William Boyd - Sweet Caress

I recognised that I was fairly drunk by the time we left the Klosett-Club and I decided I should head back to my hotel. Hannelore seemed none the worse for all the gins she’d consumed and offered to share a taxi with me. The sky was like grey flannel — early summer dawn heralded — and the air was cool. I shivered as we headed out on to Arkonaplatz looking for a taxi.

But the streets we wandered through were empty, as the light gathered and the darkness began to thin. We cast about us here and there — I was completely lost — vainly waving and shouting at any passing vehicle in the hope it would miraculously transform itself into a cab. After half an hour I was sober again. Hannelore checked her watch.

‘We might as well walk,’ she said. ‘Your hotel is only twenty minutes or so from here.’

And so we set off through the monochrome streets, the sound of our heels echoing off the facades of the apartment blocks, a few neon signs glowing in the clearing gloom, street sweepers and night workers returning home were our only companions. We walked past a small hotel — there was a waiter standing outside with a grubby tailcoat. Thick yellow light shone from the half-open door behind him. Should we go there, I asked Hannelore? No, no, she said: that place isn’t for us.

We saw the young men before they saw us, as we turned on to Oranienburger-Strasse, heading for Alexanderplatz. There were five of them in their brown uniforms, drunk and dishevelled, four of them helping the fifth climb a lamp post to tear down a poster. Hannelore led me across the street away from them but they had heard the clip-clop of our heels and turned to see us, eager for diversion. They shouted something at us — something lewd that I couldn’t understand. I glanced back and saw the climber slither heavily to the ground, swearing at us, as if his fall was our fault.

‘Don’t look at them,’ Hannelore said as more catcalls came our way. I heard their hobnails crunching on the cobbles as they followed us, shouting angrily at us, calling on us to stop. A stone skipped across the road in front of us and clattered into a parked van.

‘We have to pretend, all right?’

‘What? Yes, whatever you say.’

She put her arm round my shoulders and bumped me into a shop doorway. She rounded angrily on the men following us and shouted at them, lowering and harshening her voice. Great bellows of laughter ensued and I saw them stop and talk amongst each other.

‘What did you say?’

‘I said I’d spent the whole night trying to get you into bed and I wasn’t going to let them prevent me.’ She glanced back. ‘Or something like that. Pretend to kiss. They’re still looking.’

So we kissed, mouths slightly askew, and I was transported back to Amberfield and my practice sessions with Millicent. I heard vulpine whoops and yelps from the young men. We set off, Hannelore looking back and making an obscene gesture at them before we turned the corner and broke into a panicky run.

We reached my shabby little hotel, the Silesia Hospiz, in five minutes and rang the bell for the night clerk, both out of breath.

‘My God,’ Hannelore said. ‘A real Berlin night — Ingeborg Hammer, Nazis and you even get a kiss from me.’

The night clerk opened the door and we stepped into the lobby.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Lucky you were dressed like a man.’

‘I dress like this all the time.’

‘Oh. . Still lucky, though.’

I picked up my key and turned to find Hannelore looking round the dark lobby.

‘Is it expensive, here?’

‘They gave me a good price for one month. Forty marks a week.’

‘If you give me half of that you can have a room in my apartment.’ She smiled. ‘And you can use my darkroom.’

*

THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977

Think of their names. Hannelore Hahn, Marianne Breslauer, Dora Kallmuss, Jutta Gottschalk, Friedl Dicker — not forgetting Edith Suchitsky, Edeltraud Hartman and Annie Schulz and many more I’ve forgotten. If, in London, I had thought I was something of a rare beast as a woman photographer, I had to think again as my stay with Hannelore progressed and I came to learn that I was joining a sorority of women photographers, all working and making a living in Berlin, Hamburg, Vienna and Paris. It was empowering, not disappointing — like becoming a member of a secret society. We were everywhere, the women, cameras in hand.

When we conceived our Berlin plan, Greville lent me £50 — and it was a loan, he insisted, not a gift, and he expected to be paid back — he wasn’t funding a pleasant holiday in Berlin for me. He also gave me the contact with Rainer, assuring me that Rainer knew ‘all the best places’. I had the feeling, though, that Rainer was treating me rather as a tourist. Ingeborg Hammer had been photographed thousands of times for magazines all over Europe — there was a ready market for them, Hannelore said, which was why she was at the Klosett-Club. She showed me half a dozen magazine articles. Photographers made a reliable living from Ingeborg — as did Benno — but it was clear to me I had to descend deeper into Berlin’s dark underbelly.

In the event I took up Hannelore’s offer — the money-saving and the offer of a darkroom were too hard to resist — and I checked out of the Hospiz and moved into her surprisingly roomy flat on Jäger-Strasse near Gendarmenmarkt. There were two bedrooms, a sitting room, a kitchen and a third bedroom converted into a darkroom. The lavatory was on the landing below and if we wanted to bathe we went to the Admirals-Bad baths near the Friedrichs-Strasse station, just a few blocks away. Hannelore, however, didn’t give up her pursuit. My first night in the apartment she came into my room and slipped naked into my bed. I recognised the ploy and gently pushed her away when she tried to kiss me. She was unperturbed and resigned and we lay in bed for an hour together chatting about sex and smoking. I remember she asked me if I’d ever been with a man. I confessed I had. ‘Damn,’ she said. ‘Was it good?’ It was, actually, I said, thinking of Lockwood, fondly. ‘How many times?’ she pressed on, hopefully. I’d lost count, I said. ‘Too bad,’ she said, ‘you don’t know what you’re missing.’ I asked her when she’d known she was a lesbian. ‘I’m not a lesbian,’ she said with manifest pride, ‘I’m a pansexualist.’

Just as it had with Greville, the abortive pass made us closer, oddly, and she seemed to relax now she knew I was unlikely to succumb. I told her about my plans for Berlin — Greville’s idea about what I had to do to secure my future as a photographer — and she offered to help. We worked together in her darkroom and she showed me how to master the techniques of ‘dodging’ and ‘burning’, how to overexpose and underexpose parts of the photograph when you were printing — shining more light on some areas or filtering light into shadow with a variety of implements. Hannelore had her own technique of dodging that employed a very fine-meshed flat sieve. I liked the effects and felt my competence expand. Greville retouched his photographs — everyone did — but he was only interested in removing blemishes and wrinkles from his subjects’ faces to make them look better. The manipulation of light and shade when you dodged or burned was something he’d never tried as far as I was aware — perhaps he felt he didn’t need it, or didn’t even know about it. I began to feel I’d already moved on by coming to Berlin — the ‘Amory Clay Society Photographer’ era was over. I was changing.

HANNELORE CAME OVER TO the table with a bottle of schnapps and three glasses. We were in a danse-cabaret club called the Monokel. There were a lot of lesbians dressed in sailor suits and a good number of strange-looking men who seemed to be acting out a fantasy as Spanish hidalgos in wide-brimmed hats with long sideburns — and obvious prostitutes here and there waiting to be asked to step on to the small dance floor. Hannelore was dressed like a working-class boy in a collarless shirt, drill trousers and a leather jacket. She had a flat tweed cap on her short hair. She sat down, poured two drinks and we lit cigarettes.