Berlin Wild

by Elly Welt

  “I’ve some string,” said Frau Krupinsky.

  “That won’t do at all. Do you think you could buy some or get it from a neighbor?”

  “Will that take care of it?” she asked.

  “In about three minutes. I know we could get some at the Institute.”

  “That would take hours,” said Krupinsky. “Let me see what I can do. I should be able to find some right around here.”

  “It has to be multistrand,” I called after him as he ran out the door and left me alone with his wife.

  She began to make the bed; I poked about the radio tube. Actually, I had already detuned from BBC but didn’t want to give him the satisfaction of knowing. I needed the fishing line so they could continue to use the radio, and could do nothing more until I had it. So I listened to her bustle about the room, straightening, until, finally, I could hear her standing right behind me.

  “I’ll make some tea,” she said.

  I pretended to be so engrossed that I could not hear.

  “Would you like some tea, Josef?” Her voice was pleasant. It had a Scandinavian melody that I could not pinpoint.

  I pretended to be startled out of deep concentration. “Oh! No, thank you.” What an ass I was.

  “It’s past lunchtime. You must be hungry. I’ll cut a little sausage and bread.”

  “No. No. Thank you very much. Not a thing.” I said all this without looking at her. I knew my face was red, and I knew I was acting like a clod—but what does one do in such a situation? Should one say “I’m sorry”? Inadequate.

  “I’m sorry you are so embarrassed,” she said. “Please don’t be.”

  “It is I who should apologize to you,” I said, still looking down at the radio.

  “I’m Finnish, you know, and we don’t make a fuss about our bodies. When I was a child in Finland, we all took sauna together: mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, the children, and friends. Do you understand?”

  Finally I looked at her. “Yes. I had a Norwegian friend—his name was Petter—and his family was just like that.”

  “That’s right. And the Swedes, too. It’s just a matter of what one becomes accustomed to.”

  Could one ever become accustomed to those breasts? The thought started another erection and I turned my back and fiddled with the radio until Krupinsky returned with the fishing line. He had been gone half an hour.

  I was able to attach it to the old cord and just pull it over the pathway. “It’s fixed,” I announced. “All I have to do now is put it back in the cabinet.”

  They applauded and acted quite grateful, and both insisted that I have a cup of tea with them in celebration. I didn’t want it. I just wanted to get out of there, but it was impossible to refuse.

  I put the radio back in the cabinet, and Krupinsky and I took it off the table and put it back on the bed. I said, “You shouldn’t even have the radio in this building. It’s much too dangerous.”

  He just shrugged, but Frau Krupinsky looked at me peculiarly and said, “One must draw the line somewhere, Josef. You cannot give in completely to those swine.”

  Her reprimand—which I never forgot—disquieted me even more, and although she and I attempted polite conversation over tea, it just wouldn’t go. For one thing, I had the feeling that Krupinsky was teasing me with his wife and trying to shock me. He couldn’t keep his hands off her, even while we were drinking tea. I’d had enough, and I suggested that it was time we both return to the Institute. “It’s one thirty,” I said, “and we could be back there before three.”

  “The Chief said we didn’t have to come back this afternoon.”

  “The Chief said I didn’t have to come back. He didn’t say anything about you, Krupinsky.”

  “Well, I’m not going. We’ll no sooner get there than we’ll have to turn around and come home.”

  I knew he wanted to stay and make love to his wife, and I didn’t want him to, little bastard that I was. I began to gather together the tools.

  “Leave them! I’ll take them back tomorrow.”

  I shrugged.

  I could see that Frau Krupinsky was troubled by the dissension. Her face was pale. “Thank you, Josef,” she said, “I don’t know how we can ever thank you.” She extended her hand to me.

  I fell back on the formula I’d learned in Social Behavior Class. I bowed slightly, kissed her hand, and said, “It has been my pleasure.” Realizing at once what I’d said, I blushed to the roots and somehow grabbed my rucksack and got out the door.

  Krupinsky followed me down the hall. “You’re not really going back, Bernhardt?”

  “Oh, yes. I am.”

  “If you do, you little pisher, the Chief will know I’m playing hooky.”

  “That’s your problem,” I snapped.

  “You little schlemiel.”

  “You ought to go back.”

  “No.” A malicious, lewd grin. “I have better things to do.”

  Ordinarily I did not talk enough. When I did, I said too much and made an absolute ass of myself. I raced down the stairs feeling as out of joint as a tin man who clanks and jangles as he moves, and so out of shape, from lack of exercise and inadequate diet, that after two blocks of jogging along, I, who had been a runner, was breathless and had a sharp pain in my side. I slowed to a shuffle, my torso bent, and squeaked and jarred along, my brain in utter confusion. Krupinsky would have her clothes off already, and the idea of him fondling them in his nauseating hands infuriated me more than the image of him actually screwing her to the bed. With her rose-tipped breasts in my fantasy, I could have done it with anyone—even Marlene—if only I had a condom. And the fact that this was so, disgusted me. There was nothing good about me; I was irretrievably rotten.

  When I got back to the S-Bahn station, I headed for the vending machines in the men’s room. I had fifty pfennig—half a mark—in my pocket. The machine read; FROMM’S AKT—one mark. They had raised the price. I could have wept from the frustration of my own helplessness, and I was in actual pain from the continual genital tension. Alone in the lavatory, I relieved myself.

  When I came out, the train for Hagen was waiting. At two in the afternoon, it was not full, and I was able to sit by a window. We would be underground for twenty minutes in dim light. I rested my head against the cool dark glass, shocked and disgusted by my violent reaction to Frau Krupinsky’s breasts. With all our lack of intimacy, my family was not overly modest about the body, perhaps because Mother was a physician. But it wasn’t the body. It was the sexual body, the fact that they so warmly embraced and that she enjoyed it as much as he. And it brought back the warmth and womanliness and sweetness of Sheereen, and of the way we had been together. I realized with a crunching jolt, as the train started down its dark tunnel, that at thirteen, I had been ten times the man I now was. I had deteriorated in three years into nothing but a masturbating coward.

  Sheereen’s father was the Ambassador from Iraq—one fifth or so of the students at the Collège Français de Berlin were children of the diplomatic corps—and at age ten, when she joined my class, she was ten times the woman the German girls would ever be, and so spectacularly beautiful that most everyone was afraid to talk to her. I couldn’t believe she liked me, too. After all, there were eighteen boys in my class and only four girls.

  Sheereen was absolutely the only reason I consented to Dancing and Social Behavior Class, an optional course running eight weeks each winter. Ten- and eleven-year-old boys were not supposed to have a high opinion of girls. One had to pretend to hate them, and if one showed any interest whatsoever, he was teased unmercifully by the other boys. Consequently, although I was stirred to the core by Sheereen’s loveliness, I was too much of a conformist to let on. The only acceptable way I could demonstrate my feeling was by tormenting her. So in every class I tried to sit behind her—a boy never sat beside a girl—and pull her hair and poke her with my pencil. She was very understanding and would turn and smile at me every time I did this. One can imagine the effect this had on
me. Secretly, I dreamed of holding her romantically in my arms, and, therefore, let Mother talk me into the class—which pleased Mother no end.

  Dancing and Social Behavior Class was stupid. Imagine this group of ten- and eleven-year-old boys bowing and saying to some giggly little female, “Would you give me the honor of this dance?” And picture lectures to them on “How to Talk to a Woman in a Social Situation.” The upshot always was that one must give honor to women and never indulge in street language when speaking to them.

  I wasn’t much of an authority on street language. When I was six, I talked my mother into letting me out on the street to play with other neighborhood children. When she called me in after an hour, I said to her, “Shut up, you stupid old wreck,” and I was never permitted out on the street again. All my playmates, thereafter, were from approved families.

  One would have to dress better than usual on the day of Dancing Class, and instead of my Bavarian leather shorts and favorite blue shirt, which I always wore, Mother forced me into wool Bleyle short pants that itched miserably and a white shirt, tucked in. And she would put clean white silk gloves in my pocket. One had to wear them because one sweats so when he touches a girl. And then I had to stop downtown at a flower stall and buy a small bouquet. One bows to the lady, presents her with the bouquet, and then one tries to dance.

  Since I liked Sheereen so much, I dared not ask her. A private girls’ school participated in the class to make the numbers even, and although those girls were cruel and laughed at the boys, the first few weeks I would ask one of them.

  One of the problems was that I became quite nauseated from the waltz. It is not at all the way it appears in the movies, the couples gliding in a stately manner around the room. In a real waltz, the dancers move fast and make a turn at each step. It wasn’t as difficult when the dancing masters counted and the pianist played. There were three masters, and they would walk among us shouting, “One-two-three, one-two-three.” But when they put on the Viennese records, one couldn’t hear the “One-two-three,” and I would twirl so fast I almost threw up from dizziness. My white silk gloves would be dirty almost at once from the falls I took trying to execute the turns.

  About the third week, when I thought I understood the step, I took off like the athlete I was, perhaps confusing the waltz with a track-and-field event. I got up some pretty good speed and then, somehow, lost control. I tripped on a foot—not my own—and my partner went flying backward and slammed against a wall. I spun, fell over, and, as luck would have it, landed right on the foot of Sheereen. She was gracious. She smiled and said it could happen to anyone and that I was not at all clumsy, just strong.

  My partner had the wind knocked out of her and was crying. She refused to dance with me anymore, so it was all rearranged by the head dancing master when Sheereen told him she wouldn’t mind.

  It was accepted that she was my partner after that, and by the time I was removed from the rowing team a year or so later, we had become quite close. Of course, I was never permitted to be alone with her. She was always accompanied either by her older brother, Ahmed, who was several years ahead of us in school, or by her English governess. Miss Vinny—even her last night in Berlin, three years after we met, on her thirteenth birthday. By that time, we were deeply bound to one another.

  I was thirteen and one half when her father’s chauffeur delivered to my house an invitation, engraved in gold, to Sheereen’s thirteenth birthday party. I should have been suspicious when both Sheereen and her brother missed school for the two days preceding her birthday. When I telephoned the embassy, Miss Vinny said they were slightly ill but would be all right by the evening of the party.

  The invitation indicated dancing and a midnight supper, so I wore a suit with long pants and Mother put the white silk gloves in my pocket. She actually wanted to accompany me on the train to midtown and help me choose a very special bouquet, but I insisted that I was capable of doing this myself. She even wanted to choose the birthday present, but I had bought it weeks before at the village bookstore where my father had given me a charge account. It was a slim, leather-bound volume of Shakespeare’s sonnets.

  So much of our relationship had to do with books. I helped Sheereen with math and science, and she helped me with poetry, especially with the Arabic poets, whose images and metaphors were so different, and with the British Romantics and Shakespeare. Iraq had been a British Protectorate, and Sheereen and her family were fluent in English. She loved Shakespeare, especially Romeo and Juliet and the sonnets, which, she told me, were all about time and love.

  Mother, of course, disapproved of my choice of gifts for ten different reasons. If she had seen the inscription I wrote after showing her the book, she would have denounced me to Father and both would have forbidden me from going to the party. Sheereen and I, all along, kept the depth of our feelings from our parents. Had they known, they would have used all their power to keep us apart.

  And we didn’t actually declare our feelings to each other, except for one little exchange: one day when we were studying together in the school library, I looked up and found Sheereen staring at me. “What are you doing?” I asked her.

  “Looking at your eyes. You have very nice eyes.”

  “No, it is you who have the very nice eyes.”

  “No, you. I am lucky to have a boyfriend with such beautiful eyes.”

  “No, I am the lucky one.”

  We condensed this conversation into a little formula which we repeated every time we were together: “I am the lucky one,” one of us would say. “No, I’m the lucky one,” the other would answer.

  This was the closest we came to words of love until her thirteenth birthday, when I inscribed the book of sonnets. For Reenie, from her Seff, with all love for all time, and she gave me the poem she had written herself.

  The Iraqi Embassy was within walking distance of our high school in midtown Berlin, in a garden district of winding streets and huge villas where many of the embassies were located. It was decorated in white and pastels and had a very beautiful garden. I was surprised to find that there were many people there, mostly adults in evening clothes and officers in dress uniforms, and that I was the only boy from our class.

  It was all quite different this year. For her eleventh and twelfth birthday parties, there had been only schoolmates, and her parents had provided entertainment for us by grown-ups who did things—a puppet show, clowns, or so—and there had been trays of brightly colored ices and cakes and a sweet red punch. But this year, as I searched through the house and garden for Sheereen, I saw that there were sweet tables with heavy pastries drenched in honey and almonds, servants circulating with trays of champagne, and in the air the delicious aroma of roasting lamb and spices, which would be served later, at a midnight supper. An orchestra was playing in the ballroom, although no one was yet dancing. There was a table piled high with beautifully wrapped gifts. I kept mine in my inner pocket, planning to give it to her privately. I carried a small bouquet of violets.

  She was nowhere in sight. I joined others at the foot of the broad staircase to wait for her entrance.

  I describe other women as good-looking or attractive, as pretty or as nearly beautiful, to make it clear that Sheereen was truly extraordinary. Even when she came down that staircase, stricken and ill, on the arm of her brother, she was so breathtaking that there was an audible gasp from those watching her descend. She, too, had been permitted to dress as an adult that night and had chosen a long gown of the palest blue silk, so pale that the lights from the chandeliers made it seem iridescent. And there was a net of gauzy stuff of the same blue all around her bare shoulders. The second I saw her leaning so feebly on Ahmed’s arm, I knew.

  At the foot of the stairs, other guests crowded around, wishing her happy birthday. I could hear her sweet voice answering, “Thank you, thank you,” but I could see she was looking anxiously about for me.

  I had moved to a corner, away from the stairs. When she saw me, she left her brother’
s arm and quickened her pace, stopping short, not touching me.

  “You are leaving,” I said, very softly.

  “Tomorrow. I begged Father to take you with us.” She began in a trembling, soft voice, but it began to rise in pitch and volume. “He said no, and I said I wouldn’t go.”

  Ahmed was there beside us, and her governess, who looked tense and drawn. “Sheereen,” Miss Vinny pleaded, “you promised me you would behave.”

  “I don’t care,” she sobbed. “I won’t go.”

  Those near us could hear every word she said. Her brother’s eyes filled with tears; I was able, by some miracle, to hold mine back. From across the room, her father glared fiercely in our direction, and I knew that if her public hysteria continued for a moment longer, he would not hesitate to send her to her room and we would not have even this last evening together.

  If she had been strong, I would have crumbled. But she was not. The news she had received two days before that they were leaving had devastated her. Strange as it may seem, her terrible suffering brought out the manliness in me, and that night—her last in Berlin—I was a rock for her, and for a time after, I was more of a man than I had ever been, until six months after her departure, when my father knocked my manhood from under me by laying the responsibility for the life—or should I say the death?—of my mother on my young shoulders, when all the time it was his failure in not taking her away and the failure of his entire generation for allowing Adolf Hitler to rise to power. It was then—without the love and support of Sheereen—that I crumbled.

  Her father moved towards us.

  Both her hands were touching my arm.

  “Reenie,” I said. “You must begin the dancing with your father, or he will send you away from me right now. I will be waiting.” I folded the violet bouquet into her left hand.

  Her father was there, furious, apoplectic.

  “Good evening, Herr Ambassador.” I bowed as I had been taught in Social Behavior Class.

  He stopped short, hesitated, then turned angrily toward her.