Authors: Thomas Berger
They had from the first always spoken English together, although Schild had often sought to turn to German, partly from a masochistic pride in his fluency—and partly from the vicarious nostalgia in which he looked back on the time before his majority: the tongue of the old International had been German. But Schatzi had resisted, not so much from a pride of his own, Schild thought, as from his sixth sense for conspiracy, which told him that obscurity had as great a role as precision in underground technique. In one’s second language, facts are never finally established; when blame must be cast, it can thus fall on the vocabulary and not the man, or if the man, then first on him who by birth qualifies for absolute comprehension. There is at any rate a possibility for such miscarriage, and the professional asks for no more, from his own side or the foe.
Exploiting, to himself, his ambivalent pleasure with the present confirmation of the hypothesis, he received another notice—as he often did and as often was unarmed against, for it was his constant failure that though he had the imagination of disaster, he had not the mind. His suspicions rose the faster for his inability to believe in them. Not only had Schatzi never before transmitted the “line”; he had never been so generally obliging. His manner asked for forbearance, as if, getting that, he would go on to request ten dollars, repayable on demand. He was not, for once, in haste: he had never before sat at an interview; he had never before come to Schild’s billet;
he had never before been pleasant.
He continued to be, despite his theme, which was the occasion for neither grace nor evil but the neutrality of fact. And the first fact laid in Schild’s head by Schatzi multiplied within the minute; in the same minute that his heart multiplied its reasons for foreboding, his reason produced offspring, like some woman in Asia, or what-have-you
mise-en-scène
for the current classic instance of futile misery, who continues to reproduce like a mink notwithstanding the famine.
“In the Western zones,” Schild said, “all the ex-Nazis are getting jobs with the Military Government.”
This cut off Schatzi for a moment of aggrieved silence. Now Schild had perhaps gone too far. His question was put in a voice that suggested this was the first time he had ever been brought to this turn of the road, one nearer the hairpin than was comfortable, and unless Schild could produce Automobile Association sanction he would drag his feet.
The sudden caution, standard operating procedure for anyone else to be met in Schild’s professional circles, was unusual for Schatzi, a piece with the rest of his tonight unique demeanor. But that this was the norm and Schatzi’s usual manner the oddity, had no force, for the ordinary Schatzi, who was extraordinary, was precisely what Schild had been prepared to meet in Europe. He had hated him, true, and he had just now begun to like him, but these nervous reactions were beside the point that Schatzi had been absolutely authentic.
Or perhaps so directly to the point that they were invisible, integrated in the drama of hatred and fear and fascination of which Schatzi was a walking précis. Whatever his temporary odors, to Schild he stank of the concentration camp; he had acquired there a beastliness which but for the final morality could not be separated from that of his captors. Hideous to think so; but only moral realism to know that the difference between saint and devil was frequently never revealed until the last judgment.
“By the way,” Schild said at last, when Schatzi’s moment of silence had lengthened into an evident volition not to speak at all, “I saw the ‘big lout’ and have begun to go through the papers from his office. Only the top two or three cartons have Winterhilfe files. The rest is material from the Bund Deutscher Mädel.”
“A female division of the Hitler Youth.”
“Yes, I know that.” Schild was as usual irritated at being told what he already knew. “At any rate, I have filtered out some things for you.”
No answer. The sounds of Schatzi’s breathing became quickly like the aspiration of a rubber pillow crushed by a thigh, and died. The crickets sang madly below the fence—or wherever; if you went there to find them, they would instead be at the place you had left, and back there again only to hear their song in the bush. Behind Schild, a casement had its fastenings undone, its halves slithering open in slow provocation, followed swiftly by a broad drift of light that created a visible Schatzi but did not animate him. He wore bicycle cuff-guards resembling money clips. His shoes were swarthy, pebble-grained, and had long Italian points. The sole of one, showing a medallion of chewing gum in the arch, hung directly before Schild; danced to a rhythm that owed more to emaciation and senility than tacit music; the leg within its frayed sheath of woolen underwear was surely bare tibia and fibula and a snarl of ancient sinews. Long underwear in the middle of summer: for his pants cuff had ridden high, one bicycle clip, being sprung, failing; and he lay on his back in the grass, with one leg arched high, the other looped over it. Had he suffered a seizure? Schild rose to see beyond the bridge of legs, saw Schatzi’s eyes wide open, bland and insensitive as two bottle caps, paralytic. Dread had just put down his immediate, instinctive disbelief, he had just received the full import of the underwear shroud, when Schatzi belched like a cannon and with a sudden effort of overbearing vitality raised to the sitting position.
“Queer person who lives in your quarters,” he said.
Schild turned expecting that the German woman,
déshabillé,
could be seen framed in the window—not in concupiscence of his own but in amused anticipation of Schatzi’s; he was captivated by the sudden transition from imagined death to carnality. Instead he saw Lichenko, in undress rightly enough, but Lichenko! Who, bent at the waist, lips funneled and eyes squinted in bestial ill humor, swung one arm apelike. He was naked. The other arm crooked in menace. In his paw was, again, Schild’s .45.
In the haste to the door Schild yet had attention for the nimble Schatzi, who had sprung up beside him and maintained the pace at his elbow. He saw in his courier’s action that which relieved his greater worry: would Schatzi, knowing of Lichenko, show the innocent curiosity of a boy chasing a ladder wagon?
They symbolically broke into the kitchen, for its door was open and only the oppressive light of the interior barred entry. The German woman lay stiff and still on her mattress in the corner, frozen in contempt, not fear, her handsome face fierce, free, and remote as an eagle’s. She had, it was clear, cowed Lichenko with no more than her moral advantage.
Lichenko had jumped behind a high cabinet at the first sound of intrusion, where he thrust the pistol, or sought to thrust it, into the space between cabinet and wall. He was apprehended before this was managed. But, as if in that brief moment with himself he had taken a realistic account of his project’s miscarriage, seen it, that is, as a mere limited venture gone awry with no permanent blot on the amour propre, he met Schild straight on, handing him the pistol butt-first—to show, by its empty slot, that it was not loaded—and offering his guileless face, open and unafraid.
Was he drunk again? Schild had taken care to keep whiskey from his own room and Lichenko without direction had set a personal off-limits on St. George’s quarters; he had in fact developed an unusual delicacy towards the house in general, which Schild found more difficult to excuse than the expected barbarism. Yet here was the return of the barbaric, and he, Schild, had run to brook it, in his reflexes one with the scared calves at Lovett’s party.
Schatzi, temporarily forgotten, spoke to the woman—had been speaking to her and was now heard reacting to her consistent silence:
“Keine Antwort is auch eine Antwort.”
No answer is also an answer: for what reason was she working with Schild?
But Lichenko was not drunk. He began to shiver from the cold and adjusted the cinch in the towel about his waist, for neither was he wholly nude. He was, indeed, suddenly nothing he had been, neither victim nor captor nor naïve nor sinister, and as he prepared to speak from this new person, Schild struck him in the mouth. He had meant to knock him unconscious, so that Schatzi could not hear the Russian accent, but he had never before struck a person with this intent; he had never, since boyhood, struck any person for any reason, even comedy. He now punched too high and tore his third knuckle on Lichenko’s teeth.
It had been as hard a blow as he could summon in cold blood, but with only the free-swinging arm and no body behind it, did no physical damage. Lichenko, however, was whipped, all the more for his initial show of dignity. He grasped again at his towel, grinned in coy brutishness, rolled his head like a fawning dog. And then he whined, in German, and all was lost: “My friend, this whore tempted me!”
From the other corner Schatzi burst into his aspirant snigger, and an oxlike plodding at the door announced St. George, who, in maroon robe with white piping, slippers with elastic inserts, and pajamas a continuum of pale-blue hounds-teeth, after some deliberation had formulated his amiable comment.
“This looks like Grand Central Station!”
The pistol in his right fist, Schild furiously cut its barrel into Lichenko’s cheek and, as he went to the floor, followed him down, hacking him down, not ceasing his awful work until St. George, whose cries had gone unheeded, fell on him and stilled him with his bulk.
“CAN’T FIND ANY LETTERS
of Grandpa’s you asked for—stuff all cleaned out from under the porch to provide place for screens years ago,” wrote Reinhart’s father. “Maybe you even did it yourself—if you were paid for it. If my advice means anything, tho, I’d drop the idea—your just asking for trouble—as soon as you find any German relations they will want to borrow money from you... ,” etc., typed on a V-mail blank, small as the Lord’s Prayer engraved on the head of a pin.
Ask a stupid man, get a stupid answer. When he told Trudchen about it—for, despite her peculiarities, she was still around, still without pay, reporting to the office every morning long before he arrived—she said: “Ah, vy bozzuh! I will be your relative.”
That was all he had told her. He did not seek to expose her pitiful lies; he let stand the assumption that she lived, orphaned, in the little back room in the office building, where indeed she did report at the end of each workday. Above all, he remained silent on the visit to Lori’s. What he had learned there was for adults only, and he was not at all certain he could stand to think of it himself.
He at last understood that the complement to his long self-identification with Germanness had been a resolve never to know the German actuality. Knowledge had exhausted his options; he now had no choice but to seek out, if still they existed, his links to what, a brief half-century after Gottfried Reinhardt took ship for the New World, had disintegrated in murder and betrayal.
He had not really believed the witness of the Buchenwald photographs; mass exterminations were incredible. Real deaths were your friend Bill, one moment live, the next run down by a drunken driver; Al killed by pneumonia; Roy, his heart full of Jap metal, taking the Iwo Jima bastion and expiring a hero; or someone’s brother, well known, electrocuted by the state for the crime of homicide, and his victim; these corpses were believable in sight and mind; despite the mortician’s garish art, beyond the mystery of any death, were the concrete memories of impediments of speech, casts of eye, a rolling gait, a red Ford with a two-tone horn, and the only four-button suit in southern Ohio.
Similarly with the violet shadows under Lori’s eyes. Whoever had sold her safety from incineration had seen them upon every payment, must have had the queer guts to imagine their transformation into white ash and his own agency in the burning. And the man who would have fired the oven, dressed in his black SS-suit, with his blond crown and his blue eyes, the model to which every boy aspires, the handsome soldier fearless before the enemy, gentle with women. ... These types were not explained by the simple, pious indignation of: two kinds of man, one good and one bad; we of course are the first; they, the second.
Nor by the lack of a democratic tradition: was this what men did when denied the vote? Nor militarism: you mean that the great Frederick mounted his stallion and rode down women and children and unarmed men, and that the old knights of Nürnberg swung their blades against little ghetto-tailors?
Reinhart had been reared in what he assumed to be (since everything else was) the German code; there are two kinds of cowards: one who will not fight a man his own size or larger, and one who will fight only someone weaker; sometimes, but by no means always, the same person. But the validity of this, too, was here outmoded, for the SS man, fresh from his ravages on the helpless, stood fast against the superior enemy; was, to be sure, the fiercest soldier met by the Allied troops.
As to the anonymous blackmailer, Reinhart insisted that his, too, was a strange, mad kind of courage, for beyond gentleness and humanitarianism and a deficiency of passion, what stays the normal man from murder or even its threat is fear, not of the godly or human law or vengeance or nightmares, but of the suggestion of his own mortality.
Here all the known qualities of humanity had been united with their contradictions. This was what Bach dramatized in his monstrous monologue of truth in falsehood, that guilt could be confessed to only in a lie of the guiltless, that the first loss of the criminals had been in their human imaginations. Where Reinhart had looked in Germany for life, first in dreams of ancient glory and then, after the Nazis, for a vitality at least of evil, he saw only a horror of deadness, of which the literal corpses, the loose skins of Dachau, were but the minor part.
Yet more important than this moribund nation were the good people, those “good Germans” on whom the sanctimonious propaganda of Our Side did its work of slaughter, the mature ones like Bach who by conscious volition stayed decent and sought no fanfare for it now, and children like Trudchen who willy-nilly were clean. Were his relatives to be counted with them?