Another Green World (33 page)

Werth, an Oxbridge Fabian sort, was still miffed that the BBC had refused to run his Majdanek piece. “And it was good stuff,” he grumbled, “exclusive stuff. Spent several days there. Spoke to the local Poles. Not just Party types. They all knew what the camp was for. Hell, it was barely two kilometers outside town. When the wind was in the east, the whole place stank of it. One little boy showed me the shoes he was wearing—good as new, he was quite proud of them—that he'd nicked, you see, from a big clothing dump the Germans ran on, wait for this, Chopin Street, don't you love that? Shoes off the feet of some poor Zhid, undoubtedly. Must have been from one of the last batches to be liquidated, otherwise they would've been sized and boxed up and shipped off to the Reich. But the Poles, they're quick to grab that sort of stuff, soon as the Germans clear out, and who can blame them? They've had a bad war.”

Werth had been drinking for a while; Butler let him talk. During a pause he said, “So it's true, then? The gassing rooms, the ashes, all of it?”

Werth turned in his chair, looked Butler straight in the eye. His stare had a certain bluntness, as though he were about to say something rude. “You've been here awhile, haven't you? In the war, I mean.” He nodded, answering on Butler's behalf. “So you've seen things by now, places liberated from the Nazis. You've interviewed survivors. You've seen what's left of the liberated zones. How can you doubt for a moment it's true?”

“But the stories,” Butler persisted. “The details. The cabbages. A million dead.”

Werth's eyes rolled. “One million, ten million—that's numbers. You know how Russians are with numbers. How many people can grasp what a million means? You say a million, what you mean is, an inconceivably large number. What the stories say is, an inconceivably large number of human beings were murdered at Majdanek, under circumstances more ghastly than you can comprehend. Yes, the bloody stories are true.”

So when Butler at last came to Lublin—by special invitation of Osoby Otdel, Special Department, Bureau 1965—he expected to find some nightmare conjured out of the blackest depths of the German imagination, like those medieval woodcuts creatively depicting the torments of the damned. Only worse, many times worse, as Stalingrad is worse than Agincourt, because the capacity for bestiality is so much greater today than at any time in the past. What he did not expect was a placid, medium-sized
Old European city, laid out on a generally flat and sparsely wooded landscape, its buildings in decent shape, its streets filled with people who looked neither downtrodden nor half starved, its markets reasonably well stocked, and those famously plentiful steeples pointing hopefully toward a blue and cloudless sky. But that is what he found, and it gave his visit, on this sunny and windless day, its quality of surrealism.

You reached KZ-Majdanek by a narrow lane running east out of the city through copses of elder and pine. At first glimpse the place had a clean, well-ordered look. It was, above all, nonthreatening. You might have guessed, standing outside the perimeter fence, that it was workers' housing for some big war-related industrial concern, a Farben or a Krupps. True, there was a double rank of barbed wire fencing, but this was wartime, after all; barbed wire could be seen around many a stately home in the British countryside and many a cornfield in the American South. You grew habituated to its presence, and also to the message it contained: the world today is full of places where you are not meant to go.

Butler hopped out of the Yankee jeep and thanked the Red Army man who'd given him a lift. The main gate stood wide open, manned by a cluster of soldiers from one of the Central Asian republics. As he drew near, he tried to suppress the natural jauntiness of his stride, to turn his thoughts to the many souls who had passed this way on a journey with no return. It was difficult. A recent dusting of snow lay gently on the landscape, like a clean white sheet pulled discreetly over a corpse. Just inside the barbed wire ran a cheering row of young beeches, from whose twigs fluttered yellow leaves as bright as daffodils. One of the soldiers scrutinized Butler's papers, noticed the NKVD seal and handed them quickly back.

He paused to take the lay of the land. Beyond the gatehouse, the main camp road ran straight as a Roman highway for a kilometer or so. Boot-prints by the hundred, imprinted before the freeze, were preserved in its cinder surface. On either side stood wooden buildings painted institutional green. The Hammer and Sickle hung limp from a flagpole in a courtyard surrounded by shrubbery; it might as well have been the Stars and Stripes. The creepiest thing about this place, Butler thought, was its humdrum normality.

A couple hundred meters off, a line of soldiers filed out of one of the larger buildings and formed up in columns on the roadway. He could hear an NCO barking orders.

“What's going on there?” he asked the closest guard.

“New arrivals, getting the grand tour. Marshal's orders.”

Butler pulled out a pack of cigarettes, the white-papered kind issued
only to officers. He soon had the whole bunch—Uzbeks, as it turned out— gathered around him, chattering in a Russian even worse than his own.

“The Marshal wants all the fresh troops brought through here on their way to the front,” one of the men said.

“So they'll know what kind of enemy we're up against,” explained another.

“What about the veterans?” said Butler.

The first man spat into the snow. “We've seen enough already, haven't we?”

“I don't know,” his comrade said. “This place is a little different.”

“What's the tour like?”

“Oh, it's pretty thorough. You go into the big room where they all got undressed, and then down the hall into the gas chambers. You stand in there, and they shut the door, and the only light is from this little skylight, high up over your head. And your guide says
Look up there, look at the tiny blue Zyklon crystals coming down, aren't they pretty? Just like snow.
It gives you a chill, that does.”

“This lot's finished now,” a soldier said, pointing. “Now it's off to the ovens—they've cleaned up a bit over there. Had some German prisoners in a couple of weeks ago. Before that, there were bits of skeletons lying around, the pieces that hadn't got burned all the way.”

“One of them looked like the top half of a little girl.”

“You don't know it was a girl. Could've been a boy.”

“It looked like a girl to me.”

“Hurry now,” a man told Butler, “before the next lot comes in, you can get a tour all by yourself.”

He took a few steps forward. He stared up the camp road, past the
Bad & Disinfektion
building with its twin rows of skylights. The company of fresh conscripts marched away from him, toward a half-ruined structure that seemed to have collapsed around its single red smokestack. He recognized the place from Simonov's vivid description in
Pravda.
As with the camp as a whole, it looked much less horrible than he'd imagined.

Once again he tried to make himself feel something. He wanted to empathize properly with the countless human beings whose earthly existence had ended a few steps up the road there. Most of them had been Jews from a place called “Lublinland,” a make-believe province that existed only on the wall-charts at the SS Race and Settlement Office. Into this arbitrary corner of the Generalgouvernement, the Nazis had herded racial undesirables from the newly acquired territories of the Reich during those early, dizzying months after the fall of Poland. The plan had been to hand
their homes and farms and businesses over to
Volksdeutsch
settlers, who were themselves being coerced into “coming home” from all the old German enclaves of Eastern Europe—all part of a grand scheme to redraw the ethnic isobars of the continent. Butler wondered how things had turned out at the other end, the places from which the Lublinlanders had been “evacuated.” Had they become model German hamlets, as envisioned by the planners at the
Siedlungsamt
? Or just burned-out, depopulated zones like so much of the Nazi empire?

A wave of revulsion swept over him. He had wanted to feel something and now he did, though it was more nausea than compassion. Turning away from the crematorium, he began walking in the opposite direction, aimless, passing one block of identical buildings after another. Prisoners' barracks, he supposed, but they might have been warehouses, horse stalls, repair sheds. Beyond them, he came to a fence that divided the camp into unequal sections, its gateway open and unguarded. On the other side, the buildings were sturdier, more permanent-looking. Perhaps this had been the administrative area: offices where records were kept, a dining hall where SS men shared wholesome meals, a recreation hall to pass one's off-duty hours. Butler moved from one to another, imagining the function of each, composing little mental narratives.
Over there is the sauna, and here is where we watch the latest films from Ufa. And along here—watch your step!— Hauptmann Schuler likes to walk his Doberman bitch, he calls her Freya, isn't that the goddess who likes to fuck?
He came to a little building with a high-pitched roof that in any other place might have been taken for a chapel. But there were no chapels for Himmler's SS. Curious, he tried the door. It yielded easily, the heavy, cross-braced wood swinging back on well-oiled hinges.

“You're a bit early,” said Puak.

The little man sat on a large, wide bed that occupied a place of honor against the far wall, draped on either side with opulent folds of crimson velvet.

Butler was too startled to reply. His mind crackled with a static of detail: stag's antlers mounted over the bed, Puak's gray silk jacket smartly adorned with a white carnation, a log fire blazing in the wide stone hearth.

“I thought you might want to inspect the facilities.” Puak spoke in his perfect, slightly effeminate English, his tone neutral and his smile, as usual, open to interpretation.

“No thanks.”

“No? Then I suppose it is down to business.”

“What the hell
is
this place?” Butler was past the surprise now and on to the customary struggle of composing himself in the presence of the Spider, whose gleaming black eyes seemed capable of melting things down to their essence.

“Precisely what it appears to be”— switching now to collegial Russian. “Here, sit down, see how that chair feels, I believe it is bison's leather.”

Butler stepped closer to the outlandish chunk of wood whose upholstery sat like an expensive saddle on a torture device.

“This is a shrine,” Puak continued, now in
Hochdeutsch, “
to the heroic act of procreation. You stand in a sanctum for the breeding of German heroes!” Then English again: “From what the villagers tell us, the SS officers were always on the lookout among the political prisoners—that is to say, the non-Jews—for females of the ideal Nordic type. Blond, long legs, good breasts, proper small noses. When they found one, they would bring her back here and a few of the lads would have a go at her. They fed the girls well and kept them around for a few weeks. At the end, they offered the girls a deal: their freedom, in exchange for their promise that should a child result, it would be given over to the SS Lebensborn—a sort of baby-farming operation.”

“What happened? Did both sides keep their end of the bargain?”

Puak's smile did not change. “The prisoners were released, but their fate beyond that point is hard to determine. To the best of our knowledge, few progeny of these matings survived to full term. The Poles did not fancy a new breed of monsters being spawned among them. They killed many of the girls as a precautionary measure. It is a case of denying the enemy much needed resources—the resource in this case being a fresh supply of wombs.”

“War is biology by other means,” Butler said; cleverly, he thought.

Puak pursed his lips. “Clausewitz has nothing to say about this. We are not fighting here a Clausewitzian war. We are back in the days of Nevsky, the peasantry rising up to repel the Teutonic Knights by any means necessary. And remember, it was not
we
, nor was it the Poles, who chose to fight such a war. The Germans have allowed themselves to become drunk on their own mythology—which would not be so bad if they stayed home and listened to Wagner and stabbed each other in the back, like Siegfried and Hagen. But no. They must impose this irrational construct upon the rest of the world, and that cannot be permitted. History itself will not allow it.”

“You speak of History as though it were…an angry pagan god. Isn't
that
a kind of mythologizing?”

Puak shot him an annoyed glare, which Butler took to mean he had scored a point. “I shouldn't be so smug. You Americans also tend to mistake your own myths for objective truth. Look at your national archetype, the Lone Gunslinger—a strong and independent man, unconcerned with culture or manners, set on doing what he pleases, irrespective of the consequences. Especially if the consequences affect only such lesser breeds as Indians. That sort of legend makes for a good Saturday matinee but hardly a sound foreign policy. Then there is your homegrown version of Christianity, which is every bit as crude and apocalyptic as the Germans' Götterdämmerung, with the disadvantage of being also self-righteous. We had a taste of that in your recent Prohibition. One suspects things will only get worse as your society spins further into decline. Someday, my friend, these strands are going to intertwine, and your great nation will become as daemonically possessed by this mythic, Bible-toting cowboy as the Germans by their white knight singing the
Nibelungenlied.”

Butler was surprised to find that he resented this; it had been many years since he'd thought of himself as American. A Yank, yes, as long as the word was preceded by “expatriate,” which spared him from lugging all that heritage around. “I suppose you Russkis are above all that,” he said, trying not to sound too flippant. “No myths of any kind. No ghosts. No tendency toward hysteria. Bulgakov got the whole thing wrong.”

“The triumph of the Soviet Union,” said Puak, speaking primly as a schoolmaster, with pauses to facilitate the taking of notes, “is to have transcended national consciousness—to have dissolved the artificial boundaries between Russian and Georgian and Azerbaijani—and to have opened, to people everywhere, the greater wisdom that resides in the collective consciousness of the proletariat. The clear Communist mind is not haunted by archetypal daemons, nor ruled by outmoded conceptions of manhood and vengeance and honor. It shines forth with the light of science and understanding. And it offers this same understanding, this liberation from mythic bondage, to all humankind.” He smiled benevolently, a Marxist boddhisatva.