Another Green World (18 page)

This habit of self-observation he'd taken up at the age of twelve. That had been a signal year for Ingo, during which he'd embarked on some-thing—a quest, a private exile, a purifying ordeal—that now had brought him, in a surprising turn, to the Höhe Meissner. At twelve he began, all on his own, to choose what books to read. He volunteered to sing in the church choir, having conceived an interest in religion generally, and started earlier than most to prepare for his First Communion. In school he signed up for German, a language spoken at home that he'd never systematically investigated. He joined, at his father's urging, the newly founded Boy Scouts of America. He suffered acutely the early symptoms of adolescence. And one summer's day, in a patch of woodland near Olney, Maryland, he experienced what he could only call, borrowing a term from the Christian mystics, an epiphany.

Since then, Ingo had been laying his plans, preparing himself through readings in the classics and the most
avant-garde
Continental authors, through listening to evocative music, through secret experiments, but mostly through deep and lonely contemplation. By the age of twenty, his
preparations were complete; he was ready to take the next step. Only he had no clear idea what that step should be, and—let's be honest—for all his virtues, he was not much of a step-taker.

At which moment, as if on cue, enter Marty Panich. Who blithely had strolled up one afternoon and started babbling about the German Youth Movement. About which, needless to say, she knew almost nothing. Oh, she'd picked up a few stray facts in Anthropology class; but chiefly she was guided by a general feeling, emanating from her fashion bone, that here was a New Thing, as epochal as bobbed hair, possibly more so.

Also needless to say, Ingo knew everything: Wyneken and Wickersdorf and
Jugendkultur
, Blüher's writings and the furor they aroused, the schism between the Wandervogel and the Free German Youth, the fragile truce of 1913 and the unmitigated horror of the Great War, in which one in four Movement members had perished—and from which Martina's professor, an Austrian coward, had absented himself. He knew, too, what was happening now, in the fractious Weimar era—the scandals, the public shaming of Wyneken and Tusk, the tendentious cult of Stefan George and the rise of dangerous, adult-led factions on both right and left.

But beyond all that, in a more personal way, he knew about the Gemeindshaft der Eigenen (the Society of the Exceptional) and its illustrated journal,
Der Eigene
, which billed itself, ingenuously, “
ein Blatt für Männliche Kultur.”
Deep in the university library he unearthed the
Jahrbuch für Sexuelle Zwischenstufen—
though, to his disappointment, it shed little light on these “sexual in-between stages,” which was perhaps all one could expect from euphemisers. He even managed by transatlantic parcel post to obtain rare issues of
Schönheit
(Beauty),
Der Insel
(The Island),
Lieblingsminne
(Courtly Love), and the scarcely believable, nor translatable,
Blätter für Nacktkultur.

A whole world was there. Ingo had discovered it. And while he knew it belonged not exclusively to the young or to the Germans—Marcel Proust was French, and dead—it struck him that only since the rise of the Jugendbewegung, and only in places the Movement had touched, could this new world be mapped, explored, experienced. And he yearned, he ached, he needed desperately to experience it for himself.

Martina knew none of this. If she had, Ingo doubted she'd have understood it. To Marty, this was just the latest craze she didn't want to miss out on because, hey, it was swinging! Whereas for him, it went far deeper than that. Therein lay the difference between them.

Well, one difference. There was another, equally crucial. Ingo, knowing all he knew, and having made all his preparations, had still, by the ripe age
of twenty, done nothing about it. He stood motionless, becalmed, the perpetual observer of himself and the great world around him. Whereas Marty—who understood nothing, or precious little—was ready to hop on the next boat, regardless of when the boat sailed or where it was headed. She had no idea how to get from there to wherever this mountain was. She had no plans for eating, sleeping, bathing or attending to bodily needs whilst in Germany. Presumably she took it for granted Ingo would take care of all that. And of course, she was right.

Shaking himself free wasn't difficult. In fact he got the impression Martina wanted to get rid of him, the better to sprawl shamelessly on that ludicrous beach blanket, waiting for some strapping young Teuton to stumble over her.

So he slipped away and ambled for a while along the paths on the mountainside, taking in the scenery, noting the goings-on both banal and astonishing, meanwhile planning his next move. The first thing, he decided, was to change out of these clothes that his mother had felt were suitable for traveling. No doubt they were, but he had arrived now. At least he was very close. He didn't want to look like an
Auslander.

At a glance, there seemed no particular order to how things were arranged at the
Jugendtag.
People pitched their tents and formed their music circles and sprawled in the sun, in some cases mostly naked, just like in the magazines, wherever the fancy seized them. But with Germans there is no such thing as “no particular order,” and after a while Ingo began to detect an overarching logic by which certain areas had been reserved for special purposes. The open ground near the summit was kept clear for large public gatherings, like tonight's oath-taking ceremony, which involved a huge bonfire. Other spaces had been claimed by certain factions—the Pathfinders, it seemed, had taken a whole face of the mountain to themselves. And a stretch of paths and fields on the lower approach, down by the Meissner Haus, had been made over into a midway like that at a county fairground. Here you saw booths and exhibits where, within a few steps, you could purchase handmade wooden cups or the writings of Karl Marx or a purportedly authentic reproduction of the sword wielded by Charlemagne, the original having been entombed with him at Aachen. A dozy girl offered brochures said to reveal an infallible method of discovering your past lives, cheek-by-jowl with a boy in a yellow shirt loudly hawking a fat tome called
Mein Kampf
, apparently the memoirs of a new, self-anointed Messiah.

It did not take Ingo long to find what he was looking for. From photographs, he'd acquired a conception of what the well-turned-out Wander-vogel ought to wear. He'd even formed definite likes and dislikes: neither the androgynous look nor the pseudo-military costume affected by the
bündisch
crowd held any appeal for him. He approved, conditionally, of the
Minnesinger
style, meant to evoke the wandering minstrels and scholars of the Middle Ages, a period vivid in the collective German memory—but for his money, skintight leggings and hats with bells on them were taking the thing too far.

He chose, in the end, to keep his trousers—plain khaki twills that wouldn't, as his mom pointed out, show dirt—and to swap his shirt for a straw-colored, loosely woven jersey, its hems threaded decoratively in cobalt blue. You could tighten the V neck with a lace, also blue, and you wore the tails hanging right down over your belt. Ingo had never owned anything like this before and he liked the way it felt, the breeze flowing up around his body. His
body:
something he hadn't thought much about, not since age twelve or so, when along with everything else it had become strange to him. Wearing his new shirt, it felt strange all over again.

As a cheerful afterthought—a whim really, something Ingo rarely indulged in—he bought himself a hat. A jaunty sort of hat, pointed on top and widening toward the brim, made of undyed wool with a wide ribbon for a band. The young woman who had made it, eyeing him up and down, chose a long feather from a vase and stuck this on with expert nonchalance. She stood back to smile at the effect, then pointed him toward a mirror at the back of her stall.

Ingo gawked at himself. His neck and the top of his chest looked pale and very bare. But the blue of the shirt's piping brought out the color of his eyes, and the way the fabric hung about his shoulders made his upper body look broad and muscled, his belly trim. The hat, meanwhile, gave him a bold, mirthful, devil-take-the-hindmost air that was so different, so very different, from how it had ever felt to be Ingo Miller.

He thanked the young woman, and she astonished him by reaching out and giving him a quick embrace. “Viel Spaß!” she said. Lots of fun.

He responded with a low, humorous bow.

By the time he left the midway he had bought a rucksack—the old Boy Scout number would never do—into which he jammed his traveling clothes, a cheap wooden recorder, and the all-but-official Movement songbook, the
Zupfgeigenhansl.
Only one stop remained: long awaited, much delayed and, now that it was imminent, nerve-shattering.

A booth near the first turn of the trail bore a banner that read
Geheimes
Deutschland—
Secret Germany. There was nothing secretive about the booth, sitting there with its side flaps rolled up and its wares on display. In every visible particular it was no different from other booths, no bigger or smaller, no cleaner or
schmutlicher
, and the two young men who staffed it looked no smarter or duller, no more furtive or swarthy or strange, oily of palm, shifty of eye, jaded or jaundiced or sick of heart, than anyone else on the Höhe Meissner that morning. They looked like ordinary German youths, and when one of them greeted Ingo, his manner suggested that Ingo looked like an ordinary German youth, too.

“Are you a member?” the fellow asked pleasantly.

Ingo didn't understand. It wasn't a problem with vocabulary: his conversational skills were quite good, really, but he had come by them in a roundabout fashion, the watered-down immigrant's Deutsch of the family breakfast table having merged with a bookish, German Lit–major dialect, neither of which was quite the same as the language spoken on the Höhe Meissner. He had no way of knowing whether some everyday word— “member,”
Mitglied—
might have a special, coded or vernacular connotation. Was he a
member
…of what?

“Here is a leaflet about our organization,” the young man said, having read nothing into Ingo's confusion beyond a simple no. “We are called Geheimes Deutschland. Please, you are welcome to take this. It contains a membership form, should you be interested. The cost of dues includes a subscription to our monthly journal. Here, please take a sample issue. We lugged a ton of them up here, we do not wish to lug them down again.”

His partner laughed, rubbing an aching shoulder.

Ingo smiled. The easygoing sales pitch had allayed some of his nervousness. When you boiled it down, this was essentially a bookstore, and bookstores were nothing new to him. And yet…

Here it was, before his eyes, laid out for the world to see. The proof— solid and irrefutable—that it was all real, that such a place as Secret Germany existed. These young men were real, too, and unremarkable; they were not freaks or sicklings or Satan's newest conscripts. They were just people, like Ingo.

While he stood there, flipping absently through a German translation of
Leaves of Grass—
pleased to have his suspicions about this confirmed—a pair of newcomers arrived: two boys somewhat younger than himself, he thought, though all these German kids looked so fresh and bright-eyed, it was hard to be sure. In their cautious, hesitant manner, Ingo recognized himself, as of five minutes ago. His own uncertainty, his trepidation and excitement. Finally, with a burst of relief, his sense of having arrived at
last. Safe in the homeland, the
Heimat
, he had long been hoping to find. Ever since that afternoon seven years ago, the epiphany in the Olney woods.

They are people like me
, Ingo thought, watching the two boys while the young man behind the table offered them a free issue of the monthly
Blatt.
People like me…yet Ingo didn't even have a word for the kind of person he was. Did it matter? He couldn't decide.

He leafed through some current novels—
The Puppet-Boy, The Battle of Tertia—
and an intriguing collection of essays by someone called Sagitta,
Books of the Nameless Love.
He glanced at a collection of poems by August von Platen but soon put it down because Platen's anguished verses, though beautiful, belonged in a place like Catholic U., where the
namenlose Liebe
could not be spoken of, let alone committed to paper; you had to grit your teeth and content yourself with cryptic references to Grecian statuary. Instead, Ingo scooped up a year's worth of
Der Eigene
, which always made lively reading, and the pictures were nice, though its occasional plunge into Weimar politics left him feeling punch-drunk.

While paying for these in devalued marks, he noticed a change, subtle but definite, in the young man behind the table.

“There is a gathering today,” the fellow said quietly. “Not just our group—others as well. A discussion and, who knows?” There was in his smile something mildly conspiratorial.

Geheimes Deutschland
, thought Ingo. I've bought some magazines and suddenly I'm a citizen—a Secret German.

“At Frau-Holle-Quell,” the young man said, “do you know this spot? You will find it easily on the map in the program book. The trail is not so hard—a pleasant hike and, who knows?”

Ingo stuffed the
Blätter
into his new pack, which now was pretty full, then stepped out into the midday sun and pulled his hat off, letting the cool breeze dry the nervous sweat on his brow. He felt the kind of shakiness that comes from hunger, but it was not from hunger.

He studied the fold-out
Karte
, then tucked the program book away and set out down the trail to Frau-Holle-Quell. He was entering an unfamiliar homeland—a journey that he wanted to take, and needed to take, but that nonetheless frightened him more with every step.