The Berlin Stories (10 page)

Accordingly, we performed the comedy of entering the hotel, drinking a cup of coffee in the lounge and glancing through the morning papers. To my disappointment, we didn’t see Hitler or any of the other Nazi leaders. Ten minutes later, we came out again into the street. I found myself squinting rapidly to right and left, in search of possible detectives. Arthur’s police-obsession was exceedingly catching.

Bayer inhabited a large untidy flat on the top floor of one of the shabbier houses beyond the Zimmerstrasse. It was certainly a striking enough contrast to what Arthur called “the camp of the enemy,” the padded, sombre, luxurious hotel we had just left. The door of the flat stood permanently ajar. Inside, the walls were hung with posters in German and Russian, notices of mass meetings and demonstrations, anti-war cartoons, maps of industrial areas and graphs to illustrate the dimensions and progress of strikes. There were no carpets on the bare unpainted floorboards. The rooms echoed to the rattle of typewriters. Men and women of all ages wandered in and out or sat chatting on upturned sugar-boxes waiting for interviews; patient, good-humoured, quite at home. Everybody seemed to know everybody; a newcomer was greeted almost invariably by his or her Christian name. Even strangers were addressed as Thou. Cigarette smoking was general. The floors were littered with crushed-out stubs.

In the midst of this informal, cheerful activity, we found Bayer himself, in a tiny shabby room, dictating a letter to the girl whom I had seen on the platform at the meeting in Neukölln. He seemed pleased but not especially surprised to see Arthur.

“Ah, my dear Norris. And what can I do for you?”

He spoke English with great emphasis and a strong foreign accent. I thought I had never seen anybody with such beautiful teeth.

“You have been already to see them?” he added.

“Yes,” said Arthur. “We’ve just come from there.”

The girl secretary got up and went out, closing the door behind her. Arthur, his elegantly gloved hands resting demurely in his lap, began to describe his interview with the officials at the Polizeipraesidium. Bayer sat back in his chair and listened. He had extraordinarily vivid animal eyes of a dark reddish brown. His glance was direct, challenging, brilliant as if with laughter, but his lips did not even smile. Listening to Arthur, his face and body became quite still. He did not once nod, or shift his position, or fidget with his hands. His mere repose suggested a force of concentration which was hypnotic in its intensity. Arthur, I could see, felt this also; he squirmed uneasily on his seat and carefully avoided looking Bayer in the eyes.

Arthur began by assuring us that the officials had treated him most politely. One of them had helped him off with his coat and hat, the other had offered him a chair and a cigar. Arthur had taken the chair, the cigar he had refused; he made a considerable point of this, as though it were a proof of his singular strong-mindedness and integrity. Thereupon, the official, still courteous, had asked permission to smoke. This Arthur had granted.

There had followed a discussion, crossexamination disguised as chat, about Arthur’s business activities in Berlin. Arthur was careful not to go into details here. “It wouldn’t interest you,” he told Bayer. I gathered, however, that the officials had politely succeeded in frightening him a goqd deal. They were far too well informed.

These preliminaries over, the real questioning began. “We understand, Mr. Norris, that you have recently made a journey to Paris. Was this visit in connection with your private business?”

Arthur had been ready for this, of course. Perhaps too ready. His explanations had been copious. The official had punctured them with a single affable enquiry. He had named a name and an address which Mr. Norris had twice visited, on the evening of his arrival and on the morning of his departure. Was this, also, a private business interview? Arthur didn’t deny that he had had a nasty shock. Nevertheless, he had been, he claimed, exceedingly discreet. “I wasn’t so silly as to deny anything, of course. I made light of the whole matter. I think I impressed them favourably. They were shaken, I could see that, distinctly shaken.”

Arthur paused, added modestly: “I flatter myself that I know how to handle that particular kind of situation pretty well. Yes.”

His tone appealed for a word of encouragement, of confirmation, here. But Bayer didn’t encourage, didn’t condemn, didn’t speak or move at all. His dark brown eyes continued to regard Arthur with the same brilliant attention, smiling and alert. Arthur uttered a short nervous cough.

Anxious to interest that impersonal, hypnotic silence, he made a great deal of his narrative. He must have talked for nearly half an hour. Actually, there wasn’t much to tell. The police, having displayed the extent of their knowledge, had hastened to assure Mr. Norris that his activities did not interest them in the least, provided that these activities were confined to foreign countries. As for Germany itself, that, of course, was a different matter. The German Republic welcomes all foreign guests, but requires them to remember that certain laws of hospitality govern guest as well as host. In short, it would be a great pity if the German Republic were ever to be deprived of the pleasure of Mr. Norris’ society. The official felt sure that Mr. Norris, as a man of the world, would appreciate his point of view.

Finally, just as Arthur was making for the door, having been helped on with his overcoat and presented with his hat, came a last question asked in a tone which suggested that it hadn’t the remotest connection with anything which had previously been said: “You have recently become a member of the Communist Party?”

“I saw the trap at once, of course,” Arthur told us. “It was simply a trap. But I had to think quickly; any hesitation in answering would have been fatal. They’re so accustomed to notice these details. … I am not a member of the Communist Party, I said to them, nor of any other Left Wing organisation. I merely sympathise with the attitude of the K. P. D. to certain non-political problems… I think that was the right answer? I think so. Yes.”

At last Bayer both smiled and spoke. “You have acted quite right, my dear Norris.” He seemed subtly amused.

Arthur was as pleased as a stroked cat.

“Comrade Bradshaw was of great assistance to me.”

“Oh yes?”

Bayer didn’t ask how.

“You have interest for our movement?”

His eyes measured me for the first time. No, he was not impressed. Equally, he did not condemn. A young bourgeois intellectual, he thought. Enthusiastic, within certain limits. Educated, within certain limits. Capable of response if appealed to in terms of his own class-language. Of some small use: everybody can do something. I felt myself blushing deeply.

“I’d like to help you if I could,” I said.

“You speak German?”

“He speaks excellent German,” put in Arthur, like a mother recommending her son to the notice of the headmaster. SmiU ingly, Bayer considered me once more.

“So?”

He turned over the papers on his desk.

“Here is some translation which you could be so kind as to do for us. Will you please translate this in English? As you will see, it is a report of our work during the past year. From it you will learn a little about our aims. It should interest you, I think.”

He handed me a thick wad of manuscript, and rose to his feet. He was even smaller and broader than he had seemed on the platform. He laid a hand on Arthur’s shoulder.

“This is most interesting, what you have told me.” He shook hands with both of us, gave a brilliant parting smile: “And you will please,” he added comically to Arthur, “avoid to entangle this young Mr. Bradshaw in your distress.”

“Indeed, I assure you I shouldn’t dream of such a thing. His safety is almost, if not quite, as dear to me as my own… Well, ha ha, I won’t waste any more of your valuable time. Goodbye.”

The interview with Bayer had quite restored Arthur’s spirits.

“You made a good impression on him, William. Oh yes, you did. I could see that at once. And he’s a very shrewd judge of character. I think he was pleased with what I said to them at the Alexanderplatz, wasn’t he?”

“I’m sure he was.”

“I think so, yes.”

“Who is he?” I asked.

“I know very little about him, myself, William. I’ve heard that he began life as a research chemist. I don’t think his parents were working people. He doesn’t give one that impression, does he? In any case, Bayer isn’t his real name.”

After this meeting, I felt anxious to see Bayer again. I did the translation as quickly as I could, in the intervals of giving lessons. It took me two days. The manuscript was a report on the aims and progress of various strikes, and the measures taken to supply food and clothing to the families of the strikers. My chief difficulty was with the numerous and ever-recurring groups of initial letters which represented the names of the different organisations involved. As I did not know what most of these organisations were called in English, I didn’t know what letters to substitute for those in the manuscript.

“It is not so important,” replied Bayer, when I asked him about this. “We will attend to this matter ourselves.”

Something in his tone made me feel humiliated. The manuscript he had given me to translate was simply not important. It would probably never be sent to England at all. Bayer had given it me, like a toy, to play with, hoping, no doubt, to be rid of my tiresome, useless enthusiasm for a week at least.

“You find this work interesting?” he continued. “I am glad. It is necessary for every man and woman in our days to have knowledge of this problem. You have read something from Marx?”

I said that I had once tried to read Das Kapital.

“Ah, that is too difficult, for a beginning. You should try the Communist Manifesto. And some of Lenin’s pamphlets. Wait, I will give you…”

He was amiability itself. He seemed in no hurry to get rid of me. Could it really be that he had no more important way of spending the afternoon? He asked about the living conditions in the East End of London and I tried to eke out the little knowledge I had collected in the course of a few days’ slumming, three years before. His mere attention was flattery of the most stimulating kind. I found myself doing nearly all the talking. Half an hour later, with books and more papers to translate under my arm, I was about to say goodbye when Bayer asked: “You have known Norris a long time?”

“More than a year, now,” I replied, automatically, my mind registering no reaction to the question.

“Indeed? And where did you meet?”

This time I did not miss the tone in his voice. I looked hard at him. But his extraordinary eyes were neither suspicious, nor threatening, nor sly. Smiling pleasantly, he simply waited in silence for my answer.

“We got to know each other in the train, on the way to Berlin.”

Bayer’s glance became faintly amused. With disarming, bland directness, he asked: “You are good friends? You go to see him often?”

“Oh yes. Very often.”

“You have not many English friends in Berlin, I think?”

“No.”

Bayer nodded seriously. Then he rose from his chair and shook my hand. “I have to go now and work. If there is anything you wish to say to me, please do not hesitate to come and see me at any time.”

“Thank you very much.”

So that was it, I thought, on my way down the shabby staircase. None of them trusted Arthur. Bayer didn’t trust him but he was prepared to make use of him, with all due precautions. And to make use of me, too, as a convenient spy on Arthur’s movements. It wasn’t necessary to let me into the secret. I could so easily be pumped. I felt angry, and at the same time rather amused.

After all, one couldn’t blame them.

CHAPTER SEVEN

Otto turned up at Arthur’s about a week later, unshaved and badly in need of a meal. They had let him out of prison the day before. When I went round to the flat that evening, I found him with Arthur in the dining-room, having just finished a substantial supper.

“And what did they use to give you on Sundays?” he was asking as I came in. “We got pea-soup with a sausage in it. Not so bad,”

“Let me see now,” Arthur reflected. “I’m afraid I really can’t remember. In any case, I never had much appetite… Ah, my dear William, here you are! Please take a chair.

That is, if you don’t disdain the company of two old gaolbirds. Otto and I were just comparing notes.”

The day before Arthur and I visited the Alexanderplatz, Otto and Anni had had a quarrel. Otto had wanted to give fifteen pfennigs to a man who came round collecting for a strike fund of the I. A. H. Anni had refused to agree to this, “on principle.”

“Why should the dirty communists have my money?” she had said. “I have to work hard enough to earn it.” The possessive pronoun challenged Otto’s accepted status and rights; he generously disregarded it. But the adjective had really shocked him. He had slapped her face, “not hard,” he assured us, but violently enough to make her turn a somersault over the bed and land with her head against the wall; the bump had dislodged a framed photograph of Stalin, which had fallen to the ground and smashed its glass. Anni had begun to curse him and cry. “That’ll teach you not to talk about things you don’t understand,” Otto had told her, not unkindly. Communism had always been a delicate subject between them. “I’m sick of you,” cried Anni, “and all your bloody Reds. Get out of here!” She had thrown the photograph-frame at him and missed.

Thinking all this over carefully, in the neighbouring Lokal, Otto had come to the conclusion that he was the injured party. Pained and angry, he began drinking Korn. He drank a good deal. He was still drinking at nine o’clock in the evening, when a boy named Erich, whom he knew, came in, selling biscuits. Erich, with his basket, went the rounds of tKe cafés and restaurants in the whole district, carrying messages and picking up gossip. He told Otto that he had just seen Anni in a Nazi Lokal on the Kreuzberg, with Werner Baldow.

Werner was an old enemy of Otto’s, both political and private. A year ago, he had left the communist cell to which Otto belonged and joined the local Nazi storm-troop. He had always been sweet on Anni. Otto, who was pretty drunk by this time, did what even he would never have dared when sober; he jumped up and set off for the Nazi Lokal alone. Two policemen who happened to pass the place a minute or two after he entered it probably saved him from getting broken bones. He had just been flung out for the second time and wanted to go in again. The policemen removed him with difficulty; he bit and kicked on the way to the station. The Nazis, of course, were virtuously indignant. The incident featured in their newspapers next day as “an unprovoked and cowardly attack on a National-Socialist Lokal by ten armed communists, nine of whom made a successful escape.” Otto had the cutting in his pocket-book and showed it to us with pride. He had been unable to get at Werner himself. Werner had retreated with Anni into a room at the back of the Lokal as soon as he had come in.