A Man Lies Dreaming (2 page)

Berwick Street, Soho, on a cold November night. Electric lights cast the pavement in a gloomy glow. The dirty bookstore was open. Whores loitered outside. He stood under the awning of the bakery when his landlord came out of nowhere like a Jew in the night.

‘Herr Edelmann,’ Wolf said.

‘Mr Wolf,’ Edelmann said. ‘I am glad I caught you.’

He was a short, pudgy man with hands and a face as pale as flour. He had a furtive manner. ‘What is it, Herr Edelmann?’ Wolf said.

‘I hate to bother you, Mr Wolf,’ Edelman said. He wiped his hands at his sides as if he still wore his apron. ‘It is about the rent, you see.’

‘The rent, Herr Edelman?’

‘It is due, you see, Mr Wolf.’ He nodded, as though confirming something to an unseen audience. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘it is due some days now, Mr Wolf.’

Wolf just stood there and looked at him. The baker hopped from leg to leg. ‘Cold, isn’t it,’ he said. Wolf watched him in silence.

‘Well,’ Edelman said finally, ‘I hate to ask, Mr Wolf, really I do, but it is the way of things, isn’t it, it is the nature of the world.’ His whole stance seemed apologetic, but Wolf wasn’t fooled. There was a flash of steel underneath the baker’s quivering exterior. Wolf didn’t deign to reply. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the wad of money and peeled off two ten-shilling notes, watching the baker’s eyes all the while. He returned the rest to his pocket. He held the money in his hand. The man seemed hypnotised by the money. He licked his lips nervously. ‘Mr Wolf,’ he began.

‘Will this do, Herr Edelmann?’ Wolf said. The man made no move to take the money, waiting for it to be offered. ‘It is the nature of the world that evil exists,’ Wolf said. ‘It is not money that is evil but the means to which it is put to use. Money is an instrument, Herr Edelmann, it is a lever.’ He held the money steady in his fingers. ‘A small lever to move small people,’ he said. ‘But give me a large enough lever and I would move the very world.’

‘That’s very interesting, Mr. Wolf,’ Edelmann said. He was still looking at the money. ‘Do you wish to pay for a month upfront?’

Wolf handed him the notes. The baker took them and secreted them about his person.

‘I would require a receipt,’ Wolf said.

‘I will put one through your door.’

‘Make sure that you do,’ Wolf said. He touched the brim of his hat, lightly. ‘
Guten abend
, Herr Edelmann.’

‘Good evening to you, too, Mr Wolf.’

Wolf walked off and the baker disappeared into the darkness like a shadow. There had been too many dark streets and too many shadows, melting into the night, never to be seen again. Wolf thought about Geli. There had not been a day gone past when he had not thought about Geli.

The whores were gathered in Berwick Street. They stood light as shadows, mute as stone. Wolf hesitated as he passed nearby. With his approach the girls grew lively, and raucous laughter welcomed Wolf’s approach. In a passageway between buildings a fat whore was squatting with her back to the brick wall, crapping. He caught a glimpse of her pale loose flesh, her garments round her ankles. ‘Looking is for free,’ someone nearby said. A girl no older than sixteen flashed him a smile. Her lips were red, set in a white, made-up face. Her teeth were small and uneven. ‘Hey, mister,’ she said. ‘You want a quick one?’ She spoke English with an accent he knew well and with a vocabulary learned from reading cheap novels.

Wolf said, ‘I’ve not seen you here before.’

The girl shrugged. ‘What about it,’ she said.

‘You are Austrian,’ he said, in German.

‘What about it.’

In the alleyway the fat whore farted loudly and laughed as her bowels emptied steaming onto the cold flagstones. Wolf averted his gaze.

‘You should find another line of work,’ he told the girl.

‘Go to hell, mister.’

Underneath the streetlights a few johns were already passing, eyeing up the girls. In a few hours trade would be brisk. Another whore approached them. She was someone Wolf recognised, Dominique, a half-caste girl. ‘Pay no attention to him,’ she told the new girl. ‘It’s just Mr Wolf’s way with us. Isn’t it, Mr Wolf?’ She smiled at him. She had light brown skin, red lips and cool eyes. The new girl looked at Wolf uncertainly. He knew the expression in her eyes. Trying to place him. When he had first come to London many had known his name. Now there were precious few who cared. ‘Fräulein Dominique,’ he said, politely.

‘Mr Wolf.’ She turned to her sister in trade. ‘Mr Wolf never goes with one of us.’ Her smile was mocking. ‘Mr Wolf only ever looks.’

The Austrian girl shrugged. There was a dull look in her eyes. Wolf wondered how she had come to London, what she had escaped from. He could imagine it well enough. He bore the scars of such a departure himself. ‘What is your name?’ he said.

‘It’s Edith.’

He touched the brim of his hat. ‘Edith,’ he said.

‘You can fuck me for ten shillings,’ the girl said.

‘What Mr Wolf wants,’ Dominique said, ‘it would take more than a ten-shilling whore to satisfy.’

Wolf didn’t answer back. There was never a point, with prostitutes. In Vienna before the War he had seen them on the Spittelberggasse, each girl behind a lighted window, some young, some old, some sitting, some standing, some doing their hair or smoking cigarettes. For a long time he had walked past the low one-storey houses, with his friend, Gustl, watching them, and the men who came to use their services, how the lights in the rooms would be turned off once a deal was concluded.
One could tell by the number of darkened windows how trade was going
.

The fat whore – her name was Gerta – had emerged from the alleyway pulling up her undergarments. She waved at Wolf cheerfully. He repressed a shudder of revulsion. The young girl, Edith, had lost interest in him. A couple of men on the other side of the street were looking at her with interest, cattle traders examining livestock. They called to her and she was gone, into the shadows. The half-caste Dominique was suddenly very close. She was taller than Wolf. Her lips were by his ears. Her breath warm on his skin. ‘I know what you want,’ she said. ‘I can give it to you.’

There was a strength about her; he feared and desired what she could sense in him. Her hand reached down and pressed painfully on the front of his trousers. ‘Yes,’ Dominique murmured, ‘I know. And I would enjoy doing it to you, too.’

For a moment he was frozen; she had snared him with lust; what the Jews called the ‘evil inclination’, the
yetzer hora
. But he was stronger than her; stronger than that. He removed her hand. ‘I’ll thank you not to touch me again,’ he said. Dominique looked him down and up. Her lips curled and then she too was gone, into the night. Wolf walked on.

Wolf’s Diary, 1st November 1939 –
contd
.

At night the fruit and vegetable market closes and a different type of market springs beyond my office window.
Whores. How I hated whores! Their bodies were riddled with syphilis and the other ills of their trade. The disease was but a symptom. Its cause was the manner in which love itself has been prostituted
.

I did not feel pity for the young girl, Edith. No. Instead I felt a cold anger, the sort of anger that had once driven me to oratory, when it had burned bright and strong. To see a Germanic girl prostituted in this way, in a foreign land, was a reminder to me of my own failure, of the way the land itself had been prostituted. Once Germany bled like a soldier; now it bled like a whore. It was a slow death; it was a death of love. I walked past the girls and in the night I felt unseen eyes watching my passing; but there are always eyes watching in the night. A mystery is not when one’s action goes unobserved. Rather it is an action to which no witness is willing to come forward.

I know what Isabella Rubinstein feared. I made my way down through Walker’s Court onto Rupert Street, passing the White Horse and the Windmill cinema onto Shaftesbury Avenue. Theatreland. The lights burned bright here and theatregoers strolled along the avenue mingling with pickpockets and dollymops. At the Apollo Theatre on the corner the electric signs advertised Patrick Hamilton’s
Gaslight
. A pair of coppers I knew by sight went past me, eyeing the whores openly. I nodded to them and went on.

Gerrard Street was full of little clubs and dusty alcoves. At this time of night gentlemen were heading out to supper with their wives, and young men of a literary bent were debating the merits and faults in the poetry of H.B. Yeats, Ezra Pound and Modernism in general. On the corner with Dean Street I saw a group of Blackshirts standing together in a dark mob, eying the passers-by with sullen hostility. On a wall I saw a placard for Mosley’s election campaign. Oswald’s handsome British face stared out at me with its dapper moustache and ironic smile. I saluted him, crisply. Then I went into the Hofgarten.

It lay at the bottom of a narrow staircase behind a grey wooden door that bore no plaque. It was not a members-only club but then it was not
not
a members-only club, either. It was a place for like-minded people to meet and talk of the past. I abhorred it for all that it represented and all that it wasn’t, and couldn’t be. I pushed the heavy door at the bottom of the stairs and went in.

It was dark and smoky inside. The smell of heavy Bavarian beer hung in the air like a peasant woman’s thick skirts hanging to dry. I could hear laughter, men’s drunken talk, the tap-tap-tap of chess pieces against a chessboard. A small piano stood in the corner, but no one was playing. It was too early and years too late for anyone to be playing the Horst Wessel Song.

I could feel eyes on me. Heard the pitch of conversation change. In years past I would have revelled in it. Now I set my jaw and bore it. I hung up my coat and my hat and made my way to the bar counter.

‘What could I get you, sir?’

‘I would like a herbal tea,’ I said.

He was a big ugly brute of a man; a fine Aryan. The face he turned on me began to open its maw in a display of mockery or outrage, revealing a wealth of gold. He truly was a man who carried his valuables on his person. He never did finish, though. He took me in and his face changed and his mouth closed without voicing whatever wisdom it was he had been about to impart.

‘Tea, sir?’

‘If you would be so kind.’

‘But of course. Of course. Herr—’

‘Wolf,’ I said.

He rubbed his hands together, as if he were cold. ‘Wolf. Of course.’

‘Has Herr Hess come in yet?’ I said.

At that he all but stood to attention. ‘Not yet, sir,’ he said.

I gestured to an empty table in the corner. ‘I shall be sitting over there,’ I said. ‘Please be so kind as to bring me the tea when it is ready.’

He nodded that great big head of his. A farmer boy from Austria, of the kind I had grown up amongst. Salt of the earth. I wondered if he was smarter than he looked. I made my way to the empty table and sat down. I was glad of the darkness of the room. Too many familiar faces, too many reminders of a past the world had already forgotten and I was trying to. I fingered the roll of money in my suit pocket. I had not been to the Hofgarten in three years.

‘Our fight is for the soul of this country, and the soul of the world. We must struggle, for nothing comes easily to men such as us, who will change the world. We, the Blackshirts, have been called, and we shall lead this nation to a new and higher civilisation. There is a cancer growing in our midst, the cancer of Judaism. This is our revolution. We shall be baptised in fire. Remember, you have a voice. You have a vote. Vote Mosley. We shall triumph in adversity—’

‘Turn the God damned radio off,’ someone said.

His shadow fell on the table before I saw him. I may have dozed off. The cigarette and pipe smoke hurt my eyes. My tea had been cooling on the table for some time.

‘Hess,’ I said. He had thick wavy black hair and thick black eyebrows. His smile was genuine but cautious. I didn’t blame him.

‘Wolf,’ he said. For a moment, I thought he might try to hug me. I rose from the chair and shook his hand, formally.

‘It is good to see you again,’ he said.

‘You, too,’ I said. I looked at him. He bore up well. London had been good to Hess. His hair looked luxurious and shiny. His jacket was styled in black with the lightning bolt of the Blackshirts on the lapels. It looked tailor-made. He wore riding boots and a paunch. Hess had grown fat in this foreign city, after the Fall.

‘You are doing well,’ I said.

He patted his belly. ‘I get by,’ he said.

I gestured at the chair opposite and sat down again. He followed. ‘Can I get you anything?’ he said. I shook my head. ‘You never come to the Hofgarten,’ Hess complained. ‘Never come to see me. I wish you’d let me help you, at least. Money—’

‘I do not want your money.’

He sighed. ‘I know,’ he said. He signalled to the barman. The lad brought over a small brandy and placed it at Hess’s elbow. Hess swirled it around, sniffed it appreciatively, and sipped.