Kino

by Jürgen Fauth

  On the oceanfront, bikers, skaters, and rollerbladers oozing health zipped by in the golden late afternoon light, dodging old people with walkers and wheelchairs. There was a fresh breeze. A swarm of surfers was bopping in the water, waiting for a wave. Jupp sighed and massaged his temples.

  “After my father was arrested,” Penny went on, “we relied on Heinz and his connections for news. He loved it, the power. The son of a bitch made us suffer and wait and beg and grovel. It was Heinz who finally brought news that my father had been killed, in Bergen-Belsen.”

  “That man was not my father,” Jupp said, with barely contained anger. “You're right, I was named for Kino's younger brother, and yes, I grew up thinking Heinz and Cornelia Koblitz were my parents. But that man was not my father.”

  Penny shifted uneasily in her wheelchair. “I don't want to hear any more of this. Take me back upstairs, princess. Oma needs her medication.”

  Jupp ignored her. “It's true that I grew up believing I was his son. Heinz did well for himself after the war. De-nazified Germany needed leaders, and he became one of the stewards of the Wirtschaftswunder. He groomed me to take over Koblitz & Söhne, but I rebelled against him for as long as I can remember. I was barely eighteen when I left town, lived in communes, traveled, got married. I owned a bar in West Berlin and didn't hear from my family until Heinz died, in 1989.”

  He took another drink. “After Cornelia's death–what did you call her? A frigid bore?–Heinz remarried and had three more children. When he died, he split the company and his wealth between them, and I inherited the key to a safe deposit box. Guess what I found?”

  “Princess, please? You know what the Dokters said about my blood pressure. This man is lying.”

  Mina shook her head. “I want to hear this. What did you find–Tulpendiebe?”

  “Not just Tulpendiebe. In the climate-controlled vault of the bank, Heinz had kept prints of all of Kino's films, ten altogether. There was also a birth certificate stamped Streng Geheim that showed I wasn't born in a hospital.” From a small leather backpack, he took a yellowed document in a protective plastic sleeve. “The Nazis kept immaculate records. Here, it indicates I was born at Plötzensee Prison.” He took one more deep drink. “And Penelope, it says that you're my mother.”

  With a screech, Penny propelled herself out of the wheelchair and lunged at Jupp, trying to get a hold of the document. The two of them tumbled to the ground, struggling.

  “Help!” Jupp yelled. “Get her off me!”

  Mina took the document from Jupp's hand and held it out of reach. “Stop it,” she said. “Stop fighting.” People were beginning to point and stare, and after a few more moments of frenzied grappling, Mina managed to separate the two. She helped Penny back up. The wheelchair had fallen over, and Mina pulled Penny onto a bench overlooking the ocean. Jupp sat down next to her, breathing heavily. Mina thought he was awfully out of shape for a detective, only to remind herself that of course, he was no detective. He was–her uncle?

  “My God,” Jupp said, rubbing a long red scratch on his arm. “You know how to fight.” He passed the flask back to Penny before Mina could say anything. Mina righted the wheelchair, sat in it, and wheeled up next to them. “This is amazing,” she said, studying the swastika-adorned document. “This says you had him on June 9, 1943. It doesn't mention the father.”

  Penny's eyes were aimed somewhere above the horizon, and she began to choke with tears. Nobody spoke. Finally, she cleared her throat. “Oh, the melodrama,” she said. “It's like a scene from Meine wilden Wanderjahre. Klaus would've been proud.”

  Mina found a prescription bottle in the wheelchair's side pocket, shook out two pills, and handed them to her grandmother, who downed them gratefully.

  After a long pause, Penny began to speak.

  “I got pregnant the night we tried to leave Germany, on the sleeper train to France. We thought we were leaving everything behind, but they recognized us and we were arrested. Isolationshaft, you know what that means? I didn't see another soul the entire time. I had the baby in prison, starved, desolate. There were bombs the night you were born. They drugged me and showed me a dead baby. They told me it was stillborn, the umbilical cord around his neck like a noose. I knew they were lying. I screamed and screamed. They just gave me an injection and locked me up again.”

  Penny paused, looking sideways at Jupp.

  “I don't know how many days or weeks I spent in a haze of grief and hatred. Finally, Heinz came into my cell to tell me he had secured our release–provided we left the country and never returned. He told me it was our only chance.”

  “He sent you and Kino away,” Jupp said, “but he kept me as his own. Cornelia couldn't have children.”

  “How could Heinz get away with this?” Mina's head swung back and forth between Jupp and Penny. Her family.

  “In 1943, people had more pressing concerns than following other people's pregnancies, and dead babies were easy to come by,” Penny said. Jupp was staring out over the ocean, as if he weren't listening at all.

  “He took Jupp, and he kept the movies, too.”

  Penny made a throaty noise as if she were about to hock up a mouthful of spit, but then she just sighed. “Letting us live, that was the cruelest punishment of all.” She began to sob.

  Mina had watched Penny's drug-induced seizure and spent weeks staring at her in a coma, but this, here, was the most vulnerable she'd seen her, weaker even than as the Duke's moribund daughter. Of all her accumulated grief and dark secrets, this was the one she'd guarded more than anything. Mina wondered if Penny's frail body felt any different now that they knew. Jupp put his arm around Penny but she pushed him away. “You were never mine. You belonged to that Nazi swine who took you away. You were born in a cell and I never held you, not once. I was never your mother!”

  Mina put a hand on Penny's shoulder, hoping to calm her down. She could not imagine what it must have been like, pregnant and alone in a Nazi prison, and to lose the child.

  “Why didn't you tell me sooner?” Mina asked Jupp.

  “The time wasn't right. Heinz died just after the Wall came down, and my wife was divorcing me. My life was a mess, and I wanted nothing to do with this past. I got as far away from it as I could–Morocco, Corfu, India. During a rave in Goa, I finally realized that I couldn't keep on running. I returned home and found a Doppelnocken projector.”

  “You have seen all the movies?”

  “My father's films became my burden and my only pleasure. I learned how to store them and watched them over and over again. I found something comforting in them, and I made them my home. They were all I needed.”

  “You didn't want to find your real family?”

  “Oh, I tried. I came to your house in Connecticut, pretending to be a biographer. Detlef could barely contain his scorn, and he refused to be interviewed. I knew I had nothing in common with him, my angry little brother. I remember you, too, coming home on a bicycle just after he shut the door in my face. I wished I could have told you who I was.”

  “I don't remember that,” Mina said. She was rocking herself back and forth in the wheelchair.

  Penny stabbed her finger in Jupp's chest. “You're a coward, just like Kino. Just like Detlef. That's what the three of you have in common.”

  “You threw me out, too,” Jupp told her. “Screaming your head off before I could get a word out. Of course I didn't come back. I swiped my father's journal from the study, and I found Marty, who told me about Twenty-Twelve.”

  Mina waved for the flask, took it from Jupp, and had a drink herself. The cognac burned in her throat.

  “So you sent me Tulpendiebe. Why?”

  “Kino's movies taught me that timing is everything. When your wedding announcement turned up in the New York Times the same week the Botha auction went online, I suddenly knew what to do. Coincidences are the world's way of winking at you.”

  “I'm in the phone book.”

  “You came to Berlin because of Tulp
endiebe. It showed you cared. Your heart was in the right place. That's why I trusted you with the journal.”

  Mina felt a familiar anger rise in her throat. “If you were testing me, you fucked up good. I screwed up all around. I let that prick Dr. Hanno steal Tulpendiebe out from under my nose, remember? I took Twenty-Twelve straight back to Paramount. You're an idiot.”

  Something else occurred to her, something that made her even angrier. “What about the bomb threat, that day at Tegel? Who was that?”

  Jupp avoided her eyes, nervously unscrewing and rescrewing the top of his flask. He took another sip.

  “You're fucking kidding me, right? That was you?”

  “You left in such a hurry. I hadn't had a chance to–”

  Mina cut him off. “I don't want to hear any more. You're nuts. You could have just sent me an email and explained things. Maybe then we didn't have to lose the movies, and I didn't have to lose Sam.” Her voice trailed off. She was determined not to cry in front of them. She reminded herself she was much too angry to cry. If only it hadn't all been such a waste.

  Jupp put the flask to his lips again, but it was finally empty. He was looking out over the beach, still avoiding Mina's eyes.

  “Well,” Penny said, shaking her head. “I've had enough fun for today. Take me back to my room, princess.”

  Mina got up, glaring at Jupp. “Of course, Oma. We're done here.”

  The sun was low over the horizon now, casting long shadows on the boardwalk. Jupp cleared his throat. “The convertible was a stroke of genius.”

  “What do you mean?” There was a glimmer of something in Jupp's eyes that got Mina interested in spite of herself.

  “You must have known I followed you from the airport to the train station, right?”

  Mina shook her head. It hadn't occurred to her.

  “Your trunk was too tiny for the cans and you left them on the back seat. Remember you stopped for gas, your father went inside to pay, and you tried to call me? It gave me just enough time to swap the film.”

  “You switched the cans and I didn't notice? You're saying I pulled a gun on my father over a fake?”

  “You did it for Kino. Just like I knew you would. It was noble. We did it, Mina.”

  “You son of a bitch.”

  “Exactly,” Penny said.

  Mina was still processing this. “You manipulated me and–wait. You have Twenty-Twelve?”

  “Well.” Jupp grimaced. “For a professional, Botha did a terrible job storing the film. I spent the last three weeks in Berlin, with your friend Dr. Broddenbuck. We've been able to salvage only fragments.”

  “You saw Dr. Hanno?”

  “He happens to be a very talented digital restorator. His DVD transfer of Tulpendiebe is outstanding. He hid a digital master from Katz's goons, and we transferred the other movies on museum equipment. Most of the films look great, but Twenty-Twelve is in bad shape. It just sat in the humidity of Botha's attic and rotted away.”

  “And good riddance,” Penny said. “Come on, Mina, it's getting cold.”

  The sun was indeed setting. Mina transferred Penny back into the wheelchair. From his backpack, Jupp produced a black metal box and a small silver chain with a key.

  “This key opens the film vault in Frankfurt,” he said, “and this is a hard drive with digital transfers of the movies. Everything we have is on here. I want you to have it. I can't be alone with them any longer. It's what Kino would have wanted.”

  Mina took the key and the hard drive. “Tulpendiebe and Twenty-Twelve are on here?”

  “What's left of it, yes–as well as his other films.”

  “Oh.” Mina didn't know what to say. All of this running around, and now she just got Kino's movies handed to her? All she could manage was “Thank you.”

  “Thank you?” Penny hissed. “Girl, have you not learned a single thing? Don't you understand Kino will cause you nothing but grief and pain?”

  “Oma,” Mina said. “Don't you think they've already done their damage? I lost Sam over these movies. The least I can do now is watch them, no?”

  Penny turned away from both of them, as far as her wheelchair would permit.

  “I'll trade you one cranky woman,” Mina said, letting go of the handles. “Take her back upstairs, will you?”

  Penny protested. “Don't leave me alone with this liar!”

  “Come on,” Mina said. “I bet you like him a lot better than your other son–the one who hasn't called you once since you've woken up?”

  Penny spit and gave Jupp a sideways glance. “Do you have any more Asbach?”

  Mina squeezed the hard drive into her bag and gave Jupp a hug. He reeked of cognac. “If you like, come by the house for dinner tonight. Chester's cooking.”

  Jupp gave her a grateful nod. Mina watched as her uncle wheeled his mother away.

  Chapter 20

  Mina lost no time hooking up the portable hard drive. Neatly labeled folders contained digital masters of all of Kino's films, the Weimar and Third Reich ones as well as Twenty-Twelve, and Mina resolved to watch them in chronological order, starting with Tulpendiebe.

  This time, she saw the film differently. Parts that had seemed ridiculous and slow to her were now imbued with accidental poetry and optimism. There was love in the way the camera gazed on sick Lilly's pallid face, eyes wide with innocence of everything they were yet to see. Mina sat up all night in the upstairs study, at Kino's wooden desk, looking out over the pulsating grid of Los Angeles's lights. Hollywood was out there, but she had something even better.

  Mina watched all of Kino's Weimar output that same night, transported to Jupiter, the jolly vineyards of the Rheingau, and Land der Gnade's utopian jungle village. Every movie captured Mina's imagination more than the one before, and Penny, so young and beautiful and talented, was riveting. That she never acted again and her performances went unseen seemed, to Mina, every bit as tragic as Kino's thwarted ambition.

  The next day, Chester went to visit Penny, and Jupp, who'd spent the night in one of the spare bedrooms, joined him, apprehensive and hung over. Mina returned to the study to watch the rest of her grandfather's movies. Luftschiffwalzer and the other operettas struck her as limp, forced, with a busy surface that pretended to entertain but betrayed a terrible sadness underneath. For all their countryside picnics and glittering balls, the actors looked as if they were suffocating in their evening gowns and Prussian uniforms.

  Mina was glad when she finally made it through Tanz in den Wolken, the last of the Third Reich films, and opened the folder containing Twenty-Twelve. Unlike the other films, there wasn't one large master file, but a numbered collection of shorter clips that Jupp and Dr. Hanno had salvaged from Botha's reels, a few of them five or six minutes long, but most around the minute mark and some even shorter. Instead of cueing up the fragments in order, she opened them at random, shuffling through them, grasped by the urgent need to know what, exactly, was left of Kino's last movie.

  She recognized a few moments from the studio release version of Pirates, sometimes with added lines of dialogue or shot from a different angle, cut in a more jarring, haphazard way that made it seem as if they were part of a different narrative altogether. Other scenes, from the back lot set and filmed on location in Mexico, were entirely new to Mina. There were bits that belonged to a subplot about a mutiny, and there was talk about an ancient prophecy. Many of the scenes had a raw beauty that Mina hadn't seen in the cheesy material that was used for the recut release version. Some of them appeared to be outtakes. Mina also found scanned PDF files of a modified screenplay draft. She recognized her grandfather's jagged scrawl on the marked-up pages.

  But the more Mina clicked, the more she realized that she had less than half of the film, in discolored pieces, jumbled and scattered. The thought that she would never get to see Twenty-Twelve whole made her feel defeated.

  What was it the studios had been so afraid of? Was it something that had been lost, cut, rotted away in Botha's attic? M
ina didn't expect to find out, and she began to understand what Kino had said about his films: they were beyond anyone's control.

  What interested her now was only the film itself, the images on the screen in front of her. She couldn't get enough of them. She was thrilled to discover footage of the set fire Marty had described, the riot in Mulberry Cove, slightly overexposed images of Darius Silko and his bride Bonnie riding in a carriage, men in robes praying and chanting, and news footage of President Kennedy, giving Castro his ultimatum.

  Mina also found a short clip of a man in his sixties, standing in the surf at night, illuminated by a row of tiki torches, the waves lapping at his ankles. He was wearing torn pants and a frilly purple blouse, his face covered in stubble and his gray hair long and dirty. He was waving a cutlass and speaking directly into the camera. One of his legs was covered by a thigh-high leather boot; the other was a simple peg leg, so thin that it had to be real. With a jolt, Mina realized that she was looking at Kino.

  With an unmistakable German accent, he declared: “On the eve of Mulberry Feast, the ghost of Grapefruit Silko, legendary captain of the Gaia, Schrecken der Sieben Weltmeere, dead for a hundred years, appears in the waves to convey a message of hope and love to his heirs.”

  Mina leaned in closer. Kino rubbed his face and scratched his stubbly beard. He was hamming it up. “The volcano that looms over Mulberry Island leads down to the absolute unchanging core of the world,” he said. “Remember: no matter what, Mulberry Island remains. Anything is still possible.” Someone, possibly Marty, mumbled something off-camera, and Kino waved them off angrily. “Cut!” he shouted, and the screen went black.

  Mina rewound the clip and hit play again. She stared at her deranged grandfather, in awe of what he had tried to do.