Another Green World (24 page)

“Mm, cozy,” she said, squeezing into it.

“Haven't seen you around much.”

“I know, I've been …” She shrugged, peering into the hollows where his eyes must be. But he said nothing more, and she listened instead to the sparrowlike chatter of Tamara and a cluster of young men farther back.

The wagon groaned up from the harbor to higher ground on an old pitted road stretching along the spine of a hill. Suddenly the moon was hanging there, huge and round, casting an eerie dimensionless light over the landscape, which closely matched Martina's notion of the surface of Mars. Everything was reddish, dry, strewn with rocks the size of automobiles, lifeless for millennia.

“What is this, some kind of desert?” she asked, hoping to rouse Ingo to conversation. It bothered her, now that she thought about it, that the two of them hadn't talked for so long.

“It's no desert,” he said. “It's a ruin. A wasteland. This once was Illyria.”

Just like Ingo, she thought. Ever the Romantic, seeing moonlit ruins where everyone else, every normal person, saw nothing but… nothing. For the good reason that there was nothing to see.

“I'll bite. What's Illyria?”

“It was a paradise when the Romans discovered it. They came here and built temples in the cypress groves. Then they started cutting the trees down for their fleets and their fortresses. Then the Goths came in. Then the Mongols, then the Venetians, finally the Austrians. The Venetians were the worst. This is what's left. There's no soil anymore for trees to grow in, and if there were, the peasants would chop them down for firewood.”

You could hear the melancholy in his voice, but Martina suspected it had little to do with the lost forests of Illyria.

“Are you worried about things back home?” she asked him. “The Ring, all that?” He shrugged. His face looked thinner, she thought, more drawn. “Vernon can handle it. I've put it in writing that the place is his if I don't come back. Only, no more goddamn chickenwurst once rationing's over.”

A little joke, she guessed, though she found it a sad one. Poor Ingo. His world had become so small—the proverbial grain of sand. Eternity in a lunch hour.

“So, how are things with Timo?” he asked, a casual slap on the cheek.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, how's Timo? The two of you seem to be hitting it off.”

That was Ingo, too. To turn a companionable moment into a sparring match.

“What's that to you?”

“Nothing. I envy you, truthfully. It's a convenience, I think. Falling in love with whomever you happen to be with.”

She could have socked him—almost did, in fact—except she realized in time that it might not be her he was thinking about.

They rode on in silence, not a peaceable silence but restive, seething. The clomp of the mules and the clank of the wagon wheels seemed loud in the empty wastes.

“I wonder if we'll find him,” Martina said after a long time.

“Find who?”

But she didn't answer and he didn't ask again. When they reached the landing strip shortly after midnight, two Heinkel aircraft were waiting. Squarish, too-small-looking planes, their corrugated skins painted white, still bearing the squared-off crosses of the Luftwaffe, they stood tail-down, side by side, gleaming like metal ghosts in the moonlight.

AUGUST 1929

T
he White Russian princess was bored by the time they reached Hannover-am-Münden, which was okay with Butler because he'd begun to find her boring as well. They did little these days but snap at each other between bouts of French champagne and Berlinish lovemaking. In truth he felt sorry for the poor gal, with her clutch purse of family jewels, her cold-water flat in the Kreuzburg and her threadbare memories of having danced as a young girl in the Winter Palace.

Maybe it was a there-but-for-the-grace deal. If their situations had been reversed, the lost estates and the shabby exile's life his and not hers, perhaps Samuel Butler Randolph III would have been every bit as petulant as Sissi. But as things stood, she was the down-and-out aristocrat, praying for an end to Bolshevism, while he was the commissar-in-waiting, biding his time until Capitalism breathed its last and he could write an epic novel, a
War and Peace
for this half-spent century. Tolstoy meets Marshal Chuikov meets Cecil B. DeMille.

The jaunt down to this place near Kassel had been Sissi's idea: a different sort of weekend outing, a change of scenery, a frolic. Buy some sandals and do the Wandervogel bit. Butler couldn't see it. On the other hand, he divined possibilities in there for, say, a
Collier's
piece. German youth sunbathing bare-assed, singing folk tunes and living the natural life. Toss in a few hints about free love; titillate the innocents at home.

Butler was twenty-two and had a few years left, he figured, before taking up the serious business of literature. In the meantime it couldn't hurt to keep his name in print, bridge the gap between
The Crimson
, whose editor he should have been had not university politics gotten in the way, and the
Times Book Review.
He could have done postgrad work anywhere, but he had chosen Leipzig, whose university was already venerable long
before the first brick was laid in Harvard Square. It was important to be in Germany now. While the Weimar Republic might be a transient phase in the history of Europe—an epiphenomenon, in Hegel's lexicon—it was the fulcrum, the turning point, where the imperial past tilted against the proletarian future. In Leipzig, which lay east of the Elbe, facing out over the steppes toward Asia, the musty halls echoed with the footsteps of Schumann and Schiller even as the curtains flew back before bracing winds of revolution.

He had fallen in with Sissi at Bayreuth. What on earth had she been doing there? She loathed German opera, Wagner worst of all. But so did Butler, in the box adjacent to hers, subsequently in the same suite at the spa. Then it was off to Berlin, rising at noon to browse the
International Trib
at a café in Unter den Linden; afternoons hazy with humidity and brown coal whiled away on a blanket in the Grünewald, or adrift in a hired boat on the Wannsee; nights that never went dark in the sweaty radiance of their private midnight sun. And now this romp in the Kaufunger Forest, a hike up some mountain,
Licht und Luft
and all the rest of it.

How quickly one thing turns into another, Butler reflected. A snatch of detested Wagner came to his mind.
You see, my son, here Time becomes Space.
He hadn't a clue what it meant. Probably nothing, just sounded impressive, like Wagner in general. A hash of badly told stories, misunderstood myths, all blown up with the sideshow gimcrackery of
Gesamtkunstwerk—
clashing cymbals and blaring trumpets, singers bleeding to death while they bellow at one another across the stage.

Screw Wagner, and the white horse he rode in on. Screw German opera and the whole bloated, pestilent body of High Art: that's how Butler felt, and he wasn't alone. Everybody was quoting Spengler this year, commenting blandly over coffee on the West's imminent
Untergang
, which means “sinking,” damn it, not “decline.” Few people had given any thought to what came next, after the last bubbles rose from the deep. Most seemed to feel it didn't personally concern them.

“Are we almost there?” the Princess mumbled from a champagne drowse.

“No, we are not,” said Butler. He stared out the window as the train appeared to leap across a river gorge. The gloomy, spirit-infested waters below looked like a proper sort of place to drown in—ease oneself down, clutching a wept-over copy of
Jungen Werther
, one's lifeblood oozing slowly from the hole just at the heart, pierced by the blue flower's unsuspected thorn.

Such an end was not for Butler: never. His great destiny lay ahead of
him. He sat comfortably in the first-class carriage feeling the journey unroll beneath him, staring through clean German glass, studying his reflection there.

There was no room at the Meissner Haus. Apparently not all Free German Youth were inclined to rough it. Butler was for turning back; they could hop a local train to Kassel or—here's a thought—Göttingen. But the Princess surprised him, declaring with an exile's hard-won adaptability that she intended to go right up the mountain and sort things out when she got there.

“We can buy a tent,” she said, brightening at the thought. “A tent and some food, that's all we need.”

“You'll want something to drink, surely. I don't know if we can carry more than a magnum or two, if we have to hoof it.”

“Don't be a bore, darling. The Wandervögel don't touch alcohol, you know that. We must live cleanly from here on! Now komm mit, before it gets dark.”

The trail wasn't hard, thank God. So many young German feet had trodden it down the past couple of days you could've found your way by the dark of the moon, just from the feel of the ground. The landscape was predictably picturesque, scattered
Dörfer
and smallholdings that petered out into more thickly wooded terrain, Hölderlin oaks of requisite antiquity, Nietzschean crags and gorges. Butler was no naturalist. The most he would give the scenery was an acknowledgment that it was, as the locals would say,
charakteristisch.

You smelled the campfires before you could see where the smoke was coming from. You heard sounds as well—nothing as clear as speech or as evocative as voices raised in song, more a kind of buzzing or murmuring such as often rises from a meadow at the height of May, the combined life-sounds of bugs and bees and scurrying rodents and chittering birds and screeching crickets—except this had a human timbre, hard to define yet unmistakable. Finally you rounded a turn and before you lay the whole amazing spectacle: a mountainside bright with banners, prickling with bodies like so many moving cilia, specked with the orange of open fires and the black of those tents known as
Kohten
, shaped like lathed-down cones and said to derive from a Lappish original. Again, wholly
charakteristisch.
Nevertheless impressive, if you were impressionable. Butler was not. Sissi surprised him with a girlish capacity for awe.

“Oh, Sammy, look!”

“Why do you call me that?” he said, knowing even so that it was not the nickname that annoyed him.

She gave him a twinkling Russian smile, innocently mocking. “Because it suits you better than the other one. Butler is a foolish name, don't you agree? A butler is the chief servant of an English household. And you are nobody's servant, dushka moy. Maybe you long to be, maybe that is the secret of your name. But let us go now and find an icy mountain stream so that I can splash my face. That's all I need, then I will be ready for the party.”

“Party? What makes you think there'll be a party?”

She gave him a look he knew well and detested: the one that implied he was, after all, only a naïve American.

“Here we are, Liebe, in the middle of… did you see the
Tagesspiegel
gives the attendance at thirty thousand? Thirty thousand young people, not all of them children, either. There certainly will be a party.”

One thing turned into another. The quest for a tent led them to a booth on the arcade run by the summit's organizers, from whom you could acquire such needful things as a program book, a box of matches, and a cloth patch to sew on your rucksack, “Freideutscher Jugendtag August 1929” scripted around an emblem carried over from 1913: a bird in flight over a trio of squiggly lines that might have suggested water, or a musical staff, or the strings of a guitar. The booth was manned by a harried-looking fellow in his mid-twenties, clearly a Meissner vet. His name was Karlheinz but he had chosen, in the fashion of the Movement, to be known as Kai.

This much Sissi got out of him in a matter of seconds, along with the fact that he lived in Chemnitz and had published a smattering of poetry. Since poets tend to be aware of other poets, if only to disapprove of them, Sissi quizzed him until they turned up a mutual acquaintance, a gloomy expatriate named Vlad. From Kai's expression you would guess he had little good to say about Vlad, but that was of no account. Sissi shrieked in delight and fell upon Kai like an old friend, grasping his arm and murmuring into his ear—tales of amusing mishaps on the journey from the capital, a joke at her own expense concerning inappropriate footwear, all in a torrent of
Berlinersprach
Butler could barely comprehend, with its blurred consonants and catlike vowels, and probably neither could Kai. That was of no account either.

In twenty minutes, a perky young woman arrived to take a turn in the booth, and Kai was striding arm-in-arm with Sissi, Butler some paces back,
on a path through the woods to a smaller mountain that was not, he promised, too far off.

“The dj.1.11 are up there,” Kai told them. “Do you know of them, the deutsche Jungenschaft von 1. November? Quite a distinct group.”

“Those are the ones who write everything in lowercase,” said Butler.

Kai nodded, overlooking the possibility that Butler's comment might be sarcastic. “They are quite selective in their membership, and seem always to get the best of everything. Now they have the best campsite. The view at dawn! You can scarcely imagine.”

Butler thought that, for Sissi, to imagine the view at dawn from any-place—even her own bathroom—would be a stretch.

“If there is no extra tent,” said Kai, “then you can use mine. I should not mind sleeping under the heavens. As long as I can sleep. This has been a most wearying day.”

By the time they reached the top—Butler soaked in sweat, Sissi fresh and irreverent as a mockingbird—they found everything just as Kai had described. The spot was magnificent, a stark promontory of silver-gray rock rolling like petrified waves to a thrilling drop-off in the southeast. They had climbed above the haze that clung to the lower slopes, and the view seemed to stretch out forever, right to the Iron Mountains on the Czech frontier. The Höhe Meissner itself stood an uncertain distance to the north—two kilometers? five?— and between the two peaks you could look almost straight down into the lake called Frau-Holle-Quell, whose dark oval face was aswirl in clouds, like Snow White's magic mirror.