The Berlin Stories

by Christopher Isherwood

  When I opened the door Otto was sitting on his bed. He was staring as if hypnotized at a gash on his left wrist, from which the blood was trickling down over his open palm and spilling in big drops on the floor. In his right hand between finger and thumb, he held a safety-razor blade. He didn’t resist when I snatched it from him. The wound itself was nothing much; I bandaged it with his handerchief. Otto seemed to turn faint for a moment and lolled against my shoulder.

  “How on earth did you manage to do it?”

  “I wanted to show her,” said Otto. He was very pale. He had evidently given himself a nasty scare: “You shouldn’t have stopped me, Christoph.”

  “You little idiot,” I said angrily, for he had frightened me, too: “One of these days you’ll really hurt yourself — by mistake.”

  Otto gave me a long, reproachful look. Slowly his eyes filled with tears.

  “What does it matter, Christoph? I’m no good . . . What’ll become of me, do you suppose, when I’m older?”

  “You’ll get work.”

  “Work . . .” The very thought made Otto burst into tears. Sobbing violently, he smeared the back of his hand across his nose.

  I pulled out the handkerchief from my pocket. “Here. Take this.”

  “Thanks, Christoph . . .” He wiped his eyes mournfully and blew his nose. Then something about the handkerchief itself caught his attention. He began to examine it, listlessly at first, then with extreme interest.

  “Why, Christoph,” he exclaimed indignantly, “this is one of mine!”

  One afternoon, a few days after Christmas, I visited the Wassertorstrasse again. The lamps were alight already, as I turned in under the archway and entered the long, damp street, patched here and there with dirty snow. Weak yellow gleams shone out from the cellar shops. At a hand-cart under a gas-flare, a cripple was selling vegetables and fruit. A crowd of youths, with raw, sullen faces, stood watching two boys fighting at a doorway: a girl’s voice screamed excitedly as one of them tripped and fell. Crossing the muddy courtyard, inhaling the moist, familiar rottenness of the tenement buildings, I thought: Did I really ever live here? Already, with my comfortable bed-sitting-room in the West End and my excellent new job, I had become a stranger to the slums.

  The lights on the Nowaks’ staircase were out of order: it was pitch-dark. I groped my way upstairs without much difficulty and banged on their door. I made as much noise as I could because, to judge from the shouting and singing and shrieks of laughter within, a party was in progress.

  “Who’s there?” bawled Herr Nowak’s voice.

  “Christoph.”

  “Aha! Christoph! Anglais! Englisch man! Come in! Come in!”

  The door was flung open. Herr Nowak swayed unsteadily on the threshold, with arms open to embrace me. Behind him stood Grete, shaking like a jelly, with tears of laughter pouring down her cheeks. There was nobody else to be seen.

  “Good old Christoph!” cried Herr Nowak, thumping me on the back. “I said to Grete: I know he’ll come. Christoph won’t desert us!” With a large burlesque gesture of welcome he pushed me violently into the living-room. The whole place was fearfully untidy. Clothing of various kinds lay in a confused heap on one of the beds; on the other were scattered cups, saucers, shoes, knives and forks. On the sideboard was a frying-pan full of dried fat. The room was lighted by three candles stuck into empty beer-bottles.

  “All light’s been cut off,” explained Herr Nowak, with a negligent sweep of his arm: “the bill isn’t paid . . . Must pay it sometime, of course. Never mind — it’s nicer like this, isn’t it? Come on, Grete, let’s light up the Christmas tree.”

  The Christmas tree was the smallest I had ever seen. It was so tiny and feeble that it could only carry one candle, at the very top. A single thin strand of tinsel was draped around it. Herr Nowak dropped several lighted matches on the floor before he could get the candle to bum. If I hadn’t stamped them out the table-cloth might easily have caught fire.

  “Where’s Lothar and Otto?” I asked.

  “Don’t know. Somewhere about . . . They don’t show themselves much nowadays — it doesn’t suit them, here . . . Never mind, we’re quite happy by ourselves, aren’t we, Grete?” Herr Nowak executed a few elaphantine dance-steps and began to sing:

  “O Tannenbaum! O Tannenbaum!. . . Come on, Christoph, all together now! Wie treu sind Deine Blätter!”

  After all this was over I produced my presents: cigars for Herr Nowak, for Grete chocolates and a clockwork mouse. Herr Nowak then brought a bottle of beer from under the bed. After a long search for his spectacles, which were finally discovered hanging on the water-tap in the kitchen, he read me a letter which Frau Nowak had written from the sanatorium. He repeated every sentence three or four times, got lost in the middle, swore, blew his nose, and picked his ears. I could hardly understand a word. Then he and Grete began playing with the clockwork mouse, letting it run about the table, shrieking and roaring whenever it neared the edge. The mouse was such a success that my departure was managed briefly, without any fuss. “Goodbye, Christoph. Come again soon,” said Herr Nowak and turned back to the table at once. He and Grete were bending over it with the eagerness of gamblers as I made my way out of the attic.

  Not long after this I got a call from Otto himself. He had come to ask me if I would go with him the next Sunday to see Frau Nowak. The sanatorium had its monthly visiting-day: there would be a special bus running from Hallesches Tor.

  “You needn’t pay for me, you know,” Otto added grandly. He was fairly shining with self-satisfaction.

  “That’s very handsome of you, Otto . . . A new suit?”

  “Do you like it?”

  “It must have cost a good bit.”

  “Two hundred and fifty marks.”

  “My word! Has your ship come home?”

  Otto smirked: “I’m seeing a lot of Trade now. Her uncle’s left her some money. Perhaps, in the spring, we’ll get married.”

  “Congratulations . . . I suppose you’re still living at home?”

  “Oh, I look in there occasionally,” Otto drew down the corners of his mouth in a grimace of languid distaste, “but father’s always drunk.”

  “Disgusting, isn’t it?” I mimicked his tone. We both laughed.

  “My goodness, Christoph, is it as late as that? I must be getting along . . . Till Sunday. Be good.”

  We arrived at the sanatorium about midday.

  There was a bumpy cart-track winding for several kilometres through snowy pine-woods and then, suddenly, a Gothic brick gateway like the entrance to a churchyard, with big red buildings rising behind. The bus stopped. Otto and I were the last passengers to get out. We stood stretching ourselves and blinking at the bright snow: out here in the country everything was dazzling white. We were all very stiff, for the bus was only a covered van, with packing-cases and school-benches for seats. The seats had not shifted much during the journey, for we had been packed together as tightly as books on a shelf.

  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!”

  S
he 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 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 today 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 pine-woods — 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 today,” 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 fed 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 snow-drift. A little further on we passed close to a summer-house, 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 today. 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 bunched 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 sawmill 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 members of an aboriginal forest tribe.

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

  “Tell your 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.