Hugo Halder—Noburo Nisamata

Hugo Halder and Noburo Nisamata—known to Halder and Hans Reiter as Nisa—are close friends whose companionship takes shape in Berlin’s cafes and cabarets. Halder draws Nisa and Hans into a recurring circuit of nightlife, conversation, and extravagant invention; Nisa, in turn, becomes both the object of Halder’s playful provocations and the source of the group’s most striking laughter. Their friendship is sociable and comic, yet punctuated by silences that momentarily seem to remove all three men from ordinary time.

The Friendship in Berlin

Nisa is twenty-eight, good-natured, and willing to listen to Halder’s most outrageous ideas. He works as assistant to the charge of agricultural affairs at the Japanese legation, and Halder and Hans call him by the shortened name Nisa. The three usually meet at the Stone Virgin Cafe, a few steps from Alexanderplatz. Halder and Hans arrive first, eat—perhaps sausage with sauerkraut—and wait for Nisa, who appears impeccably dressed. After sharing scarcely a glass of whiskey, they hurry back out into the Berlin night.

The evening’s itinerary reveals how Halder takes charge of their outings. He leads the group by taxi to the Eclipse, a cheap cabaret known for its talentless performers: old women who have made a success of displaying failure without adornment. The jokes and whistles do not prevent conversation; with a waiter’s help, the friends can find a table out of the way. Nisa usually pays, while Halder, unconcerned about the cost, steers the night onward.

From the Eclipse they go to the Cafe des Artistes, where there are no variety acts but Reich painters may be seen. Nisa enjoys sharing a table with an art-world celebrity, and Halder’s long acquaintance with many of the artists—some addressed by their first names—makes this possible. Around three in the morning, they may leave for the Danube, whose tall, beautiful dancers attract them even though Hans’s poverty and unsuitable clothes sometimes make it difficult to get him past the doorman. The friendship’s pleasures are thus social and expansive, but they unfold alongside Hans’s precarious working life rather than replacing it.

Conversation, Teasing, and Laughter

When the friends spend hours on the terrace of a fashionable restaurant, Halder talks about inventions he claims he will patent and use to make his fortune once he has time. Nisa responds to these schemes with laughter so intense that it can become physical. His amusement is not confined to his mouth, eyes, or throat: his hands, neck, and feet join in, with his feet stamping delicately on the floor. The description makes laughter a full bodily expression of the companionship, not merely a reaction in the background of their talk.

Halder also turns conversation into a game of testing and provocation. After explaining the usefulness of a machine for making artificial clouds, he abruptly asks whether Nisa’s stated mission in Germany is genuine or whether he is really a secret agent. Nisa is caught off guard and at first does not fully understand the question. When Halder seriously explains what a secret agent’s mission would entail, Nisa erupts into laughter unlike anything Hans has witnessed: he collapses in a faint onto the table. Halder and Hans carry him to the washroom, splash water on his face, and revive him. The prank ends in an act of care, and Nisa’s laughter briefly turns the trio’s playful exchange into a small emergency they handle together.

Nisa speaks little, perhaps from discretion or reluctance to offend with his heavily accented German, but his occasional remarks give him a distinctive voice within the group. He describes Zen as a mountain biting its own tail; says that he studied English and that his posting in Berlin resulted from one of the ministry’s many mistakes; and offers reflections on samurais, including that the best samurai in history was a woman. He also recounts his father’s acquaintance with a Christian monk who spent fifteen years without leaving Endo, a waterless island of volcanic rock a few miles from Okinawa. These statements are not presented as a formal explanation of Nisa’s inner life; rather, they surface as memorable, sometimes enigmatic contributions to the friends’ conversations.

Halder answers Nisa’s reserve with teasing inventions. He declares that Nisa is a Shintoist, likes only German prostitutes, and can speak and write Finnish, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Dutch, and Russian in addition to German and English. The account does not establish these claims as facts; they belong to Halder’s joking performance of familiarity. Nisa’s response is to laugh slowly, show Hans his teeth, and let his eyes shine. Their exchange rests on a comfortable imbalance: Halder supplies the outrageous assertions, while Nisa’s measured amusement gives the teasing its rhythm.

Silences and Shared Company

The friendship is not made up of talk alone. At times, while the three sit on a cafe terrace or around a dark cabaret table, an inexplicable, obstinate silence descends. They seem to freeze, lose their sense of time, and turn inward, as though bypassing the abyss of daily life, of other people, and of conversation. The narrative imagines this pause as an approach to a late-romantic lakeside region whose borders are measured from dusk to dusk and whose minutes stretch toward eternity. Its imagery is grave and heightened, in sharp contrast with the practical, comic business of inventions, women, and nightlife.

The silence does not become a rupture. The three eventually emerge stiff from it and return to discussing inventions, women, Finnish philology, and the building of highways across the Reich. That return to talk matters: their companionship can accommodate both Halder’s sustained bustle and a shared inward pause without requiring either to explain the other. The book leaves the silences unexplained, making them a counterpoint to the friends’ public sociability rather than a disclosed conflict between them.

Significance of the Bond

Halder and Nisa’s friendship is established through repeated acts of company: meeting with Hans at the Stone Virgin Cafe, moving together between cabarets, listening to Halder’s schemes, and sustaining a private comic language of questions and invented claims. Nisa’s habit of paying for the group’s nights and Halder’s command of the itinerary give their outings a practical shape, while Hans’s presence makes the friendship part of a three-person circle rather than an isolated pair.

The relation also depends on contrast. Halder is the one who takes charge and provokes; Nisa is sparing with words but capable of laughter so overwhelming that it becomes a bodily event. Their evenings move between spectacle and obscurity: artists known by name, cabaret performers celebrated for failure, the difficulty of getting Hans into an elegant venue, and the unaccountable silences at a dark table. Through that alternation, the friendship appears as a form of shared life in Berlin—buoyant and eccentric, but not reducible to entertainment, since its pauses carry a depth the men never put into words.