It was in his Eighth Symphony that he first began to articulate the various danses macabres which he could no longer prevent himself from hearing. Bones, murdered or merely perished, ought to stay silent. That’s the law. But, quick and shrill as a violin-screech, they come back, to the terror of all who stand guilty of living, and then they dance, playing on their tomb-lids as lightly as cats—but the game’s evil, hateful, angry; there’s no fun in being a skeleton! He dreamed that Elena Konstantinovskaya was calling out to him. Her face was milky with fear. They were taking her away and she was screaming and then a bomb began to whistle down upon the Black Maria and she was screaming, screaming! In time, these hauntings within his ears would evolve into the terrifying Opus 110. For now, the music still had an object other than Death itself: he could blame the Germans. Maybe they’d even make him a Hero of the Soviet Union. Keeping all secrets hid within his maggot-writhing fingers, he crossed his legs, huddling against Aram Khatchaturian’s deliciously braided wife while the three of them—that is, Shostakovich and the two Khatchaturians—went over the score of the Eighth Symphony. He smiled anxiously. His glance hid within the sockets of his wounded eyes. ‣
UNTOUCHED
Freed from the constraints imposed by the policy of adventure of your intellectual governing classes, you will fulfill your duty of working to the best of your ability, and you will fulfill it under the powerful protection of Great Germany. All will earn their bread by working under domination; that will be fair. On the other hand, there will be no place for political agitators, dishonest profiteers and Jewish exploiters…
At fifteen-o’-clock a Kampfflieger bestowed gifts upon Warsaw, the bulky-shouldered pilot’s beret askew, his head sunk deep down into his neck as he hovered within an immense wheel through which the close-packed, steep-roofed Polish houses began to go up in smoke; at the center of the wheel hid an inner wheel dissected into quadrants; that was the sight of his strafing-gun. The wheel was Poland’s clock from which bullets ticked, each bullet not a moment but a moment’s end for another Pole bewitched into a blackened, grimacing corpse face-down in the mud beside its scorched rifle or pram.
At sixteen-o’-clock the Kampfflieger sported over a river and magically created from nothing a canted Polish cruiser (the magic enacted by the pull of a black lever), by which time Case White had been nearly accomplished, with mushroom-headed Germans planting the swastika flag atop the ruined bunkers of Westerplatte.
Ceasefire, armistice, Frank’s proclamation, the first “Jewish action,” each of these marked another hour on the great clockface. At twenty-one-o’-clock a reconnaissance plane passed by and with all cameras clicking harvested aerial views of the brown smoke which was Warsaw; by twenty-two-fifteen the most perfect exemplar of these, still moist from the last darkroom tray, arrived by special courier in Berlin, so that it too could be counted, recognized, preserved. (In the official military history of our Polish victory, one finds this very photograph, which depicts ruins from edge to edge, with the pious caption: The church is untouched.) At twenty-three-forty-five the Russians finished eating their half of Poland. Ten minutes later to the second, the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line had been demarcated all the way to East Prussia. How many crossings were there? That’s top secret! But, needless to say, each checkpoint was instantaneously manned by one of our field policemen in his black-and-white-striped sentry box; and a hundred meters away, more or less, one of their sentries watched him, smoking a mahorka cigarette. That was the Ribbentrop-Molotov Line. By twenty-three-forty-seven the cleansing of our respective sectors had begun. So-called “national politicians,” bourgeois democrats, Polish chauvinist elements, intellectuals, kulaks, officers and Jews were rendered harmless. Then with a ringing chime came midnight, and the thick folder which still lay open on the sleepwalker’s desk, a folder ominously snow-hued like forthcoming Russia, received its last checkmark and eagle stamp: Case White was closed.
Next came the folder for Operation Barbarossa. One of his secretaries laid it timidly on the edge of that great desk.—Thank you, my dear Trudl, said the sleepwalker, offering her a little round cake.
The folder was still quite thin at this stage. Its only document was an architectural drawing, very correctly rendered yet not without a certain mood, which conveyed a notion of how Europe Central might be altered into a courtyard of cobblestones as white as light, with a rigid double line of black, black silhouettes waiting to enter a black doorway two by two; they’d never come out.
After all, said the sleepwalker to himself, I’m compelled to act decisively. I’ve got to make it all tank-proof. A lunatic or a Jewish cancer cell could eliminate me at any time. And then who knows how all this would turn out?
And so Operation Barbarossa was opened, with our nightmares all double-censored like the postcards home of Death’s Heads. The telephone rang, requesting verification from the field echelon of Section L. Steel began to clitterclatter from Germany into Russia.
Leningrad remained almost untouched, unfortunately. Army Group North had nibbled her around the edges—the best that we could do.—We’ve got to get hold of this rail junction, muttered the sleepwalker, glaring at one of his maps.
The folder for Operation Barbarossa was thicker now. It would soon be infinitely large, which is to say exactly the same size as Russia; already it came up to the sleepwalker’s head; all his secretaries together couldn’t trundle it about, even in a ten-shelved cart. Just as an iceberg calves off towering chunks of itself into the deep, so Operation Barbarossa spawned Operations Blue, Wilhelm, Shark, Edelweiss, Fredericus, Heron, Sturgeon, Winter Storm, Thunderclap, Northern Lights… These folders with their accompanying sub-folders had now formed themselves into rows of bound volumes on tiers of steel library shelves whose aisles receded infinitely. As for the fundamental issue, Barbarossa itself, no matter how much he hacked off he couldn’t touch it; it kept swelling like a gravid corpse. Long past midnight, when the chattering of his fellow Old Fighters had sunk deep down into dreams, the sleepwalker sat alone in the Chancellery, unrolling those white maps of Russia, on which he sought to overlay his own blueprints. Draw another spearhead up here! The emblem of our Fourteenth Panzer Division is the arrowheaded rune Ogal, which means Possession. Superstitiously, the sleepwalker always aimed it eastward. And Nineteenth Panzer, that we indicate by reversing the lightning-rune Yr, Death, and slashing it with a horizontal line. Death to all of them! He longed to incise it into the whiteness multiply, but resisted. Seventh Panzer is a Y, a vulva; keep that close to home. Twenty-third and Twenty-second are both arrows; we’ll aim them each at Moscow. Now tie off another satellite territory down there; that’s right, tie it off with ligatures of barbed wire. Cauterize its ghastly red blood vessels; weigh it down with edicts and triumphal thoroughfares. Subdivide it into German farms. Now it’s been neutralized; this little matter of operational command is something that anybody can do. All the same, it didn’t seem to matter how immense he made his reinforced quadrangles, how elongated his arteries; Barbarossa surpassed them. He massed armies and injected them into Barbarossa, where they expanded into rectangles, arrows and artillery-bristling hedgehogs; Barbarossa diluted them into linelets more insignificant than eyelashes on the white maps. He ran out of space on his desk, so he had to unroll more maps on the floor. He tried to paper them over with all the documents he had. These pages gave off a chill and made him sleepy, a state which he feared more than anything.