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Francis didn’t care who he finished up with; he wasn’t much interested in making love. What did fascinate him—and what began, more and more, to fascinate Christopher, looking at it through Francis’s eyes—was the boys’ world, their slang, their quarrels, their jokes, their outrageous unserious demands, their girls, their thefts, their encounters with the police.
    Dazed with drink, smiling to himself, lighting cigarette after cigarette with shaky hands, arguing obstinately with the boys about nothing in indistinct German, Der Franni meandered from bar to bar, waiting for the moment when he would feel ready to go home and sleep. It was characteristic of Christopher that he would accompany Francis every evening on his Journey to the End of the Night, yet always leave him one third of the way through it, going home quite sober at ten, with or without a bedmate, so as to wake up fresh in the morning to get on with his novel. Seldom have wild oats been sown so prudently.
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    For Christopher, the Cosy Corner was now no longer the mysterious temple of initiation in which he had met Bubi; Berlin was no longer the fantasy city in which their affair had taken place. Their affair had been essentially a private performance which could only continue as long as Wystan was present to be its audience. Now the performance was over. Berlin had become a real city and the Cosy Corner a real bar. He didn’t for one moment regret this. For now his adventures here were real, too; less magical but far more interesting.
    The Cosy Corner (Zossenerstrasse 7) and most of the other bars frequented by Francis and Christopher were in Hallesches Tor, a working-class district. Such places depended on their regular customers. They were small and hard to find and couldn’t afford to advertise themselves, so casual visitors were few. Also, many homosexuals thought them rough and felt safer in the high-class bars of the West End, which only admitted boys who were neatly dressed.
    In the West End there were also dens of pseudo-vice catering to heterosexual tourists. Here screaming boys in drag and monocled, Eton-cropped girls in dinner jackets play-acted the high jinks of Sodom and Gomorrah, horrifying the onlookers and reassuring them that Berlin was still the most decadent city in Europe. (Wasn’t Berlin’s famous “decadence” largely a commercial “line” which the Berliners had instinctively developed in their competition with Paris? Paris had long since cornered the straight girl-market, so what was left for Berlin to offer its visitors but a masquerade of perversions?)
    The Berlin police “tolerated” the bars. No customer risked arrest simply for being in them. When the bars were raided, which didn’t happen often, it was only the boys who were required to show their papers. Those who hadn’t any or were wanted for some crime would make a rush to escape through a back door or window as the police came in.
    Nothing could have looked less decadent than the Cosy Corner. It was plain and homely and unpretentious. Its only decorations were a few photographs of boxers and racing cyclists, pinned up above the bar. It was heated by a big old-fashioned iron stove. Partly because of the great heat of this stove, partly because they knew it excited their clients (die Stubben), the boys stripped off their sweaters or leather jackets and sat around with their shirts unbuttoned to the navel and their sleeves rolled up to the armpits.
    They were all working class and nearly all out of work. If you chose to describe them as male prostitutes (Pupenjungen) you had to add that they were mostly rank amateurs, compared with the more professional boys of the West End. They were greedy but not calculating, temperamentally unable to take thought for the morrow. When they stole they stole stupidly and got caught. Although it would have been in their own interests to have their