Authors: Thomas Berger
“My fault,” he said now, manfully. “This is the Chancellery.”
“The What-cellery?” But he saw in her blue eyes a candid fooling.
“Of course,” said Cronin, studying the mosaics with his bland face, “we are in the New Chancellery which Hitler built circa 1938-39. The Old one, dating from the time of the Hohenzollerns, is next door.” Cronin never put his eyes on a person; meeting one on the arctic tundra, with nothing else to look at, he no doubt would try to inspect the wind. A tedious creep, yet you could tell by the measure of his tediousness that he did know whereof he spoke; it were destructive vanity not to use him for what he could provide.
“If you know the place, Farnie, tell us what else is worth seeing.”
“Well, the terrace and garden are certainly
there
,” Cronin answered, almost, in his pleasure, giving one a fair shot at his face, but not quite.
“Then lead on, McSnerd, and make a trail through the swamp!” said Very, sending her chime like a bowling ball down the marble gallery. And this time Cronin looked full face, demonstrating above it a dun-colored scalp parted dead center, like a statesman of the Harding era, and wondering, Amherst eyes: wondering not only who she was but why.
Eventually they crossed a hall of massive pillars, where Russian names, in their queer letters sometimes just eluding comprehension by a hair, were scratched into the bomb-sprayed walls and from a ceiling of bare girders loose power cables swung like thin pythons anxious to drop upon a meal. And, as a thick, sifting carpet, the usual litter of broken stone, plaster powder, splintered wood, and piecemeal metal, in a quantity which if reassembled, by divine act or motion-picture film run backwards, into its original forms would twice exceed them, for no fecundity can match disintegration’s.
Reinhart thought about this, but it was Very, with her fine intuition, who said: “Why when things are broken do they seem like more than when they’re together?”
“Dunno,” answered Cronin, who had apparently determined her quality and was peculiarly intrigued by it—he was breaking a trail through the trash, as she had asked, and just for her, while the others mushed ankle-deep—“no doubt the air between the pieces.”
“I don’t read you.” She stepped to the French window, of which Cronin opened and held the shutter and then caught her arm: beyond its threshold was a two-foot drop to the terrace floor.
Meanwhile, Reinhart bulled on through and nearly broke both ankles but recovered with the gay veldt-bound of a springbok. Coming back, he raised his hands under Very’s elbows and lowered her like a light barbell, effortlessly, then in malice offered the same to less-than-average-size Cronin, who took it!, being indecently beyond that kind of vanity.
As the others tumbled through each in his own fashion, a nurse named Lieutenant Leek despite support turning her foot, the trio of leaders waded across the terrace and into the junkyard garden of sand, dismembered trees, disjunctive wheels and pipes and tin air ducts, disjected planks; blooming out of these, in the dirty fungus-white of sunless growths, two concrete structures, pocked by shot, seared by flame, sprouting excrescences of scaffold and webbed iron, yet squatted conditionally whole.
On the left—they had come round to the far side—was Hitler’s bunker, according to Cronin, who named the other, a cylinder with conical roof, as a sentry blockhouse manned by the SS until the eleventh hour. In the deep embrasure of the bunker entrance a detached steel door stood angled; next to it at the same degree slouched a Mongol guard, who at their appearance sullenly presented his shoulder blades and a view of trousers-rear seemingly heavy with a load.
“Slav slob,” wittily noted Reinhart.
“Yes,” said Cronin to a length of corroded pipe lying at his feet, “he should be wearing a J. Press jacket and white bucks.” Although his statement was cryptic, his emotion was not: when he looked towards the guard his eyes were filmy with approval. Then, in the self-congratulatory manner of a white man extending common courtesy to a Negro, he plunged across the debris to the doorway, open pack of cigarettes at the ready position, loudly saying: “Z-DRAHST-voo-ee-tee, ta-VA-reesch, KAHK pa-jee-VA-yee-tee?” You could hear all the stresses of the little Russian phrasebook distributed a month earlier by Reinhart’s department.
The Mongol revolved instantly and gave him the submachine-gun muzzle big as a megaphone and all perforated with dime-sized air vents, more death-ray than gun, and if a man ever meant to squeeze the trigger, it was he. But Cronin was a stranger to cowardice; with inexorable good will he advanced, and the Mongol, though snarling imprecations in a tongue that sounded nothing like Russian and never lowering his equalizer, gave ground. Reaching the entrance, Cronin pressed the smokes at him as one might a cross upon a devil, engaged him in a going-and-coming, frustrating inquiry, and was at last driven by him into the waste of loose planks before the SS turret, where Reinhart and Very waited.
“I’m afraid it’s forbidden to enter the bunker,” he said pridefully, stepping up, as if myopic, so near that Reinhart, always uncomfortable in close approach, backed off, caught his heel in the fork of a grounded tree-branch, and freeing it too violently threw away his balance and fell backwards into a shallow trench which till then no one had marked.
“But that’s the next best thing,” said Cronin, pretending not to see, or perhaps really, in his odd way, not noticing, as Very howled vulgarly and the rest of the party, clattering through the ventilating ducts, joined her in sadistic mirth, “that’s the ditch where they burned the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun.”
Reinhart’s back-skin bubbled in gooseflesh, more historical than personal, as he scrambled slowly upwards: he had felt a distinct and depraved wish to continue lying there for a while.
“Ostensibly,” Cronin went on.
On the bank now, Reinhart saw in the trench’s sandy gutter only an ambiguous rubbish of dead leaves, board-ends, and fragments of paper coarsened and grayed by dried rain. Already he had become as reluctant to kneel and rummage in it as he had been, a moment earlier, to leave its placid bed.
“Here, in this ditch?” No, it was too much, along with the imperial chaos inside the Chancellery, to believe; was rather lock, stock, and barrel a vast hoax of propaganda and journalism; normal people like himself not only did not make history but did not see its leavings firsthand.
“I said ostensibly,” Cronin answered. “In my opinion it was a not too ingenious device to cover his escape to South America.”
“Oh you don’t think so?” asked Veronica, the corners of her mouth yet remembering the laugh on Reinhart, as did her wet eyes, life-blue in this landscape of neutral tones canescing into time past.
“If so, it worked.” Said by a newcomer to the area of the three, a stout captain in green trenchcoat, his shirt collar wearing the doctor’s bare caduceus, and Lieutenant Leek hobbled up, and in another moment the others, too, lining round the pseudo grave.
“Unfortunately yes,” said Cronin, although the captain had not properly addressed the comment to him, “anything German always succeeds famously with us. Give Hitler a year and we’ll welcome him back to defend us against the ‘Reds.’ ”
Reinhart had got interested in watching the captain, whom he did not know, whose face was manifestly German-American, wide-cheeked, beer-florid, piggishly nostriled, stupid and good—what had it to say in defense of that old seed sprung from this ground and carried across the ocean to form it?
“Do you think the Reds are a real danger now?” the captain asked in utter innocence, coloring more, for to see Cronin he had to send his eyes across Very’s Himalayan front.
“Only the American Legion and the vigilantes can save us from them. First, the unions must be stamped out...” Cronin’s face became a mask of crafty evil, apparently mimicking a memory of Goebbels’. “FDR has already been got rid of, thank God.”
How much of the sarcasm, which Cronin injected with real ferocity, astonishing Reinhart who had not believed he could show much feeling towards anything, how much of it reached the captain it was difficult to say. Too little, Reinhart feared, and he hastened to spread it abroad that Cronin spoke in jest.
“Well,” the captain answered, humorlessly shaking his thick jowls, “I don’t know it’s anything to kid about, if these Reds are going to make trouble just as soon as we get rid of this fellow.” He pointed into the depression. “If he means the Communists, I don’t think in the end they’d be much better than Hitler. Didn’t they make a pact with him which gave him a green light to start the war? And then proceeded to divvy up poor old Poland, even though they later became our allies. Killing people is all any of those fellows know, robbing people and killing them, year in and year out, for no reason at all. I’ve been a physician for seventeen years but I’ve never been able to figure out what makes fellows like that—because that’s what they are, aren’t they, just fellows, people like anybody else in the beginning.”
Excellent fat captain, with your wide, honest, Nordic face: you have come through! Reinhart watched him kneel like a barrage balloon folding, ever threatening to burst upwards again, and poke into the trench with graceful, doctor-sensitive hands that bore not an ounce of the excess flesh he carried elsewhere. Soon he discovered nothing and rose, despite his weight, easily, saying: “The American Legion stamping out the unions? I have five or six patients at home who belong to both and I also think they were good Roosevelt-Truman men, and so you’ve got me all confused.”
“Truman, ha!” snorted Cronin and suddenly gave Reinhart a knowing eye; in this matter he was willing to grant that they shared a community, and what was shameful was that Reinhart had no courage to indicate him nay, from a combination of guilt and vanity was yellow to reveal he stood with the doctor, two dense and heavy light-complexioned oafs who saw the mellow where the bright boys detected the sinister. On the other hand, he, Reinhart, would as soon cut his throat as join the American Legion or a union or the Communists or the Republicans or the New Deal, or any other outfit the joining of which prohibited one the next day from being malignantly anti-Legion, anti-union, etc., which alternation, irresponsible as it might be, to him signified, as nothing else, the precious quality of humanness.
The others by now had lost interest—in the trench; towards Cronin and the doctor they had shown none to start with or end—and broke their ring, meandering into the rubbish towards the Chancellery terrace and the wall through which they had earlier issued, a series of high windows, shutters in all degrees of angle and caries, above each its own
oeil-de-boeuf
like the dot to an exclamation.
“We can split up, if you want,” Reinhart cried before the dispersal had gone absolute. “Everybody meet in one hour at the truck outside!” Two persons made a noise of despair. “All right, forty-five minutes then. There’s lots more to see inside: you won’t be bored for a moment.” Nevertheless he again heard the groans.
“If little Harry Truman’s all that will stand in his way, expect Hitler back next month from Argentina,” said Cronin, “and back in the saddle.”
“No,” the captain answered, not looking into the ditch now and not with corny, self-conscious moral majesty, but with majesty nonetheless, the placebo-prescription majesty of the American general practitioner, famed source of the basic wisdom. “No,” he said, looking directly and honestly at Cronin, the punk kid yet with downy lip, probably still with Onan as his model, “no,
he must never happen again
.”
From the exodus one figure lingered back, a first lieutenant who held his doffed cap and scratched a graying sideburn with the same hand. He studied something in the litter on which he stood and called, without raising his head: “Hey Bernstein!”
Cronin’s captain was named Bernstein. He joined his friend, who had found a Wehrmacht belt buckle in the sand, translated for him its inscription,
Gott mit uns,
and with him, two men whose race was half run, walked out of sight beyond the SS tower.
Bernstein:
his forebears, like so many Jews, forced by the census takers to assume cognomens, had gone to gems, precious metals, and flowers for their names, had chosen that crystallized juice of ancient trees on the Baltic coast of Prussia, the sherry-golden amber, for theirs, and, fortune’s dupes, brought it to America where its sound was more rasping than lovely on the air, if not downright comic, signifying bagels and upthrust hands. But it was another crime to be laid at the German door and not against the Jews, whose old desert tongue contained no word like “Bernstein”—or “Reinhart,” which in Reinhart’s sudden view was scarcely better and only different from the doctor’s in that no one owed it apology—or “Schicklgruber-Hitler,” the funniest and ugliest of the lot.
What could a man called Cronin say to Bernstein, Reinhart & Schicklgruber, attorneys at law, delicatessen owners, or what have you, who fell out over the fratricide practiced by the last-named? Germans, Hitler’s first victims were Germans!, for that’s what German Jews were, no mistake; else, observing no loyalty but to their own tribe everywhere alien, they would better have defended themselves. Nay, might have taken the offensive, their noted acumen more than compensating for deficiency in numbers, and launched their own Hitler. But no they had been too trusting, too naïve, too German and not Jewish enough. Jews shrewd? They were rather the rubes and boobs of history; after two thousand years they were still fresh from the sticks, assuming booblike that even in the city men were men and life was what you made it.
Such innocence was almost wicked. Watching Bernstein’s shoulders too heavy to be moved by the effort of walking, Bernstein’s too-solid flesh which, if some ambitious or perhaps merely desperate forebear had not shipped the Atlantic, would have by his fellow Germans been resolved into a dew, still hearing oxlike Bernstein’s simple, hateless statement that Hitler must not happen again—Reinhart himself, pure Teuton, on the margin of this ditch would have condemned German, no, the world’s gentiles to eternal fire and thought it too cool—considering Bernstein the good, the innocent, the Jew, obsessed by Bernstein, Reinhart hated him.