The Berlin Stories

by Christopher Isherwood

  At this critical moment the door of the office opened. It was Bayer himself, come out to see what all the noise was about. His smiling eyes took in the scene with the amusement of a tolerant schoolmaster. The uproar did not disconcert him in the least; he was used to it. Smiling, he shook hands with the scared and embarrassed Arthur, laying a reassuring hand upon his shoulder. “Ludwig!” roared the onlookers. “Ludwig! Arthur! Speech!” Bayer laughed at them and made a good-humoured gesture of salute and dismissal. Then he turned, escorting Arthur and myself into the office. The noise outside gradually subsided into singing and shouted jokes. In the outer office the typists were doing their best to carry on work amidst groups of eagerly arguing men and women. The walls were plastered with news-sheets displaying the election results. We elbowed our way into Bayer’s little room. Arthur sank at once into a chair and began fanning himself with his recovered hat.

  “Well, well . . . dear me! I feel quite carried away, as it were, in the whirl of history; distinctly battered. This is indeed a red-letter day for the Cause.”

  Bayer’s eyes regarded him with vivid, faintly amused interest.

  “It surprises you, eh?”

  “Well — er — I must admit that hardly, in my most sanguine dreams, had I dared to expect such a very decisive — er —

  victory.”

  Bayer nodded encouragingly.

  “It is good, yes. But it will be unwise, I think, to exaggerate the importance of this success. Many factors have contributed to it. It is, how do you call, symptomic?”

  “Symptomatic,” Arthur corrected, with a little cough. His blue eyes shifted uneasily over the litter of papers on Bayer’s writing-table. Bayer gave him a brilliant smile.

  “Ah, yes. Symptomatic. It is symptomatic of the phase through which we are at present passing. We are not yet ready to cross the Wilhelmstrasse.” He made a humorous gesture of his hand, indicating, through the window, the direction of the Foreign Office and Hindenburg’s residence. “No. Not quite yet.”

  “Do you think,” I asked, “that this means the Nazis are done for?”

  He shook his head with decision. “Unfortunately, no. We may not be so optimistic. The reverse is for them of a temporary character only. You see, Mr Bradshaw, the economic situation is in their favour. We shall hear much more of our friends, I think.”

  “Oh, please don’t say anything so unpleasant,” murmured Arthur, fidgeting with his hat. His eyes continued furtively to explore the writing-table. Bayer’s glance followed them.

  “You do not like the Nazis, eh, Norris?”

  His tone was rich with amusement. He appeared to find Arthur extremely funny at this precise moment. I was at a loss to understand why. Moving over to the table, he began, as if abstractedly, to handle the papers which lay there.

  “Really!” protested Arthur in shocked tones. “How can you ask? Naturally, I dislike them. Odious creatures . . .”

  “Ah, but you should not!” With great deliberation, Bayer took a key from his pocket, unlocked a drawer in the writing-table, and drew from it a heavy sealed packet. His red-brown eyes sparkled teasingly. “This outlook is quite false. The Nazi of today can be the communist of tomorrow. When they have seen where their leaders’ programme has brought them, they may not be so very difficult to convince. I wish all opposition could be thus overcome. There are others, you see, who will not listen to such arguments.”

  Smiling, he turned the packet in his hands. Arthur’s eyes were fastened upon it, as if in unwilling fascination; Bayer seemed to be amusing himself by exerting his hypnotic powers. At all events, Arthur was plainly most uncomfortable.

  “Er — yes. Well . . . you may be right . . .”

  There was a curious silence. Bayer was smiling to himself, subtly, with the corners of his lips. I had never seen him in this mood before. Suddenly, he appeared to become aware of what he was holding.

  “Why, of course, my dear Norris . . . These are the documents I had promised to show you. Can you be so kind as to let me have them tomorrow again? We have to forward them, you know, as quickly as possible.”

  “Certainly. Of course . . .” Arthur had fairly jumped out of his seat to receive the packet. He was like a dog which has been put on trust for a lump of sugar. “I’ll take the greatest care of them, I assure you.”

  Bayer smiled, but said nothing.

  Some minutes later, he escorted us affably out of the premises by the back staircase which led down into the courtyard. Arthur thus avoided another encounter with his admirers.

  As we walked away along the street, he seemed thoughtful and vaguely unhappy. Twice he sighed.

  “Feeling tired?” I asked.

  “Not tired, dear boy. No . . . I was merely indulging in my favourite vice of philosophizing. When you get to my age you’ll see more and more clearly how very strange and complex life is. Take this morning, for instance. The simple enthusiasm of all those young people; it touched me very deeply. On such occasions, one feels oneself so unworthy. I suppose there are individuals who do not suffer from a conscience. But I am not one of them.”

  The strangest thing about this odd outburst was that Arthur obviously meant what he said. It was a genuine fragment of a confession, but I could make nothing of it.

  “Yes,” I encouraged experimentally, “I sometimes feel like that myself.” Arthur didn’t respond. He merely sighed for the third time. A sudden shadow of anxiety passed over his face; hastily he fingered the bulge in his pocket made by the papers which Bayer had given him. They were still there. He breathed relief.

  November passed without much event. I had more pupils again, and was busy. Bayer gave me two long manuscripts to translate.

  There were rumours that the K.P.D. would be forbidden; soon, in a few weeks. Otto was scornful. The Government would never dare, he said. The Party would fight. All the members of his cell had revolvers. They hung them, he told me, by strings from the bars of a cellar-grating in their Lokal, so that the police shouldn’t find them. The police were very active these days. Berlin, we heard, was to be cleaned up. Plainclothes men had paid several unexpected calls on Olga, but had failed, so far, to find anything. She was being very careful.

  We dined with Kuno several times and had tea at his flat. He was sentimental and preoccupied by turns. The intrigues which were going on within the Cabinet probably caused him a good deal of worry. And he regretted the freedom of his earlier bohemian existence. His public responsibilities debarred him from the society of the young men I had met at his Mecklenburg villa. Only their photographs remained to console him now, bound in a sumptuous album which he kept locked away in an obscure cupboard. Kuno showed it to me one day when we were alone.

  “Sometimes, in the evenings, I like to look at them, you see? And then I make up a story to myself that we are all living on a deserted island in the Pacific Ocean. Excuse me, you don’t think this very silly, I hope?”

  “Not at all,” I assured him.

  “You see, I knew you’d understand.” Encouraged, he proceeded shyly to further confessions. The desert island fantasy was nothing new. He had been cherishing it for months already; it had developed gradually into a private cult. Under its influence he had acquired a small library of stories for boys, most of them in English, which dealt with this particular kind of adventure. He had told his bookseller that he wanted them for a nephew in London. Kuno had found most of the books subtly unsatisfactory. There had been grown-ups in them, or buried treasures, or marvellous scientific inventions. He had no use for any of these. Only one story had really pleased him. It was called The Seven Who Got Lost.

  “This is the work of genius, I find.” Kuno was quite in earnest. His eyes gleamed with enthusiasm. “I should be so very happy, if you would care to read it, you see?”

  I took the book home. It was certainly not at all bad of its kind. Seven boys, of ages ranging from sixteen to nineteen, are washed ashore on an uninhabited island, where there is water and plenty of vegetation. They have no food
with them and no tools but a broken penknife. The book was a matter-of-fact account, cribbed largely from the Swiss Family Robinson, of how they hunted, fished, built a hut, and finally got themselves rescued. I read it at a sitting and brought it back to Kuno next day. He was delighted when I praised it.

  “You remember Jack?”

  “The one who was so good at fishing? Yes.”

  “Now tell me, please, is he not like Gunther?”

  I had no idea who Gunther was, but rightly guessed him to have been one of the Mecklenburg houseparty.

  “Yes, he is, rather.”

  “Oh, I am so glad you find this, too. And Tony?”

  “The one who was such a marvellous climber?”

  Kuno nodded eagerly: “Doesn’t he remind you of Heinz?”

  “I see what you mean.”

  In this way we worked through the other characters, Teddy, Bob, Rex, Dick: Kuno supplied a counterpart to each. I congratulated myself on having really read the book and being thus able to pass this curious examination with credit. Last of all came Jimmy, the hero, the champion swimmer, the boy who always led the others in an emergency and had a brainwave to solve every difficulty.

  “You didn’t recognize him, perhaps?”

  Kuno’s tone was oddly, ludicrously coy. I saw that I must beware of giving the wrong answer. But what on earth was I to say?

  “I did have some idea . . .” I ventured.

  “You did?” He was actually blushing.

  I nodded, smiling, trying to look intelligent, waiting for a hint.

  “He is myself, you see.” Kuno had the simplicity of complete conviction. “When I was a boy. But exactly . . . This writer is a genius. He tells things about me which nobody else can know. I am Jimmy. Jimmy is myself. It is marvellous.”

  “It’s certainly very strange,” I agreed.

  After this, we had several talks about the island. Kuno told me exactly how he pictured it, and dwelt in detail upon the appearance and characteristics of his various imaginary companions. He certainly had a most vivid imagination. I wished that the author of The Seven Who Got Lost could have been there to hear him. He would have been startled to behold the exotic fruit of his unambitious labours. I gathered that I was Kuno’s only confidant on the subject. I felt as embarrassed as some unfortunate person who has been forcibly made a member of a secret society. If Arthur was with us, Kuno showed only too plainly his desire to get rid of him and be alone with me. Arthur noticed this, of course, and irritated me by putting the obvious construction on our private interviews. All the same, I hadn’t the heart to give Kuno’s poor little mystery away.

  “Look here,” I said to him once, “why don’t you do it?”

  “Please?”

  “Why don’t you clear out to the Pacific and find an island like the one in the book, and really live there? Other people have done it. There’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t.”

  Kuno shook his head sadly.

  “Excuse me, no. It’s impossible.”

  His tone was so final and so sad that I was silent. Nor did I ever make such a suggestion to him again.

  As the month advanced, Arthur became increasingly depressed. I soon noticed that he had less money than formerly. Not that he complained. Indeed, he had become most secretive about his troubles. He made his economies as unobtrusively as possible, giving up taxis on the ground that a bus was just as quick, avoiding the expensive restaurants because, as he said, rich food disagreed with his digestion. Anni’s visits were less frequent also. Arthur had taken to going to bed early. During the day, he was out more than ever. He spent a good deal of his time, I discovered, in Bayer’s office.

  It wasn’t long before another telegram arrived from Paris. I had no difficulty in persuading Frl. Schroeder, whose curiosity was as shameless as my own, to steam open the envelope before Arthur’s return for his afternoon nap. With heads pressed close together, we read:

  Tea you sent no good at all cannot understand why believe you have another girl no kisses.

  Margot

  “You see,” exclaimed Frl. Schroeder, in delighted horror, “she’s been trying to stop it.”

  “What on earth . . .”

  “Why, Herr Bradshaw,” in her impatience she gave my hand a little slap, “how can you be so dense! The baby, of course. He must have sent her some stuff . . . Oh, these men! If he’d only come to me, I could have told him what to do. It never fails.”

  “For Heaven’s sake, Frl. Schroeder, don’t say anything about this to Herr Norris.”

  “Oh, Herr Bradshaw, you can trust me!”

  I think, all the same, that her manner must have given Arthur some hint of what we had done. For, after this, the French telegrams ceased to arrive. Arthur, I supposed, had prudently arranged to have them delivered to some other address.

  And then one evening early in December, when Arthur was out and Frl. Schroeder was having a bath, the doorbell rang. I answered it myself. There, on the threshold, stood Schmidt.

  “Good evening, Mr Bradshaw.”

  He looked shabby and unkempt. His great, greasy moonface was unwholesomely white. At first I thought he must be drunk.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  Schmidt grinned unpleasantly. “I want to see Norris.” He must have read what was in my mind, for he added: “You needn’t bother to tell me any lies, because I know he’s living here, now, see?”

  “Well, you can’t see him now. He’s gone out.”

  “Are you sure he’s out?” Schmidt regarded me smiling, through half-closed eyes.

  “Perfectly. Otherwise I shouldn’t have told you so.”

  “So . . . I see.”

  We stood looking at each other for some moments, smiling with dislike. I was tempted to slam the door in his face.

  “Mr Norris would do better to see me,” said Schmidt, after a pause, in an offhand, casual tone, as though this were his first mention of the subject. I put the side of my foot as unostentatiously as possible against the door, in case he should suddenly turn rough.

  “I think,” I said gently, “that that’s a matter for Mr Norris himself to judge.”

  “Won’t you tell him I’m here?” Schmidt glanced down at my foot and impudently grinned. Our voices were so mild and low-pitched that anybody passing up the staircase would have supposed us to be two neighbours, engaged in a friendly chat.

  “I’ve told you once already that Mr Norris isn’t at home. Don’t you understand German?”

  Schmidt’s smile was extraordinarily insulting. His half-closed eyes regarded me with a certain amusement, a qualified disapproval, as though I were a picture badly out of drawing. He spoke slowly, with elaborate patience.

  “Perhaps it wouldn’t be troubling you too much to give Mr Norris a message from me?”

  “Yes. I’ll do that.”

  “Will you be so kind as to tell Mr Norris that I’ll wait another three days, but no longer? You understand? At the end of this week, if I haven’t heard from him, I shall do what I said in my letter. He’ll know what I mean. He thinks I daren’t, perhaps. Well, he’ll soon find out what a mistake he’s made. I don’t want trouble, unless he asks for it. But I’ve got to live . . . I’ve got to look after myself the same as he has. I mean to have my rights. He needn’t think he can keep me down in the gutter . . .”

  He was actually trembling all over. Some violent emotion, rage or extreme weakness, was shaking his body like a leaf. I thought for a moment that he would fall.

  “Are you ill?” I asked.

  My question had an extraordinary effect on Schmidt. His oily, smiling sneer stiffened into a tense mask of hatred. He had utterly lost control of himself. Coming a step nearer to me, he literally shouted in my face:

  “It isn’t any business of yours, do you hear? Just you tell Norris what I said. If he doesn’t do what I want, I’ll make him sorry for the day he was born! And you, too, you swine!”

  His hysterical fury infected me suddenly. Stepping back
, I flung the door to with a violent slam, hoping to catch his thrust-forward, screaming face on the point of the jaw. But there was no impact. His voice stopped like a gramophone from which the needle is lifted. Nor did he utter another sound. As I stood there behind the closed door, my heart pounding with anger, I heard his light footsteps cross the landing and begin to descend the stairs.

  Chapter Twelve

  An hour later, Arthur returned home. I followed him into his room to break the news.

  “Schmidt’s been here.”

  If Arthur’s wig had been suddenly jerked from his head by a fisherman, he could hardly have looked more startled.

  “William, please tell me the worst at once. Don’t keep me in suspense. What time was this? Did you see him yourself? What did he say?”

  “He’s trying to blackmail you, isn’t he?”

  Arthur looked at me quickly.

  “Did he admit that?”

  “He as good as told me. He says he’s written to you already, and that if you don’t do what he wants by the end of the week there’ll be trouble.”

  “He actually said that? Oh dear . . .”

  “You should have told me he’d written,” I said reproachfully.

  “I know, dear boy, I know . . .” Arthur was the picture of distress. “It’s been on the tip of my tongue several times this last fortnight. But I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily. I kept hoping that, somehow, it might all blow over.”

  “Now look here, Arthur; the point is this: does Schmidt really know anything about you which can do you harm?”

  He had been nervously pacing the room, and now sank, a disconsolate shirt-sleeved figure, into a chair, forlornly regarding his button-boots.

  “Yes, William.” His voice was small and apologetic. “I’m afraid he does.”

  “What sort of things does he know?”

  “Really, I . . . I don’t think, even for you, that I can go into the details of my hideous past.”

  “I don’t want details. What I want to know is, would Schmidt get you involved in any kind of criminal charge?”