Europe Central (111 page)

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 church-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.

He lived with his children in the house of Gertrud’s parents, who were still alive. Lina went to visit, and found them sitting around the table with drapes drawn, the older people smiling cautiously, ready for something bad to happen, the boys grinning at the prospect of cake. Stalin’s portrait hung overhead, with a wreath of flowers at his throat, because he’d already died and become a god. They seemed relieved when she said goodbye.

I’ll walk you back, said Hans.

Across the street, in scaffolding resembling the ghost-rungs attached to whichever music-notes protrude above the staff in Shostakovich’s Eighth Quartet, a dozen laborers roosted, passing a bottle of schnapps. One of them shouted an obscenity at Lina.

Say nothing, Hans told her.

When have I ever said anything?

Everyone has bad manners now, even my children. Please forgive them.

The dirty grey snow had been ground down to slime on the cobblestones of the empty streets, and silhouettes passed sparsely through the cold shade, moving as slowly and silently as mourners.

Do you remember Vice-Landrat Beda? he said in her ear.

Of course. Once when we were small he gave us each a chocolate . . .

They indicted him for sabotage, because they didn’t like his report on the sowing. He was jailed for ten months; but they didn’t like that, either, so they increased the sentence to three years. That was in ’46, so he should have gotten out in ’49, but he’s never come back.

The rubble-piles were heaped neatly around the broken bookends of the Frauenkirche as if in offering; the round window still standing, framing nothing but grey sky.

You’re probably wondering why we don’t talk about Freya, he said then. You see, the Russians
took her away.
I don’t know how to tell you this; it’s so shameful.

Ivan will never go away,
Lina recited, but in a voice as low as her brother’s, because a policeman was blowing his nose on the far side of the street. Three stout women leaned on their shovels, pretending to work.

No, it’s worse than that, said Hans. You lived in Berlin; perhaps you’ve heard of such things, but we . . . You see, Freya—I don’t know how to say this—went away with a woman. That’s why we don’t talk about her anymore.

Lina burst out laughing. ‣

OPERATION WOLUND

Was their ill fate sealed when in they looked.

—Voçlundarkviîa (9th century?)

1

I was the last one, except for Raoul Hillenberg, Raoul Wallenberg and a hundred thousand others. I was the last one I knew about. They’d kept me because of my prior relationship with Colonel Hagen, whom of all the war criminals they loathed most. And while they never feared me (though feared me they should), I’m sure they read the hate in me.

They kept me on an island without a name; at least if the island had a name I never knew it. The last place with a name I ever knew was Shpalnery Prison.

I wrought work for them which only a German could do. Do you want to know what it was? It was rocket work.

They’d shackled and hamstrung me; furthermore, I had to sleep within a web of barbed wire woven by a metal spider whose arms were as long and narrow as that cold-steel Russian sword called the
shpaga
; to get right down to it, I didn’t sleep much, on account of the injections. What they longed for was a missile which could fly all the way across Myrkvith Forest and exterminate the West Germans; they also hoped to kill the Amis in Washington. I wished to live, so I told them that I could do whatever they wanted; besides, I actually could do it.

They peered into my toolchest. They photographed my workbench. They knocked on the side of my rocket and it sounded hollow. They didn’t understand a thing.

Lieutenant Danchenko always treated me nicely. I’ll never forget the red flashes on her blue NKVD uniform. Once when her partner was in the latrine I told her that I could make her something special if that would please her, something beautiful and poisonous which would let her kill anyone she wanted. She got suspicious then. She wondered what favor I wished in return. I whispered that what I wished was her.

She liked that. Soon I was calling her Natalya Kovalova. Then it was Natalka. She came to me within my spiderweb.

One night when we were making love I strangled her. Then I took her keys and found the long sawtoothed one which went inside the spider’s belly. I unlocked the spider and came out of the web.
Heil Dir im Siegerkranz.

Then I cut Natalka’s eyes out—beautiful brown eyes!—and bored wires into them, which I hooked up to transistors and diodes. I squeezed the bulb and they opened. Now they were sensors. After all, it’s the worker who creates all material values. I installed Natalka’s eyes high in the nose of the rocket which was supposed to kill the Amis, and the rocket came alive. It was already a fine rocket, whose shell was magnalium alloy.

I sharpened Natalka’s fine white little teeth, which had proved so good at making lovebites, and packed them into grenades which I mounted under my rocket’s wings. (I saved her canine teeth for an antipersonnel mine which I wired up against the door.) I cleaned out her skull and filled it full of wires and switches so that the rocket had a guidance system. I filled the fuel tanks with her hot Russian blood! As for the rest of her, oh, she was as soft-skinned as an Ami truck; her flesh was as smoothly sloping as a T-34’s breast, which repels our shells as a duck’s breast does rain. So the rest of her I reduced to metal-tinned cubes in order to have something to eat on my journey. Then I was ready to fly as high as heaven.

Under other circumstances I would have made jewels for that woman. Poor Natalka! But I was a prisoner and I was in a rage, knowing that there’d never again be children coming to see us off at the train station in Berlin.

Now here they came, shooting through the door. I was in the cockpit of my rocket by then. As they came bursting in, my antipersonnel mine exploded and Natalka’s teeth killed half a dozen of them! Laughing, I pulled the switch and blasted right through the ceiling.

Shall I tell you how and why I’d won out? Under my tongue (the one place they didn’t search) I kept a splinter of the old Reichscrown, in other words a piece of the True Cross. ‣

OPUS 110

The problem of the “black bread” of culture has now been completely solved, and now is the time to provide society with the “sweet biscuits” of culture.

—The Soviet Way of Life (1974)

1

Best listened to in a windowless room, better than best an airless room—correctly speaking, a bunker sealed forever and enwrapped in tree-roots—the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich (Opus 110) is the living corpse of music, perfect in its horror. Call it the simultaneous asphyxiation and bleeding of melody. The soul strips itself of life in a dusty room. When the war’s over, when Stalin’s dead and for cemetery obelisks Europe sports the orphaned chimneys of firebombed Murmansk, the scorched churches of Dresden, politics spares us for a blink or two, nervously gnawing its own claws. The soldier comes home, pulls off his muddy, bloody uniform and becomes a citizen again. So too Shostakovich. Visitors remark on his success: white and black bread both, cheese, butter, even sausage on the table! Nylon stockings for Ninusha! His children love him, Lebedinsky respects him, Glikman reveres him; Ninusha (Nina Vasilyevna to you!) keeps unwanted visitors away; the Party woos him; Galina Ustvolskaya kisses him. Oh, yes, he’s very, how should I say? If I could only . . . Don’t answer the telephone! Because it’s time to, well, you know. But what’s that sound? It certainly wasn’t in Opus 40. What key most effectively expresses bereavement? In the darkness, a cello saws out a tune as dry as the buzzing of wasps within a skull. He claps his hands to his ears, but what good will that do? It comes from within! What’s that sound? Until now, all that he and
we
could hear was the patriotic clanking of tanks under Leningrad’s arches, as translated into my Seventh Symphony. And I even
believed
! I’m not saying that the others weren’t idealists, even fat-chinned Khrennikov, who earned his . . . not that I’d speak ill of a colleague, oh, no,
dear
friends! Did you know that Comrade Stalin praises Khrennikov? Count on it! They’re two of a kind. No, it’s not I who should be considered the man of our epoch. I get angry when they kick somebody in the teeth and expect me to set it to music. How strange that Roman Lazarevich wants me to write scores for his so-called “masterpieces,” when Khrennikov would be more, you know. Of course
she
never slept with Khrennikov, at least not that I . . . Thank heavens that’s all over. Isaak Davidovich tells me that she divorced him, so he must be very . . . Not that it’s my business. She’ll probably find another older man. And, yes, the war’s over, too; I wish that Maxim would stop having nightmares about Auschwitz! I mean, in this world we have to . . . And Galisha tells me that the boy won’t even . . . Not that she’s so lucky herself, to have me for a father. Oh, my! Now Europe is silent—but what’s that sound?