The Lady from Zagreb

Interlude

French Riviera, 1956

Up on the screen Dalia unzipped her beautiful red mouth to reveal a row of perfect teeth, laughed, and stared into the camera with those big blue eyes, and I was in love all over again. After more than ten years it was as if we had never been parted. Well, almost. Cinema is cruel like that. So cruel that it must have been invented by a German, or at least imagined by one. Nietzsche, perhaps, with his idea of eternal recurrence; I can’t think of a more cinematic idea than that because, to be honest, it’s highly probable that, for obvious reasons, I’ll see this film more than once. Well, why not? I could almost smell her.

And yet, tantalizingly, I could not touch her, nor would I touch her ever again, in all likelihood. Just the thought of that made me suddenly feel so weak and sick it was as if I’d lost the will to live. You never quite succeed in filling the space of a woman you have loved. But did she even remember me? Was there ever a moment in a day when something crossed her mind to remind her of Gunther and what had happened to us both? I rather doubted that, just as in the final analysis she had certainly doubted me. She could never have believed that I would assume some of the guilt that was hers. Probably she didn’t believe it until she was safely back home. Frankly I surprised myself at the time, and I fully expected to die for what I’d done; perhaps, without her, that was even what I wanted most in the world. To die. After I came back from Belarus I’d grown tired of survival at any cost. Usually, of course, I’m not quite so noble, but love does funny things to a man. Looking at her now, on screen opposite Rex Harrison, a man who represented everything I hate most about the English — smug, self-satisfied, snobbish, only vaguely heterosexual — I formed the conclusion that, most likely, I was just a small footnote to her more notorious relationship with Josef Goebbels, which, to be fair to her, Dalia had always denied but which continued to dog her footsteps. To the Yugoslavian authorities she had steadfastly maintained that, while Hitler’s propaganda chief had certainly pursued her, she had never succumbed and in evidence argued the fact that she’d seen out the last years of the war in Switzerland in preference to accepting the film roles that Goebbels had offered her in his capacity as the head of the UFA film studio at Babelsberg.

Did I believe those denials? I’d like to have done. Even at the time I had my doubts, although you could hardly blame Dalia for the priapic doctor’s interest in her. Not entirely. A woman can only choose who she tries to make fall in love with her, not who actually does. And I certainly didn’t blame Goebbels for being besotted with her, for, in many respects, he was no different from me. We both had an eye for a pretty face — two for a very beautiful one — and it was easy to find yourself obsessed with a woman like Dalia Dresner. An hour in the woman’s company was enough to make you fall for her. That sounds like an exaggeration and perhaps it is for some but not for me. I fell in love with her almost the moment I saw her, which is perhaps hardly surprising as she was completely naked in her Griebnitzsee garden at the time. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Stories should have a beginning, they should even have a middle, but I’m never sure that ones like this ever really have an end; not while I can still feel like this about a woman I haven’t seen, or touched, or spoken to in a thousand years.