Yuri Melnikov The Limbo Zone

Chapter 2. Dust

The road north from Lemberg begins with the fact that there is no road.

That is to say, it exists on the map: a thin red line, drawn by an imperial cartographer with the same meticulousness with which Fritz Lang traced the columns in his ledgers — a line connecting dot to dot, Lemberg to Lublin, Lublin to Warsaw, Warsaw to Danzig, Danzig to Stettin — on and on, along the red arteries of a Reich that only yesterday stretched from the Rhine to the Bug, but today was contracting like a fist from which water is leaking. The red lines on the map were becoming what they had always been: ink on paper.

On paper, a road. On the ground, a quagmire.

The Kübelwagen crawled along the highway like a beetle across a sodden page of newsprint. At the wheel sat Kurt Zimmer, a corporal from the Oranienburg motor pool, assigned to Fritz for the assignment along with the car — small, wiry, with a face carved from a root. He was one of those drivers who lead a car not with their hands, but with their spine, feeling every pothole as a personal insult. He was silent. He was silent because everything that could be said was being said by the road.

The road spoke of — retreat.

Passing them — heading toward Lemberg, from where they had just fled — was that which three weeks ago had been called the Wehrmacht: trucks with dropped tailboards where soldiers with faces the color of road mud jolted; motorcycles loaded so heavily their sidecars scraped the stones; horse-drawn wagons — horse-drawn wagons! — in an army that prided itself on tanks; and the infantry, gray-green, endless, marching out of step, without formation, without song — a mass that had lost the only thing distinguishing an army from a mob: direction.

«Where are you headed?» Fritz shouted, leaning out of the car as the Kübelwagen stalled once again in a bottleneck.

A lieutenant — young, with an ashen face and eyes where the spark textbooks call «fighting spirit» had already gone out — was walking beside his men, on foot. He had likely abandoned his vehicle, or lost it, or it simply no longer existed.

«To Lemberg,» the lieutenant said. «Orders are to hold Lemberg.»

«Whose orders?»

The lieutenant looked at Fritz — at the black uniform, the runes on the tabs, the Totenkopf on the cap — and in that gaze was the expression with which field officers looked at the SS: the way one looks at a rat that has found the cheese.

«Orders,» he repeated and walked on.

Whose orders — he didn’t know. No one knew. Orders were born of the void — of rumors, of fragments of the last radiograms, of words spoken by someone to someone else an hour or a day ago. Every order contradicted the next, and together they contradicted reality, while reality contradicted itself.

And along the shoulders flowed something else.

On the right, pushing carts piled with featherbeds and pots, were those fleeing the Germans to the east. On the left, wrapped in shawls, trudged those now fleeing the Russians to the west. Counter-flows of panic, rubbing against one another.

Jews and Gypsies walked in the same dust as Poles, shoulder to shoulder, and this was wrong — not because they walked, but because they walked together. In that calligraphically perfect world Fritz had built, these streams could never intersect. But the ruled world was over. There remained only the unruled world, where everyone saved themselves along the same ditch.

«In October, everything was different, Herr Untersturmführer,» Zimmer said suddenly, his eyes never leaving the grimy windshield. «Almost a year ago…»

He jerked the wheel, swerving around a dead horse with a belly bloated like a drum.

«When we entered the Sudetenland, there was no dust. In Carlsbad, they stood along the roads. Girls threw asters onto our armor. The autumn was warm, and those flowers… they smelled of perfume, of wet asphalt, of a holiday. We drove through Europe like gods, Herr Lang. A girl threw one to me — a white one — right into the cab. I dried it. I wanted to bring it home to my wife.»

He fell silent.

«Did you?» Bremme asked from the back.

«Lost it. Somewhere between Prague and Breslau. It fell out of my pocket. Or I threw it away. I don’t remember.»

Zimmer spat out the cracked window.

«And now we’re driving through a cesspool. And no one knows which way to climb out.»

Fritz remained silent. The driver’s words bounced off him without causing harm, because inside Fritz, a different mechanics was at work. On his knees lay a brown leather briefcase with the monogram KL. And within this forest-like, primal panic, the briefcase remained the last island of supreme, crystalline reason. Inside was a folder marked «Geheime Reichssache.»

His assignment to Lemberg, to this melting pot of nationalities, had not been an inspection. Oranienburg was facing a crisis that Fritz, as a good manager, was supposed to resolve. Arrests of «asocial elements» were on schedule, but the system was failing at the output: the elderly, the sick, the exhausted could not work. They took up space. They consumed rutabaga gruel. They were a loss without a profit, a line in the budget that didn’t balance.

Shooting them was not cost-effective. A bullet is brass, it is gunpowder, it is logistics and the human factor. The economics of death demanded elegance.

That was precisely why Berlin had sent him to the East. Here, in Galicia, where the local population was gleefully ready to take on part of the dirty work, where antisemitism was absorbed with mother’s milk, Fritz Lang sought a new solution. He held meetings. He drew diagrams. What to do with those who cannot work?

He had been one step away from a clean, almost mathematical revelation. He could already see the outlines of large, bright rooms with showerheads in the ceiling, where the problem would be solved hygienically and without the expenditure of non-ferrous metals.

But Russian paratroopers and French tanks had turned his blueprints of the future into scrap paper. His perfect Reich, where he would be the Architect of Purity, had collapsed, leaving him in the dust, fleeing north toward his wife.

«Zimmer,» Fritz ordered curtly. «Turn off. A backroad. Any of them.»

«But Herr Untersturmführer, it’s not on the map…»

«Turn off. We need to clear the filters and try to catch a signal. We won’t make twenty kilometers before nightfall in this mess.»

The Kübelwagen veered, bounced over a ditch, and, crushing dry thistles, left the imperial highway. The thick, roaring noise of the refugees began to fade, muffled by yellow foliage, until it turned into the dull, distant hum of an ocean.

They stopped two kilometers later, by an old stone wall. The engine coughed and died. Silence fell — that deafening silence of September nineteen-thirty-nine, in which one could still hear an acorn fall, even though high-explosive bombs were already falling twenty miles away. The silence of a pause. The silence between an exhale and an inhale.

Bremme, the signals man, immediately hopped out of the car, carried the radio onto the hood as tenderly as an infant, and tossed a thin antenna wire over an oak branch. Zimmer opened the trunk, taking out tin cans of stewed meat and bread. Fritz stepped out of the car, stretching his stiff legs. He took out a cigarette. He wiped his hands with a handkerchief — carefully, finger by finger. A gesture from that world where, after every document, one had to wash one’s hands.

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.»

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.