Authors: Thomas Berger
“Tischmacher Gertrud,” was her next sound. Her little fist had come loose from the right braid and was available for the shaking if he so required.
Somebody was pulling something weird. Reinhart rose and went around the desk, first going towards her to throw them off guard, and at the last minute executing a left-oblique turn of a smartness he had never been up to when in formation. Popped through the doorway, his head met that of the other girl, the one of the ruin, whose name he had not originally got and who now, though still nameless and taken in a suspicious act for which there was no apparent motive, greeted him like a friend and he had a handshake after all.
He asked her in and invited both of them, she and Fraülein Tischmacher, to chairs, of which they cornered the market, since there was only enough furniture in the shabby, rickety place to service his and Pound’s narrow purposes. He even opened one of the French windows on the sand-and-crabgrass side lawn, to clear the air, for his series of cigarettes, the sine qua non for writing, had tinted the inside atmosphere gray-blue and it surely stunk to someone just entering.
The niceties owed to his guilt about not having turned a finger for her job. He had even “given his word,” he remembered, whatever that was; he said such things when under the influence he became formal and constricted. In real life, as now, he was, he knew, deft, volatile, witty. Sitting on an old wooden box, his legs up on the desktop, rough-skin boots, size 11-C, murdering the papers there—oops! the letter to Dianne was ruined, but no matter—grinning easily, he lighted another cigarette and blew a process of smoke rings, each smaller than the last and spurting through it, each round as Gertrud’s eyes, as she watched them with honest awe.
“I am sorry I took so long to come,” said the other girl, very slow and clear so that he could understand the German. Her hair sent no message of having had a wash since the night he first saw it could stand one; similarly, her dark-green beret and gray coat with breast ornamentation of Cossack’s cartridge loops. But miraculously, the fresh sunlight which marched through the open window in a brutality that made Reinhart wince, was kinder to her used face than the night had been. Something could be made of her, if you took the trouble.
Reinhart had the courage to admit that he had not yet found the right thing for her, that he had of course been working on the problem for two weeks and would no doubt soon reach a satisfactory end. Not a day passed that he didn’t arise painfully, come slowly through shaving, two portions of powdered eggs, a pint of coffee, and a lungful of Zehlendorf’s pine air to health and good prospects and then feel drop over it all the shadow of his given “word.” The trouble was he never knew how to get things done, how to make deals, how to “see” people who could arrange. At the same time he had no hope that anything could ever be done in a straightforward way.
The girl spoke fast, and incomprehensibly to him, to Gertrud, and Gertrud then said: “She vants—wwants you to believe she is grrateful for zis. She wwants to say sank you.”
“You speak English!” Reinhart was not so astonished as he made out, but she was charming, although too young for one to admit to himself that he might find some use for the charm.
Her eyes, bluer than the high, immaculate sky revealed when he opened the window, bluer than a broken bird’s egg you might find if you went behind the building and searched the pine grove, than, if you walked far enough westward you would see, the Havel; blue, the quintessence of blue, so that if the color in all its other uses had faded, Zeus might take from Gertrud’s store enough to renew the blue everywhere in the world and not leave her one whit of blue the less. These remarkable eyes, surely kept behind spectacles not because they were poor of vision but rather as protection against some thief who might pluck and sell them as sapphires in Amsterdam, showed their stars to Reinhart as, below, the small pink mouth said:
“Yes, yes, I know English zo wwell, having studied it zix yearss. I sink I do not too badly, do you?”
Oh, marvelous, marvelous, he agreed, and would have preferred her over Churchill addressing Commons.
“You have acted so kindly to my cousin,” she went on. “Perhaps I do not seem especially rude when I ask, do you sink there is also available for me a chob—do you sink for me—do you sink there is also a job for me? There.” Not covering her knees when she stood, her skirt did not pretend to when she sat but made a soft frame for the round thighs that it was no doubt a grave evil to look at.
So he looked away quickly, looked at the other girl’s sad, sweet, and honest way, and suddenly heard his own voice saying:
“Warten Sie eine Weile,”
Lovett, he would see a lieutenant named Lovett, who was chairman of everything out of the usual course, or if not he, then another officer named Nader, whose duties were similar. To the girls, however, he said only “Wait,” and in a tone which they considered too masterful to nod to, instead following his departure with heads neatly turning.
The building had no rhyme or reason. Nobody could tell what function it had served before the Fall; it may have been the only place in Germany where one could hide from the Gestapo, or perhaps on the other hand was a Gestapo-designed labyrinth through which their captives were permitted to wander free and moaning, madly seeking a nonexistent egress. Three weeks in Germany now, and Reinhart had yet to see his first right angle, true line, and square space. Outside, he regularly got lost en route to the Onkel Tom movie theater, ten minutes’ walk away, and strolling of an evening over to the Grunewald park, to the body of water called by the Krauts “Krumme Lanke” and by the GIs “Crummy Lake,” he could not be less certain of his position in space were he in Patagonia.
Somehow he reached the foyer and assuming the fresh soul of one who had just entered from the street, struck out to the right, passing the orderly room and detachment commander’s office, a treacherous area in which, although he had a certain immunity from the worst of its menaces, it was not wise to linger. From there on, he looked in sundry doors, sniffed up divers halls, consulted with acquaintances encountered in passing, most as bewildered as he, and at length spied Lovett himself, the sissy, in a large room on the northeastern corner.
The lieutenant stood willowy beside an ancient desk to which a gnarled Kraut, in a peaked Wehrmacht cap, applied cloth and a white fluid from a long brown bottle.
“I want you to bring out the highlights of the
carving,
” Lovett was saying with his arbitrary, Bible-like stresses. And then, “Highlow, Reinhart,” although he had not yet looked up to see him.
“I am being willfully misunderstood,” he continued, in a very lowww voice indeed, which quickly rose to a kind of screech to say: “But who knows German?”
Nader, dark and thuglike, sat at another desk and relieved himself of what, asking public pardon, he called “The Return of the Swallow,” by Belch. You seldom saw one without the other, and never saw either without wondering at their compact, which was surely queer and yet, on the same assurance—namely, that you simply knew it—was not
queer.
“Well, I do, somewhat,” Reinhart admitted. He was not equipped to tell the man what Lovett wished, but ordered merely:
“Polieren, polieren!”
which the fellow was doing anyway, and added “please” and “yet” and “still” and “to be sure,” the little words Germans hang on everything.
Satisfied, even pleased, Lovett lowered himself into a chair in the way one might drop a length of garden hose and listened to Reinhart’s requests with a crooked eyebrow, replying when they were done: “Wanna come to a party tonight?”
“Really?”
“Certainly, really. Do you
think
we are snobs? Of course we
are,
but you look civilized. A little house-warming at our billet. American
girls
—if that’s what you can call our nurses. Wine—if that’s what you can call this German cat-peepee. And songs. You know our place. Any time after eight.”
Since there was almost no finish left, it was impossible to shine the desk. The German knew that as well as anybody, but he kept working humorlessly as a sociologist, now moving right between Reinhart and Lovett so that they could see only unimportant parts of each other, and Lovett, usually so quick to be waspish, suffered the obstruction—perhaps in the idea that any sound from him would be received by the dolt as a countermand of his previous order. Reinhart had begun to wonder about the man and what impressions he must receive, there with his bottle and rag between two aliens speaking of nothing—for two words in a foreign tongue are double too many if you don’t get their drift—when Nader came over swinging his simian arms and said:
“Take off like a big-ass bird, Jack.”
The German looked vulnerably from him to Reinhart, his nose long and tapered like a carrot, cheeks marred, black-brown eyes screwed in deep sockets. He was an old man, maybe fifty, commanding sympathy.
“Er sagt, dass Sie herausgehen müssen.”
said Reinhart, shrugging the blame off himself.
“You see, Dewey, that can’t be polished,” said Nader to Lovett, who flipped his hand negligently and then bit at a finger. All his nails were chewed down to the nub; the fingers were long and white and maneuverable as rubber.
The German put his cleaning materials into a wooden box, the contents of which on his route to the door he stopped to rearrange. The wine bottle, being too tall, gave him trouble; he transferred it from box to armpit, then had to lower the box to the floor for resituation. As he bent, tilting the bottle, the liquid poured off on Nader’s desktop, and by the time he got his cloth to work, his head shaking stupidly, the papers thereon clung to one another in gluey fraternity.
So far as Nader went, what was done, was done. He calmly watched the man wad the papers and drop them in his box, mop up the excess fluid and then with a clean cloth rub up a high gloss, the kind Lovett had wanted on
his
desk.
“Just
look
,” cried Lovett, biting his tongue.
The German crept out, and upon his heels went Nader, returning shortly with the clotted papers, which he arranged for drying across an extra chair and table near the open window.
“The only thing that burns,” he said to Lovett, “is that that bastard could pull such a cheap trick and think he fooled me.” He had not as yet recognized Reinhart’s presence. Reinhart had no feeling towards him but distaste.
Lovett blithely ignored him and said to Reinhart: “Send this woman to me. The nurses’ quarters can probably use another maid.”
“Course I coulda let him take this stuff for ass-wipe,” Nader went on to himself, aloud, describing one document as a report to the colonel on how many butt cans had been placed around the area.
“And what about the girl, sir? She knows English. We could use an interpreter over in our office. For one thing, we’ve got this tour of Berlin coming up, and neither Lieutenant Pound nor I know anything about the city. She could—”
“Oh
God
!” screamed Lovett. “Is Pound going to start that awful Cook’s Tour doodoo again? Tell him to forget about it,
please
! He’ll lose twenty men, just as he did at Stonehenge and I’ll have to go hunt them behind every Druid altar, or here, I suppose, falling down drunk with some filthy Russian. But then I suppose nothing
I
say ever matters to that sloppy creature. All right, I’ll see about the girl tomorrow, but if I ever come to your office and see you with your hands or anything else where it shouldn’t be, I will know you for a deceitful person. Be at the party. Bye!” His eyes closed like the lid of a rolltop desk, and when shut were as seamed.
On the return to his own office, Reinhart crept noiselessly the last fifty steps to the door and, unobserved, studied for a few moments the backs of the girls within, who had apparently not so much as twitched in muscle-ease since he left, and not spoken, certainly, which you could tell from the long-established set of their heads. Looking at the clean pink of Gertrud’s scalp-parting which ran from crown to nape without a disordered hair, he regretted the evil will that had asked Lovett for her assignment to himself; she was probably about fourteen. Under civil law it would no doubt have been a crime to employ her, but then he was under the power of no such ordinance, and besides had no criminal aims.
He entered and stopped between their chairs, saying to the older, “
Alles ist in Ordnung,
everything is arranged. You must see Lieutenant Lovett tomorrow. Ask for him at the front of this building.” Her eyes were soft brown over violet shadows as she showed a gratitude that made him as uneasy as if he were wearing sweaty underwear; it was too much, in the light of his mixed motives. And still it did not make her happy, but rather more sad. Indeed, everything about her broke one’s heart to see.
“I hope you don’t mind being a cleaning woman for our nurses. There was nothing else available, since you have no English.”
And now a kind of pride appeared for the first time, as she answered: “No, I can do that.”
While he spoke, he felt near the back of his left hand the proximity of something warm and alive, not quite touching, but there: a piece of Gertrud, but whether hair, cheek, or hand he could not tell and did not wish to look. Finally, having finished his one report, he had no choice. It was her cheek, with its beautiful petal flush, extended in curiosity.
He teasingly seized the thick braid nearby and said in English: “As for you, Miss Tischmacher, how would you like to help us here, in this office, with translations?” And the soft young face moved sideways, towards a nest in his palm, but he had dropped the hand before it got there and went to sit on his box behind the desk.
There had suddenly come to him an explanation for the whole works, from start to finish, the perverse ways of this child, the other girl’s melancholy poetry and strange demand on his conscience. They had successfully taken him along both roads without resistance. And the only sense it made was that they sought what could not have been gained in a direct and open appeal to the fixed authorities. Why else apply to a corporal, one lone and powerless jerk in an army of thousands? Because he looked first like a fool and second like a German, and because she, the older, was a Nazi who would have been put at picking street-rubble if she had made her appeal elsewhere. Perhaps it was even a kind of treason to get her a job under the cover of which she could hide from her proper deserts. It was what they had been warned against: the Germans did it before and would do it again if you were not vigilant, sack the world and then when beaten ask the pity for themselves, but this time we will not be duped.