. If you wish, we can go back to your hotel by sleigh. You might enjoy the lights of Tverskoi Boulevard.

  Truth to tell, she certainly was
very, very tired, but she found herself saying: Thank you, that sounds beautiful, but I’m all right.

  As you wish.

  They walked and walked, with Russia curving ecstatically all around her like the Soviet trams swerving in double tracks through the mosaic of paving-stones, the intersection almost empty, a few sparse stragglers crossing behind the tram, then nothing but stone blankness and concrete blankness flat and eternal.

  And now I think we’ll take a tram, Frau Kollwitz. Herr Doktor Kollwitz, don’t you agree? Your wife looks done in.

  Hands folded, the tram driver watched her through his round mirror.

  The janitress and her little boy were sleeping on a mattress under the stairs, the child’s plump cheek pressed against the mother’s weary mouth, her workworn hand around his neck. Karl’s observant old face, rendered pseudo-enthusiastic by the lenses of his spectacles, turned itself upon the sleepers, and then he sighed.

  The next morning, while Comrade Alexandrov took her husband to see Red Square, which bored him, and Saint Basil’s Cathedral, whose domes, variously patterned in balloon-stripes, pinecone-knurls, ice cream swirls and ocean-waves, he reported to be quite fairytale-like, she stayed in; she was old; she wanted only to sleep. Karl, who was so devoted to her, and who always told her how much good and luck she brought him—how she loved him; how she hated him! Marriage is a kind of work, she’d once told her friend Lene Bloch. He’d never understood why she needed to be alone. It hurt him. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him! She’d learned to conceal from him how happy she became when she withdrew alone into Peter’s room. Even Russia stifled her today; she must be really, really old.

  Then there was a parade on Red Square, with Lenin’s Mausoleum always in the background, so she went to see that: a military parade, then armed workers, followed by demonstrations. In its own way it was as lovely as a service in the Marienkirche. Karl, the empathetic Social Democrat, hurrahed with the rest of them, although he didn’t understand a word. It was then and there that she made the pencil drawing entitled “Listening,” which would be lithographed the following year with the title translated into its Russian equivalent, Slushayuoshchie, the eyes rendered more bright and innocent still, and the contrast increased. (Otto Nagel: Out of Moscow, Käthe Kollwitz brought with her a beautiful page which was later worked in stone.) At that time, “Listening” was simply a pencil drawing of three rapt young heads gazing upwards, the farthest with its mouth agape like the dead child—but there is life in this young man’s eyes, amazement and inspiration, for he hears the words of Comrade Stalin! Next comes a head with closed lips; he is lost in the speech; then in the foreground, seated on his lap, snuggling in against his right arm, with its head on his shoulder, is the child, white-faced, wide-eyed, the mouth open, utterly curious and surprised but in the same position as so many of Kollwitz’s dead children, head back lifelessly. But what am I saying? It wasn’t lifeless at all! When they used to drink coffee or hot chocolate with the children in some café under the trees, the little ones sometimes gripped the backs of the chairs, peering over them at the world just like that! And Peter had said . . .

  Her husband said: I keep dreaming of elaborate Russian cakes.

  12

  This story, like this book itself, is derivative. In his unsurpassable A Tomb for Boris Davidovich, the Serbian writer Danilo Kiš relates a fable: Édouard Herriot, highest-ranking French Radical Socialist, charismatic orator, effective politician (thanks in part to him, France recognized the Soviet government), has come to pay a visit to Odessa. Monsieur Herriot, Comrade Herriot I can almost call him, has one weakness: He’s squeamish about the persecution of priests. Unfortunately, he’s due to arrive in four hours, and we’ve long since converted Saint Sophia Cathedral into a brewery! What to do? Steady now! Take down the antireligious banner outside. Under my personal supervision a hundred and twenty inmates of the nearby regional prison camp carried out another restoration of the church, in less than four hours. And Herriot is tricked.

  What about Käthe Kollwitz? Didn’t she also want to be tricked? If nothing else, didn’t she crave to feel just once the antithesis of that morbid grief she’d been condemned so long to tunnel through? So what if it were false light? At the end of that year, back in Berlin, she took up her diary and commended Moscow with its different atmosphere, so that Karl and I came back as if we had both had a good airing. It would be a simple matter to write this story as a parable of the heart which through its very empathy was duped. But she saw the janitress even though they wouldn’t have wanted her to. She sensed secret meanings in Comrade Alexandrov’s tone. The speeches on Red Square meant less to her than the rapt children who listened. She was all too well aware that the jury of the Prussian Academy, like their predecessors in the Kaiser’s day, would have preferred to insert her somewhere within the list Frauensport, Frauenheim, Frauenhaus (obsolete for bordello), Frauenkauf, rather than recognizing her as an artist. Why not give her the credit of supposing that she also saw through their Soviet equivalents? For example, when Comrade Alexandrov, perhaps genuinely wanting to know, but more likely wishing to determine the extent of her cooperation, requested her views on the emiseration of the German proletariat, she looked steadily into the man’s face, then replied: When the man and the woman are healthy, a worker’s life is not unbearable.

  In retrospect, what should she have thought or understood? Joy in others, being in harmony with them, had always been one of the deepest pleasures in her life; shouldn’t that be everyone’s? Given the limitation of her bourgeois origins, shouldn’t the fact of her empathy for the working class have counted sufficiently in her favor for “posterity” not to expect anything else of her? It may well be that her impressions of Russia are of a piece with the memorial to Peter, which once depicted Peter himself, but now depicts his parents. I sometimes fear that this is the case with everyone’s impressions of everything. (Danilo Kiš would say all this much better in his trademark ironic style; unfortunately, he’s now in the same place as Peter.) Perhaps she really did continue working without illusions. It would be too cheap to write that someone eavesdropped on her while she drew “Listening.” But even if that were true, and even if she didn’t notice, what then?

  I’ve read, not in her daybooks, but in the account of Comrade Alexandrov, to whom I am very close, that at one point when he uttered a remark which she might have construed as sinister, for it seemed to call on her to praise Comrade Stalin’s portrait (darkhaired, dark-moustached, not quite Asian, almost smiling), she simply replied: We each must fulfill our own obligation.

  It’s fair to say that this new Red Russia of dog-nosed, sprawling trucks and flat-roofed trams literally intoxicated her, and that for this pretty, darkhaired Elena—yes, her name actually was Elena—who explained to everyone that the reason Frau Kollwitz had taken up etching was in order to distribute the maximum number of prints to the working class, Käthe suddenly felt a surge of physical feeling, such as she had not felt for any woman since she was much, much younger. She heard a ringing in her ears. Gamely, she tried to sing the “Propeller Song . . .”

  13

  When it was time for her to go they made another party for her, of course, and when she arrived at the train station she found some people spontaneously organized in her honor; some of them even had banners. Among them stood a young photojournalist from Odessa; he asked permission to take her picture with his dead father’s camera; in a low shy voice he informed her that he was hoping that an editor he knew would agree to publish a portrait of the great artist K. Kollwitz in Vsyermirnaya Ilustratsia. She was feeling very tired by then, really, really tired; but she also felt sorry for him, so she nodded.

  He was very sincere and very quick. She ended up liking him. He asked if she would be willing to pose right there on the station platform with her latest masterpiece, “Listening,” which had been drawn from life in our own Soviet Union, but she explained that it was already packed away. He smiled understandingly.

  She
asked him what he aimed to do with his life, and he said that he wanted to document the progress of the Communist Revolution here and throughout the world. He was considering attending the State School of Photography if he could find somebody to help him. He wanted to go into films.

  Käthe nodded, leaning against Karl’s shoulder. All she wanted to do was take her seat on the train and rest. If she never answered another question again, except from her grandchildren, that would be so perfect! At the same time, she couldn’t bring herself to be rude to the young man. If she could only keep Karl from realizing how tired she was! Trying to rescue her, he would surely hurt the young man’s feelings.

  Excuse me, my dear, she said to him, but could you kindly repeat your name? We elderly people find ourselves becoming a bit stupid, unfortunately.

  Of course, Frau Kollwitz! My name is Karmen, Roman Lazarevich. Perhaps someday I’ll make a name for myself.

  And where did you say you come from?

  Odessa. This camera is actually my late father’s. It’s all he was able to leave me. The White Guards tortured him because he’d published a few articles in the Communist press. Later they released him, but he never recovered. He died quite young.

  You poor, poor child, said Käthe, shaking her head. She hoped that her husband hadn’t heard. Karl, who’d lost his own father and mother early, was easily upset by such cases.

  It’s a common story, unfortunately. Your expression is perfect; could you hold still for just a moment?

  And the handsome young Karmen in his corduroy cap, smoothfaced, sighted through the camera, whose bellows were part way extended and locked in position by the steel X across the top; she saw that the metal lens board of the front standard was armored, and so was everything else.

  (Shall I describe that perfect expression of hers? She conveyed an impression most of all of sad steadiness; not only did she no longer need any model but herself, but she’d turned into one of her own sculptures. Her eyes were not unlike Shostakovich’s in that grief seemed almost ready to explode out of them, like corpses flying into the air when a stray shell hits a mass grave.)