Crazy in Berlin (43 page)

“Doctor, I have sincerely tried to stop drinking,” Bach said, his face a quivering sack of shame as he lowered himself onto a folding camp chair which he overhung in every dimension. “I will conquer it, I will, you shall see.”

“May your reformation not wait upon my seeing,” replied the doctor, lightly. And Bach’s despair was as if a truck passed overhead.

Of course, if the doctor was Lori’s brother he was but half a gentile, had but half the aptitude for corruption. Of course, Reinhart had not forgotten that so much as ignored it in his quest for a villain to save someone from. Yet why the brazen badge?

“Now Corporal, I think you and I have a private matter to discuss,” said the doctor, placing his cane on the floor and in so doing offering a view of his full profile in the various perspectives of slow movement. His right eye, seen in the harsh knife of light which, as he bent, thrust in from the side, behind the dark glasses—my God, an eye? A navel, rather, a belly-button of the head, baby-new and pink within the old foxed leather which bound the skull.

One’s own eyes indrew behind the barrier of cheekbones, hid in scarlet darkness, as nevertheless one’s more courageous mouth asked: “Doctor, what is the meaning of your armband?”

“It means”—the black circles swung round and established order—“that if you drive an automobile French fashion, use it, that is to say, as a projectile with which to aim at pedestrians, I am your perfect target. I cannot see you come.”

“Wie bitte?”

“
Es tut mir leid.
I was having a bit of a joke, most unfairly. The sleeveband is of course the sign of the disabled person. Unfortunately I do not have Bach’s gift for foreign languages. Bach, could you perhaps—”

“No, it is not necessary,” said Reinhart. “I understand. It is an excellent thing—”

“They do not have it in America,” Bach cried eagerly. “Never, nowhere have I seen it.”

Lori, still standing, chided: “Now Bach, if you do not permit Otto to have some privacy, he will not talk with you later.”

“Quite so, quite so,” Bach mumbled, turned laboriously, and to Schild instituted a speech which began: “However—”

“Lenore,” the doctor said, “There is no reason why you should not sit here and assist us with your good sense. Also, working for the Americans you should have learned some English by now, unless Father’s old claim was true, that we were the champion dunces of Dahlem.”

Although, because of the difference between the doctor’s and Bach’s girths, there was now a good seat and a half to the left of Reinhart’s port hip, Lori sat down so close against him that, for the comfort of both, he had to lay his arm along the back ridge of the sofa. His love for her was just in the degree to which it remained intactile. Introduce desire and you would soon have the same old two-backed animal scuffling in the dirt, into which he and Trudchen transformed themselves daily, destructive, nightmarish, impermanent, having nothing to recommend it but necessity. With Lori he mixed spirits, was embarrassed by the flesh... but she rested, almost lay, within his arm-hollow, her hard, thin bones piquing him, the shoulder of her thick old prickly-wool sweater, carrying a scent of spice, touching his cheek. And he, who involuntarily rose at a woman’s smell—as a sleeping cat erects its ears at every sound—almost any woman, any smell, sometimes, in the street, at pure cloud of odor, the woman having long gone by, was shortly, or longly, risen.

“Now,” said the doctor, to see whom Reinhart had to clasp Lori more closely in looking round her blondeswept head, “this young woman you have got in trouble—”

“Ah no, Otto, it was not he,” Lori broke in far too eagerly for the pride of the fellow she had made her cave.

“How do you know that?” asked Reinhart, arrested in his drawing away by the sofa arm in the small of his back; because of this his irritation became briefly paranoid: how dare he be boxed in?

“Because maids, like concierges, know everything,” said Lori, mock-mysteriously, without trying to turn. “The Gestapo of belowstairs...”

The doctor disintegrated another Lifesaver and swallowed its rubble. He chose a third, perhaps a fourth, since the pack appeared to stand currently at three-quarter size. His thin lips, opaque glasses, and traces of eyebrow expressed satisfaction. His hair was a thick bush, one finally noticed as one continued to creep so tightly against Lori that when she spoke he heard the vibrations in his own chest. Bach, remote in a spirited monologue to Schild, Reinhart worried over not, nor did he despise him.

“There, there,” said Lori, patting his nearer knee with a twinkle in her hand, “everybody knows you could have.”

The doctor stared exhaustively, sightlessly, at Reinhart. Finally he spoke in his loud whisper: “Let me for a change be honest. Obviously I cannot perform the operation. I could find a colleague to do it, of course. But I intend not to. I have come here and taken your time, and your pastilles, under false colors. My motive was simply to ‘see’ an American. Are you angry with me?”

“No,” Reinhart answered. “Surely not.”

“But you should be.” The doctor was impatient. “I can solve your problem, yet I will not. And as far as you know, for a capricious reason.”

Reinhart smiled tolerance and dropped his cupped left hand on Lori’s shoulder. “I can’t force you, can I?”

“Then you are not serious?” asked the doctor in dramatic astonishment. “Disgrace for the lady, shame for you—for although you may not be the other principal in the catastrophe, your honor is somehow involved, yes?, or you wouldn’t be here. Come now, at least try to bribe me.”

Smiling again, Reinhart answered, conscious that when he had to speak without preparation his damnable German was certainly ungrammatical and, despite his “good accent” Americanized in pronunciation—you cannot take care of everything simultaneously—so that to these Germans he was ludicrous for another reason.
In their reality
he sounded:

“I donnt tink dot so easy to corrupt you are.”

“On the contrary, I am supremely corruptible. I have no honor whatsoever. For example, I would do anything to save my life.”

Reinhart felt Lori stir against him, and he released her sweater-shaggy shoulder. “Oh well, wouldn’t anybody do that?”

For the first time, but briefly, the doctor lost what had all this while been more nearly ebullience than anything else. And then, taking another, a purple, Lifesaver, he said, with the old aplomb and in the voiceless voice Reinhart had come to hear as oddly beautiful, “On the other hand, if by necessity you have learned this fact about yourself, it is nice to know. Some American writer—have you read him?—wrote a verse about seeing a man eat of his own heart. ‘Is it good?’ he asked. ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘it is bitter—but I like it. First, because it is bitter, and second, because it is mine.’ ”

Reinhart did not understand. And Lori had
not
learned much English, therefore could only repeat the words more slowly, in her low-pitched music.

He shook his head. “The funny thing is that I know all the words; it must be the combination.”

“Bach!” cried the doctor. “Excuse me for a moment. Please give us the English for this.”

Bach did, with an attitude of excessive expectation; sought to explicate, was halted.

“
Danke sehr.
Now just return to your lieutenant. We did not wish to disturb you.”

Reinhart determined to read, when he went home, this author whom a non-English-speaking German knew better than he. However, the doctor had turned out to be the usual lunatic, in love with his own rhetoric. He returned to the subject which had become a great bore to Reinhart, who had decided at the first resistance to seek another physician through Schatzi.

“I have no scruples against abortion in itself—”

His speech came within an interval of breath-taking on the part of Bach, who heard it and answered:
“Die meisten meiner Mitmenschen sind traurige Folgen einer unterlassenen Fruchtabtreibung.”

“Bach, don’t you realize you are interrupting?” chided Lori, seizing the hand with which Reinhart, bending forward, traced his trouser crease in the area of the shin. “I assure you that if you persist Otto will avoid you. ... Please do not do that,” she said to Reinhart. “A hard object in your breast pocket jabs into my back.”

A pencil, which he removed to the other side. Nevertheless, he disliked a carping woman.

Bach desisted, and when Schild spoke, cautioned him with wrinkled forehead.

“Did you get that?” Schild sadly asked Reinhart. “Most men are the sad results of abortions never undertaken.”

But by now, having adjusted to German, Reinhart heard English as somewhat dull upon the ear and difficult to follow. He believed that Schild was repeating his old objections to the plan for Very’s salvation, and assured him resignedly that it was all off. “You can stop worrying.” He should, in the first place, have hired Schatzi and thus given no one an opportunity for humanitarianism, friendship, theory, oratory, and so forth: that was the way with intellectuals; from his old uneasiness towards them, for which he had blamed himself, he was at last liberated; worse than boring, they were of absolutely no utility; if you want a barrel built, hire a cooper.

“You have changed my mind,” said Reinhart to the doctor. “Forget it. I was foolish. I don’t want to get into trouble.”

Bach, still actively desisting from interruption, wrestling with himself, gave up suddenly on an interval of losing and said, with hysterical bravery: “Tell him, Doctor, tell him about the Russian concentration camps! They were worse than the German ones!”

Lori wrenched angrily within Reinhart’s surround, Schild recoiled sickly upon himself, as if someone had hurled towards him a bucket of filth, and the doctor sighed.

His weary answer: “Ah Bach, you take what you choose. But so be it, we shall leave it at that.”

Reinhart somewhat rudely thrust Lori from his line of vision. She pushed back with unusual strength for so small a body, crumpling his outstretched fingers, and if in that second of pain he had been asked, do you still love her?, he would have said, sorely, because she is as tough as a root. Gently this time he raised himself from the slump and looked over her head.

“Are the Communists as bad as the Nazis? Were you in a Russian camp? I didn’t even know the Russians had concentration camps.” Saying which he looked haughtily at Schild, whom he had gauged as a pro-Russian liberal, and saw thereupon what he should have known from experience was more to be pitied than defied. He would never be able to match his moods, to meet aggression with the same, and humility in kind.

“Bach provides a much more effective torture than either,” said the doctor genially. “Whatever theories of coercion are developed in the future, they must take account of his method: admiration of the nonadmirable. He believes that because I was a prisoner I have a special and heroic wisdom. He is wrong, but my vanity insists otherwise; therefore, in my sense, which is nobody else’s business, he is right. Why, however, should you permit me, or him, to inflict this nonsense on you? ...Now tell me, is it true that one can enter an American cinema while the motion picture is in progress? Isn’t it queer to see middle, end, and then the beginning?”

“Yes,” Reinhart answered, “yes, one can enter at any time. But American movies are made for an audience whose average mental age is twelve years old. You should have seen the pictures they made on Nazism. Such trash is almost criminal.”

“The Nazis were presented as good men?”

“Oh no, but either they were monsters who did not resemble human beings or they were ridiculous buffoons.” He was making out all right with his primitive, do-it-yourself German, for the doctor seemed to understand.

“
Also,
this was an error: too realistic. I agree with you, this theme should be dealt with as fantasy. Lenore, do the privileges of your job include Ami films?”

“Not exactly, Otto,” Lori answered brightly. “But do you recall the old joke of Father’s about the man who was asked if he had ever eaten hare? ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘But yesterday I shook hands with a fellow whose cousin’s brother-in-law lives next door to a widow whose late husband once saw someone eating hare.’ It’s not as bad as that with me. I make the beds of persons who see the pictures every night.”

The reference to Veronica could not have been more obvious. Reinhart intended his response to be equally obvious in disregard.

“Your father has a good sense of humor?” he asked. How strange for a German! But then he remembered that her father was a Jew.

“Well, yes,” answered Lori, looking at him from the corner of her eye, he thrusting himself to the side so that she could do it, “I have never thought about it so seriously, but I suppose he had.”

Had?
Yes, dumb Reinhart, not everyone is always young and American enough to have two living parents. Besides, he was a Jew. Yet he had to speak, he, Reinhart, one in five in this subterranean, brightly lighted urinal—monstrosity, Jew, half-Jew, half-Jew, Siegfried.

“He was killed—”

“He is dead,” said Lori.

“—by the Nazis.”

“He is dead.”

“And who else, who else?” If in all his life he had reached no goals, he would take this one.

From his implacable face she turned away in embarrassment and towards the doctor gave her dirge:
“Voter, zwei Brüder, Schwägerin, Neffe, Nichte.”

In English, thus excluding his wife and brother-in-law, Bach cried: “There is no wit like that of Berlin, of which since I am not a native I can assure you without immodesty. Hitler and his damned barbarians hated this city because they could never break its spirit, because they could not transform it into a Nürnberg. I confess to you that I am a separatist. I fervently hope we remain forever isolated from the Fatherland.” He slapped his knee—too hard, and winced.

“I wish I could do something,” Reinhart said. “I wish I could say something—”

“You can indeed,” the doctor answered, impatiently stripping the paper tube from the remainder of the fruit drops, catching five of the six in the wire whisk of his left hand: one fell to the concrete and broke into three golden arcs and a modicum of sugar dust. “A lemon,
ja
? I can smell it now it is crushed.”