Ingo coughed to cover what had begun as a chuckle. He entertained for a moment the crazed notion that Isaac was hiding somewhere on board, eavesdropping through a porthole, waiting to astonish them by popping out. This was succeeded by a wave of terrible aloneness.
“Then of course came 1941, and the Germans were in Riga within the first week of their offensive. Now it was I who was caught on the wrong side. Butler flashed his press credentials and his passport and perhaps a little money, and the Germans allowed him to board a ship for Stockholm. He journeyed from there to Moscow and arranged through a certain organization for me to be moved first south to Odessa, and later, by a roundabout route, to Istanbul. I am keeping the story short. It was really quite an ordeal. Naturally, after that we lost touch with Isaac. Later we heard that the entire ZOB had been annihilated, so we more or less gave up hope for him.
“Sammy found a new career as a front-line correspondent. At one time, so he told me, he was the only American journalist traveling with the Red Army. From what I have seen since coming here, I believe that may be correct.
“And so things stood. Until one day, Isaac, who was truly alive, happened to find himself in possession of a very important, very sensitive document.”
Ingo almost laughed—probably just a nervous reaction that even Isaac wouldn't have taken amiss. There was no need to ask how such a document might have fallen into those nimble, ever-reaching hands.
“Now there was a problem,” Vava went on. “Several problems, in fact. What to do with this piece of paper. For it was too important simply to discard. And implied by this, whom to trust with news of its discovery. Finally, how to communicate this news, once the matter was decided. A chain of problems to be solved. And so Isaac took them one by one. What to do: well, the document must be delivered to the West. How to make contact: here it seems that Sammy came to mind, with his knowledge of that world and his access to many channels of communication—and, it must be said, his hunger for the big scoop. Lastly, whom to trust. For Isaac, this would have been a most serious matter. The most difficult.”
She seemed to be addressing chiefly Ingo, except he wasn't entirely paying attention. Something had gripped him, some constriction of consciousness that was moment by moment tightening its hold. The symptoms had started some while back, quietly, but by now they were growing acute. Perhaps it was no more than plum brandy on a changing tide. “Excuse me,” he managed to say, “I think maybe I need some air.”
He tried to stand but he was caught between the table and the bulkhead. The bile seemed to surge in his gut, and he felt an awful, unreasoning panic. Damn him, he thought. Fifteen years of nothing, and now this. Right back to where we left off.
“Feeling better?” asked Martina, her tone none too gentle.
“I'm fine.” Ingo's voice, in his own ears, sounded as forlorn as the bell-buoy clanging far down the river.
Vava said, “Can I get you something?”
He shook his head, though it was probably too dark for them to see.
They stood on the sagging pier. The Washington Monument, blacked out against the fantasy of a German air raid, was faintly visible, mirrored in the river, like a giant candle jutting into the smoky western sky.
“Would somebody,” he said, addressing the night at large, “be kind enough to tell me what the hell is going on?”
It was Vava who replied. “Please understand, I have no wish to bring you memories that might be… not comfortable. Except there is something I need to tell you, a message. And it is necessary that you believe. Sammy told me this especially. ‘You will have a hard time convincing Ingo. He doesn't accept new ideas readily. Part of him still lives in Schiller's age, rebelling against the fucking steam engine.' “
She spoke with a newcomer's ingenuousness. Maybe in Slavic tongues fucking was not considered rude. As a critique of Ingo's personality this was hardly new ground—he was the definitive revanchist, and proudly so—but damn it, was there no limit to Butler's cheek? “Why not just give me the message,” he said. “Leave the credulity part to me.”
The fire in the metal drum had burned down to coals, and in this faintly ominous light Vava's features shifted eastward, settling on their more elemental Asian side. The change deprived her of any definite aspect of age or even gender—which rather suited that protean, eerily modulable voice.
“You must know,” she said, “I am the third person to have carried this message. Like those before me I pass it on as accurately as I can. If there is an error, it can only be a minor one, and that chance must be accepted— the message comes from a place where words are dangerous and certain words even worse.”
This was becoming, Ingo thought, a fairy tale. An old German Märchen, secrets twinkling in the darkness like elfin gold. Speak the name, Princess, and your beloved need not die. He shrugged. “Okay,” he said, “shoot.”
“The message begins, We never thought they'd put it in writing.”
As before, it wasn't Vava's voice but an uncanny simulacrum, a distant but recognizable echo like some shortwave signal from the other side of the world.
“But they always put it in writing. They can't resist. The pig farmer has got to lord it over his pals. So here you go—a memo to Protector, Bohemia and Moravia, signed HH. ‘Der Führer hat mir befohlen, die Juden auszurotten.’ It's the real thing, I guarantee it.”
Ingo tried to interrupt. The spectral presence of another being on the pier was so compelling that he wanted to speak back to it. But Vava continued heedless, as though it were Ingo whose reality was debatable.
“But I can't take it across myself—people need me here. And I don't trust anybody, I mean anybody. Not with this. You've got to come over and get it. But send Ingo, that's my only condition. Ingo I'll trust.”
Vava paused. Now a P.S., he thought. One last tap to drive the nail home.
“And make it quick—it's getting cold in this damn haystack.”
For a while Ingo gazed into the undead cinders. When he raised his head, both women were staring at him, as though awaiting a verdict. What did they expect—tears, laughter, trembling excitement? Whatever it was, he did not intend to provide it.
Marty said, “What does it mean?”
In a mechanical voice Ingo translated the German part—The Führer has ordered me, and here some hesitation over the verb, to destroy, or perhaps to eradicate, the Jews—giving the statement no particular emphasis, as indeed it seemed to demand none. But even in his own thoughts he had no wish to dwell on the last part, the coded signature. Cold in the haystack.
“For God's sake!” Marty was getting worked up; he could feel it in the dark. “Does it sound legit? I mean, do you think it sounds like Isaac?”
Think was not the word for what Ingo was doing. Martina's words, along with others, words from long ago, German jumbled with English, faces, footsteps, hiking songs, a distant landscape, blood staining rock, summer dying in the arms of September. Do you think it sounds like Isaac?
Well, you know, now that you ask, I rather think it does. For their benefit, he shrugged. “That's impossible to say.”
“He's lying,” Martina told Vava, one girl to another, “you can hear it in his voice. He's a terrible actor. Well”— she drew a long breath—” this is big, that's for sure. Really big. Isaac's right not to keep this to himself.”
She paced. You could practically hear her brain bubbling.
“I know what you're thinking, Marty, and I simply can't believe it.” Ingo spoke with the serenity of a man who knows that his opinion, right or wrong, is not worth a tinker's dam.
“What are you going to do?” asked Vava, like the straight man in a vaudeville act.
“There's nothing we can do,” Ingo said. Still the innocent after all these years. “Unless I'm mistaken, they've got some kind of war going on over there.”
Marty spun to face him. “I am so sick of hearing people say that,” she said. “Shucks, ma'am, I'm sorry, but we've got this here war to deal with. When t
hat's over, maybe we'll have time to worry about a bunch of Jews.”
Ingo made the necessary effort to keep his voice calm. “That's not what I'm saying, as you well know. I'm merely pointing out that, under the circumstances, there's no sense even talking about this any further. There's a limit to what's possible, Marty, even for you.”
He waited for her to argue. Instead, after an interval of silence, she told him, “There was a time when you wouldn't have said that. There was a time when nothing was impossible. Remember?”
Yes, I remember, he could have replied; that would've been easy enough. But he didn't believe it. Because to remember, to truly know again, and feel again, how things had been—could your mind withstand that? Could your heart? No, it could not. And so he refused to think any more about Isaac: his message, his whereabouts, his fate, his face, his voice. None of it.
It was therefore strange indeed that when Marty prodded him—” You do remember, don't you?”— he heard himself saying yes.
Yes, damn it, I do.
LIBERATED UKRAINE
SEPTEMBER 1944
For Butler, a trip to Front Headquarters was like coming home— notwithstanding Wolfe's dictum that you can never do that again. In the field, where he traveled with a Red Army forward reconnaissance company, he was perpetually the innocent abroad: living rough and taking unnecessary risks to prove his manhood, bathing rarely, letting his beard grow, drinking the stuff that passed for coffee and the deadlier stuff that passed for vodka, clacking through the fraught hours on a special Remington modified to cough out Cyrillic characters and submitting the product to the vagaries of Soviet censorship and subsequent transmission to a baker's dozen leftist broadsheets, whose errant stringer he was. After a few weeks of this he was more than ready to retreat to more congenial environs.
At Headquarters, Butler could relax. He could sleep late and shave with real soap, sip cognac and chat brightly in any of the three or, on a good night, five languages at his disposal. He could opine loudly without fear of provoking violence. He could, if it suited him, stand up and leave the room, the tent or the bombed-out cellar to indulge in golden minutes of privacy. In short, he could return to his truest self, if only for a couple of days.
It didn't matter that Front Headquarters was forever moving from place to place. Nor that the front commander changed from time to time, nor that the whole army might be dissolved, reconstituted and renamed. Yes-terday's Voronezh Front, under Vatutin, became today's 4th Ukrainian under Petrov—broadly speaking, a wash. Above all it didn't matter that a tall, broad-shouldered Yank, striding confidently in his sheepskin boots and Astrakhan coat, would never be mistaken for a native of this godforsaken steppe. For in the end Front HQ was Butler's home, if he had ever had one.
He loved the place. He loved its surreal mélange of martial order and mad improvisation. He admired its tectonic clash of cultural types, soldiers and support staff and camp followers from all corners of the Eurasian landmass. He marveled at the Brobdingnagian logistics, the trainloads of paper churned out daily, the reservoir of alcohol drained each night, the crush of comrades old and new, many of them women, most of them young, all in the mood for adventure. You couldn't ask for a finer or more fitting home for the likes of Samuel Butler Randolph III. And it was there for him, always, in one place or another, as long as the war should last, whenever he could shake himself loose from the gruesome monotony of the line.
Butler's first order of business, as soon as he lowered himself from the cab of the mail truck he'd hitched a ride on, was to orient himself to this latest place at which Headquarters had come to rest. It was a town or small city—impossible to judge in its present condition—that the Russians called Rownje. The Nazis had called it Rovno and made it the center of SS and police operations in Reichskommisariat Ukraine. As such, it was safely distant from the official, army-run occupation authority in Zhitomir, for the boches liked to segregate military from “political” operations. The left hand, doling out ration coupons, might plausibly assert ignorance that the right hand was machine-gunning several thousand naked, shivering and sobbing women and children lined up before a ditch outside Melitopol. Division of labor: one of the higher refinements of Late Capitalism.
On this metal-gray autumn afternoon, Rownje was a treeless, blasted ruin. The boches left little standing during their long retreat. And in towns like this, from which the Waffen-SS had decamped, the destruction was especially thorough and sometimes, in a twisted way, poetic. Take the local Orthodox cathedral, a roughly cube-shaped and brightly painted structure, circa 1700. It had survived a civil war followed by a generation of compulsory atheism, and its walls of thick sandstone had withstood the initial, rather perfunctory Nazi sacking of the town; yet some thoughtful artillery officer, in the midst of the German withdrawal, had paused on the road west to Brody, turned his guns around, dialed in a series of corrections and—despite a critical shortage of ammunition—blown apart the bright blue onion of the cathedral dome. Now the building stood like a very symbol of the strange beast that was the USSR: hulking, battered, maimed and desecrated but nonetheless mighty impressive, stubbornly unwilling to die.
Butler set off in that direction, passing unhurriedly through the narrow, rubble-filled lanes without pausing to ask directions or study the hastily stenciled placards affixed to such walls as still stood—often plastered over earlier, Gothic street markers—giving directions to this or that administrative branch or subordinate command. He trusted his homing instincts, knowing from experience that the most interesting places in this floating, half-real city—the bathhouses, the senior officers' brothel, the improvised labyrinths of the NKVD—would have no street address. They would simply be there, secret places in the ruins, opening before you like Aladdin's cave so long as you knew the magic words.
Butler knew them all. He always had. The key to both his success as a journalist and his failure as a novelist, it made things happen easily and rather too quickly, rendering him congenitally restless.
A block short of the cathedral stood the old public library, a post-Leninist artifact. Its upper stories had been blown apart and its books, of course, long since reduced to ashes. But a row of Willys utility vehicles— jeeps to everyone but the Reds—stood like horses tethered outside a saloon, and two duty drivers sat smoking near a doorway, to which a path through the rubble had been cleared. A stone pediment that once held a statue of some proletarian hero now propped up a sign identifying this as the Foreign Press Liaison Office—Butler's nominal destination.
He recognized one of the drivers, a crusty old fellow from Murmansk. “Enjoying the weather?” he called from several paces off, stepping carefully between bricks and uncollected shell casings and mortar crushed as fine as talc. One thing he hated about places like this was the likelihood of treading on the odd, unidentifiable bit of human remains. He sometimes wished the Red Army would acquire, along with other spoils of victory, the Wehrmacht's fastidiousness. You overrun a town, you press-gang civilian survivors or, if none exist, employ POWs to tidy up the streets; within forty-eight hours, everything is clean enough for the Herr General's mistress to promenade through.
“Better here than home,” the old Russian called back. “They'll be having a foot of snow up there by now.”
The other driver, a teenager missing most of his left arm, gave a dutiful smirk. Butler wondered if this boy was a victim of battle or of some routine industrial mishap or else—a slight but real possibility—a shirker who'd gotten drunk and chopped his own arm off to avoid being thrown into the line. All manner of social detritus seemed to collect around the Foreign Press Liaison Office, which was convenient for the reporters: a surfeit of willing, if dubious, sources of news from the front, rumors from Moscow, predictions for the coming offensive, rosters and diagrams showing the order of battle, colorful accounts of partisan raids in Baltic outlands or Carpathian foothills, lurid reports of German atrocities, and statistics ranging from enemies captured to this year's better-than-ex
pected harvest of rapeseed. Too easy, even by Butler's standards. Most of his colleagues spent their days mooning around HQ like a brood of hungover vultures. They seldom ventured into the field, and why should they? Nobody back in Peoria would know any better, and few anywhere would care.
As far as Yanks were concerned, the war was happening in Okinawa, the Hurtgen Forest, the Arno Line. It was a story of heroism and sacrifice, a clash of Hollywood-ready field commanders—Butler's money was on Jimmy Stewart to play Patton, facing Gable as a rakish Rommel—and, at its core, a morality play. Eisenhower tossed the word crusade about and nobody thought to question him, for the myth of holy knights versus infidels—or the Allies as cavalry, Nazis as savage redskins—fi t so snugly in the American Weltanschauung.
Never mind that in the big picture, skirmishes in Western Europe barely counted as a sideshow. That the forces engaged there numbered only a fraction of those in the East. When five divisions hit the beach on D-Day, the world held its breath; one hundred and twenty Red Army divisions were now pointed right at Berlin alone, in just one sector of a six-thousand-kilometer front, stretching from the Gulf of Finland to the Caspian Sea. But such details were so numbing that the world switched off the radio. And never mind that for Germans, the fight with the Anglo-American alliance was a quarrel among cousins—a distasteful business, but one in which honor must be preserved—whereas the fight with the subhuman Bolsheviks was nothing less than a Schicksalskampf, a struggle for destiny, into which the whole ruthless fury of an evil regime had been thrown. The truth of the matter, as Butler's colleagues understood, was that nobody back home wanted to know what was happening here. The good folks in Peoria wanted to open their Sunday paper and read about courage and triumph, not horror and bestiality. They wanted a happy ending and a big-screen kiss in the last reel—not some blood-drenched Wagnerian opera, corpses strewn all over the stage, closing on a brazen and dissonant final chord.
Another Green World Page 4
