Юрий Мельников – The Limbo Zone (страница 5)

He lit up. The smoke mingled with the scent of damp leaves.

And then, a dog appeared from the undergrowth.

It didn't run out — it appeared, the way things appear in this loosened world: without warning, without reason. A minute ago, an empty field. And now — her. A large mongrel, dirty white with tan patches, so thin that every rib could be read under the skin like a string.

She stood at the boundary of light and shadow. She didn't bark. She didn't growl.

But it wasn't her emaciation that was terrifying. It was her teats — swollen, dark, weighed down toward the earth. She was a nursing mother. A mother who had plenty of milk, but those who were supposed to drink it had vanished in the craters of this mad day.

She stood and looked at them. And in her brown, transparent eyes, there was neither hunger nor supplication. There was only one question, older than human speech: Where? Where are mine?

Zimmer froze with the open tin.

“Come here, mutt,” he called softly, breaking off a piece of fatty meat and tossing it into the grass. “Here…”

The dog didn't even twitch an ear. She didn't need meat. She was looking for what these men in gray and black uniforms had taken from the world by the very fact of their existence.

Fritz looked into the animal's yellow eyes. And in this wordless contact, something made his throat seize. Because he knew that look. He had seen it on the Appellplatz in Sachsenhausen when women were being led out of the barracks, those being transferred — where? To another barracks? To another facility? To another column? — and they would turn, and their eyes would dart along the line — and the question was the same, the same, always the same: Where? Where are mine?

But back then, that look had been mere material to Fritz. An incoming flow. But now, on this empty field, reality buckled, slid, and in the yellow canine eyes Fritz suddenly saw Helga. He saw his wife standing in a flooded Berlin basement. Helga, clutching a numbed Klaus to her, while from above, from an indifferent sky, a bomb falls with a howl, absolutely indifferent to whose flesh it tears.

A strike of alien, unbearable pain pierced him beneath the shoulder blade. A simple human weakness, from which he had so carefully cured himself over the years — with drill practice, regulations, columns of figures — something for which he knew no name and wanted to know none — poured into him like water into a ship’s hold.

“Get out!” Fritz shouted hoarsely.

He stepped forward, drawing the heavy Luger from his holster. The hand of the camp architect, always so steady, gave a small, unaccustomed tremor. He aimed the barrel at the animal, defending himself from her eyes, from her loss, from his own collapsed world.

“Get out, you beast!”

The dog wasn't frightened. She looked at the pistol, blinked slowly, and, turning just as noiselessly, dissolved into the autumn woods, taking her heavy, unrequited love with her.

Fritz stood there, breathing heavily, gripping the pistol.

And at that second, behind his back, the radio crackled loudly, strained.

“Herr Untersturmführer…” Bremme’s voice from beneath the headphones sounded dry, like breaking kindling. The signals man wasn't looking at the apparatus, but somewhere through the hood of the car. “On frequency forty-two point three. Clear text. No cipher.”

Fritz slowly lowered the Luger, without taking his finger off the trigger.

“Report.”

“Königsberg is transmitting. Rastenburg has fallen. Soviet paratroopers have captured the headquarters train.”

Bremme swallowed.

“The Führer is dead, Herr Lang. He shot himself.”

The forest around them stood yellow, silent, and absolutely indifferent. Fritz looked at the piece of fatty meat in the grass, at the copper wire slung over the oak branch, at his brown briefcase with the monogram. It was over. The world ruled into columns was dead.

He holstered the pistol.

“Roll up the antenna, Bremme. Zimmer, start it up. We’re moving.”

“Where to, Herr Untersturmführer?”

“North. To the sea.”

He had to keep moving. North. Toward Helga. Toward the two packed suitcases.

Chapter 3. The Farm

He was awakened by a touch — fingers on his shoulder, short, hard fingers smelling of gasoline and bread — and Fritz opened his eyes.

He opened his eyes — and saw himself.

He was hanging.

He hung in the aperture of the sky, within a frame composed of two blackened posts and a crossbeam — hanging, and his head was positioned incorrectly, tilted, like the head of a person listening to something very quiet, something rising from beneath the earth. But he wasn't listening; he couldn't listen, because his neck was broken, and from beneath the rope — coarse, hempen, the kind used to tie bales in the camp workshops — a tongue protruded. A blue, swollen, obscene tongue that would never again issue an order, a recommendation, or a single word.

And the face, his face, was his own: the same jawline, the same forehead, the same eyes. But the eyes were open and looking down at him, sitting in the car — looking not with reproach, or with pity, but with patience, with the infinite, mineral patience of a stone that knows that everything, sooner or later, must fall.

The hanged man swayed. The rope creaked. The creaking was measured, rhythmic, like a pendulum, like a metronome, like the clatter of train wheels going in one direction: creak-creak, creak-creak, in-out, debit-credit. And every creak was a word, and the word was one, and the word was his name — not the one written on the certificate, not “Weber,” no, but the other one, the real one, the one the rope knew.

Behind the hanged man’s back was not the sky. A fence. A brick fence, long and institutional, and near the fence — something he couldn't quite make out, and from this “something” came a scent — no, not that one yet, that one hadn't arrived — but the scent already stood in the air, the way a storm stands half an hour before the first lightning strike.

“Herr Untersturmführer.”

Fingers on the shoulder. Gasoline and bread.

“Herr Untersturmführer, wake up.”

Fritz blinked. He blinked again. He rubbed his eyes — with his knuckles, hard, painfully, pressing reality back into his sockets.

The hanged man was gone.

Before the car rose a gate. A wooden arch, darkened, lopsided, with two posts on either side. A sign had once hung from the crossbeam — on rusted chains, two chains — but the right chain had snapped, and the sign dangled by the left one alone. It was tilted the way a broken neck tilts. On the sign — letters, half-erased: “...sky khutir.” Just a sign. Just the wind. Just a chain.

Creak-creak. In-out.

“Herr Untersturmführer,” Zimmer stood by the open door. “There’s a farm here. The gates aren't locked. It’s getting dark. Shall we stay the night?”

Fritz looked at the sky. It was the color of cooling lead. The sun had left without saying goodbye — the way one leaves a room where something irreparable has happened. September twilight crawled in from the east — the direction from which everything was now crawling: tanks, paratroopers, fear.

“Very well,” Fritz said, wiping clammy sweat from his forehead. “Drive in.”

They entered the yard.

The farm was of the sort that stands in Galicia from century to century, outlasting empires the way a boulder outlasts glaciers: not by resisting, but simply by — remaining. A long, whitewashed house with a thatched roof blackened by rain. Outbuildings — a stable, a shed, a hayloft — arranged around the yard like figures on a chessboard where the meaning of the game has long been lost, but the pieces remain standing. A well with a shadoof. An apple tree — knotted, old, with the last apples hanging in the twilight air like small yellow planets in a cosmos from which the light has been pumped out.

The owner came out onto the porch. In his hand, he held a kerosene Dietz lantern.

Yarema — he gave only his name, without a surname, as people do when a surname is no longer needed or no longer safe — was tall, gaunt, with a face weathered by wind and horilka to the state of old leather. His eyes — pale, faded like fabric held too long in the sun — looked out from under bushy brows without surprise. Three Germans in a military vehicle had come to him, one in the black uniform of the SS — and he was not surprised. He had seen worse. He had seen Austrians, and Poles, and Petliurists, and Reds, and Whites — they all came, and they all left, but the farm — it stood. His wife was dead, his children had left for Lemberg, vanishing in the crucible there, and now he lived here alone with a mute farmhand whom the guests never saw — he had already gone to sleep in the hayloft.

“To stay the night,” Fritz said in German, reinforcing the words with gestures. “One night.”

Yarema nodded. He understood German — not fluently, not rapidly, but the way one understands a language in which people giving orders have spoken to you for centuries: selectively, by intonation, by the tonality of the threat.

“It is possible,” he replied, and his voice was like the creak of the well-sweep: low, rusty, unlubricated by conversation. “The car behind the shed. No need to show it.”