William Boyd - The New Confessions

Lunch at the WarCorrMess in the Hotel Am Zoo. Windsor soup, brisket of beef, dressed cabbage. Floated the silk stockings theory. Several people agreed. Wrote a small article for the Herald-Post on the matter. Late in afternoon took some photographs in a burned-out-tank park — v. dramatic

Saw Die Spur des Falken again. Bogart is excellent. Cinema freezing. Looked in at Dandy Bar. No sign of Henni. Home .

The Dandy Bar was in a small street just off the Kurfürstendamm. It was in the ground floor and basement of a ruined apartment block. In the vestibule there was a reception desk and a cloakroom. Stairs led to the basement, where there was a bar and tables and chairs set around a small stage and dance floor. The place had pretensions. Some of the walls were paneled, the wood salvaged from grander buildings, and there was a lot of red plush about. The tables had white cloths and the waiters wore uniforms. It was patronized almost exclusively by American soldiers — who had more-easygoing fraternization laws — and girls.

I went there the evening after my tour round the city. The bar was open but empty. A three-piece band of emaciated men in loose Hawaiian shirts played “Don’t Fence Me In” rather well. I showed the barman a photograph of Karl-Heinz. Yes, he said, he used to come here when it was the “old” Dandy Bar, before the management upgraded it. In the old days it was for homosexuals, “men and women,” he added liberally. Karl-Heinz hadn’t been seen since. “How long ago was that?” I asked. “Four, five months,” he said. And no, no letter for him had been delivered or collected. I left a message just in case and took to dropping in there most nights. It seemed the only thing I could do. A bottle of wine cost ten pounds and I once ate a meat dish there that someone later told me was spaniel.

During those first weeks in Berlin I did my job reasonably dutifully and associated with other journalists. I found myself very quickly caught up in the apathy and aimlessness that seemed to brew in the air above the ruined city. In a curious way it was a bit like Los Angeles, only here the constant climate was destitution and deprivation. Those of us exempt from these afflictions were still contaminated by the prevailing mood, like an airborne virus. The tone employed in conversation was one of bitchery and complaint. We sat in our basement nightclubs, drinking and eating our fill, moaning about our work and living conditions. Outside, the rest of the city went to hell.

It wasn’t that my zeal to find Karl-Heinz had diminished, it was that I couldn’t think of any other way of channeling it apart from sitting at the bar in the Dandy, drinking and listening to the band and hoping vaguely that he might look in. Sometimes I went to other clubs — Rio Rita’s, Femina, Tabasco — with their lesbians and stunning transvestites, the racketeers, the cigarette and chocolate smugglers with their expensive women. In spite of evidence to the contrary, one could live very well in Berlin in those days, if one could afford it. But I found, quite apart from its association with Karl-Heinz, that I preferred the Dandy’s shabby pretensions and its ever changing multitude of whores.

One evening I chatted to one of these girls. Henni. I had no sexual interest in her but the American press was desperate for vice stories from occupied Germany — how victorious GIs were being corrupted by conquered Frauleins —and as she was alone I thought I might get some “human interest” from her. Henni was a tall girl, with almost a subterranean pallor. She had thick fair hair that needed a wash. Her upper lip was long and it gave her a faintly doleful expression. She was drinking colored water and smoking a cigarette. She said she was waiting for a major in the 82nd Airborne but he never turned up. She told me that she had been in the chorus of the Deutsches Opernhaus. I offered her another cigarette and ordered a bottle of wine. After we had talked for half an hour, she gestured towards my pack of cigarettes and said, in English and without much enthusiasm, “You give me that, we go ficken. ”

She took me back to the room she shared with her mother just off Savignyplatz. Her father, a music teacher, had poisoned himself in ‘45 when the Russians entered the city. Her mother, an old lady, smiled politely at me and left the room when we arrived. The room was small, very cold and neat. There were many pictures of cats on the walls. There was only one glass pane in the window that looked over a rubble-filled courtyard; the other holes were filled with cardboard.

Henni made a thin tea that we drank without sugar and milk. She put my cigarettes away in a cupboard.

“My mother will be delighted,” she said. “We can sell them tomorrow.” She gestured at the bed. “Shall we? Hunger is a great incentive for prostitution.”

I liked Henni. I found her intelligent dry efficacy entertaining and quite inoffensive. I went to the Dandy most nights, and when she was there returned home with her. I brought food and chocolate, but what she really wanted was cigarettes, the only hard currency in Berlin in those days. When I bought a carton of two hundred Lucky Strikes at the big post exchange in the American sector, I used to say to myself, “Ten nights with Henni.” Henni’s mother would take them down to the black market site in the Tiergarten and exchange them for food. Berlin was full of prostitutes in 1946, nearly all amateur ones. Three hundred thousand at least, one journalist said. It was, moreover, a city of women, three to every man. It was difficult for Henni to get regular clients, such was the competition, and there was something about her faintly doleful, faintly disdainful expression that put men off. Apart from me, she said she averaged three or four customers a week, and she never went with Russians.

I liked to lie in bed with her, chatting (her mother went down the hall to a neighbor’s room). It was warm in bed and we would lie there smoking Lucky Strikes and drinking whiskey. I told her about my days in Berlin. (She found it strange to think that we had shared the city before — that I might even have seen her as a little girl. “And look at us now,” she added.) She would tell me about her singing career and how she was looking forward to renewing it. One evening I asked her to sing me something and, straightaway, lying on her back, cigarette burning between her fingers, she sang in a pure clean voice “Wohin Sint die Goldenen Zeiten?” The haunting loveliness of the tune reduced me to tears.

April 10, 1946. Managed to get a car and driver to myself and went to a beach on the Havel for a picnic with Henni. We motored through the Grunewald, which is more or less untouched. A bright day with watery sun. Yachts and motorboats on the lake. Henni went swimming; I declined. She wore a dark-blue two-piece swimsuit and a red-and-white rubber bathing cap. She splashed energetically in the water then rushed out and flung herself on the sand to sunbathe. Beneath the wool of her costume I could see her nipples were hard and erect and the fair hair in her armpits was dark and sleek from the water .

I felt unaccountably depressed. If it hadn’t been for the khaki Chevrolets and the sprinkling of uniforms on the beach, we might have been back in the 1930s. What was I doing here prostituting this bright intriguing girl? I felt heavy with guilt. To expiate it I spent an hour telling her about myself as if sheer weight of information could transform me from a client to a person in her eyes. I told her about Karl-Heinz and my search for him, my dream of finishing The Confessions. She suggested matter-of-factly that I leave a poster outside Karl-Heinz’s former apartment saying I was looking for him. Everyone in Berlin used this method to trace missing friends and relatives. (Why hadn’t I thought of this?)