The Hustler: The Story of a Nameless Love From Friedrichstrasse

by John Henry Mackay

  “Outwardly our friendship passed as a marriage—as an unhappy marriage, as I hear not for the first time.”

  She continued speaking:

  “We were often together, but not always by any means. We traveled much, and then mostly separately. Precisely everything was based on that free agreement, which must be the basis of each relationship from person to person and—almost never is.

  “We were happy, he and I, together or separated, and then each in our own way,” she began again. “At least happy at times. More can no human being ask of his destiny.

  “We loved and were loved in return—each according to our nature. And we never offended against thatf

  “And how are you living now?” asked her spellbound listener.

  “In the memory of him—and the others. And—if you want it—now also a bit for you, Hermann. But now to you!”

  *

  “From where and what did he know about me? He could not have heard about me?”

  “No, but he saw you. When you were still a little chap, so small that you will hardly remember him. He saw you with your friend. He knew immediately. He had such a sharp eye.”

  Walter! The name came to him (the first, unconscious love of his childhood years!).

  “’Hermann is like me,’ he then immediately said to me. ‘He will have a hard life, for he will love with his heart. I saw it in his eyes. Let us make it easier for him, if we once can and may; what do you think?’ He is no longer able to do so.”

  She reflected.

  “He then added: ‘But only if he himself comes. Then he will be in need and distress, into which we all—at least once—come.’”

  And she concluded in her own words:

  “And so, Hermann, I come to what I have to say to you, in his name, and what I will right now say. I don’t know your relationships. But I know his will. ‘In our life,’ he often said to me, ‘in our difficult life, freedom from others, their judgment and actions, means more than usual. An external independence alone can make it bearable to some extent. Therefore he is to be my heir. If he comes. And if he does not come, then let it be another, someone deserving.’ Now you are here.”

  He jumped up.

  “No,” he cried excitedly, “no, I’ve not come for thatf

  “I know,” she interrupted him, and gave him her hand.

  “I know. But it was his wish, and so it’s mine.”

  She again pointed to the picture and around the room:

  “It is his work, the untiring work of his life.”

  He still had an objection:

  “But he himself had friends, young friends, who were closer to him than I—who must have meant much more to him?”

  She ended the conversation:

  “Be at ease. You are taking away from no one. He thought about all of those who later meant something to him. You are taking away from no one.”

  Moved, he could only keep silent.

  *

  In the first days he avoided addressing her.

  “I can’t say ‘Aunt’ to you,” he said in distress, “the word is repugnant to me.”

  “Then say ‘Mother’ to me!”

  She kissed him on the forehead.

  *

  “Tell me about my mother,” he begged.

  “She had a refined and quiet disposition, and was at the same time an exceptionally clever woman. Her only comfort, to which she could flee, was her music. Her voice was not great, but sweet and pure. I could listen for hours when she sang. Then you came and were her everything. But you can no longer know that.”

  “No,” he said, “she died too soon.”

  “My old friend did not have it easy with your father,” he heard her say further.

  My father! he thought bitterly.

  *

  They spoke further, going from the personal to the general, often and long about this love.

  Again and again he asked, when he saw how much more she did know and understand than he:

  “But from where do you know all this?”

  And again and again came the answer:

  “From him! From him, from whom I learned to understand. Not to forgive, for there is nothing here to forgive. But to understand!

  “’It is a love, like every other,’ he said again and again. ‘But whoever cannot understand it as love, or will not, never understands it.’”

  *

  “But I am—as they indeed call it—guilty of ‘indecent assault!’” he laughed out loud.

  But he immediately became serious again: “Either I am a criminal or the others are, who made this law and carry it out! There is no third—”

  “There are few human beings—” was her answer, and to her lovely and clear eyes there came an expression of sharpness and hardness which he had not yet seen in them. “There are few human beings who have not become criminals against their fellow humans—not directly, but rather indirectly, in that they tolerate and advocate laws such as this one for example.

  “And”—now her eyes flashed in anger—”and what are all the crimes in the world compared with the ones committed by those in gowns and vestments, robes and uniforms!”

  He had propped his forehead in his hands and said slowly, “I heard and understood almost nothing of what was argued there on that day. For I expected a miracle, which was then not a miracle, but a disenchantment. But it seems to me that one of these men (as if excusing himself) said: ‘I don’t make the laws, I carry them out.’

  “He carries out laws,” he ended thoughtfully, “which he considers unjust and convicts innocent people—daily and hourly. And can sleep peacefully.”

  *

  As she again spoke of him—and she did so often—he formed a picture of this uncommon man:

  “At times, if he was speaking with the others, the ‘normal’ people—but he seldom spoke any more with them about it, for he was tired of the thoughtlessness and prejudice of their answers—at times he turned the tables and asked them: ‘Tell me, what would you do if you had been born with this disposition?’ He never received, never ever, as he told me, a true and courageous answer. Indignant or lying evasions; pompous and cynical protestations; mostly, however, something we Germans dearly love, a dissertation, instead of a precise and honest answer. What indeed should they have said to him, if they wanted to be honest!

  “Yet he saw again and again that no argument worked like this so simple question.”

  *

  “It is the age which you love, Hermann. It was also his age. Do understand that,” she said once. “Another couple of years and you would have”—she interrupted herself—”and he would have perhaps remained your friend, but you would no longer have loved him. No longer thus.”

  He looked at her startled and surprised. That smile of hers appeared, as so often, on her lips:

  “Would you love him if he had a mustache?”

  And when he, entirely absorbed in thought, still did not answer:

  “For he would surely have had a mustache one day, wouldn’t he?”

  He did not smile back, but it seemed to him that a curtain parted before his understanding.

  Ridiculous, absurd, inconceivable—but the truth!

  *

  Once he said (and in the old torment):

  “I don’t know if I still love him. I hardly know any more, if I loved him. And that is probably the most frightening of all! I only know, I will never be able to forget him, if—if I can ever think about him again.”

  “That you should also not do. Only think about the beautiful hours with him. It is all that we will one day have, the memory of such hours. Cherish them. But don’t bury your whole youth in useless brooding. Consider: only this hour is yours.

  “How many happy and beautiful hours you can still have and will have, if you only will.”

  “And if I no longer find the strength and the courage for them?”

  “Courage and strength will return under your will. Will it!”

  *

&
nbsp; “For it is your destiny, as it was his. Neither oppose it, nor bow down under it. Neither one will help you to the only happiness that there is for you. Make a peace treaty with it, and direct it! Then you will conquer it and only in that way. He could do it. You can do it. Everyone can, who will!”

  My destiny, he thought, my undeserved destiny! But in the night that followed he looked at it for the first time firmly in the eyes and it appeared to him no longer so unconquerable.

  *

  And again on the last day: “Since it is passing, let it be light—your love! Let it be light—you cannot load your burden onto young shoulders, who neither want it nor are able to carry it! Let it be light: like a day in spring, like a glimmer of summer, like an hour of happiness. And do not question! Do not question! Since it stands outside of all laws and morals of people, it is freer and—perhaps also more beautiful for it. For if it is burdensome and deep—”

  “It is ruin and death!” he chimed in.

  *

  When after eight days he took his leave, he knew that he might return and would return. For his home was here from now on.

  He did not travel toward the south.

  He traveled back to Berlin.

  13

  As a young man who knew almost nothing of life and little about himself, Hermann Graff had come to the metropolis a year ago.

  As a man who wanted to know and master life as it was, he returned again.

  He had to show himself who was the stronger.

  The train rolled and rolled. The nearer he came to the goal, the more strongly he felt that the wounds in his breast had not healed over. They pained him anew.

  The wounds had been given him by life through a young hand that did not suspect where it was striking. They bled and would bleed until another young hand closed them.

  Was it already stretching out to him—one among millions—this other young hand?

  14

  As chance or destiny—so variously do people name the same thing—would have it, on the same day another train was carrying two people from an entirely different region of Germany to an entirely different goal (and far past Berlin).

  They were Gunther and his guardian.

  Because for some reason his conscience had begun to bother him the man had shown up at the institution one day. Since he came with stamped papers and as a sort of official—vice-mayor of his village—after a long debate and endless annoyances, they had delivered his ward to him.

  Now they were sitting opposite one another in an empty third-class compartment. He was a tall, coarse man with boorish features and manners, seeing red from rage over the long and costly trip, the loss of time, and all the expenses that the boy here had brought him.

  From time to time he spit and gnashed his teeth at him:

  “Just wait, little boy, you won’t run away from me again! We’ll quickly take you down a bit! Such a lousy brat, you run away from home and gallivant around out there for a whole year! Well, just wait, when we get you home again. You dirty, dirty boy, you!”

  He had nothing to fear.

  For what was sitting opposite him, this little heap of misery, was no longer thinking of flight; he no longer thought of anything at all. The boy was staring listlessly with his red-bordered eyes in the gray face before him, and he appeared to see and hear nothing that went on around him. His head was again shaved entirely bald and his lip, which usually turned up so remarkably at every excitement, no longer twitched. It was now constantly drawn up, and behind it, where a tooth had been knocked out in a fight, the ugly hole gaped.

  Indifferent and apathetic, he sat there and chewed on a piece of bread.

  The train rolled and rolled.

  He had forgotten everything. Forgotten were the hungry and the overfed days of this year; forgotten his partying, dancing, and drinking through the nights; forgotten the countless faces that had shown up in them, the old and the young, the friendly and the angry, which had all raced by him in a mad whirl; and forgotten, forgotten was the great and patient love, which had shone over him so long like a warm and bright light and which had still been unable to rescue him, not from himself and not from the others.

  Only an oppressive and dull rage still boiled in him: against Max, who had lured him there; against Atze, who then had really brought him into this life. Against everyone and everything: against those guys, the johns, who used and misused him, to throw him away like a cigarette butt; against the Count, who had treated him like a pet dog and then had chased him out; against the other boys, who had all exploited his good nature; and against him, who was the only one of all to love him—against him not the least.

  Why did he, after all the other stupid things, write such a foolish letter!

  What could have been in it! They had never shown it to him, but they nearly tortured him to death with their questions. The best thing had been only to say yes to everything. Only then did he get any peace.

  This advice of Tall Boy he had then also followed in Berlin, where they had taken him for a day, in the room with the many strange people. There, too, he had nodded to everything and said yes, even when he had not at all heard and understood what they really wanted from him.

  Had he been there, his earlier friend? He did not even know. He had not seen him. He had not heard his voice. He had not looked up, because he did not want to look up. One only looked into cold and mean eyes and faces.

  It was also not at all true that the man had loved him, as he said so often. If he had truly loved him, then he would have helped him get out. But in another way. Not with such letters.

  They had brought him back again. And then this shithead had come there to take him home again.

  They could just as well have left him there. It was all the same, like everything was. Just now it had become somewhat better for him there since Tall Boy had taken him as his steady and jealously assured that nobody else came too close to him.

  But in the end—it was all the same. His rage sank again into dullness.

  He could be indifferent to everything that still happened to him now. Already tomorrow he would be standing behind the counter again, in a blue, fatty apron, selling herring and soap to brawling farmers’ wives, with hands red from the cold and an eternally growling stomach. Only on Sundays would they probably go again to the nearest villages. Then the other boys would interrogate him. But he would certainly tell them nothing. He had nothing to tell. And then—what would they understand of it!

  The train rolled and rolled.

  It stopped at every station. At each his guardian jumped up, spit out, shot an angry look at the runaway, coughed out verbal abuse, and fell again into his drowsy sleep.

  Always other passengers got on and got off again.

  The sounds of their speech became more familiar. Already place names he recognized were striking his ear.

  The train stopped again.

  *

  They got off, the boy last.

  The short springtime of his life was over.

  AFTERWORD

  The Hustler, Mackay’s second long novel, appeared in 1926, a quarter century after his first, The Swimmer. The two novels have great historical value: both are set in Berlin and describe scenes that have nowhere else been documented in such exemplary fashion. The Swimmer describes competitive swimming and diving in the formative years of those sports in Germany. The Hustler (the original German title, Der Puppenjunge, will be explained below) gives us a view of homosexual life in Berlin in the 1920s; the accuracy of its description is vouched for by Christopher Isherwood, who wrote: “I have always loved this book dearly—despite and even because of its occasional sentimental absurdities. It gives a picture of the Berlin sexual underworld early in this century which I know, from my own experience, to be authentic” (letter of November 1983 to Sasha Alyson, publisher of the first English translation of The Hustler). But both novels are of far more value than their witness to history. The Swimmer, the story of the rise and fall of a world-champion sw
immer, while on the surface an exciting sports novel, also gives a penetrating insight into the nature of a gifted individual who is consumed by a single-minded ambition; it was written without propagandistic intent at a time when Mackay was best known as an anarchist propagandist. The Hustler, on the other hand, is clearly propaganda—written from an anarchist viewpoint, it pleads for the acceptance of man-boy love. It gives a view of human sexual nature that has been brutally suppressed—not least in our own day. Not surprisingly the novel was first published under a pseudonym. Who was Mackay/”Sagitta”?

  John Henry Mackay was born in Greenock, Scotland, on 6 February 1864. His father, John Farquhar Mackay, was a marine insurance broker, who died when his son was only nineteen months old. John Henry’s mother, nee Luise Auguste Ehlers of a well-to-do Hamburg family, returned to Germany with her young son, who thus grew up with German as his mother tongue. He later learned to speak English—and even published a volume of translations of British and American poetry—but he never wrote it very well. Following an unsuccessful year as an apprentice in a publishing house, he was a student at three universities (Kiel, Leipzig, Berlin), but only as an auditor. He early considered himself a writer, and although never very successful commercially, did gain a certain esteem. Already in 1885, following a visit to relatives in Scotland, he published an epic poem, Kinder des Hochlands (Children of the Highlands), which is inspired in part by Walter Scott’s poetry (as discussed by the Germanist Edward Mornin in “A Late German Imitation of Walter Scott” in Germanic Notes 17.4 [1986]: 49-51). In 1887 he went to London for a year, a London filled with German refugees from Bismarck’s anti-Socialist law, and there he moved to the extreme left with his interest in the “social question.” His collection of anarchist poems, Sturm (1888), was acclaimed as revolutionary. Then he read Max Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigentum (The Ego and His Own, as the title was given by the publisher, Benjamin R. Tucker, to the English translation in 1907). This strengthened Mackay in his own individualistic views, which were then seen in his book The Anarchists (1891; Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1999; also available on the Internet: http:// dwardmac.pitzer.edu/Anarchist Archives/macan/macan.html). Mackay also determined to write the biography of this forgotten philosopher of egoism; his biography of Stirner appeared in 1898, the same year as the 636-page volume of his collected poems.