Quartet for the End of Time

by Johanna Skibsrud

  “Trrrruman!” Again and again came the shout. There were toasts as well, of course, to the “late, great Rrrroosevelt,” to Stalin, to Churchill, to American women, to Russian women, to the Red Army, the American Army, the Soviet tank, and the American jeep. While Mussolini and his wife spent the night in Mezzegra awaiting execution, and Hitler awaited his own death, which would take place three days later, below the garden of Reichskanzlei, Sutton—along with Frieda Westin, Walt Kinsey, and Gene Dobbs—was entertained in Berlin to the sound of the continued bombing of the city’s interior and the shouts of the Russians, who were exacting their revenge on the city with indescribable joy. This was for Stalingrad—that was for Sevastopol!

  THE GERMANS HAD DISAPPEARED. It was as though there was not a German left in the city. Those who could manage it had indeed fled; otherwise, they hid indoors. No army was so feared as the Russians’, and for precisely the reason that—as the guards-major announced with solemnity that evening—every single officer of his staff had lost his family to the Germans. That, he said, was the secret of their extraordinary success—and the fall of Berlin. And let us see if it is not true—the guards-major said—if, for this very reason, in fifty or one hundred years we are not still fighting this very same war.

  THE NEXT DAY HITLER would learn that a surrender had been proposed and declined. He would order Himmler arrested and Fegelein shot. The Russians would fight on in the streets. It would, therefore, be nearly impossible for the jeep (Dobbs again at the wheel) to penetrate the city center—though by midafternoon they did manage, somehow, to get within fifteen blocks of Wilhelmstrasse.

  There were snipers everywhere—on rooftops, firing up from the sewers. It was madness to try to get any closer, but Frieda was intent on it. Her eyes shone, and with her blond hair and fresh good looks she looked like a midwestern Joan of Arc, ready to lead them, triumphantly, into certain death, and beyond. Sutton had learned to recognize it, by that time: the look she caught that afternoon in Frieda’s eye. It was always surprising where it would come from and when, but one thing was sure, it was always terrifying when it did come. There was something rather than aggressive, defensive about it, as though parts of the brain were already shutting down. The eyes took on a dull glow, and death was suddenly not death as measured against life; the two blended and became one, as things do in a dream. So that there was no death any longer—even as you spoke the word; even as it reared its ugly head, and stood directly facing you. There they were, fifteen blocks from Wilhelmstrasse, being urged on by Frieda Westin as though in a dream.

  At the wheel, Gene Dobbs was getting pale again—but even so, he didn’t want, any more than the rest of them, to turn back. Perhaps because, as Sutton reflected later, when you are in the midst of a battle like that, every moment that you don’t die is, in fact, a very ordinary moment. Nothing speeds up or slows down; time does not recoil, ready to spring, or stretch itself so thin as to come nearly to breaking. It just proceeds at its ordinary pace, and so the moment in which it becomes absolutely necessary to retreat never seems—until perhaps it is far too late—to actually arrive. Instead, it seems (just the opposite) even more urgently necessary to keep moving forward. Just as when, years before, Sutton had traveled down all those long empty highways through Oklahoma and West Texas with Louis and it would get to seem as though they were hardly traveling, or at least getting any nearer, to anyplace at all. As they sped along, her foot would get heavier and heavier on account of it, until finally Louis, beside her, would realize with a jolt and say, For Christ’s sake, slow down. It was always hard to slow down; to recover a more moderate pace. And just so, it was nearly impossible for them on that day, fifteen blocks from Wilhelmstrasse, to turn back; to retrace their steps as nearly as they could, in order to avoid the battles they’d so recently skirted. Of course, by then new ones had broken out so it was the same thing coming as going—except this time Sutton noticed more Germans, dead or dying on the streets.

  The Russians were clearing one block at a time, and they did so efficiently. Though it seemed, more often than not, as though no order existed at all: first one block would be cleared, then another—and the German dead continued to pile. Once, when they passed three Germans—a woman and two young boys—standing beside a row of dead German soldiers, the woman pointed at their flag, which, once again, they had stuck out the side of the window, and inquired in heavily accented English when they might be able to expect the Americans.

  Coolly, Frieda replied in German: The Americans will not be arriving, she said. Berlin belongs to the Russians. The woman took a faltering step back, and they continued on—Frieda clenching her end of the flag a little tighter so that it became taut and flapped vigorously in the wind. Sutton could tell what a thrill it had given her to be able to say that a moment before—in her decent German—thinking all the while, no doubt, of the guards-major, who, it was obvious, she had fallen madly in love with the night before.

  WHEN THEY RETURNED TO the command post there was a party in full swing, though it was barely noon. Once again, they were served cheese and fish on fine dark bread, and the vodka flowed. They danced, the guards-major and his handpicked staff of bereaved officers swinging Frieda and Sutton effortlessly around the room. “Love and Kisses” by Paul Whiteman played. Then Duke Ellington’s “Take the ‘A’ Train.” From time to time, Gene Dobbs cut in apologetically, while Kinsey in the corner started another round of toasts. To Trrrrruman! To Stalin! To Russian vodka and American jazz!

  While the Russians advanced on Wilhelmstrasse; while Mussolini dangled by a meat hook in Milan; while the Scottish Division, preparing to cross the Elbe, piped “The Mist Covered Mountains” and “The Piper of Drummond”; and right there in Berlin, Eva Braun in the Führerbunker made the final preparations for her wedding day.

  A WEEK LATER—IN WHAT would be her last assignment—Sutton flew to Dachau, in order to talk with a Polish doctor, who himself had spent the last eleven months of the war as a prisoner there. When she met him, he was busy treating a young Hungarian Jew named Petér Aleksei, who had survived the last death transport from Buchenwald. Outside the barbed-wire gates there were fifty boxcars filled with those on the same transport who had not survived; for the last week the American Army had been forcing the Dachau civilians to bury the dead. When Petér Aleksei was discovered alive, and informed of the fact, he did not believe it at first. He kept insisting: Everyone is dead.

  But you, he was told, are alive!

  He only shook his head in disbelief.

  Now he sat, stripped to the waist, wearing his prison pants and a pair of unlaced boots. The doctor had waved to Sutton when she came in, indicating a chair in the corner in which she might sit. A little light had pooled on the floor by her feet, which also slanted across the patient’s naked torso. It was a wonder it did not fall right through him, as though he were made out of glass.

  The doctor put a stethoscope to the patient’s chest and asked him to breathe. He did so. There was a slow rattle in his throat, but he didn’t cough. He held the breath for several seconds, then let it out in cautious bursts. He stared ahead at the doctor, as though waiting to be told to breathe again.

  In four weeks, the doctor told his patient. You’ll see. You will be a young man again.

  Then he dismissed him, and turned to Sutton. Yes, he said, he is one of the lucky ones. He is young enough that his body will heal—and when the body heals, the mind, and then the soul, nearly always follow. Humans are endlessly adaptable—that is what I’ve learned here, more than anything else. More than any of the other animals: I would attribute it to our ability to reason. If an animal is displaced, or if he encounters a change in his environment—he will die. The doctor shrugged. It is a natural defense system.

  It is—he continued then, after a reflective pause—a common assumption that natural life is built to continue; that it is driven to continue, against all odds—but I do not believe that this is so. The living organism protects itself when it is threatened
by shutting down. Rodents eat their young. This is an attempt to protect the living body from pain and uncomfortable change. Human beings, however—they have the capacity to reason through almost endless amounts of change; they approach it gradually, intellectually, you see—they even attempt to exploit it to their own ends. It is reason, not biological life, that strives to promote itself. Life works against reason, but reason always prevails. At the end of the world, when it comes, it will be because reason has triumphed finally above all else. You see, he said. It almost succeeded here.

  He took off his glasses and squinted into the light, which had narrowed by then into a single point on the floor. For several moments he gazed at this point without speaking, before—abruptly recollecting Sutton’s presence, and the reason for it—he turned toward her and addressed her once more.

  Yes, he said. There have certainly been some unusual experiments here. For instance, he said—now taking his glasses and rubbing them on his thin shirt—the Germans were interested to learn how long it would be possible for an aviator to go without breathing oxygen; that is, how high it would be possible for him to fly in the air. So they had a closed box and put a prisoner inside, then pumped from it all the oxygen very slowly, to see at what point the prisoners would die. It never took longer than fifteen minutes. So it was discovered that no one can live above thirty-six thousand feet in altitude. That’s the absolute limit. After that, there is simply not enough oxygen for the human body to endure.

  Another experiment took place in water. How long could a body survive in cold water? they wanted to know. This could also be useful for pilots. They wanted to find out how long a human body could survive if it were shot down over the English Channel, for example, or the North Sea. In waters such as those found in the North Sea during winter, it was discovered that a body can resist no longer than sixty-five minutes before falling unconscious—it could, however, be resuscitated for up to three hours. This sort of experiment was always reserved for new arrivals: those prisoners whose health had not already been compromised. When the victims were resuscitated, they were given three days’ rest and then used in the experiment a second—even a third time. I am not sure I have heard of any prisoner being much use any longer than that.

  Another experiment, performed mainly on Polish priests—because there was such a large number of them—involved injecting streptococcus germs between the muscle and bone of the upper thigh. Although only thirty-one deaths resulted from this experiment, those who did die did so after many months of suffering. Often they underwent numerous operations in their last days, in order to discover at what late stage it might still be possible for a man to be saved.

  The answer? He could not.

  —

  ON THE TWENTY-THIRD OF MAY, 1945, SUTTON, ALONG WITH SIX OR seven American prisoners of war, left Dachau for New York in a C-47. Gene Dobbs was with her, too. And Hans Feldman, a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. Frieda was already in San Francisco by then, covering the United Nations conference, and Kinsey was in Berlin—still toasting to the health, no doubt, of President Truman. Nobody looked out the window, or spoke, when they lifted off; nobody looked down, or thought about the relative distance between houses, or fences, or borders, when the plane rose and all below them began to seem suddenly small and far away.

  No, it wasn’t until they had reached cruising altitude and were flying across the English Channel that anyone looked down, and there was something fitting in that, Sutton thought, when she herself looked finally, because there was nothing to see, and no way to distinguish, from that limited vantage point, the difference, any longer, between the water and sky.

  VII.

  Alden

  CRACKING THE CODE. EMMETT’S ROOM, PARIS, 1936— DETOUR TO ELIzABETHTOWN, KENTUCKY, AND BARCELONA, SPAIN, 1937—DICK’S APARTMENT, PARIS, 1937—BRIEF DETOURS TO DICK’S “PLUSH” MENTAL INSTITUTION, UPSTATE NEW YORK, 1945, AND CHAMONIx, FRANCE, 1934—JACK AND PAIGE’S APARTMENT, PARIS, CHARTRES CATHEDRAL, EN ROUTE TO STALAG VIII-A, GERMANY, 1940—DETOUR TO PREFECT’S RESIDENCE AND GERMAN HEADqUARTERS, CHARTRES, 1940—JACK AND PAIGE’S APARTMENT, PARIS, 1941—DETOUR TO STALAG VIII-A, 1940–1941—LUxEMBOURG GARDENS, ALDEN’S ROOM, MARCELLO’S BAR, FRANz ECKELMANN’S HOUSE, PARIS, 1943–1944.

  Of all of them, it was only Emmett who spoke of joining when the first international volunteers for the war in Spain began to be deployed in the fall of 1936. He did not immediately do so, or even take any definitive steps toward doing so, but he spoke of it so boldly, and with such assurance, that this did nothing to shake anyone’s faith that he would. If things had gone somewhat differently and he had never gone to the war at all and been blown there into a thousand irrecoverable parts, perhaps they all still would have believed that he had. Perhaps they would have continued to listen to his stories and believe him resolutely when he spoke in his commanding tone of the sorry state of the Parti Communiste, and the radical split that would soon cause—he predicted—the downfall of the entire party, if not Europe as they currently knew it, and perhaps the whole of the Western world.

  It was toward—he would warn them—not the radical right nor the radical left, but (he could almost see it, he said, glistening before them) the dark center in the middle they were ultimately bound … And all the time, as he spoke—propped comfortably on one elbow in his narrow rented room near the Jardin Atlantique on the Boulevard Pasteur—they might have easily been convinced that he was actually off fighting foreign wars, which they themselves could not entirely support or understand.

  By the time he met Emmett, Alden could no longer imagine how any man might come to believe, with conviction, in anything, or speak with authority on any subject at all—but this only heightened his appreciation of those who did. He listened to Emmett with an admiration that bordered on devotion; savoring the flash of his eyes, for example, as he spoke of the Falangists and, in the same breath, of Léon Blum’s Matignon Agreements—which had taken the place (he lamented) of global revolution. It was this same bright light that must have flared, Alden later imagined, if briefly, in Emmett’s eyes as he was killed in the Barcelona riots of May 1937, his body sent back to be buried in his home state of Kentucky. The youngest of four generations of Emmett Hendersons— the first of which had died during the War of Independence, at the Battle of Brandywine. It was a proud history, the details of which Emmett had recounted to Alden so many times that he could almost picture him: resting up there in the Elizabethtown cemetery, all of the blue grasses of Kentucky gently saluting him with their continuous, casual wave. He could picture his mother, dressed in her Sunday best—still trim and retaining all the necessary indicators of a former beauty, so that even if it had not actually managed to be preserved, it was still understood from the traces of it that remained. Picture her walking up the hill in the late morning sun; slowly, on account of her heels, which got stuck in the soft grass and had to be carefully extracted with every step. Picture her arms, full of flowers, which in a moment she would distribute to each of the Henderson graves—careful to lay the bouquet not beneath the name of the man, but beneath the name of the woman: “wife of,” “beloved daughter to,” because, as she insisted on many occasions (in her slow drawl that indicated she belonged farther south), it was the women who suffered the most.

  Estaline Henderson, née Boutte, had in fact come from Louisiana at the age of twenty-two after having fallen in love with a Navy man, who was shortly thereafter to become Emmett’s father. Emmett himself had hardly mentioned his father, and so it is difficult to place him in the story, or comprehend the specific brand of suffering that was Emmett’s mother’s own, and made her so particularly sensitive to the suffering of all women. Perhaps he is in the car, even now, as Mrs. Henderson extracts herself with every step from the soft dirt of the cemetery grounds and makes her way to the graves of her husband’s ancestors—also, of course, the ancestors of her departed son. Perhaps he is in the car, with his hat on—a cigarette wedged partway out the window in order that its sm
oke might not ruin the upholstery. Waiting, letting the car idle, being comforted by the noise of the engine. (Evidence of the automobile’s rumbling appetite, which his weekly attempt to satisfy, in turn, satisfies him. Yes, it pleases him deeply, somehow: the insatiability of his vehicle; that constant reminder that everything—even the most modern machinery —comes at a cost.) Waiting, while his wife steps into and then out of the soft Kentucky dirt, with flowers for the women who—as she reminds him so often in her soft Louisiana drawl—have suffered the most. (It is always unclear as she says it whether the suffering she refers to occurred most notably while the husband was still alive or after he was dead.) Waiting, interminably, letting the car idle, letting the powerful throat of its engine soothe him by reminding him of the tremendous cost of being alive in the world, while his wife trudges, also interminably, through the churchyard, wearing a rutted path to the graves of her illustrious, inherited dead—no closer to understanding the sudden demise of her son than she was when she first received the letter informing her that his body, or what was left of it, would (from a location she had until that time not yet heard of) be returned.

  BECAUSE EMMETT WAS THE only person with whom Alden had shared anything of his own history—on a cool summer evening, which he would always remember later, in which they had walked home together from Dick’s place, along the Canal Saint-Martin—relating to him, in a sudden burst, everything from the disappearance of Elizabeth Gregory and the tragic early death of Joe Hodge to the professor’s onetime confidence in him: his prediction that he himself would one day be a great man. He spoke of the Indian, John, of his explosive, inglorious end, and finally of Arthur: of the shameful role he, Alden, had also played in that man’s fate—a fate that (though he had no idea what it was) he now felt quite certain had become hopelessly entangled with his own. He had even—he admitted to Emmett that night—somehow managed to get his kid sister embroiled in the mess, and ever since, they had hardly spoken. She most certainly blamed him for all of it— and quite rightly, too. Though perhaps, after all, it was best that she kept her distance now—because (he hesitated, wondering what he could actually bring himself to say out loud). Well, he had gone this far. He was beginning—he continued—to get the distinct impression that everything he touched, every person he loved, would—was bound to; it was only a matter of time—give way, crumble, explode, or otherwise disappear. That despite (and perhaps in direct proportion to) any attempt of his to assert against those greater and more noble ambitions of chance and time some proper force of his own, the more that great wheel—on which those ambitions were hung—turned blithely against him; not as though merely ignorant of his deepest desires and intentions, but as though actually conspiring against him …