Crazy in Berlin (39 page)

“Fritz, then,” said Schatzi. “A
Russian deserter is living at Fritz’s billet.
” He stirred in his chair, smiling ill in fright and pride. “Also: Fritz is going to marry an American nurse.”

He was met with an open mouth of short teeth, which appeared to be a smile. “Tell me,” said Sergeyev, his voice liquid with unction, “confess to me—you were Ernst Röhm’s very favorite fairy-boy of all,
nicht wahr
? This is the sole reason why you were present on that famous 30 June 1933 when your lover and his faction were purged. We know all this already, so I can tell you it is useless to continue your mad resistance!”

A half year before, in the middle of January, when the Russian forces were rolling through Poland, the SS closed the Auschwitz camp and herded the dangerous prisoners—mainly such Jews as were left, and politicals—on a long death march to the enclosure at Mauthausen, in Germany. Schatzi was permitted to escape. Right off, he was almost murdered by Polish vigilantes who came in to fill the vacuum. For the uniform he had continued to wear as protection against just such a hazard, snipping the green triangle off the breast, was precisely what identified him to a Polish tradesman who had made deliveries to the camp and seen Schatzi in his privileged role as “professional criminal” leading work gangs to dig their own mass graves. This Pole, until two weeks before a collaborator, was now applying the same industry to preserve Number One in the new arrangements; in which he was as unsuccessful as a man can be: the guerillas shortly knocked
him
off, but saved Schatzi for the oncoming Soviet authorities. Who in turn not long after arrival dispensed with the vigilantes themselves, so neatly that no trace of the bodies was found by three Swiss Red Cross delegates searching for eighteen days,
but saved Schatzi.

In neither case were the Russians wanton: the Polish guerillas, having shown enterprise once, would likely have proved troublesome in the Soviet occupation, and Schatzi, being officially an unperson and by personal history an advocate of no live cause, a friend of no man, totally dependent upon his captors and nicely shaped by years of captivity—it would be almost indecent to get rid of a man who could be used, and for no payment, beyond not taking that which had no absolute value: his life.

He was taken to Berlin and assigned to Sergeyev, who notwithstanding the mufti, was apparently an officer in an Intelligence section of the Red Army:
apparently,
because this was never mentioned, Sergeyev’s office being this shabby, airless cube in a building tenanted otherwise by the German Communist Party.

“And we know, believe me, that you make daily reports to American Espionage,” Sergeyev continued in his genial way. “Must I remind you once more that you are no safer in that sector than this one? How much sufferance would the Americans show if we informed them of your past,
Misterrrr
‘Burmeister,’
sirrr
.” On the English words he did a humorous imitation of the American
r,
which at the same time was very accurate.

“The only American agent I deal with is Fritz.”

“Never mind about that!” Nevertheless, Schatzi saw him write
FRITZ
on the back of a used envelope—which he pulled from a wastebasket; there was nothing on the desktop but the glass bowl for ashes and a pile of paperclips artfully arranged to appear loose but really joined into a two-foot chain, as he had discovered on an earlier visit when Sergeyev suddenly hurled it at him—
FRITZ
, he wrote it a second time and began to elaborate its lines with the pencil as he started again on Röhm.

Röhm, Röhm! From Sergeyev’s badgering at every visit, each time with a different angle of attack—the last time, of all things, he had been accused of being a spy in Röhm’s camp
for Hitler
—one could see that beneath the surface foolishness they knew everything already. And if they knew everything, they must surely know he had not been with Röhm’s personal party on the terrible night of June 30, 1933, when Hitler and company burst into the Bavarian hideaway and carted them off to the slaughter. And, to boot, Sergeyev had once asked him for an account of the executions at the Lichterfelde Cadet School in Berlin. But surely they knew that if he had been with Röhm he would have been taken to Munich, if not killed on the spot, as some were, in the sanatorium at Wiessee.

As to his erotic associations with Röhm—it was impossible to explain to anyone who had never known him the dynamism of the man, the virility which made denying him his pleasure almost shameful. Schatzi had not been given to the practice before he met him, and did not continue it extensively after the purge—indeed, although he had tried most of them, he had yet to find a kind of sex that was not tedious.

His not having been with Röhm’s party on that historical night was a piece of the strange kind of luck that blessed him his life long—or plagued him, for with his leader’s death perished a purity that he had found neither before nor since in the walks of men, a hard, clean, uncompromising resolution, honor, and bravery that the foul little Austrian upstart had betrayed to a moral leper like Goering, a weak-minded fanatic like Himmler, the antediluvian cowards of the Reichswehr, and the reactionaries of the Ruhr who had given niggardly money to the Party with the sole aim of getting more in return.

What was there to tell? Schatzi stayed in Berlin at headquarters, keeping a finger on developments, while Röhm and the other SA leaders conferred in the Bavarian retreat. Aware that they were incessantly calumniated by the evil voices at Hitler’s ear, sensing that they, the private army of the National Socialist revolution, the oldest fighters, the idealists, the conscience of the movement, had already been made superfluous in the general corruption, they were yet unprepared for the ferocity of their blood-brothers. Röhm was expecting a visit from Hitler on July 1, at which he intended to plead again to his old comrade-in-arms the case for the SA. He had a touching little gift for the Führer, a handsome bookplate. He waited in trust, with no guards; he was after all the only man in the Party who called Hitler by his first name, not to mention that he had been a Nazi even before Adolf. But when Hitler arrived, it was with a band of thugs and in the dead of night.

Simultaneous with the raid in Bavaria, Himmler and Goering took the headquarters in Berlin, capturing a hundred and fifty officers, whom they imprisoned in the Cadet School coal cellar in Lichterfelde and shot in quartets throughout the next twenty-four hours. The condemned men kept precise count of the executions; guessing whose turn came next was insurance against despair. They sang the song named for Horst Wessel. And, in innocent trust, heiled Hitler and went to their deaths faithful to his memory, for they supposed him also to have been a victim of the reactionary plot to crush the revolution.

In the twenty-seventh group-of-four Schatzi’s name was called—not, of course, “Schatzi,” but “Ernst, Friedrich Paul,
Ober-sturmbannführer
,” and even at that moment he thrilled to the crisp drumroll of his title: he had been a poor lance-corporal in the army for three years of the war, owing to the petty jealousy of a sergeant who consistently blocked his promotion. As he was marched with three others out into the mild morning and across the yard to the execution-wall, he saw some of the faces of his remaining comrades pressed against the cellar window, those old veterans of the Putsch, of a thousand café and street fights, of the Freikorps, and, before that, spotted here and there in the army of the Western Front. They had been fighting somewhere for almost twenty years, against impossible odds, for much of it ill fed and ill clothed, and always betrayed. Not one had broken down in the cellar. That was pretty good for the “pack of fairies” that so revolted Goering.

The wall was a dripping stucco of human flesh; fired from six yards away, the bullets blew the heart through a man’s back. An SS guard opened their clothing at the breast. Having difficulty with Schatzi’s woolen undershirt, he parted it with the ceremonial dagger from his belt and, inadvertently nicking the skin, excused himself. On Schatzi’s right hand was Appel, whom he had never liked. He caught his eye now as the guard went down the line drawing charcoal target-circles around their left nipples, and said softly, “Ahoy!” the old Freikorps greeting. Appel had been one of Röhm’s especial favorites; he smiled now over the gravity of his girlish face.

“By order of the Führer, FIRE!” The four prisoners stiff-armed the salute to Hitler and cried his name so loud they did not hear the order, and their chests were blasted through their backs. Or rather, three died not hearing—or if they did, were in a second beyond knowledge. Schatzi, falling with the others, heard, and knew that Röhm was dead, that Hitler had betrayed them, and that from then on he would give credence and fealty to no movement but that of his own pulse—which he heard now in the wrist crumpled beneath his ear, for he was not dead, had not indeed been hit, but rather was pulled down by the unity with his fellows. Lying with slit-eye at the level of the concrete, he saw the approach of the sole of a boot, was turned over and tested by it. A pistol slug fractured the pavement near his nose, the sharp chips whipping his face, already bloody from the liquid of Appel’s heart.

Schatzi preferred later, with his last ration of sentimentality, to believe that the officer had missed on purpose—it was said the executioners’ squad had to be changed frequently because of nerve failure—but he dared not see who it was. Shortly the disposal wagon, borrowed from a local butcher, returned from its last trip, and he along with the lifeless others was sacked into its tin bed. The rear doors were secured. The deliberate horse wheeled it creaking to the gate, which, opening, had its own sound. Fortunately, he had been thrown on top of the pile and was not crushed by the other bodies. Giving fate five minutes, as near as he could estimate, he tried the doors and found his hands too weak to manipulate the catch. Treading back, the wagon swaying, Appel and two more soft underfoot, he hurled himself forward. The wagon stopped—he had been conscious of the awful silence only as something to flee, but of course his movement broke it for the guards up front. The blond face of a horrified SS private was a circle in the bursting doors. Gory and wild—he had come so far since that he could smile at the remembered terror of that young calf—Schatzi flung out, felling the boy. They were on a deserted side street near the Stich Canal. He knew the area well, and escaped unpursued.

“I can only repeat what I have told you before,” he said to Sergeyev’s smile, which was turning more grisly. “My associations with the Nazis ceased on June 30, 1933, except that for the next twelve years I was their victim like so many others. What we in the early SA wanted was much the same as the Communists; we were even called ‘brown on the outside, red on the inside.’ ”

“Don’t insult me with your filthy comparisons between the international workers’ movement and a reactionary-mystico-homosexual cult,” Sergeyev shouted. “That was the only intelligent thing that Hitler ever did, to crush that foulness without mercy. What I want from you is the truth about those intervening years. In reality, you all the time were working with the Hitlerites as underground agent,
nicht wahr
? Or were you even that early taking American money?”

Schatzi patiently went through it all once more: after his escape he had lived for two years under a variety of aliases, outside both civil and Nazi law, until discovered by the Gestapo; after which he was kept in places of confinement for ten years.

“Excellent, excellent,” said Sergeyev. “Go right ahead with your resistance. But when you collapse into a quivering, boneless mound, remember it was your own doing....” He put down the pencil and, with the difficulty Schatzi had foreseen, dug into his pocket and found the nail file, put it to work with minute attention on the fingers of the right hand. One by one; it seemed hours before he finished and started on the left. Finally, though, it was done, and he brushed off the fall of nail dust—only to go into his breast pocket for a toothpick and clean around the little pegs which served him for teeth.

Schatzi ever so slightly changed his position in the chair, which made a loud, splitting, flatulent sound. He was genuinely embarrassed. Sergeyev bit through the toothpick, chewed it up, in fact, and blanched.

“Did you”
he said, for once not acting, and thus showing that everything heretofore had been dramatics, and in a voice so mad with anguish that it seemed afraid, and Sergeyev afraid was so fearsome that in another moment Schatzi might have flung himself from the window, had there been one,
“did you have the audacity to fart?”

Perhaps because this time he had really been moved, he accepted the explanation, took up his pencil again, and twitched it in dismissal.

“Report on your regular day.”

N
OW TO THE SAVING
of Veronica. Of all women for fertilization of the egg, a nurse; of all for illicit impregnation, a Catholic. Finally, a professional worker in the branch of healing to which problems of love were fundamental, herself love’s dupe.

Since on her own terms her infraction was inexcusable, his job would not be simple. It was even possible she would resist being saved—as she had refused that first, hysterical offer of marriage—and absolutely certain she would not admit the mode he had determined on. To a Catholic the mere use of a Trojan, he understood, was the denial to a new soul of its right to incarnate, reach puberty, and disapprove of contraception. Either you suppressed lust at its first tingling or, embracing it, you were obliged to stay for the dénouement. Abortion, of course, was downright murder.

Therefore would his guile be summoned to sally forth from the imaginary fields where it had so often bested Machiavelli. And his ingenuity: not even in a military hospital with a hundred doctors could one hope easily to recruit an abortionist, another nurse was unthinkable, and although he could name as many unscrupulous enlisted technicians as there were wards he had little faith in their Army-learned craft.