The Berlin Stories (44 page)

And now the patients came running out to meet us—awkward padded figures muffled in shawls and blankets, stumbling and slithering on the trampled ice of the path. They were in such a hurry that their blundering charge ended in a slide. They shot skidding into the arms of their friends and relations, who staggered under the violence of the collision. One couple, amid shrieks of laughter, had tumbled over.

“Otto!”

“Mother!”

“So you’ve really come! How well you’re looking!”

“Of course we’ve come, mother! What did you expect?” Frau Nowak disengaged herself from Otto to shake hands with me. “How do you do, Herr Christoph?”

She looked years younger. Her plump, oval, innocent face, lively and a trifle crafty, with its small peasant eyes, was like the face of a young girl. Her cheeks were brightly dabbed with colour. She smiled as though she could never stop.

“Ah, Herr Christoph, how nice of you to come! How nice of you to bring Otto to visit me!”

She uttered a brief, queer, hysterical little laugh. We mounted some steps into the house. The smell of the warm, clean, antiseptic building entered my nostrils like a breath of fear.

“They’ve put me in one of the smaller wards,” Frau Nowak told us. “There’s only four of us altogether. We get up to all sorts of games.” Proudly throwing open the door, she made the introductions: “This is Muttchen—she keeps us in order! And this is Erna. And this is Erika—our baby!”

Erika was a weedy blonde girl of eighteen, who giggled: “So here’s the famous Otto! We’ve been looking forward to seeing him for weeks!”

Otto smiled subtly, discreetly, very much at his ease. His brand new brown suit was vulgar beyond words; so were his lilac spats and his pointed yellow shoes. On his finger was an enormous signet-ring with a square, chocolate-coloured stone. Otto was extremely conscious of it and kept posing his hand in graceful attitudes, glancing down furtively to admire the effect. Frau Nowak simply couldn’t leave him alone. She must keep hugging him and pinching his cheeks.

“Doesn’t he look well!” she exclaimed. “Doesn’t he look splendid! Why, Otto, you’re so big and strong, I believe you could pick me up with one hand!”

Old Muttchen had a cold, they said. She wore a bandage round her throat, tight under the high collar of her old-fashioned black dress. She seemed a nice old lady, but somehow slightly obscene, like an old dog with sores. She sat on the edge of her bed with the photographs of her children and grandchildren on the table beside her, like prizes she had won. She looked slyly pleased, as though she were glad to be so ill. Frau Nowak told us that Muttchen had been three times in this sanatorium already. Each time she had been discharged as cured, but within nine months or a year she would have a relapse and have to be sent back again.

“Some of the cleverest professors in Germany have come here to examine her,” Frau Nowak added, with pride, “but you always fool them, don’t you, Muttchen dear?’

The old lady nodded, smiling, like a clever child which is being praised by its elders.

“And Erna is here for the second time,” Frau Nowak continued. “The doctors said she’d be all right; but she didn’t get enough to eat. So now she’s come back to us, haven’t you, Erna?”

“Yes, I’ve come back,” Erna agreed.

She was a skinny, bobbed-haired woman of about thirty-five, who must once have been very feminine, appealing, wistful, and soft. Now, in her extreme emaciation, she seemed possessed by a kind of desperate resolution, a certain defiance. She had immense, dark, hungry eyes. The wedding-ring was loose on her bony finger. When she talked and became excited her hands flitted tirelessly about in sequences of aimless gestures, like two shrivelled moths.

“My husband beat me and then ran away. The night he went he gave me such a thrashing that I had the marks afterwards for months. He was such a great strong man. He nearly killed me.” She spoke calmly, deliberately, yet with a certain suppressed excitement, never taking her eyes from my face. Her hungry glance bored into my brain, reading eagerly what I was thinking. “I dream about him now, sometimes,” she added, as if faintly amused.

Otto and I sat down at the table while Frau Nowak fussed around us with coffee and cakes which one of the sisters had brought. Everything which happened to me to-day was curiously without impact: my senses were muffled, insulated, functioning as if in a vivid dream. In this calm, white room, with its great windows looking out over the silent snowy pinewoods—the Christmas-tree on the table, the paper festoons above the beds, the nailed-up photographs, the plate of heart-shaped chocolate biscuits—these four women lived and moved. My eyes could explore every corner of their world: the temperature-charts, the fire extinguisher, the leather screen by the door. Dressed daily in their best clothes, their clean hands no longer pricked by the needle or roughened from scrubbing, they lay out on the terrace, listening to the wireless, forbidden to talk. Women being shut up together in this room had bred an atmosphere which was faintly nauseating, like soiled linen locked in a cupboard without air. They were playful with each other and shrill, like overgrown schoolgirls. Frau Nowak and Erika indulged in sudden furtive bouts of ragging. They plucked at each other’s clothes, scuffled silently, exploded into shrilly strained laughter. They were showing off in front of us.

“You don’t know how we’ve looked forward to to-day,” Erna told me. “To see a real live man!”

Frau Nowak giggled.

“Erika was such an innocent girl until she came here… You didn’t know anything, did you, Erika?”

Erika sniggered.

“I’ve learnt enough since then….”

“Yes, I should think you have! Would you believe it, Herr Christoph—her aunt sent her this little mannikin for Christmas, and now she takes it to bed with her every night, because she says she must have a man in her bed!”

Erika laughed boldly. “Well, it’s better than nothing, isn’t it?”

She winked at Otto, who rolled his eyes, pretending to be shocked.

After lunch Frau Nowak had to put in an hour’s rest. So Erna and Erika took possession of us for a walk in the grounds.

“We’ll show them the cemetery first,” Erna said.

The cemetery was for pet animals belonging to the sanatorium staff which had died. There were about a dozen little crosses and tombstones, pencilled with mock-heroic inscriptions in verse. Dead birds were buried there and white mice and rabbits, and a bat which had been found frozen after a storm.

“It makes you feel sad to think of them lying there, doesn’t it?” said Erna. She scooped away the snow from one of the graves. There were tears in her eyes.

But, as we walked away down the path, both she and Erika were very gay. We laughed and threw snowballs at each other. Otto picked up Erika and pretended he was going to throw her into a snowdrift. A little further on we passed close to a summerhouse, standing back from the path on a mound among the trees. A man and a woman were just coming out of it.

“That’s Frau Klemke,” Erna told me. “She’s got her husband here to-day. Just think, that old hut’s the only place in the whole grounds where two people can be alone together….

“It must be pretty cold in this weather.”

“Of course it is! Tomorrow her temperature will be up again and she’ll have to stay in bed for a fortnight… But who cares! If I were in her place I’d do the same myself.” Erna squeezed my arm: “We’ve got to live while we’re young, haven’t we?”

“Of course we have!”

Erna looked up quickly into my face; her big dark eyes fastened on to mine like hooks; I could imagine I felt them pulling me down.

“I’m not really a consumptive, you know, Christoph… You didn’t think I was, did you, just because I’m here?”

“No, Erna, of course I didn’t.”

“Lots of the girls here aren’t. They just need looking after for a bit, like me… The doctor says that if I take care of myself I shall be as strong as ever I was… And what do you think the first thing is I shall do when they let me out of here?”

“What?”

“First I shall get my divorce, and then I shall find a husband.” Erna laughed, with a kind of bitter triumph. “That won’t take me long—I can promise you!”

After tea we sat upstairs in the ward. Frau Nowak had borrowed a gramophone so that we could dance. I danced with Erna. Erika danced with Otto. She was tomboyish and clumsy, laughing loudly whenever she slipped or trod on his toes. Otto, sleekly smiling, steered her backwards and forwards with skill, his shoulders hunched in the fashionable chimpanzee stoop of Hallesches Tor. Old Muttchen sat looking on from her bed. When I held Erna in my arms I felt her shivering all over. It was almost dark now, but nobody suggested turning on the light.

After a while we stopped dancing and sat round in a circle on the beds. Frau Nowak had begun to talk about her childhood days, when she had lived with her parents on a farm in East Prussia. “We had a saw-mill of our own,” she told us, “and thirty horses. My father’s horses were the best in the district; he won prizes with them, many a time, at the show….” The ward was quite dark now. The windows were big pale rectangles in the darkness. Erna, sitting beside me on the bed, felt down for my hand and squeezed it; then she reached behind me and drew my arm round her body. She was trembling violently. “Christoph…” she whispered in my ear.

“… and in the summer time,” Frau Nowak was saying, “we used to go dancing in the big barn down by the river….”

My mouth pressed against Erna’s hot, dry lips. I had no particular sensation of contact: all this was part of the long, rather sinister symbolic dream which I seemed to have been dreaming throughout the day. “I’m so happy, this evening….” Erna whispered.

“The postmaster’s son used to play the fiddle,” said Frau Nowak. “He played beautifully… it made you want to cry….”

From the bed on which Erika and Otto were sitting came sounds of scuffling and a loud snigger: “Otto, you naughty boy… I’m surprised at you! I shall tell your mother!”

Five minutes later a sister came to tell us that the bus was ready to start.

“My word, Christoph,” Otto whispered to me, as we were putting on our overcoats, “I could have done anything I liked with that girl! I felt her all over… Did you have a good time with yours? A bit skinny, wasn’t she—but I bet she’s hot stuff!”

Then we were clambering into the bus with the other passengers. The patients crowded round to say goodbye. Wrapped and hooded in their blankets, they might have been the members of an aboriginal forest tribe.

Frau Nowak had begun crying, though she tried hard to smile.

“Tell father I’ll be back soon….”

“Of course you will, mother! You’ll soon be well now. You’ll soon be home.”

“It’s only a short time…” sobbed Frau Nowak; the tears running down over her hideous frog-like smile. And suddenly she started coughing—her body seemed to break in half like a hinged doll. Clasping her hands over her breast, she uttered short yelping coughs like a desperate injured animal. The blanket slipped back from her head and shoulders: a wisp of hair, working loose from the knot, was getting into her eyes—she shook her head blindly to avoid it. Two sisters gently tried to lead her away, but at once she began to struggle furiously. She wouldn’t go with them.

“Go in, mother,” begged Otto. He was almost in tears himself. “Please go in! You’ll catch your death of cold!”

“Write to me sometimes, won’t you, Christoph?” Erna was clutching my hand as though she were drowning. Her eyes looked up at me with a terrifying intensity of unashamed despair. “It doesn’t matter if it’s only a postcard… just sign your name.”

“Of course I will….”

They all thronged round us for a moment in the little circle of light from the panting bus, their lit faces ghastly like ghosts against the black stems of the pines. This was the climax of my dream: the instant of nightmare in which it would end. I had an absurd pang of fear that they were going to attack us—a gang of terrifyingly soft muffled shapes—clawing us from our seats, dragging us hungrily down, in dead silence. But the moment passed. They drew back—harmless, after all, as mere ghosts—into the darkness, while our bus, with a great churning of its wheels, lurched forward towards the city, through the deep unseen snow.

THE LANDAUERS

One night in October 1930, about a month after the Elections, there was a big row on the Leipzigerstrasse. Gangs of Nazi roughs turned out to demonstrate against the Jews. They manhandled some dark-haired, large-nosed pedestrians, and smashed the windows of all the Jewish shops. The incident was not, in itself, very remarkable; there were no deaths, very little shooting, not more than a couple of dozen arrests. I remember it only because it was my first introduction to Berlin politics.

Frl. Mayr, of course, was delighted: “Serve them right!” she exclaimed. “This town is sick with Jews. Turn over any stone, and a couple of them will crawl out. They’re poisoning the very water we drink! They’re strangling us, they’re robbing us, they’re sucking our life-blood. Look at all the big department stores: Wertheim, K. D. W., Landauers’. Who owns them? Filthy thieving Jews!”

“The Landauers are personal friends of mine,” I retorted icily, and left the room before Frl. Mayr had time to think of a suitable reply.

This wasn’t strictly true. As a matter of fact, I had never met any member of the Landauer family in my life. But, before leaving England, i had been given a letter of introduction to them by a mutual friend. I mistrust letters of introduction, and should probably never have used this one, if it hadn’t been for Frl. Mayr’s remark. Now, perversely, I decided to write to Frau Landauer at once.

Natalia Landauer, as I saw her, for the first time, three days later, was a schoolgirl of eighteen. She had dark fluffy hair; far too much of it—it made her face, with its sparkling eyes, appear too long and too narrow. She reminded me of a young fox. She shook hands straight from the shoulder in the modern student manner. “In here, please.” Her tone was peremptory and brisk.

The sitting-room was large and cheerful, pre-War in taste, a little over-furnished. Natalia had begun talking at once, with terrific animation, in eager stumbling English, showing me gramophone records, pictures, books. I wasn’t allowed to look at anything for more than a moment: “You like Mozart? Yes? Oh, I also! Vairy much!… These picture is in the Kronprinz Palast. You have not seen it? I shall show you one day, yes?… You are fond of Heine? Say quite truthfully, please.” She looked up from the bookcase, smiling, but with a certain schoolmarm severity: “Read. It’s beautiful, I find.”