William Boyd - The New Confessions

She hung up. I had no idea what she meant. Or rather, I had one idea but it seemed to me she was implying something else.… In the event I grew none the wiser as I had to force my attention round to completing the film, which we did with little fuss and on time. Aram Lodokian paid my five-thousand-dollar bonus without demur. The film opened in the Kino-Palast on the Kurfürstendamm with a full symphony orchestra providing musical accompaniment on February 16, 1926, and the rest is history.

We moved from Rudolfplatz, west, to a new villa in Charlottenburg. The area was being developed: on every corner new houses were being built and the streets were planted with frail lime-tree saplings guarded by tight palisades of iron spikes. Mrs. Shorrold left us and Sonia acquired an English nurse (Lily Maidbow, a plain, efficient, almost speechless girl) to look after the boys. Our house was fresh smelling — of wax from the wooden floor, of paint, of leather and fabrics — it had a wide garden planted with birch and larch, and was surrounded by a white picket fence. I never liked it. I felt like one of the lime-tree saplings. I did not need such sturdy penning in. These were the accouterments of prosperous middle age, of bourgeois plentitude. I found the place oppressive and minatory — but, conceivably, that would have been true of any home I lived in then. I was not of a mind to settle down, eat big dinners at my dining room table, dandle my babes on my knee. Doon had knocked me off kilter; I was askew, like that first time I’d gone over the top, drunk. Everything about Sonia was stable, placid and fixed. I was living in a different geometry.

I spent long hours over the autumn and winter of 1925 editing Julie, writing and rewriting the captions, Sonia made no complaint about my protracted absence from the house. She kept herself busy and enjoyed the newfound Todd prosperity more than I did. Leo, I think, suspected that something was wrong, but with his ineffable tact did not ask me anything about it. He was settling down rapidly in Berlin and was enjoying a diverting love affair with Lola Templin-Tavel. When I had had enough of work and could not bear the thought of going home, I used to meet Karl-Heinz in a bar of Uhlandstrasse, just off the Kurfürstendamm. There was nothing louche or depraved about this place, although those were qualities its neighborhood rivals strove earnestly to reproduce. Our bar, the Dix, consisted of two rooms: one, smaller, with a zinc-topped counter and a few tables and chairs; and the other, larger, with two billiard tables. Its very plainness ensured it was never overbusy. Karl-Heinz and I would sit and drink in the small room and from time to time play a game of billiards. I grew to love that place, warm and blurry with cigar smoke, the air filled with the noise of subdued conversation, the rustle of newspapers (hung from the wall on sticks) and the solid reassuring click of the ivory billiard balls. It was anonymous, populated by transients. The owner and his large ginger-haired wife made no attempt to cultivate regulars. It suited me at that difficult time.

I told Karl-Heinz everything about Doon and he thoughtfully went through the motions of sympathizing with me. He was not surprised, he said. He had been waiting for something to turn my life upside down. How come? I asked him, but he would not expand. Later he told me he could never understand why I had married Sonia. When I told him the honest reason — for sex — he was even more baffled. I think he regarded me — as a representative heterosexual — as being something of a chronic naïf when it came to sexual matters.

But he listened patiently, a true friend, to my protracted moans. I am ashamed to reflect now on those one-sided encounters. I never asked him about himself, never wondered how he did when I finally left him, or when he left me. I was up to my neck in a mire of my own selfishness. I thought of my drowning Ulsterman (I thought a lot about the war, then) as he sank in the mud of the Salient: “I’m going doyn.” … No wonder I could not escape Doon: my day was spent watching her images shimmer by me on the editing machines. Karl-Heinz knew that all I required was a listener and he provided it, selflessly. At least we could break off and play billiards. (He was a terrible player, incapable of calculating the simplest angles. I always won.)

It was early in the New Year. The film was finished and we were waiting for its release when his patience finally broke. As usual we were sitting in the Bar Dix. Karl-Heinz was drinking beer with a schnapps chaser. I was drinking Moselle. I was a little drunk, typically brimful of self-pity, rhapsodizing about Doon’s beauty and how I longed for her. I paused. To my intense surprise Karl-Heinz took both my hands in his and stared fixedly at me. I looked into his dark eyes, hooded by his sharp circumflex brows. He squeezed my hands.

“Johnny,” he said, “I tell you something very simple.” He smiled faintly, a suggestion of mischief. “Boys are better than girls.”

“Look, Karl-Heinz, no.” I smiled apologetically back. “I’m just not — you know — inclined that way.”

“But you never tried properly. I can show you. It’s fun.”

“No, really—”

“But I like you, Johnny, I do.”

“No, really. I know you do. I like you too.” I was moved.

He let go of my hands.

“It’s Doon,” I said. “She’s the only one.… I’m obsessed. I’m obsessed with her.”

“So. All right.” He sounded impatient. “There’s only one thing to do with such an obsession. You got to get another one.”

He was right. After he had gone I thought about what he had said. I would never forget Doon (in fact I had not seen her for months), but surely, I reasoned, there was room in my life for something more than this destructive unrequited longing. I had to face up to the facts. My life could not simply stand still with this rejection.

The lights were on in the house when I parked our new car — a Packard, Sonia’s choice. Sonia was awake, in bed. Her face was scrubbed clean and her hair tucked behind her ears. She had put on some weight recently and the roundness of her face had increased, accentuating her small pointy chin. I thought she looked pretty. It was a good sign. Karl-Heinz may not have provided me with an answer, but he seemed to have given me a jolt with his proposition — knocked the Gramophone needle out of its groove. I switched off the light and snuggled up to Sonia, sliding a hand inside her nightdress to cup a girlish breast.… I am sure our third child was conceived that night.

Of course I had another obsession, but it was lying dormant, temporarily overshadowed by the Doon crisis. Myself. My development as an artist. My dreams, my ambitions. The next day I literally dusted them off.

In my office at Realismus’s Grunewald studios I kept an old trunk concerning certain precious possessions, such as my reels of Aftermath of Battle , my photo albums, my diaries (now temporary abandoned), Hamish’s letters and suchlike. It was superstitious of me, I suppose, but I did not want them in the house with me. Snow had fallen in the night and from my window I could see the three vast gasometers of the Berliner Gas-Anstalt capped with white, steel cakes with generous icing.

Idly, almost absentmindedly, I opened the trunk and contemplated these artifacts of my past, like a bored shaman looking at a scattered pile of bones, halfheartedly trying to devise the way ahead. These relics, precious totems of my youthful dreams … I picked up a frayed bundle of paper tied with string. Pages from a book. I read:

I am now starting on a task which is without precedent and which when achieved will have no imitator.…’

The fit passed in seconds. It was a fit. It is the only time I have ever experienced it so physically. Afflatus, Inspiration. The muse descending — call it what you will. It was a Pentecostal confirmation of what I had to do. My task was clear to me now. I was going to make the greatest moving picture the world had ever seen. It would be unprecedented and have no imitator. I was going to make a film of Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions .