The Berlin Stories

  Frau Nowak looked after him and sighed: “He’s going round to his Nazis, I suppose. I often wish he’d never taken up with them at all. They put all kinds of silly ideas into his head. It makes him so restless. Since he joined them he’s been a different boy altogether . . . Not that I understand these politics myself. What I always say is — why can’t we have the Kaiser back? Those were the good times, say what you like.”

  “Ach, to hell with your old Kaiser,” said Otto. “What we want is a communist revolution.”

  “A communist revolution!” Frau Nowak snorted. “The idea! The communists are all good-for-nothing lazybones like you, who’ve never done an honest day’s work in their lives.”

  “Christoph’s a communist,” said Otto. “Aren’t you, Christoph?”

  “Not a proper one, I’m afraid.”

  Frau Nowak smiled: “What nonsense will you be telling us next! How could Herr Christoph be a communist? He’s a gentleman.”

  “What I say is —” Herr Nowak put down his knife and fork and wiped his moustache carefully on the back of his hand: “we’re all equal as God made us. You’re as good as me; I’m as good as you. A Frenchman’s as good as an Englishman; an Englishman’s as good as a German. You understand what I mean?”

  I nodded.

  “Take the war, now —” Herr Nowak pushed back his chair from the table: “One day I was in a wood. All alone, you understand. Just walking through the wood by myself, as I might be walking down the street . . . And suddenly — there before me, stood a Frenchman. Just as if he’d sprung out of the earth. He was no further away from me than you are now.” Herr Nowak sprang to his feet as he spoke. Snatching up the bread-knife from the table he held it before him, in a posture of defence, like a bayonet. He glared at me from beneath his bushy eyebrows, re-living the scene: “There we stand. We look at each other. That Frenchman was as pale as death. Suddenly he cries: ‘Don’t shoot me!’ Just like that.” Herr Nowak clasped his hands in a piteous gesture of entreaty. The bread-knife was in the way now: he put it down on the table. “ ‘Don’t shoot me! I have five children.’ (He spoke French, of course: but I could understand him. I could speak French perfectly in those days; but I’ve forgotten some of it now.) Well, I look at him and he looks at me. Then I say: ‘Ami.’ (That means Friend.) And then we shake hands.” Herr Nowak took my hand in both of his and pressed it with great emotion. “And then we begin to walk away from each other — backwards; I didn’t want him to shoot me in the back.” Still glaring in front of him Herr Nowak began cautiously retreating backwards, step by step, until he collided violently with the sideboard. A framed photograph fell off it. The glass smashed.

  “Pappi! Pappi!” cried Grete in delight. “Just look what you’ve done!”

  “Perhaps that’ll teach you to stop your fooling, you old clown!” exclaimed Frau Nowak angrily. Grete began loudly and affectedly laughing, until Otto slapped her face and she set up her stagey whine. Meanwhile Herr Nowak had restored his wife’s good temper by kissing her and pinching her cheek.

  “Get away from me, you great lout!” She protested, laughing, coyly pleased that I was present: “Let me alone, you stink of beer!”

  At that time, I had a great many lessons to give. I was out most of the day. My pupils were scattered about the fashionable suburbs of the west — rich, well-preserved women of Frau Nowak’s age, but looking ten years younger; they liked to make a hobby of a little English conversation on dull afternoons when their husbands were away at the office. Sitting on silk cushions in front of open fireplaces, we discussed Point Counter Point and Lady Chatterley’s Lover. A manservant brought in tea with buttered toast. Sometimes, when they got tired of literature, I amused them by descriptions of the Nowak household. I was careful, however, not to say that I lived there: it would have been bad for my business to admit that I was really poor. The ladies paid me three marks an hour; a little reluctantly, having done their best to beat me down to two marks fifty. Most of them also tried, deliberately or subconsciously, to cheat me into staying longer than my time. I always had to keep an eye on the clock.

  Fewer people wanted lessons in the morning; and so it happened that I usually got up much later than the rest of the Nowak family. Frau Nowak had her charring, Herr Nowak went off to his job at the furniture-removers’, Lothar, who was out of work, was helping a friend with a paper-round, Grete went to school. Only Otto kept me company; except on the mornings when, with endless nagging, he was driven out to the labour-bureau by his mother, to get his card stamped.

  After fetching our breakfast, a cup of coffee and a slice of bread and dripping, Otto would strip off his pyjamas and do exercises, shadow-box or stand on his head. He flexed his muscles for my admiration. Squatting on my bed, he told me stories:

  “Did I ever tell you, Christoph, how I saw the Hand?”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Well, listen . . . Once, when I was very small, I was lying in bed at night. It was very dark and very late. And suddenly I woke up and saw a great big black hand stretching over the bed. I was so frightened I couldn’t even scream. I just drew my legs up under my chin and stared at it. Then, after a minute or two, it disappeared and I yelled out. Mother came running in and I said: ‘Mother, I’ve seen the Hand.’ But she only laughed. She wouldn’t believe it.”

  Otto’s innocent face, with its two dimples, like a bun, had become very solemn. He held me with his absurdly small bright eyes, concentrating all his narrative powers:

  “And then, Christoph, several years later, I had a job as apprentice to an upholsterer. Well, one day — it was in the middle of the morning, in broad daylight — I was sitting working on my stool. And suddenly it seemed to go all dark in the room and I looked up and there was the Hand, as near to me as you are now, just closing over me. I felt my arms and legs turn cold and I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t cry out. The master saw how pale I was and he said: ‘Why, Otto, what’s the matter with you? Aren’t you well?’ And as he spoke to me it seemed as if the Hand drew right away from me again, getting smaller and smaller, until it was just a little black speck. And when I looked up again the room was quite light, just as it always was, and where I’d seen the black speck there was a big fly crawling across the ceiling. But I was so ill the whole day that the master had to send me home.”

  Otto’s face had gone quite pale during this recital and, for a moment, a really frightening expression of fear had passed over his features. He was tragic now; his little eyes bright with tears:

  “One day I shall see the Hand again. And then I shall die.”

  “Nonsense,” I said, laughing. “We’ll protect you.”

  Otto shook his head very sadly:

  “Let’s hope so, Christoph. But I’m afraid not. The Hand will get me in the end.”

  “How long did you stay with the upholsterer?” I asked.

  “Oh, not long. Only a few weeks. The master was so unkind to me. He always gave me the hardest jobs to do — and I was such a little chap then. One day I got there five minutes late. He made a terrible row; called me a verfluchter Hund. And do you think I put up with that?” Otto leant forward, thrust his face, contracted into a dry monkey-like leer of malice, towards me. “Nee, nee! Bei mir nicht!” His little eyes focused upon me for a moment with an extraordinary intensity of simian hatred; his puckered-up features became startlingly ugly. Then they relaxed. I was no longer the upholsterer. He laughed gaily and innocently, throwing back his hair, showing his teeth: “I pretended I was going to hit him. I frightened him, all right!” He imitated the gesture of a scared middle-aged man avoiding a blow. He laughed.

  “And then you had to leave?” I asked.

  Otto nodded. His face slowly changed. He was turning melancholy again.

  “What did your father and mother say to that?”

  “Oh, they’ve always been against me. Ever since I was small. If there were two crusts of bread, mother would always give the bigger one to Lothar. Whenever I complained the
y used to say: ‘Go and work. You’re old enough. Get your own food. Why should we support you?’ ” Otto’s eyes moistened with the most sincere self-pity: “Nobody understands me here. Nobody’s good to me. They all hate me really. They wish I was dead.”

  “How can you talk such rubbish, Otto! Your mother certainly doesn’t hate you.”

  “Poor mother!” agreed Otto. He had changed his tone at once, seeming utterly unaware of what he had just said: “It’s terrible. I can’t bear to think of her working like that, every day. You know, Christoph, she’s very, very ill. Often, at night she coughs for hours and hours. And sometimes she spits out blood. I lie awake wondering if she’s going to die.”

  I nodded. In spite of myself I began to smile. Not that I disbelieved what he had said about Frau Nowak. But Otto himself, squatting there on the bed, was so animally alive, his naked brown body, so sleek with health, that his talk of death seemed ludicrous, like the description of a funeral by a painted clown. He must have understood this, for he grinned back, not in the least shocked at my apparent callousness. Straightening his legs he bent forward without effort and grasped his feet with his hands: “Can you do that, Christoph?”

  A sudden notion pleased him: “Christoph, if I show you something, will you swear not to tell a single soul?”

  “All right.”

  He got up and rummaged under his bed. One of the floorboards was loose in the corner by the window: lifting it, he fished out a tin box which had once contained biscuits. The tin was full of letters and photographs. Otto spread them out on the bed:

  “Mother would burn these if she found them . . . Look, Christoph, how do you like her? Her name’s Hilde. I met her at the place where I go dancing . . . And this is Marie. Hasn’t she got beautiful eyes? She’s wild about me — all the other boys are jealous. But she’s not really my type.” Otto shook his head seriously: “You know, it’s a funny thing, but as soon as I know that a girl’s keen on me, I lose interest in her. I wanted to break with her altogether; but she came round here and made such a to-do in front of mother. So I have to see her sometimes to keep her quiet . . . And here’s Trade — honestly, Christoph, would you believe she was twenty-seven? It’s a fact! Hasn’t she a marvellous figure? She lives in the West End, in a flat of her own! She’s been divorced twice. I can go there whenever I like. Here’s a photo her brother took of her. He wanted to take some of us two together, but I wouldn’t let him. I was afraid he’d sell them, afterwards — you can be arrested for it, you know . . .” Otto smirked, handed me a packet of letters: “Here, read these; they’ll make you laugh. This one’s from a Dutchman. He’s got the biggest car I ever saw in my life. I was with him in the spring. He writes to me sometimes. Father got wind of it, and now he watches out to see if there’s any money in the envelopes — the dirty dog! But I know a trick worth two of that! I’ve told all my friends to address their letters to the bakery on the corner. The baker’s son is a pal of mine . . .”

  “Do you ever hear from Peter?” I asked.

  Otto regarded me very solemnly for a moment: “Christoph?”

  “Yes?”

  “Will you do me a favour?”

  “What is it?” I asked cautiously: Otto always chose the least expected moments to ask for a small loan.

  “Please . . .” he was gently reproachful, “please, never mention Peter’s name to me again . . .”

  “Oh, all right,” I said, very much taken aback: “If you’d rather not.”

  “You see, Christoph . . . Peter hurt me very much. I thought he was my friend. And then, suddenly, he left me — all alone . . .”

  Down in the murky pit of the courtyard where the fog, in this clammy autumn weather, never lifted, the street singers and musicians succeeded each other in a performance which was nearly continuous. There were parties of boys with mandolins, an old man who played the concertina and a father who sang with his little girls. Easily the favourite tune was: Aus der Jugendzeit. I often heard it a dozen times in one morning. The father of the girls was paralysed and could only make desperate throttled noises like a donkey; but the daughters sang with the energy of fiends: “Sie kommt, sie kommt nicht mehr!” they screamed in unison, like demons of the air, rejoicing in the frustration of mankind. Occasionally a groschen, screwed in a corner of newspaper, was tossed down from a window high above. It hit the pavement and ricocheted like a bullet, but the little girls never flinched.

  Now and then the visiting nurse called to see Frau Nowak, shook her head over the sleeping arrangements and went away again. The inspector of housing, a pale young man with an open collar (which he obviously wore on principle), came also and took copious notes. The attic, he told Frau Nowak, was absolutely insanitary and uninhabitable. He had a slightly reproachful air as he said this, as though we ourselves were partly to blame. Frau Nowak bitterly resented these visits. They were, she thought, simply attempts to spy on her. She was haunted by the fear that the nurse or the inspector would look in at a moment when the flat was untidy. So deep were her suspicions that she even told lies — pretending that the leak in the roof wasn’t serious — to get them out of the house as quickly as possible.

  Another regular visitor was the Jewish tailor and outfitter, who sold clothes of all kinds on the instalment plan. He was small and gentle and very persuasive. All day long he made his rounds of the tenements in the district, collecting fifty pfennigs here, a mark there, scratching up his precarious livelihood, like a hen, from this apparently barren soil. He never pressed hard for money; preferring to urge his debtors to take more of his goods and embark upon a fresh series of payments. Two years ago Frau Nowak had bought a little suit and an overcoat for Otto for three hundred marks. The suit and the overcoat had been worn out long ago, but the money was not nearly repaid. Shortly after my arrival Frau Nowak invested in clothes for Grete to the value of seventy-five marks. The tailor made no objection at all.

  The whole neighbourhood owed him money. Yet he was not unpopular: he enjoyed the status of a public character, whom people curse without real malice. “Perhaps Lothar’s right,” Frau Nowak would sometimes say: “When Hitler comes, he’ll show these Jews a thing or two. They won’t be so cheeky then.” But when I suggested that Hitler, if he got his own way, would remove the tailor altogether, then Frau Nowak would immediately change her tone: “Oh, I shouldn’t like that to happen. After all, he makes very good clothes. Besides, a Jew will always let you have time if you’re in difficulties. You wouldn’t catch a Christian giving credit like he does . . . You ask the people round here, Herr Christoph: they’d never turn out the Jews.”

  Towards evening Otto, who had spent the day in gloomy lounging — either lolling about the flat or chatting with his friends downstairs at the courtyard entrance — would begin to brighten up. When I got back from work I generally found him changing already from his sweater and knicker-bockers into his best suit, with its shoulders padded out to points, small, tight, double-breasted waistcoat and bell-bottomed trousers. He had quite a large selection of ties and it took him half an hour at least to choose one of them and to knot it to his satisfaction. He stood smirking in front of the cracked triangle of looking-glass in the kitchen, his pink plum-face dimpled with conceit, getting in Frau Nowak’s way and disregarding her protests. As soon as supper was over he was going out dancing.

  I generally went out in the evenings, too. However tired I was, I couldn’t go to sleep immediately after my evening meal: Grete and her parents were often in bed by nine o’clock. So I went to the cinema or sat in a café and read the newspapers and yawned. There was nothing else to do.

  At the end of the street there was a cellar lokal called the Alexander Casino. Otto showed it to me one evening, when we happened to leave the house together. You went down four steps from the street level, opened the door, pushed aside the heavy leather curtain which kept out the draught and found yourself in a long, low, dingy room. It was lit by red chinese lanterns and festooned with dusty paper streamers. Round the walls s
tood wicker tables and big shabby settees which looked like the seats of English third-class railway-carriages. At the far end were trellis-work alcoves, arboured over with imitation cherry-blossom twined on wires. The whole place smelt damply of beer.

  I had been here before: a year ago, in the days when Fritz Wendel used to take me on Saturday evening excursions round “the dives” of the city. It was all just as we had left it; only less sinister, less picturesque, symbolic no longer of a tremendous truth about the meaning of existence — because, this time, I wasn’t in the least drunk. The same proprietor, an ex-boxer, rested his immense stomach on the bar, the same hangdog waiter shuffled forward in his soiled white coat: two girls, the very same, perhaps, were dancing together to the wailing of the loud-speaker. A group of youths in sweaters and leather jackets were playing Sheep’s Head; the spectators leaning over to see the cards. A boy with tattooed arms sat by the stove, deep in a crime shocker. His shirt was open at the neck, with the sleeves rolled up to his armpits; he wore shorts and socks, as if about to take part in a race. Over in the far alcove, a man and a boy were sitting together. The boy had a round childish face and heavy reddened eyelids which looked swollen as if from lack of sleep. He was relating something to the elderly, shaven-headed, respectable-looking man, who sat rather unwillingly listening and smoking a short cigar. The boy told his story carefully and with great patience. At intervals, to emphasize a point, he laid his hand on the elderly man’s knee and looked up into his face, watching its every movement shrewdly and intently, like a doctor with a nervous patient.

  Later on, I got to know this boy quite well. He was called Pieps. He was a great traveller. He ran away from home at the age of fourteen because his father, a woodcutter in the Thuringian Forest, used to beat him. Pieps set out to walk to Hamburg. At Hamburg he stowed away on a ship bound for Antwerp and from Antwerp he walked back into Germany and along the Rhine. He had been in Austria, too, and Czechoslovakia. He was full of songs and stories and jokes: he had an extraordinarily cheerful and happy nature, sharing what he had with his friends and never worrying where his next meal was coming from. He was a clever pickpocket and worked chiefly in an amusement-hall in the Friedrichstrasse, not far from the Passage, which was full of detectives and getting too dangerous nowadays. In this amusement-hall there were punch-balls and peep-shows and try-your-grip machines. Most of the boys from the Alexander Casino spent their afternoons there, while their girls were out working the Friedrichstrasse and the Linden for possible pick-ups.