The Hustler: The Story of a Nameless Love From Friedrichstrasse (25 page)

Was he away with someone else? That, too, seemed hardly likely. He would have told him, or at least would have written. That he should just stay away without a word of explanation or of farewell—he would not and could not believe it of him. No, he would not do
that
to him. Perhaps, if their relationship had slackened instead of—as was the case—becoming closer; perhaps, if they had seen one another seldom and not, as recently, almost daily. But as it was—no, he was not a mean boy, and conscious cruelty, which so many boys did possess, lay far from him. That time in Potsdam, true—but that was now long ago, and even then there were excuses enough for him. No, his Gunther would not just walk away from him forever—he would not and could not believe it.

Besides, with whom could he be? Who would take him away so suddenly, from one day to the next? A second Count was not so easy to find, and never had he noticed that any of his current acquaintances (but what did he know of them?) were taking a deeper interest in the boy. Not from his words, but from the whole way he led his life—gifts, nonappearances, evasions—surely he would have noticed. His heart would have told him, which, indeed, was not allowed any jealousy, but did beat only for him, so that like the needle of a magnet, he would have sensed any turning away from him. No, that was not it either.

So it could only be the one thing left: they had apprehended him. For the second time, and this time inescapably! So firmly that he had been unable to send word and even now could not. The only thing that argued against this was Gunther’s repeated protestations, when he was begged to at least be careful, that since he no longer walked the streets or went to the lounges, nothing at all could happen, for “there” they were all, the gentlemen and the boys, entirely among themselves and beyond all danger.

Yet, it could only be
that!

His fear became so great that he could no longer endure it.

He
must
do something. If he only knew
what!

He thought for a moment of going to the police, but realized immediately the folly of such a step. Even if they were able to give him information, they would bluntly refuse to. The resident registration office? He was unable to give them any particulars, not even his full name.

He even thought of a private detective agency. There they would not be crude and insolent, but would take as much money as possible and naturally not help in the least. There they tried to catch husbands in flagrate delicto and unfaithful wives, but not street boys who had run away from home.

Nothing, he could do nothing.

However, since he could no longer endure this waiting, he took to the streets.

He crossed through the Passage again and again with long and hurried strides. But it was empty these icy winter days, and no people were standing around its entrances, not even a boy. He walked up Friedrichstrasse and down again in the insane hope of seeing the one face he was seeking suddenly pop up. He searched in the west. He searched everywhere.

He walked so long that his feet no longer bore him, and he staggered home.

He sat there again, often until morning dawned, alone, more hopeless from day to day. And always he had this fear lying on his heart like a heavy iron fist, then grasping for his throat to choke him, until he felt no longer able to breathe.

*

Then came hours of complete despair.

In them, too, he was driven out. He tried to deaden himself. He went to cinemas and saw nothing, to concerts and heard nothing. He went to theaters, only to get up and leave again.

He sought the old places of memory, where they had met, where they had been together: the bridge over the Spree, where at first he so often and so long had stood in vain; the little restaurant where they had sat for the first time, and then many another time after that had sat opposite one another; these and other places of memory, and each only tore the wound deeper.

Again at home and alone, it was the same. Here in that large chair his small, tender body had cuddled and there he had lain on the sofa—almost always when he had been with him. It was his favorite place—from there his clear and sweet voice had sounded over to him at his desk, impatient, begging, coaxing: to stop working and come to him. His feet had walked on this old rug—he was everywhere, everywhere! And gone—gone forever!

Another week passed, almost a third. But it did not get better. It became worse and worse.

I should not continue to think about him, he told himself. I must forget him. I must! He told himself this again and again, and knew very well that he could not. Not for a moment could he forget.

What did it help, that he tried to reason this through: It is all past. You will never see him again. He is forever lost to you! He did not believe it himself. He could not and would not believe it.

What did it help, that he forced on himself the foreign thought: You cannot continue to live like this. It is impossible. Try to find another friend. Even if it is not love, hardly even friendship (how much these thoughts resembled those earlier thoughts when he hardly knew him, wanted to forget him, and even then could not!), it would still be a living being, with whom you could talk, whom you could help, that you would have like a pet dog—what did it help that he told himself this, only to see immediately how absurd this thought was and how entirely impossible.

In such hours he had a horror of himself as a traitor. He had a horror of life, of this life which stole him from his side. He began to hate it with a wild and gloomy hate, as he now hated those who led it—the fortunate ones who could lead it.

Since he found no forgetfulness and could not bear the memories—not a single one!—any longer, he sought to deaden himself in work. He brought work home with him in piles and buried himself in it. He no longer went out. He sat over it until his aching eyes gave out and his pen fell from his hand from fatigue.

This went on for a week, until he was forced to quit, no longer from fatigue, but from disgust.

In the long run his thoughts were not frightened away or killed in this way either. They came again, oppressed and tormented him, scattered and always concentrated themselves anew into one thought:
him!

Now he did not go home from work at all.

Directly after closing he rode out of the city. Anywhere, it was all the same, only out of the city.

At some station or other he got off, strayed for hours through dark, bare woods and along the banks of the large lakes, aimless, until he came to another station, from which he rode back. He walked in all weather, in rain, storm, and wind, through wetness, mire, and snow, until his body gave way under him. Then he sat for a long time in a lonely forest inn, the only and unwelcome guest, in a cold corner, often to wait later for a long time on an empty train platform. He came home late, soaked through and muddy, but—thank heaven!—tired enough to drop.

For that was what he wanted: to become tired, dead tired, so as to find forgetfulness in sleep.

He never knew where he had been. It had been dark everywhere, dark and cold. In the woods, in the suburbs, in the strange inns. And in himself.

Then that, too, failed him.

Now there came over him spontaneously so deep a fatigue that he could no longer pluck up courage for anything, hardly for his daily work.

He still did it, but mechanically and indifferently.

In his office people shook their heads over him. They did not understand him. One time he worked day and night, voluntarily and unasked—then again he left everything standing and lying around. He was earnestly advised to visit a doctor or take a vacation.

He laughed inwardly. A doctor? How could a doctor help him?

One must have trust in a doctor, must be able to trust oneself to him.

He had no one whom he could trust.

Sure, if it had been a woman he was suffering over—how they all would have understood him! Then his passion would have been great and sacred, and his despair noble. (“Unrequited love”—celebrated in innumerable books, described, justified, and understood.) But since it was only a boy—madness, if not a crime, the only cure to be locked up. Locked up in a cold-water treatment institution for the insane.

He had no one to whom he could talk.

*

Fear and despair alternated in the third and fourth weeks, to ever new exhaustion.

Nothing brought him comfort—no hope. He had none left.

He was no longer capable of reading. It required too much effort. He could no longer work. He did not know what he was writing. And he could stand people no longer, hardly even the mere sight of them.

But he still did not lose his self-control among them.

Only it was now no longer the calm superiority of his guard, but rather a tortured summoning up of his last strength, never to show for a moment how he felt inside. A last pride held him erect. But their laughter, their conversation, even the most impersonal and indifferent shoptalk drove him mad.

His fatigue was as deep as that after a long, severe illness.

He stayed home again in the evenings. But he no longer lay on the sofa or bed, staring and listening; he just sat in a chair, arms on his knees, his head propped on his cold hands, looking straight ahead at the floor for hours—too tired to look up, too tired even to move.

At times he talked to himself.

Then it was mostly the same words, the words of a little poem that once, in spring, shortly after his arrival in Berlin, he had read and never forgotten. He did not know whose words they were. He did not reflect on what they meant or were intended to say.

It was their sound that lulled him.

He thought he remembered that the little poem was entitled “The Day.” No—”Call” had stood over it. He recited it to himself again and again:

*

Never when longing calls are you By light of day with me; Never can I return to you—That path I cannot see.

*

You should be all bathed in light In early morning’s glow, Hours and hours to be with me As through the
day
we’d go.

*

See this day from the greatest height Spread luster and light and scent—For pleasure and joy and love it’s made, Entirely for us it’s meant.

*

You, however, never come,

Are never really mine:

You come only in darkest night

And never in day’s sunshine.

*

Empty of joy and light you come, A shadow-figure face: Fool and mislead by empty walls And vanish without a trace!

*

He spoke the verses to himself again and again. Above all the two lines:

*

You come only in darkest night

And never in day’s sunshine.

*

And ended groaning:

“Never more—not by day, not in the night—never more do you come, my beloved boy, never more do you come to me, never more!”

Call? Every call for Gunther was in vain and silence the only answer.

*

Finally, the last, poor comfort of these strange words also failed. His memory held them no longer. They disintegrated and, of the empty, meaningless words, now even robbed of the sweetness of their sound, only the final lines remained for him:

*

“Fool and mislead by empty walls . . .”

*

They alone he spoke at times to the cold and mute wall opposite his house:

*

“And vanish without a trace.”

*

Without a trace! Without any trace!

*

Nothing, nothing remained.

The days passed. How many? He did not know.

The year came to an end.

*

He required sleeping pills in order to sleep. Then it was a leaden sleep, and he awoke with exhausted limbs and a heavy pressure in his temples.

And he never fell asleep without the single wish that remained to him: that it be his last sleep, from which no awakening followed!

*

He was gone! He did not know if he was still alive. And that was the most terrible of all: he did not even know that! If I knew he was dead (he often thought now), I could think about him more easily.

*

He had nothing of his.

All that he possessed of him was a small, woefully bad picture, taken on some occasion by an itinerant photographer in the street, a tintype for thirty pennies. (For in those blissful weeks of carelessness and unconcern for tomorrow his repeated resolution to have a good picture made was never carried out.)

That small, hardly recognizable picture and a dirty, half-torn scrap of paper, on which was written in a childish hand “Can you fergive me” was all that he possessed of him.

3

It was Christmas Eve.

He dreaded the holidays. Again he took work home with him, stacks of proof sheets. That they would help him, though, he no longer believed.

A snowstorm such as there had not been for years swept through the streets, accumulated into mounds, swirled around the corners, and pressed through all the crannies.

In his street the snow piled up on the end wall almost to the height of the second floor, the height of his window.

The entire city lay under a thick white blanket, with the soft white sheets of the sky over it.

He did not work; he sat there—just sat there.

In the evening he went out.

He walked down Friedrichstrasse toward Unter den Linden.

He was at the Passage.

*

For some time the Passage had taken on an entirely different appearance, outwardly and inwardly. Sold in its whole length to a large business corporation, it was first cleaned up. Relentlessly cleared out were the dubious ladies of Friedrichstrasse and their pimps. The whores and the boys were persecuted until they gave up and sought other places for their activity. Day by day, from early morning until late evening, the criminal police patrolled along the hall and immediately took away any boy they saw walk through more than once. Raids were made in the evening and at night, during which Unter den Linden and Friedrichstrasse—and with them, of course, the Passage—were closed off within a certain radius. Anyone who could not justify his presence there was loaded into a truck and, amid shrieks and howls, hauled off to the police station. They were sheer roundups.

The johns, too, both those who were always here and those who only came occasionally, naturally stayed away. All that was left, as the remains of a vanished splendor, were a couple of poor, half-starved hustlers who suspected nothing of the change in the situation and still strayed here, only to be sent back out again forthwith. Only the public, although reduced in numbers, was still the same—the petty bourgeois public with the provincial air, who shoved through and were amazed, where there was nothing more to be amazed at. For even the wax-figure museum had to close its doors. The moth-eaten dummies of the waxworks, the crowned criminals as well as the uncrowned, were carried from their pedestals into the light of day, and the great as well as the small disintegrated to dust and mold.

The cafe in the middle had become a restaurant, from which music no longer sounded to divert the strollers, and the shops did a bad business. Their proprietors changed or left.

The famous Passage even had its name at the entrance taken down and had become a street like any other. Berlin was one sight the poorer.

*

Of all of this, the man who now stood before it again naturally knew not the least, nor did it interest him.

He had not been here since the days of his final despairing attempts to find him, when he had also run here, then finally had to realize that he would no longer find him here.

Now he was standing here again. He himself did not know why.

It was already late, about nine o’clock.

All the shops around were long closed; no theater and no cinema was playing. The few restaurants still open were empty on this one evening of the year.

Here, too, everything was empty.

Graff walked on, toward the castle.

On Unter den Linden light still shone from the windows of a wine cellar. It was one of the few old wine cellars from the good old times, visited by regular customers and appreciated by connoisseurs. He entered.

Today, however, only two, old gentlemen were still sitting in the warm and comfortable room, each in his corner and as far away as possible from one another. The newcomer, too, selected a similar place and ordered a bottle of wine. He was unable to eat; as usual he had no hunger. The waiter, a son of the current proprietor who was serving his apprenticeship here according to an old custom, brought it to him. He was still as young as himself.

“You will certainly want to close soon,” the last guest for today said tiredly.

“No, sir,” sounded the friendly answer, “we’ll stay open, even if no one else comes. Don’t let me disturb you at all.”

“Don’t let me disturb you either,” he received as answer.

Graff poured himself a glass and drank the good and warming wine. I will remain sitting here, he thought. I will drink this bottle up, and then another, and perhaps still another . . . until—

But then he stood up suddenly, without having drunk the first bottle, paid, and hurried out.

A frantic restlessness had come over him.

Where was he? Where was he this evening, where? He seemed to be calling him. With a beseeching and helpless voice, he was calling him. He now heard him calling quite clearly. Where was he?

He must look for him again—there!

*

Through the thick snow he quickly walked the first few steps to the Passage as if chased.

Now he was in the hall.

It was absolutely empty. Not a soul, not a single person was in it on this evening at this hour. It lay there—forlorn, desolate, dead.

In the middle the snow, which the storm had driven through the chinks in the glass roof, had piled up. An icy cold streamed through from all sides—from above, from both entrances.

Now walking through it alone, he reached the southern entrance. Here, too, there was no one. Through the fallen snow stamped, like ghosts in fog, muffled figures, reeling, hurrying, and disappearing, shadows of the night.

Graff was standing at the exit. Here they had seen one another for the first time. Here he had stood, alone, nervous, unacquainted with everything, innocent, on a spring day, a day full of sun and sky-blue. From here he had fled—from him. When had that been? Years ago, months ago, yesterday?

What lay in between? His whole life. Their whole life—his own life and his.

Graff shuddered within himself.

He was not here. Where was he?

He walked back. Still, not a human being. Only he. Nothing, he thought, nothing in the whole world can be so comfortless as this forlorn place of dubious pleasure, of desire, of vice. Nothing!—Oh, yes: one place—your heart!

He came again to the entrance on Unter den Linden.

Here, too, he had stood, no longer alone, no longer innocent, and therefore no longer fearful, but in the circle of the others, experienced, all too experienced in everything, and had looked at him when he caught sight of him: on the hot summer afternoon he had looked at him and not moved. And then he did follow him, to come to him!

He turned and walked down Unter den Linden, still, white, and empty of people.

There behind him—that cave, it was his grave. There he lay. From there had he just now called him.

But now his call had become silent.

*

He walked home.

Here, too, all was quiet. No light in the windows, as there was everywhere else today. This house, this cursed street, in which even the children were afraid to play, was passed over by all joy, all celebrations of life.

Only pain and suffering came here, as they had come to him. And death! Why did it not come today? And why not to him?

In his room he stood at first and stared blankly ahead. His arms hung down limply and his coat slid down from them.

Then he said to himself: “It is at an end. I will never see him again. For he is dead. Only as a dead person may I still think of him.”

And suddenly, as if hit by a blow, he fell into the chair at the table. There he lay, his face buried in his hands, in the final hours of this evening.

Weep, he thought. One may weep for a dead person. It is all that one can still do for him, even if it is of no use to him and he does not know.

But he was unable to weep. Since those first bitter tears as a child he had no longer been able to weep.

He only groaned at times, the way a poor, forsaken and forlorn person groans when even his dearest thing has been taken.

Only one comfort still remained for him—one thought:

Now nothing more can come—for this was the worst!

He did not know that the last and worst was still to come.

4

He got up late and dawdled away the hours, something he had never done before.

Outside, the snowstorm blustered through the streets and the flakes swirled around his window.

He ate in a wine cellar at the Weidendamm Bridge and only with difficulty found an empty table. He was surrounded by festive activity, laughter, and cheerfulness.

He walked home again. His room had been made, as always.

These days, too, he knew of and saw his landlady as little as usual. Was she at home? What did it matter to him!

He did not work. He wanted to read, but as often as he took a book in his hand he let it fall again. He walked around, picked up objects, looked at them as if he had never seen them before, and laid them back down again. A lighted cigarette went out. He crushed it, without knowing what he was doing.

The full perception of the complete senselessness of his life without him stood suddenly before him.

For what was he living? Why should he still live on?

For he now clearly felt that he was incapable of suffering any more. Joy had gone from his life, the short joy of a few weeks. Now suffering, too, was going and his life was robbed of its last meaning.

End it! he thought. Go to him, the dead one, lay yourself beside him, and die!

Go—but where?

There was no fear, no horror of death in him, but also no longing for it. Without a longing, a self-imposed end was—he felt—not possible.

Therefore he must continue to live.

He walked around again, picked things up in his hand—his pen, an ashtray, a glass—and considered them with the same long and absent gaze as before, as if he had never seen them.

He walked to the window and looked out.

The snow had stopped blowing. Everything was white out there—white powdered the opposite wall, empty, cold, and withdrawn.

Graff stared out at it.

There, where the rain gutter ran down, he had always stood. Now the place was empty.

No, it was
not
empty. Was he not standing there—there at the gutter—was he not standing there? No, his senses must be deceiving him. It could only be a shadow.

He stepped back into the room.

I’m becoming completely crazy, he thought. I am already.

“Fool and mislead by empty walls . . .” For the first time in weeks he said the words again to himself.

Then he suddenly laid his hands firmly against his temples.

No, he had not deceived himself!

With a wild leap he was at the window, tore the casement open, cried out, dashed down the stairs, was over there. He caught the collapsing form up in his arms.

He carried him over the street, up the stairs, into his room, and let him slide onto the nearest chair. He slammed the doors and window shut, then stood before him.

He stretched his hand out, as if to make sure that it was truly he, and immediately drew it back again.

A couple of times he even ran around the room as if mad.

Then he knelt down before him, who sat there with closed eyes, his head sunk down on his breast, his arms hanging down limply as if lifeless. He took the ice cold, white hands in his own, and breathed on them.