Prater Violet (10 page)

“What would you do with it?”

“Just sail away.”

“Well, why don't you?”

“I don't know.… Places are all the same, really. I've been around.”

“Haven't you ever thought of getting married?”

“Oh, I tried that, too. When I was a kid … She died.”

“I'm sorry.”

“It wasn't so ruddy wonderful. She was a good girl, though.… You know, sometimes I wonder what all this is for. Why not just peacefully end it?”

“We all think that. But we don't do it.”

“Surely you're not fool enough to imagine there's anything afterwards?”

“Perhaps. No, I suppose not … I don't think it makes much difference.”

Now that we have touched rock-bottom, Roger suddenly brightens. “You know what have been the best things in my life, Chris? Good, unexpected lays.”

And he tells me the story of a married woman he once met in a hotel in Burton-on-Trent.

At seven-thirty, a boy from the canteen brings up tea and sandwiches. Eating together like this seems to raise the spirits of the entire unit. Anita has finished her scene, and another close-up, and gone home; she can be very co-operative when it suits her. Arthur Cromwell's scene won't take long. We shall be through by nine, after all.

Lawrence Dwight comes up from the cutting room to watch us.

He is scowling, as usual, but I can see that he feels pleased with himself. He has had a good day.

“Good evening, Herr Cut-Master. How are the patterns?”

“The patterns are a damn sight better than you deserve,” says Lawrence, “considering the muck you send us. I'm going to make you quite a nice little picture, for which you'll take all the credit.”

“That's ghastly decent of you.”

Bergmann is pacing the floor, as he often does just before a take. He comes right up to us and stands for a moment, regarding our faces with dark, troubled, unseeing eyes. Then he turns abruptly and walks away in a kind of trance.

“Come on, now,” shouts Eliot. “Let's get going. We don't want to be here all night.”

“He's wasting his talents,” says Lawrence. “What an ideal nursery governess!”

“Dead quiet, please!”

By ten minutes to nine, it is all over. We have shot two thousand feet of film. The day's work represents four minutes and thirty seconds of the completed picture.

“What are you doing this evening?” Lawrence asks.

“Nothing special. Why?”

“Let's go to a movie.”

*   *   *

“POOR DR. BERGMANN,” said my mother, when I came down to breakfast one morning, in the middle of February. “I'm afraid he'll be very worried about his family.”

“What do you mean?”

“They're still in Vienna, aren't they? It seems dreadfully unsettled there, just now.”

I picked up the newspaper. The word “Austria” jumped at me from the headlines. I was too excited to read properly. My eye caught bits of sentences, proper names: “At Linz, after heavy fighting … Fey … Starhemberg … martial law … hundreds of arrests … general strike fails to … Viennese workers besieged … hunt out socialist hyenas, Dollfuss declares…”

I dropped the paper, ran out into the hall, and dialed Bergmann's number. His voice answered as soon as the bell began to ring. “Hullo, yes…”

“Hullo, Friedrich.”

“Oh … Hullo, Christopher.” He sounded weary and disappointed. Obviously, he had been expecting some other call.

“Friedrich, I've just read the news…”

“Yes.” His voice had no expression in it at all.

“Is there anything I can do?”

“There is nothing any of us can do, my child.”

“Would you like me to come round?”

Bergmann sighed. “Very well. Yes. If you wish.”

I hung up and phoned for a taxi. While I was waiting for it, I hastily swallowed some breakfast. My mother and Richard watched me in silence. Bergmann had become part of their lives, although they had only seen him once, for a few minutes, one day when he came to the house to fetch me. This was a family crisis.

Bergmann was sitting in the living room when I arrived, facing the telephone, his head propped in his hands. I was shocked by his appearance. He looked so tired and old.

“Servus,”
he said. He didn't raise his eyes. I saw that he had been crying.

I sat down at his side and put my arm around him. “Friedrich … You mustn't worry. They'll be all right.”

“I have been trying to speak to them,” Bergmann told me, wearily. “But it is impossible. There is no communication. Just now, I sent a telegram. It will be delayed for many hours. For days, perhaps.”

“I'm sure they'll be all right. After all, Vienna is a big city. The fighting's localized, the paper says. Probably it won't last long.”

Bergmann shook his head. “This is only the beginning. Now, anything may happen. Hitler has his opportunity. In a few hours, there can be war.”

“He wouldn't dare. Mussolini would stop him. Didn't you read what the
Times
correspondent in Rome said about…?”

But he wasn't listening to me. His whole body was trembling. He began to sob, helplessly, covering his face with his hands. At length, he gasped out, “I am so afraid…”

“Friedrich, don't. Please don't.”

After a moment, he recovered a little. He looked up. He rose to his feet, and began to walk about the room. There was a long silence.

“If by this evening I hear nothing,” he told me, suddenly, “I must go to them.”

“But, Friedrich…”

“What else can I do? I have no choice.”

“You wouldn't be able to help them.”

Bergmann sighed. “You do not understand. How can I leave them alone at such a time? Already, they have endured so much.… You are very kind, Christopher. You are my only friend in this country. But you cannot understand. You have always been safe and protected. Your home has never been threatened. You cannot know what it is like to be an exile, a perpetual stranger.… I am bitterly ashamed that I am here, in safety.”

“But they wouldn't want you to be with them. Don't you realize, they must be glad you're safe? You might even compromise them. After all, lots of people must know about your political opinions. You might be arrested.”

Bergmann shrugged his shoulders. “All that is unimportant. You do not understand.”

“Besides,” I unwisely continued, “they wouldn't want you to leave the picture.”

All Bergmann's pent-up anxiety exploded. “The picture! I shit upon the picture! This heartless filth! This wretched, lying charade! To make such a picture at such a moment is definitely heartless. It is a crime. It definitely aids Dollfuss, and Starhemberg, and Fey and all their gangsters. It covers up the dirty syphilitic sore with rose leaves, with the petals of this hypocritical reactionary violet. It lies and declares that the pretty Danube is blue, when the water is red with blood.… I am punished for assisting at this lie. We shall all be punished.…”

The telephone rang. Bergmann seized it. “Yes, hullo. Yes…” His face darkened. “It is the studio,” he told me. “You speak to them.”

“Hullo, Mr. Isherwood?” said the voice of Chatsworth's secretary, very brightly. “My word, you're up early this morning! Well, that's splendid—because Mr. Harris is a little bit worried. He's not sure about some details in the next set. Perhaps you could come in a little sooner and talk things over before you start work?”

I covered the mouthpiece with my hand. “Do you want me to tell them you're not well?” I asked Bergmann.

“Moment … Wait … No. Do not say that.” He sighed deeply. “We must go.”

It was an awful day. Bergmann went through it in a kind of stupor, and I watched him anxiously, fearing some outburst. During the takes, he sat like a dummy, seeming not to care what happened. If spoken to, he answered briefly and listlessly. He made no criticisms, no objection to anything. Unless Roger or the camera operator said “No,” the scene would be printed; and we went on dully to the next.

Everybody in the unit reacted to his mood. Anita made difficulties, Cromwell hammed, Eliot fussed idiotically, the electricians were lazy, Mr. Watts wasted hours on lighting. Only Roger and Teddy were efficient, quiet and considerate. I had tried to explain to them how Bergmann was feeling. Teddy's only comment was, “Rotten luck.” But he meant it.

In the evening, just as we were finishing work, a telegram arrived from Vienna: “Don't be silly, Friedrich dear. You know how newspapers exaggerate. Inge is still on holiday in the mountains with friends. I have just made a cake. Mother says it is delicious and sends love. Many kisses.”

Bergmann showed it to me, smiling, with tears in his eyes. “She is great,” he said. “Definitely great.”

But now his personal trouble gave way to political anxiety and anger, which grew from day to day. Throughout Tuesday and Wednesday, the struggle continued. Without definite orders, without leadership, cut off and isolated into small groups, the workers went on fighting. What else could they do? Their homes, the great modern tenements, admired by the whole of Europe as the first architecture of a new and better world, were now described by the Press as “red fortresses”; and the government artillery was shooting them to pieces. The socialist leaders, fearing this emergency, had provided secret stores of arms and ammunition; but the leaders were all arrested now, or in hiding. Nobody knew where the weapons were buried. Desperately, men dug in courtyards and basements, and found nothing. Dollfuss took tea with the Papal Nuncio. Starhemberg saw forty-two corpses laid out in the captured Goethe Hof, and commented: “Far too few!” Berlin looked on, smugly satisfied. Another of its enemies was being destroyed; and Hitler's hands were clean.

Bergmann listened eagerly to every news broadcast, bought every special edition. During those first two days, while the workers still held out, I knew that he was hoping against hope. Perhaps the street fighting would grow into a revolution. Perhaps international Labor would force the Powers to intervene. There was just one little chance—one in a million. And then there was no chance at all.

Bergmann raged in his despair. He wanted to write letters to the conservative Press, protesting against its studied tone of neutrality. The letters were written, but I had to persuade him not to send them. He had no case. The papers were being perfectly fair, according to their own standards. You couldn't expect anything else.

By the beginning of the next week, it was all over, except for the government's vengeance on its prisoners. The workers' tenements were made to fly the white flag. The Engels Hof was renamed the Dollfuss Hof. Every man over eighteen from the Schlinger Hof was in prison, including the sick and the cripples. Terrorism became economical, since a new law stopped the unemployment pay of those who had been arrested. Meanwhile, Frau Dollfuss went among the workers' families, distributing cakes. Dollfuss was sincerely sad: “I hope the blood that flowed in our land will bring people to their senses.”

The other centers of resistance, in Graz, Steuer and Linz, were all crushed. Bauer, Deutsch and many others fled into Czechoslovakia. Wallisch, caught near the frontier, was hanged at Loeben, in a brightly lighted courtyard, while his socialist fellow-prisoners looked on. “Long live freedom!” he shouted. The hangman and his assistants pulled him from the scaffold and clung to his legs until he choked.

Bergmann sat in his chair facing the set, grim and silent, like an accusing specter. One morning, Eliot ventured to ask him how he had liked a take.

“I loved it,” Bergmann told him, savagely. “I loved it. It was unspeakably horrible. It was the maximum of filth. Never in my whole life have I seen anything so idiotic.”

“You want to shoot it again, sir?”

“Yes, by all means. Let us shoot it again. Perhaps we can achieve something worse. I doubt it. But let us try.”

Eliot grinned nervously, trying to pass this off as a joke.

“So?” Bergmann turned on him suddenly. “You find this amusing? You do not believe me? Very well—let me see you direct this scene yourself.”

Eliot looked scared. “I couldn't do that, sir.”

“You mean that you refuse to do it? You definitely refuse? Is that what you mean?”

“No, sir. Of course not. But…”

“You prefer that I ask Dorothy to direct this scene?”

“No…” Eliot, poor boy, was almost in tears.

“Then obey me!” Bergmann flared at him. “Do what I order!”

All that week, he seemed to be possessed by a devil. He tried to quarrel with everybody, even the loyal Teddy and Roger. We moved to another small set—a room in the Borodanian palace. Harris was present when Bergmann inspected it. I knew there would be trouble.

Bergmann found fault with everything. “In which
stables,
” he asked Harris, “did you get these curtains?” Then he discovered that one of the doors wouldn't open.

“Sorry, sir,” the carpenter explained, “we didn't have no orders it was to be made practical.”

Bergmann snorted frantically. He walked up to the door and gave it a violent kick. We looked on, wondering what was coming. Suddenly, he swung round upon us.

“And there you all stand,” he shouted, “grinning at me like evil, stubborn monkeys!”

He stormed out. We avoided each other's eyes. It was ridiculous, of course. But Bergmann's rage was so genuine, and somehow so touching, that nobody wanted to laugh.

An instant later, his tousled head popped in through a window of the set, like an infuriated Punch.

“No!” he cried. “Not monkeys! Donkeys!”

It would have been kindest, perhaps, to shout back at him, to afford him the exquisite relief of a fight. But none of us would do it. Some were sorry for him, some sulky and offended, some embarrassed, some scared. I was a bit scared of him, myself. The others assumed that I could manage him; but they were quite wrong. “You talk to him, Chris,” Teddy would tell me. And once he added, with surprising insight, “Talk to him in German. It'll make him feel more at home.”