Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  “But I have authority to come now to this house,” said Schatzi “The Lieutenant—”

  “Well, if you’re finished, screw.”

  Schatzi glanced up and down the street and moved closer. “My dear Captain”—his upgrading Nader had a gross purpose for what he assumed to be a gross person—“I have been told that the Lieutenant Lofatt’s difficulty can be traced to a Russian officer, is it true, and perhaps if this Russian can be discovered, your friend will not suffer for it.”

  Nader was not attracted. “I said blow.” He offered Schatzi assistance in negotiating the stair.

  At the same moment, however, and before Schatzi had begun to move—looking at Nader with an odd smile that the lieutenant did not understand was admiration—he saw the old housekeeper issue from the door and hail him with her fingers.

  “The blond officer has stolen my tablecloth and I don’t know what to do,” she cried. “You are their friend? Then you can help me.”

  She was breathless, fat, and wheezing, and what was left of her reason and passion obviously had its locus in the thick and tasteless furnishings of her home. It was precisely this kind of person that the movement in its early days had been pledged to get rid of; Hitler had instead purged Röhm and dispensed with the Strassers, and Goebbels, degenerate, maimed opportunist that he was, had submitted to the policies under which the bourgeoisie flourished.

  “You are a widow, no?” he asked, noticing that on her second sentence Nader went within.

  “My husband was office manager of a fine company, small but fine. It was a direct hit. Afterwards we couldn’t even find his body. Please, I have no one to help!”

  “My good lady—” he drew back as she clutched at his sleeve. Anybody with a brain in his head would have anticipated Lovett by offering to sell the cloth before he had ever touched it. “—the Americans are honest enough. There has no doubt been a misunderstanding. You must speak with him again.”

  He was already on the bottom step, but the woman followed him down and, unless he broke away immediately, would surely weep, and that he must be spared.

  “With their parties they already have destroyed everything else,” she wailed. “Did you see, the living room is empty, and I have not yet been paid. The ceiling—the ceiling was shot away for no reason.”

  Now that it was called to his attention, he remembered a certain damage in the room—yet still not enough for his tastes; they would have had to burn off the roof and knock out at least one wall for it to seem anything like a home to him.

  “But of course, this is why the officer is being sent away. You do not go unrevenged.”

  The silly bitch listened to nothing he said. “Please speak to him,” she cried. “I have no English.”

  “Ah, my good lady, neither have I, you see.”

  He had left his bicycle in a clump of bushes around the corner—not from fear of theft, for in spite of all it was still an honest land, but out of caution; avoiding the neighbor Schild, who might have seen an unconcealed vehicle.

  On the long trip to the Soviet Sector, Schatzi had to show a different combination of papers at each checkpoint, American, British, and Russian, and there was always the possibility that some illiterate of the last type might shoot him. Sergeyev would of course spring him from an arrest, but, in his own words, could “grant no immunity from a bullet.” However, he once again without incident went through the waste of Potsdamer Platz and the barricade on its east side, and although the crowds delayed him—where did they all come from, and why?—it was far better than to chance a remote and less-peopled entrance, with guards accordingly more primitive.

  From here on he found it more politic to walk much of the way, wheeling the bike beside him: it was unwisdom in this area to distinguish oneself on a wheeled possession. Even so, he was stopped once by a Russian private, not a guard but one of the many roaming at large, who would have confiscated the vehicle had not Schatzi thrust in his face the pass from Sergeyev that read: “The bearer, L. K. Burmeister, German national, registration number 2XL-1897340-C, is on special business for the Army of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. —V. Sobko, 10th Section, Hdqrs., Red Army.” At which the fool saluted as smartly as a Russian could, and went on.

  Arriving before a relatively sound four-story building off Alexander Plata, Schatzi parked his bike in the iron rack, and this time snapped a small lock around two spokes and an upright of the frame, and with still another pass issued him by Sergeyev, with data as false as the other, persuaded the soldier on door-duty to lower his machine pistol, and entered under the long red banner that said: “The unity of all Antifascists is the guarantee for the construction of a democratic Germany.”

  “Yes, do that,” Sergeyev was saying into the telephone as Schatzi entered the smallest room, at the farthest end, on the last floor. “Show him no more mercy than you would a fly that had fallen into your soup, and at the same time deal with care, just as you would with the fly, for if you crushed him then and there you might have to empty the entire bowl.”

  To one who on first meeting Hitler had seen an eccentric small-town sissy, there had come in ensuing years a disbelief in anything but the unlikely. However, it must be faced that Sergeyev differed from the commissar of legend only in his wearing mufti rather than the high, tight collar that was wanted to set off his bullet head. But then, even the civilian clothes were regulation for the type: the paradoxical jacket, both too tight and too baggy; dark-green tie and blue-striped shirt, both clean but looking dirty; and on a folding chair in the corner, a black felt hat with a little pond of light dust in its crown-dent and the brim lowered all the way round.

  Replacing the instrument in its cradle and without giving Schatzi any sign that he was received, Sergeyev revolved his squat weight, the ancient swivel chair croaking like a frog, to a low wooden shelf on the wall behind the desk, where, as usual, the articles from his pocket were scattered: crushed packet of Russian cigarettes, cheap brass lighter that took forever to catch, mean collection of zinc small money, and a nail file in a mock-leather case frayed here and there to its subcutaneous paper. On his own initiative—for he wished to give Sergeyev no more than he already had, and the best strategy to that end was no unrequested sound—Schatzi had assumed this foible owed to a stout man’s difficulty in getting to his pockets while seated. As to the drawers of the desk: Sergeyev had no more considerable paunch than a keg, which is to say from shoulders to thighs he was one thick swell with no protuberance, but he sat so tight against the furniture before him as to join it to his person. Thus the shelf. Facing which he now stayed and, to it, said in German: “This is not your day.”

  The diameter of his cropped skull widened as head gave way invisibly to neck, and both head and neck, and face, as he now made his return revolution, and the thick, hairless hands that grasped the cigarette and smashed at the lighter’s wheel, were crimson as an angry baby. Sergeyev, however, was never angry. If anyone threatened to make him so, he had him destroyed. As, anyway, he had once told Schatzi, who was disinclined to demand proof.

  “You have no answer to that? Ah well, in the east country you’ll have years to talk all you wish to the ice and snow, unless a guard puts you out of your madman’s misery with a rifle butt.”

  Schatzi waited through the inevitable joke about Siberia, as one does for the amenities. “Yes, quite true, it’s not my regular time, but I have something you should want to know.”

  “And you’ve come here last of all, not having been able to sell it elsewhere. You think you can fool me, you piece of filth? You still do not believe that I can fling you down the stairs at my pleasure?”

  Sergeyev arose and pounded to the door, opened it and thrust half of himself into the hall. “Yes, that stair down there, the one you came up,” this part of his speech itself being flung in that direction and thus scarcely audible to Schatzi. Who nevertheless had heard the threat clearly enough in the past to know it was habitually delivered in a voice devoid of all emotion; bu
t not that he believed it empty—somehow one knew without evidence that Sergeyev was the type to say it a hundred times and do it on the hundred and first, or the thousand and twelfth, or not at all, for he had no rhythm and no limit and, indeed, beyond the pocket articles, no discernible self. These on the return trip he cleared from the shelf with one hand as sweep and one as scoop and buried in his clothing, as if in anachronistic worry that Schatzi might swipe them while his head was out of the room.

  “Also!” He threw himself into the chair and grasped either end of the desk. “Proceed!”

  “Lieutenant Schild—”

  “Are you insane?” shrieked Sergeyev. He sprang up again, went again to the door, looked out, came back on a circuitous route of examination—his office was small as a private washroom, with no window, the streaked beige walls marred by no ornament, and no furniture beyond the desk and the lone extra chair that Schatzi occupied—and disengaged the telephone’s handpiece from its berth.

  “Do you think me so naïve that you can inform to American Intelligence before my face?” he screamed, still with no emotion, stamping out his cigarette in a little glass bowl evil with tobacco tar.

  “Fritz, then,” said Schatzi. “A Russian deserter is living at Fritz’s billet.” He stirred in his chair, smiling ill in fright and pride. “Also: Fritz is going to marry an American nurse.”

  He was met with an open mouth of short teeth, which appeared to be a smile. “Tell me,” said Sergeyev, his voice liquid with unction, “confess to me—you were Ernst Röhm’s very favorite fairy-boy of all, nicht wahr? This is the sole reason why you were present on that famous 30 June 1933 when your lover and his faction were purged. We know all this already, so I can tell you it is useless to continue your mad resistance!”

  A half year before, in the middle of January, when the Russian forces were rolling through Poland, the SS closed the Auschwitz camp and herded the dangerous prisoners—mainly such Jews as were left, and politicals—on a long death march to the enclosure at Mauthausen, in Germany. Schatzi was permitted to escape. Right off, he was almost murdered by Polish vigilantes who came in to fill the vacuum. For the uniform he had continued to wear as protection against just such a hazard, snipping the green triangle off the breast, was precisely what identified him to a Polish tradesman who had made deliveries to the camp and seen Schatzi in his privileged role as “professional criminal” leading work gangs to dig their own mass graves. This Pole, until two weeks before a collaborator, was now applying the same industry to preserve Number One in the new arrangements; in which he was as unsuccessful as a man can be: the guerillas shortly knocked him off, but saved Schatzi for the oncoming Soviet authorities. Who in turn not long after arrival dispensed with the vigilantes themselves, so neatly that no trace of the bodies was found by three Swiss Red Cross delegates searching for eighteen days, but saved Schatzi.

  In neither case were the Russians wanton: the Polish guerillas, having shown enterprise once, would likely have proved troublesome in the Soviet occupation, and Schatzi, being officially an unperson and by personal history an advocate of no live cause, a friend of no man, totally dependent upon his captors and nicely shaped by years of captivity—it would be almost indecent to get rid of a man who could be used, and for no payment, beyond not taking that which had no absolute value: his life.

  He was taken to Berlin and assigned to Sergeyev, who notwithstanding the mufti, was apparently an officer in an Intelligence section of the Red Army: apparently, because this was never mentioned, Sergeyev’s office being this shabby, airless cube in a building tenanted otherwise by the German Communist Party.

  “And we know, believe me, that you make daily reports to American Espionage,” Sergeyev continued in his genial way. “Must I remind you once more that you are no safer in that sector than this one? How much sufferance would the Americans show if we informed them of your past, Misterrrr ‘Burmeister,’ sirrr.” On the English words he did a humorous imitation of the American r, which at the same time was very accurate.

  “The only American agent I deal with is Fritz.”

  “Never mind about that!” Nevertheless, Schatzi saw him write FRITZ on the back of a used envelope—which he pulled from a wastebasket; there was nothing on the desktop but the glass bowl for ashes and a pile of paperclips artfully arranged to appear loose but really joined into a two-foot chain, as he had discovered on an earlier visit when Sergeyev suddenly hurled it at him—FRITZ, he wrote it a second time and began to elaborate its lines with the pencil as he started again on Röhm.

  Röhm, Röhm! From Sergeyev’s badgering at every visit, each time with a different angle of attack—the last time, of all things, he had been accused of being a spy in Röhm’s camp for Hitler—one could see that beneath the surface foolishness they knew everything already. And if they knew everything, they must surely know he had not been with Röhm’s personal party on the terrible night of June 30, 1933, when Hitler and company burst into the Bavarian hideaway and carted them off to the slaughter. And, to boot, Sergeyev had once asked him for an account of the executions at the Lichterfelde Cadet School in Berlin. But surely they knew that if he had been with Röhm he would have been taken to Munich, if not killed on the spot, as some were, in the sanatorium at Wiessee.

  As to his erotic associations with Röhm—it was impossible to explain to anyone who had never known him the dynamism of the man, the virility which made denying him his pleasure almost shameful. Schatzi had not been given to the practice before he met him, and did not continue it extensively after the purge—indeed, although he had tried most of them, he had yet to find a kind of sex that was not tedious.

  His not having been with Röhm’s party on that historical night was a piece of the strange kind of luck that blessed him his life long—or plagued him, for with his leader’s death perished a purity that he had found neither before nor since in the walks of men, a hard, clean, uncompromising resolution, honor, and bravery that the foul little Austrian upstart had betrayed to a moral leper like Goering, a weak-minded fanatic like Himmler, the antediluvian cowards of the Reichswehr, and the reactionaries of the Ruhr who had given niggardly money to the Party with the sole aim of getting more in return.

  What was there to tell? Schatzi stayed in Berlin at headquarters, keeping a finger on developments, while Röhm and the other SA leaders conferred in the Bavarian retreat. Aware that they were incessantly calumniated by the evil voices at Hitler’s ear, sensing that they, the private army of the National Socialist revolution, the oldest fighters, the idealists, the conscience of the movement, had already been made superfluous in the general corruption, they were yet unprepared for the ferocity of their blood-brothers. Röhm was expecting a visit from Hitler on July 1, at which he intended to plead again to his old comrade-in-arms the case for the SA. He had a touching little gift for the Führer, a handsome bookplate. He waited in trust, with no guards; he was after all the only man in the Party who called Hitler by his first name, not to mention that he had been a Nazi even before Adolf. But when Hitler arrived, it was with a band of thugs and in the dead of night.

  Simultaneous with the raid in Bavaria, Himmler and Goering took the headquarters in Berlin, capturing a hundred and fifty officers, whom they imprisoned in the Cadet School coal cellar in Lichterfelde and shot in quartets throughout the next twenty-four hours. The condemned men kept precise count of the executions; guessing whose turn came next was insurance against despair. They sang the song named for Horst Wessel. And, in innocent trust, heiled Hitler and went to their deaths faithful to his memory, for they supposed him also to have been a victim of the reactionary plot to crush the revolution.

  In the twenty-seventh group-of-four Schatzi’s name was called—not, of course, “Schatzi,” but “Ernst, Friedrich Paul, Ober-sturmbannführer,” and even at that moment he thrilled to the crisp drumroll of his title: he had been a poor lance-corporal in the army for three years of the war, owing to the petty jealousy of a sergeant who consistently blocked his p
romotion. As he was marched with three others out into the mild morning and across the yard to the execution-wall, he saw some of the faces of his remaining comrades pressed against the cellar window, those old veterans of the Putsch, of a thousand café and street fights, of the Freikorps, and, before that, spotted here and there in the army of the Western Front. They had been fighting somewhere for almost twenty years, against impossible odds, for much of it ill fed and ill clothed, and always betrayed. Not one had broken down in the cellar. That was pretty good for the “pack of fairies” that so revolted Goering.

  The wall was a dripping stucco of human flesh; fired from six yards away, the bullets blew the heart through a man’s back. An SS guard opened their clothing at the breast. Having difficulty with Schatzi’s woolen undershirt, he parted it with the ceremonial dagger from his belt and, inadvertently nicking the skin, excused himself. On Schatzi’s right hand was Appel, whom he had never liked. He caught his eye now as the guard went down the line drawing charcoal target-circles around their left nipples, and said softly, “Ahoy!” the old Freikorps greeting. Appel had been one of Röhm’s especial favorites; he smiled now over the gravity of his girlish face.

  “By order of the Führer, FIRE!” The four prisoners stiff-armed the salute to Hitler and cried his name so loud they did not hear the order, and their chests were blasted through their backs. Or rather, three died not hearing—or if they did, were in a second beyond knowledge. Schatzi, falling with the others, heard, and knew that Röhm was dead, that Hitler had betrayed them, and that from then on he would give credence and fealty to no movement but that of his own pulse—which he heard now in the wrist crumpled beneath his ear, for he was not dead, had not indeed been hit, but rather was pulled down by the unity with his fellows. Lying with slit-eye at the level of the concrete, he saw the approach of the sole of a boot, was turned over and tested by it. A pistol slug fractured the pavement near his nose, the sharp chips whipping his face, already bloody from the liquid of Appel’s heart.