‘The thing about Atlantic City. It’s like Washington, DC. A slum of a town with a bogus city in the middle designed for profiteering and failure.’
‘That’s very interesting, but I really should check on my father.’
‘Oh. Are we done?’
‘We’re adjourning. I’m just a little concerned. I left him at a blackjack table. He might have lost his money, he might have gone wandering. I don’t know.’
‘You’re very devoted, aren’t you?’
‘Am I? I don’t know about that. We’re making a film together.’
Somehow he has acquired her; he waits by the conference-room door for his companion to gather up the tools of her trade.
Michelle’s notes plead for him to call her. There are opportunities waiting for him, all he has to do is call her and they are his. In the last one, no doubt desperate, she begins by reminding him of the account outstanding between them. Which is all that Spencer needs to reject her, and perhaps his old world, utterly.
Spencer has been wondering how this might end. If it were a comedy, then it should end with a marriage, he and his father hook up with two hookers, find a wedding chapel, one of these casinos must have one, trying to ape Las Vegas as a destination resort, walk up the aisle, giving each other away, to blushing brides innocent again. If it were a tragedy, then death is the only solution. But this is neither, and both.
It is, he supposes, a road movie. Looking for his father on the casino floor, outside on the Boardwalk, with Jenny De Soto puffing beside him, he fails to find him. This cannot be over yet.
‘How,’ he asks Jenny De Soto, ‘should a road movie end?’
‘A road movie?’
‘That’s right. You understand genre. What are the ways a road movie can end?’
‘Uh. I guess there are three different ways.’
‘OK. Let’s hear them.’
‘Or maybe four. Four.’
‘OK. And?’
She would have been a smart student, taking notes, understanding the subject with more feel than the professor could ever share, internalising what she thought was required, while the prettier, more popular students chewed gum and went to parties.
‘The protagonists learn something from their journey, they achieve what they thought they needed, or they don’t, but that doesn’t really matter, because along the way they’ve discovered something more important that they’ve probably had all along and kind of undervalued, the meaning of friendship, is usually love—it’s kind of a Christian form, isn’t it? Redemption through picaresque?—and they go back home, and they’re wiser, they’ve learnt something, and now they can accommodate themselves to their previous discontents. Two for the Road, you know, the Donen movie?’
‘OK. Yeah. Good.’
So Jimmy Ludwig forgives his wife for being the person she is rather than the woman he would want her to be. They can begin to enjoy their twilight of toaster-ovens and day beds together. And Spencer Ludwig returns to London, to what? This road movie can’t be nearly over yet, because he has achieved no triumph and neither is he aware of having learned much yet; he just feels tiresomely unaccommodated and peevish.
‘Or else the protagonists get married, to each other—It Happened One Night!
‘I think we can forget about that one. How about number two?’
‘Well number two would be, they discover something at their destination, which they had never thought would be their destination, it’s just another place along the way, that’s what they’d thought, but something unexpected happens, and this is the place that feels like home. You might have seen? There’s a recent Iranian film, called Nowhere. It’s very beautiful.’
‘All right. OK.’
So Spencer and his father will settle here, in Atlantic City. Spencer will take a job with the film festival, or he becomes a poker player, grinding out the hours and the blinds while his father prepares them meals out of eggs. And they live together in a boarding house, or in a casino suite reserved for highrollers, Dwight tending to every whim, even making sure they cultivate a few more appetites that they have never tasted the consummation of before.
‘Number three?’
‘That’s the usual one, or maybe the second-most usual after number one. You know, they’ve tasted too much, pushed themselves too far out of reach, and now they can never go home, they’ve ridden away from any possibility of their former lives, and death is the only available outcome, the road is the pathway to the grave, Easy Rider, Vanishing Point.’
Spencer, serious now, this has moved beyond the dialectic of the classroom, he sees the last image in a cold way, the father-and-son fireball on the Parkway, or the son washed out to sea, father dying on the casino floor. Or, of course, vice versa.
‘Number four?’
‘Maybe this is the most usual one. You know, the meaning of the journey is just the taking of it. The trip that can never end? Five Easy Pieces and so forth?’
‘Yeah. That’s right.’
And the movie continues until the camera can no longer keep up with the protagonists, and off they go, Spencer and his father, getting smaller into the distance, disappearing, a speck on the endless road.
‘That’s very good, Jenny. You know your stuff.’
‘Thank you.’
‘And why do we like road movies so much?’
His questioning is making her nervous, but it shouldn’t do, because she knows. Maybe this is his unlikely culmination, and she has an older sister, or a feisty disabled mother to be suitably companioned to his father, and the four of them will set up house together, in a world of film references and supermarket bags.
‘I guess, because they operate in the endless now?’
She is right, and this is the glory and the tedium of the road movie. But how then would he incorporate the significant moments of his father’s past? Spencer despises costume drama almost as surely as he despises flashback. The two together would be intolerable, Jimmy Ludwig in pre-War suit—or bring it into the now, make his father’s history into a universal one. Jimmy Ludwig in Sarajevo (wearing a not-dissimilar suit), or Kigali (stumbling along a dusty road in bright summer clothes), or Gaza (his vulnerable head wrapped inside a keffiyeh), a Palestinian refugee or a Rwandan, who owns nothing except for a tragedy in his past and an endless hope for his future.
‘But tell me, I’m puzzled about something.’
‘What’s that?’
‘Since when did you ever obey the rules of genre?’
It’s a good question, and she’s probably right, although Competition, being a comedy, does end with a wedding. He and Jenny walk, increasingly frantic, in decreasing circles, on Boardwalk casino passageways, back into the Horseshoe, down corridors he’s never suspected before.
‘Maybe this should be a gambling movie,’ he says.
Spencer’s father had beaten the odds at three significant moments in his life, so why should a New Jersey coastal resort town be any kind of threat to him? He had been a Jew in German-occupied Warsaw in 1939, a slave labourer in a Siberian prison camp in 1941, a Polish soldier at the battle of Monte Cassino in 1944. Look around you, see the men who will shortly be dead. Your friend Benny, selected by your parents for being a good boy, Benny excelled at school, he had modest, studious ways, and you were such an unreliable boy, you had been through six high schools by the time you were sixteen, you smoked cigarettes, chased after girls, hung water-filled condoms on the blackboard, refused to accept anyone’s authority but your own. Your family was a mystery to you. Apart from one cousin, Tosia, with whom on family get-togethers you would steal away and spend an hour or so locked together, mouth to mouth, vigorously kissing until your lips were bruised and sore, you had no understanding of any of them. Not your father, who occupied his own unenviable place with such dull complacency, not your mother, who was hardly saintly in her invalid state, certainly not your brother, who found it so easy to be met with approval. And all those cousins and aunts and uncles, who would shortly be d
ead.
Now, given the boy you were, so cocky and unsure, so accustomed to disapproval, with your likings for food and girls and your mistrust, your suspicion of anyone’s intentions, and your faith that life was elsewhere, that there was a somewhere else, where, if you only could find it, your own life might begin, given all this, it was unlikely that you would take to Benny. Just the fact of him being sanctioned by your parents should have been sufficient for him to merit your eternal dislike. But it did not work out like that. You loved Benny. He wore his accomplishments lightly, his academic prowess, his medals won in chess tournaments, his skill on the violin. He was a modest shy boy, who envied you your ease in female company, your tough-Jew willingness to go into dangerous neighbourhoods with a bicycle chain draped around your shoulders.
You and Benny shared a secret devotion. Moscow was where life was going to begin. Even though, admittedly, neither of you had ever performed a moment of manual labour, you yearned to be part of the workers’ paradise. You and Benny had graduated from your Marxist-Zionist youth group, and now attended the same communist cell, which was in a small apartment on Dzielna Street, the home of a sickly schoolmaster, whose daughter brought in tea and cakes for the conspirators. Both you and Benny admired the daughter, who had blonde hair and wise tentative eyes; and for once you did not take the lead. You wanted Benny to have the girl, and you made intercessions on your friend’s behalf. After a meeting one night, when the discussion had been about the advisability of socialism in one country, about wise Koba Joe Stalin, about the lives in the sun that Walecki (aka Horwitz) and Jasieñski (aka Zysman) and Unszlicht were leading, without word back home, Izio Ludwig (Lewissohn) stood on the stairs with the schoolmaster’s daughter. She had modern ideas and did not hear him out as he pleaded Benny’s case. She listened at the beginning, arms behind her back, nodding, eyes downcast, until the last members of the cell had left the apartment building. And then she reached for him, put her arms around his neck (reddened, rawed from the bicycle chain that he had become accustomed to wear) and kissed him with a vigour that reminded him of his cousin Tosia from more innocent times.
You thought that was the end of your friendship with Benny. You would not have forgiven a friend’s treachery in this way. But Benny forgave you. Benny believed in friendship and loyalty, and anyway he had not expected an answering desire from the schoolmaster’s daughter.
‘There he is!’ says Jenny De Soto.
Spencer’s father is standing near the entrance to the casino showroom, inspecting a fountain that tumbles down one blue-lit wall. Jimmy Ludwig has always had an affinity for machinery. He will examine the workings of any mechanism new to him until he has figured out how it works, and then he will pronounce his decision, his disapproval or respect at the maker’s work.
‘That’s very smart,’ his father says.
‘We’ve been looking for you,’ Spencer says.
Could he be dressed up as a Palestinian, an African boy?—but it does not quite work, it is a presumption to Africa now, as well as to Poland of 1939, to invent Izio Ludwig into another time. We can hardly believe in such obvious lies as universal truth or the human condition.
Spencer retrieves his father and they sit, he and his small retinue, in the second-floor bar of the Horseshoe. It is being colonised now by the film festival. There are others in the black festival T-shirt, travelling strangers who look pompous and bemused, who can only be film-makers.
Spencer, his father and his fan sit at a small round table and Spencer leads his father through stories of his past for the benefit of Jenny De Soto.
‘And what about those men?’ Spencer asks.
‘Which men?’
‘Zysman. Walecki. Who were they?’ ‘They were dead.’
Said so simply, as if this is the natural state of men.
‘Executed. They were. Burned.’
‘Burned? You mean cremated?’
‘Not burned. Burned. Show trials. Burned.’
‘Oh, you mean purged?’
‘That’s right. They were burned.’
And the sickly schoolmaster would soon be dead, along with the rest of that communist cell that had built their dreams of the promised land. It was not just gangs of Polish youths you had to worry about now. The Germans were in town, and eager young Poles would stand beside German soldiers on the entrances to street squares and point out Jews to them. Work gangs were being sent out to clear the swamplands outside of the city, and the Germans saw this as a useful occupation for the Jews of Warsaw, and even if you didn’t look especially Jewish a keen-eyed Polish boy would quickly work out your provenance from your street address, the school you went to.
So Benny and you decided to get away. If ever there was a time to enter the promised land, that time was now. So across you went. You and Benny left Warsaw at night, your overcoat heavy with the gold coins that your mother had sewn into the lining. You took the train to Chelm, and spent the first of your gold coins bribing the mayor of a small town to pay for your transit by rowing boat across the Bug into the Ukraine. And how Benny was impressed at your worldly ways, the quiet word, the palmed coin, but then it became an ordeal, the long hike towards Biafystok, which was surrounded by pine woods, in which you and Benny, like children in a fairy tale, walked around, lost, forlorn, starting at sudden wildlife noises. Owls in high reaches of the trees, the scrabbling of burrowing foraging animals. You were city boys, this was not your world, navigating your path by starlight through the woods was not what Warsaw had prepared you for.
And this was not so bad. And sleeping on the floor of a kitchen in Biafystok, having persuaded the landlady that not all Warsovians were thieves, was not so bad. And finding lice on your body for the first time was not so bad. And going into the Ural mountains to work in a magnesium complex would not have been so bad, if it were not that Benny was not permitted to go with you. You hated the work there, and the loneliness, made all the worse because Benny came to see you but was ordered to leave within twenty-four hours and you never saw him again.
You were one of thousands of Polish refugees there in the Urals, and surely whatever was happening back home was preferable to this. You would be going back home, and you were losing your faith in the USSR, but you still wanted to make it to Moscow in time for the May Day celebrations. You got there too late, by several months, and you were arrested four times in those two days. Wearing your best suit from Warsaw, you did not fit in.
‘I stuck out like a sore thumb,’ Jimmy Ludwig says.
‘A couple of months later he was in Siberia,’ Spencer says.
Spencer relates a story that his father had told. After release from Siberia, after finding his way to Totskoye to join up with the Anders Army, after the march down from Tashkent to Iran, his father was close to death again. His body was collapsing from malnutrition and dysentery. The marchers—they were not soldiers yet, and some of them never would be—made camp outside Mashhad. Spencer’s father was nearly nineteen years old. He sat in the sun. He never told Spencer where the dozen hard-boiled eggs came from, but this is the scene, maybe the only scene, that Spencer would film from the past. Perhaps he had been told to distribute them to some others around him. Probably he stole them. However he came by them, he sat on the earth beside a tree with his twelve hard-boiled eggs a little away from the camp.
He ate the first one, and then the second. This was the rest of his life. Forcing himself to eat one dozen eggs. And when it was over, when, somehow, magically, he had eaten the entire batch, he vomited and lay down on the earth, to die.
Spencer can visualise the scene. His father lying on his side, perhaps a scatter of broken eggshells surrounding him, the colour of his vomit in the winter Persian sun. He was probably then almost as skinny as he is now. He closes his eyes. He shivers, his arms clutching his sides.
He does not die. The camera holds on the sleeping man, the movements of his mouth, his hand sometimes rising to brush flies away as he sleeps. A soft hubbub of Polish words from t
he distance, perhaps an argument threatens to flare up and then dies down again. And then little jump-cuts through time, the light darkens, his head is in a slightly different position each time; and it is morning and Izio Ludwig wakes up healed.
And what are the odds on this? That a man should survive Warsaw, Siberia, Monte Cassino? What are the odds that Jimmy Ludwig should be sitting shivering in an Atlantic City bar in 2008?
Chapter Seven
EXT. ATLANTIC CITY BOARDWALK—DAY
SPENCER LUDWIG stands on the beach. JIMMY LUDWIG sits huddled in an electric wheelchair.
SPENCER turns and walks back towards his father. JIMMY presses a button and whizzes forward, just before his son gets to him.
JIMMY LUDWIG
Move it, Charlie.
Again, SPENCER is about to reach his father, when JIMMY again goes forward.
SPENCER stands. He lifts his arms and lets them fall again.
In the sky, SEAGULLS swoop and caw and rise.
Extreme close-up: JIMMY LUDWIG’S face, gleeful.
SPENCER takes a step forward. JIMMY spurts forward again. SPENCER stops. JIMMY stops.
INT. ATLANTIC CITY CASINO—DAY
JIMMY LUDWIG and SPENCER LUDWIG sit facing each other at a bar table. The table has an electronic blackjack game built into it, which is obscured by the backgammon set they are playing on.
INT. ATLANTIC CITY HOTEL—DAY
Elevator doors open. Little bit of comic business as JIMMY LUDWIG can’t quite steer his wheelchair into the elevator car: he collides with the sides of the door, a metal ashtray fitting on the wall, a passenger waiting to enter.
INT. ATLANTIC CITY HOTEL ROOM—DAY
A Film by Spencer Ludwig Page 12
