Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  He was stroking her hair. He seemed constrained or worried about something.

  She murmured: Andrei, darling, I know you will always be grateful to me, and give me whatever I wish . . .

  26

  Wilfried Karlovich, whatever happened to Masha?

  My dear fellow, I don’t have enough grey cells to remember every skirt you’ve—

  She was a typist at Viktoriastrasse.

  A typist, you say? Probably an illegal element. Here, have a look for yourself; there’s nobody by that name on the roster. Come, come, why are you glaring at me in that way? Do you really think that here in the Reich people simply disappear without cause? In Stalinist Russia, now, that’s a different matter—

  She—

  Our faithful advocate of the Wlassow-Aktion raised a finger for silence. Far away, they both could hear the short blasts of the early warning siren. Then he shrugged and said to Vlasov: I fear that certain assumptions are obstructing you again. Think about it. Would it be rational to harm anybody who can contribute to the war effort?

  No. Not rational—

  Did you really care for her all that much? If so, perhaps I can—

  She was the merest flirtation, replied Vlasov in his flat way. But I’m concerned for her as a human being.

  Most likely she’s working in an armaments factory. Meanwhile, how do you feel about Heidi? I want you to know that in recognition of your hard work, certain regulations have been waived. Your union with Heidi has been sanctioned at the highest level.—Or is there some obstacle? By the way, what are you playing with in your pocket?—Oh, I see, it must be that stupid cartridge of yours . . .

  27

  On 22.3.43 we find him presiding over the graduation of the first officers’ class at Dabendorf. He was very happy with his Russian Liberation Army cockade, which made use of the same three colors as the French tricouleur and the American stars-’n’-stripes. Gripping the lectern, which barely came above his waist, he continued the commencement speech: I expect each of you not only to take a stand, but to be a fanatical fighter for our ideal. What do I mean by fanaticism? Well, let’s momentarily consider the logic of this war. Logically speaking, we are incapable of forcing the Bolsheviks, with their incomparably greater forces, to withdraw. Logic compels us to abandon our struggle. Therefore, I call on you to abandon logic. When I led the Fourth Mechanized at Lvov, we attacked Sixth Army—long before Stalingrad, you understand, so they were close to full strength, while we hardly had any tanks (Kroeger, stop filling up my glass!)—and so logically speaking we shouldn’t have hoped for any success. But that was when General von Kleist himself paid me a real compliment. He said . . .

  Let’s hope he can pull this off, one officer muttered to another.

  Anyhow, better here than in a camp!

  What if he’s been tricked?

  The Führer says . . .

  At her own request, and against the wishes of her mother, who’d warned: Liebchen, stay out of politics. It’s not healthy for a woman!, Vlasov’s fiancée attended the reception. I’ve read that she was wearing her German National Sports badge, whose interlocking letter-tendrils had been encircled by a wreath whose fruit was a single swastika. A Russian prisoner-of-war complimented her on it, with what might have been an ironic smile. Heidi said to him: I have to pass a test every year, or they’ll take it back.

  28

  On the morning of 13.4.43, a few hours before Radio Berlin made a spectacular announcement to the world, launching what Goebbels would call a hundred-percent victory for German propaganda and especially for me personally, Vlasov was sheltering listlessly in the arms of Heidi Bielenberg, enduring her endearments (the only Russian words she was ever to learn), when the telephone rang. Praying that it be a summons to command, execution, or anything other than more of this, he reached for the receiver. It was Strik-Strikfeldt.

  My dear Vlasov, am I disturbing you? Listen, I have some extremely important news. I’ll be over in a quarter-hour.

  Ya tebya lyublyu, his wife was saying.

  I love you, too, he said mechanically. Rising, he began to dress.

  Andrei, be prepared for everything. Be ready; be healthy—

  (He was choking within his tightly buttoned collar.)

  Andrei, did you hear me?

  The buzzer assaulted him. He went downstairs.

  Well, well, Vlasov, and have you been keeping busy?

  I’ve been making up a list of words which are considered to be obscenities in both Germany and the USSR. Want to hear a few? Internationalism. Cosmopolitan. Plutocracy. Intellectual. Softness. Weakness. Mercy.

  And what would you expect, my dear fellow? We’re at war with each other, so it’s natural that both our systems would get a trifle hardened and bunkered down . . .

  That’s good, murmured Vlasov, that you always show respect . . .

  And how’s your pretty wife?

  She’s pretty, and she’s my wife.

  I take it she’s en déshabillé, or you’d have invited me up . . .

  Wilfried Karlovich, I’m the son of peasants. I don’t understand French.

  Let’s take a walk, said his jocular genius, and before Vlasov knew it, they’d passed the Zeughaus and were crossing the river by means of the dear old Schlossbrücke whose wrought-iron horses Strik-Strikfeldt rarely failed to caress in a triply echeloned offensive. This time, however, he denied himself the snaky fish, the martial seahorse and even the cheerfully grotesque merman whose tail transformed itself into horse-legs. He was very excited. Beneath a winged Victory who proudly watched them from her pink-granite pillar he paused and said: I wanted to be the first to tell you . . .

  I’m listening.

  Although I flatter myself that I’ve become your friend, of course there are certain aspects to your situation here that . . . well, you haven’t always been fairly treated. I admit that, and I’m sorry. But there’s one matter very dear to my heart in which you’ve never quite believed: the honor of the German soldier. To get right down to it, Germans really are honorable people. They don’t murder women and children. I don’t deny that there’s been occasional wartime harshness, but not—not what you think.

  So? said Vlasov.

  Well, the news is going to be broadcast this afternoon. Lieutenant-Colonel Ahrens of our Five Hundred and Thirty-seventh Signal Regiment first made the report last month, but it was classified top secret until the forensic teams had made a complete investigation.

  Vlasov stared at him.

  It seems that a wolf was nosing around in the forest near Smolensk, and uncovered bones. Some Hiwis on work detail found the pit. They erected a cross. In due time Ahrens was notified.

  You love to spin out a story, don’t you?

  The site is riddled with graves! The largest one is stacked twelve bodies deep. We’ve uncovered four thousand victims so far, and Ahrens believes there will be ten thousand more. We’re already calling it the KatyMassacre. Do you want to guess who’s buried there?

  Jews, I suppose. Maybe Russians—

  You joker! No, no, no! They’re all Polish officers, and from their identity documents we’ve established that they were murdered between April and May of 1940.

  Well, and why not? muttered Vlasov dully. You were already in Poland by then—

  My dear fellow, you’re really beginning to offend me! We’re recording their names, and when the exhumations are completed those names will be given to the world. Without exception, those officers were in Soviet custody.

  I can’t—

  It’s incontrovertible. Some of them were finished off with bayonets. The German army doesn’t use four-cornered ones—

  All right, I believe you. So the NKVD murdered fourteen or fifteen thousand prisoners of war. Well, but—

  Don’t you want to know about the ammunition? his friend demanded triumphantly.

  What about it?

  Geco, 7.65 millimeter.

  Vlasov froze. And his wooer, seeing that deep penetration had been
accomplished at last, moved instantly forward to exploit the initial success.

  You know very well that the Reich sold many thousands of rounds to Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and even the Soviet Union. Apparently your NKVD preferred the reliability of German death, as it were. (That’s right; reach into your pocket and take a look.) Now, I beg your pardon if I’m trespassing on some private grief, but whatever it was that you saw in that burned village, wouldn’t it be just as well now if you could lay your prejudices to rest? Wouldn’t you be better off, not to say happier, if you could be fair and logical? With this discovery, your hopes have been exonerated. So try to relax and trust in us—

  29

  They sent him back to the occupied territories in hopes of retaining some sort of ideological bridgehead. Their new slogan: humane and correct treatment. He was as pliable now as one of Buchenwald’s little “doll boys” who offer themselves to the Kapos in exchange for food. From the train, he thought he heard shooting and screaming. He got drunk then and muttered: Between the breasts of Zoya . . .

  Excuse me, my dear friend, laughed Strik-Strikfeldt, but perhaps I shouldn’t report that comment to your wife!

  In Kiev a man who’d been waiting in the lavatory whispered, in words as evenly spaced as the numbered silver standards of vanquished regiments: General Vlasov, I was a waiter at the big Nazi banquet this March. And I heard what the quartermaster said. He was quoting the Reich Commissioner of the Ukraine. I was so horrified that I memorized every word. General Vlasov, he said, and I swear this: Some people are disturbed that the population here may not necessarily eat enough. The population cannot ask for that. One merely has to keep in mind what our heroes at Stalingrad were forced to do without . . .

  Vlasov smilingly clapped the man’s shoulder: But what can we do now? It’s too late. We have to go forward and perform our best, don’t you see? Because otherwise, everything we believe in would be endangered.

  In Riga he saw a German private beating and kicking a Russian artist for being five minutes late to an agitprop meeting of the Vlasov Men. He sat watching; helplessly he rubbed his heavy eyes.

  For the May Day celebrations at Pskov (which lies on the former Stalin Line), Vlasov appeared only when they menaced him. He’d been reliably informed that many more White Russians as well as Jews had been shot. He shaved; he cleaned his German boots. A standing ovation! Afterward, approaching the line ofdignitaries, all of them with their hands in the pockets of their long grey cloaks, he found himself compelled to bow forward in order to grasp the barely extended hand of thecolonel, who smiled stiffly and said: You Russians are not soldiers as that word is usually employed. You are ideological enemies.—Vlasov shrugged. He hardly cared for his own life anymore, or so he supposed, the anguish of his lost love now failing into dormancy, but still viable like a virus, waiting for contact with the host, which was why that host, his integrity, had to smile gently and stay away, waiting patiently for his love for her to die. Off to another factory, to serve the workers hope instead of bread! Then, with true Germanic mobility, he continued back to Riga, the railroad tracks’ rank grass failing by a long shot to grapple with the grey summer sky; and here he had to meet with more workers and then with a delegation from the Orthodox Church. Justifying the existence of his still hypothetical Russian Liberation Army, he quoted the proverb A Russian can bear much which would kill a German. (Whenever he thought of Russia, unclean feelings afflicted him, like water and blood seeping out of mass graves.) In Luga the crowds broke through the police line as they were almost to do years later in Moscow when the American pianist Van Cliburn made his debut.

  Do you wish to be German slaves? he dared to shout.

  No!

  Then fight at my side! Fight for a free Russia on equal terms with the Reich! Show the Germans what we can do!

  The-men smiled in disgust. (Come to think of it, the Germans beside Vlasov were always smiling just a shade too broadly in the photographs.) In the aisle, a Waffen--captain and Strik-Strikfeldt were arguing in low voices. The Waffen--captain said: If one gave Vlasov’s army a flag—

  We have!

  ... And his soldiers honors, one would have to treat them as comrades with natural human and political rights, and the national Russian idea would break through. Nothing could be less desirable to us than such a development.

  Yes, yes, said Strik-Strikfeldt, smiling straight into the curtainlike, willow-like wings of the eagle on the Waffen-man’s tank battle badge, but, if you don’t mind my saying so, might it not be counterproductive to take absolutely everything from the population here?

  Captain Strik-Strikfeldt, I’m not sure you appreciate the situation. Aren’t you aware that the Führer himself has already decreed that within ten years our eastern territories must be entirely German?

  Indeed, my friend, I’ve been told of that, although I’ve never seen any—

  Then don’t get above yourself.

  (In enthusiastic corroboration of his thesis that the military situation could still be reversed, Vlasov was earnestly explaining: The problem of developing a tactical breakthrough into an operational breakthrough is only now being solved.)

  Please excuse him, for he thinks in Russian. And, after all, from a strictly rational point of view—

  I’ve read Vlasov’s manifesto. It’s a stinkingly rational manifesto, to be sure.

  The audience was applauding Vlasov now, but afterwards the only person who came forward to speak with him was a functionary from theBuilding Inspection Office for Russia. Strik-Strikfeldt, trying to improve his pet orator’s morale, said: My dear fellow, you’ve done for the occupied territories what Shostakovich did for the other side at Leningrad last year! What powerful propaganda!

  My intention was not to make mere propaganda.

  He seemed satisfied then, for they’d indulged him as they would have a little child, letting him get in the last word; but then they saw him sitting with his head in his hands. Strik-Strikfeldt ran to him: Is something wrong, old fellow?

  Just a mild case of operational shock, he said with a broken laugh.

  In the prisoner-of-war camps he addressed the senior block leaders, who wore black armbands. (Someone was playing the accordion.) He proposed to them that fighting imperialism might be better than hauling stones up quarry steps until they collapsed and were shot; better than being torn to pieces bydogs, or being buried alive by trembling Jews who were then themselves buried alive; better than the experiments in the decompression chamber at Dachau (their blood didn’t boil until the altitude-equivalent was above seventy thousand feet). Soon he’d raised a million Vlasov Men, a million Russian soldiers fighting for Germany. He said to them: If we can help the Reich resist for another twelve to fifteen months, then we can build ourselves up into a power factor that the West won’t be able to forget.

  Himmler got a transcript of his speech at Gatchina, the infamous one in which he dared to call the Germans “guests of the Russians.” TheReichsführer was furious. He reported this treason directly to the Führer’s headquarters, in consequence of which the order went out to remand our Slav directly to a concentration camp. Meanwhile, the Vlasov Men were disbanded. Strik-Strikfeldt, who knew how to get around all obstacles in the most refined way, found his protégé a nice little villa on Kiebitzweg in Dahlem, not far from the Russian Liberation Army training camp.—Don’t tell him he’s actually under house arrest or he might feel a little trapped, he advised Heidi.

  Are you sure it’s healthy for him to live in a fantasy?

  Only if he believes can he make others believe. As soon as the Führer believes, it must come true.

  Well, of course, the blonde murmured.

  And, you know, my dear girl, sometimes a man needs, how should I put it, a little bolstering up. Especially an exhausted man.

  Oh, Herr Strik, you’re so right, and so good to us! Do you think we’ll be staying here long? If so, these walls must be whitewashed—

  Vlasov was at the door. Heidi rushed into his arm
s, gazing at him adoringly. He kissed her three times, in the Russian manner.

  30

  Screened by the theatrically leafy camouflage netting over the Charlotten-burger Chaussee, sequestered between bright-postered walls and sandbagged museum windows, Vlasov took long walks with his gilded victory angel. As long as she accompanied him (humming Mozart’s ever so healthy German melodies), he was permitted to go almost anywhere a German could. For a long time after the woman I loved so much had left me, I kept encountering mutual friends, small gifts from her, abandoned possessions of hers; place-names on the map ambushed me with recollections; from the walls, her photographs continued to smile at me so gently; after awhile I realized that there was nothing to do but seek out these things whose associations caused me such agony, and bury the freshly bloody grief under the dirt of new experience. Vlasov did the same. The thick green foliage of the Tiergarten reminded him of how it had been in the Russian swamps during the last days of his immaculateness; needless to say, he never mentioned anything about those times to Heidi.

  They both enjoyed visiting Moltke’s statue in the Grosser Stern. That Prussian genius was gazing up into the distance, strict and old and withered, with an eagle on either side of his coat of arms. (Soon there’d be Soviet bulletholes in his legs.)

  Heidi stopped humming and said: What a genius he must have been! Pure Aryan!

  He was a brilliant field commander. He showed your generals the way to outflank the French—

  But, Andrei, how could you have been allowed to study him in that horrid Soviet zone?

  Her husband smiled a little. He said: I can quote him if you like. Here’s one of his maxims from 1869: The stronger our frontal position becomes on account of its success of fire, the more the attacker will focus his attack on our flanks. Deep deployment is appropriate to counter this danger.