BY THE SLEEVE, LORI ushered in a man wearing dark glasses and carrying a cane, a meager man concealed within an enormous overcoat. This doctor, if such he was, would be splendid for the job. He was blind.
Reinhart heard and felt the slow removal of Bach’s weight from the couch and, staring up the rising underbelly of the green Zeppelin, towards the gondola, discerned that respect drew him up. Schild, too, had risen, was already, being nearest the door, in an introduction.
“Sir,” said Lori in her to Reinhart always lucid German, “I am Frau Bach. I should like to have you meet my brother, Dr. Otto Knebel.”
“Herr Doktor, es freut mich,” said Schild, shaking the hand which groped for his, showing an unsuspected command of the gracious forms, even slightly bowing. “Oberleutnant Schild. Ich bin ein Amerikaner.”
“Ich bin dessen gewiss.” The reply was in a high, aspirant voice, not ugly or unpleasant but strangely lingering within the innermost channel of the ear, as if a bug had crawled in there to die and, caught, changed its mind. “I am certain of that.”
For the second time in his life Reinhart had heard “certainly” as answer to an American’s self-definition. It no longer seemed strange, but because he had already got his he did not wish another. Therefore when the doctor was moved to meet him, he, mimicking Schild’s handshake and suspicion of a bow, rumbled low and uvular, authentically, “Sehr angenehm!”
“This surely,” said the doctor to Lori, “is your Ami corporal.”
Compared to his, Schatzi’s hand had been full-fleshed, hamlike; one thought not of bare bones: one held tendons and a complex of thin vessels through which slow and miserly came corpuscles one by one. Behind the glasses, in front of the tall back collar of the coat, was a real head: small, stark, but real, and so marked with life, so marking life, that the memory of other faces was rank on rank of dummies. The lenses were too black to see through, in compensation for which they themselves were animate. Finely amused now, they dramatized the implications of the breathy voice which rendered stout German as if it were the tongue of dragonflies.
“Yes,” said the doctor. “But you should have seen me six months ago!” Bach made a giddy noise. “What, Bach, my good fellow! You have held captive these Americans? Then there is still a chance that we may win the war! Very well, my dear Lenore. Now that I have located Bach I can manage alone.”
“Ah Doctor, you come right to me and take this seat, my seat, bitte, bitte. May I help you? Please, please.”
In the strength of his schoolgirl agitation Bach took two quavering steps and grasped for the doctor’s arms, which that gentleman, moving efficiently behind a probing cane, ignored with a blind man’s insouciance. On his left sleeve he wore a yellow armband carrying the rubric, three black balls, of a vicious, violent, antidemocratic cause. (Reinhart remembered his colleague Cronin’s description of such an insigne, such a movement, the week before on Cronin’s boarding an airplane which would fly him back to France as a case of chronic athlete’s foot. “Open your eyes,” Cronin said, upon no provocation whatever, “the same old thing’s starting up all over again.” The boring ass; why had one come along on the truck to say goodbye? But then Cronin hit him lightly on the shoulder and said, “So long, Reinhart. You’re the only one I could ever talk to.” Very simple: one had come along because one, all in all, had liked and would miss him.)
Sitting down in Bach’s corner of the sofa, the doctor said:
“Lenore, have you some of those excellent American pastilles? The anticipation of talking dries my throat.”
“Oh, here,” said Reinhart, who happened to be carrying a cylinder of Lifesavers. “Take these... and keep them.”
The eyeglasses widened their circles. “Vielen dank—sprechen Sie Deutsch?
“A little. Ich verstehe besser ah ich spreche.” He grinned in self-deprecation, though his auditor could not see it.
“Your accent is very good.” The doctor’s mouth was a pale pink cave, toothless; moreover, showing no evidence that teeth had ever been.
“Not good enough to fool you.”
“Why you should wish that, especially nowadays...” A Life-saver tumbled over the doctor’s tongue, glinting orangely. “But I knew you from your hand, not your speech. ... Now Bach, are you still standing there with your misplaced courtesy? Kindly be seated. And Lenore and the Lieutenant, and you, Corporal, please. As to the Lieutenant, now, I should think that though he has been in the U.S.A. some years, he was born in Germany, no?”
Since seeing the armband Reinhart had been occupied with nothing but worry for Schild. From the data of his first visit to the cellar he could hardly suppose Bach and Lori were the doctor’s fellows in a neo-Nazi faction. Who then was the doctor but the blackmailer that had preyed on them during the Hitler years and still today somehow retained his evil power? And how compelling he was: Reinhart had brought forth the Lifesavers like an automaton. Schild, the eternal do-gooder, was already captured by the man’s infirmity; Schild, the Intelligence officer, did not see the armband; Schild, the Jew, already was impaled on the doctor’s fascist needle.
Schild, the innocent fool, looked sadly pleased. “Is my accent so good?” He sat down, as he had been ordered to. “I am a native American, doctor. I am one of the lucky Jews.”
“I too am lucky, but I have not been able to decide whether my luck owes to my Aryan mother or my Jewish father,” said the doctor. “This is the kind of thing which confuses everybody but the Nazis.” He closed on his candy, swallowed it, and took another from the pack. “Why do your countrymen waste so much paper, Mr. Corporal? Really, these fruit drops would not grow stale exposed to the air. Really, what are they but crystallized sugar-water? But won’t you, all of you, join me? Bach, you must! I prescribe sweets as a substitute for that abominable ersatz-schnapps with which you are destroying your liver.”
“Doctor, I have sincerely tried to stop drinking,” Bach said, his face a quivering sack of shame as he lowered himself onto a folding camp chair which he overhung in every dimension. “I will conquer it, I will, you shall see.”
“May your reformation not wait upon my seeing,” replied the doctor, lightly. And Bach’s despair was as if a truck passed overhead.
Of course, if the doctor was Lori’s brother he was but half a gentile, had but half the aptitude for corruption. Of course, Reinhart had not forgotten that so much as ignored it in his quest for a villain to save someone from. Yet why the brazen badge?
“Now Corporal, I think you and I have a private matter to discuss,” said the doctor, placing his cane on the floor and in so doing offering a view of his full profile in the various perspectives of slow movement. His right eye, seen in the harsh knife of light which, as he bent, thrust in from the side, behind the dark glasses—my God, an eye? A navel, rather, a belly-button of the head, baby-new and pink within the old foxed leather which bound the skull.
One’s own eyes indrew behind the barrier of cheekbones, hid in scarlet darkness, as nevertheless one’s more courageous mouth asked: “Doctor, what is the meaning of your armband?”
“It means”—the black circles swung round and established order—“that if you drive an automobile French fashion, use it, that is to say, as a projectile with which to aim at pedestrians, I am your perfect target. I cannot see you come.”
“Wie bitte?”
“Es tut mir leid. I was having a bit of a joke, most unfairly. The sleeveband is of course the sign of the disabled person. Unfortunately I do not have Bach’s gift for foreign languages. Bach, could you perhaps—”
“No, it is not necessary,” said Reinhart. “I understand. It is an excellent thing—”
“They do not have it in America,” Bach cried eagerly. “Never, nowhere have I seen it.”
Lori, still standing, chided: “Now Bach, if you do not permit Otto to have some privacy, he will not talk with you later.”
“Quite so, quite so,” Bach mumbled, turned laboriously, and to Schild instituted a speech which began: “However—”
“Lenore,” the doctor said, “There is no reason why you should not sit here and assist us with your good sense. Also, working for the Americans you should have learned some English by now, unless Father’s old claim was true, that we were the champion dunces of Dahlem.”
Although, because of the difference between the doctor’s and Bach’s girths, there was now a good seat and a half to the left of Reinhart’s port hip, Lori sat down so close against him that, for the comfort of both, he had to lay his arm along the back ridge of the sofa. His love for her was just in the degree to which it remained intactile. Introduce desire and you would soon have the same old two-backed animal scuffling in the dirt, into which he and Trudchen transformed themselves daily, destructive, nightmarish, impermanent, having nothing to recommend it but necessity. With Lori he mixed spirits, was embarrassed by the flesh... but she rested, almost lay, within his arm-hollow, her hard, thin bones piquing him, the shoulder of her thick old prickly-wool sweater, carrying a scent of spice, touching his cheek. And he, who involuntarily rose at a woman’s smell—as a sleeping cat erects its ears at every sound—almost any woman, any smell, sometimes, in the street, at pure cloud of odor, the woman having long gone by, was shortly, or longly, risen.
“Now,” said the doctor, to see whom Reinhart had to clasp Lori more closely in looking round her blondeswept head, “this young woman you have got in trouble—”
“Ah no, Otto, it was not he,” Lori broke in far too eagerly for the pride of the fellow she had made her cave.
“How do you know that?” asked Reinhart, arrested in his drawing away by the sofa arm in the small of his back; because of this his irritation became briefly paranoid: how dare he be boxed in?
“Because maids, like concierges, know everything,” said Lori, mock-mysteriously, without trying to turn. “The Gestapo of belowstairs...”
The doctor disintegrated another Lifesaver and swallowed its rubble. He chose a third, perhaps a fourth, since the pack appeared to stand currently at three-quarter size. His thin lips, opaque glasses, and traces of eyebrow expressed satisfaction. His hair was a thick bush, one finally noticed as one continued to creep so tightly against Lori that when she spoke he heard the vibrations in his own chest. Bach, remote in a spirited monologue to Schild, Reinhart worried over not, nor did he despise him.
“There, there,” said Lori, patting his nearer knee with a twinkle in her hand, “everybody knows you could have.”
The doctor stared exhaustively, sightlessly, at Reinhart. Finally he spoke in his loud whisper: “Let me for a change be honest. Obviously I cannot perform the operation. I could find a colleague to do it, of course. But I intend not to. I have come here and taken your time, and your pastilles, under false colors. My motive was simply to ‘see’ an American. Are you angry with me?”
“No,” Reinhart answered. “Surely not.”
“But you should be.” The doctor was impatient. “I can solve your problem, yet I will not. And as far as you know, for a capricious reason.”
Reinhart smiled tolerance and dropped his cupped left hand on Lori’s shoulder. “I can’t force you, can I?”
“Then you are not serious?” asked the doctor in dramatic astonishment. “Disgrace for the lady, shame for you—for although you may not be the other principal in the catastrophe, your honor is somehow involved, yes?, or you wouldn’t be here. Come now, at least try to bribe me.”
Smiling again, Reinhart answered, conscious that when he had to speak without preparation his damnable German was certainly ungrammatical and, despite his “good accent” Americanized in pronunciation—you cannot take care of everything simultaneously—so that to these Germans he was ludicrous for another reason. In their reality he sounded:
“I donnt tink dot so easy to corrupt you are.”
“On the contrary, I am supremely corruptible. I have no honor whatsoever. For example, I would do anything to save my life.”
Reinhart felt Lori stir against him, and he released her sweater-shaggy shoulder. “Oh well, wouldn’t anybody do that?”
For the first time, but briefly, the doctor lost what had all this while been more nearly ebullience than anything else. And then, taking another, a purple, Lifesaver, he said, with the old aplomb and in the voiceless voice Reinhart had come to hear as oddly beautiful, “On the other hand, if by necessity you have learned this fact about yourself, it is nice to know. Some American writer—have you read him?—wrote a verse about seeing a man eat of his own heart. ‘Is it good?’ he asked. ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘it is bitter—but I like it. First, because it is bitter, and second, because it is mine.’ ”
Reinhart did not understand. And Lori had not learned much English, therefore could only repeat the words more slowly, in her low-pitched music.
He shook his head. “The funny thing is that I know all the words; it must be the combination.”
“Bach!” cried the doctor. “Excuse me for a moment. Please give us the English for this.”
Bach did, with an attitude of excessive expectation; sought to explicate, was halted.
“Danke sehr. Now just return to your lieutenant. We did not wish to disturb you.”
Reinhart determined to read, when he went home, this author whom a non-English-speaking German knew better than he. However, the doctor had turned out to be the usual lunatic, in love with his own rhetoric. He returned to the subject which had become a great bore to Reinhart, who had decided at the first resistance to seek another physician through Schatzi.
“I have no scruples against abortion in itself—”
His speech came within an interval of breath-taking on the part of Bach, who heard it and answered: “Die meisten meiner Mitmenschen sind traurige Folgen einer unterlassenen Fruchtabtreibung.”
“Bach, don’t you realize you are interrupting?” chided Lori, seizing the hand with which Reinhart, bending forward, traced his trouser crease in the area of the shin. “I assure you that if you persist Otto will avoid you. ... Please do not do that,” she said to Reinhart. “A hard object in your breast pocket jabs into my back.”
A pencil, which he removed to the other side. Nevertheless, he disliked a carping woman.
Bach desisted, and when Schild spoke, cautioned him with wrinkled forehead.
“Did you get that?” Schild sadly asked Reinhart. “Most men are the sad results of abortions never undertaken.”
But by now, having adjusted to German, Reinhart heard English as somewhat dull upon the ear and difficult to follow. He believed that Schild was repeating his old objections to the plan for Very’s salvation, and assured him resignedly that it was all off. “You can stop worrying.” He should, in the first place, have hired Schatzi and thus given no one an opportunity for humanitarianism, friendship, theory, oratory, and so forth: that was the way with intellectuals; from his old uneasiness towards them, for which he had blamed himself, he was at last liberated; worse than boring, they were of absolutely no utility; if you want a barrel built, hire a cooper.
“You have changed my mind,” said Reinhart to the doctor. “Forget it. I was foolish. I don’t want to get into trouble.”
Bach, still actively desisting from interruption, wrestling with himself, gave up suddenly on an interval of losing and said, with hysterical bravery: “Tell him, Doctor, tell him about the Russian concentration camps! They were worse than the German ones!”
Lori wrenched angrily within Reinhart’s surround, Schild recoiled sickly upon himself, as if someone had hurled towards him a bucket of filth, and the doctor sighed.
His weary answer: “Ah Bach, you take what you choose. But so be it, we shall leave it at that.”
Reinhart somewhat rudely thrust Lori from his line of vision. She pushed back with unusual strength for so small a body, crumpling his outstretched fingers, and if in that second of pain he had been asked, do you still love her?, he would have said, sorely, because she is as tough as a root. Gently this time he raised himself from the slump and looked over her head.
“Are the Communists as bad as the Nazis? Were you in a Russian camp? I didn’t even know the Russians had concentration camps.” Saying which he looked haughtily at Schild, whom he had gauged as a pro-Russian liberal, and saw thereupon what he should have known from experience was more to be pitied than defied. He would never be able to match his moods, to meet aggression with the same, and humility in kind.
“Bach provides a much more effective torture than either,” said the doctor genially. “Whatever theories of coercion are developed in the future, they must take account of his method: admiration of the nonadmirable. He believes that because I was a prisoner I have a special and heroic wisdom. He is wrong, but my vanity insists otherwise; therefore, in my sense, which is nobody else’s business, he is right. Why, however, should you permit me, or him, to inflict this nonsense on you? ...Now tell me, is it true that one can enter an American cinema while the motion picture is in progress? Isn’t it queer to see middle, end, and then the beginning?”
“Yes,” Reinhart answered, “yes, one can enter at any time. But American movies are made for an audience whose average mental age is twelve years old. You should have seen the pictures they made on Nazism. Such trash is almost criminal.”
“The Nazis were presented as good men?”
“Oh no, but either they were monsters who did not resemble human beings or they were ridiculous buffoons.” He was making out all right with his primitive, do-it-yourself German, for the doctor seemed to understand.
“Also, this was an error: too realistic. I agree with you, this theme should be dealt with as fantasy. Lenore, do the privileges of your job include Ami films?”
“Not exactly, Otto,” Lori answered brightly. “But do you recall the old joke of Father’s about the man who was asked if he had ever eaten hare? ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘But yesterday I shook hands with a fellow whose cousin’s brother-in-law lives next door to a widow whose late husband once saw someone eating hare.’ It’s not as bad as that with me. I make the beds of persons who see the pictures every night.”
The reference to Veronica could not have been more obvious. Reinhart intended his response to be equally obvious in disregard.
“Your father has a good sense of humor?” he asked. How strange for a German! But then he remembered that her father was a Jew.
“Well, yes,” answered Lori, looking at him from the corner of her eye, he thrusting himself to the side so that she could do it, “I have never thought about it so seriously, but I suppose he had.”
Had? Yes, dumb Reinhart, not everyone is always young and American enough to have two living parents. Besides, he was a Jew. Yet he had to speak, he, Reinhart, one in five in this subterranean, brightly lighted urinal—monstrosity, Jew, half-Jew, half-Jew, Siegfried.
“He was killed—”
“He is dead,” said Lori.
“—by the Nazis.”
“He is dead.”
“And who else, who else?” If in all his life he had reached no goals, he would take this one.
From his implacable face she turned away in embarrassment and towards the doctor gave her dirge: “Voter, zwei Brüder, Schwägerin, Neffe, Nichte.”
In English, thus excluding his wife and brother-in-law, Bach cried: “There is no wit like that of Berlin, of which since I am not a native I can assure you without immodesty. Hitler and his damned barbarians hated this city because they could never break its spirit, because they could not transform it into a Nürnberg. I confess to you that I am a separatist. I fervently hope we remain forever isolated from the Fatherland.” He slapped his knee—too hard, and winced.
“I wish I could do something,” Reinhart said. “I wish I could say something—”
“You can indeed,” the doctor answered, impatiently stripping the paper tube from the remainder of the fruit drops, catching five of the six in the wire whisk of his left hand: one fell to the concrete and broke into three golden arcs and a modicum of sugar dust. “A lemon, ja? I can smell it now it is crushed.”
Either Schild or Bach made a sound like the winding of a watch.
“You can,” the doctor repeated, and whatever else he said wound through the holes of the five candies in his mouth and expired before finding the orifice of speech.
“Ich habe ihn nicht verstanden,” Reinhart whispered into Lori’s hair.
“ ‘You can say something,’ ” Lori answered loudly. “ ‘You can tell us what you will make of yourself now the war is over.’ ”
He raised his meditation to point at the ceiling, to macerate his vision on the fierce lightbulb: father, two brothers, sister-in-law, nephew, niece, like the roster of a holiday reunion.
“Well, I cannot bring them back, whatever I do,” he shouted quietly. “But in my own small way I can fight all hatreds based on race, color, or creed. In my own small way I can say: we must love one another or die!” When he was moved, words came from nowhere, inspired; yet he was conscious of the falsity of those which had just arrived. It was fairly certain that of the six victims in Lori’s roll he could not have loved at least one, so goes the world. And how did a fellow go about loving any of those who killed them? For a principle means either what it says or nothing; if we love one another, we love the murderers, every one. And finally, was love really the sole alternative to massacre?
“One must love himself,” said the doctor. “The men who killed my family did not. What are totalitarians but people who have no self-love and self-respect, who believe that the humanity into which they are born is contemptible?, who believe a thing is preferable to a person, because a thing is absolute.”
“But a thing,” said Bach, “has a sense of its thingness. The Will works in inanimate as well as animate objects. That sofa may know very little, but it knows that it is a sofa.”
“Of course I agree, Bach, that this sofa has a self: I have heard it most painfully groan when you sat upon it and chuckle when you arose, but we shall wait forever if we expect it to will itself into a chair. This poor couch is so predictable.” He actually looked sad and patted its arm. “If you prick it, will it not bleed? But that is not necessarily true of a man, who may spit in your eye, or, having a taste for pain, beg you to prick him again, only harder. And what might he not make of it as a moral act? That by taking his life you have confirmed his conviction that you are inferior to him, and for some men life is a small price to pay for such reward. Or that by causing him to die well you have relieved him of the need to live well, for any victim is willy-nilly a success. Or that by divesting him of everything but the naked self you have made it possible for him to accept that self. In the end he may have used you as you believed you were using him, and who can say who was the victor?”
“Oh no,” cried Reinhart, even though he thought it likely he had misunderstood, “you cannot build some elaborate theory that in the end Nazism did good. That sounds like the idea of those old fellows in Neuengland—the northern U.S.A.—Rolf Valdo Emerson, und so weiter, who wore frock coats and walked in the woods and never cared about women, and therefore had this dry belief that evil was only the servant of a greater good.”
During this—how fluent?—speech Lori twisted round and studied him, trying, he supposed, to be unnerving: a person without experience should sit silent as a vegetable. Well that, last time with Bach, he had done. He felt now as if he were drunk, and finishing his representations to the doctor, he stared defiantly at her strong, straight nose.
“Otto can say anything he likes. You see, he has paid for the right.”
“There you have the corruptive results of working for the Amis,” laughed the doctor. “If I paid for the privilege to be theoretical, then I was cheated, my dear Lenore. All other German males are born with that right and obligation. But how true if you imply that this chap from over the sea should not be permitted to speak further without paying tribute! Come, Herr Unteroffizier, surely you have some more candy about you.” The doctor retrieved his stick from the floor and brandished it. “Here comes some English—you did not know I had some? Komm on you dirty rat hand ovuh zuh goods. This is what the racketeers order, no? Bach has a detective novel which he reads aloud to me—”
“Ja, ja, I have it just here,” Bach said eagerly, struggling to rise. “I read with simultaneous translation—”
Reinhart grandly waved him down. “That won’t be necessary at present.” He did, of course, have in his clothing another piece of sweet: a chocolate bar foolishly stored in his shirt pocket, over the heart. It was now limp. He gave it to the doctor and apologized.
“Sehr gut,” the doctor responded. He smelled it. “Schokolade! I will not eat this. I shall present it to the widow who lives across the hall from me.” He placed his cane on the concrete, giving Reinhart another sight of the umbilicus of his right eye. “I am trying to seduce her.”
Reinhart grinned anxiously and withdrew an inch from Lori, as if it were a mistaken but justified statement of his own aims, but when the doctor’s glasses were turned on him again he saw their terrible wistfulness.
“Oh God, Doctor, eat it, eat it,” he said, his voice ragged in pity. “Next time I can bring you a carton for your widow.”
“If your motive is kindness, please do not. Such largesse, if I gave it to her, would earn me only contempt. And if I kept it for myself I would eat it all immediately and fall ill. In either case I should curse you. But why do you now wish to bribe me without profit for yourself when earlier you refused to do it for gain?”
“Because he is a good man.” It was Schild who spoke, and pleadingly, and Reinhart suffered for him in anticipation, for the doctor was a kind of demon, after all; in revenge for his having been tortured by evil and falsity he would torture goodness and truth.
“And I suppose you are, too,” sharply replied the doctor. “I don’t trust a man who would rather give than receive. I can’t stand his damned pretense that he is too good for the world. He is mad. I disapprove of lunacy, illness, disability, and failure.”
Reinhart could no longer contain himself. The mad doctor’s ranting left him personally untouched, but poor Schild gulped it all down, sounding again and again that watch-winding noise in his throat, and poor Lori was limp against his shoulder, used, no doubt, to the habitual insane rhetoric of the cellar; she had, as before, gone to sleep, but the constant strain!; he would rescue her from it before the hour was out; if need be, kick Trudchen’s cheap little ass into the street and give Lori her room. Meanwhile he must catch Schild before he disappeared round the bend.
He shouted: “Das ist National-sozialismus! I don’t know what you are trying to do, Doctor—I sympathize with you, I would give my own eyes to get yours back, believe me, I would give my life if your family could come back again, I have never done anything—I couldn’t even hold a gun because of the Geneva Convention—but don’t say the Nazis were right. If that is true, then it was all useless; your loved ones died for nothing. All those corpses—I saw them in the photographs. Those beloved people, they were too good for the world. The rest of us are too bad for it...” His voice had broken, broken, as he knew ever more poignantly that with whatever motive he had begun his defense of general reason, he continued it for the sake of his own.
Therefore was the doctor right, even as he sought to repudiate him; therefore was he cramped with guilt for a crime he had not perpetrated and agonized by a suffering he had not had to endure. To be vicarious always is always to be base.
“Why do healthy people believe there is wisdom in a wound? Mumble, mumble...” The doctor slipped the envelopes from the Hershey bar, which in his stark handbones had lost its borrowed warmth-of-Reinhart and returned to brittleness, and segment on segment inserted it into slit-mouth quick-lips, munched, munched, munched. Soon was the lower third of his face childishly smeared with brown. His hair, dark-blond, high, luxuriant-grown as a Zulu’s, had burst forth from the cropped skull of the camps. Against Schild his whisper had gone hard, cruel; towards Reinhart, Reinhart now decided, it had always been a snicker.
On he went in the idiom of masticating chocolate, with a necessarily greater show of gesture than when he spoke audibly, which nevertheless stayed Greek. Schild, who had been slumped, wired up his spine and sat straight, neurasthenic. Lori slept, heavy for so light a girl.
Bach, however, listened eagerly and when the doctor, the last bit of candy down the hatch, gave off, the giant bobbed his peeled egg at Reinhart and said in English: “There you have the doctor’s world-outlook in a nutshell!”
Then it was that Reinhart realized the doctor was fake from the word go; that he was no more an alumnus of a concentration camp than Schild was a hangman.
The latter suddenly glared at him and snapped: “Very well! Russian ‘concentration camps.’ Sehr gut, ask the doctor about them! Simply the Buchenwalds of another fascism...”
The doctor wiped his mouth on a handkerchief as holey as a net dishrag, to get which he had opened his coat and revealed the necklines of, at quick count, four gray sweaters and a shirt collar of brown.
“Certainly they are not,” he said good-naturedly. “If you won’t let me avoid the subject—it is not offensive to me, since it is mine, but it should be, I insist, to you. If I must talk on this theme, I’ll take my stand on precision. Young Corporal, you talk of love. But perhaps love is for boys and girls and old ladies who love their dogs. For us professionals, consider precision. Love one another or die? But we die anyway, ja?”
“ ‘The subject is not offensive to me,’ ” Reinhart suspiciously repeated.
“I did not say pleasant or without pain. I said not offensive,” said the doctor, impatient. “Now you interpret it as you wish.” He resumed: “The Soviet camps: as you must know, Lieutenant, they have quite another purpose than the Nazis’, which latter were in their most extreme form mere extermination-places. The aim of the Soviet camps is to change people. Sometimes, inadvertently, live men are there changed into corpses; well, at least they are no longer counterrevolutionaries.
“Each kind of camp has a favorite kind of prisoner. The Nazis preferred the man who by existence was a criminal, that is, the Jew. Good Jews, bad Jews, Jews who as individuals were criminals by the usual definition, even those Jews who would have agreed with everything in the code of fascism but that all Jews should be exterminated—no, this is not yet enough: even those Jews who might have helped the Nazi cause—were murdered indiscriminately. There was some early plan for ‘useful Jews,’ but it was soon abandoned. An Einstein perhaps could have been forced or tricked into giving Hitler the atomic bomb. Nevertheless he would not have been saved from the gas chamber.
“Where in all history can we find another idealism comparable to this? Hitler did what we have always been told is the supreme glory of man, and apparently impossible to a god—for what chance did Jesus of Nazareth take if he was immortal?—Hitler sacrificed himself for that which is greater than the self, for he stuck to his guns and he is dead now. I think a name for that is Love.
“With the Soviets, however, no man is judged by what he is but rather by what he can become. Their favorite prisoner is the man capable of learning the error of his ways. He must do this through hard labor on projects useful to the state, and hence to mankind, and thus there is no waste. The penal system of a faith as inclusive as the Nazis’ was exclusive, and for that reason psychologically superior to the latter. Here at last the Jew, for example, is not a second-class citizen: he can be as great a swine as a gentile. Did you know, until that desert tribe of Hebrews found the one authentic God and that they were His chosen, an exclusive religion had never been invented? Ever since, the gentiles, who never could take a joke, have been punishing the Jews for being so damned clever. To the Communists, however, this old strife is a great bore. A man’s a man, and is capable of anything. And of course when you believe that, you are loving one another.”
“Excuse me, Doctor,” said Reinhart, adjusting a prickling shoulder under Lori’s weight, “when you opened your coat I saw your shirt. It looks like part of a uniform, but not quite the color of a U.S. Army shirt—”
“I should not suppose it does.” The doctor’s whisper lost strength in extended speech; Reinhart really helped him by interrupting. He cleared his throat with the soft yet dynamic sound one might make shaking out a floormop. “You are wrong if you think the average German feels no guilt; he simply will not dance it to the tune of you people who were not involved. My widow gave me this shirt. I suspect it is a storm-trooper’s garment, but naturally I cannot see it. ...
“Also, Lieutenant, we have looked precisely at the differences. My brother-in-law insists, however—since he cannot forgive himself for being a gentile German [Bach flushed and looked at his legs]—on their similarities. His interest lies in proving Communism worse. Because I was once a Communist I am inclined to agree. The conscience is a Himmler as demented as the real one. Remorse, whose seat is in the memory, has a purpose. Guilt, the product of the conscience, is always useless, the wrong kind of self-concern, cheating, cowardly, immoral.”
Since the doctor’s comments on his shirt, which had proved him as false as anything could, Reinhart had been rather nursing his shock than listening. He came back now to strike another blow for virtue.
“It isn’t hard to be a murderer. The tough thing is to be a victim.” He smiled so bitterly that Lori woke up on his shoulder, saying “Wie bitte?” to which he answered, “Nichts, schlafen Sie noch.”
For the first time, Bach, who had been frozen in wonder and delight, noticed her.
“Rude!” he cried in outrage. “Your brother is speaking!”
“Ach,” she said, “was kann man tun? He hasn’t stopped since I was a little girl.” Her head sank again.
The doctor laughed and laughed at the awful thing—if he was an authentic ex-prisoner—she had said to him. “When we were small she used to punch me if I talked too much. In the solar plexus. Very effective when struck just right: I couldn’t speak for half an hour. Therefore would I take revenge by playing the Leonore Overture on the gramaphone, which, because I insisted she was named for it, she detested. Then in would come brother Leo, who couldn’t study mathematics for the din, and he would shout in his shrill voice: ‘Twins have only half a brain each.’ But if the altercation continued until Father had to come upstairs, we were all for it. Father had a face like a weapon. He was a very severe man. I can recall nothing loving about him but much that was precise.
“Once when at table I spoke without permission he afterwards beat me so strenuously he sprained his arm. Feeling guilty, as I usually did upon such an event, but not remorseful, I offered to fit him out with a sling—already, you see, the future physician. ‘Do you want another whipping?’ he asked. ‘This time for being a fool? From your point of view my sprain is richly deserved.’ That is to say, he was a self-respecting man. I hated him for years. But now I think he must have died well.”
“That old Prussian authoritarianism,” said Reinhart, remembering an argument of Cronin’s. “There you have the origin of Nazism.”
“Except that my father was a Jew,” said the doctor.
“Jews can be tyrants, too.” Reinhart was earnest, no longer baited or tested the doctor. “Isn’t that what we mean when we say racism is a lie? Everybody gets his chance to be a bastard.”
“Yes, and we should not deny it even to, especially to, a victim. For there are victims and there are victims. If you read Mein Kampf you will find Hitler believed himself a victim, and because when he became a master he failed to do his job well, I am still able to agree with him in that early appraisal of himself.”
“Haha,” jeered Reinhart. “Victim of what?”
“Of indifference. The German people never understood what he wanted of them. Being normal people, they were always interested principally in themselves.”
“While the innocent were being murdered all around them... to you this is right?”
“If you think I shall tell you what is right or wrong, my friend, you are mistaken. That is your own affair. I care only for practical matters.”
Reinhart rubbed his head. Fresh from yesterday’s close haircut, it felt to his hand small, hard, monkeylike, and shiny as a convict’s.
“I give up,” he said, without knowing whether the idiom was feasible in German. “The trouble is, Doctor, I just don’t know what you want. If everything we have always thought is decent, is wrong, false, misguided, or useless, what alternative is there? The only thing I can see is the contradiction of decency; Nazism is as good a name as any, so long as we understand that Nazism in this sense is not just a German but a human thing. The Russians, then, if they have concentration camps, are Nazis. Perhaps there was some Nazism in dropping the atomic bomb on Japan, which must have killed a lot of women and children and at least some Japanese who never wanted to go to war in the first place.
“The British, someone once told me, invented the concentration camp during the Boer War. The French, so I heard, put German refugees in concentration camps at the beginning of this war. In democracies there are white people who lynch Negroes; there is anti-Semitism. I have been guilty of Nazism when I used force or threatened to on someone weaker than I or outnumbered, or when I had bad thoughts about Jews and other defenseless people—because I have done these things.” He looked proudly guilty.
“I should hope so,” said the doctor. “What’s good enough for everybody else should be good enough for you.”
“But isn’t selfishness the terrible crime of the modern era, selfishly being concerned with oneself and therefore thinking the other fellow is garbage?” He took his arm off Lori’s shoulder so that he could rub his head with both hands. “I want power, I want money, I want to be superior to a man with a colored skin or with a hooked nose”—from his tumult he was able to call time, to say “Excuse me, it was just an example” to Schild, who, in the reverse of Schatzi’s habit, was looking at him but not seeing—“therefore I tell myself he does not matter, is not even human. Then I can go on to do what I wish with him, slavery, torture, murder.”
“Imagine yourself a citizen of the American South,” said the doctor, “a person who is in daily contact with Negroes and thus must come to terms with the fact of their existence. Would you mistreat them?”
“God, I should try not to.”
“You might occasionally fail, ja?”
“I am just a human being.”
“No question of that, and so was Julius Streicher, as Hitler, who was no man’s fool, said so well: ‘He may have his faults, but well, probably none of us is entirely normal, and no great man would pass.’ Yes. But why would you try not to mistreat Negroes? Is there profit in it?”
“It would mean something to me,” said Reinhart.
“So there is a profit after all.” The doctor spoke as if he, himself, were making the discovery. To be sure, his manner throughout had been rather seeker than owner of fact; did he lack the courage of his confusions? “You cannot get respect for yourself by robbing it from another man. As to the Negroes, they might not know or understand what you were doing and therefore show no gratitude, ja? But to a healthy man this would make no difference. The self is not a gallery with a claque. And it would not be necessary for him to love the Negroes or hate the brutal whites, or worship a god or history, or be a radical or conservative. Just to be a man were sufficient, ja?”
“Your example is too easy. Excuse me for trying to tell you about life, but is it not more complicated than that? I am not likely to live where Negroes are mistreated. I did not live in Germany in Hitler’s time or in Russia. I am not a Jew, my father is not an oppressed worker or sharecropper. On the other hand, neither am I a fascist or a boss—well, let’s face it, I am nothing in particular, but you know what I mean. What would I do in a situation where an Auschwitz is possible? ...I have not told you—somewhere in Berlin, if they are still alive, I have some relatives. I hired a man to find them, but just now I realized I have always hoped he never could. What if they were Nazis?”
As a further twist of the knife, the doctor removed his glasses and began to clean them with breath and handkerchief. Reinhart averted his eyes.
“Since I can’t see through these things,” said the doctor, “I clean them from a motive of pure vanity. I do not wish to be thought a sloven.” He replaced his spectacles and took up his cane. “I should like to meet your relatives if you find them. By various accidents and choices, I have a foot in everybody’s camp. I am a halfbreed of every persuasion. You claim to have done nothing. I have done everything. Every individual life is a questioning of the validity of all others.”
“And also a confirmation of it?” asked Schild.
“Ah now,” answered the doctor, “that is irrelevant, for why should I need you, or you need me, or either of us need, say, Hitler or Stalin to tell us what we are? Ich bin kein Weltverbesserer und lasse Sie liegen.”
“Then you should be satisfied with your lot,” said Reinhart, “neither were the Germans who were not Nazis world-reformers, and they let you lie.”
“True,” said the doctor cruelly, “and they were not the ones who killed my family and took away my freedom, were they? They heard the cries and turned away, but at least they did not come and help fire the ovens.”
Reinhart had chewed his gum too long. It disintegrated. He tried to reassemble it with his tongue. He failed. Ashtrays here were unknown; the smokers had crushed out their butts on the floor. He swallowed his fragmented Spearmint and said—
But the doctor had not waited for him: “There is but one demand we can make on others: that they let us alone. Anything beyond that is a corruption or will be one within the hour.” He rose easily and hunched over his cane, which his fingers grasped as an owl a branch. “Do you think I say this because of what the others did to me? The others, I tell you, are irrelevant.
“I was a Communist. The day after Hitler came to power I fled to the Soviet Union with my family. Thanks to the tactics imposed on it by Stalin, the German Party was shortly wiped out by the Nazis. But we all knew that history was using the Nazis for our ends, so we—those of us who got out in time, that is—did not despair. The Jews? A kind of vermiform appendix on the body of history. An illusion. Science knows no definition of Jew or gentile. ... In Moscow I had a good job in the Medical Institute, doing research on skin cancer. I won two decorations for my work and soon rose to head my section. My family and I, four of us, lived in a modern apartment of four rooms—had four times the space, that is, of the average Russian family. After the required time, we became citizens.
“My chief assistant, at whose cost I had been promoted, for he had worked there since its founding, was an old Russian Jew with, like so many of them, a German name: Kupstein. He was the sort who would always be an underling. He did nothing well, but what was worse he knew and admitted it. He broke slides, he misread calibrations, once he managed to fracture the lens in a microscope—rather a difficult thing to do under ordinary conditions.
“But we human beings were not so ready to exploit our power over him. Obviously he could not help it, and his constant contrition! He could, naturally, not only have been discharged but also imprisoned for his failures. Indeed, in the Soviet view he should have been; insofar as I made allowances for his good intent I was a bad Communist and perhaps an outright traitor—and when I say this I do not refer to the disguised GPU informer on our staff. I speak of my Communist conscience. The secret police are given too much credit; for the important things we never need them.”
Crazed old man, leaning on a cane, rasping in Deutsch. Why had Reinhart almost flunked German 2? He understood every word, every nuance. The doctor condemned guilt in others but loved his own. He suffered retroactively for being sloppy years ago in Russia. ... If he had been in Russia how could the Nazis have got at him? Lori stirred. Without prior planning he whispered in her ear: “I love you.” She smiled sleepily and closed her lashes again, muttering “Knorke mit Ei.” Something with an egg. Total misunderstanding.
“... after that episode I had no choice but to relieve him of his duties. We could all have been killed. Yet I still could not report him, sentimentalist that I was. And quite rightly was I punished for that weakness. With nothing to do he hung about my elbows all day and interfered with my own work. Titration tube in mouth, I would hear his squeaky voice and almost swallow some septic liquid. Bending over the microscope I would suddenly smell his breath, vile from some horrible cheese, as he bent alongside.
“And what did he speak of? Palestine, which he called Israel. He had been there for two weeks in the 1920’s with a Soviet scientific team and was terribly impressed by everything from communal farms to climate. ‘Believe me, my dear Doctor,’ he would squeak, ‘working on the kibutzim seems a pleasure for these strange Jews. Imagine Jews as farmers! The sun turns their skin black as Africans’ and has bleached the hair of some as blond as a Pole’s—or, as your own. Sabotage is unknown, yet one never sees a policeman. Is this possible? I doubt it. But it is the witness of my own eyes. And oranges! As many as you can eat. And the young people. Imagine happy Jews!’
“ ‘Hirsch Davidovitch,’ said I, ‘your satires are very clever but they may be misunderstood. Besides, you are interfering with the experiment. Really, this sort of time-wasting is more appropriate to a bourgeois-capitalist laboratory’—I spoke that way in those days, and not simply for the GPU informer—‘we work here for the health of the international working classes and have not a moment to spare, please.’ But next day he would start in again: ‘My dear Doctor, the olives! I have seen them large as this.’ Pointing to the bulb of a Florence flask, he would knock over a rack of test tubes and then, sponging up the mess, strike the flask from table to floor.
“Kupstein, Kupstein, of course you were winning,” said the doctor, sinking an inch into the orifice of his coat collar; he had once been a tall man, but that too was now a memory. “From the first time I had tolerated his statements without an effective rebuttal, I was a fellow conspirator. It was 1938. In Germany the Nürnberg Laws had sealed the fate of the Jews—foolish Jews, one beats another and shouts ‘help,’ as the saying goes. My father, the lifelong reactionary who ordered me from his house when he found my copy of Marx, loses his department store to the Nazis, brings suit in the bourgeois courts he trusts so much, leaving the Nazis no choice but to send him to Buchenwald. Almost did I ask: well, what does he expect? With my brothers Leo and Viktor, who had given neurotic importance to their Jewish halves and turned active Zionists, they had been doomed by their stupidity and cowardice. Marxism, they agreed, was ‘no answer.’
“In the Soviet Union, meanwhile, the great purges which had begun in 1936 were now in full fury; among the high Government and Party officials only Stalin seemed secure. Could our entire leadership, except Stalin, be corrupt? Yes, no question that it could be. Communism, as I said before, admits unlimited possibility. A man can be anything history needs him to be. No chosen people here, either for good or evil. For example, among the condemned officials were many Jews, and of course the commander-in-chief of the whole plot was Trotsky, born Lev Bronstein. He had conspired with Nazi Germany to destroy the Soviet state. Impossible? But nothing is! By definition a state built and maintained by the proletariat is just, and whom it charges with a crime is guilty.
“When the rosters of the eminent were depleted, the purge began to claim the malefactors among the technicians and managerial workers. I at last discovered who had been the police informer in my department—Rostov, a biochemist—for he disappeared soon after Yezhov, the head of the GPU, was purged. The director of the institute had not survived through 1937; three successors, with only a month or two between turns, followed him to the wall or to Siberia. Dr. Narovkin, in effect my chief assistant, though Kupstein still held the title, was called to a corridor telephone one afternoon and never came back. His replacement, a simian type by the name of Gorky, sent by the personnel section without consulting me, did not bother even to imitate a scientist. All day long he sat in a corner of the laboratory, behind two carboys of acid, watching the rest of us.
“Dr. Narovkin’s work had been essential to the experiment. He had done months of research on malignancies in lymphoidal tissues. If I could at least have had his notes! But they too had vanished, the day after his own disappearance. The project was hopeless? You must remember that this was a Soviet laboratory. We had been ordered to discover, first, a preventive against sarcoma and, second, a cure for it. I reinstated Kupstein in his old post. What difference could it make now? None but for the better. Kupstein had worked in Soviet laboratories since 1919, and one thing he could do well was write reports. On his own initiative and with a perfectly straight face he now composed a manuscript of fifty thousand words reporting the successful achievement of our goal: we had found both a preventive and a cure for fleshy malignancies, and in one year less than our allotted time. I solemnly read and appended my signature to this handsomely written nonsense and forwarded it to the newest director of the institute. Not long afterward I received another decoration.”
“Doctor,” said Reinhart. “Aren’t you uncomfortable standing up?”
“Schweigen Sie!” Schild ordered in an offensive, Prussian manner, so startling Reinhart that he answered, as Prussianly, “Jawohl!” and did shut up most smartly. Bach smothered a giggle behind a trembling hand.
“Now there was no restraining Kupstein,” the doctor went on. “Defying Gorky’s unwavering surveillance, he no longer whispered. Now he spoke his heresies in the tone of normal conversation. ‘Do not despair over your loved ones back in Germany, Doctor, every death there is a life for Israel. The Jews one day will leave the cities and return to the land. Olives, lemons, palm trees!’ I could not admit that he was mad, you see, because then I should have had to accept that I also was a lunatic—for from the first his rantings had taken malignant growth in my imagination, like that very sarcoma which he and I so successfully defeated in our report. Damn the Jews—my relation to them had always been an embarrassment; now it became a poison. ‘The Law,’ Kupstein would sometimes say, ‘the immutable Law. The Jews have little else, but they have the Law and it does not change.’
“One day, speaking so, he followed me into a storage room at the other end of the laboratory from Gorky, who as usual sat at his table, but would come after us if we did not soon reappear. I took quick advantage of the situation. I seized Kupstein and said: What would you have had me do? Stay in Germany and die like a fool? You know how Nazis deal with Communists!’
“Brushing my hands away, he answered in a loud voice: ‘Just yesterday there was an unopened crate of new test tubes right there. Now where could they be?’ His eyes were innocent behind their pince-nez.
“I seized him again. ‘Kupstein, have mercy, I beg of you. We here in this country, in this very laboratory, are working for not only the Jews but the entire human race.’
“ ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, again very loud, ‘since the end of the sarcoma project one can’t find a thing here. How can we proceed to defeat carcinoma without test tubes?’
“He referred to our new assignment: a preventive for bone cancer. At any moment Gorky would come snooping. ‘I warn you, Kupstein,’ I whispered. ‘I have heard enough to have you sent away for twenty years, if not executed, as a foreign agent. Have you forgotten that Palestine is a British colony?’
“In astonishment he answered: ‘I? Have you forgotten’—there was the slightest pause, perhaps not really in Kupstein’s speech but rather in my hearing—‘that central supply holds you responsible for every piece of equipment?’
“Gorky stood in the doorway, his thick eyebrows gathered in upon the root of his nose. ‘Doctors,’ he said, ‘I must confess I have those test tubes in back of my table. I have been taking them out one by one from the straw and shining them with a bit of cloth, being ever so careful. They are now ready to go into the sterilizer—may I operate the sterilizer, Doctor? You will see I can do a good job.’ His face, menacing until a moment ago, was a cretin’s.
“Two days later, at three o’clock in the morning, I was arrested by the NKVD and taken to 22 Lubianka Street. I never saw my family again. For what I estimate to be seventy-two hours—there was no window in the room—I was interrogated without pause. I received no food, and water was administered—a glassful was dashed against my face—only when I attempted to collapse. For at least forty-eight of those hours I was given no idea of the charges against me. The NKVD officer—he was replaced by another from time to time, but they all looked the same—insisted again and again that I confess, that my crimes were known to him but, consonant with the just laws of the Soviet Union, he must hear the details from me. By turns he addressed me as villain, child, poor idiot, honorable but misguided patriot, personal friend. At the idiot level I had an opportunity to think... that devil Kupstein! Obviously he, and not Gorky, had been the police spy. Being a loyal and convinced Communist, I knew too well I had no hope this side of a full admission, but of what? Kupstein had surely turned me in on a charge of Jewish chauvinism. I could not confess to that, of all things. In an access of shame and hatred I asked for pen and ink. I wrote a statement which in style, if not quite in length, rivaled the sarcoma report. I revealed myself as an espionage agent for the National Socialist government of Germany.
“My interrogator read it with satisfaction. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you feel better for having got this off your chest.’ He flipped through the pages. ‘You see, you cannot fool us, although you are a most clever man. As a half-Jew you did not think we would suspect you of working for the Nazis, eh? And marrying a Jewish wife was also shrewd, eh? But we are shrewder yet, eh? Now name your accomplices and we will be finished with this unpleasant business.’
“My accomplices. To be sure, I had neglected this all-important matter. I wrote fifteen pages more, implicating Kupstein. This was a grim joke for which I was prepared to pay: since he worked for the NKVD, I had no doubt they would reject it. But here I intended to take my stand if it killed me, as well it might.
“ ‘Splendid.’ The interrogator smiled. ‘Now your conscience is clean. You understand that we already knew everything about the entire conspiracy. Your fellow agents in Leningrad and Kiev were arrested last week. Kupstein is also certainly no news to us; for years we have known of his fascist, Zionist intrigues as an agent of Trotsky.’
“Which in the language of the NKVD meant precisely the opposite. Somehow Kupstein the Verderber, the spoiler, had blundered through two decades in his own kind of peace—until I betrayed him.
“I was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor—a mild sentence considering my grave crimes—and sent to the Kotlas camp in the region of Arkhangelsk. The details of that servitude are not as relevant as Bach maintains. The Nazi camps were worse. To make a comparison of the two, Lieutenant, is pointless. A single principle applies to both: in both the prisoners properly are innocent. I represented a grievous error on the part of the Soviet authorities. As you have heard, I was guilty.”
“And Kupstein?” asked Schild.
“And,” said Reinhart, “will you kindly explain how you got to Germany from Siberia?”
The doctor pulled a blue muffler from inside his coat and draped it around his head as a woman would; but when he brought down his hands Reinhart saw he looked rather like Mahatma Ghandi.
“Through the camp intelligence, I heard that Kupstein was executed. My wife and children were not arrested, but they had to leave the apartment and it was made difficult for my wife to find work. I don’t know how they survived. Before long the question was academic. I was arrested in July, 1938. A year later, when Stalin and Hitler signed their pact and divided Poland, I was brought back from the camp and deported to Germany.”
“Oh no,” Reinhart gasped, a sound applicable to whichever judgment he would finally make on the doctor’s tale.
“My Soviet citizenship was revoked upon my conviction for the crime of espionage. In the pact each side agreed to return the other’s nationals it held prisoner. The Gestapo met us at the border between German and Russian Poland. My wife and children were included in the transport, I understand. I was not allowed to see them. ... They died, I believe, at Buchenwald, where my father and brothers had earlier.
“The Nazi methods of interrogation were second-rate—exclusively physical brutality; there has really been nothing new in that line since the ancient Chinese.” He shook his head almost regretfully. “The Nazis were a mediocre lot with only one idea: audacity succeeds; the idée fixe of the suicide. Where, other than poor stupid Germany, could they have got twelve years to discredit it? ...To the Nazis I was the same kind of embarrassment that the Jews had been to me. I repudiated my Communist affiliation, citing as evidence my treason to the Soviet Union, and demanded to be held as a Jew. If I had been interested in preserving my life, I chose the correct strategy. For here was another point of difference between the two systems.
“In the USSR one is given just what he asks for: at the end of my confession I asked for punishment. My request was honored. Not so with the Nazis. In their Neanderthal psychology a man asks for one thing to conceal his aim in another direction. Besides, they thought, who being something better would ask to be a Jew? I went into their dossier as Communist first, Jew second; and that took my eyes—convinced I could give them information on the Communist underground, they tortured me—but saved my life.”
Plucking at the floor with his cane, the doctor walked to the door. They all rose. Reinhart reached him first and took his arm.
The doctor shook him off irritably, then repented, saying with a smile: “Es geht allein schon schwer genug!, it is hard enough alone.”
Tough old cuss, said Reinhart sotto voce, and then he saw him pass a skeleton hand across the dark glasses, as if to verify he was indeed sightless, but the very movement was evidence of an unextinguished hope that he was not.
“Twins have but half a brain each.” The doctor grinned and pointed in Lori’s direction. “She still sleeps. Knorke, I go.”
Twins, he and Lori. Which meant the doctor looked twenty years older than he was and Lori was twenty years older than she looked. Unless it was another lie.
The doctor shook Reinhart’s hand, and then Schild’s, and finally that of Bach, who had just reached them.
“Gentlemen, I say good night. You no doubt agree with me that an inconvenient means to self-respect is to undergo punishment for a crime you have not committed—as you tonight have been punished. What a lunatic way for two young men to spend an evening! Have we nothing here in our Germany with which to entertain you? Especially you, old chap.” He punched at Reinhart with his cane. “Why so solemn? Doesn’t it bore you?”
Reinhart had imperfectly understood the doctor’s story (his mark in German 2 had, after all, approached justice), but on the basis of the experience with Bach, he smelled the self-hatred in it and understood, anyway, that people in their most serious monologues depreciate rather than celebrate themselves, and are given to exaggeration besides.
“Well,” he said. “Do you expect me to laugh at life in our time?”
Instead of answering—he should have known better than to expect him to—the doctor said: “Perhaps it will be as well if your relatives turn out to be Nazis; they have nothing further to lose.”
Reinhart said: “I personally don’t think Schatzi will find them.”
“What was that name?” asked the doctor.
“Clever fellow,” said Bach. “He gives a job to his sweetheart. But she won’t try very hard if it means the food you give her must be shared with them.”
“No, ‘Sweetheart’ is this man’s name. Don’t ask me why.”
Reinhart raised his nose nobly. “And who cares? He was three years in Auschwitz.”
“There could be only one,” the doctor murmured, as if to himself, and then he gave a succinct reminiscence of Schatzi. Which, Reinhart observed as he fell through space, yet clubbed Schild harder.
“I will kill him,” he said quietly. The great cables in his biceps expanded and split both sleeves at the seam.
“Good,” said the doctor. “But I hope not in ignorance. Kill him because he, as much as any of us, is a victim.”
He insisted that Bach not disturb Lori: he knew the contour of every broken brick between this cellar and his own, which was close by. Again he said es geht allein schon schwer genug, and went out.