William Boyd - Sweet Caress

‘I feel a bit odd in here,’ I said.

‘They’ll think you’re my friend,’ she said, giving the last word lascivious emphasis.

‘Why this place?’

She explained. ‘There’s a girl I know who comes in here. She works in a brothel. If you pay her money — and the madame, of course — she might invite you there.’

‘How would I take photographs?’ I felt a shiver of excitement. A Berlin brothel — that might cause a bit of a fuss. .

Hannelore looked at her watch.

‘If she’s coming she’ll be here any minute — et voilà! ’

Hannelore stood and weaved her way through the throng to the bar, returning, moments later, hand in hand with a short tubby girl with her hair dyed a carroty orange. Hannelore introduced her.

‘This is Trudi.’

She sat down opposite me. She had a pretty round face beneath her lurid hair and a tired baggy-eyed look that was strangely endearing. She had a woollen shawl knotted round her shoulders covering her décolletage and happily accepted the glass of schnapps that Hannelore poured for her. She sipped at it, looking at me curiously over the rim.

‘You just want photo?’ she said in faltering English. ‘Or you want ficky?’

‘Just photo.’

She spoke quickly to Hannelore and Hannelore translated for me. There was a big club-room in this particular house that operated, semi-covertly, as a brothel. But it was a room where everyone gathered, like a bar, and where the girls met their clients. The bedrooms were on the floor above. When it was busy, at the weekend, people came just to watch — couples, husbands and wives, tourists — so it would be easy to explain my presence there, but the camera would have to be hidden, somehow. If Trudi was caught she’d be thrown out and maybe punished in other ways — so she would need a lot of money to be persuaded to help.

‘How much?’

She turned to Hannelore who whispered something in her ear.

‘Five hundred marks,’ Trudi said.

I stayed calm. About £25. Maybe a month’s earnings for a working girl like Trudi if she were busy — and just about all I had left from Greville’s loan, more to the point. I pretended to waver — frowning, thinking — but I knew this was the best chance I’d have. Maybe if I’d been a man it would have been easier and I tried not to think what kind of risks a single woman in a brothel might run. But there was another risk — what if there was nothing shocking or depraved to photograph? A ‘big bar room’ didn’t sound very debauched. But the chance was worth it, I thought to myself — it would be authentic, real, if nothing else — feeling the flush of excitement spread. I searched my handbag for my purse.

‘Half now,’ Hannelore intervened, ‘half on the night.’

Trudi accepted, with a show of reluctance, but I could see how pleased she was to have the money in her hands.

‘When do we go?’ I asked.

Saturday night was always best, she said — it was always busy, sometimes fifty people in the room. And sometimes it became like a party, Trudi said, with a laugh. ‘ Ein wenig Orgie. ’ Hannelore translated: a little orgy.

‘Sounds good to me,’ I said, pouring us all another glass of schnapps. We clinked glasses to the success of our enterprise.

I was running low on funds so Hannelore offered to waive the next month’s rent that I owed her. ‘I will invest in your talent, my dear,’ she said. However, I spent the equivalent of about £2 on a solid patent-leather clutch bag with a flower-shaped diamanté clasp. I removed the facetted stone at the centre of the paste flower, cut a small hole in the leather beneath and stitched in two thin canvas straps in the bag’s interior that would firmly hold my little Zeiss Contax, the lens positioned securely and invisibly at the centre of the diamanté flower. I attached a remote release cable that I rigged up, with some glittery ribbon wrapped around it, as a small handle. There was a faintly audible click when I pressed the button but I assumed that in a busy bar no one would notice. Trial photographs that I took at a café came out very well: the key aspect was the positioning of the bag, a matter of estimating with your eyes. Sometimes the framing was askew — but you could always crop, Hannelore reminded me, and maybe it’s even better if it looks like it’s from a concealed camera. I could sense her own excitement building as Saturday approached.

Hannelore suggested I dress like a garçonne — one of the many subtypes of Berlin lesbian — reasoning that I didn’t want to be bothered by the clients. If I looked like a garçonne then, moreover, any confusion about my role in the brothel would be more easily comprehended — just another strange Berlin night-animal on the prowl. Trudi said the madame should be kept ignorant. Pay your entrance fee, she said, buy a couple of bottles of champagne and she’ll let you sit all night.

I allowed Hanna — as I was now calling her — to organise my ‘look’. First, I had my hair cut in an Eton crop, then she found me a pair of clear-lensed round-frame tortoiseshell spectacles. I wore a long olive-green worsted jacket, a shirt and tie and tucked my trousers into soft knee-length boots.

‘You look good,’ Hanna said, inspecting me. ‘Masculine-feminine. A pretty garçonne with a Bubikopf. Keep your spectacles on. Attractive but a little frightening.’

We met Trudi in the smoking room of a confectioner’s in Tauentzien-Strasse. She asked for more money — I thought that was a bad sign — but Hanna said I should give her another hundred marks; the rest when I’d checked how the photos came out. I might need to go back a few times, after all. I handed over the money, said goodbye to Hanna, who kissed my cheek and wished me luck, and I followed Trudi into the street and then down an alleyway into a courtyard. We went through an arched gateway into another courtyard. She pressed a bell set into a brass plate that had ‘Xanadu-Club’ stamped on it. I thought suddenly of Xan, my moody little brother, and took the name of the club as a good omen. I was a bit nervous in my garçonne persona but also excited. Amory Clay, photographer, was about to be reborn.

The door of the Xanadu-Club was opened by a weedy-looking man in a commissionaire’s greatcoat and he had a few words with Trudi.

‘You pay him twenty marks,’ she said.

‘Of course.’

I paid and we went upstairs to the club-rooms.

The Xanadu-Club, like everything in Berlin it seemed to me, was a strange mixture, both humdrum and exotic. This floor of the house — the social club — was a random collection of rooms. There was a bar in two of them, and a piano on a low stage in another. The furniture was an assortment of sofas, armchairs and standard restaurant tables and chairs grouped here and there. The lighting was low and, while we waited for the band, jazz music was played through loudspeakers. It was already busy and filled with men and women of all ages and sizes. I thought I could have been in the waiting room at a railway station but a second glance picked out the anomalies. Stout middle-aged men in grey business suits chatted to boys in striped sailor jerseys. Eight thin women dressed as men sat round a table. A man in a Pierrot costume danced with a girl in a satin negligee. Trudi led me to a table in the corner on the other side of the small dance floor and I ordered a bottle of Sekt from a boy dressed only in white linen shorts. Trudi went in search of the Kupplerin , the house madame.

I sipped my glass of warm Sekt and took in the room in more detail. Clearly, there were people here who came only to watch — like curious visitors at a human zoo — and there were others who intended to participate. Once again I felt the pulse of excitement at my audacity, pleased with my disguise. Two other garçonnes took to the dance floor as if to reassure me I was part of the weird crowd. Nobody was staring at me; I was left alone with my champagne and my clutch bag, carefully positioned on the table in front of me. I turned it slightly, aiming at two men in shiny suits and short wide ties who were eyeing up the girls in their satin shifts and clicked the remote release button. Got you. They approached two girls, conferred briefly and then disappeared through a leather-curtained exit at the side of the bar. I assumed that led upstairs to where the sexual shenanigans took place. I wondered if there was any way Trudi could contrive to let me visit backstage.