“CAN’T FIND ANY LETTERS of Grandpa’s you asked for—stuff all cleaned out from under the porch to provide place for screens years ago,” wrote Reinhart’s father. “Maybe you even did it yourself—if you were paid for it. If my advice means anything, tho, I’d drop the idea—your just asking for trouble—as soon as you find any German relations they will want to borrow money from you... ,” etc., typed on a V-mail blank, small as the Lord’s Prayer engraved on the head of a pin.
Ask a stupid man, get a stupid answer. When he told Trudchen about it—for, despite her peculiarities, she was still around, still without pay, reporting to the office every morning long before he arrived—she said: “Ah, vy bozzuh! I will be your relative.”
That was all he had told her. He did not seek to expose her pitiful lies; he let stand the assumption that she lived, orphaned, in the little back room in the office building, where indeed she did report at the end of each workday. Above all, he remained silent on the visit to Lori’s. What he had learned there was for adults only, and he was not at all certain he could stand to think of it himself.
He at last understood that the complement to his long self-identification with Germanness had been a resolve never to know the German actuality. Knowledge had exhausted his options; he now had no choice but to seek out, if still they existed, his links to what, a brief half-century after Gottfried Reinhardt took ship for the New World, had disintegrated in murder and betrayal.
He had not really believed the witness of the Buchenwald photographs; mass exterminations were incredible. Real deaths were your friend Bill, one moment live, the next run down by a drunken driver; Al killed by pneumonia; Roy, his heart full of Jap metal, taking the Iwo Jima bastion and expiring a hero; or someone’s brother, well known, electrocuted by the state for the crime of homicide, and his victim; these corpses were believable in sight and mind; despite the mortician’s garish art, beyond the mystery of any death, were the concrete memories of impediments of speech, casts of eye, a rolling gait, a red Ford with a two-tone horn, and the only four-button suit in southern Ohio.
Similarly with the violet shadows under Lori’s eyes. Whoever had sold her safety from incineration had seen them upon every payment, must have had the queer guts to imagine their transformation into white ash and his own agency in the burning. And the man who would have fired the oven, dressed in his black SS-suit, with his blond crown and his blue eyes, the model to which every boy aspires, the handsome soldier fearless before the enemy, gentle with women. ... These types were not explained by the simple, pious indignation of: two kinds of man, one good and one bad; we of course are the first; they, the second.
Nor by the lack of a democratic tradition: was this what men did when denied the vote? Nor militarism: you mean that the great Frederick mounted his stallion and rode down women and children and unarmed men, and that the old knights of Nürnberg swung their blades against little ghetto-tailors?
Reinhart had been reared in what he assumed to be (since everything else was) the German code; there are two kinds of cowards: one who will not fight a man his own size or larger, and one who will fight only someone weaker; sometimes, but by no means always, the same person. But the validity of this, too, was here outmoded, for the SS man, fresh from his ravages on the helpless, stood fast against the superior enemy; was, to be sure, the fiercest soldier met by the Allied troops.
As to the anonymous blackmailer, Reinhart insisted that his, too, was a strange, mad kind of courage, for beyond gentleness and humanitarianism and a deficiency of passion, what stays the normal man from murder or even its threat is fear, not of the godly or human law or vengeance or nightmares, but of the suggestion of his own mortality.
Here all the known qualities of humanity had been united with their contradictions. This was what Bach dramatized in his monstrous monologue of truth in falsehood, that guilt could be confessed to only in a lie of the guiltless, that the first loss of the criminals had been in their human imaginations. Where Reinhart had looked in Germany for life, first in dreams of ancient glory and then, after the Nazis, for a vitality at least of evil, he saw only a horror of deadness, of which the literal corpses, the loose skins of Dachau, were but the minor part.
Yet more important than this moribund nation were the good people, those “good Germans” on whom the sanctimonious propaganda of Our Side did its work of slaughter, the mature ones like Bach who by conscious volition stayed decent and sought no fanfare for it now, and children like Trudchen who willy-nilly were clean. Were his relatives to be counted with them?
Even in his duty of conscience, however, he was balked by the same ineptness which characterized his dealings in the humdrum; when fountain pens were hard to get, people like Marsala had pocketsful; similarly with liquor, broads, and passes; he, Reinhart, so damned special, one of the ought-ought per cent of the American population to go to college, a member of the owning and stable class, could manage nothing.
It was very well to say loosely, as Lori had, to go to the burgomaster’s office. He tried just that, visited the town hall in Schöneberg, which he was astonished to see employed as many bureaucratic flunkies as it were an American city untouched by war, who notwithstanding that he was Occupation showed much the same bored insolence and then when pressed claimed a search of the birth records back to 1850 turned up no Gottfried Reinhart. Of course, there was always the Russian Sector, which the eyeglassed clerk recommended snottily-reproachful, as if to say: that’s what you get for dividing our city. There was what Reinhart would earlier have identified as certainly a Nazi; now he thought it more likely the man might turn out to be an unsung hero of the anti-Hitler opposition and this job his reward.
He got aid from an unconsidered quarter. Although when he had first revealed it to Trudchen his project left her cold, she greeted him one morning with sudden interest and suggestion.
“You must have a dett-ek-tive! And I have just your person. The man who makes some work about here—he with the scarred face. He is called—so silly!—Schatzi, that means ‘sweetheart,’ did you know? Do you know which I intend?” She had her own table now, a jittery-jointed piece which swayed like a drunken spider when she assaulted the old Underwood. “He is very active in the black market. This takes him everywhere and in consequence to that he knows everyone.”
“Not the old man in the Wehrmacht cap?”
A regrettable concomitant of Trudchen’s employment was false tint laid on thickly over her natural color, and Reinhart also bore the guilt of that. He had bought her lipstick and rouge from the PX, on her request for the “raddest of the rad.”
“Oh, he has worn it, yes, but also many other costumes. When he sells one thing, he attires himself in another.”
“You don’t mean that old man who works in Lovett’s office?”
“Not regularly. He makes much money on the black market—why should he vorry?”
And he had thought the old fellow pitiful; it was a true instance of what one, disinclined to contribute, says of street cripples with their tin cups: they could probably buy and sell any of us poor working stiffs.
“I don’t suppose he was a National Socialist?” Reinhart could no longer use “Nazi”; with the passing of each German day the term became more like the name of a soap powder, some slick and vulgar “Rinso” invented by Americans, who eventually reduce everything to that level: “Nazi,” the cute name for a pack of buffoons, played always by the same actors, regularly thwarted by some clean-shaven Beverly Hills Boy Scout whom a ruptured eardrum disqualified from the real war.
However, he was not wholly serious even in putting it the long way, since in this area Trudchen’s unreliability was massive. Perhaps understandably, to her the history of modern times was a catalogue of her own losses and the responsible instrument, fate in general.
She lifted her little painted clown’s-face, the freshness obscured by the rouge but the innocence still there, and said: “Not he! He was a prisoner in a concentration camp.”
Which was a flat lie—although perhaps not hers but the old man’s; the surviving martyrs of the camps were hardly thrown into menial jobs and black-marketeering.
“Ausgezeichnet! Prima! Then he should be just the man to find die Familie Reinhart,” he said in an irony that she did not receive. “Of course it isn’t likely he’ll find anybody. There’s a separation of fifty years. Think of that, Trudchen, the last time I was German my father hadn’t yet been born.”
“Please?”
Instead of clarifying it, he fell to work with his pencil—which was blunt and unpleasant to use; if she didn’t soon return his pen he must come right out and ask her to—on the long-delayed Guide to the Ruins for the sightseeing tour.
The Olympic Stadium, built for the Olympic Games in 1936, has a seating capacity—
Or was it more graceful to say “seats”? Or “seats” as a noun: “stadium, etc., has 124,000 seats.” “Capacity” of course had a more serious tone. This was one of those days when nothing sounded right, which unluckily had begun to outnumber those on which nothing sounded wrong.
“You do not wish to hire this man?” asked Trudchen, starting to type the stencil for Page One, which, for Pound had decided on a grandiose project that would impress the colonel, was to stand as title sheet.
He had to grin. All European girls spoke with an animation at once funny and delightful, an excess of feminine vitality that juiced each word. If this held even in a sadness like Lori’s, with Trudchen, who was never less than gay, who was young and unmarred and in a perpetual celebration of ripeness, it was the very model of unalloyed girlship; you never, as sometimes at Home, suspected that you confronted a transvestite boy.
“Ah,” she went on, “how hoppy you will make zem! In these timess to have an American cowsin!”
In mock grimness he answered: “Our American Cowsin. I hope for better luck. That’s the name of the play Lincoln was watching when he was shot.”
“By Chon Vil-kes Boat, yes?” This in an eagerness which threw a tremble into her physical establishment. “And the year, 1864, yes? The day I do not know.”
“Don’t ask me!” He ambled to the French window to look on as perfect weather as the earth offered, the life-enhancing air of the Brandenburg plain, full of golden light and green smells. “My family wasn’t in the country at the time. They were here.”
Could Jews have been killed on such a day, or had they waited for rain?
The great pines stood high in the adjacent grove, and seeing down among their feet he recognized the steel-gray, crosshatched shadows from old German engravings, which were not artist’s strategy but the true lay of the land. He could have watched without doubt a delegation of trolls emerge from some root-home and bear away the Nibelungs’ lode, but impossible to the mind’s eye were the long sallow lines of victims.
“This man, this good German, how can I get in touch?”
Trudchen giggled like a spring: “Tahch—this is very vivid and so clear that no explanation is needed—baht he vill come here some time. I have taken the freedom to ask him that you might... vould... could—oh well, that you want to see him.”
Along with the cosmetics she wore a peek-a-boo white blouse disclosing an eyelet-margin slip and, beyond, the rim of a brassiere which carried larger burdens than formerly had hung upon her chest, and the pigtails no longer swung free but were entwined about her head in a yellow cocoon. In the aggregate, this was also a lie: that she was a mature girl.
“If he was in a camp, then he must be a Jew?”
Asking which he returned to his desk and fell into the chair with the noise of a beef haunch flung onto a butcher’s block.
“Oh no!” cried Trudchen with candid enthusiasm. “You are incorrect when you think only Jews were mistreated. You do not know of the Resistance?”
Sure, the plot to kill Hitler of 20 July 1944. This had already been exposed in his discussion groups as a conspiracy of reactionary generals, scarcely better than der Führer himself, whose motives were suspect and results, a failure; and who were eleven years late.
Of course there was that—she took no notice of the negating conditions, perhaps because he lost his nerve while talking to her, who was blameless, and presented them weakly—but what she meant was something of a greater scope and duration, embracing all of the non-Nazi population: a total rejection of Hitler and all of his works, dating back to 1933 and earlier. She as a German could tell him that, even though she took no interest in politics, being young and silly.
“And what did they do about it?”
“Ah, what can anybody do against beasts who are ruthless? The SS and the Gestapo, their first job was to control Germans, not Jews.”
He sat upright and brought down his fist upon the desk, not in anger but rather a kind of pleading.
“That is understood. But it is over now. National Socialism turned out to be nothing. You couldn’t find one German today who would say a good word about it. Yet it was a German thing, wasn’t it? I don’t mean the war, or the Axis, but what went on here: a horrible, dreadful thing that was completely new. Old Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun were saints alongside of this. The whole history of man is disgusting, I grant you, but why would the Germans try to set a new record? But no, I don’t even want to ask that. God knows if I had been a German what I would have been. But why can’t someone at least say he is sorry?” He looked into space, for he had no wish or reason to make it personal.
He was an idiot to speak of this to Trudchen, and she was quite right to look calfly insensate and say: “One cannot be sorry for what one has not done.”
“You must pay me no attention,” she went on, “because I am not clever, but what I can see is that God makes people suffer.” Her mouth and eyes went into round wonder, which made her, there behind the crazy lines of lopsided table and old typing machine, a complex of circles: head, eyes, glasses, mouth, breasts, hips. “At eleven o’clock in the morning of 3 February, this year, I had the fortune to be in the Bayerischer Platz Underground station when your planes came over making a direct strike with an aerial mine that blew a thirty-feet hole out of the bottom of the tube. So suddenly I did not feel anysing, no wownd, and knew only what occurred when this baby in the arms of the vo-man in front of me, now, with the blast, on top of me, this baby stared down and tried to cry at me but instead of the cry this string of blood dripped quietly from its mouth. It was alive, but dead, also; both at the same time—how can I explain this terrible sing that I mean! Your planes had come to kill Nazis, but the bombs cannot tell good from bad. A little chilt of eight months old, it had to suffer. Is it not the same way with God’s vengeance for the murder of Jesus Christ?”
It was wackily, harmlessly funny, as when the village crank says of the cyclone-torn bungalow: this is what they get for all that drinking. But she was growing into a big girl, and it was time to be set straight—which no one had bothered to do for him when he was on that level.
“You don’t—” he began, when Lieutenant Pound appeared in the doorway and Trudchen hurriedly flung back into her story.
“So when this blood began to descend upon me I reached towards my sleeve for the handkerchief but my hand could not go far, being halted by a soft, varm, cling-ging mass such as one’s hair after washing it, and I thought: so I have lost an arm, how easier in the fact than in the worry. Limbs, limbs, I have always feared losing them most.”
“Don’t bullshit, Trudchen,” said Pound, patiently genial, closing the door which was in his absence never closed, demonstrating his talent for violently hurling it to without its latching: he “pulled” it, as one does a punch in a false fight. “You’ve got two bigfat white arms today.”
Although his monastery was now neat, this abbot had stayed slovenly; as he went briskly to his desk below the little window, his loose shoelaces clicked, his tie end flapped over his shoulder, his bowlegs like two lips endlessly yawned away from each other and gulped shut.
Perhaps it was Pound’s own experience in violence: he never believed anything she said. And by his example, Reinhart, too, invariably lost belief. Although, given her time and place, the tale had been credible enough at the outset, with the introduction of self it became fiction like all the others. She was, he had to face it, the most incredible liar he had ever met.
With a significant look at Pound, who was too bored to register it, Reinhart said: “Go on, Trudchen. What happened then?”
“Well, it was really an arm, but blown off from someone other and lodged between mine and my ripps, as if it were robbing my pocket.” She placed a rolled-up stencil in the position described; buff backing to the outside, it was a painfully authentic replica.
Her attention was now directed exclusively towards Pound, and Reinhart, in half-conscious jealousy, went to block her line of vision.
“You know what? You are a prevaricator!”
Silently, Trudchen unrolled the third arm in the enormous self-confidence the mythomaniac shares with the artist, while at the same time her round nose sharpened as if in death, as if for a moment she really tested that condition the truthful call life, and rounded again as quickly; she had been there before and did not like it.
“Stop pissing around with the kid,” Pound ordered irritably. He was in a rare short mood, probably connected with the miscarriage of certain affairs of money, towards which these days he had developed an obsession. The black market had denuded him of watch, pen, pocket knife, cigarette case, lighter, ring, identification bracelet, all bedding but one blanket, all ties, shirts, drawers, undershirts, socks, and caps beyond one each, towels, writing paper, the leather frame of his wife’s picture, and his musette bag. Three days earlier he had received by mail a new pipe and pouch: the latter had already metamorphosed into a paper envelope. Which he rustled in now, spilling much, but onto a page of Yank, which when done he coned to funnel back the overflow, his narrow eyebrows shimmering ever upwards like heat waves fleeing a summer pavement.
“Haven’t you finished that guidebook yet?” he went on, with querulous twitchings. “The colonel has a wild hair in his asshole ever since Lovett’s Folly. He might put us on cleaning butt cans any minute.”
Because he was properly a cigarette man, he smoked a pipe the wrong way, inhaling great mortifying draughts which after a time in his innards came back through every superior aperture, mouth, nose, ears, eyes, suggesting that his head was afire.
“I’ll finish it today,” Reinhart answered sullenly, not unmindful of Trudchen’s spectacular show of industry; she socked so loudly at the typewriter you couldn’t hear the clearing of your own throat. No sooner did a third person come than he felt odd man out; his maximum for rapport was one being at a time. Thus it was fine with Pound alone, or alone with Trudchen, but with three people he invariably sensed a conspiracy against him.
“Oh good,” said Pound. “If you are that close to the end, you can put the fucker aside for fifteen minutes and write me a letter to the wife. You know, this and that, etc., and I’m short on dough because we had to buy new winter uniforms this month.”
“You short on dough?”
Pound made a sighing descent into his swivel chair. “Come over here,” he said confidentially. “I don’t know why I can’t tell you, since you know all my other chicken-shit business. The thought of going back to that woman—the one you write for me—is more than I can stomach. You know, when I was wounded I made kind of an agreement with Fate that if I didn’t die I would be somebody new. I never told this before to anybody in the service, but I used to be, before I was drafted, a bank teller for thirty-seven fifty a week, a creepy little rectum-kissing rabbit with two snot-nosed kids and a dog with some kinda skin rash that made his hair fall out in pink spots—he also used to sit around on the rug in the evening and fart all the time—and this woman, see. Well, she isn’t the worst person in the world, but she is set on making a man a coward. She even wanted to scare me out of using a blowtorch to take off the old paint on the outside of the house—which I was only doing cause who can afford those prick union painters and if you hire scabs the others will come by and bomb your house—you’ll start a fire, she said. And by Christ I went ahead and did it anyway, and you guessed it, it did start a fire that burned off one wall. I never missed Bob Hope’s radio show on Tuesday nights for five years—Professor Colonna: ‘that’s what I keep telling them down at the office’; Brenda and Cobina, and the rest of them. Think of that: 259 straight; once they were off because of a special news feature, something about that fucking shitbum Hitler. I tell you I was yellow as they come, but after basic they sent me to OCS where they thought that was just being cautious, I guess, a good quality for a officer. Well, we were pinned down along this hedge row in Normandy and I was dumping in my pants for fear, but still I noticed my top fly button was loose and I fastened it. And then I thought what a dirty little turd I was: with your ass about to be blown off and you button the barn door—do you get the picture? I was more afraid of my dong showing than of the German 88s. So I thought all of a sudden: World, you got twenty-eight years from me, you can keep all the rest and stick them up your giggy, and I jumped up and went across there and took that Kraut platoon, and I don’t mean to say I wasn’t scared, but anyway for once there was a reason. Shit.”
He had puffed so hard on his pipe that already its tobacco was exhausted and the air made noxious.
“You know what I made so far on the black market? Thirteen thousand, two hundred and twenty-two dollars, and it’s all gone back to the States to a bank in L.A., California. That’s where my nurse Anne Lightner is from, L.A., where they go in for the beach living. I’m going to get sprung from this woman as soon as I get home, and then I’m going out there and buy a used-car lot. That’s the kind of thing they go big for out there, with all that beach living. Everybody drives a car, that’s what Anne says.”
So was another idea exploded. It was sad, in a way, that nobody, simply nobody was what he seemed. To Reinhart, Pound had been the classic type of swashbuckler. Now he saw the late bank-clerk lines of worry and doubt, faded but still visible, at the corners of mouth and eyes, and he even liked him better for them—for daring has no unusual moral worth if you have lived with it from the cradle—yet there was no discounting the loss of something rare.
“But I have to play it cool with Alice till I get back and can defend myself,” said Pound, refilling his pipe. “So write her nice. I don’t have to tell you what to say, you have enough crap to snow anybody.” This was admiringly put, with the quick wink he must have learned in his new life, but looking sharply Reinhart saw the hint of a quaver in it, as if, in at least the most minor part, there was still a tinge of bluff.
All the while Trudchen had been typing with fanatic energy—faking madly, for the guidebook manuscript lay on Reinhart’s desk.
As he passed her on the return route, a doorknock sounded, and notwithstanding his shouted “Enter!” she leaped up and teetered to the knob—high heels, yet!
It was a soldier, for Pound. She made him wait while she proceeded to the lieutenant with a formal announcement, working her body in a queer movement which Reinhart first believed was an effort to balance on the high spikes and then recognized as an amateur version of a whore’s undulations. Her breasts were hard metallic cones, yet she still wore the thin, little-girl’s skirt ending an inch above the knees, and still the owlish, juvenile spectacles. Involuntarily he burst into a loud, barking laugh, which hideous though it was nobody but himself seemed to hear.
Lieutenant Schild’s judgment had been correct, only a bit premature (as an Intelligence man, of course, he was expected to be one jump ahead of events); if she was not on her way to tartdom, then Reinhart was an orangutan.
“Dearest Alice,” he scrawled on the yellow pad, taking in return a warm thrill of fancy that this unseen proxy wife was really his own, that he had entered her in the connubial bed and that she had borne him two small resemblances of himself, albeit snot-nosed.
On Pound’s indifferent grunt Trudchen wobbled back to her table. Reinhart had also purchased the mascara which gave her an appearance of sore, fire-tinged eyes, but the high heels were from another protector, he now had no doubt.
The soldier had gone. In his stead, in the hall shadows beyond the half-open doorway stood a shrouded representation of a human figure, crepuscular, mysterious. Upon Reinhart’s look it slid noiselessly out of range. Sauntering, Pound took Trudchen’s typewriter from beneath her very pounding fingers, ripped out and discarded the paper, and saying “At last I found the Kraut who can fix this old machine,” left.
“Darling Alice: Sweetheart, I—” Reinhart began again.
“You try alvays to hoomiliate me...” Trudchen’s lips were fashioned into a little red crossbow, through which slid the pink bolt of her tongue, in and out, tasting the lipstick.
He threw down the pencil in disgust, said malevolently: “How about returning my pen?”
“Vy do you always do this? Because I am only this little German girl?”
He strode massively across and bruised his fist on her table: “Right now, I want that pen!”
“Oh, Gee whiz!”
Find who taught her that and you had the whoremaster: Reinhart had never said “Gee whiz” in all his life long. But the tears were her own. He had last seen them when she cursed that poor Jew for telling the truth.
“Well, Gee, take it beck again, and don’t say I vas shtealing it.” Engulfed by the mixture of water and words, dissolving mascara, smeared rouge, falling hairpins—for in the grief she tore her hair down into the old pigtails—she opened the middle drawer and drew away.
Reinhart came round behind her. There it lay, the old black Parker, that gallant, veteran instrument of romance and adventure on two continents, vicarious cannon, sceptre, phallus. He seized it, already feeling the brute, and when her blue eyes peeped sideways at him over their scorched rims and she said “I oppologize”—by this time he had long forgotten what the beef was and took the pen merely so as to return it to her formally, as a permanent gift.
“So kind,” she cried, smiling-through-tears. “Do you care for my shoes? I have yesterday traded them with the chocolate you gave me.”
“Fabelhaft!” He stood behind her, hands lightly riding her narrow shoulders, eyes descending into the sweet crevasse of the pectoral range, very clear through the thin cloud of blouse.
“And I have somesing for you,” she said, “so you will not think so bad of this little Germany.”
From the drawer she withdrew a handbill of cheap European paper, weightless, the color and grain of whole-wheat bread, infamously inked. All he could read from where he stood was a headline: ES LEBE MENSCHLICHKEIT!
“Proclamation of the Resistance,” she crooned victoriously. “I have found it in this very room, in the carton-boxes. Perhaps this selfsame room in which we sit was nothing but head-quarters!”
Long Live Humanity!, no doubt to be understood in the sense of Hitler’s Peace, a peculiar German cruelty. He received her greatest whopper with an enervation so profound as to be almost pity.
“Trudchen, I can read German...” he groaned, his hands rising heavily from her shoulders and more heavily returning.
“Then read!” she screamed, turning in frenzy, and his left hand traveled into her blouse at the open neck and down the breasts’ warm canyon. Her mouth, open throughout the quick transformations of fury, fear, awe, and finally, madness, rose to his neck like the sucker of a great vampire fish surfacing from the depths of the sea, fastening to the elbow of his windpipe, so that, prohibited from breathing he fisted a tail of blonde hair and pulled as if to sever her head from the shoulders. In a moment his large right arm proved stronger than small-girl lips; he had her loose and held her gaping, an interval for bullying mastery, and then turned her, brought her forward and up, the nether hand taking a purchase within her fat furrow, hot beneath cool cloth, and carried her to cover the light snow of tobacco grains on Pound’s clean desk.
He had come so far in what had seemed desperate comedy, as in school when the kids steal your cap and you tolerate their passing it just out of reach until the smallest boy is the bearer and you engulf and batter him to the point at which his incipient grief takes the laugh off you. But Trudchen now had fear least of all, and laughed, herself, as one does whose will is consonant with the world’s; the little witch’s face in a garish disorder of evil, yet her odor was childlike, of soap.
In endless pursuit of pride, then, he became fastidious, working his way through the jungle of queer fasteners and ribbons, and the three buttons which at the crucial junction of her parts secured the last guardian triangle of doveskin fabric, beaching finally upon a little round belly incapable of further discovery.
The key in the devil’s lock, entrez monsieur, enchanté de faire votre connaissance, excruciating, pain, pain, pleasure—well into that groove of unification where the senses are harnessed towards a single fanatical end, his suddenly lost purpose. Ah, it was all so crazy. A small window broke the wall above Pound’s desk, high above—standing at full height Reinhart could just frame his face in it—and absurd, fit only for some lazy postman on stilts to pass a parcel in from the outside, to save a trip through the labyrinth. It was from this glass that he got an immaterial signal into the corner of the eye, and as if to breathe and moisten the throat, he straightened and turned his head, saw close up to the pane the feathered neck of a man who wanted a barber, Pound’s; beyond and lower, a face like a contour map of an asteroid, ripped and pitted by hot chips flying off Jupiter; two had by accident embedded collaterally and, still smoking, were eyes: ostensibly directed at Pound, but seeing him, knowing him and what he was at, not caring, not even amused, but knowing. The old German, now named: Sweetheart. In exchange for the typewriter he presented a thick wad of notes. Pound buttoned them in an upper pocket and, one-breasted like an Amazon, vanished.
“Mein Tiger!” whispered Trudchen. Looking down, melting, Reinhart felt rather than saw he had unwittingly been a success. He had also forgotten all precautions, and swift through his mind like an Army documentary ran the series of awful upshots.
“Ach,” said Trudchen, yet hypersensitive, opposing partition, “I have taken care...” Not knowing to what she referred, he accepted her assurance.
Crumpled in her fist, the old handbill, taken in surprise like everything else, was still their partner. He tore it from her and read the first line below the bold title, read it twice as with his unoccupied hand he returned himself to order. It did not change: “The appeal of Hitlerism is to the eternal Schweinhund in man.” Of course it was anti-Nazi; no matter by whom or where, it had been produced in honor and conscience and at cost, and its anonymous author, if he had eluded his compatriot enemies, had lived perhaps only to drown in the same foreign flood that swamped them.
He kissed her, long and exploratory, for the first time, and saying “Ah, I must be crazy, anyone could have walked in,” he burst away, she moaning in the sudden isolation. He ran through the French window and around the corner, and saw that Schatzi had not, because of his heavy burden, got farther than the public sidewalk.
Schatzi accepted the inevitable cigarette and slipped it between his ear and the drooping rim of the workman’s cap that with neckerchief and soiled jacket and weary trousers formed his present costume, which he would surely have had trouble in selling to a naked man.
“Do you need some conversation?” he asked, with a tremble of his nose, “or is it simply generosity? Excuse my lack of strength.”
He placed the typewriter upon the octagonal stones of the sidewalk. No sooner was it done than a woman rode by on the adjacent bicycle path and they felt the slipstream of her passing.
“Into the mechanism no doubt this blew some sand,” said Schatzi, his voice like a dumping of gravel. “So much longer to clean!” He elevated his hands in a Jewish shrug, and while the right one was up, put out a finger and ran it across his upper lip, making a gargoyle mouth.
Seeing him now in reality and close-up, Reinhart could not doubt his girl friends’ tales were true: if Schatzi were not from the concentration camp, then that establishment was illusion. True, he was more than mere skin, but give an unfilled pelt a few months’ meals and you would have Schatzi. He lived, but just lived and no more, with not one breath beyond the essential. His face was dreadful, romantically hideous, in the ugliness only supreme virtue permits, perhaps creates, as with the old saints; and though his angles were sharp, his constant tremble blurred and made them remote.
Confronted with this overwhelming authenticity, Reinhart on the instant forgot his purpose and, instead of speaking, sent a grin. He watched Schatzi catch it, warp it with the secret they shared, and send it back.
“Your breathing is labored,” he said. “Exercise shortens the span of life. He lives most long who lies in one place without movement, like a piece of warm bacon, all his life long, ja?”
“I never thought of that,” answered Reinhart. It seemed so marvelously reasonable; he put from his mind the obvious reference to the tumble with Trudchen and worried about the years gone in nailing down his coffin with a barbell. He had never before talked with an authority on mortality—who yet, he saw with a happy loss of trepidation, was also a human being, whose smile was only superficially diabolic.
For a great sweetness was exuded by Schatzi’s hard person as he suddenly stared into Reinhart’s face and said: “You wish to send me on a qvest, ja? She told me, this little piece of sausage, this Gretchen—”
“Trudchen.”
“So. You search for your kinfolk—this is correct, ‘kinfolk’ or simply ‘kin’?”
So close was he, perhaps by reason of defective hearing, he almost climbed Reinhart’s frame. It was disconcerting, especially since Reinhart judged from his clothing that he must stink and drew always away, until on the fifth circle of their patch of walk he envisioned how from a distance their two figures must look in revolution and permitted himself to be captured. He had been quite wrong: Schatzi put forth the distinct odor of eau-de-cologne.
“Wwwwell,” said Schatzi, “you have come to the right potty. Ve vill”—successful pronunciation of the first w satisfied him in perpetuity—“simply look for all the Reinharts who are not yet dead and there you are!” He actually winked, which is to say one eye was swallowed whole by the lids, like a ravenous bird ingesting a black cherry.
Impossible to think the concentration camps had not been serious; therefore what Reinhart saw before him now was the human triumph, a wit which had faced the dreadful and survived, no cloistered humor like his own. He himself was suffering depression, feeling wet and dirty and unusually exposed, and indeed, since Schatzi had taken the initiative he was no longer interested in his own mission.
“I don’t want to remind you of your troubles,” he said, though of course he did, “but would you say the concentration camp was the worst thing that could be imagined?”
If Schatzi had earlier been ebullient, he now went into a positive delight that Reinhart, because he had no experience of the world, found very grisly.
“Ah, no, no, not the worst! The worst, my young friend, is to die. Just that simple. Two added to two makes four, always. The living and the dying, and nothing else, makes ray-oll-ity.”
So Reinhart, conscious it was asinine but getting no other suggestions, gave him another cigarette. Which went behind the other ear.
“Now you must tell me an answer,” Schatzi said. “Why must you find these relatives? Of course,” he went on before Reinhart could speak, “to help them. You Amis are a decent lot. You do not become happy to see anyone starve, let by themselves relations of blood, ja? This gives one faith for the future of the world in your hands.”
Hard as Reinhart looked among the rocks which clicked together in Schatzi’s voice, he could find no insincerity, therefore he stifled the impulse to say “Horseshit!” He had at last, there could be no mistake this time, found the man with a right to say anything and it be valid. Not even Bach and not even Lori, not even when he had learned their truth, had so impressed him.
“I’d think you would hate the Germans.”
“I hate them? My friend, I am myself a German.” Saying which Schatzi bent to the typewriter, on the way down adjusting his cap, the crown of which was dark with oil. Someone had borrowed his tie to hang a felon and returned it with a frozen knot that would never undo; no doubt he had it wired to his collar or to that frail armature on which his pennyworth of skin was hung.
A marvel that he could pick up such a weight. Reinhart moved to aid him but was waved off.
“But one detail—”
“Of course.” In this regard Reinhart never admitted another as master. He produced his wallet and counted off five hundred-mark notes, fifty dollars, from the wad of five thousand which Marsala had got from a Russian soldier for Reinhart’s graduation watch.
“I didn’t mean you to do this for nothing.”
“Now,” said Schatzi, “you have shamed me with your generosity. Ray-olly, I cannot—” He drew from his pocket a brilliant blue handkerchief and snorted into it, thin and airy like a fife badly played. He took the money. “This is not what I purposed to say—which at any pace, I have now forgotten.”
Reinhart watched him go down the walk with his burden. Twenty feet away, he turned and shouted, “You shall hear of me!” And then he moved off the pavement into the trees, where he spat fiercely and vanished.
Reinhart had neglected to give him his grandfather’s name! Hot on the trail he ran, through the patch of forest to the wide prospect of Argentinische Allee, and surveyed the feasible directions. But Schatzi was gone.