Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  “I hope you don’t mind being a cleaning woman for our nurses. There was nothing else available, since you have no English.”

  And now a kind of pride appeared for the first time, as she answered: “No, I can do that.”

  While he spoke, he felt near the back of his left hand the proximity of something warm and alive, not quite touching, but there: a piece of Gertrud, but whether hair, cheek, or hand he could not tell and did not wish to look. Finally, having finished his one report, he had no choice. It was her cheek, with its beautiful petal flush, extended in curiosity.

  He teasingly seized the thick braid nearby and said in English: “As for you, Miss Tischmacher, how would you like to help us here, in this office, with translations?” And the soft young face moved sideways, towards a nest in his palm, but he had dropped the hand before it got there and went to sit on his box behind the desk.

  There had suddenly come to him an explanation for the whole works, from start to finish, the perverse ways of this child, the other girl’s melancholy poetry and strange demand on his conscience. They had successfully taken him along both roads without resistance. And the only sense it made was that they sought what could not have been gained in a direct and open appeal to the fixed authorities. Why else apply to a corporal, one lone and powerless jerk in an army of thousands? Because he looked first like a fool and second like a German, and because she, the older, was a Nazi who would have been put at picking street-rubble if she had made her appeal elsewhere. Perhaps it was even a kind of treason to get her a job under the cover of which she could hide from her proper deserts. It was what they had been warned against: the Germans did it before and would do it again if you were not vigilant, sack the world and then when beaten ask the pity for themselves, but this time we will not be duped.

  Now it was done. Lovett, particularly, was not the man before whom one could change a tune and retain face. Reinhart rubbed his head, sensing he had gone white from the discovery, and two short blond hairs drifted separately down the air past his eyes. He could see them until they reached the dark floor. For an altogether different reason he was going bald: you had constantly to wear a cap in the service, the hair couldn’t breathe. And then he remembered another reason why he liked the Army: no cause was ever wholly lost.

  Simulating casualness, he asked: “You know, of course, that you must fill out the political questionnaire, the Fragebogen.”

  She had arisen when he sat down, perhaps in a counterfeit respect—which, if so, failed; it made him feel like a fool to sit before a standing woman, especially one so small and shabby, and the fact that Gertrud held to her chair meant that the other was the only adult present.

  But he had got her, there. In a reflex of sudden worry, she turned to Gertrud and said something in a rapid German he could not make out.

  “Das schadet nichts” the pretty girl replied, smiling bluely, guilelessly, at Reinhart.

  No, it couldn’t have mattered to her; she was luckily young enough to be disqualified from the rolls of mischief; but the other had been stirred. He knew, as she said “Komm, Trudchen,” and walked slowly to the door, that he would not see her again. And well, in a way, it was sad, and because at bottom he hated to win out over any person, he finally asked her name.

  “Bach Lenore.” It was Trudchen who answered. “As wiss the great composer. Lori is a direct descendant.”

  Lori studied her in amiable suspicion. “Was hat sie gesagt?” she asked Reinhart, and when he told her, said: “Es ist kein wahres Wort daran, there’s not a word of truth in it. Trudchen is a good girl, but she exaggerates too much.”

  “Goodbye,” said Reinhart, and despite himself, “Good luck.” As a pair they were at once pathetic and amusing. Now it was Trudchen who was all for going, and Lori who lingered.

  “Reinhart.” In her throat was the rich and authentic quality with which the name had been spoken two generations ago. “Rrreinhaht,” an old possession become new and attractive, suggesting ancient connections between them. “It is surely a German name. Have you found any relatives here?”

  It was of course a new idea, to go with the name, exotic and adventurous; to find an identity in a far place, among the enemy. Yet here she was again giving him another obligation, goddamn her.

  “Oh, I wouldn’t know how,” he said in weary helplessness. “I’m not German any nearer than my grandfather, and it must be forty years or more since he came to the States.”

  He got up and reclaimed his rightful chair, booting the box into a corner filled high with similar junk and obstructing a closet door which if opened would reveal more. The buildings they had inherited hardly supported the Krauts’ reputation for tidiness and order. The closet boxes held ream on ream of papers carrying the letterhead of something called the National Socialist Volkswohlfahrt. Bureaucratic crap, very like the material in the 1209th’s own files. He had nevertheless informed Pound, who lazily said to see the Intelligence officer. This passed on to Lovett became: “An intelligent officer? Don’t hold your breath till I find one.”

  “You don’t care, then,” said Lori, only to establish the fact, without a hint of reproach.

  Trudchen poked her arm. “Ach, they should be the ones to look for him!”

  Exactly so, but his answer was: “Of course I care, but I don’t even have their last address.”

  “Oh, then your family used to correspond with them? If you can just remember the city, you can apply to the burgomaster’s office, who has records that date back, I suppose, to the Middle Ages.”

  Trudchen poked her again. “But if it is in the East Zone, Leipzig or Dresden, somewhere like that, he might as well forget about it.” When she was serious, her little mouth puckered and extended like the jaws of a pink snapdragon.

  “Yes,” said Reinhart quickly. “I’m sure now it was Dresden.”

  Oh, goddamn her sadness! When she heard that, Lori’s eyes disappeared again into the heavy violet shadows. “Then it is very likely they are dead.”

  Yes, he knew of the purposeless total bombing of Dresden, a nonmilitary target, and by not the barbarous Russians but the impeccable Western Allies. It was a very good place to have had relatives, and to have had them so disposed of, whatever their sins, by a crime of the righteous. Yes, if that was what she wanted, we are all depraved.

  “I must get back to work,” he said, and routinely added: “Shall I see you again?”

  Trudchen answered, in English: “Shooly, I shall come to commence my job!” She warded off his interruption with a small hand. “After I shall have seen Lieutenant Lofatt first.”

  He had not really meant her, poor little instrument that she was. Besides, he realized now that she was too young to be hired, anyway. The morning which had begun so favorably with his letter to Di had ended in a thorough waste.

  Lori said only “Wiederschau’n,” and was almost gone before he called her back.

  “Why do you always say that?” he asked, irritably. “I thought it was wiedersehen.”

  “It’s the same thing!” she said in a voice bright with melody. And he wondered that such a small thing could lift her spirits.

  When they had gone Reinhart sought to recover the letter he had ruined with his boots, but no luck. He should have to re-copy two whole pages, as thankless a job as sorting used laundry. Better to start all over again. He never lacked in invention, with the right audience.

  He had just taken out a clean sheet of onionskin from the office supply when the old German who had made the mess over at Lovett’s stopped in front of the window to light a cigarette, a miserable stub of a cigarette that he had taken from a small tin box. He fired the match in trembling fingers which brought it so slowly to the butt-end that the contact was charcoal to charred tobacco, dead to dead. He stared witlessly at both for a time, then returned the stub to the tin.

  Reinhart’s sudden arrival through the window took him unawares. Scared, he hastened to leave, but his weak old legs were poor servants of his intent. His right s
hoe was busted out at the juncture of upper and sole, issuing a string of gray stocking.

  “Don’t run away,” said Reinhart, jovially. “I just wanted to give you these.” A five-cigarette pack of Fleetwoods, the abominable brand included in K rations, which had lain in his field-jacket pocket since the first day in Berlin, when the cooks had not yet been set up for hot chow.

  What a shabby gift for such a wealth of gratitude! The man lost his speech, the corners of his mouth twisted in emotion, in awed delight he even forgot he was old and infirm, and disappeared round the corner with the vigor of a stripling.

  Watching him go, Reinhart thought, in satisfaction with his own courageous realism: certainly, he too could have been a Nazi, but now he was old and sick and defeated, become by the processes of cruel time himself a victim. Humanity is not the rights and wrongs of politics but a more general lottery of success and failure, and even more fundamental than those were youth and age and how one is constantly becoming the other.

  If he had relatives they too would be old—for he thought of them in terms of his grandfather—and so far separated from him that the blood connections must be taken on theory... yet he was not a Laplander or Lestrygonian; if he had any structure beneath the meretricious American veneer, it was one he shared with them. If Nazism was a German disease of the bone, his own marrow, even at two generations’ remove, could hardly be spotless. How many times had he felt within himself a black rage at existence-as-it-was and the eunuchs who prospering in it made its acceptance a standard of virtue?

  Just the other Sunday he had gone with Marsala out to Wannsee to prowl the deserted mansions on the lakeside. These had already been looted by the Russians, but there remained sufficient evidences of the genteel life: sunken bathtubs in washrooms as big as stables; roofed terraces of tile, for dancing; genuine oil paintings; one home had an iron portcullis which at the instance of an electric switch ascended from the basement to guard the door. The houses were in that intermediate state of ruin asking for more. If they had been untouched, he would have looked and left. As it was, the job needed completion. The Russkies had stolen rugs and furniture, roweled the floor, spattered the walls, had multiple diarrhea in the bathtubs and washstands. But still whole were most windows, the pictures, some glassware and vases and other fragile objects prime for the breaking. He smashed everything that came to hand, assisted only feebly by Marsala, who had been a juvenile delinquent when young and in America but here and now turned delicate, as if God were watching, and occasionally said, as he witnessed a crystal goblet pulverize against the fireplace: “We maybe shoulda mailed that home instead.”

  Yes, that was surely Nazism, that passion to destroy simply because it could be got away with, because one had been trained all his life to respect and abide by the constraints and then found in a crisis that they held no water. Who wouldn’t be a criminal if it weren’t for the police?

  He would find his relatives. If they were Nazis—but why suppose that? Because, although otherwise so stupid, he knew one truth, knew it so well he habitually tried to evade it—perhaps that is the definition of a dreamer, he thought, a man with an unusual sense of reality. Facts must be faced. There was such a thing as Nazism. It was a product of human beings, not some exotic heresy of the anthropoid apes that, owing to simian muteness, you must judge without ape-defense. The Nazis had first been clowns, and then almost without transition, devils. His parents, like their neighbors, had burned on sight the literature mailed by the Bund to German-sounding names, as they did the product of California box numbers which peddled data on the life-force; yet with match in one hand they might loosely say on the other that Hitler had a point when it came to the Jews. At college Klaus Greiner, a gentile refugee from Frankfurt—his father had been some kind of political writer—described his first two encounters with American strangers: a girl at a dance gave him an invidious lecture on democracy; a man in a cafeteria admired his being a national of the country that had at last settled the kikes’ hash.

  But whatever his relatives were, they were his. In almost every way but the accepted idea of common decency, he felt himself at odds with the world, a kind of Nazi without swastika, without revolver and gas ovens, without the specific enemies—indeed, it was a crazy feeling, an apparently motiveless identification, for although it did not include the trappings, it did comprehend the evil, as when you awoke from a nightmare of murder and for hours afterward despite the evidence of daylight and routine believed yourself an assassin; and worst of all, coexistent with the guilt, the memory of a terribly depraved yet almost romantic pride: once, anyway, you were not a victim.

  Lori, with her quiet European authority, had no doubt known from the first that he would come to this. He must look for her again and say: I am neither pious nor indifferent—he could even, as if from outside, see himself in the attitude of gentle yet strong and manly conviction and hear his firm voice purged of boyish tenor—I will find my relatives, because no man is an island.

  There remained a minor problem. His maternal grandparents, who had died when he was too small to know them and were therefore of no interest, came from what indeed was an eastern province, he was not sure just where but now in Soviet hands. His father’s father had been native Berliner—but where? He vaguely recalled the old letter in the box beneath the front porch, postmarked Berlin-hyphen-blot. Ah, it was hopeless. He went, anyway, back through the window to his desk and wrote a V-mail home, although it were more sense to poke in tea leaves or consult a necromancer than ask his folks.

  On the way through the labyrinth to the mailroom he thought of Lovett’s party and hoped he was not the only enlisted man invited; he might be taken for a fruit. And finally, another tinge of Trudchen: how old must a girl be before you may desire her?

  CHAPTER 5

  A THIN DUST OF TALCUM lay on Lieutenant Schild’s sallow cheeks, notwithstanding which the beard’s threat was darkly manifest. He had shaved a half-hour earlier, taking his usual care at the sharp angles of the chin and the mastoid region, peering nearsightedly, vulnerably, into the magnifying mirror, studying the giant’s face which regarded him with similar scrutiny. The steel-rim, GI-issue eyeglasses were back in place now, and with them the correlative look: tranquil, remote, mathematical, self-sufficient. He buttoned himself into the blouse, which, though it corresponded at all points to the measurements of his upper body, seemed uncongenial to it, and placed upon his curly poll the cap whose forward point was subtly out of line with the rear one. Finally, he folded the tie in a knot that was lumpily gauche.

  His toilet was preparation for Lovett’s party, which he assumed to be well under way, the time standing at 9:30. Only slightly acquainted with his host, whom he had met the day before in official work, he had delayed his arrival until it could be unobtrusive. After checking his watch again, he strapped on the pistol that Occupation rules required—in this the medics, legally unarmed, had it better—and left the house, conscious of the housekeeper’s green eyes on him. She was a comely war widow in her late thirties and slept in. He would not acknowledge her as a human being,

  As he descended the outside stair, his superior, Captain Roderick St. George, came bovinely up the walk.

  “Hi, Nate. Goin’ out cattin’?” He had, it seemed, determined on the long ritual, not having seen Schild since just before evening chow. Schild muttered some half-audible nonsense, and it was all the same to St. George, whose low estimate of himself was necessarily transferred to his associates.

  The captain withdrew a cigarette, fired his lighter and then held it aflame interminably without using it.

  Squinting, Schild made known a mild complaint, and St. George forthwith snapped shut the pigskin-jacketed Ronson. He disliked giving hurt, but took a modest pleasure in being an agent of mercy.

  “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, victoriously. “Something exciting on the string?”

  Schild received a malicious impulse, gave it its head.

  “Look, she has a friend, a small blonde
with fine skin and breasts like lemon-halves...”

  “Haha...”

  “You know these Germans are unleashing the bottled-up passions of years.”

  “Hahahaha...” St. George thought this a genuine joke. He could not place himself in any kind of relation with illicit sex but the comic. Besides, he regarded all Jews as humorists.

  He chuckled a stanza and then said sanctimoniously: “No, Nate, you go and have fun. I’ve got work to do. By the way, you haven’t seen, have you, a missing folder of Kraftfahrkorps correspondence?”

  “I’ll look in my files tomorrow. Offhand, though, I can’t remember it.”

  “No hurry. It was among that load I brought in today. I may have it myself.”

  The odd thing was that although St. George would have been a success as a civilian, he had never been one; not ever, if one didn’t count his eighteen years or so as a legal infant, after which he entered the Point. He was now forty-five, with twenty-odd years of garrison and administrative duty in the States and the peacetime colonies behind him. In the war he led a small Intelligence team that during the hostile phase jeeped company to company on the Third Army front and interrogated German prisoners. At present its business was more sedentary. In many of the buildings occupied by the American forces there were great stores of abandoned Nazi correspondence. Somebody had to assemble and classify them: in the reams of paper that had fallen behind the police state like dung from a plodding horse, St. George and his little crew were put to picking straws.

  The captain now reiterated his counsel about having fun and squished into the house on his crepe soles.

  It had taken Schild months to accept the reality of the captain’s stupidity, for despite Marx’s and Lenin’s examples to the contrary, Schild generally tended to overvalue people. But St. George’s was far too crude a role for a double agent. And this was, in the smallest way, that is to say, personally, regrettable, providing nothing against which to sharpen the teeth.