When not engaged in laying cards, Frl. Mayr drinks tea and lectures Frl. Schroeder on her past theatrical triumphs:
“And the Manager said to me: ‘Fritzi, Heaven must have sent you here! My leading lady’s fallen ill. You’re to leave for Copenhagen tonight.’ And what’s more, he wouldn’t take no for an answer. ‘Fritzi,’ he said (he always called me that), ‘Fritzi, you aren’t going to let an old friend down?’ And so I went… .” Frl. Mayr sips her tea reminiscently: “A charming man. And so well-bred.” She smiles: “Familiar … but he always knew how to behave himself.”
Frl. Schroeder nods eagerly, drinking in every word, revelling in it:
“I suppose some of those managers must be cheeky devils? (Have some more sausage, Frl. Mayr?)”
“(Thank you, Frl. Schroeder; just a little morsel.) Yes, some of them … you wouldn’t believe! But I could always take care of myself. Even when I was quite a slip of a girl… .”
The muscles of Frl. Mayr’s nude fleshy arms ripple unappetisingly. She sticks out her chin:
“I’m a Bavarian; and a Bavarian never forgets an injury.”
Coming into the living-room yesterday evening, I found Frl. Schroeder and Frl. Mayr lying flat on their stomachs with their ears pressed to the carpet. At intervals, they ex—
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changed grins of delight or joyfully pinched each other, with simultaneous exclamations of Ssh!
“Hark!” whispered Frl. Schroeder, “he’s smashing all the furniture!”
“He’s beating her black and blue!” exclaimed Frl. Mayr, in raptures.
“Bang! Just listen to that!”
“Ssh! Ssh!”
“Ssh!”
Frl. Schroeder was quite beside herself. When I asked what was the matter, she clambered to her feet, waddled forward and, taking me round the waist, danced a little waltz with me: “Herr Issyvoo! Herr Issyvoo! Herr Issyvoo!” until she was breathless.
“But whatever has happened?” I asked.
“Ssh!” commanded Frl. Mayr from the floor. “Ssh! They’ve started again!”
In the flat directly beneath ours lives a certain Frau Glanterneck. She is a Galician Jewess, in itself a reason why Frl. Mayr should be her enemy: for Frl. Mayr, needless to say, is an ardent Nazi. And, quite apart from this, it seems that Frau Glanterneck and Frl. Mayr once had words on the stairs about Frl. Mayr’s yodelling. Frau Glanterneck, perhaps because she is a non-Aryan, said that she preferred the noises made by cats. Thereby, she insulted not merely Frl. Mayr, but all Bavarian, all German women: and it was Frl. Mayr’s pleasant duty to avenge them.
About a fortnight ago, it became known among the neighbours that Frau Glanterneck, who is sixty years old and as ugly as a witch, had been advertising in the newspaper for a husband. What was more, an applicant had already appeared: a widowed butcher from Halle. He had seen Frau Glanterneck and was nevertheless prepared to marry her. Here was Frl. Mayr’s chance. By roundabout inquiries, she discovered the butcher’s name and address and, wrote him an anonymous letter. Was he aware that Frau Glanterneck had (a) bugs in her flat, (b) been arrested for fraud and
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released on the ground that she was insane, (c) leased out her own bedroom for immoral purposes, and (d) slept in the bed afterwards without changing the sheets? And now the butcher had arrived to confront Frau Glanterneck with the letter. One could hear both of them quite distinctly: the growling of the enraged Prussian and the shrill screaming of the Jewess. Now and then came the thud of a fist against wood and, occasionally, the crash of glass. The row lasted over an hour.
This morning we hear that the neighbours have complained to the portress of the disturbance and that Frau Glanterneck is to be seen with a black eye. The marriage is off.
The inhabitants of this street know me by sight already. At the grocer’s, people no longer turn their heads on hearing my English accent as I order a pound of butter. At the street corner, after dark, the three whores no longer whisper throat-ily: “Komm, Süsser!” as I pass.
The three whores are all plainly over fifty years old. They do not attempt to conceal their age. They are not noticeably rouged or powdered. They wear baggy old fur coats and longish skirts and matronly hats. I happened to mention them to Bobby and he explained to me that there is a recognized demand for the comfortable type of woman. Many middle-aged men prefer them to girls. They even attract boys in their ‘teens. A boy, explained Bobby, feels shy with a girl of his own age but not with a woman old enough to be his mother. Like most barmen, Bobby is a great expert on sexual questions.
The other evening, I went to call on him during business hours.
It was still very early, about nine o’clock, when I arrived at the Troika. The place was much larger and grander than I had expected. A commissionaire braided like an archduke regarded my hatless head with suspicion until I spoke to him
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in English. A smart cloakroom girl insisted on taking my overcoat, which hides the worst stains on my baggy flannel trousers. A page-boy, seated on the counter, didn’t rise to open the inner door. Bobby, to my relief, was at his place behind a blue and silver bar. I made towards him as towards an old friend. He greeted me most amiably:
“Good evening, Mr. Isherwood. Very glad to see you here.”
I ordered a beer and settled myself on a stool in the corner. With my back to the wall, I could survey the whole room.
“How’s business?” I asked.
Bobby’s care-worn, powdered, night-dweller’s face became grave. He inclined his head towards me, over the bar, with confidential flattering seriousness:
“Not much good, Mr. Isherwood. The kind of public we have nowadays … you wouldn’t believe it! Why, a year ago, we’d have turned them away at the door. They order a beer and think they’ve got the right to sit here the whole evening.”
Bobby spoke with extreme bitterness. I began to feel uncomfortable:
“What’ll you drink?” I asked, guiltily gulping down my beer; and added, lest there should be any misunderstanding: “I’d like a whisky and soda.”
Bobby said he’d have one, too.
The room was nearly empty. I looked the few guests over, trying to see them through Bobby’s disillusioned eyes. There were three attractive, well-dressed girls sitting at the bar: the one nearest to me was particularly elegant, she had quite a cosmopolitan air. But during a lull in the conversation, I caught fragments of her talk with the other barman. She spoke broad Berlin dialect. She was tired and bored; her mouth dropped. A young man approached her and joined in the discussion; a handsome broad-shouldered boy in a well-cut dinner-jacket, who might well have been an English public-school prefect on holiday.
‘“Nee, nee,” I heard him say. “Bei mir nicht!” He grinned and made a curt, brutal gesture of the streets.
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Over in the corner sat a page-boy, talking to the little old lavatory attendant in his white jacket. The boy said something, laughed and broke off suddenly into a huge yawn. The three musicians on their platform were chatting, evidently unwilling to begin until they had an audience worth playing to. At one of the tables, I thought I saw a genuine guest, a stout man with a moustache. After a moment, however, I caught his eye, he made me a little bow and I knew that he must be the manager.
The door opened. Two men and two women came in. The women were elderly, had thick legs, cropped hair and costly evening-gowns. The men were lethargic, pale, probably Dutch. Here, unmistakably, was Money. In an instant, the Troika was transformed. The manager, the cigarette boy and the lavatory attendant rose simultaneously to their feet. The lavatory attendant disappeared. The manager said something in a furious undertone to the cigarette-boy, who also disappeared. He then advanced, bowing and smiling, to the guests’ table and shook hands with the two men. The cigarette-boy reappeared with his tray, followed by a waiter who hurried forward with the wine-list. Meanwhile, the three-man orchestra struck up briskly. The girls at the bar turned on their stools, smiling a not-too-direct invitation. The gigolos advanced to them as if to complete strangers, bowed formally and asked, in cultured tones, for the pleasure of a dance. The page-boy, spruce, discreetly grinning, swaying from the waist like a flower, crossed the room with his tray of cigarettes: “Zigarren! Zigaretten!” His voice was mocking, clear-pitched like an actor’s. And in the same tone, yet more loudly, mockingly, joyfully, so that we could all hear, the waiter ordered from Bobby: “Heidsick Monopol!”