The Berlin Stories

by Christopher Isherwood

  “I say, Sally, what exactly did this young man look like?”

  “He was about your height. Pale. Dark. You could tell he wasn’t a born American; he spoke with a foreign accent —”

  “Can you remember if he mentioned a man named Schraube, who lives in Chicago?”

  “Let’s see . . . Yes, of course he did! He talked about him a lot . . . But, Chris, how on earth did you know?”

  “Well, it’s like this . . . Look here, Sally, I’ve got a most awful confession to make to you . . . I don’t know if you’ll ever forgive me . . .”

  We went to the Alexanderplatz that same afternoon.

  The interview was even more embarrassing than I had expected. For myself at any rate. Sally, if she felt uncomfortable, did not show it by so much as the movement of an eyelid. She detailed the facts of the case to the two bespectacled police officials with such brisk matter-of-factness that one might have supposed she had come to complain about a strayed lapdog or an umbrella lost in a bus. The two officials — both obviously fathers of families — were at first inclined to be shocked. They dipped their pens excessively in the violet ink, made nervous inhibited circular movements with their elbows, before beginning to write, and were very curt and gruff.

  “Now about this hotel,” said the elder of them sternly: “I suppose you knew, before going there, that it was an hotel of a certain kind?”

  “Well, you didn’t expect us to go to the Bristol, did you?” Sally’s tone was very mild and reasonable: “They wouldn’t have let us in there without luggage anyway.”

  “Ah, so you had no luggage?” The younger one pounced upon this fact triumphantly, as of supreme importance. His violet copperplate police-hand began to travel steadily across a ruled sheet of foolscap paper. Deeply inspired by this theme, he paid not the slightest attention to Sally’s retort:

  “I don’t usually pack a suitcase when a man asks me out to dinner.”

  The elder one caught the point, however, at once:

  “So it wasn’t till you were at the restaurant that this young man invited you to — er — accompany him to the hotel?”

  “It wasn’t till after dinner.”

  “My dear young lady,” the elder one sat back in his chair, very much the sarcastic father, “may I inquire whether it is your usual custom to accept invitations of this kind from perfect strangers?”

  Sally smiled sweetly. She was innocence and candour itself:

  “But you see, Herr Kommissar, he wasn’t a perfect stranger. He was my fiancé.”

  That made both of them sit up with a jerk. The younger one even made a small blot in the middle of his virgin page — the only blot, perhaps, to be found in all the spotless dossiers of the Polizeipräsidium.

  “You mean to tell me, Frl. Bowles” — but in spite of his gruffness, there was already a gleam in the elder one’s eye —“you mean to tell me that you became engaged to this man when you’d only known him a single afternoon?”

  “Certainly.”

  “Isn’t that, well — rather unusual?”

  “I suppose it is,” Sally seriously agreed. “But nowadays, you know, a girl can’t afford to keep a man waiting. If he asks her once and she refuses him, he may try somebody else. It’s all these surplus women —”

  At this, the elder official frankly exploded. Pushing back his chair, he laughed himself quite purple in the face. It was nearly a minute before he could speak at all. The young one was much more decorous; he produced a large handkerchief and pretended to blow his nose. But the nose-blowing developed into a kind of sneeze which became a guffaw; and soon he too had abandoned all attempt to take Sally seriously. The rest of the interview was conducted with comic-opera informality, accompanied by ponderous essays in gallantry. The elder official, particularly, became quite daring; I think they were both sorry that I was present. They wanted her to themselves.

  “Now don’t you worry, Frl. Bowles,” they told her, patting her hand at parting, “we’ll find him for you, if we have to turn Berlin inside out to do it!”

  “Well!” I exclaimed admiringly, as soon as we were out of earshot, “you do know how to handle them, I must say!”

  Sally smiled dreamily: she was feeling very pleased with herself: “How do you mean, exactly, darling?”

  “You know as well as I do — getting them to laugh like that: telling them he was your fiancé! It was really inspired!”

  But Sally didn’t laugh. Instead, she coloured a little, looking down at her feet. A comically guilty, childish expression came over her face:

  “You see, Chris, it happened to be quite true —”

  “True!”

  “Yes, darling.” Now, for the first time, Sally was really embarrassed: she began speaking very fast: “I simply couldn’t tell you this morning: after everything that’s happened, it would have sounded too idiotic for words . . . He asked me to marry him while we were at the restaurant, and I said Yes . . . You see, I thought that, being in films, he was probably quite used to quick engagements, like that: after all, in Hollywood, it’s quite the usual thing . . . And, as he was an American, I thought we could get divorced again easily, any time we wanted to . . . And it would have been a good thing for my career — I mean, if he’d been genuine — wouldn’t it? . . . We were to have got married today, if it could have been managed . . . It seems funny to think of, now —”

  “But Sally!” I stood still. I gaped at her. I had to laugh: “Well, really . . . You know, you’re the most extraordinary creature I ever met in my life!”

  Sally giggled a little, like a naughty child which has unintentionally succeeded in amusing the grown-ups:

  “I always told you I was a bit mad, didn’t I? Now perhaps you’ll believe it —”

  It was more than a week before the police could give us any news. Then, one morning, two detectives called to see me. A young man answering to our description had been traced and was under observation. The police knew his address, but wanted me to identify him before making the arrest. Would I come round with them at once to a snack-bar in the Kleiststrasse? He was to be seen there, about this time, almost every day. I should be able to point him out to them in the crowd and leave again at once, without any fuss or unpleasantness.

  I didn’t like the idea much, but there was no getting out of it now. The snack-bar, when we arrived, was crowded, for this was the lunch-hour. I caught sight of the young man almost immediately: he was standing at the counter, by the tea-urn, cup in hand. Seen thus, alone and off his guard, he seemed rather pathetic: he looked shabbier and far younger — a mere boy. I very nearly said: “He isn’t here.” But what would have been the use? They’d have got him, anyway. “Yes, that’s him,” I told the detectives. “Over there.” They nodded. I turned and hurried away down the street, feeling guilty and telling myself: I’ll never help the police again.

  A few days later, Sally came round to tell me the rest of the story: “I had to see him, of course . . . I felt an awful brute; he looked so wretched. All he said was: ‘I thought you were my friend.’ I’d have told him he could keep the money, but he’d spent it all, anyway . . . The police said he really had been to the States, but he isn’t American; he’s a Pole . . . He won’t be prosecuted, that’s one comfort. The doctor’s seen him and he’s going to be sent to a home. I hope they treat him decently there . . .”

  “So he was looney, after all?”

  “I suppose so. A sort of mild one . . .” Sally smiled. “Not very flattering to me, is it? Oh, and Chris, do you know how old he was? You’d never guess!”

  “Round about twenty, I should think.”

  “Sixteen!”

  “Oh, rot!”

  “Yes, honestly . . . The case would have to have been tried in the Children’s Court!”

  We both laughed. “You know, Sally,” I said, “what I really like about you is that you’re awfully easy to take in. People who never get taken in are so dreary.”

  “So you still like me, Chris darling?”
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br />   “Yes, Sally. I still like you.”

  “I was afraid you’d be angry with me — about the other day.”

  “I was. Very.”

  “But you’re not, now?”

  “No . . . I don’t think so.”

  “It’s no good my trying to apologize, or explain, or anything . . . I get like that, sometimes . . . I expect you understand, don’t you, Chris?”

  “Yes,” I said. “I expect I do.”

  I have never seen her since. About a fortnight later, just when I was thinking I ought really to ring her up, I got a postcard from Paris: “Arrived here last night. Will write properly tomorrow. Heaps of love.” No letter followed. A month after this, another postcard arrived from Rome, giving no address: “Am writing in a day or two,” it said. That was six years ago.

  So now I am writing to her.

  When you read this, Sally — if you ever do — please accept it as a tribute, the sincerest I can pay, to yourself and to our friendship.

  And send me another postcard.

  On Ruegen Island

  Summer 1931

  I wake early and go out to sit on the veranda in my pyjamas. The wood casts long shadows over the fields. Birds call with sudden uncanny violence, like alarm-clocks going off. The birch-trees hang down laden over the rutted, sandy earth of the country road. A soft bar of cloud is moving up from the line of trees along the lake. A man with a bicycle is watching his horse graze on a patch of grass by the path; he wants to disentangle the horse’s hoof from its tether-rope. He pushes the horse with both hands, but it won’t budge. And now an old woman in a shawl comes walking with a little boy. The boy wears a dark sailor suit; he is very pale and his neck is bandaged. They soon turn back. A man passes on a bicycle and shouts something to the man with the horse. His voice rings out, quite clear yet unintelligible, in the morning stillness. A cock crows. The creak of the bicycle going past. The dew on the white table and chairs in the garden arbour, and dripping from the heavy lilac. Another cock crows, much louder and nearer. And I think I can hear the sea, or very distant bells.

  The village is hidden in the wood, away up to the left. It consists almost entirely of boarding-houses, in various styles of seaside architecture — sham Moorish, old Bavarian, Taj Mahal, and the rococo doll’s house, with white fretwork balconies. Behind the woods is the sea. You can reach it without going through the village, by a zig-zag path, which brings you out abruptly to the edge of some sandy cliffs, with the beach below you, and the tepid shallow Baltic lying almost at your feet. This end of the bay is quite deserted; the official bathing-beach is round the corner of the headland. The white onion-domes of the Strand Restaurant at Baabe wobble in the distance, behind fluid waves of heat, a kilometre away.

  In the wood are rabbits and adders and deer. Yesterday morning I saw a roe being chased by a Borzoi dog, right across the fields and in amongst the trees. The dog couldn’t catch the roe, although it seemed to be going much the faster of the two, moving in long graceful bounds, while the roe went bucketing over the earth with wild rigid jerks, like a grand piano bewitched.

  There are two people staying in this house, besides myself. One of them is an Englishman, named Peter Wilkinson, about my own age. The other is a German working-class boy from Berlin, named Otto Nowak. He is sixteen or seventeen years old.

  Peter — as I already call him; we got rather tight the first evening, and quickly made friends — is thin and dark and nervous. He wears horn-rimmed glasses. When he gets excited, he digs his hands down between his knees and clenches them together. Thick veins stand out at the sides of his temples. He trembles all over with suppressed, nervous laughter, until Otto, rather irritated, exclaims: “Mensch, reg’ Dich bloss nicht so auf!”

  Otto has a face like a very ripe peach. His hair is fair and thick, growing low on his forehead. He has small sparkling eyes, full of naughtiness, and a wide, disarming grin, which is much too innocent to be true. When he grins, two large dimples appear in his peach-bloom cheeks. At present, he makes up to me assiduously, flattering me, laughing at my jokes, never missing an opportunity of giving me a crafty, understanding wink. I think he looks upon me as a potential ally in his dealings with Peter.

  This morning we all bathed together. Peter and Otto are busy building a large sand fort. I lay and watched Peter as he worked furiously, enjoying the glare, digging away savagely with his child’s spade, like a chain-gang convict under the eyes of an armed warder. Throughout the long, hot morning, he never sat still for a moment. He and Otto swam, dug, wrestled, ran races or played with a rubber football, up and down the sands. Peter is skinny but wiry. In his games with Otto, he holds his own, it seems, only by an immense, furious effort of will. It is Peter’s will against Otto’s body. Otto is his whole body; Peter is only his head. Otto moves fluidly, effortlessly; his gestures have the savage, unconscious grace of a cruel, elegant animal. Peter drives himself about, lashing his stiff, ungraceful body with the whip of his merciless will.

  Otto is outrageously conceited. Peter has bought him a chest-expander, and, with this, he exercises solemnly at all hours of the day. Coming into their bedroom, after lunch, to look for Peter, I found Otto wrestling with the expander like Laocoön, in front of the looking-glass, all alone: “Look, Christoph!” he gasped. “You see, I can do it! All five strands!” Otto certainly has a superb pair of shoulders and chest for a boy of his age — but his body is nevertheless somehow slightly ridiculous. The beautiful ripe lines of the torso taper away too suddenly to his rather absurd little buttocks and spindly, immature legs. And these struggles with the chest-expander are daily making him more and more top-heavy.

  This evening Otto had a touch of sunstroke, and went to bed early, with a headache. Peter and I walked up to the village, alone. In the Bavarian café, where the band makes a noise like Hell unchained, Peter bawled into my ear the story of his life.

  Peter is the youngest of a family of four. He has two sisters, both married. One of the sisters lives in the country and hunts. The other is what the newspapers call “a popular society hostess.” Peter’s elder brother is a scientist and explorer. He has been on expeditions to the Congo, the New Hebrides, and the Great Barrier Reef. He plays chess, speaks with the voice of a man of sixty, and has never, to the best of Peter’s belief, performed the sexual act. The only member of the family with whom Peter is at present on speaking terms is his hunting sister, but they seldom meet, because Peter hates his brother-in-law.

  Peter was delicate, as a boy. He did not go to a preparatory school but, when he was thirteen, his father sent him to a public school. His father and mother had a row about this which lasted until Peter, with his mother’s encouragement, developed heart trouble and had to be removed at the end of his second term. Once escaped, Peter began to hate his mother for having petted and coddled him into a funk. She saw that he could not forgive her and so, as Peter was the only one of her children whom she cared for, she got ill herself and soon afterwards died.

  It was too late to send Peter back to school again, so Mr Wilkinson engaged a tutor. The tutor was a very high-church young man who intended to become a priest. He took cold baths in winter and had crimpy hair and a Grecian jaw. Mr Wilkinson disliked him from the first, and the elder brother made satirical remarks, so Peter threw himself passionately on to the tutor’s side. The two of them went for walking-tours in the Lake District and discussed the meaning of the Sacrament amidst austere moorland scenery. This kind of talk got them, inevitably, into a complicated emotional tangle which was abruptly unravelled, one evening, during a fearful row in a barn. Next morning, the tutor left, leaving a ten-page letter behind him. Peter meditated suicide. He heard later indirectly that the tutor had grown a moustache and gone out to Australia. So Peter got another tutor, and finally went up to Oxford.

  Hating his father’s business and his brother’s science, he made music and literature into a religious cult. For the first year, he liked Oxford very much indeed. He went out to tea-parties and ve
ntured to talk. To his pleasure and surprise people appeared to be listening to what he said. It wasn’t until he had done this often that he began to notice their air of slight embarrassment. “Somehow or other,” said Peter, “I always struck the wrong note.”