This Great Escape

by Andrew Steinmetz

  Trepliov

  I’m commonplace and insignificant.

  JANINE

  My family name being Blum, people would naturally assume. Same as with Eva’s maiden name. But it isn’t always that the person with that name is Jewish. We weren’t brought up that way at all, neither was my father’s family brought up in the Jewish faith. Michael’s name of course was Paryla, and no one would assume anything. Living in the Soo, I knew two Jewish families. You just didn’t talk about it and there was nothing to talk about. Being German or being Jewish was not an issue. But I knew. I knew about his family background.1

  My father was accused by Eva of trying to make trouble for the Stehrs when they went to get citizenship. But that was never proven and I think it was a case of Eva having an imagination, and her paranoia. My dad didn’t have a clue about influencing anybody in government. He never took an interest in politics. But then I wouldn’t know for sure. I wasn’t living at home at the time. I was at McGill. After I left for university I really severed ties with the Soo. I had found it stifling.

  *

  Trepliov (enters, hatless, carrying a gun, and a dead seagull): Are you alone here?

  Nina: Yes alone.

  (Trepliov lays the seagull at her feet.)

  Nina: What does this mean?

  Trepliov: I was despicable enough to kill this seagull today. I’m laying it at your feet.

  Nina: What is the matter with you? (Picks up the seagull and looks at it.)

  Trepliov (after a pause): Soon I shall kill myself in the same way.

  Because words in Chekhov onstage are directly related to actions offstage; because Arkadina heckles the outdoor performance of Trepliov’s play; because Nina says she is drawn to the lake on Sorin’s estate ‘like a seagull’; because Trepliov loves Nina, and because Nina stars in Trepliov’s tedious new-agey playlet; because when Trepliov tells Nina he loves her, Nina responds ‘shhh’; because Arkadina’s lover, the writer, Trigorin, becomes interested in Nina; because Nina falls for Trigorin; because Arkadina is jealous, and because Trepliov is doubly jealous; because Arkadina calls Trepliov a ‘non-entity’, and because Trepliov feels like a non-entity in her presence; because Trepliov’s father is missing from his life, yet influential; because nothingness and emptiness and impotence are leitmotifs for Trepliov; because Arkadina wills her son into non-being so she may not grow old; because after Trepliov’s first attempt to take his life, Arkadina bandages his head, and warns him—when she is about to leave the estate again—she wants no more ‘bang bang’; because Trepliov fails at art and at love.

  *

  JANINE

  The last time I saw him was in 1962, before the movie was made, but he knew that he was going to be in it and he was quite excited talking about that. The excitement for him was being with all those renowned German actors. And then he died shortly after making the film. He was in Hamburg—wasn’t he?—working on a play. The story given to me was that he was given uppers and downers, because you don’t sleep very well when you have an exciting play, and it goes late: you arrive home and you need to come down, but you can’t mix drugs with alcohol. That was the story—‘that’s what happened’. And Margaret was not implicated in any of that, was she?

  I could not believe how little his part was in the film. He had such a minor role.

  KEN

  Mike had some permanent damage as a result of mumps. It definitely had gone into the testes. He’d mentioned it on more than a couple of occasions when Eva was present. It was obvious that it had been serious. At the least, it would have been very painful and very scary at the time. However, I am certain that there was some permanent effect. I understand that in rare cases sterility can occur.

  Arkadina: You won’t play about with a gun again when I’m away, will you?

  Trepliov: No, Mama. That was a moment of mad despair, when I had no control over myself. It won’t happen again. (Kisses her hands.) You’ve got magic hands.

  EVA

  The tragedy was that he got involved with a woman who was ten years older than him. I never met her, but she had a son, who was eighteen, and they wanted to send him from Germany to Canada, to do his high-school again. And when he came to us—a young person so dishonest and misled and confused—we had to send him back. It was a catastrophe. He was a total mess. Jerry.

  Knowing this boy, Jerry, I knew that this woman had to be sick. I could not do anything for Michi, he had to find out for himself, he had to untangle the knot. You know, Michael was such a straight, honest person. And he wasn’t anymore. He did things later … I just shudder.

  Of course Margaret, she was extremely angry when her son was sent back to Germany. Irene, my sister in Munich, tried to contact Michi about the whole business. He wouldn’t listen to her or to me. We had not been in touch. Michi was in Hamburg. He had this engagement with a theatre, and he was under such pressure from that woman—so that’s where he died, in Hamburg. She died the year later, from a brain tumour, on the operating table. I always knew that woman was sick.

  KEN

  He did not do well at school—although that surprises me. I have found a clipping from the Star dated August 19, 1955. It lists the students’ marks from the grade thirteen examinations at the Collegiate Institute. Mike’s marks were Eng. Comp. 50, Eng. Lit. 56, Alg. 50, Geom. 77, Trig 51, Botany 60, Phys. 60, Chem. 67.

  TERRY (Eva’s friend)

  I shared a house with Eva in London, Ontario, for several years. Eva never talked to me much about Michael, and to be honest, I never encouraged her to talk about him. I figured if she wanted to tell me anything about him, she would do so on her own accord. She did however tell me that he had killed himself, and she thought drugs had something to do with it. She mentioned “the woman” but never went too deeply into it. After Eva died I did find a couple of photos of Michael and I believe I still have them tucked away somewhere. There’s no doubt that Michael had what you might call “movie star” good looks, sort of a James Dean looking sort.

  KEN

  I saw Eva the following year. It was awkward because, although Eva seemed pleased for a visit, she told me not to mention Mike.

  EVA

  I would have gone to Germany, but I couldn’t.

  JANINE

  For some reason that I never fathomed, there was a rift between Eva and Michael. I never understood what was going on there, with Margaret, his girlfriend or wife—or why Eva had removed herself from contact. She didn’t hear from him for years. And then after he died, she slept beside a photograph of him, which she had on her bed table, for twenty-seven years. But at the end of her life, when my sister went to see her in hospital she wouldn’t open that door. ‘It’s too late, it’s too late.’

  *

  Special Consultation Room. National Library and Archives, Ottawa. On the 3rd floor, I have been instructed to wear white cotton gloves when handling the material. The material is Michael. In March 1956, he played Claudio in the English Department’s production of William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. There are no extant reviews. This is because there are gaps in the publication schedule of The McGill Daily. One such hole begins early in March 1956, before Much Ado opened at Moyse Hall. Publication of the newspaper recommenced in May. Convocation season. But not for Michael. He dropped out of his year at McGill in April and left Montréal in the fall for Munich. To become an actor. And maybe because the advances of a married woman, the weight of a lover, the pressure of his Arkadinian mother, his father’s whirlpooling void, were too much for The Adonis.

  There has to be more to find out about his time in Sault Ste. Marie and at McGill, and to do this I had intended to query a few more ‘names’ from Michael’s past, and to return to several of the known ‘key players’, like his good pal Ken Taylor or the straight-talking Lois Rodger. But after transcribing and reading the material through, I thought differently. I had enough
. Just enough? It didn’t seem right that I should go back for second looks. Second or third conversations invoked the spectre of police work, and statements under oath. Going back would entice embellishment or self-censorship, and also draw more attention upon me, more reflection upon my motives, when many of these people I talked with already had preconceived notions, having read my portrait of the lady.2 In their eyes, I was either heretic or hagiographer, and I didn’t feel comfortable in either role.

  You see, almost without exception, Michael’s people belonged, at one time or another, to the cult of Eva. What they remembered about Michael or Mike or Michi was often preceded by fond memories of his mother. They remembered her Whippets and Borzoi, her bridge playing and cigarette smoking, her personal style and cooking, above all her life stories—about Bimbo, the pet monkey she had as a child in Breslau; about her mother’s death from tuberculosis; about her brother and father committing her to an asylum in Germany because she pursued acting; about her marrying Karl Paryla to get away from her family; learning to play accordion in Zurich; about the dangers of her post at Radio Berlin and the invitation to become a spy for the Russians. They remembered these stories, from Eva’s canon, and also they remembered that which infused her voice: her larger-than-life manner of being. And, without exception, they bore witness to the profound influence Michael’s mother and stepfather Antoine had had on their own lives; how each of them, each their own way, were touched by this pair. Eva took people in when people needed taking in. We need to be understood most when we don’t understand ourselves. They talked to me about Eva as, I began to feel, Michael himself would never have talked about his own mother.

  Eva figured in my own childhood, and always in the back of my mind was a story I’d heard about her and The Threepenny Opera. I didn’t know much about the playwright Bertolt Brecht initially, but in my early twenties I played in a rock band in Montréal, and one night while we were in the studio making a recording I got to talking with the sound engineer about Kurt Weill. When we were done putting down tracks for the evening the sound engineer pulled out a record of Lenya performing ‘Seeräuberjenny’ and ‘Kanonen-Song’. That was it. The world-weary killer instinct: Eva talked like that. She could put on a kind of kitsch, and roll to that droll, aloof, harsh cabaret style.

  It was easy, suddenly, to see Eva as a product of Weimar Germany, manufactured by that precise period evoked by Brecht & Weill’s songs. As a socialist playwright, Brecht wouldn’t touch naturalism, which he considered an endorsement of the bourgeois world view. Eva was schooled in Brecht, and so it felt right that a novel based on her life story should put up with ideas of alienation and detachment in an effort to … I don’t know, bring about a little genre consciousness.

  Before leaving Montréal in 1956, I like to think that Mike had time on his hands, time and the inclination to peruse the INCO advertisement, which appears in the May 25th edition of The McGill Daily: “Almost two million pounds of INCO Nickel will help brighten Canadian cars in 1956 … more jobs for Canadians at the International Nickel Company of Canada.” Sault Ste. Marie, on the shores of Lake Superior, is not far from the INCO mines. I doubt Mike had it in him to return there.

  So: Germany.

  His mother did not approve. Eva didn’t want him to return there. But she and Antoine couldn’t afford to send him to New York, the only other acceptable option, in their minds, where he could train as an actor. “In Canada, it was shit.” Direct quote from Eva’s mouth. Michael called Canada a desert. So it was back to Europe. At least in Munich he could stay with relatives, including Eva’s sisters, Irene and Melanie, and father, Emil, all of whom had spent the war years in Germany.

  Despite his mother’s misgivings, Michael was back on German soil, only seven years after leaving the DP camp in Lahr. He was fourteen then; he is twenty-one now. His return allowed him to renew contact with his biological father, though the relationship between the two would always be strained. Karl Paryla had lived and worked in the early years of the GDR, in East Berlin, but he retained his permanent residence in Vienna, with his second wife, the actor Hortense Raky, and their children, the actors Nicholas and Stephan Paryla-Raky.

  When Janine Blum visited Michael in the summer of 1957, the couple toured the Swiss Alps. They went to see his elementary school, a Waldorf school, which Janine remembers was located in Habkern and not in Zurich after all. Habkern is a German–speaking municipality in the canton of Bern. The word is derived from the Old High German word for ‘hawk’ and Habkern wikipediately is ‘the place where there are many hawks.’ Hawks perhaps, but not a place of many people. The municipality’s population in 1951 hovered below seven hundred. Whether Michael attended a school in the place of many hawks or in Zurich, place of many ultra-rich, is neither here nor there. That it drew him back, in his twenties, and he revisited his school with his girlfriend is the point. His school made an impression on him. Michael had so few places like it, that he could name home, no permanent address. Born in exile, he was essentially a refugee and of undetermined nationality since birth. Yet he remembered the Waldorf school fondly. There must have been a reason.

  During their travels, in Zurich, Michael and Janine stopped in at Café Select. During the Second World War years, Café Select was a headquarters for emigrants, misfits, pacifists and anti-fascists, and it was here that Michael’s stepfather Antoine often went to pass the time. Eva and Antoine found each other in Zurich. But for Michael and Janine, Zurich was no place to rest. They toured the Bernese Alps and gazed upon the Eiger and Shreckhorn, before returning to Munich and finally saying their goodbyes. Michael had no intention of returning to Canada. Janine, no plan to stay in Germany. So: heartbreak. Janine would follow Michael’s successes in acting from afar, through her relationship with Eva, which stayed strong.

  Michael met Margaret Jahnen by 1959. They did not marry, but the couple lived in Munich as husband and wife, with Margaret’s teenage son, Jerry. Margaret goes down in history as ‘that woman’, an older woman. She was not Michael’s first association with an older woman, if we are to believe in the advances of the wife of one of his former professors at McGill. His relationship with Margaret Jahnen led to a prolonged estrangement with Eva. (Somehow, no surprise there.) Moreover, the couple experienced money troubles and Michael worked a series of odd jobs on top of his acting gigs. Chronic financial worries and professional jealousies led to tension with his father. Soon, the only person left in his corner was Margaret, about whom the family then and now remains wilfully ignorant.

  After the lean first years, his career gradually took off and he earned engagements in theatres in Bremen and in Hamburg. His acting credits include television and film roles. An extra in the film Der Engel, der seine Harfe versetzte (1959); Francisco in Hamlet, Prinz von Dänemark, a television production staring Maximilian Schell (1961); he played an extra in the film Die Schatten werden länger—Defiant Daughters, The Shadows Grow Longer (1961). He was Fred Nicolls in a TV production of Der Strohhalm, Eugene O’Neill’s ‘The Straw’ (1964), and he appeared in Aktion T 4 and Aktion Brieftaube—Schicksale im geteilten Berlin (1964). But from the beginning of his career he focused on becoming a stage actor. Early highlights include the part of Don Cesar in a production of Ein Bruderzwist in Habsburg by Franz Grillparzer, a play about a fratricidal quarrel, and a role in the August Everding production of L’Affaire Dreyfus by Hans Rehfisch, a play which focuses on the 1894 trial for treason of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer in the French military falsely accused and eventually pardoned. He also found himself in the role of Cosimo de Medici in a 1959 production of Bertolt Brecht’s Life of Galileo at the Munich Kammerspiele, the same play in which his father was cast for the 1943 World Premiere in Zurich.

  Eleven years to make it. Time was short.

  1 ‘His family background’; formerly the ‘Jewish background’: it’s time for that genealogical note, as promised, before the chorus of voices severely underestima
tes the historical pressures and traditional forces behind what’s in a name (though I do see Janine’s point: being German or Jewish did not matter to them, they were in love. But alas.) Emil Hermann Siegfried Steinmetz, to give him his full name (Eva’s father, Michael’s grandfather) was born in Breslau in 1885 to Jewish parents, Gustav Steinmetz and Bertha Keiler. Emil Steinmetz married a non-Jewish woman (Else Strohwald), an event that, interestingly, took place in Kensington, London, England in 1908. Emil himself was baptized as a Lutheran in 1916, perhaps related to the fact that he was receiving lucrative wartime contracts from the German government during WWI. He was a leather-goods manufacturer, and examples of his wartime work include military pistol holsters and the leather lining bands of officers’ helmets. Emil Steinmetz left Germany in the summer before WWII started, in 1939, and spent the wartime years in Colombia, South America. Emil was estranged from his only brother, Friedrich Steinmetz, born in 1891. Friedrich, unlike Emil, did not assimilate, and instead of Colombia sought refuge in Argentina, where Friedrich appears to have died in 1970. Friedrich’s daughter, Bertha Erica Steinmetz (b. 1920), never left Germany. Deported from Breslau in 1942, she perished in the Shoah. Emil Steinmetz returned to live in Germany in the 1950s and died there in 1977. He was one of the few on hand who attended Michael’s funeral in Munich in 1967. I am almost certain that Michael was unaware of his uncle Friedrich’s existence, unawares too that Bertha Erica Steinmetz had been murdered in Auschwitz. Information about Friedrich and Bertha Steinmetz did not become known to me until late in 2012. Obviously there has been a lot going on—many forces at play: repression, avoidance, denial, ambivalence, assimilation—which has kept our Jewish background shrouded in intergenerational darkness.