Goodbye To Berlin

Then an old man would shuffle in, whisper something to the barman and retire with him into the room behind the bar. He was a cocaine-addict. A moment later he reappeared, raised his hat to all of us with a vague courteous gesture, and shuffled out. The old man had a nervous tic and kept shaking his head all the time, as if saying to Life: No. No. N

Frl. Schroeder can go on like this, without repeating herself, by the hour. When I have been listening to her for some time, I find myself relapsing into a curious trance-like state of depression. I begin to feel profoundly unhappy. Where are all those lodgers now? Where, in another ten years, shall I be, myself? Certainly not here.

I say nothing. There is too much to say.

‘Concentration camps,’ said the fat man, lighting a cigar. ‘They get them in there, make them sign things . . . Then their hearts fail.’

It was a complicated simplicity, the negation of a negation. Its roots were entangled deep in the awful guilt of possession.

He heard later indirectly that the tutor had grown a moustache and gone out to Australia.

He tells us stories. He is sympathetic, charming. But his gestures, offering me a glass of wine or a cigarette, are clothed in arrogance, in the arrogant humility of the East.

Like most barmen, Bobby is a great expert on sexual questions.

‘It is strange how people seem to belong to places – especially to places where they were not born . . . When I first went to China, it seemed to me that I was at home there, for the first time in my life .