Limbo Zone. Chapter 9. The Platform

The Breslau station was a crater. A cathedral from which God had been removed.

The glass vault — or what was left of it: the steel ribs of the arches protruding into the sky like the ribs of a beached whale, and between the ribs, where the glass used to be — the sky. A gray, October sky. Rain, fine and cold, sifted through the breaches straight onto the platform, onto the tracks, onto the people standing along the platform in that patient, bestial expectation that war makes second nature.

The train stood on track three. Freight cars — heavy, with red stars on the sides, and hitched to the train, like a cart to an ox, were two passenger cars, old, pre-war, with wooden benches and shattered windows boarded up with plywood. The Russians needed the tracks to haul machine tools, turbines, and entire factories eastward. And traveling in the opposite direction were those who were not factories and held no value.

Fritz stood in the crowd. The portfolio at his feet. The overcoat — someone else’s, a bit too large. The papers in his breast pocket, on the left, near his heart.

He picked up the portfolio and walked toward the platform.

He didn’t sneak. Didn’t hug the walls. Walked straight ahead — to meet them, and every step was a choice, and every choice was a step — and his legs carried him the way the legs of a man who has made up his mind carry him — not because he is brave, but because there is nowhere left to turn back to.

There were three of them. Greatcoats the color of autumn earth, rifles with faceted bayonets, red stars on their side caps. The sergeant — stocky, broad-faced, with a weathered, brick-like complexion and small, observant eyes — stood with his legs apart, and in his stance was the solidity of men accustomed to standing on soil, not on parquet. The two privates — younger, one merely a boy — were smoking, watching the crowd with a lazy, feline curiosity.

The sergeant raised his hand. His palm was broad, red, chapped.

“Dokument,” he said. The German word sounded heavy, unwieldy in his mouth — like a familiar melody played on an unfamiliar instrument.

Fritz took out his Kennkarte. Held it out. His fingers did not tremble. He was empty. Emptiness is the best camouflage. Emptiness doesn’t smell of fear.

The sergeant took the document. Turned it over. Turned it back. Brought it close to his eyes. His lips moved, slowly, syllable by syllable, the lips of a man reading in a foreign language the way one walks through a foreign city: carefully, groping his way.

“Ve-ber,” the sergeant pronounced. “Hans Ve-ber.” He looked up. “Bre-men?”

“Yes. Bremen. Sales representative.”

The sergeant looked. Then at his face. At his forehead. At the scar — pink, fresh, stretching from temple to eyebrow. He raised a hand and traced a finger across his own face — in a mirror image, from temple to eyebrow, and gave a questioning nod: what is this?

“A business trip,” Fritz said. “I was on a business trip. The war started — came under fire. On the road. By chance.”

The small eyes — neither cruel nor kind. The eyes of a man who lets dozens of faces pass through him every day, and every face is a story, and every story is a lie, and he knows it, and they know it, and the ritual continues because the ritual is order, and order is the only thing left.

“The portfolio,” the sergeant poked a finger. “Offen.” (Open).

Fritz placed the portfolio on the stone parapet. Snapped the clasp. The brass was cold. KL — two letters the sergeant did not read.

The portfolio opened.

On top was bread. Half a loaf of black bread wrapped in newspaper. Beside it, sausage — horsemeat, dark brown, smelling of garlic and smoke, in waxed paper, the sausage Schaefer had shoved into his hands in silence, because food for the road requires no words.

Beneath the bread and sausage — a folder. Gray, cardboard. The stamp — smudged out with ink, that morning, in the sacristy, smudged out meticulously, like a bookkeeper, but beneath the ink, if one looked closely, you could still make out: “Geheime Reichssache” (Secret State Matter).

The sergeant nudged the bread aside. Picked up the folder. Opened it.

Blueprints. Tables. Columns of figures. Neat handwriting. Floor plans — rectangles, corridors, entrances, exits. Capacity calculations. Ventilation. Sewage. Equipment specifications.

He held the folder the way one holds a book in an unfamiliar language, with respect for the object and a complete lack of understanding. Turned the pages. One. Another. A third. A thick, red finger tracing thin lines, neat rectangles.

“Was ist das?” he poked at a schematic. “What is this?”

And at that moment — voices.

They drifted from the side, from the station square, from behind a ruined wall, from a space that was neither inside the station nor outside it, from the gap, from the liminal space, and Fritz turned his head, and the sergeant turned his head, and both privates turned their heads, because the voices were loud, and strange, and unexpected, the way a bird’s song is unexpected amidst the ruins of a fire.

Children.

Five or six. In borrowed clothes, in borrowed boots. They were not standing in a circle. They were performing. It was a show.

A girl — about eleven or twelve, with short-cropped hair and a face where childhood and old age had already met and failed to part ways, sat on a wooden ammunition crate. In her hands, an accordion, black, peeling, with mother-of-pearl buttons, half of which didn’t work. She played — furiously, frenziedly, her fingers flying over the keys, the bellows pumping like the lungs of a drowning man — inhale-exhale, inhale-exhale — and the sound coming from this instrument was — what? Not music. Not noise. Something else, something that existed before language, when people didn’t speak but only screamed — and the scream was a prayer, and the prayer was a scream.

The rest sang along. Discordantly, roughly, shouting out the words the way one shouts a sentence:

In mirror’s surface, shifting, veiled in haze,
A shape appeared, though not a shape of mine.
And cold, keen fear, like dagger’s edge ablaze,
Pierced through my soul, a grief of dark design…

And a boy.

A boy of about seven, thin, with sunken cheeks and eyes that were too large for his face, eyes that had seen what children should not see. He was dancing.

No. What he was doing could not be called a dance, the way a convulsion cannot be called a dance, the way a seizure cannot be called a dance, the way St. Vitus’ Dance cannot be called a dance. But he moved, and his movements were rhythmic, and the rhythm was precise, and the precision was inhuman. His body jerked, contorted, fractured at the joints, his head tossed, his arms flew up and fell, his feet beat a sound out of the stone that was older than music. And in this fracture, in this scream of the body, there was beauty. The kind that hurts. The kind that does not heal, but wounds.

“I am your shadow,” creaked he with a leer,
“Your second half, the darkness of your core.
You hide the pain, the torment, and the fear,
But I have come. Now speak the truth once more…”

He stepped across, and with a finger grim,
He touched my cheek, a searing trail of light.
“I am your rage, the howl from deep within,
All that you shroud and bury from your sight.”

The boy danced. The accordion sobbed. The sergeant tugged Fritz by the sleeve.

“Hey. Was ist das?”

The finger — on the blueprints. A red finger on thin lines.

Fritz looked at the blueprints. Then at the sergeant. Then at the boy.

“This,” he swallowed, “is my project. The farm of the future. Factory farming. Zero-grazing.” His voice became steady, businesslike. Weber’s voice. The voice of a sales representative. “Fattening — slaughter — conveyor processing. Poultry. Cows. Pigs.”

“Embrace me now, the passion of the vice.
Fear not,” he whispered, “I am not the foe.
I am part of you, and you are part of me…”

The sergeant looked at the blueprints. At the rectangles of the barracks. At the diagrams of the showers. At the ventilation calculations. Then at Fritz. Then at the horsemeat sausage lying in the portfolio next to the folder.

And his face melted. The wrinkles parted. The small eyes narrowed. He laughed, gutturally, viscerally, with the laugh of a man for whom pigs are not an abstraction, but life.

“Ah-ha,” he said, “Schwein. Schwein!” He tapped a finger on the blueprint. “Schwein, ja?”

And he turned to the privates, and said something in Russian, and the privates laughed, and the laughter was ordinary, human, the laughter of people who had been shown something simple, understandable, something of their own: pigs, a farm, sausage. Nothing that required explanation.

And the children, the children sang:

And so I watch the mirror’s flickering gleam,
Two beings met within a dreamland sea.
And know that fears don’t vanish like a dream,
They are destined to remain forever in me…

The boy danced. The girl played with her eyes closed.

The sergeant closed the folder. Put it back. Covered it with the bread and sausage. Shoved the Kennkarte at Fritz.

“Gut,” he said. “Nach Hause. Home. Schwein.”

And he laughed again, and in that laugh was—what? Geniality? Contempt? Exhaustion?—All of it and none of it. Just laughter. Because the war had ended, and peace had not yet begun, and in the interim—one could laugh at a man with a pig farm in his portfolio.

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

Fritz closed the portfolio. The brass clasp snapped. He walked past the sergeant, past the privates, and every step was a departure, and every departure was a salvation, and every salvation was a sentence. Because he was carrying the portfolio away, and the blueprints were—him, and the pigs were—not pigs, and the sergeant didn’t know, and the privates didn’t know, and only the children sang…

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

He boarded the car. A wooden bench. The smell of urine, smoke, wet wool, the smell of people traveling in the same direction. The portfolio at his feet. The train set off—slowly, reluctantly, with the screech of trains that do not want to go. The platform drifted away. The children drifted away. The sergeant drifted away.

Fritz closed his eyes. The clatter of the wheels — measured, even. Ta-dum, ta-dum… Ta-dum, ta-dum… He fell asleep.

The same square. The same station. The same arches.

But night.

And the square is flooded with light—not solar, not electric—a light that flashes and fades, flashes and fades—red, blue, green—a light that does not illuminate, but blinds, and the shadows it casts do not stand still, but dart about, and the air vibrates, and the vibration—low, resonant, visceral—enters the body through the soles of the feet, through the bones, through the teeth.

The same children. But not in rags.

Dressed — how? — brightly, colorfully, in clothes that belonged to no era, in clothes that were costumes for a performance meant to be staged only once.

The girl — the same one — was sitting on a stool, and the accordion in her hands was different: whole, black, gleaming. And the sound—loud, so loud that the air vibrated, the walls vibrated, the ribs vibrated. And Fritz felt this sound not with his ears, but with his ribcage, his heart beat in time — no, his heart didn’t beat, his heart fluttered, the way a bird flutters in a clenched fist, and the pressure in his temples mounted, and sweat broke out on his forehead, his neck, his back, and his lungs couldn’t hold the air, and he wanted to scream, but the scream wouldn’t come out—because the music was screaming for him.

The boy danced.

But now the dance was a dance. Not a convulsion, not a seizure. A dance in which there was — joy? — no, not joy — something for which the word is too small — freedom? — no, something on the other side of freedom, on the other side of grief, on the other side of everything, and the boy moved, and every movement was — Klaus running on the sand, and Dieter holding onto the hem of his mother’s dress, and shoes sprouting from the sand, and talcum, and chloride of lime, and white smoke, and black, and gray ash, and everything Fritz had seen, and everything Fritz had done, and everything he hadn’t done, and in the dance there was neither guilt nor forgiveness — only movement, only rhythm, only life that goes on, despite it all.

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

Fritz opened his eyes.

Cold sweat — on his forehead, on his neck, under his arms. His shirt was soaked. His body felt alien. Outside the window — in the crack between the plywood and the frame — twilight. It was drizzling. The world was gray.

The portfolio was with him. At his feet. Brown leather. Brass clasp.

Outside the window — in the gaps — ruins drifted by. Skeletons of houses. Empty window frames reflecting nothing but the sky. And in a small shard of glass still clinging to a window frame, a reflection: a face — his face? — a stranger’s face, the face of Hans Weber, a sales representative, the face of a man with a scar, in someone else’s overcoat, with a portfolio at his feet, and he could not determine where one ended and the other began.

I am part of you.

The train was slowing down. Ahead, in the wet twilight, lights emerged — sparse, dim — the lights of a station. Someone in the car said: Berlin, we’re pulling in.

Fritz gripped the portfolio.

Chapter 10. Berlin →
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