Harlot's Ghost

by Norman Mailer

  “Are you kidding?” he said. “He carried you.”

  I offer that in partial explanation for my dislike of Rosen.

  10

  OUR TRAINING FOR THE LAST TWO WEEKS WAS GIVEN OVER TO FUN AND Games. Introduced to surveillance, we were formed into three-man teams that practiced tailing an instructor (our Target) through the streets and stores of Norfolk. This involved a good amount of fast walking, and a great deal of standing in front of windows that could offer a clear reflection of the street. Our leader, the Point, was supposed to stay close to the Target while Liaison and Reserve watched alternate exits in buildings. We had signals to direct each other back and forth: Stop, Go right, Go left, Speed up, Slow down, were indicated by such actions as removing our hat, leaning against a wall, stopping by a fire hydrant, blowing one’s nose, tying one’s shoe, and—the abominable favorite—cleaning your ear with a forefinger.

  Our signs broke down. Before long, we were waving at one another, and running at a half-trot. Rushing into a department store behind Target, we invariably lost him to an elevator. If Point did manage to sight Target again, Liaison or Reserve had been lost on one of the turns. When, sooner or later, Target would finger Point, the game was over. Every hour on the hour, we returned to the steps of Norfolk City Hall to take on another Target.

  That night at the Club, drinking turned into a spree. Practical jokes abounded. Dix and one of the detonation experts set up a compressed air cartridge in the toilet connected by a wire to their end of the bar. There was a fifteen-minute wait for in-phase resolution, but when Rosen finally went to the toilet to take, as he made the mistake of announcing, “an ungodly dump,” Trigger flicked the switch. Cartridge went off. Geyser splashed Target clear off the seat. Rosen’s clothing was so drenched that he cut back to his barracks for a change of denims. “Surveillance is working at Camp Peary,” became Dix’s battle cry.

  Meanwhile, more bona fide explosions went off on night demolition exercises in the woods, and night parachutists landed, and men with blacking on their faces rushed in, quaffed a beer, rushed out. Years later, on my way to Vietnam, I was invited to a movie set by an old Yale classmate, now a producer, and so was able to watch a battle being filmed. It was a bit of preparation for Vietnam, and it certainly reminded me of the Farm. War consisted of special effects going off from time to time; that was more in the nature of the event than death. “Death is the price you pay for enjoying a real war,” one of our more hard-bitten instructors said, and I thought of that on nights when I was having a good time in Saigon.

  Now I felt like a kid on one of those endless August evenings when the late fever of summer games keeps one running into the house and slamming the door on the way out. Our surveillance exercise might have been nerve-wracking, humiliating, and just about wholly unsuccessful, but the hysteria peculiar to the work was erupting now. We had, after all, been active in the next thing to an honest-to-God movie. Shadowing a man felt as odd as a dream.

  Another victim walked into the bathroom of the Club, sat on the throne, and came out soaking wet. We laughed, and something in that commotion of waters got into the rest of the night. Rosen joined us again in dry clothes. Drunk on beer, he made the mistake of saying to Butler, “That was a crazy thing to do to a buddy. You’re lopsided.”

  “Punk,” said Butler, “spread your cheeks. I’ll teach you lopsided.”

  He said it within the hearing of everyone around. Rosen, who usually presented a small but iron face to his persecutors, hovered on the edge. “Dix, you are not quite human,” he managed to say, and with something like dignity, walked out of the club. Butler shook his head. “Hubbard, I was just treating him like a brother,” he said.

  “I wouldn’t want to be your brother,” I said.

  “Hell, my older brother used to corn-hole me until I hit him up side of the head with a rock. I was fourteen. What did your older brother do?”

  “I only have younger brothers.”

  “Corn-hole them?” Dix asked.

  “No.”

  “Weren’t man enough?”

  “My brothers are twins. It’s confusing.”

  He laughed. He clapped me on the back. He had a light in his eye that put perspiration into the palms of my hands. To my surprise, however, he sighed. “Oh, well, Arnie will recover. The question is: What about me? I’m getting too old to be a legend.”

  I don’t know how much of this scene with Butler carried over, but things did go wrong with Rosen on the night we tried to cross the East German border (Camp Peary version). For one thing, it had rained through the day. The woods were muddy, the air swarmed with midges. Our night sky was clouded. We had to proceed by compass alone, a slow procedure prone to error.

  We were working on a well-prepared scenario. If there was a climax to training at the Farm, and one course that received superior instructors and good preparation, it was Escape and Interrogation. Over the last three weeks, each of the trainees in my group had been given the role of a West German agent infiltrated into East Germany. We had each had to absorb our own West German biography, then add a detailed East German cover story. This second biography we were obliged to memorize even as a West German agent would have had to if he were infiltrating into East Germany. We were, in consequence, prepared to speak of the jobs we had held in East Germany, of family and school history including those of our near relatives killed in the Second World War, and we were supplied with the dates corresponding to major Allied bombing raids on our alleged hometown, Männernburg. Rosen and I, renamed Hans Krüll and Werner Flug for the exercise, had been memorizing hundreds of details over the last few weeks.

  At this point in time—so went the prearranged scenario—our West German principal sent out an alert to us in East Germany: Transmissions from our radio were being picked up. We had to make a run for the West German border. The last two miles would traverse an East German wood which happened to correspond to our own Virginia thicket. If we succeeded in getting over the fence unobserved, then our cover stories would not have to be used (although we were still expected to volunteer for an interrogation as if we had been caught—in order not to miss the experience!). Any chance to use this more gracious option, however, was unlikely. We were not expected to make it over the fence. Few did.

  I wanted to. I had gathered from Harlot that not only were grades at the Farm put into one’s 201 file, but also a five-letter code grouping that had much critical bearing on the future career. While you might have a fair idea of how well you had done at the Farm, the five-letter group could advance or exclude you from exceptional posts. The highest marks, I was just about certain, would be given for getting over the fence: There would be another concealed rating, no doubt, on how well one did in the interrogation.

  Rosen and I did not get off to a good start. By the time we reached the ditch adjacent to the East German fence, our fatigues were imbued with a noxious muck. Filthy and unmanned, we had to duck every thirty seconds as a searchlight swept the dirt road and fence in front of us. Every minute or so, a Jeep went by in one direction or the other. During one of these irregular intervals, we were supposed to scramble up the mud bank, climb the fence, go over the barbed wire at the top, and drop fourteen feet down to the other side. There, by the rules of our game, was freedom!

  Rosen seemed demoralized. I think he was desperately afraid of the barbed wire. “Harry, I can’t do it,” he muttered. “I can’t make it.” He was sufficiently frantic to infect me with his fear.

  “You goddamn Kike, get your ass over,” I shouted. It was a half-throttled cry, pulled back even as I was saying it, but it was there between us forever, a small but permanent dent in my view of myself as an essentially decent fellow. The searchlight went by. Sobbing from fatigue, we scrambled up the vile mud bank, hit the fence, started to climb, and were transfixed—also forever—in the glare of the searchlight as it returned, stopped like the angel of death, and rested on us. In but a few seconds, an armed Jeep with two guards drove up, its machine gun tr
ained on our bodies. We had flunked. So, for that matter, would most of the class. Even the Big Ten jocks. The exercise was not designed to make East European agents of us, but to give insight into the kind of horrendous experience some of our future agents might undergo.

  Since the guards were wearing East German uniforms, the Jeep proved to be the only element in the charade that did not seem authentic. We were manacled and driven at high speed along the border road to a whitewashed cinder-block building. Inside, was an aisle down the middle and a series of windowless interrogation cells on either side, each cell about eight feet square and containing no more than a table, a couple of chairs, and a strong lamp with a reflector that would soon be directed into our eyes. The interrogator spoke English with such an intense German accent that, willy-nilly, one found oneself copying him. I had never seen any of these men at the Farm, and learned only later that they were professional actors on contract work to the Company; this contributed to disrupting one’s anticipations; everything was becoming more real than I expected.

  Since the interrogators moved from room to room questioning other trainees as they were brought in, one was left by oneself for longer and longer periods. Given the alternation of intense interrogation and glaring white-walled silence, I began to feel a sense of dislocation as the night went on. My cover story felt awkwardly lodged, a mind jammed into my mind. During questioning, the cover story became nearly all of me. I learned that a role could become more vivid to an actor than his own life. Why hadn’t I realized how quintessential was preparation? Each detail in my imaginary life upon which I had failed to meditate sufficiently now became an added weight. For I could recall certain details only by an act of will. In contrast, every item I had been able to meditate upon in advance became alive to me. My cover story had put me in the vocational school at Männernburg near Leipzig right after the Second World War, and I had been able to imagine the pervasive stench that came through the school windows from the rubble of charred humans, dead rats, crumbled stone, and garbage—my voice sounded good to me when I spoke about my studies there.

  “What was the name of the school in Männernburg?” my interlocutor asked. He was dressed in a black Volkspolizei uniform and held an impressive sheaf of papers. Since he was also dark in complexion and had a shock of heavy black hair and a dark beard, I found it difficult to think of him as German until I remembered that the Nazi Rudolf Hess had also had just such an iron-blue pallor to his shaved cheeks.

  “Die Hauptbahnhofschule,” I replied, “was my school.”

  “What did you study there?”

  “Railroad trades.”

  “Graduate?”

  “Yessir.”

  “How did you get to school, Werner?”

  “I walked.”

  “Every day from your home?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Remember the route?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Name the streets you took.”

  I recited them. Not only was the map clear in my mind but I knew from photographs taken soon after the war how the streets ought to look.

  “On your route, Herr Flug, it was obligatory to take the Schönheitweg?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Describe the Schönheitweg.”

  I could see it before me as I spoke. “It was our grand avenue in Männernburg. The Schönheitweg had an island of grass between the two directions of traffic.”

  “Describe this island.”

  “It had trees.”

  “What kind of trees?”

  “I do not know the names.”

  “Were any of these trees cut down?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “How many traffic lights on the Schönheitweg?”

  “Maybe two.”

  “Two?”

  “Yessir, two.”

  “Near which traffic light did they cut the trees?”

  “The second light on my way to school.”

  “In which year did they cut down the trees?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  “Think, Werner, think.”

  “Before I graduated in 1949.”

  “You are saying they cut down the trees in 1947 or 1948?”

  “Probably.”

  “Do you recognize this picture?”

  “Yes. It is of the intersection at the second traffic light on the Schönheitweg. Before they cut down the trees.”

  He pointed to a building near the intersection. “Do you remember this?”

  “Yessir. Postwar. The Männernburghof. A new government building.”

  “When did it go up?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t remember the construction?”

  “No, sir.”

  “You passed every day on your way to school, but you don’t remember the construction of the only new government edifice in your town?”

  “No, sir.”

  “But you saw it every day on your way to school?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Was 1949 your last year at school?”

  “Yessir.”

  “In 1949, the Männernburghof had not yet been constructed.”

  “It hadn’t?”

  “No, Werner.”

  “I am confused.”

  “It was erected in 1951. And the trees were cut down in 1952.”

  I was in a panic. Was the memory I had developed for my East German biography at fault, or was the interrogator lying to me?

  He now inquired about my work in the railroad yards. Again, I was presented with small but definite discrepancies in the names and faces I had memorized: A locomotive repair shop to which I had been sent as clean-up man was located not at the east but the south end of the yards, and when I insisted it had to be in the east because I could remember the sun coming up in the morning, my interrogator left me alone for half an hour before coming back to ask the same question again.

  Fortified by every photograph I had studied, I formed a picture of the town of Männernburg in my mind, but it was incomplete. As in a painting by Larry Rivers—whose work, after this interrogation, never failed to fascinate me—there were blank spaces to my Männernburg. As the hours of questioning went by, edges began to blur.

  “Why were you climbing the border fence, Werner Flug?”

  “I did not know it was the border.”

  “Despite the barbed wire at the top?”

  “I thought I was in a government park. Me and my partner were lost.”

  “You were in a forbidden area. Did you know that?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Männernburg is only five kilometers east of the border.”

  “Yessir.”

  “You are aware of that?”

  “Yessir.”

  “Yet you walk through the woods that lie to the west of Männernburg and are surprised to find a fence.”

  “Me and my partner thought we were walking to the east, not the west.”

  “Werner, you were found with a compass on your person. You were not lost. You knew if you could climb the fence, you would be in West Germany.”

  “No, sir.”

  “Where would you be?”

  “It was a prank, sir. We bet each other who would be the first to get over.”

  “You are a stupid fellow. Your story is sickening.” He stood up and went out.

  In chess, if one studies openings carefully enough, one can play on equal terms with a far superior opponent for the first eight or ten or twelve moves, for as long, that is, as the opening has been analyzed. After that, one is, as they say in chess, “out of the book.”

  I was out of the book. I had an acquired background and an acquired biography, but I did not have a good explanation of why I had tried to climb the border fence in the middle of the night.

  My interlocutor came back, and began to question me as if our first colloquy had not taken place. Once more I was asked which year the tree
s were cut down on Der Schönheitweg. Again, I was interrogated on my claim that the railroad foundry was in the east yard. Each of my errors began to seem larger. I do not know if the act of confirming false details was responsible, but I began to feel as if his questions were related to a dentist’s drill, and soon the nerve would be touched. To my horror, I began to contradict myself. Now I tried to claim that I must have blundered by error into West Germany. I must have gone across a portion of the border that had—could it be?—no fence, then had wandered through the woods wanting to return to East Germany, and so had climbed the fence on the Western side, and was descending on the East German side in order to go back to work in the morning like a good citizen of the German Democratic Republic “just when the soldiers found us.”

  “Your sweat stinks with your lies. When I come back, Flug, I want the truth or I will give you a couple of hot ones.” He was holding a rubber truncheon, and he slapped it against the table. Then he left.

  Outside my eight-by-eight-foot white cement-block room, a prison din was building. The interview cells along the corridor had filled, and the most curious condition began to prevail. I do not know if the tempo of these interrogations was accelerating in anticipation of the arrival of the dawn we could not see through the windowless walls, but even as my questioner left me with the suggestion of dire remedies, so did I become more aware of cries from other cells.

  One captive was cursing audibly, “I don’t know, I don’t know. You’ve got me deranged,” he shouted. Another was whispering, but so loudly I could hear: “I am innocent. You have to believe I am innocent,” and from the farthest room down the corridor, one of the policemen was whipping his truncheon against the table. “No more, no more,” someone cried out.

  Then I heard Rosen. “This is outrageous,” he was saying in a clear voice. “I do not care what my partner claims. You have confused him and terrified him. We only climbed the fence to be able to see the lights of Männernburg and thereby find our way back. That is my story. You may have shaken my partner, but you do not faze me. You cannot intimidate me with threats of violence. Never!”