Europe Central (97 page)

In the courtroom, our guards were replaced every two hours. The telephone screamed like an eagle. Then they sentenced us in batches. But once in the transit prison a Russian woman brought us a pail of hot milk.

After that came the camp, of course, which at first was nothing more than a ring of barbed wire enclosing barren ground; some of us, still bound, gazed exhaustedly down at the dirt; others gaped up at the sky; and still they packed more and more of us in until we were so crowded that we couldn’t do anything more than stand; we’d been turned into one of Käthe Kollwitz’s etchings of the Kaiser’s prisoners! One of us whispered: My wife was a national swimming champion . . .—As for me, I never mentioned my family, who for all I know are still living in their underground cave in Köln.

A shot of adrenaline into the chest can sometimes resurrect a stopped heart. Unfortunately, the camp doctor had no adrenaline. Each corpse turned olive-green like an American troop carrier.

Those of us whose eagles hadn’t yet been stripped from our breast-pockets were already laying plans for Operation Volund. One very cold night, one of us began to sing in a stunning tenor:
Wälse! Wälse! Where’s your sword, the strong sword I’ll swing against fate? Will it break out from my breast, where my angry heart hides it?

4

And so we denazified them, making possible the following triumphant entry in our
Great Soviet Encyclopedia:

Germany
—A state in Europe (capital, Berlin) which existed up to the end of World War II (1933-45).

Germany was gone forever. The two lapdog states which remained could be tricked into fighting each other eternally, just as we and Germany used to do. As for the old Germany, she reminded us of the bygone days when Moscow was nothing but churches, river-curves and droshkys . . .

Then we returned to our own concerns. We constructed an arc vacuum furnace to smelt titanium ingots. ‣

AIRLIFT IDYLLS

For three whole days, during which time did not exist for him, he struggled in that black sack into which he was being forced by an unseen, invincible power.

—Tolstoy (1886)

1

It’s nearly impossible to convince my grandchildren that at the beginning the Iron Curtain was just that—although now that I think of it, the material might not have been iron at all. If you’ve ever inspected one of those pouches of lead foil which protects film from X-rays at airport security checkpoints, you can well imagine the abnormal heaviness, not to mention limp pendulousness (as opposed to flexibility) of that Iron Curtain: grasp a fresh corpse by the knee and raise it; the calf will swing inwards, compelling the foot to describe the same unfailing arc as a grandfather clock’s weighted pendulum; but it’s a one-way affair; heel strikes buttock or thigh, and that’s the end. When we stood our turn in the exit queue of the border station, I sometimes used to bend down and raise the hem of the Iron Curtain, just to peek out at the capitalist side where I was going; nobody was very strict in those days, and obviously I wasn’t trying to “escape.” Anyhow, the “iron” or whatever it was must have been fifteen centimeters thick; I could only lift it up to ankle height before its weight and the white light blazing in overwhelmed me, so I’d let go, and it would sink silently back into place, momentum so perfectly dampened by deadness that there could never have been the tiniest after-swing. According to an American lecturer, the Eighth String Quartet of Shostakovich (Opus 110) is supposed to represent the Curtain’s darkness, but (speaking only for myself), I’d have to say that my sensation on the Communist side was something quite different from melancholy; everything
was
dark, that’s true, but it was the darkness of a circus tent, where anything could happen. I’ll tell you just how it felt. Drawing the heavy passport from my pocket, already anticipating the treat of winning a new stamp (at that time the visa pictography of Europe Central changed almost monthly, in part as a result of the political situation—any symbol might get infected with enemy connotations—but mainly for security reasons: black marketeers duplicated those stamps easily, so the only recourse of nascent people’s power was to change the red star to a blue sickle, or enclose it in a square rectangle), first I’d hear breathing all around me; next, a hand would take my passport; after a long while I’d hear the angry thud of the stamp, and that pallid, hairy hand returned to view, spewing the document back into my possession. I stepped forward. In a sudden dazzle of flashbulbs, secret policemen would photograph me from the side, after which I’d pass beween two soldiers whose fixed bayonets tickled my ears; finally I’d round the last bend where two flaps of the Curtain (try to visualize a woman’s slit skirt) had been pulled apart and secured by ceiling-chains to admit a very narrow triangle of breathtakingly beautiful light through which each of us had to struggle, usually not without griming our shoulders with graphite, lead or whatever was actually the substance of the Iron Curtain; now I was free; but what I’ll never be able to explain is that at that exact instant my head invariably became heavy; I tasted metal and my lips swelled; a drunken nausea robbed me of my balance; and when I stood up again I thought I’d faint. It happened to all of us. Perhaps some mind-altering chemical had been released by one side against or in collusion with the other. We lurched to the West German checkpoint (Bornholmer Strasse), and the sun scorched our pale skins. If somebody had poured sand inside my head I couldn’t have felt any stranger. We’d forgotten everything! It was the taste of sleep that we were all licking off our lips. Here again stood the policeman with the long handlebar moustache; he greeted me by name now, and stamped my passport with extra crispness, because he liked me; the eagle of capitalist Germany was his alter ego. I’d never lost sight of him; the sunlight was harshly perfect on his metal buttons; but what had those two sentries on the other side looked like? Maybe their bayonets had annoyed me sufficiently to distract me from their faces. Behind them there’d been the border guard who’d stamped my passport, this time with the representation of a sledgehammer standing on end and bearing three sharp-pointed stars within its head; the East German official, counterpart to this moustached gentleman of Bornholmer Strasse, had scrutinized me most searchingly from his booth; it was incorrect that I’d glimpsed his hand; I now recollected an angled spotlight just below that window-slit through which documents were given and received; this glaring luminescence, which I’d somehow mistakenly associated with the flashbulbs of secret police, had struck me full in the chin, in order for the border guard behind his wall of dark glass to better compare me to my photograph; actually the glass couldn’t have been dark, because I remembered a pale, blurry sort of face, perhaps with more than two eyes; there might have also been an eye in the brim of his cap, because . . . But prior to him there was nothing. I might as well have never visited the world behind the Iron Curtain!

In the onion fields of Europe, translucent-lipped wombs grow concentrically within wombs; and within
them
grows what? I could definitely remember lifting up the Iron Curtain from within, just to see the brightness; I longed to ask the policeman with the handlebar moustache whether he’d allow me to do the same from this side, but then his expression would have altered; he’d realize that his friendly trust should never have touched me; it would be awkward between the two of us forever, because West Germans, who are the only Germans left, follow the rules. What should I do? For I so much wanted to see! Berlin, which in medieval times had resembled a heart carved out of a human carcass, subdivided into seventeen lobes—Wedding, Moabit, Königsviertel and all the rest (no matter that they were each as cramped as a Messerschmitt-109)—Berlin was now a quartered heart, its chambers sealed off from one another by walls of sandbags; and now this Iron Curtain was already in the dreams of Stalinists getting elaborated into the raked sand of slaughter chutes within the complex of the Berlin Wall. (I brought that about; you’ll see.) German blood must clot henceforth; it could no longer flow free. In the French sector they sing a little song about something that happens, some pretty little thing, I forget what, my French was never all that perfect anyway, when a blonde dancer from Stalingrad shows leg in the Soviet sector; I think maybe there comes a flash of sunlight in the Communist darkness or something like that. The real issue is: How can the conscious mind know what the unconscious is up to? Chancellor Adenauer in one of his speeches proclaimed that in this scientific (meaning nuclear) age, the metaphor of a heart has become outmoded; it’s better to consider Berlin as a brain; and in his, Adenauer’s view, what’s behind the Iron Curtain is the reptilian brain, the primordial, amoral system of involuntary control which, located at the very base of the skull, can and must be dispatched by NATO in a surgical, missile-based
Nackenschuss
; only thus may Germany, which is Europe and therefore all of us,
³⁹
become whole again. (This is also what the Führer used to say.)

2

Unconsciousness can never examine consciousness; but the reverse is possible, for consciousness is
reliable,
like a Ju-52 transport plane. On a sunset as purple as the identity card of an NKVD agent, I passed behind the Iron Curtain once more, and this time I meant to maintain a death-grip upon my impressions. Oh, the mysterious East! I was there for a good long while, I couldn’t tell you how long exactly, but I do remember snow and darkness; I think I experienced a symphony which stunned and chained me with chords of steel, although it’s possible that I heard not the orchestral elaboration but the core of it, in which case it would have been performed by a bespectacled genius who played by memory for me on a grand piano which was for sale, payment to be made in bread; I remember kissing somebody named Elena, but I’m not certain anymore whether she was named Elena Konstantinovskaya, Elena Kruglikova, or possibly Elena Rosetti-Solescu, with whom I seem to associate the nickname Coca. I’m fairly sure that the pavements were shimmering and shining with ice; I believe that I might have seen children peeping at me from within their fur-ruffed hoods; but I have a West German friend (codenamed HIRSCH) who subscribes to
National Geographic,
and he once showed me a pictorial about Canada, where there are people called Eskimos, in whose existence I disbelieve because they live in conditions which the phenomenon of our Iron Curtain can’t explicate: daylight for six months, darkness otherwise; but should there in fact be Eskimos, then the fur-hooded children in HIRSCH’s article may be germane; although it’s equally plausible that the children I met were Kazakhs; I could have easily gone that far east; I was in a land as deep and broad as the devil’s antitank trench; I heard the ticking of a metronome.

Well, was she Elena Konstantinovskaya or Elena Kruglikova? And what was she to me? I’ve retained an ice-clear memory of the tight black fur caps which seem to match Kazakh women’s hair, so I must have been in Kazakhstan. I can also recollect blonde Russian girls whose blonde fur shoulders—yes, they must have been wearing fox or maybe white sable, so was I at the opera?—resembled sunlight on the snow. But the rest was dark; that I’d swear to.—What category of darkness, did you ask? Dirt-black like a soldier’s hands, iron-black like the Curtain itself—with a taste of blue and grey, as is customary in metals.

That’s the sum of all intelligence I managed to gather, which really wasn’t bad for a first trip. So I decided to cross back into West Berlin. I yearned to see how successfully I prevent these recollections from effervescing away; and I might have had any number of additional objectives, too, but I can’t remember them. When I got up to the Iron Curtain itself, where darkness is particularly dark, the border guard kept his light upon me for a such a long time that I began to wonder whether he had always done this; and then he said: Why are your eyes so shifty today?

Shocked and frightened, trying to formulate an answer, I fidgeted, and then I could actually see him lean forward behind the dark glass, much as if I were looking into the dark water of the Kryukov Canal and then glimpsed the darker darkness of some fish or monster swimming up toward me; yes, he leaned forward and he crooned:
What are you, actually?

3

I feared that official; so next time I determined to dig my illegal way; in this rubbled earth we all dig like gravediggers, mindful that some fleeing
-man might have stopped here to bury a golden coronation sword, or maybe even a suitcase filled with gold and silver spoons from a castle in Krakow; we all hide things when we see death coming, and it may well be that by thus interring our treasures, we prepare our minds for our own entombment. Pharaoh must have been comforted to know that his scepter and his women would sleep forever with him. All the while, to be sure, one longs to believe that it’s possible to awake from that sleep, crawl back under the Curtain and reclaim one’s property, which remains (another hope!) safely cached away from the expropriations of Commissar Death—aren’t human beings absurd?