by Jim Shepard
In the afternoon heat they had the veranda to themselves. The Scots uniformly napped, and the Frenchmen lounged about inside, one to a table. They looked for the most part even more miserable than Flaherty. They weren’t interested in sociability; it wasn’t what their kind of tropical drinking was all about. Those who couldn’t find separate tables dragged chairs up to the wainscoting.
Pal had been overcome with a particularly vicious type of flea and some version of mange. Crosby had cut his thumb and was trying to work with a cartoon bandage. Flaherty was known to prefer more than one drink, and had been drinking heavily. He spent his afternoons sitting around making fun of Murnau’s hat. David continually capped his bottle or offered to put it away, which inevitably would initiate a short spat.
With the change of seasons, most days began poorly, with spoiled fruit for breakfast. On final location-checks, the surf often ran high when they returned from their anchorages. Confusion around the tiller would periodically cause their away-boat to broach to. Some production notes would be lost. After one capsizing, Flaherty’s pocket watch became a tiny aquarium; for the next few days he showed off a minuscule shrimp traversing the water beneath its face.
The long-awaited first day of shooting was delayed when one of the camera cases was dropped off the dock. Cleaning the camera took the next three days of Crosby’s time. The more intimate portions of the mechanism were coated with salt.
Waiting for the camera, they passed days of airless quiet and great heat. Shell-gatherers were warned from the beaches. The highest palms hung motionless, and nothing was audible but the long lines of breakers. The trades were noticeable at the highest elevations only around dusk.
Each day they lunched on parrot fish and rice pudding, squinting out at the intense glare of a cloudless oceanic afternoon. Murnau’s bare feet would usually be in the sun and he’d be distracted by the worry that they were already getting pink. As if they had nothing better to do, they resumed their argument.
Flaherty would assert that they had a responsibility to the truth. Murnau would respond, in his schoolmaster’s tone, that truth wasn’t in the slavish recording of data but in the emotion and the drama. A filmed record of the islands would convey their essence no more effectively than a fictionalized drama. All memories were acts of imagination, and to assume anything else was bottomless innocence.
“I find it completely characteristic that you don’t drink,” Flaherty stated at one point, apropos of nothing. Neither David nor Murnau responded.
Mr. Drunkard refused to believe that Murnau’s abstinence was due to kidney trouble.
The arguments came to nothing. Knowing how fond Murnau was of the Bali, Flaherty took to wearing heavy-soled shoes that would scratch the polished deck.
But it was Murnau’s job to hold their little group together. He told Flaherty he was sorry they’d gotten to this position, and that Flaherty’s film was not lost. There’d still be much of the sort of thing he wanted to record: the hunters’ strength and honesty, a Nature at once bountiful and pitiless, as well as the heartbreak of the slow disintegration of paradise.
But Tabu would not pretend that it was not a film. It would make use of the tricks of the trade. They would be done discreetly or not at all. They’d point up the emphasis of the story and not disfigure it.
Flaherty listened impatiently to such talk and then would get up and lurch inside to replace his bottle. Often he wouldn’t reappear for half an hour, and his brother would finally go to look for him.
One afternoon after David brought him back, they all watched Mehao spearfishing a hundred yards down the beach. At that distance he had the appearance of a dark Aeneas. His dress was traditional but his spear was metal, probably from San Francisco.
Murnau finally remarked that he didn’t think it was possible any longer to get an idea of the old Tahitian customs by observation. It was like staring at a Norwegian and hoping to learn about the Vikings.
Flaherty responded that he’d asked the natives who worked at the Residency about that boy. They’d described him as a mahu. An effeminate person.
The comment had no effect on Murnau. He took a sip of his lime drink. He gazed at Flaherty, and Flaherty gazed back. Finally, Murnau told Flaherty that he would make this as clear as he could. He was finished arguing with him: Flaherty was now a hired hand.
The shooting, when it did begin, went poorly. Mehao was a distraction to everyone as Murnau’s assistant.
On the second day, Flaherty remarked to the group that the Polynesians were subject to diseases of the will as well as the body. They had a word for it: erimatua. It wasn’t in Murnau’s dictionary. Those who contracted it literally died of discouragement. This was accepted as unavoidable by the victim’s family.
Sadness and guilt became the gently insistent theme of Murnau’s time with Mehao. They flared up like cold on a damaged tooth.
Mehao noticed. He had a sweet and gentle nature and an acumen for business that was startling. He was an inveterate flirt. He was married. When Murnau asked about his wife, on Fatuhiva, Mehao said, “Aita pea-pea”: it doesn’t matter.
In the small of his back he had two indentations, like the press of thumbs.
The morning after the decisive argument with Flaherty, they woke around three. The air was scented. Murnau was on his side, his cheek on Mehao’s hand. Off the veranda, a half-moon lit the surf along the shore. A black crane fished in the swirling water, stepping brokenly about.
By five Mehao was gone. Just after sunrise, Murnau flung himself into the smooth warm water of the lagoon. He anchored on his seat a few yards offshore in the soft sand, his face to the morning sun low across the water. Afterwards he took a shower bath and moved to his veranda chair for coffee and warm rolls with honey.
Flaherty emerged from his room looking hungover. He fetched his own coffee from the kitchen and returned, propping his ankles on the veranda rail alongside Murnau, as though they were two Bavarians on the Spree. He looked at Murnau with the poker-playing expression of someone who’d experienced a catastrophic setback and fancied it didn’t show on his face. He said, “Well, whatever the virtues of the Tahitian, chasteness is not one of them.”
A short letter from Murnau’s mother came in the morning mail packet. It made no mention of his letter. Apparently she’d just seen Tartüff at her local theater. She wrote, “The silver and china are always so exquisite in your films.” He pinned up the letter next to his looking glass.
The looking glass hung on a string and trembled when the trades were blowing. His red hair, his wrinkles, his age, his freckles: every morning there was the altogether draining surprise of his own coarseness.
By the 14th of August he’d received reports from four island groups, but not a single word about Spiess.
David spent much of his time placating the local “chief.” They paid for “protection,” as if in Chicago. Only by promising so much a week could they insure cooperation and prevent “fishing fleets” from crossing back and forth behind their shots.
Crosby meanwhile spent days on a tramline for the dolly. Constructing one on uneven ground caused him no end of aggravation. He carried everywhere his little notebook and The Carpenters’ and Builders’ Manual. His constant fear that he’d overlooked something important gave him a restless aspect.
Once he built the thing, all night the native girls and boys rolled his cart up and down its tracks. No one was able to sleep. Then the great joke became to derail the cart over and over. This they thought irresistably funny. Crosby, Flaherty, and Murnau finally went out to put a stop to the proceedings, and became part of the hilarity. Finally the revelers were shooed away, and Crosby stood guard over the dolly cart until morning.
The shots that they got with the dolly over the next week proved unusable.
By Mid-August, Pal seemed reinvigorated. At any given moment during a discussion they would notice him in the background against the tall grass and the skyline, flying through the air after birds. The islanders c
alled him the Bouncing Dog.
Around the veranda were innumerable crab holes, from which big land crabs emerged to work their way over to leaves or fallen blossoms. They ate anything. One pulled the end of Murnau’s towel down its hole.
Every so often they had a good night, when, thanks to a few moments with the actors or the light, Murnau had the impression that the day had gone well, and that it was all right for work to have ended.
On nights like that he set up magnesium torches around the lagoon for midnight swims with Mehao. Crosby was furious at the waste. But when they dived from the tall rocks and sprayed white light high into the air, they were like magically shining ghosts in the otherwise black water. Other Tahitians joined them, naked. Their wet bodies shimmered in the torchlight. The women held palm leaf fans before their faces.
****24 August. Every position is unposed and singular; he possesses his body as others possess music. He’s the jungle in person, though his cheekbones and black eyes are those of a Breton peasant.
Eroticism is the true subject of film. Asta Nielsen, and the way she suggested nudity with only her eyes.
Film brings the overintellectualized back into the primal realm of gesture, and allows us to recover the breathtaking power of primal communication. It lets us breathe, not speak. The new world I seek here is not a world of novelty and wonder but intuition.
Since Nature’s so generously inclined toward them, these people must create their own tragedies. So they have their tradition in which the eldest choose maidens as priestesses for the gods—maidens who then may no longer love men. They become “tabu.”
Mehao uses my sense of his exoticism as a screen. Which is more blinding to the truth: the fetishism of the colonialist or the mimicry of the native?
****Lightning all night. An ominous reminder of the fever curve. Toward morning, a promising little breeze. Around breakfast, an attack of flies.
****26 August. Crosby and Flaherty asked me to walk the beach with them. Discipline was breaking down, they reported. The project was coming apart. Changes had to be made. The shooting schedule had to be tightened. Unessential personnel had to be released. Crosby cited the uncertain weather not far off.
I told them I thought things were going well. Some listless haggling followed. At one point I sat in the waves’ wrack at the edge of a tidal pool. As the rushing water withdrew, marvels of color and design streamed through my fingers. I caught only the occasional conch or miracle spiral as proof of what I’d missed with each wave’s retreat.
At lunch they tried again. The orange of Tahiti is delicious: small and sweet with a thin, dry rind. Mehao visible from the veranda, spearfishing again. The palm-tree tattoo accentuated the muscles in his back. A minor and sad surprise: he’s spent some of the money I gave him on a straw boater’s hat. The bickering with Crosby and F. petered out.
At dusk we set up Crosby’s camera at the edge of the breakwater reef for some sunset shots. In places, we were walking on the roof of immense subterranean caverns. The sea rushed into them with uncanny noise, geysering mist and spray through the cracks. It made me feel fifteen years old.
Flaherty took the occasion to deliver a lesson on the local folklore. There was throughout Tahitian culture an element of dread. Fears of demons and the dark were deeply written in the Polynesian mind. Presences called vehinehae made the nocturnal roadside, and particularly the crossroads, frightful; they were like mist shaped as men and with the eyes of cats. They represented the dead. When a native said he was a man, he meant a man and not a demon, instead of a man and not a beast. Only recently, after twilight, Flaherty said, a demon was said to have taken the younger of two boys to the edge of the jungle. The demon was said to have whispered “You are so-and-so, son of so-and-so?” and then caressed and beguiled the boy deeper into the undergrowth while his older brother watched, petrified.
We all stood about while his little parable was supposed to be sinking in. He added that the natives believed white blood to be talismanic against the powers of hell. It was the only way that they could explain the unpunished recklessness of the Europeans.
I made no comment. Finally, Flaherty blurted out, “They’re dying, for God’s sake! The main thing is to let them die in peace.”
****30 August. Received a card from Wagner in Berlin. He is well. Max Schreck is going to star as General von Seeckt in a play called Poison Gas Over Berlin. Apparently based on a real incident, hushed up, involving a medium bomber that almost crashed the previous summer in the Tiergarten. Sure to raise a hullabaloo about the rearmament policies. Reminds me of the furor surrounding a Toller play at the Grosses Schauspielhaus about an infernal machine that stood for something pernicious in German society (authority? bureaucracy? beer?). The play was always being shut down in the second act by a storm of applause, or of whistling, seat-pounding, and catcalls.
****2 September. Finally: Spiess.
An envelope addressed to me was discovered at the Residency on an island due north of here, Starbuck Island. Inside was a latitude and longitude. I left that day, with Crosby.
It was a two-day sail to a place called Phoenix Island. On the second afternoon it emerged from a blue haze, the culmination of all this searching. Then the clouds rolled in and took it away.
At the pier we asked about Europeans. No one knew anything. Crosby suggested using francs, and it quickly became evident how many francs were involved. Crosby reminded me that the amount further damaged our already chaotic budget.
We were led through the jungle, streaming sweat. The heat was otherworldly. We dream-walked through the vegetation in a covered house of heat. The air was breathless, though overhead the river of trade winds streamed without pause.
Finally we came to the wreck of a hut, surrounded by high weeds. Behind the hut was a long, cleared field. On the field: Aviatiks!
Three old two-seaters, two with cannibalized engines. All three had long since lost their fabric.
War relics, it was explained.
I stood among them, speechless. Allmenröder’s face came back to me. I’d heard of aircraft shipped around the world to protect German interests.
“Did you fly in these?” Crosby asked.
Our guide demanded payment. Crosby took him aside.
An oilskin packet was lashed to the stick in the first plane’s forward cockpit. On it someone had drawn one of Grau’s old cabalistic signs from Nosferatu. The letter inside read:
My Inhibited Murnau, if you get this far—
Remember these? I thought it would be salutary for you to view them again.
Received word from associates in Papeete that your confederate has arrived and that you’re on your way. So I’m on my way as well. We have our boat, and we’re off: The Solomons, New Guinea, Indonesia, Japan, San Francisco, our fortune. My friends do not wish to meet you. I do not wish for you to meet them.
I promise the cessation of all packages. I wish us both peace of mind, whatever we did. We were young. We were fools: all three of us. We’ve done our penance.
What our friend did or didn’t do is his affair. No?
It’s his affair.
I wish you good luck on your project. I wish you long life—
Your friend Hecate.
It was dated 1 July: just about the time we arrived.
Our guide offered to sell us the Aviatiks.
Murnau’s relationship with Flaherty ended in mid-September. David grew increasingly despondent about their quarrels and took to drinking as much as his brother. Some evenings he was confined to his chair by inebriation. During one of those nights, he let slip a story from Flaherty’s filming of Moana in Samoa, in 1923.
Flaherty had become good friends with a German trader. The trader had done a great deal to facilitate their welcome with the natives. After two of Flaherty’s lab-assistants killed another native in a dispute, the trader and Flaherty had a falling-out, the former accusing him of obstructing the course of justice by refusing to hand the two over to the authorities. Flah
erty, however, was determined not to lose weeks training new lab-assistants. He leveled countercharges against both the Resident Commissioner, who’d taken the trader’s side, and the trader himself, claiming they were homosexuals who’d preyed upon Samoans. The Commissioner was told that the charges would be dropped if he left the country. He committed suicide that night. The trader, after being arrested, tried, and banished, committed suicide on the steamer carrying him back to Europe.
Even drunk, David had been unable to look at Murnau throughout the recounting of the story.
The next morning, Murnau terminated his partnership with Flaherty. It was arranged that Flaherty would buy out his share for five thousand dollars, to be paid when he next had five thousand dollars. Both Flahertys, it was decided, would leave by mail steamer for San Francisco within the next two weeks.
Crosby meanwhile came down with a case of blood poisoning.
In October, Murnau received from Else Lasker-Schüler a short and heartbroken letter that had taken over two years to find him. Paul had died of tuberculosis in Berlin. At the point of death he had requested that she step behind the bed curtain so that he could die alone. Lasker-Schüler’s handwriting had deteriorated so badly in the attempt to write the letter that it took Murnau countless rereadings to extract some of the details. She was, she said, making an effort to recover some of what she’d cherished, and was making lists in her letters to friends. He’d collected clocks, and had scrutinized the workings of the little wheels for hours, the way a machinist watched his contraptions. When still in his high chair, he had sketched a blackbird and had said, “I’ve drawn a crow that steals meat.” His favorite word had been Persia. His favorite breakfast had been an egg beaten with sugar. Of his sketch pads, Karl Arnold had once said, “He doesn’t draw; he swims across the paper.” However bitterly she and he had argued, they’d always known that they’d be sitting beside each other that evening at the movies.