The World as I Found It (62 page)

A cold morning breeze was blowing as Stize disappeared again. Over the Russian trenches, the first faint streaks of dawn were beginning to appear. Wittgenstein was trying to collect his thoughts when an empty tin struck him on the elbow — a warning, followed by a little edge of laughter as he turned and heard the snap of a fuse ring. He knew who it was, and turned, fatalistic, as Grundhardt flipped a stick bomb at his feet. No time to throw it away or run. Wittgenstein could hear Grundhardt cackling as he scuttled off. But the joke was on both of them, because this one didn't explode either, though for Wittgenstein it might as well have.

The mad major was perhaps not as mad as he seemed. The Russians did attack shortly after dawn, and it was only because the Austrian first lines were deployed that they even delayed that onslaught.

Some reinforcements arrived just before the attack, but they weren't in much better shape than Wittgenstein's own men, who were almost docile after a night's pounding. While the machine gunners locked and cleared their guns with a peremptory coughing, Wittgenstein and Ernst situated the men, handed out stick bombs and bandoliers of ammunition, then ordered them to load and fix bayonets. They were barely ready when the first Russian wave rushed out in a probing maneuver, covered by a thin smoke screen and a walking barrage laced with rifle fire. Stumbling over shell holes in long brown coats and tall fleece caps, most of the Russians were summarily cut down by return fire and the chugging, water-cooled machine guns that swung back and forth, dropping them in clotted heaps, some crumpling, some sitting abruptly, some blown back onto the ugly spike bayonets of those rushing behind them.

The first wave was decimated, as was the second. But those who got through managed to clear paths through the remaining wire for the third and fourth waves, who by then were whooping and cheering, impeded only by the bodies of their comrades.

The noise was deafening and it was difficult to follow targets or get more than glimpses of what was happening through the bursting shells and drifting smoke. Ernst, six or seven men down the wall from Wittgenstein, was firing and urging the men on; in the confusion, Wittgenstein never had a chance to settle accounts or say good-bye in that veiled, awkward way of men before battle. To Wittgenstein's amazement, Stize was there, too. Wittgenstein never expected him to return, yet there he was, glowering and hung over, frantically pacing back and forth to keep from trembling, almost enraged now that he realized he was trapped with nowhere to run for instructions, with no other business before him but to be sacrificed with his more expendable men, without even the prince there to see him valiantly waving that unloaded pistol in the air.

Stize probably surprised himself that day. He was helping feed bullets into the machine gun after the second gunner was killed, when he himself was shot through the throat. Wittgenstein was too busy cranking the hot bolt of his rifle, firing at glimpses of coats and arms, to be able to do anything about the chocolate maker as he lay there, bleeding to death with Krull bent over him. Nor was there anything to be done about Ernst a few moments later, when Wittgenstein paused to reload and saw him lying at the bottom of the trench, with his legs flung over his shoulders and the side of his head blown off. The Russians were nearly on them by then. Some of his men had fled, while others were wounded or feigning wounds or death or else frantically throwing down their weapons and holding up crucifixes, having heard that the Russians wouldn't shoot a man holding a crucifix. Wrong again.

There was no time to turn the men around; there was no time to do anything. As the first Russian attackers neared the trench, Wittgenstein and others nearby flung two and three stick bombs each over the breastworks, but only a handful exploded. And then the first Russians broke over them, a gang of six or seven, young and green. The Austrians who were still fighting were mostly the brawlers, the mean-eyed ones who loved it. A bearish man beside Wittgenstein dropped his rifle in favor of a pickhandle bristling with nails and a sharpened railroad spike, exultantly cursing as he broke the back of one boy in midair, then took another down at the knees, splattering his brains like a toadstool. Wittgenstein had never been caught in a dreaded hand-to-hand fight, assuring himself that it would be better to sacrifice himself, Isaac-like, than stoop so low. But he saw hobnailed boots and a bloody face in the sky — then ducked as a Russian bayonet sank like a javelin into the sandbags opposite. Whipping around, he shot the man pointblank in the face, then winged a second, before a third swung from behind and leapt on him with his rifle. The pistol went off and dropped, but as Wittgenstein fell, either he managed to put his boot into the man's groin or else the man just stumbled — no telling which, it happened so fast — and Wittgenstein wrenched the rifle from his grasp and pounced on him. The Russian was barely a boy, a yearling soldier with a square face and queer Mongol eyes. The boy knew he was dead, so fearstruck that when he screamed only air-starved steam rushed out. It was Grundhardt again. Grundhardt was all Wittgenstein saw. Like a wounded rabbit, the boy was squealing in hot, panting little breaths, his muddy hands frantically tearing at Wittgenstein's tunic, when the steel rifle butt stove down, a glancing blow that tore the skin from the side of his forehead. The broken boy shuddered and bucked. Fear raised the rifle up. Something was set in motion that couldn't be stopped. Dizzily, Wittgenstein aimed, then rammed the butt home with one final, lusting grunt, crushing bone to jelly as a tardy, sickened impulse told him the first blow would have done it.

Then Wittgenstein was scrambling over gelatinous bodies, clawing up as out of a bloody bucket. Everyone who still had legs was running then. Ahead he saw Krull, Stize's orderly, hopping nimbly over the shell holes, like black Peter with his sack of chocolates. And behind him hundreds more were running as through a fire storm, going up in geysers or falling gored on their faces as the rallying pursuers shot them down. Wittgenstein's pack was slapping his back and his blood was splashing. His chest could hardly contain his lungs. The miracle was that he was actually running to save his life that day, running with no thought of his book or of anyone but himself, bawling,
Nicht schiessen, nicht schiessen!

The Russian offensive was a route for the Austrians, who in the next week were driven back forty miles, losing some two hundred big guns and more than three hundred thousand men, killed, captured or missing. What had been an army was now a frantic, fleeing mob bent only on saving itself, stripping the dead, abandoning the wounded — even taking their last drop of water — and murdering anyone who got in its way. Hundreds drowned in the crush to cross a flimsy pontoon bridge across the rain-swollen Styr. Russian planes bombed and strafed the bottle-necked columns, and bands of Cossacks mounted on the hairy Kirghiz ponies cut down stragglers. And complicating everything were hordes of refugees, who were driven from the roads into the forests, where they hid, competing for the spoils with scavenging packs of deserters from both armies. Yellow Units, they were called, murderers and thieves who hunted in packs, like wild dogs, the all against the all.

Unable to find his own unit, Wittgenstein fought with remnants of various other units during two days of rear guard skirmishes with the Russians while the main army escaped. And everywhere he went, he looked for Grundhardt. He knew this was madness, and yet, if anything, the sheer improbability of ever finding Grundhardt made their meeting seem all the more inevitable. If he saw a soldier with Grundhardt's general build or coloring, Wittgenstein's heart would fly into his mouth. But when he called out Grundhardt's name, some weary stranger dragging a rifle and bedroll would turn around, puzzled by his wild stare.

Finally, an officer sent several squads back to a virgin stand of birches for a full night's sleep, Wittgenstein's first in weeks. Exhausted and desperate to forget, most of the men were out the second they lay down. But Wittgenstein only grew more agitated as he lay there listening to their tormented mumblings, watching them twitch and whimper in their sleep like dreaming dogs. This was not sleep, nor was the sleep life, nor was life the end. Beasts walk the earth — he saw that now. Hirsute and engorged with themselves, they rose like erections, spilling and stealing and cutting the generations down like corn.

Now the picture of his life cast its shadow across the world. Bitterly, he thought of how fiercely he had fought to save himself. And for what? Flatulent heart. Fraudulent life. The shadow ran through his empty heart as through a sieve, spilling lies in the vain hope of distilling even a few grains of truth. He had no faith, and yet he felt faith's desires — a castrato's urge, singing to only a dim memory of music, pretending that one is, after all, human, born of woman and earth. No, it was quite clear: he had no soul, but still he felt the pain of one, the phantom pain that amputees feel from missing hands that still play empty rondos and fugues. But by far the most excruciating pain was how, once severed from the soul, the unmoored mind persisted, gliding along like a monstrous shark, swimming for no other reason than to force raw life through its gills, swimming like sperm to ovum, seeking life, seeking death.

He desperately wanted to weep but every pore was plugged; he thought he would explode there under the stars, surrounded by the sleep-talkers and skittish horses who stood dreaming on their feet. And then Grundhardt was there; he was sitting right beside him. His face was black and vacant and the sharp little triangles at the top of his skull, like the ears of a cat, only confirmed Wittgenstein's suspicions. Dragging between his legs was a thick cock or tail with a meaty club head that, when Wittgenstein looked closer, resembled an ace of spades. Loathsome, the insistent way Grundhardt stropped and fondled it; Wittgenstein felt his sphincter lubricate and tighten in apprehension. He didn't argue when Grundhardt said that many others were writing the same book as he; Wittgenstein had long suspected as much. God is wasteful. How else to explain why so many men of genius — so many Darwins — are simultaneously put on the world to die in their prime so that one might propagate some peculiar species of idea? Were ideas so precious? Effortlessly, sketching equations in the air with a smoking fingernail, Grundhardt was making all kinds of logical connections that so far had eluded Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein was amazed at how he had underestimated him, that master metaphysician. Grundhardt had, for instance, devised an equation — a sort of ballistic triangulation — by which he could plot the path of bullets and so slip unscathed through the steel fusillades in the way that air slides between raindrops. But when Grundhardt sketched out Wittgenstein's own ideas, the signs swirled into nonsense and the logic went awry, causing Wittgenstein's once majestic propositions to wilt over him like spaghetti strings until he groaned with mortification. With eyes as low as the Dead Sea, Grundhardt said contemptuously:

How often I've watched you scribbling in your idiotic little book. But you were right about one thing: everything you think
is
otherwise. As for the rest,
logician
— you might as well as put a big fat
naught
before all you think …

Wittgenstein could only vaguely follow the rough outlines of Grundhardt's masterly and intricate condemnation, which, like Luther's complaint, ran on forever, far exceeding his own meager powers of reasoning. Every Jew, Grundhardt was saying, was a contradiction, which, like all contradictions, pointed in two directions and so came to naught. Every fairy, on the other hand, was a tautology, which was to say an empty copulation, arrow pointing to arrow — a vain cancellation.

For Wittgenstein, there was of course no rational way to refute or deny this wizardry, but then of course he was quite out of his depth — Grundhardt must have read his mind. In his shame, Wittgenstein's only wish then was to be crushed. But here again Grundhardt quite saw through him, sneering, Don't
presume
to choose your own punishment — I'll be the one to decide that, not you …

This was pure capriciousness: commanders were always deciding to do what their subordinates had suggested, then presuming they had thought of it first. So, seizing Wittgenstein by the buttocks, Grundhardt flipped him over and straddled him, hissing like a King monkey as he rammed himself down into the roots of Wittgenstein's molars, splitting him like a chicken with his throbbing malice, driving him down into the rich black mire even as Wittgenstein was ruefully acknowledging, finally, the sublime pleasure of his dominion.

Grundhardt was saying, Your little book is not the least bit original — kikes are always unoriginal. Would you believe what fresh underwear could cost you? But of course not, etcetera. Just now Count Primkin, etcetera. And Pinsent, too, etcetera, etcetera. And Kurt and Ernst, and even Stize, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera …

And holding him down, chattering in his ear like a ciphering cricket, Grundhardt kept monotonously repeating the word, which applied to everything, a string of deaths and failures of which he, Wittgenstein, was the natural conclusion — absurd, thought Wittgenstein, when he had denied the causal nexus.

It was almost dawn when Grundhardt finally released his victim. Looking up at him as his ruptured bowels cohered, Wittgenstein saw that he had been suffering from a blind spot and that Grundhardt had spontaneously filled that void in the way that lightning fills lakes with scalding new life. For what seemed like ages, Wittgenstein stared into the black square where Grundhardt's head should have been, stared at it even as Grundhardt, casting his malign shadow over the world, drifted away, a figure only slightly darker than the general darkness.

* * *

Again the late spring rains came. And with the rains, the Russian drive, like virtually every major offensive of the war, ground to a halt, the forces blocked by the very devastation that had enabled them to break through in the first place as mules sank to their shanks and wagons keeled over and feet sucked out of boots.