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Cabaret / House of Leaves
Ok, so this is for a fantastic prompt from ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif){kind=small}
haruslex at the horror comment fic thread at ![[info]](https://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/community.gif?v=1){kind=small}
sharp_teeth:
Cabaret / House of Leaves: There's a reason Sally can't leave the Kit Kat Klub.
I really couldn't let this one go ... and, uh, it shows. To lengthy effect, if nothing else, below the cut.
--
Warning: endemic anti-Semitism, sexism, and racism. Passing classism. Power imbalances. Erosion of free will.
Also, footnotes.
I hope I've managed to negotiate the tricky proposition of setting a horror story in Nazi Germany without doing anything crass, but please let me know if you think I've failed in any way.
This draws on the Berlin Stories as well as the film, although 'Brian Roberts' in particular has nothing whatsoever to do with Isherwood's narrator.
--
The Kit Kat Klub
--
--
What good is sittin' alone in your room1
Come hear the music play,
Life is a cabaret old chum
Come to the cabaret.
--
And the ship
The black freighter
Disappears out to sea
And
On
It
Is
Me!
--
Introductory Note: Daisy Navidson.
Brian Roberts, holder of the Truant Chair in Modern and Medieval Languages at King’s College Cambridge, was found dead in his college room, the following note in his chest pocket. The bulk of the documents which make up his work The Kit Kat Klub, ostensibly a critical discussion of the film of the same name and of the apocryphal ‘Bowles Manuscript,’ were pasted and tacked up over the walls, ceilings, and bookcases of his room, which it appears he left very seldom in the months preceding his death. Although his clothing showed some unusual lacerations, there is no reason to suppose any outside intervention, and the coroner recorded his death as due to natural causes. There was no sign of the staircase Roberts mentions in his final sentences; apart, of course, from the staircase leading up to his locked and bolted door.
The Kit Kat Klub, as is immediately obvious, is not a description of 1930s Berlin itself but of what, from Roberts’ description, is a seventies film interspersing heavy-handed nods to the political situation with variously compelling musical numbers and a heavily romanticised account of Roberts’ relationship with the singer Sally Bowles. It is, however clear that Roberts, who did indeed spend almost twelve months, from 1930-31, in Berlin, makes no clear distinction between his recollections of Sally and the cinematic version, played by [elided]. In the interests of clarity, interjections by Roberts himself, either descriptions of the ‘Bowles Manuscript’ or personal observations, are enclosed within square parentheses, [thus].
[Brian D. Roberts: preface.
I found it in my pigeonhole back when Cambridge still let in its dreary quota of coal miners’ sons, before they got shucked off for its so very very modern complement of squeaky flat-chested girls, with ponytails, from Islington. King’s chapel was still crusted over inside with soot from centuries of candles, the light from the windows spraying across the black in streaks and shoots of colour, dappled, immaculate. ‘Flashing like flecks of coal, / Quartz-fret, or sparks of salt, / In grimy vasty vault.’2 So Hopkins, that coy old fancy Jesuit. I used to sit in there and imagine it the Klub, widened and stretched almost beyond imagining, heaved up out of the river soil on frondy ribs, those garish vast Henrician roses nubs of that fat wife-eater’s delusive empire, tight as furled arses or as small brown nipples roughened up by teeth. They alternate with portcullises, of course. Young Gabriel letting slip the hounds in the dank southern oratory, caritas fidelitas and love. The lady in the garden with the wall, the light coming through her fountain and her face. The little panes filled up with broken glass, behind one down the wall the names of the War dead. One German student has his name out of the proper list, though he of course is noted: a King’s man.
And on the great dark screen the falling angels in one panel, amongst the curled grotesques. So so provincial my darling dove. And all that royal graffiti, those initials, H&A.
Henry and Anne: a great affair.
I found it in my pigeonhole I say (oh goodness gracious me, wink wink, the compère says), a claggy wet spring morning teased with stringy catgut rain. A book-sized brown-paper parcel containing, yes, a book in waxy black covers, inside the front fly-leaf the lipsticked, crackled words ‘The Kit-Kat Klub.’
And the video, black plastic, two neat little spools, as well. I still had my old player. Lucky me.
All done in spidery German, the Bowles Manuscript. Not Sally’s style at all, unless of course she’s changed and learned new things.3 Unlikely on the face of it, my wide-eyed twirly girl. She won’t be coming for me, out of the dark. No, no, my darlings, I will go to her. Or rather to her absence, which, let's face it, was pretty much the way it went in any case. They’re talking of a new incumbent as it is; I have been busy with translation and with refining the text, with making sure my walls are keeping still. I have blocked off the door.
I have the cellar key, though, they forget. My interest in the wine, a fellow’s perk. I will go down now, darlings, to the fen-dark nitric wet. There is a certain staircase that has opened in the wall. I will go down the stairs. Farewell my dears, this relic bids you a footlights-special, wave and smile, adieu. There is no place for me here in any case, now that they’ve put up ugly concrete and let in the – ]
--
Note on this edition:
Brian Roberts’ extensive annotations to his translation, revealing though they are in terms of his deteriorating mental health, have been excised for reasons of brevity. A facsimile edition of Roberts’ translation of the ‘Bowles manuscript’, together with his voluminous explanatory apparatus, is forthcoming from the Swordbridge Press. A number of his more coherent explanatory notes and interspersed quotations have however been retained, though their frankly superficial scholarship will no doubt surprise readers of Roberts’ virtuoso translation of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili. It is the hope of the current editor that these remaining annotations will serve to convey some impression of the convolutions of professor Roberts’ original translation, which, given the loss of the putative ‘Bowles manuscript’ itself,4 and since the much-discussed 1970s film, The Kit Kat Klub, can hardly be relied upon for factual accuracy, is the closest thing we have to an eyewitness account of the events at the Kit Kat Klub in the winter of 1930-31.
Also for reasons of brevity, foreign language quotations are generally given only in English translation.
Links in this hypertext edition generally serve as attributions. There should be, I wish to note as a personal aside, precisely five such links. Precisely six. I hope when people read this it dilutes the effect. Like steps or stairs, easy enough to count. Precisely one. One two. One two three one two three -
--
“Girls,” cries the compère, eyes dark and wet. “Girls girls girls for your viewing pleasure, gentlemen and ladieees.” He twirls, does a quick-fire feet-shuffle, running on the spot. Spreads out his arms. The camera pulls back.
“Girls from Lithuania,
from gay Paree in France
Girls from darkest Africa5
Come out and join the dance –”
- And they come out in a high-kicking hip-jiggling row, Mimi and Lotti and Lulu [the names were always the same on the bills, although the girls were not], feathers and spangles and faces spackled thick with powder and cream.
“Girls from far off China
From Turkey and Peru
Girls from Tin Pan Alley
Oh what a lovely view!”
At which they flip up their shaggy little skirts and give everyone a good look.6 The compère holds a twiggy finger up to his lips and makes a red-stained little moue; the audience guffaws. He struts himself across the stage like a wind-up doll, and the song continues. Girls.
--
I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking.
Isherwood, Berlin Novels, p. 243.
--
In the dressing room Sally is fixing up her eyelashes, dabbing on the glue, giving herself click-clack heavy blinks in the mirror. The row of lights around it, bulbs dimmed by peeling yellow paint, flickers and dims all at once, as if something unimaginably vast has shifted its coarse body, deep underneath Berlin. She gives a bulb a rap with one long green nail, wrinkles her nose. The light reasserts itself.
“Oh,” she said to her reflection. “Oh dearest darling simply Sally, what would we do without you?”
[What indeed? The girl they got to play Sally, I have to admit, was very much more talented than the original article. Not as pretty, however. No chin. She really was a loss to cinema, though of course her disappearance did no harm to her reputation. Live fast, die young, they say. A Polaroid life. Sally would have approved.7]
She peers forward into the mirror8 at her black-and-white face and the bent and stalky feathers sticking up around her shoulders, behind her the jewellery-box mish-mash of velvets and stained silk, runny little stockings like shrivelled caterpillar-cases.9 There is a door there, looks like, just behind a stiff row of moth-eaten tutus. Or, no, a doorway, open, black. Sally spins round. It is still there.
“Only just noticed it, have we,” says Mitzi, unhooking her corset as she shoulders past. “It was there when I came in this afternoon.” She shrugs, plumps down on a corner of the dressing table, flicks a moulting feather boa out of her face.
“But how perfectly marvellous and thrilling and out of this world, darling,” says Sally, pushing her way through racks of scratchy costumes to the door. “A most extraordinary mystery!”
She ducks under the tutus and stands in front of the doorway, black-booted feet close together at the threshold. The camera pans down from the ceiling, ends up peering over her shoulder, past her spiky lashes. The door opens onto a corridor, walls black but for a dull grey bloom. She throws Mitzi a smart little smile over her left shoulder, puts her best foot forward.
“Here goes nothing!”
[It is worth noting that all the scenes behind the doorway are filmed in black and white.]
Inside it is cold; her breath smokes out. [As big a technical challenge as the Exorcist set, I’ll wager. One can see that the technicians, when they come in shot, are bundled up in awful puffy jackets.] The walls are smooth, as if they had been touched many many times or never ever at all. Mitzi, behind her, calls out her name.
“I,” says Sally, to camera, “am an international woman of mystery.”
Her voice sounds small and sharp against the black walls. The corridor goes on, straight and level. [Like almost nothing else round here, she could have said.] And then she reaches the end, both hands flat out against the hard black wall, her breath fogging up a circle on the chilly black. She turns around, waves both her hands at Mitzi, small and uncertain by the glowing mirror, the doorway there behind her in the glass. Open and black; you can’t see Sally there at all.
“A mystery!” she calls out, “A mystery Mitzi!”
[I am uncertain if my Sally was ever quite so fatuous. I fear the answer may be in the affirmative.]
And the echoes spring up from before her and from behind her as well. There is no wall at her back, she can hear, it’s obvious, before she looks. Just the long passage and the echoes and another sound, a kind of growl.
[I can tell you it is a little like a river in flood and a little like the tearing of flesh, thick muscle filaments stretching and snapping, tendons curling back like stringy cheese. It comes up the stairwell even now, although I have pushed a sideboard of inch-thick Victorian mahogany over in front of the door and filled it with big grey breeze-blocks, a new wall near as makes no difference. The gap at the top is only finger-thick; only the cold gets through. It is so very cold, at nights. Hard, dark wood, black as pitch and sin. I am quite secure, I am aware. I have five boxes of tinned goods, a working tap. The cleaner has learned not to knock at the door. But sometimes something knocks.]
Sally runs for the doorway, shiny shoe-soles slipping on the smooth dark floor. It seems further than it had done, going in. The director indulges in a touch of slo-mo, blurring past.
She ploughs into the rack of tutus, face down, fingers stabbing into the lacy net.
“Sally! Sally are you all right, liebchen?”
Mitzi hefts her up, dusts her down, purses her lips. Looks over Sally’s shoulder at the deep dark corridor, no end in sight.10 It is cold even here on the threshold, but it was cold everywhere in winter Berlin. Cold colder cold. Sally takes Mitzi’s hands off her shoulders, gives her a cracking wide smile.
“I’m quite perfectly fine, darling Mitzi,” she says. “It is a terrible and most mysterious place.” She shudders, delicately. “No-one went into it before me, did they?” she asks.
“Nein,” said Mitzi. “It is an evil place, Sally. None should enter, not people like us.”
[Mitzi had been born a Rabbi’s son in Bavaria and had firm ideas about the behaviour proper to young ladies, even if she seldom lived up to them herself. Here she was played by a burly man in a waxy blonde wig, although I remember her as five foot five nothing and skinny as a rake. The film’s approximation of German diction is of course laughable.]
Now she leads Sally back towards the mirror and the lights, the bland black doorway in the bright fly-spotted glass.
“We will inform the management, Sally,” she says. “They will again block it up and we will forget about it.”
“Well,” says Sally, “forgetting is awfully difficult sometimes.”
She cocks her head, listening for the close of the number, girls girls girls like precious pearls pearls pearls.
“You speak of your young man Brian, Sally?” Mitzi asks, a sympathetic hand twitching her corset and cami-knickers back into place.
[Apparently, before the production fell apart, I was going to turn up on her doorstep, played by J. N. If it wouldn’t sound callous to say so, I’d note that the fate of the film did at least save me from this last indignity.]
“What? Oh, no, not Brian, silly,” said Sally. She bends down to the mirror, beribboned bottom aimed straight at the doorway. “What do you mean, ‘block it up again,’ Mitzi darling,” she says. “It’s new.”
“Loose panel,” Mitzi offers. “Stupid builders.”
Sally laughs her tinkling laugh.
“Of course not, Mitzi,” she says. “Why, just think of what’s right on the other side of that wall, dearest one. The stage, of course.”
They turn as one to look straight down the passage, fifty feet at least along into the dark.
--
No room in the house exceeds a length of twenty-five feet, let alone fifty feet, and yet Chad and Daisy’s voices are echoing, each call responding with an entirely separate voice.
HoL, p. 57.
--
The girls file off the stage, panting and hooking their thumbs under tight elastic and shabby steel-sprung corsetry.
“Your number, Sally, go go go.”
She goes, ducking on through the shiny olive green curtains, jutting her hips to the lights of the stage and the audience glinting and grinning beyond, beige and red swastika armbands, big blonde smiles.
She gives them a little wavey-wave with both hands and launches into her number.
“The continent of Europe is so wide,
Mein Herr.
Not only up and down, but side to side,
Mein Herr.
I couldn't ever cross it if I tried,
Mein Herr.”
Kiss kiss, out over the footlights. And, from somewhere far back inside the Klub behind her, bang bang, like a door swinging open and shut.
--
Their signals echo down the deep hollow street, lascivious and private and sad.
Isherwood, Berlin Novels, p. 243.
--
[The Bowles Manuscript reports that in the early hours of the morning Sally and Mitzi and Clara hustled out of The Kit Kat Klub in the filmy dawn light. They made for the main street, heels tapping over the slick cobbles, high dark houses and the smell of piss and wet plaster all around them, white moulding round doors like the curls and tweaks of the inner ear.11
They rode back to Sally’s place together, crammed in the muddy wet warmth of the tram, brass rails and slabby old ladies clutching slack string bags. Through wide and wet-laced streets, past tall, hazy houses with bony spun-sugar balconies.12
Sally let them into the greasy marble hall, hat-stands and pot-plants spiking through the half-light; they tiptoed loudly past Frl. Schroeder, snoring behind her battered green lacquer screen. Collapsed together on the sharp-shanked sofa in a great bellow of springs, drank cold gin and black bread and frosty grey pastries from the bottom of Mitzi’s red patent leather handbag, fluff caught in their fat-stiff folds.13
They talked over the hallway, a black mouth full of money. About Sally’s rich friend Natalia, whom she really shouldn’t have let drop. These days, things were so uncertain. Mitzi shook her head and frowned, talked vaguely of finding another job. Sally fed them Prairie Oysters, raw eggs and Worcestershire Sauce. They were always soft and slippery on the tongue, soft as the inside of a thigh, Max would say with a wink. For me, for her, for both of us and his big wallet too.
The next afternoon they went back to the Klub. Where else was there to go?]
--
Somewhere on the other side of the court a baby began to scream, a window was slammed to, something very heavy, deep in the innermost recesses of the building, thudded dully against a wall. It was alien and mysterious and uncanny, like sleeping out in the jungle alone.
Isherwood, Berlin Novels, p. 387.
--
The next scene opens with a close-up on the compère’s brilliant gaze, piquant as patent leather, the kohl around his eyes as sharp and brittle as a dried pressed leaf, its broken edge. He looks out down the hallway, black shoes and white spats close together at the edge, his hands in a tight little tangle at his back. He whips one hand out, raps with the back of his white knuckles on the cold black wall.
“As the grave,” says Clara. “Like fancy black marble, but not.”14
[Clara was a plump red-head who spoke clipped, sprawling English straight from her governess. Five years ago, before her family’s factories had closed, she had worn mauve net gloves and sipped her tea from the left. Black marble reminded her of her family’s tomb, shiny sharp monuments resting in white beds of quartz-chips, going gently green with rain and rot. Black urns and broken pillars, cherubs with plump black cheeks. Black doorways. At least, I like to think so.]
The compère darts his eyes sideways, snaps his fingers.
“Ah yes,” he says. “Mysterious indeed. You say you went all the way down, Sally sweet?”
“And I’m going again,” says Sally. “I’m going to find a nice fat professor with a gold watch and he will come and go ‘ooooh,’ and I will go ‘aaaaah,’ and his nice gold watch will show up on a dozen magazine covers with me right next to it. Because I was the first one down there, wasn’t I, Mitzi.” She turns to the compère. “You can come with me, this time, if you like.”
“I think, my dearest dove,” he says, speaking out of the corner of his creased-up mouth like a cartoon character, ‘I think that is unnecessary for the likes of moi.”
The last word falls out of his mouth like a wet ripe plum, and Sally shrugs, gives him her brightest smile. Then beams it onto sluggish Dieter, the handyman with soft white palms.
[A very silent boy. I always wondered if he was quite the round shilling.]
“You’ll help me, won’t you? Just string together some lights, oh please say you will, darling.”
Dieter nods, vaguely, and Sally turns up the wattage on her smile.
“Oh thank you, sweetheart,” she says briskly.
--
Paglia: Notice only men go into it. Why? Simple: women don’t have to. They know there’s nothing there and can live with that knowledge, but men must find out for sure. [...] It really comes down to what men lack. They lack the hollow, the uterine cavity, any creative life-yielding physiological incavation. The whole thing’s about womb envy or vagina envy, whatever you prefer.
‘Camilla Paglia, interviewed by Karen Green’: HoL, pp. 357-58.
--
One scene later, Sally has no rich professor, but she has a clacking trail of lights, hooked up on two hat-racks and wheeled out partway down the corridor, looking improbably festive, like lights stung out along a darkened, after hours, seaside pier.15
She has spent half the afternoon, she says, crunching her way through a cut-glass bowl of stale pink wafers in a producer’s stuffy waiting room, the other half with hands braced on his tight brown leather couch.16
“A face like wet cement dears, and a dick just like a little red worm.”
[Sitting there earnestly with her handbag on her knees and her knickers on the arm of the chair, laughing about “my father the almost-ambassador, you know.”17 Her words slapping up against that wide pale face like wet rags on a mangle. Her rough red little mouth around that little red dick.]
Backstage in The Kit Kat Klub, Sally strips off her gloves, flicks her forefingers together. She is wearing a new fur coat, soft brown-black and heavy, heavy as a sleepy kiss.
[Even in the few extant scenes, Sally’s wardrobe is quite implausibly lavish.]
“Oh, darling Clara, help me roll it down?”
Clara, rippled red curls the colour of beer, heavy camel overcoat and stubby red nails, shrugs, flicks the row of bulbs to life and begins to wheel the first hat-rack on down the corridor, her breath misting out before her. Sally follows, steering the second hat-rack, both of them receding into the brightening length of the tunnel like an eccentric bride and bridesmaid, processing down the aisle. They have a torch each in their pockets, just in case. Heavy ribbed nickel with a bulbous bullseye lens: Clara's idea.
The bulbs cast small, blurry circles of white light as they bump along the walls, tinny and festive as penny-whistles. They reach all the way to the end, although they’d estimated the corridor at a good sixty feet, the wire at no more than forty. Towards the entrance, the bulbs trail along the ground, a row of glowing breadcrumbs. Then Sally sees that Clara was looking, not back along the trail of light, but sideways, through a new turn in the corridor, leading on further into the dark.
And then, like crackling popcorn all along the line, like brittle acetate chattering up in flames, the bulbs go dead.18 Caught in the dark crook of the corridor, Sally’s breath seizes in her mouth. Like every jumpy movie moment you ever saw, she said.19 Then Clara’s pale face came on with her torch, smiling and bobbing in the ring of light.
“Coming?” says Sally, shining her light down the new corridor. “Truth or dare.”
“Dare,” says Clara, mouth tight. “And we go to the papers tomorrow morning, that is right?”
“That is right,” says Sally. She laughs, a little vacantly. “I feel as though I should have a terribly sharp sword. Perhaps a little chainmail skirt, as well.” She thumbs her torch off, on again. She leads the way into the dark.20
Their torches cast white wedding-ring and eyeball-round bright shadows on the walls, swooping and swaying as they walk. The camera follows decorously, at shoulder height. There are more turns, and, once, a side door. Inside, a square room, featureless and bare. A square hole in the floor like a neat and empty well. Sally drops down a coin, smiles, sunny, as it falls. There is, though, no sound in return. Clara raises an eyebrow.
“Feeling rich?”
They turn away from the dark square, to find a door in every wall, four open doorways, identical and black. They cannot of course remember which way they have come. They flip a coin.
Clara, under her breath, begins to sing. Sally, face white and grained-in mascara awful awful black, joins in.
“Money makes the world go around
The world go around
The world go around
Money makes the world go around
It makes the world go 'round.”21
[This detail, oddly enough, is taken verbatim from the Bowles Manuscript. As if singing could ever drown out the hideous noise, dilute the endless dark.]
They move off down those dark and smooth-skinned corridors, their faces tight with cold. The both of them stop singing soon enough, keep walking, through the still and silent black. And came out, some time, some hours later, in a hall so vast and black that their torchlight falls like ringworm, small and pale and scabby on the ground. Before them and above them there is only dark. Behind them, too. The wall has gone; the doorway they’d come through is nowhere to be found.
Clara turns to Sally, eyes black and face striated with shadow in the torchlight, greasy white curves in the dark.
“Why did you come in here, you silly girl. Why did you bring me!”
“Oh,” said Sally weakly, her voice small in the dark, “Just one of my whims.” She straightens. “It’s not like I made you come here, anyway. You want the money too.”22
[One of her whims. Dear God. I will say one thing, it is fortunate that Sally never became a mother.]
Clara breathes in, out, in again like a rope rattling through a pulley.
“Sorry, Sally,” she says. “I want this rich professor also, you understand.” She looks around. "We can go either way, I think."
They laugh, together, shakily.
Then they walk forward, out across the chamber. It takes them quite a while, the film suggests, (perhaps ten minutes, as per the Bowles Manuscript) before they come to the stairs. A twisty little spiral staircase, set into the floor, leading down, all of five feet across.
There is another sound. Not Clara’s sobbing breaths or Sally’s smoker’s rasp. The sound of something growling, far away and, they both feel it, obscenely deep below. Deep enough that Sally’s coin could well be falling still.23
They feel for each other’s hands.
The camera pulls back, though Sally’s voice remains breathily close.
“One,” whispers Sally. “One two three one two three.”
They turn and step back together in perfect time, a two-girl chorus line. It was not until they have been walking, fast and jerky, for a while, hand in cold hand across the flat dark floor, that they realise that the staircase is spreading open at their heels, inexorable and dark as spilling oil.
Almost imperceptibly at first, then faster and faster, a great spiralling amphitheatre opening behind their running feet.
And then a wall looms up, a single black opening showing in the wavering light. It is four feet across, quite square, set into the wall at waist height. Sally’s reaching fingers hook on the opening, one hand reaching back for Clara as she stumbles and falls. The camera pulls back again as Clara scrambles up, the stairs beneath her folding away into nothingness, a great sloping hole, holding within it a dull and gusting roar.
Sally yanks her up into the opening, and for a moment they clutch each other, torchlight showing Clara’s hands knuckling into Sally’s fur coat. They are not in a passage; the space is no more than an alcove, the size of a dumb-waiter.
“Oh darling,” says Sally. “Oh what a simply terrible adventure.” Her voice is flat. The camera pulls into her face, a tight flick of hair on her cheekbone. Then it turns, looking with Clara and Sally out over the void. Which constricts, a wall of greyish black coming up over the screen, obscuring the deeper black beyond.
The wall is closing up, or they are sinking down.
Clara turns to Sally. For a moment she whispers, girlishly, as if a schoolgirl woken for a midnight feast.
“Where’s the door?” she asks.
Sally laughs her silvery laugh, tinny and high.
For five minutes there is nothing on the screen but the two girls, wedged close together, battering on the tight dark walls with their fists, with the heels of their shiny shoes. The roar rises around them, drowning their cries.
At last it is so loud it is quite clear it can only come from something in there with them, inside their little box.
It ebbs. One side of the box slices away, into thick dark.
They take a moment to notice. Then they scramble out, like ladies clambering from a car, down onto the red carpet.
They are, again, in those straight corridors.24 Neat as a nursing-home, turnings and doorways looming up into their circles of light as if they are standing still, the Klub grinding around them like a zoetrope. The growl is rising, ebbing, falling, as if with some great creature’s breath. They try to run, but Sally bangs her torch and it goes out. They leave it behind and go on at a clipping pavement walk, two ladies out together on the town. The growl rises at their backs.
And Clara’s torch goes out.
They hear it, then. The sound of something thready, seedy up ahead, stringy as bright blood in glassy egg-yolk. It is a voice, singing Sch, kleines Baby.25
Und wenn die Sonne wird dunkel sein,
kauft dir die Mami ein Vögelein.
Und wenn das Vöglein nicht mehr singt,
kauft dir die Mami einen goldenen Ring.
Wenn dir das Ringlein nicht gefällt,
kauft dir die Mami die ganze Welt.26
Mitzi, chest out, lungs full, singing her heart out down the corridor, all but blocking the door and lined in light, putting the sun out, stringing her voice with mockingbirds and golden rings, singing the two girls home.
--
No excuse huh? Guess I’m just another bastard abandoning XXXX woman and kids for a big adventure. I should grow up, right?
HoL, p. 389.
--
“I am never ever ever going in there again, darlings,” says Sally, tears tracking black-flecked trails down her face. “There’s nothing down there, nothing at all.” She shudders, blinks. “I felt like Krazy Kat in the cartoons, darlings. Nothing making sense.”
Clara frowns, obviously more than a sheet or two to the wind. She knocks back another gulp of vodka and passes the bottle on to Sally.
“Your rich professor, though. This will perk up his interest, I’ll bet.” Clara grabs the bottle back, sticks it up between her legs. Sally cackles.
“Clara. I haven’t found him yet. Do try not to count your chickens, dearest one.”
“Chickens?”
They are sitting out in front of the stage, somewhere around where the black corridor should pass. But there is only dusty sunlight, coming down from the door, [a smell of watery disinfectant, lye and beer and soap. Piss too, as I recall]. The light catches the telephones on the tables, the chipped fake cherries in Clara’s black hat.27
[They told the story to the compère, the Bowles Manuscript reports. He listened with thin lips and eyes as flat as slate. Then his eyes snapped back to black-button brightness, sharp with mischief and something like anger, if you looked close enough.
He folded himself down into a seat, thin as old silk eaten through by bright chemical dyes.
“Golden boys and girls all must, I suppose,” he said, conspiratorially, to Sally; smacked his lips.
She nodded breezily.
“Lash arte o esperanza,” said the compère, to himelf.] [sic]
--
[...] tropos is at the center of “trope” and it means “turn.”
HoL, p. 150.
--
The shot pulls back, leaves them still in the sunlight muddled around the grimy tables, the greasy plush chairs.
“Cut,” says a voice. “Where’s Chad?” says someone else [Chad Navidson played Dieter. It was never planned as a speaking part]. People hustle out from behind the camera, start adjusting Sally’s makeup. An extra in spruce field grey uniform wanders by.
[The Bowles Manuscript reports that, after Sally and Clara’s abortive exploration, they had pushed a heavy dark wardrobe, rolling easily enough on little black-beetle wheels, over in front of that open door, and made straight for the bar, Clara’s face stark bone-white under her florid greasepaint.
Before they moved the wardrobe over the entrance, however, they could see that the corridor was now lined from end to end with doors, all tightly shut.
And once they’d moved the wardrobe into place, they heard behind the wood a bang, and then another. Then faster and faster, bang, bang bang bang bang, like a little boy running a great thick stick along park railings.
The sound of every single door along the passage banging back on its hinges, opening wide.
It was then that they realised that Dieter was nowhere to be found.28
Knocking back their vodka by the bar, however, they heard him shouting, muffled, just behind the wall. A long way off, though, as far as they could tell. And there beyond the wall the empty toilets, graffiti and chipped porcelain and piss.
And nothing, no-one else.
They stayed to work that evening. Outside, there was marching in the streets.29]
--
“It’s kind of scary. [...] Like you stop thinking about something and it vanishes. [...]”
HoL, p. 126.
--
[“I live at the end of a five and a half minute hallway,” Sally sang that evening, quickstepping her way through the song, hands flat out at her hips, tight black hair spangled with glitter and grease.30
She worked the room between numbers, cradling the table telephones between shoulder and ear. Oh do you see me here, dear. Oh, no, you must guess. Can’t you tell me from my voice, you big strong men at table ten?
Only once she picked up a ringing phone on silence, at first, not even the record-spin buzz of the wire. And then, far distant, the sound of shouting, then another sound, a cry.
Sally sniffed, plucked at the beaded lattice of her bodice with cigarette-yellow fingers, nicotine in every dry tight whorl, green nails.31 She made eyes at a fat man with velvet lapels, a gold swastika in the plush folds of his ascot. Sipped at her thin red cocktail, champagne and red wine: Turk’s Blood.32
Slipped off her shoes at the end of the evening, twitched a note out of her garter.
“I’m getting out of here,” she said, the white face of the compère behind her, Mitzi and Clara shrugging on their coats. “And, darlings, I ain’t never ever coming back.”
That’s when the doors slammed shut.]
--
[...] blinking out of the darkness, two eyes pale as October moons, licking its teeth, incessantly flicking its long polished nails, and then before it can reach – [...]
HoL, p. 506.
--
That’s when the tape goes straight to black and white, half way through Sally turning her face up to a makeup assistant’s hovering powder-pad.
You can hear it on the soundtrack, too, the growl. Everyone looks up. A runner drops a tray of coffee mugs, and we see at the corner of the frame – the only time he comes in shot at all – the director’s face, a blur of worried white.33
It is quite clear no-one knows where the sound is coming from. Until there is a knock, quite distinct. One, two, three times, from the back of the stage. The camera pans round, raggedly, to follow it, catching the edge of the set, a glimpse of chairs and wires beyond the borders of the Klub. And then the blackness, at the far back of the stage. The wisps of steam from the spilled coffee, from people’s mouths. The cold. Most of them must have assumed the refrigeration unit in the tunnel set next door had gone on the blink, because they barely moved.34 Sweet Californian sunshine just outside the hangar and they stayed and raised their eyebrows at the dark. The knock comes once again.
[And it comes now, behind the breezeblock, the mahogany. One two three, except of course I removed the breezeblock long ago. I shoved the sideboard back; no mean feat for a man of my age, I can tell you. The door is open, open to the stairs.]
--
‘Well, listen ... Once, when I was very small, I was lying in bed at night. It was very dark and very late. And suddenly I woke up and saw a great big black hand stretching over the bed. I was so frightened I couldn’t even scream. I just drew my legs up under my chin and stared at it. [...]’
Isherwood, The Berlin Novels, p. 376.
--
The Kit Kat Klub shows the actors looking querulously at the technicians, still mostly back behind the camera. In black and white, the scene looks suddenly authentic, despite the odd cameraman in windbreaker and jeans. A seedy club in 1930s Berlin, clientele interrupted mid cocktail by a riot outside.35
The knocking becomes a fusillade, far too fast for any human hand.36 An almost continuous sound, fast as film-frames flicking past the eye, as a weight from a snapped pulley, rocketing down.
Sally stands up, wrinkles her nose. Turns to the camera, tapping long impatient nails on the rim of her glass.
It’s at this moment that the floor begins to tilt.
--
This door was so heavy that I had to push it open with both hands; it closed behind me with a hollow boom, like the firing of a canon.
Isherwood, Berlin Novels, p. 426.
--
[The Bowles manuscript relates they tried the front door first. The door to the grotty urinals, the front window, high up at street-level, all of two feet wide in any case. Barstools bounced off the glass like rubber, and on Sally’s second swing, darkness came shuttering neatly down beyond the panes. Their breath began to mist.
It was only then that they made for the backstage, crowding into the fusty dressing room. The lights were on. Shining across the velvet and the net, the nylon and the coarse brown carpet, framing the mirror like warm yellow pearls grown deep in vast fantastic oysters, ready for the stage.
Both doors of the wardrobe were open wide, inside them nothing but a sharp black drop.
They pushed past to the back door, rattled its leather curtain to one side. Behind it came the smells of the side street, rain and damp paper, piss. At their backs, wood crackled and snapped, as if in a bonfire. The wardrobe was twisting inwards, flying out into the dark in a barrage of planks and splinters. The floor began to slope towards the void. Sally wrenched the door open.
And behind it was another passageway, pitch black.]
--
"Okay. What do you want to play?"
"I don't know," she shrugs. "Always."
HoL, p. 73.
--
Unfortunately we have no way of knowing just which cameraman was filming at the close of The Kit Kat Klub. Whoever he may have been, he kept on writing – filming, I should say – until the end.
As the knocking stops and, stumbling out of the dark, comes Chad, Dieter’s gangling young actor. The floor rights itself; people pick themselves up from amongst the tumbled set dressings.
Chad walks out to the edge of the stage.
“I found some stairs,” he says: the last clear words on the tape.
The camera zooms in towards his face, his open black mouth.37
--
"hallways."
HoL, p. 73.
--
The floor jerks once again; there is a terrible clatter, some sharp screams. The film blurs and stills, hooked now on some protrusion on the floor. It’s tilted down: the wide frame of the stage, below it now, is visible. It is quite clear the floor has tilted a good ninety degrees.
We only see one person fall into the dark. What takes up most of the frame is Sally’s face.38 She must have been thrown against the camera, and hung on, for there she is, too close for focus, white skin and great dark eyes, the lens fogging just slightly with each breath.39
She tightens her lips, opens her mouth [in slow motion, it is apparent she is about to scream].
And then the lights go out.
[Sally went first, feeling her way down the passageway. The Bowles Papers do not record when she first realised that no-one was following her.]
The tape continues, however, for half an hour. In public screenings of The Kit Kat Klub, this final section, unrelentingly black, is usually excised. If a concession is made, it usually means the inclusion of the brief section where we hear a sigh, or possibly a very distant howl.
[The stairs are open. Open as your soft thighs, my Max would say. It never was the same, after the war. I have a printout of that Sally’s face, the last frame of the film, The Kit Kat Klub. I am not sure how well I remember my first Sally’s face. It’s hard to tell with all that makeup, anyway.
I shall go down the stairs now. But I said that before.]
--
The dread of doors that won’t close is something everyone knows from dreams. Stated more precisely: these are doors that appear closed without being so.
Benjamin, The Arcades Project, L2,7, p. 409.
--
[Sally hummed to herself, thinly, in the dark.40 Her feet found the stairs.
The others, spilling out into the back alley, rain and peeling bills, hammers and sickles and swastikas painted splashily over the walls, did not realise at first that Sally was not there. They turned back, when they did. An empty alley, a solid, wet brick wall, no door at all. Behind them, blinking in the rain, the sign, The Kit Kat Klub. Blue neon, going on and off and on.
Around the front, the windows were gone, too. The door was there, tight shut.
They heard her singing then, inside the walls. A voice fattened with smoking and with fear. It receded into silence, or, perhaps, it stopped.
And they walked away, Clara first, then Mitzi and the compère, heads bowed down, faces still thick with greasepaint, their footsteps slapping through the Berlin rain.]
Behind them, the doorknob, big and brassy as a jaffa orange, slowly turns. The door swings open, open on the stairs.41
---
1 See Fyodor Dostoyevsky, ‘White Nights’, in Notes From Underground (New York: Signet Classics, 1961), p. 21: ‘A dreamer, if you want me to define him, is not a real human being but a sort of intermediary creature. He usually installs himself in some remote corner, shrinking even from the daylight. And once he’s installed in that corner of his, he grows into it like a snail or at least like that curious thing which is at the same time and animal and a house – the tortoise.’ See also Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Harvard: Harvard University Press, 1999) I4,5, p. 221: ‘“To dwell” as a transitive verb – as in the notion of “indwelt spaces”; herewith an indication of the frenetic topicality concealed in habitual behaviour. It has to do with fashioning a shell for ourselves.’
2 Gerald Manley Hopkins, ‘The Blessed Virgin Compared to the Air we Breathe’, in The Poems of Gerald Manley Hopkins, ed. W. H. Gardner and N. H. Mackenzie, p. 96.
3 See G. H. Mutlin, ‘Though a Glass Darkly: Dialect in Translation in the ‘Bowles Manuscript’’, Intricacies 23, 1998, 65-79, and H. R. Munroe, ‘Girltalk: Sally Bowles’ Broken German’, in Reshaping Femininities, ed. G. Brookes (London: CR Schuster, 1995), pp. 124-89.
4 ‘Too bad dark languages rarely survive’: Mark Z Danielewski’s House of Leaves (hereafter HoL) (London: Random House, 2000), p. 89.
5 See H Fetlin, ''Angels with plump black cheeks’: Colonial and Postcolonial Discourses in The Kit Kat Klub’, Diaspora 22 (2003), 14-55.
6 ‘Have you ever worn a maid’s outfit?’ HoL, p. 357.
7 ‘She could have laid this world to waste.
Maybe she still will.’ HoL, p. 502.
8 ‘Paglia: How would I describe it? The feminine void.’ HoL, p. 364.
9 For ‘drapery’, see HoL, p. 119. For ‘jewelry box’, ibid, p. 349. See also ‘The place is like a power-station which the engineers have tried to make comfortable with tables and chairs from an old-fashioned, highly respectable boarding house.’ Christopher Isherwood, ‘Goodbye to Berlin’ (1939), in The Berlin Novels (London: Random House, 1992), p. 260.
10 A. L. Chakravarti, ‘Doorway to Expressionism: Down the Rabbit Hole in Black and White’, in Film Strip 14 (1983), 71-112.
11 ‘To construct the city topographically – tenfold and a hundredfold – from out of its arcades and its gateways, its cemeteries and bordellos, its railroad stations and its ..., just as formerly it was defined by its churches and its markets. And the more secret, more deeply embedded figures of the city: murders and rebellions, the bloody knots in the network of the streets, lairs of love, and conflagrations.’ Benjamin, The Arcades Project, C1,8, p. 83.
12 ‘The whole district is like this: street leading into street of houses like shabby monumental safes crammed with the tarnished valuables and second-hand furniture of a bankrupt middle-class.’ Isherwood, The Berlin Novels, p. 243.
13 ‘What becomes of such things? How could they ever be destroyed?’ HoL, p. 244.
14 ‘That blank stare, permanently fixed on some strange slate bare continent’: HoL, p. 267. See also HoL, p. 319, for ‘grave’. Compare the meditation on stone that opens Gustave Meyrink’s 1915 The Golem (New York: Dover Publications, 1976), ed. E. F. Bleiler, p. 3: ‘This image of the stone that resembled a lump of fat assumes ever larger and larger proportions within my brain. I am striding along the dried-up bed of a river, picking up weathered, worn flints [...] black, with sulphry spots, like the petrified attempts by a child to create squat, spotty monsters. I strive with all my might and main to throw these stone shapes far away form me, but always they drop out of my hand, and, do what I will, are there, for ever there, within my sight. Whereupon every stone that has ever played a role in my life rises into existence and compasses me round.’ Compare Jan Svankmajer’s short film, A Game of Stones, 1965. And see also George Herriman, ‘Krazy Kat’, May 16th 1926, in Krazy & Ignatz, ed. Bill Blackbeard (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 2002), p. 85: ‘It is only sandstone, Mr Mouse – and so, but a baby, a mere child of age – shaped by the nimble fingers of nature in a moment of play – ‘
15 For underground lighting, see Ralph Ellinson, Invisible Man (New York: Random House, 1995), p. 7: ‘In my hole in the basement there are exactly 1,369 lights. I’ve wired the entire ceiling, every inch of it. And not with fluorescent bulbs, but with the older, more expensive kind, the filament type. An act of sabotage, you know.’
16 Some of the following details are likely to reflect the ‘Bowles Manuscript’ rather than the staging of The Kit Kat Klub.
17 ‘More than likely no one will ever learn whether or not the stories about the well and Karen’s stepfather are true.’ HoL, p. 348.
18 See HoL, p. 467.
19 [A detail from the Bowles Manuscript, naturally. Not that Sally ever sat through a horror movie in her life, as far as I’m aware. She was too good at capitalising on those scary moments, throwing herself into [elided] arms.]
20 ‘Cimmerian dark’: HoL, p. 98.
21 Money money money money money money
Money money money money money money
Money money money money money money
Money money.
22 ‘The darker side of whim’: HoL, p. 150.
23 ‘[...] a bottomless abyss that is the linguistic equivalent of Lyell’s open-ended stratigraphic column.’ Rosalind Williams, Notes on the Underground (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 2008), p. 49.
24 ‘[...] remarkable propensity for structures that convey and connect’: Benjamin, The Arcades Project, E2a,4, p. 125.
25 ‘There is a land that I heard of / Once in a lullaby'.
26 ‘[...] a symphony fills space as well as time. More people than Erich Mendelsohn have experienced music as a series of structures, which grew and collapsed and reformed again according to a logic not available to an architect.’ Robert Harbison, The Built, the Unbuilt and the Unbuildable (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1991), p. 162. Compare Goethe, ‘I call architecture frozen music.’ Letter to Johann Peter Eckerman [March 23, 1829], in Esther Newhost, ‘Music as Place in the Navidson Record’, in The Many Wall Fugue, ed. Eugenio Roxch & Joshua Scholfield (Farnborough: Greg International, 1994), p. 47, in HoL, p. 123.
27 See G Laricci, ‘Semblance and Simulacra: Faking it on the Berlin Stage’, Impersonations 22 (1984), 44-63.
28 See Y Leung, ‘Little Boy Lost: Silent Dieter and The Kit Kat Klub’, Impersonations 23 (1985), 55-91.
29 ‘It is easy to make this spot disappear, thanks to the flaws in the rough glass of the window: the blackened surface has merely to be brought into proximity with one of the flaws of the windowpane, by successive experiments.’ Robbe-Grillet, ‘Jealousy’, in Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet, trans Richard Howard (New York: Grove Press, 1965), p. 95.
30 See HoL, pp. 512-14.
31 ‘The way she moved. Those perfect angles she’d make with her wrists. Her beautiful long fingers.” HoL. p, 323.
32 See H. Fetlin, ‘Bloody Trenches: Scheherazade on Stage at the Kit Kat Klub’, in Cinema Today 67 (1992), 102-54.
33 See G Levy, The Authorised Biography (New York: Danton, 1998), and R Yokohama, Reflections on a Memorable Man (Tokyo: TGI Publishing, 1982).
34 See G Baranski, ‘Special Effects in The Kit Kat Klub’, Modern Cinema 45 (1978), 23-75.
35 ‘For instance, at a performance of Dr Caligari the other day, a shadow shaped like a tadpole suddenly appeared at one corner of the screen. It swelled to an immense size, quivered, bulged, and sank back again into nonentity.’ Virginia Woolf, The Cinema, 1926,
36 ‘[...] sounding alot like an old projector’: HoL, p. 501.
37 ‘‘“Covered” – is that the right word? My tooth is the whole gold, Doctor.’’ J G Ballard, The Crystal World (London: Flamingo, 1993), p. 58.
38 See J Zdanowicz, ‘Don’t Look Now: The Kit Kat Klub and the Infectious Gaze’, in Screen Languages 8 (1983), 44-78.
39 ‘One of the – often unspoken – objections to photography: that it is impossible for the human countenance to be apprehended by a machine.’ Benjamin, The Arcades Project, Y4a,4, p. 678.
40 See HoL, pp. 416, 476.
41 One. One two. One two three one two three -
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Seriously.
Just.
Damn.
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Especially since I remember that you liked the prompt as well, which was pretty cool in and of itself - it is a kinda specialised overlap of interests.
And the prompt gave me an excuse to reread House of Leaves, which oddly enough I liked more than when I read it soon after it came out - I think I wasn't expecting it to be David Foster Wallace just because it had footnotes, or something, and was happy to read it as more or less straight-up horror, as to which, oh man, that book is scary.
But anyway! I'm especially glad that this didn't grate against your teeth, because it looks like you have some real knowledge of the period (Band of Brothers...), whileas I really don't. Which is where the film came in handy, ahem.
Also, making up references to put in the footnotes was SO FUN. Transgression!
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Amazing, anyway.
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And, heh, not as much work as all that, actually. All I really did was reread House of Leaves and bits of Isherwood with bookmarks in hand, and flip back through The Arcades Project - if I'd gone all out I really should have read Benjamin's A Berlin Childhood Around 1900, for starters. And done some proper period research. But, yeah, all the for-real footnote refs are pretty spur of the moment (which means that I've since been haunted by all the ones I left out - The Yellow Wallpaper should have been a shoo-in!).
Anyway. I'm actually really glad that this does apparently read as disturbing, because, well, you don't drag WALTER FUCKING BENJAMIN, of all people, back to 1930s Berlin without being fairly sincere about what you're doing and hoping it has some heft to it.
Also, y'know, horror meme.
Oddly enough writing this didn't freak me out - House of Leaves itself, on the other hand...
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So I thought the least I could do was give him the final word, at least in terms of the quoted excerpts. But I'm still pretty *wince* about it myself - I certainly didn't do it unthinkingly, I hope. But if this does read as rather bleak, then, yes, that would be one reason.