Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  Stroking the cradle of his black telephone, which curved down as freakishly as the secretary’s spectacles—he’d send her away for the duration of our little chat—the pale man demanded to know whether I’d really swallowed that very first pill. I insisted that I had; I, how should I say, stuck to my guns, you know.

  You’re grimacing, he reproved me. You look as if wild horses are pulling you apart!

  It’s the times, sir, I said.

  Sit down, he said.

  I did.

  Clearing his throat, he began: The mystery of why Siegfried stole Brunhild’s ring and girdle, which laid him open to being proved her deflowerer and therefore hated by her kinsmen, the matter of why he told Kriemhild of his vulnerable spot so that she herself could foolishly reveal it to Hagen, these point at a will to self-destruction. And where does that come from?

  I replied (and I was proud of my answer, too): Firstly, vanity. Secondly, inability to keep a secret. Isn’t all this in the case file, sir? There’s every reason to suspect Kriemhild of being a “Juliette” spy. As for Siegfried, he refused to be colorless or self-protective; he was simply himself, and he paid the price.

  My friend, that’s true as far as it goes, but don’t you see that it’s beauty which causes all evil? Do you remember Hoffmann’s tale “Madame de Scuderi”? The demonic goldsmith makes bracelets, necklaces, rings so perfectly that he can’t bear to let them go. What can he do but creep out by night, murder his clients, and get his treasures back again? And isn’t your Elena also like that?

  No. With all due respect, she isn’t.

  She’s warping your reason.

  By your command, sir!

  Whose hair did you tie to that covert operations ring we issued you?

  I don’t know.

  You didn’t lose the ring. We took it to get the hair.

  Didn’t you plant the hair in the first place?

  He chuckled.—Perhaps we did that, too. If so, what would that prove?

  I don’t know.

  Coward! Take this tablet! No, wait. Your responses are extremely revealing. What really happened before between Siegfried and Brunhild—I mean, before the legend begins?

  I agree that she somehow knows him, since—

  You do agree? Good. That’s why I need you to tell me the origin of that single dark hair you found on your pillow.

  A succubus? I theorized.

  Don’t be sarcastic with me. I order you to consider your prior, unconscious relationship with Elena Konstantinovskaya, who by your own interpretation of pattern-events is undoubtedly a “Juliette” spy. Prepare a written report by tomorrow. Name every name.

  By your command, sir, I said. But Elena was still the one I loved. Knowing that I loved her, I knew who I was.

  19

  What about Shostakovich? By this question I don’t mean, who is he? Opus 110 answers that. I mean, what shall I do about him? One of the Gehlen Organization’s own “Juliette” spies, perhaps NEY if not a high-class torch singer at the Wintergarten, might lure him away from her. I’d certainly given up on silver bullets. Oh, but how could I do even that to him? Well, for Elena, of course. (She would have her own secret world; I could hide there.)

  My desire was to bring her under the Iron Curtain and buy her whatever she wanted at the KaDeWe department store. What would make anyone happier than that? If she wouldn’t go with me, I wanted to lay at her feet a steel box of contraband! Next dream: Our child would resemble the little East German girl who chalks a sun on the sidewalk and smiles up into the lens for Roman Karmen’s “Comrade Berlin” as the sun shines on her pressed-together knees. You see, I was already beginning to think like one of them!

  That night I did nothing but float around Berlin-East in a trance, seeing Elena in every window.

  I was happy even at dawn when I came home to the West. I nearly kissed the wide, sharp-angled and strangely delicate wings of the stone eagle on the Chancellery’s facade.

  But when I stopped by the office, I was compelled to turn in my report, an uncompromising one, I’m afraid; and the time after that, they kept me waiting a long while and finally claimed that the pale man was busy. What about HAVEMANN? He was also busy. And PFITZNER? We don’t mention him at the office anymore. What if I were on another list now, a worse one? An operative I’d never met (in retrospect I half-believe him to have been the ex-Captain KHANNI, who sold himself to the East, then bored into the Gehlen Organization, recruiting KURT in the process) informed me, not without sympathy, that Operation ELENKA had been downgraded, important as it definitely remained to the ultimate future of Germany, because in preparation for the imminent Cold War, the Amis were now demanding that we devote more manpower to unearthing the final Luftwaffe blueprints of V-weapons, which had been hidden in a coffin in a village graveyard just before the surrender; this was henceforth to constitute our Priority Apple. I said: When Priority Apple has been achieved, I wonder if we’ll be told? Everyone still had faith in me, the operative replied, but I’d need to assassinate ELENKA without logistical support.

  Take one of these tablets! he added. They’re new.

  New? So what?

  They improve concentration. That’s what you need now, soldier.

  I didn’t want to, but his lower lip trembled, so . . .

  Then I went out; I went down, and came up one of the marble passageways into the foyer of the Südbahnhof; I came into the sunlight; I descended the steps, which were almost infinitely wide, crossed the street and gazed back at its immense rectangular facade with the two giant clocks and the swastika-gripping eagle; the Bahnhof’s windowed stone arms stretched out in either direction as far as I could see. I felt safe; all my powers seemed to have returned to me. If only my dear friend Shostakovich could see this! He’d be proud of me at last.—My speculations grew ever more rhapsodic, until I awoke behind the Curtain, in the former hospital at Berlin-Karlshorst. In case you haven’t heard, I’ll now inform you that people no longer go there for their health.

  Three tall men in blue uniforms sat on an extremely long sofa, comparing scores of Shostakovich and Wagner and making tick-marks with red pencils. Between them slept a woman in a blue smock. When she woke up, I realized that she was Elena Kruglikova, although she actually might have been Klavdia Sulzhenko. At last I saw the light. She was a “Juliette” spy! They meant to distract me from Elena Konstantinovskaya! That must have been the objective all along. Against Kruglikova’s charms I safeguarded myself with the cautionary tale of that Romeo spy WALTER, who once upon a time seduced, then married LOLA, who coincidentally happened to be a secretary in the West German Foreign Ministry. Poor LOLA! I even know her real name. One day the Gehlen Organization, or perhaps the Central Intelligence Agency, reeled in her Soviet handler, MAKS, who accordingly defected, exposing both spouses. When she was arrested and shown her husband’s confession that he had married her for ideology, not love, LOLA hanged herself in her cell.

  A glass of water with my interrogators, a brandy-toast to friendship, a nibble or two of caviar, you know how it goes. These were the people who’d snatched the jurist Walter Linse right out of West Berlin and hanged him in Moscow.

  If you work correctly with us, we will always be good friends, promised the tallest man, who was codenamed GLASUNOW.

  The woman who might have been Kruglikova opened her eyes, sat up, and smiled at me with a what’s a little sex between comrades? look. I shook my head, and she vanished into the air.

  Then they gave me a nice leather map case with three pencils in its stitched-on pockets, but there was no map in it. Unable to resist stroking it, I knew at once that any rumors of black tears in der Sowjetzone were propaganda!

  Sometimes, you see, I didn’t know who I was without my identification sign! And after all the cutouts and dead letterboxes of the Gehlen Organization, after far too many crossings of that bridge over black satin water, water which was really a black curtain with pleats of grainy yellow light; and then somehow (for I was already getting sleepy)
, after too many traversals of that broad white wall arched with darkness, with windows and white palaces, I couldn’t even be certain what I loved. You see, “Juliette” spies are so treacherous! And alliances can get even more entangling than that. For example, consider this subplot from Case NIBELUNG: When RÜDIGER, once his friend and now by virtue of conflicting loyalties about to become his enemy, offers HAGEN his own shield, the latter fervently swears never to harm him in the forthcoming battle, and keeps his word; instead, RÜDIGER will be killed by the sword which he’s presented to his son-in-law GERNOT. What’s the use of that? I wish I’d never decrypted it. What should HAGEN and RÜDIGER have done? The flat clean blankness of the sleepwalker’s stone banks and ministries always stood for something unchanging—no matter that the Nazi-Soviet Pact became Operation Barbarossa; that was a superhuman event, occurring so far above me that it failed to twist my integrity. Now that I possessed a choice, I’d tried to act, each time blaming my failures of accomplishment on illusionism of miscast silver bullets; what if there were a better explanation which relieved me from even more responsibility? Oh, how sleepy I was! I could slumber now; I could blame everything on the opportunism of the bourgeoisie; it was as good as having the sleepwalker back.

  The shortest man, codenamed RIMSKY, said to me that freedom means understanding our place within the laws of history; we are more free when we acknowledge our submission to the law of gravity than when we foolishly deny it.

  And it seemed to me that RIMSKY was as familiar as my own father; he offered me the comfort which my father would have, if he hadn’t been gassed at Ypres two wars ago. Laws of history! I could surely find myself if I only obeyed enough laws.

  But what would GREINER have said about me then, or the pale man in the dark glasses? Whom would I become if they thought badly of me?

  Socioeconomic formations versus an officer’s heels on a parquet floor, which would I choose?

  RIMSKY advised me to never think backwards. If I betrayed the Gehlen Organization freely and fully, they’d give me a nice little villa in Trescow-Allee where Elena and I could make little Kruglikovas. Then I’d be safely in the peace camp! Every now and then I’d be called on to speak out against remilitarization and for reunification on the appropriate terms. Was I ready?

  I need to dream about it.

  Dreams are for cowards, said the third man, who must have been the East German spymaster, Markus Wolf.

  They flew me to a walled villa in the woods outside Moscow, whose grounds were illuminated at night; and here, among the pines and birches of Silverwood, where Elena Konstantinovskaya had given birth on 22.6.41, the Center gave me my chance for happiness.

  20

  Elena, will you please marry me?

  Which intelligence service sent you here? Remember, they’re listening.

  Elena, if I devote myself to you, will I be able to become myself?

  No.

  I promise to be very, very loyal. I’ll always say yes to you. Please say yes to me—

  No. Your eyes scare me. I’m sorry. Try to be strong . . .

  21

  That was how I learned that no is stronger than yes. (Shostakovich already knew that.) It takes two yesses for I to become we, but only one no for we to break apart, no matter what the other party wishes. Elena Konstantinovskaya’s no killed my yes, which fell voiceless into solitude. She did this, and there will never be any remedy.

  She said no, in order to be true to herself. In that case, will I find myself if I say no? How can I be any worse off? (I dislike this feeling in my heart; I wonder if I can sleep it off?) From now on, I’ll say no to everything.

  22

  In the next room, Shostakovich sat at the piano. I can’t say he was in on what had just taken place; I’ll never know how much he knew; I was too heartbroken. Probably he didn’t know; he was far too lost in himself, stationed in that windowless chamber day and night, writing passwords and cipher groups into the score of Opus 110.

  Patting me on the shoulder, he said: Don’t worry, don’t worry. There’s nothing but nonsense in this world . . .

  He was kind to me; he didn’t need to be kind! He was the one I loved . . .

  23

  So I refused to collaborate. I said no. Unfortunately, no means yes, since they’d arranged the meeting with Elena Konstantinovskaya and they must have influenced the outcome. But yes would also have meant yes. In other words, yes is stronger than no. All the same, I insist that I acted upon my convictions. I told them my guilt was too great, not that they cared about guilt. I demanded to be turned over to the Stasi. I confessed that I was even at this very moment a malignantly active member of the Gehlen Organization. Even an interview at the Ministry of State Security didn’t change my mind. When they pinched me, I scarcely felt it.

  They flew me back to East Berlin; I have always enjoyed airplanes. A stenographer kept me company at my interrogation. Perhaps he liked me for myself. He “played the piano” on a captured “Erika” typewriter. Next they brought me before the Red Guillotine, who condemned me to death, then gave me a fair trial according to all principles of socialist legality. A golden bust of Wilhelm Pieck looked on in sternly loving solicitude. Again I admitted everything. Infected by American gangsterism, I’d conspired to weaken their defensive preparedness. Worse yet, I’d continued to dream of a so-called “German way to socialism.” I’d forgotten the greatest ally and friend of the German working class, the Soviet Union. Indeed, I’d thought to rob the Soviet Union of my beautiful Elena Konstantinovskaya. Finally, I reminded the court that my class had already fulfilled its historical mission and no longer deserved to exist. My defense attorney proudly embraced me.

  When they shot me, I wasn’t worried; I knew that it wouldn’t do me any more harm than I had done Shostakovich. What it resembled was getting whirled down the drain of a stained old sink in a communal apartment; I could feel myself getting sucked downward, speeding round and round ever more rapidly until suddenly I was in the leaden pipe which communicated secretly with the West.

  I came out, none the worse for wear, and it was night. To die in the East is to live in the West.

  24

  Now I’d done it! Their black telephones began to toll. My confession had revealed to them the danger in which they stood. Shostakovich was their voice, and Elena their soul. If we could steal her, then we’d have a soul, and they’d have none. I’d now been rendered harmless, by love if not by Nackenschuss, but what if GREINER or NEY got through?

  They blockaded Berlin. That was Stage One. As soon as they could, they’d reinforce the Iron Curtain. For now, they’d starve us out of Berlin-West. This was precisely what the sleepwalker always used to worry about.

  The dreamers who held hands and ran westward through Dreamland’s forests every night, trying to get away from the Red Guillotine and come to us, the Iron Curtain already stopped them. Do you remember the last days of Operation Citadel, when we were too weak to break through at Prokhorovka? This was a continuation of that operation; no war ever ends. The lucky ones were arrested in the Restricted Area; they never even reached the Protected Zone.

  There remained certain games, ploys, possibilities, as exemplified by Kurt Strübund’s maneuver with the leather-bound documents of an erotic club called the Confederation Diplomatique; he smuggled a hundred and eighty East Germans across; the People’s Police believed them to be diplomatic passports! But the Iron Curtain, which was as dark grey as the soil of Poltava, jigjagged west across Prinzenstrasse to Checkpoint Charlie, then north along the edge of the Tiergarten to the Brandenburg Gate, bisecting Unter den Linden, grazing the ruined Reichstag, continuing up to Invalidenstrasse and Chausseestrasse, then east past Brunnenstrasse before it whipped north again, enclosing, containing or sealing off sections not all of which any one individual could see (thanks to ideological differences, you know); and they now lowered the Curtain to the very ground, screwed its hem into the ground, then added long bolts! They meant to take us all to the police stati
on, lock us away, and let us sleep off reality forever.

  25

  Fortunately for the Free World, in Tempelhof Field we’d dreamed up a great ring of hangars and terminals around the circular runway: Tempelhof Airport, with the pair of facing lions in the shadow of the two facing towers! Much of this edifice existed only in the model of the architect Sagebiel, but at least the eagle on the passenger terminal’s roof had established itself on earth; I remember seeing Russian soldiers hoist their flag up there in ’45; despite their best efforts, our eagle dwarfed them. As for the unfinished bits, no matter; we could always dream them into solidity.

  Two Red Army men in forage caps and long greatcoats were clearing mines with circle-headed wands; they wore rifles at their backs, rubble before and around them. What were they really afraid of? Maybe some explosion would wake up the East, and then summer light would rush in! God knows. As it turned out, they were readying the ground for the Wall. It wouldn’t be long before the day when reliable Soviet soldiers began unrolling the very first ring of barbed wire, flush up against their side of the sign which said BRITISH SECTOR.

  26

  And what about me?

  By rights I should have been relegated to the worst list of all, but the pale man in dark glasses was sentimental, I think because I’d told him that I’d once floated past a certain long line of trees in Dreamland where his father’s house used to stand; needless to say, I’d never been there, but he believed me. Operation ELENKA had always been a long shot; the Luftwaffe blueprints had been recovered to the satisfaction of the Amis, and countering the Berlin blockade was now Priority Apple. Moreover, precisely because I didn’t know who I really was, I had a way with dream-creatures. GRAENER, GREINER; HAVEMANN and PFITZNER all tried to do what I eventually did; none could withdraw the sword from the stone! For my own part, upon receiving my authorization from the highest levels of the Gehlen Organization, I clambered up to the roof of Tempelhof and struck the stone eagle with a stick. Away it flew, screaming!