The New Confessions

by William Boyd

VILLA LUXE, June 18, 1972

  The old bus from town deposits us at the nunnery on the outskirts of the village. There was no mail for me today—something of a wasted journey, I walk through the village towards the track that leads to my villa. As I pass the church the German girl, Ulrike, steps out from the shadow of one of its crude buttresses.

  “Mr. Todd?”

  “What!… Hello. Sorry, you gave me a shock.”

  “Can I offer you a drink?”

  “Well, I’m in a bit of a—”

  “Please, there’s something I want to ask you.”

  We go to Ernesto’s bar. Amazingly, he is actually there—I can hear him shouting angrily at his mother in the kitchen. We sit on the terrace and Feliz brings us two beers. It is that pleasant time of the evening. The heat has gone from the sun; pink bathers plod by from the public beach; soon the early bats will be swooping between the pine trees. I raise my cool glass to Ulrike. Without her spectacles and with the even tan she has now acquired, she really is quite pretty.

  “Mr. Todd, did you ever make movies?”

  For an instant I thought about denying it. “How do you know? Yes, I did.”

  “I knew it!” She smiled broadly.

  She explained: her boyfriend was a lecturer at the university in Munich. He was very involved with film studies.

  “When you told me your name I thought I had heard it before. I wrote to him about you. Yesterday I got his letter.” She looked closely at me. “He said you were very famous.”

  “Well, I was, I suppose. Forty years ago.”

  She went on to tell me about her boyfriend’s work for some film festival in Berlin. A retrospective: “Silent Films of the German Cinema.” She unfolded a piece of paper.

  “He has some questions he would like me to ask you. May I?”

  “Fire away.”

  “Good. Question one. Do you know the whereabouts of a film star called Doon Bogan?”

  9

  Passions

  I knew whom Karl-Heinz was talking about. Doon Bogan was an American, a film star with a huge following in Germany due to the improbable success of an improbable film called Mephistophela, made by Alexander Mavrocordato in 1922, a version of Faust in which, yes, Mephistopheles was a woman. Doon wore black throughout the film. Her face was chalk-white with shadowed eyes and pale lips, and always framed by a tight black cowl. She was the perfect embodiment of fate, sex and death, and the film itself, in a somewhat ham-fisted Expressionist style, was dark and garish and untidily powerful. Doon Bogan became famous, married her director, Alexander Mavrocordato, divorced him a year later and stayed on in Berlin, where she made other successful films with the likes of Pabst, Murnau and Kluge. I asked Aram what he thought of Karl-Heinz’s idea. He was intrigued and suggested that we meet her and sound her out. He warned only that the budget for Julie would rise considerably if she consented to play the part.

  We sent her the script and a meeting was arranged for lunch in the Adlon or Metropol Hotel. Perhaps it was the Bristol.… I am not too clear on the details of that day. I remember feeling the sensation of softness of the pile on the maroon carpet in the hotel bar through the thin soles of my new expensive shoes. Inside, the bar was sumptuously gloomy. Outside it was a dull noon, swagged pewter clouds over the city threatening rain, a fretful gusty wind tugging at the overcoats and skirts of passengers leaving the Friedrichstrasse Station opposite (it must have been the Metropol Hotel, after all). I was early, having visited a travel agent on some matter arising over Sonia’s and the children’s tickets and encountered a mindless bureaucratic problem. The ensuing fruitless argument with the clerk had irritated me and I went straight into the hotel bar for a drink. I ordered a large gin and water and calmed down somewhat.

  A blond woman in a jade-green dress sitting in a leather armchair across the room was scrutinizing me. Her hair was pale blond—ivory-colored—bobbed, with a fiercely edged fringe cut short across the middle of her forehead. Wide, thin but well-shaped red lips. A narrow small nose with a perceptible hook. Where had I seen her before … ? She stood up. She was tall, tall as me, even wearing flat ballet-dancer-style pumps on long, slightly splayed feet. She walked over towards me with an odd elegance, big strides, like a champion girl swimmer, say; muscled but lean, with a phocine grace.

  “Mr. Todd?”

  I said yes. I had to look up, just a little—a queer sensation.

  “I’m Doon Bogan.”

  We shook hands. My suddenly moist palm. Her dry fingers, the knuckly pressure of a big ring, just for an instant.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t … I thought you had dark—” I cleared my throat, suddenly clotted with phlegm. “Dark hair.”

  “I do. But Julie’s blond, isn’t she?”

  Aram Lodokian arrived at that moment; Alex Mavrocordato, her “adviser,” minutes later.

  It took only the space of the subsequent luncheon for me to fall heedlessly, helplessly in love with her. The physical appeal glowed strongly, incandescent, but my emotional commitment followed fast. I think it was her laugh. She laughed easily in a low voice, a crescendo. In some people that facility is merely inane. But with Doon I felt it betokened a true generosity of spirit. Her laughter was a gift to others; you felt good when you heard it—or so I reasoned in my new fantastic state.

  We drank. We lunched. I was a husk. I felt weightless on the chair. I picked at my food, but I drank so much Aram had to order two more bottles of wine.

  Later, when they had gone, Aram and I sat over coffee and cigars in the Metropol’s smoking room. I had a stinging dehydrated throat and a yammering headache.

  “My God, you drank like a fish,” Aram said.

  “She’s Julie,” I said huskily. My cigar tasted of vomit.

  “We can’t pay twenty-five. It’s crazy. Twenty, maybe. Just.”

  “I can’t do it with anybody else.”

  Aram looked at me quizzically. He wore a blue suit with a metallic aquamarine shimmer to it. He had expensive bad taste in clothes.

  “Take five thousand of my fee,” I said. “Pay me it back as a bonus if we finish on time.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I’ve never been so sure of anything in my life.”

  “It’s not such a bad idea.” He smiled. “It’ll be a good incentive for you.”

  Aram liked me, but he was no fool. He saved five thousand and got Doon Bogan. He told me he was impressed by my artistic integrity. I accepted the compliment.

  Do you know that feeling? When you meet someone and you know? The sudden hollowing out of your torso, as if your lungs, heart, viscera have gone and the ribs seem to creak like barrel staves under too much pressure? Glimmerings, intimations of the way I felt now had occurred before with Faye Hobhouse, Dagmar—even Huguette. It is, I think, to do with fear: a fear of impotence—not sexual, but of lacking the power of ability to capture the object of your vital passion. A haunting dread that you will never have the chance again, that the moment has passed you by forever.

  I sat on with Aram, emptied out, made void by that fear.

  “Relax,” Aram said, and patted my knee. “Oh yes, I forgot. This arrived for you at the studio.”

  It was a telegram from Sonia: she and the children would be arriving in four days’ time.…

  I felt a sudden nausea. A weariness of spirit, an almost complete despair.

  I saw Doon again before Sonia arrived. In the Realismus offices, where we met to sign the contracts. Karl-Heinz was there, and Mavrocordato also, to my annoyance. Mavrocordato had prematurely gray hair and was a handsome, large, jowly man with big shoulders and a big soft chest. Apparently Doon still lived with him off and on, and used him as a kind of unofficial manager. Aram wheeled his father out from his office. Champagne was opened and we toasted the success of Julie. That day I had chronic indigestion and the champagne’s acid bubbles seethed the length of my esophagus. It was as if some physical dolor had to attend my encounters with Doon. I suffered from a broth of confused s
ensations and emotions: heartburn, real and metaphorical; a sour hatred for the ursine Mavrocordato; fleeting elations and pride over Julie. And a dour worry about the impending arrival of my wife and children.

  Among the chatter and the toasts, Duric Lodokian beckoned me over to his wheelchair and shook my hand. Then he pulled me down, my ear to his smoky mouth.

  “Fantastical girl,” he coughed. “My God, I like to have her once before I die.”

  “Me too,” I said, punching my fiery chest. “Me too.”

  “I love Doon Bogan, I love Doon Bogan” was the ill-timed refrain pulsating through my head as I watched Sonia, Mrs. Shorrold and my two children advance along the platform towards me. I had not counted on my mother-in-law, but it was reasonable to suppose that Sonia could not have coped with the journey alone. I tried to expunge the image of Doon from my mind as I kissed my wife. Sonia looked as smart as ever, if a little tired, wearing a neat oyster-gray suit. Vincent shied away from me, terrified, as if I were a threatening stranger. Mrs. Shorrold held Hereford. He looked fat and jolly and shook his fist vigorously at me, in welcome, I hoped. He must have been three months old.

  I supervised the luggage and organized two taxis to transport it and us to Rudolfplatz. It was a sunny day and I pointed out this and that feature as we drove through the city center. Sonia, I could see, was excited and impressed. Berlin looked fresh and cosmopolitan. However, Sonia’s expression fell rather as we recrossed the Spree and drove down Stralauer Allee towards the apartment. Fine buildings gave way to drab residential streets. From time to time we got glimpses of the river to our right, with its untidy clusters of barges, docks piled high with bricks and sand, sacks and boxes of vegetables.

  “Why are we living here?” Sonia asked plaintively as we disembarked at Rudolfplatz.

  “It’s very cheap,” I said.

  “But I thought you said we were well off.”

  “We are.” I tried to keep the irritation out of my voice. “We’ll move, don’t worry. We’ll move tomorrow.”

  “No need for sarcasm, Johnny.”

  I could appreciate that seen through her eyes the apartment left something to be desired. I was no interior decorator, but at least I had asked Frau Mittenklott to look in twice a week to do some cleaning and cooking whenever her duties at Georg Pfau’s permitted. The unsatisfactory nature of our reunion was compounded by my inability to make love to Sonia that night. Guilt about Doon made me detumescent.

  “What’s wrong?” Sonia asked kindly. She was always thoughtful.

  “I don’t know.… I think I must be tired. Too much work, the film—” I babbled on, seeking refuge in a monologue, and soon enough Sonia fell asleep.

  And soon enough a routine and ostensible family life was established at Rudolfplatz, facilitated and made tolerable—at least for Sonia—by there being some money in the bank. A nurse was employed to look after the boys and Sonia and her mother shopped strenuously for curtains, carpets, furniture and all the odds and ends of a proper home that I had been unable to provide. At weekends we went to the beach at Wannsee, for a picnic in the Grunewald, or we took a steamer down to Potsdam. There was a sizable British film presence in Berlin in those days, owing to the considerable number of Anglo-German co-productions, and Sonia discovered that she knew some of the girls working in the studios. Even Vincent Shorrold came over for a month’s holiday. Suddenly, my life acquired its old context, something that—after the months of bachelorhood and freedom—I found unsettling. I concentrated on my film.

  July and August went by as we waited for Karl-Heinz to finish Diary of a Prostitute (A. E. Groth was notoriously pedantic—no one could rush him). In the meantime all the innumerable logistical problems of film making presented themselves and were laboriously overcome. We found our perfect château near Arneburg overlooking the Elbe, and then lost it when the owner asked for double his fee. We found another. A large model of the Parisian skyline was constructed (the view from Saint-Preux’s garret) and was destroyed in a medium-sized fire at the Grunewald studios. Monika Alt (Claire) had an abortion, followed swiftly by a nervous breakdown, and was replaced by Lola Templin-Tavel. And so on.

  I found myself becoming steadily more harassed over the day-to-day aggravations. Aram Lodokian could only devote a portion of his time to Julie, as he was preoccupied with running Realismus (old Duric seemed to be growing iller). I suggested we hire a co-producer and Aram agreed. I wrote to Leo Druce in London and offered him the job. Leo sold his car-hire business and was in Berlin by late August. Thus the old team was reunited.

  Leo was almost embarrassingly grateful. “You keep pulling me out of the fire,” he said. I told him he was doing me a favor, and sure enough his presence proved invaluable. I soon found myself with time on my hands and on the pretext of doing some rewrites on the script I went to see Doon Bogan.

  She lived in the west end, on Schlüter Strasse, off the Kurfürstendamm and not far from the Palmenhaus Café. Her apartment was small and cluttered; no real attempt had been made to prettify or decorate it. Evidence of her wealth and fame—a walnut baby grand supporting a troop of silver-framed photographs, a long rectangular chrome-and-leather sofa—contrasted strongly with her own untidiness. A bundle of half a dozen dresses was laid over the back of an armchair. In the hall was a large stack of what looked absurdly like political broadsheets.

  She showed me into the sitting room. She had on a cobalt cardigan over a shirt and tie. The hem was coming down at the back of her crepe skirt. She wore—as I came to learn she always did—her leather dancing pumps. Doon was not an unconfident woman, but she was curiously self-conscious about her height. My abiding memory of her entering a room is the relief with which she flung herself into chairs, as if she had been walking for hours. When compelled to stand, at a reception or a cocktail party, say, she always made straight for a pillar or wall to lean against. It was not a case of politesse, aware of shorter men; she did the same with Mavrocordato, who was taller than she.

  Now she sat promptly on the leather sofa and lit a cigarette. I made the usual insincere compliments about her flat. Above the fire was a blurry photograph of a strong-faced, dark-haired woman with an old-fashioned hairstyle.

  “Your mother?” I asked.

  “Rosa Luxemburg.”

  “Rosa who?”

  “My God.” She seemed surprised. “Haven’t you heard of her?”

  “No. Who is she?”

  “Those Free Corps bastards murdered her, 1919.”

  “Oh.… Politics.” I remembered there had been an abortive Communist revolution then. I took a cigarette from the inlaid box on the table.

  “Can I borrow a light?”

  “What do you mean, ‘Oh.… Politics’? Aren’t you interested in politics?”

  “I should say not.” I pointed my lit cigarette at her. “Politics is self-interest disguised by cant.” This was something Karl-Heinz had said once. I thought it had a good ring to it.

  “Surely you don’t mean that.” Her voice was flat and serious, her American accent strong all of a sudden. I sensed I was on the brink of something irrevocable.

  “Of course I don’t,” I tried a smile. “Teasing. I tend to tease people—nerves.”

  She was frowning at me, skeptically.

  “I admit I’m a cynic,” I went on, more desperate than I hoped I looked. “But I do make exceptions.” I nodded at the photograph. “The likes of Rosa, for one.”

  I held my breath. She relaxed.

  “Alex put you up to this. He said you’d get a rise out of me, right?”

  “Alex who?”

  “Mavrocordato. He can’t stand that I’m a Communist. The jerk.”

  “No, honestly, it was me. My stupid idea of a joke.” I waved my hands about. I had to sit down; my entire left leg was trembling for some reason. What the hell had got into me? Why had nobody warned me? The apartment was full of books; they now looked weighty, earnest, leftist …

  I changed the subject and we talked about
the script and the part of Julie. She said in all seriousness that she was keen on the role because she was interested in the concept of virtue and was tired of playing “whores and bitches.” We talked on. She was bright and had thought hard about the film. The afternoon wore on and the apartment grew dim. Eventually she got up and switched on the light.

  “Do you want a drink, John?” It was the first time she had mentioned my name. I felt the familiar clubbing start up in my chest.

  “Do you like to be called John or James?”

  “Whatever you like.”

  “What about James. Jamie?”

  “Hrrrrm. Hah!… mng. Sorry. Yes, fine.”

  “Right, Jamie, what about that drink?”

  “Gin and water. Please.”

  “Good God.”

  (Why did I drink that drink then? Pure affectation, but it was strong.) She went into another room to get it. Long strides, skirt swirling about her calves. The susurration of her leather pumps on the parquet flooring. I could see at the crown of her head a tiny rosette of dark hair, the blond dye growing out. I knew suddenly why she was such a big star in Europe: she was different from European women, or at least was perceived to be. She came from the New World and was not hidebound or impressed by the old. There was nothing specific about this, nothing you could put your finger on, but that sense of an entrancing alternative seemed to coil about her like ectoplasm.

  She handed me the glass. I gulped at the drink. The single light shone on her ivory hair. Her small hooked nose cast a dark shadow across her face.

  “You sure Alex didn’t put you up to that Rosa joke?”

  “Positive. I haven’t seen him since the contracts were signed.”

  “It’d be just like him.…”

  Pause.

  “Are you and he …? Not that it’s any of my business. But I—”

  It was my second mistake. She looked shrewdly at me. For the first time—and I believe this—she sensed the hot moist tentacles of my desire sneaking about her, dabbing at her skirt.

  “Why? What’s it to you?”