Limbo Zone. Chapter 3. The Farm

He was awakened by a touch — fingers on his shoulder, short, hard fingers smelling of gasoline and bread — and Fritz opened his eyes.

He opened his eyes — and saw himself.

He was hanging.

He hung in the aperture of the sky, within a frame composed of two blackened posts and a crossbeam — hanging, and his head was positioned incorrectly, tilted, like the head of a person listening to something very quiet, something rising from beneath the earth. But he wasn’t listening; he couldn’t listen, because his neck was broken, and from beneath the rope — coarse, hempen, the kind used to tie bales in the camp workshops — a tongue protruded. A blue, swollen, obscene tongue that would never again issue an order, a recommendation, or a single word.

And the face, his face, was his own: the same jawline, the same forehead, the same eyes. But the eyes were open and looking down at him, sitting in the car — looking not with reproach, or with pity, but with patience, with the infinite, mineral patience of a stone that knows that everything, sooner or later, must fall.

The hanged man swayed. The rope creaked. The creaking was measured, rhythmic, like a pendulum, like a metronome, like the clatter of train wheels going in one direction: creak-creak, creak-creak, in-out, debit-credit. And every creak was a word, and the word was one, and the word was his name — not the one written on the certificate, not “Weber,” no, but the other one, the real one, the one the rope knew.

Behind the hanged man’s back was not the sky. A fence. A brick fence, long and institutional, and near the fence — something he couldn’t quite make out, and from this “something” came a scent — no, not that one yet, that one hadn’t arrived — but the scent already stood in the air, the way a storm stands half an hour before the first lightning strike.

“Herr Untersturmführer.”

Fingers on the shoulder. Gasoline and bread.

“Herr Untersturmführer, wake up.”

Fritz blinked. He blinked again. He rubbed his eyes — with his knuckles, hard, painfully, pressing reality back into his sockets.

The hanged man was gone.

Before the car rose a gate. A wooden arch, darkened, lopsided, with two posts on either side. A sign had once hung from the crossbeam — on rusted chains, two chains — but the right chain had snapped, and the sign dangled by the left one alone. It was tilted the way a broken neck tilts. On the sign — letters, half-erased: “…sky khutir.” Just a sign. Just the wind. Just a chain.

Creak-creak. In-out.

“Herr Untersturmführer,” Zimmer stood by the open door. “There’s a farm here. The gates aren’t locked. It’s getting dark. Shall we stay the night?”

Fritz looked at the sky. It was the color of cooling lead. The sun had left without saying goodbye — the way one leaves a room where something irreparable has happened. September twilight crawled in from the east — the direction from which everything was now crawling: tanks, paratroopers, fear.

“Very well,” Fritz said, wiping clammy sweat from his forehead. “Drive in.”

They entered the yard.

The farm was of the sort that stands in Galicia from century to century, outlasting empires the way a boulder outlasts glaciers: not by resisting, but simply by — remaining. A long, whitewashed house with a thatched roof blackened by rain. Outbuildings — a stable, a shed, a hayloft — arranged around the yard like figures on a chessboard where the meaning of the game has long been lost, but the pieces remain standing. A well with a shadoof. An apple tree — knotted, old, with the last apples hanging in the twilight air like small yellow planets in a cosmos from which the light has been pumped out.

The owner came out onto the porch. In his hand, he held a kerosene Dietz lantern.

Yarema — he gave only his name, without a surname, as people do when a surname is no longer needed or no longer safe — was tall, gaunt, with a face weathered by wind and horilka to the state of old leather. His eyes — pale, faded like fabric held too long in the sun — looked out from under bushy brows without surprise. Three Germans in a military vehicle had come to him, one in the black uniform of the SS — and he was not surprised. He had seen worse. He had seen Austrians, and Poles, and Petliurists, and Reds, and Whites — they all came, and they all left, but the farm — it stood. His wife was dead, his children had left for Lemberg, vanishing in the crucible there, and now he lived here alone with a mute farmhand whom the guests never saw — he had already gone to sleep in the hayloft.

“To stay the night,” Fritz said in German, reinforcing the words with gestures. “One night.”

Yarema nodded. He understood German — not fluently, not rapidly, but the way one understands a language in which people giving orders have spoken to you for centuries: selectively, by intonation, by the tonality of the threat.

“It is possible,” he replied, and his voice was like the creak of the well-sweep: low, rusty, unlubricated by conversation. “The car behind the shed. No need to show it.”

They sat in the main room, at a table that had probably once stood in the kitchen. Fritz would remember this room — or perhaps he wouldn’t, or he would remember it incorrectly, the way things seen in a state where consciousness is already peeling away from reality like wallpaper from a damp wall are remembered. He would remember individual details, redundantly bright, as objects are bright in a fever:

The table — heavy, oak, scrubbed white, with deep gashes from a knife — a table at which people had eaten, and cut, and kneaded, and probably given birth — a table that had absorbed so many lives that it had become alive itself.

The plates — clay, coarse, with a thick brown glaze the color of last year’s honey. Four plates, though besides the host, only two guests sat at the table (Bremme had stayed in the car to man the radio).

The salo — sliced into thick, almost obscenely thick slabs, white with pink, pink with white. Salo in which the pink was not the color of meat, but the color of a sunset frozen in fat. And in the warmth of the room, it began to sweat slightly in small beads; it seemed a cross-section of human flesh, an anatomical specimen cast upon an oak block.

The bread — black, dense as peat, with a crust that crunched under the knife so loudly that Zimmer winced.

And the horilka.

The horilka stood in a bottle without a label, cloudy, yellowish, the color of that uncertain hour when it is not yet clear whether it is dawn or the reflection of a fire. Yarema poured it into four cups — clay, of the same brown firing as the plates. Four cups.

Fritz looked at the fourth one.

“Who?” he asked.

Yarema did not answer. He raised his cup, nodded — not to them, but somewhere toward the corner where a dark, soot-stained icon hung, the face of the Mother of God almost indistinguishable — and drank. They drank after him. The horilka struck the palate the way truth strikes: crudely, hotly, without warning. It smelled of scorched roots, raw earth, and wormwood.

They ate in silence.

The silence was thick, dense — the silence of people who have nothing to talk about because the things that need to be discussed cannot be spoken. Fritz ate the salo, and it melted on his tongue, its taste being exactly what the taste of the world should be — simple, fatty, real. And he couldn’t remember the last time he had eaten something real. In Oranienburg? In the officers’ mess, where schnitzel was served on schedule? But the schnitzel had been institutional, numbered, from a menu, while this salo belonged to no one, was no-man’s, salo that existed for itself, without a schedule, without accounting, without columns.

“We were waiting for you,” Yarema finally spoke, and his voice came from somewhere deep, from the place where horilka meets resentment. He spoke German slowly, picking his words like heavy stones. “We thought: the Germans will come — they will remove the Poles. There will be order. We waited a hundred years. Two hundred. The Austrians were here — nothing. The Poles were here — bad. We thought: the Germans come — it will be better.”

He fell silent. Poured another. Drank it without a chaser.

“And you — you gave us to the Russians. Traded us for something. And now you are fleeing yourselves.”

It was said without anger. With exhaustion. With that peasant exhaustion that accumulates over centuries and becomes not a feeling, but a landscape: hills, fields, patience. Yarema raised watery eyes to Fritz, examining his black uniform.

“The black uniform — it is the color of death, Pan Officer. But when death begins to run — it is funny. And terrifying. You cannot drive in this. It is a shroud. The Russians — they are near Lemberg. Perhaps already in Lemberg. The Poles — they have gone feral. They have weapons now. And your people are running. I have a radio. The last I heard: the Russians are moving on Warsaw. Your leader… the one with the mustache. He is dead. Then — noise. Only noise.”

Fritz did not answer. What could he say? That the Reich didn’t “give” them away? That the pact was a strategic move? That the Wehrmacht would restore order? Words — all words — were now the same as the red lines on the map: scrap paper. And Yarema knew it, and Fritz knew it, and this knowledge lay between them on the oak table.

“Turn on the radio,” Fritz requested quietly.

Yarema stood up and went into the other room. He returned with a receiver — old, wooden, pre-war, one of those that look like small churches: a semicircular top, a cloth speaker grille, a tuning knob, a yellow scale with the names of cities that now belonged to other countries or belonged to no one.

He placed the receiver on the table, between the plates. Turned it on. The tubes inside lit up — with a warm, living, amber light, like the eyes of a predator in the dark. The receiver hummed, warming up, the way a throat warms up before singing.

Then came the static.

That very noise: crackling, rustling, whistling — the voice of the atmosphere, the voice of a space in which all stations had gone silent. Yarema turned the knob slowly — Warsaw, Kraków, Berlin, Vienna — and every city answered identically: with noise, with void, with absence.

Suddenly, through this hum, a man’s voice broke through. He spoke rapidly, rhythmically, distant, as if broadcasting from the bottom of a well. But the words did not form meaning. It was not German, nor Polish, nor Russian. It was a language turned inside out, consisting of sibilant and guttural sounds pronounced backward. A language come from somewhere beyond the scale.

Yarema turned the knob. The voice drifted away. In its place — noise again.

And then, a song began.

It didn’t start from the receiver. It started from the silence — from that place where silence becomes so dense that sounds begin to emerge from it, the way faces emerge on an icon soot-stained by centuries of candles. A woman’s voice — deep, low, chesty. A voice that didn’t sing, but rather — remembered singing, remembered a melody it had heard once long ago, in another life.

The voice sang a cappella. No instruments, no accompaniment, no nothing — only the voice and the void, the voice and the darkness outside the window.

Llorando…

The language was unfamiliar — Spanish, or Ladino, or a language invented by this voice for this single song. The words were not important. The voice sang grief. Pure, distilled, absolute grief, from which everything had been evaporated: names, dates, circumstances. All that remained was that which makes something inside you clench, something that has no name, because anatomy does not know the organ that aches from another’s singing.

The voice filled the room. It penetrated the clay bowls, the white, sweating salo, the wood of the table. It was an illusion — a sound recorded on a piece of tape, broadcast from nowhere to nowhere, no hay banda — but the sadness was absolutely real.

Three men sat at the table — two Germans and one Ukrainian — and listened to a woman singing on a radio that shouldn’t have been working, on a frequency that shouldn’t exist.

Fritz felt as though he were falling again. That the rope on his neck was tightening. This invisible woman was singing for him. Tears, treacherous, hot tears he had forgotten since childhood, welled up in his eyes.

The horilka stood on the table. No one poured, yet the cups were full, all four of them. And Fritz looked at the fourth cup, standing before the empty chair — and the cup was full, and the chair was empty, and the voice sang.

Yarema crossed himself. Slowly, broadly, in the Orthodox fashion — from right to left, the opposite way.

The song ended. The static returned. The receiver’s tubes flickered and went out, though no one had turned it off.

Yarema silently poured the horilka. They drank in silence. The horilka was the same, but the taste had changed: now it was bitter, with the aftertaste of the water that sits at the bottom of a well where light has never fallen.

“Sleep,” the old man said. “You leave in the morning.”

Fritz lay on a bench in the main room, covered by his greatcoat. The ceiling above him was whitewashed, low, with a crack stretching from wall to wall like a front line on a map. He followed this crack, and it doubled, diverged, and in the rift between the two lines, in the gap between wakefulness and sleep, there stood a scent.

The scent of apples. The scent of salo. The scent of smoke from the stove. The scent of smoke. He fell asleep.

He was woken by Zimmer. The dawn — murky, milky, indifferent — seeped through the small window.

“Herr Untersturmführer. It’s time. The host gave us some potatoes. And bread. And this,” Zimmer showed a bottle. “Horilka. For the road.”

Fritz sat up. His head was heavy, dull as a stone — the horilka or the dream, or what stood between the horilka and the dream. Some crack into which he had fallen during the night and from which he had not entirely emerged.

He went out into the yard. The morning was cold, dewy, with that crystalline sharpness that comes at the end of September when summer has already died but autumn has not yet decided what to be. The Kübelwagen stood behind the shed; Bremme was already sitting in the back seat.

Fritz was walking toward the car, and then — out of the corner of his eye, on the periphery, where vision is not yet vision but only a hint — he saw movement.

Behind the barn, on the patch by the hayloft, a man with a pitchfork was tossing hay.

The farmhand.

The man worked steadily, habitually, the tines entering the hay and lifting it, and the hay flew. And the hay was wrong. It was too bright. Unnaturally, offensively bright — golden, radiant, acid-yellow, as if a small lamp of its own burned inside every straw. As if the hay were not hay, but yellow light that had taken the form of hay. And this light flew through the air, and the man with the pitchfork stood in this light, and Fritz could not look away. For a moment, it seemed to him that it was not straw on the pitchfork, but human hair.

The man was of medium height, sturdy, in a simple linen shirt. His face was not visible — he stood with his back turned — but something in his figure, in the set of his shoulders, in that pedantic, machine-like precision with which he drove the tines into the straw — was familiar. Not familiar — his own. As one’s reflection in a mirror is one’s own: you recognize it by that unique way your body occupies space.

The farmhand turned.

Fritz did not make out the face — the morning light was too murky — but it seemed to him, in that fraction of a second where only pure horror fits, that the farmhand had his face.

Fritz blinked. The delusion vanished. By the shed stood an ordinary old man in a dirty shirt, listlessly tossing ordinary, withered, gray autumn straw.

The light dimmed. The gold vanished. Just a man. Just a farmhand. Just hay.

“Herr Untersturmführer?” Zimmer called from behind the wheel. “Are we going?”

Fritz sat in the car. The door slammed shut. The engine coughed and started.

The Kübelwagen drove out of the yard, passed under the arch of the gate — the sign still dangled from its single chain, creaking softly in the morning air — and turned onto the backroad.

In the rearview mirror, the farm, the yard, the apple tree, and the figure of the man with the pitchfork standing in the gray fog — shrank, receded, until they finally vanished.

Until they became what everything left behind always becomes: a memory that does not yet know it is a verdict.

Chapter 4. Smoke →
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