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

After supper, the ritual of Otto’s preparations for the dance begins. Sitting in my bedroom, I hear Peter’s footsteps cross the landing, light and springy with relief—for now comes the only time of day when Peter feels himself altogether excused from taking any interest in Otto’s activities. When he taps on my door, I shut my book at once. I have been out already to the village to buy half-a-pound of peppermint creams. Peter says goodbye to Otto, with a vain lingering

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hope that, perhaps tonight, he will, after all, be punctual: “Till half-past twelve, then… .”

“Till one,” Otto bargains.

“All right,” Peter concedes. “Till one. But don’t be late.”

“No, Peter, I won’t be late.”

As we open the garden gate and cross the road into the wood, Otto waves to us from the balcony. I have to be careful to hide the peppermint creams under my coat, in case he should see them. Laughing guiltily, munching the peppermints, we take the woodland path to Baabe. We always spend our evenings in Baabe, nowadays. We like it better than our own village. Its single sandy street of low-roofed houses among the pine-trees has a romantic, colonial air; it is like a ramshackle, lost settlement somewhere in the backwoods, where people come to look for a non-existent gold mine and remain, stranded, for the rest of their lives.

In the little restaurant, we eat strawberries and cream, and talk to the young waiter. The waiter hates Germany and longs to go to America. “Hier ist nichts los.” During the season, he is allowed no free time at all, and in the winter he earns nothing. Most of the Baabe boys are Nazis. Two of them come into the restaurant sometimes and engage us in good-humoured political arguments. They tell us about their field-exercises and military games.

“You’re preparing for war,” says Peter indignantly. On these occasions—although he has really not the slightest interest in politics—he gets quite heated.

“Excuse me,” one of the boys contradicts, “that’s quite wrong. The Führer does not want war. Our programme stands for peace, with honour. All the same …” he adds wistfully, his face lighting up, “war can be fine, you know! Think of the ancient Greeks!”

“The ancient Greeks,” I object, “didn’t use poison gas.”

The boys are rather scornful at this quibble. One of them answers loftily. “That’s a purely technical question.”

At half-past ten we go down, with most of the other in—

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habitants, to the railway station, to watch the arrival of the last train. It is generally empty. It goes clanging away through the dark woods, sounding its harsh bell. At last it is late enough to start home; this time, we take the road. Across the meadows, you can see the illuminated entrance of the café by the lake, where Otto goes to dance.

“The lights of Hell are shining brightly this evening,” Peter is fond of remarking.

Peter’s jealousy has turned into insomnia. He has begun taking sleeping tablets, but admits that they* seldom have any effect. They merely made him fee! drowsy next morning, after breakfast. He often goes to sleep for an hour or two in our fort, on the shore.

This morning the weather was cool and dull, the sea oyster-grey. Peter and I hired a boat, rowed out beyond the pier, then let ourselves drift, gently, away from the land. Peter lit a cigarette. He said abruptly:

“I wonder how much longer this will go on… .”

“As long as you let it, I suppose.”

“Yes… . We seem to have got into a pretty static condition, don’t we? I suppose there’s no particular reason why Otto and I should ever stop behaving to each other as we do at present… .” He paused, added: “Unless, of course, I stop giving him money.”

“What do you think would happen, then?”

Peter paddled idly in the water with his fingers. “He’d leave me.” •

The boat drifted on for several minutes. I asked: “You don’t think he cares for you, at all?”

“At the beginning he did, perhaps… . Not now. There’s nothing between us now but my cash.”

“Do you still care for him?”

“No. … I don’t know. Perhaps. … I still hate him, sometimes—if that’s a sign of caring.”

“It might be.”

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There was a long pause. Peter dried his fingers on his handkerchief. His mouth twitched nervously.

“Well,” he said at last, “what do you advise me to do?”

“What do you want to do?”

Peter’s mouth gave another twitch.

“I suppose, really, I want to leave him.”

“Then you’d better leave him.”

“At once?”

“The sooner the better. Give him a nice present and send him back to Berlin this afternoon.”

Peter shook his head, smiled sadly:

“I can’t.”

There was another long pause. Then Peter said: “I’m sorry Christopher… . You’re absolutely right, I know. If I were in your place, I’d say the same thing… . But I can’t. Things have got to go on as they are—until something happens. They can’t last much longer, anyhow… . Oh, I know I’m very weak… .”

“You needn’t apologise to me,” I smiled, to conceal a slight feeling of irritation: “I’m not one of your analysts!”

I picked up the oars and began to row back towards the shore. As we reached the pier, Peter said:

“It seems funny to think of now—when I first met Otto, I thought we should live together for the rest of our lives.”

“Oh, my God!” The vision of a life with Otto opened before me, like a comic inferno. I laughed out loud. Peter laughed, too, wedging his locked hands between his knees. His face turned from pink to red, from red to purple. His veins bulged. We were still laughing when we got out of the boat.

In the garden the landlord was waiting for us. “What a pity!” he exclaimed. “The gentlemen are too late!” He pointed over the meadows, in the direction of the lake. We could see the smoke rising above the line of poplars, as the little train drew out of the station: “Your friend was obliged to

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leave for Berlin, suddenly, on urgent business. I hoped the gentlemen might have been in time to see him off. What a pity!”

This time, both Peter and I ran upstairs. Peter’s bedroom was in a terrible mess—all the drawers and cupboards were open. Propped up on the middle of the table was a note, in Otto’s cramped, scrawling hand:

Dear Peter. Please forgive me I couldn’t stand it any longer here so I am going home.

Love from Otto.

Don’t be angry.

( Otto had written it, I noticed it, on a fly-leaf torn out of one of Peter’s psychology books: Beyond the Pleasure-Principle.)

“Well … !” Peter’s mouth began to twitch. I glanced at him nervously, expecting a violent outburst, but he seemed fairly calm. After a moment, he walked over to the cupboards and began looking through the drawers. “He hasn’t taken much,” he announced, at the end of his search. “Only a couple of my ties, three shirts—lucky my shoes don’t fit him!— and, let’s see … about two hundred marks… .” Peter started to laugh, rather hysterically: “Very moderate, on the whole!”

“Do you think he decided to leave quite suddenly?” I asked, for the sake of saying something.

“Probably he did. That would be just like him… . Now I come to think of ďt, I told him we were going out in that boat, this morning—and he asked me if we should be away for long… .” I see… .

I sat down on Peter’s bed—thinking, oddly enough, that Otto has at last done something which I rather respect.

Peter’s hysterical high spirits kept him going for the rest of the morning; at lunch he turned gloomy, and wouldn’t say a word.

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“Now I must go and pack,” he told me when we had finished.