Another Green World (29 page)

“In case you hadn't noticed,” said Ingo, “I haven't come alone. Do you have uniforms for all of us? You think you can hide a herd of elephants?”

Shuvek shook his head. “Your companions can't be trusted. Not all of them. Something is wrong there, I am not sure what. The safest thing is to get you away. I was planning to wait a couple of days, watch how things played out. But now …well, you've wandered off on your own. It's an opportunity. We ought to take it.”

“No.” Ingo tightened his grip on the gun. “I'm not going anywhere without the others. Anyway, this whole business smells fishy.”

“Yes, I'm sure it does,” said Shuvek. “Look in the breast pocket there, you'll find something to convince you.”

Doubtful but intrigued, Ingo plucked up the jacket, which looked about the right size for him, and examined it awkwardly by touch while keeping his eye on Shuvek. After a bit of fumbling his fingertips brushed a lump of paper.

He risked letting go of the Schmeisser for a moment, extracting the paper, unfolding it. Shuvek kept still; only his eyes skittled this way and that, making sure the two of them were alone.

The paper was thick, like parchment, and roughly as wide as two hands laid together. It seemed to have been torn out of a book. On it was an artful pen-and-ink sketch of a flower: bloom, leaf, stem and seed head, all rendered in precise, botanically exact detail. The drawing was labeled
Gentiana poetica
and signed
Anton Krolow
, 13. Sept. 1929.

After several seconds, Ingo remembered to let out his breath.

Shuvek watched him dispassionately. “They said it would mean something to you.” He waited a couple of seconds and said, “Are you ready to come now? It's best if we leave while the others are asleep. Don't worry— I've ordered Petra not to harm anyone. She won't disobey, though to be honest, she doesn't care much for Jews. She blames them for all this trouble.” He gave a bitter laugh, perhaps at the idea that this trouble, this all-devouring catastrophe, could be blamed on anyone in particular. It had simply come in the manner of all misfortune, storms and invasions, malign government, mortal illness, faithless women.

Ingo paid him no attention. He folded the paper as lightly as possible, this blue flower whose petals would shatter at the merest touch.

*    *    *

They reached the guerrilla encampment by nightfall, just as the first pale stars were coming out. It was like a tiny village, a dozen rough but sturdily made structures crammed between boulders and tree trunks beside a racing, icy-looking stream. A wooden pen held chickens and a shed housed a blacksmith-cum-armorer. There was such a fantastical air about the place that Ingo felt like a character in an adventure novel, a tale of wilderness survival.

The guerrillas turned out en masse at their arrival. There were fifty at least, and for the most part they fit their surroundings like the wood-gnomes of German folklore, furtive creatures who dart among the ferns and toadstools of the forest floor, unglimpsed by all but the keenest eye. Only a few stood out: children so tiny they might have been born here in the forest, and one old woman so bent and shriveled she looked like a
Hexe
who survived by purely magical means, dispensing strange herbal remedies along with the occasional curse. Most of the adults, men and women alike, carried weapons as naturally as farmers go about with the implements of their livelihood. They dressed like Gypsies in all manner of clothing, layer upon layer, nothing matching anything else. As Shuvek and Ingo came among them they pressed in close, and Ingo felt hands running over his fatigues, fingers touching the smooth American fabric. It was as though the partisans needed to assure themselves he was a real human being and not some trick of the forest, a dangerous Black Elf in disguise.

Shuvek steered him toward one of the crude huts and under its low doorway into a squarish chamber, lit by a fire in a small stone hearth and by the chilly gray light of dusk that drifted through a window facing the stream. Here, on a stool by the fire, a man sat calmly, as if he were awaiting them. He was gaunt and his face was lined, but his hair was still yellow. Ingo guessed he was no older than himself.

In German, Shuvek said, “This is the one. His name is Müller.”

Ingo did not suppose the error was great enough to need correcting. His name was indeed Müller, or anyway it would have been had not his grandfather, fresh off the boat, chosen to Americanize it.

“Müller,” the man on the stool repeated. “Well, that's easy enough.”

Shuvek nodded.

Ingo was mystified; this man spoke
Hochdeutsch
with only a trace of Eastern inflection. He had the air of a Sudeten aristocrat, an ethnic German in a land of Slavs, who instead of heeding “the call of the blood” had chosen to go native.

“And the uniform?” the man said.

“Haven't tried it,” said Shuvek. “I'd say it's about right, though.”

They looked Ingo up and down like a tailor's dummy.

“He hasn't slept,” Shuvek said.

The man nodded. He rose from the stool and came closer, staring Ingo in the eye. “God help you,” he said after a couple of moments. He spoke simply, as though he meant this and nothing more. In the same straightforward tone he added, “I'll have someone bring hot water. A good bath will help you rest tonight. Tomorrow …”

He gave a little nod, as if he were alluding to a well-known truism—
Tomorrow is another day
or something of that kind. Then he left the hut and Ingo heard him speaking outside in the local tongue, presumably giving instructions about water.

When he dragged himself an hour later, groggy with fatigue, out of the old-fashioned washtub, his muscles felt like they'd dissolved. He must have dozed off because the water had turned tepid. The day's long walk had drained more than just his energy. By the dancing firelight, shadowy figures flitted at the borders of his vision.

He dried off as best he could on a ragged towel no bigger than a washcloth. Then he discovered his clothing was gone. In its place, neatly folded on a stool, was the German uniform.
Feldgrau, fi
eld-gray, with a tinge of green, its color was roughly that of the underside of a white-oak leaf.

“Try it on.” Shuvek addressed him from a dark corner of the room.

“What happened to my fatigues? There were things in those pockets, personal things.”

“You'll find it all right there.” He pointed to where Ingo's belongings had been arranged beside a stack of threadbare blankets with his bedroll on top. Shuvek's small eyes glistened out of the shadows. “If that uniform needs altering, we'll have it taken care of tonight. So you will be all ready in the morning. Ein ganz guter Soldat.”

Ingo, remembering how the people in the encampment had run their hands over his clothing, imagined pieces of it distributed among favored members of the group. Irritated, he said, “What happens tomorrow? What is it I have to be ready for?”

“Tomorrow?” said Shuvek, as if the word was strange to him. He sat forward, bringing his face into the firelight. “Forget tomorrow. There is no tomorrow. There is no today. Today is nothing but a dream. The only thing
real is yesterday, last evening, just before we all fell asleep. Try to remember that—the chair you were sitting in, the book you were reading. Perhaps you'll wake again, and there you'll be, right where you left off. Your family around you. Everyone laughing. And from there, your story goes on.”

NOVEMBER 1944

M
artina sat on a big rock at the edge of a river gorge and cast an eye glumly over what was left of the Varian Fry Brigade. She tried to imagine how Ingo would see them, what Ingo would think. Pigheaded and cynical and politically troglodytic he may be, but he was also disconcertingly observant, and he had a habit, in down-to-earth matters, of turning out to be right.

For starters, he'd make some crack about Grabsteen. How foppish the man looked in his custom-tailored khakis, which must have been the product of some Burbank costume shop, tapered at the waist and fitted out with Edwardian epaulets. And how he strutted like a martinet, lecturing the stone-faced partisan gal on the
comprehensive agreement that exists between our respective parent organizations.
As if such jargon had any meaning at all in the Tatry Mountains.

And surely he'd be in full-blown I-told-you-so mode over the collapse of the Brigade's best-laid plans. Back on the Eastern Shore—no, before that, a September evening in Martina's apartment in Cleveland Park, red neon spelling U-P-T-O-W-N one letter at a time outside the window—he had ticked off a laundry list of reasons why the plan was botched from the start. His analysis, typically thorough, began with the implausibility of the whole
casus belli—
the existence of a document, a piece of paper, for God's sake, so historically precious it was worth staking dozens of lives on—and proceeded from there.

What exactly, Ingo had wanted to know, is this Agudas Israel Worldwide? Are they mixed up with those terrorists in Palestine, setting off bombs at the King David Hotel and attacking British administrators in the streets? Are they frustrated actors, looking for a war movie to star in? Or worst of all, are they exactly what they appear to be: a fuzzy-headed but
well-funded rabble of Roosevelt Jews, all worked up about something they read last week in the back pages of the
Times
and determined to, quote, do something—never mind what, we'll figure that out as we go along—about these awful Nazis who are even less pleasant, we now suspect, than Republicans?

He hadn't stopped there. Who exactly will this team of guerrillas consist of? Great War retreads? Or do you intend to recruit a bunch of 4-Fs and COs and
vin-de-pays
-sipping Hemingway fans, bundle them in jumpsuits and drop them behind German lines, armed with a compass and a box of matches and a secret decoder ring?

By the time he shut up, even Martina was hopeless. Martina for whom hope was a substitute for religion—hope in the warm, tolerant future envisioned by Eleanor in her happier moods, hope as sung between the lines by melancholy Ella, hope as dispensed by those plucky USO gals high-stepping for boys at the front whose numbers might be up tomorrow. Without hope, how could you carry on?

Which brought her now, in circular fashion, to the deepest mystery of the whole affair. If Ingo was so damned sure the Varian Fry Brigade was destined to go the way of the
Hindenburg
, why in God's name had he hopped on board?

To ask such a question was to answer it.

Martina closed her eyes. For an instant, Slovensky Raj was swept away. Nineteen forty-four dissolved, and in its place was a different time, another place—a world so different it seemed to have no relation to this one, not a single point of contact, no path from one to the other.

What was that novel, so popular back then, that Ingo had gone on about?
The Man Who Walked Between Two Worlds
? Something like that. Martina never read it. She wasn't reading much at the time, not even Spengler, not even Freud. Now she regretted it, but regret was the least of what she felt when she thought about those times, the very least. The chief thing was wonder—disbelief, actually—that such a time and a place had ever been. And such a Marty. Such an Ingo.

Were they really better people in those days? She believed they were. Marty herself had been so…so open, so unafraid, so hungry for new experiences. She hadn't learned to substitute political engagement for genuine human passion. And Ingo hadn't yet forgotten how to feel; the mask he wore was still loose enough that his true face could now and again be glimpsed behind it. Even Butler, as calculating and cold-blooded as he was, still had a core of genuine belief—if not in world Communism, at least in himself, his sacred vocation as an artist.

And the German boy, Hagen—he'd been fired by a sort of idealism that was transparently heartfelt. It seemed reprehensible now, but only because you knew what it had led to. At the time, in that context, it seemed genuine enough. Like the rest of us, Hagen thought he had found a new world, a new kind of person to be.

As to Isaac…well. Who really knew what Isaac had ever been, then or now?

So of course, she perfectly understood—there was not the slightest doubt—why Ingo had come here, and why he was willing to throw his life away, if that's what it came to.

“Are you
listening
?” shouted Harvey Grabsteen. Not to Marty, as it turned out. But his high-pitched voice jolted her back to the present, the notably less-real-seeming world of 1944.

“Shuvek will come soon,” was all the woman partisan would say. It might have been the only English she knew.

Martina shook her head. Slovensky Raj reassembled itself before her, along with its unlikely inhabitants: A dejected crew of would-be guerrillas lolling at the edge of an ancient, shadowed and dangerous forest. A blank-faced woman with Slavic cheekbones and a Russian PPD. A Serbian man with brown eyes to die for and terrible teeth. A skinny kid from Charlottesville. A wiseguy from St. Louis. A hulking Great War vet with his jaw clamped and his eyes staring at nothing, waiting for the next battle.

“I said,
Are you listening?”
Grabsteen snapped, turning in exasperation to the wider audience. “I am trying to get this woman here to tell us where they've taken Miller. Also whether she intends to lead us where
we
need to go. Because otherwise, I'm determined to press on, with or without local support. We'll make new arrangements as we go. I've got plenty of Swiss francs. I'm sure we'll have no lack of possibilities.”

“Where do you think you are?” said the big noncom, Bloom. “Strolling around some studio back lot? Trying to clinch a production deal?”

Grabsteen wheeled on him. “No. I believe I am—I believe we all are— performing a
mitzvah
, a holy task that's been given us to fulfill. You can take me for a fool or a bully or a soulless Hollywood shill, whatever you like. But I'm willing to use whatever means are at my disposal to get this job done. Surely all of you would agree that our first duty is to history, to a full and just accounting of the crime that has been perpetrated against our people. If any step we take brings us nearer to that, then it's not only justified, it's morally necessary. More than this, I don't think we should say in front of an outsider.”