Olympic Affair

by Terry Frei

  “Is that acceptable?”

  “Well, the driver didn’t tell me anything. I thought we were going to that castle. Or I was meeting you at a theater.”

  “No, this will have to do,” Leni teased. “I’m staying at the castle, like all my crew, but I was able to get away after the filming at the pool. You have some very cute divers especially. But they are girls. Children!”

  She led him into the adjacent formal dining room area. A tray of meats and cheeses was on the table, with several bottles of Coca-Cola.

  “Are you hungry?” asked Leni.

  Glenn was stunned to see the soft drinks. “You’ve got Coke here?”

  “Your American company is trying to make inroads and sent over many free cases for the Olympics, both the Winter Games and now.”

  “The stuff in it keeps me awake,” Glenn said. “Cocaine, caffeine . . .”

  Leni chuckled. “Nobody seems to like it at the Castle. So if you fellows need a few extra cases, let me know.”

  As they ate a light lunch, Leni told him about the morning at the pool. “My cameraman there has taken my innovations and done very well with them,” she said.

  Glenn laid out his training regimen in the morning. “At least I was pretty much left in peace,” he said. “But I feel sorry for Jesse Owens. It’s like he’s on display. And everybody’s being nice to the Negroes. I’d make fun of your people except I know it would be the same thing in Simla, and the athletes from the other nations are acting the same way. It’s like everyone is saying, ‘Come see the Negro!’ He’s spending half his time signing autographs. Even for the Germans who work there! Hope nobody gets in trouble!”

  After an awkward silence, Leni jumped up. “Movie time!” She led the way back into the front room. “I’m sorry I forgot to arrange for your popcorn.”

  “That’s all right,” Glenn said. “Bloats me, anyway.”

  She gestured for Glenn to sit on the couch, but out of the way of the projector’s path, and moved off to close the curtains, darkening the room.

  “What are we watching?” Glenn asked.

  “You’ll see. One of my favorite films.”

  “Better than Mutiny on the Bounty?” Glenn joked.

  “Much better.”

  She turned on the projector, skirted the couch and sat next to Glenn. Lifting his arm, she draped it around her shoulders, and leaned against him. “Now don’t get any ideas,” she said with a laugh. “We are watching this film.”

  As he suspected, it was Das Blaue Licht. “The Blue Light,” she translated, needlessly. When he spotted her name in the opening credits, Leni asked pointedly, “You asked me about the Jews? Half the people involved with this film are Jews. I told you, I work with them. I am fine with that.”

  Children played in a village. A horn sounded and an open car pulled into the courtyard, outside a building with a sign that announced: Osteria. The driver was a man, his passenger a woman. A young couple.

  “An inn in Santa Maria,” Leni said. “Present day.”

  Glenn laughed. “Shush and watch!”

  She tapped him with a finger. “All right . . . unless you want translations for a while.”

  “Yeah, you better.”

  On the screen, the children crowded around the car as the man and woman climbed out. They squealed and held out huge crystals, offering them for sale. Then one little girl reached out with something else—a little framed picture of Leni, or whomever Leni was playing. It was a miniature version of the picture on Leni’s wall. As the couple entered the inn, the young woman scanned the room and noticed several more framed copies of the same picture of Leni. Moments later, the couple was eating with the inn proprietor and, finally, the woman spoke.

  Leni began her soft translations. “Who is this person Junta?”

  “Ernst, come in,” the man called out. When a little boy entered, the man directed, “Bring in the book about Junta.”

  In a few seconds, the little boy soon returned with a huge book, seemingly almost as big as he was. Leni’s picture—the same one—was cut into the book’s cover, which said:

  Historia Della Junta

  1866

  “Horst,” the innkeeper told the young man, “now you get to read about the Blue Light on the mountain.”

  Raising her voice, Leni said, “Now we go back . . . to 1866.”

  A hand reached out and picked up a huge, shiny crystal. Then, onscreen . . . Leni, as Junta. Kneeling in the mist from a nearby waterfall. Ragged clothes, wet hair.

  The woman on the poster.

  Junta heard a stagecoach on the road below. It stopped and a man climbed out and gathered his belongings. “Vigo, a German painter,” Leni explained.

  In the next few minutes, Junta hurried down the mountainside and entered the village. Villagers, approaching the church, glared and shunned her.

  “Some of them are real villagers,” Leni said. “Living in the past. It’s Foroglio, in Switzerland. It was like going back in time.”

  Junta’s face, fearful and vulnerable, filled the screen several times. Even the minister, seeing her from a window balcony, seemed wary of her. She ran away, down stone stairs, through the village.

  Then the villagers, plus Vigo, were eating in a square. Vigo said to the innkeeper, “You are not so joyful here.”

  The innkeeper explained: “There is a curse on our village. . . . When it is a full moon, there is a blue light shining on the rock. . . . Each time the young boys want to go up, and each time, one more falls and dies. . . . I planted a cross for my youngest son.”

  Suddenly, Junta was on-screen again, on the pathway next to the square. She offered flowers from her basket. Nobody wanted them, but children ran up behind her, taunting, and knocked the basket out of her hand. As the contents fell out, the huge crystal she had just found was on the ground, too. The fat local trader saw it, too, and walked over to pick it up. Looking it over, he reached into his pocket with his other hand to pay her for it. Junta tried to take back the crystal, but the trader wouldn’t let go. She bit his hand, grabbed the crystal and ran away.

  Vigo asked the innkeeper, “Why are you so against that girl?”

  The innkeeper railed, “She is not normal. . . . How can she climb toward the blue light on the steep side of the mountain, while the young boys fall down every time? . . . This Junta, she’s the damned devil’s witch!”

  Tonio, the innkeeper’s older son, ran after her. Eventually, he dragged her into a darkened alley, and off camera, they wrestled. Junta pulled back out of the alley and ran off, heading through a stream and water and trees, arriving at a ramshackle cabin at the foot of the mountain.

  “Monte Christallo,” Leni explained to Glenn. “It’s really the Crozzon di Brenta in Italy.”

  That night, with the full moon out, another village boy, Silvio, tried the climb and was killed. When grieving over the boy’s retrieved body the next morning, his mother spotted Junta and accused her of being a witch. With Vigo emerging and trying to stop them, the townspeople chased after her and she fled back to her cabin. She called out for Guzzi, a young boy shepherd, and he joined her. Even Glenn could tell that as Junta finally spoke, it was in Italian. Leni converted that, too, into English for Glenn.

  “I was on the street, early this morning,” Junta told the little boy as goats and a dog were around them in the cabin. “All of a sudden, I saw a crowd in front of Maria’s house. I heard Maria shout, ‘Junta! Junta!’ I was afraid and ran away. Then I saw the crowd. They ran after me with sticks. They threatened me with their fists and they shouted! They threw stones at me. I was running but they came nearer and nearer. Then a man jumped from a window.” She raised her arm. “He stood there like this and shouted: ‘Stop!’”

  When the dog started barking, warning them that Vigo was approaching their cabin, Junta stopped talking. So did Leni.

  Most of the rest of The Blue Light was a blur for Glenn. At best, he might have been able to offer a broad outline.

  Vigo was sm
itten with the beautiful Junta and, like a puppy, followed her around. Junta went back up the mountain, to the grotto with the crystals, on the night of the next full moon. Vigo believed he was doing a favor for her and the village by disclosing to all her “safe” path to the top. But when the villagers followed Vigo’s map, they looted the crystals, and Junta was distraught when she discovered that. So distraught that she, previously such an adept climber, fell to her death.

  By then, Leni and Glenn’s clothes had been on the floor for nearly an hour. Glenn was on his back, with his head tilted sideways, again watching the film. Leni lay sideways on top of him, turned to the screen as well.

  Earlier, he couldn’t help but notice that as Leni was on top and riding him, she not only had her eyes open the whole time, she also was looking at the screen, at least out of the corner of her eye. Glenn was surprised that, rather than being offended, he discovered that added to the excitement and thrill. He also spent much of the time after caressing her small, but firm breasts, which she had told him with a giggle “are perfect for ballet dancing . . . not always for the cinema.”

  As the film ended, Leni looked down at him asked, “How was that?”

  Glenn laughed. “Couldn’t you tell? I haven’t done it like that much . . . and never like that.”

  “I meant the film.”

  “I really liked it,” he said. “You were . . . are . . . beautiful.”

  “And?”

  “Want a review? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yes. From an American view. The film, not just me.”

  “It was a really pretty movie. Those mountains. The light. It even looks different, and I can’t explain it.”

  “Very perceptive! It was a new kind of film stock. We could make day look like night, among other things.”

  “Is it a fable of some kind—with a moral?”

  “I thought of it as a story. Others think of it as a fable. That is the wonder of storytelling. And filmmaking. It can be different things to different people.”

  “I’m thinking it was saying that being different isn’t necessarily evil. And that it’s good to leave well enough alone.”

  Leni laughed. “That’s as good as anything. But I didn’t know you were paying that much attention.”

  “Not sure you could get away with an ending like that in America, though,” Glenn mused. “We like happy endings.”

  “Yes, I have heard that you Americans are in dreamland.”

  In bed later, after more lovemaking, Leni’s head was on Glenn’s chest.

  Glenn broke a long silence. “Been meaning to ask you . . . Leni’s not your real name, is it?”

  She laughed. “For as long as I can remember, it has been,” she said. “But, yes, you are in bed with Helene Amalie Bertha Riefenstahl.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Helene Amalie Bertha,” Glenn teased.

  “Now you know why I’m Leni,” she said.

  She lifted her head and looked down, into his eyes. “A woman could fall for you.”

  “I’m just amazed I’m here,” Glenn said. “And with you.”

  “So are you proud that you fucked a movie star?”

  “No, it’s not that,” Glenn said.

  She laughed darkly. “And you already told me it wasn’t your first time, so that’s not it. So when was your first time?”

  “Really want to know?”

  “Unless it was with a goat out there in the country.”

  “Just a girl in Simla. Her parents weren’t home.” He paused. “Pretty boring, huh? Not in a car, not outside, not with my science teacher or the minister’s wife. Had crushes on both of them, I admit, but . . . It was just a girl. And she cried for an hour.” Embarrassed, he said, “Okay, what about yours? Your first time?”

  Leni turned somber. “Well . . .”

  “This doesn’t sound good.”

  “Otto Froetzheim. Germany’s best tennis player. I was dancing then and well known already, but I still was young and stupid. He invited me over, I was silly enough to go and I hadn’t been in his apartment twenty seconds when he threw me down and took me, right on his couch.”

  “He raped you?”

  “I said no, but I didn’t put up a fight. I cried, too. When I came out of the bathroom, he said he had to leave, dropped one of your twenty-dollar bills in front of me and said if I got pregnant, I could take care of it with that. That’s when our money was worthless, and twenty dollars American was like a gold bar. Maybe I should have been complimented. I wasn’t. Thank God, I wasn’t pregnant.”

  A tear dripped from Leni’s right eye. Years later, Leni’s Truth had transformed her own calculated deflowering—she had gone to the famous tennis player’s apartment because of what would happen—into rape. And Leni’s Truth disregarded that after that, she was Froetzheim’s lover for several years. At least she hadn’t rewritten the twenty-dollar-bill part of the story . . . that had happened exactly as she described, with Froetzheim cold and in a rush. At least the first time.

  She switched gears. “I take it you have a girl—or girls—back home.”

  Glenn didn’t say anything right away.

  Leni said, “Oh, for God’s sake, you’re not going to offend me. Unless you’re married and didn’t have the decency to tell me.”

  “Oh, no, I’m not married.”

  “Close?”

  Glenn laughed. “She thinks so. I don’t.”

  “Spoken like a man.”

  “She’s just out of college and will be teaching school this fall in Southern Colorado. I don’t know what’ll happen. She’s a nice girl. But there’s no ring, no promise, no plans.”

  “I think you’re overlooking something,” Leni said.

  “What?”

  “Your life is about to change. You’re going to have other opportunities. Will she fit in all of that?”

  He thought of Eleanor Holm. “A lot of people are telling me that. I’ve got to win first. Nobody chases a silver medalist. Then I’ll see.”

  “You could even be an actor,” Leni said.

  Glenn laughed.

  “I mean it,” she insisted. “Handsome, nice voice . . . and that smile!”

  “So that’s what this was? An audition?” He was part serious, part joking, half-offended, half-flattered.

  Leni snapped, “Stop that! I was attracted to you when I saw the program cover. There was just something. I thought I was right at the stadium. I knew I was right at the restaurant. And I’m certain now.” She paused and noticed Glenn’s look. “My God!” she exclaimed. “You’re embarrassed!”

  “No, just a bit in shock still, that’s all. Not long ago, you were a movie star on a poster to me.”

  “Did you at least fantasize about me?”

  “Well . . . yeah . . . I did.” He was shocked he admitted that.

  “See?” Leni asked. “Dreams can come true!”

  “Hey, your turn again,” he said, switching the subject. “You’re almost thirty. How come you’re not married?”

  “You say that like there’s something wrong with it,” Leni said.

  “I just mean . . .”

  “I know what you meant. I’ve been in love, but not what you call love.”

  “What about now? Have a guy now?”

  “Think you’d be here if I did?”

  “I just told you I had a girl . . . and I’m here. Does that make me a bad fellow?”

  “It makes you human,” Leni said. “And there’s something here, too. I know that. You know that.”

  “Yes, I know that,” Glenn said tentatively, still trying to believe all of it.

  “I don’t know what it says, but both men I’m talking about both have remained my friends. Mostly, it’s that I’m so busy and I’m gone so much. Last one was a ski instructor. Very nice, very handsome, very intelligent, very tender. It lasted almost two years. But when I was editing Triumph of the Will—and I admit I was preoccupied and obsessed; it is the only way I know how to work—he took another l
over. When I was told about it, he confirmed it so matter-of-factly . . . he’d kick her out and we would go right back to the way we were. I said it wasn’t that simple. And that was it. So, see, I can be hurt, too!”

  Glenn asked, “Just two?”

  “Just two what?”

  “You said ‘both.’ Been in love only twice?”

  “Is this a test?”

  “No, but you are in the movies . . .”

  “Let me tell you something,” she snapped. “The film business is no different than anything else. You get ahead as a woman, they say you’ve fucked everyone in the business . . . whatever the business is. In film, you’re seen shaking the hand of someone important, they say you’ve fucked him. You act opposite a leading man, they say you’ve fucked him. You’ve gotten a part from a director or backing from a producer, they say you’ve fucked him. It happens. I know it happens. That’s not how I’ve gotten where I am, and I’ve stopped worrying about what people think or say. My God, I know there are idiots out there who think I fucked Hitler . . . or Goebbels . . . or both.”

  “I know.”

  “You said that a little too quickly,” she said. “You know that’s not true, right?”

  He paused, and that was too long for Leni.

  “I should make you leave right now!”

  “Look . . .” He took a deep breath. “What I was worried about was if you had any boyfriend I needed to worry about. And worse, if he’s powerful, jealous, and maybe carries a gun.” He hadn’t intended to be funny, but as it came out, it made him laugh.

  Leni didn’t appreciate that, either. “This is not a laughing matter,” she snapped. “But so you know . . . no lover now, powerful or otherwise. And, no, never Hitler or that snake Goebbels or any of those Nazis. They were, and are, film subjects to me. No more.”

  “Of course,” he said. “I wouldn’t be here or be like this”—he gestured down, noting his nakedness—“if I didn’t know that.”

  “Good.”

  Mainly, he was relieved. “You don’t hear much about Hitler and women, anyway,” he said.