William Boyd - The New Confessions

Aram and I sat down on either side of him. The blanket round the ashtray was covered in ash. He was too frail to tap his cigarettes accurately. After the usual bland inquiries I said carefully, “Are you sure you should be smoking those, Duric?”

“Don’t be an idiot. Never did me any harm. Why should I stop now?”

“I agree, I agree. Don’t deny yourself. May I have one?”

I lit one. Aram did too. We both smoked while Duric topped up on oxygen.

“Listen,” he said eventually, “come here.”

I leaned further forward.

“What’s this film you want to make? Why are you being so difficult?”

I glanced at Aram. He looked faintly surprised. I decided to tell him.

“I want to make a film of a book called The Confessions. ”

“Who by?”

“Rousseau.”

“Rousseau again? That’s good , good. I like it. Don’t you, Aram?”

“He won’t tell me about it.”

They exchanged a few words of fast Armenian.

“Are you ready to start?” Duric asked.

“I’m working on the script.” I caught Aram’s eye. “It’s, ah, very long.”

“I don’t care. Realismus must do it.” He put his hand on my knee. “This must be Realismus film, John. Aram will help you.”

“When I say long,” I continued cautiously, “I mean very long. Extremely long.”

“What’s ‘extremely’?” Aram asked.

“I want to make three films. Three hours each.”

“ What! ”

“It’s a good idea,” Duric said. “ Phantastisch . We do it at Realismus, of course. Promise me, Aram. I mean promise. ”

Aram had the look of a man trying to control nausea.

“Yes, Papa … if at all possible.”

“No ‘if.’ I want straight promise.”

“I promise.”

Duric lay back. He looked exhausted, his thin chest rising and falling at alarming speed. I felt I could punch a hole in it with my fist, as if his body were made out of balsa wood and paper, like a model airplane. As he breathed we could hear random treacly pops and gurglings from within the chest wall. His eyes shone with tears, but it may only have been rheum. He drew me closer again.

“Promise me too, John.”

“Of course. Anything.”

“Don’t let Aram sell the business. Watch him.”

“What business?” I looked at Aram. “Realismus? He’d never sell it, don’t worry.”

“No.” He was falling asleep. “The nuts.”

“I’ll watch him,” I said. “I promise.”

Aram rang for the nurse and we stood up. The nurse came in and held the oxygen mask to his face. It seemed to rouse him and he beckoned us back. We crouched by his side. His eyes were barely open, just a slit revealing a brown limpid glimmer.

“Never give up the nuts,” he said. They were his last words. He went to sleep and died three days later.

At his funeral Aram and I shed copious tears. I had tried to hold them back, but seeing Aram’s example decided to let myself go. I had a “right good greet,” as Oonagh used to say. I felt surprisingly better for it too, and I think Aram was touched. It was odd seeing Aram cry. We walked away from the graveside sniffing, wiping our eyes and snorting into big handkerchiefs.

“He was a sly old fellow,” Aram said. “A nine-hour film. My God.”

“It’ll be amazing,” I said. “Wait and see. There’s been nothing like it.”

“I’d never do it normally,” Aram said. “I think I should tell you that. I think it’s crazy, disastrous.”

“But you promised.”

“I know, I know.”

“I promised too,” I said. “Hang on to those nuts.”

Aram laughed. “Too late, John, I’m afraid. I sold Lodokian Nüsse four months ago.”

I felt mildly cheated by this, but there was nothing I could do. Later, I used to wonder if Aram had lied, just to keep me out of his business deals.… I had no way of finding out. However, I blessed old Duric for extracting that deathbed promise from his son. I assumed that Armenian blood ties and dying oaths were inviolable, and in a sense they were. Aram was always true to the letter of his promise, if not its spirit. A few days later contracts were signed. I was salaried at one thousand dollars a month while I wrote the script (backdated) and Realismus paid me a ten-thousand-dollar option on it against a fee for the world rights to be negotiated. In addition it was confirmed that I was to direct and participate in the profits. Bland announcements appeared in the trade press. I remember I cut one out and pinned it to the wall above my desk in the villa. “Realismus Films announced yesterday that John James Todd is to film Jean Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions in 1927 on location in Switzerland and France. K.-H. Kornfeld is to play the leading role.” These prompted some speculations by journalists. My replies, I thought, were teasingly oblique. There is nothing like refusing to be specific for arousing curiosity.

The first draft of The Confessions: Part I was over six hundred pages long. After a month’s effortful work I managed to reduce it by something over a hundred pages. I began work on Part II in the autumn, but made bad progress. My mind was constantly on Part I —the director in me had taken over from the writer. There were many technical problems to be solved or experimented with; logistical pitfalls multiplied in my mind. I wrote on for another two hundred pages or so before I decided to let Part II rest for a while. In any event, winter was approaching and the wooden villa was not warm. Monika had stopped coming out too, now that the opportunities for sunbathing were gone. We met once or twice in her apartment but it was not the same. Our curious affair went into hibernation, tacitly, with no hard feelings on either side, and waited for the return of more clement weather.

So I abandoned the villa in the Jungfernheide and returned to our house in Charlottenburg. Sonia was heavily pregnant — the new baby was due in December. I went to work in my Realismus office and by the end of the year had produced a final draft of The Confessions: Part I that was 350 pages long. Of course I knew it was almost twice as long as it should be, but I was not concerned. “Once we start filming,” I reassured Aram, “you’ll see how it will come down.” He did not seem unduly perturbed. He was planning another trip to the U.S.A. in the New Year, where he expected to raise money for the new film. Large advances had been paid for Leo Druce’s Frederick the Great; Joan of Arc was generating similar excitement.

Aram was too calm, I now realize, and that tranquillity communicated itself to me. We drew up a schedule. Preproduction would commence in January 1927, filming would start in June. I would deliver a completed three-hour film in June 1928 for release in the autumn of that year. It all seemed eminently realizable. These dates, these plans conjured from the vaguest deliberations appeared utterly fixed, like the movements of the stars in the heavens, or calendrical predictions for high or low tides. We had created a timetable and with it a kind of reality. It had no real existence beyond our determination, but we acted as if it had.

“We’ll begin Part II in ’29,” I said to Aram. “One year for each part. The whole thing will be finished by 1931. We’ll show them all together. One nine-hour film.” I paused. “It’ll be magnificent,” I said with absolute, utter confidence. “Wait till you see what I can do. Amazing things. There will never be a film like it again.”

“Excellent,” he said. “But let’s get Part I finished first.”

Sonia gave birth to twins — girls — in early December. For the first time I was near my wife when the event occurred. I was very surprised at the news. Sonia said she had told me a month before her parturition, but if so the idea had not registered. I swear. It was an unpleasant reminder of just how preoccupied I had been with The Confessions: Part I . My family life was no more than a backdrop. It claimed my attention only when I wished it to. I was stunned. Suddenly I had four children! I felt faint stirrings of panic. What on earth did I think I was doing?