“They’re harmless,” Propp says, “I swear to you.”
She wants to run.
“They’re children, Sylvia,” his voice lowering but still fighting a panic. “They’re just lost children. They live here, Sylvia. We’re in their home.”
She turns her head to try and see Propp and he repeats, “They’re harmless. They only want to watch.”
And he lights them up with the beam from his penlight. Sylvia sees a dozen or more small faces, each spotlighted for a second or two, just long enough for her to realize that Propp has told the truth, that they’re exactly what he says, they’re children, ranging from maybe six years old up through the early teens. In the instant that each face is highlighted for her benefit, Sylvia can take in the horrible facts amended to their raw ages, the sunken eyes that result from too much fear and solitude, the grime-plastered hair that juts from or pastes down to the miniature skulls, the castoff, filthy, ill-fitting clothing, and more than anything else, the generic look of defeat from faces that should still be too young to know there’s a battle.
Has Propp brought her here on purpose for this singular reason? Has every other element of this nightmare — from taking the goddamn Aquinas to posing here as the stand-in Madonna — been subordinate to this image, this group portrait of inexcusable tragedy?
The children look down on her as if they were some nest of insects that share a single eye. None of them speak. None of them even move. Looking back up at them is like studying a haunting, inherently demented canvas, something slaved over by a tortured medieval monk with unlimited talent, a man whose life’s work was to depict the definition of abandonment. They’re a half-starved peasant choir, made mute by an endless destitution, angelic by way of a brutalized life rather than an unspoiled innocence.
And Sylvia thinks, in that moment, of her own childhood. And of her mother, of her mother’s face, of her smell, her entire presence. Of all the hours spent safely, securely, protected in the warmth of their small apartment.
And she lets the tears come to her eyes, come past her eyes, pour onto and then down the cheeks. But she doesn’t let any accompanying sound out and because of this she can hear Propp again. This time he’s speaking to the children, whispering, all threat and authority gone from his voice, replaced only by this fragile certainty.
He says to them, “Isn’t she beautiful?”
She doesn’t want to look up, but her head moves and the landscape is blurred and she wipes at her eyes and blinks until they clear. The children are moving off, disappearing through some small crevice in the balcony’s inner wall, until only one is left, maybe the smallest, a child of indeterminate sex, black hair matted, wearing something dark and muted. Propp keeps the light on the child and he or she lingers at the balcony’s edge, just staring at Sylvia, as if waiting for her to say something.
And when she doesn’t, the child turns and runs, follows the trail of the others like a small, nocturnal animal, something with skittish moves and small claws.
Sylvia brings her hands up to her head and when the camera flashes, she knows that she hates Propp even if she doesn’t know why.
22
Things are humming in the Henrik Galeen Memorial Studio at the top of the Skin Palace. The whole Schick company is present, filming what Hugo calls “vital stock,” footage of unscripted orgy scenes, graphic serial sex between multiple partners that the director keeps on hand at all times and edits into a film to break up what he calls “the necessary evil of the talking heads.”
Jakob Kinsky is both exhilarated and exhausted. Though he’d never admit it to any of his coworkers, he thinks he’s expending more energy than the intertwined throng rolling around on a mattress the size of a swimming pool for the benefit of two very old Panaflex cameras. Jakob hasn’t stopped moving since he arrived for his first day of work. Hugo keeps the new assistant director shooting around the studio like a pinball, positioning cameras and props, double-checking the sound, taking and retaking light readings, spraying the actors down with an atomizer full of oil and water, rummaging for a fresh can of Rigor mentholated balm, and bringing coffee, doughnuts, and carton after carton of amyl nitrite poppers.
Life is good.
He never thought he’d feel this kind of happiness again. He assumed he’d spend the balance of his life shambling after Papa and Felix and Weltsch, trying futilely to bury his grief over Felice in endless viewings of Black Angel and Touch of Evil and Edge of Doom. He wishes Felice could see him now — eighteen years old, maybe the youngest A.D. working a hot set. So it’s three thousand miles from Hollywood, but it’s four thousand miles from Maisel. He’s getting closer all the time. And if Felice couldn’t have appreciated the genre he’s found himself apprenticing within, she’d at least have to see how much more satisfied he is. How just the proximity to the cameras, the lights, the boom mikes give him a reason to want more.
What would Felice make of the actresses spread out now before him, not a trace of self-consciousness as they drop robes to the floor first thing in the morning and begin to move through a series of carnal encounters that exceed the average imagination? There’s Coco Bing, with her odd, unplaceable accent and Garbo-like aura, asking Jakob in an emotionless voice to wipe her down with a bath towel. There’s Miriam Persons, a peerless African queen who accepted the jelly Danish Jakob brought like it was the head of a weak rival. There’s China Wiene, always joking, distracted, vulnerable, huddling in her terry robe as if the overheated loft was an icehouse.
And then there’s Leni Pauline, who stands apart from everyone, as if she knew the central secret of every life in the Skin Palace, as if she’d found a way in childhood to boost her intelligence to the point where all matter of human concern was little more than a semi-funny joke. The only time Jakob feels nervous is around Leni Pauline. There’s something about the woman that makes him want to cultivate her approval. When she asked him to help her with a series of stretching exercises, he thought he’d lose the ability to speak for the rest of the day.
The men are different. Just as each actress seems a specific individual, the men seem interchangeable. They walk around as if the set were a locker room in a high school they’ll never graduate from. They never seem to put on their robes, even when shooting ends. Their demeanor gives the impression that there’s only one thing in this life that a man should either be proud or ashamed of and it’s dangling forever between their legs. Jakob wants to laugh every time he thinks of their names — Herbie Warm, Demetrie Green, Pedro Gallagher, and, the best and funniest man on the set, with his chronically sashaying hips and thrusting chin, a kind of pornographic idiot savant, telling everyone who’ll listen that he has an upcoming appointment with the Guinness Book of Records people, Udolpho Phist. Udolpho insists that Hugo bill him on the film posters as Phist, The Gargantuan Freak of Human Nature.
In a single morning, Jakob has learned film terms that he never knew existed. Things like the money shot, the two-for-six splice, the Singapore pan, and the Krakatoa dissolve. He’s studied camera angles that were never covered in any of the standard texts. He’s followed script structures that go against all the dynamics he’s worked so hard to make reflexive. And he’s seen actors and actresses do things that not one of the performers that ever appeared on the ripped and patched screen of the old Kierling Theatre in Loew Square back home ever even hinted at.