Crazy in Berlin (47 page)

“Bach hat kein Draht,”
said Mrs. Bach, who had a certain animation, but Schild decided Reinhart’s interest in her owed to the incapacity of her husband; thus it was a sinister thing, the sexual excitement of betrayal, in which she herself at least connived: “Bach has no wire.”

Lichenko’s way had been wholesome, to take the German woman by force. Last night when in sleepless midnight clarity he labored on the pillow, adding sums, he believed he had denied her to Lichenko because he wanted her for himself. Holy as a monk dreaming of the Virgin, he crept down to the kitchen and sacrificed himself upon the altar between her hard legs, she soundless except for piston hips upon the mattress. At seven o’clock, tame, she knocked upon his bedroom door and entered bearing breakfast on the last tray with which he served Lichenko and had no stomach to return for the last time to the messhall. In another land it would have been touching: bread, jam, coffee, from her own meager rations—her pantry was no Army larder—but the old hatred, now compounded, moved him rather to strike it to the floor.

“Bach has no wire,” Frau Bach repeated, and now Schild heard the contempt fall on Reinhart, not the giant. “If you wish something in this place, you must ask
me
.”

A flush of embarrassed lust suffused Reinhart’s skin, although she proceeded to define the precise limits of her statement. She drew a pin from her hair and threaded it through the lever’s empty screwhole.
“Also.”
Tense with pride, she opened the door.

Reinhart shook Bach’s hand. “We must go. Did I tell you that I like your suit?”

Bach perspired with gratitude. As high above Reinhart as the latter towered over Schild, as Schild himself loomed over Schatzi—but there ended the stairway of heads, whose lower steps would bear most weight, carrying as they did the others. But he had excluded Lichenko, smaller than he, larger than Schatzi, a truly free man who would fit in no progression.

“A gift,” said Bach, “of my kind wife. She adorns me rather than herself, probably because I am good for nothing else. But that, too, one learns to accept. The mystery remains, for whom was such a garment made? For it is my perfect size, and no tailor came to call with his tape measure. Singular!”

Reinhart, lifting away up, felt a lapel, and Schild remembered an old anti-Semitic routine: ‘Sam, the customer wants a green suit. Toin on the green light!’ Bach’s horn buttons were his proper interest: how much the gross, less the usual two percent for cash?

He supposed he saw in Frau Bach’s smile, which was entitled to it by half, the Hebraic celebration of a shrewd purchase as she spoke to Reinhart: “
Mögen Sie den Anzug,
do you like the suit? I bought it from this ‘Schatzi,’ little Trudchen’s friend.”

Reinhart gave her his large, gentile blandness: “It is beautiful.” Schild shook hands with everyone.

“You are always welcome here,” said Bach from the heart. “Next time perhaps things will be better and we can serve coffee!”

Schild permitted himself briefly to see that vision of Schild to which Bach had given, and offered to give again, hospitality; it was not unloving and it was not unloved, it was not institutional. Perhaps it also was free—but it passed too quickly into the dark cloaca of the cellar hall, and he had time only to call, in simulated enthusiasm:
“Knorke mit Ei!”

“Berlin slang, meaning ‘Splendid.’ ” He answered Reinhart’s question as they clung, Alpinists, to the summit of Monte Klamotte, Mount Rubble, and searched in darkness for the comb so marked in daylight.

“ ‘Splendid,’ ” Reinhart repeated, “ ‘splendid with an egg.’ There’s something about Berlin that gets you, isn’t there?”

“Me?” asked Schild.

“That gets a person, I mean.” Reinhart turned his ankle on a broken brick, starting a minor avalanche. “It always used to have an evil ring—also awesome and faraway, like ‘Mars,’ or ‘Jupiter.’ But here it is, and it is real. Strange to say, I just realized I love it.”

“Because it is broken,” said Schild.

“I guess so. All the crap has been blasted away, leaving something honest, and I think what the doctor meant was that honesty really does win out in the end. That is horrible and at the same time funny. ... Funnier yet because I believe the doctor himself is a fake.” By the poor, cloud-filtered light of an introvert moon he checked Schild’s face. “You see, I have been to that cellar before. The other time Bach told me a long story which turned out to be a lie.”

“A lie?”

“The whole cloth. Imagine him in the SS!”

“I can’t imagine anyone in the SS,” Schild lied. “Maybe that was a fake, too.” He did not understand why he could not speak straight to Reinhart; the good intent was there.

“Would to God it had been,” Reinhart answered fervently, and tripped himself up on a naked concrete-reinforcing rod, fell, kept talking: “Like the murder of the Belgian babies in World War I—give me a hand please?, I feel a hollow under here that I’ll break into if I make a commotion myself. ... Thanks—which was a propaganda lie. Dirty Nazis! They made it impossible to lie about the Germans. Thus Martin Luther and Frederick the Great and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe are swine, too, because they helped to make all this. Nürnberg, were you ever in Nürnberg? I used to think there was something fine there—” He crashed through the intervals of a grounded metal bedstead.

Schild took a lower way, through a shallow trough which yielded underfoot as if he walked across a human body. “When?” he asked.

“Never,” said Reinhart. “I was never there,
naturally.
I saw a book once. Albrecht Dürer’s house stands to this day, Albrecht Dürer, the old artist of the Middle Ages. He made one etching called ‘Ritter, Tod, und Teufel.’ When I first saw it I couldn’t read German, I didn’t know what that name meant, I knew only
Teufel,
and he was easy to spot: a face like a wolf, with mad eyes and one crescent-shaped horn in the back of his head and two like a ram’s curving out from under his ears. His ears were donkey’s. On the other side of the picture is Death, on a crummy, melancholy old horse. He has a long white beard, a hole for a nose, and wears a crown full of snakes, holds an hourglass. The scene takes place in a gully full of junk, lizards, skulls, tree-roots, etc.; it looks something like Berlin today. A sneaky-looking hound runs along the bottom, and there is Dürer’s trademark and the date on a little sort of tombstone.”

They had reached the bottom of their own declivity, which egressed to nowhere, and attacked the next smoking slope, Reinhart continuing to walk point.

“But in the distance you can see the towers of a great castle. Death and the Devil may have entree everywhere, but they are not in that castle, which I believe must represent a heaven. And neither is the Knight, who I’m coming to in a minute. Because he would not be a knight unless he served his time in the gully of death and the devil. Well, the Knight—there he is in the foreground, on his splendid charger walking stately through the crap, the Devil leering over the horse’s rump, old Death wheezing at him in front, the dog
sehleichend
along below, the castle far away—they could do him in and nobody in those towers would know it until too late, but even if they did, what good would it be? What help can anybody else give you against Death and the Devil?

“The castle is not relevant, as the doctor would say.” Reinhart passed through a doorway and was immediately again in the free air, for the wall stood alone in the world with no building as relative; Schild followed.

“Welcome to mine house,” said Reinhart. “I wish I knew where the hell we are, I think we’re coming back to Bach’s cellar.”

He stopped abruptly and Schild bumped into him and excused himself and said: “If you’d wait a minute I could show you.” He knew the way and wondered why he did not seize the leadership from Reinhart.

But Reinhart pistoled a hand and shot at a great concrete box on the dim horizon, an entire basement blown intact from the earth. “No, I see what I’ve been looking for. ... Neither are the Death and Devil relevant. The Knight rides through the gully as if he doesn’t see them. Of course he does—the style Dürer draws in, there’s not room for the enormous horse let alone anything else; they are packed in that lousy gulch like a frankfurter in its skin. Therefore the Knight sees them—but he walks on. And I tell you, they look pretty squalid. If you glance quickly at the picture you won’t see anything but the Knight, with his long straight spear, a bit of fur towards the tip, the splendid armor with which he is, as they say, caparisoned, but most of all that wonderful tough face, sure of itself, looking not at the airy castle or horseshit Death or the mangy Devil, because they’ll all three get him soon enough, but he doesn’t care. He is complete in himself—isn’t that what integrity means?—and he is proud of it, because he is smiling a little.”

Reinhart reached the caisson, where he waited till Schild climbed the rise and stood puffing beside him.

“And he is not en route to do combat with an unarmed enemy. He is a man and needs no helpless victim to give him respect. When I think of him there, walking forever across the pages of a moldy old book—and I guess not even there now, since my father burned it—I could... I could smile, I suppose, because I do not feel sorry for him.”

Schild smiled wryly and said: “You never saw the serf who had to help him into that heavy armor and take care of the splendid horse, or the bonded peasants who tilled his field, so that the knight could strut about as he pleased while the underlings did the work.” Perversely he clung to his loyalties while still older ones besieged him: stifling summer on the ramparts above Manhattan, windows sealed and blinds lowered as antithermal charm, faint sounds of street serfs playing stickball, Sir Nathan riding the rug, charging through a bowdlerized Malory in which Launcelot and King Arthur’s wife exchanged ethereal admiration.
For the French book saith that Sir Servause had never courage nor lust to do battle against no man, but if it were against giants, and against dragons, and wild beasts.

“No,” said Reinhart. He tore off a chunk of loose mortar from the wholesale cellar—astonishing that such strength was accompanied by any mind at all—and pitched it like a baseball, although it must have weighed fifteen pounds, far across the rubble range and down night’s black throat without a murmur.

“No,” Reinhart repeated, “you don’t get the idea. There were no serfs or vassals in this picture. This Knight was real, but not real. How can I say it? I just thought, he was not necessarily even a German. He is just a drawing—just art, is all—a lie, if you like. He belongs as much to a serf as he would to a real knight. A picture belongs to anybody who looks at it. It can even be burned, and somebody will still have it in his mind. Besides, you admit anyway that Death and the Devil are free to all—why not then the Knight?”

Because Jews were never knights, even though they had lived in Germany since long before the Middle Ages; was it in Heine that one read of the ancient Jewish communities along the Rhine?, who said: Don’t blame us for the killing of Christ, we were living here at that time! But riding the rug, working at the exalted old language to which he then had not yet realized he was historically a newcomer (but so, in his day, was Reinhart), neither did Sir Nathan admit his native disqualification for the quest of the Holy Grail.
Sir Launcelot let them say what they would, and straight he went into the castle, and tied his horse to a ring in the wall; and there he saw a fair green court, and thither he dressed himself, for there him thought was a fair place to fight in. So he looked about, and saw much people in doors and windows, that said, Fair knight thou art unhappy.

“But,” Reinhart said unhappily, “if you want to say they don’t make them like that nowadays, I agree with you. That’s progress for you: get rid of the whole works, serfs, peasants, castles—and knights, not to mention
Tod
and
Teufel.
Where do these kinds of Death and Devil fit in the doctor’s story—even if he is a fake?”

“He was real, all right,” Schild snapped. “I’m not sure about you and me, but he was real.”

“Nobody in that cellar ever shows you any evidence.”

Schild laughed in sharp anger and answered in his birthright idiom: “So whadduh you, district attorney?” It sounded authentic; he had not come so far; his temper softened. “You just said it is impossible to lie about the Nazis—”

Reinhart had found a chairleg and now slowly, inexorably bruised it against the concrete wall, until its end was fibrous as a brush.

“The Germans, I said, but I am glad to hear
you
think there is a difference.”

Quite right, the error was his, but why the special punishment? And why should Reinhart bring it, whom he trusted, to whom he was in a unique relationship of owing nothing and vice versa, his friend. ... The moon had eluded its cloud but was still niggardly, showing Reinhart as a large pale blob belonging to the powdered landscape. The gentile is everywhere at home. Reinhart leaned against the basement as if he owned it, waiting for the Jewish opinion.

“Why
me
?” Schild shouted in fear and loathing.

Reinhart was hurt, but calm. “Because you’re the only other German-American I’ve got to talk to. We have a common interest in those potato pancakes we were fed as boys.” His irony surprised him; he grinned and wrinkled his brow low, like an ape.

“For Christ’s sake,” said Schild, “don’t tell me you don’t know I’m a Jew.”

He had been wrong about Reinhart’s face; its contempt was as acute as its good feeling had been blunt.

“All right,” said Reinhart. “You’re better than I am, you know everything without having to try, and you can stick it up your ass.”

He shuffled along the basement wall, kicking up brick dust, which filtered through the hairs of the inner nose smelling like cordite. He now looked rather more resigned than angry, and at the corner of the concrete he threw up his head, pointed, and called: “The path is here!”

He had known where it was all the while. Why had he led them to wander? He was sinister, but he was also good. He descended an excavation, his round head falling evenly from sight.