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

The sitting-room was large and cheerful, pre-War in taste, a little over-furnished. Natalia had begun talking at once, with terrific animation, in eager stumbling English, showing me gramophone records, pictures, books. I wasn’t allowed to look at anything for more than a moment:

“You like Mozart? Yes? Oh, I also! Vairy much! … These picture is in the Kronprinz Palast. You have not seen it? I shall show you one day, yes? … You are fond of Heine? Say quite truthfully, please.” She looked up from the bookcase, smiling, but with a certain schoolmarm severity: “Read. It’s beautiful, I find.”

I hadn’t been in the house for more than quarter of an

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hour before Natalia had put aside four books for me to take with me when I left—Tonio Kroger, Jacobsen’s stories, a volume of Stefan George, Goethe’s letters. “You are to tell me your truthful opinion,” she warned me.

Suddenly, a maid parted the sliding glass doors at the end of the room, and we found ourselves in the presence of Frau Landauer, a large, pale woman with a mole on her left cheek and her hair brushed back smooth into a knot, seated placidly at the dining-room table, filling glasses from a samovar with tea. There were plates of ham and cold cut wurst and a bowl of those thin wet slippery sausages which squirt you with hot water when their skins are punctured by a fork; as well as cheese, radishes, pumpernickel and bottled beer. “You will drink beer,” Natalia ordered, returning one of the glasses of tea to her mother.

Looking round me, I noticed that the few available wall-spaces between pictures and cupboards were decorated with eccentric life-size figures, maidens with flying hair or oblique-eyed gazelles, cut out of painted paper and fastened down with drawing-pins. They made a comically ineffectual protest against the bourgeois solidity of the mahogany furniture. I knew, without being told, that Natalia must have designed them. Yes, she’d made them and fixed them up there for a party; now she wanted to take them down, but her mother wouldn’t let her. They had a little argument about this— evidently part of the domestic routine. “Oh, but they’re tairrible, I find!” cried Natalia, in English. “I think they’re very pretty,” replied Frau Landauer placidly, in German, without raising her eyes from the plate, her mouth full of pumpernickel and radish.

As soon as we had finished supper, Natalia made it clear that I was to say a formal good-night to Frau Landauer. We then returned to the sitting-room. She began to cross-examine me. Where was my room? How much was I paying for it? When I told her, she said immediately that I’d chosen quite the wrong district (Wilmersdorf was far better), and that I’d been swindled. I could have got exactly the same thing,

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with running water and central heating thrown in, for the same price. “You should have asked me,” she added, apparently quite forgetting that we’d met that evening for the first time: “I should have found it for you myself.”

“Your friend tells us you are a writer?” Natalia challenged suddenly.

“Not a real writer,” I protested.

“But you have written a book? Yes?”

Yes, I had written a book.

Natalia was triumphant: “You have written a book and you say you are not a writer. You are mad, I think.”

Then I had to tell her the whole history of All the Conspirators, why it had that title, what it was about, when it was published, and so forth.

“You will bring me a copy, please.”

“I haven’t got one,” I told her, with satisfaction, “and it’s out of print.”

This rather dashed Natalia for the moment, then she sniffed eagerly at a new scent: “And this what you will write in Berlin? Tell me, please.”

To satisfy her, I began to tell the story of a story I had written years before, for a college magazine at Cambridge. I improved it as much as possible extempore, as I went along. Telling this story again quite excited me—so much that I began to feel that the idea in it hadn’t been so bad after all, and that I might really be able to rewrite it. At the end of every sentence, Natalia pressed her lips tight together and nodded her head so violently that the hair flopped up and down over her face.

“Yes, yes,” she kept saying. “Yes, yes.”

It was only after some minutes that I realized she wasn’t taking in anything I said. She evidently couldn’t understand my English, for I was talking much faster now, and not choosing my words. In spite of her tremendous devotional effort of concentration, I could see that she was noticing the way I parted my hair, and that my tie was worn shiny at the knot. She even flashed a furtive glance at my shoes. I pre-142

tended, however, not to be aware of all this. It would have been rude to stop short and most unkind to spoil Natalia’s pleasure in the mere fact that I was talking so intimately to her about something which really interested me, although we were practically strangers.

When I had finished, she asked at once: “And it will be ready—how soon?” For she had taken possession of the story, together with all my other affairs. I answered that I didn’t know. I was lazy.

“You are lazy?” Natalia opened her eyes mockingly. “So? Then I am sorry. I can’t help you.”

Presently, I said that I must go. She came with me to the door: “And you will bring me this story soon,” she persisted.

“Yes.”

“How soon?”

“Next week,” I feebly promised.

It was a fortnight before I called on the Landauers again. After dinner, when Frau Landauer had left the room, Natalia informed me that we were to go together to the cinema. “We are the guests of my mother.” As we stood up to go, she suddenly grabbed two apples and an orange from the sideboard and stuffed them into my pockets. She had evidently made up her mind that I was suffering from undernourishment. I protested weakly.

“When you say another word, I am angry,” she warned me.

“And you have brought it?” she asked, as we were leaving the house.

Knowing perfectly well that she meant the story, I made my voice as innocent as I could: “Brought what?”

“You know. What you promise.”

“I don’t remember promising anything.”

“Don’t remember?” Natalia laughed scornfully. “Then I’m sorry. I can’t help you.”

By the time we got to the cinema, she had forgiven me, however. The big film was a Pat and Patachon. Natalia remarked severely: “You do not like this kind of film, I think? It isn’t something clever enough for you?”

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I denied that I only liked “clever” films, but she was sceptical: “Good. We shall see.”

All through the film, she kept glancing at me to see if I was laughing. At first, I laughed exaggeratedly. Then, getting tired of this, I stopped laughing altogether. Natalia got more and more impatient with me. Towards the end of the film, she even began to nudge me at moments when I should laugh. No sooner were the lights turned up, than she pounced:

‘Tou see? I was right. You did not like it, no?”

“I liked it very much indeed.”

“Oh yes, I believe! And now say truthfully.”

“I have told you. I liked it.”

“But you did not laugh. You are sitting always with your face so …” Natalia tried to imitate me, “and not once laughing.”

“I never laugh when I am amused,” I said.

“Oh yes, perhaps! That shall be one of your English customs, not to laugh?”

“No Englishman ever laughs when he’s amused.”

“You wish I believe that? Then I will tell you your Englishmen are mad.”

“That remark is not very original.”

“And must always my remarks be so original, my dear sir?”

“When you are with me, yes.”