The telephone rang. The enemy was approaching Düsseldorf.
Then burn Düsseldorf, he said. Do I have to tell you everything?
The telephone rang. Gauleiter Wagner wished to confirm that the water-works of Baden should be destroyed.
Confirmed, he said. Trudl, child, could you kindly put the tea on?
The telephone rang. Speer had committed treason.
Send him down to me this evening, he said.
When Speer came, the sleepwalker glared at him and said: Bormann has given me a report on your conference with the Reich Gauleiters. You pressed them not to carry out my orders, and even declared that the war is lost. Are you aware of what must follow from that?
Speer, peering up at the concrete ceiling as though he’d spied a crack, insisted that the war was lost.
If you could at least hope! the sleepwalker pleaded, for Speer was his architect. That would be enough to satisfy me . . .
Speer remained silent.
You have twenty-hour hours to think it over! the sleepwalker shouted. Get out now; you’re ill; you’re dismissed from my office!
The telephone rang. Some officer or other wanted to know what to do with the women and children in his sector once their houses had been demolished.
Tell him that the nature of this struggle permits no consideration for the populace to be taken.
The telephone rang. His National Redoubt in the Alps was almost ready. Saying nothing, he hung up.
The telephone rang. Göring wanted to assure him that the Philharmonic would go under with everything else. Meanwhile he heard an explosion far away and aboveground.
He snatched up the telephone at once, demanding to know how the Russians were able to shell Berlin. The telephone explained that they had laid down a heavy and precise curtain of fire on the airfield in Prague, so that our Luftwaffe was helpless.
Then the Luftwaffe is superfluous, said the sleepwalker. The entire Luftwaffe command should be hanged at once!
He slammed down the telephone in a rage.
The telephone rang.—Mein Führer, we’ve lost communication with Wenk. The Russians are—
Oh, I have no doubt that I’m their target, he said.
The telephone rang. Although Wenk still could not be reached, Ninth Army had been encircled, and Heinrici’s troops had also fallen out of touch, General Koller was ready nonetheless to start the counteroffensive which would save Berlin. The sleepwalker threatened him: Any commander who holds back his troops will forfeit his life in five hours!
The telephone rang. When would he be coming to the National Redoubt?
Out of the question, he explained. They might catch me through some trick. I have no desire to be exhibited in a Jewish museum.
The telephone rang. His chauffeur, Kempka, had delivered two hundred liters of petrol to the garden upstairs as ordered. The Russians were in the Tiergarten.
The telephone rang. British bombers had destroyed the National Redoubt.
You see? he remarked to his secretaries. I always know what’s right.
His bride, Eva, who was as rich and good as Holstein butter, had now swallowed a capsule on his instructions. She lay beside him on the sofa, with her big cowlike eyes filming over. He raised the Walther to his head, then hesitated, lowered it a trifle, and peered into the barrel, to see what he might see within the mountain. First it was dark, then dark, and then far inside shone a pale blue light which must have come all the way from Russia; he thought he could spy the Grand Salle de Fêtes of the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna at Tsarkoie-Sélo, the carpet as vast and multiply monogrammed as a collective farm’s sugarbeet field, cartouches of angels dimly hovering on the ceiling, then a casement window opened onto vistas of other castles. Soon he’d take possession of all that.
Just then the telephone rang again, and he knew from the cadence of the ring that it would be bad news.
No regrets now! he said with a smile. ‣
DENAZIFICATION
There aren’t bad peoples. But without mercy I’ll tell you, . . . each people has its own reptiles.
—Yevgeni Yevtushenko (1962)
1
A long line of wooden-faced men in steel helmets lowered their swastika standards to the cobblestones. They were the last coins in that hoard of soldiers now vanished like gold thrown into a river. That was where it ended, there in the Tiergarten.
A Werewolf pushed a button, and row upon row of antitank guns hidden in the grass exploded. They’d run out of shells. Then came a shot. The Werewolf had saved the last bullet for himself. He was no longer a factor.
Then they marched out of Berlin in a column, saying farewell to the ruined buildings which so few would see again; you see, they were going east. Soon they’d learn about the whitish secretions of tubercular lungs; they’d grow expert in observing the sharpening of a dying prisoner’s face. (They’d observed the deaths of Slavs, but that was different.)
Europe Central, burned clean, could now become as wide and white as Stalin-Allee in the new Berlin of our Soviet zone, whose tiny citizens recede between trees and massive apartment-cubes toward the future’s distant tower. With the arrival of the Red Army, Unter den Linden with its cubical buildings and sentinel-like roof-figures had instantaneously become almost perfect, but we wouldn’t stop there: Each new skyscraper would be taller and better than any artifacts of the capitalist world. And this really happened, or at least nearly happened, which is the most any offensive can hope for: I remember the new towers and bays of Moscow University, whose yellowish tinge (thanks to the ageing of the blueprints as I study them in 2001) gilded them with a monumentally Roman look. I remember Comrade Stalin pacing the shining wet catwalks of the Kremlin, safeguarding everything in our great Soviet land. (I wasn’t there, but Roman Karmen filmed it. I’ve seen all of his movies.) Sometimes Comrade Voroshilov joined him, bearing huge stars on his red epaulettes. They gazed down at the clean cool factories and apartment-blocks of Moscow, remaining alert, collected and resolute. Now toward them came the line of Fascist prisoners.
2
We journeyed for thousands of kilometers, sometimes in windowless train cars, the rest of the time on foot. Most of us remembered how it had been the first time, with Ivans and Natashas straggling ahead of our Panzers, carrying their belongings on their backs. The sleepwalker had said: Don’t forget who the masters are! and Field-Marshal von Manstein had walked beside us smiling and alert, his hands in his pockets. But all victories fell into the Rhine, even though our Pioneers blew up every building that still stood. We slipped west, then east again! Von Manstein was now squinting and craning at his trial . . .
Back in Germany where fog bleeds silver slime upon the willows, chestnut trees and maples, which is to say too far back to be imagined, our sisters were prostituting themselves for chocolate or chewing gum. The sleepwalker was gone—into the mountain, it was said—so we’d been decapitated, like the statue of Mars in the Zeughaus (a direct hit from a Russian gun took care of him). We limped east, and sometimes they clubbed us in the face or let loose a machine-gun burst into our ranks.
Well, they’re the victors, so they must be the master race.—This was how we tried to explain it to ourselves. We were wide-eyed corpses, trying to learn the first few lessons of the afterlife. First kilometer by kilometer, then verst by verst we weakened, receding into time, becoming denazified.—I was never a Nazi, we all said.
High on a hill of pines, the broken castle looked blindly down upon a landscape of red roofs and green fields. And here the Russians shot another straggler, who fell still dreaming of a Reichskreuz a thousand years old, of a Reichskreuz bulging with pearls and jewels. By then we knew how to keep our mouths shut.
The wind began to bite our faces. Mockingly, our captors quoted to us these lines of Akhmatova’s: I smile no more. A freezing wind numbs my lips.
3
They carried us east in boxcars; we rode railroad tracks as narrow in gauge as the strange note-strung segments which begin in measu
re ninety-six of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony; they’re for the instruments Piatti and Cassa. Most of us were bound for the mines, they said. The miners in our German fairytales were rich enough to have golden nails in their boot soles. Well, who knows? Maybe it would be like that. By train and by truck, we rode further east. Then we had to walk for twenty hours straight, without even a drink of dirty water. When they let us rest, which was sometimes just for the night, sometimes for weeks, we looked down at our clasped hands and wondered aloud whether we might have been saved by only one more Teller mine in the Hürtgen Forest.
Next was that parade in Moscow, that ordeal-by-disgrace before they subdivided us into long worms of prisoner columns to burrow into this or that hole in the Russian dirt and work to death; we marched down Red Square and people spat on us; but I’d discovered my trick; I pretended that I was still one of the heroes of the Condor Legion, marching past Franco’s swastika-hung reviewing stand in Madrid, with our right arms extended: Sieg Heil!
In the courtroom, our guards were replaced every two hours. The telephone screamed like an eagle. Then they sentenced us in batches. But once in the transit prison a Russian woman brought us a pail of hot milk.
After that came the camp, of course, which at first was nothing more than a ring of barbed wire enclosing barren ground; some of us, still bound, gazed exhaustedly down at the dirt; others gaped up at the sky; and still they packed more and more of us in until we were so crowded that we couldn’t do anything more than stand; we’d been turned into one of Käthe Kollwitz’s etchings of the Kaiser’s prisoners! One of us whispered: My wife was a national swimming champion . . .—As for me, I never mentioned my family, who for all I know are still living in their underground cave in Köln.
A shot of adrenaline into the chest can sometimes resurrect a stopped heart. Unfortunately, the camp doctor had no adrenaline. Each corpse turned olive-green like an American troop carrier.
Those of us whose eagles hadn’t yet been stripped from our breast-pockets were already laying plans for Operation Volund. One very cold night, one of us began to sing in a stunning tenor: Wälse! Wälse! Where’s your sword, the strong sword I’ll swing against fate? Will it break out from my breast, where my angry heart hides it?
4
And so we denazified them, making possible the following triumphant entry in our Great Soviet Encyclopedia:
Germany—A state in Europe (capital, Berlin) which existed up to the end of World War II (1933-45).
Germany was gone forever. The two lapdog states which remained could be tricked into fighting each other eternally, just as we and Germany used to do. As for the old Germany, she reminded us of the bygone days when Moscow was nothing but churches, river-curves and droshkys . . .
Then we returned to our own concerns. We constructed an arc vacuum furnace to smelt titanium ingots. ‣
AIRLIFT IDYLLS
For three whole days, during which time did not exist for him, he struggled in that black sack into which he was being forced by an unseen, invincible power.
—Tolstoy (1886)
1
It’s nearly impossible to convince my grandchildren that at the beginning the Iron Curtain was just that—although now that I think of it, the material might not have been iron at all. If you’ve ever inspected one of those pouches of lead foil which protects film from X-rays at airport security checkpoints, you can well imagine the abnormal heaviness, not to mention limp pendulousness (as opposed to flexibility) of that Iron Curtain: grasp a fresh corpse by the knee and raise it; the calf will swing inwards, compelling the foot to describe the same unfailing arc as a grandfather clock’s weighted pendulum; but it’s a one-way affair; heel strikes buttock or thigh, and that’s the end. When we stood our turn in the exit queue of the border station, I sometimes used to bend down and raise the hem of the Iron Curtain, just to peek out at the capitalist side where I was going; nobody was very strict in those days, and obviously I wasn’t trying to “escape.” Anyhow, the “iron” or whatever it was must have been fifteen centimeters thick; I could only lift it up to ankle height before its weight and the white light blazing in overwhelmed me, so I’d let go, and it would sink silently back into place, momentum so perfectly dampened by deadness that there could never have been the tiniest after-swing. According to an American lecturer, the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich (Opus 110) is supposed to represent the Curtain’s darkness, but (speaking only for myself), I’d have to say that my sensation on the Communist side was something quite different from melancholy; everything was dark, that’s true, but it was the darkness of a circus tent, where anything could happen. I’ll tell you just how it felt. Drawing the heavy passport from my pocket, already anticipating the treat of winning a new stamp (at that time the visa pictography of Europe Central changed almost monthly, in part as a result of the political situation—any symbol might get infected with enemy connotations—but mainly for security reasons: black marketeers duplicated those stamps easily, so the only recourse of nascent people’s power was to change the red star to a blue sickle, or enclose it in a square rectangle), first I’d hear breathing all around me; next, a hand would take my passport; after a long while I’d hear the angry thud of the stamp, and that pallid, hairy hand returned to view, spewing the document back into my possession. I stepped forward. In a sudden dazzle of flashbulbs, secret policemen would photograph me from the side, after which I’d pass beween two soldiers whose fixed bayonets tickled my ears; finally I’d round the last bend where two flaps of the Curtain (try to visualize a woman’s slit skirt) had been pulled apart and secured by ceiling-chains to admit a very narrow triangle of breathtakingly beautiful light through which each of us had to struggle, usually not without griming our shoulders with graphite, lead or whatever was actually the substance of the Iron Curtain; now I was free; but what I’ll never be able to explain is that at that exact instant my head invariably became heavy; I tasted metal and my lips swelled; a drunken nausea robbed me of my balance; and when I stood up again I thought I’d faint. It happened to all of us. Perhaps some mind-altering chemical had been released by one side against or in collusion with the other. We lurched to the West German checkpoint (Bornholmer Strasse), and the sun scorched our pale skins. If somebody had poured sand inside my head I couldn’t have felt any stranger. We’d forgotten everything! It was the taste of sleep that we were all licking off our lips. Here again stood the policeman with the long handlebar moustache; he greeted me by name now, and stamped my passport with extra crispness, because he liked me; the eagle of capitalist Germany was his alter ego. I’d never lost sight of him; the sunlight was harshly perfect on his metal buttons; but what had those two sentries on the other side looked like? Maybe their bayonets had annoyed me sufficiently to distract me from their faces. Behind them there’d been the border guard who’d stamped my passport, this time with the representation of a sledgehammer standing on end and bearing three sharp-pointed stars within its head; the East German official, counterpart to this moustached gentleman of Bornholmer Strasse, had scrutinized me most searchingly from his booth; it was incorrect that I’d glimpsed his hand; I now recollected an angled spotlight just below that window-slit through which documents were given and received; this glaring luminescence, which I’d somehow mistakenly associated with the flashbulbs of secret police, had struck me full in the chin, in order for the border guard behind his wall of dark glass to better compare me to my photograph; actually the glass couldn’t have been dark, because I remembered a pale, blurry sort of face, perhaps with more than two eyes; there might have also been an eye in the brim of his cap, because . . . But prior to him there was nothing. I might as well have never visited the world behind the Iron Curtain!
In the onion fields of Europe, translucent-lipped wombs grow concentrically within wombs; and within them grows what? I could definitely remember lifting up the Iron Curtain from within, just to see the brightness; I longed to ask the policeman with the handlebar moustache whether he’d allow
me to do the same from this side, but then his expression would have altered; he’d realize that his friendly trust should never have touched me; it would be awkward between the two of us forever, because West Germans, who are the only Germans left, follow the rules. What should I do? For I so much wanted to see! Berlin, which in medieval times had resembled a heart carved out of a human carcass, subdivided into seventeen lobes—Wedding, Moabit, Königsviertel and all the rest (no matter that they were each as cramped as a Messerschmitt-109)—Berlin was now a quartered heart, its chambers sealed off from one another by walls of sandbags; and now this Iron Curtain was already in the dreams of Stalinists getting elaborated into the raked sand of slaughter chutes within the complex of the Berlin Wall. (I brought that about; you’ll see.) German blood must clot henceforth; it could no longer flow free. In the French sector they sing a little song about something that happens, some pretty little thing, I forget what, my French was never all that perfect anyway, when a blonde dancer from Stalingrad shows leg in the Soviet sector; I think maybe there comes a flash of sunlight in the Communist darkness or something like that. The real issue is: How can the conscious mind know what the unconscious is up to? Chancellor Adenauer in one of his speeches proclaimed that in this scientific (meaning nuclear) age, the metaphor of a heart has become outmoded; it’s better to consider Berlin as a brain; and in his, Adenauer’s view, what’s behind the Iron Curtain is the reptilian brain, the primordial, amoral system of involuntary control which, located at the very base of the skull, can and must be dispatched by NATO in a surgical, missile-based Nackenschuss; only thus may Germany, which is Europe and therefore all of us,39 become whole again. (This is also what the Führer used to say.)
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