by Ward Just
Yes. And who admire Wannsee 1899.
A quiet period in your history, Greenwood said.
Mostly, it was quiet, yes.
Greenwood poured more tea, adding lemon, and made as if to go. He wanted to write down what Werner had said so he could repeat it to Claire word for word.
I wish you luck with your history, Werner.
There is something I meant to tell you.
Save it, Greenwood said. We can talk tomorrow.
Werner said, Someone called for you this afternoon. Whoever it was stopped at the front desk but left no message, I think.
There was nothing in my mailbox, Greenwood said.
A woman. I got only a glimpse of her.
Young? Old?
You must ask Marlene. She spoke to Marlene. I heard her say something about seeing your picture in the newspaper.
I didn’t know my picture was in the newspaper.
Oh, yes, Werner said. It was there. It was a few weeks ago. An announcement of your presence at Mommsen House.
Greenwood nodded. That would be the explanation. One more middle-aged American tourist having breakfast in her suite at Kempinski’s thinking it would be exciting to meet Dixon Greenwood, so why not hire a car and drive to Wannsee, see if he’s available for a drink or dinner and a chat about the motion picture business. Probably they had a friend in common, a college classmate or a mutual friend in the Industry. He sipped his tea and watched the light struggle in the western sky, wondering what the chef had against Frau Munn other than her microwave, the disputed photographs of a time long past, and the Asiatic waiters, the ones who were diluting the Teutonic gene pool. And then a fantastic idea came to him, and he looked up.
Short or tall, Werner?
I did not see her clearly.
Brunette, about fifty-five though she looks younger?
I don’t know, honestly.
Probably wearing a black beret?
Werner said, She was trim.
Beautifully built. A husky American voice.
No, Werner said.
A mink coat—
Perhaps, Werner said.
Walking with her head forward because she’s nearsighted? He was certain he had it now. Claire on the flight from Singapore to Paris or Rome and then on to Berlin. That would be like her, she enjoyed surprises, the more improbable the better. It would be like her to sashay into Mommsen House and ask for the American director, what was his name? Oldwood? Greenwood? She needed to speak to him urgently, so she would go away for a while and then return. No, no name. Claire had shown up once in Chicago while he was filming, walking into his suite at midnight, talking a kind of pidgin English and declaring that she was lonely on the coast and—Are you happy to see me, darling?
She spoke German, Werner said.
Greenwood turned away, dispirited, his hand so unsteady the teacup danced in its saucer. Another false spring come and gone. In that brief moment he had imagined them together in Berlin, introducing her to Willa and Frau Munn, Anya Ryan and the Kessels. The thought elated him and would not go away. He had imagined a week together, showing her the city, with special attention paid to the Topography of Terror and Sachsenhausen, with a side trip to Hitler’s bunker and Treptower Park later on to visit the Soviet dead, dinner at Munn Café so she could inspect Frau Munn’s trove of photographs, the before and after. Mahler at the Philharmonie, George Grosz at the Alte Nationalgalerie, not forgetting Libeskind’s Jewish Museum, the building that was so overpowering they could not decide what to put in it; so for the time being it was vacant, including the thirty-foot-high dungeon that tapered to the ceiling where a single small window indicated the world outside, false hope for the imprisoned. All this would be new to her, and then a long journey by car through Poland and the Baltic states to St. Petersburg. Neither of them had visited Russia. She had always wanted to go to Petersburg and walk along the boulevards and dine at a restaurant overlooking the frozen Neva, imagining Russian life of the nineteenth century, horse-drawn carriages moving through snowflakes the size of marbles, Nevsky Prospekt, the Admiralty buildings, pink granite, and bridges.
But Claire was not in Europe after all. She was somewhere near an open Asian sea. The possibility of seeing her made him realize how much he missed her. He was tired of talking to himself. Berlin seemed to demand solitude but it did not reward solitude. He wondered if Asia was the same for her, but of course it wouldn’t be because she was in an airplane filled with friends. Dix closed his eyes and leaned against the doorjamb, sipping Werner’s tea.
I’m sorry, Herr Greenwood.
I had an idea it might be my wife.
From America, he said.
A surprise visit, Dix said.
Your wife should be here with you, Werner said.
Yes, you mentioned that before.
A wife or a warmer climate, Werner said.
I was going to take her to St. Petersburg.
Petersburg is worse than Berlin! And it is filled with Russians.
So they say, Dix said.
And dangerous. Gangsters everywhere.
We’ve never been, Dix said.
There’s something else, Werner said. Something I’ve forgotten.
It doesn’t matter, Dix said.
Your visitor. I thought I recognized her.
Who was she, then?
I have no idea, Werner said. I had only a glimpse. But she looked familiar to me. Why, I cannot say.
16
GREENWOOD SAT in the chair by the window with his tea, cold now and bitter. He watched the scullers heading for home, bending like jockeys in the saddle. The Wannsee 1899 script was open in his lap but he did not look at it, preferring instead to admire the sculls’ wavy chevrons on the surface of the water. He remained without moving for several minutes, beguiled by the stillness of the gathering darkness, wondering all the while who had come looking for him at Mommsen House. When he went to the kitchen to prepare a vodka, he remembered that the last time he had done so, he was listening to Claire’s voice with the hiss in the background. He returned to his chair and picked up the script, thumbing the pages, weighing it with both hands. Heavy product, he thought. Willa had translated it herself; a free translation, she explained with a laugh. The writer was from the former East, a professor of philosophy who moonlighted as a screenwriter and quite successfully. He was much in demand. A better screenwriter than philosopher, she said. He taught at Weimar, the city of Goethe. He hoped for the open hand of Goethe but instead he got the smirk of the commissars, so his philosophical works were—pinched, she said with a wide smile.
It’s a pretty good script, she went on. He’s a professional, never uses two words where one will do. Never uses any words at all when he can help it. Understands the camera, where it can go and where it can’t. Sometimes his politics get in the way, but isn’t that often the case with talented individuals with axes to grind? Narrative makes a convenient whetstone, does it not? He’s homosexual and despises blood sport so all his scripts begin with a hunt. And pay attention to the music, please.
The directions were explicit: in the opening moments the soundtrack was silent, then filling gradually with the violins of the adagio from the first movement of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony, the one that moves so deliberately that a listener could believe it represented the beat of a sleeping heart. The scene began with two hawks wheeling in a brilliant sky, the hawks turning and falling, then rising as full of emotion as young dancers, their eyes patrolling the woodland below, the birches and maples afire with autumn color. They were watching a hunting party track stag in the forest of the estate in East Prussia, the one in the vicinity of the Masurian Lakes, south of Königsberg near the Polish border. They were the old baron, his three sons, and their weekend guests, robust men in traditional hunting kit, brown trousers and green jackets with suede patches at the elbows, leather boots and wide-brimmed felt hats, each carrying a side-by-side shotgun armed with a double load. The women followed on horseback, single
file on a bridle path. There was something sinister about the atmosphere, though the day was sunny and summerlike, unseasonably warm, the sky a Prussian blue. The underbrush was thick, giving way here and there into a clearing, then closing again. Heavy storks’ nests crowned the alders and maples, and now and then the party heard the hoot of an owl. And all this time the disconsolate melody of Mahler’s adagio.
The baron, his sons, and the weekend guests were moving in a line through the forest, the beaters and the dogs in the wetlands ahead, heard rather than seen. The beaters wore heavy boots, struggling through the marsh. They approached the hunters shouting Hut! Hut! and striking the marsh trees with their canes. The dogs’ jaws moved continuously, the beaters cupping their hands to their mouths as they called out. The afternoon was warm enough so that the men were sweating. They had ordered the women to be quiet but from time to time brittle laughter intruded, feminine vivacity in counterpoint to the seriousness of the hunt. The men instinctively raised their shotguns when a fox showed itself, then sped away into the undergrowth. There was something remorseless about the manner in which the men forced their way through the forest with the women trailing companionably behind in their bright clothes and conversational attitude. The camera focused on each man in turn, beginning with the red-faced baron with his fleshy nose and bristling mustache, an irascible expression on his face as he pushed through the underbrush. My property, his demeanor seemed to say, get out of my way when I’m on it. A hunting horn hung from his neck on a lanyard, and his shotgun was cradled in his arms. His oldest son walked with his youngest son; they were laughing soundlessly over some joke, careful not to be overheard by their father. The middle son walked alone, deep in thought, apparently oblivious of the task at hand. Rolf was unmistakably a city boy, with his two-inch ponytail and soft face, uncomfortable in rough clothes. He picked at the seat of his trousers, ambling negligently, as he would have done on a city street or park path. He carried his shotgun carelessly by the barrel, the stock on his shoulder like a student’s book bag. Every few moments he glanced behind him, searching for the women, reassuring himself that they were in the vicinity. Watching Rolf, his older brother, Christian, muttered that he had the look of a condemned man reviewing the misfortune that had brought him to this place, a woodland penitentiary with no reprieve in sight.
The camera paused briefly at each of the weekend guests, hearty middle-aged men, all but indistinguishable in their hunting uniforms, at ease in the surroundings, eyes moving left and right, as alert as scouts on reconnaissance, watching for stag and listening hard for the bleat of the old baron’s hunting horn. By degrees the film slowed so that the hunters were advancing in time to the music, and physically overwhelmed by the towering birches and conifers of the forest, watched all the while by the two circling hawks and the owl, permanent residents of this unquiet, unpeaceable kingdom.
Then the camera drew back, rising, until the hawks were only commas in the sky. Away to the north and east were the Masurian Lakes and settlements connected by pathways. Not quite a wilderness but not civilization, either. The camera lingered, then returned to the hunting party, focusing now on the women, beginning with the baroness—younger than the baron by two decades, she handled her mount roughly, her expression one of haughty boredom—and moving on to the three young women, two blond and lovely, the third brunette and not lovely. The plain one rode superbly, leading the way on the path, handling her horse as if she had been born on it. Her two friends were mocking her, imitating the way she sat and gripped the reins, her straight spine, the mannish swing to her shoulders. If she heard the laughter behind her, she made no sign. She was trying to keep the men in view, her head turtling forward as she attempted to penetrate the underbrush and the thick-waisted trees, and when her horse balked, she dug her spurs into its flesh. Now and then she caught sight of the lagging middle son, the barrels of his shotgun dully reflecting the occasional shafts of sunlight that fell through the crowns of the trees. His hat was off white and he wore a red scarf, unnecessary on such a warm day, and a mighty irritant to his father, a stickler for the traditions of the hunt. But the boy had never understood these rituals, forms as rigid as a sonnet. He had always been a dreamy boy, slow to anger, quick to retreat, a sly boy, his mother thought, with an unwholesome personality.
The camera rose then to display the panorama, the women behind, the hunters in the middle, the beaters and the dogs ahead, advancing toward them—and between the beaters and the hunters, shivering in a swale, a stag with a fine rack. Mahler’s adagio faded and the sounds of the hunt arrived, the hysterical baying of the dogs, the shouts of the beaters, the crash of the underbrush, and back of it all the playful laughter of the young women on horseback. There were fragments of conversation, too, the beaters complaining of the heat, the brothers planning a midwinter escapade in merry Munich, the weekend guests speculating on the size of the old baron’s landholdings, not a centimeter less than one thousand hectares and probably much, much more, prime Prussian soil, fields and woodlands with small lakes to break the monotony, every species of wildlife and the necessary woodsmen to maintain them, although the manor house did seem rundown, not at all comme il faut, even considering the plain style of Prussian aristocrats, any show of wealth seen as a sign of weakness.
The young women continued to gossip, concentrating now on the attractive shyness of the middle son, so out of place in his rough clothes and firearm, a young man more at home in a classroom or drawing room, or lying in some lover’s arms on the grassy banks of an urban river, reciting poetry and making love. He was the sort of boy who needed a woman’s protection against the brutalities of the world. His brothers were devils, so they fit right in—and here the girls began to whisper, describing the latest carousal, this one in Berlin, or was it Hamburg—dancers from a cabaret, women of the lowest type . . . The conversations were sporadic and confusing and then they subsided to a stony silence, replaced gradually by the strings and woodwinds of Mahler’s tender adagio, all movement now in slow motion as the advance continued.
When the old baron raised the hunting horn to his mouth and blew a single note, the hunters surged forward. The women urged their horses into a trot. The beaters froze where they stood, knowing that the dogs had the stag cornered, and wondered which dog would feel the puncture of the antler’s points. They listened for the anguished whine. The camera did not leave the baron’s broad German face, the veins in his forehead rising to resemble heavy twine pulled taut. The single note seemed to last forever. The old man’s enormous hands squeezed the horn and his cheeks billowed like a sail caught in a sudden gust, his cheeks coarse and red and streaked with sweat, milky droplets hanging from the wiry gray hairs of his mustache. His eyes grew wide and frightened, as if he had seen something terrible, and all the more terrible for being utterly unexpected. He seemed to struggle as the single note soared on and on, and then the horn fell from his mouth, his cheeks contracting as his eyes continued to stare at the unexpected thing somewhere beyond on the horizon.
Now his head jerked from side to side in spasms, a thin string of blood running from his nose and collecting in his mustache. His arms were raised high to the sky, the horn still held in his vise grip. He muttered something unintelligible and began to stagger, heaving this way and that. His hand went to his heart and he sagged to his knees, drooling, blood rushing from his nose and mouth. On all fours, he raised his head and toppled, crashing to the ground, rolling once and then lying still, his blood beginning to pool, his blue eyes wide open and staring at the shafts of sunlight that fell through the trees. The camera focused on the shotgun, its oiled stock and blue-black barrel, delicate chasing along the silver panel above the trigger, the baron’s crest and initials in Gothic script. The horn remained in his fist. The single note receded to silence and the natural sounds began once again, the dogs first, followed by the hunters pushing through the forest’s undergrowth. The baron lay in a small depression, the greens and browns of his hunting clothes joining with t
he branches and leaves of the forest floor, his pulmonary blood equally inconspicuous. One of the weekend guests passed within ten feet of him and saw nothing, so intent was he on stalking the stag. His three sons were well ahead and the beaters farther ahead still. The women were picking their way along the bridle path, twisting and ducking to avoid the heavy branches of the firs and beeches that lined the way.
At last they heard a single shot followed by a faint cheer. The dogs were howling and the women knew without being told that the stag was dead and that flasks of schnapps were being passed around and toasts drunk, the old baron pronouncing the traditional words. The blond girls rolled their eyes and snickered at the faraway shots and laughter, a celebration such as would follow a great battle against eastern barbarians, not a single truculent stag, an animal beautiful to look at, a noble carriage and bearing. A celebration of the strong bullying the weak, a kind of violent lovemaking, remorseless certainly, but there would be primitive animal ecstasy, too, blood and bruises, loathing, pain, exhaustion, deep sleep. The women continued to maneuver their horses down the bridle path, eager to join the celebration and learn who had fired the fatal shot, and then to watch the expert gutting of the stag. But ahead the baroness had halted and was slowly dismounting, kneeling, her hand to her mouth. And then she was screaming, high thin notes that rose ever higher, beyond the woodlands to the lakes and streams, rising and spreading to the very limits of the vast estate, and then diminishing to silence, while the hawks continued to circle in lazy arcs and the beaters, the hunters, and the weekend guests turned to seek the source of the wailing.
Greenwood rose to refill his glass, switching on the overhead light and the standing lamp in the kitchen. The room had been dark except for the single reading light next to his chair. He absently dropped ice cubes and covered them with vodka, deep in thought, thinking that the screenwriter had done a creditable job. The setting was provocative, everything shown, not told, leaving the viewer with the slightest suspicion, surely false, that someone had killed the old man, shot him dead where he stood, the killer his wife or middle son, Rolf, or one of the weekend guests, nothing so prosaic as a stroke. And that, too, had been well prepared for, the old baron corpulent, irascible, an unquiet temperament. Such a man invited distress, stroke or heart attack or apoplexy. There was nothing about him that invited sympathy, either—only the look of terror in his eyes when he knew something dreadful had happened to him. But you would need a very good cameraman, someone with experience, a cameraman with lyric gifts, intimate with shadows. And the soundman would have to know his business, recording each conversation, and separately the ambient sound; the mix was the director’s responsibility. The blond girls, avid with excitement, urging their horses forward in order to witness the celebration was a sequence of tremendous potential, concluding the moment they came around the turn in the bridle path and saw the baron down, blood on his face and hands, his widow kneeling beside him, her fists raised to the sky. So they would look at one another, appalled, and rein their horses and wait for the others, the sons, the weekend guests, and the beaters. Of course the music was an inspiration, though Dix remembered Mahler’s adagio as sinister, not tender.
