Another Green World (3 page)

“I thought we were on the same side.”

Martina flashed him the look one reserves for the hopelessly naïve. “You'll notice toward the end, something called the Zydowska Organizacja Bojowa or ZOB. That's the Jewish Fighting Organization.”

Ingo glanced down. “Another NI.”

She resisted the urge, which his air of kingly indifference provoked in her, to throw the handbag at him. “The ZOB was formed in the ghettos during the early stages of occupation. There were plenty of people around to fight in those days, but mostly they took a wait-and-see attitude: you know, maybe we can get through this, there've been pogroms before, we always manage to survive.” She shrugged,
what can you do
, recognizing in the gesture her grandmother again. “Now the wait-and-see is over, only there's nobody left to do the fighting.”

She paused long enough for Ingo to ask a question, the simplest one: Why? But he didn't—people never did. It was odd, but she knew the pattern by now. Like a blind spot, into which, at one blink, a whole race had vanished. Ingo continued to stare at the page on which the ZOB still enjoyed a hypothetic existence.

“So the next thing there, the map, shows roughly the distribution of resistance forces, principal areas of German anti-partisan operations,
Underground safe zones. The Xs mark recent major engagements. Of course the situation is highly fluid. And I should add, our intelligence, such as it is, is always out of date. What you've got there reflects our best guess at how things stood about six weeks ago. Since then, Tito has swallowed a bigger chunk of Yugoslavia. German strength in Slovakia is building up as the line shifts west. And as of last month, the Red Army has liberated a whole sweep of Poland.”

Ingo tightened his lips. “Wouldn't the appropriate term be reconquered?”

“Sure, I get it. They're Communists, so everything they do is evil. Even if it contributes to an Allied victory.” She regretted saying this immediately. Escaping into the briar patch of squabbling would suit Ingo fine. By way of atonement she surrendered the armchair and joined Ingo on the love seat, squeezing in all chummy-like.

“There in red,” she went on more calmly, pointing at a squiggle that snaked like a garden hose through the mountains on the Czech-Polish frontier, “you can see where the ZOB
might
be operating, assuming it still exists. The main concentration, near Warsaw, was wiped out last autumn. Survivors trickled east into the Pripet Marshes and merged with the Ukrainian Jewish Brigade, under the direct control of Moscow. But a local band or two might be left down here.”

She gave him a moment to absorb this. The wicked Reds are over
there;
don't worry about them, they're not even on the map. While down
here
, God willing, is the ZOB. “And in fact, if you look at this newspaper clipping, you'll see evidence that a small resistance group, whose leader, at least, is a Jew, has been active in recent months in exactly this region.”

Ingo examined the photo spread as though it were printed in some unfamiliar language. Which in a sense it was: the language of class struggle, Nazism as a terminal case of Late Capitalism, the war as the death rattle of an oppressive world order, all pitched with a broad Australian accent. The story recounted the exploits of workers and peasants waging a secret war of liberation. Grainy photographs showed ruined bridges, a train lying half on its side, tiny figures waving sticks—could they be rifles?— from atop the caboose, smoke rising in a black funnel from what was purported to be a Wehrmacht ammunition depot. Pride of place belonged to a deep-lens shot of someone identified as “the revered commander of this valiant cadre of proletarian fighters.” The photo had been magnified well beyond the limits of fidelity; it could have been anyone, anything, man or woman, golem, clotheshorse, melting snowman in jacket and cap. Beneath it, a
caption: “Known as the Little Fox, this is the only known likeness of a nameless revolutionary hero.”

Ingo said, “Bit of trouble with that syntax, don't you think?” but this struck Martina as weak cover. He couldn't drag his eyes off the picture. Some arresting quality there, though you couldn't quite put a finger on it. Was it the cock of the head, the hint of an insolent stare? The slouch in the shoulders? Something, not quite heroic… inspiring, perhaps. Or lucky— at least that. Lucky for now. In the long run, almost certainly doomed. And the revolutionary hero knows it. You can tell, somehow—he knows, he doesn't care. The fight goes on if only for the hell of it. I resist, therefore I am. The world has grown dark, the sun of Weimar has long set, but the nameless fighter pretends not to have noticed. Just one more inning, Ma, come on, we're not even hungry.

Ingo glanced up. “Are you trying to tell me,” he said calmly enough, as though it wouldn't have mattered either way, “that this Little Fox actually is Isaac?” There was no need to say more. The picture was nobody they knew, nobody they could know. It was a Rorschach splatter: feel free to project whatever you like on it, just don't expect Ingo to play along.

“But look,” she told him.

“Look at what?”

“In your hand.”

He was still holding the scrap of brown paper, covered densely with a dark, semi-legible scrawl. What's
this
now?

“It came clipped to the tear sheet,” she said, as if that explained everything. The note was not signed.

Ingo read it out, one phrase at a time, as he deciphered them. “‘ Thought this story might interest you. If so, there is a’— what's this word?—' sequel. From the same source,' comma, ‘smuggled over the wire not long ago. Looks authentic to me. You be the judge.’ Now an address. ‘2200 First Street SW.’ Not a nice part of town, is it? ‘No phone there, just go. You're looking for'— I can't make this out.”

“‘ Vava,’ I think it says.”

“Really? Oh, I see it. ‘Vava. And be sure—’ “He squinted a moment longer, making certain. Slowly he raised his head. “‘ Be sure to take Ingo. She'll only talk to both of you.' “

Martina looked away; the tension was all she could bear. She felt his gaze, steady and contemplative, moving from the paper in his hand to her own averted face, the handbag, the mess on the floor. A blurred and grainy photograph. Putting it together; weighing one thing against another.

“Even if you're right,” he said at last, “even
if—
what can we do, other than hope and pray? The war will be over soon. By Christmas, they're saying. Why did you come here, Marty? What do you want from me?”

His voice did not match his words. She turned to face him. His eyes were wide, almost imploring.

Ka-boom
, she thought. The bomb had found its target. Ingo Miller, the last isolationist, was about to go to war.

JULY 1944

D
amn him, Ingo thought. He hauled himself leadenly up the four steps to Connecticut Avenue and for half a minute stood tuning his senses to the rhythms of the city, the afternoon dragging toward a muggy evening, the jostle of pedestrians and steady crawl of traffic uptown. You could never find a cab at this time of day but Ingo guessed it didn't hurt to try.

Four steps. Roughly the depth, so he had read, of a regulation foxhole. The war was less than five years old—three if you counted from when the Yanks came in—yet Ingo's mind, like everyone's, was cluttered with its ephemera. He could open a map and point to Lidice, Coventry, Sebastopol, Saint-Lô. He could tick off the leaders of the Nazi regime and rank them in order of loathsomeness. He knew what an MG-42 was, which army used it, what its shells did when they entered human flesh. Yet he had never
felt
the war, not in a personal way, as a tug in his own well-fed gut, a looming cloud in his future. Never until now.

Isaac. A name, and then the rest: puppet limbs, sarcastic smile, faint and ever-receding voice.
See you next time, pal.
Suddenly a presence—real, unsettling, troublesome as ever, nosing into Ingo's life. His timing characteristically bad. Like a ghost from an unconnected lifetime, the vanished world of youth.

The taxi, a late-model Nash bearing the livery of Earnest's Hackney Service, idled in front of a hydrant at the corner of R, the driver pulling on a cigarette. Ingo had not yet reached the stage at which he would wonder whether such a thing were altogether plausible. Was the cab a timely coincidence or an epiphenomenon, a ripple on the surface that hinted at some dangerous current beneath? Safe on his home turf, protected by a shiny plating of summer sweat, Ingo merely flagged the driver, semaphoring
with one finger:
Hang on just a minute.
The cabbie favored him with a nod and a smile made memorable by ghastly yellow teeth.

He found Marty in the kitchen, distracting Vernon from the preparation of
Hühnchenwurst
, a spicy sausage of the chef ‘s own invention made from unrationed chicken trucked in every Saturday by farmers from the Eastern Shore. Thank God Edna, the night waitress, had agreed to come in three hours early. Skinny and tall, with scarlet nails, she was laughing at something Marty had said. At a look from Vernon—head tilting quickly toward Ingo—the kitchen fell quiet. Except for Marty, whose laughter had not really ceased since the 1932 election.

Out on the street, the cabbie flicked away his cigarette and slapped the Nash in gear. Without waiting for instructions he eased forward into traffic. Didn't bat an eye when Ingo read out the address. Perhaps in his job you developed a higher threshold of alarm.

When he spoke, his accent conjured some godforsaken hamlet in the Balkans. “Been another hot one, yes?”

Ingo saw no ground for comment. The weather was Sodomic. But he liked to think it separated real Washingtonians from the other kind, the
arrivistes
, salesmen and budding bureaucrats, illiterate Appalachians on the construction sites and transient junior officers awaiting assignment, a human goulash from all known corners of the world and a few as yet uncharted.

The cabbie at least had been here long enough to manage a rapid zigzag down one-way streets, then to turn south on Seventeenth toward the river. Traffic was thick as usual near Constitution Hall, where the Daughters of the American Revolution had forbidden Marian Anderson to sing on that summer evening five years back, on account of her being colored. She had sung instead on the Monument grounds, coming up on your left, before a crowd of eighty thousand, including Negro families with tiny children gotten up in their Sunday best, hearing an operatic singer for the first time in their lives. “
O beautiful for spacious skies,”
Miss Anderson had sung, and later, “
Nobody knows the trouble I've seen.”

You couldn't hold that concert today if you wanted to. The Mall was littered along its entire length with tempos, cheap and ugly two-story buildings designed to last for the duration and not one pay period longer, accommodating government agencies that hadn't existed eighteen months ago—the War Refugee Board being a case in point.

“So,” said the cabbie, “you hear the one about the guy who falls in the Potomac?”

His English, accent aside, was as good as the next man's. Ingo knew the
joke, which was making the rounds. But Marty said no, apparently unable to cut this off at the pass.

“Okay, so there's this guy who falls in the Potomac, right? And he's drowning, he's going down for the third time. And this pedestrian crossing the Fourteenth Street Bridge, he looks down and yells, ‘Hey, buddy, where do you live?’ The drowning guy shouts a street number. So right away the pedestrian jumps in a cab. ‘Take me to this address,’ he says. They dash over to the other side of town, and he runs up to the poor guy's apartment and tells the landlord he wants to rent the place. ‘Sorry,’ the landlord tells him. ‘That apartment has just been taken.’ ‘But that's impossible!' says the guy. ‘The fellow who lived here, I just saw him drowning in the Potomac River!’ ‘That's right,' the landlord tells him. ‘But the dame who pushed him off the bridge beat you over here.’ “

Marty by this time had lapsed into an empty gaze out the window—one of her cloudy moods had come upon her—so it fell to Ingo to offer an adequate chuckle.

The cabbie explained loudly, “The point being, in this town you cannot find a decent place to live.”

“Yeah, I get that,” said Ingo.

“It's the truth, too.”

The driver—Timo, according to a permit taped on the dash—spun hard left onto Independence, following the Potomac downstream. The scenery was more of the same: tempos, traffic, peanut vendors, newsboys flogging the
Evening Star
, soldiers and sailors and WAVES and WACs who all looked in somewhat of a daze, as if they'd just dropped out of the sky from Kansas. There were cops on horseback and MPs in jeeps, people who looked foreign, people who looked lost, people who didn't look like anything at all. Americans. Such as they were.

“Okay, then,” Timo muttered, hooking a right onto South Capitol. It might have been a warning: Gird thy loins. The neighborhood here had long been a favorite of Farm Service Bureau photographers, yielding thousands of trite and disheartening shots in which, as a backdrop, you see the gleaming white, neoclassical Rotunda, and in the foreground scenes out of
Uncle Tom's Cabin—
downtrodden darkies in a squalid dooryard, farm animals optional; mothers with empty eyes holding babies who look dead; a tar-paper alley shack bursting with shoeless children—all inevitably captioned, “In the shadow of the Capitol …” Notwithstanding, Ingo thought, that shadows fall on the
north
side. Where the slums aren't so picturesquely dreadful.

First Street began with tenements and quickly devolved to empty lots
and heavily padlocked warehouses before dead-ending at the riverfront— weed-grown, strewn with beer bottles and those cardboard squares you play the numbers on. Just shy of the embankment, Timo slapped the Nash into neutral and gave them a yellow smile.

“Twenty-two hundred,” he said cheerfully. “That would be right about here.”

Ingo cased the block. There was no physical evidence that they had reached their destination or that there was any destination to be reached. A barnlike structure of corrugated steel stood on their right, an unintended hedge of mulberry and bamboo on their left, while straight ahead, maybe thirty paces off, the Anacostia slithered by, flat and dirty and slow. There must be some mistake.