He was inclined to visit Veronica, but rather than search the hospital building for her ward, which in his imagination had acquired a sinister aura, he strolled again down the street of her billet on the chance that her duty, too, was done.
The salmon-colored gauze had been removed from the glass of the front door; on the inside surface an unseen agency, swift and sure, manipulated a cleaning rag. Its movements were mesmerizing; he had an impulse to throw himself on the grass and watch it as the warm-cool late afternoon relaxed into calm evening. Beside the door grew a bush bearing round, white berries like small versions of those pure-sugar jawbreakers with a nut in the center. There was a bush like that in his parents’ front yard, and next to it a weeping willow high in which he had once established an outpost for General Custer. Alone among the men of the 1209th he had been in no hurry to get back to the States, had in fact long planned to ask, in rakish defiance, for permanent assignment to the Occupation forces, was waiting only until it could be more than an empty, sour-grape gesture—for, without combat points, he was more or less permanent as it stood. Now, just now, watching the rag fly across the pane, seeing the bush, recalling General Custer, and with the sudden, almost unbearably dear smell of grass—he had not at first marked that the lawn was newly cut—he ached for home.
The door opened just as the general bliss had given into the deadly specificities. He had come far since his first year in the Army when he frequently had such seizures; yes, he had enlisted to escape, but there was forever another present to flee from; in the summertime, especially, one craved elsewhere. But he had nothing to get back to. In the most literal sense: already in September 1943 his parents had let his room to a man who worked an electric drill in the local defense plant, a man who had remained, had settled down, who surely had dispensed with the arrowhead collection and the stuffed bass’s head on the bookcase. And college: he simply could not face that again after three years of the expansive life.
The door had opened and a figure in head-handkerchief and apron came onto the step, saying: “Sind Sie nicht wohl?”
It was not unreasonable, since he had, after all, fallen on the lawn—an event thus called to his own attention. The person was Lori.
“No, I’m quite well,” he said in German. “It is pleasant to sit here. I see you have your job, come tell me about it. Sit down here with me.”
“I cannot sit on the grass!” she said incredulously. “I am the maid.”
At any rate, if she looked no happier now, she was no sadder. Since he was on their level, he noticed that her legs, though dressed in coarse cotton, were finely turned and rather long for her height. But there was also something terribly competent in her appearance now that she wore working clothes, a hint of hard strength that reminded him of his suspicions.
“There were no difficulties about the Fragebogen?”
“What you wish to ask is whether I was a Nazi, isn’t it? You are more shy than your fellow Americans. ... There was no such thing as a Nazi—you should know that if you have asked any other Germans. In all this great country there were no Nazis; not even Hitler, as you would hear if you could find him.”
He sat up, aghast at her change from suppliance to this arrogant self-possession. It was the famous German alternation from serf to lord, no doubt, and he felt it cruelly there on the fresh grass.
Getting to his feet, he said braggingly in English: “What the hell do I care?”
“Bitte?”
“Mit mir macht es nichts.”
“I know,” she said. “That is why—” She took a deep breath and suddenly finished it in English: “—I love you.”
You couldn’t stay angry when that was said to you, but you could look insane.
“Have I said something wrong?” She took off her dusting cap, and a wealth of hair came forth, and golden it was and clean.
“You do not know English,” he said in a voice full of augury—as if he were to go on with: you can say awful things in it. “What you mean is that you like me.”
“It is not the same as in French?”
“I think not.”
“Also.”
In the distance he heard a laugh like a great bronze chime. Unmistakable. He felt criminally that he didn’t wish Very to see him with this girl. But Lori, too, had heard and was even more anxious to flee from him.
“There comes one of my mistresses,” she whispered, already in backward motion. “I must go.”
“Veronica Leary? Lieutenant Leary?”
“I do not know the name, but the laugh cannot be mistaken.”
It was heard again, turning the corner only a few yards away, and Reinhart audaciously pushed into the house after Lori.
“Ah, what are you doing here, you mad fellow?” she asked in confusion.
“I’m going into the kitchen.” And so he did, and sat silently until Very and what sounded like a roommate entered the door and went upstairs.
“Where is Miss Leary’s room—the laughing one?” he whispered.
In frightful wonder Lori answered: “In the rear. You will go there?”
“Certainly not. Then I can leave by the front and she won’t see me out the window.”
But instead of moving on that plan, he looked at Lori and said: “You’ve washed your hair. It is very schön.”
“Thank you. I didn’t have any soap until I started this work. ... But please go now.”
Didn’t have any soap—he was terribly touched by that fact. One thought of the bombings and fires and loss of loved ones, the Götterdämmerung, but not to be able to wash your socks or bathe, that was degrading and mean.
“And where you live, I understand, is in some wet cellar. Let me get you a better place—”
“All right, but now you must go.” She took his hand in her small but very strong one and pulled him from the chair.
“Tonight, as soon as you leave work, we’ll get you a new room. I won’t leave now until you promise.”
“Ach, was kann ich tun!” she breathed in despair. “I cannot.”
“Why not?” He tightened his hand on hers.
“For reasons too long to explain now—”
“Promise! After work. What time do you finish?”
“Ah, what can I do?” she repeated. “I’ll lose my job if you do not go.”
“Come with me!” Now it was he who impelled her, through the hall to the foot of the stair.
“Hey Very, are you decent?” he shouted in a tremendous voice which agitated a small vase on the foyer table. And in no time his large friend appeared at the top, blooming lavishly in a powder-blue dressing gown, a dea ex machina about to catch the next elevator down from Olympus.
“Kiddy!” she screamed jovially. “Did you break in here to violate me? You-all ain’t supposed to be in nurses’ quarters!”
“That’s what your maid insisted.”
“Well, get out then, you fiend. I’ll see you after chow—outside.”
“I can’t, I’ve gotta work tonight.” He turned to Lori, who looked very grave, and said as quickly as he could in German: “Unless you meet me this evening I shall cause you trouble. What time?”
“Um sechs Uhr. I eat at your mess after the soldiers are finished.” She turned away in shame.
“Okay then,” shouted Very. “Don’t go away mad. Hey, where did you learn German? Wait a minute.” She disappeared, and returned with a piece of olive-colored apparel, pitched it downstairs, it taking the air like a parachute and falling to rest at Lori’s feet.
“Would you tell her to press it and be careful not to use too hot an iron?”
Which he did, adding: “Um sechs Uhr, outside the mess tent.”
Chow was SOS, shit-on-a-shingle, ground beef and gravy slopped across a slice of bread, diced carrots and canned peas, rice pudding filled with raisins resembling dead flies. Reinhart ate a grimacing spoonful of each and then smoked two consecutive cigarettes, his only pleasure the dropping of their butts into the swill.
“Any
one ever tell you you eat like a goat?” he asked Marsala, who was stuffing down seconds.
“I’ve got a right to, I worked all day,” his roommate answered on a rising, plaintive note, missing the point.
At the garbage cans were two small boys who had temporarily ducked the guard. As Reinhart prepared to empty his full messkit, one of them, saying “Pleasse,” took it from him, with a spoon flipped out the cigarette-ends, poured the contents in a tin with jagged rim, and began ravenously to feed.
Marsala pushed his boy roughly aside. “Go on, you goddam Krauthead.” But there was nothing in his kit but three drops of gravy, and when the guard appeared, sweating and worried, with his switch at the ready, Marsala stared into his bland face and threatened: “Go on, you fuck, or I’ll take ya apart. How do you like that,” he went on to Reinhart, “those kids belong to his own country.”
“Well, we hired him to keep them away.”
“Yeah, but who would really do it except a German?”
Their natural anarchism saved Italians. They were, after all, the original fascists, but even Mussolini had inspired more laughter than hatred. Someone should take the guard aside and say: Sit down, Hans, have a smoke. Now I’ll give you the rundown on life. People are worth more than things, and abstractions have almost no worth at all. When you get an order your sole responsibility is to act as if you are carrying it out. Hypocrisy is the better part of competence. It is foolish, I know, and defies everything you and I were taught; but in the degree to which you serve others and not yourself, the others will forsake you. However, comprehending neither Marsala’s threat nor Reinhart’s interior monologue, “Hans” had driven the children out of range, lashing their meager shins in the most dispassionate manner.
Reinhart had delayed taking his meal, and Marsala with him, until the tent was almost empty of soldiers and the queue of civilian workers had begun to form at the front flap, and en route to and at the apartment he dawdled for twenty minutes, part of which was aimed to bore Marsala with his company. It worked: the buddy at last drifted across the hall to needle Riley, and Reinhart returned to the mess area. Almost too late: the Army trucks used for workers’ transport idled at the curb. He spotted Lori, carrying a small, lidded pail, about to mount a tailgate.
“Also, Sie sind falsch!” he accused.
“I looked for you,” she stoically replied. “I have either to ride this truck or walk many kilometers.”
Within, the side benches were loaded with women who gave off chattering to stare at Reinhart.
“Go on.” He lifted her up in one strong action, getting on his jacket a bit of splash as the cover jarred from her can, and vaulted himself in with a terrible noise on the metal floor.
Which prompted the driver to peer through his spy-window and call: “Haul ass, kid. No riders.”
“The Lover sent me, Eberhard. I have to get new quarters for this woman.”
“Lovett never told me about it.”
“All right, all you have to do is tell him when you get back.”
“You tell him, for Jesus’ sake,” grunted Eberhard, dropping the isinglass trapdoor.
They had squeezed onto the bench between a very fat girl and a very skinny woman, so that Lori was compressed and Reinhart slashed by sharp elbows.
“Tell me now,” he asked. “Why all the strange reactions? I think you should want to have a better place to live. Trudchen told me this afternoon about your cellar—how she couldn’t sleep there for the wet—”
“Trudchen? She doesn’t live with me! ...I warned you about her untruths, but I suppose not enough. She lives with her parents in a pleasant flat, not bombed, near the hospital.”
“And I got her a room in headquarters building! What game is she playing?”
“That’s just it, you see, a game. She is very young and willful. It is not easy to be an adolescent girl in the present time.”
No, he supposed not; for that matter, it had not been easy for him to be an adolescent boy, five years and three thousand miles back, in a smooth place where the only craters were excavations for new bungalows. At least Trudchen had no pimples.
“And then, too, perhaps her family are not all that could be desired—but that’s another story. As to me, well, frankly, I have a husband.”
“Oh, that’s all right. You see, I’m not—” He had intended to say: interested in you in that way. But it would have been insulting.
“He is very strange—as now it seems I am helpless to prevent your seeing for yourself.”
The truck was under way, clanking, creaking, and in clouds of blue exhaust, which defying the principles was drawn stinking into their compartment. Under cover of his conversation in the other direction, Bony Elbows waxed friendly, cutting her sharp patella into the outer surface of his thigh. She was, he had seen on entering, at least forty-five years of age.
“Was he in the war?”
“He had an odd role.” That was her last word until a half hour later when, after various stops, one of which freed them of Fat and Thin at the same time, the vehicle came to rest at what seemed to him a purely arbitrary point in nowhere and she and he detrucked.
They stood before a hill of waste whose farthest margin must have, spilling over Asia’s width, been forever eroding into the Pacific. The sun, elsewhere on this day so rich, voided this dark field, and the sweet air had long ago sold out to its competitor gases. On this range figures thin and slumped roamed crumbling through its Brenners, sack-bearing, searching, genitors of no sound. But on the summit a small girl, a ragged head above a cotton bag, called shrill and disconsolate to nobody below: “Wo is der Heinrich?”
“Behold,” said Lori. “Nürnberger Strasse.”
Five minutes’ impossible trek and they teetered on the powdered brick at the entrance to a subterranean passage. Reinhart fired his lighter, but Lori hastily lowered its cap. “There may be escaping gas.” She drew him, now blind, down the prairie-dog way.
CHAPTER 10
ON THE SOFA LAY AN amorphous lump to which was appended a great pale ham. Lori slammed the door. A hollow groan issued from the ham, and two apertures appeared in its wan surface. After a time a mouth revealed itself, as if in one of those motion-picture cartoons where inanimate objects come to life through lines from nowhere, with the breezy implication that humanity is some sleight-of-hand. However, the present process was not flippant, but ponderous and awesome.
Lori put down her pail and fired more oil lamps, and in the richer light the great object rose gradually and with tremendous deliberation, like a sinking ship preparing for the final and irrevocable plunge, to an attitude of sitting.
“Herr Reinhart, mein Mann,” Lori waved loosely at the hulk.
“Sehr angenehm.” The voice was full, sonorous, making a grand thing of the words, and the eyes which the light showed to be as large and ripe as purple-black plums honored Reinhart directly and briefly, then shifted within the largesse of lid to Lori, who stood before the table, one hand at the base of a lamp, her left side from flank to hair bright in its refulgence.
“Here is your dinner.”
He ignored her to revolve his head to Reinhart, saying in English without accent: “Ah, this is your corporal!”
As Reinhart closed on the cold sponginess of the extended hand, he felt with surprise that his own was not being shaken in acquaintance but rather used as a purchase whereby this large figure was lifting itself from the couch, and the weight was such as to compel him to throw his rear feet wide, lest he be toppled forward.
“S’il vous plait,” his burden wheezed with difficulty on the way up, and then, all at once, was upright before him, or rather looming over him, for the man was a good seven feet tall and bulky as the great Kodiak bear. Reinhart was cast into the, for him, rare feeling of slightness. The pull left the hand, but it stayed clammily and, oddly, weightless, in his own, until he opened his fingers and gravity, not its parent body, moved it to fall slowly away.
Using that language, Lori’s man
noted that he could speak English, and would, as a courtesy. Swaying a bit, he said that it was all but impossible for him to stay erect, but that he insisted on doing so until his guest was seated. Lori having furnished a chair, he sank again to the sofa, and drew the dressing gown that was his lone garment more snugly about him.
Lying still, pale, and full, like a sack of mozzarella, he tasted of the air with porcine nostrils, and began:
“Now we can converse at our ease. My name is Bach, which as you perhaps know, signifies ‘brook’ in German, and, naturally, to every German, and very likely to others as well, simply to utter the name is to conjure up the image of the master of the Thomasschule and the three most eminent of his twenty offspring—for his loins were apparently as prolific as his brain—who were also composers of a high rank, but not quite so well known outside their own land. So far as I know, I am not a descendant of that noble line. And you are called...?”
“Reinhart.”
“The name, of course, means ‘pure of heart,’ Hart being the Low German variant of Herz. But I have a feeling that you, like so many Americans, have no great interest in etymology. Unfortunately, it is one of my many weaknesses. And I do have more than my share.” He indicated his body with a sweep of the hand. “The main among them being a physical impuissance, if you’ll permit the word, in spite of a monstrous size. This misfortune has caused my energy to be diverted directly to my brain, which as a result is extraordinarily active and frequently denies me sleep, occupied as it forever is with a thousand and one theories, ideas, and bits of information which it should like to synthesize. I speak of this brain as if it acts of its own volition, has a life, as it were, of its own. For indeed it seems to have such an independent existence—awe-inspiring, to say the least. I—it is ridiculous, is it not, to speak of an ‘I’ separate from one’s brain? but it really seems that way to me—I conceive of my own identity as relating more closely to the emotions, for I am their creature and toil under the dominion of the harsh ambassadors they send to the external world, the senses.” Here he snorted: “Smell!” Poked a pair of spread fingers into his eyes: “Sight!” Extended a fat, pink tongue, swollen as a bladder: “Taste! And so on. Do I make myself clear?” He stared for a while at Reinhart, as if he had forgotten him, then asked, shyly: “I say, do you smoke?”