Another Green World (55 page)

The red-faced innkeeper moved among the tables handing out earthenware mugs from a large, wobbling tray. Close behind him a boy of eleven or twelve, elfin-eared, grinning widely because nothing
this
interesting had happened for some time, struggled to balance an armload of bread, wheels of cheese, and crude-looking knives maybe the work of a local blacksmith.

“There ya go, pal,” said Martina, giving Grabsteen a hard smack on the shoulder, “provisions. In particular, food.”

“We have always been willing to share what we have,” the woman said defensively. “We share with the Poles, with the soldiers…”

It was not Martina's imagination, the pause here. From the woman's intonation, the sentence was meant to continue, the list meant to go on. “And you share with the partisans,” she said, “right?” When the woman didn't meet her eyes, she went on quickly, in what she hoped was a reassuring voice, “Listen, I've been here before. Some friends and I. People called me Marty back then. It was years ago—before the Nazis.”

“Yes,” said the woman. “I know who you are.”

The look she gave Martina sent a chill up her spine. Not the wondering look of someone who remembers you, dimly, from some far-off time— more the frank gaze of someone who knows you well, who was just talking about you the other day. What's Marty been up to? Be sure to tell her I said hi.

“I am Anna,” the woman said. “I am—”

From somewhere in the building—a different room, an upper story— came a woman's cry. It began as a yelp of surprise, but as it drew itself out, it became something else. Though not really loud, muffled by walls and floorboards, it possessed some quality that brought every conversation to a halt. Toward the end, before tapering into silence, the cry became a wail of protracted agony, a sound not recognizably human.

“Come,” said the woman Anna, rising from the table. “Please, Marty, come with me. Not you, sir. I need a woman only, thank you.”

*    *    *

Martina had known, more or less, what she would find in the cheerful room at the top of the narrow staircase. Not the little stove in the corner or the geraniums in pots on the windowsill, nor the pretty lace curtains and the stenciled leaves that twined across white plaster walls. Those things didn't surprise her, now that she was remembering Anna, remembering the good-natured domesticity that had prevailed here, but they were not what she had dreaded to find as she hurried up the stairs hearing the other woman's nervous breath and the tentative murmur of voices down below.

The girl lay with her head and shoulders propped up and her flaxen hair splayed against an assortment of plush down pillows. She looked too small for the high bed with its four stout corner posts. An attractive quilt with a Tree of Life pattern, bright red apples on green limbs, picked up the livid, blood-pink coloration of her cheeks. At its center, the quilt swelled over the enormous mound of her belly. Her hands and her forehead were chalk-white. She was maybe nineteen years old, and you wouldn't have bet on her seeing twenty.

Martina's first, demented thought—it must seem cynical, but it didn't feel like that—was,
So this is how they did it in the good old days.
No doctor, no hospital, no painkillers. A girl on a bed. Blood-soaked blankets. A steaming pot on the stove. A sharp-eyed crone in a chair in the corner, an utterly miserable grandmother-to-be and, if you were lucky, the local midwife. If not, some woman recruited at random, with no qualifications other than the shared misfortune of their sex.

“Hildi,” Anna said, as though speaking to a small child, “here is someone to help us. An old friend …” Now a glance, a wordless question, before the secret finally exploded:”…a good friend of Isaac's. A friend of us all. This is Marty, and she has come a great distance to help.”

“How long has this been going on?” asked Martina, out in the hall.

“Two days now. It is not genuine labor. She has terrible cramps, but they are not real contractions. I don't know what to do. There is no one to ask. None of us has been able to sleep. There used to be someone here who knew about herbs—but she left, everyone left, and she took all the books that might be helpful.”

They walked down the hall, just to be moving. Left and right, doors
stained chestnut brown stood closed, conserving heat. A small window at the end of the hall framed a view of an empty lane. Snow floated through the glowing sphere around a Dickensian street lamp.

“What
happened
here?” Martina said. The question fell out of her mouth, as so many things did, before she had time to consider it.

Anna nodded. Meaning, perhaps, she didn't object to the change of subject. “Nothing happened quickly. But everything became different over time. Those terrible right-wing people destroyed a few things, not really so much. In those days, we did not have so very much to destroy. Then they went away, and we fixed everything up, and life went on. Some of the residents would leave and others would come to take their place. There was always a certain”— groping for the English—” permanent basis.”

“I remember a man. Long hair. Good-looking.”

“Ah—that was Alwin. Hildi's father.”

Her expression was hard to read. Martina ventured, “So you and he were—”

“Not married, no. We were hardly even a couple, really. Alwin believed…well, we all believed things then. So many things we believed in! Great and foolish and in between. Each of us with our own philosophy of life, our own religion. ‘Every worker his own boss, every peasant his own lord, every Dorf its own Reich!’ Such fine slogans we had.” She shook her head. “And you—did you marry? You had a… man friend, with you, I believe? A writer?”

“That's right—a friend. The writer part I don't know about. He never got around to that great novel, I don't think. After a while we just fell out of touch.” Having gotten, she thought, what we wanted from each other. “But you decided to stay. Here in Arndtheim, I mean. Even after the Nazis?”

“Well, what better place? So many of our comrades back home were being arrested. Others went abroad, to Geneva, to Paris, to Lisbon. To New York, even, or Barcelona. But we were already abroad, do you see? In those days we were. We had our little bit of Germany here—a better Germany, a Germany of the future—and it had always been part of the plan, Alwin's plan, that we should be entirely self-sufficient. Thank God for that. It is true, sometimes we laughed about it. At the windmill, especially! But now … thank God.”

“What happened to Alwin? He gave up finally?”

“Oh, no.” Anna looked surprised; Marty had not understood at all. “No, they came here, the SS, after the invasion, when this place became part of
the Reich. We were terribly afraid. We expected them to burn the village and send us to one of their camps. Hildi led the smaller children into the forest, to hide there. I thought I would never see her again.

“They strutted around, these mighty SS men, and they looked at the cottages and the workshops, and they looked at us as well—up and down, as though it were all some kind of…exhibition, and we were simply part of it. One of the officers had been here before and he acted as their guide. See the model German hamlet. See how they grind their own meal. See how they weave fabric for their clothing. It is like the days before the awful French came with their Enlightenment, and the English with their factories. This is the real Heimat here. The soil, the woods, the sunshine. Hardworking villagers. Just how we like it.”

She sighed. “So they left the place standing. It fit nicely, don't you see, into their great plans. They wanted to turn this part of Poland into a new German homeland, and we had shown how to do this. Of course, a few things needed to be straightened out. The streets must run just so, north–south, east–west. There must be certain new buildings, important for our culture. And certain elements that have no place in the new Germany—these foreign books, these degenerate paintings, these Bolsheviks, these Jews—they must be gotten rid of. The SS men made no big fuss about it. They were actually rather courteous, people later remarked upon that. We regret, dear lady, that we must take your Tolstoy novels and burn them. We regret having to slash up your picture here, but why does this woman appear to have six arms? We regret that we must take your man out to the woods and shoot him in the head, but this is what happens when one chooses to sleep with a parasite. We regret—”

There were tears in her eyes, though she seemed to have decided, by an act of will, not to cry. As if she did not want some phantom in a black uniform to have that satisfaction.

“Alwin and I had not been…together for some while. But you know, one does not stop loving someone, just because… and he was Hildi's father.” Unexpectedly she took Martina's hand, her eyes glowed, and she forced a kind of smile onto her face. “But Isaac,” she said, her voice becoming a stage whisper, “he always seemed to know when danger was coming. He was gone that day, and stayed gone for some time. We were afraid they'd gotten him—”

“Wait a minute. You're saying, Isaac was
here
then? That he
stayed
here? Even after the war started?”

Anna gave her, once more, that look of surprise. Marty has not understood. “Of course he stayed here. Where else? He was one of the family by
then. Our poor little family, if you could call it that. He was so terribly clever, and he got on well with the Poles. And of course Hildi by that time was completely in love with him. Had been, really, since she was a young girl.”

Martina shook her head. This was too much to deal with all at once. Like a flood of paperwork, reports on dozens of subjects, dropping on your desk faster than you can read them, much less respond appropriately. “Isaac was
here,”
she said, feeling dull-witted, groping for the obvious. “Which means, he's been here all along. Which means, he's
still
around here someplace. Hiding in the woods or something. Is that right?”

Anna gave her hand a little squeeze, then let it go and turned to look out the window. At what? Swirling snow, empty cottages, abandoned dreams. Southern Poland, winter of 1944.

“Isaac,” she said, “is the father of my grandchild. He had better be around here someplace. And he had better come soon.”

“Something isn't right,” said Bloom, shaking his head. “The place is almost empty, and we haven't found anything suspicious. No weapons caches, no secret rooms. But there's something wrong. I've just got a feeling.” He paused, waiting for the inevitable objection from either Grabsteen or Martina. Hearing none, he shoved his chair back, straightened his legs beneath the table and groaned in exhaustion.

“I've got a feeling, too,” Harvey said after a while. “I've got a feeling that if we sit here long enough, the Nazis are going to come and kill us.”

“If we sit here
long
enough,” Martina said, just for the fleeting pleasure of contradicting him, “the Red Army will come and liberate us, and we can march off in solidarity with our comrades from the East.”

“Remind me to tell you sometime,” said Grabsteen—with a little smile, as though he, too, enjoyed the game, even if he was too tired to play it just now—” about Stalin's policy on immigration to Palestine. And about the official announcement of the liberation of Majdanek, which curiously made no mention of Jews.”

“The problem
now
is,” Bloom said loudly, “we all need to rest, but we can't afford to relax. What I think I'm going to do is put everyone on two-hour watches, one on and two off. We'll have four people out on the perimeter, while everybody else is inside getting some shut-eye. Then there's the problem of whether to trust the natives. They're a little
too
friendly, if you ask me.”

“They're Socialists,” explained Martina.

That seemed to cut no ice with Bloom, who gave her a blank look. Nor should it, she supposed. What had Captain Aristotle said? One never really knows who anybody is.

“Why don't you take the first watch,” Bloom told her, not a question at all. “Go find Stu, he's upstairs someplace.”

“Not Stu. He needs to stay with Hildi.”

“Not Morrie either,” said Grabsteen. “His leg got hurt back at the bridge.”

“Well, then”— Bloom swept his arms in exasperation, a slapstick gesture that almost knocked a mug off the table—” how in hell am I supposed to put together a watch list?”

“You'll figure something out,” Martina said, patting his knee.

“We know you will,” seconded Grabsteen. “We have every confidence.”

Sunlight returned the next morning. For some reason, this made things even harder to believe. The view from the front window was motionless and sentimental: timbered cottages, fallen snow, scarcely a reminder of the present century. Martina amused herself for a while, sipping hot liquid she chose to pretend was coffee, by trying to imagine what this movie-set village might be good for. Something between
Alexander Nevsky
and
Holiday Inn.
Rita Hayworth dying beautifully in childbirth. Crosby crooning the love theme in full combat gear. And Fred Astaire—born Frederic Austerlitz—doing a nifty turn as a Jewish partisan, miraculously eluding his pursuers, leaping from rooftop to rooftop in the show-stopping dance number.

From a cupboard somewhere, a radio materialized. The red-faced innkeeper, as a courtesy to his guests, ran through the dial until he found the VOA. They listened to Benny Goodman and a news broadcast. That was the first Martina had heard about Roosevelt's reelection. A fourth term—unprecedented!

She didn't have to guess what Ingo would say.

0800. The offgoing watchstanders reported various discoveries. One, you can climb the windmill tower and get a decent view of the countryside. Two, these people have everything—there's a cold room under the barn where they've got the whole carcass of, we think it's a deer, a
big
deer, all cleaned and strung up on a rope. And three, wait'll you see the Hitler Youth Hall.

“I have no desire,” snapped Martina, feeling crabby and still cold from her 0400– 0600 stint, “to see the Hitler Youth Hall.”

“We could use a CP,” Bloom pointed out. “Someplace to meet in private. Stash our gear and whatnot.” He glanced meaningfully around the common room, where villagers and Varianoviks sat elbow-to-elbow. Weapons and backpacks were scattered haphazardly. The elfin-eared boy, called Michi, as in Mouse, under the guise of wiping down a table, was fondling somebody's machine pistol.