Ernst Haffner - Blood Brothers

Little Willi’s experience was vastly different. His teenage years were poisoned by his own mother, who gave herself to strangers in the room where he slept. By the tenants who brought their johns into the room, and sometimes drunkenly staggered up to Willi’s bed: “Willi, darling, aren’t you old enough yet … do you fancy it, then … keep still, sweetheart …” The mystery into which the twenty-year-old Willi Kludas was inducted with the help of smutty pictures and his friends’ obscene speeches had been revealed to little Willi at thirteen under still more profane circumstances.

They leave the cinema and head back out onto Münzstrasse. Willi Kludas stares under every tart’s hat brim, and if he’s accosted with a practiced smile and a swaggering display of breasts and bum, then he feels a lustful itching that burns through him, dries his throat and makes his legs tremble. His damp hands in his trouser pockets clutch his money … Enough to have one of those girls. But he’s ashamed in front of his comrade. It would be a different matter if he was on his own … “What’ll we do now?” asks the boy. “Do you know anywhere where there are lots of girls?” is Willi’s counterquestion. “The fairground?” proposes the boy. “Are there any there?” “Christ, any number … behind the toilets for fifty pfennigs,” comes the expert answer.

The Silesian Fair on Schillingbrücke. Pleasure garden for all the gangs in the east of Berlin. Scene of daily jealous battles over a squeeze. Berlin’s nastiest red-light area; schoolgirls, and girls just out of school. Price: five rides at the funfair, a trip to the Hippodrome, ice lollies or potato pancakes, according to season. The more advanced of the child prostitutes have graduated to cash money. Scene of the transaction: behind the toilets. Cap cheekily shoved back so that the hair spills out over their eyes, cigarettes in the corners of their mouths, men between fourteen and twenty take in the daily parade of women between twelve and eighteen. Glances, and sometimes more than glances, assess bodies whose owners reciprocate by trying to show them off to best advantage.

Outside the funfair there’s Elly, a pretty, well-made thing of sixteen, staring yearningly at the whooshing swing boats. Little Willi knows her. “Do you fancy her then?” he asks Willi Kludas. The acquaintance is soon made. Willi buys tickets for three rides, and piles into a boat with Elly. Pulls on the strap so hard that after a few swings it’s touching the top of the frame and the operator has to use all his strength to brake. With coquettish fear Elly sits clasping Willi’s legs. Another ride, and another, and then they find themselves back on solid ground again. Elly stretches, smooths her disheveled hair, and lets the impressionable Willi into a few secrets about her build. He’s a cute boy, and not half strong …

A boy who knows what he owes his new bride is duty bound to treat her to potato pancakes. Little Willi does the honors on behalf of his gormless elder. After potato pancakes, Willi Kludas and Elly are sitting in a little dodgem car on the Iron Lake. Round the corners, Elly shows her expertise at pressing her soft body against his. Willi staggers out of the car like a drunk, and clutches Elly’s arm. Where did the little fellow get to then? Just as well he’s gone. We’ll meet up at Olga’s later anyway. Elly is in the mood for a drink. Where, asks Willi. They go to the Whale, opposite the fairground.

It’s a big beer bar where the garlands hang every day from January 1 to December 31. The band, with trumpet and drums at the fore, is evidently under strict and simple instructions to bend their efforts to the making of as much noise as possible. And lo, they succeed, for dear life if nothing else. Because the customers’ idea of entertainment in the overcrowded bar is a drunken shouting and rampaging around. Narrow passages between tables have long since been taken up by scraping shifting chairs. The whole bar is a seething confusion, swathed in the smoke of mostly non-export-quality cigarettes. In the midst of it all, scouts in a desperate pickle, are the waiters. On each one of ten fingers, defying gravity, a beer. Jammed against each elbow, if possible, oval plates with vast helpings of pork and sauerkraut.

The band comes to an understanding that they need to give their instruments a rest if they are to go on playing until closing time, and the drummer is given a signal to end. He obliges with an extra-powerful cymbal crash. For a second or two there is the grotesque auditory spectacle of a wildly yelling mob, whose vocal cords were until recently in an implacable struggle with the band. Then, seemingly abashed by its yelling, the whole bar is suddenly shtum. In that second of silence, a girl’s voice is heard, squeaky, loud, but appealing, calling: cigars, cigarettes, chocolates! The cigarette girl. Willi waves her over. Cigarettes for himself, a bar of chocolate for Elly. Then the waiter brings them their pints. By the time Willi has paid, he has exactly twenty pfennigs left. What does he care? Elly has slipped off her coat and is showing herself off to her boy in a skimpy red dress that proclaims all the amenities of her body in stentorian tones. She is aware of Willi’s staring burning eyes, and moves in a little closer. By now the band, refreshed by a round or two of free beers, is striking up again. The customers too are back to shouting in one another’s faces, apparently delighted at the healthy state of their voices.

At eleven o’clock, Willi walks Elly home. Elly has her own place; the family she does for occupies a ground-floor apartment, and Elly has a little room at the back. With heart beating wildly, Willi stands in the unlit yard, waiting for a ground-floor window to open somewhere. A few minutes later, he is sitting in Elly’s room. They aren’t able to talk much. Yes, the family live at the front, but … Willi sits there, stiff and mute. Timidity, panic, lust for the girl spin round and round, chasing each other within him. He watches Elly get undressed. Two round white arms emerge from the red dress. A subtle, wholly bewildering smell of young female flesh billows around him, causing him to moan quietly. Elly plonks herself down on the bed and takes off her last layers under the sheets. When at last her soft nakedness presses herself against his body, and she squeezes his glowing face between her almost-maternal breasts, then the accumulated sexual deprivation of years of welfare institutions is discharged with almost-animal roars.

Two hours later, exuberant as a little boy, Willi is strolling through quiet nighttime streets. The great experience is singing and whooping inside him. The great experience he has heard cheapened, thousands of times, in the tales of his friends. The great natural experience that welfare kept from him for so long. The great experience he pictured for himself in garish fevered colors, during tormented sleepless nights. The great sublime experience in the arms of tubby little Elly …

Willi is in luck. He’s spent all his money on Elly, but in the morning little Willi is shaking him: “Oi, get up, it’s snowed again!” Snow? That means he can earn money again! Off with snow shovel and broom. As they work, little Willi asks how the evening went. But Willi only gives evasive answers. Something as lovely as that you need to keep under your hat. Oh, Elly … The shovel works like a dream, it’s all the broom can do to keep up. And by the afternoon, they’ve earned another ten marks.

Three days later. No further snowfall, alas, and Willi is trying to make his bit of money last. In the morning he wakes up feeling terrible. Everything hurts. What’s the matter with him? When he tells little Willi, he breaks into a grin, and asks: “Did you look and check?” Check … check what? “I expect you will have gone to bed with Elly.” Before long, the little boy has diagnosed that Willi’s got a dose of the clap. Elly infected him. “You need to get yourself seen by the doctor right away, and you’ll be fine in two weeks.” “Doctor? I’ve got no money, and no papers.” “You don’t need them, Willi, you get seen to for nothing.”