Another Green World (46 page)

“What choice do we have?” said Tamara. Her blood was still up from the battle. “It'll be dark soon. We're caught in a goddamn blizzard and we need a place to stay. This looks like it.”

“What if—” somebody began.

“Then we deal with it.” Tamara wagged the barrel of her gun.

Nobody argued. They moved forward cautiously, the sharp smell of wood smoke coming in gusts of cold air that played around the rooftops ahead, lifting the snow and carrying it over the wall.

Martina got it then.
Walled village—
another of those medieval conceits that seem to resonate with the German, what, folk-soul? If Ingo were here, he'd know the ten-syllable term for it:
Volk
-something-
ge
-something-
heit.
He'd tell you how it ran from Wagner right back to Jesus von Kreist. But before he could do that, Martina would interrupt: It's running
here
, that's the point. Right here to Nowheresdorf, Lower Silesia. Where the holy Teutonic farmers have built a wall to keep the heathen wood-hares at bay.

“So you are proposing,” Grabsteen told rather than asked Tamara, “that we storm the gate and shoot anyone who tries to stop us.”

She slapped a fresh magazine into her Simonov, a reply eloquent enough.

“Maybe we should take a look around first,” Stu suggested.

“Maybe you could all keep your fucking voices down,” growled Bloom.

Jews
, Martina marveled. When only three of them were left in Europe, they'd still hold an election in which no candidate received a majority. Then split into at least four irreconcilable factions.

Alone, she ambled up the road. The gate was wide enough to accommodate a farm wagon—or a Mercedes staff car—and its heavy door had one of those little flaps for peeking out, just like the gate to the Emerald City, at the end of the Yellow Brick Road. Indeed, at closer range, this whole place had a fantastical air about it. The cast-iron latch was needlessly massive and ornate. Above the arch, carved in old Fraktur lettering and burned into the wood, summer-camp-style, a sign read

ARNDTHEIM Gegr. 1924

Somehow, she'd known it would. Some specter of memory, a stirring in her
Ur
-something-
geist.
She tried the latch but it was secured from inside. So she took the butt of her rifle and began pounding on the thick planks.

“What the hell are you doing?” Grabsteen yelled.

Relax, Rabbi.

Before long the others had caught up to her, and there was a complementary clamor from the other side of the wall.

“Wer is da?” a man's voice shouted, muffled by wind and snow.

Martina figured childish English was preferable to pig-German. “We are friends of Ernst Moritz Arndt,” she called. “You have to let us in.”

After that, it seemed, the people on both sides of the wooden barrier were too surprised to say anything. The next sound was a clunk of metal as the latch was unfastened. The heavy gate swung back on impeccably oiled hinges.

By this time Martina's mind was swimming with names, faces, slogans, tastes—a vanished world that would never change and never die. The wall had no place in it. Neither did the little man with the felt cap who stood just inside, peering at Martina with a mix of curiosity and fear. But the village behind him, opening like a stage set as the curtains slide apart—yes, she knew that well enough.

“Who the hell is Ernst Moritz Arndt?” Grabsteen was stupid enough to ask.

Tamara shoved past him, past Martina and the man in the felt cap, into the tiny village of Arndtheim. The sight of it brought even her to a halt: the covered well, the immaculate little green, the half-timbered cottages with their empty window boxes and second-story balconies; the well-tooled dream of a perfect, pocket-sized Germany. “What the hell is this place?” she demanded.

“Exactly what it looks like,” said Martina. “Fairy-tale Land.”

SEPTEMBER 1929

T
his blue flower, then. You imagine some ethereal, blushing, feathery sort of thing, insubstantial as a song, pure as the storm-cleansed sky. It consorts with ferns, shuns toadstools and earthworms. It is the well-loved familiar of rare butterflies, who visit only at certain hours of a summer afternoon, borne on the gentlest puffs of nectar-scented air. It winks demurely from the mossy clefts between old oaks' toes. It beckons blushingly and then, at the last heartbeat, fairylike, flickers bashfully from view. Which is what makes it so hard to find. What makes it the perfect emblem of Romantic longing. At least that's what you think.

Admit it, Ingo—that's
exactly
what you thought, until the past week or so. Clutching your little red poetry book, mooning over this haunting image, pining for that impossible object of desire.
I am searching for the blue flower
, you've told yourself.
It is a sacred quest, through a God-haunted country. And if I should fail, even if I should perish in the attempt, my death will be a blessed thing, a release from the holy torment of a martyr.

Ingo, what an idiot you've been.

Worse than that: you've been a sucker. You've bought into the oldest spiel in the book. So be it—now you know the truth. About this blue flower, and a few other things as well. Too bad you had to learn it the hard way. But really, isn't it about time?

The sad thing is, it wasn't that much of a secret. Novalis himself, who thought up the
blaue Blume
in the first place, fairly spells it out.

Which pretty much explains what kind of metaphor you're messing around with.

Emblem of poetic longing—what a laugh. It's an emblem, all right. It's an emblem because it pops up at the least expected times and the most unwelcome places. It unfurls and stands proudly and declines to wilt. It may not be the biggest thing in the forest but it sure calls attention to itself. My, what a striking color!— and you'll turn blue yourself if you try to ignore it. No use hoping it will go away: like the rankest weed, the blue flower needs to be… plucked. And plucked. And plucked again. Before you know it, you've got pollen all over the place. Any moment now somebody will notice, and you'll die of shame. Your death will come not as a blessed release but as a stupid and vulgar joke.

Lately he'd not been sleeping well, what with one thing and another. He lay open-eyed much of the night, reviewing certain scenes, imagining others, while a thousand more swam darkly in the shadows of his mind. He thought sometimes—thought quite hard, actually—about an archery contest and naked swimmers and two boys kissing in a meadow. He thought about a particular blond body that lay in a condition of despicable inviolacy only a few steps away. More than anything he thought about Anton. Sometimes his thoughts resembled ordinary memories (though what does “ordinary” mean, in this context?), but often they were more vividly colored, strangely paced, racing and slowing and occasionally locking on a single frame until the film caught fire. Images and sounds and textures and other unnameable sensations teemed so thickly in his mind that he experienced a sort of mental suffocation. It was like being caught, swarmed-over, in an especially violent dream, a dream that arose not in the mind but in the body itself. And Ingo would languish on whatever that night's bed might be—the forest floor, a stiff cot at a youth hostel or, once only, a decent mattress at a wayside inn, it made no difference to his transfigured flesh—damp with sweat, cool in the night air, burning with need, unable to keep still or to move, to think clearly or to surrender himself to oblivion. He had found the blue flower, he had devoured its seed, and now it was growing inside him, drawing nourishment from his gut.

He was a horrid, sticky mess. Everything, every feeling and mood and memory, clung to him.
Nevermore will you come out of this wood—
they had tried to warn him about that, too.

On the other hand… did he really want to leave? Ever, ever again?

*    *    *

The odd thing about these thoughts, or dreams, or agonized visions, where Anton was concerned, was their incompleteness. They resembled some modern school of painting—Cubism or the
Blaue Reiter
, Ingo knew little about such things—in which the central image is distorted or broken into pieces, changed from a three-dimensional object into a purely intuitive representation, as though you were being shown not the thing itself but a certain
feeling
about that thing. If the artist hated what he was painting, it would look one way; if he loved it, another. When Ingo thought of Anton, or tried to, he succeeded only in calling up certain aspects, isolated impressions: a flashing smile; a long leg, and how it flexed at the knee; the specific temperature of breath moving across his stomach; a string of words that played and replayed itself with no particular meaning, serving simply as a medium for that wonderful, throaty voice.

Where had he gone—the actual, warm, breathing, fully formed Anton? How had Ingo lost hold of him? And why could he not bring him back now, alive and whole, if only for a sliver of a second?

They had had so little time together. That was one thing. But even so— those days had been the most intensely felt, the most deeply experienced of Ingo's life. Of course they had ended, but did that mean, of necessity, that they were just…
gone
? Beyond his grasp, sliding deeper into the past at every moment? Is that how it worked? So much for comforting nostrums like
I'll always be with you
, or
You'll live in my heart forever.

Another thing, though. What exactly
had
it been? Ingo had assumed it was love—and if it wasn't, for God's sake, what more was required? But he wasn't sure. He knew there'd been more to it than you could measure by just tallying up the things they'd done, the physical things. (Even now, in his fallen and gooey state, Ingo shied from the frank language of sexuality.) Yet how
much
more? More in what way? For all he knew, anyone who'd ever done such things with another person felt like this. But no—he didn't believe that either.

The fact remained, irreducibly: he could not remember Anton as he felt he ought to. Somehow, in more than just a literal sense, they had parted. Some crucial aspect of Anton, the person he had been, the things he had meant, now had dropped into the past. In one respect this was a blessing; it marginally decreased Ingo's nightly torment. But on the whole it made him feel more miserably alone than ever.

*    *    *

Then the sun would rise and the nighttime ordeal would seem stranger still, because it would have no place in the glaring world of daytime. Here people would move and talk and laugh and quarrel as though Ingo were simply one of them, not a broken, half-ghostly being, disfigured by the fires of lust and never made whole again. And he would pass among them like a visitor from another realm of being, scarcely able to understand the native tongue, let alone grasp the finer points of social comportment.
I feel the breeze of another planet—
Stefan George, as usual, getting here before him. And the queer thing was, nobody seemed to notice.

Now and then Martina threw him a certain kind of look: inquisitive, perhaps concerned or sympathetic. God forbid, not pitying, please. But she never pressed it further than that—she had, mind you, her own wild garden to tend—and for the most part Ingo was content simply to be left alone.

The journey east did not require much of his attention; it proceeded and it carried him along and on a certain level he even took an active role in it. He joined in with Hagen's hiking songs, and gathered firewood, and hefted his share of the supplies. He tossed in his two cents on the question of which path to take—the nature of woodland trails is such that you never can really be sure. He ate and drank and relieved himself behind bushes and bathed in cold mountain streams and even tried once to scrub the dirt out of his clothes. But that was less than a success and he found, rather to his surprise, that he still felt embarrassed undressing in front of others.

Ingo, he thought, you are a fool. But a singular fool, at least,
ein eigener Narr:
a fool of your own creation.

And then, once upon a time…

Es war einmal
, that had been the Grimms' formula. A ritual phrase, an incantation to blur the boundaries of time and cast the listener back—or perhaps sideways—into another world with its own strictures and possibilities. At any moment along the path you might encounter a giant, a wolf, a crone, a tricky fellow dressed in rags—but whether woman or youth, elf or ogre, it surely would not be who or what it seemed at a hasty glance. You need to bear this in mind, because in this world—as perhaps in others—when opportunity presents itself, you have but a single chance to grasp it. Likewise when danger arises you have only an instant to step clear. Hesitate too long, or misjudge the situation, and you are lost.

Once upon a time, then, Ingo woke at an indefinite hour in a wood that
was not quite silent and not quite dark. A pale glow seemed to emanate from rocks and leaves and moss, and tree trunks stood flat as shadows, and the sky held a memory of moonlight but no moon. From somewhere— neither far nor near—came a soft rustling amid the undergrowth, maybe tiny creatures venturing abroad, maybe restless spirits trudging on their endless journey. Maybe a monster closing in. Maybe a lithe-limbed, pretty sprite with mischief in his eyes.

Ingo could not guess what time it was. He remembered tossing on his bedroll until quite late, but after that he must have dropped into a deep, if not necessarily long, slumber. His thoughts were dulled as though by a sleeping draught, and his limbs felt so heavy they might have been paralyzed. He tried to recall his last dream but found only unconnected impressions that ran together like watery paint. More of the usual, he supposed. Lurid fantasies, memories spun into fantastic lies, emotions he had no name for. The insanity of sleep meets the panic of waking. He lay on his cushion of fallen needles like a man trapped between the last world and the next, a citizen of neither.