Reinhart did not understand. And Lori had not learned much English, therefore could only repeat the words more slowly, in her low-pitched music.
He shook his head. “The funny thing is that I know all the words; it must be the combination.”
“Bach!” cried the doctor. “Excuse me for a moment. Please give us the English for this.”
Bach did, with an attitude of excessive expectation; sought to explicate, was halted.
“Danke sehr. Now just return to your lieutenant. We did not wish to disturb you.”
Reinhart determined to read, when he went home, this author whom a non-English-speaking German knew better than he. However, the doctor had turned out to be the usual lunatic, in love with his own rhetoric. He returned to the subject which had become a great bore to Reinhart, who had decided at the first resistance to seek another physician through Schatzi.
“I have no scruples against abortion in itself—”
His speech came within an interval of breath-taking on the part of Bach, who heard it and answered: “Die meisten meiner Mitmenschen sind traurige Folgen einer unterlassenen Fruchtabtreibung.”
“Bach, don’t you realize you are interrupting?” chided Lori, seizing the hand with which Reinhart, bending forward, traced his trouser crease in the area of the shin. “I assure you that if you persist Otto will avoid you. ... Please do not do that,” she said to Reinhart. “A hard object in your breast pocket jabs into my back.”
A pencil, which he removed to the other side. Nevertheless, he disliked a carping woman.
Bach desisted, and when Schild spoke, cautioned him with wrinkled forehead.
“Did you get that?” Schild sadly asked Reinhart. “Most men are the sad results of abortions never undertaken.”
But by now, having adjusted to German, Reinhart heard English as somewhat dull upon the ear and difficult to follow. He believed that Schild was repeating his old objections to the plan for Very’s salvation, and assured him resignedly that it was all off. “You can stop worrying.” He should, in the first place, have hired Schatzi and thus given no one an opportunity for humanitarianism, friendship, theory, oratory, and so forth: that was the way with intellectuals; from his old uneasiness towards them, for which he had blamed himself, he was at last liberated; worse than boring, they were of absolutely no utility; if you want a barrel built, hire a cooper.
“You have changed my mind,” said Reinhart to the doctor. “Forget it. I was foolish. I don’t want to get into trouble.”
Bach, still actively desisting from interruption, wrestling with himself, gave up suddenly on an interval of losing and said, with hysterical bravery: “Tell him, Doctor, tell him about the Russian concentration camps! They were worse than the German ones!”
Lori wrenched angrily within Reinhart’s surround, Schild recoiled sickly upon himself, as if someone had hurled towards him a bucket of filth, and the doctor sighed.
His weary answer: “Ah Bach, you take what you choose. But so be it, we shall leave it at that.”
Reinhart somewhat rudely thrust Lori from his line of vision. She pushed back with unusual strength for so small a body, crumpling his outstretched fingers, and if in that second of pain he had been asked, do you still love her?, he would have said, sorely, because she is as tough as a root. Gently this time he raised himself from the slump and looked over her head.
“Are the Communists as bad as the Nazis? Were you in a Russian camp? I didn’t even know the Russians had concentration camps.” Saying which he looked haughtily at Schild, whom he had gauged as a pro-Russian liberal, and saw thereupon what he should have known from experience was more to be pitied than defied. He would never be able to match his moods, to meet aggression with the same, and humility in kind.
“Bach provides a much more effective torture than either,” said the doctor genially. “Whatever theories of coercion are developed in the future, they must take account of his method: admiration of the nonadmirable. He believes that because I was a prisoner I have a special and heroic wisdom. He is wrong, but my vanity insists otherwise; therefore, in my sense, which is nobody else’s business, he is right. Why, however, should you permit me, or him, to inflict this nonsense on you? ...Now tell me, is it true that one can enter an American cinema while the motion picture is in progress? Isn’t it queer to see middle, end, and then the beginning?”
“Yes,” Reinhart answered, “yes, one can enter at any time. But American movies are made for an audience whose average mental age is twelve years old. You should have seen the pictures they made on Nazism. Such trash is almost criminal.”
“The Nazis were presented as good men?”
“Oh no, but either they were monsters who did not resemble human beings or they were ridiculous buffoons.” He was making out all right with his primitive, do-it-yourself German, for the doctor seemed to understand.
“Also, this was an error: too realistic. I agree with you, this theme should be dealt with as fantasy. Lenore, do the privileges of your job include Ami films?”
“Not exactly, Otto,” Lori answered brightly. “But do you recall the old joke of Father’s about the man who was asked if he had ever eaten hare? ‘Not exactly,’ he said. ‘But yesterday I shook hands with a fellow whose cousin’s brother-in-law lives next door to a widow whose late husband once saw someone eating hare.’ It’s not as bad as that with me. I make the beds of persons who see the pictures every night.”
The reference to Veronica could not have been more obvious. Reinhart intended his response to be equally obvious in disregard.
“Your father has a good sense of humor?” he asked. How strange for a German! But then he remembered that her father was a Jew.
“Well, yes,” answered Lori, looking at him from the corner of her eye, he thrusting himself to the side so that she could do it, “I have never thought about it so seriously, but I suppose he had.”
Had? Yes, dumb Reinhart, not everyone is always young and American enough to have two living parents. Besides, he was a Jew. Yet he had to speak, he, Reinhart, one in five in this subterranean, brightly lighted urinal—monstrosity, Jew, half-Jew, half-Jew, Siegfried.
“He was killed—”
“He is dead,” said Lori.
“—by the Nazis.”
“He is dead.”
“And who else, who else?” If in all his life he had reached no goals, he would take this one.
From his implacable face she turned away in embarrassment and towards the doctor gave her dirge: “Voter, zwei Brüder, Schwägerin, Neffe, Nichte.”
In English, thus excluding his wife and brother-in-law, Bach cried: “There is no wit like that of Berlin, of which since I am not a native I can assure you without immodesty. Hitler and his damned barbarians hated this city because they could never break its spirit, because they could not transform it into a Nürnberg. I confess to you that I am a separatist. I fervently hope we remain forever isolated from the Fatherland.” He slapped his knee—too hard, and winced.
“I wish I could do something,” Reinhart said. “I wish I could say something—”
“You can indeed,” the doctor answered, impatiently stripping the paper tube from the remainder of the fruit drops, catching five of the six in the wire whisk of his left hand: one fell to the concrete and broke into three golden arcs and a modicum of sugar dust. “A lemon, ja? I can smell it now it is crushed.”
Either Schild or Bach made a sound like the winding of a watch.
“You can,” the doctor repeated, and whatever else he said wound through the holes of the five candies in his mouth and expired before finding the orifice of speech.
“Ich habe ihn nicht verstanden,” Reinhart whispered into Lori’s hair.
“ ‘You can say something,’ ” Lori answered loudly. “ ‘You can tell us what you will make of yourself now the war is over.’ ”
He raised his meditation to point at the ceiling, to macerate his vision on the fierce lightbulb: father, two brothers, sister-in-law, ne
phew, niece, like the roster of a holiday reunion.
“Well, I cannot bring them back, whatever I do,” he shouted quietly. “But in my own small way I can fight all hatreds based on race, color, or creed. In my own small way I can say: we must love one another or die!” When he was moved, words came from nowhere, inspired; yet he was conscious of the falsity of those which had just arrived. It was fairly certain that of the six victims in Lori’s roll he could not have loved at least one, so goes the world. And how did a fellow go about loving any of those who killed them? For a principle means either what it says or nothing; if we love one another, we love the murderers, every one. And finally, was love really the sole alternative to massacre?
“One must love himself,” said the doctor. “The men who killed my family did not. What are totalitarians but people who have no self-love and self-respect, who believe that the humanity into which they are born is contemptible?, who believe a thing is preferable to a person, because a thing is absolute.”
“But a thing,” said Bach, “has a sense of its thingness. The Will works in inanimate as well as animate objects. That sofa may know very little, but it knows that it is a sofa.”
“Of course I agree, Bach, that this sofa has a self: I have heard it most painfully groan when you sat upon it and chuckle when you arose, but we shall wait forever if we expect it to will itself into a chair. This poor couch is so predictable.” He actually looked sad and patted its arm. “If you prick it, will it not bleed? But that is not necessarily true of a man, who may spit in your eye, or, having a taste for pain, beg you to prick him again, only harder. And what might he not make of it as a moral act? That by taking his life you have confirmed his conviction that you are inferior to him, and for some men life is a small price to pay for such reward. Or that by causing him to die well you have relieved him of the need to live well, for any victim is willy-nilly a success. Or that by divesting him of everything but the naked self you have made it possible for him to accept that self. In the end he may have used you as you believed you were using him, and who can say who was the victor?”
“Oh no,” cried Reinhart, even though he thought it likely he had misunderstood, “you cannot build some elaborate theory that in the end Nazism did good. That sounds like the idea of those old fellows in Neuengland—the northern U.S.A.—Rolf Valdo Emerson, und so weiter, who wore frock coats and walked in the woods and never cared about women, and therefore had this dry belief that evil was only the servant of a greater good.”
During this—how fluent?—speech Lori twisted round and studied him, trying, he supposed, to be unnerving: a person without experience should sit silent as a vegetable. Well that, last time with Bach, he had done. He felt now as if he were drunk, and finishing his representations to the doctor, he stared defiantly at her strong, straight nose.
“Otto can say anything he likes. You see, he has paid for the right.”
“There you have the corruptive results of working for the Amis,” laughed the doctor. “If I paid for the privilege to be theoretical, then I was cheated, my dear Lenore. All other German males are born with that right and obligation. But how true if you imply that this chap from over the sea should not be permitted to speak further without paying tribute! Come, Herr Unteroffizier, surely you have some more candy about you.” The doctor retrieved his stick from the floor and brandished it. “Here comes some English—you did not know I had some? Komm on you dirty rat hand ovuh zuh goods. This is what the racketeers order, no? Bach has a detective novel which he reads aloud to me—”
“Ja, ja, I have it just here,” Bach said eagerly, struggling to rise. “I read with simultaneous translation—”
Reinhart grandly waved him down. “That won’t be necessary at present.” He did, of course, have in his clothing another piece of sweet: a chocolate bar foolishly stored in his shirt pocket, over the heart. It was now limp. He gave it to the doctor and apologized.
“Sehr gut,” the doctor responded. He smelled it. “Schokolade! I will not eat this. I shall present it to the widow who lives across the hall from me.” He placed his cane on the concrete, giving Reinhart another sight of the umbilicus of his right eye. “I am trying to seduce her.”
Reinhart grinned anxiously and withdrew an inch from Lori, as if it were a mistaken but justified statement of his own aims, but when the doctor’s glasses were turned on him again he saw their terrible wistfulness.
“Oh God, Doctor, eat it, eat it,” he said, his voice ragged in pity. “Next time I can bring you a carton for your widow.”
“If your motive is kindness, please do not. Such largesse, if I gave it to her, would earn me only contempt. And if I kept it for myself I would eat it all immediately and fall ill. In either case I should curse you. But why do you now wish to bribe me without profit for yourself when earlier you refused to do it for gain?”
“Because he is a good man.” It was Schild who spoke, and pleadingly, and Reinhart suffered for him in anticipation, for the doctor was a kind of demon, after all; in revenge for his having been tortured by evil and falsity he would torture goodness and truth.
“And I suppose you are, too,” sharply replied the doctor. “I don’t trust a man who would rather give than receive. I can’t stand his damned pretense that he is too good for the world. He is mad. I disapprove of lunacy, illness, disability, and failure.”
Reinhart could no longer contain himself. The mad doctor’s ranting left him personally untouched, but poor Schild gulped it all down, sounding again and again that watch-winding noise in his throat, and poor Lori was limp against his shoulder, used, no doubt, to the habitual insane rhetoric of the cellar; she had, as before, gone to sleep, but the constant strain!; he would rescue her from it before the hour was out; if need be, kick Trudchen’s cheap little ass into the street and give Lori her room. Meanwhile he must catch Schild before he disappeared round the bend.
He shouted: “Das ist National-sozialismus! I don’t know what you are trying to do, Doctor—I sympathize with you, I would give my own eyes to get yours back, believe me, I would give my life if your family could come back again, I have never done anything—I couldn’t even hold a gun because of the Geneva Convention—but don’t say the Nazis were right. If that is true, then it was all useless; your loved ones died for nothing. All those corpses—I saw them in the photographs. Those beloved people, they were too good for the world. The rest of us are too bad for it...” His voice had broken, broken, as he knew ever more poignantly that with whatever motive he had begun his defense of general reason, he continued it for the sake of his own.
Therefore was the doctor right, even as he sought to repudiate him; therefore was he cramped with guilt for a crime he had not perpetrated and agonized by a suffering he had not had to endure. To be vicarious always is always to be base.
“Why do healthy people believe there is wisdom in a wound? Mumble, mumble...” The doctor slipped the envelopes from the Hershey bar, which in his stark handbones had lost its borrowed warmth-of-Reinhart and returned to brittleness, and segment on segment inserted it into slit-mouth quick-lips, munched, munched, munched. Soon was the lower third of his face childishly smeared with brown. His hair, dark-blond, high, luxuriant-grown as a Zulu’s, had burst forth from the cropped skull of the camps. Against Schild his whisper had gone hard, cruel; towards Reinhart, Reinhart now decided, it had always been a snicker.
On he went in the idiom of masticating chocolate, with a necessarily greater show of gesture than when he spoke audibly, which nevertheless stayed Greek. Schild, who had been slumped, wired up his spine and sat straight, neurasthenic. Lori slept, heavy for so light a girl.
Bach, however, listened eagerly and when the doctor, the last bit of candy down the hatch, gave off, the giant bobbed his peeled egg at Reinhart and said in English: “There you have the doctor’s world-outlook in a nutshell!”
Then it was that Reinhart realized the doctor was fake from the word go; that he was no more an alumnus of a concentration camp tha
n Schild was a hangman.
The latter suddenly glared at him and snapped: “Very well! Russian ‘concentration camps.’ Sehr gut, ask the doctor about them! Simply the Buchenwalds of another fascism...”
The doctor wiped his mouth on a handkerchief as holey as a net dishrag, to get which he had opened his coat and revealed the necklines of, at quick count, four gray sweaters and a shirt collar of brown.
“Certainly they are not,” he said good-naturedly. “If you won’t let me avoid the subject—it is not offensive to me, since it is mine, but it should be, I insist, to you. If I must talk on this theme, I’ll take my stand on precision. Young Corporal, you talk of love. But perhaps love is for boys and girls and old ladies who love their dogs. For us professionals, consider precision. Love one another or die? But we die anyway, ja?”
“ ‘The subject is not offensive to me,’ ” Reinhart suspiciously repeated.
“I did not say pleasant or without pain. I said not offensive,” said the doctor, impatient. “Now you interpret it as you wish.” He resumed: “The Soviet camps: as you must know, Lieutenant, they have quite another purpose than the Nazis’, which latter were in their most extreme form mere extermination-places. The aim of the Soviet camps is to change people. Sometimes, inadvertently, live men are there changed into corpses; well, at least they are no longer counterrevolutionaries.
“Each kind of camp has a favorite kind of prisoner. The Nazis preferred the man who by existence was a criminal, that is, the Jew. Good Jews, bad Jews, Jews who as individuals were criminals by the usual definition, even those Jews who would have agreed with everything in the code of fascism but that all Jews should be exterminated—no, this is not yet enough: even those Jews who might have helped the Nazi cause—were murdered indiscriminately. There was some early plan for ‘useful Jews,’ but it was soon abandoned. An Einstein perhaps could have been forced or tricked into giving Hitler the atomic bomb. Nevertheless he would not have been saved from the gas chamber.