Dream Factories and Radio Pictures (19 page)

And so it went until time to open, when the Madame suddenly appeared in front of Peter and said, “You work the door until 1930 hours.
Then
you may get into costume.”

“Yes, comrade Madame,” he said. There was no use arguing with her. It would have been like asking Rondo Hatton, Why the long face?

He went to the door. Under the covered walkway quite a nice crowd had gathered early. Peter looked at the sign out front with its double silhouette of Kropotkin and Brecht and the hand-painted legend:
Tonight!—Cabaret Kropotkin—The Zürcher Ensemble—new BRECHT play!

It wasn’t really Brecht. It wasn’t exactly a play. It wasn’t exactly new. They’d been working on it steadily in the three years since Brecht’s death.

He undid the latches as the people surged expectantly toward him. He opened the doors, stood back, nodded his head toward the tables.

“Trough’s open,” he said.

* * *

Brettschneider arrived a few minutes to eight, went in, nodded to Caspar, who was bartending, and found a spot at a table near the stage with three Swiss students. He listened to their talk a while—it must be nice to live in their world. They were treating the night as a lark; a dangerous place, reputed to be filled with drugs and lady Bolsheviks with mattresses tied to their backs.

Hesse was over in the corner. Brettschneider nodded to him. He doubted the old man saw him, as his eyes were becoming quite bad (he was, after all, eighty-three years old now); he would go over and say hello during the interval.

There were a few of what passed as Swiss celebrities present, some Germans, a few Swiss arms dealers.

Across the length of the stage was the patented Zürcher Ensemble half-curtain let down on a length of pipe. Behind it was the bare back wall. Across this were strung a few twinkling lights, like a Christmas tree with too few bulbs. People moved back and forth across the stage, quite visible to the audience from the neck up.

The band took its place in front of the curtain—banjo, piano, clarinet—and began a jazz arrangement of “The Internationale”—one or two people stood, and the rest began clapping along. When that was done, they played the old favorite “Moon of Alabama” from
Mahogany
, and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me.” Brettschneider drank a chocolate schnapps and began to feel quite warm. The cabaret was already thick with the blue smoke of a hundred different tobaccos.

Then the lights went down. From the ceiling a sign dropped: Cabaret Kropotkin—a hand came down from above and beat on the top of the sign, which unfolded into three parts: Cabaret Kropotkin—The Zürcher Ensemble Presents Bertolt Brecht’s—
Die Dreiraketenmensch Spaceoper
! The half-curtain came up. Another sign dropped in: Scene: The Rocket Men’s Club. Time: The Future.
Moritaten.

An actor dressed as a blind man came on with a barrel organ and began singing “The Night We Dropped the Big One on Biggin Hill.”

Zero, Peter, and Shemp, in their Rocket Men Cadet uniforms, walk by the beggar, who is then escorted offstage by a policeman.

“Here we are at last!” says Zero. “Just out of Basic Training! Our first taste of the Outer Reaches!”

“I’m ready for some inner reaches!” says Shemp.

“Beer again!” says Peter.

The flies pulled up revealing a bar’s interior, tables. Dropping in were huge posters of von Braun and Dornberger, and a portrait in the frame reserved for Führers. The audience found it hilarious.

Brettschneider wrote in his notebook:
Unnecessary fun made of Himmler Jr
.

When things quit falling, unfurling and drooping in from the overheads, there were swastikas whirling like propellers and a giant, very pink rocket with a purple nose cone to be seen.

The three students then sang, as appropriate title cards were revealed, “It’s Me for the Stars, and the Stars for Me,” followed by Zero’s “Once You Get Up There.” Then one of their instructor officers, Major Strasser, came in and had a drink with them.

“But don’t you find it cold here?” asks Peter.

“We Germans must get used to all climates, from the Sahara to the poles of Saturn,” says the major.

Then the chorines danced on and sang “Dock Your Rocket
Here
” and a chorus line, not of cadets but true Rocket Men, danced on, including one small grotesque figure in sunglasses.

Brettschneider wrote:
more " " " H. Jr.,
beneath his first entry.

The cadets and Rocket Men ran off with the chorines, and a new card dropped in: The Field for Rockets. Training. On one side of the fence the three cadets stood at attention; on the other a girl skipped rope to the chant:

“My girlfriend’s name is Guernica. Her Daddy bombed ’Merika . . .”

The Drill Instructor, called Manley Mann, comes on and yells at the cadets. “Where you going, you stupid lot?”

“Up. Up. Up.”

“How you goin’?”

“Fast. Fast. Fast.”

“At night, whatcha see inna sky?”

“Nazi Socialist Moon!”

“Gimme a thousand pushups.”

The cadets dropped down, began to count, “One Vengeance Weapon, Two Vengeance Weapon, Three Vengeance Weapon . . .” There was stage business with the pushups, most of it dealing with Zero’s attempts to do nothing while yelling at the top of his voice.

When they finished, Manley Mann said, “Right. Today we’re gonna learn about the MD2D3 Course Plottin’ Calculator. Walk smart follow me follow me—” and off.

Another card: Six Weeks Later. Cadet Barracks. Night.

Then came Shemp’s solo, as he looked out the window at a bored-looking stagehand holding up a cardboard moon. He did some comic patter, then went on to sing “I Wish I Had a Little Rocket of My Own.”

Then the lights went up, the Intermission sign dropped down, and the half-curtain was lowered to the stage.

* * *

Backstage the Madame was furious. “I
told
you we must take that song out!” she yelled at Shemp. “You realize you made the audience identify with your character? You know that’s against all the Master’s teachings! You were supposed to sing the ‘Song of the Iron Will.’ ”

Shemp weaved like a punch-drunk boxer, running his hands through his dank, lanky hair. “I got mixed up,” he said. “They played the wrong music, so I sang it. Yell at the band.”

“You must always
always
remember the
Verfremsdungeffekt
. You must always remind people they are watching a performance. Why do you think the stagehand holds the prop moon so everyone can see him? Are you an idiot? What were you thinking?”

Shemp paused, ticking off on his fingers. “I do. I always do. I don’t know. Yes. Nothing.”

“
Why
must I be saddled with morons?”

Shemp said something under his breath.

“What?! What did you say?!”

“I said I gotta get a drink of water, or I’m gonna lose my voice next act.”

“That’s not what you said!”

“Yes it is, comrade Ma’am.”

“Get out of my sight!”

“At once,” said Shemp, and disappeared offstage.

* * *

Zero sat on a crate in the alleyway. It was bitterly cold, but this was the only place he was sure Madame wouldn’t follow him. Peter came out, lit up a butt one of the waiters had brought him from a customer’s ashtray.

“We gotta find another way to make a living,” said Zero, his breath a fog.

“We’ve said that every night for sixteen years now,” said Peter. “Christ, it’s cold!”

“Wasn’t it Fitzgerald that said nothing much starts in Switzerland, but lots of things end there?”

“How the fuck should I know?” said Peter.

“Well, I don’t want to be one of the things that ends here,” said Zero.

Peter thought of lines from a movie he’d been in long ago, lines dealing with exile, expatriation, and death, and started to say one of them, but didn’t.

Besides, they’d already used the best lines from that movie in the play.

“It’s like I told that fat great Limey actor once,” said Peter. “ ‘Chuck,’ I said, ‘if you
have
to pork young men, just go for god’s sake and
do
it, and come back and learn your goddamn lines; just quit torturing yourself about it!’ ”

“Are you saying I should pick up a little boy?” asked Zero.

Peter shrugged his shoulders. “Where else is there to go but here, Zero?” he asked.

Zero was quiet. Then: “Sometimes I get so tired, Pete. Soon we’ll be old men. Like Bruno. Then dead old men . . .”

“But theater!—” began Peter.

“—and Brecht!—” said Zero.

“—will live forever!” they finished in unison. They laughed and Zero fell off his crate into the snow. Then they brushed themselves off and went back inside.

* * *

Brettschneider had made his rounds of the tables during the break. He looked over his notes, made an emendation on one of them. He ate a kaiser roll, then drank a gin-and-tonic, feeling the pine-needle taste far back in his throat.

Then the band came back, played the last-act overture, and cards dropped back in.

There was a classroom lecture on the futurist films of Fritz Lang,
Metropolis
and
Frau im Mond
, which then went backwards and forwards to cover other spaceward-looking films:
Himmelskibet
,
F.P.1 Antwortet Nicht
,
Der Tunnel
, and
Welttraumschiff I Startet
, at which Zero insisted on confusing Leni Reifenstahl with the Dusseldorf Murderer.

Brettschneider wrote:
unacceptable reference to Reichsminister for Culture
.

Then the play moved on to Graduation Day, where the massed cadets (represented by the three actors, some mops and brooms with mustaches painted on them, and a boxful of toy soldiers) sang “Up Up for the Fatherland” and were handed their rocket insignia.

The actors changed onstage into their powder-blue uniforms (overalls) with the jackboots (rubber galoshes) as a sign came down: First Assignment. Rocket Man City—Peënemünde.

Another sign: Suddenly—A Propaganda Crisis!

Major Strasser comes up to the three Rocket Men. “Suddenly,” he says, “a propaganda crisis!”

“Eeep Eeep Eeep Eeep!” says Shemp, staggering.

“Attention!” says the major. “Our enemies in the U.S.R. far beyond the Urals have launched one of their primitive reaction-motor ships. It is bound for the far reaches of the Solar System. Our information is that it is filled with the Collected Works of Marx and Lenin, and the brilliant but non-Aryan playwright Bertolt Brecht.”

(There was a boo from the audience, followed by laughter. The actors onstage held still until it was over.)

“Your first assignment is to intercept this missile before it can spread unapproved thinking to Nazi Socialist space, and beyond, and to destroy it.”

There was a blackout; four signs were illuminated, one after the other:

Three Go Out.

One Gets Killed.

One Goes Mad.

One Doesn’t Come Back.

The first two signs were lit. In the darkness, Zero is in a balsawood framework shaped like a small rocket. To his uniform has been added a bent coat hanger representing a space helmet.

His voice is roaring, he is determined. The band is raucous behind him but his singing overpowers it.

“Target in sight!

It’s easy, all right!

Just line up the guns and watch all the fu—

Ooops!”

A papier-mâché meteor, painted red and trailing smoke vertically, comes out of the darkness. It smashes into Zero’s ship, which flies to flinders. Zero, his coat-hanger helmet now gone, floats up into the air on wires in the dark, a hideous grin on his face.

The spotlit placard: One Goes Mad.

Shemp’s balsawood spaceship. Zero floats directly in front of it. “Whoa!” yells Shemp. He punches things on his instrument panel, running his hands over his coat hanger. “Eeep Eeep Eeep Eeep!” Then he sits bolt upright, unmoving except for the lips, making perfect sense in a monotonous voice, reciting the successive graph plots on a Fibonacci curve, as he and his ship, trailing vertical smoke, are pulled by ropes out of the light into the darkness at the back of the stage.

The spotlight searches around, finds the sign: One Doesn’t Come Back. Peter in his ship. He is mumbling the Soldier’s Creed. At the other side of the stage, light comes up on a toy rocket. Peter takes out a dart gun, fires twice at the toy, his arm outside the ship’s framework as he reloads the rubber-tipped darts. One finally hits the toy rocket—it explodes like a piñata.

Then an
oogah
klaxon horn is blown backstage, causing the audience to jump, and Peter’s ship is bathed in flickering red light. “Uh-oh,” he says. “Trouble.” Then the band begins to play softly, and he sings “I Wonder What Deborah’s Doing in Festung Amerika Tonight?”

The ship tilts downwards.

Blackout. A sign: Mars.

When the lights come back up the stage is clear. A red silk drop cloth covers the ground. For a full minute, nothing happens. Then Peter’s balsawood ship, him inside, flies out of the wings and he lands flat on his ass, legs straight out while pieces of wood bounce all over.

He stands up, brushes himself off. As he does so, stagehands begin to ripple the red silk, making it look like drifting, gently blowing sand. Peter takes off his coat hanger, takes a deep breath. A book falls from above, bounces at the rear of the moving red stage. Then another follows. Peter looks up. A book slowly lowers toward him on a wire. He reaches up and plucks it from the air. Others fall around him occasionally throughout the scene. Peter begins to read. His eyes widen even more. He looks up at the audience. He reads more. Then he stands up. “Holy dialectical shit!” he says.

Then the lights came up, and the chorines, stagehands, actors, ushers and dishwashers came in, taking their bows. Zero floated down from the ceiling on his wires, blowing kisses. Then the Madame came out, glaring at Zero, turned and took a bow to the audience for having survived Brecht.

Then they all passed among the tables, holding out baskets for donations.

* * *

Brettschneider stayed at his table drinking, while the audience mingled with the members of the Ensemble. He noticed that he’d written nothing in his notebook since the couple of entries just after intermission. When he saw Peter take something from Madame, put on his coat and go out the door, Brettschneider wrote:
Suspects then all followed their usual routines
. Then he gathered up his own things, nodded to Caspar who was still tending bar, and went back to his home and to bed.