Free Christopher and His Kind by Christopher Isherwood Page B

seen, flicking with her duster, peeping, spying, poking her short pointed nose into the cupboards and luggage of her 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.
    When Frl. Thurau read this description many years later, in a German translation, she objected to nothing except the statement that she “waddled.” Like many thousands of other middle-class victims of the inflation, Frl. Thurau had known wealthier days and still felt a sour amusement at finding herself forced to do menial, unladylike work. (“If you were a German woman of your class,” Christopher once said severely to Kathleen when he was angry with her, “you’d probably be running a brothel, right at this moment!”) Poor Frl. Thurau would have been far better off with a brothel than she was with her flatful of sleazy lodgers—Bobby the bartender, Frl. Kost the streetwalker, Frl. Mayr the out-of-work Nazi-minded jodlerin. They were all of them apt to get behind with the rent.
    Frl. Thurau and Christopher took to each other from the start. On her side, this was because she decided that he was what she called a real gentleman, someone who wouldn’t damage the furniture or throw up on the carpet and who would pay his rent on time. She addressed him, coyly and courteously, as “Herr Issyvoo.” Christopher found Frl. Thurau sympathetic, even adorable, for a reason which he could never explain to her: she strongly resembled a character in his childhood mythology—Beatrix Potter’s Mrs. Tiggy-winkle, the hedgehog-lady who does laundry for the other animals in her neighborhood.
    Frl. Thurau would brew cups of coffee or tea and chat with him at any hour of the day. She was fond of exclaiming against the depraved state of Berlin’s moral life, but in practice she was nearly unshockable. She had a low opinion of Otto because she regarded him as a parasite who lived off Christopher; but she never objected to what they did together in her flat. She slept on a sofa in the central living room and could therefore hear almost everything which went on in the neighboring bedrooms. When Christopher looked in to say good morning to her, after having enjoyed himself with more than usual energy and noise, she would roll her eyes and say archly, “How sweet love must be!” As for Frl. Kost, Frl. Thurau only disapproved of her profession when she was angry with Frl. Kost for some other reason. An establishment like Frl. Thurau’s, where you could do just as you pleased sexually, was described by Berliners as being sturmfrei (storm-free).
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    I wish I could remember what impression Jean Ross—the real-life original of Sally Bowles in Goodbye to Berlin —made on Christopher when they first met. But I can’t. Art has transfigured life and other people’s art has transfigured Christopher’s art. What remains with me from those early years is almost entirely Sally. Beside her, like a reproachful elder sister, stands the figure of Jean as I knew her much later. And both Sally and Jean keep being jostled to one side of my memory to make way for the actresses who have played the part of Sally on the stage and on the screen. These, regardless of their merits, are all much more vivid to me than either Jean or Sally; their boldly made-up, brightly lit faces are larger than life.
    (Sally Bowles’s second name was chosen for her by Christopher because he liked the sound of it and also the looks of its owner, a twenty-year-old American whom he met in Berlin in 1931. The American thought Christopher treated him with “good-humored condescension”; Christopher thought the American aloof. Christopher wasn’t then aware that this young man was in the process of becoming a composer and novelist who would need nobody’s fiction character to help him make his second name famous. His