Crazy in Berlin (25 page)

“Oh good,” said Pound. “If you are that close to the end, you can put the fucker aside for fifteen minutes and write me a letter to the wife. You know, this and that, etc., and I’m short on dough because we had to buy new winter uniforms this month.”

“
You
short on dough?”

Pound made a sighing descent into his swivel chair. “Come over here,” he said confidentially. “I don’t know why I can’t tell you, since you know all my other chicken-shit business. The thought of going back to that woman—the one you write for me—is more than I can stomach. You know, when I was wounded I made kind of an agreement with Fate that if I didn’t die I would be somebody new. I never told this before to anybody in the service, but I used to be, before I was drafted, a bank teller for thirty-seven fifty a week, a creepy little rectum-kissing rabbit with two snot-nosed kids and a dog with some kinda skin rash that made his hair fall out in pink spots—he also used to sit around on the rug in the evening and fart all the time—and this woman, see. Well, she isn’t the worst person in the world, but she is set on making a man a coward. She even wanted to scare me out of using a blowtorch to take off the old paint on the outside of the house—which I was only doing cause who can afford those prick union painters and if you hire scabs the others will come by and bomb your house—you’ll start a fire, she said. And by Christ I went ahead and did it anyway, and you guessed it, it did start a fire that burned off one wall. I never missed Bob Hope’s radio show on Tuesday nights for five years—Professor Colonna: ‘that’s what I keep telling them down at the office’; Brenda and Cobina, and the rest of them. Think of that: 259 straight; once they were off because of a special news feature, something about that fucking shitbum Hitler. I tell you I was yellow as they come, but after basic they sent me to OCS where they thought that was just being cautious, I guess, a good quality for a officer. Well, we were pinned down along this hedge row in Normandy and I was dumping in my pants for fear, but still I noticed my top fly button was loose and I fastened it. And then I thought what a dirty little turd I was: with your ass about to be blown off and you button the barn door—do you get the picture? I was more afraid of my dong showing than of the German 88s. So I thought all of a sudden: World, you got twenty-eight years from me, you can keep all the rest and stick them up your giggy, and I jumped up and went across there and took that Kraut platoon, and I don’t mean to say I wasn’t scared, but anyway for once there was a reason. Shit.”

He had puffed so hard on his pipe that already its tobacco was exhausted and the air made noxious.

“You know what I made so far on the black market? Thirteen thousand, two hundred and twenty-two dollars, and it’s all gone back to the States to a bank in L.A., California. That’s where my nurse Anne Lightner is from, L.A., where they go in for the beach living. I’m going to get sprung from this woman as soon as I get home, and then I’m going out there and buy a used-car lot. That’s the kind of thing they go big for out there, with all that beach living. Everybody drives a car, that’s what Anne says.”

So was another idea exploded. It was sad, in a way, that nobody, simply nobody was what he seemed. To Reinhart, Pound had been the classic type of swashbuckler. Now he saw the late bank-clerk lines of worry and doubt, faded but still visible, at the corners of mouth and eyes, and he even liked him better for them—for daring has no unusual moral worth if you have lived with it from the cradle—yet there was no discounting the loss of something rare.

“But I have to play it cool with Alice till I get back and can defend myself,” said Pound, refilling his pipe. “So write her nice. I don’t have to tell you what to say, you have enough crap to snow anybody.” This was admiringly put, with the quick wink he must have learned in his new life, but looking sharply Reinhart saw the hint of a quaver in it, as if, in at least the most minor part, there was still a tinge of bluff.

All the while Trudchen had been typing with fanatic energy—faking madly, for the guidebook manuscript lay on Reinhart’s desk.

As he passed her on the return route, a doorknock sounded, and notwithstanding his shouted “Enter!” she leaped up and teetered to the knob—high heels, yet!

It was a soldier, for Pound. She made him wait while she proceeded to the lieutenant with a formal announcement, working her body in a queer movement which Reinhart first believed was an effort to balance on the high spikes and then recognized as an amateur version of a whore’s undulations. Her breasts were hard metallic cones, yet she still wore the thin, little-girl’s skirt ending an inch above the knees, and still the owlish, juvenile spectacles. Involuntarily he burst into a loud, barking laugh, which hideous though it was nobody but himself seemed to hear.

Lieutenant Schild’s judgment had been correct, only a bit premature (as an Intelligence man, of course, he was expected to be one jump ahead of events); if she was not on her way to tartdom, then Reinhart was an orangutan.

“Dearest Alice,” he scrawled on the yellow pad, taking in return a warm thrill of fancy that this unseen proxy wife was really his own, that he had entered her in the connubial bed and that she had borne him two small resemblances of himself, albeit snot-nosed.

On Pound’s indifferent grunt Trudchen wobbled back to her table. Reinhart had also purchased the mascara which gave her an appearance of sore, fire-tinged eyes, but the high heels were from another protector, he now had no doubt.

The soldier had gone. In his stead, in the hall shadows beyond the half-open doorway stood a shrouded representation of a human figure, crepuscular, mysterious. Upon Reinhart’s look it slid noiselessly out of range. Sauntering, Pound took Trudchen’s typewriter from beneath her very pounding fingers, ripped out and discarded the paper, and saying “At last I found the Kraut who can fix this old machine,” left.

“Darling Alice: Sweetheart, I—” Reinhart began again.

“You try alvays to hoomiliate me...” Trudchen’s lips were fashioned into a little red crossbow, through which slid the pink bolt of her tongue, in and out, tasting the lipstick.

He threw down the pencil in disgust, said malevolently: “How about returning my pen?”

“Vy do you always do this? Because I am only this little German girl?”

He strode massively across and bruised his fist on her table: “Right now, I want that pen!”

“Oh, Gee whiz!”

Find who taught her that and you had the whoremaster: Reinhart had never said “Gee whiz” in all his life long. But the tears were her own. He had last seen them when she cursed that poor Jew for telling the truth.

“Well, Gee, take it beck again, and don’t say I vas shtealing it.” Engulfed by the mixture of water and words, dissolving mascara, smeared rouge, falling hairpins—for in the grief she tore her hair down into the old pigtails—she opened the middle drawer and drew away.

Reinhart came round behind her. There it lay, the old black Parker, that gallant, veteran instrument of romance and adventure on two continents, vicarious cannon, sceptre, phallus. He seized it, already feeling the brute, and when her blue eyes peeped sideways at him over their scorched rims and she said “I
opp
ologize”—by this time he had long forgotten what the beef was and took the pen merely so as to return it to her formally, as a permanent gift.

“So kind,” she cried, smiling-through-tears. “Do you care for my shoes? I have yesterday traded them with the chocolate you gave me.”

“Fabelhaft!”
He stood behind her, hands lightly riding her narrow shoulders, eyes descending into the sweet crevasse of the pectoral range, very clear through the thin cloud of blouse.

“And I have somesing for you,” she said, “so you will not think so bad of this little Germany.”

From the drawer she withdrew a handbill of cheap European paper, weightless, the color and grain of whole-wheat bread, infamously inked. All he could read from where he stood was a headline:
ES LEBE MENSCHLICHKEIT!

“Proclamation of the Resistance,” she crooned victoriously. “I have found it in this very room, in the carton-boxes. Perhaps this selfsame room in which we sit was nothing but head-quarters!”

Long Live Humanity!,
no doubt to be understood in the sense of Hitler’s Peace, a peculiar German cruelty. He received her greatest whopper with an enervation so profound as to be almost pity.

“Trudchen, I can read German...” he groaned, his hands rising heavily from her shoulders and more heavily returning.

“Then read!” she screamed, turning in frenzy, and his left hand traveled into her blouse at the open neck and down the breasts’ warm canyon. Her mouth, open throughout the quick transformations of fury, fear, awe, and finally, madness, rose to his neck like the sucker of a great vampire fish surfacing from the depths of the sea, fastening to the elbow of his windpipe, so that, prohibited from breathing he fisted a tail of blonde hair and pulled as if to sever her head from the shoulders. In a moment his large right arm proved stronger than small-girl lips; he had her loose and held her gaping, an interval for bullying mastery, and then turned her, brought her forward and up, the nether hand taking a purchase within her fat furrow, hot beneath cool cloth, and carried her to cover the light snow of tobacco grains on Pound’s clean desk.

He had come so far in what had seemed desperate comedy, as in school when the kids steal your cap and you tolerate their passing it just out of reach until the smallest boy is the bearer and you engulf and batter him to the point at which his incipient grief takes the laugh off you. But Trudchen now had fear least of all, and laughed, herself, as one does whose will is consonant with the world’s; the little witch’s face in a garish disorder of evil, yet her odor was childlike, of soap.

In endless pursuit of pride, then, he became fastidious, working his way through the jungle of queer fasteners and ribbons, and the three buttons which at the crucial junction of her parts secured the last guardian triangle of doveskin fabric, beaching finally upon a little round belly incapable of further discovery.

The key in the devil’s lock,
entrez monsieur, enchanté de faire votre connaissance,
excruciating, pain, pain, pleasure—well into that groove of unification where the senses are harnessed towards a single fanatical end, his suddenly lost purpose. Ah, it was all so crazy. A small window broke the wall above Pound’s desk, high above—standing at full height Reinhart could just frame his face in it—and absurd, fit only for some lazy postman on stilts to pass a parcel in from the outside, to save a trip through the labyrinth. It was from this glass that he got an immaterial signal into the corner of the eye, and as if to breathe and moisten the throat, he straightened and turned his head, saw close up to the pane the feathered neck of a man who wanted a barber, Pound’s; beyond and lower, a face like a contour map of an asteroid, ripped and pitted by hot chips flying off Jupiter; two had by accident embedded collaterally and, still smoking, were eyes: ostensibly directed at Pound, but seeing him, knowing him and what he was at, not caring, not even amused, but knowing. The old German, now named: Sweetheart. In exchange for the typewriter he presented a thick wad of notes. Pound buttoned them in an upper pocket and, one-breasted like an Amazon, vanished.

“Mein Tiger!”
whispered Trudchen. Looking down, melting, Reinhart felt rather than saw he had unwittingly been a success. He had also forgotten all precautions, and swift through his mind like an Army documentary ran the series of awful upshots.

“Ach,”
said Trudchen, yet hypersensitive, opposing partition, “I have taken care...” Not knowing to what she referred, he accepted her assurance.

Crumpled in her fist, the old handbill, taken in surprise like everything else, was still their partner. He tore it from her and read the first line below the bold title, read it twice as with his unoccupied hand he returned himself to order. It did not change: “The appeal of Hitlerism is to the eternal
Schweinhund
in man.” Of course it was anti-Nazi; no matter by whom or where, it had been produced in honor and conscience and at cost, and its anonymous author, if he had eluded his compatriot enemies, had lived perhaps only to drown in the same foreign flood that swamped them.

He kissed her, long and exploratory, for the first time, and saying “Ah, I must be crazy, anyone could have walked in,” he burst away, she moaning in the sudden isolation. He ran through the French window and around the corner, and saw that Schatzi had not, because of his heavy burden, got farther than the public sidewalk.

Schatzi accepted the inevitable cigarette and slipped it between his ear and the drooping rim of the workman’s cap that with neckerchief and soiled jacket and weary trousers formed his present costume, which he would surely have had trouble in selling to a naked man.

“Do you need some conversation?” he asked, with a tremble of his nose, “or is it simply generosity? Excuse my lack of strength.”

He placed the typewriter upon the octagonal stones of the sidewalk. No sooner was it done than a woman rode by on the adjacent bicycle path and they felt the slipstream of her passing.

“Into the mechanism no doubt this blew some sand,” said Schatzi, his voice like a dumping of gravel. “So much longer to clean!” He elevated his hands in a Jewish shrug, and while the right one was up, put out a finger and ran it across his upper lip, making a gargoyle mouth.

Seeing him now in reality and close-up, Reinhart could not doubt his girl friends’ tales were true: if Schatzi were not from the concentration camp, then that establishment was illusion. True, he was more than mere skin, but give an unfilled pelt a few months’ meals and you would have Schatzi. He lived, but just lived and no more, with not one breath beyond the essential. His face was dreadful, romantically hideous, in the ugliness only supreme virtue permits, perhaps creates, as with the old saints; and though his angles were sharp, his constant tremble blurred and made them remote.

Confronted with this overwhelming authenticity, Reinhart on the instant forgot his purpose and, instead of speaking, sent a grin. He watched Schatzi catch it, warp it with the secret they shared, and send it back.