Another Green World (11 page)

There was no getting it out of your head for a while—neither the introduction nor the graphic details that followed. Which made the hoo-rah planned for that night even more ridiculous.

Ingo slumped in a bentwood chair on the lawn behind a stucco-sided bungalow, the kind people used to order back in the Twenties from Sears, Roebuck. Your house arrived on a flatbed truck, a neat pile of precut and numbered pieces, complete with assembly manual. This style of home-building was popular with colored folks especially, because you could gather a whole neighborhood—or a big extended family like Vernon's— and knock the thing together in a week or two, no need to hire carpenters. Ingo had seen bungalows like this one, standing two decades or longer, that from the outside looked fine but on the inside were still awaiting such finishing touches as electrical wiring and a flush toilet.

Unlike those, this Craftsman-style house and its matching, well-kept outbuildings showed all the little signs of prosperity, from fresh cream-yellow paint to a stoop of poured concrete, that accrued to successful farmers in a time of food rationing. Ingo wasn't sure how Charleva had managed this with her husband away in the Artillery Corps. He supposed that the chickens, delivered to the city each Saturday, were part of it. But there were other parts, such as the regular coming and going of local people, white as well as colored, paying cash for fresh eggs and butter and home-canned preserves. He couldn't help wondering what had impelled Charleva to offer up the farm's wide tracts of fallow land and scrubby, cutover woodlots for the training of three dozen strangers in the art of guerrilla
warfare. If it was an act of patriotism, surely it was one of the oddest he'd ever heard of.

But he didn't want to wonder about that just now. He preferred to think of nothing—or, failing that, about the smell of roasting veal and hickory embers that filled the big yard and overwhelmed, thank God, the smell of penned livestock. He had dragged his chair close enough to feel the warmth of the long-smoldering fire. Half a dozen children played touch football nearby while the real thing, Redskins vs. Eagles, was broadcast from Griffith Stadium, the announcer's voice belting out of a big console set up on the side porch. He was neither following the game, exactly, nor ignoring it. He was brooding, like the hens in the low, sprawling barn across the field, camouflaged by eight-foot stalks of joe-pye weed.

From where he sat, he could see the rest of the Brigade gathered around a long table where deviled eggs, potato salad, Coca-Cola and beer had been laid out on a checkered cloth. A big outdoor roast like this would be an occasion, regardless. But today's was downright surreal, not least because of the species of animal charring in the pit.

The whole thing had been arranged, on the sly and at long distance from California, by Ari Glasser, with covert assistance on the ground from Vernon and his Uncle Leon. Besides breeding hounds that hated white people, Leon also was the most esteemed hog-roaster in Queen Anne's County, if not on the whole Eastern Shore—so Vernon claimed. In summer you had to book him weeks ahead, though things did slow down after Labor Day.

The pit had been dug yesterday morning, while the squads were on maneuver, and the fire laid around nightfall in order that the coals would be ready at dawn. And only after that, when Ari arrived late in the evening, breathless from a cross-country flight and a taxi ride that must have seemed just as long and even more dangerous, did it occur to him that roast pig might not be the perfect feast to cap off these particular five weeks of unparalleled chaos and misery.

“What was I thinking?” Glasser was said to have said.

Leon viewed the situation as a professional challenge, and the two men spent hours in the middle of the night driving along the muddy shores of the Chesapeake in an aged Ford he'd rigged out with a special bed for hauling slaughtered animals and kitchen implements and confidential ingredients from job to job. As Ari told it, Leon had finally pulled into a run-down place owned by a friend of his, declaring, “It comes to my mind that we could make do with a fatted calf.”

Hence the carcass that now hissed and popped and gave off fragrant smoke within spitting distance of Ingo's cold feet. Seven hours in the fire, it had turned black all over, with red splotches from the secret seasoning slathered on at intervals by Leon, or by Vernon acting as his deputy. Ari had stood for a good deal of that time nearby, nursing a cola, transfixed. You don't see much of this kind of thing in Hollywood, Ingo supposed. He wondered how often, after tonight, the roasted-calf motif would crop up in coming feature films. Maybe some biblical costume drama,
East of Gomorrah
… but then a pang somewhere near the heart nearly doubled him over.

He had broken a personal taboo. He had thought about the future, allowing his mind to drift past the fourth quarter of the current Redskins game. It was something he'd been drilling himself not to do, just as his thirty-odd companions, now gathered around the deviled eggs like apostles at the Last Barbecue, had drilled themselves to crawl through mud and shoot automatic weapons and defecate outdoors like real honest-to-God guerrillas.

For his own part, Ingo could not believe the war would be won or lost by his failings as a Scout. On the other hand, he could easily believe that he personally would die of dread if he allowed his thoughts to range unchecked for a single moment.

“It sounds like a close one,” someone nearby said.

Ingo started, then recognized Timo. “Close one?”

“The game,” said the driver, with a flash of bad teeth. “The Eagles are up by seven but haven't scored in a while. They got the talent, no question. I just think maybe the Skins got more staying power.”

Ingo nodded, trying to focus on football, generally a safe topic. The rules were clear and, at least where the formidable Skins were concerned, the outcome seldom in doubt. But win or lose—in marked contrast to the war in Europe, despite predictions to the contrary—the whole shebang really would be over by Christmas.

“I would like to offer a toast,” said Ari Glasser, raising his can of National Bohemian just as an annoying jingle for the very product came floating from the radio on the porch. Ingo missed the first part of whatever Ari was toasting to, listening instead to the chipper advertising ensemble. What did these people do when they weren't singing fifteen-second oratorios?

Glasser concluded, “The Varian Fry Brigade!”

There were murmurs and laughter and, from out in the field, a bit of yelling when one team of kids scored a touchdown against the other.

“What did he say?” Ingo whispered to Martina, who was standing beside him.

She rolled her eyes. “I knew you weren't listening. You never listen. This whole thing is a joke to you, isn't it?”

“No. It isn't a joke.”

“A lark, then. A little camping trip. Something to get you out of that city you hate so much.”

“I don't hate the District. I was born there.”

Glasser was still talking, thanking people. Leon, for such a fine job with this calf. Timo, for ferrying all these supplies out from Washington. Rabbi Grabsteen, for kindly being with us today. And of course Miss Charleva, for allowing us all to join her on this beautiful farm. Without her, none of this…

“Who
was
this Varian Fry?” Ingo said, loud enough to drive Glasser's voice out of his head.

“You've never heard of Varian Fry.” There was triumph in her voice, of the I-knew-it sort.

By this time people nearby, tipsy and in the mood to be entertained, were turning to catch the latest episode of the Marty & Ingo Show. He was aware of them but didn't mind; he was happy enough to play the straight man. “You'll tell me though, won't you?” he said pleasantly.

“Varian Fry was
just
the greatest American hero of the whole beginning of the war, that's all. He was the only person—back when everybody else was sitting on their thumbs, and you Republicans were frantic about keeping us out of Europe—Varian Fry actually
went
over to France, which the Germans had already occupied, and got to work smuggling people across the border. He saved over a thousand before Pétain's thugs threw him out.”

From the eavesdroppers, an excited murmur, probably less over Mar-tina's capsule bio than from hearing someone branded a Republican. Fighting words, in this crowd. Ingo scowled at the faces around him—his comrades, if you could believe it. “Varian,” he said thoughtfully, to deepen the scandal. “Sounds like a woman's name, doesn't it?”

He didn't provoke the reaction he was hoping for. For an instant he looked around at the others, into their hopeful, earnest, well-intentioned faces, and felt something like pity that quickly changed into something like panic. These people aren't guerrillas, he thought. No more than I am. They're desk warriors—assistant professors, accountants, a salesman or two. A dress designer from Wilkes-Barre. A futures analyst from Chicago. Christ, a
bartender from Dupont Circle.
We're nothing but a bunch of saps, and we're about to get ourselves killed.

“Wasn't it Varian Fry,” said one of the saps, a skinny prelaw student named Eddie Lubovich, practically a kid—” who rescued Marc Chagall?”

“And Hannah Arendt,” said somebody else.

“There,” said Martina. “You see?”

Ingo shrugged. He had no idea who Hannah Arendt was. Marc Chagall he understood to be some kind of painter—but why would a painter need rescuing? “You folks enjoy yourselves,” he said, aping his own occupational geniality, then turned away and wandered over toward the porch, where the announcer was shouting about a
great
play, a really
swell
play, we've got a whole new ball game on our hands now, without a clue as to what had happened or who stood to gain by it.

“Excuse me, Mr. Miller?” said a youthful voice.

Ingo turned to find himself looking slightly upward into the wide brown eyes, almost calflike, of Eddie, who was holding a can of National Boh in either hand. He offered one to Ingo. “You look like you've had a rough day.”

“Do I?” Ingo accepted the beer, wondering what Eddie was seeing. Today had been no worse than any other.

The kid didn't answer. He might have been half drunk already, or only excited. Ingo tried to remember being excited—as opposed to, for instance, sick with fear. He watched the boy slurp down his beer, marveling at the clear, sharp light in his eyes, the skin drawn tautly around his temples.

Eddie looked back, his gaze direct and guileless. “Could I ask you something, Mr. Miller?” he said, in a voice that still betrayed the croak of adolescence.

“Call me Ingo. Fire away.”

“How did a guy like you…I mean, how did you in particular get caught up in all this?”

“All what?” Ingo looked around, pretending to be mystified, then patted Eddie on the shoulder. You could feel the bones right through the wool
campus pullover, navy blue with an orange V on the chest. “Never mind.

It's kind of a—”

“Long story, sure. It's none of my business, anyway.”

“That's not what I was going to say.” Ingo shook his head. “Not a long story. Too short, maybe. Over much too soon.” He hesitated. “Or, I don't know—maybe not. Maybe it's still going on.”

A strange feeling came over him, as if he, not Eddie, were standing there half drunk, light streaming out of his eyes.

“I'm not sure I can explain it now. It's not that I've forgotten—I can remember every bit of it—only I'm not sure it would make sense anymore, if someone tried to retell it. The world has changed so much, it's like the definitions have shifted around. Back then, everything was so different. And I do mean everything.”

Eddie gave an uncertain laugh. “The good old days, eh?”

Ingo shook his head. “This is more than nostalgia. And the old days weren't all good. They were just…you felt more alive then, somehow. Die goldenen zwanziger Jahre—the Golden Twenties, that's what we called them. That last summer before the Depression. The end of the Free Youth Movement, though I guess you wouldn't have heard of that. Anyhow, there we were—kids from all over—on this beautiful mountain, the Höhe Meissner. It was huge. It was history, that's what everybody was saying. The second Youth Summit. All of us so young, and the world so round, and the future hanging there like you could just reach out and grab it. And then—” He shrugged. “Kommt die Morgensonne, zerfliesst's wie eitel Schaum.”

Eddie smiled politely. “I'm afraid you've lost me there, Mr. Miller. I don't speak any German. Other than Blitzkrieg and Sieg heil.”

Ingo shook his head. “Why should you? There's nothing left of all that now. But there was a time …” He stared hard at Eddie, determined not to be misunderstood. “There was a time, a genuine part of history, and part of our lives, when anything you could think of was possible. You could be whoever, whatever you wanted to be. We all believed that—every one of us there on the Höhe Meissner. And that damn mountain was the center of the world.”

AUGUST 1929

W
hat surprised Martina more than anything—possibly excepting the naked gymnasts—was that Ingo had agreed to come in the first place. If he hadn't, her parents would never have allowed her to go. Sorry, only one Atlantic crossing per family per century. But enter a nonrelated variable and suddenly the equation doesn't hold. Martina couldn't imagine how they expected
Ingo
to keep her safe. Lob spitballs at stray icebergs? Ask mashers politely to leave her alone? But somehow the notion of his trailing along, a familiar and comforting figure from her earliest childhood, had reassured the ma and papa. She started packing that same afternoon.

She supposed it was Ingo himself. The dullness of him. Always with the books or the toy soldiers or the model boats. Those stupid boats! Cork and balsa wood contraptions he would float in trenches specially dug in the backyard, filled with water lugged in buckets. The vividness of the memory surprised her. Martina seldom missed, or even thought about, her childhood. She was glad she'd woken up and joined the Jazz Age—that she hadn't remained stuck in time like poor Ingo, with his Sunday-school clothes and his knapsack full of poetry.