Europe Central (96 page)

I knew that, said Hagen.

The prison psychiatrist came on the last afternoon, to record his feelings. Hagen told him: My emotions can be summed up in two words:
Déjà vu.

Dr. Gilbert wrote down this reply. He seemed irritated.

Everything’s my fault, yawned Hagen, blowing a smoke-ring. I killed all those Jews. I saw today coming, too. I foresaw all this back in 1929.

Do you remember the tests I gave you? said the doctor in an angry voice. I learned quite a lot about you. Among other flaws, you’re diseased by infantilism. That’s why you can’t stop playing with people. You’ve never taken responsibility for anything.

What on earth are you talking about? You can punish me for anything you like! I’m ready. When you have marital problems, feel free to tell your wife it was all my doing. I know how
that
will turn out.

Dr. Gilbert slammed the notebook shut. He rose and banged on the cell door so that the guard would let him out. He refused to look at the condemned man, but when the key began to turn, he hissed over his shoulder: You don’t know who you are. Tonight you’re going to die without even knowing that much.

Of course I would prefer to be myself, said Hagen. But something always brings me back to take the blame for what God has done. And what if this something is also myself ? ‣

INTO THE MOUNTAIN

We have diagrammed the troop groupings as though they were the receding wings of a theater set—1, 2, 3, 4—inwards.

—Sergei Eisenstein, ca. 1942

Before the sleepwalker slammed the door behind him he needed there to be nothing left, not even the door itself; in the old Norse legends great men go into the mountain when they die, and their voices may sometimes be heard where there are hollows in the earth; but the sleepwalker’s intention was that there would be no mountain after him, no voices in the ground, no ground, and certainly nobody above ground to listen.

He said: Trudl, bring me the folder for Operation Spiral, would you, please? That’s a good child.

(Do you want to know why it was called Operation Spiral? The Midgaard Serpent swallows his own tail, and then what? Where does he go?)

The telephone rang. Four officers had waited too long to blow up the Remagen bridge; the enemy was across the Rhine!

Have them shot, he said.

The telephone rang. The Ruhr basin would soon pass out of our hands.

Flood the coal mines, he said. It will take the Jews twenty years to get them working again!

The telephone rang. The enemy was approaching Düsseldorf.

Then burn Düsseldorf, he said. Do I have to tell you everything?

The telephone rang. Gauleiter Wagner wished to confirm that the water-works of Baden should be destroyed.

Confirmed, he said. Trudl, child, could you kindly put the tea on?

The telephone rang. Speer had committed treason.

Send him down to me this evening, he said.

When Speer came, the sleepwalker glared at him and said: Bormann has given me a report on your conference with the Reich Gauleiters. You pressed them not to carry out my orders, and even declared that the war is lost. Are you aware of what must follow from that?

Speer, peering up at the concrete ceiling as though he’d spied a crack, insisted that the war
was
lost.

If you could at least hope! the sleepwalker pleaded, for Speer was his architect. That would be enough to satisfy me . . .

Speer remained silent.

You have twenty-hour hours to think it over! the sleepwalker shouted. Get out now; you’re ill; you’re dismissed from my office!

The telephone rang. Some officer or other wanted to know what to do with the women and children in his sector once their houses had been demolished.

Tell him that the nature of this struggle permits no consideration for the populace to be taken.

The telephone rang. His National Redoubt in the Alps was almost ready. Saying nothing, he hung up.

The telephone rang. Göring wanted to assure him that the Philharmonic would go under with everything else. Meanwhile he heard an explosion far away and aboveground.

He snatched up the telephone at once, demanding to know how the Russians were able to shell Berlin. The telephone explained that they had laid down a heavy and precise curtain of fire on the airfield in Prague, so that our Luftwaffe was helpless.

Then the Luftwaffe is superfluous, said the sleepwalker. The entire Luftwaffe command should be hanged at once!

He slammed down the telephone in a rage.

The telephone rang.—
Mein Führer,
we’ve lost communication with Wenk. The Russians are—

Oh, I have no doubt that I’m their target, he said.

The telephone rang. Although Wenk still could not be reached, Ninth Army had been encircled, and Heinrici’s troops had also fallen out of touch, General Koller was ready nonetheless to start the counteroffensive which would save Berlin. The sleepwalker threatened him: Any commander who holds back his troops will forfeit his life in five hours!

The telephone rang. When would he be coming to the National Redoubt?

Out of the question, he explained. They might catch me through some trick. I have no desire to be exhibited in a Jewish museum.

The telephone rang. His chauffeur, Kempka, had delivered two hundred liters of petrol to the garden upstairs as ordered. The Russians were in the Tiergarten.

The telephone rang. British bombers had destroyed the National Redoubt.

You see? he remarked to his secretaries. I always know what’s right.

His bride, Eva, who was as rich and good as Holstein butter, had now swallowed a capsule on his instructions. She lay beside him on the sofa, with her big cowlike eyes filming over. He raised the Walther to his head, then hesitated, lowered it a trifle, and peered into the barrel, to see what he might see within the mountain. First it was dark, then dark, and then far inside shone a pale blue light which must have come all the way from Russia; he thought he could spy the Grand Salle de Fêtes of the Empress Elizabeth Petrovna at Tsarkoie-Sélo, the carpet as vast and multiply monogrammed as a collective farm’s sugarbeet field, cartouches of angels dimly hovering on the ceiling, then a casement window opened onto vistas of other castles. Soon he’d take possession of all that.

Just then the telephone rang again, and he knew from the cadence of the ring that it would be bad news.

No regrets now! he said with a smile. ‣

DENAZIFICATION

There aren’t bad peoples.
But without mercy
I’ll tell you, . . .
each people
has its own reptiles.

—Yevgeni Yevtushenko (1962)

1

A long line of wooden-faced men in steel helmets lowered their swastika standards to the cobblestones. They were the last coins in that hoard of soldiers now vanished like gold thrown into a river. That was where it ended, there in the Tiergarten.

A Werewolf pushed a button, and row upon row of antitank guns hidden in the grass exploded. They’d run out of shells. Then came a shot. The Werewolf had saved the last bullet for himself. He was no longer a factor.

Then they marched out of Berlin in a column, saying farewell to the ruined buildings which so few would see again; you see, they were going east. Soon they’d learn about the whitish secretions of tubercular lungs; they’d grow expert in observing the sharpening of a dying prisoner’s face. (They’d observed the deaths of Slavs, but that was different.)

Europe Central, burned clean, could now become as wide and white as Stalin-Allee in the new Berlin of our Soviet zone, whose tiny citizens recede between trees and massive apartment-cubes toward the future’s distant tower. With the arrival of the Red Army, Unter den Linden with its cubical buildings and sentinel-like roof-figures had instantaneously become almost perfect, but we wouldn’t stop there: Each new skyscraper would be taller and better than any artifacts of the capitalist world. And this really happened, or at least nearly happened, which is the most any offensive can hope for: I remember the new towers and bays of Moscow University, whose yellowish tinge (thanks to the ageing of the blueprints as I study them in 2001) gilded them with a monumentally Roman look. I remember Comrade Stalin pacing the shining wet catwalks of the Kremlin, safeguarding everything in our great Soviet land. (I wasn’t there, but Roman Karmen filmed it. I’ve seen all of his movies.) Sometimes Comrade Voroshilov joined him, bearing huge stars on his red epaulettes. They gazed down at the clean cool factories and apartment-blocks of Moscow, remaining alert, collected and resolute. Now toward them came the line of Fascist prisoners.

2

We journeyed for thousands of kilometers, sometimes in windowless train cars, the rest of the time on foot. Most of us remembered how it had been the first time, with Ivans and Natashas straggling ahead of our Panzers, carrying their belongings on their backs. The sleepwalker had said: Don’t forget who the masters are! and Field-Marshal von Manstein had walked beside us smiling and alert, his hands in his pockets. But all victories fell into the Rhine, even though our Pioneers blew up every building that still stood. We slipped west, then east again! Von Manstein was now squinting and craning at his trial . . .

Back in Germany where fog bleeds silver slime upon the willows, chestnut trees and maples, which is to say too far back to be imagined, our sisters were prostituting themselves for chocolate or chewing gum. The sleepwalker was gone—into the mountain, it was said—so we’d been decapitated, like the statue of Mars in the Zeughaus (a direct hit from a Russian gun took care of him). We limped east, and sometimes they clubbed us in the face or let loose a machine-gun burst into our ranks.

Well, they’re the victors, so they must be the master race.—This was how we tried to explain it to ourselves. We were wide-eyed corpses, trying to learn the first few lessons of the afterlife. First kilometer by kilometer, then verst by verst we weakened, receding into time, becoming denazified.—I was never a Nazi, we all said.

High on a hill of pines, the broken castle looked blindly down upon a landscape of red roofs and green fields. And here the Russians shot another straggler, who fell still dreaming of a Reichskreuz a thousand years old, of a Reichskreuz bulging with pearls and jewels. By then we knew how to keep our mouths shut.

The wind began to bite our faces. Mockingly, our captors quoted to us these lines of Akhmatova’s:
I smile no more. A freezing wind numbs my lips.

3

They carried us east in boxcars; we rode railroad tracks as narrow in gauge as the strange note-strung segments which begin in measure ninety-six of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony; they’re for the instruments
Piatti
and
Cassa.
Most of us were bound for the mines, they said. The miners in our German fairytales were rich enough to have golden nails in their boot soles. Well, who knows? Maybe it would be like that. By train and by truck, we rode further east. Then we had to walk for twenty hours straight, without even a drink of dirty water. When they let us rest, which was sometimes just for the night, sometimes for weeks, we looked down at our clasped hands and wondered aloud whether we might have been saved by only one more Teller mine in the Hürtgen Forest.

Next was that parade in Moscow, that ordeal-by-disgrace before they subdivided us into long worms of prisoner columns to burrow into this or that hole in the Russian dirt and work to death; we marched down Red Square and people spat on us; but I’d discovered my trick; I pretended that I was still one of the heroes of the Condor Legion, marching past Franco’s swastika-hung reviewing stand in Madrid, with our right arms extended:
Sieg Heil!