IT WAS A FALLACY to confuse animals with human beings. Schatzi thought for a moment, as if he were counting seconds on his fingers, then gave the dog another taste of the stick. He had a technique of whipping refined to maximum sting, minimum bruise. The dog was his property and to disable it were no sense. Simultaneously with the blow, he said soberly and with no great volume:
“Guard the boat.”
The beast cried out, as was to be expected, and, as Schatzi knew, far in excess of what the pain would require, for it was not without a limited intelligence. Its chief want was constancy: a singular defect in one of a breed noted for just that virtue. But then, in justice to the dog, it had come into his possession no longer than a fortnight ago, and there was reason to believe its primary loyalty was still fastened to the former owner, a fellow countryman who had reciprocated to the extent that he recoiled from an offer of two packs of cigarettes but sold him for three.
He, Schatzi, had fed it well, had made obvious a capacity for return affection relative to what the beast showed him, had shown tolerance to the first few miscarriages of the dog’s assignments, was now nearing the margin of estrangement. When the disobedience could be interpreted as willful, he understood, even approved: the finest organisms are those with a recalcitrant substance which when tamed by its master does not dissolve but compounds with his own. Thus Russian cavalrymen he had seen who were one with their horses, not so much riders as centaurs. This in fact was the timeless sense of the ancient myth. But he had begun to think otherwise of the dog, to see in it a fundamental baseness which said not: “I refuse to guard your cursed boat until you associate it with my being.” But rather, “What boat? I chase hares and sport in the sand, and you beat me for your pleasure.”
The latter it was saying now, with the voice of its large craven eyes, its great back hunched against the forward seat; and with the repugnant knowledge that it had duped him, that he had given it what it most wished and so confirmed its appraisal of him, he in fury threw the stick far across the water. The dog went over the side and into the surf with a sudden displacement of weight that put the deck awash, and before Schatzi could work with the bilge can, was back and rearing its wet snout to the gunwale, the dripping stick between its jaws. Yes, it was not without intelligence, he admitted, reluctantly amused, but see what it could make of this! He spun the flywheel and the motor caught, and gunned away full throttle. Looking behind, he saw the dog strike out valiantly in pursuit, in a violent battle with the water, which as the distance grew between them it slowly lost but would not admit. Halfway across the Havel and far enough, he assumed, to make his point—he could no longer see its commotion—Schatzi bent back towards the Tiefehorn, the apex of the Wannsee peninsula.
Two hundred yards from shore he stilled the motor and rowed in, an eye on the woods. Which after a time satisfied him that they were deserted, and he beached and concealed the craft. Ten minutes’ walk through the forest brought him to a compound of four brick buildings around a garden: a peacetime tuberculosis hospital and during the war a school for air-raid wardens. In the garden were half a dozen Russian graves with their red stars of wood.
His goal was the great radio-transmitter building a hundred meters beyond the compound proper. Built of pallid concrete diseased with green-and-black camouflage splashes, the structure bulked four floors tall, was as long as high, as deep as long, and had no windows. To a median groove in its rear face rose a pile of rusting Wehrmacht helmets, taken off German heads by Russian hands. Also in the environs were: cartridges and shells, both unexploded and used, all calibers; hand grenades, both as loose eggs and, with the wooden handles attached, potato mashers; bayonets; Panzerfaust bazookas; elements of the imitation Luger called P-38; corrugated gas-mask canisters; gray-green tunics with a thread of red decoration through a middle buttonhole—the rusted and patinaed and mildewed and rotten, already forgotten, material particularities of an obliterated army. Which meant nothing to Schatzi—he remained.
As he entered, Schatzi took a noseful of the unique odor of the interior, a blend of urine, feces, damp, fire, and electrical effluvium from a transmitter that through it all—last stand, Russian plunderers, American snoopers—retained a deep, visceral stream of life. Its inexorable hum, issuing from the second floor but audible throughout, with the odor and, where the bulbs remained, the dim lights still burning in the halls from which humanity had fled and yet remained in the characteristic carpet of litter and excrement, had spent its force on Schatzi. Once inside he passed into a calm, and picking his way down a concrete stairway clogged with junk, which two steps before its bottom connection surrendered and itself melted into waste, he descended to the basement. Where, since he had earlier extinguished the ceiling lamps and smashed their sockets, he worked his passage with the hand torch that had once disturbed Schild.
Already he thought of Schild in the past tense, no feat for him who had but lately served in that enclosure where the present was so difficult to establish and all Jews looked alike. There had in fact been a uniform diminution of indentities as one went down through the categories of prisoners, from the green breast-triangle of the professional criminals to the yellow and black superimposed to form the Star of David. On his morning work gang the faces were the same for three years, yet a good five thousand individuals, by the record, had come into that lineup and shortly gone, without distinguishing themselves in transit. ... It was most unlikely that Schild was a fairy; to be a Jew was enough, and a Communist to boot. (In Auschwitz his breast patch would have been superimposed yellow and red, to show his double affiliation.) Therefore all the less was his keeping the Russian understandable. After Schild and the preposterous Sankt George had carried the Russian, all bloody, upstairs, a piece of chocolate oiled the woman’s tongue: the fellow was a deserter, of course.
The Red Army had dismantled the dynamos and shipped them off to the Soviet Union—this made all the more mysterious the live transmitter on the floor above; its power supply was gone—but in their great haste to complete the job before the Americans took over the sector, they built huge crates that couldn’t clear the basement door, then had to take them down and start again. The detritus from their work—boards, tarpaper, peels of metal housing—Schatzi had assembled wantonly to fill a shallow corridor off the end of the main cellar-hall. Which barred the nosey without teasing them to burrow through it, and also caused Schatzi himself some trouble in his arrivals and departures. For this reason he placed a rigid limitation on the latter, and returned now, breaking his own rules, only to fetch some Meissen china for the last deal with Lieutenant Lovett. That worthy, who had been as the Americans said “framed,” was flying out of Tempelhof tomorrow in the direction of the U.S.A. and wanted a souvenir for his mother.
It took both time and care to pass through the barrier, since one had to close in the tunnel behind, and before he could draw after him the last length of coat tail, above the noise of his entrance he heard quick paw-sounds on the stairway and in the hall and, unseen but heard, his dog announced itself without the blind. Nothing to do but grasp rearward to its collar and pull it in, and forestall in oneself the impulse towards congratulation, which was what, with idiot tongue and rolling eyes, it sought and getting would store up as merit against future failures.
Back of the debris, a door unlocked directly into Schatzi’s quarters. For earlier tenants it had served as storeroom; its walls were continuous metal shelves from floor to ceiling. They now were heavy with stores of another nature, the materials of Schatzi’s major trade: cigarettes, confections, cosmetics, and the mechanical instruments of utility-pleasure: fountain pens, watches, lighters. And also: china from Meissen; Black Forest cuckoo clocks; unique beer steins, hand-crafted and -colored, each with a history; Hitleriana: signatures of the Man, photos of same with notable associates, counterfeit currycomb scrapings of his dog Blondi’s coat, and two books from his personal library: a sob-sister romance by Hedwig Courts-Mahler and one volume of Ranke’s History of the Popes, the latter with marginal annotations in the Führer’s hand, often simply Scheisse!: souvenirs from a broader range of Nazidom; and finally a sheaf of small paintings on cardboard by an old man who lived under a heap of rubble in the Soviet Sector, whose wife had been killed in the bombings, whose daughter was raped and VDed by the Russians, and whose pictures—calendar landscapes painted in saccharine and molasses—were moving slowly even with Ami soldiers.
Schatzi took some teacups and saucers and wrapped them in pages of the Red Army paper Tägliche Rundschau. Although his collection held twenty-four, he had chosen only five sets and, moreover, had in a sharp, glancing blow against the edge of a shelf chipped the rim of one saucer. It was just those persons who claimed sophistication in objets d’art, like Lovett, who were the easiest marks, who could be relied on to call it “Dresden” and be suspicious only of the price.
Warehouse, yes, but the place was also home; there was a cot for Schatzi and a length of chain for the dog (where, having enough foolishness for the day, he now secured it), and a little iron stove whose pipe issued through a chink in the wall, emerging outside beneath the cairn of helmets. Even so, he did not dare to keep a fire in the daytime—giving precedence of mind over body, for he was always cold notwithstanding summer. Cold always, a feeling to which one never adjusts, the history of which is the history of the person and in his case almost a history of the times.
The first, the only, personal comment the man had ever made him, and he could not recall it without its full complement: 1919, seven idealists in the private room of a cheap café in München. The sour and insidious stench of beer, not only in the air, one’s own mouth, and the breath of the others, but in clothing dropped on the foot of the flophouse bed and donned again the next day (one could not go naked while they were washed), and doubtless also in Harrer’s briefcase, which along with the cigar box for funds made up the Party office.
Harrer was president; had he remained so, it must be admitted that events would have been less interesting. For one thing, Schatzi’s clothes would likely have stunk of beer to this very day! He enjoyed such reflections, trifling with times past and irrefrangible; they were the only feasible control—which surely even that other early member, he who drank no beer, would admit now, granting for the moment that he could be assembled from the ashpit in the Kanzleigarten.
But the cold. ... This fellow, about thirty, voice roughened by poison gas in the war, clothes neat but knot of tie off center, capable of incredible fury in abstract argument, but when the Ober splashed beer (which he would not suffer in his mouth) on the green fedora upon light raincoat on the adjacent chair, unruffled and gracious. In the discussion he moved that invitations to meetings be printed on the gelatine-duplicating machine and, further, that the cigar box be opened to buy three rubber stamps. On this matter Schatzi cautiously stood with the majority, thinking it over till next week; he had understood the group’s aim was to put a little money in his pocket, rather than take it out—the latter, however, being only academic at the time, for he was a month in arrears in dues and on the point of ejection from the “Home for Men” for nonpayment of rent. No, it wasn’t true that he had joined to make his fortune in the narrow sense—unless one is a German bourgeois or an American of any class, money is an obsession only when one is poor—but a country is putrid and needs airing when it gives no justice to him who still carries enemy shrapnel in the meat of his thigh.
He, Schatzi, seldom spoke at meetings. He was never strong on ideology, and for that reason his associates treated him with a certain condescension. But earlier in the year when the premier of Bavaria, the Red Jew Eisner, was shot in the street and the ensuing proletarian revolution caught Schatzi’s friends of the Thule Society momentarily planless, he had got a chance to show his talent. The Reds hung a picture of Eisner on the wall against which he fell and mounted a guard nearby to force passersby to salute. Schatzi bought a sack of flour, soaked it in the urine of a bitch in rut, accidentally dropped it while passing the portrait. The bag burst, and the stuff powdered the base of the wall: soon all the male dogs in Munich were congregated there to whine and sprinkle their eulogy.
In crushing the revolution there was some loss of blood. The Thule Society—a different order from that of the seven café-gatherers, though with like sympathies; the fellow of the rubber stamps, for one, had been elsewhere—fought as underground shock troops within the city, while the Whites besieged it from without, and in a matter of weeks the revolutionary forces had dwindled to a rabble of left-wing soldiers in the 19th Infantry barracks, of whom the Whites executed every tenth man, and a swinish lot of prisoners in the courtyard of the Munich slaughterhouse, some hundreds of whom were formally shot and the rest battered, pierced, crushed, mutilated, and otherwise coaxed to enter the land of the shadows. Having won some merit in this action, Schatzi came to the attention of Captain Ernst Röhm, who was always on the lookout for young men—for more purposes than one, as it turned out—and was recruited for one after another of Röhm’s private armies, some disbanded the day they were formed, by the Jew-Socialist traitors in the government, the same that had betrayed Germany in the last days of the war. Schatzi had been very young in that time, twenty-two and three, and a prisoner of the feverish passions of the callow: for example, when he thought of the government he saw a single face, wan, spectacled, hooknosed, showing sly sanctimony that broke quickly into womanish fear as a good fist smashed into it.
But the cold. ... After this meeting, when the cigar box had been replaced in the briefcase and the briefcase snapped and the reckoning paid, Röhm paying Schatzi’s, the seven rose to leave. Even as he buttoned his poor outer clothing—he had no overcoat—Schatzi trembled before the thought of the late-fall wind in the street; and the man beside him, getting into the raincoat, stared from the deepset eyes since famous.
“I don’t know why, I am always cold,” Schatzi apologized, and didn’t know why he did that, either, for it was honest enough, but the man without opening his mouth seemed to demand it.
In answer Adolf Hitler said: “You no doubt eat meat, which oxidizes too fast in the stomach and the warmth is dissipated. The German nation as a whole consumes meat in the manner of a pack of hogs at their swill, and can never be strong until all that is at an end—not to mention that, as Schopenhauer observed, it smokes instead of thinks. I oppose all that.” He pulled the hat very low over his brow and left the café with quick steps as Röhm, smiling with his mutilated nose, took Schatzi’s arm.
It was a tablecloth of many colors, handwoven, fringed, and according to Lovett, who folded it briskly and placed it in the wooden crate, an article of Holland. Although the old lady of the house swore that she had bought it once on holiday in that country, he had pronounced it contraband of war, first for her and now for himself. And now, in the incredibly solipsist way that only Americans can do well, he related the details to Schatzi, as if expecting congratulations.
After a cursory inspection of the china, he drew five hundred Occupation marks from a fat wallet and thrust them at Schatzi, for all the world as if he, Lovett, had got the better. For who feels he has got it, has it—added to which, by the look of the billfold, if when Lovett arrived in the States his purchase was exposed, the expenditure had been small and the swindle might even give him an aura of adventure. Standing there before him, Schatzi could conjure up a little narrative two months hence in which his own image would appear as a quaint, Old World rascal. And its force was sufficient to alter, for a moment, the long, straight direction of his life.
“No, no,” he said, returning to Lovett half the sheaf of bills. “The price that we agreed upon was two hundred and fifty marks. You are so careless of your money!”
In Lovett delight and dismay contested, with the latter ultimately victorious. For, while he took the money, he now for the first time studied Schatzi and then applied the same inspection to the china.
“This chip,” he said. “Oh! It isn’t old at all—”
“But,” Schatzi broke in happily, “it is not the age of the chip that must trouble one, but instead the age of the china. As it does happen, I know the late history of these pieces. They were on the estate of the Graf von Halsbach zu Willmark in East Prussia for decades of many years. Unfortunately for him, the count remained until the last hour in the face of the Russian advance, and is it necessary to relate further of his outcome? His daughter alone escaped, with means of certain compromises—” He slowed down, watching Lovett’s doubt metamorphose into a sexless, vicarious lust—whether fastened to the count, the Russians, the daughter, the china, or the unspecified violence, he could not say—and continued: “But one can never be for long uncertain in these cases.” He turned over the saucer in question, and pointed to the moldmark of a factory in southeast Berlin: “You see, unmistakable. Every piece of genuine Dresden ware carries that age-old stamp.”
“Yes,” said Lovett, “unmistakable. I hope I didn’t offend you, but the price, well frankly it’s so modest. You see—” laughing girlishly—“I’m not one to usually complain about something costing too little, but some things you just know you have to put out a good price for, or they’re no good and there’s no use in puttin’ out your money...”
Looking through the living-room curtains, Schatzi saw Nader, whom he feared, on the other side of the street and about to cross.
“The price,” he said hurriedly, “is set at that level because I cannot in all decency take a commission on this selling. The count’s daughter is in a bad state of life, ill and needs the money for drugs and food.”
“You must take the rest of this.” Lovett, who had also seen his roommate, thrust the bills into his hand, and they had disappeared into Schatzi’s shaggy pocket before Nader entered.
Nader scraped about dispiritedly in the hall for some moments—time enough for Lovett to conceal his purchase beneath the tablecloth in the box—before he came into the room with a sad look for his friend and a hard one for Schatzi, who prepared to leave.
“It’s no dice, Dewey. The Old Man’s had it in for you for a long time. He told me frankly that he has been looking for an excuse to ride you out ever since you joined the outfit. And he also said he always thought—he said—I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Dewey, but he said, ‘Nader, I soldiered with you for ten years. I’d hate to think you turned queer when you got your commission.’ ”
“Well, Wally, you tried, and I am very grateful,” said Lovett. He flipped away like a doffed glove and began to stuff the crate with his enormous stock of extra underwear. “I told you before that I’m quite actually happy to be going. By the time I get back to the States I’ll be up for discharge, and I’m so anxious to get out of this horrid uniform and back to the shop. Mother’s been going it alone there for three years and just hasn’t been able to cope. The qui vive is what one must always be on in antiques.”
“That prick!” said Nader. “His trouble is he just hates culture. You know his idea of fun? Throwing down glass after glass of booze and telling stories about toilets. Hour after hour. I used to have to listen to all that trash without opening my mouth in the old days when I was top for the station-hospital company at Bliss. One time I signed up for a correspondence course on how to improve my English. When he saw it he said: ‘Now, Nader, you can’t make a silk purse out of a piece of sowbelly.’ How I used to ache to get that dirty muff diver in an alley and slam the poison outen him—why can’t a man improve himself?”
Nader’s body took on the temper of the grievance; the trapezius muscle at the base of his neck threatened to burst from the shirt.
Lovett fussed the rough top onto the crate. “It’s all right, Wally,” he said. “One can’t right all the world’s wrongs—Ouch!” He had got a splinter in his pinkie.
“The point is,” answered Nader, taking over the job, nailing down the top with sixteen nails, precisely one hammerblow for each, and without a break in rhythm getting after a nose-itch with his left hand, “the point is, a guy does all he can for a friend.” He manhandled the great carton to his shoulder and fought it to the porch, being at the door the recipient of Schatzi’s courtesy.
Rid of his burden, and having no gratitude, he blocked Schatzi’s exit. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Schatzi’s arms flew up to guard his face.
“You know why I don’t like you?” Nader continued, glaring. “You always look like you want somebody to kick your ass.”
“But I have authority to come now to this house,” said Schatzi “The Lieutenant—”
“Well, if you’re finished, screw.”
Schatzi glanced up and down the street and moved closer. “My dear Captain”—his upgrading Nader had a gross purpose for what he assumed to be a gross person—“I have been told that the Lieutenant Lofatt’s difficulty can be traced to a Russian officer, is it true, and perhaps if this Russian can be discovered, your friend will not suffer for it.”
Nader was not attracted. “I said blow.” He offered Schatzi assistance in negotiating the stair.
At the same moment, however, and before Schatzi had begun to move—looking at Nader with an odd smile that the lieutenant did not understand was admiration—he saw the old housekeeper issue from the door and hail him with her fingers.
“The blond officer has stolen my tablecloth and I don’t know what to do,” she cried. “You are their friend? Then you can help me.”
She was breathless, fat, and wheezing, and what was left of her reason and passion obviously had its locus in the thick and tasteless furnishings of her home. It was precisely this kind of person that the movement in its early days had been pledged to get rid of; Hitler had instead purged Röhm and dispensed with the Strassers, and Goebbels, degenerate, maimed opportunist that he was, had submitted to the policies under which the bourgeoisie flourished.
“You are a widow, no?” he asked, noticing that on her second sentence Nader went within.
“My husband was office manager of a fine company, small but fine. It was a direct hit. Afterwards we couldn’t even find his body. Please, I have no one to help!”
“My good lady—” he drew back as she clutched at his sleeve. Anybody with a brain in his head would have anticipated Lovett by offering to sell the cloth before he had ever touched it. “—the Americans are honest enough. There has no doubt been a misunderstanding. You must speak with him again.”
He was already on the bottom step, but the woman followed him down and, unless he broke away immediately, would surely weep, and that he must be spared.
“With their parties they already have destroyed everything else,” she wailed. “Did you see, the living room is empty, and I have not yet been paid. The ceiling—the ceiling was shot away for no reason.”
Now that it was called to his attention, he remembered a certain damage in the room—yet still not enough for his tastes; they would have had to burn off the roof and knock out at least one wall for it to seem anything like a home to him.
“But of course, this is why the officer is being sent away. You do not go unrevenged.”
The silly bitch listened to nothing he said. “Please speak to him,” she cried. “I have no English.”
“Ah, my good lady, neither have I, you see.”
He had left his bicycle in a clump of bushes around the corner—not from fear of theft, for in spite of all it was still an honest land, but out of caution; avoiding the neighbor Schild, who might have seen an unconcealed vehicle.
On the long trip to the Soviet Sector, Schatzi had to show a different combination of papers at each checkpoint, American, British, and Russian, and there was always the possibility that some illiterate of the last type might shoot him. Sergeyev would of course spring him from an arrest, but, in his own words, could “grant no immunity from a bullet.” However, he once again without incident went through the waste of Potsdamer Platz and the barricade on its east side, and although the crowds delayed him—where did they all come from, and why?—it was far better than to chance a remote and less-peopled entrance, with guards accordingly more primitive.
From here on he found it more politic to walk much of the way, wheeling the bike beside him: it was unwisdom in this area to distinguish oneself on a wheeled possession. Even so, he was stopped once by a Russian private, not a guard but one of the many roaming at large, who would have confiscated the vehicle had not Schatzi thrust in his face the pass from Sergeyev that read: “The bearer, L. K. Burmeister, German national, registration number 2XL-1897340-C, is on special business for the Army of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. —V. Sobko, 10th Section, Hdqrs., Red Army.” At which the fool saluted as smartly as a Russian could, and went on.
Arriving before a relatively sound four-story building off Alexander Plata, Schatzi parked his bike in the iron rack, and this time snapped a small lock around two spokes and an upright of the frame, and with still another pass issued him by Sergeyev, with data as false as the other, persuaded the soldier on door-duty to lower his machine pistol, and entered under the long red banner that said: “The unity of all Antifascists is the guarantee for the construction of a democratic Germany.”
“Yes, do that,” Sergeyev was saying into the telephone as Schatzi entered the smallest room, at the farthest end, on the last floor. “Show him no more mercy than you would a fly that had fallen into your soup, and at the same time deal with care, just as you would with the fly, for if you crushed him then and there you might have to empty the entire bowl.”
To one who on first meeting Hitler had seen an eccentric small-town sissy, there had come in ensuing years a disbelief in anything but the unlikely. However, it must be faced that Sergeyev differed from the commissar of legend only in his wearing mufti rather than the high, tight collar that was wanted to set off his bullet head. But then, even the civilian clothes were regulation for the type: the paradoxical jacket, both too tight and too baggy; dark-green tie and blue-striped shirt, both clean but looking dirty; and on a folding chair in the corner, a black felt hat with a little pond of light dust in its crown-dent and the brim lowered all the way round.
Replacing the instrument in its cradle and without giving Schatzi any sign that he was received, Sergeyev revolved his squat weight, the ancient swivel chair croaking like a frog, to a low wooden shelf on the wall behind the desk, where, as usual, the articles from his pocket were scattered: crushed packet of Russian cigarettes, cheap brass lighter that took forever to catch, mean collection of zinc small money, and a nail file in a mock-leather case frayed here and there to its subcutaneous paper. On his own initiative—for he wished to give Sergeyev no more than he already had, and the best strategy to that end was no unrequested sound—Schatzi had assumed this foible owed to a stout man’s difficulty in getting to his pockets while seated. As to the drawers of the desk: Sergeyev had no more considerable paunch than a keg, which is to say from shoulders to thighs he was one thick swell with no protuberance, but he sat so tight against the furniture before him as to join it to his person. Thus the shelf. Facing which he now stayed and, to it, said in German: “This is not your day.”
The diameter of his cropped skull widened as head gave way invisibly to neck, and both head and neck, and face, as he now made his return revolution, and the thick, hairless hands that grasped the cigarette and smashed at the lighter’s wheel, were crimson as an angry baby. Sergeyev, however, was never angry. If anyone threatened to make him so, he had him destroyed. As, anyway, he had once told Schatzi, who was disinclined to demand proof.
“You have no answer to that? Ah well, in the east country you’ll have years to talk all you wish to the ice and snow, unless a guard puts you out of your madman’s misery with a rifle butt.”
Schatzi waited through the inevitable joke about Siberia, as one does for the amenities. “Yes, quite true, it’s not my regular time, but I have something you should want to know.”
“And you’ve come here last of all, not having been able to sell it elsewhere. You think you can fool me, you piece of filth? You still do not believe that I can fling you down the stairs at my pleasure?”
Sergeyev arose and pounded to the door, opened it and thrust half of himself into the hall. “Yes, that stair down there, the one you came up,” this part of his speech itself being flung in that direction and thus scarcely audible to Schatzi. Who nevertheless had heard the threat clearly enough in the past to know it was habitually delivered in a voice devoid of all emotion; but not that he believed it empty—somehow one knew without evidence that Sergeyev was the type to say it a hundred times and do it on the hundred and first, or the thousand and twelfth, or not at all, for he had no rhythm and no limit and, indeed, beyond the pocket articles, no discernible self. These on the return trip he cleared from the shelf with one hand as sweep and one as scoop and buried in his clothing, as if in anachronistic worry that Schatzi might swipe them while his head was out of the room.
“Also!” He threw himself into the chair and grasped either end of the desk. “Proceed!”
“Lieutenant Schild—”
“Are you insane?” shrieked Sergeyev. He sprang up again, went again to the door, looked out, came back on a circuitous route of examination—his office was small as a private washroom, with no window, the streaked beige walls marred by no ornament, and no furniture beyond the desk and the lone extra chair that Schatzi occupied—and disengaged the telephone’s handpiece from its berth.
“Do you think me so naïve that you can inform to American Intelligence before my face?” he screamed, still with no emotion, stamping out his cigarette in a little glass bowl evil with tobacco tar.
“Fritz, then,” said Schatzi. “A Russian deserter is living at Fritz’s billet.” He stirred in his chair, smiling ill in fright and pride. “Also: Fritz is going to marry an American nurse.”
He was met with an open mouth of short teeth, which appeared to be a smile. “Tell me,” said Sergeyev, his voice liquid with unction, “confess to me—you were Ernst Röhm’s very favorite fairy-boy of all, nicht wahr? This is the sole reason why you were present on that famous 30 June 1933 when your lover and his faction were purged. We know all this already, so I can tell you it is useless to continue your mad resistance!”
A half year before, in the middle of January, when the Russian forces were rolling through Poland, the SS closed the Auschwitz camp and herded the dangerous prisoners—mainly such Jews as were left, and politicals—on a long death march to the enclosure at Mauthausen, in Germany. Schatzi was permitted to escape. Right off, he was almost murdered by Polish vigilantes who came in to fill the vacuum. For the uniform he had continued to wear as protection against just such a hazard, snipping the green triangle off the breast, was precisely what identified him to a Polish tradesman who had made deliveries to the camp and seen Schatzi in his privileged role as “professional criminal” leading work gangs to dig their own mass graves. This Pole, until two weeks before a collaborator, was now applying the same industry to preserve Number One in the new arrangements; in which he was as unsuccessful as a man can be: the guerillas shortly knocked him off, but saved Schatzi for the oncoming Soviet authorities. Who in turn not long after arrival dispensed with the vigilantes themselves, so neatly that no trace of the bodies was found by three Swiss Red Cross delegates searching for eighteen days, but saved Schatzi.
In neither case were the Russians wanton: the Polish guerillas, having shown enterprise once, would likely have proved troublesome in the Soviet occupation, and Schatzi, being officially an unperson and by personal history an advocate of no live cause, a friend of no man, totally dependent upon his captors and nicely shaped by years of captivity—it would be almost indecent to get rid of a man who could be used, and for no payment, beyond not taking that which had no absolute value: his life.
He was taken to Berlin and assigned to Sergeyev, who notwithstanding the mufti, was apparently an officer in an Intelligence section of the Red Army: apparently, because this was never mentioned, Sergeyev’s office being this shabby, airless cube in a building tenanted otherwise by the German Communist Party.
“And we know, believe me, that you make daily reports to American Espionage,” Sergeyev continued in his genial way. “Must I remind you once more that you are no safer in that sector than this one? How much sufferance would the Americans show if we informed them of your past, Misterrrr ‘Burmeister,’ sirrr.” On the English words he did a humorous imitation of the American r, which at the same time was very accurate.
“The only American agent I deal with is Fritz.”
“Never mind about that!” Nevertheless, Schatzi saw him write FRITZ on the back of a used envelope—which he pulled from a wastebasket; there was nothing on the desktop but the glass bowl for ashes and a pile of paperclips artfully arranged to appear loose but really joined into a two-foot chain, as he had discovered on an earlier visit when Sergeyev suddenly hurled it at him—FRITZ, he wrote it a second time and began to elaborate its lines with the pencil as he started again on Röhm.
Röhm, Röhm! From Sergeyev’s badgering at every visit, each time with a different angle of attack—the last time, of all things, he had been accused of being a spy in Röhm’s camp for Hitler—one could see that beneath the surface foolishness they knew everything already. And if they knew everything, they must surely know he had not been with Röhm’s personal party on the terrible night of June 30, 1933, when Hitler and company burst into the Bavarian hideaway and carted them off to the slaughter. And, to boot, Sergeyev had once asked him for an account of the executions at the Lichterfelde Cadet School in Berlin. But surely they knew that if he had been with Röhm he would have been taken to Munich, if not killed on the spot, as some were, in the sanatorium at Wiessee.
As to his erotic associations with Röhm—it was impossible to explain to anyone who had never known him the dynamism of the man, the virility which made denying him his pleasure almost shameful. Schatzi had not been given to the practice before he met him, and did not continue it extensively after the purge—indeed, although he had tried most of them, he had yet to find a kind of sex that was not tedious.
His not having been with Röhm’s party on that historical night was a piece of the strange kind of luck that blessed him his life long—or plagued him, for with his leader’s death perished a purity that he had found neither before nor since in the walks of men, a hard, clean, uncompromising resolution, honor, and bravery that the foul little Austrian upstart had betrayed to a moral leper like Goering, a weak-minded fanatic like Himmler, the antediluvian cowards of the Reichswehr, and the reactionaries of the Ruhr who had given niggardly money to the Party with the sole aim of getting more in return.
What was there to tell? Schatzi stayed in Berlin at headquarters, keeping a finger on developments, while Röhm and the other SA leaders conferred in the Bavarian retreat. Aware that they were incessantly calumniated by the evil voices at Hitler’s ear, sensing that they, the private army of the National Socialist revolution, the oldest fighters, the idealists, the conscience of the movement, had already been made superfluous in the general corruption, they were yet unprepared for the ferocity of their blood-brothers. Röhm was expecting a visit from Hitler on July 1, at which he intended to plead again to his old comrade-in-arms the case for the SA. He had a touching little gift for the Führer, a handsome bookplate. He waited in trust, with no guards; he was after all the only man in the Party who called Hitler by his first name, not to mention that he had been a Nazi even before Adolf. But when Hitler arrived, it was with a band of thugs and in the dead of night.
Simultaneous with the raid in Bavaria, Himmler and Goering took the headquarters in Berlin, capturing a hundred and fifty officers, whom they imprisoned in the Cadet School coal cellar in Lichterfelde and shot in quartets throughout the next twenty-four hours. The condemned men kept precise count of the executions; guessing whose turn came next was insurance against despair. They sang the song named for Horst Wessel. And, in innocent trust, heiled Hitler and went to their deaths faithful to his memory, for they supposed him also to have been a victim of the reactionary plot to crush the revolution.
In the twenty-seventh group-of-four Schatzi’s name was called—not, of course, “Schatzi,” but “Ernst, Friedrich Paul, Ober-sturmbannführer,” and even at that moment he thrilled to the crisp drumroll of his title: he had been a poor lance-corporal in the army for three years of the war, owing to the petty jealousy of a sergeant who consistently blocked his promotion. As he was marched with three others out into the mild morning and across the yard to the execution-wall, he saw some of the faces of his remaining comrades pressed against the cellar window, those old veterans of the Putsch, of a thousand café and street fights, of the Freikorps, and, before that, spotted here and there in the army of the Western Front. They had been fighting somewhere for almost twenty years, against impossible odds, for much of it ill fed and ill clothed, and always betrayed. Not one had broken down in the cellar. That was pretty good for the “pack of fairies” that so revolted Goering.
The wall was a dripping stucco of human flesh; fired from six yards away, the bullets blew the heart through a man’s back. An SS guard opened their clothing at the breast. Having difficulty with Schatzi’s woolen undershirt, he parted it with the ceremonial dagger from his belt and, inadvertently nicking the skin, excused himself. On Schatzi’s right hand was Appel, whom he had never liked. He caught his eye now as the guard went down the line drawing charcoal target-circles around their left nipples, and said softly, “Ahoy!” the old Freikorps greeting. Appel had been one of Röhm’s especial favorites; he smiled now over the gravity of his girlish face.
“By order of the Führer, FIRE!” The four prisoners stiff-armed the salute to Hitler and cried his name so loud they did not hear the order, and their chests were blasted through their backs. Or rather, three died not hearing—or if they did, were in a second beyond knowledge. Schatzi, falling with the others, heard, and knew that Röhm was dead, that Hitler had betrayed them, and that from then on he would give credence and fealty to no movement but that of his own pulse—which he heard now in the wrist crumpled beneath his ear, for he was not dead, had not indeed been hit, but rather was pulled down by the unity with his fellows. Lying with slit-eye at the level of the concrete, he saw the approach of the sole of a boot, was turned over and tested by it. A pistol slug fractured the pavement near his nose, the sharp chips whipping his face, already bloody from the liquid of Appel’s heart.
Schatzi preferred later, with his last ration of sentimentality, to believe that the officer had missed on purpose—it was said the executioners’ squad had to be changed frequently because of nerve failure—but he dared not see who it was. Shortly the disposal wagon, borrowed from a local butcher, returned from its last trip, and he along with the lifeless others was sacked into its tin bed. The rear doors were secured. The deliberate horse wheeled it creaking to the gate, which, opening, had its own sound. Fortunately, he had been thrown on top of the pile and was not crushed by the other bodies. Giving fate five minutes, as near as he could estimate, he tried the doors and found his hands too weak to manipulate the catch. Treading back, the wagon swaying, Appel and two more soft underfoot, he hurled himself forward. The wagon stopped—he had been conscious of the awful silence only as something to flee, but of course his movement broke it for the guards up front. The blond face of a horrified SS private was a circle in the bursting doors. Gory and wild—he had come so far since that he could smile at the remembered terror of that young calf—Schatzi flung out, felling the boy. They were on a deserted side street near the Stich Canal. He knew the area well, and escaped unpursued.
“I can only repeat what I have told you before,” he said to Sergeyev’s smile, which was turning more grisly. “My associations with the Nazis ceased on June 30, 1933, except that for the next twelve years I was their victim like so many others. What we in the early SA wanted was much the same as the Communists; we were even called ‘brown on the outside, red on the inside.’ ”
“Don’t insult me with your filthy comparisons between the international workers’ movement and a reactionary-mystico-homosexual cult,” Sergeyev shouted. “That was the only intelligent thing that Hitler ever did, to crush that foulness without mercy. What I want from you is the truth about those intervening years. In reality, you all the time were working with the Hitlerites as underground agent, nicht wahr? Or were you even that early taking American money?”
Schatzi patiently went through it all once more: after his escape he had lived for two years under a variety of aliases, outside both civil and Nazi law, until discovered by the Gestapo; after which he was kept in places of confinement for ten years.
“Excellent, excellent,” said Sergeyev. “Go right ahead with your resistance. But when you collapse into a quivering, boneless mound, remember it was your own doing....” He put down the pencil and, with the difficulty Schatzi had foreseen, dug into his pocket and found the nail file, put it to work with minute attention on the fingers of the right hand. One by one; it seemed hours before he finished and started on the left. Finally, though, it was done, and he brushed off the fall of nail dust—only to go into his breast pocket for a toothpick and clean around the little pegs which served him for teeth.
Schatzi ever so slightly changed his position in the chair, which made a loud, splitting, flatulent sound. He was genuinely embarrassed. Sergeyev bit through the toothpick, chewed it up, in fact, and blanched.
“Did you” he said, for once not acting, and thus showing that everything heretofore had been dramatics, and in a voice so mad with anguish that it seemed afraid, and Sergeyev afraid was so fearsome that in another moment Schatzi might have flung himself from the window, had there been one, “did you have the audacity to fart?”
Perhaps because this time he had really been moved, he accepted the explanation, took up his pencil again, and twitched it in dismissal.
“Report on your regular day.”