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

“You’re off, too?”

“Of course.”

“To Berlin?”

Peter smiled. “No, Christopher. Don’t be alarmed! Only to England… .”

“Oh… .”

“There’s a train whichil get me to Hamburg, late tonight. I shall probably go straight on. … I feel I’ve got to keep travelling until I’m clear of this bloody country… .”

There was nothing to say. I helped him pack, in silence. As Peter put his shaving-mirror into the bag, he asked: “Do you remember how Otto broke this, standing on his head?”

“Yes, I remember.”

When we had finished, Peter went out on to the balcony of his room: “There’ll be plenty of whistling outside here, tonight,” he said.

I smiled: “I shall have to go down and console them.”

Peter laughed: “Yes. You will!”

I went with him to the station. Luckily, the engine-driver was in a hurry. The train only waited a couple of minutes.

“What shall you do when you get to London?” I asked.

Peter’s mouth curved down at the corners; he gave me a kind of inverted grin: “Look round for another analyst, I suppose.”

“Well, mind you beat down his prices a bit!”

“I will.”

As the train moved out, he waved his hand: “Well, goodbye, Christopher. Thank you for all your moral support!”

Peter never suggested that I should write to him, or visit him at home. I suppose he wants to forget this place, and everybody concerned with it. I can hardly blame him.

It was only this evening, turning over the pages of a book I have been reading, that I found another note from Otto, slipped between the leaves.

99

Please dear Christoph don’t you be angry with me too because you aren’t an idiot like Peter. When you are back in Berlin I shall come and see you because I know where you live; I saw the address on one of your letters and we can have a nice talk.

Your loving friend,

Otto.

I thought, somehow, that he wouldn’t be got rid of quite so easily.

Actually, I am leaving for Berlin in a day 01 two, now. I thought I should stay on till the end of August, and perhaps finish my novel, but, suddenly, the place seems so lonely. I miss Peter and Otto, and their daily quarrels, far more than I should have expected. And now even Otto’s dancing-partners have stopped lingering sadly in the twilight, under my window.

THE NOWAKS

The entrance to the Wassertorstrasse was a big stone archway, a bit of old Berlin, daubed with hammers and sickles and Nazi crosses and plastered with tattered bills which advertised auctions or crimes. It was a deep shabby cobbled street, littered with sprawling children in tears. Youths in woollen sweaters circled waveringly across it on racing bikes and whooped at girls passing with milk-jugs. The pavement

100

was chalk-marked for the hopping game called Heaven and Earth. At the end of it, like a tall, dangerously sharp, red instrument, stood a church.

Frau Nowak herself opened the door to me. She looked far iller than when I had seen her last, with big blue rings under her eyes. She was wearing the same hat and mangy old black coat. At first, she didn’t recognise me.

“Good afternoon, Frau Nowak.”

Her face changed slowly from poking suspicion to a brilliant, timid, almost girlish smile of welcome:

“Why, if it isn’t Herr Christoph! Come in, Herr Christoph! Come in and sit down.”

“I’m afraid you were just going out, weren’t you?”

“No, no, Herr Christoph—I’ve just come in; just this minute.” She was wiping her hands hastily on her coat before shaking mine: “This is one of my charring days. I don’t get finished till half-past two, and it makes the dinner so late.”

She stood aside for me to enter. I pushed open the door and, in doing so, jarred the handle of the frying-pan on the stove which stood just behind it. In the tiny kitchen there was barely room for the two of us together. A stifling smell of potatoes fried in cheap margarine filled the flat.

“Come and sit down, Herr Christoph,” she repeated, hastily doing the honours. “I’m afraid it’s terribly untidy. You must excuse that. I have to go out so early and my Grete’s such a lazy great lump, though she’s turned twelve. There’s no getting her to do anything, if you don’t stand over her all the time.”

The living-room had a sloping ceiling stained with old patches of damp. It contained a big table, six chairs, a sideboard and two large double-beds. The place was so full of furniture that you had to squeeze your way into it sideways.

“Grete!” cried Frau Nowak. “Where are you? Come here this minute!”

“She’s gone out,” came Otto’s voice from the inner room.

“Otto! Come and see who’s here!”

“Can’t be bothered. I’m busy mending the gramophone.”

101

“Busy, indeed! You! You good-for-nothing! That’s a nice way to speak to your mother! Come out of that room, do you hear me?”

She had flown into a rage instantly, automatically, with astonishing violence. Her face became all nose: thin, bitter and inflamed. Her whole body trembled.

“It doesn’t really matter, Frau Nowak,” I said. “Let him come out when he wants to. He’ll get all the bigger surprise.”

“A nice son I’ve got! Speaking to me like that.”

She had pulled off her hat and was unpacking greasy parcels from a string bag: “Dear me,” she fussed. “I wonder where that child’s got to? Always down in the street, she is. If I’ve told her once, I’ve told her a hundred times. Children have no consideration.”

“How has your lung been keeping, Frau Nowak?”

She sighed: “Sometimes it seems to me it’s worse than ever. I get such a burning, just here. And when I finish work it’s as if I was too tired to eat. I come over so bilious. … I don’t think the doctor’s satisfied either. He talks about sending me to a sanatorium later in the winter. I was there before, you know. But there’s always so many waiting to go. … Then, the flat’s so damp at this time of year. You see those marks on the ceiling? There’s days we have to put a foot-bath under them to catch the drips. Of course, they’ve no right to let these attics as dwellings at all, really. The Inspector’s condemned them time and time again. But what are you to do? One must live somewhere. We applied for a transfer over a year ago and they keep promising they’ll see about it. But there’s a lot of others are worse off still, I dare say… . My husband was reading out of the newspaper the other day about the English and their Pound. It keeps on falling, they say. I don’t understand such things, myself. I hope you haven’t lost any money, Herr Christoph?”

“As a matter of fact, Frau Nowak, that’s partly why I came down to see you to-day. I’ve decided to go into a cheaper room and I was wondering if there was anywhere round here you could recommend me?”

102

“Oh dear, Herr Christoph, I am sorry!”

She was quite genuinely shocked: “But you can’t live in this part of the town—a gentleman like you! Oh, no. I’m afraid it wouldn’t suit you at all.”

“I’m not so particular as you think, perhaps. I just want a quiet, clean room for about twenty marks a month. It doesn’t matter how small it is. I’m out most of the day.”

She shook her head doubtfully: “Well, Herr Christoph, I shall have to see if I can’t think of something… .”

“Isn’t dinner ready yet, mother?” asked Otto, appearing in shirtsleeves at the doorway of the inner room: “I’m nearly starving!”

“How do you expect it to be ready when I have to spend the whole morning slaving for you, you great lump of laziness!” cried Frau Nowak, shrilly, at the top of her voice. Then, transposing without the least pause into her ingratiating social tone, she added: “Don’t you see who’s here?”