The New Confessions (37 page)

I told Karl-Heinz everything about Doon and he thoughtfully went
through the motions of sympathizing with me. He was not surprised, he said. He had been waiting for something to turn my life upside down. How come? I asked him, but he would not expand. Later he told me he could never understand why I had married Sonia. When I told him the honest reason—for sex—he was even more baffled. I think he regarded me—as a representative heterosexual—as being something of a chronic naïf when it came to sexual matters.

But he listened patiently, a true friend, to my protracted moans. I am ashamed to reflect now on those one-sided encounters. I never asked him about himself, never wondered how he did when I finally left him, or when he left me. I was up to my neck in a mire of my own selfishness. I thought of my drowning Ulsterman (I thought a lot about the war, then) as he sank in the mud of the Salient: “I’m going doyn.” … No wonder I could not escape Doon: my day was spent watching her images shimmer by me on the editing machines. Karl-Heinz knew that all I required was a listener and he provided it, selflessly. At least we could break off and play billiards. (He was a terrible player, incapable of calculating the simplest angles. I always won.)

It was early in the New Year. The film was finished and we were waiting for its release when his patience finally broke. As usual we were sitting in the Bar Dix. Karl-Heinz was drinking beer with a schnapps chaser. I was drinking Moselle. I was a little drunk, typically brimful of self-pity, rhapsodizing about Doon’s beauty and how I longed for her. I paused. To my intense surprise Karl-Heinz took both my hands in his and stared fixedly at me. I looked into his dark eyes, hooded by his sharp circumflex brows. He squeezed my hands.

“Johnny,” he said, “I tell you something very simple.” He smiled faintly, a suggestion of mischief. “Boys are better than girls.”

“Look, Karl-Heinz, no.” I smiled apologetically back. “I’m just not—you know—inclined that way.”

“But you never tried properly. I can show you. It’s fun.”

“No, really—”

“But I like you, Johnny, I do.”

“No, really. I know you do. I like you too.” I was moved.

He let go of my hands.

“It’s Doon,” I said. “She’s the only one.… I’m obsessed. I’m obsessed with her.”

“So. All right.” He sounded impatient. “There’s only one thing to do with such an obsession. You got to get another one.”

He was right. After he had gone I thought about what he had said. I
would never forget Doon (in fact I had not seen her for months), but surely, I reasoned, there was room in my life for something more than this destructive unrequited longing. I had to face up to the facts. My life could not simply stand still with this rejection.

The lights were on in the house when I parked our new car—a Packard, Sonia’s choice. Sonia was awake, in bed. Her face was scrubbed clean and her hair tucked behind her ears. She had put on some weight recently and the roundness of her face had increased, accentuating her small pointy chin. I thought she looked pretty. It was a good sign. Karl-Heinz may not have provided me with an answer, but he seemed to have given me a jolt with his proposition—knocked the Gramophone needle out of its groove. I switched off the light and snuggled up to Sonia, sliding a hand inside her nightdress to cup a girlish breast.… I am sure our third child was conceived that night.

Of course I had another obsession, but it was lying dormant, temporarily overshadowed by the Doon crisis. Myself. My development as an artist. My dreams, my ambitions. The next day I literally dusted them off.

In my office at Realismus’s Grunewald studios I kept an old trunk concerning certain precious possessions, such as my reels of
Aftermath of Battle
, my photo albums, my diaries (now temporary abandoned), Hamish’s letters and suchlike. It was superstitious of me, I suppose, but I did not want them in the house with me. Snow had fallen in the night and from my window I could see the three vast gasometers of the Berliner Gas-Anstalt capped with white, steel cakes with generous icing.

Idly, almost absentmindedly, I opened the trunk and contemplated these artifacts of my past, like a bored shaman looking at a scattered pile of bones, halfheartedly trying to devise the way ahead. These relics, precious totems of my youthful dreams … I picked up a frayed bundle of paper tied with string. Pages from a book. I read:

The fit passed in seconds. It
was
a fit. It is the only time I have ever experienced it so physically. Afflatus, Inspiration. The muse descending—call it what you will. It was a Pentecostal confirmation of what I had to do. My task was clear to me now. I was going to make the greatest moving picture the world had ever seen. It would be unprecedented and have no imitator. I was going to make a film of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s
Confessions
.

I am sitting at my “lookout” with my binoculars, trying to discern what’s going on at the public beach. A police car has arrived and someone has been arrested, I think, but it is really just beyond my range. Perhaps a nudist? My hand shake is too pronounced. I consider buying a tripod.

Emilia shouts from the house that I have a visitor. I wander over. It’s Ulrike. She wants permission to go down to my beach. I say, of course.

We stand on the pool terrace, in shade, looking at the hot empty pool.

“It’s a shame about your pool.”

“It’s that fig tree. Over there. The roots, they’re pushing through the concrete searching for water. See the cracks?”

“From so far away, with such force. It’s incredible.”

“Apparently they can get through a foot of concrete. It’s always happening—cisterns, septic tanks.”

“Ah. Nature,” She said it with no cynicism. A sense of awe, rather.

I gestured at her bag.

“Off for specimens? I saw you the other day, in your boat.” I felt and attempted to ignore the beginnings of a blush. “What are you working on?” I asked quickly.

“Certain kinds of crab.”

“Really?” What more could one say about crabs? “Plenty of crabs on those rocks.”

She frowned as if she could sense my indifference.

“I wrote a small thesis on the fiddler crab. You know, the ones with one oversized claw.” She paused. “Do you know that before and after the male fiddler crab mates, he soothes the female by stroking her with his claw, very gently?”

“No. I—”

“And then—this is amazing—they make love face to face.”

“Really?”

“You see? I said ‘make love’ as if they were humans. Apart from us they are the only animals to do this. Face to face, like so.” She held up her hands analogously. “Just us and the fiddler crab. Why should that be?”

“I don’t know.”

A breeze shook the tree we were standing beneath. The dappled light
spots shifted on her face and the air-blue toweling jerkin she wore. We were two feet apart.

“Extraordinary,” I said.

She picked up her bag.

“My boyfriend said they are showing your film—
Julie
. Maybe when we go back I can see it. He says it’s very good.”

“It is. But he should see my—” I stopped just in time. “I was very pleased with it. I’m delighted it’s being shown. Doon … Doon Bogan is marvelous.”

I waited, wisely, prudently, until well after
Julie
was released before going to the Lodokians with my new plan. Aram had been pestering me for weeks to sign a new contract with Realismus but I had delayed, calculating that the audacity of my proposal would be easier to take if
Julie
was steadily earning money. So I was annoyingly evasive on the matter of what we should do next whenever Duric and Aram brought it up.

I was busy enough, anyway, with the success of
Julie
, attending gala premieres in Munich, Hamburg and Frankfurt, consenting to inumerable press conferences and interviews. Long profiles appeared in
UFA-Magazin, Film-Photos, Illustrierter Film-Courier
and
Kino
. It was the most successful and talked about film in all Berlin until the premiere of
Potemkin
at the end of April. Aram sent Karl-Heinz and Doon on an international promotional tour, to Britain, France and Italy, but they both surprisingly refused to go with the film to the U.S.A.—Doon, I believe, out of some perverse sense that she was in exile, and Karl-Heinz for the odd but simple reason that, he claimed, it was not his sort of country.

For my part, the success of
Julie
was highly gratifyingly. I felt calm, with a new deep self-assurance, which explains why in the many newspaper and magazine articles that appeared I was several times described as “impassive” or “brooding.” I
was
brooding—on what to do next—and was moving forward with steady determination. Karl-Heinz’s advice had been astute: my new obsession had saved me. I had not forgotten Doon (we met from time to time at receptions, but there were always dozens of people there; her attitude towards me is best described as pleasant), but I found her easier to cope with.

In June profits from
Julie
were such that Realismus paid me a bonus of seventy-five thousand dollars, a vast sum in those days. Aram offered me another fifty thousand to direct two films for the studio:
Frederick the Great
with Karl-Heinz and
Joan of Arc
with Doon. I asked for time to think it over.

I read and reread Rousseau’s
Confessions
and my plans for it altered daily. The scale and grandeur of my project burgeoned in my mind. After blocking out a preliminary outline I calculated that the film would last eight or nine hours. For a week I was in despair, but then suddenly realized that its great length could in fact be its greatest asset. I would make not one but
three
3-hour films of the book—a truly epic moving picture, and a fit monument to the man who had inspired it.

In March, Sonia announced that she was pregnant again and at the same time, though unconnected with this news, I rented for my own use a small wooden villa in the country, about an hour from Berlin in the woods of the Jungfernheide. There I spent weekdays alone, working secretly on the first draft of
The Confessions
, returning home at weekends. To my vague surprise, on a Friday as I motored back to Charlottenburg I found myself actually looking forward to rejoining my family. Vincent had lost his terror of me and Hereford proved to be an engaging, affectionate baby. I spent many hours teaching him to walk, during which he took the most appalling tumbles, crashing into tables, falling down steps, bouncing off walls. He would hit the ground—
slap!
—and look stunned for a moment, as if deciding what was the correct response to this misfortune. All one had to do was laugh ostentatiously—“Ha ha ha, Hereford, ho ho ho!”—and he would immediately join in, no matter how bruised or winded he was. He was a cute little fellow, still shitting himself at every opportunity.

I made one mistake that summer which was to have bitter consequences later. One Wednesday in June I drove into the city to attend Leo Druce’s wedding. He was marrying Lola Templin-Tavel. The ceremony
took place in the pretty English church (St. George’s) in the gardens of Schloss Montbijou, with a reception afterwards at the Palast Hotel. After the service Sonia felt ill and left me to go on to the reception myself. There was an impressive turn out at the Palast and I remember asking myself how Leo Druce, tyro co-producer, had managed to invite so many luminaries to his wedding—Pola Negri was there, Emil Jannings, Walter Ruttmann, Tilly de Garmo, Michael Bohnen the baritone, Conrad Veidt, Lil Dagover and many more. It was a spontaneous reflection, I bore no ill will to Leo, but I remember commenting on it—prophetically—and ironically complimenting him on his ability to get on in the world. He said, with typical modesty, that they had only come because of Lola. I might have added that that was precisely my point, but I refrained.

It was a hot day and not enough of the Palast’s windows opened to provide any kind of breeze. I felt stifled in my morning suit and stiff collar, and drank rather too much chilled fruit cup to compensate. I began to enjoy myself and the steady stream of compliments I received as a result of
Julie
’s success. That day I felt a kind of power emanating from me that was further generated by the secret that I owned.

I was talking to Leo when Aram approached. He was wearing a corn-yellow and gold-brocade waistcoat with matching spats. On anyone else they would have looked absurdly comical, but somehow Aram could carry off the crassest vulgarity. We congratulated Leo all over again on his good fortune (a touch insincerely: Lola’s famed vivacity had a distinct neurasthenic note to it) and congratulated ourselves on the news of
Julies
sale to RKO.

“I’m sailing to New York next week,” Aram said. “They’ve gone mad for
Julie
. They want every new Realismus film.” He paused meaningfully. “They’re throwing money at me for
Frederick the Great.
”

“I’m busy,” I said.

“What are you doing in that cottage, for God’s sake?”

“I’ll tell you soon. Very soon.”

“But when are you going to make
Frederick
? We’ve got to start this summer.”

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “Let Leo do it.”

They both looked at me in open amazement.

“You can do it, Leo,” I said. “Of course you can.”

“But it’s your film—earmarked—Karl-Heinz and—”

“It’s my wedding present to you.” I put my arms round them both. I
am not normally given to these sort of gestures, but I was a little drunk. “Go on, Aram. Give it to Leo. He can do it.”

Aram looked shrewd: one eye closed slightly, bottom lip held between his teeth.

“Let’s talk when you get back from the honeymoon.”

“Listen, John, are you sure you—”

I gave him another impulsive hug. “Course I am. Anyway, I’ve got something else on.”

There were more surprises to come. I took my punch glass to be refilled, and as this was being done I heard myself greeted and looked round to see a small, perfectly bald young man with an idiot grin of pleasure on his face.