Another Green World (25 page)

The vegetation at this height consisted of stunted conifers and a furze of waxy-leaved bushes with tiny berries the color of eggplant. As for tents, a quite large one was set back from the cliff—surrounded by boys in dark blue open-necked shirts who Butler supposed were the dj.1.11—and several smaller ones scattered like satellites, some of them pitched at odd angles, others barely hanging on against the pull of the wind. Butler had no idea what held any of them upright; there seemed too little soil up here to drive a stake into.

At the center of the open space, half a dozen blueshirts were building a wooden pyramid out of roughly sawn logs. It must've taken them all afternoon to haul the wood up here. A deal of trouble just for a bonfire; but that was German Youth for you. He pulled out his notebook. He would jot down some impressions.

“Sammy, darling!” Sissi sprang from a rock with a tall, stiff-backed youth in tow. “Look who I found over there, with all those nice boys—it's Count Berti! Alex is here too, he says. Can you believe it?”

Of course he could. The upper classes of Europe lived in a very small village that happened to be spread over the entire continent: a salon here, a hunting lodge there, an overfurnished flat somewhere else. They all knew one another and they shared a faculty, like a blood scent, for stumbling upon their peers in unlikely circumstances. If a Prussian baron were shot down while bombing France, his parachute would touch down on the lawn of a marquis who happened to be his third cousin, and there enjoy a luncheon of freshly bagged quail before being sent off to genteel internment.

Count Berti, who looked no older than twenty, extended a hand and gave Butler a clever, ironic little smile, perhaps a wordless confidence regarding their mutual friend Sissi, while saying in an unimpeachable tone, “Von Stauffenberg. Please call me Berthold, I am often confused with my brothers Alexander and Claus. Alexander is around here someplace. Claus has just finished his officer training and cannot be bothered with the affairs of youth. Sissi tells me, Herr Randolph, you come from Virginia?” Without waiting for an answer he switched to flawless Oxbridge English. “It is a beautiful state, I am told. Regrettably I've never had a chance to visit America, though I hope someday to do so. Germans and Americans are of a type, I believe.”

Butler disagreed but it didn't seem worth mentioning. The Count was just being gracious.
Noblesse oblige.

Now Kai legged it over toting a great stoneware jug that was evidently full. “Berthold!” he exclaimed, seeing Stauffenberg. “That's perfect, I was certain you'd like to meet our new friend from America. Berthold,” he explained to Butler, “has always been interested in foreigners. That is refreshing, isn't it, in these days of hurrah-patriotism.”

Butler nodded absently; he must remember this term,
Hurrapatriotismus.
That sort of detail would do nicely for
Collier's.

“Berthold also is a poet,” Kai purred on. “A protégé of the famous Stefan George. Are you an admirer of George, Sammy?”

Butler sensed this was some kind of test. Rather than admit he wouldn't know a George poem if it were carved by the hand of God in the rock before him, he said, “Most people call me Butler. Only Sissi here—”

“Ach, Sissi!” Berthold laughed. “She has her own names for everyone. Ist das nicht wahr, Fürsterin?”

“For myself, I do not care for George,” Kai announced. “I find him elitist, revanchist, overly nationalistic, and a terrible snob. They would drum me out of the dj.1.11, I'm afraid—they're all George ‘fans,’ as you Yanks would say. Fine fellows nonetheless. Look here what I've got from them! Some of their famous tchaj!”

He hefted the jug, and from the Mephistophelean nature of his smile, and the knowing look that passed over Stauffenberg's face, Butler guessed Sissi was right. There would be a party. A jolly little party by firelight.

“The Left made a tactical error,” the young Count declared, tossing a pebble toward the edge of the cliff, where it vanished in the darkness. “They should never have moved to amend the Meissner-Formel. Once that door was opened, the Right came charging through, and now see the mess we've got.”

He spoke in quiet, measured tones as though they were gathered around a table in a candlelit
séparé
, and not at a bonfire on a mountaintop, their conversation drowned at times by raucous singing from the dj.1.11 side. A chilling wind came from the east but occasionally changed directions, whipping smoke around in Butler's eyes.

“But the Left was correct in its arguments,” said Kai, louder than necessary. His passions were inflamed. “The amendment is needed precisely
because
the Right has become so radicalized. So angered.”

“I am not speaking of the merits of the proposal,” Stauffenberg said stiffly. “I am speaking of cause and effect. Now the newspapers are going to have—what do Americans say, Butler? A field day, yes?”

“We ought to be talking about tradition.” This was Petra, the young woman who had taken Kai's place in the organizers' booth. She was
ostelbisch
, perhaps Silesian, with straw-blond hair brushed back from a wide Slavic face and light brown, almond-shaped eyes. Her features looked especially striking in the light from the fire, which by this late hour had burned down to an orange heap that reminded Butler of a smashed Halloween pumpkin. “We ought to remain true to our own history. It was Wyneken himself who told us in 1913—you were here, Kai, you must remember—' The Youth Movement does not end at the borders of nation or language or race.' What the Left wanted to achieve was to make the language of the Formel embody this principle, on which all of us agree.”

“We don't all agree,” said a yellow-haired student from the Sudetenland, his face pink from several mugs of tchaj. “If we did, the motion would have passed. Instead we've got people stealing from one another, having fistfights, hurling racial insults…it is a kind of sacrilege.”

“The original Formel was a compromise, Ulrich,” Stauffenberg said calmly, his face half in shadow. “That was the only way to get anything accomplished in 1913, with so many factions at the table, and it remains so
today. Indeed more so, as the Movement has become more fragmented. Our problem is not that we disagree. It is that we have lost our willingness to compromise, to find some meeting ground. Unmistakably, the Right came hoping for a quarrel—something they could turn into an open struggle, a street brawl, over who should control the Movement.”

“No one should control the Movement!” Kai practically shouted.

“And the Left,” persisted Stauffenberg, “has been happy to oblige them. Now I fear there may be no way to save the situation. It is Jena 1919 all over again. Perhaps even worse this time. Think how terrible this must look to outsiders! Though I suppose you could say this too is in keeping with our tradition.” He smiled at Petra, who beamed back at him, seemingly thrilled by his attention. Then he sighed. “And all this over a couple of words on a piece of paper.”

Butler waited a few moments, to be sure no one had more to say. The dj.1.11 lads were rocking back and forth in an imaginary storm, roaring a comical sea chantey: We're off to Scandinavia, crossing the cold North Sea, leaving this land where we're
mehr bekannt und mehr verbannt
(notorious and widely banned). Then he asked, “Fistfight? Stealing? When did all this happen?”

Count Berthold rose from his place at the fire, stretched a bit, then strolled off into the shadows, the topic of fistfights apparently not to his liking. The pink-faced student leaned closer. “They say Americans were involved. Jews, they say. Some of the Jungdo boys claim the Americans attacked them.”

“Jungdo?” said Butler. He did not want to be so indiscreet as to pull out his notebook. On the other hand, he needed to get the facts straight.

“Jungdeutsche Orden,” explained the pink-faced Sudetenlander.

Order of Young Germans: a name, thought Butler, some might find redundant.

Kai made a rude noise. “Yes, I'm sure a gang of American Jews came all the way to Hessen to pick on the innocent Jungdo. That's the lot that got thrown out of Stuttgart last summer for disrupting a performance of Mahler.
Song of the Earth
, I think.”

“What's wrong, don't they like the Earth?” bubbled Sissi, half drunk. She swooned with laughter at her own joke, leaning on Kai's arm for support. He didn't seem to mind.

“No, the Second Symphony,” said Petra. “A beautiful work. So sad, though.”

“Mahler was ein rassischer Jude,” explained Kai. “Racially Jewish,
though nonreligious and culturally assimilated. That's too much for the Jungdo to bear.
Jewish music must not be played on German soil!
No, this tale of marauding Americans is too preposterous. It cannot be true.”

Butler agreed. But then, truth was not what chiefly concerned him. He wanted to hear more. This might be the angle he was looking for.

The Sudeten boy did not need much encouragement. As he heard it, someone connected with the Jungdo—a grown-up, perhaps a group sponsor—claimed that some of his private papers had been stolen, as well as a sum of money. He identified the culprit, who turned out to be an American Jew working in collusion with SAJ—the Sozialistische Arbeiterjugend, who everyone knew to be traitors to the Fatherland. Only no sooner had this criminal been arrested, and an investigation begun in keeping with the honorable tradition of German justice, than a gang of the Jew's confederates swooped in, beat the innocent Jungdo senseless and ran off into the night. Now their whereabouts were unknown, but the Order meant to track them down and right the scales.

“This is great stuff,” said Butler. “Now if we can only figure out who they are. We need to get the other side of the story.”

Kai was aghast. “You can't possibly believe—”

“Oh, I know it's hogwash. But that's exactly why there must be some truth in it. Nobody would make up anything so ridiculous. A Jew, yes—but why an
American
Jew? Why Socialists, not Communists? And why admit you captured this guy, then let him get away? People don't invent stories that make themselves look bad.”

Kai looked downcast, as though dismayed by Butler's credulity. He poured himself more tchaj, a curious beverage, meant to be served warm, that tasted strongly of herbs but seemed to consist mainly of red wine spiked with brandy and quantities of sugar, and fatally effective. “What will you do with this ‘story’?” he asked, choosing the English word over its German equivalent, which carried a connotation of factual historicity. “Will you recast it as a heroic romance? The mysterious Yankee as Robin Hood, stealing from anti-Semites and giving to the common people?”

Butler swirled his mug, studying the dregs down there. “That might be exactly how to play it,” he said thoughtfully. “The folks in Iowa might get that. Thanks, pal.”

Something was wrong with Butler's pillow next morning. Of the two heads lying on it, neither ought to have been there.

The one attached to Butler's neck was a bloated, throbbing thing, rendered
hateful by a day of champagne followed by a night of that stonework jug. The second head, which ought to have been Sissi's, was not. The hair was too thick, the bare shoulder and rounded breast—from which the blanket had slipped—too fleshly, and the skin lacked her blue-blooded pallor.

It came to Butler in fragments. Petra, the girl with Slavic cheekbones. Bellowed camp songs that grew increasingly bawdy and off-key. The ebbing fire, the enveloping darkness, the longing for body warmth, Sissi asleep on Kai's shoulder, Butler awake and amorous. Then the ease with which everything followed—the steady escalation from glances to furtive touches to a full-on embrace, starting by the fire but ending here amid tangled bedclothes in a tent that now, by daylight, was too bright and too hot and sagged ludicrously as its pegs worked loose.

Butler hoisted himself on his elbows and regretted it. Yet there was no going back; the day was advancing with or without him, and somewhere out there—this came to him now—a story waited to be told. A tale of American avengers, two-fisted innocents abroad, with “Butler Randolph” all over it.

He dragged himself out of the tent without waking Petra. Sunlight covered the world like a buttery glaze. Around him, the mountain stirred. Young Germany had arisen, the dj.1.11 had already marched off. The air was dank with heavy sweetness like that of a million overspent roses. You sensed renewal yet suspected an inner decay—lotus rising from the cesspool, that kind of thing. Jot these impressions down, old boy, before you lose them.

Sluggishly he retraced his path from the day before, coming at last to a quick-running brook where he dunked first his hands, then his entire head. Time to make a plan. Start with the Jungdo. Lock them into a version of the story, then go after the Yanks. Wrap it up by mid-afternoon and we may yet tuck in to a civilized dinner in Kassel.

There was no stopping Butler once he set his mind to something.

At first it seemed the pieces would fall readily into place. The Jung-deutsche Orden was conspicuously installed on the Meissner proper, in a campsite that bore a passing resemblance to a medieval tournament ground: colorful pennants flapping from high shaved poles around the periphery, watchtowers made of lashed timbers, an inner courtyard squared off with tents. Butler wondered how long such a fad for things troubadourish would last in America. About eighteen months, he guessed.

In Germany, it was well into its second century with no sign of anyone getting bored. They even had a name for it,
Teutschtümelei
, as untranslatable as the thing itself.

The gate to the camp, a swinging log that pivoted around an elm, was manned by a sentry who looked all of eleven. The lad's shrill command to halt and identify himself pierced Butler's aural nerve like a surgical instrument. Wincing, he brushed past the boy and knocked the gate open.

“Alarm!” the sentry cried. “An intruder has stormed the courtyard!”

The modest commotion that ensued was opportune, insofar as it brought a dozen older members of the Order out of their tents and away from their breakfast fires into the open, where he could size them up. They didn't look like a gang of bullyboys, such as one saw on the streets of German cities nowadays—more like members of a sporting club at a competitive
Gymnasium
in some staunchly bourgeois suburb like Berlin-Steglitz. Most were in their teens, though a couple looked old enough to be recent university grads. All were in uniform, a white jersey over baggy tan britches, and a few wore hats on which insignia of rank or degree had been sewn. Butler picked out the one with the most silver crosses, reckoning him to be the leader.