Another Green World (51 page)

Look, says Alwin, at the chaos of art. There is no true subject matter, no world-vision, not since the Pre-Raphaelites. Today's artist seeks only that which is instantaneous, effortless, which relates to nothing and means nothing, which lacks both antecedent and consequence. The topic of art is art itself, nothing more.

While he speaks, a young girl pops up beside him, flaxen hair in two long braids, just big enough to clamber onto his lap. Alwin steadies her with a hand but otherwise pays her no heed. His mind is on higher things.

Observe, likewise, the decadent state into which literature has fallen. The writers of our age have nothing to offer beyond the most minute self-absorption. This Irishman with his huge novel about a Jew who leaves his house, walks around Dublin, and returns home again. Or the Frenchman with his seven volumes about eating dinner and falling asleep. Even our own Professor Mann, feeding us sickly tales of a stage magician or a pervert by the sea.

The girl says, Daddy, please, we are so bored, there is nothing to do, will you tell us a story?

And God in heaven, says the Big Man, do not speak of music! Shush now, Hildi. Without doubt, we bear witness today to the death of composition. Better the degraded mewling of Berlin cabarets than the tuneless fiddle-scratching of Schoenberg!

Onward in this vein he goes, quite vividly. The girl twirls fingers in his long hair. He speaks once to her, in annoyance. Come, Hildi, calls a woman across the room, leave your father in peace.

Is this the mother? Wife, mistress, brood mare, we are not sure what categories exist here in the Great Experiment.

‘Perhaps then’ (when at last the Ideocrat pauses, the Expat ventures to suggest) ‘what is wanted is a unifying theory, a sense of where we stand in history, what is required of us. For instance, Marx suggests—’

One is permitted nothing further.

‘We need no more ideology!’ the fellow shouts, or rather, shrieks. Somehow one senses: he is quoting somebody. ‘Spengler tells us’ (of course, one knew Spengler was coming, sooner or later) ‘we need hardness. We need fearless skepticism. We need, above all, a new class of socialist overlords!’ Actually, for overlords, Herrenvolk, a word the Hitler party takes pleasure in.

The Expatriate finds no words to suit the occasion. Across the room little Hildi laughs, entertained by some antic of Isaac's. The woman— wife, mother, martyr, none of the above?— sighs, brushing hair out of her eyes. Already a few strands of silver there.

Thus the state of progressive Germany, in these last months of the decade.

17.
SEPT

A night of lovemaking and faraway dreams (a dance hall; shouting at père de famille) yields to ‘morning-red,’ the fiery dawn.

There are fists on the door. Then, in the room, the German boy. I am not awake, not really, and the boy is shouting. Where did all that stony self-possession go? Marty clicks on like a switch. She asks him: What's the matter?— in English of course, and he answers in German, but by now we understand each other as well as we ever shall.

‘You must get out quickly,’ he says, in which tongue I do not recall. ‘They have come. Look, they are just there.’

Who, where—always a headache when there hasn't been enough sleep.

Marty a swirl of motion, whipping a sheet around her nakedness, crossing the room. ‘Hagen—you're bleeding.'

At this one's eyes do rather pop. Blood it is: a long cut down one arm, a double-slash, elbow to wrist, as though he'd yanked it from a dragon's teeth. No tasty Blöndchen today, Herr Drache—but a close-run thing.

‘My god, you're dripping all over. Butler, come here, do something!'

Such as?

Something, that is all. Here is a problem, a débâcle, it can perhaps be fixed, perhaps not, but for god's sake don't just sit there. The essence of Marty. One loves her for it, even at such times.

Young Siegfried does not care to be fussed over. ‘You must go, quickly. I will be all right, it is not serious.’

You feel he has been practicing all his life to say this. Meanwhile dripping like a Polish faucet all over the cabin floor. The Expat, upright finally, finds his clothing in the still half-dark cabin, a gauze of muslin floating at the window in dawn's cool breeze. Some kind of ruckus outside, toward the center of the Dorf. Doors bang open, or shut—voices not quite raised to a shout but urgent, agitated, charged with adrenaline, you can feel the rawness of fear and anger as clearly as in a shortwave broadcast.

‘The Jungdo!’

At last the Expat understands.

Nod from the boy.

‘How many?’

‘I could not tell. A dozen, perhaps. Enough.’

Marty's eyes flare. ‘What about Isaac and Ingo?’

The boy sets his mouth. He will not answer. But you see it there, the unsaid thing, in his eyes.

‘I'll find them.' Sic, Expatrius. ‘You two go down to the stream, I'll meet you by the footbridge.'

One does not, please understand, wish to be heroic. So what is one doing, then? Maybe not much. Maybe one is just curious—one does not wish to leave the theater while the third reel is snapping before one's eyes.

Ingo and Isaac and Hagen share a cabin that sits off some way to itself, near a line of poplar trees. Getting there unseen should not be too difficult, if one moves with suitable speed and stealth.

From the village center, a woman's scream, the watery splatter of glass breaking, a lot of it at once. You picture the large windows in the Gemeindehaus. Sturdy wooden chairs—a table even—lifted and hurled. Now more of it, crashing, wood cracking, children's wails, dull thumps. DO NOT think of chair legs pounding into flesh.

Reaching the poplars—fl uttering leaves like a thousand tiny pennants, pea-green brightening to yellow in the upper branches—and suddenly here is Hagen again, puffing, a hand to his side, pressing the ribs. Injured there as well? Seemingly so, a rip down his shirt. In this light he looks half
murdered. But the face is weirdly calm, the eyes fixed. Resolution in that face. Age-old strength, a warrior nation. Yet a child's flesh, easily mangled. You think of all those schoolboys memorizing the ‘Death Song’ and imagining themselves in that burning castle, last stronghold of the Burgundians, glorious stench of smoke and blood in their nostrils, their little fingers strumming the fucking minstrel's harp, croaking out a ballad of vengeance and honor. Then ‘destiny's footsteps,' and Dietrich, NOT you, is the last man standing: so mote it be. Die for the joy of it.

‘What are you doing here?’ the Expat honestly wonders.

The boy does not reply, he does not even look. You would not understand. No, well, all right then. We step quickly forward and gain the nearest wall of the cabin, shielded from the village—safe so far. Nothing to be seen through the window. Creep around the corner—motion in the distance, a disturbance, is that fire? Then in through the door.

They have already been here and torn the place apart. Blankets shredded, a knife's work. Contents of knapsacks dumped out, kicked around, pawed through. Pages ripped from a book, flung widely. Lift one at random—a love poem—then let it fall.

The Expat feels he has been here before, picked his way through the same cloud-lit aftermath. Except the last time was in Berlin, or maybe Leipzig, the bloody wake of street fights, tavern brawls, raids upon bookstores and the ‘nests’ of enemy student groups. It's been going on for a decade now, getting more violent every year, so people say. This year mainly it's the Communists, variously titled, versus the Hitler mob. Worse in the south, they say—you should see Munich!

In the doorway a shadow. Hulking there like Frankenstein's monster, a hyperthyroidal bullyboy twirling a Freikorps bayonet between his fingers as one would a toothpick. He looks from one of us to the other, brutishly incurious. The Expat realizes: We have seen this one before, the fellow with the bandage on his nose. Salt of the Boden and pillar of the Reich-stag's largest voting bloc. Look around for something to fend him off with. A hunk of unleavened Socialist bread? A tent pole? The monster lurches forward into the room.

And then… his knees wobble, he loses his balance. Someone has clipped him from behind. Winding it backward, you catch the CLUMP of something hard striking something padded with clothing. As the brute staggers, Ingo is revealed—battered and bleeding, it seems, from a wound in his side, but puffed up in anger, one arm raised, a good-sized rock in it like an oversized fist. Fist = Faust. The rock meets the big fellow's head—
no padding there. The sound this makes will be hard to describe in a fashion not off-putting to the average American editor. The next sound is easier, a floor-shaking thud.

‘Well done!’ This from the Expat, or some tantamount banality.

But Ingo is not done and is in no humor to be congratulated. He steps past the body—is it breathing still?— and rounds upon young Hagen. ‘What did you do to Isaac?’ he says.

In the German boy's face, in his eyes, his firmly shut mouth, all is as before. There is a thing that will not be said, a page that will never be written.

‘Damn you,’ says Ingo, and he is the warrior Ingo yet, possessed by some angel of rage. ‘First Isaac, now this. I'm going to kill you.'

Yes, he would have, I believe it still. The rock had blood on it. The Expat stepped in front of him but this, from Ingo's point of view, must not have presented a credible impediment.

‘That is not true,’ said the German boy. (At any rate, he said something that conveyed less alarm than was warranted. Perhaps ‘That was not my doing,’ or even a question, ‘Why would I have done that?’)

Ingo was past such fine points of dialectic. He meant to smash the little Burgundian with his rock und das wäre das. If Hagen would not panic, the Expat would do it for him. Ingo stepped closer while frantically the point-of-view character calculated angles, the chances of tripping him up, the odds of making a run for it.

Never believe, however bad things may seem, they cannot get worse. At that moment outside the cabin appeared a whole gang of the marauding toughs, five or six or more. Chanting, perhaps very badly singing, some piece of Schweinerei—one could recall, later, a single line, ‘when Jew blood runs from my knife.’ Before Ingo could react, Hagen was out the door. You heard his voice, a clear tenor descant. You saw him pointing— over there, comrades. You neither could tell what he was up to (showing where Marty had gone?) nor take the time to puzzle it out.

‘Let's go,' the Expat said.

How then to account for Ingo's hesitation? What thoughts stormed through his mind, what feelings pressed outward from his breast? For immeasurable moments he lingered there, the Jungdo thugs only paces away. Hagen talked rapidly, gesturing, blood congealing on his arm whilst the bigger toughs watched him dumbly.

‘Now!’ the Expat hissed, and in time, barely, Ingo came unstuck.

They climbed out the back window and were quickly lost among whispering
poplars. The day turned golden, sunlight everywhere, Marty waiting beside the little brook. A beautiful dawn spread itself across the eastern marches of old Germania.

In the air, an alarum of birdcalls, an early chill—it would soon be autumn, 1929—and a smell of burning.

NOVEMBER 1944

A
nkle-deep in snow at the edge of the Greater German Reich, wearing a dead man's uniform, Ingo trooped grudgingly onward, eyes on the boot-marks left by the soldier ahead, the one he thought of as the Defrocked Priest. Ingo did not, he guessed, look so out of place himself in this curious hunting party, a rabble of foreign SS volunteers representing most of the nations of Eastern Europe. Like him, on the whole, they were overaged and unsoldierly. Their joints ached from the sudden cold and they were not slow to complain about it, in the degraded Deutsch that was their only common tongue. Eight now altogether—all on foot for this outing—they followed a road too narrow for automobiles and too rough, too broken, even for horses, through a land that seemed to belong to no one. A sign they passed half a day ago had reminded them this was a “nature protection territory.” Meaning, it seemed, you could shoot people here, but you couldn't poach the game.

Escape, he figured, was not impossible. He had taken to lagging behind and nobody cared. Now and then the Priest glanced around to give him a nod or a weary flick of the hand like a desultory benediction, but then looked away; you couldn't afford to take your eyes off the path for long.

There was, of course, the problem of footprints. Once the others noticed he was missing they would turn around and retrace their steps, then his, in the snow. Ingo did not fancy being hunted by these men. Sure, he was armed, he could take a few with him—but then what? It would be a messy business. And maybe he was still Catholic enough to have thoughts about dying with blood on his hands, even the blood of the guilty.

There were opportunties, though. Here and there along the trail, especially on slopes, big rocks jutted from the ground, their surfaces blown free
of snow. You could get a foothold there, heave yourself over and land on the downslope. Pick a spot where the evergreens are small, use low-hanging limbs for cover. It was a chance. How badly would these men care? They were going for king's meat—
living Jews.
Why waste time or bullets on lesser quarry?

He nonetheless trudged onward, holding his place in the column and watching shadows lengthen around him. He shifted the weight on his back, moved the Schmeisser's strap from one shoulder to the other. He couldn't have said why.

Well, okay, he could.

Somewhere up there, ahead of the column, unseen for hours now, was a man in a black uniform, an SS officer. He was the pathfinder, blazing a trail for the others. And he was Master of the Hunt, all his senses honed, his intuition acute.
He had a mysterious affinity with the game—
where had Ingo read that? A Karl May novel? And somehow, beneath those things, he was a blond boy Ingo had known, or at least thought he had, in a different world, an end-of-summer version of this same countryside.

Maybe there is mystery everywhere. Maybe nobody's motives are clear, everyone's feelings are chaotic, their yearnings unnameable. Maybe any given person, in unforeseen circumstances, is capable of acting in any conceivable manner. I caress you, I murder you, I bind your wounds.