The Berlin Stories

by Christopher Isherwood

  Some days after this, however, Natalia rang up of her own accord and asked me to lunch. She opened the door herself — she had evidently been waiting to do so — and greeted me by exclaiming: “Bow-wow! Baa! Meaow!”

  For a moment, I really thought she must have gone mad. Then I remembered our quarrel. But Natalia, having made her joke, was quite ready to be friends again.

  We went into the sitting-room, and she began putting aspirin tablets into the bowls of flowers — to revive them, she said. I asked what she’d been doing during the last few days.

  “All this week,” said Natalia, “I am not going in the school. I have been unwell. Three days ago, I stand there by the piano, and suddenly I fall down — so. How do you say — ohnmächtig?”

  “You mean, you fainted?”

  Natalia nodded vigorously: “Yes, that’s right. I am ohnmächtig.”

  “But in that case you ought to be in bed now.” I felt suddenly very masculine and protective: “How are you feeling?”

  Natalia laughed gaily, and, certainly, I had never seen her looking better:

  “Oh, it’s not so important!

  “There is one thing I must tell you,” she added. “It shall be a nice surprise for you, I think — today is coming my father, and my cousin Bernhard.”

  “How very nice.”

  “Yes! Is it not? My father makes us great joy when he comes, for now he is often on travel. He has much business everywhere, in Paris, in Vienna, in Prague. Always he must be going in the train. You shall like him, I think.”

  “I’m certain I shall.”

  And sure enough, when the glass doors parted, there was Herr Landauer, waiting to receive me. Beside him stood Bernhard Landauer, Natalia’s cousin, a tall pale young man in a dark suit, only a few years older than myself. “I am very pleased to make your acquaintance,” Bernhard said, as we shook hands. He spoke English without the faintest trace of a foreign accent.

  Herr Landauer was a small lively man, with dark leathery wrinkled skin, like an old well-polished boot. He had shiny brown boot-button eyes and low-comedian’s eyebrows — so thick and black that they looked as if they had been touched up with burnt cork. It was evident that he adored his family. He opened the door for Frau Landauer in a way which suggested that she was a very beautiful young girl. His benevolent, delighted smile embraced the whole party — Natalia sparkling with joy at her father’s return, Frau Landauer faintly flushed, Bernhard smooth and pale and politely enigmatic: even I myself was included. Indeed, Herr Landauer addressed almost the whole of his conversation to me, carefully avoiding any reference to family affairs which might have reminded me that I was a stranger at his table.

  “Thirty-five years ago I was in England,” he told me, speaking with a strong accent, “I came to your capital to write a thesis for my doctorate, on the condition of Jewish workers in the East End of London. I saw a great deal that your English officials did not desire me to see. I was quite a young fellow then: younger, I suspect, than you are today. I had some exceedingly interesting conversations with dock-hands and prostituted women and the keepers of your so-called Public Houses. Very interesting . . .” Herr Landauer smiled reminiscently: “And this insignificant little thesis of mine caused a great deal of discussion. It has been translated into no less than five languages.”

  “Five languages!” repeated Natalia, in German, to me. “You see, my father is a writer, too!”

  “Ah, that was thirty-five years ago! Long before you were born, my dear.” Herr Landauer shook his head deprecatingly, his boot-button eyes twinkling with benevolence: “Now I have not the time for such studies.” He turned to me again: “I have just been reading a book in the French language about your great English poet, Lord Byron. A most interesting book. Now I should be very glad to have your opinion, as a writer, on this most important question — was Lord Byron guilty of the crime of incest? What do you think, Mr Isherwood?”

  I felt myself beginning to blush. For some odd reason, it was the presence of Frau Landauer, placidly chewing her lunch, not of Natalia, which chiefly embarrassed me at this moment. Bernhard kept his eyes on his plate, subtly smiling. “Well,” I began, “it’s rather difficult . . .”

  “This is a very interesting problem,” interrupted Herr Landauer, looking benevolently round upon us all and masticating with the greatest satisfaction. “Shall we allow that the man of genius is an exceptional person who may do exceptional things? Or shall we say: No — you may write a beautiful poem or paint a beautiful picture, but in your daily life, you must behave like an ordinary person, and you must obey these laws which we have made for ordinary persons? We will not allow you to be extra-ordinary.” Herr Landauer fixed each of us in turn, triumphantly, his mouth full of food. Suddenly his eyes focused beamingly upon me: “Your dramatist Oscar Wilde . . . this is another case. I put this case to you Mr Isherwood. I should like very much to hear your opinion. Was your English Law justified in punishing Oscar Wilde, or was it not justified? Please tell me what you think?”

  Herr Landauer regarded me delightedly, a forkful of meat poised half-way up to his mouth. In the background, I was aware of Bernhard, discreetly smiling.

  “Well . . .” I began, feeling my ears burning red. This time, however, Frau Landauer unexpectedly saved me, by making a remark to Natalia in German, about the vegetables. There was a little discussion, during which Herr Landauer seemed to forget all about his question. He went on eating contentedly. But now Natalia must needs chip in:

  “Please tell my father the name of your book. I could not remember it. It’s such a funny name.”

  I tried to direct a private frown of disapproval at her which the others would not notice. “All the Conspirators,” I said, coldly.

  “All the Conspirators . . . oh, yes, of course!”

  “Ah, you write criminal romances, Mr Isherwood?” Herr Landauer beamed approvingly.

  “I’m afraid this book has nothing to do with criminals,” I said, politely. Herr Landauer looked puzzled and disappointed: “Not to do with criminals?”

  “You will explain to him, please,” Natalia ordered.

  I drew a long breath: “The title was meant to be symbolic . . . It’s taken from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar . . .”

  Herr Landauer brightened at once: “Ah, Shakespeare! Splendid! This is most interesting . . .”

  “In German,” I smiled slightly at my own cunning: I was luring him down a side-track, “you have wonderful translations of Shakespeare, I believe?”

  “Indeed, yes! These translations are among the finest works in our language. Thanks to them, your Shakespeare has become, as it were, almost a German poet . . .”

  “But you do not tell,” Natalia persisted, with what seemed really devilish malice, “what was your book about?”

  I set my teeth: “It’s about two young men. One of them is an artist and the other a student of medicine.”

  “Are these the only two persons in your book, then?” Natalia asked.

  “Of course not . . . But I’m surprised at your bad memory. I told you the whole story only a short time ago.”

  “Imbecile! It is not for myself I ask. Naturally, I remember all what you have told me. But my father has not yet heard. So you will please tell . . . And what is then?”

  “The artist has a mother and a sister. They are all very unhappy.”

  “But why are they unhappy? My father and my mother and I, we are not unhappy.”

  I wished the earth would swallow her: “Not all people are alike,” I said carefully, avoiding Herr Landauer’s eye.

  “Good,” said Natalia. “They are unhappy . . . And what is then?”

  “The artist runs away from home and his sister gets married to a very unpleasant young man.”

  Natalia evidently saw that I wouldn’t stand much more of this. She delivered one final pin-prick: “And how many copies did you sell?”

  “Five.”

  “Five! But that is very few, isn’t it?”

&
nbsp; “Very few indeed.”

  At the end of lunch, it seemed tacitly understood that Bernhard and his uncle and aunt were to discuss family affairs together. “Do you like,” Natalia asked me, “that we shall walk together a little?”

  Herr Landauer took a ceremonial farewell of me: “At all times, Mr Isherwood, you are welcome under my roof.” We both bowed profoundly. “Perhaps,” said Bernhard, giving me his card, “you would come one evening and enliven my solitude for a little?” I thanked him and said that I should be delighted.

  “And what do you think of my father?” Natalia asked, as soon as we were out of the house.

  “I think he’s the nicest father I’ve ever met.”

  “You do truthfully?” Natalia was delighted.

  “Yes, truthfully.”

  “And now confess to me, my father shocked you when he was speaking of Lord Byron — no? You were quite red as a lobster in your cheeks.”

  I laughed: “Your father makes me feel old-fashioned. His conversation’s so modern.”

  Natalia laughed triumphantly: “You see, I was right! You were shocked. Oh, I am so glad! You see, I say to my father: A vairy intelligent young man is coming here to see us — and so he wish to show you that he also can be modern and speak of all this subjects. You thought my father would be a stupid old man? Tell the truth, please.”

  “No,” I protested. “I never thought that!”

  “Well, he is not stupid, you see . . . He is vairy clever. Only he does not have so much time for reading, because he must work always. Sometimes he must work eighteen and nineteen hours in the day; it is tairrible . . . And he is the best father in the whole world!”

  “Your cousin Bernhard is your father’s partner, isn’t he?”

  Natalia nodded: “It is he who manages the store, here in Berlin. He also is vairy clever.”

  “I suppose you see a good deal of him?”

  “No . . . It is not often that he comes to our house . . . He is a strange man, you know? I think he like to be vairy much alone. I am surprise when he ask you to make him a visit . . . You must be careful.”

  “Careful? Why on earth should I be careful?”

  “He is vairy sarcastical, you see. I think perhaps he laugh at you.”

  “Well that wouldn’t be very terrible, would it? Plenty of people laugh at me . . . You do, yourself, sometimes.”

  “Oh, I! That is different.” Natalia shook her head solemnly: she evidently spoke from unpleasant experience. “When I laugh, it is to make fun, you know? But when Bernhard laugh at you, it is not nice . . .”

  Bernhard had a flat in a quiet street not far from the Tiergarten. When I rang at the outer entrance, a gnome-like caretaker peeped up at me through a tiny basement window, asked whom I wished to visit, and finally, after regarding me for a few moments with profound mistrust, pressed a button releasing the lock of the outer door. This door was so heavy that I had to push it open with both hands; it closed behind me with a hollow boom, like the firing of a cannon. Then came a pair of doors opening into the courtyard, then the door of the Gartenhaus, then five flights of stairs, then the door of the flat. Four doors to protect Bernhard from the outer world.

  This evening he was wearing a beautifully embroidered kimono over his town clothes. He was not quite as I remembered him from our first meeting: I hadn’t seen him, then, as being in the least oriental — the kimono, I suppose, brought this out. His over-civilized, prim, finely drawn, beaky profile gave him something of the air of a bird in a piece of Chinese embroidery. He was soft, negative, I thought, yet curiously potent, with the static potency of a carved ivory figure in a shrine. I noticed again his beautiful English, and the deprecatory gestures of his hands, as he showed me a twelfth-century sandstone head of Buddha from Khmer which stood at the foot of his bed — “keeping watch over my slumbers.” On the low white bookcase were little Greek and Siamese and Indo-Chinese statuettes and stone heads, most of which Bernhard had brought home with him from his travels. Amongst volumes of Kunst-Geschichte, photographic reproductions and monographs on sculpture and antiquities, I saw Vachell’s The Hill and Lenin’s What is to be done? The flat might well have been in the depths of the country: you couldn’t hear the faintest outside sound. A staid housekeeper in an apron served supper. I had soup, fish, a chop and savoury; Bernhard drank milk, ate only tomatoes and rusks.

  We talked of London, which Bernhard had never visited, and of Paris, where he had studied for a time in a sculptor’s atelier. In his youth, he had wanted to be a sculptor, “but,” Bernhard sighed, smiled gently, “Providence has ordained otherwise.”

  I wanted to talk to him about the Landauer business, but didn’t — fearing it might not be tactful. Bernhard himself referred to it, however, in passing: “You must pay us a visit, one day, it would interest you — for I suppose that it is interesting, if only as a contemporary economic phenomenon.” He smiled, and his face was masked with exhaustion: the thought crossed my mind that he was perhaps suffering from a fatal disease.

  After supper, he seemed brighter, however: he began telling me about his travels. A few years before, he had been right round the world — gently inquisitive, mildly satiric, poking his delicate beak-like nose into everything: Jewish village communities in Palestine, Jewish settlements on the Black Sea, revolutionary committees in India, rebel armies in Mexico. Hesitating, delicately choosing his words, he described a conversation with a Chinese ferryman about demons, and a barely credible instance of the brutality of the police in New York.

  Four or five times during the evening, the telephone bell rang, and, on each occasion, it seemed that Bernhard was being asked for help and advice. “Come and see me tomorrow,” he said, in his tired, soothing voice. “Yes . . . I’m sure it can all be arranged . . . And now, please don’t worry any more. Go to bed and sleep. I prescribe two or three tablets of aspirin . . .” He smiled softly, ironically. Evidently he was about to lend each of his applicants some money.

  “And please tell me,” he asked, just before I left, “if I am not being impertinent — what has made you come to live in Berlin?”

  “To learn German,” I said. After Natalia’s warning, I wasn’t going to trust Bernhard with the history of my life.

  “And are you happy here?”

  “Very happy.”

  “That is wonderful, I think . . . Most wonderful . . .” Bernhard laughed his gentle ironical laugh: “A spirit possessed of such vitality that it can be happy, even in Berlin. You must teach me your secret. May I sit at your feet and learn wisdom?”

  His smile contracted, vanished. Once again, the impassivity of mortal weariness fell like a shadow across his strangely youthful face. “I hope,” he said, “that you will ring me up whenever you have nothing better to do.”

  Soon after this, I went to call on Bernhard at the business.

  Landauers’ was an enormous steel and glass building, not far from the Potsdamer Platz. It took me nearly a quarter of an hour to find my way through departments of underwear, outfitting, electrical appliances, sport and cutlery to the private world behind the scenes — the wholesale, travellers’ and buying rooms, and Bernhard’s own little suite of offices. A porter showed me into a small waiting-room, panelled in some highly polished streaky wood, with a rich blue carpet and one picture, an engraving of Berlin in the year 1803. After a few moments, Bernhard himself came in. This morning, he looked younger, sprucer, in a bow-tie and a light grey suit. “I hope that you give your approval to this room,” he said. “I think that, as I keep so many people waiting here, they ought at least to have a more or less sympathetic atmosphere to allay their impatience.”

  “It’s very nice,” I said, and added, to make conversation — for I was feeling a little embarrassed: “What kind of wood is this?”

  “Caucasian Nut.” Bernhard pronounced the words with his characteristic primness, very precisely. He grinned suddenly. He seemed, I thought, in much better spirits: “Come and see the shop.”

  In th
e hardware department, an overalled woman demonstrator was exhibiting the merits of a patent coffee-strainer. Bernhard stopped to ask her how the sales were going, and she offered us cups of coffee. While I sipped mine, he explained that I was a well-known coffee-merchant from London, and that my opinion would therefore be worth having. The woman half believed this, at first, but we both laughed so much that she became suspicious. Then Bernhard dropped his coffee-cup and broke it. He was quite distressed and apologized profusely. “It doesn’t matter,” the demonstrator reassured him — as though he were a minor employee who might get sacked for his clumsiness: “I’ve got two more.”

  Presently we came to the toys. Bernhard told me that he and his uncle wouldn’t allow toy soldiers or guns to be sold at Landauers’. Lately, at a directors’ meeting, there had been a heated argument about toy tanks, and Bernhard had succeeded in getting his own way. “But this is really the thin end of the wedge,” he added, sadly, picking up a toy tractor with caterpillar wheels.

  Then he showed me a room in which children could play while their mothers were shopping. A uniformed nurse was helping two little boys to build a castle of bricks. “You observe,” said Bernhard, “that philanthropy is here combined with advertisement. Opposite this room, we display specially cheap and attractive hats. The mothers who bring their children here fall immediately into temptation . . . I’m afraid you will think us sadly materialistic . . .”

  I asked why there was no book department.

  “Because we dare not have one. My uncle knows that I should remain there all day.”

  All over the stores, there were brackets of coloured lamps, red, green, blue and yellow. I asked what they were for, and Bernhard explained that each of these lights was the signal for one of the heads of the firm: “I am the blue light. That is, perhaps, to some degree, symbolic.” Before I had time to ask what he meant, the blue lamp we were looking at began to flicker. Bernhard went to the nearest telephone and was told that somebody wished to speak to him in his office. So we said goodbye. On the way out, I bought a pair of socks.