Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  He carried the laden tray towards the billet. It could hardly have been for his big brown eyes that Lichenko lingered. This old-Jew’s suspicion would not be put down, despite his violent attempts at negation that, as he crossed the street, became exterior, the ultimate ineffectuality. He shook his whole body as if in a chill, and the spinach in the end compartment, having by nature no integrity, easily lost its coherence and slipped over the rim like a string of mucus.

  Lichenko could be on furlough, on extended pass, on some perfectly uncomplicated special duty from which he had legally or illegally gleaned four days of liberty; he may have been lost, have searched in vain the wilderness of Berlin for his unit, temporarily have given up. He was perhaps a liaison man between Red and American Intelligences, who—the Soviets being no fools in these matters—could better prosecute his purpose by four or five days’ discretion, especially around an idiot like St. George, who, it could quickly be seen by a shrewd fellow, would fly all to pieces at the first suspicion that his outfit was to have a serious role. There were, too, the possibilities of amnesia, outright absence without leave... and even, of course, desertion. Notwithstanding Schild’s automatic rejection of anti-Soviet messhall gossip that “hundreds” of Russian soldiers had decamped to the Allied sectors, which if true would have been a lie, he was certain that it was true in cases. It was something that could be faced without equivocation. Renegades ye will always have with you.

  In the middle of the street, a two-and-a-half ton truck nearly ran him down, the driver leaning out to carp, spotting the silver bar, recovering. A fine midsummer sun crafted suburban shadows which lay only slightly to the northeast of their objects, the time standing not far beyond one o’clock; that extreme portion of the sky that to the grounded seems at last palpable but to the winged is merely the middle distance towards another intangibility, hung unusually high even for Berlin. A soldier in fatigues lingered on the stair of one of the officers’ homes, in the grip of an internal monologue that he broke off to inspect Schild with academic superiority, which indicated he was on an errand for a captain or above. Shortly such a person, wearing a khaki undershirt, appeared at the door and bellowed: “Bugger off, Wilbur!” As Wilbur without acknowledgment merged with the shrubbery, this undershirt shouted: “Bugger you, too, Rosenthal!”

  One thing was certain: Schild’s eyes did not improve over the years.

  “Can’t you see? It’s Young! ...Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were Rosenthal. Rosenthal’s a DOCTOR IN OUR OUTFIT.”

  College Joe type with a grin. Back to bed, my boy, the world will run very well without you, or very badly; in any case, without you. An angular girl, with hairy legs, pumped decorously past on her bicycle. It was Schatzi in transvestite disguise—of course it was not, but Schild, too, could be permitted an error of identification. In the past three days he had seen Schatzi in every bony face; he had recognized him falsely with greater assurance than he had yet seen him in actuality. It was only because the genuine article never appeared in daylight that the apparitions could be ignored.

  The real Schatzi—he had left him an hour before Lichenko had come to the party. Certainly if he, Schild, were Schatzi, he would not fail to trace a connection between these events, to draw up the disjunctive proposition so favored by his courier: either... or; either Schatzi knew of Lichenko or he did not. If he knew, there could be no doubt that what had happened was with his connivance. If he did not, all the rules commanded that he be told. But this clause was the emergency measure, necessary now because he had ignored the first principle of the code: never to get into such a situation. Thus to obey the second was to admit a transgression of the first, and Schatzi already suspected him—or pretended to; in practical effects there was no important difference between reality and appearance—of mishandling his contact with the 1209th, either foolishly or from a motive of treason.

  If, on the other hand, Lichenko had been planted on him—had they nothing better to do than keep him under surveillance? It was a preposterous idea. Still, since that first morning Lichenko had been sullen and unresponsive, lurking in the bathroom when Schild was home and going through his belongings when he was away: a pair of OD socks left separate in the footlocker tray had been united in a neat ball some time between breakfast and lunch. Fortunately, Schild had long been in the habit of destroying his letters—not that he received many; he had luckily cut off from Waslow when he went underground, Waslow who was not long afterwards expelled as an infantile leftist when he resisted the change of line from hard to soft vis-à-vis the bourgeois democracies; but he occasionally got communications from his sister, who typically had not only again changed husbands but again swapped gods, with the end of the war conceiving a perverse attraction towards the doctrine of Jung, whom she suggested Nathan visit, as long as he was stationed in Germany. Jung, the anti-Semite.

  And then Lichenko’s queer behavior over the chessboard. His visible emotions while playing could only be called ferocious; he groaned cavernously at momentary setbacks, howled at each little triumph, and upon the general victory—which he was never long in gaining, for Schild was not only an inferior player at best but would have been almost afraid in these circumstances to be a good one—Lichenko became most invidious, arrogantly shoving the board across the table like a dirty cafeteria plate and rising to swagger about the room on hard heels.

  Lichenko’s larger game was surely something more than chess, and unpleasant as it was to think that in this, too, they were adversaries, to that degree the mind would not accept another possibility. As to the heart: it could not endure a second enemy among the two men with whom he held a common purpose. Whatever Lichenko’s menace, Schild forgave him for it.

  Why should a citizen of the United States of America be a Communist?, thought Lichenko, all itchy again, a quarter-hour after his fourth bath in as many days. He felt large lice loping on his back. Off came the tunic. Spine presented to mirror. Not a beast in view. Imagination. They would leave that final place when he next wore a civilian shirt, even a dirty civilian shirt, even a lice-infested civilian shirt. Did the old holy men really wear hairshirts? What then was their lie? Surely a truth was what you gave for it. Yet everyone, and from what he could see, particularly the big-spenders of belief, had their lie. Believe in very little, said his mother, and your disappointments will be as small. This had seemed funny to him when he was ten but had grown more grave with age. Old people know more than they can tell directly. His mother then had not been old in years, but some people are born old. He had seen many a baby of whom, if you squinted your eyes, you could get a picture as an old man with cap and pipe, taking the sun in the park.

  As he returned from the bathroom, the German woman moved correctly down the hall, as if on little wheels. Sluts walk so, being so large between the legs that their organs would fall out if they took long steps. You see! he grinned silently at her back, there’s no need to be so grand! Next time you pass, Vasya’s fingers will pinch your bottom!

  He had never, in his belly, believed in the existence of foreign Communists—Communists where the Bolsheviks were not in power? No sense to that. Besides, foreign comrades were not taken seriously even by Soviet Party members, as he knew from his brother. The largest Party outside the USSR, the German C.P., had been puffed out like a match when Hitler arrived. And as to the Americans, hahaha! Who already owning an automobile, a ten-room apartment, a motion-picture projector, short-wave radio, and probably an airplane, became a Communist? Lichenko knew so much about America, had had so many fantasies about it, he oftentimes forgot that he had never been there and rather owed his data to the Soviet news agency’s New York correspondent, whose dispatches he of course translated in reverse. Thus: the American worker lived like an emperor, and there was no U.S. Communist Party.

  Since moving into Schild’s billet Lichenko suspected he had been wrong about the latter. After all, the Bolsheviks had not always held power in his own country; everything started somewhere; if necessary, before one�
��s own birth. The old czars, he believed despite his mother’s testimony to the contrary, had not been first-rate people. The last one, he understood despite the Bolsheviks’ like opinion, had no culture and was ruled by a woman herself the instrument of a corrupt monk. Therefore the Communists: who had begun as a small, weak band of, he supposed, idealists and martyrs—except that Stalin, even that early, committed armed robbery for the furtherance of his ideals; and no sooner had they kicked out the czar and won the Revolution than Lenin and Trotsky slaughtered the Kronstadt sailors who had helped them.

  Perhaps there could be American Communists, for Nathan Schild seemed to be one: who else would consistently praise the Soviet Union while finding fault with his own country? A normal man bragged of his motherland even if he detested its superstructure, as did Lichenko, because there was a personal pride that took no account of politics. And some of the things Schild claimed to believe: that the Moscow treason trials were genuine trials and concerned with real treason—he was either a lunatic or a Communist.

  More likely, both. For what Lichenko would never believe was that a gentle, generous, sweet man like Nathan could, in his right mind, give allegiance to a pack of murderers. On the counsel of his affection for him, then—the heart does not lie—he did not abandon his plan to defect to the West, but added to it a finer purpose: he would also save Nathan. It would be a finer game now, with rewards or disasters of greater magnitude, but the very irony of his situation—leave it to Vasya to choose as cover the one Communist in a division of Americans!—contributed to his courage.

  Back in the room, he thought he might permit himself another tubbing. Immersed, he could cogitate better than in the liberty of the bedroom. He still had no concrete plan. Time grew no longer. The NKVD would have had his name for three days; perhaps they had already traced him as far as the house party. And as yet he had not found the propitious moment to begin his labor of truth and love with Nathan. The trouble was, these considerations made for anxiety, which was assuaged only in the bathtub’s warm wet trough.

  But he could not go now. There, he saw from behind the curtains, came Nathan with lunch, and an excellent lunch it was, although Nathan never gave it any importance. Indifference to the material conditions of life must be unique with American Communists. Certainly it was unknown to the Russian Party! This handsome house, for example, which Nathan treated as if it were a pigsty.

  Lichenko knelt and worked out a cigarette butt embedded in a bedside circle of rug mangy with other burns. The Red Army destroyed many things but nothing that could be put to use. However, reason was a crime for which no American would ever be shot. Was it a matter of distance? Three thousand miles away. You could talk all you wanted about the universal force of gravity, the iron ball and the feather dropped from the same height hitting the ground together. Just try it: by the time the feather comes to rest the iron will be a ball of rust. So with an elephant and an ant. Density, not volume and weight. So with an American; try as you may to drop him, it will be a launching. Lichenko had been a mediocre student of physics in the Kharkov technical school and insensible at the time to its multifold uses.

  CHAPTER 9

  ON HIS WAY TO WORK the morning after the party, Reinhart strolled down Very’s way. An irregular blob of olive-drab descending her porch was soon fashioned by his eyes into her form, but as it came towards him on the sidewalk he saw it was not Very but her antithesis: the lieutenant who took in drunken Russians.

  He was rather shorter than the evening before and indefinably seedy, with dust on his glasses; yet he had a more assured address, hard and bright. He was the kind of Jew before whom Reinhart felt very vulnerable, as if somewhere back he had done him a dirtiness which he, himself, did not remember but the Jew never forgot. He felt this while knowing it was not true, for not only had he not done them wrong: he had never done them anything one way or the other. None of his best friends were Jews. The species was unknown in his home town, which had no foreigners—just another reason for its unspeakable dreariness. At college there were some, who had their own fraternity and seemed to go around en bloc, occasionally sitting next to one in classes, where they were usually witty and always clever; and some girls as well, who were either remarkably beautiful or characteristically ugly, never plain, and it was a pity the lovely ones were off-limits—there had been a girl, forever enrolled on his list of classics, with sable hair, alabaster nose, cheeks of white iris, and an exquisite name, Esther Rosewater, which he used to say underbreath when she passed oblivious, Esther Rosewater, how I love you, Esther Rosewater; she made him weak in the knees, and never knew it. For that was the other thing about Jews; when they weren’t eying you with suspicion, they never saw you at all.

  As to this lieutenant, Reinhart thought: I could break him in two. At the same time, he was vaguely afraid of him.

  Badly returning Reinhart’s salute—his fingertips not quite making it to the inferior rim of his spectacles—the lieutenant referred briefly to their mission of the night before. He had found upon awakening that Miss Leary had dropped a comb in his rooms, and he had just returned it. Palpably of small value but it was her property and women care about such things, don’t they?, smiling in the condescending conspiracy of the males. He could have been lying. Reinhart, who was unusually observant, remembered no loss. Yet losses remembered are hardly losses; moreover, an officer, unlike a noncom, had little reason to dissemble in courting a nurse.

  “Was Miss Leary in?”

  “No, I left it with her roommate.”

  “What’s her name, by the way?”

  But Schild didn’t know and cared enough only to ask: “Don’t you know? Isn’t Lieutenant Leary your girl?”

  Reinhart had a tendency to toss the ball to his superiors, to tell an excess of truth that would confront them with the damning fact of their authority. When he said sorrowfully “How can she be?” the lieutenant’s response confirmed him. He, the officer, showed not only understanding but sympathy.

  “I have no objections, certainly.”

  Now it was his apparent approbation that made Reinhart uneasy. He would have preferred to leave while he was ahead, but the lieutenant hung on, walking with him towards the administration building.

  “The Russian—did he recover all right? He was a crazy little fellow. Sometimes I think all Russians are mad, or is that Communism in action? Have you seen what they did in Wannsee?”

  He fancied that with his first word the lieutenant had shot an angry look: of course, one’s big mouth had not considered that he might be a Russian Jew. Then, too, he had earlier observed that any mention of Russians not obvious praise never sat well with “liberals,” and he would have bet his duffel bag, with all its souvenirs, that his companion belonged to that breed. He had, therefore, found his weakness; he no longer felt gauche; he could not help falling before the temptation.

  “No one who hasn’t seen them would believe what a bunch of dirty tramps the Russians are. When we came in on the autobahn and met that crew, we thought first they were slave laborers for the Germans, and then service forces, maybe. But no, they were the cream of the combat troops.”

  He saw pure hate through the lieutenant’s glasses—or was it agony?—the eyes were all watery.

  The hell with him. He was not an officer in the 1209th, and you couldn’t be court-martialed for an honest description of what you, and no doubt he as well, had seen. Everyone had his own chauvinism, the sacred affiliation that he would not suffer to be questioned, let alone criticized. And how disgustingly stupid, for, in this case, was it not their very uncouthness that made the Russians’ victory all the more remarkable?

  So he said something to that effect, but even then the lieutenant’s manner did not improve, and since by that time they had arrived in the front hall of headquarters, they parted coolly, no salute being necessary under a roof.

  “Goot morning, a very nice day ve are hoffing!”

  Trudchen sat blooming behind Pound’s big, messy desk against
the forward wall, except that it was not messy but rather a place of truly stacked papers, dustless, and with a little bouquet of yellow pansies in a jam jar. On his own desk, similarly impeccable, was a pink rose. She was already flying her own colors.

  “You are surprised, yes?”

  Right, but his habit was never to show it. He thought, for the first time, that she might be uncomfortable to have around.

  She arose and came towards him, the thick sweater, unbuttoned, swaying in its two parts equivalent to the braids.

  “You see, I work for no payment until the opplication is officially opproved. But I also cannot eat at the mess until that time. Perhaps you can bring me somesing at lunchtime.”

  Reinhart tucked his cap under the belt and drifted into his chair.

  “What age did you put down?”

  “Eighteen.”

  “And they believed it?”

  “Oh, vy not. It is only two years a lie!”

  Sixteen—even those tender years seemed too many, but they did put her under the wire. Through her sweater halves he saw soft little breasts, very round, under the crocheted shirt. She was the kind of girl who in a movie would be asked by the hero, do you really need those glasses? No, she would say and fling them away forever. But Reinhart rather liked spectacles on a pretty girl; they were vulnerable-making, sexy.