The young man had partially satisfied his hunger with two sausages on rolls, bought at a stall near the gallery, but he was tired, lonely and bewildered. At that moment he would have been glad to go back to the Zoo, but he had lost his directions and did not know where it was. He left the gallery and moved on down the street.
The cinema beckoned to him with the open wings of its lobby and the gigantic displays on either side: figures of men and women, glossy leaves, planets floating in a violet-gray sky. Illuminated signs announced:
Experience new sensations!
Unprecedented excitement!
UNDER SEVEN MOONS Stella Pain - Willem DeGroot
“Indescribable!” - Tageblatt.
The price was two marks ten. The young man paid, took his ticket and went in. A few people were standing about in the anteroom, talking and smoking. There were exotic fruits and confections for sale at a long counter, and rows of automatic machines for drinks, candy, tissues. The young man gave his ticket to the turnstile machine at the door, got a stub back and found himself in a huge well of darkened seats, lit only by faint glimmers from the distant walls. Here and there around the vast bowl, clumps of people were sitting. Three-quarters of the seats were empty. There was very little noise, no one was talking or moving, evidently the show had not yet begun. The young man groped his way down the aisle, chose a seat and unfolded it. The instant he settled down and put his hands on the armrests, sound and motion exploded around him.
HE sprang up convulsively, into darkness and silence. The huge almost empty bowl of the theater was just as it had been before: the flashing phantom shapes he had seen were nowhere.
After a moment, cautiously, he touched one of the armrests again. Nothing happened. The other armrest. Still nothing. Gingerly and with trepidation, he unfolded the seat and lowered himself into it.
Again the sudden blast of light and sound. This time he glimpsed figures, heard words spoken before he leaped upright again.
All around him, the people were sitting in eerie, intent silence. Then this must be how one saw a movie - not projected on a wall, as he had always imagined, but somehow mysteriously existing when one sat in the chair. Shaking with nervousness, but determined not to be a coward, he sat down one more and gripped the armrests hard.
Light and sensation surrounded him. He was seeing the upper portions of two gigantic humans, a female and a male, against a violet sky in which two moons shone dimly. Simultaneously there was a grinding, insistent roar of wind and the man’s stentorian voice bellowed out, “Gerda, you are mine!” His face stared into hers, his strong brown hands gripped her bare arms while she replied, “I know it, Friedrich.” The words crashed into the young man’s eardrums like bombs. The two immense bodies were not far away, at the end of the theater, but loomed before him almost close enough to touch. They glowed with color, not a natural color but something altogether different and arresting, luminous pastel tones overlying shadows of glowing darkness, with a rather disturbing suggestion of dead black in all the outlines, almost like a colored engraving. They had depth but not reality, and yet they were incredibly more than mere pictures. The young man realized, with a shock of surprise, that he could smell the cold salt air, and that without knowing in the least how, he was aware of the very texture of the giant woman’s skin - smooth and waxy, like a soft artificial fruit - and of the cat-smelling tawny softness of her long blonde . hair whipping in the wind, and the hard-edged glossy stiffness of the green leaves in the near background.
“Gerda!” roared the man.
“Friedrich!” she trumpeted sadly
Then without moving a muscle the two of them vertiginously receded, as if an invisible car were drawing them rapidly away, and as they dwindled, standing and staring at one another, greenleaved shrubs gathered in to fill the space, and the sky somehow grew bigger - there were three moons drifting with a perceptible motion through the violet sky - and at that moment with a thunderous rushing sound, the rain began. Dry as he sat there, the young man could feel the streaming wetness pelting the leaves; it was lukewarm. Music skirled up in wild dissonances, lightning cracked the sky apart and thunder boomed.
It was too much.
The young man stood up, trembling all over. Sight, touch and sound vanished instantly. He was alone in the vast theater with the silent, motionless people who sat in darkness.
He moved shakily to the aisle and went out, grateful for the quiet and the sense of being alone in his skin again. He was sorry to have given up so quickly, but consoled himself with the thought that it was his first time. Later, perhaps, he would grow used to it.
AT A kiosk in the middle of the street, newspapers and magazines were on sale in metal dispensers. Beside this stood a dirty small boy and an old gray woman, with a portable teleset tuned to a popular singer. The little boy was singing harmony with him, badly, in a strained soprano. There were coins scattered on the little folding table in front of the teleset. Further along, two drunken and disheveled men were scuffing ineffectually, grabbing at each other’s surcoats for balance. A brightly painted woman giggled, but most people paid no attention. Three dark young men walked by abreast, scowling, with identical dark long surcoats and oiled forelocks. Tall cold-light signs over the buildings blinked, MOBIL. TELEFUNKEN, KRUPP-FARBEN. The young man moved through the crowd, listening to the voices and the snatches of music from open doorways, looking at faces, pausing to stare at the glittering merchandise in shop windows.
When he had been walking in the same direction for some time, he came upon a store which seemed to fill an entire square of its own, with many busy entrances and rows of brilliantly lighted display windows. The name, in tall cold-light letters over each entrance, was ELEKTRA. For want of any other direction, the young man drifted in with the crowd.
Inside, the store appeared to be one gigantic room, high-ceilinged, echoing, glittering everywhere with reflected lights. Banks of brightly illuminated display cases were ranged in parallel lines, leaving aisles between. In open spaces were statues, great flowering plants, constructions of golden and white metal. The murmuring of the crowd washed back from the distant ceiling: up there, the young man noticed, were fiery trails of light, red, green, blue, amber, that pulsed and seemed to travel along the ceiling like the exhausts of rockets. The air was heavy with women’s mingled scents and with other, unidentifiable odors; there was quiet music in the background, and a faint, multiple clicking or clattering sound.
The young man went in tentatively, listening and watching. A woman and an older man were standing by the entrance to one of the aisles, arguing vehemently in low, crisp voices; the young man caught the words, Twenty millions at the minimum. A child in a red coat was crying, being dragged along by an angry woman. A man in dark-blue uniform went hurrying by, the trousers snapping about his ankles.
There were signs in colored lights on the ceiling; one red one said “MEN’s WEAR” and a red trail went pulsing off from it; another, blue, said “WATCHES AND JEWELRY”; another, green, “CAMERAS.”
The young man followed the green trail, fascinated. Lines of people, most of them women, were moving slowly along the row of showcases. Here and there, the young man saw someone put money into one of the cases, open the glass front and take out a blouse or an undergarment, a pair of stockings, a scarf.