JUST AS IT HAD ARRIVED in England after the great mass of troops assembled there for the Continental assault was gone, so did the 1209th cross the Channel and proceed eastward against the stream of real soldiers returning. At the outset, the assignment to Germany was seen as punishment cruel and perverse. For a year they had run an enormous Nissen-hut hospital in Devonshire, tending casualties flown straight there from the fields of battle, wounds yet hot and reeking. They were veterans of the European Theater and should have been let to cross the water and swagger before the slobs on Stateside duty, to mix undelineated with the repatriated combat regiments, back in the frame where the greater category enveloped the smaller, overseas versus home.
Instead, the score was to stay grievously unjust: for more than a year the 1209th had had to stand holding its portable urinals while patients lay smug with honorable wounds, relating the grand experiences denied to people of the rear areas. Charging the Siegfried Line; streetcars filled with explosives rolled down the hill into Aachen; the bridge at Remagen, with its sign: “You are crossing the Rhine by courtesy of the —th Infantry Division”; the bombs falling on the ball-bearing works at Peenemünde, courtesy of the Eighth Air Force; the Ardennes, where even company clerks and cooks took up their virgin rifles and joined the defense and even a general proved a hero, courtesy of the 101st Airborne Division; and at the very end, “Germany” itself made commonplace by courtesy of the Third Army, who got to Pilsen in Czechoslovakia and burst into the famous brewery to fill their helmets with beer. By courtesy of the 1209th General Hospital, Colonel Roy Fester commanding, one passed his water, told his stories, took a pain pill, and went to sleep.
Just at the point, though, where the responsible latrine intelligence had disqualified the hysterics who insisted the 1209th would any day be shipped to the Pacific, and established beyond a peradventure that it would settle in the Helmstedt field where the unit was then resting as an alleged transient, and stay there forever—just at this point where the wailing was loudest, there being nothing else to do except peer through the single set of field glasses at the nurses’ tents across the meadow, came a courier of unquestioned authority with the word.
Berlin, it was to be Berlin, so long as something had to be accepted, a horse of a different hue from mere Germany; considerably better, in fact, since the combat forces had never got there. It would be at the courtesy of only the Russians, and the Russians themselves, with the Germans downed, were now a kind of enemy and face to face with their allies kept weapons at port arms. Already they had sealed the Helmstedt checkpoint, and when, after a week of negotiations, the colonel was permitted to pass with jeep, driver, and one aide, he made only fifteen miles before another Soviet unit arrested and held him twenty-four hours incommunicado.
All this, not to mention Berlin of the Nazi mythos: old Hitler screaming crazy garbage; creepy little Goebbels, dark and seamed, scraping along on his twisted foot; fat, beribboned Goering, more swollen joke than menace; swastikaed bruisers maltreating gentle little Jews; the Brandenburg Gate and Unter der Linden Trees; and acres of the famous blonde pussy, whom twelve years of Nazism had made subservient to the man in uniform: one heard that an SS trooper could bend down any girl on the street and let fly. And, once in the city, little work conjoined with a peculiar honor: the crap-house spokesmen who in England had been privy to a document from higher headquarters listing the 1209th as the biggest and best hospital in the Communications Zone, saw another now which said, approximately: the 1209th, selected because it was the biggest and best in the Communications Zone, would be the only general hospital in Berlin District.
Berlin was not the worst place to end a war; better, surely, than the gooks in the islands or France where pigs lived in the same houses as people.
As Reinhart had promised the girl, he could have been found in the frame building across the street from the hospital almost any morning if the visitor came late, and any afternoon, provided the visitor came early; he put in a good four hours of daily attendance, give or take an hour either way, and had much impressed his superior, Lieutenant Harry Pound, by his drive. Pound was not properly a medical-administrative officer at all, but an infantryman, had in fact waded in on Omaha Beach on D-Day, H-Hour plus two, and shortly thereafter led a patrol into a hedge row filled with Krauts and their armament, collecting Mauser slugs and souvenirs of grenades in all four limbs and, later, the Silver Star. Under treatment by the 1209th he had healed into limited service and was transferred from bed to staff. Their job, Pound and Reinhart, was “Special Services,” recreation, diversion, amusement both for patients and medics, things that had meaning in the long, pastoral days in England but which now were needless, except insofar as they satisfied the rules of organization. However, there was in the works a plan for Sunday guided tours of the Nazi ruins; Pound ostensibly was always out somewhere arranging for permission to enter with a force of sightseers into the Soviet Sector but had not yet got even an admission that he existed—if indeed he was really trying, for he had a girl friend in the nurses’ contingent and was often seen with her when officially he was understood to be elsewhere—and besides, individuals could go across the border on their own hook without hindrance by the Russians, without the shepherding of Pound, which was to say he and Reinhart had no motive for an undue haste in consummating their project, especially since their desks were littered with schedules and itineraries and manifests and notes to show the colonel if he snooped.
Reinhart’s obligation was to write up a guidepaper listing the principal Nazi monuments, their late tenants, and a fact or two, to be mimeographed and distributed to the tourists. He was not, at the outset of each period of composition, a facile writer, thinking first that here was his chance to show off, second that here was where he would be shown up, and third that it didn’t matter either way because the jerks who went on the tours would immediately spiral the papers into little piccolos and toot obscenities through them at passing broads, if the experience at the Cheddar Caves and Exeter Cathedral had been representative.
However, with stage three he reached the firm ground of the professional artist and could compose with enthusiasm. The only difficulty here was that when he got fluent, he inclined towards the poetic, and when that, put aside his proper work and began a letter to a female in the States who was at once a sort of girl of his and a kind of estranged wife of another soldier on European duty, as near as he could tell no precise love existing in either relation but friendship and interest all around: he always knew where Ernie was stationed and what he was doing, and vice versa, according to Dianne, and there was even some talk, now that the war was over, for a get-together between Ernie and him, arranged through their intermediary three thousand miles off.
A week after his birthday, no more fights but a couple of drunks since—now, he thought as he looked into the bathroom mirror that morning at the pouting aftermath of dissipation, you must take it easy, greasy, and you’ll slide twice as far—Reinhart sat alone in his office, with pen to foolscap, well into a new letter:
DI MY DEAR,
I certainly understand why the Princess was late with my birthday present, and will look forward with lots of pleasure when it arrives in Berlin after a long transatlantic voyage, which will make it only sweeter to the undersigned. ... Well, I’ve gotten where I always wanted to be, Di, to the heart of Europe and just wish I could be holding your hand while we look down from the battlements of some old palace with the peasants going along with their oxcarts down below—Ha Ha, the real peasants I mean, not the kind you always call me!! And I’d just as soon we left old E. playing baseball or whatever somewhere, because frankly Di, while I really like him, as you know, from what you tell me I don’t think he shares our tastes and maybe that was the trouble between you. ...
To go from the ridiculous to the sublime—all pardons asked—there are lots of exciting things transpiring here. The Intelligence Officer in our outfit, who is a friend of mine, is certain Hitler is still hiding somewhere around the city. I met a Tyrolean Count the other day, the kind of fellow you would love—I hope not literally! With an ascot tie, and all. He invited me to hunt on his estate in Bavaria which perhaps I’ll get around to doing when I’m not needed here—but that will be quite awhile. You see, no one else in the outfit can translate the Nazi documents we captured. I’m just attached to this medical outfit now for eating and sleeping arrangements. I wish I could tell you just what my job is, but even though the war is over in this Theater, there are still plenty of secrets. ...
Oh Di, when I look at your picture I think perhaps when I get home we won’t be so platonic! Like to have your reactions to this. ...
He was moving along as magisterially as the Ohio River off Cincinnati, and as impurely—but Ernie was in the paratroops and had shot nine Germans and taken as prisoner twenty more, and wore the Purple Heart—when a spot of color not olive-drab came into the corner of his eye, stuck there, not moving but vital, and since composition was the product only of solitude, his drain was corked.
The color was yellow of hair and rose of skin on a girl, just plump and no more, like a peach, who stood diffidently in the doorway. She was small, wearing spectacles with lenses large and exactly round and an abundance of drab clothing, including high woolen stockings and thick, awkward shoes that made her walk as if deformed, for under his even look she had moved gimpily into the room. Rather, was moved: the thin arm of another party could be seen as far as the elbow, at which point it disappeared round the doorframe. An inch off the arm’s furthermost extension she stopped and smiling as gloriously as one can and still show no teeth, said in a high-pitched and cowardly voice:
“Razher nice vezher ve are hoffing today!”
From behind the door, a whisper, and again the disembodied arm, this time making much of its hand, after a moment of which the girl moved by the use of her own muscles. Her walk was now pleasantly normal, if prim with perhaps an aim to restrict the swinging of her long blonde braids. The latter she caught one in each hand as she halted still far enough from Reinhart’s desk so that he could see her down to the round knees which the skirt did not quite reach, where although at rest she yet maintained some slight side-to-side movement as if she were still walking in the mind. The effect was curiously provocative and perverse, for she appeared to be a kind of large child rather than a small adult, and he regarded her severely.
“Tischmacher Gertrud,” was her next sound. Her little fist had come loose from the right braid and was available for the shaking if he so required.
Somebody was pulling something weird. Reinhart rose and went around the desk, first going towards her to throw them off guard, and at the last minute executing a left-oblique turn of a smartness he had never been up to when in formation. Popped through the doorway, his head met that of the other girl, the one of the ruin, whose name he had not originally got and who now, though still nameless and taken in a suspicious act for which there was no apparent motive, greeted him like a friend and he had a handshake after all.
He asked her in and invited both of them, she and Fraülein Tischmacher, to chairs, of which they cornered the market, since there was only enough furniture in the shabby, rickety place to service his and Pound’s narrow purposes. He even opened one of the French windows on the sand-and-crabgrass side lawn, to clear the air, for his series of cigarettes, the sine qua non for writing, had tinted the inside atmosphere gray-blue and it surely stunk to someone just entering.
The niceties owed to his guilt about not having turned a finger for her job. He had even “given his word,” he remembered, whatever that was; he said such things when under the influence he became formal and constricted. In real life, as now, he was, he knew, deft, volatile, witty. Sitting on an old wooden box, his legs up on the desktop, rough-skin boots, size 11-C, murdering the papers there—oops! the letter to Dianne was ruined, but no matter—grinning easily, he lighted another cigarette and blew a process of smoke rings, each smaller than the last and spurting through it, each round as Gertrud’s eyes, as she watched them with honest awe.
“I am sorry I took so long to come,” said the other girl, very slow and clear so that he could understand the German. Her hair sent no message of having had a wash since the night he first saw it could stand one; similarly, her dark-green beret and gray coat with breast ornamentation of Cossack’s cartridge loops. But miraculously, the fresh sunlight which marched through the open window in a brutality that made Reinhart wince, was kinder to her used face than the night had been. Something could be made of her, if you took the trouble.
Reinhart had the courage to admit that he had not yet found the right thing for her, that he had of course been working on the problem for two weeks and would no doubt soon reach a satisfactory end. Not a day passed that he didn’t arise painfully, come slowly through shaving, two portions of powdered eggs, a pint of coffee, and a lungful of Zehlendorf’s pine air to health and good prospects and then feel drop over it all the shadow of his given “word.” The trouble was he never knew how to get things done, how to make deals, how to “see” people who could arrange. At the same time he had no hope that anything could ever be done in a straightforward way.
The girl spoke fast, and incomprehensibly to him, to Gertrud, and Gertrud then said: “She vants—wwants you to believe she is grrateful for zis. She wwants to say sank you.”
“You speak English!” Reinhart was not so astonished as he made out, but she was charming, although too young for one to admit to himself that he might find some use for the charm.
Her eyes, bluer than the high, immaculate sky revealed when he opened the window, bluer than a broken bird’s egg you might find if you went behind the building and searched the pine grove, than, if you walked far enough westward you would see, the Havel; blue, the quintessence of blue, so that if the color in all its other uses had faded, Zeus might take from Gertrud’s store enough to renew the blue everywhere in the world and not leave her one whit of blue the less. These remarkable eyes, surely kept behind spectacles not because they were poor of vision but rather as protection against some thief who might pluck and sell them as sapphires in Amsterdam, showed their stars to Reinhart as, below, the small pink mouth said:
“Yes, yes, I know English zo wwell, having studied it zix yearss. I sink I do not too badly, do you?”
Oh, marvelous, marvelous, he agreed, and would have preferred her over Churchill addressing Commons.
“You have acted so kindly to my cousin,” she went on. “Perhaps I do not seem especially rude when I ask, do you sink there is also available for me a chob—do you sink for me—do you sink there is also a job for me? There.” Not covering her knees when she stood, her skirt did not pretend to when she sat but made a soft frame for the round thighs that it was no doubt a grave evil to look at.
So he looked away quickly, looked at the other girl’s sad, sweet, and honest way, and suddenly heard his own voice saying: “Warten Sie eine Weile,” Lovett, he would see a lieutenant named Lovett, who was chairman of everything out of the usual course, or if not he, then another officer named Nader, whose duties were similar. To the girls, however, he said only “Wait,” and in a tone which they considered too masterful to nod to, instead following his departure with heads neatly turning.
The building had no rhyme or reason. Nobody could tell what function it had served before the Fall; it may have been the only place in Germany where one could hide from the Gestapo, or perhaps on the other hand was a Gestapo-designed labyrinth through which their captives were permitted to wander free and moaning, madly seeking a nonexistent egress. Three weeks in Germany now, and Reinhart had yet to see his first right angle, true line, and square space. Outside, he regularly got lost en route to the Onkel Tom movie theater, ten minutes’ walk away, and strolling of an evening over to the Grunewald park, to the body of water called by the Krauts “Krumme Lanke” and by the GIs “Crummy Lake,” he could not be less certain of his position in space were he in Patagonia.
Somehow he reached the foyer and assuming the fresh soul of one who had just entered from the street, struck out to the right, passing the orderly room and detachment commander’s office, a treacherous area in which, although he had a certain immunity from the worst of its menaces, it was not wise to linger. From there on, he looked in sundry doors, sniffed up divers halls, consulted with acquaintances encountered in passing, most as bewildered as he, and at length spied Lovett himself, the sissy, in a large room on the northeastern corner.
The lieutenant stood willowy beside an ancient desk to which a gnarled Kraut, in a peaked Wehrmacht cap, applied cloth and a white fluid from a long brown bottle.
“I want you to bring out the highlights of the carving,” Lovett was saying with his arbitrary, Bible-like stresses. And then, “Highlow, Reinhart,” although he had not yet looked up to see him.
“I am being willfully misunderstood,” he continued, in a very lowww voice indeed, which quickly rose to a kind of screech to say: “But who knows German?”
Nader, dark and thuglike, sat at another desk and relieved himself of what, asking public pardon, he called “The Return of the Swallow,” by Belch. You seldom saw one without the other, and never saw either without wondering at their compact, which was surely queer and yet, on the same assurance—namely, that you simply knew it—was not queer.
“Well, I do, somewhat,” Reinhart admitted. He was not equipped to tell the man what Lovett wished, but ordered merely: “Polieren, polieren!” which the fellow was doing anyway, and added “please” and “yet” and “still” and “to be sure,” the little words Germans hang on everything.
Satisfied, even pleased, Lovett lowered himself into a chair in the way one might drop a length of garden hose and listened to Reinhart’s requests with a crooked eyebrow, replying when they were done: “Wanna come to a party tonight?”
“Really?”
“Certainly, really. Do you think we are snobs? Of course we are, but you look civilized. A little house-warming at our billet. American girls—if that’s what you can call our nurses. Wine—if that’s what you can call this German cat-peepee. And songs. You know our place. Any time after eight.”
Since there was almost no finish left, it was impossible to shine the desk. The German knew that as well as anybody, but he kept working humorlessly as a sociologist, now moving right between Reinhart and Lovett so that they could see only unimportant parts of each other, and Lovett, usually so quick to be waspish, suffered the obstruction—perhaps in the idea that any sound from him would be received by the dolt as a countermand of his previous order. Reinhart had begun to wonder about the man and what impressions he must receive, there with his bottle and rag between two aliens speaking of nothing—for two words in a foreign tongue are double too many if you don’t get their drift—when Nader came over swinging his simian arms and said:
“Take off like a big-ass bird, Jack.”
The German looked vulnerably from him to Reinhart, his nose long and tapered like a carrot, cheeks marred, black-brown eyes screwed in deep sockets. He was an old man, maybe fifty, commanding sympathy.
“Er sagt, dass Sie herausgehen müssen.” said Reinhart, shrugging the blame off himself.
“You see, Dewey, that can’t be polished,” said Nader to Lovett, who flipped his hand negligently and then bit at a finger. All his nails were chewed down to the nub; the fingers were long and white and maneuverable as rubber.
The German put his cleaning materials into a wooden box, the contents of which on his route to the door he stopped to rearrange. The wine bottle, being too tall, gave him trouble; he transferred it from box to armpit, then had to lower the box to the floor for resituation. As he bent, tilting the bottle, the liquid poured off on Nader’s desktop, and by the time he got his cloth to work, his head shaking stupidly, the papers thereon clung to one another in gluey fraternity.
So far as Nader went, what was done, was done. He calmly watched the man wad the papers and drop them in his box, mop up the excess fluid and then with a clean cloth rub up a high gloss, the kind Lovett had wanted on his desk.
“Just look,” cried Lovett, biting his tongue.
The German crept out, and upon his heels went Nader, returning shortly with the clotted papers, which he arranged for drying across an extra chair and table near the open window.
“The only thing that burns,” he said to Lovett, “is that that bastard could pull such a cheap trick and think he fooled me.” He had not as yet recognized Reinhart’s presence. Reinhart had no feeling towards him but distaste.
Lovett blithely ignored him and said to Reinhart: “Send this woman to me. The nurses’ quarters can probably use another maid.”
“Course I coulda let him take this stuff for ass-wipe,” Nader went on to himself, aloud, describing one document as a report to the colonel on how many butt cans had been placed around the area.
“And what about the girl, sir? She knows English. We could use an interpreter over in our office. For one thing, we’ve got this tour of Berlin coming up, and neither Lieutenant Pound nor I know anything about the city. She could—”
“Oh God!” screamed Lovett. “Is Pound going to start that awful Cook’s Tour doodoo again? Tell him to forget about it, please! He’ll lose twenty men, just as he did at Stonehenge and I’ll have to go hunt them behind every Druid altar, or here, I suppose, falling down drunk with some filthy Russian. But then I suppose nothing I say ever matters to that sloppy creature. All right, I’ll see about the girl tomorrow, but if I ever come to your office and see you with your hands or anything else where it shouldn’t be, I will know you for a deceitful person. Be at the party. Bye!” His eyes closed like the lid of a rolltop desk, and when shut were as seamed.
On the return to his own office, Reinhart crept noiselessly the last fifty steps to the door and, unobserved, studied for a few moments the backs of the girls within, who had apparently not so much as twitched in muscle-ease since he left, and not spoken, certainly, which you could tell from the long-established set of their heads. Looking at the clean pink of Gertrud’s scalp-parting which ran from crown to nape without a disordered hair, he regretted the evil will that had asked Lovett for her assignment to himself; she was probably about fourteen. Under civil law it would no doubt have been a crime to employ her, but then he was under the power of no such ordinance, and besides had no criminal aims.
He entered and stopped between their chairs, saying to the older, “Alles ist in Ordnung, everything is arranged. You must see Lieutenant Lovett tomorrow. Ask for him at the front of this building.” Her eyes were soft brown over violet shadows as she showed a gratitude that made him as uneasy as if he were wearing sweaty underwear; it was too much, in the light of his mixed motives. And still it did not make her happy, but rather more sad. Indeed, everything about her broke one’s heart to see.
“I hope you don’t mind being a cleaning woman for our nurses. There was nothing else available, since you have no English.”
And now a kind of pride appeared for the first time, as she answered: “No, I can do that.”
While he spoke, he felt near the back of his left hand the proximity of something warm and alive, not quite touching, but there: a piece of Gertrud, but whether hair, cheek, or hand he could not tell and did not wish to look. Finally, having finished his one report, he had no choice. It was her cheek, with its beautiful petal flush, extended in curiosity.
He teasingly seized the thick braid nearby and said in English: “As for you, Miss Tischmacher, how would you like to help us here, in this office, with translations?” And the soft young face moved sideways, towards a nest in his palm, but he had dropped the hand before it got there and went to sit on his box behind the desk.
There had suddenly come to him an explanation for the whole works, from start to finish, the perverse ways of this child, the other girl’s melancholy poetry and strange demand on his conscience. They had successfully taken him along both roads without resistance. And the only sense it made was that they sought what could not have been gained in a direct and open appeal to the fixed authorities. Why else apply to a corporal, one lone and powerless jerk in an army of thousands? Because he looked first like a fool and second like a German, and because she, the older, was a Nazi who would have been put at picking street-rubble if she had made her appeal elsewhere. Perhaps it was even a kind of treason to get her a job under the cover of which she could hide from her proper deserts. It was what they had been warned against: the Germans did it before and would do it again if you were not vigilant, sack the world and then when beaten ask the pity for themselves, but this time we will not be duped.
Now it was done. Lovett, particularly, was not the man before whom one could change a tune and retain face. Reinhart rubbed his head, sensing he had gone white from the discovery, and two short blond hairs drifted separately down the air past his eyes. He could see them until they reached the dark floor. For an altogether different reason he was going bald: you had constantly to wear a cap in the service, the hair couldn’t breathe. And then he remembered another reason why he liked the Army: no cause was ever wholly lost.
Simulating casualness, he asked: “You know, of course, that you must fill out the political questionnaire, the Fragebogen.”
She had arisen when he sat down, perhaps in a counterfeit respect—which, if so, failed; it made him feel like a fool to sit before a standing woman, especially one so small and shabby, and the fact that Gertrud held to her chair meant that the other was the only adult present.
But he had got her, there. In a reflex of sudden worry, she turned to Gertrud and said something in a rapid German he could not make out.
“Das schadet nichts” the pretty girl replied, smiling bluely, guilelessly, at Reinhart.
No, it couldn’t have mattered to her; she was luckily young enough to be disqualified from the rolls of mischief; but the other had been stirred. He knew, as she said “Komm, Trudchen,” and walked slowly to the door, that he would not see her again. And well, in a way, it was sad, and because at bottom he hated to win out over any person, he finally asked her name.
“Bach Lenore.” It was Trudchen who answered. “As wiss the great composer. Lori is a direct descendant.”
Lori studied her in amiable suspicion. “Was hat sie gesagt?” she asked Reinhart, and when he told her, said: “Es ist kein wahres Wort daran, there’s not a word of truth in it. Trudchen is a good girl, but she exaggerates too much.”
“Goodbye,” said Reinhart, and despite himself, “Good luck.” As a pair they were at once pathetic and amusing. Now it was Trudchen who was all for going, and Lori who lingered.
“Reinhart.” In her throat was the rich and authentic quality with which the name had been spoken two generations ago. “Rrreinhaht,” an old possession become new and attractive, suggesting ancient connections between them. “It is surely a German name. Have you found any relatives here?”
It was of course a new idea, to go with the name, exotic and adventurous; to find an identity in a far place, among the enemy. Yet here she was again giving him another obligation, goddamn her.
“Oh, I wouldn’t know how,” he said in weary helplessness. “I’m not German any nearer than my grandfather, and it must be forty years or more since he came to the States.”
He got up and reclaimed his rightful chair, booting the box into a corner filled high with similar junk and obstructing a closet door which if opened would reveal more. The buildings they had inherited hardly supported the Krauts’ reputation for tidiness and order. The closet boxes held ream on ream of papers carrying the letterhead of something called the National Socialist Volkswohlfahrt. Bureaucratic crap, very like the material in the 1209th’s own files. He had nevertheless informed Pound, who lazily said to see the Intelligence officer. This passed on to Lovett became: “An intelligent officer? Don’t hold your breath till I find one.”
“You don’t care, then,” said Lori, only to establish the fact, without a hint of reproach.
Trudchen poked her arm. “Ach, they should be the ones to look for him!”
Exactly so, but his answer was: “Of course I care, but I don’t even have their last address.”
“Oh, then your family used to correspond with them? If you can just remember the city, you can apply to the burgomaster’s office, who has records that date back, I suppose, to the Middle Ages.”
Trudchen poked her again. “But if it is in the East Zone, Leipzig or Dresden, somewhere like that, he might as well forget about it.” When she was serious, her little mouth puckered and extended like the jaws of a pink snapdragon.
“Yes,” said Reinhart quickly. “I’m sure now it was Dresden.”
Oh, goddamn her sadness! When she heard that, Lori’s eyes disappeared again into the heavy violet shadows. “Then it is very likely they are dead.”
Yes, he knew of the purposeless total bombing of Dresden, a nonmilitary target, and by not the barbarous Russians but the impeccable Western Allies. It was a very good place to have had relatives, and to have had them so disposed of, whatever their sins, by a crime of the righteous. Yes, if that was what she wanted, we are all depraved.
“I must get back to work,” he said, and routinely added: “Shall I see you again?”
Trudchen answered, in English: “Shooly, I shall come to commence my job!” She warded off his interruption with a small hand. “After I shall have seen Lieutenant Lofatt first.”
He had not really meant her, poor little instrument that she was. Besides, he realized now that she was too young to be hired, anyway. The morning which had begun so favorably with his letter to Di had ended in a thorough waste.
Lori said only “Wiederschau’n,” and was almost gone before he called her back.
“Why do you always say that?” he asked, irritably. “I thought it was wiedersehen.”
“It’s the same thing!” she said in a voice bright with melody. And he wondered that such a small thing could lift her spirits.
When they had gone Reinhart sought to recover the letter he had ruined with his boots, but no luck. He should have to re-copy two whole pages, as thankless a job as sorting used laundry. Better to start all over again. He never lacked in invention, with the right audience.
He had just taken out a clean sheet of onionskin from the office supply when the old German who had made the mess over at Lovett’s stopped in front of the window to light a cigarette, a miserable stub of a cigarette that he had taken from a small tin box. He fired the match in trembling fingers which brought it so slowly to the butt-end that the contact was charcoal to charred tobacco, dead to dead. He stared witlessly at both for a time, then returned the stub to the tin.
Reinhart’s sudden arrival through the window took him unawares. Scared, he hastened to leave, but his weak old legs were poor servants of his intent. His right shoe was busted out at the juncture of upper and sole, issuing a string of gray stocking.
“Don’t run away,” said Reinhart, jovially. “I just wanted to give you these.” A five-cigarette pack of Fleetwoods, the abominable brand included in K rations, which had lain in his field-jacket pocket since the first day in Berlin, when the cooks had not yet been set up for hot chow.
What a shabby gift for such a wealth of gratitude! The man lost his speech, the corners of his mouth twisted in emotion, in awed delight he even forgot he was old and infirm, and disappeared round the corner with the vigor of a stripling.
Watching him go, Reinhart thought, in satisfaction with his own courageous realism: certainly, he too could have been a Nazi, but now he was old and sick and defeated, become by the processes of cruel time himself a victim. Humanity is not the rights and wrongs of politics but a more general lottery of success and failure, and even more fundamental than those were youth and age and how one is constantly becoming the other.
If he had relatives they too would be old—for he thought of them in terms of his grandfather—and so far separated from him that the blood connections must be taken on theory... yet he was not a Laplander or Lestrygonian; if he had any structure beneath the meretricious American veneer, it was one he shared with them. If Nazism was a German disease of the bone, his own marrow, even at two generations’ remove, could hardly be spotless. How many times had he felt within himself a black rage at existence-as-it-was and the eunuchs who prospering in it made its acceptance a standard of virtue?
Just the other Sunday he had gone with Marsala out to Wannsee to prowl the deserted mansions on the lakeside. These had already been looted by the Russians, but there remained sufficient evidences of the genteel life: sunken bathtubs in washrooms as big as stables; roofed terraces of tile, for dancing; genuine oil paintings; one home had an iron portcullis which at the instance of an electric switch ascended from the basement to guard the door. The houses were in that intermediate state of ruin asking for more. If they had been untouched, he would have looked and left. As it was, the job needed completion. The Russkies had stolen rugs and furniture, roweled the floor, spattered the walls, had multiple diarrhea in the bathtubs and washstands. But still whole were most windows, the pictures, some glassware and vases and other fragile objects prime for the breaking. He smashed everything that came to hand, assisted only feebly by Marsala, who had been a juvenile delinquent when young and in America but here and now turned delicate, as if God were watching, and occasionally said, as he witnessed a crystal goblet pulverize against the fireplace: “We maybe shoulda mailed that home instead.”
Yes, that was surely Nazism, that passion to destroy simply because it could be got away with, because one had been trained all his life to respect and abide by the constraints and then found in a crisis that they held no water. Who wouldn’t be a criminal if it weren’t for the police?
He would find his relatives. If they were Nazis—but why suppose that? Because, although otherwise so stupid, he knew one truth, knew it so well he habitually tried to evade it—perhaps that is the definition of a dreamer, he thought, a man with an unusual sense of reality. Facts must be faced. There was such a thing as Nazism. It was a product of human beings, not some exotic heresy of the anthropoid apes that, owing to simian muteness, you must judge without ape-defense. The Nazis had first been clowns, and then almost without transition, devils. His parents, like their neighbors, had burned on sight the literature mailed by the Bund to German-sounding names, as they did the product of California box numbers which peddled data on the life-force; yet with match in one hand they might loosely say on the other that Hitler had a point when it came to the Jews. At college Klaus Greiner, a gentile refugee from Frankfurt—his father had been some kind of political writer—described his first two encounters with American strangers: a girl at a dance gave him an invidious lecture on democracy; a man in a cafeteria admired his being a national of the country that had at last settled the kikes’ hash.
But whatever his relatives were, they were his. In almost every way but the accepted idea of common decency, he felt himself at odds with the world, a kind of Nazi without swastika, without revolver and gas ovens, without the specific enemies—indeed, it was a crazy feeling, an apparently motiveless identification, for although it did not include the trappings, it did comprehend the evil, as when you awoke from a nightmare of murder and for hours afterward despite the evidence of daylight and routine believed yourself an assassin; and worst of all, coexistent with the guilt, the memory of a terribly depraved yet almost romantic pride: once, anyway, you were not a victim.
Lori, with her quiet European authority, had no doubt known from the first that he would come to this. He must look for her again and say: I am neither pious nor indifferent—he could even, as if from outside, see himself in the attitude of gentle yet strong and manly conviction and hear his firm voice purged of boyish tenor—I will find my relatives, because no man is an island.
There remained a minor problem. His maternal grandparents, who had died when he was too small to know them and were therefore of no interest, came from what indeed was an eastern province, he was not sure just where but now in Soviet hands. His father’s father had been native Berliner—but where? He vaguely recalled the old letter in the box beneath the front porch, postmarked Berlin-hyphen-blot. Ah, it was hopeless. He went, anyway, back through the window to his desk and wrote a V-mail home, although it were more sense to poke in tea leaves or consult a necromancer than ask his folks.
On the way through the labyrinth to the mailroom he thought of Lovett’s party and hoped he was not the only enlisted man invited; he might be taken for a fruit. And finally, another tinge of Trudchen: how old must a girl be before you may desire her?