Authors: Thomas Berger
Jews really were the chosen, the superior people. This had been Bach’s final meaning, only put in the queer, inside-out logic with which the truth was approached by Middle-Europeans, who really were sapient and deep and lived on an old ground ever fertilized by fresh gore. Poor cloistered Cronin, poor dear Veronica, they could not understand irony, that means to confront the ideal with the actual and not go mad, that whip which produced the pain that hurts-so-good, so that in the measure to which it hurt it was also funny. Finally, having flogged and laughed yourself to the rim of death’s trench, you looked within and saw irony’s own irony: the last truth was the first.
Poor Cronin’s hitherto mobile mouth fell open, static and silent at the incantatory syllables of “Bernstein.” He could be read like a highway poster: ‘Can a Jew, vis-à-vis Hitler’s ghost, be wrong?’ Far easier to accept that oneself is an ass. When he closed his lips again he wore a smile bespeaking relief; when he returned to the ivy he would switch his major to natural science.
“Politics,” said Very, pressing her bosom like an armload of soccer balls against Reinhart’s arm—accidentally?: to study that was Reinhart’s own relief—“thank God that’s an Irish trait I don’t have! Find a politician, find a crook, as the man says.” Poutingly she flung away from his side, as if he were sure to hold the opposing view, swinging capelike her soft fall of hair which, seining the sun, caught a sudden amber shaming old Prussia with its clarity and fire.
In the combination of Very and Trudchen, Reinhart’s needs were met. Such a thing was thereby proved possible, contrary to the popular wisdom which crepe-hangingly warned that man, the questing beast, was never satisfied, that worse than not achieving your aim was getting it. Indeed, he was living high off the hog in Berlin. He was rich: Marsala had sold all his gadgets in the black market and, each week, the candy ration. He did even less work than before: now that the tour was set it ran itself and Pound was gone off on leave to Switzerland, of course in the company of Nurse Lightner, where he intended to buy and transport to Berlin as personal luggage a footlocker full of wrist-watches.
Organize your sex life and all else followed, the phallus being the key to the general metropolis of manhood, which most of the grand old civilizations knew but we in America had forgotten. For example, in Ohio carnal knowledge of a sixteen-year-old girl was a prelude to the penitentiary; they could stick their pointed tits like crayon-ends in your face, wag their sloping little behinds, in summer wear shorts to the junction of belly and thigh, but if you rolled an eyeball towards them you were a pervert. He never entered Trudchen without tremors of retroactive revenge.
With Very, on the other hand, he was getting back at Germany and all its exoticism gone nasty. That was the great thing about women: with one, you had a place in a context. He had begun to think of himself as the kind of fellow who might one day get married; at least he detected the future inclination. Writing to Pound’s wife he had felt vicariously that peculiar pleasure of having an attachment one owed to and was owed by. Love as a mutual debt—certainly it was new to him as he grew old.
No longer did he spring from bed at Marsala’s eight-o’clock clarion, but lingered for a second and a third and then the thrust of a hard hand against his head, at which, still unconscious—which was his excuse—he punched out wildly at his disturber, and even though he usually missed, Marsala stayed sullen all day at these thanks. A mature man should not live with another, but with a woman from whose soft lump beside him under the steaming, odorous blankets he can take a motive to rise, the sooner to be off to honest work, the sooner to be home again as evening falls to meet this sweet dependent, now the smiling presence of the succulent table, prepared for two and not five hundred.
Yet what honest work? Had the war not come he would now have been for a year and a quarter a Bachelor of—what? A process beginning in Central Europe in 1933 (Carlo had a popgun, wanted an air rifle), or 1924, then: Hitler, having failed to capture Bavaria with his private army of cranks and loafers, sits in the prison of Landsberg am Lech dictating to Hess a lunatic statement of aims which two decades later when they have been realized to the letter are still unbelievable (umbilical cord severed and tied, Doctor slaps Carlo’s bare bottom, Carlo wails, he is human and alive), a process whose origins are in the mists of the past, whose products are millions of dead and a continent made garbage—this same process, the blowing of an ill wind, solves for one young man a dilemma, what to do with himself?, but only for the nonce.
Insurance? His father could get him in at Ecumenical Indemnity (Laughter). The campus again?; this time indebted to nobody: “they” were going to make it free for veterans, no selling apples this postwar. Which meant either of two: either everybody would go to college, and being mass it would be mean; or none of the ex-servicemen would go, leaving the same old collection of pubescent punks he had got his fill of long before coming to occupy Berlin. Germany itself. Take out papers, if you could find a government to become a national of. Pose as a mustered-out SS man, for which you had the proper appearance, make a living in chocolate bars and Lucky Strikes, pimping for Trudchen. Or merely sit in some congenial ruin and weep away to a skeleton, for what as a German you did, as an American you did not do, and as a man you saw no fit atonement for.
Since his needs were met—women, riches, life of leisure,
gemütlich
flat, loyal friend (who else but a true-life Horatio would dodge punches to do one a favor?), his connection with history (American news correspondents staged a spontaneous demonstration of Berlin GIs celebrating the Japanese surrender; photographed it; Reinhart stood upper left dutifully tossing his cap towards the sky)—since all these holdings were verifiable to the senses, euphoria must, by definition, ensue.
Yet, within the very seed of comfort he detected an inimical, corrosive juice which like the acid in a hand grenade waited tirelessly on the pulling of a pin to begin incendiary mixture. Satisfaction was his, but so also was a growing conviction it should not be: why should he alone be rewarded when the rest of the world was taxed? Even the other Americans had their troubles, wanted grievously to go home, suffered in what he so grossly enjoyed.
He began to fear his own compulsions; if he did not hurt Trudchen enough, neither did she him, and it was not because each did not try. Violent as it was, that plunging to explosion only suggested a damage he could imagine but never yet achieve, that catastrophic end the reaching of which he came, in a kind of pride of horror, to believe was his true vocation. Truly, Trudchen was too depraved to defile and too small a mount to ride to victory.
Virtually unused went his murderous-muscled body, the welted hands with one of which he could have lifted Hitler and cracked off that weak neck like a sparrow’s, penetrated Goering’s breadbasket as a thumb would sink into a rotten pear. Where was the game worth the candle, where now, standing in the empty stadium, too late, alone, a lackey groundskeeper amid discarded programs and ticket stubs, where now to find another contest?
Time had fled.
Berlin bleibt doch Berlin,
as the natives said, but for the original occupiers—the 82nd Airborne having replaced the 2nd Armored, Reinhart’s medics were seniors in service and disenchantment—as September approached, it was a different city from that Newfoundland into which their trucks had rolled on a sun-swept afternoon in July. The aftermath of war had shaded into the onset of peacetime. Regiments of women in kerchiefs and dark stockings labored to clear the bomb-sites and reclaim sound bricks. The Russians freed and dumped into the Allied sectors some thousands of Wehrmacht prisoners, who staggered along the main thoroughfares tattered, hollow-eyed, embarrassing civilians, panhandling American passersby. The black market shrunk from too-flagrant spectacle. The newest currency regulations were difficult to evade: Pound converted his Swiss watches into Occupation marks—and because the going price had fallen with the replacement of Soviet combat troops by a more conservative element, nonrapists, small spenders, of a dour respectability, got only half as much as he would have in July—but could not get them into dollars and home. “Here I sit,” he said to Reinhart, once for every hour they spent together, “with my finger in my ass and one hundred thousand marks.”
With the new Russians came fewer explosions from their sector, although incidents, frequently mortal, continued. Earlier they had shot Allies and one another in jest; now the motive had changed to a solemn dislike. Americans were counseled to avoid the eastern quarters of the city, were seduced to remain on home ground by a grandiose Red Cross Club on the Kronprinzenallee, where in the stately dining room a string ensemble in threadbare tuxedoes ingratiatingly whined and the fare was sinkers and coffee in individual silver pots; by the Uncle Tom movie theater on Onkel-Tom-Strasse which led to a structure called Uncle Tom’s Hut in the Grunewald Forest, the name German-given, long before VE-Day, for a reason no GI could grasp; by the Berlin Philharmonic, at concerts in the Titania Palast in Steglitz, though soon its conductor, out legally one night after curfew, was misunderstood by an American sentry and shot dead.
Personnel who numbered their years in the late thirties or more were shipped back to the States as senile. So went Reinhart’s friend Ben Pluck, in civil life a lawyer; in the Army, having declined to serve, eternal PFC. Others left on longevity points; thus transported was Tom Riley, from across the hall, saddening everyone whose flat lay adjacent to the stairwell; no more would the iron treads echo his jovial filth.
In the latrines they predicted the 1209th would go to Osaka, Japan, where the bearded clam ran crosswise, or the Azores, as in the limerick about sores, or as a kind of liaison force to the Turks in Istanbul. On the wards were one hundred twenty complainants of nasopharyngitis, all on the light diet. The colonel ate out the assembled officers and nurses on the subject of fourteen spent contraceptives spiked off the hospital grounds on the lances of his sanitation crew, directing his remarks principally to Chaplain Peggott and Major Clementine Monroe, the superannuated chief nurse.
Everybody in Reinhart’s apartment building had a local mistress save two ethereal privates from Supply, who had each other. Don Mestrovicz, technician fourth grade of the EENT clinic, had two in the same family: a mother still young enough, a daughter just old enough, to whom he was the filling in their sandwich. Corporal Toole from the motor pool owned a big round woman with a behind like the belly of a lute. Bruce Freeman, of X-Ray, had an ash-blonde named Mimi Hammerschlag who played bit parts in Ufa pictures; Jack Eberhard, company clerk, a dishwater blonde who like him made strange noises when drunk. Sergeant Deventer’s girl could do a take-off on Hitler with a comb for a mustache; Bill Castel’s woman, an artist, cut out his silhouette in orange paper. Ernie Wilson’s piece was three weeks pregnant; Roy Savery’s, one month; five others professed falsely to the condition, three of whom named the same sire, T-3 “Plumber” Cobb—he laid a lot of pipe—but were duly unmasked. And Farnsworth Cronin was sometimes seen with a boyish girl whose name was spelled
Irene
and pronounced
Ee-ray-nuh;
he, however, called her
Boo.
Supply outfitted everyone with short jackets, like Eisenhower’s, calling in the old skirted blouses. All noncommissioned officers in the ETO were granted a liquor and beer ration; in the 1209th these were consumed on the rear balconies, feet on ledge, cigars in jaw, and in the company of the girls, who giggled much and sometimes sang in English. No Werewolves having turned up, the district order that US personnel carry arms when off compound—the medics, their red-cross sleeve bands—was rescinded. Under the authority of the Information and Education Program, Gerald Gest was sent to Paris for a month to study French civilization at the Sore-bone, and a class in basic psychology, meeting once a week in an empty storeroom in headquarters, was offered to qualified enlisted men, which meant everybody; in its chair, PFC Harvey Rappaport, MA from NYU.
A sandy-haired corporal named Gladstone, who worked in the post exchange, blew out his brains there one night after closing, leaving no note. Veronica’s neuropsychiatric ward, already so crowded that three patients bunked in a supply room, somehow stuffed in five more beds. Walking past its door you never heard a sound, although by her account half a dozen patients wept all day and another man made squealing noises with a finger against his teeth. A paratrooper, under observation for persistent bed-wetting, was discovered to be a poseur—in the wee hours he did not really wee-wee but soaked his mattress with H20 from the bedside glass—and sent back to his outfit on charges of malingering. A tentatively diagnosed schiz struck Lieutenant Llewellyn, assistant psychiatrist, in the nape, knocking off his glasses, then sought to crush them but couldn’t with bare feet. Another patient, a brawny man with the hair of a goat, incessantly planned to become a novice in the Carmelite nuns.
No doubt it owed to such spectacular persons and events that Veronica by the fourth week of their acquaintance had lost her bloom, or rather that part of it which was rosy towards Reinhart, who suspected that being normal he bored her. And he could not very well divulge the doings of that other self who lodged with Trudchen, the mad one, the one with passions which, being there resolved, freed this one, the front man, to be so smooth and bland. Back there, Himmler did his dreadful work; up here was elegant Ribbentrop, kissing hands.
For years he had cultivated the art of surrender to women to offset his bulk, which sometimes on its approach caused, particularly small, girls to look for cover. The brute tamed by gentility, the handsome and moral equilibrium of opposites. No, its validity consisted only in the abstract, never in practice. For instance with Very: he cared little about the destination of a date, so long as it was not an official Army entertainment where they must be separated by rank. But Very had for the movies the insatiable hunger with which it was said expectant mothers went to dill pickles—a touch of madness for them, really, Western, gangster, comical, historical, pastoral, pastoral-comical, historical-pastoral, any passage of arc light through celluloid into minuscule glass beads generating counterfeit life, but especially Dramas in which any one of those actresses with big eyes and hard white jaws, dressed in jodhpurs, carrying whips, riding stallions, of course gelded, consummated a union with the scion of a swell family of old Virginia and ate for breakfast grapefruit in a bed of ice, her nostrils flaring.