William Boyd - The New Confessions

Karl-Heinz left Berlin before me, but his journey took longer. As a low-priority passenger he was held up, reprocessed, delayed and misdirected. His papers were in order, that was the main thing. In the end that fact alone made it inevitable that he would reach his destination.

I said good-bye to Henni with much regret and real sadness. Her job in Hamburg had fallen through. But she had heard from Karl-Heinz’s landlady that I had secured him passage out of Berlin and asked if I could do the same for her and her mother. I had to say no. I told her to be patient. Life in Berlin couldn’t be like this forever. On our last night together we lay in her thin bed, smoking and drinking as usual — both of us, I think, trying to pretend that we would be doing this again the next evening.

“Are you married?” Henni asked.

“No.”

“Will you marry me?”

“ What? ”

“Marry me. ”

“Good God.”

“Don’t you like me?”

“Of course I do.”

“Well, then.… We can get divorced as soon as we’re in England.”

“I’m not going to England, I’m going to America.”

“Even better.”

“I’m not American, though. I have to apply for a permit.”

“But if they let you in, surely they’ll let your wife in too. And your mother-in-law.”

I wanted to say that I’d already been married to a German and it had only lasted six months.

“Look,” I said. “I’m an old man. I’m forty-seven years old. Twenty-five years older than you. You can’t marry me. It would be a terrible mistake.”

“Oh, all right,” she said. “My mother said I should try. She likes you — much better than Major Arbogast.”

“Who the hell’s he?”

“He’s my other man who comes here.”

I felt hurt, then foolish. “You’ll be all right,” I said reassuringly. I’m sure she was.

I left the city on a mild June day; the usual cocktail of emotions bubbled in my brain. This was the city that had made my career and reputation. It had brought me Doon. It had also undone me, in a way, too. And now it was undone itself. I had a funny feeling I would be seeing it again, so I didn’t bother to look out of the window when the USAF DC-3 took off from Tempelhof. I was wrong. It was a shame. I never came back.

VILLA LUXE, June 28, 1972

A gorgeous, stifling, unbearably hot day. I wonder if I might try the path down to the beach today. I can get down there not too badly; it’s the coming back that does for me. There is a small row of stone sheds in the cove where the fishermen keep their boats. I watch these old codgers as they come back up the path after a day’s work. They certainly don’t stride, but their plod never falters. A couple of them look even older than me. How come they can do it and I can’t? Perhaps I should ask Ulrike to take me round by boat.…

It was a hot day in 1946 when Karl-Heinz and I traveled up by train to Scotland. We sat in the thick warm air of the compartment, looking at the English countryside bright in its summer clichés. We stopped, inexplicably, for two hours outside Doncaster — or was it Peterborough? I remember vaguely that Karl-Heinz and I talked about the war and its terrible consequences. I recall one thing he said. “Why did you let him, it, happen?” I had asked him. “Couldn’t you see?”

“Well, I tell you, John,” he said. “One thing about the German people — we’re very like the British in this — we have no social courage. That’s why we make good soldiers and bad citizens.”

“Haven’t you? Haven’t we ?”

“No. Not really. Don’t you think it’s true? We never complain. Neither do you. It’s always a bad sign in a population.”

We spent a couple of days in Edinburgh in a hotel in Princes Street. I took Karl-Heinz to meet my father, an encounter I’d long relished the thought of. Innes — Dad — had sold his home and now lived in an old folks’ home in Peebles, twenty miles from Edinburgh in the Tweed Valley and not far from Minto Academy. My father was eighty-four. I can see him now, his big arthritic knuckles trembling ever so slightly on his two walking sticks. We took tea with him on the terrace of the rather grand house he lived in (it’s a hotel now) on a hill overlooking the town and the fresh green park beside the fast brown river. We talked about this and that.

“So, what’re you going to do now, John?”

“Well, I’m going back to America. Karl-Heinz and I are going to finish a film we started a while ago.”

“God Almighty!” He had grown more profane as he had aged. “Finish? When did you start it?”

“Nineteen twenty-six.”

He shook his head sadly.

“Your son is a great artist, Mr. Todd,” Karl-Heinz said. “Truly.”

My father looked at Karl-Heinz as if to say, “ Him? That joker?”

“He is,” Karl-Heinz said.

“There’s no need to be polite on my account, Mr. Kornfeld. I know my son well enough. Full of daft schemes from the day he was born.” His face darkened a moment. I knew he was thinking about my mother — my birth and her death inseparable. “I knew he’d never amount to much.”

We laughed politely.

Then he took one of his hands off a stick and patted me on the knee. He left his hand there, lightly, light as a napkin.

“Not like his brother, now. Done very well for himself, has Thompson. Rich man, successful, lovely family. Grandmaster of the lodge.”

I wasn’t upset. I looked at the old man. He wouldn’t give an inch. Eighty-four and as intractable as ever.

“You’re a difficult bugger, aren’t you, Innes?” I said. “Here, have another cup of tea and shut up.”

He laughed. Quite long and hard. Then he took his hand off my knee.

It was only after we left him that I realized his touch on my knee had been the only affectionate physical contact between us since I was a child. It brings tears to my eyes as I sit here and think about it now. That gesture carries a heavy cargo.

I never saw my father again. He died peacefully in his sleep one night in the winter of 1948.

I was back in Los Angeles when I got the news of my father’s death, wrangling with Eddie Simmonette over the start of preproduction on what I regarded as The Confessions: Part III —but which was known to everyone else as Father of Liberty . I was dreadfully upset by the news, much more than I had ever expected to be. In the midst of all the grief, the guilt and remorse for things unsaid and undone, one obsession came to dominate my mind — perhaps, I can now see, as a way of allowing myself to cope. What distressed me most was the sudden realization that my father might have died without ever seeing one of my films. I telegraphed Thompson immediately: DID FATHER EVER SEE MY FILMS STOP URGENT I KNOW SOONEST JOHN.

Thompson himself replied: YOUR QUESTION IN WORST POSSIBLE TASTE STOP SUGGEST YOU SEEK PROFESSIONAL MEDICAL ADVICE STOP THOMPSON TODD.

I wrote to Oonagh, then a very old lady living in Musselburgh, with the same inquiry, and received a shaky scrawl in reply, written by a neighbor.

Dear Johnny,

Terrible sad news about your father. He was a fine good man and we will all miss him “something dreadful.” I do not know if he ever saw your “films” (I have seen them many times), but I do remember him saying on frequent occasions that he “abominated the kinema.” But I am sure he would have changed his mind if only he had seen your own “pictures.” I do know he was very proud of those “photos” you took when you were a “wee laddie.” …

And so on for another breathless couple of pages clotted with arch “colloquialisms” all about the “funeral” and the “family.”