Matthew Funk
Unharmed
A normal person in sick circumstances meets the kind of creature that thrives in them.
Matthew
Funk
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Intact and unharmed save for the attendant damage of
extensive travel, the Acquisition and Labor Assignment Depot 9-6 had survived the Russian
war. Surviving with it was Supply Sergeant Gottschalk Stein. Now, after some 1200 miles
and four years, disaster seemed to him more imminent than ever.
This had not been an unfamiliar intuition lately, growing in
mounting intensity along with the volume of Soviet artillery fire. Having an unexpected
visitor in the midst of the metal maelstrom – one as cool in attitude as they were
unfamiliar in aspect – little reinforced Stein’s world.
The Officer’s presence, utter disregard for their mutual
danger, and insistence on taking his time selecting what wares he wanted to purchase was a
cruel ceremony serving as the herald of the end. Front line life had always seemed absurd
to Gottschalk but now he was acutely aware that his final, painful moments would be
carnivalesque, with clownish fate stapling him to his seat to play the straight man in
this sadistic comedy. Collapsed mortar formed the rings of this circus, describing the
borders of the most recent foundation of ALAD 9-6. From that slouched a tent made of
military grade oilskin, shivering and clapping impatiently at the two actors who stood on
either side of an ad hoc desk made of stacked ammo cans and a plank from a Baikal church
pew.
To say that he was disappointed it would come to this – to
detention by some overshelled lunatic of an Officer’s leisurely browsing under an
artillery strike ensuring his doom – would be an understatement. Gottschalk had
always considered himself a man of substance. His life was made of more than just water
and a lot of meat, motivated by more than just vague swimming sensations inside his torso.
Destiny had been a close partner to him, a lover even, and though of humble means he might
be, he had striven to make every action he undertook brushstrokes composing a portrait of
this lover. Gottschalk had never considered existence other than fair in this regard for,
while events might have altered the colors available on his palette, the picture was
always as beautiful as could be imagined. Marches across the bleakest nation on the
planet, indignities suffered at the orders of frenzied men who considered themselves to be
his superior, life as a military quartermaster holding shop on the cusp of Hell, did not
change this.
Much. It did not change it much. It did suggest that the outcome of the
work would be grim in the fatal result. But ridiculous?
That the Officer’s appearance was antipode of the south pole of
absurdity made it all the more so.
The Officer was a noble, even a provincial man like Herr Stein could
detect that, but with a distinct tragedy to him that made him seem worthy of the word. So
many other ‘nobles’, in Stein’s experience, characteristically
weren’t. The Officer’s was a biting tragedy, the same way stepping out of
well-heated doors into alpine wind was biting. The cold to this aura was a part of this
misfortune, as something about the Officer – his apparent vitality, his beatific
features – promised that this person would be capable of so much warmth were it not
for whatever pall hung over their life.
The Officer was strong, this was undeniable. Every gesture, from when
he stabbed his finger towards an item in the Acquisition Depot to a blink of his eye, was
an affirmation of this power. Beneath the ragged, flapping sleeves, Gottschalk saw arms
like ox yokes. He walked – “prowled” would be a better word – with
legs like the great lathes Gottschalk had seen in newsreel pictures of Germany’s
industrial output, legs designed for the express purpose of pounding the vulgar mud of
Russia into a new, shining Empire. And linking both of these remarkable features was a
spine as straight as the Officer’s lineage, straight as the Prussian military
tradition, straight as a bullet flies. Around this body was total collapse. The only stiff
creases on the uniform were those formed by the pins fastening to his breast what looked
to be an exhibition of every medal issued in the war and the contours of the epaulets,
rank and unit patches. The clothes and gear of the Officer were a disaster of gray cloth
and gray mud. It was as if the raputitsa, the muddy season of the Rodina, had become so
sickened by its customary tumult that it had vomited out the outfit, which promptly stuck
to the Officer. Swallowed by this monstrous apparel, shining out of the pathetic shroud of
raw earth, the Officer looked lost.
The Officer was also quite mad.
His insanity was as obvious as his ice-chip blue eyes. He had entered
the tent just as Gottschalk was hurriedly packing away the cans of ham puree and artichoke
hearts in anticipation of fleeing the Russian offensive. The Officer had looked around
casually. He took in the place as one might a department store, measuring not only the
stock of its shelves, the gaily colored labels, stunning slogans in knockout lettering,
painted people beaming with satisfaction from posters and boxes, but also the eaves of the
place, the plank and ammo can desk, and Gottschalk himself, as if having expected an
escalator, a crystal-glass counter and grinning salesman. He strode up to the desk,
slapped the items directly behind it with two swift sweeps of his eyes, and then looked to
Gottschalk. Casually, in a voice like white wine, he inquired after women’s nylons.
Gottschalk had to battle the urge to flee, screaming with all that he had in him.
All this, during one of the heaviest Soviet barrages he had ever
endured.
The Officer was, he saw, quite mad.
When he was a textile merchant in Weisenbach, Supply Sergeant Stein had
once had the memorable displeasure of running into a madman. It had been outside the
gloriously commemorative Kirchnauer square, on the way home from his work, one of those
collisions with the flotsam of shattered worlds all spheres in humanity’s
constellation must from time to time endure. He had been passing the square, which –
predictably enough – was hosting yet another political rally. Whether the event was
being held by the German People’s Party, the Centrist Bavarian’s People’s
Party, or the National Socialist German Worker’s Party he couldn’t recall;
whatever it was, it inspired in him the traditional reaction of any good Weimar citizen to
such occasions. He quickened his pace to move past it in as short a time as possible while
looking back in devout, almost religious curiosity. The subsequent impact with the madman
had hardly been his fault, but there he was suddenly, all scrabbling scabrous fingers and
rotten mouth and eyes.
The man had immediately begun some frenzied and dire appeal to
Gottschalk Stein, delivering it with all the fervor of a lookout reporting a surprise
trench-rush by superior enemy forces. He related an elaborate tirade about how telephonic
receivers, radio mind control and visual broadcast devices implanted in the eyes would be
the doom of them all. Gottschalk could not have been more uninterested. He was, in fact,
resolutely uninterested. A simple equation had exploded to life at the instant of their
encounter – interaction with the man would be in inverse relation to the well being
of his hygiene, the state of his clothes, even the state of his own sanity. He had to
vacate, vacate immediately, before the shambling blob of entropy that was trying to share
its foul existence could taint him irrevocably. He backpedaled, waved his umbrella about
in a strange little show of force, and immediately strolled through traffic. Horns blared,
brakes squealed, but he cared little. Gottschalk had recovered from the encounter –
the lunatic had already begun assailing someone else, as was the way of the lunatic he
thought – but by now his flight was a matter of pride. To reverse himself, stride
back across the half of street he had traversed and risk the lunatic’s company again
was not only unacceptably risky, it was also humiliating. As if one of highest breeding,
he strolled across the street like it had been in his family for years.
Here in Russia the streets were made of quicksand.
There were no streets in Russia and the chalky conduits of transfer the
Soviet had established as ersatz roads had been tilled up to make way for an autobahn.
Plans had changed and now the concrete allotted to the autobahn was being used to create
walls outside of hamlets throughout Germany. The notion that anything, save perhaps a dam
of corpses, could be built in Russia by the German will was now just an exercise in
suicidal delusion. So there were no roads to cross.
Running while he was supposed to be attending an Officer would also be
an egregious breech of duty. Nevertheless, flight remained a priority in his mind,
desperately fighting for supremacy.
It remained so all the way up to the point where, with a heavy concussion outside and in a
wet, invisible burst inside his head, Gottschalk had lost his hearing. This did not deter
the Officer’s attempts to communicate with him in the slightest, and they continued
with a patient precision that was an identical sibling to the language of ballet. If the
slam of whole quarries of metal all around them would not deter – or even nonplus
– the Officer, deafness would not either.
Now little more than an acquiescent lump supporting itself on a church pew, ammo-can
countertop, Gottschalk was entirely resigned to death. Death at its worst – at its
most grotesque and pointless. A death colorless and hollow as bone. Letting go of
everything save what was tied to his body by a network of nerves, Gottschalk began to
navigate his drift into oblivion.
The Officer pointed to a twenty-pound box of chocolate truffles.
Gottschalk had tried to extricate himself initially, in the first few
minutes of the Officer’s browsing, by way of deft logic and the brute force of
emotional appeal. He vocally calculated the odds of being struck by 152mm artillery at a
range of less than 5 kilometers bombardment range. He drew a diagram with dust and his
finger. He begged and talked about his family – his wife with her fits of hysteria,
his daughter, Inga, with the dropsy. He laughed it off, laughed at danger itself, and then
offered his services as an armed escort, lauding his marks for good driving that the
Munich police had given him, 1935-1937.
The Officer had merely gone on shopping. He offered Gottschalk a stare like an injection
of sodium pentothal on the rocks and requested to see a shiny Louis-Vuitton leather purse.
Gottschalk had given it to him, leaned his knuckles into the countertop, and recommended
the same item in Burgundy.
Now the artillery had marched across the front to land around the rocky
escarpment the tent of ALAD 9-6 had been nestled in. The entire world had become noise and
calm. The thunder of the artillery bursting outside, shaking the tent, sending its flaps
on furious excursions from which they returned looking beaten and humiliated. Sometimes
they returned in shreds. Sometimes those shreds flew about the inside of the tent,
conducted by gusts of hot wind and shrapnel.
The Officer just went on shopping. He asked after a box of silk
teddies from Murmansk’s winter line, 1940. And there was the calm.
That in the midst of a disaster so intense Gottschalk could hear his teeth dislodging and
little else, the shopping continued. It was like Mütti’s on a Sunday afternoon:
ladies’ perfume, musak, and nothing in the world to do but appreciate beauty from a
thousand different angles. Only with flying metal rather than endless mirrors, cordite
instead of perfume. A cough the size of Lichtenstein blew a flap of the tent into a
churning red sky, tearing it off, sending it hurtling away, and the Officer asked after a
“Karyatis” large brass mill.
The Officer went on shopping.
One of the reasons that Gottschalk Stein, Sergeant and
Quartermaster In Good Standing, had surrendered to this craziness was that he already felt
insubordinate. He had committed a terrible transgression against the Officer, one
apparently overlooked but impossible to ignore. Since that time, he had been determined to
make amends. Not only to the Officer, but to the very system of order itself, parent of
duty and honor. This dedication had been hard come by. Though the foundation had been laid
long ago by the clever educators that populated Gottschalk’s childhood, it had only
been just twenty minutes ago that it had risen to its doughty prominence. Now he was set
on seeing his duty through to the end. Honor, absolute, would temper his life into
something of value, as it did with all life. The Officer had violated this most perfect of
paradigms by going insane. Gottschalk would be damned if he would.
This morning had begun peculiar. Gottschalk had awoken from his
cot in the ALAD 9-6 storeroom shaken with an uncommon disturbance. Though all other parts
of his psyche seemed intact and fully functional, a crucial part was missing. For the life
of him, he could not remember how he styled his hair. Laying there, he projected images of
himself with all manner of hairstyles onto the gray ceiling of the tent. Nothing came to
him. After some time, he rose, went to the bathroom he had set up in the burned out cellar
of a nearby building, and examined himself in the mirror by oil-light. He saw himself,
sweating copiously, but focused his attention on arranging his image in the hopes of
inspiring recall. Still nothing – his hair was merely a brown, unruly mass,
suggestive of no shape save chaos. He shoved its locks one way or another, spiked it high
and slicked it low, even cupped his hand over strands at the hairline to see if the length
looked familiar. Nothing doing.
It was then, at his most desperate, that he became aware that his
problems had increased. His insides were gurgling furiously, painfully straining to empty.
Gottschalk blanched white – it was dysentery, which he had seen claim so many others
in the most ghoulish and pitiful of ways!
Fortunately for his mental state, he had soon determined this to
be impossible – he drank nothing but bottled water, and its sparkling purity was
immune to imperfections, even in such a morass of the imperfect as Russia. He had vacated
himself, cleaned up shakily, and tried to ignore the fact that it had given him no relief
save an important one: It had restored his knowledge of his usual hairstyle. He groomed
fastidiously, then spent the rest of the day rushing to the cellar bathroom, crapping
explosively by a row of ruptured jams and jellies, rushing back to the ALAD 9-6 tent.
Predictably his distress had returned, his guts all napalm,
during the Officer’s shopping excursion. Gottschalk had tried to repress himself but
to little avail. After long minutes of clamping what iron he had in his guts around his
sloshing bowel, the Officer’s request for a closer look at a pair of onyx cat
statuettes on the high shelf had forced him to reach. Reaching stretched strain to its
critical point. And Gottschalk accompanied the artillery for one long, loud burst.
His shame and dishonor was nearly complete. He would not compound it by fleeing the
presence of an Officer who had use of him. All the same, he could not pretend to be
enthusiastic about the situation, nor to cater to this agent of quiet, fatal absurdity by
gracefully browsing about in the eye of impending doom.
Since his honorless flatulence, Gottschalk had taken to sitting on a milk crate whenever
the Officer wasn’t directly dealing with him. It had been some twenty minutes, and
the initial flush of humiliation had passed, receding into a weight lump of shame pressing
down on his diaphragm. Twenty minutes, at least 10 near misses from the Soviet artillery
barrage, and not a word of protest. He had already pushed the envelope with his appeals
for escape and then torn it with his flatulence. Twenty minutes, though he had ceased to
count time, measuring his progress towards a farcical death instead in items.
Pewter swan, Hunan style.
The Officer removes his helmet, unfettering an explosion of
blonde hair, runs his hand through it.
Batik mask.
The hair, while hardly fine, has a softness about it.
Sign from a Smolensk restaurant.
As does the pale of his hands, as does his mouth - like poured
pink wax - which makes Gottschalk Stein wonder.
Leningrad beads and a Muscovite snuff box.
Which makes Gottschalk Stein stop wondering abruptly, to think
insistent thoughts of his wife’s bottom, round like an apple, and the soft core
within.
A portable pet water fountain, made for Field Marshall
Manstein’s schnauzer.
And as the Officer shifts the water fountain, examining its
ingenious design, and rolling it in her – his – hands, Gottschalk returns to
wondering from a new perspective.
Clever little Parvati statue from the Urals.
That being one without guilt over admiring the Officer’s
stunning looks for, yes, he could admit it now, they were seraphically stunning.
Calico kittens, box of 36.
All of her was stunning, from her eyes of melting arctic to the
tiger-like way she shifted her balance from one leg to the other, as if constantly ready
to pounce.
Leopard spot luxury dog collar.
As if constantly ready to pounce or to rut. Yes, he was positive
now.
Minsk moisturizer, made with real pearl.
Yes, the Officer was not an Officer at all, not in the
traditional, masculine sex. That is, ‘sense’. Or was ‘sex’ more
appropriate?
Yes, the Officer was a woman.
A snow globe made of frozen silver, the flakes flecks of precious
stone, coruscating as the globe is turned, while inside engraved occupants act out a scene
that is part travel, part frolic.
The architect of his humiliation, his distress and his intended
doom, was a female charlatan. How absurd. How appropriate.
“I’ve made my decision.”
How very much like it to be a woman, life insulting and insane to
the end. How very fortunate, as this meant he needn’t stand for it any longer. The
surrealism had reached its apex. Gottschalk reached for his pistol.
The Officer looked directly at Gottschalk Stein. Directly
through.
He touched its steel hilt with fingers made of colder, heavier
stuff. He looked into eyes tough enough to break bones just by looking mean – eyes
that confirmed the woman as an Officer, as more than Officer, as a creature made of the
cold marrow found in the essence of that term. He thought of the madman, of an autobahn
that would never be built.
“How much?”
In those eyes, he was frozen.
“How much?”
Gottschalk Stein could not move.
He tried to shiver, to shake off thoughts too big – thoughts
of terrible and beautiful things dressed in the stuff of Hell. He struggled to form the
words ’60 Reichsmarks’ or at least, ‘Take it; it’s free’, to cast
that spell and so banish this…Officer…from where it could look at him.
Gottschalk Stein could not move.
“Hurry up, man. It’s dangerous here.”
He fought with all he could to survive.
All contents copyright © Matthew Funk 2007, all rights reserved.