Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  At one end of the couch sprawled a young man, who had managed by a disorderly arrangement of large limbs to command nine-tenths of the surface that should have been free; as if this were not enough, Schild was astonished to see he wore corporal’s stripes.

  With a failure of consideration he immediately regretted, since the fellow on his approach made ample room, he asked: “Is this affair for enlisted men, too?”

  Taking no seen offense, the young man grinned and waved his hand abroad. There were, in truth, several noncoms scattered through the crowd. A sergeant waltzed by at that moment with a bony nurse, in some danger of being impaled on her chin.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean anything was wrong. I’ve heard these medic outfits practice a good deal of democracy.”

  “More in the breach than in the observance.” But the corporal’s very impudence belied this. Schild anticipated trouble. He warily took stock of this soldier, whose olive-drab hulk slouched into the couch as if he owned it. Assuming comparable sang-froid, Schild without looking lifted the drink in his hand and took a modest draught. It was not a green glass at all, but a clear tumbler containing a viscuous green fluid, an oleaginous, minty, sweetish ooze. His tongue curled in revulsion. While he fancied desperate measures, the liquid crawled across the palate and drained into his throat.

  “God, that fool gave me a full glass of crème de menthe!”

  “That’s probably all he had left. They pooled the officers’ liquor rations for the party, but most of it was wines and liqueurs. I got Chablis.” The young man, lips parted in good humor, lifted the glass that stood between his feet. “It’s awful, too, if that makes you feel better.”

  Strangely, it did. There was a generosity in the corporal’s ease which minimized his impudence. With a wry nod at his orders, and despite a sense of imminent nausea, Schild organized himself for fun. But when the opportunity appeared, it was in the corporal’s name.

  “Reinhart!”

  A large nurse, constructed on the plan of Rubens’ second wife, stood before them offering her heroic body with a slight upthrust of the hips. High above, gigantic breasts made bold, made brutal, and threatened the poor weak seams of her olive dress. One listened for the ping of parting threads deep in her armpits. Very likely, said fun-loving Schild to Schild, she cocks her hips to balance the bulk of those incredible glands.

  “Come on, Reinhart,” she cried and rowdily assaulted the corporal’s arm. “Don’t be sticky.” She got him on his feet and into the amplitude of her façade. From the phonograph wailed a niggardly statement of love denied. And Schild sat in his standard condition: alone.

  CHAPTER 6

  NUESE LIEUTENANT VERONICA LEARY presided over the nut ward of the 1209th. Reinhart knew her by sight and name; was not, however, in the least acquainted. Were the standards of rank, which he approved, now to be swept aside?

  This was his first mixed-grade party, and he had so far found it difficult to put off his snobbery, even though most of the officers were from the medical staff, which meant an amiable, unsoldierly, democratic lot whose professional view of man as viscera saved them from megalomania. The administrative officers, having got wind of the conglomerate guest-list, stayed away, victims of poor judgment. For of the enlisted personnel Lovett had invited only notorious brown-nosers whose obsequiousness no intimacy could corrupt.

  With qualms about his own status, Reinhart had soon retreated to the isolation of the sofa. Now here was Leary, legitimizing him by her substantial presence, like Europa and the ox with functions reversed. But since he was, despite nature’s perverse generosity, larger still than she, the issue was a push-pull in a progressively diminishing tempo, and a nettled comment, charged with liquorous and sexy odors, blown into his ear.

  “Do you know, you’re really a punk dancer.”

  “Never claimed to be a good one.”

  Which she went for in a large way, with a splendor of teeth and a marvel of air-blue eyes, in a demonstration of the frequently altering but at any given moment perfect dominion of her withal fragile, sentient face over the dumb classicism of that body.

  “D’yuh know what?” she asked, giddy again but kindly, “Really, when it comes right down to it, you don’t have much fun, do you?”

  “I’m having fun right now,” he said, so pitifully that his heart cracked right through at the vibration and hung like a sundered glacier about to plunge into the sea.

  “Aw, kiddy, come on and cheer up! When I used to see you I would think there’s the very nicest boy in the 1209th. And also the saddest, because who knows what secrets lu-r-r-r-k in the hearts of corporals.”

  This was actually a horror to Reinhart: as he walked in dignity and rectitude, strange eyes had marked him, had abstracted a piece of him, as it were, that, insensitive fool that he was, he had never missed.

  “All right, it was just an idea,” she said then, surprisingly enough, eyes bright with the fool’s-gold of ennui, mouth parodying good humor. This came from hither-and-yon; she was revolving her head, apparently surveying the room for another candidate to storm, who, not capitulating instanter, would get the same short shrift as Reinhart.

  For he had her sized up, and stood enjoying bitterness confirmed. When a nurse smiles at a corporal, caveat would-be lover! A nurse is an ill integration of woman and officer, with one of the roles appearing wherever the ordinary lines of human deportment would ordain the other; so that you are always puckering to kiss a golden bar or saluting a breast, a stranded sycophant between sex and power.

  The music having suddenly pooped out, the rest of the crowd clogged the rear of the room, where Nader gave first aid to the record player with loud frustration at the complexities of wire. No man being opposed—even the dark, nervous officer had vanished—they returned to the couch, where Lieutenant Leary announced her name to Reinhart as “Very,” and plumped down proprietor-close. He had then, by default, been chosen.

  Since high school Reinhart had made it a principle to avoid really pretty girls, with their detestable and arrogant ignorance of the principle: they’re all the same upside down. He played courtier to no one, and was gratified in college to see that the lackeys of the prom queens were to a man spectacled and pimply, usually students of science. However, although she was beautiful, Very was reclaimed by her size; it was a near-deformity, being almost divine, and made her human.

  “Do you have the time?” he asked, for in spite of all, he was horribly bored.

  “Sure, but who’ll hold the horse?” Very answered brightly. “An old joke that if my father’s said once, he’s said a thousand times. But I can’t tell you because yesterday I sold my watch to the Russians for two hundred and fifty dollars.”

  She showed a fine, empty wrist—at such narrowing places she was as slim as she was generous in the areas for expanse—and went on to add that really the watch was sold through an agent, who no doubt had kept a sizable commission since timepieces went for about five hundred; but to her it was well worth the missing half: she feared the Russians, who were reputed to prefer large women.

  “And I’m not what you’d call petite.” Robustly she snorted.

  “The Russians like ’em fat,” Reinhart said gallantly. “And that’s not you.”

  She looked away with a hint of pain, as if the remark were out of order, and then returned to, anyway, do best by it: “One thing I know, it’s sure hard to lose it when you put on blubber. Cripes, you get so hungry, sometimes!” Her extraordinary grin over nothing, open, unafraid, witless, was more splendid than anyone else could make for cause. Trying unsuccessfully to match it, he cursed the fate that had led him early in life and from a false psychology to cultivate the impassivity of an Oriental. Now, in a time to be bravura, he found himself instead sneakily edging his knee over against hers, laying his hand on the cushion where hers, he had observed, habitually flew at punctuations in her speech, studying the rich mouth as it carved words from the adamant of the northern Midwest. If he wished to touch her, he should do it; the
re was a bond between large people, as among Negroes, Greek-Americans, soldiers, etc., by means of which their secrets were kept only from the outside world; thus, if he had such a wish, she already knew it and sitting there unprotestant was not offended.

  But there went the music again, and since girls genuinely like to dance—so much so that they will partner another of their own sex rather than sit aside—Reinhart patiently rose and returned to the grappling, this time, however, since he was prepared, getting the initiative before she did, encircling her waist with a tensed forearm the muscle of which, though she did not complain, surely put a rope burn in the small of her back, manhandling her, on the turns raising her whole weight off the floor on just that single arm.

  Coincident with her total surrender he went into tumescence and regretted that for the sake of slim hips he had worn the tight OD trousers which would show the most meager change of contour. He must hold his lower body away and cast the mind on some serene subject matter. The phonograph played “Long Ago and Far Away,” from some movie faintly recalled, abominably corny yet sad and sweet. No doubt most of them here were led to thoughts of home, and he was in this mood charitable, retaining for himself an achingly beautiful sense that it was he who was far away and long ago, like someone who lingers in the theater after the performance has ended, amid the discarded programs and slowly vanishing odors and the houselights extinguishing bulb by bulb.

  Thus as the hour fled, when the record player broke down and they returned to the couch, Reinhart felt nostalgia for the dance, and when it began again to revolve and they danced, he thought of the distant perfection of the time on the sofa, and was always ready to pull Very one way or the other like a great anthropomorphic balloon, for she had become incredibly light on her feet. In these activities, he got his hands on her in various quasi-legal ways: against the side of a knocker, as they went off the floor; slipping down from the waist and swooping like a swallow across the buttock-swell as they waited, swaying, between records; up her grooved back to the hard metal juncture of the strained brassiere, over which slip, shirt, and jacket provided no more cover than wallpaper over the last tenant’s picture-hooks.

  The society of girls is a very delightful thing, as he recalled someone had told David Copperfield, not professional, but very delightful. Reinhart had not for years, excepting café encounters and alleyway contacts with foreigners, which was something else again, had it to enjoy. Those American scents and sounds, one’s own language speaking of nothing, but understood; the thousand familiar references in matter and spirit; the absence of ambiguity—Europe was suddenly squalid, skinny, crooked, and dark, he would not have taken it for eine Mark or cinq francs. With this Yankee smooth-warm cheek against his he thought of Lori and her little cousin towards whom as late as this afternoon he had had inclinations which, because he saw them now as a product of the time and place rather than himself, could be definitely labeled strange and discordant, the whole business devious and gnarled.

  He decided he was in love, or that he would assume he was tonight and decide on its permanence the next morning. This, and the fact that no officer in the company looked disapproval—indeed, in the crush on the floor none could have if he would—the fragrance of cosmetics, the shadows when some excellent person turned down the lights for the dreamy songs, the warm wall of humanity around the tight little cell of their mutual interest, the yielding of his artificial will to the natural magnetism of her mass—in the strength of these he closed with her all the way to the shins, lost false modesty and with his lower-middle, that had become sensitive as the tips of both hands, could feel the very mount of Venus, while his mouth in the movement of the music slowly followed the round of her cheek to the lip-crevice and made entry.

  This bliss was disrupted when some bastard inaugurated a series of hot records on the turntable. Reinhart knew as he led Very back to the sofa that it was an opportunity, even an obligation, to take her outside, perhaps in supreme audacity to make a headlong rush through the back yards to his flat just around the corner, taking the tide at its flood. Yet his feeling was more delight than desire; he wished rather to prolong this time which had come fortuitously than replace it with his own initiative, which held no surprises at all.

  How marvelous it is to be singled out, and spared the tight-wire balance of establishing favor! But it also makes a man a good deal more cautious than a shy girl would believe, forwardness in small things being a fortress against large. Girls who are bold can better withhold. It is as if the tiger dug the pit, fixed the net, arranged the camouflage, and crouched laughing by while Frank Buck stumbled through and captured himself. The other side of the coin was the pleasant fantasy that you could sit very still, coining banalities when necessary, but nothing coarse or even really interested, it went without saying, sneaking through the requisite time, playing cherry, so to speak, until the girl was so wild with unrequited passion that she would positively drag you to her bed.

  On still another hand, Very bore all the moldmarks of a nice girl, the sort whose intimacies were flagrant because her intentions were innocent, like some Samaritan who courts denunciation as a pickpocket by reseating your slipping watch. She could very well get you all the way to the Beautyrest only to repair a loose spring, and nothing upset him more than basing an effort on principles not understood until its miscarriage.

  He again could have stood a drink, and Very had just as soon, but a difficult negotiation through the dance-floor athletes who despite their average age of thirty to forty were astonishingly spry at the fast music, discovered only a wet table of empty bottles. He returned to see Very sharing the couch with a gloomy captain whose collar caduceus bore a D for Dentist. He was known to Reinhart as a relatively good egg, as well as a painless practitioner, but he now wore the pious look of that partygoer who makes a fetish of his loneliness and searches grimly all evening for fellow worshipers, thus partaking in much more community than the busiest extrovert. Skinny and fuzzy, as if he had been twisted together from pipe cleaners, he sat grumbling in an undertone. However, he had dropped there only in quest of a seat, not trouble, and his scowl of greeting as Reinhart sat on the other end carried no hint of malice.

  “You know,” Reinhart said as she moved comfortably against his shoulder, “I used to be air-raid warden in the nurses’ quarters in England. Did you ever see me there?”

  “Gosh, I hope you didn’t see me! I’m always a mess around the barracks, especially in England. Wasn’t it awful there! The continual fog and rain, and that horrible tea all blue with milk, and fish and chips, and sausages filled with oatmeal. You know how many times I went to town? Once. Once, and I had enough.”

  “Weren’t you ever to London?”

  “Oh cripes no. That was dumb of me, wasn’t it?—I should have gone to London, anyway, because as everyone says you’ll never get the chance again. I bet you did, though—were the Piccadilly commandoes really pretty? Go on,” she dug an unbelievably hard elbow into his side, “you can tell me.”

  At this the captain, whom he could see beyond her, ostentatiously repressed a grin and cast his eyes on the ceiling, and Reinhart was suddenly embarrassed at the public disclosure of her stupidity. A statistical friend once told him that one out of every ten girls is pretty, and one out of every ten girls is intelligent; ergo, one out of every one hundred girls is pretty and intelligent. Pooling the women he knew with those of the statistical friend made a grand total of eighty-five; they had had every expectation that somewhere in the remaining seven and a half to each man would appear the rare combination, but Reinhart had since lost track of the friend, in whose consignment the marvel would have to be, for his own quota was exhausted. As to Very, to balance the proposition she should have had to be a Mme Curie, a George Eliot, for only genius could be commensurate with her beauty, which he realized sitting there finding fault where none was appropriate, had become ever more glorious with use. She was fantastically beautiful, there was no other possible description, and comparable to n
othing, lake, sky, gems, or flowers, but an until-now masturbation dream of the female essence.

  So he began to lie, not grossly like a politician but subtly like a statesman, referring to his parents’ street as a road, and to his college as school; spoke familiarly of dinner clothes, of riding boots, fencing, martini cocktails and the sediment of sherry wine, and of the possibility of buying oil paintings from ruined Germans for a song. He talked of love, not particularized but general, yet with a hint that behind him lay the wreckage of a hundred hearts, each keeping with it a piece of his own, for he was more passionate-impulsive than cruel. And finally, of the manly arts: boxing, judo, water polo—and creeping through the poison-gas chamber in basic training.

  He was about to bear down on the last—and with justice, for it was quite true that his gas mask had sprung a leak, letting in the smell of deadly chlorine—when he reflected that since nurses had had the same training, Very was not likely to see it as exotic.

  “Well, go on,” she screamed as the story bogged, flashing the long lashes which had some time earlier—it being, after all, a long evening after a full day’s work—begun to lower.

  “It wasn’t really anything—” On the contrary, he sensed, awfully, that it was the only thing for a whole half-hour that did interest her, and, to a degree humiliated, he determined almost vengefully for once to give the banal truth.

  “Why, the instructor said if we so much as imagined we smelled chlorine to get the hell from the shed. Which I did. There was some sand in the valve of my mask, it turned out.”

  “But were there any toxic effects afterwards?” She pressed harder against him and seemed to study his right nostril.

  “Just a little dizziness.” Off on another lie.

  “But you had a blood count, surely?”