by Robert Moss
They were strolling along the Ku’damm into the cabaret district. Johnny glanced back at the swaggering crowd of Nazis who had blocked the pavement on the other side. Max led the way into a street where lone men drifted among lurid signs advertising sex shows and porno films.
“Hitler is plumbing something atavistic in the human psyche,” Max went on. “That is the secret of his appeal. He can’t be defeated on the level of reason, because he draws directly from the unconscious, from the reptile brain that is older than thought.” In the blue light that fell from the neon sign above, Fabrikant’s mouth seemed to be moulded into a leer. “But you discussed all of that with Heinz Kordt, didn’t you?”
“How did you know?”
Max shrugged. “I know what Heinz thinks. And I knew you were bound to seek him out. You’re loyal to your friends. That’s not always a failing.”
Johnny had asked for this meeting. He had also suggested that Helene should not be present. But the choice of locale belonged to Max.
The spymaster glanced up at the sign above their heads. The neon lights picked out the exaggerated profile of a naked woman lowering herself into a tub. Die Badewanne, flashed the words underneath. The Bathtub.
“In here.”
A person in a blonde wig with breasts like hunting horns led them to a table. Johnny was struck by the legs that showed through the slits in the dress; they were as sturdy as his own, with knobbly knees. He was reminded, for a moment, of a night at the Kali-Bar in Hamburg. The night he had met Helene.
The floor show had already begun. There was a real bathtub on stage, surrounded by people of both sexes in varying stages of nudity. The centrepiece was a young man wearing only a black hood and a studded collar, who was being led around on a chain like a dog.
Max ordered Dom Perignon. He seemed determined to enjoy himself.
“Why here?” Johnny shouted above the din.
“Why not? It’s so uplifting, don’t you think? The Decline of the West in two acts, with live sex.” As if on cue, a masked man with impossible pectorals came onstage and started cracking a whip. He seemed to be a great hit with this crowd.
“About Heinz—” Johnny leaned closer, so as not to shout.
“Well?”
“He thinks we’re not doing enough to stop Hitler. I think he’s right. I talked to Dimitrov. He seems to be living in some imaginary country.”
“Drop it, Johnny. You’re talking like a German.”
“I am a German.”
“Don’t give me that crap, that Lokalpatriotismus. You know better than that. You belong to a world movement. That’s your only loyalty.”
“I’m worried about Heinz.”
“I’m fond of Heinz. You know that. He’s a good man to have with you in the trenches. But you should tell him not to make so much noise. The wind carries it further than he imagines.”
The wine waiter came up and fussed over them. Max tested the champagne and indicated his approval.
“To London!” he proposed, clinking glasses. “To the girls along the Serpentine!”
“How long have you known?” Johnny asked.
“Longer than you, I expect. I have a piece of advice for you. When you get to England, buy yourself a decent suit. Never mind what it costs.”
“Is there something wrong with my clothes?” Johnny glanced down at his grey flannel suit, bought off the peg in Bucharest years before.
“Not from my point of view. But you must come to terms with the English psyche. In the eyes of an Englishman, a man who goes to the right tailor is above suspicion.”
“I’ll try to keep that in mind.” His eyes flitted up to the semi-nude dancer who was gyrating onstage with her pet boa constrictor around her belly.
“You asked for this meeting,” Max reminded him. “It’s always a pleasure to see you, of course. But was there something in particular you wanted to say?”
“It’s about Helene.”
“Yes?”
“I’d rather she didn’t come to England with me.”
“That’s not my province.”
“But she works for you—”
Max silenced Johnny with a subtle but sudden flick of his wrist. The young man followed his gaze and saw a newcomer, smartly attired in a broad pinstripe and a bow tie, with a red rose in his buttonhole. The stranger murmured something to the transvestite waiter and was rewarded with giggles. His manner was languid, but his eyes flicked warily from side to side as he crossed the room to join a poised, very fair young man at a corner table. As Max and Johnny watched, the snake-dancer, minus the boa constrictor, threaded her way through the drinkers and sat down at the same table.
Max allowed himself a small sigh of satisfaction.
“A friend of yours?” Johnny tried to provoke him. “That, my dear fellow, is the head of British Intelligence in Berlin.”
Johnny took another look at the Englishman, trying to memorize the face.
Max reached for the champagne bottle, found it empty, and pushed it back nosedown into the bucket.
“About Helene,” he remarked, studying the chemistry between the British spy and the colourful crowd at his table, “I may have a solution for you. A temporary one, at any rate.”
“Yes?”
“It occurs to me that I may need to borrow her for a few weeks.”
7
Sigrid waited on tables in the Palace Café Mondays through Saturdays from eleven until eight, with Wednesday afternoons off. There was a brisk trade at lunchtime (secretaries and clerks from nearby government offices) and in the early evenings (cinemagoers dining out on their way to the UFA theatre up the street). In the slack times, in the middle of the afternoon, she would sketch the faces around her. Some of the customers, discovering her hidden talent, would slip her an extra mark for their portraits. It was in those lazy hours that Johnny took to drinking coffee at the Palace Café. Once he brought her a leaflet about the conditions of German workers. It was illustrated with a drawing of a street sweeper, his face corrugated by a lifetime of toil, trudging off to work.
She refused to speak to Johnny for the rest of the day. The sketch was hers, something he had asked for. He had no right to have it printed without her consent, least of all in such a publication. At the bottom of the leaflet was the long-winded title of some organization she had never heard of. She presumed it was something to do with the Communists, and when she questioned Johnny later, he didn’t bother with denials.
“Did you read it?” he demanded. “Is there anything you disagree with?”
She had to shake her head.
“Well, then, be proud you’re part of something that matters. Publications like this are important. People have to be made aware of how the workers are forced to live, of what the Fascists are doing. They have to be made to see. Your picture says more than all of the text. They’d like to use more of your work, Sigi. You don’t need to worry. Your name won’t be used. And they’ll pay you, not much, but enough to pay for the best materials you can buy. It’s a start, isn’t it?”
She had the use of her studio again. The lodger had moved on, and Johnny and Helene had taken over his room. Her father had said he wouldn’t stand for it. When drunk, he even threatened to go to the police. But he was scared of his wife, and his grumbling subsided when Johnny handed him twice the usual rent, for a whole month to boot. With the additional allowance Johnny had received from Dimitrov’s people, he had no shortage of funds. Now there was meat on the table every night and money for Hermann to loaf all day in his Lokal. And morning and evening, Johnny was there, under the same roof. In fact, he was at home far more often than Helene, who would vanish without explanation for days at a time.
His presence disturbed Sigrid. When he entered a room, he seemed to fill it. She could feel his nearness on her skin, like a physical caress. His eyes were changeable as the sea, sometimes calm and gentle, sometimes a violent tide that threatened to envelop her. She wished he would leave. She promised herself to speak to her m
other, to make them go. She had the ominous sensation that he was about to tear open the padlocks that secured a sealed room deep inside her, where some nameless, terrible thing thrashed in its chains, striving to break loose. Yet at the Palace Café, when the afternoon wore on and he had still not appeared with his battered hat and his puckish grin, she began to feel empty, almost desolate. And when he suggested little outings, she did not refuse.
These excursions were harmless enough, considered singly: a visit to the UFA cinema after work or to a rehearsal of the new play by Bert Brecht, or a Wednesday afternoon on the Wannsee. That day he hired a boat, and they sculled to the farther shore, where he scrambled onto a rock and squatted, his arms dangling over his knees, his face turned up to the sun.
“You look like a seal, with your nose pointing up like that,” she laughed at him. She turned the sketch she had begun into a caricature, with a feminine hand dangling a fish over Johnny’s nose.
“It’s not the fish I’m pointing at,” Johnny said, snatching the drawing away from her.
She made out that she hadn’t heard. But rowing back across the Wannsee, half blinded by the late sun that burned on the waters, she was frightened, less of him than of herself.
He had flung off his jacket and rolled up his sleeves. The light traced the flex of his arms, which were strong but not brawny. He leaned forward to point something out, and he smelled like the sun. He bent over her, and all of her body rushed to meet him. He found her lips. His touch scalded, but it took all of her strength to wrench herself away. She sat in the prow of the boat, quivering, her head erect, poised for flight.
“Why?” His tone wasn’t entreating or accusing. Slowly she turned back to him. He cocked his head and she wanted to laugh, because now he looked like a dog trying to puzzle out the strange speech of humans.
She said, “Because of Helene,” and tried to smooth her dress. It felt unnaturally constricting, pressing so tightly against her bosom she could hardly breathe.
“I told you already,” he said gently. “I’m not married to Helene.”
“But you sleep together.”
“Sometimes.” He held her gaze. “But there are no commitments. Except for the mission we share. And that is something I hope one day to share with you.”
The boat drifted closer to the home shore, and a copse of
fir trees on a rise swallowed the sun. She felt a sudden chill. “I’m not Helene,” she said. “I couldn’t live like that.”
“You’re saving yourself for the man you’ll marry?”
This was treacherous ground. She wasn’t sure she believed in marriage, not after what she had seen between her parents.
She moved onto safer slopes. “Helene is my sister,” she pointed out.
A maddening smile plucked at his lips. “You’re not accountable for an accident of birth.”
“It’s not proper,” she said. “It’s unanständig.”
She made this last remark with such a determined imposture of bourgeois rectitude that he burst out laughing, and it horrified her to find that she wanted to join in. The mood was so convulsive that she had to turn her back on him, so he would mistake the spasms for a different sentiment and not take them as an invitation to return to the attack. What was the matter with her?
She knew, of course, that the situation was hopeless. Johnny was a man on the run, a dangerous agitator likely to spend the rest of his life — which might not be long — behind bars. Further, he was married (well, if not exactly married, then at least pledged) to her sister. In any case, he might be leaving Berlin at any moment for God-knows-where. To cap it all, he was a sailor by trade, and everyone knew how far you could trust sailors with women.
Yet when he reached for her again, she didn’t move quickly enough to avoid him (did she move at all?) and when he crushed her against him, her body betrayed her. She should have been stiff and unyielding, wooden as a plank, but every part of her hastened to receive him. She could feel his breath on her neck, his circling hands invading her secret places. With an effort of will she grabbed the side of the dinghy — which rolled dangerously, so that water sloshed over their feet — and dragged herself away.
She moved through the rest of that week like a sleepwalker. Forms had lost their usual weight and density. In bed, she fell into a shallow, restless sleep. It was like lying on shifting sands, with a gauzy curtain blowing over her face. Waking, she went about her chores like an automaton. At the restaurant she got orders mixed up and dropped a tray, and the manager threatened to fire her.
“There are thousands of girls in Berlin!” he screamed. “Don’t think you’re anything special.”
Johnny turned up at her side one morning at the Ethno-logical Museum — had he followed her or come with her? — and they wandered among the displays of primitive art.
Johnny was fascinated by some of the masks. He stopped in front of a Kwakiutl mask from British Columbia. It showed a frontal view of a face with an enormous, tragic eye, sheared off along the ridge of the nose so that it was suddenly transformed into a dark profile.
They looked at Yoruba initiation masks, at a towering Senufo headdress that was a whole alphabet of hieratic signs, at the abstract Oceanic figures she told him had influenced Giacometti.
“The mask is not just decoration,” she told him. “The man who puts on the mask is no longer himself. He dies to the old life to become the god, or the ancestral spirit. The mask belongs to a higher order of reality than the man who wears it.”
He considered this without comment, but his face darkened. He strolled away with his hands in his pockets to stare at some shrunken trophy heads from South America. Sigrid shuddered at the sight of one of them, a nut-brown face with black oblong stones for eyes, draped with plaits of dried flowers and blue-and-red feathers. It had a coil of string in its mouth, with a length left dangling underneath like a hangman’s noose.
“I saw something like this once before.”
“Come away,” she said, taking his arm.
“All primitive art is for use,” he remarked, when they were standing on the museum steps. “Superstitious use, it’s true, but the service of something greater than the individual artist.”
“Are you preaching at me again?”
He smiled and patted her hand. “No, but they’d like some more of your drawings for a new magazine. What would a trophy head of Goebbels look like?”
Then a couple of days passed when she didn’t see him. Helene flew in and out of the flat to fetch some clothes. She was in a filthy temper and wouldn’t exchange more than half a dozen words. Hitler made a violent speech promising revenge for the assassination of a storm troop commander by the Communists. In her free time Sigrid busied herself with the Nazi caricatures Johnny had requested for the magazine. The likenesses weren’t bad. Some of them — especially the sketch of Himmler, the poultry farmer, as a turkey with wattles drooping over the collar of his SS uniform — were quite funny.
Wednesday came around, and Johnny still hadn’t reappeared. His absence made a wasteland of her afternoon off. Keep away, she had told herself, knowing that she could be only a passing diversion in the life of a man like him. She was bound to lose him soon enough, inevitably and irrevocably. But now she was terrified by the fear that he had been snatched away even sooner than she had calculated, before she had had time to make up her mind about everything. Had she been right to refuse him, that afternoon on the lake? Was it right to spurn something your whole being cried out for because you couldn’t have it for keeps? She didn’t know the answers, not for sure.
That Wednesday night, long after her parents had gone to bed, she went to the lodger’s room. The door was locked, but she opened it with the key to her own room; all the locks inside the apartment were the same.
She examined the familiar furnishings of the room the ponderous armoire against the wall, the china jug in its bowl on the washstand, the painting of a stag with a pack of dogs at its heels, the double bed with its massive headb
oard. Nothing was out of place. There was no personal touch to suggest the room was even occupied. The bed cover lay flat and smooth, the ashtray on its brass stand had been wiped clean. Overcome by a kind of panic, she rushed to the cupboard and flung the doors open. His clothes were still there: a couple of suits, the tweed coat he had worn that day on the lake.
A measure of calm returned, and with it insuperable weariness. She lay on the bed, his bed, and let sleep take her.
His breath was hot against her face. She smelled raw alcohol and wood smoke. The mattress sagged under the double weight.
He murmured, “Oh, my love.”
Coming out of the dream, she realized he had pulled up her nightgown. The fabric lay bunched beneath her armpits while his lips moved to her breasts.
She clawed at him, and there was a dull thud as his shoulder hit the wall.
Then his full weight was on her, pinning her. She opened her mouth and formed words, but no sound escaped.
She stopped wrestling and listened to the rasp of his breathing. When he forced his way between her legs, she stayed the same, not yielding, not resisting. She bit her lip at the first stab of pain and tasted her own blood.
He was bucking and sawing, but then his movements became slower, coaxing and circling as he tried to lead her like a dance partner. She relaxed a little, and began to enter into the rhythm.
But before she had learned it, he was lunging inside her. She saw his face lifted over her, flushed and triumphant, gleaming with sweat.
He whispered, “My love.” The rough stubble pricked her skin as he rested his head against her neck.
She slid away from him and went to the washbasin.
In the moonlight he could see the dark patches on the sheet.
“Sigrid,” he said hoarsely. “I didn’t know. You’re a woman made for love. I thought—”
