LICHENKO STAYED. AND IN that staying Schild ironically discovered a focus for that energy he had ever kept on call against the grand mission. For he was, or had been, a romantic, a man to whom time now and past were ancillary to time’s end, and while he saw history as a continuous process and within that process himself as nothing, with the other eye he looked on the personal life as a series of choices culminating in an absolute, a supreme of either victory or martyrdom, a storming of some Winter Palace or a fell day like that in 1933 when the Gestapo was unleashed on the German Communist Party.
Instead, his future had arrived in the form of—Lichenko; and time had stopped. Schatzi, who for all his shrewdness had not known of Lichenko until the beating, for all his eccentricity was a good Communist and had made his report; and what he, for all his hatefulness yet a hero of the camps, thought of the newest traitor did not figure in Schild’s reveries so markedly as that Schatzi’s long-held, unjust, fantastic suspicions of him had been confirmed and, finally, that, for the first time personally liable for an actual crime, he felt less guilt than serenity and lacked absolutely the sense of being hunted.
And most corrupt, his sense of humor had despite his efforts to brook it begun to prevail over the conscience. Lichenko’s invalidism had required only his attendance to be supremely ludicrous—to be, in fact, lunatic. Objectively the situation was simply a Russian slob nursed by a nervous Jew; the first was not ill, but the second was; and since each in his present arrangement was necessary to the other in just that condition, both were mad.
Or perhaps only Schild was, for he noticed that Lichenko these days never laughed; indeed, since entering into permanent bed, and despite his abominable appearance, he had developed a dignified gravity which one who knew only the earlier Lichenko would have believed impossible. One lunchtime when, carrying the loaded tray and an under-arm burden of newspapers and magazines, Schild had difficulty at the door, Lichenko sprang from the sheets to his relief, showing not only vigor but incredible strength for so small a man: he took the heavy tray in one hand and the papers in the other and, studying Life’s cover tit-girl as he went, walked silently, stately, to the bed as if it were the high altar in St. Basil’s and he Patriarch; and immediately upon reclining was again the man so infirm that Schild must needs not only spoon the mashed potatoes into his mouth but also support his head simultaneously. Lunacy, to be sure, but Lichenko’s were not so much the doings of a lunatic—Schild realized, as he heard himself laughing without accompaniment from his patient—as those of a sane man who is humoring a lunatic.
Similarly, Lichenko of an evening had invented a new amusement. He had fallen off his taste for public reading and even for cards. As to the former, he had been disillusioned by the knowledge that Skeezix lived in time, more or less relative to the limited days of actual people, had years ago at the beginning of the story been a baby, was now in his twenties, would grow old. Since fictional persons are a lie to begin with, he said, they are only interesting if they stick to it and do not pretend to have the dull troubles of real people; otherwise you did better to have true stories, which of course are always boring but then don’t pretend not to be. Like—he broke off to peer at Schild in a kind of suspicion and remark that it was possible he, Schild, would not agree, and immediately launched an attack on L’il Abner from the opposing ground: nobody could tell him an American peasant acted in that fashion.
As to the cards, it was immoral to win from a man ignorant of the game; had he known that at the outset he would not have played; he might even return the winnings, as he was not a gengster, unless—again he stopped abruptly as if to give prominence to his expression, which was this time a sneer; one so broad, however, that surely its purpose was rather mock than serious. And again Schild laughed, and again Lichenko’s face returned to wood.
Conversation appeared as the new entertainment. It was hardly more, being Lichenko’s questions and Schild’s answers; but it was not less, and since Schild had never known speech could be employed for amusement, at least not by him—he had listened to Milton; in both the Party and the Army the human sound was used only to assent to orders from above and command what lay below; to St. George it was the minimum of small-talk to get rid of him; his parents and sister had been great talkers in disregard of the defenseless tympanum, which was why he was not—since his voice had no resonance in this small room with the peaked ceiling which in the corners joined the wall a scant five feet above the floor, crowded with furniture and now with the warm congestion of dependent humanity; although Lichenko was not ill, it did make a difference to him that Schild was there to serve—these were reasons enough, if still morally inadmissible, why he should enjoy their mutual discourse.
But more important was the fact that after the initial ten minutes at Lovett’s they had never really talked. An ordinary citizen of the Soviet Union, that person who to an American existed only in theory, he had had one under his roof for three weeks and never yet found the propitious moment to ask: what is it like, the experience of that citizenship? Indeed, to place the query was not only an opportunity but, in the present context, an obligation, just as in Party circles in America one was under the reverse imperative not to question the mysterious figures who were manifestly Russian but carried passports bearing names like T. Smith.
Before the beating, Lichenko had obviously never been in the mood for talk; he had been eating, or sleeping, or washing, or scratching, or hanging over magazines or the chessboard; and that was the answer to the question never asked: there was no question about life in the USSR, it was life with incessant activity and without doubt, and even a deserter from it, one who could not meet its demands, yet carried with him its energy. In his very exploitation of Schild, Lichenko honored his society: a bourgeois gone bad would not have had the guts to go so far.
As to the other question—why had he deserted?—the science of dialectics admitted no such concern; Schild was not permitted to receive it into his mind; a person was either this or that; if that, he should either be ignored or destroyed; the alternative, if one did neither of these, was to relate it to the fact that oneself was lost. And this Schild had already done.
Now that conversation had finally come, it was appropriately on the theme of, not Lichenko, but Schild; not on the simple deserter but on the more complex; and Lichenko’s half of it was so shrewd that Schild briefly considered whether after all he had not been wrong about him.
According to Schild’s wristwatch—which was strapped to Lichenko’s bony arm, having been the stake in one last game of cards before the no-gaming resolution went into effect—the time measured seven in the evening. The tray had been washed and lay gleaming on the dressertop, against next morning’s breakfast time when it would vanish briefly to reappear heavy with eggs, melting yellow in the centers, and oatmeal porridge slushed with milk and sugar; in the end compartment, two pieces of white bread, thick as bricks, coated so lavishly with golden butter you could not lift them without smearing your fingers, which was as pleasant a sensation as running your hands over a woman, and though he knew that with this abundance the Americans had developed a culture of eating—it was some old law or another that when there was overproduction on the one hand and a shortage of markets on the other, a society tried to fill the gap with elaborate manners—and while he approved of this whole lovely ensemble of errors, he could not forbear from licking his hands. And Nathan made no objection.
That, indeed, was Schild’s reaction to all of life, so far as Lichenko could see, and he wondered again why a man with such tolerance would join a band of evil thugs whose only difference from the other group just defeated lay in the latter’s being German. Although there were German Communists, too, and surely many among them who were but lately Nazis, and wait and see if it was not exactly those who were raised to power in the East Sector. Ah, Nathan, you fool!, you who were rightly so quick to act when Vasya disgraced your house, in the big things you are truly like the silly comic strips you so dearly love to read. Look into the mirror and you will see the living Small Abner.
Though not hurt (and it was an awful strain to continue to pretend he had been; actors justly earned higher wages than a fellow who operated a lathe); although in fantastically better physical condition than he had ever before enjoyed (for the first time he had hopes of one day becoming handsomely stout), the kind it was shameful to have to hide under a mock illness rather than announce with much noise and movement; in spite of the great rewards at hand and the greater ones in promise (if the United States proved but a vain dream, then perhaps merely some sleepy hamlet in the Black Forest and a German woman with a nice round ass and a little craft like decorating Christmas-tree ornaments, and a garden of cabbage and beets—if one lived too high he got only boils and the gout) ...despite every reason for being up and about, for seizing life and making it groan, he had instead chosen to play the sick hog. And it had begun to work.
Nathan was a queer fish. For some reason he had buried his humanness so deep that one could bring it to the surface only by outraging him. Yet Lichenko had always known it was there, else he would not have taken the trouble to find it—and it was trouble, and Nathan was very lucky to have him. For now he had, at who could tell what final cost, at last established the conditions for that intimacy in which the truth could be aired.
Seven o’clock, the good air outside the closed window, which he had not had in his nose for weeks, still bright and full of August. But Nathan had turned on the dresser lamp like the indoor man he was, and come to sit by the bed to await his, Vasya’s, pleasure. The room which had on first sight looked so grand that he assumed Nathan must share it with a regiment had truly become a home. With use, the very bedsheets, so white and hard when first entered, had softened and lost their harsh odor of bleach. Even Nathan’s sloppiness, which until the “illness” intervened he had constantly opposed, had worked to the homely purpose, the rug dark with scorchings, the rent in the curtains, the deep scratches of footboard and dresser-front catching the shadows like old scars on the faces of your loved ones. ...
With a scissor-kick, as if in the water, he shot himself backwards, conking his skull on the headboard, which was not intentional but certainly claimed Nathan’s attention. Instantly his friend was up and arranging the pillow.
“Are you hurt?”
Could Nathan truly be as pained as he looked, at the possible hurt of another?
“Ah, no!” Lichenko tried to joke. “The bedstead is undamaged!”
He had got him there: Nathan fell back laughing. He himself of course did not, it being a kind of vulgarity to laugh at one’s own jokes, and instead, with serious mien, fixed the pillow from which Schild had puffed out all the good head-hollows.
“Was für Knöpfe macht Ihr Vater?” he asked.
Nathan could sit in a straight chair for hours without so much as crossing his legs, and he was thin, too, so that this ability owed nothing to the padding on his rump.
“Oh, he doesn’t make the buttons. He buys them from a buttonmaker and sells them to a manufacturer of women’s dresses. If that’s confusing, don’t bother with it. Your country is mercifully free of the middleman.”
Again Lichenko shot himself backward, but this time the pillow dulled the thud of his head hitting oak, and this time Schild did not rise, for simultaneously with the action away, Lichenko had shot his hand forward and asked: “What is that you say, free...?”
“From the middleman.”
“So.” The olive-drab undershirt, which with drawers of the same cloth, on loan from Schild, was his costume of illness, had with the movements ridden up and constricted about his narrow chest like a dog harness. “I should have told you earlier, my dear friend, I hear what is said, but between the words sometimes comes the swoosh of the rockets: ‘free’—swoosh—‘from the middleman’—swoosh, so that what goes into my mind is often different from what has been spoken. For example, I thought just now I heard you say someone was free in the Middle Ages.”
“Haha,” laughed Nathan, but wryly. “Not being a Jesuit, I could hardly say that.”
“Ah, again, another example: what I heard then was something about Jesus Christ! ...You see what I mean.” He threw his feet about under the bedclothes, which commotion looked as if a small animal were trapped there, and smiled helplessly.
Just the thing to replace Nathan’s nervousness with the responsibility of a job; he could never endure being misunderstood. It was a relief to see him break the stiff column of his spine as he leaned forward and said very slowly and with the enunciation of him who speaks into an ear trumpet: “Je-su-it—a religious order which invented a kind of fascism four hundred years before Mussolini.”
“Of course I knew it was something old,” Lichenko answered. “But you see a hydraulic engineer does not have time to learn much beyond the principles of his science. I..., my dear friend, should you be angry if I confessed to a dishonesty?”
Behind Schild’s genial facade he saw an emotion begin at the throat and descend—a giraffe would look like that if it swallowed a melon—either hatred or fear, since these were the only feelings a person might find politic not always to reveal, but which of these was here operative Lichenko could not say, there being no apparent reason for either. Wishing no lies to stand between them, he had prepared merely to admit he had not read the American books they discussed at Lovett’s party, so long as the truth was out that an engineering student had no spare time.
Instead, he said quickly: “I borrowed another of your handkerchiefs while you were gone to the dining hall. I shall send you a dozen when I go—” For a moment he imagined he had heard himself continue with: “to America,” for suddenly that was where his fancy had fled, in just that wink of the eye he had seen himself at the handkerchief stall in a store big as a sports arena, had gone back further to park his yellow Ford at the curb outside. He wore a tight blue suit of narrow gray stripes and a black felt hat low over his brow; the woman at the counter believed him a suave but dangerous racketeer, a pearl-handled revolver encased in a silk glove, as he smiled with sharp white teeth and said “Enchanted,” or whatever was proper at such a moment, which he would know.
“—a dozen. Tell me which color do you prefer? Always this olive, or should you like some of blue with narrow gray stripes?”
This was what he really said while Nathan loosened, sat back, and finally crossed his legs, one trouser riding up to uncover a pale shin whipped with dark hair.
“You know you may take anything of mine,” said Schild, “and I’ll be disturbed only if you try to pay me back.”
His incredible generosity! It had, more than any other single thing, been the cause of Lichenko’s delay. He understood that far back around the time of Jesus Christ the first Communists worked on that motive and no other, when, that is to say, they were weak and victims rather than victimizers, and it must have been splendid to live then, when good and bad were easy to isolate. Some time since, they had become so mixed that one could no longer take the sayings of one’s mother as a serious guide to life. For example, of Schild his mother would first make some old-peasant observation such as that a man with a high bridge to his nose was untrustworthy, or that ears set at that angle caught only evil wisdom. But if he showed his manners she would think him fine as a “nobleman,” which in her lexicon took on ever more precious connotations as she grew older and had further to look to see the lovely time of her youth when her father had one hundred per cent more land than her husband had now, since the latter owned none at all, and when the fields were the property of a handsome count who never cursed rather than a gang of rude bullies who stole nine-tenths of every harvest in the name of some swindler they called “the people.”
Lichenko’s mother had been illiterate. She had gone under orders to night school and learned to read and write, but she had still been illiterate—according to his brother, who belonged to the Party and, being very literate, wrote articles on agricultural matters for a newspaper in Kiev, which Lichenko, perhaps because he himself was only moderately literate, could never read beyond the first paragraph: “The representative liaison committee from the Stalin Collective Farm at Rusovo yesterday presented to the Central Organization of Rural Co-operative Societies a voluntary petition from the Third Link of field workers on the Stalin Collective Farm that it be permitted to raise its quota in regard to the harvest of wheat. Now, what does this mean relative to the development of large-scale socialist production in the sphere of agriculture? This means...”
Or take his brother—now you would assume he and Schild, being political comrades, would hit it off. But, ah no, his brother had no respect for foreigners, Communists or not, as he had once admitted to Vasya; indeed, he placed little value on any people but the Great Russian and had got so that just before the war he would speak Ukrainian only with the greatest distaste.
No, to understand Nathan one must regard him with one’s own eyes: it was the generosity, not the Communism, that was native to him, and if you said well, the Americans have so much they can afford to give some away, you had only to compare him with another like Captain St. George to see the difference. Nathan lived like a holy man of yore.
“I suppose your dearest wish is to return to your family now the fighting is over,” he said, straightening the undershirt. “Tell me of them. Your sister—is she beautiful? Is she so slender? You have a photograph, of course.”
“No—well, I did have,” Schild spoke in concern, “but in the area of Metz my belongings were stolen.”
“And your mother—can she read and write? No, don’t answer. How silly of me to ask! A fine, cultivated noble—gentleman like you! Besides, certainly everybody in the United States is literate.”
This seemed to soothe Schild, and his black eyes glowed behind the lenses as he protested happily: “Not at all. There are about ten or twelve million Americans who cannot read and write. We are not speaking now of the Soviet Union, Vasili Nikolaievitch.”
“But then it is not necessary for everyone to read and write,” said Lichenko, shrugging with his voice. “All one really needs is something to eat and wear—protection from the golod and kholod, as one says in Russian—girls to love, maybe a drink of spirits now and again, and the policeman not on your tail. I mean, if one belongs to the common people.”
Schild assented by his silence.
“The uncommon ones,” Lichenko went on, “take care of themselves. Then there are the ones between, who don’t know what they want, nicht wahr? Something different, anyway; this is not right and that is not right. Nothing is right for them!” he exclaimed in a kind of joyful hopelessness, pedaling his legs rapidly as if riding a bicycle. “But look at a big oak tree: it loves no girls, drinks only water, does not eat at all, lasts longer than the oldest man, and is satisfied throughout.”
“And is chopped down by the first fellow who needs wood,” said Schild, nodding pleasantly. His shirt pocket might be unbuttoned, but his tie and collar were fast and most uncomfortable to see through the heavy, still air. Keeping the windows shut had been a phase of Lichenko’s scheme of absolute pressure to the body as well as the spirit, and while no effect could be discerned in Schild, he himself was sweating like a plowhorse.
“Yet,” Nathan continued, not so much as a gloss on his steep forehead, “isn’t even that oak better than a worker under capitalism?, who is chopped down when he is not needed.”
“Stupid!”
“Yes, stupid is a better word for it than evil.”
Stupid Nathan! He saw even a tree politically, and no doubt would be the first to cut down an oak, to make paper for pamphlets to celebrate someone else’s sowing of the reclaimed ground, or to denounce them for seeding the wrong thing, whichever would be most bleak and deadly and contradictory of his generous heart. There was a difference of thousands of meters, in more than land and sea, between him and Lichenko’s brother, in spite of their similar faiths. His brother had, all to himself, a four-room apartment with a refrigerator and a private bathroom, but what had Schild to gain? He even disapproved of his father’s wealth.
“It would be better, I think, if the window were open.” Lichenko scrubbed his face with the undershirt tail, which when he pulled it down again was wet as a swimming suit, and since by that time Schild had opened one half of the casement and the evening air made chill entry, his belly was shortly cramped with cold.
“Good, that is just enough. Now please close it.”
“You haven’t a fever?” asked Schild as he came back to his chair softly as a cat.
“Frankly, I don’t know. I feel very strange. Perhaps I should take a bath. ... Of course you have a bathroom in your home in the U.S.A. And with hot water, no? Schön!”
“But there are many people who have not. My grandparents lived in the working-class quarter of New York City, in unbelievable slums. They had nothing but a cold-water flat, one room for living and sleeping, and the other a combination kitchen-bath. The tub had a wooden cover that served as dining table.”
“Wundervoll!” Lichenko chortled. “I knew it! They were workers and yet had a private bath, and their son grew up to be a great industrialist of buttons and his son became a fine intellectual.” He saw a cruel angle develop in the corner of Schild’s mouth, at odds with a sad cast of the eye. He, Vasya, had been carried away as usual: fact, fact was wanted and not his opinions, which only irked his friend in the proportion they were genuine.
He writhed about until his feet hung over one side of the bed and his head, the other. In upside-down vision Schild looked like a baldheaded man with a beard—indeed, somewhat like a Lenin with glasses. He had played this game as a boy: if you frowned, the lines of the forehead resembled a mouth; the real mouth you must ignore, and also that the nose opens in the wrong direction; with the remainder you had a fairly credible face which gave to the expressions what the Moscow radio gave to the truth—an odd twist, both human and not. It was years since he had played it, however, and he had lost his old proficiency in interpretation.
“What are you doing now?”
The mouth in the center of Schild’s head answered: “I’m smiling.”
“Forgive me, one gets restless in bed. To entertain myself while you are gone I have remembered certain boyhood amusements.” He righted himself, all hot above the neck, and sighed. “When I was sick as a child my mother sang little songs to me. They were always about food. For the life of me I cannot now recall a note, or I should sing one. They only come back when I am hungry.”
Schild bathed in a pond of jocularity as he said: “Then we shall have to starve you.”
“No,” Lichenko answered, “that has already been done, and believe me, my friend, just for the singing it is not worth it.”
It was aired, his first open attack on the regime of his country; he felt excellent well for having made it, and he stared fearlessly at Schild, who appropriately cast his eyes aside in deep embarrassment. Which meant he knew, then, of the Kremlin-made famine of 1933, and it meant as well that he was not so corrupt as to try to defend it. Yet if Nathan did know and, regardless of a disapproval however sincere, continued to work for those devils who had not only created the famine but standing on two million corpses denied they were there... Lichenko lost the path as all at once he found he wanted Schild to be both innocent and guilty, for only in that combination could he forgive him.
But Nathan was neither. So solemnly eloquent he almost cracked one’s heart, yet with a peculiar elation that seemed to swell his own, he spoke of Hitler’s assault on the USSR and the scorched-earth tactics and withdrawals which, because of the treacherous surprise, had been at first the Soviets’ only defense. He spoke well; indeed, so well that Lichenko almost believed the hunger here at issue was rather that of 1941 than 1933. No question that the invasion by the Germans had been worse than living under Stalin: they were foreigners. Yet, although the data was of course suppressed, hundreds of thousands of his compatriots had had another opinion, hung garlands on the invaders and enlisted in General Vlasov’s anti-Kremlin army or even in the Wehrmacht. They were wrong. If you must have a tyrant, why not keep your own?
He could not help it, he still had scruples about disabusing Schild. The Red Army, as Nathan was saying, had done a magnificent job; they were heroes; he, Vasya, was a hero and it was just and proper to hear someone say so. The Soviet Union was the greatest country in the world: there lay no contradiction between believing that and fleeing to America, or the Black Forest, or some southern land where dark-complexioned people drank wine and slept all day in the shade. And it was very probable that the Party elite represented a new and superior kind of man. He even believed Bolshevism would triumph in the long run, everywhere, because he could see in it no weaknesses and knew by experience it would stop at nothing. Even Hitler had a limit: the Germanic “race,” by which he measured everything, including his Ukrainian allies, and in the end this folly brought down his house. He was wrong.
The Communists, however, were right—oh yes, no doubt even the famine was correct from the high point of vantage, the Kremlin had its eye always on the main chance, for there in the grave lay Lichenko’s father and mother, who starved, yet there was he, son and heir, fewer than ten years later at the breech of the rocket gun, fighting loyally to save Moscow, and Stalin, from the enemy.
Communism, Nathan, is never wrong—as you would immediately agree but not understand—because its only principle is success. Just as yours is failure; what you really love is not the Red Army’s victories but the sacrifices and agony required to achieve them. How you would have approved of the famine! ...But the point I wish to make is that Stalin and his gang neither liked nor disliked starving two million people. They saw it as necessary to their plan that they requisition more foodstuffs than the peasants produced. If as a result the peasants died, they simply did not care. Communism is never wrong, Nathan, because it has no feelings at all, certainly no good ones, but no bad ones either—none at all. It is difficult to tell you that, because I have and you have, and furthermore I am a man without ambition and thus discredited.
The unspoken rang so loudly against his frontal bone that Lichenko could hardly believe Schild had not heard it, too; crystalline, cold, and true it was, like the sound of a gong made of glass. And he had never been a great one for thinking, which was his brother’s talent.
Once before the war his brother in a literary phase had read a book called The Idiot by a writer towards whom his brother had mixed feelings—saying on the one hand he did show a consciousness of something, although on the other he was of course hopelessly something and you could not look to him for something else—at any rate, in an unusually amiable mood he quoted to Vasya the very kernel of what in this writer he thoroughly disapproved: this Idiot, who if that were not enough was also a prince, appropriately found everything strange; but one evening in Switzerland, where typical of the decadent Russian nobility having nothing else to do he went to drink sulfur-water or whatnot, he heard the bray of an ass in the marketplace: “I was immensely struck with the ass, and for some reason extraordinarily pleased with it, and suddenly everything seemed to clear up in my head.”
Following the quotation his brother observed that heavy silence which means such nonsense speaks for itself. To Vasya it had said nothing until this moment more than five years later when, without the ass’s aid, he found himself in the princely condition. Everything seemed to clear up. ... He had stayed on not to save Schild but to understand him, not because Schild was good but rather because he was interesting. It was the game of the Communists, who were never wrong, to save people. For an ordinary man, an idiot, it was enough to know how the next fellow used the privilege and obligation of life, which was not the best thing imaginable, but we none of us—his brother, Stalin, Hitler, the Americans, the prince—had anything else.
Naturally, Nathan had not heard. That inner ear through which the rest of humanity hears the most important sounds is confiscated when one joins the Communists. He had often confirmed this by speaking silently to his brother: “You bastard, the only reason I wouldn’t shoot you if I had the chance is that we have the same blood.” Results always negative, despite his brother’s noted gift for smelling out heresy.
However, Schild had picked up a subtler noise which Lichenko missed. His voice became furtive as he left the siege of Stalingrad to warn: “St. George is coming upstairs.”
At last Lichenko heard the footsteps, which being both heavy and soft like those of any large animal but the horse, were unmistakable: those shoes which he so coveted, with their fat soles of yellow gum rubber; shod so, a man could run right up a smooth wall. Why Schild should think St. George a menace, however, was far from clear—if at the same time, as Nathan insisted, and Lichenko had to agree, the captain was also a fool. But a good fool, a jovial one, at least wise enough not to try to be clever. He did not even suspect he had a political as second-in-command, and was the happier for it. In a Russian company the most harmless-looking boob was invariably the secret-police informer. The wonderful American invention was a man who looked his role.
He lay badly in need now of just the neutrality that St. George dispensed. He readied his mouth to call “Kom een!” his pronunciation of which the captain never failed to approve; he was already enmired in St. George’s warm sludge, that secure, absolute, fool’s medium in which all was forever orderly—when, just as the footfalls reached the door, darkness smothered him in its close sheet.
Outside the window night had come unnoticed, but the room was blacker still, for even a night swollen and dim with cloud has its suggestions of distant fire. Damn you, Nathan, for extinguishing the lamp on a friend! Now what had been merely necessary became imperative. He called to St. George and could not hear his own voice; he strove to rise but lost the first fall to inertia, the second to his knotted bedclothes, and won the third only to hear his quarry pad beyond the bend of the hall. Nevertheless he got to the lamp, eerily not meeting Schild on the way, choked the button in its narrow throat, making light—of which he had the conviction it would reveal nothing but a chamber enclosing only himself.
Yet there sat Nathan on his hard chair, on his cast-iron behind, and looking not at all guilty, when for once he should have, but rather self-righteous.
“Yes, it’s all right now,” he said. “He’s gone to his room.”
In the interval of darkness the lamp had prepared for a success, developing its weak yellow into a splendid flare—only to lose the contest to Schild’s face, which like unpolished bone claimed all the light and gave none back. He had never looked more saintly.
“But come,” he said, rising to Lichenko’s aid and fading quickly into his old contrition. “You shouldn’t be up—you’ll take a chill.” He offered to support him and, when that was spurned, walked before, as if he were clearing a channel through some invisible marsh between the dresser and bed; alone and unwitting he went, and no one followed.
For Lichenko had turned to the big clothes cabinet in the corner next the window, turned the key, and peered into its cavern which gave the illusion of a vaster space than the surrounding room. At one end of the rod Schild’s uniforms hung unruly, as if rifled by a thief. At the other, his own, which seemed unusually small upon its hanger; and his boots, bow-legged, slumped, wanting straight heels.
“My cap, I do not see my cap, and I cannot go without it,” he said, into the depths but to Schild.
“Oh yes,” Schild answered, in a strangely strong voice. “You will want your cap. Isn’t it there on the shelf?”
Surely it was; he had forgotten the single shelf across the top of the cabinet, perhaps because he was too short to use it, but the edge of the cap’s shiny visor poked an inch beyond the board, like the nose of a midget peeking down from hiding, and he seized it. Upon his head the cap was tight, since he had not had a real haircut for three weeks, only Nathan’s trim-job around the ears with a little sewing scissors. He also got into his boots, balancing badly on one leg at a time—you cannot live abed for more than a day, even faking, and not feel giddy on your feet—and then seeing in the mirror a soldier on tropics-duty, for he wore cap, olive-drab shorts and undershirt, and boots, he groaned at his stupidity and sat upon the floor.
Schild came to him and, bending over, grasped his left heel and toe.
“I’ll pull and you pull, and off it comes. Ready?” Before he could answer, Nathan did his part unaccompanied; off it came and then the other.
“Now,” said Schild, “we’ll just put these back into the cabinet where they can’t be scuffed. And the cap, too. You won’t want to get it full of lint.” He plucked it from Lichenko’s head and ran his elbow across it twice.
“Don’t crush my cap,” Lichenko shouted.
“Ah no, this is how they brush hats in the fine American stores.”
“How am I to know that?”
Seizing his hand, Schild brought him upright.
“What you do know is that I have no reason to ruin it, nicht wahr? Therefore what I do must be to its advantage.” He looked very scholarly as he replaced the cap on the shelf. At the angle Lichenko saw that his glasses were covered with a film of dust and at least one fingerprint, distinct in oil.
“Why don’t you clean your spectacles?” he shouted angrily. “You can’t see out of your own head!”
Carefully, Schild unhooked the temple pieces from behind his ears, and painstakingly shined the lenses with the small end of his straw-colored necktie, which tonight as usual was twisted ahead of the larger.
Lichenko turned aside, embarrassed by the naked face, saying: “You should not have done that to the captain.”
“Then come,” Schild offered, the glasses yet in his fingers, “we shall go and apologize to him; I mean, we’ll go and I will apologize, and you can see his feelings haven’t been hurt.”
“Oh, I’m sure of that.” He reached up under the tunic and drew his breeches from the crossbar of the hanger. No matter where he wandered hence he would never find another man so alert to his moods and purposes, but was that not the trouble?
“Yes,” Schild reassured, “he is just a person. ... But whatever are you doing? You are ill, my friend, and must not worry about your uniform. As you can see I have taken good care of it. Look at the blouse—as clean and pressed as new, eh? And the medals—only yesterday I sponged the ribbons with gasoline. How bright their colors are! See the Order of the Red Banner—”
Lichenko sidestepped him and struggled into the breeches. After the fly was fastened he could hardly get a hand into his pocket, so American had been three weeks of meals—and that, too, was the trouble. He withdrew a wad of marks and thrust them at Schild.
“Here is payment for the underwear and handkerchiefs and whatever else I have taken, and also the winnings from the cards. You see, I cheated in those games—silly, no?, since I could have beaten you anyway, still I could not resist when it was so easy. But there you have it all back again.” He threw the bills upon the dresser.
“Yes, the cards!” Schild said, desperately exuberant. “We’ll have a three-handed game of something and get old St. George—you’ll see he isn’t hurt in any way—and take his money. He’ll like that, he’ll do anything for company.”
“As to your personal kindness,” Lichenko continued, reaching for his blouse, “there is no repaying that, not when one understands what kindness is, a thing which should make the giver feel good or he should not do it.” He said more as he crumpled the blouse over his head, but could not hear it, himself. He was so sick of himself he feared he might vomit on the very uniform whose smartness he also owed to Schild. He had learned in fifty seconds that cowardice may be a slow disease but is felt as an instant affliction, and comes more violently in rooms than on the fields of battle; at Kursk, when a Tiger tank broke rumbling and malignant through to their artillery position, he had leaped upon the deck and dropped a grenade down its throat; in gemütlich Zehlendorf he could not even stave off the insulting of a fool, much less tell the cold truth to a friend.
“Come,” said Schild, who looked now as if he were drunk or, rather, pretending to be drunk and wild, in the manner of some honor student ostentatiously letting down his hair at the end of term. “St. George has a bottle...” He rolled his eyes in what he surely meant as license, but to Lichenko they suggested those of a horse gone mad with fright.
Fright? Why should he be afraid, the one who wasn’t taking a risk? Or did his odd sympathy even extend to Lichenko’s future troubles in the great world outside?, where, after all, most people had had to struggle all their lives without his help. For the first time he was struck by Nathan’s incredible arrogance.
He buckled on the wide dress belt and strung the breast strap through the epaulette on his right shoulder, and reached again for the boots, which Nathan still held.
But Schild swung them behind his back, like a child, saying: “First let’s have that drink.”
“No, Nathan, I am not fooling any more.” He took the boots from him and this time sat down upon the bed to pull them on. “I shall say goodbye to the captain but I want no drink.” He needed only three drops of spirits to fall unconscious; his head already felt like an electric-light bulb, hot, light, empty, fragile, and loose where it screwed onto his neck; a moment somewhere back he had discovered he was ironically and genuinely ill.
“Goodbye?” asked Schild, his voice very ugly, so nasty it caught him up a bit, himself, and he pressed it out sweeter for the rest: “Where can you go?” He did not wait for a reply—being already in possession of all answers to all questions; indeed, it was mere courtesy that he had put the statement in the interrogative.
“Almost anywhere but home,” said Lichenko, grinning weakly, trying to, at any rate, as his head slowly unscrewed and Schild’s image kaleidoscoped with the vivid colors of the hair-lotion bottles on the dressertop. Nevertheless his mind stayed clear.
“You son of a bitch.”
Nathan had spoken in English, that flat, nasal language in which nothing sounded either interesting or important; and so far as he could see him through the spinning, his expression followed suit. Lichenko grinned again, hard and acid, but this time within his own heart and on the terms of his own failure. In the end, how he had conducted himself did not matter, that was the funniness of it and also the horror; in the end, the great truths could not pass through the neck of the smallest one: you cannot stir the curiosity of a corpse.
He would leave in a moment. As soon as he recovered his balance he would get his cap from the cabinet and walk through the door, down the stairs—the German woman, he reflected, handsome if too thin, would continue to go to seed—and stand upon the threshold, facing outward. One could hope the night was not windy; the world seemed larger when the wind blew, especially if the sky was dark and you could see so little that was permanent. Other persons feared lighting bolts, sunstroke, drowning, snakebites—he had always had fantasies of being blown away in a gale.
In a moment... already he could feel the strength rising from somewhere down about his ankles, which were firm in the good old boots. You couldn’t beat boots, which would hold you erect when you were limp with exhaustion. He could not believe that the Americans, in their low shoes, had much endurance.
After looking at him a long time in the same blank way, Nathan had suddenly turned towards the dresser lamp, seized the wad of Occupation marks, and begun to count. It would be an impressive sum, for what Lichenko had won in the cards from Schild were just a few negligible leaves around the fat core of the bonus he had been paid on the day of Lovett’s party. The regular pay, in rubles, was allegedly deposited at home against one’s return; these marks, intended to be spent in Germany, had on some guarantee of the Americans been printed wholesale and cost the Red Army nothing. They also, if he knew his bureaucrats and their ingenious scheme of allotments, were very likely all one would ever get in his hand. For him, of course, the matter was now academic.
He would face the world with empty pockets and without a plan. This, he realized, in a chill about the kneecaps which was closer to a falling nerve than a rising strength, was absolute freedom.
“Yes, Nathan, all of it is yours,” he said faintly, for part of him was in that state of freedom while the rest held tenaciously to the here-and-now, and his voice was not strong enough to sound both places with the same volume. “Count it, keep it, spend it. Money is a good thing, especially for a person of your type.” He meant: it may not be grand or powerful, but it is human to know the price of beans.
As if he had arrived at the total, Schild nodded to himself and rerolled the bills.
“Thank you,” he said quietly. “We are quits. And now if you can spare a minute I must get St. George to come and say his Lebewohl.”
“Lassen Sie sich Zeit,” Lichenko answered, “take your own good time.” He lay back across the bed and closed his eyes; he felt a small object drop upon his chest and separate like a broken egg; he heard Nathan leave the room. He would sleep a minute.
“Well,” St. George had said to Schild, “I did wonder if he had permission to stay this long away from his company. I did think it was funny.” In his pajamas—his alternate set, of vertical green and white stripes—lipping an unlighted pipe, smelling of mouthwash, he stood sagging near his window just opened over the black-quiet yard. “But desertion! I hope you’re certain about that. Or rather, I hope you are wrong, because he is a nice fellow.” He anyway had to sleep the night on it.
Schild neither slept nor tried to, nor could have said how he passed the hours of darkness, for they were too grievous small: a turn of the corridor and already the bathroom window was mother-of-pearl; another, and five o’clock had surely come. Silently he crept into St. George’s room and took up the wrist-watch from the bedside table, held the cold snake of its expansion bracelet: only four o’clock in Berlin’s delusive and too-early light. Nevertheless he woke the captain, who took his warnings with a face like a stale onion roll and at last rose, puffing and aged, to stuff himself into the uniform.
“Boy oh boy,” said St. George when he was dressed. “Here’s a time I would give these bars to anyone who would take them. This is a lousy business I have to do, Nate. You should be glad you’re out of it.” He made a pot of his overseas cap and drew it on. “God knows what they’ll do to him. I don’t think Russia’s much of a place.”
“But then you didn’t make the regulations, did you?” asked Schild, as he pressured him, without touching, to the door.
“I guess that’s how to look at it.” With a foot into the hall, though, he recoiled and, whispering, brushed Schild’s ear with his earnest, bulbous nose: “But does he know yet?”
Schild answered harsh: “Now I would hardly tell him.”
He ate this thought like a caramel and, swallowing it, grimaced, and then going into a profound melancholy moved with heavy hump of shoulders towards the staircase.
Within the hour two military policemen—Americans: Schild had somehow believed they would be Russian—came in tall, thin, and bored from the street, mounted the stair with drawn pistols on white lanyards... and soon descended supporting Lichenko between them, for, still in half-sleep, he could not walk erect and would not try to see with his eyes. Yet at the threshold he straightened, jerked his arms from captivity to fix his cap, said “Ladno!” the Russian okay, and walked unassisted in the new, barren day.
St. George had not returned. His mouth metallic with want of rest, Schild mounted to the room which he had not seen since the evening before and in which he had not been alone for three weeks. Scattered across the bed he saw the roll of marks in the pattern in which it had burst when he threw it. He believed that he should burn them straightaway, but as he stooped to the gathering the door downstairs made its sound and he was hailed by a raucous American voice.
The taller MP stood wide-legged and screamed up the stairwell: “Lootenant, did that fuckin’ Communist steal your wrist-watch? He’s wearing a gold Bulova.”
“No,” said Schild, after a moment. “I sold it to him.”
He thought: I will never know how long it might have gone on if he had not made that crack about Jews and money.