Authors: Thomas Berger
“Since I can’t repay your favor,” said Schild, perhaps, in the public air, a breath or two less mad—for mad is what he was, or had just been; as clear a, as well as the only, case of depressive mania Reinhart had ever seen and which, now thank God it had begun to pass away, he was able to identify and reflect that he had answered it correctly—“since I can’t repay your favor, may I ask another one?”
A formidable non sequitur, yet suggesting an idea not at all lunatic; irony, rather, and one had only to look at Schild, in whatever condition, to understand the authority with which he manipulated that instrument. Half-dead from some despondent cancer, he yet in one short question, in a failing voice, exposed the skeleton of charity: he who takes a favor returns it by asking another; he who gives one is repaid by the commission to do a second; and the score is even throughout, unless, indeed, the giver has the better.
“Of course,” granted Reinhart, foreseeing the little drama without passion in which he would deliver to Very a billet-doux from Schild, foretasting his own humiliation and perversely enjoying its savor.
“May I come along with you on your walk?”
So. Again he had persuaded another to play him for a fool, for, make no mistake, people use us as we ask them to: this is life’s fundamental, and often the only, justice. If he understood that, on the other hand he saw that to Schild it was not a mocking, ass-making request. The lieutenant actually waited on his approval, head down, his cap points echoing the general wilt of his body.
Did his grief owe to Veronica’s, of which he had been agent? Surely no man, whatever his responsibility and whatever the upshot, would lose his nerve by this. It was rather Schatzi’s money; but again, would a bad debt to a
German,
even a good one, so resound in the sane conscience?
“Would you like to borrow some money?” asked Reinhart, without a warning to himself. “I have an awful lot.” He drew his wallet as if it were a gat and with one finger triggered it open. “See, over five hundred.”
Interminably Schild stared into the note-clogged leather breech, and so near Reinhart could have snapped it to and clipped off the end of his nose. When at last his eyes lifted, their fright was giving way to the old, cold certainty that they, and no one else’s, owned all truth and virtue.
Superiorly turning his head towards the house, he said to the yard: “Now I know how a whore feels. Everybody offers me money.”
Oh, he was a fellow who could be rubbed the wrong way, and certainly he had his reasons; society had slipped him the shaft, he had doubtless been diddled by the dangling digit of destiny; there was some extenuation for his own failings, but none for those who trespassed against him—and for once to all this Reinhart, rebuffed, said
balls,
and with as much offensive familiarity as he could summon from dead start, clapped him smartly on the shoulder and announced:
“Why sure, come along. I’m going to see a man about an abortion. A broad I know, as they say, has bread in the oven. How do you like the size of this wad? If that won’t buy the job, nothing will.”
Not waiting for Schild’s reaction, he businesslike stored the wallet and marched down the sidewalk. At the corner he was pleased to hear the hurrying footsteps behind, but still he gave no quarter, and who knew how far his calves might have propelled him unaccompanied—for in contrast to Schild’s they were muscled as an oak root, tireless as pistons, and at the moment the body they supported was, inflated with purpose, a lighter-than-air craft—in reality, he was detained at the curb by the passing trucks of Lori’s caravan.
Reaching him, Schild spoke breathlessly above the roar: “You can’t be serious! That’s against the law; besides, it’s dangerous. You could be tried for murder.”
His concern, if innocent, was madly out of proportion to their acquaintance; if disingenuous, nonsensical—if he knew Very was the object of the plan, why should he, who already had fled from his own responsibility, complain? Anyway, God damn the man for his officiousness.
“But you see,” said Reinhart. “I’m not doing the job myself. I’m going to hire a German doctor.”
“So.” Schild gave him a face of regretful sadism—a smile of malice taking pleasure in itself Reinhart had seen, but never a
frown.
“So, the little blonde got to you even though you were warned.”
Now here, where Reinhart should have felt anger, he did not. His reply was simple sullenness: “You’re not even an officer in my company.”
Hard upon the tailgate of the last truck he stepped into the street, into a cloud of blue exhaust, choking. Thus, with his eyes closed, he did not see the jeep which turned the corner and, also blinded by oil smoke and carbon monoxide, might have injured him, or he it, had not his persistent saviour this time succeeded. Schild’s thin fingers, he felt with smarting arm, were strong.
“Nate!” shouted the man behind the wheel, a fattening captain who wore a knitted OD tie, “I thought I might
run
into you, a-ha-ho, mpf, mpf! Give you a ride?”
Hand still hooked into Reinhart’s swelling forearm, and applying a force whose aim was the other side of the street, Schild answered curtly: “I have some private business with this corporal.”
“So be it,” spoke the captain, reaching for the gearshift, gathering in at the mouth the drawstrings of his barracks-bag face. “Nowadays you’re always arresting someone.”
“If you can’t use that ride, I can,” Reinhart told Schild, shaking him off. “Going towards the Ku-damm, Captain?”
“Could be, if you’ll tell me where it is, unless that’s in the Russky sector. Brr, I wouldn’t chance it there, and do you know, Nate, I still can’t get that poor devil out of my—”
Schild interrupted: “We’ve changed our minds.” He produced the kind of smile, with much evidence of teeth, that one shows when his underwear is torturing his privates. “I’ll confess to you, St. George, if you won’t tell my CO., the corporal and I have something cooking on the black market.” He lowered the back of the front seat so Reinhart could hop in back.
“I know your commanding officer—a real son of a bitch,” replied St. George, going into uproarious mirth. “A dirty son of a bitch! Corporal,” he said, gagging on the
r’s,
“in case you didn’t know, I’m cussing out myself. You got that kind of C.O.?”
Reinhart grunted icily at the silly slob. Tyrannical officers, who were candid about their power, were preferable to jovial ones in love with their own decency. As to Lieutenant Schild, whose head snapped back on his fragile neck as St. George jerked the car into forward movement, he defied classification: who was doing what for whom and how was one to feel about it?
So started they towards the enormous cairn of rubble underneath which lay Nürnberger Strasse, in whose name Reinhart for the first time recognized a memorial to his old city of legend and determined to lay the symbolism before Bach, the specialist in things undreamt of by other philosophers.
However, now that he faced Bach, with Schild in the adjacent chair, Reinhart could worry over nothing but that Bach would begin where they had last left off, on the Jews; or, before an audience half of which was virgin to his dramaturgy, repeat the farce so successful at its opening, while Reinhart sat paralyzed by the ethics of entertainment:
please do not tell your friends the surprise ending.
Hastily he began to collect the differences between this visit and his last, as the man lying down to rest adds up and tries to cherish the details which differentiate this night from last, the nightmare-ridden: tonight I am lying on my other side, the pillow slip is fresh, the moonlight does not shine upon the window—oh, but God, I have the same head and I am scared.
First he noted an increase in illumination. The oil lamps were in their old positions but unfired. From the center of the stained ceiling, the nucleus of a web of hairline fissures, hung a hot electric bulb. Augmenting whose glare Bach’s reflecting, porcelain head irradiated his immediate area. His sofa, at the principal surfaces worn to the bare hemp of warp and woof, in the hitherto obscure corners shone now in a pattern of emerald, turquoise, white, and scarlet: a scene, a world, the edge of some equatorial swamp profuse with hot flowers and curving flamingos and reed-green water, and, on the lip of the depression behind Bach’s shoulder, the great throat-cup, here in ruby, of the bird whose beak can hold more than his bellican.
Bach himself wore a green suit, a moss-colored huntsman’s suit with oval bone buttons and odd straps and trimmed in gray beading; in the lapel slot, a spray of edelweiss, fake, showing its wire stem. His trousers were cuffless, bell-bottomed, seam-striped like a uniform, and between them and the floor lay ankle-high shoes of reversed leather, pine-cone brown, fastened with tasselled cords threading through a series of bright chromium clips.
“You are feeling better now,” said Reinhart.
“Oh thank you, thank you,” Bach replied, the inside of his mouth red as the flesh of a blood-orange, here and there the yellow seeds of teeth. “But the clothing produces an illusion at odds with reality. In truth, I believe that I am dying”—he threw his hands at Reinhart to dispose of a reaction which had not come—“please do not grieve: ‘by my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will he that dies this year is quit for the next.’ ” He looked slyly towards Schild and returned, fingering the blossoms in his lapel. “This flower, by the way, is quite false.”
“It is very nice, anyway,” Reinhart replied.
“You are always kind,” said Bach, coyly raising his right trouserleg to reveal an inch of brace, as a Victorian coquette might have exposed her ankle, “but the chiefest consideration will always be: where could a man with my infirmity get the real thing? Mountains, my good Corporal, one must climb the highest peaks to reach this noble plant, which is as difficult to come by as an honest man.” Having exhausted his air on the speech, Bach took more through the tube of his cigarette, in a long and intense suction which burned back an inch of ash. “The same characterization that applies to me does as well for the so-called building under which we sit at this moment”—swinging his head over the sofa arm, he spat the smoke at the floor, as if it were a mouthful of milk—“despite its apparent improvement—the laying on of electricity—it is quite likely, I am led by all my senses to believe, to collapse without warning.”
Reinhart, who would never again be taken in, said in swaggering irony: “Not while I am here, at any rate; because I have a charmed life.”
“
Is
that true!” exclaimed Bach, fanatically interested, seeking to rise unaided, in the violence of his attempt giving the illusion that he had almost made it and lost by a hair; whereas in fact he had not moved a centimeter.
“Indeed it is. May I sit down?”
“Ohhhh—” Bach began a long gasp at his own poor manners, not waiting for the completion of which Reinhart fell beside him at the end of the couch and ground out a space with his hips, at Bach’s yielding expense.
He plucked at the threads of upholstery on the sofa arm. “Handsome, very tasteful.”
“Gobelin,” said Bach, with difficulty twisting his neck, upon a static body, to face him.
“I certainly know his name,” Reinhart replied, crossing his legs and inadvertently fetching Schild, whose chair was a good four feet away, a kick in the shins, smiling absolution for himself for that, smiling then at Bach in self-admiration which quickly shaded into joke as he saw upon the great grapefruit a polite confusion that told him he had guessed wrong. “Don’t mind me,” he said rakishly. “I told a Catholic friend last week that I had never read Father Douai’s translation of the Bible.”
“Yes,” Bach answered, still perplexed. “May I ask, however, of the charm upon your life?”
“Oh of course.” He glanced covertly at Schild, who had, as late as a Stanley Laurel, just begun to rub his injured shin. “Well, I think I felt it first when we were pinned down along a hedgerow in Normandy. There was the enemy a bare hundred yards away in the next hedge, laying down a withering machine-gun fire. Well, they were bottling up the whole American advance; somebody had to do something. And I must confess, our leaders had failed us completely. The company commander, the platoon lieutenants, the NCOs, they all proved to be perfect cowards. You see, this was our baptism of fire—”
“You were infantry?” asked Bach, a hand against his left cheek, as if he restrained his head from swinging back to the frontal position. Despite the evidence of a similar, internal attempt to control his eyeballs, they were their own masters and veered continually towards Schild, until at last they fixed in that direction as a lecher’s will upon a maiden.
“Glider infantry,” Reinhart corrected, “a unit in the 101st Airborne Division, later to become the so-called ‘Battling Bastards of Bastogne.’ ”
“How terrible!” interjected Bach.
“And I don’t mean to say that at first I wasn’t scared myself. But then, crouching there, staring across that new field of rye through the hedge, towards that line of green blooming like roses with gun flashes, I suddenly looked down and saw my trousers were open. I put down my submachine gun to button them—and then I thought: ‘What a wretched little swine I am to care about this when I might be killed in two minutes!’ And then, just as quickly, I
knew
I would not be killed, got this absolute certainty that I could stand up and walk slowly across the field and never be hit. So I did just that, climbed up over the top and began to walk slowly towards the German line. After I had got about ten meters out, slugs whizzing all around me but never hitting, the Krauts stopped firing! Stopped cold. I think now they thought I was coming to surrender; and it is true that the end of a white handkerchief was showing from the breast pocket of my field jacket. Anyhow, when they stopped I gave a big holler and discharging my Thompson advanced on them as fast as I could run. Behind me the rest of the company came whooping forward, not shooting, though, because I was in their line of fire. And do you know—” he slapped his hand upon Bach’s green knee and felt, rather than the expected quivering of aspic, a hard and sharp junction of almost naked bone and metal brace—“do you know, those Germans sat paralyzed behind their guns and did not shoot once more, and when I looked over the hedge, down into their trench, all fifty-three of them threw up their hands and yelled
‘Kamerad’!
And of all things they turned out to be a crack unit of the SS, you know, the SS, fiercest fighters of all, who never surrender.”