by Nick Dybek
“I’m sorry. Start over,” I said.
“The best I can explain it is that all day I’ve imagined a man I never spoke to passing under this window. A Russian or perhaps a Pole.”
“Either would do?”
He looked up at me. His eyes were shining with tears.
“I’m sorry. Start over again, please.”
* * *
“I always felt guilty,” Paul said, “sleeping in a stranger’s home when we billeted. I suppose privacy is far from the worst thing one loses during a war. All the same . . .”
All the same, there was a certain pleasure in having the run of someone else’s house, of fashioning a picture of a life based on the clues left untouched by looters. It was a pleasure antithetical to army life: imaginative, artistic, childlike.
In July of 1915 the Second Regiment of Austrian Hussars took the town of Suwałki in Russian Poland and requisitioned a grand house on the main street. The wine cellar glinted with broken glass. The library shelves were empty, the books ashes on the hearth; but a diamond-patterned Turkish carpet still covered the floor of the great room, and several fine paintings still covered the walls—portraits of an old family with dimpled chins.
One evening Paul noticed grooves in the floor, the ghost of a grand piano, no doubt long since split for firewood. In a nearby cabinet he found—amid the expected Chopin and Beethoven—a piano sonata written by a composer, hardly known outside Vienna, who had been a friend of his older brother. Paul explained that he had once been invited to the composer’s apartment, that he had heard the composer himself perform the piece. Paul explained that, so far as he knew, that was the only occasion on which the piece had ever been performed. But apparently not. Apparently a Polish or Russian family had once gathered around a piano playing obscure Viennese music. And now they were gone and an obscure Viennese lieutenant was in their place.
Paul often tried to remember the melody of the sonata as he stared out the big front windows at Suwałki’s ghostly river, at the thousands of prisoners—literally thousands—who lurched through the main street on their way to the camps in Galicia. Thin columns of thin men, hazy in clouds of summer dust. A beating of feet against hard earth, the occasional snap of a crop or pistol. A long low hum of exhausted, ashamed words.
Only on a single occasion was he able to tell one man in the line from the next. Only on one occasion did a Russian officer, just as gaunt and gray as the others, somehow find the energy to shout. In fact, he began to point with both arms at the window in which Paul stood. He seemed desperate for his fellow officers to look at it, and perhaps one of them flicked his face that way before the whole throng slogged past and vanished utterly. Or not quite utterly, because Paul was sure he had recognized the shouting man’s face. He had seen that face many times, in fact, in the portrait on the wall in the great room.
“He was the owner of the house?” I asked.
“Think of it. To be captured, marched a hundred kilometers, only to pass by one’s own home? And then to see a stranger in the window. I still can’t fathom what that might feel like. But it did happen.”
There were footsteps in the hall. They paused outside Paul’s room and continued on. Night had fallen.
“And you think this man will pass below your window now?”
“Only metaphorically.”
“I’m afraid I don’t understand.”
“Truthfully, I don’t quite want you to understand. I only want you to believe me.”
“I do believe you,” I said. He looked genuinely relieved, and still I continued. “People do tend to see what they want, though. I could give you a hundred examples.”
“I don’t want to see it.” He raised his voice, then waved his hand through the smoke, as if to say: Why argue? “I’m flattered that the question even matters to you. I’ve talked all night, after all. You understand, I would only permit myself with a friend. Please, you say it’s never really what you want. Give me a hundred examples of what you mean. Give me one, anyway.”
“You can’t write anything about what I’m going to tell you. Can you promise me that?”
He nodded. The wine had softened my pride. I’d meant to tell him only of Sarah’s delusional notions about Fairbanks, but I found myself circling back to the fish in her purse. Keep going, he said. The pelvic bone in her hand, her step echoing down the Meuse. Keep going. Keep going. The dancing bears in Bar-le-Duc. Paul listened and smoked. Her letter to Paris. The lean dogs in La Morra. Fairbanks’s face. Her face.
And at some point I realized that I was finished and it was only once I had said all the words that I understood what they meant. Bad fortune, that was all. And, comparatively speaking, not even so bad. But at the same time I also understood that I deserved some special pity, and I suppose I expected Paul to offer it.
He said nothing, only sat at the window, his cigarette flickering in the dark, the ashtray on his knee, the moonlight on his shoulder. There was a car outside, its poorly oiled engine squealing up the street. When the car passed it was quiet enough to hear the murmur of the crowd outside the vinteria.
Santa Monica, 1950
I once met the owner of a chain of theaters in Nevada who admitted—bragged, really—that he’d sliced the opening titles from a gangster picture I’d worked on and run it as a double feature. Without the titles to tell them, the audience didn’t realize they were watching the same film twice in a row.
“How does that strike you?” he asked, as if the only response was pistols at dawn.
“I’m not sure I would have noticed either,” I said.
Though I enjoyed stamping out this particular man’s fire, my answer was almost honest. Most of the time my work was beautifully inconsequential. The majority of what I wrote was never made, and I seldom felt much gratification when it was, or much frustration when it wasn’t.
There was one script I’d badly wanted to see on the screen, however. The setting: a secret government lab in Northern California. There, a chemist named Wilson Lloyd arrives at work one morning to find that a colleague—Colleen Hill, a brilliant scientist with large coffee-brown eyes—has gone missing. Wilson immediately feels he may be responsible. In fact, Colleen and Wilson shared a kiss only the night before, amid the beakers and burners, before she guiltily pushed him away and rushed home to her husband and children.
Wilson asks Colonel Chambers, his supervisor, if Colleen is sick. The colonel has a neatly trimmed mustache and an eye patch he got in the Pacific. Is who sick? he asks. Colleen. That is, Mrs. Hill. That is, Dr. Hill. The colonel appraises Wilson with his remaining eye. I have no idea who you mean, he says at last. Are you feeling quite all right? Pressure here isn’t getting to you, is it?
Wilson asks the other chemists about Colleen, and all peer at him through thick glasses before answering in thicker accents—how many of these colleagues were recently Nazis is a question left up to the audience—that they have never heard of anyone by that name. He asks the toothless lady at the canteen, who, just the day before, ladled them both Stroganoff. No, sir. He asks the janitor, who nearly mopped his way into their tryst (thank god he whistled as he worked!).
That night, Wilson drives to Dr. Hill’s home, drunk, and rings the bell. Her husband and daughters are eating banana cream pie around the dining room table. Where is she, he demands, sounding unhinged even to himself. Where is your mother, he yells at the two frightened girls. They begin to cry. Of course they both have Colleen’s coffee-brown eyes. It’s time you left, their father says.
Wilson walks the deserted streets in a light rain. The kiss in the lab, quite frankly, had not meant a great deal to him. It was a lark with an intelligent, attractive, but obviously repressed woman. He ought not to have done it. In fact, he’s always been a bit of a cad, having already broken the heart of a blind hatcheck girl and countless second-shift nurses. But through the process—the agony—of trying to remember every detail of Colleen simply because no one else can, he finds, of course, that he loves her.
He dwells on the taste of her lipstick in the lab, a violet-red—finally remembering that they had mixed a cocktail of rare enzymes that flushed violet-red in the beaker. The beaker broke. Colleen was clumsy, one of the qualities he now realizes he loves.
He races back to the lab, half-drunk, fully desperate. He remixes the compounds. He re-smashes the beaker.
The following morning, he finds Colleen at her desk, chatting with one of the former Nazis about slalom, her left arm in a sling. He runs to her, embraces her, confesses his love and so forth.
I’m sorry, who are you? she asks.
It took the producer I was working for at the time—Tim Tweller, a man well known for that type of melodrama—several months to get back to me about the script, so I knew his answer already.
“Just who do you think is going to believe this?” he asked.
“Which part?” I answered.
“Obviously we could work around the magic beakers. Problem is, why would this Wilson even care? We’d need a female lead much too beautiful to be a scientist.”
I felt completely crestfallen and couldn’t fully explain why. Faye and I had just separated; no doubt that was part of it. It didn’t occur to me until much later that both the script and my disappointment might have had more to do with my feelings for another woman entirely.
As it happened, Tweller was the producer who had asked me to work with Max Steiner on the spy picture. And so he was the man I went to see in Culver City the Thursday after Max called me at home. But, by then, seeing Tim Tweller meant seeing his wife, Alice.
It had been an open secret for years that she was the one who made the decisions. No one complained. Tim was a drunk, and Alice was better at his job than he’d ever been sober. In fact, it had been several months since anyone had talked to Tim at all. It was assumed he had checked into a hospital and was having a hard time checking out, but no one really knew. Of course, his name was still the one that appeared in the titles.
I liked Alice. She had been a middle-class girl from western Michigan, and, though her circumstances had changed dramatically, that’s exactly what she still looked like. She wore flower-print dresses with cap sleeves, and smiled at everyone from Jack Warner to the security guards on the lot with the same thrifty warmth.
The office was just as Tim had left it, with autographed pictures of various Detroit Tigers on the walls, and a detailed model of a P-47 one of their sons had flown in the Pacific. Alice sat behind her husband’s desk—a glass and metal thing that looked like a collapsed skyscraper.
“Goodness, Tom. How lovely to see you.” She may even have meant it. We’d always gotten along. She killed with kindness. The people I disliked were the ones who wouldn’t let you be nice.
“I came about the spy picture,” I said.
“Obviously you did,” she said. “We didn’t know what we had there. That’s always how it is with the really good ones, isn’t it? Tim is ecstatic. He asked me to thank you for pitching in. To kiss your feet, actually. But you don’t mind if I just say it, do you?”
“I don’t mind at all,” I said. “And I’m glad you like the lyrics, but I have something embarrassing to admit.” I tried to make it funny. I set the scene of the party, the chocolate cake and balloons, The Threepenny Opera. The strong, sweet wine. I’d been drunk. And a bit in awe of Max Steiner, and, because I’d wanted to impress him, I began to sing lyrics that . . . were already spoken for by another picture. Would she explain to him that we needed to try something else?
She listened politely, laughing in the right places, encouraging, but her eyes narrowed as I finished, as she realized just how egregiously I’d been wasting her time.
“Which picture is that?” she asked. I began to answer. Her eyes flashed to the clock on the desk and then back at me. “Actually, it doesn’t matter. There’s weight behind this little thing now, Tom. I was trying to explain that to you. Anyway, it’s already been shot.”
“The song’s been shot?”
“Max wrote it up on Monday. Today is Thursday. You are aware we have a budget? I was just on my way to look at the dailies. Why don’t you come? Once you see it I’m sure you won’t change a thing.”
“That’s all right,” I said.
But she was already up, her skirt swishing. She put a friendly hand on my shoulder and squeezed with the strength of three men. “It’s your job, after all.”
The projector light flared. The reel began. A wrinkled mouth in close-up. A German-accented voice.
Arthur Bradley—the former major leaguer programmed with the radio codes—has arrived in Ghent after a devious route by train, rowboat, and ski; dodging communist agents, slowly falling in love with the dead psychoanalyst’s beautiful secretary. He has long since become aware of the dangerous knowledge implanted in his brain, but has no better idea how to access it than the Soviets. The secretary, Inga, has promised that another doctor, the analyst’s mentor, might extract the codes. But they missed him in Zurich, and again in Cologne.
Now Bradley sits in a comfortable armchair on the third floor of one of the Flemish houses that line the Leie River. You can practically smell the wool, leather, and pipe smoke in the office.
The wrinkled mouth and accented voice belong to the old doctor, the last person alive who might dig out the secret. He has a beard, and a pocket watch that ticks like a branch tapping at a window. The camera shifts to Bradley’s face, relaxed for the first time in two reels. He’s a good actor and very handsome. More naturalistic in approach than most. It won’t be long before he’s a star, everyone knows that. The shot switches to his point of view. The doctor’s pen light flashes. His voice is soothing and low. Bradley’s eyes droop, and the camera follows him into the dark.
He wakes to the thin sound of a whistle, to the doctor shaking his head, slowly, sadly.
My student was clever, wasn’t he? he says in the phony accent. Too clever. We now know the trigger. It is a lullaby your mother sang. But there is a problem. I cannot pull this trigger, nor can Inga, nor can the Soviets. It must be your mother’s voice. That’s the only way. You must reach her.
As far as Bradley knows, his mother is in Iowa, in the same house she has lived in for most of her life. The problem is: he has not spoken to his mother in ten years. She is a proud and cold woman. He had no father, and she wanted him to be a doctor, but he gave that up to play baseball. There was a terrible parting, during which he said things he can scarcely believe. It was just that streak of cruelty he came to Vienna to understand and slay.
Inga spots the Soviet spies through the window. In fact, she herself has been their agent the entire time, but now—in love with Arthur Bradley—she realizes she is through with her former loyalties.
They’re coming, she says. Is there another way out?
No, the doctor says, but we still have a few minutes, and I do have a phone. It is worth a try, is it not?
The phone rings in a house on Market Street in Mount Vernon, Iowa. A woman, played by a silent film star whom audiences have not seen in years, puts down her morning coffee and paper. She wears a flannel robe. It’s very early. She has no reason to be up other than habit.
She hears her son’s voice, tinny and distant, panicked, and on her face we see the buckling of a stubborn pride. The actress can do a great deal with her face. Hard bones go soft before the camera.
They’re in the building, Inga whispers.
Do you remember the lullaby? Arthur Bradley asks. There’s no time to explain. Can you sing it?
Yes, his mother says, but . . .
There’s no time to explain, he shouts. Footsteps on the stairs. His mother takes the receiver from her ear. Her nostrils suggest that she is angry, the rest of her face looks stiff and disappointed. She makes a gesture as if to hang up the phone, then doesn’t. Then sings.
I fled to the sea, the sea was too small
But I still had a ball, I still had a ball
I kissed my girl out in the park
There’s better li
ght, now that it’s dark
I stumbled home at the end of the night,
There’s better dark, now that it’s light
The snow covered the window and spread to the mirror
The perfect end to a perfect year
Steiner’s melody is far more delicate and difficult than a man behind the wheel of an ambulance could ever dream up, but it fits. You can just hum it. The mother’s voice does not match her hard face.
Then the camera cuts to Arthur Bradley’s face. The actor plays this moment well. His eyes slip into a trance, even as they well and tear. You can see all he wants to say to his mother, all he has wanted to say for years—it was just the two of them, for so long she was his entire world—but all he can say are the mechanical and cold radio codes: 2, 33, 7, 908, 1004, 2, 1919, 13 . . .
Alice Tweller sneezed as the lights came up. Some people are like that, apparently; the abrupt shift from dark to light makes them sneeze.
“Well?” she said.
I didn’t say anything, but that didn’t appear to bother her.
“There will be an arrangement for the credits as well. We may even spring for a name to sing it.” She squeezed my knee, not quite so hard this time. She was a talented woman. Her touch could say so many different things, and so unmistakably. “Your angle here isn’t money, is it? I can ask Tim, but you know what he’ll say, and I don’t see your leverage.”
“I don’t see my leverage either. I agree, it’s good.”
Alice smiled, as relieved that she could get on with her day as anything else. “Isn’t it? We’re even considering it for the title now.”
“Which part?”
“Tim likes Better Dark, Now That It’s Light. Or maybe just Better Dark.”
“Don’t do that,” I said. “It’s The End of a Perfect Year.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
* * *
Notions of duty were unfashionable in the years after the war, and with good reason. Nevertheless, I convinced myself that duty kept me in Bologna. Marcel had wired to say that our series of articles had been received with enthusiasm. He offered me another week to observe the amnesiac before I even asked.