Юрий Мельников – The Limbo Zone (страница 8)

“Russians,” he said hollowly when Fritz introduced himself. “Near Zamość. A company of fast tanks and infantry. We lost all our equipment. All the armored cars.” He smirked, and the smirk was a crack in dry clay. “But we have petrol to drown in. Dead tanks don't need fuel.”

He nodded toward a canvas-topped truck. Fritz saw the jerrycans. Even, green, stacked. Jerrycans that were supposed to feed iron tracks, and now fed only the void.

“Take as much as you need,” the Oberleutnant said. “You can't fuel horses with petrol.”

Zimmer was already dragging jerrycans to the Kübelwagen — quickly, greedily, with that hungry agility with which drivers handle fuel when it turns into treasure.

“Where are you headed?” Fritz asked.

“West. Home,” the officer took a drag. “And you?”

“North. To Stettin.”

The Oberleutnant looked at him—long and hard, the way one looks at a man who has said something irreparably stupid.

“You can't go north, Lang. The Red Army is in East Prussia. Tank wedges. A paradrop near Danzig. Rastenburg — did you hear?”

“We heard.”

“Then you know. All of Prussia is a cauldron. You can't get through Warsaw. You’re a dead man if you head north. There’s nothing there now but the Russians and the Baltic Sea.”

He finished his cigarette. Flicked the butt. Crushed it underfoot — meticulously, as if it were the last cigarette butt on earth and had to be destroyed down to the final thread of tobacco.

“And another thing, Untersturmführer,” he lowered his voice, though there was no one around but the wounded sleeping on the straw. “Take off your uniform. The Poles are on the roads. Yesterday they shot up a field gendarmerie patrol near Tarnów. All of them. And hung them — upside down. On lampposts. If they see those runes,” he nodded at Fritz’s collar tabs. “They won't ask for papers. They’ll just string you up.”

Fritz nodded. He said nothing.

The jerrycans were loaded. Zimmer started the engine. The Kübelwagen pulled out and drove west along the highway, past the column, past the wagons, past the horses with lowered heads. Fritz looked at the wounded, at their browned bandages, at the hands dangling from the sides of the carts. And every hand swayed in time with the movement, and the swaying was measured, rhythmic, like a pendulum. Creak-creak. In-out.

They had driven about two kilometers from the column. The highway was empty. The sky was empty.

And then came the sound.

At first, distant, on the edge of hearing. A hum, like the hum of a swarm of bees, like the hum of high-voltage wires, like the thrum of blood in the ears when the heart beats too fast. The hum grew. Approached. It filled the entire sky, from horizon to horizon. Fritz turned around and saw them.

Planes.

They were flying low, in formations of three. Blunt-nosed, twin-engine, with red stars on their wings. Flying evenly, confidently, with that mechanical inevitability of a conveyor belt that knows no doubts. And they were not heading for the Kübelwagen, nor for the empty highway — they were making a run on that very column of wagons with crosses that Fritz had just left behind.

“Brake!” Zimmer barked. “Off the road!”

He wrenched the steering wheel with a crunch, and the Kübelwagen flew off the asphalt, plowed through the ditch, bounded over the embankment, and crashed into a strip of woods. Branches whipped against the windshield. The engine stalled.

Silence fell. And then — not silence.

Then came the roar. Heavy, visceral, felt not with the ears but with the diaphragm, the stomach, the place where fear lives. The roar of bombs tearing the earth, tearing the wagons, tearing the horses — those very horses that had just been standing on the shoulder with lowered heads. Fritz, pressed to the ground, face in the grass, face in the black soil, heard everything: the muffled thuds, the screams, and the neighing. The neighing of horses that was not a neighing but a shriek, and this shriek was human, though it did not come from humans.

Silence fell again. Ringing.

Fritz lifted his head. Bremme lay nearby, hugging the radio the way a child hugs a pillow during a thunderstorm. Zimmer sat in the car, clutching the steering wheel with whitened fingers.

There, behind them, where fifteen minutes ago the column had stood, smoke was rising. Black. With black flakes. The same smoke as on the field with the cavalry, but now another smell was mixed into it — a smell from which Fritz turned away. That very petrol the Oberleutnant had offered them to take had become his funeral pyre.

Fritz did not look. There was no pity in him. There was only a cold, detached understanding: the machine of which he was a part was being destroyed by a more perfect machine.

“Those are Katiuskas,” Bremme said. His voice was flat, dead, the voice of a man who speaks only to keep from screaming.

“What?” Zimmer never took his eyes off the smoke.

“Katiuskas. That’s what our pilots in Spain called them. The SB frontline bomber. Tupolev. They’re faster than our fighters. You can't outrun them. A Russian woman’s name.”

“A woman’s name,” Zimmer repeated, and in his voice was that emptiness where words cease to mean anything.

Fritz Lang was silent.

He looked at the black, greasy smoke rising over the highway. And in his mind, another smoke arose once more. White, even, methodical. The two smokes, black and white, mingled, and the line between them grew razor-thin. The ash needed a hearth. It needed a place where Fritz could become what he was destined to become.

He was silent for a long time. A minute. Two. Then he adjusted the collar of his tunic.

“Start the car, Zimmer.”

“Where are we going, Herr Lang?”

“To Upper Silesia. Past Kraków.”

His fingers had stopped trembling.

“To Oświęcim,” Fritz added. “There are old Austrian barracks there. A railway junction. They won't reach there. Our people are there.”

He pronounced the name the way one pronounces the name of the only saint still capable of hearing a prayer.

The Kübelwagen crawled out of the tree line, pulled onto the highway, and turned west.

Behind them — smoke. Ahead — the road. And the road led to Auschwitz.

Chapter 5. The Blue Dress

Oświęcim revealed itself to them after midday — quietly, without warning, like a page in a book you are not yet ready for.

A small town in Upper Silesia, on the Soła River, near its confluence with the Vistula. Tiled roofs, a church spire, wisps of smoke from chimneys, plane trees along the embankment. A town like dozens of others in Silesia: German and Polish simultaneously, belonging to everyone and no one. A town that could have been a postcard, a backdrop for a Christmas tale, could have been — anything.

The September sun — late, low, almost horizontal — lay on the roofs like a honeyed varnish. It was warm. Wrongly, impossibly warm for the end of September. It happens this way on the last day before the frost, when nature, knowing the glacier arrives tomorrow, surrenders all its withheld heat at once, generously, prodigally, the way a man gives away money he will no longer need.

The Kübelwagen rolled along the road leading to the outskirts. The barracks — old, Austrian, made of red brick, built back in the time of Franz Joseph for a cavalry regiment — stood isolated, across the river. But before the barracks, there was still a block, another turn, and then...

The house.

It stood on the right side of the road, behind a low, neat picket fence of pale wood. A white house — small, two-story, with green shutters and a tiled roof of a warm, terracotta hue. In front of the house was a garden. Tended with the meticulousness that reveals not a hired gardener, but the hand of the mistress herself: the flowerbeds weeded, the rose bushes pruned, the paths strewn with fine gravel, and this gravel was clean, bright, as if washed by hand. Laundry dried on a line between two apple trees — starched, billowing in the light wind like small flags of a surrender no one had agreed to.

Fritz looked at this house, and something inside him — not in his head, but lower down, in that place where nameless things reside —shifted, the way a compass needle shifts when a magnet is brought near.

There was a woman in the garden.

She sat on a bench by the flowerbed, and children fussed around her: two boys and a girl of about five. Their voices drifted through the open window of the car—thin, bright, like glass bells. The voices of children playing in a garden on the last warm day of September. The woman wore a simple, austere dress.

Blue — the color of fidelity, as one of tailor Goldstein’s clients used to say. No, the tailor did not exist yet, Goldstein did not exist yet, Hanover had not yet arrived. The dress was blue, with a white collar, and it fit her the way dresses fit women who know their body is not an object, but a — home. It fit lightly, freely. The white collar lay against tanned collarbones, the wind gently lifted the hem. The woman laughed, and her laugh was — or so it seemed to Fritz — Helga’s laugh.

The woman caught the little girl, lifted her into her arms, pressed her close, and in this movement, in this sun-drenched scene, in the soaring childish laughter, there was contained such an unbearable, piercing, fragile beauty that Fritz forgot to breathe.