Another Green World (54 page)

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.

The writer himself, Ingo gathered, had been a committed pacifist.

Now…was he hallucinating? Or was there, just ahead, a little cow-boy's vision of Fort Apache? The high wooden stockade, rising out of the waste. No entrance that he could see. At the center, some kind of… watchtower? Too dark to tell.

Hagen signaled them to halt.

“We'll wait here,” he murmured.

Wait for what?

They shared some bread, a heavy dark loaf Magda had made, dry but welcome. The Priest stuck a canteen in Ingo's hand. The liquid that met his tongue had a burning sweetness; one of those horrible Balkan fruit brandies—also welcome. And the evening ticked on.

There was no particular time at which Hagen told them to move. For a while they busied themselves checking their weapons, making sure the clips for the MPs had been filled, Janocz setting the bayonet on his Mauser, Zim the gangster organizing his stock of ammunition and hand grenades
according to a unique system he had developed and no one else understood; perhaps it was just something to do, a private battle ritual. Ingo had noticed that everyone seemed to have a ritual of some kind. Usually simple, kiss your crucifix, button your jacket right to the top, unsnap the field knife at your belt. Uli, the yellow-haired partisan chief, had had a way of becoming absolutely still and staring into nothingness—it looked like a form of prayer or open-eyed meditation. Suddenly he would snap out of it, then be up and moving. Janocz the giant went off to empty his bowels—” Otherwise,” he told them afterward, “I shit myself. Every time, it happens.”

Ingo groped for some ritual of his own, absentmindedly running a hand over his backpack. Yes, the talisman, the book of poetry, was still there.

They went single-file until they were close to the wall. As defenses go, it wasn't much. Ingo had seen more formidable barricades in Brookland, neighbors with tiny backyards who liked their privacy. Still, it was too high to scramble over, and from the look of it too heavily built for even Janocz simply to smash through. What was Hagen's plan? A rope and grappling hook? A grenade taped to the boards?

He led them, counterclockwise, into a little patch of woods that grew right up to the wall. Or rather, the wall had been built so that it zigged into the woods, then made a turn, an angle of perhaps sixty degrees, and zagged out again. Curious. It was quite dark now, no moon yet. When they reached the trees, Hagen switched on a hand lamp.

Ingo's instinct was to flinch, to peer around and see who might be watching. But they were practically touching the wooden planks and could've been spotted only by someone hanging over the top.

As they moved between thin, pale trunks—birches he thought, maybe poplars—he made out the sound of moving water. Not loud, probably just a stream, something you could get across. But when they reached the water he understood that getting across was not what Hagen intended.

The wall had been built in such a way that the stream passed right under it. The beam of Hagen's lamp played across silver-white gleaming water that darted fishlike between ice-covered rocks, then vanished into something like a cave or tunnel. It was neither, really; just an arbitrary point where the builder's excellent plan had come up against a certain unaccommodating reality:
This stream runs right where I want my wall to go.
The builder hadn't yielded an inch, which struck Ingo as very German, though he supposed the French had done much the same with their Maginot Line. The upshot was, if you scrunched down low enough, and didn't mind getting
wet, you could slip under the wall by wading up the streambed—you might have to crawl, just at the end—and then pop out the other side.

It made him shiver to think about. Not only because of the cold. Something tingled within him. He did not believe in premonitions. This was more like a bat's trick of sensing how sound waves bounce off obstacles, only without the bat's clever faculty for interpreting the signals that came back. Eventually, the picture would become clear to him—by then, though, too late.

Meanwhile: the tingle.

When they were close enough, Hagen turned off the hand lamp. They waited awhile, letting their eyes get reaccustomed to the darkness. After half a minute Ingo could not
quite
see the shivering pallor of water in front of him.

Hagen tapped the Priest on an arm.
You first.
Then Zim, then Janocz. Saving Ingo for next to last.

A flash of insanity.
He is sending us in there to die.
But that was impossible, there could be no motive for that.

Still, it was the only time Ingo could think of—ever—that Hagen had chosen not to take the lead. That must mean something, but there was no time to wonder what. He heard a quiet splash, the Priest sucking air through his teeth, a muffled clank of weaponry—the remnants of the partisan-hunting squad moving in for the kill. And behind him, Hagen's breathing, quick and ragged, as though he'd been running a long time and had just a little bit farther to go.

NOVEMBER 1944

Y
ou may not shoot us,” said the red-faced man in the felt cap as the Varianoviks brushed past him, through the gate and up the principal street of Arndtheim. “It is forbidden to harm anyone here. We are under special protection.”

“Oh yeah?” said Tamara. “Protection by who?”

The man started to answer but someone else nearby—a woman, though you could hardly tell under all the wool—made a sound in her throat, not much more than an audible breath, and he shut up. Two other figures stood behind them, indistinct through the veil of falling snow. One was small enough to be a child.

“Well, come then,” said the woman—in English, to Martina's surprise. “Let's go someplace warm.” Her voice was gruff but not, Martina thought, unkind—the voice of a farm wife long accustomed to riding herd on a complicated household.

She led them past houses that looked deserted and a large, barnlike structure that stood partly complete, snow swirling through its rib cage of rafters. Darkness was setting in quickly now. From what Martina could see, the place had not changed in any fundamental way. A new building here and there, a windmill on the green. The biggest surprise was the community hall, which once had served as everything from a school to a public dining room. It had been expanded in the most thoughtless manner— doubled in size and divested of architectural distinction, like the work of some provincial Albert Speer. You could imagine what Ingo would say.

The woman pointed them up a smaller lane toward a rambling, two-story building of the traditional sort. It must have been here during Mar-tina's earlier visit, but in the interim it had grown, spreading from the middle outward like a maturing
Hausfrau.
A sign up front, swinging in the
wind, depicted a fat man holding a stein in one fist and a platter of
Wurst
in the other—an image at once banal and irresistible.

Inside was more of the same. A low ceiling, smoky fire in a wide hearth, tables and chairs of simple design built of chunky blond wood. The walls were made colorful by a collection of paintings, mostly impressions of generic German scenery by so-so artists, though a couple showed flair. And there were posters, which featured not heroic workers and Socialist slogans—the reigning motifs of 1929—but soldiers and farmers, defenders of Europe against a nameless menace symbolized in one instance by what appeared to be a bucktoothed, sickle-wielding Mongolian. The most appealing of the lot, graphically speaking, done in muted greens and earth tones, showed a man plowing his rich brown field while in the background, ghostlike, was a fainter image of the same man in a Wehrmacht uniform, holding a rifle. While Martina could not read the bold Gothic slogan, the image spoke clearly enough: Someday this war will be merely a fading memory, and your reward will be a piece of our newly conquered land.

It was all strange. The electric light was strange, oozing out of parchment shades and small, twinkly bulbs above a mirrored sideboard stocked with bottles and plates and glassware. Strange, too, how the room filled up, going from empty to crowded with no stages in between—people coming through the door, emerging from the shadow of a hallway, seeming to pop up, like gnomes, at all the little tables: Americans, Germans, a couple of kids, a lady who might have been their grandmother. Who knew what anybody was? The red-faced man—breathing in huffs, looking frightened—threw his coat on a hook and assumed the role of innkeeper with the deliberate ease of an actor finding his chalk mark on the stage.

And strangest of all, the illusion of sanity. As though everything here, the comfortable room, the make-believe village, was somehow part of the normal course of affairs. A group of wanderers appears at the village gate—nothing odd there. They happen to be armed to the gonads and speaking a foreign tongue, but never mind that, let them enter, let them warm themselves by our hearth. They are welcome among us, for we are decent German country folk—never mind that we are living in Poland, behind a wooden barricade in a mostly deserted little town that never seemed altogether real in the first place. Never mind that we are surrounded by people who would happily murder us, or that to the east, closer now than a few weeks ago, the Red Army stands in all its bloody, glorious, teeming chaos. Forget all of that, because here, at our little inn, by the reassuring glow of our log fire and our filament bulbs, everything is in order,
alles ist gemütlich.

Martina was not fully mindful of having sat down until the woman, the farm wife, shedding layers of wool, dropped into a chair across the table from her. Grabsteen—suspicious as ever—came to join them. On the varnished wood of the tabletop, mischievous little hands had scratched words and initials Martina couldn't interpret and a crude drawing she could. We are on a set, she thought—but a damn good one, well dressed, every detail thought out. The work of a Lubitsch, a Wilder, an Ophuls, one of those Jewish masters who fled the Nazis and wound up in Hollywood. Only this one had stayed behind, like Isaac. Stubborn, disbelieving, apolitical…it didn't matter. Suddenly history lurched, and it was too late for Hollywood, too late for anything. The trap had closed.

Bloom's voice rang through the room, “I need vol-un-
teers”—
climbing in volume and pitch on each syllable. “Teams of two, get flashlights, search every inch of this place. Go into every house, look behind every bush. I want to know exactly what we're dealing with here.”

“I'll go,” Tamara said. “Come on, Zilman.”

“That is not necessary,” the woman at the table said quietly. Her hair was silver; Martina got the idea it had turned prematurely and not so long ago. “We are but twelve, all counted, including the children. There used to be more—at one time, over two hundred—but the others…”

“I remember you,” Martina said all at once, surprising herself. She strained to retrieve the memory, which had slipped almost out of reach: a tired-looking young woman, always half stooping, whether picking up discarded toys or gently scolding a small, flaxen-haired girl. “You were some-body's mother. Was it… Helga?”

“Hildi,” said the woman, maybe confused, though not very much so, staring thoughtfully at Martina. “Hilda, really. I am somebody's mother still. Soon, God willing, shall I be somebody's grandmother. And you— you are American.” She spoke as if this were perfectly logical. Americans? Yes, one had known they would come eventually.

“If you two don't mind,” said Harvey Grabsteen, his voice honed to that cutting timbre that causes people around the world to glance over their shoulders, thinking rude thoughts in a hundred languages, “maybe you could save Old Home Week for some other time. It's urgent, first of all, that we obtain provisions. Food, in particular. And second”— this to the German woman—” we need to know whatever you can tell us about partisan activity in this area. There's a certain Underground leader we need to contact. The matter is of historical importance, and you've got to help us.”

He did not need to add,
or else.
Martina was embarrassed by him, his presence, his attitude, though at bottom she felt no differently. She was as
anxious to find Isaac as anyone, and fully understood what was at stake. It was why she had come here and why she'd dragged Ingo along.
Ingo
, she thought with a pang. Poor Ingo.

The woman at the table studied Grabsteen through clear gray eyes that struck Martina as intelligent, troubled and unnaturally detached. Hanna, was that her name? You got the feeling she was not fully present, that this pushy Yank didn't seem entirely real to her. Well, who could argue with that? Yet something else was going on, Martina was sure. A subplot, and hardly a comic one.