“Günter desires to marry Brunhild. Is he worthy of her hand? We do not know; the question has no meaning. He arranges, by deceitful means, with Siegfried's help, to satisfy his desire. Siegfried lets Kriemhild in on the plot. Later, in a moment of pique, she comes out with it. Brunhild is shamed. She has quite a temper and vows to get even. The poet's sympathies appear to be with her, but that is no matter. She enlists Hagen to exact revenge. It is quite straightforward: they must murder Siegfried. Not so easy, but the deed is done. And now, of course, further revenge is required, and that brings the House of Burgundy crashing down—that's how things go, history proves it again and again. In the end, all the principals are dead, and the only thing one can say is, Well, now that's over. Who were the heroes? Who the villains? What are the lessons here? There are none. There can be none. It is only a story, a great story—a German story.
“Which of course is the astonishing thing. A full two centuries after the last bulwarks of heathendom were smashed in Europe—which campaign, incidentally, was directed by German emperors, Otto and his successors— we find this profoundly non-Christian epic being penned in the very heart of the Holy Roman Reich, commissioned by a duly christened noble, even as Wolfram, two days' riding north, was penning his Parzival. That is the second, really quite striking point of divergence.
“There is one other. And you may think it odd, but I have come to think this may be the most telling of all. Parzival was written to be spoken aloud—memorized and then recited. The Nibelungenlied, in contrast, was composed to be chanted or sung, to the accompaniment most probably of a lyre. Thus the former is an early work of modern literature, whose author we know, whose artistic intent is fairly clear. The latter is neither modern nor literary. Though beautifully worded and filled with compelling scenes, arresting images, even the sort of nuance we would now call psychological, it is not, in the end, a work of the mind. It is a pure matter of the heart, the blood, the enraptured consciousness. The author is nameless because the story springs from deep in our folk-soul. It is the Matter of Germany in the purest possible sense.
“So there”— setting his glass down, folding his hands, a monkish gesture, as though laying aside the quill—” in brief, is the problem I have undertaken to solve. How does one speak, how can one put forward a proposition of the utmost delicacy, to a nation of people who think in categories, who look for morals and believe in consequences, on behalf of a nation that does not?”
A fair question, Ingo thought. “So,” he said, “how does one?”
Cheruski stared, eyes bleary now. He weakly waved an arm. “I have thought…well, you know, they were both Germans, it's hard to get around that. Maybe something about the Grail, the deepest mystery, the hidden truth… strip away the Christian stuff, it's pagan at the core—the sacred goblet, only a youth can approach it, an innocent, ‘slender and pure as a flame’—”
“That's George, not Wolfram.” Ingo sighed. Cheruski had seemed to be making sense there for a while. Now he was babbling, a tired and deluded old man.
“But I know,” the Professor said, fixing Ingo with a darkly impassioned stare, “what you're wondering is, do I have anything for the Reichsführer? Have I found an equation, something scientific? No, I have not. It is such a pity. For if only the Anglo-Americans could be made to understand us, then we might put an end to this needless war. Our generals could turn to the true enemy in the East. And people like you and me, Herr Müller, could take off these uniforms and get back to our books.”
Ingo slept fitfully, twisting beneath heavy blankets and coming partly awake again and again, unable to separate the strands of reality and dream, each as strange, as haunted, as the other. Footsteps echoing down cold hallways. A boy lifts a heavy cup to tender lips. A hunter rears on his steed, armor black and shiny as an automobile. Cries of terror, dragon's fire, a castle standing empty, a countryside left barren. Ingo is lost in an edgeless forest. His legs move but carry him nowhere, only deeper among the trees. There are furtive noises all around, invisible scurrying. Then a hush: the air is shot through by a hunter's horn, blazing clear and hard-edged as the sunlight.
He opened his eyes. The curtain of the cupboard bed was closed but the window drape must have been open because the coachman's room was flooded with light. He lay there blinking with the dream still in his mind, coloring his awareness. The echo of the Jägerhorn seemed to linger between these heavy plaster walls. Then he heard the snorting of a horse, and he could not have been dreaming that.
He thrust the curtain aside and struggled free of the blankets. The room was winter-cold. Outside the high window lay a hillside of naked trees whose branches, etched in white, shivered against a sky that was deep and achingly blue. The frost on fallen leaves was so heavy it looked like snow. Ingo pressed his forehead to the pane; his eyes probed the woods as if trying to locate the center of a maze. He thought of the Friedrich print hanging on the wall of the Rusty Ring, Landscape with Oaks and Hunter. The painting was a visual riddle, as this was, the question being: Where is the hunter? Because the oaks are plain enough, great craggy things with limbs broken by storms, and you can see a passing companionship of birds, the sky turbulent with cloud, a far meadow stretching pale green to glimpses of water… but in that expanse of charakteristisch Germania, can you spot the hunter? Long-standing patrons of the Ring had won rounds of drinks this way.
“Of course he's there, look at the title. All you have to do is find him. Tell you what, I'll give you an extra minute, starting—now.”
And suddenly, there he was. Fifty meters from Ingo's window, a gray-clad figure on horseback, motionless amid a confusion of boulders that lay like the bones of a fallen cathedral with a stream twisting between them. The horse, a large silvery animal, had lowered its head to drink from the half-frozen water. The rider's face was shadowed by a peaked officer's cap. When the horse had drunk its fill he moved just perceptibly in the saddle and the animal turned, clomping unhurriedly up the hill toward the house.
Then there was another, and another. One by one the hunting party came out of the forest. There were five of them mounted and another bunch, too far away yet to count, crossing a low clearing on foot.
Ingo felt a surge of panic—they were coming for him—that he tried to dismiss as irrational. Mainly, though, he felt wonderment. It was like a scene out of a different time, a more idealized version of this same countryside.
They called it the Hunting Lodge. Who would have thought they meant it literally?
He tugged on his uniform and found his way to the kitchen, a wide sunny room with hectares of counter space and copper pans dangling from hooks in mixed shades of oxidation. A cookfire blazed in an old woodstove where Magda was fussing over a pot you could have boiled a boar alive in, above which hovered a cloud of steam.
“Magda. There are people coming out of the woods. Men on horses.”
She gave him a hurried smile. Agitating the contents of the pot with a huge ladle, she said over her shoulder, “You'll find coffee in the jug there. It's mostly roasted dandelion but there's some of the real stuff mixed in. And milk if you like, but go gently. That's meant to last us awhile.”
“But Magda—do you know who these people are? They'll be here any minute. Should we…do something? Wake the Professor?”
She turned to him, ladle dribbling a grayish, gooey liquid, her temples pearled with sweat. “Do something?”— as though the idea were novel, or amusing. “A bit late for that, isn't it, dear?”
A clatter came from elsewhere in the house—a door flung open, boots stomping up a corridor. Voices raised, rambunctious, irrepressible, like revelers out on Connecticut Avenue, soldiers on leave, rousing Ingo in the wee hours, beyond caring—Whatta ya gonna do? Put me in the army and teach me to salute?
In the kitchen door a bulky figure appeared, a fairy-tale giant filling the space from sill to header. He wore a week's beard, a Russian-style fur cap, unmatched pieces of a Waffen-SS uniform and a long-barreled bolt-action Mauser. “B
y God, you old witch,” he roared, “there you are, stirring your cauldron. What is it then, a sleeping draught? God, I could use one, I'll tell you that.”
His sharp accent and reddened, fruit-shaped nose came from somewhere east of the Alps. Either of his hands could have crushed a coconut. He noticed Ingo and offered a grunt by way of hello.
“It's good porridge,” Magda scolded him, “but you're not having any till you clean up. Now step away, you're blocking the door.”
He complied indifferently, moving his bulk to the nearest sink and opening the tap, which gave forth a thin stream of water. Behind him came a second man, then a third, as unlike to one another as they were to the giant, except for their ragtag uniforms and their attitude of casual brutality. Before long there were seven of them, filling the large kitchen with raucous laughter, curses in at least three languages and a faint but disgusting smell like that of putrefying meat. They paid Ingo no more attention than they would have given a household cat, but this was scant comfort. They looked the sort of men to kick a cat aside the moment it crossed them.
“The chief is back from the east,” the giant told Magda when she handed him a steaming bowl. “Did you hear?”
She shook her head. The news didn't seem to interest her.
“He's been promoted,” the giant went on, oblivious. “I can't even pronounce what he is now.”
“Obersturmbannführer,” said a man across the room.
“Right. Same as a light colonel. Gave him a medal, too. Something he did at the front. Counterattack against the Russkis, gave ‘em a taste I'd say.”
“And nabbed some horses,” said a man with a long, thin face whom Ingo fancifully likened to a defrocked priest. “Ugly old draft horses that belonged to the artillery. Figured, if they can tug an 88 through that Ukrainian mud, they could even carry Janocz.”
They all laughed except for the giant, evidently Janocz, who nodded grudgingly. “The both of them together might do it. Myself, I'd rather walk. Never got the hang of shooting from a saddle.”
Magda stood with an empty bowl, eyeing the lot of them with unconcealed distaste. “Where is he now, then, this great hero? Will he be coming to breakfast or not?”
“Upstairs with the old man,” said the priest.
This answer did not appear to satisfy Magda, who stared at the empty bowl as though it posed an intractable dilemma.
“Give it to that one,” said Janocz, pointing to Ingo. “All good SS boys should eat their porridge. That's what Heini says, eh?”
Magda shrugged. She scooped out a portion of what looked like gelatinous, overboiled oatmeal, placed it on the counter and left the kitchen without ceremony.
Now for lack of other entertainment, the rough-looking men turned their attention to Ingo. None of them spoke, but he figured it was only a matter of time.
“How was the hunting?” he said, taking the initiative, aiming for an easy, bartender's bonhomie.
For the longest while no one made a sound, only stared at him, and Ingo feared he had given himself away.
Then the defrocked priest shook his head. “Not so good this time. We had a tip about some Czechs who'd been hitting railroad lines from a base somewhere on Tatra Polskich. We spent five days up there and saw nothing but rocks. Finally went into a little mountain village and interrogated the peasants. Nobody would talk, so we shot a few. Still no talking, so we shot some more. Soon only women and kids were left, and they started babbling, but who could believe them? So we cleared the place out and had a fire and a nice dinner, then we came back down.”
The other men nodded and muttered; a couple added details that Ingo tried not to hear. He dug into his oatmeal, which had taken on the look of liquefied brain matter.
“Know what I heard, though?” said a dark little man whose hair was cropped shorter than his dramatic, coal-black eyebrows. “I heard tomorrow we're headed out again, to the other side of the Gap. Hunting's always better there. And you know what else—”
“Not tomorrow!” groaned Janocz. “I need some rest. I haven't slept the night through in a week.”
“You need a fucking bath, is what,” another man said.
“What I heard was,” Eyebrows persisted, “there's a bunch of Jews out there, somewhere. Out in the east, toward Zakopanje.”
“They've all gone east,” the priest said archly. “Haven't you heard?”
“I'm talking about living Jews. Fighters, in the mountains somewhere. That's who we're going after. So I hear.”
Someone scoffed: “Jewish fighters.”
“I haven't shot a Jew since 1943,” mused Janocz, rubbing his chin.
“There were some Jewish fighters,” Eyebrows said. “Back when you were still loading manure down in Croatia. The ZOB—that was a tough bunch, let me tell you.”
“It was during Harvest Festival,” Janocz said. “Remember that?”
“Who doesn't?” said the priest.
“I've heard there's Jews left in Lithuania. A whole brigade of them, men and women both. Breeding in the swamps like maggots.”
“They were short of hands at the big camp up by the railroad, and they had a quota. You know, a certain number they needed to kill. Birthday present for Heydrich or some such thing.”
“Heydrich was dead by then,” said Eyebrows, apparently the historian. “It was more, a commemoration.”
Janocz scowled. “This was before the snow started, anyhow—tail end of the transport season. Harvest Festival, get it? Extra pay and lots of booze, to help you get on with the job. Plus, if you went through their pockets, who knows what you might find? Take a look at this.” He opened a flap of his filthy coat and dug something out of a pocket.
It was swaddled in red cloth, and at first Ingo thought it was a piece of jewelry. But as the giant let it dangle he saw that it was an exceedingly ornate military decoration; around the basic shape of a Prussian cross in blue enamel played an intricate filigree of silver and gold, topped by a silver lion and a pairing of delicate, green-enameled laurels. “What is it?” he couldn't help asking.
“Ah,” said the giant. “Well, I wondered about that myself. Finally I asked the Professor and he looked it up in a book someplace. Turns out it's the Commander's Cross with Swords, First Class, issued by the Duchy of Brunswick at the end of the First War. Quite a rare sort of thing, only a few dozen awarded. Well this old Jew, he was wearing it that day, under his shirt. Must've bought it at a pawnshop, I reckon. Anyhow, it's mine now.”
“Worth anything, you think?” Eyebrows said.
The giant shrugged. “Beats me. I keep it for good luck.”
“Didn't bring the last fellow much luck,” the priest pointed out.
Janocz frowned. He seemed not to have thought of that.
Then came footsteps, as regular as marching. Ingo didn't know whether to be relieved or more frightened. Could things get worse? Probably so. The giant cleared his throat, making a sound like a motorcycle kicking over. Around the room there was a general clamming-up; some of the men straightened their backs while others patted their uniforms into a poor semblance of order.
Through the kitchen door, at a crisp gait, stepped Cheruski followed closely by another officer in a field-gray cape. Jaekl came last, looking out of temper and seeming to shrink from the coarse, vile-smelling men; Ingo could hardly blame him. For an instant, the two of them exchanged an almost brotherly glance.
“The Brigadeführer tells me,” said the officer beside Cheruski, “we have a newcomer. Another Volksdeutscher, gentlemen! We are becoming quite international, aren't we, in these days?”
Ingo longed to disappear. But he forced himself to meet the man's gaze straight on. The Obersturmbannführer was not large; he stood slightly shorter than Ingo and was as trim as Jaekl at the waist, though somewhat fuller in the shoulders. His most distinguishing trait was an exceptional pallor that extended from his surprisingly delicate hands—they could have belonged to a painter or a pianist—to his unemotive face, cold blue eyes, and thinn
ing hair as fine and glossy as spun gold. His paleness became all the more striking when, in the steamy heat of the kitchen, the man whipped off his cape to reveal the all-black uniform of the Allgemeine-SS, the elite inner corps of the service, the Black Knighthood itself. He took a couple strides into the room, getting a better look at the name patch above Ingo's breast pocket.
“Miller,” he said.
No, he said Müller, he must have. Ingo felt a shiver pass through him— invisibly, he hoped—and struggled to remain impassive, to return the man's stare as coolly as Josef Müller, battle-hardened Sturmmann, would have done. He distracted himself with irrelevant details: the creases beside the fellow's mouth, the exhaustion in his eyes.
“We head out tomorrow,” the officer said. It was in effect an order. He spoke loudly, so that he appeared to be addressing the entire room, but his eyes were still on Ingo. “You come with us, Müller. I think you may find it interesting. Perhaps you will discover that you have an aptitude. The hunter's instinct.” Then turned away and gave Cheruski a brisk little nod.
“Jaekl,” the older man said, “go find Magda, would you? Tell her I shall be taking breakfast in my study, with Obersturmbannführer von Ewigholz.”
Ingo's mind clicked on those ice-blue eyes. My God, he thought. The Black Knight was Hagen.
OFF THE MAP
AUGUST–SEPTEMBER 1929
Ingo in love.
It sounded—and perhaps was—absurd, buffoonish.
And yet: as he lay on a thin youth-hostel mattress with the early light of Thuringia in his eyes, listening to a distant clatter from the courtyard, Frau Möhring giving her poor kitchen staff no respite, breakfast will be served pünktlich at seven, he felt as though he were hearing a tinkle of golden chimes and breathing ambrosia-scented air. He could scarcely restrain himself form leaping up and running across the dew-soaked grass. And he would have done so, if there were any hope of meeting Anton earlier than 10:30.
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