The Berlin Stories (39 page)

In return for this outlay, Otto has volunteered to break off his relations with the teacher. (We now discover that, in any case, she is leaving the island tomorrow.) After supper, she appeared, walking up and down outside the house.

“Just let her wait till she’s tired,” said Otto. “I’m not going down to her.”

Presently the girl, made bold by impatience, began to whistle. This sent Otto into a frenzy of glee. Throwing open the window, he danced up and down, waving his arms and making hideous faces at the teacher who, for her part, seemed struck dumb with amazement at this extraordinary exhibition.

“Get away from here!” Otto yelled. “Get out!”

The girl turned, and walked slowly away, a rather pathetic figure, into the gathering darkness.

“I think you might have said goodbye to her,” said Peter, who could afford to be magnanimous, now that he saw his enemy routed.

But Otto wouldn’t hear of it.

“What’s the use of all those rotten girls, anyhow? Every night they came pestering me to dance with them… And you know how I am, Peter—I’m so easily persuaded… Of course, it was horrid of me to leave you alone, but what could I do? It was all their fault, really….”

Our life has now entered upon a new phase. Otto’s resolutions were short-lived. Peter and I are alone together most of the day. The teacher has left, and with her, Otto’s last inducement to bathe with us from the fort. He now goes off, every morning, to the bathing-beach by the pier, to flirt and play ball with his dancing-partners of the evening. The little doctor has also disappeared, and Peter and I are free to bathe and loll in the sun as unathletically as we wish.

After supper, the ritual of Otto’s preparations for the dance begins. Sitting in my bedroom, I hear Peter’s footsteps cross the landing, light and springy with relief—for now comes the only time of day when Peter feels himself altogether excused from taking any interest in Otto’s activities. When he taps on my door, I shut my book at once. I have been out already to the village to buy half-a-pound of peppermint creams. Peter says goodbye to Otto, with a vain lingering hope that, perhaps tonight, he will, after all, be punctual: “Till half-past twelve, then….”

“Till one,” Otto bargains.

“All right,” Peter concedes. “Till one. But don’t be late.”

“No, Peter, I won’t be late.”

As we open the garden gate and cross the road into the wood, Otto waves to us from the balcony. I have to be careful to hide the peppermint creams under my coat, in case he should see them. Laughing guiltily, munching the peppermints, we take the woodland path to Baabe. We always spend our evenings in Baabe, nowadays. We like it better than our own village. Its single sandy street of low-roofed houses among the pine-trees has a romantic, colonial air; it is like a ramshackle, lost settlement somewhere in the backwoods, where people come to look for a non-existent gold mine and remain, stranded, for the rest of their lives.

In the little restaurant, we eat strawberries and cream, and talk to the young waiter. The waiter hates Germany and longs to go to America. “Hier ist nichts los.” During the season, he is allowed no free time at all, and in the winter he earns nothing. Most of the Baabe boys are Nazis. Two of them come into the restaurant sometimes and engage us in good-humoured political arguments. They tell us about their field-exercises and military games.

“You’re preparing for war,” says Peter indignantly. On these occasions—although he has really not the slightest interest in politics—he gets quite heated.

“Excuse me,” one of the boys contradicts, “that’s quite wrong. The Führer does not want war. Our programme stands for peace, with honour. All the same…” he adds wistfully, his face lighting up, “war can be fine, you know! Think of the ancient Greeks!”

“The ancient Greeks,” I object, “didn’t use poison gas.”

The boys are rather scornful at this quibble. One of them answers loftily. “That’s a purely technical question.”

At half-past ten we go down, with most of the other inhabitants, to the railway station, to watch the arrival of the last train. It is generally empty. It goes clanging away through the dark woods, sounding its harsh bell. At last it is late enough to start home; this time, we take the road. Across the meadows, you can see the illuminated entrance of the café by the lake, where Otto goes to dance.

“The lights of Hell are shining brightly this evening,” Peter is fond of remarking.

Peter’s jealousy has turned into insomnia. He has begun taking sleeping tablets, but admits that they
seldom have any effect. They merely made him fee! drowsy next morning, after breakfast. He often goes to sleep for an hour or two in our fort, on the shore.

This morning the weather was cool and dull, the sea oyster-grey. Peter and I hired a boat, rowed out beyond the pier, then let ourselves drift, gently, away from the land. Peter lit a cigarette. He said abruptly: “I wonder how much longer this will go on….”

“As long as you let it, I suppose.”

“Yes… We seem to have got into a pretty static condition, don’t we? I suppose there’s no particular reason why Otto and I should ever stop behaving to each other as we do at present….” He paused, added: “Unless, of course, I stop giving him money.”

“What do you think would happen, then?”

Peter paddled idly in the water with his fingers. “He’d leave me.” • The boat drifted on for several minutes. I asked: “You don’t think he cares for you, at all?”

“At the beginning he did, perhaps… Not now. There’s nothing between us now but my cash.”

“Do you still care for him?”

“No… I don’t know. Perhaps… I still hate him, sometimes—if that’s a sign of caring.”

“It might be.”

There was a long pause. Peter dried his fingers on his handkerchief. His mouth twitched nervously.

“Well,” he said at last, “what do you advise me to do?”

“What do you want to do?”

Peter’s mouth gave another twitch.

“I suppose, really, I want to leave him.”

“Then you’d better leave him.”

“At once?”

“The sooner the better. Give him a nice present and send him back to Berlin this afternoon.”

Peter shook his head, smiled sadly: “I can’t.”

There was another long pause. Then Peter said: “I’m sorry Christopher… You’re absolutely right, I know. If I were in your place, I’d say the same thing… But I can’t. Things have got to go on as they are—until something happens. They can’t last much longer, anyhow… Oh, I know I’m very weak….”

“You needn’t apologise to me,” I smiled, to conceal a slight feeling of irritation: “I’m not one of your analysts!”

I picked up the oars and began to row back towards the shore. As we reached the pier, Peter said: “It seems funny to think of now—when I first met Otto, I thought we should live together for the rest of our lives.”

“Oh, my God!” The vision of a life with Otto opened before me, like a comic inferno. I laughed out loud. Peter laughed, too, wedging his locked hands between his knees. His face turned from pink to red, from red to purple. His veins bulged. We were still laughing when we got out of the boat.

In the garden the landlord was waiting for us. “What a pity!” he exclaimed. “The gentlemen are too late!” He pointed over the meadows, in the direction of the lake. We could see the smoke rising above the line of poplars, as the little train drew out of the station: “Your friend was obliged to leave for Berlin, suddenly, on urgent business. I hoped the gentlemen might have been in time to see him off. What a pity!”

This time, both Peter and I ran upstairs. Peter’s bedroom was in a terrible mess—all the drawers and cupboards were open. Propped up on the middle of the table was a note, in Otto’s cramped, scrawling hand: Dear Peter. Please forgive me I couldn’t stand it any longer here so I am going home.

Love from Otto.

Don’t be angry.

( Otto had written it, I noticed it, on a fly-leaf torn out of one of Peter’s psychology books: Beyond the Pleasure-Principle.)

“Well…!” Peter’s mouth began to twitch. I glanced at him nervously, expecting a violent outburst, but he seemed fairly calm. After a moment, he walked over to the cupboards and began looking through the drawers. “He hasn’t taken much,” he announced, at the end of his search. “Only a couple of my ties, three shirts—lucky my shoes don’t fit him!—and, let’s see… about two hundred marks….” Peter started to laugh, rather hysterically: “Very moderate, on the whole!”

“Do you think he decided to leave quite suddenly?” I asked, for the sake of saying something.

“Probably he did. That would be just like him… Now I come to think of ďt, I told him we were going out in that boat, this morning—and he asked me if we should be away for long….” I see….

I sat down on Peter’s bed—thinking, oddly enough, that Otto has at last done something which I rather respect.

Peter’s hysterical high spirits kept him going for the rest of the morning; at lunch he turned gloomy, and wouldn’t say a word.

“Now I must go and pack,” he told me when we had finished.

“You’re off, too?”

“Of course.”

“To Berlin?”

Peter smiled. “No, Christopher. Don’t be alarmed! Only to England….”

“Oh….”

“There’s a train whichil get me to Hamburg, late tonight. I shall probably go straight on… I feel I’ve got to keep travelling until I’m clear of this bloody country….”

There was nothing to say. I helped him pack, in silence. As Peter put his shaving-mirror into the bag, he asked: “Do you remember how Otto broke this, standing on his head?”

“Yes, I remember.”

When we had finished, Peter went out on to the balcony of his room: “There’ll be plenty of whistling outside here, tonight,” he said.

I smiled: “I shall have to go down and console them.”

Peter laughed: “Yes. You will!”

I went with him to the station. Luckily, the engine-driver was in a hurry. The train only waited a couple of minutes.

“What shall you do when you get to London?” I asked.

Peter’s mouth curved down at the corners; he gave me a kind of inverted grin: “Look round for another analyst, I suppose.”

“Well, mind you beat down his prices a bit!”

“I will.”

As the train moved out, he waved his hand: “Well, goodbye, Christopher. Thank you for all your moral support!”

Peter never suggested that I should write to him, or visit him at home. I suppose he wants to forget this place, and everybody concerned with it. I can hardly blame him.

It was only this evening, turning over the pages of a book I have been reading, that I found another note from Otto, slipped between the leaves.

Please dear Christoph don’t you be angry with me too because you aren’t an idiot like Peter. When you are back in Berlin I shall come and see you because I know where you live; I saw the address on one of your letters and we can have a nice talk.

Your loving friend,

Otto.

I thought, somehow, that he wouldn’t be got rid of quite so easily.

Actually, I am leaving for Berlin in a day 01 two, now. I thought I should stay on till the end of August, and perhaps finish my novel, but, suddenly, the place seems so lonely. I miss Peter and Otto, and their daily quarrels, far more than I should have expected. And now even Otto’s dancing-partners have stopped lingering sadly in the twilight, under my window.

THE NOWAKS

The entrance to the Wassertorstrasse was a big stone archway, a bit of old Berlin, daubed with hammers and sickles and Nazi crosses and plastered with tattered bills which advertised auctions or crimes. It was a deep shabby cobbled street, littered with sprawling children in tears. Youths in woollen sweaters circled waveringly across it on racing bikes and whooped at girls passing with milk-jugs. The pavement was chalk-marked for the hopping game called Heaven and Earth. At the end of it, like a tall, dangerously sharp, red instrument, stood a church.

Frau Nowak herself opened the door to me. She looked far iller than when I had seen her last, with big blue rings under her eyes. She was wearing the same hat and mangy old black coat. At first, she didn’t recognise me.

“Good afternoon, Frau Nowak.”

Her face changed slowly from poking suspicion to a brilliant, timid, almost girlish smile of welcome: “Why, if it isn’t Herr Christoph! Come in, Herr Christoph! Come in and sit down.”

“I’m afraid you were just going out, weren’t you?”

“No, no, Herr Christoph—I’ve just come in; just this minute.” She was wiping her hands hastily on her coat before shaking mine: “This is one of my charring days. I don’t get finished till half-past two, and it makes the dinner so late.”

She stood aside for me to enter. I pushed open the door and, in doing so, jarred the handle of the frying-pan on the stove which stood just behind it. In the tiny kitchen there was barely room for the two of us together. A stifling smell of potatoes fried in cheap margarine filled the flat.

“Come and sit down, Herr Christoph,” she repeated, hastily doing the honours. “I’m afraid it’s terribly untidy. You must excuse that. I have to go out so early and my Grete’s such a lazy great lump, though she’s turned twelve. There’s no getting her to do anything, if you don’t stand over her all the time.”

The living-room had a sloping ceiling stained with old patches of damp. It contained a big table, six chairs, a sideboard and two large double-beds. The place was so full of furniture that you had to squeeze your way into it sideways.

“Grete!” cried Frau Nowak. “Where are you? Come here this minute!”

“She’s gone out,” came Otto’s voice from the inner room.

“Otto! Come and see who’s here!”

“Can’t be bothered. I’m busy mending the gramophone.”

“Busy, indeed! You! You good-for-nothing! That’s a nice way to speak to your mother! Come out of that room, do you hear me?”

She had flown into a rage instantly, automatically, with astonishing violence. Her face became all nose: thin, bitter and inflamed. Her whole body trembled.