Eight Girls Taking Pictures (33 page)

“You know, my parents sometimes made me recite poems,” teased Ines.

Charlotte laughed. “I know, but my father has this passion for glass. Anything to do with glass, and my family has a glass foundry.”

“So even though the glass factory wasn’t on the island anymore, you still had to make the Glass Pilgrimage?”

“Parents.”

“Mine live in Heidelberg. Professors,” said Ines.

“You grew up in Heidelberg?”

“We lived in France, Italy, and New York, so I really didn’t grow up anywhere. You don’t think the peacocks are still there, do you?”

This is how the girls found themselves on the ferry that traveled to and from the island, thinking that the gardens, the fake ruins, and the storybook castle would provide some photographic opportunities. But more than that was the unexpressed sense of wanting to revisit the place of their childhood as a way of deepening their connection; maybe they had toured the little island during the same summer, or even the same day, without knowing it? It would be as if they had been there together, establishing a makeshift shared history without either of them thinking through why the idea of already having a past with each other was so appealing.

They arrived at Pfaueninsel and weren’t disappointed: It was as ghostly and strange as it was in their memories. The inauthentic ruins came straight from a tale with jinn and magic carpets, with the palms, and the castle. The day was overcast, providing nicely diffused photographic light, though neither girl reached for her camera.

As they stood, side by side, looking at the castle, peacocks strutting around them amid the rustle of leaves, punctuated by the occasional far-off peacock cry, Charlotte said, “Let’s get out of here.”

The following Tuesday, the girls stood at the edge of a small lake not far from Pfaueninsel.

“That’s not someone’s house, is it?” asked Charlotte of a large, plain structure situated on the far end of the field. It was almost like a meadow, except the grass and weeds were cut very close to the ground and there was no sign of a crop of any sort. Charlotte wandered a little, only to notice another, almost identical building behind the first.

Before Ines could answer, the noise of a plane engine filled the space between them as a biplane landed nearby and rolled to a stop. Ines smiled, walking toward it. “Marlene,” she said softly.

The pilot, whose attire was quickly revealed as she lifted herself out of the cockpit with practiced precision, wore, in this order: a shiny chocolate leather helmet with goggles (being torn from her face), a long matching leather jacket that ended at the hips, where Charlotte could now see a pair of what looked like knee-length shorts that were rolled once. Her legs below the shorts were bare, until the ankles, where her laced-up boots began. The pilot and Ines embraced.

“No Moka Efti today?” asked the pilot.

“Wednesdays,” said Ines.

“What’s Moka Efti?” asked Charlotte.

With her arm still around Ines’s shoulders, the pilot pulled off one leather glove with her teeth, stuffing it in a pocket before reaching out a hand to Charlotte. “Grete Grun.”

“I thought your name was . . .” said Charlotte, confused but offering her hand. Grete’s grip was firm and warm.

“This is Charlotte,” said Ines.

“Charlotte,” Grete said. She was no longer half-embracing Ines. Instead she was leaning against the fuselage.

“Café Moka Efti,” said Ines to Charlotte. “On Friedrichstrasse. I work there on Wednesday afternoons.”

“Oh,” said Charlotte.

Grete Grun laughed. “Your friend thinks you’re a barmaid.”

“I work in the back,” said Ines. “With the businessmen.”

Grete said, “I think you explained that beautifully, dispelling the barmaid aspect and implying a career that pays by the hour.”

“Moka Efti has a room where businessmen can work and drink their coffee. They hire people like me—stenographers—to take dictation so they can claim to be working and not hanging around a café. They even have telephones on the desks in case someone calls. It’s a stupid job, but the pay isn’t bad.”

“So are you in or out for Wannsee this weekend?” asked Grete.

“In.”

“And you, Charlotte, will you be coming too?”

“Yes, Charlotte, will you be coming too?” asked Ines.

“I don’t know,” said Charlotte, looking to Ines.

Grete shrugged her shoulders. “If I see you I see you.” To Ines she said, “Gotta get this put away before dark.” Grete turned her back as she pivoted the plane in the direction of the simple structures. Airplane hangars, thought Charlotte, not houses. “Saturday, Marlene,” called Grete.

“Why did she say that?” asked Charlotte as they walked to the car.

“A group of us are meeting at Wannsee on Saturday, to swim and eat and spend the night on the beach. You really should come.”

“Not that—Marlene.”

Ines said nothing, then, “I’ll be at your house at noon on Saturday.”

Giselle Weiss worked in a film lab. Neile raced cars. Maria was interested in architecture and was a student at the Bauhaus; she was very excited to meet Charlotte, being an ardent admirer of Bruno Blum’s public housing projects and his work with glass. She, too, wanted to construct great monolithic buildings of glass, the passing reflections of the clouds giving the illusion of walls of sky.

And then there was Grete Grun, who was a kind of informal organizer of their modest encampment by the lake. There were two small canvas tents, folded wooden stools with canvas seats. A large hamper of food and another of drinks.

But it was Ines who brought the record player.

The girls were all about the same age as Charlotte and Ines, mid-twenties, and all from families in business (with cultural affections) or education (with cultural affections), and they all typified the media image of the New Woman, with their bobbed hair—except for blond Giselle Weiss, who wore her curly hair in two short pigtails behind her ears—and their androgynous clothing—the tailored jackets and girlish, flat-heeled shoes. They wore trousers or long shorts, much as Grete Grun had worn that day at the airfield. One of the daily papers had taken to running weekly a feature that asked
“Bub oder Mädel?”
with half a dozen head shots of Berliners the readers were to identify as boy or girl. The girls laughed about it (there was something intoxicating about
thinking you could be that close to having social power), but inside they could never fully decide who was insulted more.

As permissive and decadent as those days were—exhilaratingly so—being a homosexual man was illegal. It was dangerous and made more so by the fact that there were so few arrests, making gay men less guarded and thus more at risk. There was nothing worse than thinking yourself safe when you weren’t.

But the girls who liked girls were never considered criminal. Grete Grun said it was because “if you don’t count, then whomever you choose to sleep with doesn’t count either. By association, if you will.”

In truth, it was sometimes difficult to tell all the Berlin girls—the lesbian, the androgyne, the gamine, the New Woman—apart.

As the phonograph played that day by the lake, the girls danced, arms around each other’s waists, no one resting a languid hand on someone’s shoulder; everyone was the Girl, and no one the Fellow, the other hands clasped. Though they laughed and clowned and sometimes exaggerated their movements (a tango, a waltz, a fox trot), there were moments of quiet, a touch, a lingering kiss.

Charlotte lay on the grass next to the beautiful Giselle Weiss, her blond pigtails undone.

Later, the girls waded into the water near the shore where a flat-bottom boat with a striped cabana and gathered curtains, with the word
Eis
in white paint on its side, sold ice cream.

“Marlene,” said Grete Grun as they sat in the soft summer evening, roasting sausages over the fire, “what were the Katz twins doing with Alice last week?”

“Marlene?” asked Charlotte.

“The Katz twins,” said Neile, shaking her head. “They’ll sleep with anyone as long as they have a trust fund.”

“The Katz twins?” asked Charlotte.

Grete Grun, the pilot with her boots and rolled shorts, placed each cooked sausage in a roll with mustard and sauerkraut before handing it
round. “Vivienne and Veronika Katz,” said Grete, “frequent horse, car, and air races. They dress identically in men’s suits with neckties and knee boots and hats, and always seem to be in the company of a woman with money who can’t decide if she likes girls or not.” She licked some mustard off her fingers before handing a roll to Maria. “In this case, it’s one Miss Alice Ring, who, if I’m not mistaken, seemed more than a little uncomfortable sitting between the twins.”

Maria said, laughing, “It was as if she just found herself flanked by those two.”

“And her pearls,” said Neile, “seriously.”

“Opportunists,” said Ines to Charlotte. “You wouldn’t like them. No girl does.”

“What about Alice Ring? She likes them?”

Ines tore off a piece of the sausage roll, popped it into her mouth. “That’s another kind of girl.”

It was then that Charlotte finally caught on to the utterance of Marlene. It made sense: the unabashedly bisexual Marlene Dietrich. It was a gay endearment. It also made Charlotte feel just a little jealous when Ines said it or, more so, when Grete Grun said it while looking at Ines, her voice not unlike the sexy rasp of Dietrich herself.

“If only they’d stop coming to my races,” said Neile.

“Neile won twice last year,” said Ines.

“And crashed four times,” said Maria.

“Or stop acting like a pair of party boys,” continued Neile.

“Yeah, or they’ll find themselves in ‘
Bub oder Mädel
?’ in the paper.”

Everyone laughed.

“I dislike his work,” said Ines.

The girls were lying around the campfire, long after dinner, smoking cigarettes, Neile and Grete Grun smoking a little hash.

“I don’t understand how you can’t like it,” said Giselle Weiss. “There isn’t another novelist today taking on the complexities of modern Berlin. Okay, just the description of the 1918 demonstration of the war
veterans? That image of a group of young men, marching down the boulevard with their missing arms and legs and eyes, as if it was a human collage of body parts? I remember that parade and I don’t remember anyone saying anything half as true about it.”