The Berlin Stories

by Christopher Isherwood

  What followed had confirmed Otto in his opinion. Schmidt had been just about to leave the flat when he turned and said to Arthur:

  “Well, I’m off. I’ll leave you to the tender mercies of your precious communist friends. And when they’ve swindled you out of your last pfennig . . .”

  He hadn’t got any farther. For Otto, puzzled by all this talk and relieved at last to hear something which he could understand and resent, had taken Schmidt out of the flat by the back of the collar and sent him flying downstairs with a heavy kick on the bottom. Otto, in his narrative, dwelt on the kick with special pride and pleasure. It had been one of the kicks of his life, an inspired kick, beautifully judged and timed. He was anxious that I should understand just how and where it had landed. He made me stand up, and touched me lightly on the buttock with his toe. I was a little uneasy, knowing what an effort of self-control it cost him not to let fly.

  “My word, Willi, you should have heard him land! Bing! Bong! Crash! For a minute he didn’t seem to know where he was or what had happened to him. And then he began to blubber, just like a baby. I was so weak with laughing at him you could have pushed me downstairs with one finger.”

  And Otto began to laugh now, as he said it. He laughed heartily, without the least malice or savagery. He bore the discomfited Schmidt no grudge.

  I asked whether anything more had been heard of him. Otto didn’t know. Schmidt had picked himself up, slowly and painfully, sobbed out some inarticulate threat, and limped away downstairs. And Arthur, who had been present in the background, had shaken his head doubtfully and protested.

  “You shouldn’t have done that, you know.”

  “Arthur’s much too kind-hearted,” added Otto, coming to the end of his story. “He trusts everybody. And what thanks does he get for it? None. He’s always being swindled and betrayed.”

  No comment on this last remark seemed adequate. I said that I must be going.

  Something about me seemed to amuse Olga. Her bosom silently quivered. Without warning, as we reached the door, she gave my cheek a rough, deliberate pinch, as though she were plucking a plum from a tree.

  “You’re a nice boy,” she chuckled harshly. “You must come round here one evening. I’ll teach you something you didn’t know before.”

  “You ought to try it once with Olga, Willi,” Otto seriously advised. “It’s well worth the money.”

  “I’m sure it is,” I said politely, and hurried downstairs.

  A few days later, I had a rendezvous with Fritz Wendel at the Troika. Arriving rather too early, I sat down at the bar and found the Baron on the stool next to my own.

  “Hullo, Kuno!”

  “Good evening.”

  He inclined his sleek head stiffly. To my surprise, he didn’t seem at all pleased to see me. Indeed, quite the reverse. His monocle gleamed polite hostility; his naked eye was evasive and shifty.

  “I haven’t seen you for ages,” I said brightly, trying to appear serenely unconscious of his manner.

  His eye travelled round the room; he was positively searching for help, but nobody answered his appeal. The place was still nearly empty. The barman edged over towards us.

  “What’ll you have to drink?” I asked. His dislike of my society was beginning to intrigue me.

  “Er — nothing, thank you. You see, I have to be going.”

  “What, you’re leaving us so soon, Herr Baron?” put in the barman affably; unconsciously adding to his discomfort: “Why, you’ve hardly been here five minutes, you know.”

  “Have you heard from Arthur Norris?” With deliberate malice I disregarded his attempts to dismount from his stool. He couldn’t do so until I had pushed mine back a little.

  The name made Kuno visibly wince.

  “No.” His tone was icy. “I have not.”

  “He’s in Paris, you know.”

  “Indeed?”

  “Well,” I said heartily, “I mustn’t keep you any longer.” I held out my hand. He barely touched it.

  “Goodbye.”

  Released at last, he made like an arrow for the door. One might have thought that he was escaping from a plague hospital. The barman discreetly smiled, picked up the coins and shovelled them into the till. He had seen spongers snubbed before.

  I was left with another mystery to solve.

  Like a long train which stops at every dingy little station, the winter dragged slowly past. Each week there were new emergency decrees. Brüning’s weary episcopal voice issued commands to the shopkeepers, and was not obeyed. “It’s Fascism,” complained the Social Democrats. “He’s weak,” said Helen Pratt. “What these swine need is a man with hair on his chest.” The Hessen Document was discovered; but nobody really cared. There had been one scandal too many. The exhausted public had been fed with surprises to the point of indigestion. People said that the Nazis would be in power by Christmas; but Christmas came and they were not. Arthur sent me the compliments of the season on a postcard of the Eiffel Tower.

  Berlin was in a state of civil war. Hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere; at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, swimming-baths; at midnight, after breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon. Knives were whipped out, blows were dealt with spiked rings, beer-mugs, chair-legs, or leaded clubs; bullets slashed the advertisements on the poster-columns, rebounded from the iron roofs of latrines. In the middle of a crowded street a young man would be attacked, stripped, thrashed, and left bleeding on the pavement; in fifteen seconds it was all over and the assailants had disappeared. Otto got a gash over the eye with a razor in a battle on a fair-ground near the Cöpernickerstrasse. The doctor put in three stitches and he was in hospital for a week. The newspapers were full of deathbed photographs of rival martyrs, Nazi, Reichsbanner, and Communist. My pupils looked at them and shook their heads, apologizing to me for the state of Germany. “Dear, dear!” they said, “it’s terrible. It can’t go on.”

  The murder reporters and the jazz-writers had inflated the German language beyond recall. The vocabulary of newspaper invective (traitor, Versailles-lackey, murder-swine, Marx-crook, Hitler-swamp, Red-pest) had come to resemble, through excessive use, the formal phraseology of politeness employed by the Chinese. The word Liebe, soaring from the Goethe standard, was no longer worth a whore’s kiss. Spring, moonlight, youth, roses, girl, darlings, heart, May: such was the miserably devaluated currency dealt in by the authors of all those tangoes, waltzes, and fox-trots which advocated the private escape. Find a dear little sweetheart, they advised, and forget the slump, ignore the unemployed. Fly, they urged us, to Hawaii, to Naples, to the Never-Never-Vienna. Hugenberg, behind the Ufa, was serving up nationalism to suit all tastes. He produced battlefield epics, farces of barrack-room life, operettas in which the jinks of a pre-war military aristocracy were reclothed in the fashions of 1932. His brilliant directors and camera-men had to concentrate their talents on cynically beautiful shots of the bubbles in champagne and the sheen of lamplight on silk.

  And morning after morning, all over the immense, damp, dreary town and the packing-case colonies of huts in the suburb allotments, young men were waking up to another workless empty day to be spent as they could best contrive; selling boot-laces, begging, playing draughts in the hall of the Labour Exchange, hanging about urinals, opening the doors of cars, helping with crates in the markets, gossiping, lounging, stealing, overhearing racing tips, sharing stumps of cigarette-ends picked up in the gutter, singing folk-songs for groschen in courtyards and between stations in the carriages of the Underground Railway. After the New Year, the snow fell, but did not lie; there was no money to be earned by sweeping it away. The shopkeepers rang all coins on the counter for fear of the forgers. Frl. Schroeder’s astrologer foretold the end of the world. “Listen,” said Fritz Wendel, between sips of a cocktail in the bar of the Eden Hotel, “I give a damn if this country goes communist. What I mean, we’d have to alter our ideas a bit. Hell, who cares?”

  At the beginning of
March, the posters for the Presidential Election began to appear. Hindenburg’s portrait, with an inscription in gothic lettering beneath it, struck a frankly religious note: “He hath kept faith with you; be ye faithful unto Him.” The Nazis managed to evolve a formula which dealt cleverly with this venerable icon and avoided the offence of blasphemy: “Honour Hindenburg; Vote for Hitler.” Otto and his comrades set out every night, with paint-pots and brushes, on dangerous expeditions. They climbed high walls, scrambled along roofs, squirmed under hoardings; avoiding the police and the S. A. patrols. And next morning, passers-by would see Thälmann’s name boldly inscribed in some prominent and inaccessible position. Otto gave me a bunch of little gum-backed labels: Vote for Thälmann, the Workers’ Candidate. I carried these about in my pocket and stuck them on shop windows and doors when nobody was looking.

  Brüning spoke in the Sport Palace. We must vote for Hindenburg, he told us, and save Germany. His gestures were sharp and admonitory; his spectacles gleamed emotion in the limelight. His voice quivered with dry academic passion. “Inflation,” he threatened, and the audience shuddered. “Tannenberg,” he reverently reminded: there was prolonged applause.

  Bayer spoke in the Lustgarten, during a snowstorm, from the roof of a van; a tiny hatless figure gesticulating above the vast heaving sea of faces and banners. Behind him was the cold façade of the Schloss; and, lining its stone balustrade, the ranks of armed silent police. “Look at them,” cried Bayer. “Poor chaps! It seems a shame to make them stand out of doors in weather like this. Never mind; they’ve got nice thick coats to keep them warm. Who gave them those coats? We did. Wasn’t it kind of us? And who’s going to give us coats? Ask me another.”

  “So the old boy’s done the trick again,” said Helen Pratt. “I knew he would. Won ten marks off them at the office, the poor fools.”

  It was the Wednesday after the election, and we were standing on the platform of the Zoo Station. Helen had come to see me off in the train to England.

  “By the way,” she added, “what became of that queer card you brought along one evening? Morris, wasn’t his name?”

  “Norris . . . I don’t know. I haven’t heard from him for ages.”

  It was strange that she should have asked that, because I had been thinking about Arthur myself, only a moment before. In my mind, I always connected him with this station. It would soon be six months since he had gone away; it seemed like last week. The moment I got to London, I decided, I would write him a long letter.

  Chapter Nine

  Nevertheless, i didn’t write. Why, I hardly know. I was lazy and the weather had turned warm. I thought of Arthur often; so often, indeed, that correspondence seemed unnecessary. It was as though we were in some kind of telepathic communication. Finally, I went away into the country for four months, and discovered, too late, that I’d left the post-card with his address in a drawer somewhere in London. Anyhow, it didn’t much matter. He had probably left Paris ages ago by this time. If he wasn’t in Berlin. The dear old Tauentzienstrasse hadn’t changed. Looking out at it through the taxi window on my way from the station, I saw several Nazis in their new S.A. uniforms, now no longer forbidden. They strode along the street very stiff, and were saluted enthusiastically by elderly civilians. Others were posted at street corners, rattling collecting-boxes.

  I climbed the familiar staircase. Before I had time to touch the bell, Frl. Schroeder rushed out to greet me with open arms. She must have been watching for my arrival.

  “Herr Bradshaw! Herr Bradshaw! Herr Bradshaw! So you’ve come back to us at last! I declare I must give you a hug! How well you’re looking! It hasn’t seemed the same since you’ve been away.”

  “How have things been going here, Frl. Schroeder?”

  “Well . . . I suppose I mustn’t complain. In the summer they were bad. But now . . . Come inside, Herr Bradshaw. I’ve got a surprise for you.”

  Gleefully she beckoned me across the hall, flung open the door of the living-room with a dramatic gesture.

  “Arthur!”

  “My dear William, welcome to Germany!”

  “I’d no idea . . .”

  “Herr Bradshaw, I declare you’ve grown!”

  “Well . . . well . . . this is indeed a happy reunion. Berlin is herself once more. I propose that we adjourn to my room and drink a glass in celebration of Herr Bradshaw’s return. You’ll join us, Frl. Schroeder, I hope?”

  “Oh . . . Most kind of you, Herr Norris, I’m sure.”

  “After you.”

  “I couldn’t think of it.”

  There was a good deal more polite deprecation and bowing before the two of them finally got through the doorway. Familiarity didn’t seem to have spoilt their manners. Arthur was as gallant, Frl. Schroeder as coquettish as ever.

  The big front bedroom was hardly recognizable. Arthur had moved the bed over into the corner by the window and pushed the sofa nearer to the stove. The stuffy-smelling pots of ferns had disappeared, so had the numerous little crochet mats on the dressing-table, and the metal figures of dogs on the bookcase. The three gorgeously tinted photochromes of bathing nymphs were also missing; in their place I recognized three etchings which had hung in Arthur’s dining-room. And, concealing the wash-stand, was a handsome Japanese lacquer screen which used to stand in the hall of the Courbierestrasse flat.

  “Flotsam,” Arthur had followed the direction of my glance, “which I have been able, happily, to save from the wreck.”

  “Now, Herr Bradshaw,” put in Frl. Schroeder, “tell me your candid opinion. Herr Norris will have it that those nymphs were ugly. I always thought them sweetly pretty myself. Of course, I know some people would call them old-fashioned.”

  “I shouldn’t have said they were ugly,” I replied, diplomatically. “But it’s nice to have a change sometimes, don’t you think?”

  “Change is the spice of Life,” Arthur murmured as he fetched a glass from the cupboard. Inside, I caught sight of an array of bottles: “Which may I offer you, William — kümmel or Benedictine? Frl. Schroeder, I know, prefers cherry brandy.”

  Now that I could see the two of them by daylight, I was struck by the contrast. Poor Frl. Schroeder seemed to have got much older; indeed, she was quite an old woman. Her face was pouched and wrinkled with worry, and her skin, despite a thick layer of rouge and powder, looked sallow. She hadn’t been getting enough to eat. Arthur, on the other hand, looked positively younger. He was fatter in the cheeks and fresh as a rosebud; barbered, manicured, and perfumed. He wore a big turquoise ring I hadn’t seen before, and an opulent new brown suit. His wig struck a daring, more luxuriant note. It was composed of glossy, waved locks, which wreathed themselves around his temples in tropical abundance. There was something jaunty, even bohemian, in his whole appearance. He might have been a popular actor or a rich violinist.

  “How long have you been back here?” I asked.

  “Let me see, it must be nearly two months now . . . how time flies! I really must apologize for my shortcomings as a correspondent. I’ve been so very busy! and Frl. Schroeder seemed uncertain of your London address.”

  “We’re neither of us much good at letter-writing, I’m afraid.”

  “The spirit was willing, dear boy. I hope you’ll believe that. You were ever present in my thoughts. It is indeed a pleasure to have you back again. I feel that a load has been lifted from my mind already.”

  This sounded rather ominous. Perhaps he was on the rocks again. I only hoped that poor Frl. Schroeder wouldn’t have to suffer for it. There she sat, glass in hand, on the sofa, beaming, drinking in every word; her legs were so short that her black velvet shoes dangled an inch above the carpet.

  “Just look, Herr Bradshaw,” she extended her wrist, “what Herr Norris gave me for my birthday. I was so delighted, will you believe me, that I started crying.”

  It was a handsome-looking gold bracelet which must have cost at least fifty marks. I was really touched.

  “How nice of you, Arthur!�
�

  He blushed. He was quite confused.

  “A trifling mark of esteem. I can’t tell you what a comfort Frl. Schroeder has been to me. I should like to engage her permanently as my secretary.”

  “Oh, Herr Norris, how can you talk such nonsense!”

  “I assure you, Frl. Schroeder, I’m quite in earnest.”

  “You see how he makes fun of a poor old woman, Herr Bradshaw.”

  She was slightly drunk. When Arthur poured her out a second glass of cherry brandy, she upset some of it over her dress. When the commotion which followed this accident had subsided, he said that he must be going out.

  “Sorry as I am to break up this festive gathering . . . duty calls. Yes, I shall hope to see you this evening, William. Shall we have dinner together? Would that be nice?”

  “Very nice.”

  “Then I’ll say au revoir, till eight o’clock.”

  I got up to go and unpack. Frl. Schroeder followed me into my room. She insisted on helping me. She was still tipsy and kept putting things into the wrong places; shirts into the drawer of the writing-table, books in the cupboard with the socks. She couldn’t stop singing Arthur’s praises.

  “He came as if Heaven had sent him. I’d got into arrears with the rent, as I haven’t done since the inflation days. The porter’s wife came up to see me about it several times. ‘Frl. Schroeder,’ she said, ‘we know you and we don’t want to be hard on you. But we’ve all got to live.’ I declare there were evenings when I was so depressed I’d half a mind to put my head in the oven. And then Herr Norris arrived. I thought he’d just come to pay me a visit as it were. ‘How much do you charge for the front bedroom?’ he asked. You could have knocked me over with a feather. ‘Fifty,’ I said. I didn’t dare ask more, with the times so bad. I was trembling all over for fear he’d think it was too much. And what do you think he answered? ‘Frl. Schroeder,’ he said, ‘I couldn’t possibly dream of letting you have less than sixty. It would be robbery.’ I tell you, Herr Bradshaw, I could have kissed his hand.”