William Boyd - The New Confessions

Duric Lodokian was a hugely wealthy Armenian who had fled from his native country to Russia in 1896 shortly after the first Turkish massacres and pogroms against the Armenian people had begun. He had fled again in 1918 after the Russian Revolution and was among the first of the thousands of Russian émigrés who found sanctuary in Berlin. Lodokian had made his fortune in nuts. He described himself to me as a “nut importer.” He spoke Russian, German, French and passable English. He had sold many nuts to England, he said, but of only one type: Brazil nuts. Hundreds of tons of Brazil nuts. “What do they do with Brazil nuts?” he asked. I said I had no idea. I must say I find it hard to imagine a fortune founded on nuts, but this was Lodokian’s power base (“Every time I open a pistachio I am saying thank you,” he said to me once). The nut business sustained him through the few ups and many downs of his passion for films. Realismus Films Verlag AG was Duric Lodokian, and no film was made unless it conformed to the philosophy implicit in the name. His greatest success had been in 1920 with a movie about the horrors and dangers of venereal disease, called The Wages of Sin , and Unsparing Social Comment would, I think, have been a fair summary of the Lodokian and Realismus creed. True, it swam somewhat against the tide in the Berlin of the mid-twenties, but for every three flops there was a modest Realismus success that confirmed him in his principles, and he persevered. There was, in fact, a Realismus “school” notionally in opposition to the UFA films, the Expressionists, the Neue Sachlichkeit movement and all the other various artistic “isms” and groupings that flourished then. Two of Realismus’s regular directors were Werner Hitzig and Egon Gast. Lodokian had just persuaded the celebrated Swedish director A. E. Groth to join him and Diary of a Prostitute was the result.

Lodokian was a small, dapper brown man in his sixties. Brown as one of his nuts, I thought when I met him for the first time in the Realismus offices on the corner of the Französischestrasse and Friedrichstrasse. His face and hands were speckled with copious liver spots. He was smoking a Russian cigarette with a cardboard filter, the hand holding it trembling slightly. When he spoke it was through a kind of surf of wheezes and vascular gurglings, as if he were crippled with emphysema. There was a wheelchair and an oxygen cylinder behind his desk. He introduced me first to his son, Aram, who stood beside him. Aram was as small and neat as his father, my age, and running to fat. He had dark, slightly hooded eyes and a neat cleft in his chin. His plump cheeks gave a strange oblate look to his head. We shook hands and he smiled. It was a brilliant smile. Charm came off him like a perfume. He had the same immediate effect on me as Karl-Heinz had. Within seconds of meeting them both, you liked them and, more importantly, you wanted them to like you back. The only difference with Aram Lodokian was a slight side effect. A minute or so after yielding to the charm came a moment’s doubt as to the wisdom of so doing. Just a fleeting moment, then it passed. Although Karl-Heinz was in many ways utterly disreputable, this aftertaste never occurred.

I sat down.

“What do you know about my country?” Lodokian asked.

I decided on honesty. “Absolutely nothing.”

With enormous effort he got to his feet, shuffled laboriously to the window and beckoned me over. We looked down on the crowds in Friedrichstrasse.

“Do you think they know about the two million? Of course not.”

“Two million what?”

“The two million Armenians the Turks killed in 1915. The biggest genocide in the history of the world.”

I did not know what to say.

“Nobody wants to know the truth. That’s why I made these films.”

He clasped his mottled hands together and shook them at me in a curious gesture. He always did this to emphasize a point.

“Don’t turn your back on reality,” he said fiercely to me. “Don’t let people dream too much. Is dangerous.”

A line from some modern poem came into my head. “Human nature cannot stand too much reality,” I misquoted.

“It’s the only medicine,” he said. “The only medicine.”

I was wordless once more.

It took him two minutes to regain his seat, where he lit another cigarette.

“This is why I like your film,” he said, mystifyingly. “Very good philosophy, Jean Jacques Rousseau. Now this is Realismus. You talk to Aram, he will make the contracts.”

I felt an effervescence in my body — my blood turned to seltzer. I shook the old man’s hand and then Aram Lodokian showed me into another office. I think we talked vaguely of contracts. I remember Aram suggesting a fee of ten thousand dollars. He said they paid in dollars because of the last inflation. He smiled apologetically. I promised to acquire a lawyer that afternoon. He called for coffee and cake and offered me a Russian cigarette. His smiles and charm enfolded me like a shawl.

“Have you thought of a cast?” he asked, leaning over to light my cigarette. His English was perfect, accentless and somehow all the more foreign sounding because of that. He sat back and rubbed the knuckle of his forefinger up and down the cleft in his chin. It was a frequent gesture. I thought suddenly of it as a groove worn away by the constant motion.

“Well … Karl-Heinz Kornfeld for Saint-Preux.”

“Excellent! What about Monika Alt for Julie?”

“Possibly …”

“Or Lola Templin-Tavel?”

We nattered on, enjoying this the fantasy stage of a film project when absolutely anything and everything is possible. On my way out I asked if he could advance me five hundred dollars against my fee. Without the slightest hesitation he wrote out a check. I went straight to a post office and cabled Sonia: MONEY ON WAY STOP COME TO BERLIN SOONEST LOVE JOHN JAMES.

I still find it hard to explain why Duric Lodokian should have seen Julie as a fit subject for Realismus. I now think Aram had more influence than he acknowledged. He denied this at the time, stating that it was a combination of Rousseau’s name, the extreme length of the book and the comparative brevity of my script. His father had been very impressed that I could have constructed a story out of such intractable material.

“There are some fools,” Aram said, “who actually think that a story is unimportant. But a good story will satisfy anybody . Beautiful lightings, sets, costumes, fancy camerawork, intensity of style — this is for a coterie.” I half-agreed with him. But, anyway, whatever the reasons for the selection of Julie , I knew that I was now on my way. The path ahead was finally clear. And, also, I find it pointless to speculate on reasons too long. We can only do so much to influence events. The chain of cause and effect can be illusory and misleading. Why did that bullet shatter Somerville-Start’s teeth and not mine? What made Karl-Heinz send me the postcard? And so on. A little reflection and the so-called pattern of your life soon appears as little more than an aggregate of hazard and chance. We think we recognize good and bad luck when it affects us, but in reality there is nothing but luck. From that standpoint the Realismus contract did not seem fortuitous at all.

I acquired a lawyer, papers were drawn up and signed and half my fee was deposited in a newly opened bank account. I was suddenly wealthy again. I started looking for furnished accommodation for me and my family and moved into an office in the Realismus studios near the huge gasworks in Grunewald.

I found a furnished apartment not far from 129B on Rudolfplatz a few blocks away. I was oddly reluctant to change districts; so too was Karl-Heinz. The night before I left (Sonia and the children were due to arrive in a week or so) we had a final celebratory dinner. I gave Frau Mittenklott extra money and she cooked a gargantuan meal that made even Georg gasp. We had green corn soup, carp marinated in vinegar with horseradish sauce, stewed mutton with paprika and a hot chocolate pudding. It was a pleasant occasion in that warm fuggy flat, surrounded by the buzz of insects, and we all drank far too much. I promised Georg that no film would ever employ so many insects as Julie would. It was a fine evening. And prophetic. For the first time I registered how much Karl-Heinz drank — topped off on this occasion by three tumblers of brandy at the end of the meal. And then we talked about casting Julie. I said that at the moment Monika Alt was the prime contender. Karl-Heinz screwed up his face.