Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  And with no further ceremony Martina allowed herself to be hustled up the stairs.

  How many years has Ingo been living here? And still the place looks like he hasn't settled in. The rooms feel vacant, airless, as if the windows haven't been opened since the Coolidge administration (it is just possible they have not), and the furnishings might have been chosen by some long-dead aunt. Only the distinctive sag of an armchair, recognizably similar in shape to a certain present-day bottom, hints at current habitation. Beside it, a three-legged table holds a reading lamp and one slender volume, hardbound, jacketless. Ever hopeful, Martina lifts the cover. Love Poems of August von Platen (1796‒1835). Ex libris Dead Auntie.

  “Okay, Marty.” Ingo rounded the damask corner of a love seat and drew up with arms folded, countenance grim. “Spill.”

  She drew a breath. From this point forward, everything hung on how he would react.

  “You know what I do for a living,” she began.

  “Move paper from one basket to another, I should think, like everyone else down there.” Quickly he raised a hand, forestalling her. “Wait, yes, I know—you've been in the papers. Something to do with displaced persons, liberated prisoners, that kind of thing.”

  “That kind of thing. But it goes well beyond that. May I sit?”

  “Please.”

  She settled into his armchair—was that an act of covert aggression?— gripping the big handbag by its clasp. “The truth is, Ingo, and I'm saying this off the record, the Board is more or less a personal undertaking of Henry Morgenthau's. He strongly believes”— hastening here, ignoring Ingo's de rigueur grimace at the name of the Secretary, her boss, a notorious bleeding heart and, incidentally, the only Jew in FDR's cabinet— “believes very strongly that the United States has a moral obligation toward the victims of Nazi racial policies.”

  “Nazi, racial, policies.” Ingo pronounced the words with elaborate care, as if weighing each on his tongue. “Sounds like a euphemism.”

  “You could say that. In plain language, we're talking about murder. Murder on an unprecedented scale.”

  “I thought the term for that was war.”

  “I'm not talking about the war, Ingo. This isn't soldiers killing other soldiers. What I'm talking about—what's happening over there is…”

  While she groped for words, Ingo lowered himself to the love seat with a noisy exhalation, coming to rest in conspicuous discomfort. “I should think, Marty, in your position, with your access to classified reports and whatnot, you'd have developed a more skeptical attitude toward that sort of overblown rhetoric. It's normal in warfare, isn't it, to accuse the other side of atrocities, war crimes, all that? Keeps the blood hot, pumps up support on the home front. ‘Why We Fight,’ as revealed to Frank Capra. Gives us all a chance to take part. They also serve who sit and preach.”

  “This isn't propaganda, Ingo.”

  “I'm not saying we're as bad as they are. Don't think I'm saying that.”

  “I know what you're saying. Just—listen to me.”

  He made a little show of impatience, tapping his toes, glancing at his watch. Somehow, in her laying of plans, she had pictured him sitting here like an attentive schoolboy while she explained the facts of life in a brisk, no-questions-till-I'm-done-please voice—that voice employed to such good effect by a series of interchangeable nuns while she and Ingo sat side by side, backs quite straight, children, thank you, at Francis Xavier Elementary. In a land like ours, boys and girls, only very far away, bad men are taking all the little Jewish children and putting them on trains, and making them breathe bad air, and then burning them. But now she could see how Ingo would take that—roughly the same as the press and the War Department and the key people on the Hill were taking it. Only more so. It was not, she had come to think, a matter of disbelief. It was an incapacity to imagine. Like you couldn't imagine a sky full of swirling yellow blobs until Van Gogh painted one for you. Then voilà, of course, I see it now. How marvelous! How frightful! Surely not all of them.

  All of them—but how to spell that out for Ingo, the instinctual unbeliever? The Nazis are artists, true geniuses, and their medium is immorality. No: the only way forward was the most brutal and direct, a blow to the heart.

  “You're right.” She fixed him in a particular kind of stare: Oh, you poor, uninformed civilian. “I do have access to classified reports—look, I've brought a few along. Care to join me in breaking the law?”

  She thought she saw his shoulders twitch. Unclasping the handbag—a bit of improvisation here, yielding to a sudden impulse toward violence— she tipped it upside down. A blizzard of daily briefing sheets, memoranda, transcripts, petitions, press clippings, statistical abstracts, railway timetables and fourth-layer carbons on onionskin stormed down, entombing Platen, spilling over onto the drab Edwardian rug.

  For seconds the two of them sat there, joined in a state of mild astonishment. Ingo shook his head. “When I said spill, Marty…”

  A giggle escaped her. Like an ear-pop, a sudden equalizing of pressure. It seemed to her that Ingo was struggling to conceal a smile.

  “God,” she said, “I'm sorry. I didn't mean—”

  He waved it off. No need for apologies between old pals, right? “I get the impression, Marty, that you feel you need to demonstrate something to me. I wonder why.”

  Not I wonder what.

  With the practiced eye of a bureaucrat, she parsed the seeming chaos of paperwork. Daintily she plucked up this and this and that, shuffled them together and pressed them on Ingo in the order she deemed most likely to persuade. A State Department circular, distribution limited, three pages dense with columns and numbers, drafted by an expert in Slavic languages not eager to share his trade secrets. A map of the Carpathian Mountains, Count Dracula's old stomping grounds. A crumpled photo spread from an Australian Socialist weekly, The Anvil, cheaply printed, brittle to the touch. Last, deceptively slight, a square of brown paper just larger than needed to roll a cigarette. Ingo accepted the pile incuriously.

  “What you're looking at”— she fingered the topmost sheet—” is our best recent tally of resistance organizations in Central Europe. First column name, second column numerical strength—that's a guess, of course—and third operational status. ‘A’ means fully active, ‘I’ is for intelligence services only, ‘S’ for groups devoted primarily to sabotage—you get the idea. ‘NI’ means no information available.”

  “A lot of NIs, aren't there.”

  “Small wonder. You'll notice they tend to coincide with the groups whose strength is given at less than twenty. What happens usually is, these smaller outfits get rounded up and shot. Or they may simply be out of contact. Our information isn't perfect. A lot of it comes via the British, who may or may not be sharing everything they know.”

  “I thought we were on the same side.”

  Martina flashed him the look one reserves for the hopelessly naïve. “You'll notice toward the end, something called the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa or ZOB. That's the Jewish Fighting Organization.”

  Ingo glanced down. “Another NI.”

  She resisted the urge, which his air of kingly indifference provoked in her, to throw the handbag at him. “The ZOB was formed in the ghettos during the early stages of occupation. There were plenty of people around to fight in those days, but mostly they took a wait-and-see attitude: you know, maybe we can get through this, there've been pogroms before, we always manage to survive.” She shrugged, what can you do, recognizing in the gesture her grandmother again. “Now the wait-and-see is over, only there's nobody left to do the fighting.”

  She paused long enough for Ingo to ask a question, the simplest one: Why? But he didn't—people never did. It was odd, but she knew the pattern by now. Like a blind spot, into which, at one blink, a whole race had vanished. Ingo continued to stare at the page on which the ZOB still enjoyed a hypothetic existence.

  “So the next thing there, the map, shows roughly the distribution of resistance force
s, principal areas of German anti-partisan operations, Underground safe zones. The Xs mark recent major engagements. Of course the situation is highly fluid. And I should add, our intelligence, such as it is, is always out of date. What you've got there reflects our best guess at how things stood about six weeks ago. Since then, Tito has swallowed a bigger chunk of Yugoslavia. German strength in Slovakia is building up as the line shifts west. And as of last month, the Red Army has liberated a whole sweep of Poland.”

  Ingo tightened his lips. “Wouldn't the appropriate term be reconquered?”

  “Sure, I get it. They're Communists, so everything they do is evil. Even if it contributes to an Allied victory.” She regretted saying this immediately. Escaping into the briar patch of squabbling would suit Ingo fine. By way of atonement she surrendered the armchair and joined Ingo on the love seat, squeezing in all chummy-like.

  “There in red,” she went on more calmly, pointing at a squiggle that snaked like a garden hose through the mountains on the Czech-Polish frontier, “you can see where the ZOB might be operating, assuming it still exists. The main concentration, near Warsaw, was wiped out last autumn. Survivors trickled east into the Pripet Marshes and merged with the Ukrainian Jewish Brigade, under the direct control of Moscow. But a local band or two might be left down here.”

  She gave him a moment to absorb this. The wicked Reds are over there; don't worry about them, they're not even on the map. While down here, God willing, is the ZOB. “And in fact, if you look at this newspaper clipping, you'll see evidence that a small resistance group, whose leader, at least, is a Jew, has been active in recent months in exactly this region.”

  Ingo examined the photo spread as though it were printed in some unfamiliar language. Which in a sense it was: the language of class struggle, Nazism as a terminal case of Late Capitalism, the war as the death rattle of an oppressive world order, all pitched with a broad Australian accent. The story recounted the exploits of workers and peasants waging a secret war of liberation. Grainy photographs showed ruined bridges, a train lying half on its side, tiny figures waving sticks—could they be rifles?— from atop the caboose, smoke rising in a black funnel from what was purported to be a Wehrmacht ammunition depot. Pride of place belonged to a deep-lens shot of someone identified as “the revered commander of this valiant cadre of proletarian fighters.” The photo had been magnified well beyond the limits of fidelity; it could have been anyone, anything, man or woman, golem, clotheshorse, melting snowman in jacket and cap. Beneath it, a caption: “Known as the Little Fox, this is the only known likeness of a nameless revolutionary hero.”

  Ingo said, “Bit of trouble with that syntax, don't you think?” but this struck Martina as weak cover. He couldn't drag his eyes off the picture. Some arresting quality there, though you couldn't quite put a finger on it. Was it the cock of the head, the hint of an insolent stare? The slouch in the shoulders? Something, not quite heroic… inspiring, perhaps. Or lucky— at least that. Lucky for now. In the long run, almost certainly doomed. And the revolutionary hero knows it. You can tell, somehow—he knows, he doesn't care. The fight goes on if only for the hell of it. I resist, therefore I am. The world has grown dark, the sun of Weimar has long set, but the nameless fighter pretends not to have noticed. Just one more inning, Ma, come on, we're not even hungry.

  Ingo glanced up. “Are you trying to tell me,” he said calmly enough, as though it wouldn't have mattered either way, “that this Little Fox actually is Isaac?” There was no need to say more. The picture was nobody they knew, nobody they could know. It was a Rorschach splatter: feel free to project whatever you like on it, just don't expect Ingo to play along.

  “But look,” she told him.

  “Look at what?”

  “In your hand.”

  He was still holding the scrap of brown paper, covered densely with a dark, semi-legible scrawl. What's this now?

  “It came clipped to the tear sheet,” she said, as if that explained everything. The note was not signed.

  Ingo read it out, one phrase at a time, as he deciphered them. “‘ Thought this story might interest you. If so, there is a’— what's this word?—' sequel. From the same source,' comma, ‘smuggled over the wire not long ago. Looks authentic to me. You be the judge.’ Now an address. ‘2200 First Street SW.’ Not a nice part of town, is it? ‘No phone there, just go. You're looking for'— I can't make this out.”

  “‘ Vava,’ I think it says.”

  “Really? Oh, I see it. ‘Vava. And be sure—’ “He squinted a moment longer, making certain. Slowly he raised his head. “‘ Be sure to take Ingo. She'll only talk to both of you.' “

  Martina looked away; the tension was all she could bear. She felt his gaze, steady and contemplative, moving from the paper in his hand to her own averted face, the handbag, the mess on the floor. A blurred and grainy photograph. Putting it together; weighing one thing against another.

  “Even if you're right,” he said at last, “even if—what can we do, other than hope and pray? The war will be over soon. By Christmas, they're saying. Why did you come here, Marty? What do you want from me?”

  His voice did not match his words. She turned to face him. His eyes were wide, almost imploring.

  Ka-boom, she thought. The bomb had found its target. Ingo Miller, the last isolationist, was about to go to war.

  BUZZARDS POINT

  JULY 1944

  Damn him, Ingo thought. He hauled himself leadenly up the four steps to Connecticut Avenue and for half a minute stood tuning his senses to the rhythms of the city, the afternoon dragging toward a muggy evening, the jostle of pedestrians and steady crawl of traffic uptown. You could never find a cab at this time of day but Ingo guessed it didn't hurt to try.

  Four steps. Roughly the depth, so he had read, of a regulation foxhole. The war was less than five years old—three if you counted from when the Yanks came in—yet Ingo's mind, like everyone's, was cluttered with its ephemera. He could open a map and point to Lidice, Coventry, Sebastopol, Saint-Lô. He could tick off the leaders of the Nazi regime and rank them in order of loathsomeness. He knew what an MG-42 was, which army used it, what its shells did when they entered human flesh. Yet he had never felt the war, not in a personal way, as a tug in his own well-fed gut, a looming cloud in his future. Never until now.

  Isaac. A name, and then the rest: puppet limbs, sarcastic smile, faint and ever-receding voice. See you next time, pal. Suddenly a presence—real, unsettling, troublesome as ever, nosing into Ingo's life. His timing characteristically bad. Like a ghost from an unconnected lifetime, the vanished world of youth.

  The taxi, a late-model Nash bearing the livery of Earnest's Hackney Service, idled in front of a hydrant at the corner of R, the driver pulling on a cigarette. Ingo had not yet reached the stage at which he would wonder whether such a thing were altogether plausible. Was the cab a timely coincidence or an epiphenomenon, a ripple on the surface that hinted at some dangerous current beneath? Safe on his home turf, protected by a shiny plating of summer sweat, Ingo merely flagged the driver, semaphoring with one finger: Hang on just a minute. The cabbie favored him with a nod and a smile made memorable by ghastly yellow teeth.

  He found Marty in the kitchen, distracting Vernon from the preparation of Hühnchenwurst, a spicy sausage of the chef ‘s own invention made from unrationed chicken trucked in every Saturday by farmers from the Eastern Shore. Thank God Edna, the night waitress, had agreed to come in three hours early. Skinny and tall, with scarlet nails, she was laughing at something Marty had said. At a look from Vernon—head tilting quickly toward Ingo—the kitchen fell quiet. Except for Marty, whose laughter had not really ceased since the 1932 election.

  Out on the street, the cabbie flicked away his cigarette and slapped the Nash in gear. Without waiting for instructions he eased forward into traffic. Didn't bat an eye when Ingo read out the address. Perhaps in his job you developed a higher threshold of alarm.

  When he spoke, his accent conjured some godfo
rsaken hamlet in the Balkans. “Been another hot one, yes?”

  Ingo saw no ground for comment. The weather was Sodomic. But he liked to think it separated real Washingtonians from the other kind, the arrivistes, salesmen and budding bureaucrats, illiterate Appalachians on the construction sites and transient junior officers awaiting assignment, a human goulash from all known corners of the world and a few as yet uncharted.

  The cabbie at least had been here long enough to manage a rapid zigzag down one-way streets, then to turn south on Seventeenth toward the river. Traffic was thick as usual near Constitution Hall, where the Daughters of the American Revolution had forbidden Marian Anderson to sing on that summer evening five years back, on account of her being colored. She had sung instead on the Monument grounds, coming up on your left, before a crowd of eighty thousand, including Negro families with tiny children gotten up in their Sunday best, hearing an operatic singer for the first time in their lives. “O beautiful for spacious skies,” Miss Anderson had sung, and later, “Nobody knows the trouble I've seen.”

  You couldn't hold that concert today if you wanted to. The Mall was littered along its entire length with tempos, cheap and ugly two-story buildings designed to last for the duration and not one pay period longer, accommodating government agencies that hadn't existed eighteen months ago—the War Refugee Board being a case in point.

  “So,” said the cabbie, “you hear the one about the guy who falls in the Potomac?”

  His English, accent aside, was as good as the next man's. Ingo knew the joke, which was making the rounds. But Marty said no, apparently unable to cut this off at the pass.

  “Okay, so there's this guy who falls in the Potomac, right? And he's drowning, he's going down for the third time. And this pedestrian crossing the Fourteenth Street Bridge, he looks down and yells, ‘Hey, buddy, where do you live?’ The drowning guy shouts a street number. So right away the pedestrian jumps in a cab. ‘Take me to this address,’ he says. They dash over to the other side of town, and he runs up to the poor guy's apartment and tells the landlord he wants to rent the place. ‘Sorry,’ the landlord tells him. ‘That apartment has just been taken.’ ‘But that's impossible!' says the guy. ‘The fellow who lived here, I just saw him drowning in the Potomac River!’ ‘That's right,' the landlord tells him. ‘But the dame who pushed him off the bridge beat you over here.’ “