Crazy in Berlin (36 page)

“No, please, I’m not—”

“No,” said Reinhart, “I won’t say anything more about it, I promise.” He sat down on the log he had earlier used as head-stop. “Here, have a cigarette with me.” He took one himself and pressed the remainder of the pack upon Schatzi, who, still upset, struck it away. “Go on, you can keep them, I mean it,” Reinhart said and with sweet exasperation looked to Very for support, and saw her ambling drunkenly up the trail off the beach.

Schatzi marked her too and in a kind of fear choked: “She leaves!”

“Yes,” Reinhart answered dully. “And I don’t think she knows the way back.” Aware of his responsibility, he nevertheless took his own good time in mounting a pursuit, so that when at last he arose she had for some moments been out of vision, beyond a bristling turn of bush. And then the essential sadness struck him like an instant fever: a woman abandoned, unloved, stumbling off alone. In this matter he could be of some use, all the more because of the late harm done his vanity: for once put aside your goddamned self!

Pelting round the bush, squashing pine cones, whipped by green streamers, he spied her moving particularly, whoopsily up a bank of firs ten yards from the path where stood motionless a substantial animal showing the outline of a wolf, as well as its immediate difference: a tiny twig between its monster jaws. Seeing Reinhart, the dog spat out and as soon recaptured the twig, danced, made as if at him then away, and suddenly losing guts and idea, dropped the stick and with lifted leg discharged a high stream of urine against a sapling.

“Come back, Veronica,” Reinhart called. “The dog is harmless.”

But first to respond was the animal. Kicking back a spray of sand and leaves, it advanced on him sportively, threw great paws upon his blouse, and sought to lave his face with a tongue big as a towel.

“Down, boy!” By a mistake of tactics he was drawn into the game of shove-return; the more forcefully he flung the heavy body back, the more joyfully did it thrust in again, with salivary grin and mock-ferocious tusks. From her place among the firs Very peeped through the hairy branches and screamed.

“Cut it out!” Reinhart yelled. “I told you he was harmless. Down, you fool! Get down, damn you. Oh, damn you.
Heraus
!”

But nothing served till Schatzi, coming up silently behind, barked:
“Pfui!”
Midway in its spring, the dog at once closed in upon itself like a jackknife and folded to the ground.

“What we call a German shepherd,” said Reinhart, brushing himself clean. “Does he belong to you?” The dog looked from Schatzi to him in the quick, simple changes of canine emotion, from a loyal shame to a disloyal expectation, and slunk its great head forward in a neutral direction.

“Oh my goodness gracious!” Schatzi said in exasperation. “It follows me about—but swiftly now before she returns back...”

It appeared he had taken as an expression of fact Reinhart’s wry remark that this Schild should marry Veronica; was concerned about the money Schild owed him: “married men have spare marks” were his words. “But if they marry they must leave soon for the States,
ja
? Married couples are not permitted by the military laws to exist while giving service into the American Army—do I make this clear?”

Reinhart backed away a step: in the high emotion of his interest Schatzi had begun to spray a mist of spit. Curious fellow; but then if Schild, whom it seemed everybody had a case against, was in his debt, no wonder. Owing money to an alumnus of Auschwitz was a good deal rottener than any sexual transgression. He decided it was impeccable to detest Schild, and since that detestation had no intercourse with anti-Semitism, it was generative of power.

“Look,” he said in a strong, new voice. “I will get your money back.
I
will. Just don’t you worry. You shall have it.” He seized the man’s birdlike right hand and crushed it in pledge. Then seeing Schatzi’s emotion rise rather than fall and not wishing the embarrassment of maudlin thank-you’s, he slipped away to fetch Very, who while they talked had gingerly emerged from her green shelter and reached the trail.

“Pfui teufel!”
said Schatzi, behind him, and the dog, who had presumably offered to be out of order, whined like the slow splitting of a board.

Picking the briars from Very’s uniform, brushing her with disinterested, whisked hands, he counseled her not to brood upon and surrender to misfortune; for his promise to retrieve Schatzi’s money had been but a prefatory resolution to the main, to the one with which he assumed the obligation of her rescue.

“Don’t tell me what to do,” said Very, as a drunk does,
de haut en bas.
“And watch your hands.” Since he was at that moment in the region of her shoulder blades and had not gone lower, this could hardly be the complaint of modesty outraged.

So he laughed and smacked her full on the bum and repeated: “Don’t worry!”

“You’re vulgar,” she said with dignity and marched on to the log, and sat, and coolly went a-fishing in her bag.

Reinhart threw up his hands in light despair, for the benefit of Schatzi, who was looking the very devil. The dog leaped to its feet; Schatzi cried:
“Pfui!”
It subsided.

“Why does he keep making that hideous sound?” asked Very, pinching her face into a tiny looking glass while her other hand screwed a scarlet bullet of lipstick from its golden shell.

“Madame,” he answered, instantly restored, definitely bowing. “This ahneemal is an undisciplined rahscal without a code of ethical manners. One feels that one must give apologies.”

“I think,” said Reinhart as he saw her face sour, “that she wants to know why you say ‘Fooey.’ Is that the dog’s name?”

“Ah! Ohhohoho,
jetzt verstehe ich.
But no, this is how in German we speak to docks. What must you say? We say
Pfui!
This means ‘stop what you do!’ ‘dezist!’ and so forth.”

“It seems to work very well,” said Reinhart. “I’ve never seen a dog trained so well.”

“Why not?” Very said to her mirror in weary disgust. “That’s the way the people are here, except that instead of ‘Fooey’ it was Der Fooey. Heil, Der Fooey!” She fascist-armed her lipstick.

“Knock it off, Veronica. You don’t know what you’re saying.”

“Heil Reinhart,” she cried, playing on him the sun’s little spotlight off the mirror.

“Ignore her,” he told Schatzi, only to see the man vastly amused and himself raise a flat palm and say: “Heil Reinhart!” and laugh with stained teeth.

“Excuse me,” said Schatzi, repeating the salute but this time only mouthing the address. “However, it is very funny to see Americans do this.” He clapped himself upon the skull. “Of course! I am forgetting! Soon I may find your relatives, dear boy.”

Reinhart counterfeited an excitement he did not feel: “You don’t mean it.”

“Most surely I do.” Schatzi shrugged in his coat, cast an ominous glance upon the dog, and grimaced at the lapping margin of the water unclean with minor driftwood. “I am on the tracks, it is as much as to say.” He inspected Reinhart to see what he had aroused, put a finger in the aperture of his own ear, and said: “Ah well, perhaps I am interfering with your afternoon.”

“Not at all! Sit down on this log and tell me about it. What could be more important!” Or more inconvenient? He sat down, himself, a weariness having caught him in the reins. He envisioned his kin as tattered, hungry, and cellar-dwelling, that much responsibility added to his present chores. Arrange an abortion for a Catholic, retrieve money from a Jew, accept as family a tribe of Germans, go and catch a falling star, get with child a mandrake root—here at last were things to do, God wot. The dog, he noticed, was inching towards him on its belly, great gray lout of a thing, beseeching.

“Well,” said Schatzi, continuing to stand. “I have my look upon a certain family right there in Zehlendorf, who I know had had some great-uncle go to America many years ago.”

“But is their name Reinhart?”

“That is simply the whole point. No. But could not have your grandfather a sister?—who would quite naturally change her name when she married a husband?”

In relief, Reinhart said: “Now you’re joking.” Behind Schatzi’s back the dog had crept forward two feet; now it paused and slavered amiably. “No doubt thousands of Germans have relatives in America, and none of them named Reinhart. But it’s my fault. I never gave you my grandfather’s first name and date of birth.”

“Also,”
Schatzi reacted. “You had better do that, so that we can put to shame the false persons who will try to claim your blood.” Jamming his fists deep into his pockets, he shuddered.

“Ill write it down,” said Reinhart, “—are you cold in the sunlight?”

“Mere
Angst,
” Schatzi smiled. “Freedom is difficult to endure. But you must use my pen.” He brought forth one of those American fountain pens that profess to last a lifetime—Reinhart wondered if he had owned it in Auschwitz: “Mr. Schatzi of Berlin, Germany, used this Superba Everlasting Masterwriter for three years in the living death of a concentration camp. Yet when he was liberated
it still wrote good as new
!” He also produced a writing surface: a matchbook cover, also Yankee, on the outside a riot of yellow and red exhortation; within, a cooler plea terminating in a tiny coupon one could, if his name were no longer than Li Po’s, mail in with ten cents for a sample of accessories to shaving.

Under the salutation provided by the advertiser—
Dear Allah Shavecream Folks: Yes, I want to take advantage of your generous offer. Please rush sample kit to:
—Reinhart had no alternative but to write:

Gottfr. Reinhart, b. Aug 14, ’61.

“Thus!” said Schatzi, reading the script close to his face. “An old man.”

“He died more than ten years ago.”

“Therefore one can die in America just as anywhere else,
ja
? This is sometimes doubted in Europe, and then it is too suggested you stuff your dead as hunting trophies and mount them round the parlor, but I am sure this is peculiar to Kah-lee-for-nia, if there.”

Quick to catch his mood of levity, Reinhart jokingly commiserated: “Too bad, I spoiled your coupon.”

Schatzi reclaimed his pen so quickly that Reinhart’s fingers felt as if struck by the beak of a carnivorous bird. “Whatever do you mean?” he cried, reading the matchbook, then slyly cocked his head: “This is a swindle,
ja
? The persons at this postal box will still keep your ten cents and send you nothing,
ja
? Hahaha...”

No doubt it lay very deep, but Reinhart was never hindered by such a concern when it would be mean and ill-mannered to withhold a reply in kind. He made laughter, too, and as Schatzi’s increased in volume his own increased in racket, sobbing for breath, and was joined in the second chorus by Very’s golden instrument—how healthy it was to hear her!

Screaming with laughter as one does when he finds the joke is that there is none, Reinhart watched the dog worm in under the clamorous cover and, taking from the general amusement a fool’s license, roll upon its spine and wave great ludicrous paws.

Expecting Schatzi to begin laughing all over again, he saw him instead hide the matchbook in a fastness of his coat and, stooping, attempt to take the dog unawares with a hook of fingers to its upside-down head. To scratch was apparently his intent; but the dog held to the first appearance, rolled upright, and fell back snarling into the fence of Reinhart’s legs.

“I offer to this thing love,” Schatzi said, “and receive back only ill humor.
Was kann man tun?
Worse than a human woman.” He stared at Very. “I must be about to my business, now. What did you say Madame’s name is?”

Since in her present state Very would no doubt take unkindly an oral answer; since her head was at the moment turned away, Reinhart picked up a stick and scratched
VERONICA LEARY
in the sand, feeling somehow, against his better judgment, as if he were selling her to a white-slaver; and in atonement to Schatzi—for how wickedly misguided was a heart which was queasy towards
him
—offered another five hundred marks to finance his assignment.

“You must not at all times be so ready with your purse,”

Schatzi adjured. “What have I done for you as yet? Besides, do you know, there could be only a single payment if I give you satisfaction. Namely, that when you return back to the Oo Ess Ah you find my kinsfolk there.”

“
You
have American relatives?” Reinhart wished instantly he had not sounded incredulous.

“That is my only trouble. But I should accept some, nonetheless, and they could be gangsters or anything, I would not care.”

Little, wistful man, he shook goodbye with Reinhart and then with Very—yes, she too put out her hand—and ambled up the trail. With no more clowning, with frequent backward faces of reproach, the dog followed.

I
T WAS A FALLACY
to confuse animals with human beings. Schatzi thought for a moment, as if he were counting seconds on his fingers, then gave the dog another taste of the stick. He had a technique of whipping refined to maximum sting, minimum bruise. The dog was his property and to disable it were no sense. Simultaneously with the blow, he said soberly and with no great volume:

“Guard the boat.”

The beast cried out, as was to be expected, and, as Schatzi knew, far in excess of what the pain would require, for it was not without a limited intelligence. Its chief want was constancy: a singular defect in one of a breed noted for just that virtue. But then, in justice to the dog, it had come into his possession no longer than a fortnight ago, and there was reason to believe its primary loyalty was still fastened to the former owner, a fellow countryman who had reciprocated to the extent that he recoiled from an offer of two packs of cigarettes but sold him for three.

He, Schatzi, had fed it well, had made obvious a capacity for return affection relative to what the beast showed him, had shown tolerance to the first few miscarriages of the dog’s assignments, was now nearing the margin of estrangement. When the disobedience could be interpreted as willful, he understood, even approved: the finest organisms are those with a recalcitrant substance which when tamed by its master does not dissolve but compounds with his own. Thus Russian cavalrymen he had seen who were one with their horses, not so much riders as centaurs. This in fact was the timeless sense of the ancient myth. But he had begun to think otherwise of the dog, to see in it a fundamental baseness which said not: “I refuse to guard your cursed boat until you associate it with my being.” But rather, “What boat? I chase hares and sport in the sand, and you beat me for your pleasure.”