Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  “Your friend over there,” the man said quietly, in perfectly neutral German. Shall we talk about that soccer match? His eyes did not move. Never before had he spoken a word to Ingo, yet Ingo understood perfectly. He leaned down to tighten a boot lace and, in the process, casually glanced toward the front of the inn. Timo was sitting alone there at a table by the door. Ingo looked away, took his time with the boot, and finally sat up. The innkeeper was munching one of the hotcakes.

  “He's been sitting there all morning,” the man said pleasantly. Nice weather we're having, ja? “I believe he is waiting for something. I should keep an eye on him, if I were you. My name is Alex. I am Michi's father.”

  “I'm Ingo. You have a fine son. This is very good beer.”

  The two men shook hands.

  “What do you put in these?” said Ingo, admiring a bit of hotcake speared on a fork. “They're quite delicious. Waiting for what, I wonder?”

  “He looks like a Slav to me—is that right?” Then, more loudly: “Buttermilk, with a dash of sharp cheese and just a bit of green onion.”

  “Yes, I noticed the onion. He's Serbian, I think—but so what? These might go over nicely in Washington. Perhaps a bit more salt, and a touch of sugar.”

  “Already there's sugar.”

  “Not enough for Washington.”

  “You know how it is with Slavs. They have a bond among themselves. You don't look like an American.”

  Ingo rolled his eyes. Yes, FC-Bayern should've taken that match easily. “I don't feel like one, not lately. If they have such a bond, what are all those purges about?”

  “Family squabbles. You know how it is. We make the beer ourselves, right here.”

  “I like it very much.”

  “Thank you.”

  It was midnight, plus or minus, when Martina stumbled down those same stairs. Ingo was still sitting in the common room, and by that time most of the Varianoviks not on duty were there also, along with most of the Arndtheimers. They were engaged in a vigil that no one had planned and no one acknowledged. They sat and waited and listened with averted eyes to every sound from the room at the top of the stairs. During the interludes, the difficult silences, they conversed in muted voices about nothing much, finally nothing at all. After the conversation ran out, they merely sat. Some appeared to be dozing but nobody really slept. The BBC was playing Viennese schmaltz. There was news of fighting in Italy, heavy losses on both sides. The war, it appeared, would not be over by Christmas.

  Alex, the innkeeper, kept the stove lit and the pantry open, and young Michi, thrilled at being allowed to stay up so late, ran a continuous shuttle between the kitchen and the common room, fetching beer and food and, as the hours stretched on, water and brandy. It was one of those nights when you could not get drunk, no matter how much you put down your throat. Ingo considered going upstairs to check on the prisoner—no one had done so lately—but then a door creaked up there and a moment later, one clunky footfall at a time, Martina stumbled down. Reaching the bottom, she announced in a hoarse whisper: “It's a girl.”

  At this, a happy clamor, shouts for Michi to top up the glasses, toasts to the newborn, the mother, the landlord, the absent dad, until somebody— maybe Tamara, no one later could be sure—thought to ask, “How's Hildi?”

  To which Martina, sprawled in a chair no more than an arm's reach from Harvey Grabsteen, made no reply at all.

  The baby resting in Anna's arms looked peaceable. Anna looked peaceable as well, a contented grandma for now, walking slowly back and forth across the room, letting the natural motion of her body rock the baby against her breast.

  Ingo stood for a while in the doorway, hesitant to go any farther. But no one shooed him away or shot him admonitory female glances; in fact, he seemed to have reacquired the trick of invisibility. So after a while he stepped inside and gazed down at the tiny creature—hard to think of it as a girl, or as anything else—and then at the new mother, who did not look dead to him. Not quite. The pink was gone from her cheeks, that is true. Her eyes were shut and you could not be sure, without staring a long time, if she was breathing. She was. As Ingo watched, her lips opened slightly and her eyelids fluttered in some unimaginable dream. What might one dream about at such a time? Something ordinary, he guessed. Brushing your hair, closing a window—in the dream these would be astonishing, unprecedented.

  Stu sat in a chair pulled close to the bed. You got the feeling he'd been there all night and that he was keeping a vigil of his own. Wearily he raised his eyes to acknowledge Ingo. He shook his head very slightly.

  The baby, then. Ingo looked close, then closer yet. He was searching— who could doubt it?— for Isaac in there, concealed among those improbably small features. He found nothing of the sort—rather, a sleepy godlet from a more refined, less odorous plane of being, tired from its journey, gathered cozily into itself and taking its ease among hushed, awe-filled worshippers. Look at it: a deity with no hair, its mouth a sublime pout, blithely cuddled beyond all care and strife—ready, however, at a moment's notice, to assume the task of ruling its tiny, all-important realm.

  A tear came to Ingo's eye. He wanted to kiss the curious, shriveled being.

  So much, he thought, for the great mysteries. And now I shall take myself to bed.

  * * *

  There remain gaps in the narrative that a thousand twilights will not close. How did Ingo happen to wake up in the prisoner's room? Where had the prisoner himself gotten off to?

  The village of Arndtheim was lost in its collective slumber, or so you might have thought. And Ingo was walking in his sleep; that is practically certain. He bumped through the empty common room, upsetting chairs, then stood alone in the upstairs hallway; he shivered in the snow and wondered why his boots were not on his feet; he peeked into the birthing chamber to find it empty—no, not quite. On the bed, a slender lump lay covered by a sheet.

  Not in that order, necessarily.

  The night was past, but morning hadn't yet come. It was the Zwischenstufe, the in-between stage, when shadowy beings, spies, inverts, partisans, creatures of the Dämmerung, traitors disguised as heroes, bartenders as SS men, emerge from the nether realm and for a brief but sometimes epochal moment take the center of the stage. Infantry assaults are launched at this hour, and their success may hang on neither the whim of the war gods nor the relative might of the armies but on an ephemeral thing Clausewitz called the Schwerpunkt. To armor-plated military minds, the term has come to signify the literal “heavy point” of an attack; but Clausewitz was a classicist, not a Lutheran, and he borrowed Schwerpunkt from his study of Grecian wrestling. Two naked athletes square off, maneuver, feint, pivot, prowl the mat—and all the while the heavy point shifts between them, unseen, immaterial, yet ineluctably decisive. At an unforeseen moment, one of the wrestlers, deeming the balance to have swung in his favor, will leap to the next stage, the gross and terminal business of physical conflict. So with armies; so with battle. “Bloodshed in war,” sniffed Clausewitz, “is like the occasional cash transaction in a business normally run on credit.”

  Hagen knew that. He was gone from the bed, out on the battle plain, maneuvering, while Ingo lay dreaming, no doubt, some grossly physical dream. Now, out in the village, the dream had changed, but it was still no more believable.

  The predawn hush was a con. Beneath it lay furtive rustlings Ingo couldn't quite hear, etheric messages he could almost decode, flickering shadows that might have been wandering phantoms but more probably were hunters, tracking you, waiting to get you in the open, lining up the shot. All this Ingo knew at once and it sent a chill right up his spine, rousing him at last to complete and terrible wakefulness. That's when he realized he was not wearing his boots.

  It seemed foolish—therefore fitting—that he should die barefoot, as he had been born. Having socks on spoiled it. Ingo half turned to go back inside, but then, around the corner, came a wooden clunk: the village gate closing. There, he thought with a kind of relief. Surely he had
n't imagined that.

  He moved up the street in a series of low bounds, like a large and graceless rabbit, trying to land in spots where the snow had been worn clear. Reaching the gate, he yanked open the view port and stuck his face into it. He saw nothing of interest. Whoever had slipped out was gone.

  At places along the wall, shaky platforms had been built with ladders to reach them, so you could climb up and look over the top and perhaps, in some Karl May fantasy, get off a few shots with your trusty Winchester. Bloom had scoffed at these improvisations: too high, too narrow, too far between. Nonetheless Ingo made for the nearest of them, not so much out of interest in what was happening outside the village wall as from a desire to get his feet out of the snow.

  From the top, he stared out over the bumpy, unbeautiful countryside of Lower Silesia. It lay unmoving, loosely bandaged in a gauze of mist, as though the land itself had become a casualty. He waited for any motion, an involuntary spasm of leaf or branch; he listened hard for the hillside beneath the naked orchard to heave a great, slow, racking breath.

  Nothing: the air was still. The mist somehow obscured both distance and direction; you couldn't even tell where the sunrise would come. An identical half-light lay on all sides and left little to choose between brightness and shadow, for neither was complete.

  Ingo watched for what seemed a long time, probably just a couple of minutes. He seemed to have passed through the cold to whatever lay beyond it. His head felt wobbly from fatigue broken by too little sleep; he might have done better not sleeping at all. Maybe that's what Hagen had done.

  At this thought, some movement caught his eye. He snapped his head around but saw nothing—just the cloudy void of a meadow veined with a silver stream, and a scattering of black, tapered conifers like bottles left standing on a table.

  There—movement again. Only it seemed to Ingo that what he'd glimpsed this time—no more than a flickering shadow—had come from a different place than before. So maybe there were two things moving out there. Predator and prey? A pair of lovers? No, a stranger dyad still, resistant to definition.

  Yes. See, right there: a shaking of boughs not far from the village wall. Then a few seconds later, farther out, a dark form shifting in the meadow. Not a tree at all. A silent and nearly motionless human body.

  Ingo drew a breath so sharp it nearly became a gasp. Foolishly, he slapped a hand over his mouth and for several heartbeats didn't breathe at all.

  Not fifty paces away, slightly below Ingo and off to one side, Hagen stepped out of his hiding place. It would not have counted as such in ordinary daylight, just a gap between bare-limbed larches. He slipped forward now, quickly and boldly, away from the village. He was holding his arms out from his sides, not swinging them but simply letting them show, as if to demonstrate that he carried no weapon.

  A separate peace, thought Ingo.

  At the edge of the meadow, Hagen halted and raised one hand—not a wave, a signal.

  Across the clearing, the dark, still form unfroze: Pinocchio jerking to life. Ingo strained his eyes, willing all the light in Poland to gather itself in that one spot. For a crazed instant, the spell seemed to work. It must have been Ingo's imagination, or perhaps something less easy to explain away: a genuine vision. In that flash of time he saw everything with perfect clarity.

  The loose-jointed stride. The mismatched and ill-fitting costume. The red hair, partly hidden beneath a peasant's cap—the cap set back at a jaunty angle and the hair receding, laying bare an old scar. The eyes, bright as ever. A cunning in them you'd noticed before but perhaps not given sufficient thought to. Or else the cunning had grown more acute and dangerous over the years, honed to a death's edge from living in the wild.

  Nose, mouth, comical ears—all the features emphatically present, if anything exaggerated. Yet the effect of them, taken together, was different now. The skin sagged a bit; lines sketched by grinning had deepened into crevices; the mouth was off-center and stubborn; the nose jutted defiantly, a challenge thrust at the world.

  Yet it was Isaac. Even from this range, so far removed in years as well as distance, he was recognizably the same person as before. A man, but hardly bigger than he'd been as a boy—his frame now bony from hunger, not adolescence.

  Isaac. A miracle.

  In that moment of luminous clarity, you noticed other things as well. Everything. The trembling of Hagen's shoulders. The single halting step he took, tightening the gap. The mist like dragon's breath, a poisonous vapor on the land. A dark bird circling distantly; now a second—Odin's ravens, Memory and Thought.

  And just before the vision ended, before the colors faded to gray, you glimpsed the strangest thing of all—a scene that might have been borrowed from the Scottish play, Birnam Wood inexplicably arriving outside the castle. But it wasn't trees moving out there, it was something among them, something substantial, and in that last fraction of an instant you got the fleeting impression that a host of knights, their armor dulled by rust and mud, their lances thick as cannons, had assembled at the edge of the woods beyond the meadow, awaiting the shrill blast of a battle horn.

  End of vision. The long Mitteleuropan nightmare resumes.

  You see Hagen moving forward. Down there in the mist he must not share your broad field of view, because his progress is tentative, halting. He seems to stumble like an athlete off balance.

  Isaac's view is no better, but he has an instinct. He moves unerringly toward Hagen, and it seems to Ingo that he is reaching into a pocket. His feet do not slow; the hand knows what it's looking for. There, a scrap of paper, white and limp, that he raises like a tiny truce flag.

  You might wish to linger here.

  You might wish to savor, a few moments more, that separate peace, a remarkable silence in the swirling storm of war, a respite, if only provisional, as all things are in the black center of Europe. You might wish for time to oblige you by pausing, as it has done before.

  Now: Suspended like statues in mid-step, the two friends, or enemies, opposites, conspirators, lovers, wrestlers, mutual predators, fellow prey— whatever the truth might be, or all the tangled truths at once—stand perhaps five paces apart. The Schwerpunkt hangs between them, perfectly balanced despite their asymmetry, German to Jew. They are near enough to speak in quiet voices, to hear each other's breathing. They are as close, just now, as they will ever get.

  Sadly, you can work no magic. You cannot stop time, nor avert what must happen. If you survive, the next moment will haunt you every time you close your eyes. So perhaps you will not wish to survive, after that last bit of innocence is lost, after dawn arrives and the mist of unknowing burns away.

  All right, you think, or some war god thinks, or the Earth itself.

  All right—go on.

  ON THE RAVEN'S BEAK

  NOVEMBER 1944

  The boy Shlomo opened his eyes as usual in the hour before dawn. As usual he lay for a time quite still, wondering if he actually were awake or in some strange dream mocking wakefulness. In the half-light he could not be certain. The guerrilla base was quiet around him, though he knew the sentries were out there and, just now, especially vigilant. For at this uncertain hour, neither day nor night, wild creatures would be scurrying back to their lairs, and vampires crawling into their Grüfte, and enemies moving in to attack. Unless you were quite alert you could not be certain which was which. You might waste bullets on some ghost—that would be foolish. People would be angry and someone would say He's only a boy, and that would shame you.

  Shlomo was no boy any longer. His papi had told him so.

  He rose from his bed of fir needles and stepped out of the little hut that he shared with some of the children. He had not wanted this—he belonged with the men, the warriors—but had made no objection when they put him there. Nor when they placed clothes on him, layer upon layer as the summer changed to fall and now to winter. But at shoes, he drew the line. He had loved to go barefoot when he lived with his family, and had gone barefoot in the big camp eve
n when snow covered the ground, as it did now.

  Be glad of the snow, Papi had told him. You feel the snow and you think: This means I am alive.

  His papi had no longer been alive when he said that. He could not come along when Shlomo marched out in the morning on work details. He could not lie with him at night, holding him close and keeping him warm. So: Be glad of the cold, because it tells you that you are alive, and Papi is not. And that is why Papi comes to visit only at the in-between time, neither night nor day, neither dark nor light. For this is where Papi lives now, in the world you cannot find on any map but is quite real nonetheless, that lies not in space but in time.

  Du siehst, mein Sohn, zum Raum wird hier die Zeit.

  The boy walked through the silent camp and out onto a spine of rock that jutted like a crow's bill from the face of the mountain. He passed one of the sentries but the man made no effort to talk to him, having learned over these months that Shlomo would not answer. Shlomo spoke to Papi and Mama and they warned him to be careful of strangers. In these times, Papi gravely said, one can never be sure whom to trust.

  The boy remembered standing in the big camp one day, barefoot in the spring mud, and when the sun broke the horizon he had looked up and there, just there, were the mountains. They seemed so close. And yet he had never noticed them before. He had never looked up, he supposed. One mountain in particular—this one, where he now sat—had stood out from the others, on account of this spine like a great dark beak, its sharp profile catching the easterly sunlight.

  “You see that mountain there?” his papi told him later, after the sun went down. “It's called Vysoká today, but once upon a time it was Krkavec, the Raven. Only they don't say which raven, eh?”

  And Papi had laughed, gently and sadly. So much, so much, the laughter said, none of us will ever understand.

  Shlomo—who was not called Shlomo then—had resolved that he would come here. And so he had come, though he could not remember just how. He believed he might have learned some tricks from Papi, such as how to become invisible at certain times, and how to tell SS men from vampires, though they look very much alike. He wondered if he himself—the one to whom they gave shoes he wouldn't wear—might be already a citizen of Papi's world, even while his body ate and slept in this one.