Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  (In the street he saw a man slip his arm around a woman and that was extremely painful.)

  He tried to understand (which merely means to believe) that what she was really saying was this: I will be your sky; I will never stop smiling upon you; but now you will not see that smile anymore.

  And so the very next time he saw her (she’d come from far away to meet him here at the Eliseyev store) he gave her the envelope, murmuring: I have something that doesn’t belong to me. She accepted it in silence. And after that, neither one of them ever mentioned the photograph again. ‣

  WHY WE DON’T TALK ABOUT FREYA ANYMORE

  There is something fearful in bearing such a relation to a creature so imperfectly known . . .

  —Nathaniel Hawthorne (1846)

  1

  In the shining cobblestoned darkness of Ernst-Thälmann-Strasse, black crowds stood before the bright and empty shop windows. And Lina was lost among them. Lina had come in memory of her sister Freya, who’d been sacrificed to the firestorm. And Lina was lost everywhere! Once upon a time, the dome, tower and spire of the Frauenkirche rose above Dresden’s ancient narrow streets, which were now far more fictional than they had ever been in Hoffmann’s fairytale of the Golden Pot. Come to think of it, that strangely flat ornateness of so many edifices in prewar Dresden could have been theatrical backdrops. The play was called “Lina and Freya.” The Dresden in the old books never existed except in books, an objective fact, which implies that the ruins in broken waves of brick and stone from that night and morning when all Dresden got shattered open like a pomegranate whose seeds have been plucked from their catacombs weren’t actually there. Dresden is Europe Central, the walled kingdom in the middle of the past! Every day here begins once upon a time. But Barbarossa has withdrawn into his mountain cave to dream new cruel dreams; he’s lost to us; he never existed. Just as depressing truths from Stalingrad must be considered Russian propaganda (a mother kneeling over a frozen body, a long, long winding column of muffled, staggering figures vanishing into the fog), so the burning of Dresden was itself nothing more than a nightmare: Wake from it and see our homeland’s blond German boys in little uniforms, reaping the harvest with hand-forged scythes! This logic also allows me to say that neither Lina nor Freya ever existed except as acronymic reifications of the black telephone’s tentacles. What were they, but literary characters?

  But Lina was lost. Once this had been a different street, with a different name. Now it was Ernst-Thälmann-Strasse with its exposed pipes shading the snow.

  2

  When she crossed into Berlin-Ost at the end of that last year before the Wall, she had been somehow sure that a person would be waiting for her, perhaps one of her parents; she remembered them coming to meet her when she was a child; she expected someone, anyone. Well, wasn’t that life? There’s never any help, her father always used to say.

  Frankly, she had been a little afraid to go. She’d heard what we all had about the other Germany. But she had to respect Freya’s memory.

  It was like returning ten years to enter this new East Germany. Here, of course, the economic miracle had never occurred. Everyone looked hungry and shabby to her.

  From Berlin-Ost she took the train back into our German heartland—dark trees above blonde grass, and clouds over all—where it seemed as if another five years undid themselves! Scorched castles, boarded-up apartments, empty towns. All these stage sets had been shunted from eastward by the machinery of politics, so that the dying fairytale could play itself out to other captive audiences. They passed a poster which no one had troubled to remove: LEARNING FROM THE SOVIET UNION MEANS LEARNING FROM VICTORY! Ivy had grown across it. Which hero would wake Sleeping Beauty?

  At Bahnhof-Dresden her family was not waiting at the platform; how could Lina have predicted when she would arrive? She disembarked with her one suitcase and stood in the cold, dirty station. Here was where she’d once kissed that lieutenant whose name she no longer remembered; he’d spoken in the accents of a Silesian. Where must he be now? East or underground.

  3

  The love of Lina’s life had been a Russian translator named Elena Konstantinovskaya, for whom she had drawn up her white, white knees; she had never done anything like that before with a woman, and it was never the same afterward, not the way it had been with Elena.

  It was the very last year for Weimar Berlin: Red-lipped Hansis in long red dresses kept licking their swizzlesticks at Lina. She won the pretty-knee contest at that well-known venue on Schwerinstrasse 13. All the while she had been longing for Elena. At the Verona-Lounge she learned to dance tangos with ripe-breasted Gougnettes who wore men’s hats. Freya would have been scandalized. I’ve seen her wear a Titus-Kopf, for whose snaky coils she paid the hairdresser two days’ wages. Gypsy-Lotte at the Topkeller, who was always kind to her, even on Friday nights, fixed her up with Christa, Grete, and then, despairingly, with Red Minna, but Lina never felt, as she had with Elena, that her white thighs were shining.

  You never inspect yourself in the mirror, said Lotte. That’s a giveaway. Women who don’t love looking at themselves don’t love other women. You’re not actually one of us.

  Lina replied: It’s just that whenever I look I’m disappointed.

  Doubtless brevity and novelty had contributed substantially to the perfection of Lina’s experience, which seemed in retrospect to have lasted longer than one of Leningrad’s white nights. She remembered lying on her side gazing down at her lover, until dawn set Elena’s throat whitely aglow; now Lina could see her pulse, which was healthy and rapid like someone hurrying away from her. Elena’s rich red lips were parted and her cigarette-breath soughed almost inaudibly in and out. When she began to wake, Lina rolled away to save Elena from being haunted by her needy eyes. (This was the curse of Elena’s life, that so many people loved her so deeply that she must fail them all.)

  What happened to you in Leningrad? Freya asked over and over.

  That had been the beginning of the coldness between them.

  Then what? A government of national recovery.

  After Stalingrad, Lina had been mobilized to insert the fuses into eighty-eight-caliber shells. In 1945 she found herself mobilized again, this time by the Amis, who made us walk the hot stinking meadows where concentration camp corpses had been laid out: stinking, festering matchstick legs, groins prudishly covered by blankets. How could this have gone on? We’d never heard anything about it except a few whispers. The woman in front of her vomited. As for Lina, she looked straight ahead, disgusted but not overwhelmed; for by the time the war ended we’d all seen judgments of one kind or another.

  Next came the Cold War. We all got mobilized again.

  Lina’s eyes were still brown but her hair was grey.

  4

  Do you remember the line of scurrying archaic figures on the Georgentor? They were following a skeleton, as in Käthe Kollwitz’s drawings. And now their skeleton had led them into nothingness. They were gone in the fire.

  Her family were all at home. She hadn’t seen them since ’42. She burst into tears at the sight of their starved submissive faces.

  They sat around a white-draped oval table, drinking tea and wine for Lina’s birthday; Freya’s photograph was on the wall, and a porcelain angel simpered down upon them all in sanitized nudity.

  Her father, who was now very, very old, tried to explain to her how it had all happened: We tried to keep them away with a barrage from our eighty-eights, but there were too many planes, flying too fast and too high.

  Fortunately, that was dead history. The Anglo-American criminals exercised no jurisdiction over our zone. Dresden had come to know the comforting presence of the Red Army soldier.

  She had brought chocolate and coffee. Her mother cried.

  And Freya? No one had said a word about her yet. Among us Germans, that’s how it is.

  5

  Had Freya ever existed? Portraits can be faked. Why not repudiate her? To deny the dead is to deny death itself. Why t
reasure up every grief, as Shostakovich does? Waking from a nightmare of fire, we find counterfeits, improbabilities. Do we even exist anymore? We need a secret mirror—Elena, for instance.

  Once upon a time, Lina, whom they called a slim-hipped Mädi, went to the Auluka-Lounge to learn from reflecting herself in women which woman she really was. A former Russian prince was playing the piano, but it wasn’t he who reminded Lina of Elena; it was the artificial snowballs: how cold, how white, hence how Russian! The truth is that Elena would have preferred the Café Olala on Zietenstrasse, whose dirty windows and scratchy records were more “real,” but what’s real when we’re imprisoned in a fairytale?

  My reflection in the shopwindow on Thälmann-Strasse is not me. It is Elena Konstantinovskaya. (We’re both so white, aren’t we?) I reach out to touch her and find between my palm and hers—the center of Europe. Elena can be my mirror; how I long for her to be! But not Freya—I don’t want my reflection to be a skeleton.

  6

  On the Altmarkt’s shining wet cobblestones, dark crowds queued around the glowing lights of the department store “Howa.” Inside were glowing triangles, glowing stars, perfect statuettes. And then, beyond the Howa, Ernst-Thälmann-Strasse went off into the darkness.

  The dead had lain here, while undernourished Hitlerjugend boys and old men in long tired coats passed through, lifting them one by one by the arms and the legs onto horsedrawn carts to be hauled off to the smoking pyres. It was her cousin Vala who told her this. Vala was greyhaired now, and her front teeth were missing. She kept sighing: Oh, Lina, it’s a hard, hard life.

  Did they burn Freya here?

  Oh, no, said Vala.

  Did it happen in the first wave or the second wave? Vala, I have a right. She was my sister.

  In the second wave, said her cousin. Let’s not talk about it.

  7

  Once upon a time, a smiling, blonde-braided girl planted a bouquet in a Condor volunteer’s buttonhole. Another girl, less blonde and more serious, fumbled over the edelweiss; her soldier looked down at his breast a little anxiously, wondering whether she’d done it right and whether it would be incorrect to say something if she hadn’t. This second girl was Freya.

  Who was the smiling girl? There’s always someone else, someone irrelevant. She’s possibly dead herself, and we deny her.

  Who then was Freya? She’s dead, so isn’t that irrelevant?

  Of course the entire family had been there. They’d stayed at Lina’s flat in Berlin. That must have been in ’36 or ’37, when the Frauenkirche was still whole, when its organ still sang. That day they’d had the privilege of watching with their very own eyes as the sleepwalker wafted himself by in an open Mercedes-Klemm. And the Condor Legionnaires marched through the Brandenburg Gate . . .

  8

  The broken castle, then the Kultur Palace, then the Altmarkt, this was what Lina saw every day when she looked out the window. (Where were the Russians? They separated themselves; they had their own place.) At “Honetta Damenmoden” on the Altmarkt, one could buy a long dress, shoes or perhaps a suitcase. These objects seemed more lonely than they really were because Lina and Vala were gazing at them from the outside as they stood in the arcade on that December night.

  And right here, whispered Vala, there was a little blonde girl crying by a wagon of corpses, right where that dripping pipe is. The sweetest little girl you could imagine! One hundred percent Aryan. And for some reason I’ve never stopped wondering what happened to her.

  And the two of them stood there, staring wearily at that exposed pipe in the burnt and frozen muck.

  9

  Freya didn’t die in the firestorm, did she? asked Lina.

  Vala took her arm and led her into a scene without life, only white footprints in the white snow around the Kreuzkirche, and then she said: Are you certain that you want to know?

  Yes.

  Well, then, it happened on the anniversary of the Russian Revolution, when Red Army men always get drunk. Now it’s better, of course. That was when they came into our houses, year after year.

  I’ve heard about it.

  Exactly. Everything we used to be told in those days was true. They’re not human. For example, Grandmother was in her eighties. Now have you heard enough?

  Lina said nothing. They were one of half a dozen black-clad couples walking on the grey sidewalk.

  Vala said: They entered the maternity ward at gunpoint and raped the nurse who persuaded them not to rape a mother who’d just given birth. I won’t say who it is; you know her. Perhaps she knew what would happen, in which case I admire her sacrifice. Lina, you have no idea what it was like. They raped us on the streets, on the trains, in the fields. They arrested us and raped us. They raped us as we were cleaning their floors. Of course it wasn’t quite as bad as at the beginning, when they used to rape us in front of our husbands and then—

  And you? Don’t tell me if you don’t wish it—

  Five times, in broad daylight. If you want to know, it was on a dead horse in the middle of Grossenhanter Strasse, right across from Weber’s wine cellar—

  Vala—

  But all they did afterward, probably because I’d been a good girl, was kick me in the face a few times. Heinz was already dead, as you know, so at least he didn’t have to witness that . . . Excuse me for telling you.

  Lina knew Vala. She knew that it would be best to refrain from comment on what she had just heard, now and forever. Moreover, she knew not to look at Vala, much less touch her hand. So she said only: I understand. And what about Freya?

  Mayor Petzold of Saupersdorf used to arrange parties for the Russians, with vodka and young girls. That was how he maintained his position. You can imagine the rest. Shall we go now? I need to buy two loaves at Meyer’s, before he runs out.

  It comforted Lina to learn that no one had intended to kill her sister; she must have merely been, as Vala put it in regards to their grandmother, delicate inside.

  Your father did what he could, Vala said. He even went to the colonel to complain, which in those days took courage. The colonel warned him that if he didn’t get out, he’d be arrested for slandering the Red Army.

  After that, said Vala, all he did was go around whispering Ivan will never go away.

  10

  But this never happened. There never was a Freya. I went to the Albertinium for an exhibition of proletarian painting and sculpture in 1958, and no matter how long I looked, I couldn’t find anything unhappy!

  Do you want to know what happiness is? Happiness is the absence of unpleasant information. I do my best to live within that definition when I make my reports. What everybody wants to hear is that everything is perfect, happily ever after.

  I enjoy gazing at the loaves of bread stacked four high, end out, and the sausages hanging vertically, one per hook, in that clean shop on Postplatz. To me, that’s perfection. Herr Meyer also thinks so; he’s proud of his establishment. If I wanted to, I could remember November 1945, when the first light came back on in the Postplatz, smokily glowing in the skeletons of buildings; that was a triumph then, but in comparison to the way it is now in 1960, it’s sad. Even when I don’t want to, I sometimes remember a smashed, burned, dust-sugared skeleton lying on the Postplatz in a scorched Nazi armband, the ruined mouth gaping and the black teeth falling out of it like the bricks of the Lukaskirche; that was a triumph, too, for our victorious enemies.

  I enjoy denying Freya’s life and death, thereby sparing myself from certain information. And I enjoy gazing at the Dresden schoolgirls in knee-length checkered skirts, their blouses buttoned demurely up to their throats. Isn’t that happiness?

  Why feel sorry for ourselves, I say? Let’s reserve our compassion for the North Korean orphans at the Maxim Gorki Home. Our East German brides hold bouquets; we wish them well from tenement windows.

  Our long-skirted Rubblefrauen who dragged four-wheeled boxcars filled with broken bricks down the railroad tracks for twenty years straight, with Dresden’s chu
rch-bones and tower-skeletons mourning themselves on the other side of the Elbe, they helped get us where we are today, and now that we’re here, let’s get the Rubblefrauen out of the picture!

  11

  Her brother Hans was now a tall, pale, grim old man with sunken eyes. He kept his hands in the pockets of his prewar vest. That dark steel skeleton we’d just built across the Elbe, the “Blue Wonder” we call it, Hans had been mobilized to carry beams for that project, and his bad knee hadn’t helped him get out of it at all; in fact, since it was a war injury, received on the Ostfront, mentioning it had cost Hans a box on the ear; he was lucky it hadn’t been worse. And now his children had to learn Russian in school, he said; pretty soon we wouldn’t be Germans anymore. And it was cold in winter now, so cold, he said; the Russians had taken his stove away.

  Hans’s wife Gertrud had died in the first wave. He’d dug her out himself; he’d carried her in his arms to the Altmarkt. He’d stood there watching when the horsedrawn wagon carried her to the pyre, but they hadn’t permitted him to come closer, for fear of epidemics.