Crazy in Berlin
Authors: Thomas Berger
Thomas Berger
TO JEANNE
CHAPTER 1Du bist verrückt, mein Kind;
Du musst nach Berlin...
You are crazy, my child;
You must go to Berlin...
—Old song
I
N THE TWILIGHT, THE
bust appeared to be that of some cocked-hat Revolutionary War hero of not the very first rank, that is, not G. Washington but perhaps one of those excellent Europeans noted in fact and apocrypha for throwing their weight on our side, Lafayette, say, or von Steuben.
Fun Shtoyben
was the right way to say it, which Reinhart knew and was certain that Marsala didn’t, being his dumb but lovable buddy who was now gurgling at what was left of the bottle and would shortly hurl it away, maybe hurting someone, for a few Germans sat around in the park; he must warn him. But too late, there went the crash and narrowly missing a Kraut who merely smiled nervously and moved off, some difference from a movie Nazi who, monocled and enraged, would have spat in your face, and they were already taking a leak on Lafayette or whoever—no, “Friedrich der Grosse,” the pedestal said, for Reinhart had a lighter that could be worked with one hand.
And it was a gross thing to do, he decided in one of those drifts of remorse that blow across a drunk—because he was just educated enough to recall vaguely old Frederick out at Sans Souci with Voltaire, writing in French, representing the best, or the worst, of one tradition or the other—a part of the punkhood from which he had just this day legally departed, and which he was, in fact, at this very moment celebrating.
Fastening the fly, all one hundred buttons, no zippers in the Army because you might get caught in one as the enemy crept close, he said, just as sad as he had before been exuberant: “What a way to pass your twenty-first birthday!”
“Well,” answered Marsala, twenty-four, looking forty, and always fit whatever his condition, spitting, not taking out his cigarette, and miffed, “we could of made you a party from the messhall: them cooks are all my friends. What are you, griping?”
As they turned to leave the park, a German nipped up and snatched the butt. There stood a woman by a tree. “Honey,” Marsala shouted, “
schlafen mit
me, ohhh won’t you
schlafen mit
me!” A kind of music the making of which was his satisfaction, for having crooned it he moved on indifferently.
On the street they encountered a Russian soldier, far from home, needless to say unkempt and weary, destination unknown most of all to himself. In the friendly light of his hound’s eye they accepted, and Reinhart returned, a salute; he went on in a hopeless, probably Slavic, manner. A two-car streetcar braked to a glide and they swung aboard, paying no fare because they were Occupation; and a good thing they hadn’t to, for in a moment the son of a bitch stopped and everybody detrained and walked around a bomb crater to another car waiting on the other side, Marsala all the while looking truculently hither and yon: he was amiable only to his friends.
The ride on the new car Reinhart forgot even as it was in progress, for he had now reached that secondary state of inebriation in which the mind is one vast sweep of summer sky and there is no limit to the altitude a kite may go, the condition in which one can repair intricate mechanisms at other times mysterious, solve equations, craft epigrams, make otherwise invulnerable women, and bluff formidable men, when people say, “Why,
Reinhart
!” and rivals wax bitter. Here he was in Berlin—the very name opened magic casements on the foam of seas perilous not two months since: Hitler was rumored to be still at large, the C.O. had been briefly interned by the Russians, and Art Flanders, the “crack foreign correspondent whose headquarters were in the saddle” and column in 529 dailies from Maine to the Alamo, had already called at the outfit for human-interest sketches.
Indeed, the sheer grandeur of his geographical position had overwhelmed Reinhart until this very day, for he was an irrepressible dreamer. Marsala had been out screwing and playing the black market for a week, with already a dose of crabs and a wad of Occupation marks to show for it, and at the same time bitching incessantly that they might be stuck there forever—and nonpartisan in his disinterest in any place but Home. No, he wouldn’t have liked to be stuck in Calabria any better, besieged by his indigent relatives and wallowing in the dirt and backwardness for which no one could tell him of all people, his father having come from there, that Italy was not famous. “I got your Roman ruins and your art right here,” he would sometimes say, grabbing his clothes in the area of the scrotum—the same place, in fact, that the Romans had had them—“You take that crap and give me the United States of America.”
Now, on the car, Marsala was once again the sound of unadorned naturalism, his hard voice, the one for enemies, piercing Reinhart’s shoulder, for that was all the higher he came, like a rusty blade: “You call it. I’ll kick it out of you wherever you want.”
His target was sealed with them in the crowd on the rear platform: an American soldier, between whom and Marsala stood, swaying with the general rhythm of the rocking car, a female citizen. Her visible part was a head of blonde hair, with a good washing probably as pale as Reinhart’s own, but at present long estranged from soap and comb and as stringy as an Assyrian’s beard. Notwithstanding that he had barracked with the man for two years, in whatever land, Reinhart supposed, first, a mistake, and, second, that Marsala was wronged, but these suppositions could not dwell long even in a flushed mind, for he saw the face of the other soldier charged with righteous outrage. A big man, maybe six even, with his weight from front to back, rather than in width, if one could tell from a limited view of his shoulders and fat, seedy head. He struck you right off as a lousy guy, a type who had been drafted from the driver’s seat of a big-city bus, where he cursed
sotto voce
at proffered dollar bills and depressed the door-lever on latecomers; a journeyman in the Shit-heels’ Guild whose meanness was, after years, instinctive—but all this was irrelevant beside the fact that in a quarrel involving a woman Marsala invariably stood on the bad side. He had surely with one of his sexual instruments, voice, hands, or groin, sought an unsubtle connection—for him a crowded streetcar was as good as an alley and being caught out only a minor inconvenience soon adjusted in his favor: he had a friend, while the other man was alone.
Thus was Reinhart’s euphoria wrenched away; what Marsala expected of him was by the known pattern of his friend’s code so obvious as to go unstated. When the car stopped at the next bomb crater and the German passengers, all slumped and carrying bundles, duly filed around its margins to still another vehicle, the three soldiers and one girl drew apart and, out of a sudden sense of national delicacy, waited until the new car started away and the old reversed trolleys and started back. Then Marsala snarled, “Let’s get him,” pitching in before the other man, now manifestly regretting where amour propre had led him as he saw Reinhart’s large figure on the hostile side, had got ready: he was in the act of removing his blouse, newly pressed, perhaps by the girl, and bearing the triangle of the Second Armored Division which had fought all the way from Africa—while Reinhart and Marsala were goofing off in Camp Grant, Illinois, Devonshire, and some tent city in long-liberated Normandy.
As a medic, and rear-area at that, Reinhart had no moral guts to oppose a combat man, even for cause, even when alcohol had anaesthetized his rational-young-man’s disinclination to violence—and as for two setting upon one, its morality threw him into a state of shock. He stood in his tracks, feeling undue exposure, lighting a smoke, and out of a complex shame not looking at the girl, and saw Marsala imprison the opponent’s arms with the half-removed jacket and call: “Okay, Carlo, in the nuts!” Saw him, not able to resist his advantage until help arrived, give the man one with the knee.
His reaction to Reinhart’s coming and pulling him loose was pure astonishment, hopefully as yet unalloyed with bitterness—he must have supposed it the prelude to a more cunning mayhem—and he had just time to begin “What the fu—” before the freed adversary got a hammerlock on his throat and booted Reinhart from the field.
They fought on the site of a ruin. As Reinhart lay on the crushed-masonry ground, beneath a roof-to-basement cross section of fourteen flats, their cavities spilling tubs and bedsteads, he could not even have said where. On to two weeks in the city, and this was his first trip off base. His old buddy, for his birthday, had taken him to a black-market contact with Russian hootch to sell, his old buddy who in the grunting ranges overhead was at this moment being slaughtered. So he raised himself, hot and vital and clear, seized the traitorous and ugly bastard from the Armored by the back of the shirt-neck, turned him, and delivered two hundred three and a half pounds to the gut, to the eye and into the mouth. The man’s meat broke wetly under his fists and yet retreated at one point to bulge at another, like some hateful sack of liquid, and it was for a time a joyful rage to work for a simultaneous and general recession. But where it took him was too terrible—all at once he gave it up. The enemy, in a vast cobweb of blood, still stood. Odd, he appeared old, perhaps forty; his cap had gone, showing an area of baldness pitifully made conspicuous by a strand of hair deviated to hide it. He was standing—but it was suddenly obvious that he was very dead.
Reinhart had broken both hands at the wrist. His lungs were gone, as well; his stomach was acid and his wit beclouded once more. It was so frightening that a corpse should remain upright. He watched Marsala come round and head-butt it in the midsection. It revived, and it fell, simply a beaten man, with an awful, beaten groan.
“Jesus,” said Marsala. “Not a car in sight. We might have to walk all the way back just because of this prick of misery. You did good, Carlo,” he went on, rubbing his sore neck, which made a rasping noise, for he had an emery-paper beard. Kept rubbing, but he was in some awe.
Reinhart had not been in a fight since early grammar school and therefore had never known how it felt to kill a man and what, when done, was the peculiar scandal. He looked to the girl, who was some distance removed in the capacity of spectator, and who in return looked at him with stupid wonderment, and commanded her to approach. Which she did with a senseless caution, as if to ask: is my turn next?
“Why don’t you attend to him?”—approximately; his German was at best uncertain and now surely further corrupted by the intermittent buzzer in his skull.
“Well, yes, if you wish,” she replied, still showing wonder, and speaking from a face in which the ages were so mixed that one knew not whether oldness or youth was the essence. She knelt in worn clothing more suited to that attitude than the standing and examined the felled opponent, who even at her touch was coming painfully around. Who when he arrived came up slowly and resentfully from the supine, crying: “Keep your whore off me!” With more effort he was arisen and deliberately, crazily, gone across the ruin and onto the sidewalk, where it could be found and where not, the street, where, alone, he could be seen for a great time, despite the darkness now settled.
“Hadn’t you better follow him?” Reinhart asked incredulously. “If the car does come he may be hit.”
“Must I?” She was nearer him now and, it struck him repugnantly, believed herself a transferred spoil of war.