Authors: Thomas Berger
“To war on decency, love, truth, freedom, is to permit the Jew to mask himself with the Good, and thus to embrace him. Through our aid, the Jew was able to achieve what in all the anguished millenia before he was not. Si
monumentum requiris, circumspice!
We weeded out his weaklings, while increasing his moral capital with every one we destroyed. We hardened him with our tortures.
We
tempered him, refined him in our fires,
we
polished him down to the indestructible core. Today you can see the results of our craftsmanship: he is pure hard diamond, and his radiant leer sparkles in triumph over his fallen forge-slave.”
In conclusion Bach reached over and dropped his hand on Reinhart’s knee with a startling weight. Startling because when he had held it earlier in greeting, it was light, and since it was clammy as well, reminiscent of a damp sponge. Now it hit with a
plop
like a waterlogged sponge, and, sure enough, when Reinhart looked down he saw a faint wet stain melting the crease from his trouser-knee. This oddity was as full of liquid, it occurred to Reinhart, who remembered both the tears of gratitude at the cigarettes and the weeping in the story, as a cheese is full of “whey” in all the best fairy tales. As the first occasion on which he had come across anyone whose hands genuinely dripped with perspiration, it was worthy of cataloguing. Then too, in this damp cellar nothing dried. His own sweat, while not as plentiful as Bach’s, sheathed him like a trout’s mucous envelope. A strip of stagnant water lined the base of the wall; the concrete blocks above had sieved out a patina of mineral salts.
Bach’s rhetoric had made poor Reinhart’s head reel, from amusement through indignation to logical vertigo. He repeated the process, this time at greater cost, that he had undergone in Philosophy 100, where the splendid promise of the fall catalogue—“The major traditions of European thought”—was blighted by the inevitable petty-Machiavelli of a lecturer with his
cul-de-sacs:
“Epimenides, a Cretan, said all Cretans are liars. Was he telling the truth?” And even if he understood, he was lost, and guilty, guilty.
At last, in desperation, he said: “Just let me get hold of this. You want to kill the Jews with kindness?”
Bach made his giggle, and the hairs rose on Reinhart’s neck.
“Leave it to the American to put things without equivocation!”
Reinhart took his advantage to steer into the congenial area of behaviorism. “But all this is in terms of
feelings
and
ideas.
What exactly did you
do,
as a Nazi?”
Bach withdrew the sponge to his own knee, his eyes bagging in disappointment.
“I should have thought the intellectual history to be the more valuable. Well, then, if you insist, I can produce a few crumbs of physical activity. Humiliating, but perhaps useful as an index to the nightmare from which it took me so long to awaken.
“I joined the Party in November, 1938. I shan’t dwell on the scruples the conquering of which took me an entire decade from the aforementioned events. I placed the button under my lapel a few days before the celebrated
Kristallnacht
when, in retaliation for the murder by the Polish Jew Grynszpan of an attaché at the German Embassy in Paris, the Nazis instituted an action against Jews and Jewish property throughout the Reich. It may sound queer to you that I participated in some of the raids in Berlin. Yes, I the aesthete! My request for a role was most suspiciously received, the storm troops being constituted of the most ungodly scum you can imagine, whose motivation was not a holy passion against Jews but a simple nihilistic lust for destruction. However, a fanatical eye is an effective persuader. I managed to win a position on one of the flying squads that swooped on the Jewish shops in the Kurfürstendamm. You cannot understand, nor can I describe the exultation with which I plied my axe, even astonishing the thugs whom I accompanied, so that by the end of the night there was a tacit agreement among these canaille that I was their leader.
“In a china shop, where we had done a job worthy of your proverbial wild bull and were ready to depart, one of my companions came upon a hidden safe, buried in the rear wall. We had to send out for explosives to open it, it being impervious to the pick, and I was all for abandoning the project for better work elsewhere. But the cupidity of these swine was aroused; they were convinced the Jew had cached his treasure there. The door was eventually burst, revealing an empty chamber save for a single object, a small vase, which on examination I determined to be a piece of thirty-pfennig trash from Woolworth’s.
“Now why the Jew would have placed such a thing in his vault I could not at first explain, and, indeed, was about to pitch it aside, when the thought struck me that the scoundrel had got intelligence of the raid, and, lacking anything better, had employed this means of retaliation, with a sense that Nazis of the common stripe would be certain to think it valuable and demonstrate their idiocy by confiscating it unbroken. A very deep joke, typically Jewish. But I knew, with the penultimate hatred which is, as I now know, stupidity, but which then seemed wisdom, that at last I had in my hands an instrument to enable me to top the Jew at his own game. I led my men in another diligent round of razing. When we had done, the showcases were flinders, the walls demolished to the lath, the woodwork a pile of faggots for the stove, the wiring ripped out—in short, a reduction that could have qualified us journeymen house-wreckers. A tiny table was spared, and placed in the center of the room. On it, I centered the vase, filled to the rim with my ordure.”
For all the foliage, thought Reinhart, he is a clown at the core. “That was sort of childish, wasn’t it?”
Bach could not be conned. “No, with gratitude, if you mean ‘and therefore not responsible.’ ” And, not seeing Reinhart’s grin grow dim, he struggled to his feet without assistance; swaying over him, face contorted, arms rising and falling like a crazy windmill, he screamed in the voice of his giggle, piercing, forceful, but not loud:
“Oh no, no. Can’t you understand? In Auschwitz we of the SS could kill two thousand head in half an hour, but it was burning the bodies that took time.”
He produced a cavernous belch that shook him to the fundament, and toppled backwards, ever so slowly, onto the couch, which recoiled to the floor and recovered. Massively he slept.
Lori, too, slept in the chair, but the absence of sound as Reinhart rose and prepared to creep away, awakened her.
“No, are you leaving?”
Reinhart pointed to the sofa.
“He is spent, poor man!”
At the purity of her look, Reinhart seized her bony shoulders and shook them violently as he might have washed his overcoat with air. When he had exhausted the brutality of his violated virtue and summarized Bach’s dissertation, she tossed back her head and laughed extravagantly.
“Bach in the SS! Pardon my rudeness. Perhaps one must be German to see the joke. The SS had most severe physical requirements.”
“Why would he tell such a story?” asked Reinhart, aloud but to himself, as the chair again received his mass. “If he concocts this out of the thin air the man is surely mad.”
“No, he is not insane. The minds of the insane run in straight lines, not always Euclidean, but always straight. The job there is to find the geometrical system by which to measure them. Here, if you insist, we have something eccentric, twisted but normal. In fact,” she added, “normal is twisted.”
“But why evil?” he wailed. “When people lie they make themselves better, not worse.”
“No, you foolish boy!” She thrust her face up at him. “No, they first make themselves something, whether good or bad, but something. A man cannot live without a function. Can you understand that, you
American
?”
He had never in all his life heard the national adjective pronounced with contempt.
Amerikaner:
he loathed it for a moment himself, but there was yet one more hateful.
“You
German
!” he ranted. “Can you understand this: I am ashamed to be of German descent! It makes me sick to my stomach. I might lie to make myself worse, as you say, but not to claim I hurt defenseless people. You once asked about my relatives—I hope they were killed in the bombing! And if they weren’t, they are dead anyway in their souls. Do you know what you did when you murdered the Jews? You committed suicide, all of you!” Of course, no sooner was it out than he realized he echoed Bach to the letter, and was ashamed.
“Don’t talk of things you cannot understand.” She turned her back.
He reclaimed from the table the pack of cigarettes he had given Bach and made for the door. Lori pursued him. In the dank passageway, in the pale light that reached there from the lamps within, they grappled, she shrilling: “I must make you understand about Bach. It is simply an overactive anterior pituitary. Not only does this outlaw of a gland produce great size, but it also eliminates the sexual urge!”
“I don’t care, I don’t care.” Saying which again and again, he nevertheless permitted her to pull him back inside. He knew now of his own impotence: his great moral address had been delivered, every word, in English.
Lori drew him to the chair and notwithstanding their differences in size, literally knocked him into it, all that was necessary being one good push in the midsection.
“Now,” she cried, standing militantly before him. “It was you who insisted on coming here. You forced me to bring you against my will. Therefore you will stay until I finish. Bach has done as much for me as one human being can do for another. He has saved my life, my very life!, every single day for three years.”
“You were anti-Nazi?” asked Reinhart in rapturous awe, but she paid him no mind.
“And it involved more than simply not turning me in to the Gestapo—you perhaps think in your naïve way that that much could be expected of a husband; you have not lived in Germany—and more than concealing me, too, although that at the daily risk of his own life.”
Beneath the vast, important feelings Reinhart had a little tickle of pride, no less important, at her ceasing to speak so as to favor his imperfect knowledge of the tongue. She spoke swiftly and with the full resources of idiom and construction, and he did not miss a word.
“The long story of his art collection is pitifully short. He sold it, piece by piece, to pay for day by day of my life.”
“The Gestapo then could be bribed.” The idea made that dread agency less terrible.
“The money went elsewhere. Who got it does not matter.”
“Excuse me, I am so stupid, foolish as you say—if you don’t wish to answer you don’t have to. Why, when he has this to tell, does Bach pretend to be the reverse?”
“Because the meaningful things are never said. Because he is infected with the Berliner’s disease, irony and gallows-humor. Because—” She moved intensely near, and he was afraid she might call him
American
again, with all that scorn. “No,
I
shall not lie to you. ... Because the time when he could do something for me has now passed.”
He found that, idiotically, he had replaced the wretched cigarettes on the table.
“I came here tonight to take pity on you,” he said. “I have to ask it instead for myself. Believe me, it is not easy to be a fool. You have to work hard at it.” He went again to the door, this time unaccompanied, from which distance he looked long at her minor, crumpled figure, and said: “You are a Jew.”
Bach groaned lightly in his sleep while Lori with careful hands arranged a quilt on his recumbent hulk. Then, extinguishing all the lamps but the one on the central table, she came once more to Reinhart.
“That saves me,
nicht wahr
? That one-half Jewishness, that mongrel portion which so short a time ago condemned me, is now my salvation. And enlightened people no longer believe in miracles! Yet within oneself, one is always just a person. Even Hitler. Do you know, his favorite meal was corn-on-the-cob and jelly omelet. Think of that: there were moments when his sole concern was to retain a bit of slippery jam on a fork.”
He opened the door and stared forlornly into the gloomy passage.
“Shall I light you out?”
“No thanks. I’ll try to manage that much on my own. May I come again?”
Briefly she was against him, her small head in the hollow of his rib cage.
“You are a fool, a good fool, a kind fool.”
She gave his hand the short, one-shot European shake and said no more as he began the tortuous ascent to the mid-world.
O
NE HAD HIS CHOICE
in the officers’ liquor ration, but one could not command what was not available. The fifth of gin represented an impressive trial of even Captain St. George’s noted patience, not to mention the vermouth.
“Eleven months, Nate, it took me to assemble the ingredients of a martini, with the olives still to come. And the funny part is that I never eat the olives. Still, a drink looks naked without it, and I think, don’t you, that an olive adds a certain essential something. And the ice! There’s something, where can a fellow get ice in this stricken city?”
No, pickled onions would never do, and although the fashion was passing to lemon peel, St. George had read, he held with the olive.
“Besides, the question is academic: I haven’t seen pearl onions or lemons, either.”
The captain was therapeutic, a plump, well-padded bandage. Why the medics did not use him as resident healer in some recuperation camp was beyond Schild’s reason.
Sunset in the back yard with St. George, an awful thought as recent as two weeks ago, now was Schild’s hope. He had fallen into an attendance on the captain’s problems as one tormented by the rash might lower himself into a pool of warm oil and, comforted, in debt to the oil, so to speak, take up its study. A new approach for Schild, who hitherto might instead have gone into dermatology. But he had at once lost his strength, not by a slow erosion but at once, as if someone had opened a valve.
Last night, undoing his tie before the mirror—an atypical incident; Schild was so little concerned with his appearance that he rarely stood before the glass to put on his necktie, let alone remove it—standing, then, at the dresser, the room’s interior precisely reversed from the real, he was overcome by a quick delight, like some small-flat resident with his persistent discovery in dreams of a door behind the bookshelf that opens into another room no one knew about. Admiring the new figure in the wallpaper, all the fresh textures, the dimensions not yet contemptible by use, his eye swept to Lichenko and arrest. He had not, in the farthest reach of the new landscape, forgotten his guest; indeed, deliberately he had sought him out, as if, since the mirror worked a comprehensive reversal, it would also reverse Lichenko; as if from a novel aspect he would be seen again as he had entered Schild’s affairs, the subsequent devious patterns now revealed as a foible of the stale vision.