THE SCRIPT OPEN in his lap, Dix sat happily in a canvas deck chair on the lawn, bundled in a heavy sweater, muffler, gloves, and his Borsalino hat, surveying a scene of confusion, the cast and technicians milling about, restless as an army before taking the field. Frau Lenord stood to one side, wringing her hands, watching for breakage. He told the cameraman that he wanted one camera inside the bedroom and the other outside on the chair boom. They would film in natural light, one long take. Of course there would be false starts, practice swings before the game was afoot; but once afoot, they would follow wherever Jana led them. Now he began to place the cast, the beaters, the weekend guests, the sisters, the three sons, gamekeeper Smit, and finally the old baron. Gunther was a recruit from the Berliner Ensemble, wide as a barrel, bowlegged and weatherbeaten, with muttonchops and a lower lip as pendulous as a sausage. He had been an actor for forty years. Gunther had played saloonkeepers, artists, industrialists, Nazis, Iago, and Mack the Knife. But this was his first baron.
How do you want him? Gunther asked.
Slow, the way farm machinery is slow. But powerful. Capable of anything.
Intelligent?
After his own fashion, Dix said.
The estate is his life, Gunther said.
Every inch, Dix agreed.
I saw you once in Munn Café, Gunther said. You were having lunch with Frau Baz. I hoped we would meet.
Munn’s, Dix said. I like Frau Munn.
The baron would not go there, Gunther said.
Dix sat back in his chair and watched the actors take their places, long minutes of incoherence as dogs raced about and the horses strained against reins held by their grooms. Dix watched them briefly, then made adjustments, the beaters and the dogs farther back, the sisters and their horses up close, the older and younger sons in the middle ground, and the middle son alone under a huge beech. The baron was conspicuous by his very size and bearing and he would be in motion, now talking to his guests, now to his oldest son, now giving instructions to Smit. As he strutted about, he caressed the hunting horn that hung from his neck. This was Jana’s scene but the camera would move at intervals to the company on the lawn, seeing what she saw as she saw it. Dix wanted everyone relaxed, in an anticipatory mood before the hunt, a Prussian ceremony centuries old, the outcome never in doubt but always a surprise somewhere along the way. The mood was not festive, for the hunt was serious business. Frivolity came later. The hunters were checking their firearms and ammunition bags, eager to be off. The beaters stood in a submissive cluster, smoking briar pipes and saying very little. The forest teemed with game, not all of it harmless, and the hunters themselves were often impetuous, firing before they knew what they were firing at. Dix waited for the cast to settle and become familiar with the surroundings, who was close by and who was farther out, and the line of march. They were all friends and knew the ritual. Now and then Jana appeared at the window, looking down at the gathering in a kind of weightless trance. Everyone understood that the hunt could not begin until the baroness arrived.
Jana leaned from the window, in profile against the oyster sky. The wind teased her hair but she seemed not to notice. She was still full of sleep in the dressing gown and holding a glass of something. A daughter of the forest, Dix thought, never comfortable in this great house with its oversized portraits of overfed ancestors, heavy furniture and servants underfoot, its breathless stillness; and the assumption of superiority, that the world always yielded if pushed hard enough, and the family and the land it occupied was primary, and a near-perfect society of its own. She never understood where the sense of superiority came from—it seemed wired into the genes, a physical characteristic like blond hair or a clubfoot—but it was implacable and as natural as the air they breathed. Sorbs took some pride in their minority status and the fact of their survival over the centuries, when every hand seemed taken up against them—the difference between the confidence of the oppressor and the cunning of the oppressed. Each took pride in its own survival, the oppressors that they had not been overthrown, the oppressed that they had not been extinguished. Each believed in its superior will, the force of its collective personality and unique birthright, the one formed by habit of command, the other by a remorseless sense of grievance. The baron assured her that this was a balanced equation, one that would evolve with time but never fundamentally change; a revolution had been tried once, in 1848, and, though exceedingly violent, had not been successful. The Germans were a conservative race, and change never came willingly. We have occupied this land for four centuries and no one can take it from us. Perhaps, the baron said. Perhaps we Germans fear the future just a little, because of the barbarians in the East—and here he fluttered his hand, Asia begins just over there.
This air—she breathed it, too. She had to learn to breathe it, but now it was hers as much as it was theirs. This was the world she had joined, the one she had occupied for twenty-five years. She had borne three sons in the very bedroom where she stood, making them wait while she finished dressing. She never felt wholly a part of this life, and even now the baron would say things to her in phrases she could not comprehend. He spoke a family language dense with allusion, to times past, to family secrets and family lore, to vendettas and alliances, to village gossip and folktales and legends and country superstition. Her sons understood every word, even when very young, causing her to wonder what was latent in them, what they were capable of, and what part of the family history they would claim. And yet she felt her own attachment to the house and its surroundings, the family she had created, and the natural world beyond her windows, the animals and the streams and forests, the lake deep in the woods. She had her own claims, by virtue of occupation. Twenty-five years was more than half her lifetime. She had arrived for a weekend and stayed on for a life. She had surrendered something of herself but she had acquired something also, and that was now who she was. The villagers thought her mysterious and in important ways she was aloof from her own knotty Prussian family. She believed she had acquired the habit of command without losing her sense of grievance, meaning her membership in the minority. Not a day passed that she did not think of Lusatia, the five towns nestled up close to Czechoslovakia, and the Sorb diaspora. And she wondered what might have become of her had she resumed her wandering. But for better or worse she had made her life, had created it no less than a sculptor created a figure from a brute slab of marble, and she would not renounce it. She had worked too hard, given too much, and in some region of her mind she was proud of who she had become. Yet she believed she was capable of stepping outside her dual identities. They were arbitrary in any case; and one was an accident of birth. She believed she was entitled to a laissez-passer, and when flight became necessary—as it surely would at some unknown hour in the new century—she would walk away, find another homeland, pull on a fresh nationality. Europe existed for such migrations.
Dix was watching her carefully all this time, noticing her lips moving ever so slightly as she continued her scrutiny of the set. She was rehearsing her lines, her hands firm on the windowsill, and now he saw that she was focused on the horizon, beyond the barn and the fields to the forest. She believed she was unobserved as she raised her hands in a salute to the hawks wheeling high above the treeline, describing figure eights in the oystery sky.
Herr Greenwood? The cameraman was at his elbow. We are ready.
Cameras placed?
Yes, Herr Greenwood.
Dix called to her. Are you ready, Jana?
She signaled that she was, and moved into the interior of her bedroom so that she was visible only as a shadow.
The warmups took two hours, one mistake after another, equipment failures, mental lapses, failures of composition, cues missed, and then, when a sequence was filming smoothly, an army helicopter appeared from the east, hovered a moment, and flew away, only to return a little later, loitering on the perimeter, the slap-slap-slap of its rotors bouncing sound levels to lively heights and lending a martial air to the proceedings. Through all this, Jana kept her composure, leaning with nonchalance against the window sash, smiling a tight little smile that seemed to say, So this is the glamorous life I’ve been missing all these years.
It will take a minute, Herr Greenwood, the soundman said.
Hurry it up, Dix said.
He strolled away down the slope, giving the company time to organize itself in private. He scuffed the grass and thought he detected a change of season, a temperate watery odor, the insinuation of spring. The day was cold but the wind was without conviction, an aging prizefighter hanging on against a much younger opponent. The thought cheered Dix, a reminder that April was not far off, and April in L.A. was delicious. He watched the hawks hovering over the treeline and remembered the first day of shooting on Summer, 1921, Jana and her friends overwhelmed at what was expected of them, and frightened by the disorganization, the shouted commands in rough language. When Dix told them to take their places, they had forgotten where those places were. Trude and Marion began to snuffle and Jana demanded a ten-minute break in order to warn Dix that unless the crew behaved like gentlemen, she and her friends would “walk.” Dix began to laugh, the slang was so incongruous, and then he realized that Tommy Gwilt had put her up to it. He promised a benevolent, obscenity-free set, but in return “you girls” had to follow instructions to the letter, learn your lines and take your places when told to do so. You do not call ten-minute breaks just because you feel like it. Jana listened intently and replied in the Sorb language, something to the effect (he later understood) that she and her friends were not to be treated like farm animals. She was on the edge of tears when she said it, and did not look him in the eye, but she meant what she said.
He did not know what it was to be in charge, the one whose say-so was final. You had to keep everything in your mind because each part in a movie related to every other part. And when, time and again, they came to you for decisions you were unprepared to make—unprepared because your instincts failed or your knowledge lapsed—you made them anyway, with a show of confidence and absolute certainty, having no idea whether your decision was correct. Only Howard Hawks could get away with a casual, How the hell do I know? You decide. So he was first on the set on that first day, feeling like the pope on the balcony of St. Peter’s, giving the blessing while laying down a stern dictum—and the day was a bust, everything that could go wrong did go wrong, although he did not admit that to Claire when he called her that night. A beautiful beginning, he said merrily, couldn’t’ve hoped for better, and I’m sure we’ll come in on time and on budget.
When he hung up the telephone, he poured a glass of schnapps and called Harry. He had never called his father for advice or sympathy and did not know why he was doing so now, except that he was at sea. He was so discouraged, half believing that his beautiful film was misbegotten and that he was to blame. Harry was watching one of Nixon’s press conferences and cackling because the president was on the defensive yet again, fumbling his answers to the usual softball questions. Harry had a theory that Nixon did not have the gift of narrative, and that lack made him appear to be lying even when he was telling the truth. He does not know how to tell a story. Dix had to listen while Harry reprised the Q and A. Then Harry thought to ask what was on his mind, and Dix said he had begun to doubt his own judgment. When he described the day’s chaos—I am a general who has lost control of his army, was the way Dix put it—Harry laughed and laughed and observed that first-day jitters were normal, like your wedding night or opening day at the ballpark, all that excitement, all that potential, a clean slate just waiting to be written on.
You must believe you are home, Harry said. The familiarity of home, the ownership of the property, the owner’s authority to open a door or close it. Plant a garden or plow it under. So pull up your socks and get on with it. Do what you do best with a light heart and a brave spirit. Huston has a theory that will clear it up for you.
When you film a red wagon, never say, This is a red wagon.
Dix said, Come again?
You heard me, Harry said.
That’s very helpful, Dix said. I can take that to the bank, can I?
Harry laughed again and replied, Trust your swing, Dix. That’s what John meant. Trust your swing.
Behind him he heard a dog bark and then quiet, except for women’s voices. Someone coughed. They were waiting for him but he did not turn around or make any sign that he was paying attention or that they had a schedule to meet. He slowly took off his wristwatch and put it in his pocket. He stood watching the hawks wheel in the open sky, hearing Mahler’s adagio as he remembered early days on the set of Summer, 1921. The second day was as confused as the first but each day things improved until by the end of the week the set was alive with nervous energy, so febrile that Dix worried he would be unable to contain it. Then he understood that it didn’t have to be contained. The film was not scored until the last minute, a long, slow, blues piano, a recording of Jimmy Yancey and a sideman on traps, and only in the final frames. By then they knew they had something fine, and the Yancey fell into place as easily as a period at the end of a successful sentence. The girls were difficult but brilliant and he took care not to treat them like farm animals.
When someone touched his shoulder, he turned around.
We are ready now, Herr Greenwood.
Then let’s go, Greenwood said.
Frau Jana would like a word with you, the cameraman said.
Dix found her in the second-floor bedroom, still standing at the window. The hawks had gone. She said she was nervous, more nervous than she had been the first time. Probably that was because back then she didn’t know enough to be nervous. Dix reminded her to speak slowly, and not as if she were exchanging confidences with another. She was to speak as she would speak to herself, in the absolute privacy of her own mind. Take all the time you need but I want to make this sequence one long shot, you understand? She said she was worried that she did not look like a baroness. You’re every inch a baroness-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks, he said, and explained what he meant. You have grown into it, he said. In spite of yourself, you have grown into it and now you must live with it. This is your home, and you must live with that, too. You have made a great struggle and it has brought a kind of peace. Think of yourself at the Brücke, the Berliner Ensemble on Saturday night, your apartment in Kreuzberg, your cat.
Yes, my cat.
The men you’ve known.
Those, too, she said.
So you are standing at your window reviewing your life, knowing that this is the last time you will review it in quite this way. Because in a few hours your life will change completely. Later in the day your husband will die. You have an intimation of this. You have always had second sight. Remember your geomancy?
She looked at him strangely. Geomancy was in the other movie. Summer, 1921.
Was it? he said. He had gotten lost inside his own words.
Yes, it was. Geomancy has no place here.
I suppose not, he said. But you know that something will happen this day.
All right, she said.
Remember, very still.
Like a mime, she said.
Less than a mime. Much less. An aerialist.
I understand. And you have confidence?
Completely, he said.
They filmed Jana simultaneously from inside and outside the bedroom. She talked to herself, her lips barely moving. Her face and body would carry the scene, the look in her eyes and the tilt of her head, the minimal grace of her gestures. When she moved a lock of hair from her forehead and turned to the interior of the room, the gesture acted as punctuation to her thoughts about her father and her relations with the gamekeeper Smit. She seemed to lose herself inside her memory, more real to her than what was occurring in front of her eyes, so that the hunting party on the lawn below was faded and static, a still photograph. When she recalled her conversation with the doctor she smiled slyly and raised her eyebrows, and when she unlaced her corset her motion was so swift as to be almost sleight of hand. At the end she raised her arms in a luxurious stretch and let them fall, like an orchestra conductor at the end of a movement. The hunting party began to stir, and that was the moment Mahler’s adagio commenced.
They shot the hunt in three long days under a cooperative sun, everything successful. Then the weather turned, a cold, heavy downpour from a gravy-colored sky that washed away all color. A three-day blow, Gunther predicted. Dix returned to Mommsen House, planning to shoot Jana’s final scene on Monday, when fair weather was predicted to return. He arrived at Wannsee at nine, ate a quick dinner at Charlotte’s, and walked into his apartment at ten, dead tired but happy to be on time for the network news. He felt he had been out of touch for too long, the world’s disasters unobserved.
He poured a drink and watched a report on Russia, Yeltsin drunk again, Muslims on the march from Chechnya to Dagestan, rumors of a plague of locusts in central Russia, mysterious illnesses farther east, more trouble at Chernobyl, a fresh prime minister in the wings. Dix had the sense of a wounded animal, insulted and unpredictable because goaded beyond endurance, one way of life collapsed and its replacement not yet in sight, a nation alternately an object of scorn and of pity. One more reason for the Germans to feel apprehensive, threatened once again by the irresponsible barbarians to the east.
The rest of the broadcast went by routinely. Dix began to listen again when the news turned to Los Angeles, the Academy Awards. He realized then that the ceremony was on Sunday, two days hence, and he remembered how eagerly he had awaited the event in years past. This year he hadn’t even mailed his ballot because he had walked out of two best-picture nominees and had not seen two others. Oscar time was always feverish in Los Angeles, and he could feel that now in the mile-a-minute commentary of the entertainment reporter, her account spiced with the usual self-serving gossip from Industry insiders. He turned away for a moment, and when he turned back he saw his own face, a tanned and rugged thirtyish Dixon Greenwood in black tie, standing at a microphone with an Oscar in his fist. He was so startled he missed the first part of the report, hearing only:
. . . said to be in Germany working on a soap opera for German television in German with the star of his first film, the cult classic Summer, 1921, the young actress called Jana who has been missing for thirty years, and believed dead. The reclusive Greenwood hasn’t made a film in many years, and sources were at a loss to explain what he was doing in Germany and why a soap opera. And where did he find Jana? The story was first disclosed by the critic Shay Hamel, who dismissed the project as Greenwood kitsch, and probably pornographic. But all Hollywood is abuzz . . .
Dix groaned when he saw his own photograph followed by a still of Jana with Tommy Gwilt and one of Hamel. That bastard, Dix said aloud, but by then the entertainment reporter had vanished, replaced by the weather woman, the one with the long legs and leisurely diction, the one he watched nearly every night.
Dix threw away the dregs of his vodka and mounted the stairs to his bedroom, glowering at the mirrors and wondering what effect the publicity would have on Jana, or if it would have any effect. He hoped she did not prize her anonymity too highly, for she was about to lose it. He had been a fool not to anticipate this, the result of being away from the game for so long. You forgot the world’s rhythms, how things worked, and Germany seemed so remote, governed by a different code of conduct. No sense worrying how the bastard Hamel got hold of the story. It was in the nature of stories to leak, and the better the story, the more scandalous its elements, the faster it spread. And before you knew it, whole populations were feeding off it. This one had everything an inquiring reporter could hope for, including a movie star rising from the dead. Thank God filming was almost complete, only the one last scene on the lake.
He had been ignoring the insistent wink of the answering machine, but now as he looked at it, he decided another nightcap would help things along, so he went down to the kitchen, fixed the drink, and returned to his bedroom.
The first calls were from newspaper and magazine reporters and one of the German networks, requesting interviews and photography sessions. His agent called, asking hesitantly if Hamel’s story was true. A soap opera? On German television? Jana starring? Dix, I think you should call me back so we can talk this through. Have you signed anything? Then Lou Kniffe called from Sri Lanka to say that Claire and Howard Goodman and the others had returned commercial because he had urgent business in Colombo with the khedive or whatever the hell he called himself, and was it true about a pornographic film in German? Have you lost your mind? Call me at once. Next was Billy Jeidels, drunk from the sound of him, asking about Jana. Had he actually seen Jana? Why haven’t you called me? You’re a prick, Greenwood. You know what Jana meant to me. I’ve loved that girl from the moment I saw her, mos’ lovely lovely girl . . . And then Dix heard a scuffle and Gretchen’s infuriated shriek, and the telephone went dead. Claire followed, disappointed to be getting the answering machine. Disappointed generally, her voice powdery and indistinct. You didn’t say anything to me about a soap opera in German, Dix. Pornography, is it? That’s what the louse Hamel says it is, and I don’t want to believe him, so I’ve decided not to. And also in his column he says that Jana’s the star and he’ll have more to say about her in his next column, so everyone’s talking about Jana and you, together again. Tommy Gwilt called here and asked for your number but I wasn’t in. He wants me to call him. What do you want me to do, Dix? I wonder sometimes if you’re living on the same planet I am. On my planet we try to keep each other au courant, on the theory that we’re married and have been married for years and years and that’s what married people do most of the time, so they’re not in the dark.
When it’s convenient.
So I suppose it’s not convenient for you.
Or you think it’s not convenient for me.
Gosh, Dix. I suppose it’s Germany that’s not convenient.
We’re away to Bainbridge tomorrow for the last shoot of this ghastly film. Howard’s office will know where we are, telephone numbers and so forth, if you want to call with news. Such as when you’re returning to L.A., if you are returning to L.A.
Claire rang off without another word. Dix listened to one message after another. Howard Goodman with a bad joke and Bainbridge telephone numbers, two more reporters, and Willa Baz asking that he call her at once, she had a television crew on the doorstep demanding a press conference.
The last call on the machine was the one he dreaded, but he knew would come. He listened to it, then listened again:
Greenwood, this is Shay Hamel in Los Angeles. I need your explanation—or denial, if you’re stupid enough to give one—that your actress Jana was just fifteen when Summer, 1921 was made. Fifteen years old, my source says, a semiliterate farm girl from someplace no one ever heard of. Naked as the day she was born and having it on with Tommy Gwilt. And that you knew her age, approved it, and did nothing about it. So we need to have words, wouldn’t you say? Your version of events. Close of business today, please.