Филип Керр - Metropolis

‘I can buy that. But what’s the reason you’re telling me all this?’

‘What time do you start work?’

‘I usually begin here around midday. Why?’

‘Because it occurred to me that you might do a lot more than show me how to make myself look like a klutz .’

‘Go on.’

‘What you said about the one-legged actor at UFA. That was smart. It’s got me thinking that I haven’t really thought this through, not nearly enough. I realize now that there’s going to be a limit to how much time I can tolerate in this contraption. And perhaps, left to my own devices, to how convincing I am. Look, I know it’s asking a great deal, Brigitte, but I was thinking I might come to this theatre every day, at about eleven, before you start your proper work, when you could help fix me up, make me look like a proper klutz before I head across the bridge to beg. I could come back after a few hours and then go home. Maybe even leave my costume and the wagon here.’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘Because I think you’re a smart person, and helping me beats sitting around in here playing solitaire. Because I think that like any woman in Berlin, you want Winnetou caught. And because right now I’m the best chance of making that happen.’

‘You’re very sure of yourself, aren’t you?’

‘Not in the least. When I said chance I meant one chance in a hundred. This is a long shot, bright eyes, a very long shot, with a long gun and a deep breath and only the slightest chance of succeeding or being accurate. But right now it’s the only shot we’ve got.’

The next day was almost worthy of a short poem by Goethe about a German summer, with the sparrows on the linden trees singing in the sun’s warm clear rays. Above Berlin’s grim grey buildings the sky was as blue as the stripes on a Strandbad chair and the air was already cooking nicely as if ready to steam all the human sausage that inhabited the metropolis. In front of the Neues Theater, the rippling river Spree glinted like a cut sapphire. Inside the theatre, onstage, the band was already rehearsing one of the numbers from the opera, but it hardly seemed to be the weather to be playing anything that was deliberately out of tune. Call me old-fashioned but there’s something about a perfect day that demands perfect music. Schubert, probably.

In Brigitte Mölbling’s room I changed into my uniform and sat in the make-up chair. She tucked a sheet into the collar of my old army tunic and went to work on my shaven head with paints and sponges. I liked her attention to my face; it brought her own beautiful face nearer to mine, which felt like a good place for it to be. Up close I could smell the Nivea on her face and the perfume on her fingers; in other circumstances I might even have tried to kiss her. She hummed along with the band as she worked and before long I was humming, too; one of the tunes they were rehearsing was unfeasibly catchy.

‘And now, because we don’t want anyone to turn a deaf ear to your misfortune—’ Brigitte burned a couple of small holes into the tunic with a cigarette and, in spite of my protests, made some stains with candle wax. ‘We need to ensure the pity of those who see you, Gunther. It certainly wouldn’t do to walk into the rattrap looking like you’ve just come off the parade ground.’

After thirty minutes she pronounced herself satisfied that I was ready to go out and meet my public. So I knelt on the klutz wagon and wheeled myself eagerly to her full-length mirror, where a seismic shock awaited me. I was staring at an abbreviated, nightmarish version of myself that made me gasp out loud.

‘Holy Christ,’ I said.

The pitiful creature looking back at me was a badly damaged man who hadn’t been as lucky as me; a Gunther who, blown to pieces by an enemy mortar bomb and then salvaged by the German Army medical corps against all odds, might easily have existed in Weimar Germany’s half-Brueghel world of the blind leading the blind. The round dark glasses contrasted sharply with the creature’s pale face and bald head, so that they resembled the empty eye sockets in a human skull. A living, breathing Golgotha, I felt like Faust being shown one of my alternative futures by a rather less than accommodating Mephistopheles who cared nothing for seductively indulging me with all the pleasure and knowledge of the world. It was enough to make any man count his blessings and swear off the drink — almost.

‘Well?’ she asked. ‘What do you think?’

‘Holy Christ,’ I muttered again. ‘I look terrible.’

‘I’ll take that as a professional compliment.’

‘Well, yes, you can. It’s just that — I guess I never realized how very lucky I’ve been. I’m looking at the fellow in the mirror and asking myself what it must be like to wake up and be confronted with this horror every day.’

‘And what’s the answer?’

I thought for a moment. Seeing myself like this had made me realize something important. Something profound that was probably going to affect me for the rest of my days. Thanks to Bernhard Weiss and Brigitte Mölbling, I’d achieved something useful, even if I never did manage to catch Dr Gnadenschuss. I’d been given a genuine life lesson.

‘It’s this. That you can’t put a price on good fortune. It’s the difference between two men: One, the man in the mirror with no legs and no future other than selling Swedish matches, and the other, a stupid, able-bodied idiot of a detective who’s full of drunken self-pity instead of humble gratitude. I just got myself reminded of what a lucky break I had — to walk away from 1918 without a scratch.’

‘Well, you have to be smart to be lucky. But what you’re saying sounds like an epiphany, if you ask me.’

I took her heavily ringed hand and kissed it with fond gratitude.

‘It’s not Archimedes but yes, why not? An epiphany. They say that when you’re drinking you have to reach rock bottom to turn your life around; I think I’ve just been shown a small preview of what rock bottom might actually look like. Thanks to you I may never drink again. Well, perhaps not as much.’ I kissed her hand again.

‘If I didn’t know better I’d snatch my hand away and fetch some disinfectant. I’ve seen stray dogs that had more to recommend themselves than you do.’

‘I get that a lot.’

‘So. Are you ready?’

‘Yes.’

‘Hey, what will you do if Dr Gnadenschuss really does try to kill you? How will you protect yourself?’

‘The usual way.’ I reached into my tunic and took out a Walther automatic.

‘Good,’ she said, as if it mattered to her that I was able to look out for myself. And that was good, too: that it mattered.

She accompanied me to the front door of the theatre, where she kissed the top of my shaven head.

‘You’re interesting to me now. So be careful, Gunther. There are plenty of other wicked bastards out there who can do you harm, not just Dr Gnadenschuss.’

I wheeled myself out the door and into the sunshine, onto the cobbled streets of Berlin, and headed across the Friedrichstrasse bridge in search of a killer.

I was fond of seeing Berlin from a great height; the view from the cathedral roof is unparalleled. But the world looks different when you’re no higher than a dog’s arse and no more significant than that to the people around you. So close to the ground I felt like a small child, one of those street urchins in summer usually seen jumping naked into the river or shouting to a friend in some poor courtyard inside another courtyard, where the sun rarely if ever shone. I didn’t know if The Threepenny Opera had any klutzes in the cast, but it probably should have done; my wagon played a squeaky little tune as it bowled lamely along that put me in mind of one of the numbers from the show. Perhaps it was because I was pretending to be a cripple, but it was only now that I noticed the theatre was near the Charité hospital and on the edge of the city’s medical district, where surgical bookshops and specialist clinics were in plentiful evidence, along with orthopaedic stores featuring a variety of equipment, including shiny modern wheelchairs that looked far more attractive than the contraption I was in. But from the prices I saw advertised in the shop windows, anyone who could have afforded a decent wheelchair could never have passed for a beggar.