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

“That’s how I feel,” I said.

An awkward thing had happened to Fritz Wendel. A few days before, he had had a motor accident; he had sprained his wrist and scratched the skin off his cheek. The injuries weren’t at all serious, but he had to wear a big piece of sticking-plaster and carry his arm in a sling. And now, in spite of the lovely weather, he wouldn’t venture out of doors. Bandages of any kind gave rise to misunderstandings, especially when, like Fritz, you had a dark complexion and coal-black hair. Passers-by made unpleasant and threatening remarks. Fritz wouldn’t admit this, of course. “Hell, what I mean, one feels such a darn’ fool.” He had become exceedingly cautious. He wouldn’t refer to politics at all, even when

180

we were alone together. “Eventually it had to happen,” was his only comment on the new régime. As he said this, he avoided my eyes.

The whole city lay under an epidemic of discreet, infectious fear. I could feel it, like influenza, in my bones. When the first news of the house-searchings began to come in, I had consulted with Frl. Schroeder about the papers which Bayer had given me. We hid them and my copy of the Communist Manifesto under the wood-pile in the kitchen. Unbuilding and rebuilding the wood-pile took half an hour, and before it was finished our precautions had begun to seem rather childish. I felt a bit ashamed of myself, and consequently exaggerated the importance and danger of my position to Frl. Schroeder, who listened respectfully, with rising indignation. “You mean to say they’d come into my flat, Herr Bradshaw? Well, of all the cheek. But just let them try it! Why, I’d box their ears for them; I declare I would!”

A night or two after this, I was woken by a tremendous banging on the outside door. I sat up in bed and switched on the light. It was just three o’clock. Now I’m for it, I thought. I wondered if they’d allow me to ring up the Embassy. Smoothing my hair tidy with my hand, I tried, not very successfully, to assume an expression of haughty contempt. But when, at last, Frl. Schroeder had shuffled out to see what was the matter, it was only a lodger from next door who’d come to the wrong flat because he was drunk.

After this scare, I suffered from sleeplessness. I kept fancying I heard heavy wagons drawing up outside our house. I lay waiting in the dark for the ringing of the doorbell. A minute. Five minutes. Ten. One morning, as I stared, half asleep, at the wallpaper above my bed, the pattern suddenly formed itself into a chain of little hooked crosses. What was worse, I noticed that everything in the room was really a kind of brown: either green-brown, black-brown, yellow-brown, or red-brown; but all brown, unmistakably. When I had had breakfast and taken a purgative, I felt better.

181

One morning, I had a visit from Otto.

It must have been about half-past six when he rang our bell. Frl. Schroeder wasn’t up yet; I let him in myself. He was in a filthy state, his hair tousled and matted, a stain of dirty blood down the side of his face from a scratch on the temples.

“Servus, Willi,” he muttered. He put out his hand suddenly and clutched my arm. With difficulty, I saved him from falling. But he wasn’t drunk, as I at first imagined; simply exhausted. He flopped down into a chair in my room. When I returned from shutting the outside door, he was already asleep.

It was rather a problem to know what to do with him. I had a pupil coming early. Finally, Frl. Schroeder and I managed, between us, to lug him, still half asleep, into Arthur’s old bedroom and lay him on the bed. He was incredibly heavy. No sooner was he laid on his back than he began to snore. His snores were so loud that you could hear them in my room, even when the door was shut; they continued, audibly, throughout the lesson. Meanwhile, my pupil, a very nice young man who hoped soon to become a schoolmaster, was eagerly adjuring me not to believe the stories, “invented by Jewish emigrants,” about the political persecution.

“Actually,” he assured me, “these so-called communists are merely a handful of criminals, the scum of the streets. And most of them are not Germans at all.”

“I thought,” I said politely, “that you were telling me just now that they drew up the Weimar Constitution?”

This rather staggered him for the moment; but he made a good recovery.

“No, pardon me, the Weimar Constitution was the work of Marxist Jews.”

“Ah, the Jews … to be sure.”

My pupil smiled. My stupidity made him feel a bit superior. I think he even liked me for it. A particularly loud snore came from the next room.

182

“For a foreigner,” he politely conceded, “German politics are very complicated.”

“Very,” I agreed.

Otto woke about tea-time, ravenously hungry. I went out and bought sausages and eggs and Frl. Schroeder cooked him a meal while he washed. Afterwards we sat together in my room. Otto smoked one cigarette after another; he was very nervy and couldn’t sit still. His clothes were getting ragged and the collar of his sweater was frayed. His face was full of hollows. He looked like a grown man now, at least five years older.

Frl. Schroeder made him take off his jacket. She mended it while we talked, interjecting, at intervals: “Is it possible? The idea … how dare they do such a thing! That’s what I’d like to know!”

Otto had been on the run for a fortnight, now, he told us. Two nights after the Reichstag fire, his old enemy, Werner Baldow, had come round, with six others of his storm-troop, to “arrest” him. Otto used the word without irony; he seemed to find it quite natural. “There’s lots of old scores being paid off nowadays,” he added, simply.

Nevertheless, Otto had escaped, through a skylight, after kicking one of the Nazis in the face. They had shot at him twice, but missed. Since then he’d been wandering about Berlin, sleeping only in the daytime, walking the streets at night, for fear of house-raids. The first week hadn’t been so bad; comrades had put him up, one passing him on to another. But that was getting too risky now. So many of them were dead or in the concentration camps. He’d been sleeping when he could, taking short naps on benches in parks. But he could never rest properly. He had always to be on the watch. He couldn’t stick it any longer. Tomorrow he was going to leave Berlin. He’d try to work his way down to the Saar. Somebody had told him that was the easiest frontier to cross. It was dangerous, of course, but better than being cooped up here.

I asked what had become of Anni. Otto didn’t know. He’d

183

heard she was with Werner Baldow again. What else could you expect? He wasn’t even bitter; he just didn’t care. And Olga? Oh, Olga was doing finely. That remarkable business woman had escaped the clean-up through the influence of one of her customers, an important Nazi official. Others had begun to go there, now. Her future was assured.

Otto had heard about Bayer.

“They say Thälmann’s dead, too. And Renn. Junge, Junge… .”

We exchanged rumours about other well-known names. Frl. Schroeder shook her head and murmured over each. She was so genuinely upset that nobody would have dreamed she was hearing most of them for the first time in her life.

The talk turned naturally to Arthur. We showed Otto the postcards of Tampico which had arrived, for both of us, only a week ago. He examined them with admiration.

“I suppose he’s carrying on the work there?”

“What work?”

“The Party work, of course!”

“Oh, yes,” I hastily agreed. “Of course he is.”

“It was a bit of luck that he went away when he did, wasn’t

it?r

“Yes … it certainly was.”

Otto’s eyes shone.