But what he remembered most clearly now, from this distant perspective, was that during that car trip, in spite of his queasiness and dread, he had felt paradoxically happy, even strangely at peace. He had treasured every moment, each glimpse of the unfamiliar landscape, every breath of country air through the car's open windows. Because he knew that very soon now, before he was ready, the journey would be over.
They made frequent stops, at times and places chosen by Uli. Ingo supposed this was on his own account. He didn't mind. His leg muscles were all but spent, and the coarse fabric of the German uniform, which was the proper size but somehow wrongly proportioned, chafed the skin raw at his neck and his knees. In early afternoon they halted in a sunny hollow that narrowed to the northwest, its slopes littered with rocks the color of old newspaper. Ingo had nearly dozed off when he heard the sound of an airplane. It was impossible to guess which direction it was coming from until suddenly the plane appeared in a gap between the mountains: a two-engine craft, painted gray, buzzing along at low altitude.
“Russian,” Shuvek said, indifferently.
Uli was prying at a rock with a length of sun-bleached wood.
“What are the Russians doing way out here?” said Ingo.
Shuvek shrugged. “No one knows what the Russians are doing anywhere. Except smashing the Germans to a bloody pulp.”
“It's too low to be a reconnaissance flight,” said Uli, more deliberatively. “They might be dropping supplies to their partisans.”
“Are their partisans different from your partisans?”
Uli gave him a wistful half-smile. “We have an enemy in common. For the moment, that's what matters. To the Russians as well.”
“Yet here we sit,” Shuvek noted sourly, “the three of us, speaking the enemy's language.”
Ingo decided to voice the question that had been tugging at him. “Where do you come from, Uli? You don't sound much like a Czech.”
Uli looked thoughtful for a moment. “As to where I come from, that's easy—a place called either Bratislava or Pressburg, depending on where a certain line falls on your map. As to what I am, whether I am a Czech, or speak as a Czech ought to speak, these are questions I cannot answer, and indeed questions I might never have troubled myself over, had it not been for Uncle Adolf.” He stared at Ingo, his eyes rimmed in pink from long weariness. “You cannot understand this, I think. To be American is simple, a matter of having a piece of paper stating your citizenship. There is no question of blood, or ancestral homelands, or borders that move from one place to another.”
Ingo wasn't so sure America was as simple as that. But Shuvek went on: “Do you think so? This one here, he doesn't seem like a Yank to me.”
“Have you known many Americans?” Uli asked gently.
Shuvek shook his head. “No need to. I know what Americans are like. Just the way I knew what Germans were like, before they ever came and started shooting people. Some things you don't need to see up close to understand.”
Uli frowned. “Perhaps you're right.”
“Have you ever met the Fox?” said Ingo.
Shuvek gave him a sharp look. Uli said slowly, “I have met him. And he does seem very much an American to me. An American of a certain type. If that is what you're asking.”
It was. And Uli's reply reassured him somewhat, but also gave him a strange, shaky feeling. He was almost there now. Only one person away.
The method of the partisans was to travel around the clock: move a while, rest a while, move again. They stayed in the hollow until the sun dipped below the neighboring ridge, then headed off toward a pass that would take them through a turn-of-the-century spa village and ultimately to the Polish frontier. Timing was important; Uli wanted to reach the village just after nightfall. The problem was that near the border they must travel by roadway; the High Tatrys were too difficult to cross otherwise, even for seasoned climbers. But the road was narrow and in places ran along the edge of deep mountain lakes, with no place to flee or to hide short of diving into the icy water. If they were caught by a German patrol there was no way out, they would have to stand and fight. And there were only three of them. And one of them was Ingo.
He made a quick inventory. He still carried his stubby little Schmeisser, which by now felt almost comfortable, snug in its leather sling at his elbow. His uniform came with a supply belt of the standard German type, holding a bread bag, bayonet, ammo pouch and water canteen. His backpack contained a frayed wool blanket, a few stick-type hand grenades and a volume of poetry. All these things—the poems as well—came from the German soldier whose body, now rotting somewhere, this uniform had fit.
Ingo doubted that it was the same man, Corporal Josef Müller, whose identity papers he carried in a breast pocket. Yet it was hard, all the same, not to imagine so—not to feel that he had slipped into the empty space left by the other man's passing. A characteristic folktale of the Carpathians. One night, deep in the forest, beneath a full Hunter's Moon, Ingo Miller transforms mysteriously into Josef Müller. The soft-bellied American barkeep becomes a hardened Sturmmann of the Waffen-SS. His beer mug turns into a machine pistol, his bar rag a Brotbeutel. In place of a war-painted Redskin, his cap sports a leering Death's Head.
And yet—here is the authentic fairy-tale touch—on his back, tucked in a blanket, he still carries the same volume of poetry. Beliebte Gedichte der deutschen Romantik: Hölderlin, Heine, George, Hofmannsthal, magical verses that have always brought him such comfort and such sorrow. The little book, bound in red, is a kind of talisman, though its exact function is not revealed. Maybe it holds the power to reverse this terrible enchantment—or maybe it's the very thing that sparked his transformation in the first place.
“Now listen,” said Uli, when they reached the edge of the village. The three of them crouched behind a fence; soft amber light spilled from cottages a hundred meters away. Uli was looking hard at Ingo. “Here is something you must remember. There are worse things a man can do than die. I do not say this as the SS do—die a glorious hero's death and go straight to Valhalla. I mean that if something goes wrong, if you still have the power to choose, it is better not to be taken alive by the Nazis. Because they will kill you regardless, but they will not do it right away. Do you understand?”
Ingo nodded.
“No, you do not. Be thankful you do not. But perhaps, let us hope, you understand enough.” His face softened and he placed a hand on Shu-vek's shoulder. “Despite what my friend says, some things you must see yourself—see up close—to truly know.”
Shuvek gave a nasty sort of smile. He spoke briefly in Slovenian.
Uli shook his head, then translated: “He says not to worry. If it becomes necessary, he will shoot you himself. And he hopes you will do likewise.”
“Keine Sorge,” Ingo told him—no worries. “It would be my pleasure.”
The village slipped past like a dream. Smoke curled from its two dozen chimneys. Shingled roofs were pitched at the same angle as the mountainsides. The lane twisted past outlying farmhouses where no dogs barked, whose barns stood empty of livestock. All domestic animals had long been eaten by the Germans or the partisans, or else their owners had hidden them in high secret glades. At the far end of the village, tucked at the foot of a craggy Berg whose summit shone with early snow in the moonlight, stood an old rambling spa, built in the Swiss style with massive timbers and an overhanging roof. From one of its hundred diamond-paned windows, faint lantern light flickered. A caretaker, Ingo supposed. He looked around at the shadowed landscape and imagined Party bigwigs hiking and shooting in this rugged forest, swimming in dark blue waters that never became warm.
The village fell behind them, and they were climbing out of the valley on a tortuous, pebble-surfaced lane. The moon hung bright over the peaks, the sky was clear, the stars more luminous than Ingo could remember. Frozen night air moved in and out of his lungs, charging his brain with unusual energy, and he felt like one of those tiny figures in a painting by Caspar David
Friedrich, standing with his back to the artist, hand on a hiking staff, rendered insignificant by a breathtaking landscape, alone at what looks very much like the outermost edge of the world.
But this was not the edge of the world—it was the heart of an old and populous continent, the eye of a thousand-year Sturm. On every side lay ruined lands, burning cities, unmarked graves. And he was hardly alone, for besides his two companions the Carpathians teemed with hidden life, creatures familiar and uncanny, ghosts who sang in long-dead tongues of a time that had never been, devils in tall black boots, avenging angels toting automatic rifles, the golden eagle shrieking high above clutching its Hakenkreuz while Wotan's twin ravens, Thought and Memory, feast upon the souls of the walking dead and the soon-to-die.
This is what comes, Ingo thought, of reading those well-loved German verses over and over again. After a decade or two, they get stamped so deeply in your mind that you no longer know the sense of them, only the feeling. Then you are right at home here in Werewolf Country.
The road took them down then higher up. The moon crawled west across the sky. They hiked and rested, nibbled some bread, rubbed their sore feet, hiked again. The temperature continued to drop until the cold seemed a part of Ingo's body, something you carried everywhere without thinking much about it, like age. After that, it no longer bothered him.
Only in such an isolated spot, with a view of a perfectly clear sky, do you notice the subtle gradations of daybreak. “Darkest before the dawn” is a gross misstatement, at least here. Long before dawn you could detect a graying-out along a wide arc of horizon, so slight it seemed at first nothing more than your imagination. You noticed it chiefly by a dimming of the eastern stars. Next came a penumbral half-light that waxed, by immeasurable degrees, into the predawn state known as first light, the favored time for launching infantry assaults. By now they were close to the border.
“I say we stop here,” said Shuvek. “Keep out of sight in those woods there. Rest till mid-morning. Warm up a bit.”
Uli gave this some thought, or waited long enough to make it appear he had done so. “We'll be easier to spot then,” he pointed out. “And the Huns will have finished their porridge and sent their patrols out. No, if we're going to stop, I'd rather do it on the Polish side.”
Ingo, too exhausted to venture an opinion of his own, accepted Uli's decision as stoically as did Shuvek. The three men resumed their plodding, mulelike progress through the mountain pass.
Not long afterward—fi fteen minutes, or another kilometer of desolate roadway—Ingo became aware of a sound that did not belong here. It was faint and seemed to come from many directions at once, bouncing off the hard surfaces all around them. By the time he stopped to listen, he saw that Uli and Shuvek had stopped as well. Their faces were blank. The noise grew more distinct.
“It's not a motorbike,” Shuvek said.
“No,” Uli agreed.
A few moments later: “I don't think it's a truck.”
“No? That's good.”
Until then, Ingo couldn't have guessed that it was a motor vehicle—as opposed to an airplane or, who knew, a Tiger tank.
“It's a car,” Shuvek declared at last. “A big car.”
They looked around. Their position, though not as bad as it might have been, was bad enough: midway along a gradual curve where the road skirted a steep, smooth outcrop. On the downslope, inches past the edge, the terrain plunged steeply into a gorge. Still, there were places you could think of hiding. Only you had to think right now; the noise of the car was getting louder fast, coming up the road behind them from the Slovak side.
“Down here.” Uli pointed to a narrow cleft in the rock face that seemed to offer hand-and footholds. Below it, the chasm was so deep and shadowed you couldn't see its bottom. Shuvek scrambled down first. In his haste, one of his feet slipped loose. He hung there for a horrifying moment, struggling for balance, clinging to the rock face with one hand while the other groped blindly for something, anything, to grab hold of. Uli dropped to the ground, stuck both arms over the edge and seized Shu-vek's free hand. After that Shuvek was able to regain his balance and edge a bit lower, making room for the others.
They had lost precious seconds. The sound of the engine was clear enough that you could guess the number of cylinders. Ingo fought an urge to stare up the road, waiting dumbly for fate to roar down on him.
“Now you,” Uli said. “Hurry.”
“No.”
The surprise in Uli's face mirrored his own. Ingo hadn't planned on saying this. Nonetheless he blundered on. “I'm wearing the uniform—they'll just think I'm—”
Uli clapped him on the shoulder. It might have been agreement, or thanks, or simply goodbye. Relief, perhaps, at getting rid of this troublesome charge. There was no time to talk or even to acknowledge what Ingo was doing. Uli's head had scarcely dropped below road level when a big Mercedes touring car appeared around the bend. It was moving fast, its tires kicking up dust. The round, protruding headlights burned cold and bright, like the approaching sunrise.
Ingo began walking straight toward it. Every stride carried him farther from where Uli and Shuvek were hidden. He'd taken no more than a dozen before the car began to slow, its brakes engaging with a suppressed groan, its great engine falling to an idle.
He could not see who was inside. The windshield only mirrored the silver-blue sky. At last, as the sleek machine ground to a halt barely an arm's length away, Ingo saw himself reflected in the glass: a small and insignificant figure, like that poor schmuck captured by Friedrich, alone at the bitter end of everything.
His right hand was on his Schmeisser. He expected the car doors to fly open, jackbooted stormtroopers to leap out. There are worse things a man can do than die. Instead, the rear window on his side of the car slid smoothly down. Ingo stepped hesitantly nearer until he could look inside. A thin man with a mustache, wearing a dark leather coat over some kind of uniform, peered out at him. The Mercedes's passenger compartment was so high above road level that the two of them were almost eye-to-eye. Ingo figured the man was about ten years younger than himself.
He spoke without thinking, in the roughest German he could muster: “I'd be careful driving this way, meine Herren. The mountains are full of partisans. You'll never see them until it's too late.” He took a step back, pretending to admire the automobile. “Those Ungeziefer would love to knock out a beauty like this.”
Despite the cold he was sweating. He tried to adopt a pose of unconcern. The thin young man looked about to say something, but only ran his lips together. Nervous, Ingo thought. Which put him several grades above Ingo on the scale that runs from dead calm to shitting yourself. But everything was unfolding so fast that Ingo, near exhaustion, could hardly grasp that any of it was real. He felt like a drunk, oblivious of the conventions, with no recourse left but bluster.
From the shadowy interior of the car a second voice spoke—quiet, parsing the words carefully, like an orator rehearsing his lines.
The man with the mustache looked briefly away, muttered something, then turned back to Ingo. “The Brigadeführer would like to know what you are doing out here alone. And why you are not with your unit. I suggested that you are perhaps a deserter.”
This was the moment, Ingo supposed. Two men in the backseat. Up front just one, presumably a chauffeur. All probably armed. He might get the drop on them—maybe one chance in ten. And after they shot him, they'd go looking for his confederates, or radio for an anti-partisan squad. No, it would be best to contain the disaster; let their thoughts run the way they were going.
“It's like I told you—there are partisans all over this area. There was a fight. I got separated from my comrades. We had just made camp for the night. I found myself lost in the woods. It was dark. This happened night before last. Since then I've been trying—”
The thin man cut him off. “What is your unit, Sturmmann?” he said in a clipped, angry voice, like a Hollywood Nazi. “What is the name of your commanding offi
cer?”
Ingo started to raise his hands—All right, you got me, boys—when the other man in the backseat leaned over to the open window. This one was older, in his mid-fifties, perhaps, and though he wore the same black uniform, he didn't strike Ingo as a fighting man.
“Excuse me, please,” he said, examining Ingo through small rimless glasses. “Your accent, I have been trying to place it. How you roll the
R. And something about the intonation—it drifts lower on the final syllables. As a boy, did you by chance live in… could it be South Africa? Or perhaps—Canada?”
Ingo was afraid to respond. He'd always been proud of his German, which he'd kept in fine polish through countless hours of half-drunken banter with staffers from the German embassy. But now his confidence deserted him; he feared that by any small lapse, the shadow of a Washington drawl upon a vowel, he might betray himself. Was this a trap? he wondered. Was it some kind of test? He stared at the face behind the little spectacles but saw no guile there. Perhaps the old fellow was just dotty and fancied himself an amateur linguist.
“Repeat something for me,” the man said, his eyes brightening with inspiration. “Wer der Schönheit angeschaut mit Augen, ewig währt für ihn der Schmerz der Liebe.”
Ingo hesitated, wondering what exactly was expected of him. “Wer der Schönheit,” he began at last, “angeschaut mit Augen—” And at this point something turned inside him, and he corrected the ending of the verse: “Ist dem Tode schon anheimgegeben.” Then he said it all again, his voice falling into the meter like water finding a channel in the rock. He whose eyes have gazed upon true Beauty is already given over to Death.
The one with the mustache rolled his eyes, a supercilious little bastard.
Mainly to annoy him, Ingo went on: “Death in Venice in twenty syllables—that's what one of my professors used to say.”
The older man laughed—a dry sort of laugh, but it sounded genuine enough. He stared at Ingo for a few moments, dispassionately. He might have been a naturalist in the wild, evaluating some new specimen, deciding whether it was worth carrying home and putting under glass.
Another Green World Page 27
