Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

“Things have got all complex,” he said, “simply because I let them slide.” Schild, standing, hovered before him blankly, nervously. Beside him Bach breathed with a slight moan. Perhaps, after all, now that truth was having its day, he was about to die. The winding stain which Schild had traced on the wall was not, he could see now, a decoration of seeping water but rather a weakening division in the concrete which seemed to widen as he looked and perhaps would bring down the house—there had been sense in that, to him, lunatic action as well.

  “I should have told you before. But maybe it wasn’t eccentric to think you might know. Veronica Leary is pregnant.”

  “That big nurse?” Schild shrugged, splayed his hands in impatient despair.

  “Why put it that way?” Reinhart was angry all over again and himself despaired that relations with his newly found friend could ever be on the unswerving line of constant respect. “Can’t you even call her by her name?”

  Bach snorted as if he, too, had never witnessed an outrage of that magnitude, but turning to him in alliance one saw him chatteringly blow his snout into an aquamarine handkerchief.

  Schild’s feet, too, were splayed, and his head forward and depressed below the level of his shoulders; sitting before him Reinhart could look down the back of his head to where the collar, too large, yawned out from the hairy neck.

  “So,” said Schild, “that’s worse yet than the German girl, isn’t it? How could you get in such a predicament?” Fierce yet charged with loving concern, like that sonorous old actor who always played the father of an East Side boy torn between the life of the spirit and the life of matter, when that theme was à la mode.

  “Ah God!” sighed Reinhart. “Finally, I see. I didn’t knock her up, if that’s what you mean. I’m just trying to help Veronica out of it.”

  “Why?” Schild again chose his chair.

  “On the basis of friendship. She was never my girl. She didn’t ‘betray’ me. But I might do the same if she had. Common humanity is more important than sex. What matters is, she’s in trouble—just as, a moment ago, you thought I was. I’d rather aid than be aided any day, just like you.”

  “Then I am out of order,” Schild replied, “and there’s no help for that.” After the briefest illness, his face lay down and died.

  But why take so hard a simple error that in the end had done no harm? In his statement was implied a personal doom, unpeopled, glacial, bone-white, so much more terrible than Bach’s presages of a technicolor disaster. Was he serious? Reinhart looked at Bach, the absurd man, the absolutely useless man, who even if he were restored to health, if he had ever been there, would only stand and gawk at Oriental art, crap like that, and rant foolishly. But was he frivolous? And finally, did it matter?

  He asked the last question only to make sense of his ready answer—for that was truth: first the answer and then the question, so that while we wonder we can continue to live—did it matter?, oh hell yes, for all we have in this great ruined Berlin of existence, this damp cellar of life, this constant damage in need of repair, is single, lonely, absurd-and-serious selves; and the only villainy is to let them pass beyond earshot.

  “Do you know what we could use right now?” he said unwaveringly to Bach.

  That huge fellow swung round his enormous head, his pale eyebrows climbing in inquiry, his second chin reluctantly altering its seat in his collar, which was white and overlaid with peasant embroidery in red thread.

  “A good laugh. Say something funny.”

  “Very well.” And Bach was as good as his word in that at least he tried. He told a story of two friends, Palmström and Korf. Who, finding a mouse in their house, built a cage of latticework, into which Palmström climbed at twilight and began to play the violin. As night fell, the mouse was lured in by the music. Palmström went to sleep, then so did the mouse. In the morning Korf put the cage into a furniture wagon and hauled it out to the country. The mouse was there released. He loved his new home. Korf and Palmström, delighted, returned to town.

  “That’s the end?” asked Reinhart.

  “Of course,” said Bach, wincing in amusement, suffused with rose color. “What more could we wish? Consummate art, which I can assert only because it is certainly not of my own creation—needless to say, for what is?”

  For Christ’s sake what a story. Then he heard Schild snicker, and saw him laugh with a naïve mouth of which the upper lip flattened and glistened tightly midway across his upper teeth, and his ears protruded like a schoolboy’s.

  Through water-brimming eyes—his spectacles were tiny fish-bowls—Schild finally looked at Bach.

  “That is Christian Morgenstern.”

  “Exactly,” answered Bach. “How exciting that you also know his work!”

  “Do you remember this one?” Eagerly he moved to the edge of his chair and rapidly, in an accent which to Reinhart sounded perfect, quoted in a German of which Reinhart understood nothing.

  “All right,” said Reinhart testily, watching them howl at each other, “what does that mean?”

  Bach began: “This gentleman named Korf—”

  But Schild, impatient in his high levity, broke in: “He has invented a kind of joke, you see, that works by delayed action. The people he tells it to are horribly bored. But later that night, when they are in bed, they suddenly wake up and laugh like babies.”

  All very German and although remote from Reinhart’s old medieval visions, somehow not alien to them. At least he was gratified by the alliance of Schild and Bach, Jew and German, in a common cause.

  At this point he heard a distant, cavernous sound, as one in the bottom of a sewer would hear a person scratching at the manhole. Lori approached through the passageway.

  CHAPTER 19

  BY THE SLEEVE, LORI ushered in a man wearing dark glasses and carrying a cane, a meager man concealed within an enormous overcoat. This doctor, if such he was, would be splendid for the job. He was blind.

  Reinhart heard and felt the slow removal of Bach’s weight from the couch and, staring up the rising underbelly of the green Zeppelin, towards the gondola, discerned that respect drew him up. Schild, too, had risen, was already, being nearest the door, in an introduction.

  “Sir,” said Lori in her to Reinhart always lucid German, “I am Frau Bach. I should like to have you meet my brother, Dr. Otto Knebel.”

  “Herr Doktor, es freut mich,” said Schild, shaking the hand which groped for his, showing an unsuspected command of the gracious forms, even slightly bowing. “Oberleutnant Schild. Ich bin ein Amerikaner.”

  “Ich bin dessen gewiss.” The reply was in a high, aspirant voice, not ugly or unpleasant but strangely lingering within the innermost channel of the ear, as if a bug had crawled in there to die and, caught, changed its mind. “I am certain of that.”

  For the second time in his life Reinhart had heard “certainly” as answer to an American’s self-definition. It no longer seemed strange, but because he had already got his he did not wish another. Therefore when the doctor was moved to meet him, he, mimicking Schild’s handshake and suspicion of a bow, rumbled low and uvular, authentically, “Sehr angenehm!”

  “This surely,” said the doctor to Lori, “is your Ami corporal.”

  Compared to his, Schatzi’s hand had been full-fleshed, hamlike; one thought not of bare bones: one held tendons and a complex of thin vessels through which slow and miserly came corpuscles one by one. Behind the glasses, in front of the tall back collar of the coat, was a real head: small, stark, but real, and so marked with life, so marking life, that the memory of other faces was rank on rank of dummies. The lenses were too black to see through, in compensation for which they themselves were animate. Finely amused now, they dramatized the implications of the breathy voice which rendered stout German as if it were the tongue of dragonflies.

  “Yes,” said the doctor. “But you should have seen me six months ago!” Bach made a giddy noise. “What, Bach, my good fellow! You have held captive these Americans? Then there is stil
l a chance that we may win the war! Very well, my dear Lenore. Now that I have located Bach I can manage alone.”

  “Ah Doctor, you come right to me and take this seat, my seat, bitte, bitte. May I help you? Please, please.”

  In the strength of his schoolgirl agitation Bach took two quavering steps and grasped for the doctor’s arms, which that gentleman, moving efficiently behind a probing cane, ignored with a blind man’s insouciance. On his left sleeve he wore a yellow armband carrying the rubric, three black balls, of a vicious, violent, antidemocratic cause. (Reinhart remembered his colleague Cronin’s description of such an insigne, such a movement, the week before on Cronin’s boarding an airplane which would fly him back to France as a case of chronic athlete’s foot. “Open your eyes,” Cronin said, upon no provocation whatever, “the same old thing’s starting up all over again.” The boring ass; why had one come along on the truck to say goodbye? But then Cronin hit him lightly on the shoulder and said, “So long, Reinhart. You’re the only one I could ever talk to.” Very simple: one had come along because one, all in all, had liked and would miss him.)

  Sitting down in Bach’s corner of the sofa, the doctor said:

  “Lenore, have you some of those excellent American pastilles? The anticipation of talking dries my throat.”

  “Oh, here,” said Reinhart, who happened to be carrying a cylinder of Lifesavers. “Take these... and keep them.”

  The eyeglasses widened their circles. “Vielen dank—sprechen Sie Deutsch?

  “A little. Ich verstehe besser ah ich spreche.” He grinned in self-deprecation, though his auditor could not see it.

  “Your accent is very good.” The doctor’s mouth was a pale pink cave, toothless; moreover, showing no evidence that teeth had ever been.

  “Not good enough to fool you.”

  “Why you should wish that, especially nowadays...” A Life-saver tumbled over the doctor’s tongue, glinting orangely. “But I knew you from your hand, not your speech. ... Now Bach, are you still standing there with your misplaced courtesy? Kindly be seated. And Lenore and the Lieutenant, and you, Corporal, please. As to the Lieutenant, now, I should think that though he has been in the U.S.A. some years, he was born in Germany, no?”

  Since seeing the armband Reinhart had been occupied with nothing but worry for Schild. From the data of his first visit to the cellar he could hardly suppose Bach and Lori were the doctor’s fellows in a neo-Nazi faction. Who then was the doctor but the blackmailer that had preyed on them during the Hitler years and still today somehow retained his evil power? And how compelling he was: Reinhart had brought forth the Lifesavers like an automaton. Schild, the eternal do-gooder, was already captured by the man’s infirmity; Schild, the Intelligence officer, did not see the armband; Schild, the Jew, already was impaled on the doctor’s fascist needle.

  Schild, the innocent fool, looked sadly pleased. “Is my accent so good?” He sat down, as he had been ordered to. “I am a native American, doctor. I am one of the lucky Jews.”

  “I too am lucky, but I have not been able to decide whether my luck owes to my Aryan mother or my Jewish father,” said the doctor. “This is the kind of thing which confuses everybody but the Nazis.” He closed on his candy, swallowed it, and took another from the pack. “Why do your countrymen waste so much paper, Mr. Corporal? Really, these fruit drops would not grow stale exposed to the air. Really, what are they but crystallized sugar-water? But won’t you, all of you, join me? Bach, you must! I prescribe sweets as a substitute for that abominable ersatz-schnapps with which you are destroying your liver.”

  “Doctor, I have sincerely tried to stop drinking,” Bach said, his face a quivering sack of shame as he lowered himself onto a folding camp chair which he overhung in every dimension. “I will conquer it, I will, you shall see.”

  “May your reformation not wait upon my seeing,” replied the doctor, lightly. And Bach’s despair was as if a truck passed overhead.

  Of course, if the doctor was Lori’s brother he was but half a gentile, had but half the aptitude for corruption. Of course, Reinhart had not forgotten that so much as ignored it in his quest for a villain to save someone from. Yet why the brazen badge?

  “Now Corporal, I think you and I have a private matter to discuss,” said the doctor, placing his cane on the floor and in so doing offering a view of his full profile in the various perspectives of slow movement. His right eye, seen in the harsh knife of light which, as he bent, thrust in from the side, behind the dark glasses—my God, an eye? A navel, rather, a belly-button of the head, baby-new and pink within the old foxed leather which bound the skull.

  One’s own eyes indrew behind the barrier of cheekbones, hid in scarlet darkness, as nevertheless one’s more courageous mouth asked: “Doctor, what is the meaning of your armband?”

  “It means”—the black circles swung round and established order—“that if you drive an automobile French fashion, use it, that is to say, as a projectile with which to aim at pedestrians, I am your perfect target. I cannot see you come.”

  “Wie bitte?”

  “Es tut mir leid. I was having a bit of a joke, most unfairly. The sleeveband is of course the sign of the disabled person. Unfortunately I do not have Bach’s gift for foreign languages. Bach, could you perhaps—”

  “No, it is not necessary,” said Reinhart. “I understand. It is an excellent thing—”

  “They do not have it in America,” Bach cried eagerly. “Never, nowhere have I seen it.”

  Lori, still standing, chided: “Now Bach, if you do not permit Otto to have some privacy, he will not talk with you later.”

  “Quite so, quite so,” Bach mumbled, turned laboriously, and to Schild instituted a speech which began: “However—”

  “Lenore,” the doctor said, “There is no reason why you should not sit here and assist us with your good sense. Also, working for the Americans you should have learned some English by now, unless Father’s old claim was true, that we were the champion dunces of Dahlem.”

  Although, because of the difference between the doctor’s and Bach’s girths, there was now a good seat and a half to the left of Reinhart’s port hip, Lori sat down so close against him that, for the comfort of both, he had to lay his arm along the back ridge of the sofa. His love for her was just in the degree to which it remained intactile. Introduce desire and you would soon have the same old two-backed animal scuffling in the dirt, into which he and Trudchen transformed themselves daily, destructive, nightmarish, impermanent, having nothing to recommend it but necessity. With Lori he mixed spirits, was embarrassed by the flesh... but she rested, almost lay, within his arm-hollow, her hard, thin bones piquing him, the shoulder of her thick old prickly-wool sweater, carrying a scent of spice, touching his cheek. And he, who involuntarily rose at a woman’s smell—as a sleeping cat erects its ears at every sound—almost any woman, any smell, sometimes, in the street, at pure cloud of odor, the woman having long gone by, was shortly, or longly, risen.

  “Now,” said the doctor, to see whom Reinhart had to clasp Lori more closely in looking round her blondeswept head, “this young woman you have got in trouble—”

  “Ah no, Otto, it was not he,” Lori broke in far too eagerly for the pride of the fellow she had made her cave.

  “How do you know that?” asked Reinhart, arrested in his drawing away by the sofa arm in the small of his back; because of this his irritation became briefly paranoid: how dare he be boxed in?

  “Because maids, like concierges, know everything,” said Lori, mock-mysteriously, without trying to turn. “The Gestapo of belowstairs...”

  The doctor disintegrated another Lifesaver and swallowed its rubble. He chose a third, perhaps a fourth, since the pack appeared to stand currently at three-quarter size. His thin lips, opaque glasses, and traces of eyebrow expressed satisfaction. His hair was a thick bush, one finally noticed as one continued to creep so tightly against Lori that when she spoke he heard the vibrations in his own chest. Bach, remote in
a spirited monologue to Schild, Reinhart worried over not, nor did he despise him.

  “There, there,” said Lori, patting his nearer knee with a twinkle in her hand, “everybody knows you could have.”

  The doctor stared exhaustively, sightlessly, at Reinhart. Finally he spoke in his loud whisper: “Let me for a change be honest. Obviously I cannot perform the operation. I could find a colleague to do it, of course. But I intend not to. I have come here and taken your time, and your pastilles, under false colors. My motive was simply to ‘see’ an American. Are you angry with me?”

  “No,” Reinhart answered. “Surely not.”

  “But you should be.” The doctor was impatient. “I can solve your problem, yet I will not. And as far as you know, for a capricious reason.”

  Reinhart smiled tolerance and dropped his cupped left hand on Lori’s shoulder. “I can’t force you, can I?”

  “Then you are not serious?” asked the doctor in dramatic astonishment. “Disgrace for the lady, shame for you—for although you may not be the other principal in the catastrophe, your honor is somehow involved, yes?, or you wouldn’t be here. Come now, at least try to bribe me.”

  Smiling again, Reinhart answered, conscious that when he had to speak without preparation his damnable German was certainly ungrammatical and, despite his “good accent” Americanized in pronunciation—you cannot take care of everything simultaneously—so that to these Germans he was ludicrous for another reason. In their reality he sounded:

  “I donnt tink dot so easy to corrupt you are.”

  “On the contrary, I am supremely corruptible. I have no honor whatsoever. For example, I would do anything to save my life.”

  Reinhart felt Lori stir against him, and he released her sweater-shaggy shoulder. “Oh well, wouldn’t anybody do that?”

  For the first time, but briefly, the doctor lost what had all this while been more nearly ebullience than anything else. And then, taking another, a purple, Lifesaver, he said, with the old aplomb and in the voiceless voice Reinhart had come to hear as oddly beautiful, “On the other hand, if by necessity you have learned this fact about yourself, it is nice to know. Some American writer—have you read him?—wrote a verse about seeing a man eat of his own heart. ‘Is it good?’ he asked. ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘it is bitter—but I like it. First, because it is bitter, and second, because it is mine.’ ”