Authors: Thomas Berger
“Schild—you know I thought for a while that Schild was your lover”—she caught at her mouth—“no, that had nothing to do with this trouble, believe me... and he thought I was, and now none of it matters. ... Very, look at the top of my head and tell me what you see.”
She did more, exploring with a finger. “I think it is a slight bruise and nothing worse. You’ll be better in no time.”
“Are you sure? He kicked me bad. I was certain my scalp was laid open.”
“You know it’s all bone, with only a thin layer of skin and hair—” Her big teeth glistened in fun. “Excuse me, well, everybody has a bonehead, me too.”
“Only mine is solid—but are you sure?”
“Clear the way for added cargo!” She bounced-sat on the edge of the bed and waylaid her rising hem at the bulge of rolled nylon. “It’s pretty hard to ‘lay open’ a scalp; there’s not much to cut and it would take something awful to break the bone wide open. Though of course there’s fractures, but you don’t usually know they’re there until you look at the x-ray. ... Know who’s ward nurse here? Eleanor Leek, the cute little plump girl from the party where we met. She danced with that Russian. Sure you do! I’ll put in a good word for you. Now I have to go, the schizzes all start crying if I’m not on time. Oh, did you want to talk about the fight? But I don’t think it’s good yet. Rest awhile. Now kiddy, I’ll say goodbye. I would kiss you but everybody’s lookin’.”
As the
Santa Maria
must have swept from the Bahaman harbor, past the awed little brown men in their crummy dugouts, proceeding westward still, so Veronica sailed in splendor up the ward aisle and out the door, flying the high standard of her winged cap, and the natives returned to their fishing and coconuts.
Soon afterwards Lieutenant Leek, whom when he saw her he remembered, the fat, homely, merry person, hurried in from the corridor.
“Good, you’re conscious. Holy cow, you kept the brass waiting all day. Can you talk to them now?”
“Who?” With Very’s departure he stepped on a merry-go-round which turned slowly to no music. “I don’t feel so good.”
“I’ll give you a pain pill soon as they leave.” She left his sight and in a moment or two he was ringed by many male uniforms.
For one, the commander of the 1209th General Hospital, Lieutenant Colonel Fester, whom in three years’ service with the outfit he was seeing for the fourth time, despite the legend that Fester was ubiquitous.
“Now Steinhart, look sharp,” the colonel said in a clarion tenor. He wore white gloves, like a doorman. “This is a terrible thing you are a party to, but I know any man of mine can defend his actions. Handpicked, every man Jack of you. Remember how we kept those niggers out of our latrine on the troopship coming over? Medics, maybe. They don’t let us carry guns, but by Jesus we’ve got fists. I’d put my hand in the fire—if I didn’t have this eczema—for any one of you and know you’d return the favor—say, are you awake? Here you, Teats, or whatever your name is. Nurse! Give this man a hypo of something. What do you use nowadays? You’ve got all the drugs in the world nowadays. It wasn’t like that in the old days. By God, APC capsules, gentian violet, and you had it; after that, the pine box. Remember the old days, Major, or was that before your time?”
Reinhart opened his eyes. Next to the colonel stood a major with a young face, yet old gray sideburns.
“We’ll talk about that later, sir,” the major answered with short patience. “Here, the fellow is awake—”
“Coming around, Steinhart?” the colonel cried. “Good, now stay awake for a moment. This is Major Koenig from G-2, Berlin District. I don’t have to tell you he is a Very Important Person so far as we are concerned here in our humble way. He wants to ask you about last night.”
Reinhart also saw Captain St. George, lachrymose; an enlisted man, PFC Walter Walsh, swelled with gravity; Lieutenant Nader, resentfully watching the colonel; and finally, a brutish-faced captain who wore the crossed-pistols badge of the military police.
“Your name is Reinhart, correct?” asked Major Koenig. “How are you feeling, Corporal?”
“Carlo T., 15302320, and a little dizzy, sir.”
“Well, who isn’t? And I haven’t just broken anybody’s back, either,” Koenig said. “By the way, how did you do that?”
“Only because he would have broken mine if I didn’t.”
“I asked
how
.”
“Just caught him around the waist and bent him backwards.”
“Good fellow!” broke in the colonel. “I used to watch you wrestle at Camp Pickett every Friday night, Reinkoenig. You made me lots of money. That’s why I chose you for the 1209th. You still a corporal? Months ago I told that goddamned Lovett to put you on orders for a third stripe.”
“Thank you, sir, but I had basic at Camp Barkeley—”
“Quite all right, my boy. Just answer these questions—”
The major asked: “Do you feel well enough to get up for a few minutes? It’s difficult to talk here. The nurse said we may use the ward office.”
Reinhart lay quiet for a moment, his right as a casualty, then indicated he would try. Blackness flooded his brain as he sat upright, and he heard their voices as if through the closed window of a ballroom. His wrist was seized.
“Come on, fellow,” the colonel shouted.
In transit Reinhart slept awhile and when he came to, watching the red-black ocean recede, thought they all had gone.
“You need a pick-me-up!” the colonel roared. “Teats! Mix an ounce of medical alcohol with grapefruit juice and bring it to this soldier.” But Lieutenant Leek had crept off to hide.
“It’s all right, Major,” Reinhart said to Koenig, who offered no aid nor sympathy. “I can make it.”
The major walked smartly towards the office. Reinhart shook himself, feeling a twinge in his cheek, slipped into the dirty canvas slippers waiting below the bed, rose and followed. With all manner of noise the colonel dogged him but was denied at the door.
“This,” said Koenig, standing just within, “is an Intelligence matter, sir. Captain St. George and I will have to speak privately with Corporal Reinhart. If you gentlemen can give us a few moments?”
“Me neither?” The MP officer’s growl betrayed a fright at his exclusion. He put a broken cigarette into his mouth and tried to light it, getting only air. From the patients out in the ward arose an anonymous murmur of ridicule, which was tonic to the colonel.
He said: “As to me and Nader and PFC Walter, we’ll mix here with the men till you need us.” Followed by his reluctant entourage he went back down the aisle between the beds and shortly, among his bursts of loud, merry scatology, came the obstreperous derision which he was famous for misunderstanding as popularity.
Making an effort, Reinhart indeed felt better and stronger. The major, however, who sat upon a white-enameled chair, directed him to lie upon the operating table.
There was no allowance for discussion, so he did. St. George—he saw the genuine sadness on the fat face, and pitied him, and liked him—slumped against the wall.
“Now, PFC Walsh,” said Koenig, “who was mess guard last night, heard noises on the sports field and went to investigate. By the time he got there you were unconscious and the two other men were dead. He states he heard an automobile engine, and there were tire tracks in the sand. May we hear your account?”
On his back, unable to see his interrogator, Reinhart spouted perspiration and anticipated a nameless catastrophe. Unknown enemies held him supine and prepared to work upon him an obscene damage; he felt womanly, about to be raped. Yet all through this, his fluent voice romped on, as if it were rather the child of another man. The voice told of the chance, friendly encounter early in the evening between Reinhart and Schild, of a purposeless wander to the Tiergarten, since the black-market contact never appeared and they thus could not buy their Meissen china. Then they took a drink in a jerry-built cafe on the Ku-damm, looked for a ride home and finding none began to walk. They lost their way temporarily. Finally they reached Zehlendorf. Then the straight story of seeing Schild enter the grove, and the fight.
“There must be more,” said Koenig in his ominous, factual way.
St. George spoke for the first time: “Lieutenant Schild had some of his own contacts whom I knew nothing about. We worked in that manner. Perhaps it wasn’t SOP—”
“You said all that.”
But once begun, St. George was briefly invincible. He owed it to his late colleague. And Reinhart thought, Schild was closer to him than to me; he was never really my friend, yet I did what I could to save him; why do I tell myself I was his killer?
“Perhaps it wasn’t SOP, but I respected his intelligence. Then he was a Jew, you know. I never thought about it before, but it could hardly have been pleasant service here where they did such horrible things to his people. ... One of his German contacts was a little old fellow dressed like a workingman, who rode a bike. He came once to the billet when the Russian stayed with us. But perhaps he wasn’t there for Nate. When I saw him he was talking with the landlady.”
“Russian!” blurted Koenig. He reassumed self-control. “You can tell me all that later, Captain. At the moment we are interested in the corporal.”
Koenig did not trust Reinhart, so much was clear. But Reinhart had changed since he killed a man. Earlier he would have hated Koenig. Now he was beholden to him; wished he would let him rise, but knew he deserved no favors.
The major asked: “This little old fellow that Captain St. George mentions—was he one of the two Germans on the sports field?”
Reinhart answered no. Schatzi—Schild knew him too. He remembered the doctor’s revelation and his own bombastic threat to kill this complex person both victimizer and victim. Doubtless no one took it seriously. Could they have seen him a few hours later! But Schild had, and thought him inadequate, and come to help, and died.
“I take it then you know the man St. George means, if you are sure he was
not
there.”
“I believe so,” said Reinhart, “he hangs out around here. He is a big wheel in the black market.”
“Could this have been a dispute over a black-market deal?”
St. George answered, scandalized: “Certainly not! I never knew a man less interested in money than Nate.”
Koenig sighed. “The corporal has just testi—stated he and Lieutenant Schild went to the Tiergarten, were driven to that area by you, yourself, in which you concur, to meet someone who offered a set of Meissen china for sale.”
“Sure,” St. George laughed indignantly, “but that was for Reinhart!”
“That’s right,” said Reinhart to the major he could not see, endeavoring to meet St. George’s eye with a message of loyalty. But the captain seemed to avoid him.
“A do-gooder, the late Lieutenant Schild.”
St. George answered: “Always,” and hung his head.
Koenig continued his keen probing, to which his immaculate and subtle contempt was an additional tool. Reinhart dissembled in the only way he could, by blondly, wholesomely baring all but his suspicions, which anyway was legally impeccable. Later, the MP officer was let in, and Nader and Walsh, and, perhaps with an idea to stop his noise, briefly, the colonel.
Koenig suddenly finished; whether for good and all, naturally he did not indicate. Nader and the MP, although they showed a personal distaste for Reinhart, seemed in the absence of contrary evidence to believe his story and agree he must stand a court-martial which would formally find him guilty of homicide in the line of duty, sentence one dollar. This to forestall an attempt by Monster’s heirs, if they could be found—he remained unidentified—to bring charges.
Everybody having left, Reinhart assumed he could get up, and did so, and was frightened by the appearance of St. George, who lingered behind the operating table.
“Listen,” said the captain, with suppressed dislike, “maybe you know. Does Lieutenant Schild have any family? We don’t know who to inform. For some reason he gave as next-of-kin the name of a prostitute in Paris, Texas. I never had occasion to look at the record until this morning, and then I recalled her name from when we served together at Camp Maxey.”
“I never knew him well,” said Reinhart, whoozily standing.
“Who did? ...He had a strange sense of humor, and this shows he would go all the way with it.” Still with obvious unfriendliness, he came to Reinhart’s support. “You see, we were in combat zones since D-Day. He could have been killed at any time. But for the joke he gave the name of this streetwalker.”
Reinhart took the offered arm. They moved together into the ward. At his bed, first one on the right-hand line, he thanked the captain and shook hands, and saw astonished gratitude, and understood merely another error: St. George did not dislike, but rather fearing being disliked.
“Oh that’s all right,” said the captain, pumping his fingers. “If you don’t mind, maybe I can drop in from time to time to see you. But you’ll be better soon.” He left anxiously. He returned and placed a just-opened package of Parliament cigarettes on the night table. “Have a luxury smoke.” At the foot of the bed he turned and said: “He was a good fellow,” and waited.
“Yes, he was,” Reinhart answered and blacked out. He dreamed he was twelve years old; selling newspapers from door to door he accumulated money for a bicycle; someone stole the money but when he went outside there was the bike on the porch; a Negro applied Simonize to the fenders;
so you’re a Negro,
he said,
isn’t that fine!;
the black man rose in terror, great white eyeballs gleaming, and ran down the street. When Reinhart awakened, the same Negro, whom he had never before seen in life, carrying a tray of food walked past the bed and to his own, number five, where he sat near its head and ate rather insolently, winding spaghetti into a spoon.
Leek appeared with a tray for Reinhart containing various forms and colors of mush. He was suddenly horny; she was not so bad. He invited her to come sit upon the palm of his hand. She thought he waved her off, and went. He called her back and asked the time. Six-ten. He slept for an hour. Awakening, he asked the time of the fellow in the next bunk, who had a wart in the center of a bushy red eyebrow. Six-eleven. He denigrated the fellow’s watch, cursed its owner. The fellow slyly turned his back, and Reinhart cried into the pillow because he could not hurt him.