The Berlin Stories (25 page)

“You’ll remember me to Otto, won’t you?”

“I will.”

“And give my love to Anni?”

“Of course.”

“I wish they could have been here.”

“It’s a pity, isn’t it?”

“But it would have been unwise, under the circumstances. Don’t you agree?”

“Yes.”

I longed for the train to start. There was nothing more to say, it seemed, except the things which must never be said now, because it was too late. Arthur seemed aware of the vacuum. He groped about uneasily in his stock of phrases.

“I wish you were coming with me, William… I shall miss you terribly, you know.”

“Shall you?” I smiled awkwardly, feeling exquisitely uncomfortable.

“I shall, indeed… You’ve always been such a support to me. From the first moment we met….”

I blushed. It was astonishing what a cad he could make me feel. Hadn’t I, after all, misunderstood him? Hadn’t I misjudged him? Hadn’t I, in some obscure way, behaved very badly? To change the subject, I asked: “You remember that journey? I simply couldn’t understand why they made such a fuss at the frontier. I suppose they’d got their eye on you already?”

Arthur didn’t care much for this reminiscence.

“I suppose they had… Yes.”

Another silence. I glanced at the clock, despairingly. One more minute to go. Fumblingly, he began again.

“Try not to think too hardly of me, William… I should hate that….”

“What nonsense, Arthur….” I did my best to pass it off lightly. “How absurd you are!”

“This life is so very complex. If my behaviour hasn’t always been quite consistent, I can truly say that I am and always shall be loyal to the Party, at heart… Say you believe that, please?”

He was outrageous, grotesque, entirely without shame. But what was I to answer? At that moment, had he demanded it, I’d have sworn that two and two make five.

“Yes, Arthur, I do believe it.”

“Thank you, William… Oh dear, now we really are off. I do hope all my trunks are in the van. God bless you, dear boy. I shall think of you always. Where’s my mackintosh? Ah, that’s all right. Is my hat on straight? Goodbye. Write often, won’t you. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye, Arthur.”

The train, gathering speed, drew his manicured hand from mine. I walked a little way down the platform and stood waving until the last coach was out of sight.

As I turned to leave the station, I nearly collided with a man who had been standing just behind me. It was the detective.

“Excuse me, Herr Kommissar” I murmured.

But he did not even smile.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Early in March, after the elections, it turned suddenly mild and warm. “Hitler’s weather,” said the porter’s wife; and her son remarked jokingly that we ought to be grateful to van der Lubbe, because the burning of the Reichstag had melted the snow. “Such a nice-looking boy,” observed Frl. Schroeder, with a sigh. “However could he go and do a dreadful thing like that?” The porter’s wife snorted.

Our street looked quite gay when you turned into it and saw the black-white-red flags hanging motionless from windows against the blue spring sky. On the Nollendorfplatz people were sitting out of doors before the café in their overcoats, reading about the coup d’état in Bavaria. Goring spoke from the radio horn at the corner. Germany is awake, he said. An ice-cream shop was open. Uniformed Nazis strode hither and thither, with serious, set faces, as though on weighty errands. The newspaper readers by the café turned their heads to watch them pass and smiled and seemed pleased.

They smiled approvingly at these youngsters in their big, swaggering boots who were going to upset the Treaty of Versailles. They were pleased because it would soon be summer, because Hitler had promised to protect the small tradesmen,’because their newspapers told them that the good times were coming. They were suddenly proud of being blond. And they thrilled with a furtive, sensual pleasure, like schoolboys, because the Jews, their business rivals, and the Marxists, a vaguely defined minority of people who didn’t concern them, had been satisfactorily found guilty of the defeat and the inflation, and were going to catch it.

The town was full of whispers. They told of illegal midnight arrests, of prisoners tortured in the S. A. barracks, made to spit on Lenin s picture, swallow castor-oil, eat old socks. They were drowned by the loud, angry voice of the Government, contradicting through its thousand mouths. But not even Goring could silence Helen Pratt. She had decided to investigate the atrocities on her own account. Morning, noon and night, she nosed round the city, ferreting out the victims or their relations, crossexamining them for details. These unfortunate people were reticent, of course, and deadly scared. They didn’t want a second dose. But Helen was as relentless as their torturers. She bribed, cajoled, pestered. Sometimes, losing her patience, she threatened. What would happen to them afterwards frankly didn’t interest her. She was out to get facts.

It was Helen who first told me that Bayer was dead. She had absolutely reliable evidence. One of the office staff, since released, had seen his corpse in the Spandau barracks. “It’s a funny thing,” she added, “his left ear was torn right off… God knows why. It’s my belief that some of this gang are simply loonies. Why, Bill, what’s the matter? You’re going green round the gills.”

“That’s how I feel,” I said.

An awkward thing had happened to Fritz Wendel. A few days before, he had had a motor accident; he had sprained his wrist and scratched the skin off his cheek. The injuries weren’t at all serious, but he had to wear a big piece of sticking-plaster and carry his arm in a sling. And now, in spite of the lovely weather, he wouldn’t venture out of doors. Bandages of any kind gave rise to misunderstandings, especially when, like Fritz, you had a dark complexion and coal-black hair. Passers-by made unpleasant and threatening remarks. Fritz wouldn’t admit this, of course. “Hell, what I mean, one feels such a darn’ fool.” He had become exceedingly cautious. He wouldn’t refer to politics at all, even when we were alone together. “Eventually it had to happen,” was his only comment on the new régime. As he said this, he avoided my eyes.

The whole city lay under an epidemic of discreet, infectious fear. I could feel it, like influenza, in my bones. When the first news of the house-searchings began to come in, I had consulted with Frl. Schroeder about the papers which Bayer had given me. We hid them and my copy of the Communist Manifesto under the wood-pile in the kitchen. Unbuilding and rebuilding the wood-pile took half an hour, and before it was finished our precautions had begun to seem rather childish. I felt a bit ashamed of myself, and consequently exaggerated the importance and danger of my position to Frl. Schroeder, who listened respectfully, with rising indignation. “You mean to say they’d come into my flat, Herr Bradshaw? Well, of all the cheek. But just let them try it! Why, I’d box their ears for them; I declare I would!”

A night or two after this, I was woken by a tremendous banging on the outside door. I sat up in bed and switched on the light. It was just three o’clock. Now I’m for it, I thought. I wondered if they’d allow me to ring up the Embassy. Smoothing my hair tidy with my hand, I tried, not very successfully, to assume an expression of haughty contempt. But when, at last, Frl. Schroeder had shuffled out to see what was the matter, it was only a lodger from next door who’d come to the wrong flat because he was drunk.

After this scare, I suffered from sleeplessness. I kept fancying I heard heavy wagons drawing up outside our house. I lay waiting in the dark for the ringing of the doorbell. A minute. Five minutes. Ten. One morning, as I stared, half asleep, at the wallpaper above my bed, the pattern suddenly formed itself into a chain of little hooked crosses. What was worse, I noticed that everything in the room was really a kind of brown: either green-brown, black-brown, yellow-brown, or red-brown; but all brown, unmistakably. When I had had breakfast and taken a purgative, I felt better.

One morning, I had a visit from Otto.

It must have been about half-past six when he rang our bell. Frl. Schroeder wasn’t up yet; I let him in myself. He was in a filthy state, his hair tousled and matted, a stain of dirty blood down the side of his face from a scratch on the temples.

“Servus, Willi,” he muttered. He put out his hand suddenly and clutched my arm. With difficulty, I saved him from falling. But he wasn’t drunk, as I at first imagined; simply exhausted. He flopped down into a chair in my room. When I returned from shutting the outside door, he was already asleep.

It was rather a problem to know what to do with him. I had a pupil coming early. Finally, Frl. Schroeder and I managed, between us, to lug him, still half asleep, into Arthur’s old bedroom and lay him on the bed. He was incredibly heavy. No sooner was he laid on his back than he began to snore. His snores were so loud that you could hear them in my room, even when the door was shut; they continued, audibly, throughout the lesson. Meanwhile, my pupil, a very nice young man who hoped soon to become a schoolmaster, was eagerly adjuring me not to believe the stories, “invented by Jewish emigrants,” about the political persecution.

“Actually,” he assured me, “these so-called communists are merely a handful of criminals, the scum of the streets. And most of them are not Germans at all.”

“I thought,” I said politely, “that you were telling me just now that they drew up the Weimar Constitution?”

This rather staggered him for the moment; but he made a good recovery.

“No, pardon me, the Weimar Constitution was the work of Marxist Jews.”

“Ah, the Jews… to be sure.”

My pupil smiled. My stupidity made him feel a bit superior. I think he even liked me for it. A particularly loud snore came from the next room.

“For a foreigner,” he politely conceded, “German politics are very complicated.”

“Very,” I agreed.

Otto woke about tea-time, ravenously hungry. I went out and bought sausages and eggs and Frl. Schroeder cooked him a meal while he washed. Afterwards we sat together in my room. Otto smoked one cigarette after another; he was very nervy and couldn’t sit still. His clothes were getting ragged and the collar of his sweater was frayed. His face was full of hollows. He looked like a grown man now, at least five years older.

Frl. Schroeder made him take off his jacket. She mended it while we talked, interjecting, at intervals: “Is it possible? The idea… how dare they do such a thing! That’s what I’d like to know!”

Otto had been on the run for a fortnight, now, he told us. Two nights after the Reichstag fire, his old enemy, Werner Baldow, had come round, with six others of his storm-troop, to “arrest” him. Otto used the word without irony; he seemed to find it quite natural. “There’s lots of old scores being paid off nowadays,” he added, simply.

Nevertheless, Otto had escaped, through a skylight, after kicking one of the Nazis in the face. They had shot at him twice, but missed. Since then he’d been wandering about Berlin, sleeping only in the daytime, walking the streets at night, for fear of house-raids. The first week hadn’t been so bad; comrades had put him up, one passing him on to another. But that was getting too risky now. So many of them were dead or in the concentration camps. He’d been sleeping when he could, taking short naps on benches in parks. But he could never rest properly. He had always to be on the watch. He couldn’t stick it any longer. Tomorrow he was going to leave Berlin. He’d try to work his way down to the Saar. Somebody had told him that was the easiest frontier to cross. It was dangerous, of course, but better than being cooped up here.

I asked what had become of Anni. Otto didn’t know. He’d heard she was with Werner Baldow again. What else could you expect? He wasn’t even bitter; he just didn’t care. And Olga? Oh, Olga was doing finely. That remarkable business woman had escaped the clean-up through the influence of one of her customers, an important Nazi official. Others had begun to go there, now. Her future was assured.

Otto had heard about Bayer.

“They say Thälmann’s dead, too. And Renn. Junge, Junge….”

We exchanged rumours about other well-known names. Frl. Schroeder shook her head and murmured over each. She was so genuinely upset that nobody would have dreamed she was hearing most of them for the first time in her life.

The talk turned naturally to Arthur. We showed Otto the postcards of Tampico which had arrived, for both of us, only a week ago. He examined them with admiration.

“I suppose he’s carrying on the work there?”

“What work?”

“The Party work, of course!”

“Oh, yes,” I hastily agreed. “Of course he is.”

“It was a bit of luck that he went away when he did, wasn’t it? r “Yes… it certainly was.”

Otto’s eyes shone.

“We needed more men like old Arthur in the Party. He was a speaker, if you like!”

His enthusiasm warmed Frl. Schroeder’s heart. The tears stood in her eyes.

“I always shall say Herr Norris was one of the best and finest and straightest gentlemen I ever knew.”

We were all silent. In the twilit room we dedicated a grateful, reverent moment to Arthur’s memory. Then Otto continued in a tone of profound conviction: “Do you know what I think? He’s working for us out there, making propaganda and raising money; and one day, you’ll see, he’ll come back. Hitler and the rest of them will have to look out for themselves then….”