Юрий Мельников – The Limbo Zone (страница 2)
And then he saw them.
In the crowd of refugees descending onto the Hannover platform of thirty-nine, came Helga, Klaus, and little Dieter. Alive. Real. Dieter was crying, clutching a wooden toy to his chest. They had escaped. They had arrived. He only had to take a step, call out to them, embrace them. To start a new, nameless, quiet life in this zone of Limbo.
He took a half-step. Klaus looked back, and froze.
No. He would find them. He would embrace Helga. Klaus would say “Papa.” Dieter would cry — he always cried when he was afraid, and then, when he stopped being afraid, he cried too. They would live — here, in this zone, in this Limbo, and he would be Hans Weber, commercial representative from Bremen, and no one — no one — would ever know.
And everything would be — fine. But he had already said this — he had already told himself this before, and even earlier, and even earlier than earlier. And it all repeats, like a skipping record.
And he would lie beside her at night, and the ceiling would be white, and in the darkness — gray, and then black, and then the ceiling would vanish, and in place of the ceiling — smoke. And he would know where that smoke came from. And in that world, in that magnificent world where the Reich stands for a thousand years, Helga would have been washing his uniform. And Klaus would have been marching, straight and true, as they taught him in school. And Dieter would have stopped crying, because men do not cry, because crying is weakness, and weakness is a “no.” And in the mornings, smoke would rise from the chimney behind the hill, and they would not ask — whose? And he would know, and this knowledge would be familiar, as rain is familiar, as wind is familiar, as everything to which one becomes accustomed is familiar.
And Noah Goldstein would not be sewing suits. And Noah Goldstein — would not exist. And that other Helga, who loved blue — would not exist. And the blue dress with the white collar — would not exist. And the boy on the platform — would not exist. And the boy would not have looked back.
And if this perfect world had won, if it had arrived right this moment...
Space clanged. Again. The trap snapped shut. He looked at his wife’s blonde hair — and saw her in a baggy, filthy
Weber stood on the platform, not daring to approach them, not daring to touch them. He watched as someone’s family passed by, dissolving into the crowd of strangers, saved people whom he had not killed.
The train left. And the station left with it. Evening found him on Bahnhofstrasse.
The sun had gone — swiftly, thievishly, like a man who does not wish to be a witness. Hannover lay in the twilight, and the twilight suited it, the way a coat fits when tailored to a precise measure — the twilight hid what could not be seen in the light and exposed what the light hid.
From the barbershop on the corner, the voice of the dead propagandist could be heard again, monotonously reading the names of the dead-who-never-were. He did not stop — neither by day nor by night, neither in this world nor in that — he read as a river reads, as rain reads, as fire reads: without beginning, without end, without a comma, without mercy.
Weber stopped. He listened.
He listened to the names of people who in this world were alive, but in that other one — the one he had drafted, designed, calculated, the one where everything was correct, and pure, and according to the law — in that world, they did not exist. Not a single one. They were — figures. They were — smoke. They were — the ash that fertilized the lawn by their house, on which the grass later grew, and that grass was green, because ash is a good fertilizer; there were calculations about that too, and the calculations added up, and the columns were straight, and the handwriting — meticulous.
He listened, and the names entered him as a needle enters fabric — rhythmically, precisely, stitch by stitch — and every stitch sewed him to this place, to this pavement, to this world where they are all — alive, where the tailor sews, where the boy looks back on the platform, where the woman in the gray coat leads a child by the hand — to this world where he — is nobody.
A commercial representative from Bremen. Protestant. Did not serve. Looking for his family.
He stood there, and in the window of the barbershop — in that cracked window that doubled everyone — was his reflection. Vague. Faceless. Beside it — another, small, stooped, with glasses and a goatee.
Goldstein? Again? — No. A flare. A crack. A shadow from a lamp. No one.
And the voice read:
He recoiled.
But the voice continued with a different date, a different name, a different fate.
Not his. For now — not his.
The man without a name stood on Bahnhofstrasse, in a city pretending to be a city, in a zone that was neither a zone, nor a world, nor a purgatory, but a seam. A line along which one world is sewn to another, stitch by stitch, and if you pull the thread — both will unravel.
He stood and listened to the voice reading the names of the people he had not killed. In this world, he had not killed them.
And this “not” — thinner than a thread, thinner than a spiderweb, thinner than a blade drawn between two worlds — was the only thing standing between him and who he was.
Between him — and who he wanted to be.
And on the second track stood the empty train from Stettin, and in the empty carriages, the wind played, and the wind smelled of nothing.
Of absolutely nothing.
But above the station, above this dreary city, above this entire gray, torn-apart zone, on the very edge of one’s senses, where smell ceases to be physiology and becomes a state of the soul, there trailed a thick, sweetish, unbearably familiar scent of crematorium smoke that did not exist.
Chapter 1. Vertigo
The distance from Oranienburg to Lemberg is one thousand and eighty kilometers along the Reichsautobahn — if the Reichsautobahn still existed, if the bridges haven’t been blown up, if the gasoline hasn’t run dry somewhere between Breslau and Krakow, if the convoy hasn’t been strafed from the air, if headquarters still stands where it stood yesterday, if yesterday was still yesterday, and not some geological era separated from this morning by an impenetrable layer of burnt paper, ash, and human numbness.
The distance from Lemberg to Berlin is seven hundred and ninety.
The distance from husband to wife is immeasurable.
Fritz Lang,
He was listening to his wife's voice.
The wire — gray, coiled — stretched to the apparatus on the wall. The apparatus was screwed into the plaster with Polish screws, the plaster applied by Polish hands, which now, most likely, were digging Polish earth or were already lying in it.
But the voice came through. The voice was coming from Berlin — along a copper wire strung on wooden poles from Lemberg through Krakow, through Breslau, across fields where bomb craters hadn't yet cooled — and this in itself was a miracle, a fragile, impossible miracle: the wall, the wire, the apparatus, the receiver, the ear, the voice. This entire chain hung by a thread, on its final tension, and every sound along the way lost a piece of itself, just as water flowing through pipes in winter loses its heat. And Helga’s voice, by the time it reached his ear, was no longer entirely her voice, but its shadow, its cast, its imprint in the wax of static.
“…Dieter didn’t sleep all night,” Helga was saying, and her voice trembled but didn't break, and there was something in it that made Fritz want to smash the receiver against the wall and simultaneously press it so deeply into his ear that the voice would penetrate bone and marrow, reaching that part of the mind where things are kept before they become memories. “He heard it, we all heard it — they bombed Spandau, we were in the Schmidts' basement because ours is flooded — and Klaus was silent all night, Fritz, silent, he didn’t cry, didn’t call for me — he just sat there with his eyes open. And I don’t know what’s worse: when a child screams — or when a child is silent.”
“Helga. Helga, calm down.”
“I’ve packed two suitcases. One for the children’s things. The other for documents and winter clothes. Mother called from Stettin, it’s quiet there, the British are only bombing the factories, and there are no factories in Stettin, there's a port, but a port isn’t a factory, Fritz — the trains are still running…”