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

“Did your friend find out what happened to Schmidt afterwards?” I asked.

“Don’t suppose so, no. Why should he? What does happen to these creatures? He’s probably abroad, somewhere, blowing the cash. He’d got quite a lot out of Pregnitz, already, it seems. As far as I’m concerned, he’s welcome to it. Who cares?”

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“I know one person,” I said, “who might be interested.” A few days after this, I got a letter from Arthur. He was in Mexico City now, and hating it.

Let me advise you, my dear boy, with all the solemnity of which I am capable, never to set foot in this odious town. On the material plane, it is true, I manage to provide myself with most of my accustomed comforts. But the complete lack of intelligent society, at least, as I understand the term, afflicts me deeply …

Arthur didn’t say much about his business affairs; he was more guarded than of old.

“Times are very bad, but, on the whole, I can’t complain,” was his only admission. On the subject of Germany, he let himself go, however:

It makes me positively tremble with indignation to think of the workers delivered over to these men, who, whatever you may say, are nothing more or less than criminals.

And, a little farther down the page:

It is indeed tragic to see how, even in these days, a clever and unscrupulous liar can deceive millions.

In conclusion, he paid a handsome tribute to Bayer:

A man I always admired and respected. I feel proud to be able to say that I was his friend.

I next heard of Arthur in June, on a postcard from California.

I am basking here in the sunshine of Santa Monica. After Mexico, this is indeed a Paradise. I have a little venture on foot, not unconnected with the film industry. I think and hope it may turn out quite profitably. Will write again soon.

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He did write, and sooner, no doubt, than he had originally intended. By the next mail, I got another postcard, dated a day later.

The very worst has happened. Am leaving for Costa Rica tonight. All details from there.

This time I got a short letter.

If Mexico was Purgatory, this is the Inferno itself.

My Californian idyll was rudely cut short by the appearance of Schmidt!!! The creature’s ingenuity is positively superhuman. Not only had he followed me there, but he had succeeded in finding out the exact nature of the little deal I was hoping to put through. I was entirely at his mercy. I was compelled to give him most of my hard-earned savings and depart at once.

Just imagine, he even had the insolence to suggest that I should employ him, as before!!

I don’t know yet whether I have succeeded in throwing him off my track. I hardly dare to hope.

At least, Arthur wasn’t left long in doubt. A postcard soon followed the letter.

The Monster has arrived!!! May try Peru.

Other glimpses of this queer journey reached me from time to time. Arthur had no luck in Lima. Schmidt turned up within the week. From there, the chase proceeded to Chile.

“An attempt to exterminate the reptile failed miserably,” he wrote from Valparaiso. “I succeeded only in arousing its venom.”

I suppose this is Arthur’s ornate way of saying that he had tried to get Schmidt murdered.

In Valparaiso, a truce seems, however, to have been at last declared. For the next postcard, announcing a train journey to the Argentine, indicated a new state of affairs.

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We leave this afternoon, together, for Buenos Aires. Am too depressed to write more now.

At present, they are in Rio. Or were when I last heard. It is impossible to predict their movements. Any day Schmidt may set off for fresh hunting-grounds, dragging Arthur after him, a protesting employer-prisoner. Their new partnership won’t be so easy to dissolve as their old one. Henceforward, they are doomed to walk the Earth together. I often think about them and wonder what I should do if, by any unlucky chance, we were to meet. I am not particularly sorry for Arthur. After all, he no doubt gets his hands on a good deal of money. But he is very sorry for himself.

“Tell me, William,” his last letter concluded, “what have I done to deserve all this?”

THE END

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GOODBYE TO BERLIN

to

John & Beatrix Lehmann

A BERLIN DIARY

(Autumn 1930)

From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class. 1^ lama camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.

At eight o’clock in the evening the house-doors will be locked. The children are having supper. The shops are shut. The electric-sign is switched on over the night-bell of the little hotel on the corner, where you can hire a room by the hour. And soon the whistling will begin. Young men are calling their girls. Standing down there in the cold, they whistle up at the lighted windows of warm rooms where the beds are already turned down for the night. They want to be let in. Their signals echo down the deep hollow street, lascivious and private and sad. Because of the whistling, I do not care to stay here in the evenings. It reminds me that I am in a foreign city, alone, far from home. Sometimes I determine not to listen to it, pick up a book, try to read. But soon a call is sure to sound, so piercing, so insistent, so despairingly human, that at last I have to get up and peep through the slats of the Venetian blind to make quite sure

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that it is not—as I know very well it could not possibly be— for me.

The extraordinary smell in this room when the stove is lighted and the window shut; not altogether unpleasant, a mixture of incense and stale buns. The tall tiled stove, gorgeously coloured, like an altar. The washstand like a Gothic shrine. The cupboard also is Gothic, with carved cathedral windows: Bismarck faces the King of Prussia in stained glass. My best chair would do for a bishop’s throne. In the corner, three sham mediaeval halberds (from a theatrical touring company?) are fastened together to form a hatstand. Frl. Schroeder unscrews the heads of the halberds and polishes them from time to time. They are heavy and sharp enough to kill.

Everything in the room is like that: unnecessarily solid, abnormally heavy and dangerously sharp. Here, at the writing-table, I am confronted by a phalanx of metal objects—a pair of candlesticks shaped like entwined serpents, an ashtray from which emerges die head of a crocodile, a paper-knife copied from a Florentine dagger, a brass dolphin holding on the end of its tail a small broken clock. What becomes of such things? How could they ever be destroyed? They will probably remain intact for thousands of years: people will treasure them in museums. Or perhaps they will merely be melted down for munitions in a war. Every morning, Frl. Schroeder arranges them very carefully in certain unvarying positions : there they stand, like an uncompromising statement of her views on Capital and Society, Religion and Sex.

All day long she goes padding about the large dingy flat. Shapeless but alert, she waddles from room to room, in carpet slippers and a flowered dressing-gown pinned ingeniously together, so that not an inch of petticoat or bodice is to be seen, flicking with her duster, peeping, spying, poking her short pointed nose into the cupboards and luggage of her