“Ouf! It’s so hot in here,” Monika said, blowing discreetly down the front of her dress. “Oh, look. There’s your star.”
“Why don’t we get out of here?” I said. “Come and have a picnic at my villa.”
Monika visited me at my villa once or twice a week during the rest of that summer. We would make love and have lunch. After lunch she liked to sunbathe naked in the back garden, a policy I encouraged as this was the view overlooked by my study window. She returned to Berlin in the afternoon as the air cooled. That was as much as we ever did. Her thin, hot, oily brown body with small, oddly deflated-looking breasts are inescapably associated with the genesis of my Confessions films. I grew to like her and I think she liked me, though we never spoke of our feelings. Perhaps that was why she came back. She had half a dozen scars, old and new, on her belly. I counted an appendectomy and a cesarean section, but I could not work out what the others were. I asked her how she got them.
“Too many men, darling,” she said. “Too many men.”
One day Aram came round unexpectedly while she was there. He had returned from the U.S.A. and Frederick the Great was about to start. He did not seem particularly surprised to see Monika. We stood at my study window looking at her spread body, glossy with sun oil.
“I’ve got nothing against Monika,” he said thoughtfully. “But for a man in your position I think it’s a big mistake to get involved with an actress.”
“I’m not involved with her,” I said. “Don’t worry.”
I looked at him. He was wearing a powder-blue seersucker suit — bought in America, I assumed — a red shirt and a big fat canvas golfing cap. He looked ridiculous.
“Anyway,” I said, “what are you doing here? You know this is my secret refuge.”
“My father’s dying. He wants to see you.”
The heat, that summer of ’26 in Berlin, was immense. It slammed down out of a hazy sky the color of Aram’s suit, heavy as glass. One was glad of the city’s clean wide streets then. At least in the broad avenues and boulevards the air could stir. It must have been some kind of public holiday that afternoon as I motored back with Aram, because the pavements seemed strangely deserted and the big shops in Leipziger Strasse were closed and dark. I remember hearing the sounds of half a dozen bands as we drove through the Tiergarten. I never learned what was going on.
I was cast down by Aram’s news of his father. I had grown fond of old Duric, who had forgiven me my defection from the Realismus style once the money from Julie started to flow. He had said he planned to use the funds to make a series of films about vermin in our cities. “You mean child molesters, perverts, that sort of thing?” I had asked. “No, no!” he had shouted. “Rats and fleas! Rats and fleas!” I had only known him ill, and foolishly had come to think of his gasps and wheezes, his snail’s pace and omnipresent oxygen cylinder, as being as much part of him as his liver spots and gray hair. Suddenly these features revealed themselves as afflictions, and that shocked and subdued me.
The Lodokians, father and son, lived in a thin grand house on Kronenstrasse. Inside it was dark, curtains drawn, and one was forcibly reminded of the summer heat once more. A butler let us in and a male nurse led me upstairs.
Duric Lodokian was sitting up — rather, lying up — on a soft ramp of pillows, his oxygen mask in one hand and a Russian cigarette in the other. He talked in breathless bursts of a few seconds, pausing to guzzle oxygen from the mask, or to drag weakly on his cigarette. His brown skin was damp and a grayish mud color. His liver spots were more noticeable. He was the color of a certain type of speckled egg. (Some kind of gull or game bird, I forget which now, but they used to be fashionable hors d’oeuvres at parties in the thirties. I could never touch them — they reminded me of Duric, dying.)
Aram and I sat down on either side of him. The blanket round the ashtray was covered in ash. He was too frail to tap his cigarettes accurately. After the usual bland inquiries I said carefully, “Are you sure you should be smoking those, Duric?”
“Don’t be an idiot. Never did me any harm. Why should I stop now?”
“I agree, I agree. Don’t deny yourself. May I have one?”
I lit one. Aram did too. We both smoked while Duric topped up on oxygen.
“Listen,” he said eventually, “come here.”
I leaned further forward.
“What’s this film you want to make? Why are you being so difficult?”
I glanced at Aram. He looked faintly surprised. I decided to tell him.
“I want to make a film of a book called The Confessions.”
“Who by?”
“Rousseau.”
“Rousseau again? That’s good, good. I like it. Don’t you, Aram?”
“He won’t tell me about it.”
They exchanged a few words of fast Armenian.
“Are you ready to start?” Duric asked.
“I’m working on the script.” I caught Aram’s eye. “It’s, ah, very long.”
“I don’t care. Realismus must do it.” He put his hand on my knee. “This must be Realismus film, John. Aram will help you.”
“When I say long,” I continued cautiously, “I mean very long. Extremely long.”
“What’s ‘extremely’?” Aram asked.
“I want to make three films. Three hours each.”
“What!”
“It’s a good idea,” Duric said. “Phantastisch. We do it at Realismus, of course. Promise me, Aram. I mean promise.”
Aram had the look of a man trying to control nausea.
“Yes, Papa … if at all possible.”
“No ‘if.’ I want straight promise.”
“I promise.”
Duric lay back. He looked exhausted, his thin chest rising and falling at alarming speed. I felt I could punch a hole in it with my fist, as if his body were made out of balsa wood and paper, like a model airplane. As he breathed we could hear random treacly pops and gurglings from within the chest wall. His eyes shone with tears, but it may only have been rheum. He drew me closer again.
“Promise me too, John.”
“Of course. Anything.”
“Don’t let Aram sell the business. Watch him.”
“What business?” I looked at Aram. “Realismus? He’d never sell it, don’t worry.”
“No.” He was falling asleep. “The nuts.”
“I’ll watch him,” I said. “I promise.”
Aram rang for the nurse and we stood up. The nurse came in and held the oxygen mask to his face. It seemed to rouse him and he beckoned us back. We crouched by his side. His eyes were barely open, just a slit revealing a brown limpid glimmer.
“Never give up the nuts,” he said. They were his last words. He went to sleep and died three days later.
At his funeral Aram and I shed copious tears. I had tried to hold them back, but seeing Aram’s example decided to let myself go. I had a “right good greet,” as Oonagh used to say. I felt surprisingly better for it too, and I think Aram was touched. It was odd seeing Aram cry. We walked away from the graveside sniffing, wiping our eyes and snorting into big handkerchiefs.
“He was a sly old fellow,” Aram said. “A nine-hour film. My God.”
“It’ll be amazing,” I said. “Wait and see. There’s been nothing like it.”
“I’d never do it normally,” Aram said. “I think I should tell you that. I think it’s crazy, disastrous.”
“But you promised.”
“I know, I know.”
“I promised too,” I said. “Hang on to those nuts.”