The New Confessions (64 page)

Eugen wasn’t actually allowed in the bar because he was too badly dressed. I arrived to find him arguing with the doorman. I led him away and calmed him down. He was close to tears.

“My God! In the old days I wouldn’t have
looked
into a stinking dive like that!” he said. “I belonged to five clubs. Five. Very select. The most exclusive places.”

“Have you found him?”

“What? Yes. Yes, I think so.”

He calmed down when I gave him his cigarettes.

He took me off somewhere in the French sector. There were Tricolors
everywhere. I think the French were enjoying occupying Berlin just as much as the Russians. We abandoned the car and walked through a partially cleared street. Tremendous fires had raged here and the buildings were quite black with soot. It was a cool cloudy day with occasional drizzle. From time to time the fresh wind unpeeled a patch of encrusted soot from the walls and sent it dancing through the air like a stiff black handkerchief. We turned a corner and came to an open space, once a small square perhaps. Beyond it, the houses had been completely flattened and we found we were in a brick wasteland, big as a soccer field, pretty with copious weeds and wildflowers. Here and there people seemed to be camping in hollows burrowed in the rubble. A crowd of about thirty gathered round a blazing bonfire.

With some difficulty Eugen and I made our way across the uneven ground towards a half-demolished church. I felt most peculiar. I could hardly believe I was going to meet Karl-Heinz. I felt childishly tearful and full of trepidation. I stumbled badly and my leg began to ache.

The roof of the church had gone and so had all the pews and furniture—for firewood, I assumed. Many people seemed to be living there, sitting docilely against the wall guarding bundles of possessions, or crouched over tiny fires cooking food in steaming pots. We went down into the crypt. It was lit by electric light, to my surprise, and was very smoky. Eugen spoke to a young woman with one arm. I looked around: the place was full of young people—boys and girls. She pointed her stump towards the back of the room.

We walked towards the rear past a row of makeshift rickety tables. Half a dozen people sat at them; they seemed to be rolling cigarettes but I couldn’t be sure, I only glanced at them.

Then I saw Karl-Heinz.

He was cooking something over a large woodburning stove that was responsible for all the smoke. He wore a thick, crudely cut greatcoat that came down to his ankles. His hair had recently been shaved off and was now a patchy prickly furze. It was mostly gray. He was very thin and his grizzled neck and jaw looked like those of an old man, slack flesh and stretched sinew, no firmness. He looked up and turned. His eyebrows were the same dark circumflexes. He smiled. A few teeth had gone.

“Hello, Johnny,” he said, simply. We embraced. He stank. But it reminded me of that day in 1924, at 129B Stralauer Allee.

I don’t mind telling you that I wept. I blubbed. I was happy to see him and at the same time unbearably sad. He was only a couple of years
older than me but he looked like my father. We sat down around the stove and he insisted on serving up a miserable lunch. A soup of breadcrumbs and salt in hot water and potatoes fried in old coffee grounds scavenged from U.S. Army messes.

“At least it gives them a taste,” he said.

While we ate Karl-Heinz told me briefly about his war. He had been declared unfit for military service because of his ulcer, which, owing to wartime deprivations and the crudity of the liquor he consumed, had flared up in 1942. He carried on working in the theaters while they were open. He was in Hamburg for a while and then Munich. However, as the war neared its end he was drafted into a special battalion of men all suffering from stomach disorders. They were sent east of Berlin to face the Russians as they advanced.

“It was a very strange unit, Johnny. We talked about nothing except our health, our doctors. Ninety-five percent of us had ulcers.” I tried without success to imagine this unit.

By the time they had retreated from the
Ringbahn
to Potsdamer Platz, Karl-Heinz decided that this was the moment to desert and go to ground. For three months he pretended to be insane.

“Best performance of my life,” he said with a thin smile.

“What did you do?”

“Not while we’re eating, Johnny, please.”

I looked around at the disabled youngsters. “What’s going on here?”

“Well, I had to live. I became a
Kippensammler
. I collected cigarette butts. Then I decided to become an entrepreneur. There were all these young people living in the ruins. I got them to collect cigarette ends for me. It takes about seven butts to make a new cigarette. We sell them for two marks each. I pay them some money and we buy food on the black market. For a while we did well, but then everybody started doing it. Life had got hard again. But then you arrive …” He smiled. “My God, Johnny, you remember the day we met in Weilburg, 1918?” He stopped suddenly. The thought of all that time in between seemed to unsettle him. His smile faded. It unsettled me too. It is one of the least happy consequences of aging. All that “past” seems to mass behind the present, rendering it insignificant and nugatory. I thought of our two lives. All that effort, all those years, to end up eating coffee-flavored potatoes in the crypt of a bombed-out church. Around us the ruins of the third-largest city in the world. And there was still the future to come.

“I want you to come away with me,” I said to him. “We must get you to America.”

“Very nice idea,” he said. “What for?”

“We’re going to finish
The Confessions.
”

I think for the first time in the twenty-eight years we had known each other, Karl-Heinz looked at me with unalloyed admiration.

I found Karl-Heinz a place to stay not far from Henni’s building. I read a notice in the street that there was a room to let in a basement apartment. The young family who owned it were delighted to welcome him. The wife had seen him onstage many times. I bought him some clothes, gave him money for food, had him deloused and medically examined and secured him some false teeth and a new set of papers. All that was comparatively easy. Getting him out of the country seemed impossible.

Finally, I learned of a special Home Office scheme that had been created to allow German nationals the opportunity to rejoin members of their families in Britain. I applied on Karl-Heinz’s behalf, saying that he was a half brother of Mungo Dale and that there was accommodation and a job for him at Drumlarish. This claim was met with some skepticism. Proof was called for. I had conspired with Mungo and he obligingly wrote to the authorities saying that Karl-Heinz was the offspring of his mother’s second marriage and that he had spent many summers with the family before the Great War. They had rather lost contact with him since Mrs. Dale had died, but would be delighted to welcome him back to the Dale household once more.

In Berlin a search was instigated for documents to verify the story. It would take time, I was told, and in the end might be futile—so much had been destroyed. By this stage we were almost into June.

In the end I solved my problem by blackmailing a wing commander in the RAF (later Air Marshal Lord D——) who was suitably placed in the hierarchy of the military government to give the authorization. He was making a fortune by flying stolen antiques back to London dealers in RAF planes (an open secret in WarCorrMess). He was not alone. I could give the names of half a dozen high-ranking British officers who secured a comfortable postwar income for themselves based on German loot. This particular man was completely unperturbed when I put the deal to him. He said no editor of a British newspaper would dare print the story. I pointed out that I worked for an American newspaper and
was not similarly constrained. He signed and had Karl-Heinz’s papers drawn up and authorized while I waited. As I left, he said, “It’s little shits like you who voted Winston out of office.”

Karl-Heinz left Berlin before me, but his journey took longer. As a low-priority passenger he was held up, reprocessed, delayed and misdirected. His papers were in order, that was the main thing. In the end that fact alone made it inevitable that he would reach his destination.

I said good-bye to Henni with much regret and real sadness. Her job in Hamburg had fallen through. But she had heard from Karl-Heinz’s landlady that I had secured him passage out of Berlin and asked if I could do the same for her and her mother. I had to say no. I told her to be patient. Life in Berlin couldn’t be like this forever. On our last night together we lay in her thin bed, smoking and drinking as usual—both of us, I think, trying to pretend that we would be doing this again the next evening.

“Are you married?” Henni asked.

“No.”

“Will you marry me?”

“
What?
”

“Marry
me.
”

“Good God.”

“Don’t you like me?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well, then.… We can get divorced as soon as we’re in England.”

“I’m not going to England, I’m going to America.”

“Even better.”

“I’m not American, though. I have to apply for a permit.”

“But if they let you in, surely they’ll let your wife in too. And your mother-in-law.”

I wanted to say that I’d already been married to a German and it had only lasted six months.

“Look,” I said. “I’m an old man. I’m forty-seven years old. Twenty-five years older than you. You can’t marry me. It would be a terrible mistake.”

“Oh, all right,” she said. “My mother said I should try. She likes you—much better than Major Arbogast.”

“Who the hell’s he?”

“He’s my other man who comes here.”

I felt hurt, then foolish. “You’ll be all right,” I said reassuringly. I’m sure she was.

I left the city on a mild June day; the usual cocktail of emotions bubbled in my brain. This was the city that had made my career and reputation. It had brought me Doon. It had also undone me, in a way, too. And now it was undone itself. I had a funny feeling I would be seeing it again, so I didn’t bother to look out of the window when the USAF DC-3 took off from Tempelhof. I was wrong. It was a shame. I never came back.

A gorgeous, stifling, unbearably hot day. I wonder if I might try the path down to the beach today. I can get down there not too badly; it’s the coming back that does for me. There is a small row of stone sheds in the cove where the fishermen keep their boats. I watch these old codgers as they come back up the path after a day’s work. They certainly don’t stride, but their plod never falters. A couple of them look even older than me. How come they can do it and I can’t? Perhaps I should ask Ulrike to take me round by boat.…

It was a hot day in 1946 when Karl-Heinz and I traveled up by train to Scotland. We sat in the thick warm air of the compartment, looking at the English countryside bright in its summer clichés. We stopped, inexplicably, for two hours outside Doncaster—or was it Peterborough? I remember vaguely that Karl-Heinz and I talked about the war and its terrible consequences. I recall one thing he said. “Why did you let him, it, happen?” I had asked him. “Couldn’t you see?”

“Well, I tell you, John,” he said. “One thing about the German people—we’re very like the British in this—we have no
social
courage. That’s why we make good soldiers and bad citizens.”

“Haven’t you? Haven’t
we
?”

“No. Not really. Don’t you think it’s true? We never complain. Neither do you. It’s always a bad sign in a population.”

We spent a couple of days in Edinburgh in a hotel in Princes Street. I took Karl-Heinz to meet my father, an encounter I’d long relished the thought of. Innes—Dad—had sold his home and now lived in an old
folks’ home in Peebles, twenty miles from Edinburgh in the Tweed Valley and not far from Minto Academy. My father was eighty-four. I can see him now, his big arthritic knuckles trembling ever so slightly on his two walking sticks. We took tea with him on the terrace of the rather grand house he lived in (it’s a hotel now) on a hill overlooking the town and the fresh green park beside the fast brown river. We talked about this and that.

“So, what’re you going to do now, John?”

“Well, I’m going back to America. Karl-Heinz and I are going to finish a film we started a while ago.”

“God Almighty!” He had grown more profane as he had aged. “Finish? When did you start it?”

“Nineteen twenty-six.”

He shook his head sadly.

“Your son is a great artist, Mr. Todd,” Karl-Heinz said. “Truly.”

My father looked at Karl-Heinz as if to say, “
Him? That
joker?”

“He is,” Karl-Heinz said.

“There’s no need to be polite on my account, Mr. Kornfeld. I know my son well enough. Full of daft schemes from the day he was born.” His face darkened a moment. I knew he was thinking about my mother—my birth and her death inseparable. “I knew he’d never amount to much.”

We laughed politely.

Then he took one of his hands off a stick and patted me on the knee. He left his hand there, lightly, light as a napkin.

“Not like his brother, now. Done very well for himself, has Thompson. Rich man, successful, lovely family. Grandmaster of the lodge.”

I wasn’t upset. I looked at the old man. He wouldn’t give an inch. Eighty-four and as intractable as ever.

“You’re a difficult bugger, aren’t you, Innes?” I said. “Here, have another cup of tea and shut up.”

He laughed. Quite long and hard. Then he took his hand off my knee.

It was only after we left him that I realized his touch on my knee had been the only affectionate physical contact between us since I was a child. It brings tears to my eyes as I sit here and think about it now. That gesture carries a heavy cargo.

I never saw my father again. He died peacefully in his sleep one night in the winter of 1948.

I was back in Los Angeles when I got the news of my father’s death, wrangling with Eddie Simmonette over the start of preproduction on what I regarded as
The Confessions: Part III
—but which was known to everyone else as
Father of Liberty
. I was dreadfully upset by the news, much more than I had ever expected to be. In the midst of all the grief, the guilt and remorse for things unsaid and undone, one obsession came to dominate my mind—perhaps, I can now see, as a way of allowing myself to cope. What distressed me most was the sudden realization that my father might have died without ever seeing one of my films. I telegraphed Thompson immediately:
DID FATHER EVER SEE MY FILMS STOP URGENT I KNOW SOONEST JOHN
.