“Doctor,” said Reinhart. “Aren’t you uncomfortable standing up?”
“Schweigen Sie!” Schild ordered in an offensive, Prussian manner, so startling Reinhart that he answered, as Prussianly, “Jawohl!” and did shut up most smartly. Bach smothered a giggle behind a trembling hand.
“Now there was no restraining Kupstein,” the doctor went on. “Defying Gorky’s unwavering surveillance, he no longer whispered. Now he spoke his heresies in the tone of normal conversation. ‘Do not despair over your loved ones back in Germany, Doctor, every death there is a life for Israel. The Jews one day will leave the cities and return to the land. Olives, lemons, palm trees!’ I could not admit that he was mad, you see, because then I should have had to accept that I also was a lunatic—for from the first his rantings had taken malignant growth in my imagination, like that very sarcoma which he and I so successfully defeated in our report. Damn the Jews—my relation to them had always been an embarrassment; now it became a poison. ‘The Law,’ Kupstein would sometimes say, ‘the immutable Law. The Jews have little else, but they have the Law and it does not change.’
“One day, speaking so, he followed me into a storage room at the other end of the laboratory from Gorky, who as usual sat at his table, but would come after us if we did not soon reappear. I took quick advantage of the situation. I seized Kupstein and said: What would you have had me do? Stay in Germany and die like a fool? You know how Nazis deal with Communists!’
“Brushing my hands away, he answered in a loud voice: ‘Just yesterday there was an unopened crate of new test tubes right there. Now where could they be?’ His eyes were innocent behind their pince-nez.
“I seized him again. ‘Kupstein, have mercy, I beg of you. We here in this country, in this very laboratory, are working for not only the Jews but the entire human race.’
“ ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, again very loud, ‘since the end of the sarcoma project one can’t find a thing here. How can we proceed to defeat carcinoma without test tubes?’
“He referred to our new assignment: a preventive for bone cancer. At any moment Gorky would come snooping. ‘I warn you, Kupstein,’ I whispered. ‘I have heard enough to have you sent away for twenty years, if not executed, as a foreign agent. Have you forgotten that Palestine is a British colony?’
“In astonishment he answered: ‘I? Have you forgotten’—there was the slightest pause, perhaps not really in Kupstein’s speech but rather in my hearing—‘that central supply holds you responsible for every piece of equipment?’
“Gorky stood in the doorway, his thick eyebrows gathered in upon the root of his nose. ‘Doctors,’ he said, ‘I must confess I have those test tubes in back of my table. I have been taking them out one by one from the straw and shining them with a bit of cloth, being ever so careful. They are now ready to go into the sterilizer—may I operate the sterilizer, Doctor? You will see I can do a good job.’ His face, menacing until a moment ago, was a cretin’s.
“Two days later, at three o’clock in the morning, I was arrested by the NKVD and taken to 22 Lubianka Street. I never saw my family again. For what I estimate to be seventy-two hours—there was no window in the room—I was interrogated without pause. I received no food, and water was administered—a glassful was dashed against my face—only when I attempted to collapse. For at least forty-eight of those hours I was given no idea of the charges against me. The NKVD officer—he was replaced by another from time to time, but they all looked the same—insisted again and again that I confess, that my crimes were known to him but, consonant with the just laws of the Soviet Union, he must hear the details from me. By turns he addressed me as villain, child, poor idiot, honorable but misguided patriot, personal friend. At the idiot level I had an opportunity to think... that devil Kupstein! Obviously he, and not Gorky, had been the police spy. Being a loyal and convinced Communist, I knew too well I had no hope this side of a full admission, but of what? Kupstein had surely turned me in on a charge of Jewish chauvinism. I could not confess to that, of all things. In an access of shame and hatred I asked for pen and ink. I wrote a statement which in style, if not quite in length, rivaled the sarcoma report. I revealed myself as an espionage agent for the National Socialist government of Germany.
“My interrogator read it with satisfaction. ‘Excellent,’ he said. ‘I’m sure you feel better for having got this off your chest.’ He flipped through the pages. ‘You see, you cannot fool us, although you are a most clever man. As a half-Jew you did not think we would suspect you of working for the Nazis, eh? And marrying a Jewish wife was also shrewd, eh? But we are shrewder yet, eh? Now name your accomplices and we will be finished with this unpleasant business.’
“My accomplices. To be sure, I had neglected this all-important matter. I wrote fifteen pages more, implicating Kupstein. This was a grim joke for which I was prepared to pay: since he worked for the NKVD, I had no doubt they would reject it. But here I intended to take my stand if it killed me, as well it might.
“ ‘Splendid.’ The interrogator smiled. ‘Now your conscience is clean. You understand that we already knew everything about the entire conspiracy. Your fellow agents in Leningrad and Kiev were arrested last week. Kupstein is also certainly no news to us; for years we have known of his fascist, Zionist intrigues as an agent of Trotsky.’
“Which in the language of the NKVD meant precisely the opposite. Somehow Kupstein the Verderber, the spoiler, had blundered through two decades in his own kind of peace—until I betrayed him.
“I was sentenced to fifteen years of hard labor—a mild sentence considering my grave crimes—and sent to the Kotlas camp in the region of Arkhangelsk. The details of that servitude are not as relevant as Bach maintains. The Nazi camps were worse. To make a comparison of the two, Lieutenant, is pointless. A single principle applies to both: in both the prisoners properly are innocent. I represented a grievous error on the part of the Soviet authorities. As you have heard, I was guilty.”
“And Kupstein?” asked Schild.
“And,” said Reinhart, “will you kindly explain how you got to Germany from Siberia?”
The doctor pulled a blue muffler from inside his coat and draped it around his head as a woman would; but when he brought down his hands Reinhart saw he looked rather like Mahatma Ghandi.
“Through the camp intelligence, I heard that Kupstein was executed. My wife and children were not arrested, but they had to leave the apartment and it was made difficult for my wife to find work. I don’t know how they survived. Before long the question was academic. I was arrested in July, 1938. A year later, when Stalin and Hitler signed their pact and divided Poland, I was brought back from the camp and deported to Germany.”
“Oh no,” Reinhart gasped, a sound applicable to whichever judgment he would finally make on the doctor’s tale.
“My Soviet citizenship was revoked upon my conviction for the crime of espionage. In the pact each side agreed to return the other’s nationals it held prisoner. The Gestapo met us at the border between German and Russian Poland. My wife and children were included in the transport, I understand. I was not allowed to see them. ... They died, I believe, at Buchenwald, where my father and brothers had earlier.
“The Nazi methods of interrogation were second-rate—exclusively physical brutality; there has really been nothing new in that line since the ancient Chinese.” He shook his head almost regretfully. “The Nazis were a mediocre lot with only one idea: audacity succeeds; the idée fixe of the suicide. Where, other than poor stupid Germany, could they have got twelve years to discredit it? ...To the Nazis I was the same kind of embarrassment that the Jews had been to me. I repudiated my Communist affiliation, citing as evidence my treason to the Soviet Union, and demanded to be held as a Jew. If I had been interested in preserving my life, I chose the correct strategy. For here was another point of difference between the two systems.
“In the USSR one is given just what he asks for: at the end of my confession I asked for puni
shment. My request was honored. Not so with the Nazis. In their Neanderthal psychology a man asks for one thing to conceal his aim in another direction. Besides, they thought, who being something better would ask to be a Jew? I went into their dossier as Communist first, Jew second; and that took my eyes—convinced I could give them information on the Communist underground, they tortured me—but saved my life.”
Plucking at the floor with his cane, the doctor walked to the door. They all rose. Reinhart reached him first and took his arm.
The doctor shook him off irritably, then repented, saying with a smile: “Es geht allein schon schwer genug!, it is hard enough alone.”
Tough old cuss, said Reinhart sotto voce, and then he saw him pass a skeleton hand across the dark glasses, as if to verify he was indeed sightless, but the very movement was evidence of an unextinguished hope that he was not.
“Twins have but half a brain each.” The doctor grinned and pointed in Lori’s direction. “She still sleeps. Knorke, I go.”
Twins, he and Lori. Which meant the doctor looked twenty years older than he was and Lori was twenty years older than she looked. Unless it was another lie.
The doctor shook Reinhart’s hand, and then Schild’s, and finally that of Bach, who had just reached them.
“Gentlemen, I say good night. You no doubt agree with me that an inconvenient means to self-respect is to undergo punishment for a crime you have not committed—as you tonight have been punished. What a lunatic way for two young men to spend an evening! Have we nothing here in our Germany with which to entertain you? Especially you, old chap.” He punched at Reinhart with his cane. “Why so solemn? Doesn’t it bore you?”
Reinhart had imperfectly understood the doctor’s story (his mark in German 2 had, after all, approached justice), but on the basis of the experience with Bach, he smelled the self-hatred in it and understood, anyway, that people in their most serious monologues depreciate rather than celebrate themselves, and are given to exaggeration besides.
“Well,” he said. “Do you expect me to laugh at life in our time?”
Instead of answering—he should have known better than to expect him to—the doctor said: “Perhaps it will be as well if your relatives turn out to be Nazis; they have nothing further to lose.”
Reinhart said: “I personally don’t think Schatzi will find them.”
“What was that name?” asked the doctor.
“Clever fellow,” said Bach. “He gives a job to his sweetheart. But she won’t try very hard if it means the food you give her must be shared with them.”
“No, ‘Sweetheart’ is this man’s name. Don’t ask me why.”
Reinhart raised his nose nobly. “And who cares? He was three years in Auschwitz.”
“There could be only one,” the doctor murmured, as if to himself, and then he gave a succinct reminiscence of Schatzi. Which, Reinhart observed as he fell through space, yet clubbed Schild harder.
“I will kill him,” he said quietly. The great cables in his biceps expanded and split both sleeves at the seam.
“Good,” said the doctor. “But I hope not in ignorance. Kill him because he, as much as any of us, is a victim.”
He insisted that Bach not disturb Lori: he knew the contour of every broken brick between this cellar and his own, which was close by. Again he said es geht allein schon schwer genug, and went out.
CHAPTER 20
SCHILD THOUGHT: HOW AWFUL for Reinhart, now he knows how it feels to be a Jew. He himself was weary of trust and mistrust, weary of hatred, of victims, especially weary of Jews, as, he thought, only a Jew can be. His predominant emotion towards Schatzi still was envy, now unconditional: the freedom he had seen in him was no illusion.
When the door banged behind the departing doctor, Bach’s wife woke up. A plain girl, but Reinhart, as unrepresentative an American GI as you could wish, seemed taken with her. He was not as innocent as he had seemed. Perhaps he was even sinister, now that Schatzi no longer was. What did he want of Schild? asked Schild unfairly, for it was he who had pressed himself on Reinhart, but unfairness is also a freedom. Schild liked Bach, therefore he must keep Reinhart from seducing his wife. But illicit love is also love, which must not be opposed. Ah, but we die anyway, ja? said the doctor, forgetting to add: alone.
Who weeps for a Jew? he had asked with respect to Lichenko, one of the little men, symbolic Jews, for the love of whom we—they—control experience. Lichenko did not, but Reinhart and Bach did. Perhaps even Schatzi did. Give to a man a chance, he had said so plaintively. He also was a victim, a kind of Trotskyite of Nazism, and though privileged—for the Nazis were more tolerant of their heretics than were these others—though a labor supervisor, also a prisoner. Schatzi’s present allegiance signalized his reformation. Communism excludes no one, denies nobody his opportunity to alter, recognizes no people intrinsically chosen or condemned.
Standing large and slumped before the sofa, Reinhart spoke low to the girl. So as not to jinx him, Schild made his congé to Bach, whose great kindly face looked down like a benevolent Buddha’s, and opened the door—or tried to. Five minutes ago a blind skeleton had flung it back as easily as if it were a curtain; for him, Schild, the door was frozen. The knob, a European type, a curved lever, broke off in his hand. And no putative seduction stayed Reinhart’s, Mr. Fixit’s, prompt assistance.
Using his elbows like Schild’s father commandeering the telephone, Reinhart forced the Brecher to give ground, examined the damage, described it as negligible, made temporary repairs.
“It will come off again if it is pulled too hard,” he said to Bach, in German. “Now if you had a bit of wire—”
Bach answered in English: “My dear fellow, do not concern yourself about that. We live beneath a heap of ironmongery. Tomorrow, in the full sun, I shall grub in it for wires. What gauge is to be recommended for this purpose?”
“Bach hat kein Draht,” said Mrs. Bach, who had a certain animation, but Schild decided Reinhart’s interest in her owed to the incapacity of her husband; thus it was a sinister thing, the sexual excitement of betrayal, in which she herself at least connived: “Bach has no wire.”
Lichenko’s way had been wholesome, to take the German woman by force. Last night when in sleepless midnight clarity he labored on the pillow, adding sums, he believed he had denied her to Lichenko because he wanted her for himself. Holy as a monk dreaming of the Virgin, he crept down to the kitchen and sacrificed himself upon the altar between her hard legs, she soundless except for piston hips upon the mattress. At seven o’clock, tame, she knocked upon his bedroom door and entered bearing breakfast on the last tray with which he served Lichenko and had no stomach to return for the last time to the messhall. In another land it would have been touching: bread, jam, coffee, from her own meager rations—her pantry was no Army larder—but the old hatred, now compounded, moved him rather to strike it to the floor.
“Bach has no wire,” Frau Bach repeated, and now Schild heard the contempt fall on Reinhart, not the giant. “If you wish something in this place, you must ask me.”
A flush of embarrassed lust suffused Reinhart’s skin, although she proceeded to define the precise limits of her statement. She drew a pin from her hair and threaded it through the lever’s empty screwhole. “Also.” Tense with pride, she opened the door.
Reinhart shook Bach’s hand. “We must go. Did I tell you that I like your suit?”
Bach perspired with gratitude. As high above Reinhart as the latter towered over Schild, as Schild himself loomed over Schatzi—but there ended the stairway of heads, whose lower steps would bear most weight, carrying as they did the others. But he had excluded Lichenko, smaller than he, larger than Schatzi, a truly free man who would fit in no progression.
“A gift,” said Bach, “of my kind wife. She adorns me rather than herself, probably because I am good for nothing else. But that, too, one learns to accept. The mystery remains, for whom was such a garment made? For it is my perfect size, and no tailor came
to call with his tape measure. Singular!”
Reinhart, lifting away up, felt a lapel, and Schild remembered an old anti-Semitic routine: ‘Sam, the customer wants a green suit. Toin on the green light!’ Bach’s horn buttons were his proper interest: how much the gross, less the usual two percent for cash?
He supposed he saw in Frau Bach’s smile, which was entitled to it by half, the Hebraic celebration of a shrewd purchase as she spoke to Reinhart: “Mögen Sie den Anzug, do you like the suit? I bought it from this ‘Schatzi,’ little Trudchen’s friend.”
Reinhart gave her his large, gentile blandness: “It is beautiful.” Schild shook hands with everyone.
“You are always welcome here,” said Bach from the heart. “Next time perhaps things will be better and we can serve coffee!”
Schild permitted himself briefly to see that vision of Schild to which Bach had given, and offered to give again, hospitality; it was not unloving and it was not unloved, it was not institutional. Perhaps it also was free—but it passed too quickly into the dark cloaca of the cellar hall, and he had time only to call, in simulated enthusiasm: “Knorke mit Ei!”
“Berlin slang, meaning ‘Splendid.’ ” He answered Reinhart’s question as they clung, Alpinists, to the summit of Monte Klamotte, Mount Rubble, and searched in darkness for the comb so marked in daylight.