Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  Wildly he seized her again, this woman attractively defiled with adventure, for the first time his hand went where the eye’s fingers had so often dawdled, to the great hemisphere of her right breast and then to the left, circumnavigating like a Renaissance explorer. Licensed, it was a disappointment; and indeed he knew not why he toyed there, since his purpose was, with lump in throat, self-sacrifice.

  His one hand still mobile and encountering more brass button than pendulous woman—at least, that must be what was cutting him—with his other Reinhart lifted her rinsing face, now of a more poignant beauty, pale, implying the sanctity of a plaster, Hibernian-featured Virgin, so much more moving than must have been the real one, dark and muttering in guttural Hebrew. Deep into her eyes he was careful not to look, as he said: “Very, I will marry you!”

  What did he expect?: at minimum that the rivulets would cease to flow? Rather were they renewed, as like the heat of summer reaching the highest snow, a brilliant flush mounted to her forehead and a greater rush of water came down.

  “How can you!” she wailed. “You are not Catholic!” Repeatedly she struck his chest with her balled fist, no doubt leaving bruises.

  Jesus Christ. Like a mongoloid he stared expressionlessly at the lake. The hum of the engine had grown to a still-distant roar.

  “Isn’t there anything I can do?” He heard himself say it and was astonished by the mousiness of his tenor.

  “Hold me.”

  He did, with static hands, and squeezed her, and pushed his nose into her soft hair and breathed relief that he had not really loved her but only thought so for a while.

  “But Him, what about Him?”

  Because he had clearly pronounced the capital, she germanely asked: “God?”

  “Christ sakes, I mean the guy, who certainly wasn’t me! The Invisible Man, because I was under the impression I saw you in all your off-time—unless of course it was one of your psychopaths during duty hours. Is that now part of the therapy?”

  In more abandonment than she ever showed while necking, Veronica snuggled into him. “Go on,” she whispered, “say anything, I deserve it.”

  No, with just that quantity of censure he was done. Reinhart on the judicial bench would have freed all malefactors who pleaded guilty, for what could subsequent punishment do but incriminate the judge? Besides, he recognized in his coarseness the tedious old suburban lie that the sexual life was to be regulated by a middle-aged housewife’s sense of right and wrong. Screw, screw, screw, if you wanted to, he was proud to think was his credo; and that his own girl friend sported on that plan was the sincerest form of tribute.

  Still, if that were her taste, why had she to look elsewhere from him? He was not repulsive to women; time past, he had actually spurned unsolicited advances.

  “Who am I to say anything?” he asked, now looking into her eyes. “I’m nobody—as you have proved.” He attempted to loosen their connection, but she had clasped her arms about his waist and locked her fingers, as in that test of strength in which you try to crack the other fellow’s spine.

  “You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. Do you think I could tell anyone else?” Her mouth with its liberal lipstick was crushed against his blousefront; on the journey home he would look as if he had been shotgunned in the chest. In her rich hair, which was no longer his property, was caught a fragment of twig, which, nevertheless, he plucked out. That dear fragrance which in the old days clung to his cheek for hours after leaving her, which during a night of sleep transferred to the hood of his sleeping bag, where he could smell it next bleak morning, now penetrated his nostrils as he supposed a sister’s might, stirring mild affection but also thoughts of silly stench.

  “I know, I’m like a brother to you—but God damn it, Very, I never knew that till now. You’ve made a fool of me.”

  The chopped-egg sandwich Very had made for herself and not eaten, already slightly wilted, lay upon the green canvas of the musette bag. Still holding her, he took it and began to bite off the valances of squeezed-out filling. He did this theatrically, playing the conscious role of a person who vulgarly stuffs himself at high moments, learned from the motion pictures.

  “Well, now what are your plans?” he asked. A bit of egg fell, narrowly missing the gold bar on Very’s right epaulet, the tracking of which brought his glance to a side view of her cheek and his attention, since her eyes were closed, to the matter of whether or not she had gone to sleep. “Hey,” he said, striking her roughly with the blunt of his palm, “recover! What are you going to do now? Look, first, are you dead sure? You know swimming will delay it, and an illness too, I think. Didn’t you have a cold last week?” Without physical intimacy he yet knew very well the schedule of her menses: the laugh was not so broad in that quartet of days, and she sometimes complained of headaches. It was just, or should have been, over.

  “I’ve had the Curse enough years to know all its tricks,” she answered wryly, cocking up a brow that suggested the old, witty Very’s—and he would have liked to catch her there, saying That’s it, hold it right at that point and nothing is lost, but she was seized sooner by her own voice, which wavered and ended brokenly: “This time it’s for real.”

  Ah, Reinhart thought, means business, does it?; isn’t kidding around; no joke; on the level; for real. Perhaps he believed that nothing ever happened to him because when it did, its effects were stated in barbarous language. Once in Piccadilly talking to a streetwalker he heard overhead the Model T chatter of a buzz-bomb and thought he might die, there in the thronging black street, while a whore said “Coo, ain’t it a loud one? Four pounds for awnight, I’m no bawgen basement.” His apprehension proved baseless; the bomb sailed on to detonate in some working-class quarter, where the survivors climbed from the smoking ruins to say “Gor, that wasn’t ’alf close.” Poets are never bombed and, if women, never knocked up.

  “Well, what am I to do about it, since you so nicely included me in? I don’t want in—you might say, I never got in.”

  Obviously with Very it had been love; and hardly the kind he talked of to himself in his childish way—never again! Very in love, a victim of the conquistador passion; what would ten minutes earlier have been impossible to accept was now only difficult. At least she displayed one requisite of the authentic state: sorrow.

  “You?” she answered. “It isn’t your trouble, Carlo. You could just get up and walk away from me—you ought to. I can’t ask anything of you.” She finished crying and sat stolidly in that neutral condition which precedes the return of vanity; unlike Trudchen she looked older without make-up. She was older than Reinhart by three years; his girls always, saving Trudchen, were; one’s elders are kinder than his juniors and peers. Maureen Veronica Leary, from a suburb of Milwaukee fittingly named St. Francis, graduate of a grade school, high school, and hospital (on the three-year wartime crash program) each under the rubric of another saint. She had a brother and three sisters, all older, and her father, a retired street-railway motorman, told stories of Galway, where the supernatural was commonplace, although he hailed from a town near Dublin named Blackrock. By the time toys and clothing had come down to Very, stuffing leaked from the dollbabies and the stocking-toes were lumpy with darning; but once when she was twelve her father, drunk, brought home a pair of rollerskates her very own. Her mother stood five-ten and her number two sister, just under six and was unmarried at thirty.

  So much had Reinhart, in the normal course of events, learned. But who was the real, the essential Very?, to the exterior of which he had been attracted by its air of simpleminded jolly Catholic health. Perhaps a pagan. Not only did he usually go for older girls, he also had a weakness for Roman Catholics, who even when Irish remembered the Latin basis of their persuasion and were very feminine, seldom prudes even when they would not submit: to them a man’s appetites, being natural, being God’s splendid trick to ensure the race’s continuance, were never, even when illicit, loathsome. Now he realized he probably could have, with Very; too late he
remembered her constant surrender; indeed, she at the outset had chosen him and then waited in vain.

  “You’re in love with this guy, is that it? I suppose you don’t want to tell me who he is.” She still sat within the enclosure of his right arm, while his left, propped against the ground, suffered a slow paralysis. The sand worked up under his fingernails and shortly into a small, smarting cut on the first joint of his thumb, on which he had forgotten to put a new Band-Aid after removing the old one that morning. He had damaged himself on the clip of Trudchen’s brassiere, which lousy German thing was not a simple hook-and-eye but a pronged buckle with criminal tines. Since in his subsequent lust he had not taken care, if she had VD he with his open wound was a goner. Ah, accept it, we are all submerged in filth up to our heads. Accepting which, he saw the one man who was exempt emerge from the high thicket of marsh grass thirty yards down the beach.

  Preceding this, the engine noise he had unregisteringly heard earlier, had grown loud, identifying itself as an outboard motor; had come so thundrous close to their position that Reinhart expected momentarily to be swamped but didn’t care; had, just as it must either become visible or explode, shut itself off with two loud farts in the marsh, yet unseen. Within the minute, this person in black beret and bulky coat appeared, stamping down the last few rushes which denied him clearance to the beach and, that done, seeing them—not necessarily looking towards them, but seeing. By the man’s use of this unusual faculty Reinhart recognized, despite the altered outline, Schatzi; who surveyed the four points of the world and approached.

  Fearfully Reinhart promised Very they would return to her business later and ruthlessly withdrew his arm. Not adjusting to the new arrangement, Very stayed numbly huddled, leaning against—nothing, for Reinhart was already on his feet, obstreperous in greeting.

  “Guten Tag! Wie befinden Sie sich? Wir machen ein—wie sagt man ‘picnic’?”

  “Just so,” replied Schatzi, ten yards away and apprehensively halting there as if he foresaw an attack. “Picknick, one and same.” He winced obsequiously. “Do I receive your permission to come there?”

  “Wo?” Reinhart was still yelling as though his auditor were in Kladow.

  “In the vicinity of you and your lady.”

  “Warum nicht?”

  Schatzi came, still cautious, shoulders thrown high and hands buried in the pockets of the great overcoat, which was a dirty teddy-bear plush and fell to his ankles; scarred face contorted below the beret like a withered acorn in its cap; feet, of which only the neat little brown toes were visible, scuttling forward, one-two, pause, one-two—his overcoat fell past his ankles to brush between his footprints the spoor of a tired fox that drags its tail.

  “Fancy occurring here with you,” he said when he arrived, gauging on the balances of his eyes a specimen of flesh from both the large lumps before him: the one on the ground and Reinhart.

  “Whatever are you doing here—way out here?” asked Reinhart, altering to superiority. At the same time his unease grew more severe: he was certain Schatzi thought he had again caught him in a screw, or just after; for a crazy moment he suspected Schatzi trailed him for just that purpose.

  “Ach, business, always business—your gentle lady, she is ill?” At last Veronica acknowledged his arrival, looking up with forlorn-beagle visage, saying naught. He removed his beret.

  “Just tired,” said Reinhart. “We had a long—” he lost his voice as he watched Schatzi prepare and deliver a massive, obscene, hideous wink. However offensive, it was mesmeric: the lid flattened and then went concave, seeming to close upon a hole rather than a ball. More horrible yet, Reinhart helplessly felt his own eye return the favor.

  “We had a long walk,” he said quickly.

  “Exercise, ceaseless exercise,” said Schatzi benignly. “Well, why not?, as you say. You are yet top young for a Herzschlag, ja? Auf Englisch heißt das ‘failure of the heart,’ am I correct?” With fingers like wire-clippers he pinched a bit of jacket, shirt, and skin on Reinhart’s forearm. “Your lady as well, though. Whatever will be her difficulty? Paleness! Ah, right in the pocket I have this brandy which will make the trick.”

  Ignoring Reinhart’s weak verbal opposition, he withdrew a silver flask, unscrewed the cap and let it dangle upon its little chain, hitting the body of the vessel tok-tok, and stared down onto Veronica’s crown.

  “She doesn’t want any,” said Reinhart, but so as not to offend Schatzi he offered to take a draught himself.

  “Who doesn’t?” Very, who had been playing no heed, now with violent interest seized the same forearm that had been pinched and pulled herself up. Daintily accepting the flask, she arched her neck like an old grad under the stadium and drained off quite a large slug, then paused to take air and would have returned to kill what was left had not Schatzi, deft as a mongoose, leaped into the breach between her movements and reclaimed his property, saying: “Already better, ja?”

  “Whew!” whistled Very towards Reinhart. “That went down like a whole loaf of bread.” She gulped five times and smoothed the sitting-wrinkles from her skirt; lingeringly, with some evident pleasure in the touch of her own belly and thighs. Schatzi averted his face, as if offended.

  If so, how right he was to be. “At least thank the man,” Reinhart muttered low.

  “I don’t know Kraut.”

  “Haven’t you just heard him speaking English?”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” Turning to Schatzi, she asked, naturally very loud: “Hey, didn’t I spot you hanging around in front of Lieutenant Schild’s place the other night?”

  Schatzi twisted his neck to favor the left ear. “Spot? Hanging?”

  “On the level now, weren’t you? Oh, you weren’t in that getup. You had on a cap with a beak and you sat on a bike. Well what I mean is, it was you, I know. Come clean, I won’t blow the whistle on you for being out after curfew.”

  Reinhart made the sound of a bellows. “Damn it, Veronica, what do you think our friend will be able to understand of that?”

  By way of answer she simply smirked: drunk, apparently, or pretending to be from the moment her lips had kissed the flask. It was a way out of her difficulties.

  “She thanks you very much,” said Reinhart to Schatzi, who was confusedly repeating under his breath, ‘cap with a beak, sat on a bike.’ “And she thinks she saw you last night in front of the house where—where lives an officer she knows.”

  Where lived, indeed, to admit to himself the complete data, Lieutenant Schild. Lieutenant Schild. Which, admitted to the mind, was instantly transformed to: that Jew. Who hath usurped my office twixt the sheets? The Jew, the Jew...

  “Lieutenant Schild,” repeated Schatzi, wonderingly, pointing his ridged carrot-nose towards the lake, high; meanwhile his eyes went everywhere else. “Lieutena—wait a moment, I think—no. Also! A great fat beast of a man, with a mustache like a broom, and an implement to his speech, so that when he says something he makes this sound between the words: shicksh, shicksh. Now tell me am I right?”

  “He is thin and dark,” Reinhart said evenly.

  “Yes, an Italian,” Schatzi smiled his recognition. “Yes, I was able to obtain for him—you will pardon me, Madame—some items of which we shall only say they are worn by the ladies and cannot be seen unless one is—please pardon me, Madame—in a relationship of intimacy.” He laughed quaintly: “Hahahaheeheehee,” colored, and said: “Now I have gone too far.”

  “That isn’t possible in the present company,” Reinhart answered hatefully.

  “Oh, he speaks English all right, but I don’t get a word,” said Veronica to herself, and then to Reinhart: “Ask him if I can have another drink of that radiator fluid.” She threw up her hand. “I’ll pay him for it, don’t look so ghoulish.”

  “Nonsense,” said Schatzi, already presenting the flask. “My compliments. You are a friend of Lieutenant Schilda? Please, I do not mean to offend.” Again he laughed, this time in a very horsy manner with open, serrated mouth.
“Herr Unteroffizier Reinhart, please tell the lady what is the joke.”

  “I wish I knew it myself,” Reinhart said sullenly. “I wish I knew what was so goddamned funny.”

  “Also, Schilda is the town where the fools live. What is it in the States?”

  “Reinhartville,” said its exclusive inhabitant, watching Very swallow the rest of the brandy. With gelid courtesy he accepted the weightless flask and gave it to Schatzi. “Well,” he said, turning to her, “your troubles are solved. Since Schild is Italian, he is also Catholic. He can marry you, and may I say no one would be more appropriate.”

  She failed to answer. Already her eyes were distorted, as if one saw them under water.

  “You will mah-ree Lieutenant Schild? How lovely,” crooned Schatzi, moving in upon her, thin jowls tremulous, as an ambitious chihuahua might approach a mastiff bitch. “I can furnish food and drink for the feast. But you must both soon go back to the U.S. When?”

  “See what I mean?” murmured Very. “If that’s English, I’ll eat it.” Now her eyes looked as though a hair were drawn across each retina. By age thirty her figure would be throughout, like a Balkan peasant woman’s, the diameter of her chest; her abdomen in permanent pregnancy; thighs, like jodhpurs. The catalogue of Reinhart’s malice continued through her parts, which in the here and now were flawless... and the receptacle for a Jew. Evil, evil, evil—with evil he flagellated himself while there was still time. For of course he had this deep feeling about Jews, deeper than any he had had for Very; indeed, he recognized now, in the core of his hatred, that it was love. He loved the dead of the camps, and Bernstein, and half of Lori, and... Schild; and the dearer the possession, the dearer it was to lose it to them; nay, the dearest were not enough. Thus had Schild been in his presence then, he might have killed him as his wedding gift: Jews were too good to live.