Crazy in Berlin (29 page)

Nathan was a queer fish. For some reason he had buried his humanness so deep that one could bring it to the surface only by outraging him. Yet Lichenko had always known it was there, else he would not have taken the trouble to find it—and it
was
trouble, and Nathan was very lucky to have him. For now he had, at who could tell what final cost, at last established the conditions for that intimacy in which the truth could be aired.

Seven o’clock, the good air outside the closed window, which he had not had in his nose for weeks, still bright and full of August. But Nathan had turned on the dresser lamp like the indoor man he was, and come to sit by the bed to await his, Vasya’s, pleasure. The room which had on first sight looked so grand that he assumed Nathan must share it with a regiment had truly become a home. With use, the very bedsheets, so white and hard when first entered, had softened and lost their harsh odor of bleach. Even Nathan’s sloppiness, which until the “illness” intervened he had constantly opposed, had worked to the homely purpose, the rug dark with scorchings, the rent in the curtains, the deep scratches of footboard and dresser-front catching the shadows like old scars on the faces of your loved ones. ...

With a scissor-kick, as if in the water, he shot himself backwards, conking his skull on the headboard, which was not intentional but certainly claimed Nathan’s attention. Instantly his friend was up and arranging the pillow.

“Are you hurt?”

Could Nathan truly be as pained as he looked, at the possible hurt of another?

“Ah, no!” Lichenko tried to joke. “The bedstead is undamaged!”

He had got him there: Nathan fell back laughing. He himself of course did not, it being a kind of vulgarity to laugh at one’s own jokes, and instead, with serious mien, fixed the pillow from which Schild had puffed out all the good head-hollows.

“Was für Knöpfe macht Ihr Vater?”
he asked.

Nathan could sit in a straight chair for hours without so much as crossing his legs, and he was thin, too, so that this ability owed nothing to the padding on his rump.

“Oh, he doesn’t make the buttons. He buys them from a buttonmaker and sells them to a manufacturer of women’s dresses. If that’s confusing, don’t bother with it. Your country is mercifully free of the middleman.”

Again Lichenko shot himself backward, but this time the pillow dulled the thud of his head hitting oak, and this time Schild did not rise, for simultaneously with the action away, Lichenko had shot his hand forward and asked: “What is that you say, free...?”

“From the middleman.”

“So.”
The olive-drab undershirt, which with drawers of the same cloth, on loan from Schild, was his costume of illness, had with the movements ridden up and constricted about his narrow chest like a dog harness. “I should have told you earlier, my dear friend, I hear what is said, but between the words sometimes comes the
swoosh
of the rockets: ‘free’—
swoosh
—‘from the middleman’—
swoosh,
so that what goes into my mind is often different from what has been spoken. For example, I thought just now I heard you say someone was free in the Middle Ages.”

“Haha,” laughed Nathan, but wryly. “Not being a Jesuit, I could hardly say that.”

“Ah, again, another example: what I heard then was something about Jesus Christ! ...You see what I mean.” He threw his feet about under the bedclothes, which commotion looked as if a small animal were trapped there, and smiled helplessly.

Just the thing to replace Nathan’s nervousness with the responsibility of a job; he could never endure being misunderstood. It was a relief to see him break the stiff column of his spine as he leaned forward and said very slowly and with the enunciation of him who speaks into an ear trumpet: “Je-su-it—a religious order which invented a kind of fascism four hundred years before Mussolini.”

“Of course I knew it was something old,” Lichenko answered. “But you see a hydraulic engineer does not have time to learn much beyond the principles of his science. I..., my dear friend, should you be angry if I confessed to a dishonesty?”

Behind Schild’s genial facade he saw an emotion begin at the throat and descend—a giraffe would look like that if it swallowed a melon—either hatred or fear, since these were the only feelings a person might find politic not always to reveal, but which of these was here operative Lichenko could not say, there being no apparent reason for either. Wishing no lies to stand between them, he had prepared merely to admit he had not read the American books they discussed at Lovett’s party, so long as the truth was out that an engineering student had no spare time.

Instead, he said quickly: “I borrowed another of your handkerchiefs while you were gone to the dining hall. I shall send you a dozen when I go—” For a moment he imagined he had heard himself continue with: “to America,” for suddenly that was where his fancy had fled, in just that wink of the eye he had seen himself at the handkerchief stall in a store big as a sports arena, had gone back further to park his yellow Ford at the curb outside. He wore a tight blue suit of narrow gray stripes and a black felt hat low over his brow; the woman at the counter believed him a suave but dangerous racketeer, a pearl-handled revolver encased in a silk glove, as he smiled with sharp white teeth and said “Enchanted,” or whatever was proper at such a moment, which he would know.

“—a dozen. Tell me which color do you prefer? Always this olive, or should you like some of blue with narrow gray stripes?”

This was what he really said while Nathan loosened, sat back, and finally crossed his legs, one trouser riding up to uncover a pale shin whipped with dark hair.

“You know you may take anything of mine,” said Schild, “and I’ll be disturbed only if you try to pay me back.”

His incredible generosity! It had, more than any other single thing, been the cause of Lichenko’s delay. He understood that far back around the time of Jesus Christ the first Communists worked on that motive and no other, when, that is to say, they were weak and victims rather than victimizers, and it must have been splendid to live then, when good and bad were easy to isolate. Some time since, they had become so mixed that one could no longer take the sayings of one’s mother as a serious guide to life. For example, of Schild his mother would first make some old-peasant observation such as that a man with a high bridge to his nose was untrustworthy, or that ears set at that angle caught only evil wisdom. But if he showed his manners she would think him fine as a “nobleman,” which in her lexicon took on ever more precious connotations as she grew older and had further to look to see the lovely time of her youth when her father had one hundred per cent more land than her husband had now, since the latter owned none at all, and when the fields were the property of a handsome count who never cursed rather than a gang of rude bullies who stole nine-tenths of every harvest in the name of some swindler they called “the people.”

Lichenko’s mother had been illiterate. She had gone under orders to night school and learned to read and write, but she had still been illiterate—according to his brother, who belonged to the Party and, being very literate, wrote articles on agricultural matters for a newspaper in Kiev, which Lichenko, perhaps because he himself was only moderately literate, could never read beyond the first paragraph: “The representative liaison committee from the Stalin Collective Farm at Rusovo yesterday presented to the Central Organization of Rural Co-operative Societies a voluntary petition from the Third Link of field workers on the Stalin Collective Farm that it be permitted to raise its quota in regard to the harvest of wheat. Now, what does this mean relative to the development of large-scale socialist production in the sphere of agriculture? This means...”

Or take his brother—now you would assume he and Schild, being political comrades, would hit it off. But, ah no, his brother had no respect for foreigners, Communists or not, as he had once admitted to Vasya; indeed, he placed little value on any people but the Great Russian and had got so that just before the war he would speak Ukrainian only with the greatest distaste.

No, to understand Nathan one must regard him with one’s own eyes: it was the generosity, not the Communism, that was native to him, and if you said well, the Americans have so much they can afford to give some away, you had only to compare him with another like Captain St. George to see the difference. Nathan lived like a holy man of yore.

“I suppose your dearest wish is to return to your family now the fighting is over,” he said, straightening the undershirt. “Tell me of them. Your sister—is she beautiful? Is she so slender? You have a photograph, of course.”

“No—well, I did have,” Schild spoke in concern, “but in the area of Metz my belongings were stolen.”

“And your mother—can she read and write? No, don’t answer. How silly of me to ask! A fine, cultivated noble—gentleman like you! Besides, certainly everybody in the United States is literate.”

This seemed to soothe Schild, and his black eyes glowed behind the lenses as he protested happily: “Not at all. There are about ten or twelve million Americans who cannot read and write. We are not speaking now of the Soviet Union, Vasili Nikolaievitch.”

“But then it is not necessary for everyone to read and write,” said Lichenko, shrugging with his voice. “All one really needs is something to eat and wear—protection from the
golod
and
kholod,
as one says in Russian—girls to love, maybe a drink of spirits now and again, and the policeman not on your tail. I mean, if one belongs to the common people.”

Schild assented by his silence.

“The uncommon ones,” Lichenko went on, “take care of themselves. Then there are the ones between, who don’t know what they want,
nicht wahr?
Something different, anyway; this is not right and that is not right. Nothing is right for them!” he exclaimed in a kind of joyful hopelessness, pedaling his legs rapidly as if riding a bicycle. “But look at a big oak tree: it loves no girls, drinks only water, does not eat at all, lasts longer than the oldest man, and is satisfied throughout.”

“And is chopped down by the first fellow who needs wood,” said Schild, nodding pleasantly. His shirt pocket might be unbuttoned, but his tie and collar were fast and most uncomfortable to see through the heavy, still air. Keeping the windows shut had been a phase of Lichenko’s scheme of absolute pressure to the body as well as the spirit, and while no effect could be discerned in Schild, he himself was sweating like a plowhorse.

“Yet,” Nathan continued, not so much as a gloss on his steep forehead, “isn’t even that oak better than a worker under capitalism?, who is chopped down when he is
not
needed.”

“Stupid!”

“Yes, stupid is a better word for it than evil.”

Stupid Nathan! He saw even a tree politically, and no doubt would be the first to cut down an oak, to make paper for pamphlets to celebrate someone else’s sowing of the reclaimed ground, or to denounce them for seeding the wrong thing, whichever would be most bleak and deadly and contradictory of his generous heart. There was a difference of thousands of meters, in more than land and sea, between him and Lichenko’s brother, in spite of their similar faiths. His brother had, all to himself, a four-room apartment with a refrigerator and a private bathroom, but what had Schild to gain? He even disapproved of his father’s wealth.

“It would be better, I think, if the window were open.” Lichenko scrubbed his face with the undershirt tail, which when he pulled it down again was wet as a swimming suit, and since by that time Schild had opened one half of the casement and the evening air made chill entry, his belly was shortly cramped with cold.

“Good, that is just enough. Now please close it.”

“You haven’t a fever?” asked Schild as he came back to his chair softly as a cat.

“Frankly, I don’t know. I feel very strange. Perhaps I should take a bath. ... Of course you have a bathroom in your home in the U.S.A. And with hot water, no?
Schön
!”

“But there are many people who have not. My grandparents lived in the working-class quarter of New York City, in unbelievable slums. They had nothing but a cold-water flat, one room for living and sleeping, and the other a combination kitchen-bath. The tub had a wooden cover that served as dining table.”

“Wundervoll!”
Lichenko chortled. “I knew it! They were workers and yet had a private bath, and their son grew up to be a great industrialist of buttons and
his
son became a fine intellectual.” He saw a cruel angle develop in the corner of Schild’s mouth, at odds with a sad cast of the eye. He, Vasya, had been carried away as usual: fact, fact was wanted and not his opinions, which only irked his friend in the proportion they were genuine.

He writhed about until his feet hung over one side of the bed and his head, the other. In upside-down vision Schild looked like a baldheaded man with a beard—indeed, somewhat like a Lenin with glasses. He had played this game as a boy: if you frowned, the lines of the forehead resembled a mouth; the real mouth you must ignore, and also that the nose opens in the wrong direction; with the remainder you had a fairly credible face which gave to the expressions what the Moscow radio gave to the truth—an odd twist, both human and not. It was years since he had played it, however, and he had lost his old proficiency in interpretation.

“What are you doing now?”

The mouth in the center of Schild’s head answered: “I’m smiling.”

“Forgive me, one gets restless in bed. To entertain myself while you are gone I have remembered certain boyhood amusements.” He righted himself, all hot above the neck, and sighed. “When I was sick as a child my mother sang little songs to me. They were always about food. For the life of me I cannot now recall a note, or I should sing one. They only come back when I am hungry.”

Schild bathed in a pond of jocularity as he said: “Then we shall have to starve you.”

“No,” Lichenko answered, “that has already been done, and believe me, my friend, just for the singing it is not worth it.”