The New Confessions

by William Boyd

  8

  Julie

  The rain pelted down on Knesebeckstrasse. I held the car door open with one hand; the other raised the large umbrella sheltering the fur-clad old crone who was climbing with preposterous difficulty into her waiting taxi. Drips formed and fell from my cap’s glossy peak. I could feel the damp seeping through to my shoulder blades. I kept the smile rigid as I shut the door on her. The window glass took an age to wind down. Her bejeweled hand presented me with a shamefully inadequate tip.

  “Vielen Danke,” I said.

  I backed gratefully under the canopy at the front of the Hotel Windsor. I was the doorman. It was February 1925. Berlin, I was making my own rut.

  I have leaped a dismal year or so. Nineteen twenty-four. All the wearisome frustrations of the Superb-Imperial bankruptcy and my own concomitant slump into insolvency preoccupied me for months. Raymond Maude was undeniably grief stricken. It was the extravagant costs of The Blue Cockade and its total failure that had done for him. He sold everything the studio owned, including his remaining rights to Wee MacGregor’s Holiday. It was truly galling to see the queues forming outside the cinemas, where it was playing as profitably as its predecessor, and know that all the revenue it earned would benefit the Todd family not one penny. Finally, in the summer I joined the other litigants and sued Superb-Imperial for the outstanding nineteen-hundred pounds they owed me on the Holiday film. (I waived my claim on the stillborn King Wee MacGregor!) In the eventual meager share-out, I received 187 pounds, 18 shillings and 6 pence. It was something, I suppose. One other unhappy side effect was that the Maude marriage broke up under the strain. Rosita took herself off back to Beira or Lisbon, and Vincent never saw his godmother again.

  About July or August I accepted the inevitable and started looking for another job, but to my surprise and alarm found there was nothing forthcoming. Gainsborough Films offered me a week’s work as a stand-in cameraman. Astro-Biocraft thought there might be an opening in their editing department in a few months’ time. The film industry had entered one of its periodic slumps, true, but I soon began to suspect the malign hand of Harold Faithfull. It was my mistake, or bad luck, that I was almost unknown in the film community outside Superb-Imperial. I remembered Faithfull’s absurd threat and dismissed it as sheer fantasy until I read in a trade paper that he was making a film called The Sultan and the Temptress for Talbot Instructional Films and UFA in Germany. A man who could get work so quickly after the almighty disaster of The Blue Cockade must have some power and influence. I became convinced that Faithfull had effectively blacklisted me. He was the first in a long line of enemies that have dogged and tried to destroy my career. I have no idea why, but I seem to attract malice in the way cattle attract flies. I am not belligerent but I always end up fighting someone. What had I done to Faithfull? How could my Wee MacGregor films have possibly discomfited him? It was his own inadequacies that compelled him to hate me. It has always been that way: the talentless envy the talented in the same way as the petty envy the strong.

  I took the week’s work at Gainsborough, around the corner from Superb-Imperial in Islington, as a stand-in assistant cameraman on a film called Passionate Adventure. And then, nothing. The year wore on and our savings dwindled. In August, Sonia announced she was pregnant again. That was all I needed.

  Leo Druce was similarly impoverished. He restarted his car-hire agency in London and from time to time I would do a job as chauffeur or bus driver on outings for a pound or two. It was hardly a living and Leo could not afford to take on a partner. And besides, I wanted to make moving pictures, not drive charabancs.

  And then in October came my salvation. One morning a postcard arrived, forwarded from Edinburgh. The stamps were German. On one side was a picture of the Brandenburg Gate. And on the other:

  Hello, Johnny!

  How are you doing? Well? I am in Berlin making lots of films and plays. Come and see me. Why not?

  Kind best wishes from your old prison guard,

  Karl-Heinz

  He had given his address: 129B Stralauer Allee, Berlin …

  I remember that morning with perfect clarity. Sonia had gone out and left me with baby Vincent. I was sitting at the kitchen table in vest and trousers, drinking a cup of strong tea. Vincent was crying lustily in his cot. I was faintly nauseous from the smell of old beer seeping up through the floorboards from the pub below. I needed a shave. I thought this tableau might have been done justice by some modern Hogarth: Jobless Man, perhaps. Or The Artist’s Dream Frustrated. I heard letters being pushed through the letter box and went down to the hall to collect them. There were two bills—one from my solicitor and one from a tailor—and Karl-Heinz’s postcard. I read it as I trudged back upstairs towards Vincent’s irritating screeching. And then I felt as if I had been punched in the chest—that sudden thump of exhilaration that is the physical corollary of a brilliant idea. Of course! Of course. How parochial and hidebound of me! There were other film industries—America, France, Germany—far more audacious and inspirational than what was going on at home. Why stay put and marinate in one’s own self-pity? I would go to Berlin, join Karl-Heinz. We would make films together.…

  My mind began to work faster. I would leave as soon as possible—and alone. Whenever I was established I would send for Sonia and Vincent. I suddenly saw all the splendid potential in the idea. How vastly more intriguing to make one’s name abroad in one of the real capitals of film. No more pap or trash. No more Wee MacGregors. I felt a stimulating sense of freedom. I was almost grateful to Raymond Maude for going broke and to Harold Faithfull for his vindictive spite.

  * * *

  I left home at the end of October, promising Sonia that I would send for her and Vincent before Christmas. I went by boat—cargo steamer—from London to Bremerhaven, and from there by train to Berlin. It was pouring with rain when we left the docks at London and I did not trouble to go up on deck. I sat in the small, dusty, paneled saloon drinking a warmish mug of unsweetened cocoa and I glanced only once or twice through the portholes at the rain-smudged views of the disappearing city. I had very little money, not quite fifty pounds (I had been naturally obliged to leave the rest of what remained in our savings with Sonia, who as a further economy had quit the flat above the Salisbury and had moved in with her parents), but I felt much the same as I had that night I ran away from Minto Academy and caught the night train down to London. The future lay before me like an empty sheet of paper. All I had to do was make my mark on it.

  I had written and cabled to Karl-Heinz about my impending arrival, but I had received no reply. The train from Bremerhaven arrived at Lehrter Station in Berlin at six o’clock in the morning. It was just growing light and was decidedly cold. I bought a cup of coffee and two round bread rolls from a stall outside the entrance and wondered what to do—I thought it a little too early to turn up at Karl-Heinz’s. So I left the station and walked along the Spree for a while (I had only one suitcase with me). The river water was dark, bottle-green, sluggish. Barges were moored here and there. I crossed the river at the Marschall Bridge and wandered into the center of the city.

  Berlin … first impressions. I will try to recall them, after all these years, after familiarity has worn down the images like old coins. Berlin that cold morning in October was very clean, extraordinarily clean. Wide, broad streets. Trees, statues—statues everywhere—and fountains. It felt modern, recent. It had a new feel, a busy feel. Above my head stretched a matrix of electric tram wires. Trams were everywhere, even at this hour. I wandered through the streets—Friedrichstrasse, Behrenstrasse, Unter den Linden (with its disappointing spindly limes), past the somber palaces, the palatial stores and the fabulous hotels. It was like … Take a prosperous British Victorian city center—Bradford, Manchester, Glasgow. Buff up all the heavy overdecorated architecture, then push the buildings far apart to form clear prospects and broad avenues. Scatter young trees and white statues wherever space permits. Then add all the paraphernalia of the modern city: t
he motors, the tram and cable cars, the billboards, the neon signs, the yellow autobuses, the green taxicabs with their white-hatted drivers, and an urgent hurrying smart population. That was the Berlin I saw that morning. Its newness was my abiding impression: a city that seemed only as old as its inhabitants, as if it possessed no past beyond the memory of the generations that lived and worked among its spick-and-spanness.

  There were other Berlins, of course, that looked like Amsterdam, or medieval French towns, or cramped urban slums, or featureless industrial cityscapes, and I was to see them later that day, but I was inspired by its contemporariness as I passed among its prosperous commuters and pedestrians. I could sense no dead hand of tradition about its open squares and immaculate boulevards. I knew I could achieve great things here.

  It took me some time to find 129B Stralauer Allee. Eventually, having obtained the necessary information from a helpful English-speaking clerk at a railway station, I took the Stadtbahn east to the Stralau-Rummelsberg stop. Stralauer Allee ran along the north bank of the Spree, and here the city faintly resembled stretches of London by the Thames at Chelsea before the embankment was built. Old buildings with cellar shops and cafés, wooden jetties and unsteady rickety steps leading down to the slow river whose banks were crowded with barges lashed together.

  Number 129 was a narrow five-story house built round a small brick courtyard. The apartment where Karl-Heinz lived was on the first floor. I went through the main entrance, saw no concierge and mounted the central stone staircase to Apartment B. The name above the doorbell was Pfau.

  I was about to ring for the third time when it opened to reveal a large untidy man in a collarless shirt. He had straight, short gray hair and a large crude face with the sort of creases and dewlaps one associates with certain types of hound—a basset or a pug, say—rather than a human. He had damp lusterless eyes and a blunt nose with big hair-choked nostrils that needed clipping. He was smoking a cigar.

  “Karl-Heinz Kornfeld?” I inquired.

  The man—Herr Pfau, I assumed—shouted for Karl-Heinz, who, after a short pause, came to the door wiping shaving soap from his face. His hair was longer but otherwise he was unchanged. Tall, thin, dark, vital.

  “So, Johnny,” he said calmly. “How wonderful to see you.”

  I stepped over the threshold and we shook hands. He saw my suitcase.

  “What brings you to Berlin?”

  “Didn’t you get my letter? My cable?”

  “What letter?”

  “You had no idea I was coming?”

  “No, of course not. But it’s a delightful surprise. Come in, come in.” He introduced me to Pfau—Georg—who said hello and disappeared into another room. Karl-Heinz led me through a sitting room, dining room and kitchen and on into his own bedroom. The apartment was very badly designed. There was no hall or corridor. One room simply gave onto another as one moved around the central courtyard. The bathroom was at the end. I was so perturbed by the nonarrival of my letter that I did not really take in the simple decor and well-worn furniture. But I did notice that the walls of most rooms were lined with wooden boxes, like lockers, and stacks of fine wire-mesh cages. The apartment was very warm, as well. The air was filled with a faint electric hum, as if there were powerful dynamos in the basement.

  The Hotel Windsor’s doormen were obliged to wear typically preposterous uniforms. It was the usual comic-operetta hussar getup: gold buttons everywhere, bushy epaulettes, high peaked cap, yards of looped curtain cord with bellpull tassels swagged over the shoulders and the whole—in deference to the English note in the hotel’s name—rendered in coruscating beefeater red and gold. I felt myself an unseemly shout of color in the stolid gray streets, a human beacon that, I felt sure, must make most passersby want to shade their eyes. My uniform was slightly too large, as well. It belonged to Georg Pfau’s nephew Ulrich, whose job it was and for whom I was standing in. Some unspecified family crisis had required his presence at home in Breslau for two months and I had had no hesitation in accepting the temporary post when Georg decently offered it to me.

  It was an odd life being a doorman. I found it uncomfortable working in uniform—it reminded me vaguely of the army, but there is something pretentious about civilian uniforms that makes me uneasy. There were four of us working shifts at the Windsor and as I was the most junior I was always allocated the least lucrative—ten in the morning until four in the afternoon. I missed the crowd checking out in the morning and those checking in, in the evening. The Windsor’s restaurant was not highly regarded and the lunch trade was consequently slack. So I paced to and fro idly on Knesebeckstrasse watching the traffic and the passersby, trying to keep warm, trying to keep out of the rain and snow (the winter of 1924–25 was particularly raw). At four I went down to the basement to the staff canteen and had a meal—belly of pork with carrots, oxtail with turnips, something hearty, anyway. I had plenty of time to think and reflect.

  Accommodation had proved no problem. Karl-Heinz encouraged Georg to rent me a room in his apartment for two pounds a month. But my other ambitions were harder to achieve. The “many films and plays” Karl-Heinz had referred to in his postcard certainly existed, and Karl-Heinz was in them, all right, but usually as a nonspeaking extra. He had profited from the postwar vogue for vast historical epics and he took me to see such films as Anne Boleyn, Julius Caesar and The Trojan War in which I felt I might be able to pick out his face in the swarming multitude. Currently, he was “resting,” he told me, ironing clothes and sewing on buttons in the costume department of the Schiller-Theater Nord.

  I settled down quickly in the Pfau household. There were just the three of us. An old woman—Frau Mittenklott—came in the afternoon to clean and cook the enormous evening meal. What did I do? I wrote diligently to the studios and film companies. I wandered around the city. I drank beer and coffee, ate cake, sat in cold parks and listened to the bands. I received polite refusals from the studios and film companies, which Karl-Heinz translated for me. I started to learn German. After a month I cabled Sonia for more money. She sent ten pounds and a curt letter asking when she and Vincent would be sent for and reminding me that I had promised to be home for Christmas. The new baby was due, she added, in March and she would like—please—to be settled in her new home. I wrote back saying that things were going well and I was making progress, but my plans were taking slightly longer to realize than I had expected. I sent all my love to her and little Vince and asked her to borrow another ten pounds off her father.

  I must be honest. I felt as if I were on holiday. Nineteen twenty-four had been such a disappointing year—steady impecuniousness, Vincent teething, no work—that I was glad to be away. I liked living in Georg Pfau’s inconvenient apartment. I enjoyed being abroad in a strange fascinating city. I strolled the clean wide streets, a happy alien among the incurious Berliners. I whiled away afternoons in shops and museums. I played at being a bohemian. I had a little money, I had a warm place to live and I had my entrancing fabulous dreams. Sonia, Vincent, the Shorrolds, Wee MacGregor, Faithfull, Super-Imperial, poverty and frustration seemed to have nothing to do with me now.

  And there was Karl-Heinz. The strong affection that had grown up between us in Weilburg quickly reestablished itself. When he was not working he would take me to bars and cafés, to films and plays. He took me to the west of the city, to the Kurfürstendamm; we patronized the Bluebird and El Dorado, the Westens, Café Wien and the Romanisches Café. Here was the artistic lively heart of Berlin, where I felt I truly belonged. The solid prosperous streets I had seen the morning I arrived were for the older generation and the rich bourgeoisie. Real life was in the west. In actual fact Stralauer Allee was inconveniently placed for the west end. It was a longish trip on the elevated electric railway to the Kurfürstendamm, and after the initial enthusiasm I decided to save money by staying at home. Karl-Heinz, however, went over three or four times a week, bringing back—through my bedroom en route for his own—a steady supply of Ottos, Klauses and
Heinrichs. I kept a chamber pot beneath my bed to avoid disturbing him if I needed to go to the toilet, and I soon became accustomed to new introductions at breakfast time. Georg himself did not seem to mind these transient visitors, and after a while I began to suspect that he and Karl-Heinz were in some way “involved.” I asked Karl-Heinz about this, delicately.

  “Oh, for sure,” he said. “Georg loves me. He lets me stay here for nothing. You know, one time a month, one time every six weeks, he asks me to give him a—what do you say?—a masturb.” He pumped one hand graphically.

  “Ah.”

  “Yes, it’s a cheap rent.”

  I actually found the idea somewhat revolting, not because of anything associated with the act so much, but because Georg himself rather disgusted me. I liked him, and was most grateful for his hospitality, but there was no getting away from the fact that he was a horrible-looking person.

  For example, I tried not to take breakfast at the same time as Georg since one morning when, buttering a fresh roll, I had looked across the table and my eye had been irresistibly caught by Georg’s big dense hairy nostrils. Like two old caves, I found myself thinking, thick with brambles, moss and ferns.… Just at that moment he removed his cigar from his mouth, and with smoke still curling and eddying around his face he took a huge cracking bite of salted cucumber. My gorge rose, my mouth flooded with saliva, I gagged and I had to run from the room.

  His job too was unsettling and its associations were always with him, like a smell of onions. Georg was an insect breeder, hence all the boxes and mesh cages in his rooms; hence also the eerie buzzing of invisible dynamos and the high temperature in the flat (plump stoves and parafin heaters constantly burning). He bred bait for fishermen (maggots), silkworms for the silk industry and butterflies for lepidopterists. He provided a steady stream of crunchy grasshoppers for the reptile house and the snakepit in the zoological gardens. Recently, however, he had been in demand by the film industry. If you needed a shade-dappled clearing frothing with butterflies, Georg Pfau was your man. If you wanted bumblebees visiting flowers in an Alpine meadow, Georg would lay on hundreds of the fluffy little workers. He did most of his work for one particular studio called Realismus Films Verlag that specialized in grim low-life melodramas and that regularly required encrusted flypapers, humming heaps of ordure and infested hovels. In one Realismus film, Georg told me with pride, he could get through a thousand bluebottles. He was known in the industry as the Fly Man—der Fliegenmann.