Another Green World (56 page)

Martina guessed Bloom was right about a command post. Things were getting a little too comfy in here. “All right,” she conceded, “let's take a look.”

Bloom was gracious in his moment of victory. “I guess we could make do with two per watch,” he said. “That way everybody gets more sleep.”

They pulled on their coats. “Come on, sport,” Martina called to Michi. “You look like you could use some exercise.”

The boy understood only that he had been summoned. Perhaps he expected a scolding for his forwardness with firearms; his face lit up when it became clear that an expedition was intended. He tugged on a pair of oversized fur-topped boots that, by rights, should've been on the feet of some soldier awaiting his doom in an open trench, whistling “Lili Marlene” through frostbitten lips. They followed a path tramped in the snow by last night's ceaseless patrolling, out to the village green and then crosswise to the large wooden building whose only feature was a squat bell-tower, devoid of bell.

Michi saw her looking up there and provided some explanation in rapid, matter-of-fact Deutsch.

“I think,” ventured Bloom, “he says they gave the bell for the final victory.” When Martina didn't get it, he added, “The brass—you know, for shell casings.”

“Ah,” she said.

Michi nodded proudly.

Wait'll you see the Hitler Youth Hall—
just that, no further hints. Now Martina understood why. What could you possibly have said to convey any notion of this? The entire floor of the large, open room was taken up with…what? A display, a construction, an over-the-top and distinctly boyish fantasy. She scoured her memory but only two comparisons—both remote—came to mind. The first was an eccentric museum-style exhibit at an equally eccentric Masonic monument called the George Washington Memorial, across the Potomac in Arlington, depicting in all its quaint, harmless insanity a miniature Shriners Day Parade. At the press of a
button, Sousa squawked through tinny speakers and some kind of con-veyor-belt mechanism propelled thousands of tiny figures, miniature vehicles, marching bands, floats, regiments of war heroes, fire trucks, open Cadillacs full of waving dignitaries and, as Martina recalled, even a troupe of dancing bears, around and around and around until the bizarre became monotonous.

The second and more telling comparison was the model-train set on which her cousin Abie had been working since he was nine years old. The project had been launched on his bedroom floor with a standard Lionel kit and a few imitation trees. From there it moved to a special table in the basement, where the railway line sprouted branch tracks, tunnels and switching yards, and the landscape complexified to include hills, a river, grazing sheep, a whistle-stop platform complete with passengers and— as adolescence expanded Abie's worldview—a village that soon became a medium-sized town, featuring such enterprises as an auto dealer, a haberdasher and—in what might have been a very quiet protest against Prohibition—a Chicago-style saloon. Abie would be about thirty now. As far as Martina knew, the model railroad was still growing at a steady rate. And if her cousin lived to be one hundred and three, he possibly could achieve something on the order of what lay before her in the Hitler Youth Hall.

She stared at it—over it, through it, around its periphery, across its immeasurable expanse—for quite some time, as did Bloom. What else could you do, really? She stared at the tiny cottages with their honest-to-God thatched rooflets. At yellow-brown fields where teams of oxen tugged perfect little plows along furrows of—she tested this with her finger—actual dirt. She stared at the roads winding over hills and along stretches of reclaimed swampland—yes, with real water, held in black earthenware ponds and channeled through pebbly drainage canals. At the orchard, its hundreds of well-pruned limbs heavy with their crop of tiny red fruit. At the stable, the kennel, the chicken yard. The meadow through which a party of hunters, traditionally attired, trailed a pack of brown-and-white hounds. You could practically hear the treble squeal of the
Jägerhorn.
Martina did not doubt that somewhere, if you peeked behind every shard of rock and lifted the dainty boughs of every bush, you would find the wily fox, no bigger than a hangnail.

“Da ist Arndtheim,” Michi informed them.

No fooling. The Lilliputian village nestled near one corner of the intricate panorama. Everything was there: the spiky windmill, the inn with its wagging sign, the wooden barricade, even the boxy
Hitlerjugendhall
in
which they stood. You half expected to see a tiny Tamara waving her Simonov and shouting unrepeatable oaths in a voice like a cricket. And a teensy Grabsteen, being a weensy pain in the ass.

Martina then realized that if Arndtheim was real—that is, if the model village matched the original—the rest of it must be real, too. This was not just a panorama but a map. For some reason this gave her a creepy feeling, as if she'd been granted a vision she did not care to see: the thousand-year paradise, a land whose milk flowed as white as Aryan skin and whose honey ran as gold as the hair of a fecund
Mädlein.
It was high summer in the Reich, and though there couldn't be a sky, obviously, you knew it was blue and cloudless. So, too, the countryside was without blemish. Swamps had been drained, underbrush cleared, cottages emptied of dirty Polacks and—just a morbid guess here—a nearby shtetl, in the interest of hygiene, burned to the ground. The place where it had stood was now a hunters' meadow. As for the Jews…well, what else should be done with vermin? We shall have no weevils in our flour, no weeds in our rye field, no unwholesome ideas festering in the minds of our children; and just so—for the principle is precisely the same,
meine Herren—
no Jews breeding like bacilli among us, contaminating healthy German blood.

Michi was chattering now, pointing out this and that. Martina experienced a momentary urge to walk over and strangle the boy. Or at least pick him up by his foolish ears and spit in his little Teutonic face. The wave of anger passed through her and then out, over the imaginary landscape. It left her feeling shaken, upset with herself.
One never really knows who anybody is.
Including—perhaps especially—oneself.

“Wo fährt dieser Zug?” she asked, in her crude but usually effective tourist-guidebook Deutsch. She pointed toward the farthest edge of the landscape, where a narrow-gauge rail line snaked between ponds and sedge fields and patches of dark evergreens. In a corner, just before the track ended abruptly by the wall, stood a cluster of red-brick buildings as stately and stern as military barracks.

Michi replied earnestly and at length, an expression of manlike seriousness on his face, proud of his detailed knowledge.

“I'm missing a lot of it,” Bloom confessed. “Something about the Austrian cavalry. Won it back from the Poles. Now the SS…something about a temporary, um, installation. Factories, very important, artificial rubber. Very bad stink. After the war, better. For now, don't go there.”

“No danger of that. But what I asked was, Where does the train go?”

“He's telling you,” said Bloom, looking away, something in his voice like helplessness. “The train goes to Auschwitz. That's the nearest market
town, it's where the farmers around here sell their produce. If the room was any bigger, you could see it from here.”

Harvey Grabsteen, not one to quail, led a couple of Varianoviks laden with ammunition through the snow to the Hitler Youth Hall. He paused barely a moment before striding across the beautifully rendered countryside, crunching trees, fences, neatly tended homes and domestic livestock blithely underfoot. He may, perhaps, have put on a bit of a show, kicking bits of paradise out of his path. It was, in its way, horrifying. It was, in its way, hilarious. A fart at a funeral.

“We'll need something to block these windows,” he said, “if we're going to defend this place.”

So now he was an expert on fortifications? Martina said, “Defend it against what?”

Wide shrug,
beats me
, like a Borscht Belt comic. “Against
whatever.”

Martina shook her head. In another crazy mood swing, she took pity on the model-makers. Just when you think you've got everything in order, the Jews come back.

So: a day, then a second night, then a second day. Clouds as heavy as smoke. Smells of greasy cooking—the nervous innkeeper threw open his larder, and out came platters of schnitzel and sausages and potatoes in their myriad constellations. From the kitchen, laughter. From the bedroom at the top of the stairs, intermittent wails.

The worst part for Martina was just waiting around. For Isaac, for Isaac's baby, for the Germans, for peace, for
Götterdämmerung—
any one of which, or some diabolic combination, might come at any moment, though many moments passed, then many more, and nothing changed.

She went on watch in mid-afternoon. For two hours she tracked round and round in the snow beside a tall, slender man from Chicago named Arthur whom she understood to be an accountant, or perhaps an economist, something to do with money, which might be why she had tended to avoid him. Also, he reminded her somewhat of Eddie, or the kind of man Eddie might've grown into, easygoing and gently humorous. They talked about Henry Morgenthau, a safe topic. Arthur felt Morgenthau was wasted at Treasury—he would've been so much more effective at State. With half her mind, Martina hummed Cole Porter's “Just One of Those Things,” a wordless commentary that went down well at Washington parties
but which, to Arthur, was just a tune. With the other half, she watched Timo climb the windmill tower.
A decent view of the countryside.
Unusual initiative on his part, she thought. But what did she know about Timo? The same thing anyone knew about anybody: zilch.

At four she went off watch. Around five it got dark. Sometime after that, the shooting started.

It might, Ingo thought, have been a form of baptism, horribly botched. The water was so cold you didn't believe you were feeling it. Perhaps you weren't actually feeling it, your nerves had switched off. Which meant later, back on. Another thing to dread.

The wall came down a lot lower than he expected; the builder had made concessions to topography after all. There was justifiable doubt whether Janocz would fit, and in the event it required concerted tugging from the other end—you could imagine Zim and the Priest over there, teeth chattering, trying to get a handhold on the blubbery giant—but they managed it. Then it was Ingo's turn, and after the spectacle of Janocz his own efforts to scoot through, which ended in writhing like a damned eel, didn't seem so pathetic. Afterward, maybe, they would all share a laugh, passing the Priest's canteen around.

Hagen was under and out in a heartbeat and a half. No time for laughing now.

They stood among the trees, just inside the walled enclosure. Hagen gave them a few moments to catch their breath. Then, cautiously, they moved forward until the vegetation thinned out and they could see, at last, what they'd gotten themselves into.

After the close darkness of the woods, this place seemed almost glaringly bright. There were actual streetlamps—among the few, surely, burning that night in all of Europe. Feeble things, each casting no more than a puddle of faint, moon-yellow pallor; but the impression of brightness here was less a question of being able to see clearly than a feeling of having space around you, the world opening up. By degrees Ingo was able to make sense of the dark shapes looming before him, some in silhouette, others mere bodies of deeper shadow.

For instance. The tall thing at the center that looked like a watch-tower—that was a windmill. He could make out an indistinct motion up there, blades swirling invisibly, and hear a faint whizzing, immaculately oiled gears transferring energy to some mechanism below. Electricity for the streetlamps. Out of chaos—the unruly wind off the steppe, with its
scent of Bolshevism—purpose, order, utility. From what once had been unfruitful Polish soil, behold: a transformation, amazing as a fairy tale. Now it is Germany.

What made Ingo think he'd been here before?

The Wild West. Four bad guys and their native guide, a brooding and dangerous renegade, creep into the dusty little village under cover of darkness. They make for the saloon first, saving the bank for later, but something thwarts them—a barking dog, a sheriff making his rounds or, most likely, a sharp-eared youngster, banished upstairs while the grown-ups talked and laughed down in the parlor. His window's open and he's looking dreamily at that big prairie sky when from the street below …was it a clank of spurs? A horse rattling its bridle? And what are those shadows moving stealthily past the dry goods store?

No, not the Wild West. The heathen East, never thoroughly conquered. A land where monsters roam and people vanish in night and fog.
They've all been sent East, haven't you heard?
The village lay clean and tidy under its cap of snow, snugly buttoned behind mullioned windows. The tingle came again but Ingo could only acknowledge it; they were on the move, cottage to cottage, one empty lane to the next. A carpet of yellow light lay in front of a larger building that Ingo tried to place, but he could only come up with odd, utilitarian things: a Lions Club, a school annex, one of those places in the country—a single large room under a tin roof—that Negroes worship in. Nothing quite fit.

They moved up a narrow road, Ingo and the Priest on one side and the rest on the other. The structures they passed all appeared to be empty. Toward the center of the village they grew larger, and a few had lights on. At a traverse street, the hunters paused. Then slipped across, one at a time.

What was Hagen's plan?

Now the large building loomed straight ahead. Its pitched roof rose to a cupola, perhaps a small belltower. Schoolhouse? Closer to the mark. They moved sideways around it, keeping their distance. In places there were neatly clipped shrubs to hide behind; street trees as well, but these were no more than adolescent-sized. At last they gained an angle from which Ingo could make out a signboard in front of the building, its carved lettering discernible by reflected light.