Dream Factories and Radio Pictures

by Howard Waldrop

  Arguing with Brecht had been like talking to a Communist post. When the man’s mind was made up, that was that. When it wasn’t was the only time you could show him he was being a Stalinist putz; only then had he been known to rewrite something.

  The first time Peter had met Brecht, Peter had been nineteen and fresh off the last turnip truck from Ludow. All he wanted was a Berlin theater job; what Brecht wanted was a talented marionette. He’d ended up doing Brecht’s comedy by night and Fritz Lang’s movies by day, and in his copious free time learning to spend the increasingly inflated Weimar money, which eventually became too cheap to wipe your butt with. Then Peter found himself in America, via Hitchcock, and Brecht found himself in Switzerland, via Hitler.

  Peter sighed, looking around the table. Everybody here had a story. Not like mine, but just like mine. I was making movies and money in America. I was nominated for the Academy Award twice, after playing Orientals and psychopaths and crazy weenies for ten years. There was a war on. I was safe. It was that fat old fart Greenstreet, God rest his soul, who talked me into the USO tour with him. There we were, waiting for Glenn Miller’s plane to come in, near the Swiss border, six shows a day, Hitler almost done in, the biggest audiences we’d ever played to when BLAM!—the old world was gone.

  And when I quit running, it’s “Hello, Herr Brecht, it is I, your long-lost admirer, Peter, the doormat.”

  * * *

  “And you?” asked Madame. “What can you tell us of our late departed genius?”

  Peter ran through thirty years of memories, those of the first, and the ones of the last fifteen years. Yes, age had mellowed the parts of Brecht’s mind that needed it. Yes, he had begun to bathe and change clothes more often after his second or third heart attack, which had made things much more pleasant. He had exploited people a little less; possibly he’d forgotten how, or was so used to it that he no longer noticed when he wasn’t. No, the mental fires had never gone out. Yes, it was hard to carry on their work without the sharp nail of his mind at the center of their theater. He could also have said that Brecht spent the last three years of his life trying to put The Communist Manifesto into rhymed couplets. He could have said all that. Instead, he looked at the Madame. “Brecht wanted to live his life so that every day at 6:00 P.M. he could go into his room, lock the door, read cheap American detective stories, and eat cheese to his heart’s content. The man must have had bowel muscles like steel strands.”

  Then Peter got up and left the room.

  * * *

  Walter Brettschneider was the Cultural Attaché to the Reichsconsul in Zürich and was only twenty-five years old. Which meant, of course, that he was a major in the Geheime Staats Polizei. His job at the Consulate included arranging and attending social and cultural affairs, arrangements for touring groups from the Fatherland to various Swiss cities (Zürich, he thought, rather than Berne, being the only city in the country with any culture at all). His other job was easier—he could have been assigned to one of the Occupied Lands, or South America, or as liaison with the Japanese, which every day was becoming more and more of a chore for the Reich; his friend back in Berlin in the Ministry of Manufacture told him the members of the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere had come up with many technical innovations in the last few years; they were now making an automobile as good as the Volkswagen and had radio and televiewing equipment that required only three tubes.

  That second job of his consisted of forwarding to Berlin, each year or so, a list of thirty to forty names. Of these, a dozen or fifteen would be picked. These people would suddenly find that their permanent resident alien status in Switzerland was in question, there were certain charges, etc. And then they would be asked by the Swiss to leave the country.

  Everyone was satisfied with the arrangement, the Swiss, the Reich, in some strange way the resident aliens, as long as they weren’t one of the dozen or so. Switzerland itself was mined and booby-trapped and well defended. If the Reich tried to invade, the Alps would drop on them. Germany controlled everything going in and out—it surrounded the country for two thousand kilometers in every direction—the New Lands, New Russland, New Afrika, New Iceland, the lands along the shiny new Berlin-Baghdad Eisenbahn—except the contents of the diplomatic pouches, and some of those, too.

  If the Fatherland tried to use the Weapons on the Swiss, they lost all those glittery numbered assets, and endangered their surrounding territory.

  So the system was understood. After all, as the First Führer had said, we have a thousand years; at a dozen a year we will eventually get them all.

  Edward, his assistant, knocked and came in.

  “Heil Bormann,” he said, nonchalantly raising his hand a few inches.

  “OK,” said Brettschneider, doing likewise.

  “You remember that the two younger cousins of the Swabian Minister for Culture are arriving Thursday?” asked Edward.

  “I had tried to forget,” said Brettschneider. He opened the big 1960 calendar on his desk to February 13th, made a note. “Will you please make sure the schedule in the hall is marked? Why, why do people come to Switzerland in the winter?”

  “I certainly have no idea,” said Edward. “What’s doing?”

  “There’s a new show at the Kropotkin tonight. They’re not saying what it is, so of course I have to go see.”

  “Not the kind of place you can take the cou—”

  “Most assuredly not. But then again, last month they did the decadent American classic Arsenic and Old Lace. Quite amusing in its original version. Of course, in theirs, the Roosevelt character wasn’t Theodore. And Jonathan was made up to look like the Second Führer—” Brettschneider looked up at the three photos on his wall—Hitler, Himmler, Bormann—Himmler’s was one of the old official ones, from eleven years ago, before the chin operation, not the posthumous new official ones—“no, not really the kind of place, the type of plays two young women should see.”

  “Have a good time,” said Edward. “I have to accompany the Reichsminister’s wife to the Turkish thing.”

  “Oh? Yes? How’s your Turkish?”

  “It’s being given in English, I am led to believe. I’ll drop back in later today, in any case.”

  Edward left. Brettschneider stared at the doorway. For all he knew, Edward might be a colonel in the G.S.P.

  * * *

  “It’s too bad they don’t make Zambesi cigarettes anymore,” said Caspar, the scene designer, as he smoked one of Peter’s cheap German cigars. “We’d have them free. It was before your time, before you met Brecht, back in the early twenties. He was always trying to write pirate movies and detective novels. Before Marx. He designed an ad campaign for the tobacco company. He took an unlimited supply of Zambesis in payment. He grew to detest them before the company went out of business. I thought them quite good.”

  “I’d give anything to smoke a Camel again,” said Shemp. They were putting down tablecloths and ashtrays, and lighting the candles out front. Zero was pumping up the beer spigots over behind the bar. Madame was, as usual, nowhere to be seen, but, say something wrong, you could be sure she would hear it. The woman was fueled by the thought that someone, somewhere, wasn’t thinking about Bertolt Brecht.

  “I heard they don’t make them over there anymore,” said Caspar. “The Turks, you know? They claim, in Germany, Airship Brand is the same thing as Camels used to be.”

  “They’re as full of shit as Christmas geese,” said Shemp. “God, what I wouldn’t give for a slice of goose!”

  And so it went until time to open, when the Madame suddenly appeared in front of Peter and said, “You work the door until 1930 hours. Then you may get into costume.”

  “Yes, comrade Madame,” he said. There was no use arguing with her. It would have been like asking Rondo Hatton, Why the long face?

  He went to the door. Under the covered walkway quite a nice crowd had gathered early. Peter looked at the sign out front with its double silhouette of Kropotkin and Brecht and the hand-p
ainted legend: Tonight!—Cabaret Kropotkin—The Zürcher Ensemble—new BRECHT play!

  It wasn’t really Brecht. It wasn’t exactly a play. It wasn’t exactly new. They’d been working on it steadily in the three years since Brecht’s death.

  He undid the latches as the people surged expectantly toward him. He opened the doors, stood back, nodded his head toward the tables.

  “Trough’s open,” he said.

  * * *

  Brettschneider arrived a few minutes to eight, went in, nodded to Caspar, who was bartending, and found a spot at a table near the stage with three Swiss students. He listened to their talk a while—it must be nice to live in their world. They were treating the night as a lark; a dangerous place, reputed to be filled with drugs and lady Bolsheviks with mattresses tied to their backs.

  Hesse was over in the corner. Brettschneider nodded to him. He doubted the old man saw him, as his eyes were becoming quite bad (he was, after all, eighty-three years old now); he would go over and say hello during the interval.

  There were a few of what passed as Swiss celebrities present, some Germans, a few Swiss arms dealers.

  Across the length of the stage was the patented Zürcher Ensemble half-curtain let down on a length of pipe. Behind it was the bare back wall. Across this were strung a few twinkling lights, like a Christmas tree with too few bulbs. People moved back and forth across the stage, quite visible to the audience from the neck up.

  The band took its place in front of the curtain—banjo, piano, clarinet—and began a jazz arrangement of “The Internationale”—one or two people stood, and the rest began clapping along. When that was done, they played the old favorite “Moon of Alabama” from Mahogany, and “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree with Anyone Else but Me.” Brettschneider drank a chocolate schnapps and began to feel quite warm. The cabaret was already thick with the blue smoke of a hundred different tobaccos.

  Then the lights went down. From the ceiling a sign dropped: Cabaret Kropotkin—a hand came down from above and beat on the top of the sign, which unfolded into three parts: Cabaret Kropotkin—The Zürcher Ensemble Presents Bertolt Brecht’s—Die Dreiraketenmensch Spaceoper! The half-curtain came up. Another sign dropped in: Scene: The Rocket Men’s Club. Time: The Future. Moritaten.

  An actor dressed as a blind man came on with a barrel organ and began singing “The Night We Dropped the Big One on Biggin Hill.”

  Zero, Peter, and Shemp, in their Rocket Men Cadet uniforms, walk by the beggar, who is then escorted offstage by a policeman.

  “Here we are at last!” says Zero. “Just out of Basic Training! Our first taste of the Outer Reaches!”

  “I’m ready for some inner reaches!” says Shemp.

  “Beer again!” says Peter.

  The flies pulled up revealing a bar’s interior, tables. Dropping in were huge posters of von Braun and Dornberger, and a portrait in the frame reserved for Führers. The audience found it hilarious.

  Brettschneider wrote in his notebook: Unnecessary fun made of Himmler Jr.

  When things quit falling, unfurling and drooping in from the overheads, there were swastikas whirling like propellers and a giant, very pink rocket with a purple nose cone to be seen.

  The three students then sang, as appropriate title cards were revealed, “It’s Me for the Stars, and the Stars for Me,” followed by Zero’s “Once You Get Up There.” Then one of their instructor officers, Major Strasser, came in and had a drink with them.

  “But don’t you find it cold here?” asks Peter.

  “We Germans must get used to all climates, from the Sahara to the poles of Saturn,” says the major.

  Then the chorines danced on and sang “Dock Your Rocket Here” and a chorus line, not of cadets but true Rocket Men, danced on, including one small grotesque figure in sunglasses.

  Brettschneider wrote: more " " " H. Jr., beneath his first entry.

  The cadets and Rocket Men ran off with the chorines, and a new card dropped in: The Field for Rockets. Training. On one side of the fence the three cadets stood at attention; on the other a girl skipped rope to the chant:

  “My girlfriend’s name is Guernica. Her Daddy bombed ’Merika . . .”

  The Drill Instructor, called Manley Mann, comes on and yells at the cadets. “Where you going, you stupid lot?”

  “Up. Up. Up.”

  “How you goin’?”

  “Fast. Fast. Fast.”

  “At night, whatcha see inna sky?”

  “Nazi Socialist Moon!”

  “Gimme a thousand pushups.”

  The cadets dropped down, began to count, “One Vengeance Weapon, Two Vengeance Weapon, Three Vengeance Weapon . . .” There was stage business with the pushups, most of it dealing with Zero’s attempts to do nothing while yelling at the top of his voice.

  When they finished, Manley Mann said, “Right. Today we’re gonna learn about the MD2D3 Course Plottin’ Calculator. Walk smart follow me follow me—” and off.

  Another card: Six Weeks Later. Cadet Barracks. Night.

  Then came Shemp’s solo, as he looked out the window at a bored-looking stagehand holding up a cardboard moon. He did some comic patter, then went on to sing “I Wish I Had a Little Rocket of My Own.”

  Then the lights went up, the Intermission sign dropped down, and the half-curtain was lowered to the stage.

  * * *

  Backstage the Madame was furious. “I told you we must take that song out!” she yelled at Shemp. “You realize you made the audience identify with your character? You know that’s against all the Master’s teachings! You were supposed to sing the ‘Song of the Iron Will.’ ”

  Shemp weaved like a punch-drunk boxer, running his hands through his dank, lanky hair. “I got mixed up,” he said. “They played the wrong music, so I sang it. Yell at the band.”

  “You must always always remember the Verfremsdungeffekt. You must always remind people they are watching a performance. Why do you think the stagehand holds the prop moon so everyone can see him? Are you an idiot? What were you thinking?”

  Shemp paused, ticking off on his fingers. “I do. I always do. I don’t know. Yes. Nothing.”

  “Why must I be saddled with morons?”

  Shemp said something under his breath.

  “What?! What did you say?!”

  “I said I gotta get a drink of water, or I’m gonna lose my voice next act.”

  “That’s not what you said!”

  “Yes it is, comrade Ma’am.”

  “Get out of my sight!”

  “At once,” said Shemp, and disappeared offstage.

  * * *

  Zero sat on a crate in the alleyway. It was bitterly cold, but this was the only place he was sure Madame wouldn’t follow him. Peter came out, lit up a butt one of the waiters had brought him from a customer’s ashtray.

  “We gotta find another way to make a living,” said Zero, his breath a fog.

  “We’ve said that every night for sixteen years now,” said Peter. “Christ, it’s cold!”

  “Wasn’t it Fitzgerald that said nothing much starts in Switzerland, but lots of things end there?”

  “How the fuck should I know?” said Peter.

  “Well, I don’t want to be one of the things that ends here,” said Zero.

  Peter thought of lines from a movie he’d been in long ago, lines dealing with exile, expatriation, and death, and started to say one of them, but didn’t.

  Besides, they’d already used the best lines from that movie in the play.

  “It’s like I told that fat great Limey actor once,” said Peter. “ ‘Chuck,’ I said, ‘if you have to pork young men, just go for god’s sake and do it, and come back and learn your goddamn lines; just quit torturing yourself about it!’ ”

  “Are you saying I should pick up a little boy?” asked Zero.

  Peter shrugged his shoulders. “Where else is there to go but here, Zero?” he asked.

  Zero was quiet. Then: “Sometimes I get so tired, Pete. Soon w
e’ll be old men. Like Bruno. Then dead old men . . .”

  “But theater!—” began Peter.

  “—and Brecht!—” said Zero.

  “—will live forever!” they finished in unison. They laughed and Zero fell off his crate into the snow. Then they brushed themselves off and went back inside.

  * * *

  Brettschneider had made his rounds of the tables during the break. He looked over his notes, made an emendation on one of them. He ate a kaiser roll, then drank a gin-and-tonic, feeling the pine-needle taste far back in his throat.

  Then the band came back, played the last-act overture, and cards dropped back in.

  There was a classroom lecture on the futurist films of Fritz Lang, Metropolis and Frau im Mond, which then went backwards and forwards to cover other spaceward-looking films: Himmelskibet, F.P.1 Antwortet Nicht, Der Tunnel, and Welttraumschiff I Startet, at which Zero insisted on confusing Leni Reifenstahl with the Dusseldorf Murderer.

  Brettschneider wrote: unacceptable reference to Reichsminister for Culture.

  Then the play moved on to Graduation Day, where the massed cadets (represented by the three actors, some mops and brooms with mustaches painted on them, and a boxful of toy soldiers) sang “Up Up for the Fatherland” and were handed their rocket insignia.

  The actors changed onstage into their powder-blue uniforms (overalls) with the jackboots (rubber galoshes) as a sign came down: First Assignment. Rocket Man City—Peënemünde.

  Another sign: Suddenly—A Propaganda Crisis!

  Major Strasser comes up to the three Rocket Men. “Suddenly,” he says, “a propaganda crisis!”

  “Eeep Eeep Eeep Eeep!” says Shemp, staggering.

  “Attention!” says the major. “Our enemies in the U.S.R. far beyond the Urals have launched one of their primitive reaction-motor ships. It is bound for the far reaches of the Solar System. Our information is that it is filled with the Collected Works of Marx and Lenin, and the brilliant but non-Aryan playwright Bertolt Brecht.”

  (There was a boo from the audience, followed by laughter. The actors onstage held still until it was over.)