The New Confessions (63 page)

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? Hunger 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.

Berlin in those days was one huge noticeboard. On every available surface were nailed, pinned or stuck printed notices and handbills. Most sought news of people who had at one time occupied the now-ruined houses, but there were also want ads and for-sale signs. Someone in our street, for example, wanted to buy a pair of skis. I wrote out my own notice in red ink asking for information about the whereabouts of Karl-Heinz Kornfeld, former occupant of 129B, and, armed with hammer and nails, set off.

The block was almost completely destroyed and the nearby Spree smelled particularly purulent. I hammered the notice on the doorjamb
and stood back. What could make Karl-Heinz want to return to this ruin? Sentiment? Very unlikely.… Spring was well advanced and the piles of masonry were green with weeds. I felt a sudden helplessness. Henni had told me that twenty-five thousand refugees arrived in Berlin each day at the moment. How was I going to find Karl-Heinz among all these people? I realized I should have gone at once to the missing persons agencies that Frau Hanf had told me about. I was irritated by my procrastination. My Berlin aimlessness had cost me several weeks. I looked at my notice stuck to the door. The street had several of these requests for information. Did anybody ever read these things, or was it just a typical Berliner illusion of getting something done? I went back to PSR-4 without much confidence.

However, I resolved to make one final effort. With Frau Hanf’s help I discovered the names and addresses of two agencies and approached them with Karl-Heinz’s details. They were not sanguine. They hinted that he might not even be in Berlin anymore. Four million German refugees, they told me, had fled westwards or had been expelled from Russian-occupied countries since the war had ended. Perhaps Herr Kornfeld had gone with them? They would see what they could do.

About a week after these visits I went to see
Meine Frau die Hexe
at the cinema. I’m not sure what stimulated my memory—I think one of the extras reminded me of his secretary—but I thought suddenly of Eugen P. Eugen. Was he still alive? He might be worth trying. I thought of our earlier encounters. The man was tenacious, there was no denying that, and unscrupulous. Conceivably, he might be more efficient than the harassed agencies.

The building that had contained Eugen’s offices had been completely destroyed, along with the rest of Fehmarnstrasse. Indeed the street had not yet been cleared; only a meandering path ran through the rubble hills. I knew I was in the right place because I could see the burned and shattered blocks of the infectious-diseases hospital a few hundred yards away. Then as I walked back to Putlitzstrasse Station I had an idea. Ten minutes’ further searching uncovered the small café where Eugen used to lunch. What had he been eating that day when he told me Sonia had beaten him up? Cucumbers? Cabbage? Sausage?… Yes, it was cabbage—I remembered the smell.

The cellar café still existed and was open. Above it teetered the facade of a house, shored up with wooden buttresses. Somehow I knew Eugen would be there.

Of course, he wasn’t. Life is rarely that accommodating, but the proprietor said there was a good chance he would be in that evening.

When I returned at seven, half a dozen people sat in silence staring at watery beers in front of them and trying not to look at a small man eating avidly and noisily in a corner. I knew it was Eugen, though I would scarcely have recognized him. He was gaunt and his blond hair was gone. He wore a collarless gray-flannel shirt and a green uniform jacket. On his bald pate were three large scabs. I sat down opposite him.

“Herr Eugen?”

He looked up.

“My name is Todd. You did a job for me, a long time ago, 1928.…”

He stared at me and frowned.

“My God,” he said. “My God, yes. And then we met again in Switzerland. With Miss Bogan.”

We shook hands.

“How is Miss Bogan?”

“She’s fine.”

“Good, good. I am a great admirer.”

Neither of us seemed to want to reminisce about our last encounter. I told him what I required of him. He screwed up his face.

“Difficult. Almost impossible.” He paused. “Have you got a cigarette? You’re sure he’s in Berlin?”

We discussed the problems, then his fee. We settled on five hundred cigarettes. Somehow the transaction seemed to rejuvenate him. I could see the tiny dapper blond man in him again, like his soul.

“Can I offer you some food? They say these are rabbit rissoles. It may not be rabbit, but there is certainly a minimum of sawdust.”

I declined politely. We were awkward with each other. Two decades intervened.

“It’s strange to meet again,” he said. “I can’t tell you how distressed I was—the last time. I felt most embarrassed.” He laughed. “Which is most unusual in my trade. Not like me at all.”

He then embarked upon a long angry complaint about a burned-out tank that still hadn’t been removed from the end of the street where he lived. I commiserated with him.

“What do you think of our wonderful city?” he said with sudden bitterness.

“It’s terrible,” I said. “I couldn’t believe it, at first.”

“Can you imagine London, Paris, so totally destroyed?”

I thought about it. Buckingham Palace razed, Nelson’s Column toppled, Sacré-Coeur a heap of white rubble, all the bridges gone across the Thames and the Seine, the Grand Palais open to the sky …

“It’s hard,” I admitted. I was about to remind him who had started the destruction business off, but I changed the subject. I asked him where he would start looking for Karl-Heinz.

“Berlin is full of gangs,” he said, “deserters, displaced persons, refugees. They live in holes in the ground. I’ll make some inquiries with the police.” He smiled proudly. “I still have my contacts there.”