Authors: Thomas Berger
“No, no,” he said, returning to Lovett half the sheaf of bills. “The price that we agreed upon was two hundred and fifty marks. You are so careless of your money!”
In Lovett delight and dismay contested, with the latter ultimately victorious. For, while he took the money, he now for the first time studied Schatzi and then applied the same inspection to the china.
“This chip,” he said. “Oh! It isn’t old at all—”
“But,” Schatzi broke in happily, “it is not the age of the chip that must trouble one, but instead the age of the china. As it does happen, I know the late history of these pieces. They were on the estate of the Graf von Halsbach zu Willmark in East Prussia for decades of many years. Unfortunately for him, the count remained until the last hour in the face of the Russian advance, and is it necessary to relate further of his outcome? His daughter alone escaped, with means of certain compromises—” He slowed down, watching Lovett’s doubt metamorphose into a sexless, vicarious lust—whether fastened to the count, the Russians, the daughter, the china, or the unspecified violence, he could not say—and continued: “But one can never be for long uncertain in these cases.” He turned over the saucer in question, and pointed to the moldmark of a factory in southeast Berlin: “You see, unmistakable. Every piece of genuine Dresden ware carries that age-old stamp.”
“Yes,” said Lovett, “unmistakable. I hope I didn’t offend you, but the price, well frankly it’s so modest. You see—” laughing girlishly—“I’m not one to usually complain about something costing too little, but some things you just
know
you have to put out a good price for, or they’re no good and there’s no use in puttin’ out your money...”
Looking through the living-room curtains, Schatzi saw Nader, whom he feared, on the other side of the street and about to cross.
“The price,” he said hurriedly, “is set at that level because I cannot in all decency take a commission on this selling. The count’s daughter is in a bad state of life, ill and needs the money for drugs and food.”
“You must take the rest of this.” Lovett, who had also seen his roommate, thrust the bills into his hand, and they had disappeared into Schatzi’s shaggy pocket before Nader entered.
Nader scraped about dispiritedly in the hall for some moments—time enough for Lovett to conceal his purchase beneath the tablecloth in the box—before he came into the room with a sad look for his friend and a hard one for Schatzi, who prepared to leave.
“It’s no dice, Dewey. The Old Man’s had it in for you for a long time. He told me frankly that he has been looking for an excuse to ride you out ever since you joined the outfit. And he also said he always thought—he said—I don’t want to hurt your feelings, Dewey, but he said, ‘Nader, I soldiered with you for ten years. I’d hate to think you turned queer when you got your commission.’ ”
“Well, Wally, you tried, and I am very grateful,” said Lovett. He flipped away like a doffed glove and began to stuff the crate with his enormous stock of extra underwear. “I told you before that I’m quite actually happy to be going. By the time I get back to the States I’ll be up for discharge, and I’m so anxious to get out of this horrid uniform and back to the shop. Mother’s been going it alone there for three years and just hasn’t been able to cope. The
qui vive
is what one must always be on in antiques.”
“That prick!” said Nader. “His trouble is he just hates culture. You know his idea of fun? Throwing down glass after glass of booze and telling stories about toilets. Hour after hour. I used to have to listen to all that trash without opening my mouth in the old days when I was top for the station-hospital company at Bliss. One time I signed up for a correspondence course on how to improve my English. When he saw it he said: ‘Now, Nader, you can’t make a silk purse out of a piece of sowbelly.’ How I used to ache to get that dirty muff diver in an alley and slam the poison outen him—why can’t a man improve himself?”
Nader’s body took on the temper of the grievance; the trapezius muscle at the base of his neck threatened to burst from the shirt.
Lovett fussed the rough top onto the crate. “It’s all right, Wally,” he said. “One can’t right all the world’s wrongs—Ouch!” He had got a splinter in his pinkie.
“The point is,” answered Nader, taking over the job, nailing down the top with sixteen nails, precisely one hammerblow for each, and without a break in rhythm getting after a nose-itch with his left hand, “the point is, a guy does all he can for a friend.” He manhandled the great carton to his shoulder and fought it to the porch, being at the door the recipient of Schatzi’s courtesy.
Rid of his burden, and having no gratitude, he blocked Schatzi’s exit. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Schatzi’s arms flew up to guard his face.
“You know why I don’t like you?” Nader continued, glaring. “You always look like you want somebody to kick your ass.”
“But I have authority to come now to this house,” said Schatzi “The Lieutenant—”
“Well, if you’re finished, screw.”
Schatzi glanced up and down the street and moved closer. “My dear Captain”—his upgrading Nader had a gross purpose for what he assumed to be a gross person—“I have been told that the Lieutenant Lofatt’s difficulty can be traced to a Russian officer, is it true, and perhaps if this Russian can be discovered, your friend will not suffer for it.”
Nader was not attracted. “I said blow.” He offered Schatzi assistance in negotiating the stair.
At the same moment, however, and before Schatzi had begun to move—looking at Nader with an odd smile that the lieutenant did not understand was admiration—he saw the old housekeeper issue from the door and hail him with her fingers.
“The blond officer has stolen my tablecloth and I don’t know what to do,” she cried. “You are their friend? Then you can help me.”
She was breathless, fat, and wheezing, and what was left of her reason and passion obviously had its locus in the thick and tasteless furnishings of her home. It was precisely this kind of person that the movement in its early days had been pledged to get rid of; Hitler had instead purged Röhm and dispensed with the Strassers, and Goebbels, degenerate, maimed opportunist that he was, had submitted to the policies under which the bourgeoisie flourished.
“You are a widow, no?” he asked, noticing that on her second sentence Nader went within.
“My husband was office manager of a fine company, small but fine. It was a direct hit. Afterwards we couldn’t even find his body. Please, I have no one to help!”
“My good lady—” he drew back as she clutched at his sleeve. Anybody with a brain in his head would have anticipated Lovett by offering to sell the cloth before he had ever touched it. “—the Americans are honest enough. There has no doubt been a misunderstanding. You must speak with him again.”
He was already on the bottom step, but the woman followed him down and, unless he broke away immediately, would surely weep, and that he must be spared.
“With their parties they already have destroyed everything else,” she wailed. “Did you see, the living room is empty, and I have not yet been paid. The ceiling—the ceiling was shot away for no reason.”
Now that it was called to his attention, he remembered a certain damage in the room—yet still not enough for his tastes; they would have had to burn off the roof and knock out at least one wall for it to seem anything like a home to him.
“But of course, this is why the officer is being sent away. You do not go unrevenged.”
The silly bitch listened to nothing he said. “Please speak to him,” she cried. “I have no English.”
“Ah, my good lady, neither have I, you see.”
He had left his bicycle in a clump of bushes around the corner—not from fear of theft, for in spite of all it was still an honest land, but out of caution; avoiding the neighbor Schild, who might have seen an unconcealed vehicle.
On the long trip to the Soviet Sector, Schatzi had to show a different combination of papers at each checkpoint, American, British, and Russian, and there was always the possibility that some illiterate of the last type might shoot him. Sergeyev would of course spring him from an arrest, but, in his own words, could “grant no immunity from a bullet.” However, he once again without incident went through the waste of Potsdamer Platz and the barricade on its east side, and although the crowds delayed him—where did they all come from, and why?—it was far better than to chance a remote and less-peopled entrance, with guards accordingly more primitive.
From here on he found it more politic to walk much of the way, wheeling the bike beside him: it was unwisdom in this area to distinguish oneself on a wheeled possession. Even so, he was stopped once by a Russian private, not a guard but one of the many roaming at large, who would have confiscated the vehicle had not Schatzi thrust in his face the pass from Sergeyev that read: “The bearer, L. K. Burmeister, German national, registration number 2XL-1897340-C, is on special business for the Army of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. —V. Sobko, 10th Section, Hdqrs., Red Army.” At which the fool saluted as smartly as a Russian could, and went on.
Arriving before a relatively sound four-story building off Alexander Plata, Schatzi parked his bike in the iron rack, and this time snapped a small lock around two spokes and an upright of the frame, and with still another pass issued him by Sergeyev, with data as false as the other, persuaded the soldier on door-duty to lower his machine pistol, and entered under the long red banner that said: “The unity of all Antifascists is the guarantee for the construction of a democratic Germany.”
“Yes, do that,” Sergeyev was saying into the telephone as Schatzi entered the smallest room, at the farthest end, on the last floor. “Show him no more mercy than you would a fly that had fallen into your soup, and at the same time deal with care, just as you would with the fly, for if you crushed him then and there you might have to empty the entire bowl.”
To one who on first meeting Hitler had seen an eccentric small-town sissy, there had come in ensuing years a disbelief in anything but the unlikely. However, it must be faced that Sergeyev differed from the commissar of legend only in his wearing mufti rather than the high, tight collar that was wanted to set off his bullet head. But then, even the civilian clothes were regulation for the type: the paradoxical jacket, both too tight and too baggy; dark-green tie and blue-striped shirt, both clean but looking dirty; and on a folding chair in the corner, a black felt hat with a little pond of light dust in its crown-dent and the brim lowered all the way round.
Replacing the instrument in its cradle and without giving Schatzi any sign that he was received, Sergeyev revolved his squat weight, the ancient swivel chair croaking like a frog, to a low wooden shelf on the wall behind the desk, where, as usual, the articles from his pocket were scattered: crushed packet of Russian cigarettes, cheap brass lighter that took forever to catch, mean collection of zinc small money, and a nail file in a mock-leather case frayed here and there to its subcutaneous paper. On his own initiative—for he wished to give Sergeyev no more than he already had, and the best strategy to that end was no unrequested sound—Schatzi had assumed this foible owed to a stout man’s difficulty in getting to his pockets while seated. As to the drawers of the desk: Sergeyev had no more considerable paunch than a keg, which is to say from shoulders to thighs he was one thick swell with no protuberance, but he sat so tight against the furniture before him as to join it to his person. Thus the shelf. Facing which he now stayed and, to it, said in German: “This is not your day.”
The diameter of his cropped skull widened as head gave way invisibly to neck, and both head and neck, and face, as he now made his return revolution, and the thick, hairless hands that grasped the cigarette and smashed at the lighter’s wheel, were crimson as an angry baby. Sergeyev, however, was never angry. If anyone threatened to make him so, he had him destroyed. As, anyway, he had once told Schatzi, who was disinclined to demand proof.
“You have no answer to that? Ah well, in the east country you’ll have years to talk all you wish to the ice and snow, unless a guard puts you out of your madman’s misery with a rifle butt.”
Schatzi waited through the inevitable joke about Siberia, as one does for the amenities. “Yes, quite true, it’s not my regular time, but I have something you should want to know.”
“And you’ve come here last of all, not having been able to sell it elsewhere. You think you can fool me, you piece of filth? You still do not believe that I can fling you down the stairs at my pleasure?”
Sergeyev arose and pounded to the door, opened it and thrust half of himself into the hall. “Yes, that stair down there, the one you came up,” this part of his speech itself being flung in that direction and thus scarcely audible to Schatzi. Who nevertheless had heard the threat clearly enough in the past to know it was habitually delivered in a voice devoid of all emotion; but not that he believed it empty—somehow one knew without evidence that Sergeyev was the type to say it a hundred times and do it on the hundred and first, or the thousand and twelfth, or not at all, for he had no rhythm and no limit and, indeed, beyond the pocket articles, no discernible self. These on the return trip he cleared from the shelf with one hand as sweep and one as scoop and buried in his clothing, as if in anachronistic worry that Schatzi might swipe them while his head was out of the room.
“Also!”
He threw himself into the chair and grasped either end of the desk. “Proceed!”
“Lieutenant Schild—”
“Are you insane?”
shrieked Sergeyev. He sprang up again, went again to the door, looked out, came back on a circuitous route of examination—his office was small as a private washroom, with no window, the streaked beige walls marred by no ornament, and no furniture beyond the desk and the lone extra chair that Schatzi occupied—and disengaged the telephone’s handpiece from its berth.
“Do you think me so naïve that you can inform to American Intelligence before my face?” he screamed, still with no emotion, stamping out his cigarette in a little glass bowl evil with tobacco tar.