Kino

by Jürgen Fauth

  She held out her hand, and Mina leaned forward to take it. Under her breath, the old woman whispered something in German Mina didn't understand. She sucked air in sharply and scratched her scalp. “Every word in that notebook is a lie, princess. I know Klaus blamed the entire twentieth century on me, but his downfall was self-inflicted. He was slyer than he let on. He didn't mind when people underestimated him, thought him a jolly fella from the Rheinland with a taste for Schnapps and an eye for tail. It was real and it was also a façade, a way to hide his ambition until it was time to pounce. Do you really believe the tulip boom just occurred to him out of nowhere? Where do you think that came from? He researched everything. Look it up: Claude MacKey, On the Susceptibility of Crowds. That story about writing the script on a three-day coke binge? Bogus! Months of hard work. You wouldn't know it from his piece-of-shit lie-ridden journal, but Klaus had a real German work ethic. He was prepared when he showed up at Lang's party. He was trying much harder than he let anyone know.”

  Mina shook her head, avoiding Penny's eyes. She felt foolish because she'd believed what she'd read, and now it seemed so obvious that Kino had been exaggerating, working on his own mythology. She should've seen that.

  “His cunning served him well at first,” Penny said, struggling with the lighter until Chester handed her an already-lit cigarette. It seemed to Mina that she was getting increasingly lost in her story and the drugs, almost unable to stop now that she had begun to talk. “After Tulpendiebe, he thought he could get away with anything. But he was too drunk, too careless. He blamed his failures on me. In his journal, did he mention the plagiarism lawsuit that nearly ruined Jagd zu den Sternen? Or the costly reshoots after his failed sound experiments? His work grew increasingly erratic and he was developing a reputation at Ufa. It was me who brought in the crowds and filled the theaters, and I was the reason Pommer kept financing his movies. Pabst offered me Pandora's Box and I turned him down for Klaus–for Meine wilden Wanderjahre, a movie that kept getting postponed.”

  She didn't speak for a minute. Mina looked for Chester's help but he just glowered at her. Mina poured herself another glass of Dewar's and looked at her grandmother, waiting. Then suddenly, as if she were a toy that had been rewound, Penny continued to talk, her eyes glancing off into the distance somewhere between Mina and the television screen.

  “By the thirties, your grandfather spent his days in a drugged-out haze and his nights in bars and brothels and movie theaters. He got into accidents constantly, fell down stairs, crashed through windows, got nearly run over by streetcars. He managed to break his wooden leg regularly, don't ask me how. Those handcrafted numbers were expensive, too. He was banging every starlet between Danzig and Berchtesgaden, die Drecksau. He only wrote in the early morning hours, stoned and drunk, getting his dick sucked by some harlot he'd picked up promising her a part in the next project–the one he hadn't even written yet, the one that was half a year behind. Our marriage had become a farce, a front we maintained for the newspapers and box office returns. No matter how much I sacrificed and suffered for his sake, Klaus had lost all interest in me long before.”

  “He says he loved you,” Mina said.

  “Ha!” Penny coughed up another mouthful of phlegm and spit. It was a terrible habit. Mina could not believe that Chester went barefoot in this house.

  “Why didn't you leave him?”

  “You saw Tulpendiebe, yes? You saw the windmill, on fire? You saw the ending, the way the tulip notary dies?”

  Mina nodded. “He gets crushed. It's ghastly.”

  “It really happened. Less than two weeks after the premiere, the exact same thing, right before our eyes.”

  “I read about that.” Mina felt reassured. The journal wasn't all lies. This was something she knew. “You were on your honeymoon, in Venice. My honeymoon was ruined, too–”

  She wondered if Penny would ask, ask what had happened to her Caribbean honeymoon. They'd sent her an invitation to the wedding but, as expected, there had been no response. Now Mina wondered if Penny had ever even opened the envelope. It occurred to her that Penny might not know Mina was married at all. Didn't know or didn't care.

  “That was just the beginning,” Penny went on as if she hadn't heard. “Things in Kino's movies had a tendency to really happen. It was like déjà vu, except that you know it isn't all in your head. It often happened when I was tired, when the light was right and I turned my head just so. I'd recognize the way a group of people were arranged on the street, or lines of dialogue overheard at the butcher. The more I began to notice it, the more I recognized shots, details, angles, and compositions all around me. Once you'd seen Kino's films, these echoes infiltrated the world. Klaus, conceited Arschloch that he was, simply shrugged and took credit–he called himself a visionary, and that suited him fine. He didn't understand his power, had no idea how to control it, and he didn't care. His movies set events in motion, I saw that clearly. It was extraordinary. Father and I used to talk about how the new physics might explain the phenomenon, but it only occurred at the edges of subjective perception.”

  Mina poured herself another whiskey. She felt she was finally getting somewhere. She was also getting drunk. “I don't know,” she said. “This doesn't sound very scientific to me. Are you sure it wasn't just the drugs?”

  Penny grunted. “No, princess. Movies are drugs. And besides, Klaus was the one who was high. Most of the time, he was so careless he didn't even notice when I snuck peculiar bits of dialogue or strange props into our movies just to test my suspicions. Structural variation can create vibrational fields, morphic resonance–well, I had my theories. He was heedless. He didn't care about consequences, didn't care if people died, didn't give a damn about what happened. Times were hard and he drank too much, smoked too much kif. He was losing his grip on reality. Jagd zu den Sternen flopped, and nobody wanted to work with him. His whims were legend. For Meine wilden Wanderjahre, he had the entire ensemble jump into the Wannsee in February–only to cut the scene later. He changed the ending of Land der Gnade at the last minute. Some actors never forgave him. His career was riding on Pirates, and he might not have made movies for much longer if the Nazis hadn't come along.”

  “Why did you keep acting for him?”

  “Because I wanted to find out how he did it. Kino's movies messed with physical reality, and they were dangerous. I thought I could keep him from doing damage. I thought I could save us both. I was an idiot. There was no saving Kino. He was foolish and out of control. He toyed with a power far beyond his grasp, and little by little, his movies destroyed us both.”

  Penny closed her eyes again. Mina was afraid that she had passed out and tapped her shoulder gently.

  “She does that,” Chester said.

  Penny slapped Mina's hand.

  “Don't interrupt me.” She looked at Mina, eyes barely focusing. “Klaus considered himself a conduit. He claimed he knew how to let the images flow through him, arrange themselves to reveal truth, past, present, and future. Oh, he was passionate–that's what had attracted me to him in the first place. But he could have done so much more. He used the movies as a way to ignore everything else, instead of seeing that they were connected to everything around him. He could have changed the world, but Kino only cared about Kino.”

  Mina came to with a start, disoriented, slowly realizing that she must have fallen asleep in Penny's armchair. It was completely dark outside now, and she had no idea how long she'd been out. She made sure Kino's notebook was still where she'd put it. Across the cluttered coffee table, Chester was helping Penny to another line of white powder, and the TV was turned to the news. Paul Bremer, the new civilian administrator, had arrived in Baghdad.

  “Oh,” Mina said. She had hoped that her battling layers of jetlag would cancel each other out, but instead, she felt a leaden tiredness. What time was it in New York? In Berlin? In Punta Cana? Had she dreamed up all of those stories her grandmother told her about Kino, or did that really happen? Mina felt that
she was slowly losing her grip on reality.

  “We are not here as a colonial power,” Paul Bremer was telling the cameras. “We are here to turn over power to the Iraqi people as quickly as possible.”

  “That man is a lying sack of shit,” Mina said, almost reflexively. She hadn't had time to think about the situation in Iraq for the last few days, and her anger surprised her.

  “Of course he is,” Penny said, sucking on another cigarette. “I've heard it all before. They tell you to be scared, they tell you they'll keep you safe, and then they deal death and destruction in the name of God and country. It's always the same.”

  “You're talking about Hitler.”

  “I saw the catastrophe coming early on, but Kino was willfully blind. We could have made it out of the country in time. Gone to Hollywood along with everyone else. My father died in a concentration camp, all because Kino wanted to make that damned pirate movie.”

  That wasn't what Mina had read. This was the worst accusation of them all. “In the journal,” Mina said, “Kino claims that your father wanted to stay.”

  “Did you not hear me? Everything you read is a lie!” With surprising speed, Penny lunged forward and grabbed the journal from the table and tried to rip it along the spine. Mina reached out without thinking, and for a second, the women both pulled at the notebook. Mina was stronger and Penny's fingers slipped. The momentum sent her sliding sideways out of her chair. She crashed into the living room table, knocked over pill bottles and puzzle pieces, and landed on the floor.

  “Penny!” Chester shouted.

  “Now look at what you've done,” Penny said, flailing her arms like an overturned bug. “You attacked me.”

  “You were going to rip up the journal,” Mina said. She felt guilty for fighting with the frail old woman. She noticed blood on her arm–her grandmother had scratched her, trying to take Mina down. Mina smoothed the notebook on her leg. “It's your own fault. This is mine.”

  “The girl has no manners,” Chester said, helping Penny back onto the couch.

  “Of course she doesn't. She's a Koblitz. She's as wild as the best of us.” Licking the blood off her arm, Mina couldn't help but smile. Her grandmother had given her an actual compliment.

  “Don't smile,” Penny said. “It's a curse, you'll see. You've got it all ahead of you. Disappointment. Betrayal. Loneliness.” She took a moment to arrange herself in her chair, motioned to Chester for another cigarette, took a deep drag. He seemed reluctant to sit back down, rubbed his hands on his pants, and looked around helplessly.

  “Chester baby,” Penny said, “Are you nervous? Why don't you take one of the blue footballs, and leave us alone for a minute, just Oma and her inquisitive granddaughter? I am passing on stories of the past.”

  Chester didn't say anything, but he did reach for a pill.

  “And you, my dear?”

  Mina tilted her head. “Maybe something for my jetlag?”

  “Up or down, Mädchen? Your choice.”

  Mina needed to sleep. She needed to take a bath, wash herself clean of the airplane. But she also wanted to know everything, think everything through to the end, find out all there was to find out. She wanted to keep up with her grandmother. “Up, I guess.”

  Penny nodded, and Chester popped a prescription bottle, shook out two red pills, and dropped them into Mina's palm.

  “Have them with some juice,” he said, and pushed a carton Mina's way. She took the pills with a mouthful of cold orange juice.

  “Well,” Penny said. “Why don't you go for a swim, Chester darling?” She flicked her hand at him, sending him away. Mina did not understand why he needed to leave, what there was left to say that this man couldn't hear, but Chester sighed, got up, geared up to say something to Mina, didn't, and let himself out the sliding door into the garden. Obviously, he was used to this treatment.

  “Now,” Penny said with weary satisfaction. “The son of a bitch didn't want to leave his precious pirate movie behind. Your Kino. Did he care about the Jews? About his homosexual friend? About what happened to my father? About democracy, the book burnings, the beatings in the street? No! All he could think about were his goddamn pirates! I could see the Nazi threat coming for years, just like anybody with half a brain can see these criminals for what they are.” She flicked her hand at the TV, where Donald Rumsfeld lectured reporters about how to fight a war. “It was clear Kino couldn't work for them under any circumstances! But Goebbels kept dangling Pirates in front of him even though any fool could have seen that they'd never let him make it. The Nazis thought Dr. Mabuse was about them–a movie about a bunch of multi-racial swashbuckling anarchists on a ship would never be acceptable, no matter how much Klaus tried to please them. Thea encouraged him, and even when most of his actors had left the country, he still wanted to believe Goebbels's lies. Here, finally, was all the praise he never got during the Weimar years. Murnau was dead, Lang was gone, everybody was gone! Believe me, girl, Klaus saw what he wanted to see: an opportunity.”

  Penny spit again. Mina's heart beat faster.

  “Then, the Nazis arrested my father. My father, an intellect, a good man, a thinker! Dragged from our house in handcuffs by the SA! It was a horror. For Kino, it was a wonderful excuse–now we'd have to stay in the country. We couldn't leave as long as there was a possibility he might live, and Kino knew Ufa was his best chance. He'd wanted MGM, but the American studios turned him down, and he signed with Goebbels. Don't you believe for a second that it was for my father's sake. What did I expect? That Kino stopped being Kino?”

  Mina chewed on her lip. She infinitely preferred the version in the journal.

  “The contract was a trap. As soon as he signed, Pirates was scrapped and Kino's Weimar movies were banned. Our fate was sealed–I vowed never to act again, but Kino had to do whatever these swine wanted.”

  “At least those operettas he made were harmless, weren't they?” Mina said. “It wasn't like he made Triumph of the Will or anything?”

  For a second, Mina thought Penny might jump back out of her seat. “Did you listen to a thing I've been saying? There's no such thing as a harmless movie, princess! A screen doesn't just show things, it also hides them. There was no truth in Kino's operettas! They told splendid lies about gaiety and happiness when the reality was death and fear and destruction and oppression. No, Klaus never glorified the Führer directly, but the absurd champagne-and-ballroom fantasies he was peddling were used to distract the masses from the bloodletting. Is that any less dangerous? Less damnable?”

  Mina felt a sting when she realized the truth of what Penny told her. Of course–her grandfather had deluded himself, and he had been guilty, and she, in turn, had let him delude her, and this made her feel guilty, too. She knew Donald Rumsfeld was a scumbag, but she had been taken in by Kino, just like Kino had been taken in by Goebbels. She almost expected Penny to blame her for her father's death in the camps, too.

  “He wasn't allowed to cut them himself, so his new films never resonated the way his Weimar films did. They didn't have his rhythm, and they didn't have me. And thank God, the images stopped haunting us. Under the Nazis, his films didn't have room to breathe, but people didn't care–they went to see them again and again anyway. People enjoy being lied to, especially when times are bad. I remember Hitler at the premiere of Luftschiffwalzer, flush and rosy-cheeked with destiny, grinning and waving that stiff right hand of his. Kino was a success, but he hated himself for it. And all the while, my father's situation grew more and more desperate. And that's not all.”

  Penny gave Mina a look that frightened her. “The operettas weren't the worst of it. Did he neglect to mention Dr. Spielmann in his journal? Die Schwarze Sonne? Sachsenhausen? Of course he did.”

  Mina didn't like the sound of this. She'd heard of Sachsenhausen. It was a concentration camp.

  “You see, it wasn't just Kino and me who'd seen the echoes, the images that leaked from his films, the way they caused or anticipated events in the real wor
ld. Others noticed them, as well–but it wasn't the kind of thing you talked about if you wanted to be taken seriously. Most people managed to convince themselves that it was just coincidence and went on with their days. But I'm sure now that Goebbels had seen it, too–he was a man with a keen sense for cinema and oh, he was on to Kino. Yes, he assigned him to operettas, but they never stopped trying to uncover whatever it was that had given Kino's Weimar movies their unique power.”

  Mina nodded, too hard. She clenched her hands into fists, extended her fingers, clenched them again. Was she feeling the red pills already? She had not even asked Chester what it was she had taken.

  “When they first took power, the Nazis set up a number of secret departments that developed weapons for the coming war. Rockets, nuclear research, psychological warfare, you name it. The experimental program of the Propaganda Ministry's film department was called Schwarze Sonne–black sun. In the thirties, Kino got occasional visits at the studio from a shadowy SS officer by the name of Spielmann. He asked Kino to shoot short scenes, with whatever actors were at hand, and he took the undeveloped film with him. We never knew where he took the footage or what he did with it, and we had better things to worry about. Once the war started, Spielmann showed up more frequently, and he took Kino with him for days at a time. I was informed that he was gone on top secret Reich business–that was all. Every time they dropped him off afterwards in a black Mercedes limousine, Kino looked miserable, tired and distraught. He wouldn't talk about where they'd taken him. I always asked if he couldn't find out more about my father, but he just glared at me. He'd sit up all night, drinking. Once or twice I saw him cry, and Kino was not a man who cried. He wouldn't talk to me, and I gave up trying. We were already festering in our own private hells, accusing each other for everything that had gone wrong. Seeing him in his pathetic agony only made me hate him more.”

  She gazed off into space. Mina didn't speak. She locked eyes with her grandmother, and then Penny roused herself.