Authors: Thomas Berger
Five men had been busted in rank when caught salvaging items from the auto-da-fé. On the other hand, the colonel did not lack in a rude sense of justice: if you could make away with an overstuffed chair or an alarm clock without being seen, it was yours and beyond all future confiscation.
The tenants of Building A, first floor right, had furnished a very decent little flat, the cynosure, as Reinhart might say, of all eyes in their section. Particularly those of Buck Sergeant Tom Riley, their next-door neighbor and late technician third grade, who had made so free in their absence as not only to enter their home but also to sink his big ass into the mohair couch and fall asleep. When awakened by the crudest means they could summon on such short notice, he arose complaining, “You must of got your nose up the colonel to get to keep this furniture. Our living room looks like a Mexican cat house.” He lumped fatly to the hall door. “And why only two guys here instead of three?” His swollen nose tensed with authentic peevishness, and small wonder, for he had been reduced one grade for unsuccessful pilferage from the trashpile; but more than that, he was by instinct a petulant man, with the face of an old baby.
“Don’t be bitter,” said Reinhart, who had followed him out. “It’s my birthday.”
“Oh.” As might have been expected, he missed the ironic import of the non sequitur; he would be resentful, thank you, on his own time and ground; instead, he grasped Reinhart’s hand in embarrassed but genuine feeling, as you could tell by his nose, which went soft, saying: “You don’t mean to bird-turd me? Many happy returns of the day.” And already at his own door, he turned: “Ain’t it sad? Here we are, getting older by the minute.” Without change of expression or girding himself for the effort, he suddenly screamed, in a voice like a jazz cornet, an obscene epithet which, though it went up the concrete stairwell like a skyrocket, made no public stir, being heard all over the 1209th so frequently that it had lost its force as description: if you ever found that fellow to whom it was originally applied, you should have to think up a new one.
Because nothing succeeded like the envy of others, Reinhart returned to the living room in a, now sober, swagger. Off the top floor of the building lay an attic stuffed with furniture—the colonel lighted the bonfire only after his space ran out—and Marsala and Reinhart had picked the lock on its door and secretly helped themselves while everybody else was away at work. As to tenants, the orders demanded three per flat; given free choice, the buddies shrewdly compacted with Doyle, who three days later left on detached service.
So they had a proper home now, Marsala, a slum boy, confessing it was the nicest he ever had and the most spacious. Parlor, kitchen, and bath were luxuries militarily undreamed of. You could, see, get some rations from a cook, have a little lunch in the kitchen, then take your broad to the couch, knock off a piece, and then wash up in the bath. Marsala had indeed gone through the series three times in recent days, failing only in the last because he could not make a swift transition from pleasure to hygiene. Hence the jar of blue ointment in the bathroom medicine chest, yet another evidence the place was truly home.
The green tiles of the corner stove were still warm from a small fire they had built just after chow; July nights were cool this far north. A fall of maroon drapery concealed the big window above the couch, which in the daytime showed their private balcony and, beyond, a green promenade between their block and the next, an
allée
in the old, European sense, banned to cars and wastecans—and to the colonel, for natives retained ownership of the adjacent buildings. The enormous sideboard on the east wall had almost ruptured them to carry, and had little utility when in place, but great authority. Central was a round table of oak and six attendant chairs. No tablecloth. Other deficiencies were: nothing matched; no pictures on the wall; no knickknacks placed around; no doilies to protect the arms of the couch; no magazine rack with
The Woman’s Home Companion
and last week’s
This Week
and the publication General Motors sends gratis to Chevrolet-drivers. But it was Reinhart’s own home and he believed it was nice.
He seated himself at the table to brood on the folly of early-evening drinking, his close-cropped blond head propped on a red fist still tremulous from the fight, pale-blue eyes charged with red, one trouserleg loose from the knotted condom round the boot-top. Marsala, who didn’t know it was not nearly time to go to bed, had ignorantly gone and tomorrow would awake extra soon and, it went without saying, loud.
Reinhart all his life had detested birthdays; they were like Sundays in the middle of the week, outlawing the ordinary by a promise of the special, never fulfilled. Until this moment, for he could never think while in motion, the twenty-first had been another of the same. But, ruminating, he saw now that it had, indeed, a touch of the exotic. He had drawn blood and spilled some of his own. He rose and went again to the hall mirror in which he had inspected himself on the route back from Riley’s leaving. No, no hallucination: a nice scratch-cum-bruise on the left cheekbone, made easier to see if you tweezered your fingers about it. Riley, still sleepy, no doubt had laid it to shaving.
In addition to Marsala’s salve, the bathroom cabinet held Reinhart’s collection of medicines. Once every two months he had a slight complaint, each time in a different organ, never serious—whichever doctor was on duty in the 1209th dispensary would smile, prescribe, and likely as not give in to the urge to punch the tight belly and caution him jokingly not to worry, the undertaker would be a stranger to him for years.
The large merthiolate badge had dried and was almost ready to flake before he finished his final self-examination in the bathroom mirror, in the course of which his spirits curved downwards again. The pompous, pink-and-blond-faced creep who stared back at him had been endured enough for one day. He got out his rubbing alcohol, cotton, and applicator sticks, and wiped away the crimson fraud, threw the evidence out the window, went to the bedroom, kicked his clothes in the corner, fell on the bed next to Marsala’s, and was immediately in sleep.
F
IRST LIEUTENANT NATHAN SCHILD
, a traitor, handed a sheaf of papers to the German known as “Schatzi,” a courier to—well, above all, to an impossibility, since the measure of truth is what a man will give for it and Schild would have walked to the noose to deny that this Thing had any existence outside the mind of a malignant halfwit. Schatzi himself was just barely possible, being a returned traveler from that until the twentieth century undiscovered bourne; the most efficient of men, who could answer all questions with: “I was four years in Auschwitz.” Behind that, darkness, and not, according to the code of the underground, to be searched by Schild. Although Schatzi wore the garb of a petty bureaucrat—felt hat, stiff collar, briefcase—he suggested a ruin; although the night was warm, he trembled and winced, as if the whole of his skin had been sandpapered and recorded in pain the blows of the air’s molecules.
“What is this stuffing?” asked Schatzi, roaming Schild’s person with his free hand like a restless lover’s, probing the fly-front of the blouse.
Schild extracted a folder. “I forgot it because it’s more or less negligible.”
“Needless remark,” said Schatzi, pleasantly nasty. He struck Schild on the elbow with his finger-tips like a row of icepicks, of course hitting the nerve.
If a man could be said to have earned a broader latitude of eccentricity than most, it was Schatzi. He had once shown Schild the scars on his back, and if it had been day one could have seen the terrible commentary of his face, a kind of scorecard of the times. And that he had undergone torture and was not a Jew made it all the more criminal for Schild to detest him.
“Please,” said Schild, with genuine, if exaggerated feeling, for, although it was not that important, neither was it of no matter, and Schatzi discounted precision, “I must have this back by tomorrow noon at the outside. Captain St. George just asked for it.”
“Er kann mich im Arsche lecken!”
Sooner or later Schatzi related everything to himself, and scatologically, which was not perverse given his late experience of life reduced to essentials. Nevertheless, while understood, the common-denominatorship of Schatzi was hardly winning. Also in character, Schatzi walked in a cloud of food odors; tonight it was herring. But who was so degraded as to gainsay his right to courtly fare, let alone such simple meals as he was no doubt issued at some Soviet mess?
They stood on a strip of Wannsee shore near a wrecked pleasure pavilion, the salient feature of which was a tin Coca-Cola sign hanging crazily in the light of Schatzi’s torch, the patented slogan of its own International in German here; downtown Schild had seen the red and gold standard of Woolworth’s in a similar death-agony of capitalism. Beyond the symbolism it was a remote and even foolish place to meet. Two men upon a dark bench, one a German civilian... it was not Schild’s job to pass upon the point of rendezvous—while not forgetting for a moment that Schatzi was his superior, his mind was also wired in another circuit with the alternating current of forgetting and remembering—but he did, anyhow, make his apprehensions known, and Schatzi suggested next time bringing a girl for protective coloration. Such was Schatzi’s circuit: belly-rectum-pubis. The simplest interpretation was that he lived somewhere near the lake; perhaps, like a rat, in a hole just above the water line. Sometimes, in fact, as if caught by a sudden high tide, he appeared damp at their appointments. Schild bit his mind’s tongue; at least Schatzi said what Schatzi thought, suffered no internal wrestling matches with an indestructible malice like an extra organ.
In a sudden surge of self-remonstrance, Schild said: “We get a ration of candy, you know. In the American Army there are constant pressures upon the soldiers to be the same conspicuous consumers they were in civilian life. It’s not enough just to fight a war.”
Schatzi took the chocolate bar from his hand, undid its wrapper, scrutinized it in the light’s ray with an invisible jeweler’s lens, tested its friability with a thumbnail.
“I really found one last week that had all of it been shaped from brown clay. Think on that! The astonishing industriousness required, it having been a first-order job. All that work for fifty mark and you Amis are burdened with actual ones that you cannot eat till the day of doom.”
He pushed five ten-mark notes, already rubber-banded into that amount—yes, the Japs held the Malay Peninsula, but his bands were pure gum—into the hand of Schild which had come forward on its own volition, on its own idiotic hand’s sense that it would be shaken, just as a foot will all at once assume sovereignty and stub itself as punishment for some foot-crime or kick the girl’s shoe across the way out of some foot-lust. Schild’s face meanwhile was performing, in a vacuum, a squalid drama.
“But, my dear fellow, you shall not get more than this at the Tiergarten and think on the length of miles from here to there. You are an actual Greek for business, comrade!”
Schatzi returned the candy and took back the money, signifying the end of his joke.
“I know people who are pleased at your work,” he resumed, “and if you are not so careful they shall give you one of these posterboards to take home to Tennessee: ‘The Hitlers Come and Go Away But the German People Stay Always!’ ”
“If you get some pleasure from insisting that I’m from Tennessee, go ahead—” began Schild, but the flashlight quivered and sank, and Schatzi groaned from the ground: “I like the name.”
“An attack of dizzy,” he went on as Schild bent to aid, “brought on by four heavy suppers every day and eight hours of sleep the night, still in a warm bed.
Gemütlichkeit
is killing me. Give me some pills in the right pocket, they will make me miserable.” There was nothing in either pocket but Occupation marks. “Make all the money you canst,” said Schatzi, on his feet again but breathing with a whistle and coughing bubbly.
At such moments the call of Schild’s guilt echoed through the great tombs of the martyrs. Schatzi was indeed dying, yet he continued to serve. This, Schild knew in the final, serious level of the self, was why he hated him so: out of his own incapacity for a like magnitude of effort.
“You know,” said Schatzi, shaking his body like a dog, blowing air from his nostrils, combing his hair, long as a woman’s, with his fingers, “when Kurt brought you first, to my opinion you were a double agent. Arrived at by irrational methods, it is possible, but there was something with your eyes.” He took a flask from his briefcase and tasted of it. “Ah!” He spat. “Good drink will make a cat speak! They are, isn’t it true, simply myopiac? A fat small man, a little soccer ball of a man with eyes like that—and thicker spectacles—came into the K.Z. along with myself. I watched, in vainly, to see the existence there bring him down.” He spat again, making a nasty sound on the sand. “Ah! Cuts the flame.” Schild preferred to assume his version of “phlegm” was a portmanteau word: he must be burning inside. “One gets obsessions when you are a captive. But at the end of three months still he bounced. I never did see him on a work gang. He disappeared days somewhere but in the nights returned to the barracks. I had been convinced that he was a police spy and I am in fact yet. He lay in the bed each night end-to-end with my own bed and stared at me over his round belly and through his feet. It was terrorizing, I tell you, a man could never once find him asleep. When I awokened in the morning he looked, still; perhaps he did not close his eyes the night long. Because I do not know, you see, because I tell you I slept, I functioned as usually I do, under the watching of sixty-six devils I could do as always, because I tell you that beyond a club to my genital members there is nothing which a man can do which will touch me at all.”
Schatzi’s voice had taken on the authority usual to his concentration-camp reminiscences. On Schild’s refusal he pocketed the flask, but not before illustrating its quality, heavy silver; its feature, a spring cap worked with the thumb. As always, he withheld the dénouement until Schild in the double dread—the tedious responsibility of the auditor to help dramatize, the terrible certitude that the small fat man, whether bona fide police spy or hero, would like all the other creatures of Schatzi’s memory meet an unspeakable end—until, cold in July, he must urge him to go on.