Crazy in Berlin (30 page)

It was aired, his first open attack on the regime of his country; he felt excellent well for having made it, and he stared fearlessly at Schild, who appropriately cast his eyes aside in deep embarrassment. Which meant he knew, then, of the Kremlin-made famine of 1933, and it meant as well that he was not so corrupt as to try to defend it. Yet if Nathan did know and, regardless of a disapproval however sincere, continued to work for those devils who had not only created the famine but standing on two million corpses denied they were there... Lichenko lost the path as all at once he found he wanted Schild to be both innocent and guilty, for only in that combination could he forgive him.

But Nathan was neither. So solemnly eloquent he almost cracked one’s heart, yet with a peculiar elation that seemed to swell his own, he spoke of Hitler’s assault on the USSR and the scorched-earth tactics and withdrawals which, because of the treacherous surprise, had been at first the Soviets’ only defense. He spoke well; indeed, so well that Lichenko almost believed the hunger here at issue was rather that of 1941 than 1933. No question that the invasion by the Germans had been worse than living under Stalin: they were foreigners. Yet, although the data was of course suppressed, hundreds of thousands of his compatriots had had another opinion, hung garlands on the invaders and enlisted in General Vlasov’s anti-Kremlin army or even in the Wehrmacht. They were wrong. If you must have a tyrant, why not keep your own?

He could not help it, he still had scruples about disabusing Schild. The Red Army, as Nathan was saying,
had
done a magnificent job; they
were
heroes; he, Vasya, was a hero and it was just and proper to hear someone say so. The Soviet Union was the greatest country in the world: there lay no contradiction between believing that and fleeing to America, or the Black Forest, or some southern land where dark-complexioned people drank wine and slept all day in the shade. And it was very probable that the Party elite represented a new and superior kind of man. He even believed Bolshevism would triumph in the long run, everywhere, because he could see in it no weaknesses and knew by experience it would stop at nothing. Even Hitler had a limit: the Germanic “race,” by which he measured everything, including his Ukrainian allies, and in the end this folly brought down his house. He was wrong.

The Communists, however, were right—oh yes, no doubt even the famine was correct from the high point of vantage, the Kremlin had its eye always on the main chance, for there in the grave lay Lichenko’s father and mother, who starved, yet there was he, son and heir, fewer than ten years later at the breech of the rocket gun, fighting loyally to save Moscow, and Stalin, from the enemy.

Communism, Nathan, is never wrong—as you would immediately agree but not understand—because its only principle is success. Just as yours is failure; what you really love is not the Red Army’s victories but the sacrifices and agony required to achieve them. How you would have approved of the famine! ...But the point I wish to make is that Stalin and his gang neither liked nor disliked starving two million people. They saw it as necessary to their plan that they requisition more foodstuffs than the peasants produced. If as a result the peasants died, they simply did not care. Communism is never wrong, Nathan, because it has no feelings at all, certainly no good ones, but no bad ones either—none at all. It is difficult to tell you that, because I have and you have, and furthermore I am a man without ambition and thus discredited.

The unspoken rang so loudly against his frontal bone that Lichenko could hardly believe Schild had not heard it, too; crystalline, cold, and true it was, like the sound of a gong made of glass. And he had never been a great one for thinking, which was his brother’s talent.

Once before the war his brother in a literary phase had read a book called
The Idiot
by a writer towards whom his brother had mixed feelings—saying on the one hand he did show a consciousness of something, although on the other he was of course hopelessly something and you could not look to him for something else—at any rate, in an unusually amiable mood he quoted to Vasya the very kernel of what in this writer he thoroughly disapproved: this Idiot, who if that were not enough was also a prince, appropriately found everything strange; but one evening in Switzerland, where typical of the decadent Russian nobility having nothing else to do he went to drink sulfur-water or whatnot, he heard the bray of an ass in the marketplace: “I was immensely struck with the ass, and for some reason extraordinarily pleased with it, and suddenly everything seemed to clear up in my head.”

Following the quotation his brother observed that heavy silence which means such nonsense speaks for itself. To Vasya it had said nothing until this moment more than five years later when, without the ass’s aid, he found himself in the princely condition. Everything seemed to clear up. ... He had stayed on not to save Schild but to understand him, not because Schild was good but rather because he was interesting. It was the game of the Communists, who were never wrong, to save people. For an ordinary man, an idiot, it was enough to know how the next fellow used the privilege and obligation of life, which was not the best thing imaginable, but we none of us—his brother, Stalin, Hitler, the Americans, the prince—had anything else.

Naturally, Nathan had not heard. That inner ear through which the rest of humanity hears the most important sounds is confiscated when one joins the Communists. He had often confirmed this by speaking silently to his brother: “You bastard, the only reason I wouldn’t shoot you if I had the chance is that we have the same blood.” Results always negative, despite his brother’s noted gift for smelling out heresy.

However, Schild had picked up a subtler noise which Lichenko missed. His voice became furtive as he left the siege of Stalingrad to warn: “St. George is coming upstairs.”

At last Lichenko heard the footsteps, which being both heavy and soft like those of any large animal but the horse, were unmistakable: those shoes which he so coveted, with their fat soles of yellow gum rubber; shod so, a man could run right up a smooth wall. Why Schild should think St. George a menace, however, was far from clear—if at the same time, as Nathan insisted, and Lichenko had to agree, the captain was also a fool. But a good fool, a jovial one, at least wise enough not to try to be clever. He did not even suspect he had a political as second-in-command, and was the happier for it. In a Russian company the most harmless-looking boob was invariably the secret-police informer. The wonderful American invention was a man who looked his role.

He lay badly in need now of just the neutrality that St. George dispensed. He readied his mouth to call “Kom een!” his pronunciation of which the captain never failed to approve; he was already enmired in St. George’s warm sludge, that secure, absolute, fool’s medium in which all was forever orderly—when, just as the footfalls reached the door, darkness smothered him in its close sheet.

Outside the window night had come unnoticed, but the room was blacker still, for even a night swollen and dim with cloud has its suggestions of distant fire. Damn you, Nathan, for extinguishing the lamp on a friend! Now what had been merely necessary became imperative. He called to St. George and could not hear his own voice; he strove to rise but lost the first fall to inertia, the second to his knotted bedclothes, and won the third only to hear his quarry pad beyond the bend of the hall. Nevertheless he got to the lamp, eerily not meeting Schild on the way, choked the button in its narrow throat, making light—of which he had the conviction it would reveal nothing but a chamber enclosing only himself.

Yet there sat Nathan on his hard chair, on his cast-iron behind, and looking not at all guilty, when for once he should have, but rather self-righteous.

“Yes, it’s all right now,” he said. “He’s gone to his room.”

In the interval of darkness the lamp had prepared for a success, developing its weak yellow into a splendid flare—only to lose the contest to Schild’s face, which like unpolished bone claimed all the light and gave none back. He had never looked more saintly.

“But come,” he said, rising to Lichenko’s aid and fading quickly into his old contrition. “You shouldn’t be up—you’ll take a chill.” He offered to support him and, when that was spurned, walked before, as if he were clearing a channel through some invisible marsh between the dresser and bed; alone and unwitting he went, and no one followed.

For Lichenko had turned to the big clothes cabinet in the corner next the window, turned the key, and peered into its cavern which gave the illusion of a vaster space than the surrounding room. At one end of the rod Schild’s uniforms hung unruly, as if rifled by a thief. At the other, his own, which seemed unusually small upon its hanger; and his boots, bow-legged, slumped, wanting straight heels.

“My cap, I do not see my cap, and I cannot go without it,” he said, into the depths but to Schild.

“Oh yes,” Schild answered, in a strangely strong voice. “You will want your cap. Isn’t it there on the shelf?”

Surely it was; he had forgotten the single shelf across the top of the cabinet, perhaps because he was too short to use it, but the edge of the cap’s shiny visor poked an inch beyond the board, like the nose of a midget peeking down from hiding, and he seized it. Upon his head the cap was tight, since he had not had a real haircut for three weeks, only Nathan’s trim-job around the ears with a little sewing scissors. He also got into his boots, balancing badly on one leg at a time—you cannot live abed for more than a day, even faking, and not feel giddy on your feet—and then seeing in the mirror a soldier on tropics-duty, for he wore cap, olive-drab shorts and undershirt, and boots, he groaned at his stupidity and sat upon the floor.

Schild came to him and, bending over, grasped his left heel and toe.

“I’ll pull and you pull, and off it comes. Ready?” Before he could answer, Nathan did his part unaccompanied; off it came and then the other.

“Now,” said Schild, “we’ll just put these back into the cabinet where they can’t be scuffed. And the cap, too. You won’t want to get it full of lint.” He plucked it from Lichenko’s head and ran his elbow across it twice.

“Don’t crush my cap,” Lichenko shouted.

“Ah no, this is how they brush hats in the fine American stores.”

“How am I to know that?”

Seizing his hand, Schild brought him upright.

“What you do know is that I have no reason to ruin it,
nicht wahr
? Therefore what I do must be to its advantage.” He looked very scholarly as he replaced the cap on the shelf. At the angle Lichenko saw that his glasses were covered with a film of dust and at least one fingerprint, distinct in oil.

“Why don’t you clean your spectacles?” he shouted angrily. “You can’t see out of your own head!”

Carefully, Schild unhooked the temple pieces from behind his ears, and painstakingly shined the lenses with the small end of his straw-colored necktie, which tonight as usual was twisted ahead of the larger.

Lichenko turned aside, embarrassed by the naked face, saying: “You should not have done that to the captain.”

“Then come,” Schild offered, the glasses yet in his fingers, “we shall go and apologize to him; I mean, we’ll go and
I
will apologize, and you can see his feelings haven’t been hurt.”

“Oh, I’m sure of that.” He reached up under the tunic and drew his breeches from the crossbar of the hanger. No matter where he wandered hence he would never find another man so alert to his moods and purposes, but was that not the trouble?

“Yes,” Schild reassured, “he is just a person. ... But whatever are you doing? You are ill, my friend, and must not worry about your uniform. As you can see I have taken good care of it. Look at the blouse—as clean and pressed as new, eh? And the medals—only yesterday I sponged the ribbons with gasoline. How bright their colors are! See the Order of the Red Banner—”

Lichenko sidestepped him and struggled into the breeches. After the fly was fastened he could hardly get a hand into his pocket, so American had been three weeks of meals—and that, too, was the trouble. He withdrew a wad of marks and thrust them at Schild.

“Here is payment for the underwear and handkerchiefs and whatever else I have taken, and also the winnings from the cards. You see, I cheated in those games—silly, no?, since I could have beaten you anyway, still I could not resist when it was so easy. But there you have it all back again.” He threw the bills upon the dresser.

“Yes, the cards!” Schild said, desperately exuberant. “We’ll have a three-handed game of something and get old St. George—you’ll see he isn’t hurt in any way—and take his money. He’ll like that, he’ll do anything for company.”

“As to your personal kindness,” Lichenko continued, reaching for his blouse, “there is no repaying that, not when one understands what kindness is, a thing which should make the giver feel good or he should not do it.” He said more as he crumpled the blouse over his head, but could not hear it, himself. He was so sick of himself he feared he might vomit on the very uniform whose smartness he also owed to Schild. He had learned in fifty seconds that cowardice may be a slow disease but is felt as an instant affliction, and comes more violently in rooms than on the fields of battle; at Kursk, when a Tiger tank broke rumbling and malignant through to their artillery position, he had leaped upon the deck and dropped a grenade down its throat; in
gemütlich
Zehlendorf he could not even stave off the insulting of a fool, much less tell the cold truth to a friend.

“Come,” said Schild, who looked now as if he were drunk or, rather, pretending to be drunk and wild, in the manner of some honor student ostentatiously letting down his hair at the end of term. “St. George has a bottle...” He rolled his eyes in what he surely meant as license, but to Lichenko they suggested those of a horse gone mad with fright.

Fright? Why should
he
be afraid, the one who wasn’t taking a risk? Or did his odd sympathy even extend to Lichenko’s future troubles in the great world outside?, where, after all, most people had had to struggle all their lives without his help. For the first time he was struck by Nathan’s incredible arrogance.