HARRY POSNER

Even The Lizard

Dada is a virgin microbe which penetrates with the insistence of air into all those spaces that reason has failed to fill with words and conventions—Tristan Tzara 

At one point in your career you thought of getting a monkey, like Anita Berber. But then discarded the idea. She had done it first, was the first to do most everything one could consider decadent in post-war Berlin, the Babylon beside the Spree, as it was known. And the whole idea, in any case, was to be unique, true to one’s self. Perhaps the most modern of ideas. 

So, instead, you created a cabaret act that was both surreal and sexy. Mr. Spielmann just had to hire you on. In his eyes you were the next Anita. You’d balance his other more tame acts: Hansi the juggler/ventriloquist, who juggled toy puppies that he made to bark and yip with each toss; and Zula, the hunger artist, who’d lie, emaciated, on a tabletop, covered in food, audience members invited to come on stage to eat a little knockwurst off her shrinking stomach. 

Meine Herrschaften! Let Die Weiße Maus introduce you to the sensational, the hotter than hot, Jackie Grosz! Spotlight on. Curtain up on a slender girl gyrating at center stage, opium snaking through her naked body hidden from the waist up by an accordion, singing Putting On The Ritz while dancing the Black Bottom. A lethargic monitor lizard motionless at her feet, idly flicking his tongue, out in, out in. 

You were new at it, but you’d learned a few tricks watching the best of the best. Claire Waldorf, gone now, and her protégé Marlene Dietrich (making it big in moving pictures). And of course, poor, dead (too soon, at twenty-nine) Anita, with her bisexual monkey and her drugs and her anything goes attitude. Learned the art of titillation through obvious innuendo, the way you (not so subtly) straddled the lizard at the end of your act, ecstatically working the accordion’s bellows, in out, in out, as you lowered yourself onto its back. 

And the people loved you. Clapped and whooped and sang along. Men and women, both. Bisexuals, homosexuals, transsexuals, straight and bent. The masked ones, identities hidden in case of scandal. All of them haunted Die Weiße Maus because you gave them everything you had. And, you were undeniably talented. The crème of Berlin came: Brecht and Weill; George Grosz (yes, your proud papa) and the Dadaists, or what was left of them. And, of course, your lover, Greta. 

The Maus welcomed everyone. And so, while you sang Show me the way to the next whiskey bar… you’d look out on a cross-section of Berliners that included prominent communists and Bolsheviks, sex scientists like Dr. Hirschfeld, and, of course, prostitutes high and low, even the poor ‘mutsis’ with their distended baby bellies, and the ‘grasshoppers’ with their burn-scarred faces. All were welcomed into the Maus maelstrom of song and dance and noise and kissing and back rooms where young men would retreat to do God knows what to each other. Nobody cared. It was 1932 and freedom was still the only thing that counted. 

But Mr. Spielmann, even with the success of his establishment, became increasingly morose, as a young fascist ruffian from Munich named Hitler climbed Weimar’s broken political ladder to become chancellor of Germany. Mr. Spielmann knew that it was only a matter of months before the best of times would come crashing down. 

You began to notice strange looking people in the club: Young men, broad-shouldered, thuggish; Puffy-faced bureaucrats in ill-fitting suits stonily peppered about the room. In particular, a dark figure sitting alone at the back of the club, shrouded in shadows, coldly watching you on stage. Night after night he walked in, club-footed, sat down, ordered coffee, and stared with a pair of steely eyes that seemed to stab right through you. A whispered word floating ghostly in the air: Goebbels. Tension cutting through the frivolity. People dancing, all the while jerking worried glances in his direction. 

You were naïve, just like so many Berliners, thinking, There are too many of us. Things won’t change, not really.  

And so, on that October night, when the brown shirts came scurrying in like giant rats, clubs cracking skulls, jackboots breaking ribs, screaming Abrünniger! Hund! Arschficker!, you kept on singing, despite Mr. Spielmann’s shouts of Get out! Run, Jackie!, just before his head was caved in by the handle of a pistol.  

You kept on singing, like the players on the Titanic, as if the ship was unsinkable. As if you were immune to the poison spilling about the room, the acids thrown in people’s faces. As if the bullet slammed into your brain by a sixteen-year-old boy in a brown shirt was not a bullet at all, but part of the latest and most outrageous art form. That it was all a kind of pataphysical theatre of the imaginary. And that when the spotlight finally winked out, everything would be as it was before. Electric joy! Amphetamine air! 

But good things can be too good to last. And so, you were wrong. Even the lizard had to die.

A member of The Writers Union of Canada and Associate Member of the League of Canadian Poets, Harry Posner is an award-winning author of six books and two spoken word CDs. Harry was Dufferin County’s (Ontario, Canada) first Poet Laureate from 2017-2021. His newest book of poetry, Fractures, will be released in April of 2024.