Bliss, Remembered (19 page)

“Okay,” I said, waving my arms before me in surrender. “Love story.”

And she began again to talk into the tape recorder.

Well, that next evening Horst picked me up and took me out to dinner at a little café. I had my first glass of schnapps, Teddy. But just one. I behaved myself. I was a good girl. We just talked. I didn’t care about my dinner—wienerschnitzel, I think—because I just wanted to listen to Horst tell me about his life and to tell him about mine. I didn’t want food to get in the way. I wanted him to know everything about me, even though his life had been so much more interesting than mine. But he seemed to hang on my every word, mundane as they were.

Then, as we were finishing dinner, he asked if I wanted to go meet Leni Riefenstahl, and, naturally, I said I’d love to. By now, I’d heard a great deal about her. She’d been a dancer, and then a movie star, especially in a bunch of movies that took place in the mountains. I gathered Leni was quite the athlete. But, above all, she was very determined. In fact, Teddy, she was what you men used to call a “hard broad.” Now, you have to understand, there were also dames then. Dames and broads both. But there’s a difference. Eleanor Holm, for example. She was more what you men used to call a “tough dame.” Leni was a hard broad.

That’s a good question, Teddy. I think I was a tough dame, I really do. But there were times when I had to be a hard broad, and I think I pulled that off.

Nah, by the time you were old enough to notice that stuff, I was just a lady. You could only be a dame for so long. You could be a broad longer. But only so long. Of course, nobody can use words like that anymore. It’s inappropriate. It’s a visual world now, Teddy. Tattoos and toplessness. That’s okay. It’s tacky, but it’s okay. Because you can see them. In this world, anything you can see is just fine. We’re back to paleolithic times, when painting pictures of the animals on the cave walls was what passed for sophistication. But, you call some girl with tattoos and her bazooms hanging out a broad and everybody has a fit.

Anyway, Leni Riefenstahl. Hitler asked her to direct a propaganda film for him. And Leni certainly knew which side her bread was buttered on. She made Hitler look like a demigod, a regular avatar. So then she got the job as director for the Nazis’ Olympic film. And now she was bossing everybody around. Oh, Leni Riefenstahl was a pistol. Everybody and his brother said that.

So we walked to Horst’s car, and he opened the door for me, and I noticed, standing there, that he was taller than me—but only by a few inches when I had my heels on. Remember Winnie the Pooh?

I think it was Christopher Robin. Well, either him or Pooh himself, talking about Piglet, said, “Just the size of Piglet, my favorite size.” Horst was like Piglet in that respect. He was my favorite size. And so, when he opened the door for me, we looked into each other’s eyes for about a tenth of a second and then he took me into his arms and we started kissing. Big time.

Now, Teddy, don’t get nervous again when it comes to your mother’s lust. I’m just bringing this up to make a point, because that was the exact moment when I realized that the best kissing is standing up. I never wavered from that point of view from that moment on, that time when I was standing by the side of a car, kissing Horst Gerhardt. You see it in the movies. Stand-up kissing is just the best. Sitting down, it never works as well. It’s never even as sexy. And when it comes to lying down, there’s so much other stuff going on that the kissing becomes small potatoes. But standing up . . . I never forgot.

Good. So, after the kissing, we got into the car, and I tried to tone the electricity down, bring more of a sedate atmosphere to the proceedings. Besides, I was curious. I asked him how he got involved with Leni Riefenstahl.

“Well,” he began, “a few months ago, I was at the Rot-Weiss Club—”

“Red-White.”

“Ja, Fraulein Stringfellow. Very good.” I snuggled a little closer to him, Teddy.

Well, the boy had to drive the car, after all. I could listen to him and snuggle at the same time. So Horst went on: “Liesl, my sister. She’s married to an, uh, army officer, and he was on maneuvers, so she was living back home, and the four of us went to the club. Leni was there. Everybody knows who she is, so we were surprised when she suddenly came over to our table. I assumed she’d met my father somewhere, but no, she’d spotted me across the room, and it was me she wanted to talk to.” Horst paused then. He said, “This is a little embarrassing, Sydney, but she wanted to know if I’d be in her movie.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. Leni said I was just the type she wanted.”

“What type is that?” I asked. “The same as you’re my type?” (I could be a little arch in those days, Teddy.)

But Horst let that go. He just said, “Well, see, she was gonna start the movie with the torch comin’ from Greece, from Olympia.”

“What torch?”

“It’s something new. An Olympic torch. They lit it on Mount Olympus, and then runners brought it here. Literally—passing the torch.”

I hadn’t heard about this, Teddy, as I’d been on the ship when they’d lit the flame in the Stadium at the opening ceremony. So I asked him, “You carried this torch in Greece?”

“No, no, Sydney. Leni used lots of runners. Like Greeks when we were in Greece. But she wanted a special type when the torch got to Germany.”

“And you’re the type?”

“Yeah. Tall, fair. You know, that’s supposed to be the classic German type.”

“Handsome.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I did.” And I was pretty sure that Leni Riefenstahl was on the same page.

“Well—”

“So she filmed you?”

“Yeah, Leni wanted me to carry the torch precisely when it came over the border from Czechoslovakia into the Fatherland. So I went down with her—”

“Oh, just you and Leni Riefenstahl, the big, sexy movie star, together down by Czechoslovakia?” See, I was just teasing him, Teddy, but he reacted very, well, I would say, viscerally.

“Oh, come on, Sydney, there was a whole camera crew there. It was all business.”

Even by then, Teddy, when I was still a kid, I had a pretty good idea that whenever anybody said that something was “all business,” with a great deal of emphasis, it probably wasn’t. So I kept at it. “She’s really pretty, isn’t she?”

“Leni?”

“Yes.”

“Not as pretty as you.”

That brought me up short. “Oh, come on.”

“No, you’re really beautiful, Sydney.”

I snuggled a little closer. “Thank you, Horst. That’s the sweetest thing anybody ever said to me.”

“It is? What’s the matter with the American boys? Are they blind?”

Instinctively then, I scooted away from him, over to the far side of the seat, but I kept my eyes on him when I spoke. I wanted to say it unencumbered by being up close, snuggling. I wanted the words to carry the weight. “No,” I said, “it’s just the sweetest because you were the one who said it.” He only smiled at that, watching the road, so I asked him how the filming at the Czechoslovakian border went.

“Well, pretty good. I think she’ll use a few seconds of me in the film, but she chose another fellow to actually carry the torch into the stadium and light the flame.”

“The nerve of that hussy!” I said.

Well, in fact, Teddy, people did say hussy then. It was different from either broad and dame. Hussy meant sort of a slut, but with an attitude. Horst knew I was just having fun, though. Him from Berlin, me from the Eastern Shore—still, everything was right as rain between us from the word go. That was the magic of it. So he just shrugged and said, “Yeah, I was almost famous. But if I was the type, I wasn’t the perfect type. Leni wanted a guy with blond hair.”

“You’re blond, Horst.”

“No, I’m more of a light brown. She wanted an absolute blond. And you don’t argue with Leni. So I didn’t get to run into the stadium. But anyway, then Leni asked me if I’d help with the filming. She could use my English, and I could do the odd jobs—”

“Like when you came out to the pool in the raft.”

“Exactly. But thank God I’m only helping out. Leni’s working everyone to death.”

We were driving on the west side of town, in the section called Charlottenburg. That was the high-rent district, and it wasn’t too far from the stadium and my dormitory. Horst pulled the car into a parking lot in front of a large manor house—almost a castle, you could say. I started to open the door, but he stopped me and moved closer. I thought he wanted to kiss me again—

Now get it straight. I didn’t say kissing was bad sitting down. I just said kissing standing up was better. And trust me, I was not adverse to kissing Horst, irrespective of whatever physical geometry might be involved.

Well, he didn’t want to kiss me. Not this time. What he wanted was for me to check and see if any of my lipstick from the standing-up kiss was smeared on his face. Which it was. “You don’t want Leni to see another girl’s been monkeying around with you, do you?” I asked.

“Put a sock in it, Sydney.” He knew I was just teasing him. I took out my handkerchief—we carried handkerchiefs back then; Kleenexes were still just for hoi polloi—and put some spit on it and wiped the lipstick off, and we were ready to proceed into the castle. “It’s called Haus Ruhwald,” he told me. “That means Peaceful Woods. But I’m afraid, with Leni, it usually isn’t very peaceful.”

“Is she working this late herself?”

“Oh God, she’s the worst. She doesn’t sleep, so she doesn’t let anyone else either. You’ll see.” And I did. It really was all business. As magnificent as the building was outside, it was spare inside, almost spartan. They even had cots in the halls, and here and there some poor, exhausted worker had flopped down, trying to steal a little shut-eye.

“You really think we should be here?” I asked him. My curiosity about meeting Leni was battling my fear of having her meet me. But Horst tugged me along, down the hall.

In fact, I heard Leni before I saw her. It was a woman’s voice, barking German, that poured out into the hallway. Thereupon, some poor fellow slunk out of the room where the shouting was emanating from. As he passed us, he shook his head, moaning to Horst.

“What’d he say?” I asked.

“He said she’s like a dragon tonight, spitting fire.”

“Oh, great.”

“Don’t worry,” Horst said, taking my hand and leading me into the room from whence cometh the Gorgon flames. A projector was on, and the film was showing a relay race from the day before. Horst and I stood in the back, unobtrusively, but I could make out Leni, sitting in her chair, watching along with a couple of men. When this particular section ended, she muttered disagreeably, and then she ordered one of the men to do something or other, and when he seemed to protest—and rather mildly, I thought—she hit the ceiling, screaming God knows what.

German is very guttural, you know, Teddy. It can sound downright nasty even when it isn’t. The funny thing is, too, it’s a very rigid language. Not much to move around in. There’s not even many cuss words in it. But it just has a tone to it, you know? So when the German is really and truly mean, it knocks you back on your heels. This was such an occasion. I kinda scrunched down alongside Horst.

Someone flipped the light switch on, and as the man she’d berated left, Leni turned her head just enough to spy Horst standing in the back. Well, let me tell you, Teddy, all of a sudden it was bluebirds and lollipops. “Horst! Mein schatz!” she cooed. Schatz sounds awful, doesn’t it? If I called you schatz you’d think I was mad at you. That’s German for you. But in fact schatz means something like treasure. Horst was her treasure. So then she stepped over to him and smiled and touched him.