Wild Lavender (31 page)

The Count’s gaze moved over me, taking me in. ‘André has told me that you are an exceptionally talented singer and dancer.’

I glanced at André. At first I was tempted to deny it, at least out of modesty. But then I thought, why should I? That was what I wanted to be and André was determined
to make it happen. ‘I’m sure I will be, if André has anything to do with it!’ I said.

‘She reached some sort of plateau in Paris,’ André explained. ‘But what’s amazing is how far she went on her own before that happened. She hasn’t even had proper training. I am hoping that in exposing her to different styles and a different city, she will return to Paris refreshed.’

‘There are exceptional teachers in Berlin,’ said the Count. ‘I can write letters of introduction for you if you like.’ André and I enthusiastically accepted his offer.

The Count nodded. ‘Berlin is different to Paris, Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ he said. ‘I can imagine that the French would be taken with not only your talent but your energy. I could tell you were French the moment you walked in the door, by the way your eyes shone and your body vibrated, as if every new experience in life were a strawberry cake that was making your mouth water. Germans are more cynical than that. But at the same time, I believe that exposing oneself to different cultures creates more depth in one’s personality, and that can only help an artist.’

‘I’ve just arrived in Berlin and I can feel that happening already,’ I told him, more than pleased to be referred to as an ‘artist’. I thought what he was saying was true. I had been born in Pays de Sault, but now I had a bit of Marseilles and Paris in me too. ‘Perhaps Berlin will improve my concentration and discipline,’ I said.

The Count leaned towards me. ‘There are some things in Berlin that may shock you,’ he said. ‘In Parisian cabaret, the songs are about disenchanted love and poverty. In Berlin, cabarets are much more political…and often nihilistic. Sex and death are the obsessions here.’

André also leaned forward and whispered conspiratorially, ‘Fortunately, unlike the English and Americans, the French are not shocked easily.’

For some reason this comment amused the Count. His face flushed and he tucked his chin into his collar, trying his best to control his laughter. But it convulsed in his chest
and escaped as a roar. The sound skimmed across the tables and bounced off the walls, far louder than the clinking of coffee cups and murmured conversations around us. The more the Count tried to restrain himself, the more crimson his face turned and the louder he chortled. Then André’s deep bark of a laugh burst out, echoing after the Count’s delight like a mastiff chasing a ball. I looked from one to the other, their faces scrunched up and their torsos shaking. They were a two-man band producing the music of mirth.

Mademoiselle Canier arrived with her maid and three compartments full of luggage the following day. I thought she must be planning to move to Berlin permanently. When she saw me waiting on the station with André, a frown flitted across her face.

André helped Mademoiselle Canier down to the platform and she planted a lingering kiss on his lips. Her attitude seemed to have changed in the last few days. She behaved the way she had at Le Boeuf sur le Toit, clinging to André’s side like seaweed to the bottom of a boat.

After sitting through a monosyllabic lunch, during which Mademoiselle Canier ate a pickle and pushed the rest of her food to the side of the plate, I was relieved to learn that she had to return to Paris in a fortnight for her cousin’s ball. At least there would be some reprieve. When I was alone with André, he had been informal. As soon as Mademoiselle Canier arrived, he reverted to addressing me as Mademoiselle Fleurier. I saw that I was going to have to feel one way towards him and behave in quite another.

Count Kessler joined us to dine at the Adlon that evening. An amused grin lapped around the corner of his mouth when Mademoiselle Canier spoke to the staff in French. She ignored the Count and me unless André made a specific point of referring to us in the conversation. Afterwards, the four of us took a walk down Friedrichstrasse. Every building seemed to be a cabaret, a
cinema, a brothel, a dance hall or a drug den. Prostitutes crowded each corner and lurked in every doorway. I was used to the tarts of Marseilles and the bawdy prostitutes of Montmartre, but the whores of Friedrichstrasse were confronting: they seemed brutal and dangerous in their feather boas, chains and tassels. One dominatrix paced her corner like a panther, cracking her whip and snarling with her teeth. Another woman sat on a fire hydrant, naked except for a pair of lace-up boots. But what surprised me the most was that the people walking up and down the pavements were not working-class hordes but men in bow ties and shirts with mother-of-pearl buttons and women in dresses of oriental silk. They were stepping out of Mercedes Benz limousines and taking in their surroundings with a voyeuristic amusement. Not everyone lost their money during the crisis, I thought. Tycoons, speculators and criminals seemed to have made fistfuls from it.

André and Mademoiselle Canier strolled ahead of us. The Count walked in step with me.

‘Mademoiselle Canier takes an awfully long time to get ready, don’t you think?’ he whispered. ‘I thought we weren’t going to eat until midnight. I timed you both by my watch. You were down in twenty minutes.’

‘I have been trained for quick changes in the music hall,’ I told him.

The Count smiled, and we stopped to watch a half-naked street performer execute a head-stand. We caught an eyeful of pubic hair when the man swung himself back to his feet.

‘You look as though you have had enough, Mademoiselle Fleurier,’ the Count said. ‘This really isn’t my thing either. But lots of tourists like it, and at least you can say you have seen the Friedrichstrasse now.’

The Count called out to André, then stepped to the kerb and hailed a taxi. ‘Let us take the ladies somewhere more fun. Somewhere Mademoiselle Fleurier might learn a thing or two.’

We drove down the Unter den Linden towards the
Schöneberg district and stopped on the corner of Motzstrasse and Kalckreuthstrasse. I gazed up at the bright Art Deco lights of a club, the Eldorado, and the sign underneath that read,
You’ve found it!

‘We play a special game here,’ said the Count, his mouth twisting into a smile. ‘But I won’t tell you what it is yet.’

We left our coats with the cloakroom girl and I had to take a second look at her milky skin and ruby mouth. She was extraordinarily beautiful, even more stunning than Mademoiselle Canier or Camille, and far too exotic to be just a cloakroom attendant.

‘Good evening,’ the hostess greeted us. ‘A table by the stage?’

The Count nodded and the hostess led us through the smoky space. Her walk was a queenly glide. She would be marvellous on stage, I thought. Once we were seated I looked around the club; its decor of rose lighting and the glass bar seemed at odds with the round tables and kitsch salt and pepper shakers. The band climbed onto the stage: a pianist, trombonist, clarinetist and banjo player. They were all women and were as glamorous as the cloakroom girl and the hostess.

‘I thought the women we saw around Berlin today were beautiful, but the employees at this club are striking,’ I said to the Count. ‘Is that the reason you like this place?’

‘I believe they bring them from Bavaria especially for their beauty,’ said the Count, turning away to signal one of the waitresses. ‘Shall we order beer or champagne?’

‘Let’s try a German beer,’ said André, coughing into his handkerchief.

I gave him a pat on the back which elicited a scowl from Mademoiselle Canier. ‘It is smoky in here,’ I said.

André nodded and dabbed his watering eyes.

‘Yes,’ said the Count. ‘It is amazing how someone who smokes can be so sensitive to it himself.’

André let out what sounded like one of his laughs but it dissolved into a violent cough, hidden behind his handkerchief.

The waitress was very tall, even for a German woman, and when she returned from the bar and placed our drinks in front of us I couldn’t take my eyes from her well-manicured but large hands.

‘I thought Bavarians were like Austrians,’ I whispered to André. ‘More on the petite side.’

Before he could answer, he was shaken by another violent coughing fit and quickly sipped his beer. Mademoiselle Canier gave me a wary look, before taking out her compact and retouching her nose.

‘Look over there,’ said the Count to André, nodding towards the entrance. ‘There’s Herr Egermann, the banker, talking with Herr Stroheim from the Reichstag. I swear, anybody who is anybody comes to the Eldorado nowadays.’

It must be for the beautiful women, I thought. I was sure there were more elegant places in Berlin. A young boy brushed past me; his silk smoking jacket tickled my skin. I looked up and our eyes met. He wore his hair smoothed down and had slender shoulders and hands. I watched him join a huddle of similarly dressed boys leaning on the bar.

‘Are you ready for our game now, Mademoiselle Fleurier?’ the Count asked.

I nodded.

‘Well,’ he said, rubbing his chin, ‘look around the room and tell me who the real women are and who are men.’

I noticed the smirk on André’s face. He hadn’t been coughing at all. ‘None of them can be men!’ I cried.

‘Study them more closely,’ said the Count.

‘Well, the cloakroom girl maybe,’ I said, thinking of her angular features. ‘And the waitress has large hands. But I would never have noticed anything if you hadn’t pointed it out.’

I smiled at Mademoiselle Canier. It was an olive branch gesture, to see if she would join in the fun. But she looked as uninterested as ever. If the transvestites at the Eldorado couldn’t amuse her, what could?

‘How do you tell?’ André asked the Count. ‘I’ve heard a lot of them have been castrated and that’s why they have smooth skin and curvaceous figures.’

The Count shook his head. ‘It has nothing to do with their skin or feeling for Adam’s apples or looking between their legs. The real giveaway is when they are more feminine than the most beautiful girl. Only pansies know how to be truly erotic women.’

‘It is a good lesson for an entertainer, I think,’ said André, turning to me. ‘The art of illusion. If you can convince yourself you are one thing, then other people will believe it too.’

Mademoiselle Canier fished a silver case from her purse and pulled out a cigarette without offering one to anyone else. ‘A woman is a woman,’ she said, inserting the cigarette between her lips and waiting for André to light it. ‘Only an erotic woman can be an erotic woman.’

‘So knowingly put,’ said the Count. His tone was chivalrous but I saw the amusement dancing in his eyes. He nodded towards the bar. ‘And what about those boys over there?’ he said to me. ‘Are they what they seem?’

I turned to the men lined up at the bar. The one who had bumped into me winked in my direction. I looked back to the Count. ‘I can see now that they are women,’ I said. ‘They’re not as convincing as the men.’

‘They’re not trying to be,’ said André. ‘Theirs is the art of suggestion not transformation. Somehow their outfits make them even more feminine.’

‘I have to say that I find a woman in a tuxedo quite fetching,’ said the Count, ordering more glasses of beer.

The show began and the master of ceremonies, whose face was chalked white, introduced the chorus girls in German, French and English: ‘The incomparable…the fabulous…the like-nothing-else-in-the-world…the Eldorado Fräuleins!’ A line of statuesque ‘pansies’ appeared on stage in little more than corsets and boots.

For the next act, two of the ‘boys’ from the bar danced the tango. They glided, plunged and strutted tantalisingly but
the iceberg expressions on their faces never changed. The sight of two women dancing the tango together made what Rivarola and I had done seem clumsy. We had danced with fire and passion, but the women’s act had such a chill to it that the audience was left in an agony of expectation, and with the sense that something had been held back for later.

I watched with interest. I understood that by exposing me to these performers and ideas, André was enticing me out of my shell. The more I opened my mind, the more layers I would have to draw on for my own work. Berlin was a fresh scene with no associations and I was ready to absorb it all.

Most of the performances were good-natured spoofs of transvestism, but there was one strange act with a dwarf playing a musical saw. The long strip of metal, which he clutched between his knees, was longer than he was. But he brought his bow across the edge without strain, and skilfully bent the metal to produce high notes or released it for lower ones. The music he produced was a haunting vibrato, so ethereal that the audience remained still for the duration of his act, as if they were frightened that if they should move or talk they would be turned to stone. For a moment, the memory of the starving girl’s face returned to me and I shivered. The Count was knowledgeable in German politics; I would ask him about it when Mademoiselle Canier wasn’t around. From the little conversation I had managed to elicit from her, I had come to the conclusion that the only subject that interested her was herself.

We finished the night off with what was to become one of my happiest memories of Berlin. At the Residenz Casino—or ‘The Resi’ as it was affectionately known—the
maître d’hôtel
assigned us Table Number 14. The Count asked if Mademoiselle Canier and I minded if he and André talked privately at the bar for a few minutes. ‘Business matters,’ he apologised. ‘Very boring.’

‘Go ahead,’ I told him.

Mademoiselle Canier excused herself to go to the powder room, obviously not interested in talking with me.
She is not Odette, I thought, my mind turning to my friend who was as lovely on the inside as she was on the outside. Mademoiselle Canier was all veneer. She was certainly guarding André much more jealously than before, but as far as I could see there was no need. Nothing had changed in his feelings towards me.

I turned my attention to the buzzing crowd. There was a jazz band playing and couples foxtrotting on the dance floor. I noticed that all the tables had a telephone on them and assumed they were to call through supper and drinks orders—another example of German efficiency. Perhaps they were needed because the band was loud and the waiters couldn’t take orders the normal way. I was surprised then when the telephone on our table rang.