Crazy in Berlin (16 page)

More likely, both. For what Lichenko would never believe was that a gentle, generous, sweet man like Nathan could, in his right mind, give allegiance to a pack of murderers. On the counsel of his affection for him, then—the heart does not lie—he did not abandon his plan to defect to the West, but added to it a finer purpose: he would also save Nathan. It would be a finer game now, with rewards or disasters of greater magnitude, but the very irony of his situation—leave it to Vasya to choose as cover the one Communist in a division of Americans!—contributed to his courage.

Back in the room, he thought he might permit himself another tubbing. Immersed, he could cogitate better than in the liberty of the bedroom. He still had no concrete plan. Time grew no longer. The NKVD would have had his name for three days; perhaps they had already traced him as far as the house party. And as yet he had not found the propitious moment to begin his labor of truth and love with Nathan. The trouble was, these considerations made for anxiety, which was assuaged only in the bathtub’s warm wet trough.

But he could not go now. There, he saw from behind the curtains, came Nathan with lunch, and an excellent lunch it was, although Nathan never gave it any importance. Indifference to the material conditions of life must be unique with American Communists. Certainly it was unknown to the Russian Party! This handsome house, for example, which Nathan treated as if it were a pigsty.

Lichenko knelt and worked out a cigarette butt embedded in a bedside circle of rug mangy with other burns. The Red Army destroyed many things but nothing that could be put to use. However, reason was a crime for which no American would ever be shot. Was it a matter of distance? Three thousand miles away. You could talk all you wanted about the universal force of gravity, the iron ball and the feather dropped from the same height hitting the ground together. Just try it: by the time the feather comes to rest the iron will be a ball of rust. So with an elephant and an ant. Density, not volume and weight. So with an American; try as you may to drop him, it will be a launching. Lichenko had been a mediocre student of physics in the Kharkov technical school and insensible at the time to its multifold uses.

O
N HIS WAY TO WORK
the morning after the party, Reinhart strolled down Very’s way. An irregular blob of olive-drab descending her porch was soon fashioned by his eyes into her form, but as it came towards him on the sidewalk he saw it was not Very but her antithesis: the lieutenant who took in drunken Russians.

He was rather shorter than the evening before and indefinably seedy, with dust on his glasses; yet he had a more assured address, hard and bright. He was the kind of Jew before whom Reinhart felt very vulnerable, as if somewhere back he had done him a dirtiness which he, himself, did not remember but the Jew never forgot. He felt this while knowing it was not true, for not only had he not done them wrong: he had never done them anything one way or the other. None of his best friends were Jews. The species was unknown in his home town, which had no foreigners—just another reason for its unspeakable dreariness. At college there were some, who had their own fraternity and seemed to go around en bloc, occasionally sitting next to one in classes, where they were usually witty and always clever; and some girls as well, who were either remarkably beautiful or characteristically ugly, never plain, and it was a pity the lovely ones were off-limits—there had been a girl, forever enrolled on his list of classics, with sable hair, alabaster nose, cheeks of white iris, and an exquisite name, Esther Rosewater, which he used to say underbreath when she passed oblivious,
Esther Rosewater, how I love you, Esther Rosewater;
she made him weak in the knees, and never knew it. For that was the other thing about Jews; when they weren’t eying you with suspicion, they never saw you at all.

As to this lieutenant, Reinhart thought: I could break him in two. At the same time, he was vaguely afraid of him.

Badly returning Reinhart’s salute—his fingertips not quite making it to the inferior rim of his spectacles—the lieutenant referred briefly to their mission of the night before. He had found upon awakening that Miss Leary had dropped a comb in his rooms, and he had just returned it. Palpably of small value but it was her property and women care about such things, don’t they?, smiling in the condescending conspiracy of the males. He could have been lying. Reinhart, who was unusually observant, remembered no loss. Yet losses remembered are hardly losses; moreover, an officer, unlike a noncom, had little reason to dissemble in courting a nurse.

“Was Miss Leary in?”

“No, I left it with her roommate.”

“What’s her name, by the way?”

But Schild didn’t know and cared enough only to ask: “Don’t you know? Isn’t Lieutenant Leary your girl?”

Reinhart had a tendency to toss the ball to his superiors, to tell an excess of truth that would confront them with the damning fact of their authority. When he said sorrowfully “How can she be?” the lieutenant’s response confirmed him. He, the officer, showed not only understanding but sympathy.

“
I
have no objections, certainly.”

Now it was his apparent approbation that made Reinhart uneasy. He would have preferred to leave while he was ahead, but the lieutenant hung on, walking with him towards the administration building.

“The Russian—did he recover all right? He was a crazy little fellow. Sometimes I think all Russians are mad, or is that Communism in action? Have you seen what they did in Wannsee?”

He fancied that with his first word the lieutenant had shot an angry look: of course, one’s big mouth had not considered that he might be a Russian Jew. Then, too, he had earlier observed that any mention of Russians not obvious praise never sat well with “liberals,” and he would have bet his duffel bag, with all its souvenirs, that his companion belonged to that breed. He had, therefore, found his weakness; he no longer felt gauche; he could not help falling before the temptation.

“No one who hasn’t seen them would believe what a bunch of dirty tramps the Russians are. When we came in on the autobahn and met that crew, we thought first they were slave laborers for the Germans, and then service forces, maybe. But no, they were the cream of the combat troops.”

He saw pure hate through the lieutenant’s glasses—or was it agony?—the eyes were all watery.

The hell with him. He was not an officer in the 1209th, and you couldn’t be court-martialed for an honest description of what you, and no doubt he as well, had seen. Everyone had his own chauvinism, the sacred affiliation that he would not suffer to be questioned, let alone criticized. And how disgustingly stupid, for, in this case, was it not their very uncouthness that made the Russians’ victory all the more remarkable?

So he said something to that effect, but even then the lieutenant’s manner did not improve, and since by that time they had arrived in the front hall of headquarters, they parted coolly, no salute being necessary under a roof.

“Goot morning, a very nice day ve are hoffing!”

Trudchen sat blooming behind Pound’s big, messy desk against the forward wall, except that it was not messy but rather a place of truly stacked papers, dustless, and with a little bouquet of yellow pansies in a jam jar. On his own desk, similarly impeccable, was a pink rose. She was already flying her own colors.

“You are surprised, yes?”

Right, but his habit was never to show it. He thought, for the first time, that she might be uncomfortable to have around.

She arose and came towards him, the thick sweater, unbuttoned, swaying in its two parts equivalent to the braids.

“You see, I work for no payment until the opplication is officially opproved. But I also cannot eat at the mess until that time. Perhaps you can bring me somesing at lunchtime.”

Reinhart tucked his cap under the belt and drifted into his chair.

“What age did you put down?”

“Eighteen.”

“And they believed it?”

“Oh, vy not. It is only two years a lie!”

Sixteen—even those tender years seemed too many, but they did put her under the wire. Through her sweater halves he saw soft little breasts, very round, under the crocheted shirt. She was the kind of girl who in a movie would be asked by the hero, do you really need those glasses? No, she would say and fling them away forever. But Reinhart rather liked spectacles on a pretty girl; they were vulnerable-making, sexy.

“Let’s see now, what can we find for you to do?” He fished through the desk drawers, coming first upon the last letter from Di, which when he had put it away yesterday, having finished the answer, was open, with its envelope paperclipped to the back. Now the former was inserted in the latter, as if it had just arrived; for a moment, until he saw the slit in the envelope top, he thought it had: the outside of all her letters looked the same, with “Mrs. Ernest Cooley” in bright-purple ink in the return-address space. Ah well, Trudchen had made it neat, which reminded him to write the customary “Ans.” and the date on the face of the envelope. He reached for the fountain pen habitually kept in the righthand corner of the central drawer, and felt nothing. Nor was it elsewhere in the desk or in his pocket, and Trudchen had not seen it when she policed up.

The loss was serious. What with the black market, the PX stock of pens was exhausted, and it was not seemly to sign correspondence with a pencil. Reinhart felt an ill mood come down over him like a sack. The worst thing was that he could not, with depressed senses, find any work for Trudchen. The map of Berlin, on which she could have been employed to trace a route for the tour of the Nazi ruins, had also vanished. And he dreaded the coming of Pound, whom he had not told of their new employee, for the excellent reason that he himself had not believed she would be hired.

As if his nerves had created him prematurely, for it was only eleven o’clock, he heard Pound’s footsteps in the hall.

“Quick!” he said to Trudchen, “start straightening out those boxes.” He pointed, without looking, to the chaos in front of the closet, and grabbing a fistful of papers from his now-tidy “out” basket, fell on them with knitted brow and deliberative forefinger.

Pound sounded two feet from the door when Reinhart realized that Trudchen had moved not to the ordered task but rather closer to him. She had removed her sweater and was flexing her arms in a most provocative, catlike manner, her pink shirt everywhere in undulation.

“What are you doing!” he said furiously.

“But you see, already I have arranged those boxes this morning before you arrived.”

How irrefutably true, now that the eyes were turned in that direction: rank on rank, they pyramided almost to the ceiling, with not a loose paper showing, not a cartonflap awry. Impossible that one small girl could have done all that in a week, but there they were.

And here also was—not Pound. The liberal lieutenant, with an ingratiating smile, stood in the doorway.

“Too bad I didn’t know when we came in that you were the fellow,” he said.

“For what?” Reinhart stood up.

“Yes, and here they are.” The lieutenant pulled a box from the left slope of the pyramid, weakening the whole organization so that if Trudchen had not sprung to the gap the work of her morning would have been at naught.

“You must replace that at once!” she shouted, and the lieutenant, walking from the pile with his box, showed her a look he might have given some vermin too ripe to crush.

Christ, didn’t he even know the simple principles of stress and strain? thought Reinhart, whose height permitted him to get the topmost carton and fill the hole.

“Okay, this one is small enough to carry with me now. I’ll send a detail over for the rest.”

He was halfway to the door when Reinhart, standing high and wide, blocked the route.

“I’m afraid,
sir,
that you’ll have to tell me what this is all about.” He weighted the title with deliberate provocation—for one thing, because he was wholly in the right; for another, to break the officer’s damnable insolence.

For a moment, and for all his natural, seedy weakness and his fake amenity, the lieutenant’s eyes were hostile.

“Get out of my way—” This at once calm, masterful, and most persuasive, and Reinhart would have complied had not Trudchen rushed up desperately to add her small person to the barrier. Not even the lieutenant could resist this preposterous event. He smiled, albeit in somewhat ill grace, and set his box on the floor.

“Schild is my name, Army Intelligence. Would you like a receipt?”

No wonder now at his sang-froid. Army Intelligence! The very title had a splendid, piercing authority, far grander, because including brains, than even the paratroops, Rangers, or fighter squadrons: keen, intrepid operators in the very camp of the enemy, many-faced, anonymous; if caught, standing before the wall with a contemptuous smirk towards the rifles; if successful, only the gratification of knowing oneself supreme; no vulgar show, whatever medals were due must wait perhaps ten years hence, and perhaps not even then, for the secrets of the bureau can never be revealed.

“I’m sorry,” said Reinhart with a mouth of contrition. “You see, I didn’t understand. I couldn’t just let anyone take these things in the absence of Lieutenant Pound. He’s in charge here. Actually I don’t care about the stuff at all, and neither does he. What is it, or are we allowed to ask?”

Intelligence. No sooner had he got in the medics on his own request than Reinhart sought to escape. It was humiliating to be the one kind of soldier denied a gun. Intelligence. He even knew German, or enough for a start anyway, the rest he could pick up quickly in a training program. Psychologically he had probably all his life been a kind of undercover agent. In high school he used to follow certain girls in their Friday-evening walks, trail them from nine to midnight, at a distance, in and out of candy-store doorways, and, with the aid of evergreen bushes, right to their front steps, all unbeknownst to them, sometimes forever, sometimes only until the next morning’s study-hall revelation. Intelligence. Its operations turned out to be very secret indeed; in three years of service he had never so much as learned where to apply.