Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  There were hugs for each of them from the good Frau Möhring—for Ingo, Martina, Butler, Isaac, even for Hagen, who failed to respond. More hugs from Käthe, along with a detailed map drawn on the back of an outdated flyer, pressed into Martina's hand. (Hagen: “We do not need this map. I can find any place you might name.”) Effusive farewells and good wishes from some of the Young Socialists, Käthe's friends, the kitchen crew. At the end there were Ingo and Anton, standing eye-to-eye, with too much to say or nothing at all. How can you find a compromise, what sort of chummy goodbye would not be a vulgar apostasy?

  Anton had given the matter some thought, it seemed. He opened his sketchbook, the one he used for field observations, and spoke with his eyes safely away from Ingo's, carefully removing a page. “I have heard of a certain flower,” he said, “a blue flower—as I understand, it is not to be found in any of the scientific literature. Perhaps it is only a legend, yet there are those, my friend has told me, who claim to have seen it. I may have glimpsed this flower myself, only yesterday. Here, this is a drawing, perhaps you could help me make a positive identification.”

  Ingo took the paper but did not look at it; save that for later. “Do you know Hofmannsthal?” he said.

  “Alas, no. He is modern, I think?”

  “He died just this year. There's a poem called ‘Infinite Time’— ‘Unendliche Zeit.’ They'd probably have it in your library at the university.”

  “Thank you, I shall find it.”

  Scene—A wood near Wolfersdorf. Later that afternoon. martina: What was that business about a poem? Some

  kind of secret message? ingo [glowers]: It's just a poem. Martina: Sure. What about the picture. Can I see that? Ingo: It's just a flower. Martina: I'm sorry, Ingo. Really, I am. ingo (to himself): About what?

  It's not like they didn't warn you. It's not as though the entire corpus of German literature from the Nibelungenlied onward was not one long, breathless chronicle of heartache and loss. Frequent spurting of blood and other body fluids. Then more loss, more betrayal, more loneliness. Ingo knew it, he had always known it; it was the worst-kept secret in all of Secret Germany. Yet look at him now—like a boar who manages to be surprised by the sudden tearing at his chest, even though he has been hearing Jägerhörner and baying hounds all morning.

  It's only a question of timing.

  Hagen, scorning Käthe's map, took unto himself the role of pathfinder. He marched ahead with Butler following and Martina alternately trying to keep up and not, ultimately falling back with Ingo. He found a silent comfort in her company. Then she would blow it by opening her mouth.

  Isaac was not predictable. Something in him resisted being assigned a place, or staying in one. There were times when he lagged, others when he skipped ahead, probably to annoy Hagen, whose pace was brisk but precisely measured. More than once he vanished from the trail altogether— only to reappear half an hour later, lounging in tall yellow grass or squatting puckishly on an overhang, moving his mouth in amusement as if chewing imaginary gum.

  “Was für einen Pfadfinder denn?” he said once, sarcastically, looking down on Hagen's head. What kind of trailblazer is this? Hagen pretended to ignore him but it seemed to Ingo, from his vantage point in the rear guard, that the German boy was tracking Isaac's movements attentively. There was an odd sort of game between them—fox and hound, or maybe, in the local tradition, hare and hedgehog. The rules were unclear and so were the players' motives. You assumed they were on opposing sides, though in the folktale the two hedgehogs, unbeknownst to the hare, are acting in sneaky connivance. Now and then Ingo wondered if these two were pulling something over on everyone. Pulling it over even on themselves.

  During a longish stop for rest—which everyone pretended not to need, yet which no one was eager to see an end of—Hagen lectured them on the theory of hunting. Lesson one: Game Is Where You Find It.

  “It is not best to be in deep forest. Nor again, the open Weide. These extremes are for the most part empty. No, what is needed is the edge, the in-between area. On this side the trees, on that side the meadow. At the edge the animals find cover. They find also leaves and berries and smaller creatures to eat. They find long lines of sight, so they may notice the coming of their enemies. In every respect, the edge is best for them—it is here the hunter should seek his prey.”

  Isaac heard only part of this. Hunting didn't interest him, apparently. He got up and wandered off somewhere—not far, Ingo suspected. Probably just out there in the undergrowth, eavesdropping on them from some hidey-hole. A native of the fringes, our Isaac. And in this, at least, a clansman of Ingo himself.

  Camp that first night was on a hill south of Plauen. There was a youth hostel in town and another a few kilometers farther, in Greiz. They decided to pass on these because they had reached the western edge of Saxony, a stronghold of right-wing bands like the Jungdeutsche Orden. The arrival at a hostel of such an odd-looking group might, they feared, spark gossip. So under the stars it shall be tonight, perhaps tomorrow. Then we'll be in Czechoslovakia, a quiet country, the Sudetenland, Germans and Slavs living together peacefully—we'll have no trouble from that point.

  Meanwhile, the question of dinner. The good Frau Möhring had packed some provisions for them, but hadn't they ought to save that for the long road ahead? Over the mountains and through the woods to a model Socialist hamlet.

  “I will get food,” Hagen announced.

  “Yeah, how?” said Isaac in his most annoying tone. You could imagine him as a little kid, pushing through a crowd on the sidewalk to get his two bits in. And look, there's his mother, watching through the window, fretting. Someday, she knows, one of those larger boys is going to push back.

  Wish you were here, Ma.

  “I will set snares,” Hagen explained. “It is a skill they taught us. I have everything I need. You may start the fire within the next hour.”

  Isaac rolled his eyes. “This I gotta see.”

  They set off into the underbrush together—one stepping boldly ahead, the other slipping after him like a thief, though after a few steps you couldn't tell which was which. Among the others, responsibility divided itself in a manner that was more or less spontaneous, or at least went undiscussed. Ingo scavenged fallen branches for firewood. Martina opened bags and arranged their equipment and brought a homey order to the campsite. Butler concerned himself with Ingo's pup tent, which couldn't hold all of them, and perhaps that was Butler's point: Might as well let him and Marty have it, what say? Thanks, old boy, you're a sport. Ingo didn't really care. He was in no mood for enclosure.

  Hagen returned a good while later, not before the fire was well burned-down, looking disconsolate. He'd caught only a squirrel, thankfully plumped for the coming winter, and a scrawny fowl that had chosen the wrong patch of ground to go pecking in.

  “That's great!” Martina exclaimed doubtfully. “We'll just throw in some, ah, green stuff. And it won't hurt to eat a little of the bread.”

  “Where's Isaac?” Ingo felt obliged to ask.

  Hagen didn't give much of a reply; apparently the two had parted company. While Martina considered what to do with the meager catch, Hagen pulled from his knapsack a pretty wooden recorder, settled himself at a somewhat awkward remove and performed, flawlessly but with little feeling, a series of Youth Movement favorites. Martina tried to sing along—the gal's got heart, even Ingo conceded that—but she didn't know many of the lyrics. Her English-language rendering of “When I Go A-Wandering” was something he believed he would never forget. Afterward, Butler told off-color jokes as the light began to fail. Ingo contributed nothing whatever, beyond his brooding presence. Even this, he felt, was below par. This was the worst day of his life, and he was not about to let anything spoil it.

  Now rub the lamp.

  Poof !— a flurry of stage magic—and here before us stands Isaac. Isaac the Ever-Surprising. Isaac—can you believe it?— the Provider. In one hand a freshly slaughtered hen, well fleshed, sans head. In the other a
piece of cloth, color deep azure, function unclear.

  “There you go,” he said, to no one especially. He laid the hen before the fire. It was too good, too plump and perfect, to be credible. At the very least, it begged an explanation that was not, however, forthcoming. Not then, not ever. The blue cloth he sent lofting through the evening air. It unfurled in flight, revealing itself to be an ordinary, Scout-style bandanna. “I guess you must've dropped that,” he told Hagen. The German boy looked much less thankful than humiliated. Then, striving to top his tormentor in magical prowess, he fluffed the old make-the-hankie-disappear trick.

  What do you know? thought Ingo. Nothing much, really. There were mysteries here and he supposed they would only deepen, as the better sort of mystery did.

  After dinner (which was delicious, hunger being the finest sauce) he rolled out his blanket, turned his back to the others and carefully withdrew Anton's drawing from a jacket pocket, just over his heart. It was a pen-and-ink sketch of a flower that—though technically nonexistent—was nonetheless rendered in botanically exact detail. Stem, leaf, petal, stamen, seed pod, each part labeled in a graceful, meticulous hand. The plant was identified as Gentiana poetica. The drawing itself was a poem, he thought, in its inspiration, its density, its rigorous composition. In the tears it brought to one's eyes.

  What was that business about a poem?

  In the shadow we stood trembling.

  It hadn't been an hour since the rain—

  Yet it felt like an infinite time.

  I had taken within me all your twenty-year-old being

  While the tree (so I believed)

  Still clung to every raindrop.

  THE LINE

  MID-NOVEMBER 1944

  The key to making this work,” said Seryoshka, “is a narrow concentration of force leading to a rapid breakthrough. One quick thrust”—jabbing a finger at the map—” and we're over the line, into the enemy's rear. After that we're just dealing with partisan-hunters, not frontoviks. It isn't the same as being unopposed. But we should make rapid progress, especially if we keep to the backcountry.”

  He looked at the others, half a dozen men gathered in the political offi-cer's yurt. Besides Butler and the politruk, there were a couple operations specialists from Division, a signals man who spoke English and implored Butler to call him Bo, and a roly-poly combat engineer who wore a hand-knitted yarmulke under his helmet while crawling through German minefields. So far, Butler thought, they'd heard nothing that everyone present did not already know.

  “There are two possibilities,” Seryoshka went on. “One, we can probe for a weak spot in the enemy line. This would entail reconnaissance-in-force. Or two, and more simply, we could force the hinge.”

  He paused to let his audience think it over. It was clear to Butler that his friend preferred the second alternative. Forcing the hinge meant striking at the point where two opposing formations intersect, the small gap between two divisions, or corps, or armies—the higher up, the better. It was a risky ploy: in effect, you were doubling the number of units that stood against you. What you hoped to achieve was an interlude of uncertainty, a temporary breakdown in the enemy's tactical coordination. Whenever two military staffs are confronted by the same problem, there is likely to be a delay during which things are sorted out, intelligence shared, boundaries set, responses calibrated. By the time the dust settles, with any luck, you've accomplished your objectives—in this case, to rip the seam apart and hold it open long enough to push a motorized regiment through. If not, you're fucked from both sides.

  “One argument in favor of going for the hinge is the enemy's order of battle. Facing us in this sector, we have the 21 SS, one of the so-called foreign divisions, in this case mainly Bulgarians. On its left flank stands the 345 Infantry, a regular Wehrmacht formation dredged up this summer from what's left of Franconia. Old men, boys, desk-murderers.”

  The chubby engineer grunted. This last was a term for Germans of fighting age who, until now, had passed the war on the home front, mostly in office jobs. The popular epitome of such people, given currency by the likes of Ehrenburg, was the nameless Berlin bureaucrat signing orders for mass deportations.

  “So, you've got an SS division with German commanders, decent supplies and foreign troops flanked by a green Wehrmacht division with a core of veteran staff officers and NCOs. On the face of it, a textbook opportunity for exploitation.”

  “What textbook would that be?” wondered one of the Division men.

  Butler hoped Seryoshka was prepared for this. Red Army doctrine was essentially conservative—designed by geniuses, so the joke went, to be carried out by idiots. It favored the broad frontal assault, prepared by heavy artillery fire and conducted by an overwhelming mass of politically motivated foot soldiers. Such innovations as the Blitzkrieg were scorned as inherently Fascistic. Which did not, however, prevent Soviet officers from admiring a man like Patton—this despite the general's widely reputed anti-Communism. More than one Red Army tank commander had confided to Butler that he hoped to fight against Patton someday.

  “That book,” Seryoshka said coolly, “would be Voroshilov's account of the Civil War. He writes of a cavalry tactic known as probing for the fault. ‘The enemy's weakness lay not in lack of arms or men, but in lack of proletarian unity. We taught ourselves to exploit this.' “

  They all stared at him. The yurt went quiet except for the sizzle of green wood in the tiny burzhuika stove. Without warning, Bo, the signals man, threw back his head and laughed. Then they were all laughing.

  “Voroshilov!” Bo declared, toasting with an imaginary cup.

  Meaning, Butler guessed, they'd decided Seryoshka was lying. Had Voroshilov, that old fool, even written a book? If so, who would want to read it! But never mind. It might be a lie, but it was a grand lie—a Russian lie. The kind of thing a Red Army man prefers, most days, to the truth.

  “So we strike the hinge,” said the senior ops specialist, once things had settled down. It had the resonance of a ruling. “For that we need current intelligence. Not many line-crossers lately. Anyone want to go over there and grab a tongue?”

  They all became serious again. Probably because they understood what a tongue was, and what grabbing one entailed. Butler did not. But he liked the phrase, he jotted it down in his notebook.

  “Not a Bulgarian,” said the signals man.

  “No. A German.”

  “That means an officer,” the engineer said thoughtfully. “At least a sergeant.”

  Ops nodded. “It will be difficult.”

  “I'll go.” Seryoshka slapped Butler on the shoulder. “You come, too. This will make, what do you say? Good material.”

  It sounded like one of those plans that cannot possibly succeed. But to hear Seryoshka tell it, such operations were commonplace.

  The first task was to cross the death strip, the two-to-three-hundred-meter gap between the forward positions of the opposing armies. This area, a narrow open valley with woods on either side, had been mined by the Germans, employing a variety of explosive devices triggered unpredictably; they were very clever about such things. On moonlit nights, Russian sappers would sneak out and clear paths through the minefield, marking them with strips of cloth. On other nights, and often the same nights, German engineers would sneak out and move the cloth strips around, bury new mines and sometimes engage in sharp, hand-to-hand engagements with their Russian counterparts. It was a dangerous game but it passed the time between offensives. And it was necessary, from the Soviet point of view, because to take the pressure off, to just leave the mines lying there, would be as good as telling the Germans, We are not coming yet, you can relax for a while.

  The chubby Russian engineer was called Lyubov. He insisted on joining them, though Seryoshka tried to talk him out of it. There was a fourth man, a Chechen, whom Seryoshka had known in Stalingrad. Light on his feet, you can never hear him coming—he moves like a ghost.

  They waited until ten o'clock and then headed ou
t, first in a crouch and then down on all fours. It wasn't dark; it was never dark with all that snow. The Chechen went first with Lyubov whispering at his heels: “That way— no, to your right. Stay away from that bush there. Now straight through.” Butler expected at every instant to hear the hiss of bullets; he could practically feel them whipping through his jacket, burning channels in his skin.

  Until you do something like this, you don't think much about the precise location of each of your extremities, or how far up in the air your backside might be at any given moment. In that respect, it was educational.

  Seryoshka's breathing came from somewhere close behind him. Butler had expected to be assigned the last position himself. No. If there is an ambush, it will likely come from the rear. They let you go by, then shoot you in the back.

  The crossing took forever, then suddenly it was over. Now they were on the German side, in sparse woodland which qualitatively was no different from the woods across the valley, but which felt alien, witchy, crawling with monsters. Any one of these shadows…

  What you need to understand, Seryoshka had explained, is the nature of a front line. This isn't the Great War, we're not talking about trenches with cannon fodder lined up in neat little rows. These units are spread out along a wide sector, the leading edge is lightly manned—it's a web of forward observation posts and dug-in sentry positions, with patrols moving between them. If it were tighter than that, we could open up with mortar fire and, boom, there goes the opposition. The other thing is, what is on a sentry's mind? Imagine: it's the middle of the night, it's cold, you're awake while everyone else is sleeping, you're assigned to a certain area, after a few watches it becomes as familiar as your old schoolyard. You keep your eyes and ears open, but the truth is, you don't expect anyone to be out there. Not really. You know if you hear a noise in the forest, it's probably some animal. Or it's the sergeant, coming to check on you. If you catch a glimpse of something, flickering among the trees—well, soldiers are always seeing phantoms. Every battlefield is haunted. You've seen them, haven't you, Sammy, the phantoms?