Paulette

Paulette is a German sex worker at Le Manège whose unexpected success unsettles the house’s narrow ideal of desirability. Large, middle-aged, and visibly unlike the long-haired, slender women favored by much of the clientele, she nevertheless wins customers through kindness, persistence, and an instinct for reading them. Her arrival shifts the other women’s view of her from bafflement to personal rivalry, while making visible the difference between selling a marketable image and doing the attentive work of recognizing another person.

Arrival and Appearance

Paulette appears at the end of a particularly quiet week, when the other women are getting ready for the salon and Le Manège has recruited yet another worker despite already having a crowd of women and very few customers. She introduces herself timidly. The narrator estimates her age at about thirty-five; Paulette comes from Potsdam, though her appearance suggests, to the narrator, a more remote rural background. Her recruitment seems almost incomprehensible in a business that appears to rely on conspicuous conventional beauty.

Her body and clothes make her a striking presence. She is tall and massive, and the heels of her shoes seem to labor under her weight as she walks. Her flesh trembles with small movements. She wears her bleached hair up in a thin bun, beneath which a butterfly tattoo at the nape of her neck has faded from black toward green. Fishnet stockings struggle to reach the middle of her thighs, where they press into thick folds; tight-fitting fabrics make her body difficult to read as having a waist. Her face looks stern, her smile rare and pinched, and the narrator sees no evident erotic invitation in her eyes. What stands out instead is her determination, a quality the narrator thinks other women could learn from.

The house’s management appears to favor conspicuous signs of femininity: high heels, heavy makeup, false breasts, long extensions, gold hoops, and sweet or floral perfume. Against this standard, Paulette seems an unlikely recruit. The narrator speculates that Milo may have wanted a woman whose sheer presence would announce that the establishment was full of women, but cannot establish his actual reason for hiring her. Paulette’s appearance prompts questions about the commercial image the house sells; her conduct soon supplies a different answer to what might draw a customer in.

Work, Opportunity, and Constraint

Paulette belongs to the older German women who form what the narrator calls the brothel’s more human core. Unlike the younger Eastern European workers, who are often isolated by language and migration, these women are heard laughing and talking together in the small salon. After ten at night, that room is a privilege of the established workers: they need not present themselves when a customer arrives or even leave their chairs, and they may order alcohol. The contrast places Paulette within a relatively secure circle inside the house, though that security does not erase the economic pressure that brings her there. The narrator presents women such as Paulette as seeking a better life, or at least some breathing room after bills have been paid.

The work’s financial structure sharpens that pressure. Le Manège pays fixed wages only to its housemothers; the women depend on customers, and the house’s scarcity of business makes waiting a source of conflict and resentment. Paulette’s arrival is therefore not merely an odd personnel choice: she enters a workplace where a new worker can be perceived as competing for an already rare opportunity. The narrator contrasts Le Manège with harsher establishments, where workers may be forced to accept repeated services, denied the right to refuse particular acts, or dismissed for being ill or absent. Le Manège, by comparison, permits women to leave and return, miss shifts, and decline clients with little or no reproach. Its relative latitude does not make the work easy, but it matters to the conditions under which Paulette and her colleagues labor.

Paulette’s circumstances also resist the assumption that the women are simply free to leave because the doors are unlocked. Many workers have been brought from Eastern Europe through Milo or his contacts, with promises of better earnings, protection, and a more comfortable life in Berlin. The narrator describes how language barriers and the absence of regular pay documents can make housing and independent arrangements difficult; dependence on the house can continue even when no physical barrier prevents departure. She also observes that the workers often have little money saved, few local relationships beyond colleagues, and expenses shaped by the costly lifestyle around the brothel. These conditions frame Paulette’s apparent determination as more than temperament: her work is tied to survival and income, though the narrative does not specify her personal history or reason for coming to Le Manège.

Finding Her Customers

The gap between Paulette and the house’s usual clientele is initially hard to miss. Le Manège draws mainly businessmen with money and groups of male friends looking for a fantasy they can share: in the narrator’s description, they tend to choose a very slender woman with long hair and prominent breasts. Men more likely to desire Paulette, the narrator reasons, come alone and early, during a break. That distinction turns her apparent mismatch with the house’s beauty ideal into a question of how well a worker can recognize the person in front of her.

The answer appears when Paulette draws a taxi driver away from four younger women: Gabrielle, Michelle, Nicola, and the narrator. He offers them little more than a limp handshake and seems barely to see them. Paulette, after four evenings of going home without a customer, approaches him quietly in German. She can speak in the rough, dialectal language of the fifty-five-year-old driver, and, more importantly, seems to understand his fatigue after ten hours driving across Berlin. The narrator sees an affinity between taxi drivers and sex workers: both work independently, deal with difficult customers, and must endure other people for money. Paulette’s experience, rather than a conventionally alluring presentation, helps her meet this particular customer on his own terms.

Their conversation unfolds through long silences and slow exchanges. Sitting heavily, drinking beer together, they seem to share the exhausted posture of workers at the end of a punishing day. Paulette gets him to relax without chatter, apparently sensing that neither of them wants it. After he buys her beer and champagne, she takes his hand as though leading a child she has persuaded to cooperate. Renate, surprised that the evening’s only customer has chosen Paulette, opens room two for them.

Paulette returns a short time later with the fee for an hour and a half and an additional sixty euros for herself, which she quietly reports to Renate. The narrator wonders what service or extra charge accounts for the additional money but does not learn the answer. The uncertainty matters: the scene establishes Paulette’s ability to secure an unusually good result, not the details of what happened in the room. When she comes out, adjusting her large breasts and taking two towels from the bathroom, the narrator finds no trace of the feverish fear associated with novices. Paulette meets an encouraging smile with one of her own; for a moment, her stern features soften and she appears almost beautiful.

Success, Rivalry, and the Work of Attention

Paulette’s encounter with the taxi driver changes how the other women understand her. Of the four customers who appear that day, she attracts three; the women who had initially found her arrival astonishing begin to take her success personally. Their reaction reflects the house’s scarcity: when customers are rare, one worker’s good fortune can feel like another’s loss. The narrator, who has also spent the day without work, is left wondering what Paulette—and the other women—do behind closed doors. Yet questions about a customer receive guarded replies, if any. A brief reassurance that a man was all right can conceal almost anything, leaving Paulette’s extra earnings and the encounter that produced them unresolved.

That silence is part of the workplace’s larger division of power. The housemother may arrange introductions, collect payment, keep the records, and supervise the women, while insisting she does not want to know what happens in the rooms. The narrator recognizes how this claimed distance can coexist with authority and with a sense that management’s priorities do not necessarily match the workers’ interests. Jana, for example, exercises control through favorites, scapegoats, and shifting moods. Against that atmosphere, Paulette’s ability to win a customer is evidence of practical skill, but it does not free her from the house’s economic pressures or its hierarchy.

Paulette’s success also complicates the assumption that customers respond only to the look the establishment advertises. The narrator has imagined that the house’s usual male clientele wants an idealized, highly visible femininity; Paulette instead meets one tired man through a shared register of fatigue, quiet, and work. Her kindness is not presented as a sentimental ornament: she asks after others as though she genuinely wants an answer, and with the driver she seems to notice what sort of company he can bear. Her achievement lies in adapting her approach to a particular person, rather than performing a single standardized fantasy.

The account never discloses Paulette’s private reason for entering the business, nor what occurred in the room with the driver. It gives her no dramatic departure or final resolution. Instead, it leaves her as a worker whose determination and attentiveness briefly alter the balance among the women and expose the limits of the house’s preferred image of desirability. In a workplace organized around waiting, uncertain income, and competition for customers, Paulette’s achievement is both concrete and provisional: she earns unusually well, but the narrative keeps the means private and the larger conditions in view.