The Berlin Stories (47 page)

Soon after this, I went to call on Bernhard at the business.

Landauers’ was an enormous steel and glass building, not far from the Potsdamer Platz. It took me nearly a quarter of an hour to find my way through departments of underwear, outfitting, electrical appliances, sport and cutlery to the private world behind the scenes—the wholesale, travellers’ and buying rooms, and Bernhard’s own little suite of offices. A porter showed me into a small waiting-room, panelled in some highly polished streaky wood, with a rich blue carpet and one picture, an engraving of Berlin in the year 1803. After a few moments, Bernhard himself came in. This morning, he looked younger, sprucer, in a bow-tie and a light grey suit. “I hope that you give your approval to this room,” he said. “I think that, as I keep so many people waiting here, they ought at least to have a more or less sympathetic atmosphere to allay their impatience.”

“It’s very nice,” I said, and added, to make conversation— for I was feeling a little embarrassed: “What kind of wood is this?”

“Caucasian Nut.” Bernhard pronounced the words with his characteristic primness, very precisely. He grinned suddenly. He seemed, I thought, in much better spirits: “Come and see the shop.”

In the hardware department, an overalled woman demonstrator was exhibiting the merits of a patent coffee-strainer. Bernhard stopped to ask her how the sales were going, and she offered us cups of coffee. While I sipped mine, he explained that I was a well-known coffee-merchant from London, and that my opinion would therefore be worth having. The woman half believed this, at first, but we both laughed so much that she became suspicious. Then Bernhard dropped his coffee-cup and broke it. He was quite distressed and apologised profusely. “It doesn’t matter,” the demonstrator reassured him—as though he were a minor employee who might get sacked for his clumsiness: “I’ve got two more.”

Presently we came to the toys. Bernhard told me that he and his uncle wouldn’t allow toy soldiers or guns to be sold at Landauers’. Lately, at a directors’ meeting, there had been a heated argument about toy tanks, and Bernhard had succeeded in getting his own way. “But this is really the thin end of the wedge,” he added, sadly, picking up a toy tractor with caterpillar wheels.

Then he showed me a room in which children could play while their mothers were shopping. A uniformed nurse was helping two little boys to build a castle of bricks. “You observe,” said Bernhard, “that philanthropy is here combined with advertisement. Opposite this room, we display specially cheap and attractive hats. The mothers who bring their children here fall immediately into temptation… I’m afraid you will think us sadly materialistic….”

I asked why there was no book department.

“Because we dare not have one. My uncle knows that I should remain there all day.”

All over the stores, there were brackets of coloured lamps, red, green, blue and yellow. I asked what they were for, and Bernhard explained that each of these lights was the signal for one of the heads of the firm: “I am the blue light. That is, perhaps, to some degree, symbolic.” Before I had time to ask what he meant, the blue lamp we were looking at began to flicker. Bernhard went to the nearest telephone and was told that somebody wished to speak to him in his office. So we said goodbye. On the way out, I bought a pair of socks.

During the early part of that winter, I saw a good deal of Bernhard. I cannot say that I got to know him much better through these evenings spent together. He remained curiously remote from me—his face impassive with exhaustion under the shaded lamplight, his gentle voice moving on through sequences of mildly humorous anecdotes. He would describe, for instance, a lunch with some friends who were very strict Jews. “Ah,” Bernhard had said, conversationally, “so we’re having lunch out of doors to-day? How delightful! The weather’s still so warm for the time of year, isn’t it? And your garden’s looking lovely.” Then, suddenly, it had occurred to him that his hosts were regarding him rather sourly, and he remembered, with horror, that this was the Feast of Tabernacles.

I laughed. I was amused. Bernhard told stories very well. But, all the time, I was aware of feeling a certain impatience. Why does he treat me like a child, I thought. He treats us all as children—his uncle and aunt, Natalia, myself. He tells us stories. He is sympathetic, charming. But his gestures, offering me a glass of wine or a cigarette, are clothed in arrogance, in the arrogant humility of the East. He is not going to tell me what he is really thinking or feeling, and he despises me because I do not know. He will never tell me anything about himself, or about the things which are most important to him. And because I am not as he is, because I am the opposite of this, and would gladly share my thoughts and sensations with forty million people if they cared to read them, I half admire Bernhard but also half dislike him.

We seldom talked about the political condition of Germany, but, one evening, Bernhard told me a story of the days of the civil war. He had been visited by a student friend who was taking part in the fighting. The student was very nervous and refused to sit down. Presently he confessed to Bernhard that he had been ordered to take a message through to one of the newspaper office-buildings which the police were besieging; to reach this office, it would be necessary to climb and crawl over roofs which were exposed to machine-gun fire. Naturally, he wasn’t anxious to start. The student was wearing a remarkably thick overcoat, which Bernhard pressed him to take off, for the room was well heated and his face was literally streaming with sweat. At length, after much hesitation, the student did so, revealing, to Bernhard’s intense alarm, that the lining of the coat was fitted with inside pockets stuffed full of hand-grenades. “And the worst of it was,” said Bernhard, “that he’d made up his mind not to take any more risks, but to leave the overcoat with me. He wanted to put it into the bath and turn on the cold water tap. At last I persuaded him that it would be much better to take it out after dark and to drop it into the canal—and this he ultimately succeeded in doing… He is now one of the most distinguished professors in a certain provincial university. I am sure that he has long since forgotten this somewhat embarrassing escapade…

“Were you ever a communist, Bernhard?” I asked.

At once—I saw it in his face—he was on the defensive. After a moment, he said slowly: “No, Christopher. I’m afraid I was always constitutionally incapable of bringing myself to the required pitch of enthusiasm.”

I felt suddenly impatient with him; angry, even: “–—ever to believe in anything?”

Bernhard smiled faintly at my violence. It may have amused him to have roused me like this.

“Perhaps….” Then he added, as if to himself: “No.,.. that is not quite true….”

“What do you believe in, then?” I challenged.

Bernhard was silent for some moments, considering this—his beaky delicate profile impassive, his eyes half-closed. At last he said: “Possibly I believe in discipline.”

“In discipline?”

“You don’t understand that, Christopher? Let me try to explain… I believe in discipline for myself, not necessarily for others. For others, I cannot judge. I know only that I myself must have certain standards which I obey and without which I am quite lost… Does that sound very dreadful?”

“No,” I said—thinking: He is like Natalia.

“You must not condemn me too harshly, Christopher.” The mocking smile was spreading over Bernhard’s face. “Remember that I am a cross-breed. Perhaps, after all, there is one drop of pure Prussian blood in my polluted veins. Perhaps this little finger,” he held it up to the light, “is the finger of a Prussian drill-sergeant… You, Christopher, with your centuries of Ango-Saxon freedom behind you, with your Magna Charta engraved upon your heart, cannot understand that we poor barbarians need the stiffness of a uniform to keep us standing upright.”

“Why do you always make fun of me, Bernhard?”

“Make fun of you, my dear Christopher! I shouldn’t dare!”

Yet, perhaps, on this occasion, he told me a little more than he had intended.

I had long meditated the experiment of introducing Natalia to Sally Bowles. I think I knew beforehand what the result of their meeting would be. At any rate, I had the sense not to invite Fritz Wendel.

We were to meet at a smart café in the Kurfürstendamm. Natalia was the first to arrive. She was a quarter of an hour late—probably because she’d wanted to have the advantage of coming last. But she had reckoned without Sally: she hadn’t the nerve to be late in the grand manner. Poor Natalia! She had tried to make herself look more grown up—with the result that she appeared merely rather dowdy. The long townified dress she’d put on didn’t suit her at all. On the side of her head, she had planted a little hat—an unconscious parody of Sally’s page-boy cap. But Natalia’s hair was much too fuzzy for it: it rode the waves like a half-swamped boat on a rough sea.

“How do I look?” she immediately asked, sitting down opposite to me, rather flurried.

“You look very nice.”

“Tell me, please, truthfully, what will she think of me?”

“She’ll like you very much.”

“How can you say that?” Natalia was indignant. “You do not know!”

“First you want my opinion, and then you say I don’t know!”

“Imbecile! I do not ask for compliments!”

“I’m afraid I don’t quite understand what you do ask for.”

“Oh no?” cried Natalia scornfully. “You do not understand? Then I am sorry. I can’t help you!”

At this moment, Sally arrived.

“Hilloo, darling,” she exclaimed, in her most cooing accents, “I’m terribly sorry I’m late—can you forgive me?” She sat down daintily, enveloping us in wafts of perfume, and began, with languid miniature gestures, to take off her gloves: “I’ve been making love to a dirty old Jew producer. I’m hoping he’ll give me a contract—but no go, so far….”

I kicked Sally hastily, under the table, and she stopped short, with an expression of absurd dismay—but now, of course, it was too late. Natalia froze before our eyes. All I’d said and hinted beforehand, in hypothetic pre-excuse of Sally’s conduct, was instantly made void. After a moment’s glacial pause, Natalia asked me if I’d seen Sous les Toits de Paris. She spoke German. She wasn’t going to give Sally a chance of laughing at her English.

Sally immediately chipped in, however, quite unabashed. She’d seen the film, and thought it was marvellous, and wasn’t Prejean marvellous, and did we remember the scene where a train goes past in the background while they’re starting to fight? Sally’s German was so much more than usually awful that I wondered whether she wasn’t deliberately exaggerating it in order, somehow, to make fun of Natalia.

During the rest of the interview I suffered mental pins and needles. Natalia hardly spoke at all. Sally prattled on in her murderous German, making what she imagined to be light general conversation, chiefly about the English film industry. But as every anecdote involved explaining that somebody was someone else’s mistress, that this one drank and that one took drugs, this didn’t make the atmosphere any more agreeable. I found myself getting increasingly annoyed with both of them—with Sally for her endless silly pornographic talk; with Natalia for being such a prude. At length, after what seemed an eternity but was, in fact, barely twenty minutes, Natalia said that she must be going.

“My God, so must I!” cried Sally, in English. “Chris, darling, you’ll take me as far as the Eden, won’t you?”

In my cowardly way, I glanced at Natalia, trying to convey my helplessness. This, I knew only too well, was going to be regarded as a test of my loyalty—and, already, I had failed it. Natalia’s expression showed no mercy. Her face was set. She was very angry, indeed.

“When shall I see you?” I ventured to ask.

“I don’t know,” said Natalia—and she marched off down the Kurfürstendamm as if she never wished to set eyes on either of us again.

Although we had only a tew hundred yards to go, Sally insisted that we must take a taxi. It would never do, she explained, to arrive at the Eden on foot.

“That girl didn’t like me much, did she?” she remarked, as we were driving off.

“No, Sally. Not much.”

“I’m sure I don’t know why… I went out of my way to be nice to her.”

“If that’s what you call being nice…!” I laughed, in spite of my vexation.

“Well, what ought I to have done?”

“It’s more a question of what you ought not to have done… Haven’t you any small-talk except adultery?”

“People have got to take me as I am,” retorted Sally, grandly.

“Finger-nails and all?” I’d noticed Natalia’s eyes returning to them again and again, in fascinated horror.

Sally laughed: “To-day, I specially didn’t paint my toe-nails.”

“Oh, rot, Sally! Do you really?”

“Yes, of course I do.”

“But what on earth’s the point? I mean, nobody–—” I corrected myself, “very few people can see them….”

Sally gave me her most fatuous grin: “I know, darling… But it makes me feel so marvellously sensual….”

From this meeting, I date the decline of my relations with Natalia. Not that there was ever any open quarrel between us, or definite break. Indeed, we met again only a few days later; but at once I was aware of a change in the temperature of our friendship. We talked, as usual, of art, music, books—carefully avoiding the personal note. We had been walking about the Tiergarten for the best part of an hour, when Natalia abruptly asked: “You like Miss Bowles vairy much?” Her eyes, fixed on the leaf-strewn path, were smiling maliciously.

“Of course I do… We’re going to be married, soon.”

“Imbecile!”

We marched on for several minutes in silence.

“You know,” said Natalia suddenly, with the air of one who makes a surprising discovery: “I do not like your Miss Bowles?”

“I know you don’t.”

My tone vexed her—as I intended that it should: “What I think, it is not of importance?”

“Not in the least.” I grinned teasingly.

“Only your Miss Bowles, she is of importance?”

“She is of great importance.”

Natalia reddened and bit her lip. She was getting angry: “Some day, you will see that I am right.”