Delayed Rays of a Star

by Amanda Lee Koe

  Hans Haas was sorting out cables when he heard the dogs. They barked with authority as they reached the camp. Behind the dogs were two Italian farmers, one of them pulling a donkey cart, the other limping. Strapped to the cart was the wolf, tongue out of its jaw. Miss Riefenstahl ran from where she was rehearsing in the meadow with Franz.

  It tried to bite me, the first farmer said. So I aimed for its leg, but—

  Half of the wolf’s face had been shot off.

  Hans Haas heard Miss Riefenstahl scream.

  She squatted down, placing her head between her knees, and her hands on top of her head. Her assistant ran to her with smelling salts, but Miss Riefenstahl dashed them away. Her shoulders were heaving as she shouted: Give me space to think! One farmer called out brazenly over the top of her head: I hope we will still be paid? At this Miss Riefenstahl clambered to her feet and turned to face the farmers. Paid? she spat. If you know what’s best for you, don’t let me see your dirty face around here again.

  Late in the night, when everyone was asleep, Hans Haas got out of bed. He put his boots on, took up his rifle, and made a show of patrolling the grounds. When he was sure that no one was watching, he went to the pen where the wolf was chained.

  The wolf was still alive.

  It was lying on its side, its breathing labored. When it heard Hans Haas’s approach, it opened its eyes. It must have been in too much pain to growl or even bare its teeth, for it simply shut its eyes again. Hans Haas could see part of its skull where the bullet had torn through, a patchwork of white bone and skeiny ligaments.

  He pointed his rifle at the wolf, hands shaking as he aimed.

  He would most certainly be sent back to the front if he shot the wolf dead. Miss Riefenstahl might still keep him around to assist the gaffer if he kept his head low, with any luck. He stood there aiming the sights at the wolf’s head for a long time, but he did not release the safety catch. I’m sorry, Hans Haas said. The wolf pinched its eyes open at the sound of his voice. Hans Haas watched the wolf’s flank heaving unevenly a minute longer. Its breathing was growing more ragged. He put down his gun and left.

  * * *

  —

  THE WOLF DIED before the sun came up the next day.

  In the morning, Hans Haas saw Miss Riefenstahl and the art team standing in the wolf’s pen. If we skin it, someone said, could we drape the fur over a dog? Am I surrounded by idiots, Miss Riefenstahl said with a hand to her temple, or am I surrounded by idiots! She prodded the wolf’s dead body with a stick. Move this away, she said, I’ll think of something. She turned to the line producer. Push back the scenes with the wolf, she said, let’s go on with the other scenes we have for today. Everything else went uneventfully, and after dinner, as Hans Haas passed the dump where food scraps were discarded, he saw the wolf’s body in a corner, beside some carrot peelings and chicken bones.

  Hans Haas lay wide awake again that night.

  When all was quiet, he dressed and went to the dump. The wolf’s body was still there. Flies had begun to settle. He chased them away and dug a hole with his bare hands. It was not as deep or wide as he would have liked for it to be. When he was done burying the wolf, he plucked a wishbone from a chicken carcass to mark its grave. He stood up and shook the dirt off his palms. Turning around he heard a rustle. It was just the cook’s daughter. He put a finger to his lips. She nodded and gave him water to wash his hands with. Hans Haas cleaned his hands, walked back to his pallet, and closed his eyes. But sleep would not come, so he picked at the dirt under his nails till dawn broke.

  VIII

  The wolf had been born in a forest in Czechoslovakia at the foot of the Ore mountains. When it was fully grown, it forded the mountain pass and crossed over into Leipzig.

  It had been hunting a hare when it was itself pursued and tranquilized at the craggy foothills of the Rhine mountains. A black bear specialist from the Leipzig Zoo, collecting ursine stool samples farther afield, had sighted it.

  The last wild German wolf was thought to have been shot in the 1880s.

  There were hopes for wolves to return to the land, what with the Animal Protection Charter the NSDAP had initiated and signed into law. Conservationists at the zoo were delighted with the new antivivisection and antihunting laws, and bemused by the meticulous extent to which the fine print conveyed the particularities of their leader’s sensitive nature. The final item in the second section of the Charter read: “It is forbidden to tear out or separate the thighs of living frogs,” and the papers had reported that a restaurateur in Munich had been fined for boiling a lobster alive.

  * * *

  —

  THE LEIPZIG ZOO inducted the new wolf into their grounds with much fanfare. In a man-made enclosure, it joined a pack of gray wolves, gifted by the Americans as a diplomatic gesture years ago. Given its relatively timid nature, the new wolf was bullied by the pack. As a lower-ranking male, it did not mate with the alpha female, but it seemed to have found some luck with one of the young beta females and was just beginning to display courtship behavior when Leni approached the chairman of the Leipzig Zoo. Hoping to dissuade her, the chairman mentioned to Leni the limitations on animal use for entertainment, as meted out by law in the Animal Protection Charter. She would need a trained wolf, domesticated from youth. Perhaps they could donate a pup to her if the alpha female birthed a pack in good time.

  You will excuse me for being straightforward, dear sir, Leni said to him, but perhaps you have misunderstood my standing with our leader. My film is a direct commission. The wolf is an animal that is close to his heart. Did you know that “Adolf” is old German for the Nordic athalwolf? He shall be so disappointed to know the Leipzig Zoo was uncooperative. No pressure, of course. I’ll leave you to consider my request. The very next morning, Leni was pleased to receive an official letter of release. All the best with your movie, an enclosed postscript read, and we wish you every success.

  * * *

  —

  TOWARD THE END of the war, American freedom bombs fell on the Leipzig Zoo.

  The bull elephant from the Kingdom of Siam died immediately, his stomach blasted through. His mate and their baby would not leave his body. The sole Somalian hippopotamus drowned, pinned by debris to the bottom of the outdoor pool. A troop of twenty Pakistani rhesus monkeys escaped together, screaming and swinging from tree to tree. One by one, they all died within the hour, having drunk water contaminated by incendiary chemicals. Before he was evacuated with his wife and children, the chairman of the Leipzig Zoo ran into the ape house. His favorite Javanese white gibbon reached out to him, bloody stumps in place of graceful limbs. The white gibbon had lost so much blood and was in such a severe state of shock the chairman could hardly find a vein for the injection. After it stopped breathing, its kinked tail twitched once. The chairman ferried those he could to safety, carrying armful after armful of baboons and golden tamarind monkeys to a disused basement, locking them away from enemy fire—but who to feed them, and how would they leave if need be?

  The chairman left the key to the basement under a gaily painted fruit bowl with scalloped edges trimmed in gold gilt. Taking her hairy palm in his and walking her over, he pointed out the key’s location to the oldest orangutan matriarch from Malaya.

  Do you understand me, Dewi? he whispered. Blink if you do.

  She stared back at him with her wise round eyes.

  The next morning, a U.S. fighter craft flew in low, firing at anything that moved. Its first hit was the Leipzig Zoo’s last giraffe. There had been three, all female, two reticulated and Ethiopian. The last one standing was a new acquisition from the Nuba Mountains in Sudan that the zoo had been particularly proud of for her striking markings and her height. Tall as she was, it seemed to take her a long time to hit the cratered ground.

  Josef von Sternberg Pays a Visit to a Zen Buddhist Mental Asylum in Kyoto

  九

 
In these madcap years people have yet to understand that the motion picture is the only medium of consequence for our sycophantic times. What photography did for painting, the film is doing for the novel: freeing it from the drudgery of realistic description.

  I had wanted dearly to be a writer before I was bewitched by the bold vicissitudes promised by the movie camera’s radical juvenescence and formal despotism. The experience of a reader is one of collaborative consent toward the perceived intent of the author. The experience of the moviegoer is sentient surrender to the multisensorial will of the filmmaker. The filmmaker’s pen might not yet be amply flexible, but this is part of the thrill of the early chase: Where are we now in 1932 but thirty years into the early cradle of motion picture history?

  In the sleepy fishing village—you can be sure they call it the world republic—of belle-lettres they hark back most oft to Cervantes circa 1605, but let me put my boot down to declare Don Quixote a laggard to the quarry. A Heian court woman, Murasaki Shikibu, wrote the epic Tale of the Genji in 1021! Nine hundred and ten years later, now that writers are at last in the quandary of the modern, they are reaching beyond their cuffs to combat form with form, to slay the slain. But alas the hour is late for the writer. There is too much to unlearn. The reactionary shackles of their chosen medium’s advanced age ossifies the moving parts of their vague exertions toward the avant-garde.

  Vague—by virtue of fraternization with the reader.

  To truly be visionary, my dear ladies: there is no social contract between the audience and yourself. Their patience for an emergent narrative wears thin? Likewise my expectations on their nascent intelligence! Why should I have to imagine an audience, why shouldn’t the audience imagine me?

  * * *

  —

  EVEN THE DIRECTOR’S brows were moving at the same highfalutin tempo as his speech, so there remained the possibility that what Anna May had heard before—namely that Mr. Josef von Sternberg had appended the von to his Sternberg not as a means of ingratiating oneself with the blue-blooded, but as a dig at the philistine German obsession with titles—was true.

  She was so tired of hearing men go off on hyperextended flights of fancy as if they owned the world and you were only a clockwork toy in this regard, having to sit, listen, and nod at all the right times because they were paying for dinner, they pumped the most sugar into the production, they had cast you in their movie.

  But where was I, Miss Wong?

  The director mused as he sprawled in the wicker chair. They were taking tea in the Polo Lounge’s arbor. He pushed his jacket sleeves back. The jacket was expensive light wool, cut two or even three sizes too big for his frame, paired with tan jodhpurs and black rhinestone cufflinks. He had a droopy moustache, “Oriental-style,” that is, shaped thin to a fault in the fashion of a man not hirsute enough to grow a full beard, and a mahogany cane, even though he walked perfectly well.

  Ah, yes, he caught up to himself, here I am.

  In fact Anna May was not listening.

  She had leaned back into her chair and was watching, as discreetly as she could, every single movement of the hand belonging to the director’s companion, as it slipped a fresh cigarette from case to mouth. I’m not about to audition you, the director continued in a more reasonable tone as he nodded at Anna May, so please feel at ease. You know from Paramount the role’s already yours, you’re our Hui Fei, but I wanted to meet you beforehand, and of course I wanted you to meet Marlene, our Shanghai Lily.

  Anna May did not know if she was grateful, disappointed, or surprised—from the way Marlene leaned over and gave her hand, it was likely that she had not told von Sternberg they were previously acquainted. She’d avoided looking directly at Marlene while he pontificated.

  Miss Wong, Marlene said, as their eyes met now. A pleasure.

  She glanced away briefly to keep her cool as she returned: Likewise, Miss Dietrich.

  She did not know if it was her imagination, or if Marlene had allowed her hand to idle in hers a few beats longer than was necessary. Marlene’s hand was soft in her palm, nails unpainted but topped with a clear varnish. Anna May’s hand trembled, she hoped imperceptibly. Three years could scarcely be a precise and meaningful measure of time, not when this Marlene before her looked much younger and much older at once. Was it the hair, set back from her face in finger waves and bleached platinum? That week in Berlin, it was a comely if homely shade of dirty dark blond. Her brows were bleached to match—and where else? The brand-new image had been presented in the studio’s publicity shots, but in person Anna May saw that Marlene must have been ten pounds thinner, maybe fifteen. Who had told her to lose all that weight? She’d been lovely as she was. She was wearing a simple and sporty jersey dress, which casually showed off the lines of her trim body. There was no trace of the merry mishmash of colors and textures the woman she’d met back then had favored.

  A waiter came to take their order.

  Jo—Marlene called him that; Anna May took her lead—ordered a coffee, and Marlene said she would have the same. Anna May ordered malt whiskey. As the waiter took her order she saw Marlene give a wily smile. Anna May verged on changing to coffee, not wanting to appear to have ordered a malt whiskey in the afternoon just for effect, but Marlene had spoken: Now Miss Wong has put me in quite the mood for Scotch! Perhaps it would not be too extravagant, the waiter offered, for Miss Dietrich to enjoy both coffee and whiskey? Marlene looked to their director, guiding Anna May’s eye toward him. Together, the two women observed that Jo looked prepared to find anything Marlene did unreservedly enchanting. A splendid idea, Marlene said to the waiter.

  The whiskey arrived before the coffee.

  Remarkably, Jo had not talked stopping. His two actresses had barely said a word. Marlene raised her glass. The clink redounded lightly in Anna May’s fingers as Jo shifted in his seat, checking her profile. Asians are slighter of build. He patted Marlene’s knee absently as he addressed Anna May. Our Marlene here had to lose almost twenty pounds of blubber, can you imagine? Jo, Marlene said. Will you quit embarrassing me in front of a beautiful woman I’ve just met! She swatted Jo’s hand off her knee. He replaced it around her shoulder, looking into her eyes, and Anna May excused herself to the bathroom.

  She was powdering her nose when Marlene entered.

  Immediately she snapped her compact shut. Then she wished she had not done that—she opened the compact again. She was glad that there was another person in the space, a frowsy bathroom attendant in the corner arranging hand towels in a pyramid, or she would not have known how to carry herself. When Marlene walked up toward her, she was afraid that one of them would be tempted to mention something from the past now that they were almost alone, so it was a relief when Marlene said: Isn’t Jo quite the handful?

  A woman in a cocktail dress walked into the bathroom.

  As the woman recognized Marlene, Anna May watched her swallow her double-take as she washed her hands in proximity to the hotshot actress who’d come out of nowhere and taken L.A. by storm. Every local paper and magazine in the last couple of years had done a Marlene Dietrich feature or three. I am looking forward to working with you, Anna May said politely to Marlene’s reflection. You will excuse me if I return to the table first.

  * * *

  —

  BACK IN THE arbor the waiter held Anna May’s chair out, and Jo continued even before she was reseated. Your characters, he said, indicating Marlene’s empty chair, are opposite but the same. Yin and yang—am I saying it right? Women who live by their wits, high-class courtesans, blood sisters. You ply the Chinese coast together on the Shanghai Express. Anna May drank her whiskey as Jo went on. Shanghai is a true city, Jo said, the way a man might say a woman is a real woman, whatever that is ever meant to mean. Have you been there?

  No, Anna May said, but I would love to visit.

  This she always said about China—it seemed the right thing fo
r a Chinese person to say—but she was not so sure about it. Everything she knew about China, for the most part, came from her father’s secondhand folktales and Pearl S. Buck novels. Women had bound feet and married early. Men pulled rickshaws and took on concubines. There was not enough rice to eat, but everyone was addicted to opium. Where is the farthest you’ve traveled? Jo was asking. The farthest our Marlene has ever traveled is Cannes. She tells me she has no practical need for anything farther afield when each summer the beau monde kisses her hands in the South of France. What do you make of that?

  I make that Miss Dietrich’s career is going very well, Anna May said as Marlene returned to the table, and that I would do well to visit Cannes this summer.

  When last we were in Cannes, Jo said, we met the Pasha of Marrakech. He asked why we had not called upon him when we were in his country. Why, I said, I have never been to your country, to which the Pasha said, but I have seen that movie of yours, Morocco! So I had to tell the good Pasha that this was my fault, a shortcoming of my production, to have been unable to avoid such similarity, alas. We were shooting right here in L.A., Jo explained to Anna May, avoiding telephone wires and street signs in our shots, sweating our skins off: this looks nothing like Morocco. We worried about becoming a cheap laughingstock, not even stylized enough to say it was our faux take on faithful reality. How does L.A. pass for Marrakech, the Mojave for the Sahara? But then the Pasha of Marrakech wants to know why you did not call when you were in his domain!

  Be very careful of this man, Marlene leaned over to say to Anna May. He will let you walk out barefoot into the desert at 120 degrees, after which he will not inform you that you’ve completed your scene—because he has just enough sunlight to shoot the next scene, in which you are not needed, so you keep walking. Fainting in the heat, you are brought back to the tent, and when you wake at his feet, asking out loud in a fever dream: Do you need another close-up, what does he do? He corrects the pronunciation of your English!