by Ward Just
But with no one to guide him, Greenwood was unable to locate 19 Berggasse. The book-houses were shuttered. The breathless laughter and violin music drifted away on the breeze of a soft summer evening, and now he smelled the rich aroma of freshly baked bread. Nothing about this street was familiar. He was hopelessly lost and did not have an appointment in any case. He knew no one in this district. He had no idea how he had come to be in Vienna. The street seemed to reach to the limit of the known world, disappearing at its terminus. He removed his Borsalino and waited. His good friends had disappeared into the Mexican church, the windowless building with the heavy door and the bell silent in the alcove just above. He did not believe he would be welcome in that sanctuary, no matter his distress. His distress was not a matter of concern to whoever was supervising his quest in Vienna. He had no letter of introduction, no appointment. The unseen camera continued to film the empty street; and so, his riddled arm limp at his side, Greenwood was bereft.
3
GREENWOOD DRIFIED between his dream and the present moment, late afternoon in the villa at Wannsee. Wind rattled the windows of the apartment and a chill had settled in. He heard one door slam and then another, women’s voices loud in the corridor, and he was aware also of the aroma of freshly baked bread in a deserted street in an unfamiliar capital city. He had been somewhere in Vienna and now he was in Berlin, a traveler without vocation or fixed itinerary. The dream was present but no longer visible. Something dada about it, the dwarf in the derby hat and a Mexican church. He sat with his eyes closed, struggling with this in-between world. He told himself that he was in Berlin because he had nothing better to do and no place better to do it in, and if a dwarf was part of the bargain, so be it. Alone in Berlin, he dreamed extravagant narratives, often conjuring a high-strung carnival world, one that existed on the dividing line between memory and imagination. He was at loose ends, and everyone knew the cockeyed results of loose ends. You drifted into the past because the present was uncomposed. He took a long sip of Werner’s tea, sour on the tongue.
Dix looked up into the high mirror and saw his father’s face, the sardonic stare, the thin smile, eyebrows raised in amusement, the look he had when beginning a story. He heard Harry’s voice from years ago, back sometime in the fifties. Dix had come home late and heard his father and mother talking in the den. Or Harry was talking and his mother was listening, a story about an evening that had gotten out of hand, three men and the girls they had picked up, everyone disheveled, moving from the jazz club on Fifty-second Street to Ed’s apartment in the Village. Ed offered to sketch the girls. Life studies, he called it. Dix stood in the hallway listening to Harry’s story, trying to gather the threads. Harry was in midnarrative, drawing it out, his voice somber. His mother said nothing at all and Dix could feel the chill in the room. The girls were footloose, Harry was saying. They were game all the way, and then suddenly they weren’t game. Ed took one of them into his bedroom and the other two became alarmed at the noise. One thing led to another. Everyone had had too much to drink, and when I tried to put an end to it . . . Harry paused there without explaining what he had tried to do or what “it” was. Dix heard his mother move to the sideboard; ice rattled in her glass. That was how she got hurt, Harry said. Ed was an animal, out of control, yelling something about Japs. He was in the Pacific, you know, the marines, and I think the war came back to him. He had a kind of breakdown. His mother said something Dix couldn’t hear and Harry replied, They were very young. I don’t know how young. Old enough to know better, young enough not to care; and here Harry gave a rueful little laugh, a lonely laugh in a room that was silent except for the sharp click of ice cubes. Harry added, They were not innocent girls, no. But we were very stupid and Ed was out of control.
Yes, his mother said. You already said that.
Did I? That was what he was.
And you, Harry? Were you out of control too?
I took her to the emergency room, Harry said, and sat with her two friends while the doctor patched her up. Her wounds weren’t serious. They were exchange students, looking for a little fun on the town in New York. Their English wasn’t good so we spoke French.
And how did the police become involved, Harry?
The medical staff made a report. The story we gave them was that she had been mugged. That was the truth, too. That was what Ed did, mugged her. The girls were happy enough to see it all go away. They were nice enough girls but way out of their depth. Country girls unused to a metropolis.
And I suppose you gave them a little money.
Of course, Harry said. They were far from home.
That was the genesis of Summer, 1921. Dix worked on the screenplay for a decade, trying it first one way, then another, and in the writing the story broke free from Harry’s moorings and took on a silhouette and direction of its own. All that remained of the original were three men, three young girls, life sketches, and the war—not Ed’s war but the First World War. The apartment in Greenwich Village became a lake in southern Germany, and the jazz club on Fifty-second Street became a café in Heidelberg. No one was beaten up, no one broke down, and none of the men bore the slightest resemblance to Harry Greenwood. Harry’s story was appropriated by his son in the way that any story is remembered fully, then retold in a fashion that suits the teller.
When at last Dix had development money, he and Claire went to Europe to scout locations. The screenplay proposed three artists and the girls who spent a summer with them, and the tragic events at the end of the summer. Dix had the words on the page but he did not have the characters securely in hand. He needed to know things that would never appear onscreen but were essential all the same. He needed to know the music they liked, and what they thought about when they went to bed at night, and their dreams. Who were these artists, and how did they get to the lake? Where precisely was the lake? And who were the girls? They were young and adrift for the summer. They were attractive girls without obvious ambition. But how did they see themselves in the world? Dix believed that the locations would answer these questions.
En route from Paris to the German border, he and Claire stopped at an auberge in the Champagne country near Verdun, a pretty stone farmhouse set in rolling vineyards, a part of the world that already seemed more German than French. The auberge had a spacious dining room furnished in the horizontal Bauhaus style, square chrome tables set wide apart, a low ceiling with indirect lighting. Huge posters featuring various champagnes crowded the wall, all in all a cheerful ambiance. The sommelier suggested Bollinger, vintage 1962, and Dix agreed at once. Bollinger was the champagne they had served at their wedding and everyone had agreed that it drank very well. Claire was delighted, insisting that the sommelier was clairvoyant. Otherwise, he was just another boring European coincidence. In his green vest and silver chain and pointed beard, Claire thought he had the mischievous look of Merlin.
And we’ve been under the supervision of magicians generally, she said, ever since that character flew in from wherever offering to finance Summer, 1921, no questions asked. No changes in your treatment. No girlfriend in the cast. No brother-in-law cooking the books. Merely a soft-spoken middle-aged man in a Brooks Brothers suit with the air of Wall Street about him, wanting to supply a bagful of money to invest in a film about artists and their summer models living on a lake in Germany fifty years ago, unknown actors directed by the all-but-unknown Dixon Greenwood. None of this precisely box-office magic. In fact, box-office poison. That was why three studios in Hollywood turned it down.
Who gave him a copy of the script? Not you. Not me.
Knew your father in the old days, he’d said.
Fond of him. Harry and I were colleagues in Germany at the end of the war. Probably he’s told you the story. Or maybe he hasn’t. Anyway, there is one. And it’s a beaut.
Most affable gentleman, Claire said. Looked you in the eye, said your script was terrific, gave you the name of his accountant, and went away. We never saw him again, though the accountant was me
ticulous with the books. Your benefactor made a nice profit and so did you. And when you asked Harry about it, he laughed and said he remembered Whit. He’d done old Whit Reade a favor once, that rascal. He had some trouble and I got him out of it and he was a good friend to me, too. Helped you out, did he? Good for him. Whit never forgot his German experience at the end of the war. He believed the myths Germans told themselves were exceeded only by the myths that were told about them.
So given the history of this project, it’s logical that the sommelier would suggest Bollinger, Claire said.
They remained at the table until nearly midnight. Greenwood explained to her in detail the next day’s business, its importance in the general scheme of things. The date was 1921. Germany had not merely lost a war, it had been traduced, stabbed in the back by—and here the analyst’s voice rose in shame and indignation, offering a choir of devils, fifth columnists, intellectuals, industrialists, Bolsheviks, union bosses, bankers, and journalists, and surely no accident that so many were Jews. But the artists, fleeing the city for a summer in the Franconian countryside, would have scant interest in the analyst’s choir. The artists were possessed by the thing itself, its misery and collapse, its grief, as Picasso later would draw Guernica and not the aircraft of the Condor Legion. The Condor Legion was present in the pentimento. One world had broken down and another was being assembled before their eyes, and it was this new world that the artists sought to master. They were young. They were reckless. In some sense they were uncivilized. They were encumbered by the recent past—they had lived through it after all, each from a different vantage point, simultaneously remembering and forgetting and remembering again—and desired to account for it, collect and sift the essence of the time, as a prospector patiently pans for gold, confident of a find but mindful always of the bandits in the hills, witnesses to the discovery.
Meaning, Dix said, the audience, the ones sharing a box of popcorn in the theater, startled when the curtain parted and they saw the clearing framed by the blue water of the secluded lake. The artists were accompanied by three Sorb girls, runaways from their village in Lusatia, members of the most recent generation of the great migration from the Caucasus begun four thousand years before, an insistent central European minority known by different names depending on the region of origin, Sorbs here, Kashubians there, Wends somewhere else—but the tactful outsider would know that “Wend” carried an unfortunate connotation in German. The girls had high Asian cheekbones and were as slender and tanned as breadsticks, cheerful girls with a taste for roughhouse. Among themselves they spoke the Sorb dialect, neither Czech nor Polish nor Danish but a combination of them and others besides. They were an underground people of independent temperament and a keen sense of injustice along with a fierce will to survive. Wonderful-looking people, according to Henry Belknap, who had written about them. Inclined to fatalism, Henry said, but of course Dix knew that, owing to a cryptic footnote in one of the scholarly books he had read preparing for his thesis on European minorities. And the girls had to be discovered in situ, on location in West Germany, no small task since Lusatia was deep in the East, nestled in the Spreewald close to Czechoslovakia. No Sorbs or Kashubians or Wends loitering at the soda fountain in the drugstore at Hollywood and Vine, and no makeup artist could create one from a cheerleader at Beverly Hills High.
Why must the girls be Sorbs? Claire asked.
Because I saw a portrait of one once, Dix said. And she’ll be someone never before seen onscreen.
In the morning they drove east, through Metz and Strasbourg to Heidelberg, where after an afternoon’s reconnaissance they followed the supposed route of the wandering artists and their Sorb girls, south to the lake in the Franconian hills and the famous dirty weekend that lasted for a summer, not a coming-of-age summer because the artists had already come of age on the Western Front, and the Sorb girls—but the girls were already experienced refugees. There were sights to be seen along the way, sights the artists themselves saw as they wound their way south in the Citroën van, painted by Hans Rosing a shocking pink. In Heidelberg the Greenwoods reconnoitered the city, looking into cafés, absorbing the medieval flavor of the old university town. Then they drove to the military cemetery a few miles distant, row on row of heavy concrete crosses furred with lichen. The sky was overcast. There were no flowers or other memento mori. It appeared to Greenwood that the cemetery was seldom visited, though it was very well tended, the grass freshly cut and the hedges trimmed. Here and there were animal tracks. The surrounding forest had been cleared of deadwood. All the graves dated from the First World War. Officers were in a special section, their men arrayed around them, a sentry line even in death. After an hour’s stroll among the gravestones, Claire announced the place was haunted. Yes, she sensed ghosts. She stood in the brittle cold, her breath coming in short gasps. She was unnerved by the winter silence, the leafless trees, the hard ground underfoot, and the evidence of ghosts. I want to leave now, she said loudly. I believe we’re disturbing the souls that inhabit this ground. We have no business here. Please, Dix. We’re trespassing. Can’t you listen to me this once?
Greenwood was not listening. He was standing by himself trying to think the way the young artists thought. When they looked, what did they see? What was their responsibility in this military cemetery? He put the three artists in his mind’s camera. He observed them lark along the paths, bending to look at a name on a stone, and the rank below the name, and the date of death below the rank. The war would be fresh in their memories. Two of them were veterans themselves, and one, Jan Wendt, had served in the line for five years. Five years on the Western Front, First Marne, Second Marne, the bugles of the new century. His comrades in the trenches wanted to be near Wendt; they believed God was on his side, and at the decisive moment, theirs as well. The stubborn God of Martin Luther agreed to extend his personal protection to Wendt, an unlikely recipient of heavenly grace. Wendt told the story often, so often he came to believe it himself.
Greenwood was assembling biographies, first of Wendt, then of Rosing and Fischer. At the armistice, Jan Wendt was the sole surviving member of his battalion, and naturally once the shooting stopped he was shunned by all. Wendt was thought to be unwholesome. So he would be looking at the graves in the Militârfriedhof from an intimate angle of vision, one that had to do with his own recollections and stupendous good fortune. Bernd Fischer and Hans Rosing would see things differently. Rosing had missed the war altogether, a dubious medical deferment that allowed him to spend the duration in a sanitarium in the Black Forest. Rosing would be unable to imagine the broken bones beneath the surface of the earth. Then—were the girls with them, or waiting in the Citroën? The girls would have no interest in the interments of the cemetery. Sorbs lost no matter who won. Wendt, the irreverent one, would probably light a match on the concrete and then pose for a photograph, a cigarette in his mouth and his boot on the Gothic cross, thinking no doubt of—the girls in the Citroën, a pebble in his shoe, the high whistle of a French .75, the pure arc of a Matisse brushstroke, or the beer and sausage in the rear of the van. The photograph was in Wendt’s wallet. Bernd Fischer had taken it with the military-issue Leica he had used in the last years of the war, when he was assigned to the general staff as a portrait photographer. His was the famous candid of General Erich von Falkenhayn when he announced the unconditional objective of the siege of Verdun: “to bleed France white.” It was one of the only photographs of the haughty Prussian to capture what was unmistakably a smile, the corners of his mouth ascending slightly, his pale eyes radiating something close to warmth.
On their way out, Greenwood asked Claire to stop the car and shut off the engine. He alighted with his notebook.
She said, What are you doing?
Shhh, he said. I’m listening.
Listening to what?
He said, I’m wondering what they heard, the three of them, as they strolled around the cemetery. What was audible to them as they moved? It’s important to understand
the circumstances of the visit. Who suggested it? Wendt? What did they notice as they walked among the tombstones? And what were they thinking? Artists listen as well as see. And some of what they hear finds its way into their work, the hiss of water on keel in Homer, the racket of the locomotive in Hopper, the thud of dancing shoes on parquet in Degas. And would they have heard different things, these three, the wind in the trees, the rustle of birds, each other’s breathing? Perhaps the girls were roughhousing in the car. Did Jan Wendt decide right then to draw his Marne series? Did the wind in the trees beside the gravestones remind him of the spring wind in Flanders, when the earth turned to mud and the birds returned in flocks? He hadn’t drawn anything in two years and then, suddenly, a frenzy of activity. Fifty-two drawings in June alone, sheet after sheet of life in the German trenches, a series that was later compared with Goya’s Horrors of War, except they were far more graphic, so graphic many galleries refused to display them. Times had changed, meaning the audience had changed. Wendt was denounced for insulting the memory of the gallant German infantry. He replied that he was the German infantry, and it pleased him to insult himself.