“It might be better,” Ingo suggested, “if you waited till Marty and Bloom get back.”
“That's not your call, is it?”
“No, but”— regretfully smiling—” if you want a translator…”
Shuvek followed this exchange with a gleam in his weasel eyes. Ingo wondered in passing what sort of character traits would help a man stay alive through the Nazi occupation. Warmheartedness, he guessed, was not among them. Perhaps an instinct for sizing other men up, a knack for making timely alliances—coupled with a readiness to break them, should circumstances change. One would do well, Ingo thought, to deal cautiously with this man.
Beware of strangers you meet in the forest: the oldest lesson in the fairy-tale book.
It was five in the morning, local time, before the burial was completed. All the Americans wore a dispirited look. It was hard to imagine they still had a march ahead of them. But the surviving members of the Varian Fry Brigade formed up behind Bloom and headed out on a trail chosen by Shuvek—a tight passage between short, bristly pines better suited to wild boar—with minimal chatter and no complaints, and with Grabsteen's blustering speech still untranslated. Ingo watched for signs of a power struggle between the rabbi and the big, intimidating noncom. He saw none. The challenge came instead from Martina, who scooted up behind Bloom and positioned herself dead-center in the trail, elbowing Grabsteen back into third place. Ingo might have found such fractiousness entertaining had he not known Shuvek was seeing it, too.
They walked until the sky grew light and the stars began to fade. All this time there had been little change in the land around them. The pines pressed in monotonously and the terrain neither rose nor fell. But as dawn arrived and the first yellow beams touched the boughs in this stunted woodland—the oldest trees no taller than Ingo could have hurled his weapon—it became clear that they were moving parallel to a gorge whose edges were so sharp it looked like something hacked out by a giant's sword. The landscape was starkly drawn with a narrow palette of colors: dark green of pines and leathery ferns, umber-red where rock faces showed through a thin coverlet of soil, and the unearthly blue of an empty, comfortless sky.
You could believe the world was vast. You could believe there was within it the possibility of escape, independence, sanctuary. Ingo knew better. He knew, from his own life's journey, that the world was finite and confining. What you thought was wilderness was only a walled garden. Every vista was artfully contrived. Each noble tree, each blade of grass and tuft of moss had been placed there in accord with some grand, unknowable design. You trod a path that wound back upon itself, repeating the same actions, meeting the same people and suffering the same disappointments over and over again. Even your mistakes were repetitious; you never did more than retrace the calamitous footsteps of your forebears.
This war was a new thing only in the sense that with practice and growing expertise, the process of destruction had become more efficient, the mechanisms of death more dependable. Apart from that, the mortal agonies of the Third Reich were only the fall of the House of Burgundy all over again. Heroes and villains would be, at the end, not only united in death but nearly indistinguishable, like the bodies in the airplane. Those limbs tangled together there, did they represent some final struggle or a farewell embrace? Was it hatred that drove men to murder or was it an excess of intimacy, the despair of men trapped behind the same wall? Did the Aryan strike down the Jew because he found him strange, a despised and alien thing? Or because he knew him only too well, from having roamed the garden together, having trod the same path side by side— knew him as intimately as one knows a brother or a lover?
The hike ended finally an hour past daybreak. They had reached a spot where the tree cover thickened, pines mixing with taller spruce.
“Here we wait for dark,” declared Shuvek in English. “You rest now.”
The local partisans did not, however, seem inclined to rest themselves, at least not yet. A pair of them moved into positions up and down the trail while a third—the woman—hovered near the Americans, close enough to eavesdrop on their conversations. Ingo guessed it was prudent to assume she understood English. Shuvek headed off through the trees and after a quarter-hour was still gone. It was a relief not to feel those weasel eyes boring into you, yet Ingo felt equally troubled by the man's unexplained absence.
The Yanks settled in to their makeshift camp. Stu and Eddie collected fallen branches and kindled a small fire. Over this they set about boiling water for coffee and heating up tins of processed meat. The woman partisan glared at them and looked nervously at the sky, but Ingo couldn't tell whether this represented a genuine fear of overflying aircraft or a conditioned response brought on by years of running and hiding from every shadow.
“Ain't this grand?” said Stu, leaning back with a hunk of Spam speared on his bayonet. “Clean air, tasty food, good company—and no dishes to wash.”
Ingo sidled over to where Martina, Bloom and Grabsteen were huddled around the charred remnants of a map. It looked like the one Ingo had seen before, with its green and white terrain markings, the jagged scar of the Polish border.
“There's no way to tell how far anything is,” Grabsteen complained.
“It's not far,” said Bloom. “Your little finger is about twenty kilometers long. That's an easy day's hike, even in this country. Most days you could make thirty. If you really pushed it, you could be in Auschwitz by next week.”
Grabsteen looked affronted, as though this were an actual suggestion. Ingo heard a smirk beside him and turned to see Timo standing there. The Serb appeared very relaxed, in his natural element. But then he'd looked the same manning a taxi on the Anacostia riverfront and shuttling supplies to a Maryland chicken farm. The man was at home everywhere. Which made him nearly the inverse of Ingo, who was at home nowhere at all. Or at any rate, nowhere you could get to in 1944.
If you wanted proof of how small and tangled the world was, Ingo thought, look no further than Timo. Who had somehow, courtesy of Earnest's Hackney Service, made his way from the Balkans to a side street off Dupont Circle, thence to the cold, empty heart of Europe. What sort of pattern could you find in this? Yet there must be some pattern, as there was in all Creation. Even if, at the bottom of it all, lay God's own flaming madness, Flammenwahnsinn, just as Heine suspected.
As the morning grew warmer and the Americans finished eating and smoking, a kind of moral stupor set in. The awful events of the night seemed to fade in the sunlight. People unrolled sleeping bags or stretched out wherever they happened to be. Before long most of them were dozing. Ingo sat for a while looking down at Eddie, whose dark hair had fallen across one eye, whose arms were crossed and body folded into a childlike bundle, oblivious. He envied the kid not so much his youth as his ability to just be there, to fit in, to float with the current instead of kicking and sputtering against it. Finally he sighed and turned away.
He was exhausted, but could not relax. Perhaps the morning light disturbed him. It seemed unusually harsh, even filtered by a canopy of evergreens. It was like the unsparing light of a public locker room, a merciless illumination in which everything was revealed and nothing looked good.
Restless, he stood and stretched his limbs. The woman partisan threw a catlike glance in his direction. He resented her, standing there like a snoop. So he stepped out of her field of vision, losing himself among the trees— walking with no destination in mind, just needing time to himself. Time and space. A return, however fleeting, to his accustomed state of solitude and secrecy, the nearest thing he had now to a homeland.
Alone in the woods. It felt oddly familiar, as if he'd been here before. His muscles relaxed. He was immensely weary yet also alert, his senses sharpened, his breathing quiet and slow. After a minute or two he stopped walking and only stood there, inhaling the autumn morning, the smell of fallen needles on damp earth, the sharp upland air. He closed his eyes and listened to the birds quarreling in the treetops, red squirrels chasing each other from br
anch to branch, a rumor of larger game far off. After an uncertain time he heard a different, stealthier sound. Human feet. Boots mashing the undergrowth, moving quickly in his direction. Ingo touched his Schmeisser but he felt no sense of threat. He was on home ground; he need only hold his position.
Out of the trees stepped Shuvek. The partisan saw Ingo and stopped. His eyes moved down to the gun and back up again. He raised his hands slowly, palms open. For a few moments the two men stood there appraising each other.
“You're the one, aren't you?” Shuvek finally said, in clear though thickly regional German. “The one the Fox asked for.”
Ingo's mouth opened in surprise, but before he could speak the surprise evaporated. A tumbler fell; a puzzle piece dropped into place.
Shuvek smiled. Not a pleasant smile nor a friendly one; still there was something disarming about it, a texture of sincerity. “They said we should expect someone who looked like a German pretending to be a Yank. That was some riddle, I thought. Then you showed up.”
He reached around for something on his back. He stopped when Ingo leveled the gun at him.
“No trouble, Kamarad,” he said, with the same smile. “I'm only following instructions. Here, I've got something for you. I'll go as slowly as you like. You can see I am not armed.”
He took off a little rucksack and tossed it lightly in Ingo's direction. It landed softly, like a moccasin. Ingo kept his eye on Shuvek while he bent to pick it up. In the sack was a set of clothing. Ingo shook it out, letting the pieces fall to the ground.
“That's good,” said Shuvek. “Dirty it up a bit. It'll look more natural.”
It was a German army uniform, greenish gray, bearing a sergeant's sleeve insignia and, at the collar, the chevron of the Waffen-SS. “What the hell is this?” said Ingo.
“It's for you to put on. Not now. Later. Soon.”
Ingo glared at the man. He wanted an explanation and didn't want to dig for it.
Shuvek gave a shrug. “Like I said, I only follow instructions. You've come to see the Fox, but that's not so easy to arrange. Not at this stage. The front is collapsing, you know. The Germans are falling back. For them, that means less territory to patrol. Where you're going, it's thick with blackshirts—I'm talking about regular SS, not the lousy Hilfi. It's a question of how to hide an elephant. You know how to hide an elephant, don't you?”
“In case you hadn't noticed,” said Ingo, “I haven't come alone. Do you have uniforms for all of us? You think you can hide a herd of elephants?”
Shuvek shook his head. “Your companions can't be trusted. Not all of them. Something is wrong there, I am not sure what. The safest thing is to get you away. I was planning to wait a couple of days, watch how things played out. But now …well, you've wandered off on your own. It's an opportunity. We ought to take it.”
“No.” Ingo tightened his grip on the gun. “I'm not going anywhere without the others. Anyway, this whole business smells fishy.”
“Yes, I'm sure it does,” said Shuvek. “Look in the breast pocket there, you'll find something to convince you.”
Doubtful but intrigued, Ingo plucked up the jacket, which looked about the right size for him, and examined it awkwardly by touch while keeping his eye on Shuvek. After a bit of fumbling his fingertips brushed a lump of paper.
He risked letting go of the Schmeisser for a moment, extracting the paper, unfolding it. Shuvek kept still; only his eyes skittled this way and that, making sure the two of them were alone.
The paper was thick, like parchment, and roughly as wide as two hands laid together. It seemed to have been torn out of a book. On it was an artful pen-and-ink sketch of a flower: bloom, leaf, stem and seed head, all rendered in precise, botanically exact detail. The drawing was labeled Gentiana poetica and signed Anton Krolow, 13. Sept. 1929.
After several seconds, Ingo remembered to let out his breath.
Shuvek watched him dispassionately. “They said it would mean something to you.” He waited a couple of seconds and said, “Are you ready to come now? It's best if we leave while the others are asleep. Don't worry— I've ordered Petra not to harm anyone. She won't disobey, though to be honest, she doesn't care much for Jews. She blames them for all this trouble.” He gave a bitter laugh, perhaps at the idea that this trouble, this all-devouring catastrophe, could be blamed on anyone in particular. It had simply come in the manner of all misfortune, storms and invasions, malign government, mortal illness, faithless women.
Ingo paid him no attention. He folded the paper as lightly as possible, this blue flower whose petals would shatter at the merest touch.
* * *
They reached the guerrilla encampment by nightfall, just as the first pale stars were coming out. It was like a tiny village, a dozen rough but sturdily made structures crammed between boulders and tree trunks beside a racing, icy-looking stream. A wooden pen held chickens and a shed housed a blacksmith-cum-armorer. There was such a fantastical air about the place that Ingo felt like a character in an adventure novel, a tale of wilderness survival.
The guerrillas turned out en masse at their arrival. There were fifty at least, and for the most part they fit their surroundings like the wood-gnomes of German folklore, furtive creatures who dart among the ferns and toadstools of the forest floor, unglimpsed by all but the keenest eye. Only a few stood out: children so tiny they might have been born here in the forest, and one old woman so bent and shriveled she looked like a Hexe who survived by purely magical means, dispensing strange herbal remedies along with the occasional curse. Most of the adults, men and women alike, carried weapons as naturally as farmers go about with the implements of their livelihood. They dressed like Gypsies in all manner of clothing, layer upon layer, nothing matching anything else. As Shuvek and Ingo came among them they pressed in close, and Ingo felt hands running over his fatigues, fingers touching the smooth American fabric. It was as though the partisans needed to assure themselves he was a real human being and not some trick of the forest, a dangerous Black Elf in disguise.
Shuvek steered him toward one of the crude huts and under its low doorway into a squarish chamber, lit by a fire in a small stone hearth and by the chilly gray light of dusk that drifted through a window facing the stream. Here, on a stool by the fire, a man sat calmly, as if he were awaiting them. He was gaunt and his face was lined, but his hair was still yellow. Ingo guessed he was no older than himself.
In German, Shuvek said, “This is the one. His name is Müller.”
Ingo did not suppose the error was great enough to need correcting. His name was indeed Müller, or anyway it would have been had not his grandfather, fresh off the boat, chosen to Americanize it.
“Müller,” the man on the stool repeated. “Well, that's easy enough.”
Shuvek nodded.
Ingo was mystified; this man spoke Hochdeutsch with only a trace of Eastern inflection. He had the air of a Sudeten aristocrat, an ethnic German in a land of Slavs, who instead of heeding “the call of the blood” had chosen to go native.
“And the uniform?” the man said.
“Haven't tried it,” said Shuvek. “I'd say it's about right, though.”
They looked Ingo up and down like a tailor's dummy.
“He hasn't slept,” Shuvek said.
The man nodded. He rose from the stool and came closer, staring Ingo in the eye. “God help you,” he said after a couple of moments. He spoke simply, as though he meant this and nothing more. In the same straightforward tone he added, “I'll have someone bring hot water. A good bath will help you rest tonight. Tomorrow …”
He gave a little nod, as if he were alluding to a well-known truism— Tomorrow is another day or something of that kind. Then he left the hut and Ingo heard him speaking outside in the local tongue, presumably giving instructions about water.
When he dragged himself an hour later, groggy with fatigue, out of the old-fashioned washtub, his muscles felt like they'd dissolved. He must have dozed off because the water had turne
d tepid. The day's long walk had drained more than just his energy. By the dancing firelight, shadowy figures flitted at the borders of his vision.
He dried off as best he could on a ragged towel no bigger than a washcloth. Then he discovered his clothing was gone. In its place, neatly folded on a stool, was the German uniform. Feldgrau, field-gray, with a tinge of green, its color was roughly that of the underside of a white-oak leaf.
“Try it on.” Shuvek addressed him from a dark corner of the room.
“What happened to my fatigues? There were things in those pockets, personal things.”
“You'll find it all right there.” He pointed to where Ingo's belongings had been arranged beside a stack of threadbare blankets with his bedroll on top. Shuvek's small eyes glistened out of the shadows. “If that uniform needs altering, we'll have it taken care of tonight. So you will be all ready in the morning. Ein ganz guter Soldat.”
Ingo, remembering how the people in the encampment had run their hands over his clothing, imagined pieces of it distributed among favored members of the group. Irritated, he said, “What happens tomorrow? What is it I have to be ready for?”
“Tomorrow?” said Shuvek, as if the word was strange to him. He sat forward, bringing his face into the firelight. “Forget tomorrow. There is no tomorrow. There is no today. Today is nothing but a dream. The only thing real is yesterday, last evening, just before we all fell asleep. Try to remember that—the chair you were sitting in, the book you were reading. Perhaps you'll wake again, and there you'll be, right where you left off. Your family around you. Everyone laughing. And from there, your story goes on.”
BETWEEN TWO WORLDS
NOVEMBER 1944
Martina sat on a big rock at the edge of a river gorge and cast an eye glumly over what was left of the Varian Fry Brigade. She tried to imagine how Ingo would see them, what Ingo would think. Pigheaded and cynical and politically troglodytic he may be, but he was also disconcertingly observant, and he had a habit, in down-to-earth matters, of turning out to be right.
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