'Well, you're pretty short,' said Susie the bear. 'They sure look at me, a lot.'
'And one of them looks at Franny, a lot,' I said.
'That's not what I mean,' said Lilly. 'I mean they don't see people when they look at you.'
'That's because they're thinking about how everything could be different,' Frank said.
'People, too, Frank?' Franny asked. 'Do they think people could be different? Do you?'
'Yeah,' said Susie the bear. 'Like we could all be dead.'
Grief makes everything intimate; in our grieving for Mother and Egg, we got to know the radicals and whores as if we had always known them. We were the bereft children, motherless (to the whores), our golden brother slain (to the radicals). And so -- to compensate for our gloom, and the added gloom of the conditions in the Gasthaus Freud -- the radicals and whores treated us pretty well. And despite their day-and-night differences, they bore more similarities to each other than they might have supposed.
They both believed in the commercial possibilities of a simple ideal: they both believed they could, one day, be 'free.' They both thought that their own bodies were objects easily sacrificed for a cause (and easily restored, or replaced, after the hardship of the sacrifice). Even their names were similar -- if for different reasons. They had only code names, or nicknames, or if they used their real names, they used only their first names.
Two of them actually shared the same name, but there was no confusion, since the radical was male, the whore was female, and they were never at the Gasthaus Freud at the same time. The name was Old Billig -- billig, in German, means 'cheap.' The oldest whore was called this because her prices were substandard for the district of the city she strolled; the Krugerstrasse whores, although Krugerstrasse was in the First District, were themselves a sort of subdistrict to the Karntnerstrasse whores (around the corner). If you turned off the Karntnerstrasse onto our tiny street, it was as if you were lowering yourself (by comparison) into a world without light; one street off the Karntnerstrasse you lost the glow of the Hotel Sacher, and the grand gleam of the State Opera, and you noticed how the whores wore more eyeshadow, how their knees buckled, slightly, or their ankles appeared to cave in (from standing too long), or how they appeared to be thicker in the waist -- like the dressmaker's dummy in Frank's room. Old Billig was the captain of the Krugerstrasse whores.
Her namesake, among the radicals, was the old gentleman who had argued most ferociously with Freud about moving to the fifth floor. This Old Billig had earned his 'cheap' designation for his reputation of leading a hand-to-mouth existence -- and his history of being what the other radicals called 'a radical's radical.' When there were Bolsheviks, he was one; when the names changed, he changed his name. He was at the forefront of every movement, but -- somehow -- when the movement ran amok or into terminal trouble, Old Billig took up the rear position and discreetly trailed away out of sight, waiting for the next forefront. The idealists among the younger radicals were both suspicious of Old Billig and admiring of his endurance -- his survival. This was not unlike the view held of Old Billig, the whore, by her colleagues.
Seniority is an institution that is revered and resented in and out of society.
Like Old Billig the radical, Old Billig the whore was the most argumentative with Freud about changing floors.
'But you're going down,' Freud said, 'you'll have to climb one less flight of stairs. In a hotel with no elevator, the second floor is an improvement over the third.'
I could follow Freud's German, but not Old Billig's answer. Frank told me that she protested on the grounds of having too many 'me
mentos' to move.
'Look at this boy!' Freud said, groping around for me. 'Look at his muscles!' Freud, of course, 'looked' at my muscles by feeling them; squeezing and punching me, he shoved me in the general direction of the old whore. 'Feel him!' Freud cried. 'He can move every memento you got. If we gave him a day, he could move the whole hotel!'
And Frank told me what Old Billig said. 'I don't need to feel any more muscles,' Old Billig told Freud, declining the offer to squeeze me. 'I feel muscles in my frigging sleep,' she said. 'Sure he can move the mementos,' she said. 'But I don't want nothing broken.'
And so I moved Old Billig's 'mementos' with the greatest of care. A collection of china bears that rivaled Mother's collection (and after Mother's death, Old Billig would invite me to visit her room in the daylight hours -- when she was off duty, and gone from the Gasthaus Freud -- and I could spend a quiet time alone with her bears, remembering Mother's collection, which perished with her). Old Billig also liked plants -- plants that leaped out of those pots designed to resemble animals and birds: flowers springing from the backs of frogs, ferns sprawling over a grove of flamingos, an orange tree sprouting from the head of an alligator. The other whores mostly had changes of clothes and cosmetics and medicines to move. It was strange to think of them as having only 'night rooms' at the Gasthaus Freud -- as opposed to Ronda Ray having her 'dayroom'; it struck me how dayrooms and night rooms were used for similar purposes.
We met the whores that first night we helped them move from the third to the second floor. There were four whores on the Krugerstrasse, plus Old Billig. Their names were Babette, Jolanta, Dark Inge, and Screaming Annie. Babette was called Babette because she was the only one who spoke French; she tended to get most of the French customers (the French being most sensitive about speaking any language but French). Babette was small -- and therefore Lilly's favorite -- with a pixie face that the somber light in the lobby of the Gasthaus Freud could cause to look (at certain angles) unpleasantly rodent-like. In later years I would think of Babette as probably anoretic, without knowing it -- none of us knew what anorexia was, in 1957. She wore flowery prints, very summer-like dresses -- even when it wasn't summer -- and she had a funny kind of over-powdered sense about her (as if, if you touched her, a small puff of powder would blast through her pores); at other times, her skin had a waxiness about it (as if, if you touched her, your finger might leave a dent). Lilly told me once that Babette's smallness was an important part of her (Lilly's) growing up, because Babette helped Lilly realize that small people could actually have sex with large people and not be altogether destroyed. That's how Lilly liked to put it: 'Not altogether destroyed.'
Jolanta called herself Jolanta because she said it was a Polish name and she was fond of Polish jokes. She was square-faced, strong-looking, as big as Frank (and nearly as awkward); she gave off a heartiness that you suspected of being false -- as if, in the middle of a booming good joke, she might turn suddenly sour and produce a knife from her handbag or grind a wineglass into someone's face. She was broad-shouldered and heavy-breasted, solid in her legs but not fat -- Jolanta had the robust charm of a peasant who'd been strangely corrupted by a sneaky sort of city violence; she looked erotic, but dangerous. In my first days and nights at the Gasthaus Freud it was her image I most often masturbated to -- it was Jolanta I had the greatest trouble speaking to, not because she was the most coarse but because I was the most afraid of her.
'How can you recognize a Polish prostitute?' she asked me. I had to ask Frank for a translation. 'Because she pays you to fuck her,' Jolanta said. This I understood without Frank's help.
'Did you get it?' Frank asked me.
'Jesus, yes, Frank,' I said.
'Then laugh,' Frank said. 'You'd better laugh.' And I looked at Jolanta's hands -- she had the wrists of a farmer, the knuckles of a boxer -- and laughed.
Dark Inge was not a laugher. She'd had a most unhappy life. More important, she had not lived very much of her life, yet; she was only eleven. A mulatto -- with an Austrian mother and a black American G. I. for her father -- she'd been born at the start of the occupation. Her father had left with the occupying powers, in 1955, and nothing he'd told Inge or her mother about the treatment of black people in the United States had made them want to go with him. Dark Inge's English was the best among the whores, and when Father left for France -- to identify the bodies of Mother and Egg -- it was Dark Inge we spent most of our sleepless nights with. She was as tall as I was, although she was only Lilly's age, and the way they dressed her up made her look as old as Franny. Lithe and pretty and mocha-colored, she worked as a tease; she was not a real whore.
She was not allowed to stroll the Krugerstrasse without another whore beside her, unless she strolled the Krugerstrasse with Susie the bear; when any man wanted her, he was told he could only look at her -- and touch himself. Dark Inge was not old enough to be touched, and no man was allowed to be alone in a room with her. If a man wanted to be with her, Susie the bear kept them company. It was a simple system, but it worked. If a man looked as if he was about to touch Dark Inge, Susie the bear would make the necessary sounds and gestures preparatory to a charge. If the man asked Dark Inge to take off too many clothes, or if he insisted she look at him while he masturbated, Susie the bear would get restless. 'You're making the bear hostile,' Dark Inge would warn the man, who would leave -- or else finish masturbating quickly, while Dark Inge looked away.
All the whores knew that Susie the bear could get to their rooms in a matter of seconds. All it required was some cry of distress, because Susie -- like any well-trained animal -- knew all their voices by heart. Babette's nasal little yelp, Jolanta's violent bellow, Old Billig's shattering 'mementos.' But to us children the worst customers were the shame-faced men who masturbated to only the most modest glimpses of Dark Inge.
'I don't think I could beat off with a bear in my room,' Frank said.
'I don't think you could beat off with Susie in your room, Frank,' Franny said.
Lilly shuddered, and I joined her. With Father in France -- with those bodies most important to us -- we viewed the body traffic in the Gasthaus Freud with that detachment peculiar to mourners.