Crazy in Berlin (35 page)

“You?” she answered. “It isn’t your trouble, Carlo. You could just get up and walk away from me—you ought to. I can’t ask anything of you.” She finished crying and sat stolidly in that neutral condition which precedes the return of vanity; unlike Trudchen she looked older without make-up. She
was
older than Reinhart by three years; his girls always, saving Trudchen, were; one’s elders are kinder than his juniors and peers. Maureen Veronica Leary, from a suburb of Milwaukee fittingly named St. Francis, graduate of a grade school, high school, and hospital (on the three-year wartime crash program) each under the rubric of another saint. She had a brother and three sisters, all older, and her father, a retired street-railway motorman, told stories of Galway, where the supernatural was commonplace, although he hailed from a town near Dublin named Blackrock. By the time toys and clothing had come down to Very, stuffing leaked from the dollbabies and the stocking-toes were lumpy with darning; but once when she was twelve her father, drunk, brought home a pair of rollerskates her very own. Her mother stood five-ten and her number two sister, just under six and was unmarried at thirty.

So much had Reinhart, in the normal course of events, learned. But who was the real, the essential Very?, to the exterior of which he had been attracted by its air of simpleminded jolly Catholic health. Perhaps a pagan. Not only did he usually go for older girls, he also had a weakness for Roman Catholics, who even when Irish remembered the Latin basis of their persuasion and were very feminine, seldom prudes even when they would not submit: to them a man’s appetites, being natural, being God’s splendid trick to ensure the race’s continuance, were never, even when illicit, loathsome. Now he realized he probably could have, with Very; too late he remembered her constant surrender; indeed, she at the outset had chosen him and then waited in vain.

“You’re in love with this guy, is that it? I suppose you don’t want to tell me who he is.” She still sat within the enclosure of his right arm, while his left, propped against the ground, suffered a slow paralysis. The sand worked up under his fingernails and shortly into a small, smarting cut on the first joint of his thumb, on which he had forgotten to put a new Band-Aid after removing the old one that morning. He had damaged himself on the clip of Trudchen’s brassiere, which lousy German thing was not a simple hook-and-eye but a pronged buckle with criminal tines. Since in his subsequent lust he had not taken care, if she had VD he with his open wound was a goner. Ah, accept it, we are all submerged in filth up to our heads. Accepting which, he saw the one man who was exempt emerge from the high thicket of marsh grass thirty yards down the beach.

Preceding this, the engine noise he had unregisteringly heard earlier, had grown loud, identifying itself as an outboard motor; had come so thundrous close to their position that Reinhart expected momentarily to be swamped but didn’t care; had, just as it must either become visible or explode, shut itself off with two loud farts in the marsh, yet unseen. Within the minute, this person in black beret and bulky coat appeared, stamping down the last few rushes which denied him clearance to the beach and, that done, seeing them—not necessarily looking towards them, but seeing. By the man’s use of this unusual faculty Reinhart recognized, despite the altered outline, Schatzi; who surveyed the four points of the world and approached.

Fearfully Reinhart promised Very they would return to her business later and ruthlessly withdrew his arm. Not adjusting to the new arrangement, Very stayed numbly huddled, leaning against—nothing, for Reinhart was already on his feet, obstreperous in greeting.

“Guten Tag! Wie befinden Sie sich? Wir machen ein
—
wie sagt man
‘picnic’?”

“Just so,” replied Schatzi, ten yards away and apprehensively halting there as if he foresaw an attack. “
Picknick,
one and same.” He winced obsequiously. “Do I receive your permission to come there?”

“Wo?”
Reinhart was still yelling as though his auditor were in Kladow.

“In the vicinity of you and your lady.”

“Warum nicht?”

Schatzi came, still cautious, shoulders thrown high and hands buried in the pockets of the great overcoat, which was a dirty teddy-bear plush and fell to his ankles; scarred face contorted below the beret like a withered acorn in its cap; feet, of which only the neat little brown toes were visible, scuttling forward, one-two, pause, one-two—his overcoat fell past his ankles to brush between his footprints the spoor of a tired fox that drags its tail.

“Fancy occurring here with you,” he said when he arrived, gauging on the balances of his eyes a specimen of flesh from both the large lumps before him: the one on the ground and Reinhart.

“Whatever are you doing here—way out here?” asked Reinhart, altering to superiority. At the same time his unease grew more severe: he was certain Schatzi thought he had again caught him in a screw, or just after; for a crazy moment he suspected Schatzi trailed him for just that purpose.

“
Ach,
business, always business—your gentle lady, she is ill?” At last Veronica acknowledged his arrival, looking up with forlorn-beagle visage, saying naught. He removed his beret.

“Just tired,” said Reinhart. “We had a long—” he lost his voice as he watched Schatzi prepare and deliver a massive, obscene, hideous wink. However offensive, it was mesmeric: the lid flattened and then went concave, seeming to close upon a hole rather than a ball. More horrible yet, Reinhart helplessly felt his own eye return the favor.

“We had a long walk,” he said quickly.

“Exercise, ceaseless exercise,” said Schatzi benignly. “Well, why not?, as you say. You are yet top young for a
Herzschlag, ja
?
Auf Englisch heißt das
‘failure of the heart,’ am I correct?” With fingers like wire-clippers he pinched a bit of jacket, shirt, and skin on Reinhart’s forearm. “Your lady as well, though. Whatever will be her difficulty? Paleness! Ah, right in the pocket I have this brandy which will make the trick.”

Ignoring Reinhart’s weak verbal opposition, he withdrew a silver flask, unscrewed the cap and let it dangle upon its little chain, hitting the body of the vessel
tok-tok,
and stared down onto Veronica’s crown.

“She doesn’t want any,” said Reinhart, but so as not to offend Schatzi he offered to take a draught himself.

“Who doesn’t?” Very, who had been playing no heed, now with violent interest seized the same forearm that had been pinched and pulled herself up. Daintily accepting the flask, she arched her neck like an old grad under the stadium and drained off quite a large slug, then paused to take air and would have returned to kill what was left had not Schatzi, deft as a mongoose, leaped into the breach between her movements and reclaimed his property, saying: “Already better,
ja
?”

“Whew!” whistled Very towards Reinhart. “That went down like a whole loaf of bread.” She gulped five times and smoothed the sitting-wrinkles from her skirt; lingeringly, with some evident pleasure in the touch of her own belly and thighs. Schatzi averted his face, as if offended.

If so, how right he was to be. “At least thank the man,” Reinhart muttered low.

“I don’t know Kraut.”

“Haven’t you just heard him speaking English?”

“I’ll take your word for it.” Turning to Schatzi, she asked, naturally very loud: “Hey, didn’t I spot you hanging around in front of Lieutenant Schild’s place the other night?”

Schatzi twisted his neck to favor the left ear. “Spot? Hanging?”

“On the level now, weren’t you? Oh, you weren’t in that getup. You had on a cap with a beak and you sat on a bike. Well what I mean is, it was you, I know. Come clean, I won’t blow the whistle on you for being out after curfew.”

Reinhart made the sound of a bellows. “Damn it, Veronica, what do you think our friend will be able to understand of that?”

By way of answer she simply smirked: drunk, apparently, or pretending to be from the moment her lips had kissed the flask. It was a way out of her difficulties.

“She thanks you very much,” said Reinhart to Schatzi, who was confusedly repeating under his breath, ‘cap with a beak, sat on a bike.’ “And she thinks she saw you last night in front of the house where—where lives an officer she knows.”

Where lived, indeed, to admit to himself the complete data, Lieutenant Schild.
Lieutenant Schild.
Which, admitted to the mind, was instantly transformed to:
that Jew.
Who hath usurped my office twixt the sheets? The Jew, the Jew...

“Lieutenant Schild,” repeated Schatzi, wonderingly, pointing his ridged carrot-nose towards the lake, high; meanwhile his eyes went everywhere else. “Lieutena—wait a moment, I think—no.
Also! A
great fat beast of a man, with a mustache like a broom, and an implement to his speech, so that when he says something he makes this sound between the words:
shicksh, shicksh.
Now tell me am I right?”

“He is thin and dark,” Reinhart said evenly.

“Yes, an Italian,” Schatzi smiled his recognition. “Yes, I was able to obtain for him—you will pardon me, Madame—some items of which we shall only say they are worn by the ladies and cannot be seen unless one is—please pardon me, Madame—in a relationship of intimacy.” He laughed quaintly: “Hahahaheeheehee,” colored, and said: “Now I have gone too far.”

“That isn’t possible in the present company,” Reinhart answered hatefully.

“Oh, he speaks English all right, but I don’t get a word,” said Veronica to herself, and then to Reinhart: “Ask him if I can have another drink of that radiator fluid.” She threw up her hand. “I’ll pay him for it, don’t look so ghoulish.”

“Nonsense,” said Schatzi, already presenting the flask. “My compliments. You are a friend of Lieutenant Schilda? Please, I do not mean to offend.” Again he laughed, this time in a very horsy manner with open, serrated mouth. “Herr Unteroffizier Reinhart, please tell the lady what is the joke.”

“I wish I knew it myself,” Reinhart said sullenly. “I wish I knew what was so goddamned funny.”

“
Also,
Schilda is the town where the fools live. What is it in the States?”

“Reinhartville,” said its exclusive inhabitant, watching Very swallow the rest of the brandy. With gelid courtesy he accepted the weightless flask and gave it to Schatzi. “Well,” he said, turning to her, “your troubles are solved. Since Schild is Italian, he is also Catholic. He can marry you, and may I say no one would be more appropriate.”

She failed to answer. Already her eyes were distorted, as if one saw them under water.

“You will mah-ree Lieutenant Schild? How lovely,” crooned Schatzi, moving in upon her, thin jowls tremulous, as an ambitious chihuahua might approach a mastiff bitch. “I can furnish food and drink for the feast. But you must both soon go back to the U.S. When?”

“See what I mean?” murmured Very. “If that’s English, I’ll eat it.” Now her eyes looked as though a hair were drawn across each retina. By age thirty her figure would be throughout, like a Balkan peasant woman’s, the diameter of her chest; her abdomen in permanent pregnancy; thighs, like jodhpurs. The catalogue of Reinhart’s malice continued through her parts, which in the here and now were flawless... and the receptacle for a Jew. Evil, evil, evil—with evil he flagellated himself while there was still time. For of course he had this deep feeling about Jews, deeper than any he had had for Very; indeed, he recognized now, in the core of his hatred, that it was love. He loved the dead of the camps, and Bernstein, and half of Lori, and... Schild; and the dearer the possession, the dearer it was to lose it to them; nay, the dearest were not enough. Thus had Schild been in his presence then, he might have killed him as his wedding gift: Jews were too good to live.

“With all my resources am I trying to be understandable,” said Schatzi to Reinhart, pathetically. “
So,
you tell me please, Herr Reinhart, when is this mar-ee-ahzh?” He replaced the beret which he whipped off whenever he spoke to Very and drew Reinhart aside. In an undertone he asked: “And is not this queer?, this little
fête champêtre
without the fiancé? You rogue! The little Trudl is not sufficient for your capacity. And then the Bach woman, too, I believe, as well. Extraordinary. Soon you will have exceeded the Swiss Ambassador, Herr Vögli von Mögli Tägli.” As a period to his joke he again whinnied. “Did you grab it?
Vögle von moglich täglich.
Ah, no matter.”

“I had nothing to do with Lori,” Reinhart stated gravely, “at least not in that way.” Nevertheless he was grateful for the accusation. He might have resented another man’s combining the disparate ideas of sensuality and Frau Bach and projecting them upon him; but he saw at this juncture that rather than the deed it is the nature of the doer that rules moral judgment. Schatzi, the good German, the gentile, the witness that martyrdom was not exclusively Jewish; was it not a glorious truth of humanity that one virtuous man reclaimed a multitude of sinners? Looking at Schatzi—this twisted, blackened wire, never again to charge chandeliers, to make possible the splendors of filament or the shrewdness of connection; but
wire it still was; honor cannot be annihilated
—looking at him in homage, Reinhart said: “Why were you sent to Auschwitz?”

“Because I was a criminal,” Schatzi said mercilessly. “But now as concerning this present matter: who actually—he switched to German—“Who is this female lieutenant? Is she really going to marry this Schild? And, if so, when? Pardon my unusual curiosity, but the man owes me a considerable amount of money—enough, let us say, to give me an interest in any major activity of his. I suspect he’s a slippery customer. You know these Italians.”

How unfeeling of Reinhart to have stimulated these unpleasant memories! With an agitation painful to see, Schatzi babbled on in rapid and incomprehensible German, blinking, panting, wiping his nose.

“My friend,” said Reinhart, placing his big hand on Schatzi’s shoulder cap, encountering nothing there but bunched teddy-bear plush, withdrawing it lest the weight fell the poor ill person, “my friend, I did not mean to disturb you. I just want to say: is it not tragic that in our time it came to pass that a man had to be a criminal to remain decent?”