Europe Central by William Vollmann Page A

disappeared. That was what assassins did nowadays, when they . . .
    She carved the mourners light on dark over Liebknecht’s snow-white bier, her chisel-strokes in each woodblocked face resembling muscles beneath flayed flesh. The Communists told her that she had no right, because she wasn’t one of them. But the family had asked her to come. They’d laid red roses on his forehead, to hide the bullet holes. Outside, the rightists were singing Heil Dir im Siegerkranz.
    Liebknecht wasn’t the last. It got almost unbearable, but of course it couldn’t compare with the World War. To get right down to it, what could she do but work, and sometimes catnap in Peter’s room when Karl wasn’t there to be hurt? What he’d always wanted of her was intimacy increasing without limit. She knew now that she’d never desire that, not ever. There wasn’t space.
    Berlin’s trains kept shooting over the steel bridges; Berlin’s boats kept boring underneath them. Our exhausted front-line veterans kept gathering; now they called themselves Old Fighters although most were only in their twenties. Rightists and leftists, they killed each other in their rage.
    She visited the morgue and counted up to two hundred and forty-four murdered corpses, naked behind glass, with their clothes rolled up on their bellies. She heard the people who loved those dead ones weeping. She said to herself: Oh, what a dismal, dismal place this is . . .—Then she went home to Weissenbürgerstrasse, to etch in tears and paint in blood what she had seen. Of course in the World War it had been worse; she must never forget that.
    Another of Frau Becker’s children had died. Karl said that nothing could have been done, given the conditions in which that family had to live. He got emotional, actually. Even the living ones didn’t seem to grow very much. She remembered the way that Peter had suddenly grown so large at age fourteen . . .
    She could hear Frau Becker sobbing in Karl’s office. Karl must be giving her a sedative. Then that grocer’s apprentice came back, although by now it was practically the middle of the night; she could hear him coughing; and the atmosphere of Karl’s office, humid with tears and sputum, began to seep up around her. She’d do another woodcut of Frau Becker, but not now, because she didn’t have the strength. Sometimes she felt numb, and then her work wasn’t any good; she longed to feel. But when feeling came back, it often overcame her, and then she could do nothing but weep or stare at the floor. She went into Peter’s room and closed the door. Here she felt at peace.
    Many years ago, she and Karl had been quarreling, and so she had slept alone. Then Peter, who had been very little, had a nightmare and came scurrying into bed with her. As soon she pressed him against herself, all the desolation she’d been feeling went away. Of course it was not quite like that anymore. Oh, she felt tired, so tired! She wasn’t yet so old that she had any right to be tired. She said to herself: Work.
    She worked without reference to the fiery proto-Cubism of those years, the representational, classical past as dead as the Second Reich itself, dead, dead!—as dead as the Tsarist officers who’d now sunk beneath their own weedy mucky parade grounds so that the Party of Lenin and Stalin could march across their moldering faces. Since 1912 she had kept a room on Siegmund-shof for her plastic arts. That was where she would create the mourning woman out of stone. Mostly she carved, etched, and painted in that flat on Weissenbürgerstrasse. Those were the years when the figures in other people’s paintings began to go ever flatter, more garish, more distorted, the colors hurtful to her although she liked some of the galloping calligraphic riders in Kandinsky. Grosz’s desperately angry caricatures, the X-ray bitterness of Otto Dix, not to mention abstract constructivism; she didn’t swim with that tide. Käthe Kollwitz kept painting poor