Breakfast in the Ruins

12 Memories of Berlin: 1935: Dusty

He looks up into the cloudy eyes of his friend. You seem quite pale, he says.—Why doesn't anything happen? Karl wipes his lips.

— That's none of your business, says the black man. I feel like a drink. Do you want one? He turns and goes to the table where the waiter has arranged a variety of drinks.—What do you like?

— I don't drink much. A lemonade will do.

— A glass of wine?

— All right.

Karl accepts the glass of red wine. He holds it up to a beam of moonlight.— I wish I could help you, he says.

— Don't worry about that.

— If you say so. Karl sits down on the edge of the bed, swinging his legs and sipping his wine.—Do you think I'm unimaginative?

— I suppose you are. But that's nothing to do with it.

— Maybe that's why I never made much of a painter.

— There are lots of different kinds of imagination.

— Yes. It's a funny thing. Imagination is man's greatest strength and yet it's also his central weakness. Imagination was a survival trait at first, but when it becomes overdeveloped it destroys him, like the tusks of a mammoth growing into its own eyes. Imagination, in my opinion, is being given far too much play, these days.

— I think you're talking nonsense, says the black man. It is true that he looks paler. Perhaps that is the moonlight too, thinks Karl.

— Probably, agrees Karl.

— Imagination can allow man to become anything he wants to be. It gives us everything that is human.

— And it creates the fears, the bogeymen, the devils which destroy us. Unreasoning terror. What other beast has fears like ours?

The black man gives him an intense glare. For a moment his eyes seem to shine with a feral gleam. But perhaps that is the moonlight again.

Karl is seventeen. A dupe of the Duce. Escaped from Berlin and claiming Italian citizenship, he now finds himself drafted into the Army. You can't win in Europe these days. It's bad. There is pain...

There is heat.

— Are you afraid, then? asks Karl's friend.

— Of course. I'm guilty, fearful, unfulfilled...

— Forget your guilts and your fears and you will be fulfilled.

— And will I be human?

— What are you afraid of?

KARL WAS SEVENTEEN. His mother had gone. His father had gone. His uncle, an Italian citizen, adopted him in 1934. Almost immediately Karl had been conscripted into the Army. He had no work. He had been conscripted under his uncle's new name of Giombini, but they knew he was a Jew really.

He had guessed he would be going to Ethiopia when all the lads in the barracks had been issued with tropical kit. Almost everyone had been sure that it would be Ethiopia.

And now, after a considerable amount of sailing and marching, here he was, lying in the dust near a burning mud hut in a town called Adowa with the noise of bombs and artillery all around him and a primitive spear stuck in his stomach, his rifle stolen, his body full of pain and his head full of regrets. His comrades ran about all round him, shooting at people he couldn't see. He didn't bother to call out. He would be punished for losing his rifle to a skinny brown man wearing a white sheet. He hadn't even had a chance to kill somebody.

He regretted first that he had left Berlin. Things might have quietened down there eventually, after all. He had left only because of his parents' panic after the shop had been smashed. In Rome, he had never been able to get used to the food. He remembered the Berlin restaurants and wished he had had a chance to eat one good meal before going. He regretted, too, that he had not been able to realize his ambitions, once in the Army. A clever lad could rise rapidly to an important rank in wartime, he knew. A bomb fell nearby and the force of it stirred his body a little. Dust began to drift over everything. The -yells and the shots and the sounds of the planes, the whine of the shells and the bombs, became distant. The dust made his throat itch and he used all his strength to stop himself from coughing and so make the pain from his wound worse. But he coughed at last and the spear quivered, a sharp black line against the dust which made everything else look so vague.

He watched the spear, forcing his eyes to focus on it. It was all he had.

You were supposed to forget about worldly ambitions when you were dying. But he felt cheated. He had got out of Berlin at the right tune. Really, there was no point in believing otherwise. Friends of his would be in camps now, or deported to some frightful dung heap in North Africa. Italy had been a clever choice. Anti-Semitic feeling had never meant much in Italy. The fools who had gone to America and Britain might find themselves victims of pogroms at any minute. On the other hand the Scandinavian countries had seemed to offer an alternative. Perhaps he should have tried his luck in Sweden, where so many people spoke German and he wouldn't have felt too strange. A spasm of pain shook him. It felt as if his entrails were being stirred around by a big spoon. He had become so conscious of his innards. He could visualize them all—his lungs and his heart and his ruined stomach, the yards and yards of offal curled like so many pink, grey and yellow sausages inside him; then his cock, his balls, the muscles in his strong, naked legs; his fingers, his lips, his eyes, his nose and his ears. The black line faded. He forced it back into focus. His blood, no longer circulating smoothly through his veins and arteries, but pumping out of the openings around the blade of the spear, dribbling into the dust. Nothing would have happened in Germany after the first outbursts. It would have died down, the trouble. Hitler and his friends would have turned their attention to Russia, to the real enemies, the Communists. A funny little flutter started in his groin, below the spear blade. It was as if a moth were trying to get into the air, using his groin as a flying field, hopping about and beating its wings and failing to achieve takeoff. He tried to see, but fell back. He was thirsty. The line of the spear shaft had almost disappeared and he didn't bother to try to focus on it again.

The distant noises seemed to combine and establish close rhythms and counter-rhythms coupled with the beating of his heart. He recognized the tune. Some American popular song he had heard in a film. He had hummed the same song for six months after he had seen the film in Berlin. It must have been four years ago. Maybe longer. He wished that he had had a chance to make love to a woman. He had always disdained whores. A decent man didn't need whores. He wished that he had been to a whore and found out what it was like. One had offered last year as he walked to the railway station.

The film had been called Sweet Music, he remembered. He had never learned all the English words, but had made up words to sound like them.

There's a tavern in the town, in the town, When atroola setsen dahn, setsen dahn, Und der she sits on a luvaduvadee, Und never, never sinka see. So fairdeewell mein on tooday...

He had had ambitions to be an opera singer and he had had ambitions to be a great writer.

The potential had all been there, it was just a question of choosing. He might even have been a great general.

His possible incarnations marched before him through the dust.

And then he was dead.

— You could be anything you wanted to be. His friend kisses his shoulder.

— Or nothing. Could I be a woman and give birth to five children? Karl bites the black man.

The black man leaps up. He is a blur. For a moment, in the half-light, Karl thinks that his friend is a woman and white and then an animal of some kind, teeth bared. The black man glowers at him—Don't do that to me!

And Karl wipes his lips.

He turns his back on his friend. Okay. You taste funny, anyway.

You are a priest, devoutly religious, you are made miserable by the very idea of violence. You are, in every sense, a man of peace.

One morning you are cutting bread in the small hall attached to your church. You hear screams and oaths coming from the church itself. You hurry into the church, the knife still in your hand.

The soldier of the enemy currently occupying your country is in the act of raping a girl of about thirteen. He has beaten her and torn her clothes. He is just about to enter her. She whimpers. He grunts. You recognize the girl as a member of your parish. Doubtless she came to the church for your help. You shout, but the soldier pays no attention. You implore him to stop to no avail.

If you kill the soldier with your knife it will save the young girl from being hurt any further. It might even save her life. Nobody knows the soldier has entered the church. You could hide the body easily.

If you merely knock him out—even if that's possible -he will almost certainly take horrible reprisals on you, your church and its congregation. It has happened before, in other towns. Yet you want to save the girl.

What would you do?