Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  And so they walked a while, but not the Wandervogel sort of walking, determined and vigorous and good for you. More like playing hooky and getting away with it. The land was their co-conspirator, deflating below the foothills into a lumpy plain, easy on the feet and undemanding of the eye. None of the grandeur of the Iron Mountains here, nor the evocative, quasi-medieval Landschaft of Thuringia. The place was actually rather boring—it made Ingo think of Maryland, the remote stretches south of Annapolis where colored people lived. The fields were cramped and less than impeccably tended, though extraordinarily green. The woods, tidy and safe-looking, lacked the impressive antiquity of German forests and those deep, alluring shadows where nameless danger abides. Fuck all that, as Isaac might have said. This was good, ordinary country, pleasant enough to amble through, but nothing to write home about.

  In due course—about two minutes before Ingo would have insisted on a break—they came through a stand of poplars, the highest leaves faintly blushing with the first kiss of fall, to find themselves at the edge of a village, if “village” wasn't putting it too grandly. A couple dozen houses slumped beside the road, their yards and sheds and outhouses and livestock pens drawn up around them like an old woman's skirts. The principal buildings looked as though they might once have been taller and more gracefully proportioned, but over the decades had fattened and sagged, while creepers and roses and gooseberries and lilac bushes had filled in the gaps between them, and the surrounding woods and meadows had crept in, so that whatever sharp, right-angled lines had once divided the domestic from the wild, the pasture from the garden, the wall from its copious mantle of ivy, were now scarcely even a memory.

  At the center was a dusty common, more or less rectangular, cropped by sheep and edged by a row of thorny shrubs sporting festive scarlet berries. An old pump house, apparently still in use, was ringed by a well-kept bed of flowers Ingo couldn't begin to name: humble domestic varieties, their colors at the brink of open war—scarcely Anton's cup of tea. Small children, alike only in their drab, hard-worn clothes, were running around on the grass but stopped to watch the newcomers in undisguised fascination. A young mother, her attention roused by the silence, looked up from her knitting and stared just as brazenly. Nobody waved hello or even nodded in their general direction.

  Ingo murmured, “I guess they don't get too many visitors around here.”

  “What's to visit?” said Isaac.

  At the far end of the green stood a small Wirtshaus, probably the only public accommodation for miles and miles. Though hardly distinguishable from its neighbors—the smithy two doors down could have been its twin, with the front wall torn open and an extra chimney thrown in—it called attention to itself by the scarlet geraniums (even Ingo knew a geranium when he saw one) that tumbled from boxes under a pair of wide front windows, veiled from the inside by panels of white lace. Tacked up by the door was a hand-painted sign on which an oversized yellow chicken bathed cheerfully in a stewpot; naïve and whimsical, it might have been the work of someone's talented daughter.

  The room behind the lace curtains was furnished in three corners with heavy wooden tables and a muster of chairs sufficiently sturdy to withstand a drunken brawl. In the fourth stood a small iron stove and an empty woodbin; autumn was still a few weeks off and these people clearly weren't rushing it. The place was otherwise empty.

  Isaac made for the table farthest from the windows. A bench was set into the wall and Ingo chose this for its protective attributes. Isaac sat blithely with his back turned to the door. The landlord entered from a back hallway looking slightly flushed, wearing suspenders over his white shirt and a bright blue yarmulke. If anything about the advent of this pair surprised him, he didn't let it show. Dark, avuncular and not at all portly, he addressed them in a language so exotic, so rife with unusually situated consonants, that Ingo guessed it was Polish. Isaac responded in Yiddish, barely glancing up. The innkeeper again showed no surprise. He replied briefly, shaking his head, then his tone changed and he seemed to offer a suggestion, to which Isaac assented with a shrug.

  “Nice place here,” Ingo ventured sometime after the man had gone, because it felt odd to sit there facing each other without saying anything.

  Isaac offered no opinion. He fiddled with the table's only adornment, a fistful of pink blossoms in a stoneware jar. His nose was thrust into these when the landlord swept back in and gave him a little smile, tolerant and amused. He set down two glasses, a murky green bottle, half a loaf of coarse bread and a bowl of something squishy, black and redolent of vinegar. Ingo waited until he'd gone before giving this a worried once-over.

  Isaac said, “My aunt calls that stuff eggplant caviar.” He had lined up the glasses and was sloshing tawny liquid into them—thicker than wine, more clouded than any sort of liquor Ingo was familiar with. “For folks too poor to get the real thing, I guess. Here you go: the local poison, it's all they've got.”

  Ingo risked an experimental sip and was jolted by warring sensations, the hot tang of alcohol juxtaposed with a tongue-coating sweetness that faded in time to a vague fruity aftertaste.

  “It's supposed to be cherry,” said Isaac. “That's what the guy said. And today's stew is supposed to be veal. But in places like this, who knows? The cherry's probably apple—you know, the little green kind with holes in them. And the veal's probably last week's beef. But like my Aunt Rachel says, it's all in the preparation. She says, Give me a deep dish and some seasonings and any old kind of bird, and I'll make you a duck paprikash you'll be dreaming about for months.” He raised his glass. “To friends.”

  “Friends.” Even then, the word had taken on complicated shadings. Martina had applied it to him and Anton. He'd applied it to her and Butler. Nothing was simple anymore.

  The eggplant caviar, which one ate by spreading it over chunks of caraway-seasoned bread, was surprisingly good, though it resembled nothing Ingo had ever eaten before. And the stew, when it came at last— after a good part of the bottle had been put away—was rich and brothy, fleshed out with beans and leeks and peppers; and by the time you got to wondering about the provenance of those little cubes of meat, the question was basically moot.

  A handful of other patrons straggled in for lunch. Ingo guessed them to be farmers or laborers on their midday break. Whatever they were, they showed little overt interest in the two boys at the corner table. Now and then Ingo felt someone's glance straying over him, but by now he must have shed the more obvious signs of Americanness, of being anything besides just another wandering Junge, dusty from the road, overdue for his twice-weekly shave, spending his papa's money on food and drink. Isaac, of course, looked like nothing but himself: a semi-feral teenager who gave the distinct impression of being, in the new parlance, “rootless.” On this day, none of the locals took exception to that.

  Not that Ingo would have noticed, or cared. Just now, all that mattered was the feeling of supernal well-being that had descended upon him. The sun had dropped a bit and moved around the corner of the building so that warm yellow light came streaming through the nearest window to spread like a magic carpet across the floor. By its diffracted radiance everything in the room took on a revelatory glow—not at all blurry or hazy, rather a deepening of luminosity, such as one sees, for instance, in Rembrandt. Faces, flowers, half-filled glasses (they were on their second bottle by now) all seemed to possess an inner radiance. Every object, every being had become more wondrously itself. The glowing surface of the table spoke of a craftsman's honest, painstaking toil, subsequently burnished by years of hospitality. The pink blossoms winkled so beautifully from their jar that you could understand, just then, what kept the bees going all day long. Isaac's arm, laid uncaringly beside his plate, was a marvel of intricate design, from its endearingly awkward elbow down the length of the slender forearm to the wide, strong and somewhat clumsy-fingered hand. And all these things somehow were intertangled—the warmth, the food, the beauty of natural things, the gemütlich little pub, the freckle-faced
boy— though Ingo might have been the only one to notice. Ingo the constant observer.

  Watching the innkeeper go about his daily chores—truly, the man was a paragon of competence, quietly attentive to his patrons' every wish—Ingo experienced what he felt then was an epiphany, and might well have been so. Here was a good life, he realized. Here was an honorable way to live and a worthy thing to be. To provide for all and sundry a haven, albeit temporary, from the tempests of the world outside, a place of comfort and nourishment and fellowship…well, you could do worse, couldn't you? He topped up his glass and stared contentedly into its blood-tinted depths.

  It was around this time that Isaac found his tongue.

  Not that he hadn't kept up an off-and-on background chatter—on the food, the townies, the Polish language, the kind of shit the Socialists make you eat, how this place reminded him of the town where Eli and Rachel lived, a nice enough place if you're a fucking cow. Ingo attended to all this in an absentminded way, as you half hear a radio droning quietly in the background. Suddenly, after an interval of daydreaming, it struck him that the boy's tone of voice had changed. When or why, he couldn't have said. But Isaac was speaking now in a quiet and steady voice—not at all like himself, yet paradoxically more like himself than Ingo could remember. Which was not to say that he had any real idea who Isaac was—but then, who did?

  “Running away,” Isaac was saying just then, “that's what they called it. But I wasn't running, and I didn't really go anywhere, so how could it be running away? It was just… picking someplace different to sleep for a while. Maybe they should call it ‘lying away.’ What do you think?”

  Ingo scarcely knew how to respond. Fortunately, Isaac didn't appear to want an answer.

  “I mean, what did they expect? For me to spend my whole life sitting in school doing lousy and getting laughed at? Forget about it. Fucking school. Me and books, we never…”

  Ingo believed this was the first time he had ever heard Isaac talk about himself, his past, the sort of thing most people consider important. “You and books?” he prompted.

  Isaac looked across the table at him. Really looked. There was something unsettling about that stare. The green eyes were glazed with drink— as Ingo assumed his own were—but that was a surface phenomenon, a bodily thing. Burning through them, like sun through the waterfall, shone a clarity and intensity of awareness rather uncanny in a kid who was usually so blithe, so nonchalant. The eyes seemed to actually see you. It reminded Ingo of Halloween, when certain people can stare right through the mask and figure out who you are. Those eyes locked on him for a second or two, long enough for Isaac to come to a decision.

  “It's not like I'm stupid,” he said. “I always know what's going on. I can multiply and remember names and dates and all that shit. I just don't read.” He paused. “I can read. I know all the fucking words, I've got the rules of grammar down. I can talk fine. But when something's on paper, forget about it. I look down, I see what it says, but somehow, it doesn't mean anything. You open a book, maybe it's Treasure Island. There's pirates and gold doubloons and all. Okay. But does it make sense, or is it some idiotic kid thing? As long as it's just on paper, I don't know. But if I could go to the fucking island and meet the pirates myself, then I could tell you in two seconds: this one's an asshole, that one's all right, take the treasure and run. Or maybe, this whole thing's a load of crap, it's even worse than Peter Pan.” He shrugged. “I guess that's just how my head works. The point is, sitting in school was nothing but a waste of time. I needed to be, you know …” He waved his glass hazardously. “Out here. Seeing it for myself.”

  Ingo started to reply—that words on paper to him had always seemed more real, more nuanced and colored, than the humdrum business that passed for daily life—but Isaac signaled with the least perceptible twitch of the jaw that he wasn't quite through.

  “So anyway, I just sort of left. I didn't ‘run away,’ that's bullshit, too. But it's not like I had a lot of choices. They were sending letters home to my folks, and my pop was going bananas, and all over what? Nothing but shit on paper. So one thing led to another, and these guys who I thought were my friends turned out not to be friends after all. But see, I figured that out pretty fast, once I got out there. Because even though they said one thing, it was just words—you could take one look and see what the real story was. They had this thing they wanted somebody to do for them, and I was the first sucker that came along. I was, like, convenient. And when the whole business blew apart, well, I was convenient then, too. I looked exactly right on paper. Just the kind of troubled and misguided youth, quote unquote, the bulls needed to track down. The rest of them, my old buddies, they were all-American kids. Just like, if you look at those Jungdo assholes, I guarantee they're all a bunch of straight-A, good-mannered, pious Lutheran flag-waving patriots. They could slice my balls off tomorrow and it would be my fault—I corrupted them somehow, what a shame that bad elements like me are ruining decent deutsche Jugend. If you think I'm exaggerating, it's time to get your nose out of the fucking book.”

  Ingo wasn't sure what he thought, only what he felt. And that was growing more fraught by the minute. The least of it was, he wanted to reach across the few inches of empty table and take Isaac's hand, which seemed suddenly childlike and vulnerable, into his own. Because, behind the anger, the street talk, the knowingness, the whole tough-kid shtick, there was an Isaac quite different from the one he thought he knew. And this secret Isaac was maybe not so diametric to himself as Ingo had supposed. This Isaac felt things with a dangerous intensity; his whole being, like Ingo's, was a single raw nerve—he merely chose a different means of shielding it. Safety in brazenness. But even then, so late in the game, Ingo might have been selling him short.

  Isaac focused his eyes on Ingo with surprising steadiness, given the probable level of alcohol in his blood, as if he were calibrating the change in emotional climate. Then he said calmly, with grown-up gravitas, “That's not what I wanted to say, though.”

  Meaning, as Ingo later would surmise, that he'd wanted to say something, some definite thing. And perhaps—though this might be pressing it—that's what the whole day had been about, from the predawn wake-up to the two bottles of local poison.

  “The thing is”— Isaac spoke quietly, bringing his face close enough for Ingo to map the changeable contours of its topography, the small lines that formed and vanished around his mouth, his pale temples, his guileless eyes—” like I said before, I always know what's going on, if I can see things for myself. Like with you. That night back there at the Jugendtag—I was getting my ass kicked, but I knew what the story was and what it had to do with me. And then when you showed up, the story changed, but I got that, too. I saw how you fit into it. Maybe you didn't get it yourself, not right away. I think you're sometimes, maybe, a little slow. I don't mean dumb or anything.”

  He flashed a smile, a magical yet somehow heartbreaking smile, which seemed older and sadder than the rest of him.

  “I know you're smart, anybody can see that. I just think you don't always pick up on certain things that are kind of obvious. But that's all right, it doesn't matter. You've got…my aunt would say, He's got a good heart, that boy. I used to think that was hilarious—you mean he's not going to die anytime soon, Aunt Rachel? But I guess maybe I've never known a lot of good people before. Really good, deep down. Like that stuff the fucking Germans go on about, Ehre und Treue, honor and loyalty, except the people who won't shut up about all that wouldn't know Ehre if it bit their putz off. And then there's people like you, who never talk about anything at all. You probably think you're totally different, like nobody would like you if they really knew you. Which proves you're smart, because mostly you're right. Most guys, if they think you're a Schwuler, they'll kick the shit out of you, worse than if you're only a Jew. Imagine being a Jewish faggot!” He laughed but his eyes didn't change. He seemed anxious not to be misunderstood.

  Ingo felt trembly inside. This was a territory that re
mained foreign to him and rather forbidding. He'd done a few things and thought about many others, but never had he talked about them. Only a little with Anton, but that was an exceptional case, and anyway, the talking part had been superfluous. With Isaac it was different. Everything was, almost.

  “I just thought,” said Isaac, clenching and unclenching one hand, as getting a grip on something, “that somebody ought to tell you…”

  And as quickly as that, the focus blurred—as though Isaac had picked up one foot and then, in mid-stride, forgotten exactly where he meant to put it down. Ingo later would learn to recognize the pattern, to track it minutely through all its stages of progression. People drink differently and respond to it differently, but in a certain type of person you can discern quite clearly an upward arc leading to a point of daring, preternatural clarity, like the view from the edge of a cliff. And then, the fall. Several years hence, when the potted palms began to wilt in his Bierskeller, Ingo could gauge, practically to the minute, when it was time to call the cab. But on this summer's day, Isaac's sudden loss of concentration alarmed him. He supposed, not getting the obvious, that his friend needed some air. So he paid the proprietor, adding a liberal gratuity, and the two boys stumbled together—it was Isaac who lost his footing, but with his grip on Ingo's shoulder they shared the disequilibrium—out the door into the green, sun-drenched afternoon.

  He would remember certain subsequent details—what he'd thought, how he'd felt, what the two of them had talked about—but not others. He would remember thinking that this was becoming a regular thing with them: Isaac lurching along, weak at the knees, while Ingo half dragged him toward some destination of which he himself was unaware. He would remember how Isaac's thin body felt pressed to his side, an arm draped around his neck. The voice in his ear. Sudden bursts of laughter. Silences, broken by hummed, half-forgotten childhood tunes. The wildness of a grin, the pink cheek flushed with sun and warmth and overindulgence.