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

Berlin is a city with two centres—the cluster of expensive hotels, bars, cinemas, shops round the Memorial Church, a sparkling nucleus of light, like a sham diamond, in the shabby twilight of the town; and the self-conscious civic centre of buildings round the Unter den Linden, carefully arranged. In grand international styles, copies of copies, they assert our dignity as a capital city—a parliament, a couple of museums, a State bank, a cathedral, an opera, a dozen embassies, a triumphal arch; nothing has been forgotten. And they are all so pompous, so very correct—all except the ca-186

thedral, which betrays, in its architecture, a flash of that hysteria which flickers always behind every grave, grey Prussian façade. Extinguished by its absurd dome, it is, at first sight, so startlingly funny that one searches for a name suitably preposterous—the Church of the Immaculate Consumption.

But the real heart of Berlin is a small damp black wood— the Tiergarten. At this time of the year, the cold begins to drive the peasant boys out of their tiny unprotected villages into the city, to look for food, and work. But the city, which glowed so brightly and invitingly in the night sky above the plains, is cold and cruel and dead. Its warmth is an illusion, a mirage of the winter desert. It will not receive these boys. It has nothing to give. The cold drives them out of its streets, into the wood which is its cruel heart. And there they cower on benches, to starve and freeze, and dream of their faraway cottage stoves.

Frl. Schroeder hates the cold. Huddled in her fur-lined velvet jacket, she sits in the corner with her stockinged feet on the stove. Sometimes she smokes a cigarette, sometimes she sips a glass of tea, but mostly she just sits, staring dully at the stove tiles in a kind of hibernation-doze. She is lonely, nowadays. Frl. Mayr is away in Holland, on a cabaret-tour. So Frl. Schroeder has nobody to talk to, except Bobby and myself.

Bobby, anyhow, is in deep disgrace. Not only is he out of work and three months behind with the rent, but Frl. Schroeder has reason to suspect him of stealing money from her bag. “You know, Herr Issyvoo,” she tells me, “I shouldn’t wonder at all if he didn’t pinch those fifty marks from Frl. Kost… . He’s quite capable of it, the pig! To think I could ever have been so mistaken in him! Will you believe it, Herr Issyvoo, I treated him as if he were my own son—and this is the thanks I get! He says he’ll pay me every pfennig if he gets this job as barman at the Lady Windermere … if,

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if …” Frl. Schroeder sniffs with intense scorn:; “I dare say! If my giandmother had wheels, she’d be an omnibus!” Bobby has been turned out of his old room and banished to the “Swedish Pavilion.” It must be terribly draughty, up there. Sometimes poor Bobby looks quite blue with cold. He has changed very much during the last year—his hair is thinner, his clothes are shabbier, his cheekiness has become defiant and rather pathetic. People like Bobby are their jobs —take the job away and they partially cease to exist. Sometimes, he sneaks into the living-room, unshaven, his hands in his pockets, and lounges about uneasily defiant, whistling to himself—the dance tunes he whistles are no longer quite new. Frl. Schroeder throws him a word, now and then, like a grudging scrap of bread, but she won’t look at him or make room for him by the stove. Perhaps she has never really forgiven him for his affair with Frl. Kost. The tickling and bottom-slapping days are over.

Yesterday we had a visit from Frl. Kost herself. I was out at the time: when I got back I found Frl. Schroeder quite excited. “Only think, Herr Issyvoo—I wouldn’t have known her! She’s quite the lady now! Her Japanese friend has bought her a fur coat—real fur, I shouldn’t like to think what he must have paid for it! And her shoes—genuine snakeskin! Well, well, I bet she earned them! That’s the one kind of business that still goes well, nowadays. … I think I shall have to take to the line myself!” But however much Frl. Schroeder might affect sarcasm at Frl. Kost’s expense, I could see that she’d been greatly and not unfavourably impressed. And it wasn’t so much the fur coat or the shoes which had impressed her: Frl. Kost had achieved something higher—the hall-mark of respectability in Frl. Schroeder’s world—she had had an operation in a private nursing home. “Oh, not what you think, Herr Issyvoo! It was something to do with her throat. Her friend paid for that, too, of course… . Only imagine—the doctors cut something out of the

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back of her nose; and now she can fill her mouth with water and squirt it out through her nostrils, just like a syringel I wouldn’t believe it at first—but she did it to show me! My word of honour, Herr Issyvoo, she could squirt it right across the kitchen! There’s no denying, she’s very much improved, since the time when she used to live here. … I shouldn’t be surprised if she married a bank director one of these days. Oh, yes, you mark my words, that girl will go far… .”

Herr Krampf, a young engineer, one of my pupils, describes his childhood during the days of the War and the Inflation. During the last years of the War, the straps disappeared from the windows of railway carriages: people had cut them off in order to sell the leather. You even saw men and women going about in clothes made from the carriage upholstery. A party of Krampfs school friends broke into a factory one night and stole all the leather driving-belts. Everybody stole. Everybody sold what they had to sell—themselves included. A boy of fourteen, from Krampfs class, peddled cocaine between school hours, in the streets.

Farmers and butchers were omnipotent. Their slightest whim had to be gratified, if you wanted vegetables or meat. The Krampf family knew of a butcher in a little village outside Berlin who always had meat to sell. But the butcher had a peculiar sexual perversion. His greatest erotic pleasure was to pinch and slap the cheeks of a sensitive, well-bred girl or woman. The possibility of thus humiliating a lady like Frau Krampf excited him enormously: unless he was allowed to realize his fantasy, he refused, absolutely, to do business. So, every Sunday, Krampfs mother would travel out to the village with her children, and patiently offer her cheeks to be slapped and pinched, in exchange for some cutlets or a steak.

At the far end of the Potsdamerstrasse, there is a fairground, with merry-go-rounds, swings and peepshows. One

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of the chief attractions of the fairground is a tent where boxing and wrestling matches are held. You pay your money and go in, the wrestlers fight three or four rounds, and the referee then announces that, if you want to see any more, you must pay an extra ten pfennigs. One of the wrestlers is a bald man with a very large stomach: he wears a pair of canvas trousers rolled up at the bottoms, as though he were going paddling. His opponent wears black tights, and leather kneelets which look as if they had come off an old cab-horse. The wrestlers throw each other about as much as possible, turning somersaults in the air to amuse the audience. The fat man who plays the part of loser pretends to get very angry when he is beaten, and threatens to fight the referee.

One of the boxers is a negro. He invariably wins. The boxers hit each other with the open glove, making a tremendous amount of noise. The other boxer, a tall, well-built young man, about twenty years younger and obviously much stronger than the negro, is “knocked out” with absurd ease. He writhes in great agony on the floor, nearly manages to struggle to his feet at the count of ten, then collapses again, groaning. After this fight, the referee collects ten more pfennigs and calls for a challenger from the audience. Before any bona fide challenger can apply, another young man, who has been quite openly chatting and joking with the wrestlers, jumps hastily into the ring and strips off his clothes, revealing himself already dressed in shorts and boxer’s boots. The referee announces a purse of five marks; and, this time, the negro is “knocked out.”