The Informer

by Craig Nova

  He moved the sections of the stage, eight-by-four rectangles of two-by-fours and plywood, from the cart that had brought them from the Red Front’s storage loft to the site of the performance. He did this with an indifference to the weight of the things, as though not showing effort was part of his job, too.

  Georg, who was a sheet metal worker whose hands were covered with scars that looked like fish bones, tried to lift the sections, too, but as soon as he picked one up, his arms trembled like the string of a bass instrument.

  “Here,” said Karl. “Get out of the way. Let me have it.”

  Gaelle’s job was to help one of the actresses, Alice Sokoff, get dressed. Alice was Gaelle’s age, and she stood with a straight posture, like classical sculpture, and her skin was as white as marble. She took it as her due that people would fuss over her, even members of the Red Front. Gaelle laid out her clothes. Polished her shoes, made sure the corset she wore was clean, checked the skirts to make sure that none was torn.

  Mani came into the small tent that was used as a changing room behind the street theater. Outside, the sound of the stage being bolted together was like a house being built in a hurry.

  “Alice’s clothes look nice on her, don’t you think?” said Mani. “But she needs help with her hair. Can you brush it?”

  “Yes,” said Gaelle.

  “In front of the mirror,” said Mani. “Stand behind her.”

  “Sure,” said Gaelle.

  She stood behind the actress and brushed the heavy blond hair, which in the dim tent still sparkled, like sand in the sunlight. Gaelle put her head next to Alice’s so that they could be seen side by side, in the mirror. Mani appeared behind them, and as Gaelle worked on the hair, the brush making a hush, hush and a crackle of electricity, she looked at Mani through the mirror and kept her eyes on his and winked. “I know what you want,” she seemed to say. “Can I take this? Can I compare myself to an untouched beautiful woman, can I fuss over her, as though proof that I have been so reduced? Can I do it without blinking an eye?”

  “Makeup,” said Mani.

  Gaelle took out the kit and put down a base and eyeliner and rouge, and while she worked she still glanced up at Mani and winked, almost smiling now: it was too easy. And when the performance was over, Mani came into the dressing room again and stood there while Gaelle applied cold cream over the perfect face, rubbed it onto Alice’s cheeks and then wiped it off to show the fresh skin underneath, so youthful and moist as to seem like the petal of a flower. She kept her eyes on Mani when she did this, too. Outside, the set was being struck, and the sound of it, the squeaking sigh of nails being withdrawn, the bumping of the sections of the stage being dragged by someone other than Karl, the busy gathering of tools and bolts and whatever else was left around, was like a band of gypsies trying to stay one jump ahead of someone they had cheated.

  “You’re pretty,” said Gaelle.

  “Do you think so?” said Alice.

  “Oh, yes,” said Gaelle. “I’m in a position to know.”

  “I guess that’s right,” said Alice.

  “Here, let me help you,” said Gaelle.

  Gaelle took off the stage gown, undid the corset, and ran her fingers over the lines that were left under Alice’s breasts, the nipples as pink as barely ripened raspberries. Gaelle used a damp cloth and washed Alice, keeping her eyes on Mani, then helped with Alice’s underthings, her clothes, and passed over Alice’s small, even dainty shoes.

  “Alice has a future,” said Gaelle, as much to Mani as to anyone else.

  “Yes,” said Mani. “So many people are washed up. At a young age.”

  Gaelle put away the makeup, folded the clothes, packed them into a small black trunk that was used for costumes, and as she did she looked at Mani, as though to say, “You can trust me. You think that I am vain? That I will flinch? Why, you poor ninny. I gave that up so long ago that I can’t even remember.”

  Outside, as Karl lifted the sections of the stage onto the cart and tied them down with a trucker’s knot, Gaelle smiled at Mani and said, “Well, is that it? Is there something else you want to do?”

  “Maybe,” said Mani.

  “And what can you do for me?” she said.

  “Oh,” said Mani. “I can be around when you want me.”

  But even so, they continued. Mani wrote a part for a play in which a woman has been scarred by a factory owner who then neglects her. He showed the part to Gaelle, who looked at it, aware of what he was asking: would she stand on the stage, in costume, and show her face to the crowds, the men and women drinking beer and eating a sausage, or just gawking because there was nothing better to do. She put down the pages and said, “Yes.”

  Mani stood in the audience as she performed her part, quite convincingly, and afterward he said, “It has nothing to do with politics for you, does it?”

  “Politics,” said Gaelle. “You want to know what I think of politics…. No. I’m asking for something else.”

  “Sure,” said Mani as he looked around uneasily. “Sure.”

  “I haven’t got time for politics,” said Gaelle. “That’s a luxury.”

  “Sure,” said Mani. “Fine.”

  “I haven’t got time,” she said. “I’ve done what you asked. Well?”

  “All right,” said Mani. “I’ll stick up for you.”

  But the contest wasn’t over, not yet. The next Saturday Mani asked Gaelle to come along with some members of the Red Front to look for a new site for the street theater, and Gaelle realized that the contest had just begun. Mani, Karl, Georg, and some others got on the train, all of them pale, their skin more the color of the scars on Georg’s hand, and as they sat down together, Gaelle looked at her hands, which were pale, too, and as the train started with a slow, deep whine, like a machine from the depths of possibility, she thought that she should get some sun, but when was there time to do that? So many people in Berlin liked to sunbathe, and she imagined how it would be to have the warm caress of the sun, but all she heard was the whine of the engines.

  Two stops later, the young men got on the S-Bahn and looked around the car. They had their hair combed back in a military style, and they moved as though in a squad. The first one got on the train and glanced around until he saw Gaelle, over whom he lingered with a combination of curiosity and malice. What was she doing with the Red Front? Then the next one got on and did the same thing. They weren’t wearing uniforms, just brown pants, white shirts, ties that were tucked between the middle buttons of a shirt. Gaelle tried to stare at the men on the other side of the car. Clean-looking thugs. Nazis.

  “You knew you were going to run into them,” said Gaelle. “Right? Is that why you asked me along?”

  Mani shrugged.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  “And you’re going to lie to me, too,” she said.

  “All right,” he said. “Are you up to this or not?”

  He sat with his hands in the pockets of his leather jacket, which had cracks around the cuffs.

  “We’re outnumbered,” said Mani. “Maybe you could be a distraction. You know, tug at one of them while we let them have it.”

  Gaelle sat between Karl and Mani. She felt the scar on her face like a parasite, something that sucked her blood, and while it did that, it seemed to invite others to do the same, the men in the park, men like Hauptmann and Mani, too. Why, they thought they could get away with anything where she was concerned. Her vulnerability was one quality that attracted men to her in the park, and she used it when she could, but now she sat there, looking at the thugs on the other side of the train and then at Mani, who glanced back and seemed to say, Well, well? How far will you go? Can you take it? Even this? Will you let me use you in a fight like this?

  No, she thought, no. Screw you.

  She thought about going to work with a black eye and bruises, or worse.

  “I thought you were with us,” Mani said.

  “I thought …,” she said. She bit her lip.


  “What?” he said. “What did you think?”

  “I was hoping you might …,” she said. But then she stopped. No, this is going nowhere. How could she have even considered love, or being cared about?

  Karl looked one way and then another, as though the thugs on the other side of the train were of no consequence to him. If they were looking for trouble, they had come to the right man. His certainty and his serenity alarmed Gaelle, too, since how could anyone be so oblivious to danger? He didn’t smile at her or sneer or anything like that at all. Instead his glance, with that same appalling certainty, seemed to hit her like a light.

  Mani kept ball bearings in the pocket of his coat, and now, when he reached inside, they made a click like the kiss of a pool ball. Karl rolled his shoulder, as though trying to get loose.

  Gaelle had been told that a dog could tell if someone was scared, and she wondered if the young men on the other side of the train could tell, although she realized, as she looked at them, that it wouldn’t have made much difference.

  Karl put his lips, as thick as sausages, next to her ear and said, “Pick one. Tug on his clothes. I’ll take it from there.” He nodded at a man on the other side of the train who had blond hair and very blue eyes, the color of a delphinium. “Him. I’ll be waiting for you.”

  The S-Bahn went along the Spree, which curved through the city behind the Reichstag, the Berliner Dom, the museums, and the Lustgarten, too. A proper woman in a silk dress and furs got up and went to the door between this car and the next and pulled it open. She went through and let it slam shut behind her, without looking back.

  “There’s a smart one,” said Georg.

  Karl watched her go and said, “Yes. That’s a good idea. If you don’t like trouble.”

  The train stopped at the Zoologischer Garten station.

  “This isn’t like dressing a beautiful young woman. That’s just vanity, you know, standing up to that kind of thing when I ask you. Or letting the crowd get a look at you.”

  “You’d be surprised,” said Gaelle.

  Mani shrugged.

  “I thought I’d see how serious you were,” he said.

  “What I’ve done doesn’t count for anything? You’ve used me and then we end up like this?”

  “Just pull on one of their arms,” said Mani.

  “That one,” said Karl.

  The young men in brown pants on the other side of the car sat straight up, all watching her, or so it seemed. It was as though they were thinking the same thing, and for all she knew, they were. The one on the end, with the eyes as bright as a delphinium, kept staring at her. She felt the atmosphere in the car press in on her. Then she thought of the creeps she had handled in the park. That had been all right, and she had been plenty scared then, too. Then she thought of the parasitic aspect of the scar that invited all the worst from those people who looked for a flaw or a weakness to exploit.

  The young men on the other side of the train stood up. Mani raised an eyebrow, and then Karl, Georg, and the others stood up, toe to toe with the men in brown pants. Gaelle stood up, too. Mani reached into his pocket for a ball bearing and made a click when one of them knocked against another. Karl lifted his large hand, and held it in a fist at the side of his chest. One of the young men looked along the line from Karl to Georg and then to Gaelle.

  “What a mug,” he said. “Did you bring her along to scare us?”

  “What did you say?” said Karl.

  A man in a blue suit, a woman in a green dress, a boy in short pants, a young girl with a hat that had a large glass stick pin in it moved away, and as they went, they were careful not to look at the men in the white shirts or the members of the Red Front.

  “You heard me,” said the same young man.

  Mixed in with the muffled sound of someone being hit in the chest there was another, harder crack. Gaelle had thought this kind of fighting would be more like boxing, but instead the men shoved at one another and hit out sloppily, like struggling through brush. Karl pushed her aside. She stepped back. Three or four ended up on the floor of the train while the others stood around and kicked when they had a chance. The entire mass looked like a horse with fifteen pairs of legs that had gotten loose on the train, although it had different shoes on its feet. That same man, the one with the blue eyes, glanced in her direction.

  The train stopped and the doors slid open. Gaelle was amazed they worked when the men were kicking and grunting, shoving and hitting. One of the young men in a white shirt was bleeding from the nose, and the drops on the floor looked like red buttons that weren’t the same size. This man reached down, still dripping from the nose, and dragged a friend of his outside, onto the platform. Then Mani, Georg, Karl, and the other Red Front Fighters tumbled out the door onto the platform, too.

  They formed up into two sides. Georg, Mani, and Karl and the other members of their group on one side and the young men in brown pants and white shirts on the other. Everyone hesitated, thinking things over. They swore at one another. Mani spit at the men in brown pants. Georg threw a ball bearing. Gaelle came up to the door, and as she was about to step out onto the platform, the door slid shut.

  The train jerked. Karl turned from the men who were opposite him and looked at Gaelle, not seeming to judge her so much as to understand. Mani turned away from the line of men, too, and as his eyes caught hers, with the faintly greasy piece of glass of the door between them, he nodded and then, as clearly as though he were speaking out loud, he asked by his expression, the movement of his eyes, in the electric moment when he reached into his pocket for a ball bearing, just how she was going to make up for this.

  Karl went on staring at her as the train began to move, and when someone hit him, he just shrugged if off and continue to stare, a little hurt now, or so it seemed, and this only made Gaelle angrier. How dare anyone accuse her? What the fuck did they know? Had they been down on their knees in front of a park bench? Had they put a face next to that of a beautiful young woman to see what fate had done just to show its power, its delight in the chaotic? Then Mani, Karl, and the others disappeared into a jumble of arms and legs as a large, brown, earth-colored thing flew over the platform. Gaelle realized that it was a potato with nails in it.

  Gaelle sat there, her hands shaking. Every now and then one of the people in the car looked at her, but she didn’t look back. Had someone been killed, and if that had happened, was she involved? Would she pay the price, even though she had clearly told Mani to get lost, to go screw himself, since as far as she could tell, no one else would do it. Would the police track her down in the park or at her apartment? She thought of the three-room place she had rented not too far from the Tiergarten. Her fingers trembled at her lips, and the movement reminded her of the wings of a moth she had once touched. When she looked down, she realized that the fight could have been an illusion, and if it hadn’t been for the stain on the floor, she could almost convince herself of that. Underneath it all she was disappointed she had let herself consider love or affection or anything like that at all, and now she told herself she would put that into her own, most dark recesses, into a place that was going to be sealed up for good. She trembled with the effort, to get ready to do business, since that was what was so obviously required.

  The train stopped. She got off and stood on the platform. Then she turned to look back along the tracks where the train had come from, and in the distance, vastly diminished, she thought she could make out the platform where Mani and Georg and the others might still be fighting. The rails were shiny and curved away into the distance. She paced back and forth, looking for an angle, a way to fix this up, to make sure she had some help. The atmosphere on the platform, which was a kind of perfume of fear, was precisely what Hauptmann had left her with: it was the scent of being alone. Then she was angry that she had found herself so neatly suspended, as she often was, between what she tried to do and what it got her.

  She crossed under the tracks to the other side of the station so she
could catch the next train back the way she had come. Blocks of apartments stood by the river, which made a silver path. Then she walked back and forth, wanting the train to come and dreading its arrival. What was she going to do if she got back and they were still fighting?

  The train arrived and she got on. Men rustled newspapers as they shook them out and folded them, and the scent of the women’s perfume hung in the air. There wasn’t so much of that as there had been before the slump, but it was nice to smell. She felt the lurch of the car and wondered what would happen if the police went to her parents’ apartment. At least she didn’t live there anymore.

  The train pulled into the station where the young men had been. She got out of the car and looked across to the other platform, but it was empty. The train pulled away with a highly geared whine, which sounded to her like a toy being wound so tightly it would finally break. She was sweating.

  Finally she crossed over to the other side of the station, went downstairs and under the track and then climbed the steps, and on the platform she felt the presence of the fight, which seemed to linger like smoke. The air was warm, but she hugged herself and walked back and forth, although she stopped at some red drops about the size of a coin. The brightness of them, like new red paint, reminded her that she wasn’t finished with Mani. The contest hadn’t been decided, not yet.

  Two uniformed officers, the Schutzpolice, stood in the street under the track. Mani had told her that in a street fight, which the police had tried to break up with men on horses, Mani had used a knife to stab a horse. He said it had been a black horse and that the blood seemed all the redder, all the more glistening, as it had run down the horse’s black leg.

  “So, you’ve come back.”

  The man with the blue eyes stood on the platform.