Let me expand on this point: Perseverance is eternally correct, even when it inflames the other side. I remember from the fairytales that Grandmother Elsa used to tell me that it’s necessary to follow without the slightest deviation the advice of the fox, fish, sleepwalker, raven, telephone, ragged dwarf; moreover, this advice grows all the more valid as it disguises itself as nonsense: When stealing the golden horse, saddle him up in the worn tackle, not the jeweled harness which hangs on the other peg. When stealing the Golden Princess, who offers to come with you willingly on condition that you permit her to say goodbye to her parents, you must forbid her precisely this. Be firm; let her weep! In other words, the reward will fall only to him who obeys blindly and faithfully.
Now, I have always been willing to submit myself, particularly to women. Nonetheless, in my weaker moments, further weakened by the treasonous insinuations of Rüdiger, it had begun to seem to me that unthinking obedience, “cadaver obedience” we called it, had lost us Moscow and Stalingrad; it hadn’t yet won us Leningrad; nor could Operation Citadel be said to be progressing happily. In short, my belief in the sleepwalker had died. But he believed! He held Europe Central together in his sleep! FREYA would have short-circuited herself without him. My field telephone buzzed out code-clicks of another impending victory: He’d force the enemy to fall back…
Once upon a time, when Fremde Heere Ost cautioned him that the Russians were deploying seven hundred new tanks against us every month, the sleepwalker replied: The Russians are dead!
What if saying so could make it so? What if throwing away Sixth Army at Stalingrad corresponded to saddling the golden horse in ragged leather? What if Operation Citadel would win us the Golden Princess if and only if we threw ourselves away?
When the four dozen ebony men in chains appear, you must not reply when they ask who you are. You must allow them first to beat you, then to cut off your head. When T-34s converge on you, you must gaze steadily up their snouts. Don’t yield a single square centimeter to them! If you follow these orders faithfully, then the talking serpent will change back into a princess for you to marry, and you’ll become King of the Golden Castle.
I wish I could marry the Golden Princess, I thought, and it turned out that I’d thought aloud.
The old man replied: Those are the first sensible words you’ve spoken.
Unfortunately, there’s no Golden Princess.
In fact there is.
Perhaps on top of the Siegessäule in Berlin…
No, she’s straight ahead, just past the Thirty-eighth Defensive Construction Directorate! However, the Russians aren’t going to make it easy. They don’t like you.
Well, to be sure, they have good reason for that, I said. But they were doomed to lose their lands. It’s the will of history. They ought to love us now, for what they had will never come back.
Then show them the will of history! Or are you afraid of a few Slavs?
What could I reply? As I keep saying, I’m only a telephonist. I don’t mind admitting to being a timid sort. Back before my Lina left me, or I her (I forget which came first), we used to sit on a bench overlooking the Landwehrkanal, and in September the acorns struck the ground like gunshots; sometimes they rang off the backs of neighboring benches; I freely confess that I felt anxious; one reason that she left me was because she wanted a hero when I reminded her of a Jew.
So what did I reply?—I’ll keep on! I shouted.
A headless Russian, dripping with worms, burst out of his grave and advanced toward me, clawing at the air as he came. I blew him up with a hand grenade.
When I refused his help for the third time, the old man vanished. He went up in smoke; he was gone, just like Rüdiger, Dancwart, Gernot and Volker. I was glad; I didn’t want to be in his fairytale. Somewhere there had to be a garden of golden pears where I could waylay the Golden Princess or at least steal the golden horse and ride away to Baden-Baden. That was the fairytale I preferred to be in, the one which ended with my delicious Führer-parcel. As it was, I couldn’t get out of this fairytale spoken by Russians, whose mouths were Degatyarev DP machine guns, which we called record players because of their disk-like magazines. FREYA tried to whisper-click secrets to me on the field telephone, but the Russians shouted her down. Oh, this was becoming a nasty story; how I longed to fall back into Europe Central! But first I was going to have to overcome homogeneous forces in concentration, echeloned defenses in depth, hermeneutically endless layers of tank traps, ditches, spider holes. And those T-34s, my God! Sergeant Gunther used to make us aim for the reserve fuel tanks which sat squarishly behind the hulls, but you know what happened to Sergeant Gunther.
I’ll fight to the last man! I cried, at which ten dead Russians exploded out of the ground and began marching toward me, grinding worms between their teeth. Even the sleepwalker would have screamed. I dodged around them. They kept trudging blindly on toward our lines; the worms had eaten their eyes.
If only we’d had more Tigers! Granted, they weren’t invulnerable, but when they traveled in packs, the T-34s didn’t dare fire at them; then the T-34s dug in and hid like me.
Ammunition, like all life-force, is heavy; a man can carry only so much of it. I didn’t dare to count my rounds. This I did know: The weaker I got, the stronger they got. Here came more Russians! I sent them to their second death or got away from them; then their brothers sprouted up, new shoots from moldering onions. I still had my cartridge belt, with a few cartridges ready.
Here came a Slav as evil-looking as Rasputin, with stars on his shoulder-tabs, and I was all alone! He saw me; he stretched out his arms to me. And this Russian tried to kiss me on the mouth, which I knew would have been my death, so I blew him up with my last grenade, but here came more Russians. As the sleepwalker had insisted, the Russians are dead!
Once upon a time I’d been an invulnerable constituent of our herds of armored personnel carriers gouging their way across the wheat fields of the Kursk salient. The Germans are dead! If I’d only had something or someone to sell to the devil, you can be sure that I would have done it, for I was in difficulties!
The next thing that happened was that, miraculously overcoming the incessant pressure of the unconscious, I penetrated one more enemy line. Well, so what? A stereoscopic rangefinder was gazing at me like the uplifted heads of two cobras, and then I saw a Russian hiding in the sunflowers; I shot him with my very last bullet! This act freed the way for me to encounter an old lady in a hut on chicken legs; she was weaving something out of worms. Was that supposed to scare me?
I know how my psychotherapist would have categorized her: an angry feminine principle, which is to say (just in case I’d missed the point) an angry woman, a furious woman. But I myself happen to believe that she was simply an old lady in a hut on chicken legs. There’s no such thing as magic, Tiger tanks excepted.
Have a bowl of soup, she said, but I refused. Never eat anything in the other world! Persephone nibbles six pomegranate seeds and finds herself compelled to live in Hades for half the year. That was why for security reasons the Führer caused to be destroyed all the candy and caviar which Marshal Antonescu sent him.
What is it that you want? she demanded. She kept nodding and nodding.
Nothing, really, I replied. I’m only a telephonist.
Well, you must be here for something.
That’s precisely what I used to say to Rüdiger.
I made soup out of his eyes. And now you’re here.