Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  “I really found one last week that had all of it been shaped from brown clay. Think on that! The astonishing industriousness required, it having been a first-order job. All that work for fifty mark and you Amis are burdened with actual ones that you cannot eat till the day of doom.”

  He pushed five ten-mark notes, already rubber-banded into that amount—yes, the Japs held the Malay Peninsula, but his bands were pure gum—into the hand of Schild which had come forward on its own volition, on its own idiotic hand’s sense that it would be shaken, just as a foot will all at once assume sovereignty and stub itself as punishment for some foot-crime or kick the girl’s shoe across the way out of some foot-lust. Schild’s face meanwhile was performing, in a vacuum, a squalid drama.

  “But, my dear fellow, you shall not get more than this at the Tiergarten and think on the length of miles from here to there. You are an actual Greek for business, comrade!”

  Schatzi returned the candy and took back the money, signifying the end of his joke.

  “I know people who are pleased at your work,” he resumed, “and if you are not so careful they shall give you one of these posterboards to take home to Tennessee: ‘The Hitlers Come and Go Away But the German People Stay Always!’ ”

  “If you get some pleasure from insisting that I’m from Tennessee, go ahead—” began Schild, but the flashlight quivered and sank, and Schatzi groaned from the ground: “I like the name.”

  “An attack of dizzy,” he went on as Schild bent to aid, “brought on by four heavy suppers every day and eight hours of sleep the night, still in a warm bed. Gemütlichkeit is killing me. Give me some pills in the right pocket, they will make me miserable.” There was nothing in either pocket but Occupation marks. “Make all the money you canst,” said Schatzi, on his feet again but breathing with a whistle and coughing bubbly.

  At such moments the call of Schild’s guilt echoed through the great tombs of the martyrs. Schatzi was indeed dying, yet he continued to serve. This, Schild knew in the final, serious level of the self, was why he hated him so: out of his own incapacity for a like magnitude of effort.

  “You know,” said Schatzi, shaking his body like a dog, blowing air from his nostrils, combing his hair, long as a woman’s, with his fingers, “when Kurt brought you first, to my opinion you were a double agent. Arrived at by irrational methods, it is possible, but there was something with your eyes.” He took a flask from his briefcase and tasted of it. “Ah!” He spat. “Good drink will make a cat speak! They are, isn’t it true, simply myopiac? A fat small man, a little soccer ball of a man with eyes like that—and thicker spectacles—came into the K.Z. along with myself. I watched, in vainly, to see the existence there bring him down.” He spat again, making a nasty sound on the sand. “Ah! Cuts the flame.” Schild preferred to assume his version of “phlegm” was a portmanteau word: he must be burning inside. “One gets obsessions when you are a captive. But at the end of three months still he bounced. I never did see him on a work gang. He disappeared days somewhere but in the nights returned to the barracks. I had been convinced that he was a police spy and I am in fact yet. He lay in the bed each night end-to-end with my own bed and stared at me over his round belly and through his feet. It was terrorizing, I tell you, a man could never once find him asleep. When I awokened in the morning he looked, still; perhaps he did not close his eyes the night long. Because I do not know, you see, because I tell you I slept, I functioned as usually I do, under the watching of sixty-six devils I could do as always, because I tell you that beyond a club to my genital members there is nothing which a man can do which will touch me at all.”

  Schatzi’s voice had taken on the authority usual to his concentration-camp reminiscences. On Schild’s refusal he pocketed the flask, but not before illustrating its quality, heavy silver; its feature, a spring cap worked with the thumb. As always, he withheld the dénouement until Schild in the double dread—the tedious responsibility of the auditor to help dramatize, the terrible certitude that the small fat man, whether bona fide police spy or hero, would like all the other creatures of Schatzi’s memory meet an unspeakable end—until, cold in July, he must urge him to go on.

  But Schatzi had got a sudden subtlety. “Is Captain St. George the ass you take him as?” He pronounced “St.” as Sankt: no cue for worry, a man fills out abbreviations in his native tongue.

  “He’s a Republican.”

  “Are not we all? What does this mean? I don’t understand, I don’t understand.”

  “I’m sorry, I forgot. He’s nonpolitical, an aboriginal American type. I thought all the world knew. Let me explain: If I express so much as simple approval of a labor union, he will say, ‘Well, I’m not against unions but you’ve got to admit sometimes they go too far. I understand if a light bulb burns out in a factory the place stays in darkness until an authorized member of the electrical workers’ union comes to replace it.’ But if he saw me leading a mob on the White House under a red flag he would lay it to money or some private passion. Do you understand now? We have billeted together for two years, he knows how I look in my underwear and that I use a soap stick instead of tube lather for shaving. He knows whatever my eyebrows do when I’m puzzled, the contents of my musette bag—”

  “I understand now that you are the ass. How does a police agent operate if not this way? Fritz, Fritz, it is a little wonder that after four years of duty you are yet a first lieutenant!” It was not clear that Schatzi meant more than chaff. He had himself taken irresponsible risks near St. George, more than once lingering before Schild’s billet on a bicycle. What was obvious now, though, was his unease at Schild’s developing a point, hence the underground name, a remonstrating symbol of the overwhelming awareness and power which they both served and before which elaboration was ludicrously futile.

  “With all this knowledge,” Schild finished defiantly, “what could not be forgiven? He would trust a man forever whom he had watched cutting his toenails.”

  “Also,” said Schatzi. “I used to swim at this place but I do not mourn it—any more than I need to play the piano again. Have I told you I once have played the piano in a splendid club where the tables were connected each to each in a system of tubes from which the air is exhausted—what do you say for them?—vacuum, so, vacuum tubes, through which the people in this place could communicate on little pieces of paper—this was the same place where Emil Jannings was controller of the W.C. Haha! Did you hear of this film The Last Laugh?” He allowed the insatiable black space over the water to swallow his light’s beam for a moment, then reclaimed it to thrust into Schild’s eyes. “You will never drown in the water to mock the hangman, not you. I will just as soon choke myself as to have you know my real name. Without respect for this famous naïveté, there is something sinister about an American.”

  “You seemed to have no worry about Kurt.”

  “Kurt lived until aged ten in Budapest, Paris to the age of eleven and a half, Budapest again for three years, then Rome to the age of twenty, and finally Washington. His father is in the diplomatic service, his mother is an Hungarian and the influence. Do you know Kurt’s actual identity? In yesterday’s Stars and Stripes—a queer journal, by the bye! What are these letters at the lower-left hand of page two, this so-called ‘B-Bag’?”

  The damp had begun an osmotic affection for Schild’s feet. “Oh,” he answered in a momentary quicksand of sorrow which sucked the life from his voice but was all to the good for the present purpose: “That’s supposed to be the uninhibited feelings of the enlisted men with complaints, the vox populi of ersatz democracy. The name comes from an expression, ‘Blow it out your barracks bag,’ let off steam, air your gripes. The enlisted men used to carry their gear in two bags, one labeled ‘A,’ the other, ‘B.’ ”

  “I tell you that tells nothing. I have read a letter yesterday which said”—he broke off and produced the very clipping, holding the light for Schild to read:

  You can search the whole Enclave until your goddam corns are
thumping and you won’t find one place where EM can get anything better to drink than flat beer that the Krauts made when Hitler was a PFC. Yet every ninety-day wonder in my outfit wallows in Haig & Haig. The chickens are getting bigger and I don’t have to say what is getting deeper. Yours for World War III,

  T/5 P.....-OFF

  Bremen

  “Yes, that’s the sort of thing.”

  “Do you ever use it?”

  “No,” said Schild. “As I say, it’s essentially for enlisted men. Besides,” smiling in irony, his profession, place, and time’s surrogate for good humor, which Schatzi could not see because he was again being nervous with the flashlight, “my complaints are not so simple.”

  Schatzi laughed, for a change in a pleasant tone, perhaps owing to the fact that he had nothing to gain or lose from the passage: “As to this B-Bag, obscure name still, I do not believe from a swift look that the code would be too hard to break. It is not a device without imagination, but surely American Espionage has better means for important messages. I think these are no more than general intelligences for each sector. However, it would be that one can do worse than to attempt to decode the letters signed Berlin, a damp finger to the wind, one could say.”

  When Schatzi spoke like a neurasthenic spinster he was not fooling, even though it was only at such times that he amused Schild, an extraordinary achievement. In good Middle European style Schatzi was most suspicious of what was most innocuous, and perhaps the reverse, although in that he had not been tested. Almost to Schild’s disappointment, there was nothing dangerous, complex, or oblique in the Berlin situation. As American Intelligence analyst, he inspected confiscated Nazi correspondence files; as something else entirely, he chose interesting items for transmission to Schatzi, the jobs meshing beautifully.

  But Schild was a great over-preparer, despite the persistence with which, while he stood smeared with grease, Hellesponts shriveled to birdbaths. Having been alerted for his present function since he first reported to his draft board, having been, by unseen hands, guided to and through infantry OCS and later transferred to Intelligence by like means—Schatzi could suspect American naïveté, Schild could not afford to: the Party, with all its resources, could perform the miraculous only with the aid of history’s buffoons—sent to France and then to Berlin with the first Occupation troops, having on a word from X, a nod from Y, and a furtive motion of the elbow joint from Z, been put in touch with “Kurt,” who conducted him twice to the presence of “Schatzi” and vanished forever; symbolizing in his very position at this juncture, this square foot of wet sand, the energy and infinite pains of the agency whose creature he was—but that was just it, what small service he rendered! Two or three sheafs of trash a week, available to anybody who would walk into a bombed building and pick up a handful of scattered papers. Not to mention that the Red Army, which had got to Berlin a month before the Western powers, had surely missed little of consequence. Still, this seemed somehow his own deficiency notwithstanding the clear directions that limited him to the role, and he was conscious, in all the weak jealousy of the impotent, that herein lay another motive for aversion to his courier of the wide horizons.

  Schatzi left off his nonsense about the counterspies’ use of the B-Bag, or what, had it not arisen from his total dedication, would have been nonsense and resumed his original aim. “In any rate, in yesterday’s Stars and Stripes, on page number three, you will find a little item to announce the appointment of Nicholas G. Pope, civilian military-government official, as licenser of German newspapers in Bavaria. Kurt, Pope. The very man.”

  How loudly he spoke, how careless with the light. The very fact that the beach was abandoned and dark made it more conspicuous than the stage at the Titania Palast. Schild instinctively resisted the exposure of Kurt’s identity, learned it, that is, and didn’t learn it, a technique by which information could give comfort but not be divulged even under torture.

  Fortunate in all his cautions and fears, for they served, after all, to give him a constant business that his larger function did not, Schild arranged with Schatzi for their next assignation and sought to move off towards the broken timbers of the pavilion and the jeep on the forest road beyond. Schatzi’s hail was very like a shiv into the small of his back. As he turned to hear the not-forgotten-for-a-moment fate of the soccer-ball man, between the sound and the sense he saw in his memory Schatzi’s earlier flashlight motions. Across the water lay Kladow. Who there received his signals?

  “... so this guard made off with his cap and threw it over the top of the wire into this area that was not permitted for the prisoners and ordered him on the pain of death instantly to go and bring it back. The man climbed with the strange nimbleness of the fat, quite indifferent with the barbs going into the palms of the hands, got this cap, made it free of the snow with his underneath side of the arm, and then brought it down over his skull, which was of course shaven clean, down to the ears. On the climb again back, he was slow and breathed hard; on the top strand of wire, he let out some steam, for it was very cold, and at the time when just more than half of his weight was over—the guard had planned it well, you see, to ensure that the fall might be on the near side—the machine-pistol bullets released the air in him and the man did not fall as planned but shriveled and stayed on the wire like a soccer-ball bladder without the air. The wind even moved him. I think still he was a concealed policeman, shot in mistake. The guard vanished some time later.”

  Schild’s fingers crept to the button of his holster in a parody of a poorly remembered Hoot Gibson at bay. He would not really draw his pistol on Schatzi; for one thing, in the world outside the concentration camp this was not done, or at least not by him. If Schatzi were a double agent, the worst course was a show of violence; yet his hand would not cease its histrionism, did not indeed for some moments after Schatzi wound up the anecdote and went to the heart of the matter, for his private intelligence system extended even to the reports of Schild’s nerves.

  “Look,” he said and boldly morsed his light at Kladow, from which, as if ignited by his, another was briefly born, died, lived, died. “I go in a minute to Potsdam with a boat full of food from an American Army kitchen. For everything I know, this can be served to Herr Truman at Stalin’s villa on the next mealtime. ... But please do not think”—he held the torch at the point of his chin, splashing the beam up across the peaks and declivities of his face, as a child might make a satan’s mask in the mirror of a darkened room.

  “Of course I didn’t think—”

  “—that I could do this for anything but money.” Upon this summit of innocence Schatzi snapped off and withdrew. In the willows by the water he made noises of effort; and well before Schild had got to his own vehicle he heard the outboard churn off in such a splash that his courier might have been on the way to quench Hell. And above and beyond the lovely organization of the jeep in first gear, he heard the boat engine climb hysterically towards its extreme velocity and, reaching it, miss and backfire and belch and puke, and his heart worked with it in the shore man’s empathy until it eventually leveled into a continuum of asymmetrical impulses, like a laughter hopelessly mad, hopelessly free.

  CHAPTER 3

  WHEN ONE WAS TEN, nobody, least of all the boys of German stem, served willingly on the Kaiser’s side in war games. The little kids and younger brothers gunned Fokkers through the back yards and crashed flaming against the garage as Rickenbacker and his hat-in-ring squadron of Spads roared overhead piloted by the big boys. Then landing at the Allied aerodrome, which was quite a different thing from an airfield, and into the flight office (again the garage) swaggered they, tightbooted, helmet straps swinging free, demanding coggnack from the Frog wench behind the bar which without transition gave onto the office; while the de-Germanized younger brothers greased the planes, for this was also a hangar.

  Shortly Richthofen might pay another call in his craft painted all checkers like a taxi, pitching to the tarmac a black gauntlet, showing a brief glim
pse of grim but noble face, black-goggled, over the fuselage; mocking ailerons just clearing the high-tension wires at the field’s end but not the undercarriage, which was severed. Jerry now could not land; with nothing to lose, this dogfight was for keeps. Inside the glove, which a mechanic fetched in, a note in Teutonic script: “My compliments to your gallant command. I issue an open challenge.” Cross of Malta. Signed, Baron R. Aloft, fabric tearing in Immelmann turns, oil-line burst spewing goggle lenses with black slime, Browning jammed, you dropped the foe with your sidearm and looked down in long salute at his incendiary spiral into the chrysanthemum bed. Ave, atque, vale, brave adversary! I slew you as you would have slain me, your cause was hopeless but not contemptible, we share in that community which the whey-faced civilian regardless of nation cannot enter.

  To be sure, not every enemy was a Richthofen. G-8 the master spy, commuting behind German lines in the limitless disguises from his armpit cosmetic chest, was certain to meet the pigface Hun, bayoneter of Belgian babies, violator of maidens; cabbage for a head, sausage-limbed, cheeks of ass like dirigibles kissing, he waddled in cruel insolence before the helpless or groveled in fright before his master. G-8, whose trunk formed a triangle standing on its apex, was right to destroy this creature if only for aesthetic reasons.

  Reinhart’s paternal grandfather, who looked like one of G-8’s victims, with a somewhat better distribution of weight, was more charitably described as a double for Hindenburg, a sound man. He cut meat on weekdays and on Sundays read the Volks-Zeit-ung and decanted in the cellar a thin, tasteless homebrew of which he was inordinately proud. He could support a leg of beef at full arm’s length with one hand; he was a source of blutwurst slices on the sly; his place of work was floored with wood shavings and blood lay in pools on the butcher’s block and dripped from the joints on the hook. He had left the Old Country to beat the draft; he had reportedly thought the Nazis were fools and was fortunate to have departed the world before they could disabuse him. These, and a small store of mispronunciations, were all Carlo could remember beyond an enormous, kindly, mustached face that smelled of beer and pipe, that was less articulate in the general tongue than himself at nine, that seemed, for all its implicit power and the massive hands that could not touch his shoulders so gently as not to bruise, a distant presence.