Lucky Bastard (11 page)

Eyes fixed on Jack, Greta dug a package of Gauloises out of her rucksack and lit one. She picked a fleck of tobacco off the end of her tongue, inhaled deeply, and blew a cloud of acrid smoke across the table.

Jack coughed, then smiled apologetically. Greta, refusing to look at him, feigned interest in the ceiling and took another drag from her poisonous caporal.

Greta caught Jack's smile and made a sour face. Manfred watched, waiting to see what might happen next.

In his slow, annoying German, Jack said, “So, Greta, do you go to the university?”

Greta did not respond. The food came. Cigarette burning in her right hand, she cut up her sausages into little pieces and ate them with her fingers. She ate her fried potatoes, even her salad, in the same way. Jack recognized the style: He knew a lot of bourgeois Movement girls who had adopted infantile table manners along with round heels as a means of semaphoring radical political beliefs. He himself used a knife and fork in the American manner—cutting a morsel of sausage, putting down his knife, shifting his fork from left hand to right, spearing the food, lifting it to his mouth, chewing thirty-two times before swallowing. This unmistakable evidence of Jack's revolting nationality further disgusted Greta.

While they ate, Manfred carried on a dialectical discussion with Jack. The subject, inescapably, was politics—American politics as seen from the Left. At first, Manfred's questions were condescending, and he only half-listened to Jack's replies. But before long he began to realize that these answers were subtle, deeply informed, and, most surprising, free of cant. Jack was no fervent youth, unsure of his opinions and eager for approval. He did not protest the correctness of his own beliefs, or even bother to describe them. Nevertheless the listener felt that Jack's political convictions were so pure, so deep, so genuinely held, that he felt no need to announce them, even on first meeting. He seemed to assume, while offering no bona fides that this was the case, that Manfred would take it for granted that he believed in all the right things. This was an amazing trick of the mind.

Quite soon Jack turned what had started out to be a Socratic dialogue with himself as the learner into a tutorial on American realities—a monologue that rushed along like a river in flood, swelling as it went, picking up all sorts of strange debris. Jack was calm, collected, good-humored—impervious, apparently, to the stimuli that drove most people his age, and many older men and women, into frenzies of resentment and anger. Drowning, Manfred seized an uprooted oak—Richard Nixon—in the hope that his weight would cause it to snag on the mud of Jack's rhetoric and give him a chance to scramble ashore onto the terra firma of Marxist-Leninist principle.

But Jack was dispassionate, even about Richard Nixon.

“By any rational standard of judgment,” he said, barely pausing for breath, “Nixon has been a very effective president. An enemy, yes, and a dangerous one. He'll end the war as soon as he can, on whatever terms he can get.”

“What about his constituency, the warmongers?”

“There are no warmongers,” Jack said. “Just people who want the whole thing to be over. If he gets peace on any terms he'll be reelected in a landslide.”

“And then what?”

“And then Armageddon. Nixon will have so much power that his enemies will either have to destroy him or be destroyed by him.”

“Which will happen?”

“Both, in the end.”

Up to then, Greta had shown no sign that she understood a word of the conversation. Suddenly she said, “What a load of shit.”

Jack said, “Interesting point. Would you like to elaborate?”

“No.” Greta ground out the stub of her third Gauloise.

Manfred smiled indulgently, then, as if remembering something, looked at his watch. “Oh dear,” he said, in English. “I'm late. Greta, will you see that Jack finds his way home?”

She replied in German. “What is he, blind?”

“No, darling, not blind. Jack is our guest, a stranger in Heidelberg, and he doesn't know the town yet. And you are his first experience of German womanhood, which is famous for submission and kindness to strangers. So walk him home, please.”

Greta shrugged. She stood up. “Come, Jack,” she said. “Time for your walk.”

She spun on her heels and marched toward the exit.

Manfred said, “Take my advice. Go with her. She's not so bad when you get to know her.”

Greta had reached the stairs. She stood at the top, glaring.

Jack smiled at her, the full Kennedy display.

“I'll bet,” he said.

3
Outside the rathskeller it was raining. Glistening in the dim glow of the streetlights, the city itself was the color of rain—roofs, steeples, cobblestones, parked cars, even the whey-faced people hurrying by in wet raincoats, holding wet umbrellas. The only splashes of color were the bedraggled flags and banners, wrapped around their poles in watershot floodlight.

This dismal scene seemed beautiful to Jack. He said so, invoking the name of Ingmar Bergman because everything he had so far seen in Heidelberg reminded him of foreign films. The city was black and white, badly lit, hokily mysterious, so filled with solemn meaning that it would be ridiculous if filmed in a language you could understand.

“Beautiful?” Greta said. “You think this is beautiful?”

Greta, raised in sunless northern Europe, stared at him in pitiless disbelief, then pulled a collapsible umbrella out of her book bag and popped it open. One of the ribs was broken. A dimple in the cloth filled with water, which ran over the edge of the umbrella in a tiny cascade. Greta darted into the traffic. Jack, who had no umbrella or hat or raincoat, stayed where he was in the doorway of the rathskeller.

Greta, realizing after a few emphatic steps that Jack was not following her, stopped in the middle of the street and looked back.

“What are you waiting for?” she called in English.

“For this to let up,” Jack replied.

“
What?
”

“The rain. I'm waiting for it to stop.”

“Stop? It will never stop. You are in Germany. Come.”

Jack shrugged and stepped out in the downpour.

Greta said, “You have no umbrella?”

“Afraid not.”

“Ach! Use this!” She pulled a copy of
Bild Zeitung
out of her book bag and handed it to him.

Jack held the newspaper over his head. “‘Ach!'” he repeated. “Vunderful!”

“It won't be so wonderful for you in Germany if you have no umbrella,” Greta replied. “Come!”

Greta really did pronounce her w's as v's. It was the only flaw in her English. Jack said, “Just like Marlene.”

“
What?
”

In Dietrich's throaty diction Jack sang, “‘Falling in luff again, never vanted to …'”

Again Greta stared at him, again pointedly unamused. “Unbelievable,” she said. “Come, quickly.”

She strode away under her tiny broken umbrella, red curls bouncing, combat boots splashing decisively through puddles. Jack hurried to catch up, then skipped a stride when he was beside her in order to walk in step.

Unspeaking, she led the way into a steep, narrow street, then through several turnings into other medieval passages. Most were dark, but at length they turned into a particularly picturesque alley lined with luxury shops. Jewels, crystal, silks, were tastefully displayed in tiny windows.

“Beautiful stuff,” Jack said admiringly.

“Garbage,” Greta said. “For ersatz Americans. Look.”

They were standing in front of a shop window. Inside, a clerk hovered, smiling, as an expensively dressed man considered buying a bracelet for an expensively dressed woman. Both were middle-aged, smiling, overweight. The woman smiled adoringly at the man.

“His mistress?” Jack said.

“That sausage?” Greta said. “Never. She's his wife. His mistress would be skinny. They make you vomit.”

“Who?”

In the reflected light, Greta's face twisted with disgust. She looked up at Jack, her umbrella tilting so that rainwater spilled from the dimple in its fabric.

Vehemently she said, “What do you mean, ‘Who?' Them.” She pointed at the fat couple in the shop. “The class enemy.”

“Oh,” Jack said. “Is that what fat people are?”

“How do you think they got fat?”

“Gosh. Just like in those German expressionist pictures. But better—pictures can't fart.”

Greta's lip twitched. Jack thought that she was going to smile, but she stopped herself in time and attacked instead.

“You are very, very clever,” she said. “But you are not serious.”

“Really? How do you know?”

Greta spun on her heel and led him onward past more glittering shops. “I know because you are an American,” she said. “You see these people, all alike, all looking at jewels and clothes and all these beautiful things, all with full bellies while half the world starves or dies from American bombs? They are what America has made in Germany.”

Under streaming umbrellas, well-fed men and women in matching trench coats, mostly Burberrys, window-shopped like sleepwalkers.

“
Look at them!
” Greta said.

Jack looked. “Okay, what's the point?” he asked. “Ersatz Americans have nice raincoats and umbrellas, and real ones hold newspapers over their heads?”

“The point is,” she said, squinting fiercely, as if Jack's smiling American face were a page she could not read without her glasses, “the
point
is that they are blind. America, your country, has blinded the world to reality, to the suffering of others, to hunger, to everything that is wrong in life.”

“Okay. So?”

“So this is the result. They are hypnotized by baubles, they are under a spell, they are oblivious. They are lost.”

She was speaking German now, a torrent.

“
Verloren
,” Jack said, repeating the only word of hers that he had really understood. “Can you maybe talk a little slower?”

“No.” Greta switched back to her fluent, comical English.

“All that shit you were speaking to Manfred,” she said. “As if politics as usual will change things, as if clever maneuvers will satisfy history. You are all alike, you Americans. You march, you scream like babies who have pissed in their diapers, you burn little pieces of paper and a shitty piece of fascist cloth that is red, white, and blue, and you call yourselves revolutionaries.”

The rain was falling harder now. Water spurted from downspouts and swirled down cobbled gutters into storm drains. Jack could hear it rushing through the sewers, he could feel it running underground through the worn-out soles of his soaked shoes. The shoppers took shelter in doorways or hurried away. Greta paid the downpour no attention.

“In Germany, we know what fascism really is,” she said. “We have seen it up close, and we fight it with a million fists.”

“You do?” Jack said. He made a gesture at the shoppers, women clinging to the arms of the men and smiling through the trivial misery of this cloudburst, all of them seemingly happy after a good supper, a show, taking a stroll before conjugal sex. “These people don't seem to have any black eyes.”

Greta was stung. “You think not? That is because they are blind. So are you, my friend! You ask what antifascists do in Germany? I will tell you what they do—things that a spoiled American brat could not possibly imagine. They
act.
They don't just whine and play guitars and piss their pants. They make bombs, they rob banks, they attack American military bases with rockets! They hijack airplanes! They take fascist prisoners of war and try them in people's courts and execute them with people's justice. Even if they are their own mothers and fathers. I have friends who have arrested their own fascist parents, their fat capitalist uncles, and delivered them into the custody of people's tribunals.”

“Wow,” said Jack. “Very impressive.”

He was wet, miserable, but also fascinated. This girl was serious, a true believer—a real psychotic, not just the usual Movement chick reciting this season's radical boilerplate in the same way and for the same reasons that she wore her hair long and dressed in bib overalls and work boots, because it was what all the other girls were doing this semester.

He said, “Greta, what can I say? Good for you and your friends.”

“Don't condescend! Our fighters have died.”

“I know. I'm impressed, but maybe you guys are a little hard on your parents—”

“Hard on them? It all begins with them! Destroy the enemy closest to you! That is the first rule.”

“Okay. Maybe I'm a little soft because I'm an orphan—”

“Then you are lucky! They died before they could fuck you up!”

She was glaring up at Jack again, water pouring off her broken umbrella. She was at least ten inches shorter than he was, he outweighed her by fifty pounds, and yet her whole posture suggested that she was the wolf, he the sheep. How could anyone so small be so ferocious?

Shivering, Jack said, “I'm beginning to understand why there are so many exclamation points in German.”

“
What?
”

Jack said, “Greta, you're the one who's full of shit. The methods you're talking about won't work. They just give your enemies an excuse to hunt you down and liquidate you. Just like Hitler liquidated the Communists in the thirties. They were asking for it, and so are you.”

As always, Jack's tone was reasonable, friendly, gentle. But Greta was stung by his words. “
Ach so?
Then if we do not confront, what do we do?”

“You get inside the beast, capture its nerve centers, and give it orders.”

“And then it takes a laxative and shits you out.
Ach, du Lieber!
”

Jack laughed, a great irrepressible snort. He could not help himself; he had read this most Germanic of exclamations in so many comic books that it was deeply amusing to hear it spoken aloud by an actual German who was no less fanatical than the cartoon Krauts in
G.I. Combat
comics.