The Berlin Stories

by Christopher Isherwood

  Meanwhile, at home, in the big Mayfair house, with its four bath-rooms and garage for three cars, where there was always too much to eat, the Wilkinson family was slowly falling to pieces, like something gone rotten. Mr Wilkinson with his diseased kidneys, his whisky, and his knowledge of “handling men,” was angry and confused and a bit pathetic. He snapped and growled at his children when they passed near him, like a surly old dog. At meals nobody ever spoke. They avoided each other’s eyes, and hurried upstairs afterwards to write letters, full of hatred and satire, to their intimate friends. Only Peter had no friend to write to. He shut himself up in his tasteless, expensive bedroom and read and read.

  And now it was the same at Oxford. Peter no longer went to tea-parties. He worked all day, and, just before the examinations, he had a nervous breakdown. The doctor advised a complete change of scene, other interests. Peter’s father let him play at farming for six months in Devonshire, then he began to talk of the business. Mr Wilkinson had been unable to persuade any of his other children to take even a polite interest in the source of their incomes. They were all unassailable in their different worlds. One of his daughters was about to marry into the peerage, the other frequently hunted with the Prince of Wales. His elder son read papers to the Royal Geographical Society. Only Peter hadn’t any justification for his existence. The other children behaved selfishly, but knew what they wanted. Peter also behaved selfishly, and didn’t know.

  However, at the critical moment, Peter’s uncle, his mother’s brother, died. This uncle lived in Canada. He had seen Peter once as a child and had taken a fancy to him, so he left him all his money, not very much, but enough to live on, comfortably.

  Peter went to Paris and began studying music. His teacher told him that he would never be more than a good second-rate amateur, but he only worked all the harder. He worked merely to avoid thinking, and had another nervous breakdown, less serious than at first. At this time, he was convinced that he would soon go mad. He paid a visit to London and found only his father at home. They had a furious quarrel on the first evening; thereafter, they hardly exchanged a word. After a week of silence and huge meals, Peter had a mild attack of homicidal mania. All through breakfast, he couldn’t take his eyes off a pimple on his father’s throat. He was fingering the bread-knife. Suddenly the left side of his face began to twitch. It twitched and twitched, so that he had to cover his cheek with his hand. He felt certain that his father had noticed this, and was intentionally refusing to remark on it — was, in fact, deliberately torturing him. At last, Peter could stand it no longer. He jumped up and rushed out of the room, out of the house, into the garden, where he flung himself face downwards on the wet lawn. There he lay, too frightened to move. After a quarter of an hour, the twitching stopped.

  That evening Peter walked along Regent Street and picked up a whore. They went back together to the girl’s room, and talked for hours. He told her the whole story of his life at home, gave her ten pounds and left her without even kissing her. Next morning a mysterious rash appeared on his left thigh. The doctor seemed at a loss to explain its origin, but prescribed some ointment. The rash became fainter, but did not altogether disappear until last month. Soon after the Regent Street episode, Peter also began to have trouble with his left eye.

  For some time already, he had played with the idea of consulting a psycho-analyst. His final choice was an orthodox Freudian with a sleepy, ill-tempered voice and very large feet. Peter took an immediate dislike to him, and told him so. The Freudian made notes on a piece of paper, but did not seem offended. Peter later discovered that he was quite uninterested in anything except Chinese art. They met three times a week and each visit cost two guineas.

  After six months Peter abandoned the Freudian, and started going to a new analyst, a Finnish lady with white hair and a bright conversational manner. Peter found her easy to talk to. He told her, to the best of his ability, everything he had ever done, ever said, ever thought, or ever dreamed. Sometimes, in moments of discouragement, he told her stories which were absolutely untrue, or anecdotes collected from case-books. Afterwards, he would confess to these lies, and they would discuss his motives for telling them, and agree that they were very interesting. On red-letter nights Peter would have a dream, and this gave them a topic of conversation for the next few weeks. The analysis lasted nearly two years, and was never completed.

  This year Peter got bored with the Finnish lady. He heard of a good man in Berlin. Well, why not? At any rate, it would be a change. It was also an economy. The Berlin man only cost fifteen marks a visit.

  “And you’re still going to him?” I asked.

  “No . . .” Peter smiled. “I can’t afford to, you see.”

  Last month, a day or two after his arrival, Peter went out to Wannsee, to bathe. The water was still chilly, and there were not many people about. Peter had noticed a boy who was turning somersaults by himself, on the sand. Later the boy came up and asked for a match. They got into conversation. It was Otto Nowak.

  “Otto was quite horrified when I told him about the analyst. ‘What!’ he said, ‘you give that man fifteen marks a day just for letting you talk to him! You give me ten marks and I’ll talk to you all day, and all night as well!’ ” Peter began to shake all over with laughter, flushing scarlet and wringing his hands.

  Curiously enough, Otto wasn’t being altogether preposterous when he offered to take the analyst’s place. Like many very animal people, he has considerable instinctive powers of healing — when he chooses to use them. At such times, his treatment of Peter is unerringly correct. Peter will be sitting at the table, hunched up, his downward-curving mouth lined with childhood fears: a perfect case-picture of his twisted, expensive upbringing. Then in comes Otto, grins, dimples, knocks over a chair, slaps Peter on the back, rubs his hands and exclaims fatuously: “Ja, ja . . . so ist die Sache!” And, in a moment, Peter is transformed. He relaxes, begins to hold himself naturally; the tightness disappears from his mouth, his eyes lose their hunted look. As long as the spell lasts, he is just like an ordinary person.

  Peter tells me that, before he met Otto, he was so terrified of infection that he would wash his hands with carbolic after picking up a cat. Nowadays, he often drinks out of the same glass as Otto, uses his sponge, and will share the same plate.

  Dancing has begun at the Kurhaus and the café on the lake. We saw the announcements of the first dance two days ago, while we were taking our evening walk up the main street of the village. I noticed that Otto glanced at the poster wistfully, and that Peter had seen him do this. Neither of them, however, made any comment.

  Yesterday was chilly and wet. Otto suggested that we should hire a boat and go fishing on the lake: Peter was pleased with this plan, and agreed at once. But when we had waited three quarters of an hour in the drizzle for a catch, he began to get irritable. On the way back to the shore, Otto kept splashing with his oars — at first because he couldn’t row properly, later merely to annoy Peter. Peter got very angry indeed, and swore at Otto, who sulked.

  After supper, Otto announced that he was going to dance at the Kurhaus. Peter took this without a word, in ominous silence, the corners of his mouth beginning to drop; and Otto, either genuinely unconscious of his disapproval or deliberately overlooking it, assumed that the matter was settled.

  After he had gone out, Peter and I sat upstairs in my cold room, listening to the pattering of the rain on the window.

  “I thought it couldn’t last,” said Peter gloomily. “This is the beginning. You’ll see.”

  “Nonsense, Peter. The beginning of what? It’s quite natural that Otto should want to dance sometimes. You musn’t be so possessive.”

  “Oh, I know, I know. As usual, I’m being utterly unreasonable . . . All the same, this is the beginning . . .”

  Rather to my own surprise the event proved me right. Otto arrived back from the Kurhaus before ten o’clock. He had been disappointed. There had been very few people there, and the band was poor.r />
  “I’ll never go again,” he added, with a languishing smile at me. “From now on I’ll stay every evening with you and Christoph. It’s much more fun when we’re all three together isn’t it?”

  Yesterday morning, while we were lying in our fort on the beach, a little fair-haired man with ferrety blue eyes and a small moustache came up to us and asked us to join in a game with him. Otto, always over-enthusiastic about strangers, accepted at once, so that Peter and I had either to be rude or follow his example.

  The little man, after introducing himself as a surgeon from a Berlin hospital, at once took command, assigning to us the places where we were to stand. He was very firm about this — instantly ordering me back when I attempted to edge a little nearer, so as not to have such a long distance to throw. Then it appeared that Peter was throwing in quite the wrong way: the little doctor stopped the game in order to demonstrate this. Peter was amused at first, and then rather annoyed. He retorted with considerable rudeness, but the doctor’s skin wasn’t pierced. “You hold yourself so stiff,” he explained, smiling. “That is an error. You try again, and I will keep my hand on your shoulder-blade to see whether you really relax . . . No. Again you do not!”

  He seemed delighted, as if this failure of Peter’s were a special triumph for his own methods of teaching. His eye met Otto’s. Otto grinned understandingly.

  Our meeting with the doctor put Peter in a bad temper for the rest of the day. In order to tease him, Otto pretended to like the doctor very much: “That’s the sort of chap I’d like to have for a friend,” he said with a spiteful smile. “A real sportsman! You ought to take up sport, Peter! Then you’d have a figure like he has!”

  Had Peter been in another mood, this remark would probably have made him smile. As it was, he got very angry: “You’d better go off with your doctor now, if you like him so much!”

  Otto grinned teasingly. “He hasn’t asked me to — yet!”

  Yesterday evening, Otto went out to dance at the Kurhaus and didn’t return till late.

  There are now a good many summer visitors to the village. The bathing-beach by the pier, with its array of banners, begins to look like a medieval camp. Each family has its own enormous hooded wicker beach-chair, and each chair flies a little flag. There are the German city-flags — Hamburg, Hanover, Dresden, Rostock and Berlin, as well as the National, Republican and Nazi colours. Each chair is encircled by a low sand bulwark upon which the occupants have set inscriptions in fir-cones: Waldesruh. Familie Walter. Stahlhelm. Heil Hitler! Many of the forts are also decorated with the Nazi swastika. The other morning I saw a child of about five years old, stark naked, marching along all by himself with a swastika flag over his shoulder and singing “Deutschland über alles.”

  The little doctor fairly revels in this atmosphere. Nearly every morning he arrives, on a missionary visit, to our fort. “You really ought to come round to the other beach,” he tells us. “It’s much more amusing there. I’d introduce you to some nice girls. The young people here are a magnificent lot! I, as a doctor, know how to appreciate them. The other day I was over at Hiddensee. Nothing but Jews! It’s a pleasure to get back here and see real Nordic types!”

  “Let’s go to the other beach,” urged Otto. “It’s so dull here. There’s hardly anyone about.”

  “You can go if you like,” Peter retorted with angry sarcasm: “I’m afraid I should be rather out of place. I had a grandmother who was partly Spanish.”

  But the little doctor won’t let us alone. Our opposition and more or less openly expressed dislike seem actually to fascinate him. Otto is always betraying us into his hands. One day, when the doctor was speaking enthusiastically about Hitler, Otto said, “It’s no good your talking like that to Christoph, Herr Doktor. He’s a communist!”

  This seemed positively to delight the doctor. His ferrety blue eyes gleamed with triumph. He laid his hands affectionately on my shoulder.

  “But you can’t be a communist! You can’t!”

  “Why can’t I?” I asked coldly, moving away. I hate him to touch me.

  “Because there isn’t any such thing as communism. It’s just an hallucination. A mental disease. People only imagine that they’re communists. They aren’t really.”

  “What are they, then?”

  But he wasn’t listening. He fixed me with his triumphant, ferrety smile.

  “Five years ago I used to think as you do. But my work at the clinic has convinced me that communism is a mere hallucination. What people need is discipline, self-control. I can tell you this as a doctor. I know it from my own experience.”

  This morning we were all together in my room, ready to start out to bathe. The atmosphere was electric, because Peter and Otto were still carrying on an obscure quarrel which they had begun before breakfast, in their own bedroom. I was turning over the pages of a book, not paying much attention to them. Suddenly Peter slapped Otto hard on both cheeks. They closed immediately and staggered grappling about the room, knocking over the chairs. I looked on, getting out of their way as well as I could. It was funny, and, at the same time, unpleasant, because rage made their faces strange and ugly. Presently Otto got Peter down on the ground and began twisting his arm: “Have you had enough?” he kept asking. He grinned: at that moment he was really hideous, positively deformed with malice. I knew that Otto was glad to have me there, because my presence was an extra humiliation for Peter. So I laughed, as though the whole thing were a joke, and went out of the room. I walked through the woods to Baabe, and bathed from the beach beyond. I felt I didn’t want to see either of them again for several hours.

  If Otto wishes to humiliate Peter, Peter in his different way also wishes to humiliate Otto. He wants to force Otto into making a certain kind of submission to his will, and this submission Otto refuses instinctively to make. Otto is naturally and healthily selfish, like an animal. If there are two chairs in a room, he will take the more comfortable one without hesitation, because it never even occurs to him to consider Peter’s comfort. Peter’s selfishness is much less honest, more civilized, more perverse. Appealed to in the right way, he will make any sacrifice, however unreasonable and unnecessary. But when Otto takes the better chair as if by right, then Peter immediately sees a challenge which he dare not refuse to accept. I suppose that — given their two natures — there is no possible escape from this situation. Peter is bound to go on fighting to win Otto’s submission. When, at last, he ceases to do so, it will merely mean that he has lost interest in Otto altogether.

  The really destructive feature of their relationship is its inherent quality of boredom. It is quite natural for Peter often to feel bored with Otto — they have scarcely a single interest in common — but Peter, for sentimental reasons, will never admit that this is so. When Otto, who has no such motives for pretending, says, “It’s so dull here!” I invariably see Peter wince and look pained. Yet Otto is actually far less often bored than Peter himself; he finds Peter’s company genuinely amusing, and is quite glad to be with him most of the day. Often, when Otto has been chattering rubbish for an hour without stopping, I can see that Peter really longs for him to be quiet and go away. But to admit this would be, in Peter’s eyes, a total defeat, so he only laughs and rubs his hands, tacitly appealing to me to support him in his pretence of finding Otto inexhaustibly delightful and funny.

  On my way back through the woods, after my bathe, I saw the ferrety little blond doctor advancing to meet me. It was too late to turn back. I said “Good morning” as politely and coldly as possible. The doctor was dressed in running-shorts and a sweater; he explained that he had been taking a “Waldlauf.” “But I think I shall turn back now,” he added. “Wouldn’t you like to run with me a little?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t,” I said rashly. “You see, I twisted my ankle a bit yesterday.”

  I could have bitten my tongue out as I saw the gleam of triumph in his eyes. “Ah, you’ve sprained your ankle? Please let me look at it!” Squirming with dislike, I
had to submit to his prodding fingers. “But it is nothing, I assure you. You have no cause for alarm.”

  As we walked the doctor began to question me about Peter and Otto, twisting his head to look up at me, as he delivered each sharp, inquisitive little thrust. He was fairly consumed with curiosity.

  “My work in the clinic has taught me that it is no use trying to help this type of boy. Your friend is very generous and very well meaning, but he makes a great mistake. This type of boy always reverts. From a scientific point of view, I find him exceedingly interesting.”

  As though he were about to say something specially momentous, the doctor suddenly stood still in the middle of the path, paused a moment to engage my attention, and smilingly announced:

  “He has a criminal head!”

  “And you think that people with criminal heads should be left to become criminals?”

  “Certainly not. I believe in discipline. These boys ought to be put into labour-camps.”

  “And what are you going to do with them when you’ve got them there? You say that they can’t be altered, anyhow, so I suppose you’d keep them locked up for the rest of their lives?”

  The doctor laughed delightedly, as though this were a joke against himself which he could, nevertheless, appreciate. He laid a caressing hand on my arm:

  “You are an idealist! Do not imagine that I don’t understand your point of view. But it is unscientific, quite unscientific. You and your friend do not understand such boys as Otto. I understand them. Every week, one or two such boys come to my clinic, and I must operate on them for adenoids, or mastoid, or poisoned tonsils. So, you see, I know them through and through!”