Europe Central (50 page)

(
You can’t hang all hundred and ninety million of us,
Zoya had said.)

His erstwhile captor General Lindemann came to congratulate him, and they clinked glasses.

I must say, that was a riveting speech! These people believe in you, there’s no doubt about it . . .

Frankly, I’m in despair, said Vlasov, for he’d just learned that the formations of Russian volunteers had all been broken up and distributed among German units.

Upon my word now, what kind of thing is that for a military man to say? Just be patient a little longer, and Berlin will come around, I promise you!

You see, it’s not just the war crimes, it’s the
absurdity.
How can your leadership fail to understand that by alienating the masses, they’re obstructing their own purpose?

The German general sighed and said: Never mind, my dear fellow. The East and the West are two worlds, and they cannot understand each other.

On his return to Berlin, the spring mud of the Reich now mouse-green like Hitler’s field jacket, he sent another memorandum admonishing the Reich government:
The mass of the Russian population now look upon this conflict as a German war of conquest.
(Zykov lost at solitaire and recited another stanza from Pushkin.) He advised his masters that even now it might still be possible to regain good relations with the people, so terribly had they suffered under Communism, but it was essential to make immediate changes in occupation policy.

Olenka the typist had disappeared, but her replacement, a Latvian brunette named Masha, was an even more fun-loving girl.
³³
One morning he awoke at the Russian Court Hotel with her still sleeping in his arms. Gazing into this gentle face, he seemed to see the closed eyes of his broken wife. (And I myself, I see the big brown eyes of the woman who finally left me, the one who would have stayed with me forever if I’d only made a certain promise. She was my integrity.)

22

I repeat: Thus far, the assault on Vlasov’s character had accomplished only a limited tactical breakthrough. The attackers did not know how to achieve operational shock. As Strik-Strikfeldt so wisely aphorized:
Too much propaganda is merely propaganda.

And so he found himself back at work. Coolish and warmish Berlin spring days, cloud-sogged skies and linden-shade, these exudations transfused themselves most pleasantly into his bones. He sat wondering what to do. Zykov had not yet gone missing. One wall of his shabby little office was stacked up with bales of a colleague’s literary production:
And this underworld of the Untermensch found its leader: the eternal Jew!

He received a warning from the Gestapo that the USSR had sent a certain Major S. N. Kapustin to infiltrate his army and assassinate him. He didn’t care. Drunkenly he told a bored file clerk of the female gender: I remember when I counterattacked at Nemirov. Tank fighting for four days—

Just as a shattered concentration of troops tends to polarize around the towns or command posts it knows, which is why the attacking enemy will tend to close lethal circles around those very points, so Vlasov couldn’t help but be obsessed by that Geco cartridge of his, which he turned round and round between his fingers, trying to steel himself against the next offensive. Zykov laughed at him. Masha once stole his toy, just for fun, but he became very angry until she begged his pardon and blushingly dropped it back into his hand. There always seemed to be so much schnapps on hand that he stopped writing manifestoes. Indeed, he soon became so listless that he scarcely bothered to chat with the man from the Office for the Germanization of Eastern Nations. A. A. Vlasov might as well have been one of Berlin’s time-smoked building-stones crowned by winged figures, figures with crucifixes or figures with lances, all time-blackened into their own silhouettes. The Germans grew concerned about his health. Moreover, another proclamation of his phantom army had just come out and they didn’t want to make him into too much of a one-man show. Why not let him disappear for a bit? So, with Strik-Strikfeldt as chaperone, they sent him on a rest cure. Oh, yes; they permitted him to tour the Rhine, whose coils sometimes nearly complete a circle, their aquatic thumbs and forefingers squeezing various peninsulas of forest and slate-roofed houses into almost-islandness, while summery leaves strain outwards. He visited Köln, Frankfurt, Vienna . . .

What a sight they are! cried his best friend, merrily squinting his eyes. Look quickly, my dear Vlasov! No, no, over there! Why, they practically take my breath away . . .

In a park, rows of German girls stood with outstretched arms and breasts, mimicking their stiff wax-doll
Lehrerin
who stood above them on the monument’s steps, calling out:
One—two—three—four! All together!

Vlasov continued to drink. After considerable efforts (none of which his ward seemed to appreciate), Strik-Strikfeldt obtained permission to take him to a convalescent home for
-men in Ruhpolding, Bavaria. It was there that Vlasov met his German wife.

23

If you have ever happened to see Adolf Ziegler’s “The Four Elements,” which hangs over the fireplace of our Führerhaus in München, you may remember, in the middle panel of that triptych, a slender, small-breasted blonde who sits nestling against her darker-haired sister, staring modestly at the checkerboard floor while her elbow guards the junction of her chastely clenched thighs. There is something absurd (or, as Vlasov would say, unrealistic) about the poses of the other three nudes, especially the darkhaired one who daintily pulls a bit of drapery across her lap while clasping a harvest sheaf in her right hand. The blonde’s compact, withdrawn posture appears at least natural and comfortable. The relentless tidiness of the room which that painting dwells in, the drollness of the little round table between sofa and hearth, the fresh-scrubbed bricks of the hearth, and, above all, the insistently allegorical quality of Ziegler’s work, all work together to sugar-coat its lewdness into a veritable pill of propriety. And the ridiculous gestures of those Aryan goddesses double-coat the pill. Nobody would ever hold her arms so, or tilt her head so, unless perhaps a machine-gun blast had caused that effect when it tumbled her into the mass grave! But the seated blonde (if we disregard the empty bowl which Ziegler directed her to hold) could almost be a figure out of “real life.”

Have you guessed that Heidi Bielenberg was an athlete? She’d been one of those blondes with braids, those blue-eyed blondes who, screaming with crowd-happiness, outstretch their white-sleeved arms in salute behind a protective wall of expressionless
-men whose helmets are adorned with swastikas within red shields; so that everything everywhere grows white, black, grey, red and blonde. We first see her in a wall of German girls in tight-fitting undergarments, raising globes above their heads:
One—two—three—four! All together!
Heidi’s instructor told her that she might be capable of excellence, if she worked hard and governed herself
with inflexible harshness.
That was easy for her. She’d always been like that. Her mother was the same. Heidi wanted to be in the 1936 Olympics, but that proved impossible. Fortunately, in our Reich there were many other exciting things to do. She became a crack shot with a revolver, and got licensed to keep a pistol (I think a 7.65-millimeter Walther). Her pretty face, which specialists had measured with calipers from nose-bridge to chin, and her hair, matched against various reference-rectangles of tinted glass, both passed muster, scientifically validating her as Aryan. At a regional competition, she stood atop a rolling hoop, outstretching a swastika flag in each arm. Then they’d invited her to take part in the Nuremberg Rally, where she shared a tent with two other girls and got to see the Führer with her own eyes! (She’d kept in touch with her tent-mates. One had already given birth to a pair of Aryan twins at a
Lebensborn
facility. The other was now making eighty-eight-millimeter shell fuses, in order to do her part for total war.) Shortly after the Röhm purge, Heidi won the Reich Sports Medal, whose possession is required on the part of any girl who aspires to wed an
man. Himmler himself, who knew perfection when he saw it, had already entered her into the topmost classification in the card indexes of the
Head Office for Race and Settlement.

She met her first husband at the 1938 Yuletide bonfire. Everything about him felt right to her, from his agility when he danced, to the strangely tender gaze of his skull-emblem’s baby-eyes. Everything happened in a rush. Holding his arm, clutching the bouquet in the crook of her elbow, she passed beneath the arch of saluting hands as the wedding guests chanted:
Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!
Germany was already at war then, so she’d hardly seen Otto after the honeymoon. Two years later (it was by one of those swinging-door coincidences the time of Vlasov’s capture, one husband out, the next one in), Heidi received and immediately framed the regimental telegram, which proclaimed
OUR PROUD SORROW
.
His commanding officer also wrote her a letter, assuring her that it had been both heroic and instantaneous. Heidi framed that, too. She retained an almost virginal conviction that since she had suffered, fate was unlikely to require any further sacrifices from her. It was only at the vigil over his swastika-draped coffin, with her mother clasping her hand and so many of his comrades at attention, holding wax torches, that Heidi realized the seriousness of this struggle against Jewish bandits. Slowly she commenced to understand certain remarks and silences which she had hitherto dismissed as fruitlessly enigmatic or even defeatist. Her mother, who continued to trust in a good resolution of everything, did her best to draw Heidi back up into the mirror-pure realm of faith, and succeeded even more rapidly than she had anticipated; for the widow needed, in the spirit of the times, to give herself unendingly, and show that she could be strong unto death. Every day she went to pistol-practice. In spite of maternity, she continued to possess the streamlined body and frank appetites of a
Sportfräulein.
She loved hiking, skiing and other exercises in keeping with that wise Nazi adage:
The javelin and the springboard are more useful than lipstick for the promotion of health.
To Vlasov it was an immense pleasure merely to see her eat: white German bread slathered with sweet butter (not even apparatchiks could dine like that in Russia), great draughts of German Pilsbier, half a roast chicken at a go. At such times her face shone with such utter engrossment in her own enjoyment that he could hardly help being carried out of his gloom. If his admiration of what he thought of as her innocence might have had a patronizing quality, well, patronization is kin to the voyeurism of an old man, who wants to do what he no longer can. The sad pale face of his own immaculateness had withdrawn forever behind the blackout curtain. He was tainted now; he was mature. Why not look with pleasure upon the antics of somebody who was still fortunate to be in her moral childhood? Moreover, Heidi had a stunning chest.