The New Confessions

by William Boyd

  “Jesus Christ,” Two Dogs said.

  The man had fourteen ring fingers in his hip pockets. His breast pockets were full of jewelry and more watches. By now I was feeling sick. He was still lying down, moaning slightly.

  “What’ll we do?” I asked.

  “Maybe we should—”

  Two Dogs put the muzzle of his carbine in the man’s left ear and pulled the trigger. The man’s head gave a little jump and then seemed to half-deflate. Then Two Dogs stepped back and fired three shots into his body. Puffs of dust rose from his tunic.

  “We’ll say he tried to escape, OK, Mr. Todd?”

  “What? Yes, fine. Absolutely.”

  We didn’t touch anything. We left the fingers—a small pile of human kindling—beside the body. We walked silently back through the vineyard towards the car. Two of its doors stood wide open. All around us were woods, hills, small fields, vineyards. Some birds soared above in the pale blue sky. Cicadas screeched in the grass at our feet.

  Two Dogs patted me on the shoulder.

  “Best thing to do. I think we had to do that.”

  “What a day,” I said.

  “Shall I drive?”

  “No, no. Let me. It’ll take my mind off things.”

  We got into the car and I started the engine. We bumped down onto what we hoped was the Le Muy-Fréjus road and turned left as instructed. We had gone, I suppose, about four hundred yards when the first bullet shattered the windscreen and there was a metallic punching sound down the side of the car. I felt as though I had been kicked in the thigh and my right foot instinctively drove the accelerator down to the floor. We swerved, plunged off the road into an irrigation ditch. I banged my head and lost focus. My brain was a mist. I felt Two Dogs helping me out.

  I stood on the road somehow. Two Dogs kept asking, “Are you all right? Are you all right?” I was aware of a damp heat about my torso. Before I fell over I saw the paratroopers advancing on us and I heard the clear accents of my native country.

  “Sorry, Yank. We thought youse was Jerries inna fuckin’ Mercedes. Onyboady hurt?”

  VILLA LUXE, June 27, 1972

  I set off for the beach today longing for a swim. But I turned back after five minutes. My leg was aching slightly.

  If we hadn’t shot the Azerbaijani … if I hadn’t volunteered to drive …

  Two Dogs had bruised his elbow. I had taken a bullet through my chest, high up on the right side. It smashed a rib, passed through my right lung and ricocheted off my shoulderblade. The big rectus femoris muscle on my left thigh was almost severed, as if by a butcher’s knife. The two lasting consequences of this accident were a limp, when I was tired, and the ruination of my fine first serve at tennis.

  Anyway, that sort of “if only” digression is futile. To indulge in it is to place a blind obeisance in the laws of cause and effect. The cause of my bullet wounds was a trigger-happy Scottish para. Any attempt to trace the line further back is doomed. Could we say that my being shot was the result of Leo Druce’s smear campaign in the English press? In one sense that would be entirely accurate. In another it’s perfectly absurd. It was bad luck. Happenstance. The quantum state breaking into one human life. I bear that soldier no grudge.

  I convalesced in a large naval hospital near Washington, D.C. I was well looked after—Eddie saw to that. Fresh flowers every day, the best food. The Equalizer, as Two Dogs had told me, had been a considerable success. I had made some money. Lone Star was buoyant, as was its owner. Eddie had great plans, he told me: next we would make Jesse James, then Kit Carson. We could run the gamut of Western folk heroes. When I left the hospital he invited me to come and stay with him in Los Angeles, but I saw out the rest of the war in Ramón Dusenberry’s San Diego home, slowly and steadily regaining my health. I seemed to function surprisingly well on one lung. I wondered why nature had bothered to double up that organ—perhaps in case you got a bullet through the first.

  I was as fully recovered as I would ever be by the end of 1945. Eddie was still urging me to have a look at his script on Jesse James. I pleaded ill health for as long as I could, but then a letter arrived that changed everything and set me on a different course of action.

  The envelope that contained it was a curious-looking object, almost obliterate with official stamps and chinagraph markings. It had been sent first to my father’s house and had eventually found its way to me. It was from Karl-Heinz and was dated October 1945.

  My dear Johnny,

  So sorry to have to ask you for this, but would you lend me some money? One hundred dollars is all that I need and I will be in your debt forever and ever. I know it seems like a fortune to ask for, but I’m told that over there in Hollywood, U.S.A., dollar bills grow on trees in your gardens. Pick me one bunch, please, and send it to me at the Dandy Bar, 574 Kurfürstendamm, British Zone, Berlin.

  How are things with me? Don’t ask, my old friend, don’t ask.

  A warm English handshake from your old prison guard,

  Karl-Heinz

  Karl-Heinz was alive. This was the best news. How? By what unlikely chance? Suddenly the lethargy of my convalescent’s life fell away. I knew what to do now. I was going back to work for the Chula Vista Herald-Post.

  18

  Berlin, Year Zero

  I was full of astonishing optimism during my journey to Berlin. I felt, hard though it may be to credit, that my life was beginning again. Karl-Heinz was alive. Somehow, I knew we would finish The Confessions now, and though I had no idea what form it would take, I was sure it would come about. Too much lying around in hospital beds. Too many hours staring at the Pacific Ocean with nothing to occupy my mind, I hear you say. I had sent Karl-Heinz the money he had asked for; now all I had to do was find him.

  However, that elation—that old exhilarating sense of potential—began to seep away as we flew over the city on our approach to Templehof. I had been prepared for an image of destruction, but the vision that confronted me that afternoon in March 1946 was not so much shocking as unreal in a bizarre, sinister way. Berlin was gone, its skyline vanished. When you stand in a city and look casually about you, you see towers, roofs, steeples, gables, chimneys, treetops. Light comes at you through angles and over inclines, sometimes squeezing in through alleyways, sometimes basting the general view in wide boulevards and parks. Berlin was not razed, the shells of buildings still stood, but it had lost all those idiosyncrasies that made it particular—that made it “Berlin.” Only the Funkturm stood tall and untouched above the devastated streets. Everything else was uniformly gray and everything had been battered.

  How can I explain it? If you have ever seen a rugby team troop off the pitch at the end of a game played in exceptionally muddy conditions, you can bring to mind an analogue. The tired, tousled, dirty men seem suddenly the same size and thickness, all covered and clotted in mud. The slim, speedy winger is indistinguishable from the balding hooker with the beer belly. Their ordeal, their exhaustion and dishevelment, have homogenized them. And this is what had happened to Berlin. It was one large ruin. The city had fused.

  I was billeted in a villa in Zehlendorf—west in the American sector. It was designated by the press bureau of the military government PSR-4, for some reason. There were half a dozen journalists staying there and it was run by a pale silent woman called Frau Hanf. She was tall and rather beautiful in an exhausted, strained sort of way, but she was the very paradigm of formality. I never dared ask her a personal question.

  The next day we were taken on a tour of the city. My depression deepened. What overwhelmed me was the mess. It seemed impossible that it could ever be cleaned up. I could not imagine how a new city could ever emerge from this devastation. We drove up the Kurfürstendamm towards the Gedächtniskirche. The houses on either side were scorched shells, uneasy facades, set between vast rubble mounds. To my amazement, however, I saw bright signs and fresh paint, even neon. Shops, cafés, Lokale, were open and making a brave show of plying for trade. The streets were full of peop
le, stooped and intent and walking uncharacteristically slowly for Berliners. Everywhere were gangs of grubby trousered women sorting through bricks. Opposite the church, the Gloria-Palast—where The Confessions: Part I had played for a week—was a tumbled crater of stone and concrete.

  We drove on. Another tremendous shock. The Tiergarten had gone! gone completely, not a tree left. In its place were thousands of tatty garden plots. I was overwhelmed by this transformation. I tried to imagine Hyde Park, the Bois de Boulogne, Central Park, as vast vegetable gardens, all the trees cut down for fuel.…

  On the Brandenburg Gate were red flags and pictures of Lenin. The stark white of the memorial to the Unknown Russian Soldier seemed almost obscene set against the miserable incinerated black of the buildings all around. The Dome, the Schloss, the Chancellery … the Adlon Hotel, Wilhelmstrasse … everything shattered or demolished. I looked out of the windows at the drear view, the gangs of women and POWs sifting through the debris, my mind a confusing sequence of “before” and “after.” Where was the Bristol, the Eden, the Esplanade? Where were the embassies, the theaters, the department stores? That pile of bricks had been the bar where I would have a drink after my stint as doorman at the Windsor. This space used to be Duric Lodokian’s house. That rubble mountain had been the hotel where Leo Druce had his wedding reception. Monika Alt used to live behind this cauterized facade.… And so on. It’s pointless to rehearse the conflict of emotions, the sweet and sour memories that day provoked. They lessened subsequently and with some speed. You can get used to anything. Normality is like some tenacious waste-ground weed: it will establish itself in the most unlikely places. But I never got used to what had happened to the river Spree. Perhaps because that first day I had arrived in Berlin in ’24, in the early morning before the city was up and about, I had walked along its banks from the Lehrter Station through a cold misty dawn. Now it was the city’s sewer, clogged and polluted, rimmed with scum and thick with effluent and excreta. Its strong ornamented bridges had all been destroyed and makeshift wooden spans replaced the shattered arches. It seemed almost too solid to flow, but if you could bear to stand long enough (you could hang a hat on the smell off it, as the Berliners used to say) you could see its surface shift and eddy after a fashion, as if it were a prototype river not yet perfected, an early design model now superseded and antiquated.

  My diary. A typical day.

  Berlin, March 25, 1946. Woke early after a bad night’s sleep. Frau Hanf obligingly provided me with an early breakfast of stewed fruit and porridge before the other journalists were up. I got her to sit and have some coffee with me by offering her a cigarette. I asked her what her husband had done before the war—she said he’d been a washing machine manufacturer. She has no idea where he is now. We talked about how one might set about finding a missing person. You can leave notices around the city, she said. There are even agencies that will track down relatives for a fee. The military government and the control commission are no use at all. She said this without resentment or bitterness.

  Driven to the Kommandatura for a briefing on the next Four Powers meeting. Dull stuff. Talked to an American staff captain who said the Russians had not raped excessively. They were more interested in looting, he said. Given that most of the Russian troops were Asiatics he thought that the amount of raping in Berlin had been “about average.” He became very bitter, however, about the question of silk stockings. “More women in Berlin wear silk stockings than in Paris or London,” he insisted. Must see if I can confirm this.

  Lunch at the WarCorrMess in the Hotel Am Zoo. Windsor soup, brisket of beef, dressed cabbage. Floated the silk stockings theory. Several people agreed. Wrote a small article for the Herald-Post on the matter. Late in afternoon took some photographs in a burned-out-tank park—v. dramatic

  Saw Die Spur des Falken again. Bogart is excellent. Cinema freezing. Looked in at Dandy Bar. No sign of Henni. Home.

  The Dandy Bar was in a small street just off the Kurfürstendamm. It was in the ground floor and basement of a ruined apartment block. In the vestibule there was a reception desk and a cloakroom. Stairs led to the basement, where there was a bar and tables and chairs set around a small stage and dance floor. The place had pretensions. Some of the walls were paneled, the wood salvaged from grander buildings, and there was a lot of red plush about. The tables had white cloths and the waiters wore uniforms. It was patronized almost exclusively by American soldiers—who had more-easygoing fraternization laws—and girls.

  I went there the evening after my tour round the city. The bar was open but empty. A three-piece band of emaciated men in loose Hawaiian shirts played “Don’t Fence Me In” rather well. I showed the barman a photograph of Karl-Heinz. Yes, he said, he used to come here when it was the “old” Dandy Bar, before the management upgraded it. In the old days it was for homosexuals, “men and women,” he added liberally. Karl-Heinz hadn’t been seen since. “How long ago was that?” I asked. “Four, five months,” he said. And no, no letter for him had been delivered or collected. I left a message just in case and took to dropping in there most nights. It seemed the only thing I could do. A bottle of wine cost ten pounds and I once ate a meat dish there that someone later told me was spaniel.

  During those first weeks in Berlin I did my job reasonably dutifully and associated with other journalists. I found myself very quickly caught up in the apathy and aimlessness that seemed to brew in the air above the ruined city. In a curious way it was a bit like Los Angeles, only here the constant climate was destitution and deprivation. Those of us exempt from these afflictions were still contaminated by the prevailing mood, like an airborne virus. The tone employed in conversation was one of bitchery and complaint. We sat in our basement nightclubs, drinking and eating our fill, moaning about our work and living conditions. Outside, the rest of the city went to hell.

  It wasn’t that my zeal to find Karl-Heinz had diminished, it was that I couldn’t think of any other way of channeling it apart from sitting at the bar in the Dandy, drinking and listening to the band and hoping vaguely that he might look in. Sometimes I went to other clubs—Rio Rita’s, Femina, Tabasco—with their lesbians and stunning transvestites, the racketeers, the cigarette and chocolate smugglers with their expensive women. In spite of evidence to the contrary, one could live very well in Berlin in those days, if one could afford it. But I found, quite apart from its association with Karl-Heinz, that I preferred the Dandy’s shabby pretensions and its ever changing multitude of whores.

  One evening I chatted to one of these girls. Henni. I had no sexual interest in her but the American press was desperate for vice stories from occupied Germany—how victorious GIs were being corrupted by conquered Frauleins—and as she was alone I thought I might get some “human interest” from her. Henni was a tall girl, with almost a subterranean pallor. She had thick fair hair that needed a wash. Her upper lip was long and it gave her a faintly doleful expression. She was drinking colored water and smoking a cigarette. She said she was waiting for a major in the 82nd Airborne but he never turned up. She told me that she had been in the chorus of the Deutsches Opernhaus. I offered her another cigarette and ordered a bottle of wine. After we had talked for half an hour, she gestured towards my pack of cigarettes and said, in English and without much enthusiasm, “You give me that, we go ficken.”

  She took me back to the room she shared with her mother just off Savignyplatz. Her father, a music teacher, had poisoned himself in ‘45 when the Russians entered the city. Her mother, an old lady, smiled politely at me and left the room when we arrived. The room was small, very cold and neat. There were many pictures of cats on the walls. There was only one glass pane in the window that looked over a rubble-filled courtyard; the other holes were filled with cardboard.

  Henni made a thin tea that we drank without sugar and milk. She put my cigarettes away in a cupboard.

  “My mother will be delighted,” she said. “We can sell them tomorrow.” She gestured at the bed. “Shall we? Hu
nger is a great incentive for prostitution.”

  I liked Henni. I found her intelligent dry efficacy entertaining and quite inoffensive. I went to the Dandy most nights, and when she was there returned home with her. I brought food and chocolate, but what she really wanted was cigarettes, the only hard currency in Berlin in those days. When I bought a carton of two hundred Lucky Strikes at the big post exchange in the American sector, I used to say to myself, “Ten nights with Henni.” Henni’s mother would take them down to the black market site in the Tiergarten and exchange them for food. Berlin was full of prostitutes in 1946, nearly all amateur ones. Three hundred thousand at least, one journalist said. It was, moreover, a city of women, three to every man. It was difficult for Henni to get regular clients, such was the competition, and there was something about her faintly doleful, faintly disdainful expression that put men off. Apart from me, she said she averaged three or four customers a week, and she never went with Russians.

  I liked to lie in bed with her, chatting (her mother went down the hall to a neighbor’s room). It was warm in bed and we would lie there smoking Lucky Strikes and drinking whiskey. I told her about my days in Berlin. (She found it strange to think that we had shared the city before—that I might even have seen her as a little girl. “And look at us now,” she added.) She would tell me about her singing career and how she was looking forward to renewing it. One evening I asked her to sing me something and, straightaway, lying on her back, cigarette burning between her fingers, she sang in a pure clean voice “Wohin Sint die Goldenen Zeiten?” The haunting loveliness of the tune reduced me to tears.

  April 10, 1946. Managed to get a car and driver to myself and went to a beach on the Havel for a picnic with Henni. We motored through the Grunewald, which is more or less untouched. A bright day with watery sun. Yachts and motorboats on the lake. Henni went swimming; I declined. She wore a dark-blue two-piece swimsuit and a red-and-white rubber bathing cap. She splashed energetically in the water then rushed out and flung herself on the sand to sunbathe. Beneath the wool of her costume I could see her nipples were hard and erect and the fair hair in her armpits was dark and sleek from the water.