Free Europe Central by William Vollmann

hateful, ripe for the next war. When she couldn’t bear any more of it, she caught the tram for Weissenbürgerstrasse. She went home to her nervously overworked husband whose patients had so often modeled poverty’s face to her.
    The man in the tophat stood outside. This time she spied him in conversation with that tubercular young grocer’s apprentice who was in ecstasies about Hitler; Karl said that little could be done for him; he’d be in the grave in six months. Käthe had once asked the boy why, what he had against Jews, how he could possibly wish on Germany more hate and war. He replied: Excuse me, Frau Kollwitz, but I would like to stand for something. I would like to be there for something.—Now both of them wore swastika armbands. They looked more cheerful than she had ever seen them.
    They didn’t even notice her at first. Then they did see her. The man in the tophat said: Well, well, it’s Frau Kollwitz again.
    And she realized that all these years he had also been watching her.
    She’d put up with enough at the Prussian Academy. She had nothing to say to him.
    But the man in the tophat had something to say. Taking two steps closer, while the ashen-faced grocer’s apprentice gazed at him with shining eyes, he said: You know the difference between you and us, Frau Kollwitz? We’re optimists.
    This shocked her so much that she could scarcely breathe, because it was true.
    The dying apprentice chimed in: We never gave up. Even at the end we still believed in victory.
    She looked them in the face and said: Do you believe in it now?
    Yes, Frau Kollwitz; we at least will keep our faith.
    She rushed upstairs to Karl’s office; the door was closed and a man was groaning. She needed Karl right then, but so be it. The last flight of stairs exhausted her. She unlocked the flat and went straight to Peter’s room.
    That was the night when she dreamed that the man in the tophat had come two steps closer, and two steps closer, until suddenly he turned into a drawing she did once, of a mother catching her dead soldier-boy as he tumbles gruesomely into her arms; it was early next morning, when she awoke in Karl’s arms, sobbing, that she realized that death had now become a friend; and there would be one famous self-portrait (catalogue number 157) where death kindly leads her away. (As the sleepwalker laughed to Colonel Hagen: Don’t you think there’s something Jewish about that?) Ruf des Todes, she entitled it. That hand descending in the fullness of time to touch the artist’s shoulder, whose was it? Not a skeleton’s but also not Peter’s. His hand was eternally frail and little to her now, just as he was no grown man but a beautiful naked little boy. The hand in Ruf des Todes was heavy and old; perhaps it was Karl’s; its touch was domestic; it called her to herself so that she, weary and not at all surprised, could go with its owner to lie down in peace. But even if the hand wasn’t Peter’s, it was Peter’s bed she lay down upon.
    11
    In that same year 1927, the fraternal peoples of the USSR prepared to celebrate the achievements of Soviet power. In spite of Trotsky, the kulaks and the bourgeois monopolists, we’d built socialist democracy! Specifically, the emiseration of the masses under capitalism, which our dear friend K. Kollwitz has depicted so powerfully in her graphic work, was forever vanished, like the prewar prostitutes of the Nevsky. Moreover, we’d carried out this feat of humanism without giving ground to the capitalist anaconda which encircled us. By 1927, we could show the world an unbroken and unbreakable chain of victories. This was the year when an airplane of our R-3 series accomplished the first Moscow-Tokyo-Moscow flight. On the musical front, Shostakovich had not yet been disgraced. Photographically and metallurgically we held our own; on the educational front, we’d nearly liquidated illiteracy.
    Therefore, to mark our Revolution’s tenth birthday, it was decided to invite