The End of the World in Breslau (16 page)

“No. He hasn’t been here for a long time. He’s probably with his wife.”

“You’re lying. He always comes to see you when he’s drunk, and he was drunk yesterday. Tell me if he was here and where he is now.”

Franziska said nothing. Mock felt extremely hot. Seven years ago, as an officer in the Vice Department, he had interrogated a prostitute who had refused to tell him where her pimp, suspected of human trafficking, could be found. Losing his patience, Mock’s chief at the time had held her
one-year-old child out of the window. Maternal love had superseded her love for her procurer.

Mock felt a small hammer banging in his skull. He pulled out his notebook and quickly wrote: “Tell me where he is or I’ll tell the boy I’m going to kill his Papa” and gave it to the woman. By the fury on Franziska’s face, he saw he had correctly deciphered the phrase she had used to reassure her son.

“I’m not going to tell you anything.” She was frightened now.

Steam belched from the kettle. Mock stood up and made towards the curtain. He stopped in front of it and took a chequered handkerchief from his pocket to wipe his perspiring neck. Without another glance at Franziska, he turned into the kitchen and left the apartment.

The old woman sitting on the toilet waggled a finger at him. As he approached she whispered:

“They all were. All of them military men, even one general.”

Mock felt like saying something unpleasant to her, but he had to spare his nerves. Today would be taken up wandering from one seedy haunt to another in search of the born-again alcoholic.

BRESLAU, THAT SAME DECEMBER 2ND, 1927
EIGHT O’CLOCK IN THE EVENING

Karl Urbanek had been working as a cloakroom attendant at the CaféVariété Wappenhof for four years, and every day at the start of his duty he prayed in thanksgiving to God for his good position. For an hour now he had been trying to send his daily quota of entreaties and muttered incantations towards the heavens, but had not yet managed to fulfil his norm. This time it was the bellboy, Jäger, who disturbed him. Just as the attendant was getting to his fifth Our Father, Jäger burst into the vestibule, skidding on the polished marble floor and performing what
looked like a dance step. Urbanek, annoyed, interrupted his prayers and opened his mouth to yell at the bellboy for using the floor as an ice-rink instead of carrying out his professional duties in a serious manner. The unfulfilled penitent Urbanek did not let his anger get the better of him, however; when he thought it over for a few moments, he realized that Jäger was not sliding on the polished tiles for pleasure. The torn collar of his Wappenhof uniform and the absence of his cap were proof that the bellboy had left his post on the pavement outside rather violently. And Urbanek had not the slightest doubt that Jäger’s aggressor was the hefty fellow now hurling the boy’s cap to the floor, while gallantly allowing a stocky, dark-haired man who was brushing snow off his hat, and a small man with a narrow, foxy face, through the revolving doors.

“I tried to explain to these gentlemen that there are no more seats for today’s performance …” squeaked the boy, picking up his cap.

“So there’s no table for me?” said the dark-haired man, staring fixedly at the cloakroom attendant. “Tell me, Urbanek, is it true that there’s no table at this tingle-tangle for me and my friends?”

The attendant scrutinized the new arrivals for a moment, then a glimmer of recognition appeared in his eyes.

“But of course not!” he cried, looking sternly at Jäger. “Counsellor Mock and his friends are always our most welcome guests. Please forgive this idiot … He hasn’t been here long and he doesn’t appreciate his job … You shall have my company box immediately … Oh, it’s so long since you’ve been here, Counsellor – it must be two years … ”

Urbanek fussed over Mock and his companions and tried to take their coats, but clearly none of the three men intended to disrobe.

“You’re right, Urbanek.” Mock leaned amicably on the attendant’s shoulder, enveloping him in a strong smell of alcohol. “I haven’t been here for three years … But we don’t need the box. I just wanted to ask you something …”

“I’m all ears, Counsellor.” Urbanek returned to his position behind the counter and gestured to Jäger to take up his post on the pavement.

“Have you seen Criminal Sergeant Kurt Smolorz here today?” Mock asked.

“I don’t know who he is.”

“You don’t know who he is? That’s interesting.” Mock studied the heavy curtain separating the vestibule from the auditorium. “I understand that your boss doesn’t allow you to pass on information about your guests, but I’m well acquainted with your boss and I’m convinced he’ll praise you for the assistance you’re about to give me.”

The curtain stirred. From beyond the thick material came muffled, lively music. Mock walked up to it and yanked it aside. The words of a song suddenly became quite clear, and they all recognized the famous hit about two inseparable friends that was then being sung in Berlin’s theatres by Marlene Dietrich and Claire Waldoff. Behind the curtain stood a girl selling cigarettes. When she saw Mock she quickly hid something in her white apron and, disconcerted, approached the cloakroom counter. She was dressed like a chambermaid from a hotel whose owner skimps on the outfits of his female staff. While Mock, struck by the provocative length of her dress, was wondering what would happen if the girl leaned over without bending her knees, Urbanek gave her a fresh supply of cigarettes. The cold draught from the revolving doors had clearly done her no good, for she sniffed repeatedly through her red nose.

“How do you split it with her?” he asked the attendant when the girl had returned to the smoke-filled auditorium. “Fifty-fifty?”

“I don’t know what you care to mean, Counsellor.” Urbanek assumed an innocent expression.

“Do you think I can’t guess what she’s got hidden in her apron?” Mock smiled wryly. “Do you think I don’t realize that you’re selling your
own smokes on the side, then giving the girl her cut? How much is it? Enough for her to buy some cocoa?”

Silence descended. “God is clearly not siding with me today,” thought Urbanek. “I have offended Him. It’s because I didn’t manage to thank Him today for my position.” He remembered where he used to work: the cluttered counting-room at the printers, Böhn & Taussig, his accountant colleagues in aprons gnawed by moths, reading Marx’s
Das Kapital
without fully understanding it. Later they would trumpet defiant slogans in smoky halls filled with the furious unemployed, whose consumptive children had nothing but the carpet horse in the yard to play with; alcoholics with untreated syphilis; and pick-pockets who used their stolen coins to buy favours from tubercular ladies of the night, whose sanitary arrangements consisted of nothing more than a brass basin and a chipped chamber pot. This whole crowd, absorbing the dark tautologies of demagogues like a sponge, was infiltrated by police agents on the lookout for weaknesses in potential collaborators. It was at one such meeting that Karl Urbanek had attracted the attention of an agent. Seduced in equal measure by money, promises and religious arguments, he quickly began to enrich his exacting accountant’s mind with problems of fundaments, superstructure, production means and work, in the process of humanizing the ape. After several months of intensive study, Urbanek had found himself standing on an empty beer crate in the deserted warehouse of a river shipyard at An der Viehweide. His strong voice gushed with such a vehement hatred of capitalists and the bourgeoisie that his comrades listened to him ecstatically, and police agents began to wonder if his activism would not bring results contrary to those intended. Some weeks later, the agent who had recruited Urbanek congratulated himself on making the right decision. The new star of the communist firmament had won such favour with his comrades that after party meetings, in the back rooms of drinking dens, they revealed to him their clandestine intentions.
In 1925, Urbanek thwarted an attempt on the life of Captain Buth, chief of the municipal headquarters of the Stahlhelm, by betraying those who had taken part, and instigated a wave of arrests of members of the KPD,
†
Breslau branch, for belonging to a terrorist organization. Detonators, fuses, hand grenades and explosive materials with the mysterious names ammonit 5, romperit C and chloratit 3, came into the hands of the police. Thanks to the police, Urbanek was given the position of door attendant at Café-Variété as a reward for his work, and soon forgot about the counting-room that reeked of rat poison. Now, influenced by Mock’s words, he caught a whiff of that stench again. For a moment he wondered whether he would have agreed to collaborate with the Criminal Counsellor had the latter not discovered his little secret with the cigarette girl. He glanced at Mock’s stubborn, somewhat amused face and answered in the affirmative:

“What does he look like?” he asked.

“Medium height, red-haired, stocky.” Mock concentrated, trying to bring Smolorz’s distinguishing features to mind. “Wearing an old, crumpled hat. He would have been drunk, or at least a little inebriated.”

“Yes, I saw a man like that today, at about six.” Urbanek experienced platonic anamnesis for the second time that day. “He was with Mitzi.”

“Which room does this Mitzi work in?” Mock pulled a crumpled cigarette from his pocket and tried to recreate its rightful form.

“She’s with a client now,” the attendant hesitated then added in a perfectly controlled, ingratiating tone, sweetening his response with a broad smile of large, uneven teeth: “My dear gentlemen, please enjoy our magnificent artistic programme. The Josephine Baker of Breslau will be performing in a moment. Topless. There’s certainly something to feast your eyes on. When Mitzi’s free, I’ll send the bellboy to fetch you. Please, take my company box. The waiter will see you to it … Perhaps you would
like to order some schnapps on the house? And Counsellor, please don’t tell anyone about the cigarettes. We want to make a bit of money … The girl’s saving up for a better future … She deserves a better future … Really …”

† Kommunistiche Partei Deutschlands — German Communist party.

“She’ll be lucky if she makes enough to pay the venereal specialist,” muttered Mock, and he pulled the curtain aside. Urbanek looked at him blankly and returned to his prayers.

Mock and his two companions were taken to the company box by an obliging maître d’, whose entire earnings must have gone on whisker-pomade. Without removing their hats or coats, the men began to study the clients at the variété. On stage danced two actresses with their dresses hitched high; first they embraced, then they bounded away from one another. Some of the clients were very animated and chimed in enthusiastically. One obese individual swayed from side to side, conducting with his huge cigar and singing with such passion that his golden watch chain almost snapped across his bloated belly. But he could not remember more than the first few words of the song: “
Wenn die beste Freundin mit ‘ner besten Freundin
…”
†

Waiters bustled about distributing rings of
weisswurst
and armfuls of bottles. The slicked maître d’ flapped his stiffly starched napkin and stood before Mock a bottle of Silesian schnapps, a plate of steaming potatoes and a dish of duck-breast slices swimming in cranberry sauce. He skilfully served the men a couple of slices each and left with dance-like steps. The actresses received ovations and the audience puffed cigar smoke while Mock took to eating his duck, washing it down, all the while, with ice-cold schnapps. Zupitza, the Counsellor’s heavily built companion, bravely kept him company, whereas Wirth, the short, foxy-faced man, did not touch a drop, being as he was a man of great imaginative capabilities: every time he smelled alcohol, there loomed before his eyes a certain taproom
in Copenhagen where he had drunk too much and, instead of fleeing, had responded unnecessarily to the provocations of a band of Italian sailors. It was only thanks to his friend, the mute Zupitza, that he had survived. Every time he smelled schnapps, he would remember dens in the port where he and Zupitza had picked up extortion money from smugglers, and brothels where they had been welcomed with open arms on account of their generosity. Now, at his port enterprise on the River Oder, which was merely a cover for his criminal undertakings, he did not allow any of his employees to drink. So Zupitza was eagerly making the most of the opportunity to knock back one glass after another.

All of a sudden the lights went out and the beating of tam-tams resounded. The beating grew louder as spotlights came on one by one and swept the ceiling, a night sky painted with silver stars after the design of Berlin’s Wintergarten. As if on command the spots swept across the stage. Their columns of light picked out palm trees and a dancer wearing nothing but a grass skirt, who skipped about frenetically. Her black-painted skin was soon covered in droplets of sweat. The jerky movements of her considerable breasts synchronized perfectly with the rhythm of her body, and became deeply embedded in the memories of Breslau’s philistines. None of these men paid any attention to the tacky, pseudo-exotic accessories; in his mind every one of them was pressing the dancer against the palm tree, grinding his hips and raping her. All this was accompanied by the screech of monkeys coming from enormous gramo-phone trumpets positioned at the front of the stage.

The bellboy’s whisper brought Mock back to reality. He waggled his finger and once more listened carefully. “Room 12”, he memorized, and gave the sign to Wirth and Zupitza. They abandoned the box, leaving the duck growing cold, the schnapps growing warm, and the staid fathers of families aflame. As they approached the attendant’s counter, Urbanek jumped out horrified and spread his arms in a gesture of apology.