Schatzi began a sneer of victory—or, at any rate, what he thought was one—but the Juicy Fruit clogged in his teeth. Humiliated, he plucked it out and held it in his right hand. Obviously it felt nasty there, and no better in the left. He brought the paper wrapper from his breast pocket and was on the point of rolling the little gum ball therein, when the nurse came out of the cargo chamber and, undulating bow-wards, saw his heresy and warned: “You don’ chew, you gon’ be dog-sick.” He guiltily returned it to his mouth, where, according to his expression, it grew to baseball size.
“Why you grinnin’?” she pseudo-sternly asked Reinhart. She bent and read his tag. “What’s this, an Eyetalian name? Carlo. Kind of cute, though. You a psycho? Well then what do the normal ones look like?”
When she left Schatzi threw in the towel. He gagged on the gum, finally swallowed it, and again begged for mercy in the name of the United States of America: “You people believe a man is what he will become rather than what he has been, ja? I tell you I have reformed. Just this minute, sitting here amidst your fine comrades who love one another. I do not ever belong to anysing. Loneliness! Lack of love! These can make a man to a criminal. Have I been a rascal?—no. Yet had impulses come to me which have been dangerously near. After I arrange with great difficulty and money to be included in this shipping-to-Paris I discover your name on the list thereof. Wal, I thought, this Reinhart causes trouble and I strike back. His German relatives! Yes, I have found them, Heinz Tischmacher, son of his grandfather’s sister and second cousin to him. Tischmacher, Heinz: office worker, member of the Nazi Party. Tischmacher, Frau Emmi: likewise. Tischmacher, Reinhold: twenty-one years of age, graduate of Hitler Youth to the Waffen SS, killed on the Eastern Front in 1944. Tischmacher, Gertrud, Trudl, Trudchen: sixteen, member of the Jungmädel, girls’ branch of Hitler Jugend.
“On the other side of his descent Tischmacher has a distant relation to this monstrosity Bach, whom he takes money from, for four years, not to reveal to his Nazi comrades that Bach, Lenore, Mischling Jew, has not gone to Switzerland so much as does she hide in a closet of her man’s flat so as to avoid the Gestapo and subsequent killing.”
“These then are my people,” said Reinhart. But he worried only over whether he had committed incest with Trudchen. “You have done a good job. I’m afraid this is all I have left to pay you.” He brought forth his last two notes.
Chuckling madly, Schatzi refused them. “No, these are not your kinsfolk, dear boy! Is not this evidence of my reform? This is my untruth with which I prepared to threaten you. Which now I reveal and confess. This evil impulse to destroy you which I have conquered. So Christ said, ‘Die Wahrheit wird Euch frei machen.’ ”
“Destroy me?” asked Reinhart. He banged his head back against the fuselage, denting it (the fuselage), and guffawed.
Schatzi smiled, frightened to death but also hopeful. “Ah then,” he whispered, “mirth and good feeling. You will not expose me, ja? In the States we must make a partnership: you belong and have the handsomeness and the muscles—however did you break that great swine’s back?—I provide the mental.”
The nurse appeared at the door of the pilot’s cabin, her hip reared to catch her sexy, sinous wrist. She said: “Y’all settle down and connect your seat belts. We go in two seconds. ... Ah got my eye on you, laughin’ Carlo!” She would be a different kind of piece.
Reinhart shook Schatzi’s hand and winked elaborately. He whispered: “My friend, you have my word on it.” Then he went to the nurse, and for another reason feeling her supple arm, betrayed him.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
As many readers will have recognized, I am indebted to Konrad Heiden’s classic work Der Fuehrer (tr. by Ralph Manheim, New York, 1944) for some of the events in the career of one of my imaginary people.
A Biography of Thomas Berger
Thomas Louis Berger (b. 1924) is an American novelist best known for his picaresque classic, Little Big Man (1964). His other works include Arthur Rex (1978), Neighbors (1980), and The Feud (1983), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.
Berger was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, the son of Thomas Charles, a public school business manager, and Mildred (née Bubbe) Berger. Berger grew up in the town of Lockland, Ohio, and one of his first jobs was working at a branch of the public library while in high school. After a brief period in college, Berger enlisted in the army in 1943 and served in Europe during World War II. His experiences with a medical unit in the American occupation zone of postwar Berlin inspired his first novel, Crazy in Berlin (1958). This novel introduced protagonist Carlo Reinhart, who would appear in several more novels.
In 1946, Berger reentered college at the University of Cincinnati, earning a bachelor’s degree two years later. In 1948, he moved to New York City and was hired as librarian of the Rand School of Social Science. While enrolled in a writer's workshop at the nearby New School for Social Research, Berger met artist Jeanne Redpath; they married in 1950. He subsequently entered Columbia University as a graduate student in English literature, but left the program after a year and a half without taking a degree. He next worked at the New York Times Index; at Popular Science Monthly as an associate editor; and, for a decade, as a freelance copy editor for book publishers.
Following the success of Rinehart in Love (1962), Berger was named a Dial Fellow. In 1965, he received the Western Heritage Award and the Richard and Hinda Rosenthal Award of the National Institute of Arts and Letters for Little Big Man (1964), the success of which allowed him to write full time. In 1970, Little Big Man was made into an acclaimed film, directed by Arthur Penn and starring Dustin Hoffman and Faye Dunaway.
Following his job as Esquire’s film critic from 1972 to 1973, Berger became a writer in residence at the University of Kansas in 1974. One year later, he became a Distinguished Visiting Professor at Southampton College, and went on to lecture at Yale University and the University of California, Davis.
Berger’s work continued to appear on the big screen. His novel Neighbors (1980) was adapted for a 1981 film starring John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd. In 1984, his novel The Feud (1983) was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; in 1988, it too was made into a movie. His thriller Meeting Evil (1992) was adapted as a 2012 film starring Samuel L. Jackson and Luke Wilson.
In 1999, Berger published The Return of Little Big Man, a sequel to his literary classic. His most recent novel, Adventures of the Artificial Woman, was published in 2004.
Berger lives ten feet from the Hudson River in Rockland County, New York.
In 1966, two years after he wrote Little Big Man, Berger stands at Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, the site of Custer’s last stand in 1876. This was Berger’s first visit to the famous battlefield.
This black-and-white image became the readers’ vision of Berger: dark and esoteric. (Photo courtesy of Gerry Bauer.)
A snapshot of Berger with his friend Zulkifar Ghose, taken in midtown Manhattan in the summer of 1974. (Photo courtesy of Betty Sue Flowers.)
This marked-up manuscript page comes from a story called “Gibberish,” from Berger’s original short story collection Abnormal Occurrences.
In this 1984 letter to his agent, Don Congdon, Berger tells Congdon that he was mentioned on The David Susskind Show, a television talk show.
In this 1997 letter, Berger writes to Roger Donald, his editor at Little, Brown, about characters, props, and plot points in The Return of Little Big Man.
In 1997, Berger wrote to Congdon about communications from Michael Korda, editor in chief of the publisher Simon & Schuster, and Donald.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanic
al, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
An earlier version of Chapter Ten appeared in New World Writing Number 8 under the title “Confession of a Giant.” Copyright © 1955 Thomas Berger.
copyright © 1958 by Thomas Berger
cover design by Michael Vrana
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Thomas Berger, Crazy in Berlin
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