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

“Very few indeed.”

At the end of lunch, it seemed tacitly understood that Bernhard and his uncle and aunt were to discuss family affairs together. “Do you like,” Natalia asked me, “that we shall walk together a little?”

Herr Landauer took a ceremonial farewell of me: “At all

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times, Mr. Isherwood, you are welcome under my roof.” We both bowed profoundly.

“Perhaps,” said Bernhard, giving me his card, “you would come one evening and enliven my solitude for a little?” I thanked him and said that I should be delighted.

“And what do you think of my father?” Natalia asked, as soon as we were out of the house.

“I think he’s the nicest father I’ve ever met.”

“You do truthfully?” Natalia was delighted.

“Yes, truthfully.”

“And now confess to me, my father shocked you when he was speaking of Lord Byron—no? You were quite red as a lobster in your cheeks.”

I laughed: “Your father makes me feel old-fashioned. His conversation’s so modern.”

Natalia laughed triumphantly: “You see, I was right! You were shocked. Oh, I am so glad! You see, I say to my father: A vairy intelligent young man is coming here to see us—and so he wish to show you that he also can be modern and speak of all this subjects. You thought my father would be a stupid old man? Tell the truth, please.”

“No,” I protested. “I never thought that!”

“Well, he is not stupid, you see… . He is vairy clever. Only he does not have so much time for reading, because he must work always. Sometimes he must work eighteen and nineteen hours in the day; it is tairrible… . And he is the best father in the whole world!”

“Your cousin Bernhard is your father’s partner, isn’t he?”

Natalia nodded: “It is he who manages the store, here in Berlin. He also is vairy clever.”

“I suppose you see a good deal of him?”

“No. … It is not often that he come to our house… . He is a strange man, you know? I think he like to be vairy much alone. I am surprise when he ask you to make him a visit… . You must be careful.”

“Careful? Why on earth should I be careful?”

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“He is vairy sarcastical, you see. I think perhaps he laugh at you.”

“Well, that wouldn’t be very terrible, would it? Plenty of people laugh at me… . You do, yourself, sometimes.”

“Oh, I! That is different.” Natalia shook her head solemnly: she evidently spoke from unpleasant experience. “When I laugh, it is to make fun, you know? But when Bernhard laugh at you, it is not nice… .”

Bernhard had a flat in a quiet street not far from the Tiergarten. When I rang at the outer entrance, a gnome-like caretaker peeped up at me through a tiny basement window, asked whom I wished to visit, and finally, after regarding me for a few moments with profound mistrust, pressed a button releasing the lock of the outer door. This door was so heavy that I had to push it open with both hands; it closed behind me with a hollow boom, like the firing of a cannon. Then came a pair of doors opening into the courtyard, then the door of the Gartenhaus, then five flights of stairs, then the door of the flat. Four doors to protect Bernhard from the outer world.

This evening, he was wearing a beautifully embroidered kimono over his town clothes. He was not quite as I remembered him from our first meeting: I hadn’t see him, then, as being in the least oriental—the kimono, I suppose, brought this out. His over-civilized, prim, finely drawn, beaky profile gave him something of the air of a bird in a piece of Chinese embroidery. He was soft, negative, I thought, yet curiously potent, with the static potency of a carved ivory figure in a shrine. I noticed again his beautiful English, and the deprecatory gestures of his hands, as he showed me a twelfth-century sandstone head of Buddha from Khmer which stood at the foot of his bed—“keeping watch over my slumbers.” On the low white bookcase were little Greek and Siamese and Indo-Chinese statuettes and stone heads, most of which Bernhard had brought home with him from his travels.

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Amongst volumes of Kunst-Geschichte, photographic reproductions and monographs on sculpture and antiquities, I saw Vachell’s The Hill and Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? The flat might well have been in the depths of the country: you couldn’t hear the faintest outside sound. A staid housekeeper in an apron served supper. I had soup, fish, a chop and savoury; Bernhard drank milk, ate only tomatoes and rusks.

We talked of London, which Bernhard had never visited, and of Paris, where he had studied for a time in a sculptor’s atelier. In his youth, he had wanted to be a sculptor, “but,” Bernhard sighed, smiled gently, “Providence has ordained otherwise.”

I wanted to talk to him about the Landauer business, but didn’t—fearing it might not be tactful. Bernhard himself referred to it, however, in passing: “You must pay us a visit, one day, if it would interest you—for I suppose that it is interesting, if only as a contemporary economic phenomenon.” He smiled, and his face was masked with exhaustion: the thought crossed my mind that he was perhaps suffering from a fatal disease.

After supper, he seemed brighter, however: he began telling me about his travels. A few years before, he had been right round the world—gently inquisitive, mildly satiric, poking his delicate beak-like nose into everything: Jewish village communities in Palestine, Jewish settlements on the Black Sea, revolutionary committees in India, rebel armies in Mexico. Hesitating, delicately choosing his words, he described a conversation with a Chinese ferryman about demons, and a barely credible instance of the brutality of the police in New York.

Four or five times during the evening, the telephone bell rang, and, on each occasion, it seemed that Bernhard was being asked for help and advice. “Come and see me tomorrow,” he said, in his tired, soothing voice. “Yes… . I’m sure it can all be arranged… . And now, please don’t worry any more. Go to bed and sleep. I prescribe two or three tablets of aspirin… .” He smiled softly, ironically. Evidently

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he was about to lend each of his applicants some money.

“And please tell me,” he asked, just before I left, “if I am not being impertinent—what has made you come to live in Berlin?”

“To learn German,” I said. After Natalia’s warning, I wasn’t going to trust Bernhard with the history of my life.

“And you are happy here?”

“Very happy.”

“That is wonderful, I think… . Most wonderful …” Bernhard laughed his gentle ironical laugh: “A spirit possessed of such vitality that it can be happy, even in Berlin. You must teach me your secret. May I sit at your feet and learn wisdom?”

His smile contracted, vanished. Once again, the impassivity of mortal weariness fell like a shadow across his strangely youthful face. “I hope,” he said, “that you will ring me up whenever you have nothing better to do.”

Soon after this, I went to call on Bernhard at the business.

Landauers’ was an enormous steel and glass building, not far from the Potsdamer Platz. It took me nearly a quarter of an hour to find my way through departments of underwear, outfitting, electrical appliances, sport and cutlery to the private world behind the scenes—the wholesale, travellers’ and buying rooms, and Bernhard’s own little suite of offices. A porter showed me into a small waiting-room, panelled in some highly polished streaky wood, with a rich blue carpet and one picture, an engraving of Berlin in the year 1803. After a few moments, Bernhard himself came in. This morning, he looked younger, sprucer, in a bow-tie and a light grey suit. “I hope that you give your approval to this room,” he said. “I think that, as I keep so many people waiting here, they ought at least to have a more or less sympathetic atmosphere to allay their impatience.”