William Boyd - The New Confessions

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 .

Georg was a taciturn but placid bloke who seemed entirely happy with his life. His profession occupied most of his time. His pleasures were cigars (he smoked from rising in the morning and stubbed out his last butt when he switched off his bedside light), food — Frau Mittenklott’s gargantuan suppers — and his monthly masturb at the hand of Karl-Heinz. I worked with him for a while as his assistant when my funds began running low. I would parcel up dead butterflies and send them off to collectors, or take seething trays of maggots to fishing-tackle shops. One day we went out to the vast UFA studios at Tempelhof. A scene was being shot where the heroine (played by Nita Jungman, I think) was to be awakened by a butterfly landing on her nose. Georg carried a large jam jar busy with cabbage whites, while I lugged a hefty zinc-lined wooden box containing a block of ice wrapped in straw. One had to admire his technique. Georg encouraged his insects to act by chilling them, as it were, to the bone. The skill, the expertise, lay in knowing just how cold a butterfly or bluebottle had to be before it would do what was required. Not cold enough and it would just take off and fly away; too cold and it would simply die or fall numbed to the ground.