Crazy in Berlin (22 page)

Instead, on Lichenko’s face reigned a supreme and splendid peace, a glutton’s on arising from the board, a sadist’s on hanging up his whip, a drunkard’s on counting his corks. He looked not at all at Schild but into the obesity of the featherbed that collapsed and reasserted itself under his experimental hand as if in breathing. His own serene breaths followed suit. He had got heavier in fourteen days, a fact that his reversed image stated with a kind of hostile assurance not apparent right side front. The German woman did up his clothes: his blouse a thing of smooth planes, his boots another mirror, the trouser crease a lethal edge. His eyes hung heavy, as if he could not bear the weight of the lids. Give him six months and he would be a little fat man, a fat little tradesman, retaining his cheek-furrows but in the discontent of prosperity. The fact was that an agent provocateur satisfied, however that surfeit sat upon his features, was an agent whose mission went well. To watch him was like looking into the mouth of a clogged toilet.

The violence remained in the glass, as, turning away, he began to measure his position, he, Schild, the man of limited ambitions, commonplace talents, one who served, a rational man, mistaken now by who knew what compound of humanity and history and place for the reverse of these qualities; for although he may have been guilty it was not of the transgression for which he was now under surveillance, could not be, for it was precisely his crime that he was incapable of a crime, and unfortunately no secret police or central committee was yet in search of that kind of deviation.

As a boy he had developed a feat of controlled consciousness, a triumph over what was initially a disability, almost, he had feared at the time, a madness. Under duress of his parents, who were tyrants for the communal life—at least in theory, at least for the children; when it came to themselves it was another thing: “when you grow up you got to work don’t forget it”— expelled from home, he had gone with a children’s group, Jewish, always and forever Jewish, to Coney Island for “fun”; always and again “fun,” a separate and distinct endeavor from one’s other pursuits, to be sought only by congress with, in this case, a million other organisms who had not forgotten to leave behind their flesh and sweat glands. Despite the sun’s inability to plumb the floor of this forest of skin where he lay, he had, impossibly, got a bad burn. He did not tan and therefore unless forced avoided the sun; once in it by necessity, however, he tested that familiar theory that stern resolution overcomes all, arriving at the invariable and, for one with dark hair and eyes, peculiarly shameful rebuttal of scorched hide. The end of this day found the flames mounting to his head; he was lost for an hour and when found was sick enough to warrant being taken all the way to Manhattan in a taxi—for which when he was well he heard “somebody had to pay guess who?”—and, home, was in a half-delirium for three days while his pelt grew leprous.

Only half a delirium, because he knew what he was about and didn’t, simultaneously; or did but suspected he shouldn’t; feeling so queer in the head one hadn’t the right, so to speak, to be on the same terms with reality as other people. Lying on the sofa whose brown plush marked with patches of psoriasis the points of humanity too often stated—head, hips, and heels—watching his mother drop the wooden egg into the stocking toe, beneath the bridge lamp whose transverse member had long ago been separated from its upright by nervous readjustments and now bore its oiled-paper shade on the frayed cord alone, he felt a dread that she might not look up on schedule and carp. People don’t read on the flat of their backs holding the book over them like a sunshade, it blinds them at twenty. He yearned to receive the admonition that in normal times would have driven him out to the library and its public privacy; now to assure himself of actuality, it was a value from the past that he would have given even his assent to establish. His sister, in bed fifteen minutes, failed once to call for water; for once his father, who rarely left the house after dark, was out for cigars, which he rarely smoked. Across the airshaft from the kitchen, the Kaminskys were anaesthetized, for the first time in history they forbore to exchange insults in heavy Polish accents.

In his three days of partial coma Schild learned what his twelve years of comparative clarity had not laid clear: in the degree of one’s need, one’s companions and surroundings become negative, fail to comply. One seizes the bathroom in a quiet hour and instantly sets a fashion for the others, who appear at the door in force; one goes to the movies on Monday night and cannot win a seat from the horde of people who will miss work next morning to perform this natural service of denial; one is hungriest the evening the rest of the family, ill, dine on rye and cream cheese and admire each other’s lack of appetite. These schemes are seen with the semiconsciousness as colors are more vivid and distances overcome with squinted eyes. In health, we are tormented by reality’s presence; sick, by its loss.

When well, Schild commanded this partial coma as it had in illness mastered him, for when the prisoner holds the key, a cell changes from a proscription to a defense of liberty. It later became his obsession that experience in the large could be controlled—nay, must be, which had no regard for could—the alternative was fascism. But experience in the small, in the disparate grooves where the larger powers, so to speak, lacked elbow room, what could not be ordered could at least be converted.

In the present circumstance, Schild looked at Schild from a distance, finding him not small but different, as if in dramatic irony he knew something that his double did not. One Schild was doomed; the other could stand here invisible and invulnerable, if necessary watch from asylum the first go to the noose.

Schatzi had not appeared in ages. Schild had made two fruitless trips to Wannsee on consecutive nights; on the third he had posted a note on a tree in the Fasanenstrasse, in Wilmersdorf, used as a bulletin board by bombed-out persons seeking their families. This schedule, to be put into effect in case of emergency, had been ready for use since his first engagement with Schatzi. The note read: “Seek whereabouts of Oskar Reichel, formerly of Ludwigkirchstrasse 32. His wife is alive and well. Apply Bauer, Weddingweg 8, Lichterfelde.”

In theory, contact having been broken, Schatzi was thus directed to come to Schild, at the former’s discretion. In practice, he did not: clearly, because Schild had all at once acquired a bad odor. That Schatzi had himself fallen afoul of one power or another was unlikely, if not impossible; further, it could not be imagined. If for no other reason, fate would keep him free to taunt Schild, whatever the extremity.

Schild felt comfortably like a corpse, with Captain St. George droning on as sole mourner at the wake. The evening lurked in the population of leaves overhead, pandering for nightfall, which in Berlin appeared later than elsewhere and then only after extensive preliminaries, leaving early: at half-past three you could read your watch without a flashlight. St. George’s cigar-end periodically bloomed with fire, drooled a thin bouquet. His voice, deficient in resonance, permitted the transmission of noises from small live things rustling in the bush.

“Even the lizards, or whatever that is, are going, as our British friends say, to Bedfordshire. That’s my idea, too. I am so [yawn] sleepy. Must be the [yawn] air. Goo [yawn] night.”

The captain rose and snapped-to his folding camp stool, tonight with satisfaction. He liked smooth-snapping things, as being both easy and smart; but his taste was often impeded by the stool, for which he frequently cursed Aberfitch & Crombie: the extra ten dollars they added to every item had no justification when things stuck.

Schild sorely wished him to stay, should have liked to make the brief sound which would have accomplished that, for it was no great or difficult feat to convince St. George his presence was wanted. Yet he could not, as it were, solemnize his conversion to the invertebrate. Assuming Schild was asleep or, more likely, forgetting him simultaneously with his decision to retire, the captain stumbled into the rear door of the house.

The night chill found Schild’s marrow. A bulky insect dropped into the hair of his forearm and was entangled to frenzy. Fool that it was, it interpreted his humane efforts as malicious and died shortly of its false assumption. He sat alone within the limitations of the fence; a small yard, smaller still without St. George; a corral with like squares on either side, extending on to the ends of the block: multiple petty-bourgeois cells. A creeper rose embraced the pickets. He once knew an Eagle Scout who was born and raised five stories above the sidewalk on 191st Street but could identify every plant within a ten-mile radius of the camp at Alpine, New Jersey.

Their landlady slept on two biscuit mattresses on the floor of the kitchen. The easiest thing in the world, if she had not been German, would be to walk right in and have her. If she had not been German, however, it would not be the easiest thing. He fancied his contempt had some sexual attraction for her. The angles of her face sharpened as he passed, and he sensed furtive movements behind doors when St. George was out of the house. But he had already had his gentile, and of the classic kind, complete with rabbit nose, soap-and-water cheeks, and anti-Semitic Daddy and Mother, and he had no strong sadism even towards Germans.

He turned his slat chair, property of the house, squealing rustfully in the joints, so that he could not see the kitchen window. A dog whined in the distance; a Southerner or a Negro, passing on the sidewalk out front, described to a mute companion a succession of events that were invariably
mothafuhn;
the faint odor of pine, which was everywhere at night in the western quarter of Berlin, was superseded by the sudden smell of candy, moreover, a precise candy: Mary Janes, nut-flavored, tallowlike caramel on the outside, peanut butter in the center. Mrs. Grossman gave you one less for a penny than her competitors; Milton, when she took ten minutes off for raspberry soda and plain cake, gave one more. Amazing so shrewd a woman never knew this for fifteen years. It was after Milton had been killed in Spain that she received this knowledge, along with the other things that had to be said, fat and old and bitter, knotting a cord end from the drawer of saved string. “Better they were poison!” Although she should have known that her son was his master, and not vice versa. A boy, buying some candy, slipped a nickel underneath a newspaper on the counter, for it was Sabbath and Mrs. Grossman would not touch money until the sun had set. “Go read your books!” she shouted to Schild in Yiddish, the language, it struck him suddenly, for many things but, above all, humor; he could feel nothing beyond a terrible impulse to laugh and a sense of how terrible was his impulse. In the doorway, he bumped into the boy, who had been delayed a moment, stripping the wrapper from his bit of sweet; it was a Mary Jane. Schild’s teeth clogged in empathy, he could almost taste the peanut butter, it had always been very like putty.

All this in the second before he knew, like a bat, that a human being stood in the darkness behind his chair. He sat easy, who else could it be but Schatzi?

“And here we have Herr Schild,
zu Hause
like any merchant.”

Where had he been? was an obvious question, but could not be asked. Schatzi made succulent sounds over his candy, offering some to Schild which when taken was a disappointment not living up to its odor: so much for the memory. He was called back to the present; the atmosphere was less charged at once. There sat Schatzi, renewing the link. He had been a fool to concoct an elaborate, sinister design from meaningless coincidence, for it was through Schatzi that his line of authority led. How could a simple lieutenant in the Red Army be concerned? One must face it that Lichenko was even rather pitiful. It was no disrespect, it took nothing from his honor, was no adverse implication on the triumph of the society that had given him his chance for manliness and heroism, that Lichenko was—he almost thought, was no Milton Grossman; but Lichenko, too, had charged the fascist guns.

“I suppose you wonder where have I been,” said Schatzi, careful to keep it low. It was so dark now that he was seen as black on black, improbable but not impossible, which could not have been more appropriate to him. His voice, his rustlings, the thump of his butt-bones to the ground—all expressed an unusual geniality. In his own way, he apparently felt it good to see Schild again. He refused an offer of the chair, although it must have been uncomfortable for an ill man to sit on the cold earth.

“I saw your note some days ago; although, I was otherwise preoccupied... no, really, I am just pleased, stay where you are sitting. The ground is not unpleasant. Beneath the grass you know is sand, it does not hold the water. Berlin is one single great island of sand on the Brandenburg plain, yet it permits a lush growth of plant life, no? In spite of its architecture, Berlin is a beautiful city, but so few foreigners know it and that is sorrowful.”

Schild assumed the cynicism of his answer would be
de rigueur:
“There is little left to see now.”

“So much the worse for all,” said Schatzi, not shouting but giving the illusion he was and with the kind of conviction that Schild recognized as having originated in higher chancelleries than either of them would ever subordinate. “It was senseless of the Americans to destroy the city. The most unfortunate way to win the German people away from fascism.”

Lichenko had assured Schild that Russian artillery, particularly that multibarreled weapon known by the Germans as Stalin’s Organ, had leveled more of Berlin than the Eighth and Royal Air Forces together, and he had agreed then as he did now, yet neither time in hypocrisy.

Schatzi, making liquid, furry, catlike noises, swabbed his gums with his tongue, and then went with the keen tip of his smallest finger for a molar in the recalcitrant love of caramel. Actually he could not be seen with such precision: his ring flashed in transit, his cuff rustled, and Schild supplied the other details from memory.

“Not to speak of reconstruction,” continued Schatzi. “The Soviet Union has been given the most horrible section of the city.” To go any farther would be to imply that Stalin had been hoodwinked by Churchill and Roosevelt. Indeed, he had already gone too far. “You must indulge me in my English. Certainly I did not intend to say ‘horrible’ except in regard to the bombing there. It is, on one’s other hand, the sector most worth for rehabilitation.”