“Doctor Goult’s treatment has made me thirsty. Can I have a glass of water?”
Already the clever little vixen had slipped into the kitchen. Elvira turned on the tap and filled two glasses to the brim. She handed one to the woman who took a few sips, pasted on another artificial smile and began questioning her again.
“Did you have our friend the dermatologist touch up your face?”
“A shot of Botox in the bunny lines. And you?”
The woman stood looking around the room and seemed not to have heard the question. Elvira took a sip of water, drew a deep breath and took another sip, gripping the glass, ready to pounce. A Saint Andrew’s cross was propped against the living-room wall. The woman gazed at it with empty eyes. Two perforated leather straps with metal buckles hung from the cross-ends. The woman balanced her glass on the edge of the sink and undid one of the mother-of-pearl buttons on her blouse. She fanned her throat with her hand. The trembling silk clung to her full round breasts. Is Doctor Goult responsible for that perfect pair of tits? Like Elvira, she wore no bra. Her face took on a touch of humanity, a tint of old-fashioned pink like Japanese greasepaint. She came up to Elvira, took her hands and pressed them to her breasts. Elvira finished unbuttoning the light blue silk blouse and tugged at the cloth, freeing the last button from a fold in the skirt.
She bunched the woman’s breasts together and pressed them to the sternum. The woman moaned. Elvira stroked her cheek. Next, she pulled off her own sweater and dropped it on the rug. The woman gazed at Elvira’s bare bosom and murmured:
“I took a long time choosing between New York and Paris.”
“I’m happy to hear you say it. So did I. And I’m glad I made the choice I did. New Yorkers are impossible people, especially the women.”
Elvira’s voice was no longer the same. It had become sharp, authoritarian. She dug her nails into the porcelain skin, leaving pink streaks on the woman’s arm, then between the two breasts which were back in place now, tips slanting towards the armpits. Throwing her weight against the other woman’s pelvis, she backed her towards the wall. Step by step, the American retreated towards the cross, quite unruffled. To make it easier for the dominatrix, she raised one arm, hand hanging limp. Elvira attached her wrist to the cross, passing the prong of the buckle through the third and last hole in the strap. The woman held up her other arm. Her head was bowed. In her rolled-up eyes, the white of the iris had supplanted the bright brown of the pupils. Their faces were almost touching. The woman looked straight at her. In her eyes, there was no trace of fear, she did not so much as blink. Arrogant bitch! They locked gazes, with the American squinting. Words fell from her lips without a twitch of her facial muscles:
“I’ve just come back from a trip to Peru. Macchu Picchu . . . Have you ever been there?”
Elvira twisted her ear with wiry fingers.
“No, I’ve never been up Macchu Picchu.”
She gripped both the woman’s nipples and twisted them clockwise.
Then she dug her nails into them. The woman’s gaze began to quaver. A shudder ran through her shoulders. There were creases on either side of her mouth. Her lower lip hung loose and moist. Elvira bit hard into the limp bit of flesh, meanwhile pinching her again and again, at regular intervals. Then she relaxed the pressure but left her nails where they were. The woman rose on tiptoes as if to recoil from another pinch. Elvira rubbed her hands together and, without a word, slapped her twice. That did it, I’m wet as any slut! A lock of dark hair danced in front of the foreigner’s pale face. The bun was slowly coming apart, the locks of hair like snakes coming to life. Elvira seized one of the barrettes that slipped over the ear and brandished it threateningly before the woman’s eyes.
“How long have you been spying on me?”
“I don’t understand,” the woman said, exaggerating her American accent, and then sucked her lower lip
What an actress, she’s doing all she can to excite me! Elvira’s cheeks were burning. She dropped the barrette and pressed her sex against the American’s thigh, the other woman’s body was jutting forward like a ship’s figurehead. As she rubbed her cunt up and down on her visitor’s firm flesh, cum flowed in little spurts down her own thighs. She ran her hands over the woman’s hips, feeling for the skirt zipper. She jerked it open and pulled the skirt down around the knees. The woman wriggled.
“A skirt around the knees isn’t very stylish.”
Elvira laughed sadistically. She caught hold of lips that still bore traces of purplish lipstick in spite of all the sucking and nibbled on them. They had the sickly sweet taste of tinned lychees. Now and then she would stand back and chortle with glee. The American looked her straight in the eye. I’m going to teach this one a lesson. Elvira seized her panties with two fingers, seamless Lycra panties, cut low over the flat hips, violet like the shoes and bag. Her own panties were twisted up inside her vulva and each of her moves deepened her excitement. She pulled the Lycra away from the woman’s white skin and slipped her hand inside. Her fingers moved downward one after the other, the way one imitates the footsteps of an imaginary character in a story told to a child. For the first time, the woman’s eyelids fluttered. She tried to fend off Elvira with her tongue, gluttonously licking her cheeks and nose. Elvira’s index finger entered the plucked slit, followed by the middle finger. Her left hand pulled the skirt down further, leaving it crumpled around the woman’s calves. She inserted three crooked fingers and pushed upward. With each to and fro, her wrist rubbed against the woman’s bare belly. Another finger entered the gaping vagina, then the thumb and finally the whole hand. Elvira’s torso was pressed against the woman’s bosom. The woman gave a cough, not a real cough but an imitation meant to contract the belly and eject the churning fist inside her, but it was no use. Elvira leaned forward, took one of the breasts in her mouth and began sucking on it vigorously, as if it were a genital organ. She moved her head back and forth, mouth wider and wider till it touched the rib-cage, engulfing the whole apple of flesh. The woman’s closed eyelids quivered. Drops of saliva dribbled from her mouth. She moaned in time to Elvira’s fist and mouth and came with a long scream, neck stretched, eyes suddenly open and staring at the ceiling beams. Elvira sighed.
“In my study, there is a plane ticket to Lima. I just purchased a week’s excursion up Macchu Picchu. How could you know about that?”
Lips pursed as if to keep from replying, the woman rattled her wrists in their straps. Elvira released her and closed the light-blue silk blouse. The woman pulled up her panties and skirt, picked up the jacket and pocket-book she had laid on a kitchen stool and left. Elvira snatched up the phone and called Dr Goult.
“What was the name of the American woman I saw in your waiting room as I left your office?”
“I don’t know who you mean. What did she look like?”
“About my age, dark-brown hair, with violet shoes and matching handbag.”
But the dermatologist had seen no American patient that day. Elvira put her hand over her pounding heart, took a deep breath, jumped up and hurried down to the third level of the garage beneath her building. She opened the door of the Mercedes and searched the passenger’s seat and the dashboard compartment. No gloves. Yet she distinctly remembered the woman wearing them when she got into the car. The attendant had given out no information about the person renting space No. 353. Nor had he seen a brunette in a tweed suit.
The next day, when Elvira described the incident to her analyst, he told her to stop being so hard on herself.
Checkpoint Charlie
N. J. Streitberger
Charles knew he was in for an adventure when the taxi driver started waving a revolver around.
He was on his way from Tegel Airport and the driver was keen to show what would happen if anyone got “funny” with him.
This was the summer of 1988 and it was Charles’s first visit to Berlin. He was on an assignment for E:Go, the style-making magazine for which he wrote about cinema. Ken Loach was ma
king a rare foray beyond the shores of the UK for a film about an East German musician sneaking into the West to try his luck. Cannily aware of the influence of the magazine, the producers had invited Charles over for a few days to watch Loach at work and hang out in the city.
While he had a thorough knowledge of the director’s work, he had virtually none of Germany, apart from what he’d read and seen in movies. Berlin had always seemed to him like a fantasy city, a place of dark dreams. This imagined city had been built in his mind over the years by several viewings of The Blue Angel, in both German and English versions, Fritz Lang’s M, Cabaret, some (though by no means all) of the films of Fassbinder and Herzog and frequent exposure to the works of Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht, Isherwood, Lotte Lenya and Dagmar Krause.
Impressionable as he was, even Charles could tell the difference between real and reel life. As he had never had a loaded gun pointed more or less in his direction, it was a nerve-wracking, thrilling experience. By the time he got to his hotel, he was in a state of heightened expectation.
The day on set had gone well. Loach and his small crew had handpicked several local teenagers and punks to appear in the film and Charles very quickly fell in with them.
Although they were almost half his age they took him under their collective wing and promised to show him as much of the Berlin nightlife as possible in forty-eight hours. The fact that he wrote for E:Go was his passport into their world as they all read it in the same way he had devoured the NME when he was their age.
The director had been generous with his time, talking to Charles between set-ups and allowing him a full hour during the lunch break. He had also included him as an extra, wandering through a party scene in the non-speaking role of a record-company executive. The young punks had strutted their stuff brilliantly, mainly because they were required simply to be themselves.
It had been swelteringly hot, and back in his hotel Charles had shivered under a cold shower just to try and cool off. Down in the lobby, three girls dressed in distressed leather, ripped jeans and Doc Martens were waiting for him; his unofficial entourage. Two of the girls took his arms and marched him out into the dusk. It gave him a strange thrill to be in the company of young gorgeous, reckless and very friendly Berlin youths. Maybe he was too old for this.
Then again, maybe not.
The night proceeded apace. One club after another – some howling with music, the walls actually pulsating with the throb of the bass; a couple of dark basements where people recited poetry and sang little songs. Somewhere around 4.00 a.m. he was sitting on a sofa with the stuffing protruding from one of the arms drinking coffee while the girls danced to Eddie Cochran’s “Cut Across Shorty” on the jukebox. It was pleasantly bizarre.
He wondered whether sex might be on the cards later. Would they all come back to his hotel room? It would be impossible, not to say discourteous, to choose between them and he had never before engaged in a group session. These German girls could be very uninhibited. Or so he’d read. After all, wasn’t it the decadent lifestyle of the West that the East objected to so strongly? He imagined girls in boots and Nazi-inspired fetish wear, black silk stockings and leather corsetry; he fantasized about slender women dressed in formal male attire, black dinner suits and bow ties, cigarettes in long holders, patent leather pumps, monocles – lipstick lesbianism long before the term was coined. Otto Dix meets Salon Kitty.
By the time 5.30 a.m. rolled around and he staggered out blinking into the dawn, it was clear that it was simply an innocent night on the town. A few hugs and promises to see him later and they left him to find his own way back to the hotel. Nice kids, he thought, with just the slightest pang of regret that he hadn’t pushed home his advantage. Ah well. So much for fantasy Berlin. They were just punks past their outrage-by-date. Counter-culture shadows.
What remained of the day was free. A few hours’ sleep and he was ready to do what he wanted to do which was to visit Checkpoint Charlie and go and have a peek at the East for a couple of hours. The Spy Who Came In from the Cold loomed large in his imagination as he asked directions and then discovered that he was only five minutes away from the infamous crossing point at the Wall.
His first sight of the sign stating, “You are leaving the American Sector” in four languages, was somehow thrilling. It was like stepping into a movie.
Charles approached the white hut in the American sector with rising excitement. He produced his passport and was asked his business.
“Just a look around. I will only be a few hours.”
After giving him the standard spiel for visiting foreigners, the bored official waved him through. He walked slowly, savouring the moment as he crossed into East Berlin. Suddenly, brutally aware that he spoke no German and that he was venturing into uncharted territory, he hesitated a little, looking up at the watchtower and the barbed wire and the general accoutrements of the border. On the other side, there was a long zig-zagging barrier which he had to negotiate. He approached a long line of huts and went to the nearest window. A glum guard looked at his passport and went inside. After a while a door opened in the building and he was beckoned inside.
Charles stepped into the building and was greeted by a stern-faced woman with short-cropped blonde hair. Her face was neither beautiful nor unattractive but very square and strong with a jaw you could have hammered horseshoes on. The shapeless dun-coloured uniform gave no clue as to the figure beneath.
She was holding his passport between a finger and thumb as if she had just fished it out of a pile of dung.
“Bitte,” she said. “It says ‘Writer’. What sort of writer are you?”
“I am a film critic,” said Charles nervously. “You know, Kinema.”
“I know what a film critic is,” she replied. “Empty your pockets.”
Charles did as he was told. Wallet, handkerchief, a few coins, an embarrassingly greasy comb, keys and some extremely ancient ticket stubs for the Odeon West End. In his coat pocket he discovered he had a rolled-up copy of the latest E:Go which he had brought to read on the plane. He put that down on the table.
She immediately picked it up.
“What’s this?”
“Er, the magazine I write for. See? My name’s in there somewhere.”
She flipped through the pages of streamlined fashion models and restlessly coiffed young men in clothes that wouldn’t even figure on her dream list. She paused at a particularly provocative pose by a very young model in absurdly expensive jeans and nothing else, her androgynous breasts peeking from behind her loosely crossed arms.
“Who is this?”
“Uh, Kate Moss. She’s the hot new model. In London.”
“She is a child.”
“Well, she’s fifteen, actually. Or fourteen. I forget.”
She folded the magazine and put it in a drawer.
“You cannot take this. I must confiscate it. It is decadent material and we cannot allow this kind of corruption in the GDR.”
“Oh.”
“How long are you staying in the East?”
“About three hours.”
“Very well. Go now.”
Slightly discombobulated, Charles left the building and walked on through into the eastern part of Friedrichstrasse. It was like stepping through a portal into another dimension.
Unlike the swarming, noisy roads of West Berlin, the streets were empty and quiet. Instead of the garish posters and lurid colours of advertising hoardings and billboards there was nothing but blocks of grey stone buildings. The silence was uncanny. It was like walking into On the Beach, as if all humanity had been wiped out.
But the sun was shining and he began to walk. He managed to find his way to a large square, marvelling at the huge buildings, and the way the magnificent architecture of the old ones jostled with the blank dirty-white Soviet-era office blocks and apartments. Christ, he thought, someone actually designed these.
He looked in awe at a car park filled with Trabants. They were parked in such ord
erly rows that their square outlines looked like a row of child’s plastic bricks, lined up and ready for construction.
He wanted to buy something, a souvenir of the GDR, but wasn’t entirely sure how to go about it. There must be shops, he thought. Even communists need to buy stuff.
Eventually he spotted a lone policeman standing at an intersection. He asked directions to the shops. The cop (if that’s what he was) ignored him and walked away.
Finally he ventured into what looked like a department store called Centrum. He wandered around the aisles and tables gazing at the mass of dreadfully dull materials and ghastly manmade-fibre clothes on display. The women seemed to be all fat and listless. There were no men. Probably all working, he guessed. He bought a pair of red socks as a kind of joke souvenir for himself. At least I’ll have something to remind me of the visit, he thought.
By some miracle, he found his way back to Checkpoint Charlie.
He arrived at the gate and walked through. As he was presenting his passport a door opened at the side and his formidable interrogator beckoned him inside. Oh well, he thought. Maybe she’ll give me back my magazine.
She took him along a corridor and into a small office where she closed the door firmly. On the scuffed desk lay his magazine, opened at a fashion spread involving two men and three girls whose limbs seemed to be looped around each other.
“Anything to declare?” she asked. It was odd that she should use the very words employed by Customs people at British airports. It was almost like a parody.
“No,” he said, before remembering his socks. “Well, just these.”
He took out the crumpled paper bag and placed them on the table. She tipped the socks onto the magazine and moved them around with a stubby finger as if checking they were really dead.
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