Crazy in Berlin by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online

who hung pennants on one side of their metal-and-concrete cell, worked a water wave in the front of his hair, and crooned popular songs in idle moments. When shortly he applied again for a single, he discovered it was already on the way: the roomie had reported that Reinhart didn’t mix.
    Although the architects had designed the few single rooms to be a constant punishment for the social deviates assigned them, Reinhart lived happy in his. He had loathed the college before he saw it and after a month’s residence knew his prior feeling as too mild: it was in sum a flat green mall overrun with round pink faces saying “Hi!”
    He had read much as a boy, but only in the literature of the imagination. Expository writing was rough, almost impossible going; he had never been easy with the language of documents and directions on packages, and was not now with that of the natural and social sciences. Philosophy was somewhat better because it didn’t, and didn’t really pretend to, get anywhere. English was a book of contemporary readings about, on the one hand, the underprivileged and, on the other, initially irresponsible people coming to a sense of social obligation: there was a story, in the form of a letter to her parents, about a rich girl who married a labor organizer, the compassion going all one way—inward, to the letter-writer and spouse—and no passion at all. And German, that hard and very real tongue, proved difficult and dreary, with twelve cases for each noun, insanely irregular verbs, and perverse genders that made a door a female and a maiden a neuter, defying even that principle of nature by which, according to a neighbor in psychology, projecting objects seen in dreams are male sex symbols and receptacles female, for the pen was in Deutsch as feminine as the box was not.
    For these reasons he grew fond of his little room, last floor back, next to the toilets, with an air conduit passing first over the ranges in the kitchen four stories lower, and came not to hear the staccato flushings and smell the lemon sauce for the semolina pudding. He sometimes hid out there all day, cutting classes on the motive of the little ills—sinus, swollen Achilles tendon, foreign matter in the eye, etc.—for which the dispensary would write a note, eschewing meals with the aid of Oreo cookies and those stale, soap-flavored cheese-cracker sandwiches one buys at the drugstore, and reading books of his own choice.
    He had now grown to six-two, still an inch below his grandfather—which he might yet attain—and as much above his father as that mark exceeds five-nine. The set of dumbbells had given way to a barbell with changeable weights; in the “clean-and-jerk” lift he could handle two hundred pounds, five more than he weighed, yet he was inclined to solid beef rather than the sharp definition of muscle permitted more wiry types; and he was clumsy, tripping over roots on tardy runs to eight-o’clock classes, tending to enter a doorway with poor aim and collide with its frame, sometimes splintering the wood. A recluse, but when he emerged, a recipient of good will and that friendly fealty paid to large men in jabs-in-the-ribs and blows-on-the-upper-body, which along with the strain of trying to better his mark in the clean and jerk every afternoon kept him always sore of skin.
    The books of his choice were The Invisible Man, which he was at any given time rereading; a volume printed at the author’s expense called A Life in the Field, by an Englishman who had towards the end of the nineteenth century scouted both in Matabeleland and along the Big Horn River in Montana; and Middle European short stories in English translation, in which the characters tended to live in the mountains or the valleys between them, walking to school on rutted cowpaths, sometimes getting lost in the forest—or had departed all this for the garish, quick life of the cities, which had gone to ashes in their mouths, and now yearned for the