Another Green World (15 page)

It was inevitable, she supposed, that the two of them should have taken separate paths; what was amazing was that they'd stuck together for so long. What, when all was said and done, did they have in common? Not a thing she could see, beyond the accident of having grown up on the same block in nearly identical red-brick houses on a boring, middle-class, suburban street. A matter of socioeconomic happenstance, nothing more, and it certainly didn't mean their fates were intertwined.

Just look at him: bookish and timid, sallow from living indoors, temperamentally conservative and, let's face it, something of a stuffed shirt. He sang in the
church choir
, for God's sake. Whereas Martina was…well, she wasn't so certain about that, only about what she was not. And that was the least bit Ingo-ish.

If anything, she was more like these Socialists. The longer she was around them, the more she felt at home, among friends. Comrades. She admired their confidence, their fellowship, their dedication to a cause. She envied their well-formed ideas about the world. She approved their practical clothing, simple uniforms of good, durable cloth that blurred differences of age and gender. She liked how they pooled the chores of running the camp. She even came to appreciate—after somebody handed her a multilingual edition—the poetry of Richard Dehmel, whose words flew in red and white on a banner over the campsite.

Only one passion can be borne untiringly:
That for the world at large.

She was grateful to be spared Ingo's commentary on this, and on Dehmel's other stirring, plainspoken verses—” The Working Man,” “The Martyr,” “Harvest Song.” Martina had never much cared for poetry, but this was a different thing, a nearly opposite thing, from the precious, lilac-scented, art-for-art's-sake confections that Ingo shlepped around in his rucksack. Dehmel's writings honored struggle and pain, the joy of chil-dren's playtime, the tears at the graveside, all the ordinary hopes and sorrows that were the real stuff of people's lives. None of that sighing, dreamy nonsense like
Death in Venice
or
Remembrance of Things Past
, those neverlands where Ingo tried to lose himself.

Martina felt her eyes had been opened. She knew this was a cliché— Ingo would have mocked her for saying it—yet it was true. She was looking at the world with a different, more honest and unclouded kind of vision. Opening Franz Werfel's “Friend of the World,” she felt her heart quicken even at the preamble:

How ironic, she thought, that you had to come to Germany to find someone who would write this way. In America, such thoughts were unutterable. You could go to Catholic University, right there in Washington, D.C., and learn all about Christ's New Covenant, wherein the old tribal admonitions are brushed aside and everything hangs on love for one's fellow man—yet nobody ever mentions that he might have dark skin. Here in Germany, the land of castles and knights and magical pipers, you were free to read, and to think, and to say whatever you liked, in your very loudest voice.

And the people here—these near-adults, a whole swelling tide of youth—weren't living in the Dark Ages anymore, but boldly in the present. Having cast off the moldy Thou Shalt Nots, they were plunging into the future, the new decade about to dawn, with no rules, no fears, no inhibitions. They might do anything! The Thirties would be a time such as the world had never seen—Martina was now sure of that, if not much else.

“Come now,” Käthe called from the golden circle around the campfire. “Come, while there still is something to eat.”

Martina had been sitting alone at the edge of camp, her thoughts adrift, while darkness rose up around her, like smoke from the land itself, out of the rocks and old trees and hard-worn earth, while the sky became a tapestry of shining lights, the million stars woven together by an unseen hand and spelling out endless prophecies, if only the mortals below knew how to read them.

Near the big iron stewpot she found a dozen or so Arbeiterjugend whose faces she had come to know, and an equal number of fresh arrivals who'd been out spreading the Socialist gospel across the mountainside. They accepted Martina matter-of-factly, another sister-in-arms. A dark-eyed boy handed her a bowl of leek-and-potato soup, steaming and fragrant with wild herbs and mushrooms gathered that afternoon; without tasting it she knew it would be delicious.

She looked around for Isaac but did not find him.

Through gaps in the trees, all over the Hanstein and up the higher slopes of the Meissner, she could see the orange-yellow pricks of
campfires. All day people had been trying to guess the size of the crowd. Twenty thousand, she had heard. Then thirty. Then, unbelievably, fifty. You could imagine this if you looked at the fires and thought about all those campsites large and small tucked into every niche and fold and glade for miles. Fifty thousand young people: enough to fill Griffith Stadium back home, twice over.

One of the SAJ—a young man she'd noticed jotting entries in a ledger— turned to her and spoke in careful, almost too-polite English. “Käthe tells us that you are from Washington come?”

“You come from Washington,” a second boy corrected him, the dark-eyed one who'd given her the soup.

Martina smiled and nodded, to assure them that either phrasing was fine.

“I think that it is a beautiful city,” said the first boy. “Not like Berlin. Berlin is a great city but ugly. Like Chicago. Do you know Chicago?”

“No, I'm afraid not.”

“Over Chicago Brecht has written,” the boy said. “A real workers' city. Like Berlin, big and dirty, but so full of life! The people, warm and true.”

“Do you know Berlin?” Dark Eyes said.

Martina shook her head. “I've never been anywhere in Germany. Only here. And the train from Hamburg.”

There was quiet murmuring as this was translated and Martina felt somehow inadequate. These people were just so… good. So calm and sure and open to knowledge in all its forms.

“I think Germany's a beautiful place,” she said hastily. “I'd love to see more of it. I wish I could just, you know, wander around, like you all do.”

Hearing herself say it, she decided it was true. She wanted to cast off the constraints of college and home, a life scheduled down to the minute, and strike out along these enticing forest paths.

“If you wish that,” said Käthe, from her place halfway around the fire, “why should it not be?”

“Does the SAJ,” Martina said, awkwardly assembling her question, “just camp out anywhere? Do you have regular places, or…”

“We have a main home,” Dark Eyes said. “It is not so far from here, a place called the Leuchtenburg, near Jena. And we have a project in the East, a model village. There is a little farm there, and an artisans' workshop. We make everything for ourselves.”

“But our chief work is in the cities,” Käthe said. “Organizing among the working-class youth. Helping at soup kitchens, setting up libraries. This is our first duty, to serve and unite the ordinary people.”

Her voice had an edge, and Martina wondered if she was annoyed that the boy had mentioned these other, less-serious-minded matters.

“But you must come to Leuchtenburg!” Dark Eyes persisted. “Always guests are welcome there. It is a lovely old place, with a wonderful legend. A knight of the Holy Reich took refuge there, pursued by pagan bandits—”

“Na ja,” said Käthe, clearly annoyed now. “Just the sort of tale the Weisse Ritter like to tell. Armored aristocrats dashing about subduing the peasantry, crusaders sticking their lances through infidels.”

The boy only smiled; this argument had a rote quality, its themes probably oft-repeated. “It is only a tale, you know,” he confided to Martina. “Unlike the White Knights, and some other bündisch people we could name, we SAJ do not believe in old legends, though we may freely take pleasure in them. We do not believe either in new legends, as the Marxists do. We don't even believe in Wagner!”

There was laughter around the fire, and Martina dearly wished she got the joke, that she could be just another good, honest Socialist. When I get back to Washington, she promised herself, I'll take an interest in politics, figure out how the world works. And then I'll do something about it— mark my words.

Caught up in these thoughts, Martina was probably the last to notice the strange noises coming from the other side of the camp. Somewhere beyond the tent, off in the shadows, there was a scuffling, like a heavy object being dragged over rocks. Then a tumble, something falling or being thrown to the ground. Finally voices: two at least, male, cursing or laughing, possibly both. As the sounds got closer, a few Arbeiterjugend slipped away into the darkness like soldiers preparing to meet an unseen foe. Martina moved to follow them, but Dark Eyes held her back.

“Before, we have had trouble. People have been hurt.”

At last the source of the commotion came lurching into the wavering circle of firelight: Isaac, his face begrimed and clothing torn, his hair askew, blood-slick gashes running down one bare arm. His eyes shone with fevered brightness as he stared back and forth, like a child waking from a dream and trying to recognize the faces swarming around him.

Then, to everyone's amazement, he began to laugh. His mouth opened wide and the laughter was that of a wild creature of the woods. He took a step forward, nearly lost his balance and had to be jerked upright by the young man beside him. This second boy didn't look crazed, though he too was a shambling mess, his clothing soiled, his hat knocked sideways. Mar-tina's first thought was that he must be some German kind of Eagle Scout: he had the stiff, clenched-jawed look of someone working extra hard to
win that merit badge. Her next thought was that the boy holding Isaac on his feet was Ingo.

Ingo it was, wearing a hat she'd never seen before, some silly loden thing with a feather poking out of it, and an unfamiliar peasant-style smock that was torn and stained. Ingo the timid bookworm from Brook-land. Ingo the Dull and Predictable.

“Isaac!” someone shouted—Käthe, Martina dimly thought. “Bist okay? Bist du verletzt?”

“Verletzt?” Again the crazy laugh. “Injured? Nie—ich wäre tot. I thought I was a fuckin' goner.”

Ingo led him forward, one stumbling footfall at a time. A German boy grabbed the opposite arm and together they carried him to the fire.

When Isaac saw Martina, his marble eyes sparkled. “I met another Yank!” His voice was unreasonably loud, the voice of someone who'd had a close shave and lived to tell about it. “This guy here, Ingo Miller, he's a fucking hero. I'm serious—this Arschficker saved my life.”

OCTOBER 1944

W
ar, thought Butler, is Tolstoyan: it obeys the formula laid down in
Anna Karenina
, the famous passage about families. Every successful military operation is more or less the same, but disaster comes in limitless variety.

Sometimes the problem unfolds gradually, over weeks or months, with ever more depressing clarity, like the Eskimo technique for killing a bear by feeding it sharpened bones in blubber, so that it bleeds slowly to death from inside. That's how the annihilation of Hitler's army in the East was proceeding, from the German point of view.

Other times, trouble leaps upon you so fast you have no time even to imagine what went wrong—rather as though munitions engineers had fed the bear an armor-piercing explosive. That's how the war felt to Butler this morning. That little click in the gut, just before the
boom.

After five years as a front-line correspondent—six if you count the dress rehearsal in Spain, months devoted largely to screwing, reading Cavafy and smoking hashish—Butler had come to feel about the war as an experienced, intuitive mechanic might feel about a high-powered engine. He could clear his mind and gently touch the keys of his modified Remington, and the living pulse of the war would come throbbing into his fingertips. He could tell when the great, ravening machine was running smoothly. He could sense the changes in rhythm when it was roaring ahead or chugging wearily to a halt. He needed no inside source at Front HQ to tip him off to a new offensive: he could read it in the grinding teeth of motorized traffic, the whine of aircraft overhead, the tense, excited faces of young staff officers with secret orders behind their eyes.

Butler knew when a battle was going well from his bedroll, hearing the rolling thunder of artillery, the gentle shudder of the earth under advancing
tank columns, the electric crackle of radios as messages came through. Just so, he could tell at once when the great engine faltered, when something got stuck, a connector snapped, an artery gushed blood. He felt it, somehow, in his own flesh: a sick churning in the belly, a tightening at the throat. A dry hacking of field guns. A silence when there ought to have been noise.

He was lying in bed this morning, an hour past dawn, wrapped in a bearskin blanket in his cozy bivouac near the railroad junction at Stary Sambor, a town that might have been in Poland or Galicia or the Ukraine, depending on when you drew the line. Today, in the autumn of 1944, this was Soviet territory. So why were the guns firing?

His head ached and his knee throbbed from having been twisted hard a couple days previously, as he crawled in or out—he was drunk at the time—of the political officer's tent. The
politruk
was angry because Butler, in connivance with his new pal Seryoshka, had snagged a private bunker: a neatly excavated little den with birch-log walls and a ceiling covered with turf to keep the rain out. The Wehrmacht built such things when it went over to the defensive, and once made they were damned hard to destroy. The
politruk
, not a popular guy—in point of fact an asshole—had been assigned a low round yurt. It was warm enough, double-layered in sheep's hide, but prone to blow over, especially when its stakes had been loosened by subversive elements among the lower ranks. By virtue of its roominess it had become a popular gathering spot for battalion staff officers, who liked to keep the
politruk
in their line of sight. Hence Butler's throbbing knee and a head that, pain withal, felt much too terribly clear.