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Yuri Melnikov The Limbo Zone
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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.
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.
«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.
