Authors: Ernst Haffner
Ludwig rides for three stops. Then he transfers to another line. Changes again. Always stands by the door so that, if an inspector should come, he can get out right away. What now? Back to the gang! You don’t stand a chance alone in Berlin. He doesn’t have a penny. He won’t risk the
vicinity of Münzstrasse, where the Blood Brothers hang out, not so close to police HQ. But how is he to contact Jonny or one of the others? He could try calling Schmidt’s, at this time of day there’s bound to be a Brother there. But then he doesn’t have a coin for the phone! The train is really flying now. Ludwig can’t even make out the names of the stations. Where’s he going to get a coin from? On the opposite seat is a thrown-away paper from today. New, barely looks opened. Ludwig picks it up. The twelve o’clock edition of the
B. Z.
He has an idea. The train is stopping, not before time. Gesundbrunnen station. He quickly gets out. Climbs up to Brunnenstrasse. Heads in the direction of Badstrasse. Looks at the clock, at the newspaper kiosks. No, it’s not here yet. Up here, in the far north of Berlin, it doesn’t usually get here before half past twelve.
Once again, Ludwig takes a look around in all directions. Policemen? Nope. He chances it. He calls out: “
B. Z
. — noon edition!” and waves the paper in front of him. He shouts four times, and then he’s shot of it, and he’s got a coin for the phone. Back to Gesundbrunnen station, to the call box. He knows the number by heart. Even before anyone says hello, he can hear the oom-pah-pah music. His face cracks in a smile. The old days at Schmidt’s. Then a voice, Jonny’s, in person. He listens. Doesn’t ask many questions. Only: where are you? And: where can we meet, I’ll grab a taxi. Ludwig suggests the Vinegar Cinema. Jonny knows. He’ll be there in no more than fifteen minutes. See ya.
Vinegar Cinema? On the corner of Brunnen and Volta is a big vinegar factory. The whole area has the biting reek of vinegar. People here keep their lips pressed together when they go by on the pavement. The smell makes his mouth water.
There is a cinema next to the factory, so what else are they going to call it? It’s the Vinegar Cinema.
Still feeling very uncertain, Ludwig walks into a doorway and watches from there to see if a taxi draws up in front of the cinema. There it is, and it’s Jonny. He looks around. Ludwig charges across the street. “Hey, Jonny!” He can’t repress his joy; a few tears, wiped away with the back of his hand, spurt from his eyes. There’s no one better than Jonny in a situation like this. He firmly shakes Ludwig by the hand, and steers him into a bar. A small instant calmative, then Ludwig can tell him all about it in some quiet café. After a beer and a short, Ludwig calms down. They walk to a small café. They are the only customers in the back room, and Ludwig has the floor. First there’s an excellent brew, and a torte with whipped cream. Things that haven’t been part of Ludwig’s world for a long time. He talks. Starts off with the fellow outside Stettiner Bahnhof. “We’ll put a crimp in his style,” says Jonny.
At the end of half an hour, Jonny is fully up to speed. For the next few days, things will be a bit ticklish for Ludwig. He will have the police looking for him. And if he is caught, then that’ll be the end of his probation and he’ll have to do four months. But the long-term outlook isn’t bad. He’s not a serious criminal. And no fewer than five gang members feature on the police wanted list, just because they fled borstals. The authorities would have their work cut out if they were going to chase after every runaway youth. So long as he doesn’t rub it in …
11
AT 7 A. M.
Willi Kludas is woken by his little namesake. “Hey, Willi, there’s been a blizzard. Come on, we’ll go with the street cleaners, there’s always help taken on when it’s snowed.” In no time Willi is alert. As he gets dressed, he chokes down a couple of the leftover rolls from yesterday, and gives his little friend the last two. In the kitchen they hold their heads under the cold tap; Silesian Olga even has a rag for them to dry their heads on. Hurry, hurry, says little Willi. Jacket on, collar up, and cap. In the courtyard, the little fellow suddenly stops in the slush. “Have you got any papers, you need to show them.” Papers? Forget it, Willi Kludas. They don’t issue you with papers in the institution when you do a runner. Then I’m not going neither, the little fellow wants to say, out of solidarity, when all at once he gets an idea.
He can hardly speak for excitement, and it takes him a while to when he finally can. “You’ve still got twenty pfennigs, ain’t you? We’ll go out and buy a broom handle with that, and they’ll give us the side of a tea chest for nothing … Then we’ll rig up a snow shovel at Olga’s, and I know she’s got a broom too, an ancient thing. And then we’ll go round the shops. ‘Morning. Your bit of pavement looks parlous. Don’t think your customers will be willing to risk their
necks on that. But if you like, we can get it cleaned up for you, nice and cheap …’ And I bet we’ll have earned us a couple of marks by afternoon. Isn’t that a good idea?” They dash into the nearest soap shop. A broom handle costs fifteen pfennigs, and they are able to pick up the lid of a box of soaps for nothing. Silesian Olga is flattered and cajoled till she coughs up her old broom and a few nails. The snow shovel is put together in no time, and the two Willis rush off.
To Breslauer Strasse. Their timing is perfect. The shopkeepers are just opening their stores, and, half-asleep still, are staring at the night’s slushy gift. Third time lucky. A bony little confectioneress biddy. Willi Kludas gives the pusher its initiation, the little man scratching after with the broom, and asks in the shop for some ashes to strew. At the end of half an hour, the snow is cleared away, and the biddy pays them each thirty pfennigs, and a bag of sweet leftovers. They’re in the black. They threw in the dairy basement next door. Just a few yards, but it’s thirty pfennigs between the two of them. Across the road, the big dry-cleaning business is too cheap to spare any change, they’ve sent their pallid girl trainee out on the street. Keep going, Willi. Here a nibble, there none. Here has been cleaned already, there they’re kept talking till they’re blue in the face, over a few pfennigs.
At the end of five hours, the boys are way up on Frankfurter Allee, and things are getting stickier. Clean pavements as far as the eye can see. “Call it a day, Willi?” “I think so too, Willi.” They stop for dinner in a cheap restaurant. Three courses, with soup and a wedge of pudding. Then they do the accounts. Even after paying for dinner, they each have four marks and change. Willi Kludas hasn’t had this much money since forever. They park their tools at Silesian Olga’s. Who
knows, maybe it’ll snow again tonight. Olga is delighted with a paper twist of sweets, and here are twice forty pfennigs for the night ahead.
My God, doesn’t Berlin look different when there’s something in your pockets that jingles! Even if it’s only four marks. Willi Kludas walks through the streets at the side of his friend, with a luminous grin on his face. Their bellies are full, they have cigarettes in their pockets, they have paid for the night, and they’re in the money. “Say, what do you think about going to the cinema?” asks the younger Willi. “Pritzkow’s only costs forty pfennigs.” The Pritzkow cinema on Münzstrasse is not just a cinema where they show Westerns and cop shows. It also serves as a warming hall and a dormitory for those sufficiently flush to be able to afford the entrance money. For forty pfennigs, anyone is entitled to a seat from ten in the morning till eleven at night. There he can watch the show six times over or else sleep through it, he can take his pick. In the terms used by the regulars, you don’t pay entrance money just so that you walk out again two hours later. At Pritzkow’s you pay sleeping money, and you hang around accordingly. The narrow little cinema is jam-packed at all hours. The boys and youths sit pressed together, some staring with fascination, some in stupor at the cacophonous screen, or they’re already making back their sleeping money. Gently slumped on the seat in front or the neighbor’s shoulder, or with sagging head counting their waistcoat buttons.
Willi Kludas stares at the screen open-mouthed. For him this modest production is something of a miracle. He had no idea there was such a thing as sound films, and those girls up on the screen … they’re so bonny … and the way everything jiggles on them when they walk … The way they
throw themselves at the well-dressed gentlemen and snog them … hot damn! And their sweet singing voices … and how they flip their skirts in the air when they dance. Willi Kludas shifts around on his chair, his face is burning and his sweaty fingers are tying knots. To get a girl like that … to watch a girl … In the interval he asks his little namesake if he had ever seen a girl in the altogether. He himself hadn’t, not properly. Where could he have? At sixteen he was put in the borstal. Someone there had had a lot of pictures of fat naked women. This boy loaned the cards out to his friends at night. In return for cigarettes, or a piece of sausage, or the meat ration at dinner. Then the boys would go up to the window to get a proper look at the cards. For half an hour at a time they would stand there gawping at the naked photographs, and then in bed afterwards … well, what else was a boy going to do? And then there was Otto Kellermann, a lad with golden hair and pale skin like a girl’s, who called himself Ottilie, and if you wanted your turn with Ottilie you had to pay as well …
Little Willi’s experience was vastly different. His teenage years were poisoned by his own mother, who gave herself to strangers in the room where he slept. By the tenants who brought their johns into the room, and sometimes drunkenly staggered up to Willi’s bed: “Willi, darling, aren’t you old enough yet … do you fancy it, then … keep still, sweetheart …” The mystery into which the twenty-year-old Willi Kludas was inducted with the help of smutty pictures and his friends’ obscene speeches had been revealed to little Willi at thirteen under still more profane circumstances.
They leave the cinema and head back out onto Münzstrasse. Willi Kludas stares under every tart’s hat brim, and if he’s accosted with a practiced smile and a swaggering
display of breasts and bum, then he feels a lustful itching that burns through him, dries his throat and makes his legs tremble. His damp hands in his trouser pockets clutch his money … Enough to have one of those girls. But he’s ashamed in front of his comrade. It would be a different matter if he was on his own … “What’ll we do now?” asks the boy. “Do you know anywhere where there are lots of girls?” is Willi’s counterquestion. “The fairground?” proposes the boy. “Are there any there?” “Christ, any number … behind the toilets for fifty pfennigs,” comes the expert answer.
The Silesian Fair on Schillingbrücke. Pleasure garden for all the gangs in the east of Berlin. Scene of daily jealous battles over a squeeze. Berlin’s nastiest red-light area; schoolgirls, and girls just out of school. Price: five rides at the funfair, a trip to the Hippodrome, ice lollies or potato pancakes, according to season. The more advanced of the child prostitutes have graduated to cash money. Scene of the transaction: behind the toilets. Cap cheekily shoved back so that the hair spills out over their eyes, cigarettes in the corners of their mouths, men between fourteen and twenty take in the daily parade of women between twelve and eighteen. Glances, and sometimes more than glances, assess bodies whose owners reciprocate by trying to show them off to best advantage.
Outside the funfair there’s Elly, a pretty, well-made thing of sixteen, staring yearningly at the whooshing swing boats. Little Willi knows her. “Do you fancy her then?” he asks Willi Kludas. The acquaintance is soon made. Willi buys tickets for three rides, and piles into a boat with Elly. Pulls on the strap so hard that after a few swings it’s touching the top of the frame and the operator has to use all his strength to brake. With coquettish fear Elly sits clasping Willi’s legs. Another
ride, and another, and then they find themselves back on solid ground again. Elly stretches, smooths her disheveled hair, and lets the impressionable Willi into a few secrets about her build. He’s a cute boy, and not half strong …
A boy who knows what he owes his new bride is duty bound to treat her to potato pancakes. Little Willi does the honors on behalf of his gormless elder. After potato pancakes, Willi Kludas and Elly are sitting in a little dodgem car on the Iron Lake. Round the corners, Elly shows her expertise at pressing her soft body against his. Willi staggers out of the car like a drunk, and clutches Elly’s arm. Where did the little fellow get to then? Just as well he’s gone. We’ll meet up at Olga’s later anyway. Elly is in the mood for a drink. Where, asks Willi. They go to the Whale, opposite the fairground.
It’s a big beer bar where the garlands hang every day from January 1 to December 31. The band, with trumpet and drums at the fore, is evidently under strict and simple instructions to bend their efforts to the making of as much noise as possible. And lo, they succeed, for dear life if nothing else. Because the customers’ idea of entertainment in the overcrowded bar is a drunken shouting and rampaging around. Narrow passages between tables have long since been taken up by scraping shifting chairs. The whole bar is a seething confusion, swathed in the smoke of mostly non-export-quality cigarettes. In the midst of it all, scouts in a desperate pickle, are the waiters. On each one of ten fingers, defying gravity, a beer. Jammed against each elbow, if possible, oval plates with vast helpings of pork and sauerkraut.
The band comes to an understanding that they need to give their instruments a rest if they are to go on playing until closing time, and the drummer is given a signal to end. He
obliges with an extra-powerful cymbal crash. For a second or two there is the grotesque auditory spectacle of a wildly yelling mob, whose vocal cords were until recently in an implacable struggle with the band. Then, seemingly abashed by its yelling, the whole bar is suddenly shtum. In that second of silence, a girl’s voice is heard, squeaky, loud, but appealing, calling: cigars, cigarettes, chocolates! The cigarette girl. Willi waves her over. Cigarettes for himself, a bar of chocolate for Elly. Then the waiter brings them their pints. By the time Willi has paid, he has exactly twenty pfennigs left. What does he care? Elly has slipped off her coat and is showing herself off to her boy in a skimpy red dress that proclaims all the amenities of her body in stentorian tones. She is aware of Willi’s staring burning eyes, and moves in a little closer. By now the band, refreshed by a round or two of free beers, is striking up again. The customers too are back to shouting in one another’s faces, apparently delighted at the healthy state of their voices.