The Berlin Stories (48 page)

“I’ve no doubt I shall.”

We walked all the way back to Natalia’s home without exchanging a single word. On the doorstep, however, she asked, as usual: “Perhaps you will ring me up, one day…” then paused, delivered her parting shot: “if your Miss Bowles permits?”

I laughed: “Whether she permits or not, I shall ring you up very soon.” Almost before I had finished speaking, Natalia had shut the door in my face.

Nevertheless, I didn’t keep my word. It was a month before I finally dialled Natalia’s number. I had half intended to do so, many times, but, always, my disinclination had been stronger than my desire to see her again. And when, at length, we did meet, the temperature had dropped several degrees lower still; we seemed mere acquaintances. Natalia was convinced, I suppose, that Sally had become my mistress, and I didn’t see why I should correct her mistake—doing so would only have involved a long heart-to-heart talk for which I simply wasn’t in the mood. And, at the end of all the explanations, Natalia would probably have found herself quite as much shocked as she was at present, and a good deal more jealous. I didn’t flatter myself that Natalia had ever wanted me as a lover, but she had certainly begun to behave towards me, as a kind of bossy elder sister, and it was just this role—absurdly enough—which Sally had stolen from her. No, it was a pity, but on the whole, I decided, things were better as they were. So I played up to Natalia’s indirect questions and insinuations, and even let drop a few hints of domestic bliss: “When Sally and I were having breakfast together, this morning…” or “How do you like this tie? Sally chose it….” Poor Natalia received them in glum silence; and, as so often before, I felt guilty and unkind. There were two more meetings, equally unsuccessful. Then, towards the end of February, I rang up her home, and was told that she’d gone abroad.

Bernhard, too, I hadn’t seen for some time. Indeed, I was quite surprised to hear his voice on the telephone one morning. He wanted to know if I would go with him that evening “into the country” and spend the night. This sounded very mysterious, and Bernhard only laughed when I tried to get out of him where we were going and why.

He called for me about eight o’clock, in a big closed car with a chauffeur. The car, Bernhard explained, belonged to the business. Both he and his uncle used it. It was typical, I thought, of the patriarchal simplicity in which the Landauers lived that Natalia’s parents had no private car of their own, and that Bernhard even seemed inclined to apologise to me for the existence of this one. It was a complicated simplicity, the negation of a negation. Its roots were entangled deep in the awful guilt of possession. Oh dear, I sighed to myself, shall I ever get to the bottom of these people, shall I ever understand them? The mere act of thinking about the Landauers’ psychic make-up overcame me, as always, with a sense of absolute, defeated exhaustion.

“You are tired?” Bernhard asked, solicitous, at my elbow.

“Oh no….” I roused myself. “Not a bit.”

“You will not mind if we call first at the house of a friend of mine? There is somebody else coming with us, you see… I hope you don’t object?”

“No, of course not,” I said politely.

“He is very quiet. An old friend of the family.” Bernhard, for some reason, seemed amused. He chuckled faintly to himself.

The car stopped outside a villa in the Fasanenstrasse.

Bernhard rang the bell and was let in: a few moments later, he reappeared, carrying in his arms a Skye terrier. I laughed.

“You were exceedingly polite,” said Bernhard, smiling. “All the same, I think I detected a certain uneasiness on your part… Am I right?”

“Perhaps….”

“I wonder whom you were expecting? Some terribly boring old gentleman, perhaps?” Bernhard patted the terrier. “But I fear, Christopher, that you are far too well bred ever to confess that to me now.”

The car slowed down and stopped before the toll-gate of the Avus motor-road.

“Where are we going?” I asked. “I wish you’d tell me!”

Bernhard smiled his soft expansive Oriental smile: “I’m very mysterious, am I not?”

“Very.”

“Surely it must be a wonderful experience for you to be driving away into the night, not knowing whither you are bound? If I tell you that we are going to Paris, or to Madrid, or to Moscow, then there will no longer be any mystery and you will have lost half your pleasure… Do you know, Christopher, I quite envy you because you do not know where we are going?”

“That’s one way of looking at it, certainly… But, at any rate, I know already we aren’t going to Moscow. We’re driving in the opposite direction.”

Bernhard laughed: “You are so very English sometimes, Chistopher. Do you realise that, I wonder?”

“You bring out the English side of me, I think,” I answered, and immediately felt a little uncomfortable, as though this remark were somehow insulting. Bernhard seemed aware of my thought.

“Am I to understand that as a compliment, or as a reproof?”

“As a compliment, of course.”

The car whirled along the black Avus, into the immense darkness of the winter countryside. Giant reflector signs glittered for a moment in the headlight beams, expired like burnt-out matches. Already Berlin was a reddish glow in the sky behind us, dwindling rapidly beyond a converging forest of pines. The searchlight on the Funkturm swung its little ray through the night. The straight black road roared headlong to meet us, as if to its destruction. In the upholstered darkness of the car, Bernhard was patting the restless dog upon his knees.

“Very well, I will tell you… We are going to a place on the shores of the Wannsee which used to belong to my father. What you call in England a country cottage.”

“A cottage? Very nice….”

My tone amused Bernhard. I could hear from his voice that he was smiling: “I hope you won’t find it too uncomfortable?”

“I’m sure I shall love it.”

“It may seem a little primitive, at first….” Bernhard laughed quietly to himself: “Nevertheless, it is amusing….”

“It must be….”

I suppose I had been vaguely expecting an hotel, lights, music, very good food. I reflected bitterly that only a rich, decadently over-civilised town-dweller would describe camping out for the night in a poky, damp country cottage in the middle of the winter as “amusing.” And how typical that he should drive me to that cottage in a luxurious car! Where would the chauffeur sleep? Probably in the best hotel in Potsdam… As we passed the lamps of the toll-house at the far end of the Avus, I saw that Bernhard was still smiling to himself.

The car swung to the right, downhill, along a road through silhouetted trees. There was a feeling of nearness to the big lake lying invisible behind the woodland on our left. I had hardly realised that the road had ended in a gateway and a private drive: we pulled up at the door of a large villa.

“Where’s this?” I asked Bernhard, supposing confusedly that he must have something else to call for—another terrier, perhaps. Bernhard laughed gaily: “We have arrived at our destination, my dear Christopher! Out you get!”

A manservant in a striped jacket opened the door. The dog jumped out, and Bernhard and I followed. Resting his hand upon my shoulder, he steered me across the hall and up the stairs. I was aware of a rich carpet and framed engravings. He opened the door of a luxurious pink and white bedroom, with a luscious quilted silk eiderdown on the bed. Beyond was a bathroom, gleaming with polished silver, and hung with fleecy white towels.

Bernhard grinned: “Poor Christopher! I fear you are disappointed in our cottage? It is too large for you, too ostentatious? You were looking forward to the pleasure of sleeping on the floor—amidst the blackbeetles?”

The atmosphere of this joke surrounded us through dinner. As the manservant brought in each new course on its silver dish, Bernhard would catch my eye and smile a deprecatory smile. The dining-room was tame baroque, elegant and rather colourless. I asked him when the villa had been built.

“My father built this house in 1904. He wanted to make it as much as possible like an English home—for my mother’s sake….”

After dinner, we walked down the windy garden, in the Ťdarkness. A strong wind was blowing up through the trees, from over the water. I followed Bernhard, stumbling against the body of the terrier which kept running between my legs, down flights of stone steps to a landing-stage. The dark lake was full of waves, and beyond, in the direction of Potsdam, a sprinkle of bobbing lights were comet-tailed in the black water. On the parapet, a dismantled gas-bracket rattled in the wind, and, below us, the waves splashed uncannily soft and wet, against unseen stone.

“When I was a boy, I used to come down these steps in the winter evenings and stand for hours here….” Bernhard had begun to speak. His voice was pitched so low that I could hardly hear it; his face was turned away from me, in the darkness, looking out over the lake. When a stronger puff of wind blew, his words came more distinctly—as though the wind itself were talking: “That was during the Wartime. My elder brother had been killed, right at the beginning of the War… Later, certain business rivals of my father began to make propaganda against him, because his wife was an English woman, so that nobody would come to visit us, and it was rumoured that we were spies. At last, even the local tradespeople did not wish to call at the house… It was all rather ridiculous, and at the same time rather terrible, that human beings could be possessed by so much malice….”

I shivered a little, peering out over the water. It was cold. Bernhard’s soft, careful voice continued in my ear: “I used to stand here on those winter evenings and pretend to myself that I was the last human being left alive in the world… I was a queer sort of boy, I suppose… I never got on well with other boys, although I wished very much to be popular and to have friends. Perhaps that was my mistake—I was too eager to be friendly. The boys saw this “nd it made them cruel to me. Objectively, I can understand that… possibly I might even have been capable of cruelty myself, had circumstances been otherwise. It is difficult to say… But, being what I was, school was a kind of Chinese torture… So you can understand that I liked to come down here at night to the lake, and be alone. And then there was the War… At this time, I believed that the War would go on for ten, or fifteen, or even twenty years. I knew that I myself should soon be called up. Curiously enough, I don’t remember that I felt at all afraid. I accepted it. It seemed quite natural that we should all have to die. I suppose that this was the general wartime mentality. But I think that, in my case, there was also something characteristically Semitic in my attitude… It is very difficult to speak quite impartially of these things. Sometimes one is unwilling to make certain admissions to oneself, because they are displeasing to one’s selfesteem….”

We turned slowly and began to climb the slope of the garden from the lake. Now and then, I heard the panting of the terrier, out hunting in the dark. Bernhard’s voice went on, hesitating, choosing its words: “After my brother had been killed, my mother scarcely ever left this house and its grounds. I think she tried to forget that such a land as Germany existed. She began to study Hebrew and to concentrate her whole mind upon ancient Jewish history and literature. I suppose that this is really symptomatic of a modern phase of Jewish development—this turning away from European culture and European traditions. I am aware of it, sometimes, in myself… I remember my mother going about the house like a person walking in sleep. She grudged every moment which she did not spend at her studies, and this was rather terrible because, all the while, she was dying of cancer… As soon as she knew what was the matter with her, she refused to see a doctor. She feared an operation… At last, when the pain became very bad, she killed herself….”

We had reached the house. Bernhard opened a glass door, and we passed through a little conservatory into a big drawing-room full of jumping shadows from the fire burning in an open English fireplace. Bernhard switched on a number of lamps, making the room quite dazzlingly bright.

“Need we have so much illumination?” I asked. “I think the firelight is much nicer.”

“Do you?” Bernhard smiled subtly. “So do I… But I thought, somehow, that you would prefer the lamps.”

“Why on earth should I?” I mistrusted his tone at once.

“I don’t know. It’s merely part of my conception of your character. How very foolish I am!”

Bernhard’s voice was mocking. I made no reply. He got up and turned out all but one small lamp on a table at my side. There was a long silence.

“Would you care to listen to the wireless?”

This time his tone made me smile: “You don’t have to entertain me, you know! I’m perfectly happy just sitting here by the fire.”

“If you are happy, then I am glad… It was foolish of me—I had formed the opposite impression.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was afraid, perhaps, that you were feeling bored.”

“Of course not! What nonsense!”

“You are very polite, Christopher. You are always very polite. But I can read quite clearly what you are thinking….” I had never heard Bernhard’s voice sound like this, before; it was really hostile: “You are wondering why I brought you to this house. Above all, you are wondering why I told you what I told you just now.”

“I’m glad you told me….”

“No, Christopher. That is not true. You are a little shocked. One does not speak of such things, you think. It disgusts your English public-school training, a little—this Jewish emotionalism. You like to flatter yourself that you are a man of the world and that no form of weakness disgusts you, but your training is too strong for you. People ought not to talk to each other like this, you feel. It is not good form.”

“Bernhard, you’re being fantastic!”

“Am I? Perhaps… But I do not think so. Never mind… Since you wish to know, I will try to explain to you why I brought you here… I wished to make an experiment.”

“An experiment? Upon me, you mean?”

“No. An experiment upon myself. That is to say… For ten years, I have never spoken intimately, as I have spoken to you tonight, to any human soul… I wonder if you can put yourself in my place, imagine what that means? And this evening… Perhaps, after all, it is impossible to explain… Let me put it in another way. I bring you down here, to this house, which has no associations for you. You have no reason to feel oppressed by the past. Then I tell you my story… It is possible that, in this way, one can lay ghosts… I express myself very badly. Does it sound very absurd as I say it?’