Limbo Zone. Chapter 4. Smoke

The field opened up suddenly — the way a wound opens when a bandage is removed: in one motion, without warning, without preparation.

The dirt road curved out from behind a grove, and the grove was gone, and in its place space emerged. Flat, brown, stretching to the horizon — and in this space, scattered with the generosity with which war scatters its gifts, lay things.

Fritz asked Zimmer to stop the car. They stood on the shoulder and looked.

Closest of all was a Kübelwagen, just like their own, only turned inside out by fire. The chassis — black, twisted, reared up as if the iron had tried to flee the heat at the last moment and frozen in that impulse, in that convulsion of escape. A little further — an Opel Blitz truck, overturned on its side, the steering wheel protruding from its cab, bare as the skeleton of a clock from which the mechanism has been removed. Even further — a tank. A light Pz.II, a machine for parades and intimidating peasants. It stood in the middle of the field, its turret blown off and lying three meters away, turned toward the sky with its muzzle like an overturned cup drained to the dregs.

But this was not the main thing. The main thing was the horses.

They lay everywhere — dozens, perhaps more — in the postures in which death had caught them: on their sides, on their backs, with legs outstretched, as if they continued to gallop in some subterranean space where they had been dragged down along with their riders. Some were perfectly intact — light bays, black-browns, dapple grays. Their coats still gleamed with morning dew, the wind ruffled their manes, and one might have thought they were merely sleeping, were it not for their bloated bellies. Huge, taut as drums — bellies in which death had already begun its work, its own bookkeeping, its accounting of debit and credit.

The locals—peasants, men and women in gray homespun clothes — were dragging the carcasses to two bonfires burning at the far edge of the field. Closer to them, by the forest, the long, fresh scar of a mass grave lay black — that was where they were pulling the Uhlans. Someone had thrust a birch cross, knocked together from two poles, into the foot of the grave, and on the crosspiece hung a cap — a four-cornered Polish rogatywka with a tarnished eagle. It hung there the way things hang on a coat rack in a hallway when the master has stepped out for a moment.

Fritz looked at the rogatywka. The eagle on it looked back at Fritz with the blind, stamped gaze of cheap metal.

Fritz thought: they charged tanks. On horseback. With sabers. They knew it was pointless. They knew a saber does not pierce armor, that a horse does not outrun a shell, that cavalry in nineteen thirty-nine is suicide — a beautiful, useless, absolutely aesthetic death.

But they charged.

There was something in this that Fritz did not understand and did not want to understand. Something that did not fit into any column, into any cell of his calibrated world. It was the opposite of accounting. The opposite of calculation. The opposite of everything he believed in. They charged the tanks because… what? Because they had to? Because of the motherland? Because of honor? Words that usually provoked a light, squeamish irony in Fritz—because in his world, “motherland” was a supply schedule, and “honor” was a paragraph in the regulations.

Here, in this field, next to the dead horses and the birch cross, these words suddenly acquired a terrifying density they had never possessed before. In this tableau of ruin lay its own flawless, mathematical completeness: hot flesh challenging cold, stamped metal—and the metal tearing that flesh apart, only to choke on it.

To kindle the fires, the peasants were using diesel fuel from the destroyed trucks and automobile tires. The fire roared, greedily devouring organics and rubber. A thick, oily smoke rose into the sky, and from it, large, greasy flakes of soot fell onto the road.

One such black feather drifted down onto the sleeve of Fritz Lang’s black tunic.

He stared at this smudge of soot, and suddenly the sound of crackling tires began to recede. The color black in his eyes lost its density. The oily flake of soot suddenly slowed its dance and began to lighten. Before Fritz’s eyes, the black soot transformed into blindingly white, weightless ash.

It fell quietly, solemnly, like the first December snow. This ash no longer smelled of diesel. It emanated a subtle, terrifyingly familiar, sweetish aroma — the smell of burnt sugar, almonds, and human hair. White flakes settled on his cap, on his shoulders, on the windshield of the Kübelwagen. Fritz held out his palm. A white snowflake touched his skin and melted, leaving no dirty trace, leaving only the sensation of absolute, surgical cleanliness.

Fritz blinked. The white snow vanished. The oily smudge was blackening his sleeve once more. He rubbed it with his finger — mechanically, the way one rubs a typo on a document that must be flawless — and the smudge smeared, but did not disappear.

“Bremme,” he said curtly, dusting off the fabric. “What’s on the frequencies?”

The signals man, sitting in the car, raised his head. His face, drawn after a night spent listening to the void, brightened slightly.

“There is something, Herr Untersturmführer. On our headquarters wave. Fragments, but they’re ours. German speech. Wehrmacht format. They are somewhere nearby. Twenty or thirty kilometers to the west. Maybe closer.”

“We need to get to the highway, Herr Untersturmführer,” Zimmer said from behind the wheel. “Two jerrycans of petrol. That’s maybe a hundred kilometers. And Stettin is as far as the moon.”

Fritz looked at the field one last time. At the smoke, at the fires, at the cavalry cap.

“We drive. We’ll find our people.”

They found them an hour later.

The column was parked on the shoulder of the highway. More precisely — not parked, but lying there, the way a wounded animal lies when it is not yet dead but has already ceased to resist. Peasant, requisitioned wagons with white crosses drawn in chalk on the sides. Harnessed to them were horses so exhausted they did not lift their heads. Soldiers sat on the carts, and these soldiers were — different.

Fritz had seen the retreating men yesterday: those were a mob, a herd, a mass that had lost its form. These men — had retained their form. Not in the sense of order and formation, but in the sense that a fragment broken from a statue retains its form: it is no longer a statue, but the line of the fracture reveals what it used to be a part of.

An Oberleutnant — Fritz didn’t catch his surname, or caught it and then lost it — was sitting on the running board of a medical Opel. He was smoking and looking at the sky with the expression of a man staring at the ceiling in a dentist’s waiting room: without hope, without fear, with a dull expectation of pain.

“Russians,” he said hollowly when Fritz introduced himself. “Near Zamość. A company of fast tanks and infantry. We lost all our equipment. All the armored cars.” He smirked, and the smirk was a crack in dry clay. “But we have petrol to drown in. Dead tanks don’t need fuel.”

He nodded toward a canvas-topped truck. Fritz saw the jerrycans. Even, green, stacked. Jerrycans that were supposed to feed iron tracks, and now fed only the void.

“Take as much as you need,” the Oberleutnant said. “You can’t fuel horses with petrol.”

Zimmer was already dragging jerrycans to the Kübelwagen — quickly, greedily, with that hungry agility with which drivers handle fuel when it turns into treasure.

“Where are you headed?” Fritz asked.

“West. Home,” the officer took a drag. “And you?”

“North. To Stettin.”

The Oberleutnant looked at him—long and hard, the way one looks at a man who has said something irreparably stupid.

“You can’t go north, Lang. The Red Army is in East Prussia. Tank wedges. A paradrop near Danzig. Rastenburg — did you hear?”

“We heard.”

“Then you know. All of Prussia is a cauldron. You can’t get through Warsaw. You’re a dead man if you head north. There’s nothing there now but the Russians and the Baltic Sea.”

He finished his cigarette. Flicked the butt. Crushed it underfoot — meticulously, as if it were the last cigarette butt on earth and had to be destroyed down to the final thread of tobacco.

“And another thing, Untersturmführer,” he lowered his voice, though there was no one around but the wounded sleeping on the straw. “Take off your uniform. The Poles are on the roads. Yesterday they shot up a field gendarmerie patrol near Tarnów. All of them. And hung them — upside down. On lampposts. If they see those runes,” he nodded at Fritz’s collar tabs. “They won’t ask for papers. They’ll just string you up.”

Fritz nodded. He said nothing.

The jerrycans were loaded. Zimmer started the engine. The Kübelwagen pulled out and drove west along the highway, past the column, past the wagons, past the horses with lowered heads. Fritz looked at the wounded, at their browned bandages, at the hands dangling from the sides of the carts. And every hand swayed in time with the movement, and the swaying was measured, rhythmic, like a pendulum. Creak-creak. In-out.

They had driven about two kilometers from the column. The highway was empty. The sky was empty.

And then came the sound.

At first, distant, on the edge of hearing. A hum, like the hum of a swarm of bees, like the hum of high-voltage wires, like the thrum of blood in the ears when the heart beats too fast. The hum grew. Approached. It filled the entire sky, from horizon to horizon. Fritz turned around and saw them.

Planes.

They were flying low, in formations of three. Blunt-nosed, twin-engine, with red stars on their wings. Flying evenly, confidently, with that mechanical inevitability of a conveyor belt that knows no doubts. And they were not heading for the Kübelwagen, nor for the empty highway — they were making a run on that very column of wagons with crosses that Fritz had just left behind.

“Brake!” Zimmer barked. “Off the road!”

He wrenched the steering wheel with a crunch, and the Kübelwagen flew off the asphalt, plowed through the ditch, bounded over the embankment, and crashed into a strip of woods. Branches whipped against the windshield. The engine stalled.

Silence fell. And then — not silence.

Then came the roar. Heavy, visceral, felt not with the ears but with the diaphragm, the stomach, the place where fear lives. The roar of bombs tearing the earth, tearing the wagons, tearing the horses — those very horses that had just been standing on the shoulder with lowered heads. Fritz, pressed to the ground, face in the grass, face in the black soil, heard everything: the muffled thuds, the screams, and the neighing. The neighing of horses that was not a neighing but a shriek, and this shriek was human, though it did not come from humans.

Silence fell again. Ringing.

Fritz lifted his head. Bremme lay nearby, hugging the radio the way a child hugs a pillow during a thunderstorm. Zimmer sat in the car, clutching the steering wheel with whitened fingers.

There, behind them, where fifteen minutes ago the column had stood, smoke was rising. Black. With black flakes. The same smoke as on the field with the cavalry, but now another smell was mixed into it — a smell from which Fritz turned away. That very petrol the Oberleutnant had offered them to take had become his funeral pyre.

Fritz did not look. There was no pity in him. There was only a cold, detached understanding: the machine of which he was a part was being destroyed by a more perfect machine.

“Those are Katiuskas,” Bremme said. His voice was flat, dead, the voice of a man who speaks only to keep from screaming.

“What?” Zimmer never took his eyes off the smoke.

“Katiuskas. That’s what our pilots in Spain called them. The SB frontline bomber. Tupolev. They’re faster than our fighters. You can’t outrun them. A Russian woman’s name.”

“A woman’s name,” Zimmer repeated, and in his voice was that emptiness where words cease to mean anything.

Fritz Lang was silent.

He looked at the black, greasy smoke rising over the highway. And in his mind, another smoke arose once more. White, even, methodical. The two smokes, black and white, mingled, and the line between them grew razor-thin. The ash needed a hearth. It needed a place where Fritz could become what he was destined to become.

He was silent for a long time. A minute. Two. Then he adjusted the collar of his tunic.

“Start the car, Zimmer.”

“Where are we going, Herr Lang?”

“To Upper Silesia. Past Kraków.”

His fingers had stopped trembling.

“To Oświęcim,” Fritz added. “There are old Austrian barracks there. A railway junction. They won’t reach there. Our people are there.”

He pronounced the name the way one pronounces the name of the only saint still capable of hearing a prayer.

The Kübelwagen crawled out of the tree line, pulled onto the highway, and turned west.

Behind them — smoke. Ahead — the road. And the road led to Auschwitz.

Chapter 5. The Blue Dress →
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