Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  Anton halted a couple paces off and brushed the hair out of his eyes. The gesture was artless, long fingers raking an alabaster forehead. Ingo's feet stopped moving; he felt in that instant something pop open inside him, something in his chest. The mountain air seemed too thin, starved of oxygen. The effort of breathing made him dizzy.

  Anton didn't notice, or perhaps he was noticing other things. He appeared to be studying Ingo's shoes. “I come from Poland,” he said then, raising his eyes. “From Galizien. But now I am studying in Germany, at the university in Jena. Where, you know, the earliest of student movements began, in Hölderlin's own time. A dueling society, the Burschenschaft— quite forbidden, of course, and so doubly appealing.”

  His expression was earnest, his eyes as dark and bottomless as Frau Holle's well. A few freckles dusted the skin around his nose.

  Ingo relaxed somewhat. “I come from America. Washington, D.C.” He couldn't think what to add. Until recently, nothing about him had seemed to require clarification. Now every single thing was ambivalent.

  Anton only nodded; Ingo's origins must not have struck him as remarkable. “It is important to have come here, I think. To have returned to the homeland. This is a crucial time for all Germans, but especially the youth. We have a sacred duty to the future. We must become, as George tells us, the flag-bearers of a new order.”

  Mentally, Ingo took a step back. The college kids he knew back home didn't talk like this. Did they talk like this here? He felt a tickle of excitement, a growing certainty that he was in a new world, a world so fresh it was still in the act of self-creation. None of the old constraints need apply here—you could talk differently, behave differently, become a wholly different person.

  “In America,” Anton said, “do you know Stefan George?” Without waiting for an answer he went on, “George is very important for our Movement. He is a prophet, I think.”

  Ingo smiled. He had read George, especially the love poems. You slim and pure as a flame, you blossoming sprig on a proud stem—I breathe you in every breeze, I sip you with every drink. But he knew Thomas Mann as well, and had read his story “At the Prophet's,” a very funny send-up of the George cult.

  “There is a discussion today, about the master and his writing,” Anton said. He turned to gaze down toward the bright blurry meadow. “Quite where, I am not certain. I was only now going to look. Would you like to come along?”

  He had switched to the familiar “you.” Willst Du mitkommen? And while Ingo couldn't sort out the deeper implications of this, or what had provoked it, he wanted to come along very much.

  Their path led through spruce woods so dark you could not have guessed the hour was not far past noon. The trail was narrow and winding but well laid, its carpet of amber needles tamped flat by many passing feet. After a time the spruce thinned out into a sparser woodland of ash and elm, whose open canopy admitted streaming cataracts of sunlight. The two boys walked in silence, Ingo tending to lag a couple of paces back. It felt odd, rubbing shoulders with a virtual stranger. At the same time, irrationally perhaps, he already thought of Anton as something more than that. Not a friend exactly, more a comrade, a brother-in-arms. A native of the same mysterious homeland.

  All at once Anton stopped in his tracks, stooping down to look at something beside the trail, and Ingo nearly tumbled over him. Between two slender fingers, the boy held a cluster of tiny white flowers borne upright on a narrow stalk.

  “Siebensternen,” he said. “Do you have this in America?”

  Ingo was hardly the one to ask. He had never noticed flowers particularly, and always skimmed ahead when Proust went on and on about them. “Seven stars,” he said thoughtfully in English, but the plant's name meant nothing more to him in translation.

  “The folk-name refers to the Pleiades, I think,” said Anton. “Formally it is called Trientalis europaea.” He straightened, leaving the flower unmolested and facing Ingo with that same open and guileless expression. “Goethe tells us, we perceive only what we are able to appreciate. The coarse-minded do not see beauty, the unlettered do not hear poetry.”

  Ingo didn't know Goethe so well. Too cerebral, he thought, too daunting, like Beethoven. Himself, he was a Schubert man. “Do you study literature in Jena?”

  Anton shook his head, fluttering his long hair. “I am reading in Botany. I hope that if someday I see the famous blue flower, I should be able to recognize it.”

  Ingo laughed before he had time to wonder whether this was meant to be funny. To his relief, Anton responded with a smile—the first Ingo had seen—and it revealed a whole new facet of his sensibility; for on that face, lit by the glow of those clear eyes, the smile had a hint of irony about it, and you glimpsed a deeper awareness of the world than the boy's ingenuous manner would lead you to expect.

  “None of my comrades in Botany find that so witty,” Anton said. “They are quick to explain that the blue flower must be a type of Gentiana.”

  Ingo had no idea what a Gentiana might be, but he was pretty sure the genuine blaue Blume—an emblem of impossible yearning, invented by a consumptive poet—had no Latin designation. The whole scientific enterprise, this hubris-laden project of reducing the world to minute descriptions and quantifications—killing and drying the specimen, pinning it to a mat in a display case—was anathema to the old Romantics and their twentieth-century heirs. “There probably aren't too many botanists who read Novalis,” Ingo said, meaning this as a compliment, among other things.

  “Science need not be sterile,” said Anton, who sounded more grown-up now, more sure of himself. “Love is an observable fact of Nature, as are friendship, eros, loyalty. There is no need to talk about such fine things in terms of anatomy or the ‘evolution of species.’ “

  Having spoken his mind, he turned and headed down the trail. Ingo caught up and they walked for a while in silence, shoulder to shoulder now. At intervals, Anton would point out this or that bit of local flora—a creeper known as wood louse plant, Pediculans silvatica; pink-blossomed fever clover, Menyanthes trifoliata; and tall, reedlike flute grass, Molinia caerulea, bearing its seeds on golden stems as high as your shoulders. Ingo thought Anton himself was a bit like these botanical specimens: you came to appreciate him more and more as your faculties attained the proper atunement. It was like dialing in a radio signal, faint and wavery at first, then clear and strong. He scarcely paused to wonder what kind of signal he himself might be sending out. In his mind, he was just a quietly humming, reasonably faithful receiver.

  At last they reached the meadow. It was larger than he'd expected and its features were more complex—a rippling expanse of knolls and dales with tufts of hedge between them, sloping gently to the dark clear lake, hemmed protectively by the muscular shoulders of the mountain. You felt pleasantly isolated here—safe in your own little world—and with that feeling came a delicious sense of liberation.

  Then of course there were the people. Young men, every one of them, from what Ingo could see. He didn't try to look at them all at once, in fact was rather afraid to. He felt like a kid who's tiptoed downstairs on Christmas morning to find not just what he hoped for under the tree but more of it, in larger boxes, more extravagantly wrapped, glistening more brilliantly, filling every corner of the room. Some kids would have rushed forward with open arms, but it had always been Ingo's way to advance cautiously, eyes lowered, and start with the smallest presents—trying hard, for as long as his childish powers allowed, to ignore that gleaming red bicycle by the fireplace.

  Instinctively he drew closer to Anton, the only familiar object in sight. Never mind that the other boy was a stranger an hour ago. Anton might have felt the same, for the pair of them entered the clearing in hesitant lockstep, like cowboys in a Karl May adventure, cagily advancing through a lawless Western town, hands on their holsters, each watching the other fellow's back.

  They passed the little hollow, a natural amphitheater where high-school-aged kids in Hellenic garb awkwardly declaimed a Greek drama ent
itled, according to the placard tacked to a tree, Alkibiades. They passed a hill where a group called FKK-Jungen were holding an archery match. The competitors wore sandals and leather wrist guards and quivers that hung from their shoulders—nothing else. Ingo declined, with a proper if panicky Vielen Dank, an informative pamphlet presented by one of the archers.

  They came to a stretch of curving lakeshore crowded with cattails where the open water was clean as the sky, pale as a pearl. A narrow wooden pier had been fashioned of spruce beams—freshly scarred where limbs had been axed off—and this had been claimed as a diving platform by a gang of perhaps two dozen swimmers, ages assorted. They took turns in orderly German fashion heaving themselves out of the water, queuing up at the pier, joking among themselves and shivering while the cool mountain air brushed over their naked bodies, then leaping back in again, with varying degrees of athleticism and grace, to the hoots and applause of those already in the water. Ingo could have lingered there a while longer, but Anton seemed restless. And so they moved on.

  They had not spoken now for some time, perhaps a quarter of an hour. Ingo was uncertain how much of his own emotional state—unsettled, topsy-turvy, unprecedented—it was safe to assume that Anton shared. But he looked discomfited, and that made Ingo feel for him. Without thinking, he reached across the short distance, less than an arm's length, and touched his shoulder. You could feel the bone in its thin wrapping of cotton and flesh. You could feel the warmth of his body.

  Anton started, just perceptibly, blinked a couple of times, then glanced back at Ingo and bashfully smiled. The smile was slightly ironic, as before. He took in a quick deep breath and let it out forcefully, giving a funny sort of shrug. All this seemed to Ingo like a private form of communication, comprehensible only to the two of them. A language for secret sharers.

  “Look there,” Anton said with adolescent nervousness—nodding toward a thin hedge of alder that ran ahead of them.

  Ingo followed his eyes. He sensed he was about to glimpse the red bicycle, ready or not. What he saw, though, was nothing remarkable—the most ordinary thing, perhaps, he'd witnessed since waking up that morning. A wide path, rutted by carriage wheels, led through a gap in the alders to an overgrown pasture, its grasses tall and interspersed with late-summer wildflowers. There someone had built a small stage on which a musical performance was under way: a singer in a white smock accompanied by guitars, recorders, powwow drums and a small accordion—more or less the staple Youth Movement instrumentation. The audience was small, forty or fifty at most, scattered sparsely around the field. Most sat not facing the stage but chatting among themselves, sharing sandwiches, passing a flask around. It looked like a good place to rest one's feverish, overloaded brain.

  The two of them ambled over without need of consultation, wading through grasses topped with nut-brown heads that shattered on contact, the seeds clinging to skin and hair and clothes. They found a place to sit where the ground was relatively clear and the footing soft, with a clear view of the stage. Ingo recognized the song-in-progress, a ballad about a bird that warbles happily for an afternoon but at sunset dies in sorrow. The singer's voice was high and clear, a countertenor. Ingo breathed slowly in and out, in and out, feeling the nervousness and anxiety ease out of him. Then belatedly, like a joke sprung with masterly timing, the truth struck home. The red bicycle. Undeniable. In plain view. And suddenly, the only thing you could look at.

  A short distance away, close enough to toss a paper ball at, two other boys sat listening to the music. One was a little bigger and stockier than the other, but they were dressed alike in green tunics and both wore their hair closely cropped. The first had his arm draped around the smaller boy's shoulders. It might have been a brotherly sort of embrace, but just about the time you started to think so, the second boy turned to gaze up into his friend's face, staring intently into his eyes, and there was no mistaking what kind of look that was. Then they kissed: lightly, delicately, lip-to-lip, holding it for the longest second Ingo had ever lived. After that, they went back to listening to the music. The song was the same; the bird had not yet tumbled from its branch. Only the Earth was different.

  It was Anton, after that, who spoke—the older-seeming Anton, the botanical authority, an expert on native life-forms. “This is common in the Movement,” he said. “I found it strange at first, coming from Galizien. But here…”

  He gave Ingo a particular kind of look, and Ingo responded with a look of his own. They were deep in the secret language now, somewhere past ordinary consciousness but short of Dionysian rapture. An in-between stage, Zwischenstufe, no euphemism after all.

  They turned to follow the performance, or at least to look in that direction. The music played on. The world rotated around them. It was a glorious afternoon, deep in the countryside at the center of Germany, toward the end of summer in the year 1929. There never had been a day like this, never in human history, and Ingo was certain it would go on forever. The sun would never sink. He would never get tired or hungry. Nothing would change that really mattered. The future would unfold, his destiny would dawn, when Ingo was good and ready, not before. He knew these things with sublime certainty. And he was not, repeat not, going insane.

  The discussion of Stefan George and his work began at three o'clock and drew a sizable crowd. He and Anton found themselves pressed between two packs whose contrasting uniforms represented, Ingo feared, antagonistic Bünde. Onstage, half a dozen guys representing various factions of the Youth Movement, all about Ingo's age or a bit older, sat in deck chairs arranged in a semicircle, shuffling notes and eyeing one another with what, even at this distance, seemed a notable lack of comradely warmth.

  The whole affair was highly organized and well-thought-out until the moment when, right on schedule, the first speaker opened his mouth. Within seconds, Frau Holle awoke from her hundred-year nap and the whole mountain gave a shudder. Whatever Ingo had expected from a poetry discussion, if anything at all, it certainly was not this.

  The speaker was a tall fellow dressed like an assistant professor in a jacket with flaring lapels and many buttons. Armed with a monograph, a severely knotted tie and a pair of half-glasses that made him look ten years older, he declared in crisp, Lutheran German: “There can be no doubt that the Master, Stefan George, is a hero of the Homosexual Emancipation Movement.”

  Immediately a second young man, this one dressed in Wandervogel style, rose from his chair and shouted: “I protest! I object to the intrusion of this kind of language, which is all too typical of the Hirschfeld cabal, into this forum. Such a manner of speaking degrades noble Eros by reducing it to the status of a medical diagnosis. Moreover, this is anathema to genuine Friend-love, which is healthful and beneficial for any youth of finer temper, and which has nothing to do—nothing whatever!— with the gross cravings of degenerates and effeminates and male prostitutes, or those denizens of noisy basements whom we may call Berlin's Third Sex.”

  Fighting words, evidently. The ensuing furor erupted even before the man had finished uttering them. The scheduled speaker tried to go on with his prepared remarks, but whatever he was saying in that academic voice got drowned in the clamor. Ingo caught a few isolated phrases, slogans perhaps, but could make no sense of the arguments tossed out from the stage and hurled back from the meadow. Off to the left a boy stood shaking his fist, declaring that one of the speakers (Ingo was not sure which) ought to go back to France, where he belonged. Anton shrank from the ruckus, pressing himself closer to Ingo's side.

  Finally a tall and solemn-looking man rose from a chair at the center of the stage. There was nothing remarkable about his appearance— university-age, conservative clothing—yet there was an air of authority about him, a strength in his silence. The others must have felt it, because one by one they took their seats. A sudden calm spread like a wave through the crowd until the whole field was, if not silent, at least down to a murmur.

  “Who's that?” Ingo whispered.

  “One of the Count
s von Stauffenberg,” Anton said quietly. “The younger one, I think. They are very close to George, part of the inner circle. The Master himself has chosen not to attend—they say he never goes anywhere these days—but he sometimes sends one of his Elect.”

  All this with no tinge of cynicism. The Master. His Elect.

  Every eye was on the young count. He spoke finally in a voice just loud enough to carry across the meadow. “Wer je die flamme umschritt,” he intoned, “bleibe der flamme trabant!”

  “He's reciting George!” breathed Anton excitedly.

  Ingo knew. It was a famous poem, a kind of anthem. Whoever has circled the flame will forever remain its vassal.

  Wie er auch wandert und kreist:

  Wo noch ihr schein ihn erreicht

  Irrt er zu weit nie vom ziel.

  By the end, the crowd had taken it up like a liturgical chant, a rote invocation. However he may wander and roam, the radiance will still reach him, and he will never stray from his goal. Ingo felt the hairs rising on his neck. Beside him he sensed Anton's body stiffen with the electric thrill of the moment: hundreds of young Germans speaking as one, uttering the words of the Prophet. So much for irony.

  “Now, we have all come here,” said the young aristocrat, “to talk among ourselves as friends, and to honor the man whom we all admire, whose words have touched us so deeply. We may not agree always on what those words mean. But we all are brothers in the Movement and I hope”— pause—” that we may disagree without mistaking the other man for an enemy.”

  “But there are enemies here!” someone called back from the crowd.

  “There are no enemies here,” Stauffenberg said calmly.

  “There are Jews!” A different voice this time. “There are Bolsheviks! Parasites that feast on the blood of the German people.”