Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  Darkness again, lightly flavored with the smell of growing things. He resented this street which showed no mark of war. Lovett’s house across the way was marked by a globed light above the door, but the window blinds were drawn—indicating, no doubt, the conservative character of a party made by medical men. At the gate, it struck him that he had no motive whatever for accepting the invitation. Lovett had rudely flung it at him as he was about to leave the office after speaking with Lieutenant Nader, a preposterous, almost illiterate officer who assured him that yes, the place was loaded with papers but he better claim them fast because the colonel had fifteen men on permanent assignment to burn all the useless trash in the building and they were already halfway through.

  Next he had gone to see the colonel, to whose inner office he was conducted by an insolent sergeant-major with a border-Southern accent who announced him as “Child,” and stayed to listen to his business. On his entrance the colonel, who had been sitting in deep study of the ejection device on a mechanical pencil, snatched up a huge bolo knife from beneath his desk and sprang to the open casement, screaming: “Look sharp there, private!” Handing the weapon to an unseen soldier outside: “Here’s the only thing for that crabgrass—wait a minute, what are you doing with that butt? What? Field strip it, balls! Carry it around to the can! Wait a minute, where’s Lovett? Where? An hour ago I saw, God damn him that nance, a lid missing from one of the garbage cans in back of the hospital. You tell Lovett to mince over there and find it. No, not you, him—a gold bar doesn’t make him too good for that.”

  The colonel, Nader had told him, was scared shitless of anybody, even a corporal, from another headquarters, invariably assuming it to be a higher one that had him under surveillance for suspicion of untidiness. Schild’s request to impound what remained of the enemy documents scarcely salved his nerves.

  “Don’t tell me Lovett hasn’t been sending them to you all the while! That silly pimp!”

  Schild sternly put down in himself the dirty little pleasure that it was probably not abnormal to feel at Lovett’s being abused—but why does the girl-man stimulate sadism rather than pity?—and made a defense.

  “That is true, colonel, today’s the first time I’ve seen him,” said the sergeant-major, neutral and hateful at the same time; he was that kind of man, just as he was the sort to turn accusingly a confession upon its maker. This worthy, it was clear, held the reins of authority; typical suburban, neat-haired, office-manager type, probably from some middle place like St. Louis or Lexington.

  “I have it,” said the colonel, nervously popping the eraser from his pencil, scattering across the green blotter the contents of the reserve-lead reservoir. “I’ll assign Sergeant Shelby here to complete responsibility for the allocation of whatever it is you require. Shelby’s your man, Lieutenant Shields, want something around here, ask the enlisted men. My officers just weren’t there when the brains were passed out.” He retrieved the leads one by one, a neat trick with hands sheathed in white gloves. He answered Schild’s stare with a smile that vanished as quickly as oil into leather.

  “Eczema,” he said ruthlessly. “On all ten fingers.” He tore off a glove and showed his right hand, which looked as if it were made of rusty metal. “Neurodermatitis—terrible for a man of action.”

  Shelby grunted “Yeah” and grandly proceeded Schild into the outer office where he imperturbably took a seat behind his desk and began to read Sad Sack in Yank, from time to time calling one of the clerks to witness an especially funny turn.

  “Sergeant,” called Schild, after a few moments had defined the insolence, “I want you to show me where the papers are stored.”

  “Well yes, I will.” Not looking up from the page. “If you’ll tell me when.” But already he was weakening, that shadow of the coward was stealing across his eyes.

  “Now.” Schild spoke it in his smallest voice, to demonstrate to the man and his lackeys what a small, two cents’ worth of force was needed to bring him to heel.

  Shelby sullenly arose and led him out, smelling of after-shave lotion. In the hall Schild told him he had changed his mind, would come another day, smiled, and left almost lazily.

  But the outfit was a nest of madmen and clowns, a traveling medicine show rather than a hospital. And he realized, at Lovett’s gate, that this condition of comedy was what lured him to the party, that he could handle it or let it go at his pleasure, without, as it were, a tab to pay. He had already freed the latch, was stepping into the yard, when a low, evil whisper, as if from the conscience, said: “Enjoy yourself. Why not?”

  He drew away in the illusion that he had collided with a kind of animate bush which, weightless and retreating, yet aggressed with whipping branches in a hundred quarters, and although he stepped to the side, off the path onto the lawn, Schatzi continued to press him. Thus, without a word, he was forced to return to the public walk, where a hand jerked his sleeve in the direction of the street corner and left off, and he followed.

  At the corner, where in sound underground practice they could survey all paths of approach—or in the darkness, hear them—Schatzi spoke in a queer tone that was loud while pretending to be low, an undertone which must have been audible behind Lovett’s closed door a hundred meters off.

  “Yes, my good sir,” he said. “I am authorized to buy from you five cartons of cigarettes. Payment on delivery.”

  If they were overheard, it was a black-market deal—more than that, if an enemy operative lurked behind the tree, he was forced to hear what was after all the description of a crime towards which the Allied authorities were turning severe, and might ignore it in favor of the larger, for which he had insufficient evidence, only at the cost of his clear duty. The beauty of the method was Schatzi’s acting in worse and more furtive conscience than when he met Schild unmasqueraded, as at the Wannsee contacts.

  However, having gone so far to establish urgency, stealth, and a suggestion of controlled hysteria, Schatzi began to talk quite banally of Lovett’s party.

  “I have sold them some glassware, very lovely crystal glasses which I am relying upon you to guard over. Some persons may get drunken, you see, and it will be a scandal to break these glasses which cannot be replaced all over Germany. I speak not of my own convenience, since they have paid me, but namely of the uselessness to destroy pretty objects which also have their place in the world, or don’t you agree?”

  This preface out of the way, he thrust himself under Schild’s nose and in a passion of distrust asked: “What are your relations with Lieutenant Nader? I know yesterday you have seen him!”

  It was degrading that Schatzi, with his own active assistance, managed always to take him by surprise.

  “He’s Intelligence officer for the 1209th General Hospital and therefore the logical man to see about the German documents in their area.”

  “Of course, Intelligence officer—does not that mean to you something odd?”

  Schild regretted saying “German”; he was commonly careful to use “Nazi” or “Hitler,” rather than the adjective that comprehended an entire people, not only because the distinction figured importantly in Soviet policy, but also because Schatzi was a non-Hitlerite German. And finally because he could not truly believe in the separation and clung to it all the more, in an effort towards self-mastery.

  “As a matter of fact, it does.” He made a joke: “He has no intelligence.”

  Schatzi hooked into his elbow with murderous fingers. “Was, was? I don’t understand!” And still claimed not to on repetition. “Don’t smile!” he whispered angrily. “If you do not think this is serious, something can perhaps be done about you.”

  He had never spoken this way before. True, he was Schild’s superior, but for purposes of organization rather than discipline. And he was a German. ... How easily vileness slips in when one is momentarily weak with indignation! Yes, Schatzi was a German, a good one, which in his time meant a hero it was a privilege to know, an honor to be rebuked by, and thus Schild acce
pted the onus: What error had he made with Nader?

  “The responsibility of an Intelligence officer is that of an open police spy, no?” asked Schatzi. “Therefore you present yourself to him conveniently. He can simply sit in his desk and you walk into his hands. This leads a person to say there are two possibilities: you might be a fool or you might be a counter-agent.” He floated an inch away, and returned to his earlier, crafty voice: “But I cannot pay more to you, since Captain Josephson of the Engineers Department has promised already to sell me all I would need for a thousand mark the carton.”

  Not until he finished did Schild hear the footfalls, deliberate, soft, and yet massive as a lion’s on the route of his bars. As they approached, the courier grew ever more spurious, and when at last the organism that made them, in his own agonizingly good time, arrived in closeup, Schatzi sprang dramatically to the curb and found on his forehead a sweat so heavy it required both hands to dry. Now the melodrama was inflated beyond all sane proportion, and it was Schild who felt wet all over in genuine perspiration, certain, in a dread moment as the newcomer stopped before him and he saw a face as puffed and insensitive as a medicine ball, that it was an arrest.

  “Lovely evening, men. May I trouble you for a light?”

  A great curved pipe like Sherlock Holmes’s, like Stalin’s, and by the flare of the match, a golden lapel-cross. He continued to intake and expel till the flame seared Schild’s fingers, and then, with one last cumulus of smoke straight into Schild’s eyes, he padded on with a clabbering “good night.”

  “A holy man,” said Schild derisively, regulating his breath as Schatzi returned. And then, as Schatzi said nothing, stood rather in silent, corrosive accusation as the minutes vibrated through the watch on Schild’s wrist, up his forearm, biceps, shoulder—“Yes. That would be the perfect disguise!”

  “Don’t be ridiculouse,” Schatzi answered in a very low voice. “That was the Protestant chaplain for the 1209th Hospital. He is quite likely looking for girls, the younger the better, the dirty old man. ... You have then no explanation.” It was not a question. “Among the papers of Nader was concealed a memorandum which read ‘Documents—Schild.’ They all go to him before you deliver them to me, yes?”

  To be frightened by a fat, buttery, strolling chaplain! Schild recovered so rapidly that he all but made another small joke. “Ridiculouse,” how ridiculouse it was. Schatzi was after all accusing him of treachery; of all imaginable moments it should have been the most terrible, yet he could barely withhold laughter. Nader, Lovett, the colonel, Shelby, the chaplain, and, in his own house, St. George, with their uniforms and pipes and insignia and parties and cleanup details and evening walks—who but Schatzi could envision that fat, genial toad with the gold cross pinching some German teen-ager’s behind, or Nader’s playing the deep game?

  “I had to go to Nader, you see,” he whispered. “Anything else would have been suspicious. I assure you he’s a buffoon.”

  “Now I must not again hear you say that of anyone,” said Schatzi, “or I will know you for a traitor. I have told you those are the most dangerous persons. But even so, you do not have a connection with Nader, you say, however, you go from him to the office of the commanding colonel and insult Sergeant Shelby.”

  Surely he did not presume to direct Schild’s official relations with enlisted men; he was getting now clearly beyond his limits, and Schild forbore from righteous protest only because his intuition told him Schatzi had not yet reached the serious argument of which this was preface.

  “Shelby?” Caution made him pretend briefly not to recall the name.

  “Shelby, yes!” Schatzi’s breath into his ear was like a long needle piercing the drum. “He is a sympatizer, but he will not forever be one with rudeness.”

  “How was I supposed to know that?”

  “You might have smelled it—but that is not the point. A source in the very headquarters of the major American medical hospital in Berlin. If Major General Floyd Parks becomes ill, where does he go? To 1209th! If the deputy commander, Colonel Frank Howley? To 1209th! Eisenhower comes to Berlin, twists his ankle—even you should see the actualities. There is no brains in making enemies of someone who has the slightest power. That is the first rule. The second is, give to a man a chance.”

  Give to a man a chance! It was a touching slogan of wonderful, innocent charity, like the creed of some early social reformer, some Robert Owen, now outworn but fond in memory. He had not looked for such a sentiment in Schatzi and finding it was not quite sure he got its sense, unless beneath that scarred and charred carapace there was an old idealism that had remained impervious to the arrests and tortures and the subtler ravages of the illegal life.

  “I’m afraid I still don’t understand. Do you wish me to identify myself to him?”

  “He was told someone would come to ask his assistance.”

  Schild did not think it wisdom to remind Schatzi his directions had been simply to go to the 1209th, with no mention of a source; the injustice being done him stirred more caution than hurt.

  “Now they must give him another carton-box of vodka.”

  “He is bribed?”

  “To be sure, he is only a sympatizer and not under discipline. But tell me what time is it? Ah, so late! One more detail: in a room on the south front of Shelby’s building is a closet filled to top with papers of the old Winterhilfe—this was a Nazi agency to deal with the poor, clothing and food for charitable distribution. In the last years of the war, one hears, they gave out clothing of the Jews exterminated in the camps, sometimes even forgetting to cut off the yellow badges. Haha, cynicism could not be carried farther on...”

  How innocuous Schild’s own little joke had been in contrast to this, the authentic, vintaged gallows-humor.

  Schatzi continued: “Now there is a boy in that office, with some kind of entertainment service for the Ami troops. A great lout, with him you would be correct when you said clown. Just go there and get the files from him, no need to let Shelby know.”

  “No need to let Shelby know?” Schild could do no more than parrot the sentence.

  “Certainly not! Anything you can get without him, all the better. One shouldn’t wish that Scheisskerl to become too self-important. As I told you, he is not even a member of the Party, he cannot, in the end, be controlled—Achtung!” He reared back and harked with hand to ear. But it was only someone entering Lovett’s door down the block.

  “Isn’t that a Wehrmacht cap?” asked Schild, seeking a moment’s respite, for prolonged exposure to Schatzi’s undiluted presence was very like being worked over with a blowtorch; one had left only short breath, and that was filled with the smell of scorching. However, Schatzi’s own habit of disregarding nothing was so influential that he found himself eager for the answer, for some clue as to his frequent changes of costume, which were more likely to achieve publicity than disguise.

  But Schatzi gave every notice he could, in silence and darkness, that the question was a faux pas, social and not conspiratorial, nonetheless offending.

  “Go now to your party,” he whispered coldly. “And for heaven’s sake don’t be rude to anybody. Have pleasure, dancing and drinking, show yourself to be a normal person. What there is to lose but your chains?” With the latter he moved into better humor, saying in what no doubt was a friendly way: “Here is a little gift from me to you.”

  He pressed a small, flat package in Schild’s hand. What was it, rubbers? Schatzi didn’t understand and Schild, laughing, didn’t know the term of the German-in-the-street.

  “Empfängnisverhütende Mittel?”

  The dictionary formality got a laugh even from Schatzi. “Cigarettes of the Fleetwood brand. Also, unless emergency, the usual time and place.”

  He left, or rather he was no longer there. Nor was there a sound that could not have been made by a leaf crashing onto a pillow of moss. The “gift” lying uneasily in his pocket—as if it were soaked in phosphorous-water which when dry would explode—Schild w
ent again towards Lovett’s gate. Just before it he met the stout chaplain, whose pipe had once more gone out, this time, however, without appeal. A soft girl of about fifteen and in long braids stood swaying at his side.

  “Good evening, men,” he voiced richly. “I don’t suppose—no, I see you’re busy.” Peering. “Oh, just one of you! Well, to the party, eh? I may look in later, but just now I must act the Samaritan to this child, who is out all alone after curfew.” He reached for a braid. “You don’t suppose you—no, go on in and have fun. This is what chaplains are for. But, I say, have you any idea where Jugenheimer Weg lies?”

  Telling him, Schild thought he heard a distant, hideous snicker, a passage of air through corrupted channels; and so it was, and no more: the chaplain sucked on his dead pipe.

  “Sank you from zuh bottom of my hot,” said the girl, with a pliant little moue very visible in the glow of Lovett’s porchlight.

  Were they all dead drunk or had he got the wrong night? He knocked interminably without result, and no doubt would have given up had he not received so many counsels, nay, commands, to go there and enjoy himself. At length Lovett unbarred the portal, showing a face painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, slightly under the weather, and donating three white fingers towards hospitality.

  In the living room, which was the smaller and more airless for it, sat a number of guests in contemplation of their belt buckles. As Schild came in from the hall they looked up as one and stared ominously, hatefully, man and woman, and as quickly looked away in instant boredom. Lovett gave him a green tumbler, and Nader, who it appeared was also en menage, presented a hard look from beneath the one long eyebrow like a caterpillar across his forehead, and went into a corner from which presently a phonograph began to bray. The company arose to dance claustrally, the rug having been cleared away but not the furniture. A nurse or two, lacking partners, watched Schild in a hopeless expectancy which soon settled into resentment, for he had discovered a sofa in the opposite quarter where one might settle to view the passing parade.