The Berlin Stories: The Last of Mr Norris. Goodbye to Berlin

“Mother didn’t like to ask you,” he told me, breathless. “She was afraid you’d be annoyed… . But I said that I was sure you’d far rather be with us, where you can do just what you like and you know everything’s clean, than in a strange house full of bugs… . Do say yes, Christoph, please! It’ll be such

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fun! You and I can sleep in the back room. You can have Lothar’s bed—he won’t mind. He can share the double-bed with Grete… . And in the mornings you can stay in bed as long as ever you like. If you want, 111 bring your breakfast… . You will come, won’t you?” And so it was settled.

My first evening as a lodger at the Nowaks was something of a ceremony. I arrived with my two suitcases soon after five o’clock, to find Frau Nowak already cooking the evening meal. Otto whispered to me that we were to have lung hash, as a special treat.

“I’m afraid you won’t think very much of our food,” said Frau Nowak, “after what you’ve been used to. But we’ll do our best.” She was all smiles, bubbling over with excitement. I smiled and smiled, feeling awkward and in the way. At length, I clambered over the living-room furniture and sat down on my bed. There was no space to unpack in, and nowhere, apparently, to put my clothes. At the living-room table, Grete was playing with her cigarette-cards and transfers. She was a lumpish child of twelve years old, pretty in a sugary way, but round-shouldered and too fat. My presence made her very self-conscious. She wriggled, smirked and kept calling out, in an affected, sing-song, “grown-up” voice:

“Mummy! Come and look at the pretty flowers!”

“I’ve got no time for your pretty flowers,” exclaimed Frau Nowak at length, in great exasperation: “Here am I, with a daughter the size of an elephant, having to slave all by myself, cooking the supper!”

“Quite right, mother!” cried Otto, gleefully joining in. He turned upon Grete, righteously indignant: “Why don’t you help her, I should like to know? You’re fat enough. You sit around all day doing nothing. Get off that chair this instant, do you hear! And put those filthy cards away, or I’ll burn them!”

He grabbed at the cards with one hand and gave Grete a

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slap across the face with the other. Grete, who obviously wasn’t hurt, at once set up a loud, theatrical wail: “Oh, Otto, you’ve hurt me!” She covered her face with her hands and peeped at me between the fingers.

“Will you leave that child alone!” cried Frau Nowak shrilly from the kitchen. “I should like to know who you are, to talk about laziness! And you, Grete, just you stop that howling—or I’ll tell Otto to hit you properly, so that you’ll have something to cry for. You two between you, you drive me distracted.”

“But, mother!” Otto ran into the kitchen, took her round the waist and began kissing her: “Poor little Mummy, little Mutti, little Muttchen,” he crooned, in tones of the most mawkish solicitude. “You have to work so hard and Otto’s so horrid to you. But he doesn’t mean to be, you know—he’s just stupid… . Shall I fetch the coal up for you tomorrow, Mummy? Would you like that?”

“Let go of me, you great humbug!” cried Frau Nowak, laughing and struggling. “I don’t want any of your soft soap! Much you care for your poor old mother! Leave me to get on with my work in peace.”

“Otto’s not a bad boy,” she continued Jto me, when he had let go of her at last, “but he’s such a scatterbrain. Quite the opposite of my Lothar—there’s a model son for you! He’s not too proud to do any job, whatever it is, and when he’s scraped a few groschen together, instead of spending them on himself he comes straight to me and says: ‘Here you are, mother. Just buy yourself a pair of warm house-shoes for the winter.’ ” Frau Nowak held out her hand to me with the gesture of giving money. Like Otto, she had the trick of acting every scene she described.

“Oh, Lothar this, Lothar that,” Otto interrupted crossly: “It’s always Lothar. But tell me this, mother, which of us was it that gave you a twenty-mark note the other day? Lothar couldn’t earn twenty marks in a month of Sundays. Well, if that’s how you talk, you needn’t expect to get any more; not if you come to me on your knees.”

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“You wicked boy,” she was up in arms again in an instant, “have you no more shame than to speak of such things in front of Herr Christoph! Why, if he knew where that twenty marks came from—and plenty more besides—he’d disdain to stay in the same house with you another minute; and quite right, too! And the cheek of you—saying you gave me that money! You know very well that if your father hadn’t seen the envelope… .”

“That’s right!” shouted Otto, screwing up his face at her like a monkey and beginning to dance with excitement: “That’s just what I wanted! Admit to Christoph that you stole it! You’re a thief! You’re a thief!”

“Otto, how dare you!” Quick as fury, Frau Nowak’s hand grabbed up the lid of a saucepan. I jumped back a pace to be out of range, tripped over a chair and sat down hard. Grete uttered an affected little shriek of joy and alarm. The door opened. It was Herr Nowak, come back from his work.

He was a powerful, dumpy little man, with pointed moustache, cropped hair and bushy eyebrows. He took in the scene with a long grunt which was half a belch. He did not appear to understand what had been happening; or perhaps he merely did not care. Frau Nowak said nothing to enlighten him. She hung the saucepan-lid quietly on a hook. Grete jumped up from her chair and ran to him with outstretched arms: “Pappi! Pappi!”

Herr Nowak smiled down at her, showing two or three nicotine-stained stumps of teeth. Bending, he picked her up, carefully and expertly, with a certain admiring curiosity, like a large valuable vase. By profession he was a furniture-remover. Then he held out his hand—taking his time about it, gracious, not fussily eager to please:

“Servus, Herr!”

“Aren’t you glad that Herr Christoph’s come to live with us, Pappi?” chanted Grete, perched on her father’s shoulder, in her sugary sing-song tones. At this Herr Nowak, as if suddenly acquiring new energy, began shaking my hand again, much more warmly, and thumping me on the back:

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“Glad? Yes, of course I’m glad!” He nodded his head in vigorous approval. “Englisch Man? Anglais, eh? Ha, ha. That’s right! Oh, yes, 1 talk French, you see. Forgotten most of it now. Learnt in the war. I was Feldwebel—on the West Front. Talked to lots of prisoners. Good lads. All the same as us. …” •

“You’re drunk again, father!” exclaimed Frau Nowak in disgust. “Whatever will Herr Christoph think of you!”

“Christoph doesn’t mind; do you, Christoph?” Herr Nowak patted my shoulder.

“Christoph, indeed! He’s Herr Christoph to you! Can’t you tell a gentleman when you see one?”

“I’d much rather you called me Christoph,” I said.

“That’s right! Christoph’s right! We’re all the same flesh and blood… . Argent, money—all the same! Ha, ha!”

Otto took my other arm: “Christoph’s quite one of the family, already!”

Presently we sat down to an immense meal of lung hash, black bread, malt coffee and boiled potatoes. In the first recklessness of having so much money to spend ( I had given her ten marks in advance for the week’s board ) Frau Nowak had prepared enough potatoes for a dozen people. She kept shovelling them on to my plate from a big saucepan, until I thought I should suffocate:

“Have some more, Herr Christoph. You’re eating nothing-“

“I’ve never eaten so much in my whole life, Frau Nowak.”

“Christoph doesn’t like our food,” said Herr Nowak. “Never mind, Christoph, you’ll get used to it. Otto was just the same when he came back from the seaside. He’d got used to all sorts of fine ways, with his Englishman… .”

“Hold your tongue, father!” said Frau Nowak warningly. “Can’t you leave the boy alone? He’s old enough to be able to decide for himself what’s right and wrong—more shame to him!”

We were still eating when Lothar came in. He threw his cap on the bed, shook hands with me politely but silently,

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with a little bow, and took his place at the table. My presence did not appear, to surprise or interest him in the least: his glance barely met mine. He was, I knew, only twenty; but he might well have been years older. He was a man already. Otto seemed almost childish beside him. He had a lean, bony, peasant’s face, soured by racial memory of barren fields.

“Lothar’s going to night-school,” Frau Nowak told me with pride. “He had a job in a garage, you know; and now he wants to study engineering. They won’t take you in anywhere nowadays, unless you’ve got a diploma of some sort. He must show you his drawings, Herr Christoph, when you’ve got time to look at them. The teacher said they were very good indeed.”

“I should like to see them.”

Lothar didn’t respond. I sympathised with him and felt rather foolish. But Frau Nowak was determined to show him off:

“Which nights are your classes, Lothar?”

“Mondays and Thursdays.” He went on eating, deliberately, obstinately, without looking at his mother. Then perhaps to show that he bore me no ill-will, he added: “From eight to ten-thirty.” As soon as he had finished, he got up without a word, shook hands with me, making the same small bow, took his cap and went out.

Frau Nowak looked after him and sighed: “He’s going round to his Nazis, I suppose. I often wish he’d never taken up with them at all. They put all kinds of silly ideas into his head. It makes him so restless. Since he joined them he’s been a different boy altogether… . Not that I understand these politics myself. What I always say is—why can’t we have the Kaiser back? Those were the good times, say what you like.”

“Ach, to hell with your old Kaiser,” said Otto. “What we want is a communist revolution.”

“A communist revolution!” Frau Nowak snorted. “The idea! The communists are all good-for-nothing lazybones like you, who’ve never done an honest day’s work in their lives.”

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“Christoph’s a communist,” said Otto. “Aren’t you, Christoph?”

‘Not a proper one, I’m afraid.”

Frau Nowak smiled: “What nonsense will you be telling us next! How could Herr Christoph be a communist? He’s a gentleman.” ,

“What I say is–—.” Herr Nowak put down his knife and

fork and wiped his moustache carefully on the back of his hand: “we’re all equal as God made us. You’re as good as me; I’m as good as you. A Frenchman’s as good as an Englishman; an Englishman’s as good as a German. You understand what I mean?”

I nodded.

“Take the war, now–—.” Herr Nowak pushed back his

chair from the table: “One day I was in a wood. All alone, you understand. Just walking through the wood by myself, as I might be walking down the street… . And suddenly— there before me, stood a Frenchman. Just as if he’d sprung out of the earth. He was no further away from me than you are now.” Herr Nowak sprang to his feet as he spoke. Snatching up the bread-knife from the table he held it before him, in a posture of defence, like a bayonet. Tie glared at me from beneath his bushy eyebrows, re-living the scene: “There we stand. We look at each other. That Frenchman was as pale as death. Suddenly he cries: ‘Don’t shoot me!’ Just like that.” Herr Nowak clasped his hands in a piteous gesture of entreaty. The bread-knife was in the way now: he put it down on the tabje. ” ‘Don’t shoot me! I have five children.’ (He spoke French, of course: but I could understand him. I could speak French perfectly in those days; but I’ve forgotten some of it now. ) Well, I look at him and he looks at me. Then I say: ‘Ami.’ (That means Friend.) And then we shake hands.” Herr Nowak took my hand in both of his and pressed it with great emotion. “And then we begin to walk away from each other—backwards; I didn’t want him to shoot me in the back.” Still glaring in front of him Herr Nowak began cautiously retreating backwards, step by step,

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until he collided violently with the sideboard. A framed photograph fell off it. The glass smashed.

“Pappi! Pappil” cried Grete in delight. “Just look what you’ve done!”

“Perhaps that’ll teach you to stop your fooling, you old clown!” exclaimed Frau Nowak angrily. Grete began loudly and affectedly laughing, until Otto slapped her face and she set up her stagey whine. Meanwhile, Herr Nowak had restored his wife’s good temper by kissing her and pinching her cheek.

“Get away from me, you great lout!” she protested laughing; coyly pleased that I was present: “Let me alone, you stink of beer!”

At that time, I had a great many lessons to give. I was out most of the day. My pupils were scattered about the fashionable suburbs of the west—rich, well-preserved women of Frau Nowak’s age, but looking ten years younger; they liked to make a hobby of a little English conversation on dull afternoons when their husbands were away at the office. Sitting on silk cushions in front of open fireplaces, we discussed Point Counter Point and Lady Chatteriey’s Lover. A manservant brought in tea with buttered toast. Sometimes, when they got tired of literature, I amused them by descriptions of the Nowak household. I was careful, however, not to say that I lived there: it would have been bad for my business to admit that I was really poor. The ladies paid me three marks an hour; a little reluctantly, having done their best to beat me down to two marks fifty. Most of them also tried, deliberately or subconsciously, to cheat me into staying longer than my time. I always had to keep my eye on the clock.

Fewer people wanted lessons in the morning; and so it happened that I usually got up much later than the rest of the Nowak family. Frau Nowak had her charring, Herr Nowak went off to his job at the fumiture-removers, Lothar,

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who was out of work, was helping a friend with a paper-round, Grete went to school. Only Otto kept me company; except on the mornings when, with endless nagging, he was driven out to the labour-bureau by his mother, to get his card stamped.

After fetching our breakfast, a cup of coffee and a slice of bread and dripping, Otto would strip off his pyjamas and do exercises, shadow-box or stand on his head. He flexed his muscles for my admiration. Squatting on my bed, he told me stories:

“Did I ever tell you, Christoph, how I saw the Hand?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, listen… . Once, when I was very small, I was lying in bed at night. It was very dark and very late. And suddenly I woke up and saw a great big black hand stretching over the bed. I was so frightened I couldn’t even scream. I just drew my legs up under my chin and stared at it. Then, after a minute or two, it disappeared and I yelled out. Mother came running in and I said: ‘Mother, I’ve seen the Hand.’ But she only laughed. She wouldn’t believe it.”

Otto’s innocent face, with its two dimples, like a bun, had become very solemn. He held me with his absurdly small bright eyes, concentrating all his narrative powers:

“And then, Christoph, several years later, I had a job as apprentice to an upholsterer. Well, one day—it was in the middle of the morning, in broad daylight—I was sitting working on my stool. And suddenly it seemed to go all dark in the room and I looked up and there was the Hand, as near to me as you are now just closing over me. I felt my arms and legs turn cold and I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t cry out. The master saw how pale I was and he said: ‘Why, Otto, what’s the matter with you? Aren’t you well?’ And as he spoke to me it seemed as if the Hand drew right away from me again, getting smaller and smaller, until it was just a little black speck. And when I looked up again the room was quite light, just as it always was, and where I’d seen the black speck there was a big fly crawling across the ceiling.

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But I was so ill the whole day that the master had to send me home.”

Otto’s face had gone quite pale during this recital and, for a moment, a really frightening expression of fear had passed over his features. He was tragic now; his little eyes bright with tears:

“One day I shall see the Hand again. And then I shall die.”

“Nonsense,” I said, laughing. “We’ll protect you.”

Otto shook his head very sadly:

“Let’s hope so, Christoph. But I’m afraid not. The Hand will get me in the end.”

“How long did you stay with the upholsterer?” I asked.

“Oh, not long. Only a few weeks. The master was so unkind to me. He always gave me the hardest jobs to do—and I was such a little chap then. One day I got there five minutes late. He made a terrible row; called me a verfluchter Hund. And do you think I put up with that?” Otto leant forward, thrust his face, contracted into a dry monkey-like leer of malice, towards me. “Nee, nee! Bei mir nicht!” His little eyes focussed upon me for a moment with an extraordinary intensity of simian hatred; his puckered-up features became startlingly ugly. Then they relaxed. I was no longer the upholsterer. He laughed gaily and innocently, throwing back his hair, showing his teeth: “I pretended I was going to hit him. I frightened him, all right!” He imitated the gesture of a scared middle-aged man avoiding a blow. He laughed.

“And then you had to leave?” I asked.

Otto nodded. His face slowly changed. He was turning melancholy again.

“What did your father and mother say to that?”

“Oh, they’ve always been against me. Ever since I was small. If there were two crusts of bread, mother would always give the bigger one to Lothar. Whenever I complained they used to say: ‘Go and work. You’re old enough. Get your own food. Why should we support you?’ ” Otto’s eyes moistened with the most sincere self-pity: “Nobody under-113

stands me here. Nobody’s good to me. They all hate me really. They wish I was dead.”

“How can you talk such rubbish, Otto! Your mother certainly doesn’t hate you.”

“Poor mother!” agreed Otto. He had changed his tone at once, seeming utterly unaware of what he had just said: “It’s terrible. I can’t bear to think of her working like that, every day. You know, Christoph, she’s very, very ill. Often, at night, she coughs for hours and hours. And sometimes she spits out blood. I lie awake wondering if she’s going to die.”

I nodded. In spite of myself I began to smile. Not that I disbelieved what he had said about Frau Nowak. But Otto himself, squatting there on the bed, was so animally alive, his naked brown body so sleek with health, that his talk of death seemed ludicrous, like the description of a funeral by a painted clown. He must have understood this, for he grinned back, not in the least shocked at my apparent callousness. Straightening his legs he bent forward without effort and grasped his feet with his hands : “Can you do that, Christoph?”

A sudden notion pleased him: “Christoph, if I show you something, will you swear not to tell a single soul?”

“All right.”

He got up and rummaged under his bed. One of the floorboards was loose in the corner by the window: lifting it, he fished out a tin box which had once contained biscuits. The tin was full of letters^ and photographs. Otto spread them out on the bed:

“Mother would burn these if she found them… . Look, Christoph, how do you like her? Her name’s Hilde. I met her at the place where I go dancing… . And this is Marie. Hasn’t she got beautiful eyes? She’s wild about me—all the other boys are jealous. But she’s not really my type.” Otto shook his head seriously: “You know, it’s a funny thing, but as soon as I know that a girl’s keen on me, I lose interest in her. I wanted to break with her altogether; but she came round here and made such a to-do in front of mother. So I

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have to see her sometimes to keep her quiet… . And here’s Trude—honestly, Christoph, would you believe she was twenty-seven? It’s a fact! Hasn’t she a marvellous figure? She lives in the West End, in a flat of her own! She’s been divorced twice. I can go there whenever I like. Here’s a photo her brother took of her. He wanted to take some of us two together, but I wouldn’t let him. I was afraid he’d sell them, afterwards—you can be arrested for it, you know… .” Otto smirked, handed me a packet of letters: “Here, read these; they’ll make you laugh. This one’s from a Dutchman. He’s got the biggest car I ever saw in my life. I was with him in the spring. He writes to me sometimes. Father got wind of it, and now he watches out to see if there’s any money in the envelopes—the dirty dog! But I know a trick worth two of that! I’ve told all my friends to address their letters to the bakery on the corner. The baker’s son is a pal of mine… .”

“Do you ever hear from Peter?” I asked.

Otto regarded me very solemnly for a moment: “Christoph?”

“Yes?”

“Will you do me a favour?”

“What is it?” I asked cautiously: Otto always chose the least expected moments to ask for a small loan.

“Please… .” he was gently reproachful, “please, never mention Peter’s name to me again… .”

“Oh, all right,” I said, very much taken aback: “If you’d rather not.”

“You see, Christoph… . Peter hurt me very much. I thought he was my friend. And then, suddenly, he left me —all alone… .”

Down in the murky pit of the courtyard where the fog, in this clammy autumn weather, never lifted, the street singers and musicians succeeded each other in a performance which was nearly continuous. There were parties of boys with mandolins, an old man who played the concertina and

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a father who sang with his little girls. Easily the favourite tune was: Aus der Jugendzeit. I often heard it a dozen times in one morning. The father of the girls was paralyzed and could only make desperate throttled noises like a donkey; but the daughters sang with the energy of fiends: “Sie kommt, sie kommt nicht mehr!” they screamed in unison, like demons of the air, rejoicing in the frustration of mankind. Occasionally a groschen, screwed in a corner of newspaper, was tossed down from a window high above. It hit the pavement and ricocheted like a bullet, but the little girls never flinched.

Now and then the visiting nurse called to see Frau Nowak, shook her head over the sleeping arrangements and went away again. The inspector of housing, a pale young man with an open collar ( which he obviously wore on principle ), came also and took copious notes. The attic, he told Frau Nowak, was absolutely insanitary and uninhabitable. He had a slightly reproachful air as he said this, as though we ourselves were partly to blame. Frau Nowak bitterly resented these visits. They were, she thought, simply attempts to spy on her. She was haunted by the fear that the nurse or the inspector would look in at a moment when the flat was untidy. So deep were her suspicions that she even told lies— pretending that the leak in the roof wasn’t serious—to get them out of the house as quickly as possible.

Another regular visitor was the Jewish tailor and outfitter, who sold clothes of all kinds on the instalment plan. He was small and gentle and very persuasive. All day long he made his rounds of the tenements in the district, collecting fifty pfennigs here, a mark there, scratching up his precarious livelihood, like a hen, from this apparently barren soil. He never pressed hard for money; preferring to urge his debtors to take more of his goods and embark upon a fresh series of payments. Two years ago Frau Nowak had bought a suit and an overcoat for Otto for three hundred marks. The suit and the overcoat had been worn out long ago, but the money was not nearly repaid. Shortly after my arrival Frau Nowak

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invested in clothes for Grete to the value of seventy-five marks. The tailor made no objection at all.

The whole neighbourhood owed him money. Yet he was not unpopular: he enjoyed the status of a public character, whom people curse without real malice. “Perhaps Lothar’s right,” Frau Nowak would sometimes say: “When Hitler comes, he’ll show these Jews a thing or two. They won’t be so cheeky then.” But when I suggested that Hitler, if he got his own way, would remove the tailor altogether, then Frau Nowak would immediately change her tone: “Oh, I shouldn’t like that to happen. After all, he makes very good clothes. Besides, a Jew will always let you have time if you’re in difficulties. You wouldn’t catch a Christian giving credit like he does… . You ask the people round here, Herr Christoph: they’d never turn out the Jews.”

Towards evening Otto, who had spent the day in gloomy lounging—either lolling about the flat or chatting with his friends downstairs at the courtyard entrance—would begin to brighten up. When I got back from work I generally found him changing already from his sweater and knickerbockers into his best suit, with its shoulders padded out to points, small tight double-breasted waistcoat and bell-bottomed trousers. He had quite a large selection of ties and it took him half an hour at least to choose one of them and to knot it to his satisfaction. He stood smirking in front of the cracked triangle of looking-glass in the kitchen, his pink plum-face dimpled with conceit, getting in Frau Nowak’s way and disregarding all her protests. As soon as supper was over he was going out dancing.

I generally went out in the evenings, too. However tired I was, I couldn’t go to sleep immediately after my evening meal: Grete and her parents were often in bed by nine o’clock. So I went to the cinema or sat in a café and read the newspapers and yawned. There was nothing else to do.

At the end of our street there was a cellar lokal called the

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Alexander Casino. Otto showed it to me one evening, when we happened to leave the house together. You went down four steps from the street level, opened the door, pushed aside the heavy leather curtain which kept out the draught and found yourself in a long, low, dingy room. It waS lit by red chinese lanterns and festooned with dusty paper streamers. Round the walls stood wicker tables and big shabby settees which looked like the seats of English third-class railway-carriages. At the far end were trellis-work alcoves, arboured over with imitation cherry-blossom twined on wires. The whole place smelt damply of beer.

I had been here before: a year ago, in the days when Fritz Wendel used to take me on Saturday evening excursions round “the dives” of the city. It was all just as we had left it; only less sinister, less picturesque, symbolic no longer of a tremendous truth about the meaning of existence—because, this time, I wasn’t in the least drunk. The same proprietor, an ex-boxer, rested his immense stomach on the bar, the same hangdog waiter shuffled forward in his soiled white coat: two girls, the very same, perhaps, were dancing together to the wailing of the loudspeaker. A group of youths in sweaters and leather jackets were playing Sheep’s Head; the spectators leaning over to see the cards. A boy with tattooed arms sat by the stove, deep in a crime shocker. His shirt was open at the neck, with the sleeves rolled up to his armpits; he wore shorts and socks, as if about to take part in a race. Over in the far alcove, a man Ťand a boy were sitting together. The boy had a round childish face and heavy reddened eyelids which looked swollen as if from lack of sleep. He was relating something to the elderly, shaven-headed, respectable-looking man, who sat rather unwillingly listening and smoking a short cigar. The boy told his story carefully and with great patience. At intervals, to emphasise a point, he laid his hand on the elderly man’s knee and looked up into his face, watching its every movement shrewdly and intently, like a doctor with a nervous patient.

Later on, I got to know this boy quite well. He was called

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Pieps. He was a great traveller. He ran away from home at the age of fourteen because his father, a woodcutter in the Thuringian Forest, used to beat him. Pieps set out to walk to Hamburg. At Hamburg he stowed away on a ship bound for Antwerp and from Antwerp he walked back into Germany and along the Rhine. He had been in Austria, too, and Czechoslovakia. He was full of songs and stories and jokes: he had an extraordinarily cheerful and happy nature, sharing what he had with his friends and never worrying where his next meal was coming from. He was a clever pickpocket and worked chiefly in an amusement-hall in the Friedrichstrasse, not far from the Passage, which was full of detectives and getting too dangerous nowadays. In this amusement-hall there were punch-balls and peepshows and try-your-grip machines. Most of the boys from the Alexander Casino spent their afternoons there, while their girls were out working the Friedrichstrasse and the Linden for possible pickups.

Pieps lived together with his two friends, Gerhardt and Kurt, in a cellar on the canal-bank, near the station of the overhead railway. The cellar belonged to Gerhardt’s aunt, an elderly Friedrichstrasse whore, whose legs and arms were tattooed with snakes, birds and flowers. Gerhardt was a tall boy with a vague, silly, unhappy smile. He did not pick pockets, but stole from the big department-stores. He had never yet been caught, perhaps because of the lunatic brazenness of his thefts. Stupidly grinning, he would stuff things into his pockets right under the noses of the shop-assistants. He gave everything he stole to his aunt, who cursed him for his laziness and kept him very short of money. One day, when we were together, he took from his pocket a brightly coloured lady’s leather belt: “Look, Christoph, isn’t it pretty?”

“Where did you get it from?”

“From Landauers’,” Gerhardt told me. “Why … what are you smiling at?”

“You see, the Landauers are friends of mine. It seems funny—that’s all.”

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At once, Gerhardt’s face was the picture of dismay: “You won’t tell them, Christoph, will you?”

“No,” I promised. “I won’t.”

Kurt came to the Alexander Casino less often than the others. I could understand him better than I could understand Pieps or Gerhardt, because he was consciously unhappy. He had a reckless, fatal streak in his character, a capacity for pure sudden flashes of rage against the hopelessness of his life. The Germans call it Wut. He would sit silent in his corner, drinking rapidly, drumming with his fists on the table, imperious and sullen. Then, suddenly, he would jump to his feet, exclaim: “Ach, Scheiss!” and go striding out. In this mood, he picked quarrels deliberately with the other boys, fighting them three or four at a time, until he was flung out into the street, half stunned and covered with blood. On these occasions even Pieps and Gerhardt joined against him as against a public danger: they hit him as hard as anyone else and dragged him home between them afterwards without the least malice for the black eyes he often managed to give them. His behaviour did not appear to surprise them in the least. They were all good friends again next day.

By the time I arrived back Herr and Frau Nowak had probably been asleep for two or three hours. Otto generally arrived later still. Yet Herr Nowak, who resented so much else in his son’s behaviour, never seemed to mind getting up and opening the door to him, whatever the time of night. For some strange reason, nothing would induce the Nowaks to let either of us have a latchkey. They couldn’t sleep unless the door was bolted as well as locked.

In these tenements each lavatory served for four flats. Ours was on the floor below. If, before retiring, I wished to relieve nature, there was a second journey to be made through the living-room in the dark to the kitchen, skirting the table, avoiding the chairs, trying not to collide with the

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head of the Nowaks’ bed or jolt the bed in which Lothar and Grete were sleeping. However cautiously I moved, Frau Nowak would wake up: she seemed to be able to see me in the dark, and embarrassed me with polite directions: “No, Herr Christoph—not there, if you please. In the bucket on the left, by the stove.”

Lying in bed, in the darkness, in my tiny corner of the enormous human warren of the tenements, I could hear, with uncanny precision, every sound which came up from the courtyard below. The shape of the court must have acted as a gramophone-horn. There was someone going downstairs: our neighbour, Herr Müller, probably: he had a night-shift on the railway. I listened to his steps getting fainter, flight by flight; then they crossed the court, clear and sticky on the wet stone. Straining my ears, I heard, or fancied I heard, the grating of the key in the lock of the big street door. A moment later, the door closed with a deep, hollow boom. And now, from the next room, Frau Nowak had an outburst of coughing. In the silence which followed it, Lothar’s bed creaked as he turned over muttering something indistinct and threatening in his sleep. Somewhere on the other side of the court a baby began to scream, a window was slammed to, something very heavy, deep in the innermost recesses of the building, thudded dully against a wall. It was alien and mysterious and uncanny, like sleeping out in the jungle alone.

Sunday was a long day at the Nowaks. There was nowhere to go in this wretched weather. We were all of us at home. Grete and Herr Nowak were watching a trap for sparrows which Herr Nowak had made and fixed up in the window. They sat there, hour by hour, intent upon it. The string which worked the trap was in Grete’s hand. Occasionally, they giggled at each other and looked at me. I was sitting on the opposite side of the table, frowning at a piece of paper on which I had written: “But, Edward, can’t you see?” I was trying to get on with my novel. It was about a family who

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lived in a large country house on unearned incomes and were very unhappy. They spent their time explaining to each other why they couldn’t enjoy their lives; and some of the reasons —though I say it myself—were most ingenious. Unfortunately I found myself taking less and less interest in my unhappy family: the atmosphere of the Nowak household was not very inspiring. Otto, in the inner room with the door open, was amusing himself by balancing ornaments on the turntable of an old gramophone, which was now minus sound-box and tone-arm, to see how long it would be before they flew off and smashed. Lothar was filing keys and mending locks for the neighbours, his pale sullen face bent over his work in obstinate concentration. Frau Nowak, who was cooking, began a sermon about the Good and the Worthless Brother: “Look at Lothar. Even when he’s out of a job he keeps himself occupied. But all you’re good for is to smash things. You’re no son of mine.”

Otto lolled sneering on his bed, occasionally spitting out an obscene word or making a farting noise with his lips. Certain tones of his voice were maddening: they made one want to hurt him—and he knew it. Frau Nowak’s shrill scolding rose to a scream:

“I’ve a good mind to turn you out of the house! What have you ever done for us? When there’s any work going you’re too tired to do it; but you’re not too tired to go gallivanting about half the night—you wicked unnatural good-for-nothing… .”

Otto sprang to his feet, and began dancing about the room with cries of animal triumph. Frau Nowak picked up a piece of soap and flung it at him. He dodged, and it smashed the window. After this Frau Nowak sat down and began to cry. Otto ran to her at once and began to soothe her with noisy kisses. Neither Lothar nor Herr Nowak took much notice of the row. Herr Nowak seemed even rather to have enjoyed it: he winked at me slyly. Later, the hole in the window was stopped with a piece of cardboard. It remained unmended; adding one more to the many draughts in the attic.

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During supper, we were all jolly. Herr Nowak got up from the table to give imitations of the different ways in which Jews and Catholics pray. He fell down on his knees and bumped his head several times vigorously on the ground, gabbling nonsense which was supposed to represent Hebrew and Latin prayers: “Koolyvotchka, koolyvotchka, koolyvotchka. Amen.” Then he told stories of executions, to the horror and delight of Grete and Frau Nowak: “William the First—the old William—never signed a death-warrant; and do you know why? Because once, quite soon after he’d come to the throne, there was a celebrated murder-case and for a long time the judges couldn’t agree whether the prisoner was guilty or innocent, but at last they condemned him to be executed. They put him on the scaffold and the executioner took his axe—so; and swung it—like this; and brought it down: Kernack! (They’re all trained men, of course: You or I couldn’t cut a man’s head off with one stroke, if they gave us a thousand marks. ) And the head fell into the basket— flop!” Herr Nowak rolled up his eyes, let his tongue hang out from the corner of his mouth and gave a really most vivid and disgusting imitation of the decapitated head: “And then the head spoke, all by itself, and said: ‘I am innocent!’ ( Of course, it was only the nerves; but it spoke, just as plainly as I’m speaking now.) ‘I am innocent!’ it said… . And a few months later, another man confessed on his death-bed that he’d been the real murderer. So, after that, William never signed a death-warrant again!”

In the Wassertorstrasse one week was much like another. Our leaky stuffy little attic smelt of cooking and bad drains. When the living-room stove was alight, we could hardly breathe; when it wasn’t we froze. The weather had turned very cold. Frau Nowak tramped the streets, when she wasn’t at work, from the clinic to the board of health offices and back again: for hours she waited on benches in draughty corridors or puzzled over complicated application-forms. The

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doctors couldn’t agree about her case. One was in favour of sending her to a sanatorium at once. Another thought she was too far gone to be worth sending at all—and told her so. Another assured her that there was nothing serious the matter: she merely needed a fortnight in the Alps. Frau Nowak listened to all three of them with the greatest respect and never failed to impress upon me, in describing these interviews, that each was the kindest and cleverest professor to be found in the whole of Europe.

She returned home, coughing and shivering, with sodden shoes, exhausted and semi-hysterical. No sooner was she inside the flat than she began scolding at Grete or at Otto, quite automatically, like a clockwork doll unwinding its spring:

“You mark my words—you’ll end in prison! I wish I’d packed you off to a reformatory when you were fourteen. It might have done you some good… . And to think that, in my whole family, we’ve never had anybody before who wasn’t respectable and decent!”

“You respectable!” Otto sneered: “When you were a girl you went around with every pair of trousers you could find.”

“I forbid you to speak to me like that! Do you hear? I forbid you! Oh, I wish I’d died before I bore you, you wicked, unnatural child!”

Otto skipped around” her, dodging her blows, wild with glee at the row he had started. In his excitement he pulled hideous grimaces.

“He’s mad!” exclaimed Frau Nowak: “Just look at him now, Herr Christoph. I ask you, isn’t he just a raving madman? I must take him to the hospital to be examined.”

This idea appealed to Otto’s romantic imagination. Often, when we were alone together, he would tell me with tears in his eyes:

“I shan’t be here much longer, Christoph. My nerves are breaking down. Very soon they’ll come and take me away. They’ll put me in a strait-waistcoat and feed me through a

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rubber tube. And when you come to visit me, I shan’t know who you are.”

Frau Nowak and Otto were not the only ones with “nerves.” Slowly but surely the Nowaks were breaking down my powers of resistance. Every day I found the smell from the kitchen sink a little nastier: every day Otto’s voice when quarrelling seemed harsher and his mother’s a little shriller. Grete’s whine made me set my teeth. When Otto slammed a door I winced irritably. At nights I couldn’t get to sleep unless I was half drunk. Also, I was secretly worrying about an unpleasant and mysterious rash: it might be due to Frau Nowak’s cooking, or worse.

I now spent most of my evenings at the Alexander Casino. At a table in the corner by the stove I wrote letters, talked to Pieps and Gerhardt or simply amused myself by watching the other guests. The place was usually very quiet. We afl sat round or lounged at the bar, waiting for something to happen. No sooner came the sound of the outer door than a dozen pairs of eyes were turned to see what new visitor would emerge from behind the leather curtain. Generally, it was only a biscuit-seller with his basket, or a Salvation Army girl with her collecting-box and tracts. If the biscuit-seller had been doing good business or was drunk he would throw dice with us for packets of sugar-wafers. As for the Salvation Army girl, she rattled her way drably round the room, got nothing and departed, without making us feel in the least uncomfortable. Indeed, she had become so much a part of the evening’s routine that Gerhardt and Pieps did not even make jokes about her when she was gone. Then an old man would shuffle in, whisper something to the barman and retire with him into the room behind the bar. He was a cocaine-addict. A moment later he reappeared, raised his hat to all of us with a vague courteous gesture, and shuffled out. The old man had a nervous tic and kept shaking his head all the time, as if saying to Life: No. No. No.

Sometimes the police came, looking for wanted criminals or escaped reformatory boys. Their visits were usually ex—

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pected and prepared for. At any rate you could always, as Pieps explained to me, make a last-minute exit through the lavatory window into the courtyard at the back of the house: “But you must be careful, Christoph,” he added: “Take a good big jump. Or you’ll fall down the coal-chute and into the cellar. I did, once. And Hamburg Werner, who was coming after me, laughed so much that the bulls caught him.” On Saturday and Sunday evenings the Alexander Casino was full. Visitors from the West End arrived, like ambassadors from another country. There were a good number of foreigners—Dutchmen mostly, and Englishmen, The Englishmen talked in loud, high, excited voices. They discussed communism and Van Gogh and the best restaurants. Some of them seemed a little scared: perhaps they expected to be knifed in this den of thieves. Pieps and Gerhardt sat at their tables and mimicked their accents, cadging drinks and cigarettes. A stout man in horn spectacles asked: “Were you at that delicious party Bill gave for the negro singers?” And a young man with a monocle murmured: “All the poetry in the world is in that face.” I knew what he was feeling at that moment: I could sympathise with, even envy him. But it was saddening to know that, two weeks hence, he would boast about his exploits here to a select party of clubmen or dons—warmed discreet smilers around a table furnished with historic silver and legendary port. It made me feel older.

At last the doctors made up their minds: Frau Nowak was to be sent to the sanatorium after all: and quite soon—shortly before Christmas. As soon as she heard this she ordered a new dress from the tailor. She was as excited and pleased as if she had been invited to a party: “The matrons are always very particular, you know, Herr Christoph. They see to it that we keep ourselves neat and tidy. If we don’t we get punished—and quite right, too… . I’m sure I shall enjoy being there,” Frau Nowak sighed, “if only I can stop myself

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worrying about the family. What they’ll do when I’m gone, goodness only knows. They’re as helpless as a lot of sheep. …” In the evenings she spent hours stitching warm flannel underclothes, smiling to herself, like a woman who is expecting a child.

On the afternoon of my departure Otto was very depressed.

“Now you’re going, Christoph, I don’t know what’ll happen to me. Perhaps, six months from now, I shan’t be alive at all.”

“You got on all right before I came, didn’t you?”

“Yes … but now mother’s going, too. I don’t suppose father‘11 give me anything to eat.”

“What rubbish!”

“Take me with you, Christoph. Let me be your servant. I could be very useful, you know. I could cook for you and mend your clothes and open the door for your pupils… .” Otto’s eyes brightened as he admired himself in this new role. “I’d wear a little white jacket—or perhaps blue would be better,” with silver buttons… .”

“I’m afraid you’re a luxury I can’t afford.”

“Oh, but, Christoph, I shouldn’t want any wages, of course.” Otto paused, feeling that this offer had been a bit too generous. “That is,” he added cautiously, “only just a mark or two to go dancing, now and then.”

“I’m very sorry.”

We were interrupted by the return of Frau Nowak. She had come home early to cook me a farewell meal. Her stringbag was full of things she had bought; she had tired herself out carrying it. She shut the kitchen-door behind her with a sigh and began to bustle about at once, her nerves on edge, ready for a row.

“Why, Otto, you’ve let the stove go out! After I specially told you to keep an eye on it! Oh, dear, can’t I rely on anybody in this house to help me with a single thing?”

“Sorry, mother,” said Otto. “I forgot.”

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“Of course you forgot! Do you ever remember anything? You forgot!” Frau Nowak screamed at him, her features puckered into a sharp little stabbing point of fury: “I’ve worked myself into my grave for you, and that’s my thanks. When I’m gone I hope your father’ll turn you out into the streets. We’ll see how you like that! You great, lazy, hulking lump! Get out of my sight, do you hear! Get out of my sight!”

“All right. Christoph, you hear what she says?” Otto turned to me, his face convulsed with rage; at that moment the resemblance between them was quite startling; they were like creatures demoniacally possessed. “I’ll make her sorry for it as long as she lives!”

He turned and plunged into the inner bedroom, slamming the rickety door behind him. Frau Nowak turned at once to the stove and began shovelling out the cinders. She was trembling all over and coughing violently. I helped her, putting firewood and pieces of coal into her hands; she took them from me blindly, without a glance or a word. Feeling, as usual, that I was only in the way, I went into the living-room and stood stupidly by the window, wishing that I could simply disappear. I had had enough. On the window-sill lay a stump of pencil. I picked it up and drew a small circle on the wood, thinking: I have left my mark. Then I remembered how I had done exactly the same thing, years ago, before leaving a boarding-house in North Wales. In the inner room all was quiet. I decided to confront Otto’s sulks. I had still got my suitcases to pack.

When I opened the door Otto was sitting on his bed. He was staring as if hypnotized at a gash in his left wrist, from which the blood was trickling down over his open palm and spilling in big drops on the floor. In his right hand, between finger and thumb, he held a safety-razor blade. He didn’t resist when I snatched it from him. The wound itself was nothing much; I bandaged it with his handkerchief. Otto seemed to turn faint for a moment and lolled against my shoulder.

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“How on earth did you manage to do it?”

“I wanted to show her,” said Otto. He was very pale. He had evidently given himself a nasty scare: “You shouldn’t have stopped me, Christoph.”

“You little idiot,” I said angrily, for he had frightened me, too: “One of these days you’ll really hurt yourself—by mistake.”

Otto gave me a long, reproachful look. Slowly his eyes filled with tears.

“What does it matter, Christoph? I’m no good… . What’ll become of me, do you suppose, when I’m older?”

“You’ll get work.”

“Work… .” The very thought made Otto burst into tears. Sobbing violently, he smeared the back of his hand across his nose.

I pulled out the handkerchief from my pocket. “Here. Take this.”

“Thanks, Christoph… .” He wiped his eyes mournfully and blew his nose. Then something about the handkerchief itself caught his attention. He began to examine it, listlessly at first, then” with extreme interest.

“Why, Christoph,” he exclaimed indignantly, “this is one of mine!”

One afternoon, a few days after Christmas, I visited the Wassertorstrasse again. The lamps were alight already, as I turned in under the archway and entered the long, damp street, patched here and there with dirty snow. Weak yellow gleams shone out from the cellar shops. At a hand-cart under a gas-flare, a cripple was selling vegetables and fruit. A crowd of youths, with raw, sullen faces, stood watching two boys fighting at a doorway: a girl’s voice screamed excitedly as one of them tripped and fell. Crossing the muddy courtyard, inhaling the moist, familiar rottenness of the tenement buildings, I thought: Did I really ever live here? Already, with my comfortable bed-sitting room in the West

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End and my excellent new job, I had become a stranger to the slums.

The lights on the Nowaks’ staircase were out of order: it was pitch-dark. I groped my way upstairs without much difficulty and banged on their door. I made as much noise as I could because, to judge from the shouting and singing and shrieks of laughter within, a party was in progress.

“Who’s there?” bawled Herr Nowak’s voice.

“Christoph.”

“Aha! Christoph! Anglais! Englisch Man! Come in! Come in!”

The door was flung open. Herr Nowak swayed unsteadily on the threshhold, with arms open to embrace me. Behind him stood Grete, shaking like a jelly, with tears of laughter pouring down her cheeks. There was nobody else to be seen.

“Good old Christoph!” cried Herr Nowak, thumping me on the back. “I said to Grete: I know he’ll come. Christoph won’t desert us!” With a large burlesque gesture of welcome he pushed me violently into the living-room. The whole place was fearfully untidy. Clothing of various kinds lay in a confused heap on one of the beds; on the other were scattered cups, saucers, shoes, knives and forks. On the sideboard was a frying-pan full of dried fat. The room was lighted by three candles stuck into empty beer-bottles.

“All light’s been cut off,” explained Herr Nowak, with a negligent sweep of his arm : “The bill isn’t paid… . Must pay it sometime, of course. Never mind—it’s nicer like this, isn’t it? Come on, Grete, let’s light up the Christmas tree.”

The Christmas tree was the smallest I had ever seen. It was so tiny and feeble that it could only carry one candle, at the very top. A single thin strand of tinsel was draped around it. Herr Nowak dropped several lighted matches on the floor before he could get the candle to burn. If I hadn’t stamped them out the table-cloth might easily have caught fire.

“Where are Lothar and Otto?” I asked.

“Don’t know. Somewhere about… . They don’t show themselves much, nowadays—it doesn’t suit them, here… .

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Never mind, we’re quite happy by ourselves, aren’t we, Grete?” Herr Nowak executed a few elephantine dance-steps and began to sing:

“O Tannenbaum! O Tannenbaum! … Come on, Christoph, all together now! Wie treu sind Deine Blätter!”

After this was over I produced my presents: cigars for Herr Nowak, for Grete chocolates and a clockwork mouse. Herr Nowak then brought out a bottle of beer from under the bed. After a long search for his spectacles, which were finally discovered hanging on the water-tap in the kitchen, he read me a letter which Frau Nowak had written from the sanatorium. He repeated every sentence three or four times, got lost in the middle, swore, blew his nose, and picked his ears. I could hardly understand a word. Then he and Grete began playing with the clockwork mouse, letting it run about the table, shrieking and roaring whenever it neared the edge. The mouse was such a success that my departure was managed briefly, without any fuss. “Goodbye, Christoph. Come again soon,” said Herr Nowak and turned back to the table at once. He and Grete were bending over it with the eagerness of gamblers as I made my way out of the attic.

Not long after this I had a call from Otto himself. He had come to ask me if I would go with him the next Sunday to see Frau Nowak. The sanatorium had its monthly visiting-day: there would be a special bus running from Hallesches Tor.

“You needn’t pay for me, you know,” Otto added grandly. He was fairly shining with self-satisfaction.

“That’s very handsome of you, Otto. … A new suit?”

“Do you like it?”

“It must have cost a good bit.”

“Two hundred and fifty marks.”

“My word! Has your ship come home?”

Otto smirked: “I’m seeing a lot of Trade now. Her uncle’s left her some money. Perhaps, in the spring, we’ll get married.”

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“Congratulations. … I suppose you’re still living at home?”

“Oh, I look in there occasionally,” Otto drew down the corners of his mouth in a grimace of languid distaste, “but father’s always drunk.”’

“Disgusting, isn’t it?” I mimicked his tone. We both laughed.

“My goodness, Christoph, is it as late as that? I must be getting along… . Till Sunday. Be good.”

We arrived at the sanatorium about midday.

There was a bumpy cart-track winding for several kilometres through snowy pinewoods and then, suddenly, a Gothic brick gateway like the entrance to a churchyard, with big red buildings rising behind. The bus stopped. Otto and I were the last passengers to get out. We stood stretching ourselves and blinking at the bright snow: out here in the country everything was dazzling white. We were all very stiff, for the bus was only a covered van, with packing-cases and school-benches for seats. The seats had not shifted much during the journey, for we had been packed together as tightly as books on a shelf.

And now the patients came running out to meet us—awkward padded figures muffled in shawls and blankets, stumbling and slithering on the trampled ice of the path. They were in such a hurry that their blundering charge ended in a slide. They shot skidding into the arms of their friends and relations, who staggered under the violence of the collision. One couple, amid shrieks of laughter, had tumbled over.

“Otto!”

“Mother!”

“So you’ve really come! How well you’re looking!”

“Of course we’ve come, mother! What did you expect?” Frau Nowak disengaged herself from Otto to shake hands with me. “How do you do, Herr Christoph?”

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She looked years younger. Her plump, oval, innocent face, lively and a trifle crafty, with its small peasant eyes, was like the face of a young girl. Her cheeks were brightly dabbed with colour. She smiled as though she could never stop.

“Ah, Herr Christoph, how nice of you to come! How nice of you to bring Otto to visit me!”

She uttered a brief, queer, hysterical little laugh. We mounted some steps into the house. The smell of the warm, clean, antiseptic building entered my nostrils like a breath of fear.

“They’ve put me in one of the smaller wards,” Frau Nowak told us. “There’s only four of us altogether. We get up to all sorts of games.” Proudly throwing open the door, she made the introductions: “This is Muttchen—she keeps us in order! And this is Erna. And this is Erika—our baby!”

Erika was a weedy blonde girl of eighteen, who giggled: “So here’s the famous Otto! We’ve been looking forward to seeing him for weeks!”

Otto smiled subtly, discreetly, very much at his ease. His brand new brown suit was vulgar beyond words; so were his lilac spats and his pointed yellow shoes. On his finger was an enormous signet-ring with a square, chocolate-coloured stone. Otto was extremely conscious of it and kept posing his hand in graceful attitudes, glancing down furtively to admire the effect. Frau Nowak simply couldn’t leave him alone. She must keep hugging him and pinching his cheeks.

“Doesn’t he look well!” she exclaimed. “Doesn’t he look splendid! Why, Otto, you’re so big and strong, I believe you could pick me up with one hand!”

Old Muttchen had a cold, they said. She wore a bandage round her throat, tight under the high collar of her old-fashioned black dress. She seemed a nice old lady, but somehow slightly obscene, like an old dog with sores. She sat on the edge of her bed with the photographs of her children and grandchildren on the table beside her, like prizes she had won. She looked slyly pleased, as though she were glad

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to be so ill. Frau Nowak told us that Muttchen had been three times in this sanatorium already. Each time she had been discharged as cured, but within nine months or a year she would have a relapse and have to be sent back again.

“Some of the cleverest professors in Germany have come here to examine her,” Frau Nowak added, with pride, “but you always fool them, don’t you, Muttchen dear?”

The old lady nodded, smiling, like a clever child which is being praised by its elders.

“And Erna is here for the second time,” Frau Nowak continued. “The doctors said she’d be all right; but she didn’t get enough to eat. So now she’s come back to us, haven’t you, Erna?”

“Yes, I’ve come back,” Erna agreed.

She was a skinny, bobbed-haired woman of about thirty-five, who must once have been very feminine, appealing, wistful, and soft. Now, in her extreme emaciation, she seemed possessed by a kind of desperate resolution, a certain defiance. She had immense, dark, hungry eyes. The wedding-ring was loose on her bony finger. When she talked and became excited her hands flitted tirelessly about in sequences of aimless gestures, like two shrivelled moths.

“My husband beat me and then ran away. The night he went he gave me such a thrashing that I had the marks afterwards for months. He was such a great strong man. He nearly killed me.” She spoke calmly, deliberately, yet with a certain suppressed excitement, never taking her eyes from my face. Her hungry glance bored into my brain, reading eagerly what I was thinking. “I dream about him now, sometimes,” she added, as if faintly amused.

Otto and I sat down at the table while Frau Nowak fussed around us with coffee and cakes which one of the sisters had brought. Everything which happened to me to-day was curiously without impact: my senses were muffled, insulated, functioning as if in a vivid dream. In this calm, white room, with its great windows looking out over the silent snowy pinewoods—the Christmas-tree on the table, the paper

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festoons above the beds, the nailed-up photographs, the plate of heart-shaped chocolate biscuits—these four women lived and moved. My eyes could explore every corner of their world: the temperature-charts, the fire extinguisher, the leather screen by the door. Dressed daily in their best clothes, their clean hands no longer pricked by the needle or roughened from scrubbing, they lay out on the terrace, listening to the wireless, forbidden to talk. Women being shut up together in this room had bred an atmosphere which was faintly nauseating, like soiled linen locked in a cupboard without air. They were playful with each other and shrill, like overgrown schoolgirls. Frau Nowak and Erika indulged in sudden furtive bouts of ragging. They plucked at each other’s clothes, scuffled silently, exploded into shrilly strained laughter. They were showing off in front of us.

“You don’t know how we’ve looked forward to to-day,” Erna told me. “To see a real live man!”

Frau Nowak giggled.

“Erika was such an innocent girl until she came here… . You didn’t know anything, did you, Erika?”

Erika sniggered.

“I’ve learnt enough since then… .”

“Yes, I should think you have! Would you believe it, Herr Christoph—her aunt sent her this little mannikin for Christmas, and now she takes it to bed with her every night, because she says she must have a man in her bed!”

Erika laughed boldly. “Well, it’s better than nothing, isn’t it?”

She winked at Otto, who rolled his eyes, pretending to be shocked.

After lunch Frau Nowak had to put in an hour’s rest. So Erna and Erika took possession of us for a walk in the grounds.

“We’ll show them the cemetery first,” Erna said.

The cemetery was for pet animals belonging to the sanatorium staff which had died. There were about a dozen

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little crosses and tombstones, pencilled with mock-heroic inscriptions in verse. Dead birds were buried there and white mice and rabbits, and a bat which had been found frozen after a storm.

“It makes you feel sad to think of them lying there, doesn’t it?” said Erna. She scooped away the snow from one of the graves. There were tears in her eyes.

But, as we walked away down the path, both she and Erika were very gay. We laughed and threw snowballs at each other. Otto picked up Erika and pretended he was going to throw her into a snowdrift. A little further on we passed close to a summerhouse, standing back from the path on a mound among the trees. A man and a woman were just coming out of it.

“That’s Frau Klemke,” Erna told me. “She’s got her husband here to-day. Just think, that old hut’s the only place in the whole grounds where two people can be alone together… .

“It must be pretty cold in this weather.”

“Of course it is! Tomorrow her temperature will be up again and she’ll have to stay in bed for a fortnight… . But who cares! If I were in her place I’d do the same myself.” Erna squeezed my arm: “We’ve got to live while we’re young, haven’t we?”

“Of course we have!”

Erna looked up quickly into my face; her big dark eyes fastened on to mine like hooks; I could imagine I felt them pulling me down.

“I’m not really a consumptive, you know, Christoph… . You didn’t think I was, did you, just because I’m here?”

“No, Erna, of course I didn’t.”

“Lots of the girls here aren’t. They just need looking after for a bit, like me… . The doctor says that if I take care of myself I shall be as strong as ever I was… . And what do you think the first thing is I shall do when they let me out of here?”

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“What?”

“First I shall get my divorce, and then I shall find a husband.” Erna laughed, with a kind of bitter triumph. “That won’t take me long—I can promise you!”

After tea we sat upstairs in the ward. Frau Nowak had borrowed a gramophone so that we could dance. I danced with Erna. Erika danced with Otto. She was tomboyish and clumsy, laughing loudly whenever she slipped or trod on his toes. Otto, sleekly smiling, steered her backwards and forwards with skill, his shoulders hunched in the fashionable chimpanzee stoop of Hallesches Tor. Old Muttchen sat looking on from her bed. When I held Erna in my arms I felt her shivering all over. It was almost dark now, but nobody suggested turning on the light.

After a while we stopped dancing and sat round in a circle on the beds. Frau Nowak had begun to talk about her childhood days, when she had lived with her parents on a farm in East Prussia. “We had a saw-mill of our own,” she told us, “and thirty horses. My father’s horses were the best in the district; he won prizes with them, many a time, at the show… .” The ward was quite dark now. The windows were big pale rectangles in the darkness. Erna, sitting beside me on the bed, felt down for my hand and squeezed it; then she reached behind me and drew my arm round her body. She was trembling violently. “Christoph …” she whispered in my ear.

“… and in the summer time,” Frau Nowak was saying, “we used to go dancing in the big barn down by the river… .”

My mouth pressed against Erna’s hot, dry lips. I had no particular sensation of contact: all this was part of the long, rather sinister symbolic dream which I seemed to have been dreaming throughout the day. “I’m so happy, this evening… .” Erna whispered.

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“The postmaster’s son used to play the fiddle,” said Frau Nowak. “He played beautifully … it made you want to cry… .”

From the bed on which Erika and Otto were sitting came sounds of scuffling and a loud snigger: “Otto, you naughty boy… . I’m surprised at you! I shall tell your mother!”

Five minutes later a sister came to tell us that the bus was ready to start.

“My word, Christoph,” Otto whispered to me, as we were putting on our overcoats, “I could have done anything I liked with that girl! I felt her all over… . Did you have a good time with yours? A bit skinny, wasn’t she—but I bet she’s hot stuff!”

Then we were clambering into the bus with the other passengers. The patients crowded round to say goodbye. Wrapped and hooded in their blankets, they might have been the members of an aboriginal forest tribe.

Frau Nowak had begun crying, though she tried hard to smile.

“Tell father I’ll be back soon… .”

“Of course you will, mother! You’ll soon be well now. You’ll soon be home.”

“It’s only a short time …” sobbed Frau Nowak; the tears running down over her hideous frog-like smile. And suddenly she started coughing—her body seemed to break in half like a hinged doll. Clasping her hands over her breast, she uttered short yelping coughs like a desperate injured animal. The blanket slipped back from her head and shoulders: a wisp of hair, working loose from the knot, was getting into her eyes—she shook her head blindly to avoid it. Two sisters gently tried to lead her away, but at once she began to struggle furiously. She wouldn’t go with them.

“Go in, mother,” begged Otto. He was almost in tears himself. “Please go in! You’ll catch your death of cold!”

“Write to me sometimes, won’t you, Christoph?” Erna was

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clutching my hand as though she were drowning. Her eyes looked up at me with a terrifying intensity of unashamed despair. “It doesn’t matter if it’s only a postcard … just sign your name.”

“Of course I will… .”

They all thronged round us for a moment in the little circle of light from the panting bus, their lit faces ghastly like ghosts against the black stems of the pines. This was the climax of my dream: the instant of nightmare in which it would end. I had an absurd pang of fear that they were going to attack us—a gang of terrifyingly soft muffled shapes —clawing us from our seats, dragging us hungrily down, in dead silence. But the moment passed. They drew back— harmless, after all, as mere ghosts—into the darkness, while our bus, with a great churning of its wheels, lurched forward towards the city, through the deep unseen snow.

THE LANDAUERS

One night in October 1930, about a month after the Elections, there was a big row on the Leipzigerstrasse. Gangs of Nazi roughs turned out to demonstrate against the Jews. They manhandled some dark-haired, large-nosed pedestrians, and smashed the windows of all the Jewish shops. The incident was not, in itself, very remarkable; there were no deaths, very little shooting, not more than a couple of dozen arrests. I remember it only because it was my first introduction to Berlin politics.

Frl. Mayr, of course, was delighted: “Serve them right!”

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she exclaimed. “This town is sick with Jews. Turn over any stone, and a couple of them will crawl out. They’re poisoning the very water we drink! They’re strangling us, they’re robbing us, they’re sucking our life-blood. Look at all the big department stores: Wertheim, K.D.W., Landauers’. Who owns them? Filthy thieving Jews!”

“The Landauers are personal friends of mine,” I retorted icily, and left the room before Frl. Mayr had time to think of a suitable reply.

This wasn’t strictly true. As a matter of fact, I had never met any member of the Landauer family in my life. But, before leaving England, i had been given a letter of introduction to them by a mutual friend. I mistrust letters of introduction, and should probably never have used this one, if it hadn’t been for Frl. Mayr’s remark. Now, perversely, I decided to write to Frau Landauer at once.

Natalia Landauer, as I saw her, for the first time, three days later, was a schoolgirl of eighteen. She had dark fluffy hair; far too much of it—it made her face, with its sparkling eyes, appear too long and too narrow. She reminded me of a young fox. She shook hands straight from the shoulder in the modern student manner. “In here, please.” Her tone was peremptory and brisk.

The sitting-room was large and cheerful, pre-War in taste, a little over-furnished. Natalia had begun talking at once, with terrific animation, in eager stumbling English, showing me gramophone records, pictures, books. I wasn’t allowed to look at anything for more than a moment:

“You like Mozart? Yes? Oh, I also! Vairy much! … These picture is in the Kronprinz Palast. You have not seen it? I shall show you one day, yes? … You are fond of Heine? Say quite truthfully, please.” She looked up from the bookcase, smiling, but with a certain schoolmarm severity: “Read. It’s beautiful, I find.”

I hadn’t been in the house for more than quarter of an

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hour before Natalia had put aside four books for me to take with me when I left—Tonio Kroger, Jacobsen’s stories, a volume of Stefan George, Goethe’s letters. “You are to tell me your truthful opinion,” she warned me.

Suddenly, a maid parted the sliding glass doors at the end of the room, and we found ourselves in the presence of Frau Landauer, a large, pale woman with a mole on her left cheek and her hair brushed back smooth into a knot, seated placidly at the dining-room table, filling glasses from a samovar with tea. There were plates of ham and cold cut wurst and a bowl of those thin wet slippery sausages which squirt you with hot water when their skins are punctured by a fork; as well as cheese, radishes, pumpernickel and bottled beer. “You will drink beer,” Natalia ordered, returning one of the glasses of tea to her mother.

Looking round me, I noticed that the few available wall-spaces between pictures and cupboards were decorated with eccentric life-size figures, maidens with flying hair or oblique-eyed gazelles, cut out of painted paper and fastened down with drawing-pins. They made a comically ineffectual protest against the bourgeois solidity of the mahogany furniture. I knew, without being told, that Natalia must have designed them. Yes, she’d made them and fixed them up there for a party; now she wanted to take them down, but her mother wouldn’t let her. They had a little argument about this— evidently part of the domestic routine. “Oh, but they’re tairrible, I find!” cried Natalia, in English. “I think they’re very pretty,” replied Frau Landauer placidly, in German, without raising her eyes from the plate, her mouth full of pumpernickel and radish.

As soon as we had finished supper, Natalia made it clear that I was to say a formal good-night to Frau Landauer. We then returned to the sitting-room. She began to cross-examine me. Where was my room? How much was I paying for it? When I told her, she said immediately that I’d chosen quite the wrong district (Wilmersdorf was far better), and that I’d been swindled. I could have got exactly the same thing,

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with running water and central heating thrown in, for the same price. “You should have asked me,” she added, apparently quite forgetting that we’d met that evening for the first time: “I should have found it for you myself.”

“Your friend tells us you are a writer?” Natalia challenged suddenly.

“Not a real writer,” I protested.

“But you have written a book? Yes?”

Yes, I had written a book.

Natalia was triumphant: “You have written a book and you say you are not a writer. You are mad, I think.”

Then I had to tell her the whole history of All the Conspirators, why it had that title, what it was about, when it was published, and so forth.

“You will bring me a copy, please.”

“I haven’t got one,” I told her, with satisfaction, “and it’s out of print.”

This rather dashed Natalia for the moment, then she sniffed eagerly at a new scent: “And this what you will write in Berlin? Tell me, please.”

To satisfy her, I began to tell the story of a story I had written years before, for a college magazine at Cambridge. I improved it as much as possible extempore, as I went along. Telling this story again quite excited me—so much that I began to feel that the idea in it hadn’t been so bad after all, and that I might really be able to rewrite it. At the end of every sentence, Natalia pressed her lips tight together and nodded her head so violently that the hair flopped up and down over her face.

“Yes, yes,” she kept saying. “Yes, yes.”

It was only after some minutes that I realized she wasn’t taking in anything I said. She evidently couldn’t understand my English, for I was talking much faster now, and not choosing my words. In spite of her tremendous devotional effort of concentration, I could see that she was noticing the way I parted my hair, and that my tie was worn shiny at the knot. She even flashed a furtive glance at my shoes. I pre-142

tended, however, not to be aware of all this. It would have been rude to stop short and most unkind to spoil Natalia’s pleasure in the mere fact that I was talking so intimately to her about something which really interested me, although we were practically strangers.

When I had finished, she asked at once: “And it will be ready—how soon?” For she had taken possession of the story, together with all my other affairs. I answered that I didn’t know. I was lazy.

“You are lazy?” Natalia opened her eyes mockingly. “So? Then I am sorry. I can’t help you.”

Presently, I said that I must go. She came with me to the door: “And you will bring me this story soon,” she persisted.

“Yes.”

“How soon?”

“Next week,” I feebly promised.

It was a fortnight before I called on the Landauers again. After dinner, when Frau Landauer had left the room, Natalia informed me that we were to go together to the cinema. “We are the guests of my mother.” As we stood up to go, she suddenly grabbed two apples and an orange from the sideboard and stuffed them into my pockets. She had evidently made up her mind that I was suffering from undernourishment. I protested weakly.

“When you say another word, I am angry,” she warned me.

“And you have brought it?” she asked, as we were leaving the house.

Knowing perfectly well that she meant the story, I made my voice as innocent as I could: “Brought what?”

“You know. What you promise.”

“I don’t remember promising anything.”

“Don’t remember?” Natalia laughed scornfully. “Then I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

By the time we got to the cinema, she had forgiven me, however. The big film was a Pat and Patachon. Natalia remarked severely: “You do not like this kind of film, I think? It isn’t something clever enough for you?”

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I denied that I only liked “clever” films, but she was sceptical: “Good. We shall see.”

All through the film, she kept glancing at me to see if I was laughing. At first, I laughed exaggeratedly. Then, getting tired of this, I stopped laughing altogether. Natalia got more and more impatient with me. Towards the end of the film, she even began to nudge me at moments when I should laugh. No sooner were the lights turned up, than she pounced:

‘Tou see? I was right. You did not like it, no?”

“I liked it very much indeed.”

“Oh yes, I believe! And now say truthfully.”

“I have told you. I liked it.”

“But you did not laugh. You are sitting always with your face so …” Natalia tried to imitate me, “and not once laughing.”

“I never laugh when I am amused,” I said.

“Oh yes, perhaps! That shall be one of your English customs, not to laugh?”

“No Englishman ever laughs when he’s amused.”

“You wish I believe that? Then I will tell you your Englishmen are mad.”

“That remark is not very original.”

“And must always my remarks be so original, my dear sir?”

“When you are with me, yes.”

“Imbecile!”

We sat for a little in a café near the Zoo Station and ate ices. The ices were lumpy and tasted slightly of potato. Suddenly, Natalia began to talk about her parents:

“I do not understand what this modern books mean when they say: the mother and father always must have quarrel with the children. You know, it would be impossible that I can have quarrel with my parents. Impossible.”

Natalia looked hard at me to see whether I believed this. I nodded.

“Absolute impossible,” she repeated solemnly. “Because I know that my father and my mother love me. And so they are thinking always not of themselves but of what is for me

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the best. My mother, you know, she is not strong. She is having sometimes the most tairrible headaches. And then, of course, I cannot leave her alone. Vairy often, I would like to go out to a cinema or theatre or concert, and my mother, she say nothing, but I look at her and see that she is not well, and so I say No, I have change my mind, I will not go. But never it happens that she say one word about the pain she is suffered. Never.”

(When next I called on the Landauers, I spent two marks fifty on roses for Natalia’s mother. It was worth it. Never once did Frau Landauer have a headache on an evening when I proposed going out with Natalia.)

“My father will always that I have the best of everything,” Natalia continued. “My father will always that I say: My parents are rich, I do not need to think for money.” Natalia sighed: “But I am different than this. I await always that the worst will come. I know how things are in Germany to-day, and suddenly it can be that my father lose all. You know, that is happened once already? Before the War, my father has had a big factory in Posen. The War comes, and my father has to go. Tomorrow, it can be here the same. But my father, he is such a man that to him it is equal. He can start with one pfennig and work and work until he gets all back.”

“And that is why,” Natalia went on, “I wish to leave school and begin to learn something useful, that I can win my bread. I cannot know how long my parents have money. My father will that I make my Abitur and go to the university. But now I will speak with him and ask if I cannot go to Paris and study art. If I can draw and paint I can perhaps make my life; and also I will learn cookery. Do you know that I cannot cook, not the simplest thing?”

“Neither can I.”

“For a man, that is not so important, I find. But a girl must be prepared for all.”

“If I want,” added Natalia earnestly, “I shall go away with the man I love and I shall live with him; even if we cannot

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become married it will not matter. Then I must be able to do all for myself, you understand? It is not enough to say: I have made my Abitur, I have my degree at the university. He will answer: ‘Please, where is my dinner?’ “

There was a pause.

“You are not shocked at what I say just now,” asked Natalia suddenly. “That I would live with a man without that we were married?”

“No, of course not.”

“Do not misunderstand me, please. I do not admirate the women who is going always from one man to another—that is all so,” Natalia made a gesture of distaste, “so degenerated, I find.”

“You don’t think that women should be allowed to change their minds?”

“I do not know. I do not understand such questions… . But it is degenerated.”

I saw her home. Natalia had a trick of leading you right up on to the doorstep, and then, with extraordinary rapidity, shaking hands, whisking into the house and slamming the door in your face.

“You ring me up? Next week? Yes?” I can hear her voice now. And then the door slammed and she was gone without waiting for an answer.

Natalia avoided all contacts, direct and indirect. Just as she wouldn’t stand chatting with me on her own doorstep, she preferred always, I noticed, to have a table between us if we sat down. She hated me to help her into her coat: “I am not yet sixty years, my dear sir!” If we stood up to leave a café or a restaurant and she saw my eye moving towards the peg from which her coat hung, she would pounce instantly upon it and carry it off with her into a corner, like an animal guarding its food.

One evening, we went into a café and ordered two cups of chocolate. When the chocolate came, we found that the

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waitress had forgotten to bring Natalia a spoon. I’d already sipped my cup and had stirred it with my spoon after sipping it. It seemed quite natural to offer my spoon to Natalia, and I was surprised and a little impatient when she refused it with an expression of slight distaste. She declined even this indirect contact with my mouth.

Natalia got tickets for a concert of Mozart concertos. The evening was not a success. The severe Corinthian hall was chilly, and my eyes were uncomfortably dazzled by the classic brilliance of the electric lights. The shiny wooden chairs were austerely hard. The audience plainly regarded the concert as a religious ceremony. Their taut, devotional enthusiasm oppressed me like a headache; I couldn’t, for a moment, lose consciousness of all those blind, half-frowning, listening heads. And, despite Mozart, I couldn’t help feeling: What an extraordinary way this is of spending an evening!

On the way home, 1 was tired and sulky, and this resulted in a little tiff with Natalia. She began it by talking about Hippi Bernstein. It was Natalia who had got me my job with the Bernsteins: she and Hippi went to the same school. A couple of days before, I had given Hippi her first English lesson.

“And how do you like her?” Natalia asked.

“Very much. Don’t you?”

“Yes, I also… . But she’s got two bad faults. I think you will not have notice them yet?”

As I didn’t rise to this, she added solemnly: “You know, I wish you would tell me truthfully what are my faults?”

In another mood, I should have found this amusing, and even rather touching. As it was, I only thought: “She’s fishing,” and snapped:

“I don’t know what you mean by ‘faults.’ I don’t judge people on a haif-term-report basis. You’d better ask one of your teachers.”

This shut Natalia up for the moment. But, presently, she started again. Had I read any of the books she’d lent me?

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I hadn’t, but said: Yes, I’d read Jacobsen’s Frau Marie Grubbe.

And what did I think of it?

“It’s very good,” I said, peevish because guilty.

Natalia looked at me sharply: “I’m afraid you are vairy insincere. You do not give your real meaning.”

I was suddenly, childishly cross:

“Of course I don’t. Why should I? Arguments bore me. I don’t intend to say anything which you’re likely to disagree with.”

“But if that is so,” she was really dismayed, “then it is no use for us to speak of anything seriously.”

“Of course it isn’t.”

“Then shall we not talk at all?” asked poor Natalia.

“The best of all,” I said, “would be for us to make noises like farmyard animals. I like hearing the sound of your voice but I don’t care a bit what you’re saying. So it’d be far better if we just said Bow-wow and Baa and Meaow.”

Natalia flushed. She was bewildered and deeply hurt. Presently, after a long silence, she said: “Yes. I see.”

As we approached her house, I tried to patch things up and turn the whole business into a joke, but she didn’t respond. I went home feeling very much ashamed of myself.

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. J asked what she’d been doing during the last few days. ‘ **

“All this week,” said Natalia, “I am not going in the school.

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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—to-day 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 enig-149

matic: 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 to-day. 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 deprecat-ingly, 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 excep—

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tional 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 exira-ordinary.” Herr Landauer fixed each of us in turn, triumphantly, his mouth full of food. Suddenly his eyes focussed 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

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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 your book is 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?”

“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

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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 come 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?”

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“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 see 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.

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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, if 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

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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 you are 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—

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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 the 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.”

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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.

During the early part of that winter, I saw a good deal of Bernhard. I cannot say that I got to know him much better through these evenings spent together. He remained curiously remote from me—his face impassive with exhaustion under the shaded lamplight, his gentle voice moving on through sequences of mildly humorous anecdotes. He would describe, for instance, a lunch with some friends who were very strict Jews. “Ah,” Bernhard had said, conversationally, “so we’re having lunch out of doors to-day? How delightful! The weather’s still so warm for the time of year, isn’t it? And your garden’s looking lovely.” Then, suddenly, it had occurred to him that his hosts were regarding him rather sourly, and he remembered, with horror, that this was the Feast of Tabernacles.

I laughed. I was amused. Bernhard told stories very well. But, all the time, I was aware of feeling a certain impatience. Why does he treat me like a child, I thought. He treats us all as children—his uncle and aunt, Natalia, myself. He tells us stories. He is sympathetic, charming. But his gestures, offering me a glass of wine or a cigarette, are clothed in arrogance, in the arrogant humility of the East. He is not going to tell me what he is really thinking or feeling, and he despises me because I do not know. He will never tell me anything about himself, or about the things which are most important to him. And because I am not as he is, because I am the opposite of this, and would gladly share my thoughts

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and sensations with forty million people if they cared to read them, I half admire Bernhard but also half dislike him.

We seldom talked about the political condition of Germany, but, one evening, Bernhard told me a story of the days of the civil war. He had been visited by a student friend who was taking part in the fighting. The student was very nervous and refused to sit down. Presently he confessed to Bernhard that he had been ordered to take a message through to one of the newspaper office-buildings which the police were besieging; to reach this office, it would be necessary to climb and crawl over roofs which were exposed to machine-gun fire. Naturally, he wasn’t anxious to start. The student was wearing a remarkably thick overcoat, which Bernhard pressed him to take off, for the room was well heated and his face was literally streaming with sweat. At length, after much hesitation, the student did so, revealing, to Bernhard’s intense alarm, that the lining of the coat was fitted with inside pockets stuffed full of hand-grenades. “And the worst of it was,” said Bernhard, “that he’d made up his mind not to take any more risks, but to leave the overcoat with me. He wanted to put it into the bath and turn on the cold water tap. At last I persuaded him that it would be much better to take it out after dark and to drop it into the canal—and this he ultimately succeeded in doing… . He is now one of the most distinguished professors in a certain provincial university. I am sure that he has long since forgotten this somewhat embarrassing escapade…

“Were you ever a communist, Bernhard?” I asked.

At once—I saw it in his face—he was on the defensive. After a moment, he said slowly:

“No, Christopher. I’m afraid I was always constitutionally incapable of bringing myself to the required pitch of enthusiasm.”

I felt suddenly impatient with him; angry, even: “–—ever

to believe in anything?”

Bernhard smiled faintly at my violence. It may have amused him to have roused me like this.

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“Perhaps… .” Then he added, as if to himself: “No .,. . that is not quite true… .”

“What do you believe in, then?” I challenged.

Bernhard was silent for some moments, considering this —his beaky delicate profile impassive, his eyes half-closed. At last he said: “Possibly I believe in discipline.”

“In discipline?”

“You don’t understand that, Christopher? Let me try to explain. … I believe in discipline for myself, not necessarily for others. For others, I cannot judge. I know only that I myself must have certain standards which I obey and without which I am quite lost… . Does that sound very dreadful?”

“No,” I said—thinking: He is like Natalia.

“You must not condemn me too harshly, Christopher.” The mocking smile was spreading over Bernhard’s face. “Remember that I am a cross-breed. Perhaps, after all, there is one drop of pure Prussian blood in my polluted veins. Perhaps this little finger,” he held it up to the light, “is the finger of a Prussian drill-sergeant… . You, Christopher, with your centuries of Ango-Saxon freedom behind you, with your Magna Charta engraved upon your heart, cannot understand that we poor barbarians need the stiffness of a uniform to keep us standing upright.”

“Why do you always make fun of me, Bernhard?”

“Make fun of you, my dear Christopher! I shouldn’t dare!”

Yet, perhaps, on this occasion, he told me a little more than he had intended.

I had long meditated the experiment of introducing Natalia to Sally Bowles. I think I knew beforehand what the result of their meeting would be. At any rate, I had the sense not to invite Fritz Wendel.

We were to meet at a smart café in the Kurfürstendamm. Natalia was the first to arrive. She was a quarter of an hour late—probably because she’d wanted to have the advantage

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of coming last. But she had reckoned without Sally: she hadn’t the nerve to be late in the grand manner. Poor Natalia! She had tried to make herself look more grown up—with the result that she appeared merely rather dowdy. The long townified dress she’d put on didn’t suit her at all. On the side of her head, she had planted a little hat—an unconscious parody of Sally’s page-boy cap. But Natalia’s hair was much too fuzzy for it: it rode the waves like a half-swamped boat on a rough sea.

“How do I look?” she immediately asked, sitting down opposite to me, rather flurried.

“You look very nice.”

“Tell me, please, truthfully, what will she think of me?”

“She’ll like you very much.”

“How can you say that?” Natalia was indignant. “You do not know!”

“First you want my opinion, and then you say I don’t know!”

“Imbecile! I do not ask for compliments!”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you do ask for.”

“Oh no?” cried Natalia scornfully. “You do not understand? Then I am sorry. I can’t help you!”

At this moment, Sally arrived.

“Hilloo, darling,” she exclaimed, in her most cooing accents, “I’m terribly sorry I’m late—can you forgive me?” She sat down daintily, enveloping us in wafts of perfume, and began, with languid miniature gestures, to take off her gloves: “I’ve been making love to a dirty old Jew producer. I’m hoping he’ll give me a contract—but no go, so far… .”

I kicked Sally hastily, under the table, and she stopped short, with an expression of absurd dismay—but now, of course, it was too late. Natalia froze before our eyes. All I’d said and hinted beforehand, in hypothetic pre-excuse of Sally’s conduct, was instantly made void. After a moment’s glacial pause, Natalia asked me if I’d seen Sous les Toits de Paris. She spoke German. She wasn’t going to give Sally a chance of laughing at her English.

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Sally immediately chipped in, however, quite unabashed. She’d seen the film, and thought it was marvellous, and wasn’t Prejean marvellous, and did we remember the scene where a train goes past in the background while they’re starting to fight? Sally’s German was so much more than usually awful that I wondered whether she wasn’t deliberately exaggerating it in order, somehow, to make fun of Natalia.

During the rest of the interview I suffered mental pins and needles. Natalia hardly spoke at all. Sally prattled on in her murderous German, making what she imagined to be light general conversation, chiefly about the English film industry. But as every anecdote involved explaining that somebody was someone else’s mistress, that this one drank and that one took drugs, this didn’t make the atmosphere any more agreeable. I found myself getting increasingly annoyed with both of them—with Sally for her endless silly pornographic talk; with Natalia for being such a prude. At length, after what seemed an eternity but was, in fact, barely twenty minutes, Natalia said that she must be going.

“My God, so must I!” cried Sally, in English. “Chris, darling, you’ll take me as far as the Eden, won’t you?”

In my cowardly way, I glanced at Natalia, trying to convey my helplessness. This, I knew only too well, was going to be regarded as a test of my loyalty—and, already, I had failed it. Natalia’s expression showed no mercy. Her face was set. She was very angry, indeed.

“When shall I see you?” I ventured to ask.

“I don’t know,” said Natalia—and she marched off down the Kurfürstendamm as if she never wished to set eyes on either of us again.

Although we had only a tew hundred yards to go, Sally insisted that we must take a taxi. It would never do, she explained, to arrive at the Eden on foot.

“That girl didn’t like me much, did she?” she remarked, as we were driving off.

“No, Sally. Not much.”

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“I’m sure I don’t know why. … I went out of my way to be nice to her.”

“If that’s what you call being nice … !” I laughed, in spite of my vexation.

“Well, what ought I to have done?”

“It’s more a question of what you ought not to have done… . Haven’t you any small-talk except adultery?”

“People have got to take me as I am,” retorted Sally, grandly.

“Finger-nails and all?” I’d noticed Natalia’s eyes returning to them again and again, in fascinated horror.

Sally laughed: “To-day, I specially didn’t paint my toe-nails.”

“Oh, rot, Sally! Do you really?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“But what on earth’s the point? I mean, nobody–—” I

corrected myself, “very few people can see them… .”

Sally gave me her most fatuous grin: “I know, darling… . But it makes me feel so marvellously sensual… .”

From this meeting, I date the decline of my relations with Natalia. Not that there was ever any open quarrel between us, or definite break. Indeed, we met again only a few days later; but at once I was aware of a change in the temperature of our friendship. We talked, as usual, of art, music, books— carefully avoiding the personal note. We had been walking about the Tiergarten for the best part of an hour, when Natalia abruptly asked:

“You like Miss Bowles vairy much?” Her eyes, fixed on the leaf-strewn path, were smiling maliciously.

“Of course I do… . We’re going to be married, soon.”

“Imbecile!”

We marched on for several minutes in silence.

“You know,” said Natalia suddenly, with the air of one who makes a surprising discovery: “I do not like your Miss Bowles?”

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“I know you don’t.”

My tone vexed her—as I intended that it should: “What I think, it is not of importance?”

“Not in the least.” I grinned teasingly.

“Only your Miss Bowles, she is of importance?”

“She is of great importance.”

Natalia reddened and bit her lip. She was getting angry: “Some day, you will see that I am right.”

“I’ve no doubt I shall.”

We walked all the way back to Natalia’s home without exchanging a single word. On the doorstep, however, she asked, as usual: “Perhaps you will ring me up, one day …” then paused, delivered her parting shot: “if your Miss Bowles permits?”

I laughed: “Whether she permits or not, I shall ring you up very soon.” Almost before I had finished speaking, Natalia had shut the door in my face.

Nevertheless, I didn’t keep my word. It was a month before I finally dialled Natalia’s number. I had half intended to do so, many times, but, always, my disinclination had been stronger than my desire to see her again. And when, at length, we did meet, the temperature had dropped several degrees lower still; we seemed mere acquaintances. Natalia was convinced, I suppose, that Sally had become my mistress, and I didn’t see why I should correct her mistake—doing so would only have involved a long heart-to-heart talk for which I simply wasn’t in the mood. And, at the end of all the explanations, Natalia would probably have found herself quite as much shocked as she was at present, and a good deal more jealous. I didn’t flatter myself that Natalia had ever wanted me as a lover, but she had certainly begun to behave towards me, as a kind of bossy elder sister, and it was just this role—absurdly enough—which Sally had stolen from her. No, it was a pity, but on the whole, I decided, things were better as they were. So I played up to Natalia’s indirect questions and insinuations, and even let drop a few hints of domestic bliss: “When Sally and I were having breakfast

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together, this morning …” or “How do you like this tie? Sally chose it… .” Poor Natalia received them in glum silence; and, as so often before, I felt guilty and unkind. There were two more meetings, equally unsuccessful. Then, towards the end of February, I rang up her home, and was told that she’d gone abroad.

Bernhard, too, I hadn’t seen for some time. Indeed, I was quite surprised to hear his voice on the telephone one morning. He wanted to know if I would go with him that evening “into the country” and spend the night. This sounded very mysterious, and Bernhard only laughed when I tried to get out of him where we were going and why.

He called for me about eight o’clock, in a big closed car with a chauffeur. The car, Bernhard explained, belonged to the business. Both he and his uncle used it. It was typical, I thought, of the patriarchal simplicity in which the Landauers lived that Natalia’s parents had no private car of their own, and that Bernhard even seemed inclined to apologize to me for the existence of this one. It was a complicated simplicity, the negation of a negation. Its roots were entangled deep in the awful guilt of possession. Oh dear, I sighed to myself, shall I ever get to the bottom of these people, shall I ever understand them? The mere act of thinking about the Landauers’ psychic make-up overcame me, as always, with a sense of absolute, defeated exhaustion.

“You are tired?” Bernhard asked, solicitous, at my elbow.

“Oh no. …” I roused myself. “Not a bit.”

“You will not mind if we call first at the house of a friend of mine? There is somebody else coming with us, you see. … I hope you don’t object?”

“No, of course not,” I said politely.

“He is very quiet. An old friend of the family.” Bernhard, for some reason, seemed amused. He chuckled faintly to himself.

The car stopped outside a villa in the Fasanenstrasse.

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Bernhard rang the bell and was let in: a few moments later, he reappeared, carrying in his arms a Skye terrier. I laughed.

“You were exceedingly polite,” said Bernhard, smiling. “All the same, I think I detected a certain uneasiness on your part… . Am I right?”

“Perhaps… .”

“I wonder whom you were expecting? Some terribly boring old gentleman, perhaps?” Bernhard patted the terrier. “But I fear, Christopher, that you are far too well bred ever to confess that to me now.”

The car slowed down and stopped before the toll-gate of the Avus motor-road.

“Where are we going?” I asked. “I wish you’d tell me!”

Bernhard smiled his soft expansive Oriental smile: “I’m very mysterious, am I not?”

“Very.”

“Surely it must be a wonderful experience for you to be driving away into the night, not knowing whither you are bound? If I tell you that we are going to Paris, or to Madrid, or to Moscow, then there will no longer be any mystery and you will have lost half your pleasure… . Do you know, Christopher, I quite envy you because you do not know where we are going?”

“That’s one way of looking at it, certainly… . But, at any rate, I know already we aren’t going to Moscow. We’re driving in the opposite direction.”

Bernhard laughed: “You are so very English sometimes, Chistopher. Do you realize that, I wonder?”

“You bring out the English side of me, I think,” I answered, and immediately felt a little uncomfortable, as though this remark were somehow insulting. Bernhard seemed aware of my thought.

“Am I to understand that as a compliment, or as a reproof?”

“As a compliment, of course.”

The car whirled along the black Avus, into the immense darkness of the winter countryside. Giant reflector signs

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glittered for a moment in the headlight beams, expired like burnt-out matches. Already Berlin was a reddish glow in the sky behind us, dwindling rapidly beyond a converging forest of pines. The searchlight on the Funkturm swung its little ray through the night. The straight black road roared headlong to meet us, as if to its destruction. In the upholstered darkness of the car, Bernhard was patting the restless dog upon his knees.

“Very well, I will tell you… . We are going to a place on the shores of the Wannsee which used to belong to my father. What you call in England a country cottage.”

“A cottage? Very nice… .”

My tone amused Bernhard. I could hear from his voice that he was smiling:

“I hope you won’t find it too uncomfortable?”

“I’m sure I shall love it.”

“It may seem a little primitive, at first… .” Bernhard laughed quietly to himself: “Nevertheless, it is amusing… .”

“It must be… .”

I suppose I had been vaguely expecting an hotel, lights, music, very good food. I reflected bitterly that only a rich, decadently over-civilized town-dweller would describe camping out for the night in a poky, damp country cottage in the middle of the winter as “amusing.” And how typical that he should drive me to that cottage in a luxurious car! Where would the chauffeur sleep? Probably in the best hotel in Potsdam. … As we passed the lamps of the toll-house at the far end of the Avus, I saw that Bernhard was still smiling to himself.

The car swung to the right, downhill, along a road through silhouetted trees. There was a feeling of nearness to the big lake lying invisible behind the woodland on our left. I had hardly realized that the road had ended in a gateway and a private drive: we pulled up at the door of a large villa.

“Where’s this?” I asked Bernhard, supposing confusedly that he must have something else to call for—another terrier, perhaps. Bernhard laughed gaily:

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“We have arrived at our destination, my dear Christopher! Out you get!”

A manservant in a striped jacket opened the door. The dog jumped out, and Bernhard and I followed. Resting his hand upon my shoulder, he steered me across the hall and up the stairs. I was aware of a rich carpet and framed engravings. He opened the door of a luxurious pink and white bedroom, with a luscious quilted silk eiderdown on the bed. Beyond was a bathroom, gleaming with polished silver, and hung with fleecy white towels.

Bernhard grinned:

“Poor Christopher! I fear you are disappointed in our cottage? It is too large for you, too ostentatious? You were looking forward to the pleasure of sleeping on the floor— amidst the blackbeetles?”

The atmosphere of this joke surrounded us through dinner. As the manservant brought in each new course on its silver dish, Bernhard would catch my eye and smile a deprecatory smile. The dining-room was tame baroque, elegant and rather colourless. I asked him when the villa had been built.

“My father built this house in 1904. He wanted to make it as much as possible like an English home—for my mother’s sake… .”

After dinner, we walked down the windy garden, in the Ťdarkness. A strong wind was blowing up through the trees, from over the water. I followed Bernhard, stumbling against the body of the terrier which kept running between my legs, down flights of stone steps to a landing-stage. The dark lake was full of waves, and beyond, in the direction of Potsdam, a sprinkle of bobbing lights were comet-tailed in the black water. On the parapet, a dismantled gas-bracket rattled in the wind, and, below us, the waves splashed uncannily soft and wet, against unseen stone.

“When I was a boy, I used to come down these steps in the winter evenings and stand for hours here… .” Bern—

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hard had begun to speak. His voice was pitched so low that I could hardly hear it; his face was turned away from me, in the darkness, looking out over the lake. When a stronger puff of wind blew, his words came more distinctly—as though the wind itself were talking: “That was during the Wartime. My elder brother had been killed, right at the beginning of the War … Later, certain business rivals of my father began to make propaganda against him, because his wife was an English woman, so that nobody would come to visit us, and it was rumoured that we were spies. At last, even the local tradespeople did not wish to call at the house… . It was all rather ridiculous, and at the same time rather terrible, that human beings could be possessed by so much malice… .”

I shivered a little, peering out over the water. It was cold. Bernhard’s soft, careful voice continued in my ear:

“I used to stand here on those winter evenings and pretend to myself that I was the last human being left alive in the world. … I was a queer sort of boy, I suppose… . I never got on well with other boys, although I wished very much to be popular and to have friends. Perhaps that was my mistake—I was too eager to be friendly. The boys saw this “nd it made them cruel to me. Objectively, I can understand that … possibly I might even have been capable of cruelty myself, had circumstances been otherwise. It is difficult to say… . But, being what I was, school was a kind of Chinese torture. … So you can understand that I liked to come down here at night to the lake, and be alone. And then there was the War. … At this time, I believed that the War would go on for ten, or fifteen, or even twenty years. I knew that I myself should soon be called up. Curiously enough, I don’t remember that I felt at all afraid. I accepted it. It seemed quite natural that we should all have to die. I suppose that this was the general wartime mentality. But I think that, in my case, there was also something characteristically Semitic in my attitude. … It is very difficult to

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speak quite impartially of these things. Sometimes one is unwilling to make certain admissions to oneself, because they are displeasing to one’s self-esteem… .”

We turned slowly and began to climb the slope of the garden from the lake. Now and then, I heard the panting of the terrier, out hunting in the dark. Bernhard’s voice went on, hesitating, choosing its words:

“After my brother had been killed, my mother scarcely ever left this house and its grounds. I think she tried to forget that such a land as Germany existed. She began to study Hebrew and to concentrate her whole mind upon ancient Jewish history and literature. I suppose that this is really symptomatic of a modern phase of Jewish development—this turning away from European culture and European traditions. I am aware of it, sometimes, in myself. … I remember my mother going about the house like a person walking in sleep. She grudged every moment which she did not spend at her studies, and this was rather terrible because, all the while, she was dying of cancer. … As soon as she knew what was the matter with her, she refused to see a doctor. She feared an operation. … At last, when the pain became very bad, she killed herself… .”

We had reached the house. Bernhard opened a glass door, and we passed through a little conservatory into a big drawing-room full of jumping shadows from the fire burning in an open English fireplace. Bernhard switched on a number of lamps, making the room quite dazzlingly bright.

“Need we have so much illumination?” I asked. “I think the firelight is much nicer.”

“Do you?” Bernhard smiled subtly. “So do I. … But I thought, somehow, that you would prefer the lamps.”

“Why on earth should I?” I mistrusted his tone at once.

“I don’t know. It’s merely part of my conception of your character. How very foolish I am!”

Bernhard’s voice was mocking. I made no reply. He got up and turned out all but one small lamp on a table at my side. There was a long silence.

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“Would you care to listen to the wireless?”

This time his tone made me smile: “You don’t have to entertain me, you know! I’m perfectly happy just sitting here by the fire.”

“If you are happy, then I am glad. … It was foolish of me—I had formed the opposite impression.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was afraid, perhaps, that you were feeling bored.”

“Of course not! What nonsense!”

“You are very polite, Christopher. You are always very polite. But I can read quite clearly what you are thinking. …” I had never heard Bernhard’s voice sound like this, before; it was really hostile: “You are wondering why I brought you to this house. Above all, you are wondering why I told you what I told you just now.”

“I’m glad you told me… .”

“No, Christopher. That is not true. You are a little shocked. One does not speak of such things, you think. It disgusts your English public-school training, a little—this Jewish emotionalism. You like to flatter yourself that you are a man of the world and that no form of weakness disgusts you, but your training is too strong for you. People ought not to talk to each other like this, you feel. It is not good form.”

“Bernhard, you’re being fantastic!”

“Am I? Perhaps… . But I do not think so. Never mind… . Since you wish to know, I will try to explain to you why I brought you here. … I wished to make an experiment.”

“An experiment? Upon me, you mean?”

“No. An experiment upon myself. That is to say… . For ten years, I have never spoken intimately, as I have spoken to you tonight, to any human soul. … I wonder if you can put yourself in my place, imagine what that means? And this evening… . Perhaps, after all, it is impossible to explain… . Let me put it in another way. I bring you down here, to this house, which has no associations for you. You have no reason to feel oppressed by the past. Then I tell you my story. … It is possible that, in this way,

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one can lay ghosts. … I express myself very badly. Does it sound very absurd as I say it?’

“No. Not in the least… . But why did you choose me for your experiment?”

“Your voice was very hard as you said that, Christopher. You are thinking that you despise me.”

“No, Bernhard. I’m thinking that you must despise me. … I often wonder why you have anything to do with me at all. I feel sometimes that you actually dislike me, and that you say and do things to show it—and yet, in a way, I suppose you don’t, or you wouldn’t keep asking me to come and see you. … All the same, I’m getting rather tired of what you call your experiments. Tonight wasn’t the first of them, by any means. The experiments fail, and then you’re angry with me. I must say, I think that’s very unjust… . But what I can’t stand is that you show your resentment by adopting this mock-humble attitude… . Actually, you’re the least humble person I’ve ever met.”

Bernhard was silent. He had lit a cigarette, and now expelled the smoke slowly through his nostrils. At last he said:

“I wonder if you are right … I think not altogether. But partly… . Yes, there is some quality in you which attracts me and which I very much envy, and yet this very quality of yours also arouses my antagonism… . Perhaps that is merely because I also am partly English, and you represent to me an aspect of my own character… . No, that is not true, either. … It is not so simple as I would wish… . I’m afraid,” Bernhard passed his hand, with a wearily humorous gesture, over his forehead and eyes, “that I am a quite unnecessarily complicated piece of mechanism.”

There was a moment’s silence. Then he added:

“But this is all stupid egotistical talk. You must forgive me. I have no right to speak to you in this way.”

He rose to his feet, went softly across the room, and switched on the wireless. In rising, he had rested his hand for an instant on my shoulder. Followed by the first strains of the music, he came back to his chair before the fire, smiling.

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His smile was soft, and yet curiously hostile. It had the hostility of something ancient. I thought of one of the Oriental statuettes in his flat.

“This evening,” he smiled softly, “they are relaying the last act of Die Meistersinger.”

“Very interesting,” I said.

Half an hour later, Bernhard took me up to my bedroom door, his hand upon my shoulder, still smiling. Next morning, at breakfast, he looked tired, but was gay and amusing. He did not in any way refer to our conversation of the evening before.

We drove back to Berlin, and he dropped me on the corner of the Nollendorfplatz.

“Ring me up soon,” I said.

“Of course. Early next week.”

“And thank you very much.”

“Thank you for coming, my dear Christopher.”

I didn’t see him again for nearly six months.

One Sunday, early in August, a referendum was held to decide the fate of the Briining government. I was back at Frl. Schroeder’s, lying in bed through the beautiful hot weather, cursing my toe: I had cut it on a piece of tin, bathing for the last time at Rügen, and now it had suddenly festered and was full of poison. I was quite delighted when Bernhard unexpectedly rang me up.

“You remember a certain little country cottage on the shores of the Wannsee? You do? I was wondering if you would care to spend a few hours there, this afternoon… . Yes, your landlady has told me already about your misfortune. I am so sorry. … I can send the car for you. I think it will be good to escape for a little from this city? You can do whatever you like there—just lie quiet and rest. Nobody will interfere with your liberty.”

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Soon after lunch, the car duly arrived to pick me up. It was a glorious afternoon, and, during the drive, I blessed Bernhard for his kindness. But, when we arrived at the villa, I got a nasty shock: the lawn was crowded with people.

I was really annoyed. It was a dirty trick, I thought. Here was I, in my oldest clothes, with a bandaged foot and a stick, lured into the middle of a slap-up garden-party! And here was Bernhard in flannel trousers and a boyish jumper. It was astonishing how young he looked. Bounding to meet me, he vaulted over the low railing:

“Christopher! Here you are at last! Make yourself comfortable!”

In spite of my protests, he forcibly removed my coat and hat. As ill-luck would have it, I was wearing braces. Most of the other guests were in smart Riviera flannels. Smiling sourly, adopting instinctively the armour of sulky eccentricity which protects me on such occasions, I advanced hobbling into their midst. Several couples were dancing to a portable gramophone; two young men were pillow-fighting with cushions, cheered on by their respective women; most of the party were lying chatting on rugs on the grass. It was all so very informal, and the footmen and the chauffeurs stood discreetly aside, watching their antics, like the nursemaids of titled children.

What were they doing here? Why had Bernhard asked them? Was this another and more elaborate attempt to exorcize his ghosts? No, I decided; it was more probably only a duty-party, given once a year, to all the relatives, friends and dependents of the family. And mine was just another name to be ticked off, far down the list. Well, it was silly to be ungracious. I was here. I would enjoy myself.

Then, to my great surprise, I saw Natalia. She was dressed in some light yellow material, with small puffed sleeves, and carried a big straw hat in her hand. She looked so pretty that I should hardly have recognized her. She advanced gaily to welcome me:

“Ah, Christopher! You know, 1 am so pleased!”

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“Where have you been, all this time?” “In Paris… . You did not know? Truthfully? I await always a letter from you—and there is nothing!”’ “But, Natalia, you never sent me your address.”

“oh, i didr

“Well, in that case, I never got the letter… . I’ve been away, too, you know.”

“So? You have been away? Then I’m sorry. … I can’t help you!”

We both laughed. Natalia’s laugh had changed, like everything else about her. It was no longer the laugh of the severe schoolgirl who had ordered me to read Jacobsen and Goethe. And there was a dreamy, delighted smile upon her face—as though, I thought, she were listening, all the time, to lively, pleasant music. Despite her obvious pleasure at seeing me again, she seemed hardly to be attending to our conversation.

“And what are you doing in Paris? Are you studying art, as you wanted to?”

“But of course!”

“Do you like it?”

“Wonderful!” Natalia nodded vigorously. Her eyes were sparkling. But the word seemed intended to describe something else.

“Is your mother with you?”

“Yes. Yes… .”

“Have you got a flat together?”

“Yes… .” Again she nodded. “A flat… . Oh, it’s wonderful!”

“And you go back there, soon?”

“Why, yes. … Of course! Tomorrow!” She seemed quite surprised that I should ask the question—surprised that the whole world didn’t know… . How well I knew that feeling! I was certain, now: Natalia was in love.

We talked for several minutes more—Natalia always smiling, always dreamily listening, but not to me. Then, all at once, she was in a hurry. She was late, she said. She’d got to pack. She must go at once. She squeezed my hand, and

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I watched her run gaily across the lawn to a waiting car. She had forgotten, even, to ask me to write, or to give me her address. As I waved goodbye to her, my poisoned toe gave a sharp twinge of envy.

Later, the younger members of the party bathed, splashing about in the dirty lake-water at the foot of the stone stairs. Bernhard bathed, too. He had a white, strangely innocent body, like a baby’s, with a baby’s round, slightly protruding stomach. He laughed and splashed and shouted louder than anybody. When he caught my eye, he made more noise than ever—was it, I imagined, with a certain defiance? Was he thinking, as I was, of what he had told me, standing in this very place, six months ago? “Come in, too, Christopher!” he shouted. “It’ll do your foot good!” When, at last, they had all come out of the water and were drying themselves, he and a few other young men chased each other, laughing, among the garden trees.

Yet, in spite of all Bernhard’s frisking, the party didn’t really “go.” It split up into groups and cliques; and, even when the fun was at its height, at least a quarter of the guests were talking politics in low, serious voices. Indeed, some of them had so obviously come to Bernhard’s house merely to meet each other and to discuss their own private affairs that they scarcely troubled to pretend to take part in the sociabilities. They might as well have been sitting in their own offices, or at home.

When it got dark, a girl began to sing. She sang in Russian, and, as always, it sounded sad. The footmen brought out glasses and a huge bowl of claret-cup. It was getting chilly on the lawn. There were millions of stars. Out on the great calm brimming lake, the last ghost-like sails were tacking hither and thither with the faint uncertain night-breeze. The gramophone played. I lay back on the cushions, listening to a Jewish surgeon who argued that France cannot understand Germany because the French have experienced nothing comparable to the neurotic post-War life of the German people. A girl laughed suddenly, shrilly, from the middle of a group of young men. Over there, in the city, the votes were

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being counted. I thought, of Natalia: She has escaped—none too soon, perhaps. However often the decision may be delayed, all these people are ultimately doomed. This evening is the dress-rehearsal of a disaster. It is like the last night of an epoch.

At half-past ten, the party began to break up. We all stood about in the hall or around the front door while someone telephoned through to Berlin to get the news. A few moments’ hushed waiting, and the dark listening face at the telephone relaxed into a smile. The Government was safe, he told us. Several of the guests cheered, semi-ironical but relieved. I turned to find Bernhard at my elbow: “Once again, Capitalism is saved.” He was subtly smiling.

He had arranged that I should be taken home in the dicky of a Berlin-bound car. As we came down the Tauentzienstrasse, they were selling papers with the news of the shooting on the Biilowplatz. I thought of our party lying out there on the lawn by the lake, drinking our claret-cup while the gramophone played; and of that police-officer, revolver in hand, stumbling mortally wounded up the cinema steps to fall dead at the feet of a cardboard figure advertising a comic film.

Another pause—eight months, this time. And here I was, ringing the bell of Bernhard’s flat. Yes, he was in.

“This is a great honour, Christopher. And, unfortunately, a very rare one.”

“Yes, I’m sorry. I’ve so often meant to come and see you. … I don’t know why I haven’t… .”

“You’ve been in Berlin all this time? You know, I rang up twice at Frl. Schroeder’s, and a strange voice answered and said that you’d gone away, to England.”

“I told Frl. Schroeder that. I didn’t want her to know that I was still here.”

“Oh, indeed? You had a quarrel?”

“On the contrary. I told her that I was going to England, because, otherwise, she’d have insisted on supporting me. I

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got a bit hard up… . Everything’s perfectly all right again, now,” I added hastily, seeing a look of concern on Bernhard’s face.

“Quite certain? I am very glad… . But what have you been doing with yourself, all this time?”

“Living with a family of five in a two-room attic in Hallesches Tor.”

Bernhard smiled: “By Jove, Christopher—what a romantic life you lead!”

“I’m glad you call that kind of thing romantic. I don’t!”

We both laughed.

“At any rate,” Bernhard said, “it seems to have agreed with you. You’re looking the picture of health.”

I couldn’t return the compliment. I thought I had never seen Bernhard looking so ill. His face was pale and drawn; the weariness did not lift from it even when he smiled. There were deep sallow half-moons under his eyes. His hair seemed thinner. He might have added ten years to his age.

“And how have you been getting on?” I asked.

“My existence, in comparison with yours, is sadly humdrum, I fear… . Nevertheless, there are certain tragicomic diversions.”

“What sort of diversions?”

“This, for example–—” Bernhard went over to his writing-desk, picked up a sheet of paper and handed it to me: “It arrived by post this morning.”

I read the typed words:

Bernhard Landauer, beware. We are going to settle the score with you and your uncle and all other filthy Jews. We give you twenty-four hours to leave Germany. If not, you are dead men.

Bernhard laughed: “Bloodthirsty, isn’t it?” “It’s incredible… . Who do you suppose sent it?” “An employee who has been dismissed, perhaps. Or a practical joker. Or a madman. Or a hot-headed Nazi schoolboy.”

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“What shall you do?”

“Nothing.”

“Surely you’ll tell the police?”

“My dear Christopher, the police would very soon get tired of hearing such nonsense. We receive three or four such letters every week.”

“All the same, this one may quite well be in earnest… . The Nazis may write like schoolboys, but they’re capable of anything. That’s just why they’re so dangerous. People laugh at them, right up to the last moment… .”

Bernhard smiled his tired smile: “I appreciate very much this anxiety of yours on my behalf. Nevertheless, I am quite unworthy of it. … My existence is not of such vital importance to myself or to others that the forces of the Law should be called upon to protect me. … As for my uncle he is at present in Warsaw… .”

I saw that he wished to change the subject:

“Have you any news of Natalia and Frau Landauer?”

“Oh yes, indeed! Natalia is married. Didn’t you know? To a young French doctor. … I hear that they are very

happy.”

“I’m so glad!”

“Yes… . It’s pleasant to think of one’s friends being happy, isn’t it?” Bernhard crossed to the waste-paper basket and dropped the letter into it: “Especially in another country… .” He smiled, gently and sadly.

“And what do you think will happen in Germany, now?” I asked. “Is there going to be a Nazi putsch or a communist revolution?”

Bernhard laughed: “You have lost none of your enthusiasm, I see! I only wish that this question seemed as momentous to me as it does to you… .”

“It’ll seem momentous enough, one of these fine mornings” —the retort rose to my lips: I am glad now that I didn’t utter it. Instead, I asked: “Why do you wish that?”

“Because it would be a sign of something healthier in my own character. … It is right, nowadays, that one should

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be interested in such things; I recognize that. It is sane. It is healthy… . And because all this seems to me a little unreal, a little—please don’t be offended, Christopher—trivial, I know that I am getting out of touch with existence. That is bad, of course… . One must preserve a sense of proportion… . Do you know, there are times when I sit here alone in the evenings, amongst these books and stone figures, and there comes to me such a strange sensation of unreality, as if this were my whole life? Yes, actually, sometimes, I have felt a doubt as to whether our firm—that great building packed from floor to roof with all our accumulation of property—really exists at all, except in my imagination… . And then I have had an unpleasant feeling, such as one has in a dream, that I myself do not exist. It is very morbid, very unbalanced, no doubt. … I will make a confession to you, Christopher… . One evening, I was so much troubled by this hallucination of the non-existence of Landauers’ that I picked up my telephone and had a long conversation with one of the night-watchmen, making some stupid excuse for having troubled him. Just to reassure myself, you understand? Don’t you think I must be becoming insane?”

“I don’t think anything of the kind. … It could have happened to anyone who has overworked.”

“You recommend a holiday? A month in Italy, just as the spring is beginning? Yes. … I remember the days when a month of Italian sunshine would have solved all my troubles. But now, alas, that drug has lost its power. Here is a paradox for you! Landauers’ is no longer real to me, yet I am more than ever its slave! You see the penalty of a life of sordid materialism. Take my nose away from the grindstone, and I become positively unhappy… . Ah, Christopher, be warned by my fate!”

He smiled, spoke lightly, half banteringly. I didn’t like to pursue the subject further.

“You know,” I said, “I really am going to England, now. I’m leaving in three or four days.”

“I am sorry to hear it. How long do you expect to stay there?”

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“Probably the whole summer.”

“You are tired of Berlin, at last?”

“Oh no. … I feel more as if Berlin had got tired of me.”

“Then you will come back?”

“Yes, I expect so.”

“I believe that you will always come back to Berlin, Christopher. You seem to belong here.”

“Perhaps I do, in a way.”

“It is strange how people seem to belong to places— especially to places where they were not born… . When I first went to China, it seemed to me that I was at home there, for the first time in my life… . Perhaps, when I die, my spirit will be wafted to Peking.”

“It’d be better if you let a train waft your body there, as soon as possible!”

Bernhard laughed: “Very well. … I will follow your advice! But on two conditions—first, that you come with me; second, that we leave Berlin this evening.”

“You mean it?”

“Certainly I do.”

“What a pity! I should like to have come… . Unfortunately, I’ve only a hundred and fifty marks in the world.”

“Naturally, you would be my guest.”

“Oh, Bernhard, how marvellous! We’d stop a few days in Warsaw, to get the visas. Then on to Moscow, and take the trans-Siberian… .”

“So you’ll come?”

“Of course!”

“This evening?”

I pretended to consider: “I’m afraid I can’t, this evening… . I’d have to get my washing back from the laundry, first… . What about tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow is too late.”

“What a pity!”

“Yes, isn’t it?”

We both laughed. Bernhard seemed to be specially tickled by his joke. There was even something a little exaggerated in his laughter, as though the situation had some further dimen—

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sion of humour to which I hadn’t penetrated. We were still laughing when I said goodbye.

Perhaps I am slow at jokes. At any rate, it took me nearly eighteen months to see the point of this one—to recognize it as Bernhard’s last, most daring and most cynical experiment upon us both. For now I am certain—absolutely convinced —that his offer was perfectly serious.

When I returned to Berlin, in the autumn of 1932,1 duly rang Bernhard up, only to be told that he was away, on business, in Hamburg. I blame myself now—one always does blame oneself afterwards—for not having been more persistent. But there was so much for me to do, so many pupils, so many other people to see; the weeks turned into months; Christmas came—I sent Bernhard a card but got no answer: he was away again, most likely; and then the New Year began.

Hitler came, and the Reichstag fire, and the mock-elections. I wondered what was happening to Bernhard. Three times I rang him up—from call-boxes, lest I should get Frl. Schroeder into trouble: there was never any reply. Then, one evening early in April, I went round to his house. The caretaker put his head out of the tiny window, more suspicious than ever: at first, he seemed even inclined to deny that he knew Bernhard at all. Then he snapped: “Herr Landauer has gone away … gone right away.”

“Do you mean he’s moved from here?” I asked. “Can you give me his address?”

“He’s gone away,” the caretaker repeated, and slammed the window shut.

I left it at that—concluding, not unnaturally, that Bernhard was somewhere safe abroad.

On the morning of the Jewish boycott, I walked round to take a look at Landauers’. Things seemed very much as usual,

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superficially. Two or three uniformed S.A. boys were posted at each of the big entrances. Whenever a shopper approached, one of them would say: “Remember this is a Jewish business!” The boys were quite polite, grinning, making jokes among themselves. Little knots of passers-by collected to watch the performance—interested, amused or merely apathetic; still uncertain whether or not to approve. There was nothing of the atmosphere one read of later in the smaller provincial towns, where purchasers were forcibly disgraced with a rubber ink-stamp on the forehead and cheek. Quite a lot of people went into the building. I went in myself, bought Łhe first thing I saw—it happened to be a nutmeg-grater—and strolled out again, twirling my small parcel. One of the boys at the door winked and said something to his companion. I remembered having seen him once or twice at the Alexander Casino, in the days when I was living with the Nowaks.

In May, I left Berlin for the last time. My first stop was at Prague—and it was there, sitting one evening alone, in a cellar restaurant, that I heard, indirectly, my last news of the Landauer family.

Two men were at the next table, talking German. One of them was certainly an Austrian; the other I couldn’t place —he was fat and sleek, about forty-five, and might well have owned a small business in any European capital, from Belgrade to Stockholm. Both of them were undoubtedly prosperous, technically Aryan, and politically neuter. The fat man startled me into attention by saying:

“You know Landauers’? Landauers’ of Berlin?”

The Austrian nodded: “Sure, I do… . Did a lot of business with them, one time… . Nice place they’ve got there. Must have cost a bit …”

“Seen the papers, this morning?”

“No. Didn’t have time… . Moving into our new flat, you know. The wife’s coming back.”

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“She’s coming back? You don’t say! Been in Vienna, hasn’t she?”

‘That’s right.”

“Had a good time?”

“Trust her! It cost enough, anyway.”

“Vienna’s pretty dear, these days.”

“It is that.”

“Food’s dear.”

“It’s dear everywhere.”

“I guess you’re right.” The fat man began to pick his teeth: “What was I saying?”

“You were saying about Landauers’.”

“So I was… . You didn’t read the papers, this morning?”

“No, I didn’t read them.”

“There was a bit in about Bernhard Landauer.”

“Bernhard?” said the Austrian. “Let’s see—he’s the son, isn’t he?”

“I wouldn’t know… .” The fat man dislodged a tiny fragment of meat with the point of his toothpick. Holding it up to the light, he regarded it thoughtfully.

“I think he’s the son,” said the Austrian. “Or maybe the nephew… . No, I think he’s the son.”

“Whoever he is,” the fat man flicked the scrap of meat on to his plate with a gesture of distaste: “He’s dead.”

“You don’t say!”

“Heart failure.” The fat man frowned, and raised his hand to cover a belch. He was wearing three gold rings: “That’s what the newspapers said.”

“Heart failure!” The Austrian shifted uneasily in his chair: “You don’t say!”

“There’s a lot of heart failure,” said the fat man, “in Germany these days.”

The Austrian nodded: “You can’t believe all you hear. That’s a fact.”

“If vou ask me,” said the fat man, “anyone’s heart’s liable to fail, if it gets a bullet inside it.”

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The Austrian looked very uncomfortable: “Those Nazis …” he began.

“They mean business.” The fat man seemed rather to enjoy making his friend’s flesh creep. “You mark my words : they’re going to clear the Jews right out of Germany. Right out.”

The Austrian shook his head: “I don’t like it.”

“Concentration camps,” said the fat man, lighting a cigar. “They get them in there, make them sign things… . Then their hearts fail.”

“I don’t like it,” said the Austrian. “It’s bad for trade.”

“Yes,” the fat man agreed. “It’s bad for trade.”

“Makes everything so uncertain.”

“That’s right. Never know who you’re doing business with.” The fat man laughed. In his own way, he was rather macabre: “It might be a corpse.”

The Austrian shivered a little: “What about the old man, old Landauer? Did they get him, too?”

“No, he’s all right. Too smart for them. He’s in Paris.”

“You don’t say!”

“I reckon the Nazis’ll take over the business. They’re doing that, now.”

“Then old Landauer’ll be ruined, I guess?”

“Not him!” The fat man flicked the ash from his cigar, contemptuously. “He’ll have a bit put by, somewhere. You’ll

see. He’ll start something else. They’re smart, those

Jť ews… .

“That’s right,” the Austrian agreed. “You can’t keep a Jew down.”

The thought seemed to cheer him, a little. He brightened: “That reminds me! I knew there was something I wanted to tell you… . Did you ever hear the story about the Jew and the Goy girl with the wooden leg?”

“No.” The fat man puffed at his cigar. His digestion was working well, now. He was in the right after-dinner mood: “Go ahead… .”

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A BERLIN DIARY

(Winter 1932-3)

Tonight, for the first time this winter, it is very cold. The dead cold grips the town in utter silence, like the silence of intense midday summer heat. In the cold the town seems actually to contract, to dwindle to a small black dot, scarcely larger than hundreds of other dots, isolated and hard to find, on the enormous European map. Outside, in the night, beyond the last new-built blocks of concrete flats, where the streets end in frozen allotment gardens, are the Prussian plains. You can feel them all round you, tonight, creeping in upon the city, like an immense waste of unhomely ocean— sprinkled with leafless copses and ice-lakes and tiny villages which are remembered only as the outlandish names of battlefields in half-forgotten wars. Berlin is a skeleton which aches in the cold: it is my own skeleton aching. I feel in my bones the sharp ache of the frost in the girders of the overhead railway, in the ironwork of balconies, in bridges, tramlines, lamp-standards, latrines. The iron throbs and shrinks, the stone and the bricks ache dully, the plaster is numb.

Berlin is a city with two centres—the cluster of expensive hotels, bars, cinemas, shops round the Memorial Church, a sparkling nucleus of light, like a sham diamond, in the shabby twilight of the town; and the self-conscious civic centre of buildings round the Unter den Linden, carefully arranged. In grand international styles, copies of copies, they assert our dignity as a capital city—a parliament, a couple of museums, a State bank, a cathedral, an opera, a dozen embassies, a triumphal arch; nothing has been forgotten. And they are all so pompous, so very correct—all except the ca-186

thedral, which betrays, in its architecture, a flash of that hysteria which flickers always behind every grave, grey Prussian façade. Extinguished by its absurd dome, it is, at first sight, so startlingly funny that one searches for a name suitably preposterous—the Church of the Immaculate Consumption.

But the real heart of Berlin is a small damp black wood— the Tiergarten. At this time of the year, the cold begins to drive the peasant boys out of their tiny unprotected villages into the city, to look for food, and work. But the city, which glowed so brightly and invitingly in the night sky above the plains, is cold and cruel and dead. Its warmth is an illusion, a mirage of the winter desert. It will not receive these boys. It has nothing to give. The cold drives them out of its streets, into the wood which is its cruel heart. And there they cower on benches, to starve and freeze, and dream of their faraway cottage stoves.

Frl. Schroeder hates the cold. Huddled in her fur-lined velvet jacket, she sits in the corner with her stockinged feet on the stove. Sometimes she smokes a cigarette, sometimes she sips a glass of tea, but mostly she just sits, staring dully at the stove tiles in a kind of hibernation-doze. She is lonely, nowadays. Frl. Mayr is away in Holland, on a cabaret-tour. So Frl. Schroeder has nobody to talk to, except Bobby and myself.

Bobby, anyhow, is in deep disgrace. Not only is he out of work and three months behind with the rent, but Frl. Schroeder has reason to suspect him of stealing money from her bag. “You know, Herr Issyvoo,” she tells me, “I shouldn’t wonder at all if he didn’t pinch those fifty marks from Frl. Kost… . He’s quite capable of it, the pig! To think I could ever have been so mistaken in him! Will you believe it, Herr Issyvoo, I treated him as if he were my own son—and this is the thanks I get! He says he’ll pay me every pfennig if he gets this job as barman at the Lady Windermere … if,

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if …” Frl. Schroeder sniffs with intense scorn:; “I dare say! If my giandmother had wheels, she’d be an omnibus!” Bobby has been turned out of his old room and banished to the “Swedish Pavilion.” It must be terribly draughty, up there. Sometimes poor Bobby looks quite blue with cold. He has changed very much during the last year—his hair is thinner, his clothes are shabbier, his cheekiness has become defiant and rather pathetic. People like Bobby are their jobs —take the job away and they partially cease to exist. Sometimes, he sneaks into the living-room, unshaven, his hands in his pockets, and lounges about uneasily defiant, whistling to himself—the dance tunes he whistles are no longer quite new. Frl. Schroeder throws him a word, now and then, like a grudging scrap of bread, but she won’t look at him or make room for him by the stove. Perhaps she has never really forgiven him for his affair with Frl. Kost. The tickling and bottom-slapping days are over.

Yesterday we had a visit from Frl. Kost herself. I was out at the time: when I got back I found Frl. Schroeder quite excited. “Only think, Herr Issyvoo—I wouldn’t have known her! She’s quite the lady now! Her Japanese friend has bought her a fur coat—real fur, I shouldn’t like to think what he must have paid for it! And her shoes—genuine snakeskin! Well, well, I bet she earned them! That’s the one kind of business that still goes well, nowadays. … I think I shall have to take to the line myself!” But however much Frl. Schroeder might affect sarcasm at Frl. Kost’s expense, I could see that she’d been greatly and not unfavourably impressed. And it wasn’t so much the fur coat or the shoes which had impressed her: Frl. Kost had achieved something higher—the hall-mark of respectability in Frl. Schroeder’s world—she had had an operation in a private nursing home. “Oh, not what you think, Herr Issyvoo! It was something to do with her throat. Her friend paid for that, too, of course… . Only imagine—the doctors cut something out of the

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back of her nose; and now she can fill her mouth with water and squirt it out through her nostrils, just like a syringel I wouldn’t believe it at first—but she did it to show me! My word of honour, Herr Issyvoo, she could squirt it right across the kitchen! There’s no denying, she’s very much improved, since the time when she used to live here. … I shouldn’t be surprised if she married a bank director one of these days. Oh, yes, you mark my words, that girl will go far… .”

Herr Krampf, a young engineer, one of my pupils, describes his childhood during the days of the War and the Inflation. During the last years of the War, the straps disappeared from the windows of railway carriages: people had cut them off in order to sell the leather. You even saw men and women going about in clothes made from the carriage upholstery. A party of Krampfs school friends broke into a factory one night and stole all the leather driving-belts. Everybody stole. Everybody sold what they had to sell—themselves included. A boy of fourteen, from Krampfs class, peddled cocaine between school hours, in the streets.

Farmers and butchers were omnipotent. Their slightest whim had to be gratified, if you wanted vegetables or meat. The Krampf family knew of a butcher in a little village outside Berlin who always had meat to sell. But the butcher had a peculiar sexual perversion. His greatest erotic pleasure was to pinch and slap the cheeks of a sensitive, well-bred girl or woman. The possibility of thus humiliating a lady like Frau Krampf excited him enormously: unless he was allowed to realize his fantasy, he refused, absolutely, to do business. So, every Sunday, Krampfs mother would travel out to the village with her children, and patiently offer her cheeks to be slapped and pinched, in exchange for some cutlets or a steak.

At the far end of the Potsdamerstrasse, there is a fairground, with merry-go-rounds, swings and peepshows. One

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of the chief attractions of the fairground is a tent where boxing and wrestling matches are held. You pay your money and go in, the wrestlers fight three or four rounds, and the referee then announces that, if you want to see any more, you must pay an extra ten pfennigs. One of the wrestlers is a bald man with a very large stomach: he wears a pair of canvas trousers rolled up at the bottoms, as though he were going paddling. His opponent wears black tights, and leather kneelets which look as if they had come off an old cab-horse. The wrestlers throw each other about as much as possible, turning somersaults in the air to amuse the audience. The fat man who plays the part of loser pretends to get very angry when he is beaten, and threatens to fight the referee.

One of the boxers is a negro. He invariably wins. The boxers hit each other with the open glove, making a tremendous amount of noise. The other boxer, a tall, well-built young man, about twenty years younger and obviously much stronger than the negro, is “knocked out” with absurd ease. He writhes in great agony on the floor, nearly manages to struggle to his feet at the count of ten, then collapses again, groaning. After this fight, the referee collects ten more pfennigs and calls for a challenger from the audience. Before any bona fide challenger can apply, another young man, who has been quite openly chatting and joking with the wrestlers, jumps hastily into the ring and strips off his clothes, revealing himself already dressed in shorts and boxer’s boots. The referee announces a purse of five marks; and, this time, the negro is “knocked out.”

The audience took the fights dead seriously, shouting encouragement to the fighters, and even quarrelling and betting amongst themselves on the results. Yet nearly all of them had been in the tent as long as I had, and stayed on after I had left. The political moral is certainly depressing: these people could be made to believe in anybody or anything.

Walking this evening along the Kleiststrasse, I saw a little crowd gathered round a private car. In the car were two girls:

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on the pavement stood two young Jews, engaged in a violent argument with a large blond man who was obviously rather drunk. The Jews, it seemed, had been driving slowly along the street, on the look-out for a pick-up, and had offered these girls a ride. The two girls had accepted and got into the car. At this moment, however, the blond man had intervened. He was a Nazi, he told us, and as such felt it his mission to defend the honour of all German women against the obscene anti-Nordic menace. The two Jews didn’t seem in the least intimidated; they told the Nazi energetically to mind his own business. Meanwhile, the girls, taking advantage of the row, slipped out of the car and ran off down the street. The Nazi then tried to drag one of the Jews with him to find a policeman, and the Jew whose arm he had seized gave him an uppercut which laid him sprawling on his back. Before the Nazi could get to his feet, both young men had jumped into their car and driven away. The crowd dispersed slowly, arguing. Very few of them sided openly with the Nazi: several supported the Jews; but the majority confined themselves to shaking their heads dubiously and murmuring: “Allerhand!”

When, three hours later, I passed the same spot, the Nazi was still patrolling up and down, looking hungrily for more German womanhood to rescue.

We have just got a letter from Frl. Mayr: Frl. Schroeder called me in to listen to it. Frl. Mayr doesn’t like Holland. She has been obliged to sing in a lot of second-rate cafés in third-rate towns, and her bedroom is often badly heated. The Dutch, she writes, have no culture; she has only met one truly refined and superior gentleman, a widower. The widower tells her that she is really womanly woman—he has no use for young chits of girls. He has shown his admiration for her art by presenting her with a complete new set of underclothes.

Frl. Mayr has also had trouble with her colleagues. At one town, a rival actress, jealous of Frl. Mayr’s vocal powers, tried to stab her in the eye with a hatpin. I can’t help admiring that actress’s courage. When Frl. Mayr had finished with

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her, she was so badly injured that she couldn’t appear on the stage again for a week.

Last night, Fritz Wendel proposed a tour of “the dives.” It was to be in the nature of a farewell visit, for the Police have begun to take a great interest in these places. They are frequently raided, and the names of their clients are written down. There is even talk of a general Berlin clean-up.

I rather upset him by insisting on visiting the Salome, which I had never seen. Fritz, as a connoisseur of night-life, was most contemptuous. It wasn’t even genuine, he told me. The management run it entirely for the benefit of provincial sightseers.

The Salome turned out to be very expensive and even more depressing than I had imagined. A few stage lesbians and some young men with plucked eyebrows lounged at the bar, uttering occasional raucous guffaws or treble hoots— supposed, apparently, to represent the laughter of the damned. The whole premises are painted gold and inferno-red—crimson plush inches thick, and vast gilded mirrors. It was pretty full. The audience consisted chiefly of respectable middle-aged tradesmen and their families, exclaiming in good-humoured amazement: “Do they really?” and “Well, I never!” We went out half-way through the cabaret performance, after a young man in a spangled crinoline and jewelled breast-caps had painfully but successfully executed three splits.

At the entrance we met a party of American youths, very drunk, wondering whether to go in. Their leader was a small stocky young man in pince-nez, with an annoyingly prominent jaw.

“Say,” he asked Fritz, “what’s on here?”

“Men dressed as women,” Fritz grinned.

The little American simply couldn’t believe it. “Men dressed as women? As women hey? Do you mean they’re queer?”

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“Eventually we’re all queer,” drawled Fritz solemnly, in lugubrious tones. The young man looked us over slowly. He had been running and was still out of breath. The others grouped themselves awkwardly behind him, ready for anything—though their callow, open-mouthed faces in the greenish lamplight looked a bit scared.

“You queer, too, hey?” demanded the little American, turning suddenly on me. . “Yes,” I said, “very queer indeed.”

He stood before me a moment, panting, thrusting out his jaw, uncertain it seemed, whether he ought not to hit me in the face. Then he turned, uttered some kind of wild college battle-cry, and, followed by the others, rushed headlong into the building.

“Ever been to that communist dive near the Zoo?” Fritz asked me, as we were walking away from the Salome. “Eventually we should cast an eye in there. … In six months, maybe, we’ll all be wearing red shirts… .”

I agreed. I was curious to know what Fritz’s idea of a “communist dive” would be like.

It was, in fact, a small whitewashed cellar. You sat on long wooden benches at big bare tables; a dozen people together—like a school dining-hall. On the walls were scribbled expressionist drawings involving actual newspaper clippings, real playing-cards, nailed-on beer-mats, match-boxes, cigarette cartons, and heads cut out of photographs. The café was full of students, dressed mostly with aggressive political untidiness—the men in sailor’s sweaters and stained baggy trousers, the girls in ill-fitting jumpers, skirts held visibly together with safety-pins and carelessly knotted gaudy gipsy scarves. The proprietress was smoking a cigar. The boy who acted as a waiter lounged about with a cigarette between his lips and slapped customers on the back when taking their orders.

It was all thoroughly sham and gay and jolly: you couldn’t

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help feeling at home, immediately. Fritz, as usual, recognized plenty of friends. He introduced me to three of them—a man called Martin, an art student named Werner, and Inge, his girl. Inge was broad and lively—she wore a little hat with a feather in it which gave her a kind of farcical resemblance to Henry the Eighth. While Werner and Inge chattered, Martin sat silent: he was thin and dark and hatchet-faced, with the sardonically superior smile of the conscious conspirator. Later in the evening, when Fritz and Werner and Inge had moved down the table to join another party, Martin began to talk about the coming civil war. When the war breaks out, Martin explained, the communists, who have very few machine-guns, will get command of the roof tops. They will then keep the Police at bay with hand-grenades. It will only be necessary to hold out for three days, because the Soviet fleet will make an immediate dash for Swinemiinde and begin to land troops. “I spend most of my time now making bombs,” Martin added. I nodded and grinned, very much embarrassed—uncertain whether he was making fun of me, or deliberately committing some appalling indiscretion. He certainly wasn’t drunk, and he didn’t strike me as merely insane.

Presently, a strikingly handsome boy of sixteen or seventeen came into the café. His name was Rudi. He was dressed in a Russian blouse, leather shorts and despatch-rider’s boots, and he strode up to our table with all the heroic mannerisms of a messenger who returns successful from a desperate mission. He had, however, no message of any kind to deliver. After his whirlwind entry, and a succession of curt, martial handshakes, he sat down quite quietly beside us and ordered a glass of tea.

This evening, I visited the “communist” café again. It is really a fascinating little world of intrigue and counter-intrigue. Its Napoleon is the sinister bomb-making Martin;

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Werner is its Danton; Rudi its Joan of Arc. Everybody suspects everybody else. Already Martin has warned me against Werner: he is “politically unreliable”—last summer he stole the entire funds of a communist youth organization. And Werner has warned me against Martin: he is either a Nazi agent, or a police spy, or in the pay of the French Government. In addition to this, both Martin and Werner earnestly advised me to have nothing to do with Rudi—they absolutely refused to say why.

But there was no question of having nothing to do with Rudi. He planted himself down beside me and began talking at once—a hurricane of enthusiasm. His favourite word is “knorke”: “Oh, ripping!” He is a pathfinder. He wanted to know what the boy scouts were lüce in England. Had they got the spirit of adventure? “All German boys are adventurous. Adventure is ripping. Our Scoutmaster is a ripping man. Last year he went to Lapland and lived in a hut, all through the summer, alone… . Are you a communist?”

“No. Are you?”

Rudi was pained.

“Of course! We all are, here… . I’ll lend you some books, if you like… . You ought to come and see our club-house. It’s ripping… . We sing the Red Flag, and all the forbidden songs… . Will you teach me English? I want to learn all languages.”

I asked if there were any girls in his pathfinder group. Rudi was as shocked as if I’d said something really indecent.

“Women are no good,” he told me bitterly. “They spoil everything. They haven’t got the spirit of adventure. Men understand each other much better when they’re alone together. Uncle Peter (that’s our Scoutmaster) says women should stay at home and mend socks. That’s all they’re fit for!”

“Is Uncle Peter a communist, too?”

“Of course!” Rudi looked at me suspiciously. “Why do you ask that?”

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“Oh, no special reason,” I replied hastily. “I think perhaps I was mixing him up with somebody else… .”

This afternoon I travelled out to the reformatory to visit one of my pupils, Herr Brink, who is a master there. He is a small, broad-shouldered man, with the thin, dead-looking fair hair, mild eyes, and bulging, over-heavy forehead of the German vegetarian intellectual. He wears sandals and an open-necked shirt. I found him in the gymnasium, giving physical instruction to a class of mentally deficient children —for the reformatory houses mental deficients as well as juvenile delinquents. With a certain melancholy pride, he pointed out the various cases: one little boy was suffering from hereditary syphilis—he had a fearful squint; another, the child of elderly drunkards, couldn’t stop laughing. They clambered about the wall-bars like monkeys, laughing and chattering, seemingly quite happy.

Then we went up to the workshop, where older boys in blue overalls—all convicted criminals—were making boots. Most of the boys looked up and grinned when Brink came in, only a few were sullen. But I couldn’t look them in the eyes. I felt horribly guilty and ashamed: I seemed, at that moment, to have become the sole representative of their gaolers, of Capitalist Society. I wondered if any of them had actually been arrested in the Alexander Casino, and, if so, whether they recognized me.

We had lunch in the matron’s room. Herr Brink apologized for giving me the same food as the boys themselves ate— potato soup with two sausages, and a dish of apples and stewed prunes. I protested—as, no doubt, I was intended to protest—that it was very good. And yet the thought of the boys having to eat it, or any other kind of meal, in that building, made each spoonful stick in my throat. Institution food has an indescribable, perhaps purely imaginary, taste. ( One of the most vivid and sickening memories of my own school life is the smell of ordinary white bread.)

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“You don’t have any bars or locked gates here,” I said. “I thought all reformatories had them… . Don’t your boys often run away?”

“Hardly ever,” said Brink, and the admission seemed to make him positively unhappy; he sank his head wearily in his hands. “Where shall they run to? Here it is bad. At home it is worse. The majority of them know that.”

“But isn’t there a kind of natural instinct for freedom?”

“Yes, you are right. But the boys soon lose it. The system helps them to lose it. I think perhaps that, in Germans, this instinct is never very strong.”

“You don’t have much trouble here, then?”

“Oh, yes. Sometimes… . Three months ago, a terrible thing happened. One boy stole another boy’s overcoat. He asked for permission to go into the town—that is allowed— and possibly he meant to sell it. But the owner of the overcoat followed him, and they had a fight. The boy to whom the overcoat belonged took up a big stone and flung it at the other boy; and this boy, feeling himself hurt, deliberately smeared dirt into the wound, hoping to make it worse and so escape punishment. The wound did get worse. In three days the boy died of blood-poisoning. And when the other boy heard of this he killed himself with a kitchen knife… .” Brink sighed deeply: “Sometimes I almost despair,” he added. “It seems as if there were a kind of badness, a disease, infecting the world to-day.”

“But what can you really do for these boys?” I asked.

“Very little. We teach them a trade. Later, we try to find them work—which is almost impossible. If they have work in the neighbourhood, they can still sleep here at nights… . The Principal believes that their lives can be changed through the teachings of the Christian religion. I’m afraid I cannot feel this. The problem is not so simple. I’m afraid that most of them, if they cannot get work, will take to crime. After all, people cannot be ordered to starve.”

“Isn’t there any alternative?”

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Brink rose and led me to the window.

“You see those two buildings? One is the engineering-works, the other is the prison. For the boys of this district there used to be two alternatives… . But now the works are bankrupt. Next week they will close down.”

This morning Ď went to see Rudi’s club-house, which is also the office of a pathfinders’ magazine. The editor and scoutmaster, Uncle Peter, is a haggard, youngish man, with a parchment-coloured face and deeply sunken eyes, dressed in corduroy jacket and shorts. He is evidently Rudi’s idol. The only time Rudi will stop talking is when Uncle Peter has something to say. They showed me dozens of photographs of boys, all taken with the camera tilted upwards, from beneath, so that they look like epic giants, in profile against enormous clouds. The magazine itself has articles on hunting, tracking, and preparing food—all written in super-enthusiastic style, with a curious underlying note of hysteria, as though the actions described were part of a religious or erotic ritual. There were half-a-dozen other boys in the room with us: all of them in a state of heroic semi-nudity, wearing the shortest of shorts and the thinnest of shirts or singlets, although the weather is so cold.

When I had finished looking at the photographs, Rudi took me into the club meeting-room. Long coloured banners hung down the walls, embroidered with initials and mysterious totem devices. At one end of the room was a low table covered with a crimson embroidered cloth—a kind of altar. On the table were candles in brass candlesticks.

“We light them on Thursdays,” Rudi explained, “when we have our camp-fire palaver. Then we sit round in a ring on the floor, and sing songs and tell stories.”

Above the table with the candlesticks was a sort of icon— the framed drawing of a young pathfinder of unearthly beauty, gazing sternly into the far distance, a banner in his hand. The whole place made me feel profoundly un—

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comfortable. I excused myself and got away as soon as I could.

• • •

Overheard in a café: a young Nazi is sitting with his girl; they are discussing the future of the Party. The Nazi is drunk.

“Oh, I know we shall win, all right,” he exclaims impatiently, “but that’s not enough!” He thumps the table with his fist: “Blood must flow!”

The girl strokes his arm reassuringly. She is trying to get him to come home. “But, of course, it’s going to flow, darling,” she coos soothingly, “the Leader’s promised that in our programme.”

To-day is “Silver Sunday.” The streets are crowded with shoppers. All along the Tauentzienstrasse, men, women and boys are hawking postcards, flowers, song-books, hair-oil, bracelets. Christmas-trees are stacked for sale along the central path between the tramlines. Uniformed S.A. men rattle their collecting-boxes. In the side-streets, lorry-loads of police are waiting; for any large crowd, nowadays, is capable of turning into a political riot. The Salvation Army have a big illuminated tree on the Wittenbergplatz, with a blue electric star. A group of students were standing round it, making sarcastic remarks. Among them I recognized Werner, from the “communist” café.

“This time next year,” said Werner, “that star will have changed its colour!” He laughed violently—he was in an excited, slightly hysterical mood. Yesterday, he told me, he’d had a great adventure: “You see, three other comrades and myself decided to make a demonstration at the Labour Exchange in Neukölln. I had to speak, and the others were to see I wasn’t interrupted. We went round there at about half-past ten, when the bureau’s most crowded. Of course, we’d planned it all beforehand—each of the comrades had to hold one of the doors, so that none of the clerks in the office could get out. There they were, cooped up like rabbits… . Of course, we couldn’t prevent their telephoning for the

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Police, we knew that. We reckoned we’d got six or seven minutes … Well, as soon as the doors were fixed, I jumped on to a table. I just yelled out whatever came into my head —I don’t know what I said. They liked it, anyhow… . In half a minute I had them so excited I got quite scared. I was afraid they’d break into the office and lynch somebody. There was a fine old shindy, I can tell you! But just when things were beginning to look properly lively, a comrade came up from below to tell us the Police were there already—just getting out of their car. So we had to make a dash for it. … I think they’d have got us, only the crowd was on our side, and wouldn’t let them through until we were out by the other door, into the street… .” Werner finished breathlessly. “I tell you, Christopher,” he added, “the capitalist system can’t possibly last much longer now. The workers are on the move!”

Early this evening I was in the Biilowstrasse. There had been a big Nazi meeting at the Sportpalast, and groups of men and boys were just coming away from it, in their brown or black uniforms. Walking along the pavement ahead of me were three S.A. men. They all carried Nazi banners on their shoulders, like rifles, rolled tight round the staves—the banner-staves had sharp metal points, shaped into arrowheads.

All at once, the three S.A. men came face to face with a youth of seventeen or eighteen, dressed in civilian clothes, who was hurrying along in the opposite direction. I heard one of the Nazis shout: “That’s him!” and immediately all three of them flung themselves upon the young man. He uttered a scream, and tried to dodge, but they were too quick for him. In a moment they had jostled him into the shadow of a house entrance, and were standing over him, kicking him and stabbing at him with the sharp metal points of their banners. All this happened with such incredible speed that I could hardly believe my eyes—already, the three S.A. men had left their victim, and were barging their way through

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the crowd; they made for the stairs which led up to the station of the Overhead Railway.

Another passer-by and myself were the first to reach the doorway where the young man was lying. He lay huddled crookedly in the corner, like an abandoned sack. As they picked him up, I got a sickening glimpse of his face—his left eye was poked half out, and blood poured from the wound. He wasn’t dead. Somebody volunteered to take him to the hospital in a taxi.

By this time, dozens of people were looking on. They seemed surprised, but not particularly shocked—this sort of thing happens too often, nowadays. “Allerhand… .” they murmured. Twenty yards away, at the Potsdamerstrasse corner, stood a group of heavily armed policemen. With their chests out, and their hands on their revolver belts, they magnificently disregarded the whole affair.

Werner has become a hero. His photograph was in the Rote Fahne a few days ago, captioned: “Another victim of the Police blood-bath.” Yesterday, which was New Year’s day, I went to visit him in hospital.

Just after Christmas, it seems, there was a streetfight near the Stettiner Bahnhof. Werner was on the edge of the crowd, not knowing what the fight was about. On the off-chance that it might be something political, he began yelling: “Red Front!” A policeman tried to arrest him. Werner kicked the policeman in the stomach. The policeman drew his revolver and shot Werner three times through the leg. When he had finished shooting, he called another policeman, and together they carried Werner into a taxi. On the way to the police-station, the policemen hit him on the head with their truncheons, until he fainted. When he has sufficiently recovered, he will, most probably, be prosecuted.

He told me all this with the greatest satisfaction, sitting up in bed surrounded by his admiring friends, including Rudi and Inge, in her Henry the Eighth hat. Around him,

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on the blanket, lay his press-cuttings. Somebody had carefully underlined each mention of Werner’s name with a red pencil.

To-day, January 22nd, the Nazis held a demonstration on the Biilowplatz, in front of the Karl Liebknecht House. For the last week the communists have been trying to get the demonstration forbidden: they say it is simply intended as a provocation—as, of course, it was. I went along to watch it with Frank, the newspaper correspondent.

As Frank himself said afterwards, this wasn’t really a Nazi demonstration at all, but a Police demonstration—there were at least two policemen to every Nazi present. Perhaps General Schleicher only allowed the march to take place in order to show who are the real masters of Berlin. Everybody says he’s going to proclaim a military dictatorship.

But the real masters of Berlin are not the Police, or the Army, and certainly not the Nazis. The masters of Berlin are the workers—despite all the propaganda I’ve heard and read, all the demonstrations I’ve attended, I only realized this, for the first time to-day. Comparatively few of the hundreds of people in the streets round the Biilowplatz can have been organized communists, yet you had the feeling that every single one of them was united against this march. Somebody began to sing the “International,” and, in a moment, everyone had joined in—even the women with their babies, watching from top-storey windows. The Nazis slunk past, marching as fast as they knew how, between their double rows of protectors. Most of them kept their eyes on the ground, or glared glassily ahead: a few attempted sickly, furtive grins. When the procession had passed, an elderly fat little S.A. man, who had somehow got left behind, came panting along at the double, desperately scared at finding himself alone, and trying vainly to catch up with the rest. The whole crowd roared with laughter.

During the demonstration nobody was allowed on the

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Bülowplatz itself. So the crowd surged uneasily about, and things began to look nasty. The police, brandishing their rifles, ordered us back; some of the less experienced ones, getting rattled, made as if to shoot. Then an armoured car appeared, and started to turn its machine-gun slowly in our direction. There was a stampede into house doorways and cafés; but no sooner had the car moved on, than everybody rushed out into the street again, shouting and singing. It was too much like a naughty schoolboy’s game to be seriously alarming. Frank enjoyed himself enormously, grinning from ear to ear, and hopping about, in his flapping overcoat and huge owlish spectacles, like a mocking, ungainly bird.

Only a week since I wrote the above. Schleicher has resigned. The monocles did their stuff. Hitler has formed a cabinet with Hugenberg. Nobody thinks it can last till the spring.

The newspapers are becoming more and more like copies of a school magazine. There is nothing in them but new rules, new punishments, and lists of people who have been “kept in.” This morning, Goring has invented three fresh varieties of high treason.

Every evening, I sit in the big half-empty artists’ café by the Memorial Church, where the Jews and left-wing intellectuals bend their heads together over the marble tables, speaking in low, scared voices. Many of them know that they will certainly be arrested—if not to-day, then tomorrow or next week. So they are polite and mild with each other, and raise their hats and enquire after their colleagues’ families. Notorious literary tiffs of several years’ standing are forgotten.

Almost every evening, the S.A. men come into the café. Sometimes they are only collecting money; everybody is compelled to give something. Sometimes they have come to

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make an arrest. One evening a Jewish writer, who was present, ran into the telephone-box to ring up the Police. The Nazis dragged him out, and he was taken away. Nobody moved a finger. You could have heard a pin drop, till they were gone.

The foreign newspaper correspondents dine every night at the same little Italian restaurant, at a big round table, in the corner. Everybody else in the restaurant is watching them and trying to overhear what they are saying. If you have a piece of news to bring them—the details of an arrest, or the address of a victim whose relatives might be interviewed— then one of the journalists leaves the table and walks up and down with you outside, in the street.

A young communist I know was arrested by the S.A. men, taken to a Nazi barracks, and badly knocked about. After three or four days, he was released and went home. Next morning there was a knock at the door. The communist hobbled over to open it, his arm in a sling—and there stood a Nazi with a collecting-box. At the sight of him the communist completely lost his temper. “Isn’t it enough,” he yelled, “that you beat me up? And you dare to come and ask me for money?”

But the Nazi only grinned. “Now, now, comrade! No political squabbling! Remember, we’re living in the Third Reich! We’re all brothers! You must try and drive that silly political hatred from your heart!”

This evening I went into the Russian tea-shop in the Kleiststrasse, and there was D. For a moment I really thought I must be dreaming. He greeted me quite as usual, beaming all over his face.