Underworld

remembered the powder room, that's what she remembered, downstairs, in the grand lounge.

She watched Miles Lightman weave through the crowd, doing a couple of pirouettes as he approached, taking in the full 360, eyes slightly popping.

'Where are we, in a model room at Bloomingdale's?'

'We're in 1932, that's where we are.'

'It's sort of I-don't-know-what, isn't it?'

'Jazz moderne,' Klara said.

'Can you believe I've never been here?'

She was surprised to see that Miles had dressed for the occasion. Many people had and so had Miles, to the extent that he dresses. He wore his scuffed boots and jeans but also had a leopard shirt and mustard tie and a black corduroy jacket with an Edwardian flare.

They watched a man come down the grand staircase, feigning injury as he went past the mural. Miles had a package of cigarettes for Klara. While they waited he gave her further background on the event.

The event was a showing of the legendary lost film of Sergei Eisen-stein, called Unterwelt, recently found in East Germany, meticulously restored and brought to New York under the aegis of the film society Miles belonged to, a remarkable coup for the group. After a period of maneuvering, infighting and hard bargaining they managed to reach an agreement with several rock impresarios and arranged to cosponsor this one-time screening, with orchestral accompaniment, in a house seating nearly six thousand people.

'How do you explain the turnout?' Klara said. 'A lot of gay men in this lobby.'

'I think you ought to see the film and figure it out for yourself. I'll only tell you that word got around, early on, that Eisenstein made a film with a powerful theme and the footage has been hidden away all these decades because the theme deals on some level with people living in the shadows, and the government, or the governments, the GDR and the Soviets, have suppressed the film until now.'

Probably shot in the midthirties, sporadically and in secret, during a period of acute depression for Eisenstein. Ostensibly idle at the time, goaded by fellow Soviet directors to discard his theories and conceits. Called eccentric, called myth-ridden and politically unsound, accused of being out of touch with the people. Stories began to circulate that he'd been executed.

Esther Winship showed up waving her handbag and saying, 'I don't need to see the movie. I already love it. This hall is so wonderful. I'd forgotten it was here. Miles, you look like a mod-and-rocker reunion.'

'Where's Jack?' Klara said.

'Where could he be? Is it your shirt or tie that gives me vertigo?'

'Thank you, Esther.'

'He's having a drink around the corner,' she said.

There was an ambivalence that vitalized the crowd. Whatever your sexual persuasion, you were here to enjoy the contradictions. Think of the relationship between the film and the theater in which it was showing-the work of a renowned master of world cinema screened in the camp environment of the Rockettes and the mighty Wurlitzer. But a theater of a certain impressive shapeliness, a breathtaking place, even, for all its exaggerations and vanities, with roundels of enameled brass on the outer walls and handsome display cases in the ticket lobby and nickel bronze stair rails here in the foyer, a space thai: resembled the hushed and sunken saloon of an ocean liner. And possibly a film, you're not likely to forget this, that will be riddled with mannerisms whatever the level of seriousness. At least you hope so. Didn't Ivan the Terrible contain scenes so comically overwrought, amid the undeniable power of the montage, that you laughed and caught your breath more or less simultaneously?

'Nobody, practically, has seen the film up to this point,' Miles said. 'Four of us have seen it in our group and half a dozen promoters and theater brass and that's about it on this side of the Iron Curtain.'

Miles knew Eisenstein inside and out. He knew more than was humanly healthy. He knew the shot sequence in Potemkin just about cold. The deadly cadence of black boots. The white jackets of the soldiers. The mother clutching weakly at her waist, The rear wheels of the baby carriage rolling out of the frame.

But there were things nobody seemed to know about this movie. Where it was made. How it was made-he didn't have official backing obviously. And why he didn't use sound. One theory pointed to Mexico. The enormous amount of footage he shot openly for his Mexican epic was a cover for a subversive venture, went the theory and this was it.

'Actually I haven't seen a single thing he's ever done,' Esther said. 'But I met him once, you know.'

Miles turned his head slowly to look at her.

'You knew Eisenstein?'

It was a look of total revaluation.

'Met him briefly.'

'Where?'

'Here. I was very young, of course. New York. Barely twenty, I think. And he was sitting for a portrait and my parents knew the painter and I went along.'

'We have to talk about this,' Miles said.

'That's all there is, I'm afraid. He asked me to call him Sergei.'

'What else?'

'He drank a lot of milk. He said it was breakfast.'

'What else?' Miles said.

'Actually he showed up with the milk, in a bottle. I got him a glass and he thanked me.'

'What else?' Miles said.

The other thing nobody knew was where the title came from. Eisenstein knew German and may have had a reason for choosing a title in that language. But it's more likely the film acquired the title during its long repose in an underground vault in East Berlin.

'Gnomelike sort of fellow, as I recall.'

'What else?'

'Large head. Sort of very high forehead. Milk came in bottles then, remember?'

It became the movie people had to see. A nice tight hysteria began to build and there were tickets going for shocking sums and counterfeit tickets and people rushing back from the Vineyard and the Pines and the Cape to engineer a seat.

Just a movie for godsake and a silent movie at that and a movie you probably never heard of until the Times did a Sunday piece. But this is how the behavioral aberration, once begun, grows to lavish panic.

'But will we actually be able to sit through it?' Esther said. 'Or is it one of those things where we have to be reverent because we're in the presence of greatness but we're really all sitting there determined to be the first ones out the door so we can get a taxi.'

'You're thinking of theater,' Miles said. 'This is film.'

Jack Marshall turned up with peanuts on his breath, Esther's husband, and they went into the auditorium.

Klara remembered it now, suddenly so familiar, the feeling of plush and mothered comfort, it felt like her mother hovering, a space soothingly wombed and curved, and the way the proscenium arch rayed out into the ceiling, about eight stories at its highest point, and the spoked rows of downy seats, and the choral staircases that softened the side walls, and the overvastness that seemed allowable, your one indulgence of this type, shrinking everyone in the hall to child size, heads turning and lifting, a rediscovered surprise and delight floating over the crowd, not the last such emotion that people would share this evening.

It developed that the show had a pace and theme and it started with the sound of chase music, offstage, a tinny piano doing the familiar sort of ragtime score that used to accompany silent movies. Then the house lights went down and the great motorized curtain slowly lifted and the full orchestra appeared. A rustle in the audience. Moments after the musicians began to play, the whole unit commenced moving, sliding nicely in its band car to the front of the stage. How wondrously funny and odd. The music became suspenseful now, a series of diminished chords, perhaps a scary moment pending-and sure enough the orchestra reached the stage apron and dropped rather dramatically into the pit and then completely out of sight, elevatored down like so many geeks in tuxedos, a maneuver of a certain farcical bravado, greeted with cheers.