The Berlin Connection

by Johannes Mario Simmel

  Professor Pontevivo came to see me after dinner. We discussed what he had told me about the functions of the min d and he continued, "I can explain the functions of the mind to a drinker. I can explain the reason of an inferiority complex, the problem he beUeves himself not able to handle. One thing I cannot do. Do you know what?"

  "Yes. You can point out the difficulties in his life which made him a drinker but you cannot remove this difficulty. I thought about that. I imagine that is also the reason why—I once read this—about ninety percent of so-called cured drinkers sufl^er relapses and are actually incurable."

  "You are perfectly right. If a man of forty drinks because he cannot progress in his profession, n6 longer loves his wife, desires another woman, is convinced that his talent wUl never be recognized—I cannot obtain for him the woman he dreams of or release him from the one he hates. Neither can I suddenly make him a successful businessman or a Nobel prize winner. I cannot change his basic circumstances."

  "Well, then! Hl-bred children. A bad marriage. A wasted life. Enough to drive a man to drink! No matter how well you explain it to him: All he knows then is why he drinks. You are not able to do any more for him.'*

  "Yes, I can."

  "You can?"

  "I can—" The slight professor interrupted himself. From below we heard noises and men's voices, muffled but still audible in the stillness of the night.

  "Non cosi lentamente!"

  "Attenzione, idiota! £ sul mio piede!"

  "What is on hi« foot?" I asked.

  "The coffin probably," Pontevivo guessed. From the window we watched two men in shirtsleeves struggling to haul a coffin up the steps from the basement of the clinic to a waiting hearse. The coffin swayed dangerously.

  "Who died?"

  "Our composer. Yesterday morning."

  It upset me to hear that.

  "We usually remove our—hm—departed ones late at night. Many patients would be shocked to witness such a transfer. Do you possibly belong with these people, too?"

  I was silent.

  "Mr. Jordan, people are dying all over the world. In a hospital death ought to be a regularly expected event. Don't you agree? Why are you sad?"

  "That he died without having completed his concerto."

  "All of us are saddened by that," said Pontevivo.*

  Apparently not all. From below we heard this dialogue.

  "£ un compositore. Dicono che ha fatto una si bella musica!"

  "Musica, merda! H mio piede!"

  Finally the coffin was placed in the hearse and they drove away. We watched until it disappeared in the darkness, in the void, where all of us would disappear one day.

  "By the way, toward the end he also became very pious," said Pontevivo. "It happens frequently. He felt iU

  and almost daily demanded the priest and extreme unction. All in all he received it seven times. Yesterday morning he told the masseuse to come back at eleven since he had just received extreme unction. By eleven he had already died . . ." Pontevivo led me away from the window. "Where were we?"

  "I said you could do very little for a drinker because you could not change his circumstances."

  "Right. And I said that I could!"

  "How can you do that?"

  "I can change his attitude to life. I can—improbable as it may sound—correct his engrams; his experiences as it were. I can effect changes in his subconscious stemming from early, unpleasant experiences with mother, father, poverty, wealth, sickness and so on. I can transform his inferiority complex into a normal emotion. There would then be no more reason for him to drink."

  "Then you can change a person?"

  "A person, yes. But I can only do that if the patient is agreeable. The patient must cooperate. He must agree to my treatment."

  "Which is?"

  "Hypnosis," said Pontevivo.

  "You can cure alcoholism through hypnosis?"

  "In the last two years I have had many successful cures, only a few setbacks. Please consider if you are prepared for this kind of treatment. Good night, Mr. Jordan."

  This had been the fourth lecture.

  20

  On Sunday, the twenty-ninth of November 1959, at exactly four p.m., a pale young man with close-cropped black hair and dark-framed glasses entered the office of

  the foreman of the hotel garage and asked for Walter Schauberg.

  "He just got back from Essen," answered the foreman. "He's driving for a movie company now," he added genially while he looked at the seemingly nervous young man carrying a heavy attache case. "He's supposed to drive back there tonight."

  "Yes, I know," answered the young man. "We were going to see a movie."

  The foreman sent a mechanic to fetch Schauberg from the sub-basement. Schauberg was wearing a dark gray chauffeur's uniform. Together with the young man he left the garage and went to a nearby cinema. He bought two tickets for the four o'clock performance. He aroused the cashier's anger by insisting that he had given her a fifty-mark biU and not a twenty she insisted he had given her. After a lengthy argument Schauberg "discovered" his mistake, apologized and entered the movie theater accompanied by the cashier's, "That's a new trick, is it? I'm going to remember your face!"

  "I hope so," said Schauberg softly. They waited until the newsreel was shown and left the movie theater, whose only usher had left, by a side exit. At the hotel they used the delivery entrance and service elevator. Shirley, very pale in a black robe opened the door as soon as they knocked. They entered in silence. While the young man took off his shabby coat and pulled up the sleeves of his blue turtleneck sweater Schauberg hung a card on the outside of the door. In four languages it said: do not disturb!

  Schauberg now locked the door from the inside. Still not a word had been said. Rain beat against the windows. The young man's hair was damp. He put on a white surgeon's cap. Schauberg did the same after he had removed his beret and Shirley had gasped at the sight of the horrible scar.

  All I have described and will describe I know from Schauberg's report.

  Both men moved the large table to the window. Schau-berg spoke for the first time, "Where is the pail?"

  "In the bathroom," answered Shiriey.

  "Get it." Shirley brougli the pail she had bought t^e day before at Schauberg's request.

  "The sheets and the other things?"

  Shirley pointed to the bed. On it were three new white sheets, sterile cotton wool, sterile gauze, and sanitary napkins. The men spread two sheets over the table and Schauberg took off his jacket and also rolled up his sleeves. He said to Shirley, "You can get undressed now."

  "I'm only wearing the robe."

  The young man meanwhile had spread the contents of his attache case on another smaller table. He lit a kerosene burner held in a tripod. On it he placed a chromium bowl he had filled with water. He placed a number of surgical instruments in the bowl. Now he spoke for the first time. "Has to boil ten minutes." He couldn't have been more than three years older than Shirley. He looked •undernourished, sad and nervous.

  Schauberg said, "Now you can call the operator." He went to the bathroom where he began methodically to scrub his hands and arms.

  Shirley instructed the operator. "This is Shirley Brom-field in six-eighteen. I don't feel very well and I'm going to take a sleeping pill. Please don't accept any calls for me until I call you again."

  Schauberg returned and threw a razor and shaving brush into the boiling water.

  "What's that for?" The young man's watery eyes blinked fearfully behind his glasses.

  "I'll take care of it. Wash your hands."

  "Why shave her? Iodine will do."

  "You shut up."

  "That's crazy! Shaving too! As if we have that much time!"

  Schauberg looked threatening. His voice was low, "I worked ethically for twenty years like any decent doctor, and I'm going to work properly today too. You understand me?"

  The young man shrugged and went to scrub his hands. Schauberg told me later, "Na
turally, iodine would have done as well. But—ridiculous I know—just then I remembered that I had no license to practice any more. I did it out of stubbornness. Stubbornness and . . . and longing for my profession, probably. Ridiculous, isn't it?"

  Shirley lay on the towel on the bed and he shaved her carefully. "Now you can take off your robe and lie on the table. Feet to the window. We need light."

  "Can I have a pillow for my head? The table is so hard."

  "No. You have to lie flat. You'll be sleepy in a moment and you won't feel anything." Schauberg injected Shirley's vein.

  "What's that?"

  "Evipal. By the way, your stepfather sends his best regards. Move forward. Farther, to the edge of the table." Shirley obeyed apathetically. The injection was taking effect. "Let your legs hang down." Schauberg pushed the pail close to her legs. He turned on the radio.

  "Music drowns out noises. Spread out your arms."

  Schauberg tore a long, wide strip off the sheet. He tied one end around Shirley's right wrist, pulled the strip underneath the table to the other side and secured Shirley's other wrist. Her stretched out arms were now fixed as those of a crucified person.

  "Pull your knees up. Higher!" he said louder. Shirley was mumbling, not reacting to his request. He pushed her legs up against her body. He placed a wide long strip of the sheet underneath the backs of her knees and fastened the strip tightly behind the girl's neck. He went to the

  bathroom where the student was still brushing his hands and began to scrub again. The instruments were rattling in the boiling water and melodies of a Lehar operetta came from the radio.

  "How is her heart?" asked the student.

  "It's okay. You have Cardiazol?"

  "Yes."

  "Good."

  "Why should you need it if her heart is okay?"

  "One never knows. It's always good to have handy." Both men went over to Shirley. The student placed the mask on her face.

  "Count, please."

  Indistinctly Shirley began to count, "One, two, three . . ."

  "Breathe deeply," said the student. He slowly dropped ether onto the cotton wool of the mask. Schauberg bent over Shirley.

  ". . . four ... five . . ."

  "She's out," reported the student.

  "All right," said Schauberg. "The rings, please."

  As he inserted the first the telephone began to ring.

  21

  The music emanating from the radio was sweet and sticky as honey.

  Schauberg straightened up.

  The telephone shrilled.

  "It wiU stop in a moment," said Schauberg.

  The telephone stopped ringing.

  "You see," said Schauberg. "The next ring, please."

  The telephone started up again.

  The student dropped the ring.

  "Stupid," said Schauberg. The student picked up the

  ring and threw it back into the boiling water. The telephone continued to ring. i

  "I can't stand that," groaned the student. His face was green.

  "If she doesn't answer they'll stop ringing. She said she didn't want to be disturbed.*'

  The telephone stopped.

  "There you are," said Schauberg.

  The telephone began again.

  Schauberg said, "It must be something important."

  "If it is they'll send someone up here."

  "The sign is on the door."

  "That won't stop them if it is important," the student cried hysterically. Schauberg shrugged his shoulders and walked toward the telephone.

  "You can't answer that!"

  "Why not?" asked Schauberg, supremely confident. "After all, I am her stepfather's chauffeur. I could have brought her something from him." He turned off the radio, Shirley moaned and moved her head.

  "God . .. forgive .. ."

  "Give her a little more."

  The student dropped a little more ether onto the mask.

  Shirley quietened.

  Schauberg lifted the receiver. He did not say anything. A woman's voice said, "Miss Bromfield, I'm terribly sorry to disturb you. You said you did not wish to be called. But an inspector from the police is here and he says it is urgent. Just one moment I'll connect you ..."

  The Seventh Tape

  Infernal noise, while the steel block, glowing blue-white, shot out from under the resounding electric hammers of the pressure rollers. It sped to the furiously rotating cylinders of the roUing mill.

  The light in the workshop was so intense that all of us, workmen and movie staff used goggles. There was no escape from the noise of the gigantic machines.

  Two hundred men had started on the nightsliift at seven p.m. this twenty-ninth of November. They were stripped to the waist, wearing the usual costume of boots, protective helmets and goggles. The heat was almost unbearable despite the huge ventilators forcing fresh air into the mill.

  This is where we would be shooting for the next five nights. We had permission to shoot only at night for, during the day, five hundred men worked here. We would have been in their way.

  What was to be filmed now was a segment of the career of Carlton Webb, the drunken weakling played by me. The brutal, sweaty world of tough manual laborers, into which he was suddenly thrown almost destroyed him. But painfully, stubbornly he fought through to a personal victory.

  355

  The background of this "movie within the movie" was the daily lives of working men. Among them and their families the hero came to know "real" life, "real" problems, "real" men and—a dramatic essential—a beautiful working girl, later to be his sweetheart, and Evelyn's rival.

  After Carlton Webb's salvation (as it were) through honest toil he would be killed by Evelyn's jealous husband.

  The two hundred men of the night shift were more than just extras. They were real men—not players. After talking and working with them I had a greater awareness of that other world, more solid and lasting than my world of luxury apartments, corruption and depravity.

  Joan, Schauberg and I had left Hamburg at eight o'clock Sunday morning. We reached Essen by eleven o'clock. In the afternoon two foremen instructed me in routines I would need for the scenes that night. I had an hour's rest before starting work^at seven p.m.

  The scenes in Essen were the most dreadfully taxing ones, psychologically and physically. Workers were on four-hour shifts but we—under pressure by our deadline—spent eight or nine hours in the heat and noise of the mill. Those were five nights I would not soon foreet!

  On that first Sunday night the make-up artists were horrified when they saw my body covered with spots, pustules and scabs. Seaton, Kostasch and Albrecht had been summoned.

  Soon half a dozen people were starine at me, shaking their heads all the while I was insisting that the rash was a harmless allergy; that I was already under the care of a dermatologist in Hamburg and that he had said make-up would conceal the rash but not irritate it. Schauberg had told me, "You can apply any amount of make-up. Considering the large doses of aureomycin you've had it's simply impossible to get an infection! Just to make sure I'll give you another one to carry you through until I get back."

  He had done that, and left at twelve noon. Now it was ten p.m. While we were shooting perspiration was rapidly washing away my make-up. As though I was really a workman I pushed the white-hot steel bouncing past us, with a long iron bar along the rotating cylinders. I had a double for a few dangerous scenes (such as a liSt fight on a narrow bridge above the rolling mill) but I played in most of the takes.

  The camera man told me not to worry about the melting make-up. "We're using panchromatic film. The glowing metal will photograph so bright, you'll all appear as silhouettes. Close-ups are on your face and that is free of the rash."

  A buzzer sounded. Two hundred exhausted men left. Two hundred fresh men started work.

  Eleven p.m.

  Schauberg had been gone eleven hours. What was keeping him? It was seven hours since he had operated on Shirley.

  S
omething must have happened! Something went wrong with Shirley. Or with Schauberg. Or with both of them. What had happened?

  I played my scenes. The fear did not leave me. My arms grew weak; I could hardly hold the iron bar, my head ached, my back hurt, and along with the perspiration I felt my strength ebb. At midnight we paused for a half hour.

  Still no sign of Schauberg.

  1 was lying on my cot in a portable dressine room. Harry had wrapped me in blankets and I asked him to bring me a telephone. He rolled in the telephone with a seemingly endless line rolling off a drum on wheels. With shaking hands I dialed my hotel in Hamburg.

  "This is Peter Jordan. I'd like to speak to my daughter, please."

  "I'm sorry Mr. Jordan, Miss Bromfield left word that she did not want to be disturbed."

  "When?"

  "At four o'clock. She said she did not feel well."

  "You have not heard from her since?"

  "No, Mr. Jordan. She said she was going to take a sleeping pill."

  "Well, connect me anyway."

  "But—"

  "Connect me! It is important! The worst that can happen is that we wake her!"

  I heard the phone ring.

  "Miss Bromfield does not answer."

  "So I see."

  "She must be fast asleep."

  "Yes." Perhaps she was dead.

  "Shall I send someone up?"

  Perhaps she really was asleep. Perhaps Schauberg was still with her. Perhaps—

  "No. No, don't do that! I don't want to disturb her if she is sleeping that deeply. Thank you, operator."

  Twelve-thirty a.m.

  Where was Schauberg?

  Why didn't Shirley answer?

  If something happened to Shirley, if Schauberg had injured her ... if she had bled to death ... if this old morphine addict with his shaky hands had killed her ... if he was already on his way to the frontier . . ,

  "Good God in heaven!"

  I suddenly realized that I had spoken aloud. I believe I had never said those words before!

  A knock. The door opened.

  "And a very good evening, or rather good morning." Schauberg looked pale and tired but he smiled.