Entire novel will come out here within the new year...
18. Hotelier
FOR AS LONG as Helmut knew there had always been a hotelier or an innkeeper in his family. The name Redl had been synonymous with hotels in Vienna since the early 17th century, though the first Redl taking up the profession was executed soon afterwards as a traitor for acquiescing to the invading Turks in taking over his home, then demanding payment for their stay, not to mention for the pleasures of his sultry daughter. The invaders found his rash audacity and boldness so extraordinary that the incident appeared in dispatches to the Sultan in Byzantium who answered: Pay him.
They did, and continued their lodgings, and the amenities of his daughter. After the Turks were routed from Vienna and Austria, the authorities did not find Redl's business dealings with the enemy so benevolent and were not so generous as the heathen Sultan, having Redl quartered for treason and complicity with the enemy. By then other guests were lodging in his rooms, and his daughter, taking over from her father, had her eye on the eye on the larger building next door and even thought of adding a few stories to the existing one she now owed.
Helmut had taken over the hotel from his father, who continually changed the name, from Majestic to Royal to Excelsior, until Helmut settled on his own, the Redl Haus. No matter that Redl had taken on sinister spy associations unknown to Helmut. Though Helmut regretted slightly never having married while the old man was alive so as to assure him there be an heir to take over at his own passing, when Friska arrived Helmut didn't real care all the much as to the fate of the establishment once he was gone. Frau Friska was as good a legatee as any heir or scion he could produce. If one day they lowered the Hotel Redl sign for good – to the consternation of local historians and newspaper editorials/obituaries (though they did nothing to fill his rooms) – he'd just as well agree to call the place Hotel Friska as any other.
In the few years Helmut ran the establishment after his father's passing he had his fill of hotel-keeping; the hotel steadily deteriorated not only in its physical structure and appearance, but also in the clientele it attracted. Just as Helmut could never decide which to do first, fix the plaster or change the path-worn carpets, so too was he blind to his lodgers, who often arrived without luggage and departed with a pillowcase stuffed with towels, sheets, and soaps.
The Tourist Commission even downgraded his rating from Excellent to Good, eventually omitting the hotel from the recommendations it sent across the Continent to tourist bureaus and travel-guide publishers as an enticement to travelers.
Still, it took him another two years, after numerous official reprimands, before he got around to removing the Commission's Recommended sticker from the hotel door window, and that only because the window was broken in a scuffle between guests and not from any bureaucratic threats. He later re-glued the old sticker to the new window. Though it soon curled up around the edges and looked as if it would fly off with each door opening/closing, it stayed stuck for at least another year before Frau Friska finally flicked it off with her nail and replaced it with the new Recommended sticker the hotel received the same day.
For Frau Friska Belinska it was as if the hotel had been awaiting her arrival. She appeared one morning just as Helmut was struggling with the padlocked front door after a sleepless night in the city jail trying to understand why he was being held accountable for what went on in his hotel rooms once the guests closed behind them. Prostitution? Sadism? Kidnapping? All I do is rent the rooms. Helmut kept protesting, but the police shoved him with the other rounded-up suspects and charged him with a house of prostitution and associating with known criminals.
It was probably the name Redl which got him out so quickly (official Vienna still impressed with something long since faded), though he was warned to return the following afternoon for arraignment before a magistrate, or else, noted hotelier or not, he would forfeit all rights and remain in jail until a trial date which could be months away. Frau Friska stepped in behind him just as he broke through the police padlocks and opened the door.
It was odd for anyone to request a room so early in the morning. Even in his father's day the earliest guests did not arrive till at least the afternoon, and then they'd usually just deposit their bags at the desk to be sent to their rooms as they went about their business in the city.
He had seen the strange figure lurking about the quiet street as soon as he turned the corner, clutching a small paper parcel to her chest. Though she wore men's trousers and a large ill-fitting suit jacket, the flower-printed blouse beneath the jacket was certainly feminine and out of place with the otherwise masculine appearance. Her uneven, oddly-cut hair was dirty and matted in spots where it was cut short – the scalp bruised and scabbed where was cut short – and her unwashed face had that yellowed puffy look of slowly healing sores from blows and punches.
Helmut's first impression was that she was one of those pansies from the canal who had tricked someone by an assumed femininity and got beaten for the almost successful charade. His first instinct was to turn her out – he was in trouble as it was without adding charges of homosexuality to his list of crimes – still, there was that tinge of sorrow and pity he always felt in seeing someone destitute, which had become a common sight everywhere in the city: a bum scavenging for food in the trash; an old couple seeking refuge in a cold hallway; hungry children overturning a fruit stand so as to steal an apple or two and run away.
It wasn't the usual idlers and shirkers, but entire working and middle-class families who now huddled on the streets or in soup-kitchens or lice-infested sleeping shelters, those who had lost everything in the Great Depression and couldn't seem to scrape enough to get started again, much less hold their families together.
This was the real outrage: that a society continued to function and prosper while a greater portion of its people could not. This was also the temptation and justification: that those who weren't prospering by rights and duty should overthrow that society by any means possible.
Helmut let the sorry-looking stranger into the hotel and locked the door behind them.
For the rest of the week Frau Friska became the sole guest of the Hotel Redl, occupying a double room on the second floor overlooking the Mozarthaus across the street. The charges against Helmut dropped for insufficient evidence by the presiding magistrate, who then summoned Helmut to the bench to enquire if the hotel had a back entrance unseen from the street, then slowly grew angry at Helmut's seeming incomprehension of what he was hinting at. The judge angrily dismissed him from court with the stern warning that his family's reputation in Vienna would be of little help if he were brought before the judge again. Helmut shrugged and hurried back to his ailing guest.
He temporarily dismissed the staff, giving the three maids and the porter a week's wages he could ill-afford to expend, and hung a large hand-printed Closed sign on the front door. Friends of the other suspects swept in the raid came pounding on the door and demanded Helmut turn over the belongings that had been left behind, dismissing his explanations that the police had confiscated everything from the rooms as evidence.
We'll get you! threatened the male friends, while the females simply called him Idiot! and ran off down the street.
Though Helmut was unnerved by the raid, the arrest, the court hearing, and the repetitive threats of door-pounders, he was even more unnerved and puzzled by his new guest. As soon as she requested a room, she also told him she had no money to pay for one, but that there was bank account in Berlin she had been trying to transfer to Vienna and that the funds should be available any day now. This was a new one on Helmut; prospective guests usually did not admit they were without funds until they over-extended their stay as much as possible, and even then, denied there were any real financial worries.
"We'll settle in a day or two after my funds come in,” they'd say, and never be seen again.
But he believed his new guest; whether she was telling the truth or not didn't seem to matter all that much to Helmut. Not that he was the proverbial soft touch, but rather the rare kind of man who easily took compassion on another's bad luck and usually ended up paying the price for it. Still, his misreading of one person's character had never hardened him so much as to dismiss another without even a glance.
“Don't worry,” he had told the flustered Friska, her face sweating in the morning chill, her arms leaning heavily on the front reception desk. “You know how slow and greedy bureaucracies can be. They readily take your deposits but demand a reference from Adam for a simple withdrawal.”
Friska chuckled. Helmut escorted her up to the rooms and shut down the hotel.
It was not until a few days later that Helmut was surprised by the actual beauty of his guest and what a few garments and creams and rouges could do to enhance and alter a seeming plain and battered face and body. He had spent hours skirting about the obvious femininity of his visitor, knowing fell well that the sick person in bed was a male, but treating the patient with all the reserve and sensitivity due an injured and ailing person, be he man or woman.
Helmut walked quietly, left the downstairs wireless set off, muted the hall and bedroom lights, and one morning brought a sprig of flowers in a vase to brighten the cheerless curtain-drawn recovery room. It was not only the first time in his life Helmut had personally cared for anyone (his father dying unexpectedly in his sleep), but also the first time he had ever gazed upon anyone with that strange fear, nervousness, and uncertainty which is a prelude to love. He'd often sit for hours near the bed, staring at the sleeping figure, his mind vacant of any dreams, hopes, scenarios, but sitting as if his mere presence in the room were beneficial to a speedy recovery.
He knew nothing of what had occurred to the man, why he was beaten, why his hair was crudely shorn, whether he was Austrian or German, or even if it'd be safe to be in the same room with him once he slept off his illness and was well enough to move again. What if he was harboring a killer? A child-molester? A pervert wanted by the authorities?
He shrugged; it was like taking in a stray cat off the streets; either your house could be contaminated with fleas and lice, or your cellars rid of mice and rats; the risk was always there, but the chance was always worth it.
“Guten Morgen!” he said cheerily one day, and almost dropped the breakfast tray he carried, surprised by a slender woman standing near the open window, the bed empty and unmade. For a moment he thought his ailing guest had a visitor, though perplexed as to how the woman gained entrance to the hotel. He was about to withdraw when the woman turned and smiled and greeted him, “Good morning!”
He blushed and recognized the voice and stuttered a reply and felt very uncomfortable as he set down the tray on an end table.
“Your breakfast,” he muttered and tried to hurry out of the room.
“Join me for a cup,” said Friska, moving across the room, her skirt swaying around her shins, her torso eased slightly forward from her high-heeded shoes, her breasts arched and pointed up in a white satin blouse.
“I...I...already had,” Helmut stuttered.
“Just one?” asked Friska. Her face gleamed in morning sunshine, the makeup and creams disguising the bruises beneath, the mascara evening out the blackened eyes, the lipstick creating an appealing pout on her still-swollen lips.
“No cup,” said Helmut, gesturing to the tray.
Friska frowned.
“But I already had,” he shrugged and shook his head. “This is your breakfast.”
Friska brightened. She took the tray to a small round table near the window and sat down, simultaneously adding equal parts of milk and coffee. She blew a waft of breath over the steaming cup and took a sip.
“Ahh...even better than Berlin's,” she sighed, taking another sip.
Helmut nodded and was about to tell her the story of how the Turks brought coffee to Vienna but remembered he had already told her the story the previous day, when he forgot having related the same story a day earlier.
“Hmm,” he blushed, and remained hovering by the door.
It had been more than a week since Friska arrived. For the first few days she mostly slept and recuperated in bed, barely touching the breakfast, lunch and dinner Helmut brought up. She had finally eaten a full meal yesterday and asked to borrow some toiletries. If he could advance the money, would he purchase some garments and things she needed? Helmut noticed that she had already washed the print blouse she had arrived in, but the trousers and jacket remained on the closet doorknob he had hung them on after picking them off the floor the day before; they'd probably have to be discarded.
He readily loaned her the use of his razor and soaps and went for the other brushes, tooth-powders, combs and goods she requested. Fortunately she had made up a list of required articles, and though Helmut felt awkward entering the Ladies Millinery store on the Mariahilferstrasse, he simply handed over the list, nervously explaining it was for an ailing female relative, then stood red-faced as the list was compiled, wrapped, paid for, and handed over.
He should have expected the change into woman's clothing; what he didn't expect was the actual woman in them. She had trimmed her hair, evening the odd-cut clumps into a short boyish bob upswept off her forehead but short at the sides (though definitely longer than any male haircut), and she had rouged her cheeks and lips and eyes to an almost unrecognizable tincture of her previous self. Yet it wasn't the makeup or skirt which so unnerved Helmut, but the pointed bosom she thrust out and held high on her body. He gaped greedily.
Ever since Helmut became aware of the physical and sexual differences between himself and females, it was their bosoms he longed and lusted after. Yet in his entire forty-two years only twice had he actually ever touched a female breast: that of a prostitute who resisted his rough mauling of her large teats and kept pushing his hands off, and that of an overdeveloped young girl in a dirndl who wouldn't let him touch her anywhere else.
The prostitute he soon forgot, disgusted by the recollection of ejaculating in her mouth and having her spit out and retch all over his crotch and thighs, but the young girl in a dirndl became an almost nightly masturbatory fantasy. Though it had been over twenty years since he saw or touched her, her breasts in his dreams were as familiar and large as if he had personally been pawing them in the two decades since.
Friska's breasts were nowhere near the size of the prostitute's or the exaggerated girl of imagination; still, Helmut could not help but stare hungrily at the pointed shape and form of the fake bosom. He knew they weren't real; he had seen her bare flat chest the first day he brought breakfast and found her asleep uncovered in bed, but they were as near to real, or at least attainable, as any he had imagined or sometimes made up for himself.
For like most chronic masturbators, Helmut had eventually evolved himself into his own ideal fantasy. Though he started with the dream of breasts on a girl, he had progressed to the vision of what the girl would and would not let him do to those breasts, until he became the girl of the fantasy and controlled the availability and offer of his breast: the teasing, resisting, the baiting, and the crying out in final release.
It was only a matter of time before the stroking of his own flat chest, which did nothing to arouse or excite him, led to the logical notion of cramming his shirt with towels and cloths and stacking up pillows atop his torso as he laid grinding and moaning beneath his tumbling breast-mauling dream-lover.
Friska saw him staring and pushed out her bosom even more. She had long ago learned that it isn't a flesh and blood woman most men desire but the ideal of a woman, and the more exaggerated and unattainable the better.
Though her penis may have blocked the reality of someone else's fantasy, Friska always thought of herself as the complete embodiment of the ideal woman. It wasn't so much a question of physical gender, but how that gender was expressed. All the men she had ever been with knew she was a male beneath the facade of female makeup and clothes. She knew their longing for her went beyond the cliched explanation of men and women coupling to be reunited and heal their separation from Adam's rib. Their longing was the natural longing of men being a part of each other long before any separation took place.
Maybe that's why God scarred Adam for millenniums and why Man felt so alone in the Cosmos: he had taken too much pleasure in himself.
The bitterness between the sexes, their conflicts, their misunderstandings, their ability to hurt and hate each other other stemmed from that fact alone: woman was created to stop the hedonism and self-indulgence Adam had in himself. The animalistic coupling between men and women was not a longing for unity to breach the separation, but an attack of revenge to further punish and rebel against the imposed desire and need men and women were cursed to express for each other.
If men were attracted to Friska knowing full well that she was as them, it was a facade of going through the motions and conquering a female to find an image of themselves that only enhanced the pleasure and satisfaction the two took in each other, and brought them into a unity of togetherness a woman could long for but never experience with a man. It wasn't trickery, deception, or manipulation if a man was lured to a man dressed as a woman, but a stimulus that once stripped of its cultural sham of perfumes, brassieres, powders and silks would reveal that the man playing at being a woman and the man seducing the woman to uncover the man were only annealing a distant primordial race-memory of a species which had once had no need of others but itself. Attracted to the imposition of apartness, the transvestite can befuddle the wrenching hand of God and gel with Adam as no woman can. A sin? A taunting of nature? Or simply an affirmation that the first draft of Creation, Adam alone, was already perfect?
They stared at each other across the room. Friska slowly sipping her coffee, Helmut hungering after her breast. When she finished and set down her cup, they walked instinctively toward each other and fell onto the bed. Their mouths met and her skirted torso rose up against his stiff penis and she felt her own, pressing to uncurl and rise and free itself from the puckered hold of her panties and girdle. Their tongues probed each other, and Helmut gripped a breast and tugged it up her chest, molding it slightly below her shoulder.
He ejaculated in his pants, lay still for a moment, then rolled off and tried to rise, but Friska pulled him back down. His face and mouth greedily fell onto the awkwardly risen tit and he sucked quietly, peacefully, his fingers pulsing around the other fake breast, also rising out of its hold and moving to her shoulder. They lay clothed in bed the rest of the day.
Friska never got her savings from Berlin: the Nazi authorities had confiscated all possessions of deportees. She eventually concluded it better not to press her claims since the Austrian Nazi Party was becoming as voluble as the early German one. They would welcome the opportunity to do Berlin's bidding and shut up an enemy and pest of the Reich.
She took over the reins of the hotel and restored it to its former attractiveness and money-making status, eliminating its transient riff-raff who had become accustomed to free lodging. She gave out a room either when payment was made in advance or when there a was a certainty the guest was legitimate and would not abscond with the bill or a pillowcase of goods.
Within a year the Austrian Tourist Commission once more gave the Hotel Redl its Recommended citation. Within another year Friska had the back rooms on the second floor portioned into cubicles, not only providing a rewarding and secure haven for young boys to dress as girls, but also quadrupling the hotel's back corridor earnings in six months, making what the legitimate part on the upper floors would take two years to earn.
And for Helmut, Frau Friska always enlarged and puffed out her breasts.
