Authors: Thomas Berger
In the last he was terribly confirmed by a story of Marsala’s. Roy Savery, an enlisted assistant in the operating room, had just yesterday performed an abortion on his German girl friend and she bled to death.
“His trouble was,” said Marsala in high disgust, “oh my aching back!, he loved her. If he didn’t of, she would still be alive and he wouldn’t be up for court-martial. Any girls I knock up I do them a favor and don’t see them again.” He chuckled and screwed his gangster’s face around the stump of cigar on which his large incisors were clamped, smoke and speech intermingling from the side alleys of his mouth: “Why not? I never raped anybody long as I lived. Am I right?”
They sat
en famille
in their living room, at the round table beneath a chandelier of five dead bulbs and one live. Marsala took off his undershirt, revealing a natural vest of hair, from deep in the tangles of which glinted a silver religious medal as might a fragment of broken airplane within the jungles of the Mato Grosso. He had too extravagantly stoked the corner stove an hour before, and the air was at that temperature in which the skin weeps and philosophy proliferates.
“Poor girl.” Reinhart groaned, in part because he was miserable with perspiration.
“Yeah, he held a gun on her to make her haul his ashes,” Marsala growled disingenuously, suspending from his index fingers the dancing, ghostlike undershirt, which he inspected for cleanliness and finding insufficient balled and cast under the sideboard. “He should of done it, see? Then he woona owed her nothing at all, if you get my meaning.”
“It’s burning in here. I’d better open the window.”
“No, whadduh yuh crazy? I take pneumonia with no shirt on, you dumb dong.... So get yaself a American girl like you got, huh you big dummy Carlo? Knows how to take care of her humping self, huh? Now don’t tell your old buddy you don—”
“You got any extra money, buddy?”
Marsala snatched from a back pocket and propelled across the table his old brown billfold fat as a squab and said, while drawing on the stogie: “Take whadduhyuh want.”
Reinhart chose a sheaf of one thousand marks from a store of twice that much. “Can I have this?” He fanned the bills so Marsala could count them.
“
What
is this?” his friend answered, outraged, and bending over, seized the wallet’s remaining notes and threw them in his face. “
What
is this, fuck-your-buddy week?
La putana Maria!
You won’t take my money, I give you a shot inna head.”
“I can probably pay you back next month—”
“Okay, say one more word and I go rub shit in your sack,” shouted Marsala, dilating his hirsute nostrils. “Don’t hump me with them college insults, Carlo Kraut. My cash’s not good enough for you, okay, okay, OKAY!” He paced furiously around the room, having his great noisy pleasure.
In a moment he marched into the hall, flung wide the outer portal, and bellowed Riley’s old call up the stairwell, hearing which Jack Eberhard came out upon the top-floor landing and cried in riposte: “You like cake? Take this, it’s raisin.” Then more doors opened and some of the other good old boys popped out shouting all the grand old irreverences on the genito-urinary tract, the oestrous cycle, the gastro-intestinal system, and their heresies, and when someone mock-flatulated with a hand in bare armpit, someone else whooped: “Kiss me again, sweet lips!”
“Where’s Reinhart?” called the guys from the third floor, and the cry was taken up by throats on all levels to the roof: “Rein-hart! Reinhart!” Inside, Reinhart listened, a kind of warm cramp in his stomach, and then rose, went into the hall, and looked up through the spiral of shining comrade-faces whom one day it would be a death to leave.
“Short arm!” he shouted. “Marsala, get the flashlight!” And everywhere sounded the cheers and catcalls and boisterous generosity, and the third-floor guys fetched a pitcher of water and poured it down in a great quivering sheet, really funny because they really aimed to hit them and only narrowly failed. Marsala got angry and had to be held back by real force from climbing up and kicking the bowels out of the whole bunch. To soothe him Reinhart recited everybody’s favorite poem:
When the nights are hot and sultry
Is no time to commit adultery.
But when the frost is on the punkin,
That’s the time for Peter Duncan.
A society grounded on common inconvenience, where friendship was innocent of opportunism and tolerance flourished without manifesto: no crime could outlaw you from this company; no merit beyond the grossest went recognized; where sensitivity was soon reduced to coarseness and ambition stifled; where lethargy was rewarded and disenchantment celebrated; this cul-de-sac off the superhighway to the glorious Houyhnhnm of the future where a chicken would stew in every pot and each man be his own poet, unarmed, owing allegiance to one world—this splendid, dear, degrading society, here as nowhere else Reinhart felt at home and loved.
An invitation from an
ad hoc
party headed for the noncoms’ club, there to swallow strong German beer, cuss, spit, smoke, and perhaps, about closing time, to plunge into a sharp dispute on a subject of no permanent importance (such as Marrying a Virgin) and nearly come to fracas, poignantly tempted him—as in college when a gang formed in the recreation room, he had never been. At the moment, having a role, he saw his mission to save Veronica as only arbitrary, but manhood’s job could be defined as that which replaced the known and comfortable with the difficult and unpleasant.
Being a man, he went inside to the bathroom and spread his available money in series along the washstand lip, which being European did not seek to stint on marble and extended flat and wide for ten inches on either side of the basin. Last week, unsuspecting next week’s extremity, he had mailed home a money order for his maximum allowance, corporal’s pay plus ten per cent, roughly eighty bucks. Remaining were three thousand marks, to which were now added Marsala’s twenty-two hundred, totaling the equivalent of five hundred twenty American dollars. Vis-à-vis such a sum, a German physician of the present day could ill afford to stand upon his ethics. How Reinhart would lure Veronica to a foreign operating table, unsuspecting, he had not as yet studied. But the means by which the doctor would be gained were as close as belowstairs in Very’s very billet.
Lori Bach—Lori and Bach, who in their combination, in their-cellar, in his conscience, localized a grief which, unable to admit, he for a month had pretended was not there. Also manly was his resolve to go, on the strength of a concrete purpose, and look it in the eye.
“Ah!” said Bach from the sofa. “So kind of you to bring a friend, Mr. Corporal Reinhart, and if I am not deceived by my failing vision—although the cooked carrots brought almost nightly by my good wife from the American mess, if indeed stewing does not destroy their sight-giving properties, are restoring it—he is an officer; and where but among you excellent Yanks could be possible such a friendship: corporal and lieutenant, splendid, splendid.”
Falling from Reinhart’s hand, his cow-teat fingers in a feat of levitation floated to the lieutenant. “Bach. So good to know you.”
“Schild,” answered the officer who bore that name.
“Es freut mich.”
And then his eyes, pained, confused, bugged at Reinhart and seemed to ask approval for himself.
Instead, Reinhart recommended Bach. “He is a good man, Lieutenant, he is a better man than I can say. I am very proud to know him.”
Schild stared dully, said plaintively: “Yes.” Without waiting for the invitation Bach already prepared upon soundless, moving lips, he fell into the nearest chair and put a grim surveillance on his own feet.
“My wife,” said Bach, beaming on Schild but speaking to Reinhart, “has not yet returned with him you require. Let us then, over three of the cigarettes you so kindly sent along to me, commingle our thoughts. The packet is just there upon the table. Please serve Mr. Lieutenant Schild—which of course means ‘shield’; and one is happy to see, ha!, that he has come
with
rather than
upon
it; every American, how singular!, seems to be of German descent—and yourself, and then I shall be so bold as to ask one.”
And there was all of it again, like the landscape of a recurrent nightmare: the concrete tomb, the sweet smell of garbage, the white monster; all awful and yet familiar, like Xmas with the relatives, or for that matter, life, simply life in general, from whose calculated ills we do not fly to seek others known not of but surely worse, because unchosen.
Choice: make this one and you must also make the next, and once begun you have the habit. A mere hour ago he had sought out Lori as she came from the mess tent, given her, right there on the plain thronged with her colleagues making for the trucks, his problem, bald and coarse; and so forthright was his temper that he left uncorrected the implication Veronica was his mistress.
Certainly she knew a German doctor, and her wise-weary eyes took no stock of him at all, seeing him as end, not means, yet were fond in recognition, attended on him specially and without demand. Yes, that very evening, if he liked, she could bring the physician to her cellar for a meeting, Bach’s and her cellar on Nürnberger Strasse, which since he could never have found it again she placed in relation to the Kurfürstendamm and the ruin of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church. She would see him there at eight o’clock, as simple as that. He shook her fine-boned hand, her small, dynamic hand, and saw her hair again could use a soaping, that her beret was frayed, that her stockings of rough brown cotton sagged at the ankle and the gray coat wanted its central button; and each deficiency was another focus for his sudden love.
Having chosen action, then, having chosen love, clothed in the warmth of his volitions he had wandered through the slowly chilling late-afternoon light, in the time of day for gentle melancholy, the hour when perhaps even devil and saint are briefly, postprandially imperfect; when colors, which had been subdued by its noontime flare, spring defiantly at the sun in its decline, radiantly false as Kodachromes; when Reinhart in his earlier self had been wont to dream of being ruthless Tamerlaine, or Don Giovanni severing a maidenhead, or a poet with flashing eyes and floating hair.
Now, however, in the realization that he had, in the only sense harsh actuality permits, done these, been these, or didn’t wish to be, he forgave himself and plunged into the palpable present. Schild. He would go upon this moment to Lieutenant Schild and squeeze from him Schatzi’s money. Moreover, since morally speaking it was beside the point and tactically an obstacle, he dispensed with the identification of Schild as Jew, thin, dark, sharp, arrogant, and deceitful as the man incontestably was. To dispense with it he had first to make it; and then must congratulate himself on its not making a difference, and then say a thanks to fate for at last coughing up a Jew who had trespassed against gentiles.
But the first-lieutenant’s bar was quite another thing. To beard an officer, a corporal armed only with right’s might was ill weaponed, and the technique of obsequious insolence which in three years’ service Reinhart had made his own was a device rather more for survival than dominance.
He moved along the street of officers’ billets, a short block of the little toy houses of Zehlendorf with terracotta-tiled tentroofs, tight fences, and playing-card lawns. How queer it must be for Schild to live in such a house and look out upon a provincial street through white curtains; whereas Reinhart himself had done it for years; how contemptible to Schild’s keen senses. How could Schild forgive the neat-meshing casements and the correct dun stones in the walk? A spreading evergreen bush flanked his stoop, from the lintel above his door sprouted a night light like a globed mushroom. Had a Jew ever lived in such a house, and had he been ripped screaming from it by pink-and-blond young men?
As, asking, he lingered at the gate, the answer opened the door and stood uncertainly upon the threshold,
ecco homo,
Lieutenant Schild, and the response of Reinhart’s heart, in the same vocabulary lately used for loving Lori, said: even had he raped Veronica and murdered Schatzi, I could never raise my hand against him.
Man, man, one cannot live without pity. What Reinhart proposed to feel was the general emotion, but as he watched Schild come pitiably down the walk in his forlorn movements and crummy uniform, wiry hair bushing his cap, opaque spectacles, blousefront a home for lint, splay-shoed, wrinkle-pocketed, choking on a necktie with a dirty knot, insignia corroded and awry, haddock-faced—as he made these sorrowful entries in the ledger, Reinhart’s sympathies became particular. Whatever pity Schild deserved for simply being a Jew, he required more for merely being Schild. The decent thing to do was leave.
But before sluggish Reinhart could get under way, Schild had reached the gate and, with its faded pales between them, said stoically, for all the world as if he knew of the mission which Reinhart had just abandoned: “Yes, Corporal, you came for me?”
“I was taking a walk,” Reinhart answered shamefully. “And I saw this house and remembered the crazy Russian we took upstairs last month—” he broke off and in concern came back: “Did you get all the files from the office?”
“You did me a kind service that night,” said Schild, cloudily, fingering the gate’s catch; but though it was a simple rod and slot he could not work it, stopped trying and capped his hands on the picket-points. “I wish I could do something about repayment, but you see I am not in your company.”
To Reinhart, too, it seemed a tragedy; he felt his cheeks lose their blood and fall in, to match Schild’s; like Schild’s his voice sounded as if it crossed a body of water: “I’m sorry, very sorry. ... That German kid hasn’t bothered you any more, has she, when I’m not there? Dirty little whore, she makes me sick.”
Without trying the exterior handle, without hands he applied his hip against the gate and pressed inexorably in: the hardware ground, bent, was sprung free, shooting its several parts and screws tinkling to the walk; and Schild came through to the pavement, unheeding what had been necessary for his egress—which, done, struck Reinhart as regrettable and clarified his mind. He gathered the fragments of the lock and after a quick determination that they could never be reassembled, at least left them available on the cap of the gatepost.