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

This evening, I visited the “communist” café again. It is really a fascinating little world of intrigue and counter-intrigue. Its Napoleon is the sinister bomb-making Martin;

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Werner is its Danton; Rudi its Joan of Arc. Everybody suspects everybody else. Already Martin has warned me against Werner: he is “politically unreliable”—last summer he stole the entire funds of a communist youth organization. And Werner has warned me against Martin: he is either a Nazi agent, or a police spy, or in the pay of the French Government. In addition to this, both Martin and Werner earnestly advised me to have nothing to do with Rudi—they absolutely refused to say why.

But there was no question of having nothing to do with Rudi. He planted himself down beside me and began talking at once—a hurricane of enthusiasm. His favourite word is “knorke”: “Oh, ripping!” He is a pathfinder. He wanted to know what the boy scouts were lüce in England. Had they got the spirit of adventure? “All German boys are adventurous. Adventure is ripping. Our Scoutmaster is a ripping man. Last year he went to Lapland and lived in a hut, all through the summer, alone… . Are you a communist?”

“No. Are you?”

Rudi was pained.

“Of course! We all are, here… . I’ll lend you some books, if you like… . You ought to come and see our club-house. It’s ripping… . We sing the Red Flag, and all the forbidden songs… . Will you teach me English? I want to learn all languages.”

I asked if there were any girls in his pathfinder group. Rudi was as shocked as if I’d said something really indecent.

“Women are no good,” he told me bitterly. “They spoil everything. They haven’t got the spirit of adventure. Men understand each other much better when they’re alone together. Uncle Peter (that’s our Scoutmaster) says women should stay at home and mend socks. That’s all they’re fit for!”

“Is Uncle Peter a communist, too?”

“Of course!” Rudi looked at me suspiciously. “Why do you ask that?”

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“Oh, no special reason,” I replied hastily. “I think perhaps I was mixing him up with somebody else… .”

This afternoon I travelled out to the reformatory to visit one of my pupils, Herr Brink, who is a master there. He is a small, broad-shouldered man, with the thin, dead-looking fair hair, mild eyes, and bulging, over-heavy forehead of the German vegetarian intellectual. He wears sandals and an open-necked shirt. I found him in the gymnasium, giving physical instruction to a class of mentally deficient children —for the reformatory houses mental deficients as well as juvenile delinquents. With a certain melancholy pride, he pointed out the various cases: one little boy was suffering from hereditary syphilis—he had a fearful squint; another, the child of elderly drunkards, couldn’t stop laughing. They clambered about the wall-bars like monkeys, laughing and chattering, seemingly quite happy.

Then we went up to the workshop, where older boys in blue overalls—all convicted criminals—were making boots. Most of the boys looked up and grinned when Brink came in, only a few were sullen. But I couldn’t look them in the eyes. I felt horribly guilty and ashamed: I seemed, at that moment, to have become the sole representative of their gaolers, of Capitalist Society. I wondered if any of them had actually been arrested in the Alexander Casino, and, if so, whether they recognized me.

We had lunch in the matron’s room. Herr Brink apologized for giving me the same food as the boys themselves ate— potato soup with two sausages, and a dish of apples and stewed prunes. I protested—as, no doubt, I was intended to protest—that it was very good. And yet the thought of the boys having to eat it, or any other kind of meal, in that building, made each spoonful stick in my throat. Institution food has an indescribable, perhaps purely imaginary, taste. ( One of the most vivid and sickening memories of my own school life is the smell of ordinary white bread.)

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“You don’t have any bars or locked gates here,” I said. “I thought all reformatories had them… . Don’t your boys often run away?”

“Hardly ever,” said Brink, and the admission seemed to make him positively unhappy; he sank his head wearily in his hands. “Where shall they run to? Here it is bad. At home it is worse. The majority of them know that.”

“But isn’t there a kind of natural instinct for freedom?”

“Yes, you are right. But the boys soon lose it. The system helps them to lose it. I think perhaps that, in Germans, this instinct is never very strong.”

“You don’t have much trouble here, then?”

“Oh, yes. Sometimes… . Three months ago, a terrible thing happened. One boy stole another boy’s overcoat. He asked for permission to go into the town—that is allowed— and possibly he meant to sell it. But the owner of the overcoat followed him, and they had a fight. The boy to whom the overcoat belonged took up a big stone and flung it at the other boy; and this boy, feeling himself hurt, deliberately smeared dirt into the wound, hoping to make it worse and so escape punishment. The wound did get worse. In three days the boy died of blood-poisoning. And when the other boy heard of this he killed himself with a kitchen knife… .” Brink sighed deeply: “Sometimes I almost despair,” he added. “It seems as if there were a kind of badness, a disease, infecting the world to-day.”

“But what can you really do for these boys?” I asked.

“Very little. We teach them a trade. Later, we try to find them work—which is almost impossible. If they have work in the neighbourhood, they can still sleep here at nights… . The Principal believes that their lives can be changed through the teachings of the Christian religion. I’m afraid I cannot feel this. The problem is not so simple. I’m afraid that most of them, if they cannot get work, will take to crime. After all, people cannot be ordered to starve.”

“Isn’t there any alternative?”

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Brink rose and led me to the window.

“You see those two buildings? One is the engineering-works, the other is the prison. For the boys of this district there used to be two alternatives… . But now the works are bankrupt. Next week they will close down.”

This morning Ď went to see Rudi’s club-house, which is also the office of a pathfinders’ magazine. The editor and scoutmaster, Uncle Peter, is a haggard, youngish man, with a parchment-coloured face and deeply sunken eyes, dressed in corduroy jacket and shorts. He is evidently Rudi’s idol. The only time Rudi will stop talking is when Uncle Peter has something to say. They showed me dozens of photographs of boys, all taken with the camera tilted upwards, from beneath, so that they look like epic giants, in profile against enormous clouds. The magazine itself has articles on hunting, tracking, and preparing food—all written in super-enthusiastic style, with a curious underlying note of hysteria, as though the actions described were part of a religious or erotic ritual. There were half-a-dozen other boys in the room with us: all of them in a state of heroic semi-nudity, wearing the shortest of shorts and the thinnest of shirts or singlets, although the weather is so cold.

When I had finished looking at the photographs, Rudi took me into the club meeting-room. Long coloured banners hung down the walls, embroidered with initials and mysterious totem devices. At one end of the room was a low table covered with a crimson embroidered cloth—a kind of altar. On the table were candles in brass candlesticks.

“We light them on Thursdays,” Rudi explained, “when we have our camp-fire palaver. Then we sit round in a ring on the floor, and sing songs and tell stories.”

Above the table with the candlesticks was a sort of icon— the framed drawing of a young pathfinder of unearthly beauty, gazing sternly into the far distance, a banner in his hand. The whole place made me feel profoundly un—