"Aren't you cold in that dress, Anastasia?" Lulu asked as we walked down the chill stairwell of her apartment building. I couldn't take my eyes off Anastasia's alluring ass half veiled in the fishnet dress, glowing flesh and inviting shadows, an intricate geometry of intersecting diagonals and slim curves, reeling me into unfathomable seduction.
"At least one feels something, liebchen," Anastasia drawled. "The heart pounds and so one knows that one is alive. Also, men seem to like it." She turned and looked at me insolently. "Don't you, little one?"
"I don't find gooseflesh terribly erotic," I replied, trying to stare her down and losing my footing in the process. I tumbled down a flight of concrete stairs and lay there clutching my ankle. The two girls walked past, laughing mercilessly. I hobbled after them into the cold night air. Anastasia slid gracefully into the driver's seat of a shiny black Ferrari. Lulu got in beside her after I had edged myself into the cramped back seat. We drove off in a squeal of tortured rubber.
"Why do you stay in this slum, Lulu?" Anastasia asked, turning a corner at high speeds, almost flattening an elderly couple transfixed in her headlights like outraged rabbits.
"East Berlin is so wonderfully drab," Lulu protested.
"There are some amusing places here now," Anastasia conceded, driving effortlessly through three consecutive red lights. "But I should have thought your tastes would be better served elsewhere."
"Where are we going tonight?" Lulu asked.
"We are meeting Stash at Der Mauer," Anastasia replied, whipping the Ferrari through a maze of dark alleys. "It's a new club," she explained. "Owned by my hairdresser. We thought you might enjoy it." Anastasia braked savagely at the nondescript entrance of a warehouse. A young man in khaki uniform and jackboots goose-stepped up and saluted stiffly. "Real East German border guards. Saure pays attention to detail. He is a good hairdresser." Anastasia rapped at the warehouse entrance three times. The door opened a crack. A furtive eye looked us over and then the door opened wide.
"Princess!" A little bald man in dinner clothes exclaimed ecstatically, kissing Anastasia's hand and bowing obsequiously all around. "At your service. Princess, the gentleman is already here. I have had your table arranged in the bunker. I thought you would be more comfortable there. Please tell me if you have any special desires this evening." He giggled and rubbed his pudgy little hands.
We walked into an immense space packed with young people. The room was divided in half by a high concrete wall. Tables on either side shuddered with the deafening sound of machine gun fire. Searchlights played across the room. Groups of grungy desperadoes amused themselves trying to climb across rows of barbed wire. Four sentry towers stood in each corner of the warehouse and men in uniforms stood at attention in the turrets, holding rifles. A corpse or two lay artistically asprawl on the floor. We picked our way through to the center of the room and clambered down a metal spiral staircase which led to a small cellar. Swastikas and yellowing portraits of Hitler hung on every wall.
A man sat alone at a table laid out for four. He rose slowly as we approached, kissed Anastasia on the cheek, took Lulu's hand in his and brushed the air above it with his lips, and then turned to me. "Stanislas Malinowski," he murmured as we shook hands. He was a tall man with very broad shoulders hunched together slightly. He had the most melancholy eyes I had ever seen: cold pale blue, crinkled at the edges, they seemed to have seen it all. His thin lips were twisted into an agreeable sneer and a broad scar ran diagonally across the lines on his wide forehead. He wore his thinning blond hair a little too long at the back. I guessed that he was in his late thirties, Polish, and a gentleman.
"What do you do, sir?" I asked once we had been served. I'm always more polite with a drink safely in hand.
"Please call me Stash," Stanislas replied with equal politeness. "I am a director."
"Theater or film?" I used to take part in amateur theatricals in the primary school I attended in San Salvador. I had won considerable notoriety at the age of seven for my portrayal of Jesus as an incompetent young carpenter. My father had even received death threats on my life from ultra-Catholic extremists.
"Don't you remember, angel, we saw Sodom together in Oxford," Lulu brightly reminded me from across the table.
I stared wide-eyed at Stash. It was all I could do to prevent myself from gushing about how much I had enjoyed Sodom and the even more gloomily erotic Gomorrah. Lot's Daughters, the most recent and controversial of Malinowski's black and white series of Old Testament movies, had won critical acclaim and prizes galore but it had also sparked off violent protests in New York and Jerusalem where angry demonstrators had set fire to an art theater in which the movie had just opened, inflicting third degree burns on a popcorn vendor with no sense of smell who died a few days later in hospital of his injuries, a tragedy which gave rise to the United Nations sponsored Campaign to Enhance the Status and Power Of the Olfactorily Labored (official acronym: CESSPOOL). "What are you working on now?" I asked.
"Uriah's wife," Stash said, carefully filling his glass with equal measures of gin, vodka, and ether.
"Is that the one King David was after, so he sent her husband into battle to die?"
"Yes. Lots of sex and violence. And everyone dies miserably." Stash looked a little happier. "Just what they deserve."
"Stash is a good Polish Catholic. He believes that beautiful Jewesses should be portrayed as bitches," Anastasia said evenly.
"That's why I chose you for the role, Nasty," Stash replied equally equably. "So few actresses reveal their innate viciousness. You are the exception that proves the rule. Whatever that means." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I have worked with many actors. Most are good liars. One actually believes for some time that they have feelings, even brains," he added graciously. "But all actors, by definition, want people to stare at them. Sit passively and eat popcorn and look at me and drool! And yet these monsters of vanity and narcissism also want to be liked. The contradiction is infuriating. I would gladly see all actors strangled at birth like female infants in the Third World. Or perhaps one would wait until they first revealed this vicious propensity. Then one might shut them up in a cave without food or water as the Namuna Indians do to children suspected of hysterical leanings." Stash smiled widely, his lips still pressed together tight.
"If you hate actors so much, why don't you stop directing?" Lulu objected.
Stash and Nasty laughed at this piece of naivete. Lulu blushed. "I always do," Stash answered. "Every movie is my last. Then I run out of money and I have to make another movie, knowing that it will only cause me anguish." He spread out his broad calloused hands in a graceful gesture of resignation. "Life is suffering and one has to make a living. Therefore one must suffer. It is better than being bored."
"What did you do before you become a director?"
"I was an anthropologist," Stash said sadly. "And a mountain climber. One day my harness broke and I fell and broke my back in three places and then I had plenty of time to think about my life as I lay in the hospital. I decided that this sort of prostitution appealed to me. They say that I am a good director. And I enjoy these old Biblical myths. These stories of human greed and divine cruelty."
"Midas," I said, remembering something. Lulu crinkled her eyes at me. Very casually, she leaned over toward Stash. Her black dress slipped off one round white shoulder.
"I don't think that myth is in the Old Testament," Stash said mildly. "But, yes, he too was greedy and the gods took advantage. Whom the gods would punish, they grant his every wish." He looked at Lulu and smiled. Their hands grazed each other as they picked up their drinks. My eyes met Anastasia's phosphorescent glitter. Her knee brushed mine under the table.
"Where did you get those bruises?" Nasty asked curiously. "Do you like to be beaten?" Small hot fingers stroked my thigh.
"Some skinheads in Prague got a little carried away," I said, trying to control my breathing. The fingers slid deftly under the napkin on my lap. "It was really my own fault." I told them briefly about my chequered career at the University of Truth and Justice.
"Does Max von Hohenstaufen have something to do with this strange university? He is a cousin through one of my mother's marriages," Anastasia explained indifferently. "The most boring fellow. His son is nicer but he always has this guilty look in his eyes. Just because Max mistreated him as a child. Poor Willi. He is now working as a prostitute near the Zoo."
Stash laughed. "Maybe I should tell Flysenko to study male prostitutes," he murmured to himself.
"Flysenko? The Polish sociologist?" I asked. "He will also be teaching at the University of Truth and Justice soon. Cain Piknik recommended him."
"Well, yes, Piknik would. The man has an insane sense of humour. He used to give the policemen little foil medals when they came to arrest him. He can also whistle with his asshole. Very confusing when we were trying to escape arrest together. Nobody was ever sure if Piknik was a real dissident or an agent provocateur. After the revolution, he became very wealthy. He claims it is from his pornographic newspaper but nobody believes it. Most mysterious. But at least he is amusing. Flysenko, on the other hand…"
"Do you know him?"
"We taught together in Warsaw many years ago. If you were still at this university, you would have the dubious pleasure of hearing Flysenko give pompous lectures on the connection between pleasure and pain." Stash's lips curled. "As though one learns about such things by talking about them. For over two decades, he has been claiming to be working on a monumental study of prostitution. But he is still doing his field research."
Stash, Nasty, Lulu and I sat in the cellar drinking and talking for hours. When we eventually emerged from the bunker at four in the morning, the fun had only just begun upstairs. A group of giggling girls sat astride the wall, chipping at it with sledgehammers while beneath them gangs of hippies and skinheads slamdanced savagely in ankle deep water from the fire hoses and water cannons of the border guards. Tear gas and cordite hung heavy in the humid air. Sniggering happily, pudgy Saure watched it all and raked in the cash.
Stash said that he would drive Lulu home. Nasty just took one of my fingers and ran the tip of her tongue along its length lingeringly. Then she bit it. Viciously. I could feel my heart pounding. I knew I must was alive.
"At least one feels something, liebchen," Anastasia drawled. "The heart pounds and so one knows that one is alive. Also, men seem to like it." She turned and looked at me insolently. "Don't you, little one?"
"I don't find gooseflesh terribly erotic," I replied, trying to stare her down and losing my footing in the process. I tumbled down a flight of concrete stairs and lay there clutching my ankle. The two girls walked past, laughing mercilessly. I hobbled after them into the cold night air. Anastasia slid gracefully into the driver's seat of a shiny black Ferrari. Lulu got in beside her after I had edged myself into the cramped back seat. We drove off in a squeal of tortured rubber.
"Why do you stay in this slum, Lulu?" Anastasia asked, turning a corner at high speeds, almost flattening an elderly couple transfixed in her headlights like outraged rabbits.
"East Berlin is so wonderfully drab," Lulu protested.
"There are some amusing places here now," Anastasia conceded, driving effortlessly through three consecutive red lights. "But I should have thought your tastes would be better served elsewhere."
"Where are we going tonight?" Lulu asked.
"We are meeting Stash at Der Mauer," Anastasia replied, whipping the Ferrari through a maze of dark alleys. "It's a new club," she explained. "Owned by my hairdresser. We thought you might enjoy it." Anastasia braked savagely at the nondescript entrance of a warehouse. A young man in khaki uniform and jackboots goose-stepped up and saluted stiffly. "Real East German border guards. Saure pays attention to detail. He is a good hairdresser." Anastasia rapped at the warehouse entrance three times. The door opened a crack. A furtive eye looked us over and then the door opened wide.
"Princess!" A little bald man in dinner clothes exclaimed ecstatically, kissing Anastasia's hand and bowing obsequiously all around. "At your service. Princess, the gentleman is already here. I have had your table arranged in the bunker. I thought you would be more comfortable there. Please tell me if you have any special desires this evening." He giggled and rubbed his pudgy little hands.
We walked into an immense space packed with young people. The room was divided in half by a high concrete wall. Tables on either side shuddered with the deafening sound of machine gun fire. Searchlights played across the room. Groups of grungy desperadoes amused themselves trying to climb across rows of barbed wire. Four sentry towers stood in each corner of the warehouse and men in uniforms stood at attention in the turrets, holding rifles. A corpse or two lay artistically asprawl on the floor. We picked our way through to the center of the room and clambered down a metal spiral staircase which led to a small cellar. Swastikas and yellowing portraits of Hitler hung on every wall.
A man sat alone at a table laid out for four. He rose slowly as we approached, kissed Anastasia on the cheek, took Lulu's hand in his and brushed the air above it with his lips, and then turned to me. "Stanislas Malinowski," he murmured as we shook hands. He was a tall man with very broad shoulders hunched together slightly. He had the most melancholy eyes I had ever seen: cold pale blue, crinkled at the edges, they seemed to have seen it all. His thin lips were twisted into an agreeable sneer and a broad scar ran diagonally across the lines on his wide forehead. He wore his thinning blond hair a little too long at the back. I guessed that he was in his late thirties, Polish, and a gentleman.
"What do you do, sir?" I asked once we had been served. I'm always more polite with a drink safely in hand.
"Please call me Stash," Stanislas replied with equal politeness. "I am a director."
"Theater or film?" I used to take part in amateur theatricals in the primary school I attended in San Salvador. I had won considerable notoriety at the age of seven for my portrayal of Jesus as an incompetent young carpenter. My father had even received death threats on my life from ultra-Catholic extremists.
"Don't you remember, angel, we saw Sodom together in Oxford," Lulu brightly reminded me from across the table.
I stared wide-eyed at Stash. It was all I could do to prevent myself from gushing about how much I had enjoyed Sodom and the even more gloomily erotic Gomorrah. Lot's Daughters, the most recent and controversial of Malinowski's black and white series of Old Testament movies, had won critical acclaim and prizes galore but it had also sparked off violent protests in New York and Jerusalem where angry demonstrators had set fire to an art theater in which the movie had just opened, inflicting third degree burns on a popcorn vendor with no sense of smell who died a few days later in hospital of his injuries, a tragedy which gave rise to the United Nations sponsored Campaign to Enhance the Status and Power Of the Olfactorily Labored (official acronym: CESSPOOL). "What are you working on now?" I asked.
"Uriah's wife," Stash said, carefully filling his glass with equal measures of gin, vodka, and ether.
"Is that the one King David was after, so he sent her husband into battle to die?"
"Yes. Lots of sex and violence. And everyone dies miserably." Stash looked a little happier. "Just what they deserve."
"Stash is a good Polish Catholic. He believes that beautiful Jewesses should be portrayed as bitches," Anastasia said evenly.
"That's why I chose you for the role, Nasty," Stash replied equally equably. "So few actresses reveal their innate viciousness. You are the exception that proves the rule. Whatever that means." He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. "I have worked with many actors. Most are good liars. One actually believes for some time that they have feelings, even brains," he added graciously. "But all actors, by definition, want people to stare at them. Sit passively and eat popcorn and look at me and drool! And yet these monsters of vanity and narcissism also want to be liked. The contradiction is infuriating. I would gladly see all actors strangled at birth like female infants in the Third World. Or perhaps one would wait until they first revealed this vicious propensity. Then one might shut them up in a cave without food or water as the Namuna Indians do to children suspected of hysterical leanings." Stash smiled widely, his lips still pressed together tight.
"If you hate actors so much, why don't you stop directing?" Lulu objected.
Stash and Nasty laughed at this piece of naivete. Lulu blushed. "I always do," Stash answered. "Every movie is my last. Then I run out of money and I have to make another movie, knowing that it will only cause me anguish." He spread out his broad calloused hands in a graceful gesture of resignation. "Life is suffering and one has to make a living. Therefore one must suffer. It is better than being bored."
"What did you do before you become a director?"
"I was an anthropologist," Stash said sadly. "And a mountain climber. One day my harness broke and I fell and broke my back in three places and then I had plenty of time to think about my life as I lay in the hospital. I decided that this sort of prostitution appealed to me. They say that I am a good director. And I enjoy these old Biblical myths. These stories of human greed and divine cruelty."
"Midas," I said, remembering something. Lulu crinkled her eyes at me. Very casually, she leaned over toward Stash. Her black dress slipped off one round white shoulder.
"I don't think that myth is in the Old Testament," Stash said mildly. "But, yes, he too was greedy and the gods took advantage. Whom the gods would punish, they grant his every wish." He looked at Lulu and smiled. Their hands grazed each other as they picked up their drinks. My eyes met Anastasia's phosphorescent glitter. Her knee brushed mine under the table.
"Where did you get those bruises?" Nasty asked curiously. "Do you like to be beaten?" Small hot fingers stroked my thigh.
"Some skinheads in Prague got a little carried away," I said, trying to control my breathing. The fingers slid deftly under the napkin on my lap. "It was really my own fault." I told them briefly about my chequered career at the University of Truth and Justice.
"Does Max von Hohenstaufen have something to do with this strange university? He is a cousin through one of my mother's marriages," Anastasia explained indifferently. "The most boring fellow. His son is nicer but he always has this guilty look in his eyes. Just because Max mistreated him as a child. Poor Willi. He is now working as a prostitute near the Zoo."
Stash laughed. "Maybe I should tell Flysenko to study male prostitutes," he murmured to himself.
"Flysenko? The Polish sociologist?" I asked. "He will also be teaching at the University of Truth and Justice soon. Cain Piknik recommended him."
"Well, yes, Piknik would. The man has an insane sense of humour. He used to give the policemen little foil medals when they came to arrest him. He can also whistle with his asshole. Very confusing when we were trying to escape arrest together. Nobody was ever sure if Piknik was a real dissident or an agent provocateur. After the revolution, he became very wealthy. He claims it is from his pornographic newspaper but nobody believes it. Most mysterious. But at least he is amusing. Flysenko, on the other hand…"
"Do you know him?"
"We taught together in Warsaw many years ago. If you were still at this university, you would have the dubious pleasure of hearing Flysenko give pompous lectures on the connection between pleasure and pain." Stash's lips curled. "As though one learns about such things by talking about them. For over two decades, he has been claiming to be working on a monumental study of prostitution. But he is still doing his field research."
Stash, Nasty, Lulu and I sat in the cellar drinking and talking for hours. When we eventually emerged from the bunker at four in the morning, the fun had only just begun upstairs. A group of giggling girls sat astride the wall, chipping at it with sledgehammers while beneath them gangs of hippies and skinheads slamdanced savagely in ankle deep water from the fire hoses and water cannons of the border guards. Tear gas and cordite hung heavy in the humid air. Sniggering happily, pudgy Saure watched it all and raked in the cash.
Stash said that he would drive Lulu home. Nasty just took one of my fingers and ran the tip of her tongue along its length lingeringly. Then she bit it. Viciously. I could feel my heart pounding. I knew I must was alive.
