Limbo Zone. Chapter 7. The Chrysalis

Darkness had weight.

It lay upon him — dense, moist, woolen — a darkness that could be touched, if only his hands would obey, if only hands existed, if only he remembered what hands were. The darkness smelled of ether, iodine, sweat, and something sour and hospital-like — the smell of a place where the body ceases to belong to you and becomes an object, a specimen, a thing on a table, and someone — who? — touched this thing, and the thing did not object.

Fingers. Someone else’s fingers. They were unfastening — what? — buttons, hooks, a belt; they were removing — what? — skin, a shell, chitin — they were stripping, peeling, pulling, and somewhere above him, in a warm, yellow, lamplit fog, voices cawed — not words, but sounds, shards of words, German, yet distant, as if from beneath a thick layer of murky water:

“…Schneid den Ärmel auf… ruhig… halt ihn…” (…Cut the sleeve open… easy… hold him…)

And Fritz felt himself shedding — no, not a uniform, not a tunic, not broadcloth — he was shedding himself. Layer by layer. Rank by rank. Name by name. A collar tab — like a torn-off scale. A peaked cap — like a discarded calvarium. Boots — like cast-off hooves. The collar was being peeled away from the wound, and the wound breathed, and the air — cold, medicinal, hostile — entered his soft, unprepared, pulsing flesh, and the flesh responded with pain, but the pain was foreign, distant — it was not his skin that hurt, but the cocoon — and beneath it all — beneath the black cloth, beneath the belts, beneath the skin, beneath the cocoon — beneath all of it, there was — what?

A chrysalis.

Soft, pale, legless, blind — a creature that had not yet become what it would be — a creature consisting of pure possibility and pure helplessness — a creature in which wings already existed, but were still folded, still unspread, not yet knowing why. It waited. It waited for its transformation. But someone had cut it open prematurely, and it lay there — naked, flayed, with ichor on its frontal bone — and the transformation was underway, but in the wrong direction. The wrong way.

“…shrapnel… frontal bone… pressure is dropping…”

A voice. Another voice — thinner, younger, closer. Bremme? Bremme, alive — muttering something nearby, from behind a wall, or behind a curtain, or from within, from the same darkness, from the same cocoon:

“…Fritz… Herr… can you hear me…”

I hear you. I hear you, Bremme. But you are far away. You are behind glass. And the glass is cracked. And through the cracks — it is not light. Through the cracks…

Helga.

She is sitting on the bed. The room is bright, a Berlin room, with a high ceiling and white curtains. April. Thirty-two. You are standing by the bed — young, bewildered, in an unbuttoned tunic, and the nurse places a bundle in your arms. Warm. Living. Heavy, like a sentence. Klaus. The firstborn. A face — red, wrinkled, impossible — the face of a being just arrived from nowhere, from the same darkness in which you now lie — and Helga says:

“Take him.”

And you take him. With both hands, carefully, clumsily. He weighs — nothing. He weighs — everything. Your hands tremble. Helga laughs. The smell — milk, talcum, a starched diaper. The tender, floury scent of baby powder. You lower your face to this warm little bundle and think: This. This is why. Why there is order, and lists, and neatness, and the Reich — this is why: so that he might live. So that he might have a place to live. So that the world he entered would be clean.

Clean.

Talcum grated against his teeth.

No. It didn’t crunch. It grated. The floury scent of powder thickened, turned into a dry, chalky dust that clogged his nostrils — and beneath the dust, from under it, like dampness seeping through plaster, another smell emerged. The sharp, acrid, eye-stinging smell of chloride of lime. The bundle in his arms grew lighter. Lighter. Lighter still. The diaper was gray, not white — and not a diaper — and Klaus’s face, no — not his? — the face was dissolving, red into gray — and you are holding — what? — you are holding ash, warm, shifting, it flows through your fingers — and beneath the ash there is nothing, it is empty, the bundle is empty — and all around is not a ward, all around is concrete, bunks, three-tier bunks receding into a perspective that has no end — and a cry, not the cry of your son — another, many-voiced, cracked, dry — a cry coming from behind a heavy, steel door with a hermetic peephole…

Pain.

Real, physical, blinding — it flared in his left temple like a short circuit. Someone was touching his wound, and the wound answered, and the answer was white — a white flash in which the concrete vanished, the bunks vanished, the crying vanished — a flash like a magnesium explosion — and in that flash, the sea.

Blue, flat, shimmering.

Rimini. Thirty-seven. Hot sand burning the soles of the feet. A sanatorium for officers’ families — a white building on the hill. Helga in a bathing suit, Helga laughing, her straw hat blowing away, and Klaus — five years old — running after it along the water’s edge, and his legs — small, crooked, tanned — thumping on the wet sand, and the water foaming around those legs, and Helga shouting — Be careful! — and Fritz sitting on a deckchair with a newspaper, and the newspaper reporting on Nuremberg, and on the front page — columns, torches, thousands of faces — and Dieter sleeping in a pram in the shade, Dieter, who is almost two. And all of this is real. All of this — happened. The sun, the sand, Helga’s cry, Klaus’s legs in the surf. It was — and it will be. And for the sake of this — everything.

The sun grew brighter. Too bright. Unbearably, acidly yellow. The light scorched his retinas, burned out the shadows, and in this light, the sand beneath his feet began to change. The grainy, moist surface — the very one where Klaus had just left footprints — darkened, thickened, and from it, the way bones sprout from the earth, something else began to sprout. A shoe. A child’s shoe, worn, with a scuffed toe. Beside it, a pump. A woman’s, black, with a low heel. Beside it, another. And another. Footwear rising from the sand — dozens, hundreds — children’s sandals, men’s brogues, worn-out boots — mountains — and the wave licked these mountains, and every shoe was empty, and in every void was the absence of a leg — and the absence weighed more than the presence — and the mountains grew, and the sea rose, and the surf no longer foamed, it squelched, and Klaus…

Klaus was gone. The beach was empty. Only shoes — to the horizon.

The darkness came flooding back. A thick, reddish-brown darkness in which he was drowning—and someone’s hands held his head, and fingers smelling of carbolic did something to his temple — and the pain came in waves — and each wave brought an image and washed another away — and he could hold on to none of them…

Hay.

Pitchforks in his hands. A coarse linen shirt on his body. Hands — without gloves, calloused, foreign — the hands of a farmhand. He is standing by the barn, and the sun is low, autumnal, and the hay is yellow — no, golden — no, the hay is burning, burning from within, every straw glowing like the filament in a lamp — and he drives the pitchfork in and lifts a sheaf — and the sheaf disintegrates in the air, and the straws, slowly, slowly — in the weightlessness, in the airlessness of a dream — break apart and become not straw, but hair. Women’s hair. Severed. Blonde, dark, red, gray — thousands of strands flying in the yellow light — and he is knee-deep in them, pitchfork in hand, and the light fades, and he is gray, he is a shadow, he is — nobody. He is a man without a name, in a world where Helga is alive.

Just hay. Just a farmhand.

Voices behind the wall. Not hospital voices. Not military. Foreign, hoarse speech. Polish? Ukrainian? Bremme? Bremme, are you here? Bremme did not answer. Or he did, but the words were not his, the words were frequencies: noise, crackle, the white noise of a radio tuned to a wave that is not on the dial.

The square.

Berlin. Twenty-nine. Maybe thirty. A propaganda rally. Torches tear into the night sky, and the sky is red, and the crowd roars, and the roar merges into a pulse, powerful, hot, primal — “Sieg!” (Victory!) — and Fritz stands in the crowd, and he believes, and the faith is hot as a flame — a faith that makes one want to march, and shout, and live.

And then — her.

Not in the crowd. At the edge of the crowd. She isn’t listening. She has stopped. Simply stopped on the street to watch. Fair hair tucked behind an ear. A gray coat. A music folder in her hand — she was coming from the conservatory, or from a lesson, or — it doesn’t matter — she had stopped, and she was looking not at the rostrum, but at him.

At him.

And he looked at her. And the world tilted. It didn’t disappear — it tilted. Like a pendulum swings: at one point, the Thousand-Year Reich, the march, and the banner; at the other—a girl who had stopped to watch. And the pendulum swung, and he could not choose, and he did not choose, and he took both.

He took both. The torch in one hand. Her palm in the other. And both hands—were burning.

The flame of the torches flared up. The heat melted skin. The crowd no longer roared slogans. The crowd moaned. The roar turned into a low, industrial, continuous hum — the hum of giant fans, of exhaust shafts, the hum of a machine working underground. Red light — no longer torches — the reflection from the open maws of muffle furnaces. The fire hummed. The fire demanded.

Helga is still there. In the stream. She wears a coarse, baggy coat — a man’s, off someone else’s shoulder — and she moves with the stream, along a concrete chute — down, underground, to the showers — and she looks at him, directly, through the fire — with eyes full of bottomless, infinite, inhuman sorrow — with eyes that know — and her lips move, and through the roar of the flame:

“Fritz. Why didn’t you burn the portfolio?”

Silence. Absolute, deafening silence. The kind that comes when the heart stops.

And in this silence — not at once — first one by one, then in pairs, then in chorus—voices. Children’s voices. They weren’t singing. They were chanting — discordantly, faltering, interrupting each other, the way a nursery rhyme is shouted in a courtyard, the way a taunt is shouted, in time with footsteps shod in wooden clogs — and the clogs drummed on concrete, on stone, on bone…

Do not fear.
I am not the foe.
I am part of you,
And you are part of me.

The voices rang out — thin, glass-like — voices that did not know what Fritz knew, had not seen what he had seen — voices from a world where a rhyme is just a rhyme, where a song is just a song — or was it? — or were these the voices of those who knew everything — and sang — because there was nothing else left.

Do not fear.
I am not the foe…

The voices were approaching. Or — he was approaching them. The darkness thinned — red, then brown, then gray, then — gray with pink — like fog thins when the sun is not yet visible but already felt. And through the fog — a body: his own, a stranger’s, heavy — bandages on his head — the smell of iodoform — an aching, hot, pulsing pain in his left temple — and thirst, a thirst so great his tongue was dry, like cardboard — and his throat stuck together—and hands exist, hands obey — and fingers move — and beneath the fingers is fabric, coarse — not silk, not broadcloth — burlap, a bedsheet…

I am part of you,
And you are part of me…

He opened his eyes.

The world — swam. Outlines — blurred, colors — muted. The ceiling — wooden, dark, low — the ceiling of a farmhouse, or a hospital, or a monastery — and light — from somewhere to the side — dim, candlelight — and the first thing he saw — not a wall, not a face, not a lamp — the first thing he saw was a crucifix.

Wooden. Darkened by time, by smoke, by centuries — and on the wood, a figure, small, carved crudely, in a peasant fashion — a man with outstretched arms, with a tilted head. The head was tilted the way the head of one listening to something very quiet tilts. Or the way a head tilts when the neck is broken. He had seen this tilt. On the farm. On the sign. In a dream. In reality. Everywhere — the same angle. The same rhyme. The same impossibility.

The Crucified One looked down at him. Through lowered eyelids. With that same, boundless, firm, natural patience — the patience of stone, the patience of wood — the patience of the dead, who look upon those who forgot to die.

The wounds on the palms of the Crucified One were neat. Round. Just as round as the holes in the windshield of the Kübelwagen. Just as the bullet holes. The mandala — here, too.

Behind the wall — voices. Children’s. A rhyme. Or — a prayer. Or — a sentence.

Do not fear.

Fritz Lang lay on his back, in a room he did not recognize, beneath a crucifix that knew him better than he knew himself. Nearby, on a stool, stood a tin mug of water. He could not reach it. He could not.

He lay in the gap between two names. Between Lang and that other one, whose papers lay — where? in the pocket of a tunic that is no more? in a brown portfolio that is — where? — Between the uniform and nakedness. Between the chrysalis and that which it is destined to become. Between the torch and the palm. Between one world — and another.

In the gap it was quiet.

Quiet — and nothing.

And the crucifix watched.

Chapter 8. The Parish →
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