ON HIS WAY TO WORK the morning after the party, Reinhart strolled down Very’s way. An irregular blob of olive-drab descending her porch was soon fashioned by his eyes into her form, but as it came towards him on the sidewalk he saw it was not Very but her antithesis: the lieutenant who took in drunken Russians.
He was rather shorter than the evening before and indefinably seedy, with dust on his glasses; yet he had a more assured address, hard and bright. He was the kind of Jew before whom Reinhart felt very vulnerable, as if somewhere back he had done him a dirtiness which he, himself, did not remember but the Jew never forgot. He felt this while knowing it was not true, for not only had he not done them wrong: he had never done them anything one way or the other. None of his best friends were Jews. The species was unknown in his home town, which had no foreigners—just another reason for its unspeakable dreariness. At college there were some, who had their own fraternity and seemed to go around en bloc, occasionally sitting next to one in classes, where they were usually witty and always clever; and some girls as well, who were either remarkably beautiful or characteristically ugly, never plain, and it was a pity the lovely ones were off-limits—there had been a girl, forever enrolled on his list of classics, with sable hair, alabaster nose, cheeks of white iris, and an exquisite name, Esther Rosewater, which he used to say underbreath when she passed oblivious, Esther Rosewater, how I love you, Esther Rosewater; she made him weak in the knees, and never knew it. For that was the other thing about Jews; when they weren’t eying you with suspicion, they never saw you at all.
As to this lieutenant, Reinhart thought: I could break him in two. At the same time, he was vaguely afraid of him.
Badly returning Reinhart’s salute—his fingertips not quite making it to the inferior rim of his spectacles—the lieutenant referred briefly to their mission of the night before. He had found upon awakening that Miss Leary had dropped a comb in his rooms, and he had just returned it. Palpably of small value but it was her property and women care about such things, don’t they?, smiling in the condescending conspiracy of the males. He could have been lying. Reinhart, who was unusually observant, remembered no loss. Yet losses remembered are hardly losses; moreover, an officer, unlike a noncom, had little reason to dissemble in courting a nurse.
“Was Miss Leary in?”
“No, I left it with her roommate.”
“What’s her name, by the way?”
But Schild didn’t know and cared enough only to ask: “Don’t you know? Isn’t Lieutenant Leary your girl?”
Reinhart had a tendency to toss the ball to his superiors, to tell an excess of truth that would confront them with the damning fact of their authority. When he said sorrowfully “How can she be?” the lieutenant’s response confirmed him. He, the officer, showed not only understanding but sympathy.
“I have no objections, certainly.”
Now it was his apparent approbation that made Reinhart uneasy. He would have preferred to leave while he was ahead, but the lieutenant hung on, walking with him towards the administration building.
“The Russian—did he recover all right? He was a crazy little fellow. Sometimes I think all Russians are mad, or is that Communism in action? Have you seen what they did in Wannsee?”
He fancied that with his first word the lieutenant had shot an angry look: of course, one’s big mouth had not considered that he might be a Russian Jew. Then, too, he had earlier observed that any mention of Russians not obvious praise never sat well with “liberals,” and he would have bet his duffel bag, with all its souvenirs, that his companion belonged to that breed. He had, therefore, found his weakness; he no longer felt gauche; he could not help falling before the temptation.
“No one who hasn’t seen them would believe what a bunch of dirty tramps the Russians are. When we came in on the autobahn and met that crew, we thought first they were slave laborers for the Germans, and then service forces, maybe. But no, they were the cream of the combat troops.”
He saw pure hate through the lieutenant’s glasses—or was it agony?—the eyes were all watery.
The hell with him. He was not an officer in the 1209th, and you couldn’t be court-martialed for an honest description of what you, and no doubt he as well, had seen. Everyone had his own chauvinism, the sacred affiliation that he would not suffer to be questioned, let alone criticized. And how disgustingly stupid, for, in this case, was it not their very uncouthness that made the Russians’ victory all the more remarkable?
So he said something to that effect, but even then the lieutenant’s manner did not improve, and since by that time they had arrived in the front hall of headquarters, they parted coolly, no salute being necessary under a roof.
“Goot morning, a very nice day ve are hoffing!”
Trudchen sat blooming behind Pound’s big, messy desk against the forward wall, except that it was not messy but rather a place of truly stacked papers, dustless, and with a little bouquet of yellow pansies in a jam jar. On his own desk, similarly impeccable, was a pink rose. She was already flying her own colors.
“You are surprised, yes?”
Right, but his habit was never to show it. He thought, for the first time, that she might be uncomfortable to have around.
She arose and came towards him, the thick sweater, unbuttoned, swaying in its two parts equivalent to the braids.
“You see, I work for no payment until the opplication is officially opproved. But I also cannot eat at the mess until that time. Perhaps you can bring me somesing at lunchtime.”
Reinhart tucked his cap under the belt and drifted into his chair.
“What age did you put down?”
“Eighteen.”
“And they believed it?”
“Oh, vy not. It is only two years a lie!”
Sixteen—even those tender years seemed too many, but they did put her under the wire. Through her sweater halves he saw soft little breasts, very round, under the crocheted shirt. She was the kind of girl who in a movie would be asked by the hero, do you really need those glasses? No, she would say and fling them away forever. But Reinhart rather liked spectacles on a pretty girl; they were vulnerable-making, sexy.
“Let’s see now, what can we find for you to do?” He fished through the desk drawers, coming first upon the last letter from Di, which when he had put it away yesterday, having finished the answer, was open, with its envelope paperclipped to the back. Now the former was inserted in the latter, as if it had just arrived; for a moment, until he saw the slit in the envelope top, he thought it had: the outside of all her letters looked the same, with “Mrs. Ernest Cooley” in bright-purple ink in the return-address space. Ah well, Trudchen had made it neat, which reminded him to write the customary “Ans.” and the date on the face of the envelope. He reached for the fountain pen habitually kept in the righthand corner of the central drawer, and felt nothing. Nor was it elsewhere in the desk or in his pocket, and Trudchen had not seen it when she policed up.
The loss was serious. What with the black market, the PX stock of pens was exhausted, and it was not seemly to sign correspondence with a pencil. Reinhart felt an ill mood come down over him like a sack. The worst thing was that he could not, with depressed senses, find any work for Trudchen. The map of Berlin, on which she could have been employed to trace a route for the tour of the Nazi ruins, had also vanished. And he dreaded the coming of Pound, whom he had not told of their new employee, for the excellent reason that he himself had not believed she would be hired.
As if his nerves had created him prematurely, for it was only eleven o’clock, he heard Pound’s footsteps in the hall.
“Quick!” he said to Trudchen, “start straightening out those boxes.” He pointed, without looking, to the chaos in front of the closet, and grabbing a fistful of papers from his now-tidy “out” basket, fell on them with knitted brow and deliberative forefinger.
Pound sounded two feet from the door when Reinhart realized that Trudchen had moved not to the ordered task but rather closer to him. She had removed her sweater and was flexing her arms in a most provocative, catlike manner, her pink shirt everywhere in undulation.
“What are you doing!” he said furiously.
“But you see, already I have arranged those boxes this morning before you arrived.”
How irrefutably true, now that the eyes were turned in that direction: rank on rank, they pyramided almost to the ceiling, with not a loose paper showing, not a cartonflap awry. Impossible that one small girl could have done all that in a week, but there they were.
And here also was—not Pound. The liberal lieutenant, with an ingratiating smile, stood in the doorway.
“Too bad I didn’t know when we came in that you were the fellow,” he said.
“For what?” Reinhart stood up.
“Yes, and here they are.” The lieutenant pulled a box from the left slope of the pyramid, weakening the whole organization so that if Trudchen had not sprung to the gap the work of her morning would have been at naught.
“You must replace that at once!” she shouted, and the lieutenant, walking from the pile with his box, showed her a look he might have given some vermin too ripe to crush.
Christ, didn’t he even know the simple principles of stress and strain? thought Reinhart, whose height permitted him to get the topmost carton and fill the hole.
“Okay, this one is small enough to carry with me now. I’ll send a detail over for the rest.”
He was halfway to the door when Reinhart, standing high and wide, blocked the route.
“I’m afraid, sir, that you’ll have to tell me what this is all about.” He weighted the title with deliberate provocation—for one thing, because he was wholly in the right; for another, to break the officer’s damnable insolence.
For a moment, and for all his natural, seedy weakness and his fake amenity, the lieutenant’s eyes were hostile.
“Get out of my way—” This at once calm, masterful, and most persuasive, and Reinhart would have complied had not Trudchen rushed up desperately to add her small person to the barrier. Not even the lieutenant could resist this preposterous event. He smiled, albeit in somewhat ill grace, and set his box on the floor.
“Schild is my name, Army Intelligence. Would you like a receipt?”
No wonder now at his sang-froid. Army Intelligence! The very title had a splendid, piercing authority, far grander, because including brains, than even the paratroops, Rangers, or fighter squadrons: keen, intrepid operators in the very camp of the enemy, many-faced, anonymous; if caught, standing before the wall with a contemptuous smirk towards the rifles; if successful, only the gratification of knowing oneself supreme; no vulgar show, whatever medals were due must wait perhaps ten years hence, and perhaps not even then, for the secrets of the bureau can never be revealed.
“I’m sorry,” said Reinhart with a mouth of contrition. “You see, I didn’t understand. I couldn’t just let anyone take these things in the absence of Lieutenant Pound. He’s in charge here. Actually I don’t care about the stuff at all, and neither does he. What is it, or are we allowed to ask?”
Intelligence. No sooner had he got in the medics on his own request than Reinhart sought to escape. It was humiliating to be the one kind of soldier denied a gun. Intelligence. He even knew German, or enough for a start anyway, the rest he could pick up quickly in a training program. Psychologically he had probably all his life been a kind of undercover agent. In high school he used to follow certain girls in their Friday-evening walks, trail them from nine to midnight, at a distance, in and out of candy-store doorways, and, with the aid of evergreen bushes, right to their front steps, all unbeknownst to them, sometimes forever, sometimes only until the next morning’s study-hall revelation. Intelligence. Its operations turned out to be very secret indeed; in three years of service he had never so much as learned where to apply.
“Just routine correspondence of some German agency, I should think,” said Lieutenant Schild, staring grimly at Trudchen, who kept leaning into Reinhart and kept getting pushed away. “It’s pretty tedious to have to go through it, but we must.”
Trudchen leaned against Reinhart again and said, with great, solemn lashes, “Anyvay, ve should vait for Lieutenant Pound!”
“Truchen, I want you to do something for me. Go over and sit in that chair behind my desk and schweigen Sie.”
“Vy so formal?” she asked pouting, but did it.
Just as he had hoped, Schild’s interest was caught.
“You are fluent?”
“Not really, but I have enough for a good base. I’d like to have an opportunity to brush up my German.”
Schild leaned close and said in an undertone, jerking his thumb towards Trudchen: “Where did you get that little tot?”
For a moment Reinhart thought: oh, but she’s not that young; then he realized that what Schild had said, in his Eastern accent, was “tart,” a term out of old plays, meaning “whore” or thereabouts, perhaps not so strong; what he always saw when he read it was a circular piece of pastry with strawberry jam in the center, and hence, a girl whose person might symbolize such a sweet. That was Trudchen all right. Yet he was responsible for her, in a way, and although it was funny it was also nasty.
His remonstrance was lost before he found it, for Schild, very certain, proceeded.
“Take my word and get rid of her before she gets you in trouble.”
“But she’s just a kid!” He said it too loud and dared not look towards her. “I swear I haven’t touched her, Lieutenant, I haven’t even thought of her in that way—”
“Don’t be foolish,” said Schild, sharply, “I’m not concerned about her welfare but yours.”
So he had made an impression on him! Reinhart was almost ready to say: I’ll trade Trudchen for a transfer to Intelligence; perhaps now the war was over, some of Schild’s men would go home on points and there would be openings.
“She was peddling her little ass up and down the officers’ street last night. Finally she got her prey, that fat—, well, it’s better not to say. ... One of these days she’ll turn up pregnant and I don’t think you’ll want to be made the goat.”
Hurt, Reinhart grunted thanks; the lieutenant clearly thought him naïveté incarnate; the trouble was, his complexion was too fair, there were no shadows on his face, no lines of character, and his eyes being pale blue looked stupid; he had labored his life long under the prejudice of his appearance. He was like a big, bland baseball bat; Schild on the other hand resembled a pair of scissors, ugly, black, incisive. How he envied him, even to the tarnish on his silver bar, the dried fog at the edge of his glasses, and the bulge in the flyfront of his ETO jacket that betrayed an undone button. And, as he watched him leave, perhaps even his dirty mind, which was a symbol of freedom.
A sob from Trudchen drew him to her, more in curiosity than pity.
“What are you doing!”
She was crying, had her spectacles off for that purpose, was flushed and dripping, and presented so much misery that, despite himself, he gave her his olive-drab handkerchief, which luckily was clean.
“He has told you somesing evil about me, that—” Whatever followed went into the handkerchief. One braid had got twisted about her neck like a noose, and Reinhart, leaning across the desk, returned it to order. The flushed face came briefly out of the cloth to say “Sank you.”
“Trudchen, where were you last night?”
“Wiss my cousin Lori in her cellar. This is all the place we have to live, in a cellar which is all cold and wet and without light. The dampness comes into one’s bones and most nights one cannot sleep because of the pain...”
Suddenly arthritic and conscious that the sun had some moments before left the big window, he sat down on the desktop.
“No,” he said gently, “I mean earlier, before you went to bed—were you in this area last evening?”
“Most absolutely n—” She started to speak into the handkerchief but emerged to study him narrowly. “You won’t think that I must be a foolish or superstitious person? ...I consulted with your priest.”
Priest. By chance he knew that the Catholic priest of the 1209th was away on leave to Rome; his assistant, Joe Para, who was one of Tom Riley’s roommates across the hall, had taken a shower that morning in Reinhart’s bathroom. Yet there was surely an unintentional error here.
“Well, then,” said Trudchen when he explained, “this was the Protestant priest, a very large man, do you know him?”
Of course, Schild’s “fat—”; things were linking up in sweet reason.
“I wished to see him for guidance,” she went on. “I am alone in the world, without father and mother, sometimes it is all so confusing. Do you believe in God?”
“I haven’t made my mind up,” said Reinhart. “But I don’t hold anything against someone who does.” It were cruel, if Chaplain Peggott gave her comfort, to abuse that great, grinning, flabby sententious ass, and it certainly had nothing to do with God, who if He existed at all, Reinhart was sure, was an It rather than a He and altogether neutral. As for himself, who had been as infant a Lutheran and then, when a schism developed within that congregation over whether or not the Ladies Aid should amortize the church mortgage by serving public suppers and his parents left with the progressive element, a Presbyterian. He believed that Protestantism was deadly mediocrity, Catholicism weak-minded, and Judaism alien—and all harmless. He was incapable of bigotry, on the ground that it was a massive bore—like the convictions from which it sprang. On the other hand, if it were carried to fanaticism, to that ultimate degree in which to advance his cause the believer was willing to destroy himself rather than other people: gone this far, it was, as with a Joan of Arc, a heroism to which the original motive was irrelevant.
Gertrud of Berlin—it was scandalous to be with the force which compelled a small girl towards martyrdom.
“Look, I’ll see if I can get you a better place to live. I think they have rooms around this area for civilian employees, maybe right in this building, God knows there’s room enough.” He revolved his head in disgust at a vision of a thousand rooms unoccupied while girls slept in wet cellars. “And for Lori, too.”
“Oh, but there is a reason that she cannot,” said Trudchen, and immediately began again to weep softly. “But your priest is not a good man. He tried to have his vay viss me.” She reached to Reinhart’s hand. “He touched me—here.” She cupped his hand very neatly around one of her breasts and, even though the illustration was clear, kept it there infinitely. “ ‘I just must see if you are wearing your medal,’ he said. ‘But perhaps it slipped down.’ And then, so quick as one could think of it, he—” In the quickness she described, Trudchen had stretched open the neck of her shirt and inserted Reinhart’s hand on the bare skin underneath. “ ‘Vair is it?’ he asked, with a very horrible smile. This must be it—’ ”
Withdrawing so swiftly that he unraveled a strand of pink crochet, he shouted: “It’s a lie, Trudchen, it’s a contemptible lie!”
Piggy Peggott—he had many sins, but they were of another kind of gluttony: he was famous in the officers’ mess for seconds, thirds, and fourths; but all one had to do was look at him to see that somewhere back home he had the inevitable preacher’s wife in dowdy, unkempt clothing and disorderly hair, to whom he was flagrantly faithful; it was simply a matter of definition.
Not to mention that: “Protestants don’t wear medals!”
If she had earlier cried in soft self-pity, she howled now in the most violent hatred, her face red and ugly, swinish.
“It vas this Jew who turned your feelings against me!”
He felt himself tremble fearfully, thought for a second that he had hit her; indeed, his big hand hung tremulously in the air between them as if it had bounced there off her small face. But it had not—at the instant it would have struck, the fist had been seized by the mind, for Trudchen, in her temper, was not silent.
“They have no respect. Of course none of this did happen, but that was what he told you, was it not?—only he made me the bad person, that dirty, filthy creature, that foul—”
“Don’t say it, Trudchen, it simply is not said. He must have made a mistake, anybody could do that. You have to admit that there are German girls who might—well, anyway, it had nothing to do with his being of the Hebrew faith.”
“But it does have something to be connected to that I am a German. At least for him it does. Because the Nazis do not like the Jews, I am made to suffer. In 1933 I am four yearss old; in 1938, nine yearss. They did not permit children to operate the concentration camps.”
Reinhart had a weakness in the small of his back, which standing up did not relieve. He wished he had a grievance; being without one in the modern world was disabling. How gratifying to be the lowliest Negro in Alabama, with no person alive who was not in your debt. How satisfying to be a Jew, with a two-thousand-year claim or, now, a German who had got his medicine unjustly. He should have been in combat and had his foot shot off, so that when he was brought a complaint he could point to the stump and say: obviously, I can do nothing about it, I can’t even walk.
He produced a roll of peppermint Lifesavers and, thumbnailing back the tinfoil, offered the first segment to Trudchen. Shortly it could be heard clicking against her little rabbit-teeth.
“This is very sweet and not at all—what do you say?”
“ ‘Hot,’ I guess.”
“It is ‘not so hot’? But that means ‘no good,’ yes? That is not what I mean. I like it better than ours, which are more—”
“ ‘Hot.’ That’s another usage—the word is good for almost anything.”
Such as her face, which now, with glossy lines of tear, was cooling. He should have liked to stroke it. She was so helpless, yet at the same time, if that were possible, indomitable. It was the same combination of contraries he had seen in Lieutenant Schild.
In the afternoon a PFC sent by Schild began to remove the cartons, antlike—with small burdens and many trips. Pound slopped in at two o’clock, looking for his sunglasses, which after a moment’s search he remembered he had sold, listened to Reinhart’s explanation of Trudchen and account of Schild’s mission, saying to the first, “Why not?” and to the second, “Good deal,” punched Reinhart in the belly, and left at two-ten.
Neither Lovett nor Nader was in their office, owing, Reinhart assumed, to the catastrophic finale to the party; the colonel no doubt was grinding them into powder. About which even if he had liked them Reinhart would have felt rather more pleasure than pain, he being an enlisted man to the core.
Since, then, official authority could not be consulted, he prowled through the empty rooms in the furthermost reaches of his own wing and found a little closetlike chamber that would meet Trudchen’s want. It was already outfitted with a tiny stove and a naked steel bedstead and spring; from the 1209th supply room he fought a mattress and sleeping bag out of the sergeant in charge.
Delighted, Trudchen threw her arms about him when she saw the new quarters.
“Do you need some help to get your things from Lori’s?”
“Oh no, you must not bother!” A brief crease flew through her clear brow. “I have almost nothing. You will not go there?”
“Not if you don’t want me to.”
“Ah, not I. But Lori would be aimborrossed.”
“By the way, did she get her job?”
Trudchen showed a sly look. “Do you know, she did not tell me! She is a very odd human being. One must accustom oneself to her strangeness, but she is very nice.”
Leaving her there, he returned to the office. Four o’clock. The PFC had disappeared, after having taken away all of three cartons. On the point of calling it a day, himself, he saw the heavy sweater that Trudchen had left behind. He carried it to her room, but already she had gone, either by the window or some secret back door off the hall, whose existence he knew not of. Folding the sweater, with a view to placing it on the bed, he felt a hard, cylindrical object somewhere in the weave. It was his missing pen, along the bottom seam of a pocket. So funny: she could hardly have stolen it and then permitted so simple a discovery. Must, rather, first have borrowed and then retained in a slip of the hand. Yet if he reclaimed it now, she might remember, look, find it again with him, think he had caught her in a theft but for reasons of his own would not protest, be discomfited. He placed the sweater on her pillow and left.
He was inclined to visit Veronica, but rather than search the hospital building for her ward, which in his imagination had acquired a sinister aura, he strolled again down the street of her billet on the chance that her duty, too, was done.
The salmon-colored gauze had been removed from the glass of the front door; on the inside surface an unseen agency, swift and sure, manipulated a cleaning rag. Its movements were mesmerizing; he had an impulse to throw himself on the grass and watch it as the warm-cool late afternoon relaxed into calm evening. Beside the door grew a bush bearing round, white berries like small versions of those pure-sugar jawbreakers with a nut in the center. There was a bush like that in his parents’ front yard, and next to it a weeping willow high in which he had once established an outpost for General Custer. Alone among the men of the 1209th he had been in no hurry to get back to the States, had in fact long planned to ask, in rakish defiance, for permanent assignment to the Occupation forces, was waiting only until it could be more than an empty, sour-grape gesture—for, without combat points, he was more or less permanent as it stood. Now, just now, watching the rag fly across the pane, seeing the bush, recalling General Custer, and with the sudden, almost unbearably dear smell of grass—he had not at first marked that the lawn was newly cut—he ached for home.
The door opened just as the general bliss had given into the deadly specificities. He had come far since his first year in the Army when he frequently had such seizures; yes, he had enlisted to escape, but there was forever another present to flee from; in the summertime, especially, one craved elsewhere. But he had nothing to get back to. In the most literal sense: already in September 1943 his parents had let his room to a man who worked an electric drill in the local defense plant, a man who had remained, had settled down, who surely had dispensed with the arrowhead collection and the stuffed bass’s head on the bookcase. And college: he simply could not face that again after three years of the expansive life.
The door had opened and a figure in head-handkerchief and apron came onto the step, saying: “Sind Sie nicht wohl?”
It was not unreasonable, since he had, after all, fallen on the lawn—an event thus called to his own attention. The person was Lori.
“No, I’m quite well,” he said in German. “It is pleasant to sit here. I see you have your job, come tell me about it. Sit down here with me.”
“I cannot sit on the grass!” she said incredulously. “I am the maid.”
At any rate, if she looked no happier now, she was no sadder. Since he was on their level, he noticed that her legs, though dressed in coarse cotton, were finely turned and rather long for her height. But there was also something terribly competent in her appearance now that she wore working clothes, a hint of hard strength that reminded him of his suspicions.
“There were no difficulties about the Fragebogen?”
“What you wish to ask is whether I was a Nazi, isn’t it? You are more shy than your fellow Americans. ... There was no such thing as a Nazi—you should know that if you have asked any other Germans. In all this great country there were no Nazis; not even Hitler, as you would hear if you could find him.”
He sat up, aghast at her change from suppliance to this arrogant self-possession. It was the famous German alternation from serf to lord, no doubt, and he felt it cruelly there on the fresh grass.
Getting to his feet, he said braggingly in English: “What the hell do I care?”
“Bitte?”
“Mit mir macht es nichts.”
“I know,” she said. “That is why—” She took a deep breath and suddenly finished it in English: “—I love you.”
You couldn’t stay angry when that was said to you, but you could look insane.
“Have I said something wrong?” She took off her dusting cap, and a wealth of hair came forth, and golden it was and clean.
“You do not know English,” he said in a voice full of augury—as if he were to go on with: you can say awful things in it. “What you mean is that you like me.”
“It is not the same as in French?”
“I think not.”
“Also.”
In the distance he heard a laugh like a great bronze chime. Unmistakable. He felt criminally that he didn’t wish Very to see him with this girl. But Lori, too, had heard and was even more anxious to flee from him.
“There comes one of my mistresses,” she whispered, already in backward motion. “I must go.”
“Veronica Leary? Lieutenant Leary?”
“I do not know the name, but the laugh cannot be mistaken.”
It was heard again, turning the corner only a few yards away, and Reinhart audaciously pushed into the house after Lori.
“Ah, what are you doing here, you mad fellow?” she asked in confusion.
“I’m going into the kitchen.” And so he did, and sat silently until Very and what sounded like a roommate entered the door and went upstairs.
“Where is Miss Leary’s room—the laughing one?” he whispered.
In frightful wonder Lori answered: “In the rear. You will go there?”
“Certainly not. Then I can leave by the front and she won’t see me out the window.”
But instead of moving on that plan, he looked at Lori and said: “You’ve washed your hair. It is very schön.”
“Thank you. I didn’t have any soap until I started this work. ... But please go now.”
Didn’t have any soap—he was terribly touched by that fact. One thought of the bombings and fires and loss of loved ones, the Götterdämmerung, but not to be able to wash your socks or bathe, that was degrading and mean.
“And where you live, I understand, is in some wet cellar. Let me get you a better place—”
“All right, but now you must go.” She took his hand in her small but very strong one and pulled him from the chair.
“Tonight, as soon as you leave work, we’ll get you a new room. I won’t leave now until you promise.”
“Ach, was kann ich tun!” she breathed in despair. “I cannot.”
“Why not?” He tightened his hand on hers.
“For reasons too long to explain now—”
“Promise! After work. What time do you finish?”
“Ah, what can I do?” she repeated. “I’ll lose my job if you do not go.”
“Come with me!” Now it was he who impelled her, through the hall to the foot of the stair.
“Hey Very, are you decent?” he shouted in a tremendous voice which agitated a small vase on the foyer table. And in no time his large friend appeared at the top, blooming lavishly in a powder-blue dressing gown, a dea ex machina about to catch the next elevator down from Olympus.
“Kiddy!” she screamed jovially. “Did you break in here to violate me? You-all ain’t supposed to be in nurses’ quarters!”
“That’s what your maid insisted.”
“Well, get out then, you fiend. I’ll see you after chow—outside.”
“I can’t, I’ve gotta work tonight.” He turned to Lori, who looked very grave, and said as quickly as he could in German: “Unless you meet me this evening I shall cause you trouble. What time?”
“Um sechs Uhr. I eat at your mess after the soldiers are finished.” She turned away in shame.
“Okay then,” shouted Very. “Don’t go away mad. Hey, where did you learn German? Wait a minute.” She disappeared, and returned with a piece of olive-colored apparel, pitched it downstairs, it taking the air like a parachute and falling to rest at Lori’s feet.
“Would you tell her to press it and be careful not to use too hot an iron?”
Which he did, adding: “Um sechs Uhr, outside the mess tent.”
Chow was SOS, shit-on-a-shingle, ground beef and gravy slopped across a slice of bread, diced carrots and canned peas, rice pudding filled with raisins resembling dead flies. Reinhart ate a grimacing spoonful of each and then smoked two consecutive cigarettes, his only pleasure the dropping of their butts into the swill.
“Anyone ever tell you you eat like a goat?” he asked Marsala, who was stuffing down seconds.
“I’ve got a right to, I worked all day,” his roommate answered on a rising, plaintive note, missing the point.
At the garbage cans were two small boys who had temporarily ducked the guard. As Reinhart prepared to empty his full messkit, one of them, saying “Pleasse,” took it from him, with a spoon flipped out the cigarette-ends, poured the contents in a tin with jagged rim, and began ravenously to feed.
Marsala pushed his boy roughly aside. “Go on, you goddam Krauthead.” But there was nothing in his kit but three drops of gravy, and when the guard appeared, sweating and worried, with his switch at the ready, Marsala stared into his bland face and threatened: “Go on, you fuck, or I’ll take ya apart. How do you like that,” he went on to Reinhart, “those kids belong to his own country.”
“Well, we hired him to keep them away.”
“Yeah, but who would really do it except a German?”
Their natural anarchism saved Italians. They were, after all, the original fascists, but even Mussolini had inspired more laughter than hatred. Someone should take the guard aside and say: Sit down, Hans, have a smoke. Now I’ll give you the rundown on life. People are worth more than things, and abstractions have almost no worth at all. When you get an order your sole responsibility is to act as if you are carrying it out. Hypocrisy is the better part of competence. It is foolish, I know, and defies everything you and I were taught; but in the degree to which you serve others and not yourself, the others will forsake you. However, comprehending neither Marsala’s threat nor Reinhart’s interior monologue, “Hans” had driven the children out of range, lashing their meager shins in the most dispassionate manner.
Reinhart had delayed taking his meal, and Marsala with him, until the tent was almost empty of soldiers and the queue of civilian workers had begun to form at the front flap, and en route to and at the apartment he dawdled for twenty minutes, part of which was aimed to bore Marsala with his company. It worked: the buddy at last drifted across the hall to needle Riley, and Reinhart returned to the mess area. Almost too late: the Army trucks used for workers’ transport idled at the curb. He spotted Lori, carrying a small, lidded pail, about to mount a tailgate.
“Also, Sie sind falsch!” he accused.
“I looked for you,” she stoically replied. “I have either to ride this truck or walk many kilometers.”
Within, the side benches were loaded with women who gave off chattering to stare at Reinhart.
“Go on.” He lifted her up in one strong action, getting on his jacket a bit of splash as the cover jarred from her can, and vaulted himself in with a terrible noise on the metal floor.
Which prompted the driver to peer through his spy-window and call: “Haul ass, kid. No riders.”
“The Lover sent me, Eberhard. I have to get new quarters for this woman.”
“Lovett never told me about it.”
“All right, all you have to do is tell him when you get back.”
“You tell him, for Jesus’ sake,” grunted Eberhard, dropping the isinglass trapdoor.
They had squeezed onto the bench between a very fat girl and a very skinny woman, so that Lori was compressed and Reinhart slashed by sharp elbows.
“Tell me now,” he asked. “Why all the strange reactions? I think you should want to have a better place to live. Trudchen told me this afternoon about your cellar—how she couldn’t sleep there for the wet—”
“Trudchen? She doesn’t live with me! ...I warned you about her untruths, but I suppose not enough. She lives with her parents in a pleasant flat, not bombed, near the hospital.”
“And I got her a room in headquarters building! What game is she playing?”
“That’s just it, you see, a game. She is very young and willful. It is not easy to be an adolescent girl in the present time.”
No, he supposed not; for that matter, it had not been easy for him to be an adolescent boy, five years and three thousand miles back, in a smooth place where the only craters were excavations for new bungalows. At least Trudchen had no pimples.
“And then, too, perhaps her family are not all that could be desired—but that’s another story. As to me, well, frankly, I have a husband.”
“Oh, that’s all right. You see, I’m not—” He had intended to say: interested in you in that way. But it would have been insulting.
“He is very strange—as now it seems I am helpless to prevent your seeing for yourself.”
The truck was under way, clanking, creaking, and in clouds of blue exhaust, which defying the principles was drawn stinking into their compartment. Under cover of his conversation in the other direction, Bony Elbows waxed friendly, cutting her sharp patella into the outer surface of his thigh. She was, he had seen on entering, at least forty-five years of age.
“Was he in the war?”
“He had an odd role.” That was her last word until a half hour later when, after various stops, one of which freed them of Fat and Thin at the same time, the vehicle came to rest at what seemed to him a purely arbitrary point in nowhere and she and he detrucked.
They stood before a hill of waste whose farthest margin must have, spilling over Asia’s width, been forever eroding into the Pacific. The sun, elsewhere on this day so rich, voided this dark field, and the sweet air had long ago sold out to its competitor gases. On this range figures thin and slumped roamed crumbling through its Brenners, sack-bearing, searching, genitors of no sound. But on the summit a small girl, a ragged head above a cotton bag, called shrill and disconsolate to nobody below: “Wo is der Heinrich?”
“Behold,” said Lori. “Nürnberger Strasse.”
Five minutes’ impossible trek and they teetered on the powdered brick at the entrance to a subterranean passage. Reinhart fired his lighter, but Lori hastily lowered its cap. “There may be escaping gas.” She drew him, now blind, down the prairie-dog way.