Authors: Thomas Berger
Reinhart groaned: “Because so do I. Really.”
T
EMPELHOF AIRPORT WAS STILL A
mess of cracked-eggshell buildings, but the Air Force had policed up the field and laid its steel-mesh runways. Grounded craft sat dirty and rather larger than they looked in the sky, on what Reinhart believed was in the jargon of the trade called the “apron.” Identification of airplanes was a prideful talent with some people, not him. The nearest fellow in the party, a tall thin T/5 with heavy eyebrows arched in perpetual curiosity, pointed out a Liberator, joked: “It looks like a pregnant dachshund.”
Upon application the T/5 confessed to being a case of chronic dermatitis, showed a bandaged right hand, said with a smirk of self-hatred: “I guess you were wounded.”
“No,” said Reinhart, pointing to Trooper, who stood sickly at his left, “he and I are psychos.” Succeeding that, Trooper dug him with an elbow of embarrassment; he turned to the gutless fellow and bawled him out; therefore he did not see the T/5’s reaction.
But he heard him say: “Well, this skin trouble is supposed to be psychosomatic, so we’re all in the same boat.”
“It’s nothing to brag about,” Reinhart answered. Crushed, the T/5 monkeyed with his duffle bag.
Staff Sergeant Owens, in charge of the patient group from door of hospital to hatchway of plane, again called the roll and lost four names in the roar of revving engines and the braggadocio bellowing of mechanics.
“See that rusty heap over there behind the Liberator?” Trooper asked Reinhart. “I bet you beaucoup marks that’s what we got to ride. And we won’t get any chutes. Oh my busted back, I feel bad.”
“Now Trooper, I’ll tell you a thing. Know that Air Corps gunner down at the end of the ward? When I told him we were shipping out to Paris by plane, he said, ‘Then I’ll never get out of Berlin. I love to fly but one time two months ago I dreamed the engines conked and I had to jump.’ That’s why he ended up in Psycho—the dream has haunted him ever since. He says he would rather go down in flames than hit the silk. Everybody has his own horror. You don’t mind the jump but are leery of the plane.”
“That’s on account of my training, Carlo. Those instructors never had any elasticity.”
Instead of wondering what that meant, Reinhart hung himself up on his own term: he was very leery of Very Leary. Although as late as the evening before she had betrayed no knowledge of his leaving, he, the old victim of guile, now practitioner, would not feel safe until he soared the air. He looked towards the buildings and would not have been astonished had Veronica come sailing from them and taxied up the mesh, dwarfing the Liberator. What a piece to run away from!; he supposed again that he
was
nuts. The T/5 there, who stared hornily at the female member of a professional party heading towards them, would sell his country for a Veronica.
He was torn by a distant shout and in involuntary panic tried to hide behind emaciated Trooper, who, a blotter for anybody else’s emotion, almost wept: “They after you, too?”
Reinhart regained his self-respect. “Don’t get your balls in an uproar. I’m looking out for you.”
“It’s not,” said Trooper, “that I’m afraid to get hurt. I just don’t like the humiliation.”
The shout was closer, and clearer, and in the two syllables of Reinhart’s cognomen. He turned to face the firing squad and saw—Marsala. He ran to meet him, ignoring Sergeant Owens’ howl.
Ten yards away, Marsala slowed to a measured, inexorable pace, waded in, hosing his target with an abuse of great variety and color: scatophagous Reinhart, the traitor, the Oedipus Rex, the fornicator of infants, the defiler of graves, the double-barreled international bastard and revolving son of a bitch.
“Fuck you and fuck your friends,” he at length concluded. He turned away. His eyes were wet.
“I was going to write you from Paris, buddy. They only told me yesterday I was on shipment, and wouldn’t let me get out to say goodbye.”
Marsala wiped his nose and fired up a big black cigar, throwing the match over a shoulder.
“Well whaddo I care where you go in Paris, huh? What’s it to me you die like a turd? You goin’ on a plane, huh? I don’t mean what I said then, I take off the curse, you die and ya blood will be on my heart. Here, you wanna cigar? I ain’t mad no more. Besides you’re a poor dumb cuckoo. ... You’re shit, too. How’d you work it? I’ll say this for you, you got a lot of guts and talent to fool that old Millet. I been wrong about you for years. I thought you was this college type. But for Christ in heaven, after looking at you I think we run my brother from Murder Inc. for chief of police. You make a whore out of this young kid, you knock off a guy with your bare hands, then you play nuts and get home before everybody else. What college you come from, I think it was reform school.”
Reinhart modestly smiled at this somewhat inflated précis of his career, which however was sound in the essentials—including the last-named. Millet had been on the verge of sending him back to duty—believing in the actuality of King Arthur turned out to be quite O.K. mentally—when in the interests of a new scheme Reinhart relapsed into the old symptoms. Just as he had foreseen, the ward needing his bed for new arrivals, Millet got rid of him.
“I don’t know if this is the best way. I might get hung up in Paris for months, but I have to take care of that paratrooper over there. Where do you think they’ll send us?”
Marsala spit out a fragment of wet tobacco. “The 179th General. That’s on the north side in a place called Clitchy.”
“Stinks, I guess.”
“Oh no.” Marsala’s eyebrows climbed. “I saw it. I ran down there when we was in Normandy. It ain’t a sow pen like the 1209th, I tell you that much. And then you get a pass, you go to Pig Alley—and don’t try to crap me any more you would go to this Loo museyum.”
The party of flight nurse, co-, and full pilot had passed them, and sure enough, skirted the Liberator for the rusty cargo plane behind it. Reinhart felt imminent-departure gas in his stomach.
“Well, this is it, buddy. I’ll write you a letter, tell you how it goes. You’ll get home yourself any day now, you got more than enough points.” He shook his hand.
Marsala diffidently picked his nose. “I never answer.”
“Why not? You going to hold a grudge?”
“Whaaat grudge, you rummy?” He punched Reinhart’s hand aside. “Give the Princess a smooch for me. ... Now I guess with all your twat here you forgot her: you know, that married chicken with a husband in the paratroops.”
Oh by God, Dianne Cooley. He owed her a letter for three months. And her husband Ernie, in the 82nd Airborne, the bright shoulder patch of which he saw, across the field, on the narrow shoulder of Trooper. It was an off chance.
“To tell you the truth,” he said. “I’m not convinced that I ought to leave. I like the Army, as I always told you, and I like Berlin, but it seems to be a good time to get out of both. But I’ll have to play it straight in Paris. I don’t want a Section Eight discharge. That might affect my career.”
Marsala shivered in his overcoat. “It’s gonna be a cold winter here for Jesus sake. A week yet to Halloween and it’s already like a witch’s tit. They’re cutting down trees in the Tier Garden. No coal. ... Career? I got your career.” He squeezed himself in the crotch. “You’re gonna be a hood, that’s what.”
“A psychiatrist. How about that? Except for a couple of people, including you, everybody I see is sick, boy, and bad.”
“Especially you,” Marsala complained. “I take back what I said about you fakin’. I knew old Millet couldn’t be fooled.”
Reinhart shook the buddy’s hand again and saw the black eyes swim. “So long, Jimmy, you were the best of them all. Have fun with Trudchen.”
Holding his back stiff, he rejoined the group of patients. Time, where did old Time go, what were its mysteries? Not the narrow time towards which some weeks ago he was disordered, but that great gray fog behind us and before us, into which our lovers and friends vanish, events pass, and which claims even our old selves as we stand here in the limited clearing, nude in our newest one. Having learned from the Italians that crying is no reflection on a fellow’s manliness, Reinhart dropped a tear or two for the summer of 1945, already gone; the war, long gone; the Army, soon to go; his twenty-first year, going drop by drop; and inventoried in water the dear people known and lost in this adventure, Schild, Lori, Bach, even including Veronica, whom he now believed he really did love but even so intended to remain adamant towards, and that was the sadness of it.
By the time he rejoined Trooper his face had dried. He anyway reached for his handkerchief. A tractor was towing the cargo crate to a clear vista on the landing strip.
“Yep, that’s it,” said Trooper. “Like I said, the old C-47. I’m gonna faint.”
“Like hell you are,” Reinhart muttered. “Wait a minute, anyway, I’m looking for something.” No handkerchief in his pocket. He opened his duffle bag. On top lay a little Red Cross sack of dirty socks and pinned to it was a note which he could, and did, read without undoing.
Kiddy—thanks for not making a scene about leaving. You have always been decent about a person’s feelings. I will always think of you close to my heart but I can’t get in touch with you anymore like this or any other way,
because
—well, I never did tell you the name of my real boy friend and I better not now—ha! what I called him in front of you was s.o.b.—nasty to laugh tho, because I do love him very much and now we are back together. He has to get a divorce from his wife but is not a Roman Catholic so its O.K. I have sinned but true love conquers all. We plan a double wedding with Ann Lightner & Lt. Pound who is in the same fix as X. Don’t know where we’ll live—all around, I expect, since X is Regular Army. Oops, maybe I told you too much. Anyway, I send you all the love I can without being disloyal to my Husband To Be. Your intimate friend,VERY
He got a handkerchief and blew his nose just as Owens called the roll again and, conveniently, just at his own name, and the sergeant took it as answer. They filed towards the open doors in the plane’s belly. Trooper didn’t collapse, because Reinhart threatened to forsake him in Paris if he did.
Reinhart was last in line. He took a final noseful of Berlin air, which was cold and fresh and yet carried a faint dust of ruin. German rubble-workers around the administration building conversed in their native argot, and by some acoustical principle he could hear them.
“Kommste imma erst so spät nach Hause?”
“Nee, nur wochentags. Der Sonntag jehört meiner Familie
—
da schlafe ick’n janzen Tag.”
He did not understand a word. From the air the city would look like the crater-pocked, man-void moon. Finally one foot, and then the other, stepped from Brandenburg sand-plain to echoing metal floorboard.
The flight nurse, who wore a long green coverall, took the roster from departing, sycophantic Owens and began her own count. This time Reinhart watched for Trooper’s response. It came on “Poteet, Hastings F., Jr.,” a name Reinhart had heard as many times as the roll was called and never connected with his patient for the simple reason that Trooper did not answer properly but rather raised one finger and coughed.
Reinhart shouted “ho” at his own name, which came right after, and asked Trooper: “Did you know a guy in the 82nd named Ernie Cooley?”
And Hastings F. Poteet said instantly, with no sense whatsoever of the coincidence: “Oh you know him, too. They’ll never get Cooley.”
“I’ll be damned. You really know him, Ernie Cooley, from Norwood, Ohio? I used to go out with his wife, if it’s the same one.” He expatiated on the theme of one small world.
Which made no impression on Trooper, whose delusion was that while the world is infinite, all things are simultaneous. He waited with his polite, beagle eyes until he had his chance to say that Cooley had deserted in Normandy in June, 1944, almost as soon as the chutes hit the ground in their first jump of the war, and that, again, they would never get him—because if they did it was curtains.
“Why?”
“Desertion in the face of the enemy. They shoot you in the heart for that—and for other things too,” he added darkly.
The T/5, who sat on Reinhart’s left and had been listening, struck his curious brows into their business: “That’s almost as bad as what sometimes happens in the hospital: desertion in the face of an enema. When they catch you for that, you get shot in the ass.”
Reinhart thought it very funny—he was near hysteria, anyway, at leaving Berlin to rejoin the earth-people; the doors were still open, the engine quiet, the pilot outside on the ground, lazily joking with a mechanic; he could still burst away and regain the great, ruined, dear city—but a single slight smile and the T/5 would own him for the rest of the flight.
He looked about for another victim on which to stick this adhesive fellow. Against the other wall, on the line of metal seats which paralleled his own, sat eight or nine types; on his side, eight or so more. In addition to Trooper and himself there were five other psychos, all quiet cases, whom he knew only by sight; one obvious traveler from the skin ward—a sergeant of limited dimensions, whose acned cheeks were relief maps of Berlin; beyond himself, nobody from the staff of the 1209th.
The pilot climbed in and sauntered forward. Ground crew without, and nurse inside, sealed the doors, and probability surrendered to necessity. His chance was forever gone. Only Trooper’s whine saved Reinhart from claustrophobic frenzy.
“We won’t need chutes, old buddy,” he told him with a pat on the shoulder patch. “These machines never fail.” He looked across to Sergeant Acne for confirmation and saw, in spite of the eruptions, the crewcut showing at one side of a cocked overseas cap, the OD overcoat—he saw—well, he saw, but sick in the gut from his hallucination he begged forgiveness of Jehovah Millet and would have given blood sacrifices to have Him there to say he did not see—Schatzi. “Do they, Sarge?” he nevertheless asked.
Sarge silently turned his head towards the pilot’s cabin. Poor chap, if he wasn’t Schatzi—in his profile, corrupted by the malady, there was little likeness—he was to be pitied, for a hideous boil lived in the very orifice of his left ear. He had not heard.