Crazy in Berlin (44 page)

Either Schild or Bach made a sound like the winding of a watch.

“You can,” the doctor repeated, and whatever else he said wound through the holes of the five candies in his mouth and expired before finding the orifice of speech.

“Ich habe ihn nicht verstanden,”
Reinhart whispered into Lori’s hair.

“ ‘You can say something,’ ” Lori answered loudly. “ ‘You can tell us what you will make of yourself now the war is over.’ ”

He raised his meditation to point at the ceiling, to macerate his vision on the fierce lightbulb: father, two brothers, sister-in-law, nephew, niece, like the roster of a holiday reunion.

“Well, I cannot bring them back, whatever I do,” he shouted quietly. “But in my own small way I can fight all hatreds based on race, color, or creed. In my own small way I can say: we must love one another or die!” When he was moved, words came from nowhere, inspired; yet he was conscious of the falsity of those which had just arrived. It was fairly certain that of the six victims in Lori’s roll he could not have loved at least one, so goes the world. And how did a fellow go about loving any of those who killed them? For a principle means either what it says or nothing; if we love one another, we love the murderers, every one. And finally, was love really the sole alternative to massacre?

“One must love himself,” said the doctor. “The men who killed my family did not. What are totalitarians but people who have no self-love and self-respect, who believe that the humanity into which they are born is contemptible?, who believe a thing is preferable to a person, because a thing is absolute.”

“But a thing,” said Bach, “has a sense of its thingness. The Will works in inanimate as well as animate objects. That sofa may know very little, but it knows that it is a sofa.”

“Of course I agree, Bach, that this sofa has a self: I have heard it most painfully groan when you sat upon it and chuckle when you arose, but we shall wait forever if we expect it to will itself into a chair. This poor couch is so predictable.” He actually looked sad and patted its arm. “If you prick it, will it not bleed? But that is not necessarily true of a man, who may spit in your eye, or, having a taste for pain, beg you to prick him again, only harder. And what might he not make of it as a moral act? That by taking his life you have confirmed his conviction that you are inferior to him, and for some men life is a small price to pay for such reward. Or that by causing him to die well you have relieved him of the need to live well, for any victim is willy-nilly a success. Or that by divesting him of everything but the naked self you have made it possible for him to accept that self. In the end he may have used you as you believed you were using him, and who can say who was the victor?”

“Oh no,” cried Reinhart, even though he thought it likely he had misunderstood, “you cannot build some elaborate theory that in the end Nazism did good. That sounds like the idea of those old fellows in Neuengland—the northern U.S.A.—Rolf Valdo Emerson,
und so weiter,
who wore frock coats and walked in the woods and never cared about women, and therefore had this dry belief that evil was only the servant of a greater good.”

During this—how fluent?—speech Lori twisted round and studied him, trying, he supposed, to be unnerving: a person without experience should sit silent as a vegetable. Well that, last time with Bach, he had done. He felt now as if
he
were drunk, and finishing his representations to the doctor, he stared defiantly at her strong, straight nose.

“Otto can say anything he likes. You see, he has paid for the right.”

“There you have the corruptive results of working for the Amis,” laughed the doctor. “If I paid for the privilege to be theoretical, then I was cheated, my dear Lenore. All other German males are born with that right and obligation. But how true if you imply that this chap from over the sea should not be permitted to speak further without paying tribute! Come, Herr Unteroffizier, surely you have some more candy about you.” The doctor retrieved his stick from the floor and brandished it. “Here comes some English—you did not know I had some?
Komm on you dirty rat hand ovuh zuh goods.
This is what the racketeers order, no? Bach has a detective novel which he reads aloud to me—”

“
Ja, ja,
I have it just here,” Bach said eagerly, struggling to rise. “I read with simultaneous translation—”

Reinhart grandly waved him down. “That won’t be necessary at present.” He did, of course, have in his clothing another piece of sweet: a chocolate bar foolishly stored in his shirt pocket, over the heart. It was now limp. He gave it to the doctor and apologized.

“Sehr gut,”
the doctor responded. He smelled it. “
Schokolade!
I will not eat this. I shall present it to the widow who lives across the hall from me.” He placed his cane on the concrete, giving Reinhart another sight of the umbilicus of his right eye. “I am trying to seduce her.”

Reinhart grinned anxiously and withdrew an inch from Lori, as if it were a mistaken but justified statement of his own aims, but when the doctor’s glasses were turned on him again he saw their terrible wistfulness.

“Oh God, Doctor, eat it, eat it,” he said, his voice ragged in pity. “Next time I can bring you a carton for your widow.”

“If your motive is kindness, please do not. Such largesse, if I gave it to her, would earn me only contempt. And if I kept it for myself I would eat it all immediately and fall ill. In either case I should curse you. But why do you now wish to bribe me without profit for yourself when earlier you refused to do it for gain?”

“Because he is a good man.” It was Schild who spoke, and pleadingly, and Reinhart suffered for him in anticipation, for the doctor
was
a kind of demon, after all; in revenge for his having been tortured by evil and falsity he would torture goodness and truth.

“And I suppose you are, too,” sharply replied the doctor. “I don’t trust a man who would rather give than receive. I can’t stand his damned pretense that he is too good for the world. He is mad. I disapprove of lunacy, illness, disability, and failure.”

Reinhart could no longer contain himself. The mad doctor’s ranting left him personally untouched, but poor Schild gulped it all down, sounding again and again that watch-winding noise in his throat, and poor Lori was limp against his shoulder, used, no doubt, to the habitual insane rhetoric of the cellar; she had, as before, gone to sleep, but the constant strain!; he would rescue her from it before the hour was out; if need be, kick Trudchen’s cheap little ass into the street and give Lori her room. Meanwhile he must catch Schild before he disappeared round the bend.

He shouted:
“Das ist National-sozialismus!
I don’t know what you are trying to do, Doctor—I sympathize with you, I would give my own eyes to get yours back, believe me, I would give my life if your family could come back again, I have never done anything—I couldn’t even hold a gun because of the Geneva Convention—but don’t say the Nazis were right. If that is true, then it was all useless; your loved ones died for nothing. All those corpses—I saw them in the photographs. Those beloved people, they were too good for the world. The rest of us are too bad for it...” His voice had broken, broken, as he knew ever more poignantly that with whatever motive he had begun his defense of general reason, he continued it for the sake of his own.

Therefore was the doctor right, even as he sought to repudiate him; therefore was he cramped with guilt for a crime he had not perpetrated and agonized by a suffering he had not had to endure. To be vicarious always is always to be base.

“Why do healthy people believe there is wisdom in a wound?
Mumble, mumble
...” The doctor slipped the envelopes from the Hershey bar, which in his stark handbones had lost its borrowed warmth-of-Reinhart and returned to brittleness, and segment on segment inserted it into slit-mouth quick-lips, munched, munched, munched. Soon was the lower third of his face childishly smeared with brown. His hair, dark-blond, high, luxuriant-grown as a Zulu’s, had burst forth from the cropped skull of the camps. Against Schild his whisper had gone hard, cruel; towards Reinhart, Reinhart now decided, it had always been a snicker.

On he went in the idiom of masticating chocolate, with a necessarily greater show of gesture than when he spoke audibly, which nevertheless stayed Greek. Schild, who had been slumped, wired up his spine and sat straight, neurasthenic. Lori slept, heavy for so light a girl.

Bach, however, listened eagerly and when the doctor, the last bit of candy down the hatch, gave off, the giant bobbed his peeled egg at Reinhart and said in English: “There you have the doctor’s world-outlook in a nutshell!”

Then it was that Reinhart realized the doctor was fake from the word go; that he was no more an alumnus of a concentration camp than Schild was a hangman.

The latter suddenly glared at him and snapped: “Very well! Russian ‘concentration camps.’
Sehr gut,
ask the doctor about them! Simply the Buchenwalds of another fascism...”

The doctor wiped his mouth on a handkerchief as holey as a net dishrag, to get which he had opened his coat and revealed the necklines of, at quick count, four gray sweaters and a shirt collar of brown.

“Certainly they are not,” he said good-naturedly. “If you won’t let me avoid the subject—it is not offensive to me, since it is mine, but it should be, I insist, to you. If I must talk on this theme, I’ll take my stand on precision. Young Corporal, you talk of love. But perhaps love is for boys and girls and old ladies who love their dogs. For us professionals, consider precision. Love one another or die? But we die anyway,
ja
?”

“ ‘The subject is not offensive to me,’ ” Reinhart suspiciously repeated.

“I did not say pleasant or without pain. I said not offensive,” said the doctor, impatient. “Now you interpret it as you wish.” He resumed: “The Soviet camps: as you must know, Lieutenant, they have quite another purpose than the Nazis’, which latter were in their most extreme form mere extermination-places. The aim of the Soviet camps is to change people. Sometimes, inadvertently, live men are there changed into corpses; well, at least they are no longer counterrevolutionaries.

“Each kind of camp has a favorite kind of prisoner. The Nazis preferred the man who by existence was a criminal, that is, the Jew. Good Jews, bad Jews, Jews who as individuals
were
criminals by the usual definition, even those Jews who would have agreed with everything in the code of fascism but that all Jews should be exterminated—no, this is not yet enough: even those Jews who might have helped the Nazi cause—were murdered indiscriminately. There was some early plan for ‘useful Jews,’ but it was soon abandoned. An Einstein perhaps could have been forced or tricked into giving Hitler the atomic bomb. Nevertheless he would not have been saved from the gas chamber.

“Where in all history can we find another idealism comparable to this? Hitler did what we have always been told is the supreme glory of man, and apparently impossible to a god—for what chance did Jesus of Nazareth take if he was immortal?—Hitler sacrificed himself for that which is greater than the self, for he stuck to his guns and he is dead now. I think a name for that is Love.

“With the Soviets, however, no man is judged by what he is but rather by what he can become. Their favorite prisoner is the man capable of learning the error of his ways. He must do this through hard labor on projects useful to the state, and hence to mankind, and thus there is no waste. The penal system of a faith as inclusive as the Nazis’ was exclusive, and for that reason psychologically superior to the latter. Here at last the Jew, for example, is not a second-class citizen: he can be as great a swine as a gentile. Did you know, until that desert tribe of Hebrews found the one authentic God and that they were His chosen, an exclusive religion had never been invented? Ever since, the gentiles, who never could take a joke, have been punishing the Jews for being so damned clever. To the Communists, however, this old strife is a great bore. A man’s a man, and is capable of anything. And of course when you believe that, you are loving one another.”

“Excuse me, Doctor,” said Reinhart, adjusting a prickling shoulder under Lori’s weight, “when you opened your coat I saw your shirt. It looks like part of a uniform, but not quite the color of a U.S. Army shirt—”

“I should not suppose it does.” The doctor’s whisper lost strength in extended speech; Reinhart really helped him by interrupting. He cleared his throat with the soft yet dynamic sound one might make shaking out a floormop. “You are wrong if you think the average German feels no guilt; he simply will not dance it to the tune of you people who were not involved. My widow gave me this shirt. I suspect it is a storm-trooper’s garment, but naturally I cannot see it. ...

“
Also,
Lieutenant, we have looked precisely at the differences. My brother-in-law insists, however—since he cannot forgive himself for being a gentile German [Bach flushed and looked at his legs]—on their similarities. His interest lies in proving Communism worse. Because I was once a Communist I am inclined to agree. The conscience is a Himmler as demented as the real one. Remorse, whose seat is in the memory, has a purpose. Guilt, the product of the conscience, is always useless, the wrong kind of self-concern, cheating, cowardly, immoral.”

Since the doctor’s comments on his shirt, which had proved him as false as anything could, Reinhart had been rather nursing his shock than listening. He came back now to strike another blow for virtue.

“It isn’t hard to be a murderer. The tough thing is to be a victim.” He smiled so bitterly that Lori woke up on his shoulder, saying
“Wie bitte?”
to which he answered,
“Nichts, schlafen Sie noch.”

For the first time, Bach, who had been frozen in wonder and delight, noticed her.

“Rude!” he cried in outrage. “Your brother is speaking!”

“Ach,”
she said,
“was kann man tun?
He hasn’t stopped since I was a little girl.” Her head sank again.

The doctor laughed and laughed at the awful thing—if he
was
an authentic ex-prisoner—she had said to him. “When we were small she used to punch me if I talked too much. In the solar plexus. Very effective when struck just right: I couldn’t speak for half an hour. Therefore would I take revenge by playing the Leonore Overture on the gramaphone, which, because I insisted she was named for it, she detested. Then in would come brother Leo, who couldn’t study mathematics for the din, and he would shout in his shrill voice: ‘Twins have only half a brain each.’ But if the altercation continued until Father had to come upstairs, we were all for it. Father had a face like a weapon. He was a very severe man. I can recall nothing loving about him but much that was precise.