A mask falls over the prisoner's face—a mask that never stops changing, one expression shifting into another. His hands have begun to tremble. He draws his lips inward, as if to moisten them. Then, without warning, the eyes twitch up and catch you by surprise. A queer little nod, like the look on your face has given something away. Damn him. And damn yourself, for remaining here, for listening to this.
“I was a cavalry officer, did you know that? How could you. Yes, an old-fashioned horseman, on account of my well-attested riding skills. We opened an SS riding school, I was among the first instructors. That would have been 1936. I wonder, what was Isaac doing then? During the Polish campaign we managed to field an entire company. By the time of the Russian invasion, it had grown to a brigade. We didn't see much action in the early stages—that was a tankman's game. But when winter came and the engine blocks froze up, we were the only German formation, I think, that remained fully mobile. The Russians launched their counteroffensive around Moscow, and we were thrown in to check their advance. Twenty thousand Siberian horsemen on those rugged little ponies, and about five hundred of us alive by then, on animals that were cold and half starved and poorly shod. But we made them pay for every inch. We bled them. And most of us got killed, of course, and those who didn't …well, you come out of something like that, I can tell you, a different man. Things that mattered once don't matter anymore, while other things…
“I wish you could know what I mean. But I can never explain it. Still, if you should happen to find yourself alive one day when around you is only death—all your comrades under the ground and you walking above them, hammering little birchwood crosses into the earth—at such a time you might find your view of life wondrously simplified. A man thinks, This is the only thing I love, the one thing that matters to me. All the rest, the devil can take it.”
You watch the prisoner with rekindled interest. You guess he's leaving a good deal out. But you sense nonetheless that he is making, if not a confession, at least a sort of final testimony. Saying the last things that need to be said.
“The trouble with war is that you cannot just walk away, even when you grow sick of it. You wish to, but you cannot. So you do the best you can manage, which is to create your own small peace, somewhere. You would think it foolish, my friend, the things men will do. They will take any animal and make a pet of it. Or they will find some kid wandering around, half crazed, his whole family dead, and they'll turn him into a mascot. I knew a man who carved a chess set out of roots. We were living down in a hole. It was called a bunker but really it was just a hole with some canvas pulled over the top, and when you leaned against the walls you felt roots digging into your back. So my comrade, he would cut these roots out, and after a while he had a collection, so he began to carve them into chess pieces. A waste of time, no? But it kept him sane for the rest of his life, which as I recall was long enough to get the black pieces finished and half of the white.
“For myself, I wanted more than that. I wanted a…more comprehensive sort of peace. So I wrote to my friend in Berlin and asked to be transferred out of the cavalry. I volunteered for partisan-hunting duty, which had been popular for a while, until people realized you could get killed doing it. In fact this was quite likely, it could happen at any time, no need to wait for the next offensive. Therefore such duty became less popular and they were employing mainly foreign regiments—Romanians to hunt Czechs, Slovaks to hunt Poles, and so forth. Everybody to hunt Jews. My request was ignored for several months but then—you know how things happen in the army—one day, out of nowhere, my orders arrived. I believe Cheruski might have intervened somehow, because my assignment was to this sector, which was more than I had hoped for. By then, you see, I was no longer in the business of hoping. Yet here I was. And I was happy it was so. For it brought me back to Arndtheim. Also to Isaac.”
You stare at him. You shoot X-rays through his skull, but they reveal no obvious malignancy. During this examination the prisoner watches you, almost piteously. He cares what you think. The next moment, disconcertingly, he laughs.
“Don't you see? It was the old game again, the old conspiracy. Both ends against the middle. Here was my greatest enemy, the notorious partisan, der Fuchs. The only Jew left in Silesia who wasn't counting his final hours in a camp somewhere. And here was I, his nemesis, the terrible Partisanjäger, wearing a Death's Head and riding a big white horse. What could have been more perfect? It was within our power, more than ever, for each to give the other what he most desired. For Isaac, protection. He had his own little band by that time, people who depended on him for survival— including, I was to learn, this ridiculous family here, crack-brained people left over from the Twenties who hadn't enough sense to get out. And for me, peace. A separate peace, on a secret front. Which turned out, however, not to be so simple to arrange, when one considers what I had been sent here to do.”
No kidding. When one considers.
“In the army, you know, always there is someone watching you. They watch from above, but even more so from below. They expect you to do your job. If your job is to cook porridge, they want it thick and steamy in time for breakfast. If your job is to kill partisans, they want, at the end of the day, to see a bit of blood on your hands. The more blood the better. So the problem becomes, whose blood shall it be? Also, how do we extract it in sufficient quantity to satisfy everyone, above and below, yet manage also to keep certain people, secret people, absolutely safe?”
“I'll bite. How?”
The prisoner's smile saddens. “Both ends against the middle, remember? Protection in exchange for peace. For Isaac—to give you one example—I rounded up enough lumber to build the wall here, to turn this place into a little Schloss. Otherwise, these foolish people would have been murdered long ago. The Poles would have done it, or my men, or the foul spirits of the water, in revenge for all that swamp draining. There were many things I did of this kind—not least turning a blind eye to the reports coming in about this bandit, the Fox. As for Isaac, I can say he paid me in full. If anything, he was too generous. Each time we met he would hand me a little square of paper, no bigger than a ration card. And on this paper I would find a list—each item neatly written out. As you know, he hates to write, so he does it carefully.”
Yes. I know.
“Everything was there: names, dates, hiding places. Enemies of the Reich, you see—bandits, saboteurs, rival guerrillas. Peasants known to shelter fugitives. You could never be certain who anybody was, not really. You only knew, here is an inventory of human lives. Take what you need, but don't be too greedy, you've got to make the supply last out the war.”
“That's ridiculous. Obscene. Isaac would never—”
“No? Then what else would Isaac have done? Tell me that. I'm not asking what you would have done, or some other person. We're talking about Isaac, and we're talking about myself. Two natural traitors. He got his start long ago by betraying his family, his friends. I began by betraying my Volk. We simply carried on from there. It has been for us an ideal partnership, a perfect balance. More than that. More than you can know. Or perhaps it might be that only you can know.”
No. I can't. I won't.
The prisoner sighs. “Or perhaps not. It doesn't matter, I suppose. Though I might add, if you are looking for proof…”
“I'm not.”
“Nonetheless. I have not wholly lost my knack for picking up the odd document here and there. I seldom get my hands on anything of great value—just a few things for Isaac to send up through resistance channels, to maintain his good standing among his peers. Such peers as remain. But there was one time, a dinner party Cheruski threw—you know, the poor fellow tries so hard to weasel into the Reichsführer's inner circle—and there were some big shots there, including that fellow Hoess, who runs the camp. Another cavalry man, as it happens. Well, Hoess had this memorandum, a duplicate off a message pad, and he was showing it discreetly around, only not so discreetly after his ninth or tenth cognac. And it seemed t
o go astray, because later he was looking for it, quite pale actually, but I don't believe he found it again.”
“I know what you're talking about. Why should I believe you?”
A shrug. “Well, you know Isaac got the damned thing from somewhere.”
“Sure—if it exists.”
“That's right. But then, you'll know soon enough, won't you?”
“Soon? Why's that?”
The head cocked, words not needed: Listen.
From the room down the hall, an aria of agony. The soprano's voice ascending, reaching a peak, holding there, then trailing into a low, agonized groan.
The prisoner nods. “Isaac may be a slippery little Kerl, but he's loyal when he chooses to be. He's not going to hide in his hole at a time like this.”
Out in the corridor, Ingo just stood there, his brain boiling. He watched as though from the wrong end of a telescope, so that everything seemed very far away, Martina hurrying up the stairs and crossing the hall with no more than a glance in his direction, then disappearing into Hildi's room. The door bumped shut behind her.
He took a step to follow her, but the second step wouldn't come; some hidden power resisted him.
End of the corridor. Top of the stairs. Symbols fraught with terminality. Women, he grimly thought. Guardians of the final mysteries; high priestesses of beginnings and ends.
Opposites attract—well, sometimes they do, when they don't repel. Look at Ingo and Marty. Look at Ingo and women generally. Or look—the next thought, lying in ambush, now pounced—look at Hagen and Isaac.
He is back in the room, facing the prisoner while the prisoner observes him blankly.
“Where did Isaac disappear to, then?” Ingo demands. By this time, there is no need to spell it out. The terrible image, blood on the rocks, is sufficiently clear in both their minds.
“Where does the Little Fox ever go? Never very far. He regained consciousness and found himself alone—he was frightened, no doubt. Disoriented, possibly. A blow to the head. You were right, the water was too shallow. I suppose he went into the woods and waited there. Until everyone was gone. It is what he does. It has kept him alive for a remarkably long time.”
“So…where did you run off to?”
“I ran, that's all. I was sixteen years old, for God's sake. I thought I had just seen a person die. I thought I was about to be killed myself. I was… in no ordinary state of mind. As soon as it grew light, I headed back here. On the way, I almost ran into the Jungdo boys. They were marching down the road in formation, left-two-three-four, as they did everything else. I took a shorter path and reached the village ahead of them, but by that time… ach, everything happened so quickly.”
“So you just ran into them. They just happened to be there. At the ass end of Silesia.”
The prisoner makes a thrusting motion that would've been alarming were his wrists not securely tied. “People like that,” he says hotly, “they find you. Eventually they do. You think you've left them behind, outsmarted them, and perhaps you have, for a while. But they keep coming. Such men, it is in their nature. This is what they do, just as the Fox slips away and hides.”
Now the prisoner falls quiet, and Ingo sits there brooding. A piece is missing. Not a minor one.
“It still doesn't quite explain …” Thinking aloud, but also inviting the prisoner to help, should he care to. “All along, you and Isaac, even before Frau-Holle-Quell—well, maybe it was a game to him. That would make sense, wouldn't it? Sort of make-believe, switching roles, like cowboys and Indians, then Indians and cowboys. But you…”
You aren't really one for games, are you?— addressing in his mind not the haggard SS officer before him but the boy in his clean blue uniform, sixteen years old, self-possessed, untouchable. “What were you up to back then? For that matter, what are you up to now? If you're not here to set a trap, then for God's sake, why are you here?”
The prisoner's ever-changing mask freezes now into a single face, and Ingo bodily draws back, because it is a face he knows.
“Are you completely unfamiliar,” the prisoner says, in that moment Hagen again, Hagen the beautiful, “a man like you, a Romantic, with the concept of unrequited love?”
Then the face crumbles, the years rush back. The prisoner lowers his head until it rests on both of his hands, lashed together and clenched into a single fist. “I was only a boy,” he says, so quietly you can barely hear him. “And you know, boys do fall in love.”
Snap, Ingo thought. It was not a minor piece. And it fit perfectly.
Somewhere, in a different world perhaps, or a series of interlocking and strongly similar worlds, the late-autumn sun drifted across the sky, birds took wing, little girls cried and hugged their dollies, young men laid down their lives for the Mother-or Fatherland, a blue-haired widow toddled from her apartment in Adams-Morgan to take tea at the Rusty Ring, a painter tried to convey the essence of his complicated lover by giving her six arms, and an army led by Communists raced an army led by Christians to a river that flowed like an artery through the heart of their common foe.
There is only one question left to ask—a small, overlooked, seemingly unnecessary one—in order to finish the picture.
“Where,” you need to know, “do I come into this? Why would Isaac drag me back over here? There must have been a hundred other ways of doing it.”
“Oh, well… that.”
The prisoner shifts uncomfortably on the bed, bound there still. But you cut him free a while ago. This poor fellow will never escape; he is powerless, and always has been.
“I suppose, really, that was an idea I might have, you know, slipped into his head. He liked it very much. It…I believe it amused him.”
Amused him?
Well, it would have. “But”— the missing piece is close by, your fingers tingle, groping for it—” why, though, Hagen? Why me?”
The prisoner shrugs. He is beyond help now, and you pity him.
“Certain things in common?” he murmurs tentatively. Then he answers in that abrupt German manner that still manages to surprise you. “I suppose after so much time, so much loss”— at the end, an almost bashful smile—” I needed someone to talk to. And so did you, Kamarad. So did you.”
“That's crazy. Verrücht. I was perfectly okay, thanks, right where I was. I didn't need anything. Especially from you.”
Hagen had the grace not to respond directly. “I knew you once,” he said after a measured pause. “I knew you, not in detail—what town did you grow up in, what is your favorite color—but more generally, the sort of person you were. And I see now the sort of person you have become. I do not say one is better, one is worse. Only that the two are different.”
“No joke. The whole damn world is different.”
“Just so. Exactly so. Es war einmal, the world was wide and green and beautiful. Is that what you mean? And in that world all things were possible. One could live freely and honestly then, with no need of make-believe. One could be simply oneself. You, Ingo—you felt that way once upon a time, didn't you? You were a Schwuler who read poetry and didn't care for swimming and fell in love rather too easily, I think. This was the Ingo I knew. And this Ingo—I remember quite clearly—was brave enough, and truthful enough, to be exactly that. I would say he was quite courageous. More so than I.
“But that world is lost, is it not? Something happened that took all that warmth and beauty and possibility away. This new world is a cold, dangerous, unforgiving place, and within it one can no longer live as one lived then. You cannot; I cannot. We have drawn into our shells. We no longer permit ourselves to yearn or dream—above all, not to reveal our love. We have come down from the Magic Mountain to live in exile on a desolate plain.
“Ah, but Isaac. Our Isaac, by some miracle, has continued to live in that other world. He is still up there on that mountain. Still follows the Meissner-Formel. ‘We will shape our lives by our own choice, following our own inner truth.' You remember? A naïve attitude, I'm sure you'l
l agree. Unreasonable. A bit mad, even. Yet that was Isaac then, and it is Isaac even today.
“God knows, he was far from perfect. He was not handsome, or noble, or especially virtuous. He was nothing other than himself. He could be kind, sometimes, and there was laughter always behind those eyes. One came to love him for that. I did, and you did also. And so we must love him still, because however different we ourselves have become—you a recluse, like Eichendorff ‘s hermit, myself a ‘war criminal’— Isaac remains simply Isaac. The world has changed unimaginably. But he, alone of all of us, has never shrunk from it. It is not a matter of courage, I think, nor of tenacity, nothing of that sort. It is a matter of sheer wonder. A singular being, bestowed upon the world.”
“Ein Eigene.”
“Pardon me?” said Hagen, for Ingo had not meant to speak out loud and the word was barely a mumble.
“Get some rest, Kamarad,” Ingo advised him. “You look terrible.”
Hagen lowered his eyes. He could not rest; they both knew that. Like a starving beast of prey, he could only wait in some fading imitation of hope.
Down the hall the girl roared in agony, grunted in rage—you never would have believed such sounds could come out of that frail and nearly bloodless body. Ingo supposed there was a lesson here. But he was too tired to draw it.
Such females as were still in Arndtheim—Marty, Anna, Tamara, an ancient Oma, a dark-haired teenager whose complexion and comportment were in open revolt—hurried in and out of the room like agents on an urgent mission that could not be spoken of.
Ingo stepped down the stairs with elaborate care, because they were steep and his feet unsteady. No, his feet were fine, his mind was the problem. The innkeeper signaled him in some imperceptible manner—one tap-puller to another—and when Ingo sat down near the fire he slid a plate of potato hotcakes and a tankard of black beer in front of him. He remained standing until Ingo signaled back in the same occult fashion, as he would've Bernie or Vernon. Then the man lowered himself into a chair across the table. His face was not so red now. He looked oddly at ease.
Another Green World Page 47
