Crazy in Berlin (24 page)

Even in his duty of conscience, however, he was balked by the same ineptness which characterized his dealings in the humdrum; when fountain pens were hard to get, people like Marsala had pocketsful; similarly with liquor, broads, and passes; he, Reinhart, so damned special, one of the ought-ought per cent of the American population to go to college, a member of the owning and stable class, could manage nothing.

It was very well to say loosely, as Lori had, to go to the burgomaster’s office. He tried just that, visited the town hall in Schöneberg, which he was astonished to see employed as many bureaucratic flunkies as it were an American city untouched by war, who notwithstanding that he was Occupation showed much the same bored insolence and then when pressed claimed a search of the birth records back to 1850 turned up no Gottfried Reinhart. Of course, there was always the Russian Sector, which the eyeglassed clerk recommended snottily-reproachful, as if to say: that’s what you get for dividing our city. There was what Reinhart would earlier have identified as certainly a Nazi; now he thought it more likely the man might turn out to be an unsung hero of the anti-Hitler opposition and this job his reward.

He got aid from an unconsidered quarter. Although when he had first revealed it to Trudchen his project left her cold, she greeted him one morning with sudden interest and suggestion.

“You must have a
dett
-ek-tive! And I have just your person. The man who makes some work about here—he with the scarred face. He is called—so silly!—Schatzi, that means ‘sweetheart,’ did you know? Do you know which I intend?” She had her own table now, a jittery-jointed piece which swayed like a drunken spider when she assaulted the old Underwood. “He is very active in the black market. This takes him everywhere and in consequence to that he knows everyone.”

“Not the old man in the Wehrmacht cap?”

A regrettable concomitant of Trudchen’s employment was false tint laid on thickly over her natural color, and Reinhart also bore the guilt of that. He had bought her lipstick and rouge from the PX, on her request for the “raddest of the rad.”

“Oh, he has worn it, yes, but also many other costumes. When he sells one thing, he attires himself in another.”

“You don’t mean that old man who works in Lovett’s office?”

“Not regularly. He makes much money on the black market—why should he vorry?”

And he had thought the old fellow pitiful; it was a true instance of what one, disinclined to contribute, says of street cripples with their tin cups: they could probably buy and sell any of us poor working stiffs.

“I don’t suppose he was a National Socialist?” Reinhart could no longer use “Nazi”; with the passing of each German day the term became more like the name of a soap powder, some slick and vulgar “Rinso” invented by Americans, who eventually reduce everything to that level: “Nazi,” the cute name for a pack of buffoons, played always by the same actors, regularly thwarted by some clean-shaven Beverly Hills Boy Scout whom a ruptured eardrum disqualified from the real war.

However, he was not wholly serious even in putting it the long way, since in this area Trudchen’s unreliability was massive. Perhaps understandably, to her the history of modern times was a catalogue of her own losses and the responsible instrument, fate in general.

She lifted her little painted clown’s-face, the freshness obscured by the rouge but the innocence still there, and said: “Not he! He was a prisoner in a concentration camp.”

Which was a flat lie—although perhaps not hers but the old man’s; the surviving martyrs of the camps were hardly thrown into menial jobs and black-marketeering.

“Ausgezeichnet! Prima!
Then he should be just the man to find
die Familie
Reinhart,” he said in an irony that she did not receive. “Of course it isn’t likely he’ll find anybody. There’s a separation of fifty years. Think of that, Trudchen, the last time I was German my father hadn’t yet been born.”

“Please?”

Instead of clarifying it, he fell to work with his pencil—which was blunt and unpleasant to use; if she didn’t soon return his pen he must come right out and ask her to—on the long-delayed Guide to the Ruins for the sightseeing tour.

The Olympic Stadium, built for the Olympic Games in 1936, has a seating capacity—

Or was it more graceful to say “seats”? Or “seats” as a noun: “stadium, etc., has 124,000 seats.” “Capacity” of course had a more serious tone. This was one of those days when nothing sounded right, which unluckily had begun to outnumber those on which nothing sounded wrong.

“You do not wish to hire this man?” asked Trudchen, starting to type the stencil for Page One, which, for Pound had decided on a grandiose project that would impress the colonel, was to stand as title sheet.

He had to grin. All European girls spoke with an animation at once funny and delightful, an excess of feminine vitality that juiced each word. If this held even in a sadness like Lori’s, with Trudchen, who was never less than gay, who was young and unmarred and in a perpetual celebration of ripeness, it was the very model of unalloyed girlship; you never, as sometimes at Home, suspected that you confronted a transvestite boy.

“Ah,” she went on, “how hoppy you will make zem! In these timess to have an American cowsin!”

In mock grimness he answered:
“Our American Cowsin.
I hope for better luck. That’s the name of the play Lincoln was watching when he was shot.”

“By Chon Vil-kes Boat, yes?” This in an eagerness which threw a tremble into her physical establishment. “And the year, 1864, yes? The day I do not know.”

“Don’t ask me!” He ambled to the French window to look on as perfect weather as the earth offered, the life-enhancing air of the Brandenburg plain, full of golden light and green smells. “My family wasn’t in the country at the time. They were here.”

Could Jews have been killed on such a day, or had they waited for rain?

The great pines stood high in the adjacent grove, and seeing down among their feet he recognized the steel-gray, crosshatched shadows from old German engravings, which were not artist’s strategy but the true lay of the land. He could have watched without doubt a delegation of trolls emerge from some root-home and bear away the Nibelungs’ lode, but impossible to the mind’s eye were the long sallow lines of victims.

“This man, this good German, how can I get in touch?”

Trudchen giggled like a spring: “Tahch—this is very vivid and so clear that no explanation is needed—baht he vill come here some time. I have taken the freedom to ask him that you might... vould... could—oh well, that you want to see him.”

Along with the cosmetics she wore a peek-a-boo white blouse disclosing an eyelet-margin slip and, beyond, the rim of a brassiere which carried larger burdens than formerly had hung upon her chest, and the pigtails no longer swung free but were entwined about her head in a yellow cocoon. In the aggregate, this was also a lie: that she was a mature girl.

“If he was in a camp, then he must be a Jew?”

Asking which he returned to his desk and fell into the chair with the noise of a beef haunch flung onto a butcher’s block.

“Oh no!” cried Trudchen with candid enthusiasm. “You are incorrect when you think only Jews were mistreated. You do not know of the Resistance?”

Sure, the plot to kill Hitler of 20 July 1944. This had already been exposed in his discussion groups as a conspiracy of reactionary generals, scarcely better than der Führer himself, whose motives were suspect and results, a failure; and who were eleven years late.

Of course there was that—she took no notice of the negating conditions, perhaps because he lost his nerve while talking to her, who was blameless, and presented them weakly—but what she meant was something of a greater scope and duration, embracing all of the non-Nazi population: a total rejection of Hitler and all of his works, dating back to 1933 and earlier. She as a German could tell him that, even though she took no interest in politics, being young and silly.

“And what did they do about it?”

“Ah, what can anybody do against beasts who are ruthless? The SS and the Gestapo, their first job was to control Germans, not Jews.”

He sat upright and brought down his fist upon the desk, not in anger but rather a kind of pleading.

“That is understood. But it is over now. National Socialism turned out to be nothing. You couldn’t find one German today who would say a good word about it. Yet it was a
German
thing, wasn’t it? I don’t mean the war, or the Axis, but what went on here: a horrible, dreadful thing that was completely new. Old Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun were saints alongside of this. The whole history of man is disgusting, I grant you, but why would the Germans try to set a new record? But no, I don’t even want to ask that. God knows if I had been a German what I would have been.
But why can’t someone at least say he is sorry
?” He looked into space, for he had no wish or reason to make it personal.

He was an idiot to speak of this to Trudchen, and she was quite right to look calfly insensate and say: “One cannot be sorry for what one has not done.”

“You must pay me no attention,” she went on, “because I am not clever, but what I can see is that God makes people suffer.” Her mouth and eyes went into round wonder, which made her, there behind the crazy lines of lopsided table and old typing machine, a complex of circles: head, eyes, glasses, mouth, breasts, hips. “At eleven o’clock in the morning of 3 February, this year, I had the fortune to be in the Bayerischer Platz Underground station when your planes came over making a direct strike with an aerial mine that blew a thirty-feet hole out of the bottom of the tube. So suddenly I did not feel anysing, no wownd, and knew only what occurred when this baby in the arms of the vo-man in front of me, now, with the blast, on top of me, this baby stared down and tried to cry at me but instead of the cry this string of blood dripped quietly from its mouth. It was alive, but dead, also; both at the same time—how can I explain this terrible sing that I mean! Your planes had come to kill Nazis, but the bombs cannot tell good from bad. A little chilt of eight months old, it had to suffer. Is it not the same way with God’s vengeance for the murder of Jesus Christ?”

It was wackily, harmlessly funny, as when the village crank says of the cyclone-torn bungalow: this is what they get for all that drinking. But she was growing into a big girl, and it was time to be set straight—which no one had bothered to do for him when he was on that level.

“You don’t—” he began, when Lieutenant Pound appeared in the doorway and Trudchen hurriedly flung back into her story.

“So when this blood began to descend upon me I reached towards my sleeve for the handkerchief but my hand could not go far, being halted by a soft, varm, cling-ging mass such as one’s hair after washing it, and I thought: so I have lost an arm, how easier in the fact than in the worry. Limbs, limbs, I have always feared losing them most.”

“Don’t bullshit, Trudchen,” said Pound, patiently genial, closing the door which was in his absence never closed, demonstrating his talent for violently hurling it to without its latching: he “pulled” it, as one does a punch in a false fight. “You’ve got two bigfat white arms today.”

Although his monastery was now neat, this abbot had stayed slovenly; as he went briskly to his desk below the little window, his loose shoelaces clicked, his tie end flapped over his shoulder, his bowlegs like two lips endlessly yawned away from each other and gulped shut.

Perhaps it was Pound’s own experience in violence: he never believed anything she said. And by his example, Reinhart, too, invariably lost belief. Although, given her time and place, the tale had been credible enough at the outset, with the introduction of self it became fiction like all the others. She was, he had to face it, the most incredible liar he had ever met.

With a significant look at Pound, who was too bored to register it, Reinhart said: “Go on, Trudchen. What happened then?”

“Well, it was really an arm, but blown off from someone other and lodged between mine and my ripps, as if it were robbing my pocket.” She placed a rolled-up stencil in the position described; buff backing to the outside, it was a painfully authentic replica.

Her attention was now directed exclusively towards Pound, and Reinhart, in half-conscious jealousy, went to block her line of vision.

“You know what? You are a prevaricator!”

Silently, Trudchen unrolled the third arm in the enormous self-confidence the mythomaniac shares with the artist, while at the same time her round nose sharpened as if in death, as if for a moment she really tested that condition the truthful call life, and rounded again as quickly; she had been there before and did not like it.

“Stop pissing around with the kid,” Pound ordered irritably. He was in a rare short mood, probably connected with the miscarriage of certain affairs of money, towards which these days he had developed an obsession. The black market had denuded him of watch, pen, pocket knife, cigarette case, lighter, ring, identification bracelet, all bedding but one blanket, all ties, shirts, drawers, undershirts, socks, and caps beyond one each, towels, writing paper, the leather frame of his wife’s picture, and his musette bag. Three days earlier he had received by mail a new pipe and pouch: the latter had already metamorphosed into a paper envelope. Which he rustled in now, spilling much, but onto a page of
Yank,
which when done he coned to funnel back the overflow, his narrow eyebrows shimmering ever upwards like heat waves fleeing a summer pavement.

“Haven’t you finished that guidebook yet?” he went on, with querulous twitchings. “The colonel has a wild hair in his asshole ever since Lovett’s Folly. He might put us on cleaning butt cans any minute.”

Because he was properly a cigarette man, he smoked a pipe the wrong way, inhaling great mortifying draughts which after a time in his innards came back through every superior aperture, mouth, nose, ears, eyes, suggesting that his head was afire.

“I’ll finish it today,” Reinhart answered sullenly, not unmindful of Trudchen’s spectacular show of industry; she socked so loudly at the typewriter you couldn’t hear the clearing of your own throat. No sooner did a third person come than he felt odd man out; his maximum for rapport was one being at a time. Thus it was fine with Pound alone, or alone with Trudchen, but with three people he invariably sensed a conspiracy against him.