Geoff Nicholson - Street Sleeper

‘There might have been another article in it,’ Renata said later. ‘An expose, something radical, compassionate.’

Or it might have been another rip-off.

She began freelancing on motoring topics with an off-beat or feminine angle. ‘Beauties Who Aren’t Afraid of Beasts; Renata Caswell talks to four women who drive hard to handle macho machines.’ You know the sort of thing.

Then came the offer of a job as staff writer on Cult Car . The magazine had been running for just six months, trying to capture the market sector that likes cars but isn’t made up of boy-racers or Porsche-fanciers. It was even hoped that some women might buy it. Renata couldn’t see it lasting more than another six months, and even if it did she certainly hoped she wouldn’t still be with it.

♦

It was a sadder but wiser man who ate his English breakfast that morning. Yes, thought Ishmael, in many ways life is like a computer game, but he didn’t go into details.

He thought again of body language. You see a youth standing in front of you in a martial-arts pose, teeth set, nostrils flared, right away it says aggression . You see a girl in a magazine — legs splayed, eyes rolled in mock ecstasy, immediately the body language says, ‘I’m only doing this for the money.’

Ishmael was lingering over his pot of tea. The place was crowded yet nobody would come and sit next to him. Their body language was telling him something.

He smelled. It was time to do some laundry.

He had always hated laundrettes, not that it mattered much since Debby’s mother washed most of his clothes. He suddenly missed Debby, but there was nothing for it. He drove along the motorway until he saw a huddle of new houses just off the road. He took the next exit and drove back. He found a clean, smart laundrette and parked outside.

He would put on his blue leathers and wash all his other clothes. There weren’t many. He scrabbled about on the back seat and changed. This was not easy, not in a Volkswagen Beetle, not parked outside a laundrette in the middle of a new housing estate. He was grateful for the smoked glass.

♦

The desire to belong to something more important and greater than ourselves is a very natural, very understandable and very dangerous one.

Within the Nazi Party there were so many groups and sub-groups to which one might belong. The fifteen- to eighteen-year-olds had the Hitler Youth, the younger still had the Deutsches Jungvolk. Girls could join the Bund Deutscher Maedel, women the NS Frauenschaft. There were Nazi organizations for doctors and teachers and civil servants. There was even a place for artists in the Nazi Kulturbund. There was room for everyone. Everyone could be included, more or less. And if you wanted to take part in almost any leisure activity, be it soccer, or chess, or skiing, it was necessary to be a member of a club which was itself a member of, and was directed by, an organization called Kraft-durch-Freude — Strength Through Joy.

♦

Ishmael stuffed his dirty clothes into a pillow-case and entered the laundrette.

A fellow in the corner approached him. Ishmael could tell right away he was not ordinary. He was smoking a wet cigar, which Ishmael found anti-social in the confines of the laundrette, but he didn’t complain. He wanted to avoid conflict, at least for the next half hour or so.

The man looked sixty, had grey hair cut into a young style with a Nero-type fringe. He was overweight but tall enough and big-boned enough to avoid being gross. He wore a blazer and a couple of big gold rings. Ishmael’s mother would have called him a fine figure of a man.

He said to Ishmael, ‘Do you want to share my washer?’

‘Pardon?’

‘I see you don’t have much laundry, and neither do I. Would you care to put your things in with mine? Save money.’

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Hell, thought Ishmael, you hear so much about ‘English reserve’ yet here he was, a complete stranger, being treated with almost Mediterranean good humour by one of the locals.

‘When you’re a single man you don’t ever seem to create enough laundry for these big machines.’

Ishmael agreed with him. It was only small talk. They weren’t having a real sharing of ideas as yet but he had to start somewhere.

♦

There were those, too, who might become members of the SA — Sturm-Abteilung, a storm-trooper, brown shirt. They were close to Hitler, they had their own martyr, Horst Wessel, gone to live in a slum with a prostitute in order to dedicate himself to the Nazi cause, and murdered by communists. But their image was bad — drinkers, street brawlers, homosexuals.

William L. Shirer writes, in The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich :

Many of its top leaders, beginning with its chief, Roehm, were notorious homosexual perverts. Lieutenant Edmund Heines, who led the Munich SA, was not only a homosexual but a convicted murderer. These two and dozens of others quarrelled and feuded as only men of unnatural sexual inclinations, with their peculiar jealousies, can.

Oh really? But it is not surprising that Peter Baldung, a young man of Aryan appearance and with the desire to belong to a winning side, is delighted when instead of becoming a mere SA he can become a Schützstaffel, SS, a member of Hitler’s personal army, with their smart distinctive uniform and their oath of personal loyalty to the Führer. Peter feels he has come a long way since he was that small boy who pressed his face against the glass of the Benz showroom in Munich all those years ago.

♦

‘Love the leather suit,’ the man said.

‘It’s the first time I’ve worn it, actually. It’s a bit warm.’

‘My name’s Howard by the way.’

‘Call me Ishmael.’

The man looked puzzled at first.

‘Oh, as in Moby Dick .’

And then he laughed in a way that Ishmael found incomprehensible and a bit coarse.

They sat for a while and watched the laundry go round.

‘It’s very outlaw.’

Ishmael assumed he was still talking about the leather suit.

‘It was in a sale.’

They continued in this disconnected way for some time until, out of the blue, Howard said, ‘Look, do you give or take?’

At last, Ishmael thought, they were getting down to some spiritual basics.

‘I do both,’ he said. ‘Naturally. It seems to me that if there’s one basic thing that would make the world a happier place it’s a genuine bit of give and take.’

Ishmael got the impression that Howard had stopped listening, an impression confirmed when he jumped to his feet and started to pace the laundrette.

‘Look,’ he said in a loud whisper, ‘my place is just round the corner. Let’s go and have a stiff gin and tonic.’

Gin and tonic at ten in the morning! This was real Bohemianism. Poor old Debby. She thought two Baby-chams and a bag of pork scratchings were the first steps on the road to becoming an absinthe drinker. His mother too. If he’d suggested anything more extreme than a glass of sherry on Christmas morning she’d have thought he was the Antichrist. How far he had come.

♦

By 1944 Peter Baldung will be a trusted high-flyer at Buchenwald, an intimate friend of Frau Use Koch, wife of the commandant there, also known as the Bitch of Buchenwald. Peter will learn to put up with her tantrums, her hysterical whims, and will aid her in her new hobby of making lampshades from human skin. He will seek out for her skin that is young, healthy, unblemished by age or disease. But the first time he offers her a skin that is smooth, clear but also embellished with a tattoo of a matador, she is beside herself with delight. She is thrilled beyond all reason.

But in 1935 Peter is merely part of the retinue that accompanies Adolf Hitler to a race meeting at Avus, along with Jacob Werlin who is now Hitler’s official adviser on motoring matters. Werlin and Hitler have had no chance to talk, indeed Hitler has not been able to speak to anyone, having lost his voice after some intensive oratory. But Hitler is keen to know the latest details of Dr Porsche’s developing Type 30. They slip into the garden of a local Reichskanzler and Hitler summons Peter. He commands him to turn around and he uses Peter’s broad black, uniformed back as a writing desk. On a piece of paper Hitler jots down urgent questions about the project. How many horsepower has the engine? Air-cooled? Weight of car? Is the test model ready?