Yuri Melnikov The Limbo Zone

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.

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.»

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