NOW TO THE SAVING of Veronica. Of all women for fertilization of the egg, a nurse; of all for illicit impregnation, a Catholic. Finally, a professional worker in the branch of healing to which problems of love were fundamental, herself love’s dupe.
Since on her own terms her infraction was inexcusable, his job would not be simple. It was even possible she would resist being saved—as she had refused that first, hysterical offer of marriage—and absolutely certain she would not admit the mode he had determined on. To a Catholic the mere use of a Trojan, he understood, was the denial to a new soul of its right to incarnate, reach puberty, and disapprove of contraception. Either you suppressed lust at its first tingling or, embracing it, you were obliged to stay for the dénouement. Abortion, of course, was downright murder.
Therefore would his guile be summoned to sally forth from the imaginary fields where it had so often bested Machiavelli. And his ingenuity: not even in a military hospital with a hundred doctors could one hope easily to recruit an abortionist, another nurse was unthinkable, and although he could name as many unscrupulous enlisted technicians as there were wards he had little faith in their Army-learned craft.
In the last he was terribly confirmed by a story of Marsala’s. Roy Savery, an enlisted assistant in the operating room, had just yesterday performed an abortion on his German girl friend and she bled to death.
“His trouble was,” said Marsala in high disgust, “oh my aching back!, he loved her. If he didn’t of, she would still be alive and he wouldn’t be up for court-martial. Any girls I knock up I do them a favor and don’t see them again.” He chuckled and screwed his gangster’s face around the stump of cigar on which his large incisors were clamped, smoke and speech intermingling from the side alleys of his mouth: “Why not? I never raped anybody long as I lived. Am I right?”
They sat en famille in their living room, at the round table beneath a chandelier of five dead bulbs and one live. Marsala took off his undershirt, revealing a natural vest of hair, from deep in the tangles of which glinted a silver religious medal as might a fragment of broken airplane within the jungles of the Mato Grosso. He had too extravagantly stoked the corner stove an hour before, and the air was at that temperature in which the skin weeps and philosophy proliferates.
“Poor girl.” Reinhart groaned, in part because he was miserable with perspiration.
“Yeah, he held a gun on her to make her haul his ashes,” Marsala growled disingenuously, suspending from his index fingers the dancing, ghostlike undershirt, which he inspected for cleanliness and finding insufficient balled and cast under the sideboard. “He should of done it, see? Then he woona owed her nothing at all, if you get my meaning.”
“It’s burning in here. I’d better open the window.”
“No, whadduh yuh crazy? I take pneumonia with no shirt on, you dumb dong.... So get yaself a American girl like you got, huh you big dummy Carlo? Knows how to take care of her humping self, huh? Now don’t tell your old buddy you don—”
“You got any extra money, buddy?”
Marsala snatched from a back pocket and propelled across the table his old brown billfold fat as a squab and said, while drawing on the stogie: “Take whadduhyuh want.”
Reinhart chose a sheaf of one thousand marks from a store of twice that much. “Can I have this?” He fanned the bills so Marsala could count them.
“What is this?” his friend answered, outraged, and bending over, seized the wallet’s remaining notes and threw them in his face. “What is this, fuck-your-buddy week? La putana Maria! You won’t take my money, I give you a shot inna head.”
“I can probably pay you back next month—”
“Okay, say one more word and I go rub shit in your sack,” shouted Marsala, dilating his hirsute nostrils. “Don’t hump me with them college insults, Carlo Kraut. My cash’s not good enough for you, okay, okay, OKAY!” He paced furiously around the room, having his great noisy pleasure.
In a moment he marched into the hall, flung wide the outer portal, and bellowed Riley’s old call up the stairwell, hearing which Jack Eberhard came out upon the top-floor landing and cried in riposte: “You like cake? Take this, it’s raisin.” Then more doors opened and some of the other good old boys popped out shouting all the grand old irreverences on the genito-urinary tract, the oestrous cycle, the gastro-intestinal system, and their heresies, and when someone mock-flatulated with a hand in bare armpit, someone else whooped: “Kiss me again, sweet lips!”
“Where’s Reinhart?” called the guys from the third floor, and the cry was taken up by throats on all levels to the roof: “Rein-hart! Reinhart!” Inside, Reinhart listened, a kind of warm cramp in his stomach, and then rose, went into the hall, and looked up through the spiral of shining comrade-faces whom one day it would be a death to leave.
“Short arm!” he shouted. “Marsala, get the flashlight!” And everywhere sounded the cheers and catcalls and boisterous generosity, and the third-floor guys fetched a pitcher of water and poured it down in a great quivering sheet, really funny because they really aimed to hit them and only narrowly failed. Marsala got angry and had to be held back by real force from climbing up and kicking the bowels out of the whole bunch. To soothe him Reinhart recited everybody’s favorite poem:
When the nights are hot and sultry
Is no time to commit adultery.
But when the frost is on the punkin,
That’s the time for Peter Duncan.
A society grounded on common inconvenience, where friendship was innocent of opportunism and tolerance flourished without manifesto: no crime could outlaw you from this company; no merit beyond the grossest went recognized; where sensitivity was soon reduced to coarseness and ambition stifled; where lethargy was rewarded and disenchantment celebrated; this cul-de-sac off the superhighway to the glorious Houyhnhnm of the future where a chicken would stew in every pot and each man be his own poet, unarmed, owing allegiance to one world—this splendid, dear, degrading society, here as nowhere else Reinhart felt at home and loved.
An invitation from an ad hoc party headed for the noncoms’ club, there to swallow strong German beer, cuss, spit, smoke, and perhaps, about closing time, to plunge into a sharp dispute on a subject of no permanent importance (such as Marrying a Virgin) and nearly come to fracas, poignantly tempted him—as in college when a gang formed in the recreation room, he had never been. At the moment, having a role, he saw his mission to save Veronica as only arbitrary, but manhood’s job could be defined as that which replaced the known and comfortable with the difficult and unpleasant.
Being a man, he went inside to the bathroom and spread his available money in series along the washstand lip, which being European did not seek to stint on marble and extended flat and wide for ten inches on either side of the basin. Last week, unsuspecting next week’s extremity, he had mailed home a money order for his maximum allowance, corporal’s pay plus ten per cent, roughly eighty bucks. Remaining were three thousand marks, to which were now added Marsala’s twenty-two hundred, totaling the equivalent of five hundred twenty American dollars. Vis-à-vis such a sum, a German physician of the present day could ill afford to stand upon his ethics. How Reinhart would lure Veronica to a foreign operating table, unsuspecting, he had not as yet studied. But the means by which the doctor would be gained were as close as belowstairs in Very’s very billet.
Lori Bach—Lori and Bach, who in their combination, in their-cellar, in his conscience, localized a grief which, unable to admit, he for a month had pretended was not there. Also manly was his resolve to go, on the strength of a concrete purpose, and look it in the eye.
“Ah!” said Bach from the sofa. “So kind of you to bring a friend, Mr. Corporal Reinhart, and if I am not deceived by my failing vision—although the cooked carrots brought almost nightly by my good wife from the American mess, if indeed stewing does not destroy their sight-giving properties, are restoring it—he is an officer; and where but among you excellent Yanks could be possible such a friendship: corporal and lieutenant, splendid, splendid.”
Falling from Reinhart’s hand, his cow-teat fingers in a feat of levitation floated to the lieutenant. “Bach. So good to know you.”
“Schild,” answered the officer who bore that name. “Es freut mich.” And then his eyes, pained, confused, bugged at Reinhart and seemed to ask approval for himself.
Instead, Reinhart recommended Bach. “He is a good man, Lieutenant, he is a better man than I can say. I am very proud to know him.”
Schild stared dully, said plaintively: “Yes.” Without waiting for the invitation Bach already prepared upon soundless, moving lips, he fell into the nearest chair and put a grim surveillance on his own feet.
“My wife,” said Bach, beaming on Schild but speaking to Reinhart, “has not yet returned with him you require. Let us then, over three of the cigarettes you so kindly sent along to me, commingle our thoughts. The packet is just there upon the table. Please serve Mr. Lieutenant Schild—which of course means ‘shield’; and one is happy to see, ha!, that he has come with rather than upon it; every American, how singular!, seems to be of German descent—and yourself, and then I shall be so bold as to ask one.”
And there was all of it again, like the landscape of a recurrent nightmare: the concrete tomb, the sweet smell of garbage, the white monster; all awful and yet familiar, like Xmas with the relatives, or for that matter, life, simply life in general, from whose calculated ills we do not fly to seek others known not of but surely worse, because unchosen.
Choice: make this one and you must also make the next, and once begun you have the habit. A mere hour ago he had sought out Lori as she came from the mess tent, given her, right there on the plain thronged with her colleagues making for the trucks, his problem, bald and coarse; and so forthright was his temper that he left uncorrected the implication Veronica was his mistress.
Certainly she knew a German doctor, and her wise-weary eyes took no stock of him at all, seeing him as end, not means, yet were fond in recognition, attended on him specially and without demand. Yes, that very evening, if he liked, she could bring the physician to her cellar for a meeting, Bach’s and her cellar on Nürnberger Strasse, which since he could never have found it again she placed in relation to the Kurfürstendamm and the ruin of the Kaiser Wilhelm Church. She would see him there at eight o’clock, as simple as that. He shook her fine-boned hand, her small, dynamic hand, and saw her hair again could use a soaping, that her beret was frayed, that her stockings of rough brown cotton sagged at the ankle and the gray coat wanted its central button; and each deficiency was another focus for his sudden love.
Having chosen action, then, having chosen love, clothed in the warmth of his volitions he had wandered through the slowly chilling late-afternoon light, in the time of day for gentle melancholy, the hour when perhaps even devil and saint are briefly, postprandially imperfect; when colors, which had been subdued by its noontime flare, spring defiantly at the sun in its decline, radiantly false as Kodachromes; when Reinhart in his earlier self had been wont to dream of being ruthless Tamerlaine, or Don Giovanni severing a maidenhead, or a poet with flashing eyes and floating hair.
Now, however, in the realization that he had, in the only sense harsh actuality permits, done these, been these, or didn’t wish to be, he forgave himself and plunged into the palpable present. Schild. He would go upon this moment to Lieutenant Schild and squeeze from him Schatzi’s money. Moreover, since morally speaking it was beside the point and tactically an obstacle, he dispensed with the identification of Schild as Jew, thin, dark, sharp, arrogant, and deceitful as the man incontestably was. To dispense with it he had first to make it; and then must congratulate himself on its not making a difference, and then say a thanks to fate for at last coughing up a Jew who had trespassed against gentiles.
But the first-lieutenant’s bar was quite another thing. To beard an officer, a corporal armed only with right’s might was ill weaponed, and the technique of obsequious insolence which in three years’ service Reinhart had made his own was a device rather more for survival than dominance.
He moved along the street of officers’ billets, a short block of the little toy houses of Zehlendorf with terracotta-tiled tentroofs, tight fences, and playing-card lawns. How queer it must be for Schild to live in such a house and look out upon a provincial street through white curtains; whereas Reinhart himself had done it for years; how contemptible to Schild’s keen senses. How could Schild forgive the neat-meshing casements and the correct dun stones in the walk? A spreading evergreen bush flanked his stoop, from the lintel above his door sprouted a night light like a globed mushroom. Had a Jew ever lived in such a house, and had he been ripped screaming from it by pink-and-blond young men?
As, asking, he lingered at the gate, the answer opened the door and stood uncertainly upon the threshold, ecco homo, Lieutenant Schild, and the response of Reinhart’s heart, in the same vocabulary lately used for loving Lori, said: even had he raped Veronica and murdered Schatzi, I could never raise my hand against him.
Man, man, one cannot live without pity. What Reinhart proposed to feel was the general emotion, but as he watched Schild come pitiably down the walk in his forlorn movements and crummy uniform, wiry hair bushing his cap, opaque spectacles, blousefront a home for lint, splay-shoed, wrinkle-pocketed, choking on a necktie with a dirty knot, insignia corroded and awry, haddock-faced—as he made these sorrowful entries in the ledger, Reinhart’s sympathies became particular. Whatever pity Schild deserved for simply being a Jew, he required more for merely being Schild. The decent thing to do was leave.
But before sluggish Reinhart could get under way, Schild had reached the gate and, with its faded pales between them, said stoically, for all the world as if he knew of the mission which Reinhart had just abandoned: “Yes, Corporal, you came for me?”
“I was taking a walk,” Reinhart answered shamefully. “And I saw this house and remembered the crazy Russian we took upstairs last month—” he broke off and in concern came back: “Did you get all the files from the office?”
“You did me a kind service that night,” said Schild, cloudily, fingering the gate’s catch; but though it was a simple rod and slot he could not work it, stopped trying and capped his hands on the picket-points. “I wish I could do something about repayment, but you see I am not in your company.”
To Reinhart, too, it seemed a tragedy; he felt his cheeks lose their blood and fall in, to match Schild’s; like Schild’s his voice sounded as if it crossed a body of water: “I’m sorry, very sorry. ... That German kid hasn’t bothered you any more, has she, when I’m not there? Dirty little whore, she makes me sick.”
Without trying the exterior handle, without hands he applied his hip against the gate and pressed inexorably in: the hardware ground, bent, was sprung free, shooting its several parts and screws tinkling to the walk; and Schild came through to the pavement, unheeding what had been necessary for his egress—which, done, struck Reinhart as regrettable and clarified his mind. He gathered the fragments of the lock and after a quick determination that they could never be reassembled, at least left them available on the cap of the gatepost.
“Since I can’t repay your favor,” said Schild, perhaps, in the public air, a breath or two less mad—for mad is what he was, or had just been; as clear a, as well as the only, case of depressive mania Reinhart had ever seen and which, now thank God it had begun to pass away, he was able to identify and reflect that he had answered it correctly—“since I can’t repay your favor, may I ask another one?”
A formidable non sequitur, yet suggesting an idea not at all lunatic; irony, rather, and one had only to look at Schild, in whatever condition, to understand the authority with which he manipulated that instrument. Half-dead from some despondent cancer, he yet in one short question, in a failing voice, exposed the skeleton of charity: he who takes a favor returns it by asking another; he who gives one is repaid by the commission to do a second; and the score is even throughout, unless, indeed, the giver has the better.
“Of course,” granted Reinhart, foreseeing the little drama without passion in which he would deliver to Very a billet-doux from Schild, foretasting his own humiliation and perversely enjoying its savor.
“May I come along with you on your walk?”
So. Again he had persuaded another to play him for a fool, for, make no mistake, people use us as we ask them to: this is life’s fundamental, and often the only, justice. If he understood that, on the other hand he saw that to Schild it was not a mocking, ass-making request. The lieutenant actually waited on his approval, head down, his cap points echoing the general wilt of his body.
Did his grief owe to Veronica’s, of which he had been agent? Surely no man, whatever his responsibility and whatever the upshot, would lose his nerve by this. It was rather Schatzi’s money; but again, would a bad debt to a German, even a good one, so resound in the sane conscience?
“Would you like to borrow some money?” asked Reinhart, without a warning to himself. “I have an awful lot.” He drew his wallet as if it were a gat and with one finger triggered it open. “See, over five hundred.”
Interminably Schild stared into the note-clogged leather breech, and so near Reinhart could have snapped it to and clipped off the end of his nose. When at last his eyes lifted, their fright was giving way to the old, cold certainty that they, and no one else’s, owned all truth and virtue.
Superiorly turning his head towards the house, he said to the yard: “Now I know how a whore feels. Everybody offers me money.”
Oh, he was a fellow who could be rubbed the wrong way, and certainly he had his reasons; society had slipped him the shaft, he had doubtless been diddled by the dangling digit of destiny; there was some extenuation for his own failings, but none for those who trespassed against him—and for once to all this Reinhart, rebuffed, said balls, and with as much offensive familiarity as he could summon from dead start, clapped him smartly on the shoulder and announced:
“Why sure, come along. I’m going to see a man about an abortion. A broad I know, as they say, has bread in the oven. How do you like the size of this wad? If that won’t buy the job, nothing will.”
Not waiting for Schild’s reaction, he businesslike stored the wallet and marched down the sidewalk. At the corner he was pleased to hear the hurrying footsteps behind, but still he gave no quarter, and who knew how far his calves might have propelled him unaccompanied—for in contrast to Schild’s they were muscled as an oak root, tireless as pistons, and at the moment the body they supported was, inflated with purpose, a lighter-than-air craft—in reality, he was detained at the curb by the passing trucks of Lori’s caravan.
Reaching him, Schild spoke breathlessly above the roar: “You can’t be serious! That’s against the law; besides, it’s dangerous. You could be tried for murder.”
His concern, if innocent, was madly out of proportion to their acquaintance; if disingenuous, nonsensical—if he knew Very was the object of the plan, why should he, who already had fled from his own responsibility, complain? Anyway, God damn the man for his officiousness.
“But you see,” said Reinhart. “I’m not doing the job myself. I’m going to hire a German doctor.”
“So.” Schild gave him a face of regretful sadism—a smile of malice taking pleasure in itself Reinhart had seen, but never a frown. “So, the little blonde got to you even though you were warned.”
Now here, where Reinhart should have felt anger, he did not. His reply was simple sullenness: “You’re not even an officer in my company.”
Hard upon the tailgate of the last truck he stepped into the street, into a cloud of blue exhaust, choking. Thus, with his eyes closed, he did not see the jeep which turned the corner and, also blinded by oil smoke and carbon monoxide, might have injured him, or he it, had not his persistent saviour this time succeeded. Schild’s thin fingers, he felt with smarting arm, were strong.
“Nate!” shouted the man behind the wheel, a fattening captain who wore a knitted OD tie, “I thought I might run into you, a-ha-ho, mpf, mpf! Give you a ride?”
Hand still hooked into Reinhart’s swelling forearm, and applying a force whose aim was the other side of the street, Schild answered curtly: “I have some private business with this corporal.”
“So be it,” spoke the captain, reaching for the gearshift, gathering in at the mouth the drawstrings of his barracks-bag face. “Nowadays you’re always arresting someone.”
“If you can’t use that ride, I can,” Reinhart told Schild, shaking him off. “Going towards the Ku-damm, Captain?”
“Could be, if you’ll tell me where it is, unless that’s in the Russky sector. Brr, I wouldn’t chance it there, and do you know, Nate, I still can’t get that poor devil out of my—”
Schild interrupted: “We’ve changed our minds.” He produced the kind of smile, with much evidence of teeth, that one shows when his underwear is torturing his privates. “I’ll confess to you, St. George, if you won’t tell my CO., the corporal and I have something cooking on the black market.” He lowered the back of the front seat so Reinhart could hop in back.
“I know your commanding officer—a real son of a bitch,” replied St. George, going into uproarious mirth. “A dirty son of a bitch! Corporal,” he said, gagging on the r’s, “in case you didn’t know, I’m cussing out myself. You got that kind of C.O.?”
Reinhart grunted icily at the silly slob. Tyrannical officers, who were candid about their power, were preferable to jovial ones in love with their own decency. As to Lieutenant Schild, whose head snapped back on his fragile neck as St. George jerked the car into forward movement, he defied classification: who was doing what for whom and how was one to feel about it?
So started they towards the enormous cairn of rubble underneath which lay Nürnberger Strasse, in whose name Reinhart for the first time recognized a memorial to his old city of legend and determined to lay the symbolism before Bach, the specialist in things undreamt of by other philosophers.
However, now that he faced Bach, with Schild in the adjacent chair, Reinhart could worry over nothing but that Bach would begin where they had last left off, on the Jews; or, before an audience half of which was virgin to his dramaturgy, repeat the farce so successful at its opening, while Reinhart sat paralyzed by the ethics of entertainment: please do not tell your friends the surprise ending. Hastily he began to collect the differences between this visit and his last, as the man lying down to rest adds up and tries to cherish the details which differentiate this night from last, the nightmare-ridden: tonight I am lying on my other side, the pillow slip is fresh, the moonlight does not shine upon the window—oh, but God, I have the same head and I am scared.
First he noted an increase in illumination. The oil lamps were in their old positions but unfired. From the center of the stained ceiling, the nucleus of a web of hairline fissures, hung a hot electric bulb. Augmenting whose glare Bach’s reflecting, porcelain head irradiated his immediate area. His sofa, at the principal surfaces worn to the bare hemp of warp and woof, in the hitherto obscure corners shone now in a pattern of emerald, turquoise, white, and scarlet: a scene, a world, the edge of some equatorial swamp profuse with hot flowers and curving flamingos and reed-green water, and, on the lip of the depression behind Bach’s shoulder, the great throat-cup, here in ruby, of the bird whose beak can hold more than his bellican.
Bach himself wore a green suit, a moss-colored huntsman’s suit with oval bone buttons and odd straps and trimmed in gray beading; in the lapel slot, a spray of edelweiss, fake, showing its wire stem. His trousers were cuffless, bell-bottomed, seam-striped like a uniform, and between them and the floor lay ankle-high shoes of reversed leather, pine-cone brown, fastened with tasselled cords threading through a series of bright chromium clips.
“You are feeling better now,” said Reinhart.
“Oh thank you, thank you,” Bach replied, the inside of his mouth red as the flesh of a blood-orange, here and there the yellow seeds of teeth. “But the clothing produces an illusion at odds with reality. In truth, I believe that I am dying”—he threw his hands at Reinhart to dispose of a reaction which had not come—“please do not grieve: ‘by my troth, I care not; a man can die but once; we owe God a death and let it go which way it will he that dies this year is quit for the next.’ ” He looked slyly towards Schild and returned, fingering the blossoms in his lapel. “This flower, by the way, is quite false.”
“It is very nice, anyway,” Reinhart replied.
“You are always kind,” said Bach, coyly raising his right trouserleg to reveal an inch of brace, as a Victorian coquette might have exposed her ankle, “but the chiefest consideration will always be: where could a man with my infirmity get the real thing? Mountains, my good Corporal, one must climb the highest peaks to reach this noble plant, which is as difficult to come by as an honest man.” Having exhausted his air on the speech, Bach took more through the tube of his cigarette, in a long and intense suction which burned back an inch of ash. “The same characterization that applies to me does as well for the so-called building under which we sit at this moment”—swinging his head over the sofa arm, he spat the smoke at the floor, as if it were a mouthful of milk—“despite its apparent improvement—the laying on of electricity—it is quite likely, I am led by all my senses to believe, to collapse without warning.”
Reinhart, who would never again be taken in, said in swaggering irony: “Not while I am here, at any rate; because I have a charmed life.”
“Is that true!” exclaimed Bach, fanatically interested, seeking to rise unaided, in the violence of his attempt giving the illusion that he had almost made it and lost by a hair; whereas in fact he had not moved a centimeter.
“Indeed it is. May I sit down?”
“Ohhhh—” Bach began a long gasp at his own poor manners, not waiting for the completion of which Reinhart fell beside him at the end of the couch and ground out a space with his hips, at Bach’s yielding expense.
He plucked at the threads of upholstery on the sofa arm. “Handsome, very tasteful.”
“Gobelin,” said Bach, with difficulty twisting his neck, upon a static body, to face him.
“I certainly know his name,” Reinhart replied, crossing his legs and inadvertently fetching Schild, whose chair was a good four feet away, a kick in the shins, smiling absolution for himself for that, smiling then at Bach in self-admiration which quickly shaded into joke as he saw upon the great grapefruit a polite confusion that told him he had guessed wrong. “Don’t mind me,” he said rakishly. “I told a Catholic friend last week that I had never read Father Douai’s translation of the Bible.”
“Yes,” Bach answered, still perplexed. “May I ask, however, of the charm upon your life?”
“Oh of course.” He glanced covertly at Schild, who had, as late as a Stanley Laurel, just begun to rub his injured shin. “Well, I think I felt it first when we were pinned down along a hedgerow in Normandy. There was the enemy a bare hundred yards away in the next hedge, laying down a withering machine-gun fire. Well, they were bottling up the whole American advance; somebody had to do something. And I must confess, our leaders had failed us completely. The company commander, the platoon lieutenants, the NCOs, they all proved to be perfect cowards. You see, this was our baptism of fire—”
“You were infantry?” asked Bach, a hand against his left cheek, as if he restrained his head from swinging back to the frontal position. Despite the evidence of a similar, internal attempt to control his eyeballs, they were their own masters and veered continually towards Schild, until at last they fixed in that direction as a lecher’s will upon a maiden.
“Glider infantry,” Reinhart corrected, “a unit in the 101st Airborne Division, later to become the so-called ‘Battling Bastards of Bastogne.’ ”
“How terrible!” interjected Bach.
“And I don’t mean to say that at first I wasn’t scared myself. But then, crouching there, staring across that new field of rye through the hedge, towards that line of green blooming like roses with gun flashes, I suddenly looked down and saw my trousers were open. I put down my submachine gun to button them—and then I thought: ‘What a wretched little swine I am to care about this when I might be killed in two minutes!’ And then, just as quickly, I knew I would not be killed, got this absolute certainty that I could stand up and walk slowly across the field and never be hit. So I did just that, climbed up over the top and began to walk slowly towards the German line. After I had got about ten meters out, slugs whizzing all around me but never hitting, the Krauts stopped firing! Stopped cold. I think now they thought I was coming to surrender; and it is true that the end of a white handkerchief was showing from the breast pocket of my field jacket. Anyhow, when they stopped I gave a big holler and discharging my Thompson advanced on them as fast as I could run. Behind me the rest of the company came whooping forward, not shooting, though, because I was in their line of fire. And do you know—” he slapped his hand upon Bach’s green knee and felt, rather than the expected quivering of aspic, a hard and sharp junction of almost naked bone and metal brace—“do you know, those Germans sat paralyzed behind their guns and did not shoot once more, and when I looked over the hedge, down into their trench, all fifty-three of them threw up their hands and yelled ‘Kamerad’! And of all things they turned out to be a crack unit of the SS, you know, the SS, fiercest fighters of all, who never surrender.”
“Oh yes,” Bach answered, lowering his hand; his head, as promised, instantly swung away like some half-door between a kitchen and dinette. “I surely know of the SS and can only say that the fact must have been as you suggest, that they anticipated the surrender would be vice versa. For to them fear meant as little as does memory to an ingrate. In the Warsaw Ghetto the SS fought on until the last schoolboy put down his penknife and the last little housewife dropped her paving brick.”
So of course there it was, Schild raised his eyes, the curve of Bach’s fat cheek glistened with triumphant sweat, and Reinhart’s big feet began to punish each other for the humiliating failure. “Ghetto,” that beastly ugly word the pronunciation of which began in the deepest throat and worked forward like a piece of phlegm—he had heard nothing else. The loathsome Germans and the damnable Jews: the plague that had befallen both their houses was kind beside the one he now wished upon them. He also wished for nerve to direct Schild to the booby hatch and for courage to tell Bach he intended to carry off his wife, with whom he was in earnest love.
Yes, spiting all his wishes, he forced himself to say: “Were you in the SS at that time?”
Bach again pushed round his head, but before he made a word Schild rose and spoke ferociously to Reinhart: “I’m not going to let you do it, you understand? If anything goes wrong they’ll put you in Leavenworth for twenty years. According to your stupid middle-class morals, I suppose, better to take a chance on ruin rather than beget a child out of wedlock. You are an idiot!”
There was no longer a question that he had gone nutty as a fruitcake: with hard steps he strode to the end of the cellar and leaned against the wall and gravely examined its waterstains.
Bach began to speak in a low, grating, regular tone, like an electric drill needing oil: “The SS? My friend, I—”
“What business is it of yours what I do?” Reinhart screamed at Schild, notwithstanding the poor fellow was mad. “I can get through life without your help!” And notwithstanding that Bach, poor chap, was an invalid, he turned on him viciously: “For Christ’s sake can’t you talk of something other than the Jews?”
“Curious,” said Bach, smiling mildly, “the manner in which a member of the other ranks may speak to an officer, in the American Army.”
“He’s not in my unit,” Reinhart answered, lowering his voice. In the corner of his eye he saw Schild return.
But the words were kind; the face, gentle: “Because I am your friend. Isn’t that reason enough?”
“Sure it is, sure it is.” Reinhart swallowed. “I suppose it is the only good one for doing anything in the world.” He dared not admit to himself how deeply he was touched, how much sense lay in madness, how heroic was decency’s response to brutality’s negation. For this he could repay Schild only with candor.
“Things have got all complex,” he said, “simply because I let them slide.” Schild, standing, hovered before him blankly, nervously. Beside him Bach breathed with a slight moan. Perhaps, after all, now that truth was having its day, he was about to die. The winding stain which Schild had traced on the wall was not, he could see now, a decoration of seeping water but rather a weakening division in the concrete which seemed to widen as he looked and perhaps would bring down the house—there had been sense in that, to him, lunatic action as well.
“I should have told you before. But maybe it wasn’t eccentric to think you might know. Veronica Leary is pregnant.”
“That big nurse?” Schild shrugged, splayed his hands in impatient despair.
“Why put it that way?” Reinhart was angry all over again and himself despaired that relations with his newly found friend could ever be on the unswerving line of constant respect. “Can’t you even call her by her name?”
Bach snorted as if he, too, had never witnessed an outrage of that magnitude, but turning to him in alliance one saw him chatteringly blow his snout into an aquamarine handkerchief.
Schild’s feet, too, were splayed, and his head forward and depressed below the level of his shoulders; sitting before him Reinhart could look down the back of his head to where the collar, too large, yawned out from the hairy neck.
“So,” said Schild, “that’s worse yet than the German girl, isn’t it? How could you get in such a predicament?” Fierce yet charged with loving concern, like that sonorous old actor who always played the father of an East Side boy torn between the life of the spirit and the life of matter, when that theme was à la mode.
“Ah God!” sighed Reinhart. “Finally, I see. I didn’t knock her up, if that’s what you mean. I’m just trying to help Veronica out of it.”
“Why?” Schild again chose his chair.
“On the basis of friendship. She was never my girl. She didn’t ‘betray’ me. But I might do the same if she had. Common humanity is more important than sex. What matters is, she’s in trouble—just as, a moment ago, you thought I was. I’d rather aid than be aided any day, just like you.”
“Then I am out of order,” Schild replied, “and there’s no help for that.” After the briefest illness, his face lay down and died.
But why take so hard a simple error that in the end had done no harm? In his statement was implied a personal doom, unpeopled, glacial, bone-white, so much more terrible than Bach’s presages of a technicolor disaster. Was he serious? Reinhart looked at Bach, the absurd man, the absolutely useless man, who even if he were restored to health, if he had ever been there, would only stand and gawk at Oriental art, crap like that, and rant foolishly. But was he frivolous? And finally, did it matter?
He asked the last question only to make sense of his ready answer—for that was truth: first the answer and then the question, so that while we wonder we can continue to live—did it matter?, oh hell yes, for all we have in this great ruined Berlin of existence, this damp cellar of life, this constant damage in need of repair, is single, lonely, absurd-and-serious selves; and the only villainy is to let them pass beyond earshot.
“Do you know what we could use right now?” he said unwaveringly to Bach.
That huge fellow swung round his enormous head, his pale eyebrows climbing in inquiry, his second chin reluctantly altering its seat in his collar, which was white and overlaid with peasant embroidery in red thread.
“A good laugh. Say something funny.”
“Very well.” And Bach was as good as his word in that at least he tried. He told a story of two friends, Palmström and Korf. Who, finding a mouse in their house, built a cage of latticework, into which Palmström climbed at twilight and began to play the violin. As night fell, the mouse was lured in by the music. Palmström went to sleep, then so did the mouse. In the morning Korf put the cage into a furniture wagon and hauled it out to the country. The mouse was there released. He loved his new home. Korf and Palmström, delighted, returned to town.
“That’s the end?” asked Reinhart.
“Of course,” said Bach, wincing in amusement, suffused with rose color. “What more could we wish? Consummate art, which I can assert only because it is certainly not of my own creation—needless to say, for what is?”
For Christ’s sake what a story. Then he heard Schild snicker, and saw him laugh with a naïve mouth of which the upper lip flattened and glistened tightly midway across his upper teeth, and his ears protruded like a schoolboy’s.
Through water-brimming eyes—his spectacles were tiny fish-bowls—Schild finally looked at Bach.
“That is Christian Morgenstern.”
“Exactly,” answered Bach. “How exciting that you also know his work!”
“Do you remember this one?” Eagerly he moved to the edge of his chair and rapidly, in an accent which to Reinhart sounded perfect, quoted in a German of which Reinhart understood nothing.
“All right,” said Reinhart testily, watching them howl at each other, “what does that mean?”
Bach began: “This gentleman named Korf—”
But Schild, impatient in his high levity, broke in: “He has invented a kind of joke, you see, that works by delayed action. The people he tells it to are horribly bored. But later that night, when they are in bed, they suddenly wake up and laugh like babies.”
All very German and although remote from Reinhart’s old medieval visions, somehow not alien to them. At least he was gratified by the alliance of Schild and Bach, Jew and German, in a common cause.
At this point he heard a distant, cavernous sound, as one in the bottom of a sewer would hear a person scratching at the manhole. Lori approached through the passageway.