Aram laughed. “Too late, John, I’m afraid. I sold Lodokian Nüsse four months ago.”
I felt mildly cheated by this, but there was nothing I could do. Later, I used to wonder if Aram had lied, just to keep me out of his business deals.… I had no way of finding out. However, I blessed old Duric for extracting that deathbed promise from his son. I assumed that Armenian blood ties and dying oaths were inviolable, and in a sense they were. Aram was always true to the letter of his promise, if not its spirit. A few days later contracts were signed. I was salaried at one thousand dollars a month while I wrote the script (backdated) and Realismus paid me a ten-thousand-dollar option on it against a fee for the world rights to be negotiated. In addition it was confirmed that I was to direct and participate in the profits. Bland announcements appeared in the trade press. I remember I cut one out and pinned it to the wall above my desk in the villa. “Realismus Films announced yesterday that John James Todd is to film Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions in 1927 on location in Switzerland and France. K.-H. Kornfeld is to play the leading role.” These prompted some speculations by journalists. My replies, I thought, were teasingly oblique. There is nothing like refusing to be specific for arousing curiosity.
The first draft of The Confessions: Part I was over six hundred pages long. After a month’s effortful work I managed to reduce it by something over a hundred pages. I began work on Part II in the autumn, but made bad progress. My mind was constantly on Part I—the director in me had taken over from the writer. There were many technical problems to be solved or experimented with; logistical pitfalls multiplied in my mind. I wrote on for another two hundred pages or so before I decided to let Part II rest for a while. In any event, winter was approaching and the wooden villa was not warm. Monika had stopped coming out too, now that the opportunities for sunbathing were gone. We met once or twice in her apartment but it was not the same. Our curious affair went into hibernation, tacitly, with no hard feelings on either side, and waited for the return of more clement weather.
So I abandoned the villa in the Jungfernheide and returned to our house in Charlottenburg. Sonia was heavily pregnant — the new baby was due in December. I went to work in my Realismus office and by the end of the year had produced a final draft of The Confessions: Part I that was 350 pages long. Of course I knew it was almost twice as long as it should be, but I was not concerned. “Once we start filming,” I reassured Aram, “you’ll see how it will come down.” He did not seem unduly perturbed. He was planning another trip to the U.S.A. in the New Year, where he expected to raise money for the new film. Large advances had been paid for Leo Druce’s Frederick the Great; Joan of Arc was generating similar excitement.
Aram was too calm, I now realize, and that tranquillity communicated itself to me. We drew up a schedule. Preproduction would commence in January 1927, filming would start in June. I would deliver a completed three-hour film in June 1928 for release in the autumn of that year. It all seemed eminently realizable. These dates, these plans conjured from the vaguest deliberations appeared utterly fixed, like the movements of the stars in the heavens, or calendrical predictions for high or low tides. We had created a timetable and with it a kind of reality. It had no real existence beyond our determination, but we acted as if it had.
“We’ll begin Part II in ’29,” I said to Aram. “One year for each part. The whole thing will be finished by 1931. We’ll show them all together. One nine-hour film.” I paused. “It’ll be magnificent,” I said with absolute, utter confidence. “Wait till you see what I can do. Amazing things. There will never be a film like it again.”
“Excellent,” he said. “But let’s get Part I finished first.”
Sonia gave birth to twins — girls — in early December. For the first time I was near my wife when the event occurred. I was very surprised at the news. Sonia said she had told me a month before her parturition, but if so the idea had not registered. I swear. It was an unpleasant reminder of just how preoccupied I had been with The Confessions: Part I. My family life was no more than a backdrop. It claimed my attention only when I wished it to. I was stunned. Suddenly I had four children! I felt faint stirrings of panic. What on earth did I think I was doing?
Our house that December was bedlam. Sonia and Lily were fully occupied with the girls — Emmeline and Annabelle — and for a while I had to oversee the two boys. For some reason Frau Mittenklott — who had followed us from Rudolfplatz — had been given responsibility for the Christmas decorations. There was a vast green fir tree in the drawing room, burning real candles and hung with real cakes and a kind of decorative shortbread. Smaller replicas stood in the hall and dining room. Furthermore boughs had been hewn from other conifers and were suspended wherever possible above doors, windows and staircases. The air was thick with resinous piny fumes that made my eyes sting and reminded me of my father’s antiseptic experiments. Heavy swags of redvelvet ribbon were draped above the fireplaces and from every projecting ledge, picture frame and table corner the good woman had set or hung miniature presents — matchboxes wrapped in bright paper and filled with raisins or nuts to be unwrapped by the children whenever the anticipation proved too much or the wait too long. This was the whimsical custom, so Frau Mittenklott informed me, in the village where she had been born and raised. Our house seemed the very paradigm of festivity, bright symbol of the Christmas season itself. The misery was capped, though my duties diminished, when Vincent and Noreen Shorrold arrived from London to share our joy.
On Christmas Day 1926 we were all present in the sitting room. John James Todd, the film director; his wife, Sonia; their four children — Vincent, Hereford, Emmeline and Annabelle — the nurse, Lily Maid-bow; and the in-laws, Mr, and Mrs. Shorrold, In the kitchen Frau Mittenklott was cooking a goose, three rabbits, a suckling pig — a whole farmyard of animals, as far as I know. I had just opened my present from Sonia. A pipe. A ghastly curved meerschaum with a carved yellow bowl the size of a coffee cup and — this is true — red and green tassels hanging from it.
“I can’t smoke this!” I said, shocked, to Sonia.
“Course you can, Johnny,” Vincent Shorrold said. “Nothing like a pipe for a man.”
“And what on earth does that mean? But — seriously — I can’t put this thing in my mouth. I’d be a laughingstock.”
“Here, I’ll get it going for you, boy,” Vincent Shorrold said, and took it from me. He proceeded to fill it with what looked like fistfuls of shag from his own pouch.
“That’s a right big smoke, that’s for sure,” he said as he tamped down the tobacco with his thumbs. “There’s a tin and a half of ready-rubbed in there.” He put it in his mouth. I saw his jaw muscles clench as they took the strain.
“Fair weight,” he commented. “Give you a right stiff neck, this will.”
It took him five or six matches and as many minutes to ignite the compacted mass of tobacco. The room was soon blue with gently shifting strata of smoke. The twins began to cry, their pure new eyes stinging. I sat very still in my chair, my face fixed. The women looked on with admiration as Vincent Shorrold fumed and blew, thick smoke snorting, apparently, from every orifice in his head.
“Grand cool draw,” he said, coming over, sucking and blowing. “It’ll be going for a couple of hours yet.” He held the vile object out to me, its little tassels swinging, its stem gleaming with Shorrold saliva.