Child of the Light (34 page)

Her glance at his hand contained only contempt.

He let go of her, feeling ashamed. Why was it that the lower he seemed in her eyes, the more he wanted her? "The cabaret scene's under fire by the National Socialists. There could be trouble. Real trouble."

"You're telling me nothing new."

Her gaze strayed to the pineapple and, for an instant, she looked hungry. Women! Why couldn't she be like the rest, capable of love at any time as long as there was some price tag attached?

"Don't you know that we're part of the Jewish conspiracy to pervert the purity of Germany's young men?" she asked. "Their strength and virtue might become so drained they could no longer lift blackjacks and billy clubs against old women and rabbis. We must not corrupt you boys with elegance such as this." She gestured toward the dirt-encrusted pipes that crisscrossed the room. "We must save ourselves for true-hearts like Herr Himmler, and pray that Goebbels--the darling--will honor us with a visit."

"They wouldn't come here."

"Oh? Göring already has. Twice. Our manager led everyone in a standing ovation. I wonder if that fool even entertained the possibility that Henri was mocking him! I wouldn't be at all surprised if Goebbels showed up too. He does hate to be outdone. Wouldn't it be wonderful if he got a hard-on watching Rathenau's niece strut her little butt!"

"Stop it!" Furious beyond caution, he gripped her arms. "You have to leave this place. It's dangerous, immoral, not for you."

"Where else can a dancer with Jewish blood find work these days?" She jerked free of his hold. "As your mistress?
 
While you're earning your keep playing footsie with the Nazis, I could take in laundry, and while you're entertaining the officers' wives, I could earn pin money in one of those cabarets where they have sex on-stage. Would that turn you on?"

To taunt him, she took a wide-legged stance and placed her hands on her hips.
"Zieh dich aus, Petronella, zieh dich aus,"
she sang. "Get undressed, Petronella, get undressed." She had Trude Hersterberg, the most famous of the stars who satirized Berlin's penchant for nudity, down pat.

Erich's head pounded. It frightened him, this side of her.

"I could fornicate with one of your shepherds onstage. Now that would be unique! Pisces and a Jew going at it while you Nazis applaud and Goebbels stomps his clubfoot!"

Stunned by her outburst, he let go of her. Without another word she walked from the room, not with the saucy hip-swing some of the other performers affected, but with the grace he remembered from long ago. At the end of the hall, where a red curtain hung in an archway whose plaster was badly chipped, she turned and blew him a kiss. "Happy birthday, Erich."

He stood in the dimly lit passage, damning her again--and himself for allowing her to stir him so. Only he seemed to bring out this side of her. It was as if she were punishing him for not having been born a Jew or for not being foolish or philosophical enough to scrape off his foreskin and cover his head with it like a caul, seeing only what his culture wanted him to see...thinking its hooded thoughts.

He could feel the anger rising in him, as it always did after yet another defeat at Miriam's hands. The time had come to stop treating her like the princess she pretended to be. Why should he have to feel like this whenever she rejected him. He wasn't a leper, unclean and unworthy. His approach had been wrong, that was all. She was always pushing him toward the edge. Tormenting him. Pushing him to be more insistent. He could see her now, fighting him and fucking him with equal abandon.

Sometimes he stood outside the cigar shop, watching her with Solomon and envying their ease with one another as they arranged cases and swept the floor and waited on people. With Solomon, the Freunds, sometimes even with his own parents, she laughed freely, her spirit one of dogged optimism. She was also like that with those customers who could no longer afford real Havanas or Cubans and bought cigars made of cabbage leaves soaked in a solution of nicotine.

He had seen Solomon walk her to the trolley, watched them exchange smiles as she boarded. Their umbrella of shared warmth made him feel small and cold, an uncovered child curled up asleep on a drafty floor.

Not that he was jealous of Solomon, he assured himself--even given the probability that Solomon and Miriam were sharing a bed.

After all, he did not lack women. On the contrary; the wealthier and more powerful their husbands were, the more the wives seemed to want him. Because it pleased him to do so, he made them beg for what they wanted. Lately, however, the more they writhed and moaned, the more he loathed them, and himself. He slept little, and usually alone, falling asleep to dream of Solomon's hand on Miriam's pubis, his mouth on her breasts.

"You shouldn't be back here now." A balding, thickly sweatered dwarf lifted a broom like a quarter-staff and shook it at him. "It's show time."

Erich shoved the pineapple into the dwarf's arms and pushed past him into the nightclub. The place was crowded, a-throb with a four-four beat. Faded, water-stained green and white awnings sagged from black poles; a pink, plaster Venus de Milo wearing a maroon brassiere decorated the bar. Men in ratty suits and overalls, some cradling bar girls in short leather skirts and silk stockings, lounged beside tables covered with green and white tablecloths. The air was heavy with smoke and stank of sweat.

Onstage, a clown wearing a green-and-red shirt, baggy pants, and a wolf's mask which sported a bulbous nose, boasted of his days as a waiter at Luna Park. "There I was on Naked Days, in my formal attire," he said, eyeing the derrière feathers of a blonde-wigged Red Riding Hood who came prancing onstage, "while Berlin's best families romped nude around me."

As if determined to make up for lost time, he took hold of the blonde, knelt beside her, and began working his nose under her feathers and into her ample posterior. Wide-eyed, the girl jumped forward with a startled "Oooh!" The audience screamed its approval, cheering and whistling and stomping in time to the music.

Appearing to gather her resolve, Red Riding Hood turned and confronted the beast with her only weapon. She opened her cape, and wriggled. A St. Nicholas beard covered her pubis, and her red brassiere, studded with jingling bells, had holes that revealed blinking green nipples. The drooling wolf's pants burst open and a prosthetic penis the length of a broomstick sprang up, a Christmas bow tied behind the knob.

Daintily she tugged at the ribbon, and a banner unfurled under his wolfhood. It read:
"Sieg Heil."

The crowd roared and the curtains closed. Knowing Werner Fink, on loan from Katakombe on Bellevuestrasse while that club was being revamped, would be on next, the audience grew silent. They had come to see the infamous
conférencier
half in the hopes that they would be there on the inevitable night of his arrest, for why and how he had survived this long remained a mystery.

Fink stepped out between the curtains and threaded toward a table. The spotlight followed him. He was a pasty-faced man with heavily mascaraed eyes and hair slicked with black shoe polish.

Standing there in his black shirt and tie and too-small black jacket, he surveyed the audience.

"We were closed yesterday, and if we are too open today, tomorrow we may be closed again."

Laughter followed Fink's famous opening lines; several men in the audience raised their mugs and shouted,
"Prosit!"
 
Erich, who liked Fink, wondered if the man had avoided arrest precisely because he was so outrageous. It might be useful to keep that in mind.

The
conférencier
made his way to center stage. "No, I'm not Jewish." He placed a white-gloved hand to his forehead. "I only
look
intelligent."

The drummer hit the cymbal. Mugs were lowered and the laughter became more restrained. A man in the uniform of the SS, seated at a table to the far left of the stage, stood up, his face a study in disgust. He clicked his heels, saluted smartly, and strode out of the nightclub. Erich quickly took the man's chair.

Fink stared out over the stage lights. Cupping his hands like a megaphone, he asked, "CAN YOU HEAR ME ALL RIGHT? ANYONE OUT THERE WHO'S NOT HARD OF THINKING?"

Erich was close enough to the stage to smell the sweat of the performers and to see the spray of saliva that emerged from Fink's mouth as he continued his diatribe. However, the awning overhead was ripped and hung annoyingly in his face, disturbing his vision. He slapped it aside.

"Just tear it down." The swarthy man seated at the table placed the elbow of his grimy leather jacket on the table and revolved his black cigar with his tongue, chewing rather than smoking it. Picking a clump of sodden tobacco off his lip, he frowned and wiped his hand on his grease-spotted white shirt. Coarse black hair poked out of an old workman's cap, and a two-day growth of beard completed the picture of a man of the masses.

In the subdued applause that followed, the man said, "The name's Brecht. Bertolt Brecht."

Before Erich could give his name, Fink's rapid-fire delivery filled the room. "I love black shirts." He opened his jacket and puffed out his chest. "Brown ones, too. I salute them!" Raising his hand in the Nazi salute, he looked from his hand to the floor and back again, and said, "That's how deep we're in the shit."

While Fink bowed to polite applause, a dancer who doubled as a waitress sauntered over to Erich's table. He ordered Berliner Weisse mit Schuss, champagne-beer with a shot of raspberry syrup. When she brought the glasses she bent and placed a napkin on his thigh, giving him ample view of her cleavage. He knew he was expected to slip folded money between her breasts. He glanced away. She gave him a hard smile, swiped at the table with a bar rag and walked off.

"I can tell you from personal experience," Brecht said, "that one has more honey in her pants than a Bremen beehive."

"Not interested."

"Chacun à son goût
--to each his own." Brecht sipped his white beer. "Me, I come for the sequins and sex. There's no art to the shows anymore, except for Fink, and I hear he's hanging on by his fingernails." He eyed Erich's uniform suspiciously. "I suppose you're another of those who has come to write him up so he can be punished by the keepers of order."

Is that what he looked like to Brecht? A keeper of order? How laughable! His dogs...
they
were the
real
keepers of order, capable equally of killing upon demand and loving without reservation.

"Just here for the main attraction," he told Brecht.

Brecht shook his head. "Now there is wasted talent."

Erich had heard of Brecht, some poet or playwright who hung around cabarets like a pig around a corncrib. People of suchso-called occupations were worthless; as waffle-brained as Solomon, except that they had the bad taste to air their souls in public.

"In case you haven't heard, I'm not to be called a
conférencier
anymore," Fink went on. "The government says I'm an
Ansager
because that
other
word is too French. So many changes! Government, language, the newspaper on the bottom of my bird cage, my face if I'm not careful. Change everywhere except in my pocket! Only one thing never changes--the beauty of our very own Mimi de Rau!"

As he backed into the wings, the curtains swung open. Reclining on an ottoman and haloed in red light was "Mimi,"kohl-eyed and wearing a spangling headdress roped with fake jewels. From her ears hung brass baubles. Erich recognized them even if the rest of the audience did not. They were matching
dreidels,
like the ones the Freund and Weisser children had spun each Chanukah until the world went mad.

"Sei lieb zu mir,"
she sang, her voice sultry while her earrings told the world in her own small way that life had spun her around once too often.
"Komm nicht wie ein Dieb zu mir...."

Erich could feel the crowd's pulse quicken as people responded to her version of "Mean to Me," the popular Dietrich song. "Be kind to me. Don't come like a thief to me...."

"Time was when a talent like that would have embraced the audience. Now she merely entrances them," Brecht said.

"Go to hell."

"Already have. It rang with the tramp of jackboots, so I have returned here to Limbo, where the entertainment's better. Take the lady on stage, for example. There's a Christmas treat. Voice like an angel, body waiting to be unwrapped."

Knocking over the beer, Erich grabbed Brecht's throat so fast that it appeared the playwright's cigar must shoot from his mouth. For an instant the men stared at each other, Erich with his mangled hand raised to slap the playwright, Brecht with his eyes bulging.

Brecht took the cigar from between his lips. "Meant no insult, friend." Despite its being unlit, he thumped the cigar on the ashtray as if to dislodge imaginary ash.

Erich released him. Embarrassed, he stared at the table. The man was not out of line. "Look, I'm--"

"Sorry? Don't be." Brecht rubbed his neck. "The Fatherland has too much to be sorry for already."

"Sei lieb...zu...mir.

Miriam's song, plaintive and sensual, floated to its conclusion amid a burst of applause.

She rose slowly and drifted forward, arms outstretched as though to embrace a lover. Erich looked around the audience with cynical detachment. Strange how the only time she did not stir him was when she was performing. The red stage lights were intended to make her look wanton, but the effect was both illusion and delusion, for her demeanor made it apparent she was untouchable. That knowledge seemed to enflame most spectators, yet the more the other men wanted her the less enticing he found her. It was only when he and she were alone, or when he was alone and she was alive in his fantasies, that he could not control his childhood desire of wanting her to love him. Not just screw him. Love him.