“Not exactly, but—”
“How long ago was this?”
Christ, he could smell it still, that odor of laundries and swimming pools, fiercely clean, implacably antiseptic, inhuman, the same stink outer space must have beyond the farthest planet. Three years ago, when he was a punk recruit, his suntans yet shiny, his fatigues still dark green, his gas mask clotted; it gave him no pleasure to dwell on that era.
“Oh, well then, I guess it wasn’t serious.”
“Of course not, that’s what I said.”
“No mental effects?”
“Mental! You mean crazy? I hope not, nuts as I already am—but you can’t be serious. Chlorine attacks the lungs, if it gets you, and you are so busy dying you haven’t got time to go mad.”
“When you’ve been around as many weirdies as I have, kiddy,” she said in a bluff, coarse way that made him recoil, “you would know that many people don’t have time for anything else.”
This was a grisly turn indeed, and his feelings rumbled in his stomach as he pursued it. “Seriously, can chlorine gas—?”
“Oh, you’re not worrying now, after this long? There now, I’ve upset you. Maybe I was joking a little. To tell the truth, I don’t know anything about poison gas except what they told us.” She laughed a little too violently and a touch too long, and if at its peak you had taken a still picture with a very fast camera, you might have seen that she herself for a moment looked deranged. “But are you aware that many kinds of internal medication taken to excess can produce a psychosis? Sulfa drugs, for example.”
“They can!” He said it in so terrible a voice that the dentist, still there on the other side of Very, jerked in professional, hypocritical dismay, as if his drill had slipped and lacerated a tongue.
“Well, only temporary.” Into his face she had pushed hers wide with the most glorious grin of the evening, at once splendid and grotesque, and so near that with almost no effort he could have sunk his incisors into her velvet nose. Then she drew back and laughed, laughed, laughed. “Oh, I’ve got you so scared! Now the next time you contract nasopharyngitis you won’t take sulfa, and then you’ll catch pneumonia, blaming it all on me.”
He asked, somewhere between joke and real, “Does that mean I’d be put on your ward?”
“For pneumonia? No.”
“I mean—the other.” He deplored euphemism, but he fancied that her mirth had become briefly acid with malevolence.
“Why not get to know me off duty, instead?” She patted his hand, but it was not in the least provocative. “I’m nicer then. Besides, we don’t need you, we’re all filled up, got more patients now than when the war was on. Bet you thought it would be the other way around. That’s because it’s never the real things that crack people, but the imaginary.”
The music had at last become soft. Because someone tripped over it, lightly cursing, Reinhart crossed his restless, foot-tapping leg over the quiet one; his trunk inclined in a long plastic crescent: a smooth-leather couch would have ejected him to the floor. Very when solemn was not very Very, he said to himself, and to her: “I was always in a funny position.”
He was in enough of one now for her to hesitate and then produce a question he had not heard for three years, an idiotic cuteness nevertheless poignant, fragrant of Tom Collinses floating Maraschino cherries and cheeseburgers dripping catsup but with no onion, because of the necking to come, in some congested, clamorous pleasure palace on the great Midwestern plain.
And when she asked “Funny haha or funny peculiar?” he was caught, with all the force of his past, in the iron fist of love, and would inevitably have been drawn sideways in a most funny uncomfortable position to crush the charming folly against her lips with his own—had not the dentist at that moment peered ugly around her exquisite right breast and called:
“Hey, Reinhart, why don’t you scout around for some hooch! That damned Lovett has some in the kitchen, I know. Do me a favor and go look.”
“Why don’t you go yourself?” Specialist officers would accept almost anything that was simultaneously assured and good-humored.
“That lousy skinflint faggot!” mumbled the dentist, and mixed himself again into the cushions.
Very rolled her eyes. “You were saying, when we were so r. i.?”
“That I always wanted to be in combat, but frankly, I was too cowardly to volunteer for the infantry. What I wished would happen was that I would simply be assigned there through no voluntary act of my own. Then my conscience would have been clear, as it were.”
“Conscience? Who lets himself in for danger unless he has to?”
“That’s it,” he groaned. “I’m very sensible. I didn’t volunteer, and I’m not sorry that I did not. My regret is that somebody else didn’t make me. When I say conscience, I don’t mean it bothers me now, but that it would have if I volunteered, so much so that I would probably have been killed.”
“Obscure.”
“Don’t you get it? I would have felt I was committing suicide.”
“Don’t talk like that!” She manipulated his hand, as if this perversion had settled in that member, and could be worked out, like a cramp. It was only too clear that he wasn’t getting through, and he understood that he very likely never would. Anyway, her failure was in itself a kind of success. Having essayed this theory with others—if you haven’t heroism to bring to a woman, you have to lay your intentions at her feet—he had tasted many times the ultimate indifference most people have to the imagination’s projections, especially in the hypotheses of somebody else’s morality.
“I’m sometimes embarrassed at fighting the war as a kind of Broadway press agent.”
“Special Services are certainly necessary, or the Army wouldn’t have it. Besides, think how human it is to entertain people. Think how fine it would be if each side fought with entertainers, with the victory going to whoever made most people laugh.” It was obvious from the jolly bell in her own throat, which she now tolled, who would win. And Reinhart, with this revelation of the open secret of her force—that she would always be victor, from an inability to imagine loss—knew that he must have her.
So, with mock impatience, he said: “You’re not serious.” And slid his arm around her splendid waist, as the captain’s face hove into view once more, saying:
“You wanna dance?”
Three or four times, to Very’s blind shoulder. When he eventually registered, she declined, and considering the situation, perhaps too rudely, Reinhart thought. To make up for which he grinned amenity at the man.
“I didn’t ask you,” the dentist groused, and ambled off in the half-bitter, half-stoical slump of a panhandler.
“You wanna dance?” she mimicked, and meant it, moving to draw Reinhart to his feet.
“How can we now, if you just refused him?”
But she didn’t, genuinely, see why not.
CHAPTER 7
IDLY, BUT WITH GREAT care, Schild marked the room and its furnishings: solid pieces, dark; dual escutcheon lamps on the wall at various points in an academic rhythm: fireplace, for example, bracketed by a pair whose vertical members swelled like pregnant bellies to the points of the switches. A corner stove, ceramic, beige, built up of molded doughnuts of ever-diminishing circumferences, baroque welts and carvings, small black door amidships for introduction of fuel. Which was those bricks stacked neatly by.
“Compressed coal dust, very tidy,” said Lovett, who had come up silently and followed the direction of Schild’s eyes. “These Germans are the most technically advanced people in Europe, damn them, if that’s a recommendation. The throne room upstairs has a pushbutton flusher—what I mean is, no chain!” He threw himself gingerly on the very edge of a sofa cushion, giving the impression of artificial vivacity, and staring, said: “No, I don’t know you—you’re surely new in the outfit.”
“Look, Lieutenant, you invited me yesterday. Frankly, I wish you’d remember it.” Schild spoke in the sharp tone of eminent reason. Yet he seldom
used it for so slight a cause as this, and he wondered now at himself: whether his motive had been on Schatzi’s example, or that from some hint of unconscious fear he had suddenly needed exterior proof of his identity.
“Certainement,” said Lovett quickly. “You’re the Nazi-hunter. I’m sorry. Have you met any of these lovely people?” Upon the negative he rose, saying “How lucky you are,” and snatching Schild’s arm, led him through the crowd to the kitchen, which was 1920’s-modern, with a gas stove up on four legs, like the one everybody’s mother once had, including Schild’s, and a bright, yet enclosed breakfast nook sprinkled with painted rosebuds, fir trees, and goody-goody gnomes in Lederhosen and dirndls, a sovereign little house within the house. Peering inside, Schild made out the witch, a small worn person of feminine gender, smiling bereavement, expropriation, and sycophancy.
“Atrocious old bitch of a Nazi housekeeper,” said Lovett. “That’s who.” His attenuated index finger signaled dismissal, and the old woman trotted her carpet slippers up the back stairs to the second floor.
When they were inside the booth Lovett produced, by an elaborate act of spontaneous creation, a full bottle of Scotch and two paper cups.
“And what are you?” he asked without warning, lolling his head and transforming his eyes into little knife-cuts intended to symbolize high interest. “I mean, what are you really?”
To have reproduced exactly what Schild’s mother had once asked, Lovett should have gone on: “You are still a good boy?” And should have been lying on a hospital bed, the white, segmented, cranked-and-rodded dais of pain, flanked by electrical nurse-alarms, half-filled vessels of water, folded cardboard sputum cups; should have worn magnifying glasses which projected eyes in terrible, bloated particularity, showing the iris as not a smooth round but rather an uneven burst of pigment threads darning into the void of the pupil, repeating silently the accusation so often voiced in earlier times of health: that their vision was lost in the pregnancy that engendered him. A queer, cruel, lifelong lie, that not until she was under ground did he, consulting the old schoolgirl snapshots, expose. Indeed, it was only by the spectacles that you could know her amid the anonymity of fifty middy blouses.
Come tell me the truth, they ask, of which you are manifestly a walking denial: what crimes lie concealed behind your façade, who are you to be closed when we, the rest of us, are open? And how determined they are to wonder forever, how implacable is their will to ignorance! “I am nothing that I wished to be: chronologically, not a fireman, not a cowboy, not a gentile, philosopher, lover, nor revolutionary. But what are your failures?”
No purpose in asking that of Lovett, who was really a kind of success, who besides had wanted only a simple statement of civilian occupation, doctor, lawyer, Indian chief, against which to set his own probably rare, surely very dear calling. He saw in no pride that Lovett had chosen him, of all the crowd, for cahoots, just as the lone Negro in a company would draw to him, or the person with a lisp or one arm, the girl with the hair-lip, and it happened twice at parties for Russian war relief that he attracted the pariah of that context, the lost Republican who cornered him to trust, conspiratorially, that the aid would not strengthen communism in that forlorn country. Whatever the pariahhood, it unerringly found and clove to him: he must stink of separateness. From this final, subtlest of variations on anti-Semitism, which built its Dachau in the heart, there was no refuge, and he foresaw the day he would be assigned to infiltrate the B’nai Brith and at the first meeting be pulled aside to receive the confidence of some disguised Nazi.
“I was a teacher at a private school.”
Lovett smirked triumphantly. “In New York?”
Where else? Schild felt himself capable of the accent of East Broadway and the Houston Street shrug, but was proved right in his restraint by Lovett’s next question.
“Fashionable?”
Perhaps it was the Scotch which had sheared the falls and rises from the usually schizophrenic voice, leveled it into an even plain of clay, for what Schild heard was “fashionable,” and he was disinclined to believe it, even of Lovett.
But a timid knock on the back door freed him from the issue, a weak knock, but followed rapidly by an entry in the opposite character, bold, brutal, hinge-torturing.
“Oh, why do they use the yard?” Lovett wailed. “We have a pretty john!”
In a moment his despair sharpened into fright. A freckled Soviet face, mounted on tunic shoulder-boards and wearing a cap awry, poked jovially into the entrance of the dinette.
And roared: “Herr Leutnant, ich bin hier. Was für ein Haus! Schön, Schön!”
The Russian was a little lieutenant of artillery, dressed in high-neck tunic, flared breeches like displaced wings, and boots. His good brown eyes searched for an object that did not elicit admiration, and failed. A line of dirt across his prominent Adam’s apple showed how far he had washed. His hair had been shaved up to the temples, and obviously with a dull scissors, by himself and that very afternoon. He saluted Lovett, Schild, and the house. Saying “Verzeihung,” he stepped to the sink and took a drink of water through his hand.
Lovett had met him on a black-market mission to the Kurfürstendamm, picked him up for a souvenir, for who had ever known a Russian?; had written out the address—who ever thought he would find it? The only trouble was he only spoke German, who could talk to him my Gawd! Finding that Schild could, Lovett sniffed in pique and vanished.
In the living room the lieutenant shook off Schild’s patronage and charged the cautious company with outthrust arm, announcing “Leutnant Lichenko!” And prevailed, pumping hands and snowing compliments, and when he had taken care of even the humblest, he turned the approbation on himself. He explained the three medals in a Venetian-blind overlap on his thin chest, the deeds of valor which they marked, and expressed curiosity that the Americans were not equipped with boots. His own, he averred, were of a superb workmanship and quality beside which the German-army issue could not dare to show its pressed-paper grain. He applied the same judgment to his tunic, breeches, belt, and cap. The latter he removed extravagantly for the ladies but replaced directly. He wore it as he and Schild studied the phonograph, which by means of a small device on either side of the turntable had knowledge of each record’s duration and released new ones at the proper intervals from the stack it bore.
“Goes round, herum, push button to play again, to puh-lay a-gain, pu-ush button. Sechs records only, will it take. Compree? Sechs records,” said Nader, winking stupidly at Schild.
“What’s that, Dwight Fiske?” asked a thin dentist who had joined the elbow crowd. “ ‘The Colonel’s Tropical Bird.’ There’s a sex record for you, Leek!”
Who was a plump kibitzer of a nurse that threw him a dreadful smile and said, dreadfully: “You’re so-o-o-o gay.” Pointing at Lichenko, she asked Schild, “Suppose he’d like to dance?” But Schild had already given her his back.
Lichenko took off his cap, scratched his head, inspected the fingernail, replaced the cap, and begged Leek’s pardon. Throughout, his left eye, which seemingly he could work independently of the right one, was fixed towards a picture on the next wall, and his feet were casually screwing him that way. At last he was ready to go directly before it, to abrade its surface—in an inconspicuous corner, so that if damage were caused none would show—and to proclaim: “A genuine oil painting. Oh, very schön, indeed. Private property, yes? But roses in a bowl and nothing else! Where can the philosophy be in something like this?” Did Schild know Repin? Oh, ausgezeichnet, excellent, excellent!” “Ivan the Terrible Kills His Son.” Bloody picture. Angst, Angst! “This we call the Russkaya dusha, the Russian soul. Or did you know that already?”
With the question, for which since he was not just making noise he wished an answer, he gave specific notice to his benevolent patron: “You do know, das ist sehr gut: all these things can be useful for friendship. My German is fluent, yes? And my accent is unusually accurate. That is because I worked at it both in t
heory and in application. Ach, it is not easy to do things the right way, but it is always possible, ja?, always possible, my friend.”
He had said “my friend” and taken Schild’s hand. Russian male friends kissed on meeting and walked hand-in-hand, yet since 1917 homosexuality had all but vanished in the Soviet Union.
His calluses torturing Schild’s smooth palm, Lichenko approved: “Your German, you know, is excellent. Was this learned in the wonderful American schools?”
Oh, partly, and in part from a grandfather. Schild was pleased and apprehensive at once, the latter from questioning, any questioning.
“You are of German descent, then? Does it give you a queer feeling to return to your old motherland as an enemy? The Russian word is rodina. Rodina—motherland. I will teach you the Russian language in this manner, term by term, although I am Ukrainian. But Russian nowadays is more useful, yes? But you are German?”
Schild smiled lazily to let it pass, but Lichenko ripped at his fingers: “Tell me, tell me!”
Sneezes, orgasms, interrogations, their irrevocable end is ordained in their beginning.
“Ich bin jüdisch.”
“I see, I see! Then it is not queer but pleasant!” Lichenko grinned—indeed, he had not stopped grinning: the ravines in his face were grin-grooves, his irregular nose was lumpy with grin, these along with his winged thighs making him a Mercury of mirth. It was, frankly, a private thing, which he could respect while not losing any skin from his own ass.
And he was soon away to other pictures and objets d’art, furniture, rugs, and the dark-blue wallpaper with its silver suggestions of flower petals dissolving in ink. He bounced into an obese chair, which bounced him halfway out. He sneaked carefully back into place, and the chair submitted to good manners. As for Schild, he sat crosslegged at its side on the floor.
Lichenko’s German was very good, too, for he was an educated man, an engineer, in fact, although the war had caught him before he finished school. His intended specialty concerned dams and sluiceways, the diversion of streams, paradises from deserts, the transformation of the face of the earth, or anyway one-sixth of it. Nor was Soviet engineering a cultural Siberia. He slid easily from an apostrophe to steamshovels into American writing, where he was better than oriented.