Authors: Thomas Berger
“No, of course not, not if you haven’t any
decency
.” The last word in English; he didn’t know it in German, and she didn’t know it this way or, in truth, hadn’t any, for she smiled.
Nothing smelled ranker than disloyalty. He had wanted so much to approve of the first German girl he met—for this was she, not counting the women seen from train and truck on the journey to Berlin or the cleaning and secretarial help—if for nothing else, as an act of anti-piety against the established faith. The very faith of which, curiously enough, he found himself at least a part-time worshiper, one of those half-agnostics who go to church without believing or stay home and believe; whatever, he had waited two weeks before going on pass, since this was the best manner in which to avoid Germans and still ache, with trepidation and even a kind of love, to see them.
“If I must go—
wiederschau’n
!” She extended her hand in the genuine enthusiasm displayed by all Europeans, not just the French, upon arrivals and departures, as if for all their hatreds they love one another, or do for a moment at making and breaking contact, and at this first touch in ten minutes not motivated by hostility, Reinhart suddenly felt drunken again and feared that he might weep—for the sore opponent vanished alone in the night, for his friend who did not understand fighting fair, for the girl now under his compulsion, and for the material things in waste all about them, all the poor, weak, assaulted and assaulting people and things, and of course for himself, isolated by a power he didn’t want.
But certainly he did not cry. Instead he gave her his dizzy eyes and said:
“It’s a terrible thing to desert a friend.”
“Bitte?”
He repeated it, as near as he could come, in German, and she replied:
“There was nothing else you could do. He would have killed the small man.”
She
was granting
him
absolution! But his anger did at any rate conquer the sadness. He barked his ill will towards a woman who leaves a beaten man, and in a moment found his only ease in the thought that with luck his speech had been too bad for her full comprehension. For she had answered:
“I was not
with
the soldier! Believe me, in all my life I have never before seen him!”
So much for that. And Marsala, who had had his rest, was prepared to reassume the command so lately transferred; he might defer to Reinhart, from now on, in matters of personal combat, but surely never in affaires d’amour.
“C’mon, why mess with this one? A pig,” he said without malice, perhaps kindly, if you wished to look at it that way, for there was no point in stirring up the girl’s hopes, but anyhow with the candor of the unembellished man, which was just what Reinhart prized highest in Marsala and why he associated with him rather than with the refugees from college. The cruelty was an inseparable element of the greater value, a unique honesty and a kind of honor: Marsala never assumed an ethical superiority to anyone else. But he was generous in granting one, for now no sooner were his comments out than he showed with a bored jerk of the head that the girl’s pigness was suddenly understood as Reinhart’s precise interest.
“If the girl didn’t belong to him,” asked Reinhart, “what in hell was the beef?”
“How should I know?” Marsala’s swarthy head revolved in unworried failure to understand the provocations constantly offered; the world was full of enemies, that was all. You watched, you took care of them, they took care of you—you did not look for a reason and you didn’t actually feel any lasting grudge. “There’s all kinds of bastards around.” He scratched his boot-toe in the rubble. “If you really want to know, he called me a guinea.”
Reinhart, missing the sly grin of mock piety and having learned Marsala’s elaborate code regarding these nicknames—Marsala himself habitually used them and especially those applying to his own kind, but denied the latter to non-guineas except people like Reinhart who held an honorary card—merely said “Oh” and turned to the Kraut girl.
At close view he decided she was young and that her longitudinal lines of cheek and veteran eyes were from lifelong residence in a sanguinary country, but the darkness forbade one’s being sure. She had merely come to watch a fight?
“One has to admit that it was interesting.” She had moved very close to him, perhaps because of the dark, and there was enough light to see that just a chance remained to make her attractive, at least to get by. Reinhart would have liked to seize and scrub and comb and color and dress her—to straighten her out; the world was filled with people who out of simple inertia wouldn’t make a move to fulfill their own promise.
“But,” she went on, “you are a noncommissioned officer. Please, may I ask you: how does one get a job with the Americans?”
“There are places for such things,” he disappointedly replied. He hadn’t known
what,
yet had hoped for something other than the humdrum, perhaps an unexpected birthday gift. His parents’ package had not arrived, very likely never would, the occasion being one on which their undependability was notable. Besides, the girl became more attractive as she talked; her voice was pitched low and had a melancholy music and her whole manner was submission to the male principle. “You want me to get you a job, is that right?” She was within a hair of contact with his belt buckle, and he had come under a compulsion at once to fuse into her body and not move his, which could be done by easing forward the belly usually, as a matter of vanity, held back.
“For Christ Almighty sake,” said Marsala, in the testiness of one whose judgment has gone unheeded, “the soldier has gone horny.” He was right by being wrong; he assumed their conversation to be a bargaining.
They were now touching, the girl standing firm and, madly, as if unconscious of anything strange, pursuing her first interest: “It’s all so confusing. I am ready to do any kind of work—as cleaning woman if need be. ... Do you have a
bottmann
?”
It was much too rare for his simple vocabulary. He had not learned it in two years of college where he ostensibly majored in the language but in fact moped lonely around bars and crowded, smoky places with small string combos, with no real stomach for liquor and no real courage with women, drinking much, nevertheless, and fumbling at some tail. On the margin of a flat flunk he had enlisted in the Army. At any rate, he could deliver correctly not a single long sentence in German and could translate nothing beyond very short strings of words with exact English equivalents.
You are a bad man
was maybe what she meant; if so it was a weak remonstrance, as when you are small and exchange exposures with the neighbor girl, who coyly says “You are a bad boy,” all the while pulling up her dress. He had slipped his arm into her worn coat, where a missing button made it easy, and around her narrow waist, and she came full into him, saying still, so madly!: “Is a female
bottmann
allowed?”
Suddenly and so nuttily did its sense at last arrive that he released her and retreated a step.
Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Four Feathers,
“but when it comes to slaughter you will do your work on water, an’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.” When you were in the field against Mohammed Khan, Oxford-educated Pathan who returned to his mountain fastness to lead the tribes against the Crown, you had a batman; when, that is, you were a British officer serving Victoria, to whom you drank health and broke the glass, or for all he knew even at present, you had an orderly.
“Well, I’m going,
I’m on my way,
” Marsala groaned reproachfully, and hypocritically, for he scraped away only a short distance and sat down on a wasted wall, lighted a cigarette with a great flare and coughed.
Her look had no defenses: “I know just a few English words.”
“That one is very rare,” replied Reinhart with all his gentle forces. He added: “I am just an
Unteroffizier,
a corporal, a nobody, a silly fellow—”
She returned his smile in the exact degree of wryness with which it had been given her, aiding him, in tune with him, so that when the exchange was completed he had been purged of self-pity and satisfaction with the vision of himself as uncorrupted by efficacy; and furthermore was not made sore by its loss. He was forgiven all the way down the line, and most of all for thinking it was forgiveness—she was far beyond that, standing there before him on the mound of trash, without vanity, making no judgments, facing facts.
“Also,”
he said. “You will have your job. You have my word.”
His oath was no doubt meaningless in German; one certainty of alien languages was that each had its own way, untranslatable, for the moral expressions. But its effect was not needed by her, who it could be seen in the clearness of her eye admitted no doubt towards him.
Marsala was back, seizing Reinhart’s elbow and, this time with unbelievable modesty, whispering in his ear: “You’re not thinking of slipping her the tool? I mean, it’s all right with me, I just wanted to get things straight, no sense for me to stand here, just gimme the sign—”
“Old buddy,” said Reinhart, “friends may come and friends may go and some may peter out, I know, but I’ll be yours through thick or thin.”
“Yeah, I know,” came Marsala’s hoarse whisper, which was louder than his normal voice, “ ‘peter out or peter in.’ Well, what will it be? It’s boring to stay here. I mean, for me.” “Boring” was a word he had learned from Reinhart, using it with weak authority and only as a favor to his teacher. It took quite enough effort, however, to have its power.
“You must come to see me at my organization,” Reinhart told the girl. “Now can you remember this? It is the 1209th—but the number doesn’t matter. We are a military hospital and are in a school building in Zehlendorf, at the corner of Wilskistrasse and Hartmannsweiler Weg. Across the street in a wooden building is headquarters. You come in the door and turn left. You go all the way to the end of the hall, to the last room, and there I am.”
The language became easier to use as he spoke, and he found himself on better terms with talking than he had been in years; in German even directions were a kind of success, precise and scientific. Still in temper with him, the girl, now three feet away and in deep shadow, said: “You have a good accent!”
“Now you
will
remember?”
“Oh yes! But please, what is your name?”
He had turned to leave with Marsala, like a monarch—in all the world there are no good departures—and now, kingly, gave: “Carlo.”
She was stepping towards him in an eager courtesy. “As in Monaco—I shall remember.”
Marsala grinned like a possum at the traditional repast; honor was being done his old rule: give them only your first name, which cannot be traced. His lack of civilization had suddenly become repulsive.
“No—Reinhart, Carlo Reinhart.
Es ist ein deutscher Name
.”
“Certainly.”
He shook hands with her and in American fashion held it too long, so that hers wilted and sought to escape.
They were still a party of three at the streetcar stop. But before one came, if ever it did, a jeep throttled up out of the blackness, bearing MPs on their eternal quest for miscreants. Like all American police, they stayed at their remove of faint hostility even after Reinhart and Marsala identified themselves and proved blameless; indeed, even after the constables took them aboard for a ride to their billeting area, which since it lay off the beat was a considerable favor, it seemed needful for the sake of an institutional pride that all pretend it was a kind of arrest and sit silent on the way. The four men, that is, for the girl had not been considered, had not, properly speaking, been seen, the non-fraternization policy being neither quite repealed nor, beyond the flagrant, enforced.
She might stay there for hours—this was a thought of Reinhart’s, which he answered with the familiar indictment: so many millions of non-Germans would lie dead forever. Yet it had been so appropriate to pity her; he aggressively presented that claim to himself. “Certainly” was her answer to the characterization of his name. From birth he had been a good, sturdy
German
type, lived in a solid
German
house, on a diet of
G.
potato salad (with vinegar),
G.
cole slaw (with bacon grease),
G.
coffeecake (with butter-lakes), run on a regimen of
G.
virtue (bill-paying, bedding and rising early, melancholia), and whenever he left it was met by approving people who said: “Ah! He’s going to be (or is) a big
G.
like his grandfather.”
The term, however, had a double meaning, which was honored even by near-illiterates; its other use was as synonym for a kind of foulness. And now there was a third, for here he was in the ancient homeland, and he was something different.
“Home” was a compound in Zehlendorf from which the 1209th General Hospital had evicted the German residents, a block of three long apartment buildings arranged in an open rectangle around a private park. The latter, in some former time almost a university campus with green and wanton walks for rambling, had been converted at the order of the 1209th’s commanding officer into a junkyard for the disposal of property the Germans left behind. The colonel was neither opposed to comfort for his men nor a partisan of pain and deprivation for the owners who after all would one day return; he was nothing, no Savonarola, no crypto-fascist symbol of the military mind, not even, because he was a medic, quite a soldier, nor, because he was commanding officer, quite a doctor—but owing to this he wished grievously to be something, if only a converter of matter from one form to another. Thus he periodically had put to the torch, had resolved into carbon and the immaterial gases, the giant cairn of objects which Reinhart and Marsala now skirted on their way to the south building: couches and loveseats, dining tables, bedsteads, chaises longues, sideboards, three pianos, fourteen wind-up victrolas and two thousand records; eight thousand books; rugs, pictures, tablecloths, postcard collections, skis, jewelry boxes, letters, diaries, journals, manuscripts, apologias, Nazi party cards, memoranda, paper, paper, paper; and one little souvenir plaque from the Western Hemisphere: an electric-pencil sketch of a pickaninny sitting in a Chic Sale, inscribed “Best wishes from Savannah, Ga.” Another pile held the noncombustibles, mainly cooking utensils and fifty more or less complete china services from the royal house of an imaginary principality.