SCHILD THOUGHT: HOW AWFUL for Reinhart, now he knows how it feels to be a Jew. He himself was weary of trust and mistrust, weary of hatred, of victims, especially weary of Jews, as, he thought, only a Jew can be. His predominant emotion towards Schatzi still was envy, now unconditional: the freedom he had seen in him was no illusion.
When the door banged behind the departing doctor, Bach’s wife woke up. A plain girl, but Reinhart, as unrepresentative an American GI as you could wish, seemed taken with her. He was not as innocent as he had seemed. Perhaps he was even sinister, now that Schatzi no longer was. What did he want of Schild? asked Schild unfairly, for it was he who had pressed himself on Reinhart, but unfairness is also a freedom. Schild liked Bach, therefore he must keep Reinhart from seducing his wife. But illicit love is also love, which must not be opposed. Ah, but we die anyway, ja? said the doctor, forgetting to add: alone.
Who weeps for a Jew? he had asked with respect to Lichenko, one of the little men, symbolic Jews, for the love of whom we—they—control experience. Lichenko did not, but Reinhart and Bach did. Perhaps even Schatzi did. Give to a man a chance, he had said so plaintively. He also was a victim, a kind of Trotskyite of Nazism, and though privileged—for the Nazis were more tolerant of their heretics than were these others—though a labor supervisor, also a prisoner. Schatzi’s present allegiance signalized his reformation. Communism excludes no one, denies nobody his opportunity to alter, recognizes no people intrinsically chosen or condemned.
Standing large and slumped before the sofa, Reinhart spoke low to the girl. So as not to jinx him, Schild made his congé to Bach, whose great kindly face looked down like a benevolent Buddha’s, and opened the door—or tried to. Five minutes ago a blind skeleton had flung it back as easily as if it were a curtain; for him, Schild, the door was frozen. The knob, a European type, a curved lever, broke off in his hand. And no putative seduction stayed Reinhart’s, Mr. Fixit’s, prompt assistance.
Using his elbows like Schild’s father commandeering the telephone, Reinhart forced the Brecher to give ground, examined the damage, described it as negligible, made temporary repairs.
“It will come off again if it is pulled too hard,” he said to Bach, in German. “Now if you had a bit of wire—”
Bach answered in English: “My dear fellow, do not concern yourself about that. We live beneath a heap of ironmongery. Tomorrow, in the full sun, I shall grub in it for wires. What gauge is to be recommended for this purpose?”
“Bach hat kein Draht,” said Mrs. Bach, who had a certain animation, but Schild decided Reinhart’s interest in her owed to the incapacity of her husband; thus it was a sinister thing, the sexual excitement of betrayal, in which she herself at least connived: “Bach has no wire.”
Lichenko’s way had been wholesome, to take the German woman by force. Last night when in sleepless midnight clarity he labored on the pillow, adding sums, he believed he had denied her to Lichenko because he wanted her for himself. Holy as a monk dreaming of the Virgin, he crept down to the kitchen and sacrificed himself upon the altar between her hard legs, she soundless except for piston hips upon the mattress. At seven o’clock, tame, she knocked upon his bedroom door and entered bearing breakfast on the last tray with which he served Lichenko and had no stomach to return for the last time to the messhall. In another land it would have been touching: bread, jam, coffee, from her own meager rations—her pantry was no Army larder—but the old hatred, now compounded, moved him rather to strike it to the floor.
“Bach has no wire,” Frau Bach repeated, and now Schild heard the contempt fall on Reinhart, not the giant. “If you wish something in this place, you must ask me.”
A flush of embarrassed lust suffused Reinhart’s skin, although she proceeded to define the precise limits of her statement. She drew a pin from her hair and threaded it through the lever’s empty screwhole. “Also.” Tense with pride, she opened the door.
Reinhart shook Bach’s hand. “We must go. Did I tell you that I like your suit?”
Bach perspired with gratitude. As high above Reinhart as the latter towered over Schild, as Schild himself loomed over Schatzi—but there ended the stairway of heads, whose lower steps would bear most weight, carrying as they did the others. But he had excluded Lichenko, smaller than he, larger than Schatzi, a truly free man who would fit in no progression.
“A gift,” said Bach, “of my kind wife. She adorns me rather than herself, probably because I am good for nothing else. But that, too, one learns to accept. The mystery remains, for whom was such a garment made? For it is my perfect size, and no tailor came to call with his tape measure. Singular!”
Reinhart, lifting away up, felt a lapel, and Schild remembered an old anti-Semitic routine: ‘Sam, the customer wants a green suit. Toin on the green light!’ Bach’s horn buttons were his proper interest: how much the gross, less the usual two percent for cash?
He supposed he saw in Frau Bach’s smile, which was entitled to it by half, the Hebraic celebration of a shrewd purchase as she spoke to Reinhart: “Mögen Sie den Anzug, do you like the suit? I bought it from this ‘Schatzi,’ little Trudchen’s friend.”
Reinhart gave her his large, gentile blandness: “It is beautiful.” Schild shook hands with everyone.
“You are always welcome here,” said Bach from the heart. “Next time perhaps things will be better and we can serve coffee!”
Schild permitted himself briefly to see that vision of Schild to which Bach had given, and offered to give again, hospitality; it was not unloving and it was not unloved, it was not institutional. Perhaps it also was free—but it passed too quickly into the dark cloaca of the cellar hall, and he had time only to call, in simulated enthusiasm: “Knorke mit Ei!”
“Berlin slang, meaning ‘Splendid.’ ” He answered Reinhart’s question as they clung, Alpinists, to the summit of Monte Klamotte, Mount Rubble, and searched in darkness for the comb so marked in daylight.
“ ‘Splendid,’ ” Reinhart repeated, “ ‘splendid with an egg.’ There’s something about Berlin that gets you, isn’t there?”
“Me?” asked Schild.
“That gets a person, I mean.” Reinhart turned his ankle on a broken brick, starting a minor avalanche. “It always used to have an evil ring—also awesome and faraway, like ‘Mars,’ or ‘Jupiter.’ But here it is, and it is real. Strange to say, I just realized I love it.”
“Because it is broken,” said Schild.
“I guess so. All the crap has been blasted away, leaving something honest, and I think what the doctor meant was that honesty really does win out in the end. That is horrible and at the same time funny. ... Funnier yet because I believe the doctor himself is a fake.” By the poor, cloud-filtered light of an introvert moon he checked Schild’s face. “You see, I have been to that cellar before. The other time Bach told me a long story which turned out to be a lie.”
“A lie?”
“The whole cloth. Imagine him in the SS!”
“I can’t imagine anyone in the SS,” Schild lied. “Maybe that was a fake, too.” He did not understand why he could not speak straight to Reinhart; the good intent was there.
“Would to God it had been,” Reinhart answered fervently, and tripped himself up on a naked concrete-reinforcing rod, fell, kept talking: “Like the murder of the Belgian babies in World War I—give me a hand please?, I feel a hollow under here that I’ll break into if I make a commotion myself. ... Thanks—which was a propaganda lie. Dirty Nazis! They made it impossible to lie about the Germans. Thus Martin Luther and Frederick the Great and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe are swine, too, because they helped to make all this. Nürnberg, were you ever in Nürnberg? I used to think there was something fine there—” He crashed through the intervals of a grounded metal bedstead.
Schild took a lower way, through a shallow trough which yielded underfoot as if he walked across a human body. “When?” he asked.
“Never,” said Reinhart. “I was never there, naturally. I saw a book once. Albrecht Dürer’s house stands to this day, Albrecht Dürer, the old artist of the Middle Ages. He made one etching called ‘Ritter, Tod, und Teufel.’ When I first saw it I couldn’t read German, I didn’t know what that name meant, I knew only Teufel, and he was easy to spot: a face like a wolf, with mad eyes and one crescent-shaped horn in the back of his head and two like a ram’s curving out from under his ears. His ears were donkey’s. On the other side of the picture is Death, on a crummy, melancholy old horse. He has a long white beard, a hole for a nose, and wears a crown full of snakes, holds an hourglass. The scene takes place in a gully full of junk, lizards, skulls, tree-roots, etc.; it looks something like Berlin today. A sneaky-looking hound runs along the bottom, and there is Dürer’s trademark and the date on a little sort of tombstone.”
They had reached the bottom of their own declivity, which egressed to nowhere, and attacked the next smoking slope, Reinhart continuing to walk point.
“But in the distance you can see the towers of a great castle. Death and the Devil may have entree everywhere, but they are not in that castle, which I believe must represent a heaven. And neither is the Knight, who I’m coming to in a minute. Because he would not be a knight unless he served his time in the gully of death and the devil. Well, the Knight—there he is in the foreground, on his splendid charger walking stately through the crap, the Devil leering over the horse’s rump, old Death wheezing at him in front, the dog sehleichend along below, the castle far away—they could do him in and nobody in those towers would know it until too late, but even if they did, what good would it be? What help can anybody else give you against Death and the Devil?
“The castle is not relevant, as the doctor would say.” Reinhart passed through a doorway and was immediately again in the free air, for the wall stood alone in the world with no building as relative; Schild followed.
“Welcome to mine house,” said Reinhart. “I wish I knew where the hell we are, I think we’re coming back to Bach’s cellar.”
He stopped abruptly and Schild bumped into him and excused himself and said: “If you’d wait a minute I could show you.” He knew the way and wondered why he did not seize the leadership from Reinhart.
But Reinhart pistoled a hand and shot at a great concrete box on the dim horizon, an entire basement blown intact from the earth. “No, I see what I’ve been looking for. ... Neither are the Death and Devil relevant. The Knight rides through the gully as if he doesn’t see them. Of course he does—the style Dürer draws in, there’s not room for the enormous horse let alone anything else; they are packed in that lousy gulch like a frankfurter in its skin. Therefore the Knight sees them—but he walks on. And I tell you, they look pretty squalid. If you glance quickly at the picture you won’t see anything but the Knight, with his long straight spear, a bit of fur towards the tip, the splendid armor with which he is, as they say, caparisoned, but most of all that wonderful tough face, sure of itself, looking not at the airy castle or horseshit Death or the mangy Devil, because they’ll all three get him soon enough, but he doesn’t care. He is complete in himself—isn’t that what integrity means?—and he is proud of it, because he is smiling a little.”
Reinhart reached the caisson, where he waited till Schild climbed the rise and stood puffing beside him.
“And he is not en route to do combat with an unarmed enemy. He is a man and needs no helpless victim to give him respect. When I think of him there, walking forever across the pages of a moldy old book—and I guess not even there now, since my father burned it—I could... I could smile, I suppose, because I do not feel sorry for him.”
Schild smiled wryly and said: “You never saw the serf who had to help him into that heavy armor and take care of the splendid horse, or the bonded peasants who tilled his field, so that the knight could strut about as he pleased while the underlings did the work.” Perversely he clung to his loyalties while still older ones besieged him: stifling summer on the ramparts above Manhattan, windows sealed and blinds lowered as antithermal charm, faint sounds of street serfs playing stickball, Sir Nathan riding the rug, charging through a bowdlerized Malory in which Launcelot and King Arthur’s wife exchanged ethereal admiration. For the French book saith that Sir Servause had never courage nor lust to do battle against no man, but if it were against giants, and against dragons, and wild beasts.
“No,” said Reinhart. He tore off a chunk of loose mortar from the wholesale cellar—astonishing that such strength was accompanied by any mind at all—and pitched it like a baseball, although it must have weighed fifteen pounds, far across the rubble range and down night’s black throat without a murmur.
“No,” Reinhart repeated, “you don’t get the idea. There were no serfs or vassals in this picture. This Knight was real, but not real. How can I say it? I just thought, he was not necessarily even a German. He is just a drawing—just art, is all—a lie, if you like. He belongs as much to a serf as he would to a real knight. A picture belongs to anybody who looks at it. It can even be burned, and somebody will still have it in his mind. Besides, you admit anyway that Death and the Devil are free to all—why not then the Knight?”
Because Jews were never knights, even though they had lived in Germany since long before the Middle Ages; was it in Heine that one read of the ancient Jewish communities along the Rhine?, who said: Don’t blame us for the killing of Christ, we were living here at that time! But riding the rug, working at the exalted old language to which he then had not yet realized he was historically a newcomer (but so, in his day, was Reinhart), neither did Sir Nathan admit his native disqualification for the quest of the Holy Grail. Sir Launcelot let them say what they would, and straight he went into the castle, and tied his horse to a ring in the wall; and there he saw a fair green court, and thither he dressed himself, for there him thought was a fair place to fight in. So he looked about, and saw much people in doors and windows, that said, Fair knight thou art unhappy.
“But,” Reinhart said unhappily, “if you want to say they don’t make them like that nowadays, I agree with you. That’s progress for you: get rid of the whole works, serfs, peasants, castles—and knights, not to mention Tod and Teufel. Where do these kinds of Death and Devil fit in the doctor’s story—even if he is a fake?”
“He was real, all right,” Schild snapped. “I’m not sure about you and me, but he was real.”
“Nobody in that cellar ever shows you any evidence.”
Schild laughed in sharp anger and answered in his birthright idiom: “So whadduh you, district attorney?” It sounded authentic; he had not come so far; his temper softened. “You just said it is impossible to lie about the Nazis—”
Reinhart had found a chairleg and now slowly, inexorably bruised it against the concrete wall, until its end was fibrous as a brush.
“The Germans, I said, but I am glad to hear you think there is a difference.”
Quite right, the error was his, but why the special punishment? And why should Reinhart bring it, whom he trusted, to whom he was in a unique relationship of owing nothing and vice versa, his friend. ... The moon had eluded its cloud but was still niggardly, showing Reinhart as a large pale blob belonging to the powdered landscape. The gentile is everywhere at home. Reinhart leaned against the basement as if he owned it, waiting for the Jewish opinion.
“Why me?” Schild shouted in fear and loathing.
Reinhart was hurt, but calm. “Because you’re the only other German-American I’ve got to talk to. We have a common interest in those potato pancakes we were fed as boys.” His irony surprised him; he grinned and wrinkled his brow low, like an ape.
“For Christ’s sake,” said Schild, “don’t tell me you don’t know I’m a Jew.”
He had been wrong about Reinhart’s face; its contempt was as acute as its good feeling had been blunt.
“All right,” said Reinhart. “You’re better than I am, you know everything without having to try, and you can stick it up your ass.”
He shuffled along the basement wall, kicking up brick dust, which filtered through the hairs of the inner nose smelling like cordite. He now looked rather more resigned than angry, and at the corner of the concrete he threw up his head, pointed, and called: “The path is here!”
He had known where it was all the while. Why had he led them to wander? He was sinister, but he was also good. He descended an excavation, his round head falling evenly from sight.
“Wait!” Schild shouted, pelting after, through the crying, broken turf. When he reached the bombhole Reinhart’s broad back was laboring across the other rim. “I gave you an order!” He suffered fear that the man would deny him again, this time in insubordination—the first irregularity had been merely personal—and he would be required to turn him in for arrest. ‘You are always arresting someone,’ St. George, whose Army it was and not Schild’s, had complained.
He scrambled across the chasm as Reinhart, obeying, waited. He had trouble, too, at the rim, and not being as tall as Reinhart, could not have made it without help. Which he received, unrequested. Reinhart’s hand was cold and dirty.
Reaching the upper level, he began to speak his amends, which, as always, altered during their travel from source to mouth. Hysteria was, finally, the only cause he had ever served, but at least he was loyal to that. He accepted his uniqueness, and remembered an old story told him by a fellow traveler undergoing the transition to simple liberal and eventually no doubt to worse—the typical American politics of pis aller—and that was his respects to Reinhart.
“When Trotsky and Stalin first fell out, the Politburo met to resolve their differences. Since Stalin controlled a majority of its members, it soon decided in his favor and demanded that Trotsky recant. ‘You are ordered,’ the decision read, ‘to stand up and say: “Comrade Stalin, you are right. I am wrong. I apologize.” ‘Very well,’ Trotsky answered, ‘I accept the decision.’ He stood up and said in a heavy Yiddish rhythm: ‘You are right? I am wrong? I apologize?”
Reinhart grinned. “Neither do I, sir. ... Since we are speaking freely, I can say I knew that whatever else might be said of you, you weren’t chicken-shit. Jewish officers never are. They have too much pride to be. They are free.”
“No,” Schild answered quietly. “If you believe that you believe in a lie and you make it too hard on the Jews.”
“But I have seen it. I have three years’ service—I enlisted,” said Reinhart in pride. “If you don’t mind my saying it, Jews are sometimes know-it-alls and their manners could stand improvement, but that doesn’t have anything to do with decency and is anyway a proof of their freedom—” He checked on Schild’s reaction with the defiant self-righteousness, nose slightly flared, of the man who by his general benevolence is sanctioned to be specifically offensive; he wished to hurt Schild, Schild could see, in the interests of some comprehensive good that would finally bankrupt him, Reinhart, but first he would take a small profit.
“—and don’t tell me that is anti-Semitism,” said Reinhart, cowering, for all his size. “I’m sick of being made to feel a swine because I’m of German descent. I’m sick of being in the privileged class that nothing ever happens to. I’m tired of being big and healthy, but I can’t help it, I was born that way. If you would be a prisoner in any concentration camp ever made, I would be a guard. Now, you know everything—but do you know that? How that makes a person feel? Do you know what it is to be in debt to everybody? Not you, you are always right.”
“I?” said Schild. He sat down on a ridge of waste. The sudden armistice within had relaxed his muscles. He repeated the grammatical fiction almost genially: I, the pronoun of rectitude: “I am a murderer.”
Reinhart took seat beside him, and with the added weight the ridge of brick-halves squashed out about their ankles.
“Ah,” said Reinhart, “you should have a pair of these boots. Now your shoes will be filled with that junk.”
“That’s all right,” Schild said, although he too, with a sense of expansiveness, granted its tragedy; he, the rude Besserwisser, accepted this Middle Western, gentile horror of discomfort and unrespectability, opened his shoes and dumped them clean. His right sock had a large hole revealing his largest toe.
“Why don’t you turn that in to salvage?” paternally asked Reinhart, pointing rudely.
“No salvage for officers,” he answered, self-consciously pitiful. “We have to buy our own.”
“I keep forgetting.” Reinhart searched his pockets. “You got a butt?—wait, by God, here’s that little pack of Fleetwoods you yourself gave me last month. Well, they’re as good now as ever. They are made stale.”
Schild took one and found he was quite right; Reinhart knew everything.
“Now don’t you worry,” Reinhart said, “all that was just talk. Berlin does something to everybody; makes one want to accuse himself.” He blew a smoke-mustache from his nostrils. “In a war there’s no such thing as murder. It’s kill or be killed. I don’t blame the regular German army, for example, for fighting against the Allies—even if their cause was wrong; that’s a very different deal from the particular Nazi outrages. To be precise—when I said the doctor might be a fake, I meant in the unimportant things, such as whether or not he was in those camps, whether or not he was a Communist or a twin of Lori, and so on. I never for a minute doubted he was honest in the fundamental human things—you see he could be an ex-Nazi and still be straight on those. Did you ever think of Hitler as just a man eating jelly omelets, needing a haircut, clearing his throat, getting out of bed in the morning and yawning? Did you ever think of someone saying to him at such a time: ‘Come on, Adolf, I see a bit of dandruff on your collar and I heard you belch, and I know you have your troubles. Come on now, you can’t crap me, you’re a man like any other.’
“But I started by wanting to be precise. Precisely, I can conceive of an honorable German hating Hitler yet fighting for his country in the Wehrmacht. I can also imagine a German Jew who in spite of what was done to him thinks of Germany as his own country, for he is a German, isn’t he? And if he has permitted the Nazis to convince him he isn’t, he has let them win—in a way they never did with all their bullies and gas ovens. They are the non-Aryans, they are the degenerate race who rotted and betrayed a great people, not the Jews. I can conceive of such a man, I don’t mean I expect any particular individual to be one, you can’t blame a man for not being a hero.”
Despite his fervor Reinhart spoke slowly, and Schild for once was not impatient. Having confessed, he had awaited the question of a pure-hearted fool, which, the old legends promised, would heal his wound. Instead he found himself cured of Germanic whimsy. He, and not Reinhart, was the romantic; fools there are in abundance, but not one is innocent.
“Reinhart,” he said evenly, “now listen to me. I forgive you. Do you understand? I forgive you.”
“That is not what I want—”
“But that is what you get from me, nevertheless. And if you won’t take it”—he grinned and shot his cigarette-end in a high rocket which no sooner exploded on the wasteland than two shadowy children filtered from behind a rubble hillock and claimed it as prize, quarreling on who should pinch its ember, whose ragged smock-pocket should tote it to their used-tobacco Shylock—“you can stick it up your ass.”
“It doesn’t do me any good,” said Reinhart. “Now them—forgive those kids. They really had nothing to do with it, unless you believe with Hitler that a whole people can be degenerate.”
But he would not let a gentile be sanctimonious with him. On the other hand, he again cleaned his shoes for Reinhart’s sake and rose, saying: “Do you know we have to walk back to Zehlendorf?”
“Unless we can hitch a ride.”
“This late?” asked Schild, looking at his bare wrist. In what bleaker field was his watch ticking now? To Reinhart, he knew all the answers, yet why was his every emotion another question? “Do those children stay awake all night on the chance an American will come by and throw away a butt?”
“What else have they got to do?” Reinhart asked toughly. He field-stripped his own cigarette and hooved it into the ground.
“What do you have against them?”
“A private grudge,” said Reinhart, “that’s my own damned business. Well, if we have to walk, that makes it easy, no choice.” He rebloused his pants, tightened his belt, adjusted the jacket, made his cap smart, and, ready for any D-Day, motioned Schild to take the lead.
Once they were out of the rubblefield and in the open gray streets gulching the ruins, Schild fell back beside him in an aesthetic revulsion against captaining one man all the way to the Grunewald Forest. With no one before him to control the pace, Reinhart increased his stride, measuring off a yard per step. Schild fell behind. On the bicycle path of the Hohenzollerndamm, in Wilmersdorf—they were beyond the congestion and, hence, the worst damage, on a wide thoroughfare becoming suburban, with streetcar tracks, bounded by greenery and particular rather than mass ruins—Schild leaned against a poster-pillar and took air.
Marching with loud slaps of his rubber soles, head fixed as if he were in ranks, Reinhart went on unheeding. Schild watched him for a hundred yards in the light of Berlin’s dawn, which came early in the small hours—therefore it was later than he had supposed. Reinhart would soon look back. On a childish impulse Schild stepped behind the pillar and waited. The footsteps rapidly tramped beyond earshot.
He found that inadvertently he had kept Reinhart’s veteran Fleetwoods. Going in through the cellophane and limp pasteboard, his fingers made inordinate noise, and had he still been a nervous man he might have mistaken the sounds for those of someone creeping out of ambush behind him. He fired his cigarette and took a lungful of corrosive smoke, toying with a paradox: the one man he knew who was the ambush type had least need of concealment. In proof of this he saw Schatzi standing nearby on the sidewalk, hiding in the open air and light, a concrete apparition.
“I have followed you like a sickly conscience,” said his courier, who wore a motley of olive-drab clothing.
“You are out of uniform,” Schild answered, laughing softly. “If the MPs come along I can have you arrested.”
“I’m doing you no harm,” Schatzi said in some worry. Then he smirked weakly. “Come Fritz, you make the joke with your old comrade with whom you have already deceived, so that I am in trouble across the boundary.” He pointed over his shoulder. “The Russian is gone, ja?”
Schild asked: “Do I throw off an odor, that you can follow me with your nose?”
“Perhaps you will not believe, what can one do?” He shrugged. “Having some business on the Tauentzien Strasse—very well, being exact, in the basement of the KaDeWe—ah Fritz, what a pity that excellent compartment store must be bombed!” Tears coursed the runoffs on either side of his crag-nose. “Ah, Fritz, I must confess I have had a drop—I am in my glasses, as it were.” He wove across the bicycle path and rested against the pillar. “Verzeihung, Herr Litfass! ...Why should I care about this ugly place? What have they done to my Nürnberg? Because I am not Saupreuss, a Prussian pig, beileibe nicht. Pure Bavarian, verfluchte Scheiss!”
His American overseas cap was pulled low and round as a sailor’s. His nose began to run; he cleared it onto the dark green of his new field jacket in two short swipes marking the chevrons of snot-corporal. “From the Ranke Platz I saw you creeping over the ruins with that oaf and I thought, this Fritz has lost his Russian fairy-boy and got him a nice young American in its stead. You have been foolish, Fritz, and they know about it—they know everything—you don’t deal now wiss stupid Nazis.”
He reached for Schild’s sleeve and, missing, fell to the ground on his hands, yet caught himself arched, and backed spiderlike till his rump was against the pillar. From the point of contact he rose inch by inch along his spine, cleaving to the shaft.
Erect, coughing vacantly, he whined: “They killed my dear dog, Fritz, with a machine pistol shot him through the head. That is their kind of people! I loved that creature, to which they should not have done this harm. I gave to him food from out my own mouth.”
Schild began to walk away, in peace.
“Come again here and listen, you bit of turd!” Schatzi screamed. “In Auschwitz I liquidated better men as you by the thousands. Du kannst mich im Arsche Lecken.”
“No,” said Schild, calmly smoking, “no, you did not. You only buried them. You were forced to, you yourself were a prisoner.”
“ ‘Forced to,’ ” Schatzi repeated drunkenly. “I carried a club, Fritz, but one must be careful how hard one beats them, or the SS will rage with jealousy and take the post away. Then too, these thin bones were easily cracked, which meant the job would be nonsense because they must remain strong enough to dig—I always knew you were a double agent, didn’t I always say so? You yourself are Intelligence! Pity me, Fritz, they have murdered my dog. Dirty Russians! It unsecured itself from the chain and came by my heels already, unknown to me until I was stopped by this sentry at Sergeyev’s building. The dear dog has been thinking, ‘Ah my master is attacked!’ He sprang at the soldier and the Russian shot him.”
“I am sorry. Really I am,” said Schild.
“Brown on the outside, red on the inside like a beefsteak, we were in the early Sturmabteilung. We had many similarities to the Communists, Fritz. Idealism, we were idealists, and we died for it—like the Jews. We were the first Jews. Thus I can understand you. I too hate this filthy Germany.” He wiped his nose again, promoting himself to snot-sergeant. “You are a soldier, but you were shrewd enough to get for yourself a safe position behind the lines of battles. Why should you not, if you are clever enough? I do not criticize. In the Great War I was not a shrewd fellow like you, but a simple foot-soldier. Just see this.” He raised his trouser cuff and lowered the stocking. “Verdun, February 1916”—a blind, purple hole in his calf. He opened the jacket sleeve and that of the wool shirt beneath it, and drew back the arm of heavy, dirty underwear: “Verdun, September 1916” —a masticated chicken leg was his left forearm. “August 1918, mustard gas in the lungs, the forest of the Argonne. As you known, I still today cough. While I collected these thanks, I must not tell you what was occurring behind our back in Germany, you would believe me insulting to you and your peo—no, one does not say that, but there existed fat swine who profited by our blood. And when after the war we went to settle wiss them, these Nazis killed us instead. Berufsverbrecher, professional criminal, I am called in the camp—” The liquid discharges of the eyes and nose left prison-bar traces on his dusty face.
Schatzi continued the catalogue of wrongs done him, and Schild thought, they are as real as anyone’s, as Reinhart’s, as his own: who among us is not a Jew?
He said: “All right. Now you’d better get yourself together. Perhaps you can find another dog—”
“The only thing in years I wished to love!” Schatzi threw his head back against the pillar and unabashedly wailed.
Twice tonight Schild had been chosen to hear a candid heart; it was the old choice and fitted his old gift. For the first time he knew it as a tribute to what he was, or what they supposed him to be, and perhaps after all these were one and the same. If Hitler had not died in the Chancellery garden he would one day seek Schild out and tell him, weeping, of being twice denied a career in art by the academic examiners; rejected by his sweetheart niece who then blew out her life; a bum in a Vienna flophouse, befriended by a Jewish old-clothes dealer; gassed in the war; and, finally, of his last defeat as the Red Army swarmed over the Spree. And Schild would say, All right, Hitler, we shall weep together.
To Schatzi he repeated: “Collect yourself, man. Sergeyev will have your head if you are reported drunk.”
Immediately Schatzi dried from within and became one hard instrument of suspicion. “Whom did you say?”
“Sergeyev. You just mentioned going to Sergeyev’s building—”
“Ah, but did I mention why?” He fell into his usual semi-crouch, which put his head four feet off ground, and Schild, who had always believed this the stance of attack, realized at last its purpose was rather to make Schatzi a small target.
With supreme distaste, but nothing else would serve, he grasped Schatzi’s jacket and pulled him upright and vulnerable. “The next time you see him, report that Fritz is finished.” He watched the red respect flood Schatzi’s eyes. “Do you understand?” Schatzi trembled in admiring assent. “If you do not tell him, I shall let Corporal Reinhart beat you to death.”
“This great beast?” whispered Schatzi.
“All I have to do is nod to him.” Schild released his grip, requiring all his muscles to hold his face stern. “He also knows your story and, because he is a gentile, holds a grudge. Do you remember a Dr. Otto Knebel in Auschwitz?”
“They all looked alike to me,” Schatzi answered without thought, then taking a sober one: “Perhaps he was in Monowitz, another section of the camp from mine.”
“He remembers you.”
“Maybe he lies. The SS marched them out to Germany when the Russians approached, and who would survive such an ordeal? Lucky, I escaped. Luckier yet, you were never there in any case.” He was returning to his old self, with both relief and disappointment at Schild’s apparent decision not to molest him further. “But accept from me this warning, Fritz. Serg—they do not recognize luck. And they have also their camps. You did better to transfer from Berlin, where they can easily get at you, before playing the renegahd.”
Without feeling, Schild said: “I’m no renegade. You can also tell him I won’t talk.”
“Fritz,” said Schatzi. He came close in a reek of liquor, eyes drifting: “I have some regret for mistakes in my life. Wiss my family was not the love you Jews have for each another. You can not understand how my father was beating me always. I have had another dog at ten years of age. My father struck that dog to death when it slipped its chain and entered the house and fed upon his slippers.”
Behind him Schild heard the noise of a vehicle in Hohenzollern Platz.
“Was that in Nürnberg?” he asked.
Schatzi was caught up short, made his eyes keen, and answered: “Precisely. Do you know the city? In the Altstadt, below the cahstle wall.”
“Near the Dürerhaus?”
“In fact, overlooking,” Schatzi answered. “I have heard Dürer’s house is kaputt from the bombing. Is it so?”
“I don’t know. I have never been there.”
“Dürerhaus, Scheisshaus, what should we care, eh Fritz?”
Schild backstepped from his camaraderie, turned and saw the jeep bumping over the streetcar tracks. It was now as light as an overcast afternoon. The tall MP beside the driver saluted, and Schild knew a moment’s qualm. But it was not he who arrested Lichenko.
“You want a ride, Lieutenant? Is that crumb bothering you? Hey Hitler, spricken see English?” He smacked his billyclub into his palm. “C’mere. I’ll give you some democracy right in the nuts.”
“He’s with me,” said Schild, officerly factual, showing his ID card. “If you drive on down this street you will see a corporal. I want you to give him a lift if you are going that way. He too was with me on official business, so don’t bother him about a pass.”
The MP obsequiously lowered his club. Likely had he seen Schatzi alone, he would not even have made the threat; he wished merely to be appreciated.
“I hope,” Schild continued nevertheless, “you don’t speak in that loose fashion to every German you meet. You might run into an anti-Nazi.”
Again the MP assented, careful in his policeman way to give excuse without a show of confusion. “I didn’t know there were any.”
“Neither did I,” said Schild. “But we can’t let that make a difference.”
The jeep snorted down the vacant Hohenzollerndamm.
“You Amis are strangest of the strange,” said Schatzi. By means of the MP’s menace he had regained full dignity. “This I first believed was a weakness of the mind, and next for me it was a sinister thing. Finally, I see, and it is harmless: you really believe that you are the master race.” This time he wiped his nose on a handkerchief. “The Germans, you know, never did, and least of all when this crazy sissy Adolf, and this cripple Goebbels, and that fat Zeppelin with the large mouth Goering, told them they were. A German knows he is not anysing. Instead for a time he thinks that they are, Adolf und Gesellschaft. Never himself. A French waiter makes a German feel like an ox. An Englishman makes him feel ill dressed. His great philosophers either talk so he cannot understand them, like Hegel, or tell him what a disgusting lout he is, like Nietzsche. And then there are the Jews, always so clever and so successful. See the magnificent land where they run things, America! ...Fritz, I am speaking earlier of my mistakes. I work for the Communists because they force me. When I am a young man I spilled much of their blood, but now I am old and weak. Unless I serve they will denounce me to the American police—this thing with Röhm and the early SA. I will be treated like a Nazi, ja? At least this way I am free. But can you get me to America, I shall not inform them you will go. Is it an honest arrangement?”
“Perfectly,” said Schild, “except that I don’t get a profit. Now I’ll make you a deal. First, you report to Sergeyev that Fritz is done. Second, you make certain I never see you again. On my part I’ll keep Corporal Reinhart from killing you. Now”—he seized Schatzi and turned him around—“that way is east. Go already, in peace and freedom.”
Schatzi went, looking back from time to time with the reproach and puzzlement of an exiled pet, but going. Schild watched him as far as the Platz and, reminded by his animal progress, pitied him again for the loss of his dog.
Reinhart was at Roseneck, Rose Corner, when he heard the jeep engine and, because his permanent pass was good not later than 0100 hours, he crept into an empty beer garden and hid behind a tree. The car made the turn and vanished into Rheinbabenallee. Emerging, he saw the darkness of the Grunewald woods a couple more football-field lengths down the street. He had lead in his ass and his feet were aflame. Distances elsewhere standard, in Berlin were triple; and he had taken no real exercise in years. As well he was a chair-medic, the Rangers and paratroopers were lucky not to have him. He regretted having pulled on ahead of Schild, for not only was he tired, he was lonely. But the Jews and their mad pride, he would never learn to cope with it.
Crossing Kronprinzenallee at last, he saw where someone had chopped down a tree in the Grunewald. He walked in and sat on the fallen trunk. He searched in vain for a cigarette, but the Pall Malls were at Bach’s, the Fleetwoods with Schild. No matter, his lungs were weak enough. He struck himself in the chest and coughed histrionically, feeling a certain softness in the pectorals. Weight lifters out of training develop breasts like women, look worse than the ninety-pound weaklings they originally were, he remembered. Undoubtedly the same thing happens to the muscles of the trained mind: in time intellectuals’ heads grow flabby. The morality of Puritans becomes mushy. Life mocks those who try.
Now that he had found Kronprinzenallee he knew the way home: straight down it about fifty miles to Argentinische Allee, around that crescent about halfway, another twenty, until you reached a patch of trees and sandbags and excavations, traversing which you came finally upon the farthermost limbs of the detachment headquarters building. Trudchen would be long gone to the bosom of her family, obeying her parents’ ukase against staying in bed with a man after ten o’clock at night. He had his joke; actually, she told them she had to work overtime at the office. They were, he supposed, a typical German familial unit, of which he should make a sociological investigation—except that he knew all about normal people, who are everywhere the same.
Rest in his condition only made it more difficult to return to movement. He checked the blouse of his trousers, that precise indicator of a soldier’s smartness—Schild, for example, had he worn boots would have stuffed the cuffs crudely into their mouths and buckled the straps. The contraceptive around his right boot proved to be frayed. He took a new one from his watch pocket, peeled it, tied it in place. The Kraut who found the discarded rubber would never figure it out.
Ready to move, he saw in Hohenzollern’s distance the insignificant form of Lieutenant Schild, walking steadily, nothing ambitious but with a certainty in his carriage that he would get there, wherever it was. A tough little guy, in his own way. If I could be like Schild, Reinhart believed, I would not complain. So he waited for him.
Arriving, Schild said: “The MPs didn’t find you?”
Reinhart boasted: “I was too quick for them.”
“They were going to give you a ride.”
“I can make it all right. Why didn’t you take one?”
“I have an aversion to the police.”
“You and me both.”
“I wanted to ask you,” said Schild, “what are you going to do about your friend Nurse Leary?”
“That’s a difficulty.” He was getting nervous again at having to walk so slowly. “Let her go to hell, I guess. Except that I gave my word.”
“What do you owe huh?” Schild asked, New Yorkly.
“Nothing whatsoever. That is exactly why I cannot go back on my word.”
“I’d think it would be the other way around.”
Reinhart felt the newly arranged cuff working loose with his stride. Screw it. He smiled down at Schild and said: “What you mean is you thought I would think so. But I don’t. It would be letting the other fellow decide what you yourself should feel. I never have been able to stand that. That’s what I like about the Army, where you are told what to do and eat and wear, but never what to think and feel. Everybody but me seems to hate it, on the grounds that it takes away their ‘freedom.’ When did you last see a free man in civilian life?” He pushed back his sweat-heavy cap and snorted. “Look at me. I alone am right. Ha! Join the Reinhart Party!”
Paired, the travel had improved; already they had crossed the sandy Pücklerstrasse and the apartment houses of Argentinische Allee lay in the field of vision.
Schild said: “The knights of Cornwall are no men of worship, as other knights are. And because of that, they hate all men of worship.”
“What is that?”
“From King Arthur. You put me onto him with your ‘Ritter, Tod, und Teufel.’ ” Schild slowed. “Here, let’s have the last two of your Fleetwoods. ... You think a lot, don’t you?”
“Too much,” Reinhart complained with a mouthful of smoke. “Indeed I am a drone. However, I don’t usually do the talking. By nature I am a listener.”
“Do you ever get any snatch?”
Astounded, Reinhart asked him to come again. The same, and this intellectual was not even grinning.
“Since you ask, Lieutenant, only that little Trudchen—just as you predicted. She was no virgin. She is depraved, in fact, was already, which makes me feel less badly about it.”
“Well,” said Schild, “if she’s old enough to have it, she’s old enough to use it.”
“War is terrible when it corrupts a young kid like that,” Reinhart said piously.
Cigarette in the side of his mouth, head cocked so the smoke could not catch in his glasses, Schild asked: “Are you serious?”
“No.”
They joined in pragmatic, male laughter, the kind that would have stimulated the heroines of those movies Very loved to heat up their castrating irons.
Then it was only fair that Reinhart interrogate Schild. Who confessed to having been a teacher in civil life, specializing in English, in a private school that Reinhart suspected was “progressive,” where the students did whatever they wished and called the instructors by their first names. Was it? In part, Schild admitted, laughing more than ever.
“Frankly, that’s just the kind of thing I would have loathed as a kid. I always got a lot of satisfaction from believing I was more progressive than the school. Your place would take that away. Don’t you think it is better for superiors not to understand the people under them too well? I like a rather stern authority that I can hate and feel morally better than.”
“And overthrow?” Because he had done less talking, Schild’s cigarette was down to a nub carrying a long, quivering ash. A sudden burst of fresh morning wind snowed it across his blouse.
“Sure, sure, but there will always be something else.” Throat parched, Reinhart threw away his half-smoked smoke and said: “I accept life. Some things in it are by nature hateful.”
“You are the most extreme reactionary I have ever met,” said Schild, but pleasantly; almost, one could imagine, with approval.
As they turned into Argentinische they met a light, drifting film of rain, which was refreshing to the warm cheeks but also a douche on Reinhart’s spirit. He had run off at the mouth, revealed the location of his defenses and their strength, while wise Schild had really said nothing. Worse, he could not have faith in his own honesty: in action he had always proved to be the least independent of men, not reactionary at all. This evening, for example, he had needed Schild’s open ear.
They cut through the little woods and came out by quiet detachment headquarters, passed the sleeping hospital, and in the now generous rain took each other’s leave at the corner of officers’ row. Schild dripped water from the end of his obvious nose and smelled of wet wool, even as Reinhart did himself, and had trouble with his spectacles.
“I’m supposed to wear glasses myself,” Reinhart said. “For reading. I am farsighted. But I broke them in England. ... Do you feel all right now, Lieutenant? Frankly, I thought you acted a bit odd early this evening.”
Schild removed his cap and wrung it like a sponge, put it back all wrinkly. Then he saw Reinhart’s frown, took it off again and smoothed it across his knee. “Okay now? Reinhart, you are a fop. Why yes, I feel good. But I thought you were interested only in yourself.”
“Never did I say that,” Reinhart answered dolefully. “You have any idea of how late it is? We must have walked ten or fifteen miles.”
“Three-thirty perhaps, four, who knows? If you get in trouble at your outfit I’ll fix it.” He returned Reinhart’s salute and said: “I never have anybody to talk to, either. Thank you for letting me come along.”
Reinhart watched him all the way to the gate of his billet, thinking, I have done you a favor? His own waterladen cap weighed on his head like a sandbag; he removed and wrung it à la Schild. When he looked again through the rain his friend was stepping safely over the threshold.
Reinhart approached the rear of his apartment building on the alley that was but an unpaved continuation of the officers’ street. He stifled an impulse to climb up and enter his flat through the balcony, which might have incited the half-awakened Marsala to witless mayhem. Similarly, before going around front he took a leak in the bushes lest toilet-flushing would wake his buddy. While in midstream he heard a door down the street and there, inexplicably, came out Schild again, walking to the corner at which they had parted, and then out of sight up Possweg. Cursing the capacity of his bladder, he at length finished. At the corner he saw Schild enter the dark grove where the mess tents were pitched. It’s too early to get coffee! The guard there will shoot him! were among his angry self-expostulations. Reaching there himself, he saw the tents were farther to the left than he had remembered; besides, Schild was fifty yards into the trees and still going.
Like an Iroquois, Reinhart crept silently from pine to pine until there were few left and a plain like a soccer field showed light before him. At the edge of the grove Schild stood with two civilian persons, one of thickset middle height and the other a great lump of fellow larger than Reinhart by three inches in every dimension and, by the set of his massive shoulders, no Bach. Drawn up on the soccer field beyond, a black European sedan.
Perhaps because the wind was wrong—at that moment he realized the rain had stopped and the wind risen, cold against damp clothing—he heard nothing of their speech, knew only that they looked at Schild and Schild at the ground. But the evil voice sounded within him: The black market, how like a Jew. As if upon that signal, the two men seized his friend, each on an arm, and dragged him towards the car.
Fear’s fat serpent squirmed down Reinhart’s throat, circled the belly, and undulated through his intestines. Even the smaller guy looked as if he were built of bricks—the larger one was a monster; he could not have felled him with a baseball bat. They wore cloth caps and neckerchiefs and dark clothing, were some European kind of thugs, ranged against a little Jew and an over-sized boy. Oh, unfair! he whimpered and had every intent to hide, but was too limp to stand still, too weak to walk away, so no choice was left for a coward but to run towards them.
He squished over the wet sand and was nowhere near when they heard him and turned. The large one released Schild and stalked forward.
“Go away, boy,” he growled in German. “This is no affair of yours.”
Reinhart slowed but kept coming, still too scared to stop.
“He means no harm,” said Schild. “Let me talk to him.”
Brick-built, maintaining his hold, answered: “All right, but not in English.” And told Monster to stand aside.
“This is private business,” Schild said harshly. “Intelligence work. I’ll thank you to keep your nose out of it.”
Reinhart stopped three feet from the giant. It was so strange to be addressed in German by his friend. Groping for vocabulary, he said: “What kind of Intelligence needs the capture of an American?”
“Damn you,” Schild yelled furiously, shaking off Bricks’s arm. “Don’t come here with your naïve bungling. I give you a direct order to leave this minute if you value your stripes.”
Planning something, an old trick of movie combat, Reinhart trembled in anticipation—for it never could be worked in real life, on this damp plain, in wet clothing, by a coward who was sure he had misjudged appearances. With relief he heard the threat to his rank. A man in authentic danger would hardly be so precise.
“All right.” Shamefaced, he added: “I forgot to tell you earlier: I have never understood the Jews, but I’m not proud of it.”
Schild answered: “Neither have I, neither am I.” Yet his head rose in pride.
Monster mockingly repeated: “Die Juden habe ich nie verstanden—”
Knowing his fist would shatter, and caring desperately about it—he hated to be hurt—certain that as usual he was wrong and lost and impotent, he released what little reason he had accumulated in twenty-one years, wheeled badly, plunged slippingly, and weakly struck into the giant’s armored belly. Wondrously he felt his hand prevail as if it had punched a cushion. The man’s deep guts wormed against his knuckles. Monster buckled, retching. Reinhart kicked his face.
He turned towards Bricks, just in time to save Schild’s blood, for the man exposed a paratrooper’s gravity knife, dropped the blade, and waded in low.
He screamed: “Get away you fool!” Which brave little Schild ignored, waiting defenseless, calmly, Jewlike, for his fate.
Reinhart sprang, Bricks did quick footwork, Reinhart fell flat in muck and looking up saw Schild professionally elude the blade, simultaneously knee Brick’s groin and chop his neck. Wilting, Bricks cried in pain, to which Schild’s cruel answer was a hacking at his forearm, precision hands above and below, that snapped the bone.
But Monster, face of gore, had meanwhile lumbered over. With his hobnailed sole he opened Reinhart’s cheek as you would boot a melon. On all fours, Reinhart took another, ill aimed; still, his cropped skull was grooved from fore to aft and red fluid flowed out and blinded him. A third and he would be dead. It was all very real.
Unseeing, he crabbed as Monster swung again; he tumbled over, cleared his eyes. His life’s dear blood left gout on gout; his bare cheekbone sorely caught the wind; but he got up. He stalked Monster, who great as he was now retreated; who could not have been an ex-SS man, for they were not craven. He caught him, took the battering of the leaden fists, bore in inexorably, embraced him in murderous love. Monster’s hands belabored his kidneys, tried for his neck, but he was now in too close; therefore they tightened around his own small-of-back and sought to break it.
His head within the hollow of Monster’s neck, he bit for the jugular. The skin was tough as chain mail, and besides he could not close his jaws, having an obsession this would push his senses through that cranial wound which Monster was opening further with each chin-stab. Then did he turn his face sidewise, upon the good cheek, and join his hands—he could just barely, around that iron barrel—and compressed, and it was hopeless.
From his good eye he saw Schild leave the fallen, whining Bricks and come to punish Monster’s back, futilely, without a weapon. The rabbit punches which felled Bricks bounced harmlessly from Monster’s invulnerable nape. Slowly Reinhart’s spine began to crack. But then within the clasp he believed so weak, so did Monster’s ribs, fibrously, like celery, yet not in sufficient time. For there was Bricks rising from the ground, crippled, twisted, knife in a left hand sufficient for the job on Schild’s unguarded back.
“Lieutenant... behind you,” he panted, his voice loose air and too little of that. At the cost of his life he loosed the hold on Monster that curtailed his own breath, and Monster exploited it. Off his axis now he shouted: “Schild for the love of Christ—” Still was Schild deaf, the bastard; he would give his life for Reinhart’s which was already gone. A last hope was to call the worst he could; to stir his friend, if only by hate, to preserve his own hide. And surely he hated him enough then to frame the cry, as one can only hate him who makes you beneficiary of his total sacrifice. Jew, I want them to kill you.
He never said it aloud; too authentically had it sounded through the chambers of his heart. Rather have him dead than hear that knell.
So, looking into his eyes, he saw Schild get it once, twice, thrice, in terrible thumps up to the knife’s haft, and squint in agony and sink. His thick glasses slid down his thin nose. He fell behind Monster, sparing Reinhart further sight, but his feet were in view and writhing.
Now came Reinhart’s turn. Monster was killing him as it was, but Brick’s dagger were quicker. Yearning for peace he awaited its first nick; getting it, heard a queer noise which he supposed was his heart ticking out. Monster loosed him slightly, turned head to look at Bricks in the sedan, stripping gears, driving off.
Monster roared, and was cut short by the vise of Reinhart’s arms. He pleaded, shedding tears and blood from his raw face, and Reinhart was moved but could not oppose his own awful will. Not even when he heard the tearing of the vertebral column beneath his wrists could he free poor Monster, who thus died in his embrace. Life all gone, he let him fall. He knelt by Schild and searched for a pulse. He found none. He retrieved the spectacles, which were unbroken, and mounted them on his friend: he recognized him again.
He stood up, victor, and surveyed the field. Then jealous Death, who wins all battles, wound him in its dark sheet.