Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  For starters, he'd make some crack about Grabsteen. How foppish the man looked in his custom-tailored khakis, which must have been the product of some Burbank costume shop, tapered at the waist and fitted out with Edwardian epaulets. And how he strutted like a martinet, lecturing the stone-faced partisan gal on the comprehensive agreement that exists between our respective parent organizations. As if such jargon had any meaning at all in the Tatry Mountains.

  And surely he'd be in full-blown I-told-you-so mode over the collapse of the Brigade's best-laid plans. Back on the Eastern Shore—no, before that, a September evening in Martina's apartment in Cleveland Park, red neon spelling U-P-T-O-W-N one letter at a time outside the window—he had ticked off a laundry list of reasons why the plan was botched from the start. His analysis, typically thorough, began with the implausibility of the whole casus belli—the existence of a document, a piece of paper, for God's sake, so historically precious it was worth staking dozens of lives on—and proceeded from there.

  What exactly, Ingo had wanted to know, is this Agudas Israel Worldwide? Are they mixed up with those terrorists in Palestine, setting off bombs at the King David Hotel and attacking British administrators in the streets? Are they frustrated actors, looking for a war movie to star in? Or worst of all, are they exactly what they appear to be: a fuzzy-headed but well-funded rabble of Roosevelt Jews, all worked up about something they read last week in the back pages of the Times and determined to, quote, do something—never mind what, we'll figure that out as we go along—about these awful Nazis who are even less pleasant, we now suspect, than Republicans?

  He hadn't stopped there. Who exactly will this team of guerrillas consist of? Great War retreads? Or do you intend to recruit a bunch of 4-Fs and COs and vin-de-pays-sipping Hemingway fans, bundle them in jumpsuits and drop them behind German lines, armed with a compass and a box of matches and a secret decoder ring?

  By the time he shut up, even Martina was hopeless. Martina for whom hope was a substitute for religion—hope in the warm, tolerant future envisioned by Eleanor in her happier moods, hope as sung between the lines by melancholy Ella, hope as dispensed by those plucky USO gals high-stepping for boys at the front whose numbers might be up tomorrow. Without hope, how could you carry on?

  Which brought her now, in circular fashion, to the deepest mystery of the whole affair. If Ingo was so damned sure the Varian Fry Brigade was destined to go the way of the Hindenburg, why in God's name had he hopped on board?

  To ask such a question was to answer it.

  Martina closed her eyes. For an instant, Slovensky Raj was swept away. Nineteen forty-four dissolved, and in its place was a different time, another place—a world so different it seemed to have no relation to this one, not a single point of contact, no path from one to the other.

  What was that novel, so popular back then, that Ingo had gone on about? The Man Who Walked Between Two Worlds? Something like that. Martina never read it. She wasn't reading much at the time, not even Spengler, not even Freud. Now she regretted it, but regret was the least of what she felt when she thought about those times, the very least. The chief thing was wonder—disbelief, actually—that such a time and a place had ever been. And such a Marty. Such an Ingo.

  Were they really better people in those days? She believed they were. Marty herself had been so…so open, so unafraid, so hungry for new experiences. She hadn't learned to substitute political engagement for genuine human passion. And Ingo hadn't yet forgotten how to feel; the mask he wore was still loose enough that his true face could now and again be glimpsed behind it. Even Butler, as calculating and cold-blooded as he was, still had a core of genuine belief—if not in world Communism, at least in himself, his sacred vocation as an artist.

  And the German boy, Hagen—he'd been fired by a sort of idealism that was transparently heartfelt. It seemed reprehensible now, but only because you knew what it had led to. At the time, in that context, it seemed genuine enough. Like the rest of us, Hagen thought he had found a new world, a new kind of person to be.

  As to Isaac…well. Who really knew what Isaac had ever been, then or now?

  So of course, she perfectly understood—there was not the slightest doubt—why Ingo had come here, and why he was willing to throw his life away, if that's what it came to.

  “Are you listening?” shouted Harvey Grabsteen. Not to Marty, as it turned out. But his high-pitched voice jolted her back to the present, the notably less-real-seeming world of 1944.

  “Shuvek will come soon,” was all the woman partisan would say. It might have been the only English she knew.

  Martina shook her head. Slovensky Raj reassembled itself before her, along with its unlikely inhabitants: A dejected crew of would-be guerrillas lolling at the edge of an ancient, shadowed and dangerous forest. A blank-faced woman with Slavic cheekbones and a Russian PPD. A Serbian man with brown eyes to die for and terrible teeth. A skinny kid from Charlottesville. A wiseguy from St. Louis. A hulking Great War vet with his jaw clamped and his eyes staring at nothing, waiting for the next battle.

  “I said, Are you listening?” Grabsteen snapped, turning in exasperation to the wider audience. “I am trying to get this woman here to tell us where they've taken Miller. Also whether she intends to lead us where we need to go. Because otherwise, I'm determined to press on, with or without local support. We'll make new arrangements as we go. I've got plenty of Swiss francs. I'm sure we'll have no lack of possibilities.”

  “Where do you think you are?” said the big noncom, Bloom. “Strolling around some studio back lot? Trying to clinch a production deal?”

  Grabsteen wheeled on him. “No. I believe I am—I believe we all are— performing a mitzvah, a holy task that's been given us to fulfill. You can take me for a fool or a bully or a soulless Hollywood shill, whatever you like. But I'm willing to use whatever means are at my disposal to get this job done. Surely all of you would agree that our first duty is to history, to a full and just accounting of the crime that has been perpetrated against our people. If any step we take brings us nearer to that, then it's not only justified, it's morally necessary. More than this, I don't think we should say in front of an outsider.”

  Bloom bristled. “You can pickle the sermon, Rabbi. I don't need anyone to tell me what I'm doing here.”

  Martina let them argue. Grabsteen's mitzvah, not so long ago the driving obsession of her life, seemed a fool's errand now, a snipe hunt. Where has Ingo gone? she wondered for the hundredth time. Walking between two worlds, she supposed. The warm and the cold. The first in color, like the paintings on the wall at the Rusty Ring; the second black-and-white, like wartime newsreels. The first true. The second preposterous, nightmarish, untenable.

  It was clear enough why Ingo had come here. Because somewhere in the dark heart of Europe, hidden deep in the forest, was a secret crack in the wall of time, a passage from one world to the other. Martina hoped he would find it. And she yearned to follow him. She wished they could be together again, all of them, if only for a little while—an afternoon, an hour—in that warm green place.

  * * *

  AUGUST 1929

  Say what you will about fairy-tale castles. For Martina's money they were drafty and dark and every little noise echoed like crazy and just try finding a bathroom in the middle of the night.

  None of which was to say she was immune to the charms of the Leuchtenburg. No: there was a beauty to this old pile of rocks, even a kind of romance, for those of susceptible disposition. She glanced pointedly at Ingo, who stood leafing through the guestbook on the other side of what once had been some margrave's private chapel. The room doubled now as a miniature museum, where a selection of the castle's surviving artworks was displayed, and as an office for the youth hostel that had sprung up in one of the less ruined wings. Ingo was smiling to himself.

  “What are you smirking about?”

  He looked up, as though surprised to find her there. “Nothing, really. Some of these entries, they're just so�
�”

  “So?”

  “So German. Listen to this one, it's a poem by ‘Two Mädlein from Leipzig,’ from back in May:

  We are young, the world is open,

  Oh you beautiful wide world!

  All our longing and desire

  Lies in yonder wood and field.

  “And here's one from a couple of weeks ago, must've been some guy on his way to the Jugendtag. He writes in this really dark Gothic. ‘Your best weapon will always be the word: Ich will.'”

  “That's two words,” said Martina.

  “Exactly.”

  She looked him over. He had become strange to her, these last few days. Ever since the Höhe Meissner. Being in Germany seemed to bring out some hidden aspect of his temperament. But that was ridiculous; the whole point of Ingo, the safe and boring kid next door, was that he had no hidden aspects. That is what Martina's parents had counted on, and what, she now realized, she'd been counting on as well. So much for the eternal verities.

  Ingo fished out his pocket watch—an affectation acquired, she believed, from a photograph of Thomas Mann—and said, “I guess I better be going.”

  “Going where?”

  He paused a moment, as if deciding whether to divulge a great secret. “Orchid hunting.”

  “What?”

  To be surprised by Ingo was doubly surprising, because he'd always been so predictable. What had changed? It wasn't just the clothes. Though come to think of it, where had these new hiking shorts come from, and this troubadour's tunic? No, his skin had taken on a healthy sort of glow, and his face looked thinner, like he'd finally shed some of that baby fat. His eyes shone with an unfamiliar light, and he carried himself with a new sort of assurance.

  Martina crossed the room; she gave him a companionable jab on the arm. “Since when did you become such an avid naturalist?”

  He turned his head away, feigning a sudden interest in a statue of Saint Sebastian, commissioned four hundred years ago on account of his reputation as a defender against the plague. The martyr was scantily clothed and naturalistically rendered. “There's nothing wrong,” Ingo said lightly, “with taking an interest in one's surroundings. Is there?”

  “I didn't say—”

  “For example.” Staring through her, eyes alight. “Did you know, thirty-eight species of wild orchids have been identified in the countryside around Jena? At least fifteen can be found near the Leuchtenburg. And not only orchids. The Saale Valley marks the northernmost spot in Europe where a number of plant species naturally occur. It's because of the climatic influence of the south-facing sandstone outcrops. Crocuses bloom here in February.”

  Martina was at a loss. She personally didn't know a crocus from a croquet hoop, and Ingo's sudden interest in such things left her modestly flabbergasted. Also, admit it, left out. “Did it occur to you that I might like to go orchid hunting?”

  His expression plainly said that it had not. “Do you really want to go crawling around in the woods looking for tiny flowers that probably aren't even in bloom?”

  “No, of course not. But I would like to do something.” Her voice sounded sniffly, even to herself.

  “Why not just go out and get some fresh air?”

  “I've had nothing but fresh air. I'd like to breathe some exhaust fumes, just to remember what century I'm in.”

  “You could see what Isaac's up to.”

  “Isaac? That's a laugh. What, is it afternoon already?”

  “Or go help out in the woodshop. Or the kitchen. There's always plenty to do.”

  “Yeah? How come I don't see you volunteering to scrub pots and sweep sawdust? What have you been doing with yourself? You take off in the morning and I don't see you till dinnertime.”

  Under questioning, his manner became twitchy. But all he said was: “Orchid hunting.”

  “Yeah, right. It wouldn't surprise me if you had a Mädlein out there somewhere.”

  His ears reddened. She supposed it was unfair to tease him. Poor Ingo.

  That afternoon it rained. You could see the storm approaching, purplish clouds unrolling from the northeast. A change came into the air, a queer sort of inverse pressure, forceful emptiness. The light grew otherworldly, streaming sideways as though from a parallel dimension, casting trees into bright relief against the dark sky. Martina, who'd never noticed such things before, wondered if this was an early symptom of Romanticism.

  Isaac appeared as usual around two p.m., padding into the third-floor chamber where Martina sat before a tall window watching the weather change. Somebody else's clothing drooped from his bony frame like laundry hung out to dry. He approached sleepily, toting an oversized mug.

  Martina smiled at him like he was a little brother. Not her own, somebody else's, an object of entertainment and frequent annoyance.

  “What's going on?” he asked, his voice a teenage croak.

  “It's about to rain. Look.”

  He cocked an eye toward the window. “It rains all the time in Germany.”

  “It rains everywhere.”

  “Nah, it's different here.”

  “How?”

  He shrugged. “It feels different. You get soaked and you don't dry out. Everything turns gray. People get cranky.”

  Outside, in the castle close, there was an orderly sort of commotion. Frau Möhring, the tirelessly cheerful hostel Mutter, directed her gang of kitchen helpers in a rapid harvest of vegetables from the courtyard garden. Most of the couple dozen kids currently bunking here were Arbeiterjugend, and they took the “worker” part seriously. Martina felt tired just looking at them. Their little baskets filled rapidly with produce.

  God, she thought—cabbage soup again. All these pure-bodied young Germans. No meat, no drink, no polluted air, no unwholesome jazz music. She knew there was a point to it, but what this might be continued to elude her.

  A long rumble of thunder shuddered through the castle and came bouncing off a nearby cliff—a place called the Dohlenstein, where the young Germans liked to take their clothes off and lie in what passed for a summer sun. Martina gave an involuntary shudder.

  “Here,” said Isaac, offering his mug. “Want some of this? It's elderberry, I think.”

  “No”— almost snapping at him.

  “See what I'm talking about?” He gave her a drowsy smile.

  “I'm sorry. I'm getting a little stir-crazy. You feel like doing something?”

  “Like what?”

  “I don't know. Go out, get rained on. Hike to Seitenroda. I'm starting to feel like Rapunzel in here.”

  Isaac gave an appreciative smirk. “I'm supposed to be laying low, remember? Käthe's orders.”

  Martina remembered. It was why they'd come here, after his run-in with the Jungdo. Ingo had sprung for train fare to Jena—Isaac being clearly in no shape to walk halfway across Germany—and Käthe had drawn a map from there to the Leuchtenburg. Go to ground for a while, she told Isaac. Lie low, but keep your nose to the wind. Like a clever little fox.

  When the first drops arrived—and not until then—there was a bustle through the arch-covered gateway as the hostel guests ran indoors. Martina watched for Ingo but he didn't appear. The afternoon darkened to a false twilight and the castle roof began to leak in too many places to count. For all its size, the place felt crowded. Every room in the habitable wing had its little cluster of young people plucking lutes or arguing over Nietzsche's unknown god or rehearsing for a performance later of Hof-mannsthal's Death and the Fool. These German kids seemed to like being crammed together—maybe it was in the nature of Social Democracy— and Isaac settled in among them with his characteristic lack of self-consciousness. An advantage, perhaps, of being essentially homeless. They accepted him as they might an interesting animal, say a pup, suitable for making a mascot of. As for Martina, she was ever more aware of her status as an outsider: the meat-eating, crow-haired, brashly spoken and politically innocent foreigner.

  Vaguely unsettled, as though niggled by foreboding, she paced fr
om one paneled and tapestry-hung chamber to the next, blinking at the occasional flare of lightning. Eventually she found herself in a stairwell leading up through a circular turret called, for historical reasons unknown to her, the Veil Tower. Half a dozen boys too young for Gymnasium raced one another up and down winding steps so tall as to guarantee knee strain, all the while shrieking with the excitement of imaginary battle. Martina climbed until they were well below her. Their voices, high-pitched and ecstatic, floated upward blurred by masonry into a diffuse trill, like a boys choir misbehaving in a cathedral. From the uppermost story, perhaps sixty feet above the ground, narrow paneless slots through the enormously thick walls gave fragmented views of the countryside.

  The heart of the storm had already passed to the west; the sky above the Saale was starting to brighten. A thin blanket of fog lay across the valley like cotton, the green of summer soaking through. The view from each cannon-slot was different, but all were lovely and each as implausible as the next—surely no landscape had looked this way for at least a hundred years. These Germans, so gullible, to believe any of it was real.

  Out of the mist, two riders materialized, guiding their mounts up the old dirt lane beside the river. Martina watched them in suspended disbelief. As they came nearer, she made them out to be male, one older and larger of frame than the other. The latter was very pale beneath a wet, drooping hat, but he rode with assurance, like someone born to the saddle. The other was bareheaded and dark-haired and sat stiffly on his horse as though trying to impress someone—a pompous knight cantering onto the tournament field, accompanied by his squire. Only of course, in a proper legend, it is the golden-haired boy who bears the mark of destiny.

  Now would be the moment. If Martina had long golden tresses, this was her cue to send them cascading from the turret. Improvising in haste, she pawed through her pockets and discovered Käthe's crumpled map. She folded this sloppily into a paper airplane, which on its maiden flight tumbled into a fatal nosedive. Martina watched with dismay as it spiraled down the face of the tower toward a fringe of hawthorn at the base of the wall.