The Weather in Berlin

by Ward Just

  Strange no one remembers, Dix said.

  Not so strange, Henry said. It’s forty-five years ago. When Adam asked his contacts whether the family was Jewish, they said they had no idea. Mueller was such a small firm. And it was so long ago. One elderly banker, now retired, said he believed that Herr Mueller was “not political.”

  Dix said, What does that mean?

  Could mean he wasn’t a Nazi.

  Could mean anything, Dix said. Remember, when we visited, he spoke to us about the war. Unimaginable, he said, unspeakable. And then he said no more, but for those few seconds he was a man possessed by demons. But which demons? Tell me this. Did the bank continue operations during the war?

  The retired banker thought not, Henry said. He believed that Herr Mueller was absent.

  Absent?

  The word he used, Henry said. But he admitted he might be wrong.

  So he could have been in the army or in the camps.

  Or in America or Britain. He might have been lucky and gotten out of Germany.

  And returned after the war, Dix said.

  You’re not convinced. You like uncertainty, Dix.

  I like Harry Greenwood’s thought. It only matters to Herr Mueller.

  But surely, Henry began.

  And he’s dead. His wife and sons are dead. Even the bank is gone.

  Dix returned to his room to await dinner. The Kessels were arguing next door but he paid no attention. The light on the answering machine was winking but he paid no attention to that, either. He made a drink and stood looking into the mirrors, and then he took the script and sat in the chair near the window. Night had come on quickly and the lights across the lake were busy. When the phone rang, he answered it without thinking and was delighted to hear Claire’s silky voice. As if by unspoken agreement, they did not speak of work. Claire had news of the children, nothing alarming: Nancy had returned from Florida without mishap, and Jerry had a new girlfriend. Name unknown. Dix described the nightly battles of the Kessels and put the phone next to the wall so she could listen to the one in progress. When he asked her how she was feeling, she said she was tired. He said, Free an owl and gain merit. There were many ways in this life to gain merit; a bequest in a will, for example. But it would have to be done with sincerity.

  How long do you intend to stay in that dreadful country? she asked.

  Not long, he said. He promised to leave for L.A. before the end of the month, and that was for certain. She heard something in his voice and asked what he was up to actually. Not much, he lied. Liar, she said.

  Something may be brewing, he said. I can’t talk about it. Bad luck to talk about it. She let that pass and went on to propose a vacation, someplace they had never been to and where they knew no one. An island somewhere, the Caribbean or the Mediterranean, a place where there was uninterrupted sun and the food was good. Cyprus, he said. She countered with Malta. They began to laugh about the disastrous vacations they had had. Aspen when it rained and Scotland when it rained and the time they went to visit her parents in Mad River Glen and it rained there, too, in February. She said she was lonely without him, and he said she did not know what lonely was until she had spent a winter in picturesque Wannsee, but all that would end before the month was out.

  So much to tell you, he said.

  She said playfully, Have you been faithful to me? He caught his breath and said that he had. Me too, she said. So we don’t have to worry about that. They went on in that spirit a moment and then she said she missed him dreadfully. She was snappish and impatient with people. What she wouldn’t give for a good night’s sleep—

  Dix said, Jana was fifteen.

  Claire said, Fifteen what?

  Fifteen years old when we shot the film.

  When you shot Summer, 1921?

  Yes, he said.

  When did you discover that?

  Jana showed up the other day. She told me.

  Jana showed up in Berlin?

  She called me up and I took her to lunch and she said she was fifteen. Fifteen when we were shooting her nude scenes, and she was sleeping with Tommy Gwilt and Billy Jeidels. She ran away because she was tired of living another life onscreen. That’s what she said. She ran away believing that no one would care or look for her because she was just another Sorb girl, of no consequence.

  I’m sorry you told me. I wish you’d waited.

  Waited for what?

  When you were back home. I don’t know what to say. We’re living in two places, and neither place has anything to do with the other.

  Dix sat with the script in his lap planning the next day’s shoot, beginning at eight A.M. in the baroness’s bedroom, Jana at the window, slowly dressing for the hunt. He hoped to God the cameraman knew his business. Willa said that he did and that his English was fluent. Tell him what to do, Dixon, and he will do it. Dix wanted long takes, minutes long, the way Huston filmed The Dead. The voice-over would take time, the tone and pitch of Jana’s voice had to be exactly right, a lonely voice with the dust of centuries on it, a voice that knew grief and would know it again, because the worst horrors were to come in the new century.

  He rose and stepped to the window, tapping his glass on the pane. The Kladow ferry came into view, a tub of a boat but its lights were welcoming. He wanted to film it but no such boat existed on Lake Wannsee or anywhere else in 1899. Somewhere near the Oder he would surely find a small lake, a blue lake that in its peace and simplicity was utterly deceiving. That was where the final scene took place, the baroness and her son at war, everything between the lines. He finished what was left in the glass and watched the lights go out in the villas on the far shore. Across the carpet of water he saw the banker’s face, sallow, deeply lined, stricken, a face filled with remorse, a face without a trace of pride.

  21

  THE SCRIPT OPEN in his lap, Dix sat happily in a canvas deck chair on the lawn, bundled in a heavy sweater, muffler, gloves, and his Borsalino hat, surveying a scene of confusion, the cast and technicians milling about, restless as an army before taking the field. Frau Lenord stood to one side, wringing her hands, watching for breakage. He told the cameraman that he wanted one camera inside the bedroom and the other outside on the chair boom. They would film in natural light, one long take. Of course there would be false starts, practice swings before the game was afoot; but once afoot, they would follow wherever Jana led them. Now he began to place the cast, the beaters, the weekend guests, the sisters, the three sons, gamekeeper Smit, and finally the old baron. Gunther was a recruit from the Berliner Ensemble, wide as a barrel, bowlegged and weatherbeaten, with muttonchops and a lower lip as pendulous as a sausage. He had been an actor for forty years. Gunther had played saloonkeepers, artists, industrialists, Nazis, Iago, and Mack the Knife. But this was his first baron.

  How do you want him? Gunther asked.

  Slow, the way farm machinery is slow. But powerful. Capable of anything.

  Intelligent?

  After his own fashion, Dix said.

  The estate is his life, Gunther said.

  Every inch, Dix agreed.

  I saw you once in Munn Café, Gunther said. You were having lunch with Frau Baz. I hoped we would meet.

  Munn’s, Dix said. I like Frau Munn.

  The baron would not go there, Gunther said.

  Dix sat back in his chair and watched the actors take their places, long minutes of incoherence as dogs raced about and the horses strained against reins held by their grooms. Dix watched them briefly, then made adjustments, the beaters and the dogs farther back, the sisters and their horses up close, the older and younger sons in the middle ground, and the middle son alone under a huge beech. The baron was conspicuous by his very size and bearing and he would be in motion, now talking to his guests, now to his oldest son, now giving instructions to Smit. As he strutted about, he caressed the hunting horn that hung from his neck. This was Jana’s scene but the camera would move at intervals to the company on the lawn, seeing what she saw as she saw i
t. Dix wanted everyone relaxed, in an anticipatory mood before the hunt, a Prussian ceremony centuries old, the outcome never in doubt but always a surprise somewhere along the way. The mood was not festive, for the hunt was serious business. Frivolity came later. The hunters were checking their firearms and ammunition bags, eager to be off. The beaters stood in a submissive cluster, smoking briar pipes and saying very little. The forest teemed with game, not all of it harmless, and the hunters themselves were often impetuous, firing before they knew what they were firing at. Dix waited for the cast to settle and become familiar with the surroundings, who was close by and who was farther out, and the line of march. They were all friends and knew the ritual. Now and then Jana appeared at the window, looking down at the gathering in a kind of weightless trance. Everyone understood that the hunt could not begin until the baroness arrived.

  Jana leaned from the window, in profile against the oyster sky. The wind teased her hair but she seemed not to notice. She was still full of sleep in the dressing gown and holding a glass of something. A daughter of the forest, Dix thought, never comfortable in this great house with its oversized portraits of overfed ancestors, heavy furniture and servants underfoot, its breathless stillness; and the assumption of superiority, that the world always yielded if pushed hard enough, and the family and the land it occupied was primary, and a near-perfect society of its own. She never understood where the sense of superiority came from—it seemed wired into the genes, a physical characteristic like blond hair or a clubfoot—but it was implacable and as natural as the air they breathed. Sorbs took some pride in their minority status and the fact of their survival over the centuries, when every hand seemed taken up against them—the difference between the confidence of the oppressor and the cunning of the oppressed. Each took pride in its own survival, the oppressors that they had not been overthrown, the oppressed that they had not been extinguished. Each believed in its superior will, the force of its collective personality and unique birthright, the one formed by habit of command, the other by a remorseless sense of grievance. The baron assured her that this was a balanced equation, one that would evolve with time but never fundamentally change; a revolution had been tried once, in 1848, and, though exceedingly violent, had not been successful. The Germans were a conservative race, and change never came willingly. We have occupied this land for four centuries and no one can take it from us. Perhaps, the baron said. Perhaps we Germans fear the future just a little, because of the barbarians in the East—and here he fluttered his hand, Asia begins just over there.

  This air—she breathed it, too. She had to learn to breathe it, but now it was hers as much as it was theirs. This was the world she had joined, the one she had occupied for twenty-five years. She had borne three sons in the very bedroom where she stood, making them wait while she finished dressing. She never felt wholly a part of this life, and even now the baron would say things to her in phrases she could not comprehend. He spoke a family language dense with allusion, to times past, to family secrets and family lore, to vendettas and alliances, to village gossip and folktales and legends and country superstition. Her sons understood every word, even when very young, causing her to wonder what was latent in them, what they were capable of, and what part of the family history they would claim. And yet she felt her own attachment to the house and its surroundings, the family she had created, and the natural world beyond her windows, the animals and the streams and forests, the lake deep in the woods. She had her own claims, by virtue of occupation. Twenty-five years was more than half her lifetime. She had arrived for a weekend and stayed on for a life. She had surrendered something of herself but she had acquired something also, and that was now who she was. The villagers thought her mysterious and in important ways she was aloof from her own knotty Prussian family. She believed she had acquired the habit of command without losing her sense of grievance, meaning her membership in the minority. Not a day passed that she did not think of Lusatia, the five towns nestled up close to Czechoslovakia, and the Sorb diaspora. And she wondered what might have become of her had she resumed her wandering. But for better or worse she had made her life, had created it no less than a sculptor created a figure from a brute slab of marble, and she would not renounce it. She had worked too hard, given too much, and in some region of her mind she was proud of who she had become. Yet she believed she was capable of stepping outside her dual identities. They were arbitrary in any case; and one was an accident of birth. She believed she was entitled to a laissez-passer, and when flight became necessary—as it surely would at some unknown hour in the new century—she would walk away, find another homeland, pull on a fresh nationality. Europe existed for such migrations.

  Dix was watching her carefully all this time, noticing her lips moving ever so slightly as she continued her scrutiny of the set. She was rehearsing her lines, her hands firm on the windowsill, and now he saw that she was focused on the horizon, beyond the barn and the fields to the forest. She believed she was unobserved as she raised her hands in a salute to the hawks wheeling high above the treeline, describing figure eights in the oystery sky.

  Herr Greenwood? The cameraman was at his elbow. We are ready.

  Cameras placed?

  Yes, Herr Greenwood.

  Dix called to her. Are you ready, Jana?

  She signaled that she was, and moved into the interior of her bedroom so that she was visible only as a shadow.

  The warmups took two hours, one mistake after another, equipment failures, mental lapses, failures of composition, cues missed, and then, when a sequence was filming smoothly, an army helicopter appeared from the east, hovered a moment, and flew away, only to return a little later, loitering on the perimeter, the slap-slap-slap of its rotors bouncing sound levels to lively heights and lending a martial air to the proceedings. Through all this, Jana kept her composure, leaning with nonchalance against the window sash, smiling a tight little smile that seemed to say, So this is the glamorous life I’ve been missing all these years.

  It will take a minute, Herr Greenwood, the soundman said.

  Hurry it up, Dix said.

  He strolled away down the slope, giving the company time to organize itself in private. He scuffed the grass and thought he detected a change of season, a temperate watery odor, the insinuation of spring. The day was cold but the wind was without conviction, an aging prizefighter hanging on against a much younger opponent. The thought cheered Dix, a reminder that April was not far off, and April in L.A. was delicious. He watched the hawks hovering over the treeline and remembered the first day of shooting on Summer, 1921, Jana and her friends overwhelmed at what was expected of them, and frightened by the disorganization, the shouted commands in rough language. When Dix told them to take their places, they had forgotten where those places were. Trude and Marion began to snuffle and Jana demanded a ten-minute break in order to warn Dix that unless the crew behaved like gentlemen, she and her friends would “walk.” Dix began to laugh, the slang was so incongruous, and then he realized that Tommy Gwilt had put her up to it. He promised a benevolent, obscenity-free set, but in return “you girls” had to follow instructions to the letter, learn your lines and take your places when told to do so. You do not call ten-minute breaks just because you feel like it. Jana listened intently and replied in the Sorb language, something to the effect (he later understood) that she and her friends were not to be treated like farm animals. She was on the edge of tears when she said it, and did not look him in the eye, but she meant what she said.

  He did not know what it was to be in charge, the one whose say-so was final. You had to keep everything in your mind because each part in a movie related to every other part. And when, time and again, they came to you for decisions you were unprepared to make—unprepared because your instincts failed or your knowledge lapsed—you made them anyway, with a show of confidence and absolute certainty, having no idea whether your decision was correct. Only Howard Hawks could get away with a casual, How the hell do I know? You deci
de. So he was first on the set on that first day, feeling like the pope on the balcony of St. Peter’s, giving the blessing while laying down a stern dictum—and the day was a bust, everything that could go wrong did go wrong, although he did not admit that to Claire when he called her that night. A beautiful beginning, he said merrily, couldn’t’ve hoped for better, and I’m sure we’ll come in on time and on budget.

  When he hung up the telephone, he poured a glass of schnapps and called Harry. He had never called his father for advice or sympathy and did not know why he was doing so now, except that he was at sea. He was so discouraged, half believing that his beautiful film was misbegotten and that he was to blame. Harry was watching one of Nixon’s press conferences and cackling because the president was on the defensive yet again, fumbling his answers to the usual softball questions. Harry had a theory that Nixon did not have the gift of narrative, and that lack made him appear to be lying even when he was telling the truth. He does not know how to tell a story. Dix had to listen while Harry reprised the Q and A. Then Harry thought to ask what was on his mind, and Dix said he had begun to doubt his own judgment. When he described the day’s chaos—I am a general who has lost control of his army, was the way Dix put it—Harry laughed and laughed and observed that first-day jitters were normal, like your wedding night or opening day at the ballpark, all that excitement, all that potential, a clean slate just waiting to be written on.

  You must believe you are home, Harry said. The familiarity of home, the ownership of the property, the owner’s authority to open a door or close it. Plant a garden or plow it under. So pull up your socks and get on with it. Do what you do best with a light heart and a brave spirit. Huston has a theory that will clear it up for you.

  When you film a red wagon, never say, This is a red wagon.