The New Confessions (38 page)

“Almyr Nelson,” he said. “ ‘Baby.’ Remember?”

“Of course. How are you, Baby?”

He smoothed imaginary hair on his gleaming pink pate. “Bit thin on top, otherwise fine.” He smiled again. “Well, you’re certainly doing all right for yourself.… Listen, Harold’s here. Come over and meet him.”

“Delighted.”

Faithfull, fatter than ever, was standing too close to someone I knew, Monika Alt, who was fanning herself vigorously with a menu. She greeted me as if I were an old friend, though we were no more than acquaintances.

“Thank God,” she whispered as she kissed me. “Terrible halitosis.”

“Look who I’ve dug up, Harry,” Nelson said, drawing me forward. “Old Todd, the intrepid balloonist. Can you credit it?”

Faithfull managed a weak smile.

“Todd … congratulations.” His face was moist with sweat. I smelled his rotting teeth as he spoke.

I accepted his good wishes. “What are you doing over here?” I asked.

“Just started a film.”

“Called
The Tip-top Twins Go Sailing,
” Baby Nelson said cheerfully. “Part of a series.”

“Sounds like fun,” I said. “By the way, Faithfull, I should do something with your teeth. Your breath smells repulsive.”

I took Monika’s arm and we turned away and strode off through the crowd, Monika’s shoulders heaving with shocked silent laughter. It was childish of me, I know, but these opportunities are rare in life and must
not be ignored. Cherish them, savor them; they provide some comfort in the dog days.

Monika and I had another drink and I told her about my past encounters with Harold Faithfull. We laughed some more. Monika Alt was in her mid-thirties, I think, maybe ten years older than me. She was a thin, blond, sinewy woman who had been a celebrated theatrical actress but whose career had never fully restarted after the hiatus caused by the war. She had been married three or four times and drank rather too much. As we talked she leaned against me occasionally, a breast flattening against my upper arm. It could have been accidental, but it is my opinion that a woman knows exactly when her breasts come into contact with anyone or anything, animate or inanimate. The warmth, the alcohol, my crude besting of Faithfull, and the new sense of confidence that irradiated me made me find her suddenly attractive. I felt a prickling and easing in my groin. However, I doubt very much if I would have gone to bed with her that afternoon if I had not just at that moment seen Doon and Mavrocordato across the room.

“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.”

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?