William T. Vollmann - Europe Central

Table of Contents

ALSO BY WILLIAM T. VOLLMANN

You Bright and Risen Angels
The Rainbow Stories
The Ice-Shirt
Thirteen Stories and Thirteen Epitaphs
Whores for Gloria
Fathers and Crows
Butterfly Stories
The Rifles
An Afghanistan Picture Show
The Atlas
The Royal Family
Argall
Rising Up and Rising Down

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 10 Alcorn Avenue, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4V 3B2 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), Cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany, Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published in 2005 by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Copyright William T. Vollmann, 2005

All rights reserved

Portions of this work first appeared in Conjunctions, Grand Street, Film Comment, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and Expelled from Eden: A William T. Vollmann Reader, edited by William T. Vollmann, Larry McCaffery, and Michael Hemmingson (Thunders Mouth Press, 2005).

PUBLISHERS NOTE

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Vollmann, William T.

Europe central / by William T. Vollmann. p. cm.

eISBN : 978-1-101-11819-1

1. GermanySocial life and customsFiction. 2. Soviet UnionSocial life and customsFiction. I. Title.

PS3572.O395E97 2005

813.54dc22 2004061170

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Map by the author

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the authors rights is appreciated.

http://us.penguingroup.com

This book is dedicated to the memory of Danilo Kis, whose masterpiece
A Tomb for Boris Davidovich kept me company for many years
while I was preparing to write this book.

D. D. Shostakovich

PATRONYMICS

For the convenience of my countrymen who lose their way in Russian novels.

Akhmatova [Gorenko], Anna Andreyevna

Arnshtam, Leo Oskarovich

Danchenko, Natalya Kovalova

Denisov, Edison Vasiliyevich. Nickname: Edik.

Glikman, Isaak Davidovich

Glivenko, Tatyana Ivanovna

Kainova, Margarita Andreyevna

Karmen, Roman Lazarevich

Konstantinovskaya, Elena [Yelena] Evseyevna. Nicknames: Elenka, Elenochka, Lyalya, Lyalka, Lyalotchka.

Krupskaya, Nadezhda Konstantinovna

Lebedinsky, Lev Nikolayevich

Lenin [Ulyanov], Vladimir Ilyich. Often called Ilyich.

Litvinova, Flora Pavlovna

Nikolayevna, Tatyana Petrovna

Rostropovich, Mstislav Leopoldovich

Shebalina, Alisa Maximova

Shostakovich, Dimitri Dimitriyevich. Nicknames: Mitya, Mitenka, etc.

Shostakovich, Galina Dimitriyevich. Nicknames: Galya, Galisha, Galotchka.

Shostakovich, Mariya Dimitriyevna. Nickname: Mariyusha.

Shostakovich, Zoya Dimitriyevna

Supinskaya [later Shostakovich], Irina Antonova. Nicknames: Irinotchka, Irinka.

Ustvolskaya, Galina Ivanovna

Varzar [later Shostakovich], Nina Vasilyevna. Nicknames: Ninotchka, Ninusha, Ninka, Nita.

Vlasov, Andrei Andreyevich

Operation Barbossa

VIEW FROM A RUINED ROMANIAN FORT

(1945)

STEEL IN MOTION

Field-Marshal Erich von Manstein (1958)

A squat black telephone, I mean an octopus, the god of our Signal Corps, owns a recess in Berlin (more probably Moscow, which one German general has named the core of the enemys whole being ). Somewhere between steel reefs, a wire wrapped in gutta-percha vibrates: I hereby... zzzzzzz... the critical situation... a crushing blow. But because these phrases remain unauthenticated (and because the penalty for eavesdropping is death), its not recommended to press ones ear to the wire, which bristles anyhow with electrified barbs; better to sit obedient, for the wait cant be long; negotiations have failed. Away flees Chamberlain, crying: Peace in our time. France obligingly disinterests herself in the Prague government. Motorized columns roll into snowy Pilsen and keep rolling. Italy foresees adventurisms reward, from which she would rather save herself, but, enthralled by the telephone, she somnambulates straight to the balcony to declare: We cannot change our policy now. We are not prostitutes. The ever-wakeful sleepwalker in Berlin and the soon-to-be-duped realist in the Kremlin get married. This will strike like a bomb! laughs the sleepwalker. All over Europe, telephones begin to ring.

In the round room with the fan-shaped skylight, with Greek gods ranked behind the dais, the Austrian deputies sit woodenly at their wooden desks, whose black rectangular inlays enhance the elegance; they were the first to accept our future; their telephone rang back in 38. Bulgaria, denied the British credits which wouldnt have preserved her anyway, receives the sleepwalkers forty-five million Reichsmarks. The realist offers credits to no one but the sleepwalker. Shuffling icons like playing cards, Romania reiterates her neutrality in hopes of being overlooked. Yugoslavia wheedles airplanes from Germany and money from France. Warsaws humid shade is already scented with panic-gasps. The wire vibrates: Fanatical determination... ready for anything.

According to the telephone (for perhaps I did listen in once, treasonously), Europe Centrals not a nest of countries at all, but a blank zone of black icons and gold-rimmed clocks whose accidental, endlessly contested territorial divisions (essentially old walls from Roman times) can be overwritten as we like, Gauleiters and commissars blanching them down to grey dotted lines of permeability convenient to police troops. Nows the time to gaze across all those red-grooved roof-waves oceaning around, all the green-tarnished tower-islands rising above white facades which grin with windows and sink below us into not yet completely telephone-wired reefs; nows the time to enjoy Europe Centrals caf umbrellas like anemones, her old grime-darkened roofs like kelp, her hoofbeats clattering up and bellnotes rising, her shadows of people so far below in the narrow streets. Nows the time, because tomorrow everything will have to be, as the telephone announces, obliterated without warning, destroyed, razed, Germanified, Sovietized, utterly smashed. Its an order. Its a necessity. We wont fight like those soft cowards who get held back by their consciences; well liquidate Europe Central! But its still not too late for negotiation. If you give us everything we want within twenty-four hours, well compensate you with land in the infinite East.