SLEEPLESS, the House quiet around him, Dix took comfort from a remark of Eric Rohmer’s, to the effect that his life was colorless. Rohmer said, We didn’t have happy years or happy times. Real life was the movies, making them, discussing them, writing about them.
That was another way of affirming that mere existence yielded before product—love affairs, scandals, quarrels, births, deaths, all incidental and without consequence. Life was present to give context to the films you made. You involved life as you invented a film, and lies were part of it. Lies were fundamental. Attention was paid to the work in progress, and when there was no work in progress, attention lapsed and you looked up one day to discover you were ten years older—and where had the decade gone? The answer was: thinking about the previous decade. He believed he had Germany to thank for that insight. He rolled over, his leg throbbing; and then he was back on the mountainside at Tahoe, occupied with his severed head.
The next morning he was up early. He didn’t bother to return Shay Hamel’s call. He telephoned Willa Baz and advised her to slip quietly from her house and stay with friends or in a hotel. She should decline to answer questions, no matter how harmless they might seem. Refer everyone to him. If she could get Jana under wraps, that would be a good idea, too, unless Jana didn’t want to be under wraps, in which case she would tell her story, any story she wanted. The important thing was to let nothing interfere with the shoot Monday morning, the final scene. Principals only, he added—Jana, Karl, cameraman, soundman, me, you, if you want to be there.
She said, Is it true, Dixon? Jana was fifteen?
Dix said, She says she was.
And you didn’t know?
No, he said. I didn’t.
But you should have.
Yes, I should have.
It’s going to be bad, she said.
It won’t matter after Monday.
It will matter, Dixon. The police—
It was almost thirty years ago, he said.
There’ll be an inquiry.
There was an inquiry then. Presumed death by misadventure.
The publicity will be terrible. They’ll have a circus.
I suppose they will, he said.
It’s an irresistible story. And not only in Germany but all over the Continent and America also.
Debauching the young, Dix said. So the commissars turned out to be correct.
It’s not funny, she said. Who was responsible for the story?
Who leaked it? I have no idea. I thought it might be you.
Me? Willa’s voice was filled with offense. I would never do such a thing.
You’re going to have the most watched program in the history of German television.
It is already the most watched program in the history of German television, she said stiffly. Then she paused, reconsidering. Do you think so? she asked.
I’m sure of it, he said.
It was not me, she said. I would never do that.
Okay, he said.
I had no idea she was fifteen.
It was probably someone in Los Angeles.
Perhaps it will work out, Willa said without conviction.
No, it won’t, Dix said. Things tend to work out in the movies. Things tend not to work out in life.
When he hung up, Dix stood for a moment pondering his next move. Then he realized he didn’t have a next move. His only move was to stay away from the press and make certain that Jana was on board for the Monday shoot. He did not have her telephone number or her address. He had no idea where she was. Then he wondered if Henry Belknap was free for the weekend. They could take a train to Leipzig or Dresden, perhaps historic Weimar for a day, Goethe’s house in the morning and Buchenwald in the afternoon, German opera in the evening. When the phone rang he hesitated before answering but finally picked up.
I’ve been trying to call you, Anya Ryan said. Have you watched television this morning? Your friend Jana was just on, an interview with one of the German networks.
I don’t have time for this, Dix said.
You should, though. You should have heard it. She gave quite a show.
So what did Jana say?
Anya began to laugh and then she said, Jana denied the story. She said it was stupid, the work of someone who wanted to destroy her and you, too. She said she was twenty years old when she made Summer, 1921 and that everyone connected with the film had been perfect gentlemen, generous in every way. Especially you. She might as well have been in a convent, Jana said, and any suggestion otherwise was slander. She feels she has been discriminated against, as was usually the case with Germans in their relations with Sorbs. First you try to exterminate us, then to Christianize us. Now you slander us, girls simply trying to earn a living. But what could you expect from the nation where Nazism was invented? She went on in that vein for some time. It was a kind of monologue, Dix. She said the slander was unacceptable. They should be ashamed of themselves.
She said that? Dix said.
There was more. I can’t remember all of it.
And did she speculate where the story came from?
Your enemies, she said. And her enemies, too.
Unspecified enemies?
She did not name them exactly, Anya said. But she knew they were German.
And what did the interviewer say?
He apologized, Anya said.
For himself alone or for the German nation.
The nation, I think. Collective guilt. But he seemed to want an amnesty.
I’ll bet he did, Dix said.
Jana demanded that the network look into the historic mistreatment of the Sorb people and then they’d think about the amnesty.
It sounds like quite a performance, Dix said.
Oscar quality, I’d say, Anya replied.
In early morning the mist had yet to burn off. It hung in folds, rising and drifting over the skin of the lake. The sun was absent but loitering somewhere in the vicinity. They set up on a bluff that rose over the water, one camera there and another in the launch that would follow Jana’s skiff. Everyone had congratulated Jana on the interview, so brave and forceful, the television idiot looking as if he had been kicked in the groin and at the end was babbling nonsense; and he was so big, he looked like a giant next to Jana. Who knew how such terrible stories began and circulated, when there was no truth to them at all. Being an entertainer meant you were surrounded by lies and half-lies, living inside a cartoon. Jana accepted the compliments with a forced smile while Dix looked on. Now she sat shivering in a canvas chair, her hands wrapped in a crimson scarf, while Karl, as Rolf, stood a few feet away, skipping stones on the water and mumbling his lines. Dix had gone over the scene with Jana, but he needn’t have bothered. She appeared well prepared, and understood that the camera would be on her most of the time. It was her scene. Her voice held it together no less than La Gioconda’s smile. Karl’s assignment was to react, until the end when he had words of his own.
You’re going to tell him the story of your life, Dix said.
Not all of it, Jana replied.
The important parts, Dix said.
He is my son. There are things mothers never tell their sons.
That’s what’s between the lines, Jana.
And he is not fond of me.
No, he isn’t.
He thinks of me as inferior. An accidental baroness.
His father told him things—
That when we met I did not know how to sit on a horse.
Or set a table.
He believes I am ruining his life.
You are, Dix said.
I am trying to preserve what is best for the family, its traditions and code of conduct, its location amid the remote Masurian Lakes. The baron’s reluctance to venture beyond the boundaries of the estate. His mistrust of the world outside. He knows his limitations but he does not see them as limitations. He sees them as virtues. And he is not entirely wrong. The world can bring only grief.
And never forget your place in the family.
I suppose that is also in the baroness’s mind, she said, and then, after a moment, she turned to look at Karl, still idly skipping stones while he thought about his lines. She said, He is so lumpish. So without wit. He is indulgent and soft, like an animal bred for the slaughterhouse. I think Rolf is quicker, quick on his feet, quick-witted. Karl is miscast.
Rolf the dreamy aesthete, is that it?
It would be more in character.
It would not, Dix said. Karl’s clumsiness is part of the bargain.
I see him as slippery, and brutal as marble.
He is a beautiful dancer, Dix said with a smile.
Yes, he has that. He is the sort of man who should be set to music. Jana raised her shoulders and let them fall, all the while watching Karl bend and throw, concentrating on achieving the fifth skip. She said, I think he is lazy also, dreaming great dreams without a sense of proportion as to how to attain them. These dreams are related to personal conquest. He is attracted to Italy but doesn’t know what it is that attracts him. Is it the weather? He likes the sun and the aqua sky. He likes the conversation and the wine. He likes the churches. But at the same time he’s thinking, Poor Italy, so undisciplined and without purpose. So operatic in its sorrows. He retreats to it as he retreats to a warm bed at night. Italy is a woman to be ravished. He is thinking in his heart that Italy is an inferior country, without a sense of destiny and mission. Without a desire to lead the world, living on the larger stage. Italy does not exist for itself but for him. He likes it for the dreams it gives him. Best of all, Italy is not Germany. Rolf values Italy the way certain Americans value France.
Dix looked up when the makeup artist arrived and asked if she could begin to touch up Frau Jana. She arranged the pots and brushes on a little folding table and went to work on Jana’s forehead and cheeks.
Dix said, You must use your voice like a musical instrument.
Yes, you told me that. About a thousand times.
So I did.
You like to repeat yourself.
So I do. Dix watched the makeup artist apply a thin coat of powder to the bridge of Jana’s nose. Her eyes were closed and the powder caused her nose to twitch like a rabbit’s. Dix said, Almost done. Are you ready?
I wish it weren’t so cold, she said. I am wearing a sweater under my coat and two pairs of stockings and still I am cold. Has the mist gone away?
Not yet, he said.
I suppose it doesn’t matter, does it? We can improvise, no?
You’ll forget about the cold when the camera begins to roll.
You’ve written a beautiful script, Dix.
I wrote it for you, he said.
Only a few word changes, a new line here or there, one line dropped and another moved, and it’s as if the navigator changed course forty-five degrees and you land at one continent instead of the other. I love Karl’s line, You are trying to punish me, you do not have the right. Trying to dismiss me as you would a servant, and then I slap him hard and his hand flies to his face. Tears are in his eyes. He steps back and he is no longer looking at me in the same way. He did not imagine I could do such a thing. And then he looks away because he can no longer bear to see my face. Jana smiled, turning her head so that the makeup artist could attend to the mole on her left cheek.
Leave the mole, Dix said.
Karl said it was all right if I hit him hard, Jana said. He said he wouldn’t mind because he has a strong jaw.
He’ll mind when it happens.
But then it won’t matter, she said. Can you tell me one thing? Where did you get such an idea?
Weimar, Dix said. I spent the weekend in Weimar, at a hotel just down the street from Goethe’s house. Such a warren of a house, passageways everywhere, rooms smaller than you expect. A skull on the mantel. Goethe was productive in Weimar. And so was I.
The idea, she said impatiently.
I saw a woman slap a man on the street. And then he slapped her back, knocked her down.
Jana looked at him doubtfully. And what happened then?
He walked away. I helped her up. When I spoke to her, she was mortified. An American, a foreign tourist, witnessing such a thing. It was as if I had broken into their bedroom. She turned her back and walked off without a word.
The makeup artist finished, wished Jana good luck, and went away.
I thought it was a good idea to leave Wannsee, Dix said. All the commotion in the newspapers. Then someone told me about your interview and I knew the story would die. You took away their oxygen. But I went to Weimar anyhow. I needed a change of scene, to go to a place I had never been.
Why doesn’t Rolf slap me? Jana asked suddenly.
Because he is afraid of you, Dix said.
She said, I am not sorry I had no children.
It’s only a movie, Jana.
You say that? You of all people.
Actors don’t have to believe what directors believe.
Children betray you, Jana said.
Not always, Dix said.
Mine would have, she said softly.
Let’s talk about something else, she added.
Dix heard a sound behind him and looked up.
Five minutes, Herr Greenwood, the cameraman said.
Greenwood nodded at him and said to Jana, That was quite an interview.
He was a pig, Jana said. They all are. Full of themselves, television babies.
A spur-of-the-moment idea?
I had it all along, Jana said.
And the story itself—
Who knows? she said.
You were the only one who knew it, Dix said.
People know things, Jana said vaguely.
Not that, Dix said. No one knew about that except you. Then you told me.
There are no secrets in this world, Jana said.
If you say so, Dix said.
Amazing what people will believe sometimes.
Who did the telling, Jana?
Karen Hupp, Jana said. She’s fierce, that one. She loved doing it. Confusion to the enemy, she said. Karen has causes and the Sorb cause was new to her, a downtrodden tribe she had barely heard of. She was sympathetic, naturally.
So she called someone she knew, someone at the networks or a newspaper.
Yes, she did, Jana said.
You caused a stir, Dix said. When she did not reply, he said, Answer this. Which is true, fifteen or twenty?
Jana shrugged and turned her head to look at Karl. He was standing at the water’s edge, his hands behind his back. In his heavy coat and boots he looked like a mariner. She said, There are things that happen to you in your life that you’re tired of keeping to yourself. It’s exhausting. And so you try to find a way to bring things to light, and mischief is one of the ways. People should know what men are capable of, given the right conditions. A certain atmosphere, an unfamiliar situation, no rules, and a desire to exercise authority. She drew her scarf tight across her knees. What difference does age make? Men should be held to account. They want to live in a certain way, there’s a payment for it. There’s an American expression, “Living loud.”
I think the expression is “Living large,” Dix said.
Is that what it is?
In America, he said.
I thought it was the other, Jana said.
He looked at her as she turned away, her smile brief as a heartbeat. She was made for mischief in the way that other women were made for childbirth or the cello. She lived in a realm of mischief, pranks and escapades, exaggerations and provocations. This was how she kept herself apart. Her world was not anchored. She believed she lived as a guest in someone else’s house. So she was elusive, often insincere, waiting for the knock on the door, inhabiting the shadows, and when anyone inquired too closely—well, then, she put them off, turned their heads by making something up, and if in the making-up she was able to settle a score, so much the better. She wasn’t malicious, merely guarding what was hers. She believed that once she shared what was important to her, it was no longer hers. Dix remembered Billy Jeidel’s dull, drunken voice, mos’ lovely lovely girl.
Jana sighed, leaning forward in her chair, shivering slightly.
The mist is burning off the lake, she said at last.
We’re ready now, Herr Greenwood, the cameraman said from a distance.
Dix rose, offering his hand to Jana.
He said, Two hours more, that’s all.
And what happens to Jana then?
Dix said, Whatever she wants.
And do you have an idea what that will be?
To go away again, Dix said.