by Jane Smiley
“But who wants to remake it?” said Zoe.
Max didn’t answer. He went back to the book. He read, “Here’s how they save Taras. ‘His friend took hold of his arms and legs, swaddled him up like a child, replaced all his bandages, wrapped him in an oxhide, bound him up, and, roping him to his saddle, galloped away with him.’ I’d like to put that onscreen.”
“He’s unconscious?” said Delphine.
“He’s the sole survivor,” said Max. “Here it says, ‘Not one remained who had stood up for the just cause.’ That would be the cause of sectarian religious fanaticism. Anyway, the Cossack cause is lost. The Poles have won. After he recovers, Taras decides that he has to go look for his older son, he can’t help himself. He takes a trip to a town on the Black Sea and looks up a Jew, Yankel, that he once saved from being killed by the Cossacks. He persuades Yankel to take him to find Ostap in Warsaw, which Yankel, being a Jew, I gather, is able to do.”
Stoney said, “Being Jewish actually is a conspiracy, you know. That’s what my father always said. Not only in Hollywood.”
“You’re joking, right?” said Isabel.
“I am, but was Jerry?” said Stoney.
“Here’s my favorite part,” said Max, “‘Hear me! Hear me, my Lord,’ said Yankel. ‘Here is what we will do. Fortresses and castles are now being built everywhere. French engineers have come from abroad and so a great deal of brick and stone is being carried over the roads. Let my lord lie on the bottom of the wagon, and I’ll lay bricks over him. My lord looks hale and hearty, and so no harm will come to him, even if it is a little heavy, and I’ll make a hole in the bottom to feed my lord through.’
“So they get to Warsaw, and Taras tries to persuade some local Jews to get Ostap out of the city jail. They apparently talk Yiddish, which I think is interesting, and which Taras can’t understand. They go out and reconnoiter, but they come back with news that the prisoners are to be executed. Taras, of course, has to see this. So there is a very interesting scene where the Jews dress Taras up in an aristocratic robe and try to smuggle him into the prison, but he gives himself away when one of the guards insults the Russian Orthodox religion, and Taras can’t help attacking him. Taras has blown their cover, so they have to bribe their way out of the prison—”
“Or fight,” said Zoe. “In an American movie, they would have to fight their way out.”
“We’ll see,” said Max. “But they get to the square where Ostap is to be executed. The square is full of people of all ages and classes, males and females, howling for the executions. They bring Ostap on first, and they strap him to the wheel, because he is supposed to be broken on the wheel before he is beheaded. Taras watches as they torture his son, and the narrator says that you can hear the cracking of his bones all the way to the back of the crowd. Ostap makes no noise, but at the last minute, he cries out, ‘Batko! Where are you? Do you hear me?’ and the crowd falls silent. In the silence, Taras calls out, ‘I hear you!’ and then the book says, ‘A million people shuddered as one man.’”
Everyone around the table was silent.
Max went on. “Ostap dies smilingly, as they say. Taras goes back to Ukraine and raises a huge army of Cossacks and returns and burns down eighteen towns and forty Catholic churches. He’s very angry, and so, it says, ‘Lifting the children in the streets on the points of their spears, they threw them into the flames.’”
“I’ve never seen that on the screen,” said Cassie.
“The war continues, until Taras is finally captured. As they are burning him to death, he shouts encouragement to the rest of the Cossacks, who escape by leaping their horses off a high cliff into the Dniester River. The Poles aren’t good enough horsemen for this, and they and their horses get crushed and dismembered on the rocks.” Max coughed.
Zoe pushed her chair back and rearranged her hair, then glanced at her watch. It was just after eight. Max looked at her. She said, “But what happened to the girl?”
“The implication is that she died in the burning of one of the towns, I guess.”
“So,” said Elena, “every one of the characters dies—the father, the two sons, the girl?”
“Only the Jews survive,” said Cassie.
“And this takes place when, again?” said Elena.
“Well, it was written in the 1830s, but it’s supposed to take place in the late 1500s.”
“Seems like yesterday,” said Charlie.
Max said, “I gather that, in terms of local grudges and historic enmities, it is exactly like yesterday.”
“You can see some of those pan shots perfectly. The horses galloping through the tall grass and all. The stars,” said Delphine. “The burning towns.”
“I just can’t see it as mass entertainment,” said Zoe. “Everyone dies. The young lovers don’t live happily ever after.”
Stoney cleared his throat, then glanced at Max, who, Zoe saw, nodded slightly. Stoney said, “Nevertheless, there is a group of investors who want to make this movie, right out of the book, just the way it is, death, torture, horses, costumes, anti-Semitism, and all. Not Americans, but with plenty of money.”
“Since all the Jews survive,” said Cassie, “it must be some Israelis.”
“Or not, depending on your feelings about what the survival of the Jews means,” said Zoe. “I think this is very touchy material. Kind of like making a movie of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. You could do it and it would be a good movie, and, you know, about five years ago, Spielberg sent me the book and asked me if I would like to play the woman Cassy. When they sent it to me, I was amazed at first that they would even think of doing such a project, but I started to read it, and this character of Cassy was so great—the greatest black woman character you would ever want to play—she’s smart and brave and beautiful and angry and sexual, and she pulls the wool over the villain’s eyes and saves a young girl from a fate worse than death. But the book had so much baggage attached to it that I thought no one could carry it, not even Spielberg, and he was king then. I thought about it long and hard.”
“So you didn’t make it.”
“We didn’t. But that wasn’t the reason.”
“What was the reason?” asked Charlie.
“The Spielberg people found out that someone had already made it for TV about ten years before.” Zoe grinned.
Max laughed out loud.
Now the slider opened, and Zoe turned her head. Here came Paul, looking terrifically benign. Zoe said, “Oh, dear one. I wish you’d been here. Max told the bloodiest story. Chock-full of monotheistic religion.”
“Oh dear,” said Paul.
Delphine said, “Tell me the basic plot again?”
Max answered, “Well, in the first act, Taras decides to make a little war to avenge various crimes and show his sons how life on the steppe is lived. In the second act, Andrei betrays the Cossacks for the sake of a beautiful woman and Taras has to kill him. In the third act, Ostap is captured, and Taras traces him to Warsaw, where he watches his execution, and this is followed by general war.”
“I just don’t get the theme,” said Elena. “What am I, the audience, supposed to learn here? You know what it’s like? It’s like The Return of Martin Guerre, where the guy comes back from the Thirty Years War and says he’s this woman’s husband, and he moves in and they have a lovely time, and then the other redheaded guy comes home, and he’s much worse—he’s lost one leg and he never was very nice to begin with, and now he’s mad as hell, and he manages to prove that he is Martin Guerre, and the wife, who is perfectly beautiful and well meaning, has to watch the fake husband, who is her real beloved, get hanged, and then go home and accept the nasty bastard who is her real husband, and he’s even madder now that he knows that she slept with the other guy.”
“Talk about a Catch-22,” said Charlie.
“Well, it was a wonderful movie, but I was in my twenties when I saw it, and I thought that was just the way life was—unjust, romantic, and sad. I mean, now I think, well, at least she k
new true love for a while, and maybe that’s worth a high price, but what’s the lesson of this one?”
“Does there have to be a lesson?” said Max.
“Think of a Hollywood movie without one,” said Delphine. “You can’t think of one.”
“It’s not a Hollywood movie,” said Stoney.
“What if it’s just like the book?” said Max. “What if it just unfolds, battles, sieges, raids, tortures, conflagrations? Religious hatreds, anti-Semitism, and all? What if the characters are unvarnished and misguided and make the wrong choices and die cruel deaths, the end? I saw The Return of Martin Guerre, too. What I liked about it was the hog wallows and the geese in the house and the dark, low-ceilinged rooms and the dully shining pewter on the table and the dirty faces and the strange-looking cattle, and all in color. We could do that, too. Take a camera into the past and show how different it was.”
“Like Rob Roy,” said Cassie. “I remember I saw that movie with some friends, and in the opening credits, you had all these shots of the beautiful Scottish Highlands, and I turned to the other couple and I said, ‘These are my people, onscreen at last!’ and then they grin and all their teeth are black and rotten.”
Everyone smiled.
Charlie said, “So, Max, are you going to make this movie?”
Max shook his head.
Zoe glanced at Stoney, who was looking out the window. Stoney knew, and therefore Zoe understood, that negotiations were not over—they were only just beginning.
Zoe pushed back her chair and got up from the table. One of the things that you noticed over the years in Hollywood was how many of the movies that didn’t get made coexisted in your mind with all the movies that did get made. Take that Uncle Tom’s Cabin movie, for example. She had thought the odds on getting that movie made were a thousand to one. And yet, in her mind, there were scenes from a movie—the slave woman Cassy and the new girl hiding in the attic of Simon Legree’s ramshackle house, only coming out at night to haunt Legree as part of Cassy’s escape plan. Or Cassy and the girl sneaking through the horrid Louisiana swamps, all the trees draped in Spanish moss, poisonous snakes swimming all around them. And she could perfectly picture scenes without herself at all—Tom on the deck of the paddle-wheeled steamboat, asleep, waking up to the sound of feet running past his head, and then sitting up just in time to watch a girl whose child is going to be sold as she throws herself with the child in her arms over the railing into the river. Or at the beginning, maybe even during the opening credits, the wife of the Kentucky plantation owner breaks the news to the slave girl Eliza, who is otherwise well treated and well dressed, that her child is to be sold to help pay some of the plantation’s debts. There would be the great scene where Eliza leaps from ice floe to ice floe as she escapes across the Ohio River. And here’s the paddle-wheeler going down the Ohio River, and Morgan Freeman or Sidney Poitier, or someone younger, maybe Danny Glover, standing by the railing on the lower deck, as Tom.
Having a movie in your mind was not like reading a book, where the passing images were loose and a bit vague, and the characters had being but not actual faces. When you were thinking about something for a movie, well, there was Morgan Freeman as Tom, and he was reassuring and wise, and his wife was a grandmotherly type, and the things that were done to Morgan were shocking and unjust the way all attacks on goodness are unjust, and Morgan Freeman’s movie was about that. But if Danny were Tom, then he wasn’t a grandfather, and his wife, say Oprah, wasn’t a grandmother—they were healthy and youthful and good, but also a bit dangerous, without even knowing it, and everything about Danny as Tom while he is going down the hard path he must go down takes more effort and more faith—and that was how she would have played Cassy to Danny’s Tom. She, and maybe only she (as Cassy, of course), would have sensed the rebellion that Tom was holding in check, and she would have tried to appeal to it. He would have come to the plantation in a new shipment of slaves, and he would have been imposingly healthy because he would have been treated well in his last place, and he would have been in despair because he had been expecting to be freed, and she, as Cassy, half crazy from working as Legree’s concubine and put to work in the fields for insubordination, in spite of her beauty, would have seen this Tom as her only hope. It would have been like a seduction in a way, though not a sexual one. She would have been seducing the side of him that could be tempted to hate and destroy, and the drama and electricity of their conversation would come from the audience’s knowledge that such a thing as attacking and killing Legree was still physically possible for Tom because of his size and strength, and also at least remotely tempting for him because he does recognize the injustice of the world he lives in—he not only recognizes it, he also knows that other worlds exist, unlike most of the field slaves on the plantation. It would have been a great scene.
And she would have gotten to escape, to go north, to show Cassy’s ability to transform her very being in order to ride trains, walk down streets, to pass, literally, among the enemy, all to save the girl. It was a great, great part.
And then there was the music. The packet of materials Spielberg’s company sent with the book included an article by some college professor about how, in the slave period, music was used by the whites for coercive purposes—as long as the slaves were singing, then they couldn’t be planning among themselves for escape or rebellion. So the slaves were made to sing, but what they sang about was release and redemption—their release, and the redemption of the world they lived in—and so the music was complex and beautiful. Zoe could hear the soundtrack even without precisely knowing the words to all the songs. Even a song that no one could sing anymore, like “Ole Black Joe,” would take on a different meaning altogether, and all the voices would sing out, in chorus and solo. While she was imagining the movie, Zoe had longed to be one of those voices—for that reason alone, she would have participated in the project, just to sing those songs with the full knowledge of what they meant. That Uncle Tom’s Cabin project was never to be and existed only in her mind, but so powerfully that she had never bothered to seek out a copy of the TV movie, though the cast was full of actors she liked and respected. The only thing she’d heard about it was that since they filmed in Mississippi there could be no ice floes, so Eliza escaped on a raft of some kind. If Max pursued this movie long enough, thought about it long enough—it would get bigger and fuller, until it seemed like it was actually on film, and only some sort of extraneous factor, like the existence of another version, showed you that it wasn’t. Zoe sighed, though not precisely for either Max’s project, to which she was mostly indifferent, or Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She sighed, she thought, because there were certain thoughts you had that should be realized and communicated, but never would be.
Paul, who had given her a decorous kiss, was standing by the open refrigerator, his nose to the blossom end of a cantaloupe he had found there. The look on his face told her that he found the cantaloupe worthy even though it was out of season. He set it down on the counter and contemplated it, then took out an orange. Then the front door opened and Simon walked in with Isabel. Simon was saying, “And, let’s see, chocolate croissants for a healthy start to the day, and a couple of nice Danish for the more adventurous ones like your mom.” He smiled. Zoe didn’t see how you could resist his smile, but Isabel seemed to. She said, “People don’t realize that dairy products are actually bad for you. Small children should not eat dairy products. It screws up their calcium uptake. They should actually be eating kale and broccoli and dandelion greens.”
Simon set down his bag on the center island and said, “I can eat dandelion greens. I have eaten kale and Brussels sprouts. It’s just that I choose to eat Cap’n Crunch. Right, Mom?”
“Right!” said Elena. “You are incorrigible.” She smiled and turned to Isabel. “But he likes tofu, I’ll give him that. Who’s hungry?”
Max said, “Where’s the paper? What day is today?”
“It’s Wednesday,” said Isabel.
“Day seven of the war,” said Elena, “and no one’s stopped it yet.”
“We’re winning,” said Charlie, and Elena gave him a tight look.
“It’s true,” he said. “It’s all over the paper. They’re moving toward Baghdad as fast as they can. There’s hardly any resistance to speak of. Hardly anyone’s been killed. I mean, everyone’s saying that it’s going better than expected.”
“Just who is everyone?” said Elena. “The same everyones who concocted the war to begin with, right?” Zoe saw Cassie and Delphine exchange a glance. There had been a few words at the dinner table the night before, but not a real argument.
“Well, the newspeople. Everyone,” said Charlie. He looked simultaneously oblivious and aggressive.
“And,” said Elena, sharply, “explain to me this ‘winning’ idea.”
Zoe glanced at Isabel and Max. They were glancing at each other and at her. Max had an odd look on his face. He was standing by the toaster, and his toast popped up, and he put his hand out for it, but he didn’t pick it up.
“What do you mean?” said Charlie.
“What do you mean? What does winning this war mean?”
“Well, obviously, getting rid of the weapons of mass destruction, rousting out the Al Qaeda cells, getting rid of Saddam.” He smiled, Zoe thought uncomfortably, but brazenly. It had dawned on him that the person who could be called his hostess was deadly, seriously angry. Zoe, however, had to admit that what he said made perfect sense—obviously you had to do those things. Paul was still cutting up the fruit and setting it in neat wedges on a plate. Charlie went on, “Making sure that they don’t attack us, of course.”
“Were they planning to attack us?” Elena lifted the knife she was holding, then put it down on the island.
“Yes.”
“What’s your evidence for that? Are Iraqi troops massing in Mexico and Canada? Are there Iraqi ships sitting just outside American waters, are Iraqi submarines in New York Harbor?”
