Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  “Ah—that was Alwin. Hildi's father.”

  Her expression was hard to read. Martina ventured, “So you and he were—”

  “Not married, no. We were hardly even a couple, really. Alwin believed…well, we all believed things then. So many things we believed in! Great and foolish and in between. Each of us with our own philosophy of life, our own religion. ‘Every worker his own boss, every peasant his own lord, every Dorf its own Reich!’ Such fine slogans we had.” She shook her head. “And you—did you marry? You had a… man friend, with you, I believe? A writer?”

  “That's right—a friend. The writer part I don't know about. He never got around to that great novel, I don't think. After a while we just fell out of touch.” Having gotten, she thought, what we wanted from each other. “But you decided to stay. Here in Arndtheim, I mean. Even after the Nazis?”

  “Well, what better place? So many of our comrades back home were being arrested. Others went abroad, to Geneva, to Paris, to Lisbon. To New York, even, or Barcelona. But we were already abroad, do you see? In those days we were. We had our little bit of Germany here—a better Germany, a Germany of the future—and it had always been part of the plan, Alwin's plan, that we should be entirely self-sufficient. Thank God for that. It is true, sometimes we laughed about it. At the windmill, especially! But now … thank God.”

  “What happened to Alwin? He gave up finally?”

  “Oh, no.” Anna looked surprised; Marty had not understood at all. “No, they came here, the SS, after the invasion, when this place became part of the Reich. We were terribly afraid. We expected them to burn the village and send us to one of their camps. Hildi led the smaller children into the forest, to hide there. I thought I would never see her again.

  “They strutted around, these mighty SS men, and they looked at the cottages and the workshops, and they looked at us as well—up and down, as though it were all some kind of…exhibition, and we were simply part of it. One of the officers had been here before and he acted as their guide. See the model German hamlet. See how they grind their own meal. See how they weave fabric for their clothing. It is like the days before the awful French came with their Enlightenment, and the English with their factories. This is the real Heimat here. The soil, the woods, the sunshine. Hardworking villagers. Just how we like it.”

  She sighed. “So they left the place standing. It fit nicely, don't you see, into their great plans. They wanted to turn this part of Poland into a new German homeland, and we had shown how to do this. Of course, a few things needed to be straightened out. The streets must run just so, north–south, east–west. There must be certain new buildings, important for our culture. And certain elements that have no place in the new Germany—these foreign books, these degenerate paintings, these Bolsheviks, these Jews—they must be gotten rid of. The SS men made no big fuss about it. They were actually rather courteous, people later remarked upon that. We regret, dear lady, that we must take your Tolstoy novels and burn them. We regret having to slash up your picture here, but why does this woman appear to have six arms? We regret that we must take your man out to the woods and shoot him in the head, but this is what happens when one chooses to sleep with a parasite. We regret—”

  There were tears in her eyes, though she seemed to have decided, by an act of will, not to cry. As if she did not want some phantom in a black uniform to have that satisfaction.

  “Alwin and I had not been…together for some while. But you know, one does not stop loving someone, just because… and he was Hildi's father.” Unexpectedly she took Martina's hand, her eyes glowed, and she forced a kind of smile onto her face. “But Isaac,” she said, her voice becoming a stage whisper, “he always seemed to know when danger was coming. He was gone that day, and stayed gone for some time. We were afraid they'd gotten him—”

  “Wait a minute. You're saying, Isaac was here then? That he stayed here? Even after the war started?”

  Anna gave her, once more, that look of surprise. Marty has not understood. “Of course he stayed here. Where else? He was one of the family by then. Our poor little family, if you could call it that. He was so terribly clever, and he got on well with the Poles. And of course Hildi by that time was completely in love with him. Had been, really, since she was a young girl.”

  Martina shook her head. This was too much to deal with all at once. Like a flood of paperwork, reports on dozens of subjects, dropping on your desk faster than you can read them, much less respond appropriately. “Isaac was here,” she said, feeling dull-witted, groping for the obvious. “Which means, he's been here all along. Which means, he's still around here someplace. Hiding in the woods or something. Is that right?”

  Anna gave her hand a little squeeze, then let it go and turned to look out the window. At what? Swirling snow, empty cottages, abandoned dreams. Southern Poland, winter of 1944.

  “Isaac,” she said, “is the father of my grandchild. He had better be around here someplace. And he had better come soon.”

  “Something isn't right,” said Bloom, shaking his head. “The place is almost empty, and we haven't found anything suspicious. No weapons caches, no secret rooms. But there's something wrong. I've just got a feeling.” He paused, waiting for the inevitable objection from either Grabsteen or Martina. Hearing none, he shoved his chair back, straightened his legs beneath the table and groaned in exhaustion.

  “I've got a feeling, too,” Harvey said after a while. “I've got a feeling that if we sit here long enough, the Nazis are going to come and kill us.”

  “If we sit here long enough,” Martina said, just for the fleeting pleasure of contradicting him, “the Red Army will come and liberate us, and we can march off in solidarity with our comrades from the East.”

  “Remind me to tell you sometime,” said Grabsteen—with a little smile, as though he, too, enjoyed the game, even if he was too tired to play it just now—” about Stalin's policy on immigration to Palestine. And about the official announcement of the liberation of Majdanek, which curiously made no mention of Jews.”

  “The problem now is,” Bloom said loudly, “we all need to rest, but we can't afford to relax. What I think I'm going to do is put everyone on two-hour watches, one on and two off. We'll have four people out on the perimeter, while everybody else is inside getting some shut-eye. Then there's the problem of whether to trust the natives. They're a little too friendly, if you ask me.”

  “They're Socialists,” explained Martina.

  That seemed to cut no ice with Bloom, who gave her a blank look. Nor should it, she supposed. What had Captain Aristotle said? One never really knows who anybody is.

  “Why don't you take the first watch,” Bloom told her, not a question at all. “Go find Stu, he's upstairs someplace.”

  “Not Stu. He needs to stay with Hildi.”

  “Not Morrie either,” said Grabsteen. “His leg got hurt back at the bridge.”

  “Well, then”— Bloom swept his arms in exasperation, a slapstick gesture that almost knocked a mug off the table—” how in hell am I supposed to put together a watch list?”

  “You'll figure something out,” Martina said, patting his knee.

  “We know you will,” seconded Grabsteen. “We have every confidence.”

  Sunlight returned the next morning. For some reason, this made things even harder to believe. The view from the front window was motionless and sentimental: timbered cottages, fallen snow, scarcely a reminder of the present century. Martina amused herself for a while, sipping hot liquid she chose to pretend was coffee, by trying to imagine what this movie-set village might be good for. Something between Alexander Nevsky and Holiday Inn. Rita Hayworth dying beautifully in childbirth. Crosby crooning the love theme in full combat gear. And Fred Astaire—born Frederic Austerlitz—doing a nifty turn as a Jewish partisan, miraculously eluding his pursuers, leaping from rooftop to rooftop in the show-stopping dance number.

  From a cupboard somewhere, a radio materialized. The red-faced innkeeper, as a c
ourtesy to his guests, ran through the dial until he found the VOA. They listened to Benny Goodman and a news broadcast. That was the first Martina had heard about Roosevelt's reelection. A fourth term—unprecedented!

  She didn't have to guess what Ingo would say.

  0800. The offgoing watchstanders reported various discoveries. One, you can climb the windmill tower and get a decent view of the countryside. Two, these people have everything—there's a cold room under the barn where they've got the whole carcass of, we think it's a deer, a big deer, all cleaned and strung up on a rope. And three, wait'll you see the Hitler Youth Hall.

  “I have no desire,” snapped Martina, feeling crabby and still cold from her 0400– 0600 stint, “to see the Hitler Youth Hall.”

  “We could use a CP,” Bloom pointed out. “Someplace to meet in private. Stash our gear and whatnot.” He glanced meaningfully around the common room, where villagers and Varianoviks sat elbow-to-elbow. Weapons and backpacks were scattered haphazardly. The elfin-eared boy, called Michi, as in Mouse, under the guise of wiping down a table, was fondling somebody's machine pistol.

  Martina guessed Bloom was right about a command post. Things were getting a little too comfy in here. “All right,” she conceded, “let's take a look.”

  Bloom was gracious in his moment of victory. “I guess we could make do with two per watch,” he said. “That way everybody gets more sleep.”

  They pulled on their coats. “Come on, sport,” Martina called to Michi. “You look like you could use some exercise.”

  The boy understood only that he had been summoned. Perhaps he expected a scolding for his forwardness with firearms; his face lit up when it became clear that an expedition was intended. He tugged on a pair of oversized fur-topped boots that, by rights, should've been on the feet of some soldier awaiting his doom in an open trench, whistling “Lili Marlene” through frostbitten lips. They followed a path tramped in the snow by last night's ceaseless patrolling, out to the village green and then crosswise to the large wooden building whose only feature was a squat bell-tower, devoid of bell.

  Michi saw her looking up there and provided some explanation in rapid, matter-of-fact Deutsch.

  “I think,” ventured Bloom, “he says they gave the bell for the final victory.” When Martina didn't get it, he added, “The brass—you know, for shell casings.”

  “Ah,” she said.

  Michi nodded proudly.

  Wait'll you see the Hitler Youth Hall—just that, no further hints. Now Martina understood why. What could you possibly have said to convey any notion of this? The entire floor of the large, open room was taken up with…what? A display, a construction, an over-the-top and distinctly boyish fantasy. She scoured her memory but only two comparisons—both remote—came to mind. The first was an eccentric museum-style exhibit at an equally eccentric Masonic monument called the George Washington Memorial, across the Potomac in Arlington, depicting in all its quaint, harmless insanity a miniature Shriners Day Parade. At the press of a button, Sousa squawked through tinny speakers and some kind of con-veyor-belt mechanism propelled thousands of tiny figures, miniature vehicles, marching bands, floats, regiments of war heroes, fire trucks, open Cadillacs full of waving dignitaries and, as Martina recalled, even a troupe of dancing bears, around and around and around until the bizarre became monotonous.

  The second and more telling comparison was the model-train set on which her cousin Abie had been working since he was nine years old. The project had been launched on his bedroom floor with a standard Lionel kit and a few imitation trees. From there it moved to a special table in the basement, where the railway line sprouted branch tracks, tunnels and switching yards, and the landscape complexified to include hills, a river, grazing sheep, a whistle-stop platform complete with passengers and— as adolescence expanded Abie's worldview—a village that soon became a medium-sized town, featuring such enterprises as an auto dealer, a haberdasher and—in what might have been a very quiet protest against Prohibition—a Chicago-style saloon. Abie would be about thirty now. As far as Martina knew, the model railroad was still growing at a steady rate. And if her cousin lived to be one hundred and three, he possibly could achieve something on the order of what lay before her in the Hitler Youth Hall.

  She stared at it—over it, through it, around its periphery, across its immeasurable expanse—for quite some time, as did Bloom. What else could you do, really? She stared at the tiny cottages with their honest-to-God thatched rooflets. At yellow-brown fields where teams of oxen tugged perfect little plows along furrows of—she tested this with her finger—actual dirt. She stared at the roads winding over hills and along stretches of reclaimed swampland—yes, with real water, held in black earthenware ponds and channeled through pebbly drainage canals. At the orchard, its hundreds of well-pruned limbs heavy with their crop of tiny red fruit. At the stable, the kennel, the chicken yard. The meadow through which a party of hunters, traditionally attired, trailed a pack of brown-and-white hounds. You could practically hear the treble squeal of the Jägerhorn. Martina did not doubt that somewhere, if you peeked behind every shard of rock and lifted the dainty boughs of every bush, you would find the wily fox, no bigger than a hangnail.

  “Da ist Arndtheim,” Michi informed them.

  No fooling. The Lilliputian village nestled near one corner of the intricate panorama. Everything was there: the spiky windmill, the inn with its wagging sign, the wooden barricade, even the boxy Hitlerjugendhall in which they stood. You half expected to see a tiny Tamara waving her Simonov and shouting unrepeatable oaths in a voice like a cricket. And a teensy Grabsteen, being a weensy pain in the ass.

  Martina then realized that if Arndtheim was real—that is, if the model village matched the original—the rest of it must be real, too. This was not just a panorama but a map. For some reason this gave her a creepy feeling, as if she'd been granted a vision she did not care to see: the thousand-year paradise, a land whose milk flowed as white as Aryan skin and whose honey ran as gold as the hair of a fecund Mädlein. It was high summer in the Reich, and though there couldn't be a sky, obviously, you knew it was blue and cloudless. So, too, the countryside was without blemish. Swamps had been drained, underbrush cleared, cottages emptied of dirty Polacks and—just a morbid guess here—a nearby shtetl, in the interest of hygiene, burned to the ground. The place where it had stood was now a hunters' meadow. As for the Jews…well, what else should be done with vermin? We shall have no weevils in our flour, no weeds in our rye field, no unwholesome ideas festering in the minds of our children; and just so—for the principle is precisely the same, meine Herren—no Jews breeding like bacilli among us, contaminating healthy German blood.

  Michi was chattering now, pointing out this and that. Martina experienced a momentary urge to walk over and strangle the boy. Or at least pick him up by his foolish ears and spit in his little Teutonic face. The wave of anger passed through her and then out, over the imaginary landscape. It left her feeling shaken, upset with herself. One never really knows who anybody is. Including—perhaps especially—oneself.

  “Wo fährt dieser Zug?” she asked, in her crude but usually effective tourist-guidebook Deutsch. She pointed toward the farthest edge of the landscape, where a narrow-gauge rail line snaked between ponds and sedge fields and patches of dark evergreens. In a corner, just before the track ended abruptly by the wall, stood a cluster of red-brick buildings as stately and stern as military barracks.

  Michi replied earnestly and at length, an expression of manlike seriousness on his face, proud of his detailed knowledge.

  “I'm missing a lot of it,” Bloom confessed. “Something about the Austrian cavalry. Won it back from the Poles. Now the SS…something about a temporary, um, installation. Factories, very important, artificial rubber. Very bad stink. After the war, better. For now, don't go there.”

  “No danger of that. But what I asked was, Where does the train go?”

  “He's telling you,” said Bloom, looking away, somethin
g in his voice like helplessness. “The train goes to Auschwitz. That's the nearest market town, it's where the farmers around here sell their produce. If the room was any bigger, you could see it from here.”

  Harvey Grabsteen, not one to quail, led a couple of Varianoviks laden with ammunition through the snow to the Hitler Youth Hall. He paused barely a moment before striding across the beautifully rendered countryside, crunching trees, fences, neatly tended homes and domestic livestock blithely underfoot. He may, perhaps, have put on a bit of a show, kicking bits of paradise out of his path. It was, in its way, horrifying. It was, in its way, hilarious. A fart at a funeral.

  “We'll need something to block these windows,” he said, “if we're going to defend this place.”

  So now he was an expert on fortifications? Martina said, “Defend it against what?”

  Wide shrug, beats me, like a Borscht Belt comic. “Against whatever.”

  Martina shook her head. In another crazy mood swing, she took pity on the model-makers. Just when you think you've got everything in order, the Jews come back.

  So: a day, then a second night, then a second day. Clouds as heavy as smoke. Smells of greasy cooking—the nervous innkeeper threw open his larder, and out came platters of schnitzel and sausages and potatoes in their myriad constellations. From the kitchen, laughter. From the bedroom at the top of the stairs, intermittent wails.

  The worst part for Martina was just waiting around. For Isaac, for Isaac's baby, for the Germans, for peace, for Götterdämmerung—any one of which, or some diabolic combination, might come at any moment, though many moments passed, then many more, and nothing changed.

  She went on watch in mid-afternoon. For two hours she tracked round and round in the snow beside a tall, slender man from Chicago named Arthur whom she understood to be an accountant, or perhaps an economist, something to do with money, which might be why she had tended to avoid him. Also, he reminded her somewhat of Eddie, or the kind of man Eddie might've grown into, easygoing and gently humorous. They talked about Henry Morgenthau, a safe topic. Arthur felt Morgenthau was wasted at Treasury—he would've been so much more effective at State. With half her mind, Martina hummed Cole Porter's “Just One of Those Things,” a wordless commentary that went down well at Washington parties but which, to Arthur, was just a tune. With the other half, she watched Timo climb the windmill tower. A decent view of the countryside. Unusual initiative on his part, she thought. But what did she know about Timo? The same thing anyone knew about anybody: zilch.