Blood Brothers by Ernst Haffner Page B

to be able to afford the entrance money. For forty pfennigs, anyone is entitled to a seat from ten in the morning till eleven at night. There he can watch the show six times over or else sleep through it, he can take his pick. In the terms used by the regulars, you don’t pay entrance money just so that you walk out again two hours later. At Pritzkow’s you pay sleeping money, and you hang around accordingly. The narrow little cinema is jam-packed at all hours. The boys and youths sit pressed together, some staring with fascination, some in stupor at the cacophonous screen, or they’re already making back their sleeping money. Gently slumped on the seat in front or the neighbor’s shoulder, or with sagging head counting their waistcoat buttons.
    Willi Kludas stares at the screen open-mouthed. For him this modest production is something of a miracle. He had no idea there was such a thing as sound films, and those girls up on the screen … they’re so bonny … and the way everything jiggles on them when they walk … The way theythrow themselves at the well-dressed gentlemen and snog them … hot damn! And their sweet singing voices … and how they flip their skirts in the air when they dance. Willi Kludas shifts around on his chair, his face is burning and his sweaty fingers are tying knots. To get a girl like that … to watch a girl … In the interval he asks his little namesake if he had ever seen a girl in the altogether. He himself hadn’t, not properly. Where could he have? At sixteen he was put in the borstal. Someone there had had a lot of pictures of fat naked women. This boy loaned the cards out to his friends at night. In return for cigarettes, or a piece of sausage, or the meat ration at dinner. Then the boys would go up to the window to get a proper look at the cards. For half an hour at a time they would stand there gawping at the naked photographs, and then in bed afterwards … well, what else was a boy going to do? And then there was Otto Kellermann, a lad with golden hair and pale skin like a girl’s, who called himself Ottilie, and if you wanted your turn with Ottilie you had to pay as well …
    Little Willi’s experience was vastly different. His teenage years were poisoned by his own mother, who gave herself to strangers in the room where he slept. By the tenants who brought their johns into the room, and sometimes drunkenly staggered up to Willi’s bed: “Willi, darling, aren’t you old enough yet … do you fancy it, then … keep still, sweetheart …” The mystery into which the twenty-year-old Willi Kludas was inducted with the help of smutty pictures and his friends’ obscene speeches had been revealed to little Willi at thirteen under still more profane circumstances.
    They leave the cinema and head back out onto Münzstrasse. Willi Kludas stares under every tart’s hat brim, and if he’s accosted with a practiced smile and a swaggeringdisplay of breasts and bum, then he feels a lustful itching that burns through him, dries his throat and makes his legs tremble. His damp hands in his trouser pockets clutch his money … Enough to have one of those girls. But he’s ashamed in front of his comrade. It would be a different matter if he was on his own … “What’ll we do now?” asks the boy. “Do you know anywhere where there are lots of girls?” is Willi’s counterquestion. “The fairground?” proposes the boy. “Are there any there?” “Christ, any number … behind the toilets for fifty pfennigs,” comes the expert answer.
    The Silesian Fair on Schillingbrücke. Pleasure garden for all the gangs in the east of Berlin. Scene of daily jealous battles over a squeeze. Berlin’s nastiest red-light area; schoolgirls, and girls just out of school. Price: five rides at the funfair, a trip to the Hippodrome, ice lollies or potato pancakes, according to season. The more advanced of the child prostitutes have graduated to cash money. Scene of the