Europe Central (95 page)

That week he found himself less often dreaming his way into that place of houses like white islands, which, if one gazes down on it from an airplane, like a reader soaring over an opened book, seems almost bluish-green, with occasional bright yellow rectangles of mustard fields, and cool rivers winding through the flatness, their richly grassy lips studded every now and then with trees. Where the fields shine most greenish, there too one of the rivers sometimes also goes green, but in one spot where the green has gone so rich as to rival blackness, the river retains its original lapis-grey character; and it’s there that the windowed tower of that narrow white house rises over the pear orchard to gaze across the levee. This house was empty now. But he wasn’t worried; he knew where she was. She was inside the white book. And as long as she dwelled there, she was with him. He was in ecstasy.

(He sent her a telegram to find out whether she had gotten to the lilypad chapter and she had; she’d understood everything; and even though she was busy she telephoned him right back so sweetly and spoke with him for nearly half an hour, after which he begged her to please give him her photograph and she gently replied: No.)

That book which he had entered, now she too was living within it. Now and forever it would be hers.

His love was graced by perfect control. He knew that he would never hurt her or the other man. He could live without asking anything. He loved her so much that he could freely give her up if she asked that of him. His love was far more perfect than he was. We might say that it partook of the same perfection as this white book, whose two-dimensional dancers (brought into being only to emphasize the wholeness of the protagonist) wore golden crowns which tapered into ribbed sequined stingers. Their wrists made slow swimming motions while the devotees knelt before the incense-swirls and the flower sticks. And now in the fifth chapter, the woman of the naked thighs, the one from the title page, emerged from an initial letter E and began to dominate the other characters, who were really no more than the glittering piecemeal reflections of faces on golden tiles.

She was reading the fifth chapter right now. He remembered it so well. He had read it one summer’s afternoon, in much the same way that he now gazed so deeply into her face, drinking and drinking of its inexhaustible brightness while she gazed gently back at him and he could not help but smile into her face because he was so happy and she smiled back, her slender fingers sliding up and down the coffee glass. The happiness of knowing that she was now in that particular room with the golden tiles where he had been and could be again whenever he chose, this happiness was so intense that he longed for death. All anguish was gone.

And now in the eighth chapter this protagonist, this woman of the book was accepting a fancy
pongmalai
from somebody; it consisted of two lavender ribbons, each wearing its own string of white buds and green buds and more white buds which then merged into the upturned bowl of an opened rose; then a white banana flower the size of an apple led the eye across the divide to the mirror image, the downturned rose, followed by two more strings of fragrant white jasmine buds each tasseled with banana petals. This was the crucial scene. She was reading it at that moment. And he experienced the ecstasy of knowing that she with her perfect intelligence now knew that the woman in the book was
she,
with every visual element, every typographical atom down to the very final letter
, perfectly representing and adoring her attributes. ‣

OPERATION HAGEN

“I gave her my oath that I’d not wrong her anymore,” returned King Gunther, “and I mean to keep it forevermore. When all’s said and done, she is my sister.” “Let me take the blame,” replied Hagen.

—Nibelungenlied, ca. 1200

1

We obliterated Warsaw block by block; why let the Slavs get it back? We prepared to dynamite Prague, but unfortunately it fell too quickly.

Hagen, more anciently called Hogni, had been opposed to attacking Russia in the first place. But he was too noble to hide his own guilt. I consider him as brave and forward-looking as Rommel. He said: Let me take the blame.

The sleepwalker liked that, I can assure you! And so Hagen got classified as indispensable to the war effort (I’ve held his identity card in my hand, counting up its various swastikas and eagles)—but in between crises he wasn’t even authorized to enter the outer checkpoint at Wolf’s Lair. That tells you how the High Command felt about him. A lesser man might have been offended, but Hagen never stopped being realistic. He said to me: I know what I’m here for, and I accept it. Now let’s go get drunk at the Golden Horseshoe. Himmler claims that the hostess is the last Negress left in Berlin . . .

He got drunk; I didn’t. I watched a single tear creep down his cheek.

In the first winter of Operation Barbarossa, with Moscow unvanquished and our soldiers freezing to death by the thousands, Hagen and I went to Kranzler’s for a beer. The place was almost empty, and there wasn’t any coffee, either. Hagen murmured to me that the twenty percent wartime surcharge on alcohol might soon be raised; of course he’d bear the blame for that.

The cigarette girl, who looked exhausted, sat slowly stitching up the upholstery of the most tattered chairs with packing twine. German string wasn’t strong enough nowadays, being nothing but braided paper; but packages still came from Switzerland; everybody scavenged those. The cigarette girl was bitter against the Jewish agents who’d caused this shocking turn in the war. Winking at me, Hagen said: It’s all my fault. I’m the King of the Jews.

She slapped his face.

Hagen laughed and turned the other cheek. A single tear began to swell upon the duct of his bloodshot eye.

On 12.12.42, when the sleepwalker was saying: We must under no circumstances give Stalingrad up. We should never get it back again!, Hagen kept quiet, but afterwards he remarked to me: Don’t think I can’t see the end. I
know
what’s coming.—He saw it, all right. But he never flinched. Isn’t that a virtue?

On 19.7.43, when we abandoned Operation Citadel as lost, the sleepwalker sent for Hagen by telephone. I was all the way at the other end of the Marble Gallery when he slammed down the telephone, but the crash was gunshot-loud, so I came running. Then I saw the expression on his face. He could have been an
-man machine-gunning a truckful of Russian infantry in revenge for the Ostfront’s fogs, encirclements, airplane attacks, partisans, suicide charges, winters, swamps. He caught me looking at him and screamed:
Dismissed!
I clicked my heels, saluted and marched away as far as the waiting room, where I’d still be within call in case he needed anything. Another crash! He was trying to slam the telephone down under the earth! But here came Hagen, immaculate, ironic, ready for anything. He should have been a general but he was only a colonel. He winked at me as I opened the door to announce him. Before I had shut it behind him, I could already hear shouting and breaking glass. When Hagen staggered out, he looked as if he’d donated too much blood at a frontline hospital. He sighed: I need some Pervitin to pick me up . . .

We went to watch a newsreel at the Ufa-Palast. The film was out of date; it was all victories. Most of the audience had only come for the feature: Lisca Malbran in “Young Heart.” You can imagine them: ancient ladies, legless men, and a few pallid factory workers—but I should also mention that solitary, radiant little boy in a Hitlerjugend uniform; he
Sieg Heil
’d every falling bomb.—My replacement, joked Hagen.

We promenaded on Wilhelmstrasse and counted broken windows; we strolled past the boarded-up shops on Potsdamer Strasse, at which point he laughed angrily:
We must under no circumstances give Stalingrad up.
I felt no need to ask him where it would all end.

By then I was sleeping with the cigarette girl at Kranzler’s. She didn’t even have enough ration points to buy a new girdle. After her apartment got bombed out, I made the mistake of asking Hagen for advice on where we should live. He said: There are pewter coffins in the crypt.

I wouldn’t want you to think that I was angry at him. When all’s said and done, he was the best friend I ever had. He never lied to me or put the blame on others.

My cigarette girl got called up to work at an armaments plant where every new bullet was still copper-roofed like the Berlin Cathedral, but the copper ran out, which was all Hagen’s fault. Then the British dropped one, ten minutes before the end of her shift. I didn’t even get a scrap of her dress to hold onto.

To distract me, Hagen took me to the Bayreuth Festival to see “Götterdämmerung.” In the final act, when Gunther sings:
Complain not to me, but to Hagen; he’s the cursed boar who slew this hero!
Hagen laughed aloud, then wept again. Because he was in uniform, they didn’t dare tell him to be quiet. I glanced up at the sleepwalker’s private box, but the curtain was drawn. Sometimes it’s better not to know.

2

Here comes Hagen through the Brandenburg Gate, at the head of a long file of anxious women and children. The battle of Berlin has just ended. They say that a hundred thousand civilians died. The survivors are coming back. A woman strides quickly into West Berlin, clutching her buttonless coat. Another woman, a darkhaired beauty, holds her child’s hand, her face blank and shocked. Hagen leaps up on a mound of rubble and shouts down at them: I did it! I lost Berlin!

They throw stones at him. But Hagen’s invulnerable, like Judas. He’s armored with steel-plated guilt.

I see Hagen at Nuremberg—naturally. How could he not be there? He’s a principal defendant! They might have let him off, since he was only a colonel, but he insists that he was really a general.

I’ll never forget the look on Justice Jackson’s face when Hagen rose, stared straight forward, and coolly explained: The function of Germans in Europe, and our duty itself, is to take the blame for everything. We commit crimes so that the rest of you can feel pure.

On 1.10.46 he was found guilty on all counts. General Nikitchenko added: The record is filled with his own admissions of complicity. There is nothing to be said in mitigation.

There he sat, in the very front row, with the worst of those war criminals, some of whom were in uniforms and others in suits; their heads slumped forward, as if the headphones weighed them down, and they closed their eyes, waiting for sentence to be passed upon them. It happened in alphabetical order. As each one’s turn neared, he opened his eyes, sat up straight, and braced himself, staring up at the judges. But when the court called upon Hagen to rise, his face became as bright as the lights of the Metropole on that night I’ll never forget when the
artistes
Margot and Heidi Hoffner danced nude together, and all of us who saw them felt that we’d been given a secret deep within the embrace of the wartime blackout.

Defendant Hagen, said the President, on the counts of the indictment on which you have been convicted, the International Military Tribunal sentences you to death by hanging.