Another Green World (59 page)

“It matters,” said Grabsteen.

For once, neither Martina nor Ingo disagreed.

After a while they got tired of asking questions, tired of Hagen's resolute silence and tiredest of all, probably, of how he seemed barely to register their presence, as if they were no more than ghosts. They might be doing their best to haunt him, but this was a man accustomed to being haunted; he'd seen his share of ghosts more gruesome and terrifying than these could ever be.

It was time for Bloom to go on watch. That was their stated reason for breaking off the interrogation. A more honest reason might have been that this German officer in his black uniform, in some manner none of them could pin down, was starting to unnerve them. His proximity was oppressive. We won't kill him, they decided, not just yet. We'll stick him in a room somewhere, back at the inn, maybe, where we can keep an eye on him.

So they prodded him at gunpoint—the whole pack of them, safety in numbers—across the green and up the narrow staircase. They chose a room at the very end of the hall and lashed his wrists together and tethered his ankles to a bedpost. They kicked a chamber pot in his direction. Finally they stood looking down at him, while Hagen sat on a corner of the bed looking at who knows what. His own private horror show. Or maybe a comedy, a bit of fluff to amuse our boys on leave from the front. Sing along with Zarah Leander now, lads; in the morning it's back to hell.

“Somebody ought to stand guard,” Bloom said, though he didn't stick around to argue the point. He had saddled himself with coat and rifle and was already lumbering to the door. “I don't think he can wiggle loose. But you never know.”

“I'll stay,” Ingo said—too readily, perhaps. Martina gave him a look, but it was only a look, he thought. She doesn't suspect anything.

What might she have suspected, though?

There was a time.

All those years ago, the very thought
alone with Hagen
would've shot through him like an electric charge. A complex charge, positive and negative at once. In which respect, was anything different now?

Alone with Hagen. In a room at a cozy inn, somewhere near the end of the world, in a storybook version of Germany.

There was a time: it was true. Incredible as it now seemed, Ingo knew those days had really happened; they had dawned as punctually as this one and set as surely this must, too. Yet they seemed infinitely long ago, before winter and war and loss had even been thought of. A different Ingo had lived in a different body then.

I feel the breeze of another planet.
Hardly a stranger one, though. A different Ingo, but not a greater fool. And a different Hagen…but still the same enigma.

Who are you?
Ingo wanted to ask. But he did not speak, and neither for a while did he look at Hagen directly. He moved from corner to corner in the room, paused to glance out the window at Arndtheim, a paradoxical place that was dying and gaining new residents at the same time. He walked to the door and closed it, unable to bear the sounds of Hildi's pain on top of everyone else's. Then he crossed the room again to the only chair, near the window, and sat down. The light fell starkly on Hagen's prematurely aged face.

Now, at last, you dare to look at him. And quickly away, for he is looking straight back at you. Muster your resolve; raise your eyes to meet his.

Hagen said: “I would never have wished that harm should come to him.”

Precisely that, for the German construction admitted no ambiguity. Much will be lost in precision, poorly recompensed in snap and color, when English muscles in as the international language of scholarship. “When?” Ingo asked—meaning, as Hagen must have understood, in which world? This one or that, ersatz or authentic?

Hagen shifted on the bed. He did not intend, perhaps, to draw attention to the bonds at his wrists. Ingo's hand almost,
almost
, moved to the knife on his belt—as if for an instant it was controlled by a will other than his own. More likely, his own will was not the firm, dependable thing he might have wished. A very old problem.

“You are blind,” said Hagen. “Always, you were blind. You look at a thing and see…I don't know. Not what is there, truly. Also with a person—you look at him and you see a character from a story. The role, not the actor.”

“I don't think so,” said Ingo, which was honest enough. He could see what Hagen meant, though.

“Na ja. So, tell me, who then is Isaac? Who then am I? Not, what part do we play.”

Ingo considered. Remembered. He kept quiet a long time. Hagen kept
quiet as well, though note that he does not take his eyes off you. He is making a point: he is stronger in captivity than you in freedom.

Well, fuck that. He's just a prisoner. He counts for nothing now, if he ever did. As far as you're concerned, he is faceless and nameless. You will conduct your interrogation, and once you're satisfied with his responses, you will leave.

“Here's what
I
think,” said Ingo, somewhat fortified. “For starters, I think you set us all up back then. Isaac especially. I think you tracked us to the Leuchtenburg and pretended to warn us that your Jungdo buddies were looking to kick our ass. But the whole thing was a con. Your plan was to tip your pals off, first chance you got, as to where they could find us. And that's exactly what you did, because that's how it all played out.”

You sit back, awaiting his reaction. It comes in his own good time.

“Tell me what you remember, exactly,” the prisoner said. “Not at the Leuchtenburg. After that, here, in Silesia. Tell me the story. Of this”— now a measured pause, holding at arm's length the fatal word—” betrayal.”

“No,” said Ingo. “I don't have to do that.”

“That is true.”

“I don't owe you anything.”

“Of course not.”

“You know, you're lucky I didn't kill you. Because I could have. I ought to have. Back in the woods.”

“Which woods?”— pinning you with his glance.

You understand, too well, that he is asking not
where
but
when.
The frozen woods of 1944? Or the enchanted forest of 1929?
I don't know
, you say, perhaps too quickly, and only to yourself.

Of course you're lying.

Es war einmal
, that's how they begin. Once upon a time.
Es war einmal
, three boys went into the forest. It was a beautiful warm day. One boy was very pale, with hair as white as summer clouds and eyes as blue as the sky. The second boy had red hair and a comical face with freckles and a mouth that was too wide and a nose as big as Pinocchio's. And the third boy, though he must have been there, was invisible.

These boys walked for what might have been hours, or it might have been only minutes, for in the forest, in those days, time behaved differently than it does now. After a while they came to a river. The river was full of quick-moving water that sparkled like diamonds and tickled your skin like
a thousand shivering elvers, because it had flowed down all the way from the land of werewolves and it still held the cold of snowy peaks and also a certain mysterious power, the magic of transformation: it could change truth into fantasy, happy dreams into nightmares.

The boys took off their shoes and stuck their feet into the water, but it was too shallow for swimming and the rocks too slippery to wade out on. Then the pale boy said, There's a place where the water is deeper, where we can jump in and swim. Swell, the red-haired boy said. And the other boy said nothing, because in addition to being invisible he had no voice.

Now you may ask how the pale one knew about the place where the water was deep. But you will never learn the answer, even if you think hard about it for fifteen years.

The boys followed the river downstream and finally came to an old wooden bridge, the sort of bridge trolls like to live under. But under this bridge there was only water, clear and deep and blue and cold, though not so cold you didn't want to swim in it. By now, the day had grown quite warm and the boys were tired from all that walking.

The pale boy said, I am going to dive in from up there, and pointed up at the old wooden bridge. And the red-haired boy said, You think it's deep enough? And the invisible boy thought,
No, it isn't
, but he could not say so.

So the pale boy began taking off his clothes, and so did the red-haired boy. As to the third boy, who can say?

Now, the pale boy's body was beautiful. Yet even so, you feared to touch it, on account of its hardness, and also because of a dangerous power it seemed to possess.

The red-haired boy was not beautiful, but really quite odd. His limbs were gangly and his neck too thin, his ears altogether too large. Yet you did not fear to touch this unlovely body, and in fact you would have enjoyed touching it, on account of its warmth, and also because of an attracting energy it seemed to possess.

As to the third boy, who can say whether he was fat or thin, handsome or hideous? Perhaps he had no body at all—only a pair of invisible eyes that watched the other two boys clamber onto the old wooden bridge, and a secret heart that swelled with envy and longing.

They climbed and dove and came up spluttering, and they dunked each other and floated on their backs and kicked themselves leisurely to shore. And so the hours passed or perhaps only an instant, for time was behaving so strangely that it might have stopped running entirely. At last they hauled themselves onto a big rock that was warm from the afternoon sunshine.
But by then the sun was falling low, and the rock was mostly in shadow, and as the naked boys lay there they began to feel cold.

We ought to put our clothes on
, the invisible boy wanted to say, though he had no voice to say it.

We ought to light a fire, the pale boy said, in a voice clear and strong.

All right! said the red-haired boy, who had no intention of putting his clothes on, even though goose bumps were forming on his unlovely but magically attracting skin. You got matches?

We don't need matches, the pale boy said. He dug into the pack he carried everywhere and drew out of it a magnifying glass such as a young naturalist might carry into the woods. All we need, he said, is kindling. And he looked at the invisible boy, whom he seemed to be able to see just then, and said, Go look for some dry leaves, and some little twigs, and some bigger branches for when it gets going.

The invisible boy did not think to ask why he should gather kindling while they just lounged on the rock. It might have been that he had no mouth to ask such a question, only a pair of eyes and a heart that caused him mainly sorrow. So he did as he was bidden and returned in no time at all, for time had stopped running. But while he was gone, a terrible change had occurred.

On the rocks before him, lower down than before, just at the edge of the water, the red-haired boy lay as one who is dead. His eyes were closed, and blood was all over his unlovely skin.

The pale boy was kneeling over him and the backpack he carried everywhere was open with its contents spilled about. In one hand the pale boy held a long strip of cloth such as a young assassin might use to strangle his victims. In the other, a knife of fearsome length and sharpness. Hearing footsteps, he froze like a statue, his face as cold as a snow-topped mountain, his eyes as blue and empty as the sky.

Now the third boy, who must not have been invisible any longer, did not give thought to the awful scene that lay before him. It might have been that his actions were guided only by a heart that pumped with horror and rage. But at least his voice had returned to him, and he let out a frightful bellow. Then he set upon the pale boy, heedless of his assassin's tools, and it seemed likely that one or the other must presently die.

Suddenly, the third boy felt a terrible sharp pain in his side and looked down to find that his body was visible once more, with a long and fearsome knife sticking into it. And he froze like a statue, if a statue that was magically bleeding.

At this, the pale boy leapt up and grabbed his clothes from the rock, then ran off into the forest.

The now-visible boy stood looking at the knife dangling from one side of his belly. And though it caused him pain and there was an alarming amount of blood, it seemed to him that the knife had not actually stuck in very deep. Certainly it had not penetrated to his vital organs, owing in part to the thickness with which these organs were girded with flesh around the boy's middle. And when he put a hand to the knife, it fell with a clang to the rock.

The boy made a bandage for himself, using a length of the assassin's cloth he cut to size with the murderous blade. It might have been that, by now, his brain had started to work again. And it is certain that time was running once more, because the sun dropped ever lower behind the trees. And still the red-haired boy lay on the rocks, as still as death.

Yet he was alive. His thin chest rose and fell, the heart beat strongly beneath his unlovely skin. The now-visible boy lifted him up like a child and laid him on a softer patch of ground, away from the water. Then he took his own shirt and dipped it in the stream and began to clean the other's wounds. As he wiped the blood away he saw that the wounds were mainly on the knees and the hands and the forehead, and that of these the one on the forehead was worst. It lay just under the thick red hair at the front, as if an assailant had bashed him with a rock. Though as the third boy's brain continued slowly to work, indeed as it worked without stopping for the next fifteen years, he began to see that there could be another explanation.

There was no question of moving the red-haired boy that night. Hours went by, and he lay there as one who has fallen into an enchanted sleep. Making a fire was now impossible, for the young naturalist's magnifying glass was useless without the sun. So the third boy did the best he could; he pulled the injured boy's clothes back onto the unlovely body and lay down beside him, holding the other boy close, sharing his own body's warmth. Thus they spent the night, and all that while the now-visible boy's heart was filled with strong feelings of many kinds. He felt confusion and fright. He felt anger. He felt hope. Despair warred with determination in his breast. Hatred for the one boy wrestled with a feeling for the other that he could not name, or perhaps chose not to.