At four she went off watch. Around five it got dark. Sometime after that, the shooting started.
It might, Ingo thought, have been a form of baptism, horribly botched. The water was so cold you didn't believe you were feeling it. Perhaps you weren't actually feeling it, your nerves had switched off. Which meant later, back on. Another thing to dread.
The wall came down a lot lower than he expected; the builder had made concessions to topography after all. There was justifiable doubt whether Janocz would fit, and in the event it required concerted tugging from the other end—you could imagine Zim and the Priest over there, teeth chattering, trying to get a handhold on the blubbery giant—but they managed it. Then it was Ingo's turn, and after the spectacle of Janocz his own efforts to scoot through, which ended in writhing like a damned eel, didn't seem so pathetic. Afterward, maybe, they would all share a laugh, passing the Priest's canteen around.
Hagen was under and out in a heartbeat and a half. No time for laughing now.
They stood among the trees, just inside the walled enclosure. Hagen gave them a few moments to catch their breath. Then, cautiously, they moved forward until the vegetation thinned out and they could see, at last, what they'd gotten themselves into.
After the close darkness of the woods, this place seemed almost glaringly bright. There were actual streetlamps—among the few, surely, burning that night in all of Europe. Feeble things, each casting no more than a puddle of faint, moon-yellow pallor; but the impression of brightness here was less a question of being able to see clearly than a feeling of having space around you, the world opening up. By degrees Ingo was able to make sense of the dark shapes looming before him, some in silhouette, others mere bodies of deeper shadow.
For instance. The tall thing at the center that looked like a watch-tower—that was a windmill. He could make out an indistinct motion up there, blades swirling invisibly, and hear a faint whizzing, immaculately oiled gears transferring energy to some mechanism below. Electricity for the streetlamps. Out of chaos—the unruly wind off the steppe, with its scent of Bolshevism—purpose, order, utility. From what once had been unfruitful Polish soil, behold: a transformation, amazing as a fairy tale. Now it is Germany.
What made Ingo think he'd been here before?
The Wild West. Four bad guys and their native guide, a brooding and dangerous renegade, creep into the dusty little village under cover of darkness. They make for the saloon first, saving the bank for later, but something thwarts them—a barking dog, a sheriff making his rounds or, most likely, a sharp-eared youngster, banished upstairs while the grown-ups talked and laughed down in the parlor. His window's open and he's looking dreamily at that big prairie sky when from the street below …was it a clank of spurs? A horse rattling its bridle? And what are those shadows moving stealthily past the dry goods store?
No, not the Wild West. The heathen East, never thoroughly conquered. A land where monsters roam and people vanish in night and fog. They've all been sent East, haven't you heard? The village lay clean and tidy under its cap of snow, snugly buttoned behind mullioned windows. The tingle came again but Ingo could only acknowledge it; they were on the move, cottage to cottage, one empty lane to the next. A carpet of yellow light lay in front of a larger building that Ingo tried to place, but he could only come up with odd, utilitarian things: a Lions Club, a school annex, one of those places in the country—a single large room under a tin roof—that Negroes worship in. Nothing quite fit.
They moved up a narrow road, Ingo and the Priest on one side and the rest on the other. The structures they passed all appeared to be empty. Toward the center of the village they grew larger, and a few had lights on. At a traverse street, the hunters paused. Then slipped across, one at a time.
What was Hagen's plan?
Now the large building loomed straight ahead. Its pitched roof rose to a cupola, perhaps a small belltower. Schoolhouse? Closer to the mark. They moved sideways around it, keeping their distance. In places there were neatly clipped shrubs to hide behind; street trees as well, but these were no more than adolescent-sized. At last they gained an angle from which Ingo could make out a signboard in front of the building, its carved lettering discernible by reflected light.
HITLERJUGENDH ALL
Across the road, the village opened onto a sort of common. The windmill was there, and a smaller structure that looked like a gazebo. Ingo's tingling amped up. Everything is different, and yet …
He knew, but didn't. He wasn't quite ready for the journey to end, the old Ford to roll to a stop near Olney, Maryland. For a thirty-two-year-old Isaac to emerge from behind the well house.
Those footsteps, he figured, must be Janocz or Zim crossing the street. They clattered heedlessly; he turned to shush them.
It was not Janocz or Zim. Right up the middle of the lane, weapons slung indifferently at their sides, came Tamara, Marty's friend, and a guy Ingo didn't know too well, a band teacher from somewhere.
Here?
Ingo opened his mouth—too slowly. The burst of a German machine pistol ripped the night apart like a wolf ‘s teeth tearing its prey. The American man—Bobby Zilman was his name—went down on one knee. It was too dark to read his face; Ingo only imagined a look of amazement. Then Bobby seemed to vanish in a second burst of gunfire that knocked him backward into the shadows.
At approximately the same time, though the sequence wasn't clear to him, Ingo killed the Defrocked Priest. It happened quickly, his hands moving as if under someone else's control. Next moment, he was standing there with the feeling of having been punched in the side. He hadn't gotten a proper grip on the Schmeisser, and it had bucked against him.
Tamara went down. Ingo figured she was dead, leaving him alone against the other three. But from the darkness in the lane, a series of small flashes: Tamara's automatic rifle, noisy chatter like a string of small fireworks going off. Zim shot back, though Ingo could see he was scarcely aiming, just making short sweeps with his MP. Ingo raised his own weapon and squeezed the trigger until the clip was spent. Then he dropped behind some bushes and groped for the ammunition pouch on his belt.
For a moment, all was quiet.
Across the road, a long, deep groan. It came from Janocz, and somehow, just from the sound of it, you could tell he was mortally wounded. A dying mammoth. Different noises came from somewhere around the corner—a door banging open, footsteps crunching rapidly through the snow. Ingo looked up to see Hagen standing above him.
Just standing there. He glanced down once, long enough for Ingo to feel foolish for having been caught like this, an ammo clip dangling futilely in his hand. Then Hagen looked away, up the street, where the footsteps were coming from. He had drawn his pistol, a Walther automatic, but for some reason, or no reason, he chose not to use it. There were shouts— among them, Tamara's—and another burst of fire, followed by a blaze of return fire that lasted for a while. That would do for Zim, Ingo supposed.
“There's another one, over there!” Tamara shouted.
Hagen still did not move. He neither raised nor dropped the Walther. He seemed to have accepted, in advance, whatever fate might befall him.
Ingo scrambled to his feet, slipping in the snow. A death wish, he thought grimly, though he had no truck with such Freudian claptrap. He stood there in his SS uniform with an empty machine pistol in his hands; and there stood Tamara not a dozen paces away, pointing her Simonov right at his face.
“Don't do anything you'll regret,” he said.
That must have surprised her. She lowered the rifle a little, squinting at him through the darkness. Other people were coming up behind her. Perhaps she felt safety in numbers. Her body seemed to relax. “Oh, it's you,” she said finally. The gun twitched over toward Hagen. “Who's this one, then?”
Hagen let the pistol drop from his fingers.
“Funny you should ask,” Ingo told her. “I've been wondering that myself.”
Martina was upstairs, sitting with Hildi. The girl looked drain
ed of something vital, one of the humors, a medieval essence that nowadays applied only to Central European physiognomies. From Bratislava to Danzig, people still died of an incorrect ratio of phlegm to black bile. Hildi's cheeks glowed with a fever you couldn't feel by touching her forehead; she was being consumed from within by a cold, wasting fire.
The little body in her belly remained absolutely still. Lying low, awaiting its chance. Come soon, Martina nearly prayed. Toward God, fate, doom, chance, the futures market and the four planes of the Sephiroth, she felt identically ambivalent. For Martina, life was possibility, not certainty; so was whatever might or might not lie beyond it.
Between bouts of excruciating pain, Hildi pushed herself up by the elbows on an ever-growing mound of pillows; dozens of geese must have given their entire breasts to fill them. Sometimes she rallied her dwindling energies to attain a state bordering on conversational normality. This seemed to happen especially in early evening—could that be when she expected Isaac to arrive?— and it was happening now, while Stu grabbed an early dinner and Martina was standing what she thought of as the Hildi watch.
“I can barely remember,” the girl said, speaking English out of politeness, smiling at her own hesitations, “before the Nazi time. It must have been so…pretty.”
Nazizeit, the term they used here. As though talking about the Ice Age, the Lower Cretaceous, some rough patch of natural history that was beyond human agency, no question of interrupting it—and to prove the point, Anna had quoted Rilke: Who talks of victory? To endure is all.
“It was okay,” said Martina. “It wasn't the Golden Age.”
“But people call it the Golden Twenty-Years?”
“Twenties. Yeah, they do. They're kidding themselves. Didn't anybody ever tell you—” She should have kept going, blathered something, because the sudden pause caught Hildi's attention.
The girl's eyes froze on her, black beads suspended in blue ice. Still young enough to sense, instantly and with one hundred percent accuracy, when a grown-up is about to dissemble. “Tell me what?” she said in her sweetest voice.
“How Isaac got here in the first place.” Because it wasn't as though, Martina thought, she didn't have a right to know.
“No…I am not sure.”
“He came here—we all came here, but it was on account of him— because some big nasty guys were planning to kill him. Because he'd played a trick on them, stolen some documents, I don't know, I barely understood it at the time. But that's your Golden Twenties. Gangs of bullies marching around singing battle songs and beating each other to death. Even the good parts…”
… were a lie, she intended to say, thinking of the economic boom, drunken Fitzgerald and crazy Zelda, Hoover and his gang of pious crooks. But that was remembering backward. “Actually, the good parts were really good.”
“That is what Isaac says.”
“You see a lot of him?” This breaking a little promise to herself not to interrogate the poor girl. Wait till she's better, then give her the third degree.
Hildi sat further upright. She seemed unsure whether to answer, or how. Martina guessed she'd made her own promises, not so little and not only to herself. The strain in her face made you want to hug her, to reassure her—but what sort of reassurance, under these circumstances, wouldn't be another lie?
“Everything is a secret,” Hildi said at last. “For years has it been so. Before the war—ever since I remember. From the Poles must we keep secret what we have, how much food, how many animals, or they will feel, I don't know—neidisch. From the Nazis must we keep our politics. Since the war, is it even harder. The partisans must not learn this, the army must not know that. Even Isaac must—”
Her eyes grew momentarily wild; she had almost spoken the unspeakable, let slip the greatest secret of all. Even Isaac must not know …what? Martina was beside herself.
“So, we built the wall,” said Hildi, recovering nicely, only a little flushed around the ears. “That made everything easier. Our whole world now is hidden, so within it we are safe. My papa said, Socialists are no good at lying anyway. Lying is the province of the Right, people who live behind locked gates, making plans, counting profits. We live in the fields, the factories, apartment blocks—for us, talking is pleasure, sharing is necessity. We are truth-tellers. After the wall, our truth is locked inside. The lies out.”
Martina thought you could argue that the opposite was true. But she kept that to herself.
“We see Isaac if he wants to be seen”— the answer to Martina's question, catching her by surprise. “When he needs food. When he is hurt. When he…when he wants—”
Suddenly she was sobbing. It was a relief, almost. The girl did not object to Martina's arms closing around her, and as her crying spell continued, the first soft trickle burgeoning to a steady stream, Martina found herself supporting Hildi's weight from the waist up. And so she felt very plainly, as though her own body were involved, the sharp jolt from all the muscles around the girl's abdomen.
Hildi's crying stopped. For an instant, she didn't breathe. Then she gave a yelp of more astonishment than pain. “O mein Gott,” she whispered.
Martina eased her back down onto the pillows. Hildi's eyes were wide; her hands were shaking on either side of her belly, like she was afraid to touch it.
“Is it the same as before?” Martina asked softly, once she thought Hildi was able to speak.
The girl only shook her head. Then she shook it again, more emphatically, and closed her eyes.
Martina stood up. I'll get Stu, is what she was going to say. But it was in that moment, precisely, that the first spray of gunshot, like a fistful of little rocks thrown hard against a piece of wood, came from somewhere inside the village wall. Insanely, Martina welcomed them.
At last, she thought. No more waiting.
LAIR OF THE BEAST
LATE NOVEMBER 1944
Butler had been afraid many times but the experience of pure, unreasoning terror had thus far eluded him. His Satanic baptism, when it came, was not by fire but by water—the cold waters of the River San, not so much as rivers go, typical of the winding tributaries of the Ukraine and southern Poland, meandering like a royal bloodline and quietly gathering strength before allying downstream, in the north, to create the mighty, half-frozen barriers behind which the Wehrmacht was preparing without hope to make its next-to-last stand.
The Red Army, for reasons Butler could not determine, had a particular dislike of rivers. Therefore the Soviets had devised any number of ingenious methods to get men and vehicles across them, each more fiendishly difficult, fraught with risk and effective than the last. To deal with the minor obstacle of the River San, Comrade General Krivon had dispatched a platoon of engineers wearing thick goat-wool vests, some new type of undergarment designed to retain warmth even when immersed in water and jaunty black caps that came to a little peak and gave them the look of Dark Elves out of a Scandinavian nightmare. These men spent several days smoking Butler's cigarettes and readying the components of a special pontoon bridge—the Fascists have nothing like it—while taking turns reading aloud from the latest inflammatory screed by Ilya Ehrenburg, the most colorful of the propagandists and a writer whose knack for the bloody-minded metaphor Butler could not help admiring, however hard he tried. Had Ehrenburg been reared on the Capitalist side, he by now would have made a bundle in Hollywood and be spending his leisure hours in printed silk shirts beside swimming pools, instead of commuting between Moscow and the vilest reaches of the Eastern Front, chatting up field marshals and common foot soldiers, daily adding new species to the Nazi bestiary and generally outdoing Butler at his own game. Envy is a frightful bore as well as a deadly sin, but there you have it.
The order to cross came on a night that began with a fattening moon but by 0200 or so had turned moonless. It was seasonably cold, with a light wind that got heavier when it found the open run of river, along which it could work up a nice north-to-south velocity. The pontoon bridge resembled n
othing Butler had seen before and so did the engineers, after they crushed out their last Camels and pulled the caps over their faces and got down to earning their rubles. The bridge rolled forward on specially built runners, its sections stacked three tiers high. At water's edge the engineers engaged a sort of hand brake that stopped the runners cold, then undid a latch that released the pieces of the bridge, which slid on greased skids down the natural declivity of the terrain and landed in the water, one after another, plop plop plop. They thereupon sank to a depth of between thirty and forty centimeters, where the Germans could not see them, nor the Soviets either, though the latter knew where to find them. More or less.
All very well—except, of course, that in the actual event everything went a great deal more slowly, with an incredible amount of heavy mechanical clacking and grinding, pieces getting stuck or else coming loose prematurely, bridge sections hitting the water and floating away downstream. Before long, even if the Germans had been sleeping like Red-Beard under his mountain, they would've begun to suspect something was afoot. But the Germans were not sleeping; they were awake and launching flares and sighting in their MG-42s. And at that moment, when the excitement seemed to have reached an ungodly peak, Seryoshka shouted “Now, comrades!” and they all went into the water.
The engineers had been in there for some time already, up to their necks, clamping the bridge together and keeping it properly aligned, and quite a few of them were dead. The others were dying as fast as could reasonably be expected, but meantime they managed to hold the incredible sinking-floating Bridge to Hell in one piece long enough for an entire motorized reconnaissance regiment to hurl itself from the Soviet side of the river, and a better-than-company-sized remnant to arrive intact on the opposite shore. From there it was a dash into the woods, through the blazing line and into the German rear—a classic Red Army set-piece of this latter phase of the Great Patriotic War.
Another Green World Page 44
