Another Green World (47 page)

Suddenly, Isaac loomed above him—as if he were floating there, weightless and ghostly pale. Ingo's heart slammed a couple of times, then calmed with recognition. Only Isaac.

“Shh,” the boy admonished him, “get up,” though he seemed to make no sound. He motioned with a flick of the head or the casting of an eye; for some reason the precise gesture was hard to focus on, yet its meaning was clear.
Come on—let's get out of here before anyone else wakes up.

Ingo could find no reason to refuse. In his bleary state the idea made good sense. He sat up and rubbed his eyes and soon was stumbling away from the camp, which that night had been pitched on a broad ledge in the foothills of northwest Carpathia: he wasn't entirely sure which country they were in. Ahead of him, Isaac ducked through a scrim of black-leaved laurel that edged the old forest road, and they stepped out onto a north-facing slope formed mostly of naked, rain-smoothed rock and hence easy to walk on, even in semi-darkness. They proceeded obliquely downhill. Ingo tried to catch up with the smaller, more quick-footed boy, but he could not.

By increments, like a ticking watch, the landscape grew brighter: dawn could not be far away. Now all the questions Ingo ought to have asked pressed down on him. What was Isaac up to? Where he was taking them; why did Ingo have to come along? As if overhearing, Isaac looked back across one scrawny shoulder. You might, had you been so disposed, have read his quirky, corner-of-the-mouth smile any number of ways.

The ground leveled off and the sky took on a faint blush of magenta. A sound of moving water came from someplace ahead. In crevices between rocks appeared tufts of blue-eyed grass,
Sisyrinchium
, a dwarfish cousin of the lily clan, whose lavender six-pointed flowers wilt in the evening but open again in the warmth of afternoon. Ingo would not have recognized it, would never even have seen it, a couple of weeks ago. To have loved, he thought— even for an hour, imperfectly—is to have glimpsed the world through a different set of eyes. And through those eyes, to have perceived a whole new dimension, a secret plane of reality, hidden from ordinary sight. So much he had learned from Anton, so much. He lurched onward dumbly, feeling something like bereavement. His feet met the rugged concavity of a draw with the easy familiarity of old neighbors whom time has turned into friends. The air smelled of mountains, of autumn, of heartbreak.

Isaac at last stopped, but Ingo, overfilled with his own thoughts, didn't notice in time and the two nearly collided. Isaac laughed, intercepting him with a stiff, sinewy arm. There was no guile in his laughter or in the clear, faceted sparkle of his eyes.

“I've got something to show you,” he said—practically the first words either of them had spoken all morning. “Only we're a little early, we've got to wait till just the right time. Okay?”

His voice, his entire outward manner, had a surface impenetrable as concrete. Ingo couldn't fathom what, if anything, lay underneath. He supposed this was a useful survival trait for an undersized kid in tough surroundings. Isaac squatted down on the irregular ground and he followed suit. There seemed no need to talk about anything. The day came on rapidly now; the sky lost its rosy flush, and a rope of gray cloud stretched across the eastern horizon, backlit in yellow. Ingo rubbed his hands together, anticipating the pleasure of sunrise.

“Okay, let's go,” Isaac said suddenly. Quickly he was up and moving away, lower into the mouth of the gully. The footing was difficult here, and sharp-pointed rocks, having tumbled from someplace above, lay all around; it would be quite easy to trip and land on one. Nonetheless Ingo struggled to keep pace, steadying himself by using scrappy little fir trees as handholds. Soon his fingers were black with resin and smelled of Christmas. Ahead, the hill reared up in a promontory, deeply cleft down the center and dark except for a thin silvery line, like a spider thread, that ran down its face and disappeared among a jumble of boulders. The sound of water grew more distinct.

“It's a waterfall!” Ingo said, understanding at last. “Wait, I want to look at this.”

Isaac shook his head. “Not from here. Come on. The sun's almost up.”

He led them on a roundabout path, deeper into the draw and through a copse of quivering birch. A narrow stream darted along a groove in the rock, making quiet, somewhat musical noises almost like giggling. The first rays of dawn—pink-tinged gold, like amber with a smidgen of blood inside—struck the slope above them. Then they stepped clear of the trees and the waterfall stood before them, tumbling perhaps three stories into a little chasm it seemed to have churned out for itself. Numerous protrusions from the cliff face shattered the silver column and sent water jetting and splashing and streaming in every possible direction, in patterns that altered continually. Glittering skeins dangled and waved like gonfalons, and through them, at just this instant, blazed the sunrise—the light breaking into a thousand colors, each droplet becoming a minuscule prism, and the water in turn dissolving the sun into its molten essence.

Ingo drew his breath. It was one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen, and he was no stranger to beauty. He stared for a minute or two—the vision never ceased changing, like a highly advanced type of kaleidoscope—until after a while he became aware that Isaac was looking at him. Bemused, he looked back.

“I knew you'd like it,” said Isaac, sounding pleased with himself. “I'm not much for nature, myself. But I thought, you know—I bet Ingo would go for it.”

“But…”

But why—
the question was too obvious to ask.

“I owe you,” the kid said with a shrug. “Like I told you. I owe you one bigger than this, actually. But hey. It's pretty, right?”

“That it is.”

They stood and admired it a while longer, though the magical effect diminished rapidly with the onset of full daylight. A particular combination of circumstances seemed to be required for the full effect: sun, water, season, observer, each needed to be in precise alignment. Ingo had no intention of upsetting it by asking how the hell Isaac had known about this place. Certain things are best regarded as eternal mysteries, and he was quite sure this was one of them.

Afterward, there was no thought of going straight back to the campsite. Something must have come loose in Ingo's brain, like a broken electrical coupling, because all he wanted to do was lie on the rock in the morning sun. He wasn't really drowsy; to the contrary he felt unusually alive and
alert, though in a languid, catlike fashion. He was worn out from days of hiking; just to sit still was an indescribable pleasure. More profoundly, he was exhausted from the nightly onslaught of
The Sorrows of Young Ingo—
insomnia, doubt, aloneness, desire—which were not lessened by the knowledge that they were not his alone. He was hardly the only citizen of Secret Germany, after all. There was a whole underground nation of people like himself, unconfined by borders or language. That realization had been thrilling at first, but after a while the strain of it began to wear at you. You hankered for normality. You wished things could get boring again, if only for a day or two.

That morning, sprawled in the sunlight, Ingo felt bored in the nicest possible way. The chortle of water slipping invisibly among the rocks seemed to poke gentle fun at his self-absorption, his Gothic melancholia. Had the others been around—Butler, Hagen, Martina—he might have found it difficult to just let go, to lie there unself-consciously, doing nothing, planning nothing, regretting nothing. With Isaac, somehow, it was different. With Isaac, you could just say to hell with it all.

Speaking of Isaac, though—where was he, what was he doing, while Ingo lay there enjoying his short-lived truce with the world? Was he okay? Happy, angry, apathetic, impatient to grow up, nostalgic for his childhood? Was he thinking of his family, his lost home across the sea? Or cooking up some fresh scheme to torment Hagen and thwart the frowning fates?

It would be as useful to ask, What do foxes dream of? Where does the fire go when you blow out a candle? The only thing Ingo cared to know was that when he turned his head sometime around mid-morning, Isaac was perched next to him on the rock, upright and frisky, red hair lying in tufts around his elf-ears, raring to go. Which was more or less exactly how he would always remember him.

Isaac declared he was starving to death, and Ingo—despite having left his appetite somewhere around the Leuchtenburg, and shedding a few pounds to prove it—decided he must be starving, too. Maybe the idea of food touched some nostalgic chord in him: Remember the good old days when we used to
eat
? Life was so much simpler then.

Again, the campsite would never do. No, our food must be cooked up in a proper kitchen, served on proper plates at a proper table. We must on
the side have a satisfying beverage—thank you, but no more of Frau Möhring's dandelion-root “coffee.” Above all we must have only pleasant company, which means present company, because things become complicated if we toss in any one of our trailmates, don't they? There would then be debates, differences, misunderstandings. Whereas with just the two of us, old comrades from the Battle of Frau-Holle-Quell, everything's right out in the open—right, pal?

And so they walked a while, but not the Wandervogel sort of walking, determined and vigorous and good for you. More like playing hooky and getting away with it. The land was their co-conspirator, deflating below the foothills into a lumpy plain, easy on the feet and undemanding of the eye. None of the grandeur of the Iron Mountains here, nor the evocative, quasi-medieval
Landschaft
of Thuringia. The place was actually rather boring—it made Ingo think of Maryland, the remote stretches south of Annapolis where colored people lived. The fields were cramped and less than impeccably tended, though extraordinarily green. The woods, tidy and safe-looking, lacked the impressive antiquity of German forests and those deep, alluring shadows where nameless danger abides. Fuck all that, as Isaac might have said. This was good, ordinary country, pleasant enough to amble through, but nothing to write home about.

In due course—about two minutes before Ingo would have insisted on a break—they came through a stand of poplars, the highest leaves faintly blushing with the first kiss of fall, to find themselves at the edge of a village, if “village” wasn't putting it too grandly. A couple dozen houses slumped beside the road, their yards and sheds and outhouses and livestock pens drawn up around them like an old woman's skirts. The principal buildings looked as though they might once have been taller and more gracefully proportioned, but over the decades had fattened and sagged, while creepers and roses and gooseberries and lilac bushes had filled in the gaps between them, and the surrounding woods and meadows had crept in, so that whatever sharp, right-angled lines had once divided the domestic from the wild, the pasture from the garden, the wall from its copious mantle of ivy, were now scarcely even a memory.

At the center was a dusty common, more or less rectangular, cropped by sheep and edged by a row of thorny shrubs sporting festive scarlet berries. An old pump house, apparently still in use, was ringed by a well-kept bed of flowers Ingo couldn't begin to name: humble domestic varieties, their colors at the brink of open war—scarcely Anton's cup of tea. Small children, alike only in their drab, hard-worn clothes, were running
around on the grass but stopped to watch the newcomers in undisguised fascination. A young mother, her attention roused by the silence, looked up from her knitting and stared just as brazenly. Nobody waved hello or even nodded in their general direction.

Ingo murmured, “I guess they don't get too many visitors around here.”

“What's to visit?” said Isaac.

At the far end of the green stood a small
Wirtshaus
, probably the only public accommodation for miles and miles. Though hardly distinguishable from its neighbors—the smithy two doors down could have been its twin, with the front wall torn open and an extra chimney thrown in—it called attention to itself by the scarlet geraniums (even Ingo knew a geranium when he saw one) that tumbled from boxes under a pair of wide front windows, veiled from the inside by panels of white lace. Tacked up by the door was a hand-painted sign on which an oversized yellow chicken bathed cheerfully in a stewpot; naïve and whimsical, it might have been the work of someone's talented daughter.

The room behind the lace curtains was furnished in three corners with heavy wooden tables and a muster of chairs sufficiently sturdy to withstand a drunken brawl. In the fourth stood a small iron stove and an empty woodbin; autumn was still a few weeks off and these people clearly weren't rushing it. The place was otherwise empty.

Isaac made for the table farthest from the windows. A bench was set into the wall and Ingo chose this for its protective attributes. Isaac sat blithely with his back turned to the door. The landlord entered from a back hallway looking slightly flushed, wearing suspenders over his white shirt and a bright blue yarmulke. If anything about the advent of this pair surprised him, he didn't let it show. Dark, avuncular and not at all portly, he addressed them in a language so exotic, so rife with unusually situated consonants, that Ingo guessed it was Polish. Isaac responded in Yiddish, barely glancing up. The innkeeper again showed no surprise. He replied briefly, shaking his head, then his tone changed and he seemed to offer a suggestion, to which Isaac assented with a shrug.

“Nice place here,” Ingo ventured sometime after the man had gone, because it felt odd to sit there facing each other without saying anything.

Isaac offered no opinion. He fiddled with the table's only adornment, a fistful of pink blossoms in a stoneware jar. His nose was thrust into these when the landlord swept back in and gave him a little smile, tolerant and amused. He set down two glasses, a murky green bottle, half a loaf of coarse bread and a bowl of something squishy, black and redolent of vinegar. Ingo waited until he'd gone before giving this a worried once-over.

Isaac said, “My aunt calls that stuff eggplant caviar.” He had lined up the glasses and was sloshing tawny liquid into them—thicker than wine, more clouded than any sort of liquor Ingo was familiar with. “For folks too poor to get the real thing, I guess. Here you go: the local poison, it's all they've got.”