“‘In fact, I don’t think she was at all seriously aggrieved. I remarked: You know what Edward is, and she agreed that we all knew what you were. You may be thankful, my dear, that we don’t.’”

He paused, asked:

“Well, did you understand it?”

“A little.”

“What?”

“There’s a bit about something being expensive, isn’t there? Doesn’t ‘dear’ mean expensive?”

“Yes.”

“You see? I can understand English.”

Franz smiled complacently, helped himself to a cigarette:

“No, but tell me, Edward. How did you really get that scar?”

“I’ve told you.”

“No. But really. Wasn’t it in the War?”

“Yes, if you like.”

“You fought in the War?”

“Yes.”

“Did you kill many Germans?”

“Quite a lot.”

“Then I shall kill you,” said Franz, catching Edward by the throat. But he became serious almost immediately:

“It must have been terrible.”

“It was awful,” said Edward.

“You know,” said Franz, very serious and evidently repeating something he had heard said by his elders: “that War … it ought never to have happened.”

Also by Christopher Isherwood

ALSO BY CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

NOVELS

A Meeting by the River

A Single Man

Down There on a Visit

The World in the Evening

Prater Violet

Goodbye to Berlin

The Last of Mr. Norris

All the Conspirators

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

My Guru and His Disciple

Christopher and His Kind

Kathleen and Frank

Lions and Shadows

BIOGRAPHY

Ramakrishna and His Disciples

PLAYS (WITH W. H. AUDEN)

On the Frontier

The Ascent of F6

The Dog Beneath the Skin

TRAVEL

The Condor and the Cows

Journey to a War

(with W. H. Auden)

COLLECTION

Exhumations

TRANSLATIONS

The Intimate Journals of Charles Baudelaire

(and the following with Swami Prabhavananda)

The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali

Shankara’s Crest-Jewel of Discrimination

The Bhagavad-Gita

DIARIES

Diaries: Volume 1, 1939–1960

The Sixties: Diaries 1960–1969

Liberation: Diaries 1970–1983