Where is Rothenburg? asks Kitty Schmidt.
Schellenberg immediately reminds Kitty Schmidt of the secret agreement she signed, and Kitty Schmidt no longer asks questions, she just coordinates the work and feigns naïveté. A soldier who is genuinely from Rothenburg shows up once at Salon Kitty He is no special guest, but this soldier receives first-class sexual services with the lady listed in the album as Number 7, and though the soldier from Rothenburg does climax, he gives away no information to anyone, he merely climaxes as he never has; and even after the magnificent orgasm, while he sips champagne, nibbles caviar and whispers foolish promises in the ear of beauty Number 7, he betrays no secrets, because he has none to betray, but the wax discs in the cellar spin, around they spin, recording only moans. Until late 1942 Kitty is visited by various prominent people, domestic and foreign powermongers: Count Galeazzo Ciano, Joachim von Ribbentrop, and their Spanish colleague, Minister of Foreign Affairs Ramón Serrano'Súñer, then S.S.-Major-General Sepp Dietrich, a particularly demanding guest who asks for all twenty girls at once for a party, a huge orgy; the cables on the “bugs” are red hot from his sexual potency and physical stamina. The confidential staff in the cellar are astonished and agitated. The only time the recording and listening equipment is turned off is during Reinhard Heydrich’s regular, in fact, frequent “tours of inspection”. Spies stop in at Salon Kitty, such as Roger Wilson, a British spy who gives his name as Ljubo Kolčev, a staff member at the Bulgarian Embassy. He happens to trip over a surveillance cable while workmen for the secret service are running it from the cellar of Giesebrechtstrasse 11 to the offices of the main staff of the Sicherheitsdienst (S.D.) on Meinekestrasse, in the close vicinity of the building where Nobel Prize winner Imre Kertész happens to live today, a man whose fate was probably tailored by Eichmann in the mid-1940s right there at Meinekestrasse. Upon seeing other things besides sex going on at Salon Kitty, Wilson, the British spy, secretly introduces his own secret British service of counter-espionage. Forget poor Borghild. Those were the days, my friend. In 1940 alone, more than 10,000 men take the stairs up to the third floor of Number 11 on Giesebrechtstrasse in Berlin. In just one month there are more than 3,000 orgasmic sessions recorded. But as time passes there are more and more special guests; they outnumber the ordinary clients, and the “special ladies” work full steam, spending more time at Madame Kitty’s parlour. They drink more, report less, discipline dwindles in the sexual headquarters of counter-intelligence, the Gestapo send in additional quantities of food and drink. This all costs a pretty penny — there’s a war on — and Heydrich’s dissatisfaction grows. In July 1942 a bomb falls on the building on Giesebrecht-strasse, and the Gestapo wash their hands of the operation. The bugging apparatus is hastily removed. Kitty and all the girls, the special girls whose golden carriages have overnight turned to pumpkins, and the ordinary Cinderellas who have been with her for years, set up shop on the ground floor of the building and go on working. Until her death in 1954 Kitty never breathes a word about the entire operation. Twenty-five thousand recorded discs in the Gestapo archive mysteriously disappear after the Russians enter Berlin, and word has it that they end up at Stasi headquarters, and the war waged via cunts proves yet again to be without effect.
Ah, yes, Haya also remembers Marika Rökk, the Hungarian, who conquers the great compact heart of Nazi Germany in Die Frau meiner Träume, Leichte Kavallerie and Der Bettelstudent; who dances and sings and acts in the movies until the 1960s, when she does the same in theatres here and there, everywhere, but the troupes with which Marika Rökk performs do not tour Gorizia, and all Haya is left with is a poster from 1944 and a tinge of melancholy when she hears over the local Gorizia news of Marika Rökk’s fatal heart attack at some point in 2004, by which time Marika Rökk is well into her nineties. She takes with her to eternity the jubilee Bambi Award 1948 and the jubilee Bambi Award 1998, named after the much-loved book by Felix Salten, born Jewish as Sigmund Salzman, who begins his career as a writer by sending poems, letters, stories and essays to several Viennese newspapers, using an array of pseudonyms. Bambi, the book of Haya’s and Nora’s childhood, is a big hit when it comes out in Vienna in 1923, and for a decade and more children are crazy about Bambi, but it is suddenly banned in 1936, because the Nazis decide it sends the younger generation all sorts of terrible messages, and no filthy Jew is going to stir up their fount of life. So Bambi was not a childhood favourite for Haya’s sister Paula and her brother Orestes, who listen instead to the tales of Snow White, Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood, because these are enduring stories, written by brothers whose last name is Grimm (not someone whose surname is Salzman), boys of fine, pure blood. This Salten is a prickly fellow. In 1902 he riles the public with his in memoriam to Emile Zola, and in 1910 he ruffles the feathers of the townspeople of Vienna when he criticizes the city’s recently deceased, beloved mayor of many years Dr Karl Lueger, a member of the Christian Social Party and a flagrant anti-Semite, a favourite of Hitler’s, whose bronze statue stares straight into Café Prückel, where celebrated cabaret artists — Jews — performed in the cellar before they were sent off to the camps, and whose ring road, the Dr-Karl-Lueger-Ring, still encircles the heart of old Vienna.
So it is that Marika Rökk goes off into oblivion with an award for life’s work; for her contribution to the German film industry. It is not important, concludes Haya. Chaos rules everywhere, regardless.
Then there is María Mercader in the film Finalemente soli, and Doris Duranti as Contessa Castiglione, and Ernst von Klipstein, whom Haya doesn’t like much because of the long face, and the celebrated Margit Dayka in that movie, what was it called? in which she plays an orphan who learns when she grows up that she is probably Jewish, so she cannot marry her boyfriend, who, like all those actors, is tall and fair-skinned and healthy and strong and has gleaming white teeth, and she loves him so much, and he is forbidden from loving any Jewish woman, no matter what she looks like, even though there are blonde Jews who are tall and healthy, with teeth every bit as white, but there is no chance, absolutely out of the question, and then the girl, Haya thinks the name was Rozsi, yes, this Rozsi played by Margit Dayka plans to kill herself, but everything turns out fine in the end, because it transpires that Roszi is actually not Jewish after all, so she can freely marry her beloved. Such a tender film gives Haya hope for a more beautiful life on those bleak nights in Gorizia. In 1944 Haya is dreaming about the future, sometimes while under the covers, sometimes in the darkness of half-empty cinemas; while up there, on the silver screen, which grows and spreads in the dark, stare countless penetrating blue eyes, men’s and women’s eyes, and she looks back at them, and observes all those mother-of-pearl complexions, the wavy hair, and follows the valiant destinies, Lord, what a world of enchantment in the middle of little occupied Gorizia, in mid-winter, oh Lord, with all of them here it is impossible to be alone.
Meanwhile, neighbours are disappearing.
Francesco Bevk (who lived for a time at Via Montesanto 26) is no longer around, says Amalia Valich, new owner of the building, and Ada cannot find his children’s book, the one in Slovenian, and she would really like to find a copy, because now that she is drinking grappa and Strega more often and hiding it less, so much so that even spraying her mouth with cheap perfume doesn’t mask it, now, when things are as they are, in war and poverty, the voices of her ancestors, the poems her mother Marisa used to read to her, flit through her thoughts, and it happens that Ada lies there for hours, overcome and whimpering, and then, dishevelled and snivelling, she natters on about things no-one understands…