The Berlin Stories

by Christopher Isherwood

  “Who’s Sally?”

  “Why, I forgot. You don’t know Sally. Too bad of me. Eventually she’s coming around here this afternoon.”

  “Is she nice?”

  Fritz rolled his naughty black eyes, handing me a rum-moistened cigarette from his patent tin:

  “Mar-vellous!” he drawled. “Eventually I believe I’m getting crazy about her.”

  “And who is she? What does she do?”

  “She’s an English girl, an actress: sings at the Lady Windermere — hot stuff, believe me!”

  “That doesn’t sound much like an English girl, I must say.”

  “Eventually she’s got a bit of French in her. Her mother was French.”

  A few minutes later, Sally herself arrived.

  “Am I terribly late, Fritz darling?”

  “Only half of an hour, I suppose,” Fritz drawled, beaming with proprietary pleasure. “May I introduce Mr Isherwood — Miss Bowles? Mr Isherwood is commonly known as Chris.”

  “I’m not,” I said. “Fritz is about the only person who’s ever called me Chris in my life.”

  Sally laughed. She was dressed in black silk, with a small cape over her shoulders and a little cap like a page-boy’s stuck jauntily on one side of her head:

  “Do you mind if I use your telephone, sweet?”

  “Sure. Go right ahead.” Fritz caught my eye. “Come into the other room, Chris. I want to show you something.” He was evidently longing to hear my first impressions of Sally, his new acquisition.

  “For heaven’s sake, don’t leave me alone with this man!” she exclaimed. “Or he’ll seduce me down the telephone. He’s most terribly passionate.”

  As she dialled the number, I noticed that her fingernails were painted emerald green, a colour unfortunately chosen, for it called attention to her hands, which were much stained by cigarette-smoking and as dirty as a little girl’s. She was dark enough to be Fritz’s sister. Her face was long and thin, powdered dead white. She had very large brown eyes which should have been darker, to match her hair and the pencil she used for her eyebrows.

  “Hilloo,” she cooed, pursing her brilliant cherry lips as though she were going to kiss the mouthpiece: “Ist dass Du, mein Liebling?” Her mouth opened in a fatuously sweet smile. Fritz and I sat watching her, like a performance at the theatre. “Was wollen wir machen, Morgen Abend? Oh, wie wunderbar . . . Nein, nein, ich werde bleiben Heute Abend zu Hause. Ja, ja, ich werde wirklich bleiben zu Hause . . . Auf Wiedersehen, mein Liebling . . .”

  She hung up the receiver and turned to us triumphantly.

  “That’s the man I slept with last night,” she announced. “He makes love marvellously. He’s an absolute genius at business and he’s terribly rich —” She came and sat down on the sofa beside Fritz, sinking back into the cushions with a sigh: “Give me some coffee, will you, darling? I’m simply dying of thirst.”

  And soon we were on to Fritz’s favourite topic: he pronounced it Larv.

  “On the average,” he told us, “I’m having a big affair every two years.”

  “And how long is it since you had your last?” Sally asked.

  “Exactly one year and eleven months!” Fritz gave her his naughtiest glance.

  “How marvellous!” Sally puckered up her nose and laughed a silvery little stage-laugh. “Doo tell me — what was the last one like?”

  This, of course, started Fritz off on a complete autobiography. We had the story of his seduction in Paris, details of a holiday flirtation at Las Palmas, the four chief New York romances, a disappointment in Chicago, and a conquest in Boston; then back to Paris for a little recreation, a very beautiful episode in Vienna, to London to be consoled and, finally, Berlin.

  “You know, Fritz darling,” said Sally, puckering up her nose at me, “I believe the trouble with you is that you’ve never really found the right woman.”

  “Maybe that’s true —” Fritz took this idea very seriously. His black eyes became liquid and sentimental: “Maybe I’m still looking for my ideal. . .”

  “But you’ll find her one day, I’m absolutely certain you will.” Sally included me, with a glance, in the game of laughing at Fritz.

  “You think so?” Fritz grinned lusciously, sparkling at her.

  “Don’t you think so?” Sally appealed to me.

  “I’m sure I don’t know,” I said. “Because I’ve never been able to discover what Fritz’s ideal is.”

  For some reason, this seemed to please Fritz. He took it as a kind of testimonial: “And Chris knows me pretty well,” he chimed in. “If Chris doesn’t know, well, I guess no one does.”

  Then it was time for Sally to go.

  “I’m supposed to meet a man at the Adlon at five,” she explained. “And it’s six already! Never mind, it’ll do the old swine good to wait. He wants me to be his mistress, but I’ve told him I’m damned if I will till he’s paid all my debts. Why are men always such beasts?” Opening her bag, she rapidly retouched her lips and eyebrows: “Oh, by the way, Fritz darling, could you be a perfect angel and lend me ten marks? I haven’t got a bean for a taxi.”

  “Why, sure!” Fritz put his hand into his pocket and paid up without hesitation, like a hero.

  Sally turned to me: “I say, will you come and have tea with me sometime? Give me your telephone number. I’ll ring you up.”

  I suppose, I thought, she imagines I’ve got cash. Well, this will be a lesson to her, once for all. I wrote my number in her tiny leather book. Fritz saw her out.

  “Well!” He came bounding back into the room and gleefully shut the door: “What do you think of her, Chris? Didn’t I tell you she was a good-looker?”

  “You did indeed!”

  “I’m getting crazier about her each time I see her!” With a sigh of pleasure, he helped himself to a cigarette: “More coffee, Chris?”

  “No, thank you very much.”

  “You know, Chris, I think she took a fancy to you, too!”

  “Oh, rot!”

  “Honestly, I do!” Fritz seemed pleased. “Eventually I guess we’ll be seeing a lot of her from now on!”

  When I got back to Frl. Schroeder’s, I felt so giddy that I had to lie down for half an hour on my bed. Fritz’s black coffee was as poisonous as ever.

  A few days later, he took me to hear Sally sing.

  The Lady Windermere (which now, I hear, no longer exists) was an arty “informal” bar, just off the Tauentzeinstrasse, which the proprietor had evidently tried to make look as much as possible like Montparnasse. The walls were covered with sketches on menu-cards, caricatures and signed theatrical photographs — (“To the one and only Lady Windermere.” “To Johnny, with all my heart.”) The Fan itself, four times life size, was displayed above the bar. There was a big piano on a platform in the middle of the room.

  I was curious to see how Sally would behave. I had imagined her, for some reason, rather nervous, but she wasn’t, in the least. She had a surprisingly deep husky voice. She sang badly, without any expression, her hands hanging down at her sides — yet her performance was, in its own way, effective because of her startling appearance and her air of not caring a curse what people thought of her. Her arms hanging carelessly limp, and a take-it-or-leave-it grin on her face, she sang:

  Now I know why Mother

  Told me to be true;

  She meant me for Someone

  Exactly like you.

  There was quite a lot of applause. The pianist, a handsome young man with blond wavy hair, stood up and solemnly kissed Sally’s hand. Then she sang two more songs, one in French and the other in German. These weren’t so well received.

  After the singing, there was a good deal more hand-kissing and a general movement towards the bar. Sally seemed to know everybody in the place. She called them all Thou and Darling. For a would-be-demi-mondaine, she seemed to have surprisingly little business sense or tact. She wasted a lot of time making advances to an elderly gentleman who would obviously have preferred a chat with th
e barman. Later, we all got rather drunk. Then Sally had to go off to an appointment, and the manager came and sat at our table. He and Fritz talked English Peerage. Fritz was in his element. I decided, as so often before, never to visit a place of this sort again.

  Then Sally rang up, as she had promised, to invite me to tea.

  She lived a long way down the Kurfürstendamm on the last dreary stretch which rises to Halensee. I was shown into a big gloomy half-furnished room by a fat untidy landlady with a pouchy sagging jowl like a toad. There was a broken-down sofa in one corner — and a faded picture of an eighteenth-century battle, with the wounded reclining on their elbows in graceful attitudes, admiring the prancings of Frederick the Great’s horse.

  “Oh, hullo, Chris darling!” cried Sally from the doorway. “How sweet of you to come! I was feeling most terribly lonely. I’ve been crying on Frau Karpf’s chest. Nicht wahr, Frau Karpf?” She appealed to the toad landlady, “ich habe geweint auf Dein Brust.” Frau Karpf shook her bosom in a toad-like chuckle.

  “Would you rather have coffee, Chris, or tea?” Sally continued. “You can have either. Only I don’t recommend the tea much. I don’t know what Frau Karpf does to it; I think she empties all the kitchen slops together into a jug and boils them up with the tea-leaves.”

  “I’ll have coffee, then.”

  “Frau Karpf, Liebling, willst Du sein ein Engel und bring zwei Tassen von Kaffee?” Sally’s German was not merely incorrect; it was all her own. She pronounced every word in a mincing, specially “foreign” manner. You could tell that she was speaking a foreign language from her expression alone. “Chris darling, will you be an angel and draw the curtains?”

  I did so, although it was still quite light outside. Sally, meanwhile, had switched on the table-lamp. As I turned from the window, she curled herself up delicately on the sofa like a cat, and, opening her bag, felt for a cigarette. But hardly was the pose complete before she’d jumped to her feet again:

  “Would you like a Prairie Oyster?” She produced glasses, eggs and a bottle of Worcester sauce from the boot-cupboard under the dismantled washstand: “I practically live on them.” Dexterously, she broke the eggs into the glasses, added the sauce and stirred up the mixture with the end of a fountain-pen: “They’re about all I can afford.” She was back on the sofa again, daintily curled up.

  She was wearing the same black dress today, but without the cape. Instead, she had a little white collar and white cuffs. They produced a kind of theatrically chaste effect, like a nun in grand opera. “What are you laughing at, Chris?” she asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said. But still I couldn’t stop grinning. There was, at that moment, something so extraordinarily comic in Sally’s appearance. She was really beautiful, with her little dark head, big eyes, and finely arched nose — and so absurdly conscious of all these features. There she lay, as complacently feminine as a turtle-dove, with her poised self-conscious head, and daintily arranged hands.

  “Chris, you swine, do tell me why you’re laughing?”

  “I really haven’t the faintest idea.”

  At this, she began to laugh, too: “You are mad, you know!”

  “Have you been here long?” I asked, looking round the large gloomy room.

  “Ever since I arrived in Berlin. Let’s see — that was about two months ago.”

  I asked what had made her decide to come out to Germany at all. Had she come alone? No, she’d come with a girl friend. An actress. Older than Sally. The girl had been to Berlin before. She’d told Sally that they’d certainly be able to get work with the Ufa. So Sally borrowed ten pounds from a nice old gentleman and joined her.

  She hadn’t told her parents anything about it until the two of them had actually arrived in Germany: “I wish you’d met Diana. She was the most marvellous gold-digger you can imagine. She’d get hold of men anywhere — it didn’t matter whether she could speak their language or not. She made one nearly die of laughing. I absolutely adored her.”

  But when they’d been together in Berlin three weeks and no job had appeared, Diana had got hold of a banker, who’d taken her off with him to Paris.

  “And left you here alone? I must say I think that was pretty rotten of her.”

  “Oh, I don’t know . . . Everyone’s got to look after themselves. I expect, in her place, I’d have done the same.”

  “I bet you wouldn’t!”

  “Anyhow, I’m all right. I can always get along alone.”

  “How old are you, Sally?”

  “Nineteen.”

  “Good God! And I thought you were about twenty-five!”

  “I know. Everyone does.”

  Frau Karpf came shuffling in with two cups of coffee on a tarnished metal tray.

  “Oh, Frau Karpf, Liebling, wie wunderbar von Dich!”

  “Whatever makes you stay in this house?” I asked, when the landlady had gone out: “I’m sure you could get a much nicer room than this.”

  “Yes, I know I could.”

  “Well then, why don’t you?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I’m lazy, I suppose.”

  “What do you have to pay here?”

  “Eighty marks a month.”

  “With breakfast included?”

  “No — I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?” I exclaimed severely. “But surely you must know for certain?”

  Sally took this meekly: “Yes, it’s stupid of me, I suppose. But, you see, I just give the old girl money when I’ve got some. So it’s rather difficult to reckon it all up exactly.”

  “But, good heavens, Sally — I only pay fifty a month for my room, with breakfast, and it’s ever so much nicer than this one!”

  Sally nodded, but continued apologetically: “And another thing is, you see, Christopher darling, I don’t quite know what Frau Karpf would do if I were to leave her. I’m sure she’d never get another lodger. Nobody else would be able to stand her face and her smell and everything. As it is, she owes three months’ rent. They’d turn her out at once if they knew she hadn’t any lodgers: and if they do that, she says she’ll commit suicide.”

  “All the same, I don’t see why you should sacrifice yourself for her.”

  “I’m not sacrificing myself, really. I quite like being here, you know. Frau Karpf and I understand each other. She’s more or less what I’ll be in thirty years’ time. A respectable sort of landlady would probably turn me out after a week.”

  “My landlady wouldn’t turn you out.”

  Sally smiled vaguely, screwing up her nose: “How do you like the coffee, Chris darling?”

  “I prefer it to Fritz’s,” I said evasively.

  Sally laughed: “Isn’t Fritz marvellous? I adore him. I adore the way he says, ‘I give a damn.’ ”

  “ ‘Hell, I give a damn.’ ” I tried to imitate Fritz. We both laughed. Sally lit another cigarette: she smoked the whole time. I noticed how old her hands looked in the lamplight. They were nervous, veined and very thin — the hands of a middle-aged woman. The green finger-nails seemed not to belong to them at all; to have settled on them by chance — like hard, bright, ugly little beetles. “It’s a funny thing,” she added meditatively, “Fritz and I have never slept together, you know.” She paused, asked with interest, “Did you think we had?”

  “Well, yes — I suppose I did.”

  “We haven’t. Not once . . .” she yawned. “And now I don’t suppose we ever shall.”

  We smoked for some minutes in silence. Then Sally began to tell me about her family. She was the daughter of a Lancashire mill-owner. Her mother was a Miss Bowles, an heiress with an estate, and so, when she and Mr Jackson were married, they joined their names together: “Daddy’s a terrible snob, although he pretends not to be. My real name’s Jackson-Bowles; but of course, I can’t possibly call myself that on the stage. People would think I was crazy.”

  “I thought Fritz told me your mother was French?”

  “No, of course not!” Sall
y seemed quite annoyed. “Fritz is an idiot. He’s always inventing things.”

  Sally had one sister, named Betty. “She’s an absolute angel. I adore her. She’s seventeen, but she’s still most terribly innocent. Mummy’s bringing her up to be very county. Betty would nearly die if she knew what an old whore I am. She knows absolutely nothing whatever about men.”

  “But why aren’t you county, too, Sally?”

  “I don’t know. I suppose that’s Daddy’s side of the family coming out. You’d love Daddy. He doesn’t care a damn for anyone. He’s the most marvellous business man. And about once a month he gets absolutely dead tight and horrifies all Mummy’s smart friends. It was he who said I could go to London and learn acting.”

  “You must have left school very young?”

  “Yes. I couldn’t bear school. I got myself expelled.”

  “However did you do that?”

  “I told the headmistress I was going to have a baby.”

  “Oh, rot, Sally, you didn’t!”

  “I did, honestly! There was the most terrible commotion. They got a doctor to examine me, and sent for my parents. When they found out there was nothing the matter, they were most frightfully disappointed. The head mistress said that a girl who could even think of anything so disgusting couldn’t possibly be allowed to stay on and corrupt the other girls. So I got my own way. And then I pestered Daddy till he said I might go to London.”

  Sally had settled down in London, at a hostel, with other girl students. There, in spite of supervision, she had managed to spend large portions of the night at young men’s flats: “The first man who seduced me had no idea I was a virgin until I told him afterwards. He was marvellous. I adored him. He was an absolute genius at comedy parts. He’s sure to be terribly famous one day.”

  After a time, Sally had got crowd-work in films, and finally a small part in a touring company. Then she had met Diana.

  “And how much longer shall you stay in Berlin?” I asked.

  “Heaven knows. This job at the Lady Windermere only lasts another week. I got it through a man I met at the Eden Bar. But he’s gone off to Vienna now. I must ring up the Ufa people again, I suppose. And then there’s an awful old Jew who takes me out sometimes. He’s always promising to get me a contract; but he only wants to sleep with me, the old swine. I think the men in this country are awful. They’ve none of them got any money, and they expect you to let them seduce you if they give you a box of chocolates.”