Another Green World

by Richard Grant

  The boy gazed out from the mountain with his wide, empty eyes. He watched the sentry light a cigarette, warming his fingers for a few seconds in the flame. He watched an eagle circle slowly half a mile away, a deity of the skies. He watched shadows move across a land that once had been called Poland. Names, he thought—peculiar, how they always changed. The great fighter himself—so Shlomo had heard one partisan tell another—had not always been called the Fox. He had once had a different name, that of an ordinary boy.

  “Isaac,” the great fighter told him. He was sitting near Shlomo on the rock, though the sentry had not seen him arrive. “My name was Isaac.”

  Izaak, Shlomo repeated. The word tasted funny on his tongue—sharp, like a knife edge. But sweet as well, like green pepper.

  “And you were Tzadik,” the great fighter said, in his gentlest voice, the one he used with the children.

  The boy gasped. No one remembered that name. Even he himself had almost forgotten it. The delight of hearing it again surged through him and he stood up straight, his bare toes clutching the rock, and he laughed like a little boy being tickled.

  The sentry looked around but only for a moment—he had gotten used to this sort of thing. Everyone knew that the boy saw things other people could not; he heard voices to which everyone else was deaf. You came to accept it, as you accept almost anything, even death, after a while. After a while, it seems natural. Every shtetl has its jester, its opnarer, so why should a guerrilla base not have a holy fool? There is a place for everyone in this world and also, we may hope, in the next one.

  “The thing is,” said the great fighter, whose secret name was Isaac, “it was the right thing, what you did. You were right to go hide there at the edge of the woods. It's what your mama wanted. She wanted you to stay alive.”

  Yes, I know. It was true, his papi had told him. Even so, the boy found it strange that anyone else should understand.

  “Only I guess it's made you a little crazy,” said Isaac with a shrug. “That's all right, too, I think. I knew some people who weren't crazy at all—or only for a little while, when they were young—and it always seemed like they were missing out on something. But you—you don't miss much, do you?”

  The boy had no idea. He had begun to tremble. Which was quite odd, because he scarcely felt the cold.

  “Don't worry.” The great man touched him on the arm—his hand burned there with a welcome kind of warmth, a living fire. “It's kind of a question of balance. It's like you're in some narrow place, you might fall off on either side. So you lean a little this way, a little that—you want to stay up there for as long as you can. Eventually, you fall off. That's how it goes. You lean a little too far one way, and—” He made a sound like what happens when an egg hits the floor.

  The boy laughed. The sentry did not turn his head.

  “The thing is, it happens to everybody. As far as I know it does. It happens to whole countries, even. Look down there, what's that? Silesia? The Grail Kingdom? It could be anything. It could be America.”

  Into the boy's eyes came a sudden sparkle. Amerika! That magical land.

  “Yeah, well, you wait. Just stay on your feet, that's all I'm saying.”

  The great fighter, who once upon a time had been a boy called Isaac, began walking away. He moved easily although the path, here at the edge of the cliff, was treacherous. After several steps he paused and looked back at the boy.

  “See you next time,” he said.

  Solemnly, Tzadik raised his hand.

  And the great fighter passed into the Dämmerung.

  ANOTHER GREEN WORLD

  NOVEMBER 1944

  Out of the dawn, out of the woods, came a single clap. It was not loud. There was no second clap, and the land was too flat to produce an echo. Just one sound, then a return of silence. One shot, that's all a good sniper needs. The best snipers in the world, by the winter of 1944, were serving in the Red Army. They were veterans of Stalingrad, Sebastopol, Kharkov, Odessa, the most gruesome battles ever fought. Seryoshka had killed already, by his own tally, one hundred and twenty-two men, Germans, Bulgarians, Romanians, Croats, Italians, Lithuanians, every sort of Fascist and counterrevolutionary and running dog he had managed to center in his scope. A single shot for each.

  Now, one hundred and twenty-three. To the list, add one American.

  The bullet must have passed through the thin body and out again before Isaac heard the shot. He did not die immediately. High-velocity rounds often penetrate their targets without inflicting major trauma at the point of impact. So you had this further and deepening horror, of watching the look change on his face, realization spreading across his unlovely features even as the tiny spot at his throat grew larger, like a flower opening. You watched him lift a hand, slowly, still disbelieving. What the hell is this? Then, that little stagger.

  All the rest happens quickly—the eyes go wide and white, the paper slips from his fingers, flutters like a falling leaf, and Isaac dies. You feel his presence ebbing out of the world. You close your eyes so as not to see him fall.

  You died also, then, in a way. The Ingo that you had always been, who could fall asleep without dread, who could awaken in hope. But another Ingo was there, smoothly taking control of your body, or perhaps the other had been living inside you all along—the Ingo that broke a Gruppenführer's nose and almost killed Hagen and surely killed the Defrocked Priest. Now he wanted to kill again. But first you needed a weapon, a target and, while you're at it, some fucking boots wouldn't hurt.

  So: Race up the lane, screaming bloody hell, shutters popping open and people yelling down. All of it a blur. You grabbed the Schmeisser but threw it down—worthless at long range. In the common room, a Mauser stood propped against a wall. Take that. Take the innkeeper's coat as well, to cover this damn uniform.

  By this time, you had managed to rouse the whole village; even women worn out from the childbirth and its awful aftermath were poking their heads out. You caught Marty's eye or she caught yours. She saw the difference right away, and you saw the surprise, the nonrecognition. Meet the new Ingo, how do you do? No time for a handshake just now. The blood-lust was upon you.

  At what point did Bloom catch up? You remember a big hand grabbing your shoulder, some kind of question barked in your face. You must have answered. Perhaps intelligibly. Somehow or other, the Varian Fry Brigade got its act together, with an unknown adversary at the gate, those bastards that killed Isaac and were about to pay for it. You fell in with the others— marching side by side, a team player at last—and together you climbed the ramparts and readied your weapons, still quaking yourself with battle rage. Yet at the same time you were icy-calm inside, operationally calm; your hand steady, your eye sharp, your goal to murder the first thing that moved.

  But you had gotten there too late.

  By the time Ingo reached the top of the wall, across the meadow in full battle array stood what looked like the entire Red Army. He didn't realize at first it was the Russians, only that it was not what he expected. He had imagined bad guys, evil Nazis, a field of gray uniforms, a cavalry charge. Instead, this unbelievable sight: the whole meadow lined with American jeeps and Studebakers, half-tracks, armored personnel carriers and an honest-to-God tank, a T-34 that was noisy as hell and sat there swiveling its short-muzzled gun back and forth like it wanted to end the war right then and there by itself.

  Between the Americans in the village and the Soviets near the tree line, Hagen stood at the center of the open space over Isaac's sprawled body. He was staring down, ignoring the growl of approaching engines, the hundred weapons sighted in on him. His head hung low, and even from this distance you could see his shoulders quaking.

  The Red Army commander must have signaled a halt. The vehicles sat with their motors idling. Through hatches and windows and firing slits you could make out round-topped, dark green helmets, sometimes a face, sometimes enough of a body to draw a bead on. Ingo looked down the long barrel of the Mauser from one to another. It
was a bit like staring down a roller coaster. You could practically hear the screams. But his finger held steady at the trigger. He did not plan to kill randomly. He wanted to find the right target. He wanted to be sure.

  The door of a truck opened with a metal squawk and a man got out waving a white piece of cloth, apparently someone's undershirt. A second, taller man stepped out from the driver's side, and together they moved across the meadow toward the village. The man with the flag glanced at Hagen, then away. Clearly this broken and surrounded German, whoever he was, presented no danger. The man kept walking, drawing closer until you could make out his dark mustache and the sheen of his rifle stock. You noticed also that the rifle was equipped with a large telescopic sight.

  The second man—for a few moments you'd taken your eyes off him— was meanwhile walking over to where Isaac lay with Hagen tilting over him. The tall newcomer ignored both of them, his head moving slowly from side to side as if he had dropped something there. Then he saw what he was looking for. He bent over, and when he straightened again he was holding a piece of paper. How big is a ration coupon? Something about like that, maybe. In the same moment, his other hand dipped into a pocket and came out with a small silver object. As he flicked it, you saw that it was an American-style lighter. The flame leapt quickly to the paper, and for a second or two the man's face was lit by the glow of fire.

  What was it, the expression on that face? Triumph, fulfillment, a touch of smugness, a liberal dose of self-regard: that's how Ingo read it. And it was funny that his own instantaneous reaction, a surge of hatred, and not the expression itself, or the face on which it appeared, was how he recognized Marty's old pal Samuel Butler Randolph, the Third and very last.

  The Mauser is an accurate weapon, if your eye is good and your grip is firm, and as he raised this one, the new Ingo thought, I've wanted to do this for a long, long time.

  But the shot, when it came, was not yours.

  Everyone had forgotten Hagen. By that time he was little more than a ghost, so perhaps he had temporarily vanished. When he reappeared he was holding his Walther, a classic German officer's handgun. You need a strong hand to fire one properly, and Ingo supposed that Hagen's final reserve of strength must have passed straight through that little barrel, for every bullet found its mark.

  The first two were for Butler. They were placed just so, thump, the first in the head, then thump, the second in the heart. Hagen pivoted easily, master of the Schwerpunkt, and ran off a series of four shots into Seryoshka, who was in the middle of a slow-motion turn, the bullets tracing an arc around his back, his upper arm, his chest, then his chest again, straight-on. A fifth bullet, delayed by half a second while Hagen adjusted his aim, seemed to pass right through an eye.

  That was the end, for the hundred weapons that were sighted in on him began firing all at once, and pieces of Hagen flew in all directions like red confetti tossed gaily at a parade. It was astonishing: he simply blew apart. Ingo, the new Ingo, saw this as an almost enviable sort of death, a splashy exit.

  When you climbed down from the wall, when you opened the gate and stepped through it, out onto the battle plain, were you perhaps seeking an end like that for yourself? If you were, no one blames you.

  One of the Americans began shooting. God knows why, or at what, or even who it was, though Ingo's money was on Harvey Grabsteen. Especially in respect to timing, for the shooter waited until you were beyond the protection of the wall, with the hundred Soviet marksmen hastily scrubbing Hagen's name off their barrels and chalking in that of yours truly. But then Bloom was yelling, and the shooting dried up.

  After that, nobody fired from either side. Ingo was a perfect target, big and slow, but he might as well have been carrying the Hammer and Sickle in one arm and the Stars and Stripes in the other. He crossed the meadow in an unbroken march, the longest of his Wandervogel existence. Something about the heedlessness with which he did it, as if no one were left in the world save himself and a few scattered corpses, must have flipped some switch in the collective Soviet-American mind. By the time he reached…

  No, not yet. Take a breath, slow down, let the world catch up. Russians were crawling out of their vehicles. Americans were climbing down from the wall. He heard Marty's voice, somewhere behind him. Wait up, damn it. He heard the gate swinging wider, then more voices. Now a Russian was coming up from the other side—cautious but friendly, holding out his hand. You are American? Call me Bo.

  All right. Go on.

  * * *

  Isaac lay on his back. It was a terrible thing to look at, but you had died already, so what was the threat? You were kneeling beside him. You were touching his unlovely but still loved skin.

  Regrets, dreams, sorrows, laughter. Memory and thought. His crooked smile, jokes you learned from him, questions you would never ask, then, now or ever. The warmth of his mouth. The danger in his sideways glance. Whom had he betrayed, how many, why? Sun on the water. Blood on the rock. A night sky, the mountains—adoration, yearning, stars overhead. His freckles. The smell of warm hay in the sunshine. His green marble eyes.

  People have gathered around you but now stand back, or maybe they simply cannot come this far. You and Isaac are alone, away from winter, far from 1944.

  Only one person can follow you here. Only one is able to brush past you and reach Isaac, touching his dead face with its tiny fingers. But when you look down, you see it is no person at all. It is a tiny god, a being who belongs in this frozen world no more than Isaac, no more than you. The godlet moves in someone's arms, but then the arms withdraw and you're holding the magical being yourself, as one might hold a small planet. The incredible limbs move and the dark eyes flash; the mouth opens, round as a button, to speak in a language only you can interpret.

  Yes, you tell the little god, for you have understood its question. You feel its life squirming in your hands, its densely concentrated holiness.

  Yes, you say—and that answer becomes a promise, a sacred vow. Yes, I will save you. Yes, I will protect you. Yes, I will tell you stories someday, funny stories about your daddy, each with a happy end. Yes, I will make your daddy live for you. I will live for you myself, to make it all come true.

  Yes. I will take you away, to a place where nothing can hurt you, no one can threaten you. And you will be free there, you will have everything, you will know love and your love will be returned. And never will winter come again, and never loss, and never sadness. And there you will live forever, as we too still live—far, far away, in that magical country.

  Another green world.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Heartfelt thanks to Ed Shindle, my friend and German teacher, for his kindness, patience and steely resolve.

  Copyright © 2006 by Richard Grant

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Another green world / Richard Grant. —1 st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. World War, 1939–1945—Europe—Fiction. 2. Americans—Europe—Fiction. 2. 3. World War, 1939–1945—Underground movements—Fiction. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Poland—Fiction. 5. World War, 1939–1945—Yugoslavia—Fiction. 3. 6. Auschwitz (Concentration Camp)— Fiction. I. Title.

  ps3557.r268A86 2006

  813'.54—dc22

  2005057930

  eISBN: 978-0-307-49395-8

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.0

 

 

 
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