by Jim Shepard
That had not been Wilhelm’s first sexual experience. On his fourteenth birthday his father had called him into his study to announce that Wilhelm would be having a party, and to request a list of girls that might be invited. He’d been pleased when his son had been able to name two immediately: Emmy Virchov, who knew so much about poetry and always teased him; and Rose Siedhoff, a Jewess keen on music and painting, very soft-spoken and a great favorite of his mother’s. Herr Plumpe had asked for more names. Emmy and Rose had been an acceptable beginning but also oversensitive and odd. And neither was pretty.
Wilhelm had had no more names. Additional names had been provided by his brothers. The evening had not been a success: a gathering of solitaires politely weathering the noise until they could again be left alone with their books.
That summer his parents took him to the island of Juist in the North Sea, partly for a change of air, and also to stop his hiding indoors and reading. He was by then officially delicate. There was less conflict at the beach, because he loved the dunes, and swimming.
On that island, to the astonishment of his family, he formed an acquaintance with a fisherman who every day crossed back and forth in a ketch in front of the beach. The fisherman put in at a nearby inlet, and young Wilhelm walked over to him and struck up a conversation. The fisherman took him sailing. Herr Plumpe was openmouthed. When the boat rounded the headland and the beach fell out of sight, the fisherman dropped the sail, let the boat drift, and opened the buttons of his pants. He showed Wilhelm what he wanted. As if paralyzed, Wilhelm lay in the thwarts. He noticed that one of his hands remained outspread throughout. He saw stars. He wanted to do this every day.
On their return, they ran their boat aground a few feet from Herr Plumpe’s lounge-chair. The fisherman told Herr Plumpe that the boy had a talent for sailing. Every day afterwards, until the family left the island, he and Wilhelm would sail around the headlands, drop the sail, and pull each other free of their pants, letting themselves drift.
Following their kiss, they spent the day in Wilhelm’s room embracing and kissing in passionate fits and starts but refraining from anything else. In situations like this, Hans said, he imagined a man hiding in the wardrobe, ready to make him pay through the nose for the rest of his life. When Wilhelm broached the subject of amorous adventures in general, he declared both his pity for the ravages of passion and his revulsion at hypocrisy. They both spoke as seasoned men of the world, between kisses that made them tilt and lean on an unsteady floor.
They returned to class the next day, their absence loudly noted for the group by one of their classmates, a boy named Walter Spiess.
Spiess they’d registered from the beginning as having a face that looked to have been modeled in a confectioner’s shop. They knew him as a saboteur capable of demoralizing an entire class. His poem on the battle of Actium had won the monthly prize, even though it had flaunted the fact that after its first two lines—Spindle-topped waves / hurl themselves at the sea-chariots—it had had nothing whatsoever to do with the subject. In the dramatic club he had played Hecate, called upon to witness Wilhelm’s oath, as Jason, to Hans’s Medea.
He watched them from a distance for the few weeks following their day-long absence and then, one afternoon, asked them to look at one of his paintings. It was a catastrophe, he shrugged, but they’d get an idea of what he did. There was a blankness to his manner which was not simplicity. He seemed to be committed to nothing in particular, to stand in an attitude of general hospitality to opportunities.
He and Hans led the way. Wilhelm followed, feeling excluded and faintly sulky.
Spiess’s room was at the end of a hallway, half hidden beneath a staircase. They were impressed by what he’d done with it. He’d found an antique bronze screen for his fireplace, and had brought in a Turkish divan. In an alcove he’d constructed a sultan’s tent of pink silk and muslin. Inside, over the bed, a small silver casket hung suspended by chains.
His easels were in the bathtub. His landscapes turned out to involve monstrous trees that confronted one another over prostrate figures. Over the sink he’d framed a medieval woodcut of a witches’ sabbath. The artist had conceived it as a cross between a carnival and a trade convention. Arty newspapers—Free Spirit, The Herald of Hellas, New Friendship—were spread around the floor.
After a short visit they left, and made no subsequent overtures. Even so, they got to know him. He surfaced wherever they went, always scratching around about money; he’d changed his mind about a tutoring job when his future charge had asked in a peculiar way if he was interested in poisonous spiders. He had terrible luck with clothes, and his favorite hat had to be thrown away after he got sick into it one night at the theater.
He also announced himself to be a democratizing influence. Concerning the arts, he pretended to be bored to tears by all pretension: the ballet should be forbidden by the Reichstag; for entertainment there were boxing matches and bicycle races; if anyone needed more, they should stay at home and look in the mirror. He represented, he told them, all that was best in the modern consciousness. He kept a pair of opera glasses in his room, through which he looked at a nudist in an apartment across the street. The man was fat and would go about his business in the evenings with the curtains open, reading and handling himself. About sex it became evident that he had the matter-of-factness of someone sitting down to dinner.
Wilhelm and Hans agreed to remain polite but not welcoming. One night, two months after they’d climbed the railway trestle, Spiess stopped by Wilhelm’s room, when Hans was at the library, to ask if he wished to go for a walk. Wilhelm declined but was intrigued. And Hans was late. An hour went by. Restless and annoyed, Wilhelm decided to go to the library. He left his room thinking of Spiess, then turned a corner and ran into him.
Their impulse was to draw back, but they went up to each other. As if by agreement, they walked around the school grounds and the athletic fields.
They talked about their backgrounds. Spiess complimented him on his height. Wilhelm mentioned in turn that he’d liked the sultan’s tent. He was titillated by the decadence of the flirtation, yet berated himself. Wasn’t he devoted to someone else? Didn’t he have any rules? Would the few he tried to impose upon himself constantly give way? Suppose Hans returned? Where would he say he’d been? He walked along, hands in pockets, absorbed with the complications. The idea of causing Hans pain appalled and fascinated him. He was a small boy considering the effects of shaking the ant-farm. What a pig I am, he finally thought, glorying in his wickedness.
BERLIN, 1910
It was characteristic of Hans that the first afternoon they spoke, he asked Wilhelm his goals in life. Wilhelm surprised himself by answering “The theater,” and from thereafter philology receded rapidly. A year later they quit Charlottenburg together to study art history and literature in Heidelberg. When Spiess wrote, offering to visit, they never responded.
In Heidelberg as students they performed Schiller in the presence of the Grand Duke of Baden. Max Reinhardt was in the audience. Backstage he sought out Hans and Wilhelm, still in costume, and offered the nineteen-year-old Wilhelm a place in his newly founded theater school in Berlin. If he agreed to stay for six years, it would cost nothing. Wilhelm was nonplussed. Hans said, “He accepts your offer right here, on the spot.” For years afterwards Reinhardt referred to Hans as Wilhelm’s “agent.”
Wilhelm’s father was not informed. The arrangement had been for him to send the money for the term-bills directly to his son, and Wilhelm simply had his mail forwarded. It took his father a year to discover what was happening. He had premonitions of trouble, though; every so often he sent along with the tuition money a postcard on which was written Domi manere felicibus corvenit: The happy do best to stay at home.
What a corps Reinhardt had collected! The evening of the introductory lecture, they attended a reception hosted by Reinhardt a his home. Their invitation read, “Herr Plumpe and his Agent.’ They met Müthel, Hoffman, Storm, Eckersberg,
Conrad Veidt Granach, and Lubitsch. Reinhardt himself never joined the party. At various points he emerged backlit on the upper landing of the darkened staircase, a shadowy presence overseeing the proceedings.
Everyone turned out to be one of Reinhardt’s discoveries. Eckersberg he’d noticed in a church choir. Lubitsch had been a tailor’s apprentice. Within a half hour of their arrival, the new recruits had bonded sufficiently to create an imbroglio by defending Granach, a stumpy Jew from Galicia, from the anti-Semitic teasing of one of the instructors.
They felt exhilarated and full of themselves. Appreciably taller than the rest, Veidt and Wilhelm regarded each other over a sea of heads. They’d been the most strenuous in the skirmish over Granach. Hans christened them “the two bell-towers.”
Veidt was striking: gaunt and pallid, with a drawn face that gave people an uncomfortable sense of the skull beneath. He reminded Wilhelm of something that might hang at a crossroads in winter. His humor was quiet and mordant. His eyes worked to insure that no one outdid his tragic or sinister air. He wore nothing but black.
They exhausted one another’s backgrounds and stood about in nervous groups, gossiping in low voices, watching the stairs for Reinhardt’s reappearance. They noted what hung on the walls. They nibbled goose and liver sausage. They traded enthusiasms about a legendary production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which each of them had seen three years earlier: the curtain going up on real trees, growing not out of painted ground-cloth but of palpable grass! Real flowers embowering the middle distance, the beeches and lake in the background mirrored between two hills. A moon shining over real mist. Streams trickling. And just when they’d believed they had absorbed the production’s visual wonder, the stage had begun to revolve. The gasp from the audience! The entire forest slowly revealed new aspects and perspectives inexhaustible as nature. Elves and fairies darted through the scene, disappearing behind trees, re-emerging from hillocks. Who could doubt Lysander’s bewilderment in such a setting? The opening moment had expressed the very heart of the play.
Speaking of gasps from the audience, Veidt said, and went on to tell them the first story they’d heard of the poet Else Lasker-Schüler: her scandal the year before in the company’s production of The Moor’s Seraglio.
She’d maneuvered herself an extra’s role as one of the lovers carried onstage in pairs and reclining on litters during the climactic scene in the courtesans’ quarters. Each night her litter was deposited against the back wall of the set, as downstage a swordfight was staged in front of a dazzling corps de ballet. In the middle of the play’s run, she’d informed Veidt that on her litter every night she made love with her partner, a young masseuse from the Saar named Anni, who wore an appliance she warmed and lubricated beforehand. Each night Anni opened her robe and they began while still being carried on, held above their slaves’ heads.
Veidt and his pals Granach and Lubitsch had appeared at the next performance armed with the best opera glasses they could find. They confirmed her story. They then attended performances on seven consecutive nights, bringing with them an ever-increasing group of theater lovers. Lasker-Schüler and her Anni mounted each other throughout the scene, concealed by the fact that the other pairs of lovers were miming the same activity. Later, she told Veidt that each night when the curtain came down, they separated, flushed and focused on their own pleasure, changed side by side in the chaos of the extras’ dressing room, absorbed in their mirrors, not allowing themselves to touch. Then they rendezvoused in the basement costume-storerooms, nesting on gowns and hussars’ capes arranged in a crate.
Reinhardt had finally noticed, and fired her. In her poems afterwards she’d referred to her “Turkish Anni.”
Upon hearing the story, Hans resolved that she should attend one of his parents’ soirées.
After Reinhardt’s party the new recruits went out to certain clubs of Veidt’s choosing. Wilhelm and Hans hesitated, but were titillated by what they might see, since Berlin, for them, meant Boys. Before leaving for school, Wilhelm had spent sleepless nights flipping through an underground guide to Berlin, subtitled What Baedeker Won’t Tell You.
The first club was in an unmarked subbasement on a deserted street. Veidt led the way, their scoutmaster. Granach, Müthel, Hans, and Wilhelm followed. Inside the outer door was a heavy leather curtain; Wilhelm was the last one through once Veidt swept it aside. The group stood around like a hiking club that had stumbled onto a ladies’ tea.
The cement floor had been painted black, the lights blue. The effect was that of an aquarium twilight.
The patrons returned to what they were doing. What they were doing, Veidt explained as his charges crowded into two high-backed benches separated by a filthy wooden table, was violating §180, §74, and §183 of the Criminal Code.
The long and narrow room was decorated with articles of clothing, most of which they couldn’t identify. A mockery of a rustic sign hung over the beer taps, and the table coasters were labeled Cozy Corner. A Polizeiknüppel, a leather-covered length of steel spring, hung on the wall behind the bartender.
At the far end, a raised platform was flanked by two dwarf spotlights and a curtain.
At the nearest table, a boy dressed without conviction as a sailor sat with a man in English tweeds. They kissed. The sailor eased the Oxford don’s lips apart with two fingers.
“My God,” Granach said from deep in their booth, and Veidt excused himself to chat with someone at the bar.
Boys who sold themselves for sex, Müthel finally remarked, had no future. They all looked at him.
“The voice of experience,” Hans said.
Nevertheless, Müthel said. It was true. Their clients couldn’t allow themselves to care what became of them.
They abused him for his threepenny psychology, and in so doing led themselves out of their paralysis of excitement and terror.
It occurred to them that they were thirsty. They tried various ways of attracting the barkeep’s attention.
Granach ventured the opinion that since prostitution was heartless and marriage immoral, abstention was preferable. Müthel added that he regarded women as a distraction, nothing more. Hans took both their hands, and said, “Come, now. Why don’t we all face the music and say what we mean: that we’re frankly afraid of them?”
Wilhelm kept to himself, aware that he didn’t know how anyone besides merchants’ sons and bookworms actually spoke.
Veidt stood at the bar sipping champagne. He looked to be considering the clientele with unsurprised benevolence.
Granach mentioned that he’d first seen Veidt in a cabaret on the Schützenstrasse. Veidt had played The Doomed Homosexual. That had been at least two years ago. How old could he have been?
Müthel wanted to know if they thought he was a member of—what was it called?—the Society of Free Spirits.
Wilhelm looked at Hans and Hans looked away. He seemed relaxed.
Granach shrugged, then put two coasters over his eyes for monocles. What was that gang on about, anyway? he asked.
Müthel said that, as he understood it, the idea was the celebration of Greek ideals. Spiritual calm and inner peace, in the intimate company of a friend.
Oh, yes, Granach said. Willi and Fritzi, after the football match. The older and younger boy at school. “The evening tutorial, in which the most spiritual of values were inculcated … Willi had dropped his pen-knife in Fritzi’s bed, and together they hunted for it, for without it there would be no fun that day.”
Hans smiled across the table at Wilhelm: a calming, beautiful smile.
Where was the barkeep? Müthel wanted to know. Were they ever going to drink?
In the penultimate chapter, the inevitable discovery, Granach added. Handled with more tristesse than panic: “But the strict Headmaster found out their inclinations.”
Hans smiled again. It sounded, he said, like Granach had done some hunting for the pen-knife himself.
Granach laughed.
The conversation lapsed.
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Veidt finally returned, easing in beside Wilhelm so that their bodies touched from shoulder to knee. Granach asked if this so-called bar in fact ever served anything to drink. Veidt asked what they’d been talking about. Müthel caught him up on the conversation.
“‘The sordid perils of actual existence,’” Veidt remarked, looking at Wilhelm.
Hans regarded them both.
“Granach was telling us about your role as The Doomed Homosexual,” Müthel said.
“As to questions concerning my nature,” Veidt said, with a smile, “my usual answer is ‘Musical.’”
The bartender arrived with a tray of five glasses of Mampe’s orange-flavored cordial.
“Who ordered these?” Granach asked.
“Whom do you think?” Veidt said.
They toasted themselves.
“What are we?” Granach asked, grimacing at the taste. “English shopkeepers’ wives?”
“A man over there gave me his card,” Veidt said, removing it from a pocket and showing it round. “It says under his name, ‘Portuguese Doctor.’”
“As in Dutch wife?” Hans asked. “French letter? Spanish fly?”
The two dwarf spotlights at the end of the bar flared on, and a fanfare was performed by a fat man with a clarinet. He then pulled open the curtain to reveal two women in heavy makeup and dressed as Amazons. The special quality of the proceedings that followed depended in part on the disparity in the size of the women. One was so small as to appear to be the other’s daughter. They mimed a pitched battle which ended with the tiny woman pinned, at which point they seemed to see each other with new eyes. The victor lowered her face slowly, while the vanquished kept her eyes on the approaching mouth. At the crucial moment the victor stopped, their open lips only grazing. The group at the table could hear breathing, and glasses clinking. Then the victor reared back and tore away the tunic from between the vanquished’s legs. The vanquished did the same to the victor. The fat man performed another fanfare. Neither woman was a woman.
