Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  It was then, when he thought of Milton, though dead, though discredited, though renegade, as someone still to be taken into account, that Schild realized his sole defense against insanity was the Party. The acceptance of one’s own complicity in the Party’s crimes was the only escape from knowing oneself a criminal. Fate leads the willing and drags the unwilling by the neck: ostensibly Greek, but how much closer to the long, moaning servitude of the Jews, with whom in the end Milton chose to identify.

  For he had written Schild one letter from Spain, a strange letter, in the early spring of ’37. Strange even for Milton, who was more talker than writer—“like Sophocles, Jesus of Nazareth, and Hitler,” as he used to say in his Bren-gun voice and then stop to catch breath before throwing it away again, eyes rising through an atmosphere of mixed slyness and purity, “all seekers of oral gratification; you will notice none of us smoked. O vanitas!”—and hence never wrote proper letters but rather short scrawls discontinuous in thought and calligraphy, on whatever surface lay at hand and could be mailed, cigarette packages, cereal boxtops, the reverse of one’s own note to him; and in Spain, until now, no letters at all.

  This one was pencil, on an unbleached, glazed strip, serrated across the midsection, of—Spanish toilet paper. “If I should not be at large by next Yom Kippur, read this.” On the religious holidays in New York, Milton’s observance was, dragging Schild along, to go to some lunch counter and stuff himself with pork; his ambition at twenty had been to lay a girl between afternoon and evening prayers on the Day of Atonement; he had never yet done this, he said, because he could not determine which was the greater sin, to screw a Jewish girl or to commit racial shame with a shiksah, for which he used the Nazi term Rassenschande. Once on that day, sitting on a bench in the middle island of Broadway, watching the promenaders in their best clothes, he said: “When at last the Messiah comes, he will be an anti-Semite.”

  The letter therefore fell within the known context, had besides the familiar mordant-shading-into-mortuary wit, the Galgenhumorische pun like Mercutio’s: if I should not be at large, that is, if I should not be a gross Mann; he anticipated his death. Then followed a translated quotation from a Hebrew religious poem of the eleventh century. He had returned to God. Small wonder he could not have made that candid.

  But an old mutual admiration of theirs had been Poe’s “Purloined Letter” and Dupin’s theory of deception, which he explains by a game of puzzles played upon a map. One player requires his opponent to find the name of a certain town. A novice will invariably choose the “most minutely lettered names; but the adept selects such words as stretch, in large characters, from one end of the chart to the other. These, like the over-largely lettered signs and placards of the street, escape observation by being excessively obvious.”

  It was a faith that Milton spoke of, but rather one lost than another gained:

  ... thou didst vouchsafe to give me a perfect creed, to believe that thou art the God of Truth and thy prophets are true, and when thou didst not place my portion among those who rise up and rebel against thee; among the foolish people who blaspheme thy name; who deride thy law; chide thy servants, and deny the truth of thy prophets. They assume innocence, but underneath is deceit; they make a show of a pure and clean soul, whilst the bright spots of the leper are concealed underneath... SOLOMON BEN GABIROL, died Valencia, c. 1057

  Lichenko stayed. To keep him was to abet a desertion from the Soviet Union. To turn him in was an admission that the hideous sacrifices which had gone into his making were not finally criminal, but useless. Milton had never been able to forgive a confusion of the two.

  CHAPTER 14

  LICHENKO STAYED. AND IN that staying Schild ironically discovered a focus for that energy he had ever kept on call against the grand mission. For he was, or had been, a romantic, a man to whom time now and past were ancillary to time’s end, and while he saw history as a continuous process and within that process himself as nothing, with the other eye he looked on the personal life as a series of choices culminating in an absolute, a supreme of either victory or martyrdom, a storming of some Winter Palace or a fell day like that in 1933 when the Gestapo was unleashed on the German Communist Party.

  Instead, his future had arrived in the form of—Lichenko; and time had stopped. Schatzi, who for all his shrewdness had not known of Lichenko until the beating, for all his eccentricity was a good Communist and had made his report; and what he, for all his hatefulness yet a hero of the camps, thought of the newest traitor did not figure in Schild’s reveries so markedly as that Schatzi’s long-held, unjust, fantastic suspicions of him had been confirmed and, finally, that, for the first time personally liable for an actual crime, he felt less guilt than serenity and lacked absolutely the sense of being hunted.

  And most corrupt, his sense of humor had despite his efforts to brook it begun to prevail over the conscience. Lichenko’s invalidism had required only his attendance to be supremely ludicrous—to be, in fact, lunatic. Objectively the situation was simply a Russian slob nursed by a nervous Jew; the first was not ill, but the second was; and since each in his present arrangement was necessary to the other in just that condition, both were mad.

  Or perhaps only Schild was, for he noticed that Lichenko these days never laughed; indeed, since entering into permanent bed, and despite his abominable appearance, he had developed a dignified gravity which one who knew only the earlier Lichenko would have believed impossible. One lunchtime when, carrying the loaded tray and an under-arm burden of newspapers and magazines, Schild had difficulty at the door, Lichenko sprang from the sheets to his relief, showing not only vigor but incredible strength for so small a man: he took the heavy tray in one hand and the papers in the other and, studying Life’s cover tit-girl as he went, walked silently, stately, to the bed as if it were the high altar in St. Basil’s and he Patriarch; and immediately upon reclining was again the man so infirm that Schild must needs not only spoon the mashed potatoes into his mouth but also support his head simultaneously. Lunacy, to be sure, but Lichenko’s were not so much the doings of a lunatic—Schild realized, as he heard himself laughing without accompaniment from his patient—as those of a sane man who is humoring a lunatic.

  Similarly, Lichenko of an evening had invented a new amusement. He had fallen off his taste for public reading and even for cards. As to the former, he had been disillusioned by the knowledge that Skeezix lived in time, more or less relative to the limited days of actual people, had years ago at the beginning of the story been a baby, was now in his twenties, would grow old. Since fictional persons are a lie to begin with, he said, they are only interesting if they stick to it and do not pretend to have the dull troubles of real people; otherwise you did better to have true stories, which of course are always boring but then don’t pretend not to be. Like—he broke off to peer at Schild in a kind of suspicion and remark that it was possible he, Schild, would not agree, and immediately launched an attack on L’il Abner from the opposing ground: nobody could tell him an American peasant acted in that fashion.

  As to the cards, it was immoral to win from a man ignorant of the game; had he known that at the outset he would not have played; he might even return the winnings, as he was not a gengster, unless—again he stopped abruptly as if to give prominence to his expression, which was this time a sneer; one so broad, however, that surely its purpose was rather mock than serious. And again Schild laughed, and again Lichenko’s face returned to wood.

  Conversation appeared as the new entertainment. It was hardly more, being Lichenko’s questions and Schild’s answers; but it was not less, and since Schild had never known speech could be employed for amusement, at least not by him—he had listened to Milton; in both the Party and the Army the human sound was used only to assent to orders from above and command what lay below; to St. George it was the minimum of small-talk to get rid of him; his parents and sister had been great talkers in disregard of the defenseless tympanum, which was why he was not—since his voice h
ad no resonance in this small room with the peaked ceiling which in the corners joined the wall a scant five feet above the floor, crowded with furniture and now with the warm congestion of dependent humanity; although Lichenko was not ill, it did make a difference to him that Schild was there to serve—these were reasons enough, if still morally inadmissible, why he should enjoy their mutual discourse.

  But more important was the fact that after the initial ten minutes at Lovett’s they had never really talked. An ordinary citizen of the Soviet Union, that person who to an American existed only in theory, he had had one under his roof for three weeks and never yet found the propitious moment to ask: what is it like, the experience of that citizenship? Indeed, to place the query was not only an opportunity but, in the present context, an obligation, just as in Party circles in America one was under the reverse imperative not to question the mysterious figures who were manifestly Russian but carried passports bearing names like T. Smith.

  Before the beating, Lichenko had obviously never been in the mood for talk; he had been eating, or sleeping, or washing, or scratching, or hanging over magazines or the chessboard; and that was the answer to the question never asked: there was no question about life in the USSR, it was life with incessant activity and without doubt, and even a deserter from it, one who could not meet its demands, yet carried with him its energy. In his very exploitation of Schild, Lichenko honored his society: a bourgeois gone bad would not have had the guts to go so far.

  As to the other question—why had he deserted?—the science of dialectics admitted no such concern; Schild was not permitted to receive it into his mind; a person was either this or that; if that, he should either be ignored or destroyed; the alternative, if one did neither of these, was to relate it to the fact that oneself was lost. And this Schild had already done.

  Now that conversation had finally come, it was appropriately on the theme of, not Lichenko, but Schild; not on the simple deserter but on the more complex; and Lichenko’s half of it was so shrewd that Schild briefly considered whether after all he had not been wrong about him.

  According to Schild’s wristwatch—which was strapped to Lichenko’s bony arm, having been the stake in one last game of cards before the no-gaming resolution went into effect—the time measured seven in the evening. The tray had been washed and lay gleaming on the dressertop, against next morning’s breakfast time when it would vanish briefly to reappear heavy with eggs, melting yellow in the centers, and oatmeal porridge slushed with milk and sugar; in the end compartment, two pieces of white bread, thick as bricks, coated so lavishly with golden butter you could not lift them without smearing your fingers, which was as pleasant a sensation as running your hands over a woman, and though he knew that with this abundance the Americans had developed a culture of eating—it was some old law or another that when there was overproduction on the one hand and a shortage of markets on the other, a society tried to fill the gap with elaborate manners—and while he approved of this whole lovely ensemble of errors, he could not forbear from licking his hands. And Nathan made no objection.

  That, indeed, was Schild’s reaction to all of life, so far as Lichenko could see, and he wondered again why a man with such tolerance would join a band of evil thugs whose only difference from the other group just defeated lay in the latter’s being German. Although there were German Communists, too, and surely many among them who were but lately Nazis, and wait and see if it was not exactly those who were raised to power in the East Sector. Ah, Nathan, you fool!, you who were rightly so quick to act when Vasya disgraced your house, in the big things you are truly like the silly comic strips you so dearly love to read. Look into the mirror and you will see the living Small Abner.

  Though not hurt (and it was an awful strain to continue to pretend he had been; actors justly earned higher wages than a fellow who operated a lathe); although in fantastically better physical condition than he had ever before enjoyed (for the first time he had hopes of one day becoming handsomely stout), the kind it was shameful to have to hide under a mock illness rather than announce with much noise and movement; in spite of the great rewards at hand and the greater ones in promise (if the United States proved but a vain dream, then perhaps merely some sleepy hamlet in the Black Forest and a German woman with a nice round ass and a little craft like decorating Christmas-tree ornaments, and a garden of cabbage and beets—if one lived too high he got only boils and the gout) ...despite every reason for being up and about, for seizing life and making it groan, he had instead chosen to play the sick hog. And it had begun to work.

  Nathan was a queer fish. For some reason he had buried his humanness so deep that one could bring it to the surface only by outraging him. Yet Lichenko had always known it was there, else he would not have taken the trouble to find it—and it was trouble, and Nathan was very lucky to have him. For now he had, at who could tell what final cost, at last established the conditions for that intimacy in which the truth could be aired.

  Seven o’clock, the good air outside the closed window, which he had not had in his nose for weeks, still bright and full of August. But Nathan had turned on the dresser lamp like the indoor man he was, and come to sit by the bed to await his, Vasya’s, pleasure. The room which had on first sight looked so grand that he assumed Nathan must share it with a regiment had truly become a home. With use, the very bedsheets, so white and hard when first entered, had softened and lost their harsh odor of bleach. Even Nathan’s sloppiness, which until the “illness” intervened he had constantly opposed, had worked to the homely purpose, the rug dark with scorchings, the rent in the curtains, the deep scratches of footboard and dresser-front catching the shadows like old scars on the faces of your loved ones. ...

  With a scissor-kick, as if in the water, he shot himself backwards, conking his skull on the headboard, which was not intentional but certainly claimed Nathan’s attention. Instantly his friend was up and arranging the pillow.

  “Are you hurt?”

  Could Nathan truly be as pained as he looked, at the possible hurt of another?

  “Ah, no!” Lichenko tried to joke. “The bedstead is undamaged!”

  He had got him there: Nathan fell back laughing. He himself of course did not, it being a kind of vulgarity to laugh at one’s own jokes, and instead, with serious mien, fixed the pillow from which Schild had puffed out all the good head-hollows.

  “Was für Knöpfe macht Ihr Vater?” he asked.

  Nathan could sit in a straight chair for hours without so much as crossing his legs, and he was thin, too, so that this ability owed nothing to the padding on his rump.

  “Oh, he doesn’t make the buttons. He buys them from a buttonmaker and sells them to a manufacturer of women’s dresses. If that’s confusing, don’t bother with it. Your country is mercifully free of the middleman.”

  Again Lichenko shot himself backward, but this time the pillow dulled the thud of his head hitting oak, and this time Schild did not rise, for simultaneously with the action away, Lichenko had shot his hand forward and asked: “What is that you say, free...?”

  “From the middleman.”

  “So.” The olive-drab undershirt, which with drawers of the same cloth, on loan from Schild, was his costume of illness, had with the movements ridden up and constricted about his narrow chest like a dog harness. “I should have told you earlier, my dear friend, I hear what is said, but between the words sometimes comes the swoosh of the rockets: ‘free’—swoosh—‘from the middleman’—swoosh, so that what goes into my mind is often different from what has been spoken. For example, I thought just now I heard you say someone was free in the Middle Ages.”

  “Haha,” laughed Nathan, but wryly. “Not being a Jesuit, I could hardly say that.”

  “Ah, again, another example: what I heard then was something about Jesus Christ! ...You see what I mean.” He threw his feet about under the bedclothes, which commotion looked as if a small animal were trapped there, and smiled helplessly.

  Just the thi
ng to replace Nathan’s nervousness with the responsibility of a job; he could never endure being misunderstood. It was a relief to see him break the stiff column of his spine as he leaned forward and said very slowly and with the enunciation of him who speaks into an ear trumpet: “Je-su-it—a religious order which invented a kind of fascism four hundred years before Mussolini.”

  “Of course I knew it was something old,” Lichenko answered. “But you see a hydraulic engineer does not have time to learn much beyond the principles of his science. I..., my dear friend, should you be angry if I confessed to a dishonesty?”

  Behind Schild’s genial facade he saw an emotion begin at the throat and descend—a giraffe would look like that if it swallowed a melon—either hatred or fear, since these were the only feelings a person might find politic not always to reveal, but which of these was here operative Lichenko could not say, there being no apparent reason for either. Wishing no lies to stand between them, he had prepared merely to admit he had not read the American books they discussed at Lovett’s party, so long as the truth was out that an engineering student had no spare time.

  Instead, he said quickly: “I borrowed another of your handkerchiefs while you were gone to the dining hall. I shall send you a dozen when I go—” For a moment he imagined he had heard himself continue with: “to America,” for suddenly that was where his fancy had fled, in just that wink of the eye he had seen himself at the handkerchief stall in a store big as a sports arena, had gone back further to park his yellow Ford at the curb outside. He wore a tight blue suit of narrow gray stripes and a black felt hat low over his brow; the woman at the counter believed him a suave but dangerous racketeer, a pearl-handled revolver encased in a silk glove, as he smiled with sharp white teeth and said “Enchanted,” or whatever was proper at such a moment, which he would know.