Can I ask why?
It has to do with protecting my career. That’s all I can tell you.
All right, but then what can I do?
Divorce her. That’s what you have to do.
But it’s not fair! cried Karmen. She can’t confront her accuser; she can’t know the grounds on which I’m to leave her; she can’t refute these charges—
Do you want the man’s name?
I—
He’s a certain composer. That first time, last November, she wouldn’t take her hands off him, so he actually had to leave the party. I know it’s an ugly story. He was upset; he complained about her to a friend who told me; the friend was supposed to keep his secret, because, you see, he depends on Elena for a recommendation. That’s why you can’t mention his name. Do you believe me?
Karmen sat very still. Finally he said: Of course I believe you, Comrade Alexandrov. But if I’m not allowed to approach him or mention his name to her, then I’ll have to go on acting as though I believe her.
Then a month later when he was in the Ukraine (and he knew full well that by being so far from her he was abandoning and disappointing her, that what he should have done was keep shooting documentaries about local collective farms for Sovkinozhurnal) she telephoned him and he said:
So what did you end up doing last night?
Actually, I didn’t stay home. A friend called me, and we went out for a drink…
Oh, really? Which friend? he casually asked. He had never asked that before.
There was a silence, and then she said in a very low voice: Shostakovich.
He felt as if she had kicked him in the stomach.
Oh, he said.
You sound upset, came Elena’s voice.
Oh, not at all. I’m not upset. So how often do you see him? I don’t believe you’ve mentioned him lately.
He’s a… a fairly good friend.
Oh, he said again, and changed the subject.
Of course she’s unfaithful to you, Roman Lazarevich. (This was the opinion of all his friends.) A man doesn’t take a woman out to dinner on a regular basis unless he’s getting something from her, especially if she’s a married woman.
I know, I know.
Well then?
I guess I really don’t care. If she’d only tell me, then I—
Now you’re speaking in incomplete sentences, just like that Shostakovich.
The thing is, I think about her all the time.
Work harder, Roman Lazarevich! That’s the best cure!
I know. But the odd thing is, my work doesn’t matter to me anymore. I know it’s ridiculous, but I sometimes feel that my love for her is the only thing that’s genuine about me.
Standing leftwards of the desk where her husband worked by lamplight, with a canteen beside him, his daybook on one side, and his light meter holding down one corner of the paper, Elena smiled at him lovingly.
Do you think there’s any hope at all? he asked.
I can’t honestly say that I do feel any hope, she said gently.
But still they stayed together.
And now the war had come, and whenever he got to see her, which was far more often than most husbands got to see their wives, he felt claustrophobic; he couldn’t forget how she had called him creepy for wanting to be all alone with her in isolated places.
I’ve already told you how during the Nazi-Soviet idyll he’d gone in the ice-breaker Josef Stalin to film the rescue of the Sedov with her crew of thirteen. This vessel had been icebound for eight hundred and twelve days. Karmen would never forget the magnetic storms, the cold, the silence. And yet none of it had depressed him; he was an adventurer; he truly loved the experience! (Shostakovich would have killed himself.) Of course, what’s worst about being icebound is the solitude, but a gregarious man is armored against that. Roman Karmen never ran out of jokes. He’d bunked with his cameraman V. Shtatland and his sound engineer Ruvim Khalulashkov; if either man turned morose, Roman Karmen knew how to make him laugh.26 Defeatism is a crime. They recorded the repair and reassembly of the Sedov’s engine. The engine started; the Sedov was saved; one more Roman Karmen film ended happily! But now when he was with Elena he was back in the cold; they sat miserably together in the captain’s icy cabin.
He asked her whether she was sure that the problem was him, not her, and she said that she was sure.
Was it like this with Shostakovich?
Never.
They invited him to film the premiere of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, but he didn’t want to see Shostakovich; even though Arnshtam scolded him, he said he didn’t have time. Instead, he requested a transfer out of the Central Frontline Kinogroup and filmed “Leningrad Strikes Back!” (A titanic poster of D. D. Shostakovich in a fire-helmet gazed shyly down on him.) He crawled with his camera over the ice of Lake Ladoga to film the agony and encourage the defenders, almost getting killed four times.
Two lost soldiers, with frost on their machine-pistols, huddle over their truck’s frozen engine as they try to read a map. Ruins stretch behind them and before them. Perhaps they’ll die today, but Roman Karmen has photographed them; he wants them to live forever. We see them for a single long instant in his newsreel, and we feel for them; we want them to get safely to Leningrad. Roman Karmen is a man who cares! He stands in the same fur-lined greatcoat in which he filmed “The Sedov Men,” knee deep in Leningrad snow, with the skeleton of a wrecked bus very black behind him. Throwing back his head and shoulders, yet continuing to gaze levelly ahead, he braces the cine-camera against his heart.
The half-blacked-out eyes of supply trucks creep darkly through the white fog and ice of Lake Ladoga. He leaps to one side, films it, gets back in another truck which turns out to be filled with sullen soldiers he’s never met; in thirty seconds he gets them grinning at his imitation of the laughing man in “Volga-Volga.”
He came home and she was sitting by the gramophone, listening to Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata in D Minor (which is Opus 40, I believe). He sat down beside her and she gazed at him in annoyance.
He had just found that his application to speak at the Conference on American and British Cinema had been accepted. Everyone would be there, even Eisenstein, since his name was familiar to the Americans; he was supposed to read a paper on feature films. It meant good cheer and good food, neither of which was in great supply in those war years, and he had thought that Elena would be coming with him; actually he had applied for her sake. But now they had what’s called a little talk, which is to say a talk in which she gradually, carefully expressed more and more how hopeless she felt, all the time watching him to make sure that no one dose was lethal. It was like the time that a nurse he cared for had been killed by a Fascist barrage, and they sat him down and said first: Roman Lazarevich, we have some very bad news, and then: We’re very sorry, but something has happened, and so on and so on, und so weiter as the German Fascists would say. In this spirit, Elena asked him what he thought about their life together, what he thought, what he thought, always what he thought! Eventually, he comprehended: She wants me to do the dirty work!
This isn’t fair! he cried weakly.
I understand, said Elena, evidently willing to be infinitely agreeable as long as her object could be obtained. Usually she got angry the instant he accused her of being unfair.
Do you ever think about it? she kept asking him.
After awhile he felt like a character in a silent film—a half-silent film, I should say, for he could still hear and remember her words, but everything he said might as well have been silent.
26
In a photograph in an East German retrospective catalogue, we see Karmen in Loyalist uniform, but hatless, standing happily amidst his colleagues, shouldering his camera as they shoulder their rifles, with sandbags and a doorway behind them. He is the happiest man in the picture; for him, Spain seems to be a lark. His colleagues in their berets will stay and die, or else at the war’s sad end flee into internment camps in France. But this cruel and ignorant interpretation of a brave man’s smile neglects two facts: First, while he was with them, he ran at least as great a risk as they; secondly, he believed, and rightly, that only by inflaming the world, for instance through the camera-propaganda of R. L. Karmen, could the Spanish cause hope to triumph.