Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  Marty by this time had lapsed into an empty gaze out the window—one of her cloudy moods had come upon her—so it fell to Ingo to offer an adequate chuckle.

  The cabbie explained loudly, “The point being, in this town you cannot find a decent place to live.”

  “Yeah, I get that,” said Ingo.

  “It's the truth, too.”

  The driver—Timo, according to a permit taped on the dash—spun hard left onto Independence, following the Potomac downstream. The scenery was more of the same: tempos, traffic, peanut vendors, newsboys flogging the Evening Star, soldiers and sailors and WAVES and WACs who all looked in somewhat of a daze, as if they'd just dropped out of the sky from Kansas. There were cops on horseback and MPs in jeeps, people who looked foreign, people who looked lost, people who didn't look like anything at all. Americans. Such as they were.

  “Okay, then,” Timo muttered, hooking a right onto South Capitol. It might have been a warning: Gird thy loins. The neighborhood here had long been a favorite of Farm Service Bureau photographers, yielding thousands of trite and disheartening shots in which, as a backdrop, you see the gleaming white, neoclassical Rotunda, and in the foreground scenes out of Uncle Tom's Cabin—downtrodden darkies in a squalid dooryard, farm animals optional; mothers with empty eyes holding babies who look dead; a tar-paper alley shack bursting with shoeless children—all inevitably captioned, “In the shadow of the Capitol …” Notwithstanding, Ingo thought, that shadows fall on the north side. Where the slums aren't so picturesquely dreadful.

  First Street began with tenements and quickly devolved to empty lots and heavily padlocked warehouses before dead-ending at the riverfront— weed-grown, strewn with beer bottles and those cardboard squares you play the numbers on. Just shy of the embankment, Timo slapped the Nash into neutral and gave them a yellow smile.

  “Twenty-two hundred,” he said cheerfully. “That would be right about here.”

  Ingo cased the block. There was no physical evidence that they had reached their destination or that there was any destination to be reached. A barnlike structure of corrugated steel stood on their right, an unintended hedge of mulberry and bamboo on their left, while straight ahead, maybe thirty paces off, the Anacostia slithered by, flat and dirty and slow. There must be some mistake.

  But Marty was halfway out the door, and Ingo could hardly permit a woman, even her, to traipse around unescorted in a place like this. So he clambered out and leaned back through the passenger-side window, handing the cabbie the payment due plus a liberal gratuity. “Say, buddy, how about sticking around awhile?”

  With a quick nod, Timo killed the ignition.

  Ingo glanced up and down the desolate block. “Will you be okay out here?”

  In a move too quick to follow, Timo lifted from someplace low a cutdown Louisville Slugger, cored like an apple, its center fitted with a black iron dowel. Self-defense, Ingo guessed, was a knack you picked up early in Balkan hamlets. Timo clicked on the radio, which was airing a jingle on behalf of a downtown jeweler.

  “You don't need cash,” says Mr. Tash.

  “If you'll take a chance on romance,

  I'll take a chance on you!”

  “Look.” Marty stood before a gap in the mulberries, where a wooden sign had been long overtaken by the endemic rot of the waterfront. Her fingers ran over the chipped and faded lettering. “I think it says ‘Buzzards Point Yacht Club.’ “

  From what he could see, it might as easily have read Buzz off, you shlub. But Marty had already slipped through the shadowy opening, and so, with a final glance at the cab, Ingo followed, as he always had done, feeling little of curiosity, still less of hopefulness—only a dumb, stoic resolve to prevent Marty, despite her unstinting efforts toward that end, from getting them both killed.

  * * *

  Inarguably, there were watercraft. A small number of which, mainly turn-of-the-century motor launches, might have passed for yachts. But in the harsh, orange-tinted glare of late afternoon, what Ingo chiefly beheld was a dirty boatyard with three sagging piers and an armada of leaky hulks including one rusted inland tug, a pair of Maryland skipjacks, a side-trawler with a permanent starboard list, a demasted ketch and, most preposterously, an ancient steam-driven tour boat whose patriotic paint job had peeled down to dry-blood primer, clotheslines heavy with drab, shapeless laundry running between its stanchions—the thing looked like a set from the Our Gang serial, bobbing on a sullen tide. Away from the shoreline, tucked in a little grove of trees-of-heaven, stood a squarish cinder block building the size of a garage—what do you bet they call this the Clubhouse?— in front of which a Coca-Cola machine gleamed fire-engine-red under a canvas awning on a patio of broken Mexican tile. No question, the place had atmosphere. And something more: Ingo finally realized that each dilapidated boat was inhabited, by men and women, feral-looking children, aged and infirm relations, sinister-looking cats and at least one large, exotically feathered parrot. These were not casual day-sailors but long-term residents. Whatever the Yacht Club might once have hoped to be, it had become a floating tenement.

  Marty greeted the first person she met, an elderly woman whose skin had faded to no color at all, rocking in a deck chair that was not intended to rock, with the unprefaced declaration, “We're looking for Vava.”

  The old lady studied her, in no rush to reply. “Another one now, is it? Well, you'll find Vava down to the end of the second pier. Likely you'll be waking her up. Never seen such a one for napping. Think she hadn't slept in a month of Sundays.”

  Crossing the boatyard, Ingo felt in an animal way that he was entering alien territory; his nostrils flared at an unknown, perhaps predatory musk. The second pier seemed in no worse shape than the first or third. Halfway along it, a sawed-off metal drum resting on bricks gave forth licking flames, greasy smoke and the heavenly smell of roasting fish. Ingo caught himself relaxing—wherever food was, he was at home. The multicolored children scampering around the fire smiled up at him with round brilliant eyes. The water lapped and gurgled below. He heard Marty exchanging introductions with someone down the pier, but only faintly, as though the voices were muffled by a very thick fog.

  “Ingo,” she called sharply.

  With a couple of kids at his heels, he walked down to where she and a tall woman of striking aspect—a Siberian princess, he thought—stood at opposite ends of a short gangplank.

  “Ingo, this is Vaw-va,” drawing out the difficult vowel. “She's been living here since February. I was just telling her I wish she'd gotten in touch before now!”

  A manic tang in her voice. She was as lost as he was, Ingo realized, just as estranged from her native milieu. But while that struck him as a reason to hang back, in Marty evidently it provoked a temperamental urge to plunge onward. The two women regarded him as though something were expected on his part. He could not think what.

  “I am so happy to meet you,” Vava said at last, though she didn't sound happy. “Won't you both come aboard?”

  The gangplank led at an acute angle down to the deck of a vessel so beat-up and salt-grimed that you expected to find Bogie leering sarcastically from the helm. A sliding hatch stood open, and Vava waved them into a claustrophobic cabin with parallel benches flanking a table. Ingo could barely squeeze in, and having done so found himself wedged into an alcove, braced against the rocking of the boat. It was not unpleasant. Marty clambered on hands and knees, a tomboy again, into the seat opposite, followed more gracefully by Vava, whom at last Ingo felt he could decently stare at.

  She was attractive—beautiful, possibly—in an exotic, Eurasian fashion. Her hair was darker than blond but not quite brown, her eyes brilliant amber. He fixed her age somewhere in the mid-twenties; that is, a good decade younger than himself.

  “Sammy spoke often,” she said, “about the two of you.”

  Sammy? Ingo riffled a mental card file—had he ever known a Sammy? But Marty beamed as if in total comprehension. Yet that's how she would look under any conditions
: nose to the wind, wearing her best cocktail-party smile.

  Vava's eyes darted at them like she had let slip a small secret. Unimportant, but still secret. For several moments then the three of them sat waiting. For what, it wasn't clear, though Ingo guessed there had to be a story—an over-engineered, Hemingway-esque story with a two-ton theme bolted on. You couldn't just launch into one of those.

  Sure enough, Vava pivoted gracefully, extracting from an eye-level cabinet a bottle of plum brandy and a trio of tumblers. Generous cupfuls all around. Ingo went along with it. As the first sip reached the back of his throat, he felt—what was the word?— thrust, bodily, viscerally, into a remembered mental state. Another place, a different decade. A land where people drank sweet potent liquors and lay half-clothed in the sunlight, a time when ideas burst around you like mortar shells. Was it Germany in the Twenties? Or only the other side of the looking-glass, a dimensionless world where Isaac lingered, a blur in a grainy photograph, smiling from under his peasant's cap?

  Ingo's eyes refocused to find Vava staring into them, studiously, as if reading his thoughts. She may well have been, as the next thing out of her mouth was, “Shall I tell you how I met Isaac?”

  No need to answer. She spoke in a soft, extravagantly accented and sometimes grammatically off-key voice. First a rapid autobiography: born near Vilna and educated in Leningrad, where she lived in the artisans' quarter, Dostoyevsky's old St. Petersburg. At school she joined the Young Pioneers, dumped Dostoyevsky for Marx, attended Comsomol rallies. Shortly before graduation, her first trip abroad to a peace conference in Warsaw, where she was to represent Lithuanian Youth. Here the story grew more exact, the camera pulling in to capture detail.

  “It was March. By train we rode, taking the worst seats, in solidarity with the working class. People came from all of Europe. It was cold there—colder than Russia, I thought, but perhaps it is always cold in foreign cities. The gathering was a disappointment, not so big as had been promised, the organizers were sorry. A bad time of year for traveling, they said. But there was another reason. Some of the Western comrades whispered to us—late at night this happened, in little cafés where people read poetry and drafted manifestos and got drunk—they whispered, ‘We are worried about this Stalin. We wonder, has the Revolution been betrayed?’ Of course on the other side, people shouted back, ‘But look at Germany, there is Hitler who wants to destroy us! Everywhere are revanchists and traitors! In hard times, one can only be hard oneself !’ “

  She shrugged away those old debates, leaving you to guess which side she had taken. “Already it was 1936, everyone knew about the purges. In Warsaw and other places too, Prague, Paris, Istanbul, were living writers and painters who had fled Russia. Sometimes these people were also made to vanish. But our group leader quoted Malinkovsky: The individual counts for nothing. Our duty, in the vanguard, is to think not for ourselves but for the masses at large.”

  Ingo felt his stomach tighten and opened his mouth, perhaps to argue, though with whom? Malinkovsky? Martina shot him a fierce warning glance that Vava did not appear to notice.

  “From a table in the shadows, a voice spoke out: ‘When I try to think for the masses, it only gives me a headache.' Most of this was in bad Russian but the word for headache was Yiddish, kopvey. I knew some Yiddish because I came from Vilna, where lived many Jews. Somebody laughed and then somebody else, soon the whole room was laughing. I became angry. This was a provocation, someone was trying to embarrass our group leader. I wanted to know, who is this agitator? But the café was dark, I couldn't tell who had spoken. So I thought, I will remember this voice. Then I will know him, when we meet again.

  “And so it happened. The day after, or the next—the rally went four days in all—I heard this voice again, now in daytime, near the main hall. It was not a Polish voice, I thought. But also not the voice of a Jew, such as I had known. And the agitator, when finally I… confronted, yes? Confronted him. He did not look as I expected. Not so young as the voice sounded, perhaps no student at all. Shorter, also. With quite red hair and I would say a comical face.”

  Vava's expression changed. Had she offended her guests with this description of their friend? She had not.

  “I was angry still. But the agitator only smiled. You know, a good comrade, happy to see you, that kind of smile. And he said—”

  Ingo caught his breath. As though, if he kept absolutely quiet, he might hear that voice for himself. Indeed Vava had the phrasing, the intonation, down cold.

  “‘ Me and some friends are making a movie. Kind of a political movie. Want to be in it?’ “

  Vava paused here, frowning, seemingly still puzzled by what happened next. She had not said yes. Nonetheless she consented to leave the hall with this red-haired stranger. Movie she knew to be an American word; could the agitator be American? This would explain…well, perhaps nothing. They rode a streetcar to a different part of the city, like the workers' quarter in Leningrad, dark and populous, crouched beside a frozen river, fires burning in the street. They entered a building that was like a church but empty of pews, from whose tall ceiling hung stage lights and a tangle of wiring. At first Vava saw no other people, only a brightly illuminated corner where a make-believe cottage stood propped on wooden braces. Along a second wall someone had built a tiny forest with real tree boughs, winter-naked, nailed into fantastic configurations and trimmed out with paper scissored into rough ovals. The forest did not look credible at all, though the cottage was not so bad. “It's not supposed to be real,” the agitator explained. “It's a folk tale, get it?”

  Ingo's profession had made him an expert listener. He probed Vava's story for tiny cracks. What language was the stranger speaking—bad Russian still? Why were the lights on with no one around? Do they really make movies in Warsaw? In the end, loose threads and all, there was no denying the ring of plausibility. “So this movie,” he said mildly, circling back to a point that had struck him as out of character. “It was political, you say?”

  “Isaac said it was.” Her voice as diffident as his own. “But you know, he said many things.”

  Ingo nodded and immediately felt disloyal. In any case it was less than half true: Isaac said many things, yes, but he left a far greater number unspoken. And after these many years it was chiefly the uncertainties, the silences, that remained.

  “Isaac never had a political bone in his body,” Marty said, typically loud and indecorous. “That was one of the things that drove you crazy about him. There he was in the middle of it, but everything seemed to blow right past him.”

  Vava smiled indulgently. “By 1936,” she said, “there were in Europe not many Jews lacking a political bone.”

  Marty sat back, abashed. Her expression grew pensive. “Warsaw,” she said. “He was living in Warsaw? How long did he stay there, I wonder? I hope he had the sense to get out in time.”

  “Well, obviously he got out in time,” Ingo said impatiently. “He's still alive, isn't he? At least if that picture—”

  “You know it's him.”

  “I don't know much of anything,” he said glumly, feeling this to be all too globally true.

  Vava held the two of them in a passive and impenetrable gaze.

  Ingo turned to glare at her. “And another thing. Who the hell is Sammy?”

  “Sammy is …” She seemed genuinely perplexed. “Sammy told me you were old friends, you surely would remember. From Germany, that time…”

  Marty laid a hand on Ingo's arm and said, in the tone of someone breaking really bad news, “Sammy is Butler. You know, Butler?”

  “Oh, good God.”

  The last person Ingo wanted to hear of again—as in, ever—was Samuel Butler Randolph III: trust-fund Trotskyite, victim of vintage-champagne-poisoning and sometime intimate of the young Miss Martina Panich.

  “Butler wrote that newspaper piece,” Marty explained. “And the note with this address in it.”

  Ingo grimly nodded. Thought this story might interest you. If so,
there's a sequel. “What's the sequel?” he asked.

  Vava was no more than momentarily puzzled. Which stood to reason: if this was some kind of trick, she would be in on it.

  “You know,” she said, her voice smooth and soft, “Isaac had a number of unfortunate experiences. Back in the Thirties and also earlier, perhaps. Unexpected turns of fate he viewed as personal betrayals. He takes such things very much to heart. Too much so, I think. For a time I felt he was becoming, in the Freudian sense, a paranoiac. Though looking back… well. He is alive, no? When so many, so very many, are not. And this perhaps makes his paranoia to seem now more like a painful sort of realism. But however that may be, the result is also that he became completely distrustful. Or almost completely. Not one hundred percent, but anyway ninety-nine.”

  “Ninety-nine,” Marty parroted, as if this figure were scientifically exact, a proven constant.

  “And just how,” said Ingo, “does this concern Butler?”

  Vava would allow herself to be neither ruffled nor hurried. “When the war broke out, we found ourselves on different sides of the Molotov line. Sammy and I were at the time working around Lublin, in the East, organizing cells in anticipation of an eventual German attack. Isaac was somewhere west of Kraców—I believe he has family there. So we found ourselves in the Soviet zone when he was trapped on the German side. For a time we managed to stay in contact. Isaac became affiliated with the ZOB, and Sammy, as an American journalist, was able to travel back and forth, sometimes even to the West. He got from Isaac some good stories which were helpful in his career. Though knowing Isaac, I always wondered…”