I tried to let you see that it was all right for you to be happy, she was saying. You deserve someone better than I am.
You’ve been a pillar of strength to me, she said. I don’t know what I’ll do without you.
I know I’m letting you down, sobbed Elena. I’m really, really sorry. I hate to lose you.
That’s all right, said Karmen wearily.
He threw on his oilskin jacket and went out. She had asked him to telephone her so she wouldn’t worry about him, but he didn’t. She knew where he would be staying: at the studio, naturally. Two days later she rang him up, and he burst out crying. Elena had that effect on people.
He sobbed: When it happened, I was sure it was a mutual thing, but today it isn’t. Every time the phone rings I hope that it’s you, and now that it’s you I’m hoping that you’ll say, please take me back. You’re the one for me.
There’s a large part of me that hates to lose you, Elena said consolingly.
That would not happen until the summer of 1943, shortly before Operation Citadel. In 1942 he collaborated on “Defeat of the German Armies near Moscow,” and directed “Leningrad in Combat.” I’ve told you how I saw him at Stalingrad, eagerly photographing the captured German Fascist Field-Marshal, a certain F. Paulus, who, like a recently dead person, hadn’t entirely shed his former grandeur; in another week he’d be a convict, a nothing, but for now he still remembered how to sit up straight and proud in his uniform. All the same, he stared so woodenly into space! He reminded Karmen of someone, but he didn’t know whom. Unfortunately, the light wasn’t good enough for cinematic work. I’ve seen footage of him at Vyazma, standing between his fellow camera-soldiers K. M. Simonov and B. Tseitlin. In his bulky coat and fur cap he looks strangely gamin-like, smiling a slightly buck-toothed smile; yes, he resembles a lost French child. Simonov, who puffs at his pipe, seems the most genuine of the three. Tseitlin’s pale grin is tense beneath the cap, and Karmen’s smile is cautious. Behind them are ruins and dirty snow.
He performed all the trickiest camerawork for L. Arnshtam’s 1944 film “Zoya,” with a musical score by Shostakovich: Zoom in on the Nazi officer gazing into the slender lamp, losing the battle with himself; now pan to Zoya herself, beautiful, bruised and angry, standing upright before him in her quilted jacket; she’s ready to take her medicine, resolute to die without mercy for herself. Cut to closeup of her bloody lips saying: You can’t hang all hundred and ninety million of us.
Shostakovich had a question about whether the pacing of a certain long shot on the gallows was to be altered, because it would affect the tempo of the, you know. No one else happened to be in the studio. Arnshtam had rushed off to the Ministry for another argument. Zoya had just wiped the makeup off her lips and stood behind the half-opened lavatory door, flirting with the Nazi officer.27 The technician had gone into the darkroom to drink vodka.
Karmen laid his hand on Shostakovich’s shoulder and said: I hope it doesn’t make you sad to work with me, given the circumstances.
That’s not the point, Roman Lazarevich, oh, no, not at all! You know, you were born the same year I was, almost the same day! Three weeks apart—what a narrow frontline trench! That makes us, so to speak, contemporaries. Evidently she likes older men. Because we, I, you know. Well, that’s another matter. The point is, the point is that here, you see, in our Soviet homeland, for us…—and here Shostakovich’s lips fleered out and flittered into a spitefully sarcastic smile—film is the most important art form, not music.
My dear Dmitri Dmitriyevich!
No, nein, nyet, noch nie! That bastard Dmitri Dmitriyevich is not my concern at the moment. Film is the most… As you know, Lenin himself said so. Who can argue with Vladimir Ilyich? She wouldn’t, because she’s been, you know. The results are known—
The results of arguing?
Are you, how should I put it, crazy? screamed Shostakovich in terror. Of course I didn’t mean it like that! When she was, no, no! She never even… The results of, of, I’m implying of Soviet film in our Soviet homeland today! And Comrade Stalin confirmed Lenin’s profound and just thought and put it into, so to speak, execution.
What Karmen did next exemplified why we like him. (He found himself thinking, as he so often did: One of this person’s mannerisms is actually mine, but I don’t know what it is.) Squatting down in front of Shostakovich, rocking on his wiry little knees, he said: There’s no need for hard feelings on that score, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, absolutely none. I think you know why.
Shostakovich was silent; Shostakovich looked away. And this infuriated Karmen inexpressibly. He did not smile much nowadays. A year later, with a white bandage dividing his head into three zones, the boyish look would be entirely gone as he filmed the ruins of Berlin steadily and without pity. He was with the Second Guards Tank Regiment by then. Toward Shostakovich his anger was no less than toward the enemy. All the same, something inclined him to be gentle. Oh, the gentleness of her that was somehow sweet like milk!
He rose, smiled and said: Do you remember what they said to Robespierre at the end? I’m sure you do.
You mean when they wrenched the, the, his bandage off? And he—
Your education was better than mine. I’m just a gutter-rat from Odessa. Before his arrest, he was calling them all kinds of names, and they said, why should the people’s business be thrown out of joint for the sake of one man’s wounded self-esteem? You and I should both try to be more optimistic, Dmitri Dmitriyevich.
Shostakovich stared at him. He gaped his mouth as if to scream.
In 1945 he directed “Berlin.” (Balding and bulky, jovial in his big suitcoat; he took home a bulletholed Unter den Linden sign for a souvenir.) Somehow, he simultaneously found time to collaborate with Troyanovsky on the production of “Albania.” The next year he directed the Soviet documentary about the Nuremberg Trials.28
Whitehaired, he filmed Ho Chi Minh in 1954, leaning alertly on his elbow as the Vietnamese leader raised an arm in salute. (That was the year that the formalist Dziga Vertov, long excluded from our national life, died from cancer.) In 1955 his “Vietnam” was released to considerable official acclaim. Even the American monopoly-propagandist Burt Lancaster was forced to recognize (although perhaps not in the context of this anti-American film) his passionate love for life and people, but also an irreconcilable hatred for war, violence and fascism. Karmen’s working conditions in North Vietnam had been perilous, but at the reception after the premiere he scooped caviar on a biscuit and said: My father died at forty-four, thanks to the White Guards. I turned forty-four in 1950. So whatever happens, I’m ahead!—Then he threw back his head and laughed, just like our favorite actor in “Volga-Volga.”
An essay I found in the library basement cites his “Far and Wide My Country Stretches” (1958) as being the first film to use the Kinopanorama system of the wide curved screen, complete with nine tracks of stereophonic sound (and we’re glancingly informed that the countervailing American system used only seven). Unfortunately, the difficulty in getting the three projectors to overlap precisely proved to be most annoying, and so, the Great Soviet Encyclopedia informs us, Kinopanorama came to be used increasingly less frequently after 1963.
27
How far should one go with the enemy? Zoya herself will tell you: Not one inch! But G. Vodyanischkaya, who played Zoya, was certainly willing to follow Arnshtam’s script; isn’t one of the qualities we most prize in an actress acquiescence? Several reels of Karmen’s private footage disappeared immediately after his death in 1978, but I have it on good authority that he persuaded two starlets to let him film them kissing; this footage he reviewed over and over late at night at the Studio of Documentary Films, trying to accept Elena for who she was. Long after they’d separated forever, he would experience occasional flashes of rage when he happened to see two women sitting alone at a table in a restaurant, gazing into each other’s eyes.
28