We talk afterward for the length of a cigarette. Her German has an eastern tinge: she is from Upper Silesia, probably the daughter of Germanized Poles: Gisela—she does not tell me her last name. I ask her whether she would care to have a cognac with me; her answer is clear, resolute, and scrupulous: her percentage of the overcharge on a mere two glasses of cognac will not make up for the loss of possible business during the time we would spend drinking them, but if I ordered a whole bottle, she would be willing to chat with me for an hour.

She smiles. Her whore’s profession, she says, consists mainly of such chiseling. Contrary to the popular conception, there is a great deal more talking and boozing in a whorehouse than there is sex. As for the latter, her life here is presumably calmer than that of many a decent Hamburg housewife.

The cognac is wretched and many times more expensive than a select one would be today at Maxim’s in Paris, but that doesn’t bother me; my pockets are stuffed with money: movie money—an inflationary currency, especially when handed out in one as worthless as the Reichsmark. My delight with the girl increases. She merely sips, but tells me with her open, comradely smile that I can imagine she knows all sorts of tricks to make believe she is drinking like a lord while actually pouring the cognac away; so, for my own sake, I shouldn’t insist that she keep up with me. Nor can she drink, she adds: alcohol is one of the narcotics that wreck the lives of most of the girls in the whorehouses along this street.

I ask her if she has been plying her trade for a long time. No, she says, only a few months. But you can work your way in very quickly, if you’re not stupid. Unfortunately, most of the girls are. Practically any girl who winds up on the street owes it to stupidity or laziness.

And what about her? How did she wind up here? I ask, ready for some tale of high drama.

She came to Hamburg as a refugee, she says obligingly and without pathos, and then she found herself on the street. Her parents had insisted that she get out of Upper Silesia when the Russians came, with the first wave. They themselves were supposed to come later, but they didn’t make it; they are still there or else they’ve vanished; she hasn’t heard from them. “But they wanted to get me out,” she says, and laughs, “so that the Russians wouldn’t rape me.” The Russians caught up with her and rolled over her before she was even halfway to Berlin. The combat troops barely had time for raping; that came only with the stragglers, in Berlin.