William Boyd - The New Confessions

“Sounds ideal,” I said. “What’s his address?”

I was relieved that E. P. Eugen lived in an unfashionable northern quarter of the city — Wedding — in a small street next to the infectious-diseases hospital, and with a drab view of the Berlin ship canal at its southern end. I found it — and I am sure all Eugen’s clients felt the same — strangely reassuring to visit such an anonymous address. I traveled there by the Ringbahn —it seemed more fitting — and got off at Putlitzstrasse Station. I had never visited this district before: it was oddly spread out — warehouses, a new park that seemed not to have taken to its surroundings, the vast modern functional-looking hospital. I made my way quickly to Fehmarnstrasse.

On the door it said EUGEN P. EUGEN, LOAN REPOSSESSION AND CHARACTER REFERENCES. I knocked and was admitted by a young bespectacled girl. A small man, almost dainty, rested one haunch on what I took to be her desk. He turned and examined the dangling, gleaming toe of his boot.

“I have an appointment with Herr Eugen,” I said. “I am Herr Braun.”

“Ah, Herr Braun.” The little man stood up. “I am Eugen. Come in.”

I followed Eugen into his office. He really was very small, not much over five feet, and immaculately dressed. He had neatly parted blond hair with almost-white eyelashes, which gave him a look of childish openness. We sat down. Eugen took a long cigar out of a drawer in his desk and lit it. I imagined this was a reflex gesture. It seemed to say: “I may be a small man but I have a big cock.” I immediately disliked him.

He told me of his terms and I told him my business. I told him that I wanted a woman followed with the utmost discretion. I gave no name, just my address and Sonia’s description. I wanted to know where she went, who was there and what they did. It was simple, straightforward and our discussion lasted less than five minutes. I paid in advance and he agreed to provide a full report in one month. I got up to leave but Eugen was round his desk like a cat and stopped me at the door.

“Would you oblige me with your autograph, Herr Todd? For my secretary. She’s seen Julie five or ten times. Fifteen, perhaps.”

I signed, grudgingly, but without comment,

“Too, I am a great admirer,” he said in English, in a soft confidential voice. Then as I left he added pointedly, “Good day to you, Herr Braun.”

It was only two weeks before I heard from him. I was busy with the approaching restart of the film. Leo was away in Switzerland supervising construction of a huge set near the small town of Grex, which was doubling as eighteenth-century Geneva. I was working on a revolutionary technical device and was plotting its integration with the film when Eugen’s phone call was transferred to me in the photographic laboratories at Spandau.

“I wasn’t expecting to hear from you,” I said.

“There is good and bad news,” he said. “I must discuss them with you.”

We arranged to meet in a small café around the corner from his office in the late afternoon. It turned out to be a cellar café, a few uncomfortable doors away from the main entrance to the Institut für Infektionskrankenhaus. Eugen sat at the back of the café at a thin table, eating stuffed cucumbers. He had a bad fresh graze on his forehead and chin; apart from that he was as dapper as ever. He stopped eating as soon as he saw me and lit one of his stupid cigars.

“Can I offer you some beer? Some wine? There is excellent food here. Excellent — and at modest prices.”

“No, thanks. What happened?”

“Your wife. She discovered me.”

Eugen told me that it was his practice to use a small motorbike to follow cars. In this manner he had followed Sonia undiscovered for ten days. The day before yesterday she had not used the driver but had taken the car herself. She took an unfamiliar route and Eugen thought he was finally on to something. She motored out to the country. Somewhere near Dallgow, in a quiet lane, Eugen turned a corner and almost ran into the back of Sonia’s car (our Packard), which was deliberately parked to bring about this result. Eugen braked, skidded and fell off his bike. He tore his clothes, grazed his face and was momentarily stunned. Sonia confronted him, brandished a revolver (it must have been a child’s toy — I had to admire her nerve and aplomb) and demanded to know why he was following her.

He looked down at his cucumber.

“I had to confess a powerful infatuation,” he said. “I’m sorry, but it’s the best excuse. It always works.” Sonia had gone through his wallet and had found his business cards (here I was thankful for Eugen’s euphemistic job description).

“But I must tell you,” he went on. “Good news. She’s an honest woman. There’s nothing illicit in her life, nothing. She meets her friends, she takes her children to the park. She shops. She plays cards twice a week with other women. That’s all.”

We haggled aimlessly for a while over his fee. He said the damage to his motorbike, clothes, face and self-esteem were barely covered by the unearned portion of his advance. I gave in and returned home somewhat relieved. Sonia never mentioned the incident to me. Why? Did she suspect me? Or was she flattered by Eugen’s subterfuge? Although I was reassured I still harbored illogical worries, even though there was nothing in Sonia’s demeanor or increasingly, round, placid face (Berlin was plumping her up) that could reasonably give me cause for alarm.

Is this the time for a brief tribute to Eddie Simmonette? I owe him so much (mind you, he owes me a fair bit too) and I will never forget his generosity and tolerance, his help and understanding, when I went to him in April 1928 and told him my plans to revise completely certain aspects of The Confessions and reshoot some of the previous year’s scenes.

I was bold — I pushed my luck — only because of that deathbed promise old Duric had extracted from him. But, sentimental reasons aside, there were sound commercial reasons for backing a John Todd film in those days. Anyway, I made my bid because I was fretting about certain sequences of the film and was seeking some means of resolving them.

The plain fact is that by 1928 there was nothing much more to be done with the camera. Every so-called trick and gimmick you see on today’s cinema screens had been discovered before three decades of the century were up. Rapid cutting, multiple exposure, moving cameras, angled shots, back lighting, matte screens, selective soft focus, vignette masks, crane shots, lens diffusion, etc., etc., were all at the director’s disposal. It was as if, to take an analogy, the history of painting had moved from mud daubings on a cave wall to modern abstract expressionism in twenty-five years. We were even experimenting with a kind of 3-D picture in those days and this was one of the new techniques I wanted to employ. A firm in France was producing a type of embossed film that when projected on a screen gave the actors, if not a true three-dimensional effect, at least that of a bas-relief. It was particularly effective in close-up. The film stock was expensive but we had budgeted for it. I planned to use it in the famous cherry-picking incident, which we would film in Chambéry that summer.

All film technique, I am convinced (and as is the case with many of my theories, I am probably alone in adhering to it), originates in dreaming. We could dream slow motion before the moving camera was invented. In our dreams we could cut between parallel action, we assembled montage shots, long before some self-important Russian claimed to show us how. This is where the film derives its particular power. It re-creates on screen what has been going on in our unconscious. I met a famous director once (he shall be nameless) who purported to have been the first man to launch a remote-control camera down a stretched wire and give us for the first time the sensation of flying like a bird. But dreamers, I told him, have been flying this way since the birth of consciousness. Many of my own inventions (the hand-held camera, my soft-focus lens) originated in my dreams. This, then, was the position I found myself in. Let us take another image — a still, burning candle. It is beautiful, it illumines. Now, breathe gently on the flame and observe the flickering, dancing transformation. As I saw it, the director’s role in the film was to be the breath upon the candle flame. I had everything at my disposal in The Confessions to make that flame dance and sparkle — my vision, the actors, technical apparatus and the skills of my collaborators — but I still felt myself balked and restricted by the confinement of the lens and what we could do with it, that fixed immutable rectangle that we had to fill. And then, that spring of ’28, I dreamed about Rousseau and his walk from Geneva to Savoy. I saw him striding through the chilly landscape with the vast backdrop of the mountains behind him. It was as if I stood and watched him walk a mile in front of my eyes.… When I woke I knew that my task in The Confessions was somehow to escape the limitations of the frame.