10

Comrades

I waited, wisely, prudently, until well after Julie was released before going to the Lodokians with my new plan. Aram had been pestering me for weeks to sign a new contract with Realismus but I had delayed, calculating that the audacity of my proposal would be easier to take if Julie was steadily earning money. So I was annoyingly evasive on the matter of what we should do next whenever Duric and Aram brought it up.

I was busy enough, anyway, with the success of Julie, attending gala premieres in Munich, Hamburg and Frankfurt, consenting to inumerable press conferences and interviews. Long profiles appeared in UFA-Magazin, Film-Photos, Illustrierter Film-Courier and Kino. It was the most successful and talked about film in all Berlin until the premiere of Potemkin at the end of April. Aram sent Karl-Heinz and Doon on an international promotional tour, to Britain, France and Italy, but they both surprisingly refused to go with the film to the U.S.A.—Doon, I believe, out of some perverse sense that she was in exile, and Karl-Heinz for the odd but simple reason that, he claimed, it was not his sort of country.

For my part, the success of Julie was highly gratifyingly. I felt calm, with a new deep self-assurance, which explains why in the many newspaper and magazine articles that appeared I was several times described as “impassive” or “brooding.” I was brooding—on what to do next—and was moving forward with steady determination. Karl-Heinz’s advice had been astute: my new obsession had saved me. I had not forgotten Doon (we met from time to time at receptions, but there were always dozens of people there; her attitude towards me is best described as pleasant), but I found her easier to cope with.

In June profits from Julie were such that Realismus paid me a bonus of seventy-five thousand dollars, a vast sum in those days. Aram offered me another fifty thousand to direct two films for the studio: Frederick the Great with Karl-Heinz and Joan of Arc with Doon. I asked for time to think it over.

I read and reread Rousseau’s Confessions and my plans for it altered daily. The scale and grandeur of my project burgeoned in my mind. After blocking out a preliminary outline I calculated that the film would last eight or nine hours. For a week I was in despair, but then suddenly realized that its great length could in fact be its greatest asset. I would make not one but three 3-hour films of the book—a truly epic moving picture, and a fit monument to the man who had inspired it.

In March, Sonia announced that she was pregnant again and at the same time, though unconnected with this news, I rented for my own use a small wooden villa in the country, about an hour from Berlin in the woods of the Jungfernheide. There I spent weekdays alone, working secretly on the first draft of The Confessions, returning home at weekends. To my vague surprise, on a Friday as I motored back to Charlottenburg I found myself actually looking forward to rejoining my family. Vincent had lost his terror of me and Hereford proved to be an engaging, affectionate baby. I spent many hours teaching him to walk, during which he took the most appalling tumbles, crashing into tables, falling down steps, bouncing off walls. He would hit the ground—slap!—and look stunned for a moment, as if deciding what was the correct response to this misfortune. All one had to do was laugh ostentatiously—“Ha ha ha, Hereford, ho ho ho!”—and he would immediately join in, no matter how bruised or winded he was. He was a cute little fellow, still shitting himself at every opportunity.

I made one mistake that summer which was to have bitter consequences later. One Wednesday in June I drove into the city to attend Leo Druce’s wedding. He was marrying Lola Templin-Tavel. The ceremony took place in the pretty English church (St. George’s) in the gardens of Schloss Montbijou, with a reception afterwards at the Palast Hotel. After the service Sonia felt ill and left me to go on to the reception myself. There was an impressive turn out at the Palast and I remember asking myself how Leo Druce, tyro co-producer, had managed to invite so many luminaries to his wedding—Pola Negri was there, Emil Jannings, Walter Ruttmann, Tilly de Garmo, Michael Bohnen the baritone, Conrad Veidt, Lil Dagover and many more. It was a spontaneous reflection, I bore no ill will to Leo, but I remember commenting on it—prophetically—and ironically complimenting him on his ability to get on in the world. He said, with typical modesty, that they had only come because of Lola. I might have added that that was precisely my point, but I refrained.

It was a hot day and not enough of the Palast’s windows opened to provide any kind of breeze. I felt stifled in my morning suit and stiff collar, and drank rather too much chilled fruit cup to compensate. I began to enjoy myself and the steady stream of compliments I received as a result of Julie’s success. That day I felt a kind of power emanating from me that was further generated by the secret that I owned.

I was talking to Leo when Aram approached. He was wearing a corn-yellow and gold-brocade waistcoat with matching spats. On anyone else they would have looked absurdly comical, but somehow Aram could carry off the crassest vulgarity. We congratulated Leo all over again on his good fortune (a touch insincerely: Lola’s famed vivacity had a distinct neurasthenic note to it) and congratulated ourselves on the news of Julies sale to RKO.

“I’m sailing to New York next week,” Aram said. “They’ve gone mad for Julie. They want every new Realismus film.” He paused meaningfully. “They’re throwing money at me for Frederick the Great.”

“I’m busy,” I said.

“What are you doing in that cottage, for God’s sake?”

“I’ll tell you soon. Very soon.”

“But when are you going to make Frederick? We’ve got to start this summer.”

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “Let Leo do it.”

They both looked at me in open amazement.

“You can do it, Leo,” I said. “Of course you can.”

“But it’s your film—earmarked—Karl-Heinz and—”

“It’s my wedding present to you.” I put my arms round them both. I am not normally given to these sort of gestures, but I was a little drunk. “Go on, Aram. Give it to Leo. He can do it.”

Aram looked shrewd: one eye closed slightly, bottom lip held between his teeth.

“Let’s talk when you get back from the honeymoon.”

“Listen, John, are you sure you—”

I gave him another impulsive hug. “Course I am. Anyway, I’ve got something else on.”

There were more surprises to come. I took my punch glass to be refilled, and as this was being done I heard myself greeted and looked round to see a small, perfectly bald young man with an idiot grin of pleasure on his face.

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

“Of course. How are you, Baby?”

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

“Delighted.”

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

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

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

Faithfull managed a weak smile.

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

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

“Just started a film.”

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

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

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

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

“Ouf! It’s so hot in here,” Monika said, blowing discreetly down the front of her dress. “Oh, look. There’s your star.”

“Why don’t we get out of here?” I said. “Come and have a picnic at my villa.”

Monika visited me at my villa once or twice a week during the rest of that summer. We would make love and have lunch. After lunch she liked to sunbathe naked in the back garden, a policy I encouraged as this was the view overlooked by my study window. She returned to Berlin in the afternoon as the air cooled. That was as much as we ever did. Her thin, hot, oily brown body with small, oddly deflated-looking breasts are inescapably associated with the genesis of my Confessions films. I grew to like her and I think she liked me, though we never spoke of our feelings. Perhaps that was why she came back. She had half a dozen scars, old and new, on her belly. I counted an appendectomy and a cesarean section, but I could not work out what the others were. I asked her how she got them.

“Too many men, darling,” she said. “Too many men.”

One day Aram came round unexpectedly while she was there. He had returned from the U.S.A. and Frederick the Great was about to start. He did not seem particularly surprised to see Monika. We stood at my study window looking at her spread body, glossy with sun oil.

“I’ve got nothing against Monika,” he said thoughtfully. “But for a man in your position I think it’s a big mistake to get involved with an actress.”

“I’m not involved with her,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

I looked at him. He was wearing a powder-blue seersucker suit—bought in America, I assumed—a red shirt and a big fat canvas golfing cap. He looked ridiculous.

“Anyway,” I said, “what are you doing here? You know this is my secret refuge.”

“My father’s dying. He wants to see you.”

The heat, that summer of ’26 in Berlin, was immense. It slammed down out of a hazy sky the color of Aram’s suit, heavy as glass. One was glad of the city’s clean wide streets then. At least in the broad avenues and boulevards the air could stir. It must have been some kind of public holiday that afternoon as I motored back with Aram, because the pavements seemed strangely deserted and the big shops in Leipziger Strasse were closed and dark. I remember hearing the sounds of half a dozen bands as we drove through the Tiergarten. I never learned what was going on.

I was cast down by Aram’s news of his father. I had grown fond of old Duric, who had forgiven me my defection from the Realismus style once the money from Julie started to flow. He had said he planned to use the funds to make a series of films about vermin in our cities. “You mean child molesters, perverts, that sort of thing?” I had asked. “No, no!” he had shouted. “Rats and fleas! Rats and fleas!” I had only known him ill, and foolishly had come to think of his gasps and wheezes, his snail’s pace and omnipresent oxygen cylinder, as being as much part of him as his liver spots and gray hair. Suddenly these features revealed themselves as afflictions, and that shocked and subdued me.

The Lodokians, father and son, lived in a thin grand house on Kronenstrasse. Inside it was dark, curtains drawn, and one was forcibly reminded of the summer heat once more. A butler let us in and a male nurse led me upstairs.

Duric Lodokian was sitting up—rather, lying up—on a soft ramp of pillows, his oxygen mask in one hand and a Russian cigarette in the other. He talked in breathless bursts of a few seconds, pausing to guzzle oxygen from the mask, or to drag weakly on his cigarette. His brown skin was damp and a grayish mud color. His liver spots were more noticeable. He was the color of a certain type of speckled egg. (Some kind of gull or game bird, I forget which now, but they used to be fashionable hors d’oeuvres at parties in the thirties. I could never touch them—they reminded me of Duric, dying.)

Aram and I sat down on either side of him. The blanket round the ashtray was covered in ash. He was too frail to tap his cigarettes accurately. After the usual bland inquiries I said carefully, “Are you sure you should be smoking those, Duric?”

“Don’t be an idiot. Never did me any harm. Why should I stop now?”

“I agree, I agree. Don’t deny yourself. May I have one?”

I lit one. Aram did too. We both smoked while Duric topped up on oxygen.

“Listen,” he said eventually, “come here.”

I leaned further forward.

“What’s this film you want to make? Why are you being so difficult?”

I glanced at Aram. He looked faintly surprised. I decided to tell him.

“I want to make a film of a book called The Confessions.”

“Who by?”

“Rousseau.”

“Rousseau again? That’s good, good. I like it. Don’t you, Aram?”

“He won’t tell me about it.”

They exchanged a few words of fast Armenian.

“Are you ready to start?” Duric asked.

“I’m working on the script.” I caught Aram’s eye. “It’s, ah, very long.”

“I don’t care. Realismus must do it.” He put his hand on my knee. “This must be Realismus film, John. Aram will help you.”

“When I say long,” I continued cautiously, “I mean very long. Extremely long.”

“What’s ‘extremely’?” Aram asked.

“I want to make three films. Three hours each.”

“What!”

“It’s a good idea,” Duric said. “Phantastisch. We do it at Realismus, of course. Promise me, Aram. I mean promise.”

Aram had the look of a man trying to control nausea.

“Yes, Papa … if at all possible.”

“No ‘if.’ I want straight promise.”

“I promise.”

Duric lay back. He looked exhausted, his thin chest rising and falling at alarming speed. I felt I could punch a hole in it with my fist, as if his body were made out of balsa wood and paper, like a model airplane. As he breathed we could hear random treacly pops and gurglings from within the chest wall. His eyes shone with tears, but it may only have been rheum. He drew me closer again.

“Promise me too, John.”

“Of course. Anything.”

“Don’t let Aram sell the business. Watch him.”

“What business?” I looked at Aram. “Realismus? He’d never sell it, don’t worry.”

“No.” He was falling asleep. “The nuts.”

“I’ll watch him,” I said. “I promise.”

Aram rang for the nurse and we stood up. The nurse came in and held the oxygen mask to his face. It seemed to rouse him and he beckoned us back. We crouched by his side. His eyes were barely open, just a slit revealing a brown limpid glimmer.

“Never give up the nuts,” he said. They were his last words. He went to sleep and died three days later.

At his funeral Aram and I shed copious tears. I had tried to hold them back, but seeing Aram’s example decided to let myself go. I had a “right good greet,” as Oonagh used to say. I felt surprisingly better for it too, and I think Aram was touched. It was odd seeing Aram cry. We walked away from the graveside sniffing, wiping our eyes and snorting into big handkerchiefs.

“He was a sly old fellow,” Aram said. “A nine-hour film. My God.”

“It’ll be amazing,” I said. “Wait and see. There’s been nothing like it.”

“I’d never do it normally,” Aram said. “I think I should tell you that. I think it’s crazy, disastrous.”

“But you promised.”

“I know, I know.”

“I promised too,” I said. “Hang on to those nuts.”

Aram laughed. “Too late, John, I’m afraid. I sold Lodokian Nüsse four months ago.”

I felt mildly cheated by this, but there was nothing I could do. Later, I used to wonder if Aram had lied, just to keep me out of his business deals.… I had no way of finding out. However, I blessed old Duric for extracting that deathbed promise from his son. I assumed that Armenian blood ties and dying oaths were inviolable, and in a sense they were. Aram was always true to the letter of his promise, if not its spirit. A few days later contracts were signed. I was salaried at one thousand dollars a month while I wrote the script (backdated) and Realismus paid me a ten-thousand-dollar option on it against a fee for the world rights to be negotiated. In addition it was confirmed that I was to direct and participate in the profits. Bland announcements appeared in the trade press. I remember I cut one out and pinned it to the wall above my desk in the villa. “Realismus Films announced yesterday that John James Todd is to film Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions in 1927 on location in Switzerland and France. K.-H. Kornfeld is to play the leading role.” These prompted some speculations by journalists. My replies, I thought, were teasingly oblique. There is nothing like refusing to be specific for arousing curiosity.

The first draft of The Confessions: Part I was over six hundred pages long. After a month’s effortful work I managed to reduce it by something over a hundred pages. I began work on Part II in the autumn, but made bad progress. My mind was constantly on Part I—the director in me had taken over from the writer. There were many technical problems to be solved or experimented with; logistical pitfalls multiplied in my mind. I wrote on for another two hundred pages or so before I decided to let Part II rest for a while. In any event, winter was approaching and the wooden villa was not warm. Monika had stopped coming out too, now that the opportunities for sunbathing were gone. We met once or twice in her apartment but it was not the same. Our curious affair went into hibernation, tacitly, with no hard feelings on either side, and waited for the return of more clement weather.

So I abandoned the villa in the Jungfernheide and returned to our house in Charlottenburg. Sonia was heavily pregnant—the new baby was due in December. I went to work in my Realismus office and by the end of the year had produced a final draft of The Confessions: Part I that was 350 pages long. Of course I knew it was almost twice as long as it should be, but I was not concerned. “Once we start filming,” I reassured Aram, “you’ll see how it will come down.” He did not seem unduly perturbed. He was planning another trip to the U.S.A. in the New Year, where he expected to raise money for the new film. Large advances had been paid for Leo Druce’s Frederick the Great; Joan of Arc was generating similar excitement.

Aram was too calm, I now realize, and that tranquillity communicated itself to me. We drew up a schedule. Preproduction would commence in January 1927, filming would start in June. I would deliver a completed three-hour film in June 1928 for release in the autumn of that year. It all seemed eminently realizable. These dates, these plans conjured from the vaguest deliberations appeared utterly fixed, like the movements of the stars in the heavens, or calendrical predictions for high or low tides. We had created a timetable and with it a kind of reality. It had no real existence beyond our determination, but we acted as if it had.

“We’ll begin Part II in ’29,” I said to Aram. “One year for each part. The whole thing will be finished by 1931. We’ll show them all together. One nine-hour film.” I paused. “It’ll be magnificent,” I said with absolute, utter confidence. “Wait till you see what I can do. Amazing things. There will never be a film like it again.”

“Excellent,” he said. “But let’s get Part I finished first.”

Sonia gave birth to twins—girls—in early December. For the first time I was near my wife when the event occurred. I was very surprised at the news. Sonia said she had told me a month before her parturition, but if so the idea had not registered. I swear. It was an unpleasant reminder of just how preoccupied I had been with The Confessions: Part I. My family life was no more than a backdrop. It claimed my attention only when I wished it to. I was stunned. Suddenly I had four children! I felt faint stirrings of panic. What on earth did I think I was doing?

Our house that December was bedlam. Sonia and Lily were fully occupied with the girls—Emmeline and Annabelle—and for a while I had to oversee the two boys. For some reason Frau Mittenklott—who had followed us from Rudolfplatz—had been given responsibility for the Christmas decorations. There was a vast green fir tree in the drawing room, burning real candles and hung with real cakes and a kind of decorative shortbread. Smaller replicas stood in the hall and dining room. Furthermore boughs had been hewn from other conifers and were suspended wherever possible above doors, windows and staircases. The air was thick with resinous piny fumes that made my eyes sting and reminded me of my father’s antiseptic experiments. Heavy swags of redvelvet ribbon were draped above the fireplaces and from every projecting ledge, picture frame and table corner the good woman had set or hung miniature presents—matchboxes wrapped in bright paper and filled with raisins or nuts to be unwrapped by the children whenever the anticipation proved too much or the wait too long. This was the whimsical custom, so Frau Mittenklott informed me, in the village where she had been born and raised. Our house seemed the very paradigm of festivity, bright symbol of the Christmas season itself. The misery was capped, though my duties diminished, when Vincent and Noreen Shorrold arrived from London to share our joy.

On Christmas Day 1926 we were all present in the sitting room. John James Todd, the film director; his wife, Sonia; their four children—Vincent, Hereford, Emmeline and Annabelle—the nurse, Lily Maid-bow; and the in-laws, Mr, and Mrs. Shorrold, In the kitchen Frau Mittenklott was cooking a goose, three rabbits, a suckling pig—a whole farmyard of animals, as far as I know. I had just opened my present from Sonia. A pipe. A ghastly curved meerschaum with a carved yellow bowl the size of a coffee cup and—this is true—red and green tassels hanging from it.

“I can’t smoke this!” I said, shocked, to Sonia.

“Course you can, Johnny,” Vincent Shorrold said. “Nothing like a pipe for a man.”

“And what on earth does that mean? But—seriously—I can’t put this thing in my mouth. I’d be a laughingstock.”

“Here, I’ll get it going for you, boy,” Vincent Shorrold said, and took it from me. He proceeded to fill it with what looked like fistfuls of shag from his own pouch.

“That’s a right big smoke, that’s for sure,” he said as he tamped down the tobacco with his thumbs. “There’s a tin and a half of ready-rubbed in there.” He put it in his mouth. I saw his jaw muscles clench as they took the strain.

“Fair weight,” he commented. “Give you a right stiff neck, this will.”

It took him five or six matches and as many minutes to ignite the compacted mass of tobacco. The room was soon blue with gently shifting strata of smoke. The twins began to cry, their pure new eyes stinging. I sat very still in my chair, my face fixed. The women looked on with admiration as Vincent Shorrold fumed and blew, thick smoke snorting, apparently, from every orifice in his head.

“Grand cool draw,” he said, coming over, sucking and blowing. “It’ll be going for a couple of hours yet.” He held the vile object out to me, its little tassels swinging, its stem gleaming with Shorrold saliva.

“Have a puff, John,” Sonia said.

“Go on, Johnny,” said her mother.

The telephone rang.

I threw myself from the chair and strode urgently to answer it (why did we—why do people—keep a telephone in the hall?). I snatched the receiver from its cradle.

“Yes?”

“Jamie?”

“Yes.” It was Doon. I felt my entire body tremble. I sat down very slowly.

“Did you …” She paused. She sounded upset. “Did you mean what you said that night?”

“What night?”

She hung up. I knew what night, of course. I swore at myself for not thinking faster. But how could I think at all in this farcical Christmas grotto of a house? I put on my overcoat and a hat and went back into the drawing room. Shorrold was relighting the pipe.

“John?” Sonia said, surprised at my appearance.

“I’ve got to go,” I said. “Problems … Karl-Heinz. He’s ill.”

“But there’s dinner.”

“Save some for me. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

Exultantly, I went outside. There had been some snow earlier in the week but it had thawed. It was a cold dull afternoon as I drove towards the Kurfürstendamm, Schulter Strasse and Doon’s apartment.

There was no reply. I knocked again. I pressed my ear to the cold door listening for signs of movement within.

A neat young man carrying a new briefcase came up the stairs.

“Are you looking for Miss Bogan?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“You’ve just missed her. I passed her in the street on my way here. You might catch her. She’s heading north. Up towards the Knie.”

I spotted her as she crossed the busy intersection at Schiller and Grolmanstrasse. She was wearing a leather coat and a small-brimmed brown felt hat pulled hard down on her head. I thought she must be going to the Schiller-Theater but she passed that by. Why did I not approach her in the street? Run up behind her, tap her on the shoulder?… Because I felt suddenly weak and uncertain, now that I saw her tall figure again, striding so purposefully. Why had she telephoned me after months of silence? What had she meant by her question? I knew what I had said that night, so why now did she want the statement confirmed? I could provide no convincing answers to these questions apart from wishful ones, so I followed her discreetly as we walked through the cold quiet streets, even more deserted now as we moved further from the west end and into the industrial district of Lutzow. She turned right at the Landwehr-Kanal, with the sprawl of the Siemens electrical works opposite, and went through the doorway of what looked like a meeting hall or Low Church chapel.

I paused. The granite afternoon light was fading. The canal looked solid and very cold, as if the water was viscous, at the freezing point. I stood there dithering, getting colder by the minute. Some more people went into the hall. I had no gloves or scarf with me. Should I wait? She might be hours.… I went in.

At the far end of a thin vestibule a young man sat behind a table. He was wearing an overcoat, a roll-neck sweater and a soft brown hat of quite good quality. There were some papers in front of him.

“Afternoon,” I said.

“Are you a member?” He had a square bulging jaw that needed shaving.

“I want to join,” I improvised. “I came to meet Miss Bogan.”

He was impressed by the name. “Oh, good. Excellent. There should be no problem.”

He rummaged in the desk drawer and produced a form. “That’ll be two hundred marks,” he said. “Fill that in and I can give you a temporary card now. We’ll send the official one later.”

What kind of a club was this? I wondered as I handed in the money. I could hear indistinct conversation from the hall. The neighborhood was so drab—too drab for pornography. I filled in half the form—name, address, profession—before I thought to ask what the letters at its head stood for.

The man looked suddenly wary.

“The Revolutionary Artists’ Association,” he said. “Of the KPD.”

The Communist party. “Of course.” I managed a laugh of sorts. “What am I thinking about?”

He filled in my name on a square of cardboard and carefully stamped and initialed its reverse. He stood up and shook my hand.

“Welcome,” he said, then gestured at the door. “The meeting’s just starting.”

There must have been over two hundred people inside, mainly men, but with a fair representation of women. So many artists? I thought. I could see nothing of Doon. I edged diffidently in, pressed my back to a wall and waited. A thin man on a rostrum spoke passionately in clichés. I lost interest in seconds. In those days I was indifferent to politics, creeds and dogmas. Politics especially—I had not yet become one of its hapless victims. As Chekhov puts it, I wanted only to be a free artist. So as I scanned the faces of the audience, intent and earnest, impassive and mobile, I noted only that some of them were well-to-do; these were not all workers or students. I wondered what it was about them or the occasion that drew Doon here.

Speakers changed but the tone of voice and diminished vocabulary remained the same. There was vehement applause at the end of every speech. And then Doon got up on the rostrum. I listened to what she had to say. She attacked the institution of Christmas and, thinking of the travesty my own home had become, found myself loudly applauding all the predictable ideological grievances. She wound up with a plea for donations to party funds. She would be passing among us, she said, taking a collection.

I waited for Doon to reach me. Four people were going through the audience with wooden boxes as the meeting’s business was ponderously concluded by the thin man who had begun it all. I kept changing my position and thus made two donations before Doon and I finally met.

I felt a poignant helplessness suffuse my body as I stuffed notes into her box. To my credit, and my joy, she colored. Admiring noises came from others at my party-spirited largess.

“Thank you, comrade,” she said. Then in a lower voice, “What’re you doing here?”

“I followed you. After you called. I had to see you.”

“Are you a member?”

“Yes.”

“How long? I thought you were a cynic.”

“Oh, not so long.… People are allowed to change their minds, you know.”

“Wait for me at the end.”

I was wrong about it finishing. That meeting ran on for three hours. By its conclusion I was overpoweringly hungry. My stomach was audible at three yards, my mouth awash with saliva as I thought helplessly of Frau Mittenklott’s Christmas rum grog, her rabbit paprika and her Schokoladenstrudel.

It was night when Doon and I finally left. We walked back towards her flat, she talking overanimatedly of the cell, the cause, the struggle, the comrades. I let her natter on—she had slipped her hand through mine and I was close enough to smell her lavender perfume. Eventually I could stand it no longer and steered her into a small cellar café.

I ordered two coffees with kirsch and whipped cream and ate two large but rather solid slices of yesterday’s date torte. Then I put my hand on hers.

“Doon,” I asked, “why did you phone?”

“I shouldn’t have.”

“But you did.”

“God.… I don’t know. I was feeling blue. Fucking Christmas. I hate it.… I left Alex. Two weeks ago. I was sitting waiting for the meeting and I thought I’d—Shit. It was silly of me.”

My mouth was dry. “I still mean it.”

She lit a cigarette. She seemed uneasy now.

“It’s sweet of you to say that, Jamie.” She was trying to be composed. “But you don’t have to. Not on my account. Can I have another coffee?”

“But I do. I’ve known it since I saw you that first day in the Metropol.”

She looked down, blew a strong jet of smoke away to her left.

“But you’re a married man. You’ve got two kids—”

“Four. Now.”

“Jesus! Four?”

“Sonia had twins three weeks ago.”

“My God. Well, there you are.… It’s useless. We shouldn’t even be talking about it. I should never have called.”

She continued listing objections. I felt short of oxygen, like Duric Lodokian. I was breathing through mouth and nose but my lungs still felt starved of air. I had to divert her from the wife-and-children topic. She paused to take off her hat.

“See, I kept it blond. Memories of Julie.”

The idea seemed to fly up in my face, like a game bird started from heather.

“I was going to get in touch anyway,” I said slowly. “I want you to be in my new film. With Karl-Heinz again.”

“Oh yes. I read about it. But what part is there for me?”

“Someone called Madame de Warens.”

“I don’t know.…”

“You’d be wonderful.”

“I don’t think it’s such a good idea. What’s the film called again?”

“The Confessions.”

VILLA LUXE, June 22, 1972

Emilia has been acting strangely, lately. It’s all to do with that hole in the shutter, I’m sure. One day she was taciturn. Then yesterday she came wearing lipstick and some unattractive wooden earrings. I sense too that she doesn’t like Ulrike. It’s curious how women can become so proprietorial. I told her Ulrike had permission to use the beach. She was clearly irritated by this. I can’t be bothered trying to work out what’s going on. Could it be—however absurd it sounds—that she’s jealous? My God.…

It’s time I told you something of Jean Jacques Rousseau, for those of you unfamiliar with him. First I will give you the public image, the official version, one we can swiftly forget. Unfortunately my library here is impoverished. I can only quote from A Students’ Guide to European Philosophy by one Dr. Ida Milby-Low (M.A., D. Phil., Oxford), published in 1934. I apologize, but this is the mere husk of the man we are interested in. Bear with me.

Apoplexy is the only adequate response to that final paragraph, which has to be the most contemptible and shameful epitaph ever bestowed on one of the great geniuses of modern history. I reproduce it merely as a small sample of what Jean Jacques had—and has had—to endure from the small-minded throughout his tormented life and beyond. I will not dignify Dr. Milby-Low’s evil innuendos, many inaccuracies and omissions by further comment. The rough shape of Jean Jacques’s difficult, unique life is there—we will illumine it further, later. In the meantime only two observations need to be made.

1. Be sure of this: nothing Milby-Low recounts here is missing from Rousseau’s Confessions, as you might be forgiven for thinking from the note of smug revelation that she sometimes employs. Rousseau himself was and is the source of all slander directed against him by pedants and prudes. It is all down in fearless candor in that magnificent book and the companion volumes—Rousseau Juge de Jean Jacques and the Rêveries. No misdemeanor escapes him, from the great to the inconsequential: from abandoning his children to pissing secretly in a cantankerous neighbor’s simmering soup pot when she wasn’t looking. Rousseau is judged by Jean Jacques, not the Milby-Lows of this world.

2. Is it not curious that a life dogged with misfortune, riven with acrimony, disappointment and bitterness, is somehow perceived by the rest of mankind to be the unhappy sufferer’s own doing? True, there are people who are “their own worst enemy,” who pursue a helter-skelter ride to self-destruction. But at the same time, why can’t it be admitted that a man or woman can be cursed with filthy luck, can be denied opportunities available to others, can be surrounded by false friends and cozening flatterers? Why not? There is nothing in the scheme of things to say that this will never be the case—that it is always a result of one’s own misdirected Will. There is no guarantee of good fortune, no assurance that your allies will always be staunch, that unfairness and indifference will not always prevail. So why in these cases (Jean Jacques’s case) does the world howl paranoic, lunatic, misanthrope, ingrate, egomaniac?

I will tell you why. Because it makes people feel better, more secure. They can live, grudgingly, with a charmed life—there’s hope for us all, then—but a cursed life makes everyone uneasy. If they can lay all the blame on the victim, it makes Fate seem to be somehow under control—we play as big a part in our own downfall. We are somehow agents, responsible. Chance, the random and haphazard, the contingent, do not really dictate the way the world turns.