8

Julie

The rain pelted down on Knesebeckstrasse. I held the car door open with one hand; the other raised the large umbrella sheltering the fur-clad old crone who was climbing with preposterous difficulty into her waiting taxi. Drips formed and fell from my cap’s glossy peak. I could feel the damp seeping through to my shoulder blades. I kept the smile rigid as I shut the door on her. The window glass took an age to wind down. Her bejeweled hand presented me with a shamefully inadequate tip.

“Vielen Danke,” I said.

I backed gratefully under the canopy at the front of the Hotel Windsor. I was the doorman. It was February 1925. Berlin, I was making my own rut.

I have leaped a dismal year or so. Nineteen twenty-four. All the wearisome frustrations of the Superb-Imperial bankruptcy and my own concomitant slump into insolvency preoccupied me for months. Raymond Maude was undeniably grief stricken. It was the extravagant costs of The Blue Cockade and its total failure that had done for him. He sold everything the studio owned, including his remaining rights to Wee MacGregor’s Holiday. It was truly galling to see the queues forming outside the cinemas, where it was playing as profitably as its predecessor, and know that all the revenue it earned would benefit the Todd family not one penny. Finally, in the summer I joined the other litigants and sued Superb-Imperial for the outstanding nineteen-hundred pounds they owed me on the Holiday film. (I waived my claim on the stillborn King Wee MacGregor!) In the eventual meager share-out, I received 187 pounds, 18 shillings and 6 pence. It was something, I suppose. One other unhappy side effect was that the Maude marriage broke up under the strain. Rosita took herself off back to Beira or Lisbon, and Vincent never saw his godmother again.

About July or August I accepted the inevitable and started looking for another job, but to my surprise and alarm found there was nothing forthcoming. Gainsborough Films offered me a week’s work as a stand-in cameraman. Astro-Biocraft thought there might be an opening in their editing department in a few months’ time. The film industry had entered one of its periodic slumps, true, but I soon began to suspect the malign hand of Harold Faithfull. It was my mistake, or bad luck, that I was almost unknown in the film community outside Superb-Imperial. I remembered Faithfull’s absurd threat and dismissed it as sheer fantasy until I read in a trade paper that he was making a film called The Sultan and the Temptress for Talbot Instructional Films and UFA in Germany. A man who could get work so quickly after the almighty disaster of The Blue Cockade must have some power and influence. I became convinced that Faithfull had effectively blacklisted me. He was the first in a long line of enemies that have dogged and tried to destroy my career. I have no idea why, but I seem to attract malice in the way cattle attract flies. I am not belligerent but I always end up fighting someone. What had I done to Faithfull? How could my Wee MacGregor films have possibly discomfited him? It was his own inadequacies that compelled him to hate me. It has always been that way: the talentless envy the talented in the same way as the petty envy the strong.

I took the week’s work at Gainsborough, around the corner from Superb-Imperial in Islington, as a stand-in assistant cameraman on a film called Passionate Adventure. And then, nothing. The year wore on and our savings dwindled. In August, Sonia announced she was pregnant again. That was all I needed.

Leo Druce was similarly impoverished. He restarted his car-hire agency in London and from time to time I would do a job as chauffeur or bus driver on outings for a pound or two. It was hardly a living and Leo could not afford to take on a partner. And besides, I wanted to make moving pictures, not drive charabancs.

And then in October came my salvation. One morning a postcard arrived, forwarded from Edinburgh. The stamps were German. On one side was a picture of the Brandenburg Gate. And on the other:

He had given his address: 129B Stralauer Allee, Berlin …

I remember that morning with perfect clarity. Sonia had gone out and left me with baby Vincent. I was sitting at the kitchen table in vest and trousers, drinking a cup of strong tea. Vincent was crying lustily in his cot. I was faintly nauseous from the smell of old beer seeping up through the floorboards from the pub below. I needed a shave. I thought this tableau might have been done justice by some modern Hogarth: Jobless Man, perhaps. Or The Artist’s Dream Frustrated. I heard letters being pushed through the letter box and went down to the hall to collect them. There were two bills—one from my solicitor and one from a tailor—and Karl-Heinz’s postcard. I read it as I trudged back upstairs towards Vincent’s irritating screeching. And then I felt as if I had been punched in the chest—that sudden thump of exhilaration that is the physical corollary of a brilliant idea. Of course! Of course. How parochial and hidebound of me! There were other film industries—America, France, Germany—far more audacious and inspirational than what was going on at home. Why stay put and marinate in one’s own self-pity? I would go to Berlin, join Karl-Heinz. We would make films together.…

My mind began to work faster. I would leave as soon as possible—and alone. Whenever I was established I would send for Sonia and Vincent. I suddenly saw all the splendid potential in the idea. How vastly more intriguing to make one’s name abroad in one of the real capitals of film. No more pap or trash. No more Wee MacGregors. I felt a stimulating sense of freedom. I was almost grateful to Raymond Maude for going broke and to Harold Faithfull for his vindictive spite.

*     *     *

I left home at the end of October, promising Sonia that I would send for her and Vincent before Christmas. I went by boat—cargo steamer—from London to Bremerhaven, and from there by train to Berlin. It was pouring with rain when we left the docks at London and I did not trouble to go up on deck. I sat in the small, dusty, paneled saloon drinking a warmish mug of unsweetened cocoa and I glanced only once or twice through the portholes at the rain-smudged views of the disappearing city. I had very little money, not quite fifty pounds (I had been naturally obliged to leave the rest of what remained in our savings with Sonia, who as a further economy had quit the flat above the Salisbury and had moved in with her parents), but I felt much the same as I had that night I ran away from Minto Academy and caught the night train down to London. The future lay before me like an empty sheet of paper. All I had to do was make my mark on it.

I had written and cabled to Karl-Heinz about my impending arrival, but I had received no reply. The train from Bremerhaven arrived at Lehrter Station in Berlin at six o’clock in the morning. It was just growing light and was decidedly cold. I bought a cup of coffee and two round bread rolls from a stall outside the entrance and wondered what to do—I thought it a little too early to turn up at Karl-Heinz’s. So I left the station and walked along the Spree for a while (I had only one suitcase with me). The river water was dark, bottle-green, sluggish. Barges were moored here and there. I crossed the river at the Marschall Bridge and wandered into the center of the city.

Berlin … first impressions. I will try to recall them, after all these years, after familiarity has worn down the images like old coins. Berlin that cold morning in October was very clean, extraordinarily clean. Wide, broad streets. Trees, statues—statues everywhere—and fountains. It felt modern, recent. It had a new feel, a busy feel. Above my head stretched a matrix of electric tram wires. Trams were everywhere, even at this hour. I wandered through the streets—Friedrichstrasse, Behrenstrasse, Unter den Linden (with its disappointing spindly limes), past the somber palaces, the palatial stores and the fabulous hotels. It was like … Take a prosperous British Victorian city center—Bradford, Manchester, Glasgow. Buff up all the heavy overdecorated architecture, then push the buildings far apart to form clear prospects and broad avenues. Scatter young trees and white statues wherever space permits. Then add all the paraphernalia of the modern city: the motors, the tram and cable cars, the billboards, the neon signs, the yellow autobuses, the green taxicabs with their white-hatted drivers, and an urgent hurrying smart population. That was the Berlin I saw that morning. Its newness was my abiding impression: a city that seemed only as old as its inhabitants, as if it possessed no past beyond the memory of the generations that lived and worked among its spick-and-spanness.

There were other Berlins, of course, that looked like Amsterdam, or medieval French towns, or cramped urban slums, or featureless industrial cityscapes, and I was to see them later that day, but I was inspired by its contemporariness as I passed among its prosperous commuters and pedestrians. I could sense no dead hand of tradition about its open squares and immaculate boulevards. I knew I could achieve great things here.

It took me some time to find 129B Stralauer Allee. Eventually, having obtained the necessary information from a helpful English-speaking clerk at a railway station, I took the Stadtbahn east to the Stralau-Rummelsberg stop. Stralauer Allee ran along the north bank of the Spree, and here the city faintly resembled stretches of London by the Thames at Chelsea before the embankment was built. Old buildings with cellar shops and cafés, wooden jetties and unsteady rickety steps leading down to the slow river whose banks were crowded with barges lashed together.

Number 129 was a narrow five-story house built round a small brick courtyard. The apartment where Karl-Heinz lived was on the first floor. I went through the main entrance, saw no concierge and mounted the central stone staircase to Apartment B. The name above the doorbell was Pfau.

I was about to ring for the third time when it opened to reveal a large untidy man in a collarless shirt. He had straight, short gray hair and a large crude face with the sort of creases and dewlaps one associates with certain types of hound—a basset or a pug, say—rather than a human. He had damp lusterless eyes and a blunt nose with big hair-choked nostrils that needed clipping. He was smoking a cigar.

“Karl-Heinz Kornfeld?” I inquired.

The man—Herr Pfau, I assumed—shouted for Karl-Heinz, who, after a short pause, came to the door wiping shaving soap from his face. His hair was longer but otherwise he was unchanged. Tall, thin, dark, vital.

“So, Johnny,” he said calmly. “How wonderful to see you.”

I stepped over the threshold and we shook hands. He saw my suitcase.

“What brings you to Berlin?”

“Didn’t you get my letter? My cable?”

“What letter?”

“You had no idea I was coming?”

“No, of course not. But it’s a delightful surprise. Come in, come in.” He introduced me to Pfau—Georg—who said hello and disappeared into another room. Karl-Heinz led me through a sitting room, dining room and kitchen and on into his own bedroom. The apartment was very badly designed. There was no hall or corridor. One room simply gave onto another as one moved around the central courtyard. The bathroom was at the end. I was so perturbed by the nonarrival of my letter that I did not really take in the simple decor and well-worn furniture. But I did notice that the walls of most rooms were lined with wooden boxes, like lockers, and stacks of fine wire-mesh cages. The apartment was very warm, as well. The air was filled with a faint electric hum, as if there were powerful dynamos in the basement.

The Hotel Windsor’s doormen were obliged to wear typically preposterous uniforms. It was the usual comic-operetta hussar getup: gold buttons everywhere, bushy epaulettes, high peaked cap, yards of looped curtain cord with bellpull tassels swagged over the shoulders and the whole—in deference to the English note in the hotel’s name—rendered in coruscating beefeater red and gold. I felt myself an unseemly shout of color in the stolid gray streets, a human beacon that, I felt sure, must make most passersby want to shade their eyes. My uniform was slightly too large, as well. It belonged to Georg Pfau’s nephew Ulrich, whose job it was and for whom I was standing in. Some unspecified family crisis had required his presence at home in Breslau for two months and I had had no hesitation in accepting the temporary post when Georg decently offered it to me.

It was an odd life being a doorman. I found it uncomfortable working in uniform—it reminded me vaguely of the army, but there is something pretentious about civilian uniforms that makes me uneasy. There were four of us working shifts at the Windsor and as I was the most junior I was always allocated the least lucrative—ten in the morning until four in the afternoon. I missed the crowd checking out in the morning and those checking in, in the evening. The Windsor’s restaurant was not highly regarded and the lunch trade was consequently slack. So I paced to and fro idly on Knesebeckstrasse watching the traffic and the passersby, trying to keep warm, trying to keep out of the rain and snow (the winter of 1924–25 was particularly raw). At four I went down to the basement to the staff canteen and had a meal—belly of pork with carrots, oxtail with turnips, something hearty, anyway. I had plenty of time to think and reflect.

Accommodation had proved no problem. Karl-Heinz encouraged Georg to rent me a room in his apartment for two pounds a month. But my other ambitions were harder to achieve. The “many films and plays” Karl-Heinz had referred to in his postcard certainly existed, and Karl-Heinz was in them, all right, but usually as a nonspeaking extra. He had profited from the postwar vogue for vast historical epics and he took me to see such films as Anne Boleyn, Julius Caesar and The Trojan War in which I felt I might be able to pick out his face in the swarming multitude. Currently, he was “resting,” he told me, ironing clothes and sewing on buttons in the costume department of the Schiller-Theater Nord.

I settled down quickly in the Pfau household. There were just the three of us. An old woman—Frau Mittenklott—came in the afternoon to clean and cook the enormous evening meal. What did I do? I wrote diligently to the studios and film companies. I wandered around the city. I drank beer and coffee, ate cake, sat in cold parks and listened to the bands. I received polite refusals from the studios and film companies, which Karl-Heinz translated for me. I started to learn German. After a month I cabled Sonia for more money. She sent ten pounds and a curt letter asking when she and Vincent would be sent for and reminding me that I had promised to be home for Christmas. The new baby was due, she added, in March and she would like—please—to be settled in her new home. I wrote back saying that things were going well and I was making progress, but my plans were taking slightly longer to realize than I had expected. I sent all my love to her and little Vince and asked her to borrow another ten pounds off her father.

I must be honest. I felt as if I were on holiday. Nineteen twenty-four had been such a disappointing year—steady impecuniousness, Vincent teething, no work—that I was glad to be away. I liked living in Georg Pfau’s inconvenient apartment. I enjoyed being abroad in a strange fascinating city. I strolled the clean wide streets, a happy alien among the incurious Berliners. I whiled away afternoons in shops and museums. I played at being a bohemian. I had a little money, I had a warm place to live and I had my entrancing fabulous dreams. Sonia, Vincent, the Shorrolds, Wee MacGregor, Faithfull, Super-Imperial, poverty and frustration seemed to have nothing to do with me now.

And there was Karl-Heinz. The strong affection that had grown up between us in Weilburg quickly reestablished itself. When he was not working he would take me to bars and cafés, to films and plays. He took me to the west of the city, to the Kurfürstendamm; we patronized the Bluebird and El Dorado, the Westens, Café Wien and the Romanisches Café. Here was the artistic lively heart of Berlin, where I felt I truly belonged. The solid prosperous streets I had seen the morning I arrived were for the older generation and the rich bourgeoisie. Real life was in the west. In actual fact Stralauer Allee was inconveniently placed for the west end. It was a longish trip on the elevated electric railway to the Kurfürstendamm, and after the initial enthusiasm I decided to save money by staying at home. Karl-Heinz, however, went over three or four times a week, bringing back—through my bedroom en route for his own—a steady supply of Ottos, Klauses and Heinrichs. I kept a chamber pot beneath my bed to avoid disturbing him if I needed to go to the toilet, and I soon became accustomed to new introductions at breakfast time. Georg himself did not seem to mind these transient visitors, and after a while I began to suspect that he and Karl-Heinz were in some way “involved.” I asked Karl-Heinz about this, delicately.

“Oh, for sure,” he said. “Georg loves me. He lets me stay here for nothing. You know, one time a month, one time every six weeks, he asks me to give him a—what do you say?—a masturb.” He pumped one hand graphically.

“Ah.”

“Yes, it’s a cheap rent.”

I actually found the idea somewhat revolting, not because of anything associated with the act so much, but because Georg himself rather disgusted me. I liked him, and was most grateful for his hospitality, but there was no getting away from the fact that he was a horrible-looking person.

For example, I tried not to take breakfast at the same time as Georg since one morning when, buttering a fresh roll, I had looked across the table and my eye had been irresistibly caught by Georg’s big dense hairy nostrils. Like two old caves, I found myself thinking, thick with brambles, moss and ferns.… Just at that moment he removed his cigar from his mouth, and with smoke still curling and eddying around his face he took a huge cracking bite of salted cucumber. My gorge rose, my mouth flooded with saliva, I gagged and I had to run from the room.

His job too was unsettling and its associations were always with him, like a smell of onions. Georg was an insect breeder, hence all the boxes and mesh cages in his rooms; hence also the eerie buzzing of invisible dynamos and the high temperature in the flat (plump stoves and parafin heaters constantly burning). He bred bait for fishermen (maggots), silkworms for the silk industry and butterflies for lepidopterists. He provided a steady stream of crunchy grasshoppers for the reptile house and the snakepit in the zoological gardens. Recently, however, he had been in demand by the film industry. If you needed a shade-dappled clearing frothing with butterflies, Georg Pfau was your man. If you wanted bumblebees visiting flowers in an Alpine meadow, Georg would lay on hundreds of the fluffy little workers. He did most of his work for one particular studio called Realismus Films Verlag that specialized in grim low-life melodramas and that regularly required encrusted flypapers, humming heaps of ordure and infested hovels. In one Realismus film, Georg told me with pride, he could get through a thousand bluebottles. He was known in the industry as the Fly Man—der Fliegenmann.

Georg was a taciturn but placid bloke who seemed entirely happy with his life. His profession occupied most of his time. His pleasures were cigars (he smoked from rising in the morning and stubbed out his last butt when he switched off his bedside light), food—Frau Mittenklott’s gargantuan suppers—and his monthly masturb at the hand of Karl-Heinz. I worked with him for a while as his assistant when my funds began running low. I would parcel up dead butterflies and send them off to collectors, or take seething trays of maggots to fishing-tackle shops. One day we went out to the vast UFA studios at Tempelhof. A scene was being shot where the heroine (played by Nita Jungman, I think) was to be awakened by a butterfly landing on her nose. Georg carried a large jam jar busy with cabbage whites, while I lugged a hefty zinc-lined wooden box containing a block of ice wrapped in straw. One had to admire his technique. Georg encouraged his insects to act by chilling them, as it were, to the bone. The skill, the expertise, lay in knowing just how cold a butterfly or bluebottle had to be before it would do what was required. Not cold enough and it would just take off and fly away; too cold and it would simply die or fall numbed to the ground.

I watched Georg at work with real fascination. Nita Jungman slept; the cameras turned three feet from her face. Georg reached into his icebox where he had been chilling a butterfly. The freezing befuddled insect sat on his blunt fingertips, wings opening and closing very slowly. Georg took a sip from his cigar, pursed his loose lips together and blew a thin gentle jet of smoke onto the butterfly. The creature, irritated, could just manage a groggy two-foot flight. One hoped, naturally, it would head for the alluring peak of Nita Jungman’s pretty little retroussé nose. It was all a matter of nice calculations of correctly chilled, thus unenergetic, butterfly, and direction and velocity of cigar smoke goad. On this particular day Georg got it right three times with five butterflies. The entire studio broke into applause. Georg himself was proudest of a scene that you will probably remember in Heinrich Bern’s Deception. In it Georg persuaded a large housefly to visit every feature of the villain’s face (Rex Ermeram in his greatest role) by using the ice trick and by laying on with a pinpoint a tiny path of honey from demonic eyebrows to hooked nose, from leering lips to saber scar. Georg once told me, with passionate earnestness, that the single most important factor in any German man’s life was the freedom to smoke undisturbed in every corner of his house.

And so 1924 ended and I was still in Berlin, poorer and no further on with my career. In the New Year, Sonia wrote begging me to return for the birth of our second child and informing me of the shocking news that her father had secured me a position in his old pharmaceutical supplies company as trainee salesman. It was just at this time that I started work at the Hotel Windsor. I sent most of my first week’s pay home, said prospects were improving (I did not specify) and that the baby, if a boy, should be called Adam, and if a girl, Emmeline, after my mother.

I had not been entirely idle. Karl-Heinz and I had translated my script of Love’s Sacrifice and so far it had received only two rejections. Karl-Heinz said he would like to play the hero and I instantly agreed. Thus simply a professional association was added to our friendship, which was to survive the most hazardous traumas and ordeals.

Karl-Heinz too was knowing more success. He had acted in his first billed role as a shrewd detective investigating the disappearance of a lodger in a boarding house (I can recall nothing more of this film, which is remarkable only as Karl-Heinz’s debut). On screen he had an enticing, eye-catching impact. There was something latently unruly about him, a sense of good behavior only just being preserved with considerable effort. The Jahrbuch der Filmindustrie 1925 described him as “a most interesting find.” More offers of work came in. Karl-Heinz lent me money, some of which I sent on to Sonia.

Then, just before I finished my stint as Ulrich Pfau’s replacement, events began to move and my life to change. It was March and I was impatient for spring. I had been in Berlin for over four months and was feeling oppressed by its near-gray massiness. Karl-Heinz’s modest success made me conscious of my own frustrated stasis. I was in a bad mood, further irritated by a letter from Sonia that morning informing me that my second son had been born ten days previously and that his name was to be Hereford. Apparently there had been Herefords in the Shorrold family “for centuries.” (I quote. “You’ve heard of Hereford the Wake,” Vincent Shorrold proudly said to me later; “we go right back to him.”) As I paced up and down outside the Windsor I grew steadily more depressed. “John James Todd,” I said to myself, “accompanied by his two sons, Vincent and Hereford.” No, really, it was too appalling! Again I suspected the sly influence of Vincent Shorrold.

Just before my shift was up, at about four o’clock, a taxi pulled up in front of the hotel. I opened the door and Karl-Heinz got out. He was wearing a fawn overcoat with a fur collar. He put on sunglasses and warmed his hands on my blazing coat.

“Most amusing,” I said.

“We have a drink when you finish,” he said. “I’ve got a present for you. See you at the English Bar.”

The English Bar was on the Unter den Linden, in the passageway. It bore no resemblance at all to any hostelry in England, but Karl-Heinz thought it was a treat for me. When I arrived he was in the middle of a meal. He was still wearing his coat. I ordered a half liter of pilsner.

“Like the coat,” I said.

“You want some?” He pointed at his plate. “I pay?”

“What is it?”

“Smoked ham cooked in champagne. Delicious. With a radish sauce.”

“Tempting, but no thanks. What are we celebrating?”

“I got a job. Fantastic. Realismus Films. A. E. Groth directing. Diary of a Prostitute. I’m getting …”he considered it. “Five hundred dollars.”

“Are you the prostitute?”

“And I got one present for you.” He smiled and handed over a book wrapped in brown paper. “It’s by the same fellow as in Weilburg. You know—Rousseau.”

I read Julie, or The New Héloïse in two days with an effort directly proportional to my mounting dismay and disappointment. The turgid rhetoric, the lachrymose posturing, the relentless rhapsodies, were bitterly disillusioning after the never-to-be-forgotten exhilaration of The Confessions. For a landmark in the history of human artistic endeavor, and the signal for everthing we know as Romanticism to begin, it was extraordinarily hard going.

I find it hard now to explain why I did certain things then. I was only twenty-six years old, but the war had provided me with several lifetimes of experience. I was constantly on the verge of brilliant ideas, or at least I felt I was, and that feeling can sometimes be as important as the ideas themselves. So why, after that reaction to the book, did I decide to adapt it as a film? I had no honest explanation. It simply seemed the right thing to do. So I did it.

I wrote the script of Julie in seventeen days. I updated it to the present but kept the essential simplicity of the story. Saint-Preux—sensitive, melancholy, heart driven—is tutor to the beautiful young blond Julie, who lives in an idyllic château. They fall in love. Julie and Saint-Preux independently confide in Julie’s friend Claire (sprightly, dark) and she makes sure that the two soon know of their mutual passion. Overwhelmed by their feelings, Julie yields herself to Saint-Preux. They make love. Then Julie is stricken with remorse and guilt. She recoils from Saint-Preux and, distraught, marries an old codger called Baron Wolmar (her father’s initial choice.) Saint-Preux, suicidal, heads for the fleshpots of Paris. In despair, he decides against taking his life when he receives a letter from Julie saying that even though she is married, Saint-Preux will always be close to her heart.

Wolmar—prudent, sagacious, a philosopher of the human spirit—who knows of Julie’s past relationship with her former tutor, invites him (Saint-Preux is on the verge of nervous collapse) to come and live in their household. It is a profound and tormenting trial, but somehow Julie and Saint-Preux remain virtuous. The Baron Wolmar announces he is going on a long journey and leaves the two behind. Julie and Saint-Preux suffer a terrible ordeal of temptation and frustration, but Julie does not succumb, she remains faithful. Then, tragically, she has a fatal accident. On her deathbed she informs Saint-Preux that she has always loved him. Cut to Saint-Preux’s stricken face. Julie dies. The end.

It was, I think, a good piece of work and the story was no more impossible than any other drama currently being made. Karl-Heinz loved it and it was he who suggested we take it to Realismus. I thought this was frankly a waste of time, but Karl-Heinz insisted there was some logic in his idea. He was currently filming Diary of a Prostitute; Realismus had a certain vested interest in his career and he had access to the head of the company, Duric Lodokian. I agreed to give it a try and he took the script of it with him.

Duric Lodokian was a hugely wealthy Armenian who had fled from his native country to Russia in 1896 shortly after the first Turkish massacres and pogroms against the Armenian people had begun. He had fled again in 1918 after the Russian Revolution and was among the first of the thousands of Russian émigrés who found sanctuary in Berlin. Lodokian had made his fortune in nuts. He described himself to me as a “nut importer.” He spoke Russian, German, French and passable English. He had sold many nuts to England, he said, but of only one type: Brazil nuts. Hundreds of tons of Brazil nuts. “What do they do with Brazil nuts?” he asked. I said I had no idea. I must say I find it hard to imagine a fortune founded on nuts, but this was Lodokian’s power base (“Every time I open a pistachio I am saying thank you,” he said to me once). The nut business sustained him through the few ups and many downs of his passion for films. Realismus Films Verlag AG was Duric Lodokian, and no film was made unless it conformed to the philosophy implicit in the name. His greatest success had been in 1920 with a movie about the horrors and dangers of venereal disease, called The Wages of Sin, and Unsparing Social Comment would, I think, have been a fair summary of the Lodokian and Realismus creed. True, it swam somewhat against the tide in the Berlin of the mid-twenties, but for every three flops there was a modest Realismus success that confirmed him in his principles, and he persevered. There was, in fact, a Realismus “school” notionally in opposition to the UFA films, the Expressionists, the Neue Sachlichkeit movement and all the other various artistic “isms” and groupings that flourished then. Two of Realismus’s regular directors were Werner Hitzig and Egon Gast. Lodokian had just persuaded the celebrated Swedish director A. E. Groth to join him and Diary of a Prostitute was the result.

Lodokian was a small, dapper brown man in his sixties. Brown as one of his nuts, I thought when I met him for the first time in the Realismus offices on the corner of the Französischestrasse and Friedrichstrasse. His face and hands were speckled with copious liver spots. He was smoking a Russian cigarette with a cardboard filter, the hand holding it trembling slightly. When he spoke it was through a kind of surf of wheezes and vascular gurglings, as if he were crippled with emphysema. There was a wheelchair and an oxygen cylinder behind his desk. He introduced me first to his son, Aram, who stood beside him. Aram was as small and neat as his father, my age, and running to fat. He had dark, slightly hooded eyes and a neat cleft in his chin. His plump cheeks gave a strange oblate look to his head. We shook hands and he smiled. It was a brilliant smile. Charm came off him like a perfume. He had the same immediate effect on me as Karl-Heinz had. Within seconds of meeting them both, you liked them and, more importantly, you wanted them to like you back. The only difference with Aram Lodokian was a slight side effect. A minute or so after yielding to the charm came a moment’s doubt as to the wisdom of so doing. Just a fleeting moment, then it passed. Although Karl-Heinz was in many ways utterly disreputable, this aftertaste never occurred.

I sat down.

“What do you know about my country?” Lodokian asked.

I decided on honesty. “Absolutely nothing.”

With enormous effort he got to his feet, shuffled laboriously to the window and beckoned me over. We looked down on the crowds in Friedrichstrasse.

“Do you think they know about the two million? Of course not.”

“Two million what?”

“The two million Armenians the Turks killed in 1915. The biggest genocide in the history of the world.”

I did not know what to say.

“Nobody wants to know the truth. That’s why I made these films.”

He clasped his mottled hands together and shook them at me in a curious gesture. He always did this to emphasize a point.

“Don’t turn your back on reality,” he said fiercely to me. “Don’t let people dream too much. Is dangerous.”

A line from some modern poem came into my head. “Human nature cannot stand too much reality,” I misquoted.

“It’s the only medicine,” he said. “The only medicine.”

I was wordless once more.

It took him two minutes to regain his seat, where he lit another cigarette.

“This is why I like your film,” he said, mystifyingly. “Very good philosophy, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Now this is Realismus. You talk to Aram, he will make the contracts.”

I felt an effervescence in my body—my blood turned to seltzer. I shook the old man’s hand and then Aram Lodokian showed me into another office. I think we talked vaguely of contracts. I remember Aram suggesting a fee of ten thousand dollars. He said they paid in dollars because of the last inflation. He smiled apologetically. I promised to acquire a lawyer that afternoon. He called for coffee and cake and offered me a Russian cigarette. His smiles and charm enfolded me like a shawl.

“Have you thought of a cast?” he asked, leaning over to light my cigarette. His English was perfect, accentless and somehow all the more foreign sounding because of that. He sat back and rubbed the knuckle of his forefinger up and down the cleft in his chin. It was a frequent gesture. I thought suddenly of it as a groove worn away by the constant motion.

“Well … Karl-Heinz Kornfeld for Saint-Preux.”

“Excellent! What about Monika Alt for Julie?”

“Possibly …”

“Or Lola Templin-Tavel?”

We nattered on, enjoying this the fantasy stage of a film project when absolutely anything and everything is possible. On my way out I asked if he could advance me five hundred dollars against my fee. Without the slightest hesitation he wrote out a check. I went straight to a post office and cabled Sonia: MONEY ON WAY STOP COME TO BERLIN SOONEST LOVE JOHN JAMES.

I still find it hard to explain why Duric Lodokian should have seen Julie as a fit subject for Realismus. I now think Aram had more influence than he acknowledged. He denied this at the time, stating that it was a combination of Rousseau’s name, the extreme length of the book and the comparative brevity of my script. His father had been very impressed that I could have constructed a story out of such intractable material.

“There are some fools,” Aram said, “who actually think that a story is unimportant. But a good story will satisfy anybody. Beautiful lightings, sets, costumes, fancy camerawork, intensity of style—this is for a coterie.” I half-agreed with him. But, anyway, whatever the reasons for the selection of Julie, I knew that I was now on my way. The path ahead was finally clear. And, also, I find it pointless to speculate on reasons too long. We can only do so much to influence events. The chain of cause and effect can be illusory and misleading. Why did that bullet shatter Somerville-Start’s teeth and not mine? What made Karl-Heinz send me the postcard? And so on. A little reflection and the so-called pattern of your life soon appears as little more than an aggregate of hazard and chance. We think we recognize good and bad luck when it affects us, but in reality there is nothing but luck. From that standpoint the Realismus contract did not seem fortuitous at all.

I acquired a lawyer, papers were drawn up and signed and half my fee was deposited in a newly opened bank account. I was suddenly wealthy again. I started looking for furnished accommodation for me and my family and moved into an office in the Realismus studios near the huge gasworks in Grunewald.

I found a furnished apartment not far from 129B on Rudolfplatz a few blocks away. I was oddly reluctant to change districts; so too was Karl-Heinz. The night before I left (Sonia and the children were due to arrive in a week or so) we had a final celebratory dinner. I gave Frau Mittenklott extra money and she cooked a gargantuan meal that made even Georg gasp. We had green corn soup, carp marinated in vinegar with horseradish sauce, stewed mutton with paprika and a hot chocolate pudding. It was a pleasant occasion in that warm fuggy flat, surrounded by the buzz of insects, and we all drank far too much. I promised Georg that no film would ever employ so many insects as Julie would. It was a fine evening. And prophetic. For the first time I registered how much Karl-Heinz drank—topped off on this occasion by three tumblers of brandy at the end of the meal. And then we talked about casting Julie. I said that at the moment Monika Alt was the prime contender. Karl-Heinz screwed up his face.

“I can see she might be good,” he said, “but before you give her the job you should see one other person.”

“Who?”

“Doon Bogan.”

Doon Bogan, Doon Bogan. I can hardly write the name even to this day.

VILLA LUXE, June 18, 1972

The old bus from town deposits us at the nunnery on the outskirts of the village. There was no mail for me today—something of a wasted journey, I walk through the village towards the track that leads to my villa. As I pass the church the German girl, Ulrike, steps out from the shadow of one of its crude buttresses.

“Mr. Todd?”

“What!… Hello. Sorry, you gave me a shock.”

“Can I offer you a drink?”

“Well, I’m in a bit of a—”

“Please, there’s something I want to ask you.”

We go to Ernesto’s bar. Amazingly, he is actually there—I can hear him shouting angrily at his mother in the kitchen. We sit on the terrace and Feliz brings us two beers. It is that pleasant time of the evening. The heat has gone from the sun; pink bathers plod by from the public beach; soon the early bats will be swooping between the pine trees. I raise my cool glass to Ulrike. Without her spectacles and with the even tan she has now acquired, she really is quite pretty.

“Mr. Todd, did you ever make movies?”

For an instant I thought about denying it. “How do you know? Yes, I did.”

“I knew it!” She smiled broadly.

She explained: her boyfriend was a lecturer at the university in Munich. He was very involved with film studies.

“When you told me your name I thought I had heard it before. I wrote to him about you. Yesterday I got his letter.” She looked closely at me. “He said you were very famous.”

“Well, I was, I suppose. Forty years ago.”

She went on to tell me about her boyfriend’s work for some film festival in Berlin. A retrospective: “Silent Films of the German Cinema.” She unfolded a piece of paper.

“He has some questions he would like me to ask you. May I?”

“Fire away.”

“Good. Question one. Do you know the whereabouts of a film star called Doon Bogan?”