The Berlin Stories

by Christopher Isherwood

Frl. Schroeder was called in, for a start had to be made with Arthur’s packing. She was melancholy at first, and inclined to be reproachful, but a glass of cognac worked wonders. She had her own explanation of the reasons for Arthur’s sudden departure.

  “Ah, Herr Norris, Herr Norris! You should have been more careful. A gentleman at your time of life ought to have experience enough of these things . . .” She winked tipsily at me, behind his back. “Why didn’t you stay faithful to your old Schroeder? She would have helped you, she knew about it all the time!”

  Arthur, perplexed and vaguely embarrassed, looked questioningly to me for an explanation. I pretended complete ignorance. And now the trunks arrived, fetched down by the porter and his son from the attics at the top of the house. Frl. Schroeder exclaimed, as she packed, over the magnificence of Arthur’s clothes. Arthur himself, generous and gay, began distributing largess. The porter got a suit, the porter’s wife a bottle of sherry, their son a pair of snakeskin shoes which were much too small for him, but which he insisted he would squeeze into somehow. The piles of newspapers and periodicals were to be sent to a hospital. Arthur certainly gave things away with an air; he knew how to play the Grand Seigneur. The porter’s family went away grateful and deeply impressed. I saw that the beginnings of a legend had been created.

  As for Frl. Schroeder herself, she was positively loaded with gifts. In addition to the etchings and the Japanese screen, Arthur gave her three flasks of perfume, some hair lotion, a powder-puff, the entire contents of his wine-cupboard, two beautiful scarves, and, amidst much blushing, a pair of his coveted silk combinations.

  “I do wish, William you’d take something, too. Just some little trifle . . .”

  “All right, Arthur, thank you very much . . . I tell you what, have you still got Miss Smith’s Torture Chamber? I always liked it the best of those books of yours.”

  “You did? Really?” Arthur flushed with pleasure. “How charming of you to say so! You know, William, I really think I must tell you a secret. The last of my secrets . . . I wrote that book myself!”

  “Arthur, you didn’t!”

  “I did, I assure you!” Arthur giggled, delighted. “Years ago, now . . . It’s a youthful indiscretion of which I’ve since felt rather ashamed . . . It was printed privately in Paris. I’m told that some of the best-known collectors in Europe have copies in their libraries. It’s exceedingly rare.”

  “And you never wrote anything else?”

  “Never, alas! . . . I put my genius into my life, not into my art. That remark is not original. Never mind. By the way, since we are on this topic, do you know that I’ve never said goodbye to my dear Anni? I really think I might ask her to come here this afternoon, don’t you? After all, I’m not leaving until after tea.”

  “Better not, Arthur. You’ll need all your strength for the journey.”

  “Well, ha, ha! You may be right. The pain of parting would no doubt be most severe . . .”

  After lunch, Arthur lay down to rest. I took his trunks in a taxi to the Lehrter Station and deposited them in the cloakroom. Arthur was anxious to avoid a lengthy ceremony of departure from the house. The tall detective was on duty now. He watched the loading of the taxi with interest, but made no move to follow.

  At tea Arthur was nervous and depressed. We sat together in the disordered bedroom, with the doors of the empty cupboards standing open and the mattress rolled up at the foot of the bed. I felt apprehensive, for no reason. Arthur rubbed his chin wearily and sighed:

  “I feel like the Old Year, William. I shall soon be gone.”

  I smiled. “A week from now you’ll be sitting on the deck in the sun, while we’re still freezing or soaking in this wretched town. I envy you, I can tell you.”

  “Do you, dear boy? I sometimes wish I didn’t have to do so much travelling. Mine is essentially a domestic nature. I ask nothing better than to settle down.”

  “Well, why don’t you, then?”

  “That’s what I so often ask myself . . . Something always seems to prevent it.”

  At last it was time to go.

  With infinite fuss, Arthur put on his coat, lost and found his gloves, gave a last touch to his wig. I picked up his suitcase and went out into the hall. Nothing was left but the worst, the ordeal of saying goodbye to Frl. Schroeder. She emerged from the living-room, moist-eyed.

  “Well, Herr Norris . . .”

  The door-bell rang loudly, and there was a double knock on the door. The interruption made Arthur jump.

  “Good gracious! Whoever can that be?”

  “It’s a postman, I expect,” said Frl. Schroeder. “Excuse me, Herr Bradshaw . . .”

  Barely had she opened the door when the man outside it pushed past her into the hall. It was Schmidt.

  That he was drunk was obvious, even before he opened his mouth. He stood swaying uncertainly, hatless, his tie over one shoulder, his collar awry. His huge face was inflamed and swollen so that his eyes were mere slits. The hall was a small place for four people. We were standing so close together that I could smell his breath. It stank vilely.

  Arthur, at my side, uttered an incoherent sound of dismay, and I myself could only gape. Strange as it may seem, I was entirely unprepared for this apparition. During the last twenty-four hours I had forgotten Schmidt’s existence altogether.

  He was the master of the situation, and he knew it. His face fairly beamed with malice. Kicking the front door shut behind him with his foot, he surveyed the two of us; Arthur’s coat, the suitcase in my hand.

  “Doing a bunk, eh?” He spoke loudly, as if addressing a large audience in the middle distance. “I see . . . thought you’d give me the slip, did you?” He advanced a pace; he confronted the trembling and dismayed Arthur. “Lucky I came, wasn’t it? Unlucky for you . . .”

  Arthur emitted another sound, this time a kind of squeak of terror. It seemed to excite Schmidt to a positive frenzy of rage. He clenched his fists, he shouted with astonishing violence:

  “You dirty tyke!”

  He raised his arm. He may actually have been going to strike Arthur; if so, I shouldn’t have had time to prevent it. All I could do, within the instant, was to drop the suitcase to the ground. But Frl. Schroeder’s reactions were quicker and more effective. She hadn’t the ghost of an idea what the fuss was all about. That didn’t worry her. Enough that Herr Norris was being insulted by an unknown, drunken man. With a shrill battle-cry of indignation, she charged. Her outstretched palms caught Schmidt in the small of the back, propelled him forwards, like an engine shunting trucks. Unsteady on his feet and taken completely by surprise, he blundered headlong through the open doorway into the living-room and fell sprawling, face downwards, on the carpet. Frl. Schroeder promptly turned the key in the lock. The whole manoeuvre was the work of about five seconds.

  “Such cheek!” exclaimed Frl. Schroeder. Her cheeks were bright red with the exertion. “He comes barging in here as if the place belonged to him. And intoxicated . . . pfui! . . . the disgusting pig!”

  She seemed to find nothing particularly mysterious in the incident. Perhaps she connected Schmidt somehow with Margot and the ill-fated baby. If so, she was too tactful to say so. A tremendous rattle of knocks on the living-room door excused me from any attempt at inventing explanations.

  “Won’t he be able to get out at the back?” Arthur inquired nervously.

  “You can set your mind at rest, Herr Norris. The kitchen door’s locked.” Frl. Schroeder turned menacingly upon the invisible Schmidt. “Be quiet, you scoundrel! I’ll attend to you in a minute!”

  “All the same . . .” Arthur was on pins and needles, “I think we ought to be going . . .”

  “How are you going to get rid of him?” I asked Frl. Schroeder.

  “Oh, don’t you worry about that, Herr Bradshaw. As soon as you’re gone I’ll get the porter’s son up. He’ll go quietly enough, I promise you. If he doesn’t, he’ll be sorry. . .”

  We said goodbye hurriedly. Frl. Schroeder was to
o excited and triumphant to be emotional. Arthur kissed her on both cheeks. She stood waving to us from the top of the stairs. A fresh outburst of muffled knocking was audible behind her.

  We were in the taxi, and halfway to the station before Arthur recovered his composure sufficiently to be able to talk.

  “Dear me . . . I’ve seldom made such an exceedingly unpleasant exit from any town, I think . . .”

  “What you might call a rousing send-off.” I glanced behind me to make sure that the other taxi, with the tall detective, was still following us.

  “What do you think he’ll do, William? Perhaps he’ll go straight to the police?”

  “I’m pretty sure he won’t. As long as he’s drunk they won’t listen to him, and by the time he’s sober he’ll see himself that it’s no good. He hasn’t the least idea where we’re going either. For all he knows, you’ll be out of the country tonight.”

  “You may be right, dear boy. I hope so, I’m sure. I must say I hate to leave you exposed to his malice. You will be most careful, won’t you?”

  “Oh, Schmidt won’t bother me. I’m not worth it, from his point of view. He’ll probably find another victim easily enough. I dare say he’s got plenty on his books.”

  “While he was in my employ he certainly had opportunities,” Arthur agreed thoughtfully. “And I’ve no doubt he made full use of them. The creature had talents — of a perverted kind . . . Oh, unquestionably . . . yes . . .”

  At length it was all over. The misunderstanding with the cloak-room official, the fuss about the luggage, the finding of a corner seat, the giving of the tip. Arthur leant out of the carriage window; I stood on the platform. We had five minutes to spare.

  “You’ll remember me to Otto, won’t you?”

  “I will.”

  “And give my love to Anni?”

  “Of course.”

  “I wish they could have been here.”

  “It’s a pity, isn’t it?”

  “But it would have been unwise, under the circumstances. Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes.”

  I longed for the train to start. There was nothing more to say, it seemed, except the things which must never be said now, because it was too late. Arthur seemed aware of the vacuum. He groped about uneasily in his stock of phrases.

  “I wish you were coming with me, William . . . I shall miss you terribly, you know.”

  “Shall you?” I smiled awkwardly, feeling exquisitely uncomfortable.

  “I shall indeed . . . You’ve always been such a support to me. From the first moment we met . . .”

  I blushed. It was astonishing what a cad he could make me feel. Hadn’t I, after all, misunderstood him? Hadn’t I misjudged him? Hadn’t I, in some obscure way, behaved very badly? To change the subject, I asked:

  “You remember that journey? I simply couldn’t understand why they made such a fuss at the frontier. I suppose they’d got their eye on you already?”

  Arthur didn’t care much for this reminiscence.

  “I suppose they had . . . Yes.”

  Another silence. I glanced at the clock, despairingly. One more minute to go. Fumblingly, he began again.

  “Try not to think too hardly of me, William . . . I should hate that . . .”

  “What nonsense, Arthur . . .” I did my best to pass it off lightly. “How absurd you are!”

  “This life is so very complex. If my behaviour hasn’t always been quite consistent, I can truly say that I am and always shall be loyal to the Party, at heart . . . Say you believe that, please!”

  He was outrageous, grotesque, entirely without shame. But what was I to answer? At that moment, had he demanded it, I’d have sworn that two and two make five.

  “Yes, Arthur, I do believe it.”

  “Thank you, William . . . Oh dear, now we really are off. I do hope all my trunks are in the van. God bless you, dear boy. I shall think of you always. Where’s my mackintosh? Ah, that’s all right. Is my hat on straight? Goodbye. Write often, won’t you? Goodbye.”

  The train, gathering speed, drew his manicured hand from mine. I walked a little way down the platform and stood waving until the last coach was out of sight.

  As I turned to leave the station I nearly collided with a man who had been standing just behind me. It was the detective.

  “Excuse me, Herr Kommissar,” I murmured.

  But he did not even smile.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Early in march, after the elections, it turned suddenly mild and warm. “Hitler’s weather,” said the porter’s wife; and her son remarked jokingly that we ought to be grateful to van der Lubbe, because the burning of the Reichstag had melted the snow. “Such a nice-looking boy,” observed Frl. Schroeder with a sigh. “However could he go and do a dreadful thing like that?” The porter’s wife snorted.

  Our street looked quite gay when you turned into it and saw the black-white-red flags hanging motionless from windows against the blue spring sky. On the Nollendorfplatz people were sitting out of doors before the café in their overcoats, reading about the coup d’état in Bavaria. Göring spoke from the radio horn at the corner. Germany is awake, he said. An ice-cream shop was open. Uniformed Nazis strode hither and thither, with serious set faces, as though on weighty errands. The newspaper readers by the café turned their heads to watch them pass and smiled and seemed pleased.

  They smiled approvingly at these youngsters in their big, swaggering boots who were going to upset the Treaty of Versailles. They were pleased because it would soon be summer, because Hitler had promised to protect the small tradesmen, because their newspapers told them that the good times were coming. They were suddenly proud of being blonde. And they thrilled with a furtive, sensual pleasure, like schoolboys, because the Jews, their business rivals, and the Marxists, a vaguely defined minority of people who didn’t concern them, had been satisfactorily found guilty of the defeat and the inflation, and were going to catch it.

  The town was full of whispers. They told of illegal midnight arrests, of prisoners tortured in the S.A. barracks, made to spit on Lenin’s picture, swallow castor oil, eat old socks. They were drowned by the loud, angry voice of the Government, contradicting through its thousand mouths. But not even Göring could silence Helen Pratt. She had decided to investigate the atrocities on her own account. Morning, noon, and night she nosed round the city, ferreting out the victims or their relations, cross-examining them for details. The unfortunate people were reticent, of course, and deadly scared. They didn’t want a second dose. But Helen was as relentless as their torturers. She bribed, cajoled, pestered. Sometimes, losing her patience, she threatened. What would happen to them afterwards frankly didn’t interest her. She was out to get facts.

  It was Helen who first told me that Bayer was dead. She had absolutely reliable evidence. One of the office staff, since released, had seen his corpse in the Spandau barracks. “It’s a funny thing,” she added, “his left ear was torn right off . . . God knows why. It’s my belief that some of this gang are simply looneys. Why, Bill, what’s the matter? You’re going green round the gills.”

  “That’s how I feel,” I said.

  An awkward thing had happened to Fritz Wendel. A few days before, he had had a motor accident; he had sprained his wrist and scratched the skin off his cheek. The injuries weren’t at all serious, but he had to wear a big piece of sticking-plaster and carry his arm in a sling. And now, in spite of the lovely weather, he wouldn’t venture out of doors. Bandages of any kind gave rise to misunderstandings, especially when, like Fritz, you had a dark complexion and coal-black hair. Passers-by made unpleasant and threatening remarks. Fritz wouldn’t admit this, of course. “Hell, what I mean, one feels such a darn fool.” He had become exceedingly cautious. He wouldn’t refer to politics at all, even when we were alone together. “Eventually it had to happen,” was his only comment on the new régime. As he said this he avoided my eyes.

  The whole city lay under an epidemic of discreet, infectious f
ear. I could feel it, like influenza, in my bones. When the first news of the house-searchings began to come in, I had consulted with Frl. Schroeder about the papers which Bayer had given me. We hid them and my copy of the Communist Manifesto under the wood-pile in the kitchen. Unbuilding and rebuilding the wood-pile took half an hour, and before it was finished our precautions had begun to seem rather childish. I felt a bit ashamed of myself, and consequently exaggerated the importance and danger of my position to Frl. Schroeder, who listened respectfully, with rising indignation. “You mean to say they’d come into my flat, Herr Bradshaw? Well, of all the cheek. But just let them try it! Why, I’d box their ears for them; I declare I would!”

  A night or two after this I was woken by a tremendous banging on the outside door. I sat up in bed and switched on the light. It was just three o’clock. Now I’m for it, I thought. I wondered if they’d allow me to ring up the Embassy. Smoothing my hair tidy with my hand, I tried, not very successfully, to assume an expression of haughty contempt. But when at last Frl. Schroeder had shuffled out to see what was the matter, it was only a lodger from next door who’d come to the wrong flat because he was drunk.

  After this scare, I suffered from sleeplessness. I kept fancying I heard heavy wagons drawing up outside our house. I lay waiting in the dark for the ringing of the door-bell. A minute. Five minutes. Ten. One morning, as I stared, half asleep, at the wall-paper above my head, the pattern suddenly formed itself into a chain of little hooked crosses. What was worse, I noticed that everything in the room was really a kind of brown: either green-brown, black-brown, yellow-brown, or red-brown; but all brown, unmistakably. When I had had breakfast and taken a purgative, I felt better.

  One morning I had a visit from Otto.

  It must have been about half past six when he rang our bell. Frl. Schroeder wasn’t up yet; I let him in myself. He was in a filthy state, his hair tousled and matted, a stain of dirty blood down the side of his face from a scratch on the temples.

  “Servus, Willi,” he muttered. He put out his hand suddenly and clutched my arm. With difficulty, I saved him from falling. But he wasn’t drunk, as I at first imagined; simply exhausted. He flopped down into a chair in my room. When I returned from shutting the outside door, he was already asleep.