Free Crazy in Berlin by Thomas Berger Page A

sorry I took so long to come,” said the other girl, very slow and clear so that he could understand the German. Her hair sent no message of having had a wash since the night he first saw it could stand one; similarly, her dark-green beret and gray coat with breast ornamentation of Cossack’s cartridge loops. But miraculously, the fresh sunlight which marched through the open window in a brutality that made Reinhart wince, was kinder to her used face than the night had been. Something could be made of her, if you took the trouble.
    Reinhart had the courage to admit that he had not yet found the right thing for her, that he had of course been working on the problem for two weeks and would no doubt soon reach a satisfactory end. Not a day passed that he didn’t arise painfully, come slowly through shaving, two portions of powdered eggs, a pint of coffee, and a lungful of Zehlendorf’s pine air to health and good prospects and then feel drop over it all the shadow of his given “word.” The trouble was he never knew how to get things done, how to make deals, how to “see” people who could arrange. At the same time he had no hope that anything could ever be done in a straightforward way.
    The girl spoke fast, and incomprehensibly to him, to Gertrud, and Gertrud then said: “She vants—wwants you to believe she is grrateful for zis. She wwants to say sank you.”
    “You speak English!” Reinhart was not so astonished as he made out, but she was charming, although too young for one to admit to himself that he might find some use for the charm.
    Her eyes, bluer than the high, immaculate sky revealed when he opened the window, bluer than a broken bird’s egg you might find if you went behind the building and searched the pine grove, than, if you walked far enough westward you would see, the Havel; blue, the quintessence of blue, so that if the color in all its other uses had faded, Zeus might take from Gertrud’s store enough to renew the blue everywhere in the world and not leave her one whit of blue the less. These remarkable eyes, surely kept behind spectacles not because they were poor of vision but rather as protection against some thief who might pluck and sell them as sapphires in Amsterdam, showed their stars to Reinhart as, below, the small pink mouth said:
    “Yes, yes, I know English zo wwell, having studied it zix yearss. I sink I do not too badly, do you?”
    Oh, marvelous, marvelous, he agreed, and would have preferred her over Churchill addressing Commons.
    “You have acted so kindly to my cousin,” she went on. “Perhaps I do not seem especially rude when I ask, do you sink there is also available for me a chob—do you sink for me—do you sink there is also a job for me? There.” Not covering her knees when she stood, her skirt did not pretend to when she sat but made a soft frame for the round thighs that it was no doubt a grave evil to look at.
    So he looked away quickly, looked at the other girl’s sad, sweet, and honest way, and suddenly heard his own voice saying: “Warten Sie eine Weile,” Lovett, he would see a lieutenant named Lovett, who was chairman of everything out of the usual course, or if not he, then another officer named Nader, whose duties were similar. To the girls, however, he said only “Wait,” and in a tone which they considered too masterful to nod to, instead following his departure with heads neatly turning.
    The building had no rhyme or reason. Nobody could tell what function it had served before the Fall; it may have been the only place in Germany where one could hide from the Gestapo, or perhaps on the other hand was a Gestapo-designed labyrinth through which their captives were permitted to wander free and moaning, madly seeking a nonexistent egress. Three weeks in Germany now, and Reinhart had yet to see his first right angle, true line, and square space. Outside, he regularly got lost en route to the Onkel Tom movie theater, ten minutes’ walk away, and