The day after his arrival in Berlin he meets Max Pfister, the director of the film The Red-Blooded Tsarina. The filmmaker, now in his sixties, lives in former East Berlin. “I moved here from Cologne right after the Wall came down. My friends said I was mad and now they envy me. It’s much more in here. You’ll see. There’s a lot going on. Soon all the avant-garde in the arts will be moving into these socialist slums they’re renovating …”

Pfister has fixed himself up an apartment in a building that is a cross between a greenhouse and a gym. A glass roof eighteen feet from the ground affords a pallid light, the inordinate height makes everything seem small—the furniture, the pictures, and Pfister himself, who is, in any case, rather short, bald, and wears tiny round spectacles. His partner appears, a young blond woman who is a head taller than him. She greets Oleg with a sullen gesture and begins wrapping a scarf around her neck. “Would you like to have a drink with us?” Pfister asks and receives a cantankerous snort in reply, followed by a swift slam of the door.

“She’s a Czech,” he explains. This elucidation is somewhat elliptical and he adds, with a little laugh: “I’m not sure if she’s got a grudge against the Germans for ’38, or the Russians for ’68, ha, ha, ha …”

Oleg nods without understanding too well. The language he hears is familiar to him but he cannot keep up with the topics under discussion. After all, he’s been doing nothing but walking about all day in the hope of grasping the essence of his phantom fatherland in one long panoramic survey … He collapses onto a sofa in a lethargic mix of hunger, exhaustion, and disorientation. He has a vague sense that the Czech must be fed up with hangers-on like him coming to see her Max. And that, like all women from Eastern Europe, she would be happier in cozier and more affluent surroundings, rather than this aircraft hangar with its glass roof soiled by pigeons. And that … yes, she’s young and Max is old and rather ugly …

He has always had a vision of Germany as a tragic digest of History, the history of the Erdmann family, among others. The most disorienting thing at the moment is coming upon a couple and their petty tiffs, a banal domestic situation: an aging artist and a young woman from the former socialist bloc who hopes, thanks to this “old man,” to become integrated into life in the West …

He gets a grip on himself, grasps the glass of whiskey Pfister hands him, seizes a good fistful of salted almonds. “Don’t worry, Oleg, we’ll go and eat soon. But first I’d like to show you my film …”

The Red-Blooded Tsarina dates from the midseventies, one can tell this without looking at the credits. From the first sequences the period shows through—not so much in the technical quality as in the choice of shots, the rhythm. But especially in this mix of the claims it lays to sexual freedom and an overemphatic striving for formal novelty … Catherine is played by an actress who wears clothes totally unsuited to the rigors of Russian winters: highly revealing silk dressing gowns and shifts … And when she appears swathed in fur coats one can be sure that their panels are about to burst open to reveal thrusting breasts with scarlet nipples …

“It’s the archetype of woman as animal,” comments Pfister. “I wanted to step back from history a little, so as to bring the animal nature of desire into prominence, its immediacy, its Dasein …”

Oleg notices that the German language is particularly well equipped for giving expression to these abstractions. But at the same time this “bringing into prominence” seems to him comic, for instead of a nebulous Dasein, it is, above all, a big pair of breasts that achieves “prominence” …

He hastens to avoid denigrating the film: no, it’s far from being crap! In fact, the story line is reminiscent of that very first screenplay he wrote himself. The technique of the animated cartoon—the mirror goes up, a naked lover is seen in the alcove, Catherine moves sinuously to accentuate every curve … The mirror comes down and there she is, very much the Semiramis of the North, in the process of signing a decree or receiving Diderot, the comte de Ségur, or Casanova …

There are happy inventions that even Kozin would not have scorned! The mirror has just covered up the alcove and there is the French ambassador, baron de Breteuil, coming into the salon. They embark on a discussion, Catherine sets out her view of the situation in Europe, the Frenchman gives his rejoinder. Suddenly his eyes grow wider: there in an armchair, like half a man cut in two, “sits” a pair of the favorite’s breeches. “I had a good consultant,” Pfister explains. “He told me they made very rigid leather breeches at that time … But here, of course, it’s a metaphor for the utter emptiness of the whole diplomatic circus …”

The filmmaker is visibly moved: the film must be plunging him back into his life of twenty years ago, not really his youth, but an age when so many hopes were still possible … So as not to disappoint him, Oleg begins to express his reactions more animatedly and even to applaud from time to time. The film’s key scene is close at hand—the empress in love with her stallion! The imminence of this absurdity makes Oleg nervous. He’ll have to give a verdict without wounding his German host, who’s being so friendly.

“Here, it’s just starting!” Pfister announces, becoming almost portentous. It is clear that, twenty years on, he still believes his style of filming was innovative.

Horses gallop across the screen, white, like Orlik, Catherine’s favorite stallion. The music is similar to Ravel’s Boléro, but even more insistent. Whinnying, reworked by mixing, blends into the sound of a woman moaning. The white bodies collide, forming a nuptial round dance. The tsarina appears, clothed in silk. Lying back on a sheet? No, it’s a trick of the camera—she’s standing upright, her eyes half-closed, her back pressed against Orlik’s flank. She turns around, puts her arms about the stallion’s neck, kisses it, moans. The violet eye of the horse, filmed in close-up, becomes hazy, blends with the woman’s eye. Back to the horses—rearing up, their necks twisting, their manes lashing, gleaming light on their hindquarters. Two horses coupling, then two others. Back to the tsarina, naked, her breasts crushed rhythmically against Orlik’s chest … And again the galloping horses … And again the tsarina—a rapid tracking shot makes her disappear beneath Orlik’s muscular bulk, then finds her again, exhausted, her arms outstretched, her hair mingled with the horse’s mane …

At the restaurant Pfister maintains the solemn air that Oleg has often observed in directors after a premiere.

“Even for its time it was very daring. Imagine that nowadays! Since then we’ve been steeped in puritanism for years. Try filming a penis in a vagina now, which is, after all, what happens when two people make love, and you’ll get an ‘X’ rating right away. And in my film it was a horse!”

The food is brought—great plates edged with geometric patterns: red stars, hammers and sickles, all the socialist kitsch that is becoming fashionable. The restaurant, located in former East Berlin, seems to be following the trend. On the walls, Soviet flags, no doubt retrieved after the troops left, a few East German propaganda posters, and in one corner a dummy dressed in a long military greatcoat.

Oleg eats without concealing how hungry he was. “People might think I’m part of the decor,” he says to himself, “a starving Russian.” Pfister smokes, drinks, hardly touches the food. He is happy with his “premiere,” pleased with this enthusiastic spectator, now wolfing down his filet of veal in bread crumbs.

“Yes, how to film the tsarina and her beloved Orlik in a way that avoided outraged cries of bestiality! I rewrote that sequence a thousand times. And then, suddenly! Eureka! The trick was to cut the scene in half. In one half the horses mating (something that’s not forbidden) and alongside that, just hinted at, Catherine’s transports. And visually it was irreproachable, don’t you think?”

Oleg agrees, and even manages to make a reference to the “ontological ambivalence of human impulses,” while at the same time spearing the last few french fries with his fork, which a waiter is on the point of whisking away. He throws in one or two compliments for the sake of politeness and assures him that the work of a truly creative filmmaker can clearly be sensed in the film …

But this praise is too much. Pfister grows tense, suddenly narrows his shoulders. The excitement of the premiere is gradually wearing off. From being the forty-year-old director of twenty years ago, Max is turning back into what he is now, a little man whose bald pate gleams beneath a vast overhead lampshade acquired during the postsocialist rummage sales.

To rescue him from his slide down a slippery slope, Oleg renews his compliments more emphatically. Yes, filming that equine love affair was one hell of a challenge. Pfister must have really had to cudgel his brains … But privately he knows that it’s the weak spot in the film: the whole time one is aware of a straining after tricks in order to portray this absurd coupling. All that effort, and the result is this not-terribly-good, flashy, phony film. An army of extras, that poor Catherine, no doubt made uncomfortable by the weight of her bloated breasts, and a whole herd of horses, whose erotic moods had to be kept under surveillance. All that, just for that!

Pfister attempts an uneasy grin. At first, walking into the restaurant, he had posed as a condescending regular, a West German turning up here in the now collapsed German Democratic Republic. With the benevolent loftiness of a colonizer, he had addressed the waiters familiarly, shaken hands with the chef … Now he is no longer acting the part, guessing what this Russian who has finished gulping down his dinner must be thinking: all that, just for that …

In a last effort at social poise Pfister announces between two swigs of vodka: “By the way, I came across your Tarkovsky a number of times. An original guy, a bit crazy, a mystic—”

He breaks off, sensing that he has struck a false note. His voice becomes tinged with bitter sarcasm.

“Oh yes, Tarkovsky, a true icon. A victim of the Kremlin dictatorship. That’s how they portray him in the media. He posed as a persecuted man, as if he were some ex-convict from the Kolyma camps—and all this in his miserable exile in Venice, where he went to live and was welcomed with open arms by generous patrons. The first time I felt like kneeling: a saint, a genius, muzzled by totalitarianism! Then I thought about it … That was in the days when I was trying to scrape together a few million marks to make one of my own films. You know the old story: you beg, you prostitute yourself, you kill yourself to assemble a pittance, three candle ends offered by one producer and a pair of old socks graciously granted by a television channel … And so, I see Tarkovsky, this crucified martyr, I listen to his lamentations about the calvary he suffered to bring out his films in the USSR. And all at once, I ask myself, but wait a minute, who financed them? Well, I’ll tell you who … It was the Soviet State, goddamn it! Yes, those torturers allocated him a budget, often a rather substantial one, you know Tarkovsky didn’t skimp on his decor. So these enemies of liberty were supporting a director who made pictures that were maybe not hostile to, but certainly indifferent to, the ideals of communism. And what’s more these pretentiously complex films were often quite inaccessible to … let’s say the toiling masses. All that aesthetic monkey business in his film The Mirror, I always found it a bit tedious, not to say boring as hell … But that’s not the main point. There, I say to myself, you have somebody who’s forever moaning, but whose films have been made thanks to the taxes paid by poor kolkhozniks who can’t make head or tail of these movies designed for a little blasé elite. And, lo and behold, when this crucified martyr turns up on the Grand Canal it’s the same story all over again! The West doesn’t suit him either and he swamps us with his Nostalghia, which is even more deadly dull than the rest. But there are still idiots ready to take over from the kolkhozniks the financing of our martyr’s latest films of his moods and whims …”

Pfister rounds off his indictment in the street. He walks along swaying and gesticulating. “He’s a dead ringer for Woody Allen,” Oleg says to himself. With selfish, bitter glee he realizes that his trip to Berlin will have been helpful: Pfister’s film is, in part, what Zhurbin was trying to do. And it’s a clear failure.

They arrive in front of the building where the filmmaker lives. “Freedom to create, ha, ha, ha! But who’ll let me film another Catherine—that little girl of fourteen who goes off to Russia never to return? I found dough for my Tsarina because everyone wanted to see her lovers screwing her, that was all that interested them—a big German woman being served by horny guardsmen. And as we were right in the middle of the sexual revolution, we had to show the horse as well …”

He stops, gives Oleg a pained glance. “I went on fighting. Even after that film I still dreamed of rewriting her life. But time passed and it’s too late now. You can stay the night, if you like. What? My girlfriend? We’ll tell her you’re a KGB agent. People always suspect Russians, you know. Oh well. Here’s to the next time …”

They pause in the snow for a moment more, somewhat hesitant now, both of them aware there’s little likelihood of their ever meeting again and that their encounter has brought together countries now swallowed up, eras now obliterated. And that for Oleg (as Pfister knows), it has been his first real evening in company on his “native soil.”

In order to avoid painful farewells, Oleg asks: “In Kozin’s film Eva Sander played Catherine. You don’t know what she’s working on now do you?”

Pfister whispers, as if sharing a secret: “Take some advice from an old man. Never go back to women from the past. It only leads to unhappiness. Live in the present. It tells better lies because it’s always changing … Ah, here comes my present!”

Oleg turns around and recognizes the Czech. He thanks Pfister, beats a retreat. The latter, no doubt sobered up by the chilly air, bellows in astonishingly solemn tones: “And forget about Catherine. Impossible to film a woman no man ever loved …”