Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood

they are very happy and alone, in the darkness. Already they are lying in each other’s arms in bed. Good night, my dears. We shall not intrude upon your secrets.”
    Bergmann talked to taxi-drivers, to medical students in bars, to elderly colonels returning from their clubs, to clergymen, to Piccadilly tarts, to the boys who hung around the medallion of W. S. Gilbert on the Embankment. Nobody seemed to mind, or even to misunderstand his intentions. I envied him his freedom—the freedom of a foreigner. I could have done the same thing, myself, in Vienna or Berlin. With a foreigner’s luck, or intuition, he nearly always succeeded in picking out the unusual individual from the average type: a constable who did water colors, a beggar who knew classical Greek. And this betrayed him into a foreigner’s generalizations. In London, all policemen paint, all the scholars are starving.
    *   *   *
    THE YEAR was drawing to an end. The newspapers were full of optimism. Things were looking up; this Christmas was to be the greatest ever. Hitler talked only of peace. The Disarmament Conference had broken down. The British Government didn’t want isolation; equally, it didn’t want to promise military aid to France. When people planned their next summer’s holiday in Europe, they remembered to add, “If Europe’s still there.” It was like the superstition of touching wood.
    Just before Christmas, Bergmann and I went down to Brighton for the day. It was the only time we ever left London together. I remember this as one of the most depressing experiences of my life. Behind high clouds of white fog, the wintry sun made a pale splash of gold, far out on the oyster-gray surface of the Channel. We walked along the pier and stopped to watch a young man in plus-fours with a fair mangy mustache, who was hitting a punch-ball. “He can’t ring the bell,” I said. “None of them can ring it,” Bergmann answered somberly. “That bell will never ring again. They’re all done for. Finished.” Coming back in the Pullman car, the sea air made us both doze. I had a peculiarly vivid nightmare about Hitler Germany.
    First of all, I dreamed that I was in a courtroom. This, I knew, was a political trial. Some communists were being sentenced to death. The State Prosecutor was a hard-faced, middle-aged, blonde woman, with her hair twisted into a knot on the back of her head. She stood up, gripping one of the accused men by his coat collar, and marched him down the room toward the judge’s desk. As they advanced, she drew a revolver and shot the communist in the back. His knees sagged and his chin fell forward; but she dragged him on, until they faced the judge, and she cried, in a loud voice, “Look! Here is the traitor!”
    A girl was sitting beside me, among the spectators. In some way, I was aware that she was a hospital nurse by profession. As the prosecutor held up the dying man, she rose and ran out of the courtroom in tears. I followed her, down passages and flights of steps, into a cellar, where there were central-heating pipes. The cellar was fitted with bunks, like a barracks. The girl lay down on one of them, sobbing. And then several youths came in. I knew that they belonged to the Hitler Jugend; but, instead of uniforms, they wore bits of bear-skin, with belts, helmets and swords, shoddy and theatrical-looking, such as supers might wear in a performance of “The Ring.” Their partly naked bodies were covered with acne and skin rash, and they seemed tired and dispirited. They climbed into their bunks, without taking the least notice of the girl or of me.
    Then I was walking up a steep, very narrow street. A Jew came running down toward me, with his wrists thrust into his overcoat pockets. I knew that this was because his hands had been shot off. He had to hide his injuries. If anybody saw them, he would be recognized and lynched.
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