The Berlin Stories (37 page)

This evening Otto had a touch of sunstroke, and went to bed early, with a headache. Peter and I walked up to the village, alone. In the Bavarian café, where the band makes a noise like Hell unchained, Peter bawled into my ear the story of his life.

Peter is the youngest of a family of four. He has two sisters, both married. One of the sisters lives in the country and hunts. The other is what the newspapers call “a popular society hostess.” Peter’s elder brother is a scientist and explorer. He has been on expeditions to the Congo, the New Hebrides and the Great Barrier Reef. He plays chess, speaks with the voice of a man of sixty, and has never, to the best of Peter’s belief, performed the sexual act. The only member of the family with whom Peter is at present on speaking terms is his hunting sister, but they seldom meet, because Peter hates his brother-in-law.

Peter was delicate, as a boy. He did not go to a preparatory school but, when he was thirteen, his father sent him to a public school. His father and mother had a row about this which lasted until Peter, with his mother’s encouragement, developed heart trouble and had to be removed at the end of his second term. Once escaped, Peter began to hate his mother for having petted and coddled him into a funk. She saw that he could not forgive her and so, as Peter was the only one of her children whom she cared for, she got ill herself and soon afterwards died.

It was too late to send Peter back to school again, so Mr. Wilkinson engaged a tutor. The tutor was a very high-church young man who intended to become a priest. He took cold baths in winter and had crimpy hair and a Grecian jaw. Mr. Wilkinson disliked him from the first, and the elder brother made satirical remarks, so Peter threw himself passionately on to the tutor’s side. The two of them went for walking-tours in the Lake District and discussed the meaning of the Sacrament amidst austere moorland scenery. This kind of talk got them, inevitably, into a complicated emotional tangle which was abruptly unravelled, one evening, during a fearful row in a barn. Next morning, the tutor left, leaving a ten-page letter behind him. Peter meditated suicide. He heard later indirectly that the tutor had grown a moustache and gone out to Australia. So Peter got another tutor, and finally went up to Oxford.

Hating his father’s business and his brother’s science, he made music and literature into a religious cult. For the first year, he liked Oxford very much indeed. He went out to tea parties and ventured to talk. To his pleasure and surprise, people appeared to be listening to what he said. It wasn’t until he had done this often that he began to notice their air of slight embarrassment. “Somehow or other,” said Peter, “I always struck the wrong note.”

Meanwhile, at home, in the big Mayfair house, with its four bathrooms and garage for three cars, where there was always too much to eat, the Wilkinson family was slowly falling to pieces, like something gone rotten. Mr. Wilkinson with his diseased kidneys, his whisky, and his knowledge of “handling men,” was angry and confused and a bit pathetic. He snapped and growled at his children when they passed near him, like a surly old dog. At meals nobody ever spoke. They avoided each others eyes, and hurried upstairs afterwards to write letters, full of hatred and satire, to intimate friends. Only Peter had no friend to write to. He shut himself up in his tasteless, expensive bedroom and read and read.

And now it was the same at Oxford. Peter no longer went to tea parties. He worked all day, and, just before the examinations, he had a nervous breakdown. The doctor advised a complete change of scene, other interests. Peter’s father let him play at farming for six months in Devonshire, then he began to talk of the business. Mr. Wilkinson had been unable to persuade any of his other children to take even a polite interest in the source of their incomes. They were all unassailable in their different worlds. One of his daughters was about to marry into the peerage, the other frequently hunted with the Prince of Wales. His elder son read papers to the Royal Geographical Society. Only Peter hadn’t any justification for his existence. The other children behaved selfishly, but knew what they wanted. Peter also behaved selfishly, and didn’t know.

However, at the critical moment, Peter’s uncle, his mother’s brother, died. This uncle lived in Canada. He had seen Peter once as a child and had taken a fancy to him, so he left him all his money, not very much, but enough to live on, comfortably.

Peter went to Paris and began studying music. His teacher told him that he would never be more than a good second-rate amateur, but he only worked all the harder. He worked merely to avoid thinking, and had another nervous breakdown, less serious than at first. At this time, he was convinced that he would soon go mad. He paid a visit to London and found only his father at home. They had a furious quarrel on the first evening; thereafter, they hardly exchanged a ord. After a week of silence and huge meals, Peter had a mild attack of homicidal mania. All through breakfast, he auldn’t take his eyes off a pimple on his father’s throat. He was fingering the bread-knife. Suddenly the left side of his face began to twitch. It twitched and twitched, so that he had to cover his cheek with his hand. He felt certain that his father had noticed this, and was intentionally refusing remark on it—was, in fact, deliberately torturing him. At ist, Peter could stand it no longer. He jumped up and ashed out of the room, out of the house, into the garden, where he flung himself face downwards on the wet lawn, “

“here he lay, too frightened to move. After a quarter of an hour, the twitching stopped.

That evening Peter walked along Regent Street and picked up a whore. They went back together to the girl’s room, and talked for hours. He told her the whole story of his life at home, gave her ten pounds and left her without even kissing her. Next morning a mysterious rash appeared on his left thigh. The doctor seemed at a loss to explain its origin, but prescribed some ointment. The rash became fainter, but did not altogether disappear until last month. Soon after the Regent Street episode, Peter also began to have trouble with his left eye.

For some time already, he had played with the idea of consulting a psychoanalyst. His final choice was an orthodox Freudian with a sleepy, ill-tempered voice and very large feet. Peter took an immediate dislike to him, and told him so. The Freudian made notes on a piece of paper, but did not seem offended. Peter later discovered that he was quite uninterested in anything except Chinese art. They met three times a week, and each visit cost two guineas.

After six months Peter abandoned the Freudian, and started going to a new analyst, a Finnish lady with white hair and a bright conversational manner. Peter found her easy to talk to. He told her, to the best of his ability, everything he had ever done, ever said, ever thought, or ever dreamed. Sometimes, in moments of discouragement, he told her stories which were absolutely untrue, or anecdotes collected from case-books. Afterwards, he would confess to these lies, and they would discuss his motives for telling them, and agree that they were very interesting. On red-letter nights Peter would have a dream, and this gave them a topic of conversation for the next few weeks. The analysis lasted nearly two years, and was never completed.

This year Peter got bored with the Finnish lady. He heard of a good man in Berlin. Well, why not? At any rate, it would be a change. It was also an economy. The Berlin man only cost fifteen marks a visit.

“And you’re still going to him?” I asked.

“No…” Peter smiled. “I can’t afford to, you see.”

Last month, a day or two after his arrival, Peter went out to Wannsee, to bathe. The water was still chilly, and there were not many people about. Peter had noticed a boy who was turning somersaults by himself, on the sand. Later the boy came up and asked him for a match. They got into conversation. It was Otto Nowak.

“Otto was quite horrified when I told him about the analyst. ‘What!’ he said, ‘you give that man fifteen marks a day just for letting you talk to him! You give me ten marks and I’ll talk to you all day, and all night as well!’” Peter began to shake all over with laughter, flushing scarlet and wringing his hands.

Curiously enough, Otto wasn’t being altogether preposterous when he offered to take the analyst’s place. Like many very animal people, he has considerable instinctive powers of healing—when he chooses to use them. At such times, his ireatment of Peter is unerringly correct. Peter will be sitting at the table, hunched up, his downward-curving mouth lined with childhood fears: a perfect case-picture of his twisted, expensive upbringing. Then in comes Otto, grins, dimples, knocks over a chair, slaps Peter on the back, rubs his hands and exclaims fatuously: “Ja, ja… so ist die Sache!” And, in a moment, Peter is transformed. He relaxes, begins to hold himself naturally; the tightness disappears from his mouth, his eyes lose their hunted look. As long as the spell lasts, he is just like an ordinary person.

Peter tells me that, before he met Otto, he was so terrified of infection that he would wash his hands with carbolic after picking up a cat. Nowadays, he often drinks out of the same glass as Otto, uses his sponge, and will share the same plate.

Dancing has begun at the Kurhaus and the café on the lake. We saw the announcements of the first dance two days ago, while we were taking our evening walk up the main street of the village. I noticed that Otto glanced at the poster wistfully, and that Peter had seen him do this. Neither of them, however, made any comment.

Yesterday was chilly and wet. Otto suggested that we should hire a boat and go fishing on the lake: Peter was pleased with this plan, and agreed at once. But when we had waited three quarters of an hour in the drizzle for a catch, he began to get irritable. On the way back to the shore, Otto kept splashing with his oars—at first because he couldn’t row properly, later merely to annoy Peter. Peter got very angry indeed, and swore at Otto, who sulked.

After supper, Otto announced that he was going to dance at the Kurhaus. Peter took this without a word, in ominous silence, the corners of his mouth beginning to drop; and Otto, either genuinely unconscious of his disapproval or deliberately overlooking it, assumed that the matter was settled.

After he had gone out, Peter and I sat upstairs in my cold room, listening to the pattering of the rain on the window: “I thought it couldn’t last,” said Peter gloomily. “This is the beginning. You’ll see.”

“Nonsense, Peter. The beginning of what? It’s quite natural that Otto should want to dance sometimes. You mustn’t be so possessive.”

“Oh, I know, I know. As usual, I’m being utterly unreasonable… All the same, this is the beginning….”

Rather to my own surprise the event proved me right. Otto arrived back from the Kurhaus before ten o’clock. He had been disappointed. There had been very few people there, and the band was poor: “I’ll never go again,” he added, with a languishing smile at me. “From now on I’ll stay every evening with you and Christoph. It’s much more fun when we’re all three together, isn’t it?”

Yesterday morning, while we were lying in. our fort on the beach, a little fair-haired man with ferrety blue eyes and a small moustache came up to us and asked us to join in a game with him. Otto, always over-enthusiastic about strangers, accepted at once, so that Peter and I had either to be rude or follow his example.

The little man, after introducing himself as a surgeon from a Berlin hospital, at once took command, assigning to us the places where we were to stand. He was very firm about this—instantly ordering me back when I attempted to edge a little nearer, so as not to have such a long distance to throw. Then it appeared that Peter was throwing in quite the wrong way: the little doctor stopped the game in order to demonstrate this. Peter was amused at first, and then rather annoyed. He retorted with considerable rudeness, but the doctor’s skin wasn’t pierced. “You hold yourself so stiff,” he explained, smiling. “That is an error. You should relax completely—like this—you understand? Now try again, and I will keep my hand on your shoulder-blade to see whether you really relax… No. Again you do not!”

He seemed delighted, as if this failure of Peter’s were a special triumph for his own methods of teaching. His eye met Otto’s. Otto grinned understandingly.

Our meeting with the doctor put Peter in a bad temper for the rest of the day. In order to tease him, Otto pretended to like the doctor very much: “That’s the sort of chap I’d like to have for a friend,” he said with a spiteful smile. “A real sportsman! You ought to take up sport, Peter! Then you’d have a figure like he has!”

Had Peter been in another mood, this remark would probably have made him smile. As it was, he got very angry: “You’d better go off with your doctor now, if you like him so much!”

Otto grinned teasingly. “He hasn’t asked me to—yet!”

Yesterday evening, Otto went out to dance at the Kurhaus and didn’t return till late.

There are now a good many summer visitors to the village. The bathing-beach by the pier, with its array of banners, begins to look like a mediaeval camp. Each family has its own enormous hooded wicker beach-chair, and each chair flies a little flag. There are the German city-flags—Hamburg, Hanover, Dresden, Rostock and Berlin, as well as the National, Republican and Nazi colours. Each chair is encircled by a low sand bulwark upon which the occupants have set inscriptions in fir-cones: Waldesruh. Familie Walter. Stahlhelm. Heil Hitler! Many of the forts are also decorated with the Nazi swastika. The other morning I saw a child of about five years old, stark naked, marching along all by himself with a swastika flag over his shoulder and singing “Deutschland über alles.”

The little doctor fairly revels in this atmosphere. Nearly every morning he arrives, on a missionary visit) to our fort. “You really ought to come round to the other beach,” he tells us. “It’s much more amusing there. I’d introduce you to some nice girls. The young people here are a magnificent lot! I, as a doctor, know how to appreciate them. The other day I was over at Hiddensee. Nothing but Jews! It’s a pleasure to get back here and see real Nordic types!”