The New Confessions

by William Boyd

  “What’s this film you want to make? Why are you being so difficult?”

  I glanced at Aram. He looked faintly surprised. I decided to tell him.

  “I want to make a film of a book called The Confessions.”

  “Who by?”

  “Rousseau.”

  “Rousseau again? That’s good, good. I like it. Don’t you, Aram?”

  “He won’t tell me about it.”

  They exchanged a few words of fast Armenian.

  “Are you ready to start?” Duric asked.

  “I’m working on the script.” I caught Aram’s eye. “It’s, ah, very long.”

  “I don’t care. Realismus must do it.” He put his hand on my knee. “This must be Realismus film, John. Aram will help you.”

  “When I say long,” I continued cautiously, “I mean very long. Extremely long.”

  “What’s ‘extremely’?” Aram asked.

  “I want to make three films. Three hours each.”

  “What!”

  “It’s a good idea,” Duric said. “Phantastisch. We do it at Realismus, of course. Promise me, Aram. I mean promise.”

  Aram had the look of a man trying to control nausea.

  “Yes, Papa … if at all possible.”

  “No ‘if.’ I want straight promise.”

  “I promise.”

  Duric lay back. He looked exhausted, his thin chest rising and falling at alarming speed. I felt I could punch a hole in it with my fist, as if his body were made out of balsa wood and paper, like a model airplane. As he breathed we could hear random treacly pops and gurglings from within the chest wall. His eyes shone with tears, but it may only have been rheum. He drew me closer again.

  “Promise me too, John.”

  “Of course. Anything.”

  “Don’t let Aram sell the business. Watch him.”

  “What business?” I looked at Aram. “Realismus? He’d never sell it, don’t worry.”

  “No.” He was falling asleep. “The nuts.”

  “I’ll watch him,” I said. “I promise.”

  Aram rang for the nurse and we stood up. The nurse came in and held the oxygen mask to his face. It seemed to rouse him and he beckoned us back. We crouched by his side. His eyes were barely open, just a slit revealing a brown limpid glimmer.

  “Never give up the nuts,” he said. They were his last words. He went to sleep and died three days later.

  At his funeral Aram and I shed copious tears. I had tried to hold them back, but seeing Aram’s example decided to let myself go. I had a “right good greet,” as Oonagh used to say. I felt surprisingly better for it too, and I think Aram was touched. It was odd seeing Aram cry. We walked away from the graveside sniffing, wiping our eyes and snorting into big handkerchiefs.

  “He was a sly old fellow,” Aram said. “A nine-hour film. My God.”

  “It’ll be amazing,” I said. “Wait and see. There’s been nothing like it.”

  “I’d never do it normally,” Aram said. “I think I should tell you that. I think it’s crazy, disastrous.”

  “But you promised.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “I promised too,” I said. “Hang on to those nuts.”

  Aram laughed. “Too late, John, I’m afraid. I sold Lodokian Nüsse four months ago.”

  I felt mildly cheated by this, but there was nothing I could do. Later, I used to wonder if Aram had lied, just to keep me out of his business deals.… I had no way of finding out. However, I blessed old Duric for extracting that deathbed promise from his son. I assumed that Armenian blood ties and dying oaths were inviolable, and in a sense they were. Aram was always true to the letter of his promise, if not its spirit. A few days later contracts were signed. I was salaried at one thousand dollars a month while I wrote the script (backdated) and Realismus paid me a ten-thousand-dollar option on it against a fee for the world rights to be negotiated. In addition it was confirmed that I was to direct and participate in the profits. Bland announcements appeared in the trade press. I remember I cut one out and pinned it to the wall above my desk in the villa. “Realismus Films announced yesterday that John James Todd is to film Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions in 1927 on location in Switzerland and France. K.-H. Kornfeld is to play the leading role.” These prompted some speculations by journalists. My replies, I thought, were teasingly oblique. There is nothing like refusing to be specific for arousing curiosity.

  The first draft of The Confessions: Part I was over six hundred pages long. After a month’s effortful work I managed to reduce it by something over a hundred pages. I began work on Part II in the autumn, but made bad progress. My mind was constantly on Part I—the director in me had taken over from the writer. There were many technical problems to be solved or experimented with; logistical pitfalls multiplied in my mind. I wrote on for another two hundred pages or so before I decided to let Part II rest for a while. In any event, winter was approaching and the wooden villa was not warm. Monika had stopped coming out too, now that the opportunities for sunbathing were gone. We met once or twice in her apartment but it was not the same. Our curious affair went into hibernation, tacitly, with no hard feelings on either side, and waited for the return of more clement weather.

  So I abandoned the villa in the Jungfernheide and returned to our house in Charlottenburg. Sonia was heavily pregnant—the new baby was due in December. I went to work in my Realismus office and by the end of the year had produced a final draft of The Confessions: Part I that was 350 pages long. Of course I knew it was almost twice as long as it should be, but I was not concerned. “Once we start filming,” I reassured Aram, “you’ll see how it will come down.” He did not seem unduly perturbed. He was planning another trip to the U.S.A. in the New Year, where he expected to raise money for the new film. Large advances had been paid for Leo Druce’s Frederick the Great; Joan of Arc was generating similar excitement.

  Aram was too calm, I now realize, and that tranquillity communicated itself to me. We drew up a schedule. Preproduction would commence in January 1927, filming would start in June. I would deliver a completed three-hour film in June 1928 for release in the autumn of that year. It all seemed eminently realizable. These dates, these plans conjured from the vaguest deliberations appeared utterly fixed, like the movements of the stars in the heavens, or calendrical predictions for high or low tides. We had created a timetable and with it a kind of reality. It had no real existence beyond our determination, but we acted as if it had.

  “We’ll begin Part II in ’29,” I said to Aram. “One year for each part. The whole thing will be finished by 1931. We’ll show them all together. One nine-hour film.” I paused. “It’ll be magnificent,” I said with absolute, utter confidence. “Wait till you see what I can do. Amazing things. There will never be a film like it again.”

  “Excellent,” he said. “But let’s get Part I finished first.”

  Sonia gave birth to twins—girls—in early December. For the first time I was near my wife when the event occurred. I was very surprised at the news. Sonia said she had told me a month before her parturition, but if so the idea had not registered. I swear. It was an unpleasant reminder of just how preoccupied I had been with The Confessions: Part I. My family life was no more than a backdrop. It claimed my attention only when I wished it to. I was stunned. Suddenly I had four children! I felt faint stirrings of panic. What on earth did I think I was doing?

  Our house that December was bedlam. Sonia and Lily were fully occupied with the girls—Emmeline and Annabelle—and for a while I had to oversee the two boys. For some reason Frau Mittenklott—who had followed us from Rudolfplatz—had been given responsibility for the Christmas decorations. There was a vast green fir tree in the drawing room, burning real candles and hung with real cakes and a kind of decorative shortbread. Smaller replicas stood in the hall and dining room. Furthermore boughs had been hewn from other conifers and were suspended wherever possible above doors, windows and staircases. The air was thick with
resinous piny fumes that made my eyes sting and reminded me of my father’s antiseptic experiments. Heavy swags of redvelvet ribbon were draped above the fireplaces and from every projecting ledge, picture frame and table corner the good woman had set or hung miniature presents—matchboxes wrapped in bright paper and filled with raisins or nuts to be unwrapped by the children whenever the anticipation proved too much or the wait too long. This was the whimsical custom, so Frau Mittenklott informed me, in the village where she had been born and raised. Our house seemed the very paradigm of festivity, bright symbol of the Christmas season itself. The misery was capped, though my duties diminished, when Vincent and Noreen Shorrold arrived from London to share our joy.

  On Christmas Day 1926 we were all present in the sitting room. John James Todd, the film director; his wife, Sonia; their four children—Vincent, Hereford, Emmeline and Annabelle—the nurse, Lily Maid-bow; and the in-laws, Mr, and Mrs. Shorrold, In the kitchen Frau Mittenklott was cooking a goose, three rabbits, a suckling pig—a whole farmyard of animals, as far as I know. I had just opened my present from Sonia. A pipe. A ghastly curved meerschaum with a carved yellow bowl the size of a coffee cup and—this is true—red and green tassels hanging from it.

  “I can’t smoke this!” I said, shocked, to Sonia.

  “Course you can, Johnny,” Vincent Shorrold said. “Nothing like a pipe for a man.”

  “And what on earth does that mean? But—seriously—I can’t put this thing in my mouth. I’d be a laughingstock.”

  “Here, I’ll get it going for you, boy,” Vincent Shorrold said, and took it from me. He proceeded to fill it with what looked like fistfuls of shag from his own pouch.

  “That’s a right big smoke, that’s for sure,” he said as he tamped down the tobacco with his thumbs. “There’s a tin and a half of ready-rubbed in there.” He put it in his mouth. I saw his jaw muscles clench as they took the strain.

  “Fair weight,” he commented. “Give you a right stiff neck, this will.”

  It took him five or six matches and as many minutes to ignite the compacted mass of tobacco. The room was soon blue with gently shifting strata of smoke. The twins began to cry, their pure new eyes stinging. I sat very still in my chair, my face fixed. The women looked on with admiration as Vincent Shorrold fumed and blew, thick smoke snorting, apparently, from every orifice in his head.

  “Grand cool draw,” he said, coming over, sucking and blowing. “It’ll be going for a couple of hours yet.” He held the vile object out to me, its little tassels swinging, its stem gleaming with Shorrold saliva.

  “Have a puff, John,” Sonia said.

  “Go on, Johnny,” said her mother.

  The telephone rang.

  I threw myself from the chair and strode urgently to answer it (why did we—why do people—keep a telephone in the hall?). I snatched the receiver from its cradle.

  “Yes?”

  “Jamie?”

  “Yes.” It was Doon. I felt my entire body tremble. I sat down very slowly.

  “Did you …” She paused. She sounded upset. “Did you mean what you said that night?”

  “What night?”

  She hung up. I knew what night, of course. I swore at myself for not thinking faster. But how could I think at all in this farcical Christmas grotto of a house? I put on my overcoat and a hat and went back into the drawing room. Shorrold was relighting the pipe.

  “John?” Sonia said, surprised at my appearance.

  “I’ve got to go,” I said. “Problems … Karl-Heinz. He’s ill.”

  “But there’s dinner.”

  “Save some for me. I don’t know when I’ll be back.”

  Exultantly, I went outside. There had been some snow earlier in the week but it had thawed. It was a cold dull afternoon as I drove towards the Kurfürstendamm, Schulter Strasse and Doon’s apartment.

  There was no reply. I knocked again. I pressed my ear to the cold door listening for signs of movement within.

  A neat young man carrying a new briefcase came up the stairs.

  “Are you looking for Miss Bogan?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “You’ve just missed her. I passed her in the street on my way here. You might catch her. She’s heading north. Up towards the Knie.”

  I spotted her as she crossed the busy intersection at Schiller and Grolmanstrasse. She was wearing a leather coat and a small-brimmed brown felt hat pulled hard down on her head. I thought she must be going to the Schiller-Theater but she passed that by. Why did I not approach her in the street? Run up behind her, tap her on the shoulder?… Because I felt suddenly weak and uncertain, now that I saw her tall figure again, striding so purposefully. Why had she telephoned me after months of silence? What had she meant by her question? I knew what I had said that night, so why now did she want the statement confirmed? I could provide no convincing answers to these questions apart from wishful ones, so I followed her discreetly as we walked through the cold quiet streets, even more deserted now as we moved further from the west end and into the industrial district of Lutzow. She turned right at the Landwehr-Kanal, with the sprawl of the Siemens electrical works opposite, and went through the doorway of what looked like a meeting hall or Low Church chapel.

  I paused. The granite afternoon light was fading. The canal looked solid and very cold, as if the water was viscous, at the freezing point. I stood there dithering, getting colder by the minute. Some more people went into the hall. I had no gloves or scarf with me. Should I wait? She might be hours.… I went in.

  At the far end of a thin vestibule a young man sat behind a table. He was wearing an overcoat, a roll-neck sweater and a soft brown hat of quite good quality. There were some papers in front of him.

  “Afternoon,” I said.

  “Are you a member?” He had a square bulging jaw that needed shaving.

  “I want to join,” I improvised. “I came to meet Miss Bogan.”

  He was impressed by the name. “Oh, good. Excellent. There should be no problem.”

  He rummaged in the desk drawer and produced a form. “That’ll be two hundred marks,” he said. “Fill that in and I can give you a temporary card now. We’ll send the official one later.”

  What kind of a club was this? I wondered as I handed in the money. I could hear indistinct conversation from the hall. The neighborhood was so drab—too drab for pornography. I filled in half the form—name, address, profession—before I thought to ask what the letters at its head stood for.

  The man looked suddenly wary.

  “The Revolutionary Artists’ Association,” he said. “Of the KPD.”

  The Communist party. “Of course.” I managed a laugh of sorts. “What am I thinking about?”

  He filled in my name on a square of cardboard and carefully stamped and initialed its reverse. He stood up and shook my hand.

  “Welcome,” he said, then gestured at the door. “The meeting’s just starting.”

  There must have been over two hundred people inside, mainly men, but with a fair representation of women. So many artists? I thought. I could see nothing of Doon. I edged diffidently in, pressed my back to a wall and waited. A thin man on a rostrum spoke passionately in clichés. I lost interest in seconds. In those days I was indifferent to politics, creeds and dogmas. Politics especially—I had not yet become one of its hapless victims. As Chekhov puts it, I wanted only to be a free artist. So as I scanned the faces of the audience, intent and earnest, impassive and mobile, I noted only that some of them were well-to-do; these were not all workers or students. I wondered what it was about them or the occasion that drew Doon here.

  Speakers changed but the tone of voice and diminished vocabulary remained the same. There was vehement applause at the end of every speech. And then Doon got up on the rostrum. I listened to what she had to say. She attacked the institution of Christmas and, thinking of the travesty my own home had become, found myself loudly applauding all the predictable ideological grievances. She wound up with a plea f
or donations to party funds. She would be passing among us, she said, taking a collection.

  I waited for Doon to reach me. Four people were going through the audience with wooden boxes as the meeting’s business was ponderously concluded by the thin man who had begun it all. I kept changing my position and thus made two donations before Doon and I finally met.

  I felt a poignant helplessness suffuse my body as I stuffed notes into her box. To my credit, and my joy, she colored. Admiring noises came from others at my party-spirited largess.

  “Thank you, comrade,” she said. Then in a lower voice, “What’re you doing here?”

  “I followed you. After you called. I had to see you.”

  “Are you a member?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long? I thought you were a cynic.”

  “Oh, not so long.… People are allowed to change their minds, you know.”

  “Wait for me at the end.”

  I was wrong about it finishing. That meeting ran on for three hours. By its conclusion I was overpoweringly hungry. My stomach was audible at three yards, my mouth awash with saliva as I thought helplessly of Frau Mittenklott’s Christmas rum grog, her rabbit paprika and her Schokoladenstrudel.

  It was night when Doon and I finally left. We walked back towards her flat, she talking overanimatedly of the cell, the cause, the struggle, the comrades. I let her natter on—she had slipped her hand through mine and I was close enough to smell her lavender perfume. Eventually I could stand it no longer and steered her into a small cellar café.

  I ordered two coffees with kirsch and whipped cream and ate two large but rather solid slices of yesterday’s date torte. Then I put my hand on hers.

  “Doon,” I asked, “why did you phone?”

  “I shouldn’t have.”

  “But you did.”

  “God.… I don’t know. I was feeling blue. Fucking Christmas. I hate it.… I left Alex. Two weeks ago. I was sitting waiting for the meeting and I thought I’d—Shit. It was silly of me.”

  My mouth was dry. “I still mean it.”

  She lit a cigarette. She seemed uneasy now.

  “It’s sweet of you to say that, Jamie.” She was trying to be composed. “But you don’t have to. Not on my account. Can I have another coffee?”