Another Green World (21 page)

You could have read any number of things into that smile, as you apparently could read practically anything into Stefan George, if you wanted to. But Ingo was enough of a Catholic to believe that only one reading could be correct. And he hoped, fervently, his own reading was true.

The program finally broke into smaller disputations that floated off in many directions, fading like sparks in the sky after a fireworks display. Ingo and Anton joined the general drift back through the meadow. The sun had dropped behind the mountain now and people were starting fires, singing songs, laughing together, enjoying their citizenship in this strange, makeshift republic.

What happens next? Ingo wondered if there was some kind of script that just came to you, without effort, the way your lines pop into your head at the last moment in a school play, even when you think you've forgotten them. Or do you have to ad-lib your way through? Does Anton know?

Anton, at least, was talking—chattering away, excited by the debate, playing parts of it back, commenting on this or that speaker, agreeing or disagreeing with points Ingo could hardly remember having been made. Ingo offered scant response but Anton did not seem to mind. It was pleasant to listen to his voice, which was still boyish and seemed to come largely from the upper part of his throat, the long slender neck. Sometimes he gestured with hands that, like the neck, were long and smooth and faintly
tinged with olive. Ingo could not recall ever, at any point in his life, having actually noticed someone's hands. Well… perhaps when Timmy Nye, his scouting mentor, showed him how to tie a clove hitch.

“Oh, look”— Anton's fingers pressed lightly on his forearm—” there's that horrible man again.”

He was looking at a little knot of people some dozen paces off, marching through the field behind the burly man in the white tunic, the racial hygiene fellow: half a dozen kids all dressed in the same medieval-style clothing, all jabbering breathlessly. All but one. Close by the leader, occupying a place of honor at his side, was the most flawless boy who had ever walked the Earth.

He was perhaps sixteen, an archetype stamped in flesh: the Teutonic boy-god, fair-skinned Baldur, eyes bluer than cobalt, hair paler than spun gold, limbs more cleanly sculpted than Donatello's David—quite a bit less beefy than Michelangelo's—and each feature the epitome of its type and in perfect harmony with every other. Even his movements were those of a being who knows himself to be finer than merely human. He walked beside the Gruppenführer yet set his own course, changed directions when it suited him. The others didn't care, they were being festive, they must have thought they'd won the George debate. Only the snow-blond boy seemed to have a destination, and whatever it was he kept it to himself. From his companions, he remained as distant as any star.

Ingo could not wrench his eyes away. He found the boy terrifying. Ice-cold in his beauty. Cruel in his aloofness. Repulsive in his knowledge of his own perfection.

For an instant those cerulean eyes brushed over him. They paused just perceptibly, as though by their limitless power they were lifting Ingo for inspection, then tossing him back to the dreary realm of mortals. The eyes clicked a notch sideways and repeated the procedure with Anton. Then they were gone.

The group altered course, heading off on a side trail into the forest. Within moments they were lost from sight.

Only then could Ingo regain his equilibrium, blinking like someone just emerged from a hypnotic trance. The whole incident, if you could call it that, had lasted, what—fi fteen or twenty seconds? Anton had seen nothing. He was still talking, something about the Jungdeutscher Orden. Still warm, still real, still fully human.

Ingo felt a surge of emotion he could not have named—or rather, that the obvious name would have done nothing to clarify—and in that moment, before thought could interfere, he placed a hand on Anton's
back. The hand moved slightly, as if of its own accord, along the bumpy ridge of the spine. Anton did not react except for a pause between words— “very right-wing, very…threatening, I think”— but after that, somehow, he was walking closer, near enough for Ingo to get a physical sense, just short of actual touch, of his body inside the floppy clothes.

What happens now?

Whatever it might be, Ingo felt it pushing outward from his breast, a pressure demanding release.

Then Anton decided the matter, absolutely. He stopped walking and turned to face Ingo, an odd sort of firmness in his expression. “It is time for me to go back,” he said. “Past time, actually. I am staying at the hostel in Vockerode, a few kilometers' hiking from here. If I tarry longer, there will be no dinner. So I must say ‘until later.’ “

Ingo felt as though the air had been sucked clean out of him. But he could think of no grounds on which to object. He could hardly invite Anton up to the campsite for dinner. For starters he wasn't sure he could even find the campsite, not with evening coming on. And what would they eat? Martina was no more cook than Ingo; thus far they'd scraped along on food scavenged from the
Gasthaus
in Kassel, mostly hard bread wrapped in one of Ingo's undershirts. Hardly a meal to offer a guest.

But still. The disappointment was so sharp, so sudden and painful, Ingo feared for one dangerous, wobbly instant that tears were about to form in his eyes.

Anton must have seen it. His expression did not change, but he stepped closer and took both of Ingo's hands in his own. “I hope we can meet again tomorrow.” His breath smelled of sunshine on fresh-mown hay. “I'm afraid today I have done too much talking. I have hardly given you a chance to tell me about yourself, about your life in America. But tomorrow … perhaps, if you are willing, we could meet again on the trail there? Where we met before?”

Ingo said something, he did not know what, he would never remember. Evidently it was enough.

Anton took half a step back, then a full step forward, and kissed him lightly on the cheek. “We shall be friends, then,” he said, backing away again.

Sure, friends, okay, thought Ingo, foundering, well beyond his depth. Whatever the hell “friends” means. He guessed he would find out tomorrow.

In the meantime he watched Anton striding confidently down his separate trail, the long legs bending rhythmically and the narrow haunches
twitching under the weight of that thin, slightly awkward, miraculous body. Ingo realized he was hungry—Christ, he was starving—but that was nothing. On the whole, he felt like a million bucks.

He must have ambled for some time with no thought of where he was headed, eyes down among wild thyme, tufted grasses, soft German soil. When he raised his head, the day had passed into twilight,
Dämmerung
, that in-between stage where your vision plays tricks on you.

He had been following a path through sparse woodland, mostly birches that gleamed white like pillars in a crumbling temple. Since Charlemagne—Karl the Great, as he was known around here—the Germans had identified themselves with ancient Rome, or more exactly with a misty, romanticized vision of empire,
Reichtum
, and all its glories. Even their countryside seemed to reflect this, both the landscape and the lens of art and legend through which it was apprehended. These smooth-worn hills, haunted forests, weathered rocks, waters that housed fallen goddesses, mountains beneath which bearded emperors slept—everything spoke of some lost grandeur, a hidden but still palpable subterrain of the German soul. The Holy Reich was dormant but not dead. Frederick Red-Beard might wake and gallop down at the head of his wild legions, more wolf than man now, sweeping all modernity aside. At the
Dämmerung
, on the magic mountain, you could believe such things. You could think you glimpsed those risen knights, bloody crusaders who sang love songs and observed the niceties of
Lieblingsminne
when not slashing infidel heads off.

There, just now, in the clearing ahead. What were those white figures flickering through the shadows?

A chill ran the length of Ingo's spine. Not for the first time today, he felt in danger of losing his mental competence. He wanted to turn and flee, but that would have granted the hallucination a claim upon reality. So he pressed ahead, facing the ghosts of the past as every stouthearted German must do.

As he entered the clearing he saw that the spirits were only human—of course, who could have doubted it?— and were in fact none other than the young men in white tunics, the Gruppenführer and his pack, their number grown to a dozen or so. They were gathered into a huddle or a circle, as if enacting some esoteric rite, and why shouldn't they? It was a natural part of the Middle Ages fantasy—Grail quests and hidden castles, blood-oaths sworn at sunset.

Only by degrees did Ingo realize that it was some kind of fight or
struggle—an asymmetric affair, like the aftermath of a hunt, the stag in its death throes, lashing out dangerously, the hunters circling, vying for the honor of dealing the coup de grâce. Ingo tried to pick out the boy-god among the others but the darkness was too heavy now. They were just pale figures, more or less human, with something else in their midst, darker, nearly indiscernible on the ground. Moving, though. Rolling or crawling, fighting wretchedly to live.

One of the boys struck a match and held the flame to a stack of small branches, forest debris that appeared to have been hastily thrown into a pile. The newborn fire leapt up and the light spread itself around the clearing, though at first this only made it more difficult to see, for outside the flickering circle all was thrown into blackness.

At last, coming very near the flames, the hunters dragged their prey, which was writhing and bucking in a final burst of strength. Ingo glimpsed filthy, blood-streaked limbs and—what, surely not a baseball jersey?

The victim was no beast of the woods. It was a scrawny kid. A kid whose clothing was torn and hair tangled with leaves. He was smaller than the boys who held him, yet fought them with crazed ferocity.

“Bring him into the light here,” the Gruppenführer commanded.

Half-seen hands thrust the prisoner forward. He landed face-first, rolled a bit, started to rise, but his captors were on him immediately, pulling his arms back, someone grabbing him around the neck. After a few moments the victim gave up his struggle; it was all he could do now to breathe. His face was red and his eyes seemed to bulge; still you could see a glint of defiance there. The kid had guts, even if all his strength was gone.

A new figure stepped forward, and to Ingo's surprise this was no boy but a full-grown man, thirty at the very least. He wore not a white tunic but a khaki suit with many pockets and a wide-brimmed hat, as though just back from safari.

“Yes, that is he,” the man said, after a quick glance at the prisoner, his voice high-pitched and pompous. “That is the little Jew who took my papers. Be sure to turn out his pockets when you're done with him. Though I suspect by now he has passed the documents to his confederates. They work in groups, you know—the actual term is
cells.
We are dealing here with a hive-culture, such as one finds among insects.” He gave a short nod, then turned away and stepped quickly into the shadows.

To Ingo, who could barely take in what was happening here—
here
, at the very center of modern Germany—the man appeared simply to vanish.

“Filthy pest!” the Gruppenführer spat in the boy's face. “Give back what you stole or I will kill you this minute, I swear I will.”

“No,” said another voice. “Please. Allow me.”

Ingo knew immediately who had spoken. The perfect diction, a choris-ter's clear and ringing contralto. The beautiful boy stepped so close to the fire that, had he truly been carved out of ice, he would've started to melt. The flames brought a red flush to his cheeks, a dangerous gleam to his eye. You could see exactly why Zeus had hurled himself down from Olympus to pluck up Ganymede—or why Loki had plotted the murder of young Baldur, whose beauty transfixed the other gods. There was something dire, a whiff of the afterworld, the
Nachwelt
, in these rare creatures.

None of this was real—Ingo was sure of that. These figures were archetypes, the forest clearing an open theater, the scene drawn from one of the bloodier myths, of which there were plenty to choose. The whole thing was a queer sort of play, an acting-out or living-out of certain resonant cultural themes—that was the only explanation.

The object of the ritual sacrifice seemed to know his lines well enough. “You stupid arschgefickten Hitlerjungen,” he drawled in a voice that was weak and clotted yet strangely self-possessed.

There was something American about that voice, Ingo thought, but also something uprooted, untraceable. A voice to go with the motley, ruined clothes.

“You love this, don't you?” the victim said, plainly now addressing the boy-god himself, speaking in a curious argot that was neither English nor German. “This is how you get your little Würstchen up, I bet.”

Unaffected by this outburst, the blond boy came a step closer, holding what appeared to be a riding crop. He gazed at the prisoner with a far-off, superior air, twitching the crop like a schoolmaster's rod.

“Go on,” said the Gruppenführer. “Let's get it done.”

The boy-god would not be hurried. He paced slowly like an actor onstage, commanding not just your attention but your admiration as well. The kid on the ground thrashed with a free leg and almost managed to trip his tormentor. The blond boy stepped hastily out of range, quickly recovering his stride.

“I expected something better than this,” he said. “Aren't you supposed to be dangerous?”

He used the plural form of
you
, leaving Ingo to wonder whom he meant—Americans? Jews? Rival bundists?

“Don't worry, you'll get more,” said the prisoner.

The German's expression grew … not angry, quite. Vexed, out of patience, annoyed—the face of someone accustomed to having his way. “This can be over quickly,” he said, “or it can be prolonged and very
unpleasant. Tell us what you did with the papers you stole. Tell us right away. And then, perhaps, things will not be so bad for you.”