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

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“Congratulations. … I suppose you’re still living at home?”

“Oh, I look in there occasionally,” Otto drew down the corners of his mouth in a grimace of languid distaste, “but father’s always drunk.”’

“Disgusting, isn’t it?” I mimicked his tone. We both laughed.

“My goodness, Christoph, is it as late as that? I must be getting along… . Till Sunday. Be good.”

We arrived at the sanatorium about midday.

There was a bumpy cart-track winding for several kilometres through snowy pinewoods and then, suddenly, a Gothic brick gateway like the entrance to a churchyard, with big red buildings rising behind. The bus stopped. Otto and I were the last passengers to get out. We stood stretching ourselves and blinking at the bright snow: out here in the country everything was dazzling white. We were all very stiff, for the bus was only a covered van, with packing-cases and school-benches for seats. The seats had not shifted much during the journey, for we had been packed together as tightly as books on a shelf.

And now the patients came running out to meet us—awkward padded figures muffled in shawls and blankets, stumbling and slithering on the trampled ice of the path. They were in such a hurry that their blundering charge ended in a slide. They shot skidding into the arms of their friends and relations, who staggered under the violence of the collision. One couple, amid shrieks of laughter, had tumbled over.

“Otto!”

“Mother!”

“So you’ve really come! How well you’re looking!”

“Of course we’ve come, mother! What did you expect?” Frau Nowak disengaged herself from Otto to shake hands with me. “How do you do, Herr Christoph?”

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She looked years younger. Her plump, oval, innocent face, lively and a trifle crafty, with its small peasant eyes, was like the face of a young girl. Her cheeks were brightly dabbed with colour. She smiled as though she could never stop.

“Ah, Herr Christoph, how nice of you to come! How nice of you to bring Otto to visit me!”

She uttered a brief, queer, hysterical little laugh. We mounted some steps into the house. The smell of the warm, clean, antiseptic building entered my nostrils like a breath of fear.

“They’ve put me in one of the smaller wards,” Frau Nowak told us. “There’s only four of us altogether. We get up to all sorts of games.” Proudly throwing open the door, she made the introductions: “This is Muttchen—she keeps us in order! And this is Erna. And this is Erika—our baby!”

Erika was a weedy blonde girl of eighteen, who giggled: “So here’s the famous Otto! We’ve been looking forward to seeing him for weeks!”

Otto smiled subtly, discreetly, very much at his ease. His brand new brown suit was vulgar beyond words; so were his lilac spats and his pointed yellow shoes. On his finger was an enormous signet-ring with a square, chocolate-coloured stone. Otto was extremely conscious of it and kept posing his hand in graceful attitudes, glancing down furtively to admire the effect. Frau Nowak simply couldn’t leave him alone. She must keep hugging him and pinching his cheeks.

“Doesn’t he look well!” she exclaimed. “Doesn’t he look splendid! Why, Otto, you’re so big and strong, I believe you could pick me up with one hand!”

Old Muttchen had a cold, they said. She wore a bandage round her throat, tight under the high collar of her old-fashioned black dress. She seemed a nice old lady, but somehow slightly obscene, like an old dog with sores. She sat on the edge of her bed with the photographs of her children and grandchildren on the table beside her, like prizes she had won. She looked slyly pleased, as though she were glad

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to be so ill. Frau Nowak told us that Muttchen had been three times in this sanatorium already. Each time she had been discharged as cured, but within nine months or a year she would have a relapse and have to be sent back again.

“Some of the cleverest professors in Germany have come here to examine her,” Frau Nowak added, with pride, “but you always fool them, don’t you, Muttchen dear?”

The old lady nodded, smiling, like a clever child which is being praised by its elders.

“And Erna is here for the second time,” Frau Nowak continued. “The doctors said she’d be all right; but she didn’t get enough to eat. So now she’s come back to us, haven’t you, Erna?”

“Yes, I’ve come back,” Erna agreed.

She was a skinny, bobbed-haired woman of about thirty-five, who must once have been very feminine, appealing, wistful, and soft. Now, in her extreme emaciation, she seemed possessed by a kind of desperate resolution, a certain defiance. She had immense, dark, hungry eyes. The wedding-ring was loose on her bony finger. When she talked and became excited her hands flitted tirelessly about in sequences of aimless gestures, like two shrivelled moths.

“My husband beat me and then ran away. The night he went he gave me such a thrashing that I had the marks afterwards for months. He was such a great strong man. He nearly killed me.” She spoke calmly, deliberately, yet with a certain suppressed excitement, never taking her eyes from my face. Her hungry glance bored into my brain, reading eagerly what I was thinking. “I dream about him now, sometimes,” she added, as if faintly amused.

Otto and I sat down at the table while Frau Nowak fussed around us with coffee and cakes which one of the sisters had brought. Everything which happened to me to-day was curiously without impact: my senses were muffled, insulated, functioning as if in a vivid dream. In this calm, white room, with its great windows looking out over the silent snowy pinewoods—the Christmas-tree on the table, the paper

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festoons above the beds, the nailed-up photographs, the plate of heart-shaped chocolate biscuits—these four women lived and moved. My eyes could explore every corner of their world: the temperature-charts, the fire extinguisher, the leather screen by the door. Dressed daily in their best clothes, their clean hands no longer pricked by the needle or roughened from scrubbing, they lay out on the terrace, listening to the wireless, forbidden to talk. Women being shut up together in this room had bred an atmosphere which was faintly nauseating, like soiled linen locked in a cupboard without air. They were playful with each other and shrill, like overgrown schoolgirls. Frau Nowak and Erika indulged in sudden furtive bouts of ragging. They plucked at each other’s clothes, scuffled silently, exploded into shrilly strained laughter. They were showing off in front of us.

“You don’t know how we’ve looked forward to to-day,” Erna told me. “To see a real live man!”

Frau Nowak giggled.

“Erika was such an innocent girl until she came here… . You didn’t know anything, did you, Erika?”

Erika sniggered.

“I’ve learnt enough since then… .”

“Yes, I should think you have! Would you believe it, Herr Christoph—her aunt sent her this little mannikin for Christmas, and now she takes it to bed with her every night, because she says she must have a man in her bed!”

Erika laughed boldly. “Well, it’s better than nothing, isn’t it?”

She winked at Otto, who rolled his eyes, pretending to be shocked.

After lunch Frau Nowak had to put in an hour’s rest. So Erna and Erika took possession of us for a walk in the grounds.

“We’ll show them the cemetery first,” Erna said.

The cemetery was for pet animals belonging to the sanatorium staff which had died. There were about a dozen

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little crosses and tombstones, pencilled with mock-heroic inscriptions in verse. Dead birds were buried there and white mice and rabbits, and a bat which had been found frozen after a storm.