Prater Violet by Christopher Isherwood Page B

case. The papers were being perfectly fair, according to their own standards. You couldn’t expect anything else.
    By the beginning of the next week, it was all over, except for the government’s vengeance on its prisoners. The workers’ tenements were made to fly the white flag. The Engels Hof was renamed the Dollfuss Hof. Every man over eighteen from the Schlinger Hof was in prison, including the sick and the cripples. Terrorism became economical, since a new law stopped the unemployment pay of those who had been arrested. Meanwhile, Frau Dollfuss went among the workers’ families, distributing cakes. Dollfuss was sincerely sad: “I hope the blood that flowed in our land will bring people to their senses.”
    The other centers of resistance, in Graz, Steuer and Linz, were all crushed. Bauer, Deutsch and many others fled into Czechoslovakia. Wallisch, caught near the frontier, was hanged at Loeben, in a brightly lighted courtyard, while his socialist fellow-prisoners looked on. “Long live freedom!” he shouted. The hangman and his assistants pulled him from the scaffold and clung to his legs until he choked.
    Bergmann sat in his chair facing the set, grim and silent, like an accusing specter. One morning, Eliot ventured to ask him how he had liked a take.
    â€œI loved it,” Bergmann told him, savagely. “I loved it. It was unspeakably horrible. It was the maximum of filth. Never in my whole life have I seen anything so idiotic.”
    â€œYou want to shoot it again, sir?”
    â€œYes, by all means. Let us shoot it again. Perhaps we can achieve something worse. I doubt it. But let us try.”
    Eliot grinned nervously, trying to pass this off as a joke.
    â€œSo?” Bergmann turned on him suddenly. “You find this amusing? You do not believe me? Very well—let me see you direct this scene yourself.”
    Eliot looked scared. “I couldn’t do that, sir.”
    â€œYou mean that you refuse to do it? You definitely refuse? Is that what you mean?”
    â€œNo, sir. Of course not. But…”
    â€œYou prefer that I ask Dorothy to direct this scene?”
    â€œNo…” Eliot, poor boy, was almost in tears.
    â€œThen obey me!” Bergmann flared at him. “Do what I order!”
    All that week, he seemed to be possessed by a devil. He tried to quarrel with everybody, even the loyal Teddy and Roger. We moved to another small set—a room in the Borodanian palace. Harris was present when Bergmann inspected it. I knew there would be trouble.
    Bergmann found fault with everything. “In which stables, ” he asked Harris, “did you get these curtains?” Then he discovered that one of the doors wouldn’t open.
    â€œSorry, sir,” the carpenter explained, “we didn’t have no orders it was to be made practical.”
    Bergmann snorted frantically. He walked up to the door and gave it a violent kick. We looked on, wondering what was coming. Suddenly, he swung round upon us.
    â€œAnd there you all stand,” he shouted, “grinning at me like evil, stubborn monkeys!”
    He stormed out. We avoided each other’s eyes. It was ridiculous, of course. But Bergmann’s rage was so genuine, and somehow so touching, that nobody wanted to laugh.
    An instant later, his tousled head popped in through a window of the set, like an infuriated Punch.
    â€œNo!” he cried. “Not monkeys! Donkeys!”
    It would have been kindest, perhaps, to shout back at him, to afford him the exquisite relief of a fight. But none of us would do it. Some were sorry for him, some sulky and offended, some embarrassed, some scared. I was a bit scared of him, myself. The others assumed that I could manage him; but they were quite wrong. “You talk to him, Chris,” Teddy would tell me. And once he added, with surprising insight, “Talk to him in German. It’ll make him feel more at home.”
    But what was I