Another Green World (60 page)

Finally, at the first light of morning, the third boy stirred himself from the rock. He looked down one last time at his friend lying there in an enchanted sleep, then bent low and kissed him very lightly beside the mouth that was too wide. But whatever magic that may have had, it was
not the sort needed to break the enchantment, or maybe he was not the right sort of person to attempt it. So he stood up and said, I am going to get help. Then he set off through the forest.

He never saw the red-haired boy again. Never, ever. Because when he returned later that day, with two companions, having fled the village where a gang of assassins had arrived, the boy was gone. And though they looked and looked, and called his name in the woods, he appeared simply to have vanished, like the morning mist.

It might have been that as he slept, the red-haired boy transformed into a kind of animal, a wild stealthy creature of the forest, and that he arose and slipped away to live among his kind in the woods. Which is a thing that happened in that part of the world, in those days, and perhaps it happens still.

“To begin with,” says the prisoner, having heard this story, or those parts of it that were any of his damn business, “you nearly frightened me to death. You were bigger than I was. Older as well. Already I had seen you break the nose of one of my comrades. What did you expect me to do? Stand there while you murdered me? You were going to, I believed. You believe so yourself, don't you?”

Don't answer him. Listen maybe, don't speak. You're confused just now. The shrieking of that poor girl down the hall doesn't make you any more clearheaded.

“One more swim, we decided. One last dive, before the Schwuler gets back. I am sorry, we were cruel to you at times, I know we were. We… left you out. But again I ask you, what did you expect? We were boys, not angels. You may have had certain… ideals, certain illusions. About Isaac, especially. Don't say anything please, there is no need. I do not know or care, anymore, what you felt. What you wanted, or what held you back. I would like to say I do not care what you think of me now. Very much I would like not to care. But for some reason I cannot help it. I feel a need to…explain myself. To you.”

Not to Isaac?

The prisoner looks at you as if you'd spoken out loud. His eyes are bright but you have a sense, looking into them, there's something unhealthy about that brightness.

“Isaac and I …” Shaking his head, smiling; the smile as always defies interpretation. “Isaac and I have always had, from the start, an understanding. I mean this in no shallow sense. I do not mean a convenient mutual
arrangement, though perhaps it began like that. When we met, you know, he was seeking information for his Communist friends.”

Socialist
, you think. Though who could believe a good Republican would draw such fine distinctions?

“And I wanted… shall I tell you what I wanted? Perhaps not. Nothing more than the novel experience, at first. To be friends with a Jew, the most forbidden thing. To conspire together. Yes, I say conspire. You did not suspect this, I think. Isaac stole the papers and my comrades in the Jungdo vowed revenge on him—so went the story, and everyone believed it. Why should they not? Yet it seems funny to me that
you
fell for it. I would have expected… after all, you and I have certain things in common, have we not?”

No
, you think,
we have not.

You tell him: “Go on. Conspired to do what?”

“I had the access and it was natural that I should obtain the papers. Poor Cheruski, always the dotty professor. I so despised him! I thought him the summation of every filthy-minded schoolmaster I ever had known. Perhaps I despise him still. Yet I also have come to pity him, and over the years it is the pity that has weighed most heavily. So long, so wretchedly, did he wait for the call from Berlin! But there they would have eaten him alive. He never knows when to shut his mouth, he would have ended up at Oranienburg—you know, they say Stalin's son is locked up there. And
that's
only if he was fortunate. So I kept him in Prague, under wraps you might say, for as long as I could. Had my old classmate not been transferred out of Assignments, I might have gotten him safely to the West. Let the British figure out what to make of him, or you Amis.

“I'm drifting off subject, you say? No, you didn't, thank you, but so I am. I took the papers and gave them to Isaac, and I was so kind as to let him receive the credit as well as the blame for that. It might be, also, that he slipped a page or two from the other side into my hands, I do not remember.

“No—I shall lie to you no longer. I remember it perfectly. I remember everything. The truth is, it pains me, even now, to take from you your illusions. We all need our illusions, don't you think? God knows, I wish still to have some of mine. It would be a…a blessing to believe once more, to believe in anything. But you know what I mean. You of all people.”

Go on.

The prisoner smiles, an expression no more natural than the glow in his eyes. “Do you recall how we met? Do you recall where? It was Frau-Holle-Quell, mein Kamarad. You remember surely Frau-Holle-Quell. For myself, I will never forget it. Nor should I wish to. Many things that have
happened since then I would happily forget, but not that. You were there, and I was there, and that tall fellow was with you, he was rather nice, what was his name? He came to the Leuchtenburg. And of course Cheruski was there with his little pack of disciples, and the impressive Count von Stauffenberg, about whom I could tell you a few stories. But Isaac—how did
he
happen to turn up there, do you suppose? Just in time to bump into our swinish Gruppenführer and get himself quite nearly killed. Might that have been a planned encounter gone wrong? Two little spies, conspiring to trade secrets, betraying their comrades, having their bit of fun? Playing— you have a wonderful term for this—
playing both ends against the middle
, isn't that right? Ah, but not so skilled at it, not quite yet.”

No.

“You don't believe me? Or is my English wrong? Believe me, my friend. Believe me, if for no other reason, because I am too weary to lie, I haven't the necessary concentration. Your friends will come soon and shoot me, if you don't shoot me yourself. But even were I to walk out of here alive— well, what would that mean? Five million Russians are waiting on the other side of the hill. And were I to run the other way, your Mr. Roosevelt has promised to bring whom he calls
war criminals
to what he calls
justice
, which is to say he plans to line the SS up in front of a wall somewhere. If there is a wall left standing at that point.

“But I am not afraid of death. I do not seek it, yet it holds no fear for me. We are too closely acquainted, death and I. Not friends. One might say, neighbors.”

I can imagine.

“I don't know what you think of me—as I have told you, I would prefer not to care—but you cannot possibly know the kind of war we have fought over here, on this side. You Amis landed in France five months ago, in a few months you will be riding your jeeps around Berlin, and history will record that the war was fought and won by you. But over here, my friend, we have been fighting for fi
ve years
, we have lost entire generations— and surely not all our dead were war criminals. Count yourself lucky, you don't have time to hear
that
story. You may yet hope to fall asleep without dreading the nightmares that must come. You may hope to hold a child in your arms without thinking of other children…but perhaps we should simply leave it:
You may hope.
It is wonderful to hope. Another blessing.”

Don't give me that, Ingo thinks. You launch a war on three continents, and after it turns out badly you start looking for
pity
? You can do better than that.

“Tell me,” he says, “you've got nothing to lose. Tell me in plain language
what you've done. How many of those ‘other children’ have you killed? Why does a bleeding heart like FDR want to stand you in front of a wall?”

A mask falls over the prisoner's face—a mask that never stops changing, one expression shifting into another. His hands have begun to tremble. He draws his lips inward, as if to moisten them. Then, without warning, the eyes twitch up and catch you by surprise. A queer little nod, like the look on your face has given something away. Damn him. And damn yourself, for remaining here, for listening to this.

“I was a cavalry officer, did you know that? How could you. Yes, an old-fashioned horseman, on account of my well-attested riding skills. We opened an SS riding school, I was among the first instructors. That would have been 1936. I wonder, what was Isaac doing then? During the Polish campaign we managed to field an entire company. By the time of the Russian invasion, it had grown to a brigade. We didn't see much action in the early stages—that was a tankman's game. But when winter came and the engine blocks froze up, we were the only German formation, I think, that remained fully mobile. The Russians launched their counteroffensive around Moscow, and we were thrown in to check their advance. Twenty thousand Siberian horsemen on those rugged little ponies, and about five hundred of us alive by then, on animals that were cold and half starved and poorly shod. But we made them pay for every inch. We bled them. And most of us got killed, of course, and those who didn't …well, you come out of something like that, I can tell you, a different man. Things that mattered once don't matter anymore, while other things…

“I wish you could know what I mean. But I can never explain it. Still, if you should happen to find yourself alive one day when around you is only death—all your comrades under the ground and you walking above them, hammering little birchwood crosses into the earth—at such a time you might find your view of life wondrously simplified. A man thinks, This is the only thing I love, the one thing that matters to me. All the rest, the devil can take it.”

You watch the prisoner with rekindled interest. You guess he's leaving a good deal out. But you sense nonetheless that he is making, if not a confession, at least a sort of final testimony. Saying the last things that need to be said.

“The trouble with war is that you cannot just walk away, even when you grow sick of it. You wish to, but you cannot. So you do the best you can manage, which is to create your own small peace, somewhere. You would think it foolish, my friend, the things men will do. They will take any animal and make a pet of it. Or they will find some kid wandering around,
half crazed, his whole family dead, and they'll turn him into a mascot. I knew a man who carved a chess set out of roots. We were living down in a hole. It was called a bunker but really it was just a hole with some canvas pulled over the top, and when you leaned against the walls you felt roots digging into your back. So my comrade, he would cut these roots out, and after a while he had a collection, so he began to carve them into chess pieces. A waste of time, no? But it kept him sane for the rest of his life, which as I recall was long enough to get the black pieces finished and half of the white.

“For myself, I wanted more than that. I wanted a…more comprehensive sort of peace. So I wrote to my friend in Berlin and asked to be transferred out of the cavalry. I volunteered for partisan-hunting duty, which had been popular for a while, until people realized you could get killed doing it. In fact this was quite likely, it could happen at any time, no need to wait for the next offensive. Therefore such duty became less popular and they were employing mainly foreign regiments—Romanians to hunt Czechs, Slovaks to hunt Poles, and so forth. Everybody to hunt Jews. My request was ignored for several months but then—you know how things happen in the army—one day, out of nowhere, my orders arrived. I believe Cheruski might have intervened somehow, because my assignment was to this sector, which was more than I had hoped for. By then, you see, I was no longer in the business of hoping. Yet here I was. And I was happy it was so. For it brought me back to Arndtheim. Also to Isaac.”

You stare at him. You shoot X-rays through his skull, but they reveal no obvious malignancy. During this examination the prisoner watches you, almost piteously. He cares what you think. The next moment, disconcertingly, he laughs.

“Don't you see? It was the old game again, the old conspiracy. Both ends against the middle. Here was my greatest enemy, the notorious partisan, der Fuchs. The only Jew left in Silesia who wasn't counting his final hours in a camp somewhere. And here was I, his nemesis, the terrible Partisanjäger, wearing a Death's Head and riding a big white horse. What could have been more perfect? It was within our power, more than ever, for each to give the other what he most desired. For Isaac, protection. He had his own little band by that time, people who depended on him for survival— including, I was to learn, this ridiculous family here, crack-brained people left over from the Twenties who hadn't enough sense to get out. And for me, peace. A separate peace, on a secret front. Which turned out, however, not to be so simple to arrange, when one considers what I had been sent here to do.”

No kidding. When one considers.

“In the army, you know, always there is someone watching you. They watch from above, but even more so from below. They expect you to do your job. If your job is to cook porridge, they want it thick and steamy in time for breakfast. If your job is to kill partisans, they want, at the end of the day, to see a bit of blood on your hands. The more blood the better. So the problem becomes, whose blood shall it be? Also, how do we extract it in sufficient quantity to satisfy everyone, above and below, yet manage also to keep certain people, secret people, absolutely safe?”

“I'll bite. How?”

The prisoner's smile saddens. “Both ends against the middle, remember? Protection in exchange for peace. For Isaac—to give you one example—I rounded up enough lumber to build the wall here, to turn this place into a little Schloss. Otherwise, these foolish people would have been murdered long ago. The Poles would have done it, or my men, or the foul spirits of the water, in revenge for all that swamp draining. There were many things I did of this kind—not least turning a blind eye to the reports coming in about this bandit, the Fox. As for Isaac, I can say he paid me in full. If anything, he was too generous. Each time we met he would hand me a little square of paper, no bigger than a ration card. And on this paper I would find a list—each item neatly written out. As you know, he hates to write, so he does it carefully.”