William Boyd - Sweet Caress

‘We’re ready,’ Franziska said and she slipped past me into the sitting room. There was no applause — just the sound of two dozen men shifting in their seats.

Trudi tapped me on the shoulder.

‘I go now. Volker will find you a taxi.’

‘See you next Saturday.’

She left and I turned back to see what Franziska was up to in the room. She had taken off her hat and coat and was beginning to undress in a matter-of-fact way, exactly as if she was in her own bedroom, humming to herself, sighing with exasperation at a stubborn button. Soon she was down to her underclothes. She took off her spectacles and tucked them under the pillow.

I looked back at Volker. He was naked now — his body was very white with well-defined musculature, only his forearms tanned brown. He had a thin line of dark hair on his chest running down to his navel. He was squeezing toothpaste into his palm, then he rubbed his hands vigorously together to make a softer paste — then he began to massage this cream on to his penis.

‘What’re you doing?’ I said spontaneously, raising my bag. Click.

He was wholly unselfconscious as he pulled and tugged at himself with both hands, easing the toothpaste into his skin.

‘Ow. It’s burning,’ he said. ‘The toothpaste makes me hot. Stechend. ’ Stinging. His harelip made him lisp strangely. ‘And when it’s hot like this it makes me bigger, you see.’

He took his hands away. I could see it was working. No erection but very impressive size, nonetheless.

‘Goodness!’ I raised my bag and coughed as I pressed the remote release button.

‘It’s just a trick,’ he said, and shrugged, almost apologetically.

I turned to peer through the crack in the door again. Franziska was now naked and she walked round the bed, folding and tidying away her discarded clothes, before climbing in between the sheets. Volker loomed up beside me. All I could smell was toothpaste.

‘Ten seconds,’ he said.

Franziska was feigning sleep, making deep breathing sounds, tossing and turning as if she was dreaming.

Then Volker walked in — the dream made flesh — and the toothpaste trick provoked a gasp of envy-admiration from the male audience.

And then Volker and Franziska duly made love. Orthodox straightforward sex, the sheet thrown back, lit by the two standard lamps. When it was over Volker strode back into the kitchen. I could hear him getting dressed behind me but my eyes were on Franziska as she awoke from her dream, looked around, saw no naked man, smiled to herself, stretched luxuriously, then stepped out of bed and began to put on her clothes, ending with her spectacles, retrieved from under the pillow, then her coat and velour hat and, the working girl fully attired ready for the day ahead, she left the room without a glance.

Now there was applause — a brief clapping of hands — and I heard a surge of low-voiced conversation as Big Moustache made his way through the crowd collecting money.

Franziska stood beside me watching, expressionless. She had a sharp pointed face, almost pretty, but her lips were thin and turned down at the corner as if she were permanently disapproving or bitter.

‘You see him put the money in his pocket?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘These are tips for us — me and Volker — but he keeps them. The men have already paid to get in.’ She gave a thin smile. ‘But tonight you pay me,’ adding in English, ‘thank you very much, Miss.’

‘Who had the idea for this show?’ I asked. ‘Him?’ I pointed through the door at Big Moustache. The room was emptying fast. ‘Or Volker?’

‘No. It’s my idea. Have you a cigarette?’

I offered her a cigarette and took one myself. We both lit up. Volker had gone to the lavatory on the landing outside the kitchen.

‘It’s a very clever idea, your show,’ I said, marvelling at its potent and absolute simplicity. Franziska’s dream. All these men were paying to enjoy Franziska’s fantasy, not theirs. ‘Bravo.’

Trudi (on top) and Franziska outside the Xanadu-Club, before work. Berlin, 1931.

I returned to the club a few more times and managed to arrange some further photographic sessions with the girls — they had come to know me by now and were actually quite pleased to have their pictures taken. When I left Berlin some two weeks later I decided to fly back to London. It was extravagant, almost £10, and it took up the remains of Greville’s second loan, but I’d never been in an airliner before and I felt that a symbolic act of some sort was required at the end of my Berlin adventure.

Hanna came with me to the aerodrome at Staaken. We said our sad goodbyes — we had become real friends, I considered — and yet she managed to snatch a full kiss on my lips, hugging me to her and promising to come and see my show of Berlin photographs when it opened in London.

I was flying Deutsche Luft Hansa and as I walked across the concrete apron with the other twenty or so passengers towards the vast aeroplane — four engines, a kind of enormous flying wing — I turned to wave back at the departure building but I couldn’t see Hanna. I wondered if she’d gone.

I had a seat in the actual wing itself — you could stand upright in it easily — with a view forward through a square window, just like the pilots who were sitting in their cockpit a few feet to my right. The doors were closed, the engines started, and we trundled down the runway and, in no time, it seemed, the aeroplane heaved itself into the air, climbing very slowly, heading for Amsterdam, our refuelling stop before Croydon airport. I felt an extraordinary exhilaration, as if I might swoon, to be lifted above the earth in this way, the drumming of the engines in my ears, to be floating and yet feel so secure with a metal floor and carpet beneath my feet.

It was a cloudy day and as soon as the earth below was lost to view I wandered back through the fuselage — the airliner was perfectly steady — to the smoking parlour and had a cigarette and a gin and vermouth, served by a steward in a white jacket.

I asked the steward what kind of airliner I was in — I always liked to be specific, to retain this knowledge for the future.

‘It’s a Junkers, Fräulein,’ he said. ‘A Junkers G-38.’

I ordered another gin, enjoying this unique sensation, flying across Europe in a Junkers G-38 with a drink and a cigarette in my hand. I was experiencing my usual simultaneously contrasting Berlin moods — sadness at leaving and excited anticipation at what the future might hold. I had printed no photographs — just contact sheets of what I’d taken at the Xanadu-Club and Franziska’s show — all that was to come, with a bit of judicious dodging and burning. Greville would be pleased, I thought — I’d cabled him: ‘MISSION ACCOMPLISHED’. And I had the premonition, with a little justified self-satisfaction, also, I admit, that my pictures would cause something of a stir.

I TURNED TO CONFRONT Greville and held up a rusty tin of mulligatawny soup that I’d found behind a pile of old brown paper bags.

‘It’s a greengrocer’s,’ I said. ‘ Was a greengrocer’s.’

‘Then we’ll call it the Green and Grocer Gallery.’

Greville paced about, thinking. He was wearing a fawn light tweed suit, cream shirt and a mustard-coloured silk tie — everything toning perfectly. I rummaged in another cupboard and found a damp box of nut rissoles and five tins of baking powder. Suddenly I had an idea. I tore a bit of peeling wallpaper off the wall, searched my handbag for my pen and, when I’d found it, I wrote the words down and showed them to Greville.