Another Green World (19 page)

The Quell was a small lake shaped like a rounded eye, most of its surface glossy black where it reflected the walls of dark spruce rising steeply on either side. But at its far end, perhaps a kilometer off, the water gleamed
opalescent, a pale confusion of colors resembling mother-of-pearl where it reflected the northern sky. Just beyond the Quell lay a wide meadow, hazy green in the afternoon sun, dusted with drifts of goldenrod and pricked out with tiny moving figures, perhaps a hundred in all.

Ingo stood for a minute or two staring from the ridge. The trail tumbled before him, bumping down the spine of a draw and then skirting the edge of the pond until it vanished into a lush and shadowed land, full of mysteries. The landscape read like a fairy tale. Frau Holle's well was a motif from the Brothers Grimm: a bottomless shaft leading straight to the Otherworld. The virtuous daughter falls through and returns covered with blessings. The feckless stepsister follows and winds up suffering an awful curse. Watch your step, Secret German.

Suddenly he felt an odd sensation, like a hand laid softly on his neck, and he realized he was not alone. Turning, he saw a boy, a pale boy about his own age, who had stopped a little farther back along the trail. He didn't seem to have noticed Ingo yet, for he stood there peering outward unselfconsciously, across the forest and the lake toward the distant meadow.

The newcomer did not seem the usual Wandervogel sort. His clothes were wrong—they looked like something Ingo's mom might have picked out, sensible clothes to ride a train in. His hair fell thick and brown over a high white collar. His eyes, fixed on the horizon, were dark and somehow older than the rest of him. A satchel hung from one shoulder, its strap bone-tight. Suddenly a breeze whipped down from the summit, tugged at the loose sleeves of his shirt and the folds of his baggy trousers; the cloth flapped around slender limbs and the boy looked like he was about to blow over. Moving to steady himself, he caught sight of Ingo. Immediately he seemed to draw back into himself, though the movements were so slight that you could barely register them individually. What you perceived was the change in affect. Now the boy looked away and stood there motionless, wary.

It was a weird moment. The two of them were alone in a great empty place, too close, really, to ignore each other's presence. Normally—that is to say, in America—Ingo would have just said hi and given him a nod; that would've taken care of it. Now was different—
here
was different—and he couldn't think of how to greet the boy or what to do otherwise. Did you just walk away? Or stroll over and address this stranger on some pretext, ask for the time,
Können Sie mir sagen, wie spät ist es?

Nicht zu spät.
Not too late.

Suddenly the boy turned to look at him and opened his mouth but said
nothing—apparently surprised by whatever expression he'd met on Ingo's face—and the scene veered into comedy.

Ingo laughed, his throat tight, releasing tension.

The boy's mouth formed a tentative smile—confused, perhaps, though that must have felt more comfortable than what had come before.

“Hallo,” said Ingo, his equilibrium somewhat restored.

“Grüss Gott,” said the boy, using a Bavarian form of speech. But his accent sounded more eastern than southern, and nearly as foreign as Ingo's own. “Ich bin Anton.”

“Bin Ingo.”

They had been too close and now were too far apart. Their voices strained to cover the distance.

Anton stepped awkwardly down the path. The footing was irregular and his gait uncertain, coltish, as if his legs were too long. Ingo moved closer but had no sense of his body doing so. The wind came in quick, hurried gusts.

Anton halted a couple paces off and brushed the hair out of his eyes. The gesture was artless, long fingers raking an alabaster forehead. Ingo's feet stopped moving; he felt in that instant something pop open inside him, something in his chest. The mountain air seemed too thin, starved of oxygen. The effort of breathing made him dizzy.

Anton didn't notice, or perhaps he was noticing other things. He appeared to be studying Ingo's shoes. “I come from Poland,” he said then, raising his eyes. “From Galizien. But now I am studying in Germany, at the university in Jena. Where, you know, the earliest of student movements began, in Hölderlin's own time. A dueling society, the Burschenschaft— quite forbidden, of course, and so doubly appealing.”

His expression was earnest, his eyes as dark and bottomless as Frau Holle's well. A few freckles dusted the skin around his nose.

Ingo relaxed somewhat. “I come from America. Washington, D.C.” He couldn't think what to add. Until recently, nothing about him had seemed to require clarification. Now every single thing was ambivalent.

Anton only nodded; Ingo's origins must not have struck him as remarkable. “It is important to have come here, I think. To have returned to the homeland. This is a crucial time for all Germans, but especially the youth. We have a sacred duty to the future. We must become, as George tells us, the flag-bearers of a new order.”

Mentally, Ingo took a step back. The college kids he knew back home didn't talk like this. Did they talk like this here? He felt a tickle of excitement, a growing certainty that he was in a new world, a world so fresh it
was still in the act of self-creation. None of the old constraints need apply here—you could talk differently, behave differently, become a wholly different person.

“In America,” Anton said, “do you know Stefan George?” Without waiting for an answer he went on, “George is very important for our Movement. He is a prophet, I think.”

Ingo smiled. He had read George, especially the love poems.
You slim and pure as a flame, you blossoming sprig on a proud stem—I breathe you in every breeze, I sip you with every drink.
But he knew Thomas Mann as well, and had read his story “At the Prophet's,” a very funny send-up of the George cult.

“There is a discussion today, about the master and his writing,” Anton said. He turned to gaze down toward the bright blurry meadow. “Quite where, I am not certain. I was only now going to look. Would you like to come along?”

He had switched to the familiar “you.”
Willst Du mitkommen?
And while Ingo couldn't sort out the deeper implications of this, or what had provoked it, he wanted to come along very much.

Their path led through spruce woods so dark you could not have guessed the hour was not far past noon. The trail was narrow and winding but well laid, its carpet of amber needles tamped flat by many passing feet. After a time the spruce thinned out into a sparser woodland of ash and elm, whose open canopy admitted streaming cataracts of sunlight. The two boys walked in silence, Ingo tending to lag a couple of paces back. It felt odd, rubbing shoulders with a virtual stranger. At the same time, irrationally perhaps, he already thought of Anton as something more than that. Not a friend exactly, more a comrade, a brother-in-arms. A native of the same mysterious homeland.

All at once Anton stopped in his tracks, stooping down to look at something beside the trail, and Ingo nearly tumbled over him. Between two slender fingers, the boy held a cluster of tiny white flowers borne upright on a narrow stalk.

“Siebensternen,”
he said. “Do you have this in America?”

Ingo was hardly the one to ask. He had never noticed flowers particularly, and always skimmed ahead when Proust went on and on about them. “Seven stars,” he said thoughtfully in English, but the plant's name meant nothing more to him in translation.

“The folk-name refers to the Pleiades, I think,” said Anton. “Formally it
is called
Trientalis europaea.”
He straightened, leaving the flower unmolested and facing Ingo with that same open and guileless expression. “Goethe tells us, we perceive only what we are able to appreciate. The coarse-minded do not see beauty, the unlettered do not hear poetry.”

Ingo didn't know Goethe so well. Too cerebral, he thought, too daunting, like Beethoven. Himself, he was a Schubert man. “Do you study literature in Jena?”

Anton shook his head, fluttering his long hair. “I am reading in Botany. I hope that if someday I see the famous blue flower, I should be able to recognize it.”

Ingo laughed before he had time to wonder whether this was meant to be funny. To his relief, Anton responded with a smile—the first Ingo had seen—and it revealed a whole new facet of his sensibility; for on that face, lit by the glow of those clear eyes, the smile had a hint of irony about it, and you glimpsed a deeper awareness of the world than the boy's ingenuous manner would lead you to expect.

“None of my comrades in Botany find that so witty,” Anton said. “They are quick to explain that the blue flower must be a type of
Gentiana.”

Ingo had no idea what a
Gentiana
might be, but he was pretty sure the genuine
blaue Blume—
an emblem of impossible yearning, invented by a consumptive poet—had no Latin designation. The whole scientific enterprise, this hubris-laden project of reducing the world to minute descriptions and quantifications—killing and drying the specimen, pinning it to a mat in a display case—was anathema to the old Romantics and their twentieth-century heirs. “There probably aren't too many botanists who read Novalis,” Ingo said, meaning this as a compliment, among other things.

“Science need not be sterile,” said Anton, who sounded more grown-up now, more sure of himself. “Love is an observable fact of Nature, as are friendship, eros, loyalty. There is no need to talk about such fine things in terms of anatomy or the ‘evolution of species.’ “

Having spoken his mind, he turned and headed down the trail. Ingo caught up and they walked for a while in silence, shoulder to shoulder now. At intervals, Anton would point out this or that bit of local flora—a creeper known as wood louse plant,
Pediculans silvatica;
pink-blossomed fever clover,
Menyanthes trifoliata;
and tall, reedlike flute grass,
Molinia caerulea
, bearing its seeds on golden stems as high as your shoulders. Ingo thought Anton himself was a bit like these botanical specimens: you came to appreciate him more and more as your faculties attained the proper atunement. It was like dialing in a radio signal, faint and wavery at first, then clear and strong. He scarcely paused to wonder what kind of signal
he himself might be sending out. In his mind, he was just a quietly humming, reasonably faithful receiver.

At last they reached the meadow. It was larger than he'd expected and its features were more complex—a rippling expanse of knolls and dales with tufts of hedge between them, sloping gently to the dark clear lake, hemmed protectively by the muscular shoulders of the mountain. You felt pleasantly isolated here—safe in your own little world—and with that feeling came a delicious sense of liberation.

Then of course there were the people. Young men, every one of them, from what Ingo could see. He didn't try to look at them all at once, in fact was rather afraid to. He felt like a kid who's tiptoed downstairs on Christmas morning to find not just what he hoped for under the tree but more of it, in larger boxes, more extravagantly wrapped, glistening more brilliantly, filling every corner of the room. Some kids would have rushed forward with open arms, but it had always been Ingo's way to advance cautiously, eyes lowered, and start with the smallest presents—trying hard, for as long as his childish powers allowed, to ignore that gleaming red bicycle by the fireplace.

Instinctively he drew closer to Anton, the only familiar object in sight. Never mind that the other boy was a stranger an hour ago. Anton might have felt the same, for the pair of them entered the clearing in hesitant lockstep, like cowboys in a Karl May adventure, cagily advancing through a lawless Western town, hands on their holsters, each watching the other fellow's back.

They passed the little hollow, a natural amphitheater where high-school-aged kids in Hellenic garb awkwardly declaimed a Greek drama entitled, according to the placard tacked to a tree,
Alkibiades.
They passed a hill where a group called FKK-Jungen were holding an archery match. The competitors wore sandals and leather wrist guards and quivers that hung from their shoulders—nothing else. Ingo declined, with a proper if panicky
Vielen Dank
, an informative pamphlet presented by one of the archers.

They came to a stretch of curving lakeshore crowded with cattails where the open water was clean as the sky, pale as a pearl. A narrow wooden pier had been fashioned of spruce beams—freshly scarred where limbs had been axed off—and this had been claimed as a diving platform by a gang of perhaps two dozen swimmers, ages assorted. They took turns in orderly German fashion heaving themselves out of the water, queuing up at the pier, joking among themselves and shivering while the cool
mountain air brushed over their naked bodies, then leaping back in again, with varying degrees of athleticism and grace, to the hoots and applause of those already in the water. Ingo could have lingered there a while longer, but Anton seemed restless. And so they moved on.

They had not spoken now for some time, perhaps a quarter of an hour. Ingo was uncertain how much of his own emotional state—unsettled, topsy-turvy, unprecedented—it was safe to assume that Anton shared. But he looked discomfited, and that made Ingo feel for him. Without thinking, he reached across the short distance, less than an arm's length, and touched his shoulder. You could feel the bone in its thin wrapping of cotton and flesh. You could feel the warmth of his body.

Anton started, just perceptibly, blinked a couple of times, then glanced back at Ingo and bashfully smiled. The smile was slightly ironic, as before. He took in a quick deep breath and let it out forcefully, giving a funny sort of shrug. All this seemed to Ingo like a private form of communication, comprehensible only to the two of them. A language for secret sharers.

“Look there,” Anton said with adolescent nervousness—nodding toward a thin hedge of alder that ran ahead of them.

Ingo followed his eyes. He sensed he was about to glimpse the red bicycle, ready or not. What he saw, though, was nothing remarkable—the most ordinary thing, perhaps, he'd witnessed since waking up that morning. A wide path, rutted by carriage wheels, led through a gap in the alders to an overgrown pasture, its grasses tall and interspersed with late-summer wildflowers. There someone had built a small stage on which a musical performance was under way: a singer in a white smock accompanied by guitars, recorders, powwow drums and a small accordion—more or less the staple Youth Movement instrumentation. The audience was small, forty or fifty at most, scattered sparsely around the field. Most sat not facing the stage but chatting among themselves, sharing sandwiches, passing a flask around. It looked like a good place to rest one's feverish, overloaded brain.