Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  And everywhere between, in field and woods, sprawling in the grass, strolling down the paths, nestled among rocks and trees and wildflowers, were the laughing, heedless, golden-haired children of Hamelin Town, lured away by some wily Piper, lost forever to their families, disporting themselves now in a magical mountain land

  Where waters gushed and fruit-trees grew,

  And flowers put forth a fairer hue,

  And everything was strange and new

  But that, Ingo was quick to point out, was Browning. “And Browning”— raising a finger to emphasize this point—” was English. Whereas the Grimms, who spent some time around here, were German. Which is why”— and he again flashed that annoying, I-know-a-secret smile— “everything's so much darker in the Grimm version. Look around you. This is where a lot of the old stories come from. The Grimms hiked around the countryside listening to the old people. The real Hamelin is just up the road—as close as Baltimore, back home. And east of here, around Jena, that's where—”

  “Oh, be quiet, Ingo.”

  This spoken with no malice, like turning the radio down. Still, after that he had wandered off on his own, and Martina reminded herself that, all fancy aside, this was not make-believe. It was real, immediate, touchable. Anyhow, these kids were too old for the Pied Piper, weren't they? A good half of them were of college age, like her and Ingo. And there were grown-ups, too—veterans, she guessed, of 1913, ambling about with a dazed look, as though wondering what, exactly, they had wrought.

  They had wrought, Martina thought, something marvelous. She'd never seen kids like these. You never would, in the States. Some of them wore traditional costumes, picture-book stuff—boys in Lederhosen, girls in Dirndl. A group of high school boys calling themselves the New Templar Knights had fashioned medieval-looking tunics and loosely woven skullcaps. Another, the Deutsche Jungenschaft von 1 November, wore blowzy, sky-blue shirts and pants so short Martina turned her head away the first time they trooped by, thinking they were walking around in their underwear. Most commonly, though, the kids wore whatever caught their fancy. If a girl felt like wearing a bright scarlet blouse, its tails billowing over a pair of men's hiking pants, then she did: easy as that. If a boy felt comfortable in a one-piece homespun garment like a nightshirt, dyed bright yellow and gathered at the waist with a leather cord—hey, why not? There were kids dressed like peasants from Prussia and kids dressed like mad alchemists from Prague. Girls with their hair cropped close enough to risk sunburn, boys with golden locks tumbling over bare shoulders, muscles rippling on their chests, like dancers in some exotic, manly ballet. One little cluster of friends was dressed all in black, their faces powdered, like walk-ons out of Bram Stoker. Half a dozen girls flitted by in flimsy, diaphanous dresses so thin their breasts showed through—wood-nymphs, Martina supposed. And then, of course, the naked gymnasts; but she still hadn't come to terms with that.

  You had also, naturally, any number of people in plain, ordinary clothes—like Martina—but somehow you didn't notice them. And after a while, you didn't want to be one. You wanted to be fearless, wild and gay, to look and act as nobody ever had before. What you wanted, ultimately, was to be here, exclusively, to forget every other place else you'd ever been and every day you'd spent elsewhere. You wanted to take your place among the runaways from Hamelin, to float up in the mountain air and dance upon the wind.

  Which was more or less what people were doing. Music was every-where—sprightly tunes from guitars and flutes and tambourines and a hundred clear voices—and nothing in the world was easier or more natural than to throw your head back and lift your arms and twirl and run and leap to the rhythms and the melodies that wafted on every breeze. You breathed in the music and were nourished. You drank in air that left you intoxicated. You felt the colors like soft, supple textures caressing your eyes. And the sunshine, soft and luxurious sunshine that fell only on Old World mountains, you wore like a second set of clothes. Or even, for some people, and more by the hour, a first.

  Oh, where was Ingo?

  Martina felt she was going a little crazy, and her German—mostly hand-me-down Yiddish—wouldn't take her very far. Forget about conversation; she couldn't even read the damn program book, a document the size of the Saturday Evening Post. She had studied its illustrations, pen-and-ink work by an artist called Fidus, and had scanned the tables listing hours and names and Themen and Orten, whatever those were. If she understood correctly, a discussion was coming up soon on die Judenfrage im Jugendbewegung: the Jewish Question in the Youth Movement, though as Ingo had explained, this could also mean the Jewish Problem. Problem or question? They are not the same at all. Except perhaps to people with a very strong need for certainty.

  Without Ingo, she couldn't make up her mind—it helped so much to have someone to disagree with. She had hoped to catch the Jewish thing, which would be something to tell her father about, something to placate him. It's part of your heritage. You ought to take an interest. In theory she agreed; but what was so darned interesting, when you got right down to it? Religions, tribal affiliations, outmoded nation-states—this stuff had as little relevance to the Jazz Age, the era of improvisation and synthesis, as those quaint Templar Knight costumes. You could read all about it in Spengler, if you cared to. Everybody was reading The Decline of the West this year, except for Martina, who didn't have time to read, and Ingo, who disapproved.

  She sighed. If he didn't show, she'd leave the Germans to sort out their own Jewish Question. Without Ingo she wouldn't understand a word, which was the story of her and Judaism to begin with. She liked listening to her grandmother's stories—her favorite being the girl with the magic broom—when the old lady mangled them into English. But once you got past the folktales and into Torah scrolls and mumbling in Hebrew and the womenfolk left at home, lighting the Shabbas candle…for Martina's money, you could keep it. All that Alte Land–ish stuff she was happy to leave to Ingo, who wore his German-Americanness like other people wore hair: hyphenated right down the middle.

  Setting aside the program book, she began leafing through an old issue of McCall's she'd found abandoned in a train station, one of the half-dozen they'd trooped through in towns that grew progressively smaller, lugging their clothes and bedding and Ingo's old pup tent, changing from modern trains to aged carriages tugged slowly by huffing steam engines through too much picturesque scenery, until at last they reached the Kaufunger Wald Naturpark and joined dozens of other kids, detraining at the same place, to complete the journey on foot. A regular pilgrimage, blisters and all.

  The McCall's featured last year's fashions and an article about how to invest on margin in the booming stock market—Martina couldn't have cared less—but at least, thank God, it was in plain American English. Her eyes roamed peacefully among the paragraphs. For July, the air was cool, and the sun felt good where it touched her. She might have dozed off for a moment or two—reading ladies' magazines often had that effect—when she felt a body flopping down on the blanket beside her.

  “Where in the world have you—”

  But instead of Ingo, it was a total stranger—a boy, maybe a couple years younger than herself. Bright red hair and a face full of freckles. Martina was taken aback and might've been alarmed, if she'd had a moment to think.

  “You're American, right?” the boy asked her, slightly out of breath. His accent came at her like a fly ball from Ebbets Field.

  “How could you tell?” she asked sardonically, peering from behind her magazine, sprawled on a blanket labeled Cape May, N.J. in a nicely matched summer outfit her mother had bought for her at Woodward & Lothrop.

  The boy smiled briefly to acknowledge the joke. “Act like we're talking,” he instructed her.

  She straightened her back. This was different, she decided; something new, therefore good. Still, she wasn't sure what to make of the redheaded stranger. He was scrawny for his age, which she placed at about seventeen. All his bodily extensions—arms, legs, neck—were strikingly thin. His pale
skin was pink where the sun had found it. His eyes were sparkly and green, like a favorite marble she'd lost years ago. His nose was large and somehow bent—could it have been broken and healed kind of sideways? All in all he looked like a character out of a comic strip: next-door neighbor to the Katzenjammer Kids. For some reason you felt like smiling at him, and so—practicing this new skill, moving with the flow of her emotions— she did.

  “Yeah,” he said loudly, poorly imitating casual chitchat, “I don't know what got into me. I should have known better, falling for a stunt like that!”

  “You ought to keep your voice down,” she suggested, “if you're trying not to attract attention. Just talk normally, nobody will notice.”

  The boy thought about this, longer than Ingo would've. “You're right, thanks.” Then he went back to practically shouting. “I think later I'll hike into town and drink a few bierskis, ja?”

  “For heaven's sake,” she laughed, giving up on him. It was like dealing with a child. “What are you—hiding from somebody? Are you in trouble?”

  “Shh!” With a furtive glance over his shoulder, the boy slid nearer on the blanket. He smelled sweaty, not dirty but healthy. “That's the guy over there. The butterfly collector.”

  Martina saw who he meant. A grown man, in his mid-thirties, she guessed, and thus one of the oldest people on the mountain. “Butterfly collector” was a weird description, but you could see what the kid was getting at. He wore khaki garments with an excess of pockets, and a wide-brimmed hat, and under one arm he clutched a leather-bound notebook.

  “Is that man chasing you?” she asked, aiming for a tone of severity that wasn't easy to achieve with this kid.

  He gave her a wry little smile, raised an eyebrow, twitched one corner of his mouth. “He's chasing somebody. He didn't get a good enough look to know it's me.”

  “Know it's you who what?”

  She got only a shrug. Little wrinkles formed on either side of his mouth, as though he had too much skin for his bone structure. When he shrugged, his bony shoulders stuck up through his V-necked jersey. “Anyway, it doesn't matter. The guy's a jerk. Thinks he's some big Aryan bwana—know what I mean?”

  Martina did not. But she suspected that whatever the man might be, he wasn't chasing this kid for nothing. She looked the boy in the eye, as she imagined you might look at a little brother: Tell me the truth, shrimp, or I'll kill you. “What did you do—steal something?”

  Again, the shrug. It reminded Martina of her grandmother.

  “I don't know,” he said. “Maybe he dropped something. And I kind of, you know, maybe, accidentally picked it up.” He gave her a wink.

  She didn't know whether to smile back or tell him to get lost. Slowly, the man in khaki moved past, poking through the dozens of little campsites in the vicinity, all of them laid out more neatly than Ingo and Martina's. Now and then he paused to glance sharply in someone's face. A couple of tents away, a brawny German youth made a rude-sounding remark.

  The redhead laughed. “Did you hear that? That guy called him a Schwuler.” He looked at Martina a moment, thinking his own thoughts, then stuck out a goofy-looking hand, too big for the arm it came on. “My name's Isaac. Where you from? I didn't expect to meet any other Yanks here.”

  She shook the hand because she couldn't think of a reason not to, but didn't answer his question. To reveal herself as Martina Panich, junior at Catholic U., would've shredded whatever veil of mystery she might have possessed.

  “Don't talk to strangers, right?” Isaac nodded, allowing her hand to drop. “Can't say I blame you. You didn't get all this way on your own, though, did you? Couple of other girls come along?” He cast a critical eye over the pup tent.

  Martina followed his gaze, wondering what you could deduce from a kid-sized tent, sloppily pitched and sagging in the middle.

  “Or maybe a boyfriend,” Isaac mused. His forwardness knew no bounds. Catching her eye—God knows what expression he found there— he held his empty hands up, signaling benign intent. “Hey, I don't mean to pry. Just a little curious is all. You know—another Yank.”

  “Tell me about yourself, then,” suggested Martina. “What are you doing here?”

  The smile never quite left his lips, though now it took on a shade of bashfulness. “That's kind of a long story. I've got family in Poland—an aunt and uncle—and my folks decided maybe I ought to spend a little time with them. Get off the block awhile, you know?” His gaze drifted across the meadow. Not really looking, just moving his eyes.

  She ventured, “So you're here for the summer.”

  “Well, I guess longer than that. Forever, if my dad has anything to say about it.”

  She reappraised him. A note of family tragedy here. “What about school? Are you going to school in Poland?”

  This time the shrug came from someplace inside him; you felt more than saw it. “I'm done with school, it looks like. I was never any good at it, to tell you the truth.”

  “So you live in Poland but you don't go to school. What do you do?”

  “Well. I don't actually—” His eyes were still out there on the meadow. They were pretty, Martina thought, the way they picked up colors. When Isaac turned back he looked as though he'd slipped on a different mask, this one also smiling but made of something harder. “Things are kind of boring in Poland, you know? My uncle lives on a little farm, and there's all these animals to take care of. So anyway, this one time, I met these you might say artistic types who've got this place in the country, sort of a commune. They make pottery and toys and stuff. There's a lady who paints, and some people who want to make movies if they can get the equipment together. So I stayed there awhile, and then a few people were coming out here, so I came along.” He concluded by briefly spreading his hands wide: Ta-da! And here I am.

  As stories go, Martina found this one threadbare. But it did place the boy in a certain context. A runaway, she thought with a degree of wonder. A runaway, living in some Wandervogel commune. Not an everyday sort of thing back home. Over here, who knows? “You can call me Marty,” she said on impulse.

  He rewarded her with a flash of those sparkly eyes. “Marty. That's a good name for a Yank. So listen, Marty.” His glance cut back and forth, conspiratorially. “You must be getting kind of restless, sitting here all by yourself. Want to come meet these friends of mine? I mean, they're Germans, but they're okay, you can talk to them. They aren't bündisch or Nazi or anything.”

  She had no idea what he was talking about. But then she imagined he was just throwing jargon around to impress her. Old hand in the Movement—and look, he doesn't even shave yet! Had she not been cross with Ingo, she never would have gone off with this stranger, a kid who was at least peculiar and possibly criminal. But she was, and so she did.

  He led her down the mountain and up again, onto a lower rise called the Hanstein, along paths she couldn't have found again. Trailing a few paces back, she observed with silent amusement the boy's jerky progress, his bony limbs jostling within a random assemblage of pawned-off, mismatched clothing. She puzzled equally at his silences and his episodic sorties into conversation, primarily elliptical commentary on the people brushing past them on the trail: that fellow is Weisse Ritter; don't get this one started on Paragraph 175. She supposed it didn't matter if he was making it up. He'd become part of this adventure she was having, and if he were a scamp or a scoundrel, so much the better.

  Also, she was grateful to have something, a single person, to focus on, struggling as she was with cognitive saturation. She must have seen thousands of kids today, every one of them exotic in some fashion, gathered in bunches, or marching in files, or drifting in twos and threes, or dozing alone in leafy bowers among ferns as high as your waist. Here now, they passed under an oak limb where a shirtless boy perched spritelike, dangling his legs, trilling a tune on his recorder. A little further, rival teams of boys young enough for grade school stood on opposite sides of a campfire bellowing Volkslieder at one another. In a shadowed
glade, amid dangling bones and other spooky paraphernalia, a girl whose dark complexion came straight from a jar of stage makeup read fortune cards for giggling, flaxen-haired Heidis. You will meet a handsome man… the circumstances will be tragic… this card speaks of a departure…but see here, a sum of money is involved. Martina was wearily charmed.

  Isaac halted before a wide tent whose front panel had been furled open, its interior furnished with makeshift tables, wooden planks supported at either end by stands of cleverly lashed wood, and stools to match. The tables were laden with pamphlets, broadsheets, academic journals, gramophone recordings, cheaply bound books. A handful of earnest university types sat here and there, engaged in evidently purposeful activity. Stretched between a brace of saplings, a banner declaimed in red on white

  NUR EINE INBRUNST LÄSST SICH TREU ERTRAGEN:

  ZUR GANZEN WELT! —R. Dehmel

  Turning pointedly from the quotation to Martina, Isaac rolled his eyes. “Nobody does do-goodism like Berliners.”

  At the sound of his voice, one of the young Germans looked up. A tanned, outdoorsy-looking Fräulein, straight blond hair tugged back and pinioned with a barrette, she broke into a smile and came forward to greet the two of them.

  “Kamarad!” she exclaimed. “Wir haben noch Angst für dich gehabt!” She turned to Martina, aggressively cordial, and said something that, based on her expression alone, could only have meant “So you're a friend of Isaac's, are you?”

  “Easy on the Deutsch, Kat,” said Isaac. “Denn Marty ist Yank.”

  The young woman's eyebrows went up. “Stimmt? Ah, good day then! How do you do? I am Käthe. Welcome in our little headquarters.”