Authors: Thomas Berger
“Your breathing is labored,” he said. “Exercise shortens the span of life. He lives most long who lies in one place without movement, like a piece of warm bacon, all his life long,
ja
?”
“I never thought of that,” answered Reinhart. It seemed so marvelously reasonable; he put from his mind the obvious reference to the tumble with Trudchen and worried about the years gone in nailing down his coffin with a barbell. He had never before talked with an authority on mortality—who yet, he saw with a happy loss of trepidation, was also a human being, whose smile was only superficially diabolic.
For a great sweetness was exuded by Schatzi’s hard person as he suddenly stared into Reinhart’s face and said: “You wish to send me on a qvest,
ja
? She told me, this little piece of sausage, this Gretchen—”
“Trudchen.”
“So. You search for your kinfolk—this is correct, ‘kinfolk’ or simply ‘kin’?”
So close was he, perhaps by reason of defective hearing, he almost climbed Reinhart’s frame. It was disconcerting, especially since Reinhart judged from his clothing that he must stink and drew always away, until on the fifth circle of their patch of walk he envisioned how from a distance their two figures must look in revolution and permitted himself to be captured. He had been quite wrong: Schatzi put forth the distinct odor of eau-de-cologne.
“Wwwwell,” said Schatzi, “you have come to the right potty. Ve vill”—successful pronunciation of the first
w
satisfied him in perpetuity—“simply look for all the Reinharts who are not yet dead and there you are!” He actually winked, which is to say one eye was swallowed whole by the lids, like a ravenous bird ingesting a black cherry.
Impossible to think the concentration camps had not been serious; therefore what Reinhart saw before him now was the human triumph, a wit which had faced the dreadful and survived, no cloistered humor like his own. He himself was suffering depression, feeling wet and dirty and unusually exposed, and indeed, since Schatzi had taken the initiative he was no longer interested in his own mission.
“I don’t want to remind you of your troubles,” he said, though of course he did, “but would you say the concentration camp was the worst thing that could be imagined?”
If Schatzi had earlier been ebullient, he now went into a positive delight that Reinhart, because he had no experience of the world, found very grisly.
“Ah, no, no, not the worst! The worst, my young friend, is to die. Just that simple. Two added to two makes four, always. The living and the dying, and nothing else, makes ray-oll-ity.”
So Reinhart, conscious it was asinine but getting no other suggestions, gave him another cigarette. Which went behind the other ear.
“Now you must tell me an answer,” Schatzi said. “Why must you find these relatives? Of course,” he went on before Reinhart could speak, “to help them. You Amis are a decent lot. You do not become happy to see anyone starve, let by themselves relations of blood,
ja
? This gives one faith for the future of the world in your hands.”
Hard as Reinhart looked among the rocks which clicked together in Schatzi’s voice, he could find no insincerity, therefore he stifled the impulse to say “Horseshit!” He had at last, there could be no mistake this time, found the man with a right to say anything and it be valid. Not even Bach and not even Lori, not even when he had learned their truth, had so impressed him.
“I’d think you would hate the Germans.”
“I hate them? My friend,
I am myself a German.
” Saying which Schatzi bent to the typewriter, on the way down adjusting his cap, the crown of which was dark with oil. Someone had borrowed his tie to hang a felon and returned it with a frozen knot that would never undo; no doubt he had it wired to his collar or to that frail armature on which his pennyworth of skin was hung.
A marvel that he could pick up such a weight. Reinhart moved to aid him but was waved off.
“But one detail—”
“Of course.” In this regard Reinhart never admitted another as master. He produced his wallet and counted off five hundred-mark notes, fifty dollars, from the wad of five thousand which Marsala had got from a Russian soldier for Reinhart’s graduation watch.
“I didn’t mean you to do this for nothing.”
“Now,” said Schatzi, “you have shamed me with your generosity. Ray-olly, I cannot—” He drew from his pocket a brilliant blue handkerchief and snorted into it, thin and airy like a fife badly played. He took the money. “This is not what I purposed to say—which at any pace, I have now forgotten.”
Reinhart watched him go down the walk with his burden. Twenty feet away, he turned and shouted, “You shall hear of me!” And then he moved off the pavement into the trees, where he spat fiercely and vanished.
Reinhart had neglected to give him his grandfather’s name! Hot on the trail he ran, through the patch of forest to the wide prospect of Argentinische Allee, and surveyed the feasible directions. But Schatzi was gone.
S
CHILD’S FATHER’S BUSINESS WAS
concerned with buttons—well, you know how capitalism works on the petty levels, he neither made them nor used them, but stood in the middle between maker and user, collecting a profit.
Lichenko, however, did not know these things, which was why he asked. He was especially interested in the money: were the earnings large from such a trade?
“He never thought so,” said Schild, “But they were considerably better than working-class wages.” His smile was both bitter and genial—the first towards the distasteful topic; the second for Lichenko, to whose will he was now committed.
“Oh, but the workers, we will not speak of them,” Lichenko said contemptuously. “You surely are of a superior class.” This was the kind of thing he had been saying, in one way or another, for three days, and Schild could not yet gauge the degree of its subtlety.
Lichenko closed his eyes now and breathed profoundly, as if he were falling off. Sometimes he did; sometimes, after the same indications, not. The game hinged on whether or not Schild rose to go: if he did, Lichenko awakened; if he did not, Lichenko slept.
The bed was a chaos of stale sheets decorated with brown blood and streaks of St. George’s iodine salve. Lichenko had not left it since they laid him there on the night of the beating. Not that he had been seriously hurt: his actual wounds—a slash of the cheek, an abrasion of the lower lip—had, after the excitement was done, proved superficial. The rest were bruises, ugly, indigo-and-lavender, but bruises, and had already begun to pale under the application of St. George’s paste. And he had been struck only in the face, so that his body was as sound as ever and could have no special need for this perpetual pillowing.
Yet there he lay, sometimes straight and stiff as a corpse, suppressing breath; sometimes curled like a foetus, in which position he made bubbly noises; sometimes with limbs wanton and torn mouth wearing a wan, roguish smile, as if he had dropped there exhausted from a saturnalia.
Schild felt towards him a strange, new emotion: not, as in the case of Schatzi, loathing compounded of fear and envy, and certainly not the fierce hatred which was the sudden motive for the beating—indeed, the latter had been transformed in his memory to a distant episode involving two strangers who bore no resemblance to the Lichenko and the self he knew. Rather, this strange new feeling was the sad, sour regret of a father towards an offspring he can neither endure nor discard. He would have liked, in a moment when his own back was turned, to have had him obliterated in some bloodless, painless fashion, with no noise.
His blows had pierced the mask. He at last faced that issue he had hitherto obscured with romantic moralizing. Lichenko had originally stayed on at the billet to grovel in comfort like a pig in a slough, although admittedly deserved. But the fact of his second breach of peace indicated not all of him had yet gone soft. The fine, progressive elements in his conscience had rebelled against the ease, not with sufficient force to carry him back to duty, but at least enough to generate a protest, which appropriately had been directed towards the German woman. At that point a deft understanding might have restored him to manhood. Instead, Schild had pushed him back again, perhaps forever beyond redemption.
But in destroying him, he had also cemented Lichenko to himself. If his earlier hosthood, which he recognized as having been too permissive, owed to simple courtesy, it had since the beating become a nurseship, bonded by the obligations of guilt and limited by nothing. He found it ethically impossible even to object when Lichenko, who certainly could walk as well as ever, preferred the bedpan to the bathroom, and that only when transported by Schild—he would not suffer the
Hausfrau
in the room. Although at other times he showed great facility in bed-positions—the ass mountain, the pretzel, the scissors, the beached fish, the dismembered Osiris, the solipsist ostrich—at mealtime Lichenko would not elevate from absolute supine, so that there was nothing to do but spoon-feed him like an infant. His back itched fiercely every quarter-hour and would admit no cure but the application of Schild’s hairbrush, wielded by Schild, to the trough of his spine.
The problem of washing, which offended Schild most, even more than the bedpan, had been rather more simply resolved: Lichenko left it behind when he took to invalidism. A person, he believed, did not get dirty in bed. With the passing of the days, his decision seemed less fortunate. After three, in a room from which Lichenko also had decided to bar fresh air on the ground that in his weakened condition he might contract a disease of the lungs, Schild had ceased to dread, might even in two more days have come to yearn, the call for soap and water.
Naturally, a man in sickbed needed recreation. Lichenko required an oral reading of each day’s
Stars and Stripes,
first in the original—so that he could “study English”—and then in German translation. The comics were to be read with full gesture and if possible in voices simulating the spirit and sex of each character, especially the female ones, like Miss Lace and Daisy Mae, to whom it was impossible to give credence if they spoke in baritone. Furthermore, it was cruelly difficult to understand the narrative without a sense of what had gone before—before, that is, Lichenko had come West—synopses must be furnished, and definitions. For example, who really was Skeezix? A typical American? A character to identify with, or one to hold in
secret
contempt? He insisted grimly on
secret:
one was not so stupid as to think you could sneer openly at a feature of an official Army publication.
After the reading came the cards—he claimed to be too weak nowadays for chess—which Lichenko scattered across the foul sheets in Russian arrangements, for games that three hours hence Schild would savvy no better than at the outset except to know he was loser and must pay, the fee being invariably fifty marks, arrived at by a computation as exotic as the game.
Nursing his patient of course demanded more time than Schild’s Army duties would allow, and no one was quicker to see this than St. George, as soon as the morning after the beating.
“Oh Nate,” he said, looking away, for he could not have met Schild’s eye with anything but reproach, and he was the soul of tolerance, “Nate, take a few days off to look after the little fellow.”
Conjure with this: a captain of Intelligence, the commanding officer of a unit of the United States Army, a career officer—he still had never inquired why Lichenko was a guest in the first place. One kind of charge placed against the revolutionary by the voices of petrifaction, was arrogance: ‘He asks us to believe that he, and he alone, knows the Way, and if we do not admit this, he will not admit that we are fellow human beings.’ Schild had read that somewhere long ago, had banned its source from his memory—very likely some renegade, they were always eloquent; of course if he wished he read them, too, he was no Catholic with an Index—but afterwards carried its indictment with him, like a pocket rule, speaking to it on occasion: You talk of arrogance, you, in your arrogant assumption that we suppress all doubt; we at least have the humility to abandon our selves.
He asked it now: And what of St. George,
l’homme moyen sensual,
could there be a more ruthless overbearing than that on which his bovine assurance was fixed? In his mood Schild held it outrageous that St. George had not that first morning after Lovett’s party turned in Lichenko to the MPs as a deserter from the Red Army. Which was his clear duty, the Yalta Agreement standing as witness. Indeed, St. George could be court-martialed for malfeasance of office, were it known, and reduced to his permanent rank of PFC or whatever was the breath-taking altitude to which he had mounted in the fifteen years before Pearl Harbor.
Thus as always, Schild in his deliberations surrendered to irony, the only weapon whose victories were won exclusively from its wielder, the sword with which the Jews, like Samurai, disembowel themselves to spite their enemies. He knew now, in retroactive projection, that he had always known Lichenko was a deserter, even as early as that first rap on Lovett’s door, and in full cognizance encouraged him in the defection. He, Schild, was a traitor; he denounced himself in the dock, took himself to the cellar, shot a revolver into the base of his own skull, and did not weep over the loss of one more counterrevolutionary.
Who wept for a Jew? He derived from the question a brutal, hurting pleasure, of the kind one feels as a child, scratching an itch till it bleeds. And whether it was the pain, the pleasure, or the warmth of blood that gave him courage to press on, on he went with sharp nails through the soft flesh and webbed sinews to the nerve core. In twenty-eight years, among the regiments of shadows which had come and gone, wearing whatever badge of unit—no matter whether Star-of-David or even hammer and sickle; no matter whether in love or hatred, sympathy or suspicion—he had met one man alone who did not treat him as a Jew.
Who would weep for a Jew?
Lichenko would not.
Deserter, drunkard, schnorrer, leech, to the undeluded eye he was a compound of the baser failings—indeed he was what Schild’s father had always predicted Schild himself would grow up to be—and very likely a liar as well, for when a man is one thing, it is natural to suppose he completes the series, and it seemed appropriate to Schild, perhaps desirable, that Lichenko had not been a valiant warrior, either, but was rather a coward wearing counterfeit or stolen medals. If he would grant him all, he must begin by giving him nothing.