The New Confessions

9 Passions

I knew whom Karl-Heinz was talking about. Doon Bogan was an American, a film star with a huge following in Germany due to the improbable success of an improbable film called Mephistophela, made by Alexander Mavrocordato in 1922, a version of Faust in which, yes, Mephistopheles was a woman. Doon wore black throughout the film. Her face was chalk-white with shadowed eyes and pale lips, and always framed by a tight black cowl. She was the perfect embodiment of fate, sex and death, and the film itself, in a somewhat ham-fisted Expressionist style, was dark and garish and untidily powerful. Doon Bogan became famous, married her director, Alexander Mavrocordato, divorced him a year later and stayed on in Berlin, where she made other successful films with the likes of Pabst, Murnau and Kluge. I asked Aram what he thought of Karl-Heinz’s idea. He was intrigued and suggested that we meet her and sound her out. He warned only that the budget for Julie would rise considerably if she consented to play the part.

We sent her the script and a meeting was arranged for lunch in the Adlon or Metropol Hotel. Perhaps it was the Bristol.… I am not too clear on the details of that day. I remember feeling the sensation of softness of the pile on the maroon carpet in the hotel bar through the thin soles of my new expensive shoes. Inside, the bar was sumptuously gloomy. Outside it was a dull noon, swagged pewter clouds over the city threatening rain, a fretful gusty wind tugging at the overcoats and skirts of passengers leaving the Friedrichstrasse Station opposite (it must have been the Metropol Hotel, after all). I was early, having visited a travel agent on some matter arising over Sonia’s and the children’s tickets and encountered a mindless bureaucratic problem. The ensuing fruitless argument with the clerk had irritated me and I went straight into the hotel bar for a drink. I ordered a large gin and water and calmed down somewhat.

A blond woman in a jade-green dress sitting in a leather armchair across the room was scrutinizing me. Her hair was pale blond — ivory-colored — bobbed, with a fiercely edged fringe cut short across the middle of her forehead. Wide, thin but well-shaped red lips. A narrow small nose with a perceptible hook. Where had I seen her before …? She stood up. She was tall, tall as me, even wearing flat ballet-dancer-style pumps on long, slightly splayed feet. She walked over towards me with an odd elegance, big strides, like a champion girl swimmer, say; muscled but lean, with a phocine grace.

“Mr. Todd?”

I said yes. I had to look up, just a little — a queer sensation.

“I’m Doon Bogan.”

We shook hands. My suddenly moist palm. Her dry fingers, the knuckly pressure of a big ring, just for an instant.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t … I thought you had dark—” I cleared my throat, suddenly clotted with phlegm. “Dark hair.”

“I do. But Julie’s blond, isn’t she?”

Aram Lodokian arrived at that moment; Alex Mavrocordato, her “adviser,” minutes later.

It took only the space of the subsequent luncheon for me to fall heedlessly, helplessly in love with her. The physical appeal glowed strongly, incandescent, but my emotional commitment followed fast. I think it was her laugh. She laughed easily in a low voice, a crescendo. In some people that facility is merely inane. But with Doon I felt it betokened a true generosity of spirit. Her laughter was a gift to others; you felt good when you heard it — or so I reasoned in my new fantastic state.

We drank. We lunched. I was a husk. I felt weightless on the chair. I picked at my food, but I drank so much Aram had to order two more bottles of wine.

Later, when they had gone, Aram and I sat over coffee and cigars in the Metropol’s smoking room. I had a stinging dehydrated throat and a yammering headache.

“My God, you drank like a fish,” Aram said.

“She’s Julie,” I said huskily. My cigar tasted of vomit.

“We can’t pay twenty-five. It’s crazy. Twenty, maybe. Just.”

“I can’t do it with anybody else.”

Aram looked at me quizzically. He wore a blue suit with a metallic aquamarine shimmer to it. He had expensive bad taste in clothes.

“Take five thousand of my fee,” I said. “Pay me it back as a bonus if we finish on time.”

“Are you all right?”

“I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”

“It’s not such a bad idea.” He smiled. “It’ll be a good incentive for you.”

Aram liked me, but he was no fool. He saved five thousand and got Doon Bogan. He told me he was impressed by my artistic integrity. I accepted the compliment.

Do you know that feeling? When you meet someone and you know? The sudden hollowing out of your torso, as if your lungs, heart, viscera have gone and the ribs seem to creak like barrel staves under too much pressure? Glimmerings, intimations of the way I felt now had occurred before with Faye Hobhouse, Dagmar — even Huguette. It is, I think, to do with fear: a fear of impotence — not sexual, but of lacking the power of ability to capture the object of your vital passion. A haunting dread that you will never have the chance again, that the moment has passed you by forever.

I sat on with Aram, emptied out, made void by that fear.

“Relax,” Aram said, and patted my knee. “Oh yes, I forgot. This arrived for you at the studio.”

It was a telegram from Sonia: she and the children would be arriving in four days’ time.…

I felt a sudden nausea. A weariness of spirit, an almost complete despair.

I saw Doon again before Sonia arrived. In the Realismus offices, where we met to sign the contracts. Karl-Heinz was there, and Mavrocordato also, to my annoyance. Mavrocordato had prematurely gray hair and was a handsome, large, jowly man with big shoulders and a big soft chest. Apparently Doon still lived with him off and on, and used him as a kind of unofficial manager. Aram wheeled his father out from his office. Champagne was opened and we toasted the success of Julie. That day I had chronic indigestion and the champagne’s acid bubbles seethed the length of my esophagus. It was as if some physical dolor had to attend my encounters with Doon. I suffered from a broth of confused sensations and emotions: heartburn, real and metaphorical; a sour hatred for the ursine Mavrocordato; fleeting elations and pride over Julie. And a dour worry about the impending arrival of my wife and children.

Among the chatter and the toasts, Duric Lodokian beckoned me over to his wheelchair and shook my hand. Then he pulled me down, my ear to his smoky mouth.

“Fantastical girl,” he coughed. “My God, I like to have her once before I die.”

“Me too,” I said, punching my fiery chest. “Me too.”

“I love Doon Bogan, I love Doon Bogan” was the ill-timed refrain pulsating through my head as I watched Sonia, Mrs. Shorrold and my two children advance along the platform towards me. I had not counted on my mother-in-law, but it was reasonable to suppose that Sonia could not have coped with the journey alone. I tried to expunge the image of Doon from my mind as I kissed my wife. Sonia looked as smart as ever, if a little tired, wearing a neat oyster-gray suit. Vincent shied away from me, terrified, as if I were a threatening stranger. Mrs. Shorrold held Hereford. He looked fat and jolly and shook his fist vigorously at me, in welcome, I hoped. He must have been three months old.

I supervised the luggage and organized two taxis to transport it and us to Rudolfplatz. It was a sunny day and I pointed out this and that feature as we drove through the city center. Sonia, I could see, was excited and impressed. Berlin looked fresh and cosmopolitan. However, Sonia’s expression fell rather as we recrossed the Spree and drove down Stralauer Allee towards the apartment. Fine buildings gave way to drab residential streets. From time to time we got glimpses of the river to our right, with its untidy clusters of barges, docks piled high with bricks and sand, sacks and boxes of vegetables.

“Why are we living here?” Sonia asked plaintively as we disembarked at Rudolfplatz.

“It’s very cheap,” I said.

“But I thought you said we were well off.”

“We are.” I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. “We’ll move, don’t worry. We’ll move tomorrow.”

“No need for sarcasm, Johnny.”

I could appreciate that seen through her eyes the apartment left something to be desired. I was no interior decorator, but at least I had asked Frau Mittenklott to look in twice a week to do some cleaning and cooking whenever her duties at Georg Pfau’s permitted. The unsatisfactory nature of our reunion was compounded by my inability to make love to Sonia that night. Guilt about Doon made me detumescent.

“What’s wrong?” Sonia asked kindly. She was always thoughtful.

“I don’t know.… I think I must be tired. Too much work, the film—” I babbled on, seeking refuge in a monologue, and soon enough Sonia fell asleep.

And soon enough a routine and ostensible family life was established at Rudolfplatz, facilitated and made tolerable — at least for Sonia — by there being some money in the bank. A nurse was employed to look after the boys and Sonia and her mother shopped strenuously for curtains, carpets, furniture and all the odds and ends of a proper home that I had been unable to provide. At weekends we went to the beach at Wannsee, for a picnic in the Grunewald, or we took a steamer down to Potsdam. There was a sizable British film presence in Berlin in those days, owing to the considerable number of Anglo-German co-productions, and Sonia discovered that she knew some of the girls working in the studios. Even Vincent Shorrold came over for a month’s holiday. Suddenly, my life acquired its old context, something that — after the months of bachelorhood and freedom — I found unsettling. I concentrated on my film.

July and August went by as we waited for Karl-Heinz to finish Diary of a Prostitute (A. E. Groth was notoriously pedantic — no one could rush him). In the meantime all the innumerable logistical problems of film making presented themselves and were laboriously overcome. We found our perfect château near Arneburg overlooking the Elbe, and then lost it when the owner asked for double his fee. We found another. A large model of the Parisian skyline was constructed (the view from Saint-Preux’s garret) and was destroyed in a medium-sized fire at the Grunewald studios. Monika Alt (Claire) had an abortion, followed swiftly by a nervous breakdown, and was replaced by Lola Templin-Tavel. And so on.

I found myself becoming steadily more harassed over the day-to-day aggravations. Aram Lodokian could only devote a portion of his time to Julie, as he was preoccupied with running Realismus (old Duric seemed to be growing iller). I suggested we hire a co-producer and Aram agreed. I wrote to Leo Druce in London and offered him the job. Leo sold his car-hire business and was in Berlin by late August. Thus the old team was reunited.

Leo was almost embarrassingly grateful. “You keep pulling me out of the fire,” he said. I told him he was doing me a favor, and sure enough his presence proved invaluable. I soon found myself with time on my hands and on the pretext of doing some rewrites on the script I went to see Doon Bogan.

She lived in the west end, on Schlüter Strasse, off the Kurfürstendamm and not far from the Palmenhaus Café. Her apartment was small and cluttered; no real attempt had been made to prettify or decorate it. Evidence of her wealth and fame — a walnut baby grand supporting a troop of silver-framed photographs, a long rectangular chrome-and-leather sofa — contrasted strongly with her own untidiness. A bundle of half a dozen dresses was laid over the back of an armchair. In the hall was a large stack of what looked absurdly like political broadsheets.

She showed me into the sitting room. She had on a cobalt cardigan over a shirt and tie. The hem was coming down at the back of her crepe skirt. She wore — as I came to learn she always did — her leather dancing pumps. Doon was not an unconfident woman, but she was curiously self-conscious about her height. My abiding memory of her entering a room is the relief with which she flung herself into chairs, as if she had been walking for hours. When compelled to stand, at a reception or a cocktail party, say, she always made straight for a pillar or wall to lean against. It was not a case of politesse, aware of shorter men; she did the same with Mavrocordato, who was taller than she.

Now she sat promptly on the leather sofa and lit a cigarette. I made the usual insincere compliments about her flat. Above the fire was a blurry photograph of a strong-faced, dark-haired woman with an old-fashioned hairstyle.

“Your mother?” I asked.

“Rosa Luxemburg.”

“Rosa who?”

“My God.” She seemed surprised. “Haven’t you heard of her?”

“No. Who is she?”

“Those Free Corps bastards murdered her, 1919.”

“Oh.… Politics.” I remembered there had been an abortive Communist revolution then. I took a cigarette from the inlaid box on the table.

“Can I borrow a light?”

“What do you mean, ‘Oh.… Politics’? Aren’t you interested in politics?”

“I should say not.” I pointed my lit cigarette at her. “Politics is self-interest disguised by cant.” This was something Karl-Heinz had said once. I thought it had a good ring to it.

“Surely you don’t mean that.” Her voice was flat and serious, her American accent strong all of a sudden. I sensed I was on the brink of something irrevocable.

“Of course I don’t,” I tried a smile. “Teasing. I tend to tease people — nerves.”

She was frowning at me, skeptically.

“I admit I’m a cynic,” I went on, more desperate than I hoped I looked. “But I do make exceptions.” I nodded at the photograph. “The likes of Rosa, for one.”

I held my breath. She relaxed.

“Alex put you up to this. He said you’d get a rise out of me, right?”

“Alex who?”

“Mavrocordato. He can’t stand that I’m a Communist. The jerk.”

“No, honestly, it was me. My stupid idea of a joke.” I waved my hands about. I had to sit down; my entire left leg was trembling for some reason. What the hell had got into me? Why had nobody warned me? The apartment was full of books; they now looked weighty, earnest, leftist …

I changed the subject and we talked about the script and the part of Julie. She said in all seriousness that she was keen on the role because she was interested in the concept of virtue and was tired of playing “whores and bitches.” We talked on. She was bright and had thought hard about the film. The afternoon wore on and the apartment grew dim. Eventually she got up and switched on the light.

“Do you want a drink, John?” It was the first time she had mentioned my name. I felt the familiar clubbing start up in my chest.

“Do you like to be called John or James?”

“Whatever you like.”

“What about James. Jamie?”

“Hrrrrm. Hah!.. mng. Sorry. Yes, fine.”

“Right, Jamie, what about that drink?”

“Gin and water. Please.”

“Good God.”

(Why did I drink that drink then? Pure affectation, but it was strong.) She went into another room to get it. Long strides, skirt swirling about her calves. The susurration of her leather pumps on the parquet flooring. I could see at the crown of her head a tiny rosette of dark hair, the blond dye growing out. I knew suddenly why she was such a big star in Europe: she was different from European women, or at least was perceived to be. She came from the New World and was not hidebound or impressed by the old. There was nothing specific about this, nothing you could put your finger on, but that sense of an entrancing alternative seemed to coil about her like ectoplasm.

She handed me the glass. I gulped at the drink. The single light shone on her ivory hair. Her small hooked nose cast a dark shadow across her face.

“You sure Alex didn’t put you up to that Rosa joke?”

“Positive. I haven’t seen him since the contracts were signed.”

“It’d be just like him.…”

Pause.

“Are you and he …? Not that it’s any of my business. But I—”

It was my second mistake. She looked shrewdly at me. For the first time — and I believe this — she sensed the hot moist tentacles of my desire sneaking about her, dabbing at her skirt.

“Why? What’s it to you?”

“Nothing … or rather, energetic curiosity.”

She took this in.

“We blow hot and cold, Alex and me.… Alex and I? That’s all.”

I left shortly after that. I felt a clawing ache in my chest. I walked up the Kurfürstendamm past the bright shops and gleaming cafés, the neon cinemas, the elegant overdecorated terraces of houses. The ache would not go away. It came, I know, from a mixture of intense longing and the saddened conviction that my life, or, rather, most of the things that pertained to me, were going to be altered, bruised or destroyed because of that very longing.

I went into a café, ordered a drink, then went into the WC and masturbated into my handkerchief. It had the desired effect of dispersing those querulous emotions and querulous fears. Now I felt merely depressed and seedy. I hailed a taxi and went home to my wife and family.

I strove intermittently and fairly valiantly to forget Doon. Or, more to the point as I would soon be seeing her every day, I strove to direct the remorseless impulse of my emotions elsewhere. I was not successful. It is an insidious force that operates on you when you love and lust after someone impotently. It not only trammels up you, the agent, it bears down also on those innocent of its workings. Such as Sonia. All the real attraction I used to feel for her slowly evaporated, like a puddle in hot sun. Her neatness, her straight parting, her haunchy bottom-heaviness, became irritants and flaws.

I remember one day in August we went swimming, to the huge beach at Wannsee. Me, Sonia, Vincent and Noreen Shorrold, Vincent junior and baby Hereford. The beach was full of pink-and-brown Berliners. I sat in my swimming costume and toweling robe, steadily drinking cold hock from a Bakelite cup. My son Vincent (he was dark like me, but looked Shorrold through and through) tottered between his grandparents. Sonia knelt over Hereford, a safety pin in her mouth, busying herself with some mopping-up and cleansing operation (I have never known such a child for pissing and shitting himself: he had a vandal’s urge to soil clean things, did Hereford). I felt, and almost welcomed, such was the state of my mind, the harbingers of a headache creeping up on me. Feebly, I tried to nestle into some warm congratulatory mood of self-satisfaction. Here was my happy family, I told myself; here was my wife, my sons. I was comparatively rich, with the prospect of further riches eminently realizable. And, as an artist, I was on the point of making my first real moving picture. Why then did I feel the air around me electric with my own annoyance, crackling with static irritation? Why, when Hereford arched his back and squirmed his head round to look at me, did I not chuck the little fellow under his treble chin or rub his fat tum with a proud parental hand? Because … because I was thinking of Doon and wondering if she was spending the day with that bastard Mavrocordato. Why, that could be them in that white speedboat buzzing by, cutting across the lake heading for some rented birch-embowered villa on the far side of the Havel.… A girl swam strongly out to an anchored wooden raft and hauled herself up onto it in a fluent fluid motion. The cerise wool of her damp swimsuit clung to her breasts and belly. I tried to imagine Doon in a swimsuit. And even when the girl removed her rubber swimming cap and shook out her dark hair I thought of Doon, who had cut her long dark hair and died it blond for Julie. For me.

A tap on my forearm. Little Vince (as his grandparents called him, to my horror) offering me a tongue-and-cress sandwich to the loud applause of the other adults. His eyes were wide with alarm. Why did the boy fear me? Cruelly, I said no, thank you. He burst into tears, dropped the sandwich in the sand and fled to his mother’s wide lap.

“Johnny, really.”

“I wasn’t hungry.”

“Oh, but still …”

“God Almighty! I can’t stuff myself just for his sake!”

I stood up and angrily threw off my robe. I strode down to the water and dived in. Cool shock, a silent glide, a sudden calm. I hated myself.

I will not bore you with the actual details of the filming of Julie. Suffice it to say I knew from very early on it was going well. Karl-Heinz was superb. We whitened his face and hollowed his cheeks and eye sockets to enhance his wracked, soul-tormented personality. The particular frisson in the film was the two types of delicious anticipation that operated in it. The first was before Julie and Saint-Preux’s love was consummated. Then, second, there was more suspense over whether their sense of honor would allow their virtue to survive. It was given an added twist by Doon’s loveliness and irresistible erotic allure. Her manner on screen was one of innocent carnal license, which, in the second half when she was trying to be faithful to Wolmar, toyed with one’s sense of frustration in the most agonizing way. The two lovers desperately wanted each other. All that was physically keeping them apart was the abstract airy strictures of morality. Once old Baron Wolmar left them they had everything — place, occasion, inclination — but some higher code kept them at arm’s length.

There was one scene towards the end of the film that, when we saw the rushes, had us all on the edge of our seats baying obscene encouragement at Karl-Heinz.

It is late one evening. An albescent moon shines on Baron Wolmar’s château. On the terrace Saint-Preux wrestles with his conscience as he smokes a cigarette (remember, it has all been updated). Moths flutter round the lights (thank you, Georg). Then, further up the long terrace, Julie steps out through the French windows of her boudoir. She is wearing a luxuriant flimsy negligee, which billows occasionally in the night breezes. She advances towards Saint-Preux, their eyes fast upon one another. She stops eighteen inches from him. Caption: I love this time of the evening. May I have a cigarette? With one movement Saint-Preux slides his silver cigarette case from his pocket. Close-up of Julie’s fingers as she selects one — her lacquered nails on the slim white cylinder. Saint-Preux — cigarette in mouth — goes for his lighter in another pocket, but a slight hesitation on Julie’s part halts him. She puts the cigarette in her mouth (close-up: those wide dark lips, that white, white paper). She sways towards him. Tip of cigarette meets tip of cigarette. Ignition, burn, smoke wreaths. They move apart gazing at each other. They draw on their cigarettes, exhale. Smoke, backlit by the moon, coils and swoops thickly about them.…

This scene has been much copied, at times blatantly, at times indirectly. It was the first use in a film, I believe, of the cigarette as an erotic symbol. The scene was mightily effective and so powerful that it was almost cut by the censor. Aram reported this dull bureaucrat’s comments to me: “He says they are fornicating on screen.” Our dumb literalness—“But they’re only smoking. They’re not even touching!”—won the day. Not a frame was removed.

Naturally, Doon was a triumph in the film also. Not that she required any elevation from the stellar heights she already occupied. Her last day of filming occurred two weeks before the end of the shoot. It was her deathbed scene, where she declares she has been in love with Saint-Preux all along. Our final two weeks were to be occupied with Saint-Preux in Paris gamely resisting its temptations, sustained by Julie’s faith.

I had champagne and flowers sent to Doon’s dressing room. Aram Lodokian had arranged a formal farewell party for later that evening. I felt calm. We had worked well together and there had been no disagreements. She could see I knew what I was doing (even if you do not know what you are doing, the crucial talent required by a director, as far as actors are concerned, is to give the unchallengeable impression that you do) and, importantly, there had been no hint of intimacy between us. Certainly not from her, and I had been prudent not to let my own desires be revealed again. It seemed to me that I was finally exerting some control over myself. Even when Mavrocordato visited the set a few times. Although, through my green eyes, it looked as if they were getting on uncommonly well for a divorced couple. So why did I go to her room alone? I wanted to say good-bye and I wanted, personally and privately, to set a seal on our relationship. Friendship with a tantalizing hint of what might have been. Or so I told myself.

Doon had not changed from her deathbed nightdress, a strappy satin thing with a low back. She had a long housecoat tied loosely over it. In an anteroom her dresser was ironing. Doon poured me a glass of champagne and we idly exchanged compliments about the film.

“Did you see Alex on your way in?”

“Alex who?” I always did this.

“God, Jamie! Mavrocordato. He’s supposed to be picking me up.”

“No. No sign.”

The dresser — a small, cross-looking woman — came out of the anteroom holding a short black jacket with diamanté buttons.

“Fixed it?” Doon asked.

“You better try it on.”

Doon slipped off the housecoat and put the jacket on.

“It’s fine. Thanks, Dora, you can go.”

Dora left. Doon checked the fit of the jacket, flexing, reaching, stretching, then she took it off and flung it over the arm of her chair. A wayward sleeve knocked her near-empty glass to the ground, shattering it.

“Shit!” she said. She knelt down to pick up the pieces.

Seeing Doon’s slim tall body, one might have thought her small-breasted. Not so. She had wide flat breasts, small-nippled, with almost no sag to them. A gentle convexity covering a largish area, like the lid of a soup tureen. I saw them now as she knelt on the ground before me, the drooping front of her nightdress affording me an unobstructed view.

My tongue seemed to swell to block my throat as I slipped off my chair to kneel before her, my fingers blindly searching for shards and fragments. The erotic archaeologist … I caught a gust of her perfume, a kind of lavender. She looked up. My eyes snapped up just in time.

“Hey, don’t bother, Dora’ll get it in the—”

I kissed her with undue violence, crushing my nose painfully on her cheek, simultaneously clutching her shoulders and hauling us both to our feet. I pressed my taut bulging groin against her thigh and pushed her back and down onto the sofa. She flung her head back.

“I love you, Doon,” I said. “I love — MNEEAAGHHH!”

The pain was infernal, not of this world. The hard apex of her knee mashed my testicles against the unyielding base of my pelvis. I felt as if I had been split from the perineum up to the top of my skull by an ice ax, or impaled, sitting, on a giant freezing horn. (Gentlemen, you surely know what I am talking about. Ladies, take my word for it, there is no more fiendish agony.) Everything went blue, black, purple, orange, white. I opened my eyes. An ultrasonic scream seemed to reverberate around the room as if it were a trapped demented presence. I was on the floor — balled up well and truly, you might say. Glass splinters sparkled before my eyes. My hands cupped the jangling fragments of my ruined groin.

I twisted my head round. Doon stood by the door, fully dressed (how much time had elapsed, for God’s sake?). Through the scream in my head I seemed to hear her say calmly, “I never want to see you again, asswipe.”

I felt the vomit — a prancing bolus — in my throat. I began to crawl to the bathroom. There was a knock on the door behind me, then Mavrocordato’s voice asking, “What is it?”

Doon said, “Nothing,” and the door closed. I am sure I heard laughter.

I never made it to the toilet bowl. I vomited over the linoleum — maroon fleur-de-lis in a pretty pattern — a yard short. I left it for Dora to clean up in the morning.

Julie was an enormous hit. An international success. Realismus Films made over a million dollars in Germany, France, Britain and America. Doon Bogan became for a year or two the most glamorous and celebrated actress in Europe. Karl-Heinz Kornfeld was acclaimed as the “quintessentially hoch modern leading man.” But more of that later. My own life entered a strange troubled phase just as my personal fortunes were at their zenith.

I was, I think, actually driven a little insane by my “falling out” with Doon — if that is not too absurd a euphemism. Even after such a brutal, unequivocal rejection I could not expunge or ignore my feelings for her. What can you do in such circumstances? If you are obsessed, you are obsessed. She telephoned me two days after the incident.

“Are you all right?”

“What? Yes. A slight limp, but otherwise … Look, Doon, I—”

“I shouldn’t have hit you so hard. But I was mad. And not just at you. I was kind of upset that day.”

“God, I’m so sorry. Terribly sorry. I should never—”

“You’re a fool, John James Todd. A great, big, Grade A, ignorant fool.”

She hung up. I had no idea what she meant. Or rather, I had one idea but it seemed to me she was implying something else.… In the event I grew none the wiser as I had to force my attention round to completing the film, which we did with little fuss and on time. Aram Lodokian paid my five-thousand-dollar bonus without demur. The film opened in the Kino-Palast on the Kurfürstendamm with a full symphony orchestra providing musical accompaniment on February 16, 1926, and the rest is history.

We moved from Rudolfplatz, west, to a new villa in Charlottenburg. The area was being developed: on every corner new houses were being built and the streets were planted with frail lime-tree saplings guarded by tight palisades of iron spikes. Mrs. Shorrold left us and Sonia acquired an English nurse (Lily Maidbow, a plain, efficient, almost speechless girl) to look after the boys. Our house was fresh smelling — of wax from the wooden floor, of paint, of leather and fabrics — it had a wide garden planted with birch and larch, and was surrounded by a white picket fence. I never liked it. I felt like one of the lime-tree saplings. I did not need such sturdy penning in. These were the accouterments of prosperous middle age, of bourgeois plentitude. I found the place oppressive and minatory — but, conceivably, that would have been true of any home I lived in then. I was not of a mind to settle down, eat big dinners at my dining room table, dandle my babes on my knee. Doon had knocked me off kilter; I was askew, like that first time I’d gone over the top, drunk. Everything about Sonia was stable, placid and fixed. I was living in a different geometry.

I spent long hours over the autumn and winter of 1925 editing Julie, writing and rewriting the captions, Sonia made no complaint about my protracted absence from the house. She kept herself busy and enjoyed the newfound Todd prosperity more than I did. Leo, I think, suspected that something was wrong, but with his ineffable tact did not ask me anything about it. He was settling down rapidly in Berlin and was enjoying a diverting love affair with Lola Templin-Tavel. When I had had enough of work and could not bear the thought of going home, I used to meet Karl-Heinz in a bar of Uhlandstrasse, just off the Kurfürstendamm. There was nothing louche or depraved about this place, although those were qualities its neighborhood rivals strove earnestly to reproduce. Our bar, the Dix, consisted of two rooms: one, smaller, with a zinc-topped counter and a few tables and chairs; and the other, larger, with two billiard tables. Its very plainness ensured it was never overbusy. Karl-Heinz and I would sit and drink in the small room and from time to time play a game of billiards. I grew to love that place, warm and blurry with cigar smoke, the air filled with the noise of subdued conversation, the rustle of newspapers (hung from the wall on sticks) and the solid reassuring click of the ivory billiard balls. It was anonymous, populated by transients. The owner and his large ginger-haired wife made no attempt to cultivate regulars. It suited me at that difficult time.

I told Karl-Heinz everything about Doon and he thoughtfully went through the motions of sympathizing with me. He was not surprised, he said. He had been waiting for something to turn my life upside down. How come? I asked him, but he would not expand. Later he told me he could never understand why I had married Sonia. When I told him the honest reason — for sex — he was even more baffled. I think he regarded me — as a representative heterosexual — as being something of a chronic naïf when it came to sexual matters.

But he listened patiently, a true friend, to my protracted moans. I am ashamed to reflect now on those one-sided encounters. I never asked him about himself, never wondered how he did when I finally left him, or when he left me. I was up to my neck in a mire of my own selfishness. I thought of my drowning Ulsterman (I thought a lot about the war, then) as he sank in the mud of the Salient: “I’m going doyn.” … No wonder I could not escape Doon: my day was spent watching her images shimmer by me on the editing machines. Karl-Heinz knew that all I required was a listener and he provided it, selflessly. At least we could break off and play billiards. (He was a terrible player, incapable of calculating the simplest angles. I always won.)

It was early in the New Year. The film was finished and we were waiting for its release when his patience finally broke. As usual we were sitting in the Bar Dix. Karl-Heinz was drinking beer with a schnapps chaser. I was drinking Moselle. I was a little drunk, typically brimful of self-pity, rhapsodizing about Doon’s beauty and how I longed for her. I paused. To my intense surprise Karl-Heinz took both my hands in his and stared fixedly at me. I looked into his dark eyes, hooded by his sharp circumflex brows. He squeezed my hands.

“Johnny,” he said, “I tell you something very simple.” He smiled faintly, a suggestion of mischief. “Boys are better than girls.”

“Look, Karl-Heinz, no.” I smiled apologetically back. “I’m just not — you know — inclined that way.”

“But you never tried properly. I can show you. It’s fun.”

“No, really—”

“But I like you, Johnny, I do.”

“No, really. I know you do. I like you too.” I was moved.

He let go of my hands.

“It’s Doon,” I said. “She’s the only one.… I’m obsessed. I’m obsessed with her.”

“So. All right.” He sounded impatient. “There’s only one thing to do with such an obsession. You got to get another one.”

He was right. After he had gone I thought about what he had said. I would never forget Doon (in fact I had not seen her for months), but surely, I reasoned, there was room in my life for something more than this destructive unrequited longing. I had to face up to the facts. My life could not simply stand still with this rejection.

The lights were on in the house when I parked our new car — a Packard, Sonia’s choice. Sonia was awake, in bed. Her face was scrubbed clean and her hair tucked behind her ears. She had put on some weight recently and the roundness of her face had increased, accentuating her small pointy chin. I thought she looked pretty. It was a good sign. Karl-Heinz may not have provided me with an answer, but he seemed to have given me a jolt with his proposition — knocked the Gramophone needle out of its groove. I switched off the light and snuggled up to Sonia, sliding a hand inside her nightdress to cup a girlish breast.… I am sure our third child was conceived that night.

Of course I had another obsession, but it was lying dormant, temporarily overshadowed by the Doon crisis. Myself. My development as an artist. My dreams, my ambitions. The next day I literally dusted them off.

In my office at Realismus’s Grunewald studios I kept an old trunk concerning certain precious possessions, such as my reels of Aftermath of Battle, my photo albums, my diaries (now temporary abandoned), Hamish’s letters and suchlike. It was superstitious of me, I suppose, but I did not want them in the house with me. Snow had fallen in the night and from my window I could see the three vast gasometers of the Berliner Gas-Anstalt capped with white, steel cakes with generous icing.

Idly, almost absentmindedly, I opened the trunk and contemplated these artifacts of my past, like a bored shaman looking at a scattered pile of bones, halfheartedly trying to devise the way ahead. These relics, precious totems of my youthful dreams … I picked up a frayed bundle of paper tied with string. Pages from a book. I read:

I am now starting on a task which is without precedent and which when achieved will have no imitator.…’

The fit passed in seconds. It was a fit. It is the only time I have ever experienced it so physically. Afflatus, Inspiration. The muse descending — call it what you will. It was a Pentecostal confirmation of what I had to do. My task was clear to me now. I was going to make the greatest moving picture the world had ever seen. It would be unprecedented and have no imitator. I was going to make a film of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions.

VILLA LUXE, June 21, 1972

I am sitting at my “lookout” with my binoculars, trying to discern what’s going on at the public beach. A police car has arrived and someone has been arrested, I think, but it is really just beyond my range. Perhaps a nudist? My hand shake is too pronounced. I consider buying a tripod.

Emilia shouts from the house that I have a visitor. I wander over. It’s Ulrike. She wants permission to go down to my beach. I say, of course.

We stand on the pool terrace, in shade, looking at the hot empty pool.

“It’s a shame about your pool.”

“It’s that fig tree. Over there. The roots, they’re pushing through the concrete searching for water. See the cracks?”

“From so far away, with such force. It’s incredible.”

“Apparently they can get through a foot of concrete. It’s always happening — cisterns, septic tanks.”

“Ah. Nature,” She said it with no cynicism. A sense of awe, rather.

I gestured at her bag.

“Off for specimens? I saw you the other day, in your boat.” I felt and attempted to ignore the beginnings of a blush. “What are you working on?” I asked quickly.

“Certain kinds of crab.”

“Really?” What more could one say about crabs? “Plenty of crabs on those rocks.”

She frowned as if she could sense my indifference.

“I wrote a small thesis on the fiddler crab. You know, the ones with one oversized claw.” She paused. “Do you know that before and after the male fiddler crab mates, he soothes the female by stroking her with his claw, very gently?”

“No. I—”

“And then — this is amazing — they make love face to face.”

“Really?”

“You see? I said ‘make love’ as if they were humans. Apart from us they are the only animals to do this. Face to face, like so.” She held up her hands analogously. “Just us and the fiddler crab. Why should that be?”

“I don’t know.”

A breeze shook the tree we were standing beneath. The dappled light spots shifted on her face and the air-blue toweling jerkin she wore. We were two feet apart.

“Extraordinary,” I said.

She picked up her bag.

“My boyfriend said they are showing your film—Julie. Maybe when we go back I can see it. He says it’s very good.”

“It is. But he should see my—” I stopped just in time. “I was very pleased with it. I’m delighted it’s being shown. Doon … Doon Bogan is marvelous.”