Sent home by a routing he had not chosen, the author spends one night in the four-power capital and keeps, at last, the appointment he has carried folded in a valise since New Mexico. The gentleman wants almost nothing; note 4 gives the size of the almost. —Ed.
They sent me home the long way, by the clerk's economy I have already declined to believe in, and the long way went through Berlin. The train left Frankfurt after dark with the blinds drawn for the Soviet zone, and at Marienborn in the small hours it stood under floodlights while the Russians did the documents. A Soviet lieutenant came down the corridor checking faces against a manifest; my name stood on that manifest, and in the musette over my head, wrapped in a grey sock, rode a machined article with an eagle stamped small on its acceptance plate. He looked at me the way officials look at anybody, at a point a little behind the head, and went on; and when we rolled my shirt was through at the back, though I had done nothing the whole stop but stand in a corridor owning a sock.1
We came in at breakfast time through the southwest, where the villas still had their glass, and the ride to the billet corrected me inside a mile. Nordhausen was a town knocked flat in a night; Berlin was three years' work and still standing up: streets of facades six stories proud with the sky in every window, and under it all the smell of cold ash and broken drains. Women in men's overcoats stood in chains on the rubble, passing bricks hand to hand; and through the middle of it the trams ran, on time. At the billet, a requisitioned villa out by the Grunewald, the sergeant at the hall desk had a note for me.
"German kid brought it last night," he said. "Asked for you by name off the morning list. I told him we had no such party, and he said we would have. Friends in town already?"
"Family firm," I said, and took it upstairs. Grey paper, no stamp, and inside, in a small tidy patient hand I knew better than my own signature: The address you are carrying is under repair. Coffee is better. Krausenstrasse, the cellar at No. 17, four o'clock. Your afternoon is free. — A.
My afternoon was free. I had not known it myself until the sergeant read me the movement times; the note had been written the night before. I hand the rule to whatever young scoundrel inherits these pages, free: when a creditor you cannot pay asks you to coffee, go, brushed, shaved, and on the hour. It is the debtor who can't be found that gets sold to the bailiffs.
That left the morning, and I have never yet sat in a room while a market stood open within walking distance. The mark was dead, the cigarette had the throne, and the bourse sat in the open air west of the Brandenburg Gate, in the stump field that had been the proudest park in Prussia, the trees gone for firewood, the ground staked into cabbage plots. Ten thousand people stood about in the cold, nothing displayed and everything under a coat: silver by the fork, wedding rings, Zeiss glasses, Iron Crosses by the handful like fishhooks. A four-power patrol came through at noon, one jeep, four flags, no two men aboard with a sentence in common, the one committee in Europe that cannot quarrel, and the trade closed over behind it the way water closes behind a duck. I sold four cartons at a rate I decline to print, nobody now believing it, and a bored corporal at the Army post office turned the brick of marks into a dollar money order for Lake Forest, the Treasury standing the difference; the reader's father bought my camera, and I thank him. The camera was a Leica, off a gentleman in professor's spectacles who had opposed the regime from the first, he told me, unasked, as every German in that city told me; by Berlin's own testimony the Party had numbered eleven men, all strangers to one another, and the eleven had somehow conducted the war. He asked six cartons, took two and a tin of cheese, and threw in the leather case after I had turned away.2
At half past three I went east under the Gate, which wore a red flag, a new Soviet war memorial beside it, two sentries frozen at the present arms inside the British sector, which is Berlin in one sentence. The line itself was a painted board and a Russian private at a fire drum. He said "Papiere," held my movement order a long while, then considered the parcel under my arm until I took his meaning, and two cigarettes crossed the line without a receipt. East of the board the same ruin continued under new management, the generalissimo pasted up where the cinema bills had been. I went two streets out of my way past the address on the card, and found the number a doorway with forty feet of sky above it and grass in the hall. Under repair.
Krausenstrasse 17 was a café by courtesy: nine steps down under a shored lintel, a stove made from a fuel drum, four tables, acorn coffee holding the room. At the last table, facing the stairs, hat square beside his cup, sat the small grey punctual article himself, two years older and not one hair further along, and under the brushed overcoat the same suit the color of dust, or its brother.3
He rose the exact inch politeness requires. "Mr. Klipspringer. You are prompt. I have ordered." The proprietor was already coming with a tray, and what he set out was real coffee, in that city, that winter. "Drink it," Anton said. "It is real. The milk I do not recommend. You look well; marriage agrees with you. Texas will agree with you also, but I run ahead of myself."
Then he gave me my account, as he had once on the Alameda, no paper in sight, in a voice fit for reading train times. The wedding in October, the stone church the tool money built. The Tuesday letters, three lines the week: "an economical woman; I admire economy in a correspondent." Four hundred a month from an export house that had yet to export a pencil, owned by a subsidiary of a father-in-law, obliged to a soft grey man in Washington with no printed function. The professor, gathered in January with his arm in plaster: "he sold you the moon, I am told; a good salesman carries what he has." Fourteen tons out of an iron mine in the Goslar country, two days in front of the British, and three cases of microfilm riding every tally at a strength of zero. One hundred control compartments in Herr Faber's copperplate. And a crate off the breakage pile, written off, contents unsalvageable. "The contents," he said, "being at this hour in a villa by the Grunewald. In a sock. Grey, I believe."
There was a chip in the rim of my saucer, and I gave it a thorough examination while my hands stayed where they were. "Keep it," Anton said, mild as milk. "The article, I mean. A workman is entitled to his shavings, and we were never small about shavings. It will look well on a desk one day."
I made my move then; I had been building it since Frankfurt. I took out his card and laid it on the table, address up, with the air of a man closing an account. "I came to hand this back. I'm out, Anton. Discharged, married, in private employment. Whatever entry your people carry, it was an Army entry, and the Army and I are quits."
He looked at the card without touching it, and for a moment I could have sworn he was pleased, the way a tutor is pleased. "Returning the paper. The correct instinct; every man of sense tries it once, and always too late. You return an address, which as you saw an hour ago is a hole with grass in it. The entry was never on the card, Mr. Klipspringer. Your discharge I have read; it is in order, and it settles the Army's account. We are not the Army. A debt does not die because a third party has stopped billing you. On our books you are carried as you were entered, and the entry reads Corporal."
"I'm nobody's corporal."
"Not the Army's, no," he said, and let it lie while the proprietor came and went.
I picked the card back up; there seemed no sense leaving it for the proprietor, which is the reason I have given myself since. "The routing through Berlin," I said. "Yours."
"The routing was economical. Clerks admire economy; one gives them things to admire." He turned his cup a quarter turn. "You wrote nothing all winter. Signed nothing, kept nothing. My colleagues found it remarkable, and I told them what I told them two years ago: one does not repaint a working instrument."
"Your card said the next war. I don't see one. I see four armies in one town directing traffic."
"You have spent the winter shipping its opening inventory to Texas," he said, in the tone of a man correcting a date. "It is begun, it will be long, and a long war is a sound employer. But you did not come for doctrine. There is a small thing."
"There always is," I said, and my voice mostly behaved.
"Not today. Today is coffee." He drank some, in evidence. "The professors go behind wire at Fort Bliss, and around any such camp there grows a small industry, clerks, draughtsmen, drivers, an interpreter to take the wives to the commissary; hired locally, because armies hire locally. You are about to become the man who finds things for Germans, and the man who finds things is asked for everything. When you are asked for an interpreter, a man will offer himself. He is called Brandt. Recommend him. Once, by mouth, and only if you are asked. If you are never asked, do nothing, and the account stands as written."4
I looked for the hook in it and could not find one small enough to fit. A name, said once, on request, into a hiring line; no paper, no dates, no hardware, nothing that would ever answer to my hand; the standing rule since Los Alamos, kept the way other men keep Lent. "And that's the whole of it."
"That is the whole of it."
"And if nobody asks me—"
"Then you have had coffee in Berlin," Anton said, "and owe me the price of a coffee."
I said yes. I said it with the promptness of a man getting off cheap, and heard the promptness for what it was while it was still in my mouth; it altered nothing. Refusing would have said the name carried a value worth refusing; giving it cost nothing I could see; and I have never paid for what I could not see. "You have recommended worse," Anton said, which was true, and has gone on getting truer.
He settled in cigarettes, counted singly onto the saucer the way a careful man counts coin, a sixth added because the coffee had come hot; then the watch, the coat, the hat, and the handshake of a claims adjuster shutting a folder that has never once been in doubt. "Give my regards to the professor. He does not know me, and there is no need for that to change." And on the bottom step, hat on, half turned: "El Paso is a dry town, Mr. Klipspringer. Instruments keep well in a dry climate."
The walk back was in the dark, Berlin at night being dark as the inside of a hat, cellar light leaking up through the pavement grates. Somewhere north a wall came down of its own accord, as they did all that winter, and I was in a doorway with my heart going; nobody else in the street broke stride. The private at the fire drum took two cigarettes westbound as well, and I paid with something near enough to patriotism. At the billet I wrote Bunny her three lines, the weather, the trains, Berlin much changed, and tell Daddy the good things were on the water ahead of me; my whole board of directors sits in one leather chair in Lake Forest, and it never had a report from me that could be checked from the club. Then I slept, the reader will be disgusted to learn, like a paid-up man.
The movement office had me for the Thursday boat train to Bremerhaven, the reader knowing by now what day my bills come due, and the clerk handed up with the warrant a signal from Frankfurt: the professor's party assembling at Fort Bliss, a Halsted man wanted on the ground who knew the merchandise, proceed El Paso, home after.5
The orders said Texas. Anton had said it first.
The city the author crossed was governed in four sectors under the Allied Kommandatura, the Soviet, American, and British garrisons installed in July 1945 and the French sector cut from the British that August. Between a third and a half of its dwellings were uninhabitable, the center nearer nine in ten; the population, four and a third million before the war, stood under three; the brick chains the author describes were the Trümmerfrauen, the rubble women, paid in the better ration card, the lowest of the five cards being known in the town as the cemetery card. The military train from Frankfurt crossed the Soviet zone by night under standing agreement, with document control at Marienborn, where the passenger manifest was presented to Soviet officers as a condition of passage; the author's presence in Berlin was accordingly a matter of record on the other side some hours before it was a matter of experience on his. —Ed.
The mark being good for very little, the American cigarette served that winter as Berlin's working currency, and the exchanges sat where the author found them, in the Tiergarten and about the Brandenburg Gate and Potsdamer Platz; the park's trees had gone for fuel by municipal permit, and the ground was let out in vegetable plots. The arithmetic behind his morning is on the record. Occupation marks were printed from duplicate plates furnished to the Soviet authorities in 1944; Soviet troops, paid years of arrears in them, spent them into the markets; American soldiers took them in trade and converted them at the fixed rate into dollar instruments for home, until remittances out of the European commands exceeded the entire pay of the troops remitting, by an excess reckoned near a quarter of a billion dollars, and currency control books ended the trade in the autumn of 1946. The difference was made good by the Treasury, as the author says, without being asked. The bankruptcy inventory of 2010 lists among sundries one Leica camera, prewar, German, leather case present, no film in it. —Ed.
The Soviet services in Berlin sat at Karlshorst, in the east of the city, in the engineers' school where the surrender had been signed, and the station they built there became in time the largest their service maintained anywhere on earth. In the spring of 1946 that service changed its initials from NKGB to MGB, the third renaming in five years, with a fourth still to come; the author's gentleman, on the evidence of these papers, changed nothing whatever through any of them, not the manner, not the tailoring, and not the hand. Both names at the table in the cellar were, by their owners' separate admissions, inventions. The coffee, the author maintains, was real, and the editor believes him: real coffee moved easier east of the sector line than west of it that winter, and the reader may work out for himself what that says about who was provisioning whom. —Ed.
The civilian rolls of the Fort Bliss rocket establishment carry, from the spring of 1947, an interpreter engaged on an oral recommendation that no file preserves, under a name close enough to the one printed here; the author renamed every man he meant to keep, and there is no cause to suppose an exception. The man served quietly and was separated quietly in the autumn of 1949, no cause entered, in the same season in which the counter-intelligence summaries at El Paso record an inquiry, opened and closed unresolved, into how the firing schedules at the proving ground up the road were traveling. The author's account of the transaction in the cellar is that it cost him nothing that he could see. Nothing in the file contradicts him as to the seeing. —Ed.
The professor and an advance party had in fact landed in America in the September of 1945, and the group assembled at Fort Bliss, Texas, across the following winter came to one hundred and eighteen men, held on annual contracts as War Department Special Employees and describing themselves, in their own durable joke, as prisoners of peace. The command of them was given to the young Ordnance major the author has been calling Purcell. The gear out of the mountain had gone before them to the proving ground at White Sands, up the road from the post; by the author's calendar or the Army's, the crates reached the desert ahead of the man who counted them. The next number finds him sent to keep house for the men who built them. —Ed.