There were lots of suicides in Harlan’s movies; his wife, the Swedish actress Kristina Söderbaum, was always taking her life in his films, which must have made her wonder if he was trying to tell her something.
“I’m beginning to see why you keep her around. She doesn’t just growl. She bites, too.”
“Yes, she does. But not as much as I do.”
In the drawing room was a Swan Biedermeier living room set upholstered in white leather, several elegant tables, and a tall chest of drawers, only you didn’t notice the furniture much because of the paintings on the wall. Brightly colored, they were also recognizable, which is how I like my modern art. She told me they were by the German artist Emil Nolde and had been hanging on the walls of Joey’s city mansion until Hitler had seen them.
“He told Josef they were degenerate and to get rid of them, so now they’re here. I rather like them, don’t you?”
“I do now you’ve told me that story. In fact, Emil Nolde just became my favorite German artist.”
There was a black lyre-shaped clock on the mantelpiece and a mahogany grand piano, which couldn’t have been played much because there were as many photographs of Dalia on the lid as there were winged horses on the rug. In most of the photographs she was with someone famous like Emil Jannings, Werner Krauss, Viktoria von Ballasko, or Leni Riefenstahl. She pointed me toward an ice bucket and a bottle of Pol Roger and I managed to open it without scaring the pet white rabbit that was hopping around the floor.
“If that’s dinner, it’s looking a little undercooked for my taste.”
She pretended to scold me and then made me sit beside her on the sofa, which suited me nicely. It was quite a small sofa.
“So, what did you discover this afternoon?” she asked.
“About Yugoslavia? Only that a lot of people have advised me not to go there, Fräulein Dresner. And to be careful if I do. I thought Germany could teach the world something about hatred but it seems your countrymen know a thing or two about hate themselves. About all that I’ve learned to my advantage has been the name of the best hotel in Zagreb — the Esplanade. Which is where I’m staying, I think.”
“So you are going?”
“Yes, I’m going. Just as soon as Joey can get me on a plane.”
“Thank you,” she said quietly. “I’m so grateful to you, Herr Gunther. But please call me Dalia. And if I’m going to sit next to you on this sofa I can hardly call you Herr Gunther. I used to know a butcher in Zurich called Herr Gunther and if we’re not careful I shall ask you for some sausage. And that wouldn’t do at all.”
“Bernie,” I said. “It’s Bernie.”
We talked for a while — the kind of fast and elegant talk that passes for conversation but is really just dueling with short swords, with a man and a woman making gentle attacks and parries and ripostes. No scars are given and the vital organs are always left well alone. A very pleasant hour was spent like this before we moved into a dining room that was no less elegant than the drawing room, with a ceiling high enough to accommodate a chandelier as big as a Christmas tree. The wood grain on the table was so perfect it looked like one of those inkblot tests designed to test your imagination. Mine was doing just fine thanks to the scent Dalia was wearing, the sibilance of her stockings, the curve of her neck, and the frequency of her dazzling white smiles. A couple of times we bowed our heads and cigarettes toward the same match and, once, she let me touch her blond hair, which was so fine it was like a child’s. Meanwhile Agnes served a dinner that Dalia assured me she’d cooked herself, although I hardly cared if she had or hadn’t. I wasn’t there for a good meal — although it had been at least a year since I’d eaten as well — any more than I was there because I was a fan of her pictures: I wasn’t. I don’t go to the cinema much these days because I don’t like being told that Jews are like rats, that great folk songs are not made but fall out of the sky, and that Frederick the Great was the best king who ever lived. Besides, there are the newsreels to cope with: all that relentlessly positive news about how well our troops are doing in Russia. No, I was there, eating Dalia Dresner’s food and drinking her Pol Roger champagne, because Goebbels had been right: this siren woman’s face was permanently illuminated, not by anything so crude as an electrical bulb placed on a stage by a clever cameraman but by her own special light — the sun or the moon or whatever star was shooting through the sky at the time. Every time she looked into my eyes the effect was devastating, as if my heart had been stopped by some beautiful Medusa.
Dalia herself hardly ate anything; mostly she just smoked and sipped champagne and watched me making a pig of myself, which wasn’t difficult. But I guess I must have made conversation because I know she laughed a lot at some of my jokes. Some of them were pretty feeble, too, which ought to have put me on my guard against whatever it was she wanted. Maybe it was me, after all; then again, I’m no catch, and in retrospect I figure she just hoped to make sure that I did my best to find her father when I got to Yugoslavia. What you might call an incentive. But as incentives go, what happened next, when we went back into the drawing room for coffee — real coffee — and brandies — real brandy — would take some beating.
“Well, Bernie Gunther, I think if you don’t kiss me soon, I shall die. You’ve been sitting there wondering if you should and I’ve been sitting here wishing that you would. Look, whatever it was that Josef told you, I’m a free agent and not his possession. Thanks to him it’s been a while since any man had the guts to kiss me. I think you’re just the man to fix that, don’t you?”
I slid toward her on the white sofa and pressed my lips to hers and she gave herself up to me. It wasn’t long before my lips were anticipating more intimate ones and the exquisite secret sweet-and-sour taste of the other sex that only men can know.
“An abominable mystery,” she said breathily.
“What is?”
“Sexual behavior. That’s what Darwin called it. An abominable mystery. I rather like that, don’t you? It implies that there’s very little control we can exert about what’s happening to us.”
“That’s certainly the way I feel about it right now.”
She kissed me again and then began to gently chew at my earlobe while I set about feasting on her perfumed neck, and I remembered that there’s nothing quite like the feel of skin and flesh younger than your own. Newly picked fresh fruit as opposed to the kind that’s been on the shelf for rather longer, like mine.
“I’ve often thought,” she said, “that there’s some important scientific work to be done concerning the mathematics of fatal attraction. The male and female gametophytes. The pollen grain. The embryo sac. The irresistible attraction to the ovule. The altruistic self-sacrifice of the pollen tube cell exploding to deliver the sperm cells to the embryo sac.”
“I bet you say that to all the Fritzes you know.”
“It’s just pure organic chemistry, of course, and where there’s chemistry, there’s mathematics, too.”
“I was never very good at maths. Or chemistry.”
“Oh, I don’t know. I think you’re pretty good at it, Bernie. In fact, I think you’re getting better at it by the minute.”
I kissed her again, warming to my appointed task, and why not? She was easy to kiss. The fact is, you never really forget how to do it. After a while she pushed me gently away and, taking me by the hand, led me out of the drawing room toward a curving iron staircase. “Shall we?”
“Are you sure?”
“No,” she said simply. “But that’s what makes it exciting, isn’t it? No one can ever be sure. Being truly human is all about risk, not certainty. At least that’s the way I always look at it.”