Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  But she had no image of herself from that day. No clear memory of what she'd done or said, how she'd felt, what position she'd taken in the long debate over what to do. Already, perhaps, she was torn between the onrushing future and the fast-receding past. When all was said and done, she probably could have stayed forever in that falling-down castle. Leaky roof, cold floors, frightful plumbing and all.

  * * *

  august 1944

  Grabsteen's face was red from shouting. The woman partisan, Petra, tried to maintain her air of stoic indifference, but he wasn't making it easy for her. Her fingers slowly tightened around the tommy gun that dangled from her shoulder.

  “You must take us to your headquarters,” Grabsteen yelled at her. “I demand to see your commander. You must take us immediately. And I'm not talking about some little field camp. I'm talking about the place where orders are given. Are you hearing me? If you don't understand English, go fetch the other one. That Shuvek person.”

  Eddie tried to calm him. “If she doesn't understand English—”

  “She does understand! Can't you see it? Look at her eyes.”

  By this time the commotion had attracted the other two partisans, posted as sentries up and down the trail. These men in their ragtag clothing, coats sagging with ammunition and grenades, stood hesitantly at the edge of the encampment. Evidently the task of dealing with the Americans had been assigned to the woman alone.

  “Shuvek will come soon” is all she would say.

  “That's not good enough,” said Grabsteen. “I'm sorry, but we can't afford to wait any longer. Our people are being murdered while we stand here. It's vital that we proceed with our mission, with or without your Shuvek.” He glanced at Martina, then away. “And with or without our Miller. Now, I'm going to head up that trail, and I'm going to make for the Polish border. On the way, I intend to find a radio and make contact with… some people who can help us.”

  “That's just crazy,” said Bloom.

  “Is it? Just a Hollywood stunt, huh? Something only a crazy Jew would think of? Try to take action—to move, to strike—instead of just, be sensible, don't get excited, just sit there, we'll take care of everything, can't you see the President is a busy man?”

  “Save it for your contributors, Rabbi. That crap doesn't flush with me.”

  “Without Ingo,” Martina pointed out, “there is no mission. He's the whole point of it. The only one the Fox will trust—remember? We've been over and over this.”

  “Indeed.” Grabsteen turned his anger on her. “And the more we go over it, the less willing I am to swallow it. This operative, this so-called Fox— nobody's even certain who he is. You say he's your friend, but the odds are pretty strong he's not even American. The analysts I've spoken to believe that in all probability he's a Silesian Jew who went underground in 1939, and has been fighting the Nazis ever since. Naturally such a man would take great pains to obscure his real identity—in order, among other reasons, to protect any surviving relatives from reprisals. He operates independently of the ZOB, which is smart—look what's happened to the rest of them. It's thought he receives minor support from the Jewish Brigade in the Ukraine, but of course you can't trust the Russians to tell the truth about something like that. From all we've been able to learn—”

  “We meaning who?”

  “We meaning Agudas and certain well-placed overseas contacts. You'll understand why I can't be more specific. This Fox has managed, nobody knows how, to live off the land, right through the occupation, in one of the most venomously anti-Semitic places on Earth.”

  “All that aside—”

  “Wait, I'm not finished. What I'm telling you is that nowhere, in any intelligence I've been privy to, is there a hint that the Fox has maintained ties, even distant or indirect ties, with any person or organization in the United States. Not with you, not with anti-Nazi groups, not with distant aunts or cousins, and damn sure not with some goy bartender at a second-rate uptown saloon.”

  Martina glared at him a few moments, then made a game attempt to shrug it off. “You don't know everything, Harv. Neither do your well-placed overseas contacts. No matter what you guys think.”

  “I'm afraid I have to agree,” said Stu, who'd been uncharacteristically quiet through all this. “It doesn't make sense. Let's think: how did this whole business get started? It started with a personal message from the Fox, delivered to Miller and Martina via an old pal of theirs, some left-wing journalist. Miller was singled out by name. ‘The only one I trust,’ or some such thing.”

  “Well, of course he was—and quite an artful gambit, wouldn't you say? Because this deflected our attention from the true target of the communication.”

  Stu shook his head. “What true target? Who, and why?”

  Grabsteen pointed a finger in Martina's face. “The target was her. A publicly recognized official of the United States War Refugee Board. Hence, a point of access to the Roosevelt administration. The purpose of this entire scheme is to involve the American government, to bring a Washington insider here, into occupied territory, to witness firsthand the crimes of the Nazis—thus to make it impossible for Roosevelt to claim ignorance or to remain personally uninvolved. It's an immensely clever plan, and the only shame is, it was hatched a couple years too late.”

  A few moments passed during which everyone considered this. Eddie was the first to speak.

  “It still doesn't add up, I don't think. Even if what you say is true—the Fox was aiming at Martina, so as to bring the government in—well, that proves that the guy must be her old friend, right? Because who else could possibly know about their mutual connection with a private citizen named Ingo Miller? Unless you think, what—somebody's gotten hold of their high school yearbook?”

  “Oh, I don't know.” Grabsteen's mouth curled into a mean smirk. “Let's imagine that somebody—it could've been anyone—happened to stumble across the April 1930 issue of Harper's Bazaar? Eh, Miss Panich?”

  She rolled her eyes. It wasn't enough, she thought, that Butler's damned article, when it finally appeared, had made her the object of scandal and notoriety—and, she supposed now, secret envy—among her college set. There she was, portrayed to all the world as a dizzy, big-mouthed brunette whose chief function, story-wise, was that of a typical Hemingway gal: a convenient and adoring sexual accessory for the hard-drinking, two-fisted hero. Even Ingo had come across as a more compelling figure. And so, of course, had Isaac.

  “Did your well-placed overseas contacts dig that up for you?” she asked Grabsteen. “Or did you manage to find it all by yourself?”

  “What's the difference? The point is, anyone reading that article and making the connection between that Martina Panich and this one—it's hardly a common name—would know everything they needed in order to push the right buttons. Names, relationships, personalities. Every little quirk and foible.”

  “Not every one. Not even Butler knew—” She caught herself; though really, it was a bit late to acquire the habit of discretion. “You know what, Harv? Sometimes a cigar really is a cigar. Maybe not in the circles you move in, but sometimes, if a person says he'd like to see so-and-so, it's because so-and-so is who he wants to see. End of story.”

  “That is utter crap, and you know it. Why would a man like this Fox— no matter who he is—want to see a man like Ingo Miller?”

  “I guess you'd have to ask them about that, wouldn't you?” she said, scoring a small point. Then the afterthought struck her: If we ever see either of them again.

  Bloom pushed forward. “None of this makes—excuse me, Marty—a fucking bit of difference, does it? The only thing that matters is, we're stuck here till Shuvek gets back. I'd suggest we all sit down—”

  “No!” shouted Grabsteen. “I am not sitting down. I am moving onward right now. With or without,” he added, turning to gesture at the woman partisan, “this fool's cooperation.”

  “Without it you won't get very far,” Stu said mildly.

  “No? Then
you try communicating with her, why don't you? I've done everything I can think of. It's like talking to a rock.”

  Martina had forgotten about Timo. He'd become all but invisible since the plane landed, as though some Serbian instinct for furtiveness had reawakened in him. She didn't notice him now, really, except as a shadow moving at the edge of her vision. Perhaps she felt the slightest flicker of curiosity—what's he up to?— but certainly not alarm. Nothing like that, not until Timo raised his gun and blew the first man's head apart.

  By the time she turned her head, the second partisan's eyes were wide in terror. Almost instantly they vanished in a burst of scarlet as his face split open like a water balloon.

  Timo spun, aiming his rifle at Petra. She was gripping her PPD, but Timo's left eye was already squeezed shut and his right peering down the barrel, which was perfectly steady and pointed straight at the woman's heart. “Ask her again,” he said. “I think you will find she understands much better.”

  Martina thought she might vomit. Or else shriek like a madwoman and strangle Timo with her bare hands. She waited for someone—Bloom, Grabsteen, sensible Eddie—to react in some coherent way. But everyone stood there, as stunned as she was. Everyone except Petra, whose face merely showed a passing sadness, or perhaps disappointment. Why wasn't I able to stop this?

  In the end, Martina watched dumbly, her knees wobbling beneath her, as Grabsteen said something quietly, his head inclined toward Petra's ear. Martina didn't catch what it was, her own grasp of English seemed to have left her, but she saw the woman nod. There was no discernible expression on her face—only a profound weariness so deeply ingrained in her features that it was part of her being. Petra turned up the path and began walking.

  “Should we take her gun?” said Grabsteen. It was not clear whom he was asking, and at first no one responded.

  “I shouldn't bother,” said Timo, reslinging his rifle. “There won't be any more trouble. Not from that one.” Then he bent quickly and began stripping the dead bodies of weapons and grenades, dropping everything into a rucksack.

  Wordlessly, they moved up the trail. The woman leading them never looked back. Maybe that's the secret, thought Martina.

  LUBLINLAND

  3 NOVEMBER 1944

  The place was not what Butler had expected. It was not, after all, a fetid and smoldering city of the dead. For months now, since the Red Army slugged its way onto Polish soil, Butler had been horribly titillated by reports of a so-called Nazi death camp near Lublin, an old university town whose chief distinction heretofore had been its exceptional concentration of Catholic churches, said to be the greatest in Central Europe. That changed at the end of July when Konstantin Simonov, sometime novelist, landed a sensational story in Pravda about a facility known as KZ-Majdanek, where—so he claimed— upward of one million Jews had been “exterminated”: poisoned by gas, then burned in industrial-scale crematoria. Similar reports came thick and fast from all the Soviet papers. Red Star ran a shot of two captured SS guards taken shortly before their execution, standing in a vegetable garden among enormous heads of lettuce, grown, the caption explained, in a mixture of manure and the ashes of murdered Jews.

  It was a pornography of evil. The public was mesmerized. Butler as well. Yet the Western press made next to nothing of the whole affair, deeming it, apparently, something cooked up by Soviet propagandists. Red meat for the masses. Well, who knew? Butler, however—who knew something about propaganda and its reigning auteurs—believed the stories to be true, more or less. True enough.

  In mid-August, Marshal Rokossovsky—indignant that the word of his officers should be doubted—had invited a select pool of Western correspondents to tour the site. They were chosen for “credibility,” which is to say the likelihood their stories would run in leading periodicals, especially in America. Butler's widely known pro-Red leanings ruled him out. But a few weeks later, on a rare visit to Moscow, he bumped into Alexander Werth, the Sunday Times man, at the bar of the Hotel Lux, that grubby mecca of expatriates on Gorki Street.

  Werth, an Oxbridge Fabian sort, was still miffed that the BBC had refused to run his Majdanek piece. “And it was good stuff,” he grumbled, “exclusive stuff. Spent several days there. Spoke to the local Poles. Not just Party types. They all knew what the camp was for. Hell, it was barely two kilometers outside town. When the wind was in the east, the whole place stank of it. One little boy showed me the shoes he was wearing—good as new, he was quite proud of them—that he'd nicked, you see, from a big clothing dump the Germans ran on, wait for this, Chopin Street, don't you love that? Shoes off the feet of some poor Zhid, undoubtedly. Must have been from one of the last batches to be liquidated, otherwise they would've been sized and boxed up and shipped off to the Reich. But the Poles, they're quick to grab that sort of stuff, soon as the Germans clear out, and who can blame them? They've had a bad war.”

  Werth had been drinking for a while; Butler let him talk. During a pause he said, “So it's true, then? The gassing rooms, the ashes, all of it?”

  Werth turned in his chair, looked Butler straight in the eye. His stare had a certain bluntness, as though he were about to say something rude. “You've been here awhile, haven't you? In the war, I mean.” He nodded, answering on Butler's behalf. “So you've seen things by now, places liberated from the Nazis. You've interviewed survivors. You've seen what's left of the liberated zones. How can you doubt for a moment it's true?”

  “But the stories,” Butler persisted. “The details. The cabbages. A million dead.”

  Werth's eyes rolled. “One million, ten million—that's numbers. You know how Russians are with numbers. How many people can grasp what a million means? You say a million, what you mean is, an inconceivably large number. What the stories say is, an inconceivably large number of human beings were murdered at Majdanek, under circumstances more ghastly than you can comprehend. Yes, the bloody stories are true.”

  So when Butler at last came to Lublin—by special invitation of Osoby Otdel, Special Department, Bureau 1965—he expected to find some nightmare conjured out of the blackest depths of the German imagination, like those medieval woodcuts creatively depicting the torments of the damned. Only worse, many times worse, as Stalingrad is worse than Agincourt, because the capacity for bestiality is so much greater today than at any time in the past. What he did not expect was a placid, medium-sized Old European city, laid out on a generally flat and sparsely wooded landscape, its buildings in decent shape, its streets filled with people who looked neither downtrodden nor half starved, its markets reasonably well stocked, and those famously plentiful steeples pointing hopefully toward a blue and cloudless sky. But that is what he found, and it gave his visit, on this sunny and windless day, its quality of surrealism.

  You reached KZ-Majdanek by a narrow lane running east out of the city through copses of elder and pine. At first glimpse the place had a clean, well-ordered look. It was, above all, nonthreatening. You might have guessed, standing outside the perimeter fence, that it was workers' housing for some big war-related industrial concern, a Farben or a Krupps. True, there was a double rank of barbed wire fencing, but this was wartime, after all; barbed wire could be seen around many a stately home in the British countryside and many a cornfield in the American South. You grew habituated to its presence, and also to the message it contained: the world today is full of places where you are not meant to go.

  Butler hopped out of the Yankee jeep and thanked the Red Army man who'd given him a lift. The main gate stood wide open, manned by a cluster of soldiers from one of the Central Asian republics. As he drew near, he tried to suppress the natural jauntiness of his stride, to turn his thoughts to the many souls who had passed this way on a journey with no return. It was difficult. A recent dusting of snow lay gently on the landscape, like a clean white sheet pulled discreetly over a corpse. Just inside the barbed wire ran a cheering row of young beeches, from whose twigs fluttered yellow leaves as bright as daffodils. One of the soldiers scrutinize
d Butler's papers, noticed the NKVD seal and handed them quickly back.

  He paused to take the lay of the land. Beyond the gatehouse, the main camp road ran straight as a Roman highway for a kilometer or so. Boot-prints by the hundred, imprinted before the freeze, were preserved in its cinder surface. On either side stood wooden buildings painted institutional green. The Hammer and Sickle hung limp from a flagpole in a courtyard surrounded by shrubbery; it might as well have been the Stars and Stripes. The creepiest thing about this place, Butler thought, was its humdrum normality.

  A couple hundred meters off, a line of soldiers filed out of one of the larger buildings and formed up in columns on the roadway. He could hear an NCO barking orders.

  “What's going on there?” he asked the closest guard.

  “New arrivals, getting the grand tour. Marshal's orders.”

  Butler pulled out a pack of cigarettes, the white-papered kind issued only to officers. He soon had the whole bunch—Uzbeks, as it turned out— gathered around him, chattering in a Russian even worse than his own.

  “The Marshal wants all the fresh troops brought through here on their way to the front,” one of the men said.

  “So they'll know what kind of enemy we're up against,” explained another.

  “What about the veterans?” said Butler.

  The first man spat into the snow. “We've seen enough already, haven't we?”

  “I don't know,” his comrade said. “This place is a little different.”

  “What's the tour like?”

  “Oh, it's pretty thorough. You go into the big room where they all got undressed, and then down the hall into the gas chambers. You stand in there, and they shut the door, and the only light is from this little skylight, high up over your head. And your guide says Look up there, look at the tiny blue Zyklon crystals coming down, aren't they pretty? Just like snow. It gives you a chill, that does.”