Another Green World (52 page)

Maybe.

Only it seemed to Ingo—it always had—that Hagen was harder to decipher than most people. Qualitatively harder; a different sort of nut to crack. After a dozen years behind the bar at the Rusty Ring, chatting up every odd duck that waddled in off Connecticut Avenue, he still thought so. So maybe that's what bound him to the hunting party; maybe he hadn't given up on untangling that particular knot.

Also, there were the tracks in the snow. Ingo had expected them, in a way. The snow had stopped falling night before last, and since then all the game in the forest seemed to have been on the move, scrounging for food or searching for a nice place to bed down for the winter. Or, who knows, looking for a date. In the Boy Scouts Ingo had done the customary thing, plodding through the woods with a fold-out guide to animal tracks, trying to identify the little furry and feathered creatures who had preceded him. You hoped for a bear, a fox, but what you got were raccoons and skunks and the occasional bunny.

Without thinking much about it, he was back at it now, out of the corner of his eye. Still hoping for a fox. And getting, again, something different. This time, human footprints. He paused to consider them, and after a
few moments the Priest ambled back to join him. The tracks were not fresh; the edges had blurred from snowmelt. There appeared to be two sets, one falling mostly in the indentations made by the other, and there was something odd about the shape of the shoes, a boxiness. The prints followed the trail for a while, then turned off on what might have been a deer path, narrow and steep.

“Not bandits,” the Priest said judiciously. His jaw was bony, black with stubble, and served as a pointer for his eyes. “Escapees, I'd say.”

“From one of the camps?” said Ingo, perhaps rashly. “Like the one at Auschwitz?” He hoped this was not pressing it too far. Hölderlin cautioned against the mortal error of
Wortschuld—
the sin of uttering, of all unspeakable things, the most unspeakable.

The Priest shook his head. “They're in better shape than that. See how far apart the footsteps are? They're moving along pretty quickly. People who come out of the big camp there—and I tell you, there aren't many— they stagger. And they'd be barefoot, or near to it. These ones, see, they've got shoes of a sort, something homemade, maybe a strip of old tire with cloth sewn around it. Slave workers, I'd say, off a farm somewhere. Folks like us—foreigners, right? Except they waited for an invitation.”

It was sometime after they had overtaken the others, while listening to the latest in a limitless repertoire of filthy stories from Janocz the giant—this one involved a nun, a bar of soap, and a chicken—that Ingo experienced a revelation.

Warfare, he realized, is a team sport. It is not really so different—well, okay, rather more extreme—than any of those activities he'd sought to avoid in high school. The likeness between war and, say, varsity football went deeper than Darwinian group dynamics, locker-room crudeness, the playing-field pecking order and the fact that Ingo had no aptitude for either. It went deeper even than the familiar and, by now, boring requirement to prove one's manhood. Deeper than the prospect, never far from mind, of physical violence.

The most telling sameness, to Ingo's mind, lay in that transcendent entity, the
team:
a fraternity, a brotherhood, a shoulder-to-shoulder, thick-and-thin union—a true
Bund.
To belong to a team, to really belong, is to feel a profound identification with your teammates, a dissolving of the boundaries between you and them. We are Cardinals; we are
Kamaraden;
we are all in this together… none of which had ever applied to Ingo, visà-vis
any given sampling of his male brethren. Not in Boy Scouts. Not in high school, or at Catholic U. And how much more so, not here, not now.

If all men were like me, he thought, it would be hard to get much of a war going, wouldn't it? On the other hand, if all men were like me, there wouldn't be much of a world. Would there?

The hunters were in no hurry. Whatever might be ahead of them would still be there tomorrow; that's how Ingo read their attitude. Tomorrow, maybe next week. If it's a boar, then let it fatten up a while. If it's a Jew, let it starve. If it's a slant-eyed Russian with one of those little submachine guns, the kind that never jams—well, just you wait, Ivan. I'll see you when the time comes.

Hagen—the other men called him
der Chef—
did not join them at their campfire.

“He keeps to himself, that one,” said the man Ingo knew as Eyebrows. From his accent, maybe Lithuanian. He was a chatty sort, and it disturbed Ingo very much to think that, had this man walked into the Ring one day, wearing ordinary clothes, smoking an American cigarette, he probably would've found him an engaging fellow.

“They're all like that,” the Priest said. “Think their shit is honey.”

All who? Ingo wondered. Germans? Officers? The regular SS?

“No, this one …” Eyebrows nodded rhythmically, as if hearing a private song. “I've been with him over a year now. We've been out on, what, maybe thirty, forty operations. Big sweeps, some of them, two hundred men, artillery support, once even spotters in airplanes. Other times, only a few of us, like now. And I tell you, all those times… hell, I can't think of a word the fucker's ever said to me. Not one bleeding word, not Attention or Forward or Eat shit. It's odd, wouldn't you say? Goes against the book— a good National Socialist is supposed to be one of the men—maybe a bigger man, maybe more powerful, but still a comrade.”

“Where'd they teach you that—Rovno?”

“They didn't send me to Rovno, I went to Lublin. This was in forty-one.”

“Forty-one. Been at this awhile, eh?”

Eyebrows nodded absently, the inaudible tune still playing for him.

Then he sighed. “Long enough. I was a Party member before the war. An agitator, you might say. Fifth column, right? Volga Germans, my family were—over there for five generations, still spoke German at the dinner table. Not the proper sort, mind you. First thing they told me in Lublin
was my German's no good, I'd never make rank talking that gibberish. Well, they weren't lying.”

The campsite was in a hollow, crowded by rock faces and hulking pines. Straight overhead, Ingo could see white stars like holes in the papery darkness. The fire cast little warmth but its glow was comforting. The hunters had spread out their bedrolls and were done eating, waiting now for weariness to carry them off.

“How can you be a Volga
German,”
mumbled Janocz the giant, as though talking to himself, not caring about an answer. “That's like being a Danube
Russian.
Or a—”

“Just wait,” the Priest said tartly. “You'll be seeing Danube Russians soon enough. Rhine Russians, too, if the Yanks don't get a move on.”

A couple others chuckled, a rueful noise. It struck Ingo as odd they should view the Reich's looming defeat with such equanimity, like something that didn't affect them personally.
We're not Germans, are we?
Or maybe it was something different. Fatalism, in its unvarnished form. The native mind-set of Central Europe, crawling ineluctably westward. Someday, it might reach America.

“I guess that's what the Reds wondered, too,” Eyebrows said. “Five generations over there, then one day Comrade Molotov signs a piece of paper, him and Ribbentrop, divvying up Poland. You take that part, we'll take this. Not long after, they told us to leave. Like that—go back home to Germany. Your Führer is expecting you. Five generations, so what? You're still German, it's in the blood.

“Next thing we knew, a flat in Wedding. A real shithole. Then a farm in fucking Galicia, where not even a Polack would want to live. You're building the New Germany, they said. Didn't look like Germany to me. Hell, I barely knew what Germany looked like. I was starting to miss the Old Country, I wished the Bolsheviks hadn't thrown us out. Then the invasion came—' Kick the Russian door in,' remember that, ‘and the whole rotten house will crumble’? So I figured, you know, this was my way back. Free ride home on a troop transport, and a chance to square things with the commissars.”

Nobody asked how his plan had worked out. It was obvious: here he was with the rest of them. A hunter tonight; but soon enough, the hunted.

Ingo had half dozed off when Eyebrows said, in the darkness, “I never even made it to Russia. Vilna, that's as far as we got. Shooting the Chosen People in a ditch. It was better in Galicia. Shit, it was better in Wedding. But out here, you know, in the woods, the wilderness… this isn't so bad.”

*    *    *

Afterward he fell into something that was not quite sleep, not quite dreaming: a silent but agitated realm like the first few inches under the water of a swimming pool. In this state he was able to think rather clearly—clearly enough to suspect that, by daylight, none of these thoughts would make sense—and one particular idea seemed to hang there, waiting for him to seize it: a memory that glittered just out of reach, like a ring falling slowly to the bottom. He strained for it, his chest aching with need.

I've been here before. This very path. The same mountain—only it was summer then.

This might have been true. Equally it might've been a wholly unreasonable fancy he could not, in his half-dreaming state, dispel. The thought excited him; but paradoxically it did not cause him to awaken, rather to enter more vividly into this state of semi-awareness.

Okay, maybe he
had
been here. Under what circumstances, though? The long hike east from the Leuchtenburg? The longer, sadder journey back? Each question summoned its own stream of possibilities; they bobbed up around him, too many to choose among. Frustrated, he rolled over on the hard ground. Twigs jabbed his cheek—
this
was real, if nothing else. An insect buzzed noisily near his head. He gave it a couple of swats but the damn thing wouldn't leave him alone. In the end he gave up, he rolled onto his back and blinked languidly in the honey-colored sunlight. The insect— an enormous dragonfly—hovered like a fixed object above one eye. If he were a frog, or an enchanted prince, he could've flicked his tongue at it. Instead he let out a languorous sigh.

“Glad to hear you're alive over there,” Martina noted acerbically from her nesting spot among ostrich ferns a few steps way. He propped his head up to give her a baleful glare.

She was so full of herself these days. Ever since she and that
Schwärmer
… Ingo didn't want to think about it. At the same time, how could he not? They had made the crossing, he and his old friend Marty, albeit by different bridges. They were grown up now, physically and otherwise. And they were free—weren't they?—
to shape their lives
, as the Meissner Formula had it,
by their own choice, responsible only to themselves, following their own inner truth.
For them, anything was possible, nothing was forbidden. It was almost 1930, for God's sake.

Still and all…it was hard for him to think of Marty like that. The girl next door. A girl, period. Girls in general. Their odd shapes, the bulges and
squishiness, the smells. How much luckier to love boys, who were pure and hard and clean.

All right: I give up.

Ingo pulled himself to a sitting position, fully aroused now. Aroused as in awakened and in that other sense as well. But then he always was, wasn't he? Even while sleeping. All his dreams were about the same thing. He lived in a state that was evidently well known to a certain breed of poet: Goethe called it
seliger Sehnsucht
, blessed desire; Novalis,
heiliger Glut
, sacred lust. Quite common, apparently. To be expected and, indeed, commended. But just now, damned inconvenient.

Butler was talking. Ingo could not hear—or, more likely, chose not to waste his attention on—what he was saying. The tone was the thing: knowing, long-winded, didactic, above all pleased with itself. Blah blah blah,
ineluctable historic process
, blah blah,
enfeeblement brought on by
blah blah blah. Hagen took exception to this and while he had nothing interesting to say about it, he at least had the grace to say it in clear, well-formulated Deutsch. Isaac was patently bored, which seemed an eminently sane response. With a glance in Ingo's direction, he stood up, stretched like a tawny cat and ambled away, with no apparent destination in mind.

From the campsite a little winding path, the staple of all good
Märchen
, twisted through an obligatory jumble of greenery that Ingo, without Anton, could not name, skirting rocks, ducking beneath ancient limbs, dipping into glades where unseen water whispered mysteriously, creeping up and up onto stony ledges suitable for flinging oneself off in a paroxysm of unconsummated longing.

He found himself following this path, though oddly unaware of having decided to do so; he could remember none of the preliminaries, such as walking out of the camp. How far he had wandered was anybody's guess. Isaac was somewhere ahead of him—he knew that much. The sun fell through the trembling leaves in fat, oozy globs that ran down your limbs like melted butter. You wanted to drink it in. To toss your clothes away and writhe in it. The thrilling notion of being naked transformed itself with magical ease into the feeling of cool air moving between his legs, moss cushioning his bare footfalls, damp fronds tickling his knees. A curtain of drooping willow hung before him, a thousand leaves shot through with yellow-green light. He parted the branches—they were downy to the touch—and stepped into a shady, hemmed-in, isolated glade.

Isaac was sitting on an old fallen log like a sprite perched on its toadstool. His head, rather large for the waifish body, turned toward Ingo, his smile wider than his jawbone should have allowed. On his back and limbs,
freckles now claimed more territory than his plain pale skin. He was not willowy like Anton nor beautiful like Hagen. Ingo could not get him out of his mind. Sleeping or waking, he heard the droll boyish voice. The eyes' emerald sparkle held him spellbound.

Is this real? he wondered. Do I really feel this way? He could not remember. It seemed so, and yet not. It was as though he had leapt ahead, somehow, and these feelings had cropped up in a time of their own, without his having gotten around to feeling them. Ah, the impatience of youth. Everything that is imaginable—and what is not?— must happen right here, right now. Because I want it, I breathe it, I yearn for it. And yearning is holy.
I praise all who long for death by fire.