Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  “We read American books in the Soviet Union!” he shouted happily, digging his hard heels into the floor. “More than we do Russian. Also, more than you read in the United States. You know, of course, that American authors would starve but for the money they get from Soviet sales.”

  “I know,” said Schild, who did, at that moment; did, because fact can be countermanded by wish and hope and generosity and brotherhood, else we are lost.

  “Have you read Dreiser?” he asked.

  “The greatest American writer,” replied Lichenko. “But Upton Sinclair Lewis is schön, too, and Jack London’s Babbitt and The Iron Heel.”

  “I met Dreiser once.”

  “Also” Lichenko mumbled, removing his cap and testing his forehead with a sweaty palm.

  “He spoke at the school where I taught. A great, majestic man, a champion of humanity, and a friend of the Soviet Union, as I suppose you know.”

  “Es interessiert mich das zu wissen,” said Lichenko vaguely, but hopped to his feet positively, and bowed. For there stood Leek.

  “Now, you can’t keep our ally out of circulation!” she chided, and led Lichenko to the dancing area—though not before Schild was constrained to translate some small-talk, including a Soviet tribute to womanhood in an ornate German that englished as something Albert might have said to Victoria; nor before he volunteered to hold the doffed but troublesome cap, Lichenko having been at a loss for a cache where that article would be neither crushed nor stolen.

  A universal sense of fun could not be withstood. The troublesome shortage of fuel reached Lichenko’s apparatus, without benefit of Schild, and he laughed long and loud, tore himself from the Siamese coupling with Leek, and shot into the kitchen and out the back door. He reappeared with a shoulder sack of bottles: vodka, schnapps, whisky, and other fluids.

  Glasses flowed, music tinned, everybody danced. Reinhart, Schild saw, glided about as if on figure skates with the large nurse, in the perfect attitude of the adolescent sexual captive: closed eyes, back arched affetuoso. A more direct confirmation of the reputed egalitarianism of medical units could not be imagined.

  Schild thought about Lichenko, who had so little and so much. Throw the switch of the time machine and there he was, with his cartload of firewood, ankle-deep in mire, on his weary animal way to the sod hut, the black bread, and the cabbage; the trashy icons; the spent wife; the ravished, if pretty, the prematurely aged, if plain, daughter; swearing so vilely that if his master had the ill fortune to canter past, he might have got another crop’s end for his lifelong collection of abuse. Born old, senile at twenty, dead at forty, without ever having passed through the human. A lump of dung, hating love and beauty and intelligence because he was defined by their absence. So, gorge the rotten potatoes, let the grease befoul the lips and drip from the chin, fill the gut with the stolen bottle, and when it explodes in the head, give the wife a fist to her decaying teeth and the daughter a hand between her thighs, because you are beyond judgment, beyond hope. But not beyond history, which moves not for revenge or profit or virtue, but for the negation of negation, the arrangement of disorder, above all, for an end to waste.

  These things mature without ever having been formally born. Lichenko was, of a sudden, disorderly. Only a moment earlier he had displayed high, good, and legitimate spirits; now he had enrolled in that brotherhood of savage peoples from whom firewater should be, and often is, legally withheld. His maw sagged; his eye carmined; he drank as if, oblivious to the torrent that washed his face and gummed his tunic, he hungered for glass, and proved it by incising a piece of the tumbler’s rim. A pencil line of blood traced out the groove of his chin, like the after-punch make-up of movie martyr-priests who may invite their adversary to put on the gloves but never return the favor ad hoc.

  Amidst all those medics his wound went unattended, on the theory that if he lost enough blood he might collapse peaceably. But he had just begun to play. After checking Leek in an armchair, he detonated into the frenzy of a solo jackknife dance. The floor quaked, for although he was small, the boards were simpatico with his rhythm; the rolled carpet against the far wall, which was not, had its long, heavy belly rent by a boot-heel.

  With such sport, with Lovett impotently aflutter, with Nader enveloping himself in the phonograph wires, with the awed company’s disengagement, the room was progressively demolished. Lichenko’s success with the carpet sent him to Leek’s chair, which, after removing her, he ruined with a single jump, hard heels forward; he smashed the mantlepiece mirror, pelted coal cakes in black bursts against a carved lowboy, got a painting once out of six throws with as many tumblers, and shouted “Bezbol!” Then, to Schild, he said: “Fascists.”

  “Yes,” answered Schild.

  “Not the Americans.”

  “No.”

  “The Germans. Why should this house be spared? If you saw what they did in my country...” He sank wearily into the chair and passed a hand across his face. He signaled to Leek, pointing at his lap. She sat there submissively, bovinely, as he read her idly in Braille.

  Still on the floor, Schild shifted his weight from left to right ham and adjusted his pistol belt.

  “Will you permit me to see your weapon?” asked Lichenko. He ejected Leek. He looked feverish as he palmed the Colt. A vein in his forehead pumped into prominence. He worked the action, stroked the barrel, warmed it with his cheek, and peeped down the muzzle. He found the clip, extracted it, loosened a bullet, felt its slug, replaced the bullet, replaced the clip, pointed the piece at the still proximate Leek, went “Boom, boom!” or thereabouts in Russian vowels, finger on trigger guard.

  Ignoring her squeak, squeaking himself in delight, he took out his own pistol and thrust it butt first at Schild.

  “We’ll exchange. Then we’ll each have a souvenir of a time we will never forget.”

  It was what the Russians called a Nagan, a cheaply made cap-gun affair, but Schild accepted it reverently, and, though he detested firearms, gave an earnest imitation of Lichenko’s ecstasy over the Colt.

  “You agree? You will exchange?” shouted Lichenko. “My dear friend, I salute you!”

  On his feet, he highballed with the right hand, a dwarf against the bas relief of the large Americans who had started to surge genially upon him through the dismembered furniture. Schild was rising in honor of the moment, at the very least to return the salute, when Lichenko began to discharge the .45. He perhaps intended to squeeze off only one cartridge as an additional salute to fortune, but the kick from the one convulsed his hand into another, and he was drawn nolens volens into a full tribute.

  Below the scored ceiling and within the vermiculated walls, Lichenko, now-spent gun drooping, sniffed the atmosphere of powder, appeared about to sneeze, did not, and pushed a reproachful lower lip like a coal chute at Schild.

  “Ah, my friend, this American pistol!”

  He tore at his choker collar. “Excuse me, Vasya is ill...” And fell prone into the plaster, which, of course, was now the common ground.

  “You win the medal,” said Lieutenant Leek, an unjolly snowman, to Schild.

  He blew clean his glasses and inquired silently with blurred vision.

  “For Number One Horse’s Ass, Berlin District.”

  Nader touched Schild’s elbow and whispered: “Look, Jack, Lovett went for the MPs. Get your ass-hole buddy out of here. We’ll con them. He was just drunk.” He knelt beside Lichenko and fingered back an eyelid, peered at the red orb. “Drunk as a skunk.” He ordered Corporal Reinhart to lend a hand.

  Reinhart lifted Lichenko by the belt and pulled him over a shoulder.

  “Veronica, why don’t you go along?” asked Nader. “Jesus, maybe he’s dead.”

  “O.K. Thanks for the party,” said she. “I had a lovely time anyhow.”

  Reinhart navigated through the rear door and into the garden. Already military-police sirens sounded in the distance. Through the back yards, having trouble at every sonbitching fence, and around the block to
Schild’s house was their silent way. Reinhart’s calves were tired on the stairs, but he gripped the banister and made it in good shape to the room, where as his burden was lowered to the bed it came to life briefly, displaying a revolving eye, and returned to dreamland with a mouthful of bedspread.

  Veronica examined the body from a distance, found it hale. Reinhart said: “You’re a good fellow, sir, to do this for that Russian. If his army found out about it he’d be headed for Siberia.” And Very seconded that.

  “I think,” said Schild, “the American Army is what we have to worry about at the moment.” He took a tiny package from his pocket. “Can you use these?”

  Anybody who ever opened a K ration had Fleetwood cigarettes to dispose of, yet Reinhart was sure these were his own come home. He was too weary, the evening had been too extravagant, to inquire by what route.

  New relations consisting so fiercely in the precise time of day and the specific mise en scène, the sudden dislocation of these threw both Very and Reinhart into a diffidence, especially now as, their task ended, they went out of step down the sidewalk to Very’s house. From the side of his eye Reinhart could see her shoulder bag swinging off the divisions of silence. An occasional officer or nurse, not breaking the peace, breathed past them in the frenetic diaspora from the party. Down the street, its siren dying like a throttled pussycat, another MP jeep arrived.

  At her door, Reinhart chickened out of trying for a good-night kiss, perhaps with a view towards establishing his independence, which, in the pale simulacrum of post coitum tristis that was his after-party letdown, he felt had been compromised. Or perhaps it was a defense against the progressive frigidity she gave off as they approached the front step.

  “Oh this is where you live?” he asked numbly.

  “Haha! Were you going to charge me with breaking and entering?”

  This cruel parody of his own earlier fantasies on the mansion of her person, despite the false laughter—whose spuriousness was advertised by its miraculous lack of resonance; it was as if a great bell rang so shallowly that nothing trembled—suddenly elicited his overdue response to Lichenko’s rampage. To assault an entity of order, to register a spontaneous nay against the sanctioned and authorized; mean, but it were meaner than never to be so moved.

  But Very skipped insouciantly inside the doorway. Shortly, her other end appeared, saying: “See you in the funny papers.”

  CHAPTER 8

  CAPTAIN ST. GEORGE’S SURPRISE WAS limited. He had rapped at and opened Schild’s door on his regular schedule of unnecessary morning information—“The bath is free”—and looked upon a scrawny, alien fundament. Lichenko, rump to door, was bent in a study of his big toe.

  Schild’s guest had awakened with a refusal to recognize his benefactor. Something Schild however took in good grace and did not sully with a word as the Russian scratched an elusive cap-a-pie itch, lip-farted at his own image in the mirror, and spat a long drizzle of saliva out the window in droll reproof of the sunlight that made him wince. Then he turned, said with ill humor: “Da” and undressed for an examination of his pelt.

  St. George recovered with expedition. “I thought you had a woman in here,” he chortled to Schild, who was elbow-propped on the floorbound blanket that had been his bed.

  Arising with the aid of the dresser corner, khaki undershirt and shorts clinging to him like old crepe paper, sallow, hairy, shivering—Berlin’s air in the shadows stayed cold till noon—Schild said as St. George averted his eyes: “So what else is new?”

  He watched the dull pain fill the captain’s eyelids, distend his cheeks, sag the loose mouth, and lower the chin, going down like mercury in a chill. It was a kind of crying just beneath the epidermis; years of it had made his face one big bag.

  St. George addressed himself to the oval mirror on the dresser. “Do you know?” His ebullience had left. “Is it necessary to have an electric shaver honed every so often? Mine is beginning to pull.” He held the device towards Schild, retaining the pillbox affair which made any current American.

  “Duncroft,” he went on, “says it can’t be done. He says the razor companies aren’t going to sharpen old ones and thereby put themselves out of business. They’re going to want to sell you a new one, he says. But he’s always cynical.”

  Lichenko left off his big toe and went over the others, as if in count; midway through the left foot, he lost his sum and began again.

  “Did you see a strange man as you entered this room?” asked Schild.

  “A refugee from the party, I take it.” St. George twisted the top of a battered tin of GI foot powder, sifted a quantity into his palm, and traced rhomboids with his fingertip.

  Later, as he and Schild crossed the street towards breakfast at the 1209th officers’ mess, to which St. George had got their small unit attached for rations, he said: “Strange how when you meet a man who’s naked you don’t get to know much about him. Maybe we all rely too much on externals, but that’s the way it goes.”

  At the mess Schild was daily juxtaposed with many of the to him anonymous faces of the party, and occasionally received a curious but cordial nod. He was also aware, from time to time, of the regard of multiple eyes and the drone of comment at adjoining tables as he forked in his Harvard beets and masticated the grainy roast, but was conscious of no ill will, nor, in his sense of the word, suspicion. Once he saw Lovett across the tent, fragmenting bread with neurasthenic fingers and spotting the pieces individually over his tray, which could also be interpreted as evidence of placidity.

  But after one lunch, Nader met him outside.

  “Did you pack off the Russky? Dewey’s going to make trouble, mark my words, because the Old Man’s about to hang it on him.”

  “I’ll make it good,” said Schild. “It was my fault. I gave him the gun.”

  “Well by Jesus we’ll put in a complaint through the Kommandatura,” Nader said. “Just write down his name and outfit. Did you get the outfit?” He rummaged in his pockets for writing materials.

  Both extremities of Nader’s pencil bore chewmarks. His paper was the reverse of a snapshot carrying the pale-violet emblem of an Oklahoma developer. Schild wrote, slovenly: “Lt. Krylenko, Engrs Corps, Red Army.”

  “I don’t have much hope this will find him.” He smiled commiseration. “But you won’t have to. Just let me know the amount of the damage, and I’ll see you get reimbursed in full. I’ll see your C.O. myself this afternoon. You’ll be fully cleared.”

  “Now,” said Nader, “I know you’re oke, but you’ll do best by us if you crap out early. What I mean is—” He broke off until the pencil was reseated in his breast pocket and the flap buttoned. “Let me as somebody who was soldiering when you, Dewey Lovett, and anybody else in this road show was still sucking titty. Know the Old Man since Jesus was a PFC: hates anything involved. We’ll never find the Russian, but the thing will be wrapped up and Dewey will stop pissing and moaning.”

  “I thought it was simple decency to get him out of your place ahead of the MPs,” said Schild. “That officer fought all the way from Stalingrad to Berlin. It would be outrageous if his first defeat came from blowing out some German plaster.”

  “As long as we’re off the hook, old buddy, that’s all, as long as we’ve got something to hand them. The phony name you wrote down here will do as well as another.” He showed his chipped teeth in amiable pride. “What time I have left from being personnel officer, unit censor, permanent O.D., fire officer, postal officer, and post-exchange officer, I put to provost marshaling. You’d never make a successful crook.” Nader’s hairy wrist disposed of all possible demurrers, embarrassments, confusions. “Hell, I remember his name, I just don’t know to spell it.”

  Exposure of his minor deception freed Schild to submit the whole affair to a lens, under which he saw: being caught out by such a man and in such a way was not a demerit.

  Nader pushed the snapshot at him. “You still didn’t look at the picture on the other side.”

&nbs
p; A ripe piece of girl in her late teens sat on the first step of a rotting porch. In the background depended the rusty chains of an old slat swing; through one link, the shaft of a raffia fan. As she cuddled a stuffed panda, her deep lower lip sat in transitory melancholia, or what may have been counterfeit desire. Pleats of voile skirt fell gradually away at the thigh on the viewer’s side, as if at the border of some proscenium arch through which shortly a young man with haircut, black suit, and cascaded necktie would heel-and-toe as commencement valedictorian. She was relaxed or prepared to spring, according to which evidence had more weight: the tension of the femoral muscles or the flaccid pubis in the valley that knew no drawers.

  This was an exercise to put Schild on his mettle. How to communicate in the proper measure somewhere between coarseness and patronage. For Nader, in the classic manner of such picture-passers, watched him as a bank guard observes an unshaven man; that self of his which dwelt in Nader’s mind was about to acquire a habitation and a name. Schild suddenly ached with regret that he could not miraculously reduce his size and quality to the mode of the image and plunge into that seedy, sweaty, alien world of desiccated lumber, rusty metal, the treasures of shooting galleries, the failures of fabric, unshaven armpits, sagging wash-lines, off-stage radios, that universe of the enervated Sunday, and make animal love to the girl. Not having that option, he grinned wryly and said: “Choice”; watching it join the community in the wallet. “I believe the idea now is to ask who is she?”

  “You don’t know any less than I do,” Nader replied. “This was found behind a chair after an enlisted men’s dance in the service club at Camp Grant, Ill. I carry it for laughs.”

  Schild returned to the tent for another cup of coffee, the dregs of which he hung over until the last eater had departed and it was seemly to draw and transport Lichenko’s rations. He did not know why his guest remained, but it could hardly have been for “his big brown eyes.” A phrase from his father’s code, applied to those business associates whose sudden appearance of friendship logic and experience exposed as conspiracy. A “friend” dropping into the office for a smoke was of course a spy who mentally photographed a new button and, within half an hour after his departure, set up machinery to reproduce the plagiarism in quantity, to steal the orders of the first party and libel him to the stolen customers as a thief to confound.