When, one Sunday afternoon a week later, I visited my nurses in the City Hospital and not without vanity displayed my spruce, brand-new self, I was already in possession of a silver tie pin with a pearl in it.
The dear girls were speechless when they saw me sitting in the nurses’ room. That was late in the summer of ‘47. I crossed my arms over my chest in the traditional way and played with my leather gloves. For more than a year now I had been a stonecutter’s helper, a master at fluting and grooving. I crossed my legs, careful not to disturb the crease in my trousers. Our good Guste took care of my suit as though it had been made to order for Köster, whose homecoming was going to change everything. Sister Helmtrud wanted to feel the material and of course I let her. In the spring of ‘47 we celebrated Kurt’s seventh birthday with home-mixed egg liqueur and homemade sand cake—take two pounds of butter. Take this, take that—and I gave him a mouse-grey loden coat. Meanwhile Sister Gertrude had joined the other nurses and I passed around some candy which, in addition to twenty pounds of brown sugar, we had been given for a diorite slab. Little Kurt, it seemed to me, was much too fond of school. His teacher, who was young and attractive and in no way resembled la Spollenhauer, spoke well of him; she said he was bright, though a trifle solemn. How gay nurses can be when you bring them candy. When left alone for a moment with Sister Gertrude, I inquired about her free Sundays.
“Well, today for instance, I’m off at five. But,” said Sister Gertrude with resignation, “there’s nothing doing in town.”
I said it was worth trying. Her reaction was: “What’s the use?” Her idea was to have her sleep out. I made my invitation more definite, and when she still couldn’t make up her mind, concluded mysteriously with the words: “A little gumption, Sister Gertrude. We’re only young once. I know someone who’s got plenty of cake stamps.” I illustrated this last remark with a light, stylized tap on my breast pocket and offered her another piece of candy. Strange to say, I was rather terrified when this strapping Westphalian lass, who was not my type at all, said as though to the medicine chest: “All right, if you feel like it. Let’s say six o’clock, but not here, how about Cornelius-Platz?”
As though I would ever have expected Sister Gertrude to meet me or anyone else in or near the hospital entrance! At six o’clock I was waiting for her under the Cornelius-Platz clock, which was still feeling the effects of the war and did not tell time. She was punctual, as I could tell by the not very expensive pocket watch I had bought some weeks before. I hardly recognized her; if I had seen her a little sooner, on her descent for instance from the streetcar some fifty paces away, before she could notice me, I should have slipped quietly away; for Sister Gertrude did not come as Sister Gertrude in white with a Red Cross pin, she came in miserably cut civilian dress as Miss Gertrude Wilms from Hamm or Dortmund or one of those towns between Dortmund and Hamm.
She didn’t notice my dismay, but told me she had nearly been late because, just to be mean, the head nurse had given her something to do just before five.
“Well, Miss Gertrude, may I offer a few suggestions? Let’s first relax a while in a pastry shop and after that whatever you say: we could go to the movies, it’s too late to get theater tickets, or how about a little dance?”
“Oh, yes, let’s go dancing,” she cried with enthusiasm. It was too late when she realized, but then with ill-concealed distress, that despite my finery I was hardly cut out to be her dancing partner.
With a certain malice—why hadn’t she come in the nurse’s uniform I was so fond of?—I confirmed the arrangements; she, for lack of imagination, soon forgot her fright, and joined me in consuming—I one piece, she three—some cake that must have had cement in it. After I had paid with money and cake stamps, we boarded the Gerresheim car, for if Korneff were to be believed, there was a dance hall below Grafenberg.
We did the last bit of the way slowly on foot, for the car stopped before the uphill stretch. A September evening by the book. Gertrude’s wooden sandals, obtainable without coupons, clattered like the mill on the floss. The sound made me feel gay. The people coming downhill turned around to look at us. Miss Gertrude was embarrassed. I was used to it and took no notice. After all it was my cake stamps that had fed her three slices of cement cake at Kürten’s Pastry Shop.
The dance hall was called Wedig’s and subtitled The Lions’ Den. There was tittering before we left the ticket window, and heads turned as we entered. Sister Gertrude was ill at ease in her civilian clothing and would have fallen over a folding chair if a waiter and I hadn’t held her up. The waiter showed us a table near the dance floor, and I ordered two iced drinks, adding in an undertone audible only to the waiter: “But toss in a couple of shots, if you please.”
The Lions’ Den consisted chiefly of a large room that must once have been a riding academy. The rafters and bomb-scarred ceiling had been decorated with streamers and garlands from last year’s carnival. Muted colored lights swung in circles, casting reflections on the resolutely slicked hair of the young black marketeers, some of them fashionably dressed, and the taffeta blouses of the girls, who all seemed to know each other.
When the drinks were served, I bought ten American cigarettes from the waiter, offered Sister Gertrude one and gave another to the waiter, who stored it behind his ear. After giving my companion a light, I produced Oskar’s amber cigarette holder and smoked half a Camel. The tables around us quieted down. Sister Gertrude dared to look up. When I crushed out my enormous Camel butt in the ash tray and left it there, Sister Gertrude picked it up with a practiced hand and tucked it away in the side pocket of her oilskin handbag.
“For my fiancé in Dortmund,” she said. “He smokes like mad.”
I was glad I wasn’t her fiancé and glad too that the music had started up.
The five-piece band played “Don’t Fence Me In.” Males in crêpe soles dashed across the dance floor without colliding and appropriated young ladies who as they arose gave their bags to girl friends for safekeeping.
A few of the couples danced with a smoothness born of long practice. Quantities of gum were being ruminated; now and then a group of young black marketeers would stop dancing for a few measures to confer in Rhenish leavened with American slang while their partners, held vaguely by the arm, bobbed and joggled impatiently. Small objects exchanged hands: a true black marketeer never takes time off.
We sat the first dance out and the next foxtrot as well. Oskar took an occasional look at the men’s feet. When the band struck up “Rosamund,” he asked a bewildered Sister Gertrude to dance.
Remembering Jan Bronski’s choreographic arts, I, who was almost two heads shorter than Sister Gertrude, decided to try a schieber; I was well aware of the grotesque note we struck and determined to accentuate it. With resignation she let herself be led. I held her firmly by the rear end, thirty percent wool content; cheek to blouse, I pushed her, every pound of her, backward and followed in her footsteps. Sweeping away obstacles with our unbending side arms, we crossed the dance floor from corner to corner. It went better than I had dared to hope. I risked a variation or two. My cheek still clinging to her blouse, my hand still supported by her hips, I danced around her without relinquishing the classical posture of the schieber, whose purpose it is to suggest that she is about to fall backward and that he is about to fall on top of her, though because they are such good dancers, they never actually fall.
Soon we had an audience. I heard cries such as: “Didn’t I tell you it was Jimmy? Hey, take a look at Jimmy. Hello, Jimmy. Come on. Jimmy. Let’s go, Jimmy.”