I quoted her something I’d heard somewhere: To be a German means to do a thing for its own sake.
She stood up from her loom, waddled over to the hearth and stirred her blackly bubbling broth with a ladle made out of an airman’s goggles. Oh, how Rüdiger would have shaken his head! As for me, I couldn’t help but feel anxious. Was that news?
All this time you’ve been hunting for the secret of life, said the witch. Well, you won’t find that here. But I have something more important—the secret of death.
I confess that her offer tempted me for an instant. People will tell you that the darkness needs to be faced; that’s why we had to attack in the East to begin with! And if I only possessed the secret of death, I could have fulfilled Operation Citadel all by myself, applying what von Manstein calls a clear focal point of effort at the decisive spot. Then FREYA would love me. But what if knowing that secret changed me? I was determined not to change. To get right down to it, I wasn’t here by choice; I was only a telephonist.
Forgive me, I told her, but I’m afraid of death. For that matter, I wouldn’t even have accepted the secret of life from you. How can knowledge be anything but death?
You’re going to be sorry! she replied. I think she felt rejected.
Rejected content will come out somewhere else. That’s what my psychotherapist kept saying. I know, I know. And I was out of bullets.
So I’d rejected knowledge. Forward to the final victory!
What I longed for was to get back in touch with the big black telephone at Europe Central, where true knowledge lived, the kind which was both lifeless and deathless. I’d been trained to will myself inside the telephone, and gaze up at the underside of the black bakelite pan at the constellations of signals and connections as bright as the sparks on Valkyries’ spearpoints. Then I could guide myself; then I’d know where to go, what to do.
Oh, I was so lonely, so lonely! Just as a burning tank roars blindly about until it blunders onto a land mine and perishes, so I was; I tried to regroup and reinforce, but hopelessly. And the sky was always dark. Around me, T-34s kept pouring endlessly toward every operational objective. And FREYA had left me! FREYA was Lina, whom from now on I would think of as LINA. To speak more correctly, FREYA and LINA were sisters. I should have understood that before. Some things we’re blind to until it’s already too late. For instance, the Reds’ thrust against Twenty-third Panzer Corps prevented Division Grossdeutschland from participating in the drive on Kursk. Who knows? If Grossdeutschland had been there, Citadel might have succeeded. If LINA had loved me, what might my possibilities have been?—FREYA and LINA were both as pretty as the globs of molten metal which sometimes spew from a burning plane.
In a sunflower field, a cloud of fire idled like a swarm of flies over a dead Tiger. Then came broken carapaces crazy in the mud, doughnut-shaped trenches in the scorched sand, twin wires twitching in a skull, an induction coil spiraling infinitely in someone’s eye-socket: sufficient for me to finally raise FREYA!
I gave the password; that was why she let me touch her. Then I signaled: What must I guard against?
Sixteenth Russian Air Army… said FREYA. Her voice was warm and cold at the same time in that spectacular metallic fashion of gold.
Pillboxes and mortar positions… added LINA. I’d loved her the best. But it was now my duty to win the Golden Princess.
And then I lost them both; I’d been cheated out of that endless moment, sentimentalized by the etchings of Käthe Kollwitz, when a woman bids her soldier-boy goodbye.
I went on deeper and deeper into my own loneliness. (As I’d learned from my total education, the object must be fanatically pursued.) Soldiers and machine-guns lurking in the corn, soldiers hiding in river-grass as they awaited their turn to wade across the water in single file, they were all behind me now; it was rare that I came across the ruins of tanks canted in the mud; once I bypassed a gun which was camouflaged with wavering black stripes, almost like the facade of a Swiss cuckoo-clock house; this was an anomaly; I’d crept beyond almost everything. In other words, I was deep in the unconscious now, and thereby increasingly vulnerable to armored attacks on my lengthening flank.
So I took up the black mouthpiece, sucker of wounds, and dialed Allfather in Berlin! I wanted to tell him that there was an enemy awaiting outside, a giant in a helmet; his mouth was as vast as the gunbarrel of an SU-152; above all, I wanted to confess that the unconscious was too much for me, but I didn’t dare, so when the sleepwalker came on the line I merely asked him whether I should move forward in support of our left flank or attack out of my position. This was the sort of question that Allfather liked. (It wasn’t true that he only had one eye. Like me, he refused all knowledge which might infect him with death.)
You want me to concern myself with this very particular question? he shouted. When the Jewish wirepullers have already wormed their cables into my telephone? You scoundrel!
Yes, my Führer!
Give me your commanding officer at once. I’m going to order you to be shot!
Yes, my Führer. He’s dead, my Führer.
So you’re the only one?
Yes, my Führer.
And you stand prepared to carry on the reconquest of these lost territories?
Yes, my Führer!
He lowered his voice and whispered: You’ll need to be very careful. There are Jews all around you. And the farther east you go, the closer you’ll get to those yellow Asiatics. Stalin’s one of those. Spare no one, do you hear me? Be fair, but ruthless!
Yes, my Führer! But I have no more bullets!
He might have slammed down his black telephone, but I’ll never believe it. Allfather was my loving Uncle Wolf ! In any event, once again the line had gone dead.
What to do but soldier on? All I could do was my best. At any moment now, I said to myself, I’d see more giants and dragons, not to mention a castle with a red flag where an ogre would be raping Aryan girls. And then what? A magic weapon of some kind, or…
Now I was coming into autumn. In September those gracefully bullet-shaped acorns in the Tiergarten, shiny as fingernails, begin to fall to the ground and decay inside, so that when Lina and I break them open they seem to be filled with rich black gunpowder. That’s autumn for me. When the leaves turn yellow and spin down into the Landwehrkanal, they’re more vividly golden than ever before, since not only can we see through them as if they were lantern slides—after all, they’ve hung between us and the sun—but they’re now also in irrevocable motion; they shift, showing us the sun on one edge or the other, then fall full on like paratroopers, and it’s all so fast; they speed downward, meteors, liquid globs of gold; but once in that water, which is green-brown in the light, green-blue in the shade, they’re nothing but debris; they’re dirt. That’s how autumn is, that sad golden instant. Autumn is No Man’s Land.
Nourishing myself on ammunition from dead men, I passed tank-herds rolling evenly across the meadow toward the forest of smoke-plumes on the horizon, but they had nothing to do with me. They got devoured by hungry clouds which resembled the semicircular connectors between notes in a Shostakovich score. I can’t say I hadn’t expected that, because by now the weather was getting very gloomy. Meanwhile a flock of Shturmoviks, staggered line abreast, came croaking through the sky; with the red stars on their sides, they resembled September’s maple leaves caught in a gust. Oh, but what if they saw me? I hid in one of the many white-rimmed craters left by their bombs and kept steadily on; my psychotherapist, not to mention Sergeant Gunther, would have been proud. After that, a talking skull in a bunker wanted to tell me something or give me something, but, frankly, I didn’t care to be enlightened. A raven croaked at me: Bring the shadow back to the Germans! I shot at it and missed.