Юрий Мельников – The Limbo Zone (страница 9)

The Kübelwagen drove past.

Fritz turned around. The house, the garden, the woman, the children — all of it remained behind, shrinking — and he looked, and thought: someday. Someday — a house like this. With green shutters. With apple trees. Helga in the garden. Klaus already grown, ten, twelve. Dieter running around. And maybe a third. Or a fourth. A house where everything is right. A house where one could, finally, stop counting, accounting, filing — and simply live.

Someday. After. After what?

The barracks turned out to be exactly what Fritz had imagined: brick, long, with a grass-grown parade ground. Barracks built for one empire, used by another, and now housing men who belonged to neither. Two platoons of SS men — the remnants of a guard unit transferred here from Kattowitz after the chaos began.

Bremme and Zimmer, gray with dust and exhaustion, went to the mess hall to sleep. Fritz headed for Ludwig Klein.

Hauptsturmführer Ludwig Klein, thirty-four years old. They had served together five years ago in the Totenkopfverbände, in Dachau, back when Dachau was still a model, a showcase camp exhibited to foreign journalists. Klein was one of those who genuinely believed that the camp was a school, that the prisoners were students, and that discipline was love. This belief had not weakened over the years; it had merely hardened, like clay in a kiln.

They sat in Klein’s room — small, institutional, with an iron cot and a portrait of the Führer on the wall. Someone had already managed to drape a black mourning ribbon over the portrait. Ludwig, aged, gutted, his tunic collar unbuttoned, was smoking, flicking ash into an empty tin can.

“Göring,” Klein said mundanely, pouring Fritz some barley coffee. “Göring has taken command. Locked himself in Berlin and is preparing the city for defense. Forming the Volkssturm. A militia — boys, old men. The Russians are breaking through. The French are across the Rhine. The British bomb every night.”

He said this the way one recites a train schedule: evenly, dispassionately.

“The British bomb every night. It’s all over, Fritz.”

Ludwig took a deep drag and looked at the brown leather portfolio resting against the chair leg.

“And what of your project? Your great Hygiene of the Reich? Are you still dragging it around with you?”

Fritz looked at the portfolio. The brass clasp. The embossed KL.

“It’s here. Documentation. Blueprints. If we halt the Soviets... if there is an armistice... the problem won't just disappear, after all.”

Klein shook his head — slowly, with that heavy, bovine movement that served as his sigh.

“Burn it,” he said, grinding his cigarette butt into the tin with sadistic pressure. “Everything in that folder, burn it tonight. The classifications, the serial numbers, the signatures. And be ready to take off that uniform, Fritz. Not tomorrow — now. Have civilian clothes on hand. Soon enough, we’ll be strung up on lampposts for these runes not just by the Poles, but by our own Bauern.”

Fritz was silent. The barley coffee was growing cold in the tin mug.

“Helga,” he said finally. “I called her. She wanted to leave for Stettin. Or stay in Berlin. I have to find her. I am going north.”

Klein looked at him. There was no pity in that gaze — only that cold, professional calculus they both possessed to perfection: probabilities, variants, outcomes.

“There has been no telephone connection with Berlin for a week. The British by day and the Russians by night are turning every railway junction into a lunar landscape. Trains no longer go north. Anything that moves on rails is a target. Your wife is unlikely to have gotten out.”

He didn't finish the thought. There was no need.

“If you go north — you walk straight into the meat grinder,” Klein continued. “Keep south. Stay away from the Autobahns and military columns. Travel as a refugee. It’s your only chance. Alone. Without the uniform. And without the portfolio.”

They finished the surrogate coffee. Klein stood up, went to the window, and looked out at the parade ground.

“You know,” he said without turning around, “sometimes I think: what if we were building all of this — for ourselves? The barracks, the wire, the watchtowers. What if it wasn't for them. What if it was for us. And we just didn't know.”

Fritz did not answer. There are things it is better not to understand. There are phrases it is better not to hear.

Fritz did not sleep that night. He lay on the cot, under an institutional blanket, and listened to the wind rushing through the poplars outside the window—a sound like the rushing of a sea he had never seen. The ceiling above him was gray, concrete, without cracks.

He thought of the white house. Of the green shutters. Of the woman in the blue dress and the three children. Of the life that — someday.

The portfolio stood by the cot. He had not burned it. He could not. Not because the folder held value — the folder was dead, as a map of a nonexistent country is dead. But to burn it meant acknowledging that the Architect was left without a building. That it had all been for nothing.

In the morning, early, murky, smelling of river fog, there was a knock at the door. Klein stood on the threshold. In his hand — an envelope.

“Here,” he said, tossing the envelope onto the nightstand. “Papers. A Kennkarte and a ration pass. In the name of Hans Weber, a sales representative from Bremen. Protestant. Did not serve. Forty-one years old. Height, eye color — yours.”

Fritz picked up the cheap, embossed paper.

“Who is he?”

“A merchant. A Communist or a sympathizer. Detained in early September on the road from Kattowitz during a sweep.”

“And where is he now?”

Klein paused. His gaze grew heavy, empty.

“This is no time for procedure, Fritz. He is somewhere he no longer needs documents. But you do. You can find clothes yourself, I imagine. Everything is on the roads right now. Abandoned suitcases, abandoned lives. Pick any one. We leave in an hour, blow the blocks, and retreat toward Czechia.”

He turned to the door and stopped.

“Fritz. Burn the portfolio.”

The door closed.

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