Europe Central

by William T. Vollmann

  2

  Well, who wouldn’t have been homesick, especially during the war years? (Imagine how dreary the spectators must have felt after Comrade Stalin’s alpinists had ascended the shining Admiralty Tower of Leningrad and camouflaged it with dull grey paint.) Not only was Europe more higher-contrast and greyer than ever—never mind the broken glass, cold and darkness—but, as period movie footage demonstrates, atomic structures were actually looser—hence the stippled grey cheekbones of starving Poles, the fuzzy almost-white of children’s skinny legs, the velvety irregularities of what should have been chiseled pillar-grooves in the facades of blurry department stores not yet bombed. The perverse argument of certain liberal “experts” that the film stock of the 1940s was inherently grainier than today’s has been disproven by a Central Intelligence Agency study which employed extreme magnification to compare nitrate-based Nazi-Soviet documentaries with today’s color features. 47 As Adams demonstrated, grain is a fundamental feature of reality itself.

  3

  Still and all, one feature must be conceded to the grey old days: coherence. Just as a poem achieves its effect by a narrow application of choice within a wide application of exclusion (the word I need cannot be any of the thousands which fail to rhyme with grey), so wartime Europe was perfect in its ghastly fashion, inhabited by beings with coarse-pored silver complexions. What were my parents like when they were young? Their hair is silver now. Of course it always was; they got married before brown was invented. Relatively speaking, they had luck; my father grew up in the ultra-whiteness of Chicago winters; my mother had her grey Nebraska wheat fields. In Europe, the tonal scale remained measurably harsher. What inmate of that continent could hope to be more than a fleeing, slender civilian in an inky-black suit, or one of many snowy-camouflaged men on a tank, pointing black guns across the snow? A few million souls did get to be decorated dull-grey Russian soldier-girls in mid-grey fur hats; we see them marching westward in that propaganda spectacular “The Fall of Berlin,” to which Shostakovich wrote the soundtrack. When Khruschev, outflanking Operation Polaroid, introduced the color red into Soviet society in early 1961, it caught on so well that every subsequent decoration had to be either crimson or bloody, but during the war all medals stayed grey, of course, which I actually consider befitting because it was a dreary grey war of frozen corpses; frozen blood goes black; red would have been out of place. The pale skinny boys assembling the round magazines of machine-guns, what color should they have been but dead white? Between the reflections of long white military columns writhing in the Neva and the black trickles of people dwindling day by day on the frozen streets of Leningrad, only two zones were needed: ultra-field-grey, as exemplified by the squat darkness above the treads of the Panzerkampfwagen (specifically, a Pzkpfw-IIIF), and ice-grey, the color of those Stalinist banners which the Panzers overpassed, the banners which said: LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL.

  4

  He rose from the bed and stood lankily naked, watching his breath freeze in the greyish room. He went to the window. Yawning, he scratched a little circle in the window-frost. Through this peephole he saw what he had known he would see: dull grey battleships frozen in the ice.

  He saw men in murky greatcoats, with grey wool caps on their heads, hands in their pockets, and rifles wedged under their arms, the barrels aiming straight upwards, every man standing shoulder to shoulder for warmth as the military band played. Then they began to march. White snakes of snow-light flittered across them as they twitched rhythmically out of focus.

  He saw the pavements shimmering and shining with ice.

  He smiled. (White streaks—scratches in the war film—writhed across his face.) He was as happy as he would ever be, because the woman in the bed was his mistress, Elena Konstantinovskaya, and because after everything she still loved him.

  The master composer (which is what he was) does not bemoan the absence of greyness between the piano’s white and black keys. Anyhow, he had his greys, three strong, crude Russian shades which sufficed for everything. —Two zones, I’ve just written, but she brought the third to us. Between black and white lie the following three greys, from dark to light: the charcoal grey of Konstantinovskaya’s pubic curls, which corresponds to the shadow which our T-34 tanks cast upon the frozen pavement of Kirovsky Prospekt (let us hereby repudiate the enemy’s Pzkpfw-IIIF); the healthy mid-grey of her fingernails, lips and nipples; and the creamy pale grey, not ice-grey at all, of her face, hands and shoulders, which have been tanned by the Russian sun. Underneath her white, white breasts live twin crescent-shadows which crave to express themselves in their own intermediate shade between lip-grey and shoulder-grey, but they cannot, because all greys have been used up. Once the poem has narrowed and thereby deepened itself (for instance, limiting itself to white, black and three greys), it becomes more fully what it is; Konstantinovskaya is perfectly what she is; she is perfect; she saves him who loves her because the white sun of an explosion is a face, Death’s face, and Death’s long black tresses are smoke; without Konstantinovskaya, white and black would be only Death; she blessed them into a marriage. Here come more Germans in field-grey; here come NCOs with silver lace on their shoulder straps. Thanks to her, field-grey isn’t just an enemy shade; it’s lip-grey, too; he kisses it whenever he kisses her mouth . . .

  He drinks from her mouth. Her white breath-fog flutters across the blackish-grey swellings of the Neva. That breath will be frozen tomorrow, maning the snow-clods and dirty ice-clods and corpses in new white. Yes, the mud will be frozen silver by her breath, and then it will be dusted white, and the small bomb-smashed houses of Pulkovo will seem cleaner. All will be white on white, even the shy rare smoke which freezes as soon as it’s born from chimneys.

  5

  He said: Well, Elena, how unlucky it is that I didn’t marry you—

  Don’t cry. Stay with me today.

  But then I—

  And stay the night.

  If they’re watching—

  Of course they’re watching, Mitya.

  He took heart at that and laughed: Well, to be sure, they’re all waiting for my bad end. Here, Elena, do you see what I have with me? I forgot to show you before because I was so excited to be, well, I, I was thinking of you, Elena, oh, yes, I was . . . Sollertinsky gave me this smoked fish. I wish I knew where he got it—

  Come to bed now, she said quietly.

  6

  And it went on, it continued, greyly curving like the triple-railed tramcar tracks of Leningrad which now led directly from Comrade Zhukov’s pale, pouchy face to the round bald head and wide round eyes of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Ritter von Leeb; their pearl-grey hours flickered and stuttered past, her white breasts sanctifying by sharing the same unholy light as German munitions coming to kiss the streets newly paved by the corpses they’d made; her eyebrows were a wall of smoke. But it was only a war movie that he dreamed. He was long gone to Kuibyshev by then; he’d been evacuated with his wife and children, because he was valuable. Konstantinovskaya was in Spain; she married and divorced a certain Roman Karmen. And when the last reel flopped and chittered loose, when the projectionist returned them all to ghastly light, then the movie star awoke, rolled away from his wife’s snores, rose, fiddled with his Seventh Symphony and later stood with his face sadly and anxiously crumpled as he rested his hands on his two children’s shoulders. His glasses kept sliding down his nose. He wanted to take them off. His daughter Galya scratched a circle in the frosty windowpane. Peering through it, he saw the stopped buses, the black, flat-topped Russian automobiles whose fronts sloped doubly down over the wheels like the clasped mandibles of praying mantises, and after he had counted only two shades of grey, his white, white fingers, which in those days were exactly the same shade as piano keys, began to clench like the feelers of an insect drawing up and dying.

  7

  All right, so he’d known it was a movie all along; he’d rushed to leave her because Nina was pregnant; he’d joined the dark crowds on the far side of
the street, the safe side, where building-fronts remained multiwindowed and white. (The stenciled Cyrillic letters, white on grey, said: .) In the movie he’d finally returned to the side where he was meant to be. The soundtrack was his own. She was on top of him, and he was inside her, and their mouths both opened and then those two pale, open-mouthed Russian corpses formed their own exclusive society on a street corner which shone brilliant silver with rain. ■

  SOURCES

  These stories are not as rigorously grounded in historical fact as my Seven Dreams books. Rather, the goal here was to write a series of parables about famous, infamous and anonymous European moral actors at moments of decision. Most of the characters in this book are real people. I researched the details of their lives as carefully as I could. However, this is a work of fiction. Poetic justice has I hope been rendered, both to them and to their historical situations (which got stripped down into parables, then embellished here and there with supernatural cobwebs). To give one especially glaring example, see my note immediately following this section: “An Imaginary Love Triangle: Shostakovich, Karmen, Konstantinovskaya.” I apologize for any offense which I may have given to the living, and I repeat: This is a work of fiction.

  Under such circumstances it would be a sterile exercise in didacticism to list sources of anything other than direct quotations. But I’ve tried to be as accurate in the small details (for instance, “the sound of our footsteps, which I loved, and love still, despite everything”48), and as fair to the historical personages involved as possible. It is probably needless to state that the social systems described here, together with all their institutions and atrocities, derive entirely from the historical record.

  The chronology was for the convenience of the reader who may be unfamiliar with some of the names and events mentioned. My publisher persuaded me to cut it, on account of the wartime paper shortage. There is no compelling need to consult it; however, it might have furnished some eerie instances of German and Russian synchronicities.

  I prepared the list of patronymics for those of you who have trouble keeping track of Russian names and nicknames.

  Military terminology need not trouble the reader overmuch here, especially since its seeming specificity was so often illusory during World War II. The number of soldiers in a divison or a regiment, for instance, varied not only according to whether that regiment were German, Soviet, Romanian, Italian, etcetera, but also according to how much it had been bled to death. As the war went on, formations tended to become under official strength. (An instance of non-equivalence: When the German attempt on Moscow, Operation Typhoon, was halted in the winter of 1941, ninety-five Soviet divisions—eight hundred thousand men—stopped seventy-seven and a half German divisions—a million men.) After several attempts at drawing up a nice little chart for you, I finally despaired. The relative equivalence of ranks in the armies concerned was less problematical, but often still not exact. The only matter which does require specific elucidation is this: In Axis (and most Allied) usage, the word front refers to the immediately contested area between two armies. In Soviet usage, however, a front could be an operational grouping, similar to a Nazi army group. During the Great Patriotic War the Soviet Union formed and dissolved fronts according to the requirements of each situation. There were never less than ten, and never any more than fifteen. To minimize confusion I have capitalized the term when using it in a Soviet sense. Thus, the Volkhov Front is “Volkhov Region Red Army Group,” whereas the Volkhov front is the frontline area of the Volkhov area.

  Regarding the Ring Cycle, Parzival, Eschenbach’s Tristan and Isolde, the Nibelungenlied and the Norse songs of the Poetic Edda, it should be noted that the names and acts alter in variations of the stories: Hogni is Hagen, and Gunther Gunnar; Brynhild spells her name “Brunnhilde” whenever she finds herself in a Wagner opera. Guthrún may metamorphose into Kriemhild or Grimhild, or vanish entirely. Siegfried wins Brunnhilde for Gunther by riding through a wall of flame, or else he has already done this, awoken her and pledged troth before he ever met Gunther. In either case, the relationship between Siegfried and Gunther is a constant: vainglorious complacency on the one hand, with a hint of illicit intimacy between Siegfried and Brunnhilde, and envious, resentful dependency on the other. I have tried to respect the appropriate consistencies and inconsistencies.

  When the plurals of German nouns happen to be identical with the singulars (“Gauleiter,” “Nebelwerfer,” etc.), I thought it best to Anglicize them with an s, especially in such parallelistic constructions as: “Our Nebelwerfers against their Katyushas, what an unresolved problem!”

  The moral equation of Stalinism with Hitlerism is nothing new. V. Grossman made that point first and best in his novel Life and Fate. Here it is merely a point of departure. (What is totalitarianism? In 1945, shortly before his own death in an air raid, the horrible Roland Freisler, judge of the Nazi “People’s Court,” says to his condemned adversary what a Stalinist could also say: “Only in one respect are we and Christianity alike: We demand the entire man!”—Helmuth James von Moltke, Letters to Freya 1939-1945, ed. & trans. by Beate Ruhm von Oppen [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990; orig. German ed. 1988], p. 409.)

  A great number of my visual descriptions, both in straightforward prose and in metaphors, derive from the illustrations in Irina Antonova and Jorn Merkert, comp., Moskva-Berlin Berlin-Moskau 1900-1950 (Moscow: Galart [a supposed coproduction with Prestel-Verlag in Munich and New York; I haven’t seen the latter but if it ever comes out it would be preferable for the reader who can’t sound out Cyrillic]; 1996). This is a spectacular book.

  Descriptions of Third Reich uniforms, weapons and other militaria, particularly on the Ostfront, make occasional reference to Nigel Thomas, The German Army 1939-45 (3): Eastern Front 1941-43, illus. Stephen Andrew (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, Men-At-Arms ser. no. 326, 1999); Bruce Quarrie, Fallschirmjäger: German Paratrooper 1935-45, illus. Velmir Vuksic (Oxford: Osprey Publishing, Warrior ser. no. 38, 2001); Robin Lumsden, A Collector’s Guide to Third Reich Militaria, rev. ed. (Surrey: Ian Allan Publishing, 2000 rev. repr. of orig. 1987 ed.); Werner Haupt, A History of the Panzer Troops 1916-1945, trans. Dr. Edward Force (West Chester, Pennsylvania: Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., 1990; original German ed. 1989).

  Descriptions of the airplanes of all sides are based on the pretty color foldouts in The Gatefold Book of World War II Warplanes (New York: Barnes & Noble Books, by arr. w/ Brown Packaging Books Ltd., 1995). For details on the sources of technical specifications to Soviet airplanes, see the appropriate note to “Elena’s Rockets.”

  My occasional descriptions of the handwriting of German and Russian writers and composers derive from the samples which appear in Marianne Bernhard, comp., Künstler-Autographen: Dichter, Musiker, bildende Künstler in ihren Hand-schriften (Dortmund: Die bibliophilen Taschenbücher, Harenberg Kommunikation, 1980). The exception is the handwriting of Shostakovich, which I have described based on facsimiles reproduced in various biographies, etcetera.

  ix Shostakovich epigraph: “The majority of my symphonies are tombstones.”—Testimony: The Memoirs of Dmitry Shostakovich as Related to and Edited by Solomon Volkov, trans. Antonina W. Bouis (New York: Limelight Editions repr. of 1979 Harper & Row ed.), p. 156. (Henceforth cited, for the sake of argument, as Shostakovich and Volkov.)

  STEEL IN MOTION

  3 Epigraph—Field-Marshal Erich von Manstein, Lost Victories: The War Memoirs of Hitler’s Most Brilliant General, ed. and trans. Anthony C. Powell (Novato, California: Presidio Press, 1994 repr. of 1958 abridged trans.; original German ed. 1955), p. 22.