Europe Central (43 page)

Oh, really? Which friend? he casually asked. He had never asked that before.

There was a silence, and then she said in a very low voice: Shostakovich.

He felt as if she had kicked him in the stomach.

Oh, he said.

You sound upset, came Elena’s voice.

Oh, not at all. I’m not upset. So how often do you see him? I don’t believe you’ve mentioned him lately.

He’s a . . . a fairly good friend.

Oh, he said again, and changed the subject.

Of course she’s unfaithful to you, Roman Lazarevich. (This was the opinion of all his friends.) A man doesn’t take a woman out to dinner on a regular basis unless he’s getting something from her, especially if she’s a married woman.

I know, I know.

Well then?

I guess I really don’t care. If she’d only tell me, then I—

Now you’re speaking in incomplete sentences, just like that Shostakovich.

The thing is, I think about her all the time.

Work harder, Roman Lazarevich! That’s the best cure!

I know. But the odd thing is, my work doesn’t matter to me anymore. I know it’s ridiculous, but I sometimes feel that my love for her is the only thing that’s genuine about me.

20

Standing leftwards of the desk where her husband worked by lamplight, with a canteen beside him, his daybook on one side, and his light meter holding down one corner of the paper, Elena smiled at him lovingly.

Do you think there’s any hope at all? he asked.

I can’t honestly say that I do feel any hope, she said gently.

But still they stayed together.

And now the war had come, and whenever he got to see her, which was far more often than most husbands got to see their wives, he felt claustrophobic; he couldn’t forget how she had called him
creepy
for wanting to be all alone with her in isolated places.

I’ve already told you how during the Nazi-Soviet idyll he’d gone in the ice-breaker
Josef Stalin
to film the rescue of the
Sedov
with her crew of thirteen. This vessel had been icebound for eight hundred and twelve days. Karmen would never forget the magnetic storms, the cold, the silence. And yet none of it had depressed him; he was an adventurer; he truly loved the experience! (Shostakovich would have killed himself.) Of course, what’s worst about being icebound is the solitude, but a gregarious man is armored against that. Roman Karmen never ran out of jokes. He’d bunked with his cameraman V. Shtatland and his sound engineer Ruvim Khalulashkov; if either man turned morose, Roman Karmen knew how to make him laugh.
²⁶
Defeatism is a crime. They recorded the repair and reassembly of the
Sedov
’s engine. The engine started; the
Sedov
was saved; one more Roman Karmen film ended happily! But now when he was with Elena he was back in the cold; they sat miserably together in the captain’s icy cabin.

21

He asked her whether she was sure that the problem was him, not her, and she said that she was sure.

Was it like this with Shostakovich?

Never.

22

They invited him to film the premiere of Shostakovich’s Leningrad Symphony, but he didn’t want to see Shostakovich; even though Arnshtam scolded him, he said he didn’t have time. Instead, he requested a transfer out of the Central Frontline Kinogroup and filmed “Leningrad Strikes Back!” (A titanic poster of D. D. Shostakovich in a fire-helmet gazed shyly down on him.) He crawled with his camera over the ice of Lake Ladoga to film the agony and encourage the defenders, almost getting killed four times.

Two lost soldiers, with frost on their machine-pistols, huddle over their truck’s frozen engine as they try to read a map. Ruins stretch behind them and before them. Perhaps they’ll die today, but Roman Karmen has photographed them; he wants them to live forever. We see them for a single long instant in his newsreel, and we feel for them; we want them to get safely to Leningrad. Roman Karmen is a man who cares! He stands in the same fur-lined greatcoat in which he filmed “The
Sedov
Men,” knee deep in Leningrad snow, with the skeleton of a wrecked bus very black behind him. Throwing back his head and shoulders, yet continuing to gaze levelly ahead, he braces the cine-camera against his heart.

The half-blacked-out eyes of supply trucks creep darkly through the white fog and ice of Lake Ladoga. He leaps to one side, films it, gets back in another truck which turns out to be filled with sullen soldiers he’s never met; in thirty seconds he gets them grinning at his imitation of the laughing man in “Volga-Volga.”

He came home and she was sitting by the gramophone, listening to Shostakovich’s Cello Sonata in D Minor (which is Opus 40, I believe). He sat down beside her and she gazed at him in annoyance.

23

He had just found that his application to speak at the Conference on American and British Cinema had been accepted. Everyone would be there, even Eisenstein, since his name was familiar to the Americans; he was supposed to read a paper on feature films. It meant good cheer and good food, neither of which was in great supply in those war years, and he had thought that Elena would be coming with him; actually he had applied for her sake. But now they had what’s called
a little talk,
which is to say a talk in which she gradually, carefully expressed more and more how hopeless she felt, all the time watching him to make sure that no one dose was lethal. It was like the time that a nurse he cared for had been killed by a Fascist barrage, and they sat him down and said first: Roman Lazarevich, we have some very bad news, and then: We’re very sorry, but something has happened, and so on and so on,
und so weiter
as the German Fascists would say. In this spirit, Elena asked him what he thought about their life together, what he thought, what he thought, always what he thought! Eventually, he comprehended: She wants me to do the dirty work!

This isn’t fair! he cried weakly.

I understand, said Elena, evidently willing to be infinitely agreeable as long as her object could be obtained. Usually she got angry the instant he accused her of being unfair.

Do you ever think about it? she kept asking him.

After awhile he felt like a character in a silent film—a half-silent film, I should say, for he could still hear and remember her words, but everything he said might as well have been silent.

I tried to let you see that it was all right for you to be happy, she was saying. You deserve someone better than I am.

You’ve been a pillar of strength to me, she said. I don’t know what I’ll do without you.

I know I’m letting you down, sobbed Elena. I’m really, really sorry. I hate to lose you.

That’s all right, said Karmen wearily.

He threw on his oilskin jacket and went out. She had asked him to telephone her so she wouldn’t worry about him, but he didn’t. She knew where he would be staying: at the studio, naturally. Two days later she rang him up, and he burst out crying. Elena had that effect on people.

He sobbed: When it happened, I was sure it was a mutual thing, but today it isn’t. Every time the phone rings I hope that it’s you, and now that it’s you I’m hoping that you’ll say,
please take me back. You’re the one for me.

There’s a large part of me that hates to lose you, Elena said consolingly.

24

That would not happen until the summer of 1943, shortly before Operation Citadel. In 1942 he collaborated on “Defeat of the German Armies near Moscow,” and directed “Leningrad in Combat.” I’ve told you how I saw him at Stalingrad, eagerly photographing the captured German Fascist Field-Marshal, a certain F. Paulus, who, like a recently dead person, hadn’t entirely shed his former grandeur; in another week he’d be a convict, a nothing, but for now he still remembered how to sit up straight and proud in his uniform. All the same, he stared so woodenly into space! He reminded Karmen of someone, but he didn’t know whom. Unfortunately, the light wasn’t good enough for cinematic work. I’ve seen footage of him at Vyazma, standing between his fellow camera-soldiers K. M. Simonov and B. Tseitlin. In his bulky coat and fur cap he looks strangely gamin-like, smiling a slightly buck-toothed smile; yes, he resembles a lost French child. Simonov, who puffs at his pipe, seems the most genuine of the three. Tseitlin’s pale grin is tense beneath the cap, and Karmen’s smile is cautious. Behind them are ruins and dirty snow.

25

He performed all the trickiest camerawork for L. Arnshtam’s 1944 film “Zoya,” with a musical score by Shostakovich: Zoom in on the Nazi officer gazing into the slender lamp, losing the battle with himself; now pan to Zoya herself, beautiful, bruised and angry, standing upright before him in her quilted jacket; she’s ready to take her medicine, resolute to die without mercy for herself. Cut to closeup of her bloody lips saying: You can’t hang all hundred and ninety million of us.

Shostakovich had a question about whether the pacing of a certain long shot on the gallows was to be altered, because it would affect the tempo of the, you know. No one else happened to be in the studio. Arnshtam had rushed off to the Ministry for another argument. Zoya had just wiped the makeup off her lips and stood behind the half-opened lavatory door, flirting with the Nazi officer.
²⁷
The technician had gone into the darkroom to drink vodka.

Karmen laid his hand on Shostakovich’s shoulder and said: I hope it doesn’t make you sad to work with me, given the circumstances.

That’s not the point, Roman Lazarevich, oh, no, not at all! You know, you were born the same year I was, almost the same day! Three weeks apart—what a narrow frontline trench! That makes us, so to speak, contemporaries. Evidently she likes older men. Because we, I, you know. Well, that’s another matter. The point is, the point is that here, you see, in our Soviet homeland, for us . . .—and here Shostakovich’s lips fleered out and flittered into a spitefully sarcastic smile—
film
is the most important art form, not music.

My dear Dmitri Dmitriyevich!

No,
nein, nyet, noch nie!
That bastard Dmitri Dmitriyevich is not my concern at the moment. Film is the most . . . As you know, Lenin himself said so. Who can argue with Vladimir Ilyich?
She
wouldn’t, because she’s been, you know. The results are known—

The results of arguing?

Are you, how should I put it, crazy? screamed Shostakovich in terror. Of course I didn’t mean it like that! When she was, no, no! She never even . . . The results of, of, I’m implying of Soviet
film
in our Soviet homeland today! And Comrade Stalin confirmed Lenin’s profound and just thought and put it into, so to speak,
execution.

What Karmen did next exemplified why we like him. (He found himself thinking, as he so often did: One of this person’s mannerisms is actually mine, but I don’t know what it is.) Squatting down in front of Shostakovich, rocking on his wiry little knees, he said: There’s no need for hard feelings on that score, Dmitri Dmitriyevich, absolutely none. I think you know why.

Shostakovich was silent; Shostakovich looked away. And this infuriated Karmen inexpressibly. He did not smile much nowadays. A year later, with a white bandage dividing his head into three zones, the boyish look would be entirely gone as he filmed the ruins of Berlin steadily and without pity. He was with the Second Guards Tank Regiment by then. Toward Shostakovich his anger was no less than toward the enemy. All the same, something inclined him to be gentle. Oh, the gentleness of her that was somehow sweet like milk!

He rose, smiled and said: Do you remember what they said to Robespierre at the end? I’m sure you do.

You mean when they wrenched the, the, his bandage off? And he—

Your education was better than mine. I’m just a gutter-rat from Odessa. Before his arrest, he was calling them all kinds of names, and they said, why should the people’s business be thrown out of joint for the sake of one man’s wounded self-esteem? You and I should both try to be more optimistic, Dmitri Dmitriyevich.

Shostakovich stared at him. He gaped his mouth as if to scream.

26

In 1945 he directed “Berlin.” (Balding and bulky, jovial in his big suitcoat; he took home a bulletholed Unter den Linden sign for a souvenir.) Somehow, he simultaneously found time to collaborate with Troyanovsky on the production of “Albania.” The next year he directed the Soviet documentary about the Nuremberg Trials.
²⁸

Whitehaired, he filmed Ho Chi Minh in 1954, leaning alertly on his elbow as the Vietnamese leader raised an arm in salute. (That was the year that the formalist Dziga Vertov, long excluded from our national life, died from cancer.) In 1955 his “Vietnam” was released to considerable official acclaim. Even the American monopoly-propagandist Burt Lancaster was forced to recognize (although perhaps not in the context of this anti-American film) his
passionate love for life and people, but also an irreconcilable hatred for war, violence and fascism.
Karmen’s working conditions in North Vietnam had been perilous, but at the reception after the premiere he scooped caviar on a biscuit and said: My father died at forty-four, thanks to the White Guards. I turned forty-four in 1950. So whatever happens, I’m ahead!—Then he threw back his head and laughed, just like our favorite actor in “Volga-Volga.”

An essay I found in the library basement cites his “Far and Wide My Country Stretches” (1958) as being the first film to use the Kinopanorama system of the wide curved screen, complete with nine tracks of stereophonic sound (and we’re glancingly informed that the countervailing American system used only seven). Unfortunately, the difficulty in getting the three projectors to overlap precisely proved to be most annoying, and so, the
Great Soviet Encyclopedia
informs us, Kinopanorama came to be
used increasingly less frequently after 1963.