Crazy in Berlin Read Free

that her longitudinal lines of cheek and veteran eyes were from lifelong residence in a sanguinary country, but the darkness forbade one’s being sure. She had merely come to watch a fight?
    “One has to admit that it was interesting.” She had moved very close to him, perhaps because of the dark, and there was enough light to see that just a chance remained to make her attractive, at least to get by. Reinhart would have liked to seize and scrub and comb and color and dress her—to straighten her out; the world was filled with people who out of simple inertia wouldn’t make a move to fulfill their own promise.
    “But,” she went on, “you are a noncommissioned officer. Please, may I ask you: how does one get a job with the Americans?”
    “There are places for such things,” he disappointedly replied. He hadn’t known what, yet had hoped for something other than the humdrum, perhaps an unexpected birthday gift. His parents’ package had not arrived, very likely never would, the occasion being one on which their undependability was notable. Besides, the girl became more attractive as she talked; her voice was pitched low and had a melancholy music and her whole manner was submission to the male principle. “You want me to get you a job, is that right?” She was within a hair of contact with his belt buckle, and he had come under a compulsion at once to fuse into her body and not move his, which could be done by easing forward the belly usually, as a matter of vanity, held back.
    “For Christ Almighty sake,” said Marsala, in the testiness of one whose judgment has gone unheeded, “the soldier has gone horny.” He was right by being wrong; he assumed their conversation to be a bargaining.
    They were now touching, the girl standing firm and, madly, as if unconscious of anything strange, pursuing her first interest: “It’s all so confusing. I am ready to do any kind of work—as cleaning woman if need be. ... Do you have a bottmann ?”
    It was much too rare for his simple vocabulary. He had not learned it in two years of college where he ostensibly majored in the language but in fact moped lonely around bars and crowded, smoky places with small string combos, with no real stomach for liquor and no real courage with women, drinking much, nevertheless, and fumbling at some tail. On the margin of a flat flunk he had enlisted in the Army. At any rate, he could deliver correctly not a single long sentence in German and could translate nothing beyond very short strings of words with exact English equivalents.
    You are a bad man was maybe what she meant; if so it was a weak remonstrance, as when you are small and exchange exposures with the neighbor girl, who coyly says “You are a bad boy,” all the while pulling up her dress. He had slipped his arm into her worn coat, where a missing button made it easy, and around her narrow waist, and she came full into him, saying still, so madly!: “Is a female bottmann allowed?”
    Suddenly and so nuttily did its sense at last arrive that he released her and retreated a step. Lives of a Bengal Lancer, Four Feathers, “but when it comes to slaughter you will do your work on water, an’ you’ll lick the bloomin’ boots of ’im that’s got it.” When you were in the field against Mohammed Khan, Oxford-educated Pathan who returned to his mountain fastness to lead the tribes against the Crown, you had a batman; when, that is, you were a British officer serving Victoria, to whom you drank health and broke the glass, or for all he knew even at present, you had an orderly.
    “Well, I’m going, I’m on my way, ” Marsala groaned reproachfully, and hypocritically, for he scraped away only a short distance and sat down on a wasted wall, lighted a cigarette with a great flare and coughed.
    Her look had no defenses: “I know just a few English words.”
    “That one is very rare,” replied Reinhart with all his gentle forces. He added: “I am just an Unteroffizier, a