Europe Central by William Vollmann

Weissenbürgerstrasse with his fellow Brownshirts; perhaps, he’d died by then; the grocer’s apprentice was long in the grave. She was much too busy to take in the late summer light, let alone the mist on the Wannsee; she was too encumbered with honors. By the time the Great Depression stabbed her Republic in the back, they had promoted her to department head of the Prussian Academy of Arts. When Shostakovich’s Second Symphony premiered, she was making another dark woodcut, the mother’s face blurred like a shrouded mummy’s, the little one apparently dead; she called it “Sleeping with Child.”
    In 1931 her huge lithograph “We Protect the Soviet Union!” showed bitterly stern proletarian men locking arms with one determined proletarian woman; they were all in a line, walling away evil; coincidentally, they remind me of the rows of figures in Roman Karmen’s documentaries. Her creative work, which is devoted to the German proletariat and its liberation struggle, is one of the high points of European revolutionary realistic art.
    In the following year, while S. Korolev’s RP-1 rocket plane first flew through the Soviet sky and the sleepwalker summoned his lieutenants to headquarters at the Kaiserhof Hotel, demanding speechless obedience, she arrived at the cemetery where Peter was buried. It was July. She spent two days grieving alone, shrugging off Karl’s touch. (When after years of hesitation she finally decided to marry, her mother had promised her that she would never be without his love.) The cemetery looked more pleasant to her each time she saw it. The first time she had come, it had been walled in with barbed wire. A Belgian soldier helped her get in and led her to Peter’s grave. She had been grateful for his silence and his lack of surprise. Oh, but everything had seemed so dreary then! Now she was quite accustomed to it.
    Hans came on the twenty-fifth.—And in an instant the bullet struck him! she kept explaining over and over, while Hans stared at her, slowly shaking his head. Keim and the others put him in the trench, she said, because they thought he was only wounded when he was actually dead in that moment . . .
    That dull or guarded look, she could never be quite sure which, had came into Hans’s eyes during the war years; perhaps it was only when he was with her; it would have been natural for him to believe that she loved Peter best, simply because she’d never stop mourning him. For his sixteenth birthday she’d made Hans a bookplate of a blond and naked angel, whose genitals were neither overstated nor hidden in the American manner; and the angel stood on the edge of a white island, with his wings and fists raised as he gazed down into a grey sea, the whole scene illuminated by the riches of futurity, which, as it proved, Hans would be able to spend and his brother would not. Hadn’t she sensed that? She knew both their bodies so well; first Hans used to model for her, then Peter. And Karl used to worry about Peter’s lungs, his lack of weight. Well, poor Hans was going grey now.
    The figures were installed on the twenty-eighth, not at the grave itself, which would have been too small, but across from the cemetery’s entrance: the kneeling father, his arms folded rigidly inward as he stares straight ahead, or pretends to; really he’s gazing down into the earth, which is nowhere; his face is frozen; he bites back his grief.—Such is our life, she said to Karl.—The mother for her part bows frankly forward and down; she seems about to pitch into the grave at any moment. Indeed, in the course of its placement this female figure began tipping forward in the mucky ground; the workmen had to correct the pedestal and then lower the mother back onto her vigil-stone a second time.—I’m not sure that the World Congress of Friends of the Soviet Union would have been interested in such details.
    All the same, that was the year of her second and more extensive Soviet exhibition, the one in