Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  “So kind,” she cried, smiling-through-tears. “Do you care for my shoes? I have yesterday traded them with the chocolate you gave me.”

  “Fabelhaft!” He stood behind her, hands lightly riding her narrow shoulders, eyes descending into the sweet crevasse of the pectoral range, very clear through the thin cloud of blouse.

  “And I have somesing for you,” she said, “so you will not think so bad of this little Germany.”

  From the drawer she withdrew a handbill of cheap European paper, weightless, the color and grain of whole-wheat bread, infamously inked. All he could read from where he stood was a headline: ES LEBE MENSCHLICHKEIT!

  “Proclamation of the Resistance,” she crooned victoriously. “I have found it in this very room, in the carton-boxes. Perhaps this selfsame room in which we sit was nothing but head-quarters!”

  Long Live Humanity!, no doubt to be understood in the sense of Hitler’s Peace, a peculiar German cruelty. He received her greatest whopper with an enervation so profound as to be almost pity.

  “Trudchen, I can read German...” he groaned, his hands rising heavily from her shoulders and more heavily returning.

  “Then read!” she screamed, turning in frenzy, and his left hand traveled into her blouse at the open neck and down the breasts’ warm canyon. Her mouth, open throughout the quick transformations of fury, fear, awe, and finally, madness, rose to his neck like the sucker of a great vampire fish surfacing from the depths of the sea, fastening to the elbow of his windpipe, so that, prohibited from breathing he fisted a tail of blonde hair and pulled as if to sever her head from the shoulders. In a moment his large right arm proved stronger than small-girl lips; he had her loose and held her gaping, an interval for bullying mastery, and then turned her, brought her forward and up, the nether hand taking a purchase within her fat furrow, hot beneath cool cloth, and carried her to cover the light snow of tobacco grains on Pound’s clean desk.

  He had come so far in what had seemed desperate comedy, as in school when the kids steal your cap and you tolerate their passing it just out of reach until the smallest boy is the bearer and you engulf and batter him to the point at which his incipient grief takes the laugh off you. But Trudchen now had fear least of all, and laughed, herself, as one does whose will is consonant with the world’s; the little witch’s face in a garish disorder of evil, yet her odor was childlike, of soap.

  In endless pursuit of pride, then, he became fastidious, working his way through the jungle of queer fasteners and ribbons, and the three buttons which at the crucial junction of her parts secured the last guardian triangle of doveskin fabric, beaching finally upon a little round belly incapable of further discovery.

  The key in the devil’s lock, entrez monsieur, enchanté de faire votre connaissance, excruciating, pain, pain, pleasure—well into that groove of unification where the senses are harnessed towards a single fanatical end, his suddenly lost purpose. Ah, it was all so crazy. A small window broke the wall above Pound’s desk, high above—standing at full height Reinhart could just frame his face in it—and absurd, fit only for some lazy postman on stilts to pass a parcel in from the outside, to save a trip through the labyrinth. It was from this glass that he got an immaterial signal into the corner of the eye, and as if to breathe and moisten the throat, he straightened and turned his head, saw close up to the pane the feathered neck of a man who wanted a barber, Pound’s; beyond and lower, a face like a contour map of an asteroid, ripped and pitted by hot chips flying off Jupiter; two had by accident embedded collaterally and, still smoking, were eyes: ostensibly directed at Pound, but seeing him, knowing him and what he was at, not caring, not even amused, but knowing. The old German, now named: Sweetheart. In exchange for the typewriter he presented a thick wad of notes. Pound buttoned them in an upper pocket and, one-breasted like an Amazon, vanished.

  “Mein Tiger!” whispered Trudchen. Looking down, melting, Reinhart felt rather than saw he had unwittingly been a success. He had also forgotten all precautions, and swift through his mind like an Army documentary ran the series of awful upshots.

  “Ach,” said Trudchen, yet hypersensitive, opposing partition, “I have taken care...” Not knowing to what she referred, he accepted her assurance.

  Crumpled in her fist, the old handbill, taken in surprise like everything else, was still their partner. He tore it from her and read the first line below the bold title, read it twice as with his unoccupied hand he returned himself to order. It did not change: “The appeal of Hitlerism is to the eternal Schweinhund in man.” Of course it was anti-Nazi; no matter by whom or where, it had been produced in honor and conscience and at cost, and its anonymous author, if he had eluded his compatriot enemies, had lived perhaps only to drown in the same foreign flood that swamped them.

  He kissed her, long and exploratory, for the first time, and saying “Ah, I must be crazy, anyone could have walked in,” he burst away, she moaning in the sudden isolation. He ran through the French window and around the corner, and saw that Schatzi had not, because of his heavy burden, got farther than the public sidewalk.

  Schatzi accepted the inevitable cigarette and slipped it between his ear and the drooping rim of the workman’s cap that with neckerchief and soiled jacket and weary trousers formed his present costume, which he would surely have had trouble in selling to a naked man.

  “Do you need some conversation?” he asked, with a tremble of his nose, “or is it simply generosity? Excuse my lack of strength.”

  He placed the typewriter upon the octagonal stones of the sidewalk. No sooner was it done than a woman rode by on the adjacent bicycle path and they felt the slipstream of her passing.

  “Into the mechanism no doubt this blew some sand,” said Schatzi, his voice like a dumping of gravel. “So much longer to clean!” He elevated his hands in a Jewish shrug, and while the right one was up, put out a finger and ran it across his upper lip, making a gargoyle mouth.

  Seeing him now in reality and close-up, Reinhart could not doubt his girl friends’ tales were true: if Schatzi were not from the concentration camp, then that establishment was illusion. True, he was more than mere skin, but give an unfilled pelt a few months’ meals and you would have Schatzi. He lived, but just lived and no more, with not one breath beyond the essential. His face was dreadful, romantically hideous, in the ugliness only supreme virtue permits, perhaps creates, as with the old saints; and though his angles were sharp, his constant tremble blurred and made them remote.

  Confronted with this overwhelming authenticity, Reinhart on the instant forgot his purpose and, instead of speaking, sent a grin. He watched Schatzi catch it, warp it with the secret they shared, and send it back.

  “Your breathing is labored,” he said. “Exercise shortens the span of life. He lives most long who lies in one place without movement, like a piece of warm bacon, all his life long, ja?”

  “I never thought of that,” answered Reinhart. It seemed so marvelously reasonable; he put from his mind the obvious reference to the tumble with Trudchen and worried about the years gone in nailing down his coffin with a barbell. He had never before talked with an authority on mortality—who yet, he saw with a happy loss of trepidation, was also a human being, whose smile was only superficially diabolic.

  For a great sweetness was exuded by Schatzi’s hard person as he suddenly stared into Reinhart’s face and said: “You wish to send me on a qvest, ja? She told me, this little piece of sausage, this Gretchen—”

  “Trudchen.”

  “So. You search for your kinfolk—this is correct, ‘kinfolk’ or simply ‘kin’?”

  So close was he, perhaps by reason of defective hearing, he almost climbed Reinhart’s frame. It was disconcerting, especially since Reinhart judged from his clothing that he must stink and drew always away, until on the fifth circle of their patch of walk he envisioned how from a distance their two figures must look in revolution and permitted himself to be captured. He had been quite wrong: Schatzi put forth the distinct odor of
eau-de-cologne.

  “Wwwwell,” said Schatzi, “you have come to the right potty. Ve vill”—successful pronunciation of the first w satisfied him in perpetuity—“simply look for all the Reinharts who are not yet dead and there you are!” He actually winked, which is to say one eye was swallowed whole by the lids, like a ravenous bird ingesting a black cherry.

  Impossible to think the concentration camps had not been serious; therefore what Reinhart saw before him now was the human triumph, a wit which had faced the dreadful and survived, no cloistered humor like his own. He himself was suffering depression, feeling wet and dirty and unusually exposed, and indeed, since Schatzi had taken the initiative he was no longer interested in his own mission.

  “I don’t want to remind you of your troubles,” he said, though of course he did, “but would you say the concentration camp was the worst thing that could be imagined?”

  If Schatzi had earlier been ebullient, he now went into a positive delight that Reinhart, because he had no experience of the world, found very grisly.

  “Ah, no, no, not the worst! The worst, my young friend, is to die. Just that simple. Two added to two makes four, always. The living and the dying, and nothing else, makes ray-oll-ity.”

  So Reinhart, conscious it was asinine but getting no other suggestions, gave him another cigarette. Which went behind the other ear.

  “Now you must tell me an answer,” Schatzi said. “Why must you find these relatives? Of course,” he went on before Reinhart could speak, “to help them. You Amis are a decent lot. You do not become happy to see anyone starve, let by themselves relations of blood, ja? This gives one faith for the future of the world in your hands.”

  Hard as Reinhart looked among the rocks which clicked together in Schatzi’s voice, he could find no insincerity, therefore he stifled the impulse to say “Horseshit!” He had at last, there could be no mistake this time, found the man with a right to say anything and it be valid. Not even Bach and not even Lori, not even when he had learned their truth, had so impressed him.

  “I’d think you would hate the Germans.”

  “I hate them? My friend, I am myself a German.” Saying which Schatzi bent to the typewriter, on the way down adjusting his cap, the crown of which was dark with oil. Someone had borrowed his tie to hang a felon and returned it with a frozen knot that would never undo; no doubt he had it wired to his collar or to that frail armature on which his pennyworth of skin was hung.

  A marvel that he could pick up such a weight. Reinhart moved to aid him but was waved off.

  “But one detail—”

  “Of course.” In this regard Reinhart never admitted another as master. He produced his wallet and counted off five hundred-mark notes, fifty dollars, from the wad of five thousand which Marsala had got from a Russian soldier for Reinhart’s graduation watch.

  “I didn’t mean you to do this for nothing.”

  “Now,” said Schatzi, “you have shamed me with your generosity. Ray-olly, I cannot—” He drew from his pocket a brilliant blue handkerchief and snorted into it, thin and airy like a fife badly played. He took the money. “This is not what I purposed to say—which at any pace, I have now forgotten.”

  Reinhart watched him go down the walk with his burden. Twenty feet away, he turned and shouted, “You shall hear of me!” And then he moved off the pavement into the trees, where he spat fiercely and vanished.

  Reinhart had neglected to give him his grandfather’s name! Hot on the trail he ran, through the patch of forest to the wide prospect of Argentinische Allee, and surveyed the feasible directions. But Schatzi was gone.

  CHAPTER 13

  SCHILD’S FATHER’S BUSINESS WAS concerned with buttons—well, you know how capitalism works on the petty levels, he neither made them nor used them, but stood in the middle between maker and user, collecting a profit.

  Lichenko, however, did not know these things, which was why he asked. He was especially interested in the money: were the earnings large from such a trade?

  “He never thought so,” said Schild, “But they were considerably better than working-class wages.” His smile was both bitter and genial—the first towards the distasteful topic; the second for Lichenko, to whose will he was now committed.

  “Oh, but the workers, we will not speak of them,” Lichenko said contemptuously. “You surely are of a superior class.” This was the kind of thing he had been saying, in one way or another, for three days, and Schild could not yet gauge the degree of its subtlety.

  Lichenko closed his eyes now and breathed profoundly, as if he were falling off. Sometimes he did; sometimes, after the same indications, not. The game hinged on whether or not Schild rose to go: if he did, Lichenko awakened; if he did not, Lichenko slept.

  The bed was a chaos of stale sheets decorated with brown blood and streaks of St. George’s iodine salve. Lichenko had not left it since they laid him there on the night of the beating. Not that he had been seriously hurt: his actual wounds—a slash of the cheek, an abrasion of the lower lip—had, after the excitement was done, proved superficial. The rest were bruises, ugly, indigo-and-lavender, but bruises, and had already begun to pale under the application of St. George’s paste. And he had been struck only in the face, so that his body was as sound as ever and could have no special need for this perpetual pillowing.

  Yet there he lay, sometimes straight and stiff as a corpse, suppressing breath; sometimes curled like a foetus, in which position he made bubbly noises; sometimes with limbs wanton and torn mouth wearing a wan, roguish smile, as if he had dropped there exhausted from a saturnalia.

  Schild felt towards him a strange, new emotion: not, as in the case of Schatzi, loathing compounded of fear and envy, and certainly not the fierce hatred which was the sudden motive for the beating—indeed, the latter had been transformed in his memory to a distant episode involving two strangers who bore no resemblance to the Lichenko and the self he knew. Rather, this strange new feeling was the sad, sour regret of a father towards an offspring he can neither endure nor discard. He would have liked, in a moment when his own back was turned, to have had him obliterated in some bloodless, painless fashion, with no noise.

  His blows had pierced the mask. He at last faced that issue he had hitherto obscured with romantic moralizing. Lichenko had originally stayed on at the billet to grovel in comfort like a pig in a slough, although admittedly deserved. But the fact of his second breach of peace indicated not all of him had yet gone soft. The fine, progressive elements in his conscience had rebelled against the ease, not with sufficient force to carry him back to duty, but at least enough to generate a protest, which appropriately had been directed towards the German woman. At that point a deft understanding might have restored him to manhood. Instead, Schild had pushed him back again, perhaps forever beyond redemption.

  But in destroying him, he had also cemented Lichenko to himself. If his earlier hosthood, which he recognized as having been too permissive, owed to simple courtesy, it had since the beating become a nurseship, bonded by the obligations of guilt and limited by nothing. He found it ethically impossible even to object when Lichenko, who certainly could walk as well as ever, preferred the bedpan to the bathroom, and that only when transported by Schild—he would not suffer the Hausfrau in the room. Although at other times he showed great facility in bed-positions—the ass mountain, the pretzel, the scissors, the beached fish, the dismembered Osiris, the solipsist ostrich—at mealtime Lichenko would not elevate from absolute supine, so that there was nothing to do but spoon-feed him like an infant. His back itched fiercely every quarter-hour and would admit no cure but the application of Schild’s hairbrush, wielded by Schild, to the trough of his spine.

  The problem of washing, which offended Schild most, even more than the bedpan, had been rather more simply resolved: Lichenko left it behind when he took to invalidism. A person, he believed, did not get dirty in bed. With the passing of the days, his decision seemed less fortunate. After three, in a room from which L
ichenko also had decided to bar fresh air on the ground that in his weakened condition he might contract a disease of the lungs, Schild had ceased to dread, might even in two more days have come to yearn, the call for soap and water.

  Naturally, a man in sickbed needed recreation. Lichenko required an oral reading of each day’s Stars and Stripes, first in the original—so that he could “study English”—and then in German translation. The comics were to be read with full gesture and if possible in voices simulating the spirit and sex of each character, especially the female ones, like Miss Lace and Daisy Mae, to whom it was impossible to give credence if they spoke in baritone. Furthermore, it was cruelly difficult to understand the narrative without a sense of what had gone before—before, that is, Lichenko had come West—synopses must be furnished, and definitions. For example, who really was Skeezix? A typical American? A character to identify with, or one to hold in secret contempt? He insisted grimly on secret: one was not so stupid as to think you could sneer openly at a feature of an official Army publication.

  After the reading came the cards—he claimed to be too weak nowadays for chess—which Lichenko scattered across the foul sheets in Russian arrangements, for games that three hours hence Schild would savvy no better than at the outset except to know he was loser and must pay, the fee being invariably fifty marks, arrived at by a computation as exotic as the game.

  Nursing his patient of course demanded more time than Schild’s Army duties would allow, and no one was quicker to see this than St. George, as soon as the morning after the beating.

  “Oh Nate,” he said, looking away, for he could not have met Schild’s eye with anything but reproach, and he was the soul of tolerance, “Nate, take a few days off to look after the little fellow.”

  Conjure with this: a captain of Intelligence, the commanding officer of a unit of the United States Army, a career officer—he still had never inquired why Lichenko was a guest in the first place. One kind of charge placed against the revolutionary by the voices of petrifaction, was arrogance: ‘He asks us to believe that he, and he alone, knows the Way, and if we do not admit this, he will not admit that we are fellow human beings.’ Schild had read that somewhere long ago, had banned its source from his memory—very likely some renegade, they were always eloquent; of course if he wished he read them, too, he was no Catholic with an Index—but afterwards carried its indictment with him, like a pocket rule, speaking to it on occasion: You talk of arrogance, you, in your arrogant assumption that we suppress all doubt; we at least have the humility to abandon our selves.