Authors: Thomas Berger
“Wait!” Schild shouted, pelting after, through the crying, broken turf. When he reached the bombhole Reinhart’s broad back was laboring across the other rim. “I gave you an order!” He suffered fear that the man would deny him again, this time in insubordination—the first irregularity had been merely personal—and he would be required to turn him in for arrest. ‘You are always arresting someone,’ St. George, whose Army it was and not Schild’s, had complained.
He scrambled across the chasm as Reinhart, obeying, waited. He had trouble, too, at the rim, and not being as tall as Reinhart, could not have made it without help. Which he received, unrequested. Reinhart’s hand was cold and dirty.
Reaching the upper level, he began to speak his amends, which, as always, altered during their travel from source to mouth. Hysteria was, finally, the only cause he had ever served, but at least he was loyal to that. He accepted his uniqueness, and remembered an old story told him by a fellow traveler undergoing the transition to simple liberal and eventually no doubt to worse—the typical American politics of
pis aller
—and that was his respects to Reinhart.
“When Trotsky and Stalin first fell out, the Politburo met to resolve their differences. Since Stalin controlled a majority of its members, it soon decided in his favor and demanded that Trotsky recant. ‘You are ordered,’ the decision read, ‘to stand up and say: “Comrade Stalin, you are right. I am wrong. I apologize.” ‘Very well,’ Trotsky answered, ‘I accept the decision.’ He stood up and said in a heavy Yiddish rhythm: ‘You are
right
? I am
wrong?
I
apologize
?”
Reinhart grinned. “Neither do I, sir. ... Since we are speaking freely, I can say I knew that whatever else might be said of you, you weren’t chicken-shit. Jewish officers never are. They have too much pride to be. They are free.”
“No,” Schild answered quietly. “If you believe that you believe in a lie and you make it too hard on the Jews.”
“But I have seen it. I have three years’ service—I enlisted,” said Reinhart in pride. “If you don’t mind my saying it, Jews are sometimes know-it-alls and their manners could stand improvement, but that doesn’t have anything to do with decency and is anyway a proof of their freedom—” He checked on Schild’s reaction with the defiant self-righteousness, nose slightly flared, of the man who by his general benevolence is sanctioned to be specifically offensive; he wished to hurt Schild, Schild could see, in the interests of some comprehensive good that would finally bankrupt him, Reinhart, but first he would take a small profit.
“—and don’t tell me that is anti-Semitism,” said Reinhart, cowering, for all his size. “I’m sick of being made to feel a swine because I’m of German descent. I’m sick of being in the privileged class that nothing ever happens to. I’m tired of being big and healthy, but I can’t help it, I was born that way. If you would be a prisoner in any concentration camp ever made, I would be a guard. Now, you know everything—but do you know that? How that makes a person feel? Do you know what it is to be in debt to everybody? Not you, you are always right.”
“I?” said Schild. He sat down on a ridge of waste. The sudden armistice within had relaxed his muscles. He repeated the grammatical fiction almost genially:
I,
the pronoun of rectitude: “I am a murderer.”
Reinhart took seat beside him, and with the added weight the ridge of brick-halves squashed out about their ankles.
“Ah,” said Reinhart, “you should have a pair of these boots. Now your shoes will be filled with that junk.”
“That’s all right,” Schild said, although he too, with a sense of expansiveness, granted its tragedy; he, the rude
Besserwisser,
accepted this Middle Western, gentile horror of discomfort and unrespectability, opened his shoes and dumped them clean. His right sock had a large hole revealing his largest toe.
“Why don’t you turn that in to salvage?” paternally asked Reinhart, pointing rudely.
“No salvage for officers,” he answered, self-consciously pitiful. “We have to buy our own.”
“I keep forgetting.” Reinhart searched his pockets. “You got a butt?—wait, by God, here’s that little pack of Fleetwoods you yourself gave me last month. Well, they’re as good now as ever. They are made stale.”
Schild took one and found he was quite right; Reinhart knew everything.
“Now don’t you worry,” Reinhart said, “all that was just talk. Berlin does something to everybody; makes one want to accuse himself.” He blew a smoke-mustache from his nostrils. “In a war there’s no such thing as murder. It’s kill or be killed. I don’t blame the regular German army, for example, for fighting against the Allies—even if their cause was wrong; that’s a very different deal from the particular Nazi outrages. To be precise—when I said the doctor might be a fake, I meant in the unimportant things, such as whether or not he was in those camps, whether or not he was a Communist or a twin of Lori, and so on. I never for a minute doubted he was honest in the fundamental human things—you see he could be an ex-Nazi and still be straight on those. Did you ever think of Hitler as just a man eating jelly omelets, needing a haircut, clearing his throat, getting out of bed in the morning and yawning? Did you ever think of someone saying to him at such a time: ‘Come on, Adolf, I see a bit of dandruff on your collar and I heard you belch, and I know you have your troubles. Come on now, you can’t crap me, you’re a man like any other.’
“But I started by wanting to be precise. Precisely, I can conceive of an honorable German hating Hitler yet fighting for his country in the Wehrmacht. I can also imagine a German Jew who in spite of what was done to him thinks of Germany as his own country, for he is a
German,
isn’t he? And if he has permitted the Nazis to convince him he isn’t, he has let them win—in a way they never did with all their bullies and gas ovens.
They
are the non-Aryans,
they
are the degenerate race who rotted and betrayed a great people, not the Jews. I can conceive of such a man, I don’t mean I expect any particular individual to be one, you can’t blame a man for
not
being a hero.”
Despite his fervor Reinhart spoke slowly, and Schild for once was not impatient. Having confessed, he had awaited the question of a pure-hearted fool, which, the old legends promised, would heal his wound. Instead he found himself cured of Germanic whimsy. He, and not Reinhart, was the romantic; fools there are in abundance, but not one is innocent.
“Reinhart,” he said evenly, “now listen to me. I forgive you. Do you understand? I forgive you.”
“That is not what I want—”
“But that is what you get from me, nevertheless. And if you won’t take it”—he grinned and shot his cigarette-end in a high rocket which no sooner exploded on the wasteland than two shadowy children filtered from behind a rubble hillock and claimed it as prize, quarreling on who should pinch its ember, whose ragged smock-pocket should tote it to their used-tobacco Shylock—“you can stick it up your ass.”
“It doesn’t do me any good,” said Reinhart. “Now them—forgive those kids. They really had nothing to do with it, unless you believe with Hitler that a whole people can be degenerate.”
But he would not let a gentile be sanctimonious with him. On the other hand, he again cleaned his shoes for Reinhart’s sake and rose, saying: “Do you know we have to walk back to Zehlendorf?”
“Unless we can hitch a ride.”
“This late?” asked Schild, looking at his bare wrist. In what bleaker field was his watch ticking now? To Reinhart, he knew all the answers, yet why was his every emotion another question? “Do those children stay awake all night on the chance an American will come by and throw away a butt?”
“What else have they got to do?” Reinhart asked toughly. He field-stripped his own cigarette and hooved it into the ground.
“What do
you
have against them?”
“A private grudge,” said Reinhart, “that’s my own damned business. Well, if we have to walk, that makes it easy, no choice.” He rebloused his pants, tightened his belt, adjusted the jacket, made his cap smart, and, ready for any D-Day, motioned Schild to take the lead.
Once they were out of the rubblefield and in the open gray streets gulching the ruins, Schild fell back beside him in an aesthetic revulsion against captaining one man all the way to the Grunewald Forest. With no one before him to control the pace, Reinhart increased his stride, measuring off a yard per step. Schild fell behind. On the bicycle path of the Hohenzollerndamm, in Wilmersdorf—they were beyond the congestion and, hence, the worst damage, on a wide thoroughfare becoming suburban, with streetcar tracks, bounded by greenery and particular rather than mass ruins—Schild leaned against a poster-pillar and took air.
Marching with loud slaps of his rubber soles, head fixed as if he were in ranks, Reinhart went on unheeding. Schild watched him for a hundred yards in the light of Berlin’s dawn, which came early in the small hours—therefore it was later than he had supposed. Reinhart would soon look back. On a childish impulse Schild stepped behind the pillar and waited. The footsteps rapidly tramped beyond earshot.
He found that inadvertently he had kept Reinhart’s veteran Fleetwoods. Going in through the cellophane and limp pasteboard, his fingers made inordinate noise, and had he still been a nervous man he might have mistaken the sounds for those of someone creeping out of ambush behind him. He fired his cigarette and took a lungful of corrosive smoke, toying with a paradox: the one man he knew who was the ambush type had least need of concealment. In proof of this he saw Schatzi standing nearby on the sidewalk, hiding in the open air and light, a concrete apparition.
“I have followed you like a sickly conscience,” said his courier, who wore a motley of olive-drab clothing.
“You are out of uniform,” Schild answered, laughing softly. “If the MPs come along I can have you arrested.”
“I’m doing you no harm,” Schatzi said in some worry. Then he smirked weakly. “Come Fritz, you make the joke with your old comrade with whom you have already deceived, so that I am in trouble across the boundary.” He pointed over his shoulder. “The Russian is gone,
ja
?”
Schild asked: “Do I throw off an odor, that you can follow me with your nose?”
“Perhaps you will not believe, what can one do?” He shrugged. “Having some business on the Tauentzien Strasse—very well, being exact, in the basement of the KaDeWe—ah Fritz, what a pity that excellent compartment store must be bombed!” Tears coursed the runoffs on either side of his crag-nose. “Ah, Fritz, I must confess I have had a drop—I am in my glasses, as it were.” He wove across the bicycle path and rested against the pillar. “
Verzeihung, Herr Litfass! ...
Why should I care about this ugly place? What have they done to my Nürnberg? Because I am not
Saupreuss,
a Prussian pig,
beileibe nicht.
Pure Bavarian,
verfluchte Scheiss
!”
His American overseas cap was pulled low and round as a sailor’s. His nose began to run; he cleared it onto the dark green of his new field jacket in two short swipes marking the chevrons of snot-corporal. “From the Ranke Platz I saw you creeping over the ruins with that oaf and I thought, this Fritz has lost his Russian fairy-boy and got him a nice young American in its stead. You have been foolish, Fritz, and they know about it—they know everything—you don’t deal now wiss stupid Nazis.”
He reached for Schild’s sleeve and, missing, fell to the ground on his hands, yet caught himself arched, and backed spiderlike till his rump was against the pillar. From the point of contact he rose inch by inch along his spine, cleaving to the shaft.
Erect, coughing vacantly, he whined: “They killed my dear dog, Fritz, with a machine pistol shot him through the head. That is their kind of people! I loved that creature, to which they should not have done this harm. I gave to him food from out my own mouth.”
Schild began to walk away, in peace.
“Come again here and listen, you bit of turd!” Schatzi screamed. “In Auschwitz I liquidated better men as you by the thousands.
Du kannst mich im Arsche Lecken.
”
“No,” said Schild, calmly smoking, “no, you did not. You only buried them. You were forced to, you yourself were a prisoner.”
“ ‘Forced to,’ ” Schatzi repeated drunkenly. “I carried a club, Fritz, but one must be careful how hard one beats them, or the SS will rage with jealousy and take the post away. Then too, these thin bones were easily cracked, which meant the job would be nonsense because they must remain strong enough to dig—I always knew you were a double agent, didn’t I always say so? You yourself are Intelligence! Pity me, Fritz, they have murdered my dog. Dirty Russians! It unsecured itself from the chain and came by my heels already, unknown to me until I was stopped by this sentry at Sergeyev’s building. The dear dog has been thinking, ‘Ah my master is attacked!’ He sprang at the soldier and the Russian shot him.”
“I am sorry. Really I am,” said Schild.
“Brown on the outside, red on the inside like a beefsteak, we were in the early
Sturmabteilung.
We had many similarities to the Communists, Fritz. Idealism, we were idealists, and we died for it—like the Jews. We were the first Jews. Thus I can understand you. I too hate this filthy Germany.” He wiped his nose again, promoting himself to snot-sergeant. “You are a soldier, but you were shrewd enough to get for yourself a safe position behind the lines of battles. Why should you not, if you are clever enough? I do not criticize. In the Great War I was not a shrewd fellow like you, but a simple foot-soldier. Just see this.” He raised his trouser cuff and lowered the stocking. “Verdun, February 1916”—a blind, purple hole in his calf. He opened the jacket sleeve and that of the wool shirt beneath it, and drew back the arm of heavy, dirty underwear: “Verdun, September 1916” —a masticated chicken leg was his left forearm. “August 1918, mustard gas in the lungs, the forest of the Argonne. As you known, I still today cough. While I collected these thanks, I must not tell you what was occurring behind our back in Germany, you would believe me insulting to you and your peo—no, one does not say that, but there existed fat swine who profited by our blood. And when after the war we went to settle wiss them, these Nazis killed us instead.
Berufsverbrecher,
professional criminal, I am called in the camp—” The liquid discharges of the eyes and nose left prison-bar traces on his dusty face.