by William Boyd
‘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.
3. EIN WENIG ORGIE
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.
‘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.
‘Amory?’
Trudi stood there beside a smiling middle-aged woman with an enormous shelf of bosom. She was introduced as Frau Amoureux and we shook hands.
‘I wait here for Trudi,’ I said in my rudimentary German.
‘Oui, oui, ma chérie, je vous en prie.’
Trudi whispered in her ear and turned back to me.
‘I think you should offer Frau Amoureux a bottle of Sekt.’
I handed over the money.
I left the Xanadu-Club at two in the morning thinking that I’d never get rid of the taste of cheap Sekt in my mouth, no matter how many cigarettes I smoked. As the night had worn on the mood in the club had slowly changed. The gawping couples left and the brothel-atmosphere steadily enhanced itself. Clients and girls – or clients and boys – came down from the upstairs rooms and lingered around the bars, drinking and flirting, chatting and playing cards. Clothes were shed and more visits upstairs took place. The place was very crowded on either side of midnight but as the small hours advanced the spirit calmed and the carnality seemed to disappear from the banter and the laughter and the mood in the club became almost domestic. The weedy commissionaire came up from below and had a beer with Frau Amoureux. Men in vests played cards with semi-naked girls who had finished work for the night. The girls chatted and gossiped, smoking and drinking. Trudi joined me at the end of her shift and I ordered yet more Sekt.
‘How much do you cost?’ I asked, Sekt-emboldened.
‘For ficky I am ten marks.’ She glanced balefully at Frau Amoureux. ‘But I am giving half to her.’
I could see how earning 500 marks for bringing me here was the most enormous windfall and, as if she were reading my mind, Trudi took my hand and said thank you with obvious sincerity. She chatted on in a low voice but at a speed I couldn’t really understand. She was grateful, that much I gathered, and it seemed that if I stayed late even more things could happen in this room. Then, as she drank more, she started telling me about her life and how the Xanadu-Club was much better than being a common Kontroll-girl in the Tiergarten, which was what she used to do, outside in all weathers with all manner of perverts asking you to do unpleasant things. She even, at one stage, leant over and kissed me on the cheek. Then she spotted one of her regulars and sashayed off to greet him. I turned my bag. Click.
The next day Hanna and I developed the negative and printed out and examined the contact sheet. It hadn’t worked – somehow the camera had moved slightly in the bag, slipping in its canvas straps, and one half of the images were a blur, like a finger held over the lens.
‘You’ll just have to go again,’ Hanna said. ‘It’s a shame – some of these would have been really good.’
*
THE BARRANDALE JOURNAL 1977
Hugo Torrance called round today. I heard a car come to a halt outside the cottage – a most unusual event, unannounced, as I have signs on the single-track road leading down to the house saying ‘No turning point’, ‘No vehicular access’, precisely to det
er the curious tourist to the island, thinking they can rove where they will. I ran quickly to a front window and saw that it was Hugo and I watched him swing his stiff leg out of his old Jaguar, stamp on it to restore circulation and limp towards the front door. I had it open before he could knock.
‘My, my,’ I said. ‘What an honour.’
He kissed me on the cheek and I smelt his aftershave – Old Spice.
‘I’m having a party tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Spontaneous. My daughter and her husband are flying up from London.’
‘Alas, I’m too old for parties,’ I said.
‘Not as old as me. If I can have one you should do the honourable thing and show up – if only for half an hour.’
‘Actually, I’m rather busy—’
‘It’s my birthday, Amory. The big seven-o.’
‘Ah.’
He gave me that fierce look of his – an audible inhalation of breath, eyes narrowing, eyebrows buckling.
‘See you at the hotel tomorrow evening,’ he said, bluntly. ‘Eight o’clock. Lots to drink.’
‘I’ll be there. Can’t wait.’
‘I’m just off to Greer and Calder’s now. You’ll be amongst friends.’
I watched him reverse, turn and drive away. Interesting that he’s delivering the invitations in person, I thought, instead of just telephoning. Harder to say no, that way – so he must want a good quorum of friends. Hugo Torrance is tall, slim and bald, his white hair, what remains of it, is startlingly set off by ink-black eyebrows. A handsome septuagenarian and an ex-soldier who had his left leg shattered by machine-gun bullets at Monte Cassino in 1944. He owns and runs the Glenlarig Hotel in Achnalorn, Barrandale’s solitary licensed premises, so he’s an important man and it’s hard not to see him on a regular basis, if you fancy a drink in the bar from time to time or a meal in the dining room. I have been avoiding him, however, as I know he has designs on me. Last Hogmanay at the hotel he kissed me as I was about to leave, the bells an hour past. Kissed me seriously as we stood alone in an alcove where the coats are hung and I nearly gave in to him. I kissed him back for a second or two and broke away. ‘Stay the night, Lady Amory,’ he said, his voice husky with drink. He touched my face then swayed back. ‘Don’t ever call me that,’ I said in shock. How did he know? And now he’s asked me to his seventieth birthday party. Not asked, but effectively demanded I be there. Well, I can handle Hugo Torrance – I know his type, these old soldiers, all too well.
