Authors: Thomas Berger
In the absence of an enlisted boy friend this taste would have carried Very every evening to the Onkel Tom Kino, to that roped-off centrally situated block of seats exclusive to officers, there for two hours to shuffle off the coil of banal mortality.
Now if this was her pleasure, and as a gentleman his was in seeing she received hers, why now admit obstruction? “Look, honey, don’t worry about me. I’ll sit back in the enlisted section and meet you outside somewhere when the show’s over.” “Now you’re sore.” Of course he was not angry, just piqued at her resistance to civility. With the best intent in the world she went on: “No, tonight we’ll do what you want.” “I want to see the movie.” and usually they did, segregated for two hours and when afterwards they met, Veronica, and not he, looked miffed.
At other times when there had been no conflict of wishes, when they had taken long night strolls sometimes as far as the walled villas of Dahlem’s tree-murmuring walks (almost the only alternative he could offer to the movie-show, which was another reason for his reluctance to prevail), necessarily avoiding society, when they should have formed not two but one, in a sealed capsule of mutual affection, Veronica had lately seemed, not exactly withdrawn, but at least preoccupied. Working with these lunatics all day—apparently her thesis that they got worse in peacetime was daily confirmed—what could you expect? At first he tried to jolly her out of it, but in itself it is a morbid thing to have to cheer a woman, a transposition of the proper roles, she being by nature equipped to bring joy, while man is the rightful brooder.
And considering the precise Very, unfortunately her physical design was not for melancholy. When not in the mobile oval of laughter, her mouth formed a horizontal too broad; her chin appeared square and somewhat virile; when not quivering, her nose was a mere cartilaginous organ, not altogether true, for the induction of breath, and one could understand that it might turn crimson with the grippe. Her eyes when solemn were too pale a blue, the little skeins of iris-color patchily breaking unity, and was not the right one a lash-breadth off the zero aim? Not stimulated, her blood declined to flood her cheeks, and once, at the corner of Max-Eyth-Strasse, in the side apron of his flashlight beam he saw her face was ashen.
Vaguely desperate—for he
was
extremely fond of Very; not in love, actually: that was just something he had thought—Reinhart conceived a plan to get her into the fresh daylight air with a view of water and woods, away from minds, anyway, for one afternoon. He organized some hardboiled eggs, canned meat, and other junk from the mess sergeant, even borrowed the still half-full jars of mustard pickle and mayonnaise Bruce Freeman’s mother had mailed that gourmet, and one Wednesday, which that week was Very’s day off, with her set out for a picnic on the shore of the Havel.
From the beginning, from the moment Corporal Toole let them out of his jeep at the woodland corner of Pfaueninselchaussee and Koenigstrasse, everything went right. The better part of an hour went before they gained the shore, but Very’s color improved with each brisk step. At intervals Reinhart hopped off the road into the forest, to bring back talismans: a spray of lace fern, pine cones, a root like the trunk of an elf-woman, a stone resembling an eye, and of course, even out there, a clip of rifle cartridges. Excepting the latter, he gave them one by one to Very, who by the fourth presentation complained of loaded hands, twitted him for his idiocy, and, at last, laughed—perhaps only a snicker, but her first in a week. He was rapidly bringing her back.
On the beach, of which, wandering to the right from the spit pointing towards Peacock Island, they found a length unoccupied by military wreckage, Reinhart brought the goodies from his musette bag. In a messkit bottom Very mashed the eggs with mayo. When Reinhart bit into the first sandwich a fragment of shell cracked between his teeth, just as if he were home. He ate two, and then one of Spam, and then three pairs of saltines enclosing a hard cheese the color and taste of GI soap, and then an orange—for he had brought nothing else for thirst—and Veronica joked about his capacity. The scorings he had lately noticed in her cheeks were but night shadows, already dispersed by the sun.
He lowered his head against a massive log half-buried in the sand and extended his legs luxuriously, out, out, out, toes towards the lake, taking the pleasure of a prolonged stretch, rather like that of a mild orgasm, grunting, eyes narrowed, arms going back over the log. Five yards away the water munched quietly on the sand. Across against its far margin, the dark horizontal of the Kladow shore, a white sail quivered. On the left, and so near that in his view it seemed not an island but rather the other side of an unbroken bay, lay the Pfaueninsel. A suspicion of autumn, a certain chill filament woven into the otherwise still very warm fabric of sunlight, rather imagined than felt, and as yet too thin to penetrate vegetable nature, was felt by Reinhart, in whom it engendered a sad, sweet deliberation on the coming death of the year; and since the end of anything is peace, his heart, too, like Very’s, fell placid.
“Ah,” he cried suddenly, sitting up, “we forgot the mustard pickles!” He unscrewed the jar and offered it.
Very, while he had unfeelingly stuffed himself, had not eaten a bite, he now noticed retroactively; and the flush in her cheek was nearer the introduction of illness than health returned, as she stared with terrible white eyes into the jar and said, feebly: “They look like alligators in the mud.”
She raised her stare to him, and he saw in it a catastrophe from which he would fain have run, had it not been intermixed with a beautiful weakness towards which his manhood inexorably flowed as all streams to the sea. She had essayed a joke, but tears caught her hard upon the last word. Against his chest he brought her weeping, fragrant head, and told close into her ear the platitudes of comfort.
She shortly pushed him off in a kind of anger and, with eyes still melting, assigned all guilt to him.
“If this isn’t anything, nothing ever was: I am pregnant.”
At the edge of the beach, a fish, or a frog, or some other animate and lonely thing, loudly slapped the water and sank through a necklace of air bubbles.
N
EXT CAME THE INSECTAL
hum of a far-off engine, in perfect rhythm with the prickling of Reinhart’s hide. Unless nocturnal fancies could inseminate, his tremors belonged to another man, for he, Reinhart, had been no closer to Very’s reproductive area than the line of her belt. To put down the guilt, he developed a fury: And I, he raged in secret, I have always acted as if she didn’t have a —— (the good old bare word from the honest Anglo-Saxon culture of artisans and farmers, dating from a time before the mincing French crossed the Channel, before the eunuch scholars began to drone in tedious Latin, and eons before small Reinhart belatedly learned from a schoolmate that females are not smooth between their legs and do not produce young by unwinding at the navel).
And by extension, the term applied not only to the orifice but also to that woman who made free with hers. In love with a— but he would not think it again, this short, blunt syllable which in barracks was aired as frequently as exhausted breath: he would not because —— ness was not here at issue. Suddenly he envied her her achievement, lusted not for her body but for her trouble; wished he could weep for having committed a grand foolishness and be comforted by a big disinterested horse’s ass who never took a chance; began himself to grieve for all the errors he never made, all the disasters that all at once he strickenly knew would never ruin him—except that, so far as was apparent to the outside eye, he stayed slick and bland. Control. How detestable it was, control; how uncontrollable. How selfish!
Wildly he seized her again, this woman attractively defiled with adventure, for the first time his hand went where the eye’s fingers had so often dawdled, to the great hemisphere of her right breast and then to the left, circumnavigating like a Renaissance explorer. Licensed, it was a disappointment; and indeed he knew not why he toyed there, since his purpose was, with lump in throat, self-sacrifice.
His one hand still mobile and encountering more brass button than pendulous woman—at least, that must be what was cutting him—with his other Reinhart lifted her rinsing face, now of a more poignant beauty, pale, implying the sanctity of a plaster, Hibernian-featured Virgin, so much more moving than must have been the real one, dark and muttering in guttural Hebrew. Deep into her eyes he was careful not to look, as he said: “Very, I will marry you!”
What did he expect?: at minimum that the rivulets would cease to flow? Rather were they renewed, as like the heat of summer reaching the highest snow, a brilliant flush mounted to her forehead and a greater rush of water came down.
“How can you!” she wailed. “You are not Catholic!” Repeatedly she struck his chest with her balled fist, no doubt leaving bruises.
Jesus Christ. Like a mongoloid he stared expressionlessly at the lake. The hum of the engine had grown to a still-distant roar.
“Isn’t there anything I can do?” He heard himself say it and was astonished by the mousiness of his tenor.
“Hold me.”
He did, with static hands, and squeezed her, and pushed his nose into her soft hair and breathed relief that he had not really loved her but only thought so for a while.
“But Him, what about Him?”
Because he had clearly pronounced the capital, she germanely asked: “God?”
“Christ sakes, I mean the guy, who certainly wasn’t me! The Invisible Man, because I was under the impression I saw you in all your off-time—unless of course it was one of your psychopaths during duty hours. Is that now part of the therapy?”
In more abandonment than she ever showed while necking, Veronica snuggled into him. “Go on,” she whispered, “say anything, I deserve it.”
No, with just that quantity of censure he was done. Reinhart on the judicial bench would have freed all malefactors who pleaded guilty, for what could subsequent punishment do but incriminate the judge? Besides, he recognized in his coarseness the tedious old suburban lie that the sexual life was to be regulated by a middle-aged housewife’s sense of right and wrong. Screw, screw, screw, if you wanted to, he was proud to think was his credo; and that his own girl friend sported on that plan was the sincerest form of tribute.
Still, if that were her taste, why had she to look elsewhere from him? He was not repulsive to women; time past, he had actually spurned unsolicited advances.
“Who am I to say anything?” he asked, now looking into her eyes. “I’m nobody—as you have proved.” He attempted to loosen their connection, but she had clasped her arms about his waist and locked her fingers, as in that test of strength in which you try to crack the other fellow’s spine.
“You’re the best friend I’ve ever had. Do you think I could tell anyone else?” Her mouth with its liberal lipstick was crushed against his blousefront; on the journey home he would look as if he had been shotgunned in the chest. In her rich hair, which was no longer his property, was caught a fragment of twig, which, nevertheless, he plucked out. That dear fragrance which in the old days clung to his cheek for hours after leaving her, which during a night of sleep transferred to the hood of his sleeping bag, where he could smell it next bleak morning, now penetrated his nostrils as he supposed a sister’s might, stirring mild affection but also thoughts of silly stench.
“I know, I’m like a brother to you—but God damn it, Very, I never knew that till now. You’ve made a fool of me.”
The chopped-egg sandwich Very had made for herself and not eaten, already slightly wilted, lay upon the green canvas of the musette bag. Still holding her, he took it and began to bite off the valances of squeezed-out filling. He did this theatrically, playing the conscious role of a person who vulgarly stuffs himself at high moments, learned from the motion pictures.
“Well, now what are your plans?” he asked. A bit of egg fell, narrowly missing the gold bar on Very’s right epaulet, the tracking of which brought his glance to a side view of her cheek and his attention, since her eyes were closed, to the matter of whether or not she had gone to sleep. “Hey,” he said, striking her roughly with the blunt of his palm, “recover! What are you going to do now? Look, first, are you dead sure? You know swimming will delay it, and an illness too, I think. Didn’t you have a cold last week?” Without physical intimacy he yet knew very well the schedule of her menses: the laugh was not so broad in that quartet of days, and she sometimes complained of headaches. It was just, or should have been, over.
“I’ve had the Curse enough years to know all its tricks,” she answered wryly, cocking up a brow that suggested the old, witty Very’s—and he would have liked to catch her there, saying That’s it, hold it right at that point and nothing is lost, but she was seized sooner by her own voice, which wavered and ended brokenly: “This time it’s for real.”
Ah, Reinhart thought, means business, does it?; isn’t kidding around; no joke; on the level; for real. Perhaps he believed that nothing ever happened to him because when it did, its effects were stated in barbarous language. Once in Piccadilly talking to a streetwalker he heard overhead the Model T chatter of a buzz-bomb and thought he might die, there in the thronging black street, while a whore said “Coo, ain’t it a loud one? Four pounds for awnight, I’m no bawgen basement.” His apprehension proved baseless; the bomb sailed on to detonate in some working-class quarter, where the survivors climbed from the smoking ruins to say “Gor, that wasn’t ’alf close.” Poets are never bombed and, if women, never knocked up.
“Well, what am I to do about it, since you so nicely included me in? I don’t want in—you might say, I never
got
in.”
Obviously with Very it had been love; and hardly the kind he talked of to himself in his childish way—never again! Very in love, a victim of the conquistador passion; what would ten minutes earlier have been impossible to accept was now only difficult. At least she displayed one requisite of the authentic state: sorrow.