Mother Night

21: My Best Friend ...

I've said that I'd stolen the motorcyle I rode when I called on Werner Noth for the last time. I should explain.

I didn't really steal it. I just borrowed it for all eternity from Heinz Schildknecht, my ping-pong doubles partner, my closest friend in Germany.

We used to drink together, used to talk long into the night, especially after we both lost our wives.

'I feel I can tell you anything — absolutely anything' he said to me one night, late in the war.

'I feel the same way about you, Heinz,' I said.

'Anything I have is yours,' he said.

'Anything I have is yours, Heinz,' I said.

The amount of property between us was negligible. Neither one of us had a home. Our real estate and our furniture were blown to smithereens. I had a watch, a typewriter, and a bicycle, and that was about it. Heinz had long since traded his watch and his typewriter and even his wedding ring for black-market cigarettes. All he had left in this vale of tears, excepting my friendship and the clothes on his back, was a motorcycle.

'If anything ever happens to the motorcycle,' he said to me, 'I am a pauper.' He looked around for eavesdroppers. 'I will tell you something terrible,' he said.

'Don't if you don't want to,' I said.

'I want to,' he said. 'You are the person I can tell terrible things to. I am going to tell you something simply awful.'

The place where we were drinking and talking was a pillbox near the dormitory where we both slept. It had been built very recently for the defense of Berlin, had been built by slaves. It wasn't armed, wasn't manned. The Russians weren't that close yet.

Heinz and I sat there with a bottle and a candle between us, and he told me the terrible thing. He was drunk.

'Howard — ' he said, 'I love my motorcycle more than I loved my wife.'

'I want to be a friend of yours, and I want to believe everything you say, Heinz,' I said to him, 'but I refuse to believe that. Let's just forget you said it, because it isn't true.'

'No,' he said, 'this is one of those moments when somebody really speaks the truth, one of those rare moments. People hardly ever speak the truth, but now I am speaking the truth. If you are the friend I think you are, you'll do me the honor of believing the friend I think I am when I speak the truth.'

'All right,' I said.

There were tears streaming down his cheeks. 'I sold her jewelry, her favorite furniture, even her meat ration one time — all for cigarettes for me,' he said.

'We've all done things we're ashamed of,' I said.

'I would not quit smoking for her sake,' said Heinz.

'We all have bad habits,' I said.

'When the bomb hit the apartment, killed her and left me with nothing but a motorcycle,' he said, 'the black-market man offered me four thousand cigarettes for the motorcycle.'

'I know,' I said. He told me the same story every time he got drunk.

'And I gave up smoking at once,' he said, 'because I loved the motorcycle so.'

'We all cling to something,' I said.

'To the wrong things — ' he said, 'and we start clinging too late. I will tell you the one thing I really believe out of all the things there are to believe.'

'All right,' I said.

'All people are insane,' he said. 'They will do anything at any time, and God help anybody who looks for reasons.'

As for the kind of woman Heinz's wife had been: I knew her only slightly, though I saw her fairly often. She was a nonstop talker, which made her hard to know, and her theme was always the same: successful people who saw opportunities and grasped them firmly, people who, unlike her husband, were important and rich.

'Young Kurt Ehrens — ' she would say, 'only twenty-six, and a full colonel in the S.S.! And his brother Heinrich, he can't be more than thirty-four, but he has eighteen thousand foreign workers under him, all building tank traps. Heinrich knows more about tank traps than any man alive, they say, and I used to dance with him.'

On and on she would talk this way, with poor Heinz in the background, smoking his brains out. And one thing she did to me was make me deaf to all success stories. The people she saw as succeeding in a brave new world were, after all, being rewarded as specialists in slavery, destruction, and death. I don't consider people who work in those fields successful.

As the war drew to a close, Heinz and I couldn't drink in our pillbox any more. An eighty-eight was set up in it, and the gun was manned by boys about fifteen or sixteen years old. There was a success story for Heinz's late wife — boys that young, and yet with men's uniforms and a fully-armed death trap all their own.

So Heinz and I did our drinking and talking in our dormitory, a riding hall jammed with bombed-out government workers sleeping on straw mattresses. We kept our bottle hidden, since we did not care to share it.

'Heinz — ' I said to him one night, 'I wonder how good a friend you really are.'

He was stung. 'Why should you ask me that?' he said.

'I want to ask a favor of you — a very big one — and I don't know if I should,' I said.

'I demand that you ask it!' he said.

'Lend me your motorcycle, so I can visit my in-laws tomorrow,' I said.

He did not hesitate, did not quail. 'Take it!' he said.

So the next morning I did.

We started out the next morning side by side, Heinz on my bicycle, me on his motorcycle.

I kicked the starter, put the motorcycle in gear, and off I went, leaving my best friend smiling in a cloud of blue exhaust.

Off I went — vroooom, ka-pow, kapow — vaaaaaaa-roooooom!

And he never saw his motorcycle or his best friend again.

I have asked the Haifa Institute for the Documentation of War Criminals if they have any news of Heinz, though he wasn't much of a war criminal. The Institute delights me with the news that Heinz is now in Ireland, is chief grounds-keeper for Baron Ulrich Werther von Schwefelbad. Von Schwefelbad bought a big estate in Ireland after the war.

The Institute tells me that Heinz is an expert on the death of Hitler, having stumbled into Hitler's bunker while Hitler's gasoline-soaked body was burning but still recognizable.

Hello, out there, Heinz, in case you read this.

I was really very fond of you, to the extent that I am capable of being fond of anybody.

Give the Blarney Stone a kiss for me.

What were you doing in Hitler's bunker — looking for your motorcycle and your best friend?