Юрий Мельников – The Limbo Zone (страница 6)

They sat in the main room, at a table that had probably once stood in the kitchen. Fritz would remember this room — or perhaps he wouldn't, or he would remember it incorrectly, the way things seen in a state where consciousness is already peeling away from reality like wallpaper from a damp wall are remembered. He would remember individual details, redundantly bright, as objects are bright in a fever:

The table — heavy, oak, scrubbed white, with deep gashes from a knife — a table at which people had eaten, and cut, and kneaded, and probably given birth — a table that had absorbed so many lives that it had become alive itself.

The plates — clay, coarse, with a thick brown glaze the color of last year’s honey. Four plates, though besides the host, only two guests sat at the table (Bremme had stayed in the car to man the radio).

The salo — sliced into thick, almost obscenely thick slabs, white with pink, pink with white. Salo in which the pink was not the color of meat, but the color of a sunset frozen in fat. And in the warmth of the room, it began to sweat slightly in small beads; it seemed a cross-section of human flesh, an anatomical specimen cast upon an oak block.

The bread — black, dense as peat, with a crust that crunched under the knife so loudly that Zimmer winced.

And the horilka.

The horilka stood in a bottle without a label, cloudy, yellowish, the color of that uncertain hour when it is not yet clear whether it is dawn or the reflection of a fire. Yarema poured it into four cups — clay, of the same brown firing as the plates. Four cups.

Fritz looked at the fourth one.

“Who?” he asked.

Yarema did not answer. He raised his cup, nodded — not to them, but somewhere toward the corner where a dark, soot-stained icon hung, the face of the Mother of God almost indistinguishable — and drank. They drank after him. The horilka struck the palate the way truth strikes: crudely, hotly, without warning. It smelled of scorched roots, raw earth, and wormwood.

They ate in silence.

The silence was thick, dense — the silence of people who have nothing to talk about because the things that need to be discussed cannot be spoken. Fritz ate the salo, and it melted on his tongue, its taste being exactly what the taste of the world should be — simple, fatty, real. And he couldn't remember the last time he had eaten something real. In Oranienburg? In the officers' mess, where schnitzel was served on schedule? But the schnitzel had been institutional, numbered, from a menu, while this salo belonged to no one, was no-man’s, salo that existed for itself, without a schedule, without accounting, without columns.

“We were waiting for you,” Yarema finally spoke, and his voice came from somewhere deep, from the place where horilka meets resentment. He spoke German slowly, picking his words like heavy stones. “We thought: the Germans will come — they will remove the Poles. There will be order. We waited a hundred years. Two hundred. The Austrians were here — nothing. The Poles were here — bad. We thought: the Germans come — it will be better.”

He fell silent. Poured another. Drank it without a chaser.

“And you — you gave us to the Russians. Traded us for something. And now you are fleeing yourselves.”

It was said without anger. With exhaustion. With that peasant exhaustion that accumulates over centuries and becomes not a feeling, but a landscape: hills, fields, patience. Yarema raised watery eyes to Fritz, examining his black uniform.

“The black uniform — it is the color of death, Pan Officer. But when death begins to run — it is funny. And terrifying. You cannot drive in this. It is a shroud. The Russians — they are near Lemberg. Perhaps already in Lemberg. The Poles — they have gone feral. They have weapons now. And your people are running. I have a radio. The last I heard: the Russians are moving on Warsaw. Your leader... the one with the mustache. He is dead. Then — noise. Only noise.”

Fritz did not answer. What could he say? That the Reich didn't “give” them away? That the pact was a strategic move? That the Wehrmacht would restore order? Words — all words — were now the same as the red lines on the map: scrap paper. And Yarema knew it, and Fritz knew it, and this knowledge lay between them on the oak table.

“Turn on the radio,” Fritz requested quietly.

Yarema stood up and went into the other room. He returned with a receiver — old, wooden, pre-war, one of those that look like small churches: a semicircular top, a cloth speaker grille, a tuning knob, a yellow scale with the names of cities that now belonged to other countries or belonged to no one.

He placed the receiver on the table, between the plates. Turned it on. The tubes inside lit up — with a warm, living, amber light, like the eyes of a predator in the dark. The receiver hummed, warming up, the way a throat warms up before singing.

Then came the static.

That very noise: crackling, rustling, whistling — the voice of the atmosphere, the voice of a space in which all stations had gone silent. Yarema turned the knob slowly — Warsaw, Kraków, Berlin, Vienna — and every city answered identically: with noise, with void, with absence.

Suddenly, through this hum, a man’s voice broke through. He spoke rapidly, rhythmically, distant, as if broadcasting from the bottom of a well. But the words did not form meaning. It was not German, nor Polish, nor Russian. It was a language turned inside out, consisting of sibilant and guttural sounds pronounced backward. A language come from somewhere beyond the scale.

Yarema turned the knob. The voice drifted away. In its place — noise again.

And then, a song began.

It didn't start from the receiver. It started from the silence — from that place where silence becomes so dense that sounds begin to emerge from it, the way faces emerge on an icon soot-stained by centuries of candles. A woman’s voice — deep, low, chesty. A voice that didn't sing, but rather — remembered singing, remembered a melody it had heard once long ago, in another life.

The voice sang a cappella. No instruments, no accompaniment, no nothing — only the voice and the void, the voice and the darkness outside the window.

Llorando...

The language was unfamiliar — Spanish, or Ladino, or a language invented by this voice for this single song. The words were not important. The voice sang grief. Pure, distilled, absolute grief, from which everything had been evaporated: names, dates, circumstances. All that remained was that which makes something inside you clench, something that has no name, because anatomy does not know the organ that aches from another’s singing.

The voice filled the room. It penetrated the clay bowls, the white, sweating salo, the wood of the table. It was an illusion — a sound recorded on a piece of tape, broadcast from nowhere to nowhere, no hay banda — but the sadness was absolutely real.

Three men sat at the table — two Germans and one Ukrainian — and listened to a woman singing on a radio that shouldn't have been working, on a frequency that shouldn't exist.

Fritz felt as though he were falling again. That the rope on his neck was tightening. This invisible woman was singing for him. Tears, treacherous, hot tears he had forgotten since childhood, welled up in his eyes.

The horilka stood on the table. No one poured, yet the cups were full, all four of them. And Fritz looked at the fourth cup, standing before the empty chair — and the cup was full, and the chair was empty, and the voice sang.

Yarema crossed himself. Slowly, broadly, in the Orthodox fashion — from right to left, the opposite way.

The song ended. The static returned. The receiver’s tubes flickered and went out, though no one had turned it off.

Yarema silently poured the horilka. They drank in silence. The horilka was the same, but the taste had changed: now it was bitter, with the aftertaste of the water that sits at the bottom of a well where light has never fallen.

“Sleep,” the old man said. “You leave in the morning.”

Fritz lay on a bench in the main room, covered by his greatcoat. The ceiling above him was whitewashed, low, with a crack stretching from wall to wall like a front line on a map. He followed this crack, and it doubled, diverged, and in the rift between the two lines, in the gap between wakefulness and sleep, there stood a scent.

The scent of apples. The scent of salo. The scent of smoke from the stove. The scent of smoke. He fell asleep.

He was woken by Zimmer. The dawn — murky, milky, indifferent — seeped through the small window.

“Herr Untersturmführer. It’s time. The host gave us some potatoes. And bread. And this,” Zimmer showed a bottle. “Horilka. For the road.”

Fritz sat up. His head was heavy, dull as a stone — the horilka or the dream, or what stood between the horilka and the dream. Some crack into which he had fallen during the night and from which he had not entirely emerged.

He went out into the yard. The morning was cold, dewy, with that crystalline sharpness that comes at the end of September when summer has already died but autumn has not yet decided what to be. The Kübelwagen stood behind the shed; Bremme was already sitting in the back seat.