Limbo Zone. Chapter 6. The Mandala

The road to Breslau was like a severed artery, through which blood no longer flowed in one direction, but spilled outward in jagged, chaotic spurts.

The fine-tuned, flawless machine of the Reich, whose symmetry Fritz Lang had once secretly admired, had disintegrated into atoms. The chaos, however, had its own system, its own perverted bookkeeping. Soviet paratroopers and sabotage groups, dropped from the sky, had acted like a deadly virus, severing wires and blowing up bridges. And every severed wire bred ten rumors, every rumor bred a hundred orders, and every order contradicted the last. The German army, built solely to move forward — a machine with no reverse gear — was now spinning in place, like a blind beast that had lost the scent.

The Kübelwagen maneuvered through this stream of decaying flesh and dirty broadcloth, making its way northwest. Fritz sat in the front seat and watched the road, and the straight line soothed him, the way a ruler soothes, the way a blueprint soothes, the way anything devoid of curvature soothes. Another hundred kilometers. Beyond Breslau lay Liegnitz. Beyond Liegnitz — Cottbus. Beyond Cottbus — Berlin. Helga. The children.

Two hours into the journey, the horizon spoke.

The cannonade began not as an event, but as a sound: low, distant, on the edge of hearing. The sound splintered the air, making the needles on the dashboard vibrate. Ahead, above the line of the road, smoke was rising rapidly. Neither black nor white. Gray. The dusty, mundane smoke of battle, in which gunpowder, petrol, earth, and human meat were mixed — a smoke with no color, because color is a luxury, and battle is economy, and in battle everything burns down to an identical, indistinguishable grayness.

“There’s a battle ahead, Herr Untersturmführer,” Zimmer’s voice was dry and strained. “The highway is cut.”

“Turn right,” Fritz ordered, coldly assessing the geometry of the smoke. “Onto the dirt road. We’ll bypass it in an arc.”

Zimmer wrenched the steering wheel, and the car veered off the Prussian highway onto a dirt track leading away from the cannonade. Away from the smoke. Away from the battle.

The dirt road dived into the forest. The trees stood in a dense wall, their branches intertwining overhead to form a gloomy, green tunnel where the sunlight fell to the ground in sharp, slanting blades. These patches on the road shifted, and the earth itself seemed alive, breathing, like the hide of a beast.

Silence reigned here. But it was not that benevolent, golden silence of the autumn garden that Fritz had seen yesterday in Oświęcim. It was the silence of a predator holding its breath. The silence of the second between inhaling, and not inhaling. Between not yet, and already.

An ambush has no prelude. Death, when it comes from behind the trees, is devoid of theatricality; it is absolutely functional and therefore terrifyingly beautiful in its suddenness.

It all happened in a fraction of a second, but for Fritz Lang, time suddenly lost its fluidity. Time became glass, and the glass shattered.

At first, it wasn’t a sound. At first, there was an impact — the dry, sharp crack of the Triplex bursting. The windshield in front of Fritz’s face ceased to be a transparent barrier. The sound came later.

The glass did not simply crack. It bloomed. The bullets that stitched through it left perfect, round holes, from which a blindingly white, frosty web of cracks sprayed in all directions with the speed of thought. For one imperceptible instant, the glass transformed into an exquisite crystal mandala, into a frozen flower of absolute violence. And then this flower exploded.

Millions of glass splinters, sparkling in the rays of the sun breaking through the canopy, flooded the cabin in a downpour of diamond dust. They flew slowly, unnaturally majestically, the way snow flies, the way ash flies, settling on the black broadcloth of his tunic and the skin of his face.

Fritz turned his head to the left.

Zimmer no longer belonged to the world of living, meaningful geometry. An invisible force struck him in the chest. The driver’s body jerked backward unnaturally, like a puppet, pressing into the seatback. His hands tore away from the steering wheel, soaring upward in a gesture of antique supplication. For a second, he froze in this pose — a man crucified by the speed of a bullet, with childish, pure astonishment in his wide eyes.

And then physics took its toll. Life left Zimmer’s body faster than air escapes a punctured tire. His muscles lost their tension, and he slumped forward heavily, limply, his chest collapsing onto the steering wheel.

A horn blast tore through the silence of the forest.

The car jerked, slipped out of the rut, and with a dull crunch buried its bumper into the trunk of an old pine. The stalled engine coughed one last time. The horn, crushed beneath the driver’s dead weight, kept wailing — monotonous, unbearable — as though it were not metal but a wounded animal screaming its own death. Behind him, in the passenger seat, someone was breathing with a wet, hoarse rasp.

Fritz sat motionless. He felt no pain. Pain requires awareness, and his awareness had now narrowed to the size of a single point.

He felt only warmth. Something thick, oily, and unbearably sticky was flowing down his cheek, seeping behind his collar, soaking the silk. He parted his lips to take a breath, and a heavy, salty drop landed on his tongue.

The taste was unmistakable. It was the primal, pure taste of iron. The taste of old coins forgotten at the bottom of a pocket. The taste of rust. The taste of that very red liquid he had spent years converting into dry columns of statistics, but which now, by some absurd error, turned out to be his own.

The world began to lose its outlines. The golden light piercing through the trees dimmed, shifting to sepia, and then the edges of his vision were rapidly veiled by a thick, velvet darkness. The forest, the shattered glass, Zimmer on the wheel — all of it folded up, the way a read file folder is closed. Page to page. The last thing Fritz saw was his own hand, raised to his face. A red palm, which had always been so clean.

The darkness became absolute. But his hearing still clung to reality.

Through the continuous, oppressive wail of the horn, Fritz heard the crunch of branches. Footsteps. Heavy boots stepping on autumn leaves. There were several of them. They were getting closer.

Fritz expected foreign speech. He expected Russians, Poles, French paratroopers. He expected the end. But the voice that rang out right nearby, right above his ear, was German. Harsh, barking, with a characteristic Prussian accent. The voice of a man accustomed to giving orders.

“Nicht schießen!” (Don’t shoot!) commanded the invisible man.

Glass crunched under a boot. Someone approached the left door. There was a dull thud, then the rustle of fabric — dead Zimmer was roughly yanked off the wheel. The horn’s wail choked and fell silent. And in the ensuing silence — in that silence that comes after, always after, Fritz heard:

“Der Fahrer ist tot. Der Funker lebt.” (The driver is dead. The radioman is alive), said a second voice, young and indifferent.

Then hands in stiff leather gloves seized Fritz by the lapels of his tunic. The smell of tobacco, leather belts, and foreign sweat hit his nostrils.

“Den hier… den Offizier. Den Funker auch. Ab nach Breslau!” (This one… the officer. And the radioman too. Off to Breslau!)

The hands yanked him forward. Fritz’s head flopped limply, and at that, the world finally ceased to exist for him. All that remained was the taste of iron and the word “Breslau”, echoing away into the void.

Chapter 7. The Chrysalis →
← Prologue