Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  Schild came to him and, bending over, grasped his left heel and toe.

  “I’ll pull and you pull, and off it comes. Ready?” Before he could answer, Nathan did his part unaccompanied; off it came and then the other.

  “Now,” said Schild, “we’ll just put these back into the cabinet where they can’t be scuffed. And the cap, too. You won’t want to get it full of lint.” He plucked it from Lichenko’s head and ran his elbow across it twice.

  “Don’t crush my cap,” Lichenko shouted.

  “Ah no, this is how they brush hats in the fine American stores.”

  “How am I to know that?”

  Seizing his hand, Schild brought him upright.

  “What you do know is that I have no reason to ruin it, nicht wahr? Therefore what I do must be to its advantage.” He looked very scholarly as he replaced the cap on the shelf. At the angle Lichenko saw that his glasses were covered with a film of dust and at least one fingerprint, distinct in oil.

  “Why don’t you clean your spectacles?” he shouted angrily. “You can’t see out of your own head!”

  Carefully, Schild unhooked the temple pieces from behind his ears, and painstakingly shined the lenses with the small end of his straw-colored necktie, which tonight as usual was twisted ahead of the larger.

  Lichenko turned aside, embarrassed by the naked face, saying: “You should not have done that to the captain.”

  “Then come,” Schild offered, the glasses yet in his fingers, “we shall go and apologize to him; I mean, we’ll go and I will apologize, and you can see his feelings haven’t been hurt.”

  “Oh, I’m sure of that.” He reached up under the tunic and drew his breeches from the crossbar of the hanger. No matter where he wandered hence he would never find another man so alert to his moods and purposes, but was that not the trouble?

  “Yes,” Schild reassured, “he is just a person. ... But whatever are you doing? You are ill, my friend, and must not worry about your uniform. As you can see I have taken good care of it. Look at the blouse—as clean and pressed as new, eh? And the medals—only yesterday I sponged the ribbons with gasoline. How bright their colors are! See the Order of the Red Banner—”

  Lichenko sidestepped him and struggled into the breeches. After the fly was fastened he could hardly get a hand into his pocket, so American had been three weeks of meals—and that, too, was the trouble. He withdrew a wad of marks and thrust them at Schild.

  “Here is payment for the underwear and handkerchiefs and whatever else I have taken, and also the winnings from the cards. You see, I cheated in those games—silly, no?, since I could have beaten you anyway, still I could not resist when it was so easy. But there you have it all back again.” He threw the bills upon the dresser.

  “Yes, the cards!” Schild said, desperately exuberant. “We’ll have a three-handed game of something and get old St. George—you’ll see he isn’t hurt in any way—and take his money. He’ll like that, he’ll do anything for company.”

  “As to your personal kindness,” Lichenko continued, reaching for his blouse, “there is no repaying that, not when one understands what kindness is, a thing which should make the giver feel good or he should not do it.” He said more as he crumpled the blouse over his head, but could not hear it, himself. He was so sick of himself he feared he might vomit on the very uniform whose smartness he also owed to Schild. He had learned in fifty seconds that cowardice may be a slow disease but is felt as an instant affliction, and comes more violently in rooms than on the fields of battle; at Kursk, when a Tiger tank broke rumbling and malignant through to their artillery position, he had leaped upon the deck and dropped a grenade down its throat; in gemütlich Zehlendorf he could not even stave off the insulting of a fool, much less tell the cold truth to a friend.

  “Come,” said Schild, who looked now as if he were drunk or, rather, pretending to be drunk and wild, in the manner of some honor student ostentatiously letting down his hair at the end of term. “St. George has a bottle...” He rolled his eyes in what he surely meant as license, but to Lichenko they suggested those of a horse gone mad with fright.

  Fright? Why should he be afraid, the one who wasn’t taking a risk? Or did his odd sympathy even extend to Lichenko’s future troubles in the great world outside?, where, after all, most people had had to struggle all their lives without his help. For the first time he was struck by Nathan’s incredible arrogance.

  He buckled on the wide dress belt and strung the breast strap through the epaulette on his right shoulder, and reached again for the boots, which Nathan still held.

  But Schild swung them behind his back, like a child, saying: “First let’s have that drink.”

  “No, Nathan, I am not fooling any more.” He took the boots from him and this time sat down upon the bed to pull them on. “I shall say goodbye to the captain but I want no drink.” He needed only three drops of spirits to fall unconscious; his head already felt like an electric-light bulb, hot, light, empty, fragile, and loose where it screwed onto his neck; a moment somewhere back he had discovered he was ironically and genuinely ill.

  “Goodbye?” asked Schild, his voice very ugly, so nasty it caught him up a bit, himself, and he pressed it out sweeter for the rest: “Where can you go?” He did not wait for a reply—being already in possession of all answers to all questions; indeed, it was mere courtesy that he had put the statement in the interrogative.

  “Almost anywhere but home,” said Lichenko, grinning weakly, trying to, at any rate, as his head slowly unscrewed and Schild’s image kaleidoscoped with the vivid colors of the hair-lotion bottles on the dressertop. Nevertheless his mind stayed clear.

  “You son of a bitch.”

  Nathan had spoken in English, that flat, nasal language in which nothing sounded either interesting or important; and so far as he could see him through the spinning, his expression followed suit. Lichenko grinned again, hard and acid, but this time within his own heart and on the terms of his own failure. In the end, how he had conducted himself did not matter, that was the funniness of it and also the horror; in the end, the great truths could not pass through the neck of the smallest one: you cannot stir the curiosity of a corpse.

  He would leave in a moment. As soon as he recovered his balance he would get his cap from the cabinet and walk through the door, down the stairs—the German woman, he reflected, handsome if too thin, would continue to go to seed—and stand upon the threshold, facing outward. One could hope the night was not windy; the world seemed larger when the wind blew, especially if the sky was dark and you could see so little that was permanent. Other persons feared lighting bolts, sunstroke, drowning, snakebites—he had always had fantasies of being blown away in a gale.

  In a moment... already he could feel the strength rising from somewhere down about his ankles, which were firm in the good old boots. You couldn’t beat boots, which would hold you erect when you were limp with exhaustion. He could not believe that the Americans, in their low shoes, had much endurance.

  After looking at him a long time in the same blank way, Nathan had suddenly turned towards the dresser lamp, seized the wad of Occupation marks, and begun to count. It would be an impressive sum, for what Lichenko had won in the cards from Schild were just a few negligible leaves around the fat core of the bonus he had been paid on the day of Lovett’s party. The regular pay, in rubles, was allegedly deposited at home against one’s return; these marks, intended to be spent in Germany, had on some guarantee of the Americans been printed wholesale and cost the Red Army nothing. They also, if he knew his bureaucrats and their ingenious scheme of allotments, were very likely all one would ever get in his hand. For him, of course, the matter was now academic.

  He would face the world with empty pockets and without a plan. This, he realized, in a chill about the kneecaps which was closer to a falling nerve than a rising strength, was absolute freedom.

  “Yes, Nathan, all of it is yours,” he said faintly, for part of him was in that state
of freedom while the rest held tenaciously to the here-and-now, and his voice was not strong enough to sound both places with the same volume. “Count it, keep it, spend it. Money is a good thing, especially for a person of your type.” He meant: it may not be grand or powerful, but it is human to know the price of beans.

  As if he had arrived at the total, Schild nodded to himself and rerolled the bills.

  “Thank you,” he said quietly. “We are quits. And now if you can spare a minute I must get St. George to come and say his Lebewohl.”

  “Lassen Sie sich Zeit,” Lichenko answered, “take your own good time.” He lay back across the bed and closed his eyes; he felt a small object drop upon his chest and separate like a broken egg; he heard Nathan leave the room. He would sleep a minute.

  “Well,” St. George had said to Schild, “I did wonder if he had permission to stay this long away from his company. I did think it was funny.” In his pajamas—his alternate set, of vertical green and white stripes—lipping an unlighted pipe, smelling of mouthwash, he stood sagging near his window just opened over the black-quiet yard. “But desertion! I hope you’re certain about that. Or rather, I hope you are wrong, because he is a nice fellow.” He anyway had to sleep the night on it.

  Schild neither slept nor tried to, nor could have said how he passed the hours of darkness, for they were too grievous small: a turn of the corridor and already the bathroom window was mother-of-pearl; another, and five o’clock had surely come. Silently he crept into St. George’s room and took up the wrist-watch from the bedside table, held the cold snake of its expansion bracelet: only four o’clock in Berlin’s delusive and too-early light. Nevertheless he woke the captain, who took his warnings with a face like a stale onion roll and at last rose, puffing and aged, to stuff himself into the uniform.

  “Boy oh boy,” said St. George when he was dressed. “Here’s a time I would give these bars to anyone who would take them. This is a lousy business I have to do, Nate. You should be glad you’re out of it.” He made a pot of his overseas cap and drew it on. “God knows what they’ll do to him. I don’t think Russia’s much of a place.”

  “But then you didn’t make the regulations, did you?” asked Schild, as he pressured him, without touching, to the door.

  “I guess that’s how to look at it.” With a foot into the hall, though, he recoiled and, whispering, brushed Schild’s ear with his earnest, bulbous nose: “But does he know yet?”

  Schild answered harsh: “Now I would hardly tell him.”

  He ate this thought like a caramel and, swallowing it, grimaced, and then going into a profound melancholy moved with heavy hump of shoulders towards the staircase.

  Within the hour two military policemen—Americans: Schild had somehow believed they would be Russian—came in tall, thin, and bored from the street, mounted the stair with drawn pistols on white lanyards... and soon descended supporting Lichenko between them, for, still in half-sleep, he could not walk erect and would not try to see with his eyes. Yet at the threshold he straightened, jerked his arms from captivity to fix his cap, said “Ladno!” the Russian okay, and walked unassisted in the new, barren day.

  St. George had not returned. His mouth metallic with want of rest, Schild mounted to the room which he had not seen since the evening before and in which he had not been alone for three weeks. Scattered across the bed he saw the roll of marks in the pattern in which it had burst when he threw it. He believed that he should burn them straightaway, but as he stooped to the gathering the door downstairs made its sound and he was hailed by a raucous American voice.

  The taller MP stood wide-legged and screamed up the stairwell: “Lootenant, did that fuckin’ Communist steal your wrist-watch? He’s wearing a gold Bulova.”

  “No,” said Schild, after a moment. “I sold it to him.”

  He thought: I will never know how long it might have gone on if he had not made that crack about Jews and money.

  CHAPTER 15

  CONSIDERED AS A UNIT, REINHART and Very were some twelve feet, three hundred and forty pounds of person, and, as the beast with two backs, would have ranked in the hierarchy of animal size just after the whale, the Indian elephant, and the hippopotamus. Their coupling, however, was apparently not to come—unless it was she who overwhelmed Reinhart—for all day now he ached with the surfeit obtained in another quarter. Discretion ruled out any further sport at the office, but immediately after work each afternoon he had been calling at Trudchen’s little room down the hall, to vault between her soft legs in a ferocity which, though it had long left reason behind, never stayed her call for more and worse. Indeed, it had become S.O.P. for her, just before the climax, to scream into his ear: “You don’t hurt me enough!” and drive her small fangs into the lobe, which, while it is that portion of the human surface with the fewest nerve endings and correspondingly insensitive, still feels pressure and can swell fat and red with mistreatment and make you look odd as you go about your other business.

  But all in all Reinhart felt very natural and right about the arrangement, as one can only when he so adjusts his life as to be dirty on the one hand and clean on the other—a sort of Renaissance ideal—and therefore hypocritical on neither. With Trudchen there was no pretense of love; with Very, very little of sex; although, not being a brute or a pervert, with the former he did not withhold “love”—he was very kind to Trudchen—and with Very his imagination was not so barren as to exclude “sex”—he after all kissed her rather more than he did Trudchen, if not in so French a style, and who knew what random transport might seize her in some propitious time and place? Meanwhile, it was satisfaction of a kind of lust merely to be with her, to have her seen at his side by resentful others. Though they were not flagrant: in public they never held hands.

  And usually they were in public: for one, because even in Berlin, with its acres of forests and ruins, even if you could drag a respectable girl through stocking-snagging jungles, people abounded—Germans of course did not count, but Americans were behind each tree and in the hollow of every bomb crater—for another, having no strong need to tumble her, a man had to find public amusements with his woman.

  For example, the Nazi monuments. Pound’s and his tour had at last moved from paper to actuality. One Sunday shortly past noon two of the small vehicles termed “weapons carriers,” the parallel benches in their roofless beds creaking with packed behinds in olive drab, tooled from Zehlendorf to the now deranged nerve center of Hitler Germany.

  Very’s turn was like the stately movement of a world-ball on its axis—not a petty soccer-sized globe, mind you, but the grand sphere that dominates some centennial exposition—as she descended from the truck on the same helpful hand that Reinhart, as official guide, had granted the other nurses in the party. Her other difference was that she gave his fingers a pronounced squeeze, which not only brought pain to his knuckles but also impatience to his heart: there they were, in the great chaotic plaza before the ruined Chancellery and she was obviously unmoved. Not to mention that she had given, he had seen—for on general grounds it was a pleasure to watch her—only perfunctory notice to the legend incarnate of the series: Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden, entrance to the Wilhelmstrasse, Hotel Adlon, Foreign Office, Propaganda Ministry; had instead touched her cap, flicked her lapel, straightened her skirt, and coughed ladylike behind satiny nails.

  Now she nicely picked, with the others in the party of fourteen, across the center island nasty with torn Volkswagens and an Opel, on its side, showing naked steel supports for a roof long gone, and a lamppost twisted and wilting like a licorice whip on end; in her turn presented the long red pass to the inevitable tommygun Russians at the Chancellery door and was, with stupid, mammary ogling, admitted.

  Reinhart clove to her side, and the others, officers, nurses, and enlisted men, clung to his; shortly they were all lost together in a choppy surf of crushed marble through which black wires squirmed like sea-snakes. And as quickly were again found, in a vast chamber of pale-gray m
osaic, where a skylight of ten thousand broken panes still dribbled glass fragments down the golden incline of sun that met the shrapnel-pitted wall. They stood there, the fourteen, in a noisy, echoing silence of rubber heels abrading marble, inhaling the sour white dust which floated on the air like steam in winter, in their awe daring nothing but to take this polluted breath and give it back at the proper intervals. Over the doorway, a mile down a runway of litter fifty feet wide and to the depth of a horse, the Nazi eagle of stone-and-gilded-bronze. Besides themselves, no man.

  Naturally, thoughts of a mighty morality spilled into Reinhart’s mind, through, as it were, the skylight: if you seek his monument, look around you; Ozymandias, king of kings, etc.; living and dying with and by the sword. And PFC Farnsworth T. Cronin, who had majored in political science, in Massachusetts, and who at this moment subtly wedged himself between Reinhart and Veronica, intoned softly: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

  Sidestepping, Reinhart eased over to Very. “Can you imagine him walking down the middle of this vault, his bootheels echoing for ten minutes before you could see him? He must have looked pretty insignificant in his own house.”

  “Who?” asked Very, throwing highlights off the undercushion of her scarlet lip. “Oh you mean Hitler. But did he live right here in the Reichstag? Must have been drafty, haha.”