Stephen Dixon - What Is All This? - Uncollected Stories

Two hours later the madam, Mrs. Dorfer, came into our room and said “Knock knock, darlings. Get your finest finery and most daring undies on, as we’re going to Hitler’s hotel.”

We all get into a couple of officers’ cars Hitler sent over. Seven of us girls packed in to each one, which was almost the entire house. Lotte and Ilse were left behind. They were obviously too old — girls Mrs. Dorter saved for soldiers and townsmen who had drunk or gambled too much and were down to their last marks. During the ride I asked the girl next to me “Excited?”

“For what? None of us has more than an eight percent chance of getting him. This was also supposed to be my day off, and besides that I’m coming down with the sniffles, so with my luck it’ll probably be me.”

“But Hitler. Just that you might see him up close.”

“Yes, Hitler. Maybe you’ve a point. Truth is, till now I didn’t even think there was a real Hitler. He’s so easy to impersonate and look like, and that voice — even my brother fooled me with it once on the phone. I thought there might be four to five men dressed like him making speeches and shaking their fists all over Europe — something thought up by some military and industrial geniuses to get our economy rolling again, and knowing the national mentality, what better way? But real or not, I was never one of his bigger fans. He comes in like hailstones and thunder, and thinks we’re going to take over the whole western world? You ever read world history? I did — before, when I was becoming a teacher, plus all the best literature there is. In the end, we got to lose. You can only stick it out so far and for so long before choppo, you get your head and hands cut off and, if you’re not looking, your behind too. So big deal, I quietly say in my own way — Hitler as a client. No, I thought it over. Years from now if I’m alive and I tell people that, they’ll say ‘That miscreant and baboon? He brought the great German nation to its lowest ebb yet. You had the devil himself in you.’ But believe me, if I wind up with Hitler I don’t move any more for him than I would for any other man, unless he puts a cocked gun to my head. And with his responsibilities and heavy worries and past decisions, you think he’s going to do any amazing tricks in bed? That’s for the newsreels. Like all deep thinkers I’ve had, it’ll take everything he has for him to get started and then stay with it, so I suppose I will have to move a little more for him than with others, just to get the job over with.”

“Well, I’m excited at the prospect,” the girl on my other side said.

“It’s like a fantasy come true. When I was a young girl — I am not old — I fell in love with him right after they jailed him for that putsch. His face — so sensitive and brooding, yet sweet. And his presence, defiance and physique. That was then. Maybe now his body’s a little changed. But I wrote him a letter, even. When he got out of prison he wrote me one back. He said ‘Your faith in my cause inspired me and inspires me still. We will win.’ That was very nice. I kept the letter, knowing it would be valuable one day, but my ancestral home was bombed early in the war and everything went up in it — I won’t even specify what people were inside. But from that prison sentence till now I have adored him. If I was chosen over all you girls it would be like for some other women making love with the world’s most famous movie star who they’ve been writing about in their diaries for years. And he’s still very handsome and gallant like one, wouldn’t you say?”

“Very,” I said. “Do you know anything about what kind of girl he prefers? I heard he likes them extremely young.”

“I don’t know, though I’m sorry to hear what you said. Perhaps if he’d succeeded with that putsch and we were in the same situation now, only ten years earlier, my chances would be better. But I wasn’t a prostitute then, so I guess I lose out no matter what.”

“I’ve a good idea what he likes,” a girl on one of the jumpseats said.

“Helga, the cleaning lady in our house, told me he only likes girls with big derrieres. She said years ago she was a girl in the most elegant house in Hamburg, and Hitler, who’d just become chancellor then, came in with Goebbels or Göring — though I know those two don’t look alike, I always get their names mixed up because of the G and O. They were some pair, she said, Hitler and the other one. Joking, playing the piano, throwing money in the air. You should speak to her. She has funny stories to tell about them just from their one trip. But Hitler took the girl with the biggest buttocks. She was also very young, chunky, and kind of happy-go-lucky, and had short black hair.”

“Someone else thought he liked tall blondes with tiny waists,” I said.

“I’d heard that too. So I asked Helga again, but she said Hitler definitely picked the stubby black-haired and Göring or Goebbels chose a tall blond. But you got a nice derriere — not fat, but just big and broad enough to qualify. Mine? Too small and firm, I think — coconuts, which lots of men prefer. If Helga’s right then I guess I should count myself out too. Though I’d love to be the one selected. Not just for the money involved but because it’ll be one hell of a story to tell for the rest of my life.”

“Did Helga say what kind of man Hitler was like?”

“Only the girl he was with saw him. But she did say something quite strange happened soon after Hitler left. The girl fainted dead away in the room she’d used. They thought she was overcome with being with the new dynamic chancellor, and maybe he also had something unique going in a physical and amorous way to have had such an effect on a young pro. They revived her with salts, but she said she couldn’t speak about what happened, nor could she work anymore that night. For two days after, all she could speak was gibberish — his stress, his anxieties, how it isn’t easy guiding an entire nation and maybe becoming the future number one leader of the world. They got her a doctor, but the third day after she saw Hitler and without allowing herself another man, she really cracked and had to be taken away.”

“She must have been very immature,” I said. “I know I wouldn’t let myself go like that if he picked me tonight.”

“You never know. Have you ever had a truly great man?”

“You mean a powerful figure — world famous, like a great artist whose name everybody knows? Once; Johann the tightrope walker.”

“You had him? Out of the air I’d think he’d be ungainly and tense.”

“Sort of. But he’s called the best ropewalker in Germany and so maybe the rest of the world, we can say, can we not?”

“We might.”

“Even still, he fell. Two weeks ago — I read it in the paper. Broke both legs and his spine entertaining our troops. He was the most famous man I ever had, and just average in bed. Wanted things done, wouldn’t do much, peter out, come back, give him a few wiggles from below and you’re done with him. Nothing out of the ordinary. Normal.”

“Maybe that was a bad day for him, or a very good one. Maybe all aerialists and the like only think they have to come to us, but don’t do well because they get most of their fulfillment on the ropes and bars. And like our leader, just think of all the tensions they come to you with. Everybody watching them, one false move and so forth, some people even hoping they’ll fall because that could be more exciting than just his high-wire walk. But Hitler’s problems are much different than any other man’s, so I don’t want to prejudge him too hard. Though I do think he’ll be an experience to make love with just because he is who he is and all those pressures he has to release.”