‘Keep mangling,’ Wolfgang replied. ‘Karlsruhen’s going to love those muscles. If you’re lucky he might even promote you to Brunnhilde.’
‘There can be more than one style of art you know,’ Frieda said through gritted teeth as she worked the heavy handle. ‘Not everybody wants to look at pictures of babies on bayonets and limbless soldiers like the stuff you like. We can’t all be George Grosz or Otto Dix.’
‘Bloody geniuses, both of them. Jazz on canvas. People like Karlsruhen and his moronic
‘Just listen to yourself, why don’t you?’ Frieda said as the water from the nappies cascaded into the mangle tray. ‘You’re actually more chauvinist than the Steel Helmets with your “we’ve got better art in Germany than those bloody foreigners” — even the avant garde are nationalists. It’s pathetic.’
Wolfgang’s tone showed that despite himself he could see her point. ‘I’m just saying that for once we have something going on here that we can be proud of.’
‘So you’d feel better about it if I was posing for someone who gave me square tits and three buttocks. That would be all right, would it?’
‘It would be a lot better.’
Frieda said nothing. But she gave the mangle an extra vicious turn.
Rhinemaiden
DESPITE WOLFGANG’S PROTESTATIONS, Frieda took the modelling job and posed for Herr Karlsruhen throughout 1921 and into the following year. It was while she was on her way to the sculptor’s studio in the summer of 1922 that she heard the horrible news that Germany’s Foreign Minister had been shot, murdered while on his way to work by a teenage gang put up to it by reactionary anti-Semites. A newspaper boy was calling out a special edition of the
Frieda felt sick to her stomach. Just when things had been looking up a little, the republic’s foremost statesman was dead. That old German madness had reared its crazed, iron-clad head again.
She got off the tram on the busy Mullerstrasse and turned into a side street which had once contained small businesses and store houses but which was now principally residential. The street was on the edge of the working- class district of Wedding, which was much favoured by artists for its earthy credibility and somewhat Bohemian air. Karlsruhen rented a studio just close enough to the centre of things to gain a little cachet from the borough’s reputation, but not so close as to be fully immersed in a dangerously left-wing area that was known throughout the city as Red Wedding.
The concierge of Karlsruhen’s building gave Frieda the usual dubious glance as she let her in, clearly under the impression that nude models must be whores. Frieda returned the woman’s look with proud disdain before making her way up the stairs to the attic studio in which Karlsruhen worked. The door was half open and she could hear him singing along to a gramophone recording of
She knocked firmly, causing the door to swing fully open under the force of her fist. She knew that Karlsruhen would shake his head at this. He had once rebuked her for ‘banging on the door like a stevedore’, admonishing her to be more ‘gentle and reserved’ and a credit to her sex. This of course made Frieda knock all the louder the next time, and from then on she was always sure to give his door a knuckle-rattling bang whenever she visited. Such displays of spirit, however, seemed only to increase Karlsruhen’s attraction to her. He would giggle with silly indulgence as if she were a naughty girl and he her long-suffering father.
All this made Frieda pretty uncomfortable, but she had final exams to prepare for and standing about naked had to be the easiest way to make money in Berlin. She knew plenty of girls who would kill for her luck.
Recently, it was true, Karlsruhen’s behaviour has begun to get a little bolder. He had taken to calling her his ‘cheeky pet’ and his ‘little bud’, which made her squirm. Wolfgang had said she should demand a pay rise. Instead she had taken strength from reminding herself that once she qualified as a doctor she would never have to see the silly old fool again.
‘Enter,’ came the familiar, self-important voice from within. ‘Advance, sweet child, and be recognized.’
Karlsruhen had never served in the army but he loved to affect a slightly military air.
He was alone, of course, as Frieda had been certain he would be. Before, there had always been one or two young men busying themselves with plaster and tools in distant corners of the studio, Karlsruhen’s ‘pupils’, as he called them. He made much of the fact that he had ‘pupils’ (although to Frieda’s eye they seemed more like paid assistants), clearly fancying himself in the Michelangelo mode. Recently, however, Karlsruhen had taken to ensuring that these pupils were away purchasing supplies or on some other errand when the time came for Frieda’s sittings.
Frieda entered the huge space, which spanned the entire length and width of the building. In the daytime the studio was flooded with beautiful natural light, which shone through the skylights even on cloudy days. But night was falling and Karlsruhen had turned on the meagre forty-watt bulbs that hung from the ceiling eaves and cast eerie shadows across the silent plaster figures standing about the room.
At the far end of the studio a desk lamp stood on an empty plinth, its shaded bulb pointing to the place where Frieda would be posing, like a theatrical spotlight.
The great man was standing at his usual place, wearing his habitual white smock and beret, although Frieda did not think he had been doing much work as there was a schnapps bottle in his hand.
Karlsruhen worked mostly in clay, producing mildly erotic figures from which a mould was cast and numerous plaster replicas made to be sold at markets. But he also had pretentions to greater things and sometimes worked in bronze and occasionally even marble, although such materials were of course not readily available.
The white-clad figure watched in silence as Frieda walked the length of the room, her shoes clicking on the dusty bare floorboards. Past half-finished heroic figures and shy nymphs, round stepladders and sacks of plaster powder, over brushes and palettes, past trestle tables laden with knives, chisels, pencils and paper. Perhaps twenty metres in all with Karlsruhen’s eyes on her every step of the way before finally she arrived at the little screen in the corner, which Karlsruhen referred to as her dressing room.
It made Frieda laugh inwardly that he insisted on this ludicrous ‘courtesy’. After all, there was no ‘dressing’ to be done, only undressing, which she did as quickly as possible because her hours only began once she stood naked and in position. It would have been simpler to strip off beside her podium. Frieda had pointed this out but Karlsruhen insisted that there was a proper way to do things and she must disrobe in ‘private’, as feminine modesty demanded. Recently Frieda had noticed that her screen had moved further and further away from her podium. Clearly Karlsruhen enjoyed watching her walk naked across the studio — more fun, no doubt, than leering at her in frozen immobility.
‘Good evening, Fraulein,’ Karlsruhen said. ‘What joy it is to see you, the sun has set but its light still shines in your smile.’
‘I’m not smiling today, Herr Karlsruhen. Have you heard? They shot Walther Rathenau.’ She had not really meant to bring it up, she always tried to avoid exchanging views with Karlsruhen on any subject, but it was better than engaging with the leaden and saccharine horror of his unwanted compliments.
‘Yes, I heard,’ Karlsruhen remarked dismissively. ‘But don’t think of it so much as losing a Foreign Minister as getting rid of a Jew!’
And he laughed as if he had made an excellent joke.
Frieda didn’t reply. She was used to casual anti-Semitism. It was generally assumed that she herself was not a Jew and so she heard it all the time. It was as common in Berlin as remarks about the weather. Nothing much was meant by it, and if she had spent her days confronting it she would have had no time for anything else.
‘I can’t claim credit for that line,’ Karlsruhen went on, ‘a friend phoned me with it. He heard it on the
