Another Green World (34 page)

Butler slid tentatively back into the bison-leather upholstery. The chair was built for the Teutonically postured, hence a bad fit for the average Western spine, which yearned to slouch. “All right, what's this about?” he said. If he were to be regarded as a damn American, he might as well behave like one. “Why this little tête-à -tête in a death camp?”

“Because it is not the only such place.” Puak leaned forward from his perch on the bed. “Nor the largest. Nor the most horrific. I wanted you to see it by way of preparation.”

“Preparation. For what?”

“For your assignment. The difficult business ahead.”

“I thought my assignment was to grab a piece of paper.”

“Just so. But not an ordinary sort of paper—no, this is rather like the parchment on which Tacitus scrawled his
Germania.
A seed, you might say, from which a new and dangerous mythology could emerge.”

Butler stared at him. You did grow tired, at times, of the little man's parables. “I thought we were getting down to business.”

Puak gave a gentle laugh. “And so we are. You are a man who likes stories, Comrade Sammy, isn't that so? You like to hear them, but especially you like to tell them. Let us think then for a moment how you would tell the story of what happened here at Majdanek. You would make it out to be a tragedy, I expect. Not in Aristotle's meaning of the term, but in the commonplace sense: a stage strewn with corpses. There is even a
deus ex machina—
the T-34 crashing with Olympian power through the gate, its hatch popping open to reveal a strange being with almond eyes.”

Butler only shrugged. “Okay, a tragedy. Maybe. Why not? Love the almond eyes, that's a nice touch.”

“Very well. Now, at the center of this story there is a man, the prime mover of events, by whose command such places as Majdanek came into being. This man might be thought of as the villain, but the role does not fit him. For one thing, he never appears onstage. For another, he is no mere foil for the protagonist—and who is
that
, by the way? No, this man is more than a villain. He has assumed the godly prerogative of life and death; he has dared to reshape the world to his own design. He is guilty, that is to say, of the classic sin of
hubris
, which we know to be the downfall of tragic heroes. He must be the hero, then—the dark and terrible protagonist of the story that will be told of this place, and of the war at large.”

Butler did not need to give this a lot of thought. “That's ridiculous. Pure sophistry. Hitler's no hero. You said yourself, this isn't a tragedy as the Greeks understood it. It's something unique to the twentieth century. Call it an epic horror picture. Hitler's the producer, the DeMille. Which is why you never see him on-screen.”

Puak knitted his fingers. “Perhaps that is saying much the same thing. In any case, it shares the same problem. Everything revolves around a single man. The masses who fought and died are relegated to the chorus. Moreover, in this version, the story has no historic meaning. It becomes merely a case study in exceptionalism, like one of your Horatio Alger fables: a man can accomplish anything if he sets his mind to it. But is this the kind of story good Communists want to tell their grandchildren?”

“Tell me a different one.”

Puak rose from the bed. He stood near the hearth, making a strange figure there: the little Slav in his silk jacket, dwarfed by massive German stonework. “Of course, I lack your narrative gift. Yet it occurs to me, this tale might be spun as a piece of popular history, an exciting yet very distant-seeming object lesson that shows, among other things, how far we have come as a people, how much different and better is the world we live in today. Consider the story of the Crusades, a fantastic account of knights in shining armor marching off to glory—or to death, if that be their fate—under the banner of Christianity. Better perhaps, think of the Black Plague, a horror raging unchecked across the land, its symptoms hideous, its causes unknown—it was commonly felt to be a sign of God's displeasure—wiping out families, entire villages, erasing centuries of progress. Such stories fire the imagination. And in the hands of a politically astute narrator, they also have practical uses. They impart useful lessons about the folly of religion, the life-saving power of science.”

“The Nazis liked the one about the Crusades, too,” Butler said. “But they read something different into it.”

Puak rounded on him. “The point is that in such tales, the motive power is no longer an individual man. It is a broader thing, a widely distributed force—the people as a whole, an entire epoch. Surely our present story, of death camps and Blitzkriegs and deportations, the whole Nazi saga, can be better understood in such a telling. Not as tragedy, with a single protagonist, but as a horrifying, yet safely distant, saga from an age long past. Because then, you see, it will have a lesson to impart.”

“That the noble Soviet peasant always triumphs over Fascist Crusaders?”

Puak gave Butler an indulgent smile. “I would put it differently. Capitalism, with its stratified society and its Darwinian ethic of competition, must always lead to conflict. And the victims of that conflict must always be those most distant from the rulers, in terms of race or class or geography. Whatever its cultural achievements, and its pretense of morality, Capitalist society is at its core barbaric. Strip away its pleasant material trappings, as was done to Germany after the last war, and the inner beast emerges. No institution in Western society has the power to tame it, indeed none finds it advantageous to do so. They all, as you say, are in on the deal.”

“Maybe so. But it's academic, isn't it? You can't dictate how people who aren't even born yet are going to think.”

“No? Perhaps not. But I believe we may exert some influence, at least.

We may, for a start, manage to dethrone the tragic hero. We cannot write him out of the story, any more than you can rid the Crusades of Richard Lion-Heart. But we can deny him the leading role.”

“And how, dare I ask, are we going to do that?”

Puak turned from the fire, casting his expression into shadow. “If indeed there exists a document proving that all this”— flicking a hand toward the death camp outside the walls—” is the responsibility of one man, a single deranged mind whose force of will once held an entire continent in thrall …” He looked at Butler, his dark eyes glinting in the orange firelight, his lips forming a spider's smile. “If such proof exists, then your task is to find it and destroy it. A tale so great and terrible must have only one meaning.

“The correct one.”

NOVEMBER 1944

D
olina Zimnej Wody—Cold Water Valley—possessed a naked beauty Ingo found unnerving. Every feature was exaggerated. The riverbeds were gouged from sheer rock like battle scars. The water coursing through them ran so icy and blue you feared to drink it, lest the chill go right to your bones. On all sides the Tatry Mountains climbed at a pitch that seemed geologically implausible, shooting upward to peaks that might have been honed by a storm-god's ax. Life clung precariously to the land here: sand-colored wisps where grasses had waved in summer; dark holds of spruce whose ragged tips imitated the mountaintops; more rarely, stripped-down blackened stalks of some native flower jutting from gaps between pale gray rocks, their pods rattling faintly with the tiny seeds inside.

This land was shaped with no regard for soft-skinned creatures. And so history had flowed around it, crossing and recrossing the Polish plain to the north, creeping east onto the Ukrainian steppe, welling like a tide from the old imperial cities in the south. The war, too, had mostly bypassed the Tatrys, as it had the rest of Carpathia. But now the Reich was collapsing like an empty bag and the bloodied remnants of the Wehrmacht were retreating, mostly on foot, into territory they had skirted in the heady days of the Blitzkrieg. It was partisan-held territory, according to one school of thought. According to another—the thinking to which Ingo's guides subscribed—it was held by no one and never had been. Inherently, and like no other place in Europe, on account of its roughness and isolation, the land belonged only to itself.

Ingo had set out two days ago with the partisan Shuvek and the yellow-haired man who spoke like a Sudeten German and whom Ingo believed to be the chief of the guerrilla encampment. He was called Uli—short for
Ulrich?— but of course his given name could be anything. No one talked much, which was a relief; Ingo needed every ounce of energy for coping with the journey. And he wanted his thoughts to himself.

What these thoughts were was not easy to say. To an extent that surprised him, his mind was simply open, like a window, admitting views. These shifted from time to time, but certain things came around repeatedly, shifting
Leitmotive
that included another journey he had taken a long time ago.
Journey
made too much of it; all it had been was a drive into the country. Ingo was about to turn twelve. It was his first Boy Scout camping trip. He was frantic with anxiety; he had never spent a night away from home or needed to relieve himself in a place without indoor conveniences. He sat tensely in the backseat of somebody's rattling Ford with his friend Timmy Nye. Timmy was slender and confident, someone to whom the business of boyhood came naturally. As such he was of great interest to Ingo, who made a continuing study of his characteristics: how he wore his clothes, how he walked, how he behaved toward other boys. Riding in an automobile was itself an unusual experience—Ingo felt slightly carsick— and riding in an automobile to a place in the woods near Olney, Maryland, where he must survive without home or family for an entire weekend was without precedent.

But what he remembered most clearly now, from this distant perspective, was that during that car trip, in spite of his queasiness and dread, he had felt paradoxically happy, even strangely at peace. He had treasured every moment, each glimpse of the unfamiliar landscape, every breath of country air through the car's open windows. Because he knew that very soon now, before he was ready, the journey would be over.

They made frequent stops, at times and places chosen by Uli. Ingo supposed this was on his own account. He didn't mind. His leg muscles were all but spent, and the coarse fabric of the German uniform, which was the proper size but somehow wrongly proportioned, chafed the skin raw at his neck and his knees. In early afternoon they halted in a sunny hollow that narrowed to the northwest, its slopes littered with rocks the color of old newspaper. Ingo had nearly dozed off when he heard the sound of an airplane. It was impossible to guess which direction it was coming from until suddenly the plane appeared in a gap between the mountains: a two-engine craft, painted gray, buzzing along at low altitude.

“Russian,” Shuvek said, indifferently.

Uli was prying at a rock with a length of sun-bleached wood.

“What are the Russians doing way out here?” said Ingo.

Shuvek shrugged. “No one knows what the Russians are doing anywhere. Except smashing the Germans to a bloody pulp.”

“It's too low to be a reconnaissance flight,” said Uli, more deliberatively. “They might be dropping supplies to their partisans.”

“Are
their
partisans different from your partisans?”

Uli gave him a wistful half-smile. “We have an enemy in common. For the moment, that's what matters. To the Russians as well.”

“Yet here we sit,” Shuvek noted sourly, “the three of us, speaking the enemy's language.”

Ingo decided to voice the question that had been tugging at him. “Where do you come from, Uli? You don't sound much like a Czech.”

Uli looked thoughtful for a moment. “As to where I come from, that's easy—a place called either Bratislava or Pressburg, depending on where a certain line falls on your map. As to what I am, whether I am a Czech, or speak as a Czech ought to speak, these are questions I cannot answer, and indeed questions I might never have troubled myself over, had it not been for Uncle Adolf.” He stared at Ingo, his eyes rimmed in pink from long weariness. “You cannot understand this, I think. To be American is simple, a matter of having a piece of paper stating your citizenship. There is no question of blood, or ancestral homelands, or borders that move from one place to another.”

Ingo wasn't so sure America was as simple as that. But Shuvek went on: “Do you think so? This one here, he doesn't seem like a Yank to me.”

“Have you known many Americans?” Uli asked gently.

Shuvek shook his head. “No need to. I know what Americans are like. Just the way I knew what Germans were like, before they ever came and started shooting people. Some things you don't need to see up close to understand.”

Uli frowned. “Perhaps you're right.”

“Have you ever met the Fox?” said Ingo.

Shuvek gave him a sharp look. Uli said slowly, “I have met him. And he does seem very much an American to me. An American of a certain type. If that is what you're asking.”

It was. And Uli's reply reassured him somewhat, but also gave him a strange, shaky feeling. He was almost there now. Only one person away.

The method of the partisans was to travel around the clock: move a while, rest a while, move again. They stayed in the hollow until the sun dipped
below the neighboring ridge, then headed off toward a pass that would take them through a turn-of-the-century spa village and ultimately to the Polish frontier. Timing was important; Uli wanted to reach the village just after nightfall. The problem was that near the border they must travel by roadway; the High Tatrys were too difficult to cross otherwise, even for seasoned climbers. But the road was narrow and in places ran along the edge of deep mountain lakes, with no place to flee or to hide short of diving into the icy water. If they were caught by a German patrol there was no way out, they would have to stand and fight. And there were only three of them. And one of them was Ingo.

He made a quick inventory. He still carried his stubby little Schmeisser, which by now felt almost comfortable, snug in its leather sling at his elbow. His uniform came with a supply belt of the standard German type, holding a bread bag, bayonet, ammo pouch and water canteen. His backpack contained a frayed wool blanket, a few stick-type hand grenades and a volume of poetry. All these things—the poems as well—came from the German soldier whose body, now rotting somewhere, this uniform had fit.