Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  You are a bad man was maybe what she meant; if so it was a weak remonstrance, as when you are small and exchange exposures with the neighbor girl, who coyly says “You are a bad boy,” all the while pulling up her dress. He had slipped his arm into her worn coat, where a missing button made it easy, and around her narrow waist, and she came full into him, saying still, so madly!: “Is a female bottmann allowed?”

  Suddenly and so nuttily did its sense at last arrive that he released her and retreated a step. Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Four Feathers, “but when it comes to slaughter you will do your work on water, an’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.” When you were in the field against Mohammed Khan, Oxford-educated Pathan who returned to his mountain fastness to lead the tribes against the Crown, you had a batman; when, that is, you were a British officer serving Victoria, to whom you drank health and broke the glass, or for all he knew even at present, you had an orderly.

  “Well, I’m going, I’m on my way,” Marsala groaned reproachfully, and hypocritically, for he scraped away only a short distance and sat down on a wasted wall, lighted a cigarette with a great flare and coughed.

  Her look had no defenses: “I know just a few English words.”

  “That one is very rare,” replied Reinhart with all his gentle forces. He added: “I am just an Unteroffizier, a corporal, a nobody, a silly fellow—”

  She returned his smile in the exact degree of wryness with which it had been given her, aiding him, in tune with him, so that when the exchange was completed he had been purged of self-pity and satisfaction with the vision of himself as uncorrupted by efficacy; and furthermore was not made sore by its loss. He was forgiven all the way down the line, and most of all for thinking it was forgiveness—she was far beyond that, standing there before him on the mound of trash, without vanity, making no judgments, facing facts.

  “Also,” he said. “You will have your job. You have my word.”

  His oath was no doubt meaningless in German; one certainty of alien languages was that each had its own way, untranslatable, for the moral expressions. But its effect was not needed by her, who it could be seen in the clearness of her eye admitted no doubt towards him.

  Marsala was back, seizing Reinhart’s elbow and, this time with unbelievable modesty, whispering in his ear: “You’re not thinking of slipping her the tool? I mean, it’s all right with me, I just wanted to get things straight, no sense for me to stand here, just gimme the sign—”

  “Old buddy,” said Reinhart, “friends may come and friends may go and some may peter out, I know, but I’ll be yours through thick or thin.”

  “Yeah, I know,” came Marsala’s hoarse whisper, which was louder than his normal voice, “ ‘peter out or peter in.’ Well, what will it be? It’s boring to stay here. I mean, for me.” “Boring” was a word he had learned from Reinhart, using it with weak authority and only as a favor to his teacher. It took quite enough effort, however, to have its power.

  “You must come to see me at my organization,” Reinhart told the girl. “Now can you remember this? It is the 1209th—but the number doesn’t matter. We are a military hospital and are in a school building in Zehlendorf, at the corner of Wilskistrasse and Hartmannsweiler Weg. Across the street in a wooden building is headquarters. You come in the door and turn left. You go all the way to the end of the hall, to the last room, and there I am.”

  The language became easier to use as he spoke, and he found himself on better terms with talking than he had been in years; in German even directions were a kind of success, precise and scientific. Still in temper with him, the girl, now three feet away and in deep shadow, said: “You have a good accent!”

  “Now you will remember?”

  “Oh yes! But please, what is your name?”

  He had turned to leave with Marsala, like a monarch—in all the world there are no good departures—and now, kingly, gave: “Carlo.”

  She was stepping towards him in an eager courtesy. “As in Monaco—I shall remember.”

  Marsala grinned like a possum at the traditional repast; honor was being done his old rule: give them only your first name, which cannot be traced. His lack of civilization had suddenly become repulsive.

  “No—Reinhart, Carlo Reinhart. Es ist ein deutscher Name.”

  “Certainly.”

  He shook hands with her and in American fashion held it too long, so that hers wilted and sought to escape.

  They were still a party of three at the streetcar stop. But before one came, if ever it did, a jeep throttled up out of the blackness, bearing MPs on their eternal quest for miscreants. Like all American police, they stayed at their remove of faint hostility even after Reinhart and Marsala identified themselves and proved blameless; indeed, even after the constables took them aboard for a ride to their billeting area, which since it lay off the beat was a considerable favor, it seemed needful for the sake of an institutional pride that all pretend it was a kind of arrest and sit silent on the way. The four men, that is, for the girl had not been considered, had not, properly speaking, been seen, the non-fraternization policy being neither quite repealed nor, beyond the flagrant, enforced.

  She might stay there for hours—this was a thought of Reinhart’s, which he answered with the familiar indictment: so many millions of non-Germans would lie dead forever. Yet it had been so appropriate to pity her; he aggressively presented that claim to himself. “Certainly” was her answer to the characterization of his name. From birth he had been a good, sturdy German type, lived in a solid German house, on a diet of G. potato salad (with vinegar), G. cole slaw (with bacon grease), G. coffeecake (with butter-lakes), run on a regimen of G. virtue (bill-paying, bedding and rising early, melancholia), and whenever he left it was met by approving people who said: “Ah! He’s going to be (or is) a big G. like his grandfather.”

  The term, however, had a double meaning, which was honored even by near-illiterates; its other use was as synonym for a kind of foulness. And now there was a third, for here he was in the ancient homeland, and he was something different.

  “Home” was a compound in Zehlendorf from which the 1209th General Hospital had evicted the German residents, a block of three long apartment buildings arranged in an open rectangle around a private park. The latter, in some former time almost a university campus with green and wanton walks for rambling, had been converted at the order of the 1209th’s commanding officer into a junkyard for the disposal of property the Germans left behind. The colonel was neither opposed to comfort for his men nor a partisan of pain and deprivation for the owners who after all would one day return; he was nothing, no Savonarola, no crypto-fascist symbol of the military mind, not even, because he was a medic, quite a soldier, nor, because he was commanding officer, quite a doctor—but owing to this he wished grievously to be something, if only a converter of matter from one form to another. Thus he periodically had put to the torch, had resolved into carbon and the immaterial gases, the giant cairn of objects which Reinhart and Marsala now skirted on their way to the south building: couches and loveseats, dining tables, bedsteads, chaises longues, sideboards, three pianos, fourteen wind-up victrolas and two thousand records; eight thousand books; rugs, pictures, tablecloths, postcard collections, skis, jewelry boxes, letters, diaries, journals, manuscripts, apologias, Nazi party cards, memoranda, paper, paper, paper; and one little souvenir plaque from the Western Hemisphere: an electric-pencil sketch of a pickaninny sitting in a Chic Sale, inscribed “Best wishes from Savannah, Ga.” Another pile held the noncombustibles, mainly cooking utensils and fifty more or less complete china services from the royal house of an imaginary principality.

  Five men had been busted in rank when caught salvaging items from the auto-da-fé. On the other hand, the colonel did not lack in a rude sense of justice: if you could make away with an overstuffed chair or an alarm clock without being seen, it was yours and beyond all future confiscation.

  The tenants of Building A, first floor right, had
furnished a very decent little flat, the cynosure, as Reinhart might say, of all eyes in their section. Particularly those of Buck Sergeant Tom Riley, their next-door neighbor and late technician third grade, who had made so free in their absence as not only to enter their home but also to sink his big ass into the mohair couch and fall asleep. When awakened by the crudest means they could summon on such short notice, he arose complaining, “You must of got your nose up the colonel to get to keep this furniture. Our living room looks like a Mexican cat house.” He lumped fatly to the hall door. “And why only two guys here instead of three?” His swollen nose tensed with authentic peevishness, and small wonder, for he had been reduced one grade for unsuccessful pilferage from the trashpile; but more than that, he was by instinct a petulant man, with the face of an old baby.

  “Don’t be bitter,” said Reinhart, who had followed him out. “It’s my birthday.”

  “Oh.” As might have been expected, he missed the ironic import of the non sequitur; he would be resentful, thank you, on his own time and ground; instead, he grasped Reinhart’s hand in embarrassed but genuine feeling, as you could tell by his nose, which went soft, saying: “You don’t mean to bird-turd me? Many happy returns of the day.” And already at his own door, he turned: “Ain’t it sad? Here we are, getting older by the minute.” Without change of expression or girding himself for the effort, he suddenly screamed, in a voice like a jazz cornet, an obscene epithet which, though it went up the concrete stairwell like a skyrocket, made no public stir, being heard all over the 1209th so frequently that it had lost its force as description: if you ever found that fellow to whom it was originally applied, you should have to think up a new one.

  Because nothing succeeded like the envy of others, Reinhart returned to the living room in a, now sober, swagger. Off the top floor of the building lay an attic stuffed with furniture—the colonel lighted the bonfire only after his space ran out—and Marsala and Reinhart had picked the lock on its door and secretly helped themselves while everybody else was away at work. As to tenants, the orders demanded three per flat; given free choice, the buddies shrewdly compacted with Doyle, who three days later left on detached service.

  So they had a proper home now, Marsala, a slum boy, confessing it was the nicest he ever had and the most spacious. Parlor, kitchen, and bath were luxuries militarily undreamed of. You could, see, get some rations from a cook, have a little lunch in the kitchen, then take your broad to the couch, knock off a piece, and then wash up in the bath. Marsala had indeed gone through the series three times in recent days, failing only in the last because he could not make a swift transition from pleasure to hygiene. Hence the jar of blue ointment in the bathroom medicine chest, yet another evidence the place was truly home.

  The green tiles of the corner stove were still warm from a small fire they had built just after chow; July nights were cool this far north. A fall of maroon drapery concealed the big window above the couch, which in the daytime showed their private balcony and, beyond, a green promenade between their block and the next, an allée in the old, European sense, banned to cars and wastecans—and to the colonel, for natives retained ownership of the adjacent buildings. The enormous sideboard on the east wall had almost ruptured them to carry, and had little utility when in place, but great authority. Central was a round table of oak and six attendant chairs. No tablecloth. Other deficiencies were: nothing matched; no pictures on the wall; no knickknacks placed around; no doilies to protect the arms of the couch; no magazine rack with The Woman’s Home Companion and last week’s This Week and the publication General Motors sends gratis to Chevrolet-drivers. But it was Reinhart’s own home and he believed it was nice.

  He seated himself at the table to brood on the folly of early-evening drinking, his close-cropped blond head propped on a red fist still tremulous from the fight, pale-blue eyes charged with red, one trouserleg loose from the knotted condom round the boot-top. Marsala, who didn’t know it was not nearly time to go to bed, had ignorantly gone and tomorrow would awake extra soon and, it went without saying, loud.

  Reinhart all his life had detested birthdays; they were like Sundays in the middle of the week, outlawing the ordinary by a promise of the special, never fulfilled. Until this moment, for he could never think while in motion, the twenty-first had been another of the same. But, ruminating, he saw now that it had, indeed, a touch of the exotic. He had drawn blood and spilled some of his own. He rose and went again to the hall mirror in which he had inspected himself on the route back from Riley’s leaving. No, no hallucination: a nice scratch-cum-bruise on the left cheekbone, made easier to see if you tweezered your fingers about it. Riley, still sleepy, no doubt had laid it to shaving.

  In addition to Marsala’s salve, the bathroom cabinet held Reinhart’s collection of medicines. Once every two months he had a slight complaint, each time in a different organ, never serious—whichever doctor was on duty in the 1209th dispensary would smile, prescribe, and likely as not give in to the urge to punch the tight belly and caution him jokingly not to worry, the undertaker would be a stranger to him for years.

  The large merthiolate badge had dried and was almost ready to flake before he finished his final self-examination in the bathroom mirror, in the course of which his spirits curved downwards again. The pompous, pink-and-blond-faced creep who stared back at him had been endured enough for one day. He got out his rubbing alcohol, cotton, and applicator sticks, and wiped away the crimson fraud, threw the evidence out the window, went to the bedroom, kicked his clothes in the corner, fell on the bed next to Marsala’s, and was immediately in sleep.

  CHAPTER 2

  FIRST LIEUTENANT NATHAN SCHILD, a traitor, handed a sheaf of papers to the German known as “Schatzi,” a courier to—well, above all, to an impossibility, since the measure of truth is what a man will give for it and Schild would have walked to the noose to deny that this Thing had any existence outside the mind of a malignant halfwit. Schatzi himself was just barely possible, being a returned traveler from that until the twentieth century undiscovered bourne; the most efficient of men, who could answer all questions with: “I was four years in Auschwitz.” Behind that, darkness, and not, according to the code of the underground, to be searched by Schild. Although Schatzi wore the garb of a petty bureaucrat—felt hat, stiff collar, briefcase—he suggested a ruin; although the night was warm, he trembled and winced, as if the whole of his skin had been sandpapered and recorded in pain the blows of the air’s molecules.

  “What is this stuffing?” asked Schatzi, roaming Schild’s person with his free hand like a restless lover’s, probing the fly-front of the blouse.

  Schild extracted a folder. “I forgot it because it’s more or less negligible.”

  “Needless remark,” said Schatzi, pleasantly nasty. He struck Schild on the elbow with his finger-tips like a row of icepicks, of course hitting the nerve.

  If a man could be said to have earned a broader latitude of eccentricity than most, it was Schatzi. He had once shown Schild the scars on his back, and if it had been day one could have seen the terrible commentary of his face, a kind of scorecard of the times. And that he had undergone torture and was not a Jew made it all the more criminal for Schild to detest him.

  “Please,” said Schild, with genuine, if exaggerated feeling, for, although it was not that important, neither was it of no matter, and Schatzi discounted precision, “I must have this back by tomorrow noon at the outside. Captain St. George just asked for it.”

  “Er kann mich im Arsche lecken!” Sooner or later Schatzi related everything to himself, and scatologically, which was not perverse given his late experience of life reduced to essentials. Nevertheless, while understood, the common-denominatorship of Schatzi was hardly winning. Also in character, Schatzi walked in a cloud of food odors; tonight it was herring. But who was so degraded as to gainsay his right to courtly fare, let alone such simple meals as he was no doubt issued at some Soviet mess?

  They stood on a strip of Wannsee
shore near a wrecked pleasure pavilion, the salient feature of which was a tin Coca-Cola sign hanging crazily in the light of Schatzi’s torch, the patented slogan of its own International in German here; downtown Schild had seen the red and gold standard of Woolworth’s in a similar death-agony of capitalism. Beyond the symbolism it was a remote and even foolish place to meet. Two men upon a dark bench, one a German civilian... it was not Schild’s job to pass upon the point of rendezvous—while not forgetting for a moment that Schatzi was his superior, his mind was also wired in another circuit with the alternating current of forgetting and remembering—but he did, anyhow, make his apprehensions known, and Schatzi suggested next time bringing a girl for protective coloration. Such was Schatzi’s circuit: belly-rectum-pubis. The simplest interpretation was that he lived somewhere near the lake; perhaps, like a rat, in a hole just above the water line. Sometimes, in fact, as if caught by a sudden high tide, he appeared damp at their appointments. Schild bit his mind’s tongue; at least Schatzi said what Schatzi thought, suffered no internal wrestling matches with an indestructible malice like an extra organ.

  In a sudden surge of self-remonstrance, Schild said: “We get a ration of candy, you know. In the American Army there are constant pressures upon the soldiers to be the same conspicuous consumers they were in civilian life. It’s not enough just to fight a war.”

  Schatzi took the chocolate bar from his hand, undid its wrapper, scrutinized it in the light’s ray with an invisible jeweler’s lens, tested its friability with a thumbnail.