Limbo Zone. Chapter 8. The Parish

He woke in layers — rising from the bottom as if through water of different densities:

first, the dark, silty, thick water of delirium, where there is neither up nor down; then, murky, greenish water, where the direction of the light can already be guessed; then, bright, cold, transparent water, and finally — the surface… and you break through, and the air burns your lungs, and the world exists.

The world was a ceiling.

A wooden, dark, beamed ceiling that he had seen before, though he couldn’t remember when, a ceiling without a crack — and the crucifix — yes, the crucifix was in place: small, dark, with a tilted head, but now it was not looking at him, it simply hung there, an object among objects, wood among wood, and Fritz thought: It has grown tired of looking at me.

“You have come to.”

A voice to his left. Fritz turned his head, and the turn echoed with a dull, booming pain in his temple, the way a bell echoes if struck with an open palm — not a ring, but a moan, and there was something comforting in this moan, because pain meant a body, a body meant life, and life meant he was still here.

A man sat on a chair by the window. Thin, long, with a narrow, vertical face, a face drawn with a single line: forehead, nose, chin, no horizontals, no width — a face pointing upward, like a Gothic spire. Gray hair combed back. A clerical collar — a white strip on black, the only horizontal.

“My name is Schaefer,” the man said. “Pastor Martin Schaefer. You are in the Parish of St. Anne. Breslau.”

Breslau. The word dropped into his consciousness and remained there — heavy, motionless, and ripples spread from it: Breslau, Silesia, the highway, the forest, light through the canopy, glass, the mandala, Zimmer, blood, darkness. The ripples widened, weakened, faded.

“How long?” Fritz asked, and his voice was alien — not a voice, but a rustle, the sound a dry leaf makes when stepped upon.

“A little over three weeks. Today is October the seventeenth.”

Three weeks. Twenty-one days. Five hundred and four hours. Fritz calculated mechanically, calculated because counting is order, and order is what he knew. What he was.

“Shell shock. And the wound wasn’t deep,” Schaefer continued, in a voice accustomed to speaking to the unlucky. “A shard of glass. Frontal bone. You were picked up, taken to a hospital. But then came the infection. Dirt got into the wound. Fever. Delirium. The doctors didn’t think you would survive.”

Delirium. Klaus in his arms. Talcum. Chloride of lime. The sea. Shoes. Hay. Helga in the stream. The portfolio.

“The portfolio,” Fritz said. The word came out hoarse.

Schaefer nodded toward the corner of the room. There, on the floor, by the leg of the wardrobe, stood the portfolio — brown, leather, with a brass clasp, with the monogram KL; it stood the way things stand when they are set down and forgotten, stood and waited.

“You had it on you,” Schaefer said. “You were clutching it to your chest in your delirium. I had to pry your fingers open. I didn’t open it.”

“And the uniform?”

Schaefer looked at him. The gaze was not judgmental. Not sympathetic. The gaze of a man who had read one book for many years and learned to see a page in every face.

“I burned the uniform,” he said simply. “In the furnace. A couple of nights ago. The wool burned poorly. It smelled like scorched sheep.”

He paused.

“If a Russian patrol had found an SS uniform in my parish, they would have burned the church down along with me.”

Burned. Patrol. An image — murky, flickering: the creak of wheels, cobblestones, jolting, he was being carried on a cart, yes, on a cart, and he was covered—with what?—a sheet, a white, hospital sheet, and the sheet was pulled over his face, the way a sheet is pulled over… no, just covered, and he lay beneath this sheet, and Breslau, ruined, scorched Breslau, drifted by—no, he saw nothing, but he heard: the clatter of hooves, the creak of cartwheels, someone’s distant voice, and the smell: ash, plaster, wet brick, the smell of a city that a war had passed through and left behind, leaving ruins, silence, and a cart carrying a body covered by a sheet. Like a corpse. Like one of hundreds. No one checked the dead.

“Why?” Fritz asked. “Why did you take me in?”

“I am a pastor,” Schaefer said. “This is my parish.”

He didn’t add: “I save people.” He didn’t add: “I know who you are.” He didn’t add—anything. And in that nothing, there was more than in any word.

“I kept your papers.” Schaefer pulled an envelope from his pocket—crumpled, containing thin paper. “Hans Weber. Sales Representative. Bremen. I decided these were more necessary.”

Fritz took the envelope. His fingers — weak, doll-like — felt the paper. He looked at the name that was now his.

The days passed — slowly, the way days pass in places where time is measured not by clocks, but by a bell, and the bell of St. Anne tolled every three hours, and every tolling was an event, and every interval was an expectation, and Fritz lay there and listened to the bell, and ate what Schaefer brought: thin soup, black bread, sometimes boiled potatoes, ate and felt his body returning to him — slowly, reluctantly, the way a runaway cat returns, one that cannot be rushed.

Schaefer came twice a day — morning and evening. He sat on the same chair, in the same pose, with the same vertical patience, and spoke. He didn’t tell stories — he spoke the way a chronicle speaks, the way an annal speaks, in an even, dispassionate voice that held neither triumph nor despair, a voice stating facts that were too large for emotions.

The facts arrived in doses, like medicine that cannot be taken all at once.

On the third day, when Fritz was able to sit up, leaning against a pillow, Schaefer said:

“Göring has fled.”

He said it the way one might say, “It started raining.” Without surprise. Without commentary.

“On the seventh of October. Flew out of Berlin on a private plane. Russian tanks were already entering Potsdam. Some say Sweden. Others say Spain. Still others say the plane was shot down over the Baltic.” Schaefer shrugged. “The rat abandoned ship. Rats always abandon ship. That is not news. The news is that the ship continues to sink without the rat.”

A sound outside the window: far away, in another part of the city, an engine was running. Clattering, Soviet, diesel. This sound was already as familiar as the bell.

“Keitel signed the capitulation. Unconditional. On the twelfth of October. In Berlin. In the presence of the Russians, the British, and the French. The Party is dissolved. Banned. The symbols are banned. The salute is banned. Everything that was —” he swiped his palm through the air, a gesture like wiping chalk from a blackboard. “Everything that was — never was.” And in his voice there flickered something — not remorse, but rather the aftertaste of last year’s ash; he too had stood in the square, he too had believed, he too had nodded when the sermons proclaimed: “God has sent us the Führer,” and now, wiping the chalk from the board, he was wiping away his own handwriting too.

Fritz listened. Listened the way a patient listens to a diagnosis, without interrupting, without objecting, because one cannot object to a diagnosis. Every word of Schaefer’s landed on his consciousness the way earth lands on a coffin lid: evenly, rhythmically, shovel by shovel. The Reich. Capitulation. The Party. Banned. Shovel — earth — coffin. Shovel — earth — coffin.

“And who… who shot at us?” Fritz asked.

Schaefer smiled a bitter, bloodless smile. In that smile lay the entire theology of a lost war.

“Our own. Germans. Field gendarmerie. Units that had lost contact with headquarters. On a dirt road, in the forest, a military car with no markings — they fired at the sound of the engine. Took you for Russian saboteurs. The snake devoured its own tail. You know?”

Fritz remained silent.

“The driver?”

“Died on the spot. He was buried. Here, in the cemetery of St. Anne. I read a prayer. I didn’t know his name. There were no papers. Only a number.”

“Zimmer,” Fritz said. “Kurt Zimmer.”

Schaefer nodded. He took out a notebook, thick, with an oilcloth cover, and wrote it down. Fritz saw that there were other names in the notebook, rows of names, columns, and Fritz didn’t need to look into those columns to know what they looked like, even, neat, the names of people who were brought in, and buried, and over whom a prayer was read without knowing who they were. He knew these columns. He had compiled such columns himself.

“And the radioman? Bremme?”

“The young one? Fair-haired?” Schaefer nodded. “He was here. For two days. While you were… absent. Safe and sound. Then he left. To the west. With the last column. Said he would try to reach the British.”

Zimmer is dead. Bremme is gone. Each in his own direction. Each into his own list. The signalman who listened to the void went west. The driver who held the wheel lay in the earth. And the one who sat between them lay on a cot in the sacristy, with a stranger’s name in an envelope and a portfolio by the wall.

On the fourth day, Schaefer said:

“Goebbels.”

And fell silent. And the silence lasted a long time, and in the silence there was something Fritz had not noticed in the pastor before — not disgust, but stupor, the stupor one feels when a familiar object turns out to be something else entirely.

“His wife, Magda…” the pastor’s voice trembled, “poisoned all six of her children. Laid them out in a row, like dolls.”

The bell struck beyond the wall. Three in the afternoon. The toll hung in the air and slowly melted away.

“Laid them out in a row,” Schaefer repeated. “Six dolls. Dressed, hair combed. Tucked in… She herself as well.”

Dolls. A chrysalis. Fritz lay there and stared at the ceiling. Six children. Laid out in a row. Dressed, hair combed. And he thought — not about Goebbels’ children, no, he thought about Klaus and Dieter, about two suitcases, about the train to Stettin, Helga leaving with the children, or Helga staying in Berlin, or Helga — no, no, no…

“And him?” Fritz asked, and his own voice sounded to him like a voice from a radio — distant, flat, devoid of depth.

“Surrendered to the Russians,” Schaefer said. “Or defected. Or was taken. The versions differ. But he is in Moscow. And they say he is working. In his specialty.”

In his specialty. Propaganda turned out to be a trade that did not require loyalty. The man who had built a temple out of words discovered that words were a building material, not a foundation, and moved his workshop to another site.

Fritz thought: And my blueprints? My calculations? Can they be moved — too?

And immediately he yanked the thought back, the way one yanks a hand from a hot stove. No. Not like that. Not about that. Not now.

“The country is torn apart,” Schaefer continued the next day, and his voice returned to its chronicling evenness. “Torn apart. The Red Army is stationed all across East and Central Germany. Breslau is the Russian zone. Berlin too. The West is occupied by the French and the British. And between them,” he traced a finger through the air, drawing an invisible line, “between the Elbe and the Weser — neutral territory. The gray zone, as they call it. Hamburg, Hanover, Bremen.”

Bremen. Fritz looked at the envelope lying on the nightstand. Hans Weber. Sales Representative. Bremen.

“Neither Russians nor British,” Schaefer continued. “Neither law nor order. Smuggling, black market, famine. They say,” and here his voice took on the tone used for rumors that might turn out to be true, or might be fiction. “They say Adenauer has been appointed commandant. The former burgomaster of Cologne. Remember him? The one they removed in thirty-three. An old man. A Catholic. Hated the Party. If it is true, then the Allies are looking for Germans with clean hands.”

Clean hands. Fritz looked at his hands again, resting on top of the blanket. Thin. Pale. As if there had been no summer this year. The hands of a man who had lain in a delirium for three weeks. Callus-free. The hands of an adjutant. The hands of one who compiled lists, but never did anything himself.

Clean hands.

On the sixth day — or the seventh, the days tangled like threads in a ball from which the middle had been pulled — Fritz stood up for the first time.

The world swayed. His legs — alien, thin, the legs of a chrysalis — could not hold him, and he grabbed the headboard, and stood the way a drowning man stands, clinging to debris, and the room around him was small, whitewashed, with one window, beyond which was a courtyard, and beyond the courtyard — the wall of the church, red brick, Gothic pointedness—and there was the sun, October, low, pale — a sun that no longer warmed, but only illuminated, and Fritz stood, and held on, and looked out the window, and in the window was — the world.

A world in which there was no Reich.

A world in which the word «Reich» had become what the red lines on a map become: paint. And the flags were paint. And the columns were paint. And the torches were paint. Everything that had been — was paint on paper that had been burned. Just as the uniform was burned.

Just as everything was burned.

Except the portfolio.

The portfolio stood by the leg of the wardrobe. Brown leather. Brass clasp. KL.

Fritz looked at the portfolio. The portfolio looked at Fritz.

He turned back to the window.

And then — voices.

Children’s voices. From the courtyard. Thin, ringing, and Fritz approached the window, holding onto the wall, and saw: children. Five or six of them — small ones, and older ones, in clothes that didn’t fit, in borrowed shoes, in borrowed coats — refugee children, debris children, and they stood in a circle and chanted — discordantly, interrupting each other, faltering and starting anew:

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

A wave ran down his skin — from the back of his neck downwards, along his spine: not goosebumps, but a cold, a deep, bone-chilling cold that came not from the outside, but from within — from the place where three weeks ago, in the dark, in the cocoon, these same voices had sung to him, sung for him, and he had heard them, and he had not known whether they were part of his delirium, or if the delirium was part of their song.

The children continued. Stamping their feet — in time, out of time, and their shoes drummed on the stone slabs of the courtyard. And then — other words. New ones. Or old ones, but — ones he hadn’t heard in his delirium:

Here is the Devil, standing in my way,
Within his eyes, my own pain I descry,
Born of the dark, born of my own clay…

Fritz recoiled from the window. The hand holding the wall slipped. He almost fell.

…born of my clay, born of the darkling sky.

“What is that?” he asked in the evening, when Schaefer brought the soup and bread. “The children. The song. From where?”

Schaefer placed the bowl on the nightstand. He winced — a quick, involuntary movement.

“Refugees. From Danzig. They come every morning. We feed them. Soup, bread, whatever there is. Some are orphans. Some are lost.”

“But the song. Where did they get it?”

“Devilry,” Schaefer said. “I don’t know. No one taught them. They started singing it last week. As if the wind brought it. I tried to wean them off it.” He shook his head. “Useless. Children absorb madness faster than we do. They sing about the devil the way they play hopscotch — without understanding what they are jumping on.”

Born of the dark. Born of my own clay.
Within his eyes, my own pain I descry.

Fritz lay on the bed and listened to the voices outside the window fading, fading but not disappearing, just as an echo does not disappear in an empty church.

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

He? Are they singing about him? Or is he singing about them?

On the tenth day, Fritz said:

“I need to go to Berlin. My wife. My children. They are in Berlin. Or in Stettin. I need — to go.”

Schaefer sat on his chair. Vertical. Motionless.

“The Russians have restored railway service,” he said. “Breslau to Berlin. Trains are running. Not every day. The Russians need the tracks to haul machine tools and equipment from our factories eastward. They attach passenger cars to the freight trains. Main station.”

He paused.

“But be careful, Herr Weber,” he pronounced the name evenly, without emphasis, without quotation marks, the way one pronounces names that have been accepted, “there are patrols at the stations. Russian, Polish. They check. Papers.”

He looked at Fritz’s hands, resting on top of the blanket.

“They look at the hands. Scars. Calluses. Hands—speak.”

Fritz looked at his hands. Thin. Pale. Smooth. Callus-free. Scar-free. The hands of a man who never did it himself.

“Your hands are clean,” Schaefer said. “Perhaps too clean.”

And in those words — in the tone with which they were spoken, was everything. There was — “I know who you are.” There was — “I am not asking.” There was — “Leave.” There was — “God be your judge.” All of this — unspoken, hung in the room the way the smell of incense hangs, and Fritz heard it. And he did not answer.

“Thank you,” he said. “For everything.”

Schaefer stood up. Walked to the door. Stopped.

“Herr Weber.”

“Yes?”

“The portfolio.” He didn’t turn around. “I don’t know what is in it. I don’t want to know. But whatever is in there — leave it. I will burn it.”

“I will think about it,” Fritz said.

Schaefer nodded. Walked out. The door closed.

The portfolio stood by the leg of the wardrobe.

On the twelfth day, Fritz Lang, alias Hans Weber, a sales representative from Bremen, a Protestant who hadn’t served, got up, dressed in the clothes Schaefer had brought: worn gray trousers, a dark jacket, a collarless white shirt, an overcoat — almost black, a little too big, off someone else’s shoulder, and walked out of the room.

In the hallway — silence. The smell of incense, damp stone, old wood.

He stopped at the door.

The portfolio stood by the leg of the wardrobe. Brown leather. Brass clasp. KL. Inside—a file. Blueprints, calculations, recommendations. A project. His project. His—everything.

Schaefer had said — leave it, I will burn it.

Helga — from the smoke: why didn’t you burn it?

Klein — from Oświęcim, from another life: burn it tonight.

Fritz stood and looked at the portfolio. And the portfolio looked at Fritz.

He picked it up.

The portfolio was heavier than he remembered. Or his arm was weaker. Or what lay inside had acquired a fraction of its weight because the world for which these blueprints had been drawn was over, and the blueprints had become what a map of a nonexistent country becomes: paper, very heavy paper.

But he picked it up.

To burn it — meant to cease being who he was. To take it — meant to remain.

He took it.

He walked out into the courtyard. An October morning —gray, damp, smelling of smoke and wet stone. The church courtyard was empty. The children were gone. Quiet. Only somewhere beyond the wall — an engine, diesel, Soviet, clattering, and somewhere — voices, and somewhere — life, which continued, even though everything that had been, was over.

Fritz pressed the portfolio to his chest — a gesture that was no longer habit but instinct, the same gesture with which one presses a child to one’s breast, and started walking.

To the station. To the train. To Berlin. To Helga. To the two suitcases.

Behind him, in the sacristy, the crucifix looked at the empty bed. With patience. With the eternal patience of wood, which knows that everyone leaves.

Chapter 9. The Platform →
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