‘It was by a lake, wasn't it?’ prompted Ruth. ‘The camp.’
The lake appeared. Trees which might have been willows dangled branches over the surface. Beyond them, thick reed-beds extended out into the waters and, as the camera panned around, a few dilapidated wooden buildings came into view. The camera swung quickly about. Two men in uniform were gesticulating angrily. One walked forward and the ground swung into view as the camera was lowered.
‘There was a lot of that,’ said Ruth.
Sol turned to her.
‘In the original footage,’ she explained. ‘We cut a lot of it out.’
‘This isn't everything?’
‘It's everything worth seeing.’
When the sequence resumed the colours were duller. The sky was an opaque white and the lake sat as flat as paint behind the dark spears of the reeds and the solid boles of the trees. The foreground was dominated by a long low building painted white and roofed with red clay tiles. Some of the wooden structures seen earlier were visible behind it. Small barred windows ran in a line across the screen. The camera was static and nothing moved in the scene it recorded. Sol was silent.
‘This is where you were taken,’ said Ruth. It might have been meant as a question. ‘Where you first saw Eberhardt.’
Sol nodded, transfixed by the image on the screen, although it had not changed.
‘If I could have walked,’ he said. He felt Ruth's hand seek out his shoulder and squeeze it. ‘How different everything would have been.’
‘Escaped with Thyella?’
‘It was all she could do to get away herself.’
He pulled his attention from the screen and spoke more brightly. ‘She could hardly have carried me on her back.’
‘And if she had you would never have written Die Keilerjagd,’ Vittorio smiled.
Sol made an effort to smile back.
The sequences which followed were of places and landscapes he did not recognise: sparsely-planted cornfields, olive groves, a windmill rigged with white sails, two crows chasing each other around a bell tower. Vittorio grunted his dissatisfaction or made comments to Ruth about the suitability of these images. When the reel ended he yawned and apologised.
‘I have to get back to the hotel for five o'clock.’
He offered no further explanation.
‘What about the rushes?’ Ruth asked.
‘We can't reshoot for another week at least. Even then it depends on the light. I can go through them before that.’
‘How? If there's no time to reshoot, when will you find the time?’ Ruth's tone sharpened. ‘We have a screening room, a projector and the footage right here and now.’ Vittorio sighed, already settling back in his seat. Ruth turned to Sol. ‘Would you mind? If we ran the rushes now and then watched the final reel together afterwards?’
‘Why should I mind? I've wanted to see what you were doing all along.’
He soon placed the apartment in which they were filming. It was on an upper floor of a building which rose grandly on the right bank of the river, about fifteen minutes’ walk from his home. He recognised the ornate windows which extended almost from floor to ceiling. As the scene began, Paul Sandor was standing to the side of one of these windows, leaning against the wall and looking out at something. He was dressed in jeans and a tight sweater. After a few seconds he stepped up to the window. Whatever had caught his eye was moving nearer. He pressed his cheek against the glass as the angle grew acute, then drew back suddenly, clearly puzzled, although he was little more than a silhouette. Then something behind him disturbed his train of thought. He turned around to face the camera.
Lisa Angludet stood in a doorway at the back of the room, which was empty except for a group of disarranged chairs. She was barely visible in the gloom but as she walked forward Sol saw that her dress was in fact a man's overcoat which she held tight around her as though she were cold. Her legs and feet were bare. Her lips moved. She was angry.
Sandor shook his head and the two began to circle each other, the camera moving around both in the opposite direction. Their faces appeared and disappeared, his ironic and aloof, hers contemptuous. The light from the window hardened the angles of their faces. Suddenly Lisa looked straight into the camera, made a silly face and started laughing.
‘Forgot her line,’ said Ruth to Sol.
‘What is her line?’
‘She says, “I've had it with old men.” Paul asks her, “How many times?” Then she tries to hit him.’
The sequence began again. Sandor's interest in the unknown scene outside was more playful this time and the change of mood at Lisa's appearance more abrupt. They circled, mouthing silently at one another. Her arm rose. He caught her by the wrist and the camera pulled back to bring both actors into full-length shot, revealing that beneath the ill-fitting coat Lisa was naked. They struggled inelegantly, Sandor forcing his partner back towards the window then pushing her against the wall. There was a weariness to his movement, a sense of great weight and effort. Lisa twitched and pulled truculent faces, resisting fitfully. The final shot was taken at head height along the wall: Lisa's head being backed into frame, filling the screen and blocking out the light from the window beyond, then Sandor's blotting her out in turn. He might have been bending to kiss her neck or leaning his forehead against the plaster in exhaustion. The sequence ended.
‘It's too complicated. Too busy,’ said Vittorio, resting his elbows on the seat in front and cupping his chin in his hands.
‘It's when he pushes her against the wall. It goes slack there. Nothing's happening,’ replied Ruth. ‘She's meant to graze her shoulder, remember? Actually leave a mark there.’
‘Wearing a coat?’ queried Vittorio.
The sequence began again. To Sol's eyes it was identical to the preceding one, except the apartment itself seemed larger and gloomier.
‘That was the last,’ said Vittorio when it was over. ‘You couldn't print the others even if you wanted to. If we could hang a light outside . . .’
‘Can't,’ said Ruth. ‘I want to see them anyway.’
Sol sat through three more repetitions of the scene. Sandor and Lisa reeled through their allotted seconds, reached their end, then found them beginning again. Time passed around the two actors only in the failing of the light, so that when the fourth take commenced they were little more than masses of shadow. But this time the rhythm was broken.
‘What's happening?’ asked Sol, squinting at the screen.
‘Depends on your point of view,’ replied Ruth. ‘Either a courageous young woman is making a stand against the forces of the military-industrial complex, represented in this case by her co-star. Or a silly little girl is having a tantrum. Your choice.’
Vittorio groaned. ‘She was exhausted. We were all exhausted.’
‘She wanted to go and smoke marijuana with her friends, so she broke up the set,’ retorted Ruth.
Sandor had hold of one of Lisa's wrists but she was bringing her free arm down around his head and shoulders. He let go and she began to flail at him. Her back was to the camera and over her shoulder Sandor's face could be seen, his mouth open, shouting to someone. In the next instant the foreground filled with out-of-focus shapes, heads and bodies, as other members of the crew ran forward to separate the actors. The camera turned away, revealing coils of cable, flight-cases, tripods and light-stands, all crammed into the one corner of the room which had remained out of shot. Ruth was striding forward from this area. She wore a brown jacket and white trousers. Her hand was raised.
The lights came up. Vittorio rose and stretched.
‘Next time we have to start earlier. Or shoot in the morning and use the other side of the window. And we need an Arriflex. The Eclair's too heavy. Now I have to go. Peter's meeting me at the hotel, then we're off to the Grand Palais.’
‘The exhibition?’ Sol asked.
Vittorio nodded. ‘Have you seen it? The new work's supposed to be his best in years.’ He smiled. ‘I need darkness and
gloom. And incoherence.’
‘Enjoy,’ said Ruth.
Vittorio bent to kiss her on the cheek, then reached across to shake hands with Sol.
‘Until the next time.’
‘Tomorrow,’ Ruth called after him. ‘Seven-thirty sharp.’ The door swung and bounced off its damper, then closed smoothly behind the departing man.
‘The last reel is shorter,’ Ruth said to Sol as the screening room darkened. ‘They ran into some trouble.’
The white cell-block, in full sunlight this time but already sliding out of shot: a wooden barracks, a tangle of wire, a dirt road running along the foot of a long embankment. The train of images processed in sequence, right to left, then the camera panned up the embankment to the beginning of a long slope. The ridge far above looped between two summits. The next shot was taken from their midpoint. The camera looked out over jagged peaks cut by deeply shadowed ravines. They receded into the far distance, arrayed without pattern or end. The camera swept slowly over this harsh chaos.
‘This is what Paul meant,’ said Ruth a minute or so later. ‘He wasn't doubting you. When I showed him these shots he just couldn't believe anyone could walk through terrain like this.’
The footage quickly settled into a pattern. Shots taken from the bottoms of narrow valleys and gorges showed steep or sheer inclines of bare grey rock rising into the sky. There was no sense of direction or progress, simply a montonous succession of images. Each of these sequences was broken by shots of the villages which punctuated the journey, and these too followed a format which soon grew familiar: the kaphenion with the men hunched over tiny cups or glasses, a slow pan around the village, children playing, then a succession of close-ups of the villagers, some talking expressively, waving cigarettes about, others staring mutely into the lens. The villagers were almost all men. The few women glimpsed smiled quickly and turned away. A long shot of the road or track out of the village would end the sequence and then the mountains would rise up again.
‘The next is the part I wanted you to see,’ said Ruth as the camera panned down to a broad stream. Three children were wading through water which reached to their knees, their arms locked, two boys, and between them a girl. She pretended to stagger and stumble while the boys supported her. Then the camera rose again and found the village with its familiar stone houses and the kaphenion, which had been built around the trunk of an ancient tree.
‘Bring back any memories?’
Ruth's voice was light, oddly flirtatious.
Sol did not reply. A group of old men were sitting at the tables arranged beneath the tree, a dozen or more of them. They watched the camera without expression.
‘Sol? What's the matter?’ Ruth asked gently.
‘What are you trying to do?’
The question sounded harsher than he had intended.
‘If you have a question, why not just ask me?’ he continued. ‘I've answered plenty of questions in my time. Go on, ask what you like.’
‘Whatever are you thinking, Sol?’ Ruth replied, her surprise unmistakable. ‘What do you take me for? How could you . . .’ Then her tone grew more measured. ‘The children playing in the river. Don't you see? It's us. You, me and Jakob, when we were children. They were playing the same game. Don't you remember?’
Now a plump face filled the screen, a man in his late forties with an amiable expression on his face. He blinked in the sunlight. He was holding up a hand with one finger extended and saying something to the camera. Sol averted his face and did not speak.
‘What do you think I meant?’
He remembered that Ruth's temper rose slowly. It always had done. He had to say something. The man held up a second finger and mouthed something else. He appeared delighted. Ruth's next words were calm, however.
‘Solomon, believe me, I have no questions. I don't know how I've upset you but I'm not asking you for anything. I don't blame you for anything and I never blamed you. I'm sorry I mentioned Jakob. Anything you say to me, say it only because you want to.’
‘Ruth, I don't know what . . .’
‘It doesn't matter, Sol. It honestly doesn't matter. Come on, let's get out of here. This ends in a minute.’
‘Let it run.’
‘If you like. The villagers turned nasty. This one they're interviewing now was a little simple. The others didn't like it. Here it comes.’
The camera swung around in time to catch five or six young men walking up. The nearest raised his arm. An old man stood a few metres behind them. He was pointing at something. An indistinct shape passed across the lens and then it seemed the camera was pushed down. The ground swung into shot, bringing with it two elongated human shadows. From the arm of one dangled an object which could only have been the camera. Then the screen went dark.
***
In May of 1953 Sol moved from the Hotel d’Orléans to a cramped apartment in a side street off avenue Victor Hugo. A single taxi journey sufficed to transport his possessions: clothes, books and his typewriter, which was the property of the Perspectives office and would have to be returned. The cheaply-bound book Reichmann had handed to him now sat on the tiny table in the apartment's living area, next to Fleischer Verlag's edition and a newly-arrived Italian translation. The critic's anxious face rose in his memory, a looming balloon. All my questions are in there. Sol had watched Reichmann reluctantly shuffle out of the hotel hallway. The critic had expected something – an explanation perhaps, or an assuagement. He had received neither.
Sol had retreated upstairs, pausing on the first landing when he recognised the name printed on the green cover. Outside the door to his own room, he had turned the first page in anticipation of stepping inside and settling into his chair to read the remainder. His room was crowded with cardboard boxes which he had collected but had yet to pack. He was to move to the new apartment in two days’ time. He read, Die Keilerjagd von Solomon Memel: Eine Kommentierte Ausgabe. Below it, Adler Verlag, Tel Aviv. He had stood in the hallway, key in hand, reading by the corridor's yellowish light.
The distinction of the edition prepared by ‘J. Feuerstein’ was apparent at a glance. In the original Fleischer edition, the opening catalogue of the heroes swept down the page in solid blocks of text. The hunt began and then the poem modulated, the conflict spreading through time and space, slowly admitting the more modern war where its main action took place. This section was written in long irregular stanzas. The conclusion, in the darkness of the cave, was a continuous column of text running over a dozen pages: ‘A singular shaft sunk to the limit of the speakable whose only handholds are words,’ as Reichmann had written, adding, ‘Readers must brace themselves and climb.’
The pages of Jakob's edition were divided differently. Sol's words advanced down the page, but rarely reached further than halfway. Sometimes a mere two or three lines perched at the top, and one page contained not a single word, or not of Sol's. Instead, there were footnotes.
His new editor had called a few days later, introducing himself as Andreas Moderssohn. They exchanged pleasantries and Moderssohn expressed his admiration for the poet of Die Keilerjagd. His voice sounded young, on the telephone, and Sol decided that his deliberate manner was intended to mask nervousness. They talked of the various foreign editions in preparation and the recent decision that Die Keilerjagd should be taught in German schools. The conversation turned to the work of certain contemporary poets – Moderssohn had liked Bobrowski's last collection, Sol not – then to a proposed jacket design for the forthcoming paperback edition, which Sol had not yet received for approval and which Moderssohn described in painstaking detail. Finally they arrived at the weather. It was then that Sol understood his editor's ponderous delivery as procrastination.
‘You want to ask me something,’ Sol interjected.
There was a short silence.
‘We received an edition of Die Keilerjagd printed in Tel Aviv,’ said Moderssohn. ‘A German-language edition.’
‘Yes?’
‘We simply wo
ndered, Herr Memel, if you had approved this edition. It seems irregular, in certain ways.’
‘Irregular?’
‘It is a technicality, of course. Obviously an edition like this is intended for an academic market. Surrer Verlag would not dream of impeding the work of scholars dedicated to your work. But in the matter of permissions . . . I mean Surrer Verlag acquired the rights to Die Keilerjagd with the purchase of Fleischer Verlag and while we wish to make the poem available as you would wish, we do not want to encourage pirated editions. The mysterious Professor Feuerstein seems to have devoted a great deal of effort to your work. Even so . . .’ He left the sentence hanging, then his tone changed. ‘Herr Memel, we are asking whether you wish us to begin proceedings against Adler Verlag.’
‘Proceedings?’
‘Prosecution, Herr Memel. For infringement of copyright.’
He had misunderstood Moderssohn's slow delivery. It signalled nothing more mysterious than the speed of his new editor's wits.
‘I grew up with Jakob Feuerstein,’ said Sol. ‘We were schoolmates and then friends. The best kind of friends. We were separated during the war. I am sure I do not need to explain to you the circumstances at that time.’
‘Of course not,’ Moderssohn replied. Another pause followed. ‘You said friends?’
‘We were as close as friends could be. Until I saw his name on this new edition I thought he was dead. Now I find he survived.’
‘Forgive me, Herr Memel, but may I ask if you have read Professor Feuerstein's edition?’
‘Of course. I have it here in front of me. Why do you call him “Professor Feuerstein"? He trained to be a doctor, a medical doctor, but whether he completed his training . . .’
‘The accompanying article calls him “Professor Feuerstein”, Herr Memel.’
‘Article? Jakob has written an article?’
‘He is not quite the author,’ replied Andreas Moderssohn in the deliberate tone which had characterised his speech throughout this conversation and which, Sol reflected later, had not faltered once. ‘I think it might be simplest if I send it to you.’
In the Shape of a Boar Page 26
