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.
April 10, 1946. Managed to get a car and driver to myself and went to a beach on the Havel for a picnic with Henni. We motored through the Grunewald, which is more or less untouched. A bright day with watery sun. Yachts and motorboats on the lake. Henni went swimming; I declined. She wore a dark-blue two-piece swimsuit and a red-and-white rubber bathing cap. She splashed energetically in the water then rushed out and flung herself on the sand to sunbathe. Beneath the wool of her costume I could see her nipples were hard and erect and the fair hair in her armpits was dark and sleek from the water.
I felt unaccountably depressed. If it hadn’t been for the khaki Chevrolets and the sprinkling of uniforms on the beach, we might have been back in the 1930s. What was I doing here prostituting this bright intriguing girl? I felt heavy with guilt. To expiate it I spent an hour telling her about myself as if sheer weight of information could transform me from a client to a person in her eyes. I told her about Karl-Heinz and my search for him, my dream of finishing The Confessions. She suggested matter-of-factly that I leave a poster outside Karl-Heinz’s former apartment saying I was looking for him. Everyone in Berlin used this method to trace missing friends and relatives. (Why hadn’t I thought of this?)
As we drove back into the city I sensed my guilt and awkwardness receding. I went back to her room for sex. The ruined city, I can see, is the true context of our relationship. But why do I want her to be at least fond of me?
I took the U-bahn back to FSR-4. It started to rain as I walked the few blocks to the house and I smelled the corpses. Most of the dead beneath the rubble have decomposed completely by now, but a shower of rain seems to call forth a final ghostly reek of putrefaction.
Back at Frau H.’s, a man I knew vaguely from Reuters — just arrived — asked me if I know a Monroe Smee. I had forgotten all about Smee. I said I knew him in Hollywood before the war. Why? “I was in L.A.,” this man said, “and I met him. He was very curious to hear what had become of you.”
Tomorrow I go to Stralauer Allee. Frau H. serves up an interesting dinner. Two small carp and a sauce made from black bread, beer, onions, carrots and gingerbread seasoning.
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.