Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  I admit that I was overpowered; it was my Russian blood. For her part, Chukovskaya knelt and kissed what Gumilyev, in one of his saddest poems, memorialized as your cold, slender hands.

  16

  Then what? Then bare trees in the snow on the Moika Embankment.

  And that night when I went home, I don’t mind confessing that my head was filled with all kinds of ridiculous word-rubbish, such as the moon and six candles, and a kiss upon her eyelashes. What was I to do? Finally I picked up The Foundations of Leninism and read two pages at random. That cured me. I still felt melancholy, and it’s possible that I might have been sharp with my wife. But, as Akhmatova bitterly laughs in one of her earliest love lyrics, I don’t cure anybody of happiness! ‣

  CASE WHITE

  ... with the mysterious lens in your eye, you will be master of the thoughts of people . . . If you move freely in the world, your blood will flow more easily, all gloomy brooding will cease, and, what is best of all, brightly colored ideas and thoughts will rise in your brain . . .

  —E. T. A. Hoffmann (ca. 1822)

  In the sleepwalker’s time, there were processions of tanks,-troops and pleading diplomats from England and France while we prepared to push death aside forever and ever. The men who used to leap up in beerhalls and shout about destiny now had regiments at their command. And so the orders for Case White got unsealed, and the regiments learned that they would be going to Warsaw, city of squat, honey-colored churches and blue-grimed cobbles, so that they could look up the pink sweaty legs of Polish women.

  Our Russian friends put on “Die Walküre” at the Bolshoi (the production Jew-free, to keep us satisfied). They were looking forward to Case White; we’d agreed to let them eat half of Poland. What would they do then? I seem to see an officer’s white glove, discolored by cadaveric fluid, a rusty set of keys, a brass Polish eagle, matted muddy scraps of green canvas; multiplied three thousandfold or maybe twelve thousandfold (for no one ever agrees on numbers) in Katyń Forest. What butchers those Slavs are!

  The Austrians were happy about Case White, too. They wanted to show their new Reich what they were capable of. (Take your kinsmen’s advice; make good your old losses. That was what we told them.) The Czechs and Romanians had their own hopes. In fact, who wasn’t caught up by Case White? It opened the most spectacular scenario ever written: Germany can no longer be a passive onlooker! Every political possibility has been exhausted; we’ve decided on a solution by force!—Have you ever read the supernatural stories of E. T. A. Hoffmann? He’s the one who drafted Case White; he dreamed up treasures, magic lenses, monsters! If you want to remind me that Hoffmann died in the nineteenth century, all I have to say to you is: That just makes it better! Our regiments were going to march, with the almost maddeningly monotonous perfection of Hoffmann’s handwriting, each line perfectly level and perfectly spaced between the one above it and the one below it, each letter canted at the same angle, the same courtly bow. The sea-waves of Rilke’s handwriting, the gentle asymmetries of Mozart’s script, the ornate crowdedness of Schiller’s penmanship, all these had had their day; now it was Hoffmann’s turn again, with musical accompaniment in Beethoven’s grandiose scrawl and troop dispositions drawn up in Wagner’s surprisingly elegant cursive, stylized and sloped, his d ’s curled. And all summer, in spite of the diplomats who scuttered across her face, Europe lay as miserably passive as one of Dostoyevsky’s women. In the beerhall, a man said to me that of course every woman wants it; every woman craves to be raped by the blond beast. He’d just been accepted into Panzer Grenadier Division Grossdeutschland. He bought me a draft and showed off a photograph of his wife, whom he’d married this very year, on Uncle Wolf’s birthday, and when I asked him whether he’d ever raped her, he replied that some women don’t need to be raped because they’re candles; you light them and they burn all by themselves; they melt and they burn. He asked me if I understood him; he wanted to know if I’d ever been with a woman, and I said that I no longer dreamed of women anymore; when I closed my eyes at night I saw a pyramid of flame. Dismissing women, he announced that Poland would not be enough; one had to consider our people’s future. (In Europe everything is a performance; everything gets announced.)

  Three years later, the next act would stage itself above the pale faces and frozen hands of the Muscovites who heard on street-loudspeakers that the German Fascists were coming. In Poland, people were going up the chimney by then. But before that, yes, before that, summer made its loving leafy promises. I remember Warsaw quite well; I remember the soft yellow pillars and figures of the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin. One of those statues, a prophet by the look of him, reached up to caress the pillar which was comprised of the same powdery yellow substance as he; everything was a candle ready to be set alight. ‣

  OPERATION BARBAROSSA

  Therefore this young god always dies early, nailed to the tree . . . the maternal principle which gave birth to him swallows him back in the negative form, and he is reached by ugliness and death . . . Many at that moment prefer to die either by an accident or in war, rather than become old.

  —Marie-Louise von Franz (1995)

  The night before the Dynamos game he should have been happy, because soccer was now his only escape except for music itself; moreover, before she went to her room for the night, Nina informed him that Shebalina, whom she’d met in a sugar queue, had whispered that everything would be forgiven; poor Ninusha, who had always been so strong-minded, even believed that; she practically congratulated him; and he would have laughed in her face had she not been so obviously trusting that their lives would finally get, how should I say, better and more joyful; in short, he should have been happy, but that night he dreamed that Nina had no face, or, rather, that her face was a black disk of bakelite, perforated by concentric constellations of perfectly round holes; in effect, his wife had become a monstrous telephone receiver; and he awoke in one of his panics, which never disturbed anyone behind the other door because he didn’t cry out, not even a moan. What was that sound? He’d write it into Opus 110. He rose and looked in on his family. What was that sound? With her throat trustingly upturned and the two small heads slumbering upon her chest, she lay snoring piano, forte, piano, forte, her face joyless, prematurely aged; her breath was very bad; for some weeks she’d been complaining of an infected tooth. He would rather have married E . E. Konstantinovskaya, but now Nina was the mother of his children; and she’d kept faith with him in defiance of his persecutors, who included everyone all the way up to, you know, that bastard. It had been going on for five years now. Once they came for him, that alone would give them legal license to return for her. Nina knew that, but refused to divorce him. She loved him without understanding him, which may be the noblest love of all.

  Retreating to his bed, he fell back into a nightmare punctuated by electric signals just as his life would very soon be by tracer bullets, and there was Nina again, towering over him, shouting at him in that inhuman electric voice, that singing voice, I mean that music; it must be music which issued from her round, black cruelly birdlike face! But when he woke up, his mood seemed to have been reconfigured by a species of rotary stepping system: He felt that something tremendous and uplifting would occur. And something would: the Dynamos game!

  It was only at Lenin Stadium that he could open his mouth and scream, really scream—and here I should say that only he would have thought of what he did as screaming; he never let himself go the way that V. V. Lebeyev did; the most he might do was hiss out: Hooligans! at some unfair play, but even this brought him extreme pleasure. He favored the Dynamos on account of Peki Dementyiev, whom everyone called “the Ballerina” on account of his grace.

  Once upon a time, he’d escorted Elena Konstantinovskaya to a match of Zenith versus Spartak, which is to say Leningrad versus Moscow; the whole time she kept weeping because he’d just informed her that he must remain with Nina, thanks to what proved to be a false pregnancy. They each wore the white shirt and
dark shorts of the Dynamo Club. He, likewise weeping (his glasses were smeared), whispered amidst the shouts: You see, Elena, when I looked into the mirror this morning, I, well, I, I said to myself: Shostakovich does not abandon his children. That’s the, so to speak, situation. But if you’d rather, I’m ready to, I know a man who has a . . .—When Peki scored a goal, so that everyone around them was screaming and screaming like kulaks being executed, he, feeling sheltered by the high level of the signal, if you catch my drift, fumblingly tried to kiss away her tears, which merely stimulated them; pressing his teeth against her ear so that his own signal would be transmitted by bone conduction, he said: Let’s light thirteen candles, Elenka, and drink a toast to, to—you know it’s you I’d prefer to take with me . . .

  Another goal! He couldn’t help it; he himself started screaming and screaming! (These soccer stars would soon be employed as policemen, to save them from the front line.)

  Elenka, Elenochka, Lyalya Konstantinovskaya, well, she was finished now, so to speak: married to R. L. Karmen; to be sure, there’d been that long last night in the Luga dacha, her tears and then his dying down, or as we say in music, morendo, after which he’d simply needed to remind himself that the feelings which came over him when he saw her face (I mean his faith in her perfect qualities, not to mention his longing to be in her company always) meant nothing and could be induced to attach themselves to other women, darling Ninusha for instance, no matter that her face was a black disk. In a word, Elena Konstantinovskaya wouldn’t be coming with him today.

  He actually had two soccer matches to attend. I. D. Glikman, who truth to tell was very bored by athletic events, had agreed to come to the first one, out of hero-worship alone. Where were Glikman’s Dynamo shorts? The dear man wouldn’t dress appropriately, unfortunately. Like Nina, he didn’t actually care about the . . .

  Don’t look so sad, Dmitri Dmitriyevich! What is it? Did you see her somewhere?

  You see, I, I, well, that would be, not to put too fine a point on it, impossible, he told Glikman contemptuously, because they’re in Spain.

  Be brave! I thought I’d better tell you! You see, here it is in Izvestiya, page seven: The documentary “Spain,” whose remarkable sequences, shot at great personal risk by Roman Karmen in company with Boris Makaseyev, expose the lies of the . . . Don’t worry, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, please, please don’t worry! If I see her, I’ll tell her to keep away from you—

  You’re correct! But can we please, if you wouldn’t mind, not mention . . . Because Ninusha would, oh, dear, oh, dear, we’ll be late! There goes the streetcar—

  Something inside him was broken. Lyalka, you filled my heart until it was ready to explode, and then, oh, me! He was tired. He knew he would never get over Elena Konstantinovskaya, and therefore assumed that she, or at least her absence, must forever define him more than anything. But that very morning, just as he arrived at the stadium with Glikman, the loudspeaker said: War.

  And at once he knew, somehow he just knew, that war would be the core of his life. ‣

  THE SLEEPWALKER

  It is generally understood, however, that there is an inner ring of superior persons to whom the whole work has a most urgent and searching philosophical and social significance. I profess to be such a superior person . . .

  —George Bernard Shaw, The Perfect Wagnerite: A Commentary on the Niblung’s Ring (1898)

  1

  Their slave-sister Guthrún, marriage-chained to Huns on the other side of the dark wood, sent Gunnar and Hogni a ring wound around with wolf’s hair to warn them not to come; but such devices cannot be guaranteed even in dreams. As the two brothers gazed across the hall-fire at the emissary who sat expectantly or ironically silent in the high-seat, Hogni murmured: Our way’d be fairly fanged, if we rode to claim the gifts he promises us! . . .—And then, raising golden mead-horns in the toasts which kingship requires, they accepted the Hunnish invitation. They could do nothing else, being trapped, as I said, in a fatal dream. While their vassals wept, they sleepwalked down the wooden hall, helmed themselves, mounted horses, and galloped through Myrkvith Forest to their foemen’s castle where Guthrún likewise wept to see them, crying: Betrayed!—Gunnar replied: Too late, sister . . .—for when dreams become nightmares it is ever too late.

  When on Z-Day 1936 the Chancellor of Germany, a certain Adolf Hitler, orders twenty-five thousand soldiers across six bridges into the Rhineland Zone, he too fears the future. Unlike Gunnar, he appears pale. Frowning, he grips his left wrist in his right. He’s forsworn mead. He eats only fruits, vegetables and little Viennese cakes. Clenching his teeth, he strides anxiously to and fro. But slowly his voice deepens, becomes a snarling shout. He swallows. His voice sinks. In a monotone he announces: At this moment, German troops are on the march.

  What will the English answer? Nothing, for it’s Saturday, when every lord sits on his country estate, counting money, drinking champagne with Jews. The French are more inclined than they to prove his banesmen . . .

  Here comes an ultimatum! His head twitches like a gun recoiling on its carriage. He grips the limp forelock which perpetually falls across his face. But then the English tell the French: The Germans, after all, are only going into their own back garden.—By then it’s too late, too late.

  I know what I should have done, if I’d been the French, laughs Hitler. I should have struck! And I should not have allowed a single German soldier to cross the Rhine!

  To his vassals and henchmen in Munich he chants: I go the way that Providence dictates, with the assurance of a sleepwalker.—They applaud him. The white-armed Hunnish maidens scream with joy.

  2

  In an Austrian crowd gathered to celebrate his march into Vienna (triple-angled shadows of bodies on parade, boxy tanks, goosesteps, up-pointed rifles), a woman bays before the rest: Heil Hitler!—Children pelt his motorcade with flowers. His tanks fly both German and Austrian flags. He drafts a law to join Austria to Germany within twenty-four hours. He’s bringing them home to the Reich, he says, his smile as friendly as when he leans across a desk to sign another non-aggression treaty with the credulous dwarfs of Nifelheim.

  Dwarfs indeed! With his hands raised up (he’s so pale against his own inkblot moustache), he imparts the following unalterable truth: In this world, there are only dwarfs and giants. And I know who is whom!

  While the sleepwalker looks on, wolf-hearted Göring, his creation, explains that Czechoslovakia is a trifling piece of Europe. (Brownshirts have already appeared on the premises, welcoming the sleepwalker with their chin-straps, banners, wreaths. Soon they will write JEW on Jewish windows, and shake their fists. In the next act, as the curtains get drawn up from the stage columns, we’ll see police coming metal-headed and rigid in the tumbrils to take Jews and hostages away.) Göring continues: The Czechs, a vile race of dwarfs without any culture—nobody even knows where they came from—are oppressing a civilized race; and behind them, together with Moscow, there can be seen the everlasting face of the Jewish fiend!

  And Czechoslovakia vanishes like a handful of books flying into flames by night. Children in England and France begin trying on gas masks in anticipation of the sleepwalker’s marching columns.

  Now beneath the vast gilded eagle in the Reichstag, he sets herds of tanks browsing on the Polish meadows. Bombs fall like clashes of cymbals; arms swing in unison for his government of national recovery.

  3

  He hesitates again. He fears what lies before him in Myrkvith Forest. Not that hesitation’s practical—hasn’t he already accepted the aliens’ invitation to the contest? He dreads their spider-holes and deceits, but war’s begun; he must roll honorably forth.

  He craves to clear his mind. Yes, the curtain’s risen, but he needs to lose himself one last time within the curved black Schalldeckel which conceals the tunnel to the orchestra pit beneath the stage. From nothingness he came. Would he’d come from a solid wooden hall like Gunnar and Hogni! Well, he’ll dream Germany solid. Homeless, amorphous, he relaxe
s into nothingness whenever no one can see. He needs to be a certain velvet-puddled something, but fears that that something might really be nothing. He imagines how Gunnar felt when the Huns buried him alive in the snakepit. In his dreams he sometimes becomes a black bag filled with serpents. He wakes up vomiting, but the serpents will not crawl out his throat.

  Gunnar had a harp; he played the snakes to sleep—all of them but one. And the sleepwalker, he masks himself in music.

  4

  The sleepwalker’s minions have built him a dream called Eagle’s Nest—an eyrie rightly named, for doesn’t he possess the droning eagles of steel which are now preying upon Poland? (Each Stuka’s but an emanation of his right arm cutting through the air.) Eagle’s Nest is reached first by way of a winding mountain road, which conveys the accolyte to the bronze portal, then by a dripping marble corridor through the rock, and finally by a brass elevator up into the heights; the shaft is a hundred and sixty-five feet—why, that’s even taller than the chimney will reach at Auschwitz! Here he can gaze down upon his world of henchmen, kinsmen and foemen. All the way to Poland he can see pale, flashing hands clapping, and frozen, pale faces beneath steel helmets uplifted to seek out his hoarse, loud, bullying voice. Just as at Bayreuth one finds singers and listeners sharing the same darkness, so Hitler and his vassals now dream their way through the great night he’s spider-spun out of his own fear, weaving strands of blackness ever thicker across the sky until the lights have dimmed—indeed, indeed, just as at Bayreuth! (Before Wagner, frivolous music-munchers sauntered into an opera house whenever they felt like it, and illumination accommodated them, so that musicians and trappings could be seen, rendering the singers no more than human.) And at his command, liegemen launch eastward his bride-tokens of phosphorus, lead and steel.