Butler had been briefed endlessly and well; he understood the plan and anticipated the high rate of casualties. What he had not expected was the terror. How could he have, when he had not known terror before, except as a category of human experience that many of his favorite writers liked to spill ink over? Hemingway had written about it, as had Dostoyevsky, Remarque and even, in his pungent way, Ehrenburg. For Butler's money, they were all a pack of liars.
This terror, real terror, was not a trial of the soul or a contest of will against mortality. There was nothing heroic about it, scarcely anything human. It was reptilian and vulgar and crude—a thing of the body, an eruption, like some gland bursting open inside, flooding all your inner structures of maturity and self-control, reducing you to infantilism. It began with crapping in your pants without being aware of it. From there it got worse—much worse—and entailed involuntary moaning and wailing and shameful whimpering. It extended, in certain cases, to losing consciousness, though Butler was not to be so lucky.
No, Butler was fully conscious, hyperconscious, as though his mind had freed itself of the inconvenience of having to control this soiled and quaking body. He was alert to every sound, all the mortar explosions and chattery gun bursts, the thrashing of bodies in water and the grinding of vehicle treads, the sergeant shouting at you to get out of the way unless you wanted to be crushed, the astonished bellows of men being crushed a moment thereafter—right down to the bubbles that came from men's mouths in diminishing chains as they sank beneath the surface. He saw every muzzle flash, the thrilling trajectory of every tracer round, the dimensionless glare of every phosphorus charge igniting overhead and descending in perfect slow motion, the shadows rearranging themselves to receive it, the river spitting like a momentary fountain upon its impact. And he registered with distant satisfaction, almost pleasure, like a spectator at a boxing match, the artillery opening up on the Soviet side, shots called in by an observer at the water's edge, ripping holes in the line ahead, blowing the German defenders back to Franconia.
Beyond frenzy, a transcendent stillness lies. Hundreds of men trained to kill and persuaded to hate were doing their level best to obliterate one another. Some were better at this than others but all had been provided with the latest tools of the killer's trade and most were making a creditable showing. Butler was aware of each one of them, as you might become aware, by staring long enough, that a thunderstorm is not a monolithic downpour but rather an intricate matrix of single raindrops. If you blink, you can almost catch a wave of droplets in mid-flight, frozen in your visual memory. Butler flinched at a salvo from a Katyusha rocket battery—they called these things Stalin organs, after their cluster of shrieking pipes—and in the moment that his eyes were closed he believed he had glimpsed the ethereal web of bullet trajectories woven in the air above the river.
He was aware, too, of Seryoshka beside him, in the very moment that a shell from a Panzerfaust met the forward plate of their armored personnel carrier. The hot light and the hand yanking at his sleeve and the backward thrust of the blast wave and the instantaneous deafness came as a series of discrete events that spun themselves wonderfully into a single, unbroken experience, flowing without effort into the icy embrace of the River San, the utter darkness, the end of breathing, the unheralded and somehow anticlimactic arrival of Butler's own death, like a snap decision to join a party that you had earlier decided to pass on.
He closed his eyes. He would die, then, thirty to forty centimeters beneath the surface of the River San—and that's all she wrote.
Seryoshka persuaded him to reconsider. The suddenly ferocious Cossack grabbed him by his decadent, Western-style haircut and tugged him out of the water, where everything was peaceful, where neither enemies nor editors could get at you, back into the raging battle, the horror and violence all around. What are friends for?
To his unhappy surprise, Butler returned to himself. His body and mind were one again. He was shaken but he was now ready to ignore that. He had done the ritedepassage and was still alive, at least for the next few moments. Thus it seemed the better part of valor to make a dash for the German side of the river. Before long he was safely through, and very cold, and it occurred to him that somewhere along the line he had lost the old Remington.
He was not ashamed, afterward, to have been afraid. But he was disappointed that so little, spiritually speaking, had come of it.
He felt himself in no respect different from the man he'd been before. Perhaps, to a minor degree, he had learned something about what kind of man that was. Perhaps, to be honest with himself, he wasn't a writer at all, just an ordinary person. Because in the wake of that river crossing—a trifling instant, really, in the life of that great beast the Red Army—he discovered that the last thing he wanted to do was commit any part of the experience to paper. Which was just as well, for there was no paper, and nothing to write with. He felt, in fact, that he had no more stories to tell, and no one to tell them to anyway. He had lost—some time ago, now that he came to think of it—any sense of there being an audience out there. What might be out there, or even what out there might signify, he neither knew nor cared any longer.
All he cared about was right here, in the few square meters around him: a huddle of comrades, a clean rifle, a pair of good Finnish boots drying on the hood of an American jeep in the woods of occupied Poland. Fire had been ruled out as too dangerous; the Germans, frantic at the penetration of their line, had even put a couple planes in the air, though most of their fuel was being hoarded for some mischief in the West. No fire meant that the soaking, shivering invaders would just have to warm up as best they could—but these were Russians, warming up as best they could was a national pastime.
Granted, it was a strange life. It was not the life that had been dealt to Samuel Butler Randolph III some thirty-eight years ago on the West End of Richmond, Virginia. And what with one thing and another, it wasn't likely to drag on much longer. But for all that, it was his life, the one he had made for himself. And here on this side of the River San—in what Ilya Ehrenburg, a real writer, liked to call “the lair of the Fascist beast”— that was really all that mattered.
“We've had a message from the other end.”
The voice belonged to the signals officer, Boris Yosefovich, the jolly fellow who'd been posted to Washington and wanted to be called Bo. Butler liked him well enough but couldn't fathom why the fellow was talking while everybody was trying to sleep. Then, groggily, he realized Bo was speaking in English.
“Where is he, then?” Seryoshka replied, his rounded Oxbridge diction a contrast to Bo's American-style choppiness.
Butler heaved himself upright. The two men were huddled over a map which they were scrutinizing in the beam of a tiny flashlight. Dawn was in the wings, but the curtain had not yet begun to rise.
English…what in God's name was that about? Two things, Butler reckoned, forcing his brain to work. One, they didn't care if he overheard them. But two, as far as everyone else was concerned, this conversation was secret.
“What's the other end?” he mumbled. “Who are you talking about?”
Bo looked up anxiously.
Seryoshka gave him a nod: You explain.
“In an operation of this type,” said Bo, “you can't just charge in blindly. You want some guidance. We've got a man over there with a radio. A good fellow, a Slav.”
Butler tried to think this through. In fact he'd thought it through a hundred times already, from any number of angles. “You're Puak's man, aren't you,” he told Seryoshka. “You have been all along.”
“Who is Puak?” Seryoshka blithely wondered, back to Russian now. He had that twinkling Georgian smile down cold.
Bo concerned himself with the map.
Butler nodded. He had thought it through, and what he'd concluded was that it didn't matter. It didn't matter if Puak was using him for some inscrutable purpose, a pawn in a brain-racking chess game. It didn't matter if his best friend in the world, these days, was i
n on the plot. What mattered was history, and how it would be told by generations yet unborn. About that, Puak was dead right—which meant Puak was justified in whatever methods he adopted and whatever tools he chose, including Butler himself, to get the job done. Being a good Communist meant, among other things, coming to terms with the idea that you're nothing special, just one among the millions, and your life is of value only to the extent that it can be consumed like fuel to drive the Revolution.
So, “Who's Puak?” Seryoshka had said, and as far as Butler was concerned, that was swell. He knew that game and didn't mind playing it. Gesturing toward the map, he said, “Your Slav with the radio—where is he, do you know?”
Seryoshka raised an eyebrow, just perceptibly, which Bo understood as permission to reply.
“Right about here—some kind of village, must be a tiny place, there's no mark for it. Shouldn't be hard to reach, but we'll have to travel mostly by daylight. The terrain is difficult—see all this water? The Germans patrol the rail line, up here, and this is the main road, heading to Kraków. If we stay well south of that, we should be all right. The biggest danger, at this point, may not be the SS so much as the Armija Krajowa. The London Poles,” he explained for Butler's benefit. “We think they're well armed, and we know they're anti-Soviet. They see the Germans falling back, so already they're looking ahead to the next battle. And the next enemy is us.”
Who can blame them? Butler thought. And he saw from the other men's eyes that they didn't blame them either, but also that if these Poles were a problem, then they'd deal with it.
“How much farther?” he asked. Meaning, of course, How long will it take? You see, my son, here time becomes space.
Bo gave him a Washington grin, that can-do attitude, praise Lenin and pass the ammunition. “If we're alive this time tomorrow,” he said, “we'll be cooking breakfast in Arndtheim.”
SCHLOSS BURGUND
AUTUMN 1929, 1944
In Hagen's face, Ingo thought, you could read an entire history. Not the history made up of dates and names, noteworthy events, laws enacted, wars waged; the fellow who built a machine that changed how we live, or the one who wrote a book that changed how we think. The Gospel of Hagen was more like a poem, the kind meant to be sung, not recited. And in the pregnant immanence of the moment, with the blood of the Defrocked Priest spattered over his boots, Ingo could well imagine he was hearing the damn thing, scored as a full-blown oratorio: the Hagenlied, all its movements playing at once but broken into uncompleted phrases, no theme occurring alone or intact. He remembered a piece of music, American, not German, meant to convey the effect of a passing parade, a gay patriotic affair, only with too many bands marching too close together, this one coming and that one going, trumpets slightly out of tune, drummers a bit too excitable, as drummers will be. It was clever and awful, the sort of show-off art Ingo detested even when it succeeds in making its point, perhaps especially then.
Thus Hagen's face: lit partly by cool northern light from the Carpathians, partly by the flaring of a log fire someone had kindled too early, before the wood was dry, and dominated by the blood-black effulgence of those eyes, now gleaming, now dark again. Across that face a hundred expressions played, none lingering long, as though he were very quickly donning and discarding a large collection of masks.
“You've been a member of the SS for how long?” Grabsteen demanded, facing him across the ruined slopes of what had been a perfect miniature vineyard.
Hagen did not reply. He seemed not to comprehend the question.
“He would have signed up early on,” Ingo suggested. “As soon as he was eligible, right out of Gymnasium. Gone through the usual brainwashing at Wewelsburg, got his commission in time for the war.”
“Thank you so much,” Grabsteen snapped. “I wonder if you'd be kind enough to let the prisoner answer for himself.”
Hagen might as well have been someplace else, sitting placidly by a window in an empty room, not bound tightly to a straight-backed chair in the Hitlerjugendhall at the vertex of an arc formed by half a dozen Americans. It was just past breakfast time. They had brought him a rump of bread and a cup of ersatz coffee, but both lay untouched near his feet, dwarfing a tiny wooden cow.
“Have you personally,” Grabsteen resumed, with an angry glance at Ingo, “participated in crimes against Jews?”
“Oh, come on,” said Bloom. “Of course he has. They all have, one way or another. They're all gears in the same engine.”
Grabsteen was unmollified. “Were you a member of an Einsatzgruppe? Were you ever posted to a concentration camp? Did you assist in the forced removal of Jews from their place of residence? Were you charged with enforcing the terms of Nazi racial policies, for example the Nuremberg Laws of 1935? Did you ever command a subordinate to harm or kill any Jewish man, woman or child?”
When he paused for breath, Martina said quietly, “Did you shoot Alwin?”
Hagen turned slightly in his chair to look at her. Unemotively, he shook his head.
“It was you, though, wasn't it? Who brought them here.”
Again, no answer, unless one were coded into the set of his jaw, his sad silvered eyes.
Ingo nosed in; he had a few questions of his own. More than a few. “You thought Isaac would be here, didn't you? And if he wasn't, you were going to set a trap for him. Right? That's why you came—you weren't following a trail. You just knew.”
No denial, no shake of the head. No confession either. Only the shifting expressions, the secret oratorio.
“This is pointless,” Bloom practically shouted. “If you guys want to kill him, then take him out and do it. Or hell, I'll do it myself. But don't expect him to break down and confess to being Adolf Hitler's illegitimate son, who's done everything from running the gas chambers to sucking Rom-mel's cock. Pardon me, Marty. Because that's not going to happen. Anyway, what difference would it make? You can see he's a Nazi. What does it matter what kind of Nazi?”
“It matters,” said Grabsteen.
For once, neither Martina nor Ingo disagreed.
After a while they got tired of asking questions, tired of Hagen's resolute silence and tiredest of all, probably, of how he seemed barely to register their presence, as if they were no more than ghosts. They might be doing their best to haunt him, but this was a man accustomed to being haunted; he'd seen his share of ghosts more gruesome and terrifying than these could ever be.
It was time for Bloom to go on watch. That was their stated reason for breaking off the interrogation. A more honest reason might have been that this German officer in his black uniform, in some manner none of them could pin down, was starting to unnerve them. His proximity was oppressive. We won't kill him, they decided, not just yet. We'll stick him in a room somewhere, back at the inn, maybe, where we can keep an eye on him.
So they prodded him at gunpoint—the whole pack of them, safety in numbers—across the green and up the narrow staircase. They chose a room at the very end of the hall and lashed his wrists together and tethered his ankles to a bedpost. They kicked a chamber pot in his direction. Finally they stood looking down at him, while Hagen sat on a corner of the bed looking at who knows what. His own private horror show. Or maybe a comedy, a bit of fluff to amuse our boys on leave from the front. Sing along with Zarah Leander now, lads; in the morning it's back to hell.
“Somebody ought to stand guard,” Bloom said, though he didn't stick around to argue the point. He had saddled himself with coat and rifle and was already lumbering to the door. “I don't think he can wiggle loose. But you never know.”
“I'll stay,” Ingo said—too readily, perhaps. Martina gave him a look, but it was only a look, he thought. She doesn't suspect anything.
What might she have suspected, though?
There was a time.
All those years ago, the very thought alone with Hagen would've shot through him like an electric charge. A complex charge, positive and negative at once. In which respect, was anything different now?<
br />
Alone with Hagen. In a room at a cozy inn, somewhere near the end of the world, in a storybook version of Germany.
There was a time: it was true. Incredible as it now seemed, Ingo knew those days had really happened; they had dawned as punctually as this one and set as surely this must, too. Yet they seemed infinitely long ago, before winter and war and loss had even been thought of. A different Ingo had lived in a different body then.
I feel the breeze of another planet. Hardly a stranger one, though. A different Ingo, but not a greater fool. And a different Hagen…but still the same enigma.
Who are you? Ingo wanted to ask. But he did not speak, and neither for a while did he look at Hagen directly. He moved from corner to corner in the room, paused to glance out the window at Arndtheim, a paradoxical place that was dying and gaining new residents at the same time. He walked to the door and closed it, unable to bear the sounds of Hildi's pain on top of everyone else's. Then he crossed the room again to the only chair, near the window, and sat down. The light fell starkly on Hagen's prematurely aged face.
Now, at last, you dare to look at him. And quickly away, for he is looking straight back at you. Muster your resolve; raise your eyes to meet his.
Hagen said: “I would never have wished that harm should come to him.”
Precisely that, for the German construction admitted no ambiguity. Much will be lost in precision, poorly recompensed in snap and color, when English muscles in as the international language of scholarship. “When?” Ingo asked—meaning, as Hagen must have understood, in which world? This one or that, ersatz or authentic?
Another Green World Page 45
