by Robert Moss
“They’re dinosaurs,” Gottfried Lentz murmured with quiet contempt. “We have to kill the Prussian in all of us.” This was a backhand swipe at his wife, whose family came from East Prussia. “I’ll give you some books to read, so you can begin to understand. But Johnny—” Their corner had come into view. “Not a word about this to your mother, do you hear?”
Dutifully and secretly, Johnny had struggled with the tracts of the utopian socialists, but they were too bloodless for his taste. He preferred the mythic romances of his own country — Wolfram’s Parzifal in particular, with its tale of heroism in a magical quest to rescue a dying kingdom. He liked the Wild West adventures of Karl May, but above all he loved stories of the sea. His imagination was filled with the exploits of Raleigh and Klaus Störtebecker, the buccaneer from Hamburg. He thrilled with pride when he went with a school party to watch the launching of one of Germany’s splendid new battle cruisers. His father detested the Kaiser, with his bristling moustaches, as a noisy warmonger, but Johnny could picture himself in the smart uniform of a German naval officer. In his imagination the sea meant release from the drab taboos of family life, from his father’s albino abstractions, his mother’s petty tyranny and his sister Bertha’s tireless pursuit of a comfortable bourgeois marriage.
He was thinking of the sea now, as he worked his way through his mother’s box of Christmas ornaments. At fourteen, he was tall enough to reach the topmost branches of the tree without use of the stepladder. His rope-coloured hair, wide, chiselled mouth and candid blue-grey eyes came from his mother’s side of the family. So did the fussy set of lead crystal angels, trumpets and wings outstretched, that he was disentangling from the shrouds of crepe paper.
He yawned and wondered whether there would be time left before dinner to visit one of their neighbours on the Valentinskamp, a young man called Heinz Kordt, who wore a seaman’s cap and had sailed on the ships of the North German Lloyd. Frau Lentz disapproved of Heinz Kordt. She called him a “ruffian” and (on one occasion) a “desperado” and had forbidden Johnny to visit his lodgings — a prohibition Johnny cheerfully ignored. With his bold gaze, his ruddy cheeks and his flourishing jet-black beard, Heinz Kordt was, in Johnny’s eyes, a very fair imitation of a pirate. Johnny could picture him storming the walls of Cartagena and getting royally drunk on Spanish wine with a pair of black-eyed girls as the flames leaped from the rooftops. Kordt wove wondrous tales of lost islands in the Pacific, mutiny on the high seas and knife fights in the Boca — the red-light district — of Buenos Aires. He fed the boy’s fascination by opening up the huge metal trunk that occupied most of his room and showing him souvenirs from his voyages. One night he pulled out a tiny shrunken head, not much bigger than a walnut, with matted dark hair festooned with shells and parrot’s feathers. Kordt said he had bought it from head-hunters along the banks of the River of Death, somewhere in the jungles of Brazil.
Johnny was thinking about the shrunken head and the way it felt like baked clay to the touch, when he heard the jangle of the front door.
“Gottfried?” his mother called. “Is that you?”
The man who staggered into the living room was barely recognizable as the prim little clerk of the Shipowners’ Association or even the Sunday philosophe. His starched collar flapped wide. He was hatless, and his lank, thinning hair hung down to his eyebrows. His pince-nez was precariously suspended above the bulging tip of his nose, which was suspiciously empurpled. His overcoat trailed daringly from his shoulders.
“Gottfried?” Frau Lentz sniffed the air. “Have you been drinking?”
Between a belch and a cough Johnny’s father mumbled something that might have been, “It’s that time of year.”
“Gottfried! Have you no decency?”
“That’s not all,” Herr Lentz piped up. “I am no longer in the employ of the Swindlers’ — that is, the Shipowners’— Association.”
“Have you taken leave of your senses?”
Pink, bouncy Bertha came in from the kitchen and goggled at her father.
“How will you fend for poor Bertha, who is all but engaged?” Frau Lentz pursued. “How will we pay for Johann’s school, where he spends all his time brawling? Do you want to disgrace us? Do you want to live in the gutter? You must wash out your mouth and go to Herr Rausch at once—”
Johnny pictured Willi Rausch’s father, a bloated version of the son, a walrus with thick moustaches who fancied himself a ladies’ man and had flirted with Frau Lentz at office parties.
“Herr Rausch is a fair man,” Frau Lentz insisted.
“I did not resign.” Gottfried Lentz drew himself up to his full height, till he seemed in danger of toppling backwards.
“What are you saying?” Frau Lentz’s eyes widened. Then her arm shot out, pointing straight at Johnny. “It’s because of him, isn’t it? Because he was picking on the Rausch boy, the godless savage. We must go to them at once and apologize. Bertha, get my shawl—”
“It won’t do any good.” Johnny’s father’s lips were curled in a blissfully vacant grin. “I was sacked for expressing dangerous political ideas.”
“That can’t be true. It’s because of the boy. Bertha—”
“Not only true, my dear, but to emphasize my point I told Rausch he could stick my miserable pittance up his backside. Then I stuck this in his fat mug.” He winked at Johnny and displayed a row of shiny knuckles.
“You’re drunk! You’re insane!” Heidi Lentz looked ready to faint. An extraordinary mewling sound came from Bertha, whose heart was set on snaring the eldest of the Rausch boys.
Johnny became so excited that he let slip the lead crystal angel he had been trying to fasten to the Christmas tree. It flew to the stone apron of the fireplace and shattered into a dozen shards.
This diversion revived Frau Lentz and provided a momentary reprieve for her husband.
“Johann!” Frau Lentz shrieked.
“I’m sorry — I didn’t mean it—” Johnny stammered, but the awesome force of his mother’s wrath was now trained on him.
She lashed out with the first object that came to hand — the pair of shears they had used earlier to trim the tree. Johnny dodged the blow, seized hold of his mother’s wrist and wrenched until the metal tool fell from her hand.
For a moment she seemed bolted to the ground, stunned by this new rebellion. Then the blood rushed into her cheeks, and she yelled at her husband, “Deal with your son, you miserable excuse for a man!”
Johnny didn’t wait to see what response this would bring. Without saying a word he ran to the kitchen, grabbed his ulster from its hook and banged out the side door.
Oblivious to his mother’s screams and his sister’s wails, he raced down the steps and then west along the Valentinskamp in the direction of St. Pauli, through a fine mist of rain. It was already dark, and the street lamps cast sulphurous pools of light on the wet pavement. He paused half a block away from the house, until he saw his father come out onto the porch.
“I wish I’d been there to see it,” Johnny said when his father had caught up.
Gottfried Lentz smiled. For the first time Johnny could remember, his father looked like a free man.
“But it was because of my fight with Willi, wasn’t it?” Johnny went on.
His father’s face clouded. “It would have come to the same thing. So long as the bosses can treat people like replaceable parts. Someday we’ll change all of that. But for now—” he sighed. “Life goes on. We’d better go inside.”
“I can’t go back.”
“Don’t be silly. It’s not the end of the world. It’s not your fault. I’ll find another job.”
“I’ve been thinking about this for a while, father. I’m old enough to take care of myself—”
“You’re fourteen! What can you do without a school certificate? Work as a navvy down at the docks? There are worse bosses than Rausch, I can tell you.”
“I’ve got friends. I’ll be all right. Please go inside, father. You’ll catch cold.”
They heard Frau Lentz’s harsh voice raised from the porch. Involuntarily Johnny’s father shuddered.
“Don’t be too hard on her,” he said to his son. “She’s not a bad woman, you know. She just can’t help herself.”
“I know. I have to go, that’s all.”
Johnny waited for his father’s response. He couldn’t go back into that house, where he felt his lungs were bursting. He couldn’t go back to that expensive school, where the teachers sided with Willi Rausch because his father had money and rode around in a fancy carriage, puffing his cigar. Besides, he knew the school fees had been crippling for his father. Now it would be worse. By leaving he would be doing all of them a favour.
He refused to live as his father had lived, a man with a dream that was broken daily on the wheel. His father had had his moment of glorious revolt, and in that moment Johnny had felt closer to him than ever before. But his father’s words suggested that the moment had already passed. “Life goes on...”
I’m not going to wait until I’m past forty to punch the Rausches of this world in the nose, Johnny told himself.
“But where will you go?” his father repeated.
“I’ve got friends. I’ll manage. Don’t worry yourself.”
“You’ll write? At least you’ll write?”
“Of course I will.”
Gottfried made no effort to invoke parental authority. Perhaps he felt his own actions earlier that day had made a mockery of all that. Perhaps he felt it would be more than mildly ridiculous for him to tell this strapping youth, a head taller than himself, that he would not be able to fend for himself. Perhaps he even felt a tinge of envy.
Johnny tried not to recognize the pain in his father’s face. I’m doing them a favour, he reminded himself.
Gottfried blinked myopically through his spectacles, which were beaded with rain. Then he rummaged in his vest pocket and pressed something into Johnny’s hand. A bank note. He moved as if to hug his son, then stiffened in embarrassment and stuck out his hand instead. This friend of abstract humanity had always shied away from physical contact.
“If only I were younger—” he began, then cleared his throat.
The boy swallowed and walked quickly away.
“Proudhon!” his father’s reedy voice wafted after him. “Don’t forget to read Proudhon!”
Two blocks farther on, Johnny crossed the street and ran up the steps into the building where Heinz Kordt had his lodgings. Once the mansion of some Hanseatic burgomaster, it was now a disreputable apartment house, only a cut above a tenement.
In the lobby he nearly bowled over a sallow, furtive man in a fedora and an oversized overcoat that billowed around his ankles. The stranger thrust his hand into his pocket, and Johnny imagined that he saw the bulge of a revolver. For an instant their eyes met. The stranger’s quick stare was feral, the gaze of a hunted animal ready to round on its pursuers and tear. A low rumble came from the man’s throat. Then he was gone.
Johnny’s imagination was fired up by this brief encounter. He saw the roof of the Shipowners’ Association blown off by an anarchist bomb. He had spotted other wary, vaguely foreign men coming and going at all hours from an office at the back that was rented by a socialist group. These socialists did not look much like his father’s circle of henpecked philosophers. Maybe they were Russians. In one of his father’s tracts he had come across a reference to “the propaganda of the deed” — the method of the Russian revolutionaries who had blown up a Tsar and a grand duke. The world called these Russians terrorists, yet Johnny thought they were the reverse of cowards. They gladly put their own lives at risk, believing that by offering to sacrifice themselves they would demonstrate the purity of their cause.
The boy who had pictured himself in the uniform of a naval officer (not much chance of that now) could also daydream of joining a party of bomb throwers. He was of an age, and a temperament, in which the call of adventure, not flags or philosophies, was supreme. He wanted to live each day as if it were his last.
He climbed the stairs, and found that the lightbulb on Kordt’s landing had burned out. He stood in darkness and tapped gently on the door. There was no response. But he could see, from the chink along the bottom, that the light was on inside the sailor’s room, and he could hear gusts of music from a gramophone. He rapped louder on Kordt’s door. There was a scuffling sound and a groan that might have been bedsprings.
A sleepy voice called out, “Go away!”
The boy knocked again. “Heinz! It’s me. Johnny.”
There was an odd smell on the landing, like burning rope. He leaned his ear up against Kordt’s door. He heard low whispers, a ripple of laughter and another creak from the bedsprings.
The door was flung open without warning, so abruptly that Johnny went spinning headlong into the room and landed on a heap of pillows that had been dumped providentially on the floor. Kordt’s lodgings were suffused with pink light, the effect of the makeshift shade the sailor had constructed by tossing the top of an old pair of red pyjamas over his bedside lamp.
The first thing Johnny saw, as he tried to reorient himself, was a narrow, sloping calf in a black fishnet stocking. He raised his eyes higher. All the girl was wearing apart from the stockings was a garter belt and a tart’s brassiere with holes snipped out to show off her nipples. Her straight blond hair was cut tight around her head, like a helmet. Despite her outfit, he guessed she was not much older than he — fifteen or sixteen at most. Her breasts were barely formed, and her slender body, straight as a boy’s, was almost hairless. He stared at her, open-mouthed.
She burst out laughing and puffed smoke in his face as he tried to scramble to his feet. She was smoking a knobbly pipe, one of Kordt’s. Again there was that odd aroma of burning rope.
Heinz Kordt was laughing too. He clapped Johnny on the shoulder and said. “What’s the matter, boy? Haven’t you seen a girl’s backside before?”
Johnny blushed to the roots of his hair, and the seaman laughed louder. He was wearing only his red pyjama bottoms. He had various tattoos on his arms, among them a sea monster inscribed in marvellous detail and a cruder design of a South Seas girl in a grass skirt.
Kordt flung his arm around Johnny’s neck. “You like the look of her? Her name’s Helene. You can play with her, if she lets you.”
The girl made a face like a cat preparing to spit.
“She’s a little spitfire, all right,” Kordt said indulgently. “But she’s clean, I’ll warrant you that. She’s from Berlin. I found her at the station. A runaway, just asking for trouble. I’d thought I’d better bring her up here before she ran into somebody worse.”
Helene marched up to Johnny and tweaked his nose. “How old are you?” she demanded. Her voice was surprisingly deep; it might have been a ventriloquist’s trick. There was a disturbing vacancy about her ice-blue eyes.
Johnny swallowed and said, “Seventeen.”
“Liar,” she hissed.
“It’s true,” he protested.
“Then let me see you smoke this.” She offered him the pipe, and he wasn’t scared to take it. He had tasted tobacco before in Kordt’s room and in secret corners of the school-yard and down at the fish market. But he had never tasted tobacco like this. After a few puffs, inhaling the way she did to show he was every bit as grown up, the room started to blur and he thought he saw Kordt’s red pyjama tops burst into flame above the lamp.
“Indian hemp,” Kordt remarked mysteriously and confidentially. “Never touch it myself.” He confiscated the pipe and added, “You’d better be running back to your own folks. I’ve met your mother and that’s one lady I wouldn’t care to cross.”
“I’m not going home,” Johnny said flatly.
“One drink,” Kordt responded with mock severity. “Then it’s off with you. Helene and I have unfinished business.”
“I mean I’ve left. For good.”
While Kordt stared at Johnny, the girl waggled her finger and chortled, “He’s a runaway!
”
“Let’s see if I’ve got this straight,” Kordt said to Johnny. “You’ve left home for good?”
Johnny nodded.
“Why? You’ve got a decent home, you go to a decent school. The whole world is ahead of you. But not if you drop out.”
“You told me when you left home, you were younger than me,” Johnny countered accusingly.
“I didn’t have any choice. I didn’t even know my father’s name, and my mother was generally too drunk to remember mine. What’s your excuse?”
Johnny tried, haltingly at first, then with passion, to explain. Heinz growled when Rausch’s name was mentioned.
“I know that bastard,” the sailor grunted. “He had me on a blacklist once. For tossing a couple of scabs overboard. If the workers ever get their way, he’ll be one of the first to go.” He rubbed his chin. “All right. So what’s your next step?”
“I’m going to sea.”
“Just like that, huh?”
“I thought you might help me find a boat.” He stared at the floor, partly to avoid the spectacle of Helene, who had stretched out on the bed and was kicking her legs in the air.
“Listen.” Kordt — who had given the boy a couple of boxing lessons — feinted a right jab at his face. “You’ll find shits like Rausch on board ship as well as onshore. It’s no romance, working a merchant steamer. The officers treat you like dogs, and the men aren’t much better. You mustn’t go by my stories. You’ll learn that whatever you’re running away from has a habit of catching up with you.”
“I have to go, Heinz.”
“What do you expect to find?”
“Myself.”
He looked Kordt in the eyes then, and the seaman must have read something he approved of, because after a while he nodded. Then he was on his feet, grabbing for his clothes. He gave the girl on the bed, who had rolled over on her belly, a smack on the rump.
“Put something on, will you? I’ve a mind to show the boy the town.”
They went to a dive where Heinz seemed to be well known, on the border of St. Pauli and the workers’ district of Altona. An exotic name was picked out in multi-coloured lights at the top of a rickety flight of steps. From the street Johnny thought the sign read “Ali’s Bar.” Closer up, he saw that the bulbs in the frame of the first letter had been smashed. The place was the Kali-Bar, named for a Hindu deity.