Stardust(4)

Ben smiled to himself. An industry, but still a family business.

“He was ahead of his time with those sets, you know,” Lasner was saying. “But they were all like that, the Ufa people. Even the ones who came later. You know why? No Westerns. They never learned to shoot outside. It was all controlled light with them. Of course, they had the facilities. In those days, what they had in Berlin—I’m still knocking my brains out in Gower Gulch trying to borrow arc lamps, and over there they’re making cities. Otto,” he said, shaking his head. “I can see the resemblance now, around the eyes. I knew your mother, too. A looker. So what happened? They split, you said.”

“Another woman, I guess. That’s what I heard. My mother never talked about it.”

“Well, he was like that. He always had an eye. So that’s why he stayed there? Some skirt?”

“I don’t know. He probably thought he’d get through it—that’s what people thought then. He was making pictures with Monika Hoppe. Goebbels liked her. Maybe he thought that would protect him, they’d look the other way. Anyway, they didn’t. He was arrested in ’thirty-eight. They sent a notice to my mother. This was when they still thought they had to explain it.”

“So,” Lasner said, looking away. “Some story.”

With everything Ben remembered left out. The good days in the big house on Lützowplatz. The parties, sometimes with just a piano, but sometimes with a whole band, the air full of perfume and smoke, Ben looking down through the banister. Faces even a child recognized. Hertzberg, the comedian with the surprised round eyes; Jannings, jowly and grave even with a glass in his hand. And afterward, sometimes, the quarrels—were there women even then?

Sunday mornings, the room still smelling of stale ashtrays, his father got them ready for their walk. Scarves in winter. Umbrellas if it rained. But the walk without fail, because that’s what you did on Sundays in Berlin. Down Budapesterstrasse to the zoo, afterward a cake at Kranzler’s, his father desperate by now for a drink. Later, when they were too old for the zoo, they would head straight for the cafés, where his father met friends and Danny tried to sneak cigarettes. Then, a few years after that, they were on a train for Bremen, an American woman with her two boys, their father back on the platform at Lehrter Bahnhof.

They were meant to go home, but stayed in London. Did his mother think Otto would follow, that it was somehow important to be near him, at least on a map? When it didn’t matter anymore, after the official letter, she lacked the will to leave, and they stayed longer. By the time Ben finally did get back to America, to the Army training camp, he was grown up. The accent they teased him about now was English so he lost that one, too. And then, full circle, the Army wanted the old language of his boyhood. They polished off the rust, and it came back, as fluent as memory, bringing everything else with it, even the smell of the cakes, until finally the war took him to Berlin and he saw that it was gone for good—Kranzler’s, the zoo, all of it just rubble and dust, as insubstantial now as his father, all ghosts.

“Then what?” Lasner said, an old hand at story conferences. “She remarried? A woman like that—”

“No, she died. During the war.” He caught Lasner’s expectant look and shook his head. “She got sick.” No drama, a daily wearing away, medicines to keep the retching down, then a final exhaustion.

“So now it’s just the brother?” Lasner said, suddenly sentimental. “Let me tell you something. Stay close. What else have we got? Family. You trust blood. Don’t be like—” He took a puff on the cigar, moving farther away, drifting into anecdote again. “Look at Harry Warner. Jack makes him crazy. Screaming. Shouting. Sometimes, they’re in the same room, you don’t even want to watch. Don’t be like that.”

“But they’re still—”

Lasner shrugged. “Who else would work with Jack? He is crazy. You know, I said to him once, you hate him so much, come work with me, partners, your name first, I don’t care. At the time, this is worth a fortune to him. You know what he said? ‘You want that bastard to run my studio?’ His studio. So they’re stuck with each other, till one of them keels over. You put that kind of pressure here,” he said, touching his heart, “and sooner or later they wheel you out on a stretcher. Well.” He stood up, glancing at his watch again, then out the window. “What I hate, this time of night, is you never know where you are.” He put his hand on Ben’s shoulder, an uncle. “Remember what I said. Don’t be like Jack. Stay close.”