Authors: Thomas Berger
The latter it was saying now, with the voice of its large craven eyes, its great back hunched against the forward seat; and with the repugnant knowledge that it had duped him, that he had given it what it most wished and so confirmed its appraisal of him, he in fury threw the stick far across the water. The dog went over the side and into the surf with a sudden displacement of weight that put the deck awash, and before Schatzi could work with the bilge can, was back and rearing its wet snout to the gunwale, the dripping stick between its jaws. Yes, it was not without intelligence, he admitted, reluctantly amused, but see what it could make of this! He spun the flywheel and the motor caught, and gunned away full throttle. Looking behind, he saw the dog strike out valiantly in pursuit, in a violent battle with the water, which as the distance grew between them it slowly lost but would not admit. Halfway across the Havel and far enough, he assumed, to make his point—he could no longer see its commotion—Schatzi bent back towards the Tiefehorn, the apex of the Wannsee peninsula.
Two hundred yards from shore he stilled the motor and rowed in, an eye on the woods. Which after a time satisfied him that they were deserted, and he beached and concealed the craft. Ten minutes’ walk through the forest brought him to a compound of four brick buildings around a garden: a peacetime tuberculosis hospital and during the war a school for air-raid wardens. In the garden were half a dozen Russian graves with their red stars of wood.
His goal was the great radio-transmitter building a hundred meters beyond the compound proper. Built of pallid concrete diseased with green-and-black camouflage splashes, the structure bulked four floors tall, was as long as high, as deep as long, and had no windows. To a median groove in its rear face rose a pile of rusting Wehrmacht helmets, taken off German heads by Russian hands. Also in the environs were: cartridges and shells, both unexploded and used, all calibers; hand grenades, both as loose eggs and, with the wooden handles attached, potato mashers; bayonets;
Panzerfaust
bazookas; elements of the imitation Luger called P-38; corrugated gas-mask canisters; gray-green tunics with a thread of red decoration through a middle buttonhole—the rusted and patinaed and mildewed and rotten, already forgotten, material particularities of an obliterated army. Which meant nothing to Schatzi—he remained.
As he entered, Schatzi took a noseful of the unique odor of the interior, a blend of urine, feces, damp, fire, and electrical effluvium from a transmitter that through it all—last stand, Russian plunderers, American snoopers—retained a deep, visceral stream of life. Its inexorable hum, issuing from the second floor but audible throughout, with the odor and, where the bulbs remained, the dim lights still burning in the halls from which humanity had fled and yet remained in the characteristic carpet of litter and excrement, had spent its force on Schatzi. Once inside he passed into a calm, and picking his way down a concrete stairway clogged with junk, which two steps before its bottom connection surrendered and itself melted into waste, he descended to the basement. Where, since he had earlier extinguished the ceiling lamps and smashed their sockets, he worked his passage with the hand torch that had once disturbed Schild.
Already he thought of Schild in the past tense, no feat for him who had but lately served in that enclosure where the present was so difficult to establish and all Jews looked alike. There had in fact been a uniform diminution of indentities as one went down through the categories of prisoners, from the green breast-triangle of the professional criminals to the yellow and black superimposed to form the Star of David. On his morning work gang the faces were the same for three years, yet a good five thousand individuals, by the record, had come into that lineup and shortly gone, without distinguishing themselves in transit. ... It was most unlikely that Schild was a fairy; to be a Jew was enough, and a Communist to boot. (In Auschwitz his breast patch would have been superimposed yellow and red, to show his double affiliation.) Therefore all the less was his keeping the Russian understandable. After Schild and the preposterous Sankt George had carried the Russian, all bloody, upstairs, a piece of chocolate oiled the woman’s tongue: the fellow was a deserter, of course.
The Red Army had dismantled the dynamos and shipped them off to the Soviet Union—this made all the more mysterious the live transmitter on the floor above; its power supply was gone—but in their great haste to complete the job before the Americans took over the sector, they built huge crates that couldn’t clear the basement door, then had to take them down and start again. The detritus from their work—boards, tarpaper, peels of metal housing—Schatzi had assembled wantonly to fill a shallow corridor off the end of the main cellar-hall. Which barred the nosey without teasing them to burrow through it, and also caused Schatzi himself some trouble in his arrivals and departures. For this reason he placed a rigid limitation on the latter, and returned now, breaking his own rules, only to fetch some Meissen china for the last deal with Lieutenant Lovett. That worthy, who had been as the Americans said “framed,” was flying out of Tempelhof tomorrow in the direction of the U.S.A. and wanted a souvenir for his mother.
It took both time and care to pass through the barrier, since one had to close in the tunnel behind, and before he could draw after him the last length of coat tail, above the noise of his entrance he heard quick paw-sounds on the stairway and in the hall and, unseen but heard, his dog announced itself without the blind. Nothing to do but grasp rearward to its collar and pull it in, and forestall in oneself the impulse towards congratulation, which was what, with idiot tongue and rolling eyes, it sought and getting would store up as merit against future failures.
Back of the debris, a door unlocked directly into Schatzi’s quarters. For earlier tenants it had served as storeroom; its walls were continuous metal shelves from floor to ceiling. They now were heavy with stores of another nature, the materials of Schatzi’s major trade: cigarettes, confections, cosmetics, and the mechanical instruments of utility-pleasure: fountain pens, watches, lighters. And also: china from Meissen; Black Forest cuckoo clocks; unique beer steins, hand-crafted and -colored, each with a history; Hitleriana: signatures of the Man, photos of same with notable associates, counterfeit currycomb scrapings of his dog Blondi’s coat, and two books from his personal library: a sob-sister romance by Hedwig Courts-Mahler and one volume of Ranke’s
History of the Popes,
the latter with marginal annotations in the Führer’s hand, often simply
Scheisse
!: souvenirs from a broader range of Nazidom; and finally a sheaf of small paintings on cardboard by an old man who lived under a heap of rubble in the Soviet Sector, whose wife had been killed in the bombings, whose daughter was raped and VDed by the Russians, and whose pictures—calendar landscapes painted in saccharine and molasses—were moving slowly even with Ami soldiers.
Schatzi took some teacups and saucers and wrapped them in pages of the Red Army paper
Tägliche Rundschau.
Although his collection held twenty-four, he had chosen only five sets and, moreover, had in a sharp, glancing blow against the edge of a shelf chipped the rim of one saucer. It was just those persons who claimed sophistication in
objets d’art,
like Lovett, who were the easiest marks, who could be relied on to call it “Dresden” and be suspicious only of the price.
Warehouse, yes, but the place was also home; there was a cot for Schatzi and a length of chain for the dog (where, having enough foolishness for the day, he now secured it), and a little iron stove whose pipe issued through a chink in the wall, emerging outside beneath the cairn of helmets. Even so, he did not dare to keep a fire in the daytime—giving precedence of mind over body, for he was always cold notwithstanding summer. Cold always, a feeling to which one never adjusts, the history of which is the history of the person and in his case almost a history of the times.
The first, the only, personal comment the man had ever made him, and he could not recall it without its full complement: 1919, seven idealists in the private room of a cheap café in München. The sour and insidious stench of beer, not only in the air, one’s own mouth, and the breath of the others, but in clothing dropped on the foot of the flophouse bed and donned again the next day (one could not go naked while they were washed), and doubtless also in Harrer’s briefcase, which along with the cigar box for funds made up the Party office.
Harrer was president; had he remained so, it must be admitted that events would have been less interesting. For one thing, Schatzi’s clothes would likely have stunk of beer to this very day! He enjoyed such reflections, trifling with times past and irrefrangible; they were the only feasible control—which surely even that other early member, he who drank no beer, would admit now, granting for the moment that he could be assembled from the ashpit in the
Kanzleigarten.
But the cold. ... This fellow, about thirty, voice roughened by poison gas in the war, clothes neat but knot of tie off center, capable of incredible fury in abstract argument, but when the
Ober
splashed beer (which he would not suffer in his mouth) on the green fedora upon light raincoat on the adjacent chair, unruffled and gracious. In the discussion he moved that invitations to meetings be printed on the gelatine-duplicating machine and, further, that the cigar box be opened to buy three rubber stamps. On this matter Schatzi cautiously stood with the majority, thinking it over till next week; he had understood the group’s aim was to put a little money in his pocket, rather than take it out—the latter, however, being only academic at the time, for he was a month in arrears in dues and on the point of ejection from the “Home for Men” for nonpayment of rent. No, it wasn’t true that he had joined to make his fortune in the narrow sense—unless one is a German bourgeois or an American of any class, money is an obsession only when one is poor—but a country is putrid and needs airing when it gives no justice to him who still carries enemy shrapnel in the meat of his thigh.
He, Schatzi, seldom spoke at meetings. He was never strong on ideology, and for that reason his associates treated him with a certain condescension. But earlier in the year when the premier of Bavaria, the Red Jew Eisner, was shot in the street and the ensuing proletarian revolution caught Schatzi’s friends of the Thule Society momentarily planless, he had got a chance to show his talent. The Reds hung a picture of Eisner on the wall against which he fell and mounted a guard nearby to force passersby to salute. Schatzi bought a sack of flour, soaked it in the urine of a bitch in rut, accidentally dropped it while passing the portrait. The bag burst, and the stuff powdered the base of the wall: soon all the male dogs in Munich were congregated there to whine and sprinkle their eulogy.
In crushing the revolution there was some loss of blood. The Thule Society—a different order from that of the seven café-gatherers, though with like sympathies; the fellow of the rubber stamps, for one, had been elsewhere—fought as underground shock troops within the city, while the Whites besieged it from without, and in a matter of weeks the revolutionary forces had dwindled to a rabble of left-wing soldiers in the 19th Infantry barracks, of whom the Whites executed every tenth man, and a swinish lot of prisoners in the courtyard of the Munich slaughterhouse, some hundreds of whom were formally shot and the rest battered, pierced, crushed, mutilated, and otherwise coaxed to enter the land of the shadows. Having won some merit in this action, Schatzi came to the attention of Captain Ernst Röhm, who was always on the lookout for young men—for more purposes than one, as it turned out—and was recruited for one after another of Röhm’s private armies, some disbanded the day they were formed, by the Jew-Socialist traitors in the government, the same that had betrayed Germany in the last days of the war. Schatzi had been very young in that time, twenty-two and three, and a prisoner of the feverish passions of the callow: for example, when he thought of the government he saw a single face, wan, spectacled, hooknosed, showing sly sanctimony that broke quickly into womanish fear as a good fist smashed into it.
But the cold. ... After this meeting, when the cigar box had been replaced in the briefcase and the briefcase snapped and the reckoning paid, Röhm paying Schatzi’s, the seven rose to leave. Even as he buttoned his poor outer clothing—he had no overcoat—Schatzi trembled before the thought of the late-fall wind in the street; and the man beside him, getting into the raincoat, stared from the deepset eyes since famous.
“I don’t know why, I am always cold,” Schatzi apologized, and didn’t know why he did that, either, for it was honest enough, but the man without opening his mouth seemed to demand it.
In answer Adolf Hitler said: “You no doubt eat meat, which oxidizes too fast in the stomach and the warmth is dissipated. The German nation as a whole consumes meat in the manner of a pack of hogs at their swill, and can never be strong until all that is at an end—not to mention that, as Schopenhauer observed, it smokes instead of thinks. I oppose all that.” He pulled the hat very low over his brow and left the café with quick steps as Röhm, smiling with his mutilated nose, took Schatzi’s arm.
It was a tablecloth of many colors, handwoven, fringed, and according to Lovett, who folded it briskly and placed it in the wooden crate, an article of Holland. Although the old lady of the house swore that she had bought it once on holiday in that country, he had pronounced it contraband of war, first for her and now for himself. And now, in the incredibly solipsist way that only Americans can do well, he related the details to Schatzi, as if expecting congratulations.
After a cursory inspection of the china, he drew five hundred Occupation marks from a fat wallet and thrust them at Schatzi, for all the world as if he, Lovett, had got the better. For who feels he has got it, has it—added to which, by the look of the billfold, if when Lovett arrived in the States his purchase was exposed, the expenditure had been small and the swindle might even give him an aura of adventure. Standing there before him, Schatzi could conjure up a little narrative two months hence in which his own image would appear as a quaint, Old World rascal. And its force was sufficient to alter, for a moment, the long, straight direction of his life.