Authors: Thomas Berger
Her quick answer spared his recantation. Through tears of happiness she sang, “Darling, I knew you loved me. You will never get a job in Hollywood, you are a terrible actor! You’re afraid your feelings will be hurt, poor dear. But I tell you it’s all right, I dote on you. I don’t care if you are an enlisted man!”
So. One should not always walk against the wind. He rose and called her to him. Checking the door, she came. She had found him out, he admitted. He must have her, for love, and
now.
Oh, oh, oh.
Now.
No, no, no.
Now.
Impossible. Duty. No. Where?
Her bailiwick. He was only a visitor.
Maybe—but no.
Now.
Ohhh. Terrible. Yet love was good.
Tell Tweedledum and Tweedledee to watch the shop.
They’ll know.
So? A couple of privates.
So while he waited in the corridor, Very stopped by the treatment room and gave her excuse for ten minutes’ absence. Then, down the hall, they found an empty, moon-illuminated ward whose patients had been transferred to another on the first floor, but the beds remained.
Not in love, he made gentle approaches. In love, sitting on the bed-edge, she grew fiercely reluctant. He had to take every button of her uniform as it were a separate fort. In her white slip she cried for shame and changed her mind, and having no effect on his, slapped his face but left her hand there and coyly squashed his nose. Dead weight he must lift to draw slip skirt over bottom. Opposing her own divestiture, she nevertheless stripped off his pajama shirt. His cheek wound throbbed in each little red hole left by the stitches; the invisible scalp-ache ached as if it would have a separate orgasm. In the sexiest presentation she did not match: brassiere of pink, pants of blue. A coldness on his back foretold that the swelling former was a hoax of sponge rubber or wadded powder puffs, and he knew he could not perform. But as he retreated, so did she charge. She liberated the strained hammock and held it conquered and limp as an enemy flag. Real? By Magellan, if they were not real, there were no Eastern and Western Hemispheres, which had sat as their models.
En voyage,
his trousers were suddenly gone, and also the canvas slippers. He dove towards her sea-blue pants. Then did she bound, like the well-known main, and give him a struggle beside which poor Monster’s had been as a schoolgirl’s in a pillow fight. Trudchen’s old lacerations, which had healed, were reopened in his earlobes, and Very’s teeth were twice as large. His solar was plexed and his clavicle cleaved. She probed for that rib which Adam had given to make her. When they fell to the floor, he hit lowmost, heel-ass-head. His only purpose was tenderness. Under incessant punishment he got her again to the upper level, dropped her on the mattress,
goyng, goyng
said the springs as she bounced with flying members. She gathered herself and shuddered, blurted: “My God, the night supervisor is due any minute!” She crawled towards the footboard and her clothes. “Shh,” said Reinhart, “I think I hear her now!” She closed her legs, ivory in the half-light, pillars of the world; stood up and listened with flowing hair and sensate, rose-marked, goddess breasts, with belly-swell of satin and velvet groin. On Olympus sounded ox-eyed Hera’s jealous thunder and Aphrodite practiced
Selbstmord.
“Where?” She heard the silence of the corridor, and was caught
en face
to Reinhart and borne down through the wine-dark sea.
Later, beached and dripping, she kissed his ten fingers and remarked: “You didn’t hear the supervisor at all.” He grinned splendidly, Zeus-like, and with his godlike ear heard her all over again.
Next morning he arose without his symptoms and with a grand conviction they were no more. In hubris he dared them to appear, dared also to draw up their roster: the quivering wire in his bowels; the cold sweat and hot chill; the vacancy of a head yet heavy; the apprehension of attack; the sense he shared the skin of another man; a feeling of insupport towards the sacroiliac, as if two segments there were rather gristle than bone; the famous derangement of time; a horror over possible events: Would Trooper, writing a letter in the next bunk, ever finish that line? Would Lieutenant Llewellyn start his tour on right or left side? Would, next time he looked, a straight pin still gleam from the crack in the floor?
Hard as he tried, he stayed healthy. Llewellyn, when he came and heard, was happy in his innocent, brotherly way and advised him to counsel with Millet. Trooper, waiting with his own troubles, in his turn told the lieutenant of the old dream of jumping without a chute.
Reinhart dawdled for more self-tests. When finally he was ready to see the captain, he was last in line. Waiting, he felt his euphoria fall into a dull headache of resentment towards the other patients, leavened by a sharp distrust of Millet.
Millet turned his head and blew a large nose into an olive-drab handkerchief, very insulting. “Of course your problems are important,” he said. “More important than any other patient’s. And so are those of each one of them—when they sit before this desk. That is a fact. Do you know what a fact is?”
Reinhart looked defiant. “Yes, something that cannot be changed.”
The captain had finally got a haircut, the ballet skirt was trimmed to a gray fuzz. He sloppily put away his handkerchief.
“Isn’t it rather, something that should not be ignored?”
All right, he knew everything. But Reinhart had seen him blow his nose; he was omnipotent and all-knowing, but he also caught colds.
“Well, I’ll tell you a fact,” Reinhart said. “In this fight, which I got into to help my friend, I killed the big German. It is a terrible thing to kill a man with your bare hands. I regret it, I think from now on I’ll turn the other cheek, but I didn’t have a choice then. But I don’t feel
guilty,
if you know what I mean. It was a good fight, a fair one, I mean, for him. He was bigger and stronger than me, and we all take our chances. This is a fact. Why then instead do I feel a guilt for Schild’s death? Ill tell you. Because I could have saved him.”
Millet drew some rectangles on his pad. Nothing touched him. He said indifferently: “Why didn’t you?”
Reinhart’s symptoms had returned, full flood. While his chest shivered, bloodless, his suffused head burned; he could not recall whether he had sat in this interview one minute or all day; his whole spine was superimposed rings of lard; he looked for Millet any moment now to draw a long, keen blade and leap upon him.
Still looking away, Millet suddenly ordered him, as captain, not doctor, to answer.
Reinhart shouted, in glorious hatred. “Because I wanted you to die, you bastard.”
“Not me,” said Millet. “I was not there. That is a fact.”
Terrible, deep remorse for the error. Not Millet, certainly: Reinhart wished to kill the only man he could ever talk to, and that was Millet, who wasn’t even a Jew.
“Well, I don’t feel so good. I’m not even sure I’m sitting here right now. Maybe I died back there on the field. What living man always feels guilty of what he hasn’t done?”
“Every single one of us,” Millet answered, although it had not been a question. “You are not special in that regard. In the heat of combat, soldiers always wish their comrades would get hit, as a kind of charm against their being hit themselves, and then experience guilt if their wish comes true—but not till the battle is over and they have time and security enough to brood about, rather than preserve, themselves.”
“But,” cried Reinhart, “that is all just personal. What I am involved in is the murder of a whole continent of Jews by my people.”
“Excuse me.” Millet reddened his nose with the handkerchief.
“Do you know what is good for that?” Reinhart asked. “One of those benzedrine inhalers.”
“Thank you,” said the doctor. “I will try one.”
“Only not just before you go to bed. It will keep you awake. The benzedrine, you know.”
Millet again expressed gratitude, and said: “The personal thing is very interesting. In the three weeks of our talks—”
“Is it so long? I can’t remember, you see.”
“Oh you will, you will. ... Not once have you spoken of Lieutenant Schild as a person. Was he really your friend?”
He understood Millet’s technique well enough. It was always to oppose the freely given and dig for, what was on Millet’s terms and not his own, the withheld. Simulating anger and hurt—for his true feeling was of challenge to a battle of wits—he concluded the interview.
Then, back in bed, which had new, icy sheets, he found as usual he could not organize his thinking. Instead he tasted, in fancy, Veronica’s aphrodisiac body and felt relief that tonight was her night off. Too rich for the blood. There was another crime for which he knew no remorse: taking advantage of her love. And now he compounded it. He wrote a note to Lori, asking her to come see him after work, and had it delivered by a wardboy, PFC Remington, whom he had done a favor for in England. “And,” he cautioned, while Remington studied him with the same uncomfortable eyes he had used since Reinhart became a patient, “the German girl, and for Christ’s sake not Miss Leary.”
Lori came to the ward door an hour after the patients’ suppertime. Nurse Bronson, Very’s substitute, would have turned her away, but fortunately Lieutenant Llewellyn, permissive, dreamy type, had lingered late over his reports.
“A girl,” he said encouragingly to Reinhart. “A visitor. Well, isn’t that kind.”
“It is most important that I see her for at least five minutes. I believe, sir, it would be a kind of therapy for my disorder. Of course I know it is against the rules, and if you say so, I must get rid of her.”
Pain, like a wave of heat, warped Llewellyn’s plastic glasses. “Oh no, Reinhart, we are absolutely opposed to duress! I hope you think better of us than that. I tend to agree with your feeling that you should see this kind lady.”
“You won’t think I’m a malingerer?”
“Please free yourself of any such apprehension. Perhaps you will let me prescribe a mild sedative?” He went, lankily nervous, to a glass-front cabinet.
“No thank you, Lieutenant, she is not upset! Hahaha,” laughed Reinhart.
After a moment Llewellyn bewilderedly smiled. Then he worried: “Normal interpersonal relationships are too rare in this somewhat false environment. No, I agree with you in your feeling that you should see her. But may I ask, if you don’t mind, it is better in my judgment, whatever that is worth, that you and she do not confer out in the ward. It would disturb the other poor fellows. I should be glad to have your opinion on that, however.”
“That’s quite right, sir, quite right.”
“Oh good. Well then, I am sure Miss Bronson, who has a fine sense of these things, will be happy to let you borrow the treatment room.”
“We could be in love for a while,” said Lori, her strong, realistic face undisturbed by his proposal, the harsh light, or Miss Bronson’s periodic doorchecks one of which still echoed in the metal furniture. “But nothing else is practical.”
Suffering a partial aphasia for the German language, he asked her to repeat.
Ingenuously, she shook her hair and said in his own tongue: “Uh little surp-rise: I study English already. ... Wiss one another we may to love for some time. But alvays is
untunlich.
”
In his anticipatory fancies he had alternated between smugly hearing an absolute acceptance and listening with shame to an unqualified turndown. Instead, he had the usual compromise. He must learn, damn him, that people out there in the universe beyond his head were real and unimaginable. Had Schild really been his friend? What more could he, Reinhart, have done to prove it? Did he really love Lori? If not, why was he willing to live in that abominable cellar?
“Liebling”
he answered in German, “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Then you never will if I try to explain, Unteroffizier Carlo Reinhart, because my talents are not in analysis. You have met my brother and my husband. They never have allowed me to do anything but listen.”
Reinhart left his table-seat, went to her, and took her hand. “Nobody has ever appreciated you.”
Laughing astonishment, she squeezed him back. “What a strange remark! But I assure you that I have nothing to say, I have no ideas, why should I want to speak of nothing?”
“That’s the old Prussian nonsense, children, kitchen, church is all a woman’s good for.” He was made reckless by his indignation: “Then come to America! I will send for you as soon as I arrive.” Till that moment he had never believed he would go there again himself, but the sensible man, the Rotarian, the Philistine, who resides in the liver, somehow survives all blows to head and heart.
“Kinder, Küche, Kirche...,”
she repeated. “I have none of them. However, you would think my idea of American women just as funny, no doubt, but I shall spare you. America! This will interest Bach. You surely did not suspect he has long dabbled in technology.
Also,
he now announces to me that he has invented some means to make a glass which withstands heat. He has done this without a laboratory, simply mathematical equations in a notebook. Is this possible?—no. But in America someone will give money for it, perhaps. Is that likely?—no. But—”
“I didn’t mean you could bring Bach!” Reinhart thought: besides, we already have Pyrex.
She shaped her thin lips as if to pronounce
o
umlaut.
“You understand,” he said. “I even like him, but be fair once to yourself. That is no kind of life for a young woman. It isn’t right to sacrifice oneself for somebody else, no matter who.”
Placing upon him her famous direct look—that for which he loved her—she answered: “Certainly. So do not do it for me. I don’t know what ‘Teutonic efficiency’ is, since I have lived in Berlin all my life, but here you have an imitation: one, I love Bach very much; two, think of your self-respect! I am old enough to be your mother.”
In confusion’s rage, he shouted: “Then what did you mean by all your hints? If you love Bach why do you say you and I can love each other for a little while? Either way it’s a betrayal of something or other. ... I hate things that are dishonest and secret.”