Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  Also, the moment itself was not dramatic. Explosion, the word, poorly represents the subtlety of what he experienced: a brief shaking of the Heinkel aircraft, as if a large hand had momentarily gripped it and then let it go, followed an instant later by a rather soft, low-pitched thump. There was no way to know what had happened. The transport bay of the craft, designed to hold twelve paratroopers, was windowless and overfull. The only light came from a red bulb over the hatch leading forward to the cockpit. The noise of the twin engines was very loud, the vibrations were ceaseless.

  In the seconds after the thump, Ingo glanced at the faces around him. It was not hard to read the thoughts there. Was this kind of thing to be expected in air travel? What did it mean? Was there any danger? Nobody seemed to know.

  This suspended state lasted until someone—it must've been Stu—said, “What the hell was that?” Then it became clear that something was wrong, because the engines rose in pitch and the plane rolled into a sudden leftward bank. Ingo realized he was afraid, yet felt strangely untouched by his fear. The phrase evasive maneuvers came to his mind— something from a war movie, he guessed.

  The big Moe, the guy they called M-1, decided he'd had enough. He struggled out of his cramped position and lurched forward, bent over, toward the cabin door. In the red light his expression was a dreadful thing, a mask of anger stretched over a face of confusion. He yanked the door open and shouted some incoherent question at the pilot, a young man from the Haganah, who shouted back a long and complicated reply.

  “My God,” the big man said. He took a step back into the transport bay as though something had hit him in the stomach. The Haganah man slammed the door. “Something has happened to the other plane. A fire in the tail section. We don't know what went wrong—we have to maintain radio silence. They're able to fly but there's trouble with the steering, they seem to have lost control of the rudder.” He paused, still hunched over beside the door. He seemed to have forgotten to sit down. “We're pulling farther away, in case it blows up.”

  All Ingo could think was that there was something distorted about this announcement. The rationality in the big man's voice made a lie of what he was saying. Half the Brigade was on that other plane. Aristotle. The two other noncoms. Fifteen comrades in all. Also, half their supplies, including the maps. An irrecoverable loss.

  But it was not lost yet. How much farther to the drop-off point? Already they'd been in the air more than three hours; they must be over Slovakia by now. Ingo wished he'd paid better attention at the briefing. The plan, as he remembered it, had been to keep well clear of Budapest, where the Germans were making a stand, and head northeast into a region called Slovensky Raj. About which Ingo knew nothing except that its name meant Slovak Paradise. A wild backcountry, Aristotle had said, far from any strategic points, empty of major combatant forces, nothing there worth dying over. Only of course the dying never stopped.

  The landing zone lay somewhere in the foothills of the Tatry Mountains, “the Alps of Slovakia,” said to be controlled by partisans. Ingo could picture the place as it had looked on the map, peaks and valleys crowded along the frontier, the border jigging its way through. Kraców to the north, the Moravian Gap to the west. In between, old German towns, Ostrau, Teschen, Auschwitz, lining the trade routes of a lost empire. Nearby, a great lake, its dark waters spreading like blood between two stricken nations. The land around the drop-off zone was keyed green, the color of forest, with splotches of white where the higher peaks remained snow-locked. On the map it looked empty except for the tiny dots of villages, mostly unnamed. Nothing to fear but the elements, and whatever spirits haunted the high passes.

  If Ingo's experience held true, everything would look different on the ground. He clutched at this thought, on the ground—it implied they would land in one piece, he would live to walk the Earth again. After endless days on a ship, then a mule cart and now an airplane, he longed for something firm and unmoving under his feet. Even the killing grounds of Mitteleuropa.

  Marty sat across the aircraft bay, squeezed between Timo and Harvey Grabsteen. She glanced up and gave him an anxious little smile. Ingo could not imagine what he gave her back. His mind was a shifting screen of images, white on gray, like fading photographs. There were people in some of them, but the faces were hard to recognize. Everyone was young, while the world around them was very, very old.

  The aircraft lurched. Cables groaned as the wing flaps shifted to a new position; knocks and clunks issued from various moving parts. The Heinkel had belonged to the Luftwaffe, not long ago the terror of the skies. Tonight, suspended in blackness, the plane itself seemed terrified, quaking with cold and dread. The round heads of structural bolts looked ready to pop from the strain. Moisture from the passengers' breath had condensed on metal bulkheads. Back toward the tail, a wide hatch stood ready for the brave Fallschirmjäger to drop like Valkyries on their foes.

  Ingo's old affection for the German language was still alive; this lovely compound, “falling-shield-hunters,” seemed infinitely better than the ugly English paratroopers. Even now, it was hard for him to grasp that the language of Hölderlin, that subtle and sensuous code in which the deepest secrets of humankind had been confided, was today the language of tyrants, torturers, child-slayers, beings so crude as to seem barely human. It was hard to believe Luther's High German was capable of admitting such a term as Vernichtungslager—meaning a camp, Lager, in which people became nothing, nichts. The English approximation, extermination camp, sounded clinical by comparison. You lost the sense of profound annihilation, the veiled thought that an evil deity, an anti-Creator, was at work.

  The plane seemed to be easing itself to a lower altitude. The roar of the engines dropped to a growl. More groaning of cables, more knocking of flaps. The cabin door popped open and the Haganah pilot shouted something Ingo couldn't understand.

  “Hold on tight!” the big Moe translated. A needless command: everybody was grasping whatever lay in reach, including one another. Eddie, the prelaw student, braced himself against Ingo's shoulder; his canteen had gotten wedged between their hips. This would have been damned uncomfortable except that any bodily sensation, right now, was proof you were still alive.

  There came a loud clump, first from one side of the plane and then the other. Grabsteen gave a yelp.

  “For God's sake,” hissed Tamara, erstwhile typist, “it's only the landing gear.”

  You could see the sheen of sweat on her forehead.

  The plane swung from side to side, like something dangling from a sling. David's rock, about to be slung at Goliath's forehead. A familiar story, though you never hear what happened to the rock. Ingo sensed a struggle in progress, the unseen pilot wielding whatever it is that makes a plane fly straight and level, while his opponent—a wind off the Ukrainian steppes, raging over the rough landforms of Slovensky Raj—fought back hard.

  Suddenly the floor of the plane thrust up at them, as if the ground was breaking through. Then everything reversed itself and the craft seemed to bounce, giving you for an instant that weightless feeling as when an elevator starts down. Then the wheels hit the landing strip and the plane began to buck and brake like an automobile that has run off the road into a cow pasture. It bounced crazily for a while and finally lurched to a halt.

  There was an immediate, palpable release of tension, a shared relief verging on joy. But then, the next moment, everyone seemed to remember the other plane. A fire in the tail section.

  M-1 pushed down the center of the bay and spun the hand-bolts on the parachute hatch. He was the first out and the others crowded after him, creating a jam. By the time Ingo made it to the ground, the landing field seemed crowded and he felt an unreasoned surge of panic. His hand moved to his Schmeisser.

  Fires were burning. He saw two and then three of them: piles of flaming brush that marked the landing strip, a long arrowhead pointing into the wind. The strip itself was a narrow clearing, like a channel between two stretches of black woods. It was amazing,
he thought, that the pilot had been able to find it, a glowing needle in the haystack of Europe. But Ingo had read about the exploits of the Maquis in France—commandos dropped off at night by two-seater RAF Mosquitos with the reliability of His Majesty's Post. Such things were possible, if you had help on the ground.

  He wondered who had lit the fires.

  As his senses adjusted, the scene began to make a degree of sense. The plane had rumbled to the end of the cleared space, leaving the field open for the other plane to follow. People were gathered off to one side, staring up the strip in the direction they'd come from. Waiting.

  Ingo counted heads. Five people extra. No, four, he had forgotten the Haganah man. Four strangers among the Americans. He tried to pick them out but the firelight was shifty and nothing was clear. There, next to Grabsteen, that short fellow with a stubble of beard…no, that was Bobby Zilman, a band teacher from somewhere out West. The strangers, the men on the ground, must be keeping themselves back from the light.

  Carefully Ingo unstrapped the machine pistol from his pack. He winced at the clack when the ammunition cartridge snapped into place. A couple of heads turned his way. One belonged to Bloom, the big Moe, who stood a distance to the side with his hand on the Walther at his belt, looking fidgety. Good, thought Ingo. It's not just me.

  A minute passed slowly, then another. The moon had sunk low near the jagged ridge of the forest. The wind was light but steady and cold. Clothes that were warm on the shore of the Adriatic felt pitifully thin in Slovakia, which lay at the latitude of southern Canada. Winter here came early. Es ist schon spät, es ist schon kalt. Already it is late, already it is cold. That was Eichendorff, a poem about a witch, and the ending was not a happy one.

  The noise reached them first. A buzzing, like a drill, that grew louder as a queer sort of meteor appeared low in the heavens: a dull orange streak that plunged straight toward the landing strip. The second plane came down fast and hard, bumping to a stop some eighty meters from where everyone was waiting. Even at that distance you could see what a wreck it was. The fuselage that had gleamed white was now charred gray. The tail smoldered dully like a dying cigar.

  There was a general move in that direction, but Bloom barked out: “Hold on! I'll go see what's what. Miller, come with me. The rest of you stay put.”

  They stepped onto the landing strip in tandem, Bloom moving with a rapid, stealthy gait, surprising in a man of his size. Ingo felt like a little boy playing soldier. His gun felt too big, his head too light. The ground underfoot seemed to vanish as they stepped away from the fires. When they were halfway to the second plane, the cockpit hatch popped open and a body forced itself out, like something emerging from a charred chrysalis. This figure—the pilot, Ingo supposed—dropped to the ground, lay still for a moment, then struggled to rise. Bloom broke into a trot. Ingo heard another set of footsteps and spun with his Schmeisser at the ready, but it was only the young Haganah man. Ein guter Kamarad who'd grabbed a fire extinguisher from the undamaged plane and was loping along with it under his arm like a leaden football.

  The fallen pilot had clambered to his feet by the time they reached him.

  “Help,” he said, dazed, motioning toward the rear of the plane. “The others…”

  The smell didn't hit Ingo until they stood before the parachute hatch while the uninjured pilot hosed down the fuselage with a stream of white, foaming liquid—a smell at once alien and obscenely familiar. The eastern wind whipped it away with the smoke, but not fast enough. They struggled with the hatch, which seemed to have fused shut from the fire. Finally Bloom, in a paroxysm of frustration, threw his body against the metal surface and the panel crunched inward. The pilot gave the handle a vicious yank, and the door broke free.

  Bloom moved up into the opening. With a strangled cry, the pilot stumbled back, right into Ingo, who caught him when his body went slack. The stench was overpowering. Ingo fought the urge to vomit as he eased the pilot to the ground, then stepped over to join Bloom. The Haganah man had turned away; he appeared to be staring at the moon.

  “They're all dead,” Bloom said. In these words, simple but uttered with deliberate weight, you could hear the memory of the Great War, and you could see in his weary stance a man who'd known his share of fallen comrades. The dozen-plus souls in the scorched plane took their place in a column that already stretched long.

  Ingo made himself look; he wasn't sure why. Observing, bearing witness, seemed to be what he was meant to do. His eyes moved from one corpse to the next, and he thought how strange it was that each had stiffened in a distinct posture, as though each man had met his death in a unique, personal way. The bodies near the tail were partly burned and hard to recognize. But those farther forward seemed merely to have asphyxiated, suggesting that the plane had become, for a time, a high-altitude gas chamber. Aristotle sat upright, his head tilted forward, as though he were taking a long-needed nap.

  Bloom laid a hand on Ingo's shoulder. “Come on,” he said, his voice calm, eerily serene. “We'll need help taking care of them.”

  The first argument came at once. Bloom insisted the dead be decently buried. The local partisans saw no sense in it and were all for blowing up the plane and getting out of there. Their leader was called Shuvek. He was slightly built and had the quick-eyed, feral look of a lesser member of the weasel clan; a stoat, maybe. Of his few English phrases, he relied chiefly on “You come now.”

  Bloom wouldn't give the man the courtesy of an answer, which Ingo feared might be a mistake. The big noncom led his burial detail out to the landing field armed with handheld entrenching tools—standard GI gear designed for grubbing foxholes. Eddie started after them but Ingo grabbed his sleeve and held him back. Any last shred of innocence, he felt, was a precious thing, a thing to cherish and protect. No doubt the cause was doomed. But after two decades of reading German poetry, Ingo had come to embrace doomed causes as his own, even to find spiritual consolation in them, the more hopelessly doomed the better.

  While the diggers went about their grim task, Ingo tried to bridge the language divide. He reasoned that for better or worse they were dependent on the locals, especially now with Aristotle gone. “Verstehen Sie Deutsch?” he asked Shuvek, with a bartender's unassuming geniality— inviting the customer to chat, but not pressing it.

  The question didn't strike him as unreasonable. People in this part of the world often did understand German, the traditional language of the educated class. But Shuvek behaved as if Ingo had cast doubt on his paternity, spewing a lengthy torrent of Slovenian and then turning away to glower.

  Eddie murmured, “I think he said, he will not speak the tongue of pig-fuckers.”

  “You understand him?” Ingo gave the boy a hard look, wondering how long he'd planned to keep this amazing ability under his hat.

  “Not really. I mean, a little bit, maybe. My grandma, see…”

  “Your grandma.”

  “She lives in Poland. Or I mean, she was living in Poland, the last we… Anyhow, you know, these Slavic languages. They're all kind of similar, right?”

  Ingo had no idea. “Look, can you ask him where we need to go from here? How far we've got to travel before daylight?”

  Eddie gave him a helpless shrug. “I don't even speak Polish, not really. My grandma, she talked mostly in Yiddish with a little English thrown in, when we were around. She only used Polish to curse in.”

  In the days when things were funny, this might have earned a chuckle. But people were dead and the cold wind showed no sign of slacking up, and it was hard to imagine anything ever being funny again.

  Kommst nimmermehr aus diesem Wald—Nevermore, quoth Eichendorff, will you come out of this wood. But that was only a poem. And what was poetry worth, in the end? Not a whit compared to young, doomed Eddie. Ingo addressed himself to Shuvek, whose back was still turned. “Do we have far to travel tonight?” he asked in German.

  A second partisan muttered something from the shadows. Ingo blinked: the new voice was a
woman's. You couldn't have guessed from her rough clothing, the cap pulled down across her forehead, the way she stood with her feet spread and her Russian PPD submachine gun, with its round ammo canister, dangling from her neck like a grotesque medallion.

  Shuvek answered her in annoyance, and Ingo looked hopefully at Eddie.

  “I'm not sure, I think she asked what's eating him. He told her to shut up. Look, I could be getting this wrong.”

  Ingo thought it sounded close enough. At this point Harvey Grabsteen wandered over, having given the grave detail a pass. He jabbed a hand toward Shuvek and introduced himself like they were mingling at a cocktail party. Shuvek gave him a hard stare. He repeated, “Grab-stein?”

  “Steen,” said the gangly man with enthusiasm. “Steen, as in…Grab-steen.”

  Shuvek shook his head and muttered to the woman partisan.

  Eddie translated: “‘ There, see?’ What do you suppose that's about?”

  “Grabstein means gravestone,” said Ingo. “Sounds like the locals think your name's a bad omen, pal.”

  “That's absurd,” said Grabsteen. “Listen. It's obvious this man understands German. Tell him I am in charge of this expedition, now that we've lost Captain Aristotle. Tell him I represent the organization with which his group has been in contact. Remind him of our agreement. And let him know I expect the full support and cooperation of the forces on the ground. We have an urgent mission to complete, and we've no time to waste on this sort of pantomime.”

  Mentally, Ingo took a step back and gave Grabsteen the professional once-over. He tried to picture him at a table in the Rusty Ring, speaking in a tone like this to Bernie Fildermann during an especially hectic lunchtime shift. Bernie was the soul of forbearance and would never have responded in kind; no, he would've gone calmly about taking the customer's order and then, carrying the food to the table, lost his footing and dumped the tray in the fellow's lap.