The Hothouse (18 page)

Only one of the girls was wearing the red-and-blue uniform and the bonnet of the soldiers of the Lord, and with the other, you couldn't tell if she belonged to the Salvation Army at all, or if she was a novice who didn't yet have a uniform, or if she had just come along by chance, freely from friendship, or against her will, forced by circumstances, under protest, or just out of mere curiosity. She was perhaps sixteen. She was wearing a crumpled dress made of a cheap synthetic, her young bosom pushed out the sleek fabric, and Keetenheuve was struck by the expression of astonishment in her face, a look of constant surprise, mixed with disappointment, regret, and rage. The girl wasn't strictly speaking beautiful, and she was small as well, but her freshness and her truculence made her pretty. She was like a young colt that had been yoked up, and was frightened and bucky.

Hesitantly, holding copies of the
War Cry
in her hand, she followed in the wake of the uniformed girl, who might be twenty-five, a pale and suffering face in whose taut pallid expanse was an almost lipless mouth. Her hair, what Keetenheuve could see of it under the bonnet, was cut short, and if she took off the unflattering headgear, she would look like a boy. Keetenheuve felt himself drawn to the pair.
Sensitive and open-minded Keetenheuve.
The uniformed girl held the collection tin out to the regulars' table, and the fat business people pulled faces and pushed five-pfennig pieces into the rusty slit. Their fat wives looked stupidly and arrogantly off into the middle distance; they pretended not to be aware of the Salvation Army girl and the collection tin. The girl took her can back, and her face expressed apathy and contempt. The business people didn't look up at her face. It never occurred to them that they might be despised; and the Salvation Army creature didn't have to trouble to hide her contempt. Then the guitar adorned with pious slogans jangled against Keetenheuve's table, and the girl, contempt on her face, held out the can to him—a grim and arrogant angel of salvation. Keetenheuve wanted to talk to her, but shyness prevented him, and he spoke to her only in his thoughts. He said: Why don't you sing! Sing your hymn! And the girl replied in Keetenheuve's imagination: This isn't the place! And Keetenheuve in his imagination replied: Every place is the right place to sing the Lord's praises. And he thought: You're a little dyke, I've seen your like before, and you're terrified lest something you've stolen might be taken away from you. He put five marks in the collecting can, and he felt ashamed because he was putting five marks in the slit. It was too much and too little. The little sixteen-year-old in mufti watched Keetenheuve and watched him in astonishment. And then she pushed out the chapped lower lip of her curved and sensual mouth, and her face showed honest rage and indignation. Keetenheuve laughed, and the girl felt embarrassed and she blushed. Keetenheuve would have liked to ask the girls to sit down with him. He knew the other table would make a stir if he did; but he didn't care, yes, he would have welcomed it. But he was shy of the girls, and by the time he had got up his courage to ask them, the uniformed one was standing by the door, shouting to the little one, who hadn't taken her eyes off Keetenheuve, to get a move on. The girl trembled like a horse that hears the hated cry of the coachman and feels the tug on the reins; she turned away from Keetenheuve and cried back: "I'm coming, Gerda."

The girls left. The bell over the door rang. The door fell shut. The instant the door shut, Keetenheuve was back in London again. On the wall of an underground station, he saw a great map of the great city of London, with the sprawl of its suburbs into the countryside, and on the map there was a speck of fly dirt in London's docklands. That was where he was, Keetenheuve, at a tube station in the docks. The train that had ejected him had gone on its way; there was a roar and an icy blast in the tunnel. Keetenheuve stood on the platform and froze. It was Sunday afternoon. It was a Sunday afternoon in November. Keetenheuve was poor and alone and a stranger. Up on the street it was raining. It was a slant, lashing rain, coming out of low clouds, out of broody masses of fog that sat like heavy woolly hats on the roofs of the scabby, dirty houses and the tarred warehouses, sucking up the slothful, acrid smoke from the ancient crusty chimneys. The smoke smelled of bogland, it smelled of peat fires in wet bog-land. It was a familiar smell, it was the smell of Macbeth's witches, and in the air was their cry, fair is foul, and foul is fair! The witches had traveled into the city on the backs of the fogs, they squatted down on roofs and gutters, they had a rendezvous with the sea wind, they were touring London, they pissed in the ancient precincts, and then they howled lecherously as the storm buffeted them, as it hurled them onto the bed of the clouds, shook them, and clasped them wildly and lustfully. There was whistling and sighing in every quarter. The beams of the warehouses creaked round about, and the wind-skewed roofs groaned. Keetenheuve stood in the street. He heard the witches cackle. The pubs were shut. Men stood around idly. They listened to the witches. The warm pubs were shut. Women stood shivering in alleyways. They listened to the witches' racket. The gin was behind lock and key in the pubs. The randy witches laughed and howled and pissed and copulated. The sky was full of them. And then, out of the fog and the wet, out of the peat smoke, and the gale and the witches' sabbath, came music, came the Salvation Army people with their banners, with their
War Cry
; with fifes and drums, with peaked caps and bonnets, with speeches and hymns, trying to banish the demons and to deny the insignificance of men. The Salvation Army ranks formed into a spiral snail, formed a ring, and there they stood and shouted, and tootled and drummed their
Praise the Lord
, and the witches went on laughing, they split their cloudy sides, they pissed, and they lay down on their backs before the wind. The yellow gray black skies over the dirty square in London's docklands looked like the swollen lust-chafing thighs and bellies of pregnant witches. The cosy little pubs were shut, and the gloomy homely dives. And even if the pubs had been open, who would have had a shilling to spend on the black, frothy, gluey beer? And so of a Sunday, the men and women and the poor and also
Keetenheuve poor immigrant
had nothing better to do than form up around the Salvation Army people, and they listened to their music, and they listened in silence to their singing, but they didn't listen to the speeches, they heard the witches, they felt bony fingers reaching for them, they felt the chill and the damp. And then they went away, a hunched, freezing, sorry-looking procession, their arms folded, their hands in their pockets. Men and women,
Keetenheuve immigrant
SA
marching along
, behind the Salvation Army flag, to the beat of the Salvation Army drum, and the witches laughed and ranted and the wind rammed them hard, repeatedly, lovely sea wind from the Arctic wastes, won't you warm up, won't you get a little excited, we are the witches from the heath, we've come to be at the ball in good old London town . . . They came to a shelter and there they were made to wait, because the Salvation Army also wanted to remind them what poor people they were, and poor people had to wait. And why shouldn't they wait? There was nothing waiting for them. The shelter was warm. Gas fires were burning. They hummed, their flames glowed yellow and red and blue like flickering will-o'-the-wisps and there was a sweetish smell in the room, like a dull opiate. They sat down on wooden benches without arms or backs, because for the poor such benches are good enough. The poor are not allowed to be tired. The rich are permitted to lean. Here there were only the poor. They propped their elbows on their thighs and their chins on their hands, and they leaned forward, because they were exhausted from standing, from waiting, from feeling lost. The band played "O Come, All Ye Faithful," and a man they called the Colonel, and who looked like a colonel from the "
Daily Sketch
"
Colonel Keetenheuve at a game of cricket at Banquo Castle
, held the sermon. The Colonel had a wife (who didn't look anywhere near as posh as he did, with his picture in the
"Sketch"
she looked just about fit to be his washerwoman, and scrub his underpants), and after the Colonel had spoken (What had he said? Keetenheuve had no idea, no one had any idea), the Colonel's wife called upon the people in the hall to proclaim how bad they all were. Now, there is a confessional side to many people, and also an inclination to masochism, and so a few stepped forward and owned up to thinking wicked thoughts they had never thought, all the while they anxiously tried not to tell about the serpents they carried in their bosom, the venomous creatures. Their evil deeds remained unconfessed. Perhaps it was advisable not to mention them here. There might be plainclothesmen in the hall. And what was an evil deed if you had to confess it here in public, and before God? To torture a dog is a wicked deed. To beat a child is a wicked deed. But was it wicked to want to rob a bank? Or was it wicked to plan to murder a powerful wicked and universally respected man? Who could tell? You needed a very alert conscience to discriminate. Did the Colonel of the Salvation Army have such a conscience? He didn't look the sort. His clipped mustache looked martial, more Army than Salvation. And if the Colonel had happened to have such a sensitive conscience, what good would it do him, because a sharp, fine, and well-developed conscience would be precisely the one that could never decide whether a bank robbery was an ethical or an unethical undertaking. Confession was followed by tea. It was ladled out of a large steaming cauldron into aluminum mugs. It was black and very sweet. You burnt your lips on the hot rim of the aluminum, but the tea felt good sliding across your tongue, and trickling warmly into your belly. The gas flames buzzed, and their soft and lethal fumes mingled with the sweet smell of the tea and the harsh whiff of unwashed bodies, the pong of rain-soaked steaming clothes, to make another kind of fog that reddened before Keetenheuve's eyes and made him giddy. All longed to be outside, they longed for the tempest, they longed for the witches—but the tempting pubs weren't yet open. In Bonn, they wanted to close as well. The regulars got up to go from their tables. The business people put on fake smiles, and reached out their plump hands, they squeezed fat gold-ringed fingers, each knew what the other was worth, they knew one another's bank balances. Then they went to turn out the lights in their shop windows. They took their clothes off. They emptied their bladders. They crept into bed, the fat businessman, the fat businessman's wife, the son will go to college, the daughter will make a good marriage, the woman yawns, the man farts. Good night! Good night! Who's freezing out in the open?

Keetenheuve saw the lights going out in the windows. Where would he go? He walked aimlessly. And in front of the department store, he ran into the Salvation Army girls, and this time he greeted them like old friends. Gerda gnawed her thin bloodless lips. She was livid. How she hated men, the unmerited gift of the penis had turned their heads. Gerda would have run away, but she doubted whether Lena, the little sixteen-year-old, would have followed her, and so she had to stay and suffer the proximity of the predatory man.

Keetenheuve walked up and down with Lena in front of the shop windows, up and down in front of the darkened dolls' rooms, and while Gerda looked on with pinched mouth and burning eyes, he heard the refugee's story. Lena told it in a gentle dialect that softly swallowed some of the syllables. She came from Thuringia, and she was training to become a mechanic. She claimed she had certificates as a mechanic, and had already worked as a toolmaker. Her family had flown to Berlin with Lena, and from there they had been flown into the Federal Republic, and had lived in camps for a long time. Lena the little mechanic wanted to end her apprenticeship, and then she wanted to earn a lot of money as a toolmaker, and then she wanted to study and become an engineer, as she had been promised back East, but in the West everybody just laughed at her, and said a workbench wasn't a place for girls, and if you were poor you couldn't study. So some labor exchange put Lena in a kitchen, put her in the kitchen of a hotel, and Lena, the refugee from Thuringia, was set to rinse plates, the fatty leftovers, the fatty sauces, the fatty skins of sausages, the fatty trimmings of roast meat, and all that fat nauseated her, she vomited into the vat of pale blubbery fat. She ran out of the fatty kitchen. She ran onto the street. She stood by the side of the road, and waved to cars, because she wanted to reach her paradise, which was a shiny factory with oiled workbenches and a well-paid eight-hour day. Lena was picked up by traveling salesmen. Fatty hands groped her breasts. Fatty hands reached up her skirts, and yanked at her knicker elastic. Lena resisted. The traveling salesmen swore at her. Lena tried truck drivers. The truck drivers laughed at the little mechanic. They reached up her skirts. When she yelled, they shifted down into first, and threw her out of the cab. She reached the Ruhr. She saw the chimneys. The blast furnaces were burning. The steel rolling mills were working. The forges were forging. But outside the factory gates sat the fat porters, and the fat porters laughed when Lena asked if they had a job for a trainee mechanic with lots of experience. At least the fat porters were much too fat to reach up the trainee mechanics skirt. And so Lena had ended up in the capital. What do you do if you're homeless, where do you go if you're hungry? You go to the railway station, as if the trains would bring you a change of luck. Plenty of people approached Lena. One of them was Gerda. Lena followed Gerda, the Salvation Army girl, and she toured the town with the
War Cry
in her hand, and she was surprised by everything she saw. Keetenheuve thought: Gerda will touch your breasts as well. He thought: And so will I. He thought: It's your destiny. He thought: We're like that, it's our destiny. But he told her he would try to find a job for her at the end of her apprenticeship. Gerda’s mouth opened angrily. She said plenty of people had offered that to Lena, and their promises hadn't been worth much. Keetenheuve thought: You're right, I want to see Lena again, I want to touch her, she's tempting, and particularly tempting to me; that's what it is.
Vicious Keetenheuve.
But he still resolved to take up Lena's case with Korodin, who had contacts with factories, and maybe with Knurrewahn or one of his party colleagues who was up on the labor exchange situation. He wanted to help her. The mechanic should be given her lathe.
Virtuous Keetenheuve.
He asked Lena to meet him at the wine bar the next evening. Gerda took Lena's hand. The girls disappeared into the night. Keetenheuve remained behind in the night.