Joseph Kanon - A Good German

“Well, that was nice,” he said to Bernie. “We have to live with this guy, you know.”

Bernie looked up from his stew. “Sorry,” he said, still on edge.

Ron took a drink, looking at Tommy. “He seems to bring out the best in everybody.”

“Small fry,” Bernie said, imitating Breimer’s voice. “Whoever that is.”

“Anybody but Goering,” Tommy said.

“Small fry,” Bernie said again. “Here’s one.” He reached into the pile and pulled out a few buff-colored sheets. “Otto Klopfer. Wants to drive for us. Experienced. Says he drove a truck during the war. He just didn’t say what kind. One of the mobile units, it turns out. The exhaust pipe ran back into the van. They’d load about fifty, sixty people in there, and old Otto would just keep the motor running until they died. We found out because he wrote a letter to his CO.” He held up a sheet. “The exhaust was taking too long. Recommended they seal the pipes so it would work faster. The people were panicking, trying to get out. He was afraid they’d damage the truck.”

Another silence, this time so still that even the air around Bernie seemed to stop. He looked down at the food and pushed it away. “Fuck,” he said, embarrassed, then stood up, gathering his files, and left the room.

Jake stared at the white tablecloth. He heard the old man quietly clearing the plates, then the muffled scrape of chairs as Muller and the MG end of the table got up to leave. Tommy ground his cigarette into the ashtray.

“Well, I’ve got a poker hand waiting,” he said, subdued now. “You coming, Jake? Everybody’ll be there.”

The floating game of the war, still going on, press tents filled with smoke and battered typewriters and the steady slap of cards.

“Not tonight,” Jake said, looking at the table.

“Let’s go, Ron. Bring your money.” He stood up, then turned to Take. “Take a gun if you go out. The Russians are still all over the place. Once they get liquored up, it’s like Dodge City out there.”

But they’d be rowdy, roving the streets in packs, their good time its own warning. It was the others, the shadows gliding through the rubble, who’d pounce in the dark.

“Where was Breimer going?” he said to Ron.

“No idea. I’m the day shift. Let’s hope he gets laid.”

“Talk about punishing the Germans,” Tommy said, and then they were gone too and Jake was alone in the quiet room. He poured some more wine. The old man returned and after a quizzical look at Jake began emptying the ashtrays, carefully straightening the butts and putting them on a separate plate. Occupation currency.

“Would you like anything else?” he said in German, brushing the tablecloth.

“No. I’ll just finish this.”

“ Bitte,” he said, as polite as a waiter at the Adlon, and left.

Jake lit a cigarette. Had Otto Klopfer smoked in the cab while he ran the motor, listening to the thumps behind him? There must have been screaming, a furious pounding on the van. And he’d sat there, foot on the pedal. How could they do it? All the questions came back to that. He’d seen it on the faces of the GIs, who’d hated France and then, confused, felt at home in Germany. The plumbing, the wide roads, the blond children grateful for candy, their mothers tirelessly sweeping up the mess. Clean. Hardworking. Just like us. Then they’d seen the camps, or at least the newsreels. How could they do it? The answer, the only one that made sense to them, was that they hadn’tsomebody else had. But there wasn’t anybody else. So they stopped asking. Unless, like Teitel, the hook had gone in too deep. ‹›Jake looked around the empty room, still feeling the disturbance. Once, in Chicago, he’d worked the crime desk and the rooms had felt like this, the uneasy quiet that follows murder-the body covered but everything else disordered. He remembered the indifferent photographers, the policemen picking through the room dusting for prints, the numbed faces of the others, who didn’t look back at you but sat staring at the tagged gun in a daze, as if it had gone off by itself, and he realized suddenly that he had seen it all again today, that what the city had really become was not a bomb site but a vast scene of the crime. Shaken, waiting for someone to bring the stretcher and erase the chalk marks and put the furniture back. Except this crime wouldn’t go away, even then. There would always be a body in the middle of the floor. How could they do it? Sealing pipes, locking doors, ignoring the screams? It was the only question. But who could answer it? Not a reporter with four pieces in Collier’s. The story was beyond that, a twisted parody of Goebbels’ big lie-if you made the crime big enough, nobody did it. All the pieces he might do, full of local color and war stories and Truman’s horse-trading, were not even notes for the police blotter.

He got up from the table, his head thick with drink and the humid air. In the hall, the old man was standing in front of an open door, listening to the piano. Soft music, barely louder than the clock. When he saw Jake, he moved away, a concertgoer giving up his seat. Jake stood for a moment, trying to place the music-delicate, slightly melancholy, something nineteenth-century, like the house, a graceful world away from the abrasive dinner. When he looked through the door, he saw Bernie bent over the keys in a pool of dim light, his tight wavy hair just visible across the well of the piano. At this distance his body was foreshortened, and for a second Jake saw the boy he must have been, a diligent practicer, his mother eavesdropping down the hall. It’s something you’ll have all your life, she would have said. A nice boy, not gifted, who kept his eyes on the keys. Not yet a terrier, ready to take offense. But perhaps it was only the room, the first real Berlin room Jake had seen, with its tall stove in the corner, the piano near the window to catch the light. In the old days, there would have been cake with coffee.

Bernie kept his head down after he was finished, so that Jake was at the piano when he looked up.

“What was it?” Jake asked.

“Mendelssohn. One of the Songs Without Words”

“Beautiful.”

Bernie nodded. “Also illegal, until a few months ago. So I like playing it. Rusty, though.”

“Your audience enjoyed it,” Jake said, nodding to the hall where the old man had been.

Bernie smiled. “He’s just keeping an eye on the piano. It’s their house. They live in the basement.”

Jake took this in. “So that’s why the plate.”

“It’s all they have left. They hid it, I guess. The Russians took everything else.” He waved his hand at the room, which Jake saw now had been stripped of knickknacks, the afternoons of coffee cakes just his imagination. He looked down at the piano, covered in cigarette burns and water rings from wet glasses of vodka.

“We haven’t met. I’m Jake Geismar.” He held out his hand.

“The writer?”

“Unless there’s another one,” Jake said, pleased in spite of himself.

“You wrote the piece about Nordhausen. Camp Dora,” Bernie said. “Jacob. As in Jewish?”

Jake smiled. “No, as in the Bible. My brother got Ezra.”

Bernie shrugged. “Bernie Teitel,” he said, finally shaking Jake’s hand.

“So I heard.”

Bernie looked at him, puzzled, until Jake cocked his head toward the dining room. “Oh, that.” He looked away. “Bastard.”

“You really don’t want to join his country club, you know.”

Bernie nodded. “No. I just want to pee in his pool.” He stood up and closed the piano lid. “So what are you doing in Berlin?”

“The conference. Looking for a story, like everybody else.”

“I don’t suppose I could interest you in the program? We could use some press. Life was here. They just wanted to know how our boys were doing.”