Another Green World (35 page)

Ingo doubted that it was the same man, Corporal Josef Müller, whose identity papers he carried in a breast pocket. Yet it was hard, all the same, not to imagine so—not to feel that he had slipped into the empty space left by the other man's passing. A characteristic folktale of the Carpathians. One night, deep in the forest, beneath a full Hunter's Moon, Ingo Miller transforms mysteriously into Josef Müller. The soft-bellied American barkeep becomes a hardened
Sturmmann
of the Waffen-SS. His beer mug turns into a machine pistol, his bar rag a
Brotbeutel.
In place of a war-painted Redskin, his cap sports a leering Death's Head.

And yet—here is the authentic fairy-tale touch—on his back, tucked in a blanket, he still carries the same volume of poetry.
Beliebte Gedichte der deutschen Romantik:
Hölderlin, Heine, George, Hofmannsthal, magical verses that have always brought him such comfort and such sorrow. The little book, bound in red, is a kind of talisman, though its exact function is not revealed. Maybe it holds the power to reverse this terrible enchantment—or maybe it's the very thing that sparked his transformation in the first place.

“Now listen,” said Uli, when they reached the edge of the village. The three of them crouched behind a fence; soft amber light spilled from cottages a hundred meters away. Uli was looking hard at Ingo. “Here is something you must remember. There are worse things a man can do than die. I do not say this as the SS do—die a glorious hero's death and go straight to Valhalla. I mean that if something goes wrong, if you still have the power
to choose, it is better not to be taken alive by the Nazis. Because they will kill you regardless, but they will not do it right away. Do you understand?”

Ingo nodded.

“No, you do not. Be thankful you do not. But perhaps, let us hope, you understand enough.” His face softened and he placed a hand on Shu-vek's shoulder. “Despite what my friend says, some things you must see yourself—see up close—to truly know.”

Shuvek gave a nasty sort of smile. He spoke briefly in Slovenian.

Uli shook his head, then translated: “He says not to worry. If it becomes necessary, he will shoot you himself. And he hopes you will do likewise.”

“Keine Sorge,” Ingo told him—no worries. “It would be my pleasure.”

The village slipped past like a dream. Smoke curled from its two dozen chimneys. Shingled roofs were pitched at the same angle as the mountainsides. The lane twisted past outlying farmhouses where no dogs barked, whose barns stood empty of livestock. All domestic animals had long been eaten by the Germans or the partisans, or else their owners had hidden them in high secret glades. At the far end of the village, tucked at the foot of a craggy
Berg
whose summit shone with early snow in the moonlight, stood an old rambling spa, built in the Swiss style with massive timbers and an overhanging roof. From one of its hundred diamond-paned windows, faint lantern light flickered. A caretaker, Ingo supposed. He looked around at the shadowed landscape and imagined Party bigwigs hiking and shooting in this rugged forest, swimming in dark blue waters that never became warm.

The village fell behind them, and they were climbing out of the valley on a tortuous, pebble-surfaced lane. The moon hung bright over the peaks, the sky was clear, the stars more luminous than Ingo could remember. Frozen night air moved in and out of his lungs, charging his brain with unusual energy, and he felt like one of those tiny figures in a painting by Caspar David Friedrich, standing with his back to the artist, hand on a hiking staff, rendered insignificant by a breathtaking landscape, alone at what looks very much like the outermost edge of the world.

But this was not the edge of the world—it was the heart of an old and populous continent, the eye of a thousand-year
Sturm.
On every side lay ruined lands, burning cities, unmarked graves. And he was hardly alone, for besides his two companions the Carpathians teemed with hidden life, creatures familiar and uncanny, ghosts who sang in long-dead tongues of a time that had never been, devils in tall black boots, avenging angels toting
automatic rifles, the golden eagle shrieking high above clutching its
Hakenkreuz
while Wotan's twin ravens, Thought and Memory, feast upon the souls of the walking dead and the soon-to-die.

This is what comes, Ingo thought, of reading those well-loved German verses over and over again. After a decade or two, they get stamped so deeply in your mind that you no longer know the sense of them, only the feeling. Then you are right at home here in Werewolf Country.

The road took them down then higher up. The moon crawled west across the sky. They hiked and rested, nibbled some bread, rubbed their sore feet, hiked again. The temperature continued to drop until the cold seemed a part of Ingo's body, something you carried everywhere without thinking much about it, like age. After that, it no longer bothered him.

Only in such an isolated spot, with a view of a perfectly clear sky, do you notice the subtle gradations of daybreak. “Darkest before the dawn” is a gross misstatement, at least here. Long before dawn you could detect a graying-out along a wide arc of horizon, so slight it seemed at first nothing more than your imagination. You noticed it chiefly by a dimming of the eastern stars. Next came a penumbral half-light that waxed, by immeasurable degrees, into the predawn state known as first light, the favored time for launching infantry assaults. By now they were close to the border.

“I say we stop here,” said Shuvek. “Keep out of sight in those woods there. Rest till mid-morning. Warm up a bit.”

Uli gave this some thought, or waited long enough to make it appear he had done so. “We'll be easier to spot then,” he pointed out. “And the Huns will have finished their porridge and sent their patrols out. No, if we're going to stop, I'd rather do it on the Polish side.”

Ingo, too exhausted to venture an opinion of his own, accepted Uli's decision as stoically as did Shuvek. The three men resumed their plodding, mulelike progress through the mountain pass.

Not long afterward—fi fteen minutes, or another kilometer of desolate roadway—Ingo became aware of a sound that did not belong here. It was faint and seemed to come from many directions at once, bouncing off the hard surfaces all around them. By the time he stopped to listen, he saw that Uli and Shuvek had stopped as well. Their faces were blank. The noise grew more distinct.

“It's not a motorbike,” Shuvek said.

“No,” Uli agreed.

A few moments later: “I don't think it's a truck.”

“No? That's good.”

Until then, Ingo couldn't have guessed that it was a motor vehicle—as opposed to an airplane or, who knew, a Tiger tank.

“It's a car,” Shuvek declared at last. “A big car.”

They looked around. Their position, though not as bad as it might have been, was bad enough: midway along a gradual curve where the road skirted a steep, smooth outcrop. On the downslope, inches past the edge, the terrain plunged steeply into a gorge. Still, there were places you could think of hiding. Only you had to think right now; the noise of the car was getting louder fast, coming up the road behind them from the Slovak side.

“Down here.” Uli pointed to a narrow cleft in the rock face that seemed to offer hand-and footholds. Below it, the chasm was so deep and shadowed you couldn't see its bottom. Shuvek scrambled down first. In his haste, one of his feet slipped loose. He hung there for a horrifying moment, struggling for balance, clinging to the rock face with one hand while the other groped blindly for something, anything, to grab hold of. Uli dropped to the ground, stuck both arms over the edge and seized Shu-vek's free hand. After that Shuvek was able to regain his balance and edge a bit lower, making room for the others.

They had lost precious seconds. The sound of the engine was clear enough that you could guess the number of cylinders. Ingo fought an urge to stare up the road, waiting dumbly for fate to roar down on him.

“Now you,” Uli said. “Hurry.”

“No.”

The surprise in Uli's face mirrored his own. Ingo hadn't planned on saying this. Nonetheless he blundered on. “I'm wearing the uniform—they'll just think I'm—”

Uli clapped him on the shoulder. It might have been agreement, or thanks, or simply goodbye. Relief, perhaps, at getting rid of this troublesome charge. There was no time to talk or even to acknowledge what Ingo was doing. Uli's head had scarcely dropped below road level when a big Mercedes touring car appeared around the bend. It was moving fast, its tires kicking up dust. The round, protruding headlights burned cold and bright, like the approaching sunrise.

Ingo began walking straight toward it. Every stride carried him farther from where Uli and Shuvek were hidden. He'd taken no more than a dozen before the car began to slow, its brakes engaging with a suppressed groan, its great engine falling to an idle.

He could not see who was inside. The windshield only mirrored the silver-blue sky. At last, as the sleek machine ground to a halt barely an arm's length away, Ingo saw himself reflected in the glass: a small and
insignificant figure, like that poor schmuck captured by Friedrich, alone at the bitter end of everything.

His right hand was on his Schmeisser. He expected the car doors to fly open, jackbooted stormtroopers to leap out.
There are worse things a man can do than die.
Instead, the rear window on his side of the car slid smoothly down. Ingo stepped hesitantly nearer until he could look inside. A thin man with a mustache, wearing a dark leather coat over some kind of uniform, peered out at him. The Mercedes's passenger compartment was so high above road level that the two of them were almost eye-to-eye. Ingo figured the man was about ten years younger than himself.

He spoke without thinking, in the roughest German he could muster: “I'd be careful driving this way, meine Herren. The mountains are full of partisans. You'll never see them until it's too late.” He took a step back, pretending to admire the automobile. “Those Ungeziefer would love to knock out a beauty like this.”

Despite the cold he was sweating. He tried to adopt a pose of unconcern. The thin young man looked about to say something, but only ran his lips together. Nervous, Ingo thought. Which put him several grades above Ingo on the scale that runs from dead calm to shitting yourself. But everything was unfolding so fast that Ingo, near exhaustion, could hardly grasp that any of it was real. He felt like a drunk, oblivious of the conventions, with no recourse left but bluster.

From the shadowy interior of the car a second voice spoke—quiet, parsing the words carefully, like an orator rehearsing his lines.

The man with the mustache looked briefly away, muttered something, then turned back to Ingo. “The Brigadeführer would like to know what you are doing out here alone. And why you are not with your unit. I suggested that you are perhaps a deserter.”

This was the moment, Ingo supposed. Two men in the backseat. Up front just one, presumably a chauffeur. All probably armed. He might get the drop on them—maybe one chance in ten. And after they shot him, they'd go looking for his confederates, or radio for an anti-partisan squad. No, it would be best to contain the disaster; let their thoughts run the way they were going.

“It's like I told you—there are partisans all over this area. There was a fight. I got separated from my comrades. We had just made camp for the night. I found myself lost in the woods. It was dark. This happened night before last. Since then I've been trying—”

The thin man cut him off. “What is your unit, Sturmmann?” he said in a clipped, angry voice, like a Hollywood Nazi. “What is the name of your commanding officer?”

Ingo started to raise his hands—
All right, you got me, boys—
when the other man in the backseat leaned over to the open window. This one was older, in his mid-fifties, perhaps, and though he wore the same black uniform, he didn't strike Ingo as a fighting man.

“Excuse me, please,” he said, examining Ingo through small rimless glasses. “Your accent, I have been trying to place it. How you roll the

R.
And something about the intonation—it drifts lower on the final syllables. As a boy, did you by chance live in… could it be South Africa? Or perhaps—Canada?”

Ingo was afraid to respond. He'd always been proud of his German, which he'd kept in fine polish through countless hours of half-drunken banter with staffers from the German embassy. But now his confidence deserted him; he feared that by any small lapse, the shadow of a Washington drawl upon a vowel, he might betray himself. Was this a trap? he wondered. Was it some kind of test? He stared at the face behind the little spectacles but saw no guile there. Perhaps the old fellow was just dotty and fancied himself an amateur linguist.

“Repeat something for me,” the man said, his eyes brightening with inspiration. “Wer der Schönheit angeschaut mit Augen, ewig währt für ihn der Schmerz der Liebe.”

Ingo hesitated, wondering what exactly was expected of him. “Wer der Schönheit,” he began at last, “angeschaut mit Augen—” And at this point something turned inside him, and he corrected the ending of the verse: “Ist dem Tode schon anheimgegeben.” Then he said it all again, his voice falling into the meter like water finding a channel in the rock. He whose eyes have gazed upon true Beauty is already given over to Death.

The one with the mustache rolled his eyes, a supercilious little bastard.

Mainly to annoy him, Ingo went on: “
Death in Venice
in twenty syllables—that's what one of my professors used to say.”

The older man laughed—a dry sort of laugh, but it sounded genuine enough. He stared at Ingo for a few moments, dispassionately. He might have been a naturalist in the wild, evaluating some new specimen, deciding whether it was worth carrying home and putting under glass.

“I am surprised,” he said at last, “that anyone is still teaching Platen. But then, you're not so young, are you? You were educated before all this.” He sighed. “If I didn't know better, I would say you come from the United States. That is improbable, I realize—the days of the Bund are long past.