Kino (7 page)

To a
Landei
like me, the crowd at the Wintergarten was as thrilling as the stage, so different from the plump industrialists who visited in Königstein or the rough-hewn working men who ate knackwurst at the Gipsverein, where Herr Oberlin tended bar. At the Wintergarten, each person was fascinating, sophisticated, cosmopolitan, witty, and most of all, sexy. I laughed at the men's one-liners and desperately wanted to touch the women's silken dresses. I wanted to know them all, but even more than that, I wanted them to know me. After a couple of beers, I allowed myself to imagine that the applause was meant for me.

It was there at the Wintergarten I met Steffen. He approached from across the terrace with that graceful gliding gait of his, a smile so magnificent there was no way not to return it. By the time I noticed him, he'd already extended his hand, and before I could get up to take it, he'd introduced himself and taken the seat across from me. His cheeks were flushed–his cheeks were always flushed; it gave him a healthy complexion, even though I soon learned the real reasons were not of a healthy nature. His wild eyes were focused on me, and he talked quickly. He did not want to be forward, but he had a proposition.

Here was the attention I craved! Steffen's charisma made me feel blessed every moment his eyes were on me. Later, I knew movie stars like that, but unlike them, Steffen saw you when he looked. He smoked a cigarillo and talked fast, with so many clauses, interjections, and Scheunenviertel slang that was a mixture of
Boxverein
gangster jargon and the quasi-German the Romanian gypsies used. I learned later that he affected this accent when he wanted to impress. I didn't understand half of it, and the other half was unclear, but apparently, he was looking to play a prank on his friends–here he waved at a table across the terrace and rattled off names: Lady Miss Fear, Babsie, Kuno Kartoffel, Ute the Mole Girl, two more I didn't catch, and Anita Berber's sister Katja–and he needed my help. My help!

Why me? What kind of prank? I wanted him to slow down but I couldn't help smiling. He said he thought I had a mysterious air about me–he was talking about my leg–and he imagined that his friends would simply adore it if I robbed them. Furtively, he unbuttoned his jacket to show me the handle of a revolver. “It's not loaded.” He winked.

I looked back at his friends. One of the girls blew me a kiss. I still didn't understand.

“You want me to rob you? Do I get to keep the loot?”

Delighted, Steffen clapped his hands. “Adorable! ‘Do I get to keep the loot?' Please, you must indulge us. Wait for us in the alley behind Dorotheenstrasse. I swear the loot will be to your liking.”

Now, I was not a complete innocent. Heinz and I both had favorite girls at a bordello in Frankfurt, and I knew how to use a prostitute. I thought of Steffen Kung as a playful dilettante, clearly drunk, looking for a way to spice up his Saturday night with a harmless prank. I wasn't entirely wrong, but I had missed the point.

So I agreed. Why not? I had a surplus of optimism and no fear. Under the table, Steffen handed me the revolver. As instructed, I laid in wait for him and his friends in the alley, held them up–”
Geld oder Leben
!”–but instead of offering up their money, they turned and ran. This wasn't part of the plan! Dragging my wooden leg, I chased after them across the street, and for good measure, I fired the gun into the air.
Bang!
It was loaded after all, and the shot echoed down the street. Roaring with laughter, Steffen and his friends disappeared into one of the apartment buildings. I followed, climbing the stairs with my leg thumping on the wood steps until I reached the apartment under the roof, a wide-open space that was hung with Indian tapestries and cluttered with divans, mirrors, pillows.

“Now I have you!” I shouted, out of breath, heart beating with excitement. I fired another shot into the ceiling. Plaster fell in a cloud of dust.

Their arms went up.

“Oh my,” said a girl with a monstrous mole on her cheek. “Please don't kill us! We'll do anything you want!” To make her point, she wiggled out of her skirt. One of Steffen's friends, his arms still in the air, produced a silver tin of cocaine.
Zement
, they called it.

This was the night I learned there was a real upside to my “predicament,” as my brother Heinz liked to call it. You'd be surprised how excited a certain kind of girl–or guy–can get over a missing limb. I started off with Ute the mole girl straddling me, delicious, her blouse still on, but then I felt a hand on my thigh, and somebody was removing the strap that kept the artificial leg in place. I turned and Steffen kissed me and I returned the kiss and Ute was fucking me hard while someone else was fondling my stump. When the sun came up, we were all sitting at Aschingers, spent and eating pea soup, which was, as Steffen grandly announced, based on a recipe created by a Nobel Prize winning chemist. I used part of this story in
Meine wilden Wanderjahre
, but of course that doesn't mean anything to you.

There's a rush when you encounter something fresh, something that floors you, a great thing you didn't know existed–a kind of opening in the world, a precipitous teetering on the edge of possibility that's thrilling beyond belief. With age, these moments become more rare, until all that's left is a distant intimation one April day when the wind is just right. By the time you're as old as me, you barely remember they existed at all, unless they come to haunt you in your dreams.

Gottverfluchte Scheisse.

I get flowery when I'm sad.

Do you see what you're putting me through?

The stars above the Wintergarten are still there, but the building was ruined in a bombing raid in forty-four. I saw photos of it, in the newspaper. They made me wish I could have been there for the last show. It must have been tremendous when the roof burst.

Steffen and his friends roamed the cafés, lounges, cabarets, bars, dance halls, and back alleys of Berlin every night of the week. He was always flushed, all hugs and love and drive, his restless eyes darting while his mouth chattered on, fueled by the company and the cocaine. He knew everyone: dancers, musicians, retired Dadaists, free thinkers, anarchist lesbians, drunken Russian émigrés, actors, nudists. He was reckless and infectious and he became my teacher in depravity. As long as there was one
Tingeltangel
or revue, just one jazz orchestra playing anywhere in Berlin, Steffen would be there, up front, hollering and doing his own inimitable dance, throwing his limbs every which way and waving a bottle of champagne.

He had picked me out of the crowd at the Wintergarten as a kind of mascot, a handsome, crippled freak with a Rheinland accent and a fabulous peg leg. I was young and I learned quick. Drugs let my mind, liberated from my lurching body, soar. Under the Japanese-themed ballroom ceiling of the Residenz-Casino, where the tables had telephones and pneumatic tubes, the kaleidoscopic lights of the whirling mirrored globes and colored water displays sent me on dizzying flights of fancy while go-go dancers shook their tits and stretched their boot-clad legs, whipping the wild and drunken crowd into a frenzy.

And there was sex. There were always girls who didn't mind trying it with a guy like me. Something about the leg's absence made fucking more immediate; at least that's my theory. You probably have a name for this, Herr Dokter, but I assure you, reading about it in a book is nothing. A thing like that has to be experienced. Berlin was a school in bodies, desires, horrors, lust, jealousy, fantasy, and pain. I don't mind telling you that I've tried it all: girls, boys, three, five, ten, every which hole. Does that shock you?

It didn't take me long to understand that Steffen provided cocaine and girls for the countless friends he seemed to have in every section of Berlin. Most nights, our rounds–from the Vaterland to Café Braun, from the Stork's Nest to the Cosy-Corner–were on a schedule. The outrageous crowd that followed Steffen knew they wouldn't have to pay cover fees or champagne tabs. There was always enough
Zement
for everyone. In return or perhaps for fun, they might go to bed with people Steffen introduced them to. It was Steffen's particular genius to mix business and pleasure in a way that made everyone happy. From Steffen I learned to seek pleasure in everything I do. If it's not fun, why bother? That was his motto, and I came to see the wisdom of it. In those days, Steffen meant everything to me.

Steffen had a new prosthesis handcrafted for me by the capital's best manufacturer, with real hair and a flexible ankle, and my limp practically disappeared. He took me shopping for smart clothes, and when I began to dabble in writing, he bought me notebooks, leather-bound beauties from Italy, much better than this
Ramschladenscheissdreck
you have me write in.

As a joke, Steffen introduced me as whomever occurred to him at the moment. I was an orphaned painter, an undercover Spartakist, a science protégé on scholarship. Steffen introduced me, and then I had to keep up the lies–that was the game. I was a saxophone player in Bix Beiderbecke's band. I was a Swedish mesmerist. When I was asked about the leg, I talked about dogfights high above the Somme; when they wanted to hear my award-winning poetry, I said the poems were so Futuristic they hadn't been written yet. All it took was a straight face.

There was one lie that made me seem more interesting than all the others. Everyone wanted to drink with me, get high with me, and sleep with me when we told them I was a movie director. It was the lie that turned me into the center of attention and opened the tightest twat. One night over dinner, Joachim Ringelnatz–the whimsical poet who wore a sailor's uniform wherever he went–eyed me funny and asked if I wasn't a bit young to be working for the cinema, “
für's Kino
.”

I had my mouth full of lamb stew, so Steffen came to my defense. “Don't you read the papers? Klaus is a prodigy! The youngest director in Neubabelsberg!”

I put down my fork, swallowed, and pointed a finger. “Joachim,” I said. “I don't work
für's Kino
. I
am
Kino!”

And that's how I gave myself my own nickname. At the time I didn't have the faintest idea about the true potential of cinema. To be honest–and I know this will sound incredible to someone of your generation–I had, in the summer of nineteen twenty-four, never seen a feature film.

Of course, I'd been to the
Kino
in Frankfurt, but father always made us leave the Film-Palast after the Pathé newsreel, before the movie proper. All I ever saw was the Kaiser giving speeches, columns of soldiers leaving for the front, generals being decorated. Afterwards, father tortured us with questions about what we had learned, and Heinz always knew all the answers. I begged my father to let me stay, but he said there was no point, that movies were a waste of time.

I was twenty-two and I had never seen a movie. When Steffen found out, he laughed his red-faced out-of-control-laugh and announced, still out of breath, that we would remedy the situation immediately–after a quick stop at Ronja's basement in the Scheunenviertel, where an ancient Russian woman with long white hair kept hammocks and served pipes of sweet opium. We arrived at Ufa-Palast am Zoo in a dreamy state to see Murnau's vampire movie.

How can I describe it to someone whose eyes have been sullied by decades of trivial images dancing by on TV screens? You'll never understand the rapture, the horror, the euphoric bliss I felt at the sheer visual surprise. With each passing moment, with every new shot on the screen, waves of pleasure rolled through me.

During my miserable childhood, I had been a relentless daydreamer, spinning tales from books into wild fantasies that helped me through endless days of drudgery. I dreamed of the heroes and villains of the books my mother called
Schundromane
, the adventures of Alain Quartermain, Phileas Fogg, and Hadschi Halef-Omar. After I met Steffen, I barely slept at all, and my nights were occupied with drinking and fucking and dancing. When sleep came, unconsciousness would have been a better name for it. Dreams had vanished from my life until the opium, until the movies, until
Nosferatu
brought it all flooding back.