Finally, just as Arthur was making for the door, having been helped on with his overcoat and presented with his hat, came a last question asked in a tone which suggested that it hadn’t the remotest connexion with anything which had previously been said:
“You have recently become a member of the Communist Party?”
“I saw the trap at once, of course,” Arthur told us. “It was simply a trap. But I had to think quickly; any hesitation in answering would have been fatal. They’re so accustomed to notice these details . . . I am not a member of the Communist Party, nor of any other Left Wing organization. I merely sympathize with the attitude of the K.P.D. to certain non-political problems . . . I think that was the right answer? I think so. Yes.”
At last Bayer both smiled and spoke. “You have acted quite right, my dear Norris.” He seemed subtly amused.
Arthur was as pleased as a stroked cat.
“Comrade Bradshaw was of great assistance to me.”
“Oh yes?”
Bayer didn’t ask how.
“You have interest in our movement?”
His eyes measured me for the first time. No, he was not impressed. Equally, he did not condemn. A young bourgeois intellectual, he thought. Enthusiastic, within certain limits. Educated, within certain limits. Capable of response if appealed to in terms of his own class-language. Of some small use: everybody can do something. I felt myself blushing deeply.
“I’d like to help you if I could,” I said.
“You speak German?”
“He speaks excellent German,” put in Arthur, like a mother recommending her son to the notice of the headmaster. Smilingly Bayer considered me once more.
“So?”
He turned over the papers on his desk.
“Here is some translation which you could be so kind as to do for us. Will you please translate this in English? As you will see, it is a report of our work during the past year. From it you will learn a little about our aims. It should interest you, I think.”
He handed me a thick wad of manuscript, and rose to his feet. He was even smaller and broader than he had seemed on the platform. He laid a hand on Arthur’s shoulder.
“This is most interesting, what you have told me.” He shook hands with both of us, gave a brilliant parting smile: “And you will please,” he added comically to Arthur, “avoid to entangle this young Mr Bradshaw in your distress.”
“Indeed, I assure you, I shouldn’t dream of such a thing. His safety is almost, if not quite, as dear to me as my own . . . Well, ha ha, I won’t waste any more of your valuable time. Goodbye.”
The interview with Bayer had quite restored Arthur’s spirits.
“You made a good impression on him, William. Oh yes, you did. I could see that at once. And he’s a very shrewd judge of character. I think he was pleased with what I said to them at the Alexanderplatz, wasn’t he?”
“I’m sure he was.”
“I think so, yes.”
“Who is he?” I asked.
“I know very little about him, myself, William. I’ve heard that he began life as a research chemist. I don’t think his parents were working people. He doesn’t give one that impression, does he? In any case, Bayer isn’t his real name.”
•
After this meeting, I felt anxious to see Bayer again. I did the translation as quickly as I could, in the intervals of giving lessons. It took me two days. The manuscript was a report on the aims and progress of various strikes, and the measures taken to supply food and clothing to the families of the strikers. My chief difficulty was with the numerous and ever-recurring groups of initial letters which represented the names of the different organizations involved. As I did not know what most of these organizations were called in English, I didn’t know what letters to substitute for those in the manuscript.
“It is not so important,” replied Bayer, when I asked him about this. “We will attend to this matter ourselves.”
Something in his tone made me feel humiliated. The manuscript he had given me to translate was simply not important. It would probably never be sent to England at all. Bayer had given it me, like a toy, to play with, hoping, no doubt, to be rid of my tiresome, useless enthusiasm for a week at least.
“You find this work interesting?” he continued. “I am glad. It is necessary for every man and woman in our days to have knowledge of this problem. You have read something from Marx?”
I said that I had once tried to read Das Kapital.
“Ah, that is too difficult, for a beginning. You should try the Communist Manifesto. And some of Lenin’s pamphlets. Wait, I will give you . . .”
He was amiability itself. He seemed in no hurry to get rid of me. Could it really be that he had no more important way of spending the afternoon? He asked about the living conditions in the East End of London and I tried to eke out the little knowledge I had collected in the course of a few days’ slumming, three years before. His mere attention was flattery of the most stimulating kind. I found myself doing nearly all the talking. Half an hour later, with books and more papers to translate under my arm, I was about to say goodbye when Bayer asked:
“You have known Norris a long time?”
“More than a year, now,” I replied, automatically, my mind registering no reaction to the question.
“Indeed? And where did you meet?”
This time I did not miss the tone in his voice. I looked hard at him. But his extraordinary eyes were neither suspicious, nor threatening, nor sly. Smiling pleasantly, he simply waited in silence for my answer.
“We got to know each other in the train, on the way to Berlin.”
Bayer’s glance became faintly amused. With disarming bland directness, he asked:
“You are good friends? You go to see him often?”
“Oh yes. Very often.”
“You have not many English friends in Berlin, I think?”
“No.”
Bayer nodded seriously. Then he rose from his chair and shook my hand. “I have to go now and work. If there is anything you wish to say to me, please do not hesitate to come and see me at any time.”
“Thank you very much.”
So that was it, I thought, on my way down the shabby staircase. None of them trusted Arthur. Bayer didn’t trust him but he was prepared to make use of him, with all due precautions. And to make use of me, too, as a convenient spy on Arthur’s movements. It wasn’t necessary to let me into the secret. I could so easily be pumped. I felt angry, and at the same time rather amused.
After all, one couldn’t blame them.
Chapter Seven
Otto turned up at Arthur’s about a week later, unshaved and badly in need of a meal. They had let him out of prison the day before. When I went round to the flat that evening, I found him with Arthur in the dining-room, having just finished a substantial supper.
“And what did they use to give you on Sundays?” he was asking as I came in. “We got pea-soup with a sausage in it. Not so bad.”
“Let me see now,” Arthur reflected. “I’m afraid I really can’t remember. In any case, I never had much appetite . . . Ah, my dear William, here you are! Please take a chair. That is, if you don’t disdain the company of two old gaol-birds. Otto and I were just comparing notes.”
The day before Arthur and I visited the Alexanderplatz, Otto and Anni had had a quarrel. Otto had wanted to give fifteen pfennigs to a man who came round collecting for a strike fund of the I.A.H. Anni had refused to agree to this, “on principle.” “Why should the dirty communists have my money?” she had said. “I have to work hard enough to earn it.” The possessive pronoun challenged Otto’s accepted status and rights; he generously disregarded it. But the adjective had really shocked him. He had slapped her face, “not hard” he assured us, but violently enough to make her turn a somersault over the bed and land with her head against the wall; the bump had dislodged a framed photograph of Stalin, which had fallen to the ground and smashed its glass. Anni had begun to c
urse him and cry. “That’ll teach you not to talk about things you don’t understand,” Otto had told her, not unkindly. Communism had always been a delicate subject between them. “I’m sick of you,” cried Anni, “and all your bloody Reds. Get out of here!” She had thrown the photograph-frame at him and missed.
Thinking all this over carefully, in the neighbouring Lokal, Otto had come to the conclusion that he was the injured party. Pained and angry, he began drinking Korn. He drank a good deal. He was still drinking at nine o’clock in the evening, when a boy named Erich, whom he knew, came in, selling biscuits. Erich, with his basket, went the round of the cafés and restaurants in the whole district, carrying messages and picking up gossip. He told Otto that he had just seen Anni in a Nazi Lokal on the Kreuzberg, with Werner Baldow.
Werner was an old enemy of Otto’s, both political and private. A year ago, he had left the communist cell to which Otto belonged and joined the local Nazi storm-troop. He had always been sweet on Anni. Otto, who was pretty drunk by this time, did what even he would never have dared when sober; he jumped up and set off for the Nazi Lokal alone. Two policemen who happened to pass the place a minute or two after he entered it probably saved him from getting broken bones. He had just been flung out for the second time and wanted to go in again. The policemen removed him with difficulty; he bit and kicked on the way to the station. The Nazis, of course, were virtuously indignant. The incident featured in their newspapers next day as “an unprovoked and cowardly attack on a National-Socialist Lokal by ten armed communists, nine of whom made a successful escape.” Otto had the cutting in his pocket-book and showed it to us with pride. He had been unable to get at Werner himself. Werner had retreated with Anni into a room at the back of the Lokal as soon as he had come in.
“And he can keep her, the dirty bitch,” added Otto violently. “I wouldn’t have her again if she came to me on her knees.”
“Well, well,” Arthur began to murmur automatically, “we live in stirring times . . .”
He pulled himself up abruptly. Something was wrong. His eyes wandered uneasily over the array of plates and dishes, like an actor deprived of his cue. There was no teapot on the table.
Not many days after this, Arthur telephoned to tell me that Otto and Anni had made it up.
“I felt sure you’d be glad to hear. I may say that I myself was to some extent instrumental in the good work. Yes . . . Blessed are the peacemakers . . . As a matter of fact, I was particularly interested in effecting a reconciliation just now, in view of a little anniversary which falls due next Wednesday . . . You didn’t know? Yes, I shall be fifty-three. Thank you, dear boy. Thank you. I must confess I find it difficult to become accustomed to the thought that the yellow leaf is upon me . . . And now, may I invite you to a trifling banquet? The fair sex will be represented. Besides the reunited pair, there will be Madame Olga and two other of my more doubtful and charming acquaintances. I shall have the sitting-room carpet taken up, so that the younger members of the party can dance. Is that nice?”
“Very nice indeed.”
On Wednesday evening I had to give an unexpected lesson and arrived at Arthur’s flat later than I intended. I found Hermann waiting downstairs at the house door to let me in.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I hope you haven’t been standing here long?”
“It’s all right,” Hermann answered briefly. He unlocked the door and led the way upstairs. What a dreary creature he is, I thought. He can’t even brighten up for a birthday party.
I discovered Arthur in the sitting-room. He was reclining on the sofa in his shirt-sleeves, his hands folded in his lap.
“Here you are, William.”
“Arthur, I’m most terribly sorry. I hurried as much as I could. I thought I should never get away. That old girl I told you about arrived unexpectedly and insisted on having a two-hour lesson. She merely wanted to tell me about the way her daughter had been behaving. I thought she’d never stop . . . Why, what’s the matter? You don’t look well.”
Arthur sadly scratched his chin.
“I’m very depressed, dear boy.”
“But why? What about? . . . I say, where are your other guests? Haven’t they come yet?”
“They came. I was obliged to send them away.”
“Then you are ill?”
“No, William. Not ill. I fear I’m getting old. I have always hated scenes and now I find them altogether too much for me.”
“Who’s been making a scene?”
Arthur raised himself slowly from his chair. I had a sudden glimpse of him as he would be in twenty years’ time; shaky and rather pathetic.
“It’s a long story, William. Shall we have something to eat first? I’m afraid I can only offer you scrambled eggs and beer; if, indeed, there is any beer.”
“It doesn’t matter if there isn’t. I’ve brought you a little present.”
I produced a bottle of cognac which I had been holding behind my back.
“My dear boy, you overwhelm me. You shouldn’t, you know. You really shouldn’t. Are you sure you can afford it?”
“Oh, yes, easily. I’m saving quite a lot of money nowadays.”
“I always,” Arthur shook his head sadly, “look upon the capacity to save money as little short of miraculous.”
Our footsteps echoed loudly through the flat as we crossed the bare boards where the carpet had been.
“All was prepared for the festivities, when the spectre appeared to forbid the feast.” Arthur chuckled nervously and rubbed his hands together.
“Ah, but the Apparition, the dumb sign,
The beckoning finger bidding me forgo
The fellowship, the converse, and the wine,
The songs, the festal glow!
“Rather apt here, I think. I hope you know your William Watson? I have always regarded him as the greatest of the moderns.”
The dining-room was draped with paper festoons in preparation for the party; Chinese lanterns were suspended above the table. On seeing them, Arthur shook his head.
“Shall we have these things taken down, William? Will they depress you too much, do you think?”
“I don’t see why they should,” I said. “On the contrary, they ought to cheer us up. After all, whatever has happened, it’s still your birthday.”
“Well, well. You may be right. You’re always so philosophical. The blows of fate are indeed cruel.”
Hermann gloomily brought in the eggs. He reported, with rather bitter satisfaction, that there was no butter.
“No butter,” Arthur repeated. “No butter. My humiliation as a host is complete . . . Who would think, to see me now, that I have entertained more than one member of a royal family under my own roof? This evening I had intended to set a sumptuous repast before you. I won’t make your mouth water by reciting the menu.”
“I think the eggs are very nice. I’m only sorry that you had to send your guests away.”
“So am I, William. So am I. Unfortunately, it was impossible to ask them to stay. I shouldn’t have dared face Anni’s displeasure. She was naturally expecting to find a groaning board . . . And, in any case, Hermann told me there weren’t enough eggs in the house.”
“Arthur, do tell me now what has happened.”
He smiled at my impatience, enjoying a mystery, as always. Thoughtfully he squeezed his collapsed chin between finger and thumb.
“Well, William, the somewhat sordid story which I am about to relate to you centres on the sitting-room carpet.”
“Which you had taken up for the dancing?” Arthur shook his head.
“It was not, I regret to say, taken up for the dancing. That was merely façon de parler. I didn’t wish to distress one of your sympathetic nature unnecessarily.”
“You mean, you’ve sold it?”
“Not sold, William. You should know me better. I never sell if I can pawn.”
“I’m sorry. It was a nice carpet.”
“It was indeed . . . And worth very much m
ore than the two hundred marks I got for it. But one mustn’t expect too much these days . . . At all events, it would have covered the expenses of the little celebration I had planned. Unfortunately,” here Arthur glanced towards the door, “the eagle, or, shall I say, the vulture eye of Schmidt lighted upon the vacant space left by the carpet, and his uncanny acumen rejected almost immediately the very plausible explanation which I gave for its disappearance. He was very cruel to me. Very firm . . . To cut a long story short, I was left, at the end of our most unpleasant interview, with the sum of four marks, seventy-five pfennigs. The last twenty-five pfennigs were an unfortunate afterthought. He wanted them for his bus-fare home.”
“He actually took away your money?”
“Yes, it was my money, wasn’t it?” said Arthur eagerly, seizing this little crumb of encouragement. “That’s just what I told him. But he only shouted at me in the most dreadful way.”
“I never heard anything like it. I wonder you don’t sack him.”
“Well, William, I’ll tell you. The reason is very simple. I owe him nine months’ wages.”
“Yes, I supposed there was something like that. All the same, it’s no reason why you should allow yourself to be shouted at. I wouldn’t have put up with it.”
“Ah, my dear boy, you’re always so firm. I only wish I’d had you there to protect me. I feel sure you would have been able to deal with him. Although I must say,” Arthur added doubtfully, “Schmidt can be terribly firm when he likes.”
“But, Arthur, do you seriously mean to tell me that you intended spending two hundred marks on a dinner for seven people? I never heard anything so fantastic.”
“There were to have been little presents,” said Arthur meekly. “Something for each of you.”
“It would have been lovely, of course . . . But such extravagance . . . You’re so hard up that you can only eat eggs, and yet, when you do get some cash, you propose to blow it
immediately.”
“Don’t you start lecturing me, too, William, or I shall cry. I can’t help my little weaknesses. Life would be drab indeed if we didn’t sometimes allow ourselves a treat.”
The Berlin Stories Page 9