Sandor

Sandor is a co-owner and intermediary at Le Manège whose warmth makes him effective with the women under management and unsettling to the narrator. Jovial, French-speaking, and lavish with compliments, he also has a capacity for frightening anger; his personal attentions and recruitment work reveal how charm can soften the surface of a workplace structured by economic dependence and control.

Position and temperament

Sandor operates alongside Milo, the more withdrawn leader of Le Manège, but presents a markedly different face of authority. The narrator describes him as colorful and sociable, capable of turning from high spirits to a black anger more alarming than Milo’s habitual gloom. He is useful to management precisely because he can move between encouragement and reprimand: his wit and apparent kindness make him a persuasive go-between with the women, while the possibility of anger keeps that friendliness from feeling safe.

The narrator therefore treats his charm with caution. Sandor singles her out, partly because she is French and can help him practise his somewhat rusty French. He speaks admiringly of the years he spent in Paris, recalling the city and its boulevard Suchet with reverence. Their conversations are not about the work. When she waits for clients, he comes over to light his cigar, first sketching a hand-kiss, then talking about Édith Piaf and Jacques Brel. The cultivated gestures and shared language create an air of intimacy without removing the fact that he is part of the management.

Courtship and unequal intimacy

Sandor’s attentions are personal, but they take place inside a workplace where he has authority. His wife left him two years earlier, and he now seeks consolation in the arms of different Bulgarian and Ukrainian women. The narrator presents this as an arrangement he finds agreeable as he approaches fifty, particularly among women from regions he knows and whose languages he speaks. Sandor’s access to women at the brothel thus sits alongside his official role: the social ease that helps him manage the house also gives his attentions an unequal context.

Every evening he offers to drive the narrator home. She repeatedly sidesteps the offer, her heart beating at the thought that he might recognize her fear of being drawn into a fatal trap. The narrative does not establish that Sandor intends to harm her; the danger is the narrator’s apprehension, sharpened by his position and by the gap between his inviting manner and his capacity for anger. His kindness does not settle that uncertainty. It is part of what makes her wary.

Management and recruitment

Sandor’s intermediary role extends beyond the narrator. When Milo summons or reprimands women, Sandor can approach them more gently, though the narrator sees him working within the same hierarchy. He is present with Milo in the management salon during a dispute over a client’s attempt to pay for an extra half-hour at the cheaper hourly rate. The narrator is sent back to the room to explain the surcharge; after the client insists on speaking to Milo, she waits outside while the two men confer. Sandor tries to fill the silence with conversation. The scene places his sociability beside the management’s control of prices and the worker’s exposure to an angry client, without suggesting that his pleasant manner can resolve the underlying imbalance.

The narrator also reconstructs the recruitment pitch that brought many women to Berlin. Milo or his contacts approached women in Eastern European countries where they had been taking poorly paid jobs, including night shifts in strip clubs. A persuasive man like Sandor could sell the West as a place of opportunity: better money, protection from clients who might refuse to pay, and the chance to support family back home. The narrator frames that promise as a likely version of what attracted many women to Le Manège, not as a recruitment speech she personally witnessed Sandor deliver. Its appeal is set against the women’s later circumstances: few savings, limited local contacts, and a luxurious routine that consumes their earnings and makes leaving harder.

The house and its divided workforce

Sandor’s work as a mediator takes place in a house divided by age, language, nationality, and access to management. The older German women form a living social core: after ten at night they have the privilege of joining the small salon with the bosses and housemaids, need not present themselves to each arriving client, and may order alcohol. Their familiarity with Sandor and Maximilian contrasts with the isolation of younger migrant workers such as Micha, a nineteen-year-old Romanian whom the narrator sees being reprimanded by Milo almost every evening. Sandor’s gentler approach to Micha does not erase the hierarchy she faces or change her reluctance to engage with the business.

The contrast is also economic. Women brought to Berlin are promised safety and a higher income than they could earn in poorly paid work at home, yet the narrator observes that many are short of cash and depend on the house for food, drink, and access to cocaine. The management’s protective claims coexist with workers’ fear of the directors and with the narrator’s account of women who might prefer restaurant work if their expensive lifestyle did not bind them to the brothel. Sandor’s geniality belongs to this complicated structure: he can speak the language of opportunity and kindness while serving a business whose security and comforts do not make its workers independent.

The narrator’s distance from Sandor

Sandor’s attentions also intensify the narrator’s estrangement from the other women. After she has attracted clients and management praise, she comes to be regarded as a competitor: the French newcomer who takes clients and trails after Sandor like a prodigal daughter. His interest therefore offers her no straightforward protection or friendship. It makes her more visible within the house and helps deepen the distance between her and colleagues whose trust she had hoped to earn by working hard and keeping her head down.

That distance contributes to her growing sense that she cannot remain at Le Manège. The narrator fears bringing the sadness and treatment she experiences there back to her sisters, and recognizes that secrecy is becoming oppressive. Sandor is not shown causing her departure, nor is his relationship with her brought to a definitive resolution. Rather, he stands at the point where the narrator’s personal unease and the workplace’s structure meet: his French conversation and offers of a ride suggest intimacy, while his managerial role and the women’s dependence make that intimacy difficult to accept at face value.