Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  So who dares disbelieve in happy endings? In 1945 the productive capacity of Kuibyshev was five times greater than it had been in 1940.

  42

  Along with ninety-three thousand others, Akhmatova got her Medal for the Defense of Leningrad, although we’ve already mentioned that she had been compelled to pass most of the Nine Hundred Days elsewhere. It goes without saying that she’d written a poem in praise of Operation Iskra, and many other martial odes besides; but no one ever said that her talent was as powerful as the gun of a Josef Stalin tank. Now that we didn’t need the Anglo-Americans anymore, it was high time to bring up her past. In August 1946, we expelled her from the Leningrad Union of Writers. Comrade Zhdanov had a hand in this. Digging up her old epitaph, half nun, half whore, he spread the word that she was a real chéstnaya daválka, a woman who likes to fuck. He himself died under mysterious circumstances in August 1948. We should probably blame the Fascist-Trotskyite bloc. Thousands would be executed or imprisoned for their part in this so-called “Leningrad Affair.” For in Stalin’s symphony, we’d now reached the passage marked a battuta, which means a return to strict tempo.

  As for Shostakovich, as I said, he did quite well. His hair had begun to go white a year or so before the siege was broken. Liver spots burst out on his cheeks, as if he were a very old man. These marks or stains or images, whatever one wants to call them, what are they but reminders of how the flesh must someday corrupt within the coffin? (And Shostakovich, now he too is gone, like the German-killed lime trees of the Peterhof.)

  It was in his Eighth Symphony that he first began to articulate the various danses macabres which he could no longer prevent himself from hearing. Bones, murdered or merely perished, ought to stay silent. That’s the law. But, quick and shrill as a violin-screech, they come back, to the terror of all who stand guilty of living, and then they dance, playing on their tomb-lids as lightly as cats—but the game’s evil, hateful, angry; there’s no fun in being a skeleton! He dreamed that Elena Konstantinovskaya was calling out to him. Her face was milky with fear. They were taking her away and she was screaming and then a bomb began to whistle down upon the Black Maria and she was screaming, screaming! In time, these hauntings within his ears would evolve into the terrifying Opus 110. For now, the music still had an object other than Death itself: he could blame the Germans. Maybe they’d even make him a Hero of the Soviet Union. Keeping all secrets hid within his maggot-writhing fingers, he crossed his legs, huddling against Aram Khatchaturian’s deliciously braided wife while the three of them—that is, Shostakovich and the two Khatchaturians—went over the score of the Eighth Symphony. He smiled anxiously. His glance hid within the sockets of his wounded eyes. ‣

  UNTOUCHED

  Freed from the constraints imposed by the policy of adventure of your intellectual governing classes, you will fulfill your duty of working to the best of your ability, and you will fulfill it under the powerful protection of Great Germany. All will earn their bread by working under domination; that will be fair. On the other hand, there will be no place for political agitators, dishonest profiteers and Jewish exploiters . . .

  —Governor-General Hans Frank, to the Poles, 1939

  1

  At fifteen-o’-clock a Kampfflieger bestowed gifts upon Warsaw, the bulky-shouldered pilot’s beret askew, his head sunk deep down into his neck as he hovered within an immense wheel through which the close-packed, steep-roofed Polish houses began to go up in smoke; at the center of the wheel hid an inner wheel dissected into quadrants; that was the sight of his strafing-gun. The wheel was Poland’s clock from which bullets ticked, each bullet not a moment but a moment’s end for another Pole bewitched into a blackened, grimacing corpse face-down in the mud beside its scorched rifle or pram.

  At sixteen-o’-clock the Kampfflieger sported over a river and magically created from nothing a canted Polish cruiser (the magic enacted by the pull of a black lever), by which time Case White had been nearly accomplished, with mushroom-headed Germans planting the swastika flag atop the ruined bunkers of Westerplatte.

  Ceasefire, armistice, Frank’s proclamation, the first “Jewish action,” each of these marked another hour on the great clockface. At twenty-one-o’-clock a reconnaissance plane passed by and with all cameras clicking harvested aerial views of the brown smoke which was Warsaw; by twenty-two-fifteen the most perfect exemplar of these, still moist from the last darkroom tray, arrived by special courier in Berlin, so that it too could be counted, recognized, preserved. (In the official military history of our Polish victory, one finds this very photograph, which depicts ruins from edge to edge, with the pious caption: The church is untouched.) At twenty-three-forty-five the Russians finished eating their half of Poland. Ten minutes later to the second, the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line had been demarcated all the way to East Prussia. How many crossings were there? That’s top secret! But, needless to say, each checkpoint was instantaneously manned by one of our field policemen in his black-and-white-striped sentry box; and a hundred meters away, more or less, one of their sentries watched him, smoking a mahorka cigarette. That was the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line. By twenty-three-forty-seven the cleansing of our respective sectors had begun. So-called “national politicians,” bourgeois democrats, Polish chauvinist elements, intellectuals, kulaks, officers and Jews were rendered harmless. Then with a ringing chime came midnight, and the thick folder which still lay open on the sleepwalker’s desk, a folder ominously snow-hued like forthcoming Russia, received its last checkmark and eagle stamp: Case White was closed.

  Next came the folder for Operation Barbarossa. One of his secretaries laid it timidly on the edge of that great desk.—Thank you, my dear Trudl, said the sleepwalker, offering her a little round cake.

  The folder was still quite thin at this stage. Its only document was an architectural drawing, very correctly rendered yet not without a certain mood, which conveyed a notion of how Europe Central might be altered into a courtyard of cobblestones as white as light, with a rigid double line of black, black silhouettes waiting to enter a black doorway two by two; they’d never come out.

  After all, said the sleepwalker to himself, I’m compelled to act decisively. I’ve got to make it all tank-proof. A lunatic or a Jewish cancer cell could eliminate me at any time. And then who knows how all this would turn out?

  And so Operation Barbarossa was opened, with our nightmares all double-censored like the postcards home of Death’s Heads. The telephone rang, requesting verification from the field echelon of Section L. Steel began to clitterclatter from Germany into Russia.

  2

  Leningrad remained almost untouched, unfortunately. Army Group North had nibbled her around the edges—the best that we could do.—We’ve got to get hold of this rail junction, muttered the sleepwalker, glaring at one of his maps.

  The folder for Operation Barbarossa was thicker now. It would soon be infinitely large, which is to say exactly the same size as Russia; already it came up to the sleepwalker’s head; all his secretaries together couldn’t trundle it about, even in a ten-shelved cart. Just as an iceberg calves off towering chunks of itself into the deep, so Operation Barbarossa spawned Operations Blue, Wilhelm, Shark, Edelweiss, Fredericus, Heron, Sturgeon, Winter Storm, Thunderclap, Northern Lights . . . These folders with their accompanying sub-folders had now formed themselves into rows of bound volumes on tiers of steel library shelves whose aisles receded infinitely. As for the fundamental issue, Barbarossa itself, no matter how much he hacked off he couldn’t touch it; it kept swelling like a gravid corpse. Long past midnight, when the chattering of his fellow Old Fighters had sunk deep down into dreams, the sleepwalker sat alone in the Chancellery, unrolling those white maps of Russia, on which he sought to overlay his own blueprints. Draw another spearhead up here! The emblem of our Fourteenth Panzer Division is the arrowheaded rune Ogal, which means Possession. Superstitiously, the sleepwalker always aimed it eastward. And Nineteenth Panzer, that we indicate by reversing the lightning-rune Yr, Death,
and slashing it with a horizontal line. Death to all of them! He longed to incise it into the whiteness multiply, but resisted. Seventh Panzer is a Y, a vulva; keep that close to home. Twenty-third and Twenty-second are both arrows; we’ll aim them each at Moscow. Now tie off another satellite territory down there; that’s right, tie it off with ligatures of barbed wire. Cauterize its ghastly red blood vessels; weigh it down with edicts and triumphal thoroughfares. Subdivide it into German farms. Now it’s been neutralized; this little matter of operational command is something that anybody can do. All the same, it didn’t seem to matter how immense he made his reinforced quadrangles, how elongated his arteries; Barbarossa surpassed them. He massed armies and injected them into Barbarossa, where they expanded into rectangles, arrows and artillery-bristling hedgehogs; Barbarossa diluted them into linelets more insignificant than eyelashes on the white maps. He ran out of space on his desk, so he had to unroll more maps on the floor. He tried to paper them over with all the documents he had. These pages gave off a chill and made him sleepy, a state which he feared more than anything.

  Here came the courier now, bearing more bad news about Operation Barbarossa. He steered his motorcycle between the long double line of shiny beetle-backed limousines on the Wilhelmstrasse (another diplomatic reception was in swing) and showed his pass to the guards. It was already seventeen-o’clock. The courier must be in the Mosaic Hall now. Soon he’d be in the Runde Saal. No, already the sleepwalker could hear his jackboots echoing louder and louder as he came down the Marble Gallery.

  The sleepwalker wanted to be at Wolf’s Lair. He was returning there tomorrow. Then it would be more difficult for bad news to reach him.

  He rose, walked to the door, where the two sentries clicked their heels, and he said to them: I mustn’t be disturbed. Don’t let anybody in, unless it’s for the Anti-Comintern Pact.

  Yes, my Führer.

  Turning his back on them, he closed the door. The Russian army was essentially annihilated. He sat down at his desk and waited for the telephone to ring.

  3

  At twenty-o’-clock precisely we buried the Panzers in straw-colored holes at Millerovo, so that they’d stay untouched by Russia’s freezing cold; but mice ate the wires. Operation Barbarossa had burst out of its folder in a great white explosion, and now those snowy pages began to swirl down out of the sky, burying us alive in maps. We couldn’t understand them.

  At twenty-ten I caught hold of a top-secret Soviet document whose nested hexagon diagrams and inverted-Y insigniae strangely resembled the sketches of the abstract sculptor Rodchenko; it might have explained everything, so I delivered it to Headquarters with my own hands; unfortunately the courier plane which was supposed to convey it from Headquarters to Wolf’s Lair got shot down, so . . .

  At twenty-twenty, the sleepwalker sent us a message by teleprinter from Wolf’s Lair. He said: The attack’s not as serious as all that. I’m definitely keeping these forces right here. If we could just be certain that the Westfront would stay untouched for six to eight weeks . . .

  4

  He’d promised us that the Reich would never be touched, but after Dresden, Berlin and all the rest, what were we to make of that? By twenty-one-o’-clock, the Foreign Office (number seventy-six, Wilhelmstrasse) was a war-gnawed shell whose facade had been death-licked here and there right down to the white-dusted skeleton and whose serene, round, curly-haired stone face above the double doors would soon be punched out by a Russian rocket; on the other hand, even the Russians would prove limited in what they could touch: even after we’d lost everything, that stone face’s twin would still gaze meditatively out on those of us who survived to walk with downcast heads along the ruler-straight wormtracks between rubble piles.

  From the sleepwalker’s point of view, everything remained untouched and perfectly proportioned, at least in the universe of potentiality. (Dr. Morell prescribed two tablespoons of Brom-Nervacit before bedtime.) Decades ago he’d memorized the map of Vienna’s Ringstrasse. Berlin’s triumphal arch and Nazi meeting hall would dwarf all that. Göring’s new ministry would get what Göring longed for: the greatest staircase in the world. He’d better lose a few kilograms if he wanted to climb it! Dr. Goebbels would get a new ministry, too. (I’m told that he was still intimate with the Czech movie actress Lida Baarova.)—Unrolling Speer’s latest blueprint and pinning down its corners with antitank shells, the sleepwalker knelt over his Soldiers’ Hall, which would house Germany’s greatest treasures: the crypts of our Emperors, Führers, Field-Marshals. Meanwhile, the plaza of the nascent Central Railroad Station would be adorned with captured enemy weapons. His cinema, opera houses, hotels and electric signs already existed as cabinetmaker’s models. They’d be ready for the World’s Fair of 1950. Himmler guaranteed to supply the granite blocks for everything.

  Oh, but the sleepwalker built well! In the Occupation years, our Zoo Flak Tower would defeat the British victors: They planted twenty tons of TNT beneath it, and it was still untouched! They had to drill it full of thermite charges! Or what about Berlin Cathedral, where Hermann and Emmy Göring got married? An honor guard of two hundred war-planes flew over their heads at the end of the ceremony. Berlin Cathedral was certainly still undamaged; it wouldn’t be firebombed until 1945. Meanwhile, and we’re back in wartime now, the tall windows of the Schauspielhaus, the coffeehouses of the Kemperplatz, the stone eagle and twin sentries of the Chancellery, weren’t they all still there?

  At twenty-one-forty, an aerial bomb set the cupola of the French Cathedral on fire, but by twenty-two-forty-five Berlin was back in operating condition. At twenty-three-fifteen the Russians still hadn’t overrun Wolf’s Lair. Until nearly midnight Dr. Goebbels’s Propaganda Ministry remained untouched . . .

  At one minute before midnight, I myself was saved by a woman whose pubic hair was as soft as the reddish brick-dust upflung in the Tiergarten’s very last explosions when the Reich came to an end. She let me hide inside her womb, and the Russians never found me. As for the sleepwalker, some say he closed the hatch upon himself and vanished forever. This reminds me of the Norse legend of the Serpent of Midgaard, who swallowed his own tail. I myself tend to suspect that he’s waiting it out inside that cuckoo-clock over there. A Russian bullet stopped its hands at ten seconds to midnight. ‣

  FAR AND WIDE MY COUNTRY STRETCHES

  Seeing this film, involuntarily one clenches one’s fists in wrath . . . This film incites one to fight and inspires one with the certitude of victory.

  —Roman Karmen (1942)

  1

  Europe is Europa; Europe is a woman. Europa’s names are Marie-Luise Moskav and Berlin Liubova; Europa is Elena Ekaterinburg and Constanze Konstantinovskaya, not to mention Galina Germany, Rosa Russkaya; Europa encompasses all territory from Anna to Zoya, not omitting the critical railroad junctions Nadezhda, Nina, Fanya, Fridl, Coca (whose formal name was Elena), Katyusha, Verena, Viktoria, Käthe, Katerina, Berthe, Brynhilda, Hilde and Heidi; above all Europa is Elena.

  She was as delicious as the white Viazma gingerbread which they used to sell during Palm Week in old Petersburg, and she almost remembered the taste of it; thanks to her police file, I’m aware, as she would never be, that until she was three years old, and our Revolution ended Palm Week, her mother used to break off a piece and put it in her mouth. That is why sometimes when she was very happy she could almost taste gingerbread. I repeat: She was as delicious as white Viazma gingerbread and she didn’t even know it! Nor did so many others. No exegesis of her exists but mine. No matter what they say, she wasn’t blonde; she had dark hair. She died in 1975; I do agree with that. She was too modest to wear her Order of the Red Star very often. The apparatchiks for whom she interpreted failed to recognize her face if they passed her in the street. Her colleagues ignored her; her students never saw beyond her spectacles. Search the index of any Shostakovich biography (Khentova’s excepted) and you’ll find the meagerest references to her, never a photograph. And yet she was the most perfect of us all, a
s white and sweet as gingerbread! In Shostakovich’s illicit operas she was the flash of light in the troubled skies of chromatism.

  It was R. L. Karmen who got her next. Born in the same antediluvian year as Shostakovich, he was the one who even in his youth had a habit of standing with his legs apart like a heavy old man, the one who summed up his lifelong role: We were soldiers, armed with a camera. Unlike Shostakovich, his disposition was fundamentally cheerful, forward-looking. A laughing man dances, clutching at the bottles on a rope ladder, while an accordionist gazes lovingly up at him; thus runs one famous sequence of the movie “Volga-Volga,” which derives from Comrade Stalin’s favorite musical; more than one of us, particularly women, have compared Roman Karmen to that laughing man. Auntie Olga down the hall used to tell me that something about his likeness, which occasionally appeared in Izvestiya, used to make her feel resolute. (For good reason, she dropped dead of liver failure in 1964.) Karmen really must be considered an outstanding example of our successful Soviet man. He received the State Prize of the USSR in 1942, 1947 and then again in 1952. Oh, he knew how to smile and laugh!

  That smile of his, and the equanimity with which he agreed to commence, abandon or alter his projects as we suggested, gave rise to the supposition (highly beneficial to his career) that he accepted his place in a world whose cinema is as blandly necessary as the long petrol hoses entering the shiny square hoods of cars.