Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  Still and all…it was hard for him to think of Marty like that. The girl next door. A girl, period. Girls in general. Their odd shapes, the bulges and squishiness, the smells. How much luckier to love boys, who were pure and hard and clean.

  All right: I give up.

  Ingo pulled himself to a sitting position, fully aroused now. Aroused as in awakened and in that other sense as well. But then he always was, wasn't he? Even while sleeping. All his dreams were about the same thing. He lived in a state that was evidently well known to a certain breed of poet: Goethe called it seliger Sehnsucht, blessed desire; Novalis, heiliger Glut, sacred lust. Quite common, apparently. To be expected and, indeed, commended. But just now, damned inconvenient.

  Butler was talking. Ingo could not hear—or, more likely, chose not to waste his attention on—what he was saying. The tone was the thing: knowing, long-winded, didactic, above all pleased with itself. Blah blah blah, ineluctable historic process, blah blah, enfeeblement brought on by blah blah blah. Hagen took exception to this and while he had nothing interesting to say about it, he at least had the grace to say it in clear, well-formulated Deutsch. Isaac was patently bored, which seemed an eminently sane response. With a glance in Ingo's direction, he stood up, stretched like a tawny cat and ambled away, with no apparent destination in mind.

  From the campsite a little winding path, the staple of all good Märchen, twisted through an obligatory jumble of greenery that Ingo, without Anton, could not name, skirting rocks, ducking beneath ancient limbs, dipping into glades where unseen water whispered mysteriously, creeping up and up onto stony ledges suitable for flinging oneself off in a paroxysm of unconsummated longing.

  He found himself following this path, though oddly unaware of having decided to do so; he could remember none of the preliminaries, such as walking out of the camp. How far he had wandered was anybody's guess. Isaac was somewhere ahead of him—he knew that much. The sun fell through the trembling leaves in fat, oozy globs that ran down your limbs like melted butter. You wanted to drink it in. To toss your clothes away and writhe in it. The thrilling notion of being naked transformed itself with magical ease into the feeling of cool air moving between his legs, moss cushioning his bare footfalls, damp fronds tickling his knees. A curtain of drooping willow hung before him, a thousand leaves shot through with yellow-green light. He parted the branches—they were downy to the touch—and stepped into a shady, hemmed-in, isolated glade.

  Isaac was sitting on an old fallen log like a sprite perched on its toadstool. His head, rather large for the waifish body, turned toward Ingo, his smile wider than his jawbone should have allowed. On his back and limbs, freckles now claimed more territory than his plain pale skin. He was not willowy like Anton nor beautiful like Hagen. Ingo could not get him out of his mind. Sleeping or waking, he heard the droll boyish voice. The eyes' emerald sparkle held him spellbound.

  Is this real? he wondered. Do I really feel this way? He could not remember. It seemed so, and yet not. It was as though he had leapt ahead, somehow, and these feelings had cropped up in a time of their own, without his having gotten around to feeling them. Ah, the impatience of youth. Everything that is imaginable—and what is not?— must happen right here, right now. Because I want it, I breathe it, I yearn for it. And yearning is holy. I praise all who long for death by fire.

  Isaac was talking, or not talking. He was making a joke. He was acting the fool. He was laughing, always laughing. In some dreams the laughter is everywhere at once and in others it comes only at the end, a fulfillment, a joyous release.

  But this was no dream, was it? No dream had ever been so real. No leaves had ever whispered so gently. No flesh had ever felt so warm.

  “How come you never took a swing at it?” Isaac said.

  Ingo did not remember. He could only shrug.

  “The thing is,” Isaac said, with a finger raised, as if giving a signal, “you miss out on a lot. There's a lot of stuff you'll never know, because you don't like to take chances. I'm not saying that's bad—it's just how you are, that's all. With you, nothing's only for grins. Everything's a big deal. And I mean, a big deal. You look at some picture on the wall and think you're seeing God, when it's only a pal from school you've got a crush on.”

  Oh, come now. Isaac had never read a word of Hesse—Ingo would've bet his life on it.

  “But I like you,” said Isaac with a foxy grin, brushing off this flagrant improbability. “You're a decent guy. In fact you're the only guy I actually trust. I mean, the Socialists, they're okay. But they're all a bunch of fucking Kräuter. One minute they love you, the next”— shrug—” hey.”

  Ingo glanced down, conscious suddenly of his exposed and completely defenseless state. No secrets between them anymore.

  “Still,” said Isaac, “after all this time, who's to say what really happened?”

  Nothing, you think, miserably.

  “Are you sure?” Isaac laid a hand on his arm. It burned there sweetly like mountain sun. Selige Sehnsucht. Infinity in an afternoon. Love in death, ecstasy in pain, passion in solitude. Things that might have happened. Things you will never know. Passions, and sorrows, and losses irrecoverable, and, finally, sleep.

  * * *

  A hand on his shoulder woke him sometime before dawn. The sky, now a soft rosy gray, looked very close, rubbing the black treetops. Hagen's face peered down at him. Tense, urgent, expressionless. The eyes flashed coldly, Stay quiet.

  Around the camp, every second man lay dead. Every other one—like a macabre, inexplicable game. Choosing up sides on the nightmare playground. Eenie, meenie, miney, moe. Ingo was alive. Eyebrows had his throat slit open, blood splashed generously over his mouth, his neck, his chest. The Defrocked Priest was sitting up, stuffing things into his knapsack. The next man over had a knife hilt protruding at an angle from his heart (his own knife, they would discover). Janocz stirred sluggishly, like a bear overdue for hibernation.

  And so forth.

  Wordlessly, Hagen organized the survivors—all four of them—and they moved around the camp's perimeter. There was no shortage of tracks. In fact, there were too many, a wanton trampling. How could this have happened without waking anyone? Why hadn't they posted a night watch? And where had Hagen been all that time? Ingo guessed it was a little late for questions, yet there they were, waiting to be asked, as glaring as the heartless sunrise.

  It was some while later—they had moved out by then, their weapons in their hands, safety catches off—before anyone spoke. Hagen had gotten some distance ahead. Ingo watched him move through the woods with effortless grace, like an angel with gray woolen wings. His legs flexed, then straightened; his body seemed to float from the path to a hump of stone, then onto a long, bulging hemlock root. His cape flowed around him. In half a minute, he was only a feldgrau flutter, another shadow in the woods. Then he was gone.

  Janocz said, “Why did they do that?”

  He meant, Ingo supposed, why kill only half?

  The Priest slowed to look at him, perhaps debating whether it was worth his trouble to answer this stupid man. Then he looked at Ingo and their fourth comrade, Zim, a thin-framed former gangster—so he boasted—from the alleys of Odessa. For their benefit, the Priest said, “It was the Fox, obviously. Why does the Fox do anything?”

  Janocz shook his head. “Why?”

  The Priest gave them all a canny look. His stock-in-trade, these looks.

  “The Little Fox,” he said, in the melodramatic voice of a radio-play narrator, “just likes to have a bit of fun. That's all.”

  Ingo could not grasp any of it. He felt dizzy, like a kid at a loud party, too many things going on, running and laughter, the house made strange with decorations, a clown plucking quarters out of your ear. If it truly was the Fox who had done those things—yes, and if the Fox was truly Isaac—and if Hagen had picked up his trail, if they had not waited too long to get started…but that was too many ifs, like too many panes of glass, reflections playing between them, the view
warped and pale, impossible to focus on.

  Still: if.

  The morning turned that stubborn gray that refuses to brighten past a certain point. On a day like this at home Ingo might not have stepped outside until evening, when the sky disappeared and the lights came on, the avenue crowded, taxis honking, a radio blaring from a window upstairs, the chill and gloom shrinking to minor inconveniences like that curb you don't want to trip over. But here you were stuck, with no door inside, and the chill went right to your heart; there had never been brightness or warmth, and never would be. You moved, you breathed, you endured—it wasn't much, but what was the alternative?

  Fatalism, endemic to this landscape, especially virulent in winter—now Ingo had caught it. If, by some ludicrous whim of the gods, he should live through all this, he was doomed to be a carrier. Anyone who looked at him might be infected. They would have to quarantine him, perhaps on a chicken farm, with a supply of cognac and a large collection of German poetry. Also a phonograph, so he could listen to Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. Songs on the death of children. He'd have to smuggle the damn thing into the sunny U.S. of A., but it could be done.

  With such thoughts, and others no more reasonable, Ingo passed the day, or rather the day moved around him. They came down from the hills into a countryside flatter and—who could've imagined it—more desolate than the one they'd left. It was swampy and shrouded in mist so faint you could barely see it. The occasional stand of trees on higher ground— short-needled pines with some alder and scrubby willow—offered little consolation. Only a botanist, Ingo thought, would find anything of interest here. This curled and dried-up frond, what was that? Or these barbed seed heads that clung to your trousers? Maybe in spring, should it ever come, they would pop open and tiny black seeds would sprinkle down— not here, but wherever you'd carried them—and from the tiniest one would issue a stalk, a leaf, a flower. Something, if not exactly to hope for, at least to bear in mind.

  He couldn't tell if Hagen was following a trail or proceeding by instinct alone. There were footprints in the snow, but Ingo could make no sense of them; he wasn't even sure if they'd been made by human beings. Something was wrong with the shape, yet what sort of animal made a track like that? Actually, what sort of creature would live in these deathly marshes? Something, perhaps. Negroes in Washington lived in alleys, whole families of them. They built shacks out of packing crates and tar paper and tacked up a picture of Franklin Roosevelt, torn from a newspaper, on what they pretended was a wall. The point being, living creatures are adaptable, and unwilling, generally, just to sit down and die.

  Sometime in mid-afternoon, though it felt like dusk, der Chef stepped out from behind a tangle of stunted, black-stemmed willow and signaled them to halt. They squatted down among broken reeds—there really was no place to sit—and Hagen pulled a pack of cigarettes from his cloak and passed it around.

  The good National Socialist, Ingo thought. Still a comrade, despite his unquestioned superiority. Despite that aristocratic pallor and the ruins of beauty in that narrow, lupine and hungry-looking face.

  Hagen caught Ingo staring but did not react, just looked back for a moment, then elsewhere. Was Ingo only imagining that he had recognized him? Did Hagen remember anything about that summer? Had it— had they—meant anything to him at all?

  “These cigarettes are French,” the Priest murmured reverentially, turning one with loving care in his fingers. It was rolled in an oval shape and longer than customary. “Where'd you get French cigarettes?”

  At first it seemed Hagen was not going to answer. Ingo recalled what Eyebrows had said—dead Eyebrows, who would never walk into the Ring, never be mistaken for an engaging fellow—about Hagen never talking to common Soldaten. But to Ingo's surprise, to everyone's, der Chef was in an expansive mood just now.

  “The old man has a cellarful of them,” he said. His manner was informal, and his tone, though correct, had lost much of its former stiffness, like leather smoothed and worn-in by long use. In the face, though, something… not quite regret, nor wistfulness—a certain, maybe, disconnection. “You should see all the things down there. French cigarettes, French cognac, Alsatian beer, red wine from somewhere south, tins of fish. Parisian perfume.”

  He waited for the men's reaction—bawdy chortling, ooo la la—but made no pretense of joining in. A comrade, but made of finer stuff.

  “I asked him, as you asked me, where it had all come from. And he said, From everywhere. All over Europe. And he told me a story, something that happened in Prague back in Heydrich's day. Heydrich was living up at the palace, and the old man was teaching at the university—the oldest in the German-speaking world, so he told me. Quite proud of that. He had just learned, that day, that a famous scholar was coming to town, the leading expert on something or other—Fellow of the Reich Academy of Science, personal chum of Goebbels, table reserved for him at Horcher's. The sort of fellow who's hard to impress. Still, of course, the old boys in Prague, the faculty there, wanted to make an impression. Perhaps they thought, Here's our chance.”

  Ingo was interested to watch the expressions that moved, like screen images, across the soldiers' faces as they listened. To them, names like Horcher's and Goebbels—Heydrich, up at the palace—must conjure a world that was fabulous, far-off and now all but vanished, a rapidly fading dream. They had never glimpsed this glittering world with their own eyes, but they had believed in it, the Thousand Year Reich at the height of its glory. Some reflection of that glory, however faint, may have bounced off this and that shiny surface, a collar pin here, a lightning rune there, until it found them, lending an illusion of majesty to their wretched, anonymous lives. They had been, in their crisp Waffen-SS uniforms, citizens of the New Europe, in a war that was for them a great, dark, irresistible romance.

  Like the professors in Prague: Here's our chance.

  “So they came to Cheruski,” Hagen went on, “perhaps, I don't know, because he was a German, not a Sudeten Czech. And he was a Brigade-führer by that time, too. Look, they said, here is the menu—we're going to start with a pâté of smoked trout and dill, do you think he'll like that? And Cheruski said, Yes, he will like that. And they said, For the second course, sautéed wild mushrooms, sauce madère. What will he think of that? Yes, very good, the old man told them, he will like that very much. And for the main course, they said, duck—there are plenty of nice fat ducks there on the Donau, old women feed them scraps of bread. We'll send the caretaker down to shoot some, he's a peasant, he knows how.”

  The other men chuckled. Imagine, not knowing how to shoot a duck!

  “So the Professor said, Yes, duck, that's good, that's something out of the ordinary. But then they asked him, What shall we do about the wine? We have these Czech wines, they're quite good, really, but… And the Professor told me, You should have seen them. Like little boys, afraid Mommy will be disappointed by their school report.”

  The men nodded, puffing their French cigarettes, their faces rapt. It was amazing: they cared, actually, about this ridiculous story, a dinner in Prague, a bunch of tame Nazi scholars toadying up to some VIP from imperial Berlin.

  Hagen seemed to have forgotten his own cigarette, but he lit it now, scraping a match with a thumbnail in a quick, practiced motion, the flame spurting magically from his hand. He took a deep draw, let it out audibly, like a sigh.

  “The Professor said, The wine? That is no problem. Do you have an automobile? Yes, there was a car, but not much gasoline. That is no problem either. Hand me that telephone. So the Professor makes a call, somebody he knows who works for the Protectorate. Then he says, Jaekl, come here, would you?”

  The men exchanged glances. They knew Jaekl; they didn't much care for him. Here was a part of the story they could understand.

  “Jaekl, take these car keys, and this menu, and drive down to Paris, that's a good lad. Go to a shop in the Ninth Arrondissement—here, I am writing down the address—and show them the menu, then tell them to select the wines. And for
God's sake, be courteous about it. These French are touchy. Tell them it shall be dinner for twelve, night after next, you must have the wine right away. Here is some money. Now, go.”

  He nodded, a signal that the story was over. He took another slow pull at his cigarette.

  The hunters broke into laughter. “Now, go,” they repeated. “Just like that. Now, go. Imagine it! All the way to Paris!”

  Even Janocz laughed. Ingo doubted that he knew what he was laughing at—something to do with Jaekl, or gasoline—but he laughed loud and heartily, just the same. As though the story had dwelt longer on one of the wine bottles, and there had been a nun.

  Later Ingo surmised—no, he was certain—that the break had been calculated, that Hagen had kept an eye on his watch and the fading daylight. They had not stopped there in order to rest (Who needs rest, the big Moe had said, back on the Eastern Shore, you can rest when you're dead; they'd thought he was joking), but in order to kill a couple hours until darkness began to fall.

  The story, too, was probably calculated. Not so much to put them in mind of happier days, when a certain kind of man could send a driver halfway across Europe to fetch wine for a certain kind of meal. Rather, to distract them, to send their thoughts elsewhere, anywhere. Away from this ghastly place and whatever lay ahead of them.

  What that was, they found out soon enough. By the last light of day— curious, how these days that never got bright were so slow turning dark— Hagen led them along a narrow trail that could not be seen but that must have been there, for he followed it unerringly. Straight on, then off here, over there, down then up, through this pine grove, between those cattail-crowded bogs, down this tiny isthmus of packed and frozen mud. Maybe he'd memorized the route; maybe he oriented himself by some ancestral sensitivity most present-day men had lost.

  He had a mysterious affinity with the game. Yes, Karl May, Ingo was sure. May had taken one trip to America, he had gone out West, stayed a few weeks, breathed the air of the open prairie—and made a whole career out of it. Fantasies of the Wild West, Saturday-matinee stuff, gobbled up by generations of German schoolboys. Hagen would have read them. The allure of the wilderness, a wonderful place where you didn't have to take a bath or memorize your verb declensions, and there were no girls to tease you, none at all. Perhaps the occasional Indian maiden but that was different, more like a kind of pretty horse. Long black hair you could stroke. And the Indian boys, naked except for their loincloths. Something for everybody, Karl May. Guns, too, and shooting.