Юрий Мельников – The Limbo Zone (страница 7)

Fritz was walking toward the car, and then — out of the corner of his eye, on the periphery, where vision is not yet vision but only a hint — he saw movement.

Behind the barn, on the patch by the hayloft, a man with a pitchfork was tossing hay.

The farmhand.

The man worked steadily, habitually, the tines entering the hay and lifting it, and the hay flew. And the hay was wrong. It was too bright. Unnaturally, offensively bright — golden, radiant, acid-yellow, as if a small lamp of its own burned inside every straw. As if the hay were not hay, but yellow light that had taken the form of hay. And this light flew through the air, and the man with the pitchfork stood in this light, and Fritz could not look away. For a moment, it seemed to him that it was not straw on the pitchfork, but human hair.

The man was of medium height, sturdy, in a simple linen shirt. His face was not visible — he stood with his back turned — but something in his figure, in the set of his shoulders, in that pedantic, machine-like precision with which he drove the tines into the straw — was familiar. Not familiar — his own. As one’s reflection in a mirror is one’s own: you recognize it by that unique way your body occupies space.

The farmhand turned.

Fritz did not make out the face — the morning light was too murky — but it seemed to him, in that fraction of a second where only pure horror fits, that the farmhand had his face.

Fritz blinked. The delusion vanished. By the shed stood an ordinary old man in a dirty shirt, listlessly tossing ordinary, withered, gray autumn straw.

The light dimmed. The gold vanished. Just a man. Just a farmhand. Just hay.

“Herr Untersturmführer?” Zimmer called from behind the wheel. “Are we going?”

Fritz sat in the car. The door slammed shut. The engine coughed and started.

The Kübelwagen drove out of the yard, passed under the arch of the gate — the sign still dangled from its single chain, creaking softly in the morning air — and turned onto the backroad.

In the rearview mirror, the farm, the yard, the apple tree, and the figure of the man with the pitchfork standing in the gray fog — shrank, receded, until they finally vanished.

Until they became what everything left behind always becomes: a memory that does not yet know it is a verdict.

Chapter 4. Smoke

The field opened up suddenly — the way a wound opens when a bandage is removed: in one motion, without warning, without preparation.

The dirt road curved out from behind a grove, and the grove was gone, and in its place space emerged. Flat, brown, stretching to the horizon — and in this space, scattered with the generosity with which war scatters its gifts, lay things.

Fritz asked Zimmer to stop the car. They stood on the shoulder and looked.

Closest of all was a Kübelwagen, just like their own, only turned inside out by fire. The chassis — black, twisted, reared up as if the iron had tried to flee the heat at the last moment and frozen in that impulse, in that convulsion of escape. A little further — an Opel Blitz truck, overturned on its side, the steering wheel protruding from its cab, bare as the skeleton of a clock from which the mechanism has been removed. Even further — a tank. A light Pz.II, a machine for parades and intimidating peasants. It stood in the middle of the field, its turret blown off and lying three meters away, turned toward the sky with its muzzle like an overturned cup drained to the dregs.

But this was not the main thing. The main thing was the horses.

They lay everywhere — dozens, perhaps more — in the postures in which death had caught them: on their sides, on their backs, with legs outstretched, as if they continued to gallop in some subterranean space where they had been dragged down along with their riders. Some were perfectly intact — light bays, black-browns, dapple grays. Their coats still gleamed with morning dew, the wind ruffled their manes, and one might have thought they were merely sleeping, were it not for their bloated bellies. Huge, taut as drums — bellies in which death had already begun its work, its own bookkeeping, its accounting of debit and credit.

The locals—peasants, men and women in gray homespun clothes — were dragging the carcasses to two bonfires burning at the far edge of the field. Closer to them, by the forest, the long, fresh scar of a mass grave lay black — that was where they were pulling the Uhlans. Someone had thrust a birch cross, knocked together from two poles, into the foot of the grave, and on the crosspiece hung a cap — a four-cornered Polish rogatywka with a tarnished eagle. It hung there the way things hang on a coat rack in a hallway when the master has stepped out for a moment.

Fritz looked at the rogatywka. The eagle on it looked back at Fritz with the blind, stamped gaze of cheap metal.

Fritz thought: they charged tanks. On horseback. With sabers. They knew it was pointless. They knew a saber does not pierce armor, that a horse does not outrun a shell, that cavalry in nineteen thirty-nine is suicide — a beautiful, useless, absolutely aesthetic death.

But they charged.

There was something in this that Fritz did not understand and did not want to understand. Something that did not fit into any column, into any cell of his calibrated world. It was the opposite of accounting. The opposite of calculation. The opposite of everything he believed in. They charged the tanks because... what? Because they had to? Because of the motherland? Because of honor? Words that usually provoked a light, squeamish irony in Fritz—because in his world, “motherland” was a supply schedule, and “honor” was a paragraph in the regulations.

Here, in this field, next to the dead horses and the birch cross, these words suddenly acquired a terrifying density they had never possessed before. In this tableau of ruin lay its own flawless, mathematical completeness: hot flesh challenging cold, stamped metal—and the metal tearing that flesh apart, only to choke on it.

To kindle the fires, the peasants were using diesel fuel from the destroyed trucks and automobile tires. The fire roared, greedily devouring organics and rubber. A thick, oily smoke rose into the sky, and from it, large, greasy flakes of soot fell onto the road.

One such black feather drifted down onto the sleeve of Fritz Lang’s black tunic.

He stared at this smudge of soot, and suddenly the sound of crackling tires began to recede. The color black in his eyes lost its density. The oily flake of soot suddenly slowed its dance and began to lighten. Before Fritz’s eyes, the black soot transformed into blindingly white, weightless ash.

It fell quietly, solemnly, like the first December snow. This ash no longer smelled of diesel. It emanated a subtle, terrifyingly familiar, sweetish aroma — the smell of burnt sugar, almonds, and human hair. White flakes settled on his cap, on his shoulders, on the windshield of the Kübelwagen. Fritz held out his palm. A white snowflake touched his skin and melted, leaving no dirty trace, leaving only the sensation of absolute, surgical cleanliness.

Fritz blinked. The white snow vanished. The oily smudge was blackening his sleeve once more. He rubbed it with his finger — mechanically, the way one rubs a typo on a document that must be flawless — and the smudge smeared, but did not disappear.

“Bremme,” he said curtly, dusting off the fabric. “What’s on the frequencies?”

The signals man, sitting in the car, raised his head. His face, drawn after a night spent listening to the void, brightened slightly.

“There is something, Herr Untersturmführer. On our headquarters wave. Fragments, but they're ours. German speech. Wehrmacht format. They are somewhere nearby. Twenty or thirty kilometers to the west. Maybe closer.”

“We need to get to the highway, Herr Untersturmführer,” Zimmer said from behind the wheel. “Two jerrycans of petrol. That’s maybe a hundred kilometers. And Stettin is as far as the moon.”

Fritz looked at the field one last time. At the smoke, at the fires, at the cavalry cap.

“We drive. We'll find our people.”

They found them an hour later.

The column was parked on the shoulder of the highway. More precisely — not parked, but lying there, the way a wounded animal lies when it is not yet dead but has already ceased to resist. Peasant, requisitioned wagons with white crosses drawn in chalk on the sides. Harnessed to them were horses so exhausted they did not lift their heads. Soldiers sat on the carts, and these soldiers were — different.

Fritz had seen the retreating men yesterday: those were a mob, a herd, a mass that had lost its form. These men — had retained their form. Not in the sense of order and formation, but in the sense that a fragment broken from a statue retains its form: it is no longer a statue, but the line of the fracture reveals what it used to be a part of.

An Oberleutnant — Fritz didn't catch his surname, or caught it and then lost it — was sitting on the running board of a medical Opel. He was smoking and looking at the sky with the expression of a man staring at the ceiling in a dentist’s waiting room: without hope, without fear, with a dull expectation of pain.