Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  At the moment that it actually passed from his hand to hers they were sitting across from each other in one of the three or four restaurants where they usually met; and she, having gazed into his face with her usual richly intelligent seriousness, studied the book she now held with the same air of happy possession which he would have hoped to find had she been looking over his body before making love with him, which she would never, ever do no matter how long they both lived, a fact which made him want to utter a sound much softer and more leaden than any scream; and then, sitting within touching distance of her beautiful hands which he could not touch, he watched her open the book to the title page with its half-calligraphic brush-rendering by an unknown artist of a Buddhist pongmalai garland, probably of jasmine flowers, which was draped across a woman’s naked thigh. This was the most intimate moment that he and she would ever have (unless of course his one percent became a hundred, and she accepted him forever). He would not be at her side when she began to actually read the book; but from their frequent conversations he thought he could keep abreast of where she’d arrived each day. She’d promised to begin it that very night, when she was home with the other man, which meant that she would at least cross the frontier of the half-title page, followed by the dramatic double plant-stalks (connected by a leaf ), of the initial letter E. And now she saw before her those wide white margins and those generous white lines-between-the-lines which encouraged every word to preen itself like the treasure that it truly was.

  I should mention that this beautiful volume, which was such a pleasure to hold, began its tale with a dazzling abruptness, as if the reader had just emerged from a dark tunnel into another world, a perfect world whose ground was a hot white plain of salt upon which the words lived their eternal lives.

  I need say nothing about the plot, whose involutions (it’s a tale of obsessive love) progressed like the nested terraces on a Buddha-studded tower which narrows perfectly into nothingness. Once I visited a certain wat in Bangkok where although the day was exhaustingly hot and bright I grew enthralled by the sensation of wandering on a high place somewhere in the mist, a plateau exploding with ornately weathered crags. There were many towers, just as in this world there are many perfect books.

  This book, well, it would be wrong to say that it contained everything, but it did hold a white wall which was frescoed with masked figures, demons and bare-breasted dancing girls all wearing golden-scaled armor. These characters, who presumably represented the various types of being which flourished during the author’s epoch, journeyed through strange adventures, of course, and more commentaries have been written about their chapters than about any others in the book, for their encounters with bandit leaders in the jungle, their dialogues with the Prince of Heaven, and their dangerous dives beneath the sea to obtain the One Pearl do not lack in beauty and even philosophical significance, but these personages remained the two-dimensional inhabitants of parables—universal shadows, to be sure, but dependent, imprisoned on that white wall (which was really a double spread of white pages). They won love, power and treasure when they followed the Right Path, but the happiness available to them was founded on an ignorance, mercifully instilled in them by their author, of the fact that they were not real, and that in the realm of the real, where the true forms of love, power and treasure endure forever, their bright flat strivings (imagine the animated lives of Matisse’s cutouts) would never, ever, ever find any hope; for the dreams they lived in could be transcended by the book’s protagonist alone, whose supernatural perfection began to evince itself in the fifth chapter. For now, he could hardly wait for her to get to the second chapter, whose words, so he had read in one of the antique commentaries, had been syntactically and typographically arranged to replicate heart-shaped lilypads in a vast vase before a golden wall. Between the lilypads, in the complex interstices of the water-mirror, she’d be able to look directly into that pure zone upon which the lines of print had been so evenly superimposed. He comprehended very well that every sentence she read brought nearer that moment when she would have finished the book, that moment when the extremest final tendril of orgasm elongates, tapers and begins to become a memory; but even this he could accept; he passionately longed to follow her from chapter to chapter like a lover hastily stripping off his clothes, seeking laughingly to overtake the one he loves who has already almost finished taking off everything as she stands before him in that small white room.

  That week he found himself less often dreaming his way into that place of houses like white islands, which, if one gazes down on it from an airplane, like a reader soaring over an opened book, seems almost bluish-green, with occasional bright yellow rectangles of mustard fields, and cool rivers winding through the flatness, their richly grassy lips studded every now and then with trees. Where the fields shine most greenish, there too one of the rivers sometimes also goes green, but in one spot where the green has gone so rich as to rival blackness, the river retains its original lapis-grey character; and it’s there that the windowed tower of that narrow white house rises over the pear orchard to gaze across the levee. This house was empty now. But he wasn’t worried; he knew where she was. She was inside the white book. And as long as she dwelled there, she was with him. He was in ecstasy.

  (He sent her a telegram to find out whether she had gotten to the lilypad chapter and she had; she’d understood everything; and even though she was busy she telephoned him right back so sweetly and spoke with him for nearly half an hour, after which he begged her to please give him her photograph and she gently replied: No.)

  That book which he had entered, now she too was living within it. Now and forever it would be hers.

  His love was graced by perfect control. He knew that he would never hurt her or the other man. He could live without asking anything. He loved her so much that he could freely give her up if she asked that of him. His love was far more perfect than he was. We might say that it partook of the same perfection as this white book, whose two-dimensional dancers (brought into being only to emphasize the wholeness of the protagonist) wore golden crowns which tapered into ribbed sequined stingers. Their wrists made slow swimming motions while the devotees knelt before the incense-swirls and the flower sticks. And now in the fifth chapter, the woman of the naked thighs, the one from the title page, emerged from an initial letter E and began to dominate the other characters, who were really no more than the glittering piecemeal reflections of faces on golden tiles.

  She was reading the fifth chapter right now. He remembered it so well. He had read it one summer’s afternoon, in much the same way that he now gazed so deeply into her face, drinking and drinking of its inexhaustible brightness while she gazed gently back at him and he could not help but smile into her face because he was so happy and she smiled back, her slender fingers sliding up and down the coffee glass. The happiness of knowing that she was now in that particular room with the golden tiles where he had been and could be again whenever he chose, this happiness was so intense that he longed for death. All anguish was gone.

  And now in the eighth chapter this protagonist, this woman of the book was accepting a fancy pongmalai from somebody; it consisted of two lavender ribbons, each wearing its own string of white buds and green buds and more white buds which then merged into the upturned bowl of an opened rose; then a white banana flower the size of an apple led the eye across the divide to the mirror image, the downturned rose, followed by two more strings of fragrant white jasmine buds each tasseled with banana petals. This was the crucial scene. She was reading it at that moment. And he experienced the ecstasy of knowing that she with her perfect intelligence now knew that the woman in the book was she, with every visual element, every typographical atom down to the very final letter, perfectly representing and adoring her attributes. ‣

  OPERATION HAGEN

  “I gave her my oath that I’d not wrong her anymore,” returned King Gunther, “and I mean to keep it forevermore. When all’s said and done, she is my sister.” “
Let me take the blame,” replied Hagen.

  —Nibelungenlied, ca. 1200

  1

  We obliterated Warsaw block by block; why let the Slavs get it back? We prepared to dynamite Prague, but unfortunately it fell too quickly.

  Hagen, more anciently called Hogni, had been opposed to attacking Russia in the first place. But he was too noble to hide his own guilt. I consider him as brave and forward-looking as Rommel. He said: Let me take the blame.

  The sleepwalker liked that, I can assure you! And so Hagen got classified as indispensable to the war effort (I’ve held his identity card in my hand, counting up its various swastikas and eagles)—but in between crises he wasn’t even authorized to enter the outer checkpoint at Wolf’s Lair. That tells you how the High Command felt about him. A lesser man might have been offended, but Hagen never stopped being realistic. He said to me: I know what I’m here for, and I accept it. Now let’s go get drunk at the Golden Horseshoe. Himmler claims that the hostess is the last Negress left in Berlin . . .

  He got drunk; I didn’t. I watched a single tear creep down his cheek.

  In the first winter of Operation Barbarossa, with Moscow unvanquished and our soldiers freezing to death by the thousands, Hagen and I went to Kranzler’s for a beer. The place was almost empty, and there wasn’t any coffee, either. Hagen murmured to me that the twenty percent wartime surcharge on alcohol might soon be raised; of course he’d bear the blame for that.

  The cigarette girl, who looked exhausted, sat slowly stitching up the upholstery of the most tattered chairs with packing twine. German string wasn’t strong enough nowadays, being nothing but braided paper; but packages still came from Switzerland; everybody scavenged those. The cigarette girl was bitter against the Jewish agents who’d caused this shocking turn in the war. Winking at me, Hagen said: It’s all my fault. I’m the King of the Jews.

  She slapped his face.

  Hagen laughed and turned the other cheek. A single tear began to swell upon the duct of his bloodshot eye.

  On 12.12.42, when the sleepwalker was saying: We must under no circumstances give Stalingrad up. We should never get it back again!, Hagen kept quiet, but afterwards he remarked to me: Don’t think I can’t see the end. I know what’s coming.—He saw it, all right. But he never flinched. Isn’t that a virtue?

  On 19.7.43, when we abandoned Operation Citadel as lost, the sleepwalker sent for Hagen by telephone. I was all the way at the other end of the Marble Gallery when he slammed down the telephone, but the crash was gunshot-loud, so I came running. Then I saw the expression on his face. He could have been an-man machine-gunning a truckful of Russian infantry in revenge for the Ostfront’s fogs, encirclements, airplane attacks, partisans, suicide charges, winters, swamps. He caught me looking at him and screamed: Dismissed! I clicked my heels, saluted and marched away as far as the waiting room, where I’d still be within call in case he needed anything. Another crash! He was trying to slam the telephone down under the earth! But here came Hagen, immaculate, ironic, ready for anything. He should have been a general but he was only a colonel. He winked at me as I opened the door to announce him. Before I had shut it behind him, I could already hear shouting and breaking glass. When Hagen staggered out, he looked as if he’d donated too much blood at a frontline hospital. He sighed: I need some Pervitin to pick me up . . .

  We went to watch a newsreel at the Ufa-Palast. The film was out of date; it was all victories. Most of the audience had only come for the feature: Lisca Malbran in “Young Heart.” You can imagine them: ancient ladies, legless men, and a few pallid factory workers—but I should also mention that solitary, radiant little boy in a Hitlerjugend uniform; he Sieg Heil’d every falling bomb.—My replacement, joked Hagen.

  We promenaded on Wilhelmstrasse and counted broken windows; we strolled past the boarded-up shops on Potsdamer Strasse, at which point he laughed angrily: We must under no circumstances give Stalingrad up. I felt no need to ask him where it would all end.

  By then I was sleeping with the cigarette girl at Kranzler’s. She didn’t even have enough ration points to buy a new girdle. After her apartment got bombed out, I made the mistake of asking Hagen for advice on where we should live. He said: There are pewter coffins in the crypt.

  I wouldn’t want you to think that I was angry at him. When all’s said and done, he was the best friend I ever had. He never lied to me or put the blame on others.

  My cigarette girl got called up to work at an armaments plant where every new bullet was still copper-roofed like the Berlin Cathedral, but the copper ran out, which was all Hagen’s fault. Then the British dropped one, ten minutes before the end of her shift. I didn’t even get a scrap of her dress to hold onto.

  To distract me, Hagen took me to the Bayreuth Festival to see “Götterdämmerung.” In the final act, when Gunther sings: Complain not to me, but to Hagen; he’s the cursed boar who slew this hero! Hagen laughed aloud, then wept again. Because he was in uniform, they didn’t dare tell him to be quiet. I glanced up at the sleepwalker’s private box, but the curtain was drawn. Sometimes it’s better not to know.

  2

  Here comes Hagen through the Brandenburg Gate, at the head of a long file of anxious women and children. The battle of Berlin has just ended. They say that a hundred thousand civilians died. The survivors are coming back. A woman strides quickly into West Berlin, clutching her buttonless coat. Another woman, a darkhaired beauty, holds her child’s hand, her face blank and shocked. Hagen leaps up on a mound of rubble and shouts down at them: I did it! I lost Berlin!

  They throw stones at him. But Hagen’s invulnerable, like Judas. He’s armored with steel-plated guilt.

  I see Hagen at Nuremberg—naturally. How could he not be there? He’s a principal defendant! They might have let him off, since he was only a colonel, but he insists that he was really a general.

  I’ll never forget the look on Justice Jackson’s face when Hagen rose, stared straight forward, and coolly explained: The function of Germans in Europe, and our duty itself, is to take the blame for everything. We commit crimes so that the rest of you can feel pure.

  On 1.10.46 he was found guilty on all counts. General Nikitchenko added: The record is filled with his own admissions of complicity. There is nothing to be said in mitigation.

  There he sat, in the very front row, with the worst of those war criminals, some of whom were in uniforms and others in suits; their heads slumped forward, as if the headphones weighed them down, and they closed their eyes, waiting for sentence to be passed upon them. It happened in alphabetical order. As each one’s turn neared, he opened his eyes, sat up straight, and braced himself, staring up at the judges. But when the court called upon Hagen to rise, his face became as bright as the lights of the Metropole on that night I’ll never forget when the artistes Margot and Heidi Hoffner danced nude together, and all of us who saw them felt that we’d been given a secret deep within the embrace of the wartime blackout.

  Defendant Hagen, said the President, on the counts of the indictment on which you have been convicted, the International Military Tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.

  I knew that, said Hagen.

  The prison psychiatrist came on the last afternoon, to record his feelings. Hagen told him: My emotions can be summed up in two words: Déjà vu.

  Dr. Gilbert wrote down this reply. He seemed irritated.

  Everything’s my fault, yawned Hagen, blowing a smoke-ring. I killed all those Jews. I saw today coming, too. I foresaw all this back in 1929.

  Do you remember the tests I gave you? said the doctor in an angry voice. I learned quite a lot about you. Among other flaws, you’re diseased by infantilism. That’s why you can’t stop playing with people. You’ve never taken responsibility for anything.

  What on earth are you talking about? You can punish me for anything you like! I’m ready. When you have marital problems, feel free to tell your wife it was all my doing. I know how that will turn out.

  Dr. Gilber
t slammed the notebook shut. He rose and banged on the cell door so that the guard would let him out. He refused to look at the condemned man, but when the key began to turn, he hissed over his shoulder: You don’t know who you are. Tonight you’re going to die without even knowing that much.

  Of course I would prefer to be myself, said Hagen. But something always brings me back to take the blame for what God has done. And what if this something is also myself ? ‣

  INTO THE MOUNTAIN

  We have diagrammed the troop groupings as though they were the receding wings of a theater set—1, 2, 3, 4—inwards.

  —Sergei Eisenstein, ca. 1942

  Before the sleepwalker slammed the door behind him he needed there to be nothing left, not even the door itself; in the old Norse legends great men go into the mountain when they die, and their voices may sometimes be heard where there are hollows in the earth; but the sleepwalker’s intention was that there would be no mountain after him, no voices in the ground, no ground, and certainly nobody above ground to listen.

  He said: Trudl, bring me the folder for Operation Spiral, would you, please? That’s a good child.

  (Do you want to know why it was called Operation Spiral? The Midgaard Serpent swallows his own tail, and then what? Where does he go?)

  The telephone rang. Four officers had waited too long to blow up the Remagen bridge; the enemy was across the Rhine!

  Have them shot, he said.

  The telephone rang. The Ruhr basin would soon pass out of our hands.

  Flood the coal mines, he said. It will take the Jews twenty years to get them working again!