SO YOU’RE REUNITED with Jana after all these years, Henry Belknap said. Isn’t it remarkable how people show up years later, and right away you’re plunged back into the time when you first knew them? And now you have an episode of Wannsee 1899 and that never would have happened if you hadn’t come to Berlin. Jana either. Who would believe it? Not me. When you arrived in January I gave you three weeks, maximum. Then you were back to L.A. on some hoked-up errand, bye-bye Dix. Whereupon Jana arrives and you’re back in business. Who’s she playing?
The baroness, Dix said.
There isn’t any baroness in Wannsee 1899.
There is now, Dix said.
Can she do it?
Beautifully, Dix said. If she wants to.
And does she?
I think she does, Dix said.
Tell me this one thing, Henry said. You speak no German. Have no feel for the language that I can see. How do you work it out with the actors? How do you know when they’re speaking correctly, inflections and so on.
Tempo, Dix said. The timbre of the voice. What they’re doing with their hands and their mouths. The look in their eyes, so that I can know when they’re faking and when the audience will know they’re faking. There’s an aura when the gears mesh. And I do have some feel for the language.
They were sitting in Henry’s crowded office, books and manuscripts stacked on the long table and piled on the floor. The walls were decorated with photographs of Isaac Babel, Walter Benjamin, Richard Strauss, and Max Beckmann. A bronze bust of Willy Brandt rested on the mantel. Henry’s assistant arrived with a bucket of ice and a bottle of Polish vodka, warned Henry that he had a dinner engagement at eight, and went away, returning almost at once to say that New York was on the line, an urgent conference call. Dix poured two glasses while Henry shifted his huge bulk and reached for the telephone. Mostly he listened, and the expression on his face did not convey urgency. Dix examined the photographs, each in turn, and discovered that Babel, Benjamin, Strauss, and Beckmann all bore a mild resemblance to Henry Belknap. Brandt didn’t, except for the heavy pouches under his eyes. Dix turned to the window and watched the scullers struggle against the chop until they gave it up and drifted, collapsed over their oars. He decided that when he left Mommsen House he would remember the scullers more than any other thing but the weather. The false spring had ended the week before. Cold weather returned as the days lengthened. Each morning a thin glaze of frost covered the lawn, and the trees were as bare as the day they were born.
Why no women? Dix said when Henry finished on the telephone.
Who do you suggest? Henry asked.
I can imagine Rosa Luxemburg and Madame Blavatsky flanking Benjamin.
Get me one of Jana, Henry said. I’ll put her next to Beckmann. But first tell me about her. What’s changed?
Her voice has changed, Dix said. It’s deeper, rich as an oboe. Willa says her accent is a little hard to understand sometimes but that may be an asset. She’s sometimes slurred around the edges, so you have to listen. You have to watch her when she talks. She seems to carry the world with her. You have the feeling she’d be difficult to surprise. Everyone’s nervous around her, as if she were fragile and might break or throw a tantrum or a bomb. It’s as if Garbo came out of retirement, looking as she looked when she was twenty, except for the eyes.
Henry raised his eyebrows and nodded.
Not far-fetched, Dix said. Jana could have been Garbo. She has Garbo’s presence and integrity. Of course when she showed up on the set of Summer, 1921 she had no idea who Garbo was. She had never seen a movie. She knew what they were but she had never seen one, and the idea of being in one was—startling. Everything was new to her, the paraphernalia, the lights, cameras, microphones, a script, lines to read, and a cameraman and a director, all new. For Jana and her friends it was like being asked to be queen for a day, not knowing exactly who a queen was or what she did, only that it was surely desirable. If you had grown up in a village in Lusatia, among people whose fate was to be alone and disregarded, then to suddenly find yourself in a movie was—miraculous.
Sorbs, Henry said. Not much is written about them. Scholars study them, but no one else is interested.
And I was the miracle worker, Dix said.
Henry was sipping his drink, looking uncomfortable.
Jana was fifteen, Dix added.
Fifteen? Henry said.
Jeidels was sleeping with her. One of the actors was sleeping with her. I think she was tired of being slept with.
That’s monstrous, Dix. She was a child.
Not unusual in Hollywood, Dix thought but did not say. In Hollywood, fifteen would not raise an eyebrow. He said, She played nude scenes in the film, and played them convincingly. No one ever played them better. She played them as if she were born to them. She didn’t look fifteen. She didn’t act fifteen. When she told me she was twenty, I believed her. Why not? Simple ignorance of the ways of the world is not the property of the young only. I didn’t inquire closely because I had a movie to make, and Jana was the centerpiece.
You took her at her word, Henry said.
I didn’t ask. She volunteered.
Everyone who saw the movie fell a little in love with Jana.
That’s true, Dix said. But she didn’t like it.
Is that why she disappeared?
Partly. But mostly, she said, because she was tired of being told what to do. She said she was tired of acting someone else’s life.
Probably she was tired of taking off her clothes for the camera.
Yes, she mentioned that.
And now she’s back.
She said she changed her mind.
About taking her clothes off?
Not about that, Dix said. As far as I know.
Baronesses are famous for taking their clothes off, Henry said.
I told her I could write it in. She said not to bother.
Henry looked at the clock on the wall, then rose to refill their glasses with ice and vodka, shaking his huge head in amusement. He poured slowly and handed Dix his glass, murmuring, Prost.
After being alone all these years, maybe she wants to be a celebrity. She’s tired of being unknown and wants to be known.
A star once again, Henry said.
She’s tried one, now she’ll try the other. Maybe the idea of celebrity appeals to her, a foreign country, one she’s seen but briefly. Maybe she thinks she didn’t give celebrity a fair chance. And she’s thinking now of her picture in fan magazines, being interviewed on television. Asked her opinion of the events of the day. She’ll be the most famous Sorb in Germany. Joschka Fischer will invite her to lunch. Boris Becker will offer tennis lessons. But the main thing is the foreign country, celebrity a remote and exotic land, like Burma or Uruguay. Except once you arrive, you’re there for keeps. No exit visas from Celebrity.
Do you believe that?
No, Dix said. I’m glad she’s back.
You never believed she was dead, did you?
Never did, Dix said.
A few of us thought that was wishful thinking, you avoiding responsibility for the accident. Looking on the unlikely sunny side of things. The sunny side was not your side, Dix. It was out of character.
Claire agreed with you, Dix said. Billy Jeidels, too. And I’m sure they were right. But I had no doubt in my mind that she was alive somewhere, living anonymously. I thought she had heard some summons, an appeal, and felt obliged to disappear back into the Sorb world, wherever that was. I had no idea. I thought she went away as if she were in a dream. I thought she was tired of living among foreigners. Tired of looking at a camera’s lens. Tired of Jeidels and tired of me. Tired of the script and tired of being ordered around, reading lines that had been written for a character in a story. One of the things she did when she went away was to join a carnival troupe. She put on makeup and a false face and played clown for a while, and when she tired of that she worked in shops. She told me everyone had the right to go away when they wanted. And we had no right to interfere.
She was clever about it, Henry said.
She never thought there would be an inquiry. She couldn’t imagine anyone caring about what happened to a Sorb girl, certainly not the authorities. The authorities thought Sorbs were garbage and she was part of the garbage.
And you begin tomorrow.
Can’t wait, Dix said.
What is it, then? You haven’t found anything you liked in fifteen years. Scripts arrived, you’d throw them away. You said your audience had vanished. So it must be Jana.
Not only Jana, Dix said. It’s the script. A good one, and when I get finished with it, it’ll be very good.
Here’s luck, Henry said, raising his glass. You know what Babel’s mother said to Babel? You must know everything. Know everything, Dix.
Dix smiled but did not reply. Knowing everything was not in his bag of tricks.
Still, Henry said. I don’t understand you. Some half-assed television drama—
Not a half-assed television drama, Henry.
But not a real feature film, either.
For Christ’s sake, Henry. It’s Germany.
And that explains it?
Just keep your mouth shut about Jana, please.
Henry was silent a moment, then moved to extract a sheet of paper from the foot-high pile on his desk. He held it at arm’s length with one hand while he sipped vodka with the other. When he spoke, it was with apparent reluctance.
He said, I checked around in Hamburg. Herr Mueller died a few months after we visited him. The firm, Mueller and Sons, was sold to one of the Hamburg banks. A sale of assets only, so the name Mueller and Sons ceased to exist. No one I spoke to seems to remember the old man. His firm was nothing special, just a small private bank with limited—and here Henry looked at Dix with a wry smile—“footings,” as the bankers say. I asked Adam Kessel to give me a hand. Adam knows everyone worth knowing in Hamburg but he drew a blank also. When the old man died, his reputation seems to have died with him. It’s a pretty closed world, Hamburg banking.
Strange no one remembers, Dix said.
Not so strange, Henry said. It’s forty-five years ago. When Adam asked his contacts whether the family was Jewish, they said they had no idea. Mueller was such a small firm. And it was so long ago. One elderly banker, now retired, said he believed that Herr Mueller was “not political.”
Dix said, What does that mean?
Could mean he wasn’t a Nazi.
Could mean anything, Dix said. Remember, when we visited, he spoke to us about the war. Unimaginable, he said, unspeakable. And then he said no more, but for those few seconds he was a man possessed by demons. But which demons? Tell me this. Did the bank continue operations during the war?
The retired banker thought not, Henry said. He believed that Herr Mueller was absent.
Absent?
The word he used, Henry said. But he admitted he might be wrong.
So he could have been in the army or in the camps.
Or in America or Britain. He might have been lucky and gotten out of Germany.
And returned after the war, Dix said.
You’re not convinced. You like uncertainty, Dix.
I like Harry Greenwood’s thought. It only matters to Herr Mueller.
But surely, Henry began.
And he’s dead. His wife and sons are dead. Even the bank is gone.
Dix returned to his room to await dinner. The Kessels were arguing next door but he paid no attention. The light on the answering machine was winking but he paid no attention to that, either. He made a drink and stood looking into the mirrors, and then he took the script and sat in the chair near the window. Night had come on quickly and the lights across the lake were busy. When the phone rang, he answered it without thinking and was delighted to hear Claire’s silky voice. As if by unspoken agreement, they did not speak of work. Claire had news of the children, nothing alarming: Nancy had returned from Florida without mishap, and Jerry had a new girlfriend. Name unknown. Dix described the nightly battles of the Kessels and put the phone next to the wall so she could listen to the one in progress. When he asked her how she was feeling, she said she was tired. He said, Free an owl and gain merit. There were many ways in this life to gain merit; a bequest in a will, for example. But it would have to be done with sincerity.
How long do you intend to stay in that dreadful country? she asked.
Not long, he said. He promised to leave for L.A. before the end of the month, and that was for certain. She heard something in his voice and asked what he was up to actually. Not much, he lied. Liar, she said.
Something may be brewing, he said. I can’t talk about it. Bad luck to talk about it. She let that pass and went on to propose a vacation, someplace they had never been to and where they knew no one. An island somewhere, the Caribbean or the Mediterranean, a place where there was uninterrupted sun and the food was good. Cyprus, he said. She countered with Malta. They began to laugh about the disastrous vacations they had had. Aspen when it rained and Scotland when it rained and the time they went to visit her parents in Mad River Glen and it rained there, too, in February. She said she was lonely without him, and he said she did not know what lonely was until she had spent a winter in picturesque Wannsee, but all that would end before the month was out.
So much to tell you, he said.
She said playfully, Have you been faithful to me? He caught his breath and said that he had. Me too, she said. So we don’t have to worry about that. They went on in that spirit a moment and then she said she missed him dreadfully. She was snappish and impatient with people. What she wouldn’t give for a good night’s sleep—
Dix said, Jana was fifteen.
Claire said, Fifteen what?
Fifteen years old when we shot the film.
When you shot Summer, 1921?
Yes, he said.
When did you discover that?
Jana showed up the other day. She told me.
Jana showed up in Berlin?
She called me up and I took her to lunch and she said she was fifteen. Fifteen when we were shooting her nude scenes, and she was sleeping with Tommy Gwilt and Billy Jeidels. She ran away because she was tired of living another life onscreen. That’s what she said. She ran away believing that no one would care or look for her because she was just another Sorb girl, of no consequence.
I’m sorry you told me. I wish you’d waited.
Waited for what?
When you were back home. I don’t know what to say. We’re living in two places, and neither place has anything to do with the other.
Dix sat with the script in his lap planning the next day’s shoot, beginning at eight A.M. in the baroness’s bedroom, Jana at the window, slowly dressing for the hunt. He hoped to God the cameraman knew his business. Willa said that he did and that his English was fluent. Tell him what to do, Dixon, and he will do it. Dix wanted long takes, minutes long, the way Huston filmed The Dead. The voice-over would take time, the tone and pitch of Jana’s voice had to be exactly right, a lonely voice with the dust of centuries on it, a voice that knew grief and would know it again, because the worst horrors were to come in the new century.
He rose and stepped to the window, tapping his glass on the pane. The Kladow ferry came into view, a tub of a boat but its lights were welcoming. He wanted to film it but no such boat existed on Lake Wannsee or anywhere else in 1899. Somewhere near the Oder he would surely find a small lake, a blue lake that in its peace and simplicity was utterly deceiving. That was where the final scene took place, the baroness and her son at war, everything between the lines. He finished what was left in the glass and watched the lights go out in the villas on the far shore. Across the carpet of water he saw the banker’s face, sallow, deeply lined, stricken, a face filled with remorse, a face without a trace of pride.