They have already been here and torn the place apart. Blankets shredded, a knife's work. Contents of knapsacks dumped out, kicked around, pawed through. Pages ripped from a book, flung widely. Lift one at random—a love poem—then let it fall.
The Expat feels he has been here before, picked his way through the same cloud-lit aftermath. Except the last time was in Berlin, or maybe Leipzig, the bloody wake of street fights, tavern brawls, raids upon bookstores and the ‘nests’ of enemy student groups. It's been going on for a decade now, getting more violent every year, so people say. This year mainly it's the Communists, variously titled, versus the Hitler mob. Worse in the south, they say—you should see Munich!
In the doorway a shadow. Hulking there like Frankenstein's monster, a hyperthyroidal bullyboy twirling a Freikorps bayonet between his fingers as one would a toothpick. He looks from one of us to the other, brutishly incurious. The Expat realizes: We have seen this one before, the fellow with the bandage on his nose. Salt of the Boden and pillar of the Reich-stag's largest voting bloc. Look around for something to fend him off with. A hunk of unleavened Socialist bread? A tent pole? The monster lurches forward into the room.
And then… his knees wobble, he loses his balance. Someone has clipped him from behind. Winding it backward, you catch the CLUMP of something hard striking something padded with clothing. As the brute staggers, Ingo is revealed—battered and bleeding, it seems, from a wound in his side, but puffed up in anger, one arm raised, a good-sized rock in it like an oversized fist. Fist = Faust. The rock meets the big fellow's head— no padding there. The sound this makes will be hard to describe in a fashion not off-putting to the average American editor. The next sound is easier, a floor-shaking thud.
‘Well done!’ This from the Expat, or some tantamount banality.
But Ingo is not done and is in no humor to be congratulated. He steps past the body—is it breathing still?— and rounds upon young Hagen. ‘What did you do to Isaac?’ he says.
In the German boy's face, in his eyes, his firmly shut mouth, all is as before. There is a thing that will not be said, a page that will never be written.
‘Damn you,’ says Ingo, and he is the warrior Ingo yet, possessed by some angel of rage. ‘First Isaac, now this. I'm going to kill you.'
Yes, he would have, I believe it still. The rock had blood on it. The Expat stepped in front of him but this, from Ingo's point of view, must not have presented a credible impediment.
‘That is not true,’ said the German boy. (At any rate, he said something that conveyed less alarm than was warranted. Perhaps ‘That was not my doing,’ or even a question, ‘Why would I have done that?’)
Ingo was past such fine points of dialectic. He meant to smash the little Burgundian with his rock und das wäre das. If Hagen would not panic, the Expat would do it for him. Ingo stepped closer while frantically the point-of-view character calculated angles, the chances of tripping him up, the odds of making a run for it.
Never believe, however bad things may seem, they cannot get worse. At that moment outside the cabin appeared a whole gang of the marauding toughs, five or six or more. Chanting, perhaps very badly singing, some piece of Schweinerei—one could recall, later, a single line, ‘when Jew blood runs from my knife.’ Before Ingo could react, Hagen was out the door. You heard his voice, a clear tenor descant. You saw him pointing— over there, comrades. You neither could tell what he was up to (showing where Marty had gone?) nor take the time to puzzle it out.
‘Let's go,' the Expat said.
How then to account for Ingo's hesitation? What thoughts stormed through his mind, what feelings pressed outward from his breast? For immeasurable moments he lingered there, the Jungdo thugs only paces away. Hagen talked rapidly, gesturing, blood congealing on his arm whilst the bigger toughs watched him dumbly.
‘Now!’ the Expat hissed, and in time, barely, Ingo came unstuck.
They climbed out the back window and were quickly lost among whispering poplars. The day turned golden, sunlight everywhere, Marty waiting beside the little brook. A beautiful dawn spread itself across the eastern marches of old Germania.
In the air, an alarum of birdcalls, an early chill—it would soon be autumn, 1929—and a smell of burning.
WILDERNESS
NOVEMBER 1944
Ankle-deep in snow at the edge of the Greater German Reich, wearing a dead man's uniform, Ingo trooped grudgingly onward, eyes on the boot-marks left by the soldier ahead, the one he thought of as the Defrocked Priest. Ingo did not, he guessed, look so out of place himself in this curious hunting party, a rabble of foreign SS volunteers representing most of the nations of Eastern Europe. Like him, on the whole, they were overaged and unsoldierly. Their joints ached from the sudden cold and they were not slow to complain about it, in the degraded Deutsch that was their only common tongue. Eight now altogether—all on foot for this outing—they followed a road too narrow for automobiles and too rough, too broken, even for horses, through a land that seemed to belong to no one. A sign they passed half a day ago had reminded them this was a “nature protection territory.” Meaning, it seemed, you could shoot people here, but you couldn't poach the game.
Escape, he figured, was not impossible. He had taken to lagging behind and nobody cared. Now and then the Priest glanced around to give him a nod or a weary flick of the hand like a desultory benediction, but then looked away; you couldn't afford to take your eyes off the path for long.
There was, of course, the problem of footprints. Once the others noticed he was missing they would turn around and retrace their steps, then his, in the snow. Ingo did not fancy being hunted by these men. Sure, he was armed, he could take a few with him—but then what? It would be a messy business. And maybe he was still Catholic enough to have thoughts about dying with blood on his hands, even the blood of the guilty.
There were opportunties, though. Here and there along the trail, especially on slopes, big rocks jutted from the ground, their surfaces blown free of snow. You could get a foothold there, heave yourself over and land on the downslope. Pick a spot where the evergreens are small, use low-hanging limbs for cover. It was a chance. How badly would these men care? They were going for king's meat—living Jews. Why waste time or bullets on lesser quarry?
He nonetheless trudged onward, holding his place in the column and watching shadows lengthen around him. He shifted the weight on his back, moved the Schmeisser's strap from one shoulder to the other. He couldn't have said why.
Well, okay, he could.
Somewhere up there, ahead of the column, unseen for hours now, was a man in a black uniform, an SS officer. He was the pathfinder, blazing a trail for the others. And he was Master of the Hunt, all his senses honed, his intuition acute. He had a mysterious affinity with the game—where had Ingo read that? A Karl May novel? And somehow, beneath those things, he was a blond boy Ingo had known, or at least thought he had, in a different world, an end-of-summer version of this same countryside.
Maybe there is mystery everywhere. Maybe nobody's motives are clear, everyone's feelings are chaotic, their yearnings unnameable. Maybe any given person, in unforeseen circumstances, is capable of acting in any conceivable manner. I caress you, I murder you, I bind your wounds.
Maybe.
Only it seemed to Ingo—it always had—that Hagen was harder to decipher than most people. Qualitatively harder; a different sort of nut to crack. After a dozen years behind the bar at the Rusty Ring, chatting up every odd duck that waddled in off Connecticut Avenue, he still thought so. So maybe that's what bound him to the hunting party; maybe he hadn't given up on untangling that particular knot.
Also, there were the tracks in the snow. Ingo had expected them, in a way. The snow had stopped falling night before last, and since then all the game in the forest seemed to have been on the move, scrounging for food or searching for a nice place to bed down for the winter. Or, who knows, looking for a date. In the Boy Scouts Ingo had done the customary thing, plodding thro
ugh the woods with a fold-out guide to animal tracks, trying to identify the little furry and feathered creatures who had preceded him. You hoped for a bear, a fox, but what you got were raccoons and skunks and the occasional bunny.
Without thinking much about it, he was back at it now, out of the corner of his eye. Still hoping for a fox. And getting, again, something different. This time, human footprints. He paused to consider them, and after a few moments the Priest ambled back to join him. The tracks were not fresh; the edges had blurred from snowmelt. There appeared to be two sets, one falling mostly in the indentations made by the other, and there was something odd about the shape of the shoes, a boxiness. The prints followed the trail for a while, then turned off on what might have been a deer path, narrow and steep.
“Not bandits,” the Priest said judiciously. His jaw was bony, black with stubble, and served as a pointer for his eyes. “Escapees, I'd say.”
“From one of the camps?” said Ingo, perhaps rashly. “Like the one at Auschwitz?” He hoped this was not pressing it too far. Hölderlin cautioned against the mortal error of Wortschuld—the sin of uttering, of all unspeakable things, the most unspeakable.
The Priest shook his head. “They're in better shape than that. See how far apart the footsteps are? They're moving along pretty quickly. People who come out of the big camp there—and I tell you, there aren't many— they stagger. And they'd be barefoot, or near to it. These ones, see, they've got shoes of a sort, something homemade, maybe a strip of old tire with cloth sewn around it. Slave workers, I'd say, off a farm somewhere. Folks like us—foreigners, right? Except they waited for an invitation.”
It was sometime after they had overtaken the others, while listening to the latest in a limitless repertoire of filthy stories from Janocz the giant—this one involved a nun, a bar of soap, and a chicken—that Ingo experienced a revelation.
Warfare, he realized, is a team sport. It is not really so different—well, okay, rather more extreme—than any of those activities he'd sought to avoid in high school. The likeness between war and, say, varsity football went deeper than Darwinian group dynamics, locker-room crudeness, the playing-field pecking order and the fact that Ingo had no aptitude for either. It went deeper even than the familiar and, by now, boring requirement to prove one's manhood. Deeper than the prospect, never far from mind, of physical violence.
The most telling sameness, to Ingo's mind, lay in that transcendent entity, the team: a fraternity, a brotherhood, a shoulder-to-shoulder, thick-and-thin union—a true Bund. To belong to a team, to really belong, is to feel a profound identification with your teammates, a dissolving of the boundaries between you and them. We are Cardinals; we are Kamaraden; we are all in this together… none of which had ever applied to Ingo, visà-vis any given sampling of his male brethren. Not in Boy Scouts. Not in high school, or at Catholic U. And how much more so, not here, not now.
If all men were like me, he thought, it would be hard to get much of a war going, wouldn't it? On the other hand, if all men were like me, there wouldn't be much of a world. Would there?
The hunters were in no hurry. Whatever might be ahead of them would still be there tomorrow; that's how Ingo read their attitude. Tomorrow, maybe next week. If it's a boar, then let it fatten up a while. If it's a Jew, let it starve. If it's a slant-eyed Russian with one of those little submachine guns, the kind that never jams—well, just you wait, Ivan. I'll see you when the time comes.
Hagen—the other men called him der Chef—did not join them at their campfire.
“He keeps to himself, that one,” said the man Ingo knew as Eyebrows. From his accent, maybe Lithuanian. He was a chatty sort, and it disturbed Ingo very much to think that, had this man walked into the Ring one day, wearing ordinary clothes, smoking an American cigarette, he probably would've found him an engaging fellow.
“They're all like that,” the Priest said. “Think their shit is honey.”
All who? Ingo wondered. Germans? Officers? The regular SS?
“No, this one …” Eyebrows nodded rhythmically, as if hearing a private song. “I've been with him over a year now. We've been out on, what, maybe thirty, forty operations. Big sweeps, some of them, two hundred men, artillery support, once even spotters in airplanes. Other times, only a few of us, like now. And I tell you, all those times… hell, I can't think of a word the fucker's ever said to me. Not one bleeding word, not Attention or Forward or Eat shit. It's odd, wouldn't you say? Goes against the book— a good National Socialist is supposed to be one of the men—maybe a bigger man, maybe more powerful, but still a comrade.”
“Where'd they teach you that—Rovno?”
“They didn't send me to Rovno, I went to Lublin. This was in forty-one.”
“Forty-one. Been at this awhile, eh?”
Eyebrows nodded absently, the inaudible tune still playing for him.
Then he sighed. “Long enough. I was a Party member before the war. An agitator, you might say. Fifth column, right? Volga Germans, my family were—over there for five generations, still spoke German at the dinner table. Not the proper sort, mind you. First thing they told me in Lublin was my German's no good, I'd never make rank talking that gibberish. Well, they weren't lying.”
The campsite was in a hollow, crowded by rock faces and hulking pines. Straight overhead, Ingo could see white stars like holes in the papery darkness. The fire cast little warmth but its glow was comforting. The hunters had spread out their bedrolls and were done eating, waiting now for weariness to carry them off.
“How can you be a Volga German,” mumbled Janocz the giant, as though talking to himself, not caring about an answer. “That's like being a Danube Russian. Or a—”
“Just wait,” the Priest said tartly. “You'll be seeing Danube Russians soon enough. Rhine Russians, too, if the Yanks don't get a move on.”
A couple others chuckled, a rueful noise. It struck Ingo as odd they should view the Reich's looming defeat with such equanimity, like something that didn't affect them personally. We're not Germans, are we? Or maybe it was something different. Fatalism, in its unvarnished form. The native mind-set of Central Europe, crawling ineluctably westward. Someday, it might reach America.
“I guess that's what the Reds wondered, too,” Eyebrows said. “Five generations over there, then one day Comrade Molotov signs a piece of paper, him and Ribbentrop, divvying up Poland. You take that part, we'll take this. Not long after, they told us to leave. Like that—go back home to Germany. Your Führer is expecting you. Five generations, so what? You're still German, it's in the blood.
“Next thing we knew, a flat in Wedding. A real shithole. Then a farm in fucking Galicia, where not even a Polack would want to live. You're building the New Germany, they said. Didn't look like Germany to me. Hell, I barely knew what Germany looked like. I was starting to miss the Old Country, I wished the Bolsheviks hadn't thrown us out. Then the invasion came—' Kick the Russian door in,' remember that, ‘and the whole rotten house will crumble’? So I figured, you know, this was my way back. Free ride home on a troop transport, and a chance to square things with the commissars.”
Nobody asked how his plan had worked out. It was obvious: here he was with the rest of them. A hunter tonight; but soon enough, the hunted.
Ingo had half dozed off when Eyebrows said, in the darkness, “I never even made it to Russia. Vilna, that's as far as we got. Shooting the Chosen People in a ditch. It was better in Galicia. Shit, it was better in Wedding. But out here, you know, in the woods, the wilderness… this isn't so bad.”
* * *
Afterward he fell into something that was not quite sleep, not quite dreaming: a silent but agitated realm like the first few inches under the water of a swimming pool. In this state he was able to think rather clearly—clearly enough to suspect that, by daylight, none of these thoughts would make sense—and one particular idea seemed to hang there, waiting for him to seize it: a memory that glittered just out of reach, like a ring falling slowly to the bottom
. He strained for it, his chest aching with need.
I've been here before. This very path. The same mountain—only it was summer then.
This might have been true. Equally it might've been a wholly unreasonable fancy he could not, in his half-dreaming state, dispel. The thought excited him; but paradoxically it did not cause him to awaken, rather to enter more vividly into this state of semi-awareness.
Okay, maybe he had been here. Under what circumstances, though? The long hike east from the Leuchtenburg? The longer, sadder journey back? Each question summoned its own stream of possibilities; they bobbed up around him, too many to choose among. Frustrated, he rolled over on the hard ground. Twigs jabbed his cheek—this was real, if nothing else. An insect buzzed noisily near his head. He gave it a couple of swats but the damn thing wouldn't leave him alone. In the end he gave up, he rolled onto his back and blinked languidly in the honey-colored sunlight. The insect— an enormous dragonfly—hovered like a fixed object above one eye. If he were a frog, or an enchanted prince, he could've flicked his tongue at it. Instead he let out a languorous sigh.
“Glad to hear you're alive over there,” Martina noted acerbically from her nesting spot among ostrich ferns a few steps way. He propped his head up to give her a baleful glare.
She was so full of herself these days. Ever since she and that Schwärmer … Ingo didn't want to think about it. At the same time, how could he not? They had made the crossing, he and his old friend Marty, albeit by different bridges. They were grown up now, physically and otherwise. And they were free—weren't they?—to shape their lives, as the Meissner Formula had it, by their own choice, responsible only to themselves, following their own inner truth. For them, anything was possible, nothing was forbidden. It was almost 1930, for God's sake.
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