Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  Crazy in Berlin

  Thomas Berger

  TO JEANNE

  Contents

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  Author’s Note

  A Biography Of Thomas Berger

  Du bist verrückt, mein Kind;

  Du musst nach Berlin...

  You are crazy, my child;

  You must go to Berlin...

  —Old song

  CHAPTER 1

  IN THE TWILIGHT, THE bust appeared to be that of some cocked-hat Revolutionary War hero of not the very first rank, that is, not G. Washington but perhaps one of those excellent Europeans noted in fact and apocrypha for throwing their weight on our side, Lafayette, say, or von Steuben. Fun Shtoyben was the right way to say it, which Reinhart knew and was certain that Marsala didn’t, being his dumb but lovable buddy who was now gurgling at what was left of the bottle and would shortly hurl it away, maybe hurting someone, for a few Germans sat around in the park; he must warn him. But too late, there went the crash and narrowly missing a Kraut who merely smiled nervously and moved off, some difference from a movie Nazi who, monocled and enraged, would have spat in your face, and they were already taking a leak on Lafayette or whoever—no, “Friedrich der Grosse,” the pedestal said, for Reinhart had a lighter that could be worked with one hand.

  And it was a gross thing to do, he decided in one of those drifts of remorse that blow across a drunk—because he was just educated enough to recall vaguely old Frederick out at Sans Souci with Voltaire, writing in French, representing the best, or the worst, of one tradition or the other—a part of the punkhood from which he had just this day legally departed, and which he was, in fact, at this very moment celebrating.

  Fastening the fly, all one hundred buttons, no zippers in the Army because you might get caught in one as the enemy crept close, he said, just as sad as he had before been exuberant: “What a way to pass your twenty-first birthday!”

  “Well,” answered Marsala, twenty-four, looking forty, and always fit whatever his condition, spitting, not taking out his cigarette, and miffed, “we could of made you a party from the messhall: them cooks are all my friends. What are you, griping?”

  As they turned to leave the park, a German nipped up and snatched the butt. There stood a woman by a tree. “Honey,” Marsala shouted, “schlafen mit me, ohhh won’t you schlafen mit me!” A kind of music the making of which was his satisfaction, for having crooned it he moved on indifferently.

  On the street they encountered a Russian soldier, far from home, needless to say unkempt and weary, destination unknown most of all to himself. In the friendly light of his hound’s eye they accepted, and Reinhart returned, a salute; he went on in a hopeless, probably Slavic, manner. A two-car streetcar braked to a glide and they swung aboard, paying no fare because they were Occupation; and a good thing they hadn’t to, for in a moment the son of a bitch stopped and everybody detrained and walked around a bomb crater to another car waiting on the other side, Marsala all the while looking truculently hither and yon: he was amiable only to his friends.

  The ride on the new car Reinhart forgot even as it was in progress, for he had now reached that secondary state of inebriation in which the mind is one vast sweep of summer sky and there is no limit to the altitude a kite may go, the condition in which one can repair intricate mechanisms at other times mysterious, solve equations, craft epigrams, make otherwise invulnerable women, and bluff formidable men, when people say, “Why, Reinhart!” and rivals wax bitter. Here he was in Berlin—the very name opened magic casements on the foam of seas perilous not two months since: Hitler was rumored to be still at large, the C.O. had been briefly interned by the Russians, and Art Flanders, the “crack foreign correspondent whose headquarters were in the saddle” and column in 529 dailies from Maine to the Alamo, had already called at the outfit for human-interest sketches.

  Indeed, the sheer grandeur of his geographical position had overwhelmed Reinhart until this very day, for he was an irrepressible dreamer. Marsala had been out screwing and playing the black market for a week, with already a dose of crabs and a wad of Occupation marks to show for it, and at the same time bitching incessantly that they might be stuck there forever—and nonpartisan in his disinterest in any place but Home. No, he wouldn’t have liked to be stuck in Calabria any better, besieged by his indigent relatives and wallowing in the dirt and backwardness for which no one could tell him of all people, his father having come from there, that Italy was not famous. “I got your Roman ruins and your art right here,” he would sometimes say, grabbing his clothes in the area of the scrotum—the same place, in fact, that the Romans had had them—“You take that crap and give me the United States of America.”

  Now, on the car, Marsala was once again the sound of unadorned naturalism, his hard voice, the one for enemies, piercing Reinhart’s shoulder, for that was all the higher he came, like a rusty blade: “You call it. I’ll kick it out of you wherever you want.”

  His target was sealed with them in the crowd on the rear platform: an American soldier, between whom and Marsala stood, swaying with the general rhythm of the rocking car, a female citizen. Her visible part was a head of blonde hair, with a good washing probably as pale as Reinhart’s own, but at present long estranged from soap and comb and as stringy as an Assyrian’s beard. Notwithstanding that he had barracked with the man for two years, in whatever land, Reinhart supposed, first, a mistake, and, second, that Marsala was wronged, but these suppositions could not dwell long even in a flushed mind, for he saw the face of the other soldier charged with righteous outrage. A big man, maybe six even, with his weight from front to back, rather than in width, if one could tell from a limited view of his shoulders and fat, seedy head. He struck you right off as a lousy guy, a type who had been drafted from the driver’s seat of a big-city bus, where he cursed sotto voce at proffered dollar bills and depressed the door-lever on latecomers; a journeyman in the Shit-heels’ Guild whose meanness was, after years, instinctive—but all this was irrelevant beside the fact that in a quarrel involving a woman Marsala invariably stood on the bad side. He had surely with one of his sexual instruments, voice, hands, or groin, sought an unsubtle connection—for him a crowded streetcar was as good as an alley and being caught out only a minor inconvenience soon adjusted in his favor: he had a friend, while the other man was alone.

  Thus was Reinhart’s euphoria wrenched away; what Marsala expected of him was by the known pattern of his friend’s code so obvious as to go unstated. When the car stopped at the next bomb crater and the German passengers, all slumped and carrying bundles, duly filed around its margins to still another vehicle, the three soldiers and one girl drew apart and, out of a sudden sense of national delicacy, waited until the new car started away and the old reversed trolleys and started back. Then Marsala snarled, “Let’s get him,” pitching in before the other man, now manifestly regretting where amour propre had led him as he saw Reinhart’s large figure on the hostile side, had got ready: he was in the act of removing his blouse, newly pressed, perhaps by the girl, and bearing the triangle of the Second Armored Division which had fought all the way from Africa—while Reinhart and Marsala were goofing off in Camp Gra
nt, Illinois, Devonshire, and some tent city in long-liberated Normandy.

  As a medic, and rear-area at that, Reinhart had no moral guts to oppose a combat man, even for cause, even when alcohol had anaesthetized his rational-young-man’s disinclination to violence—and as for two setting upon one, its morality threw him into a state of shock. He stood in his tracks, feeling undue exposure, lighting a smoke, and out of a complex shame not looking at the girl, and saw Marsala imprison the opponent’s arms with the half-removed jacket and call: “Okay, Carlo, in the nuts!” Saw him, not able to resist his advantage until help arrived, give the man one with the knee.

  His reaction to Reinhart’s coming and pulling him loose was pure astonishment, hopefully as yet unalloyed with bitterness—he must have supposed it the prelude to a more cunning mayhem—and he had just time to begin “What the fu—” before the freed adversary got a hammerlock on his throat and booted Reinhart from the field.

  They fought on the site of a ruin. As Reinhart lay on the crushed-masonry ground, beneath a roof-to-basement cross section of fourteen flats, their cavities spilling tubs and bedsteads, he could not even have said where. On to two weeks in the city, and this was his first trip off base. His old buddy, for his birthday, had taken him to a black-market contact with Russian hootch to sell, his old buddy who in the grunting ranges overhead was at this moment being slaughtered. So he raised himself, hot and vital and clear, seized the traitorous and ugly bastard from the Armored by the back of the shirt-neck, turned him, and delivered two hundred three and a half pounds to the gut, to the eye and into the mouth. The man’s meat broke wetly under his fists and yet retreated at one point to bulge at another, like some hateful sack of liquid, and it was for a time a joyful rage to work for a simultaneous and general recession. But where it took him was too terrible—all at once he gave it up. The enemy, in a vast cobweb of blood, still stood. Odd, he appeared old, perhaps forty; his cap had gone, showing an area of baldness pitifully made conspicuous by a strand of hair deviated to hide it. He was standing—but it was suddenly obvious that he was very dead.

  Reinhart had broken both hands at the wrist. His lungs were gone, as well; his stomach was acid and his wit beclouded once more. It was so frightening that a corpse should remain upright. He watched Marsala come round and head-butt it in the midsection. It revived, and it fell, simply a beaten man, with an awful, beaten groan.

  “Jesus,” said Marsala. “Not a car in sight. We might have to walk all the way back just because of this prick of misery. You did good, Carlo,” he went on, rubbing his sore neck, which made a rasping noise, for he had an emery-paper beard. Kept rubbing, but he was in some awe.

  Reinhart had not been in a fight since early grammar school and therefore had never known how it felt to kill a man and what, when done, was the peculiar scandal. He looked to the girl, who was some distance removed in the capacity of spectator, and who in return looked at him with stupid wonderment, and commanded her to approach. Which she did with a senseless caution, as if to ask: is my turn next?

  “Why don’t you attend to him?”—approximately; his German was at best uncertain and now surely further corrupted by the intermittent buzzer in his skull.

  “Well, yes, if you wish,” she replied, still showing wonder, and speaking from a face in which the ages were so mixed that one knew not whether oldness or youth was the essence. She knelt in worn clothing more suited to that attitude than the standing and examined the felled opponent, who even at her touch was coming painfully around. Who when he arrived came up slowly and resentfully from the supine, crying: “Keep your whore off me!” With more effort he was arisen and deliberately, crazily, gone across the ruin and onto the sidewalk, where it could be found and where not, the street, where, alone, he could be seen for a great time, despite the darkness now settled.

  “Hadn’t you better follow him?” Reinhart asked incredulously. “If the car does come he may be hit.”

  “Must I?” She was nearer him now and, it struck him repugnantly, believed herself a transferred spoil of war.

  “No, of course not, not if you haven’t any decency.” The last word in English; he didn’t know it in German, and she didn’t know it this way or, in truth, hadn’t any, for she smiled.

  Nothing smelled ranker than disloyalty. He had wanted so much to approve of the first German girl he met—for this was she, not counting the women seen from train and truck on the journey to Berlin or the cleaning and secretarial help—if for nothing else, as an act of anti-piety against the established faith. The very faith of which, curiously enough, he found himself at least a part-time worshiper, one of those half-agnostics who go to church without believing or stay home and believe; whatever, he had waited two weeks before going on pass, since this was the best manner in which to avoid Germans and still ache, with trepidation and even a kind of love, to see them.

  “If I must go—wiederschau’n!” She extended her hand in the genuine enthusiasm displayed by all Europeans, not just the French, upon arrivals and departures, as if for all their hatreds they love one another, or do for a moment at making and breaking contact, and at this first touch in ten minutes not motivated by hostility, Reinhart suddenly felt drunken again and feared that he might weep—for the sore opponent vanished alone in the night, for his friend who did not understand fighting fair, for the girl now under his compulsion, and for the material things in waste all about them, all the poor, weak, assaulted and assaulting people and things, and of course for himself, isolated by a power he didn’t want.

  But certainly he did not cry. Instead he gave her his dizzy eyes and said:

  “It’s a terrible thing to desert a friend.”

  “Bitte?”

  He repeated it, as near as he could come, in German, and she replied:

  “There was nothing else you could do. He would have killed the small man.”

  She was granting him absolution! But his anger did at any rate conquer the sadness. He barked his ill will towards a woman who leaves a beaten man, and in a moment found his only ease in the thought that with luck his speech had been too bad for her full comprehension. For she had answered:

  “I was not with the soldier! Believe me, in all my life I have never before seen him!”

  So much for that. And Marsala, who had had his rest, was prepared to reassume the command so lately transferred; he might defer to Reinhart, from now on, in matters of personal combat, but surely never in affaires d’amour.

  “C’mon, why mess with this one? A pig,” he said without malice, perhaps kindly, if you wished to look at it that way, for there was no point in stirring up the girl’s hopes, but anyhow with the candor of the unembellished man, which was just what Reinhart prized highest in Marsala and why he associated with him rather than with the refugees from college. The cruelty was an inseparable element of the greater value, a unique honesty and a kind of honor: Marsala never assumed an ethical superiority to anyone else. But he was generous in granting one, for now no sooner were his comments out than he showed with a bored jerk of the head that the girl’s pigness was suddenly understood as Reinhart’s precise interest.

  “If the girl didn’t belong to him,” asked Reinhart, “what in hell was the beef?”

  “How should I know?” Marsala’s swarthy head revolved in unworried failure to understand the provocations constantly offered; the world was full of enemies, that was all. You watched, you took care of them, they took care of you—you did not look for a reason and you didn’t actually feel any lasting grudge. “There’s all kinds of bastards around.” He scratched his boot-toe in the rubble. “If you really want to know, he called me a guinea.”

  Reinhart, missing the sly grin of mock piety and having learned Marsala’s elaborate code regarding these nicknames—Marsala himself habitually used them and especially those applying to his own kind, but denied the latter to non-guineas except people like Reinhart who held an honorary card—merely said “Oh” and turned to the Kraut girl.

  At close v
iew he decided she was young and that her longitudinal lines of cheek and veteran eyes were from lifelong residence in a sanguinary country, but the darkness forbade one’s being sure. She had merely come to watch a fight?

  “One has to admit that it was interesting.” She had moved very close to him, perhaps because of the dark, and there was enough light to see that just a chance remained to make her attractive, at least to get by. Reinhart would have liked to seize and scrub and comb and color and dress her—to straighten her out; the world was filled with people who out of simple inertia wouldn’t make a move to fulfill their own promise.

  “But,” she went on, “you are a noncommissioned officer. Please, may I ask you: how does one get a job with the Americans?”

  “There are places for such things,” he disappointedly replied. He hadn’t known what, yet had hoped for something other than the humdrum, perhaps an unexpected birthday gift. His parents’ package had not arrived, very likely never would, the occasion being one on which their undependability was notable. Besides, the girl became more attractive as she talked; her voice was pitched low and had a melancholy music and her whole manner was submission to the male principle. “You want me to get you a job, is that right?” She was within a hair of contact with his belt buckle, and he had come under a compulsion at once to fuse into her body and not move his, which could be done by easing forward the belly usually, as a matter of vanity, held back.

  “For Christ Almighty sake,” said Marsala, in the testiness of one whose judgment has gone unheeded, “the soldier has gone horny.” He was right by being wrong; he assumed their conversation to be a bargaining.

  They were now touching, the girl standing firm and, madly, as if unconscious of anything strange, pursuing her first interest: “It’s all so confusing. I am ready to do any kind of work—as cleaning woman if need be. ... Do you have a bottmann?”

  It was much too rare for his simple vocabulary. He had not learned it in two years of college where he ostensibly majored in the language but in fact moped lonely around bars and crowded, smoky places with small string combos, with no real stomach for liquor and no real courage with women, drinking much, nevertheless, and fumbling at some tail. On the margin of a flat flunk he had enlisted in the Army. At any rate, he could deliver correctly not a single long sentence in German and could translate nothing beyond very short strings of words with exact English equivalents.