Geist

‘Nun liebe Kinder gebt fein Acht’– Rammstein.

*

My name is Sigrun, but I’ve answered to Mimi for many years now.  This is my story, or at least the story I would like to tell you.

I was – I am – a dancing girl.  How I came to end up in the Purple Shade Club in Berlin from my beginnings in the town of Gernsbach in the Black Forest, is of little consequence.  Suffice it to say that by the time I was twenty three, the Shade was both my work place and my home.  Or a tiny room, off the staircase at the back of the club’s main area was.  The room was bare, but clean and in its corner was a gas ring and kettle that served as my kitchen.  My bathroom was the toilets and wash basins used by the clientele.

Any time I had to myself was spent in writing to my family, or sometimes visiting the other girls in their various boarding houses, occasionally in their own rooms in private houses.  I was the only one of the girls who lived in the Shade, but I wasn’t the first.  There had been others before me, but I didn’t like to think about them too much.

My life, though, was mainly about dancing.  I did not entirely exist until I was on the stage, under the white spotlight of the Shade’s stage.  I’d started amongst the chorus girls; but although I followed routines and learned steps quickly, I was too tall, too suggestively sensual.  I stood out awkwardly and I made audiences feel uncomfortable.  No, I was made for solo dancing.

I found my heart in the dances I performed to the sad songs of the early hours.  When the club’s vibrancy had died down, and alcohol had made men lascivious and melancholy.  When the cigarette smoke had muted the world.

I would appear from the back of the stage in the intricate, jade kimono I’d found in the Shade’s dressing room and I would walk over to the piano where the notes of the heart-breaking songs rang out.  As the music reached a crescendo, I would shrug off the kimono to reveal the black bodice and stockings below it.  I would lie across the piano on my side and lift my leg high in the air in the most weary of manners.  After holding this pose with the necessary insouciance, I would slide off the piano and slink over to the singer, who stood stark in the spot light.  From behind him, I would wrap my arms round his chest; one of my legs round his legs, rubbing my shoe up and down his calf in time to his words of love and loss.

When the songs finished, the last notes always echoed around the Shade’s cavernous roof and then there was always a second of silence before the applause began.  In this pause, I would kiss the singer, round and full on the lips, and leave the stage, the kimono I’d picked up swishing behind me like a rippling, green sea.

Of course, in Berlin during the war, the Shade should never have been open and of course it always was.  Its audience was made up of soldiers in their uniforms - many of them were ordinary soldiers, but some were the same high ranking officers who would insist places like it shouldn’t exist at all. There were some women too in the audience –girlfriends, rarely wives of the men – and they would look at me with the same hunger in their eyes their men had.

When the Shade shuts its doors in the greyness of dawn, the audience, dancers and musicians moved on to parties in other rooms in other buildings. There were the parties where I had to smile and be interested in the banal chat of men in uniforms, where I had to listen wide eyed to their tales of battlefield bravado.  Parties where I had to endure drunken kisses and inexpert, clumsy embraces.

There were other parties too - ones I enjoyed far more.  These were the ones where I led men round on leashes, them on all fours, me yanking the leads; controlling them.  Sometimes I wore a chain round my waist that a man would be attached to by a dog collar around his neck, and the look of pain and pleasure on his face when I twisted unexpectedly to the side was something to behold.

There is beauty in a man off guard and guileless.  Something child-like.  I often thought about this when I caught sight of some of the men I encountered from these parties, in the audience at the Shade.  I’d seen them in other rooms.  In other positions.

What the men asked for and what I gave, had honesty about it.  A direct exchange.  Some feared my power over them, but it was a delicious fear.  We were beautiful in what we required from each other, uber male, uber female.

On nights after these parties, back in my room at the Shade, I always slept well.  These were the nights too, when I could most bear to think of home.  I remembered being a child on the carousel that would visit our town in the summer.  It was painted, vibrant, a whirligig of sound and colour.  But what I remember the best was the wildness of the horses’ eyes.   

Berlin has changed over the years.  Well, it’s not a profound thought to suggest that nothing stays the same.  But what I don’t know was when I changed.  I remember a very cold winter, with a lattice of frost embroidered across the window of my room.  I remember how burning my face felt, despite the ice.  I remember I didn’t want to leave, that everything seemed dream-like.   I’m not sure of anything else.

The Purple Shade Club has long gone, replaced by loft apartments for wealthy, young professionals.  My little room is the cleaning cupboard, I think.  Sometimes, I come out to dance in the middle of your room.  You may have felt my tongue as it runs up your arm, my legs wrapped around yours.

I feel your sadness too, but I make it better - I'd put you on a lead if I had one. Love may die, but desire and pain don't.  I should know.

I go back to rest amongst the cleaning products in my little cupboard and I dream.  All is spectacle, all is illusion, but still I watch like a believing child.  I remember a hot air balloon I once saw float over the Black Forest, drifting and high on the warm air currents of a long ago summer.  And I dream I get in to the balloon’s basket and float up to the moon.  I sit in the nook of its crescent and look over the world for a while, swinging.  Then I imagine a ladder – long and yellow - and I climb back down to earth.

*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dv6Th7kJ64Q