Limbo Zone. Chapter 1. Vertigo

The distance from Oranienburg to Lemberg is one thousand and eighty kilometers along the Reichsautobahn

— if the Reichsautobahn still existed, if the bridges haven’t been blown up, if the gasoline hasn’t run dry somewhere between Breslau and Krakow, if the convoy hasn’t been strafed from the air, if headquarters still stands where it stood yesterday, if yesterday was still yesterday, and not some geological era separated from this morning by an impenetrable layer of burnt paper, ash, and human numbness.

The distance from Lemberg to Berlin is seven hundred and ninety.

The distance from husband to wife is immeasurable.

Fritz Lang, SS-Untersturmführer, adjutant to the commandant of the special detention camp KL Sachsenhausen — so it was stated in his documents, and “special detention” meant a form of detention where the contents had a tendency to diminish, and Fritz had filled out these documents himself, with his own hand, in a neat accounting script, because meticulousness was not a trait to him, but a spine — stood in the corridor of the requisitioned voivodeship administration building, pressing a black Bakelite telephone receiver to his ear. It was heavy as a knuckleduster, cold as a stone — and he listened.

He was listening to his wife’s voice.

The wire — gray, coiled — stretched to the apparatus on the wall. The apparatus was screwed into the plaster with Polish screws, the plaster applied by Polish hands, which now, most likely, were digging Polish earth or were already lying in it.

But the voice came through. The voice was coming from Berlin — along a copper wire strung on wooden poles from Lemberg through Krakow, through Breslau, across fields where bomb craters hadn’t yet cooled — and this in itself was a miracle, a fragile, impossible miracle: the wall, the wire, the apparatus, the receiver, the ear, the voice. This entire chain hung by a thread, on its final tension, and every sound along the way lost a piece of itself, just as water flowing through pipes in winter loses its heat. And Helga’s voice, by the time it reached his ear, was no longer entirely her voice, but its shadow, its cast, its imprint in the wax of static.

“…Dieter didn’t sleep all night,” Helga was saying, and her voice trembled but didn’t break, and there was something in it that made Fritz want to smash the receiver against the wall and simultaneously press it so deeply into his ear that the voice would penetrate bone and marrow, reaching that part of the mind where things are kept before they become memories. “He heard it, we all heard it — they bombed Spandau, we were in the Schmidts’ basement because ours is flooded — and Klaus was silent all night, Fritz, silent, he didn’t cry, didn’t call for me — he just sat there with his eyes open. And I don’t know what’s worse: when a child screams — or when a child is silent.”

“Helga. Helga, calm down.”

“I’ve packed two suitcases. One for the children’s things. The other for documents and winter clothes. Mother called from Stettin, it’s quiet there, the English are only bombing the factories, and there are no factories in Stettin, there’s a port, but a port isn’t a factory, Fritz — the trains are still running…”

“Helga, listen to me.”

“No,” and in that “no” of hers lay that specific feminine firmness, harder than any order, because an order can be disobeyed, but a wife’s “no” cannot. It is not subject to appeal, it has no higher authority, it is not logged in the incoming register. “No, Fritz, you listen…”

“I am listening,” Fritz said, and his voice became the one he used not with his wife, but with his subordinates: even, measured, the voice of a man in control of the situation. “And I am telling you: stay in Berlin. The roads are the worst place to be right now. You will stay home. Stettin is a port, but a port is a target, Helga. A port means ships, supplies, it’s what they bomb second, right after the factories. Berlin is a fortress. The Führer is in Berlin. As long as the Führer…”

“The Führer is not in Berlin,” Helga said. “The Führer is in Prussia. Everyone knows.”

Fritz gripped the receiver. His palm began to sweat. How did she know? The location of Headquarters — Wolfsschanze, Rastenburg, East Prussia — was a secret, but secrets in Berlin lasted no longer than butter on a hot skillet: they hissed and evaporated. Frau Schmidt knew what the General Staff knew, and she knew it earlier, because the General Staff received their briefings through communication channels, while Frau Schmidt received hers from Frau Müller, from Grossman the grocer, from the dentist who treated the Chief of Staff’s adjutant’s wife — through that human wiring that functions without poles, without current, without screws, and which no paratrooper drop could ever sever.

“Helga. Listen to me. Please… Turn on the radio. The Führer knows what he is doing. Yes, the Russians stabbed us in the back,” Fritz said. “Yes, Stalin broke the pact. But you have to understand, Helga,” and here his voice took on that didactic, almost paternal intonation that so irritated Helga and which he himself mistook for persuasiveness. “You have to understand politics, at least a little: Churchill hates the communists. The Entente won’t make a deal with Stalin. The British, the French, they will stop the moment they see red flags at the Vistula. That is a law, Helga. It is a law of history… We have reserves…”

“Fritz!” Helga’s scream struck his ear so sharply he flinched. There was no SS officer’s wife in that scream anymore. There was only a mother beast saving her young. “The bombs don’t care about Churchill! They don’t care about Stalin! They don’t have eyes, Fritz! They fall from above! They don’t care what they fall on — a tank factory or Dieter’s crib! I am leaving. I am hanging up and taking the children.”

“Helga, I forbid…”

The line severed — not gradually, not fading out, but instantly, the way scissors cut, the way an umbilical cord is cut — and on the other side of the incision remained everything: the apartment, the coat rack, the smell of coffee, Dieter’s voice from the bathroom, Klaus with his open eyes, the two suitcases by the door. And on this side — silence. The hollow, final silence of a dead wire, the silence of a snapped thread, a silence without even a dial tone, because a dial tone is still a system, it is still order, still a connection, and here there was nothing. A severed edge. A crater. Emptiness.

“Helga?”

He pressed the cradle down. Released it. Pressed it again. Cranked the handle. Cranked it once more. The copper wire, seven hundred and ninety kilometers of stretched copper — was silent. Somewhere between Krakow and Breslau, or between Breslau and Liegnitz, or in an open field where a pole stood amidst an autumn furrow — somewhere out there, the thread had snapped: an artillery shell, sappers, a soldier’s boot, the wind, or simply the weight of the world bearing down on a thin vein — and the conversation was over.

Two suitcases. One for the children’s things. The other for documents and winter clothes.

The door at the end of the corridor flew open — it didn’t just open, it flew wide, slamming against the wall — and Walter Bremme, SS-Rottenführer of the signals corps, rushed toward him. The usually polished, pedantic signalman now looked as if he had been dragged by a rope over gravel. His tunic was unbuttoned, his eyes widened into two saucers brimming with pure, unadulterated terror.

“Herr Untersturmführer!”

“Bremme.”

“The Russians, Herr Untersturmführer,” and the words tumbled out of him out of order, like belongings tumbling from a suitcase opened on the run, “paratroopers — airborne drop — near Lublin — and near Radom — and, they say, near Krakow — at night — massive — no connection…”

“No connection with whom?”

“With anyone.”

That “with anyone” dropped into the corridor and lay there — it didn’t bounce, didn’t roll, it simply settled, filling the space between the walls, between the stucco molding and the floor, between the painted-over eagle and the portrait of the Führer on the opposite wall. It settled and became the very air they now had to breathe.

“Not with Army Group Headquarters,” Bremme continued, his voice acquiring the flat drone of a man who has crossed over from panic into mere recitation. “Not with Berlin. Not with the Krakow commandature. The lines are cut. They’re cutting the wires, Herr Untersturmführer. They are — everywhere… General Guderian’s tanks are stalled without fuel — the supply trains are burning… The Poles have struck our rear — the remnants hiding in the forests have joined up with the Soviets… And in the west…”

Bremme swallowed hard.

“The French have crossed the Rhine, Herr Untersturmführer. They aren’t even shooting. They are just driving trucks down our autobahns. The English are already in Belgium… We have no troops there. The Reich is squeezed from three sides.”

“What about the Führer?” Fritz asked. “Rastenburg?”

Bremme looked at him. And in that look — fleeting, sliding — was something Fritz had not seen on his subordinate’s face even once in all their months of service: not fear; fear was the norm, fear was their working environment, fear was what they manufactured. This was something else. Bewilderment. That specific, infantile bewilderment that descends when a man discovers that the floor he was walking on has suddenly vanished.

“Rastenburg has been silent since four in the morning, Herr Untersturmführer. They say — airborne drop. They say — paratroopers approaching the perimeter. But these might be rumors.”

“Rumors,” Fritz repeated mechanically.

He hung up the receiver. Slowly, meticulously — precisely onto the cradle — because meticulousness cannot end, meticulousness is the last thing left when everything else has crumbled to dust. The receiver rested on the cradle, and Fritz’s hands fell to his sides, and he stood in the corridor, straight-backed, buttoned to the collar, clean-shaven, flawless. He stood like a pole stands when the wire has already been cut, but the pole doesn’t know it yet.

He adjusted his tunic. Ran a palm over his hair — an automatic, morning, peaceful gesture, a gesture from a world where there is a mirror, a razor, a shaving brush, hot water, the scent of Kölnisch Wasser, a schedule on the wall — a gesture belonging to order. He existed for the sake of order. For the sake of every object being in its place, every man in his formation, every number in its column. So that contents would arrive and diminish, but always — always be accounted for.

And now, the numbers didn’t add up. Nothing added up. The world had turned out to be a meat grinder with stripped threads.

Fritz, without looking at the signalman, moved toward the exit. He stepped out onto the porch.

Lemberg lay before him — alien, made of stone, indifferent — a city that didn’t care who its master was: Poles, Germans, Russians, Austrians, Turks — it had outlived them all and would outlive these. The chestnut trees on the boulevard stood in their rust-red, copper foliage, and the September morning was clear and warm, and there was something obscene about this beauty — because the world had no right to be beautiful when everything was collapsing.

A column was moving down the street — westward. A retreat was not yet called a retreat: it was called a “regrouping,” an “alignment,” a “strategic withdrawal to pre-prepared positions.” But words have a breaking point, just like wire, and when a soldier is running, no word can turn a rout into a march.

Fritz looked at the column and thought about two suitcases.

Helga was probably already at the station. Or already on a train. Or the trains weren’t running — the lines cut, the wires, the paratroopers. No: to the west, towards Stettin, the lines were still intact. They had to be intact. Stettin was a port. It was the north. It was the Baltic. The Russians were in the east. They were bombing Spandau, not Stettin. Stettin was out of the way. Stettin was on the outside. Stettin was…

The distance from Lemberg to Stettin is eight hundred and sixty kilometers.

The distance from husband to wife is infinity.

He walked back into the building.

“Bremme!”

“Herr Untersturmführer?”

“A car. Fuel. Rations for three days. A map. We are leaving in an hour. The business trip is over.”

“To where, Herr Untersturmführer?”

Fritz didn’t answer. Not east — the Russians were there. Not west — the French were there. North?… To Helga. To the two suitcases by the apartment door on Schillerstrasse, if the suitcases weren’t already buried under plaster, if the door was still there, if the apartment was still standing.

He was left alone. He stood by the window, wearing a uniform that just yesterday had signified absolute power, and today signified an absolute target. He picked up the heavy Bakelite receiver again, pressed it to his ear. He listened to the silence — long and intently, the way a doctor listens to a stopped heart.

And in that silence — for the first time, barely audible, on the very fringes of his consciousness — something stirred for which he had no name. Not fear — he knew fear, fear was a tool, a working material, fear he knew how to dose and tabulate.

This was different. Something that made the world, already derailed, begin to slowly, unstoppably turn. Like a massive centrifuge. Spinning, spinning, until up became down, until the soldier became a refugee, until the man who compiled the lists was himself transformed into a hunted animal on someone else’s list.

But that would come later.

For now — there are the clouds. For now — the chestnut trees. For now — the sentry at the gates, finishing his cigarette with that greedy, doomed concentration of a man who suspects this cigarette is his last. For now — two suitcases, one for children’s things, the second for documents and winter clothes. For now — seven hundred and ninety kilometers of silent copper.

For now — there is the distance.

Chapter 2. Dust →
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