Authors: Thomas Berger
You take the Germans, for example, or really to test these intelligent new ethics, take Hitler. You at least had to grant that, terrible as they were, he had stuck to his ideals. If that awful energy could have been diverted into virtuous channels, if he could have stopped after solving the problem of unemployment and building the wonderful net of highways!—No, you most assuredly did not take either the Germans or Hitler; and if you did, there were strong grounds for popping you in the booby hatch. At least, so said without words the faces of the others to whom Reinhart, breaking his long silence, introduced this application of the theory they had so generously trained him to use. The trouble was that they had forgetfully omitted one clause from the grand code: no Germans need apply.
Reinhart was quick to know the justice in this, too, for, awakening from his long sleep, he had begun to see the terrible landscape of actuality. It was false to think that the Nazis were an accidental, noxious but temporary weed upon a permanently rich German ground of the essence, which might one day be cleared. No, go as far back as you would, the wars of 1914-18 and ’70 against freedom-loving, culture-cradle France, the rise of brutal Prussia, way back to the war lasting thirty years and further to the razing of the magnificent Roman civilization by the tribes which Tacitus had earlier observed as being without mercy. Martin Luther overthrew the wickedness of popery; Frederick the Great sponsored the culture of the Age of Reason; Goethe was spokesman for the liberties of the heart and mind; Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, revolted by their time’s cruel and shallow materialism, drafted prescriptions for the free personality—even these were but masks for more Germanic creeds, or the same old one, of tyranny, militarism, suicide, irresponsibility, and madness.
When in the last months of the war American troops went choking through the fell streets of Buchenwald and other camps, passed the vast trenches of slack human skins, the bones inside all loose from their connections, and oven-grates of gray human ash, took in their nostrils that bouquet of burned man which for recognition it is unnecessary ever to have smelled before, and for sleep impossible to forget after—when the pictures and accounts were published, for Reinhart as usual was not there—the most malevolent indictment by the anti-Germans had not been enough, the righteous people who wished to reduce the land to a pastoral community were too mild, perhaps not even another Flood would suffice. For the outrage had been done to him, Reinhart, who had trusted in his origins.
There is no native American but the redskin; we others are something else at a slight remove, which cannot be changed; our names and looks and surely some complexion of the corpuscles themselves are to some old line peculiar, else we should blow away without identity. So he believed—his only belief, along with an idea of the possibility of simple decency—and thus, with his deep relation to what the superior, bright young men in the discussion groups were pledged to destroy, he disqualified himself from their company and took up instead—well, what was fun, booze and snatch and other pursuits generally pointless and amoral, and was forever delighting such people as Marsala with his adaptability.
His one secret was that he liked the Army, where the petty decisions were provided and the major ones ignored, and where you could live as if you had been born the day you put on the uniform.
J
UST AS IT HAD ARRIVED
in England after the great mass of troops assembled there for the Continental assault was gone, so did the 1209th cross the Channel and proceed eastward against the stream of real soldiers returning. At the outset, the assignment to Germany was seen as punishment cruel and perverse. For a year they had run an enormous Nissen-hut hospital in Devonshire, tending casualties flown straight there from the fields of battle, wounds yet hot and reeking. They were veterans of the European Theater and should have been let to cross the water and swagger before the slobs on Stateside duty, to mix undelineated with the repatriated combat regiments, back in the frame where the greater category enveloped the smaller, overseas versus home.
Instead, the score was to stay grievously unjust: for more than a year the 1209th had had to stand holding its portable urinals while patients lay smug with honorable wounds, relating the grand experiences denied to people of the rear areas. Charging the Siegfried Line; streetcars filled with explosives rolled down the hill into Aachen; the bridge at Remagen, with its sign: “You are crossing the Rhine by courtesy of the —th Infantry Division”; the bombs falling on the ball-bearing works at Peenemünde, courtesy of the Eighth Air Force; the Ardennes, where even company clerks and cooks took up their virgin rifles and joined the defense and even a general proved a hero, courtesy of the 101st Airborne Division; and at the very end, “Germany” itself made commonplace by courtesy of the Third Army, who got to Pilsen in Czechoslovakia and burst into the famous brewery to fill their helmets with beer. By courtesy of the 1209th General Hospital, Colonel Roy Fester commanding, one passed his water, told his stories, took a pain pill, and went to sleep.
Just at the point, though, where the responsible latrine intelligence had disqualified the hysterics who insisted the 1209th would any day be shipped to the Pacific, and established beyond a peradventure that it would settle in the Helmstedt field where the unit was then resting as an alleged transient, and stay there forever—just at this point where the wailing was loudest, there being nothing else to do except peer through the single set of field glasses at the nurses’ tents across the meadow, came a courier of unquestioned authority with the word.
Berlin,
it was to be Berlin, so long as something had to be accepted, a horse of a different hue from mere Germany; considerably better, in fact, since the combat forces had never got there. It would be at the courtesy of only the Russians, and the Russians themselves, with the Germans downed, were now a kind of enemy and face to face with their allies kept weapons at port arms. Already they had sealed the Helmstedt checkpoint, and when, after a week of negotiations, the colonel was permitted to pass with jeep, driver, and one aide, he made only fifteen miles before another Soviet unit arrested and held him twenty-four hours incommunicado.
All this, not to mention Berlin of the Nazi mythos: old Hitler screaming crazy garbage; creepy little Goebbels, dark and seamed, scraping along on his twisted foot; fat, beribboned Goering, more swollen joke than menace; swastikaed bruisers maltreating gentle little Jews; the Brandenburg Gate and Unter der Linden Trees; and acres of the famous blonde pussy, whom twelve years of Nazism had made subservient to the man in uniform: one heard that an SS trooper could bend down any girl on the street and let fly. And, once in the city, little work conjoined with a peculiar honor: the crap-house spokesmen who in England had been privy to a document from higher headquarters listing the 1209th as the biggest and best hospital in the Communications Zone, saw another now which said, approximately: the 1209th, selected because it was the biggest and best in the Communications Zone, would be the only general hospital in Berlin District.
Berlin was not the worst place to end a war; better, surely, than the gooks in the islands or France where pigs lived in the same houses as people.
As Reinhart had promised the girl, he could have been found in the frame building across the street from the hospital almost any morning if the visitor came late, and any afternoon, provided the visitor came early; he put in a good four hours of daily attendance, give or take an hour either way, and had much impressed his superior, Lieutenant Harry Pound, by his drive. Pound was not properly a medical-administrative officer at all, but an infantryman, had in fact waded in on Omaha Beach on D-Day, H-Hour plus two, and shortly thereafter led a patrol into a hedge row filled with Krauts and their armament, collecting Mauser slugs and souvenirs of grenades in all four limbs and, later, the Silver Star. Under treatment by the 1209th he had healed into limited service and was transferred from bed to staff. Their job, Pound and Reinhart, was “Special Services,” recreation, diversion, amusement both for patients and medics, things that had meaning in the long, pastoral days in England but which now were needless, except insofar as they satisfied the rules of organization. However, there was in the works a plan for Sunday guided tours of the Nazi ruins; Pound ostensibly was always out somewhere arranging for permission to enter with a force of sightseers into the Soviet Sector but had not yet got even an admission that he existed—if indeed he
was
really trying, for he had a girl friend in the nurses’ contingent and was often seen with her when officially he was understood to be elsewhere—and besides, individuals could go across the border on their own hook without hindrance by the Russians, without the shepherding of Pound, which was to say he and Reinhart had no motive for an undue haste in consummating their project, especially since their desks were littered with schedules and itineraries and manifests and notes to show the colonel if he snooped.
Reinhart’s obligation was to write up a guidepaper listing the principal Nazi monuments, their late tenants, and a fact or two, to be mimeographed and distributed to the tourists. He was not, at the outset of each period of composition, a facile writer, thinking first that here was his chance to show off, second that here was where he would be shown up, and third that it didn’t matter either way because the jerks who went on the tours would immediately spiral the papers into little piccolos and toot obscenities through them at passing broads, if the experience at the Cheddar Caves and Exeter Cathedral had been representative.
However, with stage three he reached the firm ground of the professional artist and could compose with enthusiasm. The only difficulty here was that when he got fluent, he inclined towards the poetic, and when that, put aside his proper work and began a letter to a female in the States who was at once a sort of girl of his and a kind of estranged wife of another soldier on European duty, as near as he could tell no precise love existing in either relation but friendship and interest all around: he always knew where Ernie was stationed and what he was doing, and vice versa, according to Dianne, and there was even some talk, now that the war was over, for a get-together between Ernie and him, arranged through their intermediary three thousand miles off.
A week after his birthday, no more fights but a couple of drunks since—now, he thought as he looked into the bathroom mirror that morning at the pouting aftermath of dissipation, you must take it easy, greasy, and you’ll slide twice as far—Reinhart sat alone in his office, with pen to foolscap, well into a new letter:
DI MY DEAR
,I certainly understand why the Princess was late with my birthday present, and will look forward with lots of pleasure when it arrives in Berlin after a long transatlantic voyage, which will make it only sweeter to the undersigned. ... Well, I’ve gotten where I always wanted to be, Di, to the heart of Europe and just wish I could be holding your hand while we look down from the battlements of some old palace with the peasants going along with their oxcarts down below—Ha Ha, the real peasants I mean, not the kind you always call me!! And I’d just as soon we left old E. playing baseball or whatever somewhere, because frankly Di, while I really like him, as you know, from what you tell me I don’t think he shares our tastes and maybe that was the trouble between you. ...
To go from the ridiculous to the sublime—all pardons asked—there are lots of exciting things transpiring here. The Intelligence Officer in our outfit, who is a friend of mine, is certain Hitler is still hiding somewhere around the city. I met a Tyrolean Count the other day, the kind of fellow you would love—I hope not literally! With an ascot tie, and all. He invited me to hunt on his estate in Bavaria which perhaps I’ll get around to doing when I’m not needed here—but that will be quite awhile. You see, no one else in the outfit can translate the Nazi documents we captured. I’m just attached to this medical outfit now for eating and sleeping arrangements. I wish I could tell you just what my job is, but even though the war is over in this Theater, there are still plenty of secrets. ...
Oh Di, when I look at your picture I think perhaps when I get home we won’t be so platonic! Like to have your reactions to this. ...
He was moving along as magisterially as the Ohio River off Cincinnati, and as impurely—but Ernie was in the paratroops and had shot nine Germans and taken as prisoner twenty more, and wore the Purple Heart—when a spot of color not olive-drab came into the corner of his eye, stuck there, not moving but vital, and since composition was the product only of solitude, his drain was corked.
The color was yellow of hair and rose of skin on a girl, just plump and no more, like a peach, who stood diffidently in the doorway. She was small, wearing spectacles with lenses large and exactly round and an abundance of drab clothing, including high woolen stockings and thick, awkward shoes that made her walk as if deformed, for under his even look she had moved gimpily into the room. Rather, was moved: the thin arm of another party could be seen as far as the elbow, at which point it disappeared round the doorframe. An inch off the arm’s furthermost extension she stopped and smiling as gloriously as one can and still show no teeth, said in a high-pitched and cowardly voice:
“Razher nice vezher ve are hoffing today!”
From behind the door, a whisper, and again the disembodied arm, this time making much of its hand, after a moment of which the girl moved by the use of her own muscles. Her walk was now pleasantly normal, if prim with perhaps an aim to restrict the swinging of her long blonde braids. The latter she caught one in each hand as she halted still far enough from Reinhart’s desk so that he could see her down to the round knees which the skirt did not quite reach, where although at rest she yet maintained some slight side-to-side movement as if she were still walking in the mind. The effect was curiously provocative and perverse, for she appeared to be a kind of large child rather than a small adult, and he regarded her severely.