Another Green World (28 page)

The question didn't strike him as unreasonable. People in this part of the world often did understand German, the traditional language of the educated class. But Shuvek behaved as if Ingo had cast doubt on his paternity, spewing a lengthy torrent of Slovenian and then turning away to glower.

Eddie murmured, “I think he said, he will not speak the tongue of pig-fuckers.”

“You understand him?” Ingo gave the boy a hard look, wondering how long he'd planned to keep this amazing ability under his hat.

“Not really. I mean, a little bit, maybe. My grandma, see…”

“Your grandma.”

“She lives in Poland. Or I mean, she was living in Poland, the last we… Anyhow, you know, these Slavic languages. They're all kind of similar, right?”

Ingo had no idea. “Look, can you ask him where we need to go from here? How far we've got to travel before daylight?”

Eddie gave him a helpless shrug. “I don't even speak Polish, not really. My grandma, she talked mostly in Yiddish with a little English thrown in, when we were around. She only used Polish to curse in.”

In the days when things were funny, this might have earned a chuckle. But people were dead and the cold wind showed no sign of slacking up, and it was hard to imagine anything ever being funny again.

Kommst nimmermehr aus diesem Wald—
Nevermore, quoth Eichendorff, will you come out of this wood. But that was only a poem. And what was poetry worth, in the end? Not a whit compared to young, doomed Eddie. Ingo addressed himself to Shuvek, whose back was still turned. “Do we have far to travel tonight?” he asked in German.

A second partisan muttered something from the shadows. Ingo blinked: the new voice was a woman's. You couldn't have guessed from her rough clothing, the cap pulled down across her forehead, the way she stood with her feet spread and her Russian PPD submachine gun, with its round ammo canister, dangling from her neck like a grotesque medallion.

Shuvek answered her in annoyance, and Ingo looked hopefully at Eddie.

“I'm not sure, I think she asked what's eating him. He told her to shut up. Look, I could be getting this wrong.”

Ingo thought it sounded close enough. At this point Harvey Grabsteen wandered over, having given the grave detail a pass. He jabbed a hand toward Shuvek and introduced himself like they were mingling at a cocktail party. Shuvek gave him a hard stare. He repeated, “Grab-stein?”

“Steen,” said the gangly man with enthusiasm. “Steen, as in…Grab-
steen.”

Shuvek shook his head and muttered to the woman partisan.

Eddie translated: “‘ There, see?’ What do you suppose that's about?”

“Grabstein
means gravestone,” said Ingo. “Sounds like the locals think your name's a bad omen, pal.”

“That's absurd,” said Grabsteen. “Listen. It's obvious this man understands German. Tell him I am in charge of this expedition, now that we've lost Captain Aristotle. Tell him I represent the organization with which his group has been in contact. Remind him of our agreement. And let him know I expect the full support and cooperation of the forces on the ground. We have an urgent mission to complete, and we've no time to waste on this sort of pantomime.”

Mentally, Ingo took a step back and gave Grabsteen the professional once-over. He tried to picture him at a table in the Rusty Ring, speaking in a tone like this to Bernie Fildermann during an especially hectic lunchtime shift. Bernie was the soul of forbearance and would never have responded in kind; no, he would've gone calmly about taking the customer's order and then, carrying the food to the table, lost his footing and dumped the tray in the fellow's lap.

“It might be better,” Ingo suggested, “if you waited till Marty and Bloom get back.”

“That's not your call, is it?”

“No, but”— regretfully smiling—” if you want a translator…”

Shuvek followed this exchange with a gleam in his weasel eyes. Ingo wondered in passing what sort of character traits would help a man stay alive through the Nazi occupation. Warmheartedness, he guessed, was not among them. Perhaps an instinct for sizing other men up, a knack for
making timely alliances—coupled with a readiness to break them, should circumstances change. One would do well, Ingo thought, to deal cautiously with this man.

Beware of strangers you meet in the forest: the oldest lesson in the fairy-tale book.

It was five in the morning, local time, before the burial was completed. All the Americans wore a dispirited look. It was hard to imagine they still had a march ahead of them. But the surviving members of the Varian Fry Brigade formed up behind Bloom and headed out on a trail chosen by Shuvek—a tight passage between short, bristly pines better suited to wild boar—with minimal chatter and no complaints, and with Grabsteen's blustering speech still untranslated. Ingo watched for signs of a power struggle between the rabbi and the big, intimidating noncom. He saw none. The challenge came instead from Martina, who scooted up behind Bloom and positioned herself dead-center in the trail, elbowing Grabsteen back into third place. Ingo might have found such fractiousness entertaining had he not known Shuvek was seeing it, too.

They walked until the sky grew light and the stars began to fade. All this time there had been little change in the land around them. The pines pressed in monotonously and the terrain neither rose nor fell. But as dawn arrived and the first yellow beams touched the boughs in this stunted woodland—the oldest trees no taller than Ingo could have hurled his weapon—it became clear that they were moving parallel to a gorge whose edges were so sharp it looked like something hacked out by a giant's sword. The landscape was starkly drawn with a narrow palette of colors: dark green of pines and leathery ferns, umber-red where rock faces showed through a thin coverlet of soil, and the unearthly blue of an empty, comfortless sky.

You could believe the world was vast. You could believe there was within it the possibility of escape, independence, sanctuary. Ingo knew better. He knew, from his own life's journey, that the world was finite and confining. What you thought was wilderness was only a walled garden. Every vista was artfully contrived. Each noble tree, each blade of grass and tuft of moss had been placed there in accord with some grand, unknowable design. You trod a path that wound back upon itself, repeating the same actions, meeting the same people and suffering the same disappointments over and over again. Even your mistakes were repetitious; you never did more than retrace the calamitous footsteps of your forebears.

This war was a new thing only in the sense that with practice and growing expertise, the process of destruction had become more efficient, the mechanisms of death more dependable. Apart from that, the mortal agonies of the Third Reich were only the fall of the House of Burgundy all over again. Heroes and villains would be, at the end, not only united in death but nearly indistinguishable, like the bodies in the airplane. Those limbs tangled together there, did they represent some final struggle or a farewell embrace? Was it hatred that drove men to murder or was it an excess of intimacy, the despair of men trapped behind the same wall? Did the Aryan strike down the Jew because he found him strange, a despised and alien thing? Or because he knew him only too well, from having roamed the garden together, having trod the same path side by side— knew him as intimately as one knows a brother or a lover?

The hike ended finally an hour past daybreak. They had reached a spot where the tree cover thickened, pines mixing with taller spruce.

“Here we wait for dark,” declared Shuvek in English. “You rest now.”

The local partisans did not, however, seem inclined to rest themselves, at least not yet. A pair of them moved into positions up and down the trail while a third—the woman—hovered near the Americans, close enough to eavesdrop on their conversations. Ingo guessed it was prudent to assume she understood English. Shuvek headed off through the trees and after a quarter-hour was still gone. It was a relief not to feel those weasel eyes boring into you, yet Ingo felt equally troubled by the man's unexplained absence.

The Yanks settled in to their makeshift camp. Stu and Eddie collected fallen branches and kindled a small fire. Over this they set about boiling water for coffee and heating up tins of processed meat. The woman partisan glared at them and looked nervously at the sky, but Ingo couldn't tell whether this represented a genuine fear of overflying aircraft or a conditioned response brought on by years of running and hiding from every shadow.

“Ain't this grand?” said Stu, leaning back with a hunk of Spam speared on his bayonet. “Clean air, tasty food, good company—and no dishes to wash.”

Ingo sidled over to where Martina, Bloom and Grabsteen were huddled around the charred remnants of a map. It looked like the one Ingo had seen before, with its green and white terrain markings, the jagged scar of the Polish border.

“There's no way to tell how far anything is,” Grabsteen complained.

“It's not far,” said Bloom. “Your little finger is about twenty kilometers
long. That's an easy day's hike, even in this country. Most days you could make thirty. If you really pushed it, you could be in Auschwitz by next week.”

Grabsteen looked affronted, as though this were an actual suggestion. Ingo heard a smirk beside him and turned to see Timo standing there. The Serb appeared very relaxed, in his natural element. But then he'd looked the same manning a taxi on the Anacostia riverfront and shuttling supplies to a Maryland chicken farm. The man was at home everywhere. Which made him nearly the inverse of Ingo, who was at home nowhere at all. Or at any rate, nowhere you could get to in 1944.

If you wanted proof of how small and tangled the world was, Ingo thought, look no further than Timo. Who had somehow, courtesy of Earnest's Hackney Service, made his way from the Balkans to a side street off Dupont Circle, thence to the cold, empty heart of Europe. What sort of pattern could you find in this? Yet there must be some pattern, as there was in all Creation. Even if, at the bottom of it all, lay God's own flaming madness,
Flammenwahnsinn
, just as Heine suspected.

As the morning grew warmer and the Americans finished eating and smoking, a kind of moral stupor set in. The awful events of the night seemed to fade in the sunlight. People unrolled sleeping bags or stretched out wherever they happened to be. Before long most of them were dozing. Ingo sat for a while looking down at Eddie, whose dark hair had fallen across one eye, whose arms were crossed and body folded into a childlike bundle, oblivious. He envied the kid not so much his youth as his ability to just
be
there, to fit in, to float with the current instead of kicking and sputtering against it. Finally he sighed and turned away.

He was exhausted, but could not relax. Perhaps the morning light disturbed him. It seemed unusually harsh, even filtered by a canopy of evergreens. It was like the unsparing light of a public locker room, a merciless illumination in which everything was revealed and nothing looked good.

Restless, he stood and stretched his limbs. The woman partisan threw a catlike glance in his direction. He resented her, standing there like a snoop. So he stepped out of her field of vision, losing himself among the trees— walking with no destination in mind, just needing time to himself. Time and space. A return, however fleeting, to his accustomed state of solitude and secrecy, the nearest thing he had now to a homeland.

Alone in the woods. It felt oddly familiar, as if he'd been here before. His muscles relaxed. He was immensely weary yet also alert, his senses sharpened,
his breathing quiet and slow. After a minute or two he stopped walking and only stood there, inhaling the autumn morning, the smell of fallen needles on damp earth, the sharp upland air. He closed his eyes and listened to the birds quarreling in the treetops, red squirrels chasing each other from branch to branch, a rumor of larger game far off. After an uncertain time he heard a different, stealthier sound. Human feet. Boots mashing the undergrowth, moving quickly in his direction. Ingo touched his Schmeisser but he felt no sense of threat. He was on home ground; he need only hold his position.

Out of the trees stepped Shuvek. The partisan saw Ingo and stopped. His eyes moved down to the gun and back up again. He raised his hands slowly, palms open. For a few moments the two men stood there appraising each other.

“You're the one, aren't you?” Shuvek finally said, in clear though thickly regional German. “The one the Fox asked for.”

Ingo's mouth opened in surprise, but before he could speak the surprise evaporated. A tumbler fell; a puzzle piece dropped into place.

Shuvek smiled. Not a pleasant smile nor a friendly one; still there was something disarming about it, a texture of sincerity. “They said we should expect someone who looked like a German pretending to be a Yank.
That
was some riddle, I thought. Then you showed up.”

He reached around for something on his back. He stopped when Ingo leveled the gun at him.

“No trouble, Kamarad,” he said, with the same smile. “I'm only following instructions. Here, I've got something for you. I'll go as slowly as you like. You can see I am not armed.”

He took off a little rucksack and tossed it lightly in Ingo's direction. It landed softly, like a moccasin. Ingo kept his eye on Shuvek while he bent to pick it up. In the sack was a set of clothing. Ingo shook it out, letting the pieces fall to the ground.

“That's good,” said Shuvek. “Dirty it up a bit. It'll look more natural.”

It was a German army uniform, greenish gray, bearing a sergeant's sleeve insignia and, at the collar, the chevron of the Waffen-SS. “What the hell is this?” said Ingo.

“It's for you to put on. Not now. Later. Soon.”

Ingo glared at the man. He wanted an explanation and didn't want to dig for it.

Shuvek gave a shrug. “Like I said, I only follow instructions. You've come to see the Fox, but that's not so easy to arrange. Not at this stage. The front is collapsing, you know. The Germans are falling back. For
them, that means less territory to patrol. Where you're going, it's thick with blackshirts—I'm talking about regular SS, not the lousy
Hilfi.
It's a question of how to hide an elephant. You know how to hide an elephant, don't you?”