“I am surprised,” he said at last, “that anyone is still teaching Platen. But then, you're not so young, are you? You were educated before all this.” He sighed. “If I didn't know better, I would say you come from the United States. That is improbable, I realize—the days of the Bund are long past.
But I have heard there are still a few such people around, from the early days. People who heeded the Call of the Homeland and, as it were, missed the last boat leaving Hamburg. But I don't suppose…”
There was something almost plaintive in his expression. An aging Romantic, Ingo thought: the most pitiful thing on Earth. So perhaps it was out of sympathy—or worse, a twisted sense of comradeship—that he said without forethought, like a student trying to please his teacher, “I am American. Originally, that is.”
Hearing the words, he was horrified to have said them. The old man's eyes opened wider.
Ingo blurted, “But I came here…I mean, came to Germany, many years ago. Back in 1929.”
The younger man in the automobile, turning his back on Ingo, murmured something in a rapid undertone. The old man shook his head.
“I tell you, he is no deserter”— sounding exasperated now. “Where would he be deserting to? This road does not lead to California, I can assure you of that.” He leaned forward to rap on the driver's seat. “Albert, would you unlock the door, please?” He turned back to Ingo. “If you please, Sturmmann, take a seat there in the front. Don't worry, I'll see that you get back to your unit in due course. We can always blame your absence on the eccentric old Brigadeführer. They will understand that, won't they, Jaekl?”
The thin man offered a lackluster imitation of a smile.
The passenger door opened heavily, as though armor-plated. A prewar model, Ingo guessed, from the years before steel became a strategic commodity. He heaved himself into the stiff, leather-covered seat. The driver, a teenager wearing the field-gray of a Waffen-SS Soldat, gave him a brief cold glance and shifted into first before Ingo could close the door.
As the big car gained speed, the Brigadeführer tapped Ingo on the shoulder. “I hope we shall have time to talk,” he said. “Not now—the damn motor. But later. I have spoken only once before to an American. Language is a special passion of mine. My life's work really. The written language, primarily, though the spoken is not to be scorned. One can discern many things from a voice. And of course, the great epics were meant to be declaimed—writing them down was an afterthought. Hence, so much is lost to us. But listen to me!” That dry laugh again. “Here I am, babbling away, and I haven't even asked your name.”
“Müller,” said Ingo. At last, back to the script. “Josef Müller. Sergeant, SS.”
“Very well, Müller. And I am Professor Konrad Freiherr von Cheruski— I prefer to be called Professor, though you see they have given me a military commission, it is the only way of trumping the bureaucrats. Lately of the University of Prague, also the Department of Race Ancestry. Presently engaged in special research at the direction of the Reichsführer-SS. But at heart—and I say this to you as a man who knows his ‘Tristan’— at heart simply, an old man who has spent a great many years with his nose in a book.”
At what point they crossed into the Generalgouvernement of Poland, and at what later point they crossed again into the province of Lower Silesia, incorporated since 1939 into the Greater German Reich, Ingo could not have said. They traveled at imprudent speed along back roads through the Carpathian foothills. Around mid-morning they reached a flat, open space where they stopped for a while at an official checkpoint. Was this the border? It had not been, the last time Ingo was in the neighborhood.
There was a train station nearby and all four of them got out and walked over there. The platform was crowded with refugees, mostly German families trying to escape to the west, surrounded by heaps of their belongings. Most of them looked as though they'd been waiting for days. Girls in white uniforms were serving ersatz coffee out of a big metal urn, and one of them offered to pour some in Ingo's canteen. Cups were in short supply, she explained; it was important to save them for the boys on the troop trains, bound for the front. Ingo nodded to the girl, who spoke with a strong Polish accent. He supposed that with her washed-out skin and blue eyes she had been deemed suitable for “Aryanizing.” The black liquid was very hot, with no identifiable flavor.
Back in the car they drove with the sun on their left rear quarter. Soon they were in foothills again, though the landscape was less drama-filled than in Slovakia. Trees grew taller and fuller-bodied, and there was an abundance of little ponds. For the most part the farms and houses looked untouched by the war, except that many of them, especially in the villages, seemed empty. Overall the countryside wore a sleepy look, as if it were lying there in the sunlight waiting for something.
They passed a sign reading “Reich Nature Protection Territory,” which Ingo made out to signify some type of game preserve. There wasn't much to it, mostly old woods and rolling meadows, all in drab winter colors. For many kilometers they drove without passing a single building, though it seemed to Ingo that in some of these fields—over there, beside those wind-bent apple trees—cottages once must have stood. He glimpsed a squared-off enclosure that he guessed might have been the foundation of a barn. The land felt not so much empty as emptied.
They pulled in to a long straight drive bordered with elms. Years ago these trees had been pruned into boxlike shapes but lately the practice had been abandoned, the boxes left to burst open, spilling branches that dangled in their path. The drive ended in a circle around a statuary fountain of remarkable monstrosity: Poseidon lustily chasing sea-nymphs, or maybe they were Rhine maidens. A flight of crumbling concrete steps led in tiers up a hillock whose elaborate formal plantings had gone to thistle and bramble. At the top squatted a small mansion made of black timbers and skin-white stucco, with windows whose tops were rounded into Palladian arches. Here and there a pane was gone. The thatched roof needed re-thatching. But as Ingo lifted his eyes he noticed a column of smoke rising from one of the half-dozen chimneys. And as they climbed out of the car, smells of burning wood and molding autumn leaves filled his nostrils, and he was stirred by the strange, slowly decaying beauty of the place. What once had been somebody's dream house, with its spacious grounds and formerly well-tended garden, now belonged, so it seemed, to this black-uniformed professor, lately of the University of Prague. An SS brigadier who knew his “Tristan.”
“We call it the Hunting Lodge,” said the thin man, Jaekl. He passed in rapid little strides across a very large square room whose ceiling was two stories above, divided into vaults by enormous, crisscrossing beams. Two hearths, each big enough to hold a bridge foursome, gaped at each other from opposite walls, but only one had a fire going and that was scarcely enough to drive the chill from the cavernous space. A mounted knight impaled a stag on a wall tapestry, both prey and hunter dwarfed by naturalistically rendered oak trees on either flank. A row of antlers, sawn off the heads of mythically huge beasts, circled the room at rafter level. Had there been a unicorn's head with its phallic horn, the scene would hardly have seemed more fantastic.
“The place was built by a Jewish merchant,” Jaekl went on, using a term, Käufer, that carried a taint of venality, corruption. “It dates back to Bismarck's day. That was Bismarck's one weakness, you know, his soft spot for Jews. Let them finance your wars, that's fine—but don't bring them home to dinner afterward.”
Ingo supposed the man was talking to fill up the emptiness of the room, whose few furnishings were marshaled into a little group in one corner, the frail chairs looking as though they were trying to edge closer to the fire. But Jaekl stared at him like he was expecting an answer. Maybe this, too, was a test.
“Every hero has a weakness,” Ingo said amiably, barkeep-style. “Look at Siegfried.”
The thin man gave him a thin smile. “I don't know how long you'll be staying, so I've asked Magda to make up the coachman's room for you. Properly speaking that shou
ld be Albert's, but Albert”— lips tightening in distaste—” is sleeping elsewhere.”
Ingo nodded. His eyes drifted to the fire. He felt as though he had stepped into one of those country-house mysteries, without benefit of a murder to solve. Or perhaps there were thousands of murders and an endless list of suspects.
“You know,” Jaekl blurted unexpectedly, “it was that comment about Mann that did it.”
Ingo looked around in surprise to find the thin man watching him with eyes that had gone hot and bright.
“That coy little reference to Death in Venice. The Brigadeführer has a horrible fascination with Mann. Dangerous as well, considering what that traitor has been saying over the Voice of America. And here you come along, Vox Americanus in the flesh, quoting your sexually tormented poets and reminding him of his days at the university. Which is the last thing he needs to think about right now, with the Reichsführer himself waiting—” He looked away.
Ingo guessed he had said a little too much. Reichsführer was a title reserved for Heinrich Himmler. “I thought,” he said, deciding the provocation was worth the risk, “your boss prefers to be called Professor.”
Jaekl shot him a glare. “I address the Brigadeführer at all times with the respect that is owed to a man of his position. And I expect others to do likewise. At present, we are called to arms in defense of the Fatherland. Whatever we may have been before the war, and whatever we shall be after, we are for now German soldiers joined in a Struggle of Destiny, fighting for the very survival of our race.”
He took a couple of steps in one direction, then spun on his heel and paced back in the other. His movements took on a martial quality to match his words. The effect was something of the tin soldier.
“Before all this, I was one of the Brigadeführer's students. First at Göttingen, then, from 1938, in Prague, where I became his teaching assistant. What a wonderful time that was! But it is over now. There is no telling what will come. For the present, I am honored to serve as his personal adjutant. I hold the rank of Untersturmführer, second lieutenant, but this is a formality, I would be of no use at the front. My place is here.”
He stared at Ingo and his meaning was clear enough: This is my place, and there is no room in it for you.
Which suited Ingo fine. He had every intention of making a speedy exit. The problem was, he needed a plan. And this plan must take into account the unsettling fact that beyond the elm-lined drive lay the embattled Thousand Year Reich. His own Fatherland, in a hand-me-down sort of way. But not the most hospitable place in the world right now for anyone remotely like Ingo Miller. Who was pretty much the same person, war or no war, as he had ever been.
The woman Magda led him to the coachman's room. She looked Gypsy or Magyar and embodied the phrase “hardy peasant stock”— sturdy, uncomplaining, capable of yoking an ox or pummeling dough or delivering a baby with equal efficiency. She was, on top of that, adept with the meaningful sigh, as she demonstrated when she pulled back the faded green drapes from the high window, letting light spill into the mildew-smelling but homey enough little chamber.
“Things aren't how they used to be,” she said, gazing at something outside on the grounds, perhaps something only she could see. “There used to be six of us on staff here. I only had the downstairs to do then. That and helping out in the garden, during the high season.”
Her German was a mix of formal and colloquial phrases, like patches added randomly to a fraying garment until the original could barely be recognized.
“And there were parties, too. Real events, they were. People would drive out from Kraków, sometimes from Dresden and Leipzig. The house would be full for the whole weekend. They kept us running then.”
“How long ago was that, Magda?”
“Oh,” she waved dismissively, “ages. It was when the family still owned the place.”
“You mean the Jews?”
She looked at him in surprise. “Yes, that's right. Their name was Grünberg. Funny, the names Jews have. ‘Green mountain’— where do you suppose it comes from, a name like that? Someplace they remember? Or maybe a place they dream about.”
Ingo watched her bemusedly. She kept her back to him, folding down the blanket on an old-fashioned cupboard bed, the sort with a curtain to block out the chill of night.
“I suppose you'll be wanted at dinner,” she said. “That's at seven-thirty—pünktlich.” And then she was gone.
He unclipped his uniform belt, laid it on a dressing table and slowly undid the buttons of the jacket. As the layers of Josef Müller came away, Ingo Miller, trapped inside, was able to breathe again. He perched on the edge of the bed to loosen his boots. They had let him keep his American boots, the risk being deemed acceptable in consideration of the long walk ahead. He tried to remember the last time he'd lain on a real bed. Not a stack of blankets in a forest hut. Not a narrow bunk in a rolling ship. And not a bag in a tent on a Maryland chicken farm.
It must have been his last night at Dupont Circle, his farewell to the Rusty Ring. He'd stayed up after closing time with Vernon and Bernie, sharing National Boh from the tap and then a bottle of malt whiskey, worth its weight in ration coupons, upstairs in his sitting room. It was a Monday, and getting late, but there was noise outside; the noise had never stopped since the war got going. There must have been a ruckus at the Officers Service Club, a private establishment around the corner, because a police car came flashing up the road and hooked left onto R Street. WRC was featuring lady singers that night. They listened to Helen O'Connell and Margaret Whiting and Fran Warren and a Negro vocalist named Ivie Anderson whose voice was like brushed velvet. All these things Ingo could remember, though it seemed like they'd happened a hundred years ago. But he could not remember what he and Vernon and Bernie had talked about. Not one word.
It was dark when he opened his eyes with a jolt of panic, fearing he'd slept through dinner. But he realized there had been a loud thump at the door— someone, probably Magda, had come by to rouse him.
He dressed in darkness and groped his way out to the corridor, which was barely lit by a lantern hanging at the far end. Groggily he retraced his steps from several hours ago to find Jaekl and Albert waiting in the great square hall. Evidently the Professor had not yet shown himself. An outlandish Schwarzwald clock read 7:22. Jaekl said, “Do you take brandy?”
Well, since he was offering. The liquid glowed like it had a fire inside, and it felt much the same in Ingo's throat. He looked around the room, mostly in shadow except for a half-circle in front of the big hearth. It was odd that Germans, of all people, this race of sun-worshippers, had been reduced to living in semi-darkness for want of lamp oil. He looked at his companions, but neither returned his gaze. The clock clunked out the minutes.
Precisely at halb acht Cheruski appeared in the doorway. Wordlessly they followed him into a long dining room with a row of windows running down one wall. Here, at least, candles had been lit to supplement the hearth fire; their burning tips were reflected in the windows against the black of night like dull, flickering stars. Cheruski took a seat at the head of the table and Ingo settled into the only chair left unclaimed, directly across from Albert.
If he had expected a comradely meal—breaking bread among fellow soldiers, all ranks sharing Magda's excellent rabbit stew like social equals— that notion was laid quickly to rest. The dinner conversation took the form of a monologue by Cheruski, punctuated at intervals by obsequious questions posed by Jaekl and the occasional mutter from Albert, who wanted Ingo to pass the rolls. The Professor's topics ranged over history and literature to the lamentable state of popular cinema—” In their eagerness to divert, these people at Ufa forget that their duty, first and foremost, is to entertain”— and it would have been easy, half listening as Ingo was, to believe Cheruski was not aware that a war was in progress. Now and then the old man would drop some revealing phrase or lapse into a sort of reverie, his eyes seemingly fixed on a scene conjured out of the candlelight.
&
nbsp; “I had rooms in Göttingen,” he said in a dreamy tone, “which Hölderlin himself was said to have used. There was an old desk and people said, You know that was Hölderlin's desk. That's why they hung on to it, for it was nothing but a piece of junk. Had it been Heine's desk, it would long since have become firewood.”
He paused, smiling at the image: the Jew Dicter's desk being fed piecemeal into the flames, spreading a cheery warmth through the room. Jaekl stared at his master as if sharing the same happy thought. Ingo got an inkling now of the sort of professor Cheruski must have been: encircled by his acolytes, a following bound by love of their master and vying jealously among themselves for his favor. It was easy to imagine Jaekl among that crowd. Albert was another matter.
Ingo had time now for a closer look at the young driver, whose own attention was concentrated on nothing more complicated than his dinner plate. If Magda struck him as good peasant stock, Albert seemed a different but related sort: the farm boy given to indolence, too lazy to rise at cock's crow, too eager to nap in the hay, always with an eye out for the road to an easier life. He was well mannered enough, and pleasant-looking with his clear eyes and sturdy shoulders and cropped, straw-colored hair. Over the years he would grow heavy, like Ingo. But that was over the years— meanwhile, he had landed a safe and comfortable posting, while his peers were being sacrificed en masse to the Red Army so that the Reich might endure a few more months.
Dinner ended when the Professor set down his fork. The four of them moved back to the great hall, where Magda had heaved fresh logs on the fire. Over the past couple of hours the wind had risen. On its hilltop perch the old house caught gusts that had sailed for miles unobstructed over treetops; now they whispered at the windows and sometimes came puffing down the chimney, forcing a gout of smoke back into the room, where it drifted slowly toward the ceiling. Everyone sat in the frail-looking chairs a safe distance back.
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