The Hustler: The Story of a Nameless Love From Friedrichstrasse (6 page)

Gunther, still awake and entirely spellbound by everything he had heard and experienced, listened with both ears as if to a revelation and drank it in. His respect for his new friend knew no more bounds. Atze knew everything. There was nothing that Atze did not know.

Atze, however, as much as he enjoyed hearing himself talk, finally grew tired of his own wisdom, and since at the bottom of his wicked soul he “loved ‘em young,” he threw himself on top of him.

PART TWO 

1

There now followed a splendid time for the young Gunther. At least it seemed so to him.

They were together the whole day and Atze took care of everything. First, another suit. In Atze’s clothes closet were remarkably many things which did not fit him. Most were for younger boys. He had either grown out of them, or they had belonged to other boys. Gunther asked him about it.

“That’s not really your suit, is it?”

But he received only a short answer.

“Someone must have left it.”

There were shoes, too, low ones with wide heels, somewhat too large, but still quite wearable. Underwear, too. And a fine cravat. Atze was big on neckties.

Thus the boy was newly dressed, from head to foot. Only his straw hat was still suitable, despite the strain it had suffered.

Above all, Atze saw to his identification papers.

“What,” he said, “ya don’t have any papers! Man, how can ya hit the pavement then? When they could arrest ya at any minute!”

While Little Mama made coffee, he disappeared and stayed away half the morning. But when he returned he actually had procured identification papers. False ones, of course, but they suited him well.

“So that you know now: your name is Michael Koslowsky, you’re fifteen and a half and from Kattowitz. Understood?”

“Kattowitz? Where’s that?”

Atze hesitated.

“By the Polacks back there,” he then said with a wide wave of his hand.

He had him repeat everything before carefully tucking the papers into his inside breast pocket. He gave no hint of where the papers came from.

The two knocked about during the day, but not in the hustler areas of Unter den Linden or the “Tauenziehn.” For these areas Atze had only scorn, and he spoke with downright rage of the Brandenburg Gate.

“The only ones who go there are those who don’t have anything more to eat and don’t have any place left to stay—and they always get arrested there.”

Instead, they went into the lounges, especially when evening fell, and then in those of the west. There, everything was outwardly quite respectable. At mostly small tables sat more or less well-dressed, often over-elegant young men, many with affected manners and even wearing makeup, but others still quite vigorous and manly, waiting until customers came and sat at their tables, or called them to theirs, while soft music accompanied the mostly soft-spoken conversations. No one was allowed in without a necktie. Nor, or course, was any female admitted.

Only toward evening, after nine, did it become really full. Many couples showed up, always an older man and a younger. They sat together and no one approached them.

Then the dancing began, and people swayed to the sound of the violin.

Atze knew everything and everyone.

He went from table to table, greeting and being greeted, and was invited to join. Gunther sat alone then.

But not for long.

On the very first evening, in the second lounge, at a still early hour, he made the acquaintance of a “refined gentleman,” who sat with him, treated him, and asked few questions, but also did not leave his side until he finally took him home with him. To a house like Gunther had never seen before. In the morning, he received twenty marks, took a taxi, and rode back to Atze, who on the evening before, when they separated, had left without even saying goodbye.

As a matter of course he handed over his money, which Atze calmly pocketed as an installment.

And so it went, day by day. Sometimes, when no suitor who found favor in their eyes approached, they came home together to Little Mama, who was always awake. But most of the time Gunther was taken away—to a hotel, to a strange house, to a quiet corner of another lounge. They never returned without any money, even if it was only what Atze called “table money,” money a gentleman shoved into his pocket, while paying the bill for their carousing, for having had his company. There was enough to eat and drink every evening. More than enough. Especially to drink. (On the third evening the “Chick”—that became and remained his name—who was not yet used to all this drinking and could not tolerate it, became so drunk that he had to be driven home.)

Atze paid careful attention to the men with whom his protege went. If he approved the acquaintance, he left him alone with the man and disappeared. If he was opposed, he did not budge from the table or his side, finding evasions and excuses. Once it would have come to an argument, since the john absolutely did not want to let the boy go, if an argument were at all possible with Atze.

Alone and questioned why he had not let him go with the man, he said:

“He’s got lice!”

When Gunther stared as if he had gone crazy, he added:

“Of course he hasn’t got them. But he spanks. Do ya want to get spanked?”

No, Gunther certainly did not want that. Gunther learned about those who spanked, just as he learned, little by little, everything else that he wanted to know (as far as Atze thought it good).

Thus he quickly became used to his new, loud, and colorful life, as well as to his nickname. He soon lost all bashfulness and—above all—every fear. He learned to answer when he was questioned; never to tell the truth (which was neither expected nor wanted); and to look the gentlemen over, to see if they had “dough” and how much.

He was flattered to be the sought-after “new face.”

Disgust? No, he felt no disgust really, but also no pleasure—he simply went along. In the end, the main thing in all this was only the money.

Atze saw to it that he did not receive too little, nor throw himself away, nor “fall into bad hands.” Usually, before the boy went out with a new gentleman, Atze and the man would stop together a moment, whispering and squinting over at him. Sometimes it seemed to him that something was slipped to Atze before he returned to him, let him go, or suddenly left himself. But he might also have been mistaken, since Atze never mentioned anything about it.

Yes, those were splendid days, those early ones. Everything lay behind him—his village and his escape; behind him, those last days of need, of loneliness, and of hunger—forgotten like the cardboard box of belongings in the hotel up by the Stettin Train Station, where he no longer went. He had Atze now. Atze was his sworn friend, and he was happy each time he could show him his gratitude by handing over what he “earned.”

Little Mama, too, seemed satisfied.

Whenever the two boys wanted to eat at home, there was always something good there. However late they returned, Little Mama was always standing above, in her snow-white nightgown, lamp in hand. She let herself be grasped around the waist, while she boxed their ears painlessly. She gossiped and laughed with them, often until morning.

Atze himself was priceless.

His good humor and even temper in all situations were astonishing.

For him, life had no problems. His motto was: Take what you can, no matter where it comes from!

However, as open as he otherwise was, he stubbornly kept silent about this “where.”

Once, there appeared at the table of the cafe (not a “queer” one) where they often sat in the afternoons—drinking and playing dice to kill the long afternoon hours—a still quite young girl who sat down with them. “My fiancee,” was Atze’s only explanation and he soon left with her, after quickly arranging an appointment with Gunther, who stayed behind. Another time he left the lounge late in the evening—which almost never happened—with a gentleman whom he obviously must have known very well, and he only laughed strangely when Gunther asked him the next day who that had been (he had looked like a real criminal). A third time he surprised him in Little Mama’s lap, in a not exactly motherly embrace. They all three laughed over it. They were generally always laughing over everything. It was a merry time.

It lasted exactly two and a half weeks, during which money was always available in abundance.

*

Then, one day, Atze suddenly vanished.

This was one of his traits—suddenly to stay away for half or even a whole day, without saying where he was going. Then he would return as if nothing had happened, without a word of explanation or excuse.

He did not like to be questioned. Gunther had learned that and had adjusted accordingly.

But this time he stayed away—stayed away and did not return. When Gunther, who was beginning to be frightfully bored, pressured Little Mama, she only said:

“What can you do! That’s just the way he is. But I know that rascal. He’ll come back!”

And when he gave her an uneasy look:

“You can still come here, Chick, if you’ve got money, and sleep in his bed. I get four marks a night.”

(Until then they had always slept together in Atze’s bed, or Gunther had slept on the old sofa in the corner.)

Now, Gunther had no money, since he always handed over everything, but he now knew where to get it. The couple of days until Atze returned would go by all right without him.

Early in the afternoon, when the lounge where they had gone so many times opened, he went there, but was stopped by the proprietor.

“Not under eighteen! Strict police regulation!”

“But I’ve been here already so often—” he stammered.

“Yes, but not alone. Where is your friend?”

Well, he was not here, so he just went to another lounge. There he was allowed to sit, but he was not served. Besides him, another boy, even younger, was sitting there. And before the lounge filled up, the waiter drove them out.

What was he to do now?

He was not supposed to be a streetwalker. But after all what else remained for him?

He went to the “Tauenziehn.”

It was toward evening, and a huge mass of people pressed up and down one side of the street. An elegant but very mixed public—Berlin West. Many young girls, many young gentlemen. He had not gone twenty steps before he was signaled—into the side street.

Then he had five marks, though that too had been forbidden him: “Never under ten!”

He slept again in their bed and at noon, after enough sleep, he also got coffee from Little Mama.

But the next days were bad.

He no longer dared venture into the lounges. Of the gentlemen he had met there, he knew none more closely. He had hardly heard their names, had forgotten their houses.

But even if by chance one gentleman had remained in his memory, he would never have ventured there. Even if he had by chance met one of the gentlemen, the man would hardly have picked him up again. Never had he been picked up a second time. He was for them too indifferent to the one thing they wanted. Already when they saw him again in the lounges, they hardly knew him, but instead went with others.

What was left for him, as long as Atze was away, but to walk the streets—Tauentzienstrasse or even the Passage?

This he did but, to his own astonishment, without particular success.

There in the west, nothing happened the whole evening. At the Passage, which he entered again for the first time and walked through without any special excitement but with a certain feeling of discomfort, he was driven out by the hateful looks of the young guys loitering about, but even more by the stern looks of several men who were quite certainly criminal officers.

To be sure, he had been spoken to by a repulsive old guy who had muttered something about three marks. He would have liked to spit in his face.

With difficulty, he caught a traveler a couple of hours later at the Friedrichstrasse Train Station, and in the man’s hotel nearby he received six marks (which, moreover, he still had to remind him of).

It was now too late and he was too tired to go to Little Mama’s. Besides, he could not give her four of the six marks! What would remain then to eat with tomorrow?

The hotel in which he had slept the first nights occurred to him. A room for the night there had cost one mark fifty. It was late when he found it. The old waiter in his eternal, stained tailcoat was still there. He recognized the boy again when he asked for his things.

“What? Those old rags?” A peddler had taken them and had not given him as much for them as the boy still owed him. Could he pay today? Yes? Well then, just hand it over right now!

He paid and was in his old, small room. But he did not find again the peaceful sleep of the first nights. If only Atze were here was his recurring thought. Things just did not get along without him.

*

The next days were no better. Worse, rather.

He walked his feet sore. First, a long hour in the Passage until that became uncomfortable. Then, in Friedrichstrasse, all the way down to the Halle Gate.

Still, he made enough that he did not have to go hungry, could sit half the day in a movie house and pay for his hotel in the evening.

But he did not like his life now at all.

A constant rage boiled in him. Also against Atze. He, who in these weeks had not known money worries, who had sat in club chairs, at finely covered tables, with coffee and liqueurs before him, eating fancy cakes with whipped cream, waiting until they came to
him,
who had pocketed mostly twenty marks, once even fifty, another time thirty—he now walked the streets until he almost dropped, to go finally with the first comer! No, that did not suit him. But what was he to do?