Юрий Мельников – The Limbo Zone (страница 4)

“To where, Herr Untersturmführer?”

Fritz didn't answer. Not east — the Russians were there. Not west — the French were there. North?... To Helga. To the two suitcases by the apartment door on Schillerstrasse, if the suitcases weren't already buried under plaster, if the door was still there, if the apartment was still standing.

He was left alone. He stood by the window, wearing a uniform that just yesterday had signified absolute power, and today signified an absolute target. He picked up the heavy Bakelite receiver again, pressed it to his ear. He listened to the silence — long and intently, the way a doctor listens to a stopped heart.

And in that silence — for the first time, barely audible, on the very fringes of his consciousness — something stirred for which he had no name. Not fear — he knew fear, fear was a tool, a working material, fear he knew how to dose and tabulate.

This was different. Something that made the world, already derailed, begin to slowly, unstoppably turn. Like a massive centrifuge. Spinning, spinning, until up became down, until the soldier became a refugee, until the man who compiled the lists was himself transformed into a hunted animal on someone else’s list.

But that would come later.

For now — there are the clouds. For now — the chestnut trees. For now — the sentry at the gates, finishing his cigarette with that greedy, doomed concentration of a man who suspects this cigarette is his last. For now — two suitcases, one for children's things, the second for documents and winter clothes. For now — seven hundred and ninety kilometers of silent copper.

For now — there is the distance.

Chapter 2. Dust

The road north from Lemberg begins with the fact that there is no road.

That is to say, it exists on the map: a thin red line, drawn by an imperial cartographer with the same meticulousness with which Fritz Lang traced the columns in his ledgers — a line connecting dot to dot, Lemberg to Lublin, Lublin to Warsaw, Warsaw to Danzig, Danzig to Stettin — on and on, along the red arteries of a Reich that only yesterday stretched from the Rhine to the Bug, but today was contracting like a fist from which water is leaking. The red lines on the map were becoming what they had always been: ink on paper.

On paper, a road. On the ground, a quagmire.

The Kübelwagen crawled along the highway like a beetle across a sodden page of newsprint. At the wheel sat Kurt Zimmer, a corporal from the Oranienburg motor pool, assigned to Fritz for the assignment along with the car — small, wiry, with a face carved from a root. He was one of those drivers who lead a car not with their hands, but with their spine, feeling every pothole as a personal insult. He was silent. He was silent because everything that could be said was being said by the road.

The road spoke of — retreat.

Passing them — heading toward Lemberg, from where they had just fled — was that which three weeks ago had been called the Wehrmacht: trucks with dropped tailboards where soldiers with faces the color of road mud jolted; motorcycles loaded so heavily their sidecars scraped the stones; horse-drawn wagons — horse-drawn wagons! — in an army that prided itself on tanks; and the infantry, gray-green, endless, marching out of step, without formation, without song — a mass that had lost the only thing distinguishing an army from a mob: direction.

“Where are you headed?” Fritz shouted, leaning out of the car as the Kübelwagen stalled once again in a bottleneck.

A lieutenant — young, with an ashen face and eyes where the spark textbooks call “fighting spirit” had already gone out — was walking beside his men, on foot. He had likely abandoned his vehicle, or lost it, or it simply no longer existed.

“To Lemberg,” the lieutenant said. “Orders are to hold Lemberg.”

“Whose orders?”

The lieutenant looked at Fritz — at the black uniform, the runes on the tabs, the Totenkopf on the cap — and in that gaze was the expression with which field officers looked at the SS: the way one looks at a rat that has found the cheese.

“Orders,” he repeated and walked on.

Whose orders — he didn’t know. No one knew. Orders were born of the void — of rumors, of fragments of the last radiograms, of words spoken by someone to someone else an hour or a day ago. Every order contradicted the next, and together they contradicted reality, while reality contradicted itself.

And along the shoulders flowed something else.

On the right, pushing carts piled with featherbeds and pots, were those fleeing the Germans to the east. On the left, wrapped in shawls, trudged those now fleeing the Russians to the west. Counter-flows of panic, rubbing against one another.

Jews and Gypsies walked in the same dust as Poles, shoulder to shoulder, and this was wrong — not because they walked, but because they walked together. In that calligraphically perfect world Fritz had built, these streams could never intersect. But the ruled world was over. There remained only the unruled world, where everyone saved themselves along the same ditch.

“In October, everything was different, Herr Untersturmführer,” Zimmer said suddenly, his eyes never leaving the grimy windshield. “Almost a year ago…”

He jerked the wheel, swerving around a dead horse with a belly bloated like a drum.

“When we entered the Sudetenland, there was no dust. In Carlsbad, they stood along the roads. Girls threw asters onto our armor. The autumn was warm, and those flowers... they smelled of perfume, of wet asphalt, of a holiday. We drove through Europe like gods, Herr Lang. A girl threw one to me — a white one — right into the cab. I dried it. I wanted to bring it home to my wife.”

He fell silent.

“Did you?” Bremme asked from the back.

“Lost it. Somewhere between Prague and Breslau. It fell out of my pocket. Or I threw it away. I don't remember.”

Zimmer spat out the cracked window.

“And now we’re driving through a cesspool. And no one knows which way to climb out.”

Fritz remained silent. The driver’s words bounced off him without causing harm, because inside Fritz, a different mechanics was at work. On his knees lay a brown leather briefcase with the monogram KL. And within this forest-like, primal panic, the briefcase remained the last island of supreme, crystalline reason. Inside was a folder marked “Geheime Reichssache.”

His assignment to Lemberg, to this melting pot of nationalities, had not been an inspection. Oranienburg was facing a crisis that Fritz, as a good manager, was supposed to resolve. Arrests of “asocial elements” were on schedule, but the system was failing at the output: the elderly, the sick, the exhausted could not work. They took up space. They consumed rutabaga gruel. They were a loss without a profit, a line in the budget that didn't balance.

Shooting them was not cost-effective. A bullet is brass, it is gunpowder, it is logistics and the human factor. The economics of death demanded elegance.

That was precisely why Berlin had sent him to the East. Here, in Galicia, where the local population was gleefully ready to take on part of the dirty work, where antisemitism was absorbed with mother’s milk, Fritz Lang sought a new solution. He held meetings. He drew diagrams. What to do with those who cannot work?

He had been one step away from a clean, almost mathematical revelation. He could already see the outlines of large, bright rooms with showerheads in the ceiling, where the problem would be solved hygienically and without the expenditure of non-ferrous metals.

But Russian paratroopers and French tanks had turned his blueprints of the future into scrap paper. His perfect Reich, where he would be the Architect of Purity, had collapsed, leaving him in the dust, fleeing north toward his wife.

“Zimmer,” Fritz ordered curtly. “Turn off. A backroad. Any of them.”

“But Herr Untersturmführer, it’s not on the map…”

“Turn off. We need to clear the filters and try to catch a signal. We won't make twenty kilometers before nightfall in this mess.”

The Kübelwagen veered, bounced over a ditch, and, crushing dry thistles, left the imperial highway. The thick, roaring noise of the refugees began to fade, muffled by yellow foliage, until it turned into the dull, distant hum of an ocean.

They stopped two kilometers later, by an old stone wall. The engine coughed and died. Silence fell — that deafening silence of September nineteen-thirty-nine, in which one could still hear an acorn fall, even though high-explosive bombs were already falling twenty miles away. The silence of a pause. The silence between an exhale and an inhale.

Bremme, the signals man, immediately hopped out of the car, carried the radio onto the hood as tenderly as an infant, and tossed a thin antenna wire over an oak branch. Zimmer opened the trunk, taking out tin cans of stewed meat and bread. Fritz stepped out of the car, stretching his stiff legs. He took out a cigarette. He wiped his hands with a handkerchief — carefully, finger by finger. A gesture from that world where, after every document, one had to wash one's hands.