Free Crazy in Berlin by Thomas Berger

eating and sleeping arrangements. I wish I could tell you just what my job is, but even though the war is over in this Theater, there are still plenty of secrets. ...
    Oh Di, when I look at your picture I think perhaps when I get home we won’t be so platonic! Like to have your reactions to this. ...
    He was moving along as magisterially as the Ohio River off Cincinnati, and as impurely—but Ernie was in the paratroops and had shot nine Germans and taken as prisoner twenty more, and wore the Purple Heart—when a spot of color not olive-drab came into the corner of his eye, stuck there, not moving but vital, and since composition was the product only of solitude, his drain was corked.
    The color was yellow of hair and rose of skin on a girl, just plump and no more, like a peach, who stood diffidently in the doorway. She was small, wearing spectacles with lenses large and exactly round and an abundance of drab clothing, including high woolen stockings and thick, awkward shoes that made her walk as if deformed, for under his even look she had moved gimpily into the room. Rather, was moved: the thin arm of another party could be seen as far as the elbow, at which point it disappeared round the doorframe. An inch off the arm’s furthermost extension she stopped and smiling as gloriously as one can and still show no teeth, said in a high-pitched and cowardly voice:
    “Razher nice vezher ve are hoffing today!”
    From behind the door, a whisper, and again the disembodied arm, this time making much of its hand, after a moment of which the girl moved by the use of her own muscles. Her walk was now pleasantly normal, if prim with perhaps an aim to restrict the swinging of her long blonde braids. The latter she caught one in each hand as she halted still far enough from Reinhart’s desk so that he could see her down to the round knees which the skirt did not quite reach, where although at rest she yet maintained some slight side-to-side movement as if she were still walking in the mind. The effect was curiously provocative and perverse, for she appeared to be a kind of large child rather than a small adult, and he regarded her severely.
    “Tischmacher Gertrud,” was her next sound. Her little fist had come loose from the right braid and was available for the shaking if he so required.
    Somebody was pulling something weird. Reinhart rose and went around the desk, first going towards her to throw them off guard, and at the last minute executing a left-oblique turn of a smartness he had never been up to when in formation. Popped through the doorway, his head met that of the other girl, the one of the ruin, whose name he had not originally got and who now, though still nameless and taken in a suspicious act for which there was no apparent motive, greeted him like a friend and he had a handshake after all.
    He asked her in and invited both of them, she and Fraülein Tischmacher, to chairs, of which they cornered the market, since there was only enough furniture in the shabby, rickety place to service his and Pound’s narrow purposes. He even opened one of the French windows on the sand-and-crabgrass side lawn, to clear the air, for his series of cigarettes, the sine qua non for writing, had tinted the inside atmosphere gray-blue and it surely stunk to someone just entering.
    The niceties owed to his guilt about not having turned a finger for her job. He had even “given his word,” he remembered, whatever that was; he said such things when under the influence he became formal and constricted. In real life, as now, he was, he knew, deft, volatile, witty. Sitting on an old wooden box, his legs up on the desktop, rough-skin boots, size 11-C, murdering the papers there—oops! the letter to Dianne was ruined, but no matter—grinning easily, he lighted another cigarette and blew a process of smoke rings, each smaller than the last and spurting through it, each round as Gertrud’s eyes, as she watched them with honest awe.
    “I am