She rolled her eyes. “I knew you weren't listening. You never listen. This whole thing is a joke to you, isn't it?”
“No. It isn't a joke.”
“A lark, then. A little camping trip. Something to get you out of that city you hate so much.”
“I don't hate the District. I was born there.”
Glasser was still talking, thanking people. Leon, for such a fine job with this calf. Timo, for ferrying all these supplies out from Washington. Rabbi Grabsteen, for kindly being with us today. And of course Miss Charleva, for allowing us all to join her on this beautiful farm. Without her, none of this…
“Who was this Varian Fry?” Ingo said, loud enough to drive Glasser's voice out of his head.
“You've never heard of Varian Fry.” There was triumph in her voice, of the I-knew-it sort.
By this time people nearby, tipsy and in the mood to be entertained, were turning to catch the latest episode of the Marty & Ingo Show. He was aware of them but didn't mind; he was happy enough to play the straight man. “You'll tell me though, won't you?” he said pleasantly.
“Varian Fry was just the greatest American hero of the whole beginning of the war, that's all. He was the only person—back when everybody else was sitting on their thumbs, and you Republicans were frantic about keeping us out of Europe—Varian Fry actually went over to France, which the Germans had already occupied, and got to work smuggling people across the border. He saved over a thousand before Pétain's thugs threw him out.”
From the eavesdroppers, an excited murmur, probably less over Mar-tina's capsule bio than from hearing someone branded a Republican. Fighting words, in this crowd. Ingo scowled at the faces around him—his comrades, if you could believe it. “Varian,” he said thoughtfully, to deepen the scandal. “Sounds like a woman's name, doesn't it?”
He didn't provoke the reaction he was hoping for. For an instant he looked around at the others, into their hopeful, earnest, well-intentioned faces, and felt something like pity that quickly changed into something like panic. These people aren't guerrillas, he thought. No more than I am. They're desk warriors—assistant professors, accountants, a salesman or two. A dress designer from Wilkes-Barre. A futures analyst from Chicago. Christ, a bartender from Dupont Circle. We're nothing but a bunch of saps, and we're about to get ourselves killed.
“Wasn't it Varian Fry,” said one of the saps, a skinny prelaw student named Eddie Lubovich, practically a kid—” who rescued Marc Chagall?”
“And Hannah Arendt,” said somebody else.
“There,” said Martina. “You see?”
Ingo shrugged. He had no idea who Hannah Arendt was. Marc Chagall he understood to be some kind of painter—but why would a painter need rescuing? “You folks enjoy yourselves,” he said, aping his own occupational geniality, then turned away and wandered over toward the porch, where the announcer was shouting about a great play, a really swell play, we've got a whole new ball game on our hands now, without a clue as to what had happened or who stood to gain by it.
“Excuse me, Mr. Miller?” said a youthful voice.
Ingo turned to find himself looking slightly upward into the wide brown eyes, almost calflike, of Eddie, who was holding a can of National Boh in either hand. He offered one to Ingo. “You look like you've had a rough day.”
“Do I?” Ingo accepted the beer, wondering what Eddie was seeing. Today had been no worse than any other.
The kid didn't answer. He might have been half drunk already, or only excited. Ingo tried to remember being excited—as opposed to, for instance, sick with fear. He watched the boy slurp down his beer, marveling at the clear, sharp light in his eyes, the skin drawn tautly around his temples.
Eddie looked back, his gaze direct and guileless. “Could I ask you something, Mr. Miller?” he said, in a voice that still betrayed the croak of adolescence.
“Call me Ingo. Fire away.”
“How did a guy like you…I mean, how did you in particular get caught up in all this?”
“All what?” Ingo looked around, pretending to be mystified, then patted Eddie on the shoulder. You could feel the bones right through the wool campus pullover, navy blue with an orange V on the chest. “Never mind.
It's kind of a—”
“Long story, sure. It's none of my business, anyway.”
“That's not what I was going to say.” Ingo shook his head. “Not a long story. Too short, maybe. Over much too soon.” He hesitated. “Or, I don't know—maybe not. Maybe it's still going on.”
A strange feeling came over him, as if he, not Eddie, were standing there half drunk, light streaming out of his eyes.
“I'm not sure I can explain it now. It's not that I've forgotten—I can remember every bit of it—only I'm not sure it would make sense anymore, if someone tried to retell it. The world has changed so much, it's like the definitions have shifted around. Back then, everything was so different. And I do mean everything.”
Eddie gave an uncertain laugh. “The good old days, eh?”
Ingo shook his head. “This is more than nostalgia. And the old days weren't all good. They were just…you felt more alive then, somehow. Die goldenen zwanziger Jahre—the Golden Twenties, that's what we called them. That last summer before the Depression. The end of the Free Youth Movement, though I guess you wouldn't have heard of that. Anyhow, there we were—kids from all over—on this beautiful mountain, the Höhe Meissner. It was huge. It was history, that's what everybody was saying. The second Youth Summit. All of us so young, and the world so round, and the future hanging there like you could just reach out and grab it. And then—” He shrugged. “Kommt die Morgensonne, zerfliesst's wie eitel Schaum.”
Eddie smiled politely. “I'm afraid you've lost me there, Mr. Miller. I don't speak any German. Other than Blitzkrieg and Sieg heil.”
Ingo shook his head. “Why should you? There's nothing left of all that now. But there was a time …” He stared hard at Eddie, determined not to be misunderstood. “There was a time, a genuine part of history, and part of our lives, when anything you could think of was possible. You could be whoever, whatever you wanted to be. We all believed that—every one of us there on the Höhe Meissner. And that damn mountain was the center of the world.”
HÖHE MEISSNER
AUGUST 1929
What surprised Martina more than anything—possibly excepting the naked gymnasts—was that Ingo had agreed to come in the first place. If he hadn't, her parents would never have allowed her to go. Sorry, only one Atlantic crossing per family per century. But enter a nonrelated variable and suddenly the equation doesn't hold. Martina couldn't imagine how they expected Ingo to keep her safe. Lob spitballs at stray icebergs? Ask mashers politely to leave her alone? But somehow the notion of his trailing along, a familiar and comforting figure from her earliest childhood, had reassured the ma and papa. She started packing that same afternoon.
She supposed it was Ingo himself. The dullness of him. Always with the books or the toy soldiers or the model boats. Those stupid boats! Cork and balsa wood contraptions he would float in trenches specially dug in the backyard, filled with water lugged in buckets. The vividness of the memory surprised her. Martina seldom missed, or even thought about, her childhood. She was glad she'd woken up and joined the Jazz Age—that she hadn't remained stuck in time like poor Ingo, with his Sunday-school clothes and his knapsack full of poetry.
“Just don't go acting like someone from Scott Fitzgerald,” her mother had said. As though speaking of a place, some perilous den of sophistication, rather than a fashionable young author.
“Yeah, I'd make a great flapper, wouldn't I, Ma? With these hips?”
Her mother rolled her eyes, pretending to be scandalized while enjoying the banter. “These days, nobody wants to look like what they are. The girls want to look like boys. The boys want to look like Al Capone. I suppose gangsters want to look like…I don't know, priests.”
“Girl priests.”
“Oh, you. I was re
ading just the other day, maybe in Collier's, about some men over there someplace”— waving a hand, over there meaning Europe, where everyone had completely lost their minds—” who've started going around barefoot, dressed in old rags or what-have-you, traipsing from town to town singing and dancing and begging for food, like something out of the Middle Ages.”
“That's old news, Ma. They've been doing that since back in the Teens. We read about it in Contemporary Cultural Studies.”
“Back in the Teens! Ancient history, you're saying. Heavens, the world must be spinning faster nowadays.”
“It is, Ma. That's the whole point.”
“All the more need to be careful, then. You're only twenty.”
“Thank heavens Ingo Miller will be there.” Mocking the overbearing Hausfrau. “Now there's a fine young man. Goes to church, helps little ladies across the street—a regular Eagle Scout.”
Her mother couldn't help but laugh, then quickly atoned. “That's not nice at all! Poor Ingo.”
“Sure, Ma. It's what you sound like, though.”
But that made it all the more puzzling that Ingo should've agreed to tag along.
He tended to scoff nowadays at what he deemed Martina's, quote, modern ideas, unquote. Especially the ones that could be put down, even remotely, to Anthropology, her most recently declared major. (The last had been Drama, and before that, fleetingly, Psychology.) Her sudden, all-absorbing fascination with this or that culture, her craving for some exotic cuisine, her abrupt changes in musical taste or style of dress…you could see how that kind of thing might seem faddish to someone like Ingo, who was still listening to scratchy recordings of the Vienna Philharmonic playing The Blue Danube.
“Even Stravinsky likes ragtime,” she'd told him, showing off a new snippet of knowledge.
“Stravinsky—isn't he the fellow who caused a riot with his pagan dance piece? The one where the prima ballerina gets burned alive?”
Martina hadn't believed him; but on the other hand she wasn't a hundred percent certain he was wrong. Ingo, though pigheaded, was usually well informed. He knew about the Youth Movement, for instance. She expected him to write it off as modern nonsense, but instead he'd listened calmly for a while, eyes lifted reluctantly from his book—something thick, with a title suspiciously French—then responded simply, “Yes, I know about that.”
“You know about what?”
“About the Jugendbewegung. Everyone should. It's a notable prewar development. It's where this craze for the guitar comes from. And for hiking and camping, all that Baden-Powell business. Among other things.”
As usual, she had neither fully believed him nor dared to voice her doubts. Ingo was majoring in History with a minor in Music. Which meant, as she saw it, that he dealt primarily in Fact, secondarily in Interpretation, with a touch of Feeling thrown in rarely. So she stuck to her artfully planned sales pitch, culminating in an invitation to join her this coming summer on a journey overseas, and Ingo let her go on trotting out her little knowledge, that well-known dangerous commodity.
She laid it out for him much like her Con-Cult professor—a handsome young Swiss with a pointed accent and Freudian goatee—had explained it for her class. The Youth Movement began as a reaction of Wilhelmine teenagers against the sterile, materialistic lives and bourgeois values of their parents—or something to that effect. In the beginning it comprised loosely organized bands that gathered on weekends for daylong jaunts through the countryside, fleeing the ugly, industrialized, polluted and decadent cities for a cleaner, more authentic and aesthetically satisfying realm of woods and fields, hills and streams, towering cliffs and deep, mist-veiled gorges.
“How very up-to-date,” Ingo put in. “As though the Romantics weren't doing that a hundred and fifty years ago.”
But it hadn't ended there. At times Martina found that you had to grit your teeth and soldier onward. It hadn't ended with hiking clubs and Saturday outings in the Black Forest. Soon the youth groups joined up, the leaders drafted manifestos and the German flair for organization asserted itself. Local chapters of the leading group, the Wandervogel, sprang up at several universities; membership grew and diversified; the outings became longer, more frequent and better planned; and after a decade or so, what had begun as a spontaneous, inchoate phenomenon began to take on a distinctive style, an identity. It became, as her professor rather grandly had declared, for the first time ever, an authentic voice of youth.
Having now acquired a voice, Youth cast about for something to say with it. Bit by bit the movement, or rather the various branches of this sprawling phenomenon, took up such causes as vegetarianism, universal education, agrarian reform, sexual equality, ecumenism, folk music, the freedom to choose one's own career—
“Tell me,” Ingo interrupted, “have they discovered FKK yet? Free-Body Culture? Naked swimming and sunbathing—the body as a temple of beauty, nudity equals nature equals health? That'll be next. With Germans, that's always the next thing.”
A decade into the new century—Martina pressed on—the Movement entered a kind of adolescence. The early, innocent days yielded to a period of greater complexity but also greater promise. The original groups spawned factions and subfactions that not infrequently found themselves at odds. Magazines started up, flourished for a time and ceased publication. The movement songbook, the Zupfgeigenhansl, sold hundreds of thousands of copies. A new vocabulary, including such stirring terms as Jugendkultur, Youth Culture, entered the vernacular. Wandervogelstyle clothing—loose, functional, pseudo-peasant garb of roughly woven cotton—gained popularity. Even the new musical fashion, which rejected the stylized complexity of “art music” in favor of a simpler, more direct and participatory manner of performance, attained remarkable currency in the land of Wagner and Beethoven.
“Sure,” said Ingo, “and an ensemble called Duke Ellington's Jungle Band has reared its head in the land of John Philip Sousa. Your point, please?”
Martina was almost there. By the eve of the Great War, the Movement had grown to encompass every facet of modern European life. Its membership ranged from evangelical young Lutherans through occult-minded Anthroposophists to “neo-heathens,” Wotanists, adherents of worldwide Socialism, readers of Nordic runes, defenders of völkisch nationalism, advocates of “racial hygiene,” and even a faction advocating full civil liberties for homosexuals.
“For heaven's sake, Marty,” complained Ingo, the prude, who seemed to have gone a little pink around the ears.
At last, in the summer of 1913, all these disparate groups came together for a Youth Summit, literally on a mountaintop: someplace outside Kassel in central Germany. Kids from everywhere held meetings and gymnastic competitions and made speeches and staged late-night singing contests, made more speeches and who knows what else they did—giving the prude a little wink—and at the end of it all they ratified an official declaration stating the shared ideals and aspirations of Free Youth.
But the summit—you have to understand this—wasn't about meetings and agendas. It was about being there. Imagine! Tens of thousands of young people, from all over Europe. Germans and Czechs and Austrians and Poles and Danes, even a few White Russians. The Boy Scouts had sent a delegation from England. There were smaller numbers of French, Swedes, Lithuanians, Italians. In the end, this gathering, formally known as the Jugendtag, turned out to be so much bigger than anyone had anticipated, and coverage in the mainstream press so minimal, that nobody really knew how many kids had been there, where they'd come from or what manner of things had happened outside the published agenda. Legends abounded. But all anyone could say for sure was that some amazing alchemical fusion of massed, unsupervised youth had taken place.
“That's wonderful,” said Ingo, “really wonderful. So you didn't actually have a point after all.”
When he picked up his book again, she reached over and batted it out of his hand. “They're doing it all again,” she blurted. “A second Youth Summit. This summer. Same place, same mountain. Middle of
August. I want you to come with me. Please, Ingo. I have to be there—it's once in a lifetime— and I need somebody to travel with. Somebody my parents trust. Will you at least think about it?”
Ingo said nothing at first. He got a smug look on his face, that aggravating little smile. I know something you don't know, the look said. Then he gathered up his books.
Always with the books. Stacks of them, by writers Martina had never heard of. The Immoralist, André Gide. Der Tod in Venedig, Thomas Mann. Cities of the Plain, Marcel Proust. Demian, Hermann Hesse. Some of them were not even translated. Ingo seemed to prefer this, apparently thinking it made him look mysterious. As if there were anything about him that Martina hadn't known for a long, long time.
“Okay, Marty,” he said at last, the stack of books balanced in his arms, “I'll go. You can tell your mom.”
Simple as that. Simple, yet impossible to figure. Martina was still amazed, when she thought about it. But she didn't have a lot of time to think just now, here on top of the Höhe Meissner, with the summer sun in her hair, uncounted hordes of young people swarming around her, life exploding into brilliance and color like fireworks on the Fourth of July.
As for Ingo, he must have wandered off somewhere. That's what you do here, Martina supposed. You wander. The term Wandervogel, before it was applied to free-spirited teenagers, had something to do with birds in flight. The image was apt, she thought—right down to all this weird, bright, colorful plumage.
She peered around from the safety of her beach blanket, her little rectangular patch of middle-class America amid the dark woods and flowery meads of the Old World. The German countryside looked more or less how she'd imagined it from the Brothers Grimm. Overhead, the twisty limbs of ancient towering oaks stretched out like a giant's arms reaching to snatch you. Sunlight fell soft and golden through the boughs to dance on coralbells and lady's slippers. Great weathered rocks hunched like trolls, draped in hoary lichen. On three sides the forest pressed in, mysterious and dark, with little footpaths winding off into the shadows, forbidding yet seductive. On the fourth, you could gaze across a meadow dotted with scarlet poppies and blue cornflowers, and beyond, over a damp green vale, to the roofs and steeples of a perfect, fairy-tale village in the distance, a thousand feet below.
Another Green World Page 9
