by William Boyd
*
Berlin. Just as I’d gained exclusive access to the Xanadu-Club, Trudi went missing. We telephoned the number she had given us – no reply. Hanna managed to find out where she was living but there was nobody there. Then a messenger boy came one day with a note saying that she was ill and needed the 150 marks I still owed her. ‘She’ll be back,’ Hanna said. ‘You just have to wait.’ So I waited. It was summer in Berlin – there were worst places to be and I knew that one way or another the Xanadu-Club contained everything I needed. What do I remember of that summer as we waited for Trudi to reappear? I was happy living in Hanna’s apartment on Jäger-Strasse. I had a roof over my head but my money was running out fast.
BERLIN SNAPSHOTS 1930–1
I remember going to Lehrter station to the telegraph office there, open twenty-four hours, and sending a telegram to Greville. I asked him if I could borrow another £20 – a further loan, I stressed – and added ‘SCANDAL FORTHCOMING’. I remember I felt a curious exhilaration on leaving, excited by my own prediction and, instead of boarding the tram back to Hanna’s flat, I hired a Cyklonette cab (three wheels, cheaper) and had it take me to the Mercedes-Palast on Unter den Linden where I drank a dry martini in the bar and toasted my future.
I remember that for two weeks I taught English to a photographer friend of Hanna called Arno Hartmann. He was in his forties, married with two children, and nurtured this fantasy of going to America to make his name as a landscape photographer. ‘Every landscape in Europe is old, tired, overfamiliar,’ he used to say. ‘I need a new land.’ I charged him five marks an hour, about five shillings, slave labour but that was the going rate in Berlin. An hour with Arno was what Trudi made for a single ‘ficky’, I realised, that probably lasted a few minutes. After two weeks there had been no improvement in Arno’s faltering English so I did him a favour and resigned. Greville’s £20 had come through and I was rich again.
I remember sitting in a grubby Nachtlokal with Hanna one evening just off the Kurfürstendamm – that stretch at the end where it rises towards the Halensee. We were talking about the slump of ’29, for some reason, and how, even in Berlin, there were signs of life becoming better and more stable. I lit her cigarette for her and she exhaled a jet of smoke strongly out of the side of her mouth – in that garçonne-ish way she had – while she looked at me, fixedly, tossing her lock of hair off her brow with a flick of her head.
‘Amory. Look at me.’
‘I am looking at you.’
‘Are you sure you’re not in love with me?’
‘I’m sure. I’m not.’
‘Not even a little? A tiny bit?’
‘I’m very fond of you, Hanna. You’re a true friend.’
‘Fond. How I hate that word.’
I remember a hot afternoon at Lake Motzen. Hanna worked for various magazines whose claim to celebrate an innocent naturism and good, healthy living barely concealed the real motive of their publication, namely that their pages contained many photographs of naked young men and boys – Das Freibad, Nur Natur, Extra Post des Eigenen, for example. These naked men and boys often preferred a woman photographer, so she was told, and she was regularly in demand during the summer months while people could sunbathe glorying in the Licht, Luft and Leben that the lakes and open spaces in and around Berlin offered. We travelled out to Lake Motzen to attend a meeting of the ‘League of Air Bathing’, Hanna having arranged for me to be paid as her assistant, something she happily did whenever she thought the magazine could afford it.
It was a day of clear unobstructed sunshine and what struck me most during these excursions was not the casual nudity, so much, as the extraordinary depth and hue of the suntans that these fair-haired Berliners sported. Their skins were so burned by the sun they looked Asiatic, basted and burnished with oil to help fry their bodies better. Hanna took her pictures as the men posed naked with discus or javelin, or dived into the lake, and the boys did callisthenic exercises. Meanwhile I reloaded Hanna’s cameras, marvelling at the unreal texture of these men’s coppery hides, as if they were some alien species or lost Amazonian tribe. There wasn’t the least frisson of eroticism, as far as I was concerned, contemplating these naked male bodies cavorting about the lakeside. It was the Berlin effect – it became ever harder to be shocked or affronted. However, I’ve never really enjoyed sunbathing since, I have to say.
I remember meeting Hanna’s mother and father. They came to the apartment for tea and cakes, a concerned, wealthy, bourgeois, faultlessly polite couple in their soft expensive clothes. Hanna was provocatively at her most garçonne-like, wearing co-respondent lace-up brogues, Oxford bags, a white short-sleeved shirt with a cerise bow tie, her hair oiled back from her forehead. When she strode out of the living room to make tea I saw her parents’ anguished, uncomprehending glance at each other. What had happened to little Hanna?
I remember going to Trudi’s flat, a bedsit in an old apartment block near Alexanderplatz. There had been a big street fight outside the synagogue on Kaiser-Strasse and workmen were wearily sweeping up the debris – placards, sticks, lumps of paving, broken glass. On Trudi’s door was her name, a handwritten scrap of paper pinned above the knocker: G. Fenstermacher. ‘Windowmaker’. Hanna found this very funny. Shamefully, I’d never thought of Trudi as having a surname – she was always a simple ‘Trudi’ to me. Hanna and I sat on her bed while Trudi took the only chair the room had to offer. She was much thinner and she confirmed she’d been away to have an abortion and there had been complications and a spell in hospital. Her mother was already caring for two of her children and had categorically refused to take on a third. ‘What choice did she give me?’ Trudi said, sulkily, resentfully. I handed over the 150 marks I had promised her and arranged to meet the following Saturday night at the Xanadu-Club for another session. She asked me for an extra hundred, saying she could take me to a very private place, very secret. I had Greville’s money by then so I paid up, very curious.
4. A VERY PRIVATE PLACE, VERY SECRET
I SAT IN MY corner of the Xanadu-Club drinking Sekt and smoking, feeling very happy as I covertly clicked away with my handbag camera. It was late and some of the girls – who had also been drinking all night – did an impromptu striptease for the regulars who had lingered on. The men and the women – it had gone very heterosexual by this stage – chatted, kissed and fondled each other like lovers rather than prostitutes and paying customers, as if pleased to see each other and relishing this moment, snug and separated from the sexual commerce of the place for a few minutes, in a warm and friendly atmosphere. I was happy because I had nudity. I had half-naked Berlin prostitutes talking to each other, with their clients sitting alongside, looking on. All was well.
Trudi appeared in her hat and coat and signed off with Frau Amoureux.
‘We get a taxi,’ Trudi said.
We headed east, towards Lichtenberg, into long dark streets of old apartment buildings. I spotted a theatre and a sign that said Blumen-Strasse and then we turned down a narrow shadowy lane. I saw three other taxis ahead of us dropping off their passengers. We followed them through the usual damp, ill-lit courtyard and found a small queue of men filing in the door of an apartment, their hats pulled down, collars up. Trudi led me round to another door to the side where she rang a bell and a man looked out suspiciously. He had a pouchy, flushed face and a wide moustache. Trudi whispered a few words to him then turned to me.
‘You must give him fifty marks.’
‘But I just gave you a hundred.’
‘And I bring you to this place.’
I paid the man with the big moustache and we climbed a back stairway up one floor to a kitchen. There was a blackened tin range, a cold-water stone sink and a few shelves with pots and pans on them. There was another man standing there, reading a newspaper, naked apart from a towel tied around his waist. He looked up as we came in and I saw that he had a harelip, badly joined. He hugged and kissed Trudi and she introduced him.
‘This is Volker,
my brother.’
We shook hands.
‘If you could give him some money that would be nice.’
I duly gave Volker fifty marks. Thank you, Greville.
‘What’s happening here?’ I asked.
Trudi led me cautiously to another door off the kitchen, opening it an inch or two. Peering through I could see a larger room, a sitting room, perhaps, transformed into a kind of crude theatre. Almost twenty men were already there, scattered about on the rows of chairs. Other men were arriving – prosperous men, so they looked to me as they removed their hats and coats and the place filled up. I saw silver hip flasks being passed around, cigarettes were lit, conversations were low and terse. The audience was facing a simple wooden bed with a headboard, made up with a pillow and sheets, lit by a standard lamp at each end. I began to understand why Trudi had called this a very private place, very secret.
I turned as I heard steps coming up the kitchen stairway. A young woman came in, bespectacled, wearing a tan camel coat and a velour hat with a bow on one side. She had a bony, angled face, her tiredness visible, and she looked as if she was returning from a day’s work at an office somewhere. She kissed Volker with familiarity and fished in her handbag, handing him what looked like a tube of toothpaste.
We were introduced – this was Franziska – and I gave her the obligatory fifty marks. I thought I recognised her as one of the girls from the Xanadu-Club. A whispered exchange with Trudi confirmed that this was true. So far I had spent 250 marks on this evening but I didn’t begrudge it – I had a feeling that whatever I was about to witness was going to be worthwhile. What I was more worried about was how much film remained in my camera – I had taken many photographs in the Xanadu-Club.
Big Moustache stuck his head round the door and asked if everyone was ready.
‘We’re ready,’ Franziska said and she slipped past me into the sitting room. There was no applause – just the sound of two dozen men shifting in their seats.
Trudi tapped me on the shoulder.
‘I go now. Volker will find you a taxi.’
‘See you next Saturday.’
She left and I turned back to see what Franziska was up to in the room. She had taken off her hat and coat and was beginning to undress in a matter-of-fact way, exactly as if she was in her own bedroom, humming to herself, sighing with exasperation at a stubborn button. Soon she was down to her underclothes. She took off her spectacles and tucked them under the pillow.
I looked back at Volker. He was naked now – his body was very white with well-defined musculature, only his forearms tanned brown. He had a thin line of dark hair on his chest running down to his navel. He was squeezing toothpaste into his palm, then he rubbed his hands vigorously together to make a softer paste – then he began to massage this cream on to his penis.
‘What’re you doing?’ I said spontaneously, raising my bag. Click.
He was wholly unselfconscious as he pulled and tugged at himself with both hands, easing the toothpaste into his skin.
‘Ow. It’s burning,’ he said. ‘The toothpaste makes me hot. Stechend.’ Stinging. His harelip made him lisp strangely. ‘And when it’s hot like this it makes me bigger, you see.’
He took his hands away. I could see it was working. No erection but very impressive size, nonetheless.
‘Goodness!’ I raised my bag and coughed as I pressed the remote release button.
‘It’s just a trick,’ he said, and shrugged, almost apologetically.
I turned to peer through the crack in the door again. Franziska was now naked and she walked round the bed, folding and tidying away her discarded clothes, before climbing in between the sheets. Volker loomed up beside me. All I could smell was toothpaste.
‘Ten seconds,’ he said.
Franziska was feigning sleep, making deep breathing sounds, tossing and turning as if she was dreaming.
Then Volker walked in – the dream made flesh – and the toothpaste trick provoked a gasp of envy-admiration from the male audience.
And then Volker and Franziska duly made love. Orthodox straightforward sex, the sheet thrown back, lit by the two standard lamps. When it was over Volker strode back into the kitchen. I could hear him getting dressed behind me but my eyes were on Franziska as she awoke from her dream, looked around, saw no naked man, smiled to herself, stretched luxuriously, then stepped out of bed and began to put on her clothes, ending with her spectacles, retrieved from under the pillow, then her coat and velour hat and, the working girl fully attired ready for the day ahead, she left the room without a glance.
Now there was applause – a brief clapping of hands – and I heard a surge of low-voiced conversation as Big Moustache made his way through the crowd collecting money.
Franziska stood beside me watching, expressionless. She had a sharp pointed face, almost pretty, but her lips were thin and turned down at the corner as if she were permanently disapproving or bitter.
‘You see him put the money in his pocket?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
‘These are tips for us – me and Volker – but he keeps them. The men have already paid to get in.’ She gave a thin smile. ‘But tonight you pay me,’ adding in English, ‘thank you very much, Miss.’
‘Who had the idea for this show?’ I asked. ‘Him?’ I pointed through the door at Big Moustache. The room was emptying fast. ‘Or Volker?’
‘No. It’s my idea. Have you a cigarette?’
I offered her a cigarette and took one myself. We both lit up. Volker had gone to the lavatory on the landing outside the kitchen.
‘It’s a very clever idea, your show,’ I said, marvelling at its potent and absolute simplicity. Franziska’s dream. All these men were paying to enjoy Franziska’s fantasy, not theirs. ‘Bravo.’
Trudi (on top) and Franziska outside the Xanadu-Club, before work. Berlin, 1931.
I returned to the club a few more times and managed to arrange some further photographic sessions with the girls – they had come to know me by now and were actually quite pleased to have their pictures taken. When I left Berlin some two weeks later I decided to fly back to London. It was extravagant, almost £10, and it took up the remains of Greville’s second loan, but I’d never been in an airliner before and I felt that a symbolic act of some sort was required at the end of my Berlin adventure.
Hanna came with me to the aerodrome at Staaken. We said our sad goodbyes – we had become real friends, I considered – and yet she managed to snatch a full kiss on my lips, hugging me to her and promising to come and see my show of Berlin photographs when it opened in London.
I was flying Deutsche Luft Hansa and as I walked across the concrete apron with the other twenty or so passengers towards the vast aeroplane – four engines, a kind of enormous flying wing – I turned to wave back at the departure building but I couldn’t see Hanna. I wondered if she’d gone.
I had a seat in the actual wing itself – you could stand upright in it easily – with a view forward through a square window, just like the pilots who were sitting in their cockpit a few feet to my right. The doors were closed, the engines started, and we trundled down the runway and, in no time, it seemed, the aeroplane heaved itself into the air, climbing very slowly, heading for Amsterdam, our refuelling stop before Croydon airport. I felt an extraordinary exhilaration, as if I might swoon, to be lifted above the earth in this way, the drumming of the engines in my ears, to be floating and yet feel so secure with a metal floor and carpet beneath my feet.
It was a cloudy day and as soon as the earth below was lost to view I wandered back through the fuselage – the airliner was perfectly steady – to the smoking parlour and had a cigarette and a gin and vermouth, served by a steward in a white jacket.
I asked the steward what kind of airliner I was in – I always liked to be specific, to retain this knowledge for the future.
‘It’s a Junkers, Fräulein,’ he said. ‘A Junkers G-38.’
I ordered another gin, enjoying this unique s
ensation, flying across Europe in a Junkers G-38 with a drink and a cigarette in my hand. I was experiencing my usual simultaneously contrasting Berlin moods – sadness at leaving and excited anticipation at what the future might hold. I had printed no photographs – just contact sheets of what I’d taken at the Xanadu-Club and Franziska’s show – all that was to come, with a bit of judicious dodging and burning. Greville would be pleased, I thought – I’d cabled him: ‘MISSION ACCOMPLISHED’. And I had the premonition, with a little justified self-satisfaction, also, I admit, that my pictures would cause something of a stir.
5. SCANDAL!
I TURNED TO CONFRONT Greville and held up a rusty tin of mulligatawny soup that I’d found behind a pile of old brown paper bags.
‘It’s a greengrocer’s,’ I said. ‘Was a greengrocer’s.’
‘Then we’ll call it the Green and Grocer Gallery.’
Greville paced about, thinking. He was wearing a fawn light tweed suit, cream shirt and a mustard-coloured silk tie – everything toning perfectly. I rummaged in another cupboard and found a damp box of nut rissoles and five tins of baking powder. Suddenly I had an idea. I tore a bit of peeling wallpaper off the wall, searched my handbag for my pen and, when I’d found it, I wrote the words down and showed them to Greville.
‘Yes. I like it,’ he said, ‘somehow managing to be both exotic and sensible at the same time.’
‘Grösze and Greene.’
‘I like the umlaut and the “e” at the end of Greene.’ He tested it out loud several times: the Grösze and Greene Gallery. Then he kissed me on the cheek. ‘Clever girl. What’re you going to call the show?’