Europe Central (133 page)

Right before the sleepwalker married Eva Braun and blew his brains out, he wrote his political testament, a copy of which my paraplegic friend Fritzi somehow got hold of last year. Good thing Fritzi was already denazified! Now, this document makes several statements which I can’t entirely support; for example, in my opinion the man was too hard on the Jews, not that they don’t need a firm hand. But what did impress me was that he’d made up his mind about everything—
everything
!—back when he was nothing but a hungry tramp in Vienna; in that testament, he insisted that he hadn’t altered his conclusions about a single matter in the decades since then. Then he looked around him and said (so I imagine): What are we Germans going to be now? A rabble of syphilitic raped girls and legless men!—So he pulled the trigger. That takes guts. Paulus didn’t have the courage to do it at Stalingrad. I would have done it in an eyeblink, if that would have made any difference for Germany. Now,
that’s
triumph of the will! So I do still respect him in a way, not least for the fact that he knew what he knew, whether it was true or not. (If only if he’d allowed Guderian’s mobile formations to do what Germans do best, instead of adopting that static defense which is more suitable to Slavs!) So why not pass the time deciding what you believed, then arguing for it, being true to it?

Even in those prison days, something in me was getting ready to feel a certain way, like a field-gun zeroing in on the target; I wanted to become something once and for all; strange to say, Vorkuta came back to me as I sat so comfortably at home, reading von Manstein; and they weren’t wasted years anymore; they were leading up to something. I wanted to clarify existence, if only for myself, to draw secret and perfect distinctions until my comprehension was a narrow spearhead. (Here’s a distinction for you, free of charge: Russians opt for a massive artillery barrage before an attack, while we Germans prefer to trust in our own blood.) It was happening line by line; and I still had hundreds of glorious pages before me, like the Russian steppes in summer ’42, stretching on perfectly golden and infinite like all our victories, our lost victories I should say; and as I read I kept notes on the progress of our assault divisions.

3

Don’t think I haven’t seen it all: the national enthusiasm, the pride, the successes thrown away contrary to the will of Nature, the way our bigshots in their long grey coats used to lean backward and smile like sharks when some Polish dignitary or other would scuttle up to shake hands! In those days the sleepwalker could still dream of cracking Leningrad like a nut, making the Neva run backward, riding on the shoulders of the Bronze Horseman; while I for my part had all my teeth; my dreams swept east like silhouettes of German infantry marching up dusty summer roads. (For laughs we used to tune into Radio Leningrad, because all they broadcast was the ticking of a metronome.) Well, summer’s long gone. But I don’t care about that, for I’ve come to recognize something within my soul as titanic as the Big Dora gun which helped us reduce Sevastopol—yes, by now you’ll have guessed; I served under
him;
I’m a veteran of von Manstein’s Eleventh Army! And I hold the Iron Cross, First Class—no matter that the Americans have decreed that I can’t wear it. So I read on and on,
knowing
that I did somehow have a thousand more years ahead of me; and the lindens were shimmering outside the window and German workmen were rebuilding everything. We live not far away from the Landwehrkanal, which was our primary defensive line during the battle of Berlin (it’s also where that Jewish bitch Rosa Luxemburg got hers back in 1919). This is where our thirteen-year-old German boys came out in their black school uniforms to die in the struggle against Bolshevism. So much history all around me! And that day I really felt as if I were a part of it, I can tell you, sitting in my armchair finishing
Lost Victories.
Then I got to the part where von Manstein says that Hitler wasn’t bold enough to stake everything on success; and that thing that I’d been getting ready for so long to feel, I felt it now. And it was this:
If only von Manstein had been our Führer
. . . ‣

THE WHITE NIGHTS OF LENINGRAD

1

Were this a movie, and in particular the sort of movie which makes people happy in wartime, it would have been set in the famous “white nights” of Leningrad, when Shostakovich lay in Elena Konstantinovskaya’s arms. Unfortunately, it isn’t. Moreover, summer happens to be a season expressly reserved for Aryans, so this Russian story finds itself compelled to take place in winter, when the nights of Leningrad, like most days, are black, black, black! How about a compromise? We’ll tell our tale in grey.

Once upon a time, when it was the twentieth century and my parents were still young, color had yet to enter the world. Light and darkness, black and white, sufficed my poor grandparents; by the time my parents were born, grey had been invented by I. G. Farbenindustrie. At first it didn’t seem good for anything except smudgy London fogs, but by the time the Blitz began it could express the smoke of burning cities quite nicely. Three days before the Führer broke off his monumental tank battle in Kursk, the U.S. War Department, having been apprised by a Zeiss defector that Hitler’s home movies were now being filmed
in color,
launched the top-secret Taos Project, in the course of which an ingenious boy scientist named Ansel Adams employed a hedgehog formation of photon-guns to fracture the firmament’s tonal scale into exactly ten zones, from the primeval black of Zone 0 to the perfect blank of Zone X. Contrast, cloud-cliff relationships, pearly-grey pine trees decked out with recesses of utter black, luminance and detail, mid-range gunmetal rivers banded by wakes of paler grey, these distinctions permitted our universe a greater number of adjustments than the earlier Gutenberg model had enjoyed; but it was not until Operation Polaroid that most citizens got to see colors for the very first time: primary colors in Phase One (we smile now, when we remember that until 1979, high summer foliage could only be yellow or blue); and then, once our American landscape had been suitably conditioned by the Adams Ray, the secondaries, the tertiaries, and finally the various infrared flavors which we enjoy so much in erotic situations. As I said, the Germans had stolen a march on us here, just as the Russians would in outer space; I cannot forbear to quote from the declassified OSS “appreciation” prepared by a certain Frank Voss, our on-the-spot U.S. operative whose real mission is to sniff around for secret weapons here in the ruins of the Führerbunker; this colorblind fellow who is now experiencing color for the very first time (indeed, the only time, since his final reel included capture, torture and liquidation in North Korea) writes that from the heap of steel cannisters in the well of rubble at the far end of a dank hall now guarded by no less than three Kalmuck machine-gunners
(they were quite friendly,
he reports,
and also gave me the location of a Werewolf detachment which had created several nuisances in our sector)
there comes a shining more pale than any Zone VII grey, which nonetheless partakes of Zone II’s dramatic inevitability; Frank Voss, who at one time was a divinity student, speculates that to the sentries, whose sophistication in his opinion leaves much to be desired (their ideology, he sadly writes, compels them to see in black and white), this indescribable light may be as sacred as the star on the pale forehead of their revolutionary cruiser
Aurora.—
Yes, indescribable!—Defeated, Frank Voss withdraws to safer grey metaphors; reports of the atomic glow over Hiroshima now seem similarly off the mark. Nonetheless, in this episode he wins our hearts almost as much as does that flickering silver eminence, Bing Crosby; indeed, had it not been for the Cold War, our tense young American would probably have received the Order of Kutuzov for bravery, because, without fear or hesitation, he outdoes the daring of his Kalmuck allies: namely, he unscrews the top of the biggest movie cannister! And instantly, for a radius of perhaps twenty feet, the corridor gets colorized not by “red,” “blue” or “yellow,” for which he would have lacked the words anyway, but by their muted opposites, because the Germans’ first experiments with color involved negative film. After following Frank Voss’s strangely moving attempts to describe these hues on the basis of their estimated wavelengths, we reach this (partially corrupted) transcript of an attempt to contact HQ: Deeply regret unable to evaluate the phenomenon. Doing all possible. Please confirm immediately on emergency link whether destruction of these objects is advised before Soviet experts arrive. Voss then tries more desperately than ever to describe the magenta blush imparted to the ceiling by several thousand almost identical eight-millimeter frames of Eva Braun’s lips, but here the report has been
CENSORED: APPROX. 300 WORDS DELETED.
Well, isn’t it better that way? Mystical testimony achieves its maximum propaganda value when it shades off into inchoateness or even darkness. Besides, the Germans never intended for color to be enjoyed by anyone except the elite, and the rest of Europe remained awfully grey in those days, her best Zone 0 being blackout paper, which in museums subject to the penetration of the Adams Ray appears to be a weak greenish-black at best, while her most reliable Zone X can be no paler than a Nazi officer’s corpse staring up at the sky. This is the reason why Ansel Adams himself, that true American, never visited Europe until 1974, by which time he’d been projected into his eighth decade of life; he’d calculated that lighting conditions over there would be practically impossible, that high values would be blocked, for beyond Omaha Beach the entire continent remained divided into only two crudely differentiated zones (in which Adams explicitly counted the pearl-grey midnights of Leningrad); but he had to go just the same. In Paris his elongated shadow already lacked even a blue component; and when he got to Arles, on a conveyance whose engineers had advanced far beyond the futuristic blockiness of any armored train, he found himself
lightly charmed by the swift-passing landscape
(leaden-black earth; silver-grey grass-hairs; the Académie Française was now fiercely debating the introduction of certain sepias and russets)
but bored by its rural sameness and the evidence of tired antiquity and modern industrial landscapes.
In a word,
I confess to acute home-sickness.

2

Well, who wouldn’t have been homesick, especially during the war years? (Imagine how dreary the spectators must have felt after Comrade Stalin’s alpinists had ascended the shining Admiralty Tower of Leningrad and camouflaged it with dull grey paint.) Not only was Europe more higher-contrast and greyer than ever—never mind the broken glass, cold and darkness—but, as period movie footage demonstrates, atomic structures were actually
looser
—hence the stippled grey cheekbones of starving Poles, the fuzzy almost-white of children’s skinny legs, the velvety irregularities of what should have been chiseled pillar-grooves in the facades of blurry department stores not yet bombed. The perverse argument of certain liberal “experts” that the film stock of the 1940s was inherently grainier than today’s has been disproven by a Central Intelligence Agency study which employed extreme magnification to compare nitrate-based Nazi-Soviet documentaries with today’s color features.
⁴⁷
As Adams demonstrated,
grain is a fundamental feature of reality itself.

3

Still and all, one feature must be conceded to the grey old days: coherence. Just as a poem achieves its effect by a narrow application of choice within a wide application of exclusion (the word I need cannot be any of the thousands which fail to rhyme with
grey),
so wartime Europe was perfect in its ghastly fashion, inhabited by beings with coarse-pored silver complexions. What were my parents like when they were young? Their hair is silver now. Of course it always was; they got married before brown was invented. Relatively speaking, they had luck; my father grew up in the ultra-whiteness of Chicago winters; my mother had her grey Nebraska wheat fields. In Europe, the tonal scale remained measurably harsher. What inmate of that continent could hope to be more than a fleeing, slender civilian in an inky-black suit, or one of many snowy-camouflaged men on a tank, pointing black guns across the snow? A few million souls did get to be decorated dull-grey Russian soldier-girls in mid-grey fur hats; we see them marching westward in that propaganda spectacular “The Fall of Berlin,” to which Shostakovich wrote the soundtrack. When Khruschev, outflanking Operation Polaroid, introduced the color red into Soviet society in early 1961, it caught on so well that every subsequent decoration had to be either crimson or bloody, but during the war all medals stayed grey, of course, which I actually consider befitting because it was a dreary grey war of frozen corpses; frozen blood goes black; red would have been out of place. The pale skinny boys assembling the round magazines of machine-guns, what color should they have been but dead white? Between the reflections of long white military columns writhing in the Neva and the black trickles of people dwindling day by day on the frozen streets of Leningrad, only two zones were needed: ultra-field-grey, as exemplified by the squat darkness above the treads of the Panzerkampfwagen (specifically, a Pzkpfw-IIIF), and ice-grey, the color of those Stalinist banners which the Panzers overpassed, the banners which said: LIFE HAS BECOME MORE JOYFUL.