Crazy in Berlin (15 page)

But after one lunch, Nader met him outside.

“Did you pack off the Russky? Dewey’s going to make trouble, mark my words, because the Old Man’s about to hang it on him.”

“I’ll make it good,” said Schild. “It was my fault. I gave him the gun.”

“Well by Jesus we’ll put in a complaint through the Kommandatura,” Nader said. “Just write down his name and outfit. Did you get the outfit?” He rummaged in his pockets for writing materials.

Both extremities of Nader’s pencil bore chewmarks. His paper was the reverse of a snapshot carrying the pale-violet emblem of an Oklahoma developer. Schild wrote, slovenly: “Lt. Krylenko, Engrs Corps, Red Army.”

“I don’t have much hope this will find him.” He smiled commiseration. “But you won’t have to. Just let me know the amount of the damage, and I’ll see you get reimbursed in full. I’ll see your C.O. myself this afternoon. You’ll be fully cleared.”

“Now,” said Nader, “I know you’re oke, but you’ll do best by us if you crap out early. What I mean is—” He broke off until the pencil was reseated in his breast pocket and the flap buttoned. “Let me as somebody who was soldiering when you, Dewey Lovett, and anybody else in this road show was still sucking titty. Know the Old Man since Jesus was a PFC: hates anything involved. We’ll never find the Russian, but the thing will be wrapped up and Dewey will stop pissing and moaning.”

“I thought it was simple decency to get him out of your place ahead of the MPs,” said Schild. “That officer fought all the way from Stalingrad to Berlin. It would be outrageous if his first defeat came from blowing out some German plaster.”

“As long as we’re off the hook, old buddy, that’s all, as long as we’ve got something to hand them. The phony name you wrote down here will do as well as another.” He showed his chipped teeth in amiable pride. “What time I have left from being personnel officer, unit censor, permanent O.D., fire officer, postal officer, and post-exchange officer, I put to provost marshaling. You’d never make a successful crook.” Nader’s hairy wrist disposed of all possible demurrers, embarrassments, confusions. “Hell, I remember his name, I just don’t know to spell it.”

Exposure of his minor deception freed Schild to submit the whole affair to a lens, under which he saw: being caught out by such a man and in such a way was not a demerit.

Nader pushed the snapshot at him. “You still didn’t look at the picture on the other side.”

A ripe piece of girl in her late teens sat on the first step of a rotting porch. In the background depended the rusty chains of an old slat swing; through one link, the shaft of a raffia fan. As she cuddled a stuffed panda, her deep lower lip sat in transitory melancholia, or what may have been counterfeit desire. Pleats of voile skirt fell gradually away at the thigh on the viewer’s side, as if at the border of some proscenium arch through which shortly a young man with haircut, black suit, and cascaded necktie would heel-and-toe as commencement valedictorian. She was relaxed or prepared to spring, according to which evidence had more weight: the tension of the femoral muscles or the flaccid pubis in the valley that knew no drawers.

This was an exercise to put Schild on his mettle. How to communicate in the proper measure somewhere between coarseness and patronage. For Nader, in the classic manner of such picture-passers, watched him as a bank guard observes an unshaven man; that self of his which dwelt in Nader’s mind was about to acquire a habitation and a name. Schild suddenly ached with regret that he could not miraculously reduce his size and quality to the mode of the image and plunge into that seedy, sweaty, alien world of desiccated lumber, rusty metal, the treasures of shooting galleries, the failures of fabric, unshaven armpits, sagging wash-lines, off-stage radios, that universe of the enervated Sunday, and make animal love to the girl. Not having that option, he grinned wryly and said: “Choice”; watching it join the community in the wallet. “I believe the idea now is to ask who is she?”

“You don’t know any less than I do,” Nader replied. “This was found behind a chair after an enlisted men’s dance in the service club at Camp Grant, Ill. I carry it for laughs.”

Schild returned to the tent for another cup of coffee, the dregs of which he hung over until the last eater had departed and it was seemly to draw and transport Lichenko’s rations. He did not know why his guest remained, but it could hardly have been for “his big brown eyes.” A phrase from his father’s code, applied to those business associates whose sudden appearance of friendship logic and experience exposed as conspiracy. A “friend” dropping into the office for a smoke was of course a spy who mentally photographed a new button and, within half an hour after his departure, set up machinery to reproduce the plagiarism in quantity, to steal the orders of the first party and libel
him
to the stolen customers as a thief to confound.

He carried the laden tray towards the billet. It could hardly have been for his big brown eyes that Lichenko lingered. This old-Jew’s suspicion would not be put down, despite his violent attempts at negation that, as he crossed the street, became exterior, the ultimate ineffectuality. He shook his whole body as if in a chill, and the spinach in the end compartment, having by nature no integrity, easily lost its coherence and slipped over the rim like a string of mucus.

Lichenko could be on furlough, on extended pass, on some perfectly uncomplicated special duty from which he had legally or illegally gleaned four days of liberty; he may have been lost, have searched in vain the wilderness of Berlin for his unit, temporarily have given up. He was perhaps a liaison man between Red and American Intelligences, who—the Soviets being no fools in these matters—could better prosecute his purpose by four or five days’ discretion, especially around an idiot like St. George, who, it could quickly be seen by a shrewd fellow, would fly all to pieces at the first suspicion that his outfit was to have a serious role. There were, too, the possibilities of amnesia, outright absence without leave... and even, of course, desertion. Notwithstanding Schild’s automatic rejection of anti-Soviet messhall gossip that “hundreds” of Russian soldiers had decamped to the Allied sectors, which if true would have been a lie, he was certain that it
was
true in cases. It was something that could be faced without equivocation. Renegades ye will always have with you.

In the middle of the street, a two-and-a-half ton truck nearly ran him down, the driver leaning out to carp, spotting the silver bar, recovering. A fine midsummer sun crafted suburban shadows which lay only slightly to the northeast of their objects, the time standing not far beyond one o’clock; that extreme portion of the sky that to the grounded seems at last palpable but to the winged is merely the middle distance towards another intangibility, hung unusually high even for Berlin. A soldier in fatigues lingered on the stair of one of the officers’ homes, in the grip of an internal monologue that he broke off to inspect Schild with academic superiority, which indicated he was on an errand for a captain or above. Shortly such a person, wearing a khaki undershirt, appeared at the door and bellowed: “Bugger off, Wilbur!” As Wilbur without acknowledgment merged with the shrubbery, this undershirt shouted: “Bugger you, too, Rosenthal!”

One thing was certain: Schild’s eyes did not improve over the years.

“Can’t you see? It’s Young! ...Oh, I’m sorry, I thought you were Rosenthal. Rosenthal’s a DOCTOR IN OUR OUTFIT.”

College Joe type with a grin. Back to bed, my boy, the world will run very well without you, or very badly; in any case, without you. An angular girl, with hairy legs, pumped decorously past on her bicycle. It was Schatzi in transvestite disguise—of course it was not, but Schild, too, could be permitted an error of identification. In the past three days he had seen Schatzi in every bony face; he had recognized him falsely with greater assurance than he had yet seen him in actuality. It was only because the genuine article never appeared in daylight that the apparitions could be ignored.

The real Schatzi—he had left him an hour before Lichenko had come to the party. Certainly if he, Schild, were Schatzi, he would not fail to trace a connection between these events, to draw up the disjunctive proposition so favored by his courier: either... or; either Schatzi knew of Lichenko or he did not. If he knew, there could be no doubt that what had happened was with his connivance. If he did not, all the rules commanded that he be told. But this clause was the emergency measure, necessary now because he had ignored the first principle of the code: never to get into such a situation. Thus to obey the second was to admit a transgression of the first, and Schatzi already suspected him—or pretended to; in practical effects there was no important difference between reality and appearance—of mishandling his contact with the 1209th, either foolishly or from a motive of treason.

If, on the other hand, Lichenko had been planted on him—had
they
nothing better to do than keep him under surveillance? It was a preposterous idea. Still, since that first morning Lichenko had been sullen and unresponsive, lurking in the bathroom when Schild was home and going through his belongings when he was away: a pair of OD socks left separate in the footlocker tray had been united in a neat ball some time between breakfast and lunch. Fortunately, Schild had long been in the habit of destroying his letters—not that he received many; he had luckily cut off from Waslow when he went underground, Waslow who was not long afterwards expelled as an infantile leftist when he resisted the change of line from hard to soft vis-à-vis the bourgeois democracies; but he occasionally got communications from his sister, who typically had not only again changed husbands but again swapped gods, with the end of the war conceiving a perverse attraction towards the doctrine of Jung, whom she suggested Nathan visit, as long as he was stationed in Germany. Jung, the anti-Semite.

And then Lichenko’s queer behavior over the chessboard. His visible emotions while playing could only be called ferocious; he groaned cavernously at momentary setbacks, howled at each little triumph, and upon the general victory—which he was never long in gaining, for Schild was not only an inferior player at best but would have been almost afraid in these circumstances to be a good one—Lichenko became most invidious, arrogantly shoving the board across the table like a dirty cafeteria plate and rising to swagger about the room on hard heels.

Lichenko’s larger game was surely something more than chess, and unpleasant as it was to think that in this, too, they were adversaries, to that degree the mind would not accept another possibility. As to the heart: it could not endure a second enemy among the two men with whom he held a common purpose. Whatever Lichenko’s menace, Schild forgave him for it.

Why should a citizen of the United States of America be a Communist?, thought Lichenko, all itchy again, a quarter-hour after his fourth bath in as many days. He felt large lice loping on his back. Off came the tunic. Spine presented to mirror. Not a beast in view. Imagination. They would leave that final place when he next wore a civilian shirt, even a dirty civilian shirt, even a lice-infested civilian shirt. Did the old holy men really wear hairshirts? What then was their lie? Surely a truth was what you gave for it. Yet everyone, and from what he could see, particularly the big-spenders of belief, had their lie. Believe in very little, said his mother, and your disappointments will be as small. This had seemed funny to him when he was ten but had grown more grave with age. Old people know more than they can tell directly. His mother then had not been old in years, but some people are born old. He had seen many a baby of whom, if you squinted your eyes, you could get a picture as an old man with cap and pipe, taking the sun in the park.

As he returned from the bathroom, the German woman moved correctly down the hall, as if on little wheels. Sluts walk so, being so large between the legs that their organs would fall out if they took long steps. You see! he grinned silently at her back, there’s no need to be so grand! Next time you pass, Vasya’s fingers will pinch your bottom!

He had never, in his belly, believed in the existence of foreign Communists—Communists where the Bolsheviks were not in power? No sense to that. Besides, foreign comrades were not taken seriously even by Soviet Party members, as he knew from his brother. The largest Party outside the USSR, the German C.P., had been puffed out like a match when Hitler arrived. And as to the Americans, hahaha! Who already owning an automobile, a ten-room apartment, a motion-picture projector, short-wave radio, and probably an airplane, became a Communist? Lichenko knew so much about America, had had so many fantasies about it, he oftentimes forgot that he had never been there and rather owed his data to the Soviet news agency’s New York correspondent, whose dispatches he of course translated in reverse. Thus: the American worker lived like an emperor, and there was no U.S. Communist Party.

Since moving into Schild’s billet Lichenko suspected he had been wrong about the latter. After all, the Bolsheviks had not always held power in his own country; everything started somewhere; if necessary, before one’s own birth. The old czars, he believed despite his mother’s testimony to the contrary, had not been first-rate people. The last one, he understood despite the Bolsheviks’ like opinion, had no culture and was ruled by a woman herself the instrument of a corrupt monk. Therefore the Communists: who had begun as a small, weak band of, he supposed, idealists and martyrs—except that Stalin, even that early, committed armed robbery for the furtherance of
his
ideals; and no sooner had they kicked out the czar and won the Revolution than Lenin and Trotsky slaughtered the Kronstadt sailors who had helped them.

Perhaps there could be American Communists, for Nathan Schild seemed to be one: who else would consistently praise the Soviet Union while finding fault with his own country? A normal man bragged of his motherland even if he detested its superstructure, as did Lichenko, because there was a personal pride that took no account of politics. And some of the things Schild claimed to believe: that the Moscow treason trials were genuine trials and concerned with real treason—he was either a lunatic or a Communist.