She was quiet for a minute. “Someone you saw in the Kino,” she said to herself. “How can anybody go back?” She shook her head. “My father says Heinrich’s making plans. To go back to that.” She took a sip of wine. “And what about you? What are you going to do? Now that you’re grown up. Make pictures?”
“No.”
“No? Lasner must like you. Inviting you to dinner.”
“He likes me this week. One in the family’s enough.” Was. “My father always expected Danny to—”
“But not you. So.” Another sip, thinking. “Did you like him?”
“My father?”
“No. Daniel.”
The question, never asked, took him by surprise, something tossed in the air that hung there, incapable of being answered.
“I mean, families, people don’t always— So many years, you didn’t see each other. I just wondered.”
“That was the war.”
“Ah,” she said, the sound floating up to join the question, still suspended.
He looked out toward the city. “I wanted to be him,” he said finally.
“When you were boys.”
“Yes.” When did that stop? Does it? He smiled, moving away from it. “He was good with girls.”
“And not you?”
“I got better.”
“They say in Germany now you can get a girl for a pack of cigarettes. One pack.”
“That’s not all you’d get.”
“So it’s not for you, the easy ones. I can see that. It wouldn’t be— how do you say schicklich?”
“Proper. Seemly.”
“Seemly,” she said, trying it, then took another sip of wine. “The first time I met him—he’d undress you. Look right at you. He wanted you to know he was doing it. So people are different. You look at me from the side. You don’t want me to know you’re looking.” She waved her hand at him before he could say anything. “It’s all right. It’s nice, someone looking. Don’t be embarrassed.” She paused. “I like you looking.”
He turned to her, not sure how to respond.
“If it makes you uneasy, my being here—”
She shook her head. “No. It doesn’t matter. That’s not the way it would happen. I know you a little now. You look from the side. You’d wait. You’d wait for me to say. To start it. That’s how it would happen.” She looked at him. “Don’t you think?”
A direct look, not from the side, holding his. He felt blood rise to his skin, as if she had touched him. Danny’s wife.
“Maybe,” he said. “And maybe you’re having fun with me.”
“No.” She smiled, looking down at her glass. “Maybe the wine is.” She sat up, a drowsy stretch, gathering the robe. “Anyway, it wouldn’t be seemly, would it? Not yet.”
“No.”
“Not even cold. That’s what they’d say, yes? Well, I’m going in.” She picked up the bottle to take with her. “Have a swim if you like,” she said, moving off, then smiled at him. “I won’t look.”
HE SAT for a while, his mind drifting but then, like the water, lapping back. Schicklich. The inside of a marriage was unknowable, curtained off. He listened for sounds of her inside, but only the crickets broke the quiet. Maybe she was already in bed, not at all uneasy because she knew the way it would happen.
On his way in, he stopped at the screening room to pick up some of the office papers Republic had sent over. Scripts, drafts. What had been in his mind those last weeks? Not that Partners in Crime was likely to be revealing—formula stuff, two brothers having fun, as frivolous as Otto’s comedies.
He went over to an open film can. The film itself was still in the projector, not yet run through and put away, the last thing Danny had seen. Maybe a Continental picture with a young star, someone he wanted to watch over and over? Ben flicked the switch, half-expecting to see Ruth or Rosemary—any girl you’d want to spend an afternoon with at a residential hotel. Instead it was a Fox Movietone newsreel, men shaking hands right after Hiroshima. Ben rewound the film and started it again.
First, the usual opening montage with the water-skiers, then the airmen at Tinian Island, the ground crew loading the bomb, kneeling with the pilots in front of the plane, a picture everybody’d seen now, instant history according to the voice-over. But the camera had been there, too, recording it, making a movie. And in the plane, flying now through the clouds.
The flash and mushroom cloud, the whole city rolled up in smoke, the narrator excited by the scale of it, the most powerful thing the world has ever known. No voice, though, over the next segment, shot later, a silent sweeping pan of the charred, flattened city. A few figures picking their way through the landscape, otherwise no movement at all. More pan shots, the frame of a domed building by the river, the rest vaporized. Congratulations all around back home, scientists and generals shaking hands. They’d made a movie of it, sent cameras up, got flight crews to pose. But so had the Nazis, filming atrocities with smiling faces. That’s how they’d identified Wolf Breslau, caught on film on the rim of the mass grave, smiling, unable to resist one last close-up.