Crazy in Berlin

by Thomas Berger

  Which was a flat lie—although perhaps not hers but the old man’s; the surviving martyrs of the camps were hardly thrown into menial jobs and black-marketeering.

  “Ausgezeichnet! Prima! Then he should be just the man to find die Familie Reinhart,” he said in an irony that she did not receive. “Of course it isn’t likely he’ll find anybody. There’s a separation of fifty years. Think of that, Trudchen, the last time I was German my father hadn’t yet been born.”

  “Please?”

  Instead of clarifying it, he fell to work with his pencil—which was blunt and unpleasant to use; if she didn’t soon return his pen he must come right out and ask her to—on the long-delayed Guide to the Ruins for the sightseeing tour.

  The Olympic Stadium, built for the Olympic Games in 1936, has a seating capacity—

  Or was it more graceful to say “seats”? Or “seats” as a noun: “stadium, etc., has 124,000 seats.” “Capacity” of course had a more serious tone. This was one of those days when nothing sounded right, which unluckily had begun to outnumber those on which nothing sounded wrong.

  “You do not wish to hire this man?” asked Trudchen, starting to type the stencil for Page One, which, for Pound had decided on a grandiose project that would impress the colonel, was to stand as title sheet.

  He had to grin. All European girls spoke with an animation at once funny and delightful, an excess of feminine vitality that juiced each word. If this held even in a sadness like Lori’s, with Trudchen, who was never less than gay, who was young and unmarred and in a perpetual celebration of ripeness, it was the very model of unalloyed girlship; you never, as sometimes at Home, suspected that you confronted a transvestite boy.

  “Ah,” she went on, “how hoppy you will make zem! In these timess to have an American cowsin!”

  In mock grimness he answered: “Our American Cowsin. I hope for better luck. That’s the name of the play Lincoln was watching when he was shot.”

  “By Chon Vil-kes Boat, yes?” This in an eagerness which threw a tremble into her physical establishment. “And the year, 1864, yes? The day I do not know.”

  “Don’t ask me!” He ambled to the French window to look on as perfect weather as the earth offered, the life-enhancing air of the Brandenburg plain, full of golden light and green smells. “My family wasn’t in the country at the time. They were here.”

  Could Jews have been killed on such a day, or had they waited for rain?

  The great pines stood high in the adjacent grove, and seeing down among their feet he recognized the steel-gray, crosshatched shadows from old German engravings, which were not artist’s strategy but the true lay of the land. He could have watched without doubt a delegation of trolls emerge from some root-home and bear away the Nibelungs’ lode, but impossible to the mind’s eye were the long sallow lines of victims.

  “This man, this good German, how can I get in touch?”

  Trudchen giggled like a spring: “Tahch—this is very vivid and so clear that no explanation is needed—baht he vill come here some time. I have taken the freedom to ask him that you might... vould... could—oh well, that you want to see him.”

  Along with the cosmetics she wore a peek-a-boo white blouse disclosing an eyelet-margin slip and, beyond, the rim of a brassiere which carried larger burdens than formerly had hung upon her chest, and the pigtails no longer swung free but were entwined about her head in a yellow cocoon. In the aggregate, this was also a lie: that she was a mature girl.

  “If he was in a camp, then he must be a Jew?”

  Asking which he returned to his desk and fell into the chair with the noise of a beef haunch flung onto a butcher’s block.

  “Oh no!” cried Trudchen with candid enthusiasm. “You are incorrect when you think only Jews were mistreated. You do not know of the Resistance?”

  Sure, the plot to kill Hitler of 20 July 1944. This had already been exposed in his discussion groups as a conspiracy of reactionary generals, scarcely better than der Führer himself, whose motives were suspect and results, a failure; and who were eleven years late.

  Of course there was that—she took no notice of the negating conditions, perhaps because he lost his nerve while talking to her, who was blameless, and presented them weakly—but what she meant was something of a greater scope and duration, embracing all of the non-Nazi population: a total rejection of Hitler and all of his works, dating back to 1933 and earlier. She as a German could tell him that, even though she took no interest in politics, being young and silly.

  “And what did they do about it?”

  “Ah, what can anybody do against beasts who are ruthless? The SS and the Gestapo, their first job was to control Germans, not Jews.”

  He sat upright and brought down his fist upon the desk, not in anger but rather a kind of pleading.

  “That is understood. But it is over now. National Socialism turned out to be nothing. You couldn’t find one German today who would say a good word about it. Yet it was a German thing, wasn’t it? I don’t mean the war, or the Axis, but what went on here: a horrible, dreadful thing that was completely new. Old Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun were saints alongside of this. The whole history of man is disgusting, I grant you, but why would the Germans try to set a new record? But no, I don’t even want to ask that. God knows if I had been a German what I would have been. But why can’t someone at least say he is sorry?” He looked into space, for he had no wish or reason to make it personal.

  He was an idiot to speak of this to Trudchen, and she was quite right to look calfly insensate and say: “One cannot be sorry for what one has not done.”

  “You must pay me no attention,” she went on, “because I am not clever, but what I can see is that God makes people suffer.” Her mouth and eyes went into round wonder, which made her, there behind the crazy lines of lopsided table and old typing machine, a complex of circles: head, eyes, glasses, mouth, breasts, hips. “At eleven o’clock in the morning of 3 February, this year, I had the fortune to be in the Bayerischer Platz Underground station when your planes came over making a direct strike with an aerial mine that blew a thirty-feet hole out of the bottom of the tube. So suddenly I did not feel anysing, no wownd, and knew only what occurred when this baby in the arms of the vo-man in front of me, now, with the blast, on top of me, this baby stared down and tried to cry at me but instead of the cry this string of blood dripped quietly from its mouth. It was alive, but dead, also; both at the same time—how can I explain this terrible sing that I mean! Your planes had come to kill Nazis, but the bombs cannot tell good from bad. A little chilt of eight months old, it had to suffer. Is it not the same way with God’s vengeance for the murder of Jesus Christ?”

  It was wackily, harmlessly funny, as when the village crank says of the cyclone-torn bungalow: this is what they get for all that drinking. But she was growing into a big girl, and it was time to be set straight—which no one had bothered to do for him when he was on that level.

  “You don’t—” he began, when Lieutenant Pound appeared in the doorway and Trudchen hurriedly flung back into her story.

  “So when this blood began to descend upon me I reached towards my sleeve for the handkerchief but my hand could not go far, being halted by a soft, varm, cling-ging mass such as one’s hair after washing it, and I thought: so I have lost an arm, how easier in the fact than in the worry. Limbs, limbs, I have always feared losing them most.”

  “Don’t bullshit, Trudchen,” said Pound, patiently genial, closing the door which was in his absence never closed, demonstrating his talent for violently hurling it to without its latching: he “pulled” it, as one does a punch in a false fight. “You’ve got two bigfat white arms today.”

  Although his monastery was now neat, this abbot had stayed slovenly; as he went briskly to his desk below the little window, his loose shoelaces clicked, his tie end flapped over his shoulder, his bowlegs like two lips endlessly yawned away from each other and gulped shut.

  Perhaps it was Pound’s own e
xperience in violence: he never believed anything she said. And by his example, Reinhart, too, invariably lost belief. Although, given her time and place, the tale had been credible enough at the outset, with the introduction of self it became fiction like all the others. She was, he had to face it, the most incredible liar he had ever met.

  With a significant look at Pound, who was too bored to register it, Reinhart said: “Go on, Trudchen. What happened then?”

  “Well, it was really an arm, but blown off from someone other and lodged between mine and my ripps, as if it were robbing my pocket.” She placed a rolled-up stencil in the position described; buff backing to the outside, it was a painfully authentic replica.

  Her attention was now directed exclusively towards Pound, and Reinhart, in half-conscious jealousy, went to block her line of vision.

  “You know what? You are a prevaricator!”

  Silently, Trudchen unrolled the third arm in the enormous self-confidence the mythomaniac shares with the artist, while at the same time her round nose sharpened as if in death, as if for a moment she really tested that condition the truthful call life, and rounded again as quickly; she had been there before and did not like it.

  “Stop pissing around with the kid,” Pound ordered irritably. He was in a rare short mood, probably connected with the miscarriage of certain affairs of money, towards which these days he had developed an obsession. The black market had denuded him of watch, pen, pocket knife, cigarette case, lighter, ring, identification bracelet, all bedding but one blanket, all ties, shirts, drawers, undershirts, socks, and caps beyond one each, towels, writing paper, the leather frame of his wife’s picture, and his musette bag. Three days earlier he had received by mail a new pipe and pouch: the latter had already metamorphosed into a paper envelope. Which he rustled in now, spilling much, but onto a page of Yank, which when done he coned to funnel back the overflow, his narrow eyebrows shimmering ever upwards like heat waves fleeing a summer pavement.

  “Haven’t you finished that guidebook yet?” he went on, with querulous twitchings. “The colonel has a wild hair in his asshole ever since Lovett’s Folly. He might put us on cleaning butt cans any minute.”

  Because he was properly a cigarette man, he smoked a pipe the wrong way, inhaling great mortifying draughts which after a time in his innards came back through every superior aperture, mouth, nose, ears, eyes, suggesting that his head was afire.

  “I’ll finish it today,” Reinhart answered sullenly, not unmindful of Trudchen’s spectacular show of industry; she socked so loudly at the typewriter you couldn’t hear the clearing of your own throat. No sooner did a third person come than he felt odd man out; his maximum for rapport was one being at a time. Thus it was fine with Pound alone, or alone with Trudchen, but with three people he invariably sensed a conspiracy against him.

  “Oh good,” said Pound. “If you are that close to the end, you can put the fucker aside for fifteen minutes and write me a letter to the wife. You know, this and that, etc., and I’m short on dough because we had to buy new winter uniforms this month.”

  “You short on dough?”

  Pound made a sighing descent into his swivel chair. “Come over here,” he said confidentially. “I don’t know why I can’t tell you, since you know all my other chicken-shit business. The thought of going back to that woman—the one you write for me—is more than I can stomach. You know, when I was wounded I made kind of an agreement with Fate that if I didn’t die I would be somebody new. I never told this before to anybody in the service, but I used to be, before I was drafted, a bank teller for thirty-seven fifty a week, a creepy little rectum-kissing rabbit with two snot-nosed kids and a dog with some kinda skin rash that made his hair fall out in pink spots—he also used to sit around on the rug in the evening and fart all the time—and this woman, see. Well, she isn’t the worst person in the world, but she is set on making a man a coward. She even wanted to scare me out of using a blowtorch to take off the old paint on the outside of the house—which I was only doing cause who can afford those prick union painters and if you hire scabs the others will come by and bomb your house—you’ll start a fire, she said. And by Christ I went ahead and did it anyway, and you guessed it, it did start a fire that burned off one wall. I never missed Bob Hope’s radio show on Tuesday nights for five years—Professor Colonna: ‘that’s what I keep telling them down at the office’; Brenda and Cobina, and the rest of them. Think of that: 259 straight; once they were off because of a special news feature, something about that fucking shitbum Hitler. I tell you I was yellow as they come, but after basic they sent me to OCS where they thought that was just being cautious, I guess, a good quality for a officer. Well, we were pinned down along this hedge row in Normandy and I was dumping in my pants for fear, but still I noticed my top fly button was loose and I fastened it. And then I thought what a dirty little turd I was: with your ass about to be blown off and you button the barn door—do you get the picture? I was more afraid of my dong showing than of the German 88s. So I thought all of a sudden: World, you got twenty-eight years from me, you can keep all the rest and stick them up your giggy, and I jumped up and went across there and took that Kraut platoon, and I don’t mean to say I wasn’t scared, but anyway for once there was a reason. Shit.”

  He had puffed so hard on his pipe that already its tobacco was exhausted and the air made noxious.

  “You know what I made so far on the black market? Thirteen thousand, two hundred and twenty-two dollars, and it’s all gone back to the States to a bank in L.A., California. That’s where my nurse Anne Lightner is from, L.A., where they go in for the beach living. I’m going to get sprung from this woman as soon as I get home, and then I’m going out there and buy a used-car lot. That’s the kind of thing they go big for out there, with all that beach living. Everybody drives a car, that’s what Anne says.”

  So was another idea exploded. It was sad, in a way, that nobody, simply nobody was what he seemed. To Reinhart, Pound had been the classic type of swashbuckler. Now he saw the late bank-clerk lines of worry and doubt, faded but still visible, at the corners of mouth and eyes, and he even liked him better for them—for daring has no unusual moral worth if you have lived with it from the cradle—yet there was no discounting the loss of something rare.

  “But I have to play it cool with Alice till I get back and can defend myself,” said Pound, refilling his pipe. “So write her nice. I don’t have to tell you what to say, you have enough crap to snow anybody.” This was admiringly put, with the quick wink he must have learned in his new life, but looking sharply Reinhart saw the hint of a quaver in it, as if, in at least the most minor part, there was still a tinge of bluff.

  All the while Trudchen had been typing with fanatic energy—faking madly, for the guidebook manuscript lay on Reinhart’s desk.

  As he passed her on the return route, a doorknock sounded, and notwithstanding his shouted “Enter!” she leaped up and teetered to the knob—high heels, yet!

  It was a soldier, for Pound. She made him wait while she proceeded to the lieutenant with a formal announcement, working her body in a queer movement which Reinhart first believed was an effort to balance on the high spikes and then recognized as an amateur version of a whore’s undulations. Her breasts were hard metallic cones, yet she still wore the thin, little-girl’s skirt ending an inch above the knees, and still the owlish, juvenile spectacles. Involuntarily he burst into a loud, barking laugh, which hideous though it was nobody but himself seemed to hear.

  Lieutenant Schild’s judgment had been correct, only a bit premature (as an Intelligence man, of course, he was expected to be one jump ahead of events); if she was not on her way to tartdom, then Reinhart was an orangutan.

  “Dearest Alice,” he scrawled on the yellow pad, taking in return a warm thrill of fancy that this unseen proxy wife was really his own, that he had entered her in the connubial bed and that she had borne him two small resemblances of himself, albeit snot-nosed.

  On Pound’
s indifferent grunt Trudchen wobbled back to her table. Reinhart had also purchased the mascara which gave her an appearance of sore, fire-tinged eyes, but the high heels were from another protector, he now had no doubt.

  The soldier had gone. In his stead, in the hall shadows beyond the half-open doorway stood a shrouded representation of a human figure, crepuscular, mysterious. Upon Reinhart’s look it slid noiselessly out of range. Sauntering, Pound took Trudchen’s typewriter from beneath her very pounding fingers, ripped out and discarded the paper, and saying “At last I found the Kraut who can fix this old machine,” left.

  “Darling Alice: Sweetheart, I—” Reinhart began again.

  “You try alvays to hoomiliate me...” Trudchen’s lips were fashioned into a little red crossbow, through which slid the pink bolt of her tongue, in and out, tasting the lipstick.

  He threw down the pencil in disgust, said malevolently: “How about returning my pen?”

  “Vy do you always do this? Because I am only this little German girl?”

  He strode massively across and bruised his fist on her table: “Right now, I want that pen!”

  “Oh, Gee whiz!”

  Find who taught her that and you had the whoremaster: Reinhart had never said “Gee whiz” in all his life long. But the tears were her own. He had last seen them when she cursed that poor Jew for telling the truth.

  “Well, Gee, take it beck again, and don’t say I vas shtealing it.” Engulfed by the mixture of water and words, dissolving mascara, smeared rouge, falling hairpins—for in the grief she tore her hair down into the old pigtails—she opened the middle drawer and drew away.

  Reinhart came round behind her. There it lay, the old black Parker, that gallant, veteran instrument of romance and adventure on two continents, vicarious cannon, sceptre, phallus. He seized it, already feeling the brute, and when her blue eyes peeped sideways at him over their scorched rims and she said “I oppologize”—by this time he had long forgotten what the beef was and took the pen merely so as to return it to her formally, as a permanent gift.