In his own person too he seemed barely changed: a little thinner, a little greyer; his features drawn a little more tightly, as if by some slowly rotating inner ratcheting mechanism, around the uneven contours of his skull. But otherwise no visible concession to the years that had passed since I had last seen him, and certainly no discernible imprint of trauma from his public disgrace. As if being Klaus Menzer were an eternal proposition, not subject to the laws of mutability and decay that govern the rest of us.
He shook my hand.
‘Coffee?’
‘Sure.’
He made a pot of coffee in the open kitchen; lifting pans and jars with a droll carelessness; the handling of such humble objects being apparently a somewhat comical anomaly in the life of an eminence such as himself.
The same crumpled suit and drab T-shirt as he had always worn in the past drooped in the same ways over his elongated frame. The same silver-rimmed glasses alternately magnifying and concealing his eyes.
We sat with our mugs in armchairs of padded corduroy and gilded wood. I said little: I had made up my mind not to incur humiliation by engaging Menzer in nervous small talk. I would outsilence him: force him to work his own way towards whatever communication he had summoned me here in order to make. He gave a faint smile, seeming to take note of this, and to be amused by it.
‘So. Here we are in America,’ he said.
‘Yes.’
‘How long, for you?’
‘Since ’86.’
‘You must like it.’
‘I do.’
‘Inge also?’
‘Yes.’ I had no intention of opening up my private life to him.
‘No plans to go back?’
‘No.’
He nodded.
‘Me neither. I like it here. Did I tell you why I came over?’
‘No.’
‘Would you like to hear?’
‘OK.’
‘A film producer wanted to make a movie about me!’ He gave a laugh. ‘How about that? He brought me over from Berlin earlier this year and we flew to Hollywood together. Have you ever flown first-class? There were little pink shreds all over the bathroom. I thought someone had been tearing up the toilet paper, but it was rose petals! In Hollywood I had a house to myself up in the hills with glass walls looking onto the ocean and a garden full of orange trees. The ocean there isn’t blue, which would be almost boring, but sort of a fluorescent violet, with gold sparks on it at night…’
I sat back in my baronial chair, sipping my coffee, a little surprised that the great Menzer should think it worth the effort to give me his impressions of Hollywood, but content to hear him out. A chrome lamp hung from a long, snaking stem, its base far away in another part of the enormous room, so that the light it shed on us seemed somehow stolen or siphoned off.
‘We had meetings with studio executives every day. Those studios are like fiefdoms from the middle ages – they have their own private armies and transportation systems, their own livery, even their own language. Paramount is the Vatican, hacienda-style. The executives are all from tiny, specialised countries like Iceland or Finland. We sat in their offices and told them my life story. The leader of the Prenzlauer Berg avant-garde poetry scene who turns out to have been a Stasi informer: that was our pitch. They thought it was hilarious.’
Strange sensation – a kind of simultaneous pain and numbness – as he alludes in that matter-of-fact way to his betrayals. As if treachery were just some private habit you could make socially acceptable by coming out of the closet about it; shifting the burden of shame from speaker to listener… I tried not to flinch, but Menzer’s sensitive antennae picked up my unease immediately. He smiled:
‘You were never Gaucked, were you, Stefan?’
‘What?’
He spoke quietly. ‘Your file was never opened, was it?’
‘Not to my knowledge,’ I replied. I refrained from adding that I imagined he already knew that.
‘What I thought,’ he said.
He paused, the sign of some sort of delicate quandary appearing on his expressive face. That face! Under our cone of light every tilting plane in it, every meandering gully seemed brimmingly inhabited by him; the dwelling place in which some particular refinement of his elaborate spirit was lovingly housed, like the different parts of an instrument in its plush-lined case.
‘Well. To get back to my movie…’ The story began unfurling from him once again. I supposed now that he must have some purpose in telling it to me in such detail, that it was not merely a preamble to something else, and I began listening with a sort of guarded attentiveness.
Despite the enthusiastic responses, the meetings had come to nothing:
‘They all had the same problem,’ Menzer said, smiling. ‘They loved the idea but in the end they couldn’t see a way to present someone who betrays all his friends as a “sympathetic” character; someone audiences can “root for”, whatever that means…’
Back in New York the producer had settled Menzer’s account at the Pierre, where he had been putting him up, and moved on to other projects. But instead of going back to Germany, Menzer had decided to stay on in New York.
‘I’m like you,’ he said. ‘I like it here. I want to stay.’
His plan, he told me, was to try to get this film of his off the ground by himself, as an independent production.
‘So I don’t get my million dollars,’ he said, with a shrug that managed to convey both an unabashed sense that he was owed such a sum for his life story, and a princely indifference to being deprived of it. ‘But from what I hear you can still do all right with these New York companies who make lower-budget films where you don’t have to root for the hero. Now, this director Inge worked with; the one who used to visit us in Berlin?’
‘Eric Lowenthal?’
‘Lowenthal. Yes. I was thinking, since he has this prior interest in things East German, he was someone I should maybe get in touch with…’
For a moment now I began to wonder whether I had seriously misgauged Menzer. Though I hadn’t formed any precise idea of what his reasons for bringing me here might be, I had invested them with a degree of malice in proportion to my belief in the man’s limitless capacity for harm. And yet here he was with apparently nothing more sinister in mind than to hustle me for Inge’s old connections in the film business!
‘Well…’ I said warily, ‘that might not be a bad idea…’
‘So I was wondering if you thought Inge would be willing to give him my proposal.’
I answered carefully, half daring to hope that if I could placate him in this minor practical matter, I might after all be able to prevent any more menacing demand from entering his mind; half suspecting that this entire apparent reversal of our usual roles, with him as supplicant and myself as potential benefactor, was merely another way of amusing himself at my expense.
‘Yes… I think she would. I’m sure she would…’
It didn’t seem the right moment to mention that Inge and Lowenthal had ceased to be on speaking terms many years ago.
‘What about the money side?’ Menzer continued, casting off another of his disconcerting half smiles into the darkening room. ‘Do you think she would be able to put me in touch with investors?’
‘Inge?’
‘Yes, Inge.’
‘Well… possibly… I mean, I…’
As I was blustering, he yawned suddenly and looked at his watch:
‘Just a moment.’
Then, to my surprise, he called out towards an alcove at the far end of the room:
‘Lilian, it’s four o’clock.’
A woman emerged from the alcove. A lover, I supposed. A pang went through me. Had disgrace taken nothing from him? His old arrogant manner still intact, this choice piece of Manhattan real estate at his disposal and now, to cap it all, some girl, no doubt adoring as they always were, with nothing better to do than wait around in his bedroom in the middle of the afternoon? She came towards us in the dark room, picking her way through the bric-a-brac like a deer through trees; moving on past the freestanding kitchen. Just before her features came into the light of our chrome lamp, I realised, with the body’s quicker apprehension than the mind’s, who she was.