A German Requiem

'Favoritenstrasse,' I repeated, frowning. 'That's in the Russian sector, isn't it?'

'True,' said Rudi. 'But it doesn't make me a Communist.' He raised his little hat and smiled. 'Just prudent.'

Chapter 18

The sad aspect to her face, with its downcast eyes and the tilt of her thickening jaw, not to mention her cheap and secondhand-looking clothes, made me think that Veronika could not have made much out of being a prostitute. And certainly there was nothing about the cold, cavern-sized room she rented in the heart of the city's red-light district that indicated anything other than an eked-out, hand-to-mouth kind of existence.

She thanked me again for helping her and, having inquired solicitously after my bruises, proceeded to make a pot of tea while she explained that one day she was planning to become an artist. I looked through her drawings and watercolours without much enjoyment.

Profoundly depressed by my gloomy surroundings, I asked her how it was that she had ended up on the sledge. This was foolish, because it never does to challenge a whore about anything, least of all her own immorality, and my only excuse was that I felt genuinely sorry for her. Had she once had a husband who had seen her frenching an Ami in a ruined building for a couple of bars of chocolate?

'Who said I was on the sledge?' she responded tartly.

I shrugged. 'It's not coffee that keeps you up half the night.'

'Maybe so. All the same, you won't find me working in one of those places on the Gnrtel where the numbers just walk up the stairs. And you won't find me selling it on the street outside the American Information Office, or the Atlantis Hotel.

Chocolady I may be, but I'm no sparkler. I have to like the gentleman.'

'That won't stop you getting hurt. Like last night, for instance. Not to mention venereal disease.'

'Listen to yourself,' she said with amused contempt. 'You sound just like one of those bastards in the vice squad. They pick you up, have a doctor examine you for a dose and then give you a lecture on the perils of drip. You're beginning to sound like a bull.'

'Maybe the police are right. Ever think of that?'

'Well, they never found anything wrong with me. Nor will they.' She smiled a shrewd little smile. 'Like I said, I'm careful. I have to like the gentleman.

Which means I won't do Ivans or niggers.'

'Nobody ever heard of an Ami or a Tommy with syphilis, I suppose.'

'Look, you play the percentages.' She scowled. 'What the hell do you know about it anyway? Saving my ass doesn't give you the right to read me the Ten Commandments, Bernie.'

'You don't have to be a swimmer to throw someone a life-preserver. I've met enough snappers in my time to know that most of them started out as selective as you. Then someone comes along and beats the shit out of them, and the next time, with the landlord chasing for his rent, they can't afford to be quite as choosy.

You talk about percentages. Well, there's not much percentage in french for ten schillings when you're forty. You're a nice girl, Veronika. If there were a priest around he'd maybe think you were worth a short homily, but since there isn't you'll have to make do with me.'

She smiled sadly and stroked my hair. 'You're not so bad. Not that I have any idea why you think it necessary. I'm really quite all right. I've got money saved. Soon I'll have enough to get myself into an art-school somewhere.'

I thought it just as likely that she would win a contract to repaint the Sistine Chapel, but I felt my mouth force its way up to a politely optimistic sort of smile. 'Sure you will,' I said. 'Look, maybe I can help. Maybe we can help each other.' It was a hopelessly flat-footed way of manoeuvring the conversation back to the main purpose of my visit.

'Maybe,' she said, serving the tea. 'One more thing and then you can give me a blessing. The vice squad has got files on over 5,000 girls in Vienna. But that's not even half of it. These days everyone has to do things that were once unthinkable. You too, probably. There's not much percentage in going hungry. And even less in going back to Czechoslovakia.'

'You're Czech?'

She sipped some of her tea, then took a cigarette from the packet I had given her the night before and collected a light.

'According to my papers I was born in Austria. But the fact is that I'm Czech: a Sudeten German-Jew. I spent most of the war hiding out in lavatories and attics.

Then I was with the partisans for a while, and after that a DP camp for six months before I escaped across the Green Frontier.

'Have you heard of a place called Wiener Neustadt? No? Well, it's a town about fifty kilometres outside Vienna, in the Russian Zone, with a collection centre for Soviet repatriations. There are 60,000 of them waiting there at any one time. The Ivans screen them into three groups: enemies of the Soviet Union are sent to labour camps; those they can't actually prove are enemies are sent to work outside the camps so either way you end up as some kind of slave labour; unless, that is, you're the third group and you're sick or old or very young, in which case you're shot right away.'

She swallowed hard and took a long drag of her cigarette. 'Do you want to know something? I think I would sleep with the whole of the British Army if it meant that the Russians couldn't claim me. And that includes the ones with syphilis.'

She tried a smile. 'But as it happens I have a medical friend who got me a few bottles of penicillin. I dose myself with it now and again just to be on the safe side.'

'That sounds expensive.'

'Like I said, he's a friend. It costs me nothing that could be spent on the reconstruction.' She picked up the teapot. 'Would you like some more tea?'

I shook my head. I was anxious to be out of that room. 'Let's go somewhere,' I suggested.

'All right. It beats staying here. How's your head for heights? Because there's only one place to go on a Sunday in Vienna.'

The amusement park of the Prater, with its great wheel, merry-go-rounds and switchback-railway, was somehow incongruous in that part of Vienna which, as the last to fall to the Red Army, still showed the greatest effects of the war and the clearest evidence of our being in an otherwise less amusing sector. Broken tanks and guns still littered the nearby meadows, while on every one of the dilapidated walls of houses all along the Ausstellungsstrasse was the faded chalk outline of the Cyrillic word 'Atak'ivat' (searched), which really meant 'looted'.

From the top of the big wheel Veronika pointed out the piers of the Red Army Bridge, the star on the Soviet obelisk close by it and, beyond these, the Danube. Then, as the cabin carrying the two of us started its slow descent to the ground, she reached inside my coat and took hold of my balls, but snatched her hand away again when I sighed uncomfortably.

'It could be that you would have preferred the Prater before the Nazis,' she said peevishly, 'when all the dolly-boys came here to pick up some trade.'

'That's not it at all,' I laughed.

'Maybe that's what you meant when you said that I could help you.'

'No, I'm just the nervous type. Try it again sometime when we're not sixty metres up in the air.'

'Highly strung, eh? I thought you said you had a head for heights.'

'I lied. But you're right, I do need your help.'

'If vertigo's your problem, then getting horizontal is the only treatment I'm qualified to prescribe.'

'I'm looking for someone, Veronika: a girl who used to hang around the Casanova Club.'

'Why else do men go to the Casanova except to look for a girl?'

'This is one particular girl.'

'Maybe you hadn't noticed. None of the girls at the Casanova are that particular.' She threw me a narrow-eyed look, as if she suddenly distrusted me.