Europe Central (71 page)

They gave him a villa and allowed him to serve the people as a middle-ranking police inspector. To the extent that the postwar situation permitted, he bore out Colonel Heim’s characterization of him from the lost days:
Well groomed and with slender hands, always beautifully turned out, with gleaming white collar and immaculately polished field-boots.
About his villa, which at his preference and theirs was set apart in the Platteleite district on a hill above town, I can tell you (for I’ve seen it) that from its windows and verandas one can look down deep into the sumacs, and, beyond them, still deeper down into a mysterious gulf of trees: the central European forest. When health and leisure permitted, the old man descended sunken steps, then passed through a concrete arch to the lower lookout, comforted by the balconies, round turrets, porches and decks which overhung him. An old reddish-haired lady was gathering flowers in the weeds. Coca would have loved it here; she’d died back in ’47, in Baden-Baden, they told him. His son Ernst was allowed to visit him from time to time, probably because the Nazis had put him in a concentration camp for awhile, which made him an anti-Fascist. The other twin, Friedrich, dwelled farther away now: killed in action in Anzio in ’44. As for Olga, she never came; Ernst said that she was well, although that Baron of hers had lost a great deal of money during the war; he didn’t know why she refused to write. With palsied fingers, the father wrote her a note of congratulations upon her forty-second birthday. Ernst promised to carry it back to the other side of the Iron Curtain. He was a very loyal son, really. I’ve heard (although this cannot be verified) that in his bedroom, in that revanchist puppet state called West Germany, he kept, in defiance of “denazification,” a photograph in a silver frame of that Poltava conference back in ’42 when Operation Blau began: There was Heusinger with his fist on the edge of the map table, and Ernst’s tall, handsome father stood between Heusinger and our Führer, somewhat to the rear of them both, with his hands locked behind him; while von Weichs of Second Army gazed genially down into the white winter of the map-world, whose border the Führer was gripping with both hands, as if he were about to rip it apart. Ernst could never decide whether or not to have his father’s likeness isolated and enlarged.—The two men lit cigarettes and gazed down into Europe. It was very humid that afternoon; they had to contend with the sagging summer clouds of Saxony. Ernst’s wound, his souvenir of Stalingrad he called it, annoyed him at night sometimes, he said. He seemed to be letting himself go. He was flabby now, and he shaved imperfectly, and there were always dark circles under his eyes. Once he said: You’ll never know how happy I was, father, when I heard about your Iron Cross. I saw you from a distance once, during the fighting at Kharkov . . .—You may have it if you like, said Paulus with a little smile. I sent it to your mother in a letter, just before we lost the Stalingradsky airstrip. She would have kept it to the end, without a doubt. I also . . .—Oh, so that’s why you no longer wear your wedding ring, said Ernst with indescribable bitterness. Mama never received any such letter.—Paulus sat rigid, the left side of his face twitching like a heartbeat. On another occasion, perhaps to torment him, or so he suspected, Ernst brought him, he couldn’t imagine how he’d gotten it in these times, a copy of the Führer’s testament, after which they sat there in that villa behind closed doors, the last Field-Marshal and the ex-Captain, smoking cigarettes and gazing at the wall, with Beethoven on the gramophone, while the document lay between them: . . . and therefore to choose death of my own free will . . . After Ernst departed for West Germany, he tore it to shreds and burned it. May it be one day a part of the code of honor of the German officer, as it already is in our Navy, that the surrender of a district or a town is impossible, and that in this respect the Leader above all should give a shining example of faithful performance of duty unto death. He’d become very fond of the white and purple clover which came out every spring. First the clover, then the smell of trees and leaves; the heavily jeweled sumacs were July’s trees; from the balcony of his ship-breasted house he kept track of each summer’s progress down there in the dark gorge. In winter he listened to Beethoven on the gramophone, not Shostakovich. Nobody ever asked his address; if anyone had, he’d prepared the answer: Lausitzer Street. First right, then left—left straight on to the end. When Hilde Benjamin, nicknamed “the Red Guillotine,” became Minister of Justice, she made the correct decision, preserving and even promoting him, for Friedrich Paulus was a painstakingly accurate subordinate.—One has to be on the watch like a spider in its web, the Führer used to say, staring and glaring into Paulus’s face, searching for something evil.—Thank God I’ve always had a pretty good nose for everything. I can smell things out before they happen . . .—The Red Guillotine had much the same nose. She was a greyhaired troll with pouches under her eyes—not much of a looker, opined her male colleagues, but if this were ’45 she could still have served the turn of a dozen Russian boys. Inspector Paulus, of course, never joked in any such fashion. Nor did the other policemen make remarks in his presence; they felt uncomfortable around him; it wasn’t that they didn’t trust him (he’d been neutralized long since, rendered harmless), but they didn’t know how to take him. Why, for instance, did he punctiliously attend not only military parades, which one would have expected, but every other event, too, right down to the most tediously insignificant celebrations of the working class, which made even Stasi operatives yawn? There he stood, all alone, watching them march beneath Dresden’s half-wrecked, green-bronzed domes and cupola’d towers. He lacked what a far abler Field-Marshal (I mean of course von Manstein, who was presently serving time in a British jail) practically embodied; modestly calling it the “Prussian tradition,” as if it were just a procedure which he followed without especial credit to him; von Manstein, in short, was an officer who knew how to be close to his men. Did this Inspector Paulus think that he was too good for his colleagues? No matter. Sometimes without notice the Red Guillotine visited Dresden in her shiny black car, and on those occasions she invariably entered Paulus’s neat little office, where portraits of Marx, Lenin and Stalin hung all on a level, and she’d look at him, just look at him, as if he had a spot on his collar, at which he’d raise his head from his papers and gaze back at her without defiance or even blankness; he was ready for anything. Then she drove back to Berlin. It was as if he fascinated her. She often praised the clarity and completeness of his reports, and why not? He’d certainly worked everything out thoroughly; his logic was as rigorous as the solution to some problem of crystal chemistry. That must have been why he never got into trouble for his prewar associations with Coca’s aristocratic friends: Count Zubov, Baroness Hoyningen-Huene, the exiled prince and princess . . . Unlike poor dead Coca, the Red Guillotine enjoyed full access to his prewar service reports, one of which read:
Modest, perhaps too modest; amiable, with extremely courteous manners, and a good comrade.
(Many citizens, all too many, discovered something in her eyes like the light of a burning gasoline depot, but Paulus never saw it; she smiled upon him.) According to her own assessment, which has been preserved forever in the Stasi archives, Inspector Paulus was
an innocuous representative of the former military-professional caste. Until more specialists rise up from the ranks of the people, we should make use of him. He is cautious, discreet, industrious, punctual, intelligent and lacking in all personal ambition.
Sometimes, it’s true, he gave lectures at the military college, but these presentations, which he invariably cleared with the Stasi beforehand, were nothing more dangerous than an old man’s self-justifications. Their topic: Stalingrad. The theme: I predicted the outcome, but the Fascist High Command didn’t listen. These lectures were permitted because they offered still another example of how Hitlerism, which is essentially monopoly capitalism, misleads the people. I’m told that even the Red Guillotine attended one or two of these events, smiling rather ironically at him from the very back row. When he saw her, his heart leaped up thrillingly in his chest; he couldn’t have said why; it was almost as if he’d received a visitation from Coca. The left side of his face twitched, but he continued: At the same time, particular attention was invited to Sixth Army’s inadequate stock of supplies . . .—Other than this hobbyhorse of his, and Ernst’s intermittent visits (they now reminisced quite pleasurably together about Stalingrad; Ernst had encouraged him to expand his typewritten notes), he caused no trouble at all. Lighting one cigarette after the next (he’d developed a taste for Russian mahorka), he remained faithfully at his desk while the June Uprising got put down by the tanks of the people’s armed forces; he could hear them outside, ranging through the tight-cobblestoned streets, old T-34s by the sound of them. As the great Moltke used to say,
Genius is diligence.
First investigation, then conviction and its sequel in the cellars of the yellow-ocher castles. In a magnificent victory for the working class, they liquidated the Gehlen Organization. He remembered Major-General Gehlen very well. It was above Gehlen’s signature that those reports used to come, those misleadingly optimistic daily enemy situation reports of Fremde Heere Ost Gruppe I, Army Group B. Ernst, who seemed to be rather well connected nowadays, told him that Gehlen was now boasting: My department predicted ten days in advance precisely where the blow would fall at Stalingrad! The show trial came off perfectly, although Gehlen wasn’t in the dock; we couldn’t get to him in his lair in West Berlin. No matter: five hundred and forty-six spies arrested! As he used to say in the old days,
it’s just a matter of time and manpower.
On Münchner Platz, where the electric guillotine used to cut off Jews’ and defeatists’ heads at an optimum rate of one per two minutes, we were now guillotining drunks for singing Nazi songs.

He passed away in 1957, the year after “de-Stalinization” began and the year before Field-Marshal von Manstein published
Lost Victories
; this death rather fittingly resulted from a progressive sclerosis which allowed his mind to contemplate its hopeless situation up to the last moment, increasing the impairment on all sides while his body became unable to move, even to twitch, until even the heart got overwhelmed. He is said to have borne this agony with the utmost patience. Thanks to bureaucratic difficulties at the border, Ernst arrived too late to say goodbye. I think he might have borne his father back to Baden-Baden, to place him at Coca’s side; on the other hand, I’ve also read that he was buried in Dresden. Doubtless both accounts are true; I’ve seen with my own eyes that Christ possesses two tombs in Jerusalem. Creepers and wistaria overswarmed his grave, then red sumac berries burst out in triumph. He was the last Field-Marshal. Not for him had any mausoleum been assigned: neither pillar nor crypt, no granite eagles, no sad sooty knights killing snakes of stone. But he perished lucky; they’d granted him the slate-roofed heaven of a Saxon summer, lazy linden-games of light, clouds sweating rain. They’d given him that house which resembled an attempt to construct a breast out of plane surfaces. Later the Stasi took it over, for the furtherance of democratic police power.

In 1960, the very year when Shostakovich visited Dresden and, evidently feeling stifled by the dreamily mysterious forest all around, composed his unhappy Opus 110, Paulus’s memoir
Ich stehe hier auf Befehl
saw the light; but by then Liddell Hart had already published
The German Generals Talk,
so nobody paid much attention to this secondary effort, which was, after all, no more than the self-justification of a bookkeeper’s son. Thanks to the Cold War, Stalingrad had become an embarrassment to everyone concerned. Nonetheless, some of the victors conceded that this Paulus hadn’t been half bad at certain tactical operations involving armor. His son faithfully preserved, revised and elaborated these various defensive writings, but Dresden’s maples and lindens grew over the father’s memory like monuments. First the will, then the deed: In 1970, when the Stalingrad Tractor Works (now called the Volgograd Tractor Works) rolled out its one-millionth tank, Ernst Paulus followed our Führer’s wish at last, blowing off the skullcap in a grey and crimson shower. The last thing he saw, or seemed to see, was an army of white skeletons on that black day. ‣

ZOYA

The essential thing about anti-guerrilla warfare—one must hammer this home to everybody—is that whatever succeeds is right.

—Adolf Hitler (1942)

1

Zoya’s story has no beginning. Defined only by its end, which takes place not far westward of Moscow, in a village called Petrischevo, the tale projects itself backwards through predictable and possibly fallible contrasts into the sunny prewar collectivity for which Zoya chose to give her life. But what if she didn’t choose? The crime for which the Fascists condemned her—setting fire to a stables, in obedience to Comrade Stalin’s scorched earth policy—would surely have been followed up by grander salvoes had luck permitted. In brief, Zoya didn’t mean to die—at least, not then, not for a stables! But then, to how many has it been given to reckon at all, let alone to conclude:
My death is a fair price to pay for this objective
? The July Twentieth conspirators might have been thus satisfied, had they succeeded in their intention of assassinating Hitler. They didn’t, and got hanged with piano wire. General Vlasov, who fought first against Hitler, then against Stalin, met a kindred death. Was that “worth it”? What about the Berliners and Leningraders who died in air raids, or the soldiers on both sides who perished merely because their respective Supreme Commands from fear, vanity or incompetence forbade retreat? Or, to take the case still further, what about the random deaths that we die in peacetime? Looked at in this light, Zoya’s fate becomes supremely ordinary.