‘But shouldn’t there be more?’ Click. Next page.
‘Do you mean physical things?’ Click. Next page. ‘Intimate things?’
‘That is what…’ Click. Next page. ‘… I mean, Olga.’
‘It is important in love affairs.’ Click. ‘But a marriage isn’t
…’ Next page. Click. ‘… a love affair.’ Next page.
‘Do you think…’ Click. Next page. ‘… I should have a love affair?’ Click. Next page.
The dialogue continued, with an occasional slosh from the bathroom as Trudi changed positions. Was there somebody Trudi liked? Well, yes, there was, could Orlova guess who that might be? Orlova said she wouldn’t even try to guess. And what if Freddi found out? What then? There was no way he ever would. Orlova doubted that. Trudi persisted — the person she had in mind would never tell, of that she was sure. Then, as Orlova rushed to turn a page, it rattled, and Trudi called out, ‘Are you reading the newspaper?’
Desperately, Orlova looked around the room. Was there a newspaper? Yes! There it was, on a chair. ‘I’m just thumbing through it,’ she answered. Then, from the bathroom, the sound of Trudi getting out of the tub, and, as she dried herself, Orlova took the final exposure, jammed the document back in the briefcase, closed it, and put the camera in her bag. ‘I don’t think anybody would ever know,’ Trudi said.
Orlova hurried over to the chair, grabbed the newspaper and was standing there holding it when Trudi ran naked from the bathroom, jumped into the bed, pulled the covers up to her chin, and said, ‘That felt so good, my bath.’
‘Well, when you’re chilled…’
‘Olga, dear?’
‘Yes?’
‘Why don’t you get in here with me and keep me warm?’
Orlova laughed and threw the newspaper back on the chair. ‘I’m going to take my brandy upstairs and rest for a while.’
‘Are you sure, Olga?’ Trudi’s voice had lowered, I’m serious. The question was overt and direct.
Orlova walked over to the bed and smoothed Trudi’s hair back. ‘Yes, Trudi, I am sure,’ she said, her tone affectionate and understanding. Then she said, ‘I’ll be back later, and we’ll have dinner together,’ and left the room.
Climbing the stairs to the floor above, Orlova hoped that Trudi wouldn’t hate her — she might, that was one possible reaction. But the alternative was too dangerous. In different circumstances, Orlova thought, she might have done it — a dalliance on a snowy afternoon in the mountains, a couple of hours of discovery and excitement, nobody the wiser. With Trudi, however, she feared all that heat stored up inside would explode in real passion, real love, not just a crush on an admired older woman. What then? Longing looks from Trudi Mueller in the midst of the Hitler menagerie? These people were shrewd, they had the sharpened instincts of survivors, and they might very well figure out what was going on. No, impossible, Orlova thought as she opened the door to her room. She would be particularly sweet to Trudi at dinner; she loved her like a friend, she loved her like an older sister.
Meanwhile, a roll of film.
3 December.
As the first snow of the season whitened the grounds of the Joinville studios, the production of Apres la Guerre was smoother and faster by the day. The anarchist Jean Avila turned out to be a not entirely benevolent despot and, with cast and crew doing precisely what they were told, the daily minutes of film went from two, to three, to, on some days, five. The romantic scenes between Colonel Vadic and Ilona absolutely smouldered, and were more than once applauded on the set. There was, to professionals like Stahl and Justine Piro, no higher praise than that.
Even the message — as, after a gun battle in a Balkan village, the dying Gilles Brecker tells Colonel Vadic that an honourable death is the most important part of life — was emotional and moving. This was in no small part Avila’s victory, pressing the screenwriters, as he put it to them in a cafe, ‘to calm this fucking thing down a little — trust your actors.’ Because the lieutenant has fought bravely, because he’s given his life to save theirs, the colonel pretends to agree with him. But in Stahl’s reading of his lines, in the expression on his face as the camera moves to close-up, it is clear that Colonel Vadic has come to understand that death is death and, honourable though it may be, sorrowful beyond all else. At the end of the second day of shooting, when the sequence was completed, Avila took Stahl aside and said, ‘Thank you, Fredric.’ That wasn’t the last of the filming, not quite, but soon they would be leaving Joinville, to shoot exterior scenes in and around Beirut. Except that Beirut had now become some remote place in Morocco. ‘Where,’ Avila told the cast, repeating what Deschelles had said, ‘they are known to have sand. Plenty of sand. It’s called the Sahara.’ Once that was done, they would return to Paris, then go to the Hungarian castle — Paramount had agreed to pay! — for a few more scenes on location.
By the third of December, Orlova’s letter had reached Paris by courier and Wilkinson knew about the film of the Polish list. And the price of the Polish list, copied out from the eighteen exposures, another two hundred thousand Swiss francs. Roosevelt’s millionaire friends had been generous enough so that Wilkinson could pay, he told Stahl in the billiard room of the American Club, but the exchange was difficult. He had planned on using a ballet troupe based in Boston, headed from Paris to Berlin on a cultural friendship tour, but the willing dancer had been injured in a taxi crash on the Boulevard Saint-Germain.
For Fredric Stahl there was no reason, and even less desire, to go to Germany. In fact, he told Wilkinson, he would be going to Morocco, to a place called Erg Chebbi in the Ziz Valley. Wilkinson raised his eyebrows, Stahl said, ‘Dunes.’ The desert scenery was spectacular and had been used by other film companies. But Stahl said he would take on the job if Orlova could arrange for somebody — he doubted she’d be able to come herself — to meet him there. Wilkinson took out his notepad, rested it on the billiard table, and said, ‘Can you spell it?’
Over the next few days, Stahl realized that the prospect of leaving Paris for a time was more than a little welcome. The city of moods had fallen into a kind of trough; Parisians were feeling the pressure and they didn’t like it. Il faut en finir, they said, there must be an end to this. They were fed up with alarms — Hitler said this, Roosevelt said that — hopes high one day, dashed the next, optimism followed by gloom. So, enough! After the Munich appeasement, Hitler seemed to think he’d won; France was finished, the war was over. This scared the French, it scared the sophisticated Parisians, and Stahl could feel it.
And, almost despite himself, he became a collector of signs and omens. The Germans had installed a second news agency in Paris, the Prima Presse, that issued a flow of press releases quoted in French newspapers — more tanks, more planes, millions of men marching with guns and giving the Nazi salute. A garment manufacturer in Paris advertised its new pyjamas d’alerte, so women would have something attractive to wear in bomb shelters. And America made it clearer every day that help was not at hand. Time magazine’s newsreel series, The March of Time, brought out Inside Nazi Germany — 1938, which featured happy, hardworking Germans toiling in field and factory. Stahl watched it with disgust. And read an article by a young woman, a rising intellectual star, in which she described the French political climate as ‘a mixture of braggadocio and cowardice, hopelessness and panic’. A perfect description, Stahl thought. And on 6 December, France and Germany signed a friendship treaty, stating that ‘pacific and neighbourly relations between France and Germany constitute one of the essential elements of the consolidation of the situation in Europe and of the preservation of the general peace.’
8 December.
Deschelles had chartered two aeroplanes to fly cast, crew, and equipment to Morocco, with stops for refuelling at Marseille, and then Tangiers — for the three-hundred-mile flight to a military airfield at Er Rashida. From there, cars and trucks would take them to Erg Chebbi, where they would stay at a hotel called the Kasbah Oudami; the producer had secured all thirty rooms for ten days. They left Le Bourget Airport at dawn. More than a few of the cast and crew had never flown in an aeroplane and, when the flight turned bumpy and the plane hit air pockets, had to be calmed by the administration of strong spirits, which were not denied to the other passengers. The well-oiled Pasquin, it turned out, knew a selection of incredibly filthy songs, which most of them had never heard before. But they weren’t hard to learn.
An hour into the flight, Stahl changed seats with an electrician so he could sit next to Renate Steiner, first asking her if she minded. He managed to keep the conversation light and easy, he wanted her to understand that, everything else aside, he truly liked her, which he did. Once she relaxed she was good company, smart, funny, and Stahl realized he could make her laugh, in its way a powerful form of intimacy. A key to the heart? At the Kasbah
