Crazy in Berlin (5 page)

When in adolescence Reinhart was suddenly overwhelmed with the purposelessness of the bleak journey from pablum to embalming fluid—not for himself, but everybody else; he would somehow, alone, escape and was now investigating the various modes of exit—he once asked his father, and querulously, because the reason he alone would escape was that he alone had the guts or intelligence to ask questions rather than weakly submit, just as the power of his will would protect him, alone, from eyeglasses, baldness, false teeth, poverty, a wife: “Why didn’t Grandpa ever go back to Germany?”

Could the Old Country, so remote, so rare, fail to exceed the here and now?

His father was shaving, or repairing the outside cellar door that hadn’t been true to its frame for a decade, or washing the automobile, and perhaps before the answer came had done each of these tenfold, because for him a question must be repeated many times, by reason of his apathy, which was a superb thing in its way and could have been heroic if behind him Rome were burning or half of London keeling over with the plague.

Finally, as he rose from whatever job, scant of breath, with stated or implied senility of leg, he replied: “Use your head. What was there for him
there
?”

There had, of course, been so much for him
here.
He hadn’t even owned his own butchershop, but was wage-slave in a native American’s, a man twenty years younger. He built a brick house in an end of town that shortly thereafter suffered an encroachment of lower-class cotton-pickin’ refugees from Kentucky, know locally as Briarhoppers, with their rusty cars and back-yard shacks and incestuous five-to-a-room, brought in by an absentee landlord named Horace Remington, who everyone was sure had changed his name from Levy, although they had never seen him—any more than they had seen for themselves that the earth was round. Grandma, native-born, whom he had carried off from a ten-dollar-a-week job at the pencil factory, survived him one year, and left material holdings of the house and two hundred fifty dollars. His one son, the man Carlo watched return with steel wool to the corroded hubcaps, was far from a raving success. This car, for example, was bought used with the two-fifty bequest—which showed how far back it went. And as to the house, it had gone to join its neighbors in the pocket of “Remington,” who, despicable though he was, paid a third again as much as any other offerer and therefore was able to seduce even the good people into aiding his effort to destroy the respectability of such areas. Now if one passed the old homestead he heard guitar music and saw degenerate faces at the windows.

Carlo left his father at the task—he would have been glad to help on request, but would not volunteer; he received fifty cents a week in allowance, for which his obligation was to cut grass in summer and shovel snow in winter—and went indoors, to the dark cavity at the end of the basement, which was really not so much cellar-end as dead space, a kind of tomb, under the front porch. Here in a cardboard box soft with moisture were his grandfather’s few effects, having for half a decade been in chemical mixture with the insatiable air: a twenty-five-cent pipe, “real bruyere” stamped on the shank; a straight razor, broken; a dollar watch, scarred chromium, its intestines locked in rust; cufflinks with the Oddfellows’ paralytic eye. A letter postmarked Berlin-Something, Berlin-Smear, April 12, 1927. My God, three years after Carlo was born; he was still astonished at evidence that the world had been up and around when he was so young. Inside, handwriting that not only was in another tongue but also in an alien alphabet, even the figures were queer. Finally, a single book, the leather of which some dry past time infected with an eczema that the basement damp had treated with a salve of blue mold.
Nürnberger
something, the golden letters just visible on the granulated cover. Within, it was all pictures of that splendid medieval town of towers, castles, moats, rivers flowing through buildings, dolls’ dwelling places hung over sallyports, and ironbound doors, four feet high, for dwarfs’ abodes in the bottom of the city wall; labyrinthine ways among steep houses with a little extra roof sprouting over each attic window, the general roofs themselves nowhere true, everywhere splaying, overshooting, cutting back, growing dormers and loggias and lookouts and hexagonal capsules, restrained from soaring off their timbered plaster only by the weight of these execrescences and a million tiles fine as the scales of a trout.

Magic and fabulous—no, it was not so much these as the Ohio street outside his own window, with its covering of smooth tar down which if you rolled for ten minutes you would pass a flat, dun high school, a raw Presbyterian church without a steeple, and fifty lawns so level and unobstructed that you could some Sunday push a roller from one limit to the next and squash nothing but a row of homeowners trimming the edges. In Nürnberg female angels ringed the city fountain gushing water from their breasts, but what was extraordinary was that America could be so ugly-dull; that was the fairy tale, along with radio programs for the housewife, movie cowboys who never kissed a girl, public drivel about shut-ins, mothers, flowers, the favorite prayers of celebrities, ministers being tough guys and businessmen wise ones, the stupid arrogance of newspaper reporters who wrote “grass roots” and “with the arrival of spring, usually blasé New Yorkers set aside their sophistication and frolicked gaily as children.” And sports. At the end of his sophomore year in high school he was the largest boy in the building and was invited to come out for football by the coach, a witless man adored by his teams apparently because he cursed them at half-time. He took Reinhart’s refusal in good grace, and was clever to do so; Carlo had some time before sent away to York, Pa., for a set of dumbbells and was already more muscular than the coach, except in the head. In Europe they did such things as weight lifting and gymnastics, although he was a touch too unwieldly for the latter.

He thought about Harvard and Amherst, places of old stone and vines and fireplaces in each room and tutors, as at Heidelberg and Leipzig, but it was revealed to him his last year in high school that he must go to the nearest state university, on account of the free tuition. At this institution he was permitted neither a lodging in town nor a single in the dormitory; with the unction peculiar to the tribe, the dean of men said he must mix and placed him with a roommate who hung pennants on one side of their metal-and-concrete cell, worked a water wave in the front of his hair, and crooned popular songs in idle moments. When shortly he applied again for a single, he discovered it was already on the way: the roomie had reported that Reinhart didn’t mix.

Although the architects had designed the few single rooms to be a constant punishment for the social deviates assigned them, Reinhart lived happy in his. He had loathed the college before he saw it and after a month’s residence knew his prior feeling as too mild: it was in sum a flat green mall overrun with round pink faces saying “Hi!”

He had read much as a boy, but only in the literature of the imagination. Expository writing was rough, almost impossible going; he had never been easy with the language of documents and directions on packages, and was not now with that of the natural and social sciences. Philosophy was somewhat better because it didn’t, and didn’t really pretend to, get anywhere. English was a book of contemporary readings about, on the one hand, the underprivileged and, on the other, initially irresponsible people coming to a sense of social obligation: there was a story, in the form of a letter to her parents, about a rich girl who married a labor organizer, the compassion going all one way—inward, to the letter-writer and spouse—and no passion at all. And German, that hard and very real tongue, proved difficult and dreary, with twelve cases for each noun, insanely irregular verbs, and perverse genders that made a door a female and a maiden a neuter, defying even that principle of nature by which, according to a neighbor in psychology, projecting objects seen in dreams are male sex symbols and receptacles female, for
the pen
was in Deutsch as feminine as
the box
was not.

For these reasons he grew fond of his little room, last floor back, next to the toilets, with an air conduit passing first over the ranges in the kitchen four stories lower, and came not to hear the staccato flushings and smell the lemon sauce for the semolina pudding. He sometimes hid out there all day, cutting classes on the motive of the little ills—sinus, swollen Achilles tendon, foreign matter in the eye, etc.—for which the dispensary would write a note, eschewing meals with the aid of Oreo cookies and those stale, soap-flavored cheese-cracker sandwiches one buys at the drugstore, and reading books of his own choice.

He had now grown to six-two, still an inch below his grandfather—which he might yet attain—and as much above his father as that mark exceeds five-nine. The set of dumbbells had given way to a barbell with changeable weights; in the “clean-and-jerk” lift he could handle two hundred pounds, five more than he weighed, yet he was inclined to solid beef rather than the sharp definition of muscle permitted more wiry types; and he was clumsy, tripping over roots on tardy runs to eight-o’clock classes, tending to enter a doorway with poor aim and collide with its frame, sometimes splintering the wood. A recluse, but when he emerged, a recipient of good will and that friendly fealty paid to large men in jabs-in-the-ribs and blows-on-the-upper-body, which along with the strain of trying to better his mark in the clean and jerk every afternoon kept him always sore of skin.

The books of his choice were
The Invisible Man,
which he was at any given time rereading; a volume printed at the author’s expense called A
Life in the Field,
by an Englishman who had towards the end of the nineteenth century scouted both in Matabeleland and along the Big Horn River in Montana; and Middle European short stories in English translation, in which the characters tended to live in the mountains or the valleys between them, walking to school on rutted cowpaths, sometimes getting lost in the forest—or had departed all this for the garish, quick life of the cities, which had gone to ashes in their mouths, and now yearned for the pastoral long ago forsaken; had a quiet but desperate passion for a girl who did not know they were alive or held them in sororal affection; attended day school, oppressed by a severe master and a fat bully; kept a faithful dog. Always a single sensibility, sometimes misunderstood, usually not even taken account of, by the insensate many; and in an atmosphere of mist, distant sounds, and if in the mountains, of course the silent, imperturbable snow, deceptively serene and treacherous, and on the glacier, a frozen rainbow. The stories were to be found in collections under one rubric or another but could take place in any of a variety of Central European areas at any given time under diverse political registrations: Bohemia, the Burgenland, Silesia, even Switzerland, anywhere that had a Germanic color and preferably a castle on some steep over placid water and in the foreground a cottage with a roof of straw.

Meanwhile he was almost flunking out in his course of study in German. For one thing, it was at eight o’clock, and he was most nights up till three, reading; for another, the language as taught had no relations to the tales, being at first Herr Schmidt exchanging the time of day with his neighbor and then simple scientific excerpts for the premedical students, which the instructor decided it wouldn’t hurt the few general people to read, either. At the end of the year he just, but made it in German and the other courses, low C’s with the exception of zoology lab, where in the interests of a moody, fitful romance a girl friend had made his dissection drawings, upping him a grade.

Simultaneous with Reinhart’s entrance into junior year in high school, the Wehrmacht had invaded Poland; at the end of the term they took France; upon his graduation, entered Russia; just before his first-year college Christmas holiday, were at war with America. By one means or another, he was aware of these events although he never read the papers. He was furthermore aware that wars were wrong and foolish and the official ways of nations, always stupid and often wicked; that propaganda, regardless of side, was an absolute lie: for example, as everyone knew, the German “atrocities” of World War I were fabrications of the British and French, who moreover did not let up in the ensuing twenty years, thereby giving Hitler some excuse for his silly ravings. Hitler held no appeal for him, having an unmistakable aroma of the tramp and no dignity, and, discounting their portrayal in Hollywood movies, the Nazis
were
preposterously vulgar; but opposed to the little, venomous, weak French and the British, thin and effeminate, they could hardly be assigned the exclusive evil in an intestine European quarrel over markets and territories.

Yet when America came into the war, it was a man’s place to go soldiering, and the ideals concerned were not public ones dreamed up by journalists and pompous bores in high office but private matters. He felt himself a kind of German, yet he would cheerfully have slain the whole German army in fair combat and exposed himself to the same fate. On this principle he almost presented his person to the enlistment office early Friday morning, December 12, 1941; doubtless would have, had there been such a bureau in his little college town; but there wasn’t, and the closest city, the place he crept alone every weekend to oppose his harsh weekday regimen with whiskey and coke, was eight miles off—it was impossible to hitchhike there, enlist, and get back without missing classes.

His second thoughts were confirmed three days later when the mincing dean told the assembled men that being educated people they could better serve by pursuing their studies with renewed vigor. It was not only his idea, he averred, but that of the Armed Forces, who as reward would commission every man to graduate. However, six weeks later, when the first fine fire had cooled and it was too late to volunteer from a position of enthusiasm, the male students were reconvoked. Now anyone wishing to stay
out
of the Army must
enlist
—in the reserve.