The Hustler: The Story of a Nameless Love From Friedrichstrasse (19 page)

But they did not know; he was not allowed to tell anyone. That, however, would really have been the greatest pleasure: to relate this experience. To tell it at Uncle Paul’s at the Hustler Table and in the Adonis Lounge. He would have been the hero of the day!

Or to Atze.

He thought about Atze again and again. How astonished
he
would be!

Would he again be in Berlin? Surely. It was already a long time since the morning on which he had vanished once again.

He could stand it no longer.

What if he went to Little Mama and asked? That was still surely allowed him. Little Mama was certainly not queer. And then, too, Atze was perhaps not even there and he would come into no temptation.

Just to be able to drink coffee with Little Mama and tell her would be a release from everything that was beginning to oppress him.

He could still do that.

After all, he was not in prison here. He could come and go as he pleased, and now he had time the live-long day.

He continued to struggle with himself and his last scruples.

After three days, however, he climbed into a taxi and rode to Sonderberger Strasse by the Humboldt Wood. He wore his light summer suit, carried a cane and gloves in his hands, and naturally had his watch on his wrist. He looked like a prince and felt entirely like one.

Little Mama opened the door.

“Chick!” was all the fat woman could say.

He asked for Atze.

Yes, Atze was there. “He lies in bed the whole day and sleeps.”

Atze actually was still lying in bed, although it was bright afternoon. But hardly had he seen Gunther than he sprang up onto both feet.

He looked at him. Then, right away master of the situation:

“What did I tell you? What love won’t do!”

At first Gunther did not understand. There could be no talk of love here.

“You seem to have a fine relationship! He keeps you good, eh?” asked Atze, no longer able to control his curiosity, as he pulled on his pants.

When Gunther continued to look at him stupidly—for what could Atze know of the Count?

“Your john with the five-mark bills.”

Only now did Gunther grasp what Atze meant: the goof in Potsdam.

He waved his hands scornfully.

“Oh, not that one!”—and he began to explain.

He told his story while Atze dressed. He talked while Little Mama brought pastry and made coffee. He talked while the three sat at table, drinking and eating. He talked in a veritable intoxication of joy to finally hear himself speak once again.

For the first time since he had known Atze, the latter was speechless. He became quite silent and reflective. This was new even to him. He was lost, but he would never have admitted it. So, searching in his memory, he said what he found, and was once again the Berliner dumbfounded by nothing:

“He’s a special kind. They’re called voyeurs in France. They get it off merely from looking!”

Then, he turned to Little Mama, in a triumphant tone:

“Little Mama, what did I always tell you? Chick is a winner!”

They remained together for a long time and it was a fine evening. Every detail was talked about again and again.

As they were breaking up, however, and Gunther said they really should not have seen one another, and would probably not see one another again soon, Atze said pompously:

“ It’s not to be understood like that. For one thing he’s away, out of town. And secondly, you’re just not to go with others. You don’t have to any more. You don’t need to. And after all, what does fidelity mean? He doesn’t even love you. The other loved you.”

“What other?”

“Well, the one with the five marks.”

“But he never did anything with me either.”

“Just for that reason,” said Atze decisively. Then Atze, who not so very long ago had asserted that love was nonsense and did not exist, added:

“Just for that reason.
Because
he loved you. But again you don’t understand, Chick, and you will probably never understand, because you don’t know life like I do!”

So they did decide to meet again.

Naturally not in lounges or on hustler streets. Just among themselves.

Fifty marks a week! I won’t let them get away from me so easily! thought Atze. He had already decided right away—it did not require Little Mama’s understanding look—to participate in his friend’s good fortune to the best of his ability.

His last words, however, were only to repeat again (for even he was still numb):

“Man, Chick,
you
are a lucky dog!”

*

They met again and again during the next days.

At first in neutral streets and establishments. (Gunther paid for everything as a matter of course, after about half of his savings from the recent weeks had been first taken from him: “Just think, Chick, what all you owe me in tuition!”)

Then, when it became boring for them and they wanted to see old acquaintances again, they also met in queer bars, but only in the afternoon hours.

To be sure, Atze kept him distant from the gentlemen.

“You see how good things are going!” he said, “and why should that goofy servant ever come here.”

On the fifth day they intended to meet in the Kleist Lounge at four o’clock.

Since Gunther wanted to show off his tuxedo, which Atze had not yet admired, he changed at home beforehand.

Then he strolled in this impossible costume of black evening suit with low-cut vest, top hat, and patent leather shoes, in the early afternoon—to the secret amusement of the passersby—from the Tiergarten quarter to Wittenbergplatz, for he still had time until four. (That Franz, who was struck by the change of clothes, was following him, he did not suspect.)

He had hardly entered the still quite empty bar, however, and had just greeted Atze, when the servant appeared on the scene.

He did not make a long speech:

“If you still want to pick up your things, you can come along right now!”

The young gentleman in evening clothes, startled and disconcerted, hardly had time left to whisper to his friend: “Go to Little Mama. I’ll come afterward.”

This time Franz went ahead and the boy followed, completely abashed. He wanted to keep his things.

He got them. While he collected and packed them into the leather suitcase, Franz stood beside him, in shirtsleeves and red servant’s vest, watching each piece with sharp eyes (although Gunther did not think about taking anything that had not been a gift to him and therefore rightly belonged to him). What did not go into the suitcase was put into a cardboard box.

This time the boy carried his bag down the stairs himself and Franz followed.

Conscientious as always, he had strictly kept to his master’s order: “If the rascal shows a longing for his earlier life, let him go.”

Happy to be rid of the useless eater and inconvenient loafer in such a good way, he opened the iron door to the street and, without a further word, closed it behind the outcast.

*

The boy was no longer as disconcerted as he had been at the unexpected surprise. For one thing, he had money, still more than seventy marks, and he had a great number of fine things. So he rode first to a hotel at his old familiar Stettiner Bahnhol. But instead of his former hotel, he went to one of the large ones, opposite the train station entrance, where he took a room on the second floor in front. (Six marks a night.)

Then he went directly to Atze and Little Mama.

But here he was badly received.

The two of them, having felt sure they had set a good and firm trap for the weekly fifty marks, covered him with reproaches.

“Why didn’t you pay more attention, you stupid ass!” Atze cried.

But Gunther also had a ready tongue now and used it.

Was it not he, Atze, who had misled him into going to the queer bars again?

Thus they quarreled for a long time and one word led to another until Gunther, becoming tired of it, simply walked away, not to return.

For the second time that day he stood in the street.

No more discouraged than before.

The affair with the Count would have had to end sometime, that he understood. In the long run life there would have become simply unbearable.

Over cake and whipped cream in a cafe he counted his money and found that it was even more than he had thought: over eighty marks (for the fourth week had also been paid in advance). Enough, therefore, for at least two or three weeks!

But even if it were all gone, he would not go with anyone for under fifty marks—now that he was
so
well dressed.

6

For young Hermann Graff too, these last weeks had gone by neither slower nor faster than others, but no longer in the calm of earlier days.

He wanted to forget.

As if forgetting were easy!

He had his work and did it. He came home, then went out again for a walk—in the open air, in the environs. When the heat let up a bit (but it hardly ever did this summer), he went for long walks. Or he also stayed at home.

But more and more rarely. He had there what he wanted: quiet and solitude. But he no longer felt at ease in his room. It became ever more foreign and uncomfortable.

Not that he had any complaints about his landlady. On the contrary, no one could be served more punctually and silently than he was.

His breakfast stood before the door; his room was made spotlessly clean daily.

Never did he discover a sign of improper curiosity; never were the papers on his desk moved from their place.

He himself, meticulously tidy, could not have done better.

Nor could it be her person, for he never saw her. Days could go by without a sight of her, and when that occurred, their meeting was limited to a brief greeting, and now and then the most necessary words.

But her entire appearance was strange and unpleasant to him: the black, staring eyes, the stern mouth, the hard, cold face, even the invariably black dress, and the whole attitude of her gaunt, bony figure.

He still had no idea how she lived. When she was out of the house or there in her back rooms.

He also did not worry about it, but it was uncanny.

Had she known better days and was it only a terrible bitterness that she now showed?

Thus little by little a breath of chill came between these two people, who in living habits so resembled one another, who lived here next door to one another.

A chill breath that, with time, became a no longer concealed aversion and thus, at least on her side—he sensed it vaguely—became plain hatred.

*

Basically he had a clear and cool head. He was slow in his decisions, but once they were made, he stubbornly carried them out.

He knew his sexual disposition. He knew how it stood with him. He still read a great deal, but did not trouble himself for an explanation where there was nothing to explain. What was self-evident, natural, and not in the least sick did not require an excuse through an explanation. Many of the theories now posed he held to be false and dangerous.

It was a love just like any other love. Whoever could not or would not accept it as love was mistaken. The mistake reflected onto those who were mistaken.

They were still in the majority, those who were mistaken. And therefore in possession of force.

But they were mistaken there too. For force never has power over human sentiments. The most human of all feelings—and the strongest except hunger—was love.

Since that terrible struggle with his passion, which the young pupil in his home town had awakened in him (that pupil, whom he had so often seen, but hardly spoken to, with whom he had never become close, because all circumstances forbade it)—since that life and death struggle he had been afraid of himself. Never again in his life did he want to go through that hell again.

Besides, a certain shame had always prevented him from giving in too much to his feelings and conceding a larger space in his life to them. To betray his feelings to others, or even to show his feelings, to speak about them, would have been completely impossible for him. It would have seemed to him inconceivably ugly.

And that was why, in calmer hours, when he rendered an account of it to himself, he had at first been so frightened over the impression that this strange boy had made on him.

Then dismayed when he saw the boy again and felt how passion threatened to seize him once more and become master over him.

When he then knew he could no longer evade it, he no longer tried to. To smother and kill it—that, too, would be against his nature.

He gave in to it. His passion lived in him, became a part of him. And (as he knew) not the worst part.

But now—after the terrible disappointment of that Sunday—he struggled again: with the whole strength of his will. He must remain the stronger. He must be finished with him. He must forget him. If he could not, he was lost.

At first he believed in his victory.

Then he saw, more and more each day, how much he deceived himself.

He wanted to forget and could not.

It was too late.

*

He knew there were supposed to be people who could love only once in their lives. Once and then never again.

Did he belong to them? he asked himself.

Doubtless not. It was not the first time he was suffering. When he was still quite young, still almost a child, before puberty, he had been fond of a little schoolmate, with a shy, but entirely fulfilling tenderness, and he had cried bitter tears over him, which hurt as only a child’s tears can hurt.

Then, years later, had come that other experience: he almost a young man, the other still a boy. That experience, which had stirred up the depths of his dormant soul, which had brought him near to madness, and which even today made him shudder when he thought of those hours of torment, bitterness, despair—that experience with the foreign schoolboy, which none of his associates had even suspected and which he kept in his heart as an eternal secret.

What was it now this time?

The same? No, entirely different.

He had become older, yet was still so inexperienced, so foreign to true life, so out of human contact.

It was entirely different. This was a longing, not so much for friendship, for understanding, for trust—it was much more a desire for his self: for those hands, that face, those eyes, that—body.

He did not admit it to himself at first. But in other hours he began to suspect that it was so, when he was just lying there and stretched out his hands. For whom were they reaching, if not for
him?

What was it he yearned for? For his words? No, for his voice—for his nearness.

To have him with him—it would be enough, it would have been everything!

He wanted to forget him and could not.

He suppressed his thoughts by day. What did it help—they became dreams at night, which frightened him when he remembered them.

Nothing helped.

He now had to think about him by day. Always, wherever he walked or stood, he saw him before him.

He yearned for him. Immeasurably. With a longing that drove him mad.

And now it had come so far that all other feelings—of rage, disgust, disdain, anger, and bitterness—were absorbed into this
one
feeling of longing, perishing as if they had never been.

It triumphed, that eternal creator of everything good and best in us, the mother of all great art, the only home of all lonely or all not quite ordinary people.

It also triumphed over him.

Again—as on that Sunday afternoon, when he believed he had lost him for the second time, when he had wandered about, looking for him, not finding him, again as on that afternoon in the hall of the train station—he said to himself, with almost the same and yet other words:

“It’s terrible! I know him now! He is no longer a stranger to me. I know who he is. I should hate and despise him, and cannot! For—I
love
him!”

7

Gunther did not indulge himself in dreams for very long.

He was allowed to be generous wherever he went, looking the way he did. He was asked about nothing except the story with the Count, and everyone crowded around him to hear it again and again. He became quite wild when they touched on it. Then he gladly treated them to whatever they wanted.

The eighty or ninety marks were spent not in three weeks, but in three days.

His tuxedo had to submit to fate first—that he would surely no longer be able to use. The second-hand dealer was of the opinion that it couldn’t be used at all: “What young person wears something like that?”

He received only thirty marks (it had cost four hundred).

The sailor suit was next in line, and after it, the gold wrist-watch.

He got somewhat more for the first from a boy who had made out well the evening before and wanted to go to Hamburg and could put “such a thing” to good use there. He lived—not badly—for two days from it. Saxon eagerly took care of the watch. He faithfully promised to bring him back that very day at least a hundred marks, but he showed up with only sixty (he had already taken out twenty as a commission for himself, which he naturally kept quiet about). When Gunther became seriously angry, he said he should be happy to get so much. Who would have believed that it wasn’t stolen? Only he, the clear-headed Saxon, knew how to wangle it.

From the sixty in the evening, only twenty were left to him on waking up in the morning. They had got him drunk and left him to pay the whole bill.

Two days later, when he had paid his hotel bill, and moved with his suitcase to his old hotel, he had exactly five left.

But the worst was yet to come.

True, he no longer gave a loan to everyone who begged him, now that he himself had nothing, but in the evening he let a new arrival talk him into taking him to his room. (“I’m new here, have no place to go, haven’t yet made anything, and don’t know how to do it.”) For Gunther was basically a good-natured boy, and the memory of his own first days did the rest. A rickety sofa had been placed in the room, since it was too shabby for all the others. It was all right by him if the newcomer slept there. He also paid for him and gave him some of his supper.