Unknown - Isherwood, Christopher (The Berlin Stories - The Last of Mr Norris - Goodbye to Berlin) (TXT)

What followed had confirmed Otto in his opinion. Schmidt had been just about to leave the flat when he turned and said to Arthur:

“Well,. I’m off. I’ll leave you to the tender mercies of your precious communist friends. And when they’ve swindled you out of your last pfennig …”

He hadn’t got any farther. For Otto, puzzled by all this talk and relieved at last to hear something which he could understand and resent, had taken Schmidt out of the flat by the back of the collar and sent him flying downstairs with a hearty kick on the bottom. Otto, in his narrative, dwelt on the kick with special pride and pleasure. It had been one of le kicks of his life, an inspired kick, beautifully judged and timed. He was anxious that I should understand just how and where it had landed. He made me stand up, and touched me lightly on the buttock with his toe. I was a little uneasy, knowing what an effort of self-control it cost him not to let By.

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“My word, Willi, you should have heard him land! Bing! Bong! Crash! For a minute he didn’t seem to know where he was or what had happened to him. And then he began to blubber, just like a baby. I was so weak with laughing at him you could have pushed me downstairs with one finger.”

And Otto began to laugh now, as he said it. He laughed heartily, without the least malice or savagery. He bore the discomfited Schmidt no grudge.

I asked whether anything more had been heard of him. Otto didn’t know. Schmidt had picked himself up, slowly and painfully, sobbed out some inarticulate threat, and limped away downstairs. And Arthur, who had been present in the background, had shaken his head doubtfully and protested.

“You shouldn’t have done that, you know.”

“Arthur’s much too kind-hearted,” added Otto, coming to the end of his story. “He trusts everybody. And what thanks does he get for it? None. He’s always being swindled and betrayed.”

No comment on this last remark seemed adequate. I said that I must be going.

Something about me seemed to amuse Olga. Her bosom silently quivered. Without warning, as we reached the door, she gave my cheek a rough, deliberate pinch, as though she were plucking a plum from a tree.

“You’re a nice boy,” she chuckled harshly. “You must come round here one evening. I’ll teach you something you didn’t know before.”

“You ought to try it once with Olga, Willi,” Otto seriously advised. “It’s well worth the money.”

“I’m sure it is,” I said politely, and hurried downstairs.

A few days later, I had a rendezvous with Fritz Wendel at the Troika. Arriving rather too early, I sat down at the bar and found the Baron on the stool next to my own.

“Hullo, Kuno!”

“Good evening.”

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He inclined his sleek head stiffly. To my surprise, he didn’t seem at all pleased to see me. Indeed, quite the reverse. His monocle gleamed polite hostility; his naked eye was evasive and shifty.

“I haven’t seen you for ages,” I said brightly, trying to appear serenely unconscious of his manner.

His eye travelled round the room; he was positively searching for help, but nobody answered his appeal. The place was still nearly empty. The barman edged over towards us.

“What’ll you have to drink?” I asked. His dislike of my society was beginning to intrigue me.

“Er—nothing, thank you. You see, I have to be going.”

“What, you’re leaving us so soon, Herr Baron?” put in the barman affably; unconsciously adding to his discomfort: “Why, you’ve hardly been here five minutes, you know.”

“Have you heard from Arthur Norris?” With deliberate malice I disregarded his attempts to dismount from his stool. He couldn’t do so until I had pushed mine back a little.

The name made Kuno visibly wince.

“No.” His tone was icy. “I have not.”

“He’s in Paris, you know.”

“Indeed?”

“Well,” I said heartily, “I mustn’t keep you any longer.” I held out my hand. He barely touched it.

“Goodbye.”

Released at last, he made like an arrow for the door. One might have thought that he was escaping from a plague hospital. The barman, discreetly smiling, picked up the coins and shovelled them into the till. He had seen spongers snubbed before.

I was left with another mystery to solve.

Like a long train which stops at every dingy little station, le winter dragged slowly past. Each week there were new emergency decrees. Briining’s weary episcopal voice issued commands to the shopkeepers, and was not obeyed. “It’s “Fascism,” complained the Social Democrats. “He’s weak,”

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said Helen Pratt. “What these swine need is a man with hair on his chest.” The Hessen Document was discovered; but nobody really cared. There had been one scandal too many. The exhausted public had been fed with surprises to the point of indigestion. People said that the Nazis would be in power by Christmas; but Christmas came and they were not. Arthur sent me the compliments of the season on a postcard of the Eiffel Tower.

Berlin was in a state of civil war. Hate exploded suddenly, without warning, out of nowhere; at street corners, in restaurants, cinemas, dance halls, swimming-baths; at midnight, after breakfast, in the middle of the afternoon. Knives were whipped out, blows were dealt with spiked rings, beer-mugs, chair-legs or leaded clubs; bullets slashed the advertisements on the poster-columns, rebounded from the iron roofs of latrines. In the middle of a crowded street a young man would be attacked, stripped, thrashed and left bleeding on the pavement; in fifteen seconds it was all over and the assailants had disappeared. Otto got a gash over the eye with a razor in a battle on a fairground near the Cöpernicker-strasse. The doctor put in three stitches and he was in hospital for a week. The newspapers were full of death-bed photographs of rival martyrs, Nazi, Reichsbanner and Communist. My pupils looked at them and shook their heads, apologizing to me for the state of Germany. “Dear, dear!” they said, “it’s terrible. It can’t go on.”

The murder reporters and the jazz-writers had inflated the German language beyond recall. The vocabulary of newspaper invective (traitor, Versailles-lackey, murder-swine, Marx-crook, Hitler-swamp, Red-pest) had come to resemble, through excessive use, the formal phraseology of politeness employed by the Chinese. The word Liebe, soaring from the Goethe standard, was no longer worth a whore’s kiss. Spring, moonlight, youth, roses, girl, darling, heart, May: such was the miserably devaluated currency dealt in by the authors of all those tangoes, waltzes and fox-trots which advocated the private escape. Find a dear little sweetheart, they advised,

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and forget the slump, ignore the unemployed. Fly, they urged us, to Hawaii, to Naples, to the Never-Never-Vienna. Hugenberg, behind the Ufa, was serving up nationalism to suit all tastes. He produced battlefield epics, farces of barrack-room life, operettas in which the jinks of a pre-war military aristocracy were reclothed in the fashions of 1932. His brilliant directors and camera-men had to concentrate their talents on cynically beautiful shots of the bubbles in champagne and the sheen of lamplight on silk.

And morning after morning, all over the immense, damp, dreary town and the packing-case colonies of huts in the suburb allotments, young men were waking up to another workless empty day to be spent as they could best contrive; selling bootlaces, begging, playing draughts in the hall of the Labour Exchange, hanging about urinals, opening the doors of cars, helping with crates in the markets, gossiping, lounging, stealing, overhearing racing tips, sharing stumps of cigarette-ends picked up in the gutter, singing folk-songs for groschen in courtyards and between stations in the carriages of the Underground Railway. After the New Year, the snow fell, but did not lie; there was no money to be earned by sweeping it away. The shopkeepers rang all coins on the counter for fear of the counterfeiters. Frl. Schroeder’s astrologer foretold the end of the world. “Listen,” said Fritz Wendel, between sips of a cocktail in the bar of the Eden Hotel, “I give a damn if this country goes communist. What I mean, we’d have to alter our ideas a bit. Hell, who cares?”