Billy Wilder on Assignment by Noah Isenberg (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

tango argentino out of their accordions and sing in foreign accents. I’m dancing with a woman of exotic beauty.… White powdered arms tightly wound around my neck, the fragrance of Narcisse Noir emanating from her hair …

“Slept well?”

Roberts.

“Ironed your suit? Collar clean? Proper necktie? Wait!”

Then he comes back accompanied by a young man with a pallid face, his eyes red and teary. Seems to be somewhat asleep. His hair is thinning, although he is thirty at most. Worn out.

Roberts: “This is Herr Isin, the dance instructor.”

Herr Isin holds out a hand to me that is as soft as butter and lacks any bones. He prattles on about something, toneless and withdrawn. Russian.

Roberts: “Isin, you will explain everything to the gentleman. I have to go into the ballroom.”

Herr Isin nods, hikes up his wide trouser legs, and sits down next to me.

“So, where have you danced?”

“Nowhere.”

“I see. Amateur. Got it.”

He pulls an old bus ticket out of his coat pocket and a tiny stub of a pencil, giving its tip a lick.

“I have to register you with the police. You have to pay tax. And health insurance money. What’s your name?”

Thus and thus.

“Birthdate?”

This and such.

“Young, very young.” Ticket and pencil disappear back into Herr Isin’s pocket.

“Just the essentials. You’ll dance afternoons and evenings. From 4:30 to 7:00 and from 9:30 to 1:00. Afternoons dark suit, stiff collar, evenings tuxedo. You’ll eat with your colleagues. Like a guest.”

Like a guest—

“As for the wages: five marks a day, making 150 a month. But don’t forget, there’s also …”

Herr Isin closes his left eye.

“Dance lessons … or—tips—”

The dance instructor’s sallow face gives me a long and mild look. “The likes of us have never gone hungry. You’ll do well.”

“I’ll do well. My assignment?”

“Hmm. I can’t actually explain that to you. Our profession is practical application, nothing but practical application.”

“Our profession—”

“You can start today,” Roberts told me. “Take off your coat. I’ll explain everything else to you in the ballroom.”

The cloakroom.

“This is our new dancer.”

The woman behind the desk fixes her sharp gaze on me, sharp like a military doctor. Then she says, in a thick Czech accent: “Put down coat here. But if place full, drop off at front, or else too crowd and guests have not room. Understood?”

“Of course, my lady.”

In the ballroom. Packed. Cigarette haze. Perfume and brilliantine. Preened ladies from twenty to fifty. Bald heads. Mamas with prepubescent daughters. Young men with garish neckties and brightly colored spats. Whole families.

The jazz band on the upper level is slouching over their instruments and bobbing to the rhythm. Aside from the banjo player, who is looking down, bored and mouth agape, at the couples as they jump, grind, chuff, and hop.

Loud and sweltering.

Herr Isin’s red eyes gaze at me as though straining to say: Go!

Yes, yes, I’ll go dance. Over there in the corner, the lady in the Persian lamb coat and the crocodile leather shoes. I’ll go ask her to dance.

But Herr Isin taps my shoulder. “You’re dancing with table 91. Right over here.”

Table 91. An older lady in a bottle-green dress, with a long neck and hair the color of egg yolks; and a little lady, whose reddish snub nose is trying too hard to look uppity.

I stand in front of them, a second Buridan’s ass, sweat on my brow, showing all my colors, helpless and wobbly. Then I mechanically thrust my torso forward, toward the one with the snub nose, purse my lips, and say very softly:

“May I ask for this dance?”

She smiles at me with a sour look on her face, mulling it over.

I must look quite silly, in this comical position, blushing deeply, bowing down to her.

The little one gets up, places her chubby arm around my shoulder. We dance. The blood is pounding against my temples, my legs seem to be paralyzed by a stroke. Everything blurs until someone kicks my shin and thus revives me. An endless dance. My shirt is sticking to my body. I’m gritting my teeth. We spin on. My arms now weigh a ton. I would love to leave my dance partner standing right here, get my coat from the cloakroom, and run away, far away, to those lacking pfennigs and beds—

But Herr Isin’s face is smiling, yellow and distant.

I dance only with table 91. The one with the long neck has asked for my name, letting me know that she plans to come often, now that I’m a dancer here.

III. The Colleagues

At some point, Herr Isin comes up to me.

“Have you met your colleagues? No? Come with me!”

In the red ballroom, almost at the door, four young people sit at a table and eat with abandon.

“A new colleague, Herr …” Herr Isin rummages through his pockets for my personnel slip; my name has slipped his mind.

“Delighted, delighted, likewise, likewise.”

The four: one is named Willy and is from Vienna. He spent two years at the circus, as a performer in “Icarian games.” But this job has more to offer, he says. His teeth are bad, and his hair glistens from his cheap pomade. Wouldn’t it be better to stay with the circus?

I didn’t quite catch the name of the second one; it ended with something like—sti. Berliner. Actually a sales representative at a paper factory. That he is now dancing for the sake of the money, is, I was told (a) a sign of the rotten times, (b) a funny whim of his. In the mornings he takes around his sample cases, in the afternoons he dances. Only in the afternoons. In the evenings he has to do his bookkeeping.

The one next to me: Kurt, nice fellow, son of good people, with a tasteful, diagonally striped necktie and a weak stomach. That’s why he drinks nothing but tea. Horn-rimmed glasses. Very pleasant. He, too, is on duty only for the five o’clock tea; he, too, is not really a dancer. More like a pianist, but without steady employment. And you’d have to be well dressed for that.

Finally, the fourth