Crazy in Berlin Read Free Page B

might stay there for hours—this was a thought of Reinhart’s, which he answered with the familiar indictment: so many millions of non-Germans would lie dead forever. Yet it had been so appropriate to pity her; he aggressively presented that claim to himself. “Certainly” was her answer to the characterization of his name. From birth he had been a good, sturdy German type, lived in a solid German house, on a diet of G. potato salad (with vinegar), G. cole slaw (with bacon grease), G. coffeecake (with butter-lakes), run on a regimen of G. virtue (bill-paying, bedding and rising early, melancholia), and whenever he left it was met by approving people who said: “Ah! He’s going to be (or is) a big G. like his grandfather.”
    The term, however, had a double meaning, which was honored even by near-illiterates; its other use was as synonym for a kind of foulness. And now there was a third, for here he was in the ancient homeland, and he was something different.
    “Home” was a compound in Zehlendorf from which the 1209th General Hospital had evicted the German residents, a block of three long apartment buildings arranged in an open rectangle around a private park. The latter, in some former time almost a university campus with green and wanton walks for rambling, had been converted at the order of the 1209th’s commanding officer into a junkyard for the disposal of property the Germans left behind. The colonel was neither opposed to comfort for his men nor a partisan of pain and deprivation for the owners who after all would one day return; he was nothing, no Savonarola, no crypto-fascist symbol of the military mind, not even, because he was a medic, quite a soldier, nor, because he was commanding officer, quite a doctor—but owing to this he wished grievously to be something, if only a converter of matter from one form to another. Thus he periodically had put to the torch, had resolved into carbon and the immaterial gases, the giant cairn of objects which Reinhart and Marsala now skirted on their way to the south building: couches and loveseats, dining tables, bedsteads, chaises longues, sideboards, three pianos, fourteen wind-up victrolas and two thousand records; eight thousand books; rugs, pictures, tablecloths, postcard collections, skis, jewelry boxes, letters, diaries, journals, manuscripts, apologias, Nazi party cards, memoranda, paper, paper, paper; and one little souvenir plaque from the Western Hemisphere: an electric-pencil sketch of a pickaninny sitting in a Chic Sale, inscribed “Best wishes from Savannah, Ga.” Another pile held the noncombustibles, mainly cooking utensils and fifty more or less complete china services from the royal house of an imaginary principality.
    Five men had been busted in rank when caught salvaging items from the auto-da-fé. On the other hand, the colonel did not lack in a rude sense of justice: if you could make away with an overstuffed chair or an alarm clock without being seen, it was yours and beyond all future confiscation.
    The tenants of Building A, first floor right, had furnished a very decent little flat, the cynosure, as Reinhart might say, of all eyes in their section. Particularly those of Buck Sergeant Tom Riley, their next-door neighbor and late technician third grade, who had made so free in their absence as not only to enter their home but also to sink his big ass into the mohair couch and fall asleep. When awakened by the crudest means they could summon on such short notice, he arose complaining, “You must of got your nose up the colonel to get to keep this furniture. Our living room looks like a Mexican cat house.” He lumped fatly to the hall door. “And why only two guys here instead of three?” His swollen nose tensed with authentic peevishness, and small wonder, for he had been reduced one grade for unsuccessful pilferage from the trashpile; but more than that, he was by instinct a petulant man, with the face of an old baby.
    “Don’t be