CONSIDERED AS A UNIT, REINHART and Very were some twelve feet, three hundred and forty pounds of person, and, as the beast with two backs, would have ranked in the hierarchy of animal size just after the whale, the Indian elephant, and the hippopotamus. Their coupling, however, was apparently not to come—unless it was she who overwhelmed Reinhart—for all day now he ached with the surfeit obtained in another quarter. Discretion ruled out any further sport at the office, but immediately after work each afternoon he had been calling at Trudchen’s little room down the hall, to vault between her soft legs in a ferocity which, though it had long left reason behind, never stayed her call for more and worse. Indeed, it had become S.O.P. for her, just before the climax, to scream into his ear: “You don’t hurt me enough!” and drive her small fangs into the lobe, which, while it is that portion of the human surface with the fewest nerve endings and correspondingly insensitive, still feels pressure and can swell fat and red with mistreatment and make you look odd as you go about your other business.
But all in all Reinhart felt very natural and right about the arrangement, as one can only when he so adjusts his life as to be dirty on the one hand and clean on the other—a sort of Renaissance ideal—and therefore hypocritical on neither. With Trudchen there was no pretense of love; with Very, very little of sex; although, not being a brute or a pervert, with the former he did not withhold “love”—he was very kind to Trudchen—and with Very his imagination was not so barren as to exclude “sex”—he after all kissed her rather more than he did Trudchen, if not in so French a style, and who knew what random transport might seize her in some propitious time and place? Meanwhile, it was satisfaction of a kind of lust merely to be with her, to have her seen at his side by resentful others. Though they were not flagrant: in public they never held hands.
And usually they were in public: for one, because even in Berlin, with its acres of forests and ruins, even if you could drag a respectable girl through stocking-snagging jungles, people abounded—Germans of course did not count, but Americans were behind each tree and in the hollow of every bomb crater—for another, having no strong need to tumble her, a man had to find public amusements with his woman.
For example, the Nazi monuments. Pound’s and his tour had at last moved from paper to actuality. One Sunday shortly past noon two of the small vehicles termed “weapons carriers,” the parallel benches in their roofless beds creaking with packed behinds in olive drab, tooled from Zehlendorf to the now deranged nerve center of Hitler Germany.
Very’s turn was like the stately movement of a world-ball on its axis—not a petty soccer-sized globe, mind you, but the grand sphere that dominates some centennial exposition—as she descended from the truck on the same helpful hand that Reinhart, as official guide, had granted the other nurses in the party. Her other difference was that she gave his fingers a pronounced squeeze, which not only brought pain to his knuckles but also impatience to his heart: there they were, in the great chaotic plaza before the ruined Chancellery and she was obviously unmoved. Not to mention that she had given, he had seen—for on general grounds it was a pleasure to watch her—only perfunctory notice to the legend incarnate of the series: Brandenburg Gate, Unter den Linden, entrance to the Wilhelmstrasse, Hotel Adlon, Foreign Office, Propaganda Ministry; had instead touched her cap, flicked her lapel, straightened her skirt, and coughed ladylike behind satiny nails.
Now she nicely picked, with the others in the party of fourteen, across the center island nasty with torn Volkswagens and an Opel, on its side, showing naked steel supports for a roof long gone, and a lamppost twisted and wilting like a licorice whip on end; in her turn presented the long red pass to the inevitable tommygun Russians at the Chancellery door and was, with stupid, mammary ogling, admitted.
Reinhart clove to her side, and the others, officers, nurses, and enlisted men, clung to his; shortly they were all lost together in a choppy surf of crushed marble through which black wires squirmed like sea-snakes. And as quickly were again found, in a vast chamber of pale-gray mosaic, where a skylight of ten thousand broken panes still dribbled glass fragments down the golden incline of sun that met the shrapnel-pitted wall. They stood there, the fourteen, in a noisy, echoing silence of rubber heels abrading marble, inhaling the sour white dust which floated on the air like steam in winter, in their awe daring nothing but to take this polluted breath and give it back at the proper intervals. Over the doorway, a mile down a runway of litter fifty feet wide and to the depth of a horse, the Nazi eagle of stone-and-gilded-bronze. Besides themselves, no man.
Naturally, thoughts of a mighty morality spilled into Reinhart’s mind, through, as it were, the skylight: if you seek his monument, look around you; Ozymandias, king of kings, etc.; living and dying with and by the sword. And PFC Farnsworth T. Cronin, who had majored in political science, in Massachusetts, and who at this moment subtly wedged himself between Reinhart and Veronica, intoned softly: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
Sidestepping, Reinhart eased over to Very. “Can you imagine him walking down the middle of this vault, his bootheels echoing for ten minutes before you could see him? He must have looked pretty insignificant in his own house.”
“Who?” asked Very, throwing highlights off the undercushion of her scarlet lip. “Oh you mean Hitler. But did he live right here in the Reichstag? Must have been drafty, haha.”
If you were careless you might identify as imbecility that which was rather inattentiveness; before penetrating the Brandenburg Gate, they had swung left up the squalid lane to the old Reichstag ruin, a long, columned cinder surmounted by a dome burned to chicken wire and facing a park of weeds. In his cicerone remarks Reinhart attributed its burns to a fire set by the Nazis in 1933. Cronin corrected in a voice flat with certainty: “No, it was restored after that. What you see here came from the bombings and the Russian assault this spring”—he had apparently snooped in all these places before the tour got under way, while the real men in the outfit were out getting tail. Anyway, perhaps it was just as well this all had eluded Veronica, who also probably failed to notice that thereupon Reinhart suppressed the remainder of his own commentary, not only for the Reichstag but the succeeding buildings as well.
“My fault,” he said now, manfully. “This is the Chancellery.”
“The What-cellery?” But he saw in her blue eyes a candid fooling.
“Of course,” said Cronin, studying the mosaics with his bland face, “we are in the New Chancellery which Hitler built circa 1938-39. The Old one, dating from the time of the Hohenzollerns, is next door.” Cronin never put his eyes on a person; meeting one on the arctic tundra, with nothing else to look at, he no doubt would try to inspect the wind. A tedious creep, yet you could tell by the measure of his tediousness that he did know whereof he spoke; it were destructive vanity not to use him for what he could provide.
“If you know the place, Farnie, tell us what else is worth seeing.”
“Well, the terrace and garden are certainly there,” Cronin answered, almost, in his pleasure, giving one a fair shot at his face, but not quite.
“Then lead on, McSnerd, and make a trail through the swamp!” said Very, sending her chime like a bowling ball down the marble gallery. And this time Cronin looked full face, demonstrating above it a dun-colored scalp parted dead center, like a statesman of the Harding era, and wondering, Amherst eyes: wondering not only who she was but why.
Eventually they crossed a hall of massive pillars, where Russian names, in their queer letters sometimes just eluding comprehension by a hair, were scratched into the bomb-sprayed walls and from a ceiling of bare girders loose power cables swung like thin pythons anxious to drop upon a meal. And, as a thick, sifting carpet, the usual litter of broken stone, plaster powder, splintered wood, and piecemeal metal, in a quantity which if reassembled, by divine act or motion-picture film run backwards, into its original forms would twice exceed them, for no fecundity can match disintegration’s.
Reinhart thought about this, but it was Very, with her fine intuition, who said: “Why when things are broken do they seem like more than when they’re together?”
“Dunno,” answered Cronin, who had apparently determined her quality and was peculiarly intrigued by it—he was breaking a trail through the trash, as she had asked, and just for her, while the others mushed ankle-deep—“no doubt the air between the pieces.”
“I don’t read you.” She stepped to the French window, of which Cronin opened and held the shutter and then caught her arm: beyond its threshold was a two-foot drop to the terrace floor.
Meanwhile, Reinhart bulled on through and nearly broke both ankles but recovered with the gay veldt-bound of a springbok. Coming back, he raised his hands under Very’s elbows and lowered her like a light barbell, effortlessly, then in malice offered the same to less-than-average-size Cronin, who took it!, being indecently beyond that kind of vanity.
As the others tumbled through each in his own fashion, a nurse named Lieutenant Leek despite support turning her foot, the trio of leaders waded across the terrace and into the junkyard garden of sand, dismembered trees, disjunctive wheels and pipes and tin air ducts, disjected planks; blooming out of these, in the dirty fungus-white of sunless growths, two concrete structures, pocked by shot, seared by flame, sprouting excrescences of scaffold and webbed iron, yet squatted conditionally whole.
On the left—they had come round to the far side—was Hitler’s bunker, according to Cronin, who named the other, a cylinder with conical roof, as a sentry blockhouse manned by the SS until the eleventh hour. In the deep embrasure of the bunker entrance a detached steel door stood angled; next to it at the same degree slouched a Mongol guard, who at their appearance sullenly presented his shoulder blades and a view of trousers-rear seemingly heavy with a load.
“Slav slob,” wittily noted Reinhart.
“Yes,” said Cronin to a length of corroded pipe lying at his feet, “he should be wearing a J. Press jacket and white bucks.” Although his statement was cryptic, his emotion was not: when he looked towards the guard his eyes were filmy with approval. Then, in the self-congratulatory manner of a white man extending common courtesy to a Negro, he plunged across the debris to the doorway, open pack of cigarettes at the ready position, loudly saying: “Z-DRAHST-voo-ee-tee, ta-VA-reesch, KAHK pa-jee-VA-yee-tee?” You could hear all the stresses of the little Russian phrasebook distributed a month earlier by Reinhart’s department.
The Mongol revolved instantly and gave him the submachine-gun muzzle big as a megaphone and all perforated with dime-sized air vents, more death-ray than gun, and if a man ever meant to squeeze the trigger, it was he. But Cronin was a stranger to cowardice; with inexorable good will he advanced, and the Mongol, though snarling imprecations in a tongue that sounded nothing like Russian and never lowering his equalizer, gave ground. Reaching the entrance, Cronin pressed the smokes at him as one might a cross upon a devil, engaged him in a going-and-coming, frustrating inquiry, and was at last driven by him into the waste of loose planks before the SS turret, where Reinhart and Very waited.
“I’m afraid it’s forbidden to enter the bunker,” he said pridefully, stepping up, as if myopic, so near that Reinhart, always uncomfortable in close approach, backed off, caught his heel in the fork of a grounded tree-branch, and freeing it too violently threw away his balance and fell backwards into a shallow trench which till then no one had marked.
“But that’s the next best thing,” said Cronin, pretending not to see, or perhaps really, in his odd way, not noticing, as Very howled vulgarly and the rest of the party, clattering through the ventilating ducts, joined her in sadistic mirth, “that’s the ditch where they burned the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun.”
Reinhart’s back-skin bubbled in gooseflesh, more historical than personal, as he scrambled slowly upwards: he had felt a distinct and depraved wish to continue lying there for a while.
“Ostensibly,” Cronin went on.
On the bank now, Reinhart saw in the trench’s sandy gutter only an ambiguous rubbish of dead leaves, board-ends, and fragments of paper coarsened and grayed by dried rain. Already he had become as reluctant to kneel and rummage in it as he had been, a moment earlier, to leave its placid bed.
“Here, in this ditch?” No, it was too much, along with the imperial chaos inside the Chancellery, to believe; was rather lock, stock, and barrel a vast hoax of propaganda and journalism; normal people like himself not only did not make history but did not see its leavings firsthand.
“I said ostensibly,” Cronin answered. “In my opinion it was a not too ingenious device to cover his escape to South America.”
“Oh you don’t think so?” asked Veronica, the corners of her mouth yet remembering the laugh on Reinhart, as did her wet eyes, life-blue in this landscape of neutral tones canescing into time past.
“If so, it worked.” Said by a newcomer to the area of the three, a stout captain in green trenchcoat, his shirt collar wearing the doctor’s bare caduceus, and Lieutenant Leek hobbled up, and in another moment the others, too, lining round the pseudo grave.
“Unfortunately yes,” said Cronin, although the captain had not properly addressed the comment to him, “anything German always succeeds famously with us. Give Hitler a year and we’ll welcome him back to defend us against the ‘Reds.’ ”
Reinhart had got interested in watching the captain, whom he did not know, whose face was manifestly German-American, wide-cheeked, beer-florid, piggishly nostriled, stupid and good—what had it to say in defense of that old seed sprung from this ground and carried across the ocean to form it?
“Do you think the Reds are a real danger now?” the captain asked in utter innocence, coloring more, for to see Cronin he had to send his eyes across Very’s Himalayan front.
“Only the American Legion and the vigilantes can save us from them. First, the unions must be stamped out...” Cronin’s face became a mask of crafty evil, apparently mimicking a memory of Goebbels’. “FDR has already been got rid of, thank God.”
How much of the sarcasm, which Cronin injected with real ferocity, astonishing Reinhart who had not believed he could show much feeling towards anything, how much of it reached the captain it was difficult to say. Too little, Reinhart feared, and he hastened to spread it abroad that Cronin spoke in jest.
“Well,” the captain answered, humorlessly shaking his thick jowls, “I don’t know it’s anything to kid about, if these Reds are going to make trouble just as soon as we get rid of this fellow.” He pointed into the depression. “If he means the Communists, I don’t think in the end they’d be much better than Hitler. Didn’t they make a pact with him which gave him a green light to start the war? And then proceeded to divvy up poor old Poland, even though they later became our allies. Killing people is all any of those fellows know, robbing people and killing them, year in and year out, for no reason at all. I’ve been a physician for seventeen years but I’ve never been able to figure out what makes fellows like that—because that’s what they are, aren’t they, just fellows, people like anybody else in the beginning.”
Excellent fat captain, with your wide, honest, Nordic face: you have come through! Reinhart watched him kneel like a barrage balloon folding, ever threatening to burst upwards again, and poke into the trench with graceful, doctor-sensitive hands that bore not an ounce of the excess flesh he carried elsewhere. Soon he discovered nothing and rose, despite his weight, easily, saying: “The American Legion stamping out the unions? I have five or six patients at home who belong to both and I also think they were good Roosevelt-Truman men, and so you’ve got me all confused.”
“Truman, ha!” snorted Cronin and suddenly gave Reinhart a knowing eye; in this matter he was willing to grant that they shared a community, and what was shameful was that Reinhart had no courage to indicate him nay, from a combination of guilt and vanity was yellow to reveal he stood with the doctor, two dense and heavy light-complexioned oafs who saw the mellow where the bright boys detected the sinister. On the other hand, he, Reinhart, would as soon cut his throat as join the American Legion or a union or the Communists or the Republicans or the New Deal, or any other outfit the joining of which prohibited one the next day from being malignantly anti-Legion, anti-union, etc., which alternation, irresponsible as it might be, to him signified, as nothing else, the precious quality of humanness.
The others by now had lost interest—in the trench; towards Cronin and the doctor they had shown none to start with or end—and broke their ring, meandering into the rubbish towards the Chancellery terrace and the wall through which they had earlier issued, a series of high windows, shutters in all degrees of angle and caries, above each its own oeil-de-boeuf like the dot to an exclamation.
“We can split up, if you want,” Reinhart cried before the dispersal had gone absolute. “Everybody meet in one hour at the truck outside!” Two persons made a noise of despair. “All right, forty-five minutes then. There’s lots more to see inside: you won’t be bored for a moment.” Nevertheless he again heard the groans.
“If little Harry Truman’s all that will stand in his way, expect Hitler back next month from Argentina,” said Cronin, “and back in the saddle.”
“No,” the captain answered, not looking into the ditch now and not with corny, self-conscious moral majesty, but with majesty nonetheless, the placebo-prescription majesty of the American general practitioner, famed source of the basic wisdom. “No,” he said, looking directly and honestly at Cronin, the punk kid yet with downy lip, probably still with Onan as his model, “no, he must never happen again.”
From the exodus one figure lingered back, a first lieutenant who held his doffed cap and scratched a graying sideburn with the same hand. He studied something in the litter on which he stood and called, without raising his head: “Hey Bernstein!”
Cronin’s captain was named Bernstein. He joined his friend, who had found a Wehrmacht belt buckle in the sand, translated for him its inscription, Gott mit uns, and with him, two men whose race was half run, walked out of sight beyond the SS tower.
Bernstein: his forebears, like so many Jews, forced by the census takers to assume cognomens, had gone to gems, precious metals, and flowers for their names, had chosen that crystallized juice of ancient trees on the Baltic coast of Prussia, the sherry-golden amber, for theirs, and, fortune’s dupes, brought it to America where its sound was more rasping than lovely on the air, if not downright comic, signifying bagels and upthrust hands. But it was another crime to be laid at the German door and not against the Jews, whose old desert tongue contained no word like “Bernstein”—or “Reinhart,” which in Reinhart’s sudden view was scarcely better and only different from the doctor’s in that no one owed it apology—or “Schicklgruber-Hitler,” the funniest and ugliest of the lot.
What could a man called Cronin say to Bernstein, Reinhart & Schicklgruber, attorneys at law, delicatessen owners, or what have you, who fell out over the fratricide practiced by the last-named? Germans, Hitler’s first victims were Germans!, for that’s what German Jews were, no mistake; else, observing no loyalty but to their own tribe everywhere alien, they would better have defended themselves. Nay, might have taken the offensive, their noted acumen more than compensating for deficiency in numbers, and launched their own Hitler. But no they had been too trusting, too naïve, too German and not Jewish enough. Jews shrewd? They were rather the rubes and boobs of history; after two thousand years they were still fresh from the sticks, assuming booblike that even in the city men were men and life was what you made it.
Such innocence was almost wicked. Watching Bernstein’s shoulders too heavy to be moved by the effort of walking, Bernstein’s too-solid flesh which, if some ambitious or perhaps merely desperate forebear had not shipped the Atlantic, would have by his fellow Germans been resolved into a dew, still hearing oxlike Bernstein’s simple, hateless statement that Hitler must not happen again—Reinhart himself, pure Teuton, on the margin of this ditch would have condemned German, no, the world’s gentiles to eternal fire and thought it too cool—considering Bernstein the good, the innocent, the Jew, obsessed by Bernstein, Reinhart hated him.
Jews really were the chosen, the superior people. This had been Bach’s final meaning, only put in the queer, inside-out logic with which the truth was approached by Middle-Europeans, who really were sapient and deep and lived on an old ground ever fertilized by fresh gore. Poor cloistered Cronin, poor dear Veronica, they could not understand irony, that means to confront the ideal with the actual and not go mad, that whip which produced the pain that hurts-so-good, so that in the measure to which it hurt it was also funny. Finally, having flogged and laughed yourself to the rim of death’s trench, you looked within and saw irony’s own irony: the last truth was the first.
Poor Cronin’s hitherto mobile mouth fell open, static and silent at the incantatory syllables of “Bernstein.” He could be read like a highway poster: ‘Can a Jew, vis-à-vis Hitler’s ghost, be wrong?’ Far easier to accept that oneself is an ass. When he closed his lips again he wore a smile bespeaking relief; when he returned to the ivy he would switch his major to natural science.
“Politics,” said Very, pressing her bosom like an armload of soccer balls against Reinhart’s arm—accidentally?: to study that was Reinhart’s own relief—“thank God that’s an Irish trait I don’t have! Find a politician, find a crook, as the man says.” Poutingly she flung away from his side, as if he were sure to hold the opposing view, swinging capelike her soft fall of hair which, seining the sun, caught a sudden amber shaming old Prussia with its clarity and fire.
In the combination of Very and Trudchen, Reinhart’s needs were met. Such a thing was thereby proved possible, contrary to the popular wisdom which crepe-hangingly warned that man, the questing beast, was never satisfied, that worse than not achieving your aim was getting it. Indeed, he was living high off the hog in Berlin. He was rich: Marsala had sold all his gadgets in the black market and, each week, the candy ration. He did even less work than before: now that the tour was set it ran itself and Pound was gone off on leave to Switzerland, of course in the company of Nurse Lightner, where he intended to buy and transport to Berlin as personal luggage a footlocker full of wrist-watches.
Organize your sex life and all else followed, the phallus being the key to the general metropolis of manhood, which most of the grand old civilizations knew but we in America had forgotten. For example, in Ohio carnal knowledge of a sixteen-year-old girl was a prelude to the penitentiary; they could stick their pointed tits like crayon-ends in your face, wag their sloping little behinds, in summer wear shorts to the junction of belly and thigh, but if you rolled an eyeball towards them you were a pervert. He never entered Trudchen without tremors of retroactive revenge.
With Very, on the other hand, he was getting back at Germany and all its exoticism gone nasty. That was the great thing about women: with one, you had a place in a context. He had begun to think of himself as the kind of fellow who might one day get married; at least he detected the future inclination. Writing to Pound’s wife he had felt vicariously that peculiar pleasure of having an attachment one owed to and was owed by. Love as a mutual debt—certainly it was new to him as he grew old.
No longer did he spring from bed at Marsala’s eight-o’clock clarion, but lingered for a second and a third and then the thrust of a hard hand against his head, at which, still unconscious—which was his excuse—he punched out wildly at his disturber, and even though he usually missed, Marsala stayed sullen all day at these thanks. A mature man should not live with another, but with a woman from whose soft lump beside him under the steaming, odorous blankets he can take a motive to rise, the sooner to be off to honest work, the sooner to be home again as evening falls to meet this sweet dependent, now the smiling presence of the succulent table, prepared for two and not five hundred.
Yet what honest work? Had the war not come he would now have been for a year and a quarter a Bachelor of—what? A process beginning in Central Europe in 1933 (Carlo had a popgun, wanted an air rifle), or 1924, then: Hitler, having failed to capture Bavaria with his private army of cranks and loafers, sits in the prison of Landsberg am Lech dictating to Hess a lunatic statement of aims which two decades later when they have been realized to the letter are still unbelievable (umbilical cord severed and tied, Doctor slaps Carlo’s bare bottom, Carlo wails, he is human and alive), a process whose origins are in the mists of the past, whose products are millions of dead and a continent made garbage—this same process, the blowing of an ill wind, solves for one young man a dilemma, what to do with himself?, but only for the nonce.
Insurance? His father could get him in at Ecumenical Indemnity (Laughter). The campus again?; this time indebted to nobody: “they” were going to make it free for veterans, no selling apples this postwar. Which meant either of two: either everybody would go to college, and being mass it would be mean; or none of the ex-servicemen would go, leaving the same old collection of pubescent punks he had got his fill of long before coming to occupy Berlin. Germany itself. Take out papers, if you could find a government to become a national of. Pose as a mustered-out SS man, for which you had the proper appearance, make a living in chocolate bars and Lucky Strikes, pimping for Trudchen. Or merely sit in some congenial ruin and weep away to a skeleton, for what as a German you did, as an American you did not do, and as a man you saw no fit atonement for.
Since his needs were met—women, riches, life of leisure, gemütlich flat, loyal friend (who else but a true-life Horatio would dodge punches to do one a favor?), his connection with history (American news correspondents staged a spontaneous demonstration of Berlin GIs celebrating the Japanese surrender; photographed it; Reinhart stood upper left dutifully tossing his cap towards the sky)—since all these holdings were verifiable to the senses, euphoria must, by definition, ensue.
Yet, within the very seed of comfort he detected an inimical, corrosive juice which like the acid in a hand grenade waited tirelessly on the pulling of a pin to begin incendiary mixture. Satisfaction was his, but so also was a growing conviction it should not be: why should he alone be rewarded when the rest of the world was taxed? Even the other Americans had their troubles, wanted grievously to go home, suffered in what he so grossly enjoyed.
He began to fear his own compulsions; if he did not hurt Trudchen enough, neither did she him, and it was not because each did not try. Violent as it was, that plunging to explosion only suggested a damage he could imagine but never yet achieve, that catastrophic end the reaching of which he came, in a kind of pride of horror, to believe was his true vocation. Truly, Trudchen was too depraved to defile and too small a mount to ride to victory.
Virtually unused went his murderous-muscled body, the welted hands with one of which he could have lifted Hitler and cracked off that weak neck like a sparrow’s, penetrated Goering’s breadbasket as a thumb would sink into a rotten pear. Where was the game worth the candle, where now, standing in the empty stadium, too late, alone, a lackey groundskeeper amid discarded programs and ticket stubs, where now to find another contest?
Time had fled. Berlin bleibt doch Berlin, as the natives said, but for the original occupiers—the 82nd Airborne having replaced the 2nd Armored, Reinhart’s medics were seniors in service and disenchantment—as September approached, it was a different city from that Newfoundland into which their trucks had rolled on a sun-swept afternoon in July. The aftermath of war had shaded into the onset of peacetime. Regiments of women in kerchiefs and dark stockings labored to clear the bomb-sites and reclaim sound bricks. The Russians freed and dumped into the Allied sectors some thousands of Wehrmacht prisoners, who staggered along the main thoroughfares tattered, hollow-eyed, embarrassing civilians, panhandling American passersby. The black market shrunk from too-flagrant spectacle. The newest currency regulations were difficult to evade: Pound converted his Swiss watches into Occupation marks—and because the going price had fallen with the replacement of Soviet combat troops by a more conservative element, nonrapists, small spenders, of a dour respectability, got only half as much as he would have in July—but could not get them into dollars and home. “Here I sit,” he said to Reinhart, once for every hour they spent together, “with my finger in my ass and one hundred thousand marks.”
With the new Russians came fewer explosions from their sector, although incidents, frequently mortal, continued. Earlier they had shot Allies and one another in jest; now the motive had changed to a solemn dislike. Americans were counseled to avoid the eastern quarters of the city, were seduced to remain on home ground by a grandiose Red Cross Club on the Kronprinzenallee, where in the stately dining room a string ensemble in threadbare tuxedoes ingratiatingly whined and the fare was sinkers and coffee in individual silver pots; by the Uncle Tom movie theater on Onkel-Tom-Strasse which led to a structure called Uncle Tom’s Hut in the Grunewald Forest, the name German-given, long before VE-Day, for a reason no GI could grasp; by the Berlin Philharmonic, at concerts in the Titania Palast in Steglitz, though soon its conductor, out legally one night after curfew, was misunderstood by an American sentry and shot dead.
Personnel who numbered their years in the late thirties or more were shipped back to the States as senile. So went Reinhart’s friend Ben Pluck, in civil life a lawyer; in the Army, having declined to serve, eternal PFC. Others left on longevity points; thus transported was Tom Riley, from across the hall, saddening everyone whose flat lay adjacent to the stairwell; no more would the iron treads echo his jovial filth.
In the latrines they predicted the 1209th would go to Osaka, Japan, where the bearded clam ran crosswise, or the Azores, as in the limerick about sores, or as a kind of liaison force to the Turks in Istanbul. On the wards were one hundred twenty complainants of nasopharyngitis, all on the light diet. The colonel ate out the assembled officers and nurses on the subject of fourteen spent contraceptives spiked off the hospital grounds on the lances of his sanitation crew, directing his remarks principally to Chaplain Peggott and Major Clementine Monroe, the superannuated chief nurse.
Everybody in Reinhart’s apartment building had a local mistress save two ethereal privates from Supply, who had each other. Don Mestrovicz, technician fourth grade of the EENT clinic, had two in the same family: a mother still young enough, a daughter just old enough, to whom he was the filling in their sandwich. Corporal Toole from the motor pool owned a big round woman with a behind like the belly of a lute. Bruce Freeman, of X-Ray, had an ash-blonde named Mimi Hammerschlag who played bit parts in Ufa pictures; Jack Eberhard, company clerk, a dishwater blonde who like him made strange noises when drunk. Sergeant Deventer’s girl could do a take-off on Hitler with a comb for a mustache; Bill Castel’s woman, an artist, cut out his silhouette in orange paper. Ernie Wilson’s piece was three weeks pregnant; Roy Savery’s, one month; five others professed falsely to the condition, three of whom named the same sire, T-3 “Plumber” Cobb—he laid a lot of pipe—but were duly unmasked. And Farnsworth Cronin was sometimes seen with a boyish girl whose name was spelled Irene and pronounced Ee-ray-nuh; he, however, called her Boo.
Supply outfitted everyone with short jackets, like Eisenhower’s, calling in the old skirted blouses. All noncommissioned officers in the ETO were granted a liquor and beer ration; in the 1209th these were consumed on the rear balconies, feet on ledge, cigars in jaw, and in the company of the girls, who giggled much and sometimes sang in English. No Werewolves having turned up, the district order that US personnel carry arms when off compound—the medics, their red-cross sleeve bands—was rescinded. Under the authority of the Information and Education Program, Gerald Gest was sent to Paris for a month to study French civilization at the Sore-bone, and a class in basic psychology, meeting once a week in an empty storeroom in headquarters, was offered to qualified enlisted men, which meant everybody; in its chair, PFC Harvey Rappaport, MA from NYU.
A sandy-haired corporal named Gladstone, who worked in the post exchange, blew out his brains there one night after closing, leaving no note. Veronica’s neuropsychiatric ward, already so crowded that three patients bunked in a supply room, somehow stuffed in five more beds. Walking past its door you never heard a sound, although by her account half a dozen patients wept all day and another man made squealing noises with a finger against his teeth. A paratrooper, under observation for persistent bed-wetting, was discovered to be a poseur—in the wee hours he did not really wee-wee but soaked his mattress with H20 from the bedside glass—and sent back to his outfit on charges of malingering. A tentatively diagnosed schiz struck Lieutenant Llewellyn, assistant psychiatrist, in the nape, knocking off his glasses, then sought to crush them but couldn’t with bare feet. Another patient, a brawny man with the hair of a goat, incessantly planned to become a novice in the Carmelite nuns.
No doubt it owed to such spectacular persons and events that Veronica by the fourth week of their acquaintance had lost her bloom, or rather that part of it which was rosy towards Reinhart, who suspected that being normal he bored her. And he could not very well divulge the doings of that other self who lodged with Trudchen, the mad one, the one with passions which, being there resolved, freed this one, the front man, to be so smooth and bland. Back there, Himmler did his dreadful work; up here was elegant Ribbentrop, kissing hands.
For years he had cultivated the art of surrender to women to offset his bulk, which sometimes on its approach caused, particularly small, girls to look for cover. The brute tamed by gentility, the handsome and moral equilibrium of opposites. No, its validity consisted only in the abstract, never in practice. For instance with Very: he cared little about the destination of a date, so long as it was not an official Army entertainment where they must be separated by rank. But Very had for the movies the insatiable hunger with which it was said expectant mothers went to dill pickles—a touch of madness for them, really, Western, gangster, comical, historical, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, any passage of arc light through celluloid into minuscule glass beads generating counterfeit life, but especially Dramas in which any one of those actresses with big eyes and hard white jaws, dressed in jodhpurs, carrying whips, riding stallions, of course gelded, consummated a union with the scion of a swell family of old Virginia and ate for breakfast grapefruit in a bed of ice, her nostrils flaring.
In the absence of an enlisted boy friend this taste would have carried Very every evening to the Onkel Tom Kino, to that roped-off centrally situated block of seats exclusive to officers, there for two hours to shuffle off the coil of banal mortality.
Now if this was her pleasure, and as a gentleman his was in seeing she received hers, why now admit obstruction? “Look, honey, don’t worry about me. I’ll sit back in the enlisted section and meet you outside somewhere when the show’s over.” “Now you’re sore.” Of course he was not angry, just piqued at her resistance to civility. With the best intent in the world she went on: “No, tonight we’ll do what you want.” “I want to see the movie.” and usually they did, segregated for two hours and when afterwards they met, Veronica, and not he, looked miffed.
At other times when there had been no conflict of wishes, when they had taken long night strolls sometimes as far as the walled villas of Dahlem’s tree-murmuring walks (almost the only alternative he could offer to the movie-show, which was another reason for his reluctance to prevail), necessarily avoiding society, when they should have formed not two but one, in a sealed capsule of mutual affection, Veronica had lately seemed, not exactly withdrawn, but at least preoccupied. Working with these lunatics all day—apparently her thesis that they got worse in peacetime was daily confirmed—what could you expect? At first he tried to jolly her out of it, but in itself it is a morbid thing to have to cheer a woman, a transposition of the proper roles, she being by nature equipped to bring joy, while man is the rightful brooder.
And considering the precise Very, unfortunately her physical design was not for melancholy. When not in the mobile oval of laughter, her mouth formed a horizontal too broad; her chin appeared square and somewhat virile; when not quivering, her nose was a mere cartilaginous organ, not altogether true, for the induction of breath, and one could understand that it might turn crimson with the grippe. Her eyes when solemn were too pale a blue, the little skeins of iris-color patchily breaking unity, and was not the right one a lash-breadth off the zero aim? Not stimulated, her blood declined to flood her cheeks, and once, at the corner of Max-Eyth-Strasse, in the side apron of his flashlight beam he saw her face was ashen.
Vaguely desperate—for he was extremely fond of Very; not in love, actually: that was just something he had thought—Reinhart conceived a plan to get her into the fresh daylight air with a view of water and woods, away from minds, anyway, for one afternoon. He organized some hardboiled eggs, canned meat, and other junk from the mess sergeant, even borrowed the still half-full jars of mustard pickle and mayonnaise Bruce Freeman’s mother had mailed that gourmet, and one Wednesday, which that week was Very’s day off, with her set out for a picnic on the shore of the Havel.
From the beginning, from the moment Corporal Toole let them out of his jeep at the woodland corner of Pfaueninselchaussee and Koenigstrasse, everything went right. The better part of an hour went before they gained the shore, but Very’s color improved with each brisk step. At intervals Reinhart hopped off the road into the forest, to bring back talismans: a spray of lace fern, pine cones, a root like the trunk of an elf-woman, a stone resembling an eye, and of course, even out there, a clip of rifle cartridges. Excepting the latter, he gave them one by one to Very, who by the fourth presentation complained of loaded hands, twitted him for his idiocy, and, at last, laughed—perhaps only a snicker, but her first in a week. He was rapidly bringing her back.
On the beach, of which, wandering to the right from the spit pointing towards Peacock Island, they found a length unoccupied by military wreckage, Reinhart brought the goodies from his musette bag. In a messkit bottom Very mashed the eggs with mayo. When Reinhart bit into the first sandwich a fragment of shell cracked between his teeth, just as if he were home. He ate two, and then one of Spam, and then three pairs of saltines enclosing a hard cheese the color and taste of GI soap, and then an orange—for he had brought nothing else for thirst—and Veronica joked about his capacity. The scorings he had lately noticed in her cheeks were but night shadows, already dispersed by the sun.
He lowered his head against a massive log half-buried in the sand and extended his legs luxuriously, out, out, out, toes towards the lake, taking the pleasure of a prolonged stretch, rather like that of a mild orgasm, grunting, eyes narrowed, arms going back over the log. Five yards away the water munched quietly on the sand. Across against its far margin, the dark horizontal of the Kladow shore, a white sail quivered. On the left, and so near that in his view it seemed not an island but rather the other side of an unbroken bay, lay the Pfaueninsel. A suspicion of autumn, a certain chill filament woven into the otherwise still very warm fabric of sunlight, rather imagined than felt, and as yet too thin to penetrate vegetable nature, was felt by Reinhart, in whom it engendered a sad, sweet deliberation on the coming death of the year; and since the end of anything is peace, his heart, too, like Very’s, fell placid.
“Ah,” he cried suddenly, sitting up, “we forgot the mustard pickles!” He unscrewed the jar and offered it.
Very, while he had unfeelingly stuffed himself, had not eaten a bite, he now noticed retroactively; and the flush in her cheek was nearer the introduction of illness than health returned, as she stared with terrible white eyes into the jar and said, feebly: “They look like alligators in the mud.”
She raised her stare to him, and he saw in it a catastrophe from which he would fain have run, had it not been intermixed with a beautiful weakness towards which his manhood inexorably flowed as all streams to the sea. She had essayed a joke, but tears caught her hard upon the last word. Against his chest he brought her weeping, fragrant head, and told close into her ear the platitudes of comfort.
She shortly pushed him off in a kind of anger and, with eyes still melting, assigned all guilt to him.
“If this isn’t anything, nothing ever was: I am pregnant.”
At the edge of the beach, a fish, or a frog, or some other animate and lonely thing, loudly slapped the water and sank through a necklace of air bubbles.