IDLY, BUT WITH GREAT care, Schild marked the room and its furnishings: solid pieces, dark; dual escutcheon lamps on the wall at various points in an academic rhythm: fireplace, for example, bracketed by a pair whose vertical members swelled like pregnant bellies to the points of the switches. A corner stove, ceramic, beige, built up of molded doughnuts of ever-diminishing circumferences, baroque welts and carvings, small black door amidships for introduction of fuel. Which was those bricks stacked neatly by.
“Compressed coal dust, very tidy,” said Lovett, who had come up silently and followed the direction of Schild’s eyes. “These Germans are the most technically advanced people in Europe, damn them, if that’s a recommendation. The throne room upstairs has a pushbutton flusher—what I mean is, no chain!” He threw himself gingerly on the very edge of a sofa cushion, giving the impression of artificial vivacity, and staring, said: “No, I don’t know you—you’re surely new in the outfit.”
“Look, Lieutenant, you invited me yesterday. Frankly, I wish you’d remember it.” Schild spoke in the sharp tone of eminent reason. Yet he seldom used it for so slight a cause as this, and he wondered now at himself: whether his motive had been on Schatzi’s example, or that from some hint of unconscious fear he had suddenly needed exterior proof of his identity.
“Certainement,” said Lovett quickly. “You’re the Nazi-hunter. I’m sorry. Have you met any of these lovely people?” Upon the negative he rose, saying “How lucky you are,” and snatching Schild’s arm, led him through the crowd to the kitchen, which was 1920’s-modern, with a gas stove up on four legs, like the one everybody’s mother once had, including Schild’s, and a bright, yet enclosed breakfast nook sprinkled with painted rosebuds, fir trees, and goody-goody gnomes in Lederhosen and dirndls, a sovereign little house within the house. Peering inside, Schild made out the witch, a small worn person of feminine gender, smiling bereavement, expropriation, and sycophancy.
“Atrocious old bitch of a Nazi housekeeper,” said Lovett. “That’s who.” His attenuated index finger signaled dismissal, and the old woman trotted her carpet slippers up the back stairs to the second floor.
When they were inside the booth Lovett produced, by an elaborate act of spontaneous creation, a full bottle of Scotch and two paper cups.
“And what are you?” he asked without warning, lolling his head and transforming his eyes into little knife-cuts intended to symbolize high interest. “I mean, what are you really?”
To have reproduced exactly what Schild’s mother had once asked, Lovett should have gone on: “You are still a good boy?” And should have been lying on a hospital bed, the white, segmented, cranked-and-rodded dais of pain, flanked by electrical nurse-alarms, half-filled vessels of water, folded cardboard sputum cups; should have worn magnifying glasses which projected eyes in terrible, bloated particularity, showing the iris as not a smooth round but rather an uneven burst of pigment threads darning into the void of the pupil, repeating silently the accusation so often voiced in earlier times of health: that their vision was lost in the pregnancy that engendered him. A queer, cruel, lifelong lie, that not until she was under ground did he, consulting the old schoolgirl snapshots, expose. Indeed, it was only by the spectacles that you could know her amid the anonymity of fifty middy blouses.
Come tell me the truth, they ask, of which you are manifestly a walking denial: what crimes lie concealed behind your façade, who are you to be closed when we, the rest of us, are open? And how determined they are to wonder forever, how implacable is their will to ignorance! “I am nothing that I wished to be: chronologically, not a fireman, not a cowboy, not a gentile, philosopher, lover, nor revolutionary. But what are your failures?”
No purpose in asking that of Lovett, who was really a kind of success, who besides had wanted only a simple statement of civilian occupation, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, against which to set his own probably rare, surely very dear calling. He saw in no pride that Lovett had chosen him, of all the crowd, for cahoots, just as the lone Negro in a company would draw to him, or the person with a lisp or one arm, the girl with the hair-lip, and it happened twice at parties for Russian war relief that he attracted the pariah of that context, the lost Republican who cornered him to trust, conspiratorially, that the aid would not strengthen communism in that forlorn country. Whatever the pariahhood, it unerringly found and clove to him: he must stink of separateness. From this final, subtlest of variations on anti-Semitism, which built its Dachau in the heart, there was no refuge, and he foresaw the day he would be assigned to infiltrate the B’nai Brith and at the first meeting be pulled aside to receive the confidence of some disguised Nazi.
“I was a teacher at a private school.”
Lovett smirked triumphantly. “In New York?”
Where else? Schild felt himself capable of the accent of East Broadway and the Houston Street shrug, but was proved right in his restraint by Lovett’s next question.
“Fashionable?”
Perhaps it was the Scotch which had sheared the falls and rises from the usually schizophrenic voice, leveled it into an even plain of clay, for what Schild heard was “fashionable,” and he was disinclined to believe it, even of Lovett.
But a timid knock on the back door freed him from the issue, a weak knock, but followed rapidly by an entry in the opposite character, bold, brutal, hinge-torturing.
“Oh, why do they use the yard?” Lovett wailed. “We have a pretty john!”
In a moment his despair sharpened into fright. A freckled Soviet face, mounted on tunic shoulder-boards and wearing a cap awry, poked jovially into the entrance of the dinette.
And roared: “Herr Leutnant, ich bin hier. Was für ein Haus! Schön, Schön!”
The Russian was a little lieutenant of artillery, dressed in high-neck tunic, flared breeches like displaced wings, and boots. His good brown eyes searched for an object that did not elicit admiration, and failed. A line of dirt across his prominent Adam’s apple showed how far he had washed. His hair had been shaved up to the temples, and obviously with a dull scissors, by himself and that very afternoon. He saluted Lovett, Schild, and the house. Saying “Verzeihung,” he stepped to the sink and took a drink of water through his hand.
Lovett had met him on a black-market mission to the Kurfürstendamm, picked him up for a souvenir, for who had ever known a Russian?; had written out the address—who ever thought he would find it? The only trouble was he only spoke German, who could talk to him my Gawd! Finding that Schild could, Lovett sniffed in pique and vanished.
In the living room the lieutenant shook off Schild’s patronage and charged the cautious company with outthrust arm, announcing “Leutnant Lichenko!” And prevailed, pumping hands and snowing compliments, and when he had taken care of even the humblest, he turned the approbation on himself. He explained the three medals in a Venetian-blind overlap on his thin chest, the deeds of valor which they marked, and expressed curiosity that the Americans were not equipped with boots. His own, he averred, were of a superb workmanship and quality beside which the German-army issue could not dare to show its pressed-paper grain. He applied the same judgment to his tunic, breeches, belt, and cap. The latter he removed extravagantly for the ladies but replaced directly. He wore it as he and Schild studied the phonograph, which by means of a small device on either side of the turntable had knowledge of each record’s duration and released new ones at the proper intervals from the stack it bore.
“Goes round, herum, push button to play again, to puh-lay a-gain, pu-ush button. Sechs records only, will it take. Compree? Sechs records,” said Nader, winking stupidly at Schild.
“What’s that, Dwight Fiske?” asked a thin dentist who had joined the elbow crowd. “ ‘The Colonel’s Tropical Bird.’ There’s a sex record for you, Leek!”
Who was a plump kibitzer of a nurse that threw him a dreadful smile and said, dreadfully: “You’re so-o-o-o gay.” Pointing at Lichenko, she asked Schild, “Suppose he’d like to dance?” But Schild had already given her his back.
Lichenko took off his cap, scratched his head, inspected the fingernail, replaced the cap, and begged Leek’s pardon. Throughout, his left eye, which seemingly he could work independently of the right one, was fixed towards a picture on the next wall, and his feet were casually screwing him that way. At last he was ready to go directly before it, to abrade its surface—in an inconspicuous corner, so that if damage were caused none would show—and to proclaim: “A genuine oil painting. Oh, very schön, indeed. Private property, yes? But roses in a bowl and nothing else! Where can the philosophy be in something like this?” Did Schild know Repin? Oh, ausgezeichnet, excellent, excellent!” “Ivan the Terrible Kills His Son.” Bloody picture. Angst, Angst! “This we call the Russkaya dusha, the Russian soul. Or did you know that already?”
With the question, for which since he was not just making noise he wished an answer, he gave specific notice to his benevolent patron: “You do know, das ist sehr gut: all these things can be useful for friendship. My German is fluent, yes? And my accent is unusually accurate. That is because I worked at it both in theory and in application. Ach, it is not easy to do things the right way, but it is always possible, ja?, always possible, my friend.”
He had said “my friend” and taken Schild’s hand. Russian male friends kissed on meeting and walked hand-in-hand, yet since 1917 homosexuality had all but vanished in the Soviet Union.
His calluses torturing Schild’s smooth palm, Lichenko approved: “Your German, you know, is excellent. Was this learned in the wonderful American schools?”
Oh, partly, and in part from a grandfather. Schild was pleased and apprehensive at once, the latter from questioning, any questioning.
“You are of German descent, then? Does it give you a queer feeling to return to your old motherland as an enemy? The Russian word is rodina. Rodina—motherland. I will teach you the Russian language in this manner, term by term, although I am Ukrainian. But Russian nowadays is more useful, yes? But you are German?”
Schild smiled lazily to let it pass, but Lichenko ripped at his fingers: “Tell me, tell me!”
Sneezes, orgasms, interrogations, their irrevocable end is ordained in their beginning.
“Ich bin jüdisch.”
“I see, I see! Then it is not queer but pleasant!” Lichenko grinned—indeed, he had not stopped grinning: the ravines in his face were grin-grooves, his irregular nose was lumpy with grin, these along with his winged thighs making him a Mercury of mirth. It was, frankly, a private thing, which he could respect while not losing any skin from his own ass.
And he was soon away to other pictures and objets d’art, furniture, rugs, and the dark-blue wallpaper with its silver suggestions of flower petals dissolving in ink. He bounced into an obese chair, which bounced him halfway out. He sneaked carefully back into place, and the chair submitted to good manners. As for Schild, he sat crosslegged at its side on the floor.
Lichenko’s German was very good, too, for he was an educated man, an engineer, in fact, although the war had caught him before he finished school. His intended specialty concerned dams and sluiceways, the diversion of streams, paradises from deserts, the transformation of the face of the earth, or anyway one-sixth of it. Nor was Soviet engineering a cultural Siberia. He slid easily from an apostrophe to steamshovels into American writing, where he was better than oriented.
“We read American books in the Soviet Union!” he shouted happily, digging his hard heels into the floor. “More than we do Russian. Also, more than you read in the United States. You know, of course, that American authors would starve but for the money they get from Soviet sales.”
“I know,” said Schild, who did, at that moment; did, because fact can be countermanded by wish and hope and generosity and brotherhood, else we are lost.
“Have you read Dreiser?” he asked.
“The greatest American writer,” replied Lichenko. “But Upton Sinclair Lewis is schön, too, and Jack London’s Babbitt and The Iron Heel.”
“I met Dreiser once.”
“Also” Lichenko mumbled, removing his cap and testing his forehead with a sweaty palm.
“He spoke at the school where I taught. A great, majestic man, a champion of humanity, and a friend of the Soviet Union, as I suppose you know.”
“Es interessiert mich das zu wissen,” said Lichenko vaguely, but hopped to his feet positively, and bowed. For there stood Leek.
“Now, you can’t keep our ally out of circulation!” she chided, and led Lichenko to the dancing area—though not before Schild was constrained to translate some small-talk, including a Soviet tribute to womanhood in an ornate German that englished as something Albert might have said to Victoria; nor before he volunteered to hold the doffed but troublesome cap, Lichenko having been at a loss for a cache where that article would be neither crushed nor stolen.
A universal sense of fun could not be withstood. The troublesome shortage of fuel reached Lichenko’s apparatus, without benefit of Schild, and he laughed long and loud, tore himself from the Siamese coupling with Leek, and shot into the kitchen and out the back door. He reappeared with a shoulder sack of bottles: vodka, schnapps, whisky, and other fluids.
Glasses flowed, music tinned, everybody danced. Reinhart, Schild saw, glided about as if on figure skates with the large nurse, in the perfect attitude of the adolescent sexual captive: closed eyes, back arched affetuoso. A more direct confirmation of the reputed egalitarianism of medical units could not be imagined.
Schild thought about Lichenko, who had so little and so much. Throw the switch of the time machine and there he was, with his cartload of firewood, ankle-deep in mire, on his weary animal way to the sod hut, the black bread, and the cabbage; the trashy icons; the spent wife; the ravished, if pretty, the prematurely aged, if plain, daughter; swearing so vilely that if his master had the ill fortune to canter past, he might have got another crop’s end for his lifelong collection of abuse. Born old, senile at twenty, dead at forty, without ever having passed through the human. A lump of dung, hating love and beauty and intelligence because he was defined by their absence. So, gorge the rotten potatoes, let the grease befoul the lips and drip from the chin, fill the gut with the stolen bottle, and when it explodes in the head, give the wife a fist to her decaying teeth and the daughter a hand between her thighs, because you are beyond judgment, beyond hope. But not beyond history, which moves not for revenge or profit or virtue, but for the negation of negation, the arrangement of disorder, above all, for an end to waste.
These things mature without ever having been formally born. Lichenko was, of a sudden, disorderly. Only a moment earlier he had displayed high, good, and legitimate spirits; now he had enrolled in that brotherhood of savage peoples from whom firewater should be, and often is, legally withheld. His maw sagged; his eye carmined; he drank as if, oblivious to the torrent that washed his face and gummed his tunic, he hungered for glass, and proved it by incising a piece of the tumbler’s rim. A pencil line of blood traced out the groove of his chin, like the after-punch make-up of movie martyr-priests who may invite their adversary to put on the gloves but never return the favor ad hoc.
Amidst all those medics his wound went unattended, on the theory that if he lost enough blood he might collapse peaceably. But he had just begun to play. After checking Leek in an armchair, he detonated into the frenzy of a solo jackknife dance. The floor quaked, for although he was small, the boards were simpatico with his rhythm; the rolled carpet against the far wall, which was not, had its long, heavy belly rent by a boot-heel.
With such sport, with Lovett impotently aflutter, with Nader enveloping himself in the phonograph wires, with the awed company’s disengagement, the room was progressively demolished. Lichenko’s success with the carpet sent him to Leek’s chair, which, after removing her, he ruined with a single jump, hard heels forward; he smashed the mantlepiece mirror, pelted coal cakes in black bursts against a carved lowboy, got a painting once out of six throws with as many tumblers, and shouted “Bezbol!” Then, to Schild, he said: “Fascists.”
“Yes,” answered Schild.
“Not the Americans.”
“No.”
“The Germans. Why should this house be spared? If you saw what they did in my country...” He sank wearily into the chair and passed a hand across his face. He signaled to Leek, pointing at his lap. She sat there submissively, bovinely, as he read her idly in Braille.
Still on the floor, Schild shifted his weight from left to right ham and adjusted his pistol belt.
“Will you permit me to see your weapon?” asked Lichenko. He ejected Leek. He looked feverish as he palmed the Colt. A vein in his forehead pumped into prominence. He worked the action, stroked the barrel, warmed it with his cheek, and peeped down the muzzle. He found the clip, extracted it, loosened a bullet, felt its slug, replaced the bullet, replaced the clip, pointed the piece at the still proximate Leek, went “Boom, boom!” or thereabouts in Russian vowels, finger on trigger guard.
Ignoring her squeak, squeaking himself in delight, he took out his own pistol and thrust it butt first at Schild.
“We’ll exchange. Then we’ll each have a souvenir of a time we will never forget.”
It was what the Russians called a Nagan, a cheaply made cap-gun affair, but Schild accepted it reverently, and, though he detested firearms, gave an earnest imitation of Lichenko’s ecstasy over the Colt.
“You agree? You will exchange?” shouted Lichenko. “My dear friend, I salute you!”
On his feet, he highballed with the right hand, a dwarf against the bas relief of the large Americans who had started to surge genially upon him through the dismembered furniture. Schild was rising in honor of the moment, at the very least to return the salute, when Lichenko began to discharge the .45. He perhaps intended to squeeze off only one cartridge as an additional salute to fortune, but the kick from the one convulsed his hand into another, and he was drawn nolens volens into a full tribute.
Below the scored ceiling and within the vermiculated walls, Lichenko, now-spent gun drooping, sniffed the atmosphere of powder, appeared about to sneeze, did not, and pushed a reproachful lower lip like a coal chute at Schild.
“Ah, my friend, this American pistol!”
He tore at his choker collar. “Excuse me, Vasya is ill...” And fell prone into the plaster, which, of course, was now the common ground.
“You win the medal,” said Lieutenant Leek, an unjolly snowman, to Schild.
He blew clean his glasses and inquired silently with blurred vision.
“For Number One Horse’s Ass, Berlin District.”
Nader touched Schild’s elbow and whispered: “Look, Jack, Lovett went for the MPs. Get your ass-hole buddy out of here. We’ll con them. He was just drunk.” He knelt beside Lichenko and fingered back an eyelid, peered at the red orb. “Drunk as a skunk.” He ordered Corporal Reinhart to lend a hand.
Reinhart lifted Lichenko by the belt and pulled him over a shoulder.
“Veronica, why don’t you go along?” asked Nader. “Jesus, maybe he’s dead.”
“O.K. Thanks for the party,” said she. “I had a lovely time anyhow.”
Reinhart navigated through the rear door and into the garden. Already military-police sirens sounded in the distance. Through the back yards, having trouble at every sonbitching fence, and around the block to Schild’s house was their silent way. Reinhart’s calves were tired on the stairs, but he gripped the banister and made it in good shape to the room, where as his burden was lowered to the bed it came to life briefly, displaying a revolving eye, and returned to dreamland with a mouthful of bedspread.
Veronica examined the body from a distance, found it hale. Reinhart said: “You’re a good fellow, sir, to do this for that Russian. If his army found out about it he’d be headed for Siberia.” And Very seconded that.
“I think,” said Schild, “the American Army is what we have to worry about at the moment.” He took a tiny package from his pocket. “Can you use these?”
Anybody who ever opened a K ration had Fleetwood cigarettes to dispose of, yet Reinhart was sure these were his own come home. He was too weary, the evening had been too extravagant, to inquire by what route.
New relations consisting so fiercely in the precise time of day and the specific mise en scène, the sudden dislocation of these threw both Very and Reinhart into a diffidence, especially now as, their task ended, they went out of step down the sidewalk to Very’s house. From the side of his eye Reinhart could see her shoulder bag swinging off the divisions of silence. An occasional officer or nurse, not breaking the peace, breathed past them in the frenetic diaspora from the party. Down the street, its siren dying like a throttled pussycat, another MP jeep arrived.
At her door, Reinhart chickened out of trying for a good-night kiss, perhaps with a view towards establishing his independence, which, in the pale simulacrum of post coitum tristis that was his after-party letdown, he felt had been compromised. Or perhaps it was a defense against the progressive frigidity she gave off as they approached the front step.
“Oh this is where you live?” he asked numbly.
“Haha! Were you going to charge me with breaking and entering?”
This cruel parody of his own earlier fantasies on the mansion of her person, despite the false laughter—whose spuriousness was advertised by its miraculous lack of resonance; it was as if a great bell rang so shallowly that nothing trembled—suddenly elicited his overdue response to Lichenko’s rampage. To assault an entity of order, to register a spontaneous nay against the sanctioned and authorized; mean, but it were meaner than never to be so moved.
But Very skipped insouciantly inside the doorway. Shortly, her other end appeared, saying: “See you in the funny papers.”