Crazy in Berlin (17 page)

“Just routine correspondence of some German agency, I should think,” said Lieutenant Schild, staring grimly at Trudchen, who kept leaning into Reinhart and kept getting pushed away. “It’s pretty tedious to have to go through it, but we must.”

Trudchen leaned against Reinhart again and said, with great, solemn lashes, “Anyvay, ve should vait for Lieutenant Pound!”

“Truchen, I want you to do something for me. Go over and sit in that chair behind my desk and
schweigen Sie.
”

“Vy so
formal
?” she asked pouting, but did it.

Just as he had hoped, Schild’s interest was caught.

“You are fluent?”

“Not really, but I have enough for a good base. I’d like to have an opportunity to brush up my German.”

Schild leaned close and said in an undertone, jerking his thumb towards Trudchen: “Where did you get that little tot?”

For a moment Reinhart thought: oh, but she’s not that young; then he realized that what Schild had said, in his Eastern accent, was “tart,” a term out of old plays, meaning “whore” or thereabouts, perhaps not so strong; what he always saw when he read it was a circular piece of pastry with strawberry jam in the center, and hence, a girl whose person might symbolize such a sweet. That was Trudchen all right. Yet he was responsible for her, in a way, and although it was funny it was also nasty.

His remonstrance was lost before he found it, for Schild, very certain, proceeded.

“Take my word and get rid of her before she gets you in trouble.”

“But she’s just a kid!” He said it too loud and dared not look towards her. “I swear I haven’t touched her, Lieutenant, I haven’t even thought of her in that way—”

“Don’t be foolish,” said Schild, sharply, “I’m not concerned about her welfare but yours.”

So he had made an impression on him! Reinhart was almost ready to say: I’ll trade Trudchen for a transfer to Intelligence; perhaps now the war was over, some of Schild’s men would go home on points and there would be openings.

“She was peddling her little ass up and down the officers’ street last night. Finally she got her prey, that fat—, well, it’s better not to say. ... One of these days she’ll turn up pregnant and I don’t think you’ll want to be made the goat.”

Hurt, Reinhart grunted thanks; the lieutenant clearly thought him naïveté incarnate; the trouble was, his complexion was too fair, there were no shadows on his face, no lines of character, and his eyes being pale blue looked stupid; he had labored his life long under the prejudice of his appearance. He was like a big, bland baseball bat; Schild on the other hand resembled a pair of scissors, ugly, black, incisive. How he envied him, even to the tarnish on his silver bar, the dried fog at the edge of his glasses, and the bulge in the flyfront of his ETO jacket that betrayed an undone button. And, as he watched him leave, perhaps even his dirty mind, which was a symbol of freedom.

A sob from Trudchen drew him to her, more in curiosity than pity.

“What are you doing!”

She was crying, had her spectacles off for that purpose, was flushed and dripping, and presented so much misery that, despite himself, he gave her his olive-drab handkerchief, which luckily was clean.

“He has told you somesing evil about me, that—” Whatever followed went into the handkerchief. One braid had got twisted about her neck like a noose, and Reinhart, leaning across the desk, returned it to order. The flushed face came briefly out of the cloth to say “Sank you.”

“Trudchen, where were you last night?”

“Wiss my cousin Lori in her cellar. This is all the place we have to live, in a cellar which is all cold and wet and without light. The dampness comes into one’s bones and most nights one cannot sleep because of the pain...”

Suddenly arthritic and conscious that the sun had some moments before left the big window, he sat down on the desktop.

“No,” he said gently, “I mean earlier, before you went to bed—were you in this area last evening?”

“Most absolutely n—” She started to speak into the handkerchief but emerged to study him narrowly. “You won’t think that I must be a foolish or superstitious person? ...I consulted with your priest.”

Priest. By chance he knew that the Catholic priest of the 1209th was away on leave to Rome; his assistant, Joe Para, who was one of Tom Riley’s roommates across the hall, had taken a shower that morning in Reinhart’s bathroom. Yet there was surely an unintentional error here.

“Well, then,” said Trudchen when he explained, “this was the Protestant priest, a very large man, do you know him?”

Of course, Schild’s “fat—”; things were linking up in sweet reason.

“I wished to see him for guidance,” she went on. “I am alone in the world, without father and mother, sometimes it is all so confusing. Do you believe in God?”

“I haven’t made my mind up,” said Reinhart. “But I don’t hold anything against someone who does.” It were cruel, if Chaplain Peggott gave her comfort, to abuse that great, grinning, flabby sententious ass, and it certainly had nothing to do with God, who if He existed at all, Reinhart was sure, was an It rather than a He and altogether neutral. As for himself, who had been as infant a Lutheran and then, when a schism developed within that congregation over whether or not the Ladies Aid should amortize the church mortgage by serving public suppers and his parents left with the progressive element, a Presbyterian. He believed that Protestantism was deadly mediocrity, Catholicism weak-minded, and Judaism alien—and all harmless. He was incapable of bigotry, on the ground that it was a massive bore—like the convictions from which it sprang. On the other hand, if it were carried to fanaticism, to that ultimate degree in which to advance his cause the believer was willing to destroy himself rather than other people: gone this far, it was, as with a Joan of Arc, a heroism to which the original motive was irrelevant.

Gertrud of Berlin—it was scandalous to be with the force which compelled a small girl towards martyrdom.

“Look, I’ll see if I can get you a better place to live. I think they have rooms around this area for civilian employees, maybe right in this building, God knows there’s room enough.” He revolved his head in disgust at a vision of a thousand rooms unoccupied while girls slept in wet cellars. “And for Lori, too.”

“Oh, but there is a reason that she cannot,” said Trudchen, and immediately began again to weep softly. “But your priest is not a good man. He tried to have his vay viss me.” She reached to Reinhart’s hand. “He touched me—here.” She cupped his hand very neatly around one of her breasts and, even though the illustration was clear, kept it there infinitely. “ ‘I just must see if you are wearing your medal,’ he said. ‘But perhaps it slipped down.’ And then, so quick as one could think of it, he—” In the quickness she described, Trudchen had stretched open the neck of her shirt and inserted Reinhart’s hand on the bare skin underneath. “ ‘Vair is it?’ he asked, with a very horrible smile. This must be it—’ ”

Withdrawing so swiftly that he unraveled a strand of pink crochet, he shouted: “It’s a lie, Trudchen, it’s a contemptible lie!”

Piggy Peggott—he had many sins, but they were of another kind of gluttony: he was famous in the officers’ mess for seconds, thirds, and fourths; but all one had to do was look at him to see that somewhere back home he had the inevitable preacher’s wife in dowdy, unkempt clothing and disorderly hair, to whom he was flagrantly faithful; it was simply a matter of definition.

Not to mention that: “Protestants don’t wear medals!”

If she had earlier cried in soft self-pity, she howled now in the most violent hatred, her face red and ugly, swinish.

“It vas this Jew who turned your feelings against me!”

He felt himself tremble fearfully, thought for a second that he had hit her; indeed, his big hand hung tremulously in the air between them as if it had bounced there off her small face. But it had not—at the instant it would have struck, the fist had been seized by the mind, for Trudchen, in her temper, was not silent.

“They have no respect. Of course none of this did happen, but that was what he told you, was it not?—only he made me the bad person, that dirty, filthy creature, that foul—”

“Don’t say it, Trudchen, it simply is not said. He must have made a mistake, anybody could do that. You have to admit that there are German girls who might—well, anyway, it had nothing to do with his being of the Hebrew faith.”

“But it does have something to be connected to that I am a German. At least for him it does. Because the Nazis do not like the Jews, I am made to suffer. In 1933 I am four yearss old; in 1938, nine yearss. They did not permit children to operate the concentration camps.”

Reinhart had a weakness in the small of his back, which standing up did not relieve. He wished he had a grievance; being without one in the modern world was disabling. How gratifying to be the lowliest Negro in Alabama, with no person alive who was not in your debt. How satisfying to be a Jew, with a two-thousand-year claim or, now, a German who had got his medicine unjustly. He should have been in combat and had his foot shot off, so that when he was brought a complaint he could point to the stump and say: obviously, I can do nothing about it, I can’t even walk.

He produced a roll of peppermint Lifesavers and, thumbnailing back the tinfoil, offered the first segment to Trudchen. Shortly it could be heard clicking against her little rabbit-teeth.

“This is very sweet and not at all—what do you say?”

“ ‘Hot,’ I guess.”

“It is ‘not so hot’? But that means ‘no good,’ yes? That is not what I mean. I like it better than ours, which are more—”

“ ‘Hot.’ That’s another usage—the word is good for almost anything.”

Such as her face, which now, with glossy lines of tear, was cooling. He should have liked to stroke it. She was so helpless, yet at the same time, if that were possible, indomitable. It was the same combination of contraries he had seen in Lieutenant Schild.

In the afternoon a PFC sent by Schild began to remove the cartons, antlike—with small burdens and many trips. Pound slopped in at two o’clock, looking for his sunglasses, which after a moment’s search he remembered he had sold, listened to Reinhart’s explanation of Trudchen and account of Schild’s mission, saying to the first, “Why not?” and to the second, “Good deal,” punched Reinhart in the belly, and left at two-ten.

Neither Lovett nor Nader was in their office, owing, Reinhart assumed, to the catastrophic finale to the party; the colonel no doubt was grinding them into powder. About which even if he had liked them Reinhart would have felt rather more pleasure than pain, he being an enlisted man to the core.

Since, then, official authority could not be consulted, he prowled through the empty rooms in the furthermost reaches of his own wing and found a little closetlike chamber that would meet Trudchen’s want. It was already outfitted with a tiny stove and a naked steel bedstead and spring; from the 1209th supply room he fought a mattress and sleeping bag out of the sergeant in charge.

Delighted, Trudchen threw her arms about him when she saw the new quarters.

“Do you need some help to get your things from Lori’s?”

“Oh no, you must not bother!” A brief crease flew through her clear brow. “I have almost nothing. You will not go there?”

“Not if you don’t want me to.”

“Ah, not I. But Lori would be
aim
borrossed.”

“By the way, did she get her job?”

Trudchen showed a sly look. “Do you know, she did not tell me! She is a very odd human being. One must accustom oneself to her strangeness, but she is very nice.”

Leaving her there, he returned to the office. Four o’clock. The PFC had disappeared, after having taken away all of three cartons. On the point of calling it a day, himself, he saw the heavy sweater that Trudchen had left behind. He carried it to her room, but already she had gone, either by the window or some secret back door off the hall, whose existence he knew not of. Folding the sweater, with a view to placing it on the bed, he felt a hard, cylindrical object somewhere in the weave. It was his missing pen, along the bottom seam of a pocket. So funny: she could hardly have stolen it and then permitted so simple a discovery. Must, rather, first have borrowed and then retained in a slip of the hand. Yet if he reclaimed it now, she might remember, look, find it again with him, think he had caught her in a theft but for reasons of his own would not protest, be discomfited. He placed the sweater on her pillow and left.

He was inclined to visit Veronica, but rather than search the hospital building for her ward, which in his imagination had acquired a sinister aura, he strolled again down the street of her billet on the chance that her duty, too, was done.

The salmon-colored gauze had been removed from the glass of the front door; on the inside surface an unseen agency, swift and sure, manipulated a cleaning rag. Its movements were mesmerizing; he had an impulse to throw himself on the grass and watch it as the warm-cool late afternoon relaxed into calm evening. Beside the door grew a bush bearing round, white berries like small versions of those pure-sugar jawbreakers with a nut in the center. There was a bush like that in his parents’ front yard, and next to it a weeping willow high in which he had once established an outpost for General Custer. Alone among the men of the 1209th he had been in no hurry to get back to the States, had in fact long planned to ask, in rakish defiance, for permanent assignment to the Occupation forces, was waiting only until it could be more than an empty, sour-grape gesture—for, without combat points, he was more or less permanent as it stood. Now, just now, watching the rag fly across the pane, seeing the bush, recalling General Custer, and with the sudden, almost unbearably dear smell of grass—he had not at first marked that the lawn was newly cut—he ached for home.

The door opened just as the general bliss had given into the deadly specificities. He had come far since his first year in the Army when he frequently had such seizures; yes, he had enlisted to escape, but there was forever another present to flee from; in the summertime, especially, one craved elsewhere. But he had nothing to get back to. In the most literal sense: already in September 1943 his parents had let his room to a man who worked an electric drill in the local defense plant, a man who had remained, had settled down, who surely had dispensed with the arrowhead collection and the stuffed bass’s head on the bookcase. And college: he simply could not face that again after three years of the expansive life.