Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  “ ‘Splendid,’ ” Reinhart repeated, “ ‘splendid with an egg.’ There’s something about Berlin that gets you, isn’t there?”

  “Me?” asked Schild.

  “That gets a person, I mean.” Reinhart turned his ankle on a broken brick, starting a minor avalanche. “It always used to have an evil ring—also awesome and faraway, like ‘Mars,’ or ‘Jupiter.’ But here it is, and it is real. Strange to say, I just realized I love it.”

  “Because it is broken,” said Schild.

  “I guess so. All the crap has been blasted away, leaving something honest, and I think what the doctor meant was that honesty really does win out in the end. That is horrible and at the same time funny. ... Funnier yet because I believe the doctor himself is a fake.” By the poor, cloud-filtered light of an introvert moon he checked Schild’s face. “You see, I have been to that cellar before. The other time Bach told me a long story which turned out to be a lie.”

  “A lie?”

  “The whole cloth. Imagine him in the SS!”

  “I can’t imagine anyone in the SS,” Schild lied. “Maybe that was a fake, too.” He did not understand why he could not speak straight to Reinhart; the good intent was there.

  “Would to God it had been,” Reinhart answered fervently, and tripped himself up on a naked concrete-reinforcing rod, fell, kept talking: “Like the murder of the Belgian babies in World War I—give me a hand please?, I feel a hollow under here that I’ll break into if I make a commotion myself. ... Thanks—which was a propaganda lie. Dirty Nazis! They made it impossible to lie about the Germans. Thus Martin Luther and Frederick the Great and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe are swine, too, because they helped to make all this. Nürnberg, were you ever in Nürnberg? I used to think there was something fine there—” He crashed through the intervals of a grounded metal bedstead.

  Schild took a lower way, through a shallow trough which yielded underfoot as if he walked across a human body. “When?” he asked.

  “Never,” said Reinhart. “I was never there, naturally. I saw a book once. Albrecht Dürer’s house stands to this day, Albrecht Dürer, the old artist of the Middle Ages. He made one etching called ‘Ritter, Tod, und Teufel.’ When I first saw it I couldn’t read German, I didn’t know what that name meant, I knew only Teufel, and he was easy to spot: a face like a wolf, with mad eyes and one crescent-shaped horn in the back of his head and two like a ram’s curving out from under his ears. His ears were donkey’s. On the other side of the picture is Death, on a crummy, melancholy old horse. He has a long white beard, a hole for a nose, and wears a crown full of snakes, holds an hourglass. The scene takes place in a gully full of junk, lizards, skulls, tree-roots, etc.; it looks something like Berlin today. A sneaky-looking hound runs along the bottom, and there is Dürer’s trademark and the date on a little sort of tombstone.”

  They had reached the bottom of their own declivity, which egressed to nowhere, and attacked the next smoking slope, Reinhart continuing to walk point.

  “But in the distance you can see the towers of a great castle. Death and the Devil may have entree everywhere, but they are not in that castle, which I believe must represent a heaven. And neither is the Knight, who I’m coming to in a minute. Because he would not be a knight unless he served his time in the gully of death and the devil. Well, the Knight—there he is in the foreground, on his splendid charger walking stately through the crap, the Devil leering over the horse’s rump, old Death wheezing at him in front, the dog sehleichend along below, the castle far away—they could do him in and nobody in those towers would know it until too late, but even if they did, what good would it be? What help can anybody else give you against Death and the Devil?

  “The castle is not relevant, as the doctor would say.” Reinhart passed through a doorway and was immediately again in the free air, for the wall stood alone in the world with no building as relative; Schild followed.

  “Welcome to mine house,” said Reinhart. “I wish I knew where the hell we are, I think we’re coming back to Bach’s cellar.”

  He stopped abruptly and Schild bumped into him and excused himself and said: “If you’d wait a minute I could show you.” He knew the way and wondered why he did not seize the leadership from Reinhart.

  But Reinhart pistoled a hand and shot at a great concrete box on the dim horizon, an entire basement blown intact from the earth. “No, I see what I’ve been looking for. ... Neither are the Death and Devil relevant. The Knight rides through the gully as if he doesn’t see them. Of course he does—the style Dürer draws in, there’s not room for the enormous horse let alone anything else; they are packed in that lousy gulch like a frankfurter in its skin. Therefore the Knight sees them—but he walks on. And I tell you, they look pretty squalid. If you glance quickly at the picture you won’t see anything but the Knight, with his long straight spear, a bit of fur towards the tip, the splendid armor with which he is, as they say, caparisoned, but most of all that wonderful tough face, sure of itself, looking not at the airy castle or horseshit Death or the mangy Devil, because they’ll all three get him soon enough, but he doesn’t care. He is complete in himself—isn’t that what integrity means?—and he is proud of it, because he is smiling a little.”

  Reinhart reached the caisson, where he waited till Schild climbed the rise and stood puffing beside him.

  “And he is not en route to do combat with an unarmed enemy. He is a man and needs no helpless victim to give him respect. When I think of him there, walking forever across the pages of a moldy old book—and I guess not even there now, since my father burned it—I could... I could smile, I suppose, because I do not feel sorry for him.”

  Schild smiled wryly and said: “You never saw the serf who had to help him into that heavy armor and take care of the splendid horse, or the bonded peasants who tilled his field, so that the knight could strut about as he pleased while the underlings did the work.” Perversely he clung to his loyalties while still older ones besieged him: stifling summer on the ramparts above Manhattan, windows sealed and blinds lowered as antithermal charm, faint sounds of street serfs playing stickball, Sir Nathan riding the rug, charging through a bowdlerized Malory in which Launcelot and King Arthur’s wife exchanged ethereal admiration. For the French book saith that Sir Servause had never courage nor lust to do battle against no man, but if it were against giants, and against dragons, and wild beasts.

  “No,” said Reinhart. He tore off a chunk of loose mortar from the wholesale cellar—astonishing that such strength was accompanied by any mind at all—and pitched it like a baseball, although it must have weighed fifteen pounds, far across the rubble range and down night’s black throat without a murmur.

  “No,” Reinhart repeated, “you don’t get the idea. There were no serfs or vassals in this picture. This Knight was real, but not real. How can I say it? I just thought, he was not necessarily even a German. He is just a drawing—just art, is all—a lie, if you like. He belongs as much to a serf as he would to a real knight. A picture belongs to anybody who looks at it. It can even be burned, and somebody will still have it in his mind. Besides, you admit anyway that Death and the Devil are free to all—why not then the Knight?”

  Because Jews were never knights, even though they had lived in Germany since long before the Middle Ages; was it in Heine that one read of the ancient Jewish communities along the Rhine?, who said: Don’t blame us for the killing of Christ, we were living here at that time! But riding the rug, working at the exalted old language to which he then had not yet realized he was historically a newcomer (but so, in his day, was Reinhart), neither did Sir Nathan admit his native disqualification for the quest of the Holy Grail. Sir Launcelot let them say what they would, and straight he went into the castle, and tied his horse to a ring in the wall; and there he saw a fair green court, and thither he dressed himself, for there him thought was a fair place to fight in. So he looked about, and saw much people in doors and windows, that said, Fair knight thou art unhappy.

&n
bsp; “But,” Reinhart said unhappily, “if you want to say they don’t make them like that nowadays, I agree with you. That’s progress for you: get rid of the whole works, serfs, peasants, castles—and knights, not to mention Tod and Teufel. Where do these kinds of Death and Devil fit in the doctor’s story—even if he is a fake?”

  “He was real, all right,” Schild snapped. “I’m not sure about you and me, but he was real.”

  “Nobody in that cellar ever shows you any evidence.”

  Schild laughed in sharp anger and answered in his birthright idiom: “So whadduh you, district attorney?” It sounded authentic; he had not come so far; his temper softened. “You just said it is impossible to lie about the Nazis—”

  Reinhart had found a chairleg and now slowly, inexorably bruised it against the concrete wall, until its end was fibrous as a brush.

  “The Germans, I said, but I am glad to hear you think there is a difference.”

  Quite right, the error was his, but why the special punishment? And why should Reinhart bring it, whom he trusted, to whom he was in a unique relationship of owing nothing and vice versa, his friend. ... The moon had eluded its cloud but was still niggardly, showing Reinhart as a large pale blob belonging to the powdered landscape. The gentile is everywhere at home. Reinhart leaned against the basement as if he owned it, waiting for the Jewish opinion.

  “Why me?” Schild shouted in fear and loathing.

  Reinhart was hurt, but calm. “Because you’re the only other German-American I’ve got to talk to. We have a common interest in those potato pancakes we were fed as boys.” His irony surprised him; he grinned and wrinkled his brow low, like an ape.

  “For Christ’s sake,” said Schild, “don’t tell me you don’t know I’m a Jew.”

  He had been wrong about Reinhart’s face; its contempt was as acute as its good feeling had been blunt.

  “All right,” said Reinhart. “You’re better than I am, you know everything without having to try, and you can stick it up your ass.”

  He shuffled along the basement wall, kicking up brick dust, which filtered through the hairs of the inner nose smelling like cordite. He now looked rather more resigned than angry, and at the corner of the concrete he threw up his head, pointed, and called: “The path is here!”

  He had known where it was all the while. Why had he led them to wander? He was sinister, but he was also good. He descended an excavation, his round head falling evenly from sight.

  “Wait!” Schild shouted, pelting after, through the crying, broken turf. When he reached the bombhole Reinhart’s broad back was laboring across the other rim. “I gave you an order!” He suffered fear that the man would deny him again, this time in insubordination—the first irregularity had been merely personal—and he would be required to turn him in for arrest. ‘You are always arresting someone,’ St. George, whose Army it was and not Schild’s, had complained.

  He scrambled across the chasm as Reinhart, obeying, waited. He had trouble, too, at the rim, and not being as tall as Reinhart, could not have made it without help. Which he received, unrequested. Reinhart’s hand was cold and dirty.

  Reaching the upper level, he began to speak his amends, which, as always, altered during their travel from source to mouth. Hysteria was, finally, the only cause he had ever served, but at least he was loyal to that. He accepted his uniqueness, and remembered an old story told him by a fellow traveler undergoing the transition to simple liberal and eventually no doubt to worse—the typical American politics of pis aller—and that was his respects to Reinhart.

  “When Trotsky and Stalin first fell out, the Politburo met to resolve their differences. Since Stalin controlled a majority of its members, it soon decided in his favor and demanded that Trotsky recant. ‘You are ordered,’ the decision read, ‘to stand up and say: “Comrade Stalin, you are right. I am wrong. I apologize.” ‘Very well,’ Trotsky answered, ‘I accept the decision.’ He stood up and said in a heavy Yiddish rhythm: ‘You are right? I am wrong? I apologize?”

  Reinhart grinned. “Neither do I, sir. ... Since we are speaking freely, I can say I knew that whatever else might be said of you, you weren’t chicken-shit. Jewish officers never are. They have too much pride to be. They are free.”

  “No,” Schild answered quietly. “If you believe that you believe in a lie and you make it too hard on the Jews.”

  “But I have seen it. I have three years’ service—I enlisted,” said Reinhart in pride. “If you don’t mind my saying it, Jews are sometimes know-it-alls and their manners could stand improvement, but that doesn’t have anything to do with decency and is anyway a proof of their freedom—” He checked on Schild’s reaction with the defiant self-righteousness, nose slightly flared, of the man who by his general benevolence is sanctioned to be specifically offensive; he wished to hurt Schild, Schild could see, in the interests of some comprehensive good that would finally bankrupt him, Reinhart, but first he would take a small profit.

  “—and don’t tell me that is anti-Semitism,” said Reinhart, cowering, for all his size. “I’m sick of being made to feel a swine because I’m of German descent. I’m sick of being in the privileged class that nothing ever happens to. I’m tired of being big and healthy, but I can’t help it, I was born that way. If you would be a prisoner in any concentration camp ever made, I would be a guard. Now, you know everything—but do you know that? How that makes a person feel? Do you know what it is to be in debt to everybody? Not you, you are always right.”

  “I?” said Schild. He sat down on a ridge of waste. The sudden armistice within had relaxed his muscles. He repeated the grammatical fiction almost genially: I, the pronoun of rectitude: “I am a murderer.”

  Reinhart took seat beside him, and with the added weight the ridge of brick-halves squashed out about their ankles.

  “Ah,” said Reinhart, “you should have a pair of these boots. Now your shoes will be filled with that junk.”

  “That’s all right,” Schild said, although he too, with a sense of expansiveness, granted its tragedy; he, the rude Besserwisser, accepted this Middle Western, gentile horror of discomfort and unrespectability, opened his shoes and dumped them clean. His right sock had a large hole revealing his largest toe.

  “Why don’t you turn that in to salvage?” paternally asked Reinhart, pointing rudely.

  “No salvage for officers,” he answered, self-consciously pitiful. “We have to buy our own.”

  “I keep forgetting.” Reinhart searched his pockets. “You got a butt?—wait, by God, here’s that little pack of Fleetwoods you yourself gave me last month. Well, they’re as good now as ever. They are made stale.”

  Schild took one and found he was quite right; Reinhart knew everything.

  “Now don’t you worry,” Reinhart said, “all that was just talk. Berlin does something to everybody; makes one want to accuse himself.” He blew a smoke-mustache from his nostrils. “In a war there’s no such thing as murder. It’s kill or be killed. I don’t blame the regular German army, for example, for fighting against the Allies—even if their cause was wrong; that’s a very different deal from the particular Nazi outrages. To be precise—when I said the doctor might be a fake, I meant in the unimportant things, such as whether or not he was in those camps, whether or not he was a Communist or a twin of Lori, and so on. I never for a minute doubted he was honest in the fundamental human things—you see he could be an ex-Nazi and still be straight on those. Did you ever think of Hitler as just a man eating jelly omelets, needing a haircut, clearing his throat, getting out of bed in the morning and yawning? Did you ever think of someone saying to him at such a time: ‘Come on, Adolf, I see a bit of dandruff on your collar and I heard you belch, and I know you have your troubles. Come on now, you can’t crap me, you’re a man like any other.’

  “But I started by wanting to be precise. Precisely, I can conceive of an honorable German hating Hitler yet fighting for his country in the Wehrmacht. I can also imagine a German Jew who in spite
of what was done to him thinks of Germany as his own country, for he is a German, isn’t he? And if he has permitted the Nazis to convince him he isn’t, he has let them win—in a way they never did with all their bullies and gas ovens. They are the non-Aryans, they are the degenerate race who rotted and betrayed a great people, not the Jews. I can conceive of such a man, I don’t mean I expect any particular individual to be one, you can’t blame a man for not being a hero.”

  Despite his fervor Reinhart spoke slowly, and Schild for once was not impatient. Having confessed, he had awaited the question of a pure-hearted fool, which, the old legends promised, would heal his wound. Instead he found himself cured of Germanic whimsy. He, and not Reinhart, was the romantic; fools there are in abundance, but not one is innocent.

  “Reinhart,” he said evenly, “now listen to me. I forgive you. Do you understand? I forgive you.”

  “That is not what I want—”

  “But that is what you get from me, nevertheless. And if you won’t take it”—he grinned and shot his cigarette-end in a high rocket which no sooner exploded on the wasteland than two shadowy children filtered from behind a rubble hillock and claimed it as prize, quarreling on who should pinch its ember, whose ragged smock-pocket should tote it to their used-tobacco Shylock—“you can stick it up your ass.”

  “It doesn’t do me any good,” said Reinhart. “Now them—forgive those kids. They really had nothing to do with it, unless you believe with Hitler that a whole people can be degenerate.”

  But he would not let a gentile be sanctimonious with him. On the other hand, he again cleaned his shoes for Reinhart’s sake and rose, saying: “Do you know we have to walk back to Zehlendorf?”

  “Unless we can hitch a ride.”

  “This late?” asked Schild, looking at his bare wrist. In what bleaker field was his watch ticking now? To Reinhart, he knew all the answers, yet why was his every emotion another question? “Do those children stay awake all night on the chance an American will come by and throw away a butt?”