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

Bernhard, too, I hadn’t seen for some time. Indeed, I was quite surprised to hear his voice on the telephone one morning. He wanted to know if I would go with him that evening “into the country” and spend the night. This sounded very mysterious, and Bernhard only laughed when I tried to get out of him where we were going and why.

He called for me about eight o’clock, in a big closed car with a chauffeur. The car, Bernhard explained, belonged to the business. Both he and his uncle used it. It was typical, I thought, of the patriarchal simplicity in which the Landauers lived that Natalia’s parents had no private car of their own, and that Bernhard even seemed inclined to apologize to me for the existence of this one. It was a complicated simplicity, the negation of a negation. Its roots were entangled deep in the awful guilt of possession. Oh dear, I sighed to myself, shall I ever get to the bottom of these people, shall I ever understand them? The mere act of thinking about the Landauers’ psychic make-up overcame me, as always, with a sense of absolute, defeated exhaustion.

“You are tired?” Bernhard asked, solicitous, at my elbow.

“Oh no. …” I roused myself. “Not a bit.”

“You will not mind if we call first at the house of a friend of mine? There is somebody else coming with us, you see. … I hope you don’t object?”

“No, of course not,” I said politely.

“He is very quiet. An old friend of the family.” Bernhard, for some reason, seemed amused. He chuckled faintly to himself.

The car stopped outside a villa in the Fasanenstrasse.

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Bernhard rang the bell and was let in: a few moments later, he reappeared, carrying in his arms a Skye terrier. I laughed.

“You were exceedingly polite,” said Bernhard, smiling. “All the same, I think I detected a certain uneasiness on your part… . Am I right?”

“Perhaps… .”

“I wonder whom you were expecting? Some terribly boring old gentleman, perhaps?” Bernhard patted the terrier. “But I fear, Christopher, that you are far too well bred ever to confess that to me now.”

The car slowed down and stopped before the toll-gate of the Avus motor-road.

“Where are we going?” I asked. “I wish you’d tell me!”

Bernhard smiled his soft expansive Oriental smile: “I’m very mysterious, am I not?”

“Very.”

“Surely it must be a wonderful experience for you to be driving away into the night, not knowing whither you are bound? If I tell you that we are going to Paris, or to Madrid, or to Moscow, then there will no longer be any mystery and you will have lost half your pleasure… . Do you know, Christopher, I quite envy you because you do not know where we are going?”

“That’s one way of looking at it, certainly… . But, at any rate, I know already we aren’t going to Moscow. We’re driving in the opposite direction.”

Bernhard laughed: “You are so very English sometimes, Chistopher. Do you realize that, I wonder?”

“You bring out the English side of me, I think,” I answered, and immediately felt a little uncomfortable, as though this remark were somehow insulting. Bernhard seemed aware of my thought.

“Am I to understand that as a compliment, or as a reproof?”

“As a compliment, of course.”

The car whirled along the black Avus, into the immense darkness of the winter countryside. Giant reflector signs

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glittered for a moment in the headlight beams, expired like burnt-out matches. Already Berlin was a reddish glow in the sky behind us, dwindling rapidly beyond a converging forest of pines. The searchlight on the Funkturm swung its little ray through the night. The straight black road roared headlong to meet us, as if to its destruction. In the upholstered darkness of the car, Bernhard was patting the restless dog upon his knees.

“Very well, I will tell you… . We are going to a place on the shores of the Wannsee which used to belong to my father. What you call in England a country cottage.”

“A cottage? Very nice… .”

My tone amused Bernhard. I could hear from his voice that he was smiling:

“I hope you won’t find it too uncomfortable?”

“I’m sure I shall love it.”

“It may seem a little primitive, at first… .” Bernhard laughed quietly to himself: “Nevertheless, it is amusing… .”

“It must be… .”

I suppose I had been vaguely expecting an hotel, lights, music, very good food. I reflected bitterly that only a rich, decadently over-civilized town-dweller would describe camping out for the night in a poky, damp country cottage in the middle of the winter as “amusing.” And how typical that he should drive me to that cottage in a luxurious car! Where would the chauffeur sleep? Probably in the best hotel in Potsdam. … As we passed the lamps of the toll-house at the far end of the Avus, I saw that Bernhard was still smiling to himself.

The car swung to the right, downhill, along a road through silhouetted trees. There was a feeling of nearness to the big lake lying invisible behind the woodland on our left. I had hardly realized that the road had ended in a gateway and a private drive: we pulled up at the door of a large villa.

“Where’s this?” I asked Bernhard, supposing confusedly that he must have something else to call for—another terrier, perhaps. Bernhard laughed gaily:

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“We have arrived at our destination, my dear Christopher! Out you get!”

A manservant in a striped jacket opened the door. The dog jumped out, and Bernhard and I followed. Resting his hand upon my shoulder, he steered me across the hall and up the stairs. I was aware of a rich carpet and framed engravings. He opened the door of a luxurious pink and white bedroom, with a luscious quilted silk eiderdown on the bed. Beyond was a bathroom, gleaming with polished silver, and hung with fleecy white towels.

Bernhard grinned:

“Poor Christopher! I fear you are disappointed in our cottage? It is too large for you, too ostentatious? You were looking forward to the pleasure of sleeping on the floor— amidst the blackbeetles?”

The atmosphere of this joke surrounded us through dinner. As the manservant brought in each new course on its silver dish, Bernhard would catch my eye and smile a deprecatory smile. The dining-room was tame baroque, elegant and rather colourless. I asked him when the villa had been built.

“My father built this house in 1904. He wanted to make it as much as possible like an English home—for my mother’s sake… .”

After dinner, we walked down the windy garden, in the Ťdarkness. A strong wind was blowing up through the trees, from over the water. I followed Bernhard, stumbling against the body of the terrier which kept running between my legs, down flights of stone steps to a landing-stage. The dark lake was full of waves, and beyond, in the direction of Potsdam, a sprinkle of bobbing lights were comet-tailed in the black water. On the parapet, a dismantled gas-bracket rattled in the wind, and, below us, the waves splashed uncannily soft and wet, against unseen stone.

“When I was a boy, I used to come down these steps in the winter evenings and stand for hours here… .” Bern—

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hard had begun to speak. His voice was pitched so low that I could hardly hear it; his face was turned away from me, in the darkness, looking out over the lake. When a stronger puff of wind blew, his words came more distinctly—as though the wind itself were talking: “That was during the Wartime. My elder brother had been killed, right at the beginning of the War … Later, certain business rivals of my father began to make propaganda against him, because his wife was an English woman, so that nobody would come to visit us, and it was rumoured that we were spies. At last, even the local tradespeople did not wish to call at the house… . It was all rather ridiculous, and at the same time rather terrible, that human beings could be possessed by so much malice… .”