Magic Hoffmann (13 page)

The Zwille dance bar was on the second floor of a new building. From the window you could see the crossroads and the square around the half church. The streets were lined with wet neon signs for fast food joints, peep shows and souvenir shops. Cars and umbrellas moved beneath a grey veil. The sound of muted car horns penetrated the windows.

By day the dance bar was a normal café with breakfast, display of cakes and tinned food. Rectangular tables with yellow table cloths, each with four chairs, stood in orderly rows. At the centre of each table stood a mustard glass full of plastic flowers, a bottle of sauce and a card, promoting ‘today's gourmet tip, chicken fricassee.' Only when night fell did the dance bar reflect its name. The tables in the middle of the room were moved to one side and a dimly glittering stone floor was revealed. Candles were placed on the remaining tables, a row of colourful spotlights came on, a wine-red silk curtain was draped near the counter, and a festively garbed band of fifty-somethings struck up a tune. ‘Favourite Hits in German':
Here's To You
Mrs Robinson
or
Sailing
. Gradually the room filled with couples and singles of the same vintage as the band. They drank pineapple punch, ate eggs in mustard, danced the fox trot and the cha-cha, and by eleven they were drunk. The bar closed at twelve on the dot.

Seated in a corner by the window, near a wall of photos of famous Zwille stars, from Horbi Dex to Mareike Sunshine, Moni and Fred ate their ‘Capital Breakfast'. Apart from themselves, there were a few elderly men and women, who were already at the soup or the gourmet tip stage, two fairly unsuccessful looking businessmen hunched over beers, and a young couple who kept glancing around and giggling. Students, thought Fred. While Moni attempted to rid her slice of cheese of a squiggle of mayonnaise and place it on a bread roll, she announced: ‘I didn't say: beautiful, I said: real. And that is real Berlin…' She shook her finger towards the mustard glass. ‘All Berlin is a Neuköln.'

Fred was attempting to open a portion of honey without success. ‘…But somehow real Dieburg too.'

‘Exactly. Only over a bigger area. Berlin is a great illusion. Metropolis, big city, international style - people come from the boondocks imagining the big, wide world, and then they're stuck in the back courtyard at Hermannstrasse. They turn to drink or turn gay, torment themselves in weird clothes, learn the names of endless barmen by heart, are desperate to get into the movies, develop a speech impediment, all this so that when the cousin comes for a visit they can say: Let's take a look at Prenzelberg, it's just like New York.'

Moni looked into Fred's attentive, but not entirely comprehending eyes. ‘Oh well. It was a long sentence,' she said, and bit into her roll. Fred abandoned the honey and picked up the little pot of marmalade. ‘And you,' he asked, ‘drunk or gay?'

‘Ballet.'

Fred waited. ‘Is that all?'

‘If you want to be somebody.'

‘A ballet star?'

‘Prima ballerina.'

‘Aha. And what else? Apart from ballet? I mean what do you do with your friends?'

‘Friends? In Berlin you have appointments.'

‘No old friends from before, from school?'

Moni shook her head. ‘My parents work at the post office, and in their neighbourhood, they might as well all work at the post office. Even the children long for a nice retirement home. I quit school at sixteen and left it all behind - thank God!'

Fred tipped the marmalade onto the bread. He knew if he asked her more questions - and he had a lot to ask - he would eventually have to give out some information himself. For example why he was so nervous of Café Budapest… Fred could not work out how law-abiding Moni was. Sewing and dance school sounded to him like someone who would go to the police as a matter of course upon hearing Fred's story. On the other hand her behaviour and speech didn't exactly indicate a bourgeois sense of duty. The problem was: if he told her one thing, he would have to tell her everything, it all hung together. And how would that sound? ‘I'm supposed to have robbed a couple in the Café Budapest the day before yesterday, and then beaten up the waiter in order to escape, which is all very inconvenient, because I'm on probation for armed robbery…' Fred tried to work out Moni's age. Twenty-one or twenty-two. Would she admire armed robbers or would she have got to the stage of empathising with the victims? One thing was clear: he couldn't panic every ten minutes and come up with ridiculous lies, then still expect something from her. So before asking any more questions, he thought up some better lies.

‘Strange name: Moni Sergeyev.'

‘That's the post office's fault.'

‘The post office?'

‘My parents come from Russia and had been here two years when I arrived. They wanted to give me as typical a Berlin name as possible. That's what our janitor's daughter was called. A month later we got a new janitor. His daughter was called Charlotte.'

‘And what does the post office have to do with it?

‘They mislaid the letter firing the first janitor. He should have got it two months before.' Moni put the rest of the bread roll in her mouth. ‘By the way I know the boss of the Budapest. He doesn't get exercised about people doing a runner, he's quite used to it.'

Fred pretended to be busy drinking coffee. He was taking his time. He glanced up quickly to see that the waitress wasn't around. Carefully he put down the cup.

‘That's not it. The day before yesterday I bumped into a guy I know from the ship in the Budapest.'

‘From the ship?'

‘That's what I said. I've spent the last four years at sea. Sailor.'

‘What,' Moni raised her eyebrows, ‘a sailor?'

Fred nodded, unmoved. ‘Anyway, without my realising it, this guy beat up a couple of people and put the blame on me. And so as to escape, I had to have a fight with the waiter.'

‘Because he wanted to call the police?'

‘Yes, and…' Fred realised that she accepted the Budapest story quite calmly, ‘as a sailor you're always in a bad light. Everyone thinks they just get drunk and fight, so there's no problem with simply locking them up.'

Moni observed him curiously. Then she nodded and said: ‘I thought something of the kind yesterday evening. You have a way of looking, as if everything was new. And then these fragments of English…'

‘Yes, on the ship…
normally we speak English.
'

‘And you were at sea the entire four years?'

‘More or less. Every now and again a few days in Africa, China, Canada…' Fred pondered briefly, then he added casually: ‘You experience a great deal, only differently, and people on dry land think you've spent the whole time spitting into the sea .'

‘That's not what I meant. But when you've been away four years…A whole lot must have changed around here.'

Fred said nothing. As far as he could tell, the biggest change was that everyone felt so much had changed.

‘What kind of ship was it?' Moni pushed the plate aside and lit a cigarette.

‘Different kinds: Tankers, fruit boats…'

‘And what do you do all day there?'

‘Well…' Fred realised that he couldn't avoid giving some concrete evidence of his ‘years at sea'.

‘I was an able-bodied seaman. Worked on deck. Whatever came along, loading and unloading, cleaning, mending, sometimes at the helm…'

First nervously, then with increasing fluency, he related a mixture of his prison reading about sea traffic between Canada and Europe, what he had gleaned from films and documentaries, and those experiences from the monotonous daily grind in prison that seemed to equate to the dull routine on deck. Stories about storms and ‘man overboard,' about deadly boredom in the real sense leading to knifings, about brutal captains and table football tournaments when the sea was calm. Moni, who thus far in her life had only been on a pedalo, asked a lot of questions and followed the answers with interest. She wouldn't have put money on the stories being true, but they were certainly interesting for a city kid. Every now and again there were pauses during which they both observed each other casually, almost taking stock.

It was certainly to Fred's advantage that a well-known fact, such as that people in China drink a lot of tea, sounds completely different from the mouth of someone who is actually supposed to have seen tea-drinking Chinese.

It wasn't long before Fred really felt like a sailor.

‘So I told him to take his mitts off, but he wouldn't leave me alone, so I whacked him to port and starboard.'

Following the description of a journey by ice breaker off the Canadian coast, Moni looked at the church clock and said she was sorry but she would have to deliver some jackets.

As she was signalling to the waiter, Fred watched her blue eyes. At some point he had decided that eyes had several layers which you could eventually penetrate, until you hit on granite or straw, and that after a certain time you always came across one or the other - if you came across anything at all. With Moni's eyes he had the feeling his gaze was falling into the sea.

After he had paid, Fred asked her if he could help with the delivery.

Moni looked surprised. ‘Gladly. But weren't you supposed to be looking for someone?'

‘Oh, that…' For more than an hour Fred had scarcely given Nickel a thought, and now the question seemed almost absurd to him. For the first time since his release he wanted to stay where he was. ‘If everything works out, I'll meet him at the university tomorrow.'

‘A friend of yours.'

‘My best friend.'

Fred congratulated himself as they were leaving. Besides Moni's presence, their being together made for an almost perfect camouflage: Who would suspect a working Berlin jacket delivery man of being the deadbeat outsider who was wanted by the police?

While Fred followed Moni's golden nylon behind across streets and squares back to the hotel, he suddenly found to his surprise that the city was almost vibrantly colourful. The houses glowed in various shades of brown and beige, and even the sky was no longer simply grey, but held the promise of imminent blue. Wasn't that just like his life? Wasn't fortune smiling on him behind all the difficulties? And hadn't everything always worked out for the best for him eventually? That's exactly how it was. And today was the day. To work that out he only had to look at Moni, and this he did in spades, laden with ulterior motives, while she walked in front of him, working out her sales route in her head.

 

The taxi weaved its way through traffic jams and cursing cyclists. Rain pattered on the windscreen. Groups of tourists in orange anoraks waited by the traffic lights. Moni and Fred sat in the back seat under a pile of colourful leather jackets. The taxi driver, a young man with longish blond dreadlocks and a pleasant good-looking face out of a men's underwear catalogue, glanced thoughtfully in the rear view mirror from time to time.

The first shop they stopped at was called Globus Electronics. It lay on a busy street, which was devoid of pedestrian traffic, and it seemed closed from the outside. Neither the grey barred up front window, in which there was nothing to see but dust, nor the glass door gave any suggestion of commerce. Moni asked the driver to wait and pressed four jackets into Fred's arms.

‘All right captain: we'll be as fast as possible without seeming impatient. Always be polite and don't be surprised at anything.'

‘Aye-aye madam!'

Moni strode forth. To Fred's surprise the door opened, and they entered a long tunnel that was lit by two bare light bulbs. The walls to left and right were piled to the ceiling with cardboard boxes, bearing inscriptions in English and Japanese. Between them were metal shelves containing a colourful selection of torches, flick knives, stockings, pots, card games and gas masks. At the end of the tunnel behind a worn green writing table, on which rested a bowl of gherkins, a bottle of transparent liquid without a label and a dozen glasses surrounding a loaf of bread, sat three giants conversing softly. Their massive shaved heads, which merged seamlessly into equally powerful necks, seemed like pink stakes rammed down between the shoulder blades. Two of them were wearing sleeveless vests, which threatened to rip around the chest; their outfits were completed by colourful track suit bottoms and flip-flops. The third one was squeezed into something which must once have been a smart suit of medium size. Where the material didn't yield, it pressed the flesh beneath into small waves. His thighs resembled tightly bound joints of meat. All three were smoking.

When Moni entered the circle of light around the table, the men fell silent. Then they grinned, and their bodies emitted cheerful peals of thunder. They stood up, shook Moni's hand, patted her shoulder and drew up a chair.

Fred stood to one side with the leather jackets over his arm and tried to grasp what was being discussed in Russian around the table. He continued to cast curious glances at the gas masks and flick knives. One of the men poured Moni a shot from the bottle and clinked glasses with her. Then they seemed to talk briefly about Fred. They waved him over, took the jackets off him and pressed a glass into his hand. While they were checking the merchandise at the seams and the zips, Fred took a hefty slug and thought he was going to die. He reached for the edge of a cardboard box to steady himself. He had the feeling he was exposed to looks that were at first curious, then friendly.

As the pain slowly died down, the man with the gold chains asked: ‘Vodka good?'

Swallowing, and with a shaky smile, Fred asked: ‘Vodka?'

‘Vodka.' The man nodded and grinned, ‘like atom bomb!' and they all laughed, with the exception of Fred.

Then one of them opened a rusty metal case and took out a wad of hundreds that looked large even in his hand. Carefully, he counted two thousand marks out onto the table. Moni checked it, and another round was poured. Fred asked himself again why someone, who clearly earned good money out of jackets made of scraps of leather, was afraid of being thrown out of a wretched hotel room. Even if Moni spent a whole day on one jacket, he reckoned she could bring in a healthy month's salary in just one week.

One of the men accompanied Moni and Fred to the door, said goodbye and hung the jackets in the window.

‘My God,' said Fred as they got into the taxi, ‘why don't they just drink petrol?'

‘Too insipid.'

Moni gave the driver the next address and leaned back contentedly. ‘We already had orders for three jackets. I'm to bring more next week.'

Makes four thousand, thought Fred. ‘The shop wasn't exactly overrun with customers.'

‘It comes in waves. Sometimes all hell is let loose. The shop is only a concept in Moscow.'

‘Oh yes? I had the feeling I was with killers rather than retailers.'

Fred laughed. Moni glanced at him briefly.

‘If I were you, I wouldn't think about it.'

The second shop lay between a shabby brothel with a shattered window, in which creased photos of naked women rose up from shards of glass, and a shop which dealt in weapons and practical jokes. Young men dressed like a Red Cross fashion show thronged in front of the display of gas pistols and whoopee cushions, nudging each other enthusiastically. The window beside it was filled with cardboard boxes, and faded letters bore the legend: PARADISE-IMPORT-EXPORT. When Moni and Fred entered paradise, they were confronted with virtually the same sight as in the first shop: cardboard boxes lined the walls, in between was all kinds of junk and a table with a bottle of transparent liquid, which bore no label. This time there were no giants round the table, but two men and a woman were standing around , cutting a deal. The salesman, a gaunt ill-looking man with long greasy hair, kept shaking his head as the couple spoke to him. The only word Fred understood was ‘video'. Then the couple began carrying out the boxes and loading them into a rusty Golf with Warsaw plates. The salesman greeted Moni with a weary gesture. Without a word he took three glasses from a shelf, slumped into a chair and poured. Moni had warned Fred that delivering jackets was an exhausting business. Gradually, he understood what she meant.

While two jackets and several rounds of vodka crossed the table, the couple fetched one cardboard box after another, and when Moni and Fred left the shop, the Golf looked like a mould, into which video recorders had been poured instead of plaster.

‘How much do you earn with that?' asked Fred.

‘No idea.'

‘Maybe you can melt them down and drink them,' he mumbled as they got into the cab, ‘maybe melted videos are a hundred and sixty per cent proof. Two atom bombs!'

‘To the nearest McDonald's, and then to the chemist,' said Moni and closed her eyes.

Fortified by hamburgers and coffee, they looked for more shops, swallowed aspirin, and Moni attempted to sleep during the brief taxi rides. Fred watched as the meter reached a hundred, then two hundred. Moni's purse now contained six and a half thousand marks. At one point, Fred suddenly turned and searched Moni's half bare forearms for needle marks. There were none.

They barely spoke during the entire delivery. Work was work and flirting was flirting.

Late that afternoon they asked to return to the hotel. After Moni had paid the fare, the driver turned to Fred, and the men's underwear catalogue face suddenly became unpleasantly sly.

‘I know who you are, mate!'

Fred winced, but he was too drunk to feel afraid. As he opened the door and hauled himself out of the seat, he slurred: ‘Don't get too familiar.'

‘You're the guy who beat up that black waiter.'

Fred paused with one foot on the pavement. ‘That what?'

‘I saw your picture in the paper. Typical: flogging crap jackets to foreign piss artists, then hammering some black man for Germany in the evening!'

Perplexed, Fred opened his mouth, then he looked round for Moni, who was watching them both apprehensively. Without taking his eyes off Fred, the taxi driver picked up a microphone.

‘Keep calm. I can call the police right away!'

Fred and Moni, who looked anything but belligerent, looked at each other helplessly. Something wasn't right. His hand on the switch of the microphone, the driver stared at them. Finally Fred leaned forward. ‘Aside from talking shit, what is it you want?'

The taxi driver pursed his lips and took his time over the answer. ‘It's not as if I don't have a certain sympathy for offences perpetrated by the socially disadvantaged. I can speak from experience…'

Fred stared at the pretty face and understood not a word. Was it because of the vodka? He was attempting to make some sense of the driver's talk, when Moni let out a hoarse and somewhat dirty laugh. Both men looked up, irritated.

‘Now here's a thing! The whole time you think you're going around with some student, and he's going to start banging on about architecture or something, and in the end you realise you're dealing with a clever blackmailer.'

The taxi driver's expression suggested that Moni was right, and he was not pleased with how she had expressed herself.

But before he could say anything, Moni spoke so coldly, Fred was astonished: ‘But you've got the wrong address. The 
“
piss artists
”
 to whom we're selling these 
“
crap jackets
”
 are to an amateur blackmailer like you what the Pope is to the cleaner of the church organ. I've got your number plate and your description, and if anything happens to my friend, you've had your last fare. Do you know what these 
“
piss artists
”
 do for their first warning?'

The taxi driver's eyelids began to tremble, and veins stood out on the back of the hand holding the mike.

‘Wait…' he said.

‘Bullet in the head,' Moni interrupted, ‘cause those who cause trouble don't get warned, they are terminated right away. The warning is only for the others. Got it?'

The taxi driver got it. Without a word, he dropped the microphone onto the passenger seat and engaged first gear. Moni and Fred climbed out with the three remaining jackets under their arms.

‘And don't forget…' Moni shouted through the window, then she added something in Russian that sounded like a mixture of singing and someone being strangled. Whether you understood Russian or not, it clearly wasn't a pleasantry.

The taxi driver accelerated off, and Moni tried to memorise the number plate. Fred stared at her like a film star. She had saved him - and how!

‘Was that all true?'

Moni watched him thoughtfully, then turned towards the staircase. She sounded as exhausted now as she was animated previously. ‘If it is true, you're better off not knowing anything about it.' And ignoring Fred's enquiring gaze: ‘Did you know about the picture in the paper?'

Something in her tone of voice caused Fred to hesitate. ‘Hmhm.'

‘You should have told me. If the guys in the shops had seen the picture we'd have been out on our arses.'

‘But…' Fred could picture the three shaven giants ‘…they couldn't be afraid of me?'

‘Afraid! Of you!' Moni stood and stared at him, as if that were the most fantastical thing she had ever heard.

‘The shops are their front, they don't want any trouble there. And someone wanted by the police means trouble.'

‘If I knew what kind of businesses…'

But Moni stumbled on and shoved the door open with her shoulder. And he hadn't dared tell her about his little bit of bank robbery.

The horse photos awaited them in the hall, as well as the smell of sulphuric acid. The counter was abandoned, and the door behind it was closed. After a few steps, Moni suddenly paused, closed her eyes and peeled off to one side. Fred could barely keep up.

With Moni on one arm and the remaining jackets in the other, he climbed up four floors. When he lay her down on his bed, she opened her eyes briefly and mumbled: ‘Thank you, captain.' Then she sniffled gently and fell asleep.

Fred flopped down beside her. As he reflected on the unanticipated good fortune of having Moni in his bed, and began to contemplate if and how he might exploit the situation, his eyes also closed, and shortly thereafter he was snoring.