“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:
I am now starting on a task which is without precedent and which when achieved will have no imitator.…’
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.
VILLA LUXE, June 21, 1972
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.”
1 °Comrades
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.