It was my kind of bar. Tiny, dark, quiet, with photographs on the wall of Marlene Dietrich and Humphrey Bogart. And it was in Berlin. The bar also functioned as a pension. On the lookout for an even cheaper place to stay, I asked the cheerful barmaid the rate. "Ten euros per half hour", she said.
My companion, who had been outside on the phone, came in. "Ah," said the barmaid, still cheerful, "you want a room for her and you?" My hair turned a paler shade of white. "Oh," said the now apologetic barmaid, "you are her mother?" I was speechless. The now concerned barmaid turned to my companion: "Would your mother like a drink?"
"Tell her I take sugar," I said, recovering my composure. My new daughter played along. Two drinks later, we were learning the finer points of the business. That red-haired woman in the corner cleaned the rooms after every engagement. That brown-skinned man with his own table was Big Brother. Each room had a single bed and a box of tissues.
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"It's a hard life," said the barmaid chattily. Like most people in Berlin, she spoke reasonable English. Unlike most people in Berlin, I spoke not at all. The women who picked up clients in the street walked through the bar and up the stairs, the men in tow.
All the women were dressed for work - incredibly short skirts, painfully high-heeled boots and shoes. One of them was beautiful, in her early twenties. The others were somewhat worn, of various ages, up to their fifties. Their clients were cleanly dressed, in the casual clothes that are a marked feature of the city, mid-twenties to mid-fifties. One had a backpack. I kept offering silent thanks that the men were clean and did not seem aggressive.
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Next night, as we walked in, a different barmaid called: "We're closed." Big Brother leapt to his feet and said: "It's okay." It was ludicrous to feel complimented but I did. We sat demurely down. The small bar was fairly full. The women and their clients nursed their drinks, silently awaiting their turn to go upstairs. The barmaid didn't converse. We didn't try. Curiosity had given way to glum reality.
I came home to news of the young American woman who had given birth to two children by her captor during an 18-year incarceration. There are 8m hits on Google about the case. There are - who can explain? - only 2m on Josef Fritzl whose daughter gave birth to seven of his children in the cellar where she spent 24 years. I remember in March, when Fritzl was sentenced to life in prison, looking down at basement rooms in Ranelagh wondering if . . . and assuring myself that "no". But who knows? And who cares?
The evidence is that we do know but don't care about the global rise in trafficking of women and girls. We know that 365 unaccompanied minors (immigrant, undocumented children under 18) walked out of the hostels where we lodged them in the past decade and nobody knows what has become of them; that 14 immigrant children were rescued by gardai from the sex trade in Navan and Naas last year; and that our government has just made a 12% cut in the funding of Ruhama, the non-governmental organisation that looks after such females.
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We know that the consumption and production of pornography via the internet makes more money than Hollywood ever did, and I know that I have given up protesting to managers of Irish hotels where I stay about the offer of "adult viewing" on TV for a fee. I walk past "adult magazines" in shops without a murmur. Life-size female rubber dolls are sold in Dublin's sex shops but so what? It's better than selling women.
There hasn't been a word in weeks about the rape of children in the Irish clerical sex trade. More significantly, there has been but passing reference to the declaration by Katie Price, aka Jordan, that she has been raped more than once. A magazine industry, voracious for human-angle news about the breakdown of her marriage, yawned at this everywoman banality.
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In Berlin, most clubs have "dark rooms" where consenting adults engage with strangers in sexual congress. Consent is the operative word, I reassured myself. I'd longed for years to go to Berlin and finally there I was, but I lost heart singing that stanza so marvellously delivered by Liza Minnelli in Cabaret about Elsie not being a "blushing flower, as a matter of fact she rented by the hour". There's another song I don't sing so much any more. The one by the Dubliners about the sailor who throws coins on the table, declaiming: "Take this, me dear, for the mischief that I've done, for tonight I fear I've left you with a daughter or a son."
Hillary Clinton explained again last week why she insists on direct talks with women's groups wherever she goes. "The 19th century was about combating slavery; the 20th century was about combating totalitarianism; the 21st century is about combating sexual violence against women and girls." I think of Clinton when I see newsreels about the rapidly deteriorating situation in Afghanistan. When George Bush and Tony Blair took on the Taliban, the world was treated to indignant footage about women in burkhas. They're still in burkhas. They just don't get mentioned any more. It's our boys versus their boys; raped women are just collateral damage.
I still like Berlin. As long as it's by consent, boys.