The Berlin Stories (41 page)

Frau Nowak looked after him and sighed: “He’s going round to his Nazis, I suppose. I often wish he’d never taken up with them at all. They put all kinds of silly ideas into his head. It makes him so restless. Since he joined them he’s been a different boy altogether… Not that I understand these politics myself. What I always say is—why can’t we have the Kaiser back? Those were the good times, say what you like.”

“Ach, to hell with your old Kaiser,” said Otto. “What we want is a communist revolution.”

“A communist revolution!” Frau Nowak snorted. “The idea! The communists are all good-for-nothing lazybones like you, who’ve never done an honest day’s work in their lives.”

“Christoph’s a communist,” said Otto. “Aren’t you, Christoph?”

‘Not a proper one, I’m afraid.”

Frau Nowak smiled: “What nonsense will you be telling us next! How could Herr Christoph be a communist? He’s a gentleman.” , “What I say is–—.” Herr Nowak put down his knife and fork and wiped his moustache carefully on the back of his hand: “we’re all equal as God made us. You’re as good as me; I’m as good as you. A Frenchman’s as good as an Englishman; an Englishman’s as good as a German. You understand what I mean?”

I nodded.

“Take the war, now–—.” Herr Nowak pushed back his chair from the table: “One day I was in a wood. All alone, you understand. Just walking through the wood by myself, as I might be walking down the street… And suddenly—there before me, stood a Frenchman. Just as if he’d sprung out of the earth. He was no further away from me than you are now.” Herr Nowak sprang to his feet as he spoke. Snatching up the bread-knife from the table he held it before him, in a posture of defence, like a bayonet. Tie glared at me from beneath his bushy eyebrows, re-living the scene: “There we stand. We look at each other. That Frenchman was as pale as death. Suddenly he cries: ‘Don’t shoot me!’ Just like that.” Herr Nowak clasped his hands in a piteous gesture of entreaty. The bread-knife was in the way now: he put it down on the tabje. ” ‘Don’t shoot me! I have five children.’ (He spoke French, of course: but I could understand him. I could speak French perfectly in those days; but I’ve forgotten some of it now.) Well, I look at him and he looks at me. Then I say: ‘Ami.’ (That means Friend.) And then we shake hands.” Herr Nowak took my hand in both of his and pressed it with great emotion. “And then we begin to walk away from each other—backwards; I didn’t want him to shoot me in the back.” Still glaring in front of him Herr Nowak began cautiously retreating backwards, step by step, until he collided violently with the sideboard. A framed photograph fell off it. The glass smashed.

“Pappi! Pappil” cried Grete in delight. “Just look what you’ve done!”

“Perhaps that’ll teach you to stop your fooling, you old clown!” exclaimed Frau Nowak angrily. Grete began loudly and affectedly laughing, until Otto slapped her face and she set up her stagey whine. Meanwhile, Herr Nowak had restored his wife’s good temper by kissing her and pinching her cheek.

“Get away from me, you great lout!” she protested laughing; coyly pleased that I was present: “Let me alone, you stink of beer!”

At that time, I had a great many lessons to give. I was out most of the day. My pupils were scattered about the fashionable suburbs of the west—rich, well-preserved women of Frau Nowak’s age, but looking ten years younger; they liked to make a hobby of a little English conversation on dull afternoons when their husbands were away at the office. Sitting on silk cushions in front of open fireplaces, we discussed Point Counter Point and Lady Chatteriey’s Lover. A manservant brought in tea with buttered toast. Sometimes, when they got tired of literature, I amused them by descriptions of the Nowak household. I was careful, however, not to say that I lived there: it would have been bad for my business to admit that I was really poor. The ladies paid me three marks an hour; a little reluctantly, having done their best to beat me down to two marks fifty. Most of them also tried, deliberately or subconsciously, to cheat me into staying longer than my time. I always had to keep my eye on the clock.

Fewer people wanted lessons in the morning; and so it happened that I usually got up much later than the rest of the Nowak family. Frau Nowak had her charring, Herr Nowak went off to his job at the fumiture-removers, Lothar, who was out of work, was helping a friend with a paper-round, Grete went to school. Only Otto kept me company; except on the mornings when, with endless nagging, he was driven out to the labour-bureau by his mother, to get his card stamped.

After fetching our breakfast, a cup of coffee and a slice of bread and dripping, Otto would strip off his pyjamas and do exercises, shadow-box or stand on his head. He flexed his muscles for my admiration. Squatting on my bed, he told me stories: “Did I ever tell you, Christoph, how I saw the Hand?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Well, listen… Once, when I was very small, I was lying in bed at night. It was very dark and very late. And suddenly I woke up and saw a great big black hand stretching over the bed. I was so frightened I couldn’t even scream. I just drew my legs up under my chin and stared at it. Then, after a minute or two, it disappeared and I yelled out. Mother came running in and I said: ‘Mother, I’ve seen the Hand.’ But she only laughed. She wouldn’t believe it.”

Otto’s innocent face, with its two dimples, like a bun, had become very solemn. He held me with his absurdly small bright eyes, concentrating all his narrative powers: “And then, Christoph, several years later, I had a job as apprentice to an upholsterer. Well, one day—it was in the middle of the morning, in broad daylight—I was sitting working on my stool. And suddenly it seemed to go all dark in the room and I looked up and there was the Hand, as near to me as you are now just closing over me. I felt my arms and legs turn cold and I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t cry out. The master saw how pale I was and he said: ‘Why, Otto, what’s the matter with you? Aren’t you well?’ And as he spoke to me it seemed as if the Hand drew right away from me again, getting smaller and smaller, until it was just a little black speck. And when I looked up again the room was quite light, just as it always was, and where I’d seen the black speck there was a big fly crawling across the ceiling.

But I was so ill the whole day that the master had to send me home.”

Otto’s face had gone quite pale during this recital and, for a moment, a really frightening expression of fear had passed over his features. He was tragic now; his little eyes bright with tears: “One day I shall see the Hand again. And then I shall die.”

“Nonsense,” I said, laughing. “We’ll protect you.”

Otto shook his head very sadly: “Let’s hope so, Christoph. But I’m afraid not. The Hand will get me in the end.”

“How long did you stay with the upholsterer?” I asked.

“Oh, not long. Only a few weeks. The master was so unkind to me. He always gave me the hardest jobs to do—and I was such a little chap then. One day I got there five minutes late. He made a terrible row; called me a verfluchter Hund. And do you think I put up with that?” Otto leant forward, thrust his face, contracted into a dry monkey-like leer of malice, towards me. “Nee, nee! Bei mir nicht!” His little eyes focussed upon me for a moment with an extraordinary intensity of simian hatred; his puckered-up features became startlingly ugly. Then they relaxed. I was no longer the upholsterer. He laughed gaily and innocently, throwing back his hair, showing his teeth: “I pretended I was going to hit him. I frightened him, all right!” He imitated the gesture of a scared middle-aged man avoiding a blow. He laughed.

“And then you had to leave?” I asked.

Otto nodded. His face slowly changed. He was turning melancholy again.

“What did your father and mother say to that?”

“Oh, they’ve always been against me. Ever since I was small. If there were two crusts of bread, mother would always give the bigger one to Lothar. Whenever I complained they used to say: ‘Go and work. You’re old enough. Get your own food. Why should we support you?’ ” Otto’s eyes moistened with the most sincere self-pity: “Nobody understands me here. Nobody’s good to me. They all hate me really. They wish I was dead.”

“How can you talk such rubbish, Otto! Your mother certainly doesn’t hate you.”

“Poor mother!” agreed Otto. He had changed his tone at once, seeming utterly unaware of what he had just said: “It’s terrible. I can’t bear to think of her working like that, every day. You know, Christoph, she’s very, very ill. Often, at night, she coughs for hours and hours. And sometimes she spits out blood. I lie awake wondering if she’s going to die.”

I nodded. In spite of myself I began to smile. Not that I disbelieved what he had said about Frau Nowak. But Otto himself, squatting there on the bed, was so animally alive, his naked brown body so sleek with health, that his talk of death seemed ludicrous, like the description of a funeral by a painted clown. He must have understood this, for he grinned back, not in the least shocked at my apparent callousness. Straightening his legs he bent forward without effort and grasped his feet with his hands: “Can you do that, Christoph?”

A sudden notion pleased him: “Christoph, if I show you something, will you swear not to tell a single soul?”

“All right.”

He got up and rummaged under his bed. One of the floorboards was loose in the corner by the window: lifting it, he fished out a tin box which had once contained biscuits. The tin was full of letters^ and photographs. Otto spread them out on the bed: “Mother would burn these if she found them… Look, Christoph, how do you like her? Her name’s Hilde. I met her at the place where I go dancing… And this is Marie. Hasn’t she got beautiful eyes? She’s wild about me—all the other boys are jealous. But she’s not really my type.” Otto shook his head seriously: “You know, it’s a funny thing, but as soon as I know that a girl’s keen on me, I lose interest in her. I wanted to break with her altogether; but she came round here and made such a to-do in front of mother. So I have to see her sometimes to keep her quiet… And here’s Trude—honestly, Christoph, would you believe she was twenty-seven? It’s a fact! Hasn’t she a marvellous figure? She lives in the West End, in a flat of her own! She’s been divorced twice. I can go there whenever I like. Here’s a photo her brother took of her. He wanted to take some of us two together, but I wouldn’t let him. I was afraid he’d sell them, afterwards—you can be arrested for it, you know….” Otto smirked, handed me a packet of letters: “Here, read these; they’ll make you laugh. This one’s from a Dutchman. He’s got the biggest car I ever saw in my life. I was with him in the spring. He writes to me sometimes. Father got wind of it, and now he watches out to see if there’s any money in the envelopes—the dirty dog! But I know a trick worth two of that! I’ve told all my friends to address their letters to the bakery on the corner. The baker’s son is a pal of mine….”

“Do you ever hear from Peter?” I asked.

Otto regarded me very solemnly for a moment: “Christoph?”

“Yes?”

“Will you do me a favour?”

“What is it?” I asked cautiously: Otto always chose the least expected moments to ask for a small loan.

“Please….” he was gently reproachful, “please, never mention Peter’s name to me again….”

“Oh, all right,” I said, very much taken aback: “If you’d rather not.”

“You see, Christoph… Peter hurt me very much. I thought he was my friend. And then, suddenly, he left me—all alone….”

Down in the murky pit of the courtyard where the fog, in this clammy autumn weather, never lifted, the street singers and musicians succeeded each other in a performance which was nearly continuous. There were parties of boys with mandolins, an old man who played the concertina and a father who sang with his little girls. Easily the favourite tune was: Aus der Jugendzeit. I often heard it a dozen times in one morning. The father of the girls was paralysed and could only make desperate throttled noises like a donkey; but the daughters sang with the energy of fiends: “Sie kommt, sie kommt nicht mehr!” they screamed in unison, like demons of the air, rejoicing in the frustration of mankind. Occasionally a groschen, screwed in a corner of newspaper, was tossed down from a window high above. It hit the pavement and ricocheted like a bullet, but the little girls never flinched.

Now and then the visiting nurse called to see Frau Nowak, shook her head over the sleeping arrangements and went away again. The inspector of housing, a pale young man with an open collar ( which he obviously wore on principle), came also and took copious notes. The attic, he told Frau Nowak, was absolutely insanitary and uninhabitable. He had a slightly reproachful air as he said this, as though we ourselves were partly to blame. Frau Nowak bitterly resented these visits. They were, she thought, simply attempts to spy on her. She was haunted by the fear that the nurse or the inspector would look in at a moment when the flat was untidy. So deep were her suspicions that she even told lies—pretending that the leak in the roof wasn’t serious—to get them out of the house as quickly as possible.

Another regular visitor was the Jewish tailor and outfitter, who sold clothes of all kinds on the instalment plan. He was small and gentle and very persuasive. All day long he made his rounds of the tenements in the district, collecting fifty pfennigs here, a mark there, scratching up his precarious livelihood, like a hen, from this apparently barren soil. He never pressed hard for money; preferring to urge his debtors to take more of his goods and embark upon a fresh series of payments. Two years ago Frau Nowak had bought a suit and an overcoat for Otto for three hundred marks. The suit and the overcoat had been worn out long ago, but the money was not nearly repaid. Shortly after my arrival Frau Nowak i invested in clothes for Grete to the value of seventy-five marks. The tailor made no objection at all.

The whole neighbourhood owed him money. Yet he was not unpopular: he enjoyed the status of a public character, whom people curse without real malice. “Perhaps Lothar’s right,” Frau Nowak would sometimes say: “When Hitler comes, he’ll show these Jews a thing or two. They won’t be so cheeky then.” But when I suggested that Hitler, if he got his own way, would remove the tailor altogether, then Frau Nowak would immediately change her tone: “Oh, I shouldn’t like that to happen. After all, he makes very good clothes. Besides, a Jew will always let you have time if you’re in difficulties. You wouldn’t catch a Christian giving credit like he does… You ask the people round here, Herr Christoph: they’d never turn out the Jews.”