Shadows in Paradise

by Erich Maria Remarque

  I bowed to the Obergruppenführer in the blue suit. "A small compensation for a great misfortune," I said. "It reminds me of the last eruption of Vesuvius, the survivors cooking eggs in the hot ashes."

  "C'est la vie," said Tannenbaum. "There's only one hitch. I don't know if I got the right twin."

  "What do you mean? Aren't they identical?"

  "Not in bed. Vesel told me one was a bombshell. Mine is more on the quiet side."

  "Maybe that's the effect of your aura."

  Tannenbaume face brightened. "Maybe it is. I hadn't thought of that. But what should I do?"

  "Wait till the next picture. Maybe you'll get the part of a pirate or a sheik."

  "A sheik," said Tannenbaum. "A sheik with a harem. A la Stanislavsky."

  It was very quiet when I returned to the Garden of Allah. It was not late, but everyone seemed to be asleep. I sat down by the swimming pool and suddenly I was overcome by an uncomfortable sadness. I had often been depressed in my life, but this was a feeling I had never known before. I sat very still, half hoping that some memory, some figure from the past, would emerge to explain it. I felt no pain or anguish. This was a serene, luminous, transparent sadness behind which a whole world became discernible. I remembered that Elijah had found God not in the wind or the earthquake but in the still, small voice. Could that voice be death, and could death be no more than a gentle, nameless extinction, in which the will and, with it, fear were reduced to nothingness? I sat there for a long while and at length I felt life returning like a slow, almost perceptible tide. I went back to my room and stretched out on the bed. I listened to the soft rustling of the palm trees and had the feeling that this hour had given me a counterforce to my nightmares, that it had brought a kind of metaphysical halance into my life. I knew this feeling would be short-lived, but it was strangely comforting while it lasted. I was not surprised to see the transparent insect with the green wings circling around my lamp; that, too, seemed to be a part of this privileged moment And then I noticed that there were tears in my eyes.

  XXVII

  Two weeks later Silvers left Hollywood. Here on the coast; where he seemed to belong, it was much harder for him to do business than in New York. Wealth and publicity went hand in hand; status was just about synonymous with publicity, or call it "fame." In New York the run-of-the-mill millionaire had no such publicity machine at his disposal; he was known only to a relatively small circle. If he wished to make a name for himself, he had to do something outside the sphere of business, and that was where art collecting came in. At the very least the New York sharks were amused at Silvers and his tricks; in their desire to become well-known collectors, they were only too glad to be taken in by him, often against their better judgment In Hollywood no one took him seriously, because anyone with any standing at all in the movies enjoyed more fame, hence status, than the most eminent art collector.

  He finally managed to sell the Gauguin to Weller, but, to his infinite disgust, he needed my help even for that. In Weller's eyes I was more important than Silvers. Weller needed me for his picture; he didn't need Silvers for anything. That was too much for Silvers, whose vanity was even greater than his passion for business. "You stay here," he said, "as my bridgehead in the land of the barbarians." He wanted to put me on a strict salary basis, but I put my foot down. I was in a stronger bargaining position because I could have lived on what Weller was paying me. It was only on the day of his departure that he gave in; he cut my salary but agreed to a small commission on anything I sold. "I'm treating you like my own son," he fumed. "Anywhere else you'd have to pay for what I'm teaching you. All you care about is money, money, moneyl What a generation!"

  I drove him to the station in Scott's Cadillac, alleging that in appreciation of my services the studio had promoted me to a better car. It almost broke Silvers' heart. In New York he drove a mere Chrysler.

  In the morning I reported to the studio. My work as a consultant was simple, but trying to rescue the script was something else again. My idea was to transform this melodrama, which seemed to have been taken over almost intact from some gangster movie, into a faithful picture of a modern bureaucratic murder machine, operated not by picturesque villains or madmen, but by drab, unimaginative citizens who did their daily stint and went to bed with a clear conscience. Holt's reaction was always the same: "Nobody will believe us. There's no psychological motivation."

  To his mind—and he was sure the American public agreed with him—the crimes of the Nazis could only be motivated by innate evil. Fiendish actions could be performed only by natural-born fiends. He made only one concession. He was willing to admit that even the biggest of fiends could have his human moments—this he called "subtlety of characterization." The commander of a concentration camp, for instance, could be exceedingly fond of animals; he could be shown caressing his angora rabbits and stubbornly refusing to let his cook butcher them for stew. But to his mind, this human touch merely served to set off the bestial cruelty that was the man's true nature. I simply couldn't bring him to understand the real horror of the bureaucrats of death, who administered the camps. I couldn't make him see that they were just law-abiding citizens performing their daily tasks with the same clear conscience and sense of work well done as if they had been making toys or plumbing fixtures. He wouldn't go along; the idea was distasteful to him and it didn't fit in with the notions of psychology he had acquired while directing horror movies. He refused to believe that most of these cogs in the murder machine were perfectly normal; that when it was all over, they would go back to their jobs as clerks, grocers, or hotelkeepers without a trace of repentance, without so much as suspecting that they had done any wrong. Any misgivings they might possibly have had were dispelled by the magic words "duty" and "orders." They were the first human automata of a mechanical age; they could not be understood in psychological terms because psychology as we know it is inseparable from ethical considerations, which were inapplicable to such men. They murdered without guilt or responsibility. They were good citizens doing their duty, automated citizens—the only good kind in the Third Reich.

  Holt's answer was always the same: "Nobody will believe it Nobody. We've got to make this thing human. Even if it is inhuman, it's got to have a little human motivation."

  I tried to put in a scene that would show inhumanity without human motivation: if s one of the slave camps operated for the benefit of German industry. Holt had never heard of them. I explained to him over and over again that the crimes of the German regime had not been instigated and committed by men from Mars, but by good Germans, who certainly regarded themselves as such. I told him it was absurd to suppose that all the German generals were so blind or naïve as to be unaware of the torturing and murdering that went on day after day; I told him how the leading German corporations contracted with the concentration camps for slave laborers, who worked for sixteen hours a day on a starvation diet until their strength gave out and were then fed to the crematoriums.

  "That can't be true!" said Holt.

  "It is true. A lot of the big corporations have even built factories near the concentration camps, so as to save on transportation."

  "We can't use it," said Holt in despair. "Nobody would believe it."

  "But this country is at war with Germany. Germany is the enemy."

  "That makes ho difference. Psychology is international. They'd say we were inventing atrocities. In 1914 you could still use German atrocities in the movies—all those women and children they were supposed to have butchered in Belgium. Not any more."

  "In 1914 it wasn't true, but it was all right for the movies. Today it's true, and you can't use it in the movies because no one would believe it."

  "That's the story in a nutshell."

  I nodded and gave up. I saw there was no point in arguing. Holt was beginning to regard me as a fanatic; he no longer believed everything I said. I could tell by the way he looked at me and the weariness with which he repeated: "I know, Bob, but we can't use it It woul
d clash with the rest of the picture. Maybe later on, in another picture."

  I left the studio in despair. If even here, in enemy country, no one would believe what had happened and was still happening over there, what would it be like when I got back?

  In the next month I sold several drawings and an oil painting. It was Weller who bought the oil, a "Répétition de Danse" by Degas. Silvers promptly reduced my commission, on the ground that the buyer had been one of his customers.

  Holt bought a Renoir pastel and resold it a week later at a thousand-dollar profit. Encouraged by his success, he bought another small picture and made two thousand on it "Why couldn't we go into business together?" he asked me.

  "We'd need a lot of money. Paintings are expensive."

  "We could start on a small scale. I've got money in the bank."

  I shook my head. I felt no particular loyalty to Silvers, but I had had about enough of California. For all the local excitement, I felt as if I were living in a strange vacuum somewhere between Japan and Europe. Besides, I realized that I couldn't stay in America forever and was eager to spend as much as possible of the time I had left in New York.

  During my last few weeks on the set I was still consulted in matters of detail, but I couldn't help noticing that they wanted no more of my advice about the script Both Holt and Weller had lost faith in me and were convinced that they knew better. When the movie was finished, I was on my own, with nothing to do but wait for the fish to bite. I had decided to stay on a couple of weeks to sell a few more pictures. I knew the money would come in handy.

  "It's snowing here," Kahn wrote. "When are you coming back? I met Natasha on the street. She was wearing a fur cape and a fur cap and looked like Anna Karenina. She couldn't tell me much about you and doesn't think you'll ever come back to New York. What's Carmen doing? I haven't had any news of her."

  I was sitting by the swimming pool when the letter came. The earth must be round, I thought, because my horizon was always moving. Once upon a time Germany was my home, then Austria, then France, then all Europe, then Africa—and every one of those places became my home not while I was living there, but only after I had left it. Then it became home and took its place on the horizon. Now it was suddenly New York that I saw on the horizon, and perhaps it would be California once I was in New York.

  I went to see Carmen. She was still living in the same bungalow. Nothing seemed to have changed. "I'm going back to New York in two weeks," I said. "Why don't you come along?"

  "I couldn't possibly, Robert! My contract has another five weeks to go."

  "Have they given you something to do?"

  "I've tried on some clothes. They're giving me a small part in the next picture."

  "They always say that. Tell me, Carmen, do you think of yourself as an actress?"

  She laughed. "Of course not. But who is?" She inspected me. "Why, Robert, you're looking marvelous."

  "I've got a new suit."

  "No, it's not that Have you lost weight? Or is it your sunburn?"

  "Search me. Can I take you out to lunch? I'm loaded. I can take you to Romanoff's."

  "Great," she said, to my surprise.

  The movie actors at Romanoff's didn't interest her; she hadn't even bothered to change. She was wearing tight-fitting white slacks, which enabled me to see for the first time that she had a magnificent rear end. It was almost too much: that tragic face that would even have reconciled one to short legs, and then suddenly that delicious, well-rounded ass. "Have you heard from Kahn?" I asked.

  "He calls up now and then. But you must have heard from him or you wouldn't have come to see me."

  "No," I lied. "I came to see you because I'm leaving soon."

  "Why are you leaving? Don't you love it here?"

  "No."

  As she tried to understand, she looked like a very young Lady Macbeth. "Because of your girl friend? There are so many women. Especially here. One woman is pretty much the same as another."

  But Carmen!" I exclaimed. "That's perfect nonsense."

  "Only men think it's nonsense."

  I looked at her. She had changed a little. "Are men all alike, too?" I asked her. "But then, as a woman, you probably wouldn't think so."

  "Men aren't the least bit alike. Kahn, for instance. He's a pest"

  "What!"

  "A pest" she repeated, with a tranquil smile. "First he wanted me to go to Hollywood, now he wants me back. I'm not going. If s warm here. In New York there's snow on the ground."

  "Is that the only reason?"

  "Isn't it enough?"

  "God bless you, Carmen. But wouldn't you like to come all the same?"

  She shook her head. "Kahn would only drive me crazy. I'm a simple girl, Robert. All that talk of bis gives me a headache."

  "He's much more than a talker, Carmen. He's what we call a hero."

  "Heroes aren't fit to live with. They should die. If they come through alive, they're the biggest bores on earth."

  "Who told you that?"

  "Does somebody have to tell me? You think I'm abysmally stupid, don't you? That's what Kahn thinks."

  "Not at all. And neither does Kahn. He worships you."

  "That gives me a headache, too. Why can't you people be natural?"

  "What do you mean?"

  "Why can't you be natural like everybody else? Like my landlady, for instance. Everything gets so complicated with you people."

  The waiter served us macédoine de fruits. "Same as this here," said Carmen. "Why do you have to give it such a pompous name when it's only cut-up fruit with a bit of liqueur?"

  "Carmen," I said. "I worship you, too. Would you rather have some American ice cream instead of the pompous name? Unfortunately, they only have forty-five flavors here. In New York you'd have more choices."

  Carmen studied the list "Almond, frangipani, and vanilla," she decided. "When Kahn and I ate ice cream together, we got along. That's the only thing we agreed about."

  "That's not to be sneezed at," I said. "Did you hear about that woman in Texas who took a potshot at her husband because he liked peppermint ice cream? She couldn't stand it; she only liked strawberry."

  "You just made it up," said Carmen gravely. "American men are sweet They're not as pigheaded as Europeans."

  "But Carmen, it wasn't the man who took the potshot It was the woman!"

  "You see!"

  I brought her back to her chickens and her beloved red-headed landlady. "Why, you've even got a car," said the tragic face. "You're getting ahead, Robert, you're getting ahead."

  "Kahn has a car now, too," I lied. "A better one than this. Tannenbaum told me. Chevrolet"

  "A Chevrolet with a headache," said Carmen, turning her magnificent behind in my direction. "What's your girl friend doing?" she asked me over her shoulder.

  "I don't know. I haven't heard from her in some time."

  "Don't you correspond?"

  "We've both got writer's cramp."

  Carmen laughed. "That's the way it goes. Out of sight, out of mind. That makes everything much simpler."

  "A wiser word was seldom spoken. Can I take Kahn a message?"

  She thought it over. "What for?"

  Some chickens came fluttering out from the garden. Suddenly Carmen came to life. "Heavens! My white pants! I just ironed them! Emily! Patrick!" she screamed. "Shoo! Shoo! Oh, they've made a spot!"

  "It's nice to be able to call a calamity by name," I said. "Makes it sort of cozy."

  I started back to my Ford and suddenly stopped still. What had I said? For a second I felt as if someone had knifed me from behind. I half turned around. "It's not so bad," came Carmen's voice from the garden. "It will come out in the wash."

  Yes, I thought, but will it?

  I took leave of Scott. "I wish I had another of those sanguine drawings," he said. "I like things in pairs. God knows if you'll ever be back. Have you got one?"

  "Nothing in sanguine. But there's a nice charcoal. Also by Renoir."

  "Fine
. Then I'll have two Renoirs. Who'd have thought it!"

  I took the drawing out of my suitcase and handed it to him. "I'd rather you had it than anyone else I can think of," I said.

  "Why? I don't know anything about art."

  "You have respect for it; that's even better. Good-by, John. I feel as if we'd known each other for years."

  A typical American friendship. After a few hours or even minutes people called each other by their first names. Such relationships may be superficial, but there is often a real cordiality about them. Friendship comes quickly and easily in America; in Europe, slowly and painfully. Maybe because the one continent is young, the other old. We ought always to live as though about to take leave, I thought.