Yet what honest work? Had the war not come he would now have been for a year and a quarter a Bachelor of—what? A process beginning in Central Europe in 1933 (Carlo had a popgun, wanted an air rifle), or 1924, then: Hitler, having failed to capture Bavaria with his private army of cranks and loafers, sits in the prison of Landsberg am Lech dictating to Hess a lunatic statement of aims which two decades later when they have been realized to the letter are still unbelievable (umbilical cord severed and tied, Doctor slaps Carlo’s bare bottom, Carlo wails, he is human and alive), a process whose origins are in the mists of the past, whose products are millions of dead and a continent made garbage—this same process, the blowing of an ill wind, solves for one young man a dilemma, what to do with himself?, but only for the nonce.
Insurance? His father could get him in at Ecumenical Indemnity (Laughter). The campus again?; this time indebted to nobody: “they” were going to make it free for veterans, no selling apples this postwar. Which meant either of two: either everybody would go to college, and being mass it would be mean; or none of the ex-servicemen would go, leaving the same old collection of pubescent punks he had got his fill of long before coming to occupy Berlin. Germany itself. Take out papers, if you could find a government to become a national of. Pose as a mustered-out SS man, for which you had the proper appearance, make a living in chocolate bars and Lucky Strikes, pimping for Trudchen. Or merely sit in some congenial ruin and weep away to a skeleton, for what as a German you did, as an American you did not do, and as a man you saw no fit atonement for.
Since his needs were met—women, riches, life of leisure, gemütlich flat, loyal friend (who else but a true-life Horatio would dodge punches to do one a favor?), his connection with history (American news correspondents staged a spontaneous demonstration of Berlin GIs celebrating the Japanese surrender; photographed it; Reinhart stood upper left dutifully tossing his cap towards the sky)—since all these holdings were verifiable to the senses, euphoria must, by definition, ensue.
Yet, within the very seed of comfort he detected an inimical, corrosive juice which like the acid in a hand grenade waited tirelessly on the pulling of a pin to begin incendiary mixture. Satisfaction was his, but so also was a growing conviction it should not be: why should he alone be rewarded when the rest of the world was taxed? Even the other Americans had their troubles, wanted grievously to go home, suffered in what he so grossly enjoyed.
He began to fear his own compulsions; if he did not hurt Trudchen enough, neither did she him, and it was not because each did not try. Violent as it was, that plunging to explosion only suggested a damage he could imagine but never yet achieve, that catastrophic end the reaching of which he came, in a kind of pride of horror, to believe was his true vocation. Truly, Trudchen was too depraved to defile and too small a mount to ride to victory.
Virtually unused went his murderous-muscled body, the welted hands with one of which he could have lifted Hitler and cracked off that weak neck like a sparrow’s, penetrated Goering’s breadbasket as a thumb would sink into a rotten pear. Where was the game worth the candle, where now, standing in the empty stadium, too late, alone, a lackey groundskeeper amid discarded programs and ticket stubs, where now to find another contest?
Time had fled. Berlin bleibt doch Berlin, as the natives said, but for the original occupiers—the 82nd Airborne having replaced the 2nd Armored, Reinhart’s medics were seniors in service and disenchantment—as September approached, it was a different city from that Newfoundland into which their trucks had rolled on a sun-swept afternoon in July. The aftermath of war had shaded into the onset of peacetime. Regiments of women in kerchiefs and dark stockings labored to clear the bomb-sites and reclaim sound bricks. The Russians freed and dumped into the Allied sectors some thousands of Wehrmacht prisoners, who staggered along the main thoroughfares tattered, hollow-eyed, embarrassing civilians, panhandling American passersby. The black market shrunk from too-flagrant spectacle. The newest currency regulations were difficult to evade: Pound converted his Swiss watches into Occupation marks—and because the going price had fallen with the replacement of Soviet combat troops by a more conservative element, nonrapists, small spenders, of a dour respectability, got only half as much as he would have in July—but could not get them into dollars and home. “Here I sit,” he said to Reinhart, once for every hour they spent together, “with my finger in my ass and one hundred thousand marks.”
With the new Russians came fewer explosions from their sector, although incidents, frequently mortal, continued. Earlier they had shot Allies and one another in jest; now the motive had changed to a solemn dislike. Americans were counseled to avoid the eastern quarters of the city, were seduced to remain on home ground by a grandiose Red Cross Club on the Kronprinzenallee, where in the stately dining room a string ensemble in threadbare tuxedoes ingratiatingly whined and the fare was sinkers and coffee in individual silver pots; by the Uncle Tom movie theater on Onkel-Tom-Strasse which led to a structure called Uncle Tom’s Hut in the Grunewald Forest, the name German-given, long before VE-Day, for a reason no GI could grasp; by the Berlin Philharmonic, at concerts in the Titania Palast in Steglitz, though soon its conductor, out legally one night after curfew, was misunderstood by an American sentry and shot dead.
Personnel who numbered their years in the late thirties or more were shipped back to the States as senile. So went Reinhart’s friend Ben Pluck, in civil life a lawyer; in the Army, having declined to serve, eternal PFC. Others left on longevity points; thus transported was Tom Riley, from across the hall, saddening everyone whose flat lay adjacent to the stairwell; no more would the iron treads echo his jovial filth.
In the latrines they predicted the 1209th would go to Osaka, Japan, where the bearded clam ran crosswise, or the Azores, as in the limerick about sores, or as a kind of liaison force to the Turks in Istanbul. On the wards were one hundred twenty complainants of nasopharyngitis, all on the light diet. The colonel ate out the assembled officers and nurses on the subject of fourteen spent contraceptives spiked off the hospital grounds on the lances of his sanitation crew, directing his remarks principally to Chaplain Peggott and Major Clementine Monroe, the superannuated chief nurse.
Everybody in Reinhart’s apartment building had a local mistress save two ethereal privates from Supply, who had each other. Don Mestrovicz, technician fourth grade of the EENT clinic, had two in the same family: a mother still young enough, a daughter just old enough, to whom he was the filling in their sandwich. Corporal Toole from the motor pool owned a big round woman with a behind like the belly of a lute. Bruce Freeman, of X-Ray, had an ash-blonde named Mimi Hammerschlag who played bit parts in Ufa pictures; Jack Eberhard, company clerk, a dishwater blonde who like him made strange noises when drunk. Sergeant Deventer’s girl could do a take-off on Hitler with a comb for a mustache; Bill Castel’s woman, an artist, cut out his silhouette in orange paper. Ernie Wilson’s piece was three weeks pregnant; Roy Savery’s, one month; five others professed falsely to the condition, three of whom named the same sire, T-3 “Plumber” Cobb—he laid a lot of pipe—but were duly unmasked. And Farnsworth Cronin was sometimes seen with a boyish girl whose name was spelled Irene and pronounced Ee-ray-nuh; he, however, called her Boo.
Supply outfitted everyone with short jackets, like Eisenhower’s, calling in the old skirted blouses. All noncommissioned officers in the ETO were granted a liquor and beer ration; in the 1209th these were consumed on the rear balconies, feet on ledge, cigars in jaw, and in the company of the girls, who giggled much and sometimes sang in English. No Werewolves having turned up, the district order that US personnel carry arms when off compound—the medics, their red-cross sleeve bands—was rescinded. Under the authority of the Information and Education Program, Gerald Gest was sent to Paris for a month to study French civilization at the Sore-bone, and a class in basic psychology, meeting once a week in an empty storeroom in headquarters, was offered to qualified enlisted men, which meant everybody; in its chair, PFC Harvey Rappa
port, MA from NYU.
A sandy-haired corporal named Gladstone, who worked in the post exchange, blew out his brains there one night after closing, leaving no note. Veronica’s neuropsychiatric ward, already so crowded that three patients bunked in a supply room, somehow stuffed in five more beds. Walking past its door you never heard a sound, although by her account half a dozen patients wept all day and another man made squealing noises with a finger against his teeth. A paratrooper, under observation for persistent bed-wetting, was discovered to be a poseur—in the wee hours he did not really wee-wee but soaked his mattress with H20 from the bedside glass—and sent back to his outfit on charges of malingering. A tentatively diagnosed schiz struck Lieutenant Llewellyn, assistant psychiatrist, in the nape, knocking off his glasses, then sought to crush them but couldn’t with bare feet. Another patient, a brawny man with the hair of a goat, incessantly planned to become a novice in the Carmelite nuns.
No doubt it owed to such spectacular persons and events that Veronica by the fourth week of their acquaintance had lost her bloom, or rather that part of it which was rosy towards Reinhart, who suspected that being normal he bored her. And he could not very well divulge the doings of that other self who lodged with Trudchen, the mad one, the one with passions which, being there resolved, freed this one, the front man, to be so smooth and bland. Back there, Himmler did his dreadful work; up here was elegant Ribbentrop, kissing hands.
For years he had cultivated the art of surrender to women to offset his bulk, which sometimes on its approach caused, particularly small, girls to look for cover. The brute tamed by gentility, the handsome and moral equilibrium of opposites. No, its validity consisted only in the abstract, never in practice. For instance with Very: he cared little about the destination of a date, so long as it was not an official Army entertainment where they must be separated by rank. But Very had for the movies the insatiable hunger with which it was said expectant mothers went to dill pickles—a touch of madness for them, really, Western, gangster, comical, historical, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, any passage of arc light through celluloid into minuscule glass beads generating counterfeit life, but especially Dramas in which any one of those actresses with big eyes and hard white jaws, dressed in jodhpurs, carrying whips, riding stallions, of course gelded, consummated a union with the scion of a swell family of old Virginia and ate for breakfast grapefruit in a bed of ice, her nostrils flaring.
In the absence of an enlisted boy friend this taste would have carried Very every evening to the Onkel Tom Kino, to that roped-off centrally situated block of seats exclusive to officers, there for two hours to shuffle off the coil of banal mortality.
Now if this was her pleasure, and as a gentleman his was in seeing she received hers, why now admit obstruction? “Look, honey, don’t worry about me. I’ll sit back in the enlisted section and meet you outside somewhere when the show’s over.” “Now you’re sore.” Of course he was not angry, just piqued at her resistance to civility. With the best intent in the world she went on: “No, tonight we’ll do what you want.” “I want to see the movie.” and usually they did, segregated for two hours and when afterwards they met, Veronica, and not he, looked miffed.
At other times when there had been no conflict of wishes, when they had taken long night strolls sometimes as far as the walled villas of Dahlem’s tree-murmuring walks (almost the only alternative he could offer to the movie-show, which was another reason for his reluctance to prevail), necessarily avoiding society, when they should have formed not two but one, in a sealed capsule of mutual affection, Veronica had lately seemed, not exactly withdrawn, but at least preoccupied. Working with these lunatics all day—apparently her thesis that they got worse in peacetime was daily confirmed—what could you expect? At first he tried to jolly her out of it, but in itself it is a morbid thing to have to cheer a woman, a transposition of the proper roles, she being by nature equipped to bring joy, while man is the rightful brooder.
And considering the precise Very, unfortunately her physical design was not for melancholy. When not in the mobile oval of laughter, her mouth formed a horizontal too broad; her chin appeared square and somewhat virile; when not quivering, her nose was a mere cartilaginous organ, not altogether true, for the induction of breath, and one could understand that it might turn crimson with the grippe. Her eyes when solemn were too pale a blue, the little skeins of iris-color patchily breaking unity, and was not the right one a lash-breadth off the zero aim? Not stimulated, her blood declined to flood her cheeks, and once, at the corner of Max-Eyth-Strasse, in the side apron of his flashlight beam he saw her face was ashen.
Vaguely desperate—for he was extremely fond of Very; not in love, actually: that was just something he had thought—Reinhart conceived a plan to get her into the fresh daylight air with a view of water and woods, away from minds, anyway, for one afternoon. He organized some hardboiled eggs, canned meat, and other junk from the mess sergeant, even borrowed the still half-full jars of mustard pickle and mayonnaise Bruce Freeman’s mother had mailed that gourmet, and one Wednesday, which that week was Very’s day off, with her set out for a picnic on the shore of the Havel.
From the beginning, from the moment Corporal Toole let them out of his jeep at the woodland corner of Pfaueninselchaussee and Koenigstrasse, everything went right. The better part of an hour went before they gained the shore, but Very’s color improved with each brisk step. At intervals Reinhart hopped off the road into the forest, to bring back talismans: a spray of lace fern, pine cones, a root like the trunk of an elf-woman, a stone resembling an eye, and of course, even out there, a clip of rifle cartridges. Excepting the latter, he gave them one by one to Very, who by the fourth presentation complained of loaded hands, twitted him for his idiocy, and, at last, laughed—perhaps only a snicker, but her first in a week. He was rapidly bringing her back.
On the beach, of which, wandering to the right from the spit pointing towards Peacock Island, they found a length unoccupied by military wreckage, Reinhart brought the goodies from his musette bag. In a messkit bottom Very mashed the eggs with mayo. When Reinhart bit into the first sandwich a fragment of shell cracked between his teeth, just as if he were home. He ate two, and then one of Spam, and then three pairs of saltines enclosing a hard cheese the color and taste of GI soap, and then an orange—for he had brought nothing else for thirst—and Veronica joked about his capacity. The scorings he had lately noticed in her cheeks were but night shadows, already dispersed by the sun.
He lowered his head against a massive log half-buried in the sand and extended his legs luxuriously, out, out, out, toes towards the lake, taking the pleasure of a prolonged stretch, rather like that of a mild orgasm, grunting, eyes narrowed, arms going back over the log. Five yards away the water munched quietly on the sand. Across against its far margin, the dark horizontal of the Kladow shore, a white sail quivered. On the left, and so near that in his view it seemed not an island but rather the other side of an unbroken bay, lay the Pfaueninsel. A suspicion of autumn, a certain chill filament woven into the otherwise still very warm fabric of sunlight, rather imagined than felt, and as yet too thin to penetrate vegetable nature, was felt by Reinhart, in whom it engendered a sad, sweet deliberation on the coming death of the year; and since the end of anything is peace, his heart, too, like Very’s, fell placid.
“Ah,” he cried suddenly, sitting up, “we forgot the mustard pickles!” He unscrewed the jar and offered it.
Very, while he had unfeelingly stuffed himself, had not eaten a bite, he now noticed retroactively; and the flush in her cheek was nearer the introduction of illness than health returned, as she stared with terrible white eyes into the jar and said, feebly: “They look like alligators in the mud.”
She raised her stare to him, and he saw in it a catastrophe from which he would fain have run, had it not been intermixed with a beautiful weakness towards which his manhood inexorably flowed as all streams to the sea. She had essayed a joke, but tears caught h
er hard upon the last word. Against his chest he brought her weeping, fragrant head, and told close into her ear the platitudes of comfort.
She shortly pushed him off in a kind of anger and, with eyes still melting, assigned all guilt to him.
“If this isn’t anything, nothing ever was: I am pregnant.”
At the edge of the beach, a fish, or a frog, or some other animate and lonely thing, loudly slapped the water and sank through a necklace of air bubbles.
CHAPTER 16
NEXT CAME THE INSECTAL hum of a far-off engine, in perfect rhythm with the prickling of Reinhart’s hide. Unless nocturnal fancies could inseminate, his tremors belonged to another man, for he, Reinhart, had been no closer to Very’s reproductive area than the line of her belt. To put down the guilt, he developed a fury: And I, he raged in secret, I have always acted as if she didn’t have a —— (the good old bare word from the honest Anglo-Saxon culture of artisans and farmers, dating from a time before the mincing French crossed the Channel, before the eunuch scholars began to drone in tedious Latin, and eons before small Reinhart belatedly learned from a schoolmate that females are not smooth between their legs and do not produce young by unwinding at the navel).
And by extension, the term applied not only to the orifice but also to that woman who made free with hers. In love with a— but he would not think it again, this short, blunt syllable which in barracks was aired as frequently as exhausted breath: he would not because —— ness was not here at issue. Suddenly he envied her her achievement, lusted not for her body but for her trouble; wished he could weep for having committed a grand foolishness and be comforted by a big disinterested horse’s ass who never took a chance; began himself to grieve for all the errors he never made, all the disasters that all at once he strickenly knew would never ruin him—except that, so far as was apparent to the outside eye, he stayed slick and bland. Control. How detestable it was, control; how uncontrollable. How selfish!
Crazy in Berlin Page 26
