Another Green World (61 page)

Yes. I know.

“Everything was there: names, dates, hiding places. Enemies of the Reich, you see—bandits, saboteurs, rival guerrillas. Peasants known to shelter fugitives. You could never be certain who anybody was, not really. You only knew, here is an inventory of human lives. Take what you need, but don't be too greedy, you've got to make the supply last out the war.”

“That's ridiculous. Obscene. Isaac would never—”

“No? Then what else would Isaac have done? Tell me that. I'm not asking what
you
would have done, or some other person. We're talking about Isaac, and we're talking about myself. Two natural traitors. He got his start long ago by betraying his family, his friends. I began by betraying my Volk. We simply carried on from there. It has been for us an ideal partnership, a perfect balance. More than that. More than you can know. Or perhaps it might be that
only
you can know.”

No. I can't. I won't.

The prisoner sighs. “Or perhaps not. It doesn't matter, I suppose. Though I might add, if you are looking for proof…”

“I'm not.”

“Nonetheless. I have not wholly lost my knack for picking up the odd document here and there. I seldom get my hands on anything of great value—just a few things for Isaac to send up through resistance channels, to maintain his good standing among his peers. Such peers as remain. But there was one time, a dinner party Cheruski threw—you know, the poor fellow tries so hard to weasel into the Reichsführer's inner circle—and there were some big shots there, including that fellow Hoess, who runs the camp. Another cavalry man, as it happens. Well, Hoess had this memorandum, a duplicate off a message pad, and he was showing it discreetly around, only not
so
discreetly after his ninth or tenth cognac. And it seemed to go astray, because later he was looking for it, quite pale actually, but I don't believe he found it again.”

“I know what you're talking about. Why should I believe you?”

A shrug. “Well, you know Isaac got the damned thing from somewhere.”

“Sure—if it exists.”

“That's right. But then, you'll know soon enough, won't you?”

“Soon? Why's that?”

The head cocked, words not needed: Listen.

From the room down the hall, an aria of agony. The soprano's voice ascending, reaching a peak, holding there, then trailing into a low, agonized groan.

The prisoner nods. “Isaac may be a slippery little Kerl, but he's loyal when he chooses to be. He's not going to hide in his hole at a time like this.”

Out in the corridor, Ingo just stood there, his brain boiling. He watched as though from the wrong end of a telescope, so that everything seemed very far away, Martina hurrying up the stairs and crossing the hall with no more than a glance in his direction, then disappearing into Hildi's room. The door bumped shut behind her.

He took a step to follow her, but the second step wouldn't come; some hidden power resisted him.

End of the corridor. Top of the stairs. Symbols fraught with terminality.
Women
, he grimly thought. Guardians of the final mysteries; high priestesses of beginnings and ends.

Opposites attract—well, sometimes they do, when they don't repel. Look at Ingo and Marty. Look at Ingo and women generally. Or look—the next thought, lying in ambush, now pounced—look at Hagen and Isaac.

He is back in the room, facing the prisoner while the prisoner observes him blankly.

“Where did Isaac disappear to, then?” Ingo demands. By this time, there is no need to spell it out. The terrible image,
blood on the rocks
, is sufficiently clear in both their minds.

“Where does the Little Fox ever go? Never very far. He regained consciousness and found himself alone—he was frightened, no doubt. Disoriented, possibly. A blow to the head. You were right, the water was too shallow. I suppose he went into the woods and waited there. Until everyone was gone. It is what he does. It has kept him alive for a remarkably long time.”

“So…where did
you
run off to?”

“I ran, that's all. I was sixteen years old, for God's sake. I thought I had just seen a person die. I thought I was about to be killed myself. I was… in no ordinary state of mind. As soon as it grew light, I headed back here. On the way, I almost ran into the Jungdo boys. They were marching down the road in formation, left-two-three-four, as they did everything else. I took a shorter path and reached the village ahead of them, but by that time…
ach
, everything happened so quickly.”

“So you just ran into them. They just happened to be there. At the ass end of Silesia.”

The prisoner makes a thrusting motion that would've been alarming were his wrists not securely tied. “People like that,” he says hotly, “they find you. Eventually they do. You think you've left them behind, outsmarted them, and perhaps you have, for a while. But they keep coming. Such men, it is in their nature. This is what
they
do, just as the Fox slips away and hides.”

Now the prisoner falls quiet, and Ingo sits there brooding. A piece is missing. Not a minor one.

“It still doesn't quite explain …” Thinking aloud, but also inviting the prisoner to help, should he care to. “All along, you and Isaac, even before Frau-Holle-Quell—well, maybe it
was
a game to him. That would make sense, wouldn't it? Sort of make-believe, switching roles, like cowboys and Indians, then Indians and cowboys. But you…”

You aren't really one for games, are you?—
addressing in his mind not the haggard SS officer before him but the boy in his clean blue uniform, sixteen years old, self-possessed, untouchable. “What were
you
up to back then? For that matter, what are you up to now? If you're not here to set a trap, then for God's sake, why
are
you here?”

The prisoner's ever-changing mask freezes now into a single face, and Ingo bodily draws back, because it is a face he knows.

“Are you completely unfamiliar,” the prisoner says, in that moment Hagen again, Hagen the beautiful, “a man like you, a Romantic, with the concept of unrequited love?”

Then the face crumbles, the years rush back. The prisoner lowers his head until it rests on both of his hands, lashed together and clenched into a single fist. “I was only a boy,” he says, so quietly you can barely hear him. “And you know, boys do fall in love.”

Snap, Ingo thought. It was not a minor piece. And it fit perfectly.

Somewhere, in a different world perhaps, or a series of interlocking and strongly similar worlds, the late-autumn sun drifted across the sky, birds took wing, little girls cried and hugged their dollies, young men laid down their lives for the Mother-or Fatherland, a blue-haired widow toddled from her apartment in Adams-Morgan to take tea at the Rusty Ring, a painter tried to convey the essence of his complicated lover by giving her six arms, and an army led by Communists raced an army led by Christians to a river that flowed like an artery through the heart of their common foe.

There is only one question left to ask—a small, overlooked, seemingly unnecessary one—in order to finish the picture.

“Where,” you need to know, “do I come into this? Why would Isaac drag me back over here? There must have been a hundred other ways of doing it.”

“Oh, well… that.”

The prisoner shifts uncomfortably on the bed, bound there still. But you cut him free a while ago. This poor fellow will never escape; he is powerless, and always has been.

“I suppose, really, that was an idea I might have, you know, slipped into his head. He liked it very much. It…I believe it amused him.”

Amused him?

Well, it would have. “But”— the missing piece is close by, your fingers tingle, groping for it—” why, though, Hagen? Why me?”

The prisoner shrugs. He is beyond help now, and you pity him.

“Certain things in common?” he murmurs tentatively. Then he answers in that abrupt German manner that still manages to surprise you. “I suppose after so much time, so much loss”— at the end, an almost bashful
smile—” I needed someone to talk to. And so did you, Kamarad. So did you.”

“That's crazy. Verrücht. I was perfectly okay, thanks, right where I was. I didn't need anything. Especially from you.”

Hagen had the grace not to respond directly. “I knew you once,” he said after a measured pause. “I knew you, not in detail—what town did you grow up in, what is your favorite color—but more generally, the sort of person you were. And I see now the sort of person you have become. I do not say one is better, one is worse. Only that the two are different.”

“No joke. The whole damn world is different.”

“Just so. Exactly so. Es war einmal, the world was wide and green and beautiful. Is that what you mean? And in that world all things were possible. One could live freely and honestly then, with no need of make-believe. One could be simply oneself. You, Ingo—you felt that way once upon a time, didn't you? You were a Schwuler who read poetry and didn't care for swimming and fell in love rather too easily, I think. This was the Ingo I knew. And this Ingo—I remember quite clearly—was brave enough, and truthful enough, to be exactly that. I would say he was quite courageous. More so than I.

“But that world is lost, is it not? Something happened that took all that warmth and beauty and possibility away. This new world is a cold, dangerous, unforgiving place, and within it one can no longer live as one lived then. You cannot; I cannot. We have drawn into our shells. We no longer permit ourselves to yearn or dream—above all, not to reveal our love. We have come down from the Magic Mountain to live in exile on a desolate plain.

“Ah, but Isaac. Our Isaac, by some miracle, has continued to live in that other world. He is still up there on that mountain. Still follows the
Meissner-Formel. ‘
We will shape our lives by our own choice, following our own inner truth.' You remember? A naïve attitude, I'm sure you'll agree. Unreasonable. A bit mad, even. Yet that was Isaac then, and it is Isaac even today.

“God knows, he was far from perfect. He was not handsome, or noble, or especially virtuous. He was nothing other than himself. He could be kind, sometimes, and there was laughter always behind those eyes. One came to love him for that. I did, and you did also. And so we must love him still, because however different we ourselves have become—you a recluse, like Eichendorff ‘s hermit, myself a ‘war criminal’— Isaac remains simply Isaac. The world has changed unimaginably. But he, alone of all of us, has never shrunk from it. It is not a matter of courage, I think, nor of tenacity,
nothing of that sort. It is a matter of sheer wonder. A singular being, bestowed upon the world.”

“Ein Eigene.”

“Pardon me?” said Hagen, for Ingo had not meant to speak out loud and the word was barely a mumble.

“Get some rest, Kamarad,” Ingo advised him. “You look terrible.”

Hagen lowered his eyes. He could not rest; they both knew that. Like a starving beast of prey, he could only wait in some fading imitation of hope.

Down the hall the girl roared in agony, grunted in rage—you never would have believed such sounds could come out of that frail and nearly bloodless body. Ingo supposed there was a lesson here. But he was too tired to draw it.

Such females as were still in Arndtheim—Marty, Anna, Tamara, an ancient
Oma
, a dark-haired teenager whose complexion and comportment were in open revolt—hurried in and out of the room like agents on an urgent mission that could not be spoken of.

Ingo stepped down the stairs with elaborate care, because they were steep and his feet unsteady. No, his feet were fine, his mind was the problem. The innkeeper signaled him in some imperceptible manner—one tap-puller to another—and when Ingo sat down near the fire he slid a plate of potato hotcakes and a tankard of black beer in front of him. He remained standing until Ingo signaled back in the same occult fashion, as he would've Bernie or Vernon. Then the man lowered himself into a chair across the table. His face was not so red now. He looked oddly at ease.

“Your friend over there,” the man said quietly, in perfectly neutral German. Shall we talk about that soccer match? His eyes did not move. Never before had he spoken a word to Ingo, yet Ingo understood perfectly. He leaned down to tighten a boot lace and, in the process, casually glanced toward the front of the inn. Timo was sitting alone there at a table by the door. Ingo looked away, took his time with the boot, and finally sat up. The innkeeper was munching one of the hotcakes.

“He's been sitting there all morning,” the man said pleasantly. Nice weather we're having, ja? “I believe he is waiting for something. I should keep an eye on him, if I were you. My name is Alex. I am Michi's father.”

“I'm Ingo. You have a fine son. This is very good beer.”

The two men shook hands.

“What do you put in these?” said Ingo, admiring a bit of hotcake speared on a fork. “They're quite delicious. Waiting for what, I wonder?”

“He looks like a Slav to me—is that right?” Then, more loudly: “Buttermilk, with a dash of sharp cheese and just a bit of green onion.”

“Yes, I noticed the onion. He's Serbian, I think—but so what? These might go over nicely in Washington. Perhaps a bit more salt, and a touch of sugar.”

“Already there's sugar.”

“Not enough for Washington.”

“You know how it is with Slavs. They have a bond among themselves. You don't look like an American.”

Ingo rolled his eyes. Yes, FC-Bayern should've taken that match easily. “I don't feel like one, not lately. If they have such a bond, what are all those purges about?”

“Family squabbles. You know how it is. We make the beer ourselves, right here.”

“I like it very much.”

“Thank you.”

It was midnight, plus or minus, when Martina stumbled down those same stairs. Ingo was still sitting in the common room, and by that time most of the Varianoviks not on duty were there also, along with most of the Arndtheimers. They were engaged in a vigil that no one had planned and no one acknowledged. They sat and waited and listened with averted eyes to every sound from the room at the top of the stairs. During the interludes, the difficult silences, they conversed in muted voices about nothing much, finally nothing at all. After the conversation ran out, they merely sat. Some appeared to be dozing but nobody really slept. The BBC was playing Viennese schmaltz. There was news of fighting in Italy, heavy losses on both sides. The war, it appeared, would not be over by Christmas.