Limbo Zone. Prologue

November oozed through the brick rubble, through the slate-blue pumice of the fog, settling on the shoulders of an alien coat — taken from an alien shoulder, too vast and loose.

Hans Weber — that was the name given to the void inside this broadcloth, a name written in a calligraphic, accounting hand on a certificate issued by an office that no longer existed. He strode down Bahnhofstrasse.

He walked, listening to how the city receded before him: not out of respect, no, but out of a cindered, frozen indifference. Hannover was waking up with eyes wide open, like smashed storefronts. The sun, a tarnished brass button on the tunic of a dead sky, barely glimmered through the dust. Hans Weber, non-combatant, commercial representative, Protestant, was looking for his wife. He was looking for two boys, Klaus and Dieter, whose voices still splashed in his left ear like seawater trapped in a mother-of-pearl shell — water that was slowly but inevitably becoming salty blood.

From the disemboweled bellies of half-ruined houses, from behind curtains stitched from burlap, the radio seeped out. The airwaves in the Gray Zone suffered from an incurable arrhythmia; they were sick with frequencies that didn’t exist on any tuning scale. No one knew whose hand turned the switch, but from the speakers, through the crackle of static, glassy electricity, flowed a melody as thick as molasses — “Lili Marleen” — slowed down, as if a pale finger were dragging the phonograph needle along the grooves.

Vor der Kaserne, vor dem großen Tor…

The music bogged down in the air, then severed, and the time of the Voice began.

The Voice was reading names.

A dry, barking, fractured Berlin tenor with a faint Rhenish accent — the voice of the — dead? — Doctor from Alexanderplatz, who now, from the cellars of a Moscovite non-existence, read the lists. He read them with that peculiar, pitiless, hypnotic intonation used for reading inventory ledgers.

Esther Rosenblum, nineteen-twelve. Moritz Klein, nineteen-hundred and three. Ruth Klein…

The names fell like measured drops from a rusted tap. These were the lists of people currently trading ersatz bread on the next street, people who were alive, breathing, but in the voice of the radio-wraith they had already turned into numbers, into ash, into a thick, sweetish smoke trailing over their houses.

Noah Goldstein, born eighteen-ninety-two. Place of death: Treblinka. Date of death: August fourteenth, nineteen-hundred and forty-two.

Weber pressed his palms to his ears — palms that were clean, with neatly trimmed nails — but the voice didn’t come from without; it came from within, from that place where bone joins memory, and there was no plugging it.

In this world, this incorrect, defective world, there was no Treblinka. In this world, the war had ended in October. Goldstein is alive. He sits in his workshop. He sews a suit. He threads the needle on the first try. He smiles. There is no date. There is no place. The very word does not exist.

No, Weber was not listening to the names. No, Weber was walking to the tailor, moving his legs like a blind, swaddled pupa — a pupa waiting for a transformation, but having forgotten which specific butterfly it was destined to become.

The cellar of the workshop smelled of chalk, heated wool, and dust — the scent of halted time. Goldstein, an old Jew with eyes the color of wet asphalt, sat by a kerosene lamp. He was sewing. The needle entered the fabric and exited the fabric, in-out, in-out, and every stitch was a tiny decision, a minuscule attempt to sew back together a time torn to shreds.

“Your suit, Herr Weber. It is almost ready,” the tailor said without raising his head, and his voice rustled like dry leaves over cobblestones. “Good fabric. Pre-war. Everything is easier in a good suit. Even not being yourself — that too is easier.”

Weber sat on a chair, and the chair immediately became what every object in this zone was: a void with legs. The cellar swayed. The space of the room shivered like heated air over a brazier, and through the soot-stained walls, an endless, squelching mud seeped through.

Noah was not sitting by the lamp. Noah was standing.

He stood in a cold wind, and he wore no vest, only a thin, soaked-through striped Häftling uniform, and behind his back stretched rows of wooden, geometrically perfect barracks, receding into a gray eternity the color of a Wehrmacht uniform.

“You wanted to burn me, didn’t you, Herr Lang?” the tailor said, and his lips did not move, but the words resonated, echoing in Weber’s temples with the hum of an electric furnace. “But the matches were damp… yes? You didn’t sleep well tonight, Herr Lang?”

The humming ceased. The pendulum ticked again. The lamp smoked.

“You are quite pale, Herr Weber,” Goldstein looked over his slipped glasses, and in his gaze was unbearable, calm precision with which the dead look upon those who have forgotten to die. “Go to the station. A train arrived from Stettin today. Perhaps your family is there? If a man searches, it means he is still alive. When a man stops searching, it means he is already…”

“No,” Weber said quickly. Too quickly. Like a lie. “They stayed in Berlin. Helga would not have left Berlin.”

“Helga?” The tailor tilted his head. “A beautiful name. I had a client — Helga. A different Helga, of course. Before the war. In Berlin. She loved the color blue. She said: blue is the color of loyalty. I sewed her a dress — blue, with a white collar. A dress like that…” He traced his fingers through the air, drawing the contour of something that existed only in his memory. “The kind of dress in which one could survive the end of the world, and after the end of the world someone would look at you and say: what a beautiful dress.”

Weber was no longer listening. He burst out into the street, greedily gulping the frost-nipped air, pushing away the old man’s words, but the street was no longer a street.

There was a crunch. On the corner, hissing with its wide tires, stood a British patrol Willys. Two men in olive drab were lazily smoking. They were searching. They were looking at faces.

And then Weber smelled it.

A thick, animal, sickeningly sour smell of panic, of split adrenaline, of metallic sweat. The smell of fear. He knew it thoroughly. Back in August, in the SS training camps, he had inhaled this steam rising from those who were brought to him, the smell of those who realized they had become meat. He had been the conductor of this smell. He had been its creator.

But now there was no one else near. The smell was coming from his own armpits. From his skin. From his pores. He had stepped into the line. He had become the prey.

Beside himself, Fritz Lang — alias Hans Weber — bolted into a narrow alleyway. He ran, gasping, stumbling over bricks, and the alleyway folded like an accordion, narrowing, the walls rising upward, covered in dirty spring snow. Somewhere far away, or perhaps very close, inside his own cranium, a shepherd dog burst into a bark. One. Then another. The barking meant the scent had been caught.

The sound of his own footsteps began to change. The ragged breath, the thud of boots on stone — all of it smoothly, terrifyingly transitioned into the rhythmic, sated purr of an engine.

Fritz blinked. He was no longer running.

He was sitting on the soft, creaking leather seat of an army Kübelwagen. His hands, encased in the perfect black leather of officer’s gloves, rested calmly on his knees. The car rolled slowly through the March mud of the Warsaw Ghetto. And ahead of the car, gasping in animal terror, bleeding his feet to pulp, stumbling, ran a man in a coat that was too vast, taken from someone else’s shoulder.

And this running man, this hunted beast looking back at the dogs, was himself.

And the one sitting in the car, lazily watching the pursuit through the clean glass of the windshield, the one who felt the absolute, geometric correctness of what was happening — that was also himself. Cause and effect had traded places. The executioner was hunting his own mercy.

The alleyway ended. Weber pressed his palms against the damp wall near the railway station. His heart was hammering. There were no dogs. There never had been. He — was Hans Weber. From Bremen. Commercial representative.

The train from Stettin stood on the second track. Long, filthy, with smashed windows. People flowed out of the carriages slowly, the way people emerge from dark water — heavily, reluctantly. Women with bundles. Old men. All with the same expression on their faces, the faces of those who have arrived, but have not come home.

He stood on the platform and watched as space began to betray him again.

Every woman in a gray coat for a second became Helga. Every boy clinging to a hem — Dieter. But the longer he looked at the train, the more the smashed windows of the carriages were boarded up with planks. The doors grew heavy external bolts.

It was a different train. And the platform was different.

People did not exit slowly. They were unloaded. Fast, fast, schnell, spotlights struck the eyes, barking tore the eardrums. He stood on this platform, and before him wound an endless, submissive line, and his own hand, in its black glove, rose and fell. To the right. To the left. To live. To the oven. To the right. To the left. Every movement — a stitch of the needle, a tiny decision, a tiny choice. Meticulous. Like a column of figures.

And then he saw them.

In the crowd of refugees descending onto the Hannover platform of thirty-nine, came Helga, Klaus, and little Dieter. Alive. Real. Dieter was crying, clutching a wooden toy to his chest. They had escaped. They had arrived. He only had to take a step, call out to them, embrace them. To start a new, nameless, quiet life in this zone of Limbo.

He took a half-step. Klaus looked back, and froze.

No. He would find them. He would embrace Helga. Klaus would say “Papa.” Dieter would cry — he always cried when he was afraid, and then, when he stopped being afraid, he cried too. They would live — here, in this zone, in this Limbo, and he would be Hans Weber, commercial representative from Bremen, and no one — no one — would ever know.

And everything would be — fine. But he had already said this — he had already told himself this before, and even earlier, and even earlier than earlier. And it all repeats, like a skipping record.

And he would lie beside her at night, and the ceiling would be white, and in the darkness — gray, and then black, and then the ceiling would vanish, and in place of the ceiling — smoke. And he would know where that smoke came from. And in that world, in that magnificent world where the Reich stands for a thousand years, Helga would have been washing his uniform. And Klaus would have been marching, straight and true, as they taught him in school. And Dieter would have stopped crying, because men do not cry, because crying is weakness, and weakness is a “no.” And in the mornings, smoke would rise from the chimney behind the hill, and they would not ask — whose? And he would know, and this knowledge would be familiar, as rain is familiar, as wind is familiar, as everything to which one becomes accustomed is familiar.

And Noah Goldstein would not be sewing suits. And Noah Goldstein — would not exist. And that other Helga, who loved blue — would not exist. And the blue dress with the white collar — would not exist. And the boy on the platform — would not exist. And the boy would not have looked back.

And if this perfect world had won, if it had arrived right this moment…

Space clanged. Again. The trap snapped shut. He looked at his wife’s blonde hair — and saw her in a baggy, filthy Häftling robe. He saw Klaus, clutching a pale Dieter to himself. He saw how his own, perfect hand, encased in black leather… pointed them to the left. Into the oven. Because order demands purity. Because the machine knows no mercy.

Weber stood on the platform, not daring to approach them, not daring to touch them. He watched as someone’s family passed by, dissolving into the crowd of strangers, saved people whom he had not killed.

The train left. And the station left with it. Evening found him on Bahnhofstrasse.

The sun had gone — swiftly, thievishly, like a man who does not wish to be a witness. Hannover lay in the twilight, and the twilight suited it, the way a coat fits when tailored to a precise measure — the twilight hid what could not be seen in the light and exposed what the light hid.

From the barbershop on the corner, the voice of the dead propagandist could be heard again, monotonously reading the names of the dead-who-never-were. He did not stop — neither by day nor by night, neither in this world nor in that — he read as a river reads, as rain reads, as fire reads: without beginning, without end, without a comma, without mercy.

Weber stopped. He listened.

He listened to the names of people who in this world were alive, but in that other one — the one he had drafted, designed, calculated, the one where everything was correct, and pure, and according to the law — in that world, they did not exist. Not a single one. They were — figures. They were — smoke. They were — the ash that fertilized the lawn by their house, on which the grass later grew, and that grass was green, because ash is a good fertilizer; there were calculations about that too, and the calculations added up, and the columns were straight, and the handwriting — meticulous.

Rachel Kowalski, nineteen-hundred and ten…

He listened, and the names entered him as a needle enters fabric — rhythmically, precisely, stitch by stitch — and every stitch sewed him to this place, to this pavement, to this world where they are all — alive, where the tailor sews, where the boy looks back on the platform, where the woman in the gray coat leads a child by the hand — to this world where he — is nobody.

A commercial representative from Bremen. Protestant. Did not serve. Looking for his family.

He stood there, and in the window of the barbershop — in that cracked window that doubled everyone — was his reflection. Vague. Faceless. Beside it — another, small, stooped, with glasses and a goatee.

Goldstein? Again? — No. A flare. A crack. A shadow from a lamp. No one.

And the voice read:

Fritz Lang…

He recoiled.

 — nineteen hundred…

But the voice continued with a different date, a different name, a different fate.

Not his. For now — not his.

The man without a name stood on Bahnhofstrasse, in a city pretending to be a city, in a zone that was neither a zone, nor a world, nor a purgatory, but a seam. A line along which one world is sewn to another, stitch by stitch, and if you pull the thread — both will unravel.

He stood and listened to the voice reading the names of the people he had not killed. In this world, he had not killed them.

And this “not” — thinner than a thread, thinner than a spiderweb, thinner than a blade drawn between two worlds — was the only thing standing between him and who he was.

Between him — and who he wanted to be.

And on the second track stood the empty train from Stettin, and in the empty carriages, the wind played, and the wind smelled of nothing.

Of absolutely nothing.

But above the station, above this dreary city, above this entire gray, torn-apart zone, on the very edge of one’s senses, where smell ceases to be physiology and becomes a state of the soul, there trailed a thick, sweetish, unbearably familiar scent of crematorium smoke that did not exist.

A blue dress with a white collar.

Chapter 1. Vertigo →
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