Crazy in Berlin by Thomas Berger Read Free Book Online Page B

male students were reconvoked. Now anyone wishing to stay out of the Army must enlist —in the reserve.
    Reinhart called at the dean’s office posthaste, already having been the target of remarks in bars, inarticulate grumbles by gray-sideburned potguts on the theme of why so much meat was not yet sacked in olive drab. The dean’s secretary, one of those tight-rectumed persons whose every little motion is spite against some subject so long vanished that every other human being has taken on his-her appearance, after consulting the records told him with much satisfaction that the Enlisted Reserve Corps had a certain academic standard to which he failed to measure up. He cut classes and went to town and got stinking, which was not easy to do in an otherwise deserted tavern on Wednesday afternoon with no music. A fortyish waitress named Wanda some time in the next six hours told him I knock off work at eleven and at eleven-thirty, in a one-room apartment where a leaky faucet dripped a quick rhythm to which no one could have kept stride, displayed unusually kittenish ways and a pair of thick thighs marbled with blue veins. The First Time he had ever really Got In; as usual the popular consensus, which in his dormitory held that the experience was persistently overrated, was a lie; indeed, it had been in all his years the lone achievement; a pity that our society offered no male career in that direction.
    In the late spring, just before the end of the year, another alteration in his university’s theory of the reserves. If they limited membership to the bright students, the campus would soon be depopulated by the draft; so now a simple passing grade became a ticket of entry. Reinhart was permitted to sign up and given a little wallet-card signed by the Secretary of War as an assurance that he would do his service in the classroom. Actually, he was still ahead of time, was still not old enough to register for the draft. He had been a clever fellow in grammar school, doing eight years in seven, before the rot set in, and was yet only seventeen.
    Sophomore German was Wilhelm Tell, tough to read, maudlin of sentiment. Reinhart now had a lodging in town and in consideration of the low rent went without maid service; a gemütlich sty except on those monthly occasions when his nihilism grew strong enough to annihilate itself temporarily and he borrowed the landlady’s carpet sweeper. He read The Sorrows of Werther on his own, in English of course, and went so far as to get lent the German text by his professor, who after the fashion of the kind supposed that only good students had such ambitions and was at once wary, impressed, and all the more condescending for the pretense that he was not. But it was far too tedious to go line for line with the original; he pooped out on page two.
    As to the other courses, American history was worst, debunking all the colorful legends and filling the vacuum so made with a thick Cream-of-Wheat of—as usual—economics; tariffs and taxes and indentured servants and land grants, and a general agreement that every one of the wars could have been avoided had these items not been mishandled by well-meaning but inept statesmen.
    At the end of the fall term Reinhart made I -for-incomplete in history, as an alternative to the F he would have received had he not one morning in February absentmindedly cut his toenail too deep, inadvertently generating a wound which kept him from the exam. Presently the I stood for infinity: along about the beginning of March his gorge rose for the last time and would not come down; he went to the campus headquarters of the reserve and signed on for active duty.
    His parents protested in their pallid way, finding everything a rejection of them and at a loss to see that their weak representations made self-counsel necessary; as if an impalpable father were not enough, he had a mother with whom nothing succeeded like failure. She would have preferred his staying in school,