Christopher and His Kind Read Online Free Page B

of international sky above it—all were made utterly German by the presence of these German words.
    Months later, when Christopher began giving English lessons, he would try to convey to his German pupils something of his own mystique about the German language. “A table doesn’t mean ‘ein Tisch’—when you’re learning a new word, you must never say to yourself it means. That’s altogether the wrong approach. What you must say to yourself is: Over there in England, they have a thing called a table. We may go to England and look at it and say, ‘That’s our Tisch.’ But it isn’t. The resemblance is only on the surface. The two things are essentially different, because they’ve been thought about differently by two nations with different cultures. If you can grasp the fact that that thing in England isn’t merely called a table, it really is a table, then you’ll begin to understand what the English themselves are like. They are the sort of people who are compelled by their nature to think about that thing as a table; being what they are, they couldn’t possibly call it anything else … Of course, if you cared to buy a table while you were in England and bring it back here, it would become ein Tisch. But not immediately. Germans would have to think about it as ein Tisch and call it ein Tisch for quite a long while, first.”
    When Christopher talked like this, most of his pupils would smile, finding him charmingly whimsical and so English. Only a few decided that he was being metaphysical and therefore listened with respect. Having listened, they would question him and then argue, taking his statements with absolute literalness, until he became tired and tongue-tied.
    How could he possibly explain himself to these people? They wanted to learn English for show-off social reasons, or to be able to read Aldous Huxley in the original. Whereas he had learned German simply and solely to be able to talk to his sex partners. For him, the entire German language—all the way from the keep-off-the-grass signs in the park to Goethe’s stanza on the wall—was irradiated with sex. For him, the difference between a table and ein Tisch was that a table was the dining table in his mother’s house and ein Tisch was ein Tisch in the Cosy Corner.
    *   *   *
    Christopher had made up his mind that as soon as he was settled in Berlin he would start revising his novel, The Memorial. He had finished the first draft of it about six months before this. Since then, he had scarcely looked at it.
    So now, every morning, with his manuscript under his arm, he walked along In den Zelten and sat down in one of its cafés; indoors if the weather was cold or wet, out of doors in his overcoat if it was mild. He didn’t come here merely because the room in his apartment was dark. To work in this public atmosphere seemed better suited to his new way of life. He wanted to be in constant contact with Germans and Germany throughout the day, not shut up alone.
    With his manuscript in front of him, a tall glass of beer on his right, a cigarette burning in an ashtray on his left, he sipped and wrote, puffed and wrote. The beer, of course, was German: Schultheiss-Patzenhofer. The cigarette was a Turkish-grown brand especially popular in Berlin: Salem Aleikum. Bubi had introduced him to both, so the taste of the one and the smell of the other were magically charged. And how strange and delightful it was to be sitting here, with Turkish smoke tickling his nostrils and German beer faintly bitter on his tongue, writing a story in the English language about an English family in an English country house! It was most unlikely that any of the people here would be able to understand what he was writing. This gave him a soothing sense of privacy, which the noise of their talk couldn’t seriously disturb; it was on a different wave length. With them around him, it