“Tell me, William,” his last letter concluded, “what have I done to deserve all this?”
THE END
191
GOODBYE TO BERLIN
to
John & Beatrix Lehmann
A BERLIN DIARY
(Autumn 1930)
From my window, the deep solemn massive street. Cellar-shops where the lamps burn all day, under the shadow of top-heavy balconied façades, dirty plaster frontages embossed with scrollwork and heraldic devices. The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle class. 1^ lama camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.
At eight o’clock in the evening the house-doors will be locked. The children are having supper. The shops are shut. The electric-sign is switched on over the night-bell of the little hotel on the corner, where you can hire a room by the hour. And soon the whistling will begin. Young men are calling their girls. Standing down there in the cold, they whistle up at the lighted windows of warm rooms where the beds are already turned down for the night. They want to be let in. Their signals echo down the deep hollow street, lascivious and private and sad. Because of the whistling, I do not care to stay here in the evenings. It reminds me that I am in a foreign city, alone, far from home. Sometimes I determine not to listen to it, pick up a book, try to read. But soon a call is sure to sound, so piercing, so insistent, so despairingly human, that at last I have to get up and peep through the slats of the Venetian blind to make quite sure
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that it is notas I know very well it could not possibly be for me.
The extraordinary smell in this room when the stove is lighted and the window shut; not altogether unpleasant, a mixture of incense and stale buns. The tall tiled stove, gorgeously coloured, like an altar. The washstand like a Gothic shrine. The cupboard also is Gothic, with carved cathedral windows: Bismarck faces the King of Prussia in stained glass. My best chair would do for a bishop’s throne. In the corner, three sham mediaeval halberds (from a theatrical touring company?) are fastened together to form a hatstand. Frl. Schroeder unscrews the heads of the halberds and polishes them from time to time. They are heavy and sharp enough to kill.
Everything in the room is like that: unnecessarily solid, abnormally heavy and dangerously sharp. Here, at the writing-table, I am confronted by a phalanx of metal objectsa pair of candlesticks shaped like entwined serpents, an ashtray from which emerges die head of a crocodile, a paper-knife copied from a Florentine dagger, a brass dolphin holding on the end of its tail a small broken clock. What becomes of such things? How could they ever be destroyed? They will probably remain intact for thousands of years: people will treasure them in museums. Or perhaps they will merely be melted down for munitions in a war. Every morning, Frl. Schroeder arranges them very carefully in certain unvarying positions : there they stand, like an uncompromising statement of her views on Capital and Society, Religion and Sex.
All day long she goes padding about the large dingy flat. Shapeless but alert, she waddles from room to room, in carpet slippers and a flowered dressing-gown pinned ingeniously together, so that not an inch of petticoat or bodice is to be seen, flicking with her duster, peeping, spying, poking her short pointed nose into the cupboards and luggage of her
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lodgers. She has dark, bright, inquisitive eyes and pretty waved brown hair of which she is proud. She must be about fifty-five years old.
Long ago, before the War and the Inflation, she used to be comparatively well off. She went to the Baltic for her summer holidays and kept a maid to do the housework. For the last thirty years she has lived here and taken in lodgers. She started doing it because she liked to have company.
” ‘Lina,’ my friends used to say to me, ‘however can you? How can you bear to have strange people living in your rooms and spoiling your furniture, especially when you’ve got the money to be independent?’ And I’d always give them the same answer. ‘My lodgers aren’t lodgers,’ I used to say. They’re my guests.’
“You see, Herr Issyvoo, in those days I could afford to be very particular about the sort of people who came to live here. I could pick and choose. I only took them really well connected and well educatedproper gentlefolk ( like yourself, Herr Issyvoo ). I had a Freiherr once, and a Rittmeister and a Professor. They often gave me presentsa bottle of cognac or a box of chocolates or some flowers. And when one of them went away for his holidays he’d always send me a cardfrom London, it might be, or Paris, or Baden-Baden. Ever such pretty cards I used to get… ,”
And now Frl. Schroeder has not even got a room of her own. She has to sleep in the living-room, behind a screen, on a small sofa with broken springs. As in so many of the older Berlin flats, our living-room connects the front part of the house with the back. The lodgers who live on the front have to pass through the living-room on their way to the bathroom,’ so that Frl. Schroeder is often disturbed during the night. “But I drop off again at once. It doesn’t worry me. I’m much too tired.” She has to do all the housework herself and it takes up most of her day. “Twenty years ago, if anybody had told me to scrub my own floors, I’d have slapped his face for him. But you get used to it. You can get used to anything. Why, I remember the time when I’d have sooner
cut off my right hand than empty this chamber… . And now,” says Frl. Schroeder, suiting the action to the word, “my goodness! It’s no more to me than pouring out a cup of tea!”
She is fond of pointing out to me the various marks and stains left by lodgers who have inhabited this room:
“Yes, Herr Issyvoo, I’ve got something to remember each of them by… . Look there, on the rugI’ve sent it to the cleaners I don’t know how often but nothing will get it out that’s where Herr Noeske was sick after his birthday party. What in the world can he have been eating, to make a mess like that? He’d come to Berlin to study, you know. His parents lived in Brandenburga first-class family; oh, I assure you! They had pots of money! His Herr Papa was a surgeon, and of course he wanted his boy to follow in his footsteps… . What a charming young man! ‘Herr Noeske,’ I used to say to him, ‘excuse me, but you must really work harder you with all your brains! Think of your Herr Papa and your Frau Mama; it isn’t fair to them to waste their good money like that. Why, if you were to drop it in the Spree it would be better. At least it would make a splash!’ I was like a mother to him. And always, when he’d got himself into some scrape he was terribly thoughtlesshe’d come straight to me: ‘Schroederschen,’ he used to say, ‘please don’t be angry with me… . We were playing cards last night and I lost the whole of this month’s allowance. I daren’t tell Father… .’ And then he’d look at me with those great big eyes of his. I knew exactly what he was after, the scamp! But I hadn’t the heart to refuse. So I’d sit down and write a letter to his Frau Mama and beg her to forgive him just that once and send some more money. And she always would. … Of course, as a woman, I knew how to appeal to a mother’s feelings, although I’ve never had any children of my own… . What are you smiling at, Herr Issyvoo? Well, well! Mistakes will happen, you know!”
“And that’s where the Herr Rittmeister always upset his coffee over the wallpaper. He used to sit there on the couch with his fiancée. ‘Herr Rittmeister,’ I used to say to him, ‘do please drink your coffee at the table. If you’ll excuse my saying so, there’s plenty of time for the other thing afterwards… .’ But no, he always would sit on the couch. And then, sure enough, when he began to get a bit excited in his feelings, over went the coffee-cups… . Such a handsome gentleman! His Frau Mama and his sister came to visit us sometimes. They liked coming up to Berlin. ‘Fräulein Schroeder,’ they used to tell me, ‘you don’t know how lucky you are to be living here, right in the middle of things. We’re only country cousinswe envy you! And now tell us all the latest Court scandals!’ Of course, they were only joking. They had the sweetest little house, not far from Halberstadt, in the Harz. They used to show me pictures of it. A perfect dream!”