by Yoram Kaniuk
Oved and I went for a walk, I bought a hat like a Texan’s but with a narrow brim and Oved found a group of Mayans and greeted them and they greeted us. The Dutchman entertained us with stories. Oved sold the car because there’d be enough profit to fly back to California. He talked to the Dutchman about the diamonds we brought. The Dutchman got an appraiser to come around and he said that it was forty thousand dollars, and that someone would come the day after tomorrow and bring the money. On the third morning we heard Paul grunting and he came down to eat with us. He looked terrible. He swore that from now on he’d laugh until Oved cried at every joke he heard. We saw Valerie hanging out in the yard with one of the criminals and a day later we saw them together again. A messenger came with the appraiser. They examined the stones at great length and said they’d come with the money tomorrow and take the diamonds. Then Valerie came in, pale. She stuck to Oved. She said, Will you marry me today? And Oved answered categorically that he wasn’t getting married.
She wasn’t around in the evening and we went to a musical performance in the city square and came back late. Valerie was nowhere to be seen. I went to my room and tried to figure out what I was worrying about and couldn’t come up with an answer. Then Oved came in, trembling all over, saying, Valerie’s gone, the diamonds are gone. The Dutchman was summoned. He found out that Valerie had befriended a lady-killer by the name of Bobby Tennet. From Minnesota. He’d done five years for armed robbery. Escaped. Got caught. Did another year on a prison farm in South Carolina. Escaped and sold drugs to tourists. He knew how to charm women. He had brains and knew a lot of fancy words and was good looking too. Oved didn’t feel betrayed, he was just angry. He’d looked after Valerie for four years. Supported her. Perhaps, in his own way, even loved her. He sat around silently for a whole day and then Paul, who had already started to recover, saw how upset Oved was, and the Dutchman sent some of his people out to investigate and soon he said he knew where Valerie was hiding and if Oved wanted, for a hundred bucks—which the Dutchman would lend him—he could see to it that certain people would finish the thief off and for another fifty they’d finish Valerie off too and bring back the diamonds. The Dutchman had asked around and found out that the stones hadn’t been put up for sale yet so no one would know the difference. Oved thought it over. He told me he’d rather kill them with his own hands, but then again maybe he wouldn’t be able to. The Dutchman brought us a pretty Italian woman we didn’t sleep with. She’d known Oved back in Italy and gave us drinks. We chewed some peyote, and Oved told the Dutchman not to kill them just like that. Then he left for four days during which cartoons ran through my head nonstop and between times I ate and looked after Paul. Paul liked Oved and still hoped that maybe some of the Mayan marvels that Oved was always looking for and occasionally found would wind up rubbing off on him too. Four days later Oved returned. He said nothing. He didn’t have the diamonds. The Dutchman said he thought Oved had found them but hadn’t killed them. He said that Oved was embarrassed for Valerie. He didn’t get the diamonds because maybe he’d decided that if they wanted them so badly perhaps they deserved them.
Eventually we flew back to Los Angeles and held a consultation that Hanoch also took part in. The owner of the diamonds wept bitter tears. His three-time wife yelled. He understood that he couldn’t sue us because the deal had been illegal to begin with, but he’d counted on us and he really cried and Oved promised him Mayan urns and Aztec paintings and all kinds of things, but he wouldn’t calm down. I asked him finally if I could use the telephone in another room. I called Avi Shoes. Rita Hauser picked up. Now she was all sweetness. She said she’d just married a Spanish prince and was happy. She was happy to give me the number to Avi Shoes’s hideout—to disturb the bastard, she said. Mira picked up. She was happy to hear my voice and said she’d heard that something had happened between Lee and me. She always understood what other people were going through. I asked for Avi. He picked up and said, Avi Shoes at your service. We had always liked one another but had gone our separate ways because we no longer had anything in common apart from the terrible sore called Mira. I said, Avi, all these years I’ve never asked you for anything serious. This time I need your help, and I told him what had happened and Avi Shoes listened and asked, Exactly how much do you need, and I said, Forty grand. He said, No problem, let me speak to the man. I called the guy to the phone. They talked for a few minutes and he gave Avi his address and came back to us and said, He’s amazing, this guy I’ve just spoken to. We went back to the house. Oved slept for a week. Hanoch split up with his wife and Paul slept with his old landlady one more time and it was the last because two hours later she died of a heart attack.
I thought of going back to New York, Lee sounded angry that I wasn’t crawling back so that she could score a final victory because she knew that I hate being left even when it’s inevitable. Nick Conte told me that he was going over to a friend of his to swim in his pool and invited me to come along. We drove to a house that looked a bit like a fortress and went inside. German paintings by Nolde and Kirchner hung on the walls. We undressed and changed into bathing suits. We went out to the pool, which was in a yard facing the valley below. Lewis Milestone, whose house it was, sat in a bathing suit and was wrapped in a large towel. He was big and fat and looked like a Roman senator. On the other side of the pool sat Akim Tamiroff in a bathing suit and a white toga, and Peter Ustinov was there too. Sitting together they looked like a meeting of the Roman Senate. Milestone introduced us to one another, and of course I had pleasant memories of All Quiet on the Western Front, which he’d directed. They spoke Russian and drank vodka and talked about who I was and what I was doing and after swimming for a few minutes we sat down in Milestone’s study, and somehow I got to telling the story of Hughie and the dog and how it had occurred to me to write a script about them and make Hughie into a kind of Chan Canasta working as a Jewish clown in a Nazi concentration camp. Milestone had directed The Front Page; Hallelujah, I’m a Bum; A Walk in the Sun; Edge of Darkness; Of Mice and Men, and other movies, but then, from 1953, after several Oscars and great success, he’d been blacklisted and couldn’t work. He was the cousin of the violinist Milstein and told me he was born in Russia. Nick Conte took me back to Hanoch and Oved’s house.
The next day, Milestone called and asked me to come over for lunch. We didn’t sit in the dining room but at the pool and Milestone, who was a pleasant man—apart from the occasional Russian-style outburst: very familiar to anyone who’d grown up in Israel—asked me to tell him again about the man and the dog because he hadn’t slept all night and he asked me to tell the story in as much detail as possible and not leave anything out, even if it seemed unimportant to me, and to take as much time as I needed. We ate and drank chilled wine and I told him about Sandy Sachs and Steve and the hospital near Boston and about Hughie and the boy-dog and about a woman I once met on a street in New York at night who told me about the Auschwitz Orchestra, not much was known about it at the time, and who told me that in another camp there had been a Jewish clown who entertained the commandant, and then she talked more about the pitiful Jewish orchestra that played German marches at the entrance to the camp and about how the SS soldiers would beat and abuse them, and I said that I thought that if Hughie was the crazy clown then the encounter with the boy-dog would be even more interesting, because then it works out that dog heals dog but is still envious of dogs, and perhaps I even said that you can see how they would be living in a sort of kennel, and that would make the story very touching. I said that when I wrote the treatment I had ordered the sequence of events precisely as they’d occurred in real life and tried to be as realistic and accurate as possible within the bounds of this crazy story. Hughie meets the boy-dog. The dog barks at him. Hughie brings a battery-operated radio, and later an electric shaver, and then a typewriter, which they use to communicate, and in the end he puts him back on his feet. Milestone listened attentively. His face was taut. He said, This is a good story for a movie. He said he
hadn’t made a movie for a long time because he’d been blacklisted, but he could now and he’d like to make a comeback with a good movie after a long absence, and asked me to go see his agent Paul Kohner the next day and discuss details. After that, he didn’t let me talk. He was thinking aloud and started skipping from one topic to another. There was something nice about him and he looked like a wise old bear. His eyes talked. He asked, What time is it now? I told him. He said, I’m calling Chaplin. I asked if Chaplin was in town for a visit. He said, No, he’s in Switzerland. I had never dared to dream that I’d see a man calling Charlie Chaplin. I would be there to see a man hearing Chaplin answer the phone. After a few polite words, What’s new and how’s Oona, Milestone started telling him the story and I heard barks coming from the phone, I asked quietly: Is that Chaplin barking? He said, Yes, he understands dogs, and then went back to their conversation. They spoke at great length. This could be an excellent project, Milestone said to some man who appeared suddenly and then Milestone laughed and told the story and embellished it and the next day I went to meet Paul Kohner on Sunset Strip. He was one of two Viennese brothers who were agents and we talked and he seemed happy that Milestone was going to be directing again and asked me to rewrite my synopsis and gave me some money so that I could work for a few days. I was sent to the luxurious Beverly Hills Hotel where a room was waiting, and I wrote on a typewriter that had been brought in especially for me. The hotel was nice and I saw more stars in the gutter than in the sky and I wrote, and four days later I brought the synopsis and Kohner read it and Milestone read it and then we sat in Kohner’s office and they wanted to sign a contract with me and I said I couldn’t because half the synopsis belonged to Sandy and I had to get her permission. They looked at me in astonishment. I told them how I’d gone to visit her in the hospital. How we’d thought of writing the story. How she’d been too weak and I had written the whole thing. How she had tried to improve and revise what I had written and sold it to Playhouse 90 for fifteen thousand dollars but how they rejected her version in the end and said that it was too depressing. How she had taken out the humor and the love and made our story into something like the movie The Snake Pit and we had parted ways but she had dreamed it, lived it, Hughie was her friend, not mine, and Kohner asked a hundred questions about the sequence of events, asked about contracts, there weren’t any, said that Sandy had no rights unless I wanted to grant them to her because she sold a synopsis that you wrote following a structure you invented and based on diaries that Hughie gave you to read and didn’t give her, hence the rights are yours. He called his attorney who listened and said a few minutes later that Kohner was right. I said, Maybe so, but I have to act according to my conscience and I’m confident that if I call her she’ll be happy to grant me her permission and then I’ll add her name to mine and it’ll be at my expense. The looked at me like I was out of my mind but agreed to let me call her from the other room. There was no answer at her home. Steve didn’t answer in his office. Two friends I called next hadn’t heard from her. Finally, I asked Avi Shoes to find her for me. Avi Shoes would have found my grandmother and grandfather for me if I’d asked. A day later he called and gave me a number in Canada. I called and Sandy answered. She sounded happy and said that she and Steve had gone on a second honeymoon, or perhaps a third, and they were happy, happier than she’d been on any of her previous honeymoons throughout her four marriages, including her current marriage to Steve, and she couldn’t think about dogs and messiahs right now, because she told me I’d made Hughie into a kind of messiah, and she had no interest in Hughie right now because she was in Steve’s arms and he was giving her foot massages and feeding her fruit mouth-to-mouth and she was sorry, she’d be back in New York in a few weeks and then she could think. I appealed to her. For the first and last time, this poor woman, who had been mercilessly battered by life, sounded happy and said she was in love and didn’t want me to talk to Steve even though I’d introduced them, and hung up. Kohner and Milestone tried to persuade me but I said that I’d be in New York soon and sort it all out and they looked at me with pity and Milestone felt it was all for nothing and Kohner said that he was going back to his earlier plan to make a movie about the Korean War, Pork Chop Hill, which he did, and he made another couple of pictures and then the last one he directed was Mutiny on the Bounty.
In my final conversation with Milestone we talked about authors. He told me about working with Erich Maria Remarque and with Steinbeck and I asked why he’d never made a movie based on Saroyan who I liked so much and Milestone, who had started talking for a moment about his family and his cousin Milstein, said, With that bastard I won’t work. His career is finished. There’s a reason why no one reads him anymore. He said that Saroyan was an insufferable man. But if I wanted to, I should meet him. I said I’d tried. That through Brando I’d met Saroyan’s wife, Carol, who had once been Brando’s lover and was now married to Walter Matthau who’d made me laugh so much one day at the Stage Delicatessen, and I called her and a child’s voice answered and said, Aram speaking, who’s this? and I said, Yoram, and we both laughed and hung up. I said the first book I’d read in English was My Name is Aram. For me Saroyan was a heroic author. The Time of Your Life and My Heart’s in the Highlands were two of the most important plays written in America. Milestone reacted strangely. His got flushed and he said, You have no idea what kind of man he is. I was surprised, because Milestone, who seemed gentle and soft, was really upset. He said Saroyan had killed himself. Killed his career. Killed his wife Carol. He said that Saroyan had killed his children. I said that perhaps great writers have to kill their children and Milestone got hysterical. You’ll meet him, he said. And how. And he called him. I heard shouting. Someone cursed a lousy Israeli artist—that was me. And Milestone said something bad about me and then Saroyan swore, I heard his curses through the earpiece and they exchanged insults and in the end Milestone laughed and said, Tomorrow at the Chateau Marmont. He’ll meet you at seven. Perhaps he was touched that I liked My Name is Aram and that it was the first book I’d read in English and Milestone said that Saroyan only hears what he wants to hear you’ve read.
From the outside, the Chateau Marmont—that old hotel overlooking Hollywood which had hosted the top writers and screen-writers for fifty years—seemed enormous and even resembled an ancient citadel, but inside it was a splendid ruin. The wallpaper was dried up and torn and the upholstery threadbare. The staff was so old that it seemed their teeth were about to fall out of their mouths at any moment. Everything was covered in cobwebs and I knew that Saroyan, who had once been much admired, needed the hotel’s decline so as to hold up a mirror to his own. He came in and looked at me like a king scrutinizing one of the spiders who had helped cover the lobby in webs. He was majestic and frightening.