Read Online Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood - Free Book Online

because Edward was Christopher’s friend. Christopher was uneasily aware that Otto’s presence was spoiling their reunion. Yet his obsession was such that he couldn’t bring himself to tell Otto to disappear until Edward’s visit was over. He was afraid that Otto might disappear altogether.
    Christopher had always regarded Edward as his literary mentor; and now it seemed that he might become Christopher’s political mentor, too. For Edward was now a convert to Marxism, although he hadn’t, as yet, joined the Communist Party. Christopher found no difficulty in responding to Communism romantically, as the brotherhood of man. But he was well aware that Edward’s involvement wasn’t romantic, it was altogether sane and serious; it was a change in his whole way of life. This change implied an austerity which both attracted and scared Christopher. He began to regard Edward as a conventionally pious Catholic might regard a friend who had made up his mind to become a priest.
    Edward returned to England at the end of the month. On September 2, he went to see Kathleen, at her invitation. Formerly, she had disapproved of Edward as a subversive influence on Christopher in college. (She always thought in terms of “influences.”) But now she turned to Edward instinctively, no doubt feeling that, as a heterosexual, he couldn’t be part of Berlin’s influence on Christopher. (“That hateful Berlin,” she exclaimed in her diary, “and all it contains!”)
    Edward reported on the meeting in a letter to Christopher:
    I have betrayed everything, but very diplomatically. My only blunder was letting her know that you were paying for Otto. I was properly trapped. And I’m far from sure that I managed to convince her that buggery isn’t unnatural. However, I insisted that you were more terrific than ever in England.
    *   *   *
    After Edward’s visit, Christopher became increasingly aware of the kind of world he was living in. Here was the seething brew of history in the making—a brew which would test the truth of all the political theories, just as actual cooking tests the cookery books. The Berlin brew seethed with unemployment, malnutrition, stock-market panic, hatred of the Versailles Treaty, and other potent ingredients. On September 20, a new one was added; in the Reichstag elections, the Nazis won 107 seats as against their previous 12, and became for the first time a major political party.
    *   *   *
    At the beginning of October, Christopher moved out of his In den Zelten room and went to live with Otto and his family. The Nowaks had a flat in a slum tenement in the Hallesches Tor district: Simeonstrasse 4. (In Goodbye to Berlin, the name of the street is given as the Wassertorstrasse, the Water Gate Street, because Christopher thought it sounded more romantic. The Wassertorstrasse was actually a continuation of the Simeonstrasse.)
    The Nowaks’ flat consisted of a tiny kitchen, a living room, and a small bedroom. The living room contained two large double beds, a dining table, six chairs, and a sideboard. These pieces of furniture must have come from a larger home and a more prosperous period; there was barely space to move around them. The bedroom had two single beds in it.
    Christopher’s arrival caused a rearrangement of sleeping space which, characteristically, inconvenienced everybody in the family but Otto. Otto’s elder brother, Lothar, had to give up his bed in the bedroom to Christopher and move into one of the double beds in the living room, sharing it with their twelve-year-old sister, Grete. Frau Nowak, who had been sleeping with Grete, had to share the other double bed with her husband. Frau Nowak probably didn’t mind this—though she complained of Herr Nowak’s snoring—because Christopher, as a lodger, was bringing extra money for his bed and board into the household. Herr Nowak