The Berlin Stories (28 page)

“(Thank you, Frl. Schroeder; just a little morsel.) Yes, some of them… you wouldn’t believe! But I could always take care of myself. Even when I was quite a slip of a girl….”

The muscles of Frl. Mayr’s nude fleshy arms ripple unappetisingly. She sticks out her chin: “I’m a Bavarian; and a Bavarian never forgets an injury.”

Coming into the living-room yesterday evening, I found Frl. Schroeder and Frl. Mayr lying flat on their stomachs with their ears pressed to the carpet. At intervals, they exchanged grins of delight or joyfully pinched each other, with simultaneous exclamations of Ssh!

“Hark!” whispered Frl. Schroeder, “he’s smashing all the furniture!”

“He’s beating her black and blue!” exclaimed Frl. Mayr, in raptures.

“Bang! Just listen to that!”

“Ssh! Ssh!”

“Ssh!”

Frl. Schroeder was quite beside herself. When I asked what was the matter, she clambered to her feet, waddled forward and, taking me round the waist, danced a little waltz with me: “Herr Issyvoo! Herr Issyvoo! Herr Issyvoo!” until she was breathless.

“But whatever has happened?” I asked.

“Ssh!” commanded Frl. Mayr from the floor. “Ssh! They’ve started again!”

In the flat directly beneath ours lives a certain Frau Glanterneck. She is a Galician Jewess, in itself a reason why Frl. Mayr should be her enemy: for Frl. Mayr, needless to say, is an ardent Nazi. And, quite apart from this, it seems that Frau Glanterneck and Frl. Mayr once had words on the stairs about Frl. Mayr’s yodelling. Frau Glanterneck, perhaps because she is a non-Aryan, said that she preferred the noises made by cats. Thereby, she insulted not merely Frl. Mayr, but all Bavarian, all German women: and it was Frl. Mayr’s pleasant duty to avenge them.

About a fortnight ago, it became known among the neighbours that Frau Glanterneck, who is sixty years old and as ugly as a witch, had been advertising in the newspaper for a husband. What was more, an applicant had already appeared: a widowed butcher from Halle. He had seen Frau Glanterneck and was nevertheless prepared to marry her. Here was Frl. Mayr’s chance. By roundabout enquiries, she discovered the butcher’s name and address and, wrote him an anonymous letter. Was he aware that Frau Glanterneck had (a) bugs in her flat, (b) been arrested for fraud and released on the ground that she was insane, (c) leased out her own bedroom for immoral purposes, and (d) slept in the bed afterwards without changing the sheets? And now the butcher had arrived to confront Frau Glanterneck with the letter. One could hear both of them quite distinctly: the growling of the enraged Prussian and the shrill screaming of the Jewess. Now and then came the thud of a fist against wood and, occasionally, the crash of glass. The row lasted over an hour.

This morning we hear that the neighbours have complained to the portress of the disturbance and that Frau Glanterneck is to be seen with a black eye. The marriage is off.

The inhabitants of this street know me by sight already. At the grocer’s, people no longer turn their heads on hearing my English accent as I order a pound of butter. At the street corner, after dark, the three whores no longer whisper throat-ily: “Komm, Süsser!” as I pass.

The three whores are all plainly over fifty years old. They do not attempt to conceal their age. They are not noticeably rouged or powdered. They wear baggy old fur coats and longish skirts and matronly hats. I happened to mention them to Bobby and he explained to me that there is a recognised demand for the comfortable type of woman. Many middle-aged men prefer them to girls. They even attract boys in their ‘teens. A boy, explained Bobby, feels shy with a girl of his own age but not with a woman old enough to be his mother. Like most barmen, Bobby is a great expert on sexual questions.

The other evening, I went to call on him during business hours.

It was still very early, about nine o’clock, when I arrived at the Troika. The place was much larger and grander than I had expected. A commissionaire braided like an archduke regarded my hatless head with suspicion until I spoke to him in English. A smart cloakroom girl insisted on taking my overcoat, which hides the worst stains on my baggy flannel trousers. A page-boy, seated on the counter, didn’t rise to open the inner door. Bobby, to my relief, was at his place behind a blue and silver bar. I made towards him as towards an old friend. He greeted me most amiably: “Good evening, Mr. Isherwood. Very glad to see you here.”

I ordered a beer and settled myself on a stool in the corner. With my back to the wall, I could survey the whole room.

“How’s business?” I asked.

Bobby’s care-worn, powdered, night-dweller’s face became grave. He inclined his head towards me, over the bar, with confidential flattering seriousness: “Not much good, Mr. Isherwood. The kind of public we have nowadays… you wouldn’t believe it! Why, a year ago, we’d have turned them away at the door. They order a beer and think they’ve got the right to sit here the whole evening.”

Bobby spoke with extreme bitterness. I began to feel uncomfortable: “What’ll you drink?” I asked, guiltily gulping down my beer; and added, lest there should be any misunderstanding: “I’d like a whisky and soda.”

Bobby said he’d have one, too.

The room was nearly empty. I looked the few guests over, trying to see them through Bobby’s disillusioned eyes. There were three attractive, well-dressed girls sitting at the bar: the one nearest to me was particularly elegant, she had quite a cosmopolitan air. But during a lull in the conversation, I caught fragments of her talk with the other barman. She spoke broad Berlin dialect. She was tired and bored; her mouth dropped. A young man approached her and joined in the discussion; a handsome broad-shouldered boy in a well-cut dinner-jacket, who might well have been an English public-school prefect on holiday. • ‘“Nee, nee,” I heard him say. “Bei mir nicht!” He grinned and made a curt, brutal gesture of the streets.

Over in the corner sat a page-boy, talking to the little old lavatory attendant in his white jacket. The boy said something, laughed and broke off suddenly into a huge yawn. The three musicians on their platform were chatting, evidently unwilling to begin until they had an audience worth playing to. At one of the tables, I thought I saw a genuine guest, a stout man with a moustache. After a moment, however, I caught his eye, he made me a little bow and I knew that he must be the manager.

The door opened. Two men and two women came in. The women were elderly, had thick legs, cropped hair and costly evening-gowns. The men were lethargic, pale, probably Dutch. Here, unmistakably, was Money. In an instant, the Troika was transformed. The manager, the cigarette boy and the lavatory attendant rose simultaneously to their feet. The lavatory attendant disappeared. The manager said something in a furious undertone to the cigarette-boy, who also disappeared. He then advanced, bowing and smiling, to the guests’ table and shook hands with the two men. The cigarette-boy reappeared with his tray, followed by a waiter who hurried forward with the wine-list. Meanwhile, the three-man orchestra struck up briskly. The girls at the bar turned on their stools, smiling a not-too-direct invitation. The gigolos advanced to them as if to complete strangers, bowed formally and asked, in cultured tones, for the pleasure of a dance. The page-boy, spruce, discreetly grinning, swaying from the waist like a flower, crossed the room with his tray of cigarettes: “Zigarren! Zigaretten!” His voice was mocking, clear-pitched like an actor’s. And in the same tone, yet more loudly, mockingly, joyfully, so that we could all hear, the waiter ordered from Bobby: “Heidsick Monopol!”

With absurd, solicitous gravity, the dancers performed their intricate evolutions, showing in their every movement a consciousness of the part they were playing. And the saxophonist, letting his instrument swing loose from the ribbon around his neck, advanced to the edge of the platform with his little megaphone: Sie werden lachen, Ich lieb’

Meine eigene Frau….

He sang with a knowing leer, including us all in the conspiracy, charging his voice with innuendo, rolling his eyes in an epileptic pantomime of extreme joy. Bobby, suave, sleek, five years younger, handled the bottle. And meanwhile the two flaccid gentlemen chatted to each other, probably about business, without a glance at the night-life they had called into being; while their women sat silent, looking neglected, puzzled, uncomfortable and very bored.

Frl. Hippi Bernstein, my first pupil, lives in the Grünewald, in a house built almost entirely of glass. Most of the richest Berlin families inhabit the Grünewald. It is difficult to understand why. Their villas, in all known styles of expensive ugliness, ranging from the eccentric-rococo folly to the cubist flat-roofed steel-and-glass box, are crowded together in this dank, dreary pinewood. Few of them can afford large gardens, for the ground is fabulously dear: their only view is of their neighbour’s backyard, each one protected by a wire fence and a savage dog. Terror of burglary and revolution has reduced these miserable people to a state of siege. They have neither privacy nor sunshine. The district is really a millionaire’s slum.

When I rang the bell at the garden gate, a young footman came out with a key from the house, followed by a large growling Alsatian.

“He won’t bite you while I’m here,” the footman reassured me, grinning.

The hall of the Bernstein’s house has metal-studded doors and a steamer clock fastened to the wall with bolt-heads. There are modernist lamps, designed to look like pressure-gauges, thermometers and switchboard dials. But the furniture doesn’t match the house and its fittings. The place is like a power-station which the engineers have tried to make comfortable with chairs and tables from an old-fashioned, highly respectable boarding-house. On the austere metal walls, hang highly varnished nineteenth-century landscapes in massive gold frames. Herr Bernstein probably ordered the villa from a popular avant-garde architect in a moment of recklessness; was horrified at the result and tried to cover it up as much as possible with the family belongings.

Frl. Hippi is a fat pretty girl, about nineteen years old, with glossy chestnut hair, good teeth and big cow-eyes. She has a lazy, jolly, self-indulgent laugh and a well-formed bust. She speaks schoolgirl English with a slight American accent, quite nicely, to her own complete satisfaction. She has clearly no intention of doing any work. When I tried weakly to suggest a plan for our lessons, she kept interrupting to offer me chocolates, coffee, cigarettes: “Excuse me a minute, there isn’t some fruit,” she smiled, picking up the receiver of the house-telephone: “Anna, please bring some oranges.”

When the maid arrived with the oranges, I was forced, despite my protests, to make a regular meal, with a plate, knife and fork. This destroyed the last pretence of the teacher-pupil relationship. I felt like a policeman being given a meal in the kitchen by an attractive cook. Frl. Hippi sat watching me eat, with her good-natured, lazy smile: “Tell me, please, why you come to Germany?”

She is inquisitive about me, but only like a cow idly poking with its head between the bars of a gate. She doesn’t particularly want the gate to open. I said that I found Germany very interesting: “The political and economic situation,” I improvised authoritatively, in my schoolmaster voice, “is more interesting in Germany than in any other European country.”

“Except Russia, of course,” I added experimentally.

But Frl. Hippi didn’t react. She just blandly smiled: “I think it shall be dull for you here? You do not have many friends in Berlin, no?”

“No. Not many.”

This seemed to please and amuse her: “You don’t know some nice girls?”

Here the buzzer of the house-telephone sounded. Lazily smiling, she picked up the receiver, but appeared not to listen to the tinny voice which issued from it. I could hear quite distinctly the real voice of Frau Bernstein, Hippi’s mother, speaking from the next room.

“Have you left your red book in here?” repeated Frl. Hippi mockingly and smiling at me as though this were a joke which I must share: “No, I don’t see it. It must be down in the study. Ring up Daddy. Yes, he’s working there.” In dumb show, she offered me another orange. I shook my head politely. We both smiled: “Mummy, what have we got for lunch to-day? Yes? Really? Splendid!”

She hung up the receiver and returned to her crossexamination: “Do you not know no nice girls?”

“Any nice girls….” I corrected evasively. But Frl. Hippi merely smiled, waiting for the answer to her question.

“Yes. One,” I had at length to add, thinking of Frl. Kost.

“Only one?” She raised her eyebrows in comic surprise. “And tell me please, do you find German girls different than English girls?”

I blushed. “Do you find German girls…” I began to correct her and stopped, realising just in time that I wasn’t absolutely sure whether one says different from or different to.

“Do you find German girls different than English girls?” she repeated, with smiling persistence.

I blushed deeper than ever. “Yes. Very different,” I said boldly.

“How are they different?”

Mercifully the telephone buzzed again. This was somebody from the kitchen, to say that lunch would be an hour earlier than usual. Herr Bernstein was going to the city that afternoon.

“I am so sorry,” said Frl. Hippi, rising, “but for to-day we must finish. And we shall see us again on Friday? Then goodbye, Mr. Isherwood. And I thank you very much.”

She fished in her bag and handed me an envelope which I stuck awkwardly into my pocket and tore open only when I was out of sight of the Bernsteins’ house. It contained a five-mark piece. I threw it into the air, missed it, found it after five minutes’ hunt, buried in sand, and ran all the way to the tram-stop, singing and kicking stones about the road. I felt extraordinarily guilty and elated, as though I’d successfully committed a small theft.