REINHART TURNED ON HIS side in bed and played it cool, studying the little blue light at the end of the ward. He saw Very’s large, maternal shadow in the darker cavity of the office doorway. She had been his first concern on awakening from that positive death on the bloody field—somewhere back, weeks, he supposed; part of his trouble was a derangement of the sense of time. ... No, he would not lie. Be fair to yourself, the doctors told him, but surely that did not mean believing falsehoods. His first occupation had been resentment and self-pity, for Schild stayed dead.
He passed out again when his wounds were treated in the emergency clinic, not from pain but in another attempt to die. In vain. You could not beat the Jews at sacrifice; it was their profession. Next he had come conscious as a patient in the ward for Superficial Wounds and Contusions, of which he did not remember Marsala was master until he heard the buddy’s raucous complaints issuing from the treatment room: an underling wardboy had loused up the bandage-count. But the evidence of normality in the world outside his head terrified him, and when Marsala came to the bedside Reinhart simulated coma.
Later, en route to the night shift on the psycho ward, Veronica stopped in. Marsala was goofing off someplace, so Reinhart showed life. Then it was that he thought of her troubles and forgot for a moment his own.
“I’m sorry, Very, I tried as I promised but ran into a snag.”
He felt her pat his brush and wondered where the wound up there had gone. The gash in his cheek he still had; its bandage refracted the vision of his left eye.
“Honey...” Poor Very suffered tears. “... was this terrible fight because of me?” Yet she once again looked full-blown, her splendid flesh bursting, wherever it could, from the commonplace seersucker uniform.
“No, I never fight for any purpose. If I had wanted something from those Germans I would have licked their boots.” He now licked his lips and found the cuts towards the left corner and the bitter medication upon them.
“Don’t be so fresh with yourself,” she said. Later, in his need to tabulate things, he recalled this as the first of a series of such admonitions from practically everybody.
“Anyway, I’m stuck here and I don’t know for how long.” He reached for her hand and then, remembering the other patients, gave it up.
Bending, she displayed the partition of her breasts and whispered: “Don’t worry about me any more—I’m O.K. now—false alarm.”
He laughed in a hysterical, private place, for one reason, because he could not in public: his face was cracked. There you had a capsule history of human affairs, amidst the larger one in which they participated with everyone else, including the nearby patients who gawked innocently at Veronica’s body: what began in birth ended in death. Except that this one was all a mistake.
“Schild—you know I thought for a while that Schild was your lover”—she caught at her mouth—“no, that had nothing to do with this trouble, believe me... and he thought I was, and now none of it matters. ... Very, look at the top of my head and tell me what you see.”
She did more, exploring with a finger. “I think it is a slight bruise and nothing worse. You’ll be better in no time.”
“Are you sure? He kicked me bad. I was certain my scalp was laid open.”
“You know it’s all bone, with only a thin layer of skin and hair—” Her big teeth glistened in fun. “Excuse me, well, everybody has a bonehead, me too.”
“Only mine is solid—but are you sure?”
“Clear the way for added cargo!” She bounced-sat on the edge of the bed and waylaid her rising hem at the bulge of rolled nylon. “It’s pretty hard to ‘lay open’ a scalp; there’s not much to cut and it would take something awful to break the bone wide open. Though of course there’s fractures, but you don’t usually know they’re there until you look at the x-ray. ... Know who’s ward nurse here? Eleanor Leek, the cute little plump girl from the party where we met. She danced with that Russian. Sure you do! I’ll put in a good word for you. Now I have to go, the schizzes all start crying if I’m not on time. Oh, did you want to talk about the fight? But I don’t think it’s good yet. Rest awhile. Now kiddy, I’ll say goodbye. I would kiss you but everybody’s lookin’.”
As the Santa Maria must have swept from the Bahaman harbor, past the awed little brown men in their crummy dugouts, proceeding westward still, so Veronica sailed in splendor up the ward aisle and out the door, flying the high standard of her winged cap, and the natives returned to their fishing and coconuts.
Soon afterwards Lieutenant Leek, whom when he saw her he remembered, the fat, homely, merry person, hurried in from the corridor.
“Good, you’re conscious. Holy cow, you kept the brass waiting all day. Can you talk to them now?”
“Who?” With Very’s departure he stepped on a merry-go-round which turned slowly to no music. “I don’t feel so good.”
“I’ll give you a pain pill soon as they leave.” She left his sight and in a moment or two he was ringed by many male uniforms.
For one, the commander of the 1209th General Hospital, Lieutenant Colonel Fester, whom in three years’ service with the outfit he was seeing for the fourth time, despite the legend that Fester was ubiquitous.
“Now Steinhart, look sharp,” the colonel said in a clarion tenor. He wore white gloves, like a doorman. “This is a terrible thing you are a party to, but I know any man of mine can defend his actions. Handpicked, every man Jack of you. Remember how we kept those niggers out of our latrine on the troopship coming over? Medics, maybe. They don’t let us carry guns, but by Jesus we’ve got fists. I’d put my hand in the fire—if I didn’t have this eczema—for any one of you and know you’d return the favor—say, are you awake? Here you, Teats, or whatever your name is. Nurse! Give this man a hypo of something. What do you use nowadays? You’ve got all the drugs in the world nowadays. It wasn’t like that in the old days. By God, APC capsules, gentian violet, and you had it; after that, the pine box. Remember the old days, Major, or was that before your time?”
Reinhart opened his eyes. Next to the colonel stood a major with a young face, yet old gray sideburns.
“We’ll talk about that later, sir,” the major answered with short patience. “Here, the fellow is awake—”
“Coming around, Steinhart?” the colonel cried. “Good, now stay awake for a moment. This is Major Koenig from G-2, Berlin District. I don’t have to tell you he is a Very Important Person so far as we are concerned here in our humble way. He wants to ask you about last night.”
Reinhart also saw Captain St. George, lachrymose; an enlisted man, PFC Walter Walsh, swelled with gravity; Lieutenant Nader, resentfully watching the colonel; and finally, a brutish-faced captain who wore the crossed-pistols badge of the military police.
“Your name is Reinhart, correct?” asked Major Koenig. “How are you feeling, Corporal?”
“Carlo T., 15302320, and a little dizzy, sir.”
“Well, who isn’t? And I haven’t just broken anybody’s back, either,” Koenig said. “By the way, how did you do that?”
“Only because he would have broken mine if I didn’t.”
“I asked how.”
“Just caught him around the waist and bent him backwards.”
“Good fellow!” broke in the colonel. “I used to watch you wrestle at Camp Pickett every Friday night, Reinkoenig. You made me lots of money. That’s why I chose you for the 1209th. You still a corporal? Months ago I told that goddamned Lovett to put you on orders for a third stripe.”
“Thank you, sir, but I had basic at Camp Barkeley—”
“Quite all right, my boy. Just answer these questions—”
The major asked: “Do you feel well enough to get up for a few minutes? It’s difficult to talk here. The nurse said we may use the ward office.”
Reinhart lay quiet for a moment, his right as a casualty, then indicated he would try. Blackness flooded his brain as he sat upright, and he heard their voices as if through the closed window of a ballroom. His wrist was seized.
“Come on, fellow,” the colonel shouted.
In transit Reinhart slept awhile and when he came to, watching the red-black ocean recede, thought they all had gone.
“You need a pick-me-up!” the colonel roared. “Teats! Mix an ounce of medical alcohol with grapefruit juice and bring it to this soldier.” But Lieutenant Leek had crept off to hide.
“It’s all right, Major,” Reinhart said to Koenig, who offered no aid nor sympathy. “I can make it.”
The major walked smartly towards the office. Reinhart shook himself, feeling a twinge in his cheek, slipped into the dirty canvas slippers waiting below the bed, rose and followed. With all manner of noise the colonel dogged him but was denied at the door.
“This,” said Koenig, standing just within, “is an Intelligence matter, sir. Captain St. George and I will have to speak privately with Corporal Reinhart. If you gentlemen can give us a few moments?”
“Me neither?” The MP officer’s growl betrayed a fright at his exclusion. He put a broken cigarette into his mouth and tried to light it, getting only air. From the patients out in the ward arose an anonymous murmur of ridicule, which was tonic to the colonel.
He said: “As to me and Nader and PFC Walter, we’ll mix here with the men till you need us.” Followed by his reluctant entourage he went back down the aisle between the beds and shortly, among his bursts of loud, merry scatology, came the obstreperous derision which he was famous for misunderstanding as popularity.
Making an effort, Reinhart indeed felt better and stronger. The major, however, who sat upon a white-enameled chair, directed him to lie upon the operating table.
There was no allowance for discussion, so he did. St. George—he saw the genuine sadness on the fat face, and pitied him, and liked him—slumped against the wall.
“Now, PFC Walsh,” said Koenig, “who was mess guard last night, heard noises on the sports field and went to investigate. By the time he got there you were unconscious and the two other men were dead. He states he heard an automobile engine, and there were tire tracks in the sand. May we hear your account?”
On his back, unable to see his interrogator, Reinhart spouted perspiration and anticipated a nameless catastrophe. Unknown enemies held him supine and prepared to work upon him an obscene damage; he felt womanly, about to be raped. Yet all through this, his fluent voice romped on, as if it were rather the child of another man. The voice told of the chance, friendly encounter early in the evening between Reinhart and Schild, of a purposeless wander to the Tiergarten, since the black-market contact never appeared and they thus could not buy their Meissen china. Then they took a drink in a jerry-built cafe on the Ku-damm, looked for a ride home and finding none began to walk. They lost their way temporarily. Finally they reached Zehlendorf. Then the straight story of seeing Schild enter the grove, and the fight.
“There must be more,” said Koenig in his ominous, factual way.
St. George spoke for the first time: “Lieutenant Schild had some of his own contacts whom I knew nothing about. We worked in that manner. Perhaps it wasn’t SOP—”
“You said all that.”
But once begun, St. George was briefly invincible. He owed it to his late colleague. And Reinhart thought, Schild was closer to him than to me; he was never really my friend, yet I did what I could to save him; why do I tell myself I was his killer?
“Perhaps it wasn’t SOP, but I respected his intelligence. Then he was a Jew, you know. I never thought about it before, but it could hardly have been pleasant service here where they did such horrible things to his people. ... One of his German contacts was a little old fellow dressed like a workingman, who rode a bike. He came once to the billet when the Russian stayed with us. But perhaps he wasn’t there for Nate. When I saw him he was talking with the landlady.”
“Russian!” blurted Koenig. He reassumed self-control. “You can tell me all that later, Captain. At the moment we are interested in the corporal.”
Koenig did not trust Reinhart, so much was clear. But Reinhart had changed since he killed a man. Earlier he would have hated Koenig. Now he was beholden to him; wished he would let him rise, but knew he deserved no favors.
The major asked: “This little old fellow that Captain St. George mentions—was he one of the two Germans on the sports field?”
Reinhart answered no. Schatzi—Schild knew him too. He remembered the doctor’s revelation and his own bombastic threat to kill this complex person both victimizer and victim. Doubtless no one took it seriously. Could they have seen him a few hours later! But Schild had, and thought him inadequate, and come to help, and died.
“I take it then you know the man St. George means, if you are sure he was not there.”
“I believe so,” said Reinhart, “he hangs out around here. He is a big wheel in the black market.”
“Could this have been a dispute over a black-market deal?”
St. George answered, scandalized: “Certainly not! I never knew a man less interested in money than Nate.”
Koenig sighed. “The corporal has just testi—stated he and Lieutenant Schild went to the Tiergarten, were driven to that area by you, yourself, in which you concur, to meet someone who offered a set of Meissen china for sale.”
“Sure,” St. George laughed indignantly, “but that was for Reinhart!”
“That’s right,” said Reinhart to the major he could not see, endeavoring to meet St. George’s eye with a message of loyalty. But the captain seemed to avoid him.
“A do-gooder, the late Lieutenant Schild.”
St. George answered: “Always,” and hung his head.
Koenig continued his keen probing, to which his immaculate and subtle contempt was an additional tool. Reinhart dissembled in the only way he could, by blondly, wholesomely baring all but his suspicions, which anyway was legally impeccable. Later, the MP officer was let in, and Nader and Walsh, and, perhaps with an idea to stop his noise, briefly, the colonel.
Koenig suddenly finished; whether for good and all, naturally he did not indicate. Nader and the MP, although they showed a personal distaste for Reinhart, seemed in the absence of contrary evidence to believe his story and agree he must stand a court-martial which would formally find him guilty of homicide in the line of duty, sentence one dollar. This to forestall an attempt by Monster’s heirs, if they could be found—he remained unidentified—to bring charges.
Everybody having left, Reinhart assumed he could get up, and did so, and was frightened by the appearance of St. George, who lingered behind the operating table.
“Listen,” said the captain, with suppressed dislike, “maybe you know. Does Lieutenant Schild have any family? We don’t know who to inform. For some reason he gave as next-of-kin the name of a prostitute in Paris, Texas. I never had occasion to look at the record until this morning, and then I recalled her name from when we served together at Camp Maxey.”
“I never knew him well,” said Reinhart, whoozily standing.
“Who did? ...He had a strange sense of humor, and this shows he would go all the way with it.” Still with obvious unfriendliness, he came to Reinhart’s support. “You see, we were in combat zones since D-Day. He could have been killed at any time. But for the joke he gave the name of this streetwalker.”
Reinhart took the offered arm. They moved together into the ward. At his bed, first one on the right-hand line, he thanked the captain and shook hands, and saw astonished gratitude, and understood merely another error: St. George did not dislike, but rather fearing being disliked.
“Oh that’s all right,” said the captain, pumping his fingers. “If you don’t mind, maybe I can drop in from time to time to see you. But you’ll be better soon.” He left anxiously. He returned and placed a just-opened package of Parliament cigarettes on the night table. “Have a luxury smoke.” At the foot of the bed he turned and said: “He was a good fellow,” and waited.
“Yes, he was,” Reinhart answered and blacked out. He dreamed he was twelve years old; selling newspapers from door to door he accumulated money for a bicycle; someone stole the money but when he went outside there was the bike on the porch; a Negro applied Simonize to the fenders; so you’re a Negro, he said, isn’t that fine!; the black man rose in terror, great white eyeballs gleaming, and ran down the street. When Reinhart awakened, the same Negro, whom he had never before seen in life, carrying a tray of food walked past the bed and to his own, number five, where he sat near its head and ate rather insolently, winding spaghetti into a spoon.
Leek appeared with a tray for Reinhart containing various forms and colors of mush. He was suddenly horny; she was not so bad. He invited her to come sit upon the palm of his hand. She thought he waved her off, and went. He called her back and asked the time. Six-ten. He slept for an hour. Awakening, he asked the time of the fellow in the next bunk, who had a wart in the center of a bushy red eyebrow. Six-eleven. He denigrated the fellow’s watch, cursed its owner. The fellow slyly turned his back, and Reinhart cried into the pillow because he could not hurt him.
When everybody had gone to sleep he wandered into the toilets and counting them again and again at last made his choice of one to sit upon and read a comic book. He had not finished a page when a wardboy whom he did not recognize entered and ordered him back to bed.
“You been in here two hours.”
Reinhart snarled contempt. “I’ve been in the Army since Christ was a PFC, and don’t you forget it, you prick of misery.”
But he went. Someone kept putting a flashlight in his eyes and forced him to eat sulfa pills and drink four glasses of water.
One day Marsala, whom he was forced to admit knowing, sat on the edge of the bed and whispered, so that the bastard with the red eyebrows couldn’t hear: “Carlo, whadduh yuh doin’? You been here three weeks, your cheek is almost healed. But you keep acting crazy, they send you to Psycho. I don’t shit you, pal. I heard Captain Cage talk about it this morning.”
Reinhart had all he could do to keep from spitting in his ugly face. “Here’s what I say to you: go to hell.”
“See what I mean. Whadduh yuh want to be sore for? Jesus, I’m distracted.” He rubbed his thick and whorled temples. “So you took too much sulfa, but that don’t stay on permanent. Your white-corpuscle count is okay—”
“You flunky, what do you know about medicine? You traitor, you make me puke.” He stared fiercely at the quondam buddy, stared through him as if he were cellophane—a gift he had nowadays and would have done anything to get rid of.
“Okay,” said Marsala. “Okay then. You and I are through.
Get it? As soon as I get back to the apartment your crap goes out inna street.” He symbolically spat. “And the same goes for your lousy putana, that little kid who’s young enough to be ya granddaughter, dirty guy.”
The return on his aggression soothed Reinhart, convinced him that even wounded and mad he was potent. In delight, he said: “I hurt your feelings, didn’t I?”
Marsala looked at him a long time, his ferocity melting into a kind of grief. “Nah, I consider the source. ... Look, what for did you tell that kid Trudy she could have your extra OD shirt and pants? Don’t you think you will ever get out of here?”
“Did you give them to her?” He saw the whole thing and was serene.
Marsala clicked his teeth in lascivious regret. “You didn’t say she could have them, you ain’t even seen her since you’re here, am I right? She talked me into it, kid. I’m sorry. When we get through and are in there washing up she says she is thirteen. Jesus I’m a dirty guy.” He slapped his wrist with two fingers.
Happily, Reinhart lied: “Of course I did. I sent her a note. I’m going home soon and don’t need that extra stuff. Give it all to her and take her for yourself. She is really sixteen and if she’s old enough to have it, that’s old enough to use it. I apologize for being nasty. You’re the best buddy I ever had, and when I get home I’ll write you a letter once a month. ...” He closed his eyes and kept on talking. When he opened them again Marsala was gone and Red Eyebrows, who he also noticed had red hair, was peering at him most curiously.
“Hey Red,” he called. “I didn’t mean what I said yesterday about your watch. I was still a little dizzy from this trouble I had the other night. Have a luxury cigarette.” He picked up the Parliaments and handed them over. They were strangely dry and friable for a fresh pack.
“Yesterday?” asked Red. “That was almost a month ago.” He laughed as if he were insane.
But when later in the day they transferred a patient to the Neuropsychiatry Ward, it was not Red.
Veronica’s shadow flowed back into the black cavity of the office, meaning all was quiet on the ward. Reinhart himself certainly never made a sound. In the latrine he had even perfected a technique for micturating without noise. He wished to call no attention to himself, because he was altogether mad.
It owed to that kick in the head which couldn’t be proved. The staff in Superficial Wounds assured him he suffered from a mild toxic psychosis, the effects of an overdose of sulfa, for which they took full responsibility. Having admitted their guilt, they insisted it make him free, especially since the technical manual, Guides to Therapy for Medical Officers, called the reaction rare. And as to Reinhart’s confession that he habitually swung the pills into the deep socket of his jaw, drank the water, and spit them out when the nurse turned her back: in their view this illusion was rather an index to how many he had swallowed and been deranged by. Apologizing, they force-fed him gallons of water. Drowning, he was still mad.
The Psycho people, on the other hand, kept their convictions secret. Lieutenant Llewellyn walked on eggs from bed to bed on his morning tour of inspection, wearing the silky, untrimmed mustache to make himself look older and the plastic-rimmed eyeglasses for wisdom, carrying his mouth slack and moist in an advertisement of patience. He was rather leery of Reinhart; few indeed of his patients had killed a man with their bare hands.
Captain Millet, the chief, stayed always in the office and one went to see him at intervals. From crown to temple he shone bald as Bach; around the ears, a ballet tutu of salt-and-pepper hair. As Llewellyn was listener, Millet questioned, and had a talent for the irrelevant: Do you like girls, did you ever play with yourself, do you have headaches, did you dress up in your mother’s clothes when a boy, what do you think other people think of you, what do you want to be?
To the last Reinhart invariably answered: “Able to tell time again.” For this was the heart of the matter, but Millet, bored, toyed with his pen and never took a note.
His head he had stopped bothering to mention; if Superficial Wounds, in whose area of interest it lay, could not find that seepage of brain fluid, Psycho, devoted to the impalpable, would hardly. On the basis of many motion pictures about amnesiacs he drew up his own strategy of treatment: he could be cured by another raking blow on the skull. But owing to the queer angle, he could not slug himself sufficiently hard, and he was afraid to ask one of the nuts to do it, who might kill him. Which brought to mind an essential feature of his condition: a lack of interest in death as therapy.
Once he had tried strenuously to die, and again the next morning, when it had seemed necessary to the Gestalt of himself-Schild-and-Germany. Now it would be a simple missing of the point, for the self within him was already unearthly and losing the rest were impertinent. If someone sought to kill him he might not resist, but he would not raise his hand against himself.
His inner cautions to the contrary, in a burst of bravado he delivered this information to Captain Millet. Who blankly answered: “That is comforting.” And Reinhart was ashamed of his vanity and of his suddenly revealed wish for Millet’s affection, whom he didn’t even like and to whom he had bragged only because, he thought, Millet didn’t care.
The captain went on: “You mean, you will not commit suicide by violence. That is too easy, whereas what always attracts you is the difficult.”
“No,” Reinhart confessed. “The impossible.”
An ear fringe grew as fast as a full head of hair; Millet needed a haircut, which deficiency, however, and now a vulnerable smile—his teeth were crooked—canceled the disapproval from his next remark: “Why do you think you are so important?”
“Because—” Reinhart groped for something smashing; in his bare cupboard was one bone; he seized it—“because I am insane.”
Millet said seriously: “The Army may make errors in assignment, but they were right about me. I can show you my diplomas. I assure you, you are not insane and will not be.”
“Then I am a fake.”
Millet’s pen scratched upon his notepad, but Reinhart saw only doodles, and not imaginative ones at that. “As late as the nineteenth century they used to chain patients to the wall and whip the disorders out of them. The treatment was oftentimes successful. It might be used today except that its good effects were, I believe, only temporary and it required enormous physical exertion on the therapists’ part. Now we have the lazy man’s method. When you decide whether or not you are a fake, come in and tell me.”
Well, he guessed he had made a mark on Millet, if Millet talked to him in that ironical way. The captain was softer with the other patients, according to them—for Reinhart sometimes conversed with those who were articulate. The enuretic poseur of a paratrooper, for example, whom Very talked about back in August, had returned. Perhaps he falsified the one symptom, but he had plenty more, couldn’t use a tableknife, thought people were after him, etc.
But having got his special notice from Millet, Reinhart went back to where he started. Because his case was irrelevant to the fundamental proposition by which lunatics and psychiatrists are one: Life goes on. And not only proceeds to the measure of the ticking second hand, but also abides in wondrous detail which perhaps one can only know when on furlough from the process.
Who ever before had opportunity to study the fabric of a pillowcase? The close and naked eye saw no two threads the same. And the canvas slippers: their weave black with dirt, rich with memories of various feet walking diverse floors in many lands; their old human smell, sour, interesting. Chipped was the white paint on the bedstead, revealing multiform corrosions, patina, wounds in ancient iron; whom had it supported and in the aftermath of what: Caesarean sections, irrigations of the maxillary sinus, removal of the vermiform appendix, mere hang-overs, some deaths. Blankets of wealthy white wool, shrunken gray pajamas gaping at the fly and over the heart USAMD embroidered in red; maroon robe of weary corduroy, too short; night table all one’s own offering water in pitcher and glass, and beneath, on the low-slung shelf, colored books random and in shadow.
And through the window—lingering on the glass itself, marvelous substance almost invisible, metamorphosis of gritty sand, just as the butterfly comes from a worm and remembers it not—a view of this side of the grove on the other side of which, on the sand, some fellows murdered his only friend while he watched through another window, that glass bell under which he was wax fruit.
In this celebration of matter he got through his mornings, which were worst. From within came spontaneous improvement as the sun traveled towards America; afternoons were fair, he could sleep, and wake up in early evening, glad of life’s refuge from dreams. As natural light failed and Edison’s took over, he was better. Finally, each dark midnight, the absolute cure: bored with the soul’s business he lay unsleeping, yet not sleepless, believing in these hours of exuberant health that everybody should have a goal. During such a period of clarity and courage he decided to take his discharge, when it came, in Berlin and marry Lori.
Or join with her in whatever other relationship external conditions would allow, the mode was irrelevant; internal coherence was all. Even ménage à trois, in thinking of which he signified his affection, respect, and pity for Bach, nay his downright love for this man who needed and had a nurse, not a wife. She would continue in that role, plus which he would gain a friend to listen interminably. Reinhart spoke frankly to himself of its romanticism: this boy from distant and simple Ohio oh beautiful for spacious skies and amber waves of grain, in a rathole under the rubble of a dark and evil idea, living in adultery and cuckoldry sanctioned by mutual love, talking art and philosophy: there at last was the old German idealism he had searched for so long.
On the third night of his planning, in the second week of his residence in Psycho, he believed it politic to leave the bed and steal to the office. The paratrooper, next to him, sobbed peacefully; from elsewhere sounded placid onanistic rustles; the coast was clear.
Veronica, back to doorway, sorted files. Before Reinhart could announce himself—because he meant no harm—he was seized from behind by two husky wardboys leaping out of ambush, who were lucky to remind him poignantly of Monster’s dread embrace, and he offered no resistance.
“Oh that’s okay, fellows,” said Very when she saw, holding up parallel fingers—for some reason, all five instead of the standard two—“this kid and I are just like that.” She directed them to the treatment room, to prepare wet cocoons against an expected need towards dawn. They left, grumbling fealty.
“I was wondering when you’d come, you ingrate. I got put on nights so you could.”
She almost leered at him, and he thought: working here gets them all eventually. They sat on either side of the desk, which had kneeholes on both sides, so that his and her legs touched. Soon she squeezed one of his between both of hers and crooned: “I’ve been feeling rational guilt lately. I thought of all I owe you, Carlo, and I could just cry. You were my friend when I had nobody else to turn to, and the fact that it all came to nothing doesn’t make any difference.” She slapped on top of his the right hand of the high-scorer on St. Something’s girls’ basketball squad of 1940.
“Glad to do it, Very,” he answered quickly, for she was in the mood for something and he had little time; at that cursed early first light of Berlin he would lose his wits again. “I—”
“And I thought regardless of what went on you’ve always been my best boy friend, right here.” She indicated her left melon, underneath which lay the heart. “Because you stuck with me, and whether you ever said it or not, that is love.” She winced in ecstasy and pile-drove her linked fists into the back of that same old hand of his, flat upon the table. “Oh darling, you won’t regret it!”
He withdrew; another such love and he was crippled for life. “Look, Very, what I wanted to talk about was—”
“I’ve been a fool,” she said. “All the other men I ever knew wanted only one thing, like, excuse my French, this son of a bitch—”
“I don’t want to know who he was,” Reinhart interrupted. “And I’ll tell you something about me.” He had to do this, it was the only means by which he would ever get to his business. “So do I. Whatta you think I am, a fairy? I just use a different strategy. Now this thing about the abortion. If I could have arranged that, then I would always have something over you, get it? You’d be forced to let me have what I want.” He feared it was too strong: what business was so pressing that one must for its sake kick another human being in love’s groin?
Her quick answer spared his recantation. Through tears of happiness she sang, “Darling, I knew you loved me. You will never get a job in Hollywood, you are a terrible actor! You’re afraid your feelings will be hurt, poor dear. But I tell you it’s all right, I dote on you. I don’t care if you are an enlisted man!”
So. One should not always walk against the wind. He rose and called her to him. Checking the door, she came. She had found him out, he admitted. He must have her, for love, and now.
Oh, oh, oh.
Now.
No, no, no.
Now.
Impossible. Duty. No. Where?
Her bailiwick. He was only a visitor.
Maybe—but no.
Now.
Ohhh. Terrible. Yet love was good.
Tell Tweedledum and Tweedledee to watch the shop.
They’ll know.
So? A couple of privates.
So while he waited in the corridor, Very stopped by the treatment room and gave her excuse for ten minutes’ absence. Then, down the hall, they found an empty, moon-illuminated ward whose patients had been transferred to another on the first floor, but the beds remained.
Not in love, he made gentle approaches. In love, sitting on the bed-edge, she grew fiercely reluctant. He had to take every button of her uniform as it were a separate fort. In her white slip she cried for shame and changed her mind, and having no effect on his, slapped his face but left her hand there and coyly squashed his nose. Dead weight he must lift to draw slip skirt over bottom. Opposing her own divestiture, she nevertheless stripped off his pajama shirt. His cheek wound throbbed in each little red hole left by the stitches; the invisible scalp-ache ached as if it would have a separate orgasm. In the sexiest presentation she did not match: brassiere of pink, pants of blue. A coldness on his back foretold that the swelling former was a hoax of sponge rubber or wadded powder puffs, and he knew he could not perform. But as he retreated, so did she charge. She liberated the strained hammock and held it conquered and limp as an enemy flag. Real? By Magellan, if they were not real, there were no Eastern and Western Hemispheres, which had sat as their models. En voyage, his trousers were suddenly gone, and also the canvas slippers. He dove towards her sea-blue pants. Then did she bound, like the well-known main, and give him a struggle beside which poor Monster’s had been as a schoolgirl’s in a pillow fight. Trudchen’s old lacerations, which had healed, were reopened in his earlobes, and Very’s teeth were twice as large. His solar was plexed and his clavicle cleaved. She probed for that rib which Adam had given to make her. When they fell to the floor, he hit lowmost, heel-ass-head. His only purpose was tenderness. Under incessant punishment he got her again to the upper level, dropped her on the mattress, goyng, goyng said the springs as she bounced with flying members. She gathered herself and shuddered, blurted: “My God, the night supervisor is due any minute!” She crawled towards the footboard and her clothes. “Shh,” said Reinhart, “I think I hear her now!” She closed her legs, ivory in the half-light, pillars of the world; stood up and listened with flowing hair and sensate, rose-marked, goddess breasts, with belly-swell of satin and velvet groin. On Olympus sounded ox-eyed Hera’s jealous thunder and Aphrodite practiced Selbstmord. “Where?” She heard the silence of the corridor, and was caught en face to Reinhart and borne down through the wine-dark sea.
Later, beached and dripping, she kissed his ten fingers and remarked: “You didn’t hear the supervisor at all.” He grinned splendidly, Zeus-like, and with his godlike ear heard her all over again.
Next morning he arose without his symptoms and with a grand conviction they were no more. In hubris he dared them to appear, dared also to draw up their roster: the quivering wire in his bowels; the cold sweat and hot chill; the vacancy of a head yet heavy; the apprehension of attack; the sense he shared the skin of another man; a feeling of insupport towards the sacroiliac, as if two segments there were rather gristle than bone; the famous derangement of time; a horror over possible events: Would Trooper, writing a letter in the next bunk, ever finish that line? Would Lieutenant Llewellyn start his tour on right or left side? Would, next time he looked, a straight pin still gleam from the crack in the floor?
Hard as he tried, he stayed healthy. Llewellyn, when he came and heard, was happy in his innocent, brotherly way and advised him to counsel with Millet. Trooper, waiting with his own troubles, in his turn told the lieutenant of the old dream of jumping without a chute.
Reinhart dawdled for more self-tests. When finally he was ready to see the captain, he was last in line. Waiting, he felt his euphoria fall into a dull headache of resentment towards the other patients, leavened by a sharp distrust of Millet.
Millet turned his head and blew a large nose into an olive-drab handkerchief, very insulting. “Of course your problems are important,” he said. “More important than any other patient’s. And so are those of each one of them—when they sit before this desk. That is a fact. Do you know what a fact is?”
Reinhart looked defiant. “Yes, something that cannot be changed.”
The captain had finally got a haircut, the ballet skirt was trimmed to a gray fuzz. He sloppily put away his handkerchief.
“Isn’t it rather, something that should not be ignored?”
All right, he knew everything. But Reinhart had seen him blow his nose; he was omnipotent and all-knowing, but he also caught colds.
“Well, I’ll tell you a fact,” Reinhart said. “In this fight, which I got into to help my friend, I killed the big German. It is a terrible thing to kill a man with your bare hands. I regret it, I think from now on I’ll turn the other cheek, but I didn’t have a choice then. But I don’t feel guilty, if you know what I mean. It was a good fight, a fair one, I mean, for him. He was bigger and stronger than me, and we all take our chances. This is a fact. Why then instead do I feel a guilt for Schild’s death? Ill tell you. Because I could have saved him.”
Millet drew some rectangles on his pad. Nothing touched him. He said indifferently: “Why didn’t you?”
Reinhart’s symptoms had returned, full flood. While his chest shivered, bloodless, his suffused head burned; he could not recall whether he had sat in this interview one minute or all day; his whole spine was superimposed rings of lard; he looked for Millet any moment now to draw a long, keen blade and leap upon him.
Still looking away, Millet suddenly ordered him, as captain, not doctor, to answer.
Reinhart shouted, in glorious hatred. “Because I wanted you to die, you bastard.”
“Not me,” said Millet. “I was not there. That is a fact.”
Terrible, deep remorse for the error. Not Millet, certainly: Reinhart wished to kill the only man he could ever talk to, and that was Millet, who wasn’t even a Jew.
“Well, I don’t feel so good. I’m not even sure I’m sitting here right now. Maybe I died back there on the field. What living man always feels guilty of what he hasn’t done?”
“Every single one of us,” Millet answered, although it had not been a question. “You are not special in that regard. In the heat of combat, soldiers always wish their comrades would get hit, as a kind of charm against their being hit themselves, and then experience guilt if their wish comes true—but not till the battle is over and they have time and security enough to brood about, rather than preserve, themselves.”
“But,” cried Reinhart, “that is all just personal. What I am involved in is the murder of a whole continent of Jews by my people.”
“Excuse me.” Millet reddened his nose with the handkerchief.
“Do you know what is good for that?” Reinhart asked. “One of those benzedrine inhalers.”
“Thank you,” said the doctor. “I will try one.”
“Only not just before you go to bed. It will keep you awake. The benzedrine, you know.”
Millet again expressed gratitude, and said: “The personal thing is very interesting. In the three weeks of our talks—”
“Is it so long? I can’t remember, you see.”
“Oh you will, you will. ... Not once have you spoken of Lieutenant Schild as a person. Was he really your friend?”
He understood Millet’s technique well enough. It was always to oppose the freely given and dig for, what was on Millet’s terms and not his own, the withheld. Simulating anger and hurt—for his true feeling was of challenge to a battle of wits—he concluded the interview.
Then, back in bed, which had new, icy sheets, he found as usual he could not organize his thinking. Instead he tasted, in fancy, Veronica’s aphrodisiac body and felt relief that tonight was her night off. Too rich for the blood. There was another crime for which he knew no remorse: taking advantage of her love. And now he compounded it. He wrote a note to Lori, asking her to come see him after work, and had it delivered by a wardboy, PFC Remington, whom he had done a favor for in England. “And,” he cautioned, while Remington studied him with the same uncomfortable eyes he had used since Reinhart became a patient, “the German girl, and for Christ’s sake not Miss Leary.”
Lori came to the ward door an hour after the patients’ suppertime. Nurse Bronson, Very’s substitute, would have turned her away, but fortunately Lieutenant Llewellyn, permissive, dreamy type, had lingered late over his reports.
“A girl,” he said encouragingly to Reinhart. “A visitor. Well, isn’t that kind.”
“It is most important that I see her for at least five minutes. I believe, sir, it would be a kind of therapy for my disorder. Of course I know it is against the rules, and if you say so, I must get rid of her.”
Pain, like a wave of heat, warped Llewellyn’s plastic glasses. “Oh no, Reinhart, we are absolutely opposed to duress! I hope you think better of us than that. I tend to agree with your feeling that you should see this kind lady.”
“You won’t think I’m a malingerer?”
“Please free yourself of any such apprehension. Perhaps you will let me prescribe a mild sedative?” He went, lankily nervous, to a glass-front cabinet.
“No thank you, Lieutenant, she is not upset! Hahaha,” laughed Reinhart.
After a moment Llewellyn bewilderedly smiled. Then he worried: “Normal interpersonal relationships are too rare in this somewhat false environment. No, I agree with you in your feeling that you should see her. But may I ask, if you don’t mind, it is better in my judgment, whatever that is worth, that you and she do not confer out in the ward. It would disturb the other poor fellows. I should be glad to have your opinion on that, however.”
“That’s quite right, sir, quite right.”
“Oh good. Well then, I am sure Miss Bronson, who has a fine sense of these things, will be happy to let you borrow the treatment room.”
“We could be in love for a while,” said Lori, her strong, realistic face undisturbed by his proposal, the harsh light, or Miss Bronson’s periodic doorchecks one of which still echoed in the metal furniture. “But nothing else is practical.”
Suffering a partial aphasia for the German language, he asked her to repeat.
Ingenuously, she shook her hair and said in his own tongue: “Uh little surp-rise: I study English already. ... Wiss one another we may to love for some time. But alvays is untunlich.”
In his anticipatory fancies he had alternated between smugly hearing an absolute acceptance and listening with shame to an unqualified turndown. Instead, he had the usual compromise. He must learn, damn him, that people out there in the universe beyond his head were real and unimaginable. Had Schild really been his friend? What more could he, Reinhart, have done to prove it? Did he really love Lori? If not, why was he willing to live in that abominable cellar?
“Liebling” he answered in German, “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“Then you never will if I try to explain, Unteroffizier Carlo Reinhart, because my talents are not in analysis. You have met my brother and my husband. They never have allowed me to do anything but listen.”
Reinhart left his table-seat, went to her, and took her hand. “Nobody has ever appreciated you.”
Laughing astonishment, she squeezed him back. “What a strange remark! But I assure you that I have nothing to say, I have no ideas, why should I want to speak of nothing?”
“That’s the old Prussian nonsense, children, kitchen, church is all a woman’s good for.” He was made reckless by his indignation: “Then come to America! I will send for you as soon as I arrive.” Till that moment he had never believed he would go there again himself, but the sensible man, the Rotarian, the Philistine, who resides in the liver, somehow survives all blows to head and heart.
“Kinder, Küche, Kirche...,” she repeated. “I have none of them. However, you would think my idea of American women just as funny, no doubt, but I shall spare you. America! This will interest Bach. You surely did not suspect he has long dabbled in technology. Also, he now announces to me that he has invented some means to make a glass which withstands heat. He has done this without a laboratory, simply mathematical equations in a notebook. Is this possible?—no. But in America someone will give money for it, perhaps. Is that likely?—no. But—”
“I didn’t mean you could bring Bach!” Reinhart thought: besides, we already have Pyrex.
She shaped her thin lips as if to pronounce o umlaut.
“You understand,” he said. “I even like him, but be fair once to yourself. That is no kind of life for a young woman. It isn’t right to sacrifice oneself for somebody else, no matter who.”
Placing upon him her famous direct look—that for which he loved her—she answered: “Certainly. So do not do it for me. I don’t know what ‘Teutonic efficiency’ is, since I have lived in Berlin all my life, but here you have an imitation: one, I love Bach very much; two, think of your self-respect! I am old enough to be your mother.”
In confusion’s rage, he shouted: “Then what did you mean by all your hints? If you love Bach why do you say you and I can love each other for a little while? Either way it’s a betrayal of something or other. ... I hate things that are dishonest and secret.”
Hearing the nurse at the door, he withdrew his hand. Miss Bronson’s beet-face, pickled, cautioned against further noise and gave him five minutes to conclude.
“Then you must hate love,” said Lori, “not to mention life—no, I don’t mean that. It has been a long day for me. Fräulein Leary stayed home from duty and had numerous requests—to press her clothes and so on. I think she is in love again. Why not get yourself an American girl? People from different countries really don’t understand each other, as Bach says.”
With one or two other more important items to check off his list, Reinhart put them by, to insert here: “That is why we have these tragic wars.”
Lori rose and gathered her old coat about her waist. “According to Otto, no. War is the one time when they really do understand one another. Therefore he champions obscurity in human affairs—no,” she raised a hand, “I will not discuss it; they both say I never can get anything right.”
He had not only recaptured his sense of time: he had got back a better one than he lost, with a precise second hand. Exactly four minutes of Bronson’s ration remained.
“Lieutenant Leary is in love again. Who was it the first time?”
The candid eyes were now impure. “Yourself, of course.”
“Don’t do me any favors. I’m not really sick. I’ve been faking all the while. And by the way, does nothing affect you? If you remember, Schild and I were at your home only a few hours before he was killed.”
“If you remember, I have lived in Berlin for twelve years of Hitler and five years of war.”
“I’m sorry,” he said truly. “I just want you to tell me who was Miss Leary’s lover in August.”
“Facts, always facts, what will you do with them? Oh-kay, it’s ah deal! This captain who lives, lived, with Oberleutnant Schild.”
He began loudly to laugh, then choked it off for fear of Bronson. In mirth he used his own language: “He is shorter than her!”
“Please? As yet I don’t understand so much English.”
“Knorke, it doesn’t matter. ... So you are old enough to be my mother. You really are a twin of the doctor? Which would make you sixty.” He shook his head. Two minutes left.
“Sixteen February, 1905, for both of us. Otto was the younger-looking before he went to Russia. I did not see him again until after he had gone through the camps.” She shook Reinhart’s hand, once up, once down. “If at eighteen I had had a son like you, and he survived, I would not be disappointed now.”
Bronson stuck her head in and called time, and Reinhart growled: “Go away or I’ll tell Lieutenant Llewellyn you applied duress.” She winced and left.
“However,” Lori went on, “I didn’t and I’m not disappointed either.”
“You would say then, life goes on.”
She pushed a sportive lock behind her ear; she stood in need of a washing and combing; in the center of a general relief which he could not explain, Reinhart felt a twinge which he could: he would never provide the brush and soap.
“I do not!” she answered fiercely. “Life can do as it pleases.” Still feral, she leaping captured his neck, drew down his head, and kissed his mouth.
He concealed his momentary anguish of regret: “Thanks, anyway, for never caring about me.”
“Have it your own way.” Tough, small, unkempt, Lori marched modestly into the corridor, uneasy Bronson voiding the route. Once through the outer door, she returned to hovering, vacant, liberated Reinhart for her formal peroration.
“I have forgotten! Here comes some English: ‘Ve mawrn zuh death of a man of honor, First Lieutenant Schild, zalute zuh gallant Corporal Reinhart, shall effer keep green zuh memory of the former, and await with affection and respect the... re-choining by the latter of our fellowship, Knebel, M.D., your dear Lenore, and yours truly Bach, Ph. D.’ Also, I have remembered every word!”
Old Sad Sack St. George had topped Veronica. Now Reinhart understood why the captain had not tried to visit him on the psycho ward. He should notify St. George that Very worked nights, up to suppertime the coast was clear; except that this action was as much as to admit he was privy to their quondam goings-on. And he detested having the goods on anybody, which were always squalid. Besides, the captain, who physically favored his father, carried to Reinhart a suggestion of what he, himself, would be in twenty years: middle-aged, ingratiating, secretly prurient. He didn’t try to get in touch.
With Marsala, too, contact had been broken, which he laid to a primitive, Italianate superstition towards bats in the belfry: extravagance was permitted only in the service of lust, drink, and anarchy. Well, it had been an accident anyway that he was quartered with the damn guy; he was never so close to Marsala as the fellow ginzos with their home packages of sausage and cherry peppers.
Veronica returned to duty the next evening and squirted him loving, guarded looks as she went about ward business, but not having taken his afternoon nap, he dropped off to sleep at lights-out and so did not get to the office. Next morning he suspected having been touched on the face sometime during the night, but it could have been just a dream. However, he did find under his pillow a note on unlined paper, which read: “I’m going to knock myself off—Jesus destroy this mesage.”
He actually believed it was Veronica’s until Trooper reached over a long, thin arm and tore it away, saying, “I changed my mind.”
Reinhart looked at his bird-dog face and said: “That wouldn’t have settled anything.”
“You’re wrong,” Trooper answered. “It would so have, but I just realized I don’t want anything settled. That’s my trouble.”
“Well, what do I care about you?” Reinhart said irritably.
“That’s all right. Nobody does. That’s why I used to piss the bed, to get somebody to. But they didn’t.” He pulled the sheets over his head and said, underneath: “I don’t care any more.”
Furious, Reinhart jumped across the aisle and re-exposed the forsaken face. “Knock off that crap, Trooper. Tell me, is it true you got the Silver Star in the Holland jump?”
“I didn’t deserve it. The ones who did were all killed.”
“Don’t hand me that. The fact is I understand you were screwed. Anybody else who singlehanded bumped off ten Germans and captured fourteen more would have got the DSC. An officer would have got it.”
“He would?” He crept up on the pillow but still disbelieved, and they argued, Reinhart temporarily winning. However, it would be a long fight to get Trooper to understand that the world, and not himself, was wrong.
He concealed his new mission from Millet when they talked, and observed the captain’s techniques. Afterwards, with his own variations, since Trooper was not so sophisticated a case as he, he used them on Trooper. Trooper ate a good lunch for the first time since he had come on the ward. Another two days, Reinhart had him traducing the doctors.
He said, almost smiling: “Reinhart, you ought to take up this psycho stuff when you get out of the Army.”
Reinhart winked. “Have you been reading my mind?”
True, like knighthood, this profession gave you a permanent upper hand; like the priesthood, it made everybody else feel guilty and also grateful; like the Jews it was much reviled yet indispensable and always right. For example, Millet as a person was probably not much—he looked as if in civil life his sport was golf; his tips to caddies, meager—here he sat as universal daddy.
He sensed a certain competition with Millet in succeeding interviews, but was forced to simulate his old quest for approbation.
Towards the end of the week he reported: “I am all right again, Captain. I am sure now. I sleep well and in the regular hours, I realize that wound in my head was just imaginary, time is again just as it used to be, and I am not suspicious of anybody. Your treatment has been successful.”
“That’s good,” admitted Millet. “Why do you refuse the recreational therapy?”
“Because I don’t like to weave baskets and I already have a billfold.”
Millet said permissively: “Uh-huh. Nurse Reynolds tells me”— he found the place in a document—“you stated a wish to make a shoulder holster. Which she opposed. Were you—”
“Oh that was a kind of joke. I wanted to give it to my roommate Marsala. His brother’s a hood in Murder, Incorporated.”
“No, I don’t question that. I merely wished to know if Reynolds’ refusal made you angry.”
“Yes—well goddammit, she said no in that sweet, tolerant manner used towards psychos, yet I know what she was thinking—don’t let Reinhart do anything that suggests violence.”
“What did you do then?”
“I walked away and didn’t say anything.” He stared at Millet’s pale, bored eyes and shouted: “What in hell do you think I did, beat her up?”
“Did you want to?”
“If you don’t mind my saying it, sir, you know about as much of a man’s mind as a golfball.” He glanced at Millet’s desk, insultingly clear of letter openers, etc., even pencils, for obvious reasons. “If you mean deep down, I probably wanted to screw her. All men want to make love to every woman and kill every man. Man is a savage only partially tamed.”
Millet smiled. “Is that your own theory?”
“I read it somewhere, and then consulted my own soul. I know you people don’t think a man can help himself, but I have.”
“Was Lieutenant Schild your friend?”
Reinhart sighed. “You want me to say no. But one thing I will not do to get out of here: lie. It seems very clever to look only for the deep secrets. What we see of a person is supposedly only the false exterior; what he really is, is underneath and hidden. Thus a man who appears generous is really selfish, great lovers are secretly queers, and heroes are really cowards covering up. A fellow who feels guilty about the Jews is actually the worst anti-Semite of all, and so on. No doubt this is true. But out in the world we have no time to check these things. If a bully comes towards you with a club, you have no chance to reflect that he is actually not frightening but pitiful, that if you gave him love and understanding he would be your friend.
“Because if the front is a lie, so are the depths when taken alone. For himself, a hero may be a coward. For you, if he is on your side in a battle you do not want to know what he is in some reality outside yours. A Don Juan may be a fairy, but in practice he will make love to your girl and not to you. Do you see what I mean? The façade, too, has a reality and truth. You sit here in front of me like a god, asking me questions which I cannot ask you. Why? For reasons of your own. Somewhere back no doubt you grew a guilt towards people with mental troubles because you really have contempt for them. But I don’t want to hear about it and obviously you don’t want to tell it.
“Now the Jews and me. My feelings about them are irrational. Actually the Jews bore me stiff. And so do the Germans. All I ever cared about was old medieval Nürnberg, and that is long gone. Italy, I think, is what I like, with sunshine and that melodic language. I also hate politics and sociology and all that crap that deals with people as groups. I hated those mobs of idiots screaming Sieg Heil! and who didn’t?, but I also dislike those hordes of Russians in Red Square, who in spite of Communism are supposed to be generally good, and also the ‘starving multitudes’ of Asia and the ‘laboring masses’ everywhere. I name these examples in an effort to be honest. I don’t like conventions of generals and bosses any better, but there everybody agrees with me.
“So with the Jews, who seem to be a persistent mob throughout history, only acting in the reverse of the usual mob; they storm nothing but are stormed. They are always around with their dull troubles and their rituals and their foods, feeling special everywhere and superior. I confess I used to think it was a trick for the Jews to always complain about mistreatment. They seemed a race of gripers.
“Then the Nazis came. Or rather, I finally noticed the Nazis. And they were something new. When you speak badly about the Nazis you cannot tell a lie. Maybe, secretly, every gentile wants to kill every Jew, but the Nazis did it in practice and the other Germans, or many of them, didn’t care. But you see, someone must care.”
Millet raised his head, which had been lowered as if in sleep, and asked: “Why?”
“So that Germany will not perish.”
“But you were concerned about the Jews.”
“If you want to understand anything, you must listen,” Reinhart chided. “I am concerned about myself.”
Millet’s head sank again.
“So I met Schild that night. He forces himself on me. The motives get all mixed up, who is doing what for whom. We listen to a man who is himself confused. It is a grotesque evening, like everything in Berlin turns out to be: giants, twins who are apparently twenty years apart, blind men, would-be abortionists, experts on art, turncoats, Communists, ex-prisoners of the concentration camp, good Germans who turn out to be bad, and vice versa, and Schild and I.”
“How many people were there?”
“In addition to Schild and me, only three. I assure you it was fantastic and ridiculous. And all in this damp cellar, but we sat on a Goblin couch worth a thousand dollars. And afterwards we get in this mortal combat. But I’ll tell you this: it all happened and is still easier to believe than the concentration camps—which, by the way, the Russians have, too.
“Now I’m ready to answer. Was Schild my friend? On one hand, yours, no. I used him. If he hadn’t been a Jew I wouldn’t have given him a minute, for he was a kind of creep. I felt this definite satisfaction when he got it in the back, and it wasn’t the one you spoke of. More complex than that. I felt it because, fighting for him as I was, nobody could blame me for his death. Well, here comes a joke: no one does but myself.
“But was he my friend? In my sense, yes. He was someone I could talk to, and not the way I am talking to you, which is a sort of fraud since you are invulnerable and never talk back. And then for another reason. When you hear it you will never let me out of Psycho, because I guess it means I really am nuts. When Schild was a boy he read the King Arthur stories. And he still believed them up to the time he died.”
Millet asked lazily: “What’s ‘nuts’ about that?”
Reinhart groaned: “Because so do I. Really.”