Only the Dead Know Burbank

by Bradford Tatum

  “Born in Germany, yes. But not German. Not by any strenuous German standard. No, for a sterling example of an iron son of the fatherland you would have to look no further than to our own Mutter here.”

  The Trout clanged a fork still holding a slice of schnitzel on Mutter’s metal crown, and Mutter swatted him away, growling.

  “Good Hamburg stock, aye, friend? Why, a great uncle of his was a cannoneer for Frederick the Great. His proud blood flows all the way back to the berserkers of the Visigoths who first hacked their way into the Rhine Valley almost a thousand years ago. Good German stock, this one. And good German steel.”

  Here he tapped the plate again, but Mutter was too engrossed with his chewing to notice.

  “No, my father was a rag picker from Kraków. You can thank him for my finding you. He always taught me the value of other people’s garbage.”

  He saw my eyes glaze at this last comment and was quick to smile.

  “I mean you no disrespect, my dear, but the subject rankles. My Germany was the Germany of Beethoven and Goethe and Spengler. Not little metal men with their little metal minds. War is a mercurial thing, horrific for its complexities but beautiful in its simplicity. It gives one the experience of being alive with the tyranny of a drug. That is why it attracts us. The recent unpleasantness was a cancer in the German body. It needed to be cut out, and perhaps the patient might complain from a bit of tissue loss, but it was an operation that could be performed only under the chloroform of defeat. Today’s disturbance teaches us that we must never take our critics too seriously, even if they hold little sharpened sticks to our chests. Which reminds me, have you wondered what would have happened had he actually done it? I was positively breathless after your little fall. What are the limits of your particular gift?”

  “But what are you then,” I said, ignoring his question, “if not really German?”

  “Me? A Jew, my dear. I thought that was clear.”

  A Jew, I thought. Filthy, bat-winged legends fluttered in my mind. “But where is your tail if you are a Jew?”

  The Trout laughed, to his credit, and patted me softly on the head.

  “My tail? I keep that tucked up my ass. It reminds me to chew my food better.”

  We were getting up to leave the table when we were approached by a little man with lavender spats and striped trousers. He held his hat to his chest like a résumé, gesturing with it slightly that we might notice it and appreciate its latent value. He clicked his heels and ducked his head in imperial fashion, but his cheeks crimsoned when he saw the Trout’s mocking blank stare in return.

  “My compliments, gentlemen, lady,” he said, clipping the tails of his words as if they were cut from some sour rind. “If I may?”

  The Trout knew from the quality of his costume what fortune this person augured. But he also knew that power respects nothing more than that which mocks or ignores it. So it was in the guise of an afterthought, with studied nonchalance, that the Trout motioned to an empty seat at our table and slouched with rehearsed slovenliness into his own.

  “My name is Erich Zann,” the little man said, spitting out his tart consonants, “of Decla-Bioscop studios.”

  He offered his card. The Trout refused it.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “The Studio Babelsberg? In Potsdam? I assure you it’s the largest in the—”

  “Are you by chance a theatrical producer?”

  “Motion pictures.”

  “Motion pictures,” the Trout repeated as if the words had been scraped from the sidewalk. “And here I was getting all aflutter. Well, state your business and be done with it.”

  The little man was visibly ruffled but could find no graceful retreat. “As I was saying, we have a production deal with Universum Film AG—”

  “UFA?” the Trout almost shouted. “What are you proposing, sir, that we should make a hygiene film? Perhaps the proper way to recognize a contagious French tart or how to clean one’s ass with a bayonet?”

  Something in me sparked. A pale recognition. Was that bergamot in the air?

  “I can assure you, since the end of the war,” the little man continued, “UFA is barely under the direction of the military. We enjoy the full confidence of Deutsche Bank and are working toward privatization. And I can assure you we have staunchly avoided all hygienic content.”

  “Surely not all.” The Trout laughed.

  “That’s not what I meant. Our productions are quite proper, at least as far as the health and safety of our employees is concerned. What I mean is—”

  “Take a breath, little man. We have all night.”

  The Trout was having a grand time.

  “What I mean is, we are currently scouting for talent and I was fortunate enough to catch your performance this afternoon. The child and the giant were superb, but that last . . . feat . . . I’m not quite sure how you managed it.” The Trout smiled smugly. “That was something I’m sure we would be honored to commit to film. The scenario was a bit weak, if you don’t mind my saying, but I’m sure you could come up with something more coherent.”

  The Trout bristled and the air chilled around his eyes.

  “More coherent than the antediluvian dichotomy between life and death?”

  “Perhaps coherent was an unfortunate choice . . .”

  “Say what you mean, then,” the Trout snapped.

  The little man looked sick.

  “I’m sure we all can appreciate the great themes, sir,” he began, chewing on the words as if to soften them, “but one can never underestimate the . . . palliative effect of entertainment on—”

  “Palliative? Is that what you’re selling? Perhaps we should all emulate the Americans then and disburse with storytelling altogether.”

  “Please, again, I don’t have your gift for—”

  “Perhaps we should construct our scenarios around the noble themes of train robberies and pie throwing. Is that what you mean?”

  The little man balled up his face, then let loose for all he was worth.

  “I simply meant that film is a relatively new medium and I think it would better serve your genius should you devise a plot suited to the limitations of the moving picture.”

  This escaped in one breath.

  “I can assure you I can offer you a contract, all of you contracts. It would mean relocating to Berlin, but I’m sure you would find plenty of diversion there.”

  But the Trout had stopped listening after the magic word. He had been called a genius, something all artists suspect of themselves at one time but never bother denying until they hear it from a separate source.

  “I’m sure we can come to some arrangement, if the terms are amenable.”

  The little man brightened and extended his hand. “Wonderful,” he said. “I shall be in touch.”

  The Trout stared at the pale, extended appendage.

  “Leave us,” he said. “Before I change my mind.”

  THERE WAS A LIGHT RAIN FALLING AS THE TRAIN HEAVED OUT OF THE station. Mutter took the seat opposite me, his hands placed neatly on his lap, his side acres of hair combed wetly over his ears. He smelled of lye soap and breakfast grease. I watched his chin, as still as a porcelain vase on a high shelf, and thought of our last train ride together. Were there pictures behind his eyes, moments sweetened or soured by memory? Did he remember the child who’d spied him with his pants tangled around his ankles? Like the last time, the artist sat apart from my companion and me. This time the Trout was in the second-class car, his lap full of pages with berry-blue fingers from the frantic quill, chasing down the scenario he was contracted to deliver upon our arrival.

  I was flirting with a different anxiety. Berlin meant public: public of a very different and discerning kind. We would no longer be living in a vacant lot and playing to rubes and believers. I needed to fit in. Pass as living on a daily basis. And so this would be my role, the part I would play. I would no longer be a stage illusion. I would be as baffling and intimate as a card tr
ick. I would pretend to live, to raise and lower my chest, and smile and blink and chew and walk and turn and frown. I would close my eyes and pretend to sleep and open them and pretend to wake. And if someone touched me and felt the dry chill of my skin or sat too near and sensed the stone-stillness of my body, they would only think, That poor child, she needs a better coat. My best and only defense was the belief that people like me did not exist.

  CHAPTER 9

  The Berliner Luft, or Berlin Air, was famous for the dread it inspired. Like the stink of night sweat that bleeds through soap, the smell was not at first apparent as we pulled into the Lehrter Bahnhof. It was only as the brake steam cleared and the porters lowered the compartment windows that I felt the first tingle of regret. There was an alkaline ether in the air that could have been the essence of brick if bricks could breathe. It was an avaricious smell, something heated up in angst, then cooled too quickly, not content to be merely breathed. It had to leach out a part of you and replace it with something similar, like those malignant fairies who took human children and left crude effigies in their birthing blankets.

  I watched Mutter move more slowly than usual as he pressed himself to his full height, a warning grumble in his throat even as he lifted his arms to lower a woman’s bag. He held the bag for a moment, inching it toward his great chest as if he had forgotten why he had done it. The woman, blond with watery brown eyes, expected no shining future but did seem to want her bag, and so she held her arms in front of her, her head slightly bowed, coaxing with syllables but not words. The aisle began to fill and the woman was jostled and her desire for it seemed to wane.

  “He can keep it if he wants,” she said finally. “I have nothing in it, really. Just my son’s, what was my son’s cap.”

  “No,” I said, putting a hand on Mutter. “It’s hers,” I said. “Hand it over.”

  “Where was he wounded?” the woman asked.

  “Verdun.”

  “I lost my boy in France too. Please,” she said, her words becoming thick and peaked, “he can have it.”

  We watched her thread her way into the crowd. The upsweep of her colorless hair, the tendrils pulled loose and soft from the journey, exposed the pale nape of her neck that glowed solely for us, for the only ones who were watching. We had no other baggage, only the bodies we had brought with us, and I decided we would wait for the Trout on the platform, let him make an entrance.

  Mutter opened the woman’s bag. She was right. There was only a worn flat cap. Mutter placed it on his head, and the effects of the war seemed to evaporate from him.

  The platform was lined by a colonnade of Romanesque arches capped by enormous half circles of modern paned glass that finally gave way to more pragmatic bows of cross-braced steel trusses as if the station had simply run out of history. Assembled under these arches, in rows as orderly as their twisted and truncated physiology could offer, were heroes of the Second Reich, the trench fodder who had found their way home or at least to the city where they hoped to eke out a living from pity and the reclaimed garbage they sold. There were stalls of pencil stubs and those of cigarette stubs, watch chains and pocket pens, spectacles of all strengths, and stalls that sold just the cases. Handkerchiefs, parasols, and pocketknives. In fact, anything that could be lost or discarded resurfaced here in this goblin market of the forgotten. The sellers all wore or displayed their iron crosses, second and first class, and some even had neatly penned placards that named their regiments and the action they saw, all in the bloodless prose of the dispatch. They either squatted or sat or leaned, their amputated stumps wrinkled and pink as unbaked loaves or stuffed into laced leather sheaths that ended in hooks or pegs or crisply pinned-back fabric. They were quiet behind their orderly stalls, smelling faintly of pomade and their proximity to the ground, patient as winter wheat.

  One seller, a prim man with cheeks shaved so closely they kicked even the gray light of the station, wore the sleeves of his pressed serge suit folded and pinned behind him like the wings of a grounded duck. If he missed his arms, the rigor of his parade ground stare gave no indication. Nor did he seem in the least bothered by the nature of his merchandise. In rows as neat as military graves he displayed postcards of women in the most shocking and rude aspects of compromise imaginable. There were torture scenes with bodies trussed in rope or chains, torsos twisted in balanced curves like pinup saints with painterly slashes of blood, women wearing just their peasant braids engaging the attentions of reluctant livestock. Women with other women, a whole section with just gardening implements, another with brass band instruments. I was curious to purchase one, if only to see how he would conduct the transaction and still maintain his steely demeanor, when my eye stopped on the leer of what seemed to be a Moroccan slave girl. She was tied to a tent post, her breasts thrust forward, arms laced behind her. Her eyes were blindfolded by an elaborate sash dripping small coins, but the sweep of her nose, the defiant plump of her mouth, left no doubt. It was my mother.

  The voice of the Trout rang out, “There you are, my minions, loitering by the French postcards?”

  He picked up the card and gave it a quick once-over.

  “Never would have suspected you for the oriental, my dear.” He tossed the card to the ground.

  Mutter was quick to retrieve it and place it neatly in its slot before the seller could even take a breath to shout. I looked behind me, back at the postcard stall, and what flooded me then? Was I happy to see her, relieved she too had somehow survived? Gratified she was employed if still in the skin trade? No. It was dread. Or perhaps it was the Berlin air.

  CHAPTER 10

  I’m afraid you misunderstand me, sir.” Erich Zann continued from his chair. “It’s the recontextualization of horror we are after.”

  “Fairy tales,” the Trout slurred.

  “Perhaps if you read the scenario of our project currently in preproduction, the requisites might become clear.” He tossed a typed stack of pages bound with three brass studs toward the Trout. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari was the title.

  The Trout was at a loss. He rubbed his word-worn eyes and tried to force a complicit smile, but failed at this and looked manageably panicked.

  We had arrived at the studio only an hour previous. The space was massive but stifling, the enormous arc lights throwing entire afternoons at the still-drying timbers of the false fronts, releasing the fresh solvent of pine tar in the superheated air. It was a world as fake and presumptuous as me. I felt strangely at home. The Trout flipped the pages as if movement might jar the sentences to life, like a mutoscope divulging its secrets.

  “Why horror?” he finally asked as the pages stopped rustling.

  “Let’s just say horror has universal appeal.”

  “But horror is a discount emotion,” the Trout said. “A mere reflex to shock. I’m trying to give the audience something equally universal. Hope, faith in the continuum.”

  “They don’t want hope,” Zann said, leaning back in his chair. Sweat pooled at his collar. “They want their nightmares made safe.”

  “And you think these silly little funhouse flats you’re building, you think that informs horror?”

  “I think incorporating expressionist principals into a new medium like moving pictures is extremely innovative and communicates perfectly the unbalanced interior of our protagonist.”

  “You mean that skinny line-boy in the body suit I’ve seen prowling around out there? He couldn’t scare up a hand job on the Alexanderplatz.”

  “Herr Veidt has impeccable theatrical training,” Zann quietly enthused. “I think if you actually watched him work you’d find his portrayal quite chilling.”

  The Trout stood with a sudden snap of his knees. He held his pages in front of him, a week’s worth of effort, and ripped them in two with one straining pull. He kept his eyes pinned to the little man in the chair before him.

  “Give me twenty-four hours,” he said, turning on his heel.

  Zann stood and clicked his heels to the Trout’
s furious back.

  “They want monsters?” the Trout whispered to me through gritted teeth. “I will give them night terrors that’ll have ’em shitting blocks of ice.”

  THE STUDIO HAD PROVIDED US WITH LIVING QUARTERS, A FRESHLY framed box with two cots and a desk above the shooting floor. From this, Mutter and I were banned while the Trout worked rewriting his scenario. We sat on a wooden platform, on crates stuffed with still-fragrant hay that held the huge bulbs of the arc lights. These lights had a terrible habit of sputtering and then exploding in the middle of a scene, so bulbs were in constant demand. We were silent during the shooting, but this was a habit of the theater. The barnlike structure echoed with hammer blows and ringing telephones and the steady loping cadence of the spinning film that white-coated cameramen beat through the guts of the slender cameras. The cameras held instant fascination for me. It was the sound of tiny galloping horses, tethered to a moment, pulling it into eternity. It was the heartbeat I should have had.

  These magnificent machines seemed wasted on the scenarios they were forced to film. The gestures were too broad, too remedial, like a language made of only the past tense. I was confused by the pale lavender base over the actors’ faces, the gray-green grease paint that shadowed the eyes, the red eyebrows and blue lips. I learned later this was due to the sluggish exposure speed of the orthochromatic film. Even the camera operators and directors had to wear smoked goggles that would “slow” the lights and give them the translated naturalism that would ultimately be printed and projected. The whole process seemed unnatural and worried, what with everyone standing around in their white lab coats calling one another Herr Doktor like half-assed pharmacists before even the simplest request. I had expected the otherness of my artist’s studio back in Hietzing, not this tight Prussian efficiency. This was a factory. They would be as at home making rifle butts or rug beaters as moving pictures. What these people were filming was not life, not as I had witnessed it. And what made me qualified to pass such judgment? I was a student of living, of every gesture and nuance and smirk. Life was what I aped to go unnoticed. Watch a face hit with joy or fear and do you see? This clumsy running leap over the fence of the feeling? It is subtle and awkward and reticent. People do not want to feel. They resist. Only when the moment is overwhelming do they give in. But then it is a natural thing, like a fall from a high place. We are seized by it as by gravity. We don’t kick our legs in descent to hit the ground faster.